“If you need anything, Mr. Toms, please don’t hesitate to ask.”
Silas glanced down at Grace, silently appreciating the lean body that lay not entirely hidden underneath the light blue dress she wore. He nodded again as he continued to wait for the saddle oil he had ordered three days earlier.
By then Grace was nearly twenty-two years old and unmarried, a condition that greatly worried her parents. Grace seemed little concerned by her looming old maid status though, remaining a rather precocious and opinionated young woman who always seemed to know when the right time would be.
It was that knowing aspect of her personality that had long troubled others. Grace’s grandmother on her mother’s side had the gift as well – an ability to feel what was likely coming long before others did. It was her grandmother who first told her it was “God’s whisper” that she heard - a voice within her own mind that foretold of things to come.
Just days beyond her tenth birthday Grace had come to her mother shortly after waking and remarked how sad she was that their neighbor Mr. Torrey had died, “without his legs.” Grace’s mother shook her head and told Grace she must have had a bad dream and that Mr. Torrey was just fine.
Three months later, Benjamin Torrey, aged forty-seven died after being hit by a train. Both of his legs were severed. Grace’s mother never looked at her daughter the same way again and as whispers spread across the small North Dakota community of her “gift”, more and more subconsciously kept their distance from the girl even as she became an intelligent and dignified young woman.
It was that same God’s Whisper that urged Grace to get to know Silas Toms better. She sensed in him both a kindness and incredible strength. He was a good man and she thought perhaps, he might also make a good husband.
Her instincts, as so often they were, proved true once again. Silas came to know Grace, and the more he knew, the more he adored her. Soon the two were inseparable as the little Fortuna community began to suspect a marriage was not too far away.
That marriage took place shortly before an event that remained imbedded within Fortuna legend. It was the day a quiet, humble, and solitary man showed a side of himself many thought might not exist.
Silas Toms acted with violent intent against another human being.
Actually, it was four other human beings, young men passing through from somewhere in eastern Montana. They came driving a dark blue, V-8 powered four door sedan and stopped upon seeing Grace waiting for Silas to return from the General Store. They had just finished Sunday services together, having declared publicly their intent to marry next month. Actually, it was Grace who declared it as Silas stood silently standing next to her, though his young face did hint at a subtle, almost-grin.
He was the happiest he had ever been – a man in love.
The four young men’s car came to a sudden stop as a chorus of whistles ensued. Grace was neatly dressed in a white dress and matching hat, her straight blonde hair hanging down half her back. She ignored the cat-calls, turning her back to the men. This only urged their behavior further as each of them opened a car door and then made their way to her.
The driver, a thin twenty-three year old wearing a cowboy hat, long-sleeved white dress shirt, and tan khaki slacks tucked into a pair of new cowboy boots was the first to announce his presence.
“I can’t believe something so beautiful is all the way out here in the middle of nowhere! What’s your name, beautiful?”
Grace could smell the sour stench of whiskey on the man’s breath.
A second man took a position to Grace’s left. He wore blue jeans and a white t-shirt and had his blonde hair slicked back from his forehead. A cigarette hung from his lips as his dark green eyes looked Grace up and down without attempting to hide what he wanted to do to her.
“I think she’s up for showing us all a good time!”
The four men laughed and then the driver looked at Grace with a face pretending he had only her best interests in mind.
“What do you say, honey? You want to have some fun? We have booze, smokes, and a car. You can listen to whatever station you like.”
Grace’s eyes flared her defiance as she raised herself to her full height and glared back at the four men.
“No thank you. Please move along.”
The driver snorted as he leered back at Grace.
“Move along? Move along? You hear that fellas, she thinks she can tell us to move along? What a stuck-up little bitch!”
The second man who remained to Grace’s left reached out to grab the upper part of her left arm. His grip was tight enough to cause her to wince in pain.
“Why do you want to hurt people’s feelings like that, huh? We offered you something nice and you have to act like a spoiled bitch about it. C’mon, just get in the car. We won’t bite, I promise.”
The four men laughed as their eyes shined with both drunken courage and growing lust.
“Please let me go – you’re hurting me.”
The driver put his face directly in front of Grace’s, bathing her with his acrid breath.
“Oh, we’re not hurting you pretty lady, but we might if that’s what you want. Is that what you want?”
Grace gasped as the grip on her arm tightened further.
“GET YOUR HAND OFF OF HER.”
The four men looked up at the giant who stood just behind Grace. Unfortunately for them, they believed their superior numbers afforded them safety they did not actually have.
“Besides being one big, ugly son-of-a-bitch, who the hell are you?”
Silas pushed the man who was gripping Grace to the side and then gently pushed her into the store before turning back to face the four men.
“You shouldn’t treat ladies like that. You shouldn’t treat anyone like that. Get in your car and go.”
The man in the white t-shirt clapped his hands together and then pointed at Grace.
“Oh, I see…she’s YOUR little bitch! C’mon man, we just want a taste. We just want---“
The man wasn’t allowed to finish his already nearly incoherent thought. Silas Toms clenched a massive right fist and sent it flying into the other man’s face. The impact made a sickening wet thud as the man collapsed backwards onto the street.
The other three men paused for a half moment and then made the unwise decision to try and attack Silas all at once. Silas grabbed one of the three with both hands and literally lifted him several inches off the ground before tossing him aside like a sack of grain. One of the other two men managed to hit the much taller rancher in the chest but found the flesh underneath Silas’s church service dress shirt to be nearly as unyielding as a block of granite. The driver gave out a loud yell and then jumped onto Silas’s back while attempting to wrap his right arm underneath the big man’s chin in the hopes of choking him.
Silas reached out with his left hand and grabbed the throat of the man who had just hit him while reaching behind with his right hand and easily pulling the driver off his back. Soon he was holding both men by their respective throats and literally squeezing the life out of them.
“Silas, that’s enough! You’ve made your point. Don’t hurt them any more than you already have.”
Silas released his grip and watched as the two men fell to the ground gasping. Seconds later found all four men stumbling back into their car and then driving away as a large cloud of North Dakota dust trailed behind them.
After he had walked her back home and she stood on her family’s front porch, Grace turned to look up at Silas. She gave him a smile and then wrapped her arms around his tree-trunk body and squeezed tightly while pressing her right cheek against his chest.
“It’s a rare thing for a man to make a woman feel as safe and protected in this world as you make me feel, Silas Toms. Thank you for what you did and thank you for stopping when I asked you to.”
Grace then wrapped her arms around Silas’s neck and pulled him downward so she could kiss him lightly on his left cheek.
“I can�
��t wait to call you my husband.”
For over forty years, Grace called Silas just that. It was a marriage of quiet happiness. Neither of them was overly extroverted in showing how much one cared for the other, but each knew how deep and strong their love truly was.
One day when Grace looked at Silas with a mixture of confusion and fear, her husband knew something was terribly wrong.
“Who are you?”
The words hurt more than anything Silas had felt to that point - even more than when the doctors declared years earlier that Grace would never have children. He was becoming a stranger to the love of his life.
There were good days when Grace only forgot the little things. Perhaps where a cup was left, or to turn off the sink, but as weeks turned to months, and then months to years, the good days came less and less.
Eventually she remained in bed most times, sleeping more and more, or staring at the ceiling above her. Silas would clean her, change her clothing, and try and give her food and water. A specialist would visit from time to time from Williston to conduct a series of cognitive tests and eventually urged Silas to place Grace in a twenty-four hour care facility.
He refused, though he certainly had the means to do so thanks to Grace’s suggestion a decade earlier that they lease some of their land for oil exploration and extraction. That decision resulted in millions of dollars in royalty payments via several high producing wells on six hundred acres that was leased to the oil company. That still left four hundred acres to call their own – more than enough to afford them the privacy and self-sufficiency they had both come to hold so dear.
After the money from the oil leases started to come in Grace urged her husband to prepare for what she simply called, “The Troubles.”
“The Troubles are coming to everyone, Silas. There will be a long darkness over this land. I need you to prepare. I need you to be ready.”
In the months and years following Grace’s request, Silas Toms purchased hundreds of weapons and thousands upon thousands of rounds of ammunition including an M1 anti-aircraft gun manufactured during World War Two. The gun was located on the very same hilltop as the Toms family burial grounds and offered protection over nearly the entirety of the property.
A series of motion detection alarms were placed in locations along the dirt road leading through the narrow valley to Silas and Grace’s cabin. He didn’t understand Grace’s persistence that he prepare so thoroughly for The Troubles, but also knew better than to question her God’s Whisper.
It wasn’t until she became ill that Silas realized all of Grace’s warnings about the coming dark days failed to include herself. She always told her husband it was him who needed to be prepared. Grace Toms already knew she would not be around to help her husband when the darkness she warned of finally arrived.
The final weeks of Grace’s life were not easy ones. She had stopped eating, and then days later, would no longer even take any water. Her face was a frightening mask of loose skin and jutting bone, a death mask upon a wretched thing somehow not yet dead.
And still Silas found his wife beautiful. He gently stroked the willowy wisps of grey hair that fell over her deeply creased forehead and whispered stories of their years together to her. Sometimes he would sing to her. Grace loved to sing in church and was considered by most to have a particularly pleasant tone. Though Silas’s own singing voice was not nearly so pleasing, he hoped that somehow the songs would find their way to whatever place Grace was hiding inside the dilapidated corners of her disease-ravaged mind.
Three days before she took her final breath, Grace’s eyes suddenly opened wide and looked directly at her husband who sat next to her holding her left hand. Silas blinked several times as he realized Grace was looking at him with clear recognition.
For the first time in over a year she knew who he was.
“Silas? Look at you! You have a beard!”
Silas had not shaved for some time, resulting in a massive and unruly grey and black beard that by then hung over the top of his chest.
Grace’s lips cracked as she attempted a weak smile. She found the beard amusing.
“You look like some wild thing!”
Silas took his wife’s hand in both of his and smiled back at her. He could feel the sting of tears forming in the corners of his eyes. It was the first time he had heard her voice in many months.
“Silas, have you prepared?”
Silas nodded his head, noting how his wife’s croaking whisper of a voice had turned serious.
“Yes, just like you told me to.”
Grace closed her eyes for several seconds and then opened them again. Silas was relieved to see the recognition still remained within them.
“They will come to you, Silas. They are already on their way. He’ll send them to you. The good ones…and the bad ones too.”
Silas had no idea who his wife was talking about, and wondered if she was already retreating behind the curtain of her illness. Then her eyes narrowed as she shook her head slowly at him.
“Are you listening to me, Silas Toms?”
Silas nodded, grateful to still be hearing Grace’s voice, however weak it was.
“Yes, of course.”
“You must help them, husband. You must try and protect them. Protect them from the others, and most of all, protect them from themselves.”
Silas leaned down and kissed Grace softly on her forehead. She smiled and squeezed his hand as hard as she could.
“You are a wonderful man, Silas Toms. You’ll do right. You always have. I’ll be waiting.”
Silas brushed his lips against Grace’s left ear and whispered to her.
“I love you, wife.”
Grace’s eyes closed and though she continued breathing for three more days, never opened again. Her mind was finally done with this world and her body was soon to follow.
The sun was setting over the hills of Silas Tom’s property. He still held the body of his wife in his arms as he stood next to the freshly dug hole in the earth of the hill that would be her grave. Nearby were the resting places of both his parents. And behind them was the looming metallic presence of the M1 gun and a large pile of massive artillery shells that accompanied the weapon.
Great shadows crept across the valley that marked the long and narrow path to Silas Toms’ cabin. He wondered silently over the ending of another day, and what the next might bring. He didn’t feel any more lonely following Grace’s death, knowing that she had in fact left him some time ago. He had simply been watching over a shell of what little remained of her – a now lifeless shell that was draped over the inside of his arms.
A single crow flew overhead, its angry caw reverberating against the rocky hillsides. Silas dropped down to his right knee and then slowly placed Grace’s body into the earth. It only took him a few minutes to re-fill the hole, his still considerable strength throwing large piles of dirt with ease.
Then there was the placement of a simple wooden cross with the name Grace carved into it. By then the sun had almost completed its descent as the light of day gave way to the inky blackness of night.
Somewhere far off in the distance, likely many miles away, Silas heard the sound of a military jet. The sound lessened and then was gone entirely.
They will come to you, Silas. They are already on their way. He’ll send them to you. The good ones…and the bad ones too.
Silas Toms closed his eyes while hearing the voice of his wife, then looked down upon her grave and for the last time in his life, he wept.
---------------------
EPISODE TWELVE:
Ripper counted each of the twenty-seven bodies that hung from the tall, dark metal lamp posts along either side of the street that dissected the once-idyllic small town of Blossom, Texas.
It was late afternoon, and a warm breeze pushed its way past the corpses. Ripper felt no remorse at having ordered the group of Mexicans hanged. He considered them sub-human scum, unworthy of breathing American air. For too long they
had scurried like rats across the border, taking jobs that didn’t belong to them, engaging in assorted crimes of violence that only weakened the fabric of a once-great nation.
Ripper knew he had been delivered by God to set things right. The Race Wars were a blessing – a righteous time of cleansing the disgusting black and brown stains from the American landscape.
If it ain’t white, it ain’t right.
The saying was first told to Ripper when he still went by the name of Jack Jr. by his grandfather, a veteran of World War Two. It was a statement that never failed to bring a smile to the recently escaped thirty-eight year old Attwood Prison inmate.
American Survivalist: RACE WARS OMNIBUS: Seasons 1-5 Of An American Survivalist Series... Page 13
