The first bullet broke the man’s leg. Lucy screamed at him to hold his position, saying he had probably never done anything right during his entire existence and he now had a chance to make amends and meet Ajax in the anteroom of the next life. Whatever hope the man had been hanging on to was now gone. He moaned pitifully and more bullets came, and he danced backward, unable to stop the violence shoving him into the afterlife.
The taller captain resisted standing in front of the window, and Mr. Randy sliced off his left ear. Lucy quipped that there was no one in this age capable of giving him his ear back unless he wanted Mr. Randy to sew it back on. The lucky captain took a bullet to the forehead that ripped off the back of his skull. He stood for a moment, because that was what he had been told to do.
Ajax couldn’t believe his good fortune. Two meaty captains. His takeout order had been answered. He had grasped that some military failure had occurred, but it was unimportant. He felt Lucy’s sorrow in disappointing him, but there wasn’t a disappointed bone in his entire boneless body, which once again surprised him, yet he still laughed, another hideous manifestation that terrified newcomers to this otherworld.
Ajax materialized for the two recently executed, and they knew that it was him. He relished their discovery, since real horror demanded awareness: what you had lost, knowing the beast standing before you, and what manner of barbarism the monster intended to inflict upon you.
42
Sowing Chaos
Cricket had fully packed the P-51 with two thousand rounds of ammunition. She came in low over the city a couple of hundred feet above the tallest building, started her descent, and spotted the narrow white building at her twelve o’clock position.
She was too high, so she pushed the nose down. The speed increased as the building came into her sights. Still too high, she decided to forgo the attack and added power, leveled off, and started to climb. In seconds she had zipped past the hotel and was banking left for another run.
They’ll be waiting for me. She wondered if she should attack the south side. Wills had stressed the north side of the hotel. Maybe he left it up to me? Her emotions had clouded her memory of his exact words.
She decided to make the same run and this time get the Mustang on the “deck” and shoot the hell out of the creeps.
Flying into position, she liked her distance from the target, her altitude, and her speed. She felt like a pro and had fallen in love with flying all over again. This was another solo, one filled with nervousness and excitement. These thoughts came as a series of pleasant shocks to her body. Physically she knew she was neither ahead nor behind the airplane. Her wits matched those of the Mustang, and she fired the machine guns, obliterating several second and third-story rooms.
Cricket was leveling off when she heard Sergeant Wills say, “Rocket! Top floor!” She banked steeply left and started her strafing run sooner. On target she saw smoke coming from several vehicles on fire, less than a block from the hotel. She dived and screamed right above the wires and trees and blasted the top floor.
The plane stabbed through the air, a horse in a fast gait with plenty of football and ballet analogies to draw upon for strength and art. She didn’t know where the attackers were concentrated, but on the next run she opened fire a half mile out and swept the length of the hotel, shifting her guns slightly with small left-right rudder inputs. The disintegration of windows and walls was satisfying in the seconds that passed by. Starting to add back pressure on the stick to climb, she caught a glimpse of gunfire and again fired the six Brownings.
She sowed chaos across the rooftop.
She climbed, circled, and was in position for her next run. This time she opted to strike the narrow side of the building with four or five seconds of gun power remaining. She decided to empty all six guns from the ground floor to the rooftop.
Aware of a cellular tower off to her left, Cricket spotted a clear path to the hotel and was able to get much closer to the ground. There was movement outside the hotel, a lot of scrambling to escape. She opened fire. Her rounds tore up the slavers, sending them airborne, setting fire to their escape vehicles.
Cricket headed back to Lunken. She was out of bullets.
43
Fight Another Day
Lucy and her four bodyguards ran through the parking lot to a stand of trees that concealed an old VW bus. Her vehicle out in front of the lobby had been annihilated by the P-51, and she knew it wasn’t wise to stick around and lose her last set of wheels.
She searched the sky for the Mustang. She had no time to be disappointed, and actually looked forward to the next battle to reclaim her property. And she wasn’t too concerned about Ajax. Her intuition told her that he had other interests in life, and what occasionally pissed him off varied on the time of day or season. Unlike the meanest slave captain, she had no fear of her boss, only respect.
Her men were yelling for her to get in the car when the Mustang returned. She envied the aluminum bird’s killing power and knew she had to destroy both plane and pilot sooner rather than later.
Her one man looked exceptionally scared and had a lot to answer for. He was on the first floor when the antislavers struck, and though he was not a captain, everyone on that floor had screwed up big time. She told him to get out of the car and to run ahead and shoot the enemy, when he saw the whites of their eyes. The man couldn’t believe what he was hearing, and stared blankly.
Lucy took the driver’s seat and yelled for him to start running. The man did, and she waited until he was maybe fifty feet ahead of her. He took a bullet and his legs wobbled. The van picked up speed. She was at maybe thirty-five when she ran the man over. He screamed going down, and his muffled shrieks could be heard below the floorboards.
44
He Sendeth the Rain
Cricket rode back to Mount Adams with Sergeant Wills in a Vietnam War–era army truck.
“We lost three of the people they had kidnapped.” The sergeant looked straight ahead as he talked. “Caught in the crossfire when we stormed the building. But you were the icing on the cake. You took out several of their heavy hitters with automatic weapons—one guy with a sniper rifle, and the rocket attacks stopped after your second pass. They hardly took a shot at you since we pounded them as you came in for the attack. In the postflight, PJ Bob would confirm that the aircraft had taken a single round. “I lost five good policemen. What makes the loss worse is we’re finding out that they had already moved the majority of their hostages to another location, or maybe several.”
The good with the bad, and too much of the bad. Cricket thought of the unfairness of it all, the killers still breathing, able to enjoy a meal, a good night’s rest while the best of the best had been jettisoned from this life. She said nothing and started to walk away.
As if reading her mind, the sergeant recited Matthew: “He maketh the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth the rain on the just and the unjust…”
Pulling up in front of the Tudor, Wills said, “Tell everyone I send my best wishes, even Becca, who probably still wants me arrested. Tell her what we did today. Those folks, thirty-three rescued, many teenagers, have been dropped off at several local churches to get medical care and back to their families.”
Cricket, hand on the door handle, smiled at the police officer. “You’re a good man, Sergeant Wills. My dad would have called you a friend.”
Upstairs overlooking the river, flanked by the girls and Sister Marie, Cricket prayed quietly for the safe return of the remaining citizens marked for slavery. With Lee Ann and Lily present, she wouldn’t bring up the day’s events or her thoughts on the next step in stopping the local slave trade. Sister, and Cricket’s sick husband in bed, had no idea what had transpired at the Holiday Inn Express.
She had checked on Fritz and found him in good spirits.
“Did you save the world today?” he asked, tongue in cheek.
“Sergeant Wills saved thirty-three souls. I helped with the cleanup.”
“Sure did, my love. Wish you were there. Didn’t like going solo into battle.”
“I wish you would have stayed on the ground. You’re seriously pregnant.”
She laughed and got in bed with him.
“I had to go. I knew it was dangerous, rash, and all that.”
“Cricket, I’m glad I’m contagious. Soon it’ll be your turn to get ill, and you can stay out of trouble for a while, at least until the baby’s born.”
“No, my love. We both need to stay healthy. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of people being enslaved by these savages. Rest and water and a beautiful wife for a few more days and then back on the flight line. And you also need to be drinking mullein tea.”
The girls safely asleep, Cricket sat with Sister and Becca in the living room, with its overstuffed chairs and a comfortable couch she planned on sleeping on to give her husband room and her less chance of catching his crud.
“For once I agree with your husband,” Becca said. “You’re not in any position to be going into battle. That’s really crazy. Unless you don’t want to have the child.”
Cricket raised her voice. “How dare you talk like that to me!”
Sister Marie lasered Becca with a righteous glare.
Becca calmly continued, “We don’t live in the fossil-fuel world anymore and probably won’t return for a long time. We need to think of the demands every new mouth brings when they come screaming into the world.”
Sister said, “A really caring, loving person once said, ‘A child not only brings a mouth into the world, they bring a mind!’”
Becca folded her arms. “Both of you know all too well the condition of the world. Our old attitudes are never coming back, even when the lights come back on and our computer screens light up with Facebook and online shopping. There will be demands for the population worldwide to be drastically reduced. And if lights out and nature haven’t done a good enough job, the leaders will have to make some very difficult decisions. I know what needs doing right here in Cincinnati.”
“Right,” Cricket said, “on-demand abortion. Maybe you should extend abortions to the age of two. Why limit the choice to only nine months for snuffing out the undesirable?”
“Good idea,” Becca replied.
Sister Marie tightly held Cricket’s hand to keep her from strangling their host. Both women knew they were in the presence of another madwoman, like the Brazilian. Cricket wanted to bolt, pack everyone up and go to Lunken that night, but another voice told her to calm down and see this whole experience through. She almost shouted, See what through?
Becca got up from the couch and walked to the large picture window that overlooked the river. Of course nothing could be seen now.
“Staring into the darkness isn’t healthy,” Cricket said. She wasn’t sure why she said that. Was it her own experience from an active dream where she had taken flight? She tried to remember something in the dream that had terrified her but had no memory, only a feeling that she had been staring into the darkness.
“It’s soothing,” Becca said.
The darkness outside invoked the darkness of Cricket’s own abortion. She stood as well but kept her distance from Becca.
“Abortion is sinful,” Cricket said. “I know; I had one.”
Becca shrugged at the remark. “I had one too. Never lost any sleep over it.”
Sister Marie was now on her feet, and she circled her arm around Cricket, saying, “This isn’t necessary.”
“It is necessary.” Cricket was fighting for her child and all the unborn. The voice returned, cautioning her to control her anger.
“Abortion is legal in this country,” Sister said. “But you don’t have the right to expand it. Lights out or not.”
“We have to survive, Sister. I understand both of your concerns. I really do.” Here Becca faced them and with a politician’s aplomb, conveying that she was feeling their pain, continued on: “Cricket, I know you took a big chance today, allying yourself with the Patriarchs and going after the so-called bad guys. You must have known that innocent people might be killed by your bullets.”
“First of all, the Patriarchs aren’t some band of toxic males that need to be wiped out before they take us back to the twelfth century. They are fighting for things I thought you were fighting for—keeping people safe, keeping them alive and not tossed into slavery.”
“They killed my father.”
“You don’t know that,” Cricket yelled, and Sister told her to keep her voice down and not wake the girls.
“I see things on a larger scale than you: the babies are a condition, a condition leading to more suffering, more death, if women believe they can continue having children like they’re all living in the 1950s.”
Sister Marie said quietly, “There is nothing progressive or modern about your ideas. You want to exercise power over people, force people to live under rules and ideas that are truly antithetical to not only the Christian church but the founding of this great country. Two thousand years ago the Romans would leave unhealthy children in the wilderness to be devoured by wild animals. The Romans couldn’t stomach their imperfections and had them destroyed. You’re not moving forward. You’re going backwards to a cruel and unforgiving world.”
Becca didn’t say another word. She picked up her glass and a small bowl that she had used for some canned fruit and headed to the kitchen.
Cricket felt exhausted by the encounter. Sister Marie helped her to make a bed on the comfortable old couch. When Sister Marie left the room, Cricket placed her arms over her belly, protecting her child from the Coyotes, slavers, and especially her host.
45
Lake of the Virgin
Later that night Cricket slipped into bed, and Fritz never stirred. She needed to talk, inform him that they were living with a creature of reptilian heritage. His snoring was light, more breath than gravel, and she wouldn’t awaken him, since she loved his retreat into boyhood. “What?” he had said shortly after they were married, one night after making love. Cricket answered, “When you sleep, you drop back into boyville. You have the deep, restful look of a kid. I love that.”
Just having these thoughts relaxed her, and it wasn’t long before she was asleep and dreaming. She stepped into a dream where she was given a choice—a pleasant adventure and hot sex, or awaken in her dream to a new adventure full of danger. Wordless messages often accompanied her on these nighttime travels.
She opted for the pleasant journey and sex with a man who wasn’t her husband. Her guilt was swept away as their lovemaking became like a runaway train before they both climaxed. It was dark and she couldn’t see her lover, but she knew who it was. Angel held her tight and soon fell asleep. His dead weight was crushing her, and she managed to free herself from him, fearing him if he suddenly awoke.
She ran and was soon in a forest, and it was dark, so she slowed to a walk. She felt a tree. Its rough bark. Its wide trunk. She reached up and felt for lower branches. Nothing. Then she wasn’t so sure that it was a tree, and she slowly moved away, as she had from Angel.
Her heart racing, she heard Angel calling for her, calling for Emily. It wasn’t his rich, melodious, sincere voice from everyday life. This voice was ancient-sounding, malicious. The man wanted to possess her again. She ran.
Moonlight appeared through the branches, and the trees stood tall, skeletal, framed by a violet night sky. She ran faster and sensed when to bob and weave to avoid slamming into a trunk or low branch. Something climbed a tree not far from her and scaled it quickly, jumping from treetop to treetop.
As she left the forest, dawn was spreading slowly across the dark horizon. There were no signs of people as she approached an enormous lake. The lake looked spring-fed, its waters clear and still. The creature was breaking from the woods, and it no longer called her name but growled.
She ran into the water and it was shallow. She thought she heard the creature yell to stop, that she would drown if she went any farther.
46
Ajax at the Shore
He pursued his prey relentlessly and abruptly stopped before the water. The waters held no enchantment, no strength for him, only the promise of death. He howled with rage and took comfort knowing Cricket wasn’t fully awake in this otherworld, but experiencing a very vivid dream instead. He’d wait along the shores, perhaps disappearing, watching her from the edge of the forest, allowing her to leave the water and become his feast.
Yet there was something else that repelled him from the water. An ancient curse on his kind. He was the lone serpent, and he had been given his limitations. This fact didn’t spin him further into misery but had the effect of increasing his power. He felt that power throughout his hideous body of growing tumors and infestations. Not far from shore, he strutted his massive bulk and howled in defiance of the God who created all things.
In his rebellion he made guttural sounds that articulated clearly what was in his dark heart. He challenged God: worship of Him was another form of idolatry. And he also believed that the Creator Himself consumed souls at the time of death for the same reason Ajax did: power and pleasure. Ajax would convince the young woman that at death there was no eternal life, but simply food for the Master of the Universe.
American Blackout (Book 3): Gangster Town Page 14
