Caution:  not for children - rough language and graphic scenes

Part 2:  http://www.conspiracypenpal.com/columns/escape2.htm

67:31

    Snake paused just above the opening at the bottom of the shaft and listened.  No music.  No drums.  Not a sound since he left Gravel Voice in the care of the couple he had set free.  His screams still could be heard if Snake listened just right.

    Giving himself a slow, silent count to ten, Snake drew both pistols and, balancing on the rung, stepped back and dropped into a crouch on the floor below.  Quickly, he scanned the large space spread before him and, seeing nobody, moved forward a few inches and checked on either side of the hatchway.  All clear. 

    Snake slowly moved out into what proved to be a chamber approximately 60 feet on each side, with a twelve-foot ceiling.  No furniture whatsoever.  Aside from the open hatchway he just had left, the only other access appeared to be a closed door set midway down the wall to his left.  Shabby rugs overlapped one another, covering much of the floor area.  Brightly colored cloth strips, predominantly red, orange and black, festooned the walls, with carved wooden masks hung at the far end.  Directly beneath the masks stood a raised platform, perhaps five feet high, running the entire width of the wall, with wooden steps directly off to the left side.  What could only be described as an altar of some sort stood near the front edge, directly in the middle.

    Now standing in the center of the room, Snake could hear a faint pounding and what might be a muffled voice.  Snake moved closer to the platform and the voice resolved itself into a distant hysterical wail of sorts.  Advancing all the way to the platform, Snake was surprised to see that only the first five feet of the raised platform consisted of wood flooring.  Beyond that, perhaps another eight feet altogether, wooden planks gave way to ordinary dirt, with several mounds alongside long holes that looked for all the world like...graves.  The wailing became more pronounced, now clearly interspersed with sobbing - a man's sobbing.

    Quickly looking around once more and seeing nothing, Snake holstered the 9mm Berettas.  Placing his hands palm down on the leading edge of the platform, he smartly lifted himself up and, knees first, onto the raised wooden floor.  All those hours in the prison weight room, he thought.  Good for more than just keeping away the Black rapists. 

    What the rest of America didn't seem to know - what was common knowledge to those inside her prisons - was that more interracial rape occurred inside prison walls than outside.  It wasn't about sex.  Sex had nothing to do with the cruel and sadistic dehumanization practiced almost exclusively by Blacks and Mestizos upon hapless Whites.  And the number of Whites increased all the time, mostly just the sort that the colored monsters who lived out their lives behind bars preferred:  soft, defenseless and convicted of all manner of things not even criminal just a few short years prior.  Venting their rage upon Whitey was what it was all about, and any White would do. 

    Only nonstop vigilance and a repeated proven willingness and ability to defend himself had kept Snake intact.  Once word got around about that ape whose privates Snake literally had yanked from his body, then flushed down the toilet while he watched, doubled up in agony on the concrete floor, Snake had no more trouble.  Even so, he particularly had to be careful not to be caught alone by any of the gangs.  And virtually all the Blacks and Mestizos belonged to one gang or another, while Whites naively failed to come together for their mutual protection.

    Standing up, Snake cocked his head to one side and listened - the sobbing had stopped, to be replaced with a more insistent pounding and, now, muffled shouting:  "Help!  Help me.  Oh, God, please....help me.  Get me out of here!"  Snake advanced to the far end, where dirt was heaped up in low mounds over two of what clearly were graves...he had seen simple wooden caskets in the other holes, each of which still stood open, with larger mounds of dirt alongside each.  What the Hell?  The shouting was louder and the pounding more insistent.  Snake was certain they came from the first hole.  Snatching up a shovel that lay on the dirt nearby, Snake began digging.

    The dirt was soft.  Must have just been dumped in, for the guy still to be alive - hope his air holds out.  Snake's progress was swift as he thought over what this fellow could have done to deserve being buried alive.  And seemingly ritualistically, too, if the earlier drumming and chanting were related.  Snake felt certain they were.  Meanwhile the sobbing and shouting had stopped.  Now just the occasional, "Hurry - please hurry!" carried up from below, each time a little louder than before.

    Thunk!  His shovel stopped short just a couple of feet beneath the surface.  Snake quickly shoveled aside enough dirt to make out the full outline of the simple wooden casket, identical to the others.  Brushing off most of the loose dirt remaining, he clambered up out of the hole and, kneeling down alongside it, inserted the tip of his shovel just beneath the cover.  Leveraging on the soft edge of the opening he just had created, the cover lifted up three inches.  Fingers shot out and Snake could hear grunts as the fellow below struggled to push out of his erstwhile entombment. 

    Moving around the hole, Snake continued to leverage up the top, hearing the nails squeal as they begrudgingly gave way.  Finally, the upper portion of the top jumped a foot into the air and fell back.  Snake levered up the bottom, which he already had been working on.  With a noise not unlike fingers on slate, it came free.  Throwing the shovel aside, Snake leaned down and hauled out the long, wooden cover.

    "Thank God.  Thank God.  You're not one of them, are you?  You're white!" 

    Snake was dumbstruck.  How could I be so lucky?  Already, too.  Lots of time left.  Struggling to push himself erect, albeit very shakily, was none other than George W. Shrub, President of what was left of the United States of America.

    All was fine until Hurricane Katrina struck and then passed inland, eventually becoming simply a monstrous tropical storm once again.  Amidst the devastation that formerly had been the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts, stretching inland for perhaps fifty miles, virtually nothing remained of civilization.  For the first week, government at every level seemed paralyzed, like deer caught in the headlights.  Recrimination flew from one quarter to the next, then back again.  Meanwhile, the region quickly descended into savagery. 

    Looting began during the storm.  Indeed, it appeared that many of the New Orleans residents who stayed behind did so simply because of the shopping opportunity they knew was coming.  Then the killing began.  At first, it seemed to be simple payback by residents who sought out specific others, then it took on a racist edge as Blacks began to attack and kill every White person they encountered.  The men were lucky; rather, the ones who didn't have to watch their wives and daughters gang raped, then brutally murdered by the gangs that had taken over the region, were lucky.  They simply were shot on sight for the crime of being White.  Their bodies lay everywhere, it seemed, along with countless Blacks killed by the storm's full fury.

    Meanwhile, FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which had sopped up untold billions of taxpayer dollars through the years, simply stood by.  In fact, it came out during that first week that FEMA personnel were turning away rescue and relief workers and supplies.  Rumors about the New Orleans levees having been blown intentionally swirled through the country.  The region was isolated. 

    As Blacks throughout America stood transfixed by the developing disaster,  Black rabble rousers began to play the race card.  "You'd be doing something if those people were White," became a common accusation, picked up and repeated by both print and broadcast media.  The usual suspects, led by the likes of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, whipped the gathering crowds of Blacks into a frenzy. 

    Somewhere, a tipping point was reached and the Black riots began throughout America, seemingly all at once.  Now there seemed not to be a major American city that wasn't ablaze in several sectors simultaneously, twenty-four hours a day. 

    The troubles began with the first Blacks evacuated from New Orleans.  Wherever they were sent, it seemed, a crime wave erupted.  A crime wave that turned into a tidal wave of civil unrest and rioting before the month was out.  When local Whites saw transplanted Blacks robbing and raping wherever they went, it didn't take more than a rape or two of white teenage girls to send bands of armed Whites around, seeking out Blacks, in order to exact revenge. 

    Things quickly spiraled out of control.  Shots were exchanged and then full-scale street wars broke out, city after city, though both the government and its lapdog press did their best to hide the fact from the public, most of whom went on with their lives, blissfully unaware.

    A month after the hurricane struck, New Orleans still was under water, still a gang stronghold.  Things throughout the country fast were coming unglued.  Against the advice of those around him, President Shrub decided to lead a "fact-finding" party through downtown New Orleans, to prove to the public that things weren't as bad as the rumors had them.  He took his daughters along with him to prove the lack of danger.  In fact, things were worse than even his advisors imagined.  Much worse.

    Now he stood before Snake Plankton, a bare shadow of the man Snake had seen on TV so many times.  Haggard, with his eyes so dark rimmed that they appeared blackened.  The contrast with Shrub's pallid skin was remarkable.  He looks like something out of "Night of the Living Dead," thought Snake.  Shrub's soiled gray suit was wrinkled everywhere, with smudges of dirt and a series of what looked like drops of blood down the left breast of his jacket.  Shrub's pants had concentric patterns of varying darkness, centered on his crotch, the most recent quite dark and smaller than the rest.  He had wet himself repeatedly.  But it was Shrub's eyes that most unsettled Snake - like they had had membranes placed over the pupils, semi-opaque membranes.

66:49

    Snake helped Shrub up out of the hole, catching a whiff of the man's body odor.  Shit!  Indeed, thought Snake, that and other things I don't even recognize.  Shrub grabbed Snake around the waist and started sobbing.  "Please...please...get me out of here!"

    "Sure thing, Mr. President, but what about your daughters?  Aren't they being held down here somewhere, too?"

    "Oh, yeah....Ginna....Tonic....they were with me.  But you can come back for them.  I'm the President!  You have to get me out of here!  The country needs me."

    Like a hole in the head, thought Snake.  "Sure, sure...all in due time.  But, let's just settle down for a minute.  Tell me what happened here."

    Shrub straightened up then and rubbed away his tears with one grimy hand.  "Ok....well..."  And then his eyes grew wide and distant just as Snake snapped to full alert, having heard a small sound behind himself.

    The world exploded just then.  Bright lights and a swirling darkness as Snake fell...down, down, down, in a seemingly endless spiral....

Part 4:  http://www.conspiracypenpal.com/columns/escape4.htm