Chapter 10

“Oh, damn, did you see that? A massacre at a high school football game! That’s crazy! So many jocks killed, all in the name of ‘incel liberation.’ Just crazy. Where was that?” Becca reacted sharply to the latest scary news report among many incel and other terrorist acts.

“Little Rock, Arkansas,” I noted, even as more such incidents appeared on the news.

In East Orange, New Jersey, a homophobic bigot shot up a gay bar, killing seventeen men with an Uzi. That an illegal weapon was used didn’t exactly shock me, as the gun laws in America were never the most effective, especially at their strictest. Gun control was a sick and corrupt joke that only punished law-abiding citizens for the most part, anyway.

Sure, other countries had made theirs work, but only because they weren’t a crazy quilt of semi-sovereign “states” with various ideas about how to handle the polarizing issue. There was a national system and a national consensus on the matter ... for the most part. When half of the country dismissed the other half as “inbred gun nuts” and the other half in turn saw the first half as either “wimpy,” “out of touch city slickers,” or “commie gun-grabbers,” well, you get the idea.

But I digress. The dizzying series of violent spectacles on the national as well as local news, full of rape, murder, terrorism, and sheer, bloody mayhem ... seemed almost co-ordinated or else planned for some kind of sinister agenda. It reminded me a lot of the basic plot of that one Chuck Norris film, “Invasion, USA.” And, well, there was some evidence of Brazilian involvement in at least the Domie push to take over Virginia, if nothing else. Bolsonaro was neck deep in it, but was he really acting alone? Or did he have a puppet master pulling HIS strings, too?

Well, in our mad dash to get out of town, understandable under the circumstances, we had gone the entirely wrong direction to warn the Feds. In our defense, what warning we could give them would be little use to them by that point. Everything had already been kicked into motion. It would be like warning someone of a flat tire just as they stopped and got out the donut. A day late and a dollar short, just as the saying went.

“This one is especially disturbing,” Taslima brought our attention to the raid by more heavily armed incels on the state capital of Vermont, Montpelier.

“They’ve ... occupied both chambers of the state legislature ... and executed Governor Phil Scott, along with several other high state officials. Of both parties. Look, there’s the ‘incel’ flag, a black pill on a white field. They’re going for broke, actively toppling the state government. Probably the same crew that seized the Baxter in Sharon,” I shuddered as I considered the implications.

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” Becca quoted William Butler Yeats from his “The Second Coming.”