American Blackout (Book 2): Slaves Beneath The Stars Page 17

  “That 12-gauge shotgun is a big gun for just a turkey.”

  “Twenty-gauge doesn’t penetrate well. But no matter what gun is used, you don’t aim for the body. Wild turkeys are too tough. You need to take off the head. Twelve-gauge does the job.”

  “That makes sense,” Ethan jumped in. “You should have asked me to go. I don’t mind getting up early.”

  “Needed some time by myself,” Cricket said, eyeing both aircraft that had been taxied close to the house and barn to keep them safe. The grass was higher than the mowed four-thousand-foot field in the western pasture, and Cricket spent a moment mentally rehearsing a soft-field takeoff if she needed to “kick the tires, light the fire,” and go airborne.

  They used the stone patio with two long tables placed side by side. Jones and his men had been invited to dinner. Sister had all four children involved in every stage of food preparation. It was a pleasant afternoon, and Ethan had volunteered to say grace.

  Sister Marie was the designated prayer person, but she had deferred to Ethan, who now stood at the head of the table ready to start his prayer of Thanksgiving. After the loss of Crazy Jack, the adults had sat down with the children and again explained the untold dangers of the world they lived in, even when going from the house to the barn, and the necessity to always be accompanied by an adult. Ethan balked at the “new” rule, telling Cricket in confidence that he considered himself an adult who knew how to shoot and pray.

  Ethan bowed his head.

  “Dear Father, look down on your friends and give us the courage to fight for your truth and the truth that your love is the best. Make us warriors for Christ and let us never, never, lose heart in the battles we face. And thank you for this Turkey dinner. And thank Cricket for her fine hunting skills. Amen.”

  “Amen” was answered loudly in unison except by Ethan’s mom, who went rigid at the mention of warriors for Christ, and Doctor Claubauf, who simply shook his head in disbelief, grinning widely, showing teeth that had yellowed from routines gone awry six months in the “wilderness” of a new America. Cricket’s own attention to her hair and face had declined, and she was troubled by her skin’s erupting recently with acne. Her husband said that her hair, often piled on top, wild, and uncombed, reminded him of the singer Amy Winehouse, minus the tattoos.

  “What, Medusa on top, ratty down the sides?” she had answered.

  The food was quickly passed down each table: sweet potatoes from another Hilltop farmer, corn from Hank’s own field, and stuffing courtesy of Sister and Cricket, who jointly had made a mountain of it with walnuts and bread to stuff the birds, leaving plenty extra. They had covered both birds and cooked them in the stone barbecue pit.

  “Doctor Claw,” Ethan said, and was immediately reprimanded by his mom for the shortened version.

  “No problem, Ann,” the physicist said. “Hank calls me ‘Claw,’ and I affectionately call him my friend. Although at times I have referred to him as ‘my friend Hank, the religious fanatic.’”

  Before Cricket could jump in, Ethan replied, “Fanatics hurt people. Mr. Holaday has never hurt anyone.”

  “That’s true,” Claw said. “It’s a term of endearment. He knows that.”

  “I wish my endearing side would have a little more influence on you,” Hank said, and Cricket smiled, squeezing Fritz’s hand under the table.

  “Actually, it does,” the doctor said. “It makes my position stronger.”

  “Both of you can have your different views and can still be friends, right?” Ethan asked politely, looking to his parents for approval. Both Ann and Lawrence ate slowly and painfully smiled in unison. Caleb waited for the round of discussion to continue, his fork held over a large slice of turkey breast.

  Elbows on the table, both hands free to gesture, Claubauf said, “We’re good friends but very different. You see, Ethan, I never got the God gene in my DNA. Unlike Hank, who got that extra chromosome that made him a believer in God and the hereafter.” Cricket watched Sister Marie shoot a volley of annoyed looks at Doctor Claubauf, who had churchgoers springing with gene mutations.

  Ethan said, “Maybe it’s not such a terrible thing to love God. I love him.”

  A few adults applauded Ethan’s courage. Cricket was itching to get into battle but refrained, given Ethan’s damn good job. Ann kept looking to her husband for support.

  Predator Jones said, “Doesn’t it make sense to love what is real—God, your parents, friends, the girl you’ll marry someday?”

  Lily sat taller in her seat, and her nascent womanly figure suddenly emerged. Lee Ann tilted her head, surprised by her sister’s adding a couple of years onto her slender twelve-year-old frame. Lily caught Ethan’s eye, and he replied with a goofy smile that almost made Cricket laugh out loud. Wow, first love.

  “The stuffing is amazing,” Ann said, a slight tremor in her voice, full of emotion, unable to change the conversation, let alone the world that bruised them daily. Lawrence took his wife’s hand.

  Cricket lost her appetite. She knew how upset Ann remained since the discovery of the crucified neighbors of her parents and her recent participation in killing the slavers on the Ohio River. Cricket had tried to talk with her the previous night on the back patio, the two of them alone, but Ann couldn’t express herself. She stumbled through her fears: “We can’t keep chaos at bay—even on this beautiful farm… I’m terrified for my family.”

  It was obvious to Cricket that Sister Marie’s religion, even her music, offered no consolation, no strength for this young mother. The recent attacks had pushed Caleb to his mom’s and Doctor Claubauf’s side, and Ethan over to his dad’s and Sister Marie’s.

  Cricket noticed the light already losing strength by midafternoon and remembered as a child enjoying the magic inherent in any season, including winter, its minutes and hours falling like a dollop of honey onto homemade bread, a warm eternity of smell and taste. However, this coming winter required toughness and the basics: more candles, fuel, and food for a darker, colder existence, no longer a world of abundance.

  Without warning, the “old world” before the EMP attack sucker-punched Cricket: her music, TV shows, and friends on the weekend, her favorite customers at the salon, and a cup of hot coffee every morning with her dad and Uncle Tommy. She looked at her plate and wanted to cry out at the unfairness of it all, but found her footing by looking at the faces around the table, especially her husband’s. Light always touched him.

  Cricket screwed her head on straight in a matter of seconds: There’s a monster taking the world back to slavery. Before she’d ever daydream again of the good old days, she needed to first kill Ajax and dump him in an unmarked grave. He deserved to be lost among the elements.

  Ajax welcomed the words of the young woman—very sharp, they cut deeply. He appreciated her strength, especially the hate directed toward him. Actually, only hate could burn down the old world and prepare for the arrival of the next. He would be making a sacrifice that night, absorbing the energy of a strong young preacher whom his men had captured. This man had defied him by continuing to preach along the river towns, opposing him with a loving heart, a heart that he would soon eat. In the everyday world, his men were preparing a long fire pit to slowly roast the man alive. Ajax wanted the brave woman, his new queen, at his table.

  41

  A Tall Weed

  Once Lawrence and the kids were out of earshot, finishing the afternoon with puzzles and games inside the house, Ann unloaded on the God-fearing tribe, zeroing in on Predator Jones and Sister Marie for their unabashed talk of all things religious.

  “None of you have any idea how you’re influencing these children, especially my Ethan. You’re linking God to this horrible world we live in like He’s some general giving us our marching orders to kill—”

  “Or be killed,” Fritz interjected.

  “We should be making this world as safe and distant from the chaos as we can. Instead you go back to my parents’ town and stir up a hornet’s nest.”<
br />
  “We killed most of the hornets,” Fritz said calmly. Ann’s parents rose from the table and excused themselves, saying it would be better for them to spend time with the children.

  Ann ignored her parents and fired on Sister Marie. “All this God crap is so glib, singing songs that sound to me like fairy tales—”

  “Hear hear,” Doctor Claw witnessed with a big smile and a raising of his hand.

  “I’m not glib, nor do I spread the word of Christ like some fairy story.” Sister Marie, ramrod straight in her folding chair, fixed her gaze on the boys’ mother. “I’m not stealing your children away, sweeping them into a cult. I want them to keep seeing the beauty in this world—”

  “Forget about beauty,” Ann scoffed. “I want safety. We don’t have it here. We need to be in a big city where the authorities can really protect us.”

  “Cleveland’s a mess,” Sister said, looking to Fritz for support.

  “That it is,” Fritz said. “And I wish I could talk my mom into moving down here. Her little town east of the city has been safe and fairly well-protected. But Cleveland’s going to explode this winter with food and fuel shortages. They’ll be dying in the thousands. Her town could very well get stampeded out of existence.”

  Saddened by the emotional tug of war, Cricket pulled a diplomatic move learned from Sister Marie.

  “Maybe we can look into Cincinnati?” Cricket said. “After all, it’s not Cleveland, and some initial reports are quite favorable. But we should still consider the value of staying here… and there’s a whole bunch of reasons… good neighbors who patrol together, have dinner together, and are now communicating with one another on a much more regular basis.”

  Sister Marie smiled with gratitude. Fritz was amused.

  Ann looked to Predator Jones, who had plopped the bird carcass onto his plate and begun picking inside the cavity. “That man, Jack, your friend, was slaughtered not a mile from here.”

  Jones replied, “And the youngest Cline boy got the assassin this morning. That’s good maintenance. But really, where are we truly safe? A big city has more law enforcement, but what match is it for a dense population ripe with gangs, jihadis, and thousands of desperate people?”

  Ann stammered, “But we’re making it worse—”

  “By believing in God?” Cricket snickered.

  “That’s right,” Ann charged, turning to Sister. “I’m sorry, but this God stuff clouds our thoughts, makes us silly. It’s an escape, a drug.”

  “Ann, you really nailed it,” Doctor Claubauf said.

  Cricket faced Claubauf and unpacked each word slowly, atomically, sand turned into glass. Her inner V-8 was packed with smartass, and she happily threw her diplomatic papers out the window. “Sister Marie is very gracious and sensitive and really smart.” She stood up, and Fritz held on to her arm. “Even with the most ignorant.”

  “Ignorance is the heart of religion.” Claubauf stood up and gracefully straightened himself, showing off his height, a testimony to the rightness of his ideas. To Cricket he was a tall weed, choking the life out of those around him, unlike Fritz, who inspired everyone he met, especially the children, with strength and decency.

  “I’m going inside,” Ann said, “to be with my boys and my husband. We’re leaving here—soon—before winter. I’m not going to have my family locked up in a farmhouse hearing foolish talk about the world’s beauty while real monsters roam outside the door!”

  “Where will you go?” Sister Marie asked.

  “None of your business. My parents stand with me—I’ve almost convinced my husband.”

  She knocked her chair over leaving the table. No one called to her.

  Doctor Claubauf clapped slowly.

  42

  Final Dream

  Doctor Claubauf said, “A remarkable display of integrity. Ann’s right; religion has no business being on the world stage. It doesn’t have answers, only bromides.”

  Sister Marie replied, “And physics, for all its greatness, doesn’t have an answer for the nature of reality. You know Mars rotates in twenty-four hours, thirty-seven minutes, and twenty-three seconds. And I admit, that’s a marvelous achievement. But what was here before the Big Bang? Where’s the universe headed? Collapse, expansion? Why is it that if the tilt of Earth’s axis, our distance from the sun, the timing of the Big Bang had been off an iota, life never would have formed?”

  Doctor Claubauf sneered, “You can deride physics, all the sciences, but your religion doesn’t work with empirical evidence, whether in the natural world or the subatomic world of quantum mechanics.” Claubauf pointed a finger at Sister. “The theory of everything will supplant God, finally destroy all the lip service to an imaginary deity. For two centuries the greatest minds have strived toward that goal of a complete, total understanding of the world. It’s right around the corner, and your kind is blocking the sidewalk, talking your mumbo jumbo.

  “Your problem, Sister Marie, is that you think being a human being is a big deal. It isn’t. Animals have power, teeth, and speed that we can only marvel at.” Cricket watched Claw’s eyes brighten as he marveled at the brute force of animals. “Our weapons come exclusively from our consciousness, a wonderful fluke, like anything else in evolution. It’s only a mystery now. Soon the secrets will be revealed through diligent application of the scientific method.”

  Everyone’s attention suddenly shifted to Stan the cat, who had nailed his dinner and begun parading from the small barn to the orchard, big cat style. The squirrel, whose back legs scraped the ground, was nearly as big as Stan.

  Claubauf cackled. “That pint-size cat just made my point. No mystery about its function. It stalks and kills, and all of its so-called playtime is geared toward honing that function. It’s a marvelous killing machine. We could learn from its purity.”

  “That cat is mostly entertaining,” Predator Jones added. “Sister, I got this.”

  Claubauf rolled his eyes.

  Predator stepped up, nodded respectfully to Sister Marie, and laid his proverbial cape across the “mud puddle” before her. “Your empirical evidence for God is found in dreams.”

  “Oh, really,” Claw sighed.

  “A dream can punish, award, even enlighten or completely bewilder us,” Predator declared. “Dreams are like valves in a hydraulic system responding to the demands placed on the system when a switch is moved, like lowering the landing gear. Shaming and rewards in dreams are common, reflecting failure or success in waking life; psychological changes giving birth to dream images, all driven by damn fine chemical changes in the body. From an atheist’s perspective, you’d have to say that dreaming supports a healthy human being.”

  “Some truth in that,” Doctor Claubauf said, growing bored.

  “Can’t always get what you want, but a dream can furnish that item, bring it to us on a silver platter and then scold us for wanting something too much, maybe something we can’t have. Answers us with nightmares instead. Shit sandwiches come to mind.” Predator smiled broadly and waited for Claw’s response.

  “Very good. Very colorful.”

  “Say we have a dream as death overwhelms us.”

  “Ah, the big sleep, the final sleep.”

  “Yeah. So you agree with me so far?”

  “Am I going to be ensnared by the New Testament in the end?”

  “No, only reason.” Predator was conducting, using his hands to signal a drop in volume. “Consciousness is dimming, you’re dying, but you have a vision of a great light, great peace, or maybe, something terrifying—”

  “Wait a minute, you tricked me.” Claubauf sat straighter in his chair. “We’re talking about a dream. I don’t believe in visions. All subjective, unquantifiable anyway.”

  Predator shrugged. “I don’t call them visions either. My thing is the final dream. That hour when we pass on. At this endpoint of life the switch has turned off, or maybe it’s a rheostat, dimming the light. Either way, everything is being forgotten, no more thinking. What p
urpose could such an experience mean to any of us? How could one more dream benefit us the next day, or an hour later? You agreed that its basic function helps to keep us psychologically healthy.”

  “Unless it’s a final accounting,” Fritz said.

  Predator Jones paced in front of the seated Claw. “The final dream is a foretaste of heaven, or one of hell. It serves no last biological or psychological function, when death is descending upon us and consciousness is all but snuffed out.”

  Cricket noticed Claw’s features at war: haughty mouth, troubled eyes.

  Predator finished up. “Only a God-directed universe would offer such a meaningful dream of the past, present, and future.”

  Claw looked away from the group and acted like he was studying the falling leaves. “There you go. Making stuff up. This final-dream business is leftover crap from the day, and that crap sneaks into our dreams every night—meaningless, like this talk.”

  43

  Icarus

  Predator Jones posed another question about having a life worthy of that final dream, and Doctor Claubauf never responded. He rose quickly, bumping the table with his long legs, knocking some drinks over before heading to the bunkhouse, unlike Sister, who had sat in rapt attention and concluded with, “That’s an amazing perspective, Mr. Jones. I’ll have to share it with Sister Teresa when we’re once again together at the motherhouse.”

  A few minutes late, Predator fired up the Cub and taxied to a level section of pasture and took off. Business with his pards, he had said. Cricket and Sister Marie finished the cleanup, getting rid of the paper tablecloths and a few plastic cups and pitching them in the trash.