by H. D. Gordon
JOE 2, WHITE SHEETS
BOOK TWO OF THE JOE KNOWE SERIES
H. D. Gordon
Copyright © 2014 Heather Gordon
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
BOOKS BY H. D. GORDON
BLOOD WARRIOR
The Alexa Montgomery Saga: Book One
HALF BLACK SOUL
The Alexa Montgomery Saga: Book Two
THE RISE
The Alexa Montgomery Saga: Book Three
REDEMPTION
The Alexa Montgomery Saga: Book Four
SHOOTING STARS
The Surah Stormsong Novels: Book One
FALLING STARS
The Surah Stormsong Novels: Book Two
JOE
As always, for my little ducklings.
PROLOGUE
Last Words of the Man in the Middle
“Quickly, now! Quickly! Quickly! Quickly! Come, mothers! Come, children! Come, brothers! The hour is upon us! They’re comin’ to take us, or we gon’ go our own way, but today is our last on this plane, one way or the other…”
There was no murmur from the crowd of people, only the wide eyes and locked limbs of trapped animals. One of the babies cried out, though, because even the infants could feel the terror in the room, but were the only ones not old enough to know not to make a sound, to hold their rank. If there had ever been a time for dissention, that time had come and gone.
“They are the ones killin’ us! They force our hands. They’re jealous. They want what we have. Well, my children, I say we don’t give it to them!” Spittle flies from the corners of his dry mouth. Both fists slam down on the wooden armrests of his chair, the sound bouncing off the walls, off the locked doors and armed guards, who yesterday were only fellow Family members.
“I told you. I warned you this would happen, and you who are here have stood proud and fought hard. You deserve to die with some dignity!”
Another very small child cries out, a single, meaningless voice in a crowd of faceless people. The young mother holding it tries desperately to quiet her baby, her baby…her little baby. How could it be that this was happening? Where had it all gone wrong?
His voice is growing louder, his eyes bulging from his jaundiced face, a twisted rendition of a once handsome man, like the shell of shed snake skin. “Come on now, let’s not make a big deal out of it! Someone has got to pay for the sins of this planet, and I can’t do it all on my own anymore. I chose you, my children, you are the ones, the saviors that will show the Sinners, the vile Violaters of the human race the depth of their wrongs! I won’t allow them to come in here and torture us, steal from us the Heaven on Earth we have created!” His fists slam down once more, the ivory of his robe fluttering like diving doves.
People are moving forward; mothers, brothers, children…mothers with children in their arms. Young and old, black, brown and white, they move as one. In a last ditch effort of survival instinct, a select few recognize through the haze they only now see they’ve been cast under that they have been duped, deceived, and make slow movements toward the doors. But the doors are locked, and though they move, they know it.
Most come willingly. If willingly means that they know they have no choice either way. Fewer come in a truly willing sense, the hold on their minds so intense. And fewer still make a futile effort to escape. These people will have the poison forced into their mouths, into the mouths of their children and crying babies.
For Father has spoken, and so it will be done. From his white, wooden chair, he looks down at them and offers a smile he thinks should be comforting. Of course it is comforting. What child isn’t comforted by their father’s smile?
“Quickly, now!”
The time is here. They can feel it. Just the tone of his voice confirms it. This was where it would end.
“Quickly! Quickly! Quickly...let’s do the children first.”
PART I: WELCOME TO THE FAMILY
Chapter 1
Joe
If we manage to live long enough, everyone is bound to encounter events in life so monumental that from then on, and forever after, they are changed. They are no longer the same person as they once were, fundamentally different from when they started out in this world.
A particular feeling seems to get delivered prior to these fundamentally changing events. It’s one that steals the breath and punches the gut and momentarily short-circuits the brain. Shoulders tense for a fraction and then fall, and a wave of black feelings jumps down their throat and does tricks at the base of their stomach.
It’s a feeling I know well, a component of my curse, I suppose.
My name is Joe Knowe. I am not a boy. I stutter pretty badly when I talk, so I try not to speak as much as possible, and I’m clairvoyant. My major predictions of the future are tragedies, no winning Lotto numbers or stock market insights. A few months ago, I was involved in a shooting at the college campus I previously attended, one that took the lives of four people. But my name can’t be found anywhere in the papers. That pretty much covers the important stuff, especially the part about my name not being on record.
Currently, it is past midnight, and I am alone in a cabin owned by my Aunt Susan on the Lake of the Ozarks. I came here to gain some much needed perspective, and perhaps, some peace. It was obvious I would not be getting the peace; but the perspective—I did get that. I had drawn it in black on the white sheet of paper I was holding in my shaking hand.
It was dark in the cabin. I had been preparing for sleep when my left hand began to itch and throb, something that always proceeded a prediction, a drawing of an event that had yet to take place.
Now, I sat on the brown leather couch in the living room, staring into the brick fireplace at the dying embers of the last story I had only just completed writing, and had only just gotten to watch burn.
I was at a crossroads. Had I been a drinker, or even able to stand alcohol, I’m sure I’d be belly-deep in my aunt’s liquor closet right about now. As it was, I was drunk with dread, slumped on the couch like a poor soul that had lost all its fortune...or maybe just accepted that it had never had any to begin with.
Grinding my teeth together, I considered my options. I always considered the options, even though I always ended up making the same decision. It seemed to be an important thing to do, despite me always following the same path, as if shooed along down it by some invisible, divine hand. It was a moment that denied the existence of that hand, making me feel as though I had some choice. Like I could just get up off the couch and toss the white sheet of paper onto the still-glowing embers in the fireplace and…let it burn.
Just let it burn.
And then what? Avoid taking in any media for the next few weeks to protect myself from further guilt? Pretend I hadn’t been holding the lives and fates of several people in my hands? Pretend I hadn’t turned the other cheek, or put self-preservation before that of several of my fellow man?
And it was several, alright. The glance I’d taken at my drawing immediately after completing it had told me that. In fact, if I was being honest—which I wasn’t sure I wanted to be, not yet—several didn’t quite cover it. There were so many that they had been covered in white sheets…as if someone had run out of body bags.
Worst
of all, if my quick glance hadn’t been skewed, a sizeable portion of those things under the white sheets had been…too small.
I tried to stop the word from coming. If I could have blasted at the single thought with a 12 gauge, I would have, but it came nonetheless.
Children. A good portion of the things under those white sheets, of the dead in my drawing, could only be children.
My stomach lurched and a string of obscenities went through my head along with the looping thought: Don’t look. Don’t look. Just don’t look. My body seemed to be of an opposite mind, and I leaned over the armrest of the couch and pulled the chain of the lamp on the end table there. A soft yellow glow illuminated the room.
I took a deep breath and flipped over the paper in my hand, putting it drawing-side-up. Tucking my hair behind my ear with my free hand, I allowed myself one final breath, and looked down.
The scene was rendered in terrible detail, sketched in a way that captured the dimensions so truly that it seemed as though I could be looking at the event firsthand. That was both a blessing and a curse. The details could help me figure out how to stop it from happening—four words I was beginning to seriously hate—but they also made it almost physically painful to look at.
There were just so many of them, so many bodies covered in white sheets. If not for a hand protruding here and a foot there, small fingers still wrapped around a bottle here and a tuft of hair peeking out over there, I may have been able to pretend they were just lumps of dirt to keep from gagging. Those darn details denied me that.
I swallowed hard, forcing back my nausea, but did not look away. My eyes went to the very center of the page, where one body was propped up on a chair, sitting above the rest of them as if on some sort of dais, head bent forward in a way that could only be accomplished in deep sleep or death. Since death was obviously the theme here, I assumed the latter.
It was a man. His face was shadowed just enough to allow me an overall impression of middle-age, and at least mild attractiveness. I took note of the fact that his hair, dark and thick, was perfectly styled, not a line of lead to mark a strand of it out of place. I found this curious, and stared at it until my eyes caught on something else about the man sitting in the middle.
A small grin was pulling up his lips. As if there were not countless bodies, big and small, strewn all around him. As if he were not the centerpiece of a devil’s dream. As if he had died…happy.
I have seen my fair share of scary men in my life, take my word for it, but there was something about that smile that made the tiny hairs on my back tingle with cold fear, as if a lost, broken soul were breathing down my neck. The man in the chair was the one I would need to find, I had no way to prove that, and no doubt about it, either.
What’s worse, despite me having faced bad men before, this was the first time I wasn’t entirely sure I possessed the guts to seek out the bad guy. Anyone capable of the horror on the page before me was someone I had no business being around. He was someone nobody had any business being around. And yet…
I craned my neck down and brought the sheet up closer to my face, studying it the way a paleontologist would a rare fossil. I had to be scientific about it, otherwise I wasn’t sure I could bear looking. My eyes ran back and forth over the page, making my brow furrow as I confirmed that despite all the dead bodies, no blood seemed to have been shed, nothing seemed to have been burned or blown up…
How else, if not a fire or a bomb or bullets, could all of these people have died? How was it that despite there being so many lost, the scene looked almost…orderly, as if they had all just lied down and gone to sleep?
A drop of sweat rolled down the side of my face, even though it was moderately cool in the cabin, but I wiped it away before it could depart and fall to the page, where it would skew the terrible image. Then, an answer to my questions came from nowhere, as if just dropped from the sky directly above my head.
Had these people chosen to die?
Absurd. I brought the picture closer to my face, almost comically close—if anything in this situation could be considered comical. My eyes went back to the man in the middle, pausing over a cup held in his thick-fingered hand. I stared at the cup for a long time, coming to the conclusion that it was more a chalice, as a tiny bit of the stem was just barely visible.
“Puh-poison,” I muttered, and the true horror of the scene began to settle over me. Though I had no way to confirm this conclusion, somehow I felt it was the right answer, and if I’d learned anything, it was to trust my feelings.
I set the picture on the coffee table in front of me, face down. That was just about all I could stomach for the moment. Standing, I went through the kitchen to the back door and stepped out onto the wooden deck that hung out over the lake. The warm air of a Missouri summer in full swing wrapped around me instantly, adding to the feeling of suffocation in my soul. Gripping the railing of the deck, I shook my head slowly. If there was a God, I was starting to come to the conclusion that He hated me.
Above me, the night sky was visible in all its glory, a black canvas freckled with white. The moon was nearly full, its face staring at me double as it was reflected silver on the dark water below. I let myself feel small for a moment, because there was too much that seemed really big right then. Much too big for me to carry alone.
But how could I ask others to shoulder this with me? The only handful of people who knew about my gift were people whom I cared about dearly. How could I consciously put them in harm’s way in an attempt to save strangers?
I couldn’t. Really, like always, there was only one thing I could do. Saddle up and get down to the business of saving lives, which was not as rewarding as it sounds. Not to me, anyway. It must be kept in mind that I’ve never claimed to be a hero, and for the life of me I can’t imagine why anyone would want to be.
So, I couldn’t ask for help. Not from friends or family, and certainly not from the police. The only thing that scared me more than the bad men I always seemed to be pitted against was being discovered by the “good guys”. Who knows what they would do with me? Good Guys was a just a title they’d bestowed upon themselves. This was another thing I was rather sure of.
But, as usual, I had far more questions than answers. Who was this man in the middle of the page? Who were these people, young and old, dead all around him? Where and when would this mass death occur? Most importantly, would I be able to stop it?
Also—and this was something I knew I was pondering in vain, a false hope I would allow myself for only so long—if these people had chosen to die, if this was indeed some mass suicide, was there really an obligation to stop them? Was it even my place to tell people they couldn’t choose to die? Did their possible decision in the matter let me off the hook?
Then, that recently awful word came back to me, and this false hope was shattered in the heart-crushing manner that only the shattering of false hope brings.
The children.
Even if some of these people had willingly taken their lives (there was always the possibility they were forced to drink the poison, assuming my gut was right, and it was indeed poison that had killed them), the children had made no such decision. No, someone had made that decision for them, and that undeniable certainty could not be ignored. Whether I wanted it to, or not, it could not be ignored.
And just like that, the decision was made; signed, sealed and delivered by my own cursed, precognitive hand. I actually felt a tiny swirl of relief at just having admitted to myself that I had to try, followed by a dose of determination I had never really felt before, though I was admittedly scared out of my wits.
Long ago, I’d failed a child named Emily, which is something I have come to accept, mostly because I had been a child myself at the time. I had no such excuse this time. I had to at least try.
At this, the image of the small grin on the Middle Man’s half-shadowed face flashed through my head, and my body shuddered, but the thought that went through my head was strong and unwavering.
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I guess I’ll be seeing you soon.
Chapter 2
Joe
Although I’d been staying in Aunt Susan’s cabin for nearly a month and a half, there wasn’t much to be packed up. I’m a simple girl by nature, and had purposely left all technology behind, including my cell phone, so all I had to do was shove my clothes in my suitcase and straighten things up.
After gathering my toiletries, I washed and dried the few dishes in the sink, replacing them in their original spots, and returned the books I’d read to their various places on the bookcase. Then I gave the place a once over. Then I checked everything again. When I realized I was delaying the inevitable, I sighed, grabbed my suitcase, and headed out the door.
My hands shook as I opened the door of my El Camino and slid the suitcase to the passenger side of the long, single seat. I turned and looked out over the lake, wishing I didn’t have to leave just yet. The day was at that point of perfect lighting, the dawn close to breaking, but not broken yet. Soon, the sun would creep up over the horizon, alerting the world to the new day, but for this moment, the dark of night was a slowly thinning veil, the quiet of the surrounding land as complete as it could ever be.