Nightwalker 3

by Frank Roderus

  Wolfe laid a finger over his lips and smiled and motioned for Laffrey’s two girls to step into the bathroom. The girls looked frightened, but there was no telling what, if anything, they might have been told about this white-haired madman who came among them like an avenging whirlwind. The two of them jumped off the bed and scampered out of sight, pulling the bathroom door shut behind them. Wolfe heard the click of a lock being set.

  “Looks like we’re alone, Kent,” he said.

  “I-I didn’t—look, mister, M-Mr. Wolfe, I can explain! It isn’t what you think! I can explain, really I can!”

  “I believe you, Kent. I really do. Didn’t I just say how right you were about the plan to defend Delaney? Doesn’t that prove how smart you are? How successful? I believe everything you tell me, Kent. I’m just like Lieutenant Columbo that way.”

  “Oh, Jesus!” Laffrey moaned. Wolfe could see a stain spreading across the bedding as Laffrey’s terror caused him to wet himself.

  Wolfe reached down and took hold of the man, wrapped his fingers around Laffrey’s throat, and looked into the trembling man’s eyes.

  “Don’t!” Laffrey whispered. “Please don’t!”

  “It is not my place to judge you, Kent Laffrey,” Wolfe said softly. “But I will send you before the one who will judge you and all you’ve done.”

  “I’ll tell you-tell you anything! A-anything!”

  “Anything?” Wolfe asked.

  Laffrey shook his head vigorously. “Please?” He began to cry.

  “Where is Rebecca Morrison?”

  “Who?”

  “The girl from Tifton who escaped with me. I saw them tie her and throw her into one of the wagons. She wasn’t murdered along with the others whose blood is on your hands. Where is Rebecca now?”

  “M-Mistress Alethia, she took the girl, she has her now… had her the last I knew, anyway!”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’ll let me go now? You really will?” Laffrey begged.

  “No. I really won’t,” Wolfe said.

  His hand contracted like a steel vice, inexorably clamping tightly shut. Laffrey made a faint, muted gurgling sound and went limp.

  Wolfe did not know if Laffrey was faking or not, so he resolved the question by giving his wrist a quick twist, snapping the man’s neck. There would be no faking now.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Wolfe thought about the girls who were hiding in the bathroom. They were capable of giving an alarm, but there was only one sure way to eliminate that possibility. It was a method he would never in good conscience be able to employ. No way could he kill them, for they were as innocent as those poor people of Delaney had been. The girls were victims, not acolytes, and Wolfe could never bring himself to harm them.

  He could tie them up, but that might only anger them, and they still could free themselves or at least manage to make noise to attract attention from people in nearby rooms.

  In the end, he did nothing, nor did he say anything to them. With luck, they would remain in the bathroom hiding. Without luck, he would just have to take his chances. He turned the light off and removed his goggles, then listened at the door for a moment before stepping outside.

  The street was deserted, though he could hear sounds of merriment from somewhere in the next block. Music. But, of course, Paradise had music. Car stereos operated on twelve volts of power, playing the CDs or cassette tapes that were manufactured before the war—if things had been different, but they were not, were they? Paradise, as Alethia constructed it, was an evil place. Sodom and Gomorrah reincarnate and no Paradise at all.

  Still, what Alethia’s followers did here, James Wolfe could duplicate somewhere else. All he needed to do was to find Lurleen and Jojo. Then he, too, could seek out a windmill to spin a belt-driven generator, hook up a few twelve volt lights and a stereo. Oh, my! He could have music again when that day came.

  In the meantime, however, there were things he still had to do here in the town that used to be Tifton.

  He gave a look up and down the street and went around to the back of the motel to retrieve his rifles and ammunition, then started off toward the town square. He did not know where Alethia’s private quarters were, but the courthouse where he had first seen the redhead would be as good a starting point as any.

  He kept to the shadows, the dog trotting closely behind, and he crossed the town without being spotted. The imposing granite face of the courthouse was dark. Wolfe circled around it. There. Lights blazed from four ceiling-high windows on the third floor, and again, he could hear music.

  Back near the motel, the sounds had been of country music. This, incongruously, was Sinatra crooning into the night. Alethia’s taste? It would not surprise him.

  He went back around to the front of the massive courthouse and stood for several minutes, waiting to see if any guards had been posted. If there were, they were being very patient and very still. Wolfe knew he was not going to accomplish anything by standing here waiting to be discovered by some passerby. He took one more slow and searching look all around, then started up the stone steps to the courthouse doors.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  There was a guard, but he had been in the men’s room. Wolfe heard the faint sound of a toilet flushing, and a moment later, saw the thread of light under the bathroom door disappear. The door opened and an armed guard stepped out. He was yawning and carried his M16 slung casually over his shoulder.

  The guard’s eyes went wide when he saw Wolfe coming toward him in the gloom. His mouth opened to shout an alarm, but Wolfe did not give him time. Wolfe chopped the man’s throat with the hard edge of his hand, crushing the guard’s windpipe and silencing him, except for the futile drumming of the man’s heels on the marble floor, and the wet sound of his death rattle a moment later.

  Wolfe took the man by the collar, not waiting for him to finish the important business of dying, and dragged him inside the men’s room. As a final precaution, he stripped the rifle off the guard’s shoulder and slid it across the floor beneath the door to the nearest stall.

  Wolfe poked his head out to make sure there was no one else on duty in the lobby, then took the stairs in a rush. When he got there, Sinatra had been replaced by an instrumental recording. Percy Faith, he thought, although he would not have sworn to that.

  Whoever the artist, the sound guided Wolfe down a long corridor to the back of the building. He guessed this area would have been reserved for the office suites occupied by the judges. The thought probably appealed to Alethia now that she had set herself up as the judge of all she surveyed, complete with the powers of life and death. Well, she’d had her chance to dispense life, had she chosen to do so. Now it would be her turn to experience death.

  The door to Alethia’s quarters was not locked, but then who, after all, would dare intrude on the leader without her consent? Wolfe paused to pull the welding goggles over his eyes—it would not do to let himself be blinded when he went in—then opened the door and stepped inside.

  He stopped dead still once he saw what lay beyond the heavy oak doors. He saw, and he gagged, his gorge rising in his throat. He tried to fight it back, then gave up and spewed the meager contents of his stomach onto the thick carpet in Alethia’s private rooms.

  Never had he seen, never had he imagined anything so terrible as this.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Becca. Poor Becca.

  Wolfe could not imagine the suffering Rebecca had to endure before death brought her a measure of peace at last.

  Rebecca had been stripped naked, and Alethia was naked as well, save for the blood and gore that had splattered onto her, and which now painted much of her lower body a dull red.

  Alethia looked pleased with herself, still haughty. Seated as if on a throne, although this throne was no more than a chair upholstered in gold brocade. Still, she acted very much the queen whose subjects had better obey if they knew what was good for them, acted as if her throne was indeed gold and not mere cloth. The
only problem with her imperious attitude was that Jim Wolfe was not one of her subjects, and none of her guards was close by now.

  Wolfe regained control of himself and, avoiding looking at Becca again, strode purposefully across the room to stand before the devilishly beautiful redhead.

  “Mind your place,” Alethia ordered. “My men will kill you if I wish it.”

  “I don’t think so,” Wolfe said.

  “Come no closer, or I shall scream.”

  “Why is it that I think there’s been a whole lot of screaming in here today? I doubt a little more will draw any attention.”

  “I can kill you myself,” Alethia threatened. “I will do it. I will do to you what I did to her, and I will enjoy it, just as I enjoyed doing this to her.”

  She pointed, but Wolfe’s eyes did not follow the sweep of Alethia’s hand. He saw, therefore, when her hand slipped between her chair’s cushions and emerged with a long, slender dagger.

  Wolfe slapped the knife from her fingers, sending it spinning across the room to bang against the handsome wall paneling and fall harmlessly to the floor.

  “You hurt me!” Alethia complained.

  “No, not yet. But I intend to.”

  Alethia screamed, again and again, and on for what seemed a very long time. And Wolfe was right. None of Alethia’s men responded to her cries. Not a single one of them thought there was anything at all unusual about the sound of pain and terror emanating from that chamber of horrors.

  Eventually, as disgusted with himself as he was with her, Wolfe finished what had to be done and walked away. He wanted to go home now. Home to decency and kindness. Home to family and love.

  “Come on, boy. We have a long way still to travel, you and me.”

  The dog trotted faithfully at his heels as he made his way out into the night, and hurried away from this false Paradise.

  About the Author

  Frank Roderus wrote his first story—it was a western—when he was five. It was really awful, as might be expected, but his mother kept that typed and spell-checked short story tucked away until the day she died.

  Later, Frank became a newspaper reporter, thinking that books are written by authors which he most assuredly was not. He kept trying to write though, and eventually did it wrong enough to learn how to get it right. That first sale, a young adult novel published by Independence Press, was more than thirty years and a good many books ago.

  As a journalist, the Colorado Press Association awarded Frank Roderus their highest award, the Sweepstakes Award, for the best news story of 1980, and the Western Writers of America has twice named Frank recipient of their prestigious Spur Award.

  Frank passed away at age 73 in December 2015.

  Notes - Craig Martelle

  Written April 17, 2019

  Thank you for reading this far! You have my sincere appreciation for sticking with us and reading our stories.

  You are here because you read the first Nightwalker and thought it was good enough to read the second and now the third!

  You are on board and that means you are my favorite reader! I will strive to tell every story better than the last. Keep you guessing and following along as the world changes and Jim Wolfe changes with it. What will his soul look like when he reaches Florida? I hope it is the soul of Easter that a new day will rise, regardless of what he finds.

  I have four more stories in mind should we want to follow Jim Wolfe on his trek home. I think we should. There’s a lot of great things a man will see when he’s walking across America, or what used to be America.

  Frank Roderus passed away in 2015 but he lives in every word he wrote. You get a glimpse of the man in each of these stories as Frank put himself there, in a world torn apart by war, divided by those who have power, suffered by those without. I hope that I’ve done Frank justice with my touch ups on these stories. If you can’t tell the difference, then I have done my job in helping make these good post-apoc tales for the 21st Century.

  Spring has come early to my neck of the woods. It snowed a little last night, but that will melt today and we’ll be back in the 50s by the weekend. This close to the Arctic, we always expect it to be cold. When it’s not, those are bonus days. The northernmost golf course in North America is only a few miles from my house. I think they might open early, like mid-May early. I need to get out this year. I hit balls once last year and didn’t play a single round. I used to play three days a week. But then again, I never expected to retire to a place where the golf courses are open only three to four months out of the year.

  But, my wife is a professor and this is where she is in her tenure track position. I can work from anywhere and do. I write while I travel. We go to places where she’s on vacation, but I’m working. I write, I publish, and I market, then do it all again the next day. But this is the best gig I’ve ever had.

  I hope you enjoy the stories. It’s been a long time in bringing them to you, but now that they have built their foundation, they will continue. Thank you for coming along on this great ride with me.

  Have a great day.

  Books by Frank Roderus

  You can find a list of Frank’s Book available for sale at Amazon.com by clicking this link:

  https://www.amazon.com/Frank-Roderus/e/B001HD3100

  Books by Craig Martelle

  Craig Martelle’s other books (listed by series)

  Terry Henry Walton Chronicles (co-written with Michael Anderle) – a post-apocalyptic paranormal adventure

  Gateway to the Universe (co-written with Justin Sloan & Michael Anderle) – this book transitions the characters from the Terry Henry Walton Chronicles to The Bad Company

  The Bad Company (co-written with Michael Anderle) – a military science fiction space opera

  End Times Alaska (also available in audio) – a Permuted Press publication – a post-apocalyptic survivalist adventure

  The Free Trader – a Young Adult Science Fiction Action Adventure

  Cygnus Space Opera – A Young Adult Space Opera (set in the Free Trader universe)

  Darklanding (co-written with Scott Moon) – a Space Western

  Rick Banik – Spy & Terrorism Action Adventure

  Become a Successful Indie Author – a non-fiction work

  Enemy of my Enemy (co-written with Tim Marquitz) – a galactic alien military space opera

  Superdreadnought (co-written with Tim Marquitz) – a military space opera

  Metal Legion (co-written with Caleb Wachter) - a military space opera

  End Days (co-written with E.E. Isherwood) – a post-apocalyptic adventure

  Mystically Engineered (co-written with Valerie Emerson) – dragons in space

  Monster Case Files (co-written with Kathryn Hearst) – a young-adult cozy mystery series

  For a complete list of books from Craig, please see www.craigmartelle.com

  Other books from LMBPN Publishing

  For a complete list of books by LMBPN Publishing, please visit:

  https://lmbpn.com/books-by-lmbpn-publishing/

  All LMBPN Audiobooks are Available at Audible.com and iTunes

  To see all LMBPN audiobooks please visit:

  www.lmbpn.com/audible