Chapter Three — Missing Pieces

If someone is chasing you, you better hope it’s not Charly. When Charly is hunting you, it’s more like a charging rhinoceros than a human or another vampire trying to catch you.

Charly has always been known within his vamp house in central Africa, the Sasabonsam House, as an indefatigable, incomparably puissant warrior. A little more than a century ago, he feasted on hundreds of Belgians when King Leopold controlled vast parts of central Africa as his own private kingdom in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Leopold claimed full ownership of a massive African nation called the Congo Free State that he carved out of the jungle. There was nothing free about the place. It became the nightmarish backdrop to books like Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness.

The only thing free about the Congo Free State was Leopold’s willingness to rip entire tribal nations and languages out of history books before historians had a chance to sit down and start scribbling. That, and his penchant for plundering the nation’s resources, turning valleys of gold into ruined gulleys full of blood, grieving widows, and broken, starving children.

The Sasabonsam House didn’t much care, but if they had any human allies in the region at all, it was the straggling survivors, not the invading Belgians. While the House feasted mostly on Belgians, they also kept the locals honest by occasionally feeding on them, too.

The Sasabonsam House, through feudal kings and their proxies, also convinced locals that central African vampires, the Banyana, were a side-effect of colonialism. This created a feigned alliance that made it easier for the Sasabonsam House to maintain significant landholdings deep in the jungle where the Belgians dared not tread.

Having a ten-thousand-year-old warrior (that’s Charly) as their knight in shining armor didn’t hurt. Charly ravaged entire Belgian settlements throughout King Leopold’s Congo strongholds. Europeans knew there was a fearsome power in the dark forests they tried to master, but they didn’t know what it was, or what to call it.

It was Charly.

Charly is one of the oldest living vampires on earth, if not the oldest. He’s one of the most ancient living creatures on Earth, too. He’s older than the giant sequoia trees of California, and he sometimes looms as large when he’s bearing down on you in a cold rain. He is powerful enough that he could have survived the Jurassic Age.

You don’t want a being like that chasing you.

He chased me to the SUV, where Owens was waiting outside with Cornelia, poised to fire her special bullets into whoever or whatever was pursuing me. Cornelia was a special gun, but as my legs pumped their way toward Owens, I wasn’t sure she could stop Charly. I was even more sure that I didn’t want her to.

“Don’t shoot!” I yelled. “It’s Charly!”

Owens steadied his aim anyway. He never listens to me.

“No! Owens!”

Two choices faced Owens as I neared him, my rampaging friend close behind. One, obviously, was to shoot Charly and hope it would at least slow him down enough for me to get into the SUV and get us out of there. Even under siege from Cornelia’s bullets, which were toxic to vamps, Charly would probably survive and heal quickly enough to hunt us down soon after falling. The other choice was for me to face Charly and appeal to what was left of his mind to end his attack.

By turning around in front of Owens and his beloved anti-vampire weapon, then turning my back on him to face Charly’s charge, I guess I was choosing option two for both Owens and me.

“Fuck, Atticus, what the fuck?” Owens blurted out into what was now a horizontal, freezing rain that sliced into our faces like tiny shards of shrapnel. Garrison jumped out of the SUV, too, holding a different kind of gun, maybe a Glock.

Charly reached me more quickly than I thought he would. I knew by his footfall that he was near, but he was upon me almost the instant that I finished my pirouette in front of Owens.

You might remember from my previous tale that I sometimes envied the short life of humans. At this moment in time, I was pretty sure that humans got a raw deal. I suddenly found myself wanting much more.

I thrust my hands in front of me in a feeble attempt to stop Charly from removing my head and launching it into the Appalachian foothills north of Atlanta. “Charly,” I said. “Wait, man, it’s me. Atticus.”

Charly’s laugh was uproarious. “I know that, you chicken shit.” His laugh thundered to the point where a pine cone from a nearby tree bounced off my head. He swatted my shoulders like the old friend he was. “I had to be sure it was you, bro.”

“The fuck?” said Owens.

“Yeah,” I said. “The fuck.”

“Long story, man.” His head bobbed around like that of a skittish bird on a cautious hunt. I wondered who he was worried about. Charly wasn’t afraid of anyone that I knew of.

“Well, fuck me, let’s get out of the rain.” I looked at Owens, then the SUV. “Will he fit in there, Owens?”

Owens laughed and opened the doors. We all climbed in, Charly last. Garrison took the driver’s seat and Owens the passenger side. Charly and I sat behind them.

“What was that all about, Charly?” I asked when we were all settled. I looked down. “I think I may have shat my pants.” I never tried playing the tough guy with Charly. Nobody did. And Charly knew better, anyway, than to think that I could think I could take him in a fight without a bazooka filled with magic vampire-killing projectiles.

Somehow, Charly was already sweating. He wiped his big bald head as he said, nodding toward the house, “If I tell you what’s up in that place, you won’t believe a word of it.”

“At this point in the timeline, Charly, I’d believe a singing goat was the president of the United States. Try me.”

“Umm. Okay. But you’re not gonna like this.”

Owens couldn’t stop himself from blurting out, “Fuck’s sake.” It’s a disease he has, I think.

“Out with it,” I said.

“They cloned Daphne, man.1 They fuckin’ cloned her.”

“You’re right on both counts,” I said. “I don’t believe it, and I don’t like it.”

“And I had to make sure it was you out there in the yard, you know?”

“No, I don’t know anything. And it’s getting worse.”

Charly shook his head. He seemed genuinely shaken. “So,” he said, “I figured I’d give you a scare. I knew the real you would run like the chicken shit you are.”

I wanted to smash his newly formed smile, which had morphed into the size of a piano keyboard, into a million pieces.

“Charly,” I said. “Be nice.”

He was beaming. Pretty happy guy for a dude who was afraid of clones.

“You’re fucking proud of yourself,” I added. I was insulted, but I couldn’t deny it was a sound strategy when he continued.

“See,” he said. “A clone woulda stood its ground. No history, no real knowledge of me.”

I nodded. “I still hate you and I always will from now on,” I said in a deadpan voice. “But, shit. Tell me more.” I wasn’t ready to believe his wacky story about Daphne, but the truth was, Charly was the last person to have seen her that I knew of.

“I don’t know what the hell is going on in there,” he said, looking in the direction of the house again as a flash of lightning lit up the grounds with a double strobe of light.

“Sounds like a battle of apex predators to me,” sneered Owens. Balls of steel, still, even after all he knew about Charly.

Charly, though, no longer hated Owens, so he ignored the remark.

Calming down, breathing more slowly, Charly said, “I moved in there a few weeks ago. I lost track of Daphne in the woods about a month ago.”

“You mean, the jungle? In Madagascar?” I asked.

“Yeah, uh-huh. Whatever. We were hiding out with a Kalonoro clan. And another one, I dunno man, snatched her? I don’t know what else to call it.”

“Another Kalonoro clan?” I asked.

“Yeah, yeah. Something like that. They have this thing about newly turned vampires.” Charly shrugged. “They think they have special powers or something. Just old tales, you know? These old little vampy asses ain’t the most sophisticated dudes on the planet. But if they believe ‘em, they believe ‘em, right? So, they snatched her.”

“You might have told me sooner, dude. I’ve been scouring the fuckin’ planet for your ass for the last month and a half.”

“I’m sorry, Jade. I just got here last week. I tracked every scent in that jungle for a month. Getting you involved woulda slowed me down. I was sure I’d find her.”

I wanted to smack him again, and he knew it. He grasped my shoulders and kissed my forehead. “There’s nothin’ I wouldn’t do for you,” he said.

“I know.” I could feel tears trying to squeeze out of my eyes. “But now you’re saying they cloned her? Or someone else? I mean, there’s a big window of information I’m missing here, Charly.”

“Yeah. Well, me too. I’ve been at that house about a week, renting a room. I tracked them down. You know how good I am at tracking, right?”

I nodded. “No creature better in all the land.”

“I knew for sure wherever she was, it was somehow associated with that house. I smelled her scent. It was unmistakable.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Always has been. But wait. Before you go any further. What’s with the eye thing?”

“Eye thing?”

“Yeah, dude. Your eyes were all glazed over and black and shit before you started chasing me. That’s what got me scampering, you asshole, not because I was afraid of you.”

I was afraid of him.

Charly laughed. “You were so scared.”

I shrugged. “Maybe a little. So?”

“An old Sasabonsam trick. Works every time.”

Owens broke in with, “Can you two lovebirds try to get to the central issue here? Old Garrison here is about to fall asleep.” Garrison responded with a dirty look.

“Can’t really be hurried, asswipe,” said Charly. It felt like old times.

“What is the central issue, Charly?” I asked. “Clones? Daphne being kidnapped? What?” I was thinking about the woman on the table Owens told me about. “I mean, Owens, that was Daphne your police report was talking about, right?”

“Ya think?” Owens said sarcastically.

“Wait, what?” asked Charly.

“That’s why it would have been nice for you to come forward, you know, the very fucking second you got stateside?” said Owens angrily. “You were carrying a lot of information we could have used.”

“I was scared,” Charly said. That kind of comment wasn’t going to elicit a response even from Owens because it fell so far outside the zone of probability that it was impossible to react. Charly looked at me. “Scared for you. My best friend, ever, in all this world, and in all my years.” That was saying a lot for someone who’d lived 10,000 years. “I didn’t know what was wrong with her. Still don’t, man.”

“Wrong with her?” asked Owens.

“Yeah, man. I finally found her in the basement of that shithole. Lying on a fucking metal table. Staring straight up into the sky, saying nothing, her eyes wide open, no reaction to my touch. Nothin’. Until then, I heard or saw nothing from her. That’s why I didn’t tell you dudes. I mean, Jade, man, I was thinking that me coming back and telling you she got snatched right from under me would be worse than anything for you.”

“Let me handle my feelings, Charly. But go on.”

“Yeah, man. I know. I can be a dumbass sometimes.”

“Should be your fucking middle name,” said Owens. Balls of steel, that man.

Charly continued: “But I followed the wrong scent, Jade. The wrong fucking scent. That wasn’t her. Just, you know, smelled like her. And looked like her, except for the vacant, blank, comatose look.”

“So, this clone,” I said. “Is it in that house right now? While we’re yappin’ about it?”

“Uh huh.”

“Fuck me,” I said.

Owens was still pissed. “Who’s Chevalier?” he asked.

Charly looked at Owens. “So you dudes been tracking him, too?”

“Nope,” said Owens. “We just discovered how much we love sitting in SUVs for hours in Midtown neighborhoods eating donuts together in the freezing fucking rain. Fuck, man? How have you lived so fucking long with all that salt in your head?”

“Owens,” I said. “We were here for like, five minutes.”

Owens was pushing Charly pretty hard. Hard enough to make me wonder if Owens thought that maybe Charly was a clone. They always had an antagonistic relationship, but Charly reached a point during the Jerrold Mountain battles with the Wurdulac where I knew he’d throw his body in front of a train to protect Owens. Not that a train could hurt Charlie.

But this was a risky test, one that, if the clone responded by taking Owens out, would only prove that Owens was a smart dead guy.

But Charly was smart, too. Smarter than Owens knew. He smiled at Owens. “I see what you did there. These clones, dude, they have no personal history. You wouldn’t be able to piss it off this way”

Owens just stared.

“Good thing, too,” said Charly.

“Yeah, well,” said Owens. “That’s assuming I believe all this clone bullshit. But after Longtooth, I guess I’ll buy anything for now.” He still had a fresh scar in his hand from his coffee house encounter with Longtooth.

“And the Mouras Encantadas,” I said.

“Yeah, no shit,” said Owens.

Garrison then broke into the conversation. “Can we assign blame later?” he asked. “We need to sync up our stories. Charly needs to know everything we know, and we need to know everything Charly knows. Right now, it’s like we’re standing around shooting bullets into the air.”

Owens raised his hand. “I’ll go first. But first we need to decide what we should do about the Daphne clone, because she might not be a clone. Mr. Apex here might be wrong about everything.”

“It’s not her,” said Charly.

“You might be betting a friendship on that statement,” warned Owens, looking at me.

I shook my head sadly and choked out, “It’s not her.”

Owens nodded. “Then we should sit somewhere more comfortable and figure this shit out.”

The rain had dissipated, so after checking a weather app, we decided to drive up into Gwinnett to a steakhouse near Truist Park that Garrison knew well.

On the way there, Owens told Charly everything he had told me about the police report, and I covered everything I knew about the rest of it.

There were pieces to our version of the story that we knew were just sort of flying around loose with no connection to anything, especially the title frauds. But somehow, we knew everything was connected.

By the time Charly was finished with his side of things, some of it began to fall into place.

But I began to wonder if I’d ever see Daphne again.

Here’s a standalone short story, a noir romance, about Charly:

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You can check out the first novel in the series on Amazon, where it’s free if you have Kindle Unlimited.

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Footnotes

Chapter Three of the Psalm of Vampires sequel, Vampire Elegy, is about to drop any day now, so if you haven’t checked out the first two chapters and the prologue, now’s a good time.

So far, we’ve learned that there’s a mysterious chap named Chevalier in a ghostly house in Atlanta. In his house lies a woman in a coma who seems to maybe, perhaps, possibly, suspiciously, even, resemble Jade’s love interest, Daphne, who we thought was incubating in Madagascar’s jungles among the dwarf vampires known as the Kolonoro after Jade’s other lady friend Moreland turned her.

Whew! I’m exhausted just reading that, aren’t you? This is why you should hurry and catch up. Lots going on!

Anyhoo, there appears to be a connection between Chevalier and a local title fraudster that Jade has a strong urge to drain, but we don’t yet know what that connection is.

Vampire hunter and Atlanta police detective Standmoore Owens and his vampire friend (that’s Jade — long story, but it’s all in Psalm of Vampires) have decided to check out the place in Chapter Two. It doesn’t end well.

Here’s the first installment of Vampire Elegy:

Read the Prologue

Here are links to the next two chapters:

Chapter One

Chapter Two

You can also find more of my fiction here:

https://www.ruminato.com/s/fiction?sort=top

Now, on to some indie writer promos.

Check out some promos from other indie writers…

Fallen: Complete First Book of the Series

by Patrick Abbott

Available in EPUB, MOBI, and PDF formats. Read on your Kindle, phone, tablet, computer and more

**The Complete First Book. Books 1, 2, and 3 available on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited**

Brendan Murphy nearly died fighting for his country. Now he’s trying to stop a war.

Five years ago, alien ship appeared in low orbit all around the world and stayed there, waiting. A highly advanced alien race known as the Sabia lingered with little contact with humanity, and the worlds’ governments have been eager for answers – and access- for years.

When combat veteran Brendan Murphy is wounded stopping an attack on a Sabia diplomat, he finds himself whisked aboard one of their ships and given medical aid. This rare opportunity finds him walking a tenuous line between burgeoning friendships and secret agenda that will test his loyalties and sanity in ways he can’t begin to imagine.

Check out more on Fallen, Risen, Dormition, and the upcoming finale Assumption.

Order on Amazon directly at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09ZB1K98K

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The Testament of Silence

by Evelin Kholeli

His Father’s War Was Fought with Guns. His Will Be Fought with Data.

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by Grant Kelly

The Church Filled With Ghostly Watchers

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Notes

Blurbs of each book are written by the indie authors included in the post.

Inclusion of these books does not constitute an endorsement of any of the promoted books here, as I may not have read them. This promotion is part of a cooperative promotion by Indie authors. If you read one and like it, leave a comment! There are no affiliate links in this post.

I do not acquire any pennies for promoting these books. It’s strictly a cooperative venture between indie authors.

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Chapter Two — The Stakeout

You’re probably wondering where Daphne is. Yeah, me, too.

Owens, Moreland, and I looked for her and Charly in Madagascar and even managed to meet with remnants of the Kalonoro, the local vampires who rule the parts of the Malagasy jungles where Charly took her to incubate after Moreland turned her.

The Kalonoro are tiny little vamps, no more than about three feet tall. The giants among them might reach four feet. They’re covered in hair that requires a little more hygienic attention than they seem willing to provide.

They also all sound like loud men. Even female Kalonoro carry a booming voice that could serve as a boat horn.

We were told that Charly and Daphne sequestered with a Kalonoro clan near a small village in the jungle, but that was the only information we were able to collect from the mysterious little creatures during our two-week mission.

Owens’ leave of absence from the Atlanta PD after the events at Jerrold Mountain and in Singapore didn’t last long. He had assumed he was on thin ice, considering he bucked just about every regulation on the department’s books, but instead he was credited with busting open the simple fact that vampires existed, something humans had suppressed for hundreds of years.

His entire world was one big high-five for months after that, but he wasn’t interested in accolades. He wanted to help me find Daphne.

I’ll never understand his turnaround. But there it was. We became much more than frenemies because of all that had transpired. We were friends. It was too weird to think about much, so I didn’t.

He’s still a vampire hunter at heart. His first instinct is to make us extinct.

I guess it’s a lot like war. We had gone to battle together, saved each other’s lives more than once, and bonded over a common enemy.

I still think he’s a bit of an asshole, but he’s my asshole, and I love him like a brother. His lifespan, though, is tiny. I won’t know him long. He’ll flicker out and die before I lose another hair. But this felt good, anyway. I’m always a sucker for a story of redemption. Aren’t you?

When he called me one late Friday afternoon, I figured it was important. We were friends, but not the kind who texted each other all day.

“We need to meet,” he said.

“Those aren’t the words I like to hear at the end of a halfway decent week,” I said.

“What if I told you I might, and listen, man, when I say ‘might,’ I mean that in its strongest sense of distant possibility, know where Daphne is?”

Owens would never joke around with something like that. He knew what she meant to me.

“I need to check out a house in Midtown,” he said. “And I don’t want to do it alone. For one thing, because everything indicates it’s a vampire den, but for another, Daphne might be there.”

I was too jaded to feel much excitement. Her disappearance had felt complete, as if someone had finished a mission designed to leave me with nothing but her shadow on every wall in every room that I would ever enter again.

That’s how it feels when someone you love falls away without warning. A part of them follows you, breathing upon your every move, sensing your next plan, your next thought, but unable to express themselves beyond a sensory perception driven by memory and a hunch that lodges in your head: “Hello, Jade,” she says, “No, not there. Try this instead.” This is done without words. It is pure contemplation, but it isn’t yours.

With that apprehension, I agreed to join my new friend.

When we met for coffee at Queen’s Coffee near Piedmont Park, Owens told me about what he called a spooky house, and someone named Chevalier.

“Technically, it’s not his house anymore,” I said after he finished the story.

“Huh?”

“Long story, man.”

“When has that stopped you?”

“Fair. Well, some title fraudster snatched his home’s title from under him.”

“Shit, Atticus, how do you snatch a title from a guy who’s probably not a legal resident?” Owens had taken to calling me by my real name. Atticus. Of the great Argeadai House of Vampires. Nephew of Alexander the Great. But, of course, Owens never mentioned anything beyond “Atticus.” In fact, I think he called me “Atticus” because he thought it would annoy me, since he knew I enjoyed using my adopted name, “Jade Mourning.”

I shrugged.

“How do you yourself, in fact, legally possess a title to your fucking grand estate in Buckhead? I’ve always meant to ask you, but it’s been so far down on my list of questionable shit about you that I’ve never gotten to it. Now it seems relevant.”

“Haven’t you ever seen those cheesy web ads that say, ‘These vampire real estate tricks will make you rich?’”

Owens rolled his eyes.

I continued. “Or, ‘this one trick will. . .”

“. . .Shit, Atticus, shut the fuck up. What do you say? Ready for an adventure? Hopefully something more successful than our last one?”

I didn’t know if he was referring to the Wurdulac of Jerrold Mountain or to a statistically significant portion of Singapore’s population getting wiped out by the Mouras Encantadas. Maybe both.

I leaned my chin on my hand and flitted my eyes his way. “You mean the one that forged this beautiful bromance?”

“What I’d give for a wooden stake right now,” he replied.

“You know that’s a myth,” I said.

“Worth a try anyway. Well?”

“Well of course. I’ve been miserable for months.” I didn’t tell him about the powerful urges I’d been fighting. I couldn’t talk about that with Owens. I couldn’t tell him how close I had come the night before to draining Billy the title thief. Owens couldn’t understand. But Daphne’s long disappearance had made me despondent to my core. That Charly, her protector during her flight to Africa, was missing, too, added to it.

“I guess here’s the thing,” I said. “I think wherever she is, Charly is. Your police report doesn’t seem to mention a guy the size of a Russian tank.”

“What about the dude in the kitchen?”

It didn’t sound like Charly to me, but I didn’t have a good reason for suggesting that. Physically, I could see why Owens thought it might be him. All I had was: “The first thing anyone notices about Charly, despite his ridiculous size, is the fact that his big black bald head looks like it’s about to uncap itself and blow a geyser of steaming sweat into the room.”

“I don’t think...”

“And he was in a kitchen, for fuck’s sake. If that was Charly, the guy filing the police report would have mentioned Charly spilling a pool of sweat onto the floor.”

“He fits the description, Atticus. And if he’s watching over her for some reason without letting us know, don’t you want to know why? Maybe she’s sick, or whatever, but this, this ain’t right. Something ain’t right.”

I nodded. “Okay. How do you want to handle it?”

“We do this the old-fashioned way. The police way. We do a stakeout.”

“I thought the police way was to bust in with guns blazing.”

“Nah, I think we gotta be careful here. We have no idea what the hell is going on in that house.”

I told him about the title fraudster.

“So, wait. You were gonna eat this guy and he turns out to be a guy who’s illegally gained title over the house where maybe Daphne is being held captive?”

“Stop calling it ‘eat.’”

Now it was Owens’ turn to shrug.

“Fuck’s sake, Owens. That’s insulting.”

“I didn’t have any of this fraudster info on my bingo card before our chit chat,” said Owens, dumping a pile of sugar into his newly delivered coffee.

No wonder humans have the shelf life of deer ticks, I thought, as I watched him pour the sugar. “So?”

“So, same plan. We do a stakeout.”

“Does this mean I have to sit in a car for several hours trying to make nice with you while you stink the thing up with human scent? I’m gonna need a hazmat suit for this.”

“I’ll wear cologne.”

“You hate cologne.”

“The bigger problem is that you’re not easy to hide. It’ll be like trying to conceal a purple giraffe.”

“In the movies, you guys always have a van with gizmos and dudes in the back. I could just hide there.”

“Not the worst idea. I can probably arrange for a department vehicle big enough to do the job.”

“With tinted windows, right? I love tinted windows.”

“The works, dude. All kinds of electronic toys.”

“I’m liking this more and more. But won’t a big ass Chevy Suburban with black windows be sort of obvious? The other thing you always see in movies is a work van of some kind. I think it should be a work van.” I thought about it for a minute. “But damn, I do love toys.”

Owens sighed. “I’m sure I can work up a van with a few toys in it and a company name on the outside. Just like in the fuckin’ movies.”

“It all sounds fun, but I have a better idea.”

“Oh, goody.”

“You and Garrison sit in whatever vehicle you decide on. And I act as a listening device. I can stand outside and listen in. I’ll catch 90% of what’s being said inside. They’ll never see me.”

“I think Chevalier is a vampire. He’ll know you’re there. You fuckers have a sixth sense about that shit.”

“My man,” I said. “I’ve been practicing stealth for more than two thousand years. I think I can figure out how to stay hidden from one vamp for a few hours. You sure it’s just the one?”

“All indications. Except maybe the big guy. Charly.”

“It’s not Charly. Okay, so two then. Not a problem. I think we have a plan. Plus, it keeps us away from each other, which is how we get along the best.”

“We should write a kids’ book about how to frenemy,” said Owens.

“We’re more than that.”

“We aren’t.”

“Owens, I’m the best friend you’ve never had.”

“No wonder I’m such a miserable son of a bitch.”

We did a little more planning, then the three of us, Owens, I, and Owen’s partner, Garrison, rode out to Chevalier’s place in Midtown that evening.

The house was a massive old Edwardian, but it looked like one half of the top floor had been cut in half vertically. The gabled roof on the home’s east side halted abruptly so that the west side of the roof dropped into what looked like new construction with a flat roof. The west side of the home extended nearly to one of two iron fences fitted closely together that surrounded the property.

Somebody didn’t want people knocking on the front door of that house. There were two gates, one for each iron fence, which were about three feet apart. Both gates appeared to be equipped with electronic and deadbolt locks. The exterior fence was lined with tall, pointed spires that looked sharp enough to use at the end of a spear.

It was dark outside, but I could see all that because two floodlights illuminated the upper half of the home. A set of light blue lawn lights lit up the ground.

Owens didn’t have time to work up a van in this short amount of time, so the three of us sat in a big dark blue Chevy Suburban with the kind of tinted windows I like. Garrison handed me a necklace with a small device attached.

He looked like he had lost fifty pounds. I barely recognized him, especially with his new Van Dyke beard. “It’s a little like a body cam, but we can hear you whisper. Don’t talk loud, cuz we’re wearing these.” He pointed to an earbud. “You’ll blow our eardrums out.”

“Ozempic?” I asked.

He looked at Owens, who shrugged. “Huh?”

“Never mind,” I whispered as I bent my head down to leave the vehicle.

“Hey!” Owens whispered loudly. “That’s not how a stakeout works!” I proffered a sexy grin and escaped the big SUV.

As soon as I closed the door, a clap of thunder echoed through the clouds above. A bolt of lightning struck nearby, immediately followed by another, more explosive thunderclap. I felt no surprise when all the lights around the house flickered out.

I grabbed one of the vertical rectangular bars of the gate and used my arm strength to help whip my legs over the two ten-foot-tall wrought iron fences, landing on the balls of my feet, my legs bent like a predator poised to strike.

I found it amusing that Chevalier had built the fencing to prevent human intrusion without any thought to a vampire hurdling his first line of defense. I assumed there would be more obstacles in my immediate future.

There was a fair chance he already knew I was there. There was an equal chance that he was like me, and any extensive video camera system he was using was mostly for show, not so different than my estate’s Calacatta marble floor.

A hard rain began to pelt my body. It only took a moment for the long drapes of my hair to soak through the back of my yellowing, faded Nirvana t-shirt. I whispered into the device, “Owens, you don’t have a weather app on your phone?” No response. I gleefully imagined his stream of epithets with Garrison helplessly looking on.

Through the driving rain, I noticed a figure dragging a body around the front corner of the house to the side. Only one person I knew was that large with the kind of agility he was displaying.

“Charly?” I yelled, forgetting Garrison’s request to keep it quiet. “Fuckin’ Charly?” I strode toward him, but he disappeared with the body around the corner like a deer escaping into a copse. “Charly, man!” I ran to the side of the house, my feet sloshing through an already flooded lawn of tall, unkempt grass. “Charly!” The storm made it difficult to track where Charly went.

When I reached the side of the house, Charly wasn’t there. I ran to the back in the pitch black of night. Strobes of lightning illuminated the old Edwardian like paparazzi bulbs lighting up celebrities. Even though I can see at night as well as any other nocturnal animal, the rain complicated things, making everything blurry. The flashes of light were welcome, but not very helpful. Charly had always been an elusive cat when he needed to be.

“I’m going in, fellas,” I whispered to the device hanging from my neck. But then I felt Charly’s unmistakable vice grip on my shoulder.

“For what?” he growled. I tried to spin around, but he held firm. I backed my head into his with a bang, then turned to face him after he released his hand.

“Charly, fuckin’ hell, man,” I stammered.

When I looked into his eyes, their yellow tiger sclera were gone, replaced by thick, dark film. The soft black marbles his eyes had become revealed no pupils. He glowered at me, hissed, showed his fangs, and I ran out of the yard toward the SUV, hearing Charly’s heavy feet in pursuit.

Thanks for reading!

You can check out the first novel in the series on Amazon, where it’s free if you have Kindle Unlimited.

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Until now.

The story of how I created an app that captures the images of these beings is one born out of an accident.

It happened during what some people call The Eradication.

Magic, the ultimate weapon of the resistance fighter, didn’t just start happening. At least, that’s not how I look at it.

When people began to download MagicAct and see real, live, images of angels and demons, a big segment of humanity began to tap into that part of our universe, a part of our universe that has always been there. The only reason it has been out of reach is that people didn’t believe.

People began taking pictures of the beings who are responsible for so-called coincidences. Next, they began to tap into their power.

It is giving us a fighting chance in this Eradication. It is giving us hope.

“It works like this.” I was showing it to Zor, who likes to say his real name is his online name, “ballsyUnicorn”, which probably tells you all you need to know about Zor.

I mean, Zor is the type of dude who spent hours online watching twenty-year-old girls dance on Twitch and OnlyFans, joining various streams of comments with remarks that didn’t quite get him blocked. That was before the Eradication started. You’d expect that a dude like that isn’t going to last long, but here he is. Sometimes you just never know what’s inside a person until a crisis hits.

I attached a lens piece to my iPhone. We — my company, were able to get it approved for sale by marketing it as a zone analysis tool. The little lens attachment was supposed to analyze a zone to determine the number of Eradication survivors, and send reports to The Bureau.

Some zones are supposed to be completely free of people, and the idea was that the tool would be used as a citizen’s spyglass of sorts. When it didn’t work as advertised, the government simply ignored it.

“We worked with these dudes out of Switzerland,” I was saying to Zor. “This thing captures at a frame rate equivalent to five trillion images per second. It can capture things moving faster than light into images.” My company wrote the software, the Swiss produced the camera and my friends in Bangalore developed the chip.

“So? I mean, what’s the point?” Zor. Always the deep thinker.

“Well, most phone cameras do about 120 frames per second. See, the device here encrypts flashes of light. Every time one of these coded flashes hits an object, the object bounces an image signal containing the same precise encoding. Then, all the image signals are gathered into one single photograph. You know, one frame. Then the chip inside the device separates all these signals into individual image frames.” Really fast, I didn’t bother saying.

“Outstanding,” said Zor sarcastically. He was probably trying and failing to imagine a girl dancing at the speed of light, and completely unable to see the utility in this.

Honestly? I didn’t see much utility in it, either. The project was a bit of a lark. Something to do.

Most of the things still happening on the internet were similarly random, happening through cell towers and neighborhood antennas strung up by the Resistance and torn down by the authorities and strung up again. It was all very clandestine. These days it is almost all gone, but not before the app had managed to accomplish its unplanned mission. The internet still worked. Things could go viral.

And they did.

And the angels have spoken.

Enough people bought the device and app that they began to take very interesting pictures and movies. Demons entering the mouths of their hosts. Or swirling wildly around people in motion as if trying to guide them. Crowds of them would gather around politicians and military personnel and the people who supervised the Eradication bots.

Some of the apparitions that were captured in these images moved without moving. If they appeared still, they were not, in truth, still at all.

They existed in one part of a movie in one space for an infinitesimal moment, then in another moment in just the slightest different position. It was as if they were part of an edited video. It was as if they were lifted out of their space and dropped into the same position, one millimeter apart from the original place.

But what they were really doing was moving from place to place at speeds we can’t see with the human eye.

These differences were only discovered through analysis by dedicated servants of a still uncertain cause. You couldn’t see the changes with the naked eye, not really. You needed video capturing software to find the tiny displacements.

I can’t tell you what inspired people to analyze these things. Maybe it was just the bizarre nature of the images. A good many people assumed they were staged. But the recorded sightings became so common that people realized that they were real.

The demons, especially the demons, were everywhere. Swarms of them, like a pestilence, haunting everyone and everything, twenty-four hours a day.

People stopped analyzing and just focused on shooting and distributing their shots over what was left of the internet.

Angels were seen, too, but they seemed rare. And, frustratingly, they didn’t seem to be interfering much with demonic activity. It was like they just allowed this invasion to happen. Most people eventually concluded that the invasion was simply a permanent presence.

One person posted an image of a huge angel, a grey man with a beard and a wildly colored costume, whose presence consumed an entire hospital room as he rested his hand on the forehead of a small child. It is said that the image made a million people cry.

It is also said that it was the beginning of the human migration to a place dubbed MagicLand. Not a place, a thing. A way to tap into the magic of the good souls of the universe. A way to fight back.

Thanks for reading! This short story is set about 2,000 years before the events of MagicLand.

I am working on two sequels at once: A Psalm of Vampires sequel and a MagicLand sequel. The first chapter of the MagicLand sequel will be available soon.

The Psalm of Vampires sequel’s first chapter can be accessed starting here:

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Chapter One — The Fraudster

Nobody can hide in a room better than a vampire. Especially when his target is an inebriated couple moments away from self-inflicted wanton violence.

I didn’t need to be inside the apartment. I could have stood outside and heard every word, but I wanted to try the new, although ancient, trick I learned at Jerrold Mountain.

Blending into a wall where the only decoration was an old Vargas girl print in a black plastic frame, it was like I was right there with them.

A woman named Marge sat on a couch in nothing other than unzipped distressed blue jean shorts, accusing the man, through a drunken lisp, of infidelity. The alcohol coursing through her veins next made a series of promises about the condition of the apartment that could never be kept. “I swear I’ll clean every day, Billy, every day. Even the fuckin’ piss you leave on the floor next to the toilet.”

Normally, I hate feeding on drunks. The alcohol doesn’t affect my body, but the taste of the blood is foul. I was about to make an exception with Billy.

My wall blend was making me weak, so I released it to become an ashen shadow against the unpainted drywall, almost as if you imprinted my silhouette with a dark newspaper halftone, but with no features, just a dark grey shape.

The arguing couple noticed nothing. The booze had put blinders on. Their only focus was their besotted mutual hate.

Billy drifted into the small kitchen to get another beer, screeching something clever like, “You bitch!” in the middle of his side of the mutual tirade contest.

Marge spluttered something about “You and your fucking titles caused all this bullshit” as I neared her, my full body, dressed in my favorite black tuxedo, now looming over her.

That silenced her. My fangs jumped onto her neck, but the wretched taste of her blood forced me to spit it out onto the stained, worn carpeting, where it would fit right in.

Billy walked into the living room and tried to deliver one of his smart one-liners, “Who the fuck are you?” as Marge’s body convulsed enough to break a few ribs.

“Oh, come on,” I said as I approached him with my bloody canines exposed. “I barely got enough to knock her out.” I looked at her, then Billy. “She’s putting on an act, isn’t she, Billy.”

“Who the fuck are you?” he tried again.

By this point, I was ready to turn him into human jerky. But then I remembered James Coates.

Billy’s fate would have to wait until I knew more. Out of respect for Coates, I lunged into Billy’s neck, fangs first, and took just enough blood to knock him out.

“I can’t feed on this shit,” I said as I wiped my mouth with the bottom of his black Metallica t-shirt. I spat the blood into the blank white canvas his face had become, his eyes closed, his mouth agape like he was waiting for an oversized baby spoon.

I first encountered Billy while emerging into a downpour with Moreland from a Midtown restaurant.

Short videos of her exploits in Singapore had turned Moreland into a major celebrity, which transformed her usually foul mood into a bedrock of steaming hate. Her first impulse, which she didn’t try to contain, was to lay waste to an entire hamlet in the north Georgia Appalachian foothills.

The good news for her victims was that she didn’t kill them by draining them dry. The bad news for neighboring communities was that the people she turned did not possess the most stable of minds, which led them to an epic rampage through nearby towns.

When I asked her why she once again violated her own policy of not turning humans, she hurled sets of invectives not suitable even for these pages.

I would have thought that turning a dozen internet influencers only to see them killed by Wurdulacs would have knocked some sense into her. She had taken that hard, almost like she had lost her own children.

As for turning people in general, Moreland had never been a fan. But maybe once you get a taste, you go back to it like a drug you never should have tried in the first place.

I wanted to confront her on all this. We normally never hesitate to get in each other’s faces or call each other out, but this felt different. Personal. I let it go.

Instead, I told her that she was also increasing her celebrity status and spreading vampire lore, a concept she had always fought. More cussing.

We were arguing about this while leaving the restaurant when I saw Billy slap a woman and push her to the ground outside a bar next door.

“Let’s drain this guy,” I said.

But Moreland wanted no part of it. “Let Darwin do his thing,” she said. “It won’t take long with that dude. Besides, I thought you hated boozy blood.”

So I bid her a fond farewell, found a dark corner in the bar, and watched Billy drink himself half to death. I counted five occasions his noxious mouth almost led to a fight before he stumbled out of the bar and into his car, a black Tesla showing its age, but apparently on autopilot, since he wasn’t weaving when he drove.

I had a hard time keeping up at one point when he ran into a series of green lights on the quiet, after-hours roads lit by amber streetlights shrouded by a soft drizzle. It’s not like in the vampire movies, where we’re a blur when we run. It’s physical exertion, just like it is for you. We’re a lot faster than humans, but I can’t outrun a car that’s doing forty.

Luckily, the Tesla hit another long series of red lights until it found his apartment building. I was surprised I was able to tail him on foot the whole way. I did it for sport, really, not thinking I’d succeed.

Now that I had, I wanted to learn more about him, so I pinned his address for later.

I visited him three times. Enough to know that he wasn’t worthy of the typical symbiotic relationship that modern vampires like me maintain with humans.

This guy was a title fraudster. I had no idea what that was until I overheard him talking to Marge about it while I lurked outside. You might remember from earlier tales that vampire ears are pretty fantastic, even though they’re not pointed.

The conversation started something like this:

Marge: “You need to roll up all those deeds into a package and sell them on the dark net, Billy. This guy Coates is onto you.”

Coates, it turned out, was a housing attorney and director of the Atlanta Housing Justice Project. He had uncovered nearly a thousand of Billy’s deed thefts, tracking them almost right into Billy’s computer.

Deed theft is easy. All a crook needs to do is forge their name on a home’s title and submit it to the local county register of deeds. Boom, the deed is theirs. Most county registrars don’t bother investigating the veracity of the title. They just stamp it, take their fee, and say, “Next!”

After the bad guy hijacks the title, they can sell the property, rent it out, or suck its equity dry with second, third, even fourth mortgages.

That’s what Billy was doing. It’s illegal, but you’d be surprised how many homeowners get scammed, especially in a big city like Atlanta.

Somehow, James Coates found out, probably through a victim’s complaint, so I visited Coates to ask him a few questions.

Coates ran his operation from a small office on Peachtree Street next to a dentist's office. Even though he looked a little befuddled at first, and even though I don’t think he’d ever talked to a vampire, the first thing I noticed about him was that he maintained a beautiful Afro that he must have borrowed directly from the early 1970s. It was a beast of a thing, big, round, perfectly sculpted, perfectly trimmed. An art project.

When I sat across his desk, I could still see the top of his magnificent black globe of hair, even though it seemed to add another foot to his six-foot frame. I detected a small loop of white thread that I desperately wanted to pick out of his hair with one of my long purple fingernails.

After our introductions, even though my eyes and nose felt hunger, I told him to relax, I wasn’t there to feed. Instead, what I wanted was for him to feed me information.

“Well, you know, this stuff is new to all of us,” he said confidently. I knew what he was talking about, but I asked him anyway. “This whole vampire thing. Don’t y’all worry about, you know, the backlash? You know it’s coming.”

“I appreciate your concern,” I said. The press reviews on vampires had not been particularly glowing since the events in Singapore. “Short answer. No. Can you tell me about deed fraud?”

He did. When I pried information out of Coates about Billy, he wanted to know if I was working for Billy or if there was something else going on.

I assured him that I had no interest in supporting Billy’s scam.

“Are you… hunting him?” he asked. Smart guy. I lied and told him no, but I could tell he didn’t believe me. “It’s just that I’m sort of closing in on him. If you kill him, it might be more difficult to compensate people for their losses.”

Such empathy toward the soon to be dead, counselor, I wanted to say.

Like any good lawyer, he switched direction. “I’ve read enough about you, to, you know, sort of understand your species is divided into different camps. Just like us. And you seem to be one of the good guys. Are you one of the good guys, Mr. Mourning?”

“I dunno, man. I mean, I try? It’s complicated.”

Coates nodded.

I asked, “Do you think this guy’s money is locked up somewhere? Or is it fluid, in and out, living on the edge kind of stuff?”

“Well, that’s just it. Haven’t gotten far enough to tell. Hell, I’m just now at the point where I can present something to the DA, who, fortunately, I have a good relationship with.”

“Lucky you,” I said sarcastically.

He chuckled at that. “But what I’m presenting to the DA is just a bunch of forged documents. Not much more than that. I don’t know jack about his financial condition, what he does with the funds, how much he’s made off each scam. None of it, really. That’ll be the DA’s problem. I’m a civil attorney. I’ll sue this guy eventually. After the DA does her bit. Our organization has several clients we’re prepared to represent. But the criminal side? I leave that to others.”

“Sounds potentially lucrative for you,” I said.

“Not really. Fool’s gold. We’re a nonprofit.”

I knew that, I remembered that, but I was testing his face. I nodded. “No. I’m not going to kill him, Mr. Coates. Not if it prevents you from accomplishing your good work.”

He scowled. “I’m not sure how good it is. For every guy we catch, a thousand get away. It’s extremely frustrating. And easily fixed. All it takes is for the County to vet deed changes. Or better yet, for the state to impose some statutory validation requirements. But as you know, Fulton County is underfunded. They’d need a lot more than bake sales to add that capability to the registrar’s office.”

A simple feeding had turned into a bureaucratic quagmire. I didn’t know Coates, but I believed him. He was one of the good guys.

“Our humble investigative team did turn up one thing you might be interested in,” Coates continued.

I raised an eyebrow.

“As I said, I don’t know much about vampires. But we all now know one when we see one. Pretty much.”

“Yeah, sure. We’re all tall, but we’re not all purple. Most of us shed our skin so we can match the skin colors of the local population.”

“Well, I sort of knew that, but thanks for confirming. Anyway, one of the title frauds that has occurred is in a house where a local vampire appears to live. A fellow who goes by the name “Chevalier.”

I shook my head, not recognizing the name.

“The press has been very clear on this, but perhaps to assuage the fear of our easily frightened human population,” said Coates.

“An apt description,” I said. “Clear on what?”

“The press has probably stated a million times that there are only a few thousand of you left. So, I thought perhaps you’d heard of this Chevalier fellow.”

I had not, and I told him so. My mind went to work trying to guess which vampire house Chevalier was from, but without more information, I was stymied.

“Is he also a fraudster?” I asked.

“No, no. He appears to be the owner of a house that was defrauded. A title forge victim.”

It was difficult for me to picture a vampire as a victim of a petty human crime, and I told Coates this, too.

“Understood. He’s on the list I have of Billy’s victims, though.” Coates tapped into his computer for a minute. “Last year. But Billy hasn’t attempted to sell the property or acquire any loans on it, or anything of that nature. The title change is it, so far. Kind of a long time doing nothing in my experience. Something is stopping him. Maybe it’s as simple as he got a look at the guy, but dudes like Billy don’t make house calls, so that seems unlikely.”

I still didn’t know much more about title fraud than I knew before meeting with Coates, but I knew one thing for certain: It was time to pay a visit to this Chevalier character.

Thanks for reading!

You can check out the first novel in the series on Amazon, where it’s free if you have Kindle Unlimited.

I don’t use AI in my writing, so I don’t know how fast I’ll be cranking this out. Thank you for your patience and support of non-AI writing.

Buy Now

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Prologue

The report passed to Detective Standmoore Owens was stamped, “For Your Eyes Only.” This was the first time the precinct captain had used his new rubber stamp since the events on Jerrold Mountain.

The report, written by an Atlanta police officer transcribing a statement by a renter named Tyrique Robinson, read like a Stephen King novel.

It began with the words, “I might be dead by the time y’all do anything about this.”

Tyrique was renting space in a rooming house near Midtown. He described the home as a large Edwardian with a modernized interior.

The owner of the house, Tyrique wrote, was a mysterious man named Chevalier (pronounced “Chevall yee yay!” Tyrique made sure to point out), who rarely emerged from his upper floor living space. The main floor of the home was, in theory, space for renters, but only two of four bedrooms on the main floor were rented, one to Tyrique. “Another to a cat I never saw until the end.”

Chevalier was a tall reed of a man, according to Tyrique, the tallest he’d ever known. “Taller than Wemby, I think,” he said. “With weird, but beautiful, brown skin that held a glowing purple hue.”

Owens sat up a little straighter at his desk when he read that.

Through the basement door, Tyrique heard a loud television blaring “60 Minutes” 24/7 on a loop from the “60 Minutes” channel played on a streaming TV platform.

The loop never quit. Twenty-four hours a day, the instructional, branded narratives of “60 Minutes” anchors slid through a bright gap at the bottom of the closed door and into the living room.

Tyrique had never noticed before that the intonation, timbre, cadence, and enunciation of “60 Minutes” anchors were all carefully designed to be the same — branded like a Starbucks roasted coffee. The voices were always muffled. Tyrique couldn’t make out the words. But he knew it was “60 Minutes.” The branded voices said so.

The basement door was always locked. The only way in was by a keycode. When he asked Chevalier who lived there, Chevalier seemed defensive. “You don’t need to know,” he said. Eventually, Tyrique was told that the tenant was in hospice from cancer.

“Well,” the transcript reported Tyrique saying, “That was the story, anyway.”

Every week or so, two “really tall” guys rolled equipment out of a truck labeled “Deep Red Medical.” At this point, Tyrique noted, there was no reason not to believe Chevalier’s explanation.

But the “60 Minutes” loop never changed. The television volume never altered. And where, Tyrique began to wonder, were the tenant’s caregivers? The only person associated with the hospice patient seemed to be one little old lady whom he saw once a week.

At precisely 8 am every Monday, an elderly, tiny, hunched, whitish-grey woman who, Tyrique said, looked like “she shouldn’t be able to walk,” hefted a large laundry bag out through the basement door. The little lady had wild tufts of thin gray hair mixed in with a lot of bald spots.

“I don’t drink or do drugs or nothin’ like that,” said Tyrique. “But I swear this happened. One day, I tried to help her as she opened the door because she struggled to push that heavy bag of laundry through it. This lady, she’s maybe four feet tall, max, hunched over all the time, older than anyone I ever seen. I’m thinkin’, she must be there for that hospice guy. Maybe some kind of caregiver. Even though she looked like she needed some caregiving herself.

“So, I offer to help. I mean, she is looking all sleepy-like and tired as she pushes the door open with that big old laundry bag and stumbles through. But when I offer to help, her eyes pop open like they’re two big ass cue balls coming out of her eye sockets. With little brown dots in the middle of them. Little tiny things.

“And she screams in a male baritone voice, for real. ‘Get Out!’ she yells out in this weird echo voice or something. It did. It sounded like echoes. Like, more than one. And a dude, man. A dude’s voice. Deep, you know? And then I know something’s up. Either that, or I’m messed in the head from something else. But, like I said, I don’t do no drugs.”

If that had been the last of it, Tyrique said, he wouldn’t have reported anything to the police. Just some bad, weird juju. No, he said, there’s a whole lot more.

The owner of the house, Chevalier, owned a small old English convertible with a distinctive enough engine noise that Tyrique could usually hear Chevalier coming or going. Tyrique made a point of saying that he wished he could have seen Chevalier driving, his long, flowing, straight black hair flying in the wind with more of Chevalier sticking out of the little car than in it.

“That car? Fired up at all hours of the night. 1:30 am., 2 a.m., 3 a.m. Where he going at two or three a.m? Then he’d be back in a couple hours. His car would wake me up at 3:30 or 4 a.m. So, it wasn’t work. I really got no idea what kind of work he does, but that wasn’t no work shift I ever heard of. And come on. Nothin’ good happens when you’re out runnin’ at two am.

“Then later, I meet a former tenant who comes there once in a while to pick up his mail cuz he ain’t made his address change yet. That’s how I learned about the hospice tenant downstairs and all.

“Man, he tells me that the dude who rented my room before me got murdered outside a bar in Midtown. What time? Yeah, you guessed it. Three a.m. or somethin’.”

Disconcerting, thought Owens as he read the report, but probably not enough for a visit to a police station.

But then he read the next paragraph.

That was written by the officer interviewing Tyrique. He wrote, “Note: The murder victim Mr. Robinson refers to appears to be the guy found in a Peachtree alleyway with the last drop of blood drained out of him. No bite marks. So, vampires ruled out.”

Never, thought Owens. Never rule out vampires.

Tyrique then launched into the next event in words the reporting officer said were filtered by a combination of hushed tones, extreme anxiety, and “some noticeable hand tremors.”

“Finally, I meet the other renter. I never saw him until the morning of that last day. I woke up to pop a breakfast burrito into the microwave. But there was almost no room for me in the kitchen, the dude standing over the stove cookin’ up some eggs was so big. Did I mention it’s a big kitchen? Vaulted ceilings. Way up there.

“Huge ass stove in the middle of it. Ancient thing. Must have been a hundred years old easy. And that dude, he took up almost all the space between where he was standing to cook and the sink area behind the stove. He wasn’t fat, neither. All muscle and brawn. But get this. He was tall, too. I mean, real tall. More than seven feet, easy. This dude could have been the entire defensive line for the Falcons. Where our scouts, man? Anyway, he greets me with a big ass smile, but his teeth are all red and shit. I’m thinking that it ain’t Halloween, so why he wearing them massive fangs? This some kinda joke?

“Hey. I was pretty tired, you know? I figure, musta been cookin’ some eggs after a long night partying. Costume party or somethin’, right?

“I heard about that Jerrold Mountain shit and all, but me and everyone else I know thought it’s bullshit. Like everything else in this country these days. Covering up something, you know?

“I know. Looking back, I was stupid. But none of that shit computes. Then you got those crazy people in Singapore talking about aliens and shit? And some people sayin’ them are vampires, too. I just never believed any of it, man. You feel me?

“So, this dude, he’s looking at me with this shit ass eatin’ red grin, all fangy and shit. And I’m like, man, I just want my fuckin’ burrito.

“So I walk around the front of the stove to get around him, cuz the microwave is next to the sink behind his big ass. He watchin’ me the whole time like he trackin’ or somethin’. Now I’m gettin’ spooked. I mean, this is one big ass human. Big old mean lookin’ brown bald head and that same purple hue as the owner of the place, Chevalier. Smilin’ at me the whole goddamn time, too!”

Owens took a bite out of a blueberry muffin and washed it down with some cold coffee. “This isn’t going to work out well for you,” Owens mumbled to a man he would never meet.

“I said my hellos, zapped my burrito, and got the hell out of there,” said Tyrique.

“The next day, that’s a Monday. 8 am, old hunchback lady bursts through the door like always. I can’t take it no more, so I leap over her laundry bag, slam the door shut behind me, and dash downstairs. She’s shrieking in that big baritone male voice the whole time.

“Downstairs, it’s just a cement basement with a big light hanging from wires in the ceiling, and I kid you not, a beautiful Asian lady lying face up on a metal bed with her eyes wide open but motionless. TV blarin’ and all. I guess it was hanging from a wall or something. Didn’t notice. Too freaked out.

“I can’t remember what she was wearing. Too flipped out, man. She looked dead in a way, but alive, too. I can’t describe it. I...”

And with that, Owens stopped reading. He knocked his chair out from underneath as he ran out of the Atlanta police precinct building, then called Jade Mourning while standing in the middle of a busy Midtown sidewalk.

Tyrique was found dead and drained the next day.

Thanks for reading!

You can read the next installment, Chapter One, here:

You can check out the first novel in the series on Amazon, where it’s free if you have Kindle Unlimited. It helps to at least read the very last, short chapter, if only to guess if a previous mystery was solved.

I don’t use AI in my writing, so I don’t know how fast I’ll be cranking this out. Thank you for your patience and support of non-AI writing.

Buy Now

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Restive Souls is an alternative history novel in which the Brits win what in our timeline is called the Revolutionary War, and emancipate North American slaves in the wake of the war. Still (forever?) in final edits, so there may be goofs, evil dangling modifiers, and other shenanigans.

This excerpt did not make the final cut, but will instead be part of a second book that follows the first volume of the Restive Souls series.

Elliot Fae was introduced in a previous chapter as the warlord who runs Savannah, Georgia, in the midst of the growing African American nation that surrounds it, called the Carolina Union. He is a lone holdout who has figured out a way to maintain slavery, as the Union does not yet have the military resources to deal with him.

In this excerpt, the reader is aware that he’s about to begin a celebration over the Phalaris Bull, a sinister event that only someone like Fae could conjure.

This excerpt will only be available for a limited time.

Excerpt from Part II of Restive Souls: The Story of the Phalaris Bull (1820)

Ultimately, all was right with Fae’s prized bull. The evening of the feast descended upon Savannah at the end of a humid May day that dripped sweat from the Spanish moss dangling from two grand live oak trees in front of the entrance to the congregational courtyard. The two facing trees met in an embrace over a long walkway filled with pedestrians attending the festival.

“You look grand,” said Mae Tanner to Fae as hundreds of guests finished settling in at their tables. Servants had built a wooden platform for Fae that circled the Phalaris Bull. Mae was with Fae inside the rectory on the north end of the courtyard.

Fae was shorter than Mae, who was an average-sized woman for her time. She straightened his white collar and offered his ephod from behind his shoulders. The ephod was embroidered in the Old Testament way, with gold, blue, purple, and scarlet yarns. The ephod bore the Breastplate of Judgement, consisting of twelve square stones stacked in rows of three. Each was a different stone: emerald, topaz, amethyst, beryl, onyx, and more. Fae glided his arms inside and turned to face Mae.

“Thank you, my dear.” Mae was twenty years his junior and quite smitten by Fae. Along with a coterie of other women from town, she had done much to organize the festival. Fae had never recovered from the death of his wife, who had been killed by a horse in a coach accident many years prior. He was not at all inclined toward Mae but appreciated her interest in him.

She was a beautiful English woman with perfect manners and a delightful thin smile that at times weakened even his pious heart. He sometimes allowed for a rush of that heart, just for the feeling of it, but he also thought Mae to be a likely Jezebel, someone who could ruin the piety of the Savannah he had spent so much effort developing.

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Her wide brown eyes blinked at his as she said, “I am so looking forward to the speaking of the bull this year, Elliot.”

Fae smiled at that. “Yes, yes, that is your favorite, I know.”

She looked out the window. “The moon is red,” she said, marveling at the engorged red orb ascending over the trees. An orange tint colored by the setting sun reflecting through thin clouds distilled the scene into a perfect painting.

“Tis a Pentecostal blood moon.” He gently touched her forearm. “You will walk me to the encirclement?”

“Of course,” she smiled with a show of unnaturally straight teeth. Fae always noticed them; perfectly white, clean, straight, whereas his were ungracefully decaying as if they were ragged stumps along the banks of the Savannah River, mangled by its eroding sediments.

He couldn’t understand what she saw in his somewhat portly exterior. He was certain she saw nothing, that it was his interior that she felt drawn to. “That’s fine,” he said, thinking that, but also in response to her charms.

Abara’s drum shook the building. Fae’s garb was traditional except for his head covering, which was not. Rather than the expected turban that had become common among East Coast clerics, Fae wore his old top hat, which he grabbed from a table and placed upon his head.

Mae hooked an arm around his elbow as they walked to the stage circling the bull. She clung tightly as they strode up the five steps to the stage. Then she released him and disappeared into the crowd.

Fae watched his audience. The crowd was seated in groups of twelve, each group at a round table. The seating arrangements were designed to represent the twelve apostles who, on Pentecost, received the Holy Spirit. The tables were draped in red cloth. The live oak trees inside the courtyard were trimmed of any moss, which was replaced by long streams of red fabric of many shapes and sizes and origin, all designed and crafted by various Savannah families.

The bull was at least twenty feet away behind the circle-shaped stage upon which Fae would deliver his sermon. Fae knew that, even at that distance, he’d feel the heat from the red fires lit under the bull’s belly, which would create a most glorious incense that would blow through the bull’s nostrils and fill the surrounding air as he spoke. By the time his sermon was over, Fae knew, his body would be sweating profusely. It was all part of the holy sacrament that made up this holy day.

Fae motioned for the Man of Light, who appeared in a long red vestment threaded with illustrations of fire along the length of his chest. The man’s face was covered by a red hood as he made his way to the Phalaris Bull carrying a long, lit torch. He bent down and lit the bowl underneath the bull. Fae motioned for the chattering crowd to be silent.

“We are here today,” he began, “to ingest the Holy Spirit, to formally take in his presence. We must feel the fullness of our sanctification in our blood and bones.”

The bull began to smoke from its nostrils. Sparks shot out of its nose, producing red, glowing flashes of light.

“Above, in the sky, my brethren! The moon is the blood red that it was when our apostles first breathed in the Holy Spirit. As it is said!” Fae began to quote from the Bible’s Acts. “And I will show wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke; the sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the day of the Lord comes, the great and magnificent day. And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved!”

He stopped to survey the crowd. “Listen!”

The bull made a horrific noise, a tortured bellow, but songlike as if a great tenor was acknowledging his torture with full acceptance and grace while expressing the purity of his punishment in an overture of his dying outcry. “That is the sound of Satan you hear, my brethren! He is wounded by your acceptance of the Holy Spirit, and oh, oh, how he moans!”

The crowd gasped in astonished unison. Many in the crowd closed their eyes as they clasped their hands together in prayer. Most had witnessed the same scene in previous festival years. The bull continued its beautifully horrific sonnet. Smoke poured from its nostrils. Mattingly, thought Fae, had tuned the instrument well.

He continued quoting from the Bible:

“Brothers, I may say to you with confidence and as it is written about the patriarch David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. Being therefore a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would set one of his descendants on his throne, he foresaw and spoke about the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption. This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you yourselves are seeing and hearing. For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he himself says, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.’

“Let all the house of our great city therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.”

Fae stopped, satisfied with the crowd as nearly everyone by now was in solemn prayer. “Alight, Satan! Be gone!” he cried out, knocking his hat off his head, then squeezing his temples with both hands. At that, the red and brown smoke from the bull’s nostrils turned white. The moaning from the bull became an eerie whistling silence. Soon after, only the crackling of the fire beneath the bull could be heard.

Fae paced around for several moments on the wooden stage in silence. His audience lost none of its patience as he looked across the tables at his raptured followers.

“Once again we are required to fulfill a heavy destiny,” he said in measured solemnity. “Today, the day of this feast, marks great celebration, but also a tradition I am always loath to embark upon.”

Everyone remained silent. Most knew what was next on Fae’s agenda.

“‘Tis the Day of Reckoning, my friends. The day one of you must come forth and confess to his or her attempt to interfere with the faithful progress of one of our dear Servants of the Lord.” He then returned to his louder voice. “I believe most of you know how this works. I will walk amongst you, and one of you shall confess to your sins.

“For it is said, in Malachi Chapter two, verses two and three: If ye will not hear, and if ye will not lay it to heart, to give glory unto my name, saith the Lord of hosts, I will even send a curse upon you, and I will curse your blessings: yea, I have cursed them already, because ye do not lay it to heart. “Behold!” Fae bellowed. “I will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces, even the dung of your solemn feasts; and one shall take you away with it!”

After retrieving his stovepipe hat from the stage floor, Fae walked down some steps at the front of the stage. He began to walk among the tables and mingle with the crowd of happy but somewhat stricken festival diners. There were fruit baskets, straw plates of bread, and large iron plates of beef in the middle of each table. The plates of beef were held above sets of small, fat candles by thin crisscrossing iron bars. Each table also had large pots of boiled corn.

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“Mr. and Mrs. Holcombe,” he said to the first table he encountered. “You look well. And your little one, Beth, why, she’s grown a foot since last week!” Fae reached toward Beth to gently tweak her nose. Beth, a young girl of about five, giggled shyly.

“And you,” said Meeker Holcombe, “The Lord has been good to you.”

“Ha!” laughed Fae. “The Lord saw fit to distribute his good looks to your fine family instead of me, and I graciously accept his decision.” As he began to circle the table, Mrs. Holcombe offered him a small rose. “Thank you kindly, ma’am. Your heart is blessed by our Lord.” He meandered about the rest of the round table with similar bouquets of opulent charm.

Before proceeding to the next table, he halted. “I hope our transgressor, who sits amongst us, will not have forgotten the duty God imposes upon us. For our sins, we repent! But God also forgives. Never forget that, my friends. Be not struck down by shame, lest God strikes you down for the appalling lie of your refusal to repent.”

Fae then proceeded to charm another table.

Fae never mentioned the transgressor he had in mind as he made his rounds. These were what he called comfort visits, designed to welcome even the most established congregants into the fold as if it were their first visit to a congregation event. After he circled each table, he announced the importance of repentance.

Fae was certain of one thing. Someone had given aid to several Servants of the Lord and helped the miscreants leave Savannah territory. Whoever had provided this assistance did it out of ignorance. Fae was certain of this. His congregation was filled with people who held no malice in their hearts. One can forgive a breach in judgment, but it was important, he thought, that the transgressor be named publicly, and this was the correct forum for doing so.

Fae therefore paced, made his rounds, and preached. He hoped for an outcome like the familiar ones of past festivals. Yet he sensed a hesitancy among the people on this day, a resistance, powered most assuredly by the devil himself. Rooting out the transgressor was proving to be most difficult on this day.

As the feast continued, Fae at last alighted upon his last table. He had reached deeply into the Bible, yet there was still no confession forthcoming. He was becoming irritable as he fantasized about Shick flogging each man at every table until the devil’s many sentries were flailing about the grounds like demonic, ghostly entrails.

“Perhaps,” he said, eyeing his final direct audience, “The instigator of this crime shall not part with his deed, and will keep it close to his chest.” This was a break from his usual warmth toward the diners at this feast, and those sitting at the last table, full of wine and bread and meat, must have wondered where they had gone wrong to draw his ire when others hadn’t.

“Who have we here?” he asked. “Why, I see Ennis and Portia McGinnis and their fine boy Aladdin. Such a curious name, Aladdin,” Fae sniffed with an upturned nose. “Curious indeed. Not a very, is it rude of me to say this? Not a very Christian name, is it?” Fae bent down into Ennis’s gaunt face. Ennis was a young cobbler and no saint. Thin but strong, he was well known in town for becoming mired in brawls within the boozy thickets of late nights at the local public houses along the docks.

“Ah, and the beautiful Rachel Williamson,” who sat alone next to the McGinnis family, sandwiched between them and the newlywed Porters of Hastings Street. “How does such a lovely lass remain un-betrothed for such a length of time as you?” he wondered aloud with an impish grin that pushed one side of his long, curling mustache to the right side of his face. He tipped his hat and moved to the Porters.

“Interesting that you sit next to Mr. Porter here rather than Missus, is it not?” Fae shook his head and clicked his tongue in a sign of disgust. “Very improper. I shall have to speak to Miss Tanner on this highly visible affront to our Lord.”

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Rachel Williamson stood up to face Fae. “For a prostitute can be had for a loaf of bread, but another man’s wife preys on your very life,” she said resolutely. “How would you have him be?” she said to Fae angrily as she looked at Brian Porter, who didn’t return the gaze as he stared ahead with glazed eyes.

“Ah, Proverbs chapter six, verse twenty-six,” said Fae, returning the determined stare. Rachel was taller than Fae. They stood toe to toe, Rachel showing no fear. Fae nodded. “You know the Word. That at least is very commendable.”

Rachel firmly grasped Fae’s shoulders and whispered into his ear, “And I know my men.” She promptly sat down and folded her napkin delicately over her lap. Fae found himself strangely amused by the incident and wondered what might be uttered in the Porter household after the event.

Undaunted, he continued to circle the table.

He stopped, alarmed, looking at a tall man in a red cape; a freeman colored like a cherry-tinted dark whisky. Fae’s heart raced at the ghastly sight. The man was almost unspeakably perfect in design aside from his unfortunate color. He wore a peculiar ensemble, not of this region. Under his heavy red cape, much too heavy for this climate, Fae thought, was a tight white shirt, of cotton, Fae believed, not at all becoming a gentleman. Fae could see multiple stretches and layers of finely toned muscles under the cape that gave evidence of substantial athletic prowess. He wore long, flowing blue pants that several people could have fit in, so much bigger were they than necessary.

“I don’t know you,” Fae hissed.

His alarm magnified tenfold when he noticed who was sitting next to the stranger. How had he missed it? The Mayor of Savannah, James Wayne, stood up. “My friend,” said Wayne. “You look like you’ve seen an other-worldly apparition.” The stranger also stood up. “I’m afraid I owe you an explanation. This is Ransom Cane. He disembarked only moments ago, and I snuck him into your fine celebration,” laughed Wayne.

“I’m sure I don’t understand,” stammered Fae, still dumbstruck.

“Mr. Cane represents the Seminole Nation. He is here on a trade mission.”

“The Seminole Nation.” Fae was horrified. He had heard stories that the Florida peninsula had been overrun by savages, but this man appeared to be an appalling amalgamation of two inferior races — the natives of Florida, presumably, and the slave race. Cane’s head was wrapped by a purple turban topped by one small feather and dotted with semi-precious stones such as emeralds and rubies. The turban didn’t fully cover the top of his head, revealing black curly hair that looked like it was sprinkled with large grains of salt. He was more African than Indian, thought Fae, more slave than Indian, more savage, he assumed, than either.

Cane’s face featured almond-shaped eyes and a wide nose that further gave notice of his heritage, but his skin, although brown, contained a modestly reddish tint accentuated by the reddish light of twilight. He wore one small ring in his right nasal passage that made Fae want to strike the man down on the spot. He wondered what kind of horrific false idols the man worshipped. More hideous than Baal, no doubt, he thought.

Cane was only slightly taller than the average man, but he appeared taller than most of the people around him; his athletic, wide body dominated the surroundings. The man who had been sitting next to Cane was an even larger specimen, Fae noted. The two men were like the dominant buildings of a small town.

The man next to Cane was dressed somewhat differently, Fae noticed. His head wore a thick blue wrap, the same general color as one wrapped around his neck, except that the one around his neck had a much lighter shade. Another turban, thought Fae as a chill struck down his spine, cursing under his breath the presence of infidels. The neck wrap covered something that looked to Fae like leopard skin, prompting him to wonder if there were leopards in Florida. He didn’t seem to be wearing pants, but instead a long, flowing, rippled blue skirt the same color as Cane’s pants. Given only a glance, and Cane’s billowing pants, Fae would have had a difficult time discerning which man wore the skirt.

Cane bowed respectfully and offered a hand. Fae reluctantly shook it.

“A word,” said the mayor, gently handling Fae’s elbow to lead him away from Cane and the table. Cane, aware of the situation, nodded graciously and sat down.

“He arrived on an ironclad steam frigate not an hour ago.”

“That explains why I haven’t seen you here until now,” said Fae. In truth, Fae hadn’t noticed. He held little regard for the powerless mayor. Then he found himself again taken aback. “Did you say an ironclad frigate? Are the French in league with these heathens from Florida? And do tell. What, precisely, is an ironclad frigate?”

“The man didn’t let on as to its precise technical specifications, but she was seen ashore by dozens of witnesses. It is a large warship, Elliot, wrapped in metal. T’isn’t a wood craft, nor with sail. Mr. Cane and his entourage arrived by way of a set of smaller craft, leaving the metal beast off the docks.”

“Did you see this thing?”

The mayor nodded. “Indeed I did.”

“Guns?”

“None that I could see. But she was too far out for me to truly ascertain.”

“This is the work of the French, no doubt. Or perhaps the Spanish.” Fae thought about this quietly for a moment. “What in heaven’s name could be their game?”

“There’s more. While I was accompanying Mr. Cane and his entourage, he informed me that his Seminole Nation has sent five warships to Haiti, to enforce a treaty, he said.”

“Nonsense. It’s all a demonic ruse of some kind. Sounds like something the Spanish would do rather than the French, does it not? Such a ruse?”

“I couldn’t say. But the Seminole have rousted the Spanish from Florida some time ago.”

“What other outlandish news have you for me?”

“Only this. Mr. Cane is the elder statesman for the Seminole Nation.”

“By this, you mean to suggest he believes himself to be the barbarians’ head of state?” chuckled Fae.

“I’m afraid so.”

“I will need to have the premises cleaned and well sanitized after the feast. God knows what parasitic creatures live on that beast. Why must you have brought him here to me? Could you not have kept him above a tavern by the docks with the other malodorous trollop-chasing heathen from the Caribbean who occasionally infest our port?”

“Would I have known you should have preferred that I could have considered it,” snorted Wayne, who enjoyed wordplay. His straight, perfectly trimmed eyebrows always angled upwards but in a more pronounced way with those words. Fae marveled at how Wayne’s brown-gray hair seemed to stand straight up as a permanent fixture without being affected by wind or rain as a gusty breeze whipped through the festival grounds, then dissipated. He wondered if the hair consisted of a set of thin decorative wires.

“And if he is as wicked as you appear to think,” continued the mayor, “perhaps he would have found his way to your rice coast and lured the Servants of the Lord toward his cause, and Savannah would have found a similar fate as so many other port towns along the most southerly portions of the coast.”

Fae held one finger up. “I did not imply any wickedness. I merely am pointing to his barbarian ancestry. Never mind all that, I thank you for the information. I’ll oblige him with the respect I’d offer any head of state. And in that regard, I shall remind him we have several gunboats of our own, quite within the vicinity.”

“I don’t believe he has come here to deal in threats.”

Fae hoped that was so. He knew well that the Admiral of the Savannah Fleet was an ancient mariner whose time had long passed and would have trouble outmaneuvering his command ship around a large floating tuna carcass. “What, then?”

“Trade.”

“Indeed?”

“I suggest you hear him out. Based on his surname, one can assume he will propose what he considers a sweet offer.”

“I have my doubts, but I shall be gentlemanly, if only to curry favor with the Lord, who insists we treat world leaders, aghast as it makes me breathe such words regarding heathens, with appropriate respect.”

Wayne nodded as the two men ambled back to Cane’s table. When Fae approached Cane, Cane stood up and bowed slightly. “Mr. Cane, I am told by the good mayor you represent the Florida peninsula’s trade interests?”

Cane smiled wryly.

Notes

Image credits: Adobe stock.

This excerpt was not paywalled. My upcoming chapters for the sequel to Psalm of Vampires will be my first paywalled story. All non-fiction and most other fiction will remain free. New novels will follow the “serial” format of yore.

As for Restive Souls’ release date, sorry, I still don’t know yet.

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Atticus hated the dust in this place. In this part of the world, the dry air was softened only by the ocean salt, but that wasn’t reaching him here. He longed for the humid air of Thessaloniki.

But Atticus was an adventurer. He didn’t come here to be coddled by gentle winds. Whenever he heard of an uproar visiting a land he was unfamiliar with, he rushed to it with the gait of a bull charging a Celtiberian matador.

Rushing to a place of interest, though, often meant hating the place. This was never truer than here. Atticus had met a man who called himself a shepherd. Then they killed him.

The way local clerics murdered his new friend in this foreign land made him want to rampage with a bloodletting that would be etched onto the dry stones of their buildings until some merciful soul buried their unholy city in salt.

He couldn’t help but witness the murder because they made such a spectacle of it that avoidance was impossible. Every citizen from miles around witnessed it. Atticus couldn’t imagine what foul barbarians could invent the cruelty bestowed upon his friend, but worse, in his mind, was the fanatical gathering that cheered it on.

Yet his new friend withstood it with the strength of a dying gladiator. Stoic, like the greatest Greek philosophers, he asked only once for mercy from whoever oversaw both human and vampire existence.

The shepherd knew who or what that was, it seemed. His familiarity with that unseen universe was his superpower. Atticus had heard stories that the shepherd wasn’t afraid to flaunt his knowledge, but that was not the man he remembered.

The man he knew told him that all power rested only in the truth of love. Atticus had known powerful love at times throughout his life, but he assumed the passion of vampire love far outshone anything humans could experience or even conceive.

But his new friend was a human who understood love better than Atticus or any other vampire he knew.

He first met the shepherd on an empty road in stifling heat. Atticus was bent over three dead human bodies, his first kills in this land. They were random choices, a trio of bandits waiting for passing travelers. In the wrong place at the wrong time.

When the shepherd saw him, blood covered Atticus’s lips and chin. He knew he was wearing a stupid grin.

He looked at the man approaching and wondered if he should take on one more feed. His body had probably reached its limit, but the man’s peaceful gaze tempted him like it was a fat cow luring the butcher’s knife.

Atticus hissed to reveal sharp canines still dripping with the blood of his victims.

“You may drink my blood, vampire,” said the robed man calmly as he neared. “If you do, you shall be cleansed.”

Atticus lunged at the man’s neck, determined to empty every last drop of his blood. But as he fed, the man stood firm, then gently embraced Atticus. By the time Atticus felt finished, it was he who felt drained.

The man released his embrace. “How do you feel now, vampire? Fulfilled?”

For once in his life, Atticus was without words. He stammered a little, but said nothing. Finally, after a few quiet moments of a man and a vampire staring into each other’s eyes, Atticus found the only words that made sense. “Who are you?”

“You may call me the shepherd, my friend. I am your servant.”

“My servant? I have servants in my home. I don’t need any more.”

“You have no true servants,” replied the shepherd. “The salt from the seas that join with Thessaloniki could all dissolve upon your shores and sprout more of what you call servants, and still, you would have none.”

“Well, then…” It didn’t even occur to him to ask the shepherd how he knew of his ties to Thessaloniki.

The shepherd put his index finger against Atticus’ lips. “I am your only servant, and the only one you will ever need.”

It seemed to Atticus that many of their conversations after that day went like that. The shepherd was a man of riddles, and a riddle himself. But full of grace in a way Atticus had never experienced.

And then the shepherd was slaughtered like an animal.

A woman Atticus had noticed as the shepherd’s frequent companion washed the shepherd’s feet as he languished in the baking sun. Atticus walked up beside her. She nodded at the water from a clay bowl. Atticus scooped some with his palms and also washed the shepherd’s feet.

“You’ll come with me, then, to his tomb,” she said to Atticus after the shepherd’s last words. It was an order, not a question. She was too full of grace for Atticus to resist or question. He merely nodded. She took his hand and kissed his fingers gently, then said, “Thank you” as she walked away.

“But how will I find you?” he asked her silhouette as it drifted off. She said nothing, just continued on her way, doing nothing more than throwing a hood over her head.

“Wait!” he yelled. The skies went dark, and she disappeared into an alley that seemed made from black ink.

The woman was not there. A large boulder straddled the cave that held the tomb.

Atticus entered the cave. The echo of his voice bounced along the stone walls: “Where are you, shepherd?”

There was nothing. No sign of life. No sign of death. Just cold stone.

Atticus walked out of the tomb, stricken by unbearable sadness. What was the point of all of that? All of the shepherd’s words seemed now in vain, meant for someone else, not a soul like his, not for someone like Atticus, a soul chained to an endless life of parasitic fury.

He walked the lonely road back to town, fantasizing about a murder spree that would last as long as his never-ending wretched life.

Then he knelt on one knee, looked up at the sky, and asked one more time, “Where are you, shepherd?”

A small hand touched his shoulder. It was that of a child. A bald girl wearing a thick white robe. No more than ten.

“He left me these words,” she said.

“I’m sorry? What?”

“Listen, she said. “These are now your words, to say for all time.” And she sang in a beautiful choir of voices, thousands of children at once:

Lord, enter not into judgment with thy servant;
for no human or vampire living is righteous before thee.

For the enemy pursues me;
Tries to crush my life to the ground;
he has made me sit in darkness like those long dead.

Therefore my spirit faints within me;
my heart within me is appalled.

I remember the days of old,I meditate on all that thou hast done;
I muse on what thy hands have wrought.

I stretch out my hands to thee;
While I crave the blood of your children,
my soul thirsts for thee like a parched land.
Make haste to answer me, O Lord!
My spirit fails!
Hide not thy face from me,
lest I be like those who go down to the pit.

Notes

The song is essentially Psalm 143. Altered a bit.

Keen observers will wonder: “From miles around?” In Roman times?

“Miles” is derived from the Roman “millie passus”, which meant a thousand paces.

This is a short story adjacent to the main character of my novel, Psalm of Vampires, Jade Mourning, whose real name is Atticus of the Argeadai House of vampires.

There’s a scene in Chapter 8 where his foil/nemesis and later ally/friend, vampire hunter and Atlanta Detective Standmoore Owens, rolls his eyes after Atticus tells him his uncle is Alexander the Great. Owens then says, ”Next thing I know, you’ll tell me how you met Jesus or something.”

To which Atticus responds…

“Actually…”

Much vampire “canon” is wrong. For example: As you can tell by this story, vampires are not harmed by sunlight. That is an old myth created by humans long ago, when vampires were more plentiful and filled everyone with fear. Humans thought they needed something to fight back with. All they had was mythology.

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I hope you’ll check out Psalm of Vampires. It’s free if you have Kindle Unlimited.

I posted a sample chapter yesterday:

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Trigger warnings: This story is probably going to be insulting to Christians who have no sense of humor. Also, it contains extreme blasphemy. Off with my head! Do note, though, that I’m Christian, too, so I’m not a hater. But I’m not the kind who is easily insulted. Whenever my god yells at me for writing stuff like this, I remind him that he’s the one who invented poop, not me.

In the prequel to this story, His Lordship sent his son to a tiny planet on the outer rim of the galaxy after hearing wild stories about a guy named Moses and other violent folk. His first instinct after hearing the stories was to launch an asteroid at the planet, but he chilled and sent his brilliant, patient, and compassionate son, JC, instead. That story was covered here:

What follows is Gabriel’s report of JC’s return from the cold depths of the far-off planet. It helps to read the first one, but not necessary. You might giggle if you read it afterward, though.

Gabriel: Well, he’s back.

Lordship (pulling at long white beard): JC?

Gabriel: Yes, your eminence.

Lordship: And?

Gabriel: You’re gonna want to sit down for this.

Lordship (sighing and shaking his head): Sit down, he says. Have you ever tried inventing a new kind of waterfall while you’re sitting down?

Gabriel: No, your Lordship, I can assure you I have not. You can make waterfalls behave differently than they do now?

Lordship (rolling his eyes)

Gabriel: Silly me. What a question.

Lordship: Understandable. They all currently behave the same. As in, they fall.

Gabriel: Indeed. And what will these new ones do, your Lordship?

Lordship: Honestly, I don’t know yet. I got a little bored after seeing the 35,000-foot waterfall on the waterfall planet.

Gabriel: The planet with all the waterfalls?

Lordship (sitting down on a gas giant): That’s the one. I’m tinkering a bit, but it has to work within the realm of science, or all the sentient beings in the universe will have a collective aneurysm.

The good news is, you’ve come at a good time. I’ll take a break. Let me hear your report.

Gabriel: Should I just start with the bad news?

Lordship: Don’t you always?

Gabriel: Indeed, sir. Well, they killed him.

Lordship: They killed JC?

Gabriel: That they did, sir.

Lordship: Good Lord. I told you I should have hurled an asteroid at the little shits.

Gabriel: It gets worse.

Lordship: Is this where you tell me the deviants found a way to prevent his resurrection?

Gabriel: No, sir, but they blamed you.

Lordship: They blamed me for killing him?

Gabriel: They nailed him to a tree and said it was your idea.

Lordship (spinning a quasar on his index finger): What the fuck, Gabriel?

Gabriel: Said you sent him to them to be sacrificed.

Lordship: Holy goat balls! What are they, Republicans? And JC went along with this? I told him he could smite them at any time.

Gabriel: Seems he rather loves the silly people.

Lordship: Well, damn. Perhaps I should send him to the psych infirmary on GN-z11.

Gabriel: In the galaxy that looks like a howling dog mooning us, sir?

Lordship: That would be the one. What in the name of babbling tardigrades does he see in these people?

Gabriel: Turns out some of them are very nice. Mostly the women, sir.

Lordship: Should I roll out a mutation that kills off all the men but allows the women to procreate without them?

Gabriel: I think that would upset JC.

Lordship: Why? They… wait. They really nailed him to a tree? That’s barbaric.

Gabriel: Not just a tree, your grace. They cut it into the form of a cross so they could stretch his arms on it and…

Lordship: Enough. I’m about to vomit my ionic soup. These people disgust me. Send in the xenomorphs.

Gabriel: Apologies, your lordship. They’re a little busy warring with another predator race.

Lordship (shaking head): Free will kind of sucks, doesn’t it, Gabriel?

Gabriel: It has its downsides, your grace.

Lordship: My favorite beings really are the Tardigrades. They can live anywhere, and they don’t bother anyone. And they’re adorable.

Gabriel: One of your better efforts, I must say.

Lordship: Oh, hell, Gabe, all I did was shake the bottle and cross my fingers. Like I usually do.

Gabriel: Indeed, sir. But it was a very good shake.

Lordship: I’m guessing a few billion of the gas giants were in retrograde that day. Now, onto JC. You say he liked these people. I find this concerning. Should I stop sending him on these missions?

Gabriel: Remarkably, sir, he seems no worse for wear.

Lordship: He’s a hardy soul, I’ll give him that. But you haven’t answered my question. What does he see in these people?

Gabriel: His formal report states (examines long parchment): The vast majority of these people are decent, loving folk who love and create amazing music, art, and letters. They strive to care for their families. They are a people of grand humor and, sometimes, an almost supernatural desire to help one another when disaster strikes.

They have not yet reached full maturity, so they have not developed a satisfactory method of justice or for enforcing grace. They have a surprising tolerance for appalling levels of harm caused by a small percentage among them.

Lordship: No wonder JC likes them. A billion cheeks turned all at once.

Lordship: Quite. JC continues: Imagine a crowd of a billion of these people on the sands of Tatooine, and then one reprehensible sociopath appears and creates a footprint larger than the rest of them combined.

Lordship: Tatooine? What the hell is Tatooine?

Gabriel: Apologies, your Lordship. The ethereal version of JC hung around quite a while after his demise and watched a lot of movies.

Lordship: I see. Go on.

Gabriel: Apparently, when one of their leaders killed millions of people in ovens…

Lordship: That’s it. Just stop. Xenomorphs are too good for these people.

Gabriel: If I may, sir…

Lordship (heaving sigh): Very well, go on.

Gabriel: If I may, sir… after he killed several million people, they attempted a world government of sorts, to create a system of international law.

Lordship: That usually works, but I know you’re about to tell me that these morons found a way to screw it up.

Gabriel: Well, no, sir, not exactly. There is one individual who is trying to reverse the progress. He was somehow elected as the leader of the planet’s most powerful nation. He also (whispers into Lordship’s ear).

Lordship: Kids? I’ll kill him myself. Why haven’t these people used that cross invention on him? I’m appalled, quite frankly.

Gabriel: He’s also currently trying to destroy this notion of international law that they have been spending much time on. Time, of course, being relative, and all that.

Lordship: I hate nationhood. It’s stupid. How did such a beast manage to win an election?

Gabriel: If I may, your Lordship, I’ll reply with JC’s report. (reads from parchment): Think of this massive footprint as a symbol. The people who are good, who are decent, who are moral, have problems on this planet establishing their dominance. They allow themselves to be squashed by predators.

Lordship: A common problem.

Gabriel: Yes, sir.

Lordship: And how was this man who killed all those millions dealt with, if they hadn’t yet mastered the Light?

Gabriel: They won a war, your Lordship.

Lordship: Of course they did. Please don’t tell me they won the war in my name.

Gabriel: War has been invoked in your name throughout their history, your grace.

Lordship (dripping with sarcasm): Fantastic. But at least the good people you speak of, they found a way to end the war against the bad guys with honor, right?

Gabriel: Well…

Lordship: This is going to piss me off, isn’t it?

Gabriel: They nuked two cities on the islands of a nation that was an ally with the genocidal dude.

Lordship (spinning a galaxy-sized fireball with one hand): What????? I think they need this thing sent their way. (looks at galaxy-sized fireball)

Gabriel (Continues reading): I sense now, JC writes, a change. The good and decent people of this tiny planet are taking charge. They’re changing the narrative. They are discovering that they can emasculate the power of a toxic leader by simply pointing out his flaws and allowing him to broadcast his toxic behavior to the point where all but the most wicked say, “That is all. You are henceforth a pariah among us.” And by making fun of him. These people are, in other words, treating the pariah and his kind as one large satirical event.

Lordship: Satire’s a beautiful thing. I think the people who practice it should be rewarded with the wealth of many nations. But I digress. What of those who continue to bend to his whims? Are they also still in power in this powerful nation you speak of?

Gabriel: I’m afraid so, sir.

Lordship: Fine. I’ll just send JC back there to finish his work. It sounds like he’s done a fine job, after all.

Gabriel looks down.

Lordship: Now what?

Gabriel: I’m afraid they’ve created a myth that states that when JC returns, a great slaughter involving most of the earth’s people will transpire. Almost everyone in the religion that JC spawned believes it. That’s billions of people, your grace.

Lordship: Oh, for fuck’s sake. (Launches the galaxy-sized fireball).

Notes

Oh, my, I’m gonna lose some subscribers with this one, aren’t I?

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Thanks for reading!

I think it’s awesome that, as messed up as our world is right now, we have lit mags for baseball. Without further ado…

A Dust Storm for Daisy Gilbert

by Charles Bastille

“I want you to keep an eye on that shortstop. His name is Humberto Peña Sobreviela. Best shortstop you’ll ever see. But he can’t hit a lick. So you’ll never see him in the majors.”

Daisy adjusted her face mask and squinted through the late afternoon Midland sun.

She nodded as she stooped behind the catcher who had provided the quick scouting report.

She was about to evaluate the first pitch of her Double A career. She hadn’t been this nervous since that day she sat across from Father Grimes in his office after ditching catechism class.

The dry heat reminded her of sitting at the dentist’s office with tubes sucking the moisture out of her throat. It was a different world from the Carolina League and its withering humidity. Normally, Midland games were scheduled for the evening, but this was the first game of the year, and it was still early spring.

The starting pitcher was Sterling Mason. His participation in this game was almost a polite formality because his arrival to the major leagues was a foregone conclusion. Mason was a long, lanky fireballer who turned baseballs into small, spinning sphere-shaped jets that tailed up just as a hitter swung helplessly at the smoking embers, missing by inches. Daisy, though, had never seen his well-publicized feats up close.

“He’ll clock in at one hundred,” said the catcher, name of Diaz, who spoke with a slight Spanish accent that reminded her of a movie star whose name escaped her in the moment. “Be ready,” he warned.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Happy to help,” he said. “Remember. He only throws strikes.”

She chuckled at that. Mason reared back, and, with a tall forward kick, hurled the ball her way. It arrived instantly, but it was low and away. “That’s outside!” she yelled, thrusting her left hand across her waist. If this first pitch was any indication, Diaz was an excellent framer, she thought. His catcher’s mitt was in the zone, but the pitch was not.

“Shit, ump,” said Diaz.

“Doesn’t look like he needs my help,” she replied.

He didn’t. The next two were clean strikes just at the shoulders and almost, but not quite, inside. The batter, Montrose Stallings, watched them both.

“You’re in trouble, Stallings,” said Diaz.

Montrose Stallings had the highest on base percentage in all professional baseball, including the majors. He wasn’t a home run hitter, but he sprayed line drives across all three fields like he was trying to generally be a fair distributor of baseballs. He had the sprint speed of a jaguar and led all the minor leagues in stolen bases.

Daisy didn’t know any of this. She hadn’t done the prep work she should have done the previous night because she spent too much time reading scary weather reports about the Midland area and let herself lose focus.

“She’s gonna call the next one right,” said Stallings with the slightest wry smile as he dug into the batter’s box. Daisy had umpired enough in Single A ball to know that almost every pitch was challenged by the one who lost a call. No big deal.

Stallings tapped the plate with the fat end of his bat. Mason’s leg kicked high into the air, and the ball whistled past Stallings’ abdomen, just barely grazing his uniform before it smacked into Diaz’s mitt.

“That’s first base!” Daisy yelled.

“Oh, come on, ump,” said Diaz. “Maybe it caught the uni, but damn, just barely. He coulda moved a little, too, no?”

Stallings had remained almost motionless with his bat in the air above his shoulder as the fireball grazed his uniform, so Diaz had a point. But it was too late. She had made her call. And the league insisted on calling these kinds of brushbacks to protect future stars.

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Daisy turned away from Diaz as she took two steps toward first. “Take first,” she ordered.

Stallings yelled out, “That’s trouble,” as he jogged to first base.

“Pendejo,” said Diaz in Stalling’s direction.

Diaz crouched down as the next batter, Alonso Estévez, stepped to the plate. Estévez was another budding star, a power hitter with, Daisy noticed, tattooed, burled arms that looked like they were created in a rope factory and stamped with a dozen stories.

“This manager likes his best hitter hitting number two,” said Diaz. “But you kinda gotta be ready cuz he hits lots of foul tips. Watch that head of yours.”

This was a good guy, Daisy thought. And she loved his accent.

Then, Diaz said, “I’m gonna get that pendejo when he tries to steal. You watch.”

There was no time to watch. Daisy thought a herd of elephants was charging the mound. She spied Rocky Rockhound, the Midland team mascot who had been shooting balled-up shirts from a t-shirt cannon just before the first pitch, jumping from the left field stands into foul territory, then into the clubhouse gangway.

She saw fans standing up, peering toward the same elephant noise she heard, but Daisy could see nothing. Diaz stood up. Alonso Estévez leaned against his bat, staring in the same direction as the fans.

Diaz pushed Estévez, saying, “Get in your dugout, bro!” But Estévez merely stood there as if frozen by an ancient spell. Diaz turned around as he yanked his catcher’s mask off and looked at Daisy, who was his height and near his weight. “Come on,” he said, pulling her by the arm.

The stadium’s fans ushered forth a blurred amalgam of voices that produced a sound she’d never heard as the rumbling approached with its heavy footfall. “What about…?” she tried to ask as she watched the people in the stands show more interest in whatever was happening than the fear that they should be experiencing.

Estévez looked at Diaz, then Daisy, before running toward the visitor dugout as Daisy reluctantly let Diaz guide her toward the gangway.

She saw fans standing up, peering toward the same elephant noise she heard, but Daisy could see nothing. Diaz stood up. Alonso Estévez leaned against his bat, staring in the same direction as the fans.

Diaz pushed Estévez, saying, “Get in your dugout, bro!” But Estévez merely stood there as if frozen by an ancient spell. Diaz turned around as he yanked his catcher’s mask off and looked at Daisy, who was his height and near his weight. “Come on,” he said, pulling her by the arm.

The stadium’s fans ushered forth a blurred amalgam of voices that produced a sound she’d never heard as the rumbling approached with its heavy footfall. “What about…?” she tried to ask as she watched the people in the stands show more interest in whatever was happening than the fear that they should be experiencing.

Estévez looked at Diaz, then Daisy, before running toward the visitor dugout as Daisy reluctantly let Diaz guide her toward the gangway.

Most of the fans were too paralyzed to do much, but a few were jumping onto the field to seek shelter with the players, all of whom were making their way hastily to the clubhouse.

“This way,” said Diaz as he continued pulling Daisy by the arm. Most of the players appeared headed toward the clubhouse, but Diaz seemed to have something else in mind. Daisy felt herself stiffen in resistance.

“It’s okay, ump, come on.” He let go of her arm and instead ushered her along with a hand signal. She looked around, then followed him as he opened a small metal door. He stepped in. When she didn’t follow, he stuck one hand out and curled his finger in a motion to follow him through the doorway.

By now, the roof above them was a cacophony of thunder and grit and dry loam whipping with a frenzy against metal. Daisy scooted inside the door and was greeted by the deep smell of leather and linseed oil.

Diaz moved in front of her and slammed the metal door shut, then locked its deadbolt. “Sucks, but gotta keep out any fans that find this place, or there’ll be hundreds more.”

Daisy nodded her head. She was beyond confused. She had no idea what was happening outside. Was it a tornado?

As if reading her mind, Diaz said, “It’s okay, ump. It’s a dust storm. It’ll pass soon. I hope everyone took cover somehow.” He seemed out of breath. She noticed that he had dropped his catcher’s mask somewhere before their arrival to this tiny room.

“You have your own… closet? Or, what?” She had to speak over the din of furious winds against metal.

“Just a place to keep my catcher’s gear.”

Clatter, bang, whomp, said the dust storm.

Daisy thought that some of the old gear must have been in the closet for twenty years or more. “How long have you been here, Diaz?”

“I’m Crash Davis without the hit tool,” he replied.

“Oh, shit,” she said.

“Yeah. But I wouldn’t trade it for nothin’. Going to work every morning hearing… well, it’s not just the ball off the bat. It’s all of it. The pop of the mitts and gloves. The popcorn guy yelling in the stands. The ‘Everybody clap your hands’ song…”

“I love that,” interrupted Daisy. He inched closer to her, but Daisy was pretty sure that it was only so he could hear her better.

“Just, all of it,” he continued. “When I knew I wasn’t gonna make it to the show, I thought, well, I could go into the construction business maybe with my brother’s company. He’s pretty successful. I woulda done okay. But, nah. This is it, man.”

“Yeah,” said Daisy. “I feel ya. I mean, what are my chances getting to the bigs? It isn’t because I’m a woman, either. It’s just, well, you know. The numbers aren’t on our side when we start out.”

“I got respect for that, ump. I do,” said Diaz. “Mad respect, fact is. Just don’t tell none of my boys. But I tell you something. You got a chance. I ain’t seen much of you yet, but you seem to get it.”

“Thanks, Diaz.” She looked around the dank room, which had more humidity within its walls than any other room in Midland, Texas, she thought. “I think we’re all here for that, you know? Even your pitcher out there today.”

“Sterling Mason,” said Diaz. “First choice in last year’s draft. But yeah, you don’t get that good not lovin’ the game.”

The storm began to subside. Soon, all the clattering fell silent.

“We had three of these last year,” said Diaz as he gingerly opened the closet door.

“So, this closet. It’s your own personal shelter?”

“Hey, I deserve somethin’ for all those years I’ve given this league,” Diaz said through a laugh. He looked at Daisy, then shrugged his shoulders as he stepped furtively into the clubhouse gangway as if hoping to keep the secret forever.

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Notes

The story uses some baseball lingo. It was written for a baseball magazine! For example, the catcher being a good “framer” means he is proficient at setting up his catchers mitt when he receives the pitch that it’s more convincing to the umpire that the ball is a strike.

Every baseball fan knows who Crash Davis is. If you’re not a baseball fan, you can learn more about him here:

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Crime Scene 1.0

He and Amy Lightgood, two first graders in the woods, were exploring a shared interest: Frogs and such on the outskirts of a hidden pond.

This was a place where shadows formed by refuse-soaked sections of a forest preserve adjoining the working-class suburbs south of Chicago instructed Amy’s mother to remind the young girl that creeps who imagined unspeakable things transformed quiet groves into parlous haunts.

He had just taken Amy to what he proclaimed was the “tadpole” reservoir, a small, quiet part of the pond fed by just enough water for a tiny ecosystem to thrive. The placid inlet acted as a silent respite from the buzzing, busy creatures of the surrounding colony, a glorious place filled with work only nature can understand.

“Sometimes they die in the summer,” he said, “Like, just overnight, when it all dries up. And when that happens, there’s this big pile of them here, right here where the water is now.”

“Ick,” she said.

He led Amy to a congested thicket that covered a small cage. “Check it out,” he said excitedly, bending down and dragging the cage from under an assemblage of branches and twigs.

Amy peered in. “Is it a rabbit?”

“Uh, huh,” he beamed. He had a crush on Amy, but he didn’t know much about what that meant, other than that she was pretty, he wanted to be with her all the time, and he was always nervous around her.

“But don’t it wanna be free? Rabbits like to run around.”

He shrugged. Now that it was out in the open, the rabbit’s container looked more like a DIY contraption than a cage. The contraption did a lot of things he wanted to brag about. “Let me show you something else,” he said proudly, operating the device like a rudimentary machine. The cage clacked and clanged and rattled and shook.

“Ewwww! Why did you do that??!!!” Amy’s scream could have curdled tungsten as it rocketed into the heavy canopy with a reverberant shriek. She ran to the nearby deer trail, jumped over a blackened tree trunk, seared by lightning, that rested across a widening path, then disappeared beyond a copse of trees that led to their nearby street.

Amy never spoke to him again.

Crime Scene 2.0

“Vanamos!” Officer Riley screamed as he glared from his front step.

Amused, the gardener looked up from his work. He snickered, his lip curling slightly upwards. This further creased a dimple on his scarred cheek, which had been ravaged by a childhood pox. He aimed his garden shears with such purity and threw with such surety that they impaled the siding of Officer Riley’s house, not more than a few feet from the home’s front door. Officer Riley gazed at the new addition to his house next to him and nearly admired the work, as if he were staring at a freshly formed sculpture.

The gardener imagined himself a Quechua warrior with a majestic spear, protecting a language he had no business protecting, another colonial language, but a beautiful one, he thought, one that shouldn’t be butchered by the ignorance of an unaccomplished man wearing a blue security officer’s uniform, a mall cop, maybe, or one of those guys who sits in an office building late at night watching the occasional weary, well-dressed woman stroll by after a long day at the office, her heels resounding across an empty, dimly lit foyer.

But he missed his target, and that was that. Off to prison he went. Then, a few years later, back to the Andean village of Choquecancha, led there by the silver bracelets of a nation that never wanted him.

Crime Scene 3.0

When Officer Riley spotted the older model white Mercedes, his body seized with anger. He was in a section of Tallahassee that was quiet this time of night. A Mercedes. What’s a guy like that doing driving a Mercedes? He seethed. It was only his third night on patrol without a trainer after graduating from the academy. He was nervous about how this might go down, but he turned on his lights and pulled the man over anyway.

The man acted surprised. Even more so when Officer Riley directed the man to step out of the vehicle after viewing the license and registration. “Have you been drinking, Mr. Dawkins?” They all drank. They all did drugs. Easy answer.

Officer Riley examined Dawkins, hating the salt and pepper afro, the haughty look, the ribbed, shoulderless navy t-shirt barely containing a tattooed collection of muscles that only prison could manifest. Was he a professor or something at the nearest liberal institution for higher learning, one with, obviously, low standards and some absurd community outreach program? He wanted to ruffle up the fro and check for white powder.

“No,” said Dawkins, sounding annoyed. Not, “No, sir.” Not, “No, officer.” Just a flat “No,” as if the question was unwarranted, unheard of, unnecessary.

“Marijuana?”

“What?” Dawkins sounded even more dismissive.

“You smell like marijuana,” he said.

“You’re a liar,” Dawkins responded angrily.

Officer Riley looked the driver’s license over. Clarence Dawkins. 55 years old, suspicious white Mercedes, bad attitude. This wasn’t going to end well for Mr. Dawkins. No doubt about that, Riley thought, as another police vehicle pulled up behind his. Janice Stallings, another recent recruit, joined him.

Stallings went back to her vehicle with the driver’s license and ran the plates and the license, then returned to a growing confrontation.

“Get out of my face,” Dawkins was yelling. Stallings pulled Officer Riley gently by the elbow, and they walked to the side of the road behind Dawkins’ Mercedes.

“He’s driving on a suspended license,” said Stallings quietly.

Officer Riley felt his heart grow. “First offense?”

“First offense,” she replied. “Lost it just two weeks ago.”

“Let’s take him down,” he said.

She nodded. “You wanna try a sobriety test?”

“Nah, he refused.”

“Okay.”

It wasn’t easy, but they got Dawkins into Stallings’ squad car without a tussle. “Stay with him, I’ll search his vehicle,” Officer Riley said.

When he looked inside the Mercedes, he found a steel cup inside a cupholder in the center console. The cup seemed to have iced tea in it. A paper bag that looked like a wrapper for a skid row bottle rested on the passenger seat. Officer Riley joyously slowly opened the bag, revealing an unopened bottle of cognac.

Next, he poured most of the tea onto the side of the road and deftly opened the bottle by holding the top of the bag and the center of the bag, then twisting the top. He splashed some of the contents around the passenger seat and made sure some of it found its way into the steel cup.

He wondered what cognac and sweet tea tasted like when mixed.

Crime Scene 4.0

“Mr. Riley,” said the young public defender. “The problem…”

“Officer Riley,” he corrected.

“Sure. The problem, officer, is that there are witnesses.”

“Of course there are. Women like to destroy men.” When he stared into her, she shivered. “It’s what they do.” He snatched her smartphone from the metal table and brandished it like a weapon. “It’s like they do this flashmob thing. ‘Hey, there’s a target! Let’s get him! Oh, look, even better! He’s a cop!’ ”

Sandra Wilkins leafed through the pile of papers. “Two years of this, Mr. Riley.”

“Officer?”

“Two. I see something like twenty different witnesses in this evidence kit. I’m sorry, we need to plead this out. I can help with that, but it will require you to…”

“Nope.”

Sandra sighed. This wasn’t her first case like this. This was no way to make a living. “No direct violence. I can probably get you down to six months and maybe three years probation.”

“I’ll lose my badge.”

“Mr. Riley, you lost your badge last year.”

Crime Scene 5.0

Riley maintained a standard routine every morning. He drank a voluminous amount of coffee, sometimes with a spill of sour mash to take the edge off, then lumbered outside to check the grill of his black Escalade, his pride and joy. It was a trick he learned in a smoky church basement during an AA meeting from a woman who, in telling her story, said she did it as a sanity check from her blackouts.

Crime Scene 6.0

“So you tellin’ me that you get to tell me where to live?” A nearby jackhammer made it difficult for Officer Riley to hear the question. “That ain’t happened with any other PO, my man. All I gots to do is report my new address when I move.”

With his holstered gun as his best friend, not many of these guys intimidated him, but this one did. He was just about as loud as the jackhammer and looked fit enough to win a heavyweight boxing match. The ex-con reminded him of the drunk doper he had arrested in Tallahassee a few years ago.

“Not only that, but I need to visit your workplace and make sure they’re cool with an ex-con having employment with them,” Officer Riley said, feeling emboldened by his new threat.

“Bullshit,” said the ex-con. “All I had was a DUI. I’m doing all the court asked. And I’m on non-report, mutha fucka. You ain’t even supposed to be here.” This was true, Officer Riley knew. He was visiting this con from the list passed on to him by a previous probation officer, but this con’s name was marked as no-report.

Officer Riley didn’t care. Every opportunity to take people like this down a notch was sacred.

“I oughta just wail on your white ass and send you home in bandages,” said the ex-con.

So he did.

Crime Scene 7.0

“This is incredible!” Officer Riley tried to scream above the raucousness. It was as if the painted signs and banners had come to life to make their feelings known. “And that?” he pointed to the tall wooden structure. “Is that what I think it is?” he asked his new friend.

His friend nodded and leaned into Riley’s ear. “A gallows,” he smiled through two chipped front teeth.

“Hang Pence! Hang Pence!” the voices chanted. Could it happen? Riley wondered, hoping for history. The crowd surged toward the Capitol steps. He saw through squinting eyes people climbing into windows, breaking glass, confronting police. History. The deep state was being dismantled before his eyes. As a Capitol police officer approached Officer Riley and his new friend, Riley blasted him with pepper spray, then kicked him hard in the gut after the deep state cop covered his eyes and fell to the ground.

Soon, the Capitol police officer was overwhelmed by a mob. The officer muttered something like, “Holy Jesus,” as some from the mob began to pummel him. A large man from the middle of the group broke free and eventually pulled the officer to safety.

This made Officer Riley proud. We protect our own, he thought.

Crime Scene 8.0

A cacophony of whistles filled the frozen streets, their shrieks making it almost impossible for Officer Riley to speak loudly enough to be heard. The tree-lined neighborhood, landscaped by old Victorian and Edwardian homes, was chaos. Domestic terrorists pelted his car with snowballs and water balloons full of piss. He hid behind the front of his blackened SUV, waiting for an opportunity.

His partner, a recruit named Mason, was crouching next to him, waiting for Officer Riley to fulfill a promise. “Today,” Officer Riley had said earlier, “We play Roll-a-Kid.”

Mason asked how that worked.

“These assholes are always bringing their fucking kids somewhere,” Officer Riley answered. “School, back from school, whatever, soccer, fuck knows where else. They think if they hold their hand, the kid isn’t gonna get grabbed and sent home. So Roll-a-Kid is where we show them otherwise. You just gotta watch me once, and you’ll get it. It’s easy, then the kid goes home.”

“Home?”

“You know. Back to where they came from. Their shithole. Or maybe even a different shithole. All the same to me.”

Officer Riley felt a little drool against his lower lip and wondered if it would freeze in the outdoors. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve. The tumult of the crowd, especially the whistles, aggravated him, made him want to shoot someone in the head. Someone with one of the damn whistles. There must have been a thousand of them filling the air with their shrill rampage.

Instead, he spotted someone leading their kid to a house. He guessed the kid to be five or six. Perfect age to start a new life and forget about his irresponsible, illegal immigrant father.

“Okay,” said Officer Riley. “Your job is to watch me, watch my technique, and then hand Dad one of the cards from the deck. Doesn’t matter which one, they’re all the Ace of Spades. Got it?”

“Got it. Watch your technique,” replied the recruit.

“And hand him the card. That’s important.”

The recruit pulled the deck of cards from the glove compartment. “They’re all Aces of Spades?”

“Yep.” Officer Riley swung the big black Suburban tail-first towards the father and his kid as the kid bounded through a crosswalk at a stoplight. The Suburban skidded to a stop in the middle of the crosswalk in front of the two. Officer Riley could hear a woman repeatedly yelling, “What the fuck are you doing?” as he jumped out of his vehicle and lumbered towards the child, feeling every molecule of gout in his swollen feet.

The recruit followed closely behind and watched with admiration as Officer Riley jumped at the kid from behind, placing his arm around his chest, then throwing him to the ground. The recruit wondered, Now? Do I hand the card to the Brownie now?

“Card!” yelled Officer Riley as he struggled to contain the squirming child. “Now!”

The recruit tried to hand the card to the father, but the father punched him in the eye. An angry crowd of communists and leftists advanced, but so did fellow Patriots, some of whom were already splashing pepper spray into the eyes of the criminals who wanted to help the kid.

Even during the struggle, Officer Riley felt a surge of pride knowing there would soon be one less Brownie on the street, one less invader in America’s schools.

Crime Scene 9.0

“If you have to shoot a protester, don’t shoot a white one,” Officer Riley said to his trainee while they were driving along Pulaski Road. “It gets on the news.”

Officer Riley slowed the vehicle down as another vehicle approached. He pointed. “Brownies,” he said. Mason nodded. “Hand me the pepper spray, the one with that streamer nozzle on it.” Mason reached into the back seat and handed some pepper spray to Officer Riley.

Officer Riley’s car pulled up to a red stoplight. He pointed to a small red SUV full of kids stopped on the side of the intersection. When the light turned green, the other vehicle, a Toyota Rav4, slowly approached. Officer Riley smiled at his trainee when he noticed the driver’s side window was down on the approaching vehicle.

Officer Riley rolled his window down. He thought he heard the kids singing a song in Spanish. Cursing, he blasted the driver with pepper spray as the two cars passed.

Crime Scene 10.0

The whistles were worse than any he’d heard. It sounded like a football stadium’s boisterous crowd trying to prevent the quarterback from calling a play. The whistles even overwhelmed the sound of the agency’s big, round tear gas guns that popped pepper balls all around, filling the air with acrid blue and orange smoke. He could hear hundreds of whistles through the thick windows of their new darkened SUV as he and Mason, his former recruit, now a seasoned veteran, patrolled the streets of this South Minneapolis residential neighborhood.

“Do you really think these windows are bulletproof like they said?” asked Mason.

“Don’t know. Don’t wanna find out,” answered Officer Riley.

“Hey, check it out,” said Mason, looking ahead to his right. “That construction crew on the top of the house.” A small, two-story house was covered in Tyvek weatherization housewrap. Three silhouettes of men were crouching, trying to hide.

“Brownies,” smiled Officer Riley. “At least three of them.”

“Fucking gold,” said Mason.

“Pure fucking gold. I’d like to escort them to the C-130 myself to Uganda or wherever the fuck they’re sending the worst of ‘em,” said Officer Riley.

“Yeah,” said Mason, “Where the fuck is Uganda? That a city in Mexico? Hey, or just pick them off from here.”

“Right here, dude. That’ll shut up these whistling gay fucks.”

“Boom, splat, mother fuckers,” said Mason. “Fucking Brownie points for Mason!”

That brought forth a thunderous chuckle from Officer Riley, the first he’d felt in a few months, it seemed, what with all the hatred he had been facing during the last half year. Just yesterday, a teenage, pimple-faced white kid with long, greasy hair spat on his face in a supermarket and ran out of the store before Riley could react. The one brief moment I pull my mask off, thought Riley as he edged the vehicle near the construction site.

“You’ve been pilin’ up them Brownie points, dude. Pretty soon you’ll be trainin’ me,” he said to Mason.

“I’m a pretty good shot, bro,” said Mason. “I wanna try out the new M K in the back so bad it’s nearly making me wet my pants.”

New funding had allowed the agency to issue Mk 22 Modular Sniper Rifles to every officer. Everyone Officer Riley knew was eager to try the new weapon now that spring had descended upon the city.

The two stepped out of their vehicle. Other ICE vehicles were rounding up protesters into an armored vehicle.

“Call this shit in,” said Officer Riley. When Mason scanned the area with his phone camera, he immediately received two hits that pinged so loudly he thought his phone's glass would crack.

“A gay couple owns that vehicle that way,” Mason said, pointing to an idling Toyota Camry. “To our right, the only threat is standard protest turds and some guy who got busted for throwing vinegar balloons at a county deputy in Illinois.”

Officer Riley laughed. “Deputy probably had it coming. Take your position.” Officer Riley walked to the back of the SUV and pulled out one Mk 22 and a megaphone. He threw the Mk 22 to Mason, who was crouching behind the side of the SUV, then used his broken Spanish to order the men down from the top of the house.

The men refused and threw a few Spanish expletives his way to further lodge their objections.

“Why are they even still in this country?” asked Mason. “Haven’t these people learned anything in the last few months?”

Mason took aim and shot one of the men in the forehead, sending the man tumbling from the roof. He pulled an Ace of Spades out of his back pocket and laid it on the road carefully under a piece of broken asphalt. Officer Riley gave him a thumbs up and a broad smile as Mason aimed at another invader.

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Notes

Thanks for reading. I didn’t spend much time editing this. But I doubt Bruce spent much time editing this awesome song, either. We’re all in a hurry these days.

I’ve written this kind of stuff before. Iterations of the story below are almost ten years old now. It’s changed a bit with the times, but the essence remains. With Don Lemon’s arrest, no matter how ludicrous the charges, none of us are safe. This story is about a man’s missing wife, who is a journalist:

You might also be interested in my September 2024 warning (nonfiction) about Stephen Miller:

Trigger warnings: Language, violence + violence and language

And fueled by his righteous beliefs, he shot the security guard in the back of the head as the man, shaped like a sloth and wearing a baggy uniform, tried to crawl away.

The guard’s sleeves had already painted the floor with two long red brush strokes; artistic, geometrically perfect arcs like a road destined to become an insignia for a flag to hoist over the halls of this corrupt government.

Watching the sloth attempt to crawl away, Dawson imagined a billowing white flag in tempest winds adorned with these same red brush strokes, the pattern now inlaid upon the floor tiles by an unwitting working-class hero, a dying security guard whose sacrifice could remain a symbol of a revolution he was unable to understand through no fault of his own.

The guard was a warrior, not a sloth, but not for the enemy. He was an unheralded hero of the revolution, taking a bullet for the cause, gasping, wheezing his last breaths before being properly euthanized, surely unaware that his anonymous stain on the bank floor was virtuous, noble, immutably pure.

The final bullet silenced the guard’s body with a shudder. The artisan’s work was complete. A cleaning crew would annihilate it, but it would live on in a flag of remembrance and honor.

“You’re in one of your catatonic states,” said Myra, who was sitting on the floor next to Dawson. They were alone, aside from the dead guard and other scattered corpses. The hostages were imprisoned in a meeting room with Stu, which meant their chances for survival were about fifty-fifty, even if their most threatening challenge was a loud cough or sneeze.

Dawson looked at her and wiped at a streak of blood on her cheek, then ran his knuckle along a lock of red hair that had escaped her headscarf with a long, looping curl that suggested it wanted back in.

When he pushed the streak of blood as if on a fingerpainting, he uncovered the primary freckle, the leader of the crowded nest that filled her cheeks. Her headscarf, emblazoned with huge capitalized letters spelling “PINK,” was a context lovers' delight to Dawson, who never asked what the lettering referred to.

“What are you doing, goofy-ass?” she asked with a smile that revealed two large front teeth, the left one chipped long ago by another boyfriend.

“Admiring,” he smiled back.

The cacophony of sirens had given way to a man with a bullhorn, which neither of them had mentioned, much less responded to. The police knew this was a hostage situation. They were only now beginning to gather. There was little they would try to do for now.

“Remember our cat?” he asked Myra.

“Yeah. We’re digging quarters out of the couch for a few potatoes, and you want an expensive cat.”

Dawson snapped a few photos of the dead guard and posted them. “Yeah. Wasn’t just a cat. It was a Maine Coon.”

“Fabulous. She was a goddess. But there were times I thought we were gonna have to eat her.”

“She was like, an insurance policy.”

Myra smacked Dawson’s arm. “I wish you didn’t shoot that guy.”

“He was gonna die, babe. No way he survives those wounds. I did him a solid.”

“I mean the first time.” Her long lashes nearly covered eyes that shared the colors of the carefully sculpted boxwoods in front of their apartment building. They extended transient moments into longer ones not meant to end.

Nobody had ever affected him like this. Nobody had ever said, just through the flit of an eyelash, “Come with me, to forever.”

“No choice. Me or him.”

“I know. I was just hoping for a cleaner operation.”

When Dawson shrugged, he could feel a different splotch of blood on his tight Rolling Stones T-shirt press its cold memory of this day against his skin. “What did Sun Tzu say about war?”

“I dunno, babe. Who is Sun Zoo?”

“Wrote a book called ‘The Art of War’ or something like that.”

“Oh. What did he say?”

“Not sure. But I know I’ve heard someone say that nothing goes according to plan in war.”

“Oh. Yeah, I guess.”

Dawson grasped her chin between his index finger and thumb. The man with the bullhorn was still trying to get their attention. “You knew going in, right? I mean, we talked about this.”

“Shit, Daw, it was my idea. We need the money. We need more guns. People are countin’ on us. It’s just, you know.”

Dawson let go and kissed her quickly on the lips. “I know. We all have our role to play. You’re the brains of the operation, I’m the guns.” He tried to smile, but he didn’t like to because his teeth were yellow and crooked. He shook a lock of his long brown hair by throwing his head back.

He remembered overhearing a girl in high school saying to her friend, “He’s cute, but he’s got bad teeth.” Her friend then said something indiscernibly tantalizing about muscles and the cross tattoo on his neck.

“I’m sorry,” Myra said.

“For what?”

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“How this went down. I don’t think we should have brought Stu. I thought maybe he’d add some, I dunno, terror into the situation, and people would do what we told them to do. Stupid.” Her palm slapped the floor.

“One thing about Stu. He always brings terror into a situation.”

“Yeah. He’s pretty reliably terrible.”

“We couldn’t try this ourselves.”

“I know. Do you think the driver is dead?”

“Hmmm. Lemme think. Lots of sirens. Then gunfire. Then silence. Then an asshole with a bullhorn. Yeah. He’s dead.”

“Maybe he got away,” said Myra hopefully.

“Better than we’re gonna do.”

“Maybe the pics will make us martyrs.”

Dawson thought about the flag. “That’s the idea.”

“We’re like Bonnie and Clyde.”

“They didn’t have no cause. Nothin’ like this.”

“Weren’t they like Robin Hood a little?”

“Just the robbin’ part, babe.”

“Oh.”

The bullhorn man was beginning to sound exasperated. Then, suddenly, he went quiet.

“They comin’ now?” thought Myra out loud.

“Nah. They can’t know what’s happening inside yet. They don’t wanna kill all them people. Dude just prolly needs a throat lozenge from all his fuckin’ bellerin’.”

“Stu’s got a twitchy finger,” said Myra. “He’ll do all the killin’ for them.”

“They’ll figure on that. They don’t know Stu like we do, but they’ll know enough to not come in shootin’.”

“They don’t know Stu at all. They can’t know who any of us are. Shit, this sucks. Maybe we should give ourselves up, Daw.”

“We can if you want to. I ain’t gonna be like one of those pricks in a TV movie that yells at his babe for wanting to give up.”

“They’ll torture us and shit to get names. I ain’t doin’ that, Daw.”

Daw surprised himself by feeling a tear trying to squirm out the corner of his eye. “We can try to shoot our way out of this, but our odds ain’t great. In fact, maybe less than zero.”

“I mostly just don’t want Stu to shoot all them people.”

“Yeah. I guess I’ll need to go in there and shoot Stu. I don’t know another way.”

“Fuck. Why’d I suggest Stu?”

“He did fine in the other two.”

“No, babe, he freaked me the hell out then, too. I’m an idiot. This was bound to happen sometime. Fuck!”

“So should I do it?”

“What?” Myra exclaimed. “Shoot Stu?”

“Yeah.”

“He’ll probably just rise up from the dead and bite you on the neck.”

Dawson laughed at that. No wonder he loved this girl.

“I mean, I don’t wanna, right? Shit. You’re the dumbass? I’m the dumbass, babe. I could have covered the hostages. I just didn’t want to leave you alone here with Stu.”

Myra spoke quietly. “I didn’t want you to, either.”

Dawson jumped up. “Be right back.”

“Babe, no.”

Dawson looked at her, shook a lock out of his face, and walked towards the room where Stu was holding the hostages.

When he came back a few minutes later, Myra was sobbing. He sat down next to her and put his arm around her, which prompted her to lean her head on his shoulders. “It’s done,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said within the remains of one final sob. “I heard. Wait. You left the hostages in the room? By themselves?”

“It’s a big ass metal door. I took all their key cards. It’s a weird door. Locks from both sides. They’re not getting out. Not before the cops get here, at least.”

“Fuck me,” Myra sniffled. They were both quiet for what felt like an hour to Dawson. Finally, Myra said, “I heard a lot of screaming in there after you shot him.”

Dawson shrugged. “Turns out people don’t like guns as much as they think they do.”

“When this is over, can we go to that cabin like we promised each other we’d do?”

“Which one?” asked Dawson.

“You know, that one. It changes. But it’s always the same place. Just you and me.”

“And maybe a Maine Coon cat.”

Notes

I’m usually inspired by something I read. This time, it’s a couple of movies. One, “One Battle after Another,” which is now streaming on HBO or whatever they’re calling it these days. “One Battle after Another” is based on a Thomas Pynchon novel, “Vineland,” which I have not read. But he’s one of my favorite writers. His short story, “Entropy,” inspired this short story I wrote, although it’s very different in all ways but one:

The other inspiration for this short story was “Civil War,” which was produced by an interesting and growing independent film studio called A24, most famous for “Everything Everywhere All At Once.”

Revolution is an easy thing for some to pay homage to, but it’s not a very good answer if you care about death, dying, and peace. The human toll begins as soon as revolution begins.

As always, thank you for reading!

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Reading time: Approximately 7 minutes.

It isn’t often that I get together with The House of Morana, who hail from Eastern Europe and have been known to hunt male vampires for sport (this has a lot to do with why I avoid them).

However, the color purple has come up a lot recently in online Discord channels in the vamp world. For example:

moranabeast: sup with all the weird arrests by humans in your country?

londondaggerhound: Yeah, what are those clowns doing?

atticus [me]: hunting people based on skin color.

moranabeast: that’s medieval

londondaggerhound: I don’t think they did that shit in medieval days

moranabeast: what about us?

atticus: Not many vamps not shedding their skin, so doesn’t matter much

moranabeast: but some be brown right?

atticus: sure

londondaggerhound: They like to collect brown.

moranabeast: Our house, we never shed our skin. We favor our natural purple shade. Always will.

atticus: good luck coming to america then

londondaggerhound: They collect purple too?

atticus: Anything not bleached

moranabeast: good luck to anyone fucking with us

londondaggerhound: u should exit that godforesaken place, atticus

atticus: been here a long time bro

londondaggerhound: couple centuries is all. it’s always been a cesspool. savages. why do they love snatching non-bleached people and putting them in chains? been doing it since before they chased the native people there to the worst place on earth

atticus: oklahoma is the worst place on earth?

moranabeast: close to it

moreland: that’s why they sent them there

skinnyvamp: that stallone guy seems to like it

moreland: that’s a tv show, you dipshit

londondaggerhound: okay, anyway, so I think we should fuck with these people big time. See how they like the color purple.

atticus: I think it would take less than a couple weeks to get fully purple if I don’t shed my skin.

moreland: me too

londondaggerhound: samesies

skinnyvamp: yep

moranabeast: i’m in

So it was decided. We would all abstain from shedding our skin for a month so that our natural purple skin color would return. Then we’d meet somewhere we could draw attention to ourselves. Then, feed like maniacs. How would ICE react to a group of purple people who were all seven feet tall or close to it, chomping on burritos in Pilsen and chewing on ICE cankles for sport?

We figured they’d run for it, but we were too fast for that.

Morana arrived in Chicago ahead of me. We met in a café in Evanston, where we could easily blend in, if that’s possible for very tall people with purple skin. We figured that since purple was the color of the Northwestern University football team’s jerseys, people would assume we were sports fanatics. Very tall ones.

She showed up in a Northwestern University football jersey. I was impressed. It even fit.

I found her in a seat in the back of a dark corner of the café. I sat across from her. Sitting down, Morana towered over the young needle-studded waitress who took our order. The waitress seemed oblivious as she took our order of oat pancakes and coffee.

“What is she?” asked Morana as the waitress walked away, “About two feet tall? And what’s with this phone scanning to place our order?”

“Just some new thing they do these days. Fun fact: In the 1970s, the Northwestern University student body voted to rename the football team from the Wildcats to the Purple Haze.”1

“Damn, humans are stupid,” Morana replied.

“Is your house still on a sex boycott?”

“Shit, dude, get down to business why don’t you?”

“Just curious. You and the Mouras Encantadas are the only ones I know doing that. You’re gonna go extinct, you know. Pfft.”

“We’re hard to kill. Speaking of, killing, killing you would be hella lot more fun than having sex with you, from what I’ve been told.”

“You’ve seen that internet Giphy that says, ‘Why not both,’ right?”

She raised one of her two thread-thin dark eyebrows at that. Like all vamps, her long black hair paired well with her purple skin. Mine was cut woefully short these days. It looked like hers hadn’t been cut for years.

“So what’s the plan here, Don Juan? We all just meet up somewhere and do what?” She looked around. “Everyone should be here by now. Where is everyone?”

I shrugged. “No idea. But that sounds like as good a plan as any. It’s not like this is going to be a challenge. The ICE dregs are bottom of the barrel. About as athletic as ketchup.”

“Your friend Moreland hates it when vamps expose themselves to the public.”

“You need to be careful with words like that. We live in the Epstein era.”

“Dude, I wouldn’t have sucked that guy’s blood if you offered me all of Bulgaria’s remaining male vamps as a sacrifice to the Morana House.”

That was saying a lot. Bulgaria had fifty vampire houses and the largest vampire demographic in the world, because many had fled to the Rila and Pirin mountains during World War Two before spreading across the country during the Cold War.

That still didn’t leave many vampires in the world. There were only a few thousand of us left. Morana’s obsession with taking out male vampires was irritating, especially given our steady attrition, so I said so.

She shrugged. “Where’s Needles? I’m hungry.”

I turned to look at the counter. There was nobody there. The café, crowded with breakfast customers just moments before, was empty, too.

I stood up. “Come on,” I said, motioning her to follow me as I advanced towards the front door.

A cacophony of whistles and screaming voices greeted us when we opened the door. The sidewalks on both sides of the chaotic street were filled with people raising their cameras, throwing things, and yelling at men whose windbreakers were emblazoned with the word “POLICE.” Several humans were banging on the tinted windows of a large Chevy Suburban.

Moreland approached us wearing a tight leather onesie and grinning ear to ear.

Longtooth, “londondaggerhound” in the chat, tailed her in a dark trenchcoat. He expanded his arms as if we’d fly into them, saying calmly to us in a thick, aristocratic British accent as he approached, “So glad you could join us.”

Longtooth had canines the size of small swords that arched menacingly from his upper jaw to below his chin. He wasn’t the kind of vampire who could blend in without claiming he was going to a costume party. Yet, the chaos in the street was so thorough that nobody noticed him.

“This is marvelous,” he grinned as I reached him. “A veritable hunting ground. I suppose you’ll prefer that I don’t take random samples.”

“Go for the law enforcement types, such as they are,” I said.

“They don’t make themselves known now, do they?” he replied.

“Just look for sleazy, overweight dudes stumbling out of SUVs like that one,” I said, pointing to one that had rolled up diagonally onto a curb in the mayhem.

And so it began.

“This is delicious,” said Moreland, stabbing at a cut of lamb.

Morana raised a wine glass filled with pink ice and blood-red liquid. “Welcome to the first Christmas dinner in several centuries at the House of Morana. In honor of our weirdo friend Jade, who, for some ungodly reason, calls himself a Christian.”

Moreland, sitting next to me, raised her glass, “To dipshit,” she said, looking at me.

“Body of Christ,” I said, raising my glass and winking at Moreland, who was wearing a translucent red dress that left little to my imagination.

“More like blood of ICE, but it’ll do,” said Longtooth.

It had been, perhaps, centuries since vampire houses had gathered together to feast and drink the stored blood acquired during a mass feeding frenzy like the satisfying event in Chicago. I only knew one vamp who was capable of snatching and storing blood this way, and he wasn’t here. I wanted to ask Morana, but it didn’t seem like the moment.

This was a special occasion. It seemed appropriate, given the season, which even non-believers participated in during these modern times.

“That was a delightful event,” said Longtooth, poking at a piece of meat on his plate. “You sure this is lamb?”

Thanks for reading!

Ruminato has an eclectic set of posts, ranging from fiction to political rants about the crisis in the U.S. Becoming a paid subscriber helps keep it alive. Thank you

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I’ll be home alone this Christmas. Feel sorry for me? Say it with cash! (As Sally, Charlie Brown’s sister, says, “How about tens and twenties?”)

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Notes

Legal Disclaimer Regarding Vampire Behavior Toward ICE

Ruminato reiterates its firm commitment to non-violence, lawful discourse, and a strict “no vampires attacking anyone, especially immigration enforcement authorities” policy, no matter what that bug-eyed Patel dude tries to sell his reluctant henchmen.

Any attempts by authorities to arrest the author of this post will be met with an extreme display of flatulence that will reflect both my age and my attitude towards the regime.

Footnotes

I

First Contact was a tepid affair. No leviathan umbra from interstellar disks shadowing coiffed suburban lawns. No sieges. No Ransoms with stories from Perelandra. Not even the satisfaction of witnessing a mortally wounded Tom Cruise gurgling under his Malibu Beach home, praying for the miracles of Dianetics as alien pyrotechnics explode from under the ground and torch his home into the Neoproterozoic age.

Instead, one Visitor was discovered in an Oregon rain forest by two hikers named Candy Richmond and Herbert Melon (@candymelon). I had dated a girl named Candy Richmond once, but she didn’t live in Oregon and wasn’t much of a hiker. If it were my Candy, she would have been hiking in severely distressed blue denim shorts and high heels.

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Anyway, the visitor was sitting on an immense fallen tree while eating another tree. He was quite large, this visitor was, perhaps 40 feet tall. The hikers posted an Instagram video of the interstellar traveler gnawing on a tree trunk with the comment, “What do you guys think of this?”

Comments ranged from “Noisy, slurping alien dude,” to “We are so hosed!”

His name turned out to be unpronounceable, so everyone called him CaddyShaq because Shaq himself tweeted that the visitor would make a great golf caddy on account of his impressive arm length. CaddyShaq responded by tweeting that he was simply “an old hollow boned dinosaur” (if we have time, we will perhaps visit the process CaddyShaq used for tweeting regularly without access to a computer).

CaddyShaq did, indeed, look a bit like a dinosaur. More like a cross between a dinosaur and a feathered ape, with a large brown beak and enormous, friendly, mammalian blue eyes. The top of his head sported a nest of small, unruly yellow feathers crisscrossed with red streaks as if his scalp had been the field for a gruesomely inconclusive battle between baby chicks.

His cerulean skin bore long, undulating scales that freaked some people out, but not more than the absurdly long arms that hung from his muscular shoulders and left spindly hands dragging along the ground. When the hands weren’t engaged with the ground, they exposed no discernible fingernails or claws, but instead small suction cups where fingernails should have been, rather than where the suction cups should have been (shouldn’t they be at the bottom of his fingers rather than the top? the social media stream wondered). The suction cups appeared randomly, like the thoughts of a mad king.

He did have five fingers, and this provided a sense of relief to many people. The structure of the rest of his body was quite ape-like, aside from the scales instead of hair. A long, thin strand of feathers adorned the middle of his back and would sometimes display into a much larger and fun to watch rainbow-colored crest of avian extravagance.

There were unproven rumors that he could fly, so UFO sightings began to include images of CaddyShaq soaring through the air, but these images and videos were invariably found to be AI-generated.

The squawk accompanying his feathery pageantries could shatter gorilla glass. His long, narrow feet didn’t seem to affect his gait, although it was difficult to confirm this, considering that his gait would carry him past most observers’ field of vision after a few steps.

Oh. And he was always naked.

He didn’t even understand the concept of clothes. Once he learned more about them, he seemed fascinated, tweeting once, “India! I love that place! Such clothes!” but he still declined to wear them.

CaddyShaq’s itinerary grew. He was invited to Davos and Austin’s South by Southwest and, if he was willing to wear clothes (he wasn’t), a Joel Osteen megachurch event in Houston. He was invited to the Super Bowl, and to throw out the first pitch of the World Series — if he was willing to wear clothes (he wasn’t).

He was a garrulous individual who gabbed incessantly about seemingly unimportant topics like candy bars and the composition of the rings of Neptune (which he stated without elucidation were much more scientifically interesting than those of Saturn).

Well, by now you may be wondering where the trouble started. Keep in mind that it’s difficult for me to be objective because I met him in a county jail, where I’d like to say we became good friends. Objectivity often takes a back seat in such circumstances.

It’s possible the timeline took its first dour turn when he announced on social media that he was changing his name to Mendez. He didn’t provide a reason other than to say that, along with the Spanish language itself, he liked the sound of it. This offended much of the nation, which was in the throes of mass hysteria over Spanish surnames.

The timeline took another turn when he was asked about the nature of God by a Christian podcaster. “It is not for me to determine where you find your heart,” he said. “What I can tell you is that all the terrible things you see on your planet are called forth by a being we call Insanity, who infiltrates the minds of all sentient creatures in the universe. Attempting to decipher Insanity’s intent will drive you insane.”

The outrage machine took over from there.

When Mendez gave a TED talk regarding climate change, forty percent of the American public claimed he had been weaponized. Before the TED talk, there had been a grudging acceptance of his presence on Earth by even the most notorious purveyors of intolerance. Most found his personality innately charming.

But he was also an alien, so fear sawed the nation in half. In retrospect, the honeymoon was brief.

Then he dropped the hammer, and he may as well have drained the earth’s core of its molten lava and spat it upon the social media ecosphere. He said during the TED talk that for a planet like ours to survive, a planet that had turned into an overheated virus sponge with acidic seas overtaken by jellyfish, there could be no more seemingly innocuous hikes taken by the likes of @candymelon. “Nature has revoked your hiking privileges,” he said with the first tone of bitterness he had ever uttered.

Outrage intensified to such an extent that it cannibalized itself, then regurgitated a billion conspiracy theories, many of them only tangentially related to Mendez.

Still, he roamed the Earth freely, exploring canyons with his long arms as they lifted him from one cliff to the next, leaping across sand dunes, chasing the source of tundra winds, gnawing on the forests of Georgia’s northern hills.

And there, my friends, is where Mendez discovered America’s esteemed immigration services.

Mendez was minding his own business, nibbling carefully on a one-hundred-foot eastern pine in northern Georgia, when a team of countless well-armed police from Homeland Security and a local county sheriff’s department screeched into view at the nearest trailhead.

They flashed an impressive arsenal of weapons as they dismounted their patrol cars and armored vehicles. The county sheriff’s department normally employed 500 deputies to protect the local golf courses and their abutting subdivisions, and they were itching for just about anything that went beyond the usual meth-fueled domestic disturbance.

After they marched deeper into the woods, one deputy stood astride a thick oak tree and clung to a megaphone while three grotesquely overweight ICE men wearing balaclava masks looked on. “Put the tree down and lie face down on the ground,” the deputy commanded. It was a very crowded forest, and lying down in this way was not possible for a 40-foot being, but that didn’t stop the deputy from barking out his command again.

There were approximately 60 Glocks and 40 long guns aimed at him, so the Visitor decided he should attempt to comply.

After a considerable delay fraught with confusion and clumsy uncertainty, they hauled him to the county jail in a logging truck. There, they charged him with terroristic activities, which is a general term used by many rural sheriff departments when there is no actual crime on the books for the behavior they want to control, and besides, when a rural county jail has 800 cells to fill, a little creativity is, as they say, the mother of invention.

II

My bunkmate had finally been released after about 22 months of confinement. Like most detainees in the county jail, he waited around for trial well past a year and finally gave up, pleaded out, and left with time served. I was lying on my bunk reading a John Grisham novel during my own 21^st month when the familiar clatter of unlocking mechanisms forced my head to tilt towards my cell door.

A large-beaked creature’s head popped in, then the rest of his body was stuffed into the six-by-eight cell by a pile of cussing deputies. The beak smiled at me when it said in heavily accented English, “Luckily, I’m quite flexible.” Also, luckily, our ceiling soared high above, as he was able to sit down with his legs bent or folded over several times. He filled up the cell, of course, but I was in a lousy position to complain.

“I am not quite sure why I’m here,” said the thing with the beak. He looked like the creature we had been seeing on the news, but most of us only caught glimpses of him before somebody changed the channel to watch jail porn such as “Naked and Afraid.”

“Either do I,” I responded, picking a ramen noodle out of my teeth with a fingernail badly needing a trim.

“I would not expect you to know why I’m here, my friend,” the beak replied.

“No. I mean, I don’t know why I’m here either.”

“I see.” He tried to look around but had difficulty.

“No oranges that fit you?” I asked.

“Oranges?”

I pointed to my orange jumpsuit.

“Oh. Well, my people don’t wear clothes.”

“Huh.” There was an awkward pause, so I asked, “Where are you from, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Ipshlghachtfustsitlamanchfidlepstiefflshgrrgretryiuyplamitntkyilwrpeelmfedelminestein.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Is there a shorter word for that? Like, Ipswich or something?”

“If you like,” he said, continuing his efforts to crane his neck to view his surroundings.

“Since when do these people respect culture?” I asked him.

“I’m sorry. I don’t quite understand your meaning.”

“Well, they make everyone wear the fancy orange uniforms. But not you? Is it a cultural thing? Or can they just not find a size that fits you?” It irked me that he didn’t have to wear the orange jumpsuit.

The beak didn’t answer. He asked, “What is this place?”

“Officially?” I asked.

“Well, I suppose officially.”

“Officially, it is a form of hell on earth. It is very possible that since you have found yourself here, you died and are in hell. You may want to ask yourself what you did in your prior lifetime to deserve this.”

“Oh, there is no hell, my friend,” he said. “At least, not for our people.”

I laughed. Snickered, actually. It was a snicker. “Oh no? Then explain your current circumstance.” I expected a long wait.

“Well, this appears to be a form of confinement by your species, so I suspect there is a misunderstanding.”

I laughed again. Snickered. “Well, this place is all about misunderstandings. In fact, there are about 800 misunderstandings here.” I wanted to spit a hocker into the steel toilet, but he was blocking my view.

“I see. Are you suggesting that if I request to leave, my request will be denied?”

I shrugged, wanting to get back to my Grisham novel. “See what the magistrate says. Maybe you can bond out.”

He was perplexed by the entire concept of a bond, even after I explained it to him several times. It was clear that not only did he have no money, but that he didn’t know what money was.

“You are trying to tell me, I believe, that I cannot leave this place without this money you refer to.”

“Bingo.”

“Bingo. That is a game played by the elderly of your kind?”

I was only able to respond with a blank stare, although I was slightly impressed that he knew this. For some reason, the dichotomy of his knowing about bingo and not bail bonds didn’t register with me.

“May I inquire,” he continued, “and forgive me if I sound rude, but may I inquire about the relationship between bingo and these bonds you are describing so helpfully to me?”

“Look, buddy, no offense, but I don’t really have time to give you lessons on all the nuances of the English language.” I had all the time in the world, but I wanted to get back to Grisham.

I knew, though, that without a bond, he’d be here for a very long time. He had already begun the transition from looking rather stately in his feathery countenance to looking a bit peaked. I began to feel bad for the guy, so I explained the next step, which was to meet with a court-appointed attorney so that he could set up a plea bargain with the fine folks in the prosecutor’s office. “But they’ll keep you in here awhile so they can make sure you do some time,” I added. Then I had to explain what “doing time” meant.

“Based on admittedly limited observation, the conditions here appear worse than the zoos on your planet. Are your planet’s non-sentient criminals afforded slightly better accommodations on account of their non-sentience?”

Answering that wasn’t going to be simple. “Well, there really is no such thing as a criminal, umm, animal,” I tried.

“But they are in cages,” was his obvious reply.

“For observation,” I tried again.

“Perhaps I could be considered one of these animals. It would be a small upgrade in my accommodations.”

“You’ll have to lawyer up for that, too,” I replied.

“This court-appointed legal individual will not accomplish that for me?”

“Fraid not. Their job is to make a deal with the prosecution on how much time you do.”

“I see. Very well.” I should have been disappointed in his easy capitulation, but it was routine for this place.

To borrow a word I’ve already used, we bonded, Mendez and I, then won every pickup basketball game we played for the next 13 months.

Finally, I guess Mendez had had enough. “Let’s bust outta this joint,” he declared in an accent he had acquired that sounded like a cross between Aryan Nation and South Central, for he had forged alliances during his stay with both factions of his incarcerated brethren.

Busting out was easy because he was not only forty feet tall, but also very strong.

He simply tore off one door after another.

“Why didn’t you tell me this would be so easy?” he complained as we stepped into the fresh air.

“I needed you for the pickup games,” I said. “What if you left without me?”

“Fair,” he said with stoic understatement.

With some difficulty, I climbed aboard one of his shoulders as alarms surrounded the gated facility from which we emerged. It seemed only minutes later that we were at his former dining spot in the Georgia woods.

We partied in the thick forest for days.

“Don’t tell anyone about these roots,” Mendez said as he unfurled some from their twisty origins. “Everyone will come here and ruin the place.”

“It’s our secret,” I promised before the roots launched my mind into a hallucinatory storybook.

I learned many things from Mendez during the next few months, things that would make you rich and powerful were I to share them.

You won’t learn what they are because Mendez announced, as a set of drones flew overhead, that it was time to go home.

“It’s a shame, isn’t it?” he said. “I arrived here bearing so many gifts, but your people never inquired about what I might offer them. No inquisitiveness about what great endowments a species capable of interstellar flight might extend to the primitive inhabitants of a beautiful planet.”

I was sitting on his shoulder during that moment, thinking how we would have simply fought over his gifts. I told him so.

“I assume that the scars humans leave behind will firmly establish themselves, like the Sea of Tranquility or Tycho Crater on your moon, like the gashes of Mars, until the wild volunteer blue bonnets and purple coneflowers and the coreopsis and the blue-eyed grasses cover the Malthusian graves of your species as the decades beyond your term here on Earth open themselves to the next dominant species, a more deserving one, I hope.”

He was silent for a moment before his voice broke through the buzz of the approaching drones. “Would you like to visit our fine planet?” he asked. “It’s a busy place, full of chattering hordes.”

“I would,” I said, not caring about a return date.

A vast plumage erupted from his body.

I held onto Mendez. I held onto him for dear life, such that if you’ve ever seen a lock of hair flying in the wind, and I know you have, attached to something you barely know, that was me, holding onto Mendez as we flew away, to a place I could not imagine.

Thank you for reading!

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“What the hell just happened?”

“You’re dead, mate.”

“Dead? All I was doing was playing pickleball.”

The avocado-colored man shrugged.

“And why am I so small?” The avocado-colored man was also tiny, as he looked to be precisely the same size. Johnny looked up and noticed that he was standing next to a dandelion that must have been 20,000 feet tall, but it didn’t touch the clouds, which were plentiful. So he figured it out. He was very small. Infinitesimal, perhaps.

Johnny wasn’t willing to accept such an early demise. He was only thirty-two and, as best he knew, in perfect health.

He began to say something, but the avocado-colored man shushed him with a finger to his lips, then crossed his arms as if hugging himself tightly. The thick black bristles of his eyebrows contrasted sharply with his skin as they arched upon his asking, “If you were not dead, what would you be? And if you are dead, what are you now?”

“What kind of a question is that?” asked Johnny, thinking it quite mad.

“Two questions. The questions you must answer. A riddle to solve. But with the same answer.”

“I just want Candy…never mind,” Johnny replied. “Who are you, anyway?”

“I have many names, but you must choose your own.”

“So. Everyone’s a smartass in the afterlife, too,” said Johnny. “Good to know. How about I call you Smart Ass?”

“As you wish.”

“You never answered my question,” said Johnny.

“Ah. Your small size. I could offer to make you much larger, but then you won’t be able to hear me speak or complete your mission, and it is with me you must speak if you wish to thrive.”

“I have no idea what I want. I just got here.” Johnny looked around rather desperately, his eyes hunting for an escape route.

“You want Candy to be well, do you not?”

“Yeah, well, a little late for that. I was only thinking about my sister because…I don’t even know. She’s the first person that popped into my head when I saw you.”

“It is not too late. Not if you consider yourself a warrior,” said Smart Ass.

“I’m an accountant.”

“What if I told you that you’re a warrior?”

“Beyond finding it mildly amusing?”

Smart Ass nodded. Johnny thought Smart Ass’s head looked like a green balloon. Smooth. Barely there ears. A nose so flat he wondered if it disappeared into the surrounding smooth exterior when he slept.

Wait. Did he even sleep?

“I believe you are ready,” said Smart Ass. “The demons who haunt your sister are ready, too. Prepare for battle.”

There are apparently insane people in the afterlife, too, Johnny mused.

As he thought that, he found his right hand wrapped around the hilt of a long sword.

Johnny heard a sound that he thought must be from a cowboy hooting from high above. When he looked up, a bright red creature that looked identical to Smart Ass, a twin, he assumed, only red instead of green, slid down the dandelion stem like he was descending an old-fashioned firehouse pole.

The twin hooted the whole way down until he landed next to Smart Ass.

“Him?” the red twin asked Smart Ass.

“Who else?” replied Smart Ass. “He’s her brother.”

The red twin’s balloon face instantly revealed a sardonic Cheshire grin. “I assure you, my friend, you stand no chance,” he said to Johnny as his small eyes began to glow like tiny yellow headlights.

Johnny decided his best course of action, even though he didn’t know where he was, was to get some distance from these two clowns, so he pirouetted and began to walk away from them.

Ahead was a blue but empty landscape. No grass, no ground, but when he walked, his feet seemed firmly planted. When he looked down at his feet, all he saw was more empty blue expanse.

“Where you going?” Smart Ass whined. “You must do battle with the demons who torture your sister.”

“Yeah, you’re her only hope,” laughed the red twin.

Johnny looked at the sword. The only time he’d swung a sword was by pushing video game controllers. This wasn’t the same. He turned to face the two weirdos. “Where do I go for this… this battle?”

“You must enter her brain,” said Smart Ass. “But whether you receive assistance or not is a roll of the dice.” He produced two dice and rolled them on the floor that wasn’t there. They bounced their way to him. Clickety clack, went the dice.

“No, no, no,” said the red twin. “Just toss a coin.” He produced a coin much bigger than he, and tossed it high into the air. “Heads or tails?”

“Ummm, heads?”

“They always say that,” chuckled the red twin. About a minute later, the coin landed in front of Johnny. It was heads.

“Lucky break,” said the red twin, his sinister but gleeful smile somehow stretching further across his face.

“What does this mean?” asked an increasingly confused Johnny.

“It means you won’t be going into battle alone,” said Smart Ass. “Good thing, too, because your odds indeed would have been long. Okay, then, off you go.”

“Wait!” thundered the red twin in a terrifying voice quite different than the high-pitched, mischievous one from moments ago. “Do we have a bet or not?”

“A bet on what?” asked Johnny.

“Whether you can save your sister.”

How am I supposed to know? Johnny wondered. “Sure,” he said.

With that, he found himself in a busy, frenetic place that also seemed mostly blue but also saturated in colors he didn’t recognize. He began to wonder if someone at the pickleball courts had given him acid, but he had never tried acid, so he couldn’t ponder the possibility in detail.

Next to him was what looked like a fairy. She was tiny, even compared to him, about the size of his nose. Her silver body and wings buzzed around his head for a moment, then seemed to collide with a roulette wheel a few feet away.

The collision started the wheel.

As the wheel spun, she buzzed back to him and said, “Come,” then flew back to the wheel, which moved at such a rate he was unable to discern the symbols that blurred within its motion.

“Open your hand, please,” she said to him as he approached.

When Johnny did as instructed, she deposited a large skeleton key into his palm. “What’s this for?” he asked.

“Oh, nothing,” she giggled. “It was just in my way.”

“What’s the roulette wheel for?” Johnny asked, feeling remarkably inquisitive, he thought, for a dead guy.

“We’re going to see who your guide is. After that, you’ll be on your way,” she said merrily.

The roulette wheel stopped at a symbol that looked like a duck’s bill. Then, an animal about half Johnny’s size appeared next to him. “Ready, soldier?” asked a smiling, cartoonish platypus staring up at him.

“I’m ready for this goofy dream to end,” said Johnny.

“Great, let’s get to it. My name is Wolf. Let’s go save your sister.”

If this was all some kind of bizarre joke, it wasn’t funny. His sister had been fighting both cancer and a substance abuse problem, and was now in a coma. The cancer was in remission. The substance abuse problem was not. Hence, the coma, which Johnny had learned had been caused by heroin cut with fentanyl.

None of this was funny to him.

Before all this nonsense, he had been playing pickleball as a way to destress after spending hours, then days, at the hospital.

His sister had been a successful marketing executive until she hurt her back in a car accident. Then the opioids, the immobilization, the husband who left after only a month into her injury, leaving her with a young boy to take care of and no way to do it.

Johnny tried to help. He cut out the partying on weekends to help take care of her son, Nick. He worked a little extra so he could swing by with a big, fat, fluffy parka for him one cold winter day, and a bunch of toys on other days. He cooked dinner for her after work and started a side gig doing taxes so he could hire a full-time nurse for her.

As her back healed, she developed an addiction to opioids, then got hammered by cancer of the esophagus. More drugs, some chemo, and finally remission, but the opioids stubbornly remained.

It was a long, ugly ordeal. She had won so many victories, but not this last one. And now, Johnny was gone, understanding that grief was not only for the survivors of the dead, but for him, too, unable to help his sister, unable to be there for her or for Nick.

The bipedal platypus, looking just a little sad, Johnny thought, took his hand, and they disappeared into a nest of fibers and filaments.

Wolf let go of Johnny’s hand before approaching a tall human with massive shoulders covered by a long white robe and a long beard that reached his navel. The man handed Wolf a long, thin sword and a backpack, then pointed in the direction Wolf had been leading Johnny.

“There are more of them now than ever,” said the bearded man. “Good luck.”

Wolf looked up at Johnny and motioned him forward. “Follow me.” Wolf pulled a small device out of his backpack and pressed something. A vehicle that looked like a bumper car approached from the nest of multicolored fibers.

“In you go,” said Wolf. Johnny reluctantly climbed in, and Wolf sat in the seat in front of him. “Hold on to the bar in front of you. Like you’re on a roller coaster.”

“You know what a roller coaster is?” Johnny asked, surprised a cartoonish platypus would know such things.

“Dude.”

“Okay, okay,” Johnny said. When he grasped the bar, the car took off at an alarming and sudden speed.

“Where the hell are we going?” yelled Johnny as the bumper car careened past spider-like objects with eyes in their center, past long tendrils with bulbs at the end, past fibers and coils and clusters of three-dimensional splatters and splats and splinters and spikes.

“We’re riding a neurotransmitter in your sister’s brain!” yelled Wolf in reply. “Be prepared to fight!”

Fight what? Johnny wondered.

Creatures of all shapes and sizes lunged for the car as they rode past. Creatures with winding tendrils, short tendrils, thousands of tendrils, sometimes just one tendril seemed to target the car, just barely missing. Spikey things, round things, oblong things. Dark things, bright things, grey things, red things, black things.

“Them?” asked Johnny desperately.

“Just hold on!” bellowed the platypus.

The vehicle stopped in front of a ravishing beauty pushing one arm forward with her palm facing Johnny and Wolf.

“Come hither,” said the beauty.

Johnny eagerly jumped out of the vehicle, taking a rather major tumble to the ground in doing so.

The beauty spoke: “What you saw during your brief journey here was nothing more than a parade of organisms that populate human brains. Harmless to you and your companion.

“What you face next will be considerably more fearsome: The demons who have stolen your sister’s life. After all that work she put into making herself healthy, she was ambushed by unimaginably devious, and deviant, beings.”

The beauty continued: “They have found a way in. I cannot guarantee you can save her. You were given a riddle by the gatekeeper, were you not?”

Johnny nodded.

“Bear the riddle in mind as you face your nemesis,” said the beauty. “Or more accurately, nemeses”

Johnny nodded again, transfixed by the tall, shimmering beauty in her sparkling, glowing blue robe.

“Proceed,” she said, stepping aside.

One of Wolfe’s arms stretched out impossibly, spanning several lengths of his body, as his hand grasped Johnny and pulled him into the bumper car. The vehicle simultaneously sped past the beauty. This left Johnny with his feet in the air and his back on the bench of the car seat.

He struggled to sit up, then finally did just as the car screeched to a halt. Johnny looked around, not seeing any pavement, so he wondered how the screech was produced. He hadn’t even noticed if the bumper car had tires. He thought not.

This place was weird. He hoped that if this was the afterlife, there would be another afterlife after this one, because it pretty much sucked, aside, perhaps, from the beauty.

“Follow me,” said Wolf, who was no longer a platypus but instead an upright wolf with two long, curved fangs curling from the top of his mouth, a thick coat of long, brown and grey fur, and claws like sickles.

Sighing, Johnny followed, thinking that, no, he wasn’t dead. It was all just a bad dream.

Wolf exhaled a tremendous roar as he charged forward.

Johnny, as usual, felt lost because he didn’t see where Wolf was charging. There were no threats that he could see.

But as Wolf continued his charge, Johnny following close behind, he noticed a misty red fog thicken in the direction of Wolf’s gait. Out of it emerged a monstrous entity, with canines the size of elephant tusks drooping from the lips of each of its three heads, gargantuan, yellow scleras decorating its narrow eyes, muscular arms with ropes of burled muscle, its scaly, phosphorescent, dark red skin utterly naked, its member swinging between its thick legs like a hanging victim tossed by violent gusts.

Wolf charged with his sword, but was instantly swatted by the beast’s long, thorny tail.

“What are you?” it laughed at Johnny in a deep voice that sounded like it arrived from inside a massive barrel. Johnny noticed that Wolf’s corpse was impaled on the tail’s two long thorns as the tail snapped around the beast like it was eagerly awaiting another attack.

But Wolf shook himself free like nothing happened and fell in front of Johnny, morphing back into the platypus as he did so.

Johnny thought about the riddle.

What was he now? It was a fair question, he thought as the beast glowered.

He thought about Candy, and her forever struggle. He thought about how she once begged Johnny through a sea of tears, “God, Johnny, I wish you could slay these demons for me. I wish someone could”

He thought about how much he loved her.

“Who am I?” Johnny smiled. “I’m the one who has solved the riddle. I am Love.”

The platypus laughed haughtily when Johnny spoke. “You are not,” it said.

The beast, though, caterwauled, then vaporized into a pyramid of red dust.

At that, the platypus changed its shape yet again, this time into the red twin, who angrily yacked something in a foreign tongue. The red twin jumped up and down with its fists in the air as it shriveled as if baked in the sun for days, then also disappeared into a pile of red dust.

Above Johnny, a bright blue sky adorned with beautiful yellow and white clouds opened up to a visage, spreading across the sky, of Candy waking up from her coma, the slightest smile breaking upon her lips, a tear squeezing out of the corner of her eye, as she said, “Thank you, Johnny. I love you, too.”

Notes

To those who aren’t familiar with my writing: I suffered a hemorrhagic stroke last November, so I think about death a lot these days. Before you ask: I’m okay. It mostly only affected my vision. I was lucky. I can’t see straight, but that’s not a major change (brief chuckle).

But… that kind of thing does change one’s perspective on life, and what may or may not come after. It has definitely affected my writing of late. Lots of musings about afterlives and final analysis.

Thanks for reading!

Notes

This story appeared on September 29 in The Kraken Lore publication on Medium. I cheated and used more than four constraints, because I was in a mood.

The prompts were as follows (free link):

Main Theme (Worth 2 points, flip a coin or choose one!):

Prompt #1:

Your protagonist must master a new game to survive!

This, apparently, can be done with or without a hacksaw and a creepy doll.

Prompt #2:

Make a bet against the devil… and win!

Just be careful — like Medium, I hear he cheats!

Constraints Worth 1 point each (Choose 4 or roll 4 6-sided dice):

A coin

A pair of dice

A roulette wheel

A deadly disease

A wise old man (or similar creature)

A key that isn’t a key

Hardcore Constraint Worth 2 points (Flip a coin or choose one):

An animal companion

A plant creature

Literary Device (Worth 5 points):

Introduce a riddle for the characters to solve.

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This is an alternative history murder mystery set in a modern North America where slavery ended in the late 1700s and the Trail of Tears never occurred. What sprang from that was a multicultural nation governed by a democratic theocracy. Longman Jones is a former newspaper reporter and (of course, because it’s a murder mystery) martial arts expert who sees visions of murders immediately after they take place.

Lately, his visions have morphed from certain to possible ones. In the previous chapter, he encountered another. His latest vision showed his friend, Hiawatha, killed in a confrontation with the alleged mastermind of a murder and conspiracy plot.

Previous chapters can be found at the end of Chapter One.

Read Chapter One

Chapter Nineteen

I tapped the earpiece again. “Hiawatha can you hear me?”

“Yeah brother, I can hear you.”

“Where are you?” I asked frantically, but not as frantically as when I saw Sonata die, because this time, I was confident that the target of my vision was not dead.

“Just outside the voodoo house,” he said.

“I think there’s a sniper on the roof. I just had another vision.” Just so he knew that my vision was real, I added, “And she’s not my girl.”

“Hell, she isn’t. And thank you. I’ll keep you plugged in. Talk me through the place once I get in. Where to find Alon.”

“He’s in the third room on the right down a hallway you’ll see when you get there. Three doors on each side, he’ll be in the third on your right. Don’t bother banging the others all down.”

He didn’t reply. Instead, I heard him giving some orders, but the words weren’t distinct. I heard several rounds of automatic gunfire a few minutes later. “Sniper is down,” he said soon after. “You were right. Holiest of shits, you do have quite a gift.”

I heard lots of indiscernible commotion. Loud voices, instructions, cussing. A woman screaming, Hiawatha assuring me she’s okay, just scared, as she was getting pushed and locked into a room for her safety. Probably the front desk lady I had met.

The sounds mostly blended into one kerfuffle, except when a riff of automatic gunfire pierced through. Hiawatha cursed, but not into the phone. “Man down,” his throat hurried before I heard a loud thud that sounded like full bookshelves falling. Hiawatha was cursing a lot, now, sounding concerned.

Footfalls. Running. “Zak!” he screamed, “two o’clock!” More cussing, more gunfire. It was like listening to a war movie in which you had no idea whose side was winning.

There was clearly a lengthy gun battle. Finally, silence. “I think that was Horse Luemba who just took a few rounds,” Hiawatha said within a series of gasping breaths through a voice sounding smothered and distant. “I think we lost a man, Longman. He’s not looking good from here.” A deep breath. “I see someone at the end of the hallway.”

After more harried noises, Hiawatha said to me, “There’s a little bald man running down the hallway in a white bathrobe. Got a little spot of black hair on the top of his head like it’s a mistake.”

“That’s probably Alon,” I said.

I heard more running. Even through the earpiece, I could sense the determination, the significance of the next moments. I could almost see Hiawatha signaling his men where to move. Next, the only obvious noises I could make out were the sounds of military-grade boots hitting the floor. A lot of them.

“Nowhere for you to go, Alon,” I heard Hiawatha say. “You are Philippe Alon, are you not?”

I could faintly hear Alon’s French accent say in its high-pitched voice, “Oui, now please remove these weapons. You are in a Synod-registered congregation.” Hiawatha’s reply was swift and simple.

A long round of gunfire cut through my earpiece. “Register this,” I heard Hiawatha say.

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Chapter Twenty

“Lordy, it’s hot down here,” said Sonata Holmes, taking a drink of a cool pineapple and seltzer water through a straw. A wooden bat delivered its magical sound into the stands as it struck a baseball and lofted it far over the outfield fence, which sent Thériault Mawlings’ hands clapping high into the air as he rounded the bases in triumph. Sonata and I had taken it upon ourselves to bring a very special guest to a playoff game in Port-au-Prince.

“A lady from Texas complaining about the heat,” I said, stricken as always by her company. I clapped my hands, too, as I watched Mawlings being greeted at home plate by three others who scored in front of him, all of them jumping up and down like happy children.

Mawlings had finished the regular season hitting .327. I was obviously not destined to win any bets, especially now that the gambling operation had been taken out by Hiawatha. And especially, too, now that the federal government was pouring resources into what it considered congregational warfare. There was a long way to go, I knew, before all the truth would be found, and I had no idea what my role might be in finding it.

Summary James, sitting on the other side of me, jumped up and spilled his drink all over his pants while cheering on the next batter, who also hit a long home run, all of which elicited a loud laugh from Sonata.

I took Sonata Holmes’s hand in mine and kissed it, comfortable with the uncertain future, but glad to be away from congregational politics, if only for a day.

End of Chapter Twenty

— — — The End — — —

or, possibly the beginning…

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You can find Chapters One and Two and the current table of contents here:

The full version is available on Amazon, but it’s an older version. If I update it, I’ll send out a link.

Annie was next in line. She stared at the backs of four men who were taking care of their business at the urinals. She appreciated the intricate weaves, loops, and patterns of the filtration systems that adorned their backs, but she also loathed them because they represented dependence and the planet’s scorn. Each system possessed a unique artistic vision with dozens of thin tubes attached to the filter in each man’s backpack. The tubes were threaded by patient hands into carefully crafted webs of survival art.

They were meticulously crafted because the importance of the filters to the lives of Mall citizens had given birth to an ongoing community art contest with no winners aside from the congratulatory nods of fellow contestants. Each intricate nest of tubing represented the gift of life, because without it, breathing was ultimately fatal. Pipes and hoses and valves and penstocks, all as vital as blood and water, were rendered into individual flexible sculptures by each individual throughout the colony.

One of the men finished and walked past Annie, so she ambled up to his abandoned urinal, unzipped her printed metallic pants, pulled everything down to her knees, and squatted so that she could pee. One of the next people in line was a boy, probably about eight or nine. She stuck her tongue out at him as she peed. He giggled. When she finished, she stood up and gave the boy the finger as she walked past him. He giggled again and scrambled to the urinal.

Hemlock was waiting for her at the entrance with his long machete, sheathed like always in decorative, stiff black leather, holding its handle menacingly, his thick, arching black eyebrows sending unmistakable warnings to anyone with ideas. His dark, tattooed arms, which looked like oak barrels etched with ink illustrations of barbed wire, a hawk, and the beautiful face and long dark hair of a woman from long ago, flexed and twitched under a tight black T-shirt.

Hemlock’s machete was the only weapon Annie ever saw at the Mall aside from crossbows wielded by Nationals, who used them to shoot at packs of feral dogs that occasionally found their way inside the Mall’s interior. Hemlock never, not once, unsheathed it for her, either to show it off or as a passive aggressive form of discipline.

It was said that the Distributors carried long guns, but she never saw them. They delivered food drops without revealing anything more than robots designed to unpack the goods and leave them in the rotunda every morning.

Beyond Hemlock, into the Mall’s interior, a long queue of fidgety people needing to pee snaked along the length of the promenade lined with abodes, then around a bend into another promenade of abodes. “How come you, like, hardly ever need to go?” Annie asked Hemlock as he put his hand on her shoulder to guide her out of the bathroom.

“And how come you, like, always ask me that question?” he snarled. It was his good snarl, though, the one that made her feel safe.

Hemlock had always claimed to be her father, but she had never believed it. He cared for her better than any father she knew of, for one thing. He was more like a mother, she thought, although she never knew her mother, nor did she have much of an understanding of how mothers behaved.

Sometimes, she’d get glimpses. A mother crouched in an alley with her child as waves of dogs rampaged through the Mall, a mother nuzzling her nose against the face of an infant, or, perhaps, just a look of wariness and protection of a mother holding the hand of a child as they walked by.

Her only resentment towards Hemlock was his insistence that they continue their wanderings. Most people lived in abodes, which at one time were stores that still contained much of their original merchandise. Annie was wearing printed silver polyester pants she had acquired from one such place, called Moose Knuckles, where a man and wife speaking in accents she didn’t recognize lived with their seven kids.

When Annie had walked into their abode with Hemlock and asked if she could have a pair of the metallic-looking pants, the man smiled happily as he introduced her to a circular rack full of the things. “You may have one, choose whichever you wish,” said the man. His accent was Nigerian (Hausa, to be specific), but Annie didn’t know that.

One item was the generally accepted merchandise limit in all the abodes. There was no way to enforce the rule. Someone could, if they were so inclined, force their way into an abode to snatch more, but it was in nobody’s interest to do so. Everyone lived by the same code, and nobody needed an entire rack of metallic Moose Knuckles pants or a coat rack full of Thom Browne suits. Not at the Mall.

But their wanderings also gave her an opportunity for adventure. She was sure she was the only twelve-year-old girl who had climbed all the roller coasters, each one from one end to the other, top to bottom. She and Hemlock had spent countless nights at the adventure course and other parts of the indoor amusement park, which had long ago fallen out of service.

When it rained, they found a covered amusement, or huddled under part of the Mall’s broken roof, much of which had collapsed before she was born.

One day, Hemlock tried to find a way to the old, ravaged hotel next to the mall, but the only way there was outside, because the festooned skyway between structures was impassible, despite a long tradition of bored amateur sculptors risking their lives to transform its ruins into high art. He had snuck out of the amusement park while she was still asleep, leaving a note for her in crayon.

There were so many crayons in the Mall that you could see one with nearly every glance — on the floor, on a ledge, in an abandoned flower or plant pot, under a loop of roller coaster tracks. Sometimes Annie wondered if they reproduced on their own.

When Hemlock had returned, he looked like he had taken a mud bath. He told her there were thousands of dogs outside. Like everyone else at the Mall, he was stuck. Unlike most people at the Mall, he didn’t want to be.

What he really wanted was to get to Minneapolis. “It would be a lot like this place,” he had told her once. “But ten times better. We could live wherever we want, and we could see the outdoor life.”

“But the air,” she had said. “Filters are easy to get here if one goes bad.” He had nodded in agreement sadly, and that had been the end of it.

“I kinda need to poop now,” she said as they walked away from the bathroom queue.

“You have got to be kidding,” said Hemlock.

“I know, I know,” she said, “Regular at nine, or we go to the shrine. I’m usually good about it, Hem, right?”

He put a palm gently on her sandy blonde head. “You’re always good, kiddo.” They didn’t say anything for a bit as they walked along several clothing abodes. She couldn’t carry any more than she already had in her stuffed backpack, but she always looked. Hemlock knew she always wanted to go inside.

“I could trade these for something else,” she said brightly while patting her pants with one hand, noticing a crazy checkered and striped shirt inside one of the adobes.

“You look great in those things,” said Hemlock, referring to her metallic pants. “Besides, nobody wants your skanky-assed worn clothing. Also besides, they’ll just give you a shirt if you want one.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I guess so. But sometimes people are mean when we ask.”

“That’s what this is for,” said Hemlock, slapping the handle of his machete. Annie had never seen Hemlock kill anyone in the Mall. So it was just one of his stupid “I’m a badass” jokes. But he did look badass. “You okay? You gonna last a couple more hours?” he asked. The portable poop latrines were rolled out promptly every morning at 9 am. If she wasn’t able to hold on, they’d have to walk a long way to the shrine, which had the only plumbing in the Mall for poop.

“I’m okay,” she said.

“Good. I don’t want to have to carry you for a mile to the shrine while you’re clenching, trying not to pinch a loaf.” He had done that once when she was six. He never let her forget it.

“Be nice,” she retorted.

“You hungry?”

“I’m afraid to eat. I might want to poop,” she giggled. “But yeah.”

“We’ll stop by the food court, get some eggs. You’ll be fine.”

“I hate wasting food vouchers on breakfast. Breakfast portions are always a rip-off,” said Annie.

“I got lots of vouchers, don’t worry.”

“Someday you won’t got lots of vouchers,” she said.

“There’s always dogs,” said Hemlock.

Annie looked at his machete. “Yeah. Been awhile, though.”

“Yeah,” said Hemlock. “Maybe they all had a meeting and decided this wasn’t a great place to scavenge, after all.”

“Shuddup.”

“We could stop by Kate’s. She adores you. She’ll give you a good portion.”

“She loves everybody, Hem. She’s not gonna do me special.”

“Hmm. Well, let’s check her out, anyway. Because she loves everyone. I’m not in the mood for fools.”

“When are you?”

When they arrived at Kate’s, Kate sat them down at a big plastic table next to the kitchen.

“This thing,” Annie complained as she wrestled with her backpack while trying to sit. Her backpack was twice the size of everyone else’s because she and Hemlock walked so much. Her filter was smaller, too, but the Distributors had said the miniaturization was by design, and that it was a good one.

“I’m afraid all I’ve got today is egg drop soup,” said Kate as she helped Annie with some of the tubing. Kate sat down and looked at Hemlock. “Hemlock, the food drops are getting worse. I don’t know what’s going on. Nobody says nothin’. The Distributors are giving us zero information for the last two weeks now. Some folks here are sayin’ we oughta get a dog hunting crew out ready. For food.”

Hemlock shook his head. “There’s no manpower for something like that. Last time I went out, there were thousands of dogs. More than thousands. Never seen anything like it.”

“Took ‘em one generation to be able to breathe the air,” Kate said, shaking her head.

“That and double in size,” groaned Hemlock.

“Well, what’s feedin’ them things?” asked Kate. Kate was a tall noodle of a woman, middle-aged, whose real name was Sunita, from Bangalore, she had said to Annie once. But she liked being named after her kitchen, which had once been a restaurant named Kate’s Place.

“I dunno,” said Hemlock. His black hair was as dark as Kate’s. When Annie thought about that while they were talking, she realized that Hemlock looked Indian, too. Annie looked at her pale hands and shook her head. Father my ass, she thought.

“You okay?” asked the always alert Hemlock.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Annie.

“I mean, I guess there’s lots of animals out there, Kate,” said Hemlock. “But to get at ‘em, we gotta deal with all the dogs.”

“The Nationals are good for nothin’,” sighed Kate.

“They bring us food,” said Annie. Kate and Hemlock looked at her like she was crazy. “Well they do.”

“There’s more to it than that,” said Hemlock. He was always saying there was.

“What if they just stop?” insisted Annie. She didn’t understand their animosity toward the Nationals or the Distributors. “Like, tomorrow? Then what?”

“We all become dog fighters,” said Hemlock without emotion.

“So then why do you hate them?” asked Annie.

“The Nationals?” asked Hemlock.

Annie nodded. “And the Distributors.”

“Same folks, basically. I don’t hate them. I don’t like being dependent on them.”

“And we don’t know them much, sweety,” said Kate, looking at Annie. Kate swiped at a lock of black hair with her long, mottled, dark fingers. Annie loved how a few streaks of gray interrupted the shimmering black curtain of Kate’s hair.

One of the reasons Hemlock had given long ago why they never settled in one place was that everyone was depressed about their conditions. He said he didn’t want Annie around a bunch of doom-mongers. But Kate wasn’t a doom-monger. She was always light and cheery. Her husband had been killed in the roof collapse nearly a decade ago. Word was she had been exiled outside after going a little crazy and threatening a crowd of people with a fistful of yarn needles.

When she returned to the Mall, everyone gave her a second chance. She wasn’t just grateful. Something had changed within her essence. But she never really said much about what it was that had changed her outlook. “Animals,” she had muttered once, looking blankly into the dusty air.

“Why don’t we know them?” asked Annie innocently. “If they feed us.”

Kate laughed. “They don’t feed you. I feed you. We all feed you.” She swept her hand around to indicate all the other kitchens nearby. Most of them still had at least remnants of their original signage. Places like Panda Express and Little Tokyo and Poukei and Long John Silver’s. “They bring us the raw materials to feed you, I’ll grant you that.”

This was when Annie noticed that the food court didn’t have its usual distinct breakfast aroma. She wondered if the other food courts in the Mall were the same.

“Now what’s wrong?” asked Hemlock. Annie didn’t realize she looked like she thought there was something wrong.

“Nobody else is cooking?” she asked in answer to his question.

Kate shrugged. “Like I said.”

“Well, that’s not good,” said Hemlock.

“We gotta hope it’s just temporary, but like I said, they aren’t saying much.”

Hemlock nodded, but Annie thought he looked worried. The last time she remembered seeing him look this worried was when he carried her to the shrine. She had barely made it without pooping her pants.

When Kate stood up and headed for the kitchen, Annie noticed a large wet spot on the ass of Kate’s light, loosely fitting blue jeans. Kate also seemed to leave behind an unpleasant odor when she walked away. “Hem,” she whispered. “Kate needs to hit the bathing fountain.”

Hemlock didn’t say anything. The gaze of his dark brown almond shaped eyes was fixed on something distant.

“You’re worried,” said Annie, who always wanted to muss his long thick hair, especially when he was distracted.

“Nah, I just…” They both knew he couldn’t lie to her. “Maybe a little. But I don’t know why, so that’s why I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Last time you were worried, about a zillion dogs came into the Mall and killed like, fifty people. You said the same thing then. That, and that time I had almost pooped.”

The only weapons they had were some crossbows that Distributors dropped into the middle of the mall during the attack. Hemlock didn’t use his machete. Didn’t unsheathe it once. Annie never asked him why. Even when he found himself in a close battle with one of the dogs, he shoved a crossbow arrow into the dog’s neck instead of using the machete.

“It’s nothing. I don’t think,” said Hemlock.

“You thought you heard a dog, didn’t you?”

Hemlock nodded.

“You’re kind of paranoid,’ said Annie as Kate approached with three bowls of soup. As she slurped from a big, short-handled plastic spoon, she said, “My friend Zazzie says dogs were considered man’s best friend back in the whenever days.”

“There’s no nice way for me to say this,” said Hemlock, “But Zazzie’s an idiot. Dogs will kill you as soon as they get a sniff of you.”

“We’ve talked about this,” said Kate scornfully while drilling Hemlock with her eyes.

Hemlock shrugged. “All I see is what I see.”

And they had talked about it. Dozens of times. Kate had argued that the reason there were so many different kinds of dogs, even though they were all bigger now, was that humans bred them as loyal, loving pets. But she was never able to convince Hemlock, even though he had heard similar stories from dozens of other people.

Kate looked at Annie. “There’s another old phrase,” she started. “He has puppy dog eyes.”

“What’s that mean?” asked Annie.

“Hmmm. Well, I think it meant loving, soulful, maybe a little innocent, too.”

“Not a problem with Hem,” Annie said through a slurp.

Kate laughed. “Wasn’t considered a problem by most.”

Hemlock reacted to Annie’s teasing with, “I hate dogs.”

“They changed,” said Kate. “Got nasty. They’re pack animals. Now that the world is ruined, they’ve gone back to basics. It’s pretty simple.”

“Those stories. Just a way to cope with the fact we’re their biggest food source.”

And that was that. The same discussion as others between Kate and Hemlock, this time repeated over egg drop soup, and with Annie’s inquisitive ears listening and taking notes.

“Why are you skipping?” asked Hemlock as he and Annie began their next short journey.

“Because I love Kate and we’re heading for the coasters.”

“Says who?”

“Because there’s nothing else in this direction close enough to the poop trucks.”

“You gonna make it?”

“I dunno, Hem. It’ll be an adventure to find out,” she giggled.

Hemlock muttered something under his breath that Annie assumed was one of his more colorful curses.

Then he stopped — halted like he had been roped by a phantom pulling at his chest with an invisible lariat. Annie stopped, too. Hemlock made a shush symbol with his finger to his mouth.

Her heart pounded. When Hemlock was startled by something, it usually meant trouble. Whatever he heard had to compete with other sounds from the mall: Distant talking, music, gears grinding from places far away from Annie’s purview, undiscernible echoes offering little hint of their true selves. But Hemlock’s ears were like machines, Annie knew. He knew every sound in the Mall, the changes that morning, afternoon, and evening each brought to the overall platform of sound that stretched across the massive structure.

Or maybe he saw something, Annie thought. His eyes were the same as his ears. He could detect the subtlest change.

But she didn’t dare ask. Not because he’d punish her. He never did that. But because to speak now could be fatal.

He unsheathed his machete.

“It’s a dog,” he whispered.

“We can talk?”

“Shush.”

He advanced slowly. She followed. He didn’t try to stop her. Metal banged somewhere to their right. Hemlock approached the sound, so she did, too. The sound led them to a small metal door that was too short for humans. Metal clanged and rattled, along with something else. Annie thought it must be the sound a claw makes when it scratches metal, but since she’d never heard such a sound, it left her desperate to learn more.

And something else. A squeal of some kind. It sounded like a whimper. A low whine like some nonverbal kid. She’d heard of those sometimes being found. Kids who’d lost their parents or lost themselves somewhere in the Mall’s labyrinthine tunnels or metal passageways. The squeals seemed to accompany each claw sound.

Hemlock bent to one knee next to the metal door and began to pry it open with the machete.

“What are you doing?” asked Annie, alarmed. She wanted to believe Kate’s stories, but even if she could, even if she did, that was for an earlier time. Not now. The door popped open after Hemlock twisted it at the top with the machete. A dog launched itself into Hemlock’s gut, which threw him onto his back.

The dog couldn’t continue, though. It was stuck in a mass of wiring. And it was tiny. A little tan furball, Annie thought, with brown saucer eyes.

The dog had leapt because the wiring at the base of the nest that had captured the small beast was slack, but now that it was taut, the dog could do nothing.

Hemlock gathered himself and approached the dog on all fours, pushing the machete in front of him, before kneeling. “I always knew this machete would come in handy someday,” he said as he raised the machete in the direction of the little creature.

“God, Hem, no!” Annie yelped. She wanted to stop him so badly that she almost instinctively pulled one of the filtration tubes on his backpack.

The machete descended with fury, cleanly cutting the nest of wires. The tiny dog looked up at Hemlock with what Annie would later say were puppy dog eyes, its tail wagging like it was sure to spin off and take the dog with it, high into the air. It began to furiously lick Hemlock’s hands where he held the machete’s handle.

“What’s he trying to do to me?” Hemlock said with alarm. “Stop that!”

The dog would have none of his objections. It ran several circles around Hemlock and attacked his hand again with its primary weapon of love, showing no mercy, leaving Hemlock in a changed state that he never recovered from.

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This is an alternative history murder mystery set in a modern North America where slavery ended in the late 1700s and the Trail of Tears never occurred. What sprang from that was a multicultural nation governed by a democratic theocracy. Longman Jones is a former newspaper reporter and (of course, because it’s a murder mystery) martial arts expert who sees visions of murders immediately after they take place.

Recently, one of his visions morphed from certain to possible visions. He now encounters another. His latest vision shows his friend, Hiawatha, leading a small militia, which is supposed to be illegal, in a final confrontation with the alleged mastermind of a murder and conspiracy plot.

Previous chapters can be found at the end of Chapter One.

Read Chapter One

Chapter Eighteen

This is what I see.

More detail. More nuance than ever before. Hiawatha would call it a tighter drum.

Hiawatha Smith is talking to my old buddy at the hotel run by the Brotherly Smiles Congregation in Seminole City, Richland Price. I wouldn’t call it a friendly conversation. Hiawatha doesn’t often do friendly when persuasion is needed. He shows Price a photo from his phone of Sonata Holmes. He uses colorful language to say that because of his gambling activities, Price has put this woman in danger. It’s a stretch, but I’m not there to try to mellow him out.

Price nervously responds that he wouldn’t want any harm to come to anybody. He’s just playing baseball cards. Hiawatha softens his tone. “If you knew that an action you are about to take would save your friend Longman’s girl but would mean you could never gamble on a baseball card again, would you do that?”

She’s not my girl, Hiawatha.

Price stutters momentarily before saying, “I’d stand in front of bullets for a friend of Longman’s. Bible says friends should be willing to sacrifice their lives for their friends.”

Hiawatha slams the counter with a hand and says, “That’s a good soul! Here’s what you’re gonna do.” He explains to Price that he will set up a meeting between Hiawatha and his card dealer. Price agrees, warning him to be careful.

Hiawatha Smith meets this dealer. It is not a friendly conversation. He had told me his tech was good, but I didn’t have any idea how good. He has pictures of the card dealer’s sister and her family on his phone, and he tells the dealer in very strong terms that he wants to meet the source of the baseball cards. He wants to go all the way to the top.

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The dealer isn’t happy, but he’s a low-end player, like Price. All he wants is for Hiawatha Longfellow Smith to leave him alone, so he makes a phone call telling Philippe Alon that he has a very, very big customer who’d like to meet with him.

Alon isn’t happy, partly because he never is, and partly because he doesn’t like the idea of a small-time player trying to arrange a meeting with someone as important as he is. He rejects the meeting.

Hiawatha grabs the phone and tells Alon he’ll be there in an hour. If he knows what’s good for him, he’ll listen to what he has to say. Alon will listen, or the Seminole and Caribbean blood Hiawatha will so happily spill will spread under the broken bodies of everyone Alon knows; every age, every location, and their useless lives will leave only their last murdered memory, one entombed in caskets of blood in such a way that it will be impossible to retrieve any other kind of thought of them. This will be their legacy, he says. Only their brutal death will fall within anyone’s recollection.

Alon has no response to this as Hiawatha returns the phone to the stricken card dealer, who fearfully watches Hiawatha leave a front porch that is buttressed high above bay waters outside Seminole City by stilts over high tide.

Why am I seeing all of this? What is there to gain from such detail? Do I miss my old friend so much?

I even see the vehicles he and his small army have rented. Three vehicles, dark windows, three rows of seats each, perched on high suspensions, speeding towards the Seminole Caribbean Protestant Voudoo Congregation. What does he have in mind? It looks like a replay of the Seminole-Comanche Wars of the 1840s.

Two of the vehicles pull over into a parking area about a mile away from the congregation headquarters, while Hiawatha’s vehicle continues. I had forgotten just how much he lacks subtlety. He exits his vehicle on arrival, leaving the others to wait for him. He walks through the same entrance I had walked through before the voudoo got me, to the same woman at the desk who asks if she can help him.

He says no, and walks on through, kicking doors down in the darkened hallway I had walked through not long ago. He’s mad, I think, crazy. Filled with that Comanche blood lust I had always teased him about, thinking it a joke. The sixth door unhinged, splintered, reveals an unalarmed Philippe Alon. “Who will pay for these doors?” is his only comment about my seething friend.

“Send a bill to my congregation,” says Hiawatha.

“And what might that be?”

“I am Hiawatha Longfellow Smith of the Native American Church Congregation. And I am here to deliver one, and only one warning. You are to cease your activities in Campeche and leave my friends alone.”

“Your friends?” Alon smiles mischievously. “You have friends?”

“You know who they are.”

He walks out. I try to contact him on his earpiece, wanting to congratulate him on his ability to resist the bloodbath I was so certain was about to take place. He steps outside, and breathes in the salt air, exhaling deeply. He is then shot clean through the temple, probably by a sniper on the roof. Painless, his world dark, his men helpless as they watch.

End of Chapter Eighteen

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You can find Chapters One and Two and the current table of contents here:

Chapter Seventeen

We all stayed at the guesthouse the next day and night, mostly waiting for Trace to finish his work. He was able to deliver earpieces to everyone the next day. He brought them personally, not trusting the security of a courier service.

This allowed him to meet Hiawatha, whom, of course, he hassled for being a Comanche with an Iroquois given name. Hiawatha returned the sentiment with a couple of slurs about the mad ambition of Nor’easters. In other words, they got along swimmingly.

Hiawatha left the next morning for Seminole City. Sonata and I took a ride share to Campeche Island for an appointment she had made with Baldestero Tanning, Keeper of the Campeche Internment Housing Program.

Surprisingly, the new Tribune for the Congregation of the Texas Light, Artfield Long, would also be there. It surprised me that the new tribune for Texas Light would travel from Houston to Campeche to meet us, and I was somewhat hoping it was a coincidence that he was there. Previous Texas Light tribunes had maintained a hands-off attitude towards the internment program, probably because they didn’t want to know what was going on there.

Hiawatha insisted on sending two of his team with us. Eight others would follow closely behind. “I don’t know what to expect here, Longman,” said Sonata as we emerged from the rideshare and started walking towards the internment with Hiawatha’s men flanking us on each side.

“Either do I. I kind of feel like we’re pushing our luck a little.”

“I think that’s the idea.” She looked behind us, but Hiawatha’s people were stealthy. The other eight men were nowhere to be seen.

“Remember,” she said, “We’re here just for routine observation of the premises. We suspect nothing.”

“They know better.”

“I know. That’s a problem. I don’t know what we can do about that.”

“Part of what we need to decide is how hard to push this. If our earpieces signal a problem to Hiawatha’s team, they’ll blow the doors down and come in shooting. If our earpieces are compromised in some way, same thing. How are your nerves?”

She smiled at that. “I’m nervous, but I’ve got a supply of adrenaline fueled by a whole lot of determination and not a small amount of anger at what they’ve tried on both of us. How about you?”

I nodded. “That about sums it up.”

We reached the entrance, which was nothing like I had ever seen. Most convict housing was like any other housing. Convicts could come and go as they pleased, provided they maintained their therapy, work, and church schedules.

This place was fronted by a barrier consisting of a tall, thick steel door. In front of that, a small set of thick concrete walls surrounded a lone guard sitting on a chair reading a book. When he saw us through some protective glass covered by a metal mesh, he stood up as we approached.

We identified ourselves and told him who we were here to see. He asked for identification, then opened the barrier doors to reveal yet another imposing wall with a similar door. He signaled to us that the two men with us would not be allowed to proceed.

Ever the warriors, Hiawatha’s men made a move as if they were going to blast the guards to kingdom come with something, but Sonata nodded to them and they relaxed as she said to them, “Wait here. We won’t be long.”

The guard spoke into his com bracelet, then the first door slammed shut with a heavy clang before the next opened. I couldn’t imagine how Hiawatha thought his team could get through all this, no matter how well they were trained.

I knew the place was locked down. But not like this. In my view, this changed things. There was no way for Hiawatha to have a full understanding of this place’s security level. It was unique to the Union. The Union simply didn’t do, for lack of a better word, prisons. Sonata and I were on our own. I looked at her, she looked at me. I didn’t need to tell her this, even if I could have.

The guard let us through the second door. This led to yet another secure sanctuary manned by a few guards hiding behind a steel lattice window with a slot at its bottom that served as a receptacle.

A woman in uniform walked in front of us, throwing a set of heavy keys into the slot. The man who let us in said a few words quietly to the guards before yet another loud door clamored open with a loud buzz.

He motioned us through the door to an X-ray machine of some kind, but he didn’t ask us to remove any metal we may have had in our pockets or put anything into a tray. Instead, he just sent us through the device. Something flickered as we walked through the machine into an enormous expanse.

Drones were buzzing quickly across the floor as if the place were an online delivery warehouse. Large teams of men were working at tables far away, towards the middle of the floor, presumably doing the kind of work we had seen on Trace’s video.

I looked up, confirming what I knew about the design of the structure. The walls were pure concrete until probably the 250-foot mark, as expected, where there was a long, fenced gangway along the length of all six interior walls.

“Wait here, please,” said the guard.

We waited silently, but Sonata grabbed my hand and squeezed it for a moment before letting go. I figured they were recording every movement of ours, but I didn’t care. I ate that up.

Four men approached, two of them fit for battle, which was not leaving us in a good situation. One of the men in the middle wore a long black robe decorated with a colorful pattern in its middle, and the other wore a stark blue shirt and pants combination and a long gun strapped on a shoulder harness behind his back. Two other armed men walked just behind them, one on each side.

The man in the fancy robe extended his hand. “May I be pleased to welcome you to our grand experiment,” he said. I thought that was weird since the place was about twenty years old, so it was no longer an experiment. “Artfield Long. I have been given the honor of becoming the new Tribune of the Congregation of the Texas Light.” I gave him the traditional bow as Sonata curtsied.

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We introduced ourselves, and Baldestero Tanning, the man with the gun on his back, joined in the introductions. Of the four men we met, the Tribune was by far the smallest, and he wasn’t small. Tanning, the largest, could have filled a small arena by himself.

“Artfield,” said Sonata. “That is a very lovely name.”

“It was extended to me because I had such an affinity for drawing and painting that sometimes I would have as many as five to ten paintings and drawings on easels in my home at one time.”

Sonata laughed. “That’s cute,” she said.

“I’m afraid my artistic practice has waned a bit. Especially now, as I inherit this project, which is a handful, I find.”

“It’s, umm, quite the bustling place,” said Sonata.

He didn’t acknowledge the comment. “We have endured two tragedies at our congregation, as you know, Honoress Holmes. Our most esteemed tribune, Tomas Kibende, died a tragic death of natural causes. He was a spiritual mountain, irreplaceable, truly. But we must move on, and we did, with the quite gifted Sonoma Williams. Who suffered at the hands of the murderer, Summary James. A most wicked act, don’t you think, Honoress?” He was looking at me when he said that, in a way that made me feel like he knew about every convicted murderer I had helped escape the bonds of this facility.

“Of course, the federal government was very interested in this attack, as you can imagine, it having happened on congregational property.” He was still looking directly at me. “An attack on one congregation, after all, is an attack on all. But I have let the federal authorities know that we at Texas Light are satisfied that this was the act of one individual, and we are pleased that our facility here in Campeche is given the responsibility of rehabilitating him.”

Of course you are, I thought.

“Come,” he said. “You were promised a tour of our fine facility.”

It had not occurred to me before now how seriously wrong this situation was. The problem wasn’t so much the inmates working on drug vials shaped like cones to be possibly inserted into baseball bats, but that the federal government was taking such a hands-off approach.

The murder of a tribune, on or off congregation property, was essentially an act of war. It didn’t matter if everything pointed to an internal domestic matter. I kicked myself mentally for not having asked Sonata about this earlier. Surely, she had been aware of the implications of this since we first met. Why had she never mentioned it? The new Tribune’s explanations were not at all satisfactory.

“I’d like to ask you, Ms. Holmes, where you think a government inquiry would take us,” Long said as we approached a group of men at tables doing piecework. Sonata and I both assumed the congregation would hide their drug work. We were wrong. The men were openly filling the same cones we had seen on video.

“Probably right to this,” Sonata answered bravely.

“Precisely. Which, of course, we cannot have. Now,” he said, waving a hand across his small empire, “you are right to wonder why I’m showing you this. Truth be told, it would be quite an effort to hide in the short time we had before your arrival. But, too, I was aware of your knowledge of our work here. Nothing leaves this facility without our knowledge, including video feeds extracted from a convict’s eyewear.”

Neither of us knew what to say. Especially me.

“Next question. Why would we be doing this? We are, at the end of the day, after all, a church, are we not? Well, this facility doesn’t pay for itself. Other congregations don’t provide anywhere near sufficient funding for the layers of security we need.”

“Wait a minute,” said Sonata. “You people signed up for this.”

“In truth, we people, that is, my administration, inherited this problem. It is only mine in that I have to help maintain the solution. Nobody is hurt by this.”

“Except the people using vanti,” I said.

“They’re using it anyway, Mr. Jones. But let’s cut to the chase. I’m not here to defend decisions made by others. I don’t know how. But since you are both here, I offer you a fair warning. Halt your prying. Remove your eyes and ears from these proceedings, and I’ll be sure there are no further unannounced sundown dinnertime visits made to anyone’s home. Let me add that your recording devices were disabled by a short microwave pulse when you entered.”

Baldestero Tanning chimed in with a voice that sounded like it came from the bottom of a deep hole. “Friendly advice.” He looked at me. “You’re out of your league, anyway. If you go to the feds, there’s a fifty-fifty chance you’ll be going to the wrong person and you’ll be nobody’s memory.”

“I believe our meeting is over,” said Artfield Long.

I looked around for Summary James, not knowing if this was his shift or not, but did not see him. “Where is Summary James?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m afraid we were unable to remove his spy lenses without removing his retinas.” Long wore a long, thin, creepy smile that stretched above a thin, dark Mediterranean chin. I noticed for the first time that he had an almost impossible-to-detect thin black mustache.

After they finally let us out, I looked at Sonata, who seemed stunned by the events. “Wow,” I said, “Religion has sure gone to hell.”

“He’s lying about Summary James,” Sonata said. “To intimidate us. I had no physical reaction to his claims about what they did to his eyes.”

“So all in all it was a good visit,” I said sarcastically. She leaned slightly into my arm.

Hiawatha’s men had dutifully waited for us. When I told them what happened, they wanted to call in the eight other reinforcements and bust the place up. I shook my head as Sonata and I both rejected the idea. I was sure Tanning was right. Whatever this was, it reached into the federal government.

“It did seem highly unusual at the time,” said Sonata when I asked why she hadn’t raised an alarm about the lack of federal response over the murder. “But the trial was so over so quickly, I guess I thought the feds were satisfied. But you know what, Longman? I wasn’t. Either is my congregation. I don’t care where the tentacles reach from, and neither will the rest of Campeche.”

“There are a lot of congregations that won’t. Once word gets out.”

“Gonna put your newspaper hat back on?”

“If I can keep my friends out of it. I’m not sure how to do this without getting dudes like Trace and Hiawatha in trouble.” I looked at the two guys with us. I wasn’t trying to hide anything from them. They kept a stoic face as we called for our rideshare and headed back to the guesthouses in Campeche.

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End of Chapter Seventeen

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Chapter Sixteen

We took a rideshare to the central plaza of Campeche. It was full of nightlife. When we walked past a large drum circle, a young boy gave Sonata a rose and a small beaded bracelet before blending back into a large crowd of dancing youth. The scent of food made me hungry. We grabbed some tent food, charred buffalo on a stick, and a couple of ears of corn, then sat at a table to listen to drumming and wind instruments striking the air.

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“Now I know where you get all those bracelets,” I smiled as I powered through my ear of corn.

When we were done eating, I tapped up Hiawatha. “We’re here. Central plaza. Bring your goons.”

He laughed. “We need a plan. I’ll be there in a half-hour. Keep your phone on, send me your location.”

“You trust this guy, right?” asked Sonata after I finished talking to him.

“If I can’t trust him, life isn’t worth living,” I said.

“Interesting,” she replied.

Hiawatha arrived alone, as I knew he would.

I stood up to introduce him to Sonata, who smiled warmly. He bowed and placed a tiny flower he had pulled out from his deerskin sleeveless jacket into her hair.

We all sat down.

His hair was still long, set back in a ponytail, highlighted by a few bright blue streaks in otherwise ebony waves. He had thick, stony cheekbones, each graced with the tattoos I remembered seeing every day in my youth. His forehead was painted with three stripes. He was bigger than I remembered, more muscular. His strong arms were etched with inked drawings. One arm bore a hawk with skulls in its talons. The other arm bore what looked like a dove carrying a flower. I didn’t remember that body art, so I assumed it had been acquired since I last saw him.

“You look good, Longman.”

“You too. You’ve bulked up a bit.”

“Free weights, five times a week.”

I nodded.

We tried to discuss a plan, but found ourselves reminiscing more than we should have. Sonata had to finally speak up before we got down to a serious search for a solution. He explained that he brought about twenty men, which I found astonishing. Anything they did would have to be done discreetly. “Especially given that we are Comanche in Campeche. If the authorities here sense that a small Comanche army has arrived, they won’t take to it kindly,” he smiled.

I was genuinely disturbed about this whole militia thing, especially since I thought they had been done away with, truly, via an amendment to the Christian Bill of Rights. But for now, I was going to do what a lot of people were probably doing. I was going to be a part of the problem. Quite willingly.

“Of course, I can tell you don’t approve,” he said to me. “I’ve always been able to read you.”

“Some things never change. But this is no time for me to make judgments. I’ll sort through my feelings about it later.”

He gave me a stern look. “As a former journalist who worked at the most prestigious newspaper in the Union, I trust that you won’t sort your feelings through a news story.”

“I’m a part of this.” I looked at Sonata. “I was this close to losing someone I care about as deeply as anyone I ever have.”

With that, Sonata stared at me. I hadn’t meant to say it, but it was the truth. In truth, I also still barely knew Sonata Holmes. I had known many women much more intimately than I now knew her, yet not with such an arc of emotional gravity.

“It is interesting how we must occasionally adjust for necessities,” replied Hiawatha.

“Between you and me, and Sonata here, one of the reasons I got out of the newspaper business was because I knew someday I’d have to bust someone I like for doing something that could win me a journalism award.”

“You’ve won your share,” he said.

I shook my head. “It’s too judgmental a business for me. That got to me. Some people can play holier than thou a lot better than I can.”

“Besides,” said Sonata. “He kidnaps people.”

That brought a smile of deep appreciation from Hiawatha. I wanted to ask him if he understood why I liked this woman so much, but I didn’t need to, and I didn’t want to embarrass her any more than I already had with my previous statement.

Hiawatha folded his hands on the table. One of his wrists had a dark metal band around it with detailed art that I desperately wanted to look at. “You won’t like my proposal,” he said, looking directly into my eyes without blinking. “We need to go on the offensive. You’ve been on your heels the whole time.” He remembered my love of baseball as a youth when he said, “Batter up, slugger. Time to cap these guys with a line drive right to the mouth.”

“Okay, well, that part I like. What’s the part I won’t?”

“We need to slide you onto the tip of a fishhook.”

I liked that a lot more than I liked the idea of using Sonata as bait. “I’m still waiting for the part I don’t like.”

“And her,” he said.

“What? No. No, absolutely not.”

“Longman,” said Sonata. “I had a father who beat the crap out of his family for years before whiskey killed him. If I got through that, I can get through this, especially with a militia backup.”

“They want you, but they want her, too,” said Hiawatha. “Somehow, they know what you know. Can you get hold of your friend Trace? He sounds very useful.”

“I haven’t heard from him since his place got ransacked. Well, right after. He called using a burner phone. I sent some data through this network sniffer he gave me because he thinks they’re running their servers out of the internment housing.”

“Let me see the number he’s using,” said Hiawatha. I gave him my phone and he texted the number to someone. “Maybe something will turn up.”

“If Trace doesn’t want to be found, he won’t be found.”

“Unless he wants to be found by only you. I know how these guys think. Let’s see what my guy comes up with. Trace sounds like a special breed, but my guys are pretty good. May get a hit.”

I nodded.

I didn’t like involving Sonata, but since she was in danger anyway, I decided there was not that big a difference. “Okay,” I said. “How do we bait up, and where?”

Sonata pulled out her trusty roll-up and plotted out all the pieces for Hiawatha to examine more closely; the routes used by the Drunken Dance Congregation between Seminole City and Campeche, the parts of the internment housing used to work with vanti, the shipping container routes to the Mediterranean, and even the baseball cards sold by the Seminole Caribbean Protestants. She told me to show Hiawatha my baseball card.

After he was sufficiently filled in, Hiawatha asked me, “And you like this kid, right?” in reference to Richland Price.

“Well, yeah. He’s just a young guy, playing around, really.”

“I’m going to pay him a visit,” said Hiawatha.

“Be nice,” I said.

“I will. But he needs to know what kind of fools he’s gaming with.”

If Hiawatha was able to contribute to his welfare without giving the kid details, I was all for it.

The discussion, which Trace joined about halfway through thanks to some detective work by Hiawatha’s tech people, lasted forever, it seemed. By the time we were done working out details, the plaza had been reduced to mostly loiterers. The food tents had all folded up, the drum circle was gone, the dancing ended.

A lot can be accomplished with an extremely smart group of people and a roll-up or two. We decided on a plan of attack on two fronts. Trace said that the data his network sniffer sent was not successfully scarfed up, because all he had outside of his main operational room when I tried sending the data from the sniffer were backup servers. The receiving unit that was supposed to process the data was destroyed by Alon’s men when they ransacked the place.

But we still had enough to work out a decent plan. Both teams would wear ear implants devised by Trace to work on a 10.7 GHz frequency so that everyone could remain in communication in case something happened to somebody’s smartphone.

Sonata had determined that nobody had yet reserved this frequency with the federal government, so Trace said he’d monitor it for the rest of the evening to be sure nobody had covertly hitched a ride on it. I asked Trace how we’d speak into it.

He said it would work within the ear, but that the voice would sound a little weird, maybe muffled. Unfortunately, there was one small detail that would need to be ironed out. Not only would Trace need to ready the ear implants in less than a day, but he’d need to hack a satellite to make the relays work. It wasn’t ideal, but it was a fallback anyway. The main communication link was still our phones.

Hiawatha would drop into Seminole City for a visit, hopefully with Alon himself if he could find a way into the gambling infrastructure. If not, he said, he’d force his way in. He’d bring a team of about ten men.

Meanwhile, Sonata and I would try to work our way into the internment housing. Sonata would ask for a tour or something like that, and I’d come along almost as a dare to our adversaries to come after us. If they did, Hiawatha had another team of ten or so who he was confident could make a sufficient assault on the buildings to get us out.

The hope, of course, was that they’d politely accommodate Sonata, grumble to themselves that I was there since all the important players in that operation probably knew who I was, and we’d maybe record some damning evidence with our earpieces.

I had initially proposed that we just provide a live feed of the vanti operation to the authorities from the guy we already had in there, but Sonata was concerned about legal issues, so we decided to try a more personal approach. The reality was that Hiawatha would be doing the heavy lifting in Seminole City.

We all decided to hole up at some guest houses at Sonata’s Campeche Apostolic Congregation.

Congregations typically consisted of two types of property — those that belonged to the congregation itself, meaning the individual members, and those that belonged to the congregation as an entity, which usually meant headquarters properties, various churches, schools, administrative offices, and whatever businesses were associated with the congregation.

Most headquarters were sprawling campuses containing dozens, even hundreds of buildings, depending on the size of the congregation. Campeche Apostolic was a rather modest affair, but it still had several guesthouses where we could stay the night. A direct attack on a congregation's property was extremely unlikely, even from the likes of Alon. Such an attack would guarantee a swift and decisive response from the federal government since congregation property was considered sacrosanct.

There had not been an attack on a congregation since the Savannah Wars of the 1820s, when the Seminole Nation attacked the Southern White Baptist Congregation, an attack that history applauds but one that still led to a constitutional amendment banning the militias, which now seemed so despairingly prevalent.

We each took a room upstairs in a massive Victorian home with two large spires wrapped by long curving balconies. I could picture myself lounging on one of those balconies enjoying an iced tea, but it was late, and I was exhausted.

Hiawatha and I took each other’s forearms and embraced before he went into his room. That left Sonata and me alone in the hallway. I walked her to her room. She put the key in her door and turned around to face me. “I’ll be glad when this is over,” she said. “I’d love to hang out with you without thinking about guns and fists.”

I nodded. “Soon,” I promised. She reached up with her toes and I bent down, and we kissed each other gently on the lips.

She took my hand in both of hers and kissed it. “Soon,” she said, smiling, before turning around and entering her room. She peeked through the door as she was closing it. “Good night,” she added with her smile.

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End of Chapter Sixteen

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