Kylee, first day on the job at Side Pockets, was a bit intimidated by her trainer, the lead barmaid, winner of the annual water tank wet T-shirt contest ten years running. She looked up at the tall girl with the full sleeve and neck tattoos wearing a shredded cut-off jeans over a pink bikini in the January snow of Wichita, which had a defining effect on the pink bikini top worn by the bar matron. The men, and the two women at the bar, all gawked at the supremely confident bar-keep as she brushed the snow from her inked shoulders and let the rest melt into her cleavage as she smiled with real niceness spiced with pity, down at Kylee, who was really short by comparison with this meadhall mamma, “Welcome aboard, Kylee, hope these assholes have been respectful—nice ass. Let them decide on the tip while you’re walking away—not that you aren’t pretty—but you know Kansas boys!”
Kylee could not help but look first at the snow soaked breasts, since they were eye level, then looked up, having drawn a blank on the woman’s name, “Thank, you, ah, ah…”
“Tits & Tats,” interceded the black cowboy leering over the bar under his black stetson, whose grinning chin was cracked with a viper like punch from the tall woman, which merely widened the grin into a beaming smile of joy, “Oh, I’m in love fo’ show! A round for the house, Little Girl!”
He grinned down to Kylee, who looked up at, The Boss Bitch With No Real Name, who nodded, ‘Yes,’ to her and lent a hand. Rodeo Ron patted Dallas Black on the back and said, “I told you she’d get past the Skinny road blocks, didn’t I.”
A skinny-legged, white ‘man’ of about 30, with obvious feminine tendencies, said, “Excuse me—you mean the volunteer car washes at the intersections, those nice, shivering Somali men wiping the snow from my windshield?”
“Just wait,” said Dallas Jack, “look, there goes the neighborhood!” pointing at the huge screen TV broadcasting ANA, Automated News America, with the artificially seductive news caster GeeGee Buffin, “Oh, bebe, GeeGee Buffin’, Bro, don’ you hate it when you wanna do a cartoon? AI babes is da’ Devil’s own tool!”
Tits & Tats, switched the news onto all six screens and turned it up, “Five of those fuckers tried to stop me at Tyler & Maple. I think I fish-tailed into one with the rear right bumper when I hit the gas—they were holding on, trying to stop me—but the 2011 Charger don’t play! Even in the snow.”
The feminine man gasped, “You hit a member of a snow removal crew? You know they have Workright Citizenship, right?”
The bar patrons, including Mah & Pop and the washed-up ball player, simply gawked at the man for a moment. Then, as the sound tuned up, and the frightening female pool player sauntered over, her brass hoops rolling on her broad shoulders as her extraordinary butt donked from side-to-side, ALL eyes momentarily went from the breaking news to the bursting Levis. Kylee, involuntarily blurted in a behind the bar whisper, “Wow, what an ass!”
Tits & Tats smoothed her own narrow hips and shook her straight black hair sadly, “Tell me about it—I love that witch like a sister, but she makes me feel like a hag every time she swishes across the room. Even her hair bounces.”
“I’ll have another, Tits, a double-since I’m about to be gang-raped by an army of Wedge-headed Skinnies.”
The hispter man gasped in horror, then abruptly stopped and widened his eyes as the corn-fed girl flashed her crazy green eyes under blood red bangs up into his pale face. He retreated into his Hazy IPA as Kylee filled a Guiness for Rodeo Ron and the news, now amped up, droned on in the form of various AI Bimbo newscasters and reporters on simulated streets.
“As unusually sunny skies smile over Wichita, Kansas…”
“Say what, BITCH!,” shouted Dallas Jack, “My black ass is gettin’ snowed in dis corn crib!”
The fake news continued, “With Wichita Area unemployment at 90% due to opiate addiction, elder care facing severe housing and staffing shortages, and Boomer Era housing grossly energy inefficient, Homeland Security is stepping into the breach. Twenty-thousand young New Peace Corp volunteers from Mogadishu, Somalia are being air-lifted as we speak. For more, from Wichita, Public Square is DeeDee Smiles…” The AI newscaster then blinked seductively as the screen turned to a computer generated vision of the new temporary housing currently crowding the streets of downtown Wichita, where motor vehicles were now prohibited by the office trailers parked in the streets…
Here the gorgeous red-headed news reporter, DeeDee Smiles, was standing before a pallet of bananas topped with sacks of rice. The pallet had parachute cords attached to all four corners with a parachute fluttering above in an improbably wind. Standing on the front and back of each pallet, feat in the forklift slats and holding onto the cords in their traditional attire, small swords belted below their vests, chewing khat and grinning, were four Somali men, each with a tool: a pick, shovel, pry bar or ax.
DeeDee approached the nearest man, who was wearing a red beret, which Kylee thought clashed with the traditional garb and the Fezes worn by the other three, and asked, “Sergeant Omar, welcome. Please, explain for our viewers what your New Peace Corp Heroes will be doing to save the inhabitants of Wichita, and the Greater Four-Corners Region of Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri and Arkansas from the opiate blight?”
The man smiled like the sliver of a midnight moon, “DeeDee, the Boom Era housing is unsustainable. We bring our own food supplies, we ride down from New Peace Corp C-130s, demo obsolete housing, and build, from Missouri-Oklahoma cow chip and Kansas straw, sustainable housing in traditional manner or our country.”
The other three men then all smiled and saluted at the camera and DeeDee asked, “Sergeant Omar, isn’t this dangerous, parachuting in like this?”
The sergeant smiled, “During relief of Newfoundland, each squad of four, took an average two casualties, one dead, one wounded. The wounded man serves as cook, dead man as martyr against opiate blight—must save the white people from drugs. Whites endangered speci—ah, race, must be saved.”
“Whad’ da fug,” mumbled Dallas Jack, “Mah ass is surrounded by crackers! Dis joint be worse den Wiggertall Falls.”
Rodeo Ron slapped him on the back good naturedly and toasted the old ball player as they continued to watch and the Newscaster returned, “DeeDee Smiles reporting live from Wichita—now to HQ: I have on Open Ether, Judge Gamelon Pike of the DEA, with one of the New Peace Corps’ sponsors, Brill Yates, of Sustainable Agriculture, INC.”
The Open Ether Screen split into a six pointed star with GeeGee in one, Brill in another, The Judge in a third, and the other three pyramid shaped screens, revolving around a Kwanza Candle center, showing: parachuting Somali Relief Workers, Pallet’s parachuting in a hazardous warble, with an occasional Somali being pitched to his death when the pallet canted in the wind, and videos of great Atlas Strato-Drones being loaded on a middle-eastern military airfield. Each vast automated plane was shown to accommodate two 10-passenger vans and two 50-passenger buses. Ominously, one of the video shorts of the Atlas Strato-Drones showed buses and vans rolling out of the back end under a snowy Wichita sky, not the phony sunny sky being shown to the nation on the other videos.
Rodeo Ron drawled, “Oh shoot, y’all, it’s on—time to tool up. Them wedge-headed Skinnies be a commin’”
As the guilty liberal man began to object in his simper, “You can’t be...” a great crash sounded out front. There, right in front of the glass door and glass front, the black cab of Rodeo Ron’s Ford F-350 Diesel pickup was crushed by a pallet of bananas, rice and Somalis, all three imported commodities flying this way and that, with one body coming through the front window. Brill Yates opined on the ANA Open Ether segment, “In light of the crimes of the American Fruit Company in the Century of American Oppression, in partnership with the DEA, we are delivering bananas bio-engineered as high-protein opiate-blockers…”
And then something crashed into the roof above, the lights flickered, sheet metal groaning, shreds and crumbs of asphalt shingles falling on a pool table—a thin ebony body bounced off of Dallas Jack’s Mint El Camino and smashed into the liberal man’s smart car, wrecking it, both men unconsciously holding each other in an odd embrace that they immediately regretted. Tits & Tats reached down behind the bar, put on a bandoleer of shotgun shells over her shoulder and between her breasts, and lifted an Old West style stage coach gun and inserted two shells, “If the motherfuckers scratch the Charger—” and then, further out in the lot, a pallet of bananas, rice and men crashed into a vintage gas-powered, black Charger, and crushed it, as bodies flew arms akimbo, the airborne relief workers fairing no better then the vintage vehicles their freight crushed.
Tits and Tats screamed like a she wolf might if she had steel teeth, not a word, just directed rage.
“That is no coincidence,” said Mah, in her powered chair, between sips of her draft, to which Pops answered, “This is an attack, the parachutes have load-master toggles, capable of limited steerage—see the loop in the hand of that dead sergeant; they are targeting vintage vehicles. That means the electric stuff is going to be taken off line by D.H.S.”
The tap on the Coors light blew halfway through the old ball player’s pour. Kylee looked up at her new boss, who looked like the cover girl for a gun magazine, who snarled, “Drinks are on the house—end of the world special! The bar is all yours, Buttercup,” and then vaulted over the bar in her canvas sneakers and headed to the front door…
“This is real bad, like a bad movie,” blurted Kylee, “and now I don’t even have a real name—I’m in the shit!”
“Don’t worry, Buttercup,” comforted Rodeo Ron, “so long as there’s pussy on the floor, Big Ron is holdin’ that door!”
He then swaggered after Tits & Tats in his cowboy boots and Bull Rider belt buckle, drawing a great gleaming revolver from under his red-black flannel jacket.
