The Event: And Other Stories

By James A. Baumgard

Author James Baumgard brings you 13 genre-mixing stories that cover a wide range of human experiences. Standing out in this collection of short stories, The Event reads as being more futuristic than science fiction. In gazing into the future, we may better see the present. But understanding the present lies with the reader. Baumgard simply asks the question: What if?

Terror lies less in the macabre than in the unexpected situation in which an ordinary person is thrust. Such is the premise of "Coast Highway". That life is poorer who has not met an unforgettable person. To meet that person when and where least expected is the story of "I". Is the misanthrope to be reviled or pitied? Perhaps a bit of both, but read "Dill's Dilemma" and draw your own conclusions. What could be more terrifying for a young woman, "Mandy", than to discover she has married a stranger? "Marvelle" is well past her prime, but she has one last trick to play. Can she carry it off? An aging couple, "Mr. and Mrs. Ledbetter", must confront a long-buried secret, though it tears them apart. A senior center is in an uproar over a 'youngster' in their midst, in "Along Came Sally". A marine recruit must face the hardships of bootcamp as well as deal with a bully in "Scofie's Last Hurrah". A mysterious death in "The Good People of Krystal Springs" forces an old sheriff to relive a past he tried to forget and propels him into the arms of woman he can never have. In "Gayle's Story" a young girl must deal with loss.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9798985194333

Book preview

The Event

The air crackled with the sound of colliding Dragonflies that swarmed high overhead, emitting tiny sparks of light as they expired, while the sky scowled in a portent of meteorological mayhem.

Johnny B stretched out his hand and watched as fine metallic flakes dusted the dark hairs on his arm. Snow in June? Stranger things have happened, he thought.

Despite his primitive exterior, very few took notice of him as he passed the gauntlet of moneychangers who had set up tables near the entrance of the amphitheater. Last chance to change your currency. Best rate of exchange here! they cried in a polyglot of exhortations.

Johnny B favored the exchangers with a look of anger, disgust, and pity—to no effect. Behind each table stood a human statue of soldierly mien dressed in Middle-East casual. Beneath each of their long, flowing robes bulged a concealed, but not too concealed, lethal weapon.

Posters warned: Attention: Unauthorized vendors and counterfeiters will be severely punished.

Hit by a wave of nausea, Johnny B tried to retrace his steps, but the surge of pilgrims eager for spectacle pushed him forward.

He had attended rafter-raising revivals, but nothing prepared him for crowds of this magnitude—bodies everywhere, seemingly as numerous as the grains of sand in his beloved desert home. The billboard-sized screens that ringed the amphitheater projected the granular crowd unto itself—more ant-like than human.

To say Johnny B was unkempt, both overstated and understated his appearance. Wild best described him, and wooly, made evident by the fact that he strolled about, insofar as one can stroll in a press of people, without a stitch of clothing. His only bow to modesty, modest in the extreme, was a rope belt from which hung a leather pouch containing a mixture of dates, nuts, and seeds, enough to satisfy his body’s meager needs.

Hey, Johnny B, a jovial voice hailed him over the hubbub. Don’t need to ask you how they’re hanging. Why don’t you bring your stuff over here so Ponti Boy can have a closer look-see?

 In your dreams, Ponti Boy, Johnny B replied, with equal affability, to a dreamy-eyed, middle-aged man. Shod in red pumps and wearing a cardinal’s frock and scarlet skullcap, the man looked every inch the portly ecclesiastic, though with the face of a cherub—if that cherub had the fleshy lips of an unrepentant voluptuary and eyes that twinkled with perpetual mischief. I see you’ve moved up in the world, Ponti Boy, Johnny B continued. Last I heard, you’d been chased out of the church for chasing choirboys.

They were troubled youth in need of love and guidance, which I saw as my duty to provide, Ponti Boy retorted with a voluptuous smile.

Too much love and guidance, from what I heard, and the wrong kind of each, Johnny B replied.

The Lord works in mysterious ways, Johnny B, as do I, said Ponti Boy. Besides, the good Lord had bigger things in mind for me. Speaking of which . . . I swear, Johnny B, you get bigger every time I see you. What’s your secret, child? Or are you just happy to see me?

I eat only organic whole foods, Ponti boy. You should try it sometime, Johnny B fired back.

Mercy, Johnny B, you know I can’t give up meat, said Ponti Boy as his eyes lingered approvingly, nay lovingly, on Johnny B’s pouch.

To each his own, Ponti Boy.

Keep the faith, Johnny B. But if you can’t, stay cool, said Ponti Boy. With uncherub solemnity, he added, These are strange times, are they not?

Johnny B nodded his agreement, turned and reentered the crowd when he found his path blocked by a woman of indeterminate age, but veering toward the menopausal, cloaked in a nun’s habit.

Is that fur? she demanded, a scowl marring her otherwise attractive, if severe, coif-framed features.

Is what fur, sister? Johnny B asked.

Don’t be flippant. That, of course, she snipped, pointing at his pouch.

Sister, I assure you it’s only hair, and all mine, Johnny B replied.

It looks like fur to me. What innocent creature did you murder to make such a hideous-looking sack? You ought to be ashamed of yourself, the nun railed.

If you don’t believe me, sister, you’re welcome to take a closer look, said Johnny B, wild-looking and yet charming.

I’ll do just that. You’re nothing but a savage anyhow, the nun replied in a husky voice.

As she leaned in for a closer look, something in the pouch’s vicinity stirred. Alarmed, she jolted upright, red-faced, and threw back her shoulders.

You filthy man, she huffed, strutting around naked. Cover your shame, you beast. Filled with disgust, she covered Johnny B’s shame with a wistful glance before allowing him to pass unmolested.

Johnny B next encountered one of the event’s many Jesus impersonators. They were as inevitable as Jedi impersonators at a Star Wars convention, Judy Garland impersonators in a drag queen contest, and hooker impersonators at a congressman’s birthday bash.

I don’t have a fig leaf to cover your bits, the impersonator declared, grinning. Then, like a playground flasher, he looked furtively about and whipped open his robe. But I do have one of these in your size, he added, pointing to the front of his shirt.

Come Clean With Jesus, it shouted in letters bold. Beneath this call for cleansing was the unmistakable likeness of a popular, sable-skinned tele-preacher who did God’s work via the Eye of the Needle video network. The evangelical was shown sharing a shower with a blond, blue-eyed Jesus. The Son of God was depicted gleefully scrubbing the cleric’s back while the cleric looked cow-eyed over his shoulder at Jesus. The scene clearly intended to illustrate the preacher’s familiarity with Christ, a familiarity that unfortunately, and one might suppose unintentionally, tended more toward the carnal than the spiritual.

Johnny B wound his way toward the mound in the center of the amphitheater, from where popular praise groups pumped out soul-stirring music. An impenetrable wall of joyful worshippers dancing and writhing, as their ecstasy and proximity to others dictated, stopped him well short of his goal. The group Sluts for Christ, an all-girl band, was belting out the lyrics of their chart topping hit, On Our Knees for Jesus. Next to take the stage was The Cat-O-Mites, a sequined boy band that pranced and prissy stepped better than they sang. With undeniable fervor and a great show of teeth, through which passed barely intelligible lyrics, they caterwauled their single hit The Other Cheek. However laudable their devotion, their pulsing expression of praise sounded to Johnny B as musical as the bleating of the animals he tended in his desert retreat.

Preoccupied with the dark clouds scudding across the overcast sky—he had never seen clouds move so fast, or so erratically—he stepped on a shard of glass. Recoiling in pain, he lifted his bare foot and lost his balance. From the crowd, a hand reached out to steady him and, without a word, removed the shard and wiped Johnny B’s foot with his coarse garment. His ministrations done, the stranger slipped back into the crowd before Johnny B thanked him. Another Jesus impersonator? At least he played the part well. Ponti Boy was right, Johnny B mused. These are indeed strange times.

What appeared to Johnny B as a lowering sky filled with dark, scudding clouds was a fluid mass of hundreds of thousands of mini-drones. Sinclair Media Conglomerate’s Sparrow class drones competed for air space with the pesky, far more numerous Dragonflies. As the world’s official news service, the SMC resented civilian drones in what they considered their private air space. Although they had greased enough palms to lubricate the entire machinery of state, the SMC could not clip the Dragonflies’ wings—only curtail their use when Sparrows were in the sky. Till now.

Only governments and cash-flush organizations like the SMC could afford the highly sophisticated Sparrow, without which the SMC could not do its job. Sparrows soared hundreds of miles under the control of their licensed pilots, capturing and sending high-res images in real time halfway around the world.

Dragonflies, on the other hand, could be had for the price of a cup of niente di caffè, a popular treacly coffee-flavored beverage sold at Beaucoup Bucks coffeehouses worldwide. With affordability came ubiquity. Their overuse by geeks, freelancers, tele-explorers and voyeurs was less problematic in the hands of skilled enthusiasts, but wreaked havoc in the skies in the hands of unskilled pilots.

The Dragonfly had a fifty-mile range and sent images to the controllers that guided them. Once the images were received, the drone’s pilot uploaded the files to a server; an associate then downloaded the files and posted them to a vlogspot. While a few vlogspots garnered enough attention to attract paying advertisers, for most high-flyers, as hardcore mini-drone enthusiasts were called, it was a matter of prestige. In an age of instant messaging, seconds made the difference between a scoop and poop.

Normally friendly, competition among high-flyers covering the epochal event was anything but.

As more and more mini-drones took to the sky, as if channeling their pilots’ anger and frustration, the normally unflappable Dragonflies attacked each other. Here and there, a swarm of Dragonflies downed a larger Sparrow drone. But these aerial dogfights were a sideshow to the main event, which drew the drones to one location in unheard of numbers.

Minimally maintained by the Hammerhead Hedge Fund that owned Detroit Municipal Waterworks, the infrastructure fell into disrepair. When it ceased to be profitable altogether, said hedge fund up and left, leaving the city to fend for themselves. Because Detroiters could not make up for years of neglect, fresh water trickled into the city and then ceased entirely. Despite a sizable body of fresh water on the city’s eastern border, potable water had to be trucked in. When that became prohibitively expensive, the chronically thirsty inhabitants abandoned the once thriving but oft troubled metropolis. After asset strippers and vandals had had their fill, bulldozers rolled in and leveled the city.

As the Detroit Metro Area limped along without its namesake, a miracle happened. Money, nowhere to be got while the city’s infrastructure crumbled, fell like manna from heaven. With the infusion of funds, the infrastructure was overhauled. Once again, water flowed in, waste out. And so it came to pass that the city of Detroit was reborn, but the long-suffering Diaspora was not invited back.

The former city of Detroit became the private reserve of a score of the world’s wealthiest families, who had carved out for themselves a New Jerusalem. While Detroit still appears on older maps, the city is now the shining Free State of Rand, named after a twentieth-century philosopher who promoted the primacy of the individual over society, a philosophy that worked well for a handful—not so much for the vast majority.

The wealthiest country on earth, the FSR was the logical choice to host an event projected to cost as much as a single Olympiad. While past Olympiad hosts had gone deep in debt—to be paid by future generations ad infinitum—the FSR could write a check. But the rich don’t get rich by paying for something when they can get others to pay for it.

An island of surfeit in a sea of want, the FSR had its own golf courses and an army of poorly paid (are there any other kind?) immigrants to keep them green and groomed. A bevy of nannies, wet nurses, and maids relieved its residents of the onerous chores attached to quotidian life. The FSR boasted its own 100 percent organic supermarket and a security force that closely monitored the comings and goings of guests, and especially of guest workers.

The Randians, as residents of the FSR were called, were rumored to have richly appointed and well-stocked underground bunkers that allowed them to ride out any disaster short of the sun imploding. The bunkers set aside for the high muckety-mucks of state were said to be hovels by comparison.

Conspicuously absent were banks, for together the citizens of the FSR owned the World Federated Reserve, making it in effect their own private piggy bank. What the FSR didn’t do was levy taxes, at least not directly, and not on its own citizens. Though they owned or controlled nearly 70 percent of the world’s total resources, their minions in Congress collected taxes from cash strapped US citizen and handed it over to the FSR. So that Randians lived free, the mainland got in return higher taxes and fewer services. For helping to widen and solidify the gap between rich and poor, every handpicked US president looked forward to a gold-plated retirement in the FSR.

That the Free State of Rand straddled the Canadian/American border, after unilaterally extending it, was yet another symbol of its overweening dominance making Detroit a wise choice—from an aspiring hegemonist’s point of view.

But they, the Randians, chose Detroit for another reason. Because the FSR bestrode the Canadian/American border, Randians claimed dual citizenship, which made them beneficiaries of Canada’s publicly funded healthcare, unfair and certainly reprehensible to the vast majority of Americans who either had no healthcare insurance or else paid dearly for it. Insurance company CEOs figured prominently in the Randian firmament.

Randians valued their privacy as much as they hoarded their wealth and did everything in their power to deprive everyone else of both wealth and privacy. To be sure, social media moguls maintained at least one residence in the FSR. Mergers and acquisitions had made Sergey Sugarman, CEO of MonoView, first among equals in the rarefied social media sphere. He and his fellow moguls had posed as staunch defenders of the individual’s right to privacy, and were even successful in getting laws passed that curtailed the government’s indiscriminate snooping.

Defenders of privacy rights Sergey and his fellow moguls might have been, but of the individual’s right to privacy, not a whit. They saw the government as a competitor and sought to maximize their power and wealth by kneecapping their only competition. Thus did social media moguls become modern-day Croesuses in the business of collecting and selling private information.

Would you prefer the government gather your private information or MonoView? rhetoricized FSR-funded pundits on FSR-funded media outlets. Those in a position to dictate the choices can limit them to suit their own purpose.

Even the ultra-exclusive Randians had their elite. Because their fortunes were free of the taint of anything remotely connected to a product or a service, these elite made the idle rich of yore look like sweatshop workers by comparison, which is why their fellow Randians so admired them.

Given the Randians’ passion for privacy rights—for themselves—and their aversion to spending their own money, what induced them to host a global event in their own backyard?

The simple answer is they had no intention of spending a dime of their own fabulous wealth. Moreover, they intended to profit mightily from the event. Nor did they intend to surrender an iota of their privacy to feed a spectacle-hungry world, much less the genuinely starving, which comprised over half the world’s population.

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Randists had elevated the ranting of an embittered, cantankerous self-appointed guru of individualism from a cult to a near-monolithic religion of which Capitalism (in reality Randism, its virulently predatory form) became its benign face. And while all Randians were Randists, not all Randists were Randians—the self-selecting few who held FSR passports.

Arguably, Capitalism was an economic system and not a religion, but its beliefs and practices suggested otherwise. While religionists believed in an invisible, all-knowing divinity guiding and governing people’s lives, Capitalists believed in an invisible, all-knowing hand performing that function. And both cited chimerical entities in their mantras: religionists invoked a Holy Ghost; Capitalists invoked a Free Market.

Insofar as Randians believed in anything, their belief in Capitalism slash Randism was deep and deeply personal. With Randism’s core belief anchored in the primacy of the individual over the collective, it could hardly be otherwise.

As with every major religion, Randism was used by the shrewd and unscrupulous few to gain wealth and secure power at the expense of the many while its adherents glossed over or rationalized its inconsistencies, contradictions and falsehoods.

An early Randist was heard to quip, If God made man in his image, he must’ve been one greedy bastard. Scholars have traced the origins of the Randist motto Greed is God to that quip.

Impressive though the mega-screens were, after the initial shock and awe of seeing themselves projected en masse, the mass of people squeezed into the amphitheater mostly ignored them. Because their personal media devices (PMDs) kept them in thrall, capturing, receiving, and sending images of the event, they hadn’t noticed when the screens became giant sheets of visual noise, as if the drones’ lenses were aimed at the overcast sky—here and there, dark patches which might be storm clouds or else flocks of birds flying in tight formation, as tightly packed as the earthbound creatures in the amphitheater below.

Johnny B had no device to distract him and so noticed everything around and above him. The sky, unlike any he’d seen, was heavy with portent. Though he lived a simple life, he was far from simpleminded. While he didn’t believe in omens, the oppressive atmosphere cried out for prophecy. He shook his head and turned his attention to the screens.

As if shrugging off their lethargy, the mega-screens ringing the amphitheater flickered to life and began spewing messages noticed only by the handful in the crowd not held captive by their PMDs.

Get right with God—screw a Christian was one such message. Depending on one’s feelings toward Christianity, the message could be construed as an appeal for brotherly/sisterly/otherly love or as a call to arms.

More advert than message, two Asian masseuses in nun’s habit—minus most of the habit—offered the faithful a Celestial massage that will relief from you stress and give you heavenly ending. Their catchy slogan: You need? We knead.

On another screen, an eye squinted through the sights of a double-barreled shotgun; both barrels were pointed directly at the viewer. The caption read: "Aiming for Jesus." Whether Jesus was the goal or the target wasn’t clear.

Johnny B smiled, despite himself, at the screen that depicted a man holding a cross being shot out of a cannon, while up in the sky, beard flowing, arms outstretched, God stood ready to catch him. The cannon was labeled Jesus. The refreshingly unambiguous, if arguably inaccurate, caption read: Jesus is the only way to God.

The screens hawked merchandise as well: bobble-headed dashboard Jesus dolls and coffee, which a smiling, mug-holding Christ touted as A divinely inspired brew.

One screen introduced a line of Christian-themed lingerie. To the devout Christian woman . . . fantasize no longer. Sleep with Jesus and still be faithful to your husband.

Nor were the men ignored. Aimed at those with erectile problems was this encouraging message: "Your faith is rock hard. So can you be. Take one tiny Lazarus pill before and be upstanding till she screams for the Lord."

Other messages promoted groups ranging from the militant Jihadists for Christ to the anodyne, self-referring Christians for Christ.

The Free State of Rand chose as its lead negotiator one Sheik Carlos Walton-Gates. While more than one petrol-billionaire sheik boasted at least a part-time residence in the FSR, Sheik Carlos wasn’t one of them; Sheik was his given name.

Fifty years earlier, a bona fide sheik had been a guest at one of several palatial homes owned by David Mercer Walton-Gates. Considered too old to further his brand at the time of the sheik’s visit, so overjoyed was Walton-Gates when nine months later his wife gave birth to a healthy boy that he readily agreed to her unusual choice of name for their son.

With a plethora of names like Koch-Walton-Bezos, Bezos-Walton-Gates, Gates-Bezos-Mercer, Bezos-Mercer-Buffett, and a handful of other hyphenated (on the page and in the boudoir) pedigreed Randian names, it wasn’t long before one of them put a bug in Walton-Gates’s ear.

When he questioned his wife about the unusual name she gave their son, she confessed it was to commemorate the visit of their illustrious guest nine months earlier. Because the infant had, besides the normal allotment of appendages, a tiny slug of a penis, the freckled, fair-haired Walton-Gates never questioned his supposed issue’s shock of jet-black hair and mocha complexion.

For furthering FSR interests, Sheik Carlos proved to be a wise choice. He shifted the event’s venue (and therefore the expense) onto the impoverished Detroit Metro Area, even though the DMA couldn’t scrape together enough money to host a bowling tournament, let alone a Super Bowl, to which the upcoming event was likened—minus the gladiatorial scuffling. He also negotiated exclusive rights to the branding of the event. A portion of the sale of all commemorative merchandise: trinkets, T-shirts, tote bags, mugs, posters, bobble-headed hippie dolls, etcetera, would flow upstream to overflowing Randian bank accounts. Even a portion of the sale of every bottle of Wholly Water, the event’s official beverage, found its way into Randian coffers.

Sheik Carlos had to first convince the event’s host they must go deeper into debt to get out of debt.

"Isn’t that like trying to dig yourself out of a hole?" asked one dubious DMA representative at an exploratory meeting.

Not at all, Sheik Carlos parried. Look, as a good neighbor, the FSR is offering to loan you the money to cover your expenses, and at a very generous rate. With the projected revenue, more than just paying off the loan, you’ll be swimming in black ink in no time.

A generous rate in the eye of the lender might appear vigorish in the eye of the borrower.

If it’s such a sure thing, asked one lowly bookkeeper, unaware that Sheik Carlos had offered the committee a bribe, why is the interest rate so high?

Lest Sheik Carlos withdraw his generous offer, the other committee members shushed the bookkeeper and forbade him from attending future meetings.

Wealth and power don’t negotiate with a weaker party so much as dictate terms to it, but the fiction of negotiation had to be maintained. Thus did the Detroit Metro Area learn too late—and to its sorrow—that only by selling it assets and public services to for-profit corporations could it pay the interest on the loan.

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At the time of its immaculate conception, the FSR ordered a survey to pierce the depths of Lake Erie to determine the exact underwater location of its border with Canada. Lo-and-behold! The surveyors discovered the FSR was a baby step inside the Land of the Maple Leaf. Though the redrawn border was never recognized in international law, the chronically affable Canadians yielded to the FSR this sliver of waterlogged land.

Just as the FSR had grabbed a stretch of aqueous land under Lake Erie, Sheik Carlos carved out of the boundless sky an exclusionary area the size of the entire venue and its environs. A sovereign state calling dibs on the patch of sky directly overhead has ample precedence. But despite the FSR’s claim to sovereignty, because it had moved the venue outside its borders, not one molecule of air floating over the site belonged to it.

As audacious as his skyjacking was, Sheik Carlos took the unprecedented step of demanding 25 percent of the Sinclair Media Conglomerate’s advertising revenue for the right to fly its Sparrows in FSR’s recently acquired airspace.

What Sheik Carlos could not do, but not for lack of trying, was to prevent private drones from flying over the venue. The Sinclair Media Conglomerate was charging advertisers exorbitant rates for the promise of exclusive coverage; the more diluted the coverage, the less those advertisers would pay.

Every unlicensed drone, Sheik Carlos asserted at a press conference, means lost advertising revenue.

How much revenue are we talking about? one reporter asked.

We estimate losses in the hundreds of millions, replied the straight-faced FSR spokesman.

That’s pocket change for you guys, countered the reporter, punctuating his disdain with a sneer.

It isn’t the money, the unprincipled Sheik Carlos replied. It’s the principle.

Duped, seduced or coerced, the Detroit Metropolitan Area, little realized the tsunami heading their way as people from around the globe begged, borrowed or stole to get to the site where Jesus was expected to walk the earth a second, and perhaps final, time.

There is no consensus why, after thousands of years of waiting in the wings and countless wars, genocides, holocausts, plagues, famines, and plain run-of-the-mill mayhem, Jesus chose this time to make his big comeback. Had he simply run out of patience, as End Timers claimed?

End Timers belonged to a Christian sect that called itself, without a trace of irony, the Religious Right. Avowed followers of Jesus Christ, the path of the Religious Right tracked closely with that of the Randists such that one easily envisioned them sitting in the same pew. And what strange pew mates they would have made!

Everything the Randists believed in (and certainly practiced) was contrary to everything Jesus was recorded to have taught. True, Randists sometimes gave lip service to his teachings, as they sometimes did to the Universal Bill of Human Rights, laws handed down by the World High Court in the second millennium after Jesus’s death. The court still sits, though pile-ridden and impotent. As far-reaching