American Blackout (Book 2): Slaves Beneath The Stars Read online

  Along with Fritz, they headed to the barn to feed the horses. Finishing up, they walked out and were surprised by the noticeable drop in temperature. It was late afternoon and the sky was electric blue, harsh, like the wind. They saw Ann and Lawrence at the fire pit waving to Doctor Claw, who already was returning from the bunkhouse. Sister wrapped her arm around Cricket.

  “That was a really thrilling account of life’s end,” Sister said. “A real insight.”

  Fritz jumped in. “Yeah, he hit on something there. I guess dreams can act like a conscience. Makes sense that the last one would have a lot of intensity, soaring into the next life.”

  “Unless you’re destined for a serious head-plant straight into hell,” Cricket said. She watched Ann Davies leave the men and aim for the field, head back, enjoying the vigorous wind. Perhaps she needed time alone to digest all the religious talk.

  Cricket turned to the P-51, a stone’s throw away from them. The mechanics had driven rebar stakes into the ground for rope at three points—the wings and tail—to keep the plane from flipping over. Cricket had talked with Hank and Fritz about keeping the P-51 in the hangar for the coming winter. Hank said that his workhorse, the Cessna 180, would have to be tied down outside. “Mustang and Cub are royalty in the aviation world,” he had said, “and both go in the hangar.”

  What sounded like the crack of a starting pistol echoed from the northern woods. The three of them jumped, arms hitting one another, all three swiveling 360 degrees. While flailing, her heart drumming, Cricket saw Ann Davies falling to the ground and her husband and the doctor running toward her.

  Cricket drew her weapon, as did Fritz and Sister.

  “Sister, get back in the barn!” Cricket yelled.

  “No!” Sister Marie stood her ground.

  “Look for the shooter,” Fritz demanded.

  Claw and Lawrence were kneeling alongside Ann when the boys ran from the house, screaming for their mother and falling to the ground where she lay. Cricket watched them trying to lift her off the ground, as if any movement would again set her life in motion. Lawrence was trying to keep the boys under control, and Claubauf was eyeing each direction, gun raised.

  Fritz faced the northern woods.

  “I agree, from the north,” Sister Marie said, the barrel of her gun pointed down and away from her friends.

  Cricket ran into the barn and retrieved her Remington, and from the open door glassed the northern woods and western pasture. When Cricket held the trusty old rifle, she felt as though she held every gun she had ever shot, including her first bow and arrow, all distilled into a warm wooden stock and steel barrel full of promise, accuracy, and flat trajectory—virtues that she now needed.

  “Cricket, we need to get over to Ann,” Sister said. “Get everyone inside.”

  She continued to glass the fields and woods, and realized why her vision had blurred looking through the scope. The boys had lost their mother. She wanted to keep her position, a sentinel, out to destroy the enemy, die if she must, but she didn’t want to see the boys and their father up close. By hunting the killer, staying in the battle, she was looking away from immediate tragedy, from personal sadness and final dreams.

  “Please, let’s go.” Sister Marie was already leading the way.

  Approaching Ann’s still body and the cries of her children and her husband, Cricket wanted to bolt. No death, no battle until now had been more devastating. Caleb had his arms around his mother’s neck, and Ethan held her hand and examined it like he was observing the most sublime work of art. Lawrence held on to his boys.

  Fritz knelt alongside Ethan, who wept. Sister knelt by Ann while Cricket reached for the boy’s father. A small stream of blood came from Ann’s mouth, and a small bullet hole was evident at heart level. The great amount of blood fanning out on either side of her meant a large exit hole. Lawrence had tried CPR almost immediately but soon gave up.

  Caleb was asking his dad to try again when Sister Marie reached for Caleb, who struck her hand away.

  “I hate your God,” he yelled.

  “Caleb,” Lawrence uttered in shock.

  “Your God is a monster. He did nothing. He couldn’t protect her.”

  Cricket knew all the beautiful, profound words of comfort Sister was capable of, yet Sister said nothing.

  “Caleb, stop,” Ethan warned. “Sister loved mom, too.”

  Caleb crouched more like a cornered animal, not a boy steeped in grief. Claubauf kept his distance, maybe ready to intervene on Lawrence’s call.

  Caleb had a narrative going against God and Sister, and was looking for a way to utilize his eighty-pound frame to cause damage. Sister was reaching to touch Ann’s face when Caleb grabbed Sister’s tender right hand and squeezed her palm with all his might. She cried out in pain. Caleb had once examined the hand that had had a nail driven into it; the line of pink, lumpy scar tissue. Now he was Sister’s executioner risen from the grave.

  In the middle of everyone screaming for Caleb to stop, Cricket grabbed the boy’s wrist and squeezed hard. Caleb leveled a hateful look at Cricket even as his pain increased. When he didn’t let go, she placed the barrel of the Colt against his temple. Lawrence looked on in horror, and Fritz screamed at her to lower the gun.

  “Let her go, Caleb!” Cricket yelled.

  The boy did, and Sister Marie took a few steps backward and stumbled, falling to the ground.

  “Lawrence, we need to get Ann and the boys inside.” Fritz helped Ethan off the ground, and Lawrence rose. Caleb sat on his back legs crying, spent.

  Doctor Claubauf walked over. “Caleb, I’m taking you and your brother inside.”

  The boy looked up and took the man’s hand.

  Lawrence agreed with a tearful nod. Ethan, not wanting to leave, glanced at Fritz, but another look from his father told him to go with his brother. Claubauf held on to Caleb.

  They made a circle around Ann Davies, and Cricket apologized to Lawrence.

  Lawrence said, “He needed to be scared. He did a terrible thing to Sister.”

  “I’ll be okay,” Sister Marie said.

  “My wife wasn’t a religious person, but would you pray over her, Sister, for her peace and for my boys?”

  Sister knelt and began to pray. Fritz and Cricket stepped back to eye every direction.

  “Who would do this?” Lawrence said at the end of Sister’s prayer.

  “A maniac that deserves to die,” Cricket said.

  Sister said, “I suggest we carry Ann into the barn. I can wash and clean her up there with water from the hand pump. Lawrence, you need to get her fresh clothes. I’m so sorry. My heart aches for you and your boys.”

  “Let’s do it now.” Fritz talked but kept looking in every direction. “Claubauf will watch the boys. Lawrence, I’ll help you carry her.”

  “No, thanks. Please look out for any other monsters—protect yourselves, my boys.”

  It was a slow, solemn march to the large barn. More than once Lawrence stopped, overcome with grief, tenderly holding his wife, adjusting his arms, shifting his weight to make her as comfortable as possible. Sister stayed at his side, and Cricket paused often to glass the countryside. Inside the barn they placed Ann on one of the tables, where her husband and Sister Marie undressed and washed the young mother. Sister used her injured hand as best she could.

  Returning to the Holaday home, the boys rushed Fritz, wanting to see their mother. He said they’d be hearing from Sister Marie soon. Caleb kept a wary eye on Cricket, and Hank sat at the kitchen table with Doctor Claw.

  “None of us is safe if we can be picked off like that,” Hank said quietly to Cricket. Claw nodded.

  Cricket replied, “That’s why I’m going hunting tonight.”

  44

  An Alien Invasion

  Cricket and the girls had picked out a dark blue dress of Ann’s and brought it to Sister, along with the blankets that Ethan insisted were necessary to keep his mother warm. Cots were brought for those staying overnigh
t. Both boys visited their mother, who looked beautiful and at peace. They were allowed to stay as long as they wanted with Sister Marie, who, along with one of the mechanics, would remain the night. Oakley volunteered to keep company with Lawrence, who wouldn’t leave his wife’s side.

  The boys talked with their mom and Ethan prayed. Caleb said nothing to Sister Marie, but the hate was gone from his eyes, replaced by loneliness. A low overcast obscured the moon and stars. Outside the barn in hushed tones, Fritz and Cricket talked.

  “You know I can do better on my own.” Cricket, Colt .45 on her hip, wore black jeans and a black sweatshirt, tight enough to avoid snags. Her long hair was in a single braid tucked down the back of her sweatshirt.

  “You get in trouble every time I leave you alone. Back in Little Falls you nearly died in the park.”

  “I didn’t. You need to be here, guarding these folks. Two of us is too many to be gone tonight.”

  “Got it. I’ll go by myself.”

  “Right, and trudge through the woods with the finesse of a kid on a quad.”

  “You can’t be out all night. You’ll make a mistake.”

  “Three, four hours max. Remember, I’m just scouting. I’ll come back for you and the others. Nothing stupid. Just recon.”

  “I’m holding you to that.”

  “Fritz, I’m a bit tired, but my female intuition is on high alert—revved up.”

  “What, getting mystical knowledge of the killer’s whereabouts?”

  She kissed him. “Maybe.”

  They looked inside the barn. Sister had candles at four corners of the table and chairs for viewing. Hank, all bundled up, sat in a chair, head down, rosary in hand. Ethan and his father sat next to each other, one of them saying something, getting a slight chuckle, but more often a sigh mixed with fresh tears. Caleb sat away from his mother in the shadows with Doctor Claubauf.

  “And keep Diesel here,” Cricket demanded.

  She took Diesel’s fine head into her hands and kissed the top of his head. The dog had been moseying between the outside world and the mourners inside the barn. Affected by his tribe’s loss, Diesel moved slowly. He understood sadness and hushed tones and sometimes would lay down close to Ann, eyes open, head up, alert, like he was expected to be.

  Cricket ducked into the woods closest to the barn and began her trek. She looked back once and waved at her husband, who responded with a slow wave.

  Often she stopped to listen for voices carried on the night air. She’d inhale deeply, tracking for the scent of a campfire or food cooking. Her dad had given her the gift of solitude, and she needed it tonight after the rawness of Ann’s death and the ugliness of Caleb’s attack on Sister. A bad taste sat in her mouth as she thought how close she had come to pulling the trigger and wiping out that snot-nosed kid. For weeks Caleb had gravitated toward the doctor, receiving an introductory course in Hatred of Religion 101, in which he excelled.

  Hearing the sound of feet shuffling through the leaves, she froze for several minutes and turned her head slowly, ears aimed toward the deeper part of the woods. She couldn’t locate the direction where the sound had emerged from. Good Lord, it seemed to come from the tops of the trees, as if some creature had captured a group of souls and was now parading them overhead, imprisoned between heaven and earth.

  A few minutes later her plodding souls scurried nearby: raccoons. You guys are a long way from the Holaday farm. Lots of food there unless I’m at the house some night and catch your furry asses coming out of a trash can. Look out!

  Her dad had taught her to not fear the dark, to use it as cover. However, after her mom died, the progress she had made in hunting and staying alone in the woods at night abruptly ended late one night.

  They had been out deer hunting in mid-November after losing her mom that summer. The ground was not yet frozen, but the leaves had fallen and the wind came straight from the mouth of Old Man Winter. Her dad climbed down from the sixteen-foot tree ladder—seats on opposite sides—to go and man another tree stand. He promised to be back within the hour. Shortly after he left, Cricket heard a rustling in the limbs above. Most of the leaves were gone and she imagined an owl, getting ready to dive upon something on the forest floor. The thing did leave her tree, but it didn’t use wings and there was no flapping. It seemed to leap or jump to its next destination, crash-landing into a nearby tree.

  She had been using the Remington for years and swung it in the direction of the critter’s landing. No owl would make such noise, and a bird scared up from its roost would cry out a song of distress and madly flap its wings, making its escape.

  When the creature jumped into the next tree, it made an even bigger crash, and she raised her gun in its direction and was horrified to realize she had her finger on the trigger and was pointing the gun in the direction of her dad’s tree stand.

  For the next ten minutes nothing happened. Nothing moved in the trees or along the ground. She figured her dad would return soon. She tried to calm herself by reciting a few short prayers, and it worked until the loudest crash came from the tree closest to her. She couldn’t see anything, and her scream must have alerted it to her presence.

  She kept her finger off the trigger and aimed in the darkness. It sounded like a black bear had body-slammed the tree high above her. Still no sound, cry, call to identify the thing. She figured that a smaller animal might sound like a bear crashing through the woods. But this thing was leaping, lacking the grace of wings, storming through the treetops.

  Under heavy clothing, sweat chilled her.

  Her tree was a beech, straight and massive, nearly a hundred feet tall, and she sat sixteen feet off the ground. Even though the limbs were bare above her, the upper third still had most of their leaves. She couldn’t see more than halfway up the tree but felt it shake when the thing landed near the top, and leaves rained down.

  Cricket pointed the gun at the top and couldn’t stop shaking. Her brain couldn’t make one bit of sense of what was happening. She was twelve, had been hunting for years, sometimes alone, yet everything she knew and had experienced vanished as the thing slid down the tree, cracking limbs and shedding more leaves. She lowered her gun, pressed against the tree, and protected her head from larger limbs that fell, almost hitting her.

  The scream that was rising in her was like the one that had issued from her at the time of her mother’s death, a personal tornado, F5 status. She screamed and fired into the treetops. She fired off the magazine and then covered her head, afraid of getting hit with falling bullets. No bullets came, and whatever was above was gone as well.

  With her back to the tree, gun across her lap, she cried, thinking of her mother, and felt her mom alongside her like she had never left this earth.

  She didn’t have to wait long for her dad to come running, yelling her name. He was calling her “Emily.” And even though she preferred “Cricket” and had been trying it out for a while, his voice was the most beautiful sound in the entire world. When her dad asked her about the shooting, she described it as her Cowardly Lion moment and found the courage not only to shoot but believe in her heart that she could vanquish the thing of terror. When her dad shined his flashlight on the branches lying on the floor of the forest, he said that it probably was a microburst and checked the tree stand for sturdiness.

  Now, Cricket re-entered the woods adjacent to the northern pasture. She hadn’t thought of that strange night hunting with her father in years. To this day she never knew what was really there or if she had scared it off. But how do you scare off a hallucination? Or was it?

  Just inside the woods, she saw something dash across the crest of the pasture and disappear. She twisted quickly into a two-handed shooting posture and waited. To the left of the first shadow, another shape flickered into view and was gone. Cricket took a deep breath. Her eyes were playing tricks. She was tired, and the agony of losing Ann had overwhelmed her. She thought about those boys with their entire lives ahead of them and no mother. And Lawrence’s
loss of a woman he had fought with his life to rescue. She holstered the Colt and let the tears finally burn her face.

  Her feelings laid bare, Cricket thought of a stupid movie she once had watched with her friend Claire: The Hills Have Eyes. They had laughed through most of the movie, throwing popcorn at the TV. But this forest did have eyes. Her skin tingled from the sensation of being watched. She believed that the thing that had stalked her when she was a teenager was once again on her trail, a force of nature that could rend her limb from limb, grizzly style. Mother Nature was a beast.

  She almost turned back, but surrender would most definitely unleash some evil that would strike her down. She gathered her strength and walked deeper into the woods.

  Amid the mostly new growth, she saw the outline of an enormous tree, probably an oak, and sat at its base, resting against the trunk, feeling hidden for the moment. She drew a breath and there it was—the smell of smoke, a campfire. On her feet now, she rounded the tree. When the scent noticeably increased, she made a beeline to its source.

  “Why would the killer stick around?” Fritz had asked. “A hunch,” she answered, not even an hour ago.

  Evil had been loosed upon the world, and even her own father could not have envisioned its growth. Of course people did terrible things, and the downing of the country’s electrical grid empowered the criminal elements. But this was something new, something worse—the Brazilian had shown her that with the murder of a child and the attempt to crucify Sister Marie.

  The flicker of light was like a camera flash, and the woods darkened further. Voices, one leading, the second asking a question. The campfire loomed in a clearing, sparks in ascent.

  Her gun drawn, Cricket approached a man and woman on either side of the fire. She looked for others guarding the perimeter, off gathering more wood, or raising more hell. She stayed well outside the campfire’s light and tried to glimpse the faces and hear the conversation. But everything lacked coherency. The two characters were talking past each other.