by L. T. Vargus
“You’re supposed to sleep after this. Shouldn’t you be drinking the decaf?” she asked.
Loshak lifted the paper cup to his lips and took a long drink. “I thought I was the mother hen in this partnership.”
“Cock-a-doodle-fuck-you,” she answered.
He smiled, unperturbed.
“One more for the road,” he said, picking up another donut hole. “I’ll see you this afternoon. Oh hey, when you order in for lunch, we got some dynamite Greek food from a place across town yesterday. The gyro was excellent.”
“Duly noted,” she said, pouring herself a coffee before ducking into her cubicle.
Darger scrolled through a list of high priority calls that were marked “unplayed.” The mouse clicked, and the first file opened and began to play.
By the lack of operator prompts, Darger gathered that this call was a message left when the lines were busy. It was a man’s voice, gruff and blustering.
"You people think we're all sheep. Just simple pawns to push around the board."
Darger held her breath.
"But I know what's really going on. Me and other people like me, we see. Our eyes are open."
Could it be him? The paranoia, the thing about sheep and pawns — those were two of the keywords straight out of the profile.
"I seen the news footage. And I know when I'm being lied to. There wasn't no dead body under that sheet in the Publix lot. Not a real one anyway. It was planted. Clear as day. Blood don't move like that. You people think you're clever, but you're not even good actors. I see you smirking at one another. Laughing it up like it's all a big joke. My eyes are open."
She sighed. Another nut, this one apparently convinced that all of the shootings had been some kind of elaborate hoax.
It wasn't unusual, she knew. A certain small percentage of the population couldn't help but look for the most dramatic explanation. And what was more dramatic than an actual spree shooting? A faked spree shooting. Perpetrated by Zionists, the Illuminati, a secret class of lizard-people who ruled the world discreetly from their base deep within the Earth’s core.
She forced herself to listen to the end of the call, to be sure. To check it off her list without feeling like she might have missed something.
In the next call, a man insisted the shooter was his father.
OPERATOR: Can you tell me your father’s name, sir?
CALLER: George Blevins.
OPERATOR: And what leads you to believe your father is responsible for the shootings?
CALLER: They say he’s dead, but I know he’s not.
OPERATOR: Who’s dead, sir?
CALLER: My father. He died in 1989. But I saw him at the Circle K the other day, getting a bag of peanut M&M’s. He looked different… I suspect he went through radical plastic surgery, probably numerous surgeries, to change his face. A new identity, you see? But it was him. I know it was. He loves peanut M&M’s. Always has.
Darger sighed and refiled the call as low priority.
After that, she played another message from the voicemail system.
“I have foretold what has come to pass for years, but no one wanted to listen. You can not abandon God without violent repercussions. We promote sodomy, abortion, idolatry, and degeneracy. The glory of the great empire of Rome was destroyed by its own depravity and wickedness. The West will face a similar fate if we do not heed the warnings."
She made a note and played the next call. Click. Play. Repeat.
Eventually, she glanced at the clock in the bottom corner of the computer screen, rolling her head from side to side to loosen her sore neck muscles. She’d barely been at it for two hours.
It was going to be a long day.
The morning continued to roll by in a series of clicks, recorded voices, and words on a screen. She was about to take a break when the tone of one call took an interesting turn.
CALLER: If you destroy a nation’s culture and patriotism, then you will destroy their allegiance as well.
OPERATOR: I’m sorry… I don’t understand.
CALLER: What’s to not understand? Without a single unified cultural ethnicity, there is no country. The leftist, fascist, globalist banker’s white-genocide agenda is proceeding as planned. They want us on our knees. In slavery and servitude. But there are those among us who will not bow. We will not bow!
The line went dead. Darger blinked at the screen. Well, that one certainly had promise. It hit on about ten of the keywords she and Loshak had put together.
Darger made a few notes in her own file before she forwarded the call to a liaison at Homeland Security. It would take at least a few hours before she’d hear anything back.
Chapter 27
The absolute numb in Levi’s hands threaded icy coils into his forearms, and that dead feeling threatened to spread, to freeze away all sensation. He balled his fingers into fists a few times, felt the cold as shards stabbing into the meat of his palms, though he couldn’t tell whether the motions made things better or worse.
He looked at his reflection in the rear view mirror, made eye contact with himself, and he felt empty. He was a shell. A husk. A face with nothing behind it.
They drove without destination. The afternoon sun was bright and hot, and the air conditioner in the Jeep was no match for the humidity, but they couldn’t sit still. They’d grown sick of the grubby motel room, sick of watching cable news, watching the pundits try to mythologize what they’d done and how it related to partisan politics.
Luke jabbered in the driver’s seat of the Jeep. Smoking and talking. Talking and smoking. Levi only registered bits and pieces of it.
He could still see the FBI agent’s head and torso as he’d looked through the scope of his rifle, could still sense the thrum of anticipation that had built in his chest as he waited for the man to keep still. And he remembered that incredible moment of emptiness before the muscles in his hand and forearm flexed, and he squeezed the trigger.
There was something clean about the way the bullet spun out of the rifle’s barrel. It was different than the handgun, different from the shotgun. It was pure. True.
And after the man had toppled to the ground, he’d watched the girl — the female agent — scrambling away from the scene on hands and knees. He’d fired a round into the vehicle, not really going for her. He could have taken a shot at her as well. A real shot. But he’d hesitated, and by then she’d descended from view, disappearing behind the hill.
“You did good. You know that?” Luke said, his voice interrupting Levi’s memories.
He didn’t answer. Instead, he plucked the styrofoam cup from the beverage holder, brought it to his lips, sipped. The coffee had that burnt note to it, the blacker than black bitterness it got when the carafe had sat too long on the burner. He’d gotten so used to that acrid bite, though, that he couldn’t really enjoy a coffee without it.
“It’s happening now,” Luke said. “It’s all happening. Just like we talked about.”
The Jeep wound its way through the suburbs. Brick facades and vinyl siding surrounded them.
“People will act like they don’t understand it, like they can’t imagine why someone would do these things. But they all know. Deep down they know. See, men play almost no role in creation. Only a woman can truly create life,” he said, unlit cigarette twitching between his lips. “A woman creates, and a man destroys. That is the duality of our kind, you know? I kind of realized that in Iraq.”
He brought the lighter to his face, flicked it, the little flame snuffling into the tube of tobacco, staining the tip black for a beat before it ignited into orange.
“Everywhere we went, everything we did, the threat of suicide bombers was all around us. Each and every time I walked into a building or rounded a corner, the fear was right there, hammering away in my chest. It could be anyone, you know? Man, woman, or child. Anyone. And this wasn’t only an internal monologue of paranoia. The higher-ups reinforced the fear. We got warned about it constantly. I mean, these guy
s blow themselves to bits at the whims of their leaders, ostensibly for their so-called cause. But outside of the destruction itself, what were they accomplishing? The explosions were real enough — the human bodies liquefied to a bloody spray were very real — but there was no meaning in it.”
He turned to look out the window, took a deep drag of smoke, and let it seep out of his nostrils slowly.
“It started to dawn on me that I was no different. I was following orders, too, wasn’t I? I was watching my friends get blown up for nothing. I was putting myself in danger every day in a way that seemed just as meaningless as the suiciders, you know?”
He paused again, blinked a few times.
“It was like almost all of it was bullshit. Whatever meaning you tried to pin on it didn’t quite stick. In the long run, only the destruction was real.
“And it’s been this way for thousands of years. For all of human history. We fight. We die. We destroy each other and ourselves. Violence is in our nature, man. The bloodstains on our hands and teeth define us. Everyone knows it. Even if we pretend to be domesticated beasts, pretend to be good cattle chewing our cud, deep down we know it’s true. And we want it. We want it more than anything.”
Levi felt his thoughts spiral, his heart beat faster, that chaotic swirl of emotions that came over him whenever Luke talked like this. It was a language that got through to some part of him — a violent, frightened, angry part of himself that he didn’t understand.
“Law enforcement is the living symbol of order. Of the status quo. The false security that keeps the machine functioning. It doesn’t matter that none of us are actually safe. All that matters is that we believe that someone is keeping order, someone is keeping watch, manning the wheel. Someone is in charge. When you kill a cop, you knock the props out from under the whole fucking thing. You expose it for the sham that it is, the lie that it is. No one is watching over us. No one cares. The universe is utterly indifferent. At best.”
He puffed on his cig, continued.
“Now, a pregnant woman? She is a symbol of life carrying on, of existence persisting indefinitely. When you snuff that out, you’re really saying something. Now you’re really speaking the truth of our kind. The awful fucking truth.”
He smiled.
“It’s a violent world, and it’s inside all of us. You and me and everyone. We’ve proven it with bullets. Because power still grows out of the barrel of a gun. That’s why we’re here, I think.”
Still smiling, he looked at Levi, made eye contact with him. His pupils were gaping black pits, demonic and strange.
“This is our legacy, brother. We were born to it.”
Chapter 28
Darger slid the headphones from her ears. Break time. Turning her head from side to side elicited a series of borderline-disgusting cracks and pops.
Two of the trainees were chatting near one end of the coffee station, and Darger sidled up to refill her cup. She took the steaming brew out into the hall, preferring a few moments of quiet over joining in on the conversation. She was lost in a sea of her own thoughts. And besides that, she’d never been great at group dynamics. She had no problem with one-on-one interactions. In fact, she excelled at it. It was one of the things that made her good at what she did in Victim Assistance.
Drop her in a group, though, and she might as well be in the middle of the ocean without a life preserver. The problem, she thought, was that people in groups were always competing for attention. Because of that, the focus was constantly shifting. Violet was used to giving her undivided concentration to one person. The fluctuations in a group felt like a game of tug-of-war.
One of the analysts, she thought his name was Jerry — or was it Jared? — called out and waved to get her attention from his cubicle. Did he have something? A call she needed to hear? She stepped back into the room.
“Sorry to interrupt your break, Agent Darger, but people are starting to wonder about lunch. Agent Loshak had me order for everyone from Dimitri’s yesterday.”
Right. She was sort of the boss here, she supposed. Managing personnel wasn’t something she was accustomed to. And deciding what to eat was hard to give much thought to when they were hunting a psycho with a seemingly endless supply of both rage and ammo.
“If you guys are OK with doing that again, it works for me.”
“Agent Loshak also had us stagger our breaks yesterday so the phones wouldn’t be unmanned.”
She gave a single nod. She wondered if Loshak mentioning the gyros was his way of hinting that she’d be expected to make this kind of decision. That or maybe the guy just really loved gyros.
“However you arranged things yesterday is fine.”
“Would you like to see the menu?”
“Nah, you can order me the gyro.”
Jared — she’d decided it was definitely Jared and not Jerry — joined her in the hall a few minutes later, phone pressed to his ear.
“They’re saying it’ll be an hour wait for delivery. Fifteen minutes if we pick it up,” he relayed.
Darger was already heading back to her desk to grab her keys.
“I got it.”
Darger cranked up the air conditioning as soon as she started the car. The earlier weather front brought rain but had done nothing to quell the heat. If anything, the humidity was even more cloying since the storm.
She’d volunteered to pick up the food for a few reasons. One, because she figured it was what a good manager would do. But two, she wanted desperately to get out from underneath the harsh fluorescent lights. She drove past a low hedge of gardenias, relishing the greenery after the dour gray of her cubicle.
The GPS in the car led her across town to the restaurant, and she slid into a parking space out front. As she stepped onto the curb, the growl of an engine drowned out most of the other street sounds. Darger glanced over to see a scrawny guy on a motorcycle rumble up to the traffic light. He stretched out a booted foot to catch his balance while he waited for the light to turn green. That was when she noticed the sticker on the rear fender.
It said: MY OTHER RIDE IS YOUR MOM.
Darger snorted, turning to enter the restaurant.
She was still thinking about the ridiculous bumper sticker a few minutes later as she loaded the food-laden paper bags into her rental. After everything that had happened in the last 24 hours, she’d forgotten about the Nameless Brotherhood and Ethan’s mysterious contact outside of the FBI.
What if that person had tried to get in touch with Ethan? What if he or she had information that could lead them to the shooter?
Damn him for being so secretive about it. Why couldn’t he have just told her what he was up to?
As Darger steered the car back in the direction of the field office, it occurred to her that maybe she didn’t need to know who if she knew where.
Chapter 29
At the strike of four in the afternoon, a shadow fell across Darger’s computer monitor. She spun around in her chair.
“Anything?” Loshak asked.
She pulled the headphones from her head and handed them to Loshak.
“This is the best I’ve got,” she said, cueing up the flagged Will Not Bow call for him.
Loshak closed his eyes as the recording played out, then ducked out of the headset.
“Not bad. Though my gut says it’s not him for some reason.”
“Yeah, that was kinda how I felt,” she said. “I forwarded the info to Homeland Security. This is what they sent back.”
The file slapped onto the desktop, and Loshak paged through it.
“He used a traceable phone?”
Darger rubbed her eyes and tried to keep herself from yawning.
“Not exactly. The call originated from a computer with an IP address originating in Romania. Probably spoofed. But the same IP has a colorful internet history, as you can see from the file.”
“A major connoisseur of white supremacy bulletin boards, eh?”
“Pretty much,” Darger agreed.
“I skimmed through it. It’s pretty vanilla, really, at least compared to a lot of the rubbish on these forums. I get the feeling he’s older than our profile says — in his fifties or maybe sixties. Look at how he types.”
She pointed to a screenshot of posts made on one of the white pride online message boards.
“He either capitalizes every word or none of them. He’ll go from six exclamation points at the end of every sentence to no punctuation at all.”
Loshak pursed his lips and pretended to look insulted.
“Are you suggesting us fogeys don’t know our way around a keyboard?”
She leveled her eyes at him.
“Only the racist ones.”
That elicited a hiss of laughter.
“Alright,” he said, swatting her with the stack of papers. “Get out of here. Go get some sleep.”
Violet collected her things and made for the door.
“Hey, Darger?”
She turned back toward Loshak, and he stuck out an accusatory finger.
“Emphasis on the sleep part, right?”
Violet rolled her eyes and proceeded out the door without responding.
“What was that? I didn’t catch your answer,” he called after her.
She kept walking.
She did not plan on sleeping just yet, but she didn’t need to tell Loshak that.
Instead, she fired up the engine of her rental and went off in search of the neighborhood of matching brick tract houses.
She remembered the general area, but it took some circling and a few U-turns before she zeroed in on it. Once she’d found the place, she worried she wouldn’t be able to find the particular house she wanted. There had to be a hundred of the little brick boxes, and they all looked the same.
And then she saw it.
Rub-a-dub-dub. Mother Mary in the tub. She had never been so happy to see a statue in her life, religious figure or otherwise.
Violet parked on the street, undid her seatbelt, and wondered again at who she might find inside.
