by Jude Hardin
The noises he made weren’t quite human.
“Here’s the deal,” I said. “I don’t believe in torture, but I’m desperate and you’re a racist piece of shit. Now, you can either answer my questions, or I’m going to jam this pencil all the way up your motherfucking dick and then break it in half. You think it hurts now? Just imagine those jagged splintery ends ripping away at that delicate tissue in there. So what’s it going to be?”
He made some caveman grunts, sounding like he might be ready to see things my way. Funny how fast all that code-of-honor shit flies out the window when a fat hunk of hickory gets shoved up your pee hole. I pulled the gag out of his mouth.
“What do you want to know?” he said, breathing heavily.
“The guys in black. Tell me about them.”
He was almost crying. “Harvest Angels. The H-A. We’re the militant arm of the organization. You notice the red laces in our boots? They stand for all the blood that’s going to be shed when we take the country back for the white man.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “How many of you could there be? A couple hundred? A couple thousand?”
“Try a couple of million. Chain of Light is just the tip of the iceberg, brother. The H-A’s all over the country. You read the Bible?
Check it out. Matthew thirteen, verse forty-one: ‘The son of man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil.’ We’re going to weed out all the mud races. Niggers, Jews, gooks, beaners—all those evil motherfuckers. The H-A’s gonna kick ass and take names.”
I twirled the pencil in a little deeper. He clenched his teeth and yawped from the gut.
“There must be an armory here somewhere,” I said. “Where do they keep all the weapons and the ammo and shit?”
“You know the chow hall?”
“Yeah.”
“Same building. In back.” He paused and smiled. “You’ll never get to any of that stuff.”
“We’ll see. I saw some young women marching in dungarees yesterday,” I said. “What’s the deal with that?”
“Marching in formation? Led by a couple of Harvest Angels?”
“Right.”
“They were breeding stock. They keep those girls in a separate barracks.”
“Breeding stock. Where do they get the girls?” I said.
“They get them. That’s all I know.”
“All right. Why did Strychar have that lottery at the prayer meeting this morning?”
His voice took on a wistful quality: “At midnight it’ll be April twentieth. Adolf Hitler’s birthday. Time for the spring sacrifice. They put up a wooden swastika, tie a virgin to it, douse her in gasoline—it’s quite a sight. Invitation only. I got to go last year.”
“So where’s the big birthday party?”
“A clearing in the woods behind Reverend Strychar’s house. Same as last year.” He grimaced and swallowed hard. “You going to let me go now?”
“Sure,” I said. “Just a couple of more questions. There’s a man here somewhere, wears an eye patch and rides a Harley Electra Glide. You know who I’m talking about?”
“Seen him around, don’t know his name.”
I took the cell phone out of my pocket. “Tell me the code you used to open Strychar’s door and disable the alarm.”
“Why do you want to get into Reverend Strychar’s house?”
“Personal reasons.” I shoved the pencil in deeper. It was almost up to the eraser now.
“Jesus! All right, all right. Two-zero-two-one-two-two-three-one-three-four-three-nine.”
“Got it,” I said. It was the same as the safe combination, the numbers on the lotto ticket. 20-21-22-31-34-39. I had already memorized them last night.
“You going to let me go now?”
I looked into Brother John’s eyes and saw pure evil. He was a racist and a torturer. He had a tattoo of a burning cross on his chest. No telling how many lives he had taken in the name of hate.
I pulled the pencil out of his pecker. A few drops of bright red blood dribbled out. He breathed a sigh of relief, and then I clouted him in the forehead with the butt of the forty cal. He was still breathing when I pulled him out of the back of the van by his feet like a sack of manure and dumped him on the forest floor.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The digital clock on the van’s dashboard said 11:38. Only twenty-two minutes before Hitler’s big birthday bash and the virgin sacrificing got started.
I figured a fair amount of what Brother John had said was bullshit. Would these low-life racist pricks actually burn someone at the stake? Surely not. Something was cooking somewhere, though. I could smell it. I figured it was the two hundred pounds of brisket Strychar had confirmed over the phone.
I had two objectives in mind: get The Holy Record and get the hell off that ranch. Strychar’s house would be empty. He would be at the party with those he invited. Now that I had the code to get into the house, and the combination to the safe, everything should be a piece of cake.
I wanted to find the armory and load up on some firepower. I wanted to blow some shit up. The B movie I seemed to be stuck in should have a blazing molten-hot spectacular ending, I thought, but there was really no point to it. All I needed to do was quietly enter Strychar’s house, open the safe, get the book, and drive the van to the Clay County courthouse. I had the AK-47 and the forty-cal pistol from Brother John and his partner, just in case someone got in my way.
I turned the key, put the transmission in Drive, stomped the gas, but something was terribly wrong. I didn’t have any control over the steering. I got out and confirmed my suspicion, that the right front tire was flat. I must have picked something up when I drove into the woods. Fuck. I holstered the pistol, grabbed my backpack and the assault rifle, and headed toward Reverend Strychar’s house at a trot.
The roads were deserted, but I stayed near the tree line and in the shadows anyway. I didn’t want to risk being seen. It was a beautiful, clear April night, temperature in the low sixties. Starry, starry night. No kidding. The weather was practically perfect, and my legs and lungs were practically on fire. They should have hired a more athletic guy to play this part, I thought. I kept waiting for someone to yell Cut! and send the stunt man in, but I appeared to be on my own. My feet hurt from the tight boots, exacerbating my misery even further. Sweat poured from my face and trickled down my back in streams.
I ran through the pain and finally found my rhythm. Or, perhaps my numbness. At any rate, I was gliding along like a goddamn gazelle after a while, like a feather in the breeze. Delirium. That’s the word I was searching for. I ran through the pain and finally found my delirium.
I saw Reverend Strychar’s house and an orange glow coming from the woods behind it. The smell of meat cooking became stronger as I made my way around the perimeter of his lot. It actually smelled great. If nothing else, those Aryan motherfuckers knew how to cook some goddamn good-smelling southern barbecue.
I crouched down and duck-walked to Strychar’s front door, my chest heaving and heart pounding. No lights on in the house. I pulled out the cell phone, punched in the numbers, heard the locks click. I waltzed in like I owned the place.
I used my penlight to navigate, but the tiny bulb grew dimmer and dimmer and by the time I got to Strychar’s study the battery had died completely. I didn’t want to risk cranking on the lights, but I needed to see somehow. I couldn’t dial the combination to the safe with the little bit of light that filtered in through the windows.
I unplugged Strychar’s desk lamp and moved it to a socket closer to the safe. I took my black Harvest Angel shirt off, shrouded the lamp’s shade with it, switched on the light. Perfect. I was able to hold the lamp with one hand and dial the combination with the other.
I felt something akin to euphoria as I worked the dial. It reminded me of when I was seven. I wanted a Hot Wheels racetrack, and had been begging my stepfather for months to buy me one. “Maybe for Christmas,�
�� he said, between gulps of whiskey. I ripped a picture of that racetrack from the Sears catalog and taped it to the refrigerator door. No mistake about which one I wanted. In the picture, the cars were neck and neck at the finish line, with a blurry trail of color behind them. That’s how fast those damn Hot Wheels went on that damn track. Engines roaring, crowd cheering, rubber burning. I thought about that racetrack every night before going to sleep. I thought about it for months. On Christmas morning, there was a big package under the tree with my name on it. To Nicky, from Santa. This was it. I was going to be the envy of every boy in the second grade. The anticipation was overwhelming. I almost peed my pants as I tore the shiny red paper and revealed—
A plain white box. I had seen the racetrack I wanted in the store, and it did not come in a plain white box. It came in a box with a picture of cars neck and neck at the finish line. Blurry trail of color, crowd cheering, rubber burning.
There must have been some mistake. Someone had put my name on the wrong present.
“Go ahead and open it,” my stepfather said. He always needed a shave and stunk of booze, even on Christmas. Especially on Christmas.
I opened the package. It was a set of gray pajamas, pocked with pictures of blue Indy cars. Something a little kid would wear to bed, not a big second grader. I started bawling. I couldn’t help myself. I knew he would make me wear those PJs until they were threadbare and bursting at the seams, and I knew I would never ever get that Hot Wheels racetrack as long as I lived. When he saw my grief, he called me a spoiled brat, and stomped away to fix himself another highball. I never forgave him, and things were never the same between us. We hated each other until he blew his brains out when I was fifteen.
Now I always tell people with kids to buy them what they really want, even if you have to go into hock to do it. It’s something they’ll remember for the rest of their lives.
Opening Reverend Lucius Strychar’s safe reminded me a lot of Christmas when I was seven. The same sinking sense of disappointment engulfed me when I dialed the last number and opened the vault’s door.
The Holy Record was gone. Strychar must have taken it to the party with him.
Now what? I couldn’t just go on back to my room at the dorm and pretend nothing had happened. I’d left Caleb there unconscious, and I’d left Brother John’s partner there cuffed to the bed and impaled with a letter opener. Not to mention Brother John himself, who was probably waking up in the woods about now with some painful reminders of his own.
I couldn’t just hightail it and go on back to being regular old Nicholas Colt living in the Airstream on Lake Barkley. Caleb had come to my room with a tranquilizer shot, and he had been followed by two Harvest Angels. Somebody knew something. My cover had been blown. That was the only explanation, and that meant I was committed to doing something. Immediately.
I wasn’t extremely confident about going up against an army of white supremacist goons on what might be their biggest holiday of the year, but my only other option was to leave the compound and seek help from the police. That wasn’t much of an option, because as soon as Strychar figured out I was gone he would put everything in super-lockdown mode and make sure any evidence was nowhere to be found. Especially The Holy Record.
Going to the police at that point would have been tantamount to quitting, to giving up, to raising the white flag. I decided I was not going to give up. Either I would leave the Chain of Light ranch with the evidence I needed, or I would leave in a body bag.
I checked the desk drawer for the Python, thinking a little more firepower couldn’t hurt, but it was gone too. I crept out of Strychar’s study, backtracked through the house and out to the porch. I didn’t bother trying to lock the door.
I entered the woods behind Strychar’s house, felt my way through the pines and the underbrush and followed my nose until I reached a small hill overlooking a clearing. I stood there for a minute, drenched in sweat, wheezing like an asthmatic iguana, and gazed upon the outrageous scene below.
At the center of attention was a six-foot wooden swastika with a young woman tied to it. Brother John had been telling the truth about that after all. It appeared there was indeed going to be a human sacrifice. I pulled out my binoculars, focused in on the girl. A chill washed through me like a tidal wave. My heart actually stopped beating for a couple of seconds.
At that moment, my agenda, indeed my entire life, changed. It was Brittney Ryan, and she was very much alive.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
My eyes burned and my throat tightened, and it wasn’t from the barbecue smoke. Talk about feeling as though I’d seen a ghost. This was unreal. This was beyond anything I could have imagined. I stood there completely flabbergasted for a minute, trying to soak it in, trying to reason how this could possibly be. Then I gave myself a figurative slap in the face, because if I didn’t do something quickly I was going to lose her all over again.
I had expected the meeting to be crawling with black uniforms, but that wasn’t the case. The attendees, a hundred or so of them, wore civilian clothes and sat peacefully at candlelit tables. This party was for the drones, the worker bees. That’s what the lottery at the prayer meeting had been all about.
I recognized faces from the band and the kitchen help. Not a Harvest Angel in sight. If it hadn’t been midnight, and a six-foot swastika with a girl tied to it hadn’t been the main attraction, the scene I looked down on might have been any church picnic anywhere in the country.
I had worked out some things in my mind earlier, in the dorm room, while reading Welcome to the Chain of Light. Reverend Strychar considered interracial marriages an abomination, a sin against nature. His was a ministry of hatred; he and his followers possessed a staunch determination to preserve the purity of the Aryan race, no matter the cost.
My wife, Susan, was from Jamaica, and we were a high-profile couple because of my band Colt .45. We tried our best to maintain our privacy, but the paparazzi followed us everywhere. We were regulars in the tabloids. We were on the cover of Rolling Stone, dressed as bride and groom. She was black and I was white and we were man and wife and everyone in the world knew it, and almost everyone in the world was cool with it.
Almost.
We got the occasional stares in public, and the occasional nasty-grams in the mail. We lived in the Deep South, so some of that was to be expected. But, before Tony Beeler blurted the words pocket-47, it had never occurred to me that the plane crash had been a planned thing, a result of sabotage. And until now, it had never occurred to me that my sweet Susan and our precious daughter might have fried inside that airplane because of their skin color. It was crazy to think that a religious organization would kill a planeload of people because of ignorance and prejudice toward a married couple, but the more I thought about it the more it seemed not only possible but probable.
The more I thought about it, the more my blood boiled.
Roy Massengill drove one of our equipment buses. Roy Massengill was a Chain of Light member. He had access to the charter jet, and along with his other talents he was a decent aircraft mechanic. He was the invisible hand that came along and fucked things up. If my suspicions were correct, Roy Massengill, acting under the sanction of Reverend Lucius Strychar, lit what turned out to be the most tragic burning cross in history.
Now, more than ever, I needed to get my hands on The Holy Record. I had seen one other act of terrorism written in the book, the exploding Datsun pickup truck; I figured if Chain of Light was behind the plane crash, that would be recorded there as well.
As I stood and witnessed what promised to be yet another gruesome scene of misguided religious fervor based on ignorance and hatred, a fierce rage boiled up inside of me. I wasn’t concerned with justice. I didn’t want any of these assholes to go to jail. I wanted to kill them all. I wanted to mercilessly mow them down with the AK-47, and then rush in and rescue Brittney and take her home with me and live happily ever after.
But that’s not what happened. Not exactly.
The wooden swastika stood on a platform in the center of the clearing, and Brittney’s arms and legs were tied to it with heavy ropes. She was awake and alert and terrified. The swastika was flanked by burning crosses, one about twenty feet to the left of it and one about twenty feet to the right. The crosses appeared to be metal, the flames fed by propane cylinders. Again I was reminded of my wife and baby burning with that airplane. Reverend Strychar stood at a pulpit in front of the platform, with what I assumed was The Holy Record on a stand in front of him.
Reverend Strychar was speaking to his flock: “—and as we proceed in the most solemn of sacrifices, dear brethren, let us remember what our savior said as he hung suffering on the cross—”
“What did he say, Lucius?” I shouted from my position on the hill. I walked toward the pulpit, my rifle pointed at Strychar’s chest. “Did he tell you to kill innocent people? Did he tell you to hate folks because of the color of their skin, or because they don’t think the same way you do? I’m not a religious man, but I’m pretty sure Jesus Christ taught tolerance and love. Not too much of that ‘round here, now is there?”
“Who goes there? How dare you interrupt this holy meeting?”
“Holy? The only thing holey here is going to be your heart if you don’t untie that girl in about five seconds.”
I advanced, and Strychar finally recognized my face in the firelight.
“You,” he said. He looked astonished. He’d already killed me—twice, actually—but there I stood.
In my peripheral vision, I saw someone rise from one of the tables. I kept my eyes on Strychar.