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.

Thanks for reading!

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

I posted a sample chapter yesterday:

Kirkus Reviews says, “Get it!” I’ve received a few reports from readers that they have tried to post reviews, but they aren’t getting posted. If that happens to you, let me know in the comments or send me a DM. Thanks!

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The Mouras Encantada is a house of Vampires based in Goa, India. This vampire house abandoned the concept of procreation long ago and is thus guaranteed to die out. When one speaks, the group she is with typically speaks in one voice simultaneously with her.

They are also encountered in this Psalm of Vampires-adjacent short story:

Owens is an Atlanta detective and vampire hunter who has developed a reluctant alliance with the narrator, Jade Mourning, to deal with a common threat. Jade is a Bible-thumping vampire and influencer with a big streaming empire.

Flashing is something vampires do in this novel that allows them to travel immediately from one spot to another, but they must have been in that spot at some point in their lives to utilize this form of transport.

Brilexus is sort of the leader of the Mouras Encantada. In a previous chapter, they were given a bad dose of DNA. Long story. You’ll have to read the whole thing to get at it.

Trigger Warnings: Violence, gore, language.

Coming tomorrow: A Psalm of Vampires Easter story

Check out the Notes for some background music. If you want to.

Chapter 24: Hunger Pangs

After Philip’s CRISPR injection, Brilexus flashed to Goa and back to Singapore without incident. Like me, it took a few tries, but she got the hang of it quickly. The other four quickly demanded the same capabilities. Philip nervously accommodated the intimidating Goa vamps.

Before I had a chance to warn them about exhaustion, the five vampires were flashing back and forth, looking greatly amused. They must have done it a hundred times, grinning ear to ear like kids stumbling into a pile of unexpected Christmas presents. How they had the stamina for that, I had no idea. I was lucky to do it three or four times without feeling exhausted. Once, when they came back, they said in their common voice, “We do love Singapore. It has always been a delightful city for us.” Then, they flashed as one unit out of the lab. They appeared a few minutes later, looking pleased. This scene was repeated a dozen more times in the span of an hour.

If you’re thinking that there must be a catch, or that something was sure to go wrong, you’re right. The Goa vampires stopped returning from their flashes.

My phone started blowing up with local news reports of thirty or forty vampire attacks. Then fifty. Then sixty. These weren’t doubtful stories from disbelieving witnesses. These were attacks in broad daylight, including one at a soccer stadium full of cheering fans. Everything was on video. Enormously tall female vampires with fangs dripping blood looked at camera phones as if they were posing for grisly selfies. Human necks spewing geysers of blood were caught on video as their loosely attached bodies spasmed themselves into their final moments.

Multiple emergency vehicles blared their sirens outside the lab while people ran through the halls. Outside the building, people wandered around the surrounding campus looking at their phones, their eyes darting about like they were being circled by flocks of flying predators.

Owens was on a flight to Singapore from Atlanta, so I’d be spared his reaction for at least a brief time. Before I could even think about a course of action, more local news reports rolled in. One of the most disturbing involved a shopping center with hundreds of fatalities involving at least twenty vampires, all, according to the reports, looking precisely the same.

TikTok wasn’t just trending vampire. It was consumed by their attacks. Moreland was freaking out, texting close friends like Stormcycle and Morgenthau, who promised to send help, but since they didn’t know how to flash, may as well have said that they’d see us next Tuesday.

Bennie and Philip wondered how they’d survive the onslaught when it appeared that the rest of Singapore wouldn’t. It wasn’t like I could tell them not to worry.

It became apparent that the Mouras Encantadas were finding the time to flash to Goa to recruit more from their clan. I thought, shit, they may be biting their fellow Mouras Encantadas to inject Bennie’s DNA hack. Then I thought, shit, their initial flashes were biting jaunts to Goa. The number of reports involving attacks multiplied exponentially, all within a matter of minutes.

Moreland, who had been wearing her usual light, translucent robe, changed into her warrior outfit and pulled me by my arm, asking if I had my karambit. I told her I always have my karambit, but that if she thought we’d be able to take on a hundred Mouras Encantadas, she was crazy. “We gotta try to stop the slaughter,” she said, pulling me out of the lab, through a hallway, and out of the building. She brandished her sword.

“What about the brothers?” I said, thinking of Philip and Bennie.

“I think they’ll be okay,” she said. Exasperated, she added, “I dunno, Jade.”

“I gotta stay here,” I said. “I gotta protect those kids.”

An ambulance screeched past us, then another, then several police cars. People were screaming across the street in what appeared to be a shoe store. A cloud of shoes broke through a shattered window as if someone had found a way to spray them out of a huge hose. We ran to the store and saw six or seven Encantadas feasting on the store’s employees. The shoes that hadn’t been blown out the window were off the shelves and scattered across the carpet, which was soaked in blood.

The Encantadas looked completely out of control, like in one of those apocalyptic zombie movies where the creatures relentlessly attack with oblivious ferocity. The Encantadas weren’t just feeding. They were consuming. If they saw a piece of body that didn’t look appetizing, such as a foot, they hurled it against the wall or across the store, and, looking insanely famished, tore into another piece of flesh or organ.

While they were ravaging their victims, a beautifully eerie chorus filled the store with a song in the same key sung by several voices. A couple of the Encantadas looked up from their ravaging, but ignored us, returning to the feast as if we had merely interrupted dinner. Their eyes were wide and beady, nearly popping out of their sockets. All the comely vampires were soaked in blood. A military vehicle pulled up and emptied, but the troops were quickly overwhelmed by vampires charging through the same door of the shoe store, followed by the same eerie chorus. The soldiers were torn to shreds faster than you can tie a shoe, despite a hail of bullets that should have had at least some effect.

“What the hell is happening, Moreland?” I asked. “This isn’t exactly in the Encantada Chronicles.” I was referencing an old written history of Goa vampires that few, including Moreland, had probably heard of.

“The DNA thing that Bennie did?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Can’t be that. All their friends? The ones they’re bringing from Goa?”

“Oh, yeah. Well, what then?”

“I dunno, but there’s something wrong. They don’t look normal.” Then I changed my mind. I told her about my theory that they bit their fellow vampire brethren when they returned to Goa.

“Or they’re being controlled like I was,” said Moreland. I doubted that, but we had to consider everything.

“We gotta kill one and bring her back to the lab for Bennie to check out,” I said.

“No, we have to kill six,” said Moreland. “To guarantee that at least one of them isn’t one of the five that he gene edited. Since they all look the fucking same.”

The first one was the hardest, and it was pretty easy. Moreland entered what was left of the shoe store and took a swing at one of the Goa vampires with her sword as the rapacious vampire stooped over the remains of one of her victims. The vampire didn’t fight back but instead kept trying to feed. Moreland sliced the head off, then threw it onto the sidewalk outside as I jumped onto another and slit her throat. After I hacked off her hand, I aimed it perfectly toward the head Moreland hacked off. The hand bounced off the head, then down onto the pavement. I didn’t need her to die. I just needed her hand. Four more.

The rest were just as easy. No resistance. Their only focus was on the feeding rampage that seemed to guide their bodies. The police and military discovered that if they didn’t try to interrupt attempts to feed, they could blast them with bullets for hours. But the problem, as it always is with vampires, was that the bullets were ineffective. It was also almost impossible for law enforcement to shoot at vampires without killing victims. The situation was a mess.

Against that backdrop, we chopped at Goa vampires and hauled pieces of their bodies to the two terrified brothers, who urgently needed syringes of Valium for their anxiety. But the brothers braved through it. Bennie acted quickly to examine the DNA. Meanwhile, Philip got a desperate call from Leia Tan, who was stuck in an elevator on her college campus. Philip told her she was the luckiest person in Singapore, and to sit tight. That was probably good advice, but I told him I could try to fetch her.

It didn’t take long for Bennie to conclude that the blood of all the Goa vampires was the same. They all had his DNA hack. To say that this sent Bennie spiraling into a sudden fit of extreme depression wouldn’t come close to doing justice to his reaction.

“It’s all my fault,” he began to repeat. “If I hadn’t played God, none of this would be happening.” He couldn’t break out of this kind of conversation no matter how much consoling we did or how many times we reminded him that it wasn’t his fault that circumstances led to the use of CRISPR. We couldn’t really say it wasn’t his idea because it was, but we reminded him how we had to talk him into its execution. We reminded him how nervous he had been to try it. It didn’t matter to him. He had held the knife, so to speak.

Speaking of knives, when was the last time I didn’t keep my karambit in its sheath? Of course, you don’t have an answer for that. Neither do I, but it doesn’t happen often. Leaving it on the table next to Bennie was a supremely bad idea. I realized this as soon as I saw his hand reach for it and begin the knife’s short journey to his throat.

Moreland’s arm became a whip as she ran three or four steps toward him to snap the knife out of his hands. Then, she bit hard into his neck. Bennie’s body quickly turned yellowish white, like death, as Moreland’s eyes lit up. A strong scarlet eggshell glow surrounded her body. I could see an expression of pure enjoyment consume her through the glow’s translucence as her jaws dug deeper. Philip screamed like he had just lost his dear brother, which, in a way, he just had. The scarlet glow deepened, absorbing her body and Bennie. Bennie’s body shuddered violently as Moreland’s jaw remained firmly engaged with his neck. I could barely see Bennie and Moreland through the glow as voices in an African dialect filled the air around them.

The glow subsided. Bennie’s head spilled backward like his neck had been broken. The pupils of his eyes rolled into white. Philip was pounding on Moreland with his fists, but she ignored him. She picked Bennie up, laid him on one of the lab tables, and softly said to him, “Rest, my friend. Your days of rash self-judgment are over.”

She looked at Philip. “Sorry. We seriously do not have time for this shit. He’ll be fine in a couple of days.”

“You killed him,” Philip said through sobs as he ran to Bennie and kissed his forehead. “Bennie!”

“He almost killed himself. Or did you not see him take Jade’s knife?” said Moreland. “Now, he lives. And will live. He will live on far beyond this day of self-immolation.”

“Days? Talk about no time. We’ll all be dead by then.” Through tears, Philip was still reacting to the first thing Moreland said to him.

“Yeah, Moreland, how the hell are we going to deal with the genetics angle now?” I asked.

Author’s note: In the novel, Bennie is established as a DNA expert our heroes need to help win the day.

“I think we’ve proven that we are in over our heads in that regard, don’t you, Jade?” she replied. “Philip has everything we need.” She put her hands on Philip’s shoulders as he continued bending toward his brother. “You won’t see anything different about your brother. Nothing about his personality will change. But he won’t try to kill himself again, either.”

Philip shook his head and sat down on a chair next to Bennie. “Oh, Bennie, I’m so sorry,” he said, clasping one limp hand. He looked at Moreland. “So, you’ve turned him into one of you?”

She nodded. “He is now the origin father of the House of Chua. All his heirs are answerable to him.”

“Can you turn me, too?” asked a despondent Philip.

“I can. But we must complete our mission first. Can you?” she asked.

Philip took a rag from the table and wiped his face, which had been moistened by cascading tears. “I think so,” he said.

“I know so,” Moreland replied.

I didn’t know how I felt about Moreland’s latest rash, uncounseled decision. Turning him wasn’t necessary to save Bennie’s life. She had already achieved that by snatching the knife from his hand. But she also eliminated the possibility that he could die at his own hands during another attempt. One of the universe’s most improbable events is vampire suicide. Not because we don’t want to do it. The thought has crossed my mind a hundred times. It’s just very difficult to accomplish. Bennie would have to learn to live with his decision to alter the Goa DNA. I was determined to help him do that.

The Mouras Encantadas raged on. It occurred to me that the onslaught on Singapore would attract Longtooth’s attention. I didn’t know how he’d react, but there was no reason to think it would be for the better. I sat next to Philip. “I need you,” I said quietly.

He looked at me with glazed, puffy eyes and said, “For?”

“Longtooth. He’ll be on the move. He’ll be trying to take advantage of this situation.”

“Of course he will,” said Philip. He sighed, shook his head, stood up, and lumbered slowly to his laptop.

“Hey,” I said.

Philip turned around to look at me as he was about to sit down.

“Thank you,” I said.

He nodded, sat down, tapped the keyboard, and slid the screen my way. “Maybe it’s all wrong, Jade. Maybe I’m wrong, like Bennie was.”

“Bennie wasn’t wrong,” I replied. Moreland came up behind me.

“We all were,” said Moreland. “That was a team effort.”

Philip nodded again. “Well, you say Longtooth will move. He isn’t moving. Makes sense he’d move. Like you said. Take advantage. But according to this, he hasn’t moved.”

“He’s still in San Francisco,” I said.

“According to the beacon. Which is why I wonder if I’m wrong.”

“Unlikely you’re wrong. But strange.”

“I’m worried about Leia,” said Philip. “We’re not dating or anything. I mean, not yet. A guy can hope, though, right?”

I smiled. “Yeah. It’s good to dream. It’s good to hope, even when the world collapses around you. Or maybe especially then. You know the building she’s stuck in?”

He did. The building was near enough that I was able to retrieve her without incident. The Mouras Encantadas were too occupied with their uncontrolled feeding to notice me as I walked to and through the building’s entrance. There were two other humans in the elevator with her. I grabbed them, too, flashing them all one by one to the lab.

“Oh, fabulous,” complained Moreland when I brought the elevator occupants to the lab. “One of these days, you should set up a human petting zoo, Jade.” She stomped out of the lab to who knows where, mostly just to make a point. She didn’t want to have to think about protecting more humans.

Philip looked exhausted. He was wearing a white oxford shirt and a pair of black suit trousers with red tennis shoes. I had noticed before that his red tennis shoes seemed permanently affixed. I didn’t ask him why he was wearing the dress shirt. Whatever event he had planned to attend was canceled by the Mouras Encantadas, so it didn’t matter. The shirt was soaked through with sweat, and his normally coiffed short black hair was mussed. This should have been my clue that enough time had passed that Owens and Garrison should be arriving soon. It wasn’t though, so Owen’s text alerting me of his arrival surprised me.

After I acknowledged his text, he called my cell. “There’s a problem. The airport is on lockdown. I can’t get out of here. They’re not letting any flights out, and mine was the last one in. But I’m told they’ve sealed off the roads. I’m not going anywhere. What the hell is going on, Mourning?”

“Your worst nightmare,” I said, “Times a hundred or so.”

“You’ve been cloned into a swarm?” Still time for punches. Unbelievable.

“We’re gonna need to pull you out of there,” I said. “Garrison can lose a lung if he has to.”

I told him to meet us at his arrival gate. Moreland and I would have to flash to a place we’d both been at the airport, which left us with one choice, a small ride share area outside one of the terminals. Then we’d have to navigate through an airport stuffed with angry Singapore law enforcement officers on the hunt for people who looked a lot like us. The attackers’ profile was so ridiculously specific, though, that we thought we had a chance to get to Owens and Garrison without too much trouble.

“My hair’s not even black,” said Moreland. “And I’m not eight feet tall.”

“Don’t you have a more human looking outfit, at least?” I asked. She didn’t fit in on the best of days.

“This is totally human,” she answered, rubbing her hand across the tight spandex. “Hecho en Nicaragua,” she said in perfect Spanish.

“Let’s get this over with,” I said. “And leave your sword here, for God’s sake.”

We flashed to the Singapore Changi Airport’s ride share area, which was empty. There were no cars anywhere. The usual bustle of harried passengers around terminals was gone. We ran to a set of large electronic doors, then past security personnel and a few passengers. Airport security had managed to get almost all the passengers out of the terminal areas, but I couldn’t imagine where they were shipping them off to.

We found out soon enough. Hundreds of people were milling about a place on the huge airport’s grounds called the Rain Vortex, which was like an indoor jungle with a forty-foot manmade waterfall colored with spectacular blue lighting. The waterfall normally poured out of a glorious façade roof shaped like a funnel made from steel and glass held up by a huge round beam that made up the edge of the roof. The roof was composed of thousands of glass panels held by a twisting steel lattice framework that soared overhead.

The reason Moreland and I discovered all the people at the vortex was because we were chased there by three security officers, who couldn’t keep up with us as we raced toward the place in hopes of losing them in the small manmade jungle. Instead, we found ourselves dodging confused, frightened passengers as we darted around them. We scaled the terraced, plant-covered slopes that overlooked the round concrete drop point for the waterfall, which wasn’t in operation. No human could have made the climb as easily as we could.

While we were surveying the area below trying to figure out how to get to Owens’ gate, I got a text from Owens: “In big ass indoor jungle. Got herded there by local PD. Not sure what they call the place.” That meant he was below us somewhere in the crowd of passengers.

“We’re above you in the jungle wall,” I texted back.

“You are kidding me, right?” he texted back.

“Nope,” I replied.

Moreland began to glow. Sometimes, that glow served a damned good purpose.

“Well I can’t get up there, you idiot,” wrote Owens. “But I do see your ass. Me and everyone around me.”

One part of the crowd seemed to point up to us in unison.

“Well, wave or something, dipshit,” I texted.

A minute later, I saw a commotion below. A circle was forming around a man lying on the ground where the pointing people were. It looked like he was kicking his legs in the air and screaming. Owens. Moreland and I leaped down the jungle wall toward the circle forming around Owens. When we arrived, Garrison was laughing. Owens, his back on the ground, looked at me and yelled, “Get me out of here, will you?” Unable to contain my desire to torture him, I fell on top of him and pressed my body hard against his. I assumed Moreland was smart enough to grab Garrison, so I flashed.

Owens and I arrived on the floor of the lab. “Shit, get off me, you mother fucking goon,” he said.

“Nice to see you, too, darling,” I replied, standing up. I offered my hand, but he refused it and cursed something about my long-dead mother while he stood up. I looked to my left to see Moreland’s arm in the crook of Garrison’s elbow.

“Now, that’s nice, civil vampire travel,” said Owens as he looked at them.

“Always gotta make things difficult, don’t you, Owens,” I said.

“Shit,” he said. “What you got for me? You said you know how to take these bad boys out? And what the hell is going on here in Singapore?”

We sat down at a lab table where Philip was doing his computer thing. Moreland and I filled Owens in on everything we knew.

“How many automatic weapons we got here?” asked Owens when we were finished.

“Just a few. Not enough to arm the local police with meteor-bullet weapons,” I replied.

“You shoulda been taking out as many of these mother fuckers as you could instead of getting my ass out of there. What the hell’s wrong with you?” he asked. He seemed pretty angry. I understood his anger. What was happening in Singapore was the exact opposite of what he could have ever hoped for as the climax to his years of battling vampires.

“We’ve been doing what we can,” I said. “It only took us a few minutes to get your skinny ass out of there, and now we need you to help deal with Longtooth.”

“But you don’t need me, Mourning.” I couldn’t explain why I did. Because I didn’t know. For his mind? His guts? Both? I tried to explain. Then I looked at Garrison. “This guy’s no idiot, either. Look, man, I just need you guys, okay?”

“Alright,” said Owens. “But let’s make this the last fight with this prick. I ain’t leaving his hovel until one of us is dead. He’s in San Francisco? You know, I really hate this flashing shit almost as much as my partner here does.”

“Stop complaining for fuck’s sake,” I replied. “Dr. Chua is dead, half of Singapore’s been slaughtered. You’re doing okay here.”

“Remember how well the last injection worked out?” asked Philip sarcastically in reference to the Goa CRISPR disaster. Everyone was mad. Stressed out. Nobody said anything, so he continued. “Well, I think I’ve got a modification to these nanobots that’s worth trying.”

“At this point, we don’t have much to lose,” I said.

“I think I’ve established a response protocol,” said Philip. “I’m testing it now.” He was furiously typing on his laptop keyboard. “If I’m right, in about thirty seconds, Miss Moreland will be singing America the Beautiful.” Everyone not named Moreland looked at each other like Philip was asking us to eat a ball made of sewing needles. “And… go!”

On cue, Moreland sang:

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

She had an amazingly beautiful voice. I had always found her high pitched shrill annoying, but when she sang, it became a gorgeous soprano.

“And… stop!” Philip hit a key on the laptop.

“You little fuck,” said Moreland. “I should feed your head to your brother when he wakes up. I just might.” Like I said, sewing needles.

“Sorry,” said Philip unconvincingly. If I could see he was withholding a smile, I’m pretty sure Moreland could, too. “Before you get too mad at me, you should know that you’ll be able to use your phone to send commands when you get to Longtooth. I don’t know if these Wurdulacs can sing but it won’t matter because you’ll command them to do something else. Anything you want, actually.” He smiled innocently at her. “I could have made you dance instead. This microcircuitry is hard-wired to convert English to command inputs. There’s another language in there, too. Must be what the Wurdulacs speak.”

“I’ve never heard a Wurdulac speak,” I said.

Philip shrugged. “The processor accepts the commands in English, then sends out translations. And then, somehow, in a way I don’t understand yet, gets the body that is receiving the command through the nanobot to respond to the command. It is crazy sophisticated. My uncle figured most of this out,” he added when I looked impressed. “It has taken me this long to parse what he has done and his instructions.”

“So, the foundation for you to work with was better than he said,” I said.

“He made the tape first. But added it last. I think,” said Philip.

“The amazing Dr. Chou. Someone should make a movie out of this guy,” said Owens.

“Miss Moreland,” said Philip. “I can disable your nanobots before your arrival.”

“Mmm,” she grunted.

“Then, I’ll use them to send the signals to you. But you’ll just be a communications hub. You use the app I install on your phones to pick up the signal from the nanobots in your body. Then you send the instructions out to whatever has nanobots inside of it in Longtooth’s place.”

“Sounds complicated,” said Moreland.

“No, all you need to remember is to send the command when the phone sends you an alert that you’ve got your signal,” said Philip. “And don’t lose your phones.”

“I sure hope he’s got cell service near that building he’s in,” I said.

Owens and Garrison looked at me like I was crazy.

“It’s San Francisco,” said Owens.

“He’s bouncing these signals off satellites somewhere. Not a cell tower,” said Philip. “Some unused frequency in the five-point-nine gigahertz band.”

“Oh, that. Of course!” I exclaimed sarcastically. I had no idea what he was talking about.

“There won’t be a problem,” continued Philip. “I hacked the sim cards to your phones.”

“Of course you did,” I said.

“I feel like I’m in a Tom Clancy novel,” said Garrison.

“A what?” asked Owens.

“You know, Jack Ryan. He’s always got some brilliant computer hacker around while he’s singlehandedly smoking the Russkies.”

“Anybody seen Charly and Daphne around?” I asked rhetorically as I looked at my phone.

Moreland approached me, put her hand on my shoulder, and asked softly, “Do you really think for one second that Charly is going to let anything happen to her? She’s okay, Jade. So is he.” She wanted me to stay focused, but I had been having trouble keeping my mind off her well-being since the moment she left with Charly. Since the moment she turned, if indeed she had. I shook my head. I was frustrated.

But we had another problem. And this was one of the reasons I was desperate for Charly’s return. We couldn’t leave Philip, Leia Tan, and her elevator companions alone while the rampage was continuing outside the building. The area surrounding us had settled into an eerie quiet. But the news reports described a worsening situation.

“Everyone is probably in a bomb shelter,” Philip said when I brought it up. “Little known fact you Americans probably do not know. Every newly constructed living space in Singapore must have a bomb shelter.”

“No way,” I said.

“Way,” he said, imitating a movie comedy character. “Since the 1990s. There is one here, too. In the basement of the building next door. They are blast-proof. Maybe vampire proof. I hope so!”

“Why are there bomb shelters in residences?” asked Owens.

“Our brothers to the north,” said Philip. “Boom!” He motioned an explosion with his hands. “Another little known fact…” He leaned in closer to Owens, who was sitting across from him. “…Everyone who has one in their apartment uses them as closets!” He laughed. “True story!” I had a vision of people scrambling to pull stuff out of their bomb shelter closets so they could crawl inside and hide.

We decided that even if the Mouras Encantadas could break through a bomb shelter, they probably wouldn’t try if there was easier prey available.

So, we helped Philip gather all his equipment. Moreland gathered Bennie. Leia Tan gathered her new friends from the elevator. And we moved everything to the building that had the bomb shelter. Once there, Moreland and I found a small gathering of students huddling with their phones. After we left Leia Tan and Bennie, we fed on a couple of stragglers because we both desperately needed it. A couple of passersby were in such a state of shock they barely noticed.

Then, we gathered some weapons.

“Everyone ready?” I asked. It was time for our final meetup with Longtooth.

“Please don’t lay on top of me,” said Owens.

“Take my arm, you pansy,” I said.

Owens did so. Garrison did the same with Moreland. And it was off to San Francisco.

Notes

Some background music:

Psalm of Vampires does not adhere closely to vampire canon. I did what I wanted to.

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A paperback or hardback version of the novel is also available.

This is the final sneak peek into my upcoming novel, Restive Souls, an alternative history novel about an African empire that rises in the Carolina Low Country. This excerpt will be removed in the near future. The story takes place early during the short war during the British attack on Charleston.

We know that war as the Revolutionary War. The people in this timeline know it as the failed Colonial War that triggered the emancipation of the slaves in the late 1700s.

The captain of the victorious British fleet is grieving the loss of a woman he fell in love with shortly after the British victory.

Finneas Jewell is a free African and gifted coppersmith who had previously talked the captain into fitting the hull with copper sheathing to handle the difficult shoals around Charleston’s Sullivan Island.

Cornelius Tye is the leader of the Ethiopian Regiment (a real thing in the British army during the Revolutionary War of our timeline).

Bolo’s Notes are annotations by the novel’s helpful historian, Emmet Bolo.

Trigger warning: No professional edits yet, just me.

There was no solace in Basilia’s death under my helpless hands, but if there had been, it would have been knowing that her own claims against her faith were misplaced. Her last words were proof enough. Perhaps, as she passed into the heavens, she met her maker, who encouraged her, gently laying his hands of truth upon her.

I felt a different hand on my shoulder, but I didn’t look up to see who it was. I didn’t care.

“You will always have her strength with you,” I thought I heard Cornelius’s voice say through the storm of grief clouding my mind. “She has just given that to you, if you will have it.”

I had seen many people die, but I had never been so overcome. Within the strains of battle, even a death bound to one who is dear extends its blasphemy against the heart but for a moment, because the battle must rage on; a nearby enemy, extending grief along the devil’s nefarious web of revenge and intrigue, must be slain, and when the aria of each cherished life is absorbed by the full choir of wailing agony that forms the essence of war, we become numb to the tragic opera’s demands for more.

But not Basilia. Not now. Her essence had been shorn from the fabric of my universe, changing every calculus within. Her hasty exit left me inconsolable. The curtain was drawn, but I was determined to tear it down and curse her God, who had taken her from me like a kidnapper, immutably sovereign from human punition.

It seemed like I knelt over her into the next morning, but of course I did not. I stood up to face Cornelius, my hands and head shaking, each in their own way.

“I don’t know the why of the attack,” he said as if anticipating my question. “I am afraid to report that our Ethiopian regiment isn’t the most appreciated aspect within Henry Clinton’s land army.”

I had barely noticed that the child, Sarah, was now upon Basilia, sobbing enough for the both of us.

Cornelius must have read the expression on my face because I didn’t need to say, “Now what?” as the child looked at us both with her eyes and cheeks drenched in tears.

“We must take her urgently to a parish,” he said. “Saint Phillip’s, I think, would be best. Saint Paul’s would have been an option, but they are in disarray.”

“Saint Phillip’s is gone,” I said. “Some African thing,” was all I could manage, my mind still heavy with the moment.

“Father Tom,” he nodded. “A good man. I’d trust his hands in this. He’ll manage. But the freed slaves want their own church, and Saint Philip’s is what they chose. St. Paul’s will not be safe for her. It could be burning now, as we speak. It has been a refuge for loyalists.”

“The colonials are so hostile to emancipation as that?”

“What did you think this war is really about?” asked Cornelius. “A bit of usurious taxation? Well. Anyway. Saint Philip’s is a haven for freed slaves but is also open to loyalists. It is her best option.”

“What of the other children?” I asked.

“I can’t trust the British as far as I can spit. What would you have me do?”

“Clinton will learn of these saboteurs against the crown. I will see to that.”

“Will you? I want to believe you, good captain. I truly do. But my trust, as I said, is shaken.”

“As is mine, if it is of any help at all for you to know.”

“Tis. Our unit will remain as is. I won’t have it any other way, and I am not afraid to tell General Clinton of my insistence. Sad that we now must look out the corner of our eyes for spies within British ranks, unknowing of the disposition of anyone wearing British colors.”

“Quite forthrightly, I can tell you this,” I said. “I am neither friend nor foe to the slaves of this continent. But the crown has made a promise to you, to them, and it is my duty to enforce it. I am certain Henry Clinton feels the same way.”

“My impressions of Clinton are the same. He has been a most vocal paladin of that promise.”

I was unable to bear another moment near Basilia’s body, so Cornelius and I gathered Sarah Lightwood and took her to the Savage Home to recruit some help. While we took turns carrying the distraught child, we realized that our strategy for finding the slaves who took the child, and probably the others, and for addressing the crime we had just experienced, was the same. We would pay a visit together to General Clinton to help him understand that two seemingly conflicting crimes were related to the same cause of justice.

Surprisingly, General Clinton agreed through no persuasion other than the presentation of the initial set of facts. He seemed nearly angrier at the musket shots intended for Colonel Tye than at the fact of the still missing children. But he was sufficiently disturbed by both events to split a deployment of Hessian fusiliers to each task. One of these would assist Colonel Tye’s Ethiopian Regiment’s attempt to track down the Lightwood children. The other would be to join with the 71^st Regiment of Foot and a new battalion of loyalists commanded by a Scot named Patrick Ferguson to round up forces who might have been behind the assault on Cornelius.

Patrick Ferguson developed the Ferguson Rifle that was used by John Honeyman and Guillaume Diderot during the Battle of Trenton. He was deployed to Charleston to command a small battalion of troops to experiment with his new rifle. He knew nothing of Honeyman’s experience with the rifle, a few of which had been smuggled to New Jersey by a cohort of Ferguson’s in Britain and fell into Dylan Shale’s hands, until he met Honeyman years later.

Ferguson played a key role in putting down rebellious colonialists as the Colonial Rebellion drew to a close by working closely with loyalists, whom he recruited into his regiment. The rifle was given credit for much of the regiment’s success and became the weapon of choice among British soldiers and congregational militias.

After his appointment as British Inspector of Militia of Carolina and Georgia in 1780, he provided extensive military and espionage training to congregational militias throughout the Low Country and Georgia.

I thanked Clinton and Cornelius, wondering if the trauma of watching Basilia’s death would allow for any sleep and, if so, how nightmarish the sleep might become. Compounding the brutality of the moment was the fact that I was returning to the place I had met her, a place, too, where I had nearly quartered with her, a place where I very nearly had fallen back into that time of life when I had been a schoolboy smitten by the charms of innocence and the follies of such simple charms as a magical crest of falling hair.

The exhaustion of the day consumed me, and I was asleep nearly from the moment my head dropped onto my bed’s pillow. I dreamed of Basilia. We were dancing in a garden full of impossibly tall rice until she led me by the hand into a dark room, which became lit by moonlight. The room was full of happy children singing and cheering and laughing. Then the light changed and shone directly on Basilia and me. The children stopped their happy banter, looked at us, and started screaming.

Basilia’s face had decayed into a dark grey, cavity-filled skull, her exposed teeth falling out one by one like dominoes spilling out of a sinister cave.

I woke up in sweat. Morning sunlight shot rays through several thin rips in the window shade. Someone was pounding hard on the door. I climbed out of bed, then ran my hands clumsily over a nightstand where I had laid the pistol I had retrieved from the Lightwood estate. But I preferred my own service pistol, which meant that my unwelcome visitor would need to wait. I found it and approached the door. “Who is it?” I asked loudly.

“Most sorry sir,” said the proprietor Hasimou’s muffled voice through the aging sheet of metal-framed wood that acted as a door. “Finneas Jewell is here requesting you, sir. He ain’t tellin’ me why. Sounds important. Be careful sir goin’ out if you do. There’s trouble.”

“Tell him I’ll be down presently.”

“Yes, captain.”

Still in my knickers and a white undershirt, I hurried over to the window, lifting the shade up by its corner to peek out the window. Once again, there was mayhem in the streets. It was as if everyone had decided yesterday to take a coffee break during the riot and agree to reconvene at this hour. I could see several wisps of black smoke from different points as I gazed out the window.

My first thought was of the ships docked in the harbor. They were not far away. The public house in which I had taken lodging was on the same riverfront as the docks, which were but a short walk away.

I pulled on my tan colored breeches, then my long white captain’s naval boots, and tucked my breeches inside them. I didn’t don my blue captain’s overcoat, only the inner jacket, which was the same color as my breeches. Its multitude of large, gold-colored buttons would identify me as a captain to British forces, but wouldn’t make me an immediately obvious target to colonial rebels who weren’t well versed in British military uniform styles.

The pistol was useless in these matters, but, nevertheless, its weight gave me comfort. When I landed downstairs, Jewell was standing at the door, accompanied by three imposing men with hard snarls on their faces and skin as dark as a moonless night.

A slight man emerged through the door, which appeared to be pushed open by what looked like a man-sized finger of white smoke from the fires burning outside.

“No need to check on your ship, Captain, if that is your thinking,” said the man as he entered through the cloud of smoke as if introduced by witchcraft. “She is safe. No harm can come to her.”

“What is this, Jewell?” I asked.

“Guillaume Diderot. At your service.” The man of smoke bowed.

“This is as promised, my friend,” said Jewell. “We have seized the docks. We have seized the ships on the docks. Today, an African Navy is born in Charlestown.”

At that moment, Titus Cornelius entered the public house, following behind Diderot with a small contingent of men.

“My ship? You’ve taken my ship?” I asked incredulously, furiously. I had not noticed until now that two of the men accompanying Jewell had been carrying machetes that looked as long as their arms as they brandished them threateningly.

Cornelius waved them off. “This is a man of honor,” he said to them. “And must be treated as such.”

Then Jewell said to me, “Not your ship, captain. She is now a naval vessel of the Carolina African Navy. But sir, I wish for you to continue to captain her.”

“That’s absurd. I shall do no such thing. She’ll be sunk by the British Navy before she can depart but a foot off the docks.”

“My friend, you have proven that the British cannot easily enter this port. We have secured the fort as well as the port,” said the man calling himself Diderot.

“But how? How in a day’s time? Against such an army?” An impossible story such as his did not warrant the question, but, still, I found it tripping out of my mouth.

“Sit.” Diderot walked to a table and sat in a chair, Jewell’s three bodyguards standing behind him. I obliged.

“In Persia,” said Diderot, “There is a group known as the Asāsiyyūn. In your language, a rough translation would be ‘assassins’. It is, in fact, from that Arabic word that your own word is derived.”

“I fail to understand,” I said, wanting to stand up and run through the gauntlet of two machetes and a large man in between, then careen through the wall made by Cornelius and his men, just so I could plunge my fists into Jewell’s abdomen. I was besotted with enough rage to think I could do it, too.

“They were a Nizari Isma’ili sect,” continued Diderot, “who lived in the mountains of Persia and in Syria in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, whose main tenet, whose main, as the French might say, raison d’etre, was to foster chaos by killing Christian and Muslim leaders, in order to achieve certain objectives. Alas, assassins are in our midst in our fledgling capital. They do not share our sense of decorum.”1

“Understand that the safety of the people of Charlestown is tantamount to our ends, Captain,” said Cornelius, who, along with Jewell, was now standing behind Diderot.

I looked outside. “It does not look so from where I sit,” I replied. “There appears to be much blood on the streets.”

Jewell nodded slowly. “Regretfully, it must be said that there are a few among us who have taken their vengeance upon the city’s most prominent slave owners and colonial generals. I do hope that it ends soon, but we cannot control the fuses lit by European cruelties.”

Jewell sat down next to Diderot.

“I trusted you, Jewell. With everything. My ship. My men.”

“Aye, that you did, Captain,” said Jewell. “I am thankful for that, and this must seem a poor way for me to honor that trust. But you drank to this with me as I drank to it with you.”

“This is not quite what I had in mind.”

“You told me just the other day you cared not about your flag.” Abruptly, Jewell stood up and faced his men, then all four of them made for the door, the three bodyguards doing so on a pirouette.

Jewell turned around to face me from the entrance. “I hope you will consider your options, captain. Our navy will need fine, honorable men such as yourself.” With that, the four men entered the raucous fray outside.

I must not have been paying attention, because Diderot was gone, too. Or perhaps, I wondered, he was a mere figment of my imagination, born of rage and a need for more sleep.

Cornelius and his men remained, making me wonder if my time remaining on this earth had itself officially come to its end as I considered Diderot’s odd story of assassins.

“Henry Clinton, Peter Parker, they are indifferent to this conflict,” Cornelius said. “But I’ll add that the reason for this may be the story you’ve just been told. I am sorry to report to you captain, that the assassins Monsieur Diderot speaks of belong to my unit. The events of yesterday forced our hand. We have had to execute a few British officers in the dark of night.” At this, he and his men turned around and left much the same way as Jewell’s. But then, he, too, quickly turned at the door. “I wish you the best of luck to you, good captain, and don’t forget to wear your armband.” With that, he and his men pushed their way through the door.

I sat seething, wanting to choke the life out of Jewell. I wished at the very least to rush out and shoot him in the backside, no matter the consequences from his machete wielding friends or from Cornelius. I unstrapped my pistol and slammed it against the table. I knew I could not shoot Finneas Jewell in such a way. Even a duel seemed like a foul representation of the relationship I had built with him. But this treachery. How could it go unpunished?

I wondered about these assassins from long ago. Was such a story from the ghostly man named Diderot true? Or simply an invention of a freed slave’s fertile imagination? And how could such a pogrom against colonial leadership and British officers within Charlestown be executed in one day? It seemed to me an impossible tale. Perhaps, I thought, a couple of leaders were killed. Possibly, Parker and Clinton considered themselves targets. This might create a leadership void long enough for an uprising to possibly win the day.

It all seemed so unlikely that I began to doubt their story and suspect that the tale was either the fanciful imagination of newly freed slaves or a ploy to take one lone ship: mine. Pistol in hand, I stood up from the table and made my way toward the exit. But I heard Cornelius’ voice in my head remind me about the armband he had given me, so I went upstairs to retrieve it, stuffed it into my jacket pocket, then ran back downstairs as if I could do something.

As soon as I stepped outside, a burly light skinned man with flowing red hair grabbed my elbow. “Name’s Frind Lucas,” said the red headed man. “You are not safe,” he quickly added without giving me time to react. He was accompanied by three Africans, all armed with bayonet-equipped muskets. “Stay with us.” He wore a ragged bandage with an insignia around his bicep.

Diderot then emerged from between two buildings, again through a blanket of smoke, acting as if ready to lead the way.

Lucas’s red locks of hair escaped from a white turban with the same insignia as his armband. His shirt and pants were the same dark green color and of a style I did not recognize. The pants were loose fitting, with a rope sash around the waist, and the shirt had stone buttons and a short collar cut into a square at the throat.

He looked like an Irishman, but his accent was that of an English gentleman. Neither Diderot nor the three men accompanying Lucas said anything. Lucas smiled as he watched me wrap my bandage, which I finally realized carried the same insignia as Cornelius Tye’s uniform, around my bicep. Glancing over at Lucas, I saw that the insignia on his armband was the same. I nodded as I looked around the mayhem surrounding us. “You are friends with Finneas Jewell?”

“Of the best kind, I hope. He worked for me at a copper mine in East Orange in the New Jersey province a score ago. Took him less than a year before he was very nearly running the place. A man of his talents I have not seen hence.” The six of us were nearly against a wall of the shop next to the public house.

“We must make haste,” said Diderot.

“To where?” I objected, feeling the weight of the gun in my hand. None of the men had tried to relinquish me of it. My urge to use it to put a large hole through Diderot surprised me.

“Your vessel,” Lucas replied.

“Now tis mine again,” I sneered.

“Tis. Finneas says it is yours to do with as you wish.”

I wondered bitterly how I might fare as a privateer off the African coast.

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Notes

Cover art:

Ships at sea by Thomas Luny, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; image of woman superimposed over ships licensed from Adobe Stock; image smashup by the author.

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If you enjoyed this, please pass it on to anyone who likes to read alternative fiction!

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:

Thanks for reading!

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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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This is a sample chapter from the first part of Restive Souls, an alternative history novel about a North America that sees slavery ended in the late 1700s and experiences no further indigenous ethnic cleansing from that point as a powerful Black nation rises in the Carolina Low Country. There may be some grammatical miscues and other minor mishaps in this version not in the final version targeted for publication.

This chapter begins with the narrator, Guillaume Diderot, a free Haitian who has befriended American spy John Honeyman, describing a tense prequel to Washington’s expected approach. Diderot has, by this point in the story, become a key player in the cause for the British as a local guerrilla leader.

Honeyman has been tasked by George Washington with spycraft in support of the Christmas attack on Trenton from across the Delaware River.

Honeyman was a spy for Washington in our timeline, but in the Restive Souls timeline, his loyalties are in question after his new friendship with Diderot, who seems to have convinced him that a British victory would result in the freeing of slaves, which Honeyman would like.

Colonel Shepherd is a British colonel on site to command a local platoon.

Bolo’s Notes are made by a fictional historian, Emmet Bolo, who annotates the story with historical facts, trivia, and notes.

Trigger warning: Subversive!

This excerpt will be paywalled within a week or so.

Restive Souls

Part One, Ye Old Seeds of Flame

An Excerpt from Diderot’s Tale: 1776

On Christmas Eve, Colonel Shepherd established pickets north and south of our encampment. This maneuver, I knew, would have the unfortunate effect of ensnaring us in battle.

It may have made some sense to some for the British and their Hessian allies to attack Washington as he crossed the Delaware, but they couldn’t know the precise time this would happen, and Colonel Shepherd informed me that the Hessians were convinced that Washington would get across the river, thinking his attack on Trenton was the surprise he considered it to be.

Any number of things could ruin our plans, most of which revolved around Honeyman. It was possible that he could inform Washington that the Hessians were ready for his attack. It was also possible that, instead, the attack would not come on Christmas or Christmas Eve as we expected. Troops could not be expected to huddle in redoubts for days on end in winter.

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Such considerations expose the gamble that a military adventure can sometimes face. Decisions must be made. The importance and opportunity of capturing or killing George Washington was supremely unique, but obtaining precise information regarding his next move was like catching a snowflake in a tempestuous wind.

Colonel Shepherd informed us that Cornwallis had presumed Washington’s attack would occur on Christmas night. Mr. Candy had supplied the Hessian regiments with beer containing the lower alcohol content I had requested. This was another form of insurance. Even if the Hessians were to overindulge on Christmas Eve, they would not be wretched military men the next day.

I still didn’t know if von Donop had found his way down to Trenton to take charge of the regiments, or if instead he had succumbed to Betsy Ross’s charms. His presence would make it more likely that the Hessians would refrain from holiday celebration, although it seemed Shepherd was gaining favor. Some of his conversations led me to even wonder if he had been given oversight of the Hessians.

The gamble and the decision meant that Washington, if he attacked on Christmas Eve, would in all probability be turned back, but the possibility of capturing or killing him was small.

Mostly, the British wanted to turn away the rebels, who had been in full retreat and were demoralized. A British victory in Trenton would likely give final credence to the notion that the rebellion was a lost cause.

If our gamble was correct and Washington attacked on Christmas Day, the Hessian and British troops had a more complete ambush planned than if he attacked on Christmas Eve. Weather conditions were deteriorating such that it wouldn’t be possible to establish positions for longer than 24 hours.

Thus did Christmas Eve arrive silently. It left us the same way, to a cold, wet morning filled with dancing snowflakes bandied about by mild winds. British pickets established north of our encampment reported no movement anywhere along that part of the Delaware.

From further south came similar reports. There were fewer scouts south, because Honeyman had stated that Washington would cross the Delaware near a ferry north of our settlement.

Christmas saw no celebration, only tense anticipation.

Shepherd’s platoon moved north of our encampment that morning. The movement surprised me. I knew it was not for our protection. Rooting for a British victory did not mislead me into thinking we were allies. My conclusion was that the British or Hessians had received new intelligence, possibly from Honeyman.

We would soon discover the truth underlying Honeyman’s loyalties, such as they were.

Many in the encampment had left, seeking shelter by participating in raids against local slave ranchers. There were four women in camp, including Oo-reeh. A few of the other women had also left to participate in raids.

The women in our camp were capable with weapons. Oo-reeh, too, knew the musket. She had said when she began to reveal details of her troubles in the forest, “It was just a warning shot. I coulda shot your head off.” Kanatsoyh was amused until she demonstrated her shooting ability against a rabbit running through some brush.

“Stew meat,” she said with a proud grin. Kanatsoyh stared at her, astonished.

The day drifted on. As it did, I knew the sentries would begin to grow weary at their various posts. I took sleep in the afternoon, convinced that Washington would attempt a nighttime crossing.

Kanatsoyh and Sacareesa were encamped. Jacob Longfish returned from a raid with a slave man in tow after dusk. The slave man, who called himself Jimbo, had a fine musket that looked like it had never been fired.

Jimbo was the tallest man I had ever seen, with a body that looked like the thinnest surviving tree trunk from a scorching forest fire, and brown hair with the small, frenzied curls of an African. Something about the man struck me instantly. A warmth in his eyes, perhaps, very nearly a light stationed above his head as if he was blessed with angelic features. He spoke very little English.

“How will he know what to do?” I asked Longfish.

Longfish pointed to his horse. “He rode here with me on that horse he stole from the ranch as if he had lived atop the horse his entire life,” said Jacob. “He shall know what to do. He is guided by Gauh-dee-keh-raw-Kwest.” I looked at him blankly. “The Good Spirit,” he added.

As predicted, Jimbo went about helping around the camp everywhere he could. We had begun building a rough fortification at the edge of the tree line that began the cluster of trees protecting our small settlement.

It was not as fully secured as a redoubt, because the cold had hardened the ground too much to build a significant trench, but we had the good fortune of a fallen tree, probably the victim of a lightning strike, and several of the men had spent the past day and a half hacking at it with axes and stacking heavy logs into a circle, which was camouflaged with brush.

Any military man on close approach would quickly discover its purpose, but it was better than nothing. One of the men had mastered the art of planting angled spikes within the wood casement. I was astonished at its ingenuity.

“You here tonight,” Jimbo said to me, as if delivering a command. He touched the Ferguson hanging from my shoulder. “Not enough.” He pointed to a quiver of arrows and a bow leaning on a nearby rock, then touched my gun again. “Not enough!” he said loudly. “No good!”

Then his tall, spindly legs bounded over to the arrows and bow. He picked them up and handed them to me on his return. He pushed them into my chest and nodded his head. When I nodded and slung the quiver over my other shoulder, feeling quite burdened, Jimbo smiled grandly, revealing gritty, darkened teeth that looked considerably older than he, who was most likely a young man in his twenties.

We stationed sentries at the exterior of the longhouse at both ends. The rest of the clan ate a rabbit stew meal.

And we waited.

I began to fear, as the number of hours grew and the forest sounds gave way to the fury of a wet winter storm, that Washington would not launch his attack. I spent the night in our small fortification, which Kanatsoyh called Oo-Weh-Neh, The Iron, with Kanatsoyh, Sacareesa, Longfish, and Jimbo.

We huddled together, keeping warm in the furious wind, which shot shards of frozen rain against our faces, forcing us to wrap our heads in hooded vests. I sensed I wouldn’t see or hear rebel troops until they were upon me.

Just as that thought entered my mind, I heard distant cannon fire. It began as one, then two shots separated by substantially long moments. Soon after, it became a volley. We couldn’t know from our vantage point whose they were, but I knew their origin was north.

I wanted to jump out of the fortification, and I must have moved as if I might, because Jimbo held my shoulder down and put a finger to his mouth as if to shush me, although I hadn’t said a word. He pointed ahead, as if he could see something that wasn’t there.

The cannon fire did not draw closer. I presumed its source to be British and Hessian defenses remaining stationary to deliver an initial blow to one of Washington’s regiments, which must have successfully crossed.

How that was possible in this ungodly weather was far beyond my ability to understand. Was God, in fact, on the side of Washington? Had He parted the raging waters for the rebel general? Crossing the river would be impossible for any but the most impressively disciplined troops, and although I had never questioned rebel bravery, I had often questioned their discipline. But the sounds of battle could mean nothing else.

All we could do was wait in the cold, angry storm.

“We should be up front,” said Kanatsoyh, “at the crossing, instead of huddling here in the cold like cowards.”

I had considered that. The crossing was likely to be at or near a ferry owned by someone named Mr. McConkey, a devout rebel who had a reputation for plucking loyalist Haudenosaunee out of a crowd and introducing them to the deep waters of the river after an unpleasant death. “We don’t have the information the British have,” I replied. “And by now, were we to visit upon the battle scene, we would be but observers of the results. It will be over soon. Come. I think it safe to build a fire.”

Even Jimbo agreed to that, so we all left the fortification and built a large fire by the river. It was glorious, as the windy sleet transformed into a fantastic fall of snow that I could see clinging to the trees around us. The combination of snow and fire quickly brightened the air, casting shadows among the trees that ringed the small open space where we had built the fire.

It was an odd affair. We roasted game meats over flames amid barrages of thunderous cannon fire echoing and flashing in the distance. That the sound seemed to come no closer gave me great hope with its evidence that Washington’s advance was stalled.

After an hour, the cannon fire subsided, introducing a stillness to the air that was accentuated by white sleeves of snow adorning tree branches, icicles dangling in the softened wind, flurries tossed in the air as if shaken within a glass toy.

The contrast of such a campground scene with the pronouncements of war in the distance only moments before could not have been starker. The tension of the camp gave way to levity and dark humor, yet I was still anxious, mostly to trek northwards to discover what the remnants of battle had yielded.

The quiet was broken, however, by the unmistakable sound of galloping horses. I sensed half a dozen, at least. Leaving the fire, we scrambled to different positions.

I made haste for the bark fortress, suddenly frightfully aware that our hastily constructed attempt at a nominal redoubt would be insufficient against a sustained blast of musket fire. Jimbo and Kanatsoyh followed me. Sacareesa and others hid within nearby stands of trees.

I pulled the Ferguson off my shoulder and tried to load it, but the loading device was jammed.

The horses neared.

Jimbo tapped my shoulder with a smile while nodding his head, then tapped my quiver full of arrows. I shook my head. It was as if he had known all along. I quickly took the bow and left my right hand, holding an arrow, at one side.

Bolo’s Notes

Jimbo was the man we now know as James Tagoe, who eventually became the renowned Seer of the Princeton Synod of the New Lights. Tagoe played a crucial role during the Taking of Princeton by armed former slaves after the Colonial Rebellion. The former slaves wanted to raze the college to the ground, but Tagoe convinced them to maintain the university. He struck a bargain with the university’s trustees after Princeton’s President, a slave owner named Jonathan Dickinson, was hanged outside Nassau Hall.

The Europeans who made up the vast portion of the student body would be allowed to complete their studies after a two-year sabbatical, during which time Afrikers would be taught at the school even if they couldn’t read or write. Tagoe argued that the reading and writing could come later, but that lectures must take place with no prerequisites. The mass resignation of faculty nearly destroyed his plan, but similar events occurred at other Eastern universities, such as William & Mary, and a substantial portion of the faculty eventually returned.

The result of this was that many universities became apprenticeship centers. More advanced academics eventually prevailed in most higher education schools, but some, such as Harvard, which is now known as the Harvard Center for Advanced Vocational Studies, today remain important venues for apprenticeship rather than academics.

Tagoe’s initial efforts at establishing Princeton as an Afro-centric university failed, but the university’s student population by the end of 1850 consisted of 70% Black and First Settlers. However, the faculty did not become majority Afriker until the 21^st century.

Tagoe’s principal accomplishment was the race to educate Afrikers in the Carolina Union, and it can be argued that his emphasis on haste provided the launching pad for the immense technological progress that propelled the mid to late 19^th-century Carolina Union, and later, the United States, into a world power.

The men who finally arrived on horseback seemed drunk, as one of them fired a musket blindly while still riding, no doubt because he saw the fire and assumed a Hessian camp. There were six horsemen, five of whom seemed to be taking care to protect the sixth.

They jumped off their horses and made a circle around the sixth man, who remained on his horse. The sixth man wore a heavy dark blue coat flattened by the dreadful weather. A dark blue tricorn hat covered long reddish-brown hair fastened in the back as a ponytail. A long streak of white powder, matted down and moistened by rain and sleet, acted as a crease of sorts in the middle of the man’s ponytail. More white powder colored the hair around the man’s temples. He wore long, grand black boots.

His men were shooting randomly into the forest at nothing, looking disoriented and frightened. A shot exploded out of the trees nearest me and struck one of the men, shearing off his scalp and sending him flying backwards to his instant death. Another shot, this one from Jimbo next to me, making a terrible sound that hollowed out my right ear, ruptured another man’s abdomen, which I could see becoming a wild plumage of flesh and blood as the man looked down, his hand reaching into the mess created by the musket ball before he fell to the ground. My ears felt as if they had been filled with stone, and I was barely able to hear anything because Jimbo had fired the blasted thing so near to me.

I took an arrow and aimed at the protected man’s left shoulder, delivering a perfectly executed shot that struck just beneath his shoulder blade. I rearmed as the man turned around to face me for some reason, his horse on its two rear legs as another musket blast tore into the beast’s rib cage. I released the bow, striking the man in the front of the same shoulder. He cried out in words that would make the devil blush, as the remaining three men jumped onto their horses and galloped away, leaving the wounded man to fall upon the front of his horse as it collapsed to the ground.

I ran to him, seeking to offer aid, struck by my sudden sympathy for what was surely a man suffering from something worse than physical injury.

Jimbo followed me, carrying a rope from God knows where. It was as if the young lad were a magician. I looked at the man in the tricorn hat, then I looked at Jimbo holding the rope. “George Washington, I presume,” I said, motioning to Jimbo to secure the prisoner with his magical threads.

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Notes

As mentioned, Honeyman is based on a real character, John Honeyman.

The battle of Trenton, as we learn in the novel, was a desperate gambit by Washington after his troops were routed from New York.

The revolution was on the precipice of failure in both timelines. Washington desperately needed the Trenton victory to improve morale and help recruit more troops to his decimated and demoralized command.

In our timeline, Washington won that battle and provided a badly needed morale boost. But historians know that even the smallest alteration to events can change the flow of history to the point where a courageous river crossing becomes but a footnote.

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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.

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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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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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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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This is an emergency post for those distressed by Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

I woke up sweating, not knowing why, then I had the vision. It was no dream, no nightmare. I was wide awake. Sonata. My heart pounding, I called her, knowing it was too late but praying, trying anyway, my throat full of the kind of phlegm that only fear can produce.

“Longman!” she answered happily.

“What?” I asked, astounded.

“Silly man. You heard me.”

“I’m going to ask a stupid question. Have you seen a drone buzz over you?”

“Yeah,” she responded immediately. “It’s over my head right now. Good God, that’s weird. Is it you? I thought it was Trace. It’s using Trace’s voice.”

“It’s not me, and it’s not Trace. Sonata, if you never, ever, do anything I ask of you for the rest of your life, I will understand, but do this, please. Get out of your house instantly, get into your car, without one more second of delay.”

“What’s going on? I…”

“DO IT!” I yelled frantically, nearly in tears.

“Okay, okay,” she said. “I’ll keep our line open, okay? So you know what’s going on.”

I was becoming a praying man awfully quickly these days. I both prayed and gave thanks. “Go.”

She did, switching on her phone’s video so that I could see her movements.

“Don’t take anything. Just get to your car.”

“I haven’t driven it in months, Longman,” she said as she was running through her house, presumably to her garage, “Ever since the navigation networks collapsed.”

“Do I really need to repeat myself?”

She was breathlessly scared, I could tell, but I didn’t care. She had less than five minutes, I reasoned, before Alon’s militia would be at her house with their arsenal.

I could see her entering a large, dark area that brightened with lights as she appeared to sit in a vehicle. The vehicle started up without a problem, so she moved it forward out of the garage into the street. “A lot of people are still getting into accidents, Longman. I’m nervous.”

“Yeah, idiots still relying on their automation. Just keep your nav systems off and you’ll be fine.”

She was still out of breath as her car made its way somewhere. All I could see, with her phone presumably on its back but leaning somewhere that allowed a narrow view of what was probably the passenger window, were trees whizzing by. She was driving fast. The intent was good, but maybe too obvious. In between catching her breath, she asked, “I’ve never thought of looking this up. But why do rideshares work?”

“Isolated nav system. Separate. Not affected.” Good God, I thought, who cares? “Slow down a little. Drive like an urban housewife until you get out of your neighborhood.”

“There’s a big black van coming my way. Dark windows in front. Can’t see the sides yet.”

“Play it cool. Act normal. They may not know what your car looks like. They think you’re in the square having tea. It’s probably them.” I was astounded by how nervous I was. My hands were shaking as I held the phone. I couldn’t imagine what she felt like, but then, she hadn’t seen what I had seen.

I could tell through my phone that there was suddenly a lot of movement within her vehicle, which terrified me. “What’s going on?” I asked, alarmed.

“I’m just putting on a hat. My hair is sort of recognizable, I think.”

“Oh, you are a smart lady. Have I ever told you how smart I think you are?”

She laughed nervously, and even that laugh was a reward. “About a hundred times, you odd little man.”

I had never been called little before. “Where’s that van?”

“Right on top of me, and… gone. They slowed down just a little, but I think I’m clear. No windows on the sides of the van, Longman. I think it’s them. What is going on? How did you know?”

“I’ll tell you when you get here.”

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“I’m coming there?”

“Did you have somewhere else in mind? Wherever you’re safe is fine with me.”

“I’m coming there.”

She clearly floored it because the stuff in the window became a blur. She held the phone to her windshield so I could see the road in front of her.

I had never been so scared in my life. Not on Indigo, not in any of my previous convict kidnappings, not ever. I was afraid to measure my heart rate, so I didn’t. Even that would probably scare me at this point.

I continued to talk to Sonata as she made her way toward the bridge. I called a rideshare to follow her, but it couldn’t find her because her navigation system was off. I wondered if it was worth the risk of having her turn it on, but I thought, no, off the grid is better. I canceled the rideshare.

I wanted to call Trace, but that could be counterproductive if Alon’s men were in possession of his phone.

Meanwhile, I had to reconcile this vision I had with reality. I had never had a vision that foretold an event. Or in this case, a possible event. This could take a long time to analyze, I thought.

Other than thinking that it had occurred because I had a lot of emotional investment in the subject of this vision, I was going to have to let it all go for now. I’d have more time to talk about it with Sonata once she arrived safely. Which wasn’t a given, which tormented my nerves even more.

I watched the screen of my phone so closely that I thought my eyes would melt into it. Once she was on the bridge, the oncoming traffic was barely recognizable. She was flying, reporting to me that traffic was light. There were no cars behind her. I was pretty sure that she wasn’t being followed.

I felt a sense of deep satisfaction thinking about the goons breaking into Sonata’s home, running into the square certain that she was there, unable to answer for their mission’s failure.

Once she was over the bridge, I started walking her through the directions for getting to my hotel. She already knew how to get to the place.

When she arrived, she threw herself back first onto the bed.

“I don’t think we have a lot of time to relax,” I said.

“Give me just these few moments, Longman.”

I sat down next to her, facing the window of my hotel room, which looked out into the night over the bay.

“Tell me about your vision,” she said.

I shook my head. “I’ve never had one before the actual event, Sonata. So I thought…” I had to rally here. I was choking up. I cared a lot more about this woman than I had known, and I had known already that it was a lot.

I shook my head again. “It started with that drone. Thank God for that drone. I don’t know what kind of ransacking Alon’s men did to Trace’s place, but whatever they did, they were able to salvage some stuff and certainly a lot of data. They found a way to somehow interpolate his voice, presumably based on recordings they found.”

She sat up and walked around the bed and sat next to me. “So they were the ones who sent the drone. It was a recording. I think. When I tried to interact with it, it just said something like, ‘Stay safe,’ and took off.”

I nodded. “Yeah, maybe. Makes sense. Anyway,” and again I felt a lump in my throat. “You went into the kitchen and made a salad. Some kind of cherry wine rosemary dressing.”

She cursed in exclamation as she said, “I made that dressing last night. I was just about to make myself a salad right before you called.”

“Artichoke hearts?”

She nodded.

“Palm hearts?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Maybe a couple radishes.”

“Dear Lord, Longman.”

“The romaine lettuce has been good this year. Extra sweet.”

She lifted her hands in the air and slapped them on her legs in exasperation.

“So you’re sitting at your patio table. Eating a salad. There are two cardinals in the tree in your square.”

“Every night, around dusk,” she said. “Loud, squawky things, but I love them.”

“Five guys come in. Fully armed and loaded and looking like they’re going to war, and they shoot you with, seriously, dozens and dozens of rounds of automatic gunfire.”

“What? Why me? Why not you?” She hit me on my shoulder when she said that. I couldn’t believe how lighthearted she was feeling about it, but it was probably a reflection of intense relief.

I looked down upon her unyieldingly beautiful face. Even in her harried distress, she looked amazing, even in just a very long plain blue cotton shirt draped over aging pale cotton loungewear, even with her hair mussed from her hat, the long, complex black braids looking frazzled and frizzled and outraged, she looked amazing. “Maybe to get to me? Maybe to get to both Trace and me. Maybe more. Maybe because they’re worried about your Campeche congregation stepping into their turf? Maybe they even know something about Campeche that you don’t. Who knows? But they weren’t there to put a scare in you.”

“What do I do now? They’re in my house.”

“I’m sure they’re long gone by now. But it’s obviously not safe to go back. Look, I, of course, would love to try to play hero, but this is out of my league. We need to get your militia involved.”

She shook her head.

“You said that your congregation has one.”

“It’s kind of like two guys and a gun they share on weekends, Longman. It isn’t much.”

I was silent. I had to think. I didn’t think we had much time to think.

“Chances are they know where I am,” I said. “We aren’t safe here. I just wanted you near me. To know you were safe.” She took my hand, which sent waves of energy I had never connected with through my chest. It was the strangest feeling, worse than any high school crush. “The thing is, I don’t want to give in. Their reaction tonight proves that we are close.”

“I hate to bring this up now of all times. But your vision. It didn’t happen. Is there any chance any of the others didn’t?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. They have always happened after the fact. Like Sonoma Williams’s murder. I got the vision overnight on the day of his murder. Before it hit the news, but after it happened.”

“But it changes things. This vision. It shows that…” She stopped. “Well, I don’t know what it shows, do you? I mean, a vision of what might happen, that is so different than what will happen. Or has happened.”

“You can imagine how upset I was. It’s never been this way before. I don’t even know why I called you, other than I didn’t know what else to do. But there was no doubt in my mind that you were dead already. None.”

“Whew,” she sighed. “That’s pretty intense.”

“Could be a very handy talent if I could use it to predict their next move, but I’m sure I have nothing resembling that capability. It’s random.”

“I don’t think it’s that random.”

“What do you mean?”

“After your very first vision, what happened to you?”

I shook my head. I had no idea what she was after here.

“You went on a crusade, Longman. Let’s call it what it is. After just the one. You saw a miscarriage of justice, and you began a crusade.”

“Well, no, I didn’t begin a crusade. I just went a little crazy and kidnapped a guy and found him a new home.”

“But your mind did. Your mind went on a crusade. Don’t you see it? It happened again. Then again. Then again. Had you ever had a series of such visions before?”

I shook my head again.

“These miscarriages of justice rankle you. There’s an emotional component to these visions. In my case, a very flattering one.” She smiled lovingly at me. “And sweet, and touching. I mean, it touches me in a way I’ve never been touched.” A small tear emerged from an eye.

“Hey,” I said.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s a good kind of tear. A blessed one. Anyway, you are going to absolutely detest my idea, especially because there’s a good chance it won’t work. But if we’re careful, it won’t matter.”

“No. And no. No, we won’t use you to lure these animals, and no, it won’t work. These visions just aren’t predictable in that way. Because we’d have to put you in genuine danger for there to even be a chance of the visions getting ignited, and if a vision didn’t happen, it’s lights out for Sonata Holmes.”

“There must be some way to use these to our advantage.”

“There isn’t.”

She thought longer. I didn’t like all this talk at all.

“Then we need to take advantage of their interest in me. Let’s assume they are interested in me, more than just as a way to get to you. If they only wanted to get to you, I don’t think they would have come at me like that. In that way.”

“Possibly so.”

“So somebody at Campeche or Navasota knowing what is going on at the internment housing seems like a real possibility.”

“If we’re okay with stretching possibilities as far as we can, yes.”

“We are. As a barrister for Campeche Apostolic Congregation, it’s within my rights to ask to take a tour of the internment facilities. Especially downstairs where all the action is, which of course will not be a stated reason for my request.”

“Why is it within your rights to make that request?”

“Because Texas Light is doing a lot of business that affects my congregation.”

“They’re a Houston-based congregation, in your hood, so to speak.”

“Something like that. They don’t have a legal obligation to honor my request, but there are a million unwritten rules among congregations. It would look bad if they didn’t. I’m pretty sure Sonoma Williams wasn’t in on their scheme. I think his finding out about it is what killed him.”

I nodded. “It sure wasn’t the argument he was having with Summary James. Let’s say you do this. For one thing, we have to find a way to survive long enough for all that to transpire. For another, they’ll just clean the place up before your visit. We do have the video that Trace has of the vanti operation if he kept a backup.”

She shook her head. “Inadmissible. No magistrate will allow it as evidence.”

I took out my phone and started dialing a number.

“What are you doing?”

“Calling Hiawatha Smith. He’s the only person in the country I know who might have the resources we need to challenge these people.”

I explained everything to Hiawatha. Forget the fictional scenario that I had mentioned earlier, I told him. This was real. I didn’t know if he’d believe the tales of my visions, but I blurted them out anyway. He said he’d have a team in Campeche within the hour. “They’ll keep sending that drone out until she gets back,” he said. I told him I wouldn’t use her as bait. We agreed to shelve the discussion until his arrival.

Nocona wasn’t very far from Campeche by tube. By the time we reached her place by rideshare, Hiawatha’s people would be in Campeche, too.

“Who is he, exactly?” asked Sonata somewhat suspiciously. “I mean, here you are all, what? Surprised about militias. Now you’re calling in the cavalry?”

I laughed. “Thanks to you. See, Hiawatha and I go way back. We grew up together in Nocona.”

“Longman. That does sound somewhat like a First Settler name.”

“Well, I’m not, but like most congregations, the one I grew up in has the tradition of changing our given name when we become adults to better represent who we are and who people say we are.

“Well, since I was around a bunch of Comanche twenty-four hours a day, Longman ended up being my nickname, so I just adopted it legally. Nocona, it’s very African and very Comanche. These days, its demographics are almost like Seminole City. Lots of mixing, you know? Hiawatha,” I laughed, “I don’t know quite how he ended up with that name. I always loved the guy. As purebred a Comanche dude as you’ll ever find. A Quahadi, I believe. Kinda lost touch for a lot of years, but I knew I could rely on him now. And then you told me about the fact of these militias, and I knew that he was involved in congregational security back home, and, well, there you go.”

“Perfect,” she said, as she stood up, planting a big kiss right on my lips on her way to her feet. “I adore you. Let’s go?”

“Well, we could stay just a little longer,” I said, stunned, my eyes rolling between her and the bed.

“Longman?” she said sternly, with her hands on her hips.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said reluctantly as I stood up. She took my hand, and we headed out the door as I dialed up a rideshare.

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End of Chapter Fifteen

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Trigger warnings: Violence

Chapter Thirteen

After saying goodbye to Sonata, I headed back to the island. While sitting in the back seat of the rideshare, I felt for the network sniffer by patting the zippered pocket in my canvas shorts.

After I told the rideshare to make sure it wasn’t being followed, I heard a buzzing sound. I guessed it was a compartment opening. This was confirmed when I looked over my shoulder through the rear window.

A small drone flew out of the vehicle, which then went off course, I thought. The car made several turns before I realized it was taking a purposefully circuitous route to the bridge.

The rideshare arrived at a location about a half-mile from the internment housing. I’d walk the rest of the way. When I exited the vehicle, the drone buzzed back toward the car and reentered its compartment. The rideshare left me on the north side of the island, but south of the internment housing.

I instructed it to drive about a half-mile north of the internments and wait for me. It gave me a price, which I paid. The car drove off. I realized it would be well past dark before I’d have a chance to crash in my hotel room.

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The walk was pleasant enough. I crossed the busy highway to walk along the shore before veering back across the highway toward what Sonata had started to refer to as the prisoner tenements.

I had reminded her during our walk along the shoreline that these people were convicted of killing other people. Of course, she reminded me that Summary James was one of those people. “The Bible is clear about who the ultimate judge is,” she said. So were, she reminded me, the earliest congregational clerics when the criminal justice system in the Union was in its infancy.

The practice of rehabilitation over punishment was still a radical idea to most of the world more than 200 years after its successful adoption in the Carolina Union.

On a certain level, this made sense. The Union was uniquely capable of practicing this type of jurisprudence. The church was central to every aspect of Union life — political, economic, and legal. There were no intense logistical issues behind rehabilitating convicted criminals because every congregation had rehab houses, some more than others.

Every congregation also had the requisite number of spiritual gurus necessary to restore order to the wayward mind. The focus of the efforts was on spiritual re-enlightenment.

If drugs or alcohol were involved, which was often the case, the offender was told to quit. If he was unable, he was given help to do so. That alone resolved about 85% of criminal cases.

The other 15% produced a wrestling match between society and those who could not be successfully rehabilitated. Out of that 15%, at least half, it was found after a century of learning, were mentally handicapped. They were typically enrolled in special schools, where the recidivism rate was eventually whittled down to less than ten percent.

I thought about this during my brief walk. I also considered how each congregation had its own methodology for dealing with murder before Campeche became the arbiter of homicide.

The result was a maze of largely unsatisfying solutions. Now, it looked like the one solution that had made everyone happy was under siege. In concept, I didn’t think Campeche Island was a bad idea. But if it had turned into a lair for drug czars and criminals hiding behind congregational pulpits, something had to change.

I reached into my pocket as I approached the tall buildings housing the prisoners. I pushed the button on the back of the network sniffer while walking as close to the buildings as possible without getting hassled by guards.

The sniffer worked silently. I saw a stream of tiny numbers and letters scrolling quickly down its screen. I couldn’t read any of it because they were moving too fast, but I was pretty sure none of it would make sense to me if I could.

Trace had informed me that the only reason he had included a screen when he designed the device was so that the user would know the device was working. There was something about moving text that made people feel comfortable, he explained. He could have just included a green light or nothing at all. Instead, he wanted to broadcast to the device’s user — me — that everything was functional.

The device went dark for an instant, then flashed the words, “scan complete” before turning off. He had instructed me to dispose of the device when I was done, so I set it on one of the large boulders that ringed the buildings and smashed it with a large rock. Then I walked across the street and threw the scanner into the bay.

The process didn’t take as long as I thought it might, for which I was relieved. The rideshare was where I expected it to be. When I signaled it with my phone, its backseat passenger door opened as I approached. Then it took me to my hotel, where I had the feeling I’d sleep very soundly if somebody didn’t wake me up and kill me.

Chapter Fourteen

Sonata Holmes lives in a comfortable Comanche-style ranch home. Four halls form a square building with a kitchen and living room jutting into its small open-air center.

Each corner of the home consists of a large hexagonal room that encroaches deeply into its adjoining hallway section, extending considerably outward from its natural corner.

She keeps a grill in the open-air square, where she also maintains a small patio garden.

She is sitting in the garden reading some news items on a newspaper roll-up, enjoying the salt air of a quiet gulf evening.

While she’s sipping a cup of English breakfast tea, she hears a buzz. She looks up to see a small black object hovering high overhead. As she stares at it, she reaches for her phone, but the drone buzzes downwards quickly before she can punch in any numbers.

“Don’t be alarmed,” says a voice from the drone. She doesn’t express any such alarm, presumably because the voice belongs to Trace, who then follows up with, “I just wanted to make sure you are okay.”

“You’re back in business already?”

The voice from the drone says, “Stay safe,” as it spins away.

She stands up from her patio table, shaking her head, smiling a little at the antics of my nerdy, gruff friend.

She walks into her immaculately clean kitchen and prepares a small salad with artichoke and palm hearts, some romaine lettuce, radishes, a bit of lemon, and a cherry wine dressing infused with rosemary.

She carries that back to the patio, sitting down to eat while watching two cardinals argue over a perch on a tree in the center of her home square, just as the day is ending with a surprisingly quick dark drop of eventide.

That’s when it happens. Five helmeted men burst into the square with military-grade automatic weapons. Not the kind of weapons you’d find in even the most remote rural part of the country.

The men are dressed in black top to bottom, as if they need to, even though they are obviously here to take out a civilian. Which they do, without as much as one word, without any kind of explanation, without any kind of concern with leaving behind evidence, or even cleaning up the mess.

They riddle Sonata Holmes with at least a hundred bullets, the vibrations of her body nearly dancing in concert with the fusillade moments longer than it should before it crumples to the ground in a nearly unrecognizable, catastrophic heap of riven flesh.

This is what I see.

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End of Chapter Fourteen

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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

“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.

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Notes

Writing tip: Hey kids, you don't need to write, “she nodded her head,” like I do in this story. If the story was on my Substack, I'd edit to “she nodded.”

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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 colonial defeat. Still in final edits, so there may be goofs, evil dangling modifiers, and other shenanigans.

This part of the novel takes place in Savannah, a stubborn holdout governed by a man named Elliot Fae, who has created a fiefdom and managed to retain the last slaveholding outpost in the land. In the opening scene, mercenaries have freed some of the slaves.

“Bolo’s Notes” are annotations provided by the fictional historian who introduces major portions of the novel or adds context to the narrative.

This excerpt will only be available for a limited time. Welcome to the land of the disappearing excerpt.

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

16

Nocona had told the men found in the longhouses that they were free, but they seemed confused. Some of them knelt to pray. Others wandered aimlessly. Nocona’s Savior Warriors had rounded up the men who had poured out of the longhouse. The newly freed men stood, or knelt, or sat in a small crowd surrounded by Nocona’s men and their horses. One of them, who said his name was Lomboi, asked about a group called The Night Patrol.

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The man’s clothes were ragged. His short, black, tightly curled hair was patchy and unhealthy. Nocona, wondering about lice, didn’t want the man getting too close to him. The man standing next to him looked like he should own an ink well and a pen. He didn’t have the scars of hard labor that the man named Lomboi had. He was short and had the approximate body shape of a large brown ball, skin softer than a baby’s, and a look inside his eyes that Nocona thought testified to a life sorted out in an aristocrat’s bathtub.

He realized, for the first time in his life, that not all men were meant to be warriors, that there may come a time when some men would be sequestered from mighty warriors and work with numbers or the design of a city, or perhaps even commit to lives of song and dance. He didn’t know what it was about this man next to Lomboi that made him think those thoughts.

He thought next of the coward Pahayoko, who had lived up to his name through his great love for the women of the clan, but with a heart too soft for the Kwahadi life. Pahayoko was a man who understood numbers so well that most of his kin thought he was crazy. He would spend hours making bizarre calculations about the movement of the moon across the sky, tracking its path on a strange device near his wife’s buffalo skin tanning operation, which had expanded in recent years into a series of longhouses that served congregational business in Nacogdoches, a city that had been taken by Comancheria when Nocona was helping the father of Puhihwitsikwasʉ, Waakakwasi, capture San Antonio from the Mexicans.

Bolo’s Notes

Puhihwitsikwasʉ, known to Texan Anglos as Iron Horse, was the first Paraivo (head of state) of a united Comanche nation, known primarily as Comancheria, but sometimes as the Comanche Empire. Legend had it that Puhihwitsikwasʉ could use his mouth to blow bullets away from his body as they approached. Opposing Mexican and Spanish generals believed the legend and considered Puhihwitsikwasʉ an impossibly difficult and fearsome foe. In 1815, Puhihwitsikwasʉ, on a diplomatic mission to Charleston, presented a Spanish-made chain mail to Ecclesiastical Tribune Hesed Williamson that Puhihwitsikwasʉ said he wore in battles against the Mexicans and Spanish during the Comancheria Conquest.

During those years, Nocona couldn’t understand why any Kwahadi would look for any purpose off the horse. He forced Pahayoko to join his troupe on a hunt for Apache infidels, who had openly rebelled against God by burning churches and attacking congregational headquarters on the Comancheria frontier.

Pahayoko didn’t fare well. During a bitter fight in the West Texas plains against Llanero Apaches, Nocona watched as Pahayoko faced a warrior. Both had fallen off their horses. The Llanero was quick to jump to his feet, brandishing a knife. He waited for Pahayoko to get to his own feet. Pahayoko, however, merely stared at his opponent as he remained curled on the ground, feigning pain.

Nocona was racing toward them but stopped his horse about twenty feet away, mesmerized by the interactions between them. He aimed his Ferguson toward the confrontation.

The Llanero warrior jumped up and down twice as he looked down at Pahayoko, yelling, “Dao Go Te' doo Hondah!” or, “It is good we meet, and welcome!” Pahayoko remained curled on the ground, unable to react. Nocona called on him to stand up and fight, but instead, Pahayoko began to sob. That was too much for the Llanero warrior to bear. As he left his feet, his body seemed to trail his arm, which became a spear as it lunged toward the prone Pahayoko, quickly slicing his throat. The Llanero man screamed at Pahayoko for refusing to fight as blood emptied into the dusty ground around him.

Nocona watched as the man then stared at him. Nocona lowered his weapon and said as best he could in the Llanero’s Athabaskan language, “You fought with honor. Do not be angry with the man’s spirit. It is my head where you should bury your hatchet. I should not have brought the man to you in this way.” He didn’t know if he was speaking the man’s language correctly. As soon as he said the words, he worried that he had said something such as, “I will shoot your dog and your mother, too,” but the man bowed and turned his back on Nocona, walked back to his horse, and rode away.

The battle continued, but their battle had ended. Nocona even encountered the man once more during a horse skirmish an hour or so later when the man nodded again, raised a fist into the air, then turned his attention to another Kwahadi warrior.

After that day, Nocona changed the paints on his face. He repainted the white paint on one side of his face red to honor both Pahayoko’s cowardice and his foolish attempts to turn a coward into a warrior. He added a geometric tattoo line to the blue side of his face, already busy with numerous others, to represent the tracking of the moon, also in honor of Pahayoko. He added another tattoo, consisting of a thinly drawn representation of a fist, on the red side of his face, to represent the honor of the Llanero man who had killed Pahayoko.

But until seeing the little round man next to Lomboi Cutter, he had always considered Pahayoko an anomaly. A freak of nature. All Kwahadi, he had thought, must be warriors. It was their singular purpose. He had always felt remorse over what happened to Pahayoko. But why? Now he knew. Some men, like women, needed protection. Without even knowing the man in front of him, he wanted to take him by the shoulders and pledge protection to him. It was a strange feeling.

Nocona turned his attention to Lomboi. “This Night Patrol you speak of. It is weak. We have eliminated many of them already in a short time. You will see more of them die if you join us.” He looked at the man next to Lomboi. “He should stay here.”

“Where are you going?” asked the round man.

“To Savannah,” Nocona answered.

The round man smiled broadly. “I told you,” he said, striking Lomboi on the shoulder.

“Yes, you did,” Lomboi smiled back. Lomboi looked at Nocona. “He predicted this. He said you were coming.”

“He speaks to the great spirit?” asked Nocona.

“He’s just an architect,” said Lomboi. “But he is from a congregation. Everyone in a congregation speaks to the great spirit.”

“I hail from the Cejita de Los Comancheros Congregation. I bow to you in Christ’s name.” Nocona jumped off his horse and bowed.

“Are you from the Union?” asked the round man.

“I am from far away. West, from the great plains of a land you’ve never seen. We are allies with the Carolina Union. Mostly because,” Nocona smiled, “they pay us well.”

The round man sized up Nocona. “You are a Comanche?”

“I am Comanche in the same way you are a human. It is a broad grouping. But if it helps you understand, you may consider me Comanche. My name is Nocona. These are my fellow Kwahadi warriors. We are savior warriors who free the lands from those who taint the word of God.”

“I am Kolo Opala,” said the round man.

“And you are an architect. I have never heard of those people. Are the architects from the slave nest across the wide waters?”

“No no. That is my profession. I built a church. A cathedral, I guess you could call it. The Methodist Episcopal Praise House in Charleston.”

“I have been told of this great building by the diplomats who have been to Charleston. You built this yourself? Are you a sorcerer?”

Kolo smiled. “No, I drew the plans. On paper. And instructed others how to build.”

“You were a commander of a builder’s army then.”

“Well, yes, as it were.”

“I have found that all good leaders of men possess the same qualities. How many here among you are willing to fight?”

Kolo looked at Lomboi. Lomboi shrugged his shoulders. “Now?” Lomboi asked.

“This is how your Carolina Union won its way from the Anglos. You won a victory, freed captives, turned them into an army, and moved on to the next subjugated enclave. Is this not so?”

Lomboi looked at his bedraggled brethren. “I don’t know how much fight any of us have within us. We have not had a good meal in half a year.”

“If you can fight your way into Savannah, you can eat heartily there,” said Nocona. By this time, some of Nocona’s men had begun treating a few minor wounds on some of the men who had emerged from the longhouses.

“We can fight,” said Kolo. “I know how to handle a Ferguson. But we have no weapons.”

“Can you fire a flintlock? We have looted several, if you can handle them.”

“I have never fired a flintlock or a Ferguson,” said Lomboi. “All I’ve done is work the fields.”

“I have never fired a muzzle-loaded weapon,” confessed Kolo quietly.

Nocona looked around. This would not do. “Ask your men and women here. Some here surely have experience with gunpowder weaponry. Or perhaps the bow and arrow. We can provide these as well.”

“I can do this,” said Lomboi. He touched Kolo’s shoulder and began to walk around the camp, conferring quickly with the men and women in the newly freed group.

Nocona was fascinated by Kolo. He was soft spoken, with soft hands, even a soft face, but Nocona sensed a determination in him. And he could fire a gun. He thought that if Kolo were to fall off a horse and find himself challenged by another man, he’d respond with his best parry, even if it was a fruitless endeavor. He would not be Pahayoko.

“Your friend says you predicted my arrival. How so?” asked Nocona.

Kolo shook his head. “I didn’t really predict it. I was captured only a fortnight ago. The man who runs Savannah’s congregation has been staging raiding parties as far north as waterways just south of Charleston. Capturing rice field workers working the rivers and creeks in the lower country there. I was visiting my brother, a field hand in the rice delta. He has a grand home that he shares with several others. It had been a plantation home, but it was confiscated after the Colonial Rebellion. A beautiful piece of architecture, I must admit. Europeans are evil, but they know how to design grand homes. Now they are our homes. We built them, after all.”

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“And what of your brother?”

“They only got me. I had strayed off congregational lands some, despite warnings, which I chose not to believe. To look at two absurdly immense magnolia trees. It was an expensive viewing, I must say.”

“The Union has been taking a lazy approach to this scourge in the Savannah River valley. We are here to rectify that mistake on their behalf.”

“Have they no militia? No army?”

“They have a great navy. Their army is weak. They rely on their congregations for militia, and these militia are unwilling to do much more than defend their parish.”

“The congregation I am a part of. It was said that they would send militia to Savannah to fight.”

Nocona shook his head. “We are paid by a congregation from Philadelphia. A Methodist congregation, I think. We are in truth, not paid by the Union itself.”

“You are mercenaries.”

“That is fair to say. But we would never work for heathens like this Savannah slave-holding warlord. The Kwahadi believe that the Carolina Union best represents the future of your East Coast. Anglos cannot be trusted with as much as an apple seed on their fingertips. Comancheria is a great empire. We can do much business with the Carolina Union. The New England Federation? Not so much.” Nocona sniffed loudly, annoyed to even be thinking of the New England Federation, even though it was no longer dominated by Anglos.

As if on cue, Kolo said, “There is a rumor that the leader of the Kedash Lost Nations Congregation, Sojourner Truth in New York City, wishes to lead New York City into the Carolina Union.”

“There are many stories of this Sojourner Truth in the plains. It is said she has seen visions since the very day she was born.”

Kolo nodded. “She is famous. And young. Just barely in her twenties and already a tribune.”

“But New York City alone? Surely the British will not allow such a secession.”

“Philadelphia has joined. And Baltimore joined soon after.”

Nocona knew of Philadelphia and its exit from the New England Federation in 1812. But he had also understood it as an event much appreciated by the Anglos and Germans and other Europeans of the Federation. Philadelphia was an African city. As was Baltimore. He wondered if Europeans were preparing to settle for a separate but agrarian society. If the Europeans living in the Americas hoped for a strategy of fleeing the cities for life and dominance in the countryside, they were sorely mistaken, he thought.

Nocona noticed that Kolo was staring at him without speaking. Finally, Kolo asked, “You have a congregation? In Comancheria?”

“That is amusing. Even savages think we are savages,” Nocona laughed. “That is the convincing way of the Anglo, who spread disinformation like butter on hot bread.”

“I am sorry. I did not mean any disrespect. I am surprised that congregational ways could have spread so far west so soon. That is all. My comment was not meant as a cultural statement.”

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“A cultural statement. What an interesting way you have with words. You have received a formal education in the white man’s world?” Nocona wasn’t impressed by that. It would be like learning how to pray from the church of Hades.

“No. I learned architectural drawing from a mentor, a freed slave in Charleston. After that, I studied some at a small congregational university in Charleston. I didn’t receive a degree, but I learned much. It was a university administered by the Afriker community in Charleston, but there were some European teachers there. Out of necessity, I’m afraid. But they were sympathetic to our causes.”

“Hmph,” said Nocona. He had met few Anglos sympathetic to the cause of anything but their desire to control the continent. A few Germans were said to be migrating to Texas, but they seemed the same to him. Interested only in conquest and extracting anything of value from the soil.

“There is also an impressive Tsărăgĭ university north of Charleston.”

“And do they also teach the white man’s ways? Seems an invasion of a different sort.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Kolo said.

Nocona thought he understood well enough, and suddenly felt the desire to wrap a cowhide strap across the man’s mouth.

But Kolo continued. “The white man is here to stay. We must become practiced in his ways of industry, or he will use his industry to subjugate us. We must master it and become even more proficient at it than he. The Carolina Union navy has begun building metal ships that can successfully do battle with three European frigates simultaneously, without one battle scar.”

Nocona didn’t know anything about naval ships. “Battle scars are honorable,” he said.

“Not if they sink you,” replied Kolo.

“Perhaps the Union should consider using its formidable Navy to turn away Europeans attempting to land on these shores to subjugate us with their industry,” said Nocona.

“They don’t sense that need methinks. Europeans wishing to move to the newfound lands have begun to favor the far southern reaches. The vast continental lands south of Mexico.”

Bolo’s Notes

Discouraged by the demographics in the northern Americas, a massive wave of European immigration ultimately resulted in The Argentine Confederation, a southern power that eventually controlled all South America aside from Brazil and the Spanish speaking nations north of Peru and Brazil.

The immigration was fueled in large part by huge land purchases by the British banking firm Barings and Hope & Company, as well as the German Berenberg Bank. This led to an influx of European industrial titans and a hugely successful wheat export trade.

There is to this day a continuing cold war between the United States and its ally Brazil aligned against The Argentine Confederation, mostly because of the Argentine Confederation’s history of brutality against Inca populations in its territories and a continuing fascist regime that has led to the decimation of First Settler populations in the Southeast portions of the country. Much of the cold war is fought through proxy rebellions in the mountainous Chilean and Peruvian provinces on behalf of the United States, and through proxy rebellions on behalf of Argentina against the U.S. ally, The Haitian Federated Archipelago in the Caribbean.

Nocona knew nothing of these lands.

Kolo continued. “If anything, I think the leaders of the country feel like they need some measure of European immigration in order to integrate their knowledge of industrial processes.”

“Mr. Kolo, you are now making me ill and faint. Let us table this discussion for another time. Perhaps after both our deaths and at the dinner table of the angels.”

Kolo smiled at that and bowed. “As you wish, of course.”

Nocona liked this man. He had a grace about him that Lomboi seemed to lack. But Lomboi had suffered greatly, Nocona thought. He felt empathy for both men.

Lomboi returned with a head count of potential soldiers. It accounted for nearly half the men, and a fair measure of women who had been gathered from another camp, which surprised Nocona. Women typically stayed behind during wartime in his culture, but he didn’t doubt their ability to fight when called upon. Some Comanche clans were known to have powerful female warriors.

“That is enough. Then you shall all join us on our march to Savannah. It will be unsafe for us to leave those who cannot fight with us. We have enough knives among us to distribute to everyone who is not soldiering. If the worst happens, they will be able to fight to their death, and hopefully leave long gashes for their enemies to cherish in honor of battle.”

17

Adwoa Inlight Asana Abuakwa was feeling old. She had buried her husband a few days prior—after, it seemed to her, having just met him. They had been married twenty-five years, but that span seemed so much shorter now. She had always considered herself fortunate in finding an Ashanti man from the Aduana clan. Finding someone from a similar background was a near miracle given the uncertainty of Afriker ancestry. Many people didn’t even know their birthday, much less where they were from with any precision.

Adwoa had found a home in a community on All Saints Congregation property in Charleston with dozens of other Ashanti. But the path of her life had been laid down when the Tsărăgĭ priestess Ahyoka was murdered in front of her. Adwoa had always been known for her bayi. The events of those days fostered a desire within her to dedicate her life to its cultivation.

When the Queen Mother of the congregation’s Ejura-Fey community had introduced her to her husband, Adwoa rejected him on the spot, saying he would interfere with her bayi. He would have none of it. He felt so high and mighty, she was recalling now with a smile, so sure that she was his birthright, it seemed, that he declared that her bayi was no match for his desire to be her husband. He was part of a council of the judicial healing court of the Ejura-Fey community and considered himself very important. And, he frequently pointed out, his lust for her could smother any magic that she might have.

His name was Hosmer Falling Sky. He had a First Settler mother and an Aduana father, but he looked and acted fully like an Aduana. He had helped the Tsărăgĭ rebuild their settlement in Monck’s Corner, which they renamed Wassamasaw, and learned financial numbers at the Tsărăgĭ university. In fact, he had joined their congregation before he met Adwoa, and only reluctantly left, he had said, because of his strong bond with fellow Ashanti in Charleston.

In physical form, he had not been the strongest man, but in mind and morals, she thought, he surely was. She refused to experience his death in a permanent state of grief. He had lived well until consumption usurped his body, and she would live her remaining days in celebration of his presence on earth.

Despite his frequent teasing over her bayi and its weakness compared to his determination to be her husband, he was Adwoa’s loudest advocate. He had told her one day to spread her wings, to listen to every movement on the ground and in the air, to tap into her magic during every second of every hour of every day.

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And so, she did. It was for that reason that she could hear the ravens from far away sent by a raven master, she knew, off the coast of Savannah. It was for that reason that she knew they were in flight to report a great danger. It was for that reason that she knew she could skip the usual report to the Queen Mother and go directly to the congregational synod with her information, and it was for that reason she knew they would listen to her.

Without hesitation, the congregational synod dispatched a message to the Charleston Naval Command, which launched two of its three new ironclad frigates into the waters off the docks of the city’s newly constructed port.

The original intent had been to launch the new frigates with much fanfare, but the winds had been carrying rumors of trouble in Savannah for many years, and although nobody knew what to expect, it was determined that now would be the time to find out. So, the frigates were hastily released from their berths and sent out to crawl along the coast south to Savannah.

The Carolina Union then held a special session of its Synod, where it decided to send cavalry units to Savannah. These were to be led by the 16th Queen's Carolina Lancers, which numbered more than 250 men.

Such was Adwoa’s influence. It didn’t hurt that she was not known for false alarms. Her alarms were quite rare. Her most famous alarm was discussed frequently and ruefully by Zulu West, who expressed her regret at not being able to sufficiently react to Adwoa’s awareness on that fateful day of Ahyoka’s undead spirit.

Neither the congregational synod nor the Carolina Union Synod waited for the ravens’ message from Savannah. They sent a military response with the understanding that the final details from the ravens’ message might alter the course of the mission. For now, the gunships and cavalry were sent on a simple assignment: assess the situation.

When the ravens finally arrived, Adwoa had been sleeping lightly in her cabin along the Wampacheone Creek on All Saints congregational grounds. Sometimes she could hear the moaning of slaves from long ago as she slept, moaning that still haunted the creek bed and the woodlands of the old Boone Plantation that had once occupied the area around her. That she could hear that moaning was the curse of her bayi, for she was alone in experiencing the ghostly and guttural cries and groans of suffering and torture. It was as if someone had created a book of sound to record the way of life of those who built the land’s homes and agriculture under the crack of a whip, and then told her, “Only you shall listen.”

She awoke at dawn to the sound of thousands of ravens descending into the branches of the live oak trees, whose dripping moss shook like ropes dangling from clanging bells as the ravens alighted. The live oak trees consisted of two perfectly spaced rows leading to the old Boone estate, which was now a school and administrative center for the congregation’s Ejura-Fey community. The ravens landed on the branches so that now they nearly covered the trees completely, turning them black.

The ravens chattered amongst themselves until Adwoa scampered out of her cabin wearing nothing more than a long nightshirt and feathered slippers. When she appeared, the ravens went silent, until one spoke. It screeched in a long, scratchy, old voice, but she couldn’t understand it and told them so. Then another spoke in shorter, more understandable squawks. It mentioned, in raven’s tongue, the ironclad that had summoned them. Then the beast went silent. Another raven spoke, this one in a series of long-winded, deep caws that described a harsh land that, the raven said, echoed the very same kinds of groans and utterances of the Wampacheone Creek. But, said another raven in caws of much shorter bursts, these were not the groans of ghosts.

Adwoa could see it all clearly, and then saw something much worse as the ravens screamed in unison, shaking the nearby trees with deafening high-pitched screeches.

She saw a man inside a bronze bull being burned alive, his tortured shrieks echoing through the interior of the bull and then out two sculptured nostrils as if by the design of the most macabre musical instrument that a human mind could conjure. The sounds had somehow been made hauntingly beautiful, and the raven who described this to her as it gave her this vision expressed its great dismay over this violation of the great spirit that had created both man and bird.

The ravens had been told by the ironclad’s Raven Master to carry a different message, said another raven, but this was the message they chose to send. Then the ravens flew up in unison like a black blanket being sucked into the heavens, disappearing over the trees, twisting and curling into a black cloud that colored the emerging blue sky of the new day.

Notes

h/t to for the alert regarding International Crow and Raven Appreciation Day.

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

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