The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: The Bombs, the Boil, and the Blue Boy, Part 5.0 of 6

In an attempt to track down the origins of the suspects in an attempted terror attack in Washington, official Royce Freeman ends up in a small town with strange customs and nothing but anger to offer strangers.

This is the first half of Part 5 of The Bombs, the Boil, and the Blue Boy. To avoid spoilers, read Parts 1, 2, 3.0, 3.5, and 4 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 Royce Freeman from The Case of the Broken Fixers.

Content warnings: Creeps, mild swearing.

FRIDAY AFTERNOON, JUNE 18, 1943
NORTHERN END OF MAIN STREET
IDLERS GAP, VIRGINIA

Royce Freeman was out of breath by the time he entered the town proper. The hike up from where the road had been blown out was punishing and would have winded him even without the heavy pack on his back. He took a second to mop down his forehead as he got the lay of the land.

Of course he had never been to Idlers Gap before, and Hell, Speck County was a sundown area. He’d only be caught dead there.

Still, the place looked familiar. The town his father had grown up in hadn’t been too different: a little shithole nestled in a low spot between the mountains, choked by scrubby woods and heavy history. Idlers Gap had one street, a church, and a store, and none of them looking open for business.

The cliffside collapsed across the road had been Freeman’s first sign that strangers weren’t encouraged to visit. After they’d sent a bomber to Washington, of course.

It hadn’t been hard to track down the bomber’s town. After his arrest, Libby had clammed right up. That was fine. All it took was a visit to Ottens, the seat of Speck County, to fill in the blanks. The old lady in the archives barely remembered anywhere called ‘the Gap,’ but her recollection became crystal clear over a fresh coffee and a sawback. About twenty years back, the isolated town of Idlers Gap, way up in the mountains, ceased to be. About overnight, everyone moved out. The mine had already been long dry and the trees weren’t worth chopping down again. That camel snapped right in half when the Spanish flu did its rounds on whoever was left.

She didn’t know what he could possibly mean about blue folks and funny churches, but she had a lot of work to do that afternoon and got right back to it.

A call to C&P Telephone confirmed that they’d never ended up wiring Idlers Gap and that the town was abandoned. It took a knock on the door and a sit-down with a badge on the table for them to be more forthcoming.

Turned out, not one of the linemen who’d reported back had actually made it into the town. They’d come upon some trees fallen across the road and a sheriff warning them about a road closure. When they’d come back a couple months later, they’d run into the same trees and the same sheriff, telling ‘em not to waste their time. After a while, they stopped coming back.

In the end, it didn’t bother C&P enough to follow up: it was expensive to run phone lines up a mountain. Connecting a couple dozen folks to the outside world wouldn’t ever balance that sheet.

When Freeman had driven up that same route, he’d found a rockslide closing off the entire road. Not just a few pebbles, either. The telltale boreholes in the mountainside told him he was looking at anything but an accident.

His handheld radio barely worked between those peaks, worn down and stubby as the Appalachians might be. He made one last call on his boosted car transmitter letting Baltimore know what he was heading into, then hefted his bags and picked his way across the rocks.

It was a four mile hike to the town proper, and he was watched the entire way. If the flashing binocular lenses hadn’t alerted him that an amateur on horseback was trailing him from the ridge line, said amateur’s all-white getup stuck out like a sore thumb.

Freeman knew learned to be wary of white men in white robes, but he fought down that instinct and kept on. He’d seen Libby sporting the same get-up and knew that it wasn’t affiliated with the same brand of sinister he’d been trained to see.

Still, those particular outfits and their probably unintentional resemblance to racist regalia reinforced the whole ‘if you ain’t from here, git’ attitude that pervaded the Gap better than most.

He supposed for a moment that the residents of the Gap might have been trying to be intentionally obvious with their scout in an attempt to intimidate him away. If that were the case, he’d expect to find a welcoming committee waiting when he entered town limits.

Instead, he got an empty street.

Beyond the lack of shotgun-toting locals eager for him to move on, there were other conspicuous absences evident in the Gap. No wires, be they phone, power, or even a damn telegraph, hung from a single one of the rickety structures. That made it no surprise when he couldn’t spot any radio or TV aerials. Nor was there any sign of fire hydrants or so much as a hand-pumped well. There weren’t any cars, not even a Model T, and every stoop featured an unoccupied hitching post.

The whole place looked like it had frozen forty years back. With the pace places like the Gap were liable to adopt new technology, that put its pause right on track with the dates C&P gave about its linemen getting run off.

The Stone Age situation made him grateful he’d brought his big bag, though he’d cursed it every step of the way up the damn mountain.

Hoofbeats tattooed past him, the rider in white passing him parallel on the far side of the row of dilapidated buildings. Freeman watched him wheel around between two houses and jump off his horse in front of the largest place in town, what had to be their church. It was most of the way down the street and Freeman took his time walking there.

He could see another half-dozen horses tied up on its far side as he got closer. His welcoming committee was inside. No sense in rushing them. Last thing he wanted was a bunch of weird isolationists riffing with him. He wanted them calm.

Freeman meandered around while he waited, taking in the sights.

The church, he was pretty sure he was looking at one, with that A-frame roof and the big windows, had been painted all white. He couldn’t spot a cross on the place to save his life. He looked around the corner. The yard behind it was littered with old gravestones and dozens of criss-crossing clotheslines stretched above. The white robes, masks, gloves, and booties pinned to them rippled in the wind like a ghostly choir.

He spotted two women at work at a steaming vat, one pitchforking dirty clothes into it, the other hooking clean garments out and slinging them over the clothesline. The fire under the vat raged unnoticed between them. Both were wrapped up like King Tut.

“Hey there, ma’am,” Freeman called out. He held up a hand by way of the greeting. The pair looked at each other, exchanged a silent signal, then laid their tools aside, hiked up their robes, and hustled inside the church through some back door.

As far as Freeman could tell, he’d made it further into Idlers Gap than any visitor had since 1919. Twenty-three years was long time for a stew to boil. Between Libby’s blue skin, hand-edited Bibles, and eagerness to harm others, Freeman wasn’t sure what other chunks might have congealed in that time, but he was sure he was about to find out.

He heard raised voices as he ambled over to the front side of the church. He posted up on the far side of the street; he wasn’t trying to crowd anyone.

The town was eerie, that was for sure. Every door, in place of a mailbox, featured a rack of soiled white robes, as if waiting to be picked up. A single set of ruts marred the empty street, like the same wagon had gone uninterrupted up and down its length a million times.

Freeman caught a distinct sweetness in the air. He knew the smell: corn whiskey, or something like it, and high proof at that. The people of the Gap were moonshiners. That was a good reason to lay low, he figured. Not a good reason to poison oneself blue with colloidal silver, but maybe a reason to keep their heads down.

He took up a spot in front of the church and waited. Not so close that they could bum rush him, not so far that he looked scared. He could still hear them arguing inside.

He thought it might be best to have his hands empty when they first saw him. He set his big bag down carefully at the foot of a large post across the way from the church. There was a huge plaque mounted on it, hand-carved, wooden, and scrimshawed with letters. He thought he was looking at names, though the ones near the top were worn illegible with age. Two new lines near the bottom were sharp and fresh:

Gunston Roust

Brother Three

“‘Brother Three?’” he read aloud. “What the Hell?”

The creaking of the cross-less church’s front door brought his attention front-and-center. A phalanx of white-robed men and women filtered out of the door, each clutching a long gun.

One stepped out of their ranks, a young man by his eyes, with thick shoulders and indigo skin where Freeman could see his face. He was masked, wrapped, robed, and gloved, identical to the rest of them save for the gleaming Luger carried open in his right hand. His left was restiing on the grip of an old holstered revolver.

“Hey there,” he said as the people arranged themselves into a row before him. “My name’s Royce, and I am so happy to meet y’all. It’s a heck of a hike up here, you know.”

None of them spoke. A sad little breeze fluttered their robes, kicking up dust and dead grass.

Freeman pointed at the German pistol the stand-out was holding.

“That’s a fun little piece of gear,” he said, “Where’d you get it?”

The man studied the Luger in his hand as if he’d never seen it before. He offered no explanation.

“I came a long way to see y’all,” Freeman continued. “It sounds like you’d have a tough time here. I was hoping I could help.”

“We don’t need your help,” the leader croaked. He had a thick accent and his voice warbled with something unsteady. “We’ve been mandated to help you.”

“Help me?” Freeman asked. “I’ll take it. What would y’all like to help with?”

“We survived here, all without giving up our freedom to deceivers,” the leader replied. “You here to learn from us, or to chain us?”

“I’m just here to listen.”

“Good,” the leader said. He seemed to relax, which his people mirrored. “Did you meet our missionaries? Did they show you the way?”

“I did, and they did,” Freeman replied. “They have more work to do out there, but they sent me back to learn.”

“Good, they are our best, they are meant to show the way,” the leader said. Freeman could tell he was smiling under his mask. “I am Brother Parcival, sheriff of Idlers Gap, missionary of the All-Highest, and we have been waiting here for so long. Let us show you the way.”

“Happy to learn it,” Royce replied, even as his guts twisted into a knot. He knew where ‘All-Highest’ came from: the same place a Luger did. He did his best not to glance at his big bag where it laid out of reach.

“Good,” Parcival replied. “But before you can learn, you must be cleansed.”

His people stepped up next to him, staring Freeman down.

Freeman knew he was too old to run far.

They pounced on him as one, lifting him as he struggled. There were too many and they were too strong. He felt his clothes tearing away as they carried him inside the former church. In seconds he was naked, held aloft by dozens fingers digging into him like talons. Acrid fumes washed over him, choking him. The very air within was poison.

Darkness swallowed him as the doors slammed shut behind them.

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Copyright © 2025 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

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