“Not Much Longer,” Annie Flash Fiction by Jeff Posey
Coming in 2013
A flash fiction piece in preparation for the novel-in-progress Ellipsis: Annie and the Second Anasazi, by Jeff Posey, set in the year 2054. Sign up for notification by email here.
Reagan Newcastle stood looking out the boardroom window to the streets twenty-five stories below. He could see seven Annie’s from there, the nearest painted on the glass of a derelict office tower across the street. Dressed in her trademark tiny blue vest, tight red shorts, and white knee boots, the image of Annie leaned against a life-sized bottle of vodka and looked at Newcastle with the same expression he remembered from the night he tried to bed her. He’d been so shocked that she went along, his erection failed him, and she never gave him another chance.
On the street below, slow-rolling sun cabs mingled with ultra-light hydrogen cars and a few grimy gasoline models from before the First Outage. Newcastle loved old cars, especially the gleaming black Hummer that muscled its way to the curb at his building. A 1999 model, he knew, almost fifty-five years old. Two men emerged who looked like human Hummers, pushed back the perpetual throng of street people, and soon the white head of Peter emerged, chairman of the board of 2G Inc. In a few moments, he would burst into the room and fill it with the intense charisma that propelled him to become pastor of the three largest churches in Texas, and then to merge the thirty-three largest mega-churches in the Southern States, and then created 2G to own and operate them.
From the popular pulpit of gNet video, Peter preached 2G as being “To God,” and in private to senior secular business owners who disliked governmental meddling, he christened it “Second Government.” His theory involved outsourcing government to 2G, hence achieving a slow-burn takeover. Upon success, he would call it the First Government of New America. Newcastle knew all about it.
Already, 2G had contracts to provide police, fire protection, and water to Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Shreveport, Birmingham, and Atlanta. Peter cut workers’ pay to a flat ten dollars a day and fired everyone who complained, with the public warning that “Only the fittest survive, and unfit whiners don’t fit into 2G.” He created the most profitable company in the South, behind Annie’s Liquor Emporium. The girl in the painting across the street. And the only woman he ever loved.
“Reagan,” Peter said as he entered the room behind his two bulldog guards. They swept the room and back out in a ballet of practiced movement, and backed out, noiselessly closing the heavy oak double doors. Peter stretched his hands at Reagan and they did an awkward four-handed shake, Peter’s trademark when he hadn’t seen you in a while.
“How was your drive from Dallas?” Reagan asked, though he suspected Peter’s response. It rarely varied.
“Getting worse.” Peter walked to the picture window and looked out. A head shorter than Newcastle, the older man radiated energy. “Unfit people everywhere. After the Second Outage, I thought more would go to God, but they bred like locusts.” He raised his white eyebrows a couple of times. “But not for much longer.”
Ellipsis: Annie and the Second Anasazi, set in 2054 A.D., is about a migration of intellectuals into the deserts of New Mexico where people live like the ancient ones because of changing climate coupled with an intolerable mix of politics and religion that rises in the cities of the American South. Annie is the daughter of Tucker and Lydia Roth of the short story, Girl on a Rock.
Cover art for Ellipsis: Annie and the Second Anasazi is by Derek Murphy of Creativeindie Covers.
