Dawn of the Unthinkable by James Concannon Page B

shock and outrage as her skirt went to half-mast and a
pretty pair of pink panties was there for the world to see. Damn, in the old days, ladies wore slips , he thought, and
this might not have been so bad. But no, this child (she looked all
of about sixteen) had to go practically au naturel, probably to
allow some cheesy boyfriend quicker access , he thought
disgustedly. He could see his eyes wide with terror, and he looked
like a perfect fool.
    He clicked the TV off and hung his head. A
scriptwriter could not have made this any worse. He knew he was
going to be a laughing-stock and was not looking forward to meeting
with the spin-doctors to try to fix this. Smug bastards, they would
be shaking their heads in sympathy while internally calculating
their fees like a bunch of crows fighting over road kill. He
remembered he still had her on the phone. “Oh, boy,” he sighed into
the phone, “that was bad.”
    “ Bad? ” she laughed, “That was a joke ! I’d hate to see what you’d do if someone pulled a real
gun instead of a kitchen utensil. You’d probably try to crawl up
some aide’s asshole!” she said with total scorn. He winced at the
imagery. Why did he put up with this? Then he remembered.
    “Should I still come over?” he asked
hopefully.
    “I prefer real men, but I guess you’ll have
to do. Get here in fifteen minutes, or I’ll be gone,” she said and
hung up.
    He hung up and hustled into the shower. It
would be impossible to get there in that time, but she would wait
just for the pleasure of ripping into him for being late. As the
water coursed around him, he wondered about how the film had gotten
to CNN so quickly. It had to be a set-up, because the
cameraman, who must have had one of those small camcorders, had
only focused on the girl and him. Those tree-huggers would not have
thought up anything as nasty as this on their own. Usually they
were content with rhyming slogans on recycled poster-board. No,
somebody had to have put them up to it, but who? Could it be the
one he was going to see? She was not usually the type to stage
events that involved other people, but maybe she was branching out.
On the other hand, maybe his wife. She certainly would not mind
seeing him humiliated, as he had done it to her enough. He quit
thinking about it as his headache worsened; he would have to take
something for it now. He finished his shower, dressed, and left for
his appointment.

Chapter 6
    Fall 1989
    Ryan came back from the range re-energized.
He was only an average golfer, but driving the ball was his
strength and he loved to bang them out. Douglass was a lot better
but was pretty forgiving of his mistakes, so he was the ideal
partner.
    The physical hiatus allowed Ryan to plunge
back into writing his article. He was glad he did not have to do
this for a living, as sometimes the words came to him easily. At
other times, he could barely squeeze out a “the.” He figured that
if he could just stick to it, he might be able to finish in a week,
which was about his attention span for extra-curricular projects
such as these.
    He had, in the course of his work life, a
lot of low paying part-time jobs. So even if he did not have the
academic credentials to write a political commentary with a lack of
a PoliSci degree, he did have a broad range of life experiences to
draw on. So while his upbringing had been lower middle-class
suburban, he had experienced some of the grittier jobs that a man
could have. Though certain people might question his ability to
comment on the state of society, he felt that he had worked up from
the bottom, becoming the first in his family to earn a Master’s
degree. In order to fix society you had to have seen how most parts
of it lived, and through working tough jobs and witnessing how the
upper class lived, he had a good idea of how things worked. He had
heard many different opinions from the various people he had worked
with over the years and tried to incorporate many of those