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hypnoticwinter · 5 years ago

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Down the Rabbit Hole part 4

"You kids really ought to feel ashamed of yourselves," Peter says to them, and one of them, at least, the youngest, probably, judging by his looks, by the baby fat still on his cheeks, has the decency to feel embarrassed, to cast his glance downwards and away, to let his cheeks color with the shame of it. The other two, older, lankier, cooler, probably, just stare at him, hands folded in their laps. One of them, the girl, snaps her gum loudly.

There in the break room of Ranger Station 34c, the one with the old beige-painted walls that they never got around to redoing when they renovated the rest of the old Anodyne-era ranger stations, and the big poster from the 80s about the Roadless Rally, it's easy to forget that just fifteen feet below them is a pool of gastric acid powerful enough to strip flesh from bone within about five minutes flat, assuming total submersion.

"It was just a joke," the older boy says, and Peter rolls his eyes.

"Do you feel like it was a joke?" he asks, turning his gaze to the younger one. He must be around thirteen or fourteen. His hair is short but messy, like the barber wasn't paying attention when he'd cut it.

"No," the boy says, quietly, not willing to look Peter or the other two in the eyes. The girl snaps her gum again and Peter points at her.

"Spit that gum out," he tells her, nudging the wastepaper bin forward with his foot. Inside it he can see a printout of the memo that they'd emailed around earlier about the park staying open later for the firework show. Peter had groaned initially when he'd gotten it but then the promise of time and a half was transmitted in a reply and he'd felt better about it. The girl stares at him defiantly.

"You can't make me," she says. "You're not a cop."

"In here I am. Didn't you know that? Down here Rangers have almost the same authority as police do," he says, conscious, suddenly, of how he's resting his forearm almost lazily on the butt of his pistol. "I can make arrests, write tickets. Anything you can think of."

"Can you hold us here without charging us?" the older boy asks suddenly. He looks up at Peter with defiant eyes. "I want to –"

"How old are you?" Peter asks, not letting him finish. The boy shrugs.

"Nineteen."

"Really? Let me see your ID."

"Don't have it."

"Not in your wallet?" Peter asks, looking over at the table to his left, where he'd put the three kids' things. He walks over to it, pushes the girl's sweatshirt aside, picks up the small leather wallet with the embroidered fisherman on it. "This one yours?"

The kid won't answer him so he looks at the girl. "Is it yours?" he asks, waggling the wallet at her. She shakes her head after a moment.

"It's not mine," the youngest one volunteers.

"Well, look at that," Peter says. "Process of elimination. It's either yours or mine," he says to the oldest boy, making a show of patting his pockets. "Hmm, now where'd I leave my...oh, there it is," he says, pulling his own wallet out briefly, showing it to them. "Looks like this one's yours. You going to have to tell me how old you really are or do I have to look in here?"

"I said I'm nineteen," the boy repeats. Peter flips open the wallet, sorts through an insurance card and a Subway giftcard before finding the kid's ID. He pulls it out and studies it.

"Nineteen, huh?"

"Yeah."

"Bad at math, huh? When's your birthday?"

"June third."

"The year, smartass."

"Uh –"

"Too bad. You wouldn't have to think that long about it. You're seventeen," he says, fingering the ID. "Happy birthday..." he stops, looks down at the ID and back up at the older boy, enjoying the way his face tightens. "...Fitzroy. Hell of a name."

"Alright," Makado says, bursting through the door, a little out of breath. She glares at Peter. "I'm here. What the hell was so important?"

Peter nods to the eldest boy and the girl. "Why don't you tell her?"

"It was a joke," the girl says.

"Just a prank," Fitzroy agrees.

Peter shakes his head, looks at Makado. "These two," he says, pointing to the girl and the boy, "pushed this kid off of a walkway and were taunting him while he was slipping down into the pool below this ranger station." He gets a perverse sort of satisfaction watching Makado's cinnamon complexion pale slightly.

"Jesus," she breathes. "Thank you for not putting that on the radio."

"I'm not a total idiot."

"Look, what's the big deal?" the girl says. "It's not like we were going to let him drown, we would have jumped in after him."

The youngest boy shudders. Peter watches Makado's eyes narrow. "Did you see any signs down here?" she asks, her tone very cold. After a moment the girl shakes her head. "You," she says, turning her attention to Fitzroy. "People are only allowed down here as part of a ranger-lead tour, how did you get down here?"

He mumbles something.

"What was that?" Makado asks, cocking her head. He explains that they waited until a ranger slid his card to unlock the fence and then distracted him once he'd gone through by pretending to be lost and had asked questions for long enough that he'd forgotten to lock the gate after him. Makado rolls her eyes on hearing this, looks at Peter. "It must have been DeAngelis," she says. "He's the only one dumb enough to fall for that."

"Not everybody's as paranoid as you are," Peter reminds her, and she laughs.

"And yet I'm a head ranger and everybody else isn't. Wonder why that is?"

"Can we go now?" the Fitzroy asks, and Makado glares daggers at him.

"Absolutely not," she says. "You two," she says, pointing at him and the girl, "are going to the police station topside, and you're going to be booked for attempted murder."

"What?" the girl shrieks. The boy looks scared for a moment but regains his cool and laughs.

"You're just trying to scare us," he says, but Makado shakes her head, looking grimly satisfied.

"First," she says, counting on her fingers, "you're trespassing. On federal property, I should add, which is a fairly serious crime. Up to six months in prison, and a $500 fine."

"But we were –"

"Shut up," Peter tells them.

"Second, you aren't being incredibly cooperative right now, which is really only going to make things worse for you in the long run."

The girl looks like she wants to say something but thinks better of it.

"Third, the pool beneath this structure is the largest digestive bulb in the upper Pit area," she says significantly, glancing between the three of them. The younger one frowns, then pales. "You have any idea what that means?" she asks the girl, who shakes her head.

"The pool isn't water, or whatever you thought it was. It's acid."

"Bull," the older boy says.

"You think we'd be going to all this trouble if we weren't serious?" Peter asks. Neither of them have an answer. He looks over at Makado, jerks his head towards the table behind them. "Check out what's in the wallet over there."

She looks at him, then turns around, flips open the wallet. Peter can hear her rustling through it but he's watching Fitzroy, watching the way he squirms, watching the way he can't quite seem to meet Peter's eyes.

Makado makes a very small noise that Peter swears must have been her chuckling, but when she turns back around, perhaps a half a second later than he might have expected her to, her face is deadly serious. "Looks like we're adding drug possession to the list of charges," she says. Fitzroy makes a strangled noise somewhere in his throat and the girl groans.

"Come on!" she says. Her tone is pleading. "It's only a dub!"

"I'm going to pretend I know what that means," Makado tells her. She turns to Peter, leans in to whisper in his ear. "I'll call someone. Take them up to the surface and kick them out."

"No charges?" he murmurs.

"Of course not. They're kids. I'll keep the weed, though, that should teach them a lesson. Probably about twenty dollars' worth in this bag."

Peter nods and Makado pulls her radio out of its holster, clicks it over to the general channel. "Makado here, unattached rangers in Lower Gastro Zone B, respond please."

She takes her finger off the button and waits. Quiet static rumbles to itself on the channel, then the radio squawks.

"Makado, it's Maria. I just clocked out and I was heading back to the LVC, do you need me to clock back in?"

"Stand by, Maria," she says. She glances at Peter. "I forgot," she growls. "There's that stupid fireworks display tonight."

"Yeah, we're staying open until..."

"I forget. Midnight? Something like that."

"Hey, you're a Head Ranger, I figured you would know."

"Wait a minute," Makado frowns, clicking the radio on again. "Maria," she asks, "isn't everybody working late tonight? Why are you clocking out already?"

"I got permission from Carl," Maria says. "Cause my mom is in bed with that fever, you know, and I have to pick up my kid, and I don't have anybody else who can –"

"Okay, Maria," Makado says, "that's okay. You go on and go home."

"Are you sure? I've got about half an hour before –"

"Don't worry about it, Maria. Makado out."

"Roger."

Peter looks at Makado and Makado looks at Peter. "Whatever," she says. "We can take them up."

"You don't have more important things to do?"

"Probably," she admits. "But maybe I need a break."

"Alright kids," Peter says, turning to the three of them. Fitzroy and the girl have been whispering back and forth to each other the whole time, their faces drawn and serious, the gravity of the situation finally breaking over them. The youngest one is trying not to look smug but that disappears when Peter glares at him, lumping him in with the three of them. "All of you are in big trouble. Even you," he says, pointing to the youngest. "What's your name?"

"Tyler," he says in a small voice.

"Tyler, you were still trespassing. Don't think you're getting out of this scot-free."

"Are we doing good-cop bad-cop?" Makado murmurs in his ear. He can feel her breath on his earlobe and it sends a row of goosebumps cascading up his spine. "I thought I was usually the bad cop."

"You can be the bad cop later," he mutters back, keeping his eyes fixed on the kids. He feels more than hears her lips part in a smile.

"Let's go," she says.

They do. Peter happens to look at his watch before they all file out of the break room, him in the rear, watching the kids; the time is 9:30 at night on July 4th, 2007.

* * *

While they're marching down the long fenced-in corridor out of Lower Gastro Zone B back to the utility lift that will take them back to the Lower Visitor Center and, from there, ultimately to the surface, Peter considers the pink, fleshy walls pressed against the fence. This particular corridor suffered a contraction about a week ago when a stent failed and the Pit's muscles naturally filled in the resulting extra space. There was a tour group in the corridor when it happened and according to a friend of his, who was leading the tour group at the time, four people of the twelve fainted.

For the moment it's safe, though, since the temporary extra stents installed by Engineering are holding back the passage from complete collapse, but a more permanent solution will have to be sought soon. From what he understands they'll have to either go back in and tease the flesh back from the fence and insert additional permanent stents, as well as repair parts of the path that had buckled under the sudden change in pressure, or give up on this corridor altogether and widen out a new one, link it up to the vast network of passageways making up the lit, reinforced networks of the Pit.

He doesn't reflect on it often, but when things like this happen, when stents fail, when things go wrong (which is thankfully fairly rare, at least in his experience), Peter can't help but think of what it must be like, to be trapped in a corridor like this if it were to totally collapse in on itself, if, by some unlucky and unlikely coincidence, every stent were to fail simultaneously. As far as he knows nothing like that has ever happened in the history of the park, but it's a possibility, if a vague one. If you were in a proper suit you'd probably survive, the suits are armored and rated against a certain level of crushing pressure, but the kind he's wearing now, the lighter, 'interior-work' suit, wouldn't be able to stand up to that kind of abuse. It's only the heavy, reinforced engineer suits that would let you survive, and even then if you didn't have a supply of personal stents and probably a laser cutter you'd be trapped there, alive but unable to move, surrounded by throbbing, crushing flesh, unable to do anything but call for help on your helmet radio and watch the air in your canister tick down until you ran out and asphyxiated.

Peter's not bothered by tight spaces – when you get hired at the Mystery Flesh Pit you have to pass a claustrophobia test, even if you're working at the Burger King in the LVC – but even without any phobia of it the thought isn't pleasant.

He finds his eyes wandering down Makado's figure, lithe and supple even in the bulk of her ranger suit, at the way her sides taper inwards and then frill outwards pleasantly at her hips. He watches her hips sway as she walks. He knows he shouldn't look but he does anyway.

Ahead of him he sees Makado incline her head downwards and tap her earpiece, listening intently. He flips through the channels on his radio briefly but hears nothing out of the ordinary – whatever she's hearing must be on the command channel he doesn't have access to. Still walking forwards, she turns briefly and looks back at him; their eyes meet for a moment, then she turns back around. If the look was supposed to carry any significance or meaning, he misses it.

She says something into the radio then slows to a stop, turns around. "Alright kids, hold up for a second," she says. Peter slips past the three of them, sidles up to Makado. "Got a call from Control," she mutters. "There's a flooding issue in the Sand Gullet."

Peter's eyebrows raise. "How bad?"

"Don't know. Engineering is on the way right now, we'll know more in a couple minutes."

"What happened?"

"Pump failure."

"I mean, that's not so unusual. It's been raining cats and dogs today and they really ought to have replaced those pumps in waves instead of waiting to do all of them at once."

"Sorry," Makado says. Something in her tone cuts a quiet sliver of dread across Peter's belly. "I misspoke," she tells him. "The emergency pump failed."

It takes a moment for him to process that but when he does his eyes widen. "Oh fuck," he says.

"Oh fuck," she agrees. "Listen to me. You're down here more often than I am. Closest constriction-rated shelter from here?"

"Safest is the ranger station we came from. Closest is the elevator housing ahead. Your call, you know the Sand Gullet better, if it's full enough that the e-pump would have kicked in..."

Makado shakes her head briefly. "We can make it back to the ranger station. Hunker down, ride it out. Safest place in a constriction, those gastric pools don't have many muscles surrounding them."

"It'll take ten minutes to get back there."

"Five if we stop talking and run for it. Let's go."

The kids almost panic when Makado tells them that the area is becoming unsafe and they will need to run as fast as they can back to the ranger station they came from, but Peter grabs Fitzroy and Tyler and Makado grabs the girl whose name he still does not know, and as they run Peter puffs out what reassuring nothings he can in between breaths, trying to make it seem like this is less of a big deal than it is. Than it might be.

They keep as quick of a pace as they can. Makado's lean physique could easily outstrip all of them but she stays at the girl's pace, helping her up when she trips and stumbles, letting Peter and the boys get ahead. They cover the long hallway in a few minutes while Peter focuses on his breathing, in through his nose and out through his mouth. Tyler is flagging a little but keeping up, and all of Fitzroy's cockiness seems to have departed him at this point. His eyes are wide and frightened.

The path diverges into a fork. They came from the left, Peter remembers. He puts his hand out, catches himself on the fence, pushes off and keeps running. He glances behind as he does and sees Makado, face drawn, eyes grim, nodding at him, just behind. He can smell the gastric bulb ahead.

The lights snap off with an audible click and a hum of powering-down electrical lines. "Fuck!" Peter yells, skidding to a stop, drawing the two boys closer in so they don't fall. Makado plows into his back and Peter stumbles but keeps his balance.

"Why the hell are the lights off?" she asks. "Did we lose power?"

"We must have," Peter says, snapping the flashlight from his belt and clicking it on. He angles it upwards towards one of the heavy-duty fluorescent fixtures but can't see any obvious signs of damage. "We must have," he repeats.

"Makado to Control, over," Makado intones, pressing her earpiece deeper into her ear. She repeats herself twice before shaking her head and pulling out her radio and flicking through the channels. "This is Makado," she says on the general line. "We've got a power loss in LGZ Bravo, can anybody confirm if this is localized?"

Nothing but static, stronger than before. She looks at Peter significantly. "It must be the whole park," she says after a moment. "The repeaters are down."

She looks at the kids. "We need to move. Now."

"Wait, Makado –"

"No time," she says, hustling them along towards the ranger station. The constriction hits before she's taken ten steps, and it's so strong that Peter drops his flashlight, sending it skidding crazily ahead of them and then off of the walkway through the fence, casting shadows that flex and writhe and skitter. The girl is screaming and Makado is huddling over her, keeping her still; one of the boys, Tyler, he thinks, cries out, and he can hear Fitzroy breathing heavily at his side, and Peter realizes that without even thinking about it he has grabbed them both and taken them down to the floor of the walkway with him. He wants to squeeze his eyes shut and wait for it to be over but he forces himself not to. Outside the fence the fleshy walls of the conduit they're in are writhing and convulsing. He can hear the faint, distant rumble of a carnal moan, coming from somewhere deep in the Pit's gullet, but the actual noise is really fairly soft; just a wet, squishing sound, the slapping of muscle twitching and clenching in on itself, and then a sound that strikes dread into his very core – the snapping pop of a hydraulic stent failing.

The lights flicker back online, which surprises Peter, and as they all blink in the sudden brightness he and Makado lock eyes; he sees from her expression that she also heard the stent fail, and they scramble to their feet, hauling the kids upwards with them. The girl is clutching her wrist; she looks almost mad with fear, staring around at the fleshy walls of the corridor, several feet closer to the fence than they were before the lights went out and still shuddering and convulsing against the retaining plate in the ceiling. He hears the stent nearest them let out a dangerous hiss. Makado shakes her head.

"Double-time it," she commands, starting back down the corridor.

"Makado, wait," he repeats, looking back down towards the elevator, a long way off and out of sight.

"No time," she says, pushing the girl ahead of her. Halfway down, where the stent failed, the fence has been bent inwards and the flesh is puckered into a wrinkled, ugly cone, leaving enough room to crawl through. It would be tight, though, and likely the fence would catch on some of their gear. Makado touches her earpiece and swears, pulls it out, then takes out her radio and examines it. Even from ten feet away Peter can see that it's busted; she must have fallen on it when the convulsion knocked her off her feet. "We need to get to that ranger station," she tells Peter, and he shakes his head.

"Makado, we can't."

"What?"

"Think about it. The power was still out when that convulsion hit," he explains, pulling his own radio out and handing it to her. As she takes it and plugs her earpiece into it, he continues. "If the power was out, then the hydraulics would have been out too. And if –"

"Shit, you're right," she says, reaching out to steady herself as another tremble runs through the corridor. Almost a full second after, they feel the walkway shudder as the Pit convulses again, someplace deeper in its anatomy. Tyler stumbles and Peter reaches out and catches him. For the first time since he's known her, Makado looks unsure. Past her shoulder, Peter sees the crumpled cone of flesh ahead of them crunch inwards another inch or so. He can see blood dripping down from the chain links where they've dug into it. He shakes his head.

"If we go down that way," he says, pointing at it, "we'll get trapped down there. And if the ranger station slipped or got dislodged and it's sinking into the bulbule right now..."

Another convulsion rocks through the corridor. Makado falls to her knees, then pitches sideways – the cone has finally crushed the fence entirely and canted that section of walkway at a crazy angle. Past it they hear a muffled thump as another stent fails. The Pit shudders.

Peter holds out his hand and Makado takes it. She nods at him.

"Alright," she says. "Let's go."

"Are we going to –" Tyler starts, but Peter shakes his head.

"No talking," he says, grabbing ahold of Tyler and Fitzroy's hands. "We need to go."

Two more stents collapse as they make their way down the corridor, jogging now, not willing to risk a full sprint in case of another rolling wave of convulsions pitching the walkway beneath them and throwing them off. Luckily, the stents ahead seem to be holding. The second stent that collapsed did so barely twenty seconds after they passed under it, and the noise was so loud that even Makado yelped in surprise and the five of them huddled closer together for a moment, watching the muscles of the Pit crush the reinforced steel into an irregular ovoid pellet. After that they hurried even quicker. The utility lift they're heading to is contained within a reinforced access shaft, one that Peter reasons will likely have been able to withstand the convulsions of the Pit, even if they've gotten bad. He wonders briefly, stumbling a little amid flickering lights as the corridor tilts again, what things are like in the Visitor Center; if the power went out and there was a choke response simultaneously, there could have conceivably been some serious damage.

"Hey, Mak," he calls ahead, and Makado turns, breathing heavily, looks at him. She's told him not to call her that, not at work at least, but he figures that right now it's the least of their concerns. Plus it's easier to say, fewer syllables; less of a strain on his tiring lungs. Tyler is practically done for already and Fitzroy isn't doing much better. It's a long distance to the elevator and every branch they pass, Peter's seen something worrying. Corridor to Rest Stop 23? Collapsed inwards when a stent failed close to their end of the corridor. Lots of blood. The Pit's or some poor ranger or visitor trapped in exactly the wrong place? There's nothing so dramatic as an arm or a hand or a leg sticking out of the scrunched, wrinkled orifice. Corridor to the Lower Interpit Campground? There's a lesser copepod lurking on the rounded, livid ceiling, roughly the size of a deer, antennae prickling with anticipation as he and Makado stopped to consider it. Further down the lights were flickering, and even further down the lights were out entirely. They looked at each other and Makado shook her head.

"Mak," he says again. "Have you gotten anything on the radio?"

"Thought I told you not to call me that," she mutters, fiddling with the radio. She unplugs her earpiece, turns the volume up. They all listen; even Fitzroy and the girl cock their heads intently. Where before there was static and the tantalizing hint of communication, just too fuzzy for them to be able to make out, there is just a worrying soft noise. "The repeater must be completely fucked," she says. She switches to the general channel. "This is Makado, can anybody hear this? Respond, over."

The seconds tick by. Somewhere close by but obscured by pounds and yards of flesh, a stent collapses. Peter jumps when it does, the thumping noise like the beating of a heart, praying that it wasn't any place they needed to go.

The convulsions have slowed now, still passing in rolling waves of panic, but with longer and longer intervals between them. Even the girl, whose name he still does not know, doesn't shriek when the walls writhe, but merely looks at them with a horrible emptiness in her eyes, as though she's simply waiting for it to be over. She hasn't spoken a word in about ten minutes now, and Makado has to coax her into jogging with them when they do move forward.

Makado shakes her head, holds the button down again. "This is Makado," she repeats. "Can anybody –"

The radio squawks and they all jump. Makado nearly drops it. "-akado, it's – trapped in the –" a voice says, tinny with static. Peter can barely make it out, let alone determine who it is. Once the noise stops Makado taps the button twice. "Makado here, I don't know who said that but we can barely hear you, please repeat? Over."

"Makado," comes the reply, a little better. "It's Carl. Can you hear – now? Respond please."

"Carl, we hear you," she says urgently. "Are you alright?"

"No," he says. He sounds frightened. "I'm in access tunnel 32, a stent... -apsed and I'm trapped, I can get into - ...Campground, but –"

From there, the broadcast devolves into indistinguishable noise. Makado frowns at Peter. "Access tunnel 32, that's on the other side of the Campground, right?"

"Yeah," Peter nods. "32, 41, and 17 feed into it."

"Carl, we heard most of that," she broadcasts. "Get to the campground and sit tight, Peter and I will rendezvous there in ten minutes, how copy?"

Nothing. Nothing at all. Peter blows his breath out. "The campground is probably a mess right now."

"Yes," Makado agrees, "but it won't have constricted enough to have blocked off passage, it's too big of a bulb. We can get through and then meet up with Carl, and then we can all get to the elevator and take off together. If he's alone in there –"

"Do you want to split up?" Peter asks, looking significantly at the teenagers. They've been watching Peter and Makado's conversation with terrified faces. They seem to have accepted for the moment that they're safe, but whatever claustrophobia they might have had before they entered the Pit is coming back in spades. Tyler keeps looking up at the ceiling as though it might collapse inwards on them at any moment, although, realistically speaking, a collapse like that would be all sides and all angles at once, realistically speaking, and if it were bad, they'd be pinned between the fence and the walkway and get the breath crushed out of them that way.

"No, absolutely not," Makado says. "We've all got to stick together."

"But the kids –"

"I am not letting them go off alone and get picked off by a shamble or something, and I am not letting you or myself go and try to meet up with Carl alone and have the same damn thing happen. Did you see the size of that copepod back there?" she asks, jerking her thumb over her shoulder. "We'll have to go that way, you know."

"I know, I know, it's just –"

She reaches out, puts her hand on his shoulder, pulls him inwards. For one insane moment Peter thinks she is about to kiss him, but then her chin lands on his shoulder and she whispers into his ear, "Pete, I'm scared too. I don't want to die down here. But we have got to get these kids out, and we have to get Carl. If he's hurt, if he's in trouble, we're going to help him. You and me can make it happen."

Peter nods after a moment and then Makado squeezes his shoulder and is gone, hunkering down and gathering the three teenagers close to her. "Listen to me, guys," she says, "I need you two," she says, looking at Tyler and Fitzroy, to take care of...honey, what's your name?"

Peter sees the girl's lips move but she doesn't actually say anything. "Her name is Eileen," Fitzroy says.

"Eileen," Makado says, "you're doing great."

"I'm scared," Eileen murmurs.

"I know, honey, but you're doing great. We're going to be down here for just a little longer and then we'll be going outside, okay?"

"We have to go get your friend, don't we?" Tyler asks, and Makado nods. Peter turns around so that the three teenagers won't be able to see and takes out his service pistol, checks that it's loaded. He knows it is but something about doing this makes him feel a little better.

When he turns back around the kids look a little better. Tyler looks determined, at least, and Fitzroy doesn't look quite as panicked as before. He doesn't know what Makado told them; probably some kind of empty promise about them being back on the surface quickly. No, stop that, he thinks. We will be back on the surface quickly. This is just a choke response. They probably already have pumps working in the sand gullet. Everything will be fine.

They make the trip down to the campground cautiously. The copepod lurking on the ceiling has disappeared since they moved past and Peter isn't sure whether or not that's a good sign. When they get to the darkened section of the hallway Peter draws his pistol. Makado looks at him, as do the kids. He gives them a smile and shrugs. "Just in case," he explains.

But they are lucky and don't run into anything, other than another lesser copepod, a smaller one than the one before, that takes one look at them and scurries off like an overgrown cockroach.

The campground is situated in a large gastric bulb that, a very long time ago, had been drained of its contents and various campsites marked out, which provided for slightly more comfortable camping quarters than just setting up a tent in a bronchial canal or other tubule. It was roomy, with fairly spectacular calcium deposits for an area as high up in the Pit as it was. There were even a few electrical outlets, as well as a restroom. The convulsions have put all that to hell, though; the restroom and camping platforms have cracked and tilted, and while the retaining shunts and plates seem to be alright, there's a small rupture in the ceiling where it looks like a bone might have torn through the thin, vulnerable flesh, and a steady stream of what proves to be gastric juices is pouring in from the tear, mixing noxiously with the Pit's blood and falling in thick, sticky rivulets to the floor, where it's already collected in a depression. A small pack of macrobacteria, about ten or so, are rolling about the pool; they must have came in from the entrance to the lower organ trails, over there on the left, a dark, gaping chasm in the floor. The stairs leading down to it still seem intact, so perhaps everything's alright down there – but, Peter reflects, if macrobacteria have gotten in, that means that something nastier might have as well.

"Do you see Carl?" he asks Makado, sweeping the beam of her flashlight across the vast bulb. The campground looks deserted, as it should have – there wasn't anybody in here all day, as far as he knows. There weren't any permits issued for this area, at any rate, so nobody, no guests at least, should have been in here.

"I don't –" Makado starts, then trails off. He glances back at her and then follows the beam of her flashlight, and sees a body laid out on the floor, almost in the corner of the bulb, with a round macrobacterium squatting evilly on its upper chest. He can see the ranger suit and knows it must be Carl, it simply must be.

"Shit," Peter says, taking a step forwards.

"Peter," Makado hisses, desperate. "Peter, don't."

"I have to see," he growls. "He might be okay."

"He's gone, Peter."

"Goddam it!" he says, as loud as he dares. One of the macrococci tumbling about the gastric stream pauses for a moment and they watch with bated breath, but it resumes its gamboling just as quickly. Peter creeps closer to Carl's supine form, the sucking noises the bacterium is making nearly turning his stomach. When he gets to within about ten feet of it he looks back at Makado. She shakes her head slowly but Peter can't stop, he has to know, he'd want Carl to be this tenacious for him, he'd want every effort to be made. He looks at the macrococcus; it's big and spiky, the size of a beach ball, its oral groove turned to Carl's face. He'll be okay, Peter tells himself, he's just passed out because of lack of oxygen, he's suffocating. If I get it off of him he'll be fine.

The bacterium's flagellae waggle with slow, lazy motions that Peter can't help but interpret as satisfaction. "Fuck it," he mutters, then takes a few running steps and swings his leg out like he were kicking a football and punts the bacterium away from Carl. It's a magnificent kick, really; it sails off in an arc and splatters against a calcium deposit fully thirty or forty feet away, a thick yellow mucus bursting out of it like a water balloon, the thing's deflated skin sliding weakly and wetly to the ground. Peter sees none of this; he can feel his gorge rising. Behind him, Makado groans and covers Eileen's eyes; Tyler looks away, but Fitzroy cannot stop looking, for there, limp on the ground, is the maculated, jawless corpse of Carl, his eyes popped and sucked out of their sockets, his tongue abraded to a stump, all of the flesh from his cheekbones to his collarbone devoured by the macrobacterium.

Peter doesn't recognize Makado when she grabs his arm and drags him away, cursing at him, begging him to work with her here, dammit, doesn't notice when Tyler and Fitzroy both take ahold of him and help pull him back the way they came. He regains control of his legs somewhere along the access pathway. They make it to the elevator and Peter collapses against the thick reinforced wall, eyes shut, still feeling queasy. He can't get the image of Carl's half-eaten face out of his mind. Makado pushes the button and then goes, sits next to him, rests her head on his shoulder. The kids huddle in their own corner, equally drained and exhausted. Eileen threw up on the way there and she still looks green.

"I'm sorry," Makado says.

"I should have listened to you," Peter tells her. "I should have just..."

"Don't."

"I should have –"

"Peter, don't."

He realizes that he's crying, then a moment later realizes that Makado is as well.

The elevator is on its way down, the readout proclaims, and Fitzroy lets out a ragged whoop. Makado lets out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding and wipes her eyes. "Alright," she says, looking at the teenagers. "We're halfway there. It'll take a little bit for the elevator to get here, but we're halfway there. You guys are doing great."

Mumbles and nods. Peter gets up and stretches. He feels a little better. Eileen even manages a little smile, after some coaxing from Makado.

It's quiet for a moment or two, and then there is a crackle from the PA speaker on the wall. Everyone looks up at it; Makado frowns, glances at Peter. "Anybody who can hear this," the voice states, "brace for choke response RIGHT NOW!"

Peter has only a split second to see the flash of panic flutter across the broad, fine lines of Makado's face before the floor bucks beneath them and hurls him into the wall head-first, and darkness takes him.

Continue with Part 5

Back to Table of Contents

#writing #mystery flesh pit

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godsheadangel · 6 years ago

Text

NEWLY CROWN HEADANGELQUEEN 10/10/19

💞💞 [HEADANGELQUEEN💛SABY👑] 💞💞 BATTLE ANGEL PRINCE TWINS😇😇KNOWN AS CORY😇AND CHAD😇 ARE STIRRING UP THE FOUNDATION BENEATH MY FEET THIS MORNING STILL DARK AND BRISK YET DAY SHALL COME WITH THE LIGHT🌅BRINGING ANOTHER BLESSED DAY FROM OUR GOD💫

AND MANY DAYS SHALL THE AWAKENED🌄 SEE IN THE NEAR FUTURE A FEW ANGELS IN [FLESH] TAKE FLIGHT INTO THE SKIES🌌 TO HELP AND RESCUE THOSE IN DISTRESS OR [WALKING THE STREETS] SOMETIMES SO ELIMINATING OUR ENEMIES WITH THEIR HEAVENLY💫BLESSED POWERFUL FISTS🤜

LIKE ▶ HEAD ANGEL KING👑OF DEATH💀 FATHER ELIMINATE DEMONS WHO DISOBEY ME, THY 👁GOD💫KNOWN AS THEIR UNCLE!

TRUST, FROM THEIR BEAUTIFUL AND TRULY [UNSEEN POWERFUL ANGELICMOTHER👑] THEY SHALL BE SO OF HUMBLENESS AND GREAT UNDERSTANDING YET DON'T CROSS THEM FOR THEY BE REAL ANGELS😇BORN TO DO THEIR BIRTHRIGHT JOB OF SEEKING OUT AND DESTROYING EVIL DEMONS! FOR SURELY EVERYONE LIVING IN MY WORLD🌍[DO SO KNOW THAT A CLOSED FIST🤜] MEANS YOUR DEMON LIFE IS COMING TO A END!!!

THOSE SPIRITUALLY AWAKENED🌄DO SO KNOW NOW THAT SUPERBABYANGELS👑DO COMETH WITH VERY HEAVENLY💫MIGHTY POWER AND SIGHT FROM ANGELMAMI'S

ELITEANGELQUEENS/HEADANGELQUEENS

SABY👑 [SEEN ABOVE]

DOLLICIA BRYAN👑

SUE HERERA👑

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SEEMA MODY👑

LESLIE MARIN👑

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LESLIE SYKES👑

SHARON TAY👑

AMBER LEE👑

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KIMI EVANS👑

COURTNEY FRIEL👑

KACEY MONTOYA👑

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LU PARKER👑

SOUMADA KHAN👑

ANALICIA CHAVES👑

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LEEPRETTY👑

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BRITTANY RENNER👑

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LAUREN WILLIAMS👑 [LALOVETHEBOSS]

ROMI CHASE👑

MORENA👑 [QUEENLATINLOVE]

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

VANESSA BORGE👑

DANIELLE GERSH👑

MARY BETH MCDADE👑

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GAYLE KING👑

MARKINA BROWN👑

TASHA👑 [BEAUTYBOOTYANDBRAINS05]

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

EBONI K. WILLIAMS👑

ANGELA RYE👑

BRANDY NORWOOD👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

HASLINDA AMIN👑

YVONNE MAN👑

SCARLET FU👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

DEMI MOORE👑

ASHLEY JUDD👑

SANDRA BULLOCK👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

KRISTEN👑 [KRISTENLIVE]

KENDRA👑 [KISSEDBYKEN]

MYA MARIE👑 [MYAHSKYE]

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

ABIGAIL DOOLITTLE👑

JULIE HYMAN👑

KAILEY LEINZ👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

KAITLAN COLLINS👑

KRISTEN WELKER👑

CHRIS JANSING👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

MICHELLE KOSINSKI👑

ALISON KOSIK👑

RACHEL NICHOLS👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

JEANNE BUSS👑

KELLI TENTANT👑

LIZ HABIB👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

ABBY HUNTSMAN👑

S.E. CUPP👑

LIBERTE CHAN👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

ABBY PHILIP👑

ARWA DAMON👑

PAMELA BROWN👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

DANA BASH👑

NATALIE ALLEN👑

STEPHANIE RUHLE👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

NIA MALIKA-HENDERSON👑

LAURA COATES👑

CASSIDY HUBBARTH👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

MOLLY QERIM👑

CARI CHAMPION👑

KRISTINA PINK👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

JOSINA ANDERSON👑

LISA SALTERS👑

PAM OLIVER👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

DORIS BURKE👑

HOLLY ROWE👑

KAREN TSO👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

LOUISA BOJESEN👑

EMILY CHANG👑

SHERY AHN👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

ABIGAIL RATCHFORD👑

KINDLY MYERS👑

AMBER PRIDDY👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

NICOLE SWEDBERG👑

KHLOE KARDASHIAN👑

TAHICORALIE👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

TORY KELLY👑

DEMI LOVATO👑

KATY PERRY👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

SHAKIRA👑

SOLANGE KNOWLES👑

SHEENA EASTON👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

STEVIE NICKS👑

SOPHIE DEE👑

OLIVIA O'LOVELY👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

LUSCIOUS LOPEZ👑

SONIA BLAZE👑

TORI BLACK👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

CAMILLE WINBUSH👑

NICOLEANNECRUZ👑

MIRIAM👑 [MIRIAMDASILVAMOURA]

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

ANGELLE BROOKS👑

MICHAELA PEREIRA👑

ROBIN MEADE👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

JENNIFER WESTHOVEN👑

AINSLEY EARHARDT👑

ALISYN CAMEROTA👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

ALISON ROWE👑

ASHLEY BANFIELD👑

SUSAN HENDRICKS👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

CAROL COSTELLO👑

BERTHA COOMBS👑

MICHELLE VALLES👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

MARIAPEREZXOX👑 [COLUMBIAN MODEL]

VANESSA👑 [BRAZILIANVANESSA]

COLLEEN WILLIAMS👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

JOVANA LARA👑

LESLIE LOPEZ👑

CYNTHIA FRELUND👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

ADITI KINKHABWALA👑

ERIN COSCARELLI👑

LINDSAY RHODES👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

KAY ADAMS👑

ELIZABETH ESPINOZA👑

LYNETTE ROMERO👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

STEPHANIE SIMMONS👑

CALLIE THORNE👑

KAVITA CHANNE👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

KAVITHA NAIR👑

CHARLIZE THERON👑

THERESA CAPUTO👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

CHERYL CASONE👑

DAGEN MCDOWELL👑

MARIA BARTIROMO👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

MIKA BRZEZSINSKI👑

REBECCA QUICK👑

HALLIE JACKSON👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

NICOLE PETALLIDES👑

LAUREN SIMONETTI👑

GERRI WILLIS👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

JACKIE DEANGELIS👑

KATE ROGERS👑

MEG TIRRELL👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

ANA KOOIMAN👑

JULIE BANDERAS👑

ANDREA TANTAROS👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

MELISSA FRANCIS👑

HEATHER CHILDS👑

LIZ CLAMAN👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

ELIZABETH MACDONALD👑

ALIX STEEL👑

LISA ABRAMOWICZ👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

CAROLINE HYDE👑

PAT HARVEY👑

BRANDI HITT👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

BRI WINKLER👑

ASHLEY CALLINGBULL👑

ROSEANNE SUPERNAULT👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

MAYA MICHELLE REW👑

TAHNEE ELK👑

LYNDA CARTER👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

SARINA SIRTIS👑

VICKI GUNVALSON👑

BARBARA STREISAND👑

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

LISA VANDERPUMP👑

PAM GRIER👑

SANDRA SMITH👑 FBN

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

COCO FRANCESCA👑 [MODEL]

YOLLIE MONROE👑

PHOENIX SKYE👑 [MODEL]

VIVICA A. FOX👑

LISA RAYE MCCOY👑

SUSAN LI👑 FBN

ROSELYN SANCHEZ👑

ROSA ACOSTA👑

LILI👑 [LILILIBER]

SARA UNDERWOOD👑

NIKKI LEIGH👑

ASHLEY GRAHAM👑

ROS GOLD-ONWUDE👑

LI BINGBING👑

GONG LI👑

YUNA ITO👑

🤜🤜🤜🤜🤜🤜🤜💀💀💀🤛🤛🤛🤛🤛🤛🤛

ANGELMAMI'S WEAR THATANGELICLOOK💫

👉FOR ALL DO SPEAK IN HOLY💫SPIRIT💫👈

NAMED ARE THE MOTHERS TO BE OF THE SUPERANGEL HIGH FLYERS TAKING FLIGHT TO HELP SAVE THOSE IN NEED! TRUST ITS TRUE FOR THIS SHALL BE FROM THE VERY BLESSED HEAVENLY💫17xTIMES SEED!!!

SOME POWERFUL BABYANGELS👑BORN SO WITH REAL ELECTRICITY COMING FOURTH FROM THEIR VERY PALMS, SOME WITH SUPER STRENGTH OF 1O GROWN MEN, SOME WHO CAN READ MIND THOUGHTS OF EVERYONE ALIVE, SOME BORN WITH THE GIFT OF PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY AND SOME THE POWERS OF MOVING HEAVY OBJECTS THE SIZE OF A HOUSE AROUND!!!

TRUST, ALL GIVEN HEAVENLY💫BORN POWERS ARE REAL JUST LIKE HEAVENLY💫

GIVEN MIRACLES💫HEALINGS AND REAL BLESSINGS FROM MY HOLY💫POWERFUL SPIRIT💫FOR I AM HE, THY LIVING GOD💫

AWAKEN🌄FOR THE CHANGING TIMES🌄

WHEN U LEAST EXPECT IT GOD💫REACTS!

152 notes · View notes

orbemnews · 4 years ago

Link

Lou Dobbs’s Show Is Canceled by Fox Business Lou Dobbs, one of former President Donald J. Trump’s most loyal media supporters, abruptly lost his pulpit on Friday when Fox Business canceled his weekday television show, which had become a frequent clearinghouse for baseless theories of electoral fraud in the weeks after Mr. Trump lost the 2020 presidential race. Mr. Dobbs’s decade-long tenure at the network ended with little warning — a guest host filled in for his Friday slot — only a day after the election technology company Smartmatic filed a defamation lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation and Fox News. The suit, which seeks damages of at least $2.7 billion, also named Mr. Dobbs as an individual defendant along with two other Fox anchors, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro. Smartmatic specifically cited Mr. Dobbs’s program, which by late last year had become so packed with falsehoods about Mr. Trump’s defeat that Fox Business was forced to run a fact-checking segment debunking some of its own anchor’s assertions. Executives at Fox did not elaborate on Friday about why they had canceled Mr. Dobbs’s program, which was the top-rated show on Fox Business and drew a bigger audience than its competition on CNBC. The network said in a statement that it regularly reviewed its programming lineup. “Plans have been in place to launch new formats as appropriate postelection, including on Fox Business,” the network said. “This is part of those planned changes.” A person familiar with Fox’s decision said the network’s concerns about Mr. Dobbs predated this week’s filing of the Smartmatic lawsuit. But the person, who requested anonymity to describe private personnel matters, conceded that Mr. Dobbs’s extreme and unrepentant endorsements of Mr. Trump’s false election claims had imperiled his position, as did other moments. For instance, on the day of siege at the U.S. Capitol, Mr. Dobbs described protesters as merely “walking between the rope lines.” The cancellation came as lawsuits and legal threats are rippling the landscape of media organizations popular with right-wing viewers. Dominion Voting Systems has sued two lawyers who represented Mr. Trump, Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell, over false claims they made on Fox News and other outlets that the company aided President Biden’s victory, and it is considering additional litigation. Mr. Dobbs, 75, rose to fame as a CNN anchor, becoming a mainstay of television business news. He began hosting his Fox program in 2011, lured by the network’s co-founder Roger Ailes, and was watched by a soon-to-be-very influential fan: Mr. Trump, who shared Mr. Dobbs’s right-wing values, particularly the anchor’s hard-line stance against unchecked immigration. The men also shared an interest in questioning President Barack Obama’s birthplace, a canard that helped lead to Mr. Dobbs’s exit from CNN in 2009. At the White House, Mr. Trump came to see Mr. Dobbs’s program as required viewing; his allies learned that an appearance on “Lou Dobbs Tonight” would guarantee attention in the West Wing. The president even patched in the television host during some policy discussions with his White House staff. Mr. Trump, who was barred from Twitter last month, has been circumspect since leaving the White House in what subjects he comments on. But roughly an hour after the news of Mr. Dobbs’s departure broke, the former president issued a statement to The New York Times. “Lou Dobbs is and was great,” Mr. Trump said. “Nobody loves America more than Lou. He had a large and loyal following that will be watching closely for his next move, and that following includes me.” The loyalty went both ways. As recently as Thursday, his final day on Fox Business, Mr. Dobbs spoke disparagingly of Republican Party leaders for, in his view, showing insufficient loyalty to Mr. Trump. He described Senator Mitch McConnell and Representative Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leaders in Congress, as “toadies for the Democratic Party.” Mr. Dobbs remains on contract with Fox, but the network has no plans to put him back on the air, according to a person briefed on its plans. For now, a rotating group of hosts will replace Mr. Dobbs in his 5 p.m. slot. The anchors Jackie DeAngelis and David Asman will sit in for him next week. (“Lou Dobbs Tonight” repeats at 7 p.m.) The cancellation was reported earlier by The Los Angeles Times. The Smartmatic lawsuit filed on Thursday cited a false claim from a November episode of “Lou Dobbs Tonight”: that Hugo Chávez, the former president of Venezuela, had a hand in the creation of Smartmatic technology, designing it so that the votes it processed could be changed undetected. (Mr. Chávez, who died in 2013, did not have anything to do with Smartmatic.) The Chávez claim was made by Ms. Powell, who worked as a lawyer for Mr. Trump and was a frequent guest on Mr. Dobbs’s program. She was also sued by Smartmatic on Thursday, along with Mr. Giuliani. Mr. Dobbs was also cited in the lawsuit for using the phrase “cyber Pearl Harbor” to describe a supposed vote-fraud conspiracy, borrowing language used by Ms. Powell. There are signs that the other hosts named in the suit, Ms. Bartiromo and Ms. Pirro, may be in a more favorable position with Fox management than Mr. Dobbs. It was clear weeks ago that defamation suits from Smartmatic and Dominion could be imminent. Since then, Ms. Bartiromo was picked to audition for a new 7 p.m. program on Fox News, and Ms. Pirro debuted a new travel program, “Castles USA,” on the Fox Nation streaming service, in which she visits castles around the country. Fox has pledged to fight the Smartmatic litigation, saying in a statement: “We are proud of our 2020 election coverage and will vigorously defend this meritless lawsuit in court.” Don Herzog, who teaches First Amendment and defamation law at the University of Michigan, said it was possible that canceling Mr. Dobbs could aid Fox in its defense of the lawsuit. If Mr. Dobbs had continued to discuss Smartmatic or promote election fraud on his program, the network could have been liable for each new claim, Mr. Herzog said. Fox officials could also argue that the lawsuit made them aware of untruths that Mr. Dobbs had helped spread. And in a trial atmosphere, the cancellation of Mr. Dobbs’s program might help persuade jurors that the network was acting in good faith. Mr. Herzog said a responsible judge would counter that sentiment: “A judge should instruct a jury that what Fox does later to try to show they’re acting in good faith doesn’t settle the question of whether they were acting in good faith at some earlier time.” Such was the sudden nature of Mr. Dobbs’s exit that even the anchor who filled in for him on Friday, Mr. Asman, did not appear to have been briefed on the news. At the end of the 5 p.m. broadcast, Mr. Asman smiled at the camera, wished his viewers a happy weekend, and added a parting note: “Lou will be back on Monday.” John Koblin and Jonah E. Bromwich contributed reporting. Source link Orbem News #Business #Canceled #Dobbss #Fox #Lou #Show

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coloradofinanceorganization · 6 years ago

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Yahoo Finance Kicks Off Eight Hours of Live Video Programming on Monday, January 7th

The top business and finance news platform to showcase bell-to-bell market coverage through daily shows and special events

On Monday, January 7th, 2019 beginning at 9am ET, Yahoo Finance extends its daily live programming to eight hours. The business and finance platform’s bell-to-bell coverage will feature six daily shows, with an additional special weekly program hosted by Yahoo Finance’s editor in chief, “Influencers with Andy Serwer,” on Thursdays at 5pm ET. Throughout the day, anchors and analysts will provide commentary on breaking news, political stories, pop culture moments and the day’s stock market activity.

All programs will stream on Yahoo Finance, the Yahoo Finance app, and Apple TV, with select shows and special events available live and on-demand via Yahoo on the Roku Channel.

To achieve this milestone, Yahoo Finance has recently grown its staff and increased content production from three to eight hours of live programming, welcoming leading anchors including: Adam Shapiro (formerly of Fox Business), Julie Hyman (formerly of Bloomberg TV) and Jackie DeAngelis (formerly of CNBC), who join Yahoo Finance veterans: Alexis Christoforous, Jen Rogers, Myles Udland, Seana Smith, Dan Roberts and Melody Hahm.

PROGRAMMING LINEUP:

**all times shown in EST

9:00AM – The First Trade (formerly Market Movers) Market preview and opening bell coverage, bringing you the headlines expected to drive the day’s market action. Heavily investor-focused content combined with the top stories (news, sports, entertainment) away from finance/business.

10:00AM – YFi AM (formerly Morning Meeting) Yahoo Finance’s conversational morning chat show covering not only the top headlines, but stories that are driving the most “buzz.”

11:00AM – On the Move (formerly Midday Movers) A look at the top headlines and in depth analysis of what is moving the markets.

1:00PM – YFi PM (new show) Yahoo Finance’s conversational afternoon chat show covering not only the top headlines, but stories that are driving the most “buzz.”

2:00PM – The Ticker (new show) Each day, we’ll focus this hour on the top 10 tickers driving the day’s action. The program will highlight Yahoo Finance’s proprietary data analysis on which stocks are receiving the most clicks from our members and those “Tickers” will be highlighted on “The Ticker.”

3:00PM – The Final Round (extended) Looking ahead to the closing bell, covering the most important business news stories of the day, what’s driving the markets and what to expect in the days and weeks ahead.

5:00PM on Thursday – Influencers with Andy Serwer (new show) Yahoo Finance presents Influencers with Andy Serwer, a weekly interview series. Yahoo Finance Editor-in-Chief Andy Serwer will sit down with some of the biggest names in business, politics, entertainment, sports, and academia. ‘Influencers’ will focus on industry trends, the macro economy and issues of the day through a business lens. Guests include: Barry Diller, Jill Abramson, Danny Meyer, Glenn Hutchins, Jean Case, Darren Walker, Tarana Burke, and more.

For any media requests, please contact [email protected]

Follow Yahoo Finance on Social Media:

Twitter: @YahooFinance

Instagram: @yahoofinance

Facebook: YahooFinance

LinkedIn: Yahoo-Finance

YouTube: YahooFinance

Want to join the conversation? Tweet at @YahooFinance with your questions and comments for a chance to be featured on a show

Want to help spread the news? Tweet:@ YahooFinance launches live bell to bell coverage today. Stream on the YFi app or online at finance.yahoo.com #YahooFinance

from Informer Digest Feed http://yahoofinance.tumblr.com/post/181811447884

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renegadepharmacist · 6 years ago

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76 billion opioid pills: Newly released federal data unmasks the epidemic

By Scott Higham, Sari Horwitz and Steven Rich

July 16 at 8:19 PM

The data in the DEA database tracks the path of every single pain pill sold in the United States, including oxycodone, above. (John Moore/Getty Images)

America’s largest drug companies saturated the country with 76 billion oxycodone and hydrocodone pain pills from 2006 through 2012 as the nation’s deadliest drug epidemic spun out of control, according to previously undisclosed company data released as part of the largest civil action in U.S. history.

The information comes from a database maintained by the Drug Enforcement Administration that tracks the path of every single pain pill sold in the United States — from manufacturers and distributors to pharmacies in every town and city. The data provides an unprecedented look at the surge of legal pain pills that fueled the prescription opioid epidemic, which has resulted in nearly 100,000 deaths from 2006 through 2012.

Just six companies distributed 75 percent of the pills during this period: McKesson Corp., Walgreens, Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen, CVS and Walmart, according to an analysis of the database by The Washington Post. Three companies manufactured 88 percent of the opioids: SpecGx, a subsidiary of Mallinckrodt; Actavis Pharma; and Par Pharmaceutical, a subsidiary of Endo Pharmaceuticals.

[Top takeaways from The Post’s analysis of the DEA database]

Purdue Pharma, which the plaintiffs allege sparked the epidemic in the 1990s with its introduction of OxyContin, its version of oxycodone, was ranked fourth among manufacturers with about 3 percent of the market.

The volume of the pills handled by the companies skyrocketed as the epidemic surged, increasing about 51 percent from 8.4 billion in 2006 to 12.6 billion in 2012. By contrast, doses of morphine, a well-known treatment for severe pain, averaged slightly more than 500 million a year during the period.

Those 10 companies along with about a dozen others are now being sued in federal court in Cleveland by nearly 2,000 cities, towns and counties alleging that they conspired to flood the nation with opioids. The companies, in turn, have blamed the epidemic on overprescribing by doctors and pharmacies and on customers who abused the drugs. The companies say they were working to supply the needs of patients with legitimate prescriptions desperate for pain relief.

The database reveals what each company knew about the number of pills it was shipping and dispensing and precisely when they were aware of those volumes, year by year, town by town. In case after case, the companies allowed the drugs to reach the streets of communities large and small, despite persistent red flags that those pills were being sold in apparent violation of federal law and diverted to the black market, according to the lawsuits.

[Companies respond to previously unreleased DEA data about opioid sales]

Plaintiffs have long accused drug manufacturers and wholesalers of fueling the opioid epidemic by producing and distributing billions of pain pills while making billions of dollars. The companies have paid more than $1 billion in fines to the Justice Department and Food and Drug Administration over opioid-related issues, and hundreds of millions more to settle state lawsuits.

But the previous cases addressed only a portion of the problem, never allowing the public to see the size and scope of the behavior underlying the epidemic. Monetary settlements by the companies were accompanied by agreements that kept such information hidden.

Trump’s claim of ‘amazing’ success in cutting opioid prescriptions | Fact Checker

Trump suggests he reached a three-year goal in one year. But the trend started under President Obama. (Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)

The drug companies, along with the DEA and the Justice Department, have fought furiously against the public release of the database, the Automation of Reports and Consolidated Order System, known as ARCOS. The companies argued that the release of the “transactional data” could give competitors an unfair advantage in the marketplace. The Justice Department argued that the release of the information could compromise ongoing DEA investigations.

Until now, the litigation has proceeded in unusual secrecy. Many filings and exhibits in the case have been sealed under a judicial protective order. The secrecy finally lifted after The Post and HD Media, which publishes the Charleston Gazette-Mail in West Virginia, waged a year-long legal battle for access to documents and data from the case.

On Monday evening, U.S. District Judge Dan Polster removed the protective order for part of the ARCOS database.

Drilling into the DEA’s pain pill database VIEW GRAPHIC

Drilling into the DEA’s pain pill database

Lawyers for the local governments suing the companies hailed the release of the data.

“The data provides statistical insights that help pinpoint the origins and spread of the opioid epidemic — an epidemic that thousands of communities across the country argue was both sparked and inflamed by opioid manufacturers, distributors, and pharmacies,” said Paul T. Farrell Jr. of West Virginia, co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs.

In statements emailed to The Post on Tuesday, the drug distributors stressed that the ARCOS data would not exist unless they had accurately reported shipments and questioned why the government had not done more to address the crisis.

“For decades, DEA has had exclusive access to this data, which can identify the total volumes of controlled substances being ordered, pharmacy-by-pharmacy, across the country,” McKesson spokeswoman Kristin Chasen said.

A DEA spokeswoman declined to comment Tuesday “due to ongoing litigation.”

Addicted and left behind: the opioid epidemic killing African Americans

Sam Rogers and Renee Howell live in fear of their next drug overdose as fentanyl has sent the rate of deaths among African Americans skyrocketing. (Whitney Shefte/The Washington Post)

Cardinal Health said that it has learned from its experience, increasing training and doing a better job to “spot, stop and report suspicious orders,” company spokeswoman Brandi Martin wrote.

AmerisourceBergen derided the release of the ARCOS data, saying it “offers a very misleading picture” of the problem. The company said its internal “controls played an important role in enabling us to, as best we could, walk the tight rope of creating appropriate access to FDA approved medications while combating prescription drug diversion.”

While Walgreens still dispenses opioids, the company said it has not distributed prescription-controlled substances to its stores since 2014. (Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press)

While Walgreens still dispenses opioids, the company said it has not distributed prescription-controlled substances to its stores since 2014. “Walgreens has been an industry leader in combatting this crisis in the communities where our pharmacists live and work, ” said Phil Caruso, a Walgreens spokesman.

Mike DeAngelis, a spokesman for CVS, said the plaintiffs’ allegations about the company have no merit and CVS is aggressively defending against them.

Walmart, Purdue and Endo declined to comment about the ARCOS database.

A Mallinckrodt spokesman said in a statement that the company produced opioids only within a government-controlled quota and sold only to DEA-approved distributors.

Actavis Pharma was acquired by Teva Pharmaceutical Industries in 2016, and a spokeswoman there said the company “cannot speak to any systems in place beforehand.”

A virtual road map

The Post has been trying to gain access to the ARCOS database since 2016, when the news organization filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the DEA. The agency denied the request, saying some of the data was available on its website. But that data did not contain the transactional information the companies are required to report to the DEA every time they sell a controlled substance such as oxycodone and hydrocodone.

The drug companies and pharmacies themselves provided the sales data to the DEA. Company officials have testified before Congress that they bear no responsibility for the nation’s opioid epidemic.

The numbers of pills the companies sold during the seven-year time frame are staggering, far exceeding what has been previously disclosed in limited court filings and news stories.

Three companies distributed nearly half of the pills: McKesson with 14.1 billion, Walgreens with 12.6 billion and Cardinal Health with 10.7 billion. The leading manufacturer was Mallinckrodt’s SpecGx with nearly 28.9 billion pills, or nearly 38 percent of the market.

The states that received the highest concentrations of pills per person per year were: West Virginia with 66.5, Kentucky with 63.3, South Carolina with 58, Tennessee with 57.7 and Nevada with 54.7. West Virginia also had the highest opioid death rate during this period.

Rural areas were hit particularly hard: Norton, Va., with 306 pills per person; Martinsville, Va., with 242; Mingo County, W.Va., with 203; and Perry County, Ky., with 175.

In that time, the companies distributed enough pills to supply every adult and child in the country with 36 each year.

The database is a virtual road map to the nation’s opioid epidemic that began with prescription pills, spawned increased heroin use and resulted in the current fentanyl crisis, which added more than 67,000 to the death toll from 2013 to 2017.

Tracy Martin of Philadelphia holds a photo of her son Aaron Starrs, who died at age 21 in 2015, during a protest of FDA opioids policy in Washington in April. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

The transactional data kept by ARCOS is highly detailed. It includes the name, DEA registration number, address and business activity of every seller and buyer of a controlled substance in the United States. The database also includes drug codes, transaction dates, and total dosage units and grams of narcotics sold.

The data tracks a dozen different opioids, including oxycodone and hydrocodone, which make up three-quarters of the total pill shipments to pharmacies.

Under federal law, drug manufacturers, distributors and pharmacies must report each transaction of a narcotic to the DEA, where it is logged into the ARCOS database. If company officials notice orders of drugs that appear to be suspicious because of their unusual size or frequency, they must report those sales to the DEA and hold back the shipments.

As more and more towns and cities became inundated by pain pills, they fought back. They filed federal lawsuits against the drug industry, alleging that opioids from the companies were devastating their communities. They alleged the companies not only failed to report suspicious orders, but they also filled those orders to maximize profits.

As the hundreds of lawsuits began to pile up, they were consolidated into the one centralized case in U.S. District Court in Cleveland. The opioid litigation is now larger in scope than the tobacco litigation of the 1980s, which resulted in a $246 billion settlement over 25 years.

‘Where the virus grew’

Judge Polster is now overseeing the consolidated case of nearly 2,000 lawsuits. The case is among a wave of actions that includes other lawsuits filed by more than 40 state attorneys general and tribal nations. In May, Purdue settled with the Oklahoma attorney general for $270 million.

In the Cleveland case, Polster has been pressing the drug companies and the plaintiffs to reach a global settlement so communities can start receiving financial assistance to mitigate the damage that has been done by the opioid epidemic.

To facilitate a settlement, Polster had permitted the drug companies and the towns and cities to review the ARCOS database under a protective order while barring public access to the material. He also permitted some court filings to be made under seal and excluded the public and press from a global settlement conference at the outset of the case.

Last June, The Post and the Charleston Gazette-Mail asked Polster to lift the protective order covering the ARCOS database and the court filings. A month later, Polster denied the requests, even though he had said earlier that “the vast oversupply of opioid drugs in the United States has caused a plague on its citizens” and the ARCOS database reveals “how and where the virus grew.” He also said disclosure of the ARCOS data “is a reasonable step toward defeating the disease.”

Lawyers for The Post and the Gazette-Mail appealed Polster’s ruling. They argued that the ARCOS material would not harm companies or investigations because the judge had already decided to allow the local government plaintiffs to collect information from 2006 through 2014, withholding the most recent years beginning with 2015 from the lawsuit.

“Access to the ARCOS Data can only enhance the public’s confidence that the epidemic and the ensuing litigation are being handled appropriately now — even if they might not have been handled appropriately earlier,” The Post’s lawyer, Karen C. Lefton, wrote in her Jan. 17 appeal.

The lawyers also noted the DEA did not object when the West Virginia attorney general’s office provided partial ARCOS data to the Gazette-Mail in 2016. That data showed that drug distribution companies shipped 780 million doses of oxycodone and hydrocodone into the state between 2007 and 2012.

On June 20, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Ohio sided with the news organizations. A three-judge panel reversed Polster, ruling that the protective order sealing the ARCOS database be lifted with reasonable redactions and directed the judge to reconsider whether any of the records in the case should be sealed.

On Monday, Polster lifted the protective order on the database, ruling that all the data from 2006 through 2012 should be released to the public, withholding the 2013 and 2014 data.

‘Prescription tourists’

The pain pill epidemic began nearly three decades ago, shortly after Purdue Pharma introduced what it marketed as a less addictive form of opioid it called OxyContin. Purdue paid doctors and nonprofit groups advocating for patients in pain to help market the drug as a safe and effective way to treat pain.

But the new drug was highly addictive. As more and more people were hooked, more and more companies entered the market, manufacturing, distributing and dispensing massive quantities of pain pills.

Purdue ending up paying a $634 million fine to the Food and Drug Administration for claiming OxyContin was less addictive than other pain medications.

Annual opioid sales nationwide rose from $6.1 billion in 2006 to $8.5 billion in 2012, according to industry data gathered by IQVIA, a health care information and consulting company.

Individual drug company revenues ranged in single years at the epidemic’s peak from $403 million for opioids sold by Endo to $3.1 billion in OxyContin sales by Purdue Pharma, according to a 2018 lawsuit against multiple defendants by San Juan County in New Mexico.

During the past two decades, Florida became ground zero for pill mills — pain management clinics that served as fronts for corrupt doctors and drug dealers. They became so brazen that some clinics set up storefronts along I-75 and I-95, advertising their products on billboards by interstate exit ramps. So many people traveled to Florida to stock up on oxycodone and hydrocodone, they were sometimes referred to as “prescription tourists.”

The route from Florida to Georgia, Kentucky, West Virginia and Ohio became known as the “Blue Highway.” It was named after the color of one of the most popular pills on the street — 30 mg oxycodone tablets made by Mallinckrodt, which shipped more than 500 million of the pills to Florida between 2008 and 2012.

When state troopers began pulling over and arresting out-of-state drivers for transporting narcotics, drug dealers took to the air. One airline offered nonstop flights to Florida from Ohio and other Appalachian states, and the route became known as the Oxy Express.

A decade ago, the DEA began cracking down on the industry. In 2005 and 2006, the agency sent letters to drug distributors, warning them that they were required to report suspicious orders of painkillers and halt sales until the red flags could be resolved. The letter also went to drug manufacturers.

Even just one distributor that fails to follow the law “can cause enormous harm,” the 2006 DEA letter said.

DEA officials said the companies paid little attention to the warnings and kept shipping millions of pills in the face of suspicious circumstances.

As part of its crackdown, the DEA brought a series of civil enforcement cases against the largest distributors.

The corporations to date have paid nearly $500 million in fines to the Justice Department for failing to report and prevent suspicious drug orders, a number that is dwarfed by the revenue of the companies.

But the settlements of those cases revealed only limited details about the volume of pills that were being shipped.

In 2007, the DEA brought a case against McKesson. The DEA accused the company of shipping millions of doses of hydrocodone to Internet pharmacies after the agency had briefed the company about its obligations under the law to report suspicious orders.

“By failing to report suspicious orders for controlled substances that it received from rogue Internet pharmacies, the McKesson Corporation fueled the explosive prescription drug abuse problem we have in this country,” the DEA’s administrator said at the time.

In 2008, McKesson agreed to pay a $13.25 million fine to settle the case and pledged to more closely monitor suspicious orders from its customers.

That same year, the DEA brought a case against Cardinal Health, accusing the nation’s second-largest drug distributor of shipping millions of doses of painkillers to online and retail pharmacies without notifying the DEA of signs that the drugs were being diverted to the black market.

Cardinal settled the case by paying a $34 million fine and promising to improve its suspicious monitoring program.

Some companies were repeat offenders.

In 2012, the DEA began investigating McKesson again, this time for shipping suspiciously large orders of narcotics to pharmacies in Colorado. One store in Brighton, Colo., population 38,000, was ordering 2,000 pain pills per day. The DEA discovered that McKesson had filled 1.6 million orders from its Aurora, Colo., warehouse between 2008 and 2013 and reported just 16 as suspicious. None involved the Colorado store.

DEA agents and investigators said they had amassed enough information to file criminal charges against McKesson and its officers but they were overruled by federal prosecutors. The company wound up paying a $150 million fine to settle, a record amount for a diversion case.

Also in 2012, Cardinal Health attracted renewed attention from the DEA when it discovered that the company was again shipping unusually large amounts of painkillers to its Florida customers. The company had sold 12 million oxycodone pills to four pharmacies over four years.

In 2011, Cardinal shipped 2 million doses to a pharmacy in Fort Myers, Fla. Comparable pharmacies in Florida typically ordered 65,000 doses per year.

The DEA also noticed that Cardinal was shipping unusually large amounts of oxycodone to a pair of CVS stores near Sanford, Fla. Between 2008 and 2011, Cardinal sold 2.2 million pills to one of the stores. In 2010, that store purchased 885,900 doses — a 748 percent increase over the previous year. Cardinal did not report any of those sales as suspicious.

Cardinal later paid a $34 million fine to settle the case. The DEA suspended the company from selling narcotics from its warehouse in Lakeland, Fla. CVS paid a $22 million fine.

As the companies paid fines and promised to do a better job of stopping suspicious orders, they continued to manufacture, ship and dispense large amounts of pills, according to the newly released data.

“The depth and penetration of the opioid epidemic becomes readily apparent from the data,” said Peter J. Mougey, a lawyer for the plaintiffs from Pensacola, Fla. “This disclosure will serve as a wake up call to every community in the country. America should brace itself for the harsh reality of the scope of the opioid epidemic. Transparency will lead to accountability.”

Aaron Williams, Andrew Ba Tran, Jenn Abelson, Aaron C. Davis and Christopher Rowland contributed to this report.

#opioid epidemic

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marcusssanderson · 7 years ago

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50 Integrity Quotes to Increase Your Authenticity

Our latest collection of integrity quotes on Everyday Power Blog. Enjoy!

“Say what you mean; and mean what you say!” It seems I heard these words at least a million times growing up. In my early years it sounded like some unconscionable standard that I was supposed to live by; wasn’t happy doing, and frankly sometimes didn’t think I could even come close to meeting.

But, with experience, I came to realize that it was meant to frustrate me, but it was about teaching me to live with “integrity!”

Formally defined, living with integrity requires displaying strong principles; being consistent; staying away from corruption and operating honorably and honestly. When you evaluate this definition, it may seem to approach a level of perfection that is difficult to reach let alone maintain; but breaking it down to the mantra you were taught in childhood to “say what you mean; and mean what you say” makes it clear, simple and achievable.

And, going further as you mature you recognize that it even goes beyond “saying” to “doing.” Your words and your thoughts must be reinforced by your actions and your deeds.

In other words, make sure the words that flow from your tongue are truly what you feel in your heart and match with the intentions and beliefs in your mind. Then, follow-up by ensuring that your actions are in synch with the words you speak. If you follow this method more often than not, you will live a life of integrity, treating others fairly, honorably and with great respect.

Sometimes, it takes a simple quote or verse to remind you of the key principles to live by. So, here are a few integrity quotes to help increase your authenticity. Read on and find one that speaks to you. Memorize it or post in key locations as a reminder to ensure your words and thoughts are consistent with your actions and deeds which will bolster your integrity!

Integrity Quotes to Increase Your Authenticity

1. “With integrity, you have nothing to fear, since you have nothing to hide. With integrity, you will do the right thing, so you will have no guilt.” – Zig Ziglar

2. “Integrity is the ability to accept one’s past choices and actions and go forth and act in accordance with one’s deepest values from within.” – Lynne Namka

3. “It is not what we profess in public, but where we walk and what we practice in secret that gives us integrity.” – Sir Francis Bacon

4. In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence and energy. And if they don’t have the first, the other two will kill you.” — Warren Buffett

5. “Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way.” – Aristotle

6. “He is not wise to me who is wise only in words, but he who is wise in deeds.”- St. Gregory

7. “Power is actualized only when word and deed have not parted company.”- Hannah Arendt

8. “Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not.” – Oprah Winfrey

9. “Integrity is telling myself the truth. And honesty is telling the truth to other people.”- Spencer Johnson

10. “Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.” – Albert Einstein

Integrity quotes to help ensure your words and thoughts are consistent with your actions and deeds

11. “Your reputation and integrity are everything. Follow through on what you say you’re going to do. Your credibility can only be built over time, and it is built from the history of your words and actions.” – Maria Ra Zumich -Zec

12. “To know what is right and not do it is the worst cowardice.” – Confucius

13. “To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” –William Shakespeare

14. “Never rob your character to enrich your pocket.” –James Lendall Basford

15. “Do not repeat anything you will not sign your name to.” –Author Unknown

16. “Laws controls the lesser man. Right conduct controls the greater one.”- Chinese Proverb

17. “Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.” –George Bernard Shaw

18. “Live in such a way that you will not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.”-Will Rogers

19. “God grant me the courage not to give up what I think is right even though I think it is hopeless.” – Chester W. Nimitz

20. “The reputation of a thousand years may be determined by the conduct of one hour.” – Japanese Proverb

Integrity quotes to remind us to always do the right thing

21. “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart”. –Alexander Solzhenitsyn

22. “Every human being has…and attendant spirit…if it does not always tell us what to do, it always cautions us what not to do.” – Lydia M. Child

23. “The strength of a man’s virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts.” – Blaise Pascal

24. “I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the house-tops.” – Oscar Wilde

25. “Live so that your friends can defend you but never have to”. –Arnold H. Glasow

26. “Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.” – Harper Lee

27. “The time is always right to do what is right.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

28. “Each of you, for himself, by himself and on his own responsibility, must speak. And it is a solemn and weighty responsibility, and not lightly to be flung aside at the bullying of pulpit, press, government, or the empty catch-phrases of politicians. Each must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, and which course is patriotic and which isn’t. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide it against your convictions is to be an unqualified and inexcusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may. If you alone of all the nation shall decide one way, and that way be the right way according to your convictions of the right, you have done your duty by yourself and by your country – hold up your head.” – Mark Twain

29. “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.”- Martin Luther King Jr.

30. “Living with integrity means:

Not settling for less than what you know you deserve in your relationships.

Asking for what you want from other

Speaking your truth, even though it might create conflict or tension.

Behaving in ways that are in harmony with your personal values.

Making choices based on what you believe, and not what others believe.” —Barbara DeAngelis

Integrity quotes to remind of the importance of this trait

31. “I am not bound to win, but I bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live up to what light I have.” –Abraham Lincoln

32. “If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it.” – Marcus Aurelius

33. “Be faithful to that which exists within yourself.” – Andre’ Gide

34. “Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn’t blow in the wind or change with the weather. It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in there and see a man who won’t cheat, then you know he never will. Integrity is not a search for the rewards of integrity. Maybe all you ever get for it is the largest kick in the ass the world can provide. It is not supposed to be a productive asset.” – John D. MacDonald

35. “Allow yourself to think only those thoughts that match your principles and can bear the bright light of day. Day by day, your choices, your thoughts, your actions fashion the person you become. Your integrity determines your destiny.” – Heraclitus

36. “A mode of conduct, a standard of courage, discipline, fortitude and integrity can do a great deal to make a woman beautiful.” –Jacqueline Bisset

37. “An authentic and genuine life grows like a sturdy tree. And like a tree, it grows slowly. Every time you make a different and better decision, it grows a little. Every time you choose to do the right thing, even when nobody would find out otherwise, it grows a little. Every time you act with compassion, relinquish your right to strike back, take a courageous stand admit fault or accept responsibility, it grows a little.” — Steve Goodier

38. “Integrity is congruence between what you know, what you profess, and what you do.” –Nathaniel Branden

39. “There comes a time in your life when you can no longer put off choosing. You have to choose one path or the other. You can live safe and be protected by people just like you, or you can stand up and be a leader for what is right. Always, remember this: People never remember the crowd; they remember the one person that had the courage to say and do what no one would do.” — Shannon L. Adler

40. “Decide what you stand for. And then stand for it all the time.”- Clayton M. Christensen

Other inspirational integrity quotes

41. “I’ve heard it said of faith that first we jump, and then we grow wings. Integrity is like that too, I think. That’s what you have to gain. The sacrifice turns into a gift that is priceless.” – Matt Baldwin

42. “Some say if you want success surround yourself with successful people. I say if you want true and lasting success surround yourself with people of integrity.”- Charles F. Glassman

43. ” You don’t have to walk on water, it’s how you walk on land.” –Jason Crabb

44. “What health is to the body; honesty is to the soul.” –Amit Kalantri

45. ” We prove ourselves by the way we live, and the way we live resonates among all we know and do.” – Robert Vanleeuwen

46. “Nobody will ever take you se rious in life, until they know that your yes is yes, and your no is no.” – Bamigboye Olurotimi

47. “A house built with integrity will endure and so will a company.” – Khang Kijarro Nguyen

48. “When you take the high road to living a virtuous life, you are fortified by knowing that regardless of what life throws your way or what storms may rage, you are grounded in goodness. In this, you secure not only your own integrity, but you secure it in the eyes of others. ” – Susan C. Young

49. “Honesty is more than not lying. It is truth telling, truth speaking, truth living, and truth loving.” – James E. Faust

50. “The thought manifest the word: The word manifests the deed; The deed develops into habit; And habit hardens into character; So, watch the thought and its ways with care, And let them spring forth from love born out of compassion for all beings. As the shadow follows the body, as we think, so we become.” –Juan Mascaro

Which integrity quotes were your favorites?

Hopefully, these integrity quotes inspired you to evaluate and improve your personal integrity. As you move forward, remember, integrity begins with the thoughts, ideas, interests and beliefs you verbalize. It then takes shape as you mold your words and visions allowing them to direct your path – the steps you take, the decisions you make, the processes you carry out.

These all define your reputation, your character, how the world sees you and responds to you as well as how you, in turn, interact with those around you. Based on the level and quality of your integrity you contribute to making the world a better place and helping those who are open and accepting strive to develop their “best self.”

Or, you strip the society of opportunities to grow as well as deny love, compassion, and advancement to fellow citizens.

So, each and every day take a look at the “one in the mirror” and remind yourself to “mean what you say and say what you mean.” Then, convert those thoughts and words into actions and deeds which correspond with your true, best and positive intentions – bolstering and upholding your integrity!

Did you enjoy these integrity quotes? Which of the quotes was your favorite? Tell us in the comment section below.

The post 50 Integrity Quotes to Increase Your Authenticity appeared first on Everyday Power Blog.

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