"The Golden Calf Obligation" - Chapter 36

[seymoure]

Perfect

 

“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.”                          

-Theodore Geisel

 

It took only a couple of minutes to take the captives from the closet and tie them to kitchen chairs. Then we were ready to wake them up and begin the interrogation.

It should have been easy. But the C.I.A. with blow torches couldn’t have gotten anything out of these three.

We didn’t even get Name, Rank or Serial Number out of these parrots. Just a chant. That they picked up and then shouted, sang or spoke for all the time they were awake.

“He is my God. He calls me above. I am the vanguard of the Purge. He is my God. He calls me above. I am the vanguard of the Purge.” Rinse and repeat.

They gave us nothing but this for the next two hours. After a while it became a drug for them. The more they chanted the higher they were and the farther from doing anything but feeding on the chant and their compatriots’ chanting. We separated them and they sought to be heard by their brothers in the other room. We knocked all but one out and he strove to be heard by their God up in the clouds. Threats of violence fed their ardor. They didn’t want food or water or to go to the bathroom. They just wanted to chant. It wasn’t a ploy; it was lifeblood.

Harry stepped back and shouted (the only way to be heard), “You see this in the indoctrination phase of cults. They deny them all the things they want as part of the brainwashing and they focus on one thing. We could cut out their tongues and they would sway back and forth because they were still chanting in their heads.”

We decided to wrap them up in tidy bundles, load them into the ambulance and turn them over to the police. It would also give us a chance to have some groceries that the marshal had personally picked up for us.

In that exchange we got another bit of news. Captain Bran’s detectives had uncovered Blaine Fine’s autopsy. Chester had been looking into the reporter’s case. He had been looking into the Sarah Browning plane crash. After that he had had an interview with Simon Churchill (the bogus NTSB guy) and he had disappeared, later found and cremated. What Chester had found was that the body that was cremated wasn’t Fine’s. No one could identify the body turned to ashes, but a local coroner did an autopsy on the body that had been identified as a John Doe and found both petechial hemorrhage and traces of grayanotoxin.

“Somebody was impatient,” I explained to Chester. “He couldn’t wait for the poison, grayanotoxin, to finish him off, so they strangled him.”

“Sounds like these kinds of religious fanatics to me,” Chester answered with a bit of anger. I knew he was a very devout man, and people hiding their murderous spirits behind a church got under his skin.

I handed him the report, which he looked at forlornly, and then handed it back to me. I realized that he wasn’t very used to wading through this kind of paperwork. It might as well have been written in Swahili as far as he was concerned.

We sat down to construct some sandwiches and divide a gallon of milk when I almost face-palmed myself.

I reached in my pocket and took out the piece of paper I had shoved in there just before the explosion that had started this whirlwind of activity.

I sat, looking at the advertisement ripped out of a magazine and could not believe my eyes.

“So,” Harry said as he put a glass of cow juice on the table before me, “What is the big clue?”

“It’s an ad,” I said and put the paper down on the table for all to see.”

“Oh my God!” Chester said.

The room filled with thunderstruck silence.

 

© C. Wayne Owens

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