American Blackout (Book 2): Slaves Beneath The Stars Page 26

  She went to the car and pulled the control for the lights that shined deep into the woods. She ran some distance and took cover behind a tangle of trees only feet away from the water.

  “This is crazy,” she whispered to herself, trying to believe this wasn’t about revenge as much as protecting the Holaday farm before the savages swarmed.

  Several tall men in capes or long gowns burst onto the narrow beach, yelled, and stayed beyond the car’s headlights. More followed. The women screamed their delight when they found Dakota, and pulled him half out of the car and started beating him with small clubs. Most ignored the dead passenger and circled the car, ensuring it was safe to get inside. Of course she had the keys, but someone could always hotwire the thing.

  More bodies stormed from the woods, and she stopped counting after thirty. The more adventurous crawled through the car and played with the lights, though they kept them on. Dakota had been removed from the car, and the women were rifling through his pockets and then stripping him, stabbing him with long, sharpened sticks and laughing.

  There wasn’t any time left. A few attackers separated themselves from the mob around the old Lincoln, scanning the woods, including her position near the water. Minutes earlier she had inserted the battery into the garage remote control she now held in her hand. She shivered in fear. She had made a mistake—there were too many of them, and she was too close. And when she decided to run, someone would notice.

  She hit the button on the garage remote, and the explosion was quickly followed by a secondary blast—Howard’s full tank of gas.

  The ignited gas and C-4 illuminated the beach. The headlights briefly stayed on as the car went vertical. Bodies and limbs went airborne. The cries of the dying filled the air.

  61

  Ancient Ways

  Ajax thrilled at the sensation of flight, following the group of hunters. He not only understood their confusion, their hurt, their loss; he relished it. He enjoyed their primitive path. Nearly all had forsworn modern weapons except the fool who died in the blast with the .38 revolver stuck in his waistband. The death of the young man in the back seat wasn’t the problem, it was the fool’s lack of purity. And worse, Ajax’s beautiful counterpart, the young woman at the wheel of the Lincoln, might have been harmed.

  Ajax felt beak and talons growing, his face pooching out, the ends of his limbs curving toward their destiny. He thought, I’m evolving! His laughter was a first in this new realm, and its harshness startled him.

  Ajax had his prey singled out, the dead fool with the gun who had broken all the rules. In this black-on-black world, Ajax saw everything and swooped in. What he now clutched in all four claws struggled helplessly, and he looked for a high perch to rest and eat.

  62

  Secret Admirer

  Minutes later, the remains of the Lincoln and the savages still burned and a lone man in a long dark coat moved in a circle outside the carnage. The survivors disappeared into the forest. The solitary man seemed to have no sympathy for the dead or dying and never made a move to help those who cried out to him.

  Keeping her eye on the destruction and the single man remaining alive, Cricket backed up slowly, quietly, Colt in hand, feeling for trees and branches with her free hand. She walked backward long enough that the fiery remains became like campfires in the distance. She turned and faced a dark woods, unsure of the lake’s relation to the farm. She had never noticed the small lake from the air, but then arrivals and departures in the Mustang were quick and busy.

  She concluded she was close to home, but which direction? Often she stopped and listened for voices, footsteps. She said a prayer for Dakota in her own words, out loud, and finished with a Hail Mary and a Glory Be. Pain had been such a horrific and unexpected experience for the boy that he’d stayed in shock and never connected to Cricket or anyone else, including God, whom he had cursed from the back seat when he found the strength.

  Now Cricket swore, seeing the small fire in the distance. Back at the lake, walking in circles! She was trying to figure out the correct direction to take when the fire abruptly climbed taller—campfire! She approached cautiously, stopping often to listen for conversation or savages roaming nearby or, worse, stalking her.

  Through a tangle of black limbs she saw a lone man seated on a dead tree, his back to her, feeding the fire. She waited for other signs of trouble. Fear creased her back with chills. Was it the tall survivor silhouetted against the flaming Lincoln? She backed up a few steps ready to take off in another direction, but then the stranger turned his head to the side: Doctor Claubauf!

  Her dislike for the doctor was foremost, yet she welcomed the odd duck in the middle of the haunted forest. Whatever had brought him out to these woods was unimportant. Right now she needed him to point toward home. A lot of trouble afoot. She needed to get back to those she loved.

  Claubauf sat in a small clearing, and his raincoat duster covered the ground like a collapsed tent. She holstered the Colt, yet the shotgun had a shell chambered and was ready to swing quickly into firing position.

  Over the campfire the physicist roasted a squirrel impaled on a long branch.

  “Doctor Claubauf, I presume?” Cricket said, her voice cracking, using the famous quotation of Stanley meeting Doctor Livingstone in Africa, but more important, made popular in the Hastings home by Uncle Tommy, who had often used the phrase when surprised by a friend unexpectedly dropping by. Claubauf turned and smiled, not like a man surprised by the encounter but as if asking, What took you so long?

  “Dinner will be served in five minutes.”

  “Sorry, I need to get back to the house.”

  “Why, it’s a beautiful night. I have a hot meal, and your hubby won’t be back until who knows when. The farm is quiet, safe, and peaceful. I was just there. No worries.”

  “I’ll take a raincheck. What’s the direction?”

  Claubauf pointed straight ahead, then to the right and left, and used his thumb to point behind him, saying it was only a mile away.

  “Why the games, Doc?”

  “A secret admirer doesn’t play games.”

  Cricket had a lot to say but only exhaled a foul word she rarely used. She knew of his attraction to her but had ignored the many signals. She was used to getting signals of affection from men since the age of twelve. As a teenager, the “losers” could hang around as long as they behaved themselves. She dealt unconsciously with most, which left room for random acts of cruelty. With someone desirable, she became very focused, very intimate. She got pregnant that way and the abortion followed, making her weary of men until Fritz. The world’s ending and then her falling madly in love with her white knight in a Mustang had muddied her “girl radar” on matters of new suitors.

  Claubauf said, “I wasn’t playing games when I followed you on your escapades and made sure no harm came to you.”

  “So I guess the guy I shot, who still had enough strength left to bone-crush me, was really taken out by you?”

  “That was all you. But the visit to the Kains. The riverboat carnage—”

  “That was Lawrence on shore helping us out.”

  “I was, too. Farther upriver. And a few hours ago, I made quick work of the Nazi ready to wipe you out.”

  “Okay, thanks, Doc for helping me out on some difficult days. But I’m a one-man woman.”

  “Country song?”

  “Reality.”

  Cricket looked about. Savages on the prowl wouldn’t be entertained by this conversation but might like to roast her and the doctor over a strong fire. Doctor Claubauf pulled the squirrel off the stick, inspected it, and let it cool by shoving his end of the branch into the ground.

  “Doctor, have you noticed savages tearing through the forest tonight?”

  “Desperate people populate our world now.”

  “I thought you’d be more discriminating—”

  “Surely you don’t mean good guys and bad guys, cops and robbers?”

  “That’s exactly what
I mean.”

  “Oh, goodness, they’re folks trying to survive, you know, survival of the fittest. And you’re awfully fit. Which makes you highly desirable in our brave new world. However, that moral map you like to consult for your decision-making is nothing but a prop.”

  “That prop is based on my religion.”

  “A prop based on a superstition.” He stood up and eyed her. “You’re like a great composer—you know all the rules, and when you want, you break them, and the results are thrilling. Yet still carrying that map around. It’s tattered and stained, of no use. Throw it away, Emily. It’s useless in this new world. What I’ve witnessed—”

  “You witnessed the attack on me and the killing of a young man I had in the back seat; savages playing with his dead body right before I hit the button and blew them all to hell.”

  “I wasn’t there. I was coming from the Holadays’ when I heard the explosion. Did you kill any children?”

  “I kill savages. What’s going on, Doc? Do you know these people?”

  “I was with them days ago. Not tonight. You see, I have an ability to walk into any wild setting and not so much take charge, but to offer my services, lend my expertise.”

  “What services? Killing? Or quantum mechanics?”

  “Always ready for either discussion. Tonight’s band are into hunting, running in packs, like wolves I guess, things like that. They refuse to use any modern weapons. That’s why they left Crazy Jack’s shotgun. There are excesses in these roving bands of like-minded folks. But I don’t judge. But I do act if they pose an immediate threat to my people.”

  “They were hunting me.”

  “And they made a big mistake. Didn’t they?”

  “So, in your travels, Doc, have you run into Ajax yet?”

  “Of course, countless times. Ajax was guiding the earthmovers, the hunters on the river, among the slavers on the night you freed those children, the attack on Halloween.”

  “So, the answer is no.”

  “I haven’t had the pleasure of shaking his hand. Anyway, from firsthand accounts, he’s charismatic, well-educated, hence the Greek name, and you’d probably fall in love with him the first time you two met.”

  She was ready to slug the doctor and head home. One of those cruel moments…

  “For being enamored with yours truly, you seem to take a lot of chances with your imaginary girlfriend. Putting her in dangerous situations.”

  Of course, she had gone too far. He looked at her with the desperate eyes of a lover who begs his beloved to stare back at him and hear the stories and confessions never told to another soul.

  Nervously, she searched for the right path to take her home, trying not to focus on him.

  “Oh, it’s that way,” he said, wagging an impatient finger over her shoulder. “Yes,” he sighed, making his confession, “you’ve been going in the right direction. Please excuse my pettiness. Very bad behavior for someone who’s truly in love.”

  “What are you saying?” Cricket started moving in the direction of her loved ones.

  “Your actions on Halloween made me fall madly in love with you. You knelt down and slid the knife across the throat of one fiend when no one was looking, except me.”

  “They were trying to kill us. I finished him off, that’s all.”

  “No one else would have the cojones, including your husband, to do that. Everyone else would have waited for him to die or made a futile attempt at nursing him back to health, and for what, to kill more of us? That Hankism—‘She’s India’—really fit you that night. Kali transformed into her most beautiful manifestation of the goddess.”

  She dismissed the allusion to Indian goddesses with a shake of her head, yet did appreciate the doctor’s acknowledging and respecting a side of her that even her husband had at times found disturbing: the avenging angel. Perhaps her actions had been cold, but they’d been necessary and righteous, like blowing up the hoodlums of The Great Hunt down by the water, bringing back law and order to a world gone mad. This position she knew for sure her dad would have supported.

  Claubauf began to carve a small piece of meat and offered it to Cricket, who refused it with a simple “no thanks.”

  He said, “I knew the chance of you falling in love with me was highly unlikely.”

  “You’d have better luck becoming Master of the Universe.”

  Impatiently, she listened to one of his oral “love letters.” After Halloween he was patrolling alone one evening and came upon a stranger in the woods. He stalked the man for an hour and then killed him.

  “Like you, no thought to mar the action. He was a threat, like finding a spider crawling up your bare arm. A shiver of fear tells you what to do, not your brain. Like a great poet once said, ‘Between the idea / And the reality / Falls the Shadow.’ I was young when I first read that, and I feared that would be my life’s story: the interruption from religious guilt, the shadow of conscience, or simply doubt, inhibiting a great act, a pure act.”

  “Not familiar with the poem and don’t really care. I don’t go around killing strangers who leave me or my people alone.”

  Claubauf shrugged, as if it were a minor difference, and then rose alongside the fire, unnaturally tall, like he was on stilts; his duster nearly touching the ground.

  “Before the lights come back on, I want to do my small part to help people recognize we have everything we need in the human imagination to make life better, to bring peace and health to all the world’s people without the games of religion. This is a fecund time for me, Emily Hastings. We both have what it takes to plant the seeds of a new world during this time of battle and survival.”

  “The name’s Cricket. And we need to get back to the farm.”

  “Like I said a few minutes ago, they’re fine. I can keep an eye on new threats approaching, before they arrive.”

  “Good, you do that, Doc.” She turned and started to slowly walk away, even though she wanted to run. Everything he said seemed skewed, a cover-up. Should she turn and fire?

  “So… two avenging angels… male and female, righting the world?”

  “Who said anything about angels?” Claubauf announced. “There are no angels. No devils. Only men and women. I’m happy with a woman, an all-too-human one. Enjoy your walk.”

  She was near the edge of the light. The darkness ahead was suffocating. A chill poked the back of her neck as if Claubauf were reaching for her. She turned around. He still stood by the fire, but his desire had leapt after her. He’d do anything, a voice said, and she almost raised the shotgun to annihilate him. But he was right, she had that moral map, until her anger blew it off the table.

  She almost believed him, no devils and angels, until she thought of fiends like the phony Klingons, or Jason on Halloween, or numerous others who had made their intentions known in a world with few cops and jail cells, let alone public defenders. She knew that the world of her short twenty-two years was a good world, though flawed. She knew that getting Uncle Tommy over to the Ledges to read the Declaration of Independence on July Fourth was one of the most important things she had ever done. Daily, she remembered so much of her dad’s wisdom, and was startled when he joined her quiet conversation: It’ll always be a good world to raise a family.

  Doctor Claw wanted a new world, a new race of people unencumbered by religion. How far would he go in bringing about this new world?

  She said nothing else and walked into the darkness. She prayed on this walk for guidance, not just out of the woods but in the moment-by-moment decisions that would come her way. She prayed for Fritz to successfully return and for the continued safety of Sister Marie and Predator Jones, and for Hank, Lawrence, and those beautiful children. She drew a breath and prayed aloud for those destroyed in the explosion at the lake, and a sudden gust of wind answered her.

  63

  An Owl’s Cry

  Cricket stared at the stars overhead, incalculable in number. The depth of the universe made her dizzy, looking up from a dark wood
s into a black sky and seeing the endless fiery clusters, but without any sense of order. She and her dad could find Orion, the Pleiades, the Big and Little Dipper, and with the advent of digital star maps they had discovered new constellations depending on the time of year. But over the haunted forest, the breadth of the stars of heaven no longer offered well-known forms of beauty and design.

  Her muscles ached, her insides felt mushy, and acid clung to her throat. Cricket paused and caught a low-hanging limb for balance, ready if she had to empty her guts. Even sleep, though greatly needed, seemed impossible. To lie down now would be to give up as the world spun into oblivion. She was left with an awful hangover, the type that allows you only one lousy position to stop the world from spinning so quickly out of control.

  An owl’s cry brought her back to the woods, still very alive with predator chasing prey. Were the hunters on her trail? Was Claw tracking her? A deeply wounded man, Claw had frightened her tonight with his desire. What would he do to impress her?

  It had been on the tip of her tongue to ask him if he was the lone survivor of the car bomb, or had he just watched, savoring the dead and dying, like she had?

  She thought of the murder of the Lutheran minister and other killings that bore the mark of someone who imagined they were a new breed of human, out to stamp out the old and give birth to another reality, like the Brazilian from up north.

  Yet again, could Claubauf be capable of cold-blooded murder, torture, listening to the pleas of his victims untroubled?

  She started walking faster, bumping into branches and bushes, tripping over rotting stumps. Her body was bruised and tired, and all the talking inside her head vanished except one terrible bit of wisdom: his infatuation with her was strong enough to harm those she loved.

  Soon she caught a light in the distance. The farmhouse.