The Enumerator, a novel Part 11

Part 11

The Enumerator

His Last Will and Testament

By: Olaf Danielson

This is a copyrighted novel owned by Sandbares Press, PO Box 808, Summit SD 57266, an imprint owned by Orient Beach Publishing Inc. All rights reserved. Contact information: storolaf@yahoo.com, 605-949-0982. The novel is serialized to Substack in 2025, no reproduction is allowed unless authorized by Sandbares Press.

Chapter 18

A week had passed and Judge Miller, my friend, who like me, had a passion for science fiction. He was in New Town exchanging books with me. We typically met once a week, although of late it had been less frequently due to all the business with the new territory. Frequently, Nicole joined us and even more occasionally the woman that Judge Miller slept with, Rachel, a board member, also joined in. Nicole figured this was male time and usually left us alone, unless she really liked the book we were reading. When we were finished, the sheriff stopped by to pick up the judge and take him back but then after chatting about recent events, we found out the state crime lab had released the house. With a macabre sense of crime fascination, we talked our chief law enforcement officer into giving us a tour.

I had never been in the house, and we had just walked to where the sheriff had found the shoe when we saw a Johnson County Sheriff Department’s cruiser drive up the driveway. We walked over to see what was up. I didn’t recognize the Johnson County sheriff, but our sheriff did. They shook hands.

“Sorry to interfere in what is now your side of the line, sheriff,” Sheriff Brown from Johnson said. “I was driving home, and I found Mrs. Avery hitchhiking. I decided the least I could do for the poor widow was to give her a lift.”

“No problem,” Sheriff Haymeier said and then he introduced the judge and me. Sheriff Brown never inquired as to why I was there. Then the widow opened the cruiser’s door, came out, ignored the condolences and just stumbled past us towards the house.

“Is it even cleaned up yet?” Sheriff Brown asked.

“No, we just got the release form the Kansas Bureau of Investigation office in Garden City this morning.” Our sheriff replied.

“I never would have guessed he was cabable of this. Avery was an ass, but…” He shook his head.

“Was the crime scene for that telephone manager and his family as bad as they say?” Judge Miller asked.

“Worse,” Sheriff Brown said opening the door of his Ford Galaxie. “Maybe some year I’ll be able to sleep again. You can’t imagine something so horrible. It was inhuman. I ran into investigators who worked on the Clutter murder case in Finley County, and they noted that it never really goes away.” he said and then drove away.

We just stood there watching the Johnson squad heading back south and then we stood in silence for a while until the widow came back out of the house. We didn’t know what to expect. She held a shoebox and came over to us. She looked at me. “One hundred thousand.” She said succinctly.

“One hundred thousand what?” I repeated confused.

“You are the man that was buying property in Fillmore County, correct.” I nodded. “Fifty then, get the paperwork today, cash, and a train ticket…west.” She shook her head. “I can’t believe it came to this.”

“This is pretty quick, ma’am,” I said. “You...”

“No, I don’t want this God damned house. I will never set foot in it again.” She interrupted me. “I didn’t want this God damn life. My daughter ran off and I haven’t seen my son for two years and now this.” I kind of expected her to cry but she just looked numb. “I am going to go to the ocean, drink the most expensive bottle of whisky, walk into the water, and just end it.”

The judge looked at me and shrugged. “Ma’am. You can start a new life, a new beginning.”

I tried to encourage her too. “You have options.”

“What? Your options?” She looked at me. “You gave me three. I’m not living in this house of horror, and you won’t certainly invite me to live with you considering who I am or at least was. My fucking bastard of a husband and I haven’t been fifty miles from this spot in Kansas in our entire lives. Your county won’t take me, Johnson County doesn’t want me, and I might as well become food for the fishes. Go throw me in some nut house if you think that will help, but even they can’t stop me, eventually I will get out. I don’t need a gun.”

I looked at the other two, the judge just shrugged, and the sheriff was always hard to read. “What makes you think we wouldn’t let you join us?” I said thinking that Mrs. Avery had not been to any informational meeting and knew nothing about us. I was not even sure how she knew of the three options.

She stood there and looked at the building like it was causing her pain. “Okay, mister dealmaker. I’ll sign the deed, over to you for nothing. If, you let me get that can of gasoline in the shed and let me burn the fucking house to the ground, let me burn it all down, everything. Then you have to promise me you’ll bulldoze everything, flatten everything and leave nothing standing, not even the trees. The sheriff can then take me to Goodpasture or whatever you do with new residents or whatever you call them. I have no clue what you believe or why. Believing in anything since I firmly believe in nothing right now, may be difficult. All I ask is to let me spend my days cleaning the courthouse since my husband filled it with his bullshit his whole life, well mostly Johnson County’s, and I won’t ever complain about anything. I eat little and I’ll work hard. That is my final deal, take it or leave it.”

“Ma’am you can have it better than that.” Judge Miller said.

“Judge.” She said. “You may end up differently, but I’m going to hell when I die. I might as well get used to it, and prepare myself for the punishment I deserve. Being only fifty-one, I will have a while to wait. If you agree, agree, and it is time to light a fire. If not let us sign the paperwork, get me some money so I can get the fuck out of Kansas.”

I had no authority, but I used the radio on the squad and twenty minutes later Nicole drove over to us with a deed. Mrs. Avery signed it, and the Judge notarized it. I went and grabbed a gas can and in a few minutes, we were in want of a match, since we didn’t have any. The sheriff finally got a flare, lit it and gave it to her, but she demurred. Mrs. Avery took off all of her clothing and then threw them into the house. Finally standing there stark naked, she grabbed the flare and threw it into the door and the gasoline exploded. The fire shot out the windows as she calmly walked back to us.

“Please keep your end of the bargain. You can now take me wherever I am supposed to go. If you have a blanket for me to cover up with in the car, fine, if not, I’ll ride naked. I deserve nothing.”

Ms. Avery refused to change her name. She cut her hair short in quarantine and kept it that way for the rest of her life. As was part of the deal, she was assigned to clean the courthouse and was always the last person to be baptized each week in Goodpasture. She lived quietly and anonymously, and as far as I knew never even spoke to her daughter even though they both were members of the same worship group. It really wasn’t anyone’s business, and we had some of our own strange people. She died of cancer in 1979. Her death celebration was as fervent as anyone’s. Her story ended the strange saga of the Avery affair.

Chapter 19

Life in rural Kansas moved on, spring brought on summer, summer became fall, and fall became winter. The lives of the citizens ebbed and flowed with the cycle of the wheat, the cattle, and the cycles of their own lives. The 1960s ended with the citizenry of Fillmore County largely oblivious to the events of Martin Luther King, RFK’s, or Malcom X’s assassination. We did not approve but thought little of the Vietnam War, since the draft boards ignored us, Even Denny McClain’s thirty-one win season for the Detroit Tigers in 1968 alluded everyone. The only reason I mention these things here is that I did know about them. The radio station had an AP teletype and the announcers parroted the news reports of the day which included items like the assassinations and the protests, but they were not truly appreciated for what they were. Mostly, Goodpasture remained in blissful isolation.

In a land of equality, the plight of the black man in America was not acknowledged any more than the Fillmore County idea that gross disparities existed between all men. Our three black families lived like me, and I like them. Sports were not something of interest to the citizens here. We knew about the St. Louis Cardinals and Green Bay Packers, but the Ice Bowl was an abstract concept that we never grasped. We usually played more inclusive outdoor games than just baseball, but we knew the rules of the sport and I played it every so often. I like baseball. I was a Tigers fan when I was in Indiana and I liked Al Kaline, so I kept tabs on my old team, especially during the 1968 campaign that led to a World Series victory and McClain’s legendary pitching performance that year. There was no harm in that. I could not see how it violated any of the Ten Commandments.

Although Southwestern University was not a bastion of protests, the students returned with Friday evening stories of what they had heard from their professors or fellow students. We spent hours of discussion wondering if the protests envisioned by Marx and Engels about the rise of the proletariat were happening. We waited, hopeful that a new dawn in America would emerge, and as the news worsened and the protests grew into the Seventies our dream of a new America was suddenly turned to despair as without understanding why, it all just ended. It seemed to us that the young protestors and dreamers of the Sixties decided collectively that it was just time to go to work, make money, and have children. They eventually became all that they swore they were against just a few years earlier. In the end, nothing really changed, just like nothing in Kansas changes.

The national economy was in ravishes in the early Eighties, but it wasn’t bad for us, largely self-sufficient, not dependent on oil. Although we had spent most of our reserves buying property, the oil shock of the Seventies refilled our coffers with lots of money from our oil production. Our agricultural surpluses, however brought comparatively less in the open market, but having no debt to service left the company in good shape. The high inflation and high interest rates left us largely living the life we had experienced for the previous twenty years.

It took a little sleuthing by me, but the company eventually owned all the minerals in the new territory and despite an initial belief to the contrary, there was oil. The largest well the company ever drilled was very near to Avery’s old homesite and when oil was discovered there in 1981 with the high oil prices, large royalty checks started to stream into the treasury and allowed us to keep up and to start computerizing the county and the school with something called Apples.

It was 1984 when something that would change the direction of my comfortable life for two decades occurred. There was a boy named Stephen Adams who lived just west of Sun City. I knew his mother from my days of being the enumerator and in working for the county, but I didn’t know them well. If I had met the young man of seventeen, I didn’t realize it. It seems the young lad was a sociopath. If I had still been a sociologist, he could have made a good study subject of whether genetics or environment caused such behavior. He became a talk of the group after his numerous fights with other boys and destructive behavior. We all had dinner discussions on Friday of what should be done after the locals withheld his right of coming of age training. The council did not trust him with the girls or better put; the girls didn’t trust him. He made threats to many members of the council and as expected he wasn’t invited and then there was one Wednesday in June of a rumor of an attempted rape. The victim, in her twenties fought him off, but then the police became involved after he went missing.

He decomposing body was found hanging in an abandoned building in a corner of the county. It seemed everyone breathed a sigh of relief. But questions were raised. What were we to do? A rape trial would be a public event the county citizenry wouldn’t like. Old Judge Miller even looked relieved to have the case taken care of before it even became a case.

The ritual burning of his body after the Saturday gathering of the Fellowship of Believers had no tears, even his mother looked stoic and somewhat relieved. I’m sure young Adams had caused her a lot of angst in his short life. There had been other troubled youth, troubled adults and rumors of mostly men threatening the status quo, but like this boy, their lives ended by accident, disease, or at their own hands. After the celebration of death, if it could called that, I was milling on the green in the center of Sun City largely thoughtless when the sheriff walked up and told me to follow him to his cruiser. I followed him after finding my shoes on the edge of the parking lot. He pulled up his car. “John, get in.” He said sounding impatient through an open window.

“Where to?” I asked. The sheriff was not someone who was in the business of giving rides unless it was for the judge.

“Mr. Rademacher has requested your company for the afternoon.” He said perfunctorily.

I climbed into the back of the cruiser somewhat confused as to why this old man wanted to talk to me and why the sheriff was doing his business. I had met Rademacher exactly three times, once in 1960 doing the census, once later that year when he grilled me on the council when I applied to join, and once doing the business of the county, but besides the afternoon of the inquisition, neither visit lasted more than a few minutes nor had anything substantial came from them. Rademacher was still on the board of the company which made him a leader in the community, but he was, if anything, a token member as it was clearly others really ran things. I never even saw him in any of the planning meetings about the New Town additions phase I or II.

In silence, the sheriff drove east of town to a hill overlooking the river and a small non-descript house which sat across from a large farm. He pulled into the end of the driveway and parked. “He is around back sitting outside.” The sheriff said as he got out. I opened the door, stood up and I watched him walk over to the shade under a cottonwood and sat down. “Go on,” he urged me. “Go on.”

I walked to the back of the house as the sheriff looked like he wasn’t going anywhere. Rademacher had an outside table where he was sitting reading a novel by Ursula La Guin. I had become very good at spotting book covers. I stood at the edge of his patio as he was reading until he looked up and then finished his page uncaringly as I waited. Finally, he put down the novel. “Have you read the Dispossessed?” He asked me.

“Yes, I have.” I admitted. “It has some similarities to us in a resource depleted world but La Guin’s is an interesting opinion. I find it odd she describes the capitalists as being naked, and here it is the opposite.”

“It is just fiction,” Rademacher said. “Much like us, as we are just fiction, too.” he said with a chuckle. “Sit down.” He ordered. He pulled up a bottle of wine from below and poured a glass as I sat and handed it over to me.

“What do I owe the honor?” I said. “It is a little early for wine today.”

“My friend, after what I have to tell you, you will think it is not nearly early enough to be drinking. You will have wished you had started earlier, much earlier.” He raised his glass and we both drank but it wasn’t clear to what we were drinking to. “I wish we were meeting under better circumstances. It is, however, time…your time.” The old man drank another sip.

“My time?” I repeated looking confused.

“What do you think of our society, the Fellowship of Believers, and this place?” He held out both hands, then stood up and began to pace a little as I just watched.

“I think it is a perfect society.” I finally admitted.

“Is it now?” He said.

“Well, nothing is perfect, I guess.” I didn’t know what was being asked of me.

“Are you glad you were invited to join?” He asked.

“Of course.” I replied confidently. “You grilled me pretty bad if I remember correctly.”

“Hum…do you realize that you were destined to be killed?” He said.

“No,” I looked at him shocked. “By whom?” I asked. “When?”

“Oh, by those that take care of the loose ends, but well… you were granted a reprieve. It is hard to fathom, someone trading everything for the life of someone they had never even met, but you my friend were lucky.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Nicole gave up everything for you.” He looked off into the distance. “One of the smartest and brightest people here. She even gave up a Rhodes scholarship, to come back here and be the future leader of our society. Then you come along, and oddly she exchanged everything for your life. She came here and standing right where you are begged me on hand and knee. Pleaded with me, kneeling on that grass, begging me to spare your life.”

I was listening astonished. “What did Nicole give up for me? Why?”

“Why you ask. You, John Thoreson refused to leave. Despite everything we did to you, purges, isolation, and even giving you the data, you just would not go. Nicole stormed into to see Nick Sartor and said killing you was wrong. It would cast suspicion on us since the government was already suspecting something about us. Having the FBI snooping around was a valid concern and Sartor sent her to me. She offered to trade her life for you. She resigned her position as the person training to replace Sartor. She agreed that she would convince you to join us or she would agree to leave us permanently never to return. I like great bargains. I decided that that was a bargain we had to accept. She is an amazing woman. I don’t know how she did it, but she succeeded. You have now had twenty-four quiet peaceful years and so has Nicole.” He stopped, put his hands on the table and looked right at me. “Your time has now come my friend, it has come. Nicole’s agreement is over. What do you think 24 years is worth to you? She has paid plenty and it is time to pay your own bill, my friend. She offered us everything, but we only took a little. Were you worth it for her?” He laughed. “I wouldn’t have done such a deal. What I said in your hearing for membership was true, but you have shown some potential over the years.”

I looked at him in silence, confused as to what he was asking and then he smiled. He sat down and calmly poured some more wine and then drank it quite comfortably in the silence. “So, who do you think runs this place?” He asked me finally.

“Well, the President does,” I said while he smiled like I was an idiot. “The board of directors?” He shook his head negative. The people run it,” now I smiled. He didn’t look like I had answered the question at all.

“So, here we have a wonderful utopian society that has lasted for a hundred years.” He looked at me like I was a child. “Why hasn’t there ever been a challenge to the status quo?” I didn’t answer. “Do you think someone like Stalin, like that German in Chile, really anyone would try to have taken over? Where are the dissenters?” He asked me. I still didn’t answer. “Someone over the years would have sensed the potential to take power and there would have been a coup. There has never been anything but 100% acceptance. This society isn’t that perfect. No place is.”

“Maybe we have such a well -organized society there aren’t any dissenters?” I said disagreeing with him.

“No,” he said. “What happens to the sociopaths like that young boy that hung himself that you just watched burn? People like that would potentially disrupt society.”

I thought for a moment. At first I was thinking that they go to prison or psychiatric facilities like in the outside world but here they all seem to kill themselves. “Many seem to commit suicide.” I said.

“How convenient…for us,” he said. “You were working for the company when we were amalgamating those three townships when the county expanded. Am I correct?”

“Yes,” I said. “I had just started but I was helping in the first assimilation and the land purchasing project after we got the extra township assigned to our county.”

“That was an unexpected problem. You remember that lone holdout in the end?”

“Yes,” I admitted again.

“What was his name? I forget.” Rademacher scratched his head.

“Who could forget him? His name was Avery, a serious asshole not to mention mass murderer. He hung himself after some evidence emerged about his involvement with that telephone guy’s murder in Johnson County.”

“Did he now? So equally convenient.” He said. “Do you think that whole deal in Topeka would have ever happened if that telephone guy hadn’t been murdered in the first place? It would have been difficult to have one landowner in this county not being part of the Fellowship of Believers, asking questions, coming to meetings…sending letters, being an asshole as you so accurately described. Would we have ever gotten Johnson County to be so cooperative if that terrible murder wouldn’t have happened? That telephone guy managed to screw it up the first time. There was more to it than just the Governor wanting votes. Such a wasteful murder for a few thousands of dollars’ worth of stuff. Odd for such a self-righteous man to suddenly be introspective enough to commit suicide. I would suspect his first response would be to shoot the sheriff or maybe shoot you or even Nicole. Obviously, murder didn’t bother him by the looks of that original crime scene.” Rademacher paused and then went back to the first case.

“You were at the first crime scene?” I asked.

He just smiled and didn’t answer. “We have open county meetings and when everyone that attends is part of us, it isn’t a problem.”

“What are you really saying to me?” I asked.

“Well… who really makes this place work, is what I’m saying. Who is really in charge? I’m trying to tell you what is really going on behind the scenes. Not everything is providence, luck, fate, or whatever you care to call it. Let me put it this way. Nicole knew, she could feel it, sense it, but she was incredibly smart, a manipulator extraordinaire. It was a loss that she needed to remain in a middling position all these years just so that you could be controlled by her sexuality. That girl knows a lot about things. Her IQ is at least 180, maybe more. It is probably so high, it can’t be adequately tested. She understands womanhood.”

“I…I don’t know what to say.” I stammered.

“There is nothing you can say. Would you John Thoreson trade your soul so that you could make sure the other four-thousand of us here in Fillmore County could live in peace and harmony…but you yourself would be condemned to hell? Would you make that trade?”

“Boy that is a hard question.” I said. “But in our religion, there isn’t hell. You mean forever subjugating my soul to be trapped here in this world?”

“Well whatever hell is…here on earth, fire and brimstone, soul gone, whatever you think hell is, it matters not to me. I can talk religion with you if you believe that. I do not think you are that naïve., John Thoreson. Maybe the false God does what the good God can’t? Maybe I serve him. What if you had to forego worship to the God of Light and be forced to do work that was more akin to the God of this earth. Could you forego the limitations of the Ten Commandments? But by foregoing it, you assure that our experiment with socialism works as it has for almost one hundred years.”

“I am assuming you are implying that the system we have here doesn’t work in even the small scale as we have designed it.”

He looked at me quite seriously. “Someone needs to do the dirty work in this utopian society. That is the fallacy of utopianists. They need the help from the outside or from the inside for it to work. Marx had some excellent theories, but in practice humans do not have such a Puritan work ethic. We don’t always do what is best for us and we definitely don’t do what we are told to do. We grumble, we get stubborn, and we lie. These are all traits Marx didn’t account for. He thought of humans as perfect creatures when you and I know we aren’t.”

“Yes, we aren’t.” I agreed.

“We think about ourselves, not the society we live in. We only think of the society when it suits us to do so. That is my job to keep those that don’t toe the line, who want to infiltrate, and those who threaten us on the outside permanently neutralized. I’m the shepherd. I protect and cull the bad sheep. I guard against wolves. I do what they can’t or won’t do or can hardly imagine that what needs to be done.”

“You do?” I asked dumbfounded. “How?” I didn’t get what he was saying.

“Yes,” he smiled. “The East Germans have the Stasi and the Russians the KGB. Here, it is I that truly runs this society and make it work. I make it hum like a well-oiled machine. Now, I don’t care what we plant or usually who works where or sleeps with whom, but I am the ultimate check and balance. Many have written that socialism cannot work because of unequal contribution by the proletariat. If someone doesn’t want to work or starts spewing some rhetoric that will ultimately destroy this place, I need to step in. If news of what we are about reaches the outside, then once we get on the radar, we will be permanently corrupted. Don’t underestimate the lure of materialism and capitalism. Even when both of us know that we live in bliss. Be even more wary of those from the outside that crave what we have.”

“How do you do what you do?” I asked still not really grasping it.

“It is simple. I’ll use the flock of sheep analogy, like I said before. One gets sick, you need to cull it. If one decides to bite you or gets out of control, you have to take it out. A wolf comes in from the woods, and you shoot it.” He looked at me dumbfounded. “John, I eliminate threats. If we need to, I kill people. I would have eliminated you twenty-four years ago, if not for Nicole pleading with me, begging me not to. I didn’t do it because of anything you did. You were just another smart-assed stupid kid. But with you, however, I saw the seeds of potential. I thought of a need we’d have later and like I said, Nicole made a bargain, and I just wanted to see if she could accomplish it. Damn, she was good. I lost a bet for a bottle of wine on her.”

“Why?” I asked. “What need?”

“The why…the same reason we eliminated other census workers as they knew too much and saw things no one should ever see. I would have given you a pass if you had just taken the data and left, but you didn’t, you stayed. You said to my questions 24 years ago you didn’t have any qualities that the society needed, and no special skills. That was incorrect. It was incorrect then, and it is still incorrect now. You just didn’t realize you had them. I decided you would eventually make a good member for my little team and would be a potential replacement for me, so I kept you around. Seeing your work over the years, I realized how good you truly are. You work behind the scenes really efficiently. Nicole has taught you some of her wily arts. You assimilated and here you now are, but as I said your time has now come full-circle. You have what it takes, I think, to make the deal I have made.”

“What if I didn’t assimilate?” I asked the obvious.

“You would have met an unfortunate end, my friend.” The older man didn’t show any emotion. “You are not the first census worker who has sat where you have sat.”

“The one that disappeared….so is it just you alone or are there others?”

“I have others that do my bidding.” He said.

“The sheriff I suspect, he brought me here. The president of the corporation?” I asked him.

“No, not the president.” He smiled. “He or she is selected randomly from those that are qualified. I suspect some of those on the board know I, or what I do, exist. Nicole knew. No one would ever ask. Like I said, we do what needs to be done. They need us to do it, so they don’t say anything or ask the questions they don’t want to hear the answers for.”

He threw over a bag to me. I looked inside. I saw blood encrusted jewelry including a diamond ring. “Shit!” I dropped the bag. “Johnson County?”

“Of course.” He smirked proudly.

“You’re the second man?” I turned white.

“No, I was the first man. Sheriff Haymeier was the second man. I wanted to make that fucker bleed, and I made him watch as I cut up his wife and then his children into little pieces. I wanted to wipe off that smirk he had on his face when he made a deal with old Governor Avery. That other Avery just had the wrong shoe size, wrong for him.” He laughed. “It all came together one day. The sheriff is a genius for these things.”

“Does the council know?” I was getting lightheaded.

“They don’t want to think about it. This is a very happy place. What I do is anything but happy. I never get to deliver flowers or spread happiness. The happiness is mine alone knowing that a problem has been terminally solved. But there is a price for this happiness, and they like those types of problems to go away and have a permanence. It is a price that you and I and a few others have to pay to be here.” He pointed to the fields and stood. “Harmony and tranquility, it is theirs for the taking and the only price is our souls, you, the sheriff, and mine. It is so simple. What are a few souls for the greater good?” He grabbed his glass and drank some more wine. “It is easier for us from the outside to assume this role. We have seen the dark side of humanity and materialism. We know materialism, it is in us deeply, and murder is as natural to you and me as breathing this country air. You can’t purge it from you. It doesn’t go away. It never goes away. Are you transcended or are you still a boy from Seattle?”

“I don’t know, the past is there, I guess.” I admitted.

“You and I both know in our guts that a place like this cannot sustain itself and cannot survive. We can feel that, but they can’t. Soon the Soviet Empire will crack as it cannot sustain itself, Germany will unify, and that experiment will be over. Bolshevism was idealistic until the intellectuals were executed. They never saw that coming, I suspect, as they were too deluded in their own rhetoric and ideals.” He sat back down.

“You were not born here?” I asked.

“Heavens no. I was born on a little ranch near Victoria, Texas. I fell in love…well it was lust, with a woman in my Biology class at Southwestern. It turned out that she was from Kansas, some damn place called Goodpasture. I had never heard of it. It was a small dot on the largest of maps. I was smitten but she didn’t give me the time of day. I begged her to let me into her dorm, her pants, and to that holiest of places between her tits. I was persistent. I think she finally had pity on me if nothing else. Most of the women who have had sex with me over the years, have been pity-fucks. I’m not a guy who could ever be loved. I guess the sex was worth it for me in retrospect, as I wouldn’t leave her for anything once I tasted that forbidden fruit and she was so free with her body, it was like nothing I could imagine. It was a dream. There was no doubt that when I was invited to stay here, I would. After I had been here a few years, the woman moved on, and I was helping lay out a road by then, so I didn’t notice or care.

“I always wondered why they let me in. I had nothing they needed. I wasn’t even a good student. I played too much football in school. I was definitely not much to look at. Then not that long before you came along, I got the same invite you are getting from me. It was an invitation one can’t refuse. Well, I guess you can refuse but…”

“Invite?” I asked.

“Better put, as a new assignment of one’s duties and expectations,” Rademacher laughed. “This isn’t a choice. Consider this as something like the Bureau of Labor assignments. There is no road back, for you, John. There is no road back to Berkeley, Richmond, Indiana, or even Seattle. Last week you were a guy sleeping in Nicole’s bed and doing the bidding of the Society and by the week after next, you will be doing my bidding and sleeping with someone else.”

“Does Nicole know about this?” I asked.

“No, she will just accept that you have been reassigned to the winter colony as assistant manager in Florida. She will be here and will have other duties that will distract her from thinking about you. Yes, it will be a tearful goodbye, maybe you two will have sex again when you are back, that doesn’t matter. For now, I need you to go to Florida. That is unless next weekend it will be your spirit releasing fire that will be celebrated on Saturday. That is up to you, not me. I don’t care. There are others, you are not that special.”

He reached into his pocket, pulled out a pistol. He slid it over towards me on the table. “What is that?” I asked.

“There are options. You gave Avery three options. I’ll give you three as well. You can take that gun and shoot me, I don’t care, but you need to run like hell. Maybe the sheriff won’t kill you right off. But you will be as good as dead anyway. You can never be seen here again. You can also use it to shoot yourself. I’ll find another, meat is cheap for the butcher. Your second choice is to just leave but then we’ll kill you and because you made me do it, it will be a horrible end. The sheriff enjoys those sorts of things. Thirdly, you make your pledge later to serve me unquestionably and do what is expected of you. It makes no difference to me what you do.”

“I have yet to see the upside of this offer, sir.” I said truthfully.

“There is no upside, my friend, unless living is considered an upside and after doing this for decades, I am not sure it is living that I do now. After you kill a few people or send someone to prison, you get callous to it. That I will share with you. Maurice is correct about sex, it can offer no more than a few seconds of satisfaction. There is no joy in having the life of every member of this community in your hands or the fate of a society on your shoulders. Maybe you will make a mistake and kill someone who is innocent. I killed an entire family in Johnson County…well he wasn’t innocent. I smashed heads like I was smashing rocks for a road or smashing rotten pumpkins. We had to make it ghastly. Maybe you do something with a visitor that opens a can of worms, as they say, but you live with it. I am not infallible and the few of us try to clean up our messes. In the end you will get like me, old, cynical, and a man who drinks too much, and whose soul has become the property of the wrong god. I used to drown my emotions in lust but that was only a distraction. Did I feel guilty in knowing that boy you burnt today is no more, that terrible teenager? Hell, No. There is no cure for sociopaths, despite much ballyhoo in liberal writings. The only solution is one filled with lead or the business end of a rope. My only joy is knowing that in the last twenty years I have let Goodpasture move successfully to the next generation and in five years or so, I will pass that torch to you, and it will totally be your problem. You will undoubtedly help me commit suicide and then it will be your responsibility to keep this place going. It will not be easy. It hasn’t been for me. You have to be calculating and to do this, you have to look at lives as you would a pasture. You have to determine what are weeds, what are grains, and what is truly poisonous. You can’t kill everyone.”

I swallowed hard. “This isn’t a Quaker thing either. I do not think I have the stomach for this. pacifism is in my soul.”

“You were no more a Quaker than you are a Believer. You were born a Lutheran, a Nordic Lutheran. I know your past. No one can mask what you are born to. I said that before. No, you will be a good one of us. You will kill without mercy. I am happy with my choice. Now you will swear your allegiance to me, pledge me your soul with witnesses I will assemble. If you are going to kill me, kill me, if you are going to kill yourself do it already, I’m an old man. I lack patience for drawn out decisions.” He finally stood and picked up the gun and put it in his pocket. “If not then, you will prove to me your pledge of sincerity, then we will eat, fornicate a little possibly, and then in ten days you will prepare yourself to be my eyes and ears in Florida.”

“Shit,” I said reflexively.

“Shit is a good term.” He smiled. “Shit is what we do, we do the shit that needs to be done.”

He gave me some time to think as I walked around the yard, sat and looked out at the countryside. There really wasn’t any choice to be made, I didn’t have a choice. That was crystal clear, almost too clear. I had missed my chance of to kill myself. Two hours later I was led into the basement of his house. “This will be yours someday, John.” He said as he went to a wall and then slid open what looked like paneling. “Sometimes you or others may need my space. There is an outside entrance to the basement.” He pointed. “It is locked, but you will get a key.” He moved a loose cinderblock slightly and a door swung open. “Pull this piece of wood here and this one here.” He pointed to the ceiling, “and this room will never be able to be opened by anyone, ever again.” He handed me a robe as he was also putting one on, stripping out of everything except the robe. “Then I could hear other’s footprints stepping down the stairs, I recognized the sheriff in the lead, a young woman from the convenience store in Goodpasture, another man who I think was a farmer from the western portion of New Town, which was part of the new territory annexed in the county two decades ago. Three other women came, one in her thirties and two also in their twenties I had not seen them before. Now, like me, they were also in robes.

He led me into the secret room, sort of a dungeon and just like in a dungeon a man was chained to the far wall. I gasped looking at him. His head was covered but I could tell he was listening.

“We’ll deal with that later.” Rademacher said in my direction pointing at the man. “Stand over on the circle, John.”

I was shaking as I walked over to a simple circle etched in the concrete floor. I looked around in the dimly lit room. It was musty and I didn’t know what to think. I felt like crying. I had thought I should pray but was dumfounded as to whom to pray to and for what.

“John Thoreson,” Rademacher said. “Do you pledge to serve me without question or reward?”

He paused and so I felt the need to answer. “Yes.” I gulped. I didn’t really have a choice.

“If I tell you to kill someone?” Will you kill them?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Even if it is to take your own life?”

“Especially if it is to take my own life,” I said honestly.

For nearly an hour I was given scenarios, actions and all of them I agreed to. Have sex with someone, kill them, and eliminate even one of those in this room if I am told to do so. Then I agreed to follow the goals of the Fellowship of Believers. “Will you place this society, the Fellowship of Believers its very continuance as your guidance?”

“Yes,” I replied.

Then all the others in the room agreed to accept me as their absolute leader should something happen to Rademacher. I wasn’t sure what would come next and then the old man asked to come forward and then he gave me a knife. “This man rode a motorcycle onto our property and then evaded the law for a period of time. We cannot tolerate him sharing what he has seen. John, kill him.”

I looked at the knife and then the man chained to the wall. I gulped. I looked over to the others in the room watching me. I took a deep breath and walked over.

“Fucking bastard,” the blindfolded man said as I neared him. He couldn’t see me, but I was sure he could sense me. What happened next seemed like such a blur. I remember sinking the knife deep into his neck and being covered in blood and then as the warmth came over me, I felt the others nearby and especially the women rubbing me and the dying man. It was something almost Satanic if there was a Satan, but thinking about it later it was just blood lust in the true sense of the word. In the end all of us killed the man, stabbing, thrusting and then as the lust came over me, I found myself having sex with one of the women, blood was all over her breasts as she screamed in orgasm. I could see Rademacher bowing out and leaving the room, his deed was done. I was his, I had made my deal with the dark side.

Somewhere after dark, the orgy over, the other guy named Horace and I took the corpse to his farm and in a shed we began the grisly task of dismemberment and then a few hours later out in a dank corner of the county we burnt the remains in an old forge furnace. I shoveled coal while Horace threw in bits and pieces of the unnamed biker we had cut up earlier with a saw. I assumed that the bike and personal effects had previously been taken care of. During the whole process, Horace said but a few words, just interjections like “open the door,” or “shovel in more coal.”

At dawn, the sheriff came and found me at Horace’s house and after I cleaned up using a garden hose to a faucet on the outside of a shed, he drove me back to my apartment, telling me that nothing should be said about anything including my moving to Florida until after the next weekend. Everything would come together better after that point. I walked in and sat down in the kitchen, shaking from the night of excess and sin, murder, blood, and lust. I poured myself a glass of milk. After what can only be described as a night from hell. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t focus and I couldn’t grasp what I had done. I had always thought that maybe I’d sell my soul for a lot of money, fame, a beautiful woman, or something substantial, but in my case, I had sold my soul for a concept that didn’t even include me.

Nicole eventually awoke and came into the kitchen. “Where did you get off to yesterday? I saw the sheriff drive you off.” She asked sitting down. She grabbed the milk and poured a glass for herself and then refilled mine.

“The county had some business that I needed to attend to.” I lied.

“On a weekend?” Nicole looked confused and then smiled. “I hope she was worth it. I don’t like to sleep alone,” she laughed and then headed off to bathe.

I thought about the sex with the woman covered in blood and then the other woman. No, it wasn’t worth it. I thought.