Chapter 18

That gang in Marietta really got my goat. I asked Dad why I could not go ahead right now and clean their clocks. He thought about it for all of 30 seconds before saying for me to go ahead. He just warned me to be careful. He was certain that these guys would have no qualms about killing me or anyone else in the family. I hadn't thought of that last little bit, but I thought that my concubines could take care of anything that showed up. That may have been the enthusiasm of youth, but I really felt that way.

I took Sally with me this time. There was no special reason for that—it was just her turn. We flew directly to Marietta, and I pushed our speed as hard as I could. I even went supersonic whenever I thought that I could get away with it. I did stay close to the ground, though, so I did make a mess of some wilderness areas, and I wish now that I had been more careful. We got there about 9:00 AM and went into hiding. I wanted a chance to mentally scan the place before we blundered into something that we couldn't handle.

I looked around and started scanning the minds from the top down. The executives were about as evil as you could hope to find this side of a cesspit. They would sell anything, including each other, if the price were right, and that price did not have to be very high. On the other hand, they were scared of their own shadow, so they were extremely dangerous.

There was one big boss, four sub-bosses, and seven captains. All of these men lived in the mansion. None of them had conventional families; instead, they had what they called "mistresses," but they were hardly more than sex slaves. There were no children, of course, because the executives were both too selfish to take a chance on having to share what they had, and too insecure to want any possible tug on their emotions. They certainly did not love their mistresses.

About 15 people worked as clerks and secretaries, and 10 worked as specialists, such as computer repair technicians. The reason the number of clerks and secretaries varied was because they were killed the moment they showed any sign of anything less than complete loyalty to their immediate boss. Once you started working for this bunch, you were hooked for life, and that might not be a very long time!

My investigation to this level took four days, and all of the women who came with me were bored to death. None of them were anxious to make a second trip as long as I was not going to do any more than I had been doing. I was not surprised, and I was actually happy that the women wanted to stay home. I thought that I could work better by myself on this kind of job.

None of the workers inside the mansion ever left. That included everybody from the top boss to the lowest clerk. The bosses stayed where they were safe, but the workers were imprisoned, for practical purposes. The workers were well paid, but they really had little that they could spend their money on. Most of them thought that they could work in the mansion for a while and accumulate a nice stash of money and then leave. What they didn't know was that nobody left except in the proverbial pine box.

Any outside work, such as was done by that telephone answerer, were people hired from a local gang that did what it was told for the money and never asked questions. Very few of the people who were not bosses actually knew what they were doing. Oh, they knew that it was illegal, but that was about the limit of their knowledge. Anybody who learned any more than that was "fired."

Okay, that meant that all I really wanted to remove were the 12 bosses and managers. The rest of them were petty crooks at worst, and could not be a major threat to society if they were allowed to run loose. What I needed to do was to collect these 12 men into one place and eliminate them. The rest, including the mistresses, could be turned loose to fend for themselves.

I noticed that the only time all of the 12 were together, more or less separated from the other people in the building, was during lunch. They all ate lunch together and used the opportunity to discuss current projects and possible new ones. That was when I would grab them. I could seal them up with frozen-air walls while I did a detailed scan of each mind. I didn't know what I was looking for, but I would know it if and when I found it.

Well, this was as good a day as any to do that, so I got to work on my task. They were all collected in the dining room and eating by 12:30, and that was when I struck. I simply sealed the room in a hollow cube of frozen-air. I perforated the walls of the cube so that they would not suffocate before I was finished with them.

I started with the boss of bosses, since I figured that he would be the most fruitful. Man, was I wrong! He was nothing but a mass of walking greed. He already had a plan in mind for eliminating each of his subordinates as soon as he was dispensable. Of course, he was going to keep all of the proceeds of their activities for himself. Mistresses would be eliminated out of hand.

I did not get one bit of useful information from him, so I began looking at the four lesser bosses. They were nearly as bad as the main boss, but their attention was more focused on getting rid of him and becoming the main boss themselves. Other than that, they were concerned about keeping their underlings in line.

I was pretty damned disgusted by the time I got to the lowest level of bosses. Their main concern was in staying alive long enough to replace their current boss. Of course, they did concern themselves with doing the best job they could within their particular bailiwick. They were looking for new ways to make money for the gang, but that was always secondary to staying alive long enough to rise to the next level.

The only useful thing that I did get out of this exercise was that I found out where the software DVD from Dad had been stored. It had not been used more than that once to try to collect credit card numbers, and they were still trying to decode the data that they had downloaded. One or more heads were going to roll pretty damned soon if that problem was not quickly solved. I was almost tempted to hold off my retribution until after I saw what happened there, but I decided not to stall around that long.

I decided that none of these guys were worth saving, and I did have other things that I wanted to do, so I figured that I would just kill them by stopping their hearts and removing the frozen-air barrier. That only took a matter of minutes to accomplish, and I was ready to pick up the DVD. I had the combination to the safe, so I did not need any help from anyone else to do that job. I broke into the front door of the mansion by sheer force of my TK and went to the safe I was interested in.

I was still wearing my camouflage skin coloring, and I scared the Hell out of anyone who saw me. I opened the safe and pulled out the DVD. I used TK to crush it until it melted, and that was the end of its usefulness. There were several people standing around in shock staring at me, and I said to them, "You are free to leave now. All of the bosses are dead. I suggest that you grab what you can and get the Hell out of here before you get into all kinds of trouble. Nobody will try to stop you, yet, but I cannot say what will happen when the bodies begin to decompose. Tell everybody else to run, too. I wish you good luck. Goodbye."

With that, I went outside and flew home.

Now that I had put down two of our main enemies, I turned my attention to the KGC. I was not sure just how much of a danger they really were, but I was still upset over their efforts to kill me. I had determined in my scanning of the minds of the crooks in Marietta that they had not been associated with the efforts on my life, except that they had tried to take credit for them to put pressure on Dad. The real threat to me had been from the KGC, and I wanted to pull them down before they took it into their heads to go after somebody who could not defend himself from them.

I knew the identities of a few of them, and I expected to get the names of the rest of the crew from the ones that I knew. I talked to Dad about just how I should get the retribution I wanted, and he convinced me that simply killing the fools would not be an adequate punishment. Instead, he suggested that a public humiliation would be a lot harder for those blowhards to stand, so that was what I set out to do. This was going to take longer, but would probably be a lot of fun in the long run.

The head mucky-muck of the local crew was a banker who was as pompous as you could hope to find anywhere. I discussed the situation with my concubines, and we came up with what we thought would be the most embarrassing kind of revenge. Cyrus Crawford was 52 years old, and had spent that entire time learning how to be a bigot. Of course, his target was anyone with any Black heritage, so that was where I started.

One morning after he had arrived at work, I encased him in the same kind of frozen-air armor that my family wore. However, I made the color of this armor a dark chocolate brown. Cyrus Crawford now looked like the epitome of that hated "nigger race." Cyrus was shocked to the core when his skin seemed to turn this color. His first thought was to hide himself from the public until he could wash it off. He did not know at that time that there was no way for him to remove the color, and I certainly didn't tell him.

Crawford stayed in his office all day and would not allow anyone in to see him. He waited until everyone else had gone home before he sneaked out to his waiting car which was parked in the alley behind the bank. His chauffeur, a Black man, naturally, was not even allowed to see him as Cyrus entered the car. Unfortunately from Cyrus' point of view, there was no way to keep the chauffeur from seeing him when Cyrus exited the car.

Not only that, several of the servants in the house, most certainly the Black butler saw Cyrus as he came in the door. It did not take long for word to spread all through the staff that Cyrus' skin had changed color. This precipitated a great deal of amusement among the servants because everyone knew of their employer's bigotry.

Cyrus, Jr. happened to be home from college, the University of Alabama, at that time, and could not help laughing when he first caught sight of his father. That got him banished back to the university forthwith—he did not even have time to eat supper before being thrown out of the house!

Mrs. Crawford was able to contain herself and did not laugh out loud, but she was as amused by her husband's discomfort as anyone else. She, too, was as much of a bigot as Cyrus, and she banned him from her bed until he could get rid of that disgusting skin color. She, an upstanding White aristocrat, was not going to be fucked by a black cock, no matter what the source.

Cyrus headed for the shower and spent the whole time in there trying to wash off the dark skin color. He stayed until the hot water was gone and even suffered through a dash of cold water as he tried to wash his skin back to its original color. He was at his wit's end when he could not get the color off. He even resorted to telephoning his doctor, a life-long friend, to ask him to come to his home for consultation. Of course, the doctor did not make house calls, but he did acquiesce when Cyrus finally explained the problem. By the way, the doctor was on the KGC list I had.

The doctor showed up and worked over Cyrus' skin with everything that he kept in his little black bag. He had some powerful bleaching agents in that bag, but nothing would remove the color. I had the armor protect Cyrus' skin from the bleaching agents since I did not want to cut short his period of suffering.

Cyrus did not go to the dining room for dinner that night. Instead, he ate alone in his study because he did not want to show off his new skin color. Cyrus spent the night in a guest room because his wife would not let him sleep with her. She did not want to risk catching whatever was affecting him. I toyed with the prospect of changing her skin color, too, but I let that idea slide for the moment.

I was having a ball listening via mind scans to the suffering that Cyrus was going through. My family was also enjoying the event as I relayed to them what was going on. Cyrus' bigotry was well known throughout Dothan, so we could well understand the agony that he was going through.

Cyrus had hoped that the affliction would wear off over night, but he was downcast to discover that he was still the same color when he woke up as when he had retired the previous night. Oh, well, back to the shower to try to get that damned color off of his body. He spent an hour in the shower trying various things, including laundry bleach, to clear his skin, but nothing would work. In despair, he dressed minimally and ate some breakfast in private.

He refused to go in to work and assumed the lifestyle of a hermit in fear of being seen. Of course, by now, word of his predicament was spreading through town as the household staff spread the word. The Black population of Dothan was amused beyond words and the bigoted portion of the White population was horrified. The latter group hoped that this was not a contagious disease that was going to spread throughout the city. The rest of the population just laughed at Cyrus Crawford and his troubles. I wondered which of those two attitudes would have upset Cyrus the most if he knew of them.

This was so much fun that I started spreading the "sickness" throughout the bigoted population, starting with Mrs. Crawford. That poor woman almost went insane when she saw the change taking over her body. Of course, she blamed her husband for bringing the problem home, and she probably would have shot him if she had ready access to a gun.

I arranged to have the affected person's skin change color gradually as if it were caused by an advancing sickness. It amused me to see the gradually darkening skin in about 35% of the White population. On the other hand, I was gratified to see that 65% were not affected, but most of these were children. At least that bode well for the future.

This changing of the skin color became a burden before I had completed my work with the population in Dothan. I had hoped to spread this "sickness" over the whole state of Alabama, and eventually over the whole country, but it simply became too time consuming, and I had to settle for doing it only for Dothan and its environs.

That little game took about two weeks, and I had lost track of my original plan. Now that a lot of the population was turning color, Cyrus had broken out of his spell as a hermit and was returning to his former routine. However, his wife had still not opened her bed or her legs for him. She considered that the whole thing was his fault! Somehow, word of that had also gotten around town, and Cyrus was the laughingstock of the business community.

Much to my surprise, that was the last straw as far as Cyrus was concerned. First, his skin had darkened, and now his manhood was under attack. That was all he could take, and the next morning he was found hanging in his study. Because he had not known what he was doing, he had strangled to death, and the coroner estimated that it had taken him about 20 minutes to die. Well, so much for Cyrus Crawford, now it was time to hit the rest of the local KGC hierarchy.

I decided to make a big show out of this, so I intended to strike against all of them at the same time. There were 19 left in the upper echelons of the KGC around Dothan. I arbitrarily selected a Wednesday night to strike. Each one would have to be dealt with individually, so I got started as soon as it got dark. I had found an unused barn that I could store my victims in until I was ready for them to show up in public.

The first part of the night, I collected them and stowed them in the barn. Once I had all of them collected, I proceeded to work on them as fast as I could because it was getting close to dawn. Each man was bound hand and foot with nylon cable ties after he was stripped of any night clothes that he might have been wearing.

The next step was to fasten a length of rope around his penis and scrotum. I made sure to include his penis because I wanted to make sure that his balls were not crushed by the next step. I used TK to convey each man to a lamp post along Main Street in Dothan and tied the other end of the rope so that he hung by his genitalia from the lamp post.

I had my concubines in place to take photographs of the hanging men as they were put into place. There were no photographs made of me, so my anonymity was preserved. The screaming from the pain was sure to draw someone eventually, so I was certain that the men would not be hanging there very long. As it happened, the Fire Department cut them down, but the last man was not removed before a large crowd had gathered. This included TV cameras, so a lot was recorded by the news, though not every one.

I took care of that by having the photos that my concubines had taken printed out and scattered throughout the Dothan area. They were also sent to the news outfits all over the South. The photos were accompanied by an explanation of why the show had been put on. Included was a threat to repeat the episode against any KGC or KKK-like group that dared show its ugly head. A couple of days later, the strange skin color problem disappeared. That produced a collective sigh of relief.