St. Izzy of F Street: Chapters 45-47
A Pre-Apocalyptic Novel: Installment 20 of 28
Cover design by Kris Norris; main photo by Alonso Reyes
Back cover description
An autistic journalist in Washington, DC, befriends a homeless woman who wields an “End is Near” sign and proclaims the coming destruction of the world. Sonny remains skeptical of Izzy’s prophecies, even as they come true with increasingly dire results—natural disasters, wars, and the loss of his career. One message catches the FBI’s attention, which sends Sonny into depression and panic attacks. He can ignore Izzy as delusional or help spread the word, but he needs a sign before it’s too late.
Previously in Chapter 44
Izzy’s prophecies begin to come to true in rapid and dramatic fashion, including a tsunami in Palau, war in the Middle East, and a major earthquake in Southern California with thousands dead. A cable news report about the Izzy website sends page views and subscriptions — and income — through the roof.
Chapter 45
“We’ll ask them to sacrifice an unblemished first-born goat for you.”
Exhaustion finally took hold and we all slept until dinnertime. My internal body clock hadn’t yet synced up with the children of the night. I stumbled around in my underwear trying to remember how to make coffee. Remember what day it was. Was it evening or early morning?
Nobody else was up yet, so I scanned the news for the latest.
Iran threatened Israel with annihilation. Damascus was digging out of the rubble left by Israeli jets. Disneyland was digging out of the rubble left by He Who Is. Israel was still counting the dead in Haifa and Tel Aviv. They’d rolled tanks and troops to the Syrian border. The UN called for an immediate ceasefire or else... or else they’d write a sternly worded letter. Russia called for the International Court of Justice to file war crime charges against Israel. The US ambassador to the UN said, “That’s rich.”
China called for calmer heads to prevail and offered to negotiate a ceasefire between all parties. This while their ships moved to blockade Taiwan.
North Korea tested a long-range missile by firing it over Japan into the Pacific Ocean.
NATO prepared for an all-out war against, well, against somebody. Anybody. Maybe everybody.
The US president called on the War Powers Act to mobilize US troops everywhere all at once, and asked Congress to get their asses back in session for Memorial Day weekend.
I saved links to all the stuff Dori might be interested in.
It felt strange to be in the middle of the biggest series of news stories to happen at once while, as an unemployed former journalist, sitting on the sidelines to watch it unfold. My mind kept going to story angles I could pursue, how to localize the events in the Middle East and California for MidAmerica. San Andreas fault line in California. Could that happen with the New Madrid fault line in Missouri?
A synagogue in Nebraska — in a MidAmerica town — was firebombed. Fortunately, the bomb didn’t go off as planned, the fire didn’t spread beyond scorching an exterior wall and putting the bomber in the hospital with second-degree burns on his hands. The biggest casualty was his eyebrows had gone missing. A DC bureau chief could have gotten comment from AIPAC.
Not my job, man.
An hour passed before a toilet flushed. Levi was up and wandered out in his underwear. I wanted to get dressed, but didn’t want to wake up Dori, so Levi and I sat around in our man-panties. He grunted good morning, grabbed a coffee — first time I’d ever seen him drink the stuff — and sat at his computer.
His rebel yell woke Dori up.
She ran out in her girl-panties, still trying to pull a T-shirt over her head, giving Levi and me a nice flash.
Levi was dancing again. I’d never go to a dance club with this guy.
“We’ve got—” He stopped to sit down and look again. “We’ve got $101,306 in our accounts.”
“Holy fuck!” Dori said it out loud.
I thought it.
“I’m going to have to make some changes to bank accounts and stuff. That’s going to get harder to move funds around. I thought we’d be dealing with a lot less than this. And this is in one week.”
Dori and I showered and dressed, then we pushed Levi into the bathroom to do the same.
With my list of story links, Dori started plowing through the news and lining them up against prophecies, comparing to the interpretations from the commenters. More than a thousand premium subscribers, some at the old five-dollar rate, some at the new price-gouging twenty bucks. “Supply and demand,” Levi had said. More than a hundred comments tried to match up prophecies with fulfillments.
Dori said a few were on the mark, but some were just outright lunatics.
The irony didn’t escape me.
Most of the comments were disagreements that morphed quickly into name-calling arguments. “Good for business,” Levi had said. “Keeps them coming back.”
And when Dori posted her explanations, everyone took them as correct and true. They assumed it was Izzy the Great Prophetess Her Own Self revealing the true meanings, so the arguments would curtail.
No one argued with Izzy. Her word was gospel.
By time Levi got out of the shower, the bank accounts had surpassed $150,000. The number of visitors bogged down the servers.
Levi asked for delivery food so he could add more servers and change up some connections to handle the web traffic.
“I thought you said you prepared for this,” Dori said.
“I’d prepared for fifty thousand visitors. Maybe a hundred thousand. Not a million plus in twenty-four hours.”
The site went viral. Which then generated more news stories about how the site went viral and what deep sociological conclusions could be ascertained about the idiots who frequented sites like this.
Those stories, of course, just generated higher traffic to the site.
“And we have our first ad already!” Levi restrained himself from another dance session. “For a Medicare Advantage plan!”
“Does anyone want Salvadoran for dinner?” I asked. “Dori and I can go out and eat, leave you alone, then bring you some food.”
Levi didn’t know what Salvadoran food consisted of. “Goat stew or something? What do they eat in El Salvador?”
Dori and I looked at each other. We weren’t sure either. But I wanted to try that little place over by the elementary school.
Dori liked the idea. “We’ll text you pix of the menu.”
“Let me know if they have anything kosher.”
Dori laughed. “You’re not kosher.”
“No,” Levi said, “but I’m thinking about it.”
“We’ll ask them to sacrifice an unblemished first-born goat for you,” she said.
Chapter 46
“Burn them. Burn every single one of them, down to ashes.”
California began the long process of cleaning up. A few aftershocks had taken more lives, collapsed a few already damaged buildings. Israel and various groups in Syria and Lebanon slugged it out for another twenty-four hours, then paused. Not a ceasefire, both were quick to say. They’d just ceased firing for the moment.
Russia kept up their bluster but made no military moves. Germany pounded the podium at the UN but at the NATO meeting, they made the case themselves that it was an accident, not an actual attack on a NATO ally, so need for anyone to get their lederhosen in a twist.
Bears and leopards back in their cages for the moment. Maybe everybody was taking a much-needed deep breath.
Website traffic did not slow down though.
Dori made sure she highlighted a couple of the more hopeful prophecies from Izzy to help calm frayed nerves, although none of them had come true. At least not yet.
By Sunday night, Levi announced we’d crossed the quarter-million-dollar mark. He hadn’t figured out how to discreetly shuffle the money around yet without attracting unwanted attention. At the rate he was going, it would take two years just to withdraw what was already there.
“We need to pay Izzy something,” I said, while we all took a break from the end of the world to watch The Force Awakens for the hundredth time. Dori had never seen it, which Levi had trouble wrapping his head around. I had grown bored with it when I was a teenager. For Levi, it was more than a movie. It was a religious experience. Hard to watch it again with Levi’s constant narration to explain everything to Dori. She looked like how I felt when she explained Izzy’s prophecies to me.
“Good idea,” Dori said, after I’d repeated myself twice to get their attention away from the TV. “How much should we give Izzy?”
“Maybe I’ll give her my share,” I said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Levi said and hit the pause button. “You’d have to give her a suitcase of cash, which would get stolen the first night she sleeps in the park.”
“Maybe she could buy a house,” I said.
Dori thought about it a bit more rationally. “Maybe rent a studio apartment for her and stock it with groceries.”
“Maybe she could just stop by once a week for a hundred dollars.” Levi wasn’t so generous, but probably even more rational than Dori.
“I don’t know. But I need to give her something. We’re making bank with her prophecies. She probably doesn’t even know.”
The bigger issue would be to find her.
I checked my bank account app. The MidAmerica severance deal had hit. That, plus the first bonus, accounted for about $16,000 of the $88,000 in my account.
Levi had solved the money transfer issue.
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