by JN Lenz
Both Clyde and Sid remained on the small ledge where the two guides had been just moments earlier, before they disappeared along the line which descended another two hundred feet to the next ledge. The ice and snow from the avalanche passed mere feet in front of where the pair clung to the mountain face. All sign of the two guides, their line and the anchors which headed down the Mountain face were all gone. Sid immediately looked up for a sign of more falling snow, but it was still snowing too heavily to see much more than a few feet.
Leaning his head over the edge, there was no way to see if the two guides had been saved by some firmly anchored bolts further down the line. The anchors directly beside the ledge had all disappeared, pulled along with the rope from the mountain face. Clyde pulled Sid back from the edge of the small cliff, pulling him hard against the face of the rock before barking out orders for Sid to help in hunkering down, they needed to secure to the cliff as best they could. There was an area of the small cliff that recessed back into the Mountain face by a couple of feet, after securing a pair of anchors to latch the carabineers on Sid’s jacket. After securing the anchors, Clyde would stuff Sid into the small crevice and latch him to the anchors to secure him against the mountainside in the event of another avalanche.
Clyde would use the remaining anchors to secure his pack pack on an angle against the rock, further sheltering Sid’s head and body from the elements. Once Sid was firmly secured he would then latch himself onto the rock, draping his body over the crevice opening, sheltering Sid from the elements. Clyde faced in towards Sid, his back to the elements; convincing Sid they could survive the storm on the mountain face until it had passed.
They would not activate the transponder or the GPS tracker until the storm cleared, this to reserve the life of the batteries. There could be no rescue in this weather. Both the devices would be kept inside Clyde’s coat, inside his thermal underpants to keep the devices as warm as possible. The two would spend the next three days latched to the side of the mountain face, strapped to an impossibly small ledge as the temperatures continued to fall before the storm finally came to an end. I had no idea that for the last three days, my son had been barely clinging to life on the edge of a mountain in a far off world.
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Chapter 16
With so little time left before I had to be on the road, needing desperately to be home in time to hear my son’s voice again. At best there would be time to read one more file, and I would need to be quick about it. I found myself not wanting to walk away until I was able to consume the contents of each and every one of the files. With little time before I needed to leave I chose a thin file, one of a handful from the last file box on the cabinet shelf. The box held what I believed to be Clyde’s last five murders; I pulled what looked to be the thinnest of the five files from the file box. The front cover revealed it was his sixty third murder. Flipping past the cover sheet and same simple font listing only the number
63
Studying that first page my eyes instantly focused on the date, December 06, 2025. That month was one of our busiest ever; it was an end to our best yearly profits ever. The Christmas and New Year’s holidays in particular was traditionally the busiest time in the Funeral Home business, all the lonely hearts of the world giving up on life in these, the loneliest of their days each year.
The traditional holiday spike in business had brought us to a new sales plateau, the previous years of stagnant sales growth from the year two thousand and twenty had ended any new purchases of Funeral Homes. My investing turned instead to purchasing a number of Nursing Homes, in part to steer them in the end, to one if our funeral home facilities. As the lost decade finally came to an end across the developed world in the year 2020, our ability to draw margin from our upper end clients had allowed us to continue to prosper despite dismal economic landscape.
As a group, the minority rich remained the only clients that could afford to demand lavish accommodations and care in small boutique nursing homes before ending it all in one of our funeral homes. The ultra conservatives of the past decade and an half had slashed the social security and pension benefits of the ever growing population of elderly, the cuts part of the measures in an attempt to maintain payments on the massive government debts, incurred from decades of unsustainable spending. The result of the cuts affecting the majority of the population, no longer able to afford to be cared for in their old age, living out the remainder of their hard working lives in near poverty.
There was the upswing in burial rates as a result of the dramatic increase in violent deaths, including a spike in the amount of murders against the wealthy elderly. Over the past few years it had turned into an epidemic, a lost generation of youth, rebelling against the establishment which remained firmly in control by the older demographic. The once small marginalized extreme right wing that sat, long relegated to the periphery of the political structure in America, had now gathered strength on the back of the successive conservative majorities who ruled through the last years of the lost decade. Swept into office on the back of their anti-tax stance, they would drive the wedge deeper between the minority rich and the majority of poor, while America’s infrastructure and social safety net was disseminated.
Now in its wake, the leaders of the anti-tax and Tea party movement who had controlled National policy for a decade had evolved themselves into near neo Nazi zealots. They polarized the elderly for taking up too much of the dwindling government revenue base. The unemployed youth saw little in their future to motivate them, from the low wages for the jobs that were available to the endless spiral of poverty that surrounded them all resulted in a spike in anti-establishment sentiment among the youth of that Nation and they had no aversion to violence.
These skin heads and fascists groups would target the visibly old and weak, those easiest to accost in the streets and attack in their homes the where the elderly would be just as defenseless. It would appear the actions Clyde and I had taken years earlier when we had eliminated six elderly citizens solely for financial reasons had now become a modern day phenomena among the disenchanted youth of America. The daily news reports this year would continually be reporting new attacks and murders terrorizing an entire generation of senior citizens across America, naturalized Canadians who had flocked to America during the decade of fire sale prices on real estate began to migrate back north of the forty ninth parallel frightened at the prospect of home invasion south of the border.
Those older American citizens wealthy enough would hire security and seal themselves behind gated communities and by driving bullet proof vehicles while those less fortune did what they could to protect themselves. Despite their efforts to protect themselves there would be a pronounced increase in the number of elderly homicides in the last eighteen months as the skin heads and neo Nazi youth movement grew in popularity. The COM or Clockwork orange movement had formed organizations in the majority of the largest American cities; the group was loosely based on the home invasion based attacks of the cult movie favorite from the early nineteen seventies.
What a completely different place the world had become since that decade after the summer of love, who would know that sixty years on a violent cult movie would be an everyday reality. Many of the group’s members were highly intelligent thieves and butchers striking out at the wealthiest group of Americans, seventy six per cent of which were over the age of sixty five. The young demographic of the population for those aged sixteen to twenty nine represented over sixty per cent of those currently living below the poverty line in America.
The reduction of American military bases and also their dwindling investments in the poorest areas of the world after the year two thousand thirteen until now would be matched by increases of terrorism around the world. The reductions in America’s footprint around the world a result of their efforts to slash the unsustainable debts they had been accumulating, security in areas of Africa less of a priority now that America produced close to the equivalent
amount of oil as it consumed.
The military, now more focused on their control of the oceans and their own borders rather than the pouring trillions into the dark holes of Africa and central Asia. Now America left these areas for Russia and China to fight over, China now controlled the commerce and supported several regimes in Africa while the Russians remained tied to the bulk of Asia’s Nations. This increased violence around the world, increased Natural disasters from our still warming and melting planet this coupled with the stagnant growth of the lost decade with its rocky financial markets and failing banks perpetuated a society that saw the potential for disaster around every corner.
The ultra-rich no longer trusted those same institutions that had helped create their great wealth while hiding much of it from government tax collectors as a credible and safe location for all their money. If everything really did go to shit cash and gold would be king and the only way to survive, security box is a bank is of no use if it is not possible to get into the bank.
The result of this paranoia meant those rich enough to have large amounts of money in the banks and investments also began to hold substantial amounts of cash and gold within the walls of their residences. The well organized and skilled members of a Clock Work Orange attack team included security experts to disable alarm and communication systems including blocking Satellite connection, the home invasion squads would be trained in tactical entry the majority of these members came directly from the Military.
Junior members of CWO groups would join the elite American Military training camps across America only to go AWOL following their training to live in the underground existence of a CWO member. The security force and personal body guards that the wealthiest elderly would hire to protect them and their families would rarely stand a chance against the tactically trained invaders. The precision of their attacks would also be no match for local Police forces whose numbers had been greatly reduced from the budget cuts of the lost decade, the members of CWO would be long gone from the scene of the crime by the time authorities would arrive.
There would be cases of the home owners and their security being killed others where they would be left alive, the fact this was occurring at all had the “ olds” as many of the youth on the far right would call them panicking. Their last stand may occur in the Halls of government where due to the ever decreasing youth vote the “olds” of the Nation still controlled Congress and the Senate. Last month there was a private members bill read on the Floor to enact the Military to deploy TSE in the streets and the neighborhoods of the Nation in an attempt to stop the Home Invasion attacks, the Bill would in effect place a Military enforced curfew and Policing of the Nation, or Martial law. The Bill failed but not before also receiving a large number of votes in favor of the proposal.
File number sixty five would be one of Clyde’s most complexes which he illustrated clearly by the amount of time he spent planning. The name that headed the bio detail file that accompanied all of Clyde’s files read Clark Morrow, I knew I had heard of the name but I could not place him until I read further into the file detailing the weeks Clyde spent stalking him. I name of Clark Morrow did not bring an immediate visualization to me because I had known him by Junior Morrow, a name his father labeled him with early in life and one that would stick with him to his death. Clark “junior” Morrow was the owner and proprietor of the West Side cleaning company.
Our connection to him came after the purchase of two Nursing Homes we had purchased from the same seller. The previous owner had been contracting the majority of his cleaning through Morrow’s West Side Cleaning company. Having our accountants perform the same audit we completed post each acquisition one of the findings discovered included a very favorable contract to supply cleaning services of all sheets, towels, uniforms and residents laundry.
So economical was the services of the West Side Laundry the pair of Nursing Homes had ceased to complete any laundry services on site what so ever. The extensive savings being realized through the contract brought me into contact with Junior Morrow to discuss the potential of extending his services to some of our other Nursing Home and Funeral Home’s cleaning requirements.
To that point the Nursing Homes under our ownership completed their own laundry services and the Funeral Homes continued to deal with local cleaners for dry cleaning their suits. My initial meeting went well as Junior provided a clear plan which demonstrated that combining several locations would create extensive savings. As interested as much in the savings as the possibility of operating our own cleaning facility which would service several of our own locations I requested a walk through the West Side facilities in order to see for myself what machinery and staffing would be required for such an operation.
Anything that would keep a closed loop was of great interest to me and was a driving factor in the way I directed Clyde and my business interests. That tour of the facilities would provide me with a definitive answer that day, one that was quite different than what my expectation was to be. I had been expecting at the minimum to walk away that day with a contract to extend our contract for West Sides services or at best a new business plan to add to our present holdings.
The afternoon was hot and muggy the day I met Junior for a tour of the facility. The solid metal door which resided at the end of the office hall contained no window, workers wishing to enter the office (which most avoided) needed to push a buzzer beside the door. Security would take ask a series of questions through the closed circuit monitoring system before allowing access into the office.
The cool breeze from the air conditioned office followed us through the door Junior had led me through, once on the shop floor the sun filled office gave way to an oppressively dank and darker factory floor. Several large machines sat sporadically throughout the vast warehouse, its low ceilings lined by the rows of dirty and rusting fluorescent lights running off into the distance. Mounds of white sheets and towels sat in wheeled plastic carts littered the floor, meanwhile dozens of sweating oriental workers scurried around between the hot steaming presses and washers.
Junior attempted to yell above the roar of the machinery as we made our way through the cluttered aisles of the factory floor, I paid little attention to his words; I was transfixed on the workers in this hell on earth. The countless sets of eyes staring back at me with emptiness I had never before witnessed in a live person; it was like looking into the eyes of the dead. Each wearing identical sweat stained tee shirts which clung tightly around the thin body frames. I was almost in a state of shock; here I stood in the bowels of a sweat shop in the heart of the country’s richest city.
The entire experience resulted in me canceling our existing contract with the West Side Laundry company within weeks of my visit; I would have cancelled it right there and then that day but I knew I needed time to make alternative arrangements. Clyde and I had murdered in the name of business, so who was I to wave the corporate morality flag?
I could remember telling Clyde weeks later about my visit, I understand now why he had been so very interested in the details of that day on the cleaner’s factory floor. As I read on through file number sixty it was apparent Clyde had taken a keen interest in Junior Morrow. Clyde would not only spend time observing the movements and life style of Junior but also that of several of his workers. The workers who worked more than sixteen hours some days would take the bus back to one of a few townhouses Junior owned that were spread out within the seediest parts of the city. Each one of the town homes would house twenty to thirty of the workers, sleeping and working through endless shifts on the factory floor that ran twenty four hours a day.
Junior Morrow on the other hand lived a very different life style from that of his work force. Quit unlike the dank and dark conditions of the factory floor juniors mansion sat on the shores of the city’s largest lake, its tall windows flanking its waterside walls. The files would go on to detail how Sodo Morrow was a member of the top golf course in the area and lived the life of privilege at every tur
n. Clyde detailed in the file how he followed Sodo’s every move for over a month all the while using his onboard computer in the Range Rover to research everything possible about Clark and his business associates during Clyde’s stake outs. Contained in the file on Sodo would be a pair of plans that in the end Clyde had rejected in favor of a plan that would allow nature and the earth to administer the death sentence to Clark. The first rejected plan had really caught my attention and after reading I understood why Clyde had decided to abandon it, the whole idea was fucking crazy.
The idea centered on placing junior in a water proof twelve foot square container; water tight windows had been fixed to each end. The box would need to be delivered to Clyde’s waterfront property on Georgian Bay weeks prior to the planned abduction of Junior Sodo. There was a tractor on site with a loader attachment that Clyde could use to unload and move the box down close to the water; here he would mount the box onto a cart which sat on his marine railway.
Normally the shore railway was used to launch his fishing boat into the lake from a out building twenty six feet from shore the rail line would transport the container out into the open bay at a water depth of over six feet. Once free from the cart the air filled bags attached to the sides of the container would allow it to float, waiting until total darkness blanketed the water and shoreline Clyde would place an unconscious Clark Morrow into the container and seal and lock its only portal.