Zep

 

Frankie Zeppino looked around for Bette. He was facing the entrance to the city's university. The building was in shambles. There had been no "national" education for a long time.

No one was learning anything in these public institutions of the past century. The middle class had been destroyed. There was no longer any pretense.

Some expensive private schools were still in charge of training the ruling elites by providing them with advanced training. The objective was to prepare them for the exercise of economic and political power. 

But for people of modest means, like Zep and the vast majority of the population, there was only the university where, in the name of equality, an ersatz education was provided. These public universities had become large arenas where young people usually spent one or two years hanging out and flirting before returning to their role as slaves. 

The system gave the youngest the illusion of freedom before making them spend their meager slave wages on rent in apartment buildings and in discount warehouses that were still pompously called "supermarkets. The same low-quality products could be found everywhere.

The globalist system had prevailed and monopolies had taken hold, with no alternative possible. The big companies ruled the planet, having long since reduced to ruin the states, the unions and any individual initiative. Community rules and the investments they imposed prohibited any private initiative. It was therefore necessary to join the system as quickly as possible to hope to survive. 

"Zep", as he was called, had understood all this for a long time, despite his young age. He had, however, heard of communities of free men who had left the System.  Most of them ended up dying miserably in some dump. They died there without any help, far from sight. These "alternative" places were indispensable to the oligarchs, who thus set a trap for rebellious spirits and rebellious people to eliminate them more discreetly. Zep had guessed that too. He was tempted to take the plunge in spite of everything, but he did not belong to the generation capable of dying for an ideal. He was afraid, he wanted to be left alone, to be left alone. There were no more heroes in his generation. Like all those of his generation, he had been fed on poorly nourishing food, his intelligence had not been trained by any method and his will was crushed by the conditioning he had undergone since childhood. He was built like a skinny rabbit, he had no chance to survive outside the system. He was a cripple.

Yet he wanted something else to exist. He had to. He was actively searching, as discreetly as possible, for the person who could get him out of the matrix.

He had once visited a large poultry farm. As he watched the chickens being raised in cages, incubated and then reared in these closed buildings before ending up being recomposed for various food products, he understood.  He saw that, like the chicken, he was being led inexorably to the slaughterhouse. He was just an ignorant, unimaginative chicken, fed a mediocre diet, so that he would not imagine the sky and its infinity.

Zep certainly didn't think he was an eagle, he was too aware of his physical, intellectual and spiritual mediocrity, especially since Bette had made him read the documents and books of his father, who was a true intellectual.

Zep now knew. He was obsessively searching for a way out of the trap.

His friend Bette was his only confidant, his best friend. She was gentle and docile, in love with him since childhood. 

She admired his dreams of freedom. Zep reminded her a little of her father, independent, intelligent, crazy. 

Both Zep and his father were right. The system was, of course, unjust, inhuman. But what could be done about it? One had to live with it until it changed, one day.

Bette was already a woman. She didn't intend to stay long at the university, a place too anarchic to satisfy her need for order and stability. She wanted to apply for a job in a factory as soon as possible, get married and have a child.

So she waited patiently for her Zep to finally mature, to come into line and become the man of her life. She could see herself and Zep living in one of those apartments that were provided to couples who worked in factories.

She didn't want her father's life as an outcast. What was the point of denouncing the globalist system? Nothing was being changed, nothing. There was no longer anyone capable of hearing, reacting, revolting. The globalists had definitely changed the characteristics of the human species. They had selected the individuals and eliminated the resistances, like they were making dog breeds.

Humanity was now composed of passive, submissive, limited, not to say dazed beings. The recalcitrants had been eliminated or exiled. They ended up dying in some hostile place, lost, condemned to a lonely death.

Thanks to her father, she knew all this. The rulers were too powerful, too well organized. Any resistance was futile.

Bette had learned from her mother that one had to live in spite of everything, to hope with God and love in one's heart, even if God was now forbidden by the government.

Zep entered one of the "faculty" lobbies, the one in front of which Bette usually met. She wasn't there. It was odd, Bette was never late for their appointments. He looked around for someone who knew Bette in the crowd of young people he saw. 

He was tense, because it was urgent to see her, today more than ever. He had finally met, the day before, an individual with whom he had been trying to make contact for a long time.  The man, of whom he knew nothing, even his name, had told him about an extraordinary place, far, far away from the city where he lived.

This place was far to the east, far behind the lines of enemy territory. 

It was a place where people lived in freedom, far from the political affairs of globalism, which was not interested in them. The climate was harsh, of course, but life there was simple and smiling for all those who dared to make the journey.

The man Zep had met had to go back, because he knew the way to get there.  The journey was said to be dangerous, but Zep was willing to take it. 

He wanted to take Bette with him. He wanted her for himself.

He had thought about the two of them. He considered her his bride, his soul mate, his true friend.

True, she did not share his metaphysical tortures, but she was reliable, she was the only person he trusted. 

Besides, he couldn't stand the idea that she could give herself physically to another. She was the only person he loved and desired, even a little. 

Zep was emotionally handicapped. Conceived by exogenous disease, he had been taken care of by maternity wards and then by state institutions since childhood. Like almost all the kids of his generation, he had never known his mother's womb, her smells, her kisses.

His parents, themselves the product of test tubes, had lost all parental instinct. Zep had been entrusted to state-run nurseries.

Zep hated growing up in these industrial nurseries. He absolutely did not want this anonymous fate for Bette and the children he would have from her.

He was probably infertile, like more than 90% of his generation. In order to keep only the expected 500 million slaves, the globalist rulers had sterilized, through vaccinations and diet, the majority of fetuses and potential progenitors. The majority of humanity was sterile.

Since Bette's parents had been among the elite, it was likely that Bette retained her reproductive potential. Perhaps with treatment, medical guidance, or even sperm donation in the rebel territories, she could bear a child, their child.

Bette knew the Mundialist plan. She knew. She had heard her father, read his books. Through Bette, Zep had read Bette's father's books. He knew. He knew everything.

Zep looked around the hall. Classes hadn't started yet. Students were waiting in the hall for the doors to open.  Zep saw people he knew by sight, in addition to the usual colorful characters who haunted such places to talk, shine, or cover themselves in ridicule depending on their abilities.

They were all sterile test tube baby assholes, they could all die in a bombing, Zep didn't care. But he wasn't seeing Bette. He didn't have much time, he was leaving that evening.

He had to talk to her, so he immediately headed for her home. By taking the route she usually took, he had every chance of intercepting her. Bette was not the kind of person to take a route other than the usual one. On the way, Zep looked carefully at the street. He didn't see Bette. 

When he got close to her house, he saw a crowd, firemen and a few policemen pushing the crowd aside.  He couldn't get close, but he heard what people were saying: "I heard the father killed himself.  He killed his wife and daughter with him." 

What a horror!

He wasn't quiet, this guy.

Sure, he killed them all, he wanted to blow up the neighborhood. His poor wife, even the kid, he killed her!

Zep walked away quickly, went into an alley and slumped against the wall. His head was spinning. He couldn't see. He sat down on the ground. He had just lost the only person who mattered to him.

Bette had told him that she was afraid she and her parents would be eliminated and that the murder would be made to look like a family suicide. She knew, they knew, that this could happen, as it had happened to many other holdouts.

Zep did not know Bette's parents directly. His friendship with their daughter had always been kept low-key so he wouldn't meet the father. The latter had been part of the ruling caste, before leaving it voluntarily, he would not have supported his daughter mating with a "lab rat." That was what he called people like Zep, a species limited intellectually and emotionally, a kind of subhuman destined to work in factories. So Bette had preferred that her friendship with Zep remain unknown to her parents.

Bette's father knew too much. He told Bette a lot of disturbing things that Bette sometimes told Zep.

She confided to her Zep, a little embarrassed, that her father despised people like Zep, that population of sheep, of passive morons that exogenesis and modern genetics were manufacturing.

Bette's father no longer wanted to live in this world of zombies, of passive victims.

The system sought to silence Bette's father. He was often taken away by the police, went to jail, to a psychiatric clinic. Each time, he came back more diminished, more destroyed, sometimes unable to speak for months.

Bette and her mother often cried. Bette's father had written books that no one published. He said that one day he would be shot. Bette's parents were waiting for the final blow.

Eventually they had been killed, all of them. They'd burned the house down to make all traces disappear. That was their way.

Zep was truly alone in the world this time. 

He finally got up and went back the way he came so as not to attract attention. He was alone, but he was also free to pursue the dream that had haunted him so strongly for years, if only to choose the place where he would die.

Death, in fact, was waiting for Zep there, on the front, at the next mobilization. For there was war, this war that had been rotting humanity for millennia. The bodies and souls of the survivors were destroyed for generations, long after the holocaust was over. No nation emerged unscathed from a conflict and the misplaced exultation of a victory was pitiful. 

Who wins wars? Not the vain heads of the victors who posed for pictures and rewrote history to their advantage; not even the financiers who profited from their criminal strategy: they were damned, thrown into the clutches of the devil they had served.

In every war there were unmentionable state secrets, secret agreements that betrayed humanity and served certain interests. These secrets condemned their executors. 

Zep thought about all this. Nothing would ever change.

The people who were running the show were leading the herd of brainless people that humanity had become to their liking.

The weak didn't even have hope of an afterlife anymore, they had no religion capable of transcendence. Even that they couldn't keep.

In the end, the bastards who were in charge were right to despise the plebs.

Zep would certainly be among the next batch of cannon fodder. No one was coming back from this war. It was a war of extermination, a safe and effective way to depopulate the planet. 500 million survivors, not one more slave.

It took Zep two days to get to the back of the line. He tried to reach the bus station. He walked painfully through the dust.  In the other direction, columns of refugees, exhausted with fatigue, tried to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the horror of the fighting. The anguished faces of the people, the lost eyes of the children, told horrible stories that nobody wanted to hear. Zep tried to look away. 

He was part of a column that, strangely enough, was walking stubbornly in the opposite direction, towards the front, towards the bombing. No one around him seemed ready to explain why he was walking in this direction; Zep no more than the others.

Why wasn't he alone in wanting to move towards the front. Did the others have the same information he did? A doubt began to creep in.

On the horizon, straight ahead, incessant bombing could be heard, terrifying. From time to time, strange cracks split the air, as if struck by lightning. The air vibrated, giving a headache, making some people vomit.

New weapons were being used there. Zep was particularly frightened by this new weapon that cracked the atmosphere and pulped organs. He had seen the obscene images of it in the war reports of the state propaganda. The effects were terrible, thousands and thousands of corpses, bodies vomiting blood and humours, piled up in the bombed cities.

Fear was the method used by globalism to control people.

In spite of himself, Zep was shaking with fear. He moved forward, fighting the terror with every step. 

His contact had told him that there would be someone waiting for him at the station. Who, he didn't know. He had a password: "Maximum". What a stupid password! He didn't even know when to say it, or under what circumstances. 

All this was not very clear, Zep was beginning to doubt more and more.

There must have been hundreds of thousands of runaways around him, stubbornly converging on the front.

These people did not seem to want to take the last buses, the last trucks requisitioned to evacuate the civilians. It was easy to see, anyway, that not all of them would be able to leave on the buses. In the crowd, many soldiers had deserted. They had discarded their military jackets, unhooked their badges, but it was still easy to guess who they were. They hid as best they could, hoping to escape the firing squads that were waiting for them everywhere and doing their terrible work on the sides of the roads, under the eyes of the horrified civilians, of the moaning mothers who were shouting to be left alone.

Apparently, on the front, the situation was desperate. The rumor was that the enemy was using this new weapon that was decimating not only the front line, but the entire territory, hitting cities at random. No one knew how to protect themselves from it. We hoped for surrender, but the enemy seemed determined to exterminate the entire population. 

It was an all-out war that would only end with the last breath of the last victim. The army, for what was left of it, resisted only to allow the civilian population to flee as far as possible. At least, that is what the authorities said.

Were these soldiers really acting as heroes, paying with their blood for the survival of their people, as the authorities said? No, they were, more likely, drugged to death, moving like zombies towards their end.

That is, if people wanted to believe in heroism... Zep didn't believe in it anymore. He knew the mentality of the young people who had gone to war. Most of them were his elders, only a few months, sometimes a few weeks. He knew so many who had been forcibly enlisted.

Every month the conscription age dropped, so many died. 

Zep was one of the next batch. He recognized that fear, more than anything else, had made him want to run away before he was drafted.

It was the same for his entire generation. He knew too well the mindset of his generation, its potential, to believe in its heroism. None of them had the makings of a hero, not even a man. They were all laboratory guinea pigs, stupid, uneducated and cowardly.

The rebellious characters, the stubborn ones, the warriors had been eliminated through genetic selection, vaccinations, programmed addictions and previous wars. 

Only the sleeping, sheep-like, diminished and weak strains of people like him were now born.

Zep finally arrived at the first buildings of the station, a cordon of military personnel filtered the entrance, blocking the crowd.

Zep walked around the entrance. There was no point in trying to get through, the military would not let anyone through.

Near the buildings, whole families had stopped there. People had built makeshift shelters with blankets, carts, tarps, and cardboard boxes.

These people did not have the strength to continue.  They had landed there, waiting for hypothetical help or death. Their shelters formed narrow alleys, the huts squeezing each other.

It was the ultimate, illusory search for a certain normality, the paltry security of a village.

Yet why didn't these people go back? Why didn't they flee from that terrifying front? Why didn't the soldiers force them to leave? Zep couldn't find the brutal logic of the government.

He moved closer to the makeshift camp, passing between the improvised tents and piles of cardboard boxes.

Finally, he heard some kids talking among themselves about the fabulous world behind the lines.  All these people were there for the same reason as him. They had all been told about a heavenly world behind the front lines, beyond the enemy's territory...

Suddenly, Zep understood. They were being told to go to the front, to delay, perhaps, the enemy's advance.

But was it not, rather, to get rid of the last indecisive elements, the last skeptics.

Zep collapsed. Had he been played? His whole miserable life had been an illusion. To think that he had even wanted to take Bette into this trap!

He was going to die like a chicken, like a pawn. 

After an hour of prostration, he raised his head and looked around. There was no way out. On one side, there was the forehead, which meant certain death. On the other side, to the rear, the road was now blocked by the military, officially to allow the passage of so-called military reinforcements. 

Zep doubted that these overworked soldiers would ever let him through.

He looked at them carefully. These young men were not in a normal state. Their eyes were fixed, haggard. That's right, they were drugged. Some were even vomiting on the floor.  If riots broke out, these kids would shoot without even realizing it. 

Zep knew now that he would never meet his contact. He stopped to rest and take stock. He had to think, quickly, and find the way out, if there was still time.

He moved a little closer to the building. A door had been broken down, the crowd was running in. He rushed in with the others. 

Civilians were running around the buildings, reaching the parking lots on the upper floors, looking for a vehicle to leave.

Zep decided it was safer to stay on the lower floor. Already, military personnel were pouring in.  Officers were barking orders. The soldiers took up their positions, waiting for the order to fire.

The crowd was grumbling, the women were screaming.

Zep knew he had to get outside quickly. He made his way to the exit, yelling that the soldiers would shoot.  Some people turned away, most people hesitated.

Zep kept yelling that the military would shoot. Finally, the crowd gave in to panic.  Everyone turned toward the exit, breaking windows to get out, at the risk of getting hurt. 

Soon gunfire was heard, the army was firing on the crowd. 

Zep was outside. People were running around, chaos reigned, women and men were screaming.  That was it, they were trying to get rid of all the naysayers.

Zep suddenly spotted what he was looking for: a cast-iron cover that led to the basement.  He hoped he had stumbled upon a sewer, a drain wide enough for him to walk through.

He lifted the cast iron plate with great difficulty, a ladder descended to the bottom. He climbed down in a hurry, unable to put the cast iron cover back on properly.

The shooting continued, no one seemed to have paid any attention to him. 

He groped his way through the water in the darkness.  The water was cold and clear. The smell of the place was surprisingly pleasant, a fresh, clean smell of detergent.

Zep moved forward. His eyesight was adjusting a little. He could see daylight at regular intervals, through vents that reached the surface. He seemed to be heading in the right direction: away from the noise of the bombing. He hurried away.

After walking for what seemed like a good hour, he decided to look through the vents to see where he was. He was in the middle of the countryside, these drains did not follow the roads. He tried to find an exit to the surface. There was none at this point. He continued his progress, he had no choice.

Anyway, he was better off there than dead on the surface. In a way, the solitude of this tunnel was safer than being in the middle of a frightened crowd at the mercy of the military.

Suddenly, a sound caught his attention in the narrow channel. It was a faint whistling sound, that of a small electric machine. He looked and listened carefully. The noise became clearer. Then he saw a small, harmless-looking machine moving toward him in the stream. What kind of robot was it? Was it a surveillance robot to prevent people from escaping the trap?  Zep threw himself back against the wall, trying to get as far away from the device as possible. 

The robot passed him by, continuing on its way. Zep gasped.

Suddenly he felt a terrible pain in his leg, then a blow to his heart. He sank into the water, almost unconscious. A second electric shock hit him, his body was like a ball of fire. The robot! The robot was sending electric shocks into the water, to annihilate rats and humans like him. He was now slumped over, half drowning, unable to move, unable to speak.

Already, another collection system was coming toward him, a grate that evacuated him, letting only the water through. He felt the life leaving him, the water entering his trachea. He was drowning. Strangely, the fear was gone. He thought only of Bette, of the only happy moment of his barren life.

"Bette, I'm coming..."

Frankie Zeppino died like that, electrocuted like one of their fucking industrial chickens.

"Shit, even my death is crummy..."

https://www.amazon.com/William-Kergroach/e/B07BR6V6D9