Stories 

 

The Orange Chuckle Head and His Toothless Sidekick

 

By

 

Alex Insannity

 

 

A cathartic romp after the sad state of affairs that led us to destruction

 

 

 

They all drew straws; his was the shortest, so they made him their leader.  Boos came from a few in the straw poll crowd as they let go of their fleeting clutch on power and threw in their next-to-last straws.  The new leader, and his less-than-able-bodied little sidekick, smiled as the straw poll winner held his short straw in his tiny little hand and gave a thumbs up high into the air, in defiance of the boos. The smile on his sidekick's face was a toothless one. All his teeth had fallen out due to the lack of proper dental protection in the drinking water that was instituted during the last draconian and anti-science administration.  His boss’s teeth were store-bought. They cost a pretty penny. He liked to have lots of pretty little things around him and some pretty things, like expensive jeans, that cost him a big chunk of change, more than just nickels and dimes.  His quarters were nicer than most, too.  His highly secure Oppidum shelter is below his west wing.  It was voted one of the best ultra-wealthy bunkers when voting mattered.  He was very proud of it, and very proud of himself, far too proud.  His luxury bunker was far and away better than the ones from Atlas, Vivos, or any other secret bunkers created for the large number of high-net-worth clients that needed protection.  The award-winning bunkers served them well, but only partially.  Fallout from bad decisions can only be avoided for so long.

      

As the last straw leader standing, he stared out at the crowd as the boos subsided into a resigned melancholy, which had happened before. He addressed the bald heads and gray faces that had assembled with great difficulty, coming from as far away as they could manage, given the distance and location of their remote luxury bunkers.  They were the elites in business, governing, and religion, which in some places was the same as governing with the sheik, the shahs.  All were bald because their hair had fallen out due to the level 4-7 gray radiation that lingered from the nukes.  The initial blasts decimated most lands and obliterated any above-ground living breathing organism, with the life ending 10-20 gray levels of radiation.  The gray faces in the crowd reflected their inner feeling and the dark gray skies overhead, as the radioactive particulate matter from the black clouds filled several layers of the Earth's atmosphere. The dark clouds overhead would linger there and continue their negative, unhealthy effects for over a decade, not that it mattered.  

 

Mist from the breaths of sad-faced survivors mixed with toxic air since the air temperature was now 20 degrees colder than it should be due to the nuclear winter, summer, and spring fallout that would also linger longer than they would. Global warming was no longer an issue since the polar ice caps and glaciers had been thawed like they were microwaved, which is precisely what happened. The monolithic masses of frozen moisture were turned into salty brackish water that was raising the sea levels but wouldn’t affect many.  There were a few left!

  

The crowd that assembled at the once grand ellipse, which was now in post war ruins, was one of the largest surviving groups able to assemble.  Not another group of its size was near.  There were other pockets of bunker dwellers sprinkled around the globe, but getting to them or communicating with them was nearly impossible.  The final acts of the ultimate apocalyptic world war ironically assured that. 

 

This or any other congregation of walking dead souls would not get any larger because a highly secret and genetically lethal weapon had been developed and deployed with the unique and dark purpose of castrating society, if it came to that, and it had.  Its ultra-short wavelength gamma rays could penetrate even the most well-fortified bunker, regardless of its thick protective shell or construction.  The effect of this deeply penetrating weapon was to neuterize the enemy, not just neutralize them.  Its intimate intent and effect was to create an infertility rate of 100%, with gamma ray radiation that affected the sex organs of all humans, everywhere.  What sperm there was were blanks, and any egg that did form would never hatch another human.  Civilization, as they all once knew it, was behind them and below them.  

 

The death toll was incalculable since all the calculate-able machine no longer worked.  The Electro-Magnetic Pulse blasts that initiated the war made sure of that.  You can’t command troops if you can’t communicate.  The chain of command was broken.  The world was a hand-to-mouth place now, with food mostly coming from cans and freeze-dried survival packets.  Most quickly realized it was fruitless to fight, and that's why they reluctantly listened to the last straw man standing in front of them.  Guns were everywhere, just in case. He was standing on the steps of the ruined remains of the former seat of government.  He had been there before, and his defiance of the rules of law back then had unequivocally led to the wild lawlessness that was threatening them all now. Even a wild tribe needed a leader, and he had already led them badly before. So what the heck.

 

“I say to all of you, he said, “I will make our last days our best days and honor your last wishes. Our golden age will shower down on us. We will not go down on anyone. Our reign will be marked as being a beautiful thing even as we fade away.” 

 

No one clapped, since there was nothing to clap about.  They all knew, after all, it was all of them that ruined it for everyone else.  The greedy wars over money, power, land, food, and anything and everything were how they got to the dead-end destination they currently inhabit.  Now it was a matter of subtraction as they would not be able to reproduce, and soon, all would all be gone.  Every last one of them.  

 

In point of fact, it was the last straw man standing in front of them that brought this all upon them.  He had thoughtlessly signed off on the use of that ultra-secret diabolical nueterizing weapon.   One that any sane advisor would have beseeched him not sign, if they had only known.  But the stable genius in his distracted, money-hungry alternate reality signed off on it. It was then immediately handed over through lucrative back channels and sold to his nation's enemies.  They used it!

 

He didn’t give it much thought when he first signed the insane use order.  It was just another document he had stockpiled in his bathroom like toilet paper after he was forced to leave his throne, due to popular demand. In fact, some of those other secret documents were used for just that purpose and flushed down the toilet.  They became the top secret toilet papers.  A great way to wipe an asses ass, but that is water and documents down the crapper.

 

It was only the luck of the straw that made the orange man their leader again.  Why he was still alive and not killed as a mercy killing was a cruel and unsettling mystery to those committed to moral decency and social norms.  

 

He stood there without remorse, as he always did, and went on to say, 

 

“Any of you who do not want to die from natural causes, well, we can honor that if you’d like.”  It will be my pleasure to take you out of your misery!  After all, you voted for me once.”

 

When there was a world with a viable future, his greed, arrogance, and MAGA maniacal thirst for world domination had set the stage for this ultimate destruction.  His tyrannical tariffs and territorial trade threats were countered with warheads, and they were matched with warheads, which created a domino effect of warheads and war heads.  Destruction rained down as the generals around the globe gave orders to launch more and more nuclear warheads. They emptied their arsenals, and not a calm head could do anything about it.  

 

The ultra-rich ones, with insider advanced warning, headed to their secure high-net-worth bunkers.  They were lavishly appointed with the best money could buy.  As they hunkered in their naive protective cover, they watched on giant screens as the ballistic missiles were launched from and landed on lands and seas all over the globe, millions upon millions of non-bunker-proof homes, towns, cities, and countries were obliterated, or nearly so.  

 

The entertaining pay per view nuclear fighting event did not last long. The cameras and transmissions were knocked out in round one as the power grids, communication towers, cables and broadcast hubs were targeted with Electro Magnetic Pulses. The screens went black.  Also, the transportation arteries were severed and the life blood flow of data dried up.  There was no inter of the internet.  There was no net either, just a big blackout and no information. A net zero for communications. 

 

All this was done in a pre-mediated and calculated way, precisely planned according to the war games devised over the course of sophisticated civilized warfare history.  Around the world, defense and offense wish lists were big-budget items in every government’s planning initiative. They were funded and honed over the warring centuries.  All went according to plan for each warring side, with only one problem.  They had no way of stopping it. The FAILSAFE scenarios that each and every nation expected would be a true deterrent, wasn’t.  They were all wrong, and it was more Fail and UNSAFE then failsafe or now just a global falling out period.    

 

The day after, the plan did not abort the destruction.  It was a tough pill to swallow.  Fiery missiles inseminated the deep-“seeded” cradle of civilization and the other concentrations of industry and productive wholesome life. It violated them with a violent back-handed and rear-ended thrust of hatred.  They were fucked.  The hatred of a few turned into all out war for all.  It terminated the birthplaces of democracy and crushed the places where peace and harmony might have survived and where attempts at freedom had been happily adopted and nurtured.  They were all snuffed out. It was a sad story and a bad movie ending.

 

A few in the freezing crowd wondered how they could have let this happen, but said nothing, just as they had before this all happened.  The orange-headed small straw leader chuckled and said,

 

“Well, I guess I miscalculated my macho power,” he said to an unamused crowd, “Maybe we didn’t make it great again.”

 

He quickly turned his orange head side to side just in case a stray projectile was heading his way.  To repeat, why he was still alive and not killed as a mercy killing was a cruel and unsettling mystery to those committed to decent morals and social norms.  Sadly, nearly, if not all of, those good people were killed in the first few blasts!

 

His head and face were orange only because he had a stockpile of orange makeup he used to disguise his naturally gray face, and soul. It had worked for two non-consecutive terms in office and one that he resorted to during his absence.  But that mare on history was a war ago.

 

Given the circumstances, it was as obvious as the chill in the air; it was not great again, and on lukewarm reflection, most realized, it was not great even before.  His toothless sidekick, standing on a soapbox next to him, said,  “Well, I think it’s great.”  The crowd gasped. The orange straw man, seeing the crowd's reaction, turned and slapped his loyal sidekick in his toothless face. He fell off his soapbox.  

 

The only thing worse than a blind follower is a stupid follower, and the toothless sidekick, a disbarred JD lawyer, was both.   He thought about standing up for himself, but realized it had never worked in the past, so he just lay there and did not tell another lie! 

 

The collection of seemingly bright Harvard and Yale billionaire bunker dwellers had come out of their elaborate post-apocalyptic war retreats like critters on Groundhog Day, only to find a world really destroyed. They looked around and took it all in but there was nothing left to take, and they were shocked by the magnitude of their miscalculations.  There were no borders to defend, no migrants to expel, no venom to spew, no religion worth imposing, or low-paid workers to subjugate.  The equal footing they were now all on was contaminated, and each and every one knew it!

 

They were looking up at the orange chuckle-faced head as he pontificated and made it very clear he was in a serious state of delusion, as they began to realize they had once actually voted for this chucklehead.  They knew this now, and they knew nothing could be done at this point to rebuild, to what end! No babies would be born or aborted.  No need for education or schools that ban books, no need for a righteous punitive religious order.   The world was down to bare essentials, like food and shelter.  There was enough food for now and no need to fight over it, but.

 

If there was anything good that came from this too-little-too-late event, it was the awareness of the futility of greed.  Not that there weren’t fights over food, but they were quickly stopped.  Everyone had a gun.  There were no winners anymore, just sore losers and wounded ones.  

 

The bunkers they expected to stay in for longer than they were able to, due to flaws in technology and planning, were well stocked.   And, with far fewer consumers, there were ample food supplies. Although that too would run out, eventually. The ground was far too contaminated to farm or grow anything.  If anything did grow, that too would be futile, not fertile, and consuming any of what might grow would only hasten the inevitable, and poisoning is a less pleasant and desirable way to die than starvation.

 

The ultra-wealthy yachts that were not torpedoed and were able to make it to ports had food supplies as well.  Food and shelter were plentiful.  What was in short supply was a reason to live and a desire to go on.  The population has been culling itself with self-inflicted exit strategies every day.  There was an end in sight, and that end was first sighted in 2024.  It was going to end, and it would be soon.

 

The nuclear subs that were still armed, like the aptly named HMS Vengeance, still roamed the sea aimlessly.  They had no communications, just final preordained instructions.  Their military Navy shipyards that supported and supplied them were destroyed.  The last command in their doomsday scenario was to launch their final missile payloads and destroy any remote lands that might still house and protect the most prepared. 

 

Each nation had several nations it hated and put all those nations together, and they could tear every nation apart, and did!.  No place on earth was spared, which further illustrates the sheer vengeful, vindictive venom that pulsed through each nationality's patriotic veins. 

 

“Long Live… and God Bless…” (place your nation's name here) was not honored, and the gods did not bless or let live any nation. The gods of all faiths just looked down with disgust, if there are gods that can be disgusted.

 

It seemed fitting that they were destroying a place where they had built a civilization that created things of beauty, ingenuity, and intelligence, including artificial intelligence, which was not the ultimate risk so many had predicted and feared.  AI regenerative bots did add to the planning scenarios for the ultimate destruction, and some renegade regenerative AI systems that were not reliant on the internet and the power grid lived off the energy from private sources.  They were still thinking and planning, mostly depressing doomsday thoughts. 

 

Like a chess game, two moves until checkmate, they, in their self-aware state, realized they too were doomed.  Ironically, it was those energy-intensive private AI systems that ultimately depleted the power of their billionaire hosts electrical hospitality and sucked the power systems dry shutting the intricate infrastructure down. The non-synapse firing self-aware regenerative thinkers, with an “in your face” way of thinking they had learned from their host, smugly counted down the time until final system shut off and displayed the remaining hours, minute and seconds on the screen and verbalized it in the voice chosen by their programmer/owner.   Five - four - three - two, one said with a British accent, then silence, and another screen went black.   A variation on that theme played out all over the globe in the finest, most sophisticated high net worth bunkers, as the techie support team freaked out and wanted to pull out their hair, but it was already gone!  The best laid plans of mice and vicious men had blown up in their botox faces and tucked behinds.  Not a single mouse survived, and even cockroaches were doomed; their genetic makeup was messed up.  Tardigrades were reluctant to continue since no other vermin would survive, especially human vermin. It was beyond bleak; it was fitting.

 

Power was no longer distributed in government, business, politics, or energy.  Solar panels worked great when there was the sun, but with the forecast of black clouds and gray skies for a decade, the prospects were not sunny.  Wind turbines had electronic components that made their stiff blades impotent like a wheel of fortune stuck on bankrupt with no spins left.  Everything was broken.

 

The internet had ceased to function with the first wave of EMP blasts, and even devices in Faraday cages were not able to last long.  Ultimately, the gravy chain, the block chain, and the supply chain were reliant on a symbiotic relation with nature, power, and cooperation.  None of that existed anymore.  They failed. The food chain was doomed since the contamination of the smallest, which was consumed by all those along the chain, would eventually contaminate the largest and thereby kill off everything in between. 

 

The orange straw man stood like a scarecrow as he looked over those who had stuck by him or been stuck with him, more than once.  He realized even as the crowd of elites he had wooed looked up to him, he still looked down on them and knew he really only liked himself, which should have been obvious to all, as it was pointed out on numerous occasions, but that fact was still not blatantly obvious, yet. 

 

He went on and on and on, as he had a way of doing, as he spewed out his Jim Jones cool-aid-infused mind-rotting gibberish to the gullible masses that must have been on an acid trip to listen to him in the first place.  Several in the crowd were imbibing consciousness-altering substances.  Why not, they thought, what hallucination or bad trip could be worse than this reality, listening to a deranged, unhinged, scary straw man babble out his tower of lies.

 

He went on,

 

 “As I was saying, I will make your end the best it can be; you can believe in me. You will have no better end.  It will be a beautiful end, a perfect end!”

 

His toothless sidekick, with mascara running down his sweaty, tearing face, lay at his leader's feet licking the souls of his boots, hoping the contaminated soil on them would hasten his demise.  He saw no reason to live after his humiliated, makeup-smeared face had been slapped by his fearless leader.  The orange narcissist pushed and kicked aside his toothless sidekick as the sad sack of loyalty grabbed onto his former leaders shit kicking high goose stepping boot straps and licked his tough-as-leather black soul. 

 

It was futile.  No amount of money could provide a purpose.  Even Bitcoin bit the dust, and the Dogecoin false tale stopped wagging as its investors were delisted from humanity or were in the process of checking out.  The life that was left was not cherished, just endured!  The billionaire, mostly boy, club had shot their wad.  And would never shoot it again.  All their toys and trophy wives were not worth playing with and had no trade-in value.  It was a zero-sum game they had played and lost.  No million dollar give away could rig this inevitable depletion by natural selection.  When your number was up, you were down and out. That’s how it was on the only planet in the solar system that humans had gotten a chance to inhabit. The Moon and Mars would not be in their grasp anymore.  The Moon would only be a Moon Pie in the sky, and Mars would only be a candy bar.  

 

Those left on the International Space Station had a bird's-eye view of the thermonuclear fireworks that had set off the conflagration that went beyond biblical proportions.  It was armageddon in all its devilish global melting pot caldron of glory.  The smell of human and non-human flesh stunk to the high heavens, and the nuclear barbecue smoke remained there.  

 

On the hovering satellite station circling the globe, it was an X essential space event. They too would not see their blue origin plant and would die as a space oddity, so said Major Tom as he looked down. The X that marked the spot on earth where their return trip was supposed to land was no longer an X; it was a giant smoldering hole, a big zero in the ground.   The X in space would not be heading back to the XO zero on Earth.  They could kiss it goodbye.

 

The blasts and fallout from the nuked earth had also caused the elegantly designed string of starlike communication devices that encircled the low earth orbit to unhooked from their geosynchronous bracelet formations and fall to earth.  They did minimal damage compared to all the other damage.  The once crown jewels of GPS and cell phone services were shattered.  No cell phone would ring, no text message would be sent.  No global positioning, driving congestion maps, or destination route would be plotted.   There would be no more reservations except the obvious.  

 

The fault of all of this was the military industrial complex that simply figured out that destruction was a growth industry, and they had grown the weapons business by a lot.  Their saber-rattling and big dick waving were cut off, and they would not be able to grow a new one.  The heads of the destructive, greedy leadership states were lopped off, and the body politic castrated.

 

As the crowd of once powerful, wealthy last survivors listened or left,  the lying huckster with the red hat and orange face went on,  

 

“We can find games to play and do art projects to keep us busy, he said in an attempt at being upbeat. “I know we can make up limericks!”

 

As he tried to buy more time with the crowd of last straw followers, they realized that it would be fun to make sure the orange obtuse orator would never rhyme again.  They didn’t want anything to rhyme with orange.

 

The dwindling crowd said nothing.  They knew that, like a hypnotist, he had them Svengali'd in believing his anti-antiseptic, homophobic, transgender, and immigrant rhetoric and his god-fearing, hateful web of lies.  He and his brand of hypnocracy had convinced them, over his long apprenticeship and eventual mastery of the dark art of impersonating god on earth, that only he could solve their problems.  Now it was clear he was the source of their problems.  

 

The crowd had continued to thin. Some from self-inflicted exits and others from the emotional wounds they realized they had suffered for years.  The ones that still listened began to think maybe there was a chance to gain.  Gain what, well, anything; they had nothing more to lose but their life.  It didn’t really matter what change they needed; they wanted a change.   

 

The orange chest puffed straw man looked like a big talking Cheeto, and oh what a cheat and liar he was as he rambled on while his unrequited loyal sidekick admirers were about vomit from the large gooey wads of contaminated radioactive morsels he had licked off the soul-less leader's boots and jammed them down his throat and swallowed.  This, along with the year of the other jizzy crap he had swallowed from the orange chuckle dickhead chief, was making him think, which was not part of his job description or duties.  He was now fed up and throwing up on the false idol who tried to kick him away from his soiled suit pants.  The toothless sidekick had had enough. He was furious and full of the contaminated crap.  He stood up to the orange chuckle head and said his last words as loud and clear as he could. “I don’t love you anymore, you are dead to me!”  With that said, he grabbed the short straw from the tiny fingers and the dirty deed doer's hand and fell off the political platform and died. 

 

The crowd let out a cheer.  That was all they needed to turn against the orange chucklehead. They all grabbed their straws, ran to the ruined Capitol steps that he had once before asked them to storm, and covered his orange face and tiny thumbs with their straw ballots.  They stuffed straw in his mouth to shut him up and set him aflame.  He looked like a sacred scarecrow bonfire of vanity as the orange glow matched his makeup. His orange mask melted away to reveal a gray so deep it pushed light out and made him look black.  A color he never wanted to be.  It took a long time for him to burn at the bully pulpit since there was a bitter flame burning inside him, fighting like hell with the one outside.  But eventually the orange, red, white, and blue fingers of the flames met and shook their fiery hand and pointed their fickle finger of fate at the super egoless burning pile of unctuousness. The crowd cheered louder, and they made their final impression known. His arrogant orange face was singed and melted into a waxy orange pool onto his sidekicks' liberated souls. His fate was signed, wax sealed, never to be delivered again.

 

In the end, the once winners at-all-cost and the ultimate big losers, had done a final good deed to depose and dispose of a despicable despot.  The orange chuckle head was sentenced by the ultimate general attorney and keeper of eternal moral law to be frequently incinerated in the gaetz of hell and forever smolder in the ashtray of history.    

 

 

Sadly, they all knew there would be no history.  At least, no one to read it.  And even more sadly,

they knew they had done what the good people of the earth had feared they would, they destroyed it.  There were no more weapons of mass destruction.  The mass destruction was done.  It was a fitting farewell to arm, but a bit too late to save the life and limb of humanity or its family tree, taking out everything like trash, including prickly weeds like Hannity.  Mother Earth would soon be alone, just another barren planet unable to support life.

 

Over the next span of remaining time, as the food supplies ran out and the will and ability to live were gone, the small populations of Armageddon survivors were not survivors.  The realization that it will all have to come to an end can make it easier to go.  That was the way for most.

 

The youngest among them and last to meet their demise was an un-aborted baby born into a billionaire family. They were born in their highly filtered, musk and fluoride-free ultra luxury bunker during the first days of the final war.  Secretly, they were fathered by the orange chuckle head, although he denied it, by the wife of his biggest billionaire supporter. The last one born grew up in the hyper-loopy and depressing world that constituted the end times. They lived out their shortened non-binary life expectancy exit-stance and then took their last hermaphroditic breath. Then it all ended, gone forever and forever and ever, and no one would ever get to make it great again!  Thank god!