American Blackout (Book 2): Slaves Beneath The Stars Page 5

  “Hey, Doc, let’s stay on guard. Save comparisons for after dinner.”

  He walked into the apple orchard, continuing to scan the forest and meadow. She followed a few feet behind, moving in a wide circle, gun lowered.

  He stayed focused and stuck with his story. “Twenty years ago my wife fell seriously ill. By the time they went after the disease, she was already in stage four. Of course there was nothing to be done, so her religion kicked into high gear.”

  They circled back to the dead men alongside the shed.

  “You should have welcomed it.”

  “I don’t welcome consolation prizes, especially when they steal a possible cure. Of course there were pitfalls with the experimental drug, but next to death, it was a real ray of hope. It would have been difficult, maybe just prolonging the pain, but we were given a real chance. Instead, she turned to the fables filling the New Testament.”

  “Couldn’t abide by her decision?”

  “I couldn’t abide with a reckless fairy tale influencing her decision in the last months of her life. I promised myself that I would uproot this religion in my classroom, in the papers I wrote, in the discussions I had with friends. I acquainted myself with guns to take aim at my target—metaphorically, that is.”

  12

  Only Horror

  “Are the girls inside?” Cricket watched the house.

  “With Hank and Caleb,” Sister said, Ethan by her side. She walked right past Cricket and the doctor and stood over the two men on the ground, hand covering her mouth.

  “Sister, they came to steal and kill.” Claubauf shielded his eyes from the sun with his hand. “They said some terrible things about your religion as a warm-up to the coming mayhem. I’d call it a moment of highly active self-defense.”

  “Don’t joke about killing those two.” Cricket stared down the doctor, who turned away. “Ethan, please get the tractor and the flat trailer.”

  Ethan left for the barn, and Sister Marie knelt alongside the two dead men, head bowed, praying. Two distant shots rang out from the forest, and Cricket knew in her gut these weren’t the clean shots of a hunter scoring dinner. She and the doctor ran outside the orchard and faced different directions, sweeping the property.

  Cricket spotted Fritz and the mechanics racing over from the airstrip, where Fritz had been helping Forrest and Oakley step through an inspection and reload the P-51’s guns. He made a quick stop at the house, dropping off the two men, then made a beeline to Cricket in a four-seat Mule with an old VW Bug engine Hank had dropped in the utility vehicle after the EMP attack.

  “Come on, get in,” he shouted to Cricket, braking hard in a skid, tearing up the grass. “I spotted several people ducking into the north woods. I think I saw children.”

  No invitation for the doctor, who shrugged. “I’ll stick around with these folks and keep the house safe.”

  “Thanks,” Fritz said, and Cricket almost screamed, You have no idea what a creep he is!

  Cricket tried to ignore the inner turmoil and lasered the forest with her excellent vision. She told Fritz of the bumbling intruders, and he had heard Claubauf’s shots but had flooded the Mule. He got it running in time for the next two shots.

  She hung on to the row bar with one hand; in the other was the Colt, barrel up. The off-road vehicle bounced as they climbed the long hill that plunged them into the woods.

  Inside the forest, the pale light made each fall tree a standout, one of a kind, crisp-looking in a new creation. Fritz braked and the two of them scouted for other attackers on the run. Fritz shut off the engine. The woods were quiet. The leaves fluttered straight down to the forest floor. No breeze to change their glide path.

  “You think they ducked in here?” Cricket said.

  “Yeah. Straight ahead the elevation rises again. They’ll stick to level ground as long as they can—that way.” He pointed left.

  He started the Mule, and the air-cooled engine sounded mighty, determined, faithful, like Cricket’s lovable “four-legged mule,” Diesel.

  They drove slowly.

  Fritz said grimly, “They’re being slowed down by kids. They’re not far ahead. We’re stopping here and tracking them.”

  Stepping out of the Mule, pocketing the keys, Fritz glassed the surroundings with the scope of the Remington. Cricket let her husband lead and double-gripped the Colt, pointed down and to the right.

  Neither of them spoke. They spotted and pointed: a snapped dead branch, the scuffed forest floor spewing its guts with clues. Fritz raised his hand and Cricket stopped. He saw the bodies a few moments before she did. Not far from where they stood were two small mounds, partially obscured by the heavily leafed branch of a recently fallen tree.

  As they moved closer, they looked everywhere except at the bodies. Cricket figured that like her, Fritz had known what they would find once they glimpsed the strangers running into the woods dragging children along. She knew there were no surprises to come from the two small bodies on the ground, only horror.

  A boy and girl, close in height and weight, maybe six or seven years of age, had been torn from this life by headshots. Their hands were tied with plastic cuffs, and their clothes were filthy. Cricket couldn’t look away from them, but Fritz spun around facing every direction, the rifle at waist level. When he circled again, he raised it and glassed the forest, saying nothing, trembling with rage.

  Tearful and sure that they weren’t being set up for an attack, Cricket knelt alongside the two children, and grief forced her to remember Grace’s death. She stroked both children’s hair, sensing that they were still nearby, confused, frightened at being jettisoned from their bodies and made to look upon their own deaths. She touched them, prayed, and talked. They would know love during this passage. Whatever shadow of sensation remained, it would be love filled.

  Fritz was talking, yet it took her a moment to make sense of his words.

  “Please, Cricket, get up and keep watching. I need to check the children closer.”

  She knew he needed to check their bodies, and she kept focused, eyeing the woods that seemed partnered with the monsters that had enslaved these children. His sighs told her everything.

  Fritz said, “I’m going to get the Mule.”

  “We need to keep after these savages.”

  “I want these children out of this place and made ready for burial. I can’t leave them here.”

  The shot that flew close to husband and wife made their decision. On his belly, Fritz sighted movement. “Cricket, take the rifle. You’re a better shot at this range.”

  On her belly as well, she scooted close to him and took the Remington, and used a large fallen limb to steady her aim. A man came into view crouched behind a tree, his head visible on one side, his ass sticking out the other end. She could take a headshot like he had given the children, but instead waited. The man started motioning to another person and exposed most of his body. She had a clear shot to the heart but decided to go lower for a gut shot. His scream ripped the still air of the forest. The next voice came from a woman—

  “We surrender. Don’t shoot!”

  Waving a dark cloth, the woman emerged from a thicket of bushes. Cricket administered a second gut shot, and the woman went down screaming.

  Fritz grabbed her arm. “What the hell are you doing? You could have finished them! They’ll alert others.”

  “Their suffering is music to my ears.”

  Fritz gave his wife a strange look before running straight for the couple, who bled and screamed and rolled over the ground. Cricket caught up, telling him to let the monsters suffer. Fritz ignored her, his Glock pointed straight ahead. Cricket had her knife out.

  The woman cursed them as they approached, and Fritz shot her in the head. The man, who had no more energy to utter his curses above a whisper, raised his hand like he was hailing a cab.

  Fritz’s first bullet caught the man’s right ear, and he yelped before Fritz drove the next round into his forehead.

  Cr
icket turned and ran back to the children. In her heart she believed that with the monsters dead, a just reward, a great peace, would now be granted the young innocents. Fritz was calling her but she never looked back. She collapsed between the two children weeping. She stretched out her arms and held them both, some final protection, accompanying them to God’s side.

  Part II

  THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION

  13

  Big Phil’s Lesson

  Late in the day, Big Phil had to face the fact that three of his men and one woman would not be returning. The lovers were good slavers, serious and deadly. The other two he referred to as jokers. The jokers had encouraged the morning’s mission and found themselves walking into a trap, believing the farm had a large catch of children, easy pickins. The anti-slavers had slaughtered them on the spot. The good “employees” were soon hunted down as well. None of the four had done their homework, Phil surmised, remembering the old line: If it’s too good to be true.… Back in the old days, the two jokers would have been fired long ago, but since this was a new business and slavers came from many different backgrounds, he was still learning the ropes, giving second chances. He doubted Ajax believed in second chances or do-overs, and didn’t look forward to their next one-on-one meeting.

  He cringed thinking of the brother and sister who, at dawn, had boarded a medium-sized flat-bottom boat and joined in the high-pitched cries of other captives to return home to parents and loved ones. He shrugged off the dull pain in his chest by congratulating himself on a late-morning catch: a young couple, thirtysomething, both fit, gym muscles, and very attractive.

  The young couple would fetch the best whiskey, drugs, or sex on the new market. Big Phil also needed work boots, a winter coat, and gloves. He dreamed of gold as well. Some slavers were taking gold as payment, planning for the world’s eventual return to normal commerce and exchange.

  He had the two in his pup tent, and poked his head in and smiled. The woman was defiant but said nothing. The man hung his head in shame. Ajax wouldn’t return until evening while a thousand dramas—fights, beatings, high-stakes gambling—were taking place on a stretch of the Ohio River just a few miles upriver from Marietta. Right now, not far from Phil’s tent, a tall captain was punching and kicking one of his catch who had tried to escape that morning.

  The gagged man was tied, and before the slave captain slugged him again, he went over to the morning breakfast fire and brought back a long branch, its tip red. He waved it and the man didn’t flinch, but cursed incoherently behind the gag. The slaver laughed and stabbed the man’s chest with the hot-tipped branch, and though the runaway screamed, he kicked at his tormentor.

  The slave captain disappeared and soon returned with a Rottweiler on a short leash. He let the dog get really close to the man without biting him. He dragged the dog off when the man repeatedly kicked his bound legs at the mutt. Big Phil was impressed and dragged out his catch to watch. Others in the camp had done the same, bringing out their catch to observe the punishment for runaways.

  Once again the slave captain disappeared. He was gone longer this time but returned followed by two men carrying a wooden coffin. The bound man on the ground became still, his eyes big. He flinched when the tall slaver kicked the lid off with steel-toe work boots that Big Phil really envied. When someone handed the slaver a handful of nails and a hammer, the man tried to roll away and many slavers laughed, except Big Phil’s catch: the woman no longer defiant; the man crying.

  The gagged man was placed in the coffin, and he banged the sides with his body and raised himself half out of the coffin before being shoved back down by the laughing captain.

  As they fitted the lid and began to nail the coffin shut, Big Phil said he had seen this punishment before. He explained that the knocking they now heard—a soft thud, he called it, smiling at his ability to be descriptive and precise—was the man’s head striking the wooden coffin as he tried to end his life before being buried alive.

  14

  A Three-Million-Year-Old Creation

  The next few days were quiet and sad. The adults talked amongst themselves in hushed tones, and the kids were kept busy collecting eggs, making meals, and doing lots of cleaning. Sister gave them the exciting job of retrieving two heads of cabbage, buried almost two months earlier with dozens more in a long trench lined with straw and covered with boards and more straw and dirt. Claubauf had taken care of the burial detail in the unplowed field across the road with Forrest’s and Oakley’s help.

  A private, adults-only ceremony was held in the eastern meadow that had been unplowed for a decade. The mechanics had fashioned small crosses for the graves. The Holaday children never learned of the dead kids in the woods. They were told of the two men who had started to make trouble and were shot and buried. The Clines and other Hilltop families were informed, and trackers from several families made a daylong search of the woods, but no signs could be found of camps or a larger operation. It appeared to Hank and his neighbors that a handful of misfits were buying and selling children. Unfortunately, they had to consider that a larger organization was perhaps in play. Ajax rocketed into Cricket’s mind, a beast transforming into a man.

  Caleb said little and stayed close to his mom. Ethan was instructed by his father not to say anything to his brother or the girls of what he had seen. The planes taxied from the western meadow to alongside the main barn. At night, patrols were shrunk to a tight perimeter around the barns and houses.

  On Friday morning, Cricket and Lawrence packed a few supplies in the Barracuda and headed to Ann’s parents. En route, the rear windows cracked, Diesel scampered across the back seat, unable to decide which view offered the most attractions. He eventually aimed his snout for the river.

  Ann had thought it too soon to make the trip. “With all the dangers here, I vote we stay put.” Both Lawrence and Cricket had disagreed, believing Ann’s parents to be in real trouble and ensuring they’d return by nightfall. Fritz supported the day trip but needed to remain at the farm in order to test-fly the Mustang later that afternoon after its one-hundred-hour inspection.

  They took Route 7, which followed the river.

  The top was up on the Barracuda, and Cricket kept it around forty to avoid abandoned cars and parts littering the road. She pulled out the Glock when the occasional car or truck passed.

  Her scan included the river, which appeared mighty in the autumn light, a three-million-year-old creation, a muddy catalog of sorrows and dreams. Yet a few million years was nothing next to Ohio’s snuggling close to the equator some four hundred million years ago, when strange creatures basked in a warm sea and devoured one another. She had taken several trips in high school to Rocky River on the west side of Cleveland, looking for fossils, especially shark’s teeth. If the world ever got its head back on straight, she might finally go to college and study geology.

  Lawrence had kept quiet for the first few miles. Now he talked of his fears.

  “I didn’t want to scare Ann any more than she is, but her parents’ neighborhood felt alien, taken over, like in The Body Snatchers.”

  Ajax is scarier than any science fiction movie. Cricket gripped the wheel, pushed back in her seat. “When the world we love returns… I think I’ll avoid movies… keep to books in my spare time. Mostly history, a lot of geology—I like the perspective—and definitely some chick lit. My only reading now is a little copy of the Constitution”—she patted her back pocket—“and Sister Marie’s missal. A beautiful read. I’d be in worse shape without it.”

  “World War One survivors were given Jane Austen to help their recovery.”

  “Forget their suffering?”

  “Actually to bring them back into the world. To heal their wounds. Show the beauty of civilization. The social order.”

  “I like that.”

  She played with the radio, getting only static. Then a voice, someone shouting through the noise only to be drowned out by static an octave higher.

  “Searching for
music? News?” Lawrence asked.

  “Looking for the Great Maha Rushie—”

  “Rush Limbaugh?”

  “He’s the man. Dad had him on the internet and I could listen anytime, usually at night after school. I love that man.… He made me laugh and taught me so much about politics and life.”

  Lawrence looked straight ahead, bewildered and amused.

  Cricket spotted the bridge to cross the river to the West Virginia side when the glint of a small plane, bright yellow, caught her eye. She pulled into a parking lot kicking up dust, crunching gravel, and with Lawrence holding on to the dashboard. An abandoned construction company, all its windows broken, had a row of large earthmovers and dump trucks parked behind the brick office.

  Cricket ran from the car to escape the cloud of dust that encircled the Barracuda. Lawrence was yelling something at her, and she made it into the clear to see a bright yellow Piper J-3 Cub aiming for her.

  “Take cover!” Lawrence shouted.

  She ignored him. Arms over her head, she waved and cried. The Cub became a blur as she saw her father once again in his J-3 Cub on the last day of his life. She remembered him circling overhead after she had cut down a pair of savages firing on the convertible as they headed north for a rendezvous with other police departments.

  Diesel ran in a large circle barking happily, tuned to the sound, look, and smell of his master’s flying contraption that in the past had made him envious. Jealousy aside, the contraption was now the heart and soul of the human he had loved for years.

  Once overhead, the Cub turned south, crossing the Ohio, maintaining a low altitude.

  “Cricket, if some maniac had a gun…”

  “I never heard of a Piper Cub with a mounted machine gun. This was the plane that showed up after the attack. Only Doctor Claubauf and I saw it. He almost took a shot at it.”