Chapter 5 - Beneath a Wonderful View
Much of the ancient, home world accompanied mankind on his rockets that arched into the stars. Colonists, be they settlers of Griffin XIII or of Halifax Proxi, always took with them a little of their native soil, perhaps a small throwing stone for luck, or a beloved creature that might provide a little companionship and mirth. In addition, mankind brought with them notions that carried no weight, ideas that possessed no mass that might tax a rocket thruster. Every voyager to the stars carried old superstitions and grudges, penchants and habits that were difficult to break no matter how many light years they covered amongst the stars.
Though darkness never settled upon Griffin XIII to replace the planet's lavender and golden sky with night's shadows, the settlers who slumbered beneath their glass ceiling still moaned for the visions of monsters that visited their nightmares, still tossed between their sheets for the anxiety of things that might go bump in the night, still cried for the frights nightmares whispered lurked a step beyond the foot of the bed. Mankind evolved a technology to bridge the stars, but such advancement provided no guarantee that humans would ever rise above the primordial terror that had haunted them since they called the ancient, native world's forests home.
A knock pounded upon Kassie Mayhap's plastic apartment's door, bolting her awake as Scott leapt off the bed's opposite side. Instinctively, her hand reached for her gun on the nightstand.
"Stay in the bedroom," Scott whispered as his hand belted his jeans before unholstering his sidearm. Kassie heard the weapon hum as its barrel gathered its fury. "There's no good reason for anyone to pound that loudly on your door when the colony sleeps. Is your gun in order?"
Kassie released her weapon's safety and her heart calmed as the gun warmed in her hand.
"I've maintained it as well as anyone else. It'll be ready."
A second pounding rattled the apartment walls. Scott leaned forward in the room's artificial dark and kissed Kassie, and then drifted through the shadows to confront whatever danger knocked on their threshold to shake them out of their dreams.
"Who the hell is it?" Scott shouted in the dark.
"Chad Snopes," a voice shouted back. "Open the door, Scott Lomax. There's been murder on Griffin XIII."
Kassie listened and shivered in her bed. How could there be another killing in the colony? Hadn't those followers of Zeb Griffin not boarded their rockets to escape the violence that plagued the home world? Had they not built a settlement in which citizens shared common enough ideology and customs to rid themselves of the desire to harm their neighbors? How could the violence linger? Had their guns failed them? Were their weapons not meant to protect them from such hurt?
"I'm unlatching the door," Scott called out, "but know I'm armed."
"Of course," Chad's voice seeped through the plastic.
Scott kept his weapon raised as the door opened. Chad paid the gun little attention as he promptly stepped into the apartment. The confidence of his actions tossed Scott's mind into a stumble as a half a dozen more colonists followed into the room. The men fanned out in all directions, making it impossible for Scott to keep his weapon trained upon all of them as his stomach tensed in surprise and worry.
"Leave it to the Snopes brothers to so rudely stride into another patriot's home," Scott glared from one brother to another. "We should never have allowed so many brothers on board our rocket. So many brothers tend to undermine Old Zeb's teachings regarding self-reliance."
Chad Snopes answered with a flat voice. "Maybe so. But there's one less Snopes brother tonight. Someone crushed Kent Snopes' skull with a crowbar and left his body in the street."
Kassie held her breath as she listened through the shadows. Griffin XIII had established no police force to guard against murder. The colony employed no detectives to investigate such killing. A police force was another bureaucracy, one that was not supposed to have been required in a colony where citizens kept to their own business and refrained from impeding upon another's liberty, where every settler possessed a weapon with which to defend him or herself. Old Zeb Griffin taught that any bureaucracy infringed upon freedom.
But murder still visited Griffin XIII. Kassie didn't need to think very long, nor hard, to realize that the Snopes brothers who gathered in her main room composed a posse of men bent on finding whatever form of justice, or revenge, they judged their dead brother deserved, regardless of the toll such a quest took on anyone's liberties.
"And how does your brother's murder bring you to pound on this door when everyone's sleeping?" Scott asked from behind his gun.
Chad slowly sat upon the sofa. "I'm going to have to ask you for a very hard favor, Scott. I'm going to have to ask for your cooperation now, and hope for your forgiveness later. You see, whoever crushed my brother's skull also stole his gun."
"Why would someone do such a thing?" Scott asked. "Everyone has a gun, and every gun is the same. There should be no need to envy another's firearm."
Another of the Snopes brothers shrugged his shoulders. "Who can guess the reasoning of any man? None of us. Nor is it any of our business to do so. Maybe whoever killed our brother lost his weapon. Maybe the murdered didn't take good care of his gun so that it broke. Maybe that killer just wants to creep up and club folks on the head so he can steal their guns and collect a private arsenal."
"But no matter the reason," Chad continued, "our brother is dead, and we mean to bring his killer to justice."
Scott raised an eyebrow. "Whose justice?"
"Our justice." Chad didn't hesitate to answer.
"So why, again, is it that you Snopes have knocked on this door?"
Chad gathered a breath.
"I need you to give me your gun, Scott."
Kassie's finger moved closer to her gun's trigger as she heard that question. Chad Snopes had lost his mind to request such a thing. He had no right to pound upon his sleeping neighbors' doors and expect them to hand their weapons to him. A gun was a natural liberty of every patriot of Griffin XIII. Chad was no better a citizen than the rest of them, had no authority to take another's gun.
Dumbfounded, some moments passed as Scott simply stared at Chad Snopes.
"You can't be serious."
"I am very serious," Chad's voice remained calm though the room turned so tense. "All of the Snopes brothers monogram their guns. We modified the data stream sent by the United Systems so that our three-dimensional printers scratched our initials on the underside of each weapon's barrel."
"You distrust your neighbors so much?" Scott growled.
"Old Zeb never advised any patriot to trust his fellow citizen," Chad countered. "He taught to trust only yourself. I fear my brother's killing testifies to our old leader's wisdom."
"And yet you want me to just hand my gun over to you?" Scott gaped.
"I know, Scott," Chad leaned forward, "but one way or another, we're going to look at your gun."
The Snopes brothers moved with such quick and quiet confidence that Scott failed to notice when they too had withdrawn their weapons and raised their sights upon him. Scott might turn Chad Snopes into an ash pile, but he would be killed before his heart could pump another beat. One Snopes brother or another was going to inspect his weapon for their dead brother's initials. Scott couldn't think of a way to avoid it.
Yet the insult of the Snopes brothers barging into Kassie's apartment before demanding he hand his gun over to them was too bitter of a pill to swallow. It was the principle of the thing. Zeb Griffin held no liberty closer to his chest than the freedom to bear arms. Would Zeb Griffin not sacrifice his life before he lay down such a sacred liberty? Would any true patriot not do the same?
"I know what you're thinking," Chad nodded, "but I promise to repay you in whatever way I can. We would be loyal to you, Scott. You will not be the first neighbor to let us peek at your gun. We hate having to ask it. But we can depend only upon ourselves to find our brother's killer."
Scott's hand wavered.
"Let them look at your gun," Kassie stepped into the room, the gun in her hand lowered to her side. "They'll move on."
Scott lowered his arm, though his eyes smoldered. "But the shame of it, Kassie."
"Let the Snopes have the shame. We've worked too hard to pay for another's crime. The opportunity will come to make the Snopes account for the liberties they take from us tonight."
Chad nodded. "And we won't dodge that reckoning."
Kassie handed her gun over first. She bristled while Chad's hands grasped her weapon, burned as his fingers caressed the underside of the barrel to feel for his dead brother's initials. Finding none, he returned the gun promptly. Scott followed Kassie's example, and again, Chad's hands inspected the gun and found no mark.
The Snopes brothers silently filed out of Kassie's apartment. They did not, however, make it to another neighbor's door. Two dozen colonists waited in the street for the Snopes, and each settler held a raised gun in his or her hand.
One of the Snopes brothers instantly leveled his gun upon a face in the crowd. "I'm not going to hand my gun over to anybody. You're going to have to kill me if you want my gun."
Kassie trembled as she heard the humming guns from her doorway. She dreaded to consider the firepower burning in those weapons. The Snopes discovered the tables turned upon them, and Kassie feared Chad and his brothers would not be as accommodating as she and Scott had been hardly a minute earlier.
A man in the crowd lowered his gun and stepped forward. Everyone's fingers hovered dangerously close to their triggers.
"We're not going to ask you to hand over your gun, Gary. But we're here to make sure none of you Snopes ask another citizen to do the same. We've gathered to make sure you all just turn around and go back home."
The Snopes brother relaxed and pointed his gun at the ground. But just when the crisis appeared to pass, Chad Snopes lifted his gun and pointed it square in the face of the man who spoke for the crowd.
"Afraid that doesn't do me any good, Wes Henderson," Chad's voice employed the same flat words he had tossed in Kassie's apartment. "That still leaves my brother's killer out on the loose. Hell, Wes, maybe you're my brother's murderer. Maybe one of these men who meets us here in the street aims my brother's gun at me. We're going to take our justice, and we're going to have to ask that all of you hand over your guns."
Kassie felt Scott hold her a second before a searing flash of light blinded her eyes. The humming guns shrilled as they unleashed their deadly pulses of fire. A wave of intense heat passed over her shoulder, and in an instant, Kassie no longer felt Scott's arms holding her. She heard a booming crack overhead followed by the chimes of glass shattering upon the ground. The hairs on her head stood upright as air hissed around her ears.
She knew in a moment what that hiss implied. The guns silenced, and Kassie had a short window of time in which to open her eyes and gaze upon what had been wrought in the street of Griffin XIII. The guns had been unleashed. A dozen piles of ash stood where they had been men holding guns, motes of their remains already lifting into the hissing air. Kassie dropped to her knees as she saw that Scott too had been disintegrated to dust. The men who survived grasped their guns still tighter as they chocked for oxygen. Kassie felt a tickle at the back of her throat, then a burn, and then she could not breath.
As darkness seeped into the periphery of her vision, Kassie Mayhap looked upwards into the beautiful, lavender and gold sky of Griffin XIII. An errant gunshot had shattered the colony's protective glass ceiling, and the planet's lethal atmosphere flooded into the colony. A sour smell stung in Kassie's nose as her body fell numbly onto the ground. Watching the golden veils of radiation sway in the sky, Kassie took whatever solace she could from dying beneath such a view.
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Patriots of Griffin XIII Page 5