Elective Decisions

“Anybody here?”  No response.  He scratched a balding pate. “WAITER!”

 

A girl of sixteen with too much makeup applied in too isometric a fashion sauntered up to the podium, apologizing quickly: “Sorry about the wait.  The Rex’s were in the grass-pool again.  They had to remove an outside wall and wheel in a forklift—”

“Fine.  Just get me a table.  Now.”

“How many?”

“How many does it look like?  ME!  C’mon…”

She swallowed and did her best impression of an insincere smile: “Right this way, sir.  My name is Michelle, I’ll be your hostess this evening,” she sat him at a table on one of the restaurant’s many balconies, then took her shirt off and began massaging her upper torso. “Which one would you like me to bring the drink on?”

The balding man did a double-take; then: “Put your shirt on and get me a waiter, I’m not thirsty.”

“But I’m supposed to—”

“NOW!”

She blushed and grabbed at the shirt.  Another patron across the balcony held up a finger: “Uh, hostess!”

“Just a minute!”  She ran to the table.

The man who’d called her sat with a young lady dressed in the kind of finery that pissed off revolutionaries in countries with names that rhymed with “ussia”.  “Yes, the left breast,” he said. “Oh, no—my wife, not me.”

Michelle turned to the wife and began to bat herself around like a very excited cat.  There was little eroticism in the act.

Back to the bald man with the constipated expression to complement his reflective noggin:  He put two feet up on the table and whipped out a phone that had a tiny 3-D dancer pirouetting around the outside as a “sleep” animation.  When he opened the phone, she winked at him, did a little shimmy, then sucked back into the holoprojector on the side.  Satic effervesced over the tiny viewscreen.  Baldy waited until a man that could have been his twin appeared: “Okay, I’m in, I have a table.  When do you want me to do the implant?”

The other man had to spit a wad of chewing tobacco into a cup, wiping his mouth as he answered: “When the dancing boys get on stage, there’ll be ten minutes until the animatronic T-Rex’s come out and do the can-can.  Now when that happens, the chandelier projectors go through their bicentennial act, and you’ll be damned for service because all the staff—sans the cooks, of course—come down to sprinkle glitter and fake blood and all that on the patrons.  I want you to sneak into the kitchen, go past the walk-in freezer on your left, there’ll be a small passageway, take a right, go to freezer number seventeen and do what I told you with the vial.  Then stay there until I call you.”

“Okay.”

“Repeat it back to me, Caid.”

“Uh…wait for the fruits to Fosse, ten minutes till the reptiles impersonate some Frenchies, then when the holo-show goes, so do I…how long till it starts, y’think?”

“How should I know?  You’re in the damned restaurant!”

“Yeah, but you used to manage the kitchen—”

“The Kitchen, Caid, not the floor.  That’s a different department.  That’s how I know the cooks’ll be out smoking instead of getting ahead.  And that’s why I’m telling you the timing on this is very important—”

“Look, couldn’t I just sit at the bar; then go back there?”

“No, no no no no.  The drunks don’t pay attention to the show, neither do the bar-staff; they’d see you.”

“But—”

“But me no buts!  And while you’re waiting, I’d recommend the dog.  They got a shipment of Pomeranians last week, and they fatten ‘em up down in Cuba, these days.”

“Thanks, boss.  I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Sit on a pickle and rotate,” the imaged disappeared.

“May the Country Stand Strong—” Caid returned; but his superior at the interior had already disappeared; and now Caid felt slightly inferior—which just goes to show that alliteration can and will go too far.

A waiter showed up a second later wearing a cape and a wig, and smoking from a pipe while itching him/herself incessantly: “Whatcha’ want, I’m Franky.”

“You’re my waiter?”

“You’re my customer?  C’mon, asshole, I ain’t got all day.”

“Get me the…Pomeranian?”

“Rare?  Medium?”  The He/She thing had a notebook.

“Both.  And skip the salad, bring me a beer.”

“You can’t have a beer, you told Michelle no and made her put her shirt back on—”

Caid grabbed the…person…by the shirt/blouse: “You get me a damned beer, kid.  And keep the weed out of it, I need to be awake by the end of the meal.”

The waiter gulped: “Okay.  You want the deser—”

“No!  I don’t want the damned desert, get it off the ticket.”

“Sure about that, Mac?  The desert is totally complimentary.  I’ll even keep the cigar-butts out, if you like—”

“Thank you, but I’m lactose intolerant.”

“Oh, there’s no dairy in the sorbet.  It’s a kind of low-fat tangy-twist; and there’s a bonus:  It’s made from the agricultural surplus of the collective-farms, so you know the quality is better than anything else you’ll find at the StateMart—”

“Kid, listen: I work for the government.  I do not—read my lips—I do not want the desert, okay?”

“Even though we’ll have to throw it out, and waste a citizen’s quota?  You know someone else might like—”

Caid took the table’s water and threw it in the kid’s face: “I say no, I mean it!  Now buzz off!”

The server buzzed.

Now all Caid had to do was—

“Your beer, sir,” Michelle had her shirt off again and was shimmying.

“Didn’t I tell you not to do that?”

“Sorry, force of habit.”

“It’s okay.”

She had a hand to her mouth, “Ahem…”

“I’m not giving you a tip!”

“Hmph!”  She bumped his table as she turned and he had to catch his drink.

Caid sipped the beverage with an expression akin to an octopus in an Asian country; which is to say fairly irate, but with a smattering of fear that some huge hand might pinch him with chopsticks and eat him whole.  Crazier things had happened in Applebees.

But time seemed to have failed the test on longevity, and in moments the dancing-boys were cavorting queerly across the stage while everybody clapped and the old ladies did cocaine off the hostess’s chests.  Then ten animatronic dinosaurs pranced across the stage; though one slipped and fell into a green pool with a splash, and suddenly the waiters and hostesses were everywhere; adjusting their costumes as they sprinted to the scene and cursing under their breath.  The history projection was going to start early, Caid could tell.

He drained his beer and ran down the steps, around a podium, through an aisle, past the restrooms, and toward a pair of double doors that were as clear of traffic as the boss had promised.  He pushed through with a cautious look over his shoulder, took a left past the first freezer, then found his way into number seventeen.  From his breast pocket he removed a vial of nanoprojectors and an alkaline facilitator which he put the vial into, shaking it until the LED turned green and indicated a full charge.

He sprinkled the projectors into the sorbet, then waited.

Music was loud on the stage; he could hear the animated explosions of the Arab ‘shrooms, and then some overly orchestrated love tune that described the relationship of the First Man and the Afghan.  Caid rolled his eyes and then a cigarette, smoking quietly, the phone in his hands.  When it finally did start to vibrate, he jumped and dropped the nic-stick, then answered hurriedly: “H-hello?”

“You’re fuzzy, Caid.”

“So’re you.”

“Probably not the best reception in a freezer, eh?”

“Yeah…”

“I won’t ask you if you got the stuff mixed in, because you did.  Now I’ve got my eye on the back door; gimme a minute and I’ll let you out…comfortable?”

“Not really.  It’s freezing in here.”

“It is a freezer.”

“You’ve got a real sense of the iron—”

“Shut up or I’ll make ‘em take your tax-break.”

“Nothing so drastic as that, now!  I’m sorry.  I got kids to feed, y’know.  And I never volunteered for field duty—”

“No bureaucrat ever does… Okay, run out the door now, and take an immediate left!”

Caid got up and ran to the door—

“Ditch the phone!  Ditch the phone!”

He threw it at an ice-encrusted wall, then opened the door and ran to the left.  There was a double-door with an emergency crashbar and warning ‘grams that blinked in Caid’s contacts and told him not to enter.  He ignored them and crashed through.

Five armed police officers shot him dead in an instant.

 

***

 

“And now, ladies and gentlemen,” said the figure onstage—he was a graying man in his mid-fifties with a goofy kind of laugh and a Texan accent.  “Biforcate yourselves for this momentous intrusion.  I giveth you: Desert!”

The restaurant clapped the vaudeville Bush as he goose-stepped off, then “oohed!” and “ahhed!” as the cigar-sorbet came out with chocolate tobacco butts sprinkled all over the multicolored scoops that seemed to float in the State-Sanctioned Ever-Cold glass.

“It’s especially good tonight, don’t you think?”  Said the man who’d sat near Caid on the balcony.

“Yes,” she replied. “A lot better than our hostess—y’know, in MY day, they’d be begging for a happy ending.  I’ll bet she doesn’t give two in a year.”

“You were very good—mmm!  What is that, do you taste it?”

“Yeah…kind of nutty.  You think they actually have frozen butts in here?”

“No.  Applebees doesn’t have that kind of cuisine.  At least I don’t think.  When I was working on the set of The Scientologist American they didn’t have that kind of thing; no sponsored food-chain would have it.”

“Well.  Maybe somebody missed a shipment.”

Her husband picked his teeth, looking at something in the sorbet. “I suppose it’s possible…”  His eyes were faraway. “I suppose it’s possible…I suppose it’s possible…I suppose it’s possible…”

“Honey?”

His face began to register a kind of dread: “I suppose it’s possible…I suppose it’s possible…” He grabbed at his throat, and his eyes began to glaze over, and he began to choke, and she could see static dancing in his mouth.

“What’s the matter! … What’s the matter! … What’s the matter! … What’s the matter!”

Then she felt it in her own esophagus; she felt the nanites diverting blood from one passageway to another, and suddenly she felt incredibly pleasant, and then the ice-cream didn’t matter, and neither did the poor stripper/hostess, or anything else as the image slowly coalesced above her head.

When two hundred other patrons suddenly dropped dead, the serving staff was only slightly surprised to see a little man in a faded grey uniform projected from the open mouths of the deceased.  He smiled and held his hands out, and his voice echoed across the balconies.  There was a full-sized projection of him coming from an extraordinarily obese Italian at the Reserved Tier in the middle of the restaurant. 

The volume on his animation was the loudest: “Good evening.  Please, turn on the security transmitters; you need to catch all of this.  First, it must be understood that we at the Academy are very sorry about the sudden downsizing, but we had no choice as housing quotas have gone up in the north sector.  This was a government-sanctioned elimination; every man woman and child in this restaurant is a registered re-appropriations evader, and insists on hoarding space in the south.  Now far be it from us to intrude; but economically, it is penultimate for everyone in this fine country to enjoy the freedoms that our forefathers guaranteed.  These elites are enemies to that cause, and have fought time and again to segregate the country, the economy, your healthcare, and your ability to live freely and with absolutely equal opportunity.  Their elimination is merely necessary.  So laud those who have died in the name of freedom!” 

The figure pumped its fist into the sky, and the March of Freedom with the Barack overture filled the room as the Collective Republic of America symbol bounced off the walls.

Michelle picked up a body and began to drag it toward the kitchen.  The caped waiter was beside her.  She said: “They could’ve at least sent a new signal this week.”

He/She nodded. “I get tired of the overture myself.  Hey, are you going to the beach after work?”

“Not with you, Frankie.”

“It’s Franky with a ‘y’, today.”

“My apologies—you should stick with the ‘ie’.”

“But y’know, I just hate the maxi-pads so much.”

Michelle laughed, “Yeah.  But they tip you better.”

 

Kevin Bennett is a strict conservative, and a firm believer in all
things Christian.  Recently graduating with his BA in theatre from a
liberal university, he is no stranger to the enemies rhetoric.  He is
known to be thrown with refutable force from classrooms preaching
unabashedly ignorant liberal policies.  Usually he picks himself up
and goes in for another licking.  As you can imagine, Mr. Bennett
isn’t the best at social relations.  When he’s not picking fights with
Obama-zombies and collective-brained socialists, he enjoys writing
music and fiction.  Sometimes he’ll watch Arrested Development with a
beer or two.  Or three.

You can contact Kevin Bennett by email at clarkstaplesbennett@gmail.com