The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: The Bombs, the Boil, and the Blue Boy, Part 4 of 6

Driven mad as his vision is pulled out from under him by a master manipulator, a man who has only ever solved his problems with violence turns to his most trusted tool again.

Then, the Office arrives to study the strange phenomenon known only as ‘the Boil.’

This is Part 4 of The Bombs, the Boil, and the Blue Boy. To avoid spoilers, read Parts 1, 2, and 3 (first and second halves here) first. It is the fourth story in The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: Old Dogs Still Got Teeth and is a stand-alone story spanning decades. This part features some familiar faces, such as Jules Desrochers from From the Annals of the Shadow Committee, as well as Birdie Ogden and Trivaldus Epoch from The Case of the Broken Fixers.

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

SUNDAY MORNING, MAY 30, 1943
THE SEAT OF THE ALL-HIGHEST
IDLERS GAP, VIRGINIA

Sheriff Gunston Roust paced the former church’s back row like a caged panther while the invalid spewed forth a torrent of horrendous nonsense. Whatever foolishness the pale stranger vomited up, the people of Idlers Gap were happy to lap it up from the floor at his useless feet.

The sheriff had given them everything and they tossed him away the second some silver-tongued devil got carried into their midst.

The Hell of it was, it was Parcival who done brought the jackal to them. Everything the sheriff had done, he’d done it for Parce: he’d killed, he’d hidden, he’d hurt and scared folks he’d known for his whole life, just to keep that little boy alive. Then, as soon as that little boy was a man, he’d turned his back on all that sacrifice.

A few words from ‘Brother Three’ and it was all gone.

“Those we need to question are the men in Washington,” Brother Three was intoning in his blank, unaccented drone, “It was the All-Highest who sent forth these tests upon the land. It was intended to winnow out those who could believe and those who had the foresight and bravery to act on those beliefs. He gave us all the tools to survive. You all saw that.”

The sheriff was the only one who had seen that, and they all knew. They had just forgotten. Or they had been made to forget. The sheriff could hear his blood hammering through his veins.

Brother Three sat back in his wheelchair and looked over his flock. His pink-eyed gaze never quite reached beyond the back row, to the sheriff’s pacing lane. The bandages encircling his perforated torso matched the whiteness of his robes and of his hairless flesh. Even missing a lung and half his spine, his voice carried, reverberating off the sanctuary’s curved rafters:

“But even with all His tools and His faithful, this country failed His tests. We were struck low by the germ, the simplest of His creations. How?”

“The deceivers,” the congregation replied, half-whispered, as if Three’s spoon-fed responses came to each of them as some synchronized divine revelation. Parcival’s voice stood out among them.

The sheriff stalked among the cleansing stations. The widows sat rapt. He walked between them without drawing reaction. It was like he was glass while Brother Three spoke.

“The deceivers,” Three agreed. “Those who have connived their way to power. Egg-sucking snakes, one and all. They hide the truth from those that are left, keep them under heel and lock. We’ve remained strong through His tests. We are his army.”

The last thing any army ever done was bring the flu back from Europe with them, and that had taken his wife and whittled his town to bones. The sheriff wasn’t interested in being in any kind of army.

“We must carry His will to Washington and find the deceivers. If we point the compass of truth at them, we will finally bring all glory due His name and the dawn that will rise over your land will be bright and pure.”

The people of Idlers Gap gazed up at Brother Three, draped in white and posted up in his stupid chair, like sleepy puppies. The sheriff wouldn’t have been surprised to see a few tongues lolling. It turned his stomach.

“We must confront the deceivers!” Three continued. He was ramping up to one of his frequent fervors and the sheriff was sick of the whole show.

“Name ‘em,” he grunted before he realized he was speaking aloud. Three looked up, like he was seeing Sheriff Roust for the first time. He deflated a bit, like he was letting out the air he’d sucked down in anticipation of a mighty rant.

“I cannot, He alone is entitled to the truth,” Three replied after a moment. “I cannot speak in His voice. I must earn it. We all must. We march up their white towers and root them out.”

“‘Root ‘em out?’ Like pigs? He’s talking in circles, y’all,” the sheriff protested. He watched Parcival lean forward in his seat, watched his own son’s eyes flick between him and the crippled charlatan on his rolling throne.

“Like saviors, sheriff. He calls for us to enter the deceivers’ palaces, throw their curtains open, and let the Sun burn off the shadows betwixt they might hide,” Three said, his bullshit filling every corner of the hall. A smile turned up the corner of Parcival’s mouth. The boy had craved action, he lusted after what was beyond their valley. It was an old story in the mountains, aged long before they had sequestered themselves away from the lethal foulness allowed to infest the outside world.

“Which palaces?” the sheriff pressed again.

“You know their seat,” Three purred.

“Washington,” the congregation whispered together.

“Washington is the foul heart where we must drive His golden-tipped spear,” Three clamored.

“‘We?’ Son, you ain’t gonna be driving a spear into any God damn thing, you can’t even get down the God damn stairs,” the sheriff snapped. If he had not ben wearing his mask, he might have spat at Three’s useless feet.

The congregation gasped. Parcival was on the edge of his seat, ready to get between the two men. If it came down to it, the sheriff did not know which of them his son would protect.

“Sheriff Roust,” Three hissed, his voice scraping like leather honing a blade, “As always, we thank you for hearing His word and preserving these people. But hearing and understanding are different skills. You led them through the darkness, so that I might shepherd them into the light.”

“The only thing I’m hearing is a bunch of crap,” the sheriff yelled.

“Sheriff!” one of the widows hissed.

“I apologize for my choice of words, y’all, but this man, or whatever he is, is as much a charlatan as any of the others. He ain’t trying to save us, he’s trying to make us adopt some crusade. Some fools’ errand that he cain’t do himself no more.”

“Sheriff,” Three said. His voice was low, without the false pastoral melody. It was the sound of death. His ecclesiastical facade had slipped, showing the predator beneath. If his pale skin could’ve taken on a hue, the sheriff suspected that Brother Three might have gone boiling red in that moment.

Sheriff Roust ignored the simmering blowhard and addressed his neighbors:

“Y’all, how how we survived here? By staying put, trusting ourselves, and respecting the tools we been given. The tinctures, the silver, the masks, those are what kept us safe. We ain’t some missionaries trying to save the world. The world tried to kill us, so we saved our own selves. We don’t owe anybody outside of these mountains a single, solitary thing.”

“Sheriff,” Three repeated. His tone had gone from warning to threat.

The congregation looked uneasy. They knew what the sheriff was capable of, and in that very hall, of all places.

“And we don’t owe you a damn thing,” the sheriff continued. “The way I see it, it’s you that should be grateful to us.”

“In fact, I am,” Three said, his pale pink eyes locked with Roust’s but projecting to speak to the whole room. “I am in awe of you. You beat back the plagues that culled the rest of the world, the calamities that allowed greedy, short-sighted men to take control of this world. You don’t owe anything to me, but you have a responsibility to the rest of the world. You’re the last pure people and you must show them the way.”

“Only way I’m showing is you to the door,” the sheriff growled. “We ain’t leaving this valley. But you are.”

The sheriff took a step down the aisle toward the man seated at the front of the chamber. The congregation jolted like lightning had shot through them, but only one person moved to stop him.

“Sit down, boy,” the sheriff snarled. He never even looked at his son. Parcival froze in place as if petrified on the spot.

“Sheriff Roust,” Three mewled. He sat up a little taller, adjusted the white draped over him, then boomed: “I have been called on by Him, the All-Highest, to change the world. I will be damned if I allow a backwards, ignorant, obstinate coward to oppose in His will.”

“If you knew what it takes to keep these folks together and safe, you wouldn’t use that word,” the sheriff said. He wasn’t as loud as Three, and his voice didn’t reverberate through the rafters, but the folks in the front pews began sliding to the side. “It ain’t just swinging your arms around and making promises and giving compliments. It’s every day, every little thing. It’s cold silver and colder winters. It’s cutting up phone lines and burning down bridges. It’s gardens and rationing and making sacrifices. And all that? I do it for someone I already lost. You couldn’t do it. So you best re-think that word.”

“What, ‘coward?’ A coward hides in a little hole like a mouse. A coward clings to the past like a blanket in a storm. A coward stays quiet because there are enemies on the other side of the door.”

Three looked triumphant, as if he’d planted the spear and was holding the boar at bay. When he looked at the faces of his flock, his mask faltered for an instant. They looked like people who had already seen the lightning and were counting seconds until the thunder.

“Sounds like you could learn a thing or two from a coward,” the sheriff replied. He slipped the revolver out of his pocket. Three’s pink eyes locked onto the old gray gun. He knew what the sheriff had down with it. Still, he smirked.

“Brother Parcival,” he purred, “The sheriff has a burden he wishes to unload. Please, relieve him of it.”

Parcival Roust stayed standing but didn’t so much as twitch. He’d found the old scuffed floors very interesting.

The sheriff and the man from beyond the sky stared each other down. The aisle between the door and the altar felt a mile long and an inch all at once.

No one in the building could say who fired first. The revolver roared in the sheriff’s hand and a flash illuminated Three’s robes from within. Gunston Roust was struck in his chest, dropping him to the floor. The sheriff’s shot lanced through Brother Three’s upper arm. The pale man did’t even bother to wince. His robes moved as he shifted his pistol to his other hand.

Brother Three smirked like a man who didn’t have pints of red staining his white robes. He threw the soiled coverings aside and lifted his small black pistol.

“Coward - !” he started, only for gray matter to erupt from his gray pate. His loose, tumbling brains splattered across the altar and dais.

Brother Three slumped over in his chair, hollowed and dead.

The widows shrieked.

The sheriff wheezed and collapsed. His pistol fell out of his suddenly limp grasp. A few of his friends and neighbors clustered around him, praying, weeping, laying their gloved blue hands upon him.

If he could have reached out to his son in his last few seconds, he would have.

“He’s dead,” someone whispered.

“All-Highest,” someone gasped, then muttered a prayer.

Parcival remained frozen. His father, who had saved his life and preserved an entire town as the world was ravaged around them, was dead. Brother Three, the man who had given him truth and a calling, had killed him, then left too.

“What do we do?” Widow Ames sobbed. She hovered over Three’s body, as if she longed to drape herself across him in lamentation. She knew better than expose herself to a dead man’s raw vitreous fluids, even in her darkest moments.

“What now?” he heard the congregation ask.

“The deceivers are out there, they’ll come for us,” they were saying.

Parcival looked between his father, the preserver, and Brother Three, the crusader. There were other people alive out there, towns and families that could have been spared the horrors that his family had suffered through. Towns and families that were ruled and manipulated into fear and subservience.

Gunston Roust had shown them how to defeat those demons, and Brother Three had told them where to take that knowledge.

The All-Highest had shown them the way for a reason, and it wasn’t to fester in the Gap. It was to shepherd others into the future.

“Those deceivers won’t come for us,” he said after a moment. The congregation went silent. He felt all of their eyes on him. “They won’t come for us because we’re coming for them, first.”

TUESDAY NIGHT, JUNE 1, 1943
ABOARD JEAN CHASTEL
58°35’55.6" N, 30°48’42.7" W

“I already knew I’d have no idea what this thing is,” Doctor Ladybird Ogden whispered to Trivaldus Epoch from their place on the bow. The massive Boil rose before them, thousands of feet tall, thousands more across. Its blue glow undulated, as if putting on a show for them.

“Why’d you come, then?” Epoch asked.

“To see it,” she replied.

He looked askew at the consulting folklorist. She was tall and broad, strong, tanned, confident, braced against the frigid wind as the cerulean lights played across her face. Her gray braids were more a testament to her experience than anything else. She looked like an explorer, on the hunt for the new unknown.

He had seen how the other officials treated her, too. She was respected. He was a joke to them. He knew the same tales she did, the same herbs and minerals, the same signs and omens. Only she called them oral histories, traditional medicine, and illusory correlation.

The other officials thought her a genius and a resource. They found him to be an odd waste of space.

“Admittedly, my focus is on North American historiography, but I’ve been known to dabble,” she went on, “Even so, I’ve never come across anything like this, anywhere.”

“This is a specific kind of odd,” Epoch agreed. He reached up and sifted through the garland of amulets and crystals dangling from his neck, pushing aside phylacteries and monkey paws until his fingers found his worn-smooth unicursal hexagram pendant. It slipped into a familiar groove in his palm and warmed to his touch.

He had many eyes upon him.

“Do you have any ideas?” Ogden asked. He almost jumped. Few officials willingly sought out his hypotheses.

“I would need more information,” he said after a jilted pause.

“Of course,” she replied. She stood up straight as if to return to the warmth of the cabin and the milling specialists within. There were officials whose knowledge was considered legitimate inside, people whose ideas carried weight. Marine biologists, physicists, chaplains, vulcanologists, oceanographers, all manner of person given framed evidence of their expertise.

“For instance,” Epoch blurted, his voice almost cracking, “Is this shape limited to the surface of the water? Or does the orb continue uninterrupted below?”

“As in a sphere rather than a dome?” she asked. She leaned back on the rail, her green eyes locked onto him with a scholar’s intensity. “What different conclusions would that draw?”

He had piqued her interest.

“Several things,” Epoch said with a shrug, “I also want to know if it’s consistent all the way through. Is it hollow? Does it get denser? Can you pass through it?”

“Admiral Desrochers plans to send a wire-operated dinghy to its edge in the morning,” Ogden said. “To take film of it up close, as well as take radar, sonar, radiograph, and spectrograph readings.”

“I don’t think that will help,” Epoch replied.

“Why not?” she asked.

“This is not something meant for us,” he answered. The pendant felt like it was glowing red hot in his palm. “This is a spiritual phenomenon, beyond anything measured in numbers.”

Her interest twisted in that half-second as a near-concealed smirk denoting patronizing wryness turned up the corner of her mouth. In that moment he became someone that was no longer a trained expert nor a combat-hardened official in her eyes, but Christopher Greener, the silly burn-out who played with candles, told fairy tales, huffed chemicals, and gave himself a brand-new name that was even sillier than he was.

“What observations led you there?” she wondered. Her tone was that of a nanny wondering who had drawn on the baseboards.

He composed himself before answering. When he spoke he had to lay out every argument. For the mundane, assumptions could be glossed over. For the fantastic, every element need be backed up with logic because the default response to his expertise was objection.

“The water’s reaction, the steam, indicates a great heat, but we feel no heat radiating from the Boil. Our oceanography team reported no fluctuations in ambient water temperature around it. The aerial recon photos we looked at marked it as a perfect circle, as well. One that has not moved or changed since it was first observed three weeks ago. I take this to mean that there is a very intense, but relatively small, source, with a very consistent output.”

“Gonzales has some Geiger–Müller tubes scheduled for the next flight out here. If that thing is outputting anything, those will pick it up,” Odgen replied. She was back with him. Officials, as a whole, were an open-minded lot. Although many subjects in Epoch’s purview as consulting occultist were heretical to them as generally people of science, they were willing to listen to even the most ‘outlandish’ things when presented logically.

Trivaldus Epoch was a traveler of those outlands, and though those roads were governed by laws far beyond the bounds of logic, he had learned to use it as a basis to guide the uninitiated down those unfamiliar paths.

“Whatever those Geiger counters show, there are facts we already know about the Boil’s true nature, things we can see from here,” Epoch said. He had her on the hook, he simply had to reel her in slow. Too much eagerness would throw her, regardless of how cogent his argument was.

He had to let her come to him.

The surface of the Boil shifted. The swirling shapes within seemed to react to their observation. He could see symbols within the mists, Enochian letters and Slavic runes, Solomonic seals both greater and lesser, hieroglyphs and kanji. Every so often an eye or mouth would blossom out of the chaos and die against the edge of the glowing sphere. He had seen them clearly when they’d arrived, but the edges had begun to blur.

He could not afford to dull his tools.

Epoch slipped a hand into his pocket and retrieved one of the dried teonanácatl caps he had brought with him. He mimed shivering, then brought his hands to his face as if blowing warm breath into them. He was thin and the North Atlantic was cold. Ogden did not notice when he placed the mushroom on his tongue, or when he said a quick prayer to the dead and their guides journeying through Mictlān as he chewed and swallowed it. The bitter, earthy funk was jarring but familiar.

“What can we see?” Ogden asked after a moment.

“Fundamental truths,” Epoch replied. He grasped the railing and stared into the blue. He could feel the mushroom’s divine touch growing outward from his third chakra. He exhaled slowly, eager to be enveloped in it.

“Nature is movement, adaptation,” he explained. He had to be fast, for once the mushroom overtook him he would not be constrained by the formalities required for his explanation. But were he too fast, she would abandon his truth as quackery and for not better reason than an unrefined delivery.

“The Boil is stationary, its shape and position unaffected by the winds or the current. It is also a perfect circle. Although nature can approximate perfection, it does not achieve it. The natural world, by its definition, embraces flaws.”

“So it is artificial,” Ogden replied.

“The energy required to create this phenomenon is immense. Larger than anything we had ever produced,” Epoch said. He felt his blood slowing down in his veins. As his speech sped up, the rest of his body fell into a familiar rhythm.

“Gonzales has told me about the work they’re doing in New Mexico, and the numbers they are analyzing across the road from Zoo Base,” Ogden said. “The release of atomic energies could account for something like this.”

“Gonzales,” Epoch repeated. The name rolled around in his mouth like a jawbreaker. It seemed heavy against his teeth, as if saying it could crack them.

Cerulean light snapped into focus before him. He could almost read the words marching across the thing’s mountainous face.

“That is his body of study, he was a physicist before all this,” she said. Epoch risked a glance at her. She was staring at him.

“Of course, yes,” he muttered, stumbling over the primitive words. The Boil’s pulse reverberated through him. The gossamer silk that held his essence within his corpus twanged like a violin string with its each undulation.

Beyond, the Boil showed him in the angles of John Dee’s angelspeak.

“Yes, but this beyond that,” he said, hoping the ape noises issued from his mouth were English. “But we could not harness that release into something so consistent.”

Power, it said in flitting Sanskrit.

“It is too much for us,” he added. He could feel his bones move, dragging the flesh after them like a hand in a puppet.

“So, for those reasons you consider this a spiritual reaction,” she replied.

“Or greater,” he answered. He looked up, expecting her to stare at him wide-eyed as so many others would. Instead, she was lost into the Boil’s warbling blue.

Maybe he had not spoken aloud.

“Stress and fear create chemicals in our bodies,” he said. He would need to harness that foul language of logic once more to appeal to her. “Those are measurable.”

“True,” she replied.

“Since history began, people all over the world have considered this Earth a living being. Think of Tlaltecuhtli, Gaia, Kṣitigarbha, Mother Nature, Papahānaumoku, Fjorgyn. Why would this war not elicit a similar stress response in our planet?”

“This is an ulcer?” she asked.

“I do not know,” he admitted.

Certainty, the Boil flashed in kanji. Epoch took a deep breath. The sea air whirled through his lungs, activating each of his alveoli in sequence, chilling him through his tissues and into his bones.

“It is a beacon,” he answered. He was far from certain, and predatory eyes glared at him from the blue.

“To who?” she asked.

“Those who can change things,” he said. His voice grew more confident with his every spoken word until they tumbled out one after the other. “It is so far out here, beyond the borders of any country, to call to those with the resources to come. It wants us to end this war.”

Even as his vomited forth his conclusion, his mind retreated from it. He was sugar-coating it, wanting to be accepted rather than right.

“That implies an intelligence, conscious or not,” Ogden concluded. “One with the ability to make this.”

“Many people believe in that kind of intelligence,” Epoch said, “Whether they call it by the same name or not.”

His sanitized theory floated between them for a minute, each respectfully eager to appease the other, each rejecting it wholly.

“That is an interesting theory,” Ogden said after a stilted second. She feigned a chill and rubbed her arms, looking over her shoulder at the heated cabin and the gaggle of real scientists inside. “Perhaps the tests tomorrow will shed more light on this.”

“Perhaps,” Epoch replied.

“Don’t catch a cold out here,” she told him, then left.

Coward, the Boil spelled out in Norse runes.

“Shut up,” Epoch muttered. The crisp wind stole the words off his lips.

He knew what it was. He knew what reaction a body had to an infection. It was not a warning. The Earth, red in tooth and claw, was a predator. Those gods he’d named were not benevolent. They were from violent pantheons who existed on a different order than man or nature. They did not need a beacon, nor did they need help.

The Boil was its means for them to purify their realm. It was as if a light had shined down, showing that all the squabbles of men, the millions dead, amounted to nothing but the gnawing of termites.

The Boil would be the Earth’s pesticide.

The eddies on its face calmed for a second, pleased by his conclusions.

He smiled. He knew what it was.

Doorway, it confirmed, the hieroglyphs the same as the ancients’ word for Hell.

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Copyright © 2025 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

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