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Posted: 10/27/2014 2:09:54 PM EDT
Across the Scimitar


Evil men came across the Scimitar River to spread the god’s terror, and the kid watched his whole world burn before his very eyes.  He sat cross-legged, watching the flames gyrate when the old man came from behind.  Other men moved along with the old man, but they seemed unreal somehow, like ghosts, or just the rumors of men.  The old man stood behind the boy without speaking.  The two just watched the house burn.   Other houses burned too.  Every structure is sight burned, even the sheds and outbuildings.  They dumped fuel on the nearby spinach fields and tried to set them alight, but they didn’t take flame and only a few rows smoldered.  One of the ghost men coughed to clear his lungs of the smoke.  He carried a rifle.  Another toed at one of the bodies that littered the street.  He carried a rifle too.  Finally the old man spoke.

“They hit pretty hard this time, didn’t they.”

The boy didn’t speak.

“You got anybody in there,” the old man said.  He used his chin to point into the fire.

“Everybody I had was in there.”

The old made an animalistic grunt.  It conveyed sympathy better than any words could.  The kid looked up.  His eyes were red, but he did not cry.  The kid was old enough to drive, but not old enough to vote.  He didn’t look old enough to do either.  But there was a hardness to him.  Maybe it was because the house and all in it burned.  Maybe it had always been there.  Either way the old man liked it.

“The Irishman is putting together a militia.  He’s down in King’s City.  We’re joining up.  You got a rifle?”

“Ain’t got nothing no more.”

“That’s okay.  We’ll get you one.”

“The Irishman?  The one who sells tractors?”

“He ain’t selling tractors today.  The Irishman’s got plenty of guns and is handing them out.  He used to be a M’Reen.  He was a general.  Or maybe a sergeant.  Either way he ain’t messing around.”

A wild dog, lean and tan, sauntered up to one of the bodies lying in the street.  One of the men with rifles shooed it away.  The dog skittered off a few paces, then crept back to a severed head lying loose from a pile of severed heads in the street.  The dog lapped at it.  The second man shot the dog.

“Once they get the taste of blood, they’re broken and can’t be fixed,” The shooter explained.  He had a beard and a beaten down baseball hat with the flag on it in subdued colors.

“Gaw-damn,” The old man said.

They all climbed into a crew cab pickup.  Both the bed and the interior were littered with guns.  Loose shotgun shells rolled across the floor boards. Red plastic gleamed.  

“Gaw-damn,” The old man repeated.  They all drove off to King’s City, and the fires burned in the rearview mirror.


KING CITY

The old man’s name was Nash.  The man in the battered hat was Greywald.  If the third man had a name the kid didn’t catch it.  King City was beaten down, one of the many interior agriculture hubs that just barely hung on.  They drove down the main street which looked like the main street of a ghost town.  Aged brick buildings sported advertising murals for soft drinks that no longer existed.  Some store fronts were boarded up.  Others were empty save for the sun-bleached For Sale signs that hung in their windows.  They stopped in front of a prefabricated building of corrugated metal.  A sign on top of this building sported red and white checks and red, ‘Feed.”  Another sign, hand painted on plywood red:

SIGN UP
MILITYA


On a loading dock they’d erected a card table and some folding chairs.  In front of the card table ran a line of men.  Some old, some young.  Most carried weapons of types, varieties and conditions so eclectic as to be haphazard.  Behind the card table sat the adjutant.  Behind the adjutant stood the Irishman.  The men filed up one at a time and signed their name in a ledger the adjutant kept.  The old man, the kid and the others piled out of the pickup.

The kid stole a glance to the other side of the street.  A middle aged man, frail and dressed in billowing pink, waved a sign and shouted at the armed men signing their names.

“This won’t solve anything,” The sign wield shouted.  “We must exercise restraint!”

“Shit, the spilled blood is still warm.  They get here earlier every time,” Nash said. Greywald spat into the street.

“Fuckers get tipped off.  That way they get a head start.”

“You think so?”

“Don’t matter.  He’s here and people are dead just the same.  C’mon.  Let’s put our names on the roster.”


They joined the line.  The kid moved as if in a daze, his young mind still trying to put together everything that had happened, everything that was happening now.  The smell of burnt spinach still filled his nostrils and added to the surreal nature of this world.  He caught snippets of the conversations around him.  He snatched individual words and bits of the conversation out of the air like they were crane flies gliding slowly through the autumn air.  Across the street the protesting man used words like diversity and tolerance.  Men in line in front of them with shotguns and rifle slung over their shoulders used words like beheading, sex slaves, mass-executions, rape.  The kid’s head cleared like fog burning off in the morning.  His mind put the words together into sentences.

“They attacked the junior high down in Creston.  Took the girls and murdered the rest.”

“Took about fifty kids with them back across the river.  They’ll sell them if we don’t do something.”

“Parkfield always paid the head tax, but they attacked that town first.  Anything they couldn’t kill they burned down.”

“Cut off both his kids’ heads right in front of him.  Then they cut off his head.”

“The governor ain’t said a word about it.”

“Even the twelve year olds.  Lined ‘em all up in a ditch and shot them.”

“The Irishman aims to go across the Scimitar.”

The Scimitar River had another name, given to it by white explorers who found it long ago.  That name had stood for centuries.  Now it was called the Scimitar, renamed by the government officials established the refuge on the other side.  The administrators renamed the river because they thought it would make the people who now lived there feel good.  The administras arrested people like the kid and the men signing their names in the ledger when they crossed the river.  The savages on the other side crossed at will on their errands of rape and murder, plunder and slavery.  The men who renamed the river did nothing to stop them.  The armed and angry men kept talking.

“If he crosses the Scimitar, I’m going with him.”

“What the hell do I pay these taxes for?”

They waited in line.  The kid got a good look at the adjutant.  He was short and squat, bookish with sleepy eyes.  At his feet were wooden crates full of rifles and metal boxes full of ammunition.  Big red letters on the rifle crates read, ‘Not for Sale in California.’  The kid got a look at the Irishman too.  

The Irishman was tall, all arms and legs and head bald except for an even growth of white fuzz.  He could have been balding, or he could have just shaved his head.  He was stoop shouldered.  From the chest up he leaned in and always craned his head forward as if he were trying to hear a conversation more clearly.  He looked Lincoln-esqe in stature and gate, all he needed was a hat, coattails and the beard.  But he kept his face clean shaven, and he never wore a hat, no matter the condition of the weather or the intensity of the sun, a fact the kid would find peculiar.  The Irishman carried no gun the kid could see.  But he had a long knife at his belt, and he carried a long blackthorn stick topped with a globe of polished metal.

Greywald and Nash signed their names in the adjutant’s book.  

“We ain’t providing no rifles if you got your own,” The adjutant said.

“I’m fair enough with the one I got,” Greywald said.

The Irishman pointed to Greywald’s forearm with the end of his stick.  There, at the end of a partially rolled shirt sleeve, a stain of blue poked out.

“Let’s have a look at that ink.”

Greywald rolled up the rest of his sleeve.  An intricate tattoo was revealed.  A scuba diver swam before a background of an open parachute.  A bowie knife, a boat paddle and a flaming torch were thrown in for good measure.

“This isn’t going to be like it was back on the mew,” The Irishman said.

“I know that sir.”

“You wanna be a sergeant on this lashup?”

“I’d rather stay a trooper if it’s all the same, sir.”

“Suit yourself.”

Next the Irishman pointed at the kid.

“How old is that one?  I don’t cotton to child soldiers.”

The old man spoke up.

“Kid got burned out.  His people are gone.”

The Irishman looked at the kid.  “That right?”

The kid nodded.

“Family is gone?”

The kid nodded again.

“You want revenge?”

The kid nodded a third time, his face angry stone.

“Me too.”

The Irishman planted his stick down on the cement loading dock.  He leaned on it and seemed to stretch forward a mile.  “You don’t waste your words.  I like that.  Don’t forget how angry you are kid.  People get comfortable, they forget how to get angry. Angry get stuff done.  You ever shot a gun.

One last nod to the affirmative.

He pointed to the adjutant.  Put this one on the roster and get him outfitted.  The adjutant nodded.  After the kid signed his name the adjutant handed over a rifle and ammunition and did so without a sound.  He didn’t waste words either.

The kid collected up his kit.  Before he went away he said to the Irishman, “My pa had a calendar with your face on it in the barn.”

“That a fact.”

“Yes sir.”

“Well son, I won’t be selling any tractors today.”  

Next the Irishman pointed at the sign with his stick.

“Either spell that sign correctly or tear it down.  We’re upholding western civilization here.  We have standards to uphold.”

Some men tore down the sign.

“Gaw-damn,” Nash said.



A DEBATE

“He’s got a golden bear frame around his license plate.  Guess that explains his behavior.”

The kid watched the Pink Protestor continue his solitary protest.  He’d grown louder and angrier in his denunciations of violence and the militia, shouting at any passersby, interested or not.  The kid suspected the vitriol stemmed from the fact he was largely ignored.  A new one standing next to the kid called himself Chin.  Chin was in his mid-twenties.  He had a rifle and pistol and was outfitted with the kind of gear that made young men envious and made older men roll their eyes.

“My name ain’t really Chin.  I’m using an alias. They got spies and fifth columnists everywhere.  Take that one…”  Chin pointed at the Pink Protestor with his own chin.

“He’s talking peace and non-violence, but he’ll sell your name and the name of your family to the head counters across the Scimitar for a few pieces of silver.  You’ll wake up with your head off and your family murdered.”

“I guess he’s gotta pay for them fancy duds somehow.”

“And if ain’t the head counters it’s their apologists in the cities.”  Chin checked over his gear.  Then he said without warning, “I go by Chin ‘cuz I look Chinese.”

“Ain’t ya?”

“I’m from Pasadena.”  The kid considered that fact for a while before responding.

“That’s cool.”

They’d all signed the book and been outfitted and organized into two companies.  Now they milled about the loading dock waiting for the Irishman to speak.  The Irishman came out of the feed building.  His long legs stretched out in a manner that seemed to be captured in slow motion, propelling him forward in a caricature of normal human motion.

Some of the men were drinking beer.  The smell of the beer hit him.  Then his nose caught more whiffs of the burnt spinach leaves from the morning.  His stomach turned.  He thought of his family and the emotion and the stink and the velocity of his life made everything confused and overwhelming.  Colors melted into each other, a psycadelic melting of different realities.  The Irishman would say things the kid could not hear.  The armed men around him shouted but he could not hear their words either.  He only saw lips move.  He saw bits and pieces of the world as if through a microscope.  He saw whiskers above sneering lips.  He saw unclean teeth.  He saw specks of dust on the Irishman’s fine leather boots and saw numbers engraved into the receiver on Chin’s rifle.  He saw the tab of a beer can on the ground and it reminded him of his father and he wanted to scream and to cry and to rip his own skin out.  He wanted to hide in a corner and stand on top of a mountain.  He wanted to hold the mother he would never see again.  The Irishman was still speaking and used words like Poitiers and Lepanto and the kid didn’t know what they meant, and he wanted to go back to school but he didn’t know if there was a school anymore and he wanted to find that out.  But most of all, he wanted to go to the other side of the Scimitar River.

Through the hazed lens of his life he saw the Pink Protestor come across the street.  His pink garments ballooned in the wind.  He looked like a pink cog sailing on the trade winds.  His sign read;

Coexist

And it was written in all those crazy characters, like you see on the bumpers of Subaru station wagons.  The armed men in the crowd who’d been shouting settled down.  Seeing the Pink Protestor’s approach, the Irishman stopped his stump speech.  His eyes narrowed down to flinty gunfighter slits.  He planted his stick down and leaned forward on it, waiting.

The Pink Protestor didn’t wait for an invitation.  He climbed up on the loading dock.  Still waving his sign around, he unleashed upon the armed crowd of armed vigilantes.  He called them crazed Christians and hyper racists. He called them xenophobic, islamophobic, homophobic.  He called them capitalists and flyovers, intolerant and ignorant.  He called them all words the kid did not know, but recognized only for their ugliness.

“He wouldn’t say all those things if he thought we might shoot him,” Chin said.  

Nash, who came up behind the younger two agree.  “His kind have been handled with kid gloves for far too long.”

People around the town had come out to listen to the Irishman speak.  Now they listened to the Pink Protester.  A rare few nodded silent encouragement to the speaker they favored.  Most just stood and watched, not daring to favor either party, disinterested in any outcome, spectators in the life and world that went on all around them but not inside them.

“Folks’ll go anyway the wind blows them,” Chin said.  Later the kid would realize what that meant.

The Pink Protestor stopped his rant, panting.  He turned to the patiently waiting Irishman, who, smiling, leaned forward on his stick.  Guessing this was his opportunity to offer his counter narrative, he pushed up on his stick, straightening, and then he spoke.

“If you talk like that, if you think like that, you’re more dangerous than the head counters across the river.  You done speaking your peace then?”

The Pink Protestor was not done speaking his peace.  He didn’t even listen to the Irishman.  Instead he used the moment to catch his breath and then begin another tirade.   Ignoring the lanky Irishman, he directed his words and energy directly onto the armed assembly. The Irishman handed over his stick to the adjutant.  His eyes never left the Pink Protestor.   Without another word he drew a five-shot revolver out of nowhere and shot the pacifist once right through the back of his head.  The protestor collapsed onto the deck of the loading dock like a giant pink bag of feed.  One leather sandal came loose and flop down from the dock.

The men in the audience were shocked, but shock quickly turned to approval.

“Guess it just got real,” Chin said.

“It’s been real since sunrise.  

“I think the Irishman’s right.  He won’t be selling any tractors today.”
Link Posted: 10/27/2014 2:52:57 PM EDT
[#1]
Hell yes, keep it coming.

Link Posted: 10/27/2014 4:00:21 PM EDT
[#2]




Sharkman, this is pretty damned good.  Parched and grim and ruthless.  Please keep it up.
Link Posted: 10/27/2014 10:06:38 PM EDT
[#3]
Hell yes.
Link Posted: 10/28/2014 1:12:21 AM EDT
[#4]
Nice work Shark.  I particularly like your writing of the Kid's state of mind while the Irishman speaks....and also the end of the protestor.  

"...he won't be sellin' any tractors today."  
Link Posted: 10/29/2014 7:47:51 AM EDT
[#5]

       
  Is this a look at the state of the world set before the Spartan's Last March or something different?






Either way I like it...

Link Posted: 10/29/2014 4:35:46 PM EDT
[#6]
Awesome!
Link Posted: 10/29/2014 6:02:43 PM EDT
[#7]
Discussion ForumsJump to Quoted PostQuote History
Quoted:
          Is this a look at the state of the world set before the Spartan's Last March or something different?



Either way I like it...

View Quote


The two are not related, but my world view and appreciation of the human condition really hasn't changed between this, The Spartan's Last March, or the Flip of the Coin story.  I was finishing up, "American By Blood," when the stuff went down in Canada and Iraq went deeper down the elevator shaft to hell.  American By Blood was written a lot like Blood Meridian, which was part of the inspiration for The Spartan's Last March, so you'll probably see some stylistic similarities between the kid's adventures and The Colonel's.




Link Posted: 10/29/2014 6:05:25 PM EDT
[#8]
Discussion ForumsJump to Quoted PostQuote History
Quoted:
Nice work Shark.  I particularly like your writing of the Kid's state of mind while the Irishman speaks....and also the end of the protestor.  

"...he won't be sellin' any tractors today."  
View Quote


Yeah, every time I write a story it seems like I come to a point where somebody is making a speech, and I don't like writing speeches necessarily, so I guess I phoned it in.  Hopefully I phoned it in in a way that worked.  

"...he won't be sellin' any tractors today."

I guarantee that neither the kid no the Irishman will sell any tractors during the course of this story.


Link Posted: 10/30/2014 9:57:49 AM EDT
[#9]
They left the Pink Protestor where he fell.  One of the men put the Coexist sign over his pale dead face and with that as his shroud, the Pink Protestor was forgotten.   The Irishman did some further consultation with the Adjutant and a few of the older men.  Greywald was brought into this inner circle, but the kid and Chin were not.  After these latest details were attended to the order was given.

“We’ll cross up at old Camp Roberts.  Now let’s skedaddle.”

The men mounted up in their trucks.  Older ones shed bits of hay from their beds and tailgates like dandruff as the proceeded out of town.  The kid was back in the truck with Nash and Greywald.  Chin joined them.  Despite all his fancy gear, the young man from Pasadena looked green.  

“I expect the shooting will start soon,” Chin said.  

“I expect your right,” the Kid said.  Greywald, who sat in the passenger seat while Nash piloted.  This veteran turned back and looked at the two younger men.  His countenance said, “Don’t be hasty,” but his lips never moved.  


The administrators gave all the land west of the Scimitar to the headcounters.  That included the old highway and so a new one had to be laid on the eastern side of the river.   It was done, as all things were done at this time and place, in a manner that was equal parts corruption and incompetence.  The asphalt had been laid too thin, and so the road was broken and potholed all along the drive.  In places there was no asphalt at all and so the road would unexpectedly transition from blacktop to compacted gravel.  The convoy, with many drivers already in their cups, moved in jerks and starts as all these transitions were negotiated.  Curses and empty beer cans flew.  

“Hell fire,” Nash said after slamming on his breaks just in time to avoid plowing into the back of an SUV that bounced off the ground when it hit a pothole at speed.

“Hell fire,” he repeated again.  The convoy got moving.  Nash rubbed at his whiskers.

“Back in my grandfather’s day, when you built something in this country you built it to last.  Didn’t matter what it was; roads, bridges, buildings.  They built the Hoover dam in a time without computers.  They were still using mule power when they built the aqueducts and reservoirs around here.  Now nothing lasts.  Buildings are all prefab steel, meant to last ten years but kept for forty.  The roads crumble before they’re even finished.  Any big project gets started but never finished.”  Nash took one hand off the steering wheel and waved it at a series of lonely concrete pylons, meant to hold a train trestle but standing lonely and un-topped.  

“We don’t even have the force of will to build our own roads.  No wonder the head counters find us easy pickings.”

“They won’t think we’re so easy when the sun rises,” Greywald said. Nash disagreed.

“Nothing will change.  Ninety percent of the folks in this country are asleep at the switch.  Half of the ones left over are working for the other side.”

“The ones asleep at the switch don’t matter.  We do.”

“We’ll see.”


The sun hung low in the Western sky.  It began its descent behind the mountains.  From there it would go down into the Pacific Ocean and then rise again in the east.  They stopped short of the crossing at old Camp Roberts and dismounted.  The Irishman spoke with the Adjutant again.

“You keep the bulk of ‘em here with you. I’ll take the hotshots with me and go around.”

“I saw some folks playing with their phones when we left town.”

“Yes, I expected that to happen. It’ll be fine.”

“How many are you taking, boss?”

The Irishman looked around.  Men where drinking again, reaching into ice chests staged in the back of their trucks next to stacks of bird guns and deer rifles.  He didn’t like what he saw and spat on the ground.

“Most of these folks should have stayed on the couch, watched some of those shows where famous people try and dance.”

“At least they got off their asses this time,” The Adjutant said hopefully.  

The Irishman shrugged and let out a long sigh.  His eyes took on a look of bittersweet nostalgia.  “We’ll see how long it lasts.”  The Irishman looked to the west.  There lay old camp Roberts, a bridge, and the Scimitar River as yet uncrossed.   “I’ll take twenty fire breathers with me.  Keep the rest here.  Don’t let them get too drunk less the headcounters come across and attack, and keep the negligent discharges to a minimum.”  

The Adjutant looked warily into the reservation beyond the river.  “They can see us from over there.”

“There probably watching us already, tipped off by fifth columnists in town.  I’m counting on that.  Hang tight.  I’ll send you a text when its time.”

The Adjutant indicated compliance with a nod.

The Irishman hand selected twenty men from the hundred or so militia volunteers.  This group of selectees began with Greywald and Nash.  The Irishman was careful to select older men, or veterans like Greywald.  When the Irishman spotted Chin, he asked, “Can you use all that fancy gear or do you just stand in front of a mirror and eyeball yourself?”

“I can use it.  I spent a hitch in the Army.”

“You fight anywhere.”

“Army don’t fight no more.  I just handed out boxes to people who didn’t deserve them.”

“You’re hired.”

The kid was the last to be picked, but he was picked all the same.  They mounted back up in their trucks and backtracked several miles, then dismounted again.  The sun had set by this time and the sky was aglow, blue midnight and gleaming white stars.  An owl hooted, and in the distance a coyote made a lonesome howl.  

With these Praetorians of Americana following, the Irishman went across the Scimitar.  
Link Posted: 10/30/2014 12:42:44 PM EDT
[#10]
I'm liking this. When will it be ready to buy?
Link Posted: 10/31/2014 8:29:04 PM EDT
[#11]
Great to read your prose again sharkman!
Link Posted: 11/4/2014 2:02:15 PM EDT
[#12]
The Scimitar was only the notion of a river.  It was a line in the earth marked by rocks and gravel and sand.  Trickles of water tinkled along.  They crossed on foot, weapons in hand and moving under a cloudless sky of indigo.  The Irishman led them.  He consulted neither map nor compass.  He carried no rifle, only his metal tipped shillelagh.

They moved into the preserve of the headcounters without incident.  The land here was wild, and nature cared not about the world of men.  On the other side, the ground took elevation.  The flat arid farmland surrendered to foot hills that fed into the coastal range.  Great trees, thick trunked with reaching branches, rose out of the earth.  Dry leaves crunched softly under work boots and hiking boots, and the fauna whispered when it was brushed aside with rifle barrels.  

The Irishman took them to the top of a foothill and stopped.  They circled about him like school children, waiting for their next command.  Greywald was the first to take a knee.  One by one the other veterans remembered their old skills and followed suit.  The others, those who’d never served until tonight, quickly picked up on it and knelt too.  Senses were heighted by the night sky and nature and energy of violence barely contained.  The Irishman motioned Greywald over with his cane.

“You still don’t want to be a sergeant?”

“No.”

“How about ‘Chief of Scouts?’”

“Can I still shoot bad guys?”

“You may.”

“Okay then.”

The Irishman pointed his stick like a laser.  “Should be over that next set of high ground.  Take one man with you, scout it out and come back here.”

Greywald nodded and grabbed the kid by the collar.

“Time to earn a dollar.”


They set out together.  A chill set in, but not from fear.  The kid moved quietly behind Greywald, moving as the elder moved, stepping as he stepped.  The confusion and daze that plagued him since the morning were gone.  He felt alert, alive, sharp, predatory.  Fallen leaves and light brush crunched softly beneath their feet.  Greywald moved like a shadow, an image that kind of floated along.  Owls hooted.  Coyotes howled.  This was the natural world of God’s creation, and they hunted through it.  They crested the next set of high ground and heard the noises of men coming from down below.  Metallic sounds.  Electronic sounds.  Grumbles and whispers. Clicks and clacks and coughing.  

Nearby stood a charred wooden obelisk that was a tree before it was struck by lightning.  Greywald led the kid to it.  

“Wait here.  I’m going on alone.  I’ll scout it out and come back.  You got that smoke wagon on safe?”

“I do.”

“Check it.”

The kid checked it.  “It’s on safe.”

“Good.  Keep it there. You see somebody comin’ at you in the dark, don’t shoot ‘cuz it’ll be me.”

“What if it’s the headcounters?  What if they get the jump on ya?”

“The headcounters ain’t got the jump on me yet. They ain’t starting tonight.  Now stay here and keep that finger off the trigger.”


Greywald set off, alone, into the dark and mysterious sounds that could only be the slaughtering and slaving headcounters.   The kid plopped down next to the tree and leaned his body against it, using it to break up the outline of his form, the way his father taught him in the life he lived before his reincarnation manifested in flames and smoke and blood.  He was alone, but he did not feel afraid.  He felt like a hunter, which was much better feeling than that of being the hunted, or even worse, of being a victim, as he’d been a few hours ago.  In this world, some people relished in being victims, equated victimhood to sainthood.  He didn’t understand that then and understood it less so even now, here, in the dark with a rifle in his lap and nature all around, certain that soon he would be killing headcounters and comfortable with the impending violence all around him.  

Time passed and the moon and stars moved across the sky.  True to his word, Greywald returned alone.  The whisper of crunching leaves heralded his return.  

“They’re right where the Irishman said they’d be.  C’mon.  Let’s report back.”


They found the others where they left them.  The Irishman sat on the ground, cleaning his nails by the light of the moon with an ornate antler handled knife which sported a long and narrow blade.  The edge caught moonlight and glinted.  Greywald informed the Irishman as to the disposition of the enemy.

“They were right where you said they’d be.  They’re waiting alongside the road.”

“They’re waiting for the adjutant and the others to come down the road so they can bushwhack them.  But the adjutant ain’t coming down the road, not till I tell him to.”

“You think they were tipped off?”

“I expect they were, and I aim to find out for sure, and how did the tipping off.  But that’s for later.  How many were there?”

“Enough to make it worth our while.  What are your orders?”

The Irishman sheathed his knife.  He looked up at the sky.  His dark eyes took in the bright stars, each element in contrast to the other.  He closed his eyes and leaned back onto the grass, folding his hands behind his head.

“We’ll wait a spell. Waiting is never easy in a situation like this, but waiting to attack is a lot easier than waiting to be attacked, waiting on the other party to make their play.  The longer they wait, the weaker they get, so we’re gonna make them wait.   Now let’s sit a spell and soak up some of this moonlight.”

The Irishman relaxed, and in less than a minute, he slept.  The lanky chieftain slept the sleep of babes, not the least bit disconcerted by the impeding violence.  The kid watched, amazed at the old man’s ease with the whole affair. The world turned and all the others stirred uneasily, but the Irishman slept.   When the time for sleeping ended, he woke up naturally and without aid of an alarm.  One moment his eyes were closed, seeing only the secrets of his dreams, the next moment they were open and he was awake.

The Irishman stood.  As he rose, his movements seemed more mechanical than organic.  When he rose to his full length he stretched out his arms and legs and seemed to fill the world.  He was armed now. He carried an ornate semiautomatic shotgun.  All the furniture was rich oiled hardwood, expertly checked along the pistol grip.  The receiver was covered with intricate scrollwork and etchings.  In gold, there were inlays of birds in flight, a Scottish stag with a rack that stretched high and wide.  The shortened barrel was topped with mother of pearl beads.  The Irishman’s cane was gone.  He might have turned the stick into the shotgun by magic, and if the Irishman were some wizard the kid would not have been surprised.  The Irishman looked east were a faint glow had just begun to suggest a sunrise.  The warriors flocked around their warrior-king, and he spoke.

“This is Indian country, and in Indian country you attack at dawn. C’mon.  Let’s go.”

They moved across the landscape, hushed, but eager.  At the crest of the last rise they stopped.  In the low ground below they heard more sounds.  Men stirring in the trees along the road.  They were the sounds of cold men, hungry men, tired men.  Men demoralized from waiting all night to execute an ambush that never took place.  The Irishman and his band of freebooters spread into a skirmish line.  Somehow the stick was back in the Irishman’s hand.  He wielded it like a British officer on Flander’s Field, directing his men across the battlefield.  When all was set, one-handed he waved it forward like a sabre and set loose his dogs of war down the hill and upon the enemy.  What ensued was not a battle, but a massacre.  There was no other word for it.  
Link Posted: 11/5/2014 9:23:35 AM EDT
[#13]
Beautiful writing.
Link Posted: 11/5/2014 11:47:22 PM EDT
[#14]
Good stuff!

Thanks!!
Link Posted: 11/6/2014 1:35:50 AM EDT
[#15]


Sharkman, this is just awesome stuff.  Stepping lightly, a shared problem: writing

for a very small deep audience.  Many of whom are here.  Are you ambitious?

I am.  I want to smash the pretenders to our language.  And I may well fail.



What you are doing here is pretty close to Cormac McCarthy (sic?) The Road, but he

is 'cool', and we are not.  A little too close to the bone, naming that river "The Scimitar."



Just FFFing outstanding.  If you are ambitious, please lurk on Kindle Boards, and

learn the game.  There are women writing werewolf/bondage/billionaire/DERIVATIVE

OF DERIVATIVE/FFFing pornography...making a thousand dollars A DAY.




Your story is so way past good its giving me a nose bleed.



Carry on, Sharkman.



DCBourone

Link Posted: 11/6/2014 3:42:44 AM EDT
[#16]
I'm diggin' it Shark.  Keep it comin'.  

Thanks for writing it.  Also, New Sparta needs moar attention.  

Link Posted: 11/6/2014 5:30:34 AM EDT
[#17]
This is ridiculous. I would pay you to read the rest.
Link Posted: 11/6/2014 6:45:00 AM EDT
[#18]
sharkman, another good start. Thanks for writing.
Link Posted: 11/6/2014 2:01:02 PM EDT
[#19]
Discussion ForumsJump to Quoted PostQuote History
Quoted:

Sharkman, this is just awesome stuff.  Stepping lightly, a shared problem: writing
for a very small deep audience.  Many of whom are here.  Are you ambitious?
I am.  I want to smash the pretenders to our language.  And I may well fail.

What you are doing here is pretty close to Cormac McCarthy (sic?) The Road, but he
is 'cool', and we are not.  A little too close to the bone, naming that river "The Scimitar."

Just FFFing outstanding.  If you are ambitious, please lurk on Kindle Boards, and
learn the game.  There are women writing werewolf/bondage/billionaire/DERIVATIVE
OF DERIVATIVE/FFFing pornography...making a thousand dollars A DAY.


Your story is so way past good its giving me a nose bleed.

Carry on, Sharkman.

DCBourone
View Quote


Thanks man.  

"A little too close to the bone, naming that river "The Scimitar."  We all know what this is about, which is why it would never get mainstream published, which is also why I felt compelled to write it.

Link Posted: 11/6/2014 2:04:08 PM EDT
[#20]
Discussion ForumsJump to Quoted PostQuote History
Quoted:
I'm diggin' it Shark.  Keep it comin'.  

Thanks for writing it.  Also, New Sparta needs moar attention.  http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs19/f/2007/237/e/7/THIS_IS_SPARTA_v2_0_by_DoooM.gif

http://unrealitymag.bcmediagroup.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/painting.jpg
View Quote


We're getting close.  I'm putting down about 3 quality pages on the follow up a week.  Still got a lot to work out in my head though. It will get more involved in the world of New Sparta.  Multiple story-lines. Some new characters.  Some old ones.
Link Posted: 11/6/2014 11:07:16 PM EDT
[#21]

The worst part of watching you and DC (and others...but excellence and all that) ply your untested talents here for peanuts is the knowledge that if Hollywood had the courage to see the future instead of only seeing the past they would be here...courting you like the lords of prose you are and not making batman 27.

I hope I live to see the first movie made when the grid comes back online and we find spare time to make movies again.

I pray minds like those working here are there to give service to what will need to be said in that world.
Link Posted: 11/7/2014 5:58:13 AM EDT
[#22]
DC and the SHARK, together... these are good times to be on the world wide web.  I have been reading all the "good stuff" that floats to the surface here for a very long time.  It has only been recently that I felt the need to make a name and "join."  DC and SHARK, your stuff is VERY good and holds the steel well.  Many of us read and do not comment, but please understand that we enjoy these little glances into your minds, and know that "silence is consent" with many here.  


Thank you so much for coloring my imagination with your work.  I enjoy these reads very much and I would like to enjoy them further.  Please, continue the work.
Link Posted: 11/10/2014 12:00:43 AM EDT
[#23]
Sharkman6, you too,? Barely have time to keep up with another one writing on these boards, and you go and do this. The old man with the cane reminds me of some old scotsman who served in the SAS. Good stuff ! Starts as good as your other prose I've read.
BLG
Link Posted: 11/20/2014 8:53:43 PM EDT
[#24]
They fell upon the head counters while they were still at rest in their encampment.  They descended upon their enemy in a long line and all the while mist rose up from the trees and hills to meet the morning.  The Irishman posted himself at the center of the line, and he was the first to fire, as was his right.  He came upon a head counter awake and making tea at a fire beneath a wide reaching oak tree.  The young man looked up from his brass kettle and a perfected arrangement of small glass cups.  A thin and manicured beard framed his shocked countenance.  The Irishman leveled his shotgun and fired from the hip.  Lead spray pierced.  The kettle rattled and the glass teacups shattered and the man fell dead, face first into the fire.

After that the whole line erupted with gunfire.  It was less a gunfight than a melee with guns.  Head counters came awake, groggy, confused, slow with shock and sleep and they were killed unprepared by the Irishman's dogs of war.  Head counters were shot in sleeping bags and shot in states of dazed semi-consciousness.  They were shot reaching for weapons and they were shot tossing weapons away in efforts to offer surrender.  

The kid came upon one who tried simultaneously to unwrap himself from a womb of blankets and grab an assault rifle that hung from a nearby tree branch by its canvas strap.  The headcounter’s dual efforts were confused and clumsy and in vain.  The kid fired at close range.  Red mist rose and the body descended back into the blankets, the face disappearing as if it belonged to a drowned man in the sea.  The kid fired again and again for good measure, each rifle shot throwing up puffs of cheap white stuffing.

All around the similar images were repeated.  A head counter held forward a captive child and both he and his offering were shot dead.  Another headcounter ran to a vehicle to escape.  He got halfway inside before two men armed with pistols yanked him out.  The pistol whipped him until he fell to the ground.  Then they stomped and kicked him and together they killed their quarry without firing a shot.  

The enemy that could ran out of the wood line and into the road, and from up the road came the adjutant's column, calls into action by the Irishman.  In moments the fleeing bandits were trapped between the two forces. Hands went up and weapons were cast aside and the killing paused as the armed vigilantes ponder what to do next.

“Round them all up,” The adjutant called.  And they were rounded up and huddled together.  Weapons were stripped away from those who still had them.  The bloodletting, which had begun with such fury, ended with awkward abruptness.  Men lowered their weapons and held them at their hips, forming a corral of riflemen, each guardian uncertain as to what to do next.

“Where is the Irishman,” a man called.  But the Irishman was nowhere to be found, at least not at first.   The pause was awkward to a degree that was painful, the kid studied the faces of the detained, and he did not like what he saw.

The enemy surrendered with defiance but without humiliation.  The kid scanned the headcounters’ faces and saw men comfortable in their capitulation, comfortable in the knowledge that to forfeit the day would mean only a brief hiatus before returning to the battlefield, and most likely in a position of greater advantage.  They had been caught and captured, but the kid could see mockery in the face of each headcounter.  This battle was but a jape, and the kid and his companions were the fools.

Or so one would have thought until the Irishman emerged from the tree line.

He came out into their midst, loping along in his peculiar way.  He slung his shotgun.  In both arms he carried the limp body of girl.  She was limp from death, limp, from a death by rape.  Trailing behind the Irishman was a second girl, naked save for her own blood.  She moved barefoot, silent as a mute.  She and the dead girl may have been sisters.  Maybe not.  Nash came out of the tree line too.  He led some freed captive children, each one wrapped in a blanket.  Nash took one look at the Irishman and then hurriedly shoo’d his charges back into the trees.  The Irishman walked up to the guards and captives and gently laid the fallen girl to rest upon the earth.  Then he stretched erect, his hard dark eyes took in the scene, they burned with displeasure.

“What’s all this then,” The Irishman asked.

"They've given up the ghost," a man said, pointing to the discarded weapons.  “They surrendered.”  The Irishman spat.

"Our forefathers took no prisoners at Lepanto.  Took none at Iwo Jima neither.  This ain't no Western Army manned by belligerents who fear God and love Christ.  The normal rules of jus ad bello do not apply.

"They worship death.  Let them have their god."

The Irishman unslung his shotgun.  It twirled off his shoulder like a baton and rose up into its proper place in his shoulder.  He strode up to the most defiant looking headcounter in the bunch.  His hips made a gun fighters sway as the lanky frame propelled itself to the target.  The selected headcounter was an older man whose grayling beard has been badly dyed black, and whose eyes radiated hate and contempt. This one must not have understood the Irishman's words, or at least did not believe them.  The kid could see this one thought he faced only the same old game of catch and release.  He still did not believe, right up to the moment the Irishman placed the muzzle of the shotgun against his forehead and fired.

That was all it took to start the slaughter anew.  The other men fell upon the head counters and sent each one to their heathen paradise or to hell or some unknown black void.  They shot them.  They clubbed them.  They ran knives across throats.  They strangled them barehanded, until their faces went purple and their tongues wagged out lifeless.

One among the captives was a brown skinned man named Miguel.  He wore an attempt at a beard that was nothing more than scraggly hairs that came out of his neck.  He wore no mustache, and must have been forty.  He claimed he was from Oaxaca and had been born and baptized Catholic.  He said that he too had been captured in a raid by the headcounters.  He renounced Islam and the Prophet Mohammed and all save the Holy Trinity.  He recited the Our Father in Spanish and then again in English.  When he finished those he began to recite it a third time in Latin.  The Irishman came up from behind and while the Latin words hung in mid-air, stabbed the man in the throat.  Miguel crumpled into the dust and as he bled out the captain of the troop said this:

“We got two people here, the terrorists and the captives they took, and they didn’t take no forty year old Mexican as a sex slave.”

Another man rushed forward and planted a foot on Miguel’s back.  While Miguel still bled and tried to hold back the gurgling flow from his neck, this new rifleman drew out a bowie knife. He ran the blade out in an arc across Miguel’s forehead and with a rip of his free hand, took the dying prisoner’s scalp.

“Their way is to collect the heads of our people. We’ll take the scalps of theirs.”  

Up rose a roar of excitement.  The assorted militia men approved of this new practice and the small forested valley erupted with the bloodlust.  One man with blonde hair and pale skin spoke in French, so fast the words ran together like blurring streaks of light.  The man held up a passport indicating his nationality and claiming exemption.  A man with a gray and brown beard forced the Frenchman to his knees and made him cover his face with the passport.  Then, placing the heavy chrome barrel of a revolver against the cover, shot though the booklet and it's owner. The Frenchman fell over, and his twitching body was scalped.  

The killing continued all around.  It was all hacking and slashing and clubbing. The dead were not safe, each one scalped and mutilated further.  The kid watched Chin take a scalp and do a poor job of it.  

"It's butchery," Chin said gleefully.  "But it's our butchery this time."  

The kid wandered away from the scalping, back into the tree line.  He found the nameless third man from the following morning there, the one who, along with Nash and Greywald, found him alone.  This nameless man lay face down in the dirt, his arms flat at his side, like a board of dead human being.  The kid passed him and found the body he had shot, still entombed in its blankets.  

He flicked out a pocket knife and went to work on the scalp.  It was harder than he thought, messier.  When he was done he held in his hand an ugly, fleshy hairy bit of carnage that was unsatisfying.  He threw the botched work into the weeds.  Then he fished around the corpse and found a cord around inside a pocket.  Threaded through the cord were perhaps a dozen wedding rings.  They sparkled and the gems and precious metal reflected hues of rising orange sun and the crimson of bloodletting. Chin walked up and admired the find with a whistle.

“You got yourself a nice set of souvenirs there.”

“These belonged to somebody,” The kid said gloomily.  He stuffed the lace of rings into a pocket.

They Irishman strutted by, issuing out orders even now amongst the mayhem, the adjutant following dutifully alongside.

"Collect up anything of value," the Irishman ordered.  "And gather up their phones, adjutant, especially the phone off that old fella I sent to hell.  We'll take them to the Nerd for exploitation."

"You want to push ahead after this?"

"Negative," the Irishman answered. "This punitive expedition was ad hoc at best.  We ain’t got the legs to push any further. We'll return to civilization once things calm down here.  But mind yourself adj, this ain't over."

The adjutant trotted off to execute his orders.  The Irishmen, squatted down where he stood, there amongst the mutilated dead and the living, ravenous with their bloodlust. He picked at the grass and the weeds, insulated by his own thoughts from the carnage all around.  And the kid forgot the violence too and, from his own little world, watched the Irishman who too existed in his own world, and each one was at peace in that time and place. And after a time The Irishman noticed the kid staring at him. He flung aside the bits of grass between his fingers.

"It ain't like the old times, kid, but it'll have to do."  Then he rose to his full length and walked over to the kid.  Looking down into the younger man’s eyes he said with words that were lonely and sweet in their sorrow;

"This will be the last war I get to have."

Then he ruffled the young man’s hair as if he were no more than a boy on a ball field, and strode off into the wood line and was gone.

"This will be the last war he gets," the kid said aloud to nothing.  And all around the acts of slaughter continued, abated by neither shame, nor regret.
Link Posted: 11/21/2014 11:50:10 AM EDT
[#25]
Nice. I'm really getting into this story.
Link Posted: 11/21/2014 3:59:48 PM EDT
[#26]
Very nice!

Thank you for the chapter!
Link Posted: 11/24/2014 2:25:06 AM EDT
[#27]
Good stuff

When do we get another chapter
Link Posted: 11/26/2014 7:24:42 PM EDT
[#28]
Discussion ForumsJump to Quoted PostQuote History
Quoted:
Good stuff

When do we get another chapter
View Quote


Sooner or later.
Link Posted: 11/26/2014 7:25:36 PM EDT
[#29]
To Serve and Protect


The Irishman took his breakfast al fresco, at a wrought iron table on a brick patio that faced the street.  He dined like a gentlemen.  Before him lay a pair of hot croissants.  An ornate French press held dark, rich coffee.  With a newspaper in one hand, he reached over and worked the press.  The headline on the newspaper held the words, “Massacre,” “Intolerance,” and “Phobia.”

“It doesn’t say anything about the headcounters coming across the river and killing us until you get to the back page of section D, and even then it’s only half a paragraph,” The Irishman said disapprovingly.  He tossed the paper onto the table and poured his coffee.

“What’d ya expect from the Bee,” Greywald said.  He leaned against a timber post that had gone gray from the weather.  He sipped coffee with one hand.  The other held the pistol grip of the assault rifle that hung tight against its sling.   “Anything about it in the Rustler?”

“The Rustler is nothing but pool stories from writers in New York now,” The Irishman said with disgust.  “Every damn newspaper in the country now is run from either New York or D.C.”  The Irishman sipped his coffee and watched the street.

In the days following the raid into headcounter territory most of the men drifted off, returning to their farms and families and lives.  Only the most hardcore remained, or the ones who had nowhere else to go.  Now, they stood around their chieftain, in the open, armed and unashamed.  

The kid stayed too, of course.  He had looted a pistol off of one of the dead. It's was mostly black plastic but still of good quality. It's previous owner had no holster, so the kid wedged it inside his belt so the checkered plastic grip poked out.

The Irishman took another sip of coffee.  He had neither his shotgun nor his stick today, and if he carried the small revolver the kid did not see it.  He did wear the leather belt loaded with shotgun shells.  It was of fine brown saddle leather, as was the sheath that held his bowie knife.  Belt and sheath matched the Irishman’s high leather boots.  The rest of his outfit was of dark tones of English wool, and a starched shirt of white cotton.  If he was a killer, he was a well-dressed killer.

“Boss, take a look up the street,” Greywald said.  He took another sip of his coffee and set it down, freeing up that hand for deadlier work.  The other stayed on the rifle.  The other men made similar stirrings.  The Irishman only smiled.  

Rolling slowly down the street was an enormous black sport utility vehicle.  A host of lights and bumpers and antennae adorned the vehicle, as did a variety of blue and yellow decals that read;

“Chief of Police”

The car stopped in front of the patio and a tinted window went down with an electronic buzz.

“Good morning, Chief,” The Irishman called out.  

“I think we need to talk,” a voice squeaked out meekly from inside the vehicle.

Chief Kathleen James had a Bachelor degree in criminal justice from one Ivy League School, a Masters in Community Policing from another, and a PhD in Law Enforcement and Social Justice from a third.  When the administrators combined the sheriff’s office and all the municipal police departments in the county into one unified police force, she was their unanimous choice to manage the agency.  In spite of those credentials, she was completely unqualified for any position in law enforcement or leadership.

“Fine.  What shall we talk about chief,” The Irishman asked.  He made no move from his wrought iron chair.  The chief looked warily over the armed men.  She wore thick glasses.  They magnified her eyes and made them look like pie plates.  She made no move to get out of the passenger side of the vehicle.  Her driver, a short, squat thing who looked more like a swineherder’s daughter than a police officer, made eye contact with no one.  She stared straight out over the steering wheel.  The kid saw her knuckles turn white.

Chief James’ eyes darted over the weapons.  

“Some people crossed over the Scimitar River the other day.”

“You are right chief,” The Irishman said.  His words were not negative, but they filled the air with a sarcastic boisterousness.  “Some people did cross the Scimitar River.  They came on errands of loot, rape and murder.  Why, this young man’s spinach fields were burnt.  The burning spinach caused an awful smell.  As did the smell of the dead Americans.”

“That’s not what I meant,” The chief said.  She pushed her thick glasses up her nose. “I meant, some people crossed the river.  They raided across the river.  That is a federal sanctuary, a reservation.”

“It is indeed,” The Irishman answered.  “I’ve the signs along the highway myself.”

“It’s a crime to go onto their reservation.  I could have you arrested for that.”

The Irishman smiled brightly and nodded, but, was unmoved and unafraid.  The chief, still not moving out of the passenger side of the suv, looked over the armed men again.  They were all lean, hard men, with flinty and hungry eyes.   The weapons did not stir, but they were there; rifles and shotguns slung across chests, pistols slung low, the hilts of long sharp knives poked out above belt lines.  The clips of other knives held them against pockets for easy access.  One man had what looked like a grenade.    

“You can’t have those weapons out on the street.  You can’t have them at all,” The Chief said with a pout.

“Ohhhh,” The Irishman said with a long and slow deliberateness.  “These things aren’t hurting anybody.   And if they were, why I’m sure you and your fellow officers would come by and collect them up.”  He smiled.  His smile was an invitation, a challenge, and one the chief did not accept.

“If you cross the Scimitar River, I can’t protect you.”

“Chief, you ain’t protecting us now.”

The Chief had her fill.  The window went up and the car drove off, as effectual as she had ever been.  As the fancy vehicle faded away down the street, the Adjutant approached, a handful of papers in his hand.

“I don’t think that went the way she wanted.”

“I don’t care what she wanted.  What do you have for us Adj?”

“Just came back from the Nerd.  He hacked into those phones we took off the dead headcounters. He gave us two certainties. The first one I gave to Juan. This other fella is just up the road."

The adjutant handed the Irishman a sheet of paper. Lines of information on it were highlighted in yellow.  He took the adjutant's offering with one hand and resumed drinking coffee with the other.

"That's a lot of phone calls. What's this fella do??"

"He teaches at the local junior high school."

"A teacher?  Hmmm. Unfortunate business that." The Irishman finished his coffee.  He set down the cup and looked over at the kid, seeming to notice him and his pistol for the first time.

"Well, ain’t you a real desperado kid," the Irishman said. "What's your name anyways?"

"Angus, sir."

"Angus huh? That's a quality handle you're toting around."

"Thank you, sir."

“Don’t mention it.  Alright boys, we got some dirty business to attend to.  Might as well get it done.”

The posse gathered  up their weapons and headed to school.
Link Posted: 11/27/2014 9:10:58 AM EDT
[#30]
Moar.
Link Posted: 11/27/2014 11:25:13 AM EDT
[#31]
Link Posted: 11/29/2014 1:32:09 PM EDT
[#32]
Discussion ForumsJump to Quoted PostQuote History
Quoted:
I read this as a premonition.

People have no idea what's coming.  I've been researching Muslim Brotherhood activities in this country.  They are steadliy moving the ball down the field while our team is sitting in the locker room staring slack-jawed at "Dancing with the Kardashians" or some other triviality.
View Quote



That is the idea.
Link Posted: 11/29/2014 3:04:18 PM EDT
[#33]
Nice

I like where this story is going.

Now get back to working on our next chapters
Link Posted: 12/4/2014 7:44:26 PM EDT
[#34]
The first thing they saw when they got to the school was the brand new police cruiser.  It was new and expensive, and like the chief’s SUV was adorned with all manner of accoutrements which were new, and expensive.  Decals along the side of the cruiser read:

[div style='text-align: center;']Unified Police Force: Public Schools Division
When the armed posse piled out of their trucks, the two officers pretended not to see them.  When the armed posse starred down the police officers they started up their cruiser and drove away.

“For all their fancy gear they didn’t have much fight in them, did they.” Nash said.

The Irishman watched the taillights fade away with disapproval.

“Always a shame when men make a pledge to defend, get paid to defend, and then don’t defend.  It is even worse when the society they make the bargain with allows them to get off without a hitch.  You can bet your last dollar them two will still be wearing their badges next month.  C’mon.”

The business was ugly. They all knew it would be, but they did not know just how ugly it would get. They entered the school without opposition.  The policemen were gone and there were no other defenders at the school, despite the recent attacks by the villainous headcounters. The administrators felt that armed guards would scare the students in a way the murdering, raping and enslaving headcounters would not. So the Irishman and the kid and the others entered unopposed and without much difficulty found their target before his students, lecturing.  Greywald held up the incriminating phone records, for they were the warrant for his arrest and execution.

“You’ve been working with the headcounters.  Now you are coming with us.”

The apologist’s name was Jones.  He had to be drug bodily from the classroom.  He screamed and cried and wailed before his students.  His dignity left, and he would never get it back.  In the end, he was taken by the legs and drug out, his hands scrabbling at his students’ feet for salvation.  While the other men pulled, the kid looked at the classroom of students.  He recognized some of them and they recognized him and he guessed that was okay.  He had nothing to go back to and he supposed that also meant he had nothing to hide from.  They finally got Jones out of the classroom, his fingernails leaving claw marks on the doorframe.  The kid nodded at the students and was the last to leave.
When they got him into the parking lot the police had not returned and everybody knew they wouldn’t.  They bound Jones and threw him in the back of a pickup.  Along the face of the school, blinds cracked open and eyes peered out to observe the grotesquery.  Jones wailed like a wounded animal.

“Damn, but this is unpleasant,” Nash said.

A white station wagon in the school parking lot had a bumper sticker.  It depicted a black cross with a red ‘no’ line through it.  The sticker read:

KEEP YOUR IMAGINARY FRIEND OUT OF MY SCHOOL

Greywald jerked a thumb at the sticker.  “You think that applies equally to the headcounters?”

“Of course not.  The person parading that sticker around wouldn’t say boo to a headcounter.  Nowadays, folks only want to fight the people that they know won’t fight back.  That’s the whole damn problem.”

Trussed up hand and foot, the traitor was loaded into the back of a truck.  The air had a sharp, mean chill to it.  The wind blew with a cruelty.  The kid climbed into the cab of a truck, as much to be away from the elements as the screaming captive.  It was no glorious business, executing a man.  It was a pitiful thing.  As the trucks drove out of town and Jones made pleas for his life, the business grew even more pitiful.  On the bench seat next to the kid, Chin turned green.  The wind and the road noise weren’t enough. The kid’s ears picked up the curses and the insults, the pleas, the offers of contrition and the bribes.  They all fell on lifeless ears.  Even the Irishman’s crew looked like dead men, all emotionless in their solemnity.  The event took on a life of its own, and perhaps the gravity of it beat the men down to a point they no will left to stop it.

The convoy stopped at the spot.  The sky had not just the color of lead, but seemed to have the weight of it too.  Men stood stooped, with slouching shoulders and bend necks.  A lone oak tree beckoned.  It was without leaf or bark, and looked a perfect fit for the business of execution.  A field of long yellow grass and grey dust, and a rusty barbed wire cattle fence separated this Golgotha from the highway.  They piled out.  One man had the foresight to bring a wooden stepladder.  Another brought a rope.  A clean shaven cowboy named Dale fashioned the noose while all, including Jones, watched.  Hemp twisted around hemp, and the condemned man set to cursing and pleading and begging for his life.  And with each turn of the rope, and with each word from the dead man’s lips, the mood grew greyer.

“You helped the headcounters,” The Irishman finally announced when the trussed up Jones was finally perched atop the stepstool.  The wind gusted and man and stool wobbled.  When the wind ceased the man kept wobbling.

“The headcounters come here to kill us.  To rape and enslave our children, to take away our lives and our legacies and you helped them.  You’re a conspirator, a fifth columnist in this war.  Traitors are hung.  So, now, we’re going to hang you.”
“I had no choice,” Jones said pleading.  “What could I have done?  What could I have done?”

“You could have been a man,” The Irishman answered with a snap.  “This is yours.  This world.  This civilization built up over the centuries by sweat and blood.  You could have fought for it.  Instead you gave it all away, and for what?”

“You can’t fight them,” Jones continued.  “We can’t just go on fighting each other.  We killed them and now they kill us.  We can’t go on like that.  If we fight we’re just as bad as they are.  We all have to live together. We’re all here.  All of us, together.  You can’t kill me.  We’re all here.  We’re all the same.  You can’t kill me.  You can’t.  You can’t.”    

“You got people killed, children killed, children stolen.”

“No,” Jones protested.  “No, no.”  He blubbered tears rolled down his eyes.  His skin was red in places and pale in others.  

“I saved lives.  I did.  I talked to the headcounters.  Yes, yes.  But they promised not to attack my school.  Those were my children too.  All of them.  You see?  Don’t you see?  I gave them information to protect the children.  My children.  Your children.  I saved them.  You see that, don’t you?  You can’t kill me.  You see what I did?  You can’t kill me.  You can’t.  Please. Please.”

The kid stepped forward.  The begging stopped.

“You sided with the headcounters because you thought people like us would never do anything, that we’d just lay down and take it.  Well I ain’t takin’ it.  My sister used to go to your school,” the kid said.  Before anybody could say anything else he kicked out the ladder.  Jones dropped, something cracked but it was not enough, and the teacher hung from his rope and strangled, kicking and spinning the whole time.  

“Let him hang,” a man said.

“No,” The Irishman said.  “We ain’t doing this for pleasure.  That’s their way.  It ain’t our way.  Things got out of hand the other day.  I ain’t letting it happen again.  Two of you grab a leg and give him a yank.”

The kid was the first to step forward.  Chin joined him. The each took a leg and yanked downward until the crunching, and the strangling, and the kicking stopped.  Now the hanged body just spun on its hempen cord. And when the rope twisted around enough times in one direction, it would slowly reverse course and spin in the other.  
 
“An ugly business,” The Irishman said.  “But one way or t’other, it’ll only get uglier.”

The man was hung, but hung without relish.  Only a sad sense of duty surrounded the scene, and when it was over the men left without speaking much.  Each brooded in their own thoughts.  

Before they left, a sign was hung around the condemned man’s neck.  It outlined his crime.

“He was weak”

Link Posted: 12/4/2014 8:41:13 PM EDT
[#35]
Link Posted: 12/4/2014 9:34:16 PM EDT
[#36]
Thank you for the new chapter!

As usual, your writing makes one think.

Ugly stuff when the folks that have been to busy working and having a life finally have more than they can take.
Link Posted: 12/5/2014 2:17:29 AM EDT
[#37]
Good job Shark!  Keep 'er goin'!  
Link Posted: 12/5/2014 5:49:12 AM EDT
[#38]
Wow, Good chapter.
Link Posted: 12/6/2014 3:56:51 PM EDT
[#39]
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Quoted:
Wow, Good chapter.
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+1

Nice
Link Posted: 12/7/2014 10:57:39 AM EDT
[#40]


       
Thanks again for this story.  Being set in a  less fantastic world than The Spartan's Last March makes it a bit easier to relate to. It is every bit   as enjoyable a read too!











Let us know when we can support you by purchasing it...




 
Link Posted: 12/9/2014 2:41:25 PM EDT
[#41]
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Quoted:
        Thanks again for this story.  Being set in a  less fantastic world than The Spartan's Last March makes it a bit easier to relate to. It is every bit   as enjoyable a read too!



Let us know when we can support you by purchasing it...

 
View Quote

The Spartan's Last March was supposed to be set in a Semi-Fatastical world, so I'm glad it had that feel to it, so thanks for that feedback.

Trying to make this one a novella, so maybe 150 pages or so.   Once I'm at the 1/2 way point I'll start seriously thinking about putting it out there on Kindle.
Link Posted: 12/9/2014 3:13:16 PM EDT
[#42]
Discussion ForumsJump to Quoted PostQuote History
Quoted:

The Spartan's Last March was supposed to be set in a Semi-Fatastical world, so I'm glad it had that feel to it, so thanks for that feedback.

Trying to make this one a novella, so maybe 150 pages or so.   Once I'm at the 1/2 way point I'll start seriously thinking about putting it out there on Kindle.
View Quote View All Quotes
View All Quotes
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Quoted:
Quoted:
        Thanks again for this story.  Being set in a  less fantastic world than The Spartan's Last March makes it a bit easier to relate to. It is every bit   as enjoyable a read too!



Let us know when we can support you by purchasing it...

 

The Spartan's Last March was supposed to be set in a Semi-Fatastical world, so I'm glad it had that feel to it, so thanks for that feedback.

Trying to make this one a novella, so maybe 150 pages or so.   Once I'm at the 1/2 way point I'll start seriously thinking about putting it out there on Kindle.


I  just downloaded the novellas (Fourth Order Effects and Operation Swarm) from the Sean Bastle series a few days ago.  Anything else planned for that story line?
Link Posted: 12/13/2014 7:24:39 AM EDT
[#43]
Jones was the first to be hung.  He would not be the last.  Others followed, and after every execution the Irishman could be heard to remark, “These are the real enemies.  The headcounters are but a symptom.  There swings the disease.”

The raid and the hangings sparked an outcry across the land.  Local political leaders moved quickly to capitalize on the political potential of the events.  At the state capital, the legislators passed a bill that was immediately signed by the governor.  The new law stated that the state “strongly condemned vigilantism.”  Around the nation, similar symbolic laws were passed, by city councils and county councils, by members of school boards and library boards.   In Palo Alto, a man ran for county Water Commissioner on the platform that he would, “End The Hate.”  That platform would deliver him to his desired office.

Leaders in the field of education joined in.  In a university back east, the University President scheduled a second commencement so she could weigh in and prove her commitment to coexistence.  She said that although the University had Catholic roots, and was named after a Saint, it was really the headcounters religion which brought the institution into being.  She went on to list in creative detail the headcounter’s contribution to dance, literature, drama, Computer Science, Micro Biology, Marine Biology, and various other subjects. As she spoke, invited headcounters of standing sat beside her and nodded pleasantly, each one smiling with approval.

Civil rights leaders turned out to speak against the attacks on the headcounters, and sought to link that struggle to their own.  A woman who claimed to be the head of the gay rights group, “Homosexual Action Now!”  Made the claim that an attack against the headcounters was an attack against Queers everywhere, for they faced a common foe. “The LGBT community has no greater friend,” She said of the headcounters.  “And together we have no greater foe that those who hate us for our religion, race, or orientation.  We stand together in a community of love, warmth, coexistence and mutual acceptance.”

“Their Lives Matter,” read the waving signs and the electronic messages that bounced back and forth across the internet.  Nobody asked if the lives taken by the headcounters mattered.  If the lives of the children taken captive mattered, if the lives of the men killed and women raped mattered, nobody said so and they got no catchphrase of their own.  

As the outcries swelled, the highest officials in government were inspired to symbolic gestures, platitudes and rhetoric. In the U.S. Senate, one of the caucuses were so moved that they arrived to the floor wearing the headcounters traditional garb.  Masked and veiled and swaddled, each took their turn at the podium outlining their list of outrages they had suffered since the nation’s founding, and some trying, but not quite making, the case that their peoples’ past travails were somehow linked to the Irishman’s revenge attacks.  Members of the party in power claimed that more vigilantism would occur if they were not reelected.  The party not in power claimed that such vigilantism would continue until they held the majorities.  Grandees for both parties spoke out, all competing for the headcounters’ sympathies.

The Attorney General of the United States made a circuit of all the usual talk shows.  He made outrageous claims, chief among them was that while religion had everything to do with the reprisals against the headcounters, it had nothing to do with the headcounters initial forays.  “Religion is at work here,” he said.  “The same religion that commands its followers to blow up abortion clinics or hate on elected officials based on the color of their skin.  The same religion that commands people to not pay their fair share of taxes, or to cling to their guns every time they are faced with a nuanced situation they don’t have the education to comprehend.”  At the end of each interview he whined that, “Somebody needs to investigate these events,” as if he as the attorney general had no power to do so.

None of this noise was complimented by any action. The administrators seemed as unwilling to move against the Irishman’s renegades as they were to move against the headcounters.  The law was reserved for the law obeying.  Motorists who committed traffic infractions were handed tickets.   Farmers who committed environmental infractions were issued fines.  But armed parties in defiance of the law, be they headcounters or renegades seeking vengeance, were granted de facto amnesty.

“A whole lotta nothing,” Nash remarked.  “A whole lot of nothing.”

The kid spat into the dust.  He had a holster now.  It was a new one and he hung it low off a hip.  The plastic still had a shine to it.  They all had lots of new gear.  The world’s noise makers made noise, and the bulk of the world remained motionless, but quietly, in small numbers, some people lent their support to the raiders. Equipment flowed in. More importantly money flowed in.  It came in trickles, but every little bit helped.

In the days that followed the hanging, they moved around a lot.  They went from farm to farm, staying at one or two different places each day, hoping to stay a step ahead of the law.  Soon that precaution was abandoned.  The chief was not chosen for her role because of her inclination to action. She was not going to do anything.  Everybody knew who they were.   They made no attempts to hide it.  But in the few times she made public appearances the chief announced that she and her officers were launching investigations to identify the culprits.  As far as the kid could tell, the investigations involved handing out traffic tickets and sitting at the police station and turning the other way whenever the posse passed by.  

“This inertness has a gravity to it,” Chin said. “It possesses a force all its own. Like that saying, an object at rest tends to stay at rest.  It seems to me everybody else is at rest, just watching the world go on around them. Like they’re standing in front of a mirror watching their dicks get smaller.”

“The headcounters ain’t at rest,” The kid said.  “I ain’t either.”

The kid and Chin watched as a few flatbed tow trucks unloaded their contents.  The Irishman set his militia up on an old ranch that had been burned out by headcounters months before.  That morning the trucks arrived, brand new SUVs and pickups, gifts given quietly to support their efforts.

“The man giving them over, his name is Winton or Winston or something like that.  He may be Jewish, but I also heard he owns a dealership out by Stockton, so maybe he ain’t Jewish after all.”

Angus frowned at his friend’s absurdity but said nothing about it.  “If he’s kitting us out and sparing us from lectures about coexistence, he’s alright in my book.”

“I heard we’re going back over tonight.”

Angus looked up at the sky.  It was dark, a slate gray that promised wind and rain come nightfall.

“It’ll be good weather for raiding.”

“It’ll rain,” Chin said.  “I hope it don’t rain if we go.  I don’t have a proper coat for unseasonable weather.”

The kid looked Chin up and down.  “You brought everything else.  You didn’t bring a coat.”

“Didn’t think I’d need it.”

“You ain’t got no sense,” The kid said.  He spat into the dust again.

“I got night vision.”

“That night vision keep you dry tonight?”

“Maybe we won’t go.”

“The Irishman ain’t gonna waste this weather sitting on his ass. You ain’t got no sense.”

Chin fiddled around with the pouches on his chest.  He wore less gear now than he did when he first arrived.

“How many do you think we are now?”

“Greywald said forty this morning.”

Men had come in to join up.  Some were veterans of prior wars with the headcounters, wars which had gotten bloody but went nowhere.  Some were people whose families had suffered from headcounter attacks.  Many were ordinary people, ordinary people who were tired of having to endure headcounter attacks and then further endure being hectored by various leaders for their lack of empathy to the headcounters plight.

“Every time the headcounters blow up a school or shoot up their co-workers,” one volunteer was heard to say, “I got to hear about how it is somehow all my fault.  I figure if it is all going to be my fault, then it is all going to be my fault.”  

They all came to get a satisfaction they could not find other wise.  Forty was not many, but in a world which prized inaction, forty could be a legion.

Chin and the kid supervised the unloading of the vehicles.  Nearby, around a pile of old steel irrigation pipes, abandoned farm equipment creaked and groaned as the wind picked up.

“It’ll rain tonight for sure,” Nash said.  Chin grumbled.    

By the new trucks, the Irishman and Greywald conversed. The kid could not hear them.  He didn’t need to.  He knew what it was all about.  When they finished, the Irishman stalked off.  He held his silver tipped stick in his hand.

Greywald came forward, a scoped carbine in hand, pistol and bowie knife hanging from his belt. The most casual glance at his face could discern that he had orders to deliver.  Despite his earlier protests, he had gravitated into the role of sergeant for the outfit.  Now he delivered the Irishman’s orders.

“Gather up your kit boys.  We’re heading back across that river.”
Link Posted: 12/13/2014 7:25:54 AM EDT
[#44]
Discussion ForumsJump to Quoted PostQuote History
Quoted:


I  just downloaded the novellas (Fourth Order Effects and Operation Swarm) from the Sean Bastle series a few days ago.  Anything else planned for that story line?
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Quoted:
Quoted:
Quoted:
        Thanks again for this story.  Being set in a  less fantastic world than The Spartan's Last March makes it a bit easier to relate to. It is every bit   as enjoyable a read too!



Let us know when we can support you by purchasing it...

 

The Spartan's Last March was supposed to be set in a Semi-Fatastical world, so I'm glad it had that feel to it, so thanks for that feedback.

Trying to make this one a novella, so maybe 150 pages or so.   Once I'm at the 1/2 way point I'll start seriously thinking about putting it out there on Kindle.


I  just downloaded the novellas (Fourth Order Effects and Operation Swarm) from the Sean Bastle series a few days ago.  Anything else planned for that story line?


A few other novellas are planned, and a third book to close out the trilogogy.  I'm still working out the book though.  And the novellas... only so many hours in the day.
Link Posted: 12/13/2014 8:18:08 AM EDT
[#45]
Link Posted: 12/13/2014 4:04:35 PM EDT
[#46]
Discussion ForumsJump to Quoted PostQuote History
Quoted:


A few other novellas are planned, and a third book to close out the trilogogy.  I'm still working out the book though.  And the novellas... only so many hours in the day.
View Quote View All Quotes
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Discussion ForumsJump to Quoted PostQuote History
Quoted:
Quoted:
Quoted:
Quoted:
        Thanks again for this story.  Being set in a  less fantastic world than The Spartan's Last March makes it a bit easier to relate to. It is every bit   as enjoyable a read too!



Let us know when we can support you by purchasing it...

 

The Spartan's Last March was supposed to be set in a Semi-Fatastical world, so I'm glad it had that feel to it, so thanks for that feedback.

Trying to make this one a novella, so maybe 150 pages or so.   Once I'm at the 1/2 way point I'll start seriously thinking about putting it out there on Kindle.


I  just downloaded the novellas (Fourth Order Effects and Operation Swarm) from the Sean Bastle series a few days ago.  Anything else planned for that story line?


A few other novellas are planned, and a third book to close out the trilogogy.  I'm still working out the book though.  And the novellas... only so many hours in the day.


This is great news!
Link Posted: 12/13/2014 4:05:53 PM EDT
[#47]
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Quoted:
"Their lives matter."

Timely.  Relevant.
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Yeah, VERY timely and good paragraph.
Link Posted: 12/14/2014 1:04:16 PM EDT
[#48]
Outstanding. "Going back across the river tonight".
Link Posted: 12/19/2014 1:02:21 AM EDT
[#49]
I have really enjoyed your story.
Thanks
Link Posted: 12/20/2014 5:38:29 PM EDT
[#50]
Good chapter dude.

Sounds like some action is coming in the next chapter
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