Location: Rancho Coronado
Music: Radio Station
Tag: @Blythe Thorne
The sound of windy rain against the shingles rose to a mellow raucous, as if the house had grown a stomach and with it, an urgency to fill it. I recalled hearing the weather report but at the time, I had tuned it out. 107.3 Morro Rock Radio. Bringing you an interruption from the hum and thump of the classics for an incoming forecast. Expect heavy rains along the southeastern edge of Night City with cold winds carried up from Laguna Bend. Get those umbrellas ready, we'll pump up the pace with Suffer Me by The Cold Stares and Brutus Backlash.
My attention had been elsewhere. I had sat in that Javelina for well over three hours, parked as discreetly as possible down the road from a specific house nestled in the heart of Coronado. Just up the road from Alumecar & Jerez. The cookie crumbs of the circumstance had stretched out from a community center down in Santa Domingo where the faithful congregated on Wednesday and Sundays. Probably peppered in bits of fellowship and bible study in between, but who was keeping score?
A series of disappearances were on the radar for both the Sixth Street and Valentinos. This even had the silver lining of serving as a means for temporary cooperation for the two gangs who were otherwise at each other's throats. Simple matters of disputes over shipments, territorial demarcations, and the usual fuss of who could run the streets. All seemed to dull in respect to the matter at hand. But the disappearances had no readily apparent rhyme or reason except that they were all women. A joytoy, a merc, a medical technician, a mechanic, a bartender. The list grew and as it did, the gap between the themes of professions and connections grew in kind.
Except for the Community Center. Of course, these disappearances occurred over a wide swath of time so winnowing down to location and the search for God wasn't particularly easy or forthcoming. The merc had taken on a gig that left her team in a pool of blood and her counting her blessings as the lone survivor. Survivors' guilt likely earned her several peruses through the good book before eventually abandoning ship for the next gig and the urgent need to provide for her daughter and disabled husband. Not a lot of time for the holy when you can hardly catch a breath between ejecting a magazine and feeding another one in.
On the other side of it, the medical transport pilot had visited that Community Center for years, having transferred services from another center that was caught in the crossfire of a turf war and the inevitability of soft target firebombing. Her mother died and a day later, she found footing for her faith in another tabernacle. And in between was a joytoy. An acquaintance of mine, one I had met many years ago on a gig. She had gotten caught up in a bit of a tight spot up in The Glen and I had taken a palmful of eddies to extract her. I can still picture that night, the bruises and the desperate smile, like the way a cornered dog looks at you after a rescue. Not sure if you're there to kill it or harm it, but happy for the change all the same. Stacy Contilly. Why she had taken up bible study was beyond me but afforded a chance for speculation, I had assumed the nature of her occupation and the enlistment of chrome had finally gotten to her.
I ran the details down over and over again, flipping across the datapad and reading the collection of faces and their associated details. Who they were, what they did, what they meant to other people. I waited until I was confident that no one was home and when the decision came, I found my way into the house through a gated backyard and an easily picked door lock. It was as well kept as could be expected for the area, though it still carried the usual marks of disrepair with sagging sidings, broken window panes, and scuffing on the bottom corners of the doors where someone had propped it open with their boot.
Back at the gulag, atrocities were part and parcel. Up on the Northside, booster gangs and scavs thrive in the morally reprehensible. All to say that it takes a lot to stir an emotional response with receptors fried from a lifetime of abuse. But when I stepped into this place and was struck with the musky copper silence of broken things and their pieces used to communicate interpretations of scripture and the teachings of gospel, I simply had nothing to compare it to. Everything shrunk and the world minimized and condensed into a simple truth. Some people don't deserve to live.
Now that I'm standing here, the rain forecast finally coming to fruition, I find myself staring calmly into the lifeless sockets where the Priests eyes used to live. Maybe I was looking for an answer, a reason that went beyond fanaticism. But there was nothing there and I'm convinced there wasn't from the start. Stretching out my fingers over and over again, the coating of blood cracked along my palms like poorly set paint. Rubbing them together, I took a deep breath as the flecks of blood turned to dust and salted the floor. It was there that I read another line, written against the creaky floorboards and partially obscured by the front room furniture. Floorboards that gave sanctuary to a basement where senseless acts were treated as communion.
Return, O ye revolting Children. And I will give you pastors according to my own heart.
