Coming around the leading edge, worried she may have missed something, she again inspected the gun rack for obstructions. Under the wing, hundreds of rounds were packed and ready for use. At the nose of the plane she took a deep breath and examined the prop more closely, not only for nicks, but to admire the blades that gave the Mustang such speed and grace.
Redwing blackbirds owned the summer field, and turkey buzzards glided overhead. All other sounds of potential trouble—voices, war cries, vehicles blasting through the forest or along a nearby road—were absent.
She felt more alone than when she was left with the burning vehicles and her dad’s lifeless body. The Brazilian’s brief appearance had only added to the unreality of death and loss that day.
The surrounding forest felt empty. Cricket shuddered.
She wished to hear the rowdy sound of Fritz’s jeep or the mechanics’ hippie van puttering to the rescue.
She didn’t need a watch; the first hour had passed, and the sun announced early afternoon.
Cricket climbed back into the cockpit and retrieved the jerky and a bottle of water, and then found refuge from the hot sun under the wing, sitting against the left main tire. She pulled the 9-millimeter, checked the magazine, and felt for extras in her vest. Too hot for the vest but she kept it on. She liked having pockets and liked that it was once Claire’s, and maybe a lot of teenage mojo was still pressed into the smooth leather.
The slight breeze that cooled her ended. Silence took hold of the grassy field. She looked at the Queen Anne’s lace and chicory—summer’s accessories—and no longer saw their beauty. The plants had started to shrivel, past their prime. The chicory’s blue flowers looked shabby, and the wide face of Queen Anne’s lace curling in on itself looked more like a large spider.
She remembered that the road near this alternate landing strip was a mere half mile away, with easy access through a sparsely wooded forest. She listened for Fritz and company.
All the markers of summer were fading. This place was as desolate as an abandoned factory in an abandoned industrial park. And in that emptiness there echoed crimes committed by nature herself. Had there been an Indian, or a settler, who had died here violently, alone? A storm that had briefly threatened and then retreated, tricking a lone traveler, sure of his safety, into the open, only to be struck by lightning? Wolves, a rogue bear? Could their cries echo through time and space and wither the petals too soon or singe away a flower’s brightness, its handsome color?
And then there was the saber-tooth tiger, the famous sit-and-wait predator. She had laughed when her biology teacher first mentioned it in high school. “How ferocious,” she had playfully baited the teacher. There wasn’t even positive proof the animal roamed Ohio. Fossil evidence had only been found in surrounding states. Now she wondered about its size and if in a field like this it could decide to lie down and not be seen.
Cricket shook her head and laughed.
“Better to scare myself on a sunny afternoon than at three in the morning.”
She leaned her head back on the tire and stretched her neck gently, a moment of pleasure, relief from ancient tigers and empty fields. She closed her eyes and must have fallen asleep. She awoke startled, sweat again moistening the back of her shirt. She crawled out from under the wing and watched a child come dancing from the forest. A young girl in a blue dress was dancing to a lively tune. For her ears only. And then the screams came.
Cricket raced toward the girl, touching the automatic, ready to protect her from some monster of the Pleistocene epoch or a present-day maniac bolting from the forest running the girl down.
Cricket became aware of the cloud of yellow jackets attacking the girl as the girl became aware of Cricket. But the child had no energy to be pleased or disappointed. She was fighting an enemy that couldn’t be struck down, throttled, or stamped out of existence. Cricket twirled the girl around and brushed and smacked at her dress, arms, and legs. There was no first sting for Cricket but multiple ones, and she picked up the girl who struggled in her arms and ran for the plane.
She ran fast but the bites and stings came anyway. The worst to her face and scalp. The girl whimpered and twisted against Cricket’s body. Near the plane the attack lessened, and she veered away from the Mustang and kept running. She didn’t want the wasps to know about the P-51 and the open canopy and numerous niches to invade seeking food and shelter.
Her lungs ached and she kept to a big circle outside of the plane. Finally, the yellow jackets gave up the chase. Her arms and face burned and the girl was staring at her, tears running down a swollen face. She gently lowered the girl, who had to be no older than ten and held on to her.
“Honey, where are your parents?” Cricket asked.
The girl started to sob and slipped from Cricket’s arm. Cricket caught her at the waist and walked her toward the airplane.
“I think they’re all dead. I was outside and I hid when the men and women came. They were all mean-looking, ugly, and I had to cry real quietly, especially for my little brother Ryan.”
The girl shook with grief, and Cricket knelt in front of her.
“You did nothing wrong. Honey, what’s your name?”
“Grace.”
“Grace, if those people had seen you they would have hurt you, too. Your parents wanted you to live. Because they loved you so much.”
The girl hugged Cricket and wouldn’t let go.
“I’m going to take you away from here. A place with lots of good men and good women and children.”
The girl looked up and stared at Cricket.
“Will I be as pretty as you someday?”
“Much prettier.”
“I don’t think so,” she said, her voice dropping a register, the register of a child’s common sense. “Is that your plane?”
“Yes, it is. But first, I’m going to wash these bites before we go for a short flight, which I bet you’ll enjoy.”
“I’ve only been up in a helicopter. Will I get sick?”
“No time to get sick, Grace. Maybe ten minutes. I’ll make it smooth, and you get to look out at the beautiful countryside.”
“This place isn’t very beautiful.”
“I know.”
Grace never complained about the yellow jacket attack and only grimaced when the warm water was poured over the many bites and stings. With the young girl’s face swollen, her eyes half closed, Cricket guided here up the wing and helped her into the cockpit. Grace breathed a long “wow” seeing the jumble of controls and round-dial instruments.
With Grace strapped firmly in the rear seat wearing earplugs and the headset mostly resting on her shoulders, Cricket hit the primer for a second and started the engine. As it warmed up, she was startled to see the generator output at zero on the ammeter. She quickly remembered that her experience was with alternator-driven systems that immediately produced a current. Idling at thirteen hundred rpm, the Mustang’s generator needed fifteen hundred rpm to start operating. Until then, anything electrical was powered by the battery.
All was normal, and Cricket briefly closed her eyes and thanked God for the health of the airplane. The cool prop blast gave her and Grace much-needed relief.
She S-turned the All-American fighter, not that she would hit a tree or a parked car, but she worried about savages surprising them or something worse. Thinking, scanning the field and forest on either side of the plane, she nervously tapped each flight instrument, an old habit of her father’s before taking the Cub airborne. “A needle could be sticking,” he’d like to say.
Before swinging around for takeoff, she caught herself absentmindedly tapping the gear handle, the control Fritz had warned would raise the landing gear on the ground if she experienced a serious enough brain fart. Anxiety tightened her stomach, and she took a deep breath, fighting to regain her situational awareness. She closed the canopy and ran the checklist. It was early evening when she lifted off for the short flight back to civilization.
Climbing into a
n electric blue sky, Cricket added a line of a prayer at the end of the after-takeoff checklist, picked up a southwest heading at three thousand feet, and tore across the summer countryside. Below lay a rich earth of gold fields and long shadows. Grace repeated a litany of beautiful this and beautiful that. They both had escaped hell’s spillover.
Minutes later, Cricket came across the field just above the trees at two hundred miles per hour and saw the American flag strung across several trees at the west end of the field. She yelled her satisfaction and Grace cheered, too. For now, good had won out against evil.
The cockpit was quiet until final approach, when she heard Grace crying. Adjusting power and pitch, Cricket knew that this girl was waking up to a brave new world without her parents and brother.
At touchdown Grace talked rapidly as the plane rolled hard along the ground.
Fritz opened the canopy.
“Lord, what happened to you, Cricket? And who is this beautiful young lady?”
“Fritz, meet Grace. Grace, this is Captain Fritz Holaday. The guy who checked me out in this bird.”
“Hi, Captain Fritz,” Grace said, being helped from the cockpit by the aviator. “I don’t have anywhere to go. But Cricket rescued me. She’s strong and beautiful and real brave. And we both got stung a whole bunch.”
“Yeah, I can see that.”
“Everything secure here?” Cricket looked worried.
“For the moment. I’ll debrief you once we get Grace over to my parents.” He studied Grace with a smile. “Sweetie, you’re tough and beautiful too after surviving all those damn wasps. We’ll start with some Benadryl at my parents’ and a cool bath. How’s that?”
“That would be wonderful.”
Fritz passed Grace to Frank, who lifted her off the edge of the wing.
Fritz said, “This is my good friend, and he’s going to get you something to drink before we go.”
“Are you a pilot?” she asked Frank.
“That’s right. Since I was your age.”
“Wow, that’s a long time ago. I bet you were bigger than me.”
“Smaller actually.”
Fritz and Cricket followed down the wing.
“Grace is right; you are beautiful.” Fritz paused. “Even with a face full of wasp stings.”
He turned away from Cricket to answer a question from one of the mechanics checking over the plane. He started to take a step toward the Mustang when she spun him back around and planted a big kiss on his mouth.
She pushed away, holding on to his shirt. “You don’t call me beautiful and walk away.”
“Yeah, you’re right.” He pulled her close and returned the kiss.
Fritz drove and they held hands. Frank sat in back with Grace.
It was dark when they made it to the Holadays’ residence. Judy and Sister Marie made a big fuss over their new guest and went to work bathing her, patting her skin with a big fluffy towel until she was dry. They applied ointment and removed stingers where they could find them.
Frank left with the jeep and was staying with friends on the south side of town. On the front porch Cricket held Fritz’s hand tightly, telling him all about Grace’s nightmare and hearing more terrible news.
“Cricket, an entire family was found dead this morning, ten minutes from here. Maybe the same gang that did the drive-by at the airstrip today. It crossed my mind they were testing us. Never even saw them. Sorry, I couldn’t leave to get you. I expected them back. Unfortunately, they found easy pickins at this expensive housing development. Ugly, ritual-style killings.”
“Children?”
“Three.”
“Who found them?”
“The neighbors. They awoke to obscenities written all over the outside of the home. The monsters advertised.”
“From what Grace told me, her family was probably killed last night, too.”
“Horrible.”
“You think the Brazilian had anything to do with it?”
“That’s a real stretch, Cricket. She’s obnoxious. Big ego. Possibly a drug dealer. And loves being the zaniest character in town.”
Cricket smiled at the use of “zany” before saying, “We need to get the word out to the folks around town. We have a small army of killer ghouls that need to be dealt with.”
“It all could be random.”
Mrs. Holaday walked outside and smiled at her son and Cricket holding hands.
“Grace wants to say goodnight. To both of you.”
The young girl was in Mrs. Holaday’s pajamas and sound asleep. Diesel lay at the foot of the bed on the floor, his warm eyes asking, How am I doing?
“You’re great, Diesel,” Cricket whispered. They watched Grace for a few minutes and went back downstairs and sat with Ron and Tony on the porch.
“Connecting the ugly dots,” Tony said. “I’m good at it.”
“If they were connected we’d have an enemy with a face,” Ron insisted, “and we don’t. How do we protect ourselves from chaos? The world’s guts have spilled onto the floor. What’s out there is chaos.”
“Sounds like an ivory-tower lecture to me.”
“Tony,” Ron hissed, “stop making right-wing talking points. Look at what we’re dealing with. And it’s not good guys and bad guys.”
Fritz said, “Well, some really bad people murdered two families last night.”
Ron hung his head in serious thought.
Cricket glanced inside to see Sister Marie headed for the kitchen and then to the stairs leading to the second floor, where Grace was sleeping. “A lot of precious souls inside. I’ve got first watch.”
27
Patron of the Arts
“Hope for what?” Cricket asked the man dressed in black, wearing long sleeves on a day promising to be warm. It was early morning and it had stormed overnight, leaving puddles along the uneven sidewalks of Little Falls.
“For stopping the modern world,” the man announced. Earlier he had introduced himself as Anton. He casually observed the Brazilian in a white leotard exercising in the park with a half dozen children and a semicircle of nervous parents quietly watching. Cricket observed his dilated pupils but saw no other signs of drug use, unless it was a drug that gave one the personality of an arrogant fine-dining manager.
“It’s already been stopped,” Fritz said.
The man raised his chin, a gesture of the anointed from the tribe of culinary arts. “We want this current state of affairs forever. No going back to machines and computers.”
“And the plan is?”
“You’re watching it,” Anton said, using his chin to point at the Brazilian.
“Jazzercise had its heyday,” Fritz said. “It didn’t change the world much.”
“What, yearning for disco, or just the glittering ball?” Cricket wanted to bust his jaw.
Anton ignored her, facing the Brazilian. “Children understand the really important things in life.”
“So what’s being taught here?” Cricket asked.
“Love of the body. I’m not a dancer myself. I find my expression in painting. I’ve had showings in SoHo.”
“Oh, is that so?” Cricket said, and Anton frowned. “You probably have a card you’d like to give us.”
“Young lady, you’re not very funny. Cards and showings, marketing yourself, are no longer important anyway. The Brazilian has taught me that. She once broke a man’s arm at one of my last exhibits in Cleveland. It was a great way to exit the commercialism of the art world. The man had been looking at one of my paintings, up close, sniffing the thing actually, which was awfully disgusting. He made an ugly face, pointing at a bluebird on the wing: ‘What the hell is that supposed to be—a bird?’ The Brazilian swiftly grabbed him at the elbow and the wrist and snapped the bone like it was a dead tree branch.”
“Wow, a real patron of the arts,” Cricket said, watching Anton’s mentor move through her steps. “Great teaching style.”
Starting out with tai chi, the moves quickly took on a dec
idedly sexual tone with hip bumps and the Brazilian telling the kids to pretend they were climbing a long pole that “goes straight to heaven,” adding, “Come up with moves you think would quicken your move toward paradise.”
The adults looked at each other, though none openly expressed their displeasure.
The man with the cane hobbled up.
“This is Electron Larry the Scientist,” Anton quipped, smiling at the kids, now on their backs thrusting their hips into the air.
“Mr. Scientist, what say you?” Cricket asked. “Your job ends soon when this new earthly paradise arrives.”
The man looked around like he had a thousand ideas on his plate and no time to express a single one. Cricket felt his anxiety, his hatred—for what? The old world as Anton and the Brazilian described it? For Cricket and everyone she loved? He focused on the Brazilian and the children.
Finally, Anton said, “Larry, tell these folks your story.”
“I’m an electrical engineer. Was, that is. Early spring, before the solar flare, I was on my bike and got struck by a car. I don’t get around like I used to.”
“Where’s your family?” Cricket said.
“I’m not married,” the man said, looking at the ground.
“So, you’re onboard with this new-world business?” Fritz asked.
The man watched the children and the Brazilian. One couple pulled their young teenage daughter from the group and were openly fighting with the Brazilian. She told the children to ignore the flare-up and to feel golden light shoot up their spine to the top of their head.
“Who the hell do you think you are?” the father said, face to face with the Brazilian. She had to stop her steroid-designed bodyguard from coming after the man. The heavy-jawed white male had a six-inch-tall blonde Mohawk and piercings everywhere. The Brazilian controlled him by simply caressing his sculpted bicep for a moment. The father grabbed his daughter, who called him a dork for pulling her away from the group in the middle of an exercise.
The Brazilian called out to the parents who were dragging their girl down the street: “It’s called exercise. Very American.” She turned to the kids. “That’s enough for today. Same time tomorrow. Right here beneath this glorious morning sun we’ll keep building our physical and spiritual chops. Really learn to love ourselves and feel our female power, especially you young boys.”
Pulse of the Goddess: American Blackout Book One Page 14
