The Two-Day War: The Destruction of Washington, DC: Lenny

[continued from "The Two-Day War: The Destruction of Washington, DC: Sam Eisenstein]

​

By Yael Dragwyla, a.k.a. Furshlugginer492

​

As if in answer, he heard a tap-tap-tapping coming toward him along the nearby sidewalk.

The sound almost sent him running for cover. Was it a mugger, coming after a perceived easy target? Before leaving his apartment earlier, Sam had taken care to check the ammunition in the very illegal semiauto he now carried in an underarm holster whenever he went out, making sure the 14-slot clip (another violation of the gun laws; ever since Reno’s ghastly administration, the only ones licensed to carry handguns with a capacity for more than 6 cartridges at a time had been federal cops; not even municipal cops were exempt from that law, something which had, of course, had the unintended consequence of alienating most law-enforcement personnel in the country from the federal government, thanks to the surge of injuries and deaths they sustained on the job for lack of adequate firepower to deal with the ever-growing criminal population) was completely filled. He was loaded for bear – with a full clip in his .40-caliber Glock and two other full clips in one pocket, he could handle just about anything that came his way. Assuming he was able to cut and run and go to ground successfully before he could be ID’d by anyone, of course.

But it was, he saw now, old Leonard Angel (“Lenny to my friends, and don’t you forget it, Sam!” he’d told Sam upon their first encounter, chuckling and extending a hand), a blind man who haunted the streets of DC, sometimes by day, sometimes by night, making cryptic comments to those he passed – comments which, as it turned out later, were stunningly accurate predictions of future events or, in some cases, assessments of the various character flaws and/or strengths in the individual on whom he bestowed his weirdly prophetic comments. Though very old, infirm (in addition to being blind, Lenny had had two hip-replacement surgeries in the last ten years, suffered from mild but still dangerous emphysema, had various other problems with his joints, and probably had a heart condition as well), and, judging from his usual general appearance, not well-off or well cared-for, he was apparently immune to the city’s criminal element.

According to local legend, about five years ago Lenny had been out walking somewhere along “K” Street late one night when a pack of young gangsters had accosted him. They weren’t interested in robbing him – everybody knew he had nothing worth stealing with him, except maybe his cane. Young, two-legged wolves on the prowl, they were looking for something to have a little fun with, and Lenny seemed to them to be as likely a toy as any.

Surrounding him, they started bombarding him with questions, as if challenging his right to be where he was, a seeming ritual of territorial behavior. In fact, they were just warming up to the supreme moment, when they’d begin in earnest to beat him to death and then run off laughing. They’d done that sort of thing numerous times before without suffering any bad consequences, and had no reason to believe things would be different this time – the night was dark, no cops were around, any citizens who might have come to help had taken one look at what was going down and fled. Who was to stop them?

Lenny was.

The unthinkable happened. The leader of the murderous gang took a position right in front of Lenny, his top lieutenants ranging to either side or taking up station in back of the old man, who, hearing the young men all around him, had come to a halt. He said, “Who you think you are, old man?”

“Who asks?” Lenny said. Unbelievably, a smile had suddenly spread across his face, the gold in his teeth glinting brightly under nearby mercury-vapor street-lamp.

“I aksing you, old man!” snarled the kid.

“Well, then, I shall tell you: I am Nemesis.”

“Who dat? Who dat ‘Nemesis’ jive?” the young man said belligerently, balling up his fists. But a sudden tremor in his voice belied his bellicose challenge. The other young men who had surrounded Lenny felt a chill. Instead of the bright black joy of murder-to-come, they felt the same heavy grey pall of horror slipping over them that had enveloped their leader. They didn’t like it – to say the least. Terror began to weigh them down, filling their souls like molten lead. In reaction, they readied themselves for murder – and, appalled, felt their limbs grow heavier yet, heavy as concrete caissons filled with cold seawater. Whaffuck was happening?

“Nemesis is the one who is sent by God to punish those guilty of hubris. I doubt any of you know what hubris is, so I will tell you: it is the arrogance of those who would spit in the face of God. Such as those who intend murder – one of the things expressly forbidden by God’s ten great Commandments, the ones He gave to Moses up on Mount Sinai.

“It is not wise to entertain hubris in yourself,” he continued, as the men around him – or rather, boys, for none of them was over 17 – stood there, appalled to find they could neither move nor speak, unable to do anything but listen as the old, obviously highly educated Black man they had tried to ambush not only wasn’t at all frightened of them, but actually enjoying this encounter. “Terrible things happen to those who do. In you, son,” he said to the kid standing before him, the boy’s mouth hanging open in shock, “I see someone who has two roads before him. One is marked LIFE, and leads first back to school, where you get your GED, then on to a good college, where you get a Bachelor’s in Business Administration. You then go out into the world, are hired by a major corporation and begin a highly lucrative career. You marry a wonderful young woman, with whom you have three lovely children, all of whom become highly successful in life – and, at your good-hearted wife’s urging, track down the two bastard children you’ve sired on girls here in the city, one by rape, the other in lust, and adopt them, raising them to be fine, church-going men who have good lives of their own.

“The other road is labeled DEATH. It ends about six months from now, when you make a very bad decision that leads you to engage in a fire-fight with the police, which ends with your death and that of two of those policemen.

“As for your friends here,” he went on, his smile now a grin that showed how sharp his teeth really were, in spite of all those bright gold fillings in them, “the same fork in the road starts here. Your friend James, over there,” he said, idly waving his hand to indicate the lieutenant standing at his left shoulder, “can make a choice that takes him back to church again, where his pastor, the one who has led that congregation since James was a babe in arms, persuades him to go back to school, in this case to a good trade school, where he is certified as an electrician and given assistance in joining the Electrical Worker’s Union. He makes a very good career in that trade. He, too, marries, has children, and in general has a rich, fulfilling life, a God-fearing man who ends his days at the age of 89 among his loved ones, dying quickly in his sleep after a wonderful reunion with his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. The other road, the one marked DEATH, however, will bring him to an end in about, oh, two years, when he dies of that new strain of AIDS, the one for which no cure will be found for the next 30 years . . .”

And so it went around the circle of boys. One after the other he told their fortunes, and they found that they believed – that they couldn’t not believe. Nor could they move, or speak.

And when he had finished telling each boy what that boy’s personal “two roads” of the future held, Lenny told them all most graciously “Good night, gentlemen,” and, bobbing his head up and down, a brief, final nod that closed the conversation like the sound of Gabriel’s Horn announcing the roll-up of the world and all its works, walked out between the young leader of the gang and the boy next to him and made his way down along the sidewalk, none of them daring or even able to keep him from doing so. It was only after he had disappeared into the gloom of night that they found they could move again – at which point they took off running, each one in a different direction, heading for home, heading out of town, heading for whatever hills there might be beyond the city limits.

There were other such legends. Somehow, nobody laughed at them. People believed. How Lenny did it, nobody knew – but there were rumors: he was a sorcerer, he was a Qaballist, he was a conjure-man, he’d been in Vietnam and learned some weird form of Magick from a Montaignard wise man, and so on and on.

In fact, Lenny was a veteran of the Korean War. Born in 1932, in 1950 he’d voluntarily enlisted when war had broken out in that part of the world, gone over to fight Communism. He’d come home with a GI bill, gone to college, where, of all things, he’d majored in anthropology, and had graduated with honors. Then Vietnam had come along, and he’d answered his country’s call again, this time in the rôle of combat-arts trainer. For that was another thing he’d picked up along the way: a mastery of several forms of combat arts, an eclectic connoisseur of the best the Far East had to offer of such disciplines, from the ninjutsu forms of Japan, to the Chinese disciplines of tai chi and related forms, to jiu-jitsu and numerous others. Lenny, who’d become something of a friend over the years, had told Sam once that from very early boyhood he, Lenny, had found all such arts fascinating. He was also a student of military science – strategy, tactics, technology – and military history, and at college had declared a minor in those areas because they figured into the things he found most interesting in anthropology, the history of Man the War-Maker. On top of everything else, his ratty appearance about town notwithstanding – artful camouflage belying the gentleman and scholar hidden within – he was frequently invited by numerous academic groups as well as municipal committees to speak on a wealth of different topics, on all of which he was a world-class expert, at which times he was as polished and well-dressed as any member of the State Department on a diplomatic mission of the utmost importance, whom none of his neighbors and few of his friends would ever have recognized as “Blind Lenny.”

The local legends about Lenny were, as far as Sam knew, quite true. He’d asked Lenny about them, and Lenny, grinning, had told him, “Sam, when you get to be my age, you’ll see the world in a whole different light than you do now – and I’m sure that due to all the experience that goes with your age even now, you see the world far differently than those boys that confronted me that evening ever could. I really don’t know if my ‘prophecies’ that night were accurate. Nor do I care. But those boys sure thought I had something, mainly because long ago I learned how to throw away fear when it went from being a good servant to a bad master.

“After I took my Master’s in cultural anthropology I tried teaching the subject at a local college. I did okay as a professor, but I found it more personally rewarding to teach combat arts – not martial arts, which are, really, just sports arts, with not much training in how to put them to use in real combat, where life and limb are threatened and you need them. No, what I wanted to teach were the techniques and strategies developed on battlefields all over the world by real soldiers, warriors, people who’ve been there, done that, worn the T-shirt, worn it out, tore it up, and didn’t bother with another because T-shirts aren’t worth shit with bullets flying around your ears,” he had said, laughing. “Then Korea came along. I joined up and went over there, and while I was there, I found people who could teach me more about combat arts. Much more. And I was hooked.

“The war ended, I came home, went back to teaching cultural anthropology at a liberal-arts college. Got married, had two children, got divorced, she took the kids and moved clear across the country, to California, married somebody else, you know how it is. Vietnam came along. The Army asked me to train Rangers in combat arts – they knew about my experience, figured I’d make a good instructor. I guess I did – the men I trained came home again, intact in body and soul, in higher numbers than those trained by others, and in much higher numbers than those who’d had no real training in the sort of things I taught at all.

“Vietnam ended. I came home. This time, I opened a dojo of my own. Anthropology became a sort of hobby, that and history – oh, I wrote up articles and sent them to the professional journals all the time, but my heart was in teaching people who’d been getting in trouble all the time and couldn’t get out, or were scared shitless of everything in their own neighborhoods, how to avoid trouble and, if they couldn’t avoid it, deal with it successfully, using what I had to teach them about self-protection and then, when they’d learned enough background material, the heavy-duty stuff, the genuine ryu of Japan and the Chinese systems on which those were based.

“I still teach those things – I’ve still got a dojo over on “O” Street” – he had named an address, far from the city center – “and I usually have about ten students. That’s in addition to the classes for women and children I teach – the women want to learn how to defend themselves from attackers, of course, and they usually do well at the ryu once they’ve learned the basic stuff, too. The children I teach ‘evade, avoid, escape’ tactics, how to get away from someone trying to abduct or molest them, and how to make one hell of a racket in the process, calling hell down on the bastards’ heads while they get to safety,” he had said, chuckling.

“I enrolled my son in a dojo after his – after my ex-wife’s brother tried something with him. Nobody can touch him now,” Sam had said, joining Lenny in laughter.

“You must be a great father,” Lenny had said, smiling. Then, frowning, “So few are, any more. A terrible shame. That’s what’s wrong with so many of these young punks – they’re punks because they never had anyone to teach them what it is to be a man, to make them want to grow up to be fine men, good men, with something to contribute to the world.”

“Yeah, I know. – So how’d you get rid of that bunch of kids that night?”

“Them? Oh, hell, that was easy. Like I said, when fear won’t do you any good, throw it away. The confidence left behind in its wake scares the holy living shit out of kids like that – I could have said anything to them and it would have scared them silly, way I was about then. ‘Don’t fear the Reaper’ is sometimes good advice, Sam. Your namesake, old Sam Houston the original, must’ve known that, way he was able to nail old Santa Ana the way he did.”

They’d both laughed, and Sam had offered to buy Lenny a beer, and Lenny had accepted on condition it was Dos Equis or Red Hook or Moosehead or some other decent beer, “Not that Budweiser crap, and for God’s sake, never, never, ever Coors! I swear they brew that shit up from the outfall from one of those factories that are screwing up the Colorado River so bad these days!” And, laughing, they’d found a tavern and hoisted a couple of brewskis apiece, and it had been a most pleasant Spring evening.

Now Lenny was approaching him along the sidewalk, tap-tap-tap. He still took in students for dojo training – he’d actually been blinded by shrapnel in Korea, permanent blindness due to the obliteration of his optic nerves by shell frags, but he claimed it had made it easier to learn and practice “the good stuff,” the arts of war as he had learned them all over the Far East, the Near East, India, in the US, Mexico, and Central and South America. Lenny had been a travelin’ man for most of his life, loved to travel, and always, wherever he went, he sought out teachers to learn more, ever more of the traditions and techniques and wisdom of the art and science of war and battle. He claimed that because he was blind, there was less to get in his mind’s way of learning – and maybe that was true. Sighted people focused mostly on what they could see – and thereby missed a great deal of what was going on around them. Those who lacked sight were thrown back on much older, wiser senses: hearing, scent, touch, the tenuous “lateral line” sense that probably had evolved from the electromagnetic senses of our ancient piscine ancestors and which might underlie much of what was usually taken to be ESP and other paranormal senses, and maybe even real paranormal senses themselves. Certainly being blind hadn’t robbed Lenny of much – and it had given him wonderful things the sighted never knew, such as hearing so acute he could literally hear conversations taking several blocks away, know how many people were within two blocks of where he stood and just how they were positioned by the faint vibrations he picked up in the air and through the sidewalk, a host of other things.

Tap-tap-tap. A welcome sound.

“Hello, there, Sam,” said Lenny, now about twenty feet away. In spite of the city’s heat – beyond the park it must still have been hot as the hinges of Hell – he was wearing a baggy yellow pullover over his T-shirt. Ancient camouflage trousers and equally old, runover brown shoes completed his ensemble.

“How the hell do you do it, Len?”

“Heat-signature.”

“Is that bullshit, or for real?”

“For real – that, and your breathing. Everybody’s got a particular signature in the way they breathe – not to mention the odors they give off with every breath. Anyway, it all adds up to you.”

“Come sit a spell on the bench – it’s cool here.”

“I know, but I got to go do something, unfortunately.”

“What’s up?”

“See that church over there?” Lenny said, coming to a stop about three feet from Sam, using his cane to point in a general southeast direction.

“St. Mark’s?” Sam had gone by it many times on walks through the city.

“That’s the one. I’m going there. Need to pay my respects.”

“Someone die?”

“Well, maybe somebody will soon. Anyway, the One I’m going to see is the one who knows the last day and hour of each one of us. I need to go talk with Him.”

“Something wrong?” Sam asked, now alarmed. Lenny was, after all, a nonagerian. In spite of his bad health, he looked at least a quarter of a century younger than he really was. But eventually it all catches up with us, doesn’t it?

“I’m . . . not sure.” Lenny raised his head, looked almost as if he were sniffing the air, hunting for an elusive scent of something. “I . . . well, to be honest, I’m out right now because I woke up from a very strange dream a little over an hour ago, and that’s why I’m on my way to church. Father Evans told me I could go in any time I wanted through a door most don’t know about – he and I have been friends for years, and he trusts me not to abuse the privilege. This is the first time I’ve ever felt the need. He won’t be up and about, and the main doors are locked up tight, but I can get in. I want to – after that dream I had, I need to.”

“What did you dream?”

“Well,” Lenny said slowly, “it’s hard to describe. Let’s just say I need to make sure my accounts are square, you know? Father Evans won’t be up to hear my confession, but He’ll be there, He always is.”

Once again Sam felt that little rill of liquid helium ooze along his spine. Suddenly he believed – and unlike those boys who’d once thought to try murdering Lenny, he knew why he believed: Len was a warrior and, like Sam, a patriot. He was also a very religious man, but rarely said much about his beliefs. Tonight’s revelation was unheard of. It was not the sort of thing Len would joke about, and Sam knew it. “Maybe I’d better head over to the synagogue,” he said, more to himself than to Len, but of course Len, with his preternaturally acute hearing, made it out clearly.

“Maybe so. At least . . . say your prayers, Sam. The world turns very strangely right now,” Len said, his voice low and heavy with portent.

“I – will. Thanks.” And he meant it.

“You take care, now, Sam. I got to be off, got to go talk with my Friend,” said the old man.

​

[Continued in "The Two-Day War: The Destruction of Washington, DC: Armageddon"]

Submitted August 28, 2019 at 03:29AM by Furshlugginer492 https://ift.tt/2UaAXvG