American Blackout (Book 3): Gangster Town Read online

  Cricket felt a surge of attraction for the dapper fellow. Was it the bedroom eyes, the easy swagger? She felt embarrassed, and holstered the Colt and pulled the long coat closed with both hands.

  Becca said coolly, “What’s your name?”

  “Cricket,” she said, and Angel laughed warmly.

  “That’s it?” Becca rolled her eyes toward the snowy heavens.

  “Emily Cricket Hastings. And this is my husband, Fritz.”

  Becca said, “Keep the gun, but here’s my warning. You’ve shown us that you’re impulsive, maybe dangerous. Hurt the snow leopard and I’ll ship you downriver to a prison near Louisville.”

  “We already saved the big leopard,” Fritz said, like he was checking off an item on his to-do list.

  Cricket added, “The cat was at our home just minutes ago. It had our girls and friend cornered. I let her out through the sliding door in the girls’ bedroom.”

  “See, Becca, this is a fine woman, like yourself,” Angel chimed in. “She saved my Sabrina. She didn’t shoot her. I can see truth in her eyes. Sabrina, too, knew immediately that you were a friend.” He looked at Cricket like he had entrusted her with the love of his life for a long and difficult journey ahead. “Becca, we must get moving. My Sabrina’s close by, and there are many through fear and ignorance who might harm her.”

  Becca looked Cricket up and down. “You are a mess of surprises. Come by for Christmas dinner tomorrow. I’ll send a car. How many?”

  “Five, but you threatened to jail me,” Cricket said.

  “Don’t be so sensitive.” The woman looked at Angel, who nodded with a sparkle in his eye that said, of course, done deal.

  “I guess we leave our guns at home?”

  “What do you think?” Becca again looked to the snow-filled heavens, beseeching a higher power and shaking her head at an unsatisfactory answer.

  Fritz said, “Sorry about all the extra excitement. I’d like to talk about your plans for maintaining security in the city. We’ve been patrolling the river and countryside looking for bands of escaped criminals, especially engaged in the slave trade.”

  “Sure,” Becca said. “Be ready at one.”

  3

  Ajax

  Ajax hovered above the bare trees and snow-covered ground. He watched the drama play out without sound, silence in this world of dreams. Blood was sprinkled on the newly fallen snow, a sign of artistry, a sign of new life. The biters circled their victim and lunged at the still moving man as the mood overwhelmed them. One participant, perhaps wiser than the rest, looked up as if he would beseech his new god. Then Ajax saw him stick out his tongue and catch the falling snow. One animal action following another. Nothing of importance, no breakthrough. And Ajax did yearn for a breakthrough. He wanted to be recognized, ultimately worshipped. He was feared where it counted, especially among his slavers, who now neared the city with their catch. They were led by a darling creature named Lucy, and they would obey her in his absence.

  He did feel a thrill when he sensed the energy signature of the woman he had followed the past month. She was now camped in the city with her motley band of do-gooders who had no idea what force of nature hid in their midst. Only he knew and could appreciate her full range of power.

  4

  Attack of the Coyotes

  Cricket and Fritz stood in front of their current home of only a week and watched the caravan of classic cars motor away.

  “Should we really go tomorrow?” Cricket asked. “Who are these people? How could that iceberg be the mayor?”

  “Cleveland Command mentioned a young woman filling in for her murdered father until elections. City council elected her. It fits.”

  They were outside the front door, the snow had stopped, when a scream from nearby startled them.

  “I’m checking it out.” Cricket started to run.

  Fritz said, “I’m guarding the house. Should I tell you not to do anything rash?”

  “Might register someday, when I’m an old woman.”

  She called Diesel to her side and the two of them tore through the backyards. The screams ahead grew more frantic, a shout for each singular horror. Cricket stopped abruptly alongside a tool shed, leaned forward, hands on her bare legs and threw up. Three months pregnant, her morning sickness had been delayed by the appearance of a fairy-book leopard and the city’s eccentric mayor and suave counselor. She wiped her mouth with snow, and she and Diesel started to run again. On the next street people came out of their homes, some armed. Cricket held out her Colt as her long leather coat billowed behind, her wild hair flowing. Her muscled legs pumped through the snow. One woman gawked at her like she was the beast roaming the neighborhood.

  She didn’t have far to go. She turned the corner and came upon a group of people who were helping a young man off the ground. Something had ripped his clothes, and it appeared he had several deep cuts. The man stood dazed, searching the ground, perhaps for his wallet or glasses. A young teenage girl kept a hand on the injured man, helping him to stay standing.

  “What happened here?” Cricket’s eyes moved over not only the scene before her but along the houses; any movement behind her in the street. The locals headed back into their homes, stealing glances at the long-haired beauty. Diesel approached the unlikely pair and graciously accepted a few pets and kind words. He was Cricket’s four-legged therapist of the canine world.

  The man was bleeding from cuts on his face, arms, and legs. He stared at Cricket and let the young girl speak for him.

  “Coyotes,” the girl said, matter-of-fact.

  “Start shooting them,” Cricket replied. “I’ve seen people with guns this morning.”

  “Too hard for most people,” the girl replied. “I think I’d have trouble, too. You don’t want to kill a person. Maybe just scare them. Yeah,” she sighed, “I guess we could scare them. Shoot in the air. Something like that.”

  “We’re talking about wild dogs, coyotes—right?”

  “Coyotes are people. Young people, mostly. They go around in these gangs, pick somebody out and go crazy on them. They usually don’t rob the person.”

  The man was getting his wits back and looked at Cricket with plenty to say.

  “My name’s Ed Strong. I’m a law student. We started classes a few weeks ago, and someone at the university didn’t like what I said and they sent the Coyotes after me.”

  “This isn’t random?” Cricket asked; Diesel looked to her and made a muted cry, acknowledging humans’ depravity.

  “I wish it were. It’d be easier to deal with.” The girl looked to the man, who pushed up his torn sleeves, revealing several bite marks.

  “A professor did this?” Cricket had no trouble believing somebody in academia would commit a heinous crime after her experience at the Holaday farm with Doctor Claubauf, a professor of physics who happened to be a part-time serial killer.

  “I don’t know.” Ed picked his winter coat off the ground and shook the snow off. “It could very well be a student.”

  “And your crime?”

  “I kept insisting our laws and our Constitution were the best way to move forward after the EMP attack. I got a lot of people to agree with me. They were clapping. The professor said we lived in a time where we couldn’t indulge our own interests and pleasures anymore, especially our white privilege.”

  “You don’t appear very privileged today.”

  The young man shrugged, holding his right arm, grimacing at the flare-up of pain. He never stopped talking, though.

  “I know it is important to work as a community. Learn what’s important to the community. To those who are still oppressed. I didn’t disagree. I said we had to do both.”

  Cricket wouldn’t bite the kid but did think of slapping him for falling for all the old yarns of political correctness. The world had lost its power to heat and feed and save the helpless no matter their skin color. She wished she had the Constitution in her back pocket to wave in front of the kid and tell him to read it
during his recovery, starting with the Declaration of Independence. She thought of her great-uncle reading the document every July Fourth, and a tear escaped down her cold face. She looked left and right with a heavy heart and centered herself with the Glory Be, a short prayer.

  “When did you commit your crime?” Cricket asked.

  “Yesterday.”

  Cricket paused, amazed at the speed of this intentional act of sadism, if he was telling the truth. “You need medical attention.”

  The teen volunteered. “My aunt works at the hospital. A twenty-minute walk.”

  “I have a car,” Cricket said.

  “I’d rather walk.” The man smiled at the girl. “I have a friend here. I’m not going to bleed out.”

  “You’re not worried about another attack?”

  “No, this was a warning.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Their pack leader, spokesperson, is not part of the attack. He guides the others: when to start, when to stop. I heard my crime against the people and some other nonsense about belonging to the Patriarchs, which I’m not. Then he kept repeating the charges against me. It’s hard to concentrate when you’re pinned to the ground and crazy people are biting you. When they stopped, the spokesperson said I was free to go about my business. He even said I had a future here in good ole Cincinnati. In law! He said that I never wanted to see the Coyotes again.”

  “That’s why people around here don’t do much,” the girl offered. “I’m surprised some even came out of their homes. That was pretty cool.”

  “What are you going to do?” Cricket asked.

  Ed Strong surveyed his arms and legs, gently touched a jagged bite mark on his cheek, and stared at the blood on his glove.

  “I have a lot to think about. You don’t get three strikes. The pack leader said the next time the Coyotes would bite me to death.”

  5

  Hell’s Carolers

  Cricket had a full house for Christmas Eve. Predator Jones and the two Bobs came over for dinner and a present swap. The girls and Sister Marie busied themselves making more decorations for a small tree that Predator and his men had found the previous day.

  Predator and the Bobs stayed at the Lunken airport, which was susceptible to flooding from the Ohio River and referred to by pilots over the years as Sunken Lunken. Before the EMP attack, its activity had been based on private and corporate flyers. Now it was largely quiet except for the excitement Cricket and Fritz caused taking the Mustang for a spin. There they protected and kept flying Fritz’s P-51 on loan from Wright-Patterson and a Piper Cub and Citabria belonging to Predator and his Band of Old Coots, who had brought along their instruments for the night’s celebration. Several Guardsmen would be watching their flying machines that night.

  On the mantel of a wood-burning fireplace sat the Nativity set of Hank Holaday, Fritz’s grandfather. Doctor Claubauf had murdered the grandfather three weeks earlier for Hank’s unwavering devotion to Christ and advocating for the children’s religious instruction. Claubauf believed the severe power outage had signaled a final solution for superstitious beliefs.

  In early spring, a solar storm had shut down most power grids worldwide. Days later an Iranian nuke exploded high above Kansas and reduced the U.S. to digital shambles. Some cities and states used the week between nature and men’s mischief to shield electronics and obtain generators without digital components. Cleveland and the northeast corner of Ohio, where Cricket and company had left, were once again falling apart. Fritz was worried about his mom, who had decided in late summer to remain in the town of Little Falls, fifteen miles east of Cleveland, where thousands had died in the first several months of the energy blackout.

  Sister Marie and Lily sat in the middle of a long plum-colored leather couch with a string of paper cutout snowflakes. Old newspapers were spread out on the carpet before Lee Ann, who was slowly painting a red Christmas tree on a blue plastic globe. The entire living room was softly illuminated by a Coleman lantern and a dozen small candles placed in the shape of a cross in the center of a large oval glass table. The youngest, Lee Ann, asked one question after another about Sister’s “real” home back in Cleveland. Sister Marie Boulding had lived her entire adult life at the convent for the Sisters of Saint Augustine in the heart of the city, and had worked and taught nursing at nearby hospitals. She hadn’t heard anything definitive in two months about its status and the women who made up the order’s community.

  Cricket was watching and smiling as Predator Jones tuned his violin. Her mind reeled from the ugliness of today’s attack on a young man for simply having a different point of view in a so-called institution of higher learning. Yet she had felt a strange kind of hope connecting with the beautiful white leopard outside her window—high poetry. And, of course, Becca and Angel were high comedy, the Shakespearean kind, which came with a certain amount of danger, remembering Sister Marie’s primer on the Bard during her high school years. Sister liked to say that the power of Shakespeare’s work made it more likely for one to do a Shakespearean reading of Freud than a Freudian reading of Shakespeare. “Besides all of his insights into human nature, what could be more beautiful than laughing? A lot of laughs in Shakespeare’s plays, even the tragedies. Not many in Freud’s narrow world of sex and ruin.”

  “What are you going to play, Mr. Jones?” Lily folded her arms, studying the men.

  Predator looked to the two Bobs. Cub Bob pushed back his Steelers cap, the small acoustic guitar resting atop his gut. PJ Bob shrugged, still tuning a guitar that appeared twice the size of his pard’s.

  Predator said, “Well, Miss Lily, I thought we’d open with ‘The Wexford Carol.’” Both girls looked to each other, stunned at the men’s choice of a Christmas song they had never heard. “Cub Bob is our guest tenor tonight. And this tune never will lose its charm. It’s over eight hundred years old, ladies. One of Ireland’s fairest of carols.”

  Predator started the melody, and PJ Bob played a deep bass line on his guitar, letting each weighty note ring and die before sounding the next note. Cub Bob added the chords and began singing. Cricket wasn’t familiar with the song, either, yet the melody and words, “Good people all, this Christmastime…” felt like a forgotten memory. Predator left the melody and played a widely spaced countermelody on the wistful violin to Cub Bob’s vocal.

  “‘Prepare and go,’ the angel said / ‘To Bethlehem, be not afraid,’” stuck to Cricket’s ribs, the very sauce of Christmas. Sister Marie, a vocalist and guitarist in her own right, began singing along.

  After the song and much praise bestowed on the Old Coots for delivering such a lovely carol, the girls told everyone to be seated and that they would serve the cookies. When the girls left for the kitchen, Fritz asked Predator if he needed anything from Wright-Patterson for the Mustang or the Cub.

  “How about a small tactical nuke I could use on a band of roaming terrorists or escaped prisoners?”

  Sister said, “Mr. Jones, I know that’s just a dark joke you’re making, but maybe we can wait until the new year to talk in jest of such things.”

  Predator stood up and, with the graciousness of a medieval knight, bowed before a princess he had just rescued. The girls soon returned, each carrying a tray of cookies. Cricket saw that they looked more serious, as if cookie making were a most serious affair. The girls set the dessert around the cross on the glass table.

  Lily said, “We heard something real strange coming from outside.”

  “We cracked the door open,” Lee Ann said.

  “Both of you know better,” Sister Marie insisted. “We’ll lose heat, and it’s not safe to poke your noises out without an adult present.”

  “You’re right, but we thought that maybe it was just the wind… and we didn’t want everyone to worry if it was just the wind.”

  “That’s pretty awesome that you’re worried about protecting us,” Cricket said, following Fritz, who headed into the kitchen with Predator. “Stay in the living room with Siste
r.”

  “Boys, stay at the front of the house,” Predator Jones said, “and move the logs apart. Keep that fire low.”

  Before opening the back door, the three adults listened carefully and drew their weapons.

  Upon opening the door, they did hear the wind. It howled above the trees. Cricket remembered the presence she had dealt with as a teenager, hunting with her father, and being stalked by something in the treetops above her deer stand.

  Fritz was closing the door when another pitch was heard an octave or more above the wind. Coyotes.

  They made sure all the doors were locked, and Predator stayed in the kitchen, lowering the wick on the single lantern till it was nearly extinguished. He set the lantern in the corner of the room, hidden by the refrigerator, so he would have a chance to see someone approaching from the backyard. In the living room, Fritz headed out the front door with PJ Bob.

  “You heard it, too,” Lee Ann said to Cricket.

  “You two have really good ears.”

  “Is it bad people?” Lily said sadly.

  “It could be,” Cricket replied. “But we’re going to protect you.” The two Bobs had put down their instruments and checked on the other rooms and the basement.

  “I wish Ethan and Caleb were here,” Lily said. “They’re brave boys.”

  Lawrence Davies and his sons had remained at the Holaday farm with other hilltop families outside of Marietta. There were no plans for their coming to Cincinnati until spring.

  Sister put her arm around both girls. “All of us love you, and we’ll do everything in our power to keep you safe.”

  “But the bad people made us stop singing,” Lee Ann said.

  “Not for long; it could be pranksters,” Cricket said, and Cub Bob agreed, returning with his partner, giving the thumbs-up.