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First Edition Design Publishing - Frank Casella

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110 pages

English

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Who could possibly think that terrorism could have therapeutic benefits? 9-11 Narcosis chronicles a doctor who formulates a deadly plan as a form of treatment to what ails the nation. If his plan is carried out, and there is good reason to believe it will be, then we certainly will be cured.

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Thriller

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Publié par	First Edition Design Publishing
Date de parution	15 juillet 2014
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781622876525
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0360€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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9-11 Narcosis

First Edition Design Publishing
9-11 Narcosis
Copyright ©2014 Frank Casella

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

The author wishes to thank Vance Mulholland for his editorial assistance.

ISBN 978-1622-876-51-8 PRINT
ISBN 978-1622-876-52-5 EBOOK

LCCN 2014942433

July 2014

Published and Distributed by
First Edition Design Publishing, Inc.
P.O. Box 20217, Sarasota, FL 34276-3217
www.firsteditiondesignpublishing.com

ALL R I G H T S R E S E R V E D. No p a r t o f t h i s b oo k pub li ca t i o n m a y b e r e p r o du ce d, s t o r e d i n a r e t r i e v a l s y s t e m , o r t r a n s mit t e d i n a ny f o r m o r by a ny m e a ns ─ e l e c t r o n i c , m e c h a n i c a l , p h o t o - c o p y , r ec o r d i n g, or a ny o t h e r ─ e x ce pt b r i e f qu ot a t i o n i n r e v i e w s , w i t h o ut t h e p r i o r p e r mi ss i on o f t h e a u t h o r or publisher .
9-11 Narcosis

By

Frank Casella
Prologue
If you want to clear your mind from the cloud of uncertainty, go to a cemetery and walk among the gravestones. Visualize the bodies decomposing in a shallow grave, with a light dusting of soil for cover. All the while critters eat away at the rotting flesh, until nothing is left except a fading memory, and the satisfaction that the dead have been digested into the living world.
But the dead deserve a more glorious contribution to civilization than merely serving as sentimental fertilizer for lower life forms. Gratefully, certain entrepreneurs have taken advantage of the emerging market of regenerative medicine where various body parts are used for surgical restoration. The dead, at least parts of them, can now be found among, actually within, the living. For a few weeks, I harvested bones from corpses, because I had to.
Many bodies came before me and I did my best not to wonder who they once were when alive. I kept a professional cool distance between my subjects and their previous lives. I vowed not to get involved in the labors of researching their obituaries. In one instance, however, the inexplicable death of a child forced me to disobey that promise. By doing so, my brain developed some sort of ailment and caught fire.
Then came 9-11. At first, I didn’t think it could happen, but it did. 9-11 narcosis snared me in its trap. For many hours I sat in front of the computer watching videos of the planes smashing into the towers. Over time, those scenes transformed into a distorted reality of what really happened. The passage of time is forever changing the past so that historical interpretations become confused and cannot be trusted. I studied the bodies falling, hoping to get a clue as to why everyone thought 9-11 meant something more than what they could see with their lying eyes.
For days, I traipsed through the dust downtown, past the hopeless pictures of loved ones posted on the walls, and scanned their images into my head to see what might come of it. Alas, they were just faces to me. Even though the entire canon of philosophy was said to have emerged from the rubble, I couldn’t find anything except people searching for something that wasn’t there.
Worse still, everyone tossed their sentimental hearts upon Ground Zero, but there was nothing left. The Twin Towers were reduced to ash in a matter of seconds. People felt cheated, as if a loved one suddenly died then immediately disappeared into thin air, leaving only an empty casket to mourn over. Someone pulled the plug on those buildings and they collapsed like a bad joke.
I sensed hypocrisy among this nation of patriots who didn’t so much mourn the loss of life but celebrate an evasion from death. 9-11 was so horrible they couldn’t get enough of it, so long as they could witness the carnage from the comfort of their living rooms. Schadenfreude became a national epidemic.
Something had to be done to remedy the situation and I felt compelled to act. Doctors try to help people, and as a doctor, it would have been malpractice not to capitalize on the moment to provide a more potent treatment to sustain our nation’s sadistic desires. In the laboratory of my mind, I stoked the coals and stirred the cauldron, and once the therapeutic plan came into being, it could not be deterred. For a moment, I was unable to contain my joy. The squirrels inside my head began to dance and the snakes slithered in my veins.
I have since calmed down. I sit in my chair and I look through the window. The sun rises and the sun sets. Not even God can stop me from laughing.
The plan is now in motion and out of my control—it cannot be stopped. Say your prayers if you think that might help. I suggest you go to your neighborhood cemetery and walk among the dead. It will clear your mind, or maybe it won’t. Either way, it won’t matter. When the time comes, that is where you’ll want to be.
Chapter One

I always wanted to be left alone to walk by the side of the road with no care in the world. But on that night, when I was stumbling alongside the Garden State Parkway, I would have preferred to be in one of those cars speeding recklessly by. Where were they going at that unlawful hour? Anyone except a Mexican on a bicycle was likely up to no good. I was down to my last bottle and was just about to cross into New York State when I passed out. I’m not sure how long I was unconscious before the state trooper rudely cast her flashlight upon my face and other bodily appendages. It seemed that I had traveled far away, even though that was not possible in New Jersey, where everything is so cramped and gasping for air. I commended the state trooper for having keen eyesight because it was a drizzly August night with fog hovering low, and I was tightly snuggled underneath a bush. I thought that only the night varmints knew I was there.
“Would you mind leaving me alone?” I begged. “There are plenty of Mexicans around stealing jobs. Why don’t you go harass them?”
“I cannot do that, sir,” she said.
“And why can’t you do that, officer?”
“Officer to base, assistance needed,” she said over her radio.
“Get that at Radio Shack?” She didn’t answer. “By the way, did you see my trousers?”
“What is your name, sir?”
“Eddie. Sir Eddie.”
“Eddie, do you have a last name?”
“Yes.”
“Can I see some identification, please?”
“Sure, my wallet is in my trousers,” I said. “Did you see them?”
I tried to stand, but my trousers were around my ankles, and just before I stumbled to the ground the policewoman greedily confiscated the bottle of cough syrup from my hand. Back-up arrived with another grisly policewoman. Both of them examined the cough syrup as if it were some sort of explosive.
Without the proper gentlemanly decorum suited for the occasion, I was tossed into the patrol car, and brought to Valley Hospital in Ridgewood. After some silly questions from the emergency room doctor, like why as a child I ran my cat over with the lawn mower (to get to the other side, duh), I was transferred to the Payne Daley Psychiatric Hospital in White Plains, New York.
At Payne Daley, they put me on 5-North. Where I would sit in front of the window near the nurses’ station, where the sun would hit my face. The warmth of the sun made me feel good. At night, the stars would shine, and their radiant photons, having started their journey long before I was even born. I wondered about time long ago, before the Eskimos, before electricity and TV dinners, before the evil computers, when everything was better. There were fingernail marks embedded in the wooden window frame and I wondered who left them. Beneath the window, five stories down, was a concrete sidewalk that led to the parking lot where the doctors and nurses parked their cars. I couldn’t see much beyond the rolling lawn, the iron spiked fence, and the perimeter of trees. But I knew that once past the guard post, a right at the light would take me onto 495 West, past Tarrytown, then to the Tappan Zee Bridge, and eventually back to Jersey. A couple miles upriver in Buchanan, New York, is the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant. The nuclear authorities think they have it protected but they really don’t. I pledged that one day I would make them regret their negligence.
I spent a lot of time thinking and not thinking on 5-North and came to realize, as many others have, that it must have been a beautiful planet before the humans came. I became convinced that one day the planet would rid itself of humans and be happy again.
Humans, going around dreaming they are part of some grand scheme, one with the universe, bigger and more important than they actually are. The reality being that they are in quite insignificant.
A strange cocktail of pills had me snowed in a sedative narcosis—and at first I enjoyed it. But after a while, I began to mumble and stagger about, and it seemed I was encased in a nineteenth century mortuary. The walls were layered under thick coatings of paint, and the red brick building and stagnant air weighed me down, so that most of the time I was ready to keel over like a tired old plow horse. I had to check my pulse to see if I was still alive. Deep down within my inner sanctity, the essence of my being was screaming to get out, but I was trapped inside an old horror movie.
The routine dispensing of medication served to establish the patient’s biorhythm. The nurse would hand out the medication and I would take the medication. The first round of dosing was at 10 am, just after breakfast. The morning medication made me tired and I would have to sit down. Sweat would bead up on my forehead and run down my nose. After lunch, I would take my station by the window and wait for the second round of meds that made me jumpy. Unable t