Excited Delirium Chapter 67: Aftershocks: China Scene of Devastation
Author’s Note: The following is Chapter 67 of the my online book “Excited Delirium”. Please post comments. Please tell your friends about this story. If you’ve missed a chapter, please click here for Chapter 1 (Prelude) or here for the full index.
It was late in the evening, Beijing time, when the first murmurs of life started to show in what was once a great city.
Before the Olympics were set to start in August, the estimated population was 17 million, but that official number barely accounted for the 2-4 million people that inhabited the hutong, or mazes of alleyways, that surrounded the city. That number was, thankfully, depleted significantly due a government edict that “encouraged” people to leave for holidays and to rent properties to incoming tourists and sports enthusiasts. That, and the actual brutal program of shoving a vast majority of unwanted people out of the city so that it would be clean and presentable for the onslaught of the visitors.
These guesses and figures are important, because to this day, there is still a significant amount of disagreement concerning the number of people that were killed in the Great ’08 and most now acknowledge that we will never know how many people paid with their lives for the ambitions of a select few in North America.
Final official statements were that more than two million either died or were classified as missing (and never found) during and after the Quake. The majority of these people were unsuspecting tourists.
In the past, China had kept the door shut on any interference from international bodies when disaster struck, be it natural or man-made, and in the hours and days that followed, the response was no different, but for reasons that many would not have expected.
The largest government in the world resides in Beijing where the President of the People’s Republic of China (PROC) chairs the National People’s Congress, a party that consists of nearly 3,000 elected seats. These elected officials are supported by tens of thousands of bureaucrats. Few survived the Great ’08 as few were prepared for the fierceness of this seemingly natural attack on their nation. They were preparing to show the world how great China was and they paid with their lives as others sought to bring about a cataclysmic shock.
The original plan for Garamond, Hadlock and a long line of others that wanted China wiped from the map was to marginalize its government. Without an official government, China would wander and fail to respond to desperate pleas from the international community as people arrived at their doors with open hands and buckets of cash.
Most officials of China were now crushed under a tomb of angry steel fingers that squeezed the life out of them when the “Bird’s Nest” – the official Olympic Ceremonies Stadium built specifically for the Olympics – collapsed after the 9.8 Richter scale earthquake and smaller, yet still significant, ripples shocked through the city. The building was crushed as easily as a collection of toy cars get thrown when a child shakes out a small rug.
A headless state, regardless of where it’s located, results in two things: the loss of a lot of blood and the appearance of heroes who try to squelch the pandemonium.
If there was sufficient leadership and guidance, particularly with the intent of digging into the rubble and pulling out a satisfactory status quo, the crisis in China would not have drawn as much attention as it did.
Problems would have been solved, people might have been saved and countless millions might still be with us. Or so we in the West were lead to believe as out politicians descended on the state and began seeking ways to interject private companies and public charities on the will of the Chinese.
By Monday morning, reps from all of the divisions of the OMNINet, along with many other companies, sat in emergency boats and container ships in the Bay of Bo Hai, which is the closest body of water near Beijing. They sat in media rooms and press galleries around the world, waiting to press the ‘enter’ button that would flood the market with stories about how evil the Chinese Empire is and how it needs to be changed. They sat in the offices of Congressmen, EU officials and in Asian foreign affairs departments, patiently waiting for the command to proceed with plans.
All the eager personnel needed to begin their commercial and mission-like invasion of the unsuspecting and living inhabitants was the nod from OMNINet management.
For those people who were there, none will ever forget the events that transpired within just 72 hours of the worst disaster in modern history.
[Author’s Note: I conceived of this plot component in 2006 and wrote most of these chapters into the story of ‘Excited Delirium’ during the course of 2007. I was stunned like the rest of the world when a tragic earthquake struck the province of Sichuan on May 12, 2008. Please believe me that I do not want to ‘profit’ from the suffering that the hundreds of thousands in this quake experienced. I remind all readers that this is a work of fiction and that my goals are to speak to the symbolic reference that’s used in the numerology along with the viewpoint of one fictional cult concerning the fate of the Chinese.]
(Note: “Excited Delirium” is a work of fiction. Any person, place or thing depicted in this work of fiction is also a work of fiction. Any relation of these subjects or characters to real locations, people or things are an unintentional coincidence.)
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Excited Delirium by Liam Young is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License .
Based on a work at www.exciteddelirium.ca .