25

Rocky Mountain Low.

As they were bundled into the Learjet waiting on the tarmac, Dredly wondered whether it was legal for Federal officials to arrest people outside their own country (Bermuda being a British territory), let alone when their sole purpose was to enforce their own warped version of normalcy upon the world. As the plane roared off, Dredly stared out of the window, lost in thought. He had been prepared for many things on arriving in Bermuda, but this had not been one of them. Sage wondered whether there would be an in flight movie. Greta only hoped that the promises of regular bowels weren't being exaggerated. However, the three of them were united in one thing - that before meeting their fate at the hands of those ‘normal’ crazies, they would go down fighting - or at least singing. US Blues seemed the logical place to start, and when it came to the bit about skinning the goat, Sage did a frighteningly good impression of a goat being skinned, just for effect. After about an hour they got through their repertoire of Grateful Dead songs and sank back into their seats once more. There was a pause, then Greta looked at the well-dressed agent:
“How do you live with yourself?” She asked.
“I don’t. I live with my mother.” He replied.
“Okay, then how do you sleep nights, huh?”
He pulled out a bottle of pills. “I chug a few of these and I’m off in the land of nod, for a night untroubled by the screams of the people I’ve been re-educating all day. ‘Course, I need a couple of these little red pills to kick-start me in the morning.”
“But they’re all legal, so that makes it okay.” Dredly interjected.
“Hey, you catch on fast for a weirdo.”
“I’m flattered. Although it is a fact that none of us are on drugs now, or have taken any in the recent past.”
“That don’t matter. Buying Dead bootlegs makes you culpable in the eyes of the sewing grandmothers of Duluth, and if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me.”
“So presumably, like them, you’re wearing incontinence pants and occasionally just go where you’re sitting.”
The agent said nothing, but simply shifted uncomfortably. They didn’t like to think why.

Within a few hours they were coming in to land at a private airfield, but there were no indications as to where it was. The scruffy agent had changed into a boring looking suit and joined the other in prodding their prisoners off the plane and into a waiting van. It was night and as the van lurched away, Dredly wondered what they were getting into. Since there was nothing they could do about their situation, Greta and Sage made themselves comfortable and got some sleep, while Dredly kept watch. After a couple of hours he saw a sign for Montana through the windscreen. Then, as the sun reddened, they slipped into the outskirts of Billings. It seemed an unremarkable place and they drove through its sleepy streets until they finally came to a halt. Dredly looked out and was mildly surprised. Rather than pulling up outside some grand building, they seemed to be in the drive of an ordinary looking 50's style red brick house. He prodded Greta and Sage awake.
“We’re here. It's Billings all right, but it looks like...”
“The prisoners will keep quiet.” The first agent said, pushing them out of the back of the vehicle. They blinked in the sunlight and shivered. It was freezing. The back of the van had been chilly and the light breeze outside cut right through them. Sage and Greta were confused. Dredly had been right - it was just a normal looking house. Why hadn't they been taken to the dreaded headquarters of the Federal Bureau for Making Sure People Don’t Have Too Much Fun? They walked up the driveway and waited briefly in the small porch while the first agent rang the bell. There was a pause, the door opened and then they were led through. As one, the three friends gasped at the sight that befell their eyes. Before them was a huge complex of low buildings and gardens at the centre of which was a white, squat bunker. So the front of the house had been a front! But how could they have not seen all those gardens from the outside? Sage looked at his two friends, hoping that they were doing better at working out the mystery, but their blank expressions told him that just for once he wasn't lagging behind in the comprehension stakes.

The agents led them up a short path towards the white bunker. It was windowless, but set in beautiful surroundings, with well-kept lawns and flowerbeds. On the far side of the complex there was a golf course - Sage had to hand it to these guys, they certainly had some interesting instruments of torture. They were led into the building through a set of electric sliding doors and taken to the reception desk. The foyer was typical Government office fare - marble effect floors, rubber plants here and there, men with guns and dark glasses.
“Got three more for you, Duane.” Said the second agent to the cru-cut man behind the main desk.
“Well done.” The pencil pusher at the desk had a strained voice and a strained, veiny facial expression, which made him look like he had taken one too many of his pencils and pushed it into an orifice for which it wasn’t designed. That worried Sage. If the man did nasty things to himself, what would he do to them?
“You leave them with me,” He continued, “I'll... Take them from here.”
Sage cast a worried glance at Dredly, who didn't look happy at all. There was something deeply disturbing in the man's intonation. The two field agents turned to leave.
“Have a nice day.” The second agent sneered.
“May your rubber pants always leak at the knees.” Dredly replied. The agent scowled and walked away uncomfortably.
“Okay you three, you come with me.” Duane motioned for them to follow him. They marched over to the lift, which showed twenty floors - clever for a bungalow. The group stepped inside and started their descent.
“Haven’t you noticed anything strange?” Sage asked their new guard.
“Like what?”
“Like the fact that you’re guarding two men and a whopping great polar bear!” Sage demanded.
“See it every day.” He said, regarding Greta with disdain. “Some cheap hippie punk who’s dropped a couple of tabs too many and has convinced himself he’s a polar bear. Nothing new.”
“She. She’s a polar bear.” Dredly corrected. If they were going to dis' his friends, they could at least be gender correct.
“No, he just thinks he’s a she. It’s typical drug induced wish fulfilment - Freud covers it extensively.”
“But I’ve even got a post office box in Sisimiut. Here, look at these pictures of my family.” Greta pulled out some photos and showed them to Duane.

“I never said it was a simple hallucination. It’s an example of mass induced hysteria. Fortunately, I can’t see them because I’m on drugs to stop any hallucinations. You look like an ordinary enough guy to me, and if you try to convince me otherwise, I’ll put my fingers in my ears and hum so loudly I won’t be able to hear you. Okay, here we go, sub-basement fifteen.”
The lift doors opened and Dredly's jaw dropped in amazement. Before them was not the torture chamber they had been expecting, but what appeared to be a middle class suburban housing estate. It was warm and sunny, with a clear blue sky above and a gentle breeze wafting the scent of lawnmower fuel and grass cuttings. Just along the street a man was tending to his front lawn and a few doors down a dog was playing with a lawn sprinkler.
Dredly nudged Sage. “You don’t think they could have slipped us some drugs already do you?”
He shrugged his shoulders and they stepped out into the strange sub-reality. The road, which was a cul de sac, and all the houses were clearly built inside a cave of gigantic proportions. The sky must have been a back-projection, and the sun a big halogen bulb. What was frightening was that everything was perfect, right down to the smell of the tarmac softening under the sun’s heat. It was like something out of a Fifties movie and it worried them. It was the kind of normality which produces serial killers - ‘perfect’ neighbours who never trouble anyone until they’re hauled away by the police and they dig up their garden to find that they’ve been killing people for twenty years. Dredly glanced behind him, but could not see the lift or the wall. Instead, there was a massive projection of an expansive vista, down the middle of which ran a road with houses on either side, identical to those in the the cul de sac. There were people tending their gardens on the vast video screen and everything seemed horribly real.
“Hey, come on!” Duane ordered, and he led them to the nearest house on the left of the street. They entered. It all seemed incredibly normal inside: plain, clean carpets, unfussy furnishings, photographs of a family on the mantelpiece. However, they were led into the basement and it was only when Duane opened the doors of what looked like a tool cupboard to reveal a white corridor beyond, that Dredly realised that they may well have come to the end of the road. There was no escape from that bunker and in a few weeks, they would probably be living as good citizens in Billings, Montana. Duane pushed them into the corridor, which clearly ran the length of the street and which had doors set into the plain walls in the approximate positions of where each house was. This was how they were able to gain access to all the houses. At this point, Duane split them up. He opened one of the doors on the left of the passage and pushed Dredly inside.
“See you in Billings!” He called, and as the door closed, he caught the look of fear in Greta's eyes. Dredly smiled at her and was pleased to see the apprehension melt. Then the locking mechanism clicked and he was locked away from his friends.
Dredly had been placed in a small, square room. Everything in it was white - the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the table and chairs in the middle of the room, the coat of the bald man sitting on the other side of the table... Ah yes - the bald man sitting on the other side of the table.
“Mr...?” He looked at Dredly questioningly, waiting for him to give his name. Dredly mentally dug his heels in - the baldy wasn’t going to get him without a fight!
“Pitta-Bread.” Dredly replied, extending his hand jovially, “Nathaniel Pitta-Bread.”
The bald man shook his hand and gave him an unconvincing smile. Dredly took it and put it into his top pocket to smoke later.
“Nathaniel Pitta-Bread? Strange name.”
“My father was a Mormon and my mother was Greek,” Dredly explained, “But I’m Jewish, so you can imagine the kind of family arguments we used to have when trying to decide what films to get out on video.”
“Yes...” He said slowly and wrote something down on the pad in front of him.
“You’re probably wondering why I’ve brought you here...” Dredly began, “Oh, please feel free to stand up if you want...”
“You’re only making this more difficult for yourself Mr... Mr...”
“No, it’s Mr. Pitta-Bread, not Mr. Mister.” Dredly corrected. Surely he had the man on the run!
“Thank you for this display, but it really is not necessary.” The bald man had a non-descript voice. It was the kind of voice that was so instantly forgettable, that Dredly wouldn’t have been able to pick it out at an identity parade five minutes after being mugged by it.
“We are going to make you normal.”
“Ah, that old one, eh? Don’t you realise that this Shangri-La which people call normality doesn’t exist?” Dredly countered.
“It does exist. It is above us now.”
“I hate to burst your bubble, but a Fifties style Midwest street fifteen floors underground in a concrete bunker is not normal.”
The bald man rode the criticism as if he had heard it a hundred times before. “I am not going to take lessons in normality from a Deadhead.” He replied.
“But even outside here, normality is a myth.”
“Oh come now, Mr. Pitta-Bread, we all know what being normal is.”
Dredly knew that he only had one hope of salvation - break the belief system of the man before him. If he could do it, there might still be a chance of escape. If he could not... He took a breath and went for it.

“Yes, we all know what being 'normal' is, but do we know anybody who actually lives that ideal in reality? No, we do not. It’s like Christmas. We’ve all got this image of Christmas as being a time of loving and giving, when everything runs smoothly; when mother enjoys cooking the turkey, even though twenty members of her husband’s family whom she doesn’t like have just descended on the house; when the kids’ new puppy doesn’t chew up granny’s pair of Christmas slippers; when the kids aren’t at each others throats; when we can all sit down in front of the telly and watch a dramatisation of a Dickens novel and say honestly that we enjoyed it and weren’t just watching it because it seemed like the right thing to do; when nobody gets a load of crappy stocking fillers which will all find their way into charity shops within a week of the New Year; when warring armies put down their weapons and play football with each other; and when millions of turkeys march into the abattoir laughing and singing, happy in the knowledge that they’ve lived productive lives and are now going to give pleasure to overfed people; when people eat Brussels sprouts and not only enjoy them, but also don’t spend the rest of the afternoon farting. We all believe that as the ideal, but it never happens. The puppy does chew up granny’s slippers, and leaves a present of its own at the bottom of the stairs for dad to slip in when he comes down to make the coffee on Boxing Day; people always get uptight, mother always has too much to do, and nobody ever likes the Brussels sprouts and they always fart after eating them. It’s all a myth, a tidy little package, and normality is just the same.”
“I’m not sure I can agree with that...” The bald man began his repost, but Dredly was on a roll and wasn’t about to let him get a word in. If he was to be lobotomised, he would state his case first.
“No!” Dredly cried, “Cut through all the crap you see in adverts and look at the truth. There is no normality out there. If normality is what the majority of people out there in the wide world have in their lives, then you’d better start making me work a sixteen hour day for a pittance, eating rice as my main staple, with five children and half a dozen land mines scattered across my back yard. ‘But’, you’ll say, ‘That isn’t normality here, and that’s the important thing.’ But even here, being normal is not having a white picket fence and a wife who spends her afternoons singing, making jam and wearing gingham. Nobody lives that way except in adverts. You don’t need to haul me in here to screw with my mind. Just plop me in front of a TV and leave it to the advertisers. They are the ones warping our lives, they’re the ones who make their livings from mind control. They force their ideals down our throats and is it surprising people start choking? When people are constantly being told what to aspire to, should we be shocked when they explode from frustration when they can’t achieve the aspirations that weren’t even theirs in the first place? No we should not. The most beautiful thing about people is that everyone is different. We all have our own different takes on reality, because nobody else can have the exact same viewpoint as anyone else. So trying to make everybody the same, trying to create a steady state, is futile. Why do it? Why sit in a concrete bunker when you could be out in the open air running and laughing with the breeze? Come on, break out with me and we can go and discover the heart of America, and maybe even discover ourselves along the way - what do you say?” Dredly held his hand out towards the man as he finished. He was out of breath and perspiring, exultant at the thought of freedom. The bald man sat there in silence, staring through him for a few moments.
“If you’ve finished, Mr. Pitta-Bread, I’ll administer the drugs now.”

Dredly's hand dropped to his side and his body deflated, his hope escaping from him in a heavy sigh. So! The gambit had failed! Lobotomy and Billings beckoned. The bald man offered Dredly a glass of water, but no pills. It seemed odd. It was only after he had drained the glass that it occurred to him that the drugs might have already been in the water supply. Then the bald man laughed.

Will the guys really be lobotomised? And what's so bad about Billings anyway? After all, according to their website it's 'a vibrant community known for its quiet neighbourhoods and bustling business districts'.

Find out if their marketing blurb is true in the next factually accurate chapter...