Waiting for the Galactic Bus by Parke Godwin

Author:Parke Godwin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780553280661
Publisher: Spectra
Published: 1988-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

“Well, I’m real happy for Roy. I guess. This is a neat breakfast Can you make eggs like McDonald’s?”

“There is no such franchise here yet,” Simnel informed her coolly. “Though I’m sure Mr. Stride will insist on one. As Judas remarked, a ray of hope to the benighted. Good morning, mum.”

20

The late, late show

Charity woke in the dark. Randy wasn’t beside her in the bed; that didn’t bother her at all. Outside of sex, he wasn’t much company. Everything he said sounded like a commercial.

Just... she felt creepy and more alone than she ever had since dying. She rang Simnel and heard only the quiet intermittent buzz. Randy gone, Simnel out. She was alone and couldn’t sleep. She tried the outside phone: nothing, still out of order. From habit, she reached for the TV remote and turned on the wall set.

The screen sprayed garish color and flickering shadows over the dark bedroom, resolving to a night scene with a telereporter’s voice-over —

“— just an hour ago the peace of these black and Jewish homes in a quiet neighborhood of Below Stairs was shattered by devastating White Paladin raids led personally by Roy Stride, new head of the Paladin party.”

Cut to Roy himself standing in an open car, leather-coated, whip in hand, black peaked cap perched at a cocky angle, and —

Cut to a black family being dragged from their front door by huge Paladin guards. Husband, wife, three children being hustled ungently toward a waiting van. When the father broke away and resisted, one guard simply shot him. The action was brutally graphic: two guards slammed the man up against the van and a third opened fire with a submachine gun. The gunfire went on and on, his body disintegrating in sharp detail and color.

“No...” Charity recoiled from the scene, tried to change channels. They were all the same but someone was playing tricks with the camera. The black man fell and fell with his head coming apart — and then Roy again, standing in the open car. He turned to Charity as the camera came in close, and looked directly at her, found her, his mouth twisted in a smirk of macho triumph and pride.

“Hey, Charity, that you? Where are you? Look: I told you how it would be.”

And once more the scene cut to another home, smoke and flame spurting from a shattered window, Paladins sprinting out of the front door. A man and woman lay crumpled on the front steps. The camera zoomed in on them. It looked to Charity as if someone had cut every artery in their bodies. You wouldn’t think there was that much blood in just two bodies.

“The general feeling in the political air,” the telereporter’s voice-over went on dispassionately, “is that these raids have the tacit assent of the White Christian populace.”

“Who said?” Charity blurted. “I didn’t.”

“— certainly no government troops or police have made any move to intervene, as though quietly allowing political force of gravity to take its course. This act is seen by some as a definite referendum.

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