Digitalis Rex: Chapter 8 - Downtown
Do you happen to the world, or does the world happen to you.
She held the top of the steering wheel with both hands and tightened her grip to stop the shaking as she gunned the Malibu down Del Amo Boulevard towards home like a tracer bending into its target.
Rey looked over at the passenger seat and down at her phone. Marcus. Then reached over and picked it up. She speed-dialed him. One ring. Two. Three. Too easy. Nothing to it. Yeah. Yeah. White boy playing gangster, cartel people smugglers for Christ’s sake. ‘Pick up. Pick it up,’ she said, under her breath.
Rey merged onto the 405 North. The phone timed out. She threw it on the passenger seat. I'm not doing it. I'm not dragging anyone out of a shelter. No way. No way.
She looked over at the phone. Where is he? I need you, Marcus. I need you.
The countdown to the 110 off-ramp was coming up on her right. She moved into the exit lane and picked up her phone again. She speed-dialed. One ring. Two. ‘Come on, come on. Pick it up.’ Three. Four...The phone timed out again. Rey threw it back on the passenger seat and, at the last minute, cut across the lanes and stayed on the 405 North to Culver City.
He looked low level. White trash playing Sicario. Cartel. Sinaloa, probably. Maybe Jalisco. Could even be MS-13. She didn’t know. Not with any significant likelihood. Not for sure.
Marcus wasn’t picking up.
She could understand Sinaloa. All business. Strategic. Bribery, coercion, and violence, if necessary. But Jalisco, that was another thing. They depopulate and take over quickly. Strategic, but vicious with an extreme, brazen, even ostentatious use of violence. Their modus operandi was people smuggling and money laundering. Their calling card, a grotesque spectacle of public executions and mutilation.
In main street USA, the number of nail salons and barber shops, and cash-intensive businesses had ballooned. On the surface it looked like regeneration, the old replaced by the new, Millennial and Gen-Z entrepreneurs making money, BMWs and high end SUVs parked outside. Main Street regentrified in a digital age. Except for one inconvenient problem. Paying the rent on a downtown unit when the shop was almost always empty.
In some states, cannabis was legal, a bona fide industry, but it was still a predominantly cash-based business because cannabis remains illegal at the federal level, and this meant banks were reluctant to take cash deposits from cannabis retailers.
The US Central Bank was so concerned about the amount of money being held on site overnight, exposed to the risk of placement, the depositing of cash made from all the bad stuff, drug-trafficking, human-trafficking, prostitution, extortion, and off the books gambling, they decided to intervene. They sent federally sanctioned trucks to pick up the cash, and in return the cannabis retailer received digital dollars deposited directly into their bank account. And yes, that meant the US Central Bank acted as a drug dealer.
Nobody noticed. Except the Jalisco drug cartel, who took no time at all to explain to the owners of cannabis reselling businesses in the American Southwest, using their own particular brand of salesmanship, that they would be receiving the regular cash deposits, not the Central Bank, the wife of one who refused, kidnapped, beheaded, and hung by an ankle from an overpass in Juarez, naked.
Cheerleaders and prom queens, quarterbacks and movie stars, living the dream, beheaded and mutilated, crucified on bridges all over the country.
America was not prepared. Not for this kind of violence.
If Marcus was connected, everything she thought was true was a lie. She wanted to go home. Opt out. Quit. Run away. But she couldn’t. Not yet. And that guy knew where she lived.
She sat in silence listening to the noise of the tyres alternating on asphalt and concrete. Rough, loud. Quiet, smooth. West of her, Century City's phallic skyline loomed. An effigy of control.
She inched down the driver side window. The air pressure inside the cabin dropped, the smell of sun bleached plastic and sweat from threadbare seats pulled out into the night. The Malibu twitched as fresh air was sucked in through the air vents as the pressure equalised. Hair whipped across her face, strands blown across her cheeks, over her eyes, and out of the window as the cool evening air caressed her neck and shoulders.
And she needed someone to hold her now.
Rey sat with her back leaning forward off the rest, her shoulders hunched, arms stretched, hands held high on the hard plastic wheel. She squeezed it and arched her back.
She tried Marcus again. The phone rang off. No answer.
Orange light stroboscopically interrupted her vision as she drove through the underpass, moving shadows across her hands, over little white scars raised off the skin.
And he’s yelling again.
She rubbed the back of her hand.
He’s in my face. There’s a girl. She’s in the room.
Back in the car, she tasted the acetone.
The girl cowers in a chair. He’s over by the fire. And he’s back again. Moving fast. Talking fast. Spittle flying in her face. She looks away, down into the dirt, at the filth on the wooden floor.
Vehicles passed on her left, forming air pockets as they pierced the cool evening air creating shockwaves that buffeted the Malibu. Rey glanced at the speedometer. Ninety. She slowed and looked out at the traffic. So busy. Busy going nowhere. Busy. Blind. Travelling at speed into a future they will not believe.
He’s by the fire now. Silent. And then he’s back. Burning cigarette in his hand. Alcohol on his breath. He grabs her hair and forces her to look at him.
‘No daddy. Please. I’ll do it right next time.’
‘You need a little reminder of the correct temperature, girl. See this.’
He moves the cigarette up near her eye. Close enough to feel the heat of the burning embers.
‘Don’t daddy. Don’t. Don’t.’ The girl is crying. She looks over at a door.
‘No point lookin’ girl. She ain’t coming.’
She pushes back in the chair, eyes wide, scared out of her wits.
‘But she had it coming.’
His face morphs like a fisheye, sides bending flat, pushing his eyes, nose, and mouth forwards in a grotesque distortion as he smiles.
‘Just like you.’
He jabs the cigarette into the back of the girl’s hand.
She screams in agony.
Rey jumped, shook her head. The countdown exit to Culver City. Dead ahead.
She shouldn't have hit the girl. What was I thinking. And that launch. Everyone laughing and clapping. The DJs whipping the crowd up into a frenzy. They don't know what's coming. They just don't know. She needed to think. Eduardo had cut her off but now she needed thirty grand. Marcus couldn’t protect her. Not from Penchek. Not even God can protect you from him. And what about this girl. Who’s going to protect her.
‘Fuck it,’ Rey said. She turned right off the 405 onto Venice Boulevard and pointed the Malibu towards downtown. There was an IHOP on her right.
She was sixteen and alone with enough to get her out, but she had to be careful. The first place she ate after getting off a Greyhound travelling west was at IHOP. Safety, warmth. A place to sit. The brightest smiles, given by those who often had the least to give. And seeing one made her smile. She always asked for a booth with a good view of the room. It never gets old.
Tattoo parlours, noodle bars, gaming stores and beauty salons, mini-marts and massage parlours, meat markets, electrical supplies. Soccer moms outside soccer stores, cell phones and liquor. People on the sidewalks like bees in servitude to their queen. Rey watched them as she drove past. Greens, reds, the orange light from the street reflected off the windscreen and across the glass on the driver and passenger side doors, her skin absorbing the blue and yellow light from the neon signage as it passed through her field of vision.
Hot chicken. Tacos and chicken. Spicy. Fried. Grilled. There were chicken joints on every other street corner. She’d driven this route hundreds of times but it was the first time she had noticed, the first time she had made the connection.
Chicken. Mass-produced and cheap. Grown fast and fattened in cages, pumped with hormones and fat slurry. Eyes and skin scalded by chlorine. Feathers burned. Industrial scale protein production, processed not raised, crammed into crates and shipped to the slaughterhouse. Hung by their legs and electrified to stun, not quite dead, a blade cut their throats, some only partially, the unlucky few scalded again, blood seeping through their skin and eviscerated while still alive.
Chicken, turkey, and duck. Their names at the slaughterhouse, the same as on the plate, but we don’t eat cow and pig. We eat beef and pork.
Rey watched a woman walking down the street, typing into her oblong, tuned out. They never see it coming. Only at the end when it's too late do they realise their fate. Ikizukuri sashimi. Prepared, skewered, and eaten alive.
A thousand years ago, in what is now England, the Anglo-Saxons were in the sixth century of their existence. Agrarian and prosperous, their wooden buildings built beside crumbling Roman stone. They had their own currency, their own laws, and their own way of life. It had been that way for centuries.
But then came a weak king, Edward the Confessor, who made a promise he could not keep. When Harold was crowned, the French-speaking Normans, Northmen, Vikings who had settled and dominated northern France, claimed betrayal. A young Duke, William, declared himself the rightful heir. And in 1066, he crossed the channel and ripped the Anglo-Saxon world apart.
The Normans became the new ruling class, dismantling the old Anglo-Saxon order, casting them down into a peasant underclass, their wooden structures replaced by Norman stone in the militaristic style, in a country-wide iconoclastic purge. A new system of control.
They called them cows and pigs. But the Normans called them boeuf and porc. And even now, a thousand years on we kill cows and pigs using the peasants’ tongue but serve their flesh on plates with the aristocrats’. Control begins with the language of the conquerors.
Everything that is, and everything that will be, changes. It is the only thing that’s guaranteed. The only constant.
The skyscrapers of Los Angeles towered ahead of her. All over the world, skylines were changing. Ziggurats to bridge heaven and earth. Neo-pyramids. The mathematics of their design resonating through time and space, in a Pythagorean symphony, like music frozen in time, subjugating the many in their shadows, their function known only to the few, a network of generators and relays for a control system yet to be born. Neural architecture for a quantum age, a retuning of the Earth’s frequency, shifting OM into discordance.
She read the corporate logos. Their colours and design. The words, a semiotic mechanism of control. But it was nothing new. In an earlier age, Medieval cathedrals were encoded with a spiritual geometry, projecting power and dominance over everyone. Then Christ the King was rebranded as Christ the Pauper. He died for your sins, an ideological inversion, shrouding you in guilt. The ruler became the servant. The execution, the redemption. Power hides behind humility. Centuries later, the Haussmannization of Paris, surveillance disguised as beauty. They called it the Belle Epoque. The good era, but what if it was all a lie. Not modernisation, sanitation, or aesthetics, but strategic control. The boulevards were deliberately widened to prevent the erection of barricades and allowed cavalry and artillery to move and fire down straight roads. Military suppression and population control under the Eiffel Tower. Engineered obedience behind the Bar at the Folies-Bergère.
And it was happening again.
She watched as people walked down the sidewalk. Many now lost in their heads, staring into an electronic illusion. It was one of the first things she realised at Stanford. In the absence of war, societal change comes not by reeducating the minds of the old because that’s too expensive and can lead to problems, but by influencing the minds of the young. Simple and efficient. The long game played over decades and centuries, not by the famous or the loud, but by the real people of power. They’re not presidents or prime ministers, or the people you see giving interviews on television, and you’ll never see them commenting on social media platforms or talking on podcasts, performing on the clown show that is social media. No. They’re the ones in the shadows. The ones you’ve never heard of. The kingmakers who make you and break you. A country rises and falls. They pull the strings of power.
Rey turned off Highway 10 at the San Pedro exit and looped back on herself as she drove into Downtown. It changed when she crossed 7th Street. Into dereliction and despair. To her left, ramshackle tents tied to the side of buildings. Blue and silver and dark green. Cardboard boxes and dumpsters. Mattresses covered in human filth and cast away from the world. A white girl was figuring out the poles on a tent, pulling down the waterproofing she’d probably stolen, trying to figure out how to make herself safe. Across the street, a guy in a black hoodie bent over at the waist, almost back on himself, his back breaking. Rey could see the marks, his face ruptured, bleeding, poisoned by the fentanyl.
They lined the whole street now. On both sides, plastic sheeting making shelter. Cardboard boxes taped together with anything they could find from the street, impromptu tents. A new kind of township. A shanty town. Desperation. Poverty. Begging and Violence. Shopping carts and plastic crates filled with anything they could find from dumpsters or steal. Anything they could sell. Anything to feed their habit. Staying alive was now just a by-product of their search for the next hit.
But this wasn’t an autocracy controlled by corruption at the hands of a tin-pot dictator. This was here, in America's backyard, in the richest country in the world. Beneath the veneer of wealth, a dark, miserable reality, an uncared for class, festered, cast away and forgotten in the shadows of the Los Angeles skyline.
She crossed 5th Street, and put on an unmarked black baseball cap. The Women’s Mission on her right, Rey parked beneath an unlit street light, fifty yards from the entrance. A banner was strapped to the pole, high up. Angkor Wat. The Imperial Khmer Empire. She looked around at the tents. At its height, Angkor was the largest and most advanced city in the world, its five towers a fractal of Mount Meru, its temples aligned along the spring equinox, a hologram of heaven projected down, its urban planning, hydraulic systems, and architecture, the most advanced upon this earth, and yet it failed, its economy crippled by wars, nature reclaiming what was hers and the rest was lost in time.
Until the 1970s.
Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, invoking the name of the ancient Khmer Empire, tried to rewrite history from Year Zero. Not by building, but by execution. A genocide in the name of a revolution. An outrage against humanity.
Rey walked past tents and split plastic bags, the contents rotting on the sidewalk. The stench hung in the air, like a 21st century miasma blighting the unwashed, whose clothes reeked of sun-dried urine, shit, and vomit. The system of the world had left them to live and die on the street. Rey shook her head. ‘This is a disgrace,’ she said.
The mission’s entrance had an iron gate. A reinforced door was twenty yards in front of her. She kept her head down as she approached. There was an intercom by the side of the door. Rey pressed the button, a faint hum coming out of the speaker.
She waited and looked around, keeping her face hidden as much as she could under her cap. The speaker crackled into life.
‘This is the Women’s Mission. Can I help you?’
Rey pressed the button again. ‘There's a woman in room eight. She's in danger. I can't tell you who's coming, but I know someone is coming. They're coming for her. Get her out and get her out now.’ She released the button and waited.
Inside a long silence, Rey studied the probabilities. An F-250 would make short work of that gate and from the other side of San Pedro, she figured the sixty yards would be an effective launch pad to ram the reinforced door.
The intercom crackled, the humming replaced by a different voice.
‘I'm the night manager. I've called the police. You've been filmed and we've got you on camera.’
Rey kept her head down and pressed the button again.
‘The police can't help. You can't help. Whatever's coming for her, you, this door, what you think you can do, it won't be enough. Just get her out.’
The speaker stayed silent. Rey listened to the intermittent monotone hum.
She pressed the button again. No answer.
All the windows had bars. Rey looked a little higher. It looked impregnable. But she knew it wasn’t. It could be rammed by a reinforced truck, but that was not the most efficient way. And if she was right, the outside door and whoever was on the other side of it did not matter. They’d use the quickest most effective method to open it. No matter the collateral damage.
The night manager probably didn’t call in an immediate threat to life so the police would classify it as priority two or three, not priority one. She figured she had fifteen minutes.
Back at the Malibu, Rey popped the trunk. She flicked open the black canvas bag and lifted out a fire axe and a sledgehammer.
To be continued...
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Love it John. Thank you.