His single arm was attached tightly at the wrist to a thick rope fastened above to an iron beam. Cricket held on to him and used her knife to cut the rope and lower the man to the floor. He was tall and of good build, but he felt sickeningly light as he collapsed against her, a man hollowed out by a great loss. She gently lowered him to the floor and in the process nearly threw up inhaling his hours of terror, stale sweat, and urine.
“My children…” the man uttered and closed his eyes, mercifully passing out in her arms.
She examined the severed arm and saw bone protruding from the burnt skin. Keeping him alive for more torture, or…
The monsters above still slept soundly. He never told her how many, but she’d cover every room before taking any action. Maybe the ghouls all slept together. She remembered the leftist radical and bomber Bill Ayers talking about destroying monogamy, forcing everyone to sleep with everyone else, including those of the same sex, even if one wasn’t so inclined. Perhaps these monsters were of the same tribe, destroying the old world in every niche of its beating heart.
Cricket climbed the steps and turned off the flashlight before opening the basement door.
50
The Dream of Monsters
Before leaving the kitchen, Cricket glanced out the back and side windows and no longer saw Sister and Diesel. At the entrance to the living room, she paused and listened. She was startled by the wind that gusted, pressing against a house once full of love and dreams. But nothing like love stirred from the living room or the floors above her.
Once in the living room, she saw a half dozen in sleeping bags and covers pulled from beds. One beautiful quilt of blues and muted gold was wrapped around a couple sleeping spoon fashion. Gun out, she walked closer for a better look, and both of them, perhaps early twenties, had blood in their hair. But it wasn’t theirs. She saw that the girl’s bare arm was blood-smeared, not from an injury but from a ritual, probably a ritual made up on the spot. Another couple, naked atop their sleeping bag, had designs written in blood down their chests.
Cricket felt nauseous and had to leave. She was glad she had had only coffee and canned fruit that morning. However, the lack of any serious protein and fat in the food, the walking, and now this made her wobbly, and she nearly kicked the couple closest to the doorway. Thankfully, they all slept soundly, cocooned in the shadow of sex and feasting.
The other rooms on the first floor were empty. At the bottom of the steps she grabbed the Glock .380 and slipped it into her coat pocket. She kept the extra magazines for the two guns in two different pockets. She had fifteen rounds before she’d have to reload either gun.
She started up and heard bedsprings slam once and a few guttural sounds. She’d check the lovers’ room last. In the first bedroom, once a young girl’s room with its farm-green walls and boy-band posters, another couple slept with their faces buried in each other’s crotches. Unlike the blood-smeared couple downstairs, this couple were fresh and clean.
In the shadows of the dresser top, she witnessed an unbelievable sight. The arm of the father lay atop the dresser amidst clothes and jewelry strewn about. The hand of the severed arm held a baseball-size rock bound tightly with light rope. The killing end was wet with blood. A weapon used against other family members?
Cricket left the room quickly and wanted to run down the stairs and out of the house and keep running.
51
Ajax’s Observations
Ajax settled into a corner a few feet above the cold cement floor. He simultaneously slid between visions of himself in bed catching a midwinter nap and as a floating thing whose shape and boundaries continually shifted. This black-on-black world had deepened due to the place and the fool’s dying on the floor, dying in despair.
The one-armed wretch had watched his children being killed and eaten and his wife raped before he suffered the loss of his right arm, hacked off by an ax he had used for years and rarely sharpened. Ajax mused on what was worse: the decades-long horror of domesticity or the rubbing out of one’s entire family in a single evening.
He knew his queen had inhaled the foul smells of the man’s agony, but he had nothing resembling a nose or even a pair of nostrils anywhere on his mass. Yet he experienced it as a physical sensation, a finger poked deep inside his new body, a trembling along his cobweb filaments. Ajax laughed and then excused himself to the dying man, who spiraled deeper into his newfound hell of pain and disillusionment. Ajax didn’t hear or feel curses directed at the Creator, only the bitter “why” asked ad nauseam.
In the rooms above, he could hear his queen moving from room to room, her hate growing, her vengeance coming. He glided back to his warm, quiet bedroom and noticed a smile on his sleeping human face and thought, How angelic.
He made his prayer to the Destroyer of all things, thankful for his meal that would soon float toward the orifice poorly named his mouth. For as beautiful as he was in his everyday body, this Ajax was a monster that defied description.
He heard the man struggling for another breath. How strange, how hypocritical, he thought, suffering such a loss and greedy for another breath or two. Humans, always thinking of themselves.
Ajax had grown tired of remaining passive for his coming meal, and detached himself from the wall and in spider fashion scurried to the man and crawled onto his chest. The man was aware of something unclean touching him, and he turned his head in disgust, believing his stench had created the sensation.
Ajax heard the man’s heart fly into arrhythmia, a fast, useless activity preceding death, and waited anxiously knowing his queen needed him for inspiration.
He pressed his mass into the man, desiring to speed up the death process, when the man called to the God of love. Instantly the man was answered and a great peace washed over the broken body. Ajax yelled obscenities and furiously tried to tear at the body without success. A moment glided by and the man was gone. No feast.
In rage Ajax ascended toward the upper rooms of the house. Now a new stench, the man’s despair, clung to him.
52
Getting Even
In the hallway, slowing down her breathing, making a plan, Cricket heard a strange noise from the “lover’s nest.” The loud moaning was horrible, and she knew it came from a person gagged. She raced into the bedroom and saw a naked, bearded man holding a knife, and the gagged, tied-up mother bleeding from a deep cut across her throat. Cricket’s yell exploded with the Colt .45, and the murderer met Death: the ultimate killer and robber of all earthly things. Cricket paused for a moment, and though it was dangerous to be distracted, she needed to make a short prayer, since there would be no other who would pray for this woman in the moments following her death. She sent the mother a prayer, saying she wasn’t alone and was soon to be reconnected with her family.
Cricket ran back to the room of the sleeping couple, who were no longer sleeping but scrambling for weapons. She didn’t process what weapons they held and fired or threw, but deftly took aim and crushed both their skulls with fat 45-caliber rounds.
She heard shouting and running from downstairs. Then the front door slammed. Names were called out. No one answered from upstairs. Halfway down the steps, Cricket opened fire into the living room before seeing a single monster. More screams. Curses. She was heading toward the living room when a groggy woman stumbled from the kitchen with a large knife and a string of incoherent F-bombs. Cricket destroyed her chest.
Cricket had reached the kitchen and wouldn’t run out the back. She pulled the .380 from her ankle and fired both guns at the screaming man who flew into the kitchen firing an AR-15. Gun and savage skidded across the floor, his life ending in a comic sprawl as he tried to scramble away, across his own blood smear, before shaking and dying.
The front door opened, and the remaining monsters were taking flight. She stood on the front steps and took aim with her newly acquired AR-15 at the cowards, who were better at murdering children and tied-up adults than fighting face-to-face. She downed two quickly, and
the third was taken out by a neighbor who had come out of her house with a pistol-grip shotgun. The two women just stared at each other until Cricket lowered her weapon.
Other neighbors emerged.
“What happened to the Conways?” a neighbor asked.
“Killers,” Cricket answered. “I need to go back and check on the monsters. I’ll let you know when it’s all clear.”
She circled around back and again entered through the back door. She waited in the kitchen and listened. The half-naked guy in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor was very dead, with an eye missing and a ragged hole where his mouth used to be.
She moved slowly to the other rooms and found the dead ones striking poses of doom: legs splayed and twisted, arms bent backward, heads torqued away from their bodies, and blood everywhere. Before climbing the steps, she listened.… Although the family members would never walk these rooms again, Cricket almost could hear snatches of conversations: complaints about daily struggles, the love given to dreams.
Halfway up the steps, she stopped and thought she heard movement from the bedroom where the wife had been killed. She glanced inside the room of her first kill. All was frozen at the time of death. She brought the Colt up with both hands and charged into the room. The killer-rapist had lifted himself onto the bed and raised one arm, signaling surrender.
Cricket said, “I thought I killed you just a few minutes ago. Did hell revive you?”
“That’s funny,” the man wheezed, applying pressure to the wound high on his chest.
Cricket shot the dresser and then swung quickly around facing out, keeping the man on the bed still in her sights. Someone with some juice remaining might be attracted to the action and come running. No one came. The man on the bed waved his free arm; the other, shot up and useless.
“You can turn me over to the Patriarchs. They’ll put me in jail. They’re straight-up guys.”
“I don’t think so.”
The man repeated “wait!” several times until a single round entered his cheek and shattered his face.
53
Homeward Bound
In the basement she found the father dead. Somehow she was sure the man was at peace, along with his family. That fact had to be true. She felt the final reckoning of the damned and the good standing there in the cold basement.
At the house that night, she didn’t touch her food and said little. Fritz asked her to go flying with him the next day, and she refused.
“You can handle the scouting on your own. Give me a couple days.”
“I’ll give whatever time you need. Two sternwheelers just left Louisville today, headed our way.”
The slavery dots began to connect quickly. Fritz said Sergeant Wills believed that a big shipment of slaves was moving out soon—the last big roundup before the weather worsened.
Cricket quietly sipped tea with Sister Marie and the girls that night. Lee Ann’s questions took time to answer, overshadowed by the brutalized family and the horror of the father dying in the basement. She now doubted that any peace had accompanied the man in the last moments of his life. She looked past the girls and watched the dark hallway and dining room, sensing that something, only feet away, was creeping animal-like from room to room. Had terror tagged along?
“What are your plans tomorrow?” Lee Ann asked.
Tomorrow didn’t feel like a new day, a place to start fresh. She’d awaken with the same disturbing visions she’d never be able to forget.
Cricket struggled to keep from crying. “Keeping you safe, sweetie.”
“I heard from Elaine that the scientist’s trial would be wrapping up tomorrow,” Sister Marie said. “I’ll go with you. The two Bobs, Elaine, and Fritz will be here.”
“We’ll be safe,” Lily added.
“You’re brave girls,” Cricket said, and the two of them rushed into her arms. “I love you both very much.” A few tears escaped, and the house once again felt free of anything malignant.
Cricket would summon her last bit of energy for the girls, for the handful of human beings in her life, but she didn’t have the energy for the trial. Her testimony had been interrupted, and she was due to take the stand again. Her game of defending the woman through basic Constitutional freedoms seemed a waste of time. The scientist would just get a slap on the wrist. It wasn’t the return of slavery or ghouls murdering a family.
“Becca said she’d be leaving in early morning,” Sister informed Cricket. “You’re starting to fade. I’ll give the mullein tea credit.”
Cricket’s body was slowing down for sleep. Fritz was already in bed.
Cricket finished a last swallow of the warm tea. “While we’re out, I want to stop by the hospital and check on Predator. Did you hear anything today when you got back?”
“Becca said he slept most of the day and is in good hands.”
54
Patriarchs
In the car, on the way to the trial the next morning—spring-like weather, sun, and soft clouds—Cricket asked Becca why she was so adamant about this show trial.
“I guess I want to show folks the dangers of unscientific thought.”
“I talked to Beth as well,” Sister said. “She came by her ideas through research. This is a dangerous path.”
“Because the lights are out is why we need it. Americans have been spoiled by a world that entertains and gives them excessive creature comforts that are unsustainable.”
“What kind of world do you want to sustain?” Cricket asked.
“Less people using less resources.”
Sister said, “I believe you would stifle human genius. We can’t expect to control every impulse. What seems arrogant, selfish, even mean sometimes in science and the arts can so often lead to benefits for all. And the best way to curb extreme selfishness is the return to a God-directed life.”
“Becca, I know you want to do what’s right for the people of Cincinnati.” Cricket ran over Becca’s response to Sister, and the two women talked over each other.
“We’re laying the groundwork for a new world,” Becca insisted. “What happens in this city is a blueprint for the future, for the rest of the country, even the world. Whether or not the lights come back on means nothing.”
Cricket answered, “Sorry, I think it’s real important that the lights come back on. People are dying without medicine, especially the old. Our doctors, our cops don’t have the tools to keep people healthy and safe. Technology is dead. A child or someone’s grandparent can die because there’s no ambulance to come and pick them up.”
Becca said nothing. Cricket talked more of the horrors of everyday life, including the family that had been murdered.
“It’s a shame people are so coddled by this unsustainable world we’ve manufactured.” Becca folded her arms and looked out the side window.
“I don’t know, I think it’s a good thing that our food rarely kills us. I grew up with opportunities for happiness and fulfillment the world has never known.”
“It’s all so selfish.” Becca looked to her driver, who nodded his large head in agreement.
“You’re laying the groundwork for the slavery of mankind,” Sister Marie said.
“That’s ridiculous, Sister. I despise slavery, and if it tries to make a comeback, I’ll squash it out of existence.”
“We’ve seen evidence that it’s already back,” she countered. “If you joined forces with the Patriarchs, you’d be able to destroy them.”
Becca turned to them in the back seat. “Their entire philosophy is about slavery. They killed my father because he wanted to see people live in freedom.”
Finished talking, Becca faced out at the sidewalks that were clearing of snow due to the unseasonably warmer air mass moving into southern Ohio. Fritz had learned from Cleveland Command that the Canadians had reported an Arctic front swooping down across the middle of a Canada, potentially upending the atmosphere and producing a lot of snow.
Cricket had the last word. “Becca, I’ve met w
ith the Patriarchs.”
55
Punishment
Becca was furious and hadn’t spoken another word to Sister and Cricket, seated alongside them behind the defense counsel’s table.
Beth turned to them and said she was not going to take the stand again.
Becca stared at the scientist, let a moment pass, and then smiled. “Wise move.”
Cricket tried to explain how the Patriarchs had saved her on Christmas Eve, when she was being hunted down by Burners. No response followed. Would they lose their happy home? Since yesterday’s horror, Cricket believed she had again added to the loss and chaos of an upside-down world. She hadn’t sought Sister’s counsel, and had just blurted out her connection with and support of the Patriarchs.
The trial started, and Judge Maxine’s mean streak widened. She glared at Cricket, who was called to the stand.
“Speak out of turn, try to turn the tables on the prosecutor, start asking him the questions, and you’ll land in jail.” The judge leaned back and kept the gavel pressed against her breast, as if to say, My cudgel is my heart.
The prosecutor approached the stand.
“Last time we were trying to understand your credentials when the lights went out.” He glanced at his paper. “You answered that you are an American.”
Laughter from the courtroom.
“What does that mean?” he asked without smiling.
“I’m a citizen who accepts our founding, our legal system, our philosophy derived from the Declaration of Independence. Your—”
“Stop right there,” the prosecutor said, looking at the judge, who slammed her gavel. “Asked and answered. You’re an American citizen without any knowledge about the subject of this trial.”
American Blackout (Book 3): Gangster Town Page 16