Mayor Bloom shook his head and then extended a hand to shake Porter’s. The police superintendent glanced at the hand and then abruptly turned and left the mayor’s office without saying another word.
Two hours later…
Reverend Dullton was atop a large flatbed trailer being used as a stage where he stood behind a simple dark plastic podium in all his community agitator glory. The purple track suit had been replaced by a dark pinstriped custom dress suit and blood-red tie. His grey-streaked dark hair was slicked back against his overly large skull, and his chemically whitened teeth gleamed in the glow of the late-afternoon Chicago sun. He stood before a crowd of nearly three thousand, their numbers a great swirling dark mass of apprehension and discontent.
These are my people and they will do anything I ask of them.
“Can you hear me?”
The crowd roared.
“Good! And you know what? They are all hearing you!”
The people cheered more loudly as hundreds of fists pumped the air above their heads.
“Now I come here today to let you all know I’ve been talking to some very powerful people and after all these years of you being afraid of them, I’m happy to say they are now very much afraid of YOU!”
Another roar of enthusiastic approval washed over the short fat man behind the podium who briefly closed his eyes to savor the moment, though as soon as those same eyes opened the reverend was hungry for more.
Much more.
“What started in Chicago has spread all across this country. We are at long last washing away the sins of this wretched nation!”
To Reverend Dullton’s right stood Superintendent Porter who, along with nine other Chicago police officers, escorted the reverend per the city mayor’s direct order to the South Side Chicago location where the rally was scheduled to take place. Those officers now stood unmoving and silent just behind the reverend’s place at the podium.
“Now it’s time we pause, and reflect, and give these so-called leaders a chance to remedy the many wrongs they have committed against us over all these years.”
This time there was no roar of approval but rather a confused murmur that rippled through the thousands gathered. The reverend sensed the crowd’s confusion and quickly moved to clarify.
“I mean to say, we give them just a little time to give us what we’ve always wanted – justice! Justice! Justice!”
Reverend Dullton pumped his fleshy right fist upward each time he shouted the word justice and then stopped, stunned by the silence that greeted him.
“Traitor!”
“You’re one of them!”
“You sold us out!”
“Judas!”
A thick sheen of sweat covered the reverend’s face as his eyes glanced upward at the grim-faced Superintendent Porter.
“Now hold on! Hold on! I’ve been in the belly of this city’s beast! I’ve fought alongside all of you to bring accountability for the wrongs done! And I’m proud to say that things will be changing around here! As your voice, the powers of this city now answer to me, and that means they have to answer to all of you!”
A few hundred applauded, but confusion and uncertainty permeated the mob. Everyone on the stage, including the reverend, sensed that uncertainty turning into something angry, ugly, and potentially very-very dangerous.
“Listen to me! Look who I have following my orders now! The head of the entire Chicago Police Department! He stands here as my servant – and yours!”
Superintendent Porter’s jaw clenched as he glared at the reverend while his fellow police officers did the same.
“How many years have the police of this city abused you? How many wrongs have they committed in the name of the law? Well, there’s a new sheriff in town, and his name is the Reverend Albert Dullton come here to make things right!”
Porter leaned toward the reverend, his hissing retort picked up by the podium microphone.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing? Don’t go selling us out to try and save your own fat ass!”
Dullton knew the mob heard the superintendent’s remarks and seized upon the opportunity.
“You see! Look at how this city’s police talk down to the black man! They’ve always considered us second-class citizens! Am I right or am I right?”
The reverend’s charge appeared disingenuous even to the increasingly agitated mob. Herman Porter’s skin was noticeably darker than the reverend’s. Four of the nine other police officers on the stage were black as well.
A small rock struck the reverend’s chest, causing the rotund community organizer to let out a high-pitched yelp as he stumbled back from the podium.
This drew the loudest roar yet from the crowd.
Reverend Dullton was desperate to regain the advantage. He turned and pointed to the officers standing behind him.
“These are the people you should be angry about! They’re the ones pointing the guns! They’re the ones putting us in jail! I say it’s about time we put them in jail!”
Porter had reached the limits of both his patience and his obligation to the mayor. He knew every second his officers remained on that stage their lives were that much more in danger.
“We’re out of here, double-time. Let’s go.”
The officers quickly complied with the order, moving toward the black SUVs parked behind the flatbed stage.
“Where do you think you’re going? I didn’t say you could leave? Hey! Hey!”
Herman Porter paused to give the reverend one last withering look before departing.
“You said those are your people, right? Well then good luck to you, Reverend. Something tells me you’re going to need it.”
“Wait! Don’t leave me here! Please! I didn’t mean anything! You got to tell these idiots what they want to hear! It’s just for show, man! Please don’t leave me here alone with these animals!”
In his panic, Reverend Dullton neglected to remember the microphone that still delivered his words to the glowering throng just below him – a throng that now repeated an accusatory cry that terrified the hapless would-be ruler of Chicago.
“Judas! Judas! Judas!”
As a teenager, young Albert Dullton’s favorite story was Frankenstein. He read the book multiple times, and watched and then re-watched the various film depictions of that famous horror tale, though he never fully understood or appreciated the story’s underlying theme of a man’s arrogant and ultimately tragic obsession to pronounce science superior to that of God. Of how the mad Dr. Frankenstein’s own creation, the story’s monster, inevitably turned against its master.
Looking out at the swirling mass of black before him, Reverend Dullton finally did come to understand the true lesson of his favorite boyhood story – though it was an understanding that came much too late.
In the seconds that followed the reverend screamed repeatedly and loudly.
Unfortunately for him, nobody cared…
------------------------
EPISODE SIX:
Dearborn, Michigan
Akrim Al-Saddi was surprised at how little fear or even regret he had for what he knew to be the final moments of his own life.
The edge of the sharpened blade was cool against the skin of his throat. Soon the knife would press deeper, his flesh would cut, tear, and then mere seconds later Akrim’s head would be removed from his body and he would be no more.
There would be blood of course – lots and lots of blood. He might scream, though he hoped not to do so. He didn’t wish to give the others the pleasure of hearing those screams.
There was nothing to be done about it. He had made his choice and despite that choice bringing his life to its too-soon conclusion, it would at least be a death born of a righteous cause. Akrim gave his own life to save that of two innocents.
Allah willing.
It was less than an hour earlier he found himself in the Mosque cellar standing near the young woman bound and gagged to a plumbing fixture that ran along cellar�
��s grey concrete wall. Her eyes rolled in her head out of both fear and disbelief that she had been taken from the Catholic Church she attended, pushed into the back of a van, and then thrown down here to be used as a video-taped blood sacrifice that would be shown and replayed by Muslims around the world.
Akrim remembered the change within his mosque taking hold shortly after the race riots began in Chicago little more than a few weeks earlier. The elders began speaking openly of, “taking Dearborn for our own.” They remarked how Muslims were already nearly half of the city’s population, and that non-Muslims had grown too fat, fearful and lazy to put up any kind of real opposition.
“We must take what Allah desires to be ours before someone else does!”
Those were the oft-repeated words of the Imam Hussan Ali, the leader of the Dearborn Mosque Akrim had attended since fleeing the brutal chaos of Iraq and coming to America seven years earlier. Akrim was stunned to see so many within the Mosque nodding their heads in agreement.
Two days later the first Christian church was burned down in Dearborn. Then another in Detroit, followed by the destruction of a large Jewish temple in the Detroit neighborhood of Oak Park.
This destruction only wetted Hussan Ali’s appetite for further aggression and he found most of the three hundred regular male attendees of the Dearborn Mosque more than willing to continue the Imam’s sudden quest to wipe out what he called, “homes of the false prophets.”
Dearborn was facing the same onslaught of race-motivated violence as so many other urban areas across America. Law enforcement, overwhelmed with the seemingly impossible task of maintaining any semblance of order, neglected to even question a single person associated with Akrim’s mosque about the church and temple burnings.
Four days ago the first murder took place. Akrim knew there would be more – likely many more.
The victim was a vocal leader within Dearborn’s small Jewish community who gave a series of interviews with local media decrying the upsurge in race and religious-motivated violence. He then went on to claim much of the Dearborn violence appeared to be originating from some within the city’s large Muslim population.
Though the Jewish leader was correct, his public complaint sent Hussan Ali into a rage.
The order was given.
“The infidel must die.”
Sixty-seven year old Michael Levin, the son of two Holocaust survivors, was dragged from his home just after 2:00 a.m. He was literally thrown down the stairs into the Mosque cellar and severely beaten and then left there unconscious suffering from a fractured skull, broken jaw, and two broken ribs.
At 5:00 a.m. the Imam descended the cellar stairs holding a ten-inch knife in his right hand. As Hussan Ali grasped onto Michael Levin’s face and placed the blade against the Jewish man’s neck, the Imam cried out to the handful of Muslim men who stood silently watching the execution.
“God is great! God is great! God is great!”
The others joined the Imam in the chorus as the blade sunk deep into Michael Levin’s throat, tearing flesh, severing cartilage, and then cutting more slowly through the bone of the spinal cord until the head was removed – a head Hussan Ali held up in front of him as the Jewish man’s blood pooled around the Imam’s feet.
“Did I not tell you that our time is now? This city will be ours! We have taken the life of a Jewish pig! Now you are to go out and bring me a Christian so that we can do the same. Dearborn will run with the blood of the infidels! Allah blesses our devotion to him and gives us strength to do what must be done!”
Every member of the mosque was ordered to enter the cellar and gaze upon the Imam’s work. Akrim was among those who did so. He stood silently staring in horror at the body and the decapitated head that sat next to it. It appeared impossibly surreal, a thing of nightmare far beyond what had until recently been Akrim Al-Saddi’s much happier though far from perfect, reality. He had known most who attended his mosque to be reasonable people simply devoted to their faith. Now he saw them as monsters seemingly willing to do anything the Imam asked of them.
Soon after Michael Levin’s body was removed from the cellar, twenty-seven year old Sarah Clement took its place. She was an attractive, blonde-haired young woman who worked part time at the Dearborn Catholic Church she had attended since she was a young girl. Three members of Akrim’s mosque took her in the church parking lot. Ten minutes later she found herself in near-darkness below the Mosque awaiting the arrival of the Imam, her dark blue jeans covered in dirt and the left sleeve of her red flannel shirt torn several inches from when the men first grabbed onto her and she struggled to get away.
Akrim was ordered to watch over the woman until the Imam made himself available for her beheading. He avoided looking at her directly, not wanting to see the fear in her light blue eyes.
This is not right. This is not Allah’s will! We are killing the innocent. We are doing the bidding of a man lost in his own bloodlust.
Akrim kept those thoughts to himself knowing that if he were to speak them to others the result would be swift punishment and perhaps even his own death. He knew well how to keep a secret, having done so for many years. In Iraq his sexual inclinations were hidden from both his family and most in his village community. Since coming to the United States his personal life remained largely unknown by others. Homosexuality was forbidden among practicing Muslims, though Akrim had come to know many other fellow Muslims who lived in secret as he did.
What would Hussan Ali consider the greater sin, my sexual preference or this poor woman’s faith? Most likely he would see us both dead.
Sarah Clement sensed the conflict within the quiet man who stood in the cellar shadows some ten feet from where she was chained to a steel water pipe. Her eyes had adjusted to the darkness just enough to allow her to see a man of average height and build with a round and pleasant face lightly covered in a neatly trimmed dark beard. He was clothed in black slacks and a white dress shirt. She correctly guessed Akrim’s age to be around forty, and could also see in his dark eyes nearly as much fear as her own. She bit down on the strip of fabric that covered her mouth, hoping to speak to him.
“Please help me.”
The words were muffled but Akrim was still able to make them out. He continued to avoid Sarah’s gaze, pretending he didn’t hear her plea.
“I’m pregnant. I’m carrying a child.”
Akrim glanced at the mosque’s female prisoner and then quickly looked away as his heart pounded from inside his chest.
The Imam would have us murder the unborn!
“I’m telling you the truth. Please, don’t let them hurt my baby.”
Tears welled up within Sarah’s eyes as she waited for Akrim to look at her again. Seconds later she was rewarded with his doing so.
“Can you help me – please?”
Both Sarah and Akrim looked up at the sound of someone descending the cellar steps behind them.
It was the Imam, his eyes shining in the gloom as his teeth glimmered from within the unruly bed of a massive grey and black speckled beard. Hussan Ali had spent the entirety of his fifty-three years in relative obscurity quietly yearning for a life far greater than the one he occupied. With the rising tide of the blood-tinged race wars that threatened to overtake all of America, the Imam believed his moment had finally arrived and he intended not to waste it.
“Has she said anything to you?”
Akrim shook his head, the lie coming easily to him.
The Imam glowered down at Sarah, took several steps toward her and spit into her face.
“Catholic pig! Infidel whore! Today you die! It is Allah’s will!”
With tears streaming down her face, Sarah Clement cried out, surprising both the Imam and Akrim with how powerful and defiant her voice was despite her great fear and confusion.
“I’m pregnant! Why are you doing this? What is wrong with you people?”
Hussan Ali’s eyes widened as did his smile.
“Good! That is an even great
er blessing! We shall snuff out the disease that is both you and your unborn child!”
The Imam turned and gripped both of Akrim’s shoulders in his thick-fingered, powerful hands.
“Did you hear, Akrim? The whore infidel provides us an even greater sacrifice! Watch over her for just a little longer. I’ll be back soon. We will set up the video equipment and then finish what Allah would have done!”
The Imam bounded back up the steps as his gold-trimmed black and white robe billowed behind him.
Akrim stood with his back to the hostage and tried to shut out the sounds of the woman’s sobs while at the same time knowing what was happening inside the mosque was the personification of evil.
American Survivalist: RACE WARS OMNIBUS: Seasons 1-5 Of An American Survivalist Series... Page 6
