General Fiction posted March 18, 2025 Chapters:  ...19 20 -21- 22... 


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I woke up this mornin' feelin' fine...
A chapter in the book No - Say It Ain't So!

NO! Say It Ain't So! Ch 28

by Wayne Fowler


In the last chapter Phil, as Trump, got the Vice President’s resignation. Phil then presented the Senate leadership with his nominations and convinced them to expedite the confirmations. Tom and Phil plotted how to prevent a premature ‘switch’.
Tom spent the night keeping Phil (Trump) awake. Tom and Phil worked out the rest of the plan.
 
Chapter Twenty-eight
Tom
 
    “Tom, am I glad to see you! You know I’m the President, right?” Phil’s whine sounded pitiful. Imagining it in Trump’s voice helped a little. “How did they let you in? They won’t let Paté in. Anyone, really. I’ve been trying, but there’s no one to even ask. I’m just here by myself. They have bars on the outside of all the windows. It’s like I’m in jail. Do you know where we are? Why do I look like this man?”

    We were in a small community north of Arlington, Virginia, Walker Chapel. I didn’t know who owned the small, split level three-bedroom, two-bath house situated on a cul-de-sac. I didn’t need to know. It was furnished for adults, not a family. One of the bedrooms was an office, and another office was set up on the ground floor sharing open space with a laundry area. Considering that there was only one entry/egress road, I don’t think the design was to use it as a safe house, more like just a house, maybe picked up by the government some decades past for the use of important refugees, like the Shah of Iran, or a deposed King of the Congo.

    There were two cars parked on the street, facing opposite directions, both occupied by armed Capitol policemen.

    I showed up just after nine. Trump was trying to get Fox on the television, not knowing that it had been parentally blocked.

    “Do you know what they’ve done to our country, Tom? I have to get back there, to the White House. Can you get me back there?”

    “Wouldn’t it be something if you had Bilbo’s Ring of Power?” I asked. “You could just walk out of here and straight into the Oval Office. How about if we check on our friend, Bilbo. Maybe we can learn. And then in the morning…”

    “You think, Tom? In the morning? I’m really tired. Maybe if I just went to sleep and woke up in the White House…”

    “That’s probably not a good idea, not without Bilbo’s ring. And we don’t have any idea how to use it.”

    “You just take it out of your pocket and put it on.”

    “Oh, but the inscription inside." I tried to distract him “Which way to turn it? Do you have to recite the words? But what language are they written in? Elven? Some lost Middle Earth tome? Do we even know the simplest thing that Bilbo knew naturally? Like which finger to put the ring on? What if instead of making you invisible, it made you bald… and ugly, and screechy, like an old hag of a woman?”

     Trump, in Phil’s frame, shuddered.

    “Maybe we should. You know, check in on Bilbo,” Trump said. “I could lie in bed like at the White House.”

    “There’s no chair in there,” I countered, not knowing whether there was or not. “And the overhead light wouldn’t be good for either one of us.” I desperately needed him not to be in a position to nod off.

    Phil’s head nodded, his lower lip sagging.

    We were on chapter eleven. Trump latched onto the part about the secret key Gandalf provided to get into the mountain using the hidden keyhole. I let him get carried away with a comparison to the tunnels beneath the White House.

    I emphasized the treasure under the mountain and the corresponding threat of Smaug.

    “You know,” Trump said, “there’s rooms in the basement they wouldn’t let me in. They wouldn’t tell me what was in them. And I think one of them, there was heat coming through the door. I could feel it. I knew there was something. Do you think I should have opened it?” Trump asked.

    I ignored the question and continued reading about the dwarves being trapped in darkness.

“That’s like me,” Trump interjected.

I didn’t stop, only six or seven hours to go.

 Trump became obsessed with who the five armies might be, and whether there were good people on both sides. Even though the story progressed through many scenes, he continually posited various countries as aligned with and against one another, comprising the five armies. Some of his alignments would be laughable had they not come from the brain of the leader of the free world, the most powerful man in the world.

The closer it got to the witching hour, midnight, the more animated I got. As Trump's eyelids began to flutter, I stood and circled the room while reading. Injecting as much excitement as I could. Finally, after zooming to the end of a chapter, for which reason, I could only ascribe to my proclivity to job completion, something inherent in task-oriented people, I suggested a snack and drink break. Before resuming my reading, I managed to get him to drink an entire can of Diet Coke and half another one, enlisting the aid of his bladder to keep him awake.

We’d barely started chapter eighteen where unconscious Bilbo, injured in battle, is taken to King Thorin, who died in battle. I was glancing to the end of the book, only pages away with hours to go, when Trump snapped alert. “Did you hear that?” he asked.

I had, but hadn’t. I should have. Should have been paying more attention. The back fence was a friendly neighbor fence, constructed of cheap, rough-cut one-by-twelves horizontally woven about four-by-four posts. The fence looked the same on both sides with no front and no back – friendly neighbor. It was a favorite when neighbors shared the cost.

The drawbacks were that they were easily scaled, and after not too much time, inherently flimsy. The boards popped off with the slightest pressure.

One of them did just that. I ran to the back door, a sliding glass door. It had no bars and the locks were notoriously ill-suited for security. Most people placed a piece of wood, or a cut-to-size broomstick in the bottom track, preventing the door’s sliding. Such was the case here. Had Trump the least familiarity with the door, he could have escaped.

The backyard was lit only by a large security light favored by those in more rural areas on a power pole down the block, but there was light enough to see that a fence board was missing in one section. Someone wanted in. In the middle of the night. Probably Schlape’s people.

After making sure that both Trump and I had shoes on, I pulled him up from the couch, telling him it was time. We had to save Bilbo!

I flashed the front porch light switch on and off several times. I thought about dot-dot-dot Morse coding S-O-S, but had no confidence that it would be properly read. And it would take too much time. Most everyone knew that sliding glass doors could be quickly lifted right off their tracks and removed entirely. Boom-botta-bing.

Somebody would not be happy with me, but I threw a dining room chair into the living room picture window. I guess you could say I was making a habit of breaking those things. This time, I wouldn’t if I had the Remington.

The chair didn’t go all the way through, held in place by the outside bars, but it had the desired effect of gaining a guard’s attention. One in the driver’s side of the nearest car opened his door, taking his sweet time about getting out of the car. “Intruders in the backyard!” I shouted. “Get us out!”

The guard got on a walkie-talkie device, presumably to speak to a guard in the other car. No one exited the other car, probably watching to see if whatever it was I was hollering about was a diversion.

The guard whose attention I’d gotten drew his sidearm. I’d rather he’d drawn the house key. “Get us out before the shooting starts,” I yelled through the broken glass.

Nothing. The man sauntered around to the side of the house as if to check out the backyard. At this rate, he would get around in time to walk in the hole in the back of the house to either get shot himself or to watch over my corpse after Trump had been whisked through a busted-down back fence, not that I imagined the worst.

“Come on! Follow me!” I shouted to Trump. “I had to repeat it, adding that we were escaping to get him to move. The door to the garage locked from the inside. It felt and sounded like there might be a padlocked hasp on the garage side. Wrestling my way around a prancing Phil/ Trump, I shot to the kitchen in hopes of a hammer and a screwdriver. Thank goodness both were near the top of the junk drawer.

The first of the three hinge pins was a challenge, but using the extracted pin, I got the other two out without much trouble. Swinging the door contrary to its design busted the hasp loose. We were in the garage. The electric garage door opener worked. Yay! We were outside, me urging Trump to the back door of the nearest car, the one formerly occupied by a guard.

 Trump/Phil actually, in the back seat, I tried to start the car. The FOB must have been in the guard’s pocket. It wouldn’t start.

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photo from FanArtReview: FamousHouse!20 by nikman

Phil Jansen: woke up one day as Donald Trump
Donald Trump: woke up one day as Phil
Tom McQuin: White House butler
Betty Goodman: White House Chief of Staff
Dr. Schweitz: White House doctor
Hakeem Jeffries: as himself, House minority leader
Kirsten: Trump press secretary
Pate': 3rd daughter of the President
Robert Schlape: fixit man for Trump (using his real name, even here in FanStory, could be fatal)
walkie-talkie: two way radio
Pays one point and 2 member cents.

Artwork by nikman at FanArtReview.com

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