DON'T INTERRUPT THE SORROW, DARN RIGHT (Part Two)

Inside the garage with the smooth, cool concrete floor and the dim lighting, it seemed almost tranquil. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Yes. Tranquil. Peaceful. Nice.

But only for a moment. I heard Rhonda's door slam just as my pants hit me in the head. She had stepped out and thrown them across at me above the car's roof, having already slipped into some gold colored sweats that she apparently had under the seat or next to her by the driver's door. It took her about two seconds to do this, apparently; and she also had on flip-flops. I guess it made sense though - it was her damned car, she knew about it's "issues", so she came prepared. Or as prepared as a person could be nowadays.

Rhonda was pacing back and forth along the driver's side of the car. She seemed agitated and she slapped her hand rhythmically on the car's hood and fenders as she paced. I knew that she used to smoke and that she had quit years ago but I was betting she could have used one about then. I had a gigantic fat Jamaican sized joint in my shirt pocket and I was thinking about asking her if she wanted to give that a go, to kind of wind down. I reached in and rolled it between my fingers.

I had known Rhonda for maybe four years. We had met in a "professional capacity"; she was getting a divorce and I was the lawyer representing her asshole husband. She was tall, almost six feet, and quite slim. If I remembered right she had played college basketball at some podunk school somewhere - but I didn't remember where exactly. I did remember that the coach was some sort of greasy slimeball named Roy something, who had tried to get into her pants and she had quit the team over it. She was now about thirty years old and her figure was still striking and athletic; she cast an imposing shadow and she looked like she could take care of herself - which I knew for a fact, she could. The athleticism was no accident; Rhonda worked out or ran almost every day - up until recently I guess. She was very pretty with strawberry blonde hair cut quite short, well-formed facial features and just enough freckles to make you want to fantasize about the farmer's daughter your dad always joked about. She didn't have the pigtails though, and if you tried to pinch her cheeks you would definitely get smacked. So it didn't quite fit. And she was no hayseed by any means - I knew she could play a man if it suited her needs. She had done it to me, after all.

"Hey, what the hell are you so worked up about?" I asked her. I was now fumbling for my shoes under the edge of the front seat of the Peugot. "We made it in, no problem."

"I know, I know," she said rather distractedly. "But every day it gets worse. I'm not even sure what those damned ferret things were - must have been twenty of them and they were dressed up like baseball umps? That was it, wasn't it? Where would they even come from? For Christ's sake - animals think they're people, toys and dolls think they are bad-ass motherfuckers, and half the real people don't think at all, they've just disappeared into the cosmic goo somewhere, or crawled up inside of their own insanity. I think sometimes I might be about there myself - not really sure if I am seeing reality or just hallucinating like some dope addict or something."

I stepped away from the car and slipped the joint back into my pocket. It was pretty dark in this garage but it was spacious, with maybe five or six other cars parked in various spots around the room. This was actually a small parking garage that serviced the three-story office building above us.

"Well you were just saying, it is what it is, or whatever. Best to figure, if you are seeing it, then it's reality at this point, no matter what it is. Here we are, we have been dropped dead on our asses in the midst of something, and we have to keep our heads clear if we are going to not let it roll over us." I paused for a moment. "I think those umps were outfitted for the American League. They had inside chest protectors didn't they? I think the National League still wears the old fashioned ones on the outside of their jackets. Probably the NL ones were over on Nosferatu Boulevard calling balks or catcher's interference or something."

Rhonda grinned. She seemed more relaxed now. "Fuck you, counselor," she said. As she turned away from the car she was suddenly staring straight into the fervent face of Larry the Prophet. He had a National Geographic magazine in his hand. I figured he must have lost his Gideon's Bible again.

"So you're blaspheming again?!" he shouted right in Rhonda's face. I winced, expecting him to get a swift kick in the testicles but Rhonda held it in check and just stepped back a bit. "Didn't I tell you, the lord Jesus is sitting in his transparent tomb, he is browsing through the magazines and eating the wax fruit and he is looking out at you and me and all the rest, and soon he is going to open the glorious sliding patio door and step out and melt us all. Just melt us all with his vampire breath."

"Prophet!" I called out. "How does Dracula Jesus feel about a bunch of uptight snake-eating rodents running around in the street making ball and strike calls?"

Larry had been a bean-counter in one of the offices upstairs. He was a good example of the distressingly large percentage of folks who had pretty much totally caved in when things started going all to shit. I never heard him say a word in my life until he turned up here in the garage as the Prophet - before that he just stood in the corner of the elevator with his head down. Now he had on some kind of high school band jacket that had darts in the front, his dirty tee shirt had a Robert Crumb Mr. Natural "Keep on Trucking" image on it, and he was wearing a lady's leotard. Most of the time it was pretty obvious that he was sporting a boner inside it too. A modern day Man of the Cloth, to be sure.

Now Prophet had the bug-eye going and he was going up and down rapidly on his tip toes for some reason. "The snakes must be cast out! You know that! If it takes a group of short furry sports officials in regulation league equipment to do it then praise the dripping fangs of Jesus and let it be!" Larry often got going on how Jesus was the original vampire and he had got a bunch of folks to drink his blood and had given them eternal life. I think he had it that Jesus died on the cross just because it was a cross and it burned him up or something - plus I think some Roman soldier supposedly stuck him in the side with a wooden stake while he was hanging around on Mount Calvary. Saying the Son of God was some kind of unholy demon from hell was kind of a novel approach based on the ideology of most organized Christian religions, but somehow Prophet had it all worked out. When shit just stopped making sense some folks can make their own kind of sense out of anything I guess. Or nothing. Personally I figured taking God and sticking him right in the middle of all this bullshit that was going on right now, just wasn't being very fair to God. But of course a lot of people got out their God hats and buckled on their God boots and started marching around, once this shit came down.

Welcome to the world that never ends, and of course it's got to be on all the cable stations, and probably in high def to boot.

Prophet was not the only other person in the garage. Most forms of work had basically ceased in the last few weeks. My legal skills weren't being called for too much; not very many divorces were being initiated. But somehow trucks were still running carrying food and fuel and other supplies, and many grocery stores, gas stations and a few medical facilities were staying open. Also the porno shops. In spite of my smart remarks about high definition, TV was off the air. Lots of people didn't feel safe in their homes - hell, if you looked in the carport to find Rover and some of his canine pals were building a guillotine out of PVC and your woodworking tools, you might start thinking about other options for living arrangements. A place like this parking garage was somewhat of a sanctuary with limited access from the outside and remote access available just to those who had worked in the building above. So once the street level windows and doors were completely blocked off, there was a little bit of security here. Not much, but a little. Maybe ten or so of the former employees from above were here now, with families if they had them. Probably twenty to twenty-five people. It was hard to tell, all of them were never here at once, even at night.

And there was a strict rule against pets - no animals allowed. And no dolls or "action figures" for the kiddies, or even those little plastic army men. Somebody let their kid bring in a couple G.I. Joes, unbeknownst to the rest of us, and then Jimmy Redding's wife woke up in the middle of the night with a little plastic guy in a sailor suit sitting on her chest and trying to get her bra undone. Some of the cars, like Rhonda's, had also been tampered with, and all we could figure was, these little soldier boys had done it. Nobody knew how, or what they had done. And let's not even try and get into why. Since the intellect in the cell phone system was able to get about anywhere, and tell his minions to do whatever he wanted, it was really, really hard to keep from being infiltrated in some way. Try to get everybody to agree they can't have a phone on them. Maybe they can go without toilet paper, maybe they can crap and wipe their asses with a sock, or a newspaper, or a raw pork chop; but they just can't let go of their little picture phone gadgets. The "evil genius" who was currently at the top of the food chain was using them to communicate and to spy, through the camera functions, so if there was a phone around you were compromised. Same with computers, iPods and anything else with a wireless network involved. Near as we could tell, we had finally gotten rid of all of them here in the garage.

I pushed by Prophet and moved towards the stairs that went up into the building. "Hey Bram," I said as I shoved him aside, "maybe you should go out for a garlic dinner or something. Leave Rhonda alone, will you?"

He looked at me rather blankly. "The Tennessee stud loved the Tennessee mare," he said. I just shook my head and walked on. Upstairs I had some notes that I needed. If I could connect all the dots, I might have a line on one of these former Winston Churchills, one who might even be right here in Rapid City. There had to be something we could learn, something we could do.

Rhonda came up beside me and we started to mount the stairs together. She rubbed lightly up against my arm, looked over at me and smiled. I swear the thought of pinching her cheeks never even crossed my mind.

"I saw that monster ganja reefer you pulled out of your bag of tricks earlier. What say we go up to the Office of Reclamations and Reconciliations and fire that fucker up?"

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