Zero Hour: Where are our Children (A Serial Novel) Episode 5 of 9

by Gary Sapp

the boy’s chin and jaw. Young Keven had the rough brown skin that reminded the older man of the bark of the sycamore trees back home in Memphis. When Louis threw Kevin into one of the closets, the handling that all knew recruits got until they settled down, all of the boy’s treats came spilling out of his pockets and on to the floor.

  Again, this one was far from a perfect catch. He wasn’t Moses Jackson. He damned sure wasn’t Christopher Prince reincarnated. Yet, he will have to do. He would have to do indeed.

  Louis gagged him, roped his hands behind his back. The boy fussed into the electric tape covering his mouth until the little booger cried himself to sleep at last.

  Young Keven wasn’t the only one crying in the room. We are such a pussy. Aloud Louis Keaton said: “I can’t do this…I won’t do this anymore.” He said it out loud to separate his private thoughts from that other part of him. His personal voice was growing more urgent. “I’ll run away from here. I’ll start over somewhere else. I won’t let Serena Tennyson or her people find me.”

  Are we all shook up? Louis heard the other’s voice asking him, Hugh’s voice dripped with sarcasm. The other’s voices loud and clear enough now in Louis’ ears to make him think that he himself had vocalized it; Let us go. We can do this alone. Thanks for coming. We can take it from here.

  Louis slid himself into the opposite corner of the room until the brick wall greeted him from behind, halting his retreat. “No. Why don’t you go away? I don’t need you. Nobody needs you here, Hugh. Just leave me alone.”

  We’re wasting time, idiot. And we’ve waited long enough. Hurry…it’s time to take what is rightfully ours. There are six other boys here in the sanctuary. It’s like its Christmas Eve all over again and we’re going to open one present early. Hurry…the Dragon Lady will be here soon. Serena will come to spoil all our fun

  Louis began to slowly inch himself back across the floor to where the sleeping boy lay still sleeping. The sound of his boots sliding along the hard floor sounded like sandpaper and caused him to wince and grit his teeth. It was a glorious noise. It had drowned out Hugh, at least for the moment.

  Young Kevin must have sensed what danger he was in. The boy swam up out of his nap and began jerking about in his bondage like someone suffering from a seizure. The duct tape continued to muzzle his cries. The security detail that had been assigned to accompany Louis and the other boys had become real lax over the past few days with all of the inactivity and endless waiting. We can always count on the pitfalls of human nature helping us out can’t we? They didn’t even hear Louis when he’d driven up. The two of them were either napping themselves or maybe they were playing on their phones. It would feel so right. Louis ran his right hand over Kevin’s coarse mane of hair, down the nape of his neck, followed the slightest curve of the boy’s back…until he’d reached lower…

  Louis cried again after it was all over.

  There was a smoky breeze flowing in from the window. Despite the stench Louis opened it as far as it would let him so that the air would help dry his tears. “I promised I wouldn’t hurt any of you.” He apologized to boy who had cried himself to sleep once again. “I had given my word to myself that I wouldn’t touch any of you yet.”

  Well, once a liar, always a liar. Hugh said to him. And yet, keeping promises was never our specialty was it? Man that was wonderful. They are right when they say that it is just like riding a bike…that you never truly forget how. It’s been so long…too damned long. We got a cigarette? Maybe we could bum a Newport off of Xavier Prince?

  Louis heard the sound of unabated laughter.

  He wasn’t entirely sure anymore whether it was his own physical merriment…or the glee of the other from some deranged area of his mind.

  “I tried.” Louis Keaton buried his wrinkled face in his hands. He glanced out of the window into a full moon’s light, his resolve now broken, his energy spent.

  We knew that how we lacked the courage to this through to the end. We knew this day would come again. The other’s voice cracked in hesitation for an instant. We always have

  “You’ve never forgiven me have you, Hugh?” Louis asked the question.

  Forgive us…why should we do that.

  “Because I tried to save you,” Louis fought back a fresh round of tears. Dr. Angel Hicks-Dupree had told him long ago that this day of self-reckoning would finally come. “I was just a little boy myself, Hugh, and I did everything that I could to save you. Don’t you remember?”

  Hugh Keaton and Louis Pope had hit it off almost from the first cloudy Memphis day that they’d met. They couldn’t be more on the opposite end of the physical scale: Hugh was husky for his age, built like a bump on a log. Louis stretched out long and lean like a greyhound and pale from not going outside much before he’d met Hugh.

  They were the two peas in the preverbal pod to say the least.

  They would play together from sunrise to sunset. Hugh and Louis would run around nearly dehydrating in the blazing heat of the late afternoon…until the evening thunderstorms or the pop of the street lights churning to life chased them indoors only to start the process towards the next day’s renewal of activities.

  By time the season had called out for bummers, calf length boots and Thanksgiving turkeys to awaken from their yearlong slumber…a tearful Hugh had let his best friend in the whole world in on his little dirty family secret. Hugh had remembered not planning to tell him. It was something that just kind of fell out of his mouth one quiet night before Louis’ parents called him in for supper. The other boy cried at the horror of what Hugh had told him about him and Templeton’s special Uncle to nephew relationship. There was a human sense of comfort and relative safety when you are sheltered under the umbrella of company and fellowship.

  Even Louis Pope knew this to be true.

  After the telling of the tale had concluded itself, Louis dried his eyes at last and showed the steady resolve of a young man that he would never live to become.

  Louis Pope got his long lanky legs beneath him and headed for home before his parents called him this night. Hugh had instantly regretted telling him about Uncle Templeton. Louis had to think that he was some type of freak. Only bad kids were molested by their uncles. Louis must have thought that Hugh was either a liar or a pervert. Now Hugh had risked losing his best friend in the world forever because he disclosed this terrible secret to another kid who was powerless to do anything about it anyway.

  In all the years that have passed, Hugh Keaton never forgot the look on Louis Pope’s face as he stopped in the middle of the street and looked back at him before he left for home that evening.

  And he never forgot what he said.

  “I’m going to tell my folks what you’ve told me, Hugh.” Louis’ smile was a sympathetic one. “You’re the best friend that I’ve ever had. I’m not to let anyone ever hurt you again. I won’t leave you behind.”

  It was the first and last lie that Louis Pope would ever tell his friend Hugh Keaton.

  He did leave Hugh—long enough to tell his mom and dad, with a 12 year’s attention to detail, what his friend Hugh Keaton had told him was going on in his family’s trailer. Over the next few weeks cops from the local sheriff’s office would venture out to interview Uncle Templeton or Lisa Healey—Hugh’s mom, or Hugh himself. Hugh had never been more encouraged. The boys continued to play every day that the winter weather and the holiday break allowed them. Louis informed Hugh that some police pals of his dad told him that their office was close to making an arrest. They also told his dad that his family’s testimony would be vital to any charges sticking against Templeton Healey. Without their testimony, any case otherwise would be Hugh Keaton’s word against his uncle. And Templeton had his allies down in the department as well. It scared Hugh—at least a little—that there was a chance that his mom might get prosecuted too. Where would he live if his mom went to jail? But when Louis said that his parents liked him well enough to consider adopting him if the state incarcerated his mom also…Hugh knew
with all certainty that his luck and his life were finally going to change for the better.

  It was now the morning of Christmas Eve…and the next day would be the greatest Christmas that the boy, Hugh Keaton, would have ever known.

  And yet, this same Hugh Keaton awoke Christmas morning to the smell of something burning and he instinctively somehow knew that his fairytale ending was going up in flames as well.

  He could hear the fire crackling in the air as if someone were playing a percussion instrument in his ears. Whatever was burning it was very nearby. It was extremely close. He just knew it to be true. Hugh jumped up from out of his bed and sprinted through his uncle’s trailer. When he opened the front door everything from directly in from of him due North looked to be as it should have been.

  And then he peered over his far left shoulder…to the single family home where Louis Pope and his parents lived.

  Their home was engulfed in flames.

  Louis screamed aloud as he ran barefooted out in the snow as fast as his plump little legs would carry him. It was no way that anyone inside that burning inferno had got out in time. It was no freaking way.

  Hugh fell to his knees in the snow about 20 feet or so from the scene of the fire.

  He screamed again.

  He cried out for Louis and his parents who were burning inside.

  And then he turned up the volume as he screamed…for himself. He knew that his great opportunity for escape—his final chance of living a healthy, normal life had gone up in flames with the murder of the Pope family. Hugh remembered what Louis had told him when he said that his family’s testimony would be vital to any charges sticking against Templeton Healy.

  As three fire trucks rolled in, Louis turned and looked back to the trailer where he had lived. He shook his head violently at that proclamation that had bounced around in his head. For anyone to call what he had going on in that shack of existence life was the cruelest joke of them all. He saw his Uncle Templeton standing in front of the door, an ugly but triumphant smile beginning to play on his thin lips. He flicked a lighter… the flame rising time and again… until the boy could no longer stand to watch. Finally, Hugh’s stomach churned and he threw up last night’s supper into a pile that bled color into the blandness of the white snow. And even at that distance, even with all of the commotion all around him, Louis could read what mouthed off of his uncle’s lips into the frosty air. Merry Christmas, Nephew. Tonight you will receive your greatest Christmas gift of all. You’ve earned it

  Uncle Templeton had his gift unwrapped and waiting for him later on that night. And he made his mother sit in on this session as well. The boy had nearly sprung up trouble with the law he spat. She would either watch him fuck her son or she would witness as he killed him for all the hassle he’d drummed up. Templeton kept feeding his special Christmas gift to his beloved nephew night after night after night…for weeks on end.

  He told Serena Tennyson that he never knew for certain when the boy who was Hugh Keaton, died during that span. He did know for certain that the Louis persona—what little he still believed to be gentle and decent about this world had been born while he kneeled in his filth of his own vomit that cold Christmas morning. And yet, he was even more convinced that his Uncle’s vile personality had wedged its way into his brittle mind as the new Hugh Keaton sometime or the other while he poked him from behind that night. He was about strength through force and manipulation.

  And so Serena had heard all she had cared to hear from his lips the other day when she had first visited him and Moses here in the sanctuary. And Oracle had stormed out of there and traveled West with Shooter and a handful of other agents and unleashed a Whirlwind that Memphis would not soon forget. The petite woman dressed all in black shot and killed four former policemen who had long retired to their pensions with knowledge of the Hell that Keaton’s uncle had unleashed on that—the holiest of all days all those years earlier.

  His uncle Templeton had entered the Pope’s home unseen through a back window. He then overwhelmed Louis’ father shortly thereafter and beat the man to a pulp. Still enraged, he bonded both parents together at the wrist to two of the dining room chairs. And since they’d been so damned interested in a man’s private affairs…then he would let them see firsthand how a Healey handled his business with his nephew. Bound and helpless, the Pope’s shared a front row seat and could only watch while Templeton Healey sodomized their son…

  And yet, friends and neighbors, the hell of this tale was still on the back burner you might say.

  Templeton told Serena—before she killed him—that he remembered pouring gasoline on seemingly every inch of floor space in the Pope’s living room for good measure, torching the place and leaving all three behind powerless except to watch…and burn as their home blazed around them.

  Keaton still failed to understand why Serena spared his mother—though Oracle forced her to stay and watch as she methodically tortured her brother for nearly 12 hours before killing and eventually burning Templeton Healey’s remains until there was nothing left of him but charred bones and memories of an old man begging for his pathetic life between screams of agony—

  “Louis!” He was back here in the present again and it was Serena Tennyson screaming at him here in the sanctuary. “What in the hell is going on here?”

  Danielle Rohm shook him by his shoulders. “Answer her, Louis.” She looked at young Kevin lying naked and…violated in a fetal position in the closet. And now the shit really hits the fan. “You disobeyed a direct order, Louis. You weren’t supposed to…my God, what have you done?”

  Louis felt a goofy smile forming on his weathered face...just like the one’s his Uncle Templeton used to wear when he was being particularly mischievous.

  But a molested 13 year boy lying naked in a closet was only the beginning of his troubles late this evening.

  Moses Jackson and the other five boys had gone missing.

  Serena Tennyson cursed. And then she dialed her cell phone, telling the party on the other end to issue a Code Red. The hostages had escaped and they needed to take appropriate measures to get them back before they were seen by the general public.

  The two guards were unaccounted for as well. Louis decided that they either they were out looking for the children or they had decided to try to escape Serena’s wraith for allowing this breach of security to happen in the first place.

  Serena planted one hand on a slim hip and paced back and forward again to she had returned from where she started. She exhaled audibly. She looked as if were taking all of her self-discipline to hold her temper.

  “We agreed that you would wait until I signaled you to initiate physical contact with any of the hostages.” She said to him her lecturing tone that she did so well. “You’ve compromised much of our leveraging position with a House in Chains and the FBI. You’re…lust has jeopardized our entire operation here.”

  He raised his knees to his chest and cocked his head ever slightly left. “I have done just that, Serena. What I have also done is simply raised the stakes. The Rapture alone had grown stale.” He said. “Calm down, woman. Sadly, you and I know that Moses Jackson and the others are still virgins. They still have value to you.”

  The three of them drove up the length of highway that separated the Sanctuary from the outer fringes of the city four times. Rohm drove five to ten miles over the speed limit. Serena stayed on her cell, scanning side streets, alleys, wooded areas and shadowed corners looking for the boys. It was dark once they reached Fulton County and Atlanta’s city limits.

  Riding shotgun, Louis Keaton got a different perspective of the city that had served as his personal playground of pleasure. This area had become a smorgasbord for pain and suffering and despair since he and Muhammad Clark had last preyed on these sacred grounds. Still, it is our Kingdom, Keaton thought. It is our kingdom and our rules. No one, not even Muhammad Clark had done it better than we have.

  He relaxed, sitting his hands behind in head and laid
back on the seat, smelling the seat's fine leather and the funk fumigating from underneath his arm pits. He stretched out totally, kicking his boots on the seat, perfectly content, perfectly tranquil unlike he’d ever felt in his life. He felt no worries, no stress. He was different somehow. He was better.

  And his rapid fire changes hadn’t gone unnoticed by the Oracle.

  She looked back him once…and again just before she clicked her phone to the off position. She then turned her attention to Rohm.

  “Make a left turn here at the next intersection.”

  “Are you sure? I don’t think that we should—“

  “Do it, Rohm.”

  He said without being asked his opinion: “Rohm’s right, Dragon Lady. We are wasting time.” The car screamed past a pack of young men and women of color dressed in khaki suits and sneakers. The Peacekeepers were out in force tonight, casing neighborhoods that the APD dared only to go in with an army in tow.

  Serena seemed to consider implications of any rash decisions that she might make. “Alright,” She said to Rohm more than to him. “Rohm, get us back to the highway, right away. The only way that those hostages made it nearly this far is if they reached the interstate and picked up a ride after leaving the sanctuary. Moses Jackson is a bright boy to be sure…but he would need to be a miracle worker to get them that far without a map or a guide.”

  After Rohm spun the vehicle around, Serena took one final glance at the downtrodden neighborhoods they were leaving in their rear view mirror and then found his eyes. She glared at him. She frowned at him. He only smiled back in return, the new and improved Keaton no longer intimated by her, before he closed his eyes completely and relaxed once again.

  She answered a call she relieved on her cell phone on the first ring.

  “This is Oracle, what is it?” She listened to this party on the other end for a time and then shut the phone off again.

  With his eyelids still closed he asked her: “More trouble, Dragon Lady?”

  “Apparently you aren’t the only fool who showed weakness in performing your duties tonight.”

  “Do tell,” He said.

  Rohm stopped looking at traffic she was pulling out into long enough to peer over at Serena. “What happened?”

  “One of those two security personnel that were in charge of watching the sanctuary shot and killed the other. The running theory coming from the others we left behind there after we went in search of those missing is this: He had been engaging in conversations and showing signs of discontentment with Pandora’s mission and his role specifically in it over that past few days.” She rubbed her forehead, the stress taking its toll.