Zimbabwe

© 2013 John Parker. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 05/31/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4817-9608-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-9609-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-9610-1 (e)

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Contents

ZIMBABWE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

John Parker was born an Ayrshire farmer’s boy on 1 January 1964 in the West of Scotland and was educated at Gateside School and Garnock Academy, Kibirnie. He studied at the Glasgow College of Building and Printing and became an engineer in the gas industry, where he is still employed. After leaving his home village of Gateside by Beith in 1983, he moved to Troon. In 1995, he went to the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides and lived in Stornoway for ten years before returning to the town of Gourock, where he now resides. After travelling the world, mainly by himself, he now prefers to divide his time between his home in Scotland and his house on La Isla de la Juventud, Cuba.

Parker’s interests are writing comedy, travelling, and photography. While preferring to tutor himself in his writing dexterity or any other intellectual allegiance, he acquired a handy knowledge of various languages to assist him on foreign shores. This bilingual adroitness as he backpacked all over the world gave Parker a different perspective and outlook on the many places he saw and the people he met along the way.

Zimbabwe is the second of Parker’s books after Escape Route, which is about the many ridiculously comical tight spots that he experienced during his backpacking journeys. On one of Parker’s many backpacking digressions, he sojourned extensively all over Africa, and his observations there, along with his farming background, inspired him to write this book.

Zimbabwe is a fictional book of satirical humour about a country ruled by a dictator. The story denotes a wry and often cruel dénouement regarding the consequences of dictatorships and also presents a supposition on how the lives of the citizens within them are affected. The humorous characters within the literary composition tends to veer the reader towards the hypothesis that both black and white people are guilty of a slightly tribal built-in prejudicial disposition, and it also reveals how fickle the human race can be. However, it’s all written in the name of comedy, and the moral of the book is to demonstrate the instability in character that makes up the human psyche and to find the humour that lies beneath.

Many literary critics are now commenting that there isn’t enough humour being written nowadays. Zimbabwe is unique and others who have read it thought it was hilarious, written by an author with a sharp sense of humour, you will have a laugh or two if you read on.

ZIMBABWE

Deep in darkest Africa

Ruled the despot Robert Mugabe,

Imposing his asphyxia

Upon all the white society.

Mugabe told them he’d kill the lot

And threatened to take away their farms,

So one man named Abe who was a Scot

Decided that he would take up arms.

Risky from the outset, and it was true that he might end up in hell.

But could it all be worth it? Only time and death would ever tell.

Abe was the rock at the heart of the clan, a most heroic man.

He was the honour, the pride, the brains—and the man who had a plan.

All his brothers caught a flight,

Took their sons and three squaws with them too,

To start an almighty fight

That’d end up in a bloody coup.

The sons were all army men,

All of them killers to the bone.

They’d kill Mugabe in his den

And take over the tyrant’s throne.

Risky from the outset, and it was true that they might end up in hell.

But could it all be worth it? Only time and death would ever tell.

Abe was the rock at the heart of the clan, a most heroic man.

He was the honour, the pride, the brains—and the man who had a plan.

Finally when it would end,

They’d shape the future of Zimbabwe,

This is the message they would send:

Kill the despot Robert Mugabe.

Abe was the rock at the heart of the clan, a most heroic man.

He was the honour, the pride, the brains—and the man who had a plan.

But will they ever succeed

To deliver analgesia

So the people will be freed

And the land renamed Rhodesia?

CHAPTER ONE

The Plot

If there were three individual lone wolves borne into in this world who were capable of winning any individual dual that a man could be confronted with, and kill their foe with the proficiency one could only attribute to a top of the food chain hunter, they were three cousins named Zachery, Joshua, and Woodrow Fleck. All three were thirty-five years old, all born in April 1964. Their fathers were three brothers who were farmers that owned three farms in the West of Scotland. They had bequeathed their own Christian names to their only sons, which was the protocol of Fleck family tradition down through the generations in order to maintain an indelible bloodline. Their mothers were three Navajo squaws who had been purchased—nay, traded for—by the boys’ fathers simply for the biological act of bearing and giving birth to the sons who would preserve their family name. Unfortunately, this mixing and enriching of the DNA from a West of Scotland male with that of a female Navajo squaw had a puerperal adverse effect on each sibling.

The chemical pheromone substance released between these two genealogically rapturous tribes seemed to influence the boys’ psychology. The result was that it induced a little bit of a rough element in the boys’ behaviour. Their automatic responses to stimuli of the mind were not dictated by consciousness. Nay… their natural instincts tended to make them have a propensity for savagery and genre of violence from their childhood and onwards through life. The psychiatrists to whom they were sent had never seen such nutcases before, let alone been in the position to be able to diagnose their symptoms. Put quite simply, they were vicious psychopaths. They not only were known as three little boys dedicated to the torture and killing of cats but also a team widely revered for their creative originality and inventiveness in the use of torture before the death of their victims. In fact, they insisted upon it, claiming torture to be inherent in their culture. The fact was that they had an antipathy towards all creatures great and small, which lead to a natural inclination and tendency in them to disengage the last puff of breath out of any animal that breathed.

Their fathers had a great deal of trouble with them whilst they were growing up, as so many of the animals on their farms were being sacrificed by the boys in their quest to discover how many ways there were to kill a beast. They all were expert vets by the time they were twelve due to how much they had learned about the insides of animals by opening them up so many times. Had it not been for father Zachery’s idea of converting their farm’s livestock from a dairy herd to that of a beef herd, and building their own internal abattoir, they may well have all gone out of business. This intellectual action of father Zachery made it possible for the fathers, on the discovery of a dying beast that the boys had decided to inflict their cataclysm upon, to slit its throat, had it not been done so already, and slaughter it by means of their abattoir. Thereby the fathers could still make a profit from the dead animal by selling its remnants to local butcher shops and retail outlets, thus earning their living as meat traders. Soon that also became too difficult to sustain. Due to the rate of kills the boys were making on the herd, supply was soon outstripping demand. So father Zachery again came up with an archetypical answer. He told the boys that when a beast had to be killed, then they would be the ones who slaughtered it, humanely, every Sunday. The boys never liked the sound of the word ‘humane’ but agreed, thinking Sundays wouldn’t be boring anymore. Henceforth through this agreement, the farms of the fathers’ condominium stayed solvent and the boys’ addiction to killing perfectly innocent creatures in God’s kingdom for no just reason whatsoever was sufficed. Calm was restored.

That calm didn’t last long. The boys were soon reported to the RSPCA for a particularly ghastly incident one Guy Fawkes night. It involved an altercation between wee Jeannie Brocklebank’s fluffy floppy-eared rabbit and a Catherine wheel firework. The month of November was an extremely bad time for all creatures great and small that lived within the vicinity of the Fleck boys. During this month, the boys could profit by utilising fireworks as torturing devices in their arsenal of brutality. Poor Jeannie Brocklebank’s floppy-eared rabbit was to become a sacrificial victim in one of the boys’ experiments with fireworks and what effect they could have on their neighbour’s cute little pet. A Catherine wheel firework was tied to the rabbit’s floppy ears and set off. Unbelievably, the rabbit survived, but it was no comfort to wee Jeannie Brocklebank. What had once been her cute, cuddly pet now resembled a miniature caricature of Satan’s goat. Due to the gunpowder on its once cute looks, the formerly fluffy ears it had now resembled two burnt and black tentacles, which looked like little crooked horns rising vertically from its hairless black face. The unfortunate little creature looked like an evil cretin and was only to serve as fuel for the nightmares that poor wee Jeannie Brocklebank was to suffer throughout the rest of her childhood.

Jeanie’s father, Waldorf, decided that he had put up with enough of the boys’ cruelty, so he reported the incident to an officer from the RSPCA. The officer went to Zachery’s farm to investigate, albeit apprehensively, as he had heard of the infamous Flecks. The perplexed expression on his face as he approached the farm resembled that of a politician suffering from a sudden and severe attack from his haemorrhoids while being grilled in a live interview by Jeremy Paxman on BBC Newsnight. Upon arriving on the farm, he was shocked to observe the boys tying a ferret to a rocket they had purchased from the firework dealer. This normally fearless creature had a look of sheer terror on its face just before the rocket was ignited and sent it up into the sky and oblivion, where the rocket exploded in a plethora of crimson, green, yellow, and red. The RSPCA officer was going to start criminal proceedings against the boys but was dissuaded when father Zachery offered him the bribe of some fine venison from a deer the boys had killed with their bows and arrows whilst out hunting on the moor. Also, the fact that the boys had absconded with the officer’s Irish wolfhound that he had left in the back of the car, and indeed were going to go about killing it in front of him by carving it up with their tomahawks, made the officer get into his car and take flight, never to be heard from again.

The pets that the boys had on the farm had been dealt particularly bad luck to have had the boys as their keepers. They reared rabbits and ferrets. Not because they thought them nice to have as pets, but because they had a high rate of reproduction and always kept them supplied with stock that they could kill. The boys also admired the ferrets for their tenacity and ferociousness. They admired the fact that ferrets could kill rabbits even though rabbits were bigger. On many a rabbit sacrifice, they would study the way in which the ferret would dispatch its victim by biting the rabbit on the mane of its neck, slicing the spinal cord and killing it instantly. They would then try this out on the cattle on a Sunday, finding that it truly was the quickest route to kill a beast.

The one and only animal the boys admired on the farm was an old red fox they named Vincent. Vincent could dodge their arrows, evade their buckshot, and never put a foot in one of the boys’ snares they had set for him. He was a master of escape routes and was never cornered. Yet he still managed to snatch a chicken or two from their fathers’ chicken coop. But one day Vincent was to fall prey to the Eglington fox hunt. The boys had to watch from a distance as fifty hounds that were running with the hunt ripped Vincent apart. The boys were white with rage and bent on revenge for Vincent the fox, which they’d admired so much. They didn’t have to wait long for their revenge. On the night before the next hunt meet, the boys snared and killed another fox that was not as smart as Vincent was. They then cut out its liver and made a scent trail with it across a field to some trees. Directly at the other side of them lay a cliff with a twenty-foot drop. The next morning when the hunt met, the hounds that picked up the scent made a run in the direction of the trees. The huntsmen behind made a charge on horseback in pursuit of the hounds. They ran and galloped through the trees, and every one of them went straight off the cliff. All of the hounds were dead, maimed, or had to be put down; all twelve horses had to be shot, as they had broken bones. The head huntsman never walked again and was wheelchair bound, which delighted the boys, as he was in fact Waldorf Brocklebank. The boys thought they’d taught the condescending old galoot a jolly good lesson about how he ought not to throw stones when he lived in a glass house. Fortunately there were no human deaths, which prevented a more serious enquiry into the cause of the catastrophe, so the boys were off the hook.

It was no surprise to any of the fathers that as soon as their boys turned sixteen, they left school and joined the army. To the boys, being paid to kill another human being and getting away with it, or even hero-worshipped for it, was a boon of cosmic proportion that they could not resist. In almost two decades of service in the British Army, they saw a lot of action as snipers and made plenty of kills. In fact, they made so many kills and slaughtered their victims in such a horrific fashion that the hierarchy of the British Army wanted them dismissed on a permanent leave of absence.

From the Falklands War to the streets of Belfast and then to the deserts of Iraq, the reports of savagery and torture that had filtered through from the front line to the top brass on how the enemies had met their maker were becoming too hot to handle. The Argentineans had sent reports back to the British high command, wanting to know why fifty-five of their conscripted soldiers’ corpses were found on Mount Tumbledown, not just dead but castrated and scalped with tomahawks to boot. An American sniper who had been an ex-marine but had joined the IRA as a sympathiser was found on a moor in Ireland, tied to the heather, completely naked and outstretched, left to the mercy of the midges, with his eyes sewn open, his tongue cut out, and a wasps’ nest adorning his crotch. The fact that he’d been shot in the ass and the bullet that entered him had lodged in his liver all coerced to make sure of his passing away before he could be questioned about who his perpetrators were. Suspicions were always rife that the three Fleck cousins were doing the dirty deeds, as they always came back from their missions with almost all their ammo. This was because they preferred to make use of camouflage and sneak up on their prey rather than take it out with a bullet from a distance. The boys liked to close in on their target and use their knives or tomahawks to dispatch the victim. The reports that had come in from Iraq on what was being inflicted on the Arab soldiers were of a cruelty that was of an ad nauseam nature. There were reports of snakes being used to kill enemy soldiers, some buried in ants’ nests, and even some being eaten alive by desert foxes, each episode just as gut wrenching as the other. They were all becoming too hard to cover up and so grotesque in nature that the army did not want to hear tell of any additional monstrosities of that nature.

It had been after an exquisitely ghastly discovery on a mountainside in Iraq that the army top brass could take no more. Three Iraqi fighters had been found buried in the ground up to their necks and had apparently been dispatched by having their heads used as rugby balls. The heads that had been left sticking out of the earth were half decapitated, the eyes kicked out of their sockets, noses and ears ripped off and laying several metres away. The soldiers of the special forces platoon who discovered them were unable to hold down any food for two days after seeing such a sight. Then, when the three cousins were overheard by a major in the camp as they laughed about which one of them would be the best at taking a conversion penalty kick in a rugby match, and nick-naming themselves ‘The Drop Kick Flecks’, their days as soldiers were over.

It came as no surprise to the three cousins when they were finally offered discharge with full pay. They also were comforted by the fact that their platoon commander had told them that if Britain was ever at war with the Japanese again, he’d be sure to enlist them. They had been thinking about retiring anyway, as they wanted to settle down, start families, and have their own sons whom they could pass their names down to in order to carry on the Fleck dynasty. Maybe even continue life on Civilian Street as animal veterinaries and open their own surgery.

But through a simple twist of fate that had breached the comfort zone of the Fleck dynasty, the three lone wolves were to fight again when their only other cousin, Abraham Fleck, had called for help. Abraham lived and farmed in Zimbabwe and had hit upon troubled waters because of President Robert Mugabe’s ideology and intentions for his new Zimbabwe. Mugabe, through his ardent sentiments of piety for his own black African people, had induced corrupt policies which gave more rights to the black Africans than that of the white Africans. Through blundering admonitions in his speeches, he had branded the white Zimbabweans as pariahs and refused to have for them any kind of debate or sentiment, nor even give protection toward the situation he’d suppressed upon the white settlers. This was a semaphore to the black Africans for the unleashing of their own subversion towards white men. The opportunity to inflict hardship on the white settlers was just an unavoidable lubricant on the wanton brains of his Kaffir henchmen to rush for prosperity and take revenge by fair means or foul, like a payback for the years of suppression that the British Empire had imposed on them. Now it was at the stage where mobs of Mugabe’s henchmen had reached the ridiculous assumption that they could kick the white settlers off their farms and take them over, even although none of them knew a thing about agriculture. Their predilection for a genre of violence symptomatic in their protocol had now reached eschatological proportions,