This book is based on real events. Only the people, places, and events are fictionalized. The stupidity is 100% real.
Santos had hit her stride. She’d already bashed the usual enemies trying to turn Florida and America into a woke, queer, emasculated, genderbending, multiethnic, polyamorous, promiscuous, Godless, socialist welfare state. As great as that sounded to a significant portion of the population, it was all red meat to her rabid base. Now was the time to pivot to the mouth-breathing middle-of-the-road voters who were far too busy struggling to pay rent to commit any significant bandwidth to who was using what bathrooms or what trimester the government could force women to carry unplanned pregnancies to term. In other words, the people sitting in the stands outside the Bulge.
“And I’ll tell you one more thing!” she cried into the microphone. “The Leftist mob has done nothing to improve your lives. How has DEI, CRT, defunding the police, and brainwashing our children into believing there are 23 different genders, how has any of that, lowered your grocery bill? How has that helped you afford a home or put your kids through school or college? It hasn’t! But I will!”
The roar from the crowd in the stands was audible even on the Bulge. Santos glanced at the oligarchs surrounding the stage. They were nodding along or looking at their phones. A few had fallen asleep. They were completely unconcerned with anything she had to say. They just wanted a Miami Heights plot so they could squirrel away their ill-gotten gains or resell it for an insane markup. Santos didn’t care. She’d already extracted her pound of flesh and wasn’t talking to them anyway.
The governor noticed that Elzos’ seat in the front was empty. That was annoying. Glancing to the side of the stage, she saw that Thing 0 wasn’t at his usual post. Also annoying. But she wasn’t going to allow any of that ruin the greatest triumph of her political career.
“I will!” she repeated, waving her hands in the air for emphasis. “That’s what Miami Heights is all about: making the lives of real Floridians better the American way, the capitalist way!”
Another faraway roar.
“With the inauguration of this new development, I’ve drawn property insurers back to the state and lowered everyday Floridians’ premiums.”
The former was true enough though the latter had yet to bear out.
“Miami Heights will lower housing costs across South Florida. Renting and owning a home in good neighborhoods, which seemed like nothing less than a pipe dream for so long, will finally be an achievable goal for working and middle-class South Floridians—a model for the rest of the state to emulate.”
The largest round of applause yet.
“And I see no reason why we can’t replicate Miami Heights’ success everywhere in the Sunshine State!”
Santos was really getting into it now, the prospect of concentrating even more billionaires onto their own private citadels in return for political contributions—and maybe a bit on the side in her overseas accounts—animated her to new rhetorical heights. Santos’ voice swelled, the wind blew, she knew this would be an iconic moment, and she loved it.
“I’ve developed a plan to build new Heights developments across the state. Whereas Miami Heights was a happy accident, I’ve greenlit an initiative to construct enclaves on artificial hills in some of Florida’s most expensive real estate markets.”
Now was her time to shine, the great oratorical flourish of her speech. Santos grinned in anticipation.
“We’ll build a Tampa Heights! An Orlando Heights! A Clearwater Heights!”
The crowd was already losing its mind. Santos kept building.
“A Palm Beach Heights! A Fort Lauderdale Heights! A Tallahassee Heights! A Pensacola Heights! A Daytona Heights! It’ll be the greatest infrastructure project in the history of the Sunshine State and it won’t cost a penny in taxes. It’ll put more money in your pockets and improve your daily lives far more than the woke mob could ever dream of doing.”
Mussolini got a bad rap, but Santos understood now more than ever before why he loved delivering these kinds of speeches. It was time to bring it all home.
“And if any of the illegals, the degenerates, or the socialist sympathizers—the people who’ve taken your jobs, changed your culture, and told you you’re evil simply for holding God’s and your parents’ teachings to be true—get in our way, I’ll sweep them aside just like I did right here on Miami Heights!”
Santos stood back from the podium, hands on hips, beaming, and let the crowd’s cheers roll over her. Even the oligarchs were getting into it. Some clapped politely, though most gave her a standing ovation. She could feel her legion of online trolls turning the moment into a meme. A full minute passed before she approached the microphone again.
Santos raised her hands in an attempt to tamp down the applause but, at this point, the rest of the oligarchs were on their feet. She pondered how many billions of dollars she’d be able to siphon off them throughout the rest of her term and smiled.
“Alright, alright, now,” she said into the mic. “OK, y’all. Thank you. Thank you. People got places to be! Ha ha! I need to finish this speech! Thank you!”
She paused another 30 seconds until the cheering sufficiently died down for her to continue.
“OK now!” She exclaimed with a wave. “It’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for. Who wants to see me drive this commemorative stake into the Bulge?”
Now it was the oligarchs’ time to go wild. Their energy and whooping matched that of the crowd they’d never allow within a mile without an electrified fence in the way.
Santos lifted the button, displaying it to the oligarchs and bleacher-bound poors.
“Well,” she continued. “I always say, ‘Give the people what they want!’”
She pressed the button, and the crane dropped the metal weight on the spike’s head, driving it ten feet into the ground with a clang that reverberated across the Bulge. Everyone cheered.
“Oh, you liked that, did you?” she asked, grinning ear to ear. “You want me to do it again?”
Another cheer. She pushed the button. Down went the weight, down went the stake, buried halfway down its length.
“Again?” she asked.
Without waiting for a response, she pushed the button, thrusting the stake downward another ten feet. This time, a slight rumble followed its descent. The earth shook, almost indiscernibly at first. Soon, however, water bottles began to tip over and cell phones clattered off the bleachers and onto the floor. A murmur of concern passed through the oligarchs and crowd in the stands, but Santos was way too in the zone to notice.
“One more push for Florida!” she cried. “One more push for history!”
The weight fell from the crane, slamming the stake, and burying it completely into the Bulge. 12 firework mortars behind the stage sent rockets flying in a fan-shaped pattern before exploding above the platform. Santos placed her hand on her chest as “God Bless America” blasted from massive speakers, but she had a hard time keeping her balance.
The ground shook violently. Santos stumbled. She grabbed the podium to keep from falling. The oligarchs stood from the chairs, panic in their eyes. Santos turned around to see a dark, viscous liquid that smelled of rancid meat and acid oozing from around the base of the buried golden stake.
Then, just as “God Bless America” reached a crescendo with its final “home sweet home,” the stake exploded upward, riding a jet-black pressurized geyser of biohazardous waste, human excrement, and corrosive chemicals one hundred feet into the cloudless South Florida morning sky. A full 40 seconds passed before it landed, point down and a mile away, in the Poultry Point executive parking lot.
Santos and the oligarchs were drenched in the noxious liquid, the latter sprinting away in fear, while the governor remained frozen in horror, staring at this unchained force of human violence on the natural world.
A steady drizzle of used condoms, artifacts of the sinkhole’s decades of use as a cruising spot, plastered the oligarchs as they staggered, slid, and fell down the Bulge.
“Welp, that explains the human DNA,” quipped Noah from the stands.
Somewhere off the Bulge, arguably the world’s greatest cameraperson kept their lens trained on the unfolding disaster, so it continued to be broadcast directly onto the three giant screens before the stands. They panned out from the governor, condom flapping in her hair, to a wide shot of the Bulge that kept the entire geyser in frame.
Most of the crowd in the bleachers had run for their cars, but Cynthia, Monica, Carlos, and Noah remained rooted to their seats.
“I’m streaming the whole thing!” laughed Monica as she fiddled with the drone controls.
The jet shrank, sputtered, and then stopped completely.
A few seconds passed while nothing happened.
“Is… that it?” asked Carlos.
The toxic fountain burst back to life, this time accelerating the petrified remains of a 50-year-old orca carcass 10 stories into the sky. The school bus-sized cetacean pirouetted gracefully as it reached the apex of its ascent.
“Holy shit,” began Noah.
“That looks,” added Cynthia.
“Exactly like,” continued Carlos.
“Free Willy,” concluded Monica.
For just one moment, the killer whale paused in midair, an impossible creature in an impossible environment, before it began its inevitable descent back toward the earth. Picking up tremendous speed on its downward trajectory, it landed on top of the governor and atomized the stage into a million splintered pieces.
This was all perfectly captured on the screens thanks to the cameraperson’s seemingly inhuman skill and presence of mind.
“Holy fuck!” yelled Cynthia.
“What the… what the shit! What the fuck!” cried Carlos. “What the fuck was that? What the fuck did I just see?”
“I’m pretty sure that was the missing orca,” answered Noah in shock.
Monica did her best not to burst into laughter, since she was pretty sure she’d just witnessed someone—as distasteful as she was—crushed to death by a flying whale.
The four stood and stared silently at the Bulge, its geyser going strong as ever. They were alone now, the only ones in the stands who hadn’t run from the unnatural phenomenon unfolding before them.
“Didn’t see that coming,” muttered Noah.
“What do we do now?” asked Carlos.
“I want to watch this a bit more,” answered Monica.
“You should probably take a video,” said Cynthia to Carlos and Noah. “You know, for posterity.”
They nodded in agreement and took out their phones.
The wind shifted, peppering their clothes with foul-smelling drops.
They stood there for a long while, watching the geyser’s majesty, when a tall, fit man in a navy-blue suit appeared next to Monica. He wore a red tie, dark sunglasses, and a facemask. The man opened a black golf umbrella to block the incoming drops.
“You think you won, don’t you?” he asked, staring straight ahead.
Monica glowered at him.
“It seems pretty obvious that we won,” she replied.
He smirked.
“You didn’t win,” he said, sweeping his arm across the scene of devastation. “You didn’t cause any of this. Untold numbers of faceless imbeciles doing wildly imbecilic things for decades are responsible. You aren’t a catalyst of justice. You’re just another spectator to idiocy. Perfectly predictable idiocy. Which, if you do the work to properly investigate and know is coming, always translates to money.”
“Why do you sound like a comic book villain?” demanded Monica.
He paused and removed a small plastic tile from his suit pocket. It had a round button in the center, which he circled with his thumb before pushing.
The screens went dead, cutting off the broadcast of the fountain gushing from the top of the Bulge. Monica’s drone fell to the floor. Their phones stopped working.
“What the fuck was that?” cried Carlos.
“A localized EMP device,” replied the man as he placed the tile back in his pocket. “It’s incredible what Mossad has been able to miniaturize. Now we can speak candidly without having to worry about recording devices and other sneaky journalistic tricks.”
“Who are you?” asked Cynthia.
“I’m just some guy,” he responded. “Someone who used to think power was the world’s greatest aphrodisiac before he realized that, without money, there is no power.”
“That’s the weirdest fucking kink…” began Carlos.
“I’m here to deliver a message on behalf of my patron,” he interrupted.
“Yeah? And who’s that?” demanded Monica squaring up to the man.
“Someone about to make a tremendous amount of money from this idiocy,” he said, looking down at Monica like one might at a curiously aggressive insect.
“Elzos?” asked Cynthia. “How could he possibly make any money off this?”
“Oh, the Bulge drew property insurers back to Florida like moths to a flame. It was easy money for them. So, my patron leveraged gargantuan policies on the Bulge to the hilt. And now he’s about to cash out without ever even laying a concrete foundation. Which brings me to my message.”
The man sidestepped Monica and planted himself between the four and the still-erupting geyser. Tiny figures ran headlong down the slope, tripping over chairs, rubble, and each other. The Bulge had begun to slowly sink, a process that would continue for the next several days until it transformed into Florida’s newest, most toxic lake.
“You’re nothing,” he continued. “You had no control over what happened. My employer didn’t swat you like flies because you were so utterly, hilariously powerless to stop him.”
He paused and narrowed his gaze, making a point of looking each of them directly in the eye.
“Don’t. Fuck. With. Him. Or you will be crushed. Just like our dearly departed governor.”
“Wait, hold up,” Carlos shook his head. “You knew Santos would be squashed by an airborne killer whale?”
The man hesitated.
“Um, well, no, not exactly,” he said. “I mean who could’ve predicted that? We just knew that this would turn into a disaster. And disasters, when predicted, are just opportunities.”
Cynthia scowled.
“If we’re so powerless, why even bother to warn us? Why not keep ignoring us and go about your business unless you’re actually afraid of us?”
The man’s body language communicated he would love nothing more than to swat her down right there.
“For your own good,” he answered tersely. “This will be your only warning. Should you fail to heed it, the only indication of my patron’s displeasure will be the devastating consequences that will follow.”
He began to walk away.
“Oh, and one more thing,” he stopped mid stride, his back still turned. “I’d short the market if I were you. This shit,” he gestured at the still erupting Bulge. “Will definitely cause a recession.”
The end.
