15 Signs Of Murder (Fifteen thrillers)

by Luis Samways

  “What are you doing? Cut my ropes off,” I heard Jerry say from behind me. If I was being completely honest, at the time I was considering ditching his ass. But something came over me. Some sort of truth that rattled the idea out of me. I turned around and saw him looking at me. I knew we were in this together, and we were all we had. I didn’t know if I could manage to survive out there without him. So I decided it was best if I got him out of his restraints and we both hauled ass out of there.

  I ran up and tackled him to the ground. He landed on his front, and I got on top of him.

  “What the fuck, man?” he said.

  “I’m cutting your damn rope off,” I replied.

  “You didn’t need to tackle me like that.”

  I smiled to myself as I started to rip at his restraints. Truth is, I wanted to beat the crap out of him. I wanted to show him that I was in control, and he wasn’t. I could tell he didn’t like the thought of such a thing. I could see it was eating at him, and that made me very happy.

  “Almost done,” I said, scuffing his hair up like your grandma did when she said how cute you were. He didn’t appreciate that, either. “I swear to God Almighty himself, Abel, if you ever do that to me again, then we will have a problem.”

  I ignored his empty threats and tugged one last time at his ropes. It was much easier with two hands. What took me hours before took no less than three minutes. Saying that, the ropes were mighty thick, and I was glad that we would be out of them.

  The rope snapped, and Jerry was free. The lion roared once again. It was the one beside us; he was a big fellah. He’d been asleep for much of the time we were inside the barn, but now he was wide awake and looked hungry. He started to roar even more. I wasn’t sure if it was some sort of alarm thing that the farmer had taught the lion to do when he wasn’t there, to warn him of escapees. I wasn’t going to find out, though; we needed to get out of there pronto.

  “The door is locked from the outside. We need to find a way to unlock it,” I said.

  Jerry smiled at me. Not only with his mouth, or what I could see of it in the darkness, but with his eyes. One of those full-on smiles. The sort a guy on drugs having a good time would don on his face.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Jerry said. And then he grabbed me by the shoulders.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “This is for tackling me!” he screamed, and then pushed all his weight on me, still gripping tightly onto my shoulders, throwing himself into my sternum. We went crashing into the cage door, ripping it off its hinges and landing in a heap on the other side.

  “Whooo, now that’s a tackle!” Jerry hollered as he got up. “Whooo!” he bellowed again.

  “Keep your damn voice down,” I said. The lion in the cage had quieted down. I wasn’t sure why, but I saw his piercing eyes looking at us. I think we might have scared him a little when we went flying through the cage. “That hurt, you asshole,” I muttered as I brushed myself off, getting up to my feet.

  “We got through it, though. That’s what counts. I even feel a little closer to you now!”

  I didn’t reply. I was taken aback by the distant sound of a plane in the sky. My eyes widened. I knew we only had a few minutes.

  “The planes, they’re about to bomb the farm!” I said.

  “Or land on it,” Jerry replied.

  I stood there and looked at him in disbelief. “You said that if they were going to land anything, it would be a helicopter. Hence why you thought they’d bomb us,” I said.

  “Well, maybe, maybe not. The Germans have done weirder things, you know, but my gut says they are going for the kill. Either way, I’m not sticking around to find out!”

  I nodded. We both ran up to the barn door. Before we could open it, it opened itself, and a surprised farmer stood in our way. He looked shocked, yet angry. He was holding some food on a plate. He dropped it and was about to swing at us. Jerry clocked him on the chin, making the big bastard tumble to floor.

  “The bigger they are,” Jerry said.

  “Come on, we need to go,” I yelled. That was when we saw the planes approaching on the horizon. The jets were screaming, and the air seemed to vibrate as they flew even closer. We made a run for it, across the open field and over to the brush. We jumped through the bushes and ran as far from the farm as we could. When the first bomb dropped, the trees started to rattle.

  “I guess it was a bomb after all!” Jerry shouted.

  “You don’t say!” I yelled back at him, both of us tearing down the mountainside as fast as we could. But Jerry spoke too soon. It wasn’t only “a bomb,” it was a shitload of them. One after the other. Each one of them rattled the trees even harder until they weren’t just rattling, they were falling.

  “Jerry, watch out!” I said, but I wasn’t watching out properly myself. For the second time in the day, a tree had KO’d me like a Soviet boxer, and I was down for the count. At least this time I hadn’t walked into one. This one so happened to have fallen on me.

  Chapter Twelve

  Cindy Goldstein and her daughter exited the cab outside Section 45’s motel district. It was a dark and seedy area. A line of women stood on the curb, watching cars go by. They were dressed in provocative clothing that showed a lot of their skin. Some were deeply bronzed, while others were barely pink. The district she was in was full of all sorts of people. Blacks, whites, and Hispanics. It truly felt like the only place in Germany where people were people, and not just a race. She felt happy to be in such a place, even if it was dangerous. That was the world she lived in, you see. It was dark and foreboding. Even in the streets of “traitors,” as the Germans called it, she felt safer than the fake blanket of oppression that covered Berlin. She felt good being in a place where she didn’t know who the bad people were. They could have all been bad, for all she cared, but what would they want with a housewife from Berlin? Nothing. That was for sure. They were all too busy doing their own thing, minding their own business.

  “Who are all these people, Mommy?” Mary-Lou asked her mother as they walked past a huddle of people. The shadows on the road grew ever bigger as they passed more and more people, all hanging on the corners of the street like loiterers.

  “They are like you and me, honey,” she replied, gripping her daughter’s hand firmly.

  “Are they scared, Mommy?” she asked.

  Cindy looked at her daughter as they walked down the street and smiled. She could see her daughter was a little startled. She wasn’t used to seeing so many people. So many different people at that. It was scary to Cindy, let alone her little daughter.

  “No, baby. There isn’t anything to be scared about. You see, these people are like me and you. They are hiding from the bad people so the bad people can’t hurt them,” she said, pulling her daughter a little closer to herself.

  “The bad people? Like Daddy — is he bad, Mommy?”

  Cindy stopped dead in the middle of the street. A few people behind her gave her a wide berth and walked around. None of them complained. It was as if they expected trouble if they did. It was something in the air that drove her to think that. Something that clung onto the crowd around her. She could see it in their eyes. The fear. The same fear that her daughter had. The same fear she had.

  “Your daddy wasn’t a bad person, dear. He was just confused. All of us can be confused at times. And when that happens, we need some time on our own, to rid the confusion from our minds.”

  Cindy’s daughter smiled at her and hugged at her legs. “I want to feed the duckies, Mommy! I know I’m not confused about that,” Mary-Lou said.

  It brought a smile to Cindy’s tired face. She legitimately felt a little warmer inside, even in the dark place she found herself in. “We’d better find a park, then. But tomorrow, honey. Mommy needs to rest, and so do you!”

  With that, both of them walked off down the street and around the corner. Cindy saw what she was looking for. A motel sign blinked a few feet above them.

  Vaca
ncies, it read, flashing red and blue.

  “Come on, baby, time for some rest, I don’t know about you, but Mommy is sleepy.”

  “Can’t feed the ducks if you’re tired, Mommy. Might fall asleep and fall into the river.”

  They laughed and went into the motel.

  A few seconds later, a man came around the corner. He was holding his head. He had bumped it pretty hard on some stairs at the train station. He wasn’t the least bit worried, though, because he knew he was about to get what he wanted, and Cindy Goldstein was going to get what was coming to her. Of that he was sure.

  “I’m coming for you, you bitch,” he said under his breath. He really was coming for her. He was coming for her with everything he had.

  He walked down the street toward the blinking “Vacancy” light and made his way inside the motel. He had his hand on his service pistol tucked inside his coat. His fingers tapped on the gun a few times as he entered the motel with the neon lights.

  Tap, tap, tap.

  The time had come.

  Chapter Thirteen

  New Germania, Section - 8

  Commander Klaus hit his fist against the keyboard that sat next to his computer terminal. The keys smashed under his heavy weight, and splinters of plastic exploded across his desk. He pressed down on the buzzer with his finger, nearly popping the button out of its place from his anger. He hadn’t been as angry as he was in a very long time. The voice in his head was telling him that somebody should pay dearly for the fumble he had just witnessed. But he wasn’t interested in such retributions. He was interested in ending the charade that the hunt for the Jew and Jerry the Reich agent was turning into.

  “First Officer Faber gave us the order that we could do what we wanted to find the Jew and the traitor, so that is what I propose. We strike while we know they are in the area, and we strike hard!” Klaus said, still pressing down hard on the intercom on his desk.

  On the other end, his secretary had patched him into a phone call with the missile logistics men stationed in New Germania. They had a Tomahawk ready for action. It had just been green-lit by Klaus. He wasn’t having anything but a yes as an answer. The commander wanted the mountains covered with the ash of Jerry and Abel. He wanted them to suffer for what they had put the army through.

  “Enough is enough. We end this now. I don’t care what anybody says, we are hitting them with a nuke, and we are doing it now!” Klaus shouted at the top of his lungs. He was ready for annihilation, and he wanted it to happen in a timely manner.

  “Okay, sir, give us ten minutes, and we’ll have the Tomahawk fired at the mountain ridge. The estimated catastrophe region of the bombsite will be in a radius of forty-five miles. Anyplace in that area will be uninhabitable for two hundred years, sir. The nearby lake may end up bringing the fallout closer to Section 8. That could cause the fallout from the bomb to spread anywhere between one hundred and one thousand miles,” the voice on the intercom said.

  Klaus could hear the stutter in the speech of the logistics person he was talking to. If anything, it made Klaus appreciate the historic moment he was about to make a reality. A nuclear bomb hadn’t been fired in twenty-eight years. Britain was nuked by the Germans and had remained absolutely desolate and barren since then. The Commander didn’t care that part of New Germania would also suffer the same fate. Something had to be done regarding the Jew and the traitor, and Klaus was certain he would be the one to end it.

  “Just do what I say, and have that fucking rocket up in the air as soon as possible. If you don’t, I’ll find you myself and shove the damn missile down your throat!”

  The Commander took his finger off the button and sat back in his chair. The weight of the Empire rested on his shoulders, and the chair he was sitting on squeaked under the immense pressure. It was safe to say that Klaus was ready for a new era in New Germania. It was an era that he imagined he would rule in, and all domestic warfare with the rebels would be met with swift, precise, and deadly action.

  “You will be crushed under my aggression,” he said to himself. To whom he was directing the statement was not clear, but whoever stepped in front of the Commander now was surely going to end up with a bullet in the head for their trouble.

  Chapter Fourteen

  On A Mountainside, New Germania.

  I opened my eyes to see Jerry standing over me with a grin on his face. The trees were still shaking, and the pain in my head was steadily growing stronger.

  “You sure like being knocked for six, don’t you?” I heard him say.

  At first I couldn’t hear much, but once I got my hearing back, Jerry’s annoying voice began to rattle in my ears.

  “Just help me up. Can’t believe my damn luck sometimes,” I said.

  Jerry gave me his hand and hoisted me up. I jumped to my feet and touched my head. It felt a little warm and sticky.

  “It’s just a cut, man. A branch landed on you. It was a big branch, but you seem all right,” Jerry said, still grinning from ear to ear.

  “I thought a tree landed on me or something,” I said, trying to catch my breath. The sounds of explosions had stopped, and I figured the Germans had ceased bombing the farm. All around us, a thick, heavy layer of smoke clung onto the air as we tried to breathe. It was no use. The whole mountainside seemed to be layered in a dusty smog that turned the day into dusk.

  “Nah, you were that close to one, but you lucked out. We need to get going before more than trees fall on us,” Jerry said, turning around and continuing down the ridge. I looked on and saw how far we were from the winding road below. We were at least a thousand feet. Just like that winding staircase that went on forever at the rebel compound I’d stayed in the day before, I knew that this endeavor to get to the bottom was going to cost us some energy.

  “Wait a second, Jerry. We can’t just traverse the damn cliff face like this. We need to think of a plan. It will take days to get to that road!”

  It was a good job the bombs had stopped falling. Jerry wouldn’t have heard me if they were still dropping out of the sky like they were. He turned around a few feet from me and nodded.

  “I’m well ahead of you on that,” he said. He pointed to a large piece of sheet metal that was lodged between a tree and a rock. He went over to it and pulled it out of the double grip it was entangled in. It must have come from the farm during the explosions. It looked out of place in the leafy cliff face we were standing on. Trees and bushes surrounded us. The metal sheet stood out like a sore pimple just below your lips.

  “What the hell are we going to do with that?” I asked.

  “You’ll see,” Jerry said as he got to work.

  He started to bend the ends of the sheet metal. It didn’t look too thick, so it must have been relatively easy to do. I lost interest in what he was doing when I spotted something in the distance, down the slope. The mountain ridge seemed to slope on for miles, but in reality it was only about a thousand feet until the road below. There were rocks and trees everywhere, but right in front of us was an undisturbed flat piece of slope that seemed to stretch down the cliff all the way to the bottom. The road in question was a dirt road, and it wound downward. It looked as if it was leading somewhere, but where, I had no clue. I looked back at Jerry, who had finished his abomination, and he gave me a wink.

  “Ever been sledding?” he asked.

  I had no idea what that meant. And then he placed the metal sheet on the dusty ground, aligned to the flat sloping bit I had spotted earlier.

  “Oh, my God, you aren’t seriously thinking of doing what I think you’re doing?” I asked.

  “Hop on!” Jerry said.

  He got onto the sheet. It was big enough to fit maybe two people on, as far as death traps go, that is. He held onto the bent metal piece he’d contorted at the front. There was a bent bit at the back as well. I wasn’t overly excited about sitting on this so-called “sled.”

  “No, I will not hop on! Are you mad, Jerry? Do you seriously think we’ll survive such a trip
down the mountain? We’ll be barrel rolling before you can say ‘go,’” I said.

  Jerry nodded. He turned his head to face me and dug his feet into the ground. He was sitting on that thing like it was a bucking bronco. He looked as if he was trying to tame the metal beast and stop it hurtling off onto the slope.

  “I don’t know about you, Abel, but I’m pretty tired of cheating death. You see, if we survive the fall, at least we’ll have cheated death some more and go about our boring lives! If we do die, at least we won’t have to cheat death anymore!”

  I smiled. I couldn’t help it. Jerry was right. As stupid and idiotic as one would have to be to go sledding down a mountain on a piece of flimsy metal, we didn’t have much of a choice. Either die on a sled, or die at the hands of the Germans. Or worse, take two days to get down the mountain carefully, only to die of thirst. So I decided to hop on.

  “Okay, how do we do this?” I said, getting onto the back.

  “Hold onto my waist. We’ll probably have to lean to the right to keep from tipping. If we can get down this slope and stay on the flat part, avoiding all the trees and rocks, we should be okay!”

  I grinned. I didn’t care anymore. We had been shot at all day, chased around the mountainside, hunted by lions, and locked up like prisoners. Sledding down the mountainside seemed like the only plausible thing to do!

  “Hold on, buddy!” Jerry said as I clung onto his waist, digging my head into his shoulders like an embarrassingly intimate man-hug from the back.

  “Let’s do this,” I yelled. And to my surprise, we did do it. We did it very fast!

  “SHIT!!!!!!!!” I said as Jerry kicked his feet off the slope and we both went sliding down the mountain. We tucked our bodies in tight and hoped for the best.

  I was just hoping that I wouldn’t be knocked out by any more trees this time. Two was enough for a day.

  Chapter Fifteen

  A Motel, Section 45, Germany