Dramatic Foreshadowing of Bad Things in the Dark

It came sideways first, a few odd deaths here and there, a few ugly deals gone wrong that the city wrote off as anomalies. The rate of violence? Miniscule. The frightening part was the bloated bodies and weird flesh ruptures, people barely identifiable as human any more covered in weird wrinkly patches of flesh. Cellulite, they called it. But after a certain point, the odd spheroids and flaps of flesh as big as a normal man’s arm took on an identity of themselves. Gluttony is a deadly sin, right?

Nothing like this had every come out of the northern Virginia drug scene. Arrests for cocaine, marijuana, speed, and the occasional prep school kid trying crack occupied over 87% of all drug cases. ODs happened, sure, but not like this. When the city saw a spike in mortality over a six month period, alarm bells started going off in city hall. The state of Virginia wouldn’t stand for a bunch of their citizens dying off in droves to a new street-craze drug. So they called the two baddest motherfuckers in the state, maybe the world.

Sam Cord, 43 years old, police force operative for 21 years with a resume as long as a line outside Taco Bell on 49 cent Taco Tuesdays. FBI, SWAT, highway patrol, meter maid, Segway surveillance team, DEA specialist, you name it, he’d done it. He carries a Colt Python .357 revolver, loaded at all times of course, and only aims for the head. He wears a fedora and doesn’t look like an idiot when he does it. If he was in a Clint Eastwood movie, he’d be one of the guys that survives, not because the writer wrote the plot that way, or the director didn’t want him to die, but because no one on set had the stones to tell him that he’d have to die in this scene.
His partner was a short, spindly, deadeye that wore a funny green coat. Sure, Twitch was a little weird, but the green coat exercise was more of a means to distract perpetrators before he slammed their faces into the hood of the police cruiser and pulled a sack of drugs out of their pockets. Twitch had a way of being right about pretty much nothing, ever, but still somehow managed to get some fucking work done. He wrote only with green pens and did all of his paperwork while chain smoking cigarettes out the window of the cruiser. Sometimes, he only spoke in movie quotes and adverbs. They called him Twitch because, well, with a gun in his hand, he never, ever missed.

God was pissing on the world late one September afternoon, storm clouds and lightning strikes ruining a perfectly good weekend that everyone in VA probably would’ve spent having a great fucking time during otherwise. Twitch and Cord were playing poker in the station, looking like bad motherfuckers hunched over the table and tossing cards. These games never got very far because Cord had a tendency to blast a hole with his magnum through any stack of chips that he lost. ‘Men, full alert’ came a voice over the loudspeaker. ‘We have another incident 612, at least five victims, all apparently related, in Southeast Gilborough. Twitch, Cord, get your asses down there. This one looks bad.’

Twitch and Cord looked at each other. Twitch wore thin spectacles that made his slanted face look even more bird-like. Cord could tell that Twitch was wondering if he’d shoot anybody today. ‘Doesn’t look good, Twitch, they’re probably all dead already.’ Twitch was visibly distraught. It had been too long since there had been a good drug cartel bust up in VA. These OD fatalities were, well, immensely uninteresting. ‘Get your coat, buddy, let’s check this thing out.’

Driving through sheets of rain, Cord guided the police cruiser through a city canyon crawl of tourists and civil war novelty shops. Gas was $3.19 a gallon. ‘Goddamnit, I swear, every year these people get fatter and slower’

‘Chill out Cord. Slow people are much easier to arrest. God knows I don’t like foot chases. Too many variables.’ Twitch rolled a pen through his fingers.
‘Do you remember that family we saw in The Ship last night? Holy fucking shit that dad was so fat he could barely fit into the booth. I saw the waiter try to give him a child seat to support the fat on his right side alone. Poor guy looked like he had a carpet rolled up under his arm.’

‘Yeah that was pretty sad. Food was terrible too. Felt like I was going into a coma after we finished.’

‘Have you looked through the case files for this thing?’

‘Yeah, I have. It’s pretty disturbing. The mortality rate for regular users is sky high. Krel, they’re calling it on the street.’ Twitch held up an OD scene photo of a shattered vial coated in a thin, colorless liquid. ‘What a horrible way to die. The chem guys say that the addiction rate is almost universal amongst users, but abuse varies by person.’

‘Universal addiction rate? That’s worse than meth.’

‘I know. It’s almost like it’s an instinctive human desire for this stuff. Deep down, hidden somewhere in the animal depths of your brain, is a horrible craving for Krel. We’ve all got it. It’s just a matter of whether or not you choose to try.’
‘Fucking sick, man. And someone figured out a way to concentrate and package this shit. Unbelievable.’

The cruiser ground to a halt outside an apartment complex in the Gilborough suburbs. It was one of those new developments that tried to ride both sides of the fence, a Whole Foods, Publix, and organic tea shop in the same shopping complex as a half dozen fast food restaurants and junk food stores. No discernable pattern of yuppies’ shopping habits between the two seemed to emerge. Local investigators found that the organic food stores and tea shops had become a means of consumer’s retribution against their own foul eating habits, with a slow decline into obesity and Type II Diabetes inevitably waiting.

Cord stepped out of the car, swept his coat to the side to look cool, then lit a cigarette with a match like a total boss. Twitch felt around in his coat pocket to make sure he had plenty of ammo even though the yellow tape had already been drawn around the condo entrances like crooked highlighter lines. There was nobody to shoot in there. Damn!

‘You don’t want to go in there, detective. It’s pretty ugly.’

‘Stand down officer, I’ve seen some horrible things in my day. Nothing a couple of dead bodies is going to change.’

‘Yessir.’

Cord ducked under the yellow tape and gave Twitch a look that said ‘damn, we’re in charge now.’ The front door had been broken with a police battery and pieces of the deadbolt cluttered underfoot as the two stepped inside. Flashbulbs popped as the CSI guys took a bunch of pictures of the dead bodies from funny angles. ‘Good God, Twitch. It’s worse than we thought.’

This was becoming all too common. A whole family had horribly OD’ed over the course of a weekend. A mom and dad, two sons and a daughter bloated up like someone had stuck a helium pump in them and left for the weekend. Each had died in a different manner, but all from the same drug. A creamy, yellow substance lined the furniture, walls, even parts of the ceiling. It had a weird, sticky consistency that seemed vaguely familiar. The dad’s arteries had literally burst in several places, the worst being a crimson blood stain turning black around where his carotid entered the skull. His arms and legs had swollen up to freakish proportions, dwarfed only by the enormous, swung gut hanging off, over, on him. His eyes glazed over, sugar stains caked his lips. It appeared as though fruit-by-the-foot had been rolled into horse-needle sized injection canisters and deep fried for solidity. A massive 64 ounce milkshake lay mostly finished as flies swarmed to the straw to slurp up as much of the sweet, sweet nectar as possible. A family-sized bucket of KFC had turned over, but not even the flies were interested in the tiny bits of flesh left on the bones. The mom laid in the recliner and may have simply been asleep if a massive heart attack hadn’t stopped her blood flow days ago.

‘Fucking Christ, look at this, Cord!’ Twitch had found something that neither he nor his partner had ever seen before. The other remnants of the KFC meal lay in total neglect, a huge pile of wrappers and boxes thrown into a corner beside the TV. Originial recipe, Extra crispy, creamed corn, mashed potatoes, biscuits, mac & cheese, apple pie minis, baked beans, the whole nine yards, all removed from their packaging and laid into a massive cauldron in the center of the coffee table, spun down with a hand blender to the consistency of wet plaster, then piped into hospital-sized feeding bags. The mother had literally liquefied their meals and pumped them into her and her children’s Femoral arteries as if caulking a bathtub.

The true culprit revealed itself as Cord turned over a pile of empty Coke cans between the mother and father. ‘You’re right, Twitch. This is sick. And look at what these motherfuckers were into.’ Cord held a broken vial of Krel up to the dim light of the flatscreen TV. ‘There’s tons of them here. It looks like they tried to inject it at first, then just ate it straight out of the vial. Christ, these things are fucking everywhere!’Cord kicked aside a weirdly shaped tea pot as he and Twitch stepped out the front door.

The two stepped outside to smoke a ton of goddamned cigarettes and try to shake the horror out of their brains. The rain continued to pour as the two detectives paced back and forth to look really important in front of the junior cops meandering about inside. ‘Those poor people literally ate themselves to death. How the fuck did this happen?’ Cord asked.

‘I don’t know. It looks like the KFC just started the party and the Krel finished them off. What a fucking waste. There was even a Whole Foods across the street.’
‘Fuck that hippy nonsense, that place is full of Anti-Christs!’ Cord whipped out his pistol.

‘Easy there, cowboy. The medical reports show that they all experienced massive organ failures around the same time. Blood sugar levels were through the roof, white blood cell counts extremely low, the dad even had temporary blindness for a few minutes before he expired.’

‘Well, he’s blind for good now.’ Cord could say things like that because no one would fuck with him.

‘What do you make of it?’

‘Consider the evidence, Twitch. These people were trying to get healthy. Remember that tea kettle (made by Nepalese tradesmen) that I saw by the door? Well, there were also some organic blueberries and yogurt (raised in a climate controlled environment by 5th generation Native American workers), and a few raw carrots from the farmer’s market hidden in the refrigerator. They tried to eat themselves healthy and found out how bad that organic crap tastes. They rebounded, hard. Too hard. God.’ Cord didn’t usually throw up, but he really felt like it.

Static buzzed through Twitch’s walkie-talkie as Cord lit another cigarette with an acetylene torch. How he got it, nobody knows. Twitch listened intently as the details came in, his green pen working furiously on his notepad to get all the details right, ridiculous as they were: self-aware cows, massive social organization, heavy diet changes, new levels of speech and the beginnings of language separation, ranchers enormously distraught and arming themselves in droves. ‘Cord, this is fucked up beyond all belief. Apparently, the Krel supply has worked itself into the bovines. This shit is getting out of control. We’re needed in Lexington, stat!’ As the two detectives climbed into the cruiser, Cord glanced over his shoulder and noticed that gas had gone up to $3.27 a gallon.

NY Times Book Review:

"Working titled 'The Carnivore's Surprise,' Rhett Orvin's odd retelling of the classic Michael Pollan ecological, ethical, and culinary masterpiece 'The Omnivore's Dilemma' has been inverted in almost every sense possible. Almost entirely absent of moral conscience, Mr. Orvin depicts two trigger-happy detectives blasting their way through stockyards, paper mills, schools, post offices, carriage tour guide break rooms, and single engine airplanes as they search for the truth behind the mysterious substance 'Krel' that is killing off the natives of Northern Virginia in droves. Where Mr. Pollan offered insight, detail, and solutions, Mr. Orvin spoon feeds the reader gun fights and foul language that grow distasteful as the two detectives dispatch the wrong persons with nary a care. Often glossing over details, the work plays fast and loose with the truth of 'The Omnivore's Dilemma' and brutally understates the most valuable lessons of the original book. The tone suggests that Twitch and Cord, the two detectives, are more interested in emptying boxes of ammo at bad guys than finding a solution to the food problem in America. One particularly odd episode details the ungainly spiritual development of farm animals into a fully sentient, organized society rebelling against their masters, albeit without the Orwellian sensibility. Ridiculously, the animals have gained both speech and an atavistic form of human religion. Apparently, Mr. Orvin hasn't gone to any of the lengths that Mr. Pollan has, such as purchasing a steer and following it to slaughter. If Mr. Orvin had even taken the time to interview a farm animal, he would know that they are incapable of speech.

The point of Mr. Orvin's writing is obtuse at best. Where he aims for humor, he comes across as crass. His attempts to incorporate the findings of 'The Omnivore's Dilemma' generally fall flat as even the densest detectives would be able to figure out the connection between Krel and its source. An oddity at best, this work is suggested only for those that desire intrigue, violence, bad language, and coarse humor. Otherwise, do yourself a favor and flip back through 'The Omnivore's Dilemma' where you'll certainly have a much better chance at wrapping your arms around the food crisis facing America."

Thursday, October 6th, 2011