The Corporation

CHAPTER TWENTY

DESPITE BEING PHYSICALLY exhausted, Michelle Dowling sat on a rumpled sofa in an apartment somewhere in downtown San Francisco, sitting with Rachel Drummond and four other members of the Coalition, their attention riveted to the news.

It was nine-thirty p.m and the major news story was the explosion that leveled the National Headquarters of Corporate Financial Consulting Group near Calistoga, California.

Speculation was running rampant on all the news networks that the explosion was caused by a bomb, or a series of bombs. Shell-shocked survivors were interviewed, men and women in rumpled, dusty business attire, their features glazed with shock—something that surprised Michelle. They all said the same thing, how they were working when all of a sudden there was an explosion, or they heard an explosion, or something down the hall exploded. They ran out of the building despite feeling that they should stay and help salvage the company. One man said, “I was at my desk when the building shook and the lights went out. The building kept shaking and something inside me just snapped and I realized what was happening. I realized I had ducked under my desk and I thought that if I stayed there I’d be crushed, so I ran out of the department and was lucky enough that the explosion came from a department a few doors down. I went down the staircase and made it outside as the rest of the building just started going under.” The man was streaked with dirt and blood and appeared visibly upset. For a moment Michelle felt guilty that she had been responsible for causing this man pain but then something John Stanley, one of the Coalition members who was gathered there, said, “Look at his face. Listen to what he’s saying.”

Michelle paid closer attention to the man, as well as other victims of the bombing. All of the people interviewed by the media said pretty much the same thing; they were in a daze, just blindly going about their everyday duties prior to the blast; they felt a brief desire to stay and help protect company property and their work but then something snapped—it was as if they realized their very lives were at stake. Then they ran out of the building.

“That’s the key,” John Stanley said as they watched the news coverage. John appeared to be in his late forties, maybe early fifties, had thinning blonde hair, and he wore thin wire-frame glasses. “When we blew up Corporate Financial we severed its hold on people. That’s what happened.”

The investigation was ongoing and the fire had been put out an hour ago. The estimated death toll was over six hundred so far. The Department of Homeland Security was called in and the Federal Government was investigating possible links to Islamic Terrorism. Still, other sources opined that it looked to be the work of an American Terrorist outfit, one probably holding the same anti-government views as Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

Michelle kept waiting for a news flash to announce that two women were seen fleeing the scene in a battered Honda and were wanted for questioning.

As the evening wore on those fears slipped further away.

The apartment she was in was on the tenth floor of an old building near the Mission District. It was owned by an ex University Professor of Philosophy, a golden-skinned white-haired man named Rafael Martinez, who introduced himself to Michelle as one of the founding members of the Coalition when she and Rachel arrived. Talking with Rafael and John and the other members she met there—everything had happened so fast she couldn’t remember the names of the other people—helped calm her down. Only Rachel appeared to lose it in the hour or two after they arrived at the apartment. She retreated to a corner, plopped herself down in an easy chair and wept. A few times Michelle heard Rachel say Alan’s name during her sobs. Michelle felt bad that Alan didn’t make it out of the building, that he was probably dead, lying in the rubble of Corporate Financial. She was too numb emotionally to react. Rachel, on the other hand, couldn’t get over it. The way she was crying gave Michelle the feeling that she was mourning the loss of a great love.

As much as Michelle wanted to see Donald, as much as she yearned for him, she couldn’t stop thinking about her mother, Connie Dowling.

She was positive that her real mother had somehow broken through the corporate influence that had taken over her physical self. When Connie had told Michelle to leave the building, to run, to get away, that had been the real Connie Dowling. Michelle had seen the stark terror in her eyes and the love her mother never lost for her; she knew now that her mother had been fighting with Corporate Financial the entire time and somehow Michelle had never known it. The Corporate Financial side had tried to trick her into believing her mother still cared for her whenever it gained control. That’s what tipped Michelle off. When Connie told her to remember her childhood and the good times they’d had, that was the clincher. Michelle had no good memories of childhood and her real mother. The Corporate Financial side was pretending to be emotional and human. But it didn’t know how to do that. It didn’t realize it had sucked all the humanity out of her mother years ago, when Michelle was a baby.

That’s when Michelle started to cry again and this time she let her emotions out. She sat down on the sofa and mourned the loss of her mother. Rafael sat down gently beside her and asked if she wanted to talk. She shook her head. “I’ll be okay,” she said between sobs.

Rafael’s hand on her shoulder was reassuring. She felt genuine warmth coming from him. “I’m here if you need to talk,” he said.

Michelle accepted the tissues he offered and when she got control of herself her mother came into her mind again, followed closely by her father. “My father,” she said. “He was Frank Marstein.”

Rafael nodded. “Yes. I know.”

“My mother… she was still there. She… was trying to fight it. But my father…” Michelle searched for the right words. “There was nothing there. I looked into his eyes and… he just wasn’t there.”

“Your father had risen to an extremely powerful position prior to becoming immersed with Frank Marstein,” Rafael said. He had a slight Spanish accent. “That helped when it was time for Frank Marstein to surrender his previous host, an executive named Carl Jacobs who developed lung cancer. Your father went through another immersion process and Frank Marstein possessed your father’s body fully. Frank’s spirit completely took over your father’s. It made him so powerful that he was blinded by his singular purpose to consume resources and grow the business, consuming everything in his path.”

“We’ve been working on this for five years now,” John Stanley said. He had planted himself on the floor, sitting cross-legged. “All of us here had at one time either worked for Corporate Financial or been with companies that used them as consultants.”

“In my case, my life-partner worked at a law firm where several of their consultants were stationed.” Rafael motioned to his partner, a middle-aged man with a similar look and build. The man smiled at Michelle. Michelle smiled back, feeling better. “When Tomas began to be affected, I started doing research. I met John and we were able to save Tomas, thank God.”

“I was purified in the desert,” Tomas said. He stepped forward. “I was already being influenced and I didn’t even know it. Rafael and John basically kidnapped me and took me to a remote spot in the desert, performed a couple of purifying rituals over me. That severed Corporate Financial’s hold on me and I was cleansed.” He paused. “The three of us dropped out of the corporate world, out of legitimate employment basically, and started the movement.”

The rest of the members filled her in during the three or so hours they watched news reports of the destruction of Corporate Financial. The group began pulling together in a tight, underground organization thanks to the Internet. “Rachel helped keep it tight,” Tomas said. “She met Rafael on a message board when they were trading stories on what happened to each other. This was before corporations began monitoring message boards and blogs. They started emailing each other and Rachel came out here and we met. She brought a few other members together and one of us, Bill Wesley,” Tomas motioned to a middle-aged man with dark hair sitting cross-legged on the floor with a small group of people, “did background checks on everybody. He used to be in law enforcement. That reassured everybody, made them feel that there were no Corporate Financial spies in the group. We were able to keep our membership down to twenty people. The smaller, the better. That’s why we were able to avoid detection from law enforcement. We have no web presence, no official base. Unlike groups like Weather Report or fringe groups like American Workers United for Freedom From Corporate Tyranny, we already knew where the source of the cancer lay—in Corporate Financial. We saw that they were secretly working at becoming the dominant corporate force in the world… bigger than Time Warner, bigger than Microsoft. We saw that they were influencing the rise of Corporatism in the world, that they were influencing and guiding the majority of corporate buyouts and fraud in the world.”

“Alan told me he filled you in on our background,” Rafael said.

Michelle nodded. “A little.”

“We didn’t have to do much,” Rafael said. “A lot of the work was already being done by some of the groups Tomas just mentioned. We sort of piggy-backed on them in stealth mode I guess you could say. We planted several key people within Corporate Financial to gather as much information as possible and others in the group mapped out this operation.” Rafael paused. “We planned carefully and thank God, it worked.”

By now Rachel had stopped crying but she still appeared down. She stared blankly at the TV.

Rafael leaned close to Michelle and squeezed her hand. “Rachel and Alan were very close,” he whispered. Michelle nodded. Her feelings were confirmed.

One of the Coalition members changed the channel from CNN to Fox. The news reports from Fox were even sketchier, so Rafael asked him to turn to MSNBC. There was more coverage of the bombing on that news outlet and then it switched to another story, one coming out of Washington. “The House and Senate are meeting tonight in what is being described as an emergency measure to draft legislation reversing a bill that passed by a narrow margin last week,” the newscaster was well-known to Michelle. “The bill, known to Labor Advocates as ‘The Corporate Slavery Bill’, passed quietly last week and was signed by the President. It had been pushed and lobbied by various pro-corporate and big business groups who were working to abolish many of the rules and regulations put forth by the Department of Labor which they believed tilted too heavily in favor of employees. Labor Groups and Unions were quick to raise questions about the bill and had worked hard at applying pressure to various media and corporate groups to defeat it. It has since come to the attention of many of the senators that supported it that the bill would have virtually done away with all protections guaranteed to workers in all forms of employment. Basically, anybody employed at any company, no matter how small or large, could be made to work for however many hours and for whatever wage the employer deemed fit. That included slave wages, under slave conditions.”

Everybody in the room was riveted to the report. A Senator went on camera to relate that he and many of his colleagues didn’t even see that particular provision in the bill, which was actually originally written to clarify certain Trade and Commerce laws in the country. The section seemed to have been slipped in as an afterthought (several members of the Coalition openly scoffed at this; John Stanley said, “I find it hard to believe this bullshit, coming from a guy who has favored big business over consumer rights his entire political career!”). Nobody in either the House or Senate knew how it got in and several members of Congress refused to speak about it on camera.

The news anchor concluded the report with an interview with a journalist from a highly respected Internet News site who related that, had the bill remained in place, the law would have allowed employers to invade the privacy of their employees in their homes on their off-time, demand they work longer hours without additional compensation or risk losing their jobs altogether, eliminate mandatory vacations and sick time, and lower their wages to fit the marketplace. All this, the journalist said, was all in the guise of “strengthening the companies in the global marketplace.” John Stanley piped up again. “That was just the tip of the iceberg. It would have been a lot worse.”

Michelle didn’t even want to imagine how much worse it would have been but she couldn’t help it. Visions of the majority of the population working seventeen hour days, seven days a week, made to work or risk starvation and extreme poverty. It would be like the middle ages when the serfs were trampled on by the landowners and royal members of society of the day. And it would have been perfectly legal thanks to the legislation. Civil disturbances would have broken out, resulting in hundreds, probably thousands, of deaths. When it was all over the entire country would have been devastated. There would be lawlessness, anarchy. There would only be the very rich and the very poor. The middle-class would cease to exist.

She saw now how Corporate Financial had made it their goal to intertwine with government to advance their goals. Change the laws and you change the business climate in your favor.

She only hoped they had been able to stop it in time.

They watched the news in relative silence for the next thirty minutes as other stories seemingly unrelated to the Corporate Financial bombing and the last-minute effort to reverse the so-called Corporate Slavery law were related: violent disturbances in New York (one on Wall Street when a Finance Executive hung himself in the men’s room of a trading firm), Los Angeles and Chicago. There was one story about a violent skirmish in Lincoln, Nebraska when a secretary beat her supervisor to death with her shoe. The secretary had apparently been working at her office for the past two days non-stop. “Flip the channels,” Bill said. “Let’s see what else is going on.”

Rafael flipped through the stations. The news was reporting more of the same. In addition to the main stories on Corporate Financial and the show-down in Washington, there were scattered reports of violent incidents in the work place. “People are waking up and breaking free of Corporate Financial’s hold,” John Stanley said. He was sitting on the sofa now, on Michelle’s right. “If you notice, a lot of what’s happening is people who were forced to work against their will saw a chance and struck back. Some of them had pent-up anger and unleashed it.”

“The people Corporate Financial was controlling,” Michelle said, remembering Alma Smith and David Harrington and the others who displayed similar zombified expressions. “What happened to them?”

“Many of them most likely died,” John Stanley said. “We have reports that there were numerous Corporate Financial Consultants who succumbed to exhaustion and heart attacks and died but they were animated by Corporate Financial. The corporate entity itself kept them going, sort of like a puppet master.”

“Like Dennis Harrington,” Michelle said, remembering the story Jay related to Donald, that Dennis Harrington looked and appeared dead in his hotel room. She quickly told the story to John, who nodded.

“I’ve heard similar stories but have never witnessed them myself,” he said. He looked troubled. “I’d like to think that with the destruction of the building, we’ve destroyed the source of possession.”

“What about people who weren’t like Dennis?” Michelle asked.

“It looks like some of them may be confused now,” John Stanley said, indicating the current news story with a nod. The news story in question concerned a mini-riot at an office park after several hundred office employees destroyed office equipment, smashed windows and computers, and assaulted each other. One of the witnesses was being interviewed. He looked haggard and bruised and was described as an Office Manager. “It was like everybody snapped,” he said. “One minute I was… well… I was working and the next I heard this great… well… it’s hard to describe, but all of a sudden everybody in the office just started screaming. My secretary screamed that she was going to kill me. I looked up, saw one of my Analysts hog-tied with duct tape under the desk and I immediately went over to help him when I was attacked.”

The stories were so similar in their outlandishness and surreal quality that they had Michelle mesmerized. She couldn’t help but stay glued to the TV as the rest of the Coalition members wandered in and out of the living room, talking in small groups, nibbling on plates of food. It was the only thing she could do to convince herself that the world, in some way, was returning to normal.

WHEN THE KNOCK on the apartment door came at ten minutes past midnight, Michelle Dowling was off the sofa quickly. One of the Coalition members was already positioned at the door and drew a small caliber handgun as he looked through the peephole. Michelle had to fight the urge to yell, “Donald!”, she was so excited. She’d been aching to see him since Jay called a few hours ago and told her and Rafael that they were passing Bakersfield and would be in the Bay Area in a few hours. Rafael had given them directions and Michelle had stayed awake running on pure adrenaline. She was so tired but she couldn’t go to sleep. She had to see Donald!

The Coalition member with the gun unlatched the bolt, and opened the door just as Michelle reached it. “Donald!”

Donald Beck went to her and held her, and Michelle knew right then that somehow everything was going to be okay.

A FEW HOURS later.

It was closing in on three a.m. Most of the Coalition members who lived in other parts of the city, or who had secured lodgings elsewhere, had left. Rafael Hernandez and Tomas Rodriguez were the only ones left, as this was their apartment. Jay O’Rourke was sitting in the kitchen at the table, his laptop open, talking to Tomas in quiet tones as Michelle bundled down with Donald in sleeping bags on the sofa and the floor. Donald was stretched out in a sleeping bag on the floor by the sofa. Michelle was lying on her side, dressed in sweat pants and a T-shirt Tomas had found for her. Rafael had already gone to bed. Rachel was sleeping in the one guest room of the apartment and had turned in over an hour ago. Michelle had heard her crying a while ago but now the room was silent.

Michelle looked down at Donald as he lay on his back, his eyes open. “I still can’t believe any of this happened.”

“What do you mean?” Donald asked.

“It just seems so surreal,” Michelle said. “The fact that I participated in this… the media’s calling it the worst terrorist act in this country since the Twin Towers attacks… it’s just surreal. I don’t think of it as a terrorist act.”

“I don’t either,” Donald said softly.

“I’m sure other terrorists have thought the same thing,” Michelle continued. “Osama bin Laden, Mohammad Atta, Timothy McVeigh… they didn’t think of themselves as criminals. They really thought… still think in some cases… that they’re fighting the ultimate evil.”

“Don’t start thinking you’re the same as them,” Donald said, raising himself up and looking at her. “You aren’t a terrorist. You aren’t a monster.”

Visions of her mother came to her and she felt the tears again. Donald held her; she’d told Donald everything within the first thirty minutes of his arrival. Now she held back the tears and said, “I know this is different! I can see from what’s going on today that what we did affected everything! I mean… look at what’s going on in Congress… all those… incidents across the country—”

“We’re all a part of it as much as you are,” Donald said softly. “You, me, Jay and Rachel… Rafael and Tomas. All of us.” Donald looked tired. “If I didn’t know your heart the way I do, I would have been inclined to think you were going over the deep end when this all came up a few weeks ago, but I didn’t. I saw it happening myself in the medical field. Part of me so much wants to pick up the phone and call Dr. Brown and find out how Michael Brennan is but I can’t. Especially if the police or the FBI has already put two and two together and are looking for you.”

Michelle wiped tears from her eyes. She knew what Donald was talking about. Rafael told them all before the others left that they would convene in the morning to discuss the next phase: picking up and moving on, was how he termed it. He had an operative already assigned to Donald’s situation and was working to see how much the authorities might know about him, if they didn’t already. For Michelle it was a different story. The FBI was eventually going to find out that she had flown to California for Corporate Financial Business and had most likely died in the explosion. If they found her alive they would want answers, namely where she was when the blast happened. And if any kind of surveillance equipment survived the blast and evidence obtained from it pointed her way, there would be trouble. That’s why they needed to discuss the next move. “Don’t worry,” Rafael had said soothingly. “We can make sure you are either out of the country or have a new identity. We’ve been working on something like this for a long time now. We figured that when it all came down, we’d need the resources to disappear.”

There was so much uncertainty in what was going to happen, but despite that Michelle felt okay. She stretched out on the sofa, finally feeling her mind give way to the fatigue that her body was under. “I’m so tired,” she said, not even aware she was crying again, this time from the sheer relief that it was over. It was finally over.

“I love you,” Donald said, sitting up in his sleeping bag. She went to him and they embraced awkwardly, she half on the sofa and he sitting up on the floor wrapped in his sleeping bag. “No matter what happens, I love you.”

They remained that way for a moment and after awhile she lay back down. Donald lay down too and she felt herself drifting to sleep. For the first time in months she felt calm, at peace. She felt comforted with these people, with Rafael and Tomas, and John, Jay, and Rachel. She was worried about Jay’s situation with his wife—she’d caught bits of his conversation with her earlier and it was obvious she was very worried about him and that the police were pressuring her to tell them where he was. Her heart bled for him; she knew more than anything he wanted to see his son again but would probably be unable to after today. She wished she could help him.

She closed her eyes, sinking into sleep. She felt a strange kinship with these people. She knew they would take care of her just as she wanted to take care of them. She fell asleep with the sounds of police sirens racing by outside and when she dreamed, she dreamed about Alanis.