The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: The Bombs, the Boil, and the Blue Boy, Part 1 of 6

A routine patrol hunting for U-boats leads Jules Desrochers, commander of the Office’s Atlantic bureau, to something strange and wonderful that he’s never seen before.

Then, in a quiet mountain town in 1919, news from the outside reaches the wrong ears, and a grieving husband makes a horrifying choice that will reverberate for decades.

The Bombs, the Boil, and the Blue Boy is the fourth story in The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: Old Dogs Still Got Teeth. It is a stand-alone story spanning decades and features some familiar faces, such as Jules Desrochers in From the Annals of the Shadow Committee.

Content warnings: violence, gun violence, death, gaslighting, creeps, tobacco use, drug use, mild swearing.

THURSDAY NIGHT, MAY 13, 1943
ABOARD LA MOUETTE
ABOVE THE NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN

“Jean, enemy torpedoes in the water!” Rear Admiral Jules Desrochers called out. He had to shout into his radio to be heard over the Chickenhawk’s thundering rotors. He watched two white lines extend from the rabbiting U-boats’ rear bays like slow cracks inching across a pane of glass.

“Torpedoes confirmed, Mouette, over,” Captain Lalo Loor of the Jean Chastel reported back. His raspy voice was disconcertingly level for a man with a pair of acoustic-tracking warheads bearing down on him.

Far below, the Jean pulled hard to starboard, the textbook maneuver to remove herself from their intercept vector.

“Get above the U-boats, do not lose them,” Desrochers ordered. Queenie Flynn smiled wide and leaned their ship-spotting rotor-copter into a steep dive to close in on the steaming Nazi submarines.

“Drums armed,” T.R. Swintch, the bombardier, confirmed from the back. Desrochers twisted around in his seat to see the two officials behind him slide the fuselage doors open. The racks of cylindrical drum bombs ratcheted toward the doors. Sure, half of Mouette, his Chickenhawk, was radar and radio, but the rest was fine-tuned for blowing krauts out of the water.

If they could get a hit, or even splash them anywhere close, the concussive blasts the drum bombs produced would rattle the Nazis out of their cans. No one in their right minds would attempt a dive after having half their rivets blown in.

“Coming in fast,” Flynn warned, then pushed their dive even deeper with a gut-churning lurch. Her black braids hung in the air like tendrils as gravity momentarily abandoned them. Desrochers gripped his seat so hard he thought his knuckles were going to pop. Mouette dropped with the grace of a dead moose. Fixed-wing pilots complained that the contraptions were hideous, that they only flew because they beat the air into submission. Desrochers knew that the air jockeys were simply jealous.

After hearing about the commando work being down with Chickenhawks back in the States, he knew there was potential underway. The ability to take off and land on a dime meant that Chickenhawks had immense potential as spotters. The ability to see the enemy first was often the difference between a crew coming home or a mass burial at sea.

The dual-rotored monstrosities would be the new crow’s nest. Sure, they needed some work: flak could shred them, they weren’t yet steady enough to battle severe winds, and the salt was hell on their mechanisms, but they were learning and improving daily. He’d even brought an engineer from Zoo Base for fixes on the fly. Doctor Clarice Wenter battled daily seasickness, but her in-air insights were supremely valuable between the greenings of her gills.

At that moment, she was clutching a handhold like it owed her money, letting her short brown hair whip in the wind. Still, she never took her eyes off the gauges.

“Do not let them dive!” Desrochers ordered, as if any of his hand-picked sub-hunters was guessing at their jobs.

Mouette came in low, skimming the frigid waves. If the krauts had been doing anything more than buttoning up to high-tail it, they could have popped the rotor-coptor out of the sky with a dismissive volley. Every Chickenhawk was heinously loud, absurdly fragile, and disconcertingly conspicuous, and Mouette was no different. Only a madman would use it as a naval spotter.

As that madman, Desrochers was determined to be aboard every time he ordered it aloft. He had plenty of odd ideas as the Field Commander of the Office’s Bureau for Atlantic Oceanic Affairs, and he tried to test as many of them personally as he could.

“Closing in!” Flynn reported. Swintch leaned out the open door, putting eyes on his target. Desrochers pressed himself against his window to get a view of the U-boat.

“Get ready!” he said. He knew his crew was the best and did not need guidance, but he felt he needed to do something. He let them work and focused his binoculars on the second sub.

It was steaming at full speed, a typical Type VII, a black blade cutting through dark seas. It was the emblem emblazoned in its conning tower caught his eye: a grinning skull surrounded by an eel biting its own tail. He wasn’t familiar with it, but he’d be happy to have a few prisoners explain it to him. In fact, he could already see his next crop of detainees: a swarm of little kriegsmarine ants running up and down the deck, buttoning down the hatches to prepare to dive.

Before he could advise his team to hurry up, the Chickenhawk bounced in the air once, twice, six times. Each drum bomb, an M-29-N acoustic-ballistic depth charge, weighed about two hundred pounds. Rolling a half-dozen of them out the door shifted the rotor-copter’s weight significantly. Desrochers held fast as the Chickenhawk seemed to skip across the the wind like a stone on a lake. He watched Flynn wrangle it back under control in seconds.

“There she is,” she muttered to herself. Behind her, crammed between the pilot’s seat and the depth charge rails, Wenter noted the Chickenhawk’s jarring response to the loss of weight silently, dedicated to her role as an observer.

“On target!” Swintch reported. Flynn leaned into the yoke and closed in on the second U-boat, not waiting to see the results of their first attack.

Desrochers twisted in his seat to watch the sea. The six drum bombs pitted the roiling surface as its they’d scooped the water out whole. After a second, the waves came crashing back in with the kind of force that needed mathematicians to describe. Somewhere in all that, a U-boat was being battered into scrap. The Nazis inside would be shaken like beans in a can.

He’d seen drum bombs shake the propellors off a battleship. The U-boat would be dead in the water.

If they wanted to try to dive afterward, they could be his guest. Otherwise, the krauts could wait for the Jean to scoop them up and throw them in her generously apportioned brig.

“Target two, intercept in thirty,” Flynn called.

Desrochers brought his binoculars back up. The men on deck had stopped their dive prep. In fact, they’d taken the cover off their deck gun. A searing spotlight blazed to life and lanced upward, illuminating Mouette’s soft belly. More men were emerging onto the deck, long guns in hand.

“They’ve got teeth!” he shouted.

“Hang on!” Flynn advised. She twisted her stick to the left, then back right. Mouette danced with her, not swerving like fixed-wing would but whipping its tail around into a wide circle. The spotlight followed, slow and then overcompensating, but finding them no matter what maneuvers she pulled.

The deck gun roared. Its shell was never going to do anything but miss wide, but it had the desired effect of forcing Flynn out of her direct pursuit. The Chickenhawk was a brittle thing, and even a close shot would rip it apart.

“Loor!” Desrochers grunted into the radio. “Jean, do you read? Over.”

It took a moment of swerving around cannon shells and small arms fire, ducking the spotlight, before their response to come through:

“We’re still here, Admiral,” Captain Loor grunted. “Shook one fish and toasted the other. What’s your situation? Over.”

“Shark One is down, can’t close on Two,” Desrochers replied through a clenched jaw. Flynn whipped Mouette around its own tail in a way that nearly sent Desrochers’ lunch gurgling into his lap.

“We don’t have eyes on her, she’s riding too low,” Loor said. “If you can put a beam on her, we can lay down some cover.”

Desrochers looked at Flynn, who’d been listening in.

“T.R., light ‘em up!” she ordered. Behind them, Swintch clipped the safety pin back into the drum bomb launch rail and pulled a bazooka-sized device off a rack above the door. Two thick black cables screwed into its back end, and he took a cap off its front to reveal a gleaming purple lens. He clipped himself onto a hook in the jamb and leaned out into the open air, the device on his shoulder.

“Ready to go,” he called over the wind.

“And away we go!” Flynn shouted back. She flipped a switch on her console and the Chickenhawk lurched but quickly corrected. Wenter scribbled another note.

Nothing had changed in Desrochers’ view, but he knew that the tube on Swintch’s shoulder was pumping out kilowatts of ultraviolet light in a tight beam so invisibly bright that the Jean’s Vampir scopes could see it for miles. They’d be able to follow the angle of its beam to determine the U-boat’s relative heading and speed.

Then it was just a matter of dropping some lead on the bastards.

“Signal spotted, Admiral,” Loor reported from miles away in the Jean’s control room. “We’re mathing it now. Hold her steady and prepare for return fire.”

“Easier said than done,” Flynn muttered, trying to both keep Mouette nimble enough to avoid incoming fire and steady enough for Swintch to keep the ultraviolet beam on the krauts.

“Not so jerky,” Swintch snapped, leaning hard against his clipped harness, more outside of the rotor-copter than in.

Flynn grunted and swerved around another shot from the deck gun.

“You want to fly this thing?” she asked. “Be my guest!”

“Just another minute,” Desrochers said, trying to sound as calming as he could. The way the Chickenhawks were built, even a carbine round could pierce straight through. They might as well have been in a hot air balloon.

“Keep on it, T.R.!” Flynn grated. Swintch didn’t have any attention to spare: every ounce of his concentration was required to keep his UV projector trained on the U-boat. He compensated for every one of Mouette’s evasive dips and turns as best he could.

Tracers flicked past and a burning in his chest reminded Desrochers that he’d been holding his breath. The radio crackled after another fifteen dragging seconds:

“Math done and payload away, over,” Captain Loor reported. Desrochers did not have to give the any instructions: Flynn knew to bug out.

A ten-round high-angle salvo airburst above the U-boat a few seconds later. The air cracked wide open and the sea was replaced with shredded white. In the midst of it, the U-boat broke. The calamitous blast scoured the men and guns from its hull and cracked its spine like a lobster claw.

“Positive engagement, Jean,” Flynn reported.

“Acknowledged, standing down,” Loor confirmed. “Moving to intercept Shark One.”

The U-boat sank faster than Mouette could circle back around.

“Prepare for survivors,” Desrochers ordered.

“Ready for C.O.G. shift,” Swintch replied. Flynn nodded and kept Mouette hovering level, centering the yellow little bubbles on her panel. Swintch clambered over his depth charge rig, pulled some pins, and pushed it on a track toward the back of the fuselage, opening up a wide space in the middle. Other Chickenhawks were optimized for personnel transport. Mouette could make a little space, especially to save drowning men.

“Launch rails secure,” he reported once the rig was locked down. He dragged a bag packed with life rings up to the open door. Wenter helped him unfold and extend a crane arm and winch that could swing out to haul people up and out of the water. “Ready for rescue operations.”

“Negative contacts,” Wenter said. Desrochers scanned the calming sea with his own binoculars.

“Nothing yet,” he confirmed. No sailors had yet surfaced.

His heart sank. Sure, it was good to have taken fifty Nazis out of the fight, but the men had families. Every enemy killed was the catalyst to harden their loved ones into more fervent fascists. Desrochers would have preferred to capture them, to help them break the spell the Nazis had cast over them. Hopefully the Jean would have more luck with the other vessel.

“Another few minutes, please,” he said. Flynn nodded and circled the site. Oil and debris bobbed on the surface, but nothing else.

“Mark it,” Desrochers ordered after there seventh or eighth circuit. Swintch nodded and activated a mailbox-sized transponder buoy, then kicked it overboard. The thing plunked down among the flotsam and bobbed, pumping out a radio signal that the Jean would follow. They’d skim any equipment or documents they could get. Even one loose-lipped love letter could be what they needed for their next big break.

If they could even get a hint how the Enigma X worked, it could save countless lives. But that was wishful thinking.

What concerned Desrochers most was what the pair of submarines was doing off the coast of Greenland in the first place. The Jean was only there by circumstance, testing the Mouette in low-temperature conditions, but the krauts were up to something. There was a chance they were opportunists, hoping a hapless convoy might lumber on by and they could pick off the stragglers.

Desrochers knew Nazis better than that. They were there for something, he just had to figure out what.

While he was waiting for initial reports from the Jean regarding prisoner statements from the first U-boat, Flynn found his answer:

“Sir, I’ve got… something… at our one,” she said. Desrochers brought his binoculars up and scanned the north-eastern horizon. It was the dull glow that caught his eye, gentle and pulsing like arctic ice. It was haunting, ethereal. Flynn added: “No positive I.D., sir.”

Desrochers’ jaw slowly fell open as he studied the strange light. It was as bright as a distant city, one floating at meridian between the Arctic Sea and the North Atlantic.

It couldn’t be there.

“Radar?” Wenter asked.

“No blips,” she answered.

“What is it?” Swintch wondered. “Should I reconfigure?”

That broke the spell that had ensorcelled Desrochers. He lowered his binoculars and considered that for a moment. No, he wasn’t about to attack something simply because he did not understand it. But as mesmerizing as the strange light was, he could never forget that he was at war.

“We must be ready for anything, although violence will not be our first response. Reset the bomb rails, Mister Swintch. And prepare conventional munitions,” he ordered, and the bombardier got to work right away. Desrochers leaned over to look at the instrument panel, instantly getting lost in the dozens of gauges and meters and giving up. “How is our fuel?”

“Looks like about eighty percent, sir,” Flynn replied. She wrestled to compensate as Mouette bucked when Swintch pushed the heavy bomb rail back into active position by the side door.

“Miss Flynn, Mister Switch, Doctor Wenter, are you all interested in seeing what lies to our north?” Desrochers asked. They each nodded.

“As am I,” Desrochers replied. He grabbed the radio mic and called the Jean: “Lalo, we have visual on an unknown contact to the northeast.”

Loor took a moment to respond.

“Negative radar contacts on aerial and surface, Mouette,” he reported. “However we see it as well. I do not presume that I could convince you to wait an hour? Rescue operations are still underway.”

“You keep fishing for jerries,” Desrochers said. “We’re going to take a closer look. Swintch is activating another transponder so you can catch up when you’ve finished collecting our new guests. Let them shiver a bit, that might encourage them to offer some insight.”

The resignation in Loor’s voice was evident in his response:

“Merde. At least bug out if things get hairy. I know you can hear me, Official Flynn. Do not get our boss killed. Over.”

“Heard, skipper,” Flynn replied. A nod from Desrochers was her go-ahead, and she leaned Mouette forward, catching the wind under its dual rotors. The aircraft roared ahead, toward the nebulous aura.

It had been far further than they’d guessed, forcing Flynn to watch the fuel gauge judiciously. When they hit the forty percent capacity mark, Desrochers made the call to continue. They had to trust that the Jean would be steaming behind them and would be there as a landing pad before they dropped out of the sky.

Desrochers had to run the numbers on their time versus airspeed three times before they were close enough to see the origin of the light.

It was a massive orb set in the ocean, mountainous. Its roiling, squirming skin was translucent white, with the blue glow pulsing softly from its core.

“Oh my goodness,” Wenter gasped from the back.

“Take us up, Flynn,” Desrochers ordered. She nodded and pushed Mouette’s rotors to claw skyward. It took what felt like several minutes for them to reach an altitude level with the orb’s apex.

“Two thousand feet, sir,” she reported.

“Damn,” Swinch muttered. “What is it?”

The thing looked like a bath bubble sitting atop the sea. It was perfectly round, a half-mile tall and a mile across. It shuddered like it was filled with steam, or ghosts, insistently testing its edges, pushing and squirming to burst it. Faint blue pulsed within.

It took Desrochers a full minute to gather the words for what he was seeing, meager as they were:

“I have never seen anything like this.”

“What about you, doc?” Swintch asked. The three of them broke the thing’s hypnotic hold and turned to stare at their guest from Zoo Base. She had seen things there that none of them could imagine, surely she had answers.

Wenter blinked, surprised that they’d want to talk to her, to even mouth words, when the mesmerizing thing was there right in front of them.

“Me? No, I… I am at a loss,” she replied. Her gaze drifted away from them and locked back onto the pulsing, foreign thing. Blue danced across her eyes. “I am an aeronautical engineer. For this you’d need a chemist, or a physicist. Maybe a priest.”

SUNDAY MORNING, JANUARY 19, 1919
WEST CORINTH BAPTIST CHURCH
IDLERS GAP, VIRGINIA

Sheriff Gunston Roust’s wife had not been in the ground four days before Pastor Ames reassembled his mewling flock to let them cough and slobber over one another in the name of that lazy bastard, God.

Prayers hadn’t helped Meredith, and they wouldn’t help any of the rest of them. As he told it, Pastor Ames and the rest of them had prayed their little hands raw wishing her back to health, but they sure as Hell didn’t wash ‘em. They didn’t wear masks, or keep apart, or quit spitting in the street. What they did do was pray.

When the flu came to town, they hadn’t even bothered praying. It had ridden in on the line men they’d all celebrated. The sheriff had lived his whole life in the little hole between the mountains their town was nestled in. He’d never needed to make a telephone call in his damn life, so when those strangers came to town, carrying their germs with ‘em, he’d tried to shuffle ‘em right back out. It was the mayor and the pastor that’d welcomed ‘em in.

Those boys got to sniffling and sneezing, and pretty soon everyone else did, too. The telephone poles went up and the line men left. In their wake, six people had died. Meredith Pellier Roust was the first. When she left him she was hacking and pale, and little Parcival had to watch her die.

The sheriff kicked in the church’s front doors, shattering the sad little stained glass fishes and lambs. Someone screamed, but he didn’t think anything of it. They should have been scared.

“What in God’s name - !” Ames shouted, but he silenced himself when he saw the sheriff’s get-up.

“Gunston? What are you doing?” Mayor Clydler asked. He was standing in his traditional seat in the the front pew.

The sheriff could see how they’d be confused. None of them had so much as worn a mask since the outbreak began. His face was covered from his eyes up and down in a white cotton wrap. He wore gloves and a white tunic to prevent the further spread of germs. Besides his eyes, his only visible feature was the brass star pinned to his chest.

“What the Hell do you think you’re doing?” the mayor demanded.

“What I’m doing?” the sheriff snarled. “Y’all just killed my wife and you’re fixing to do it again!”

“Gunston,” the pastor started, but the sheriff wasn’t having any of his patronizing bullshit.

“You two are under arrest,” he snapped.

“Arrest?” the mayor asked, incredulous.

“Murder, six counts each,” the sheriff replied. He counted up the shocked congregants. “And eighteen counts attempted.”

“Gunston, Meredith - !” the mayor tried, but that shit was not about to fly.

“Don’t you say her name,” the sheriff snarled. “Y’all read. You know she didn’t have to die. But not a one of you gave half-a-shit to go out of your way to save her. Not a one of you!”

“Gunston, God’s plan might not make sense at first - !” the pastor tried again, but no, that wasn’t happening.

“God’s plan? God gave us masks, soap, quinine, colloidal silver, a lick of sense. He gave us doctors that know how to handle this and the opportunity to listen to ‘em. His plan was for us to come together and beat this this bug, not to let our people wither off the tree,” the sheriff ranted. “We had the ability to avoid this, but y’all were too selfish and lazy to do anything at all.”

“Now that’s not fair,” the mayor said, snorting his retort. “Those quacks on the radio don’t know a thing, they’re in it to control us and make themselves rich. It’s unfortunate what happened, but we got off a lot better than most places.”

“‘Not fair?’ ‘Unfortunate?’” the sheriff said, shocked frozen. He shook his head, trying to make sense of it. “Boy! Come in here!”

Ladies gasped as Parcival Roust entered the church, stained glass crunching ’neath his white-wrapped boots. The smock his father has draped over him covered him from his head to the floor and trailed through the shards behind him.

He looked every bit the ghost he wished he was.

“Boy, it’s pretty ‘not fair’ and ‘unfortunate’ that these sorry cusses didn’t see fit to help your mother live, ain’t it?” Gunston snapped. “Boy! Look at me when I’m speaking to you!”

Parcival’s gaze rose from the floor. Beneath the mask, his father had a week’s worth of graying beard, hollow cheeks, and bloodshot eyes that looked like they belonged to a different man. The furious haint bellowing, waving his white-cloaked arms around, he wasn’t the man who’d raised him.

But that specter wasn’t wrong, either. Inaction was as malicious as premeditation. They had every opportunity to prevent Meredith’s awful death, and they couldn’t be bothered.

Parcival wasn’t going to cry. He would have to save that for later, when he was alone. He pulled at the fabric mask covering his nose. It had become hard to breathe.

“Parcival, son…” the mayor tried, but the sheriff’s pistol suddenly jerked in his direction like it had been yanked on a string. Clydler’s hands rose. He advised: “Don’t do anything rash, Gunston.”

As if the sheriff hadn’t played the whole scenario out a hundred times in his head over the past four days.

“This ain’t what your pa should be doing, is it, son?” the pastor tried.

“Y’all killed half the people allowed to call him that,” Gunston grated, swinging his pistol around the room. Folks ducked and whimpered as its barrel pointed in their direction. “So keep that word out of your dirty mouths, if you please.”

“Sheriff, I’d ask you to surrender that - !” the pastor tried, only to get shouted down:

“‘Sheriff?’ You keep using words you ain’t got the right to. Y’all elected me to keep this God-forsaken place safe and the only snakes I find are you! So what am I to do? Let y’all keep biting people? A mayor’s s’pposed to make the hard choices to keep his town safe. And a pastor’s job ain’t hard, it’s to make everybody happy to do the right thing. Brother’s keeper and all. But neither one of you vipers has the fortitude to do your jobs.”

Gunston was sweating under his protective wraps. His heart was racing a mile a minute. He could feel blood pounding behind his eyes. Liquid silver coursed through his arteries like a mongoose chasing down a cobra.

“You hear what I’m saying?” he shouted at the trembling congregation. His voice shook the old church’s rafters.

“We do, sheriff, we do,” the mayor assured him. Clydler’s bald head was about as red as a beet. Every glistening bead of sweat contained enough of his germs to kill a dozen Merediths, and he was just letting them run off his pate and splatter on the floor.

“I don’t think so, you serpent,” Gunston spat. “Are you resisting a lawful arrest?”

“This isn’t - !” Clydler started, but the sheriff shouted over him.

“Sounds like! And you, pastor?”

“Gunston, think about what you’re doing,” Ames said in that patronizing, quiet tone a disappointed reverend takes on.

“What do you think I been doing? Six days and six nights since the one person on God’s green Earth who made things make sense withered away and died, I been thinking. And what I learned was that God didn’t do that to her. He didn’t do that to me or to my boy. Y’all did. And as I understand it, you’re both resisting?”

“Sheriff! That is preposterous,” the mayor objected.

Either one of ‘em could’ve said it and it wouldn’t matter because it was still dead wrong.

“Mayor Clydler, you’ve known me a long time. I ain’t one to beat around the bush. I promise you that if one more drip of poison leaves your mouth, my boy is going to fill you with buckshot, you understand me?”

The mayor nodded and clapped his trap. The sheriff took a deep breath then stepped up to the pulpit. His glare alone forced Ames to abdicate his position.

“Y’all,” he said to the frozen congregation, “They killed Meredith. They killed Amos, Beth, Aunt Sara, Rusty, and Fran. It ain’t an argument, it is what it is. Our mayor welcomed Typhoid Marys into this town, and our pastor brought them into this flock. Every step of the way they could have stopped this thing, and they didn’t. For a damned telephone!”

The congregation gasped almost as loud at his salty language as they had at his drawn pistol.

“How many of y’all got calls to make? The only person I want to talk to ain’t around to be picking up any of my calls!”

“Sheriff - !” the mayor tried.

“What did I tell you about talking?” the sheriff snarled over him. He took a second to calm himself before continuing his impromptu sermon:

“God, my God, gave us the eyes, guts, hearts, and hands to beat this flu. We all know it. We know about soap and masks and keeping our distance. God gave us silver to purify ourselves, He gave us the sun to burn out the germs. He gave us lye to scald our clothes. He gave us these mountains to keep us apart and keep us healthy. You know who ignored Him?”

The congregation whispered like a flock of feather dusters.

“You know who. And if you’re not sure, ask yourselves: what’s a mayor if his town stays home? What’s a pastor if the church is empty?”

“I can’t listen to another word of this malarky!” Clydler snapped.

“Fred, you could have stayed quiet.”

“Sheriff, Gunston, I know you’re hurting…” Clydler started, but a loud sigh from the sheriff shut him up.

“Boy,” the sheriff groaned, his eyes closed, leaning against the pulpit, “Why don’t you go ahead and shoot Mayor Fred.”

All eyes turned to Parcival and his oversized smock. He nudged the hanging fabric aside and lifted the shotgun he’d been toting beneath it to myriad gasps. The gun was damn-near as long as he was tall. He struggled to lift it, but when he got underneath it he braced to keep its double barrels steady as he settled his aim on the mayor’s chest.

“Come on, go ahead now,” Gunston said softly. “You do it right, you only got to do it once.”

“Come now, sheriff, this isn’t what - !” Pastor Ames started, only for the sheriff whipped around and drill hot lead through his chest. He gasped like a fish and flopped boneless to the floor to twitch and wheeze.

The loud noise made Parcival jump and he squeezed his own trigger on instinct. His aim had drifted and the buckshot swept low and through the mayor, yanking him off his feet.

“Oh, God!” Clydler yelped. A couple women screamed.

“Fred, God don’t deal in fools and killers,” the sheriff grunted. He turned to his son: “I said ‘do it right or do it twice,’ didn’t I?”

“Oh, God!” the mayor sputtered again, clutching at his legs.

“Yes, sir,” Parcival mumbled under his mask, his gaze locked on the floor in front of him.

“Say that again?” the sheriff demanded.

“Yes, sir!” Parcival replied, just shy of shouting. He looked at the flowing arches in the front of the church, tracing their curves to where they met high about the dark walnut altar. Anywhere except at the blubbering, bleeding mayor. He broke open his shotgun, pulled the shells, and planted a new pair in the breech.

The whimpers of the congregation went silent as the sheriff swung his pistol around.

“Do it right, boy,” the sheriff said.

Parcival trudged forward, dragging his quarantine robes through the busted glass, until he was but a few feet from the mayor.

Clydler tried to sputter reason, his polished facade cracked and leaking with each desperate word ’til it shattered altogether:

“It wasn’t our fault, son. We didn’t do nothin’ to your momma. We were kin, she’s my momma’s cousin. You don’t have to - !”

The shotgun roared anew, and the mayor’s arguments reached their conclusion.

“Dear God, Gunston,” Pastor Ames gasped from the floor.

“There you go, dripping your venom again,” the sheriff snarled. He stepped over the mayor’s splattered remains, leaving his son to tremble in his robes. “You ignored Him, now you want His help? I always knew you were a poisonous coward, Milt.”

“Please…” Ames tried. Sheriff Roust straddled him and spoke to the shocked parishioners:

“These two men killed our friends and families as sure as if they’d run ‘em down in truck. We know that. But some judge wouldn’t help us. Those folks out there - ” he pointed out the busted front door, over the mountains toward the county seat and beyond, “They don’t know nothing about God, or justice. They brought this plague upon us. What me and Parcival did was God’s work, and we cut out the middleman. We saved Old Sparky some voltage.”

Pastor Ames could only gasp. The sheriff squatted, whispering just for him:

“Meredith couldn’t catch her breath at the end, either.” He patted the pastor’s shoulder and walked away, leaving him to die alone.

“Y’all, we’re at a crossroads,” he said to everyone left. “Do we let greedy cowards lead us to ruin, or do we follow God’s will and use the tools He gave us?”

The congregants looked at each other. He didn’t see any more tears, and none of them was fixing to bolt. He smiled, his first in weeks.

“Parcival, come here,” he said, letting a calmness wash over him. His son walked slowly, wooden. The shotgun’s stock dragged on the floor. He stopped two yards from his father, as he’d been taught. The sheriff was proud of him.

“Son, I pledge to you, to all y’all, that I will do everything in my God-given power to keep every one of you safe and healthy. Whatever He calls me to do, I will. And those outside of our Eden will never poison us again.”

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Copyright © 2025 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin. Art by Tyrelle Smith.