What if the COVID Vaccine was a covert government project to eliminate Vampires by degrading their human-food-sourced blood supply? What if it was bungled by Fauci and the National Health Agency bureaucrats and now Vampires want payback?
The gleaming black Mercedes Benz is waiting, doors open, by the time we reach the main front courtyard of Old St. Josephs Jesuit Church. Katrina is hustling a brisk power walk to reach the car and get this place in its rear view mirror. We just about touch the vehicle when she stops me dead in my tracks and grabs my arm. She’s got that look….
“DON’T OPEN YOUR MOUTH UNTIL I SAY SO…..REMEMBER!” She barks the words at me but gently assists me into the back seat.
I’m too numb to talk……keeping my gums shut is just fine with me.
Inside the car she waggles her seat belt at me and points to mine.
I immediately buckle up as the car starts creeping up the courtyard driveway onto the street. Katrina nails the accelerator at the first break in traffic and starts weaving in and out of lanes like a bat outta’ Hell. It’s late, dark and she’s way over the limit – but she doesn’t care.
She starts ripping turns up and down side streets – in and out, zig-zagging our way through some really shitty neighborhoods. Finally we arrive at a Stop Sign feeding into a main drag I recognize….Kensington Avenue. The absolute worst open-air drug, homeless and addict-infested nightmare of big city blight in the United States. Kensington Avenue is so bad that You Tube has a library full of videos about it, documenting its dystopic descent into an abyss of filth and decay that even beats the shantytowns of Calcutta and Rio de Janeiro
Katrina hangs a quick right off the side street onto Kensington’s main drag and immediately we find ourselves in the middle of traffic lanes choked by cars intermittantly jamming on their breaks for inpromptu meetings with their drug dealers. Cadres of these guys – they’re all males – brazenly trot up to waiting cars and transact business as calmly as if they’re scalping football tickets in the parking lot of Eagles Stadium. Ahhh…..Capitalism in the city of Brotherly Love.
Garbage and filth is strewn everywhere. Broken bottles, cardboard boxes, disgarded soiled clothing…..sagging, ripped tents….tarpaulins draped across sidewalks covered with what looks like human execrement. And people – the most desperate wrecks of humanity. They stagger and lope up and down the roadway or sit collapsed in a heap on curbs – quivering and shaking for want of the drugs their bodies crave. Some yell out loud to no one in particular, others curse and scream out gibberish waving their arms in pathetic spasms. It’s all borderline surreal under the hazy yellowish glow of street lights in one of the most storied of American cities – birthplace of the US Constitution and where Ben Franklin sojourned, resolute and optimistic about the chances of our new Republic surviving.
One woebegone leans against a fire hydrant with his ripped pants down around his ankles, shitting a torrent of foul sludge onto the street. His aim is bad – and his tattered trousers catch the brunt of it all. A pregnant woman – her belly bulging out from underneath a child’s size t-shirt with a dinosaur on it – squats and pees in the right lane of Kensignton Avenue barely ten feet from our front bumper. Her face is eroded from Meth abuse and her head is a patchwork of baldness…..her swollen belly is enormous and is covered in weeping, glistening sores. Katrina slams on the brakes. The sad sack pulls up her stained and frayed sweat pants and hobbles off on backened, hideously swollen bare feet.
These sorry souls are everywhere, swarming up and down what used to be a major commerical thoroughfare. The businesses on each side of the avenue are boarded up or their fronts covered by heavy roll-up grates swathed in graffiti. Everything is so defaced with spray paint that all that remains are indecipherable messages of urban despair and decline. Address markings are unrecognizable. Nobody’s getting mail at these places…..
Police avoid Kensington. It’s a no-mans land set aside to accomodate the unwanted, broken, cast off and forgotten detritus of our world. A place to drug-up and die. No one wants its denizens……they are collateral damage. An embarassment our society finds too unbearable to acknowledge.
We creep along silently inside the car, listening – ironically – to soft classical music. The calming, sonorous sounds of Mozart serenade us through this Hellish landscape. By now I’m nearly crazy to find out what the Hell is going on – but I keep my mouth shut. Occasionally I see Katrina looking at me in the rear-view mirror, expressionless. I follow her lead and struggle to keep cool.
We crawl up Kensignton at a snail’s pace – apparently this is the witching hour for drug entrepeneurs to score their big deals.
Katrina suddenly makes a right turn mid-block into a shallow drive facing a big, heavy steel garage door – it looks like a boarded up car service entrance to a Pep Boys Auto Center long since abandoned. An old Pep Boys sign is still affixed to the roof line of the building – swinging precariously from a sizeable rusted and twisted steel bracket.
We stop facing the formidable interlocked sections of steel, our headlights reflecting off its graffiti-encrusted surface area. Throngs of hopeless Kensignton Avenue nomads fumble and scrape past the back of the Mercedes Benz – the ass end of which is still jutting into the sidewalk because the driveway is so shallow.
We wait……and wait. We hear sounds of people pawing and squeezing past the polished trunk of the car as they shamble and clamber themselves to God knows where. A few tremulous zombies collide straight into our vehicle rather than trying to go around it – as if it’s some kind of apparition they can walk through. And here we sit listening to Mozart. The whole scene is macabre. I feel like I’m losing my mind.
Finally, the massive steel garage door starts moving upward, squealing ungodly protests of metal against metal and corroded, rusty chain drives. This thing hasn’t opened in years…… Surprisingly, Katrina kills the Mercedes’ headlights.
Katrina guns the car forward into total blackness at her first opportunity, almost scraping the Mercedes’ roof on the steel door as it continues its cacophony upward. She’s driving blindly into black shadows of what appears to be a large room. I soon feel the door screaming it’s – now amplified – closure behind us, rattling and clanking our teeth loose inside the confines of this dark place we’ve penetrated.
She stops the car. Suddenly I’m blinded by intense lights bathing the car and the interior of the room around us. Four serious-looking men in crisp white coveralls are making their way towards us.
Katrina shoots me a look and orders, “Get out…..”
Emerging out of the driver’s door, Katrina barks a word – it sounds German, something like “Sicherheit” – and the men scatter towards a floor-to-ceiling steel latticework of immaculate space-age shelving, hangers and tool drawers that line the far end of the room.
Computer monitors and oversized scopes hang from the roof, where massive blower ductwork is positioned to suck out auto exhaust and exchange air in industrial quantities. Overhed cameras with blinking red dots are positioned every ten feet. I can see the back side of the now closed, massive steel garage door…..it’s brand new. Obviously, it’s been doctored to make it sound disused and decrepit from the outside. It’s tracks and rollers are military-grade and reinforced like Fort Knox. It’s springs are huge, strung to cables that could suspend a bridge. Everything about this place screams over-engineered, high tech and state of the art. The words “no expense spared” come to mind.
The place isn’t a “garage” in any vernacular, grease-monkey parlance. It’s more of a clean room – a combination technical diagnostic center and high-end modification facility for vehicles most people can’t afford. There isn’t a smudge of dirt, grease or filth anywhere. It’s a surgery center for the sophisticated rides Jay Leno makes videos about – or a Formula-One Race Car theater you’d find at LeMans.
The men commence their tasks – whatever those tasks are – silently. They all are young(ish), tall and have sandy blonde-hair. One has a moustache…..and as Mr. Moustache slips past Katrina, he makes a point to catch her eye and flip her something. She snatches it out of the air like a pro and nods a quick “thanks”. She’s not surprised by anything – she’s as cool as a safecracker.
These guys clearly got a heads-up we were going to show up here. Our presence is no surprise to anybody except me. She gets my attention and points to a door about twenty feet distant. It has no doorknob, only a numbers pad that controls access. I barely get to her side and she’s already entered a series of numbers that make the door open with an audible “snick”. I follow her through the portal and down a long white hallway – as clean as the “garage” – to another door. Same drill….. Katrina quickly inputs the required code and we emerge into yet another large “garage” that is brightly lit from above and as clean as a hospital room. Cameras blink at us from every angle. More racks, more shelving and more monitors. Filtered air wafts past us like a summer breeze.
In the center of the room sits a jet-black, 2023 Tesla Model S Dual Motor. This posh little beauty is facing the back of another massive steel garage door, ready for a road trip.
Mr. Moustache back in the other room must’ve tossed Katrina the Tesla’s key fob. She opens the back passenger door for me and then gets behind the steering wheel. We belt-up simultaneously. For a moment Katrina stares at a small number glowing on the dashboard. Ninety-five percent charged.
The massive garage door starts – silently – moving up. The Tesla, too, moves silently – straight forward. No engine starting, revving or bumps as its transmission is engaged. It glides with a ghostly noiselesness that I – a guy weaned on gas-powered rides – finds both eerie and sublime. It’s my first time in a Tesla. I could get used to this.
I’m glad for the quiet – Katrina and I have got a Hell of lot to talk about. I surmised the minute she cautioned me against talking in the Mercedes that it had been bugged….probably tagged, too. I have a vague recollection from my High School German classes that “Sicherheit” means “Security”…..The boys in white coveralls up the hall are probably deep-dive-tearing that beautiful Merc apart right about now. Not my problem. I just want answers.
Time to go.
Copyright 2023, Jon Croft
Graphic courtesy of Wikipedia
