Stephen Randel - The Chupacabra

Earlier that day, Kip had spent the morning swinging a heavy sledgehammer at the cracked and sinking walkway that led to the front of the big white house he’d grown up in. His hands ached from the impact of the hammer as it smashed the ancient sidewalk into pieces he could pry out of the ground with a crowbar and stack in a pile. As the morning wore on, the growing pile began to vaguely resemble a crumbling Aztec pyramid. Max had watched his work in the morning sunshine before deciding it was more interesting to chase grasshoppers in the lawn. After a while, Max found the sound of steel pounding on concrete too annoying and decided to retire to the house for a long nap, preferably next to his master.

After a short break for lunch, Kip borrowed Bennett’s truck and purchased the rest of the supplies he needed to form and fill the new pathway he was working on. It had taken several hours to dig out the path to the proper depth, fill the base with gravel, and line it with wooden forms.

Stopping to admire his handiwork in the late afternoon sun, he realized how glad he was that the house wasn’t set back further from the street. Wiping his brow and pulling on his shirt, his shoulders beginning to burn from the bright sun he had labored under all day, he smiled as he realized how much he enjoyed actually building something real. Working construction jobs had filled Kip’s summers during college, and he loved the physical labor. He also learned that even though the pay was good for a college kid, the backbreaking work was too difficult to imagine as a career, and finishing his degree and finding a desk job made a lot more sense. The only problem was, on Wall Street, he wasn’t really building anything. Buying and selling bonds all day long, adding a small markup for his firm to keep, was exciting and profitable, but some days it seemed he was just trading the same bond names with the same coupons and same maturities over and over again. There was no end game. Nothing physical left afterward to admire except commissions and bonus checks. In the old days, at least the certificates were actually physical and traded hands. Not anymore. Billions and billions of dollars’ worth of bonds traded hands every day on the street, but they only existed in electronic form. Entries on an inventory ledger, they whizzed past each other through cyberspace, racing to their next buyer. Some days it frustrated him that he couldn’t actually reach out and touch them.

And then when the credit markets crashed, there was nothing left. How do you value a debt instrument that has no buyers? There were underlying assets somewhere, but if no one would bid for the bonds associated with the assets, it was almost if the homes, the buildings, the infrastructure projects underlying them simply vanished. And when everything vanished, it vanished fast. When any market bubbles, the prevailing sentiment is that the biggest risk is not taking enough risk. What will they say if someone else makes more money than we do? Besides, it’ll be different this time, and if not who cares? We’ll all go down together, at least until the government bails us out, and you know they will. We’re too important. Not the small businesses going under left and right, real businesses with real assets and real working-class employees. No, save our industry and its trillions of dollars’ worth of electronic debits and credits. If not, how can we pay the upkeep on our back-up yachts?

Realizing how much work he still had to do tomorrow mixing and pouring the concrete, leveling the surface, and setting the expansion joints sobered Kip from his funk. Putting away his tools, Kip noticed Bennett had pulled his truck from out of the back alley and swung around the block, stopping in front of the house.

“What’re you all dressed up for, old man?” Kip asked. “Got a hot date?”

“Going to meet a buddy for a drink. I won’t be out late,” said Bennett as he examined the half-finished project. “Now, when you said you were going to fix the walk, I didn’t think you were going to tear up my whole front yard.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll finish it tomorrow.”

“If you don’t mind, could you make it a little wider for me?” Bennett quipped as he drove off down the street.

Kip dropped his shovel and kicked it.

Upstairs, Avery continued to type away in his dimly lit room.

To: Office of the Attorney General

United States Department of Justice

Dear Sir:

I am writing you today to bring to your attention a matter of grave importance. Recent research I have conducted and submitted at my expense for the benefit of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is being ignored by said organization. The only other remotely possible explanation is a deliberate and willful FDA cover-up operation rivaled only in its insidious scope by the Aaron Burr conspiracy perpetrated early in the nineteenth century. My earth-shaking discovery occurred when I stumbled across a national online retailer, specializing in overstocked items, who was marketing large quantities of near-expiration Strawberry Kitty Cakes. I’m reluctant to name the online retailer specifically, as I’m currently considering taking legal action against their corporate directors regarding a separate transaction. However, being a devoted fan of Strawberry Kitty Cakes, I immediately placed an order for seven gross, one thousand and eight individually wrapped snack cakes being the most my larder could contain at the time. When the shipment arrived, I was amazed to discover the items in question were originally designated for sale and distribution in Asia. As I’m sure you’re aware, the Strawberry Kitty Cake snack food product line is manufactured and distributed by Great Panda Wind Holdings Limited, a Chinese conglomerate located in Shandong Province. They are one of the world’s largest conglomerates, with dozens of operational divisions, including mining, electronics, pharmaceuticals, food and beverage, cosmetics, and lampshades. I became aware of their subversive plot as I noticed the difference in ingredient labels between the shipment delivered and my current, domestically procured supply of Kitty Cakes. The food-coloring ingredient for Asian Strawberry Kitty Cakes is beetroot. For U.S. Strawberry Kitty Cakes, it’s Red Number Eighty-Two. I immediately became suspicious of the discrepancy, as food-coloring behavior modification and mind control is one of the yet-to-be-fulfilled methods of food borne-terrorism, at least until now. In lengthy discussions with food and drug scientific experts I discovered in online chat rooms and anti-government forums, there is a growing body of hard scientific evidence that Red Number Eighty-Two is in fact a thought-modification drug used as part of the “conditioning programs” administered to Korean War POWs. Please refer to the outstanding 1962 documentary film, The Manchurian Candidate, for additional details. I fear that unless immediate action is taken, an imminent thought and behavior modification initiative, sometimes referred to as brainwashing, may be launched by the Chinese government against the citizens of the United States. Hopefully we aren’t too late to act, as Strawberry Kitty Cakes have been available to and deliciously enjoyed by U.S. consumers for over three decades. My greatest fear, however, is that Chinese operatives have infiltrated the Food and Drug Administration specifically to silence the voice of scientists like myself. By the day, I become more convinced this is why my previous correspondence to the FDA has been unanswered. I await your reply.

In some towns in America, a lanky, elderly gentleman wearing a seersucker suit with a white pocket square, crisply pressed white oxford button-down dress shirt, yellow and white polka dot bow tie. and white bucks pulling up to a hotel valet stand in an enormous black Ford F-450 Super Duty extended-cab truck might seem a little out of place. Not in Austin, Texas. Bennett climbed down from his truck and handed the keys to the young valet who ran up to meet him.