A Fate Worse Than Death

[b] A Fate Worse Than Death – Chapter 01

That last punch literally popped one of my eyes out of my head. It was now dangling from its socket, giving me a very interesting view of my cigarette burned tits, both of which were missing their nipples compliments of the butane torch that had been used to turn them into a pair of charred lumps of cooked meat before the Red soldier with the pliers ripped what was left of them from my squeezies. The torch was then used once more to cauterize the wounds. Why I’ll never know, we zombies don’t bleed, never had, never will. My reaction to all of this was not exactly what my torturers were expecting, but hell, we zombies don’t have much feeling; that’s not our fault.

Allow me to introduce myself; I’m Mariah 377, manufactured in October 2072, too late, it turned out, to be of any influence on the final resolution of Civil War 3 that finally settled matters for good. I, like a few of the more advanced Mariah models, have a small but succinct history of the former United States of America implanted in my memory files to act as a guide for why I was doing what I had been programmed to do.

Believe it or not, my main function is to strike terror into the hearts of our enemies, the Red state people, through guerrilla warfare and terrorist activities. Unfortunately they won the best two out of three falls and my purpose no longer has meaning. However that has nothing to do with carrying out my prime directive.

Civil War 2 broke out shortly after a cloned Right, Connors 5, was declared president of the USA by the Supreme Court, after the hotly contested election of 2052 that had brought out nearly three-quarters of the newly qualified voters as decided by the Supreme Court in its landmark decision in the case of Bilbo vs Obama. The judicial writ effectively disenfranchised ninety percent of the current US population. Only those who met one of the following set of qualifications were declared fit to cast ballots in any national election.

A qualified voter had to be worth at least ten million dollars, as determined by the IRS, a member of the upper three levels of corporate management for organizations with annual sales in excess of ten billion dollars, a baptized member of the US Church of the Crusader, members of Congress and their immediate families, those made voters by Congressional action and members of the US Army of Freedom, which was currently carrying out campaigns on three continents. Once it became common knowledge that the cloned Right, Connors 5, was none other than a physically improved version of Connors 2, it was all over as far as who would provide the leadership for the USA in future generations.

Of interest, Connors 3, the brother of Connors 2, was the last US president to be fettered by the 22nd Amendment, since repealed. He was forced to end his tenure in 2021. He in turn was succeeded in office by his brother, Connors 4, who held the office of US President for thirty-two years, despite a number of severely debilitating illnesses, which caused him to be put on a ventilator and kept alive via a feeding tube, until he was well past one hundred years of age.

During the final eleven years of his term in office, the acting president of the country, in reality, was his much younger wife who he had wed shortly before taking office.