Rose had been hungry lately. Thirsting. It had been so long since she had gotten her latest fix. Her last penetration. Sex just wasn’t the same with white dick (though Hispanic came in at a close second to black), and she found herself growing increasingly celibate while quarantined in Upstate New York. Chris might have taken her for dead that fateful evening when he thought he had wiped out the Order of the Coagula, and with it any further chance for the Armitages to hijack black bodies. But he was wrong. She was a survivor. Always had been. In this way, she considered herself just as black as any Negroid. She struggled, and she persevered with equal, even surpassing, amounts of fortitude. This was precisely why she felt entitled to be part of the Black Lives Matter protests that were raging through NYC, just a few short hours away if she drove fast enough. After all, she had stayed away long enough not only to ensure she hadn’t contracted COVID-19 (why would she? She was rich…it’s not like she worked in a grocery store for fuck’s sake), but for Chris to get a false sense of security as well, to never suspect that he might run into her again. What’s more, she was the perfect person to be billed as a “white ally.” With her financial resources and doe-eyed look, they would all capitulate to the whims of her undercover fetish immediately. 

She had to get herself organized. Sure, she might try to join up a protest that had already been arranged by someone–likely an angry black woman whose rage was finally trending, therefore both acceptable and sought after–but then she wouldn’t get to orchestrate it. To be deemed at the center of it all so that potential “recruits” might come up to her unasked (and probably unmasked) to thank her for all she had done in her role as a “good white ally.” Yet she knew she needed someone black to “co-chair” the event in order to lend herself legitimacy. In order to generate the cachet she needed to be taken seriously rather than viewed merely as an opportunist trying to hit on the vein of a zeitgeist that might spare her from being deemed just another frivolous white woman or, worse still, a Karen (though she knew she was too pretty to be filed away in that category).

She racked her brain for someone she could contact to help her, to anchor her “cause.” It was then that Rose remembered the friend of a former college roommate who had always lusted after her affluence and power. Perhaps Imani would be willing to assist Rose in her aims (albeit unwittingly) if she were to allow her the financial resources she had blatantly desired from her vantage point as a “poor black child” from the Bronx (Rose rolled her eyes, this bitch could spare her the garden variety sob story). She reached out to the old roommate and secured Imani’s contact details. It didn’t take long for her to reply in the affirmative that she would love to “co-host a protest.” Though, of course, she didn’t put it in those terms, that was precisely what Rose was billing it as in her own mind, practically salivating as she thought of the black herds congregating before her to worship at the altar of her deceit. 

While everyone had taken to the usual cliche spots of Wall Street, Union Square and Downtown Brooklyn, Rose told Imani she wanted the location to stand out for its uniqueness and politicized symbolism. Imani offered Central Park, near the area where the Christopher Columbus statue still remained. Rose stifled her dismay, keeping it at an internal level. Jesus, we’re not trying to generate any redskin clientele, she said to herself. Guess blacks really do need white people to help them with their shit for brains. She pretended it was a “super cute idea,” then immediately suggested Harlem might be a better choice. “Maybe in front of the Apollo?” she offered, trying to make it seem to Imani as though it was her idea. Imani was resistant; audibly in her voice there was a certain amount of hesitation, as though such a milieu was too played at this juncture.

Rose kept pressing it–and so it was that the event, “A Peaceful Protest and Act of Resistance Hosted by Rose Armitage and Imani Duende,” was scheduled to go forward on Saturday, July 18th, at a moment when it felt as though the protest momentum was starting to fall off. That non-black people were beginning to realize they had been giving too much of their focus to the Negroes and had dropped the ball on looking out for themselves amid the corona redux that was starting once more to take hold of the city just as it began to open up again almost fully. It was the perfect instant to rejuvenate the movement and take credit for it, Rose smiled to herself as she envisioned all the praise these poor misguided black folk would give her, as though they truly bought into the notion that she gave a shit about them for anything beyond their physical attributes. She would need to start spawning them soon (she would never have a child with them herself, but she’d be happy to fuck as a means to “test the merchandise”), possibly taking a few prospects from the protest back Upstate where she could make her final decisions and experiments without having to drown out the noise and chaos of the city. She would need to think. To strategize in a manner that required the careful use of Punnett squares. 

The turnout at the protest was surprisingly numerous, for Rose, somewhere in the back of her mind (in her own Sunken Place, if you will), believed that they would all see right through her disingenuous intentions. To her, it felt so obvious–and how could they honestly still be this bamboozled into believing white people gave a damn about them for anything beyond their own selfish, usually political machinations? Black people were still their great tools, their playthings and puppets. The only difference now was, whites had to go through the motions of making black people feel they were in control of the situation, that it wasn’t still being manipulated for them along every step of the way.

And that’s just what Rose did as she let Imani give her little speech of empowerment while standing at her side silently. Just another form of white silence, if you’d like. Not to mention her silent sweeping through the crowd to tranquilize select parties with what she called Blackout Serum. She and a hired worker (who was just amoral enough to go along with it for the right price) would take them to a nearby tent, everyone assuming that it had been a case of heat stroke (though how could anybody make that assumption when black skin could withstand the highest degree of sunshine?–which was why they would be the ones to survive when climate change came to its complete fruition… just another reason Rose needed their bodies)… or exhaustion.

The worker would then dump them into the back of a truck that would be driven to her Upstate compound. They would find themselves awakening in separate isolation cells so that they couldn’t talk amongst each other, or try to plot a way out. Not that there was going to be one. Rose had learned quite a few hard lessons about escaped vessels from Chris, who, lo and behold, had shown up to take the bait. He probably came just because he saw her name on the proverbial flier. Maybe in his own naive way, he thought that, by monitoring her, he could protect the others. They locked eyes for just a split second before she jabbed him in the side with her syringe. “O true apothecary, thy drugs are quick,” she uttered to him as he faded from consciousness. Chris likely never read Shakespeare, but she had to marvel at her own cleverness, snickering diabolically as she “kindly” escorted him to the “medical tent.” 

By the day’s end, she had collected twenty-six specimens, divided equally among the two genders (because, try as trans people might to get Rose on board, she knew there was no “third gender”). Her lab awaited. 

***

Over the course of the rest of the summer, Rose and Imani organized several more BLM protests together, with Rose keeping Imani around for the social clout necessary to garner her black cross sections. Otherwise, it would’ve been a lot of Obama-loving white kids showing up for an excuse to have a block party without being judged for risking the spread of COVID. So long as one had a “viable cause”–namely, anti-racism–they could do anything in large groups. For what did life matter anyway in a world that still upheld and promoted the far worse sickness of discrimination? Rose grinned. Dumbshits, all of them. 

The bodies kept piling up at her compound. Each day, after a fresh round of creating new Punnett squares while sipping from her glass of milk and enjoying a few errant Fruit Loops from the bowl next to her, she felt ever-closer to creating the “perfect specimen” for her mind to be transferred to. And it was fortunate, because BLM protests were all but nil by the time late fall rolled around. There had been a few reports of some of the black people who had gone missing on the days of said protests, but, luckily for Rose, everyone seemed to believe the police were somehow responsible. It wasn’t her business to correct what people wanted to believe. Occasionally opening Chris’ cell to remind him of the sexual chemistry they had together when he was still with her consensually, all Rose could really do now was bide her years and wait for the child to be born, to grow.

By the time it was ready, the planet would be near its threshold of overheatedness. But it wouldn’t be a problem for Rose. She, like all white folk had been conditioned, knew how to brandish a political moment to her advantage. And it was fortunate, too, because BLM protests were abolished after 2020, when the governments worldwide began to insist upon the required “subduing” of anyone gathered in a crowd of ten or more. With the virus as their ironclad excuse, they chose their own political greasing agent to justify the violent “quelling” of anyone who dared to gather en masse, especially for protests. The end of Black Lives Matter was… no matter to Rose. She had looted all the bodies she would need to sustain the Order of the Coagula, thanks to BLM as her own personal slave auction, where the only price paid was by the protesters themselves…