90
Washington was its usual obnoxious self. All of the accoutrements of its fanatic fascism were in full display all around him. Elements of its nationalist worship abounded including icons selected and built to hypnotize and ingratiate the fascist principle. These included the Washington monument, Jefferson memorial, Martin Luther King memorial, the massively huge capitol building, the white house, library of congress, national archive, the pentagon, numerous reflecting pools, park-like streets lined with flowers, thousands of little American flags, and a hundred additional monuments and museums of art selected precisely for instilling unbridled patriotism in the mentally unwary. Then, on top of the little flags at ground level, there were lots of huge American flags. Thousands of flags flew high above the buildings. They were everywhere. All of these icons of patriotism disgusted him.
Because of what they had done to abandon his son, Brandon, to an early death he was sickened by the faulty and corrupt displays of respect for a nation that deserved none of it. In Stone’s mind America was and would always be the killer of his only son. Therefore, the nation was nothing but a senseless, heartless, and quite rabid dog biting the ankles of each citizen that passed innocently close to it.
Stone stayed away from the buildings he hoped to gut from corner to corner, because as of yet he was not ready to take them down. He didn’t want to play his hand. His face was well known all over Washington, D.C., from his military days. He would need camouflage to keep them from identifying him in video clips they were constantly taking and archiving of visitors to the national shrines. He needed a front, several of them, and in Washington there were plenty of available victims.
He was camping at night outside of Washington in total stealth, deep inside the Shenandoah National Forest down in Virginia. He survived there as a hidden, unregistered camper, living as a hermit in the woods unobserved by the park rangers.
His human imprint was tiny. It was just him and his sleeping bag with a one and a half foot high tent overhead which was covered by branches and leaves far away from the customary paths. To Stone, it was a comfortable setup. His food was kept in packets of compressed nutrients high in flavor and nourishment. For the most part he ate nothing in the woods. Instead, he ate in his car. The bagged foods were ready to eat.
He was wary. He did not want to present his automotive and facial signatures in food stores where cameras were running inside and out twenty-four-seven and were always available for the various gestapos to study later. So he stayed away from those places. It was the same with filling stations. Instead, he purchased food and gas from small family run rural stores where there were no cameras to trace him. If there were cameras around, he stayed away.
Today, he dressed casually and covered his face with a latex mask he had manufactured months before from a cadaver in one of the morgues. He had several faces of his victims that he had made impressions of. Because he prided himself, he only took impressions he found facially presentable. Perhaps in doing this, James was demonstrating a wee bit of his own personal vanity. On the other hand, he didn’t want to select facial masks of persons who would attract attention on account of their ugliness. Ugliness tended to be associated with sinister personalities, and the various authorities regularly zeroed in on such persons. The police tended to think that criminals could be profiled by their looks. For this reason, he chose nice looking faces which tended to “deprofile” him in the minds of the observers who he understood would always be out there. It was obvious to James Stone, if his new face seemed innocently pleasant, his enemies would be more likely to overlook him.
His face and hairdo neatly glued to his facial skin, he drove to the train station and boarded a tram for the city. The interior of the railroad passenger car was brightly lit. The hand grabs were clean as were the displays of greedy corporatist ads that ringed everyone with their propaganda concerning expensive new cars, bank services, cell phones, candy, unfunded charities, civil rights groups, and other extraneous products and services that could easily exploit the riders by luring them into various money traps already set for them by the rich.
The train car was a perfected symbol of predatory corporatism and the search for exploitation of innocent people whom their ads constantly violated and hooked as weak willed customers unable to control themselves. If the people understood the markups on these products and how the banks would use every ploy to charge them for this or that tiniest speck of services in order to pick their pockets, they would be appalled, but these bits of knowledge were carefully hidden from the placards that glared down upon them from their predatory perches. Besides, the news programs were on the take from these same corporatist advertisers, so they did nothing to spill the beans and warn the people lest they lose these same lucrative accounts.
So that Stone would not leave his own fingerprints, James wore latex impressions of his victims that tightly covered his own hands. So, he left their fingerprints instead of his own. He wondered if this might be an exploitation of his victims, but the thought barely crossed his mind, because he was only doing it to keep the authorities from finding and arresting him. Besides, everything was fair in a war against injustice. He was simply revenging the murder of his only son, Brandon, and, in any event, corpses had no rights in the first place, because they were dead. In America, the deceased possessed no rights under law, because they were dead. Stone was not an ignorant man. Stone had theorized that their deaths had even more meaning by allowing him to use impressions of their faces and hands to fool the authorities, because his cause was so just. In any and every war that mankind had ever fought, the principle of persevering to victory at all costs was nearly always the prime objective on both sides. Stone was a trained military man. He understood goals and policies. He knew how nations worked. He believed that people had the same rights as their so-called “rulers.” In fact, the entire idea of rulers was anathema to a person like Stone who was raised up with an open mind. To Stone, a ruler was a medieval concept in a long gone ancient world in which free men were not even allowed to exist, because they were viewed as threats to the corrupt and evil monarchies that ruled by force and possessed the intention to harm others.
He sniffed his hands. He smelled a slight latex scent. This was probably because his face had been freshly covered by a new latex mask of a dead man’s face. This latex was the smell of security and safety.
He began to focus as a Washington listening post. He drank endless cups of coffee in the restaurants and bars where the government workers would stop for a rest. At all times of the day and night, these places were abuzz with talkative rumor queens who had access to government offices, buildings, warehouses, and parking lots and couldn’t keep their mouths shut. He listened for several things including the reassignment of personnel, especially intelligence on who was leaving town for a long vacation, who had been transferred to foreign offices, and other personnel matters where someone who went suddenly missing might not be noticed for weeks or months if ever. After several days, he heard a man from NSA say that he was going on vacation, and, since he was a bachelor, he was simply flying to Vegas for what he had said was the cure. His name was Collins Hawk. He was from an Army family which he said he was totally out of touch with. They hadn’t seen eye-to-eye for several years. James heard him tell his friends that his estrangement from his family had become permanent. Here was a man that no one would know was missing for weeks and maybe months if not forever. People on vacation would get lost from the shuffle in a place like the District of Columbia very easily. They were always being transferred from one office to another, especially when they worked for the National Security Agency or NSA which had more than fifteen thousand employees and had grown exponentially over the war on terror which the government was using to specifically destroy America’s constitutional rights.
James followed him out of the restaurant. Collins Hawk was tired and slow. Although he was in his thirties and fit, he’d evidently had quite a workout that day and was unobservant of Ranger
Stone stalking him. James kept close, as he would need to act rapidly and surely when Collins reached his car and opened its door. A few blocks away, they entered a narrow street where brownstones lined the sidewalks. Collins reached his car which was a black Lexis in immaculate condition. He searched for his keys, found them, then aimed the car key and opened the door. When he bent down to enter the Lexis, Stone reached down and pulled up on the back of Hawk’s suit, slamming his head powerfully upward against the top of the door jam. He then pushed Hawk’s stunned body into the car all the way across the seat and over the hump, then jumped in. Collins was still conscious, but Stone bent down, grabbed his head with both hands and administered his standard broken neck maneuver which resulted in the usual snapping noise. In seconds, Collins Hawk disappeared from the government’s gaze.
Stone took Hawk’s keys and started the engine. He pulled out slowly, and made his way to the place outside of town where he left his car. There, he stopped and opened the trunk. Next, he transferred Collins’ still tidy remains to his other car’s trunk, started it, and drove off.
After he reached the isolated part of the Shenandoah National Park, he pulled off the road and down a hill that was hidden from the highway. There, deep in the woods, where he had pitched his camp, he carried Collins to a glen where he had already dug a grave. He carefully removed Collins’ clothes, wallet, and ID badge, placing them neatly in his bag for reuse in DC. Then, using several tools, he removed Collins’ hands and head and placed them in three mold boxes in which he poured a pink latex compound which would surrounded Collin’s hands and head and waited for it to harden. It did not take long. Next he opened the box, cut into the material and peeled the forms away from the face and hands. Then, he painted liquid latex into the mold piece and placed images of his own hands and head against them which he kept in another box. When he closed the mold, the latex bonded itself in a thin layer between James’s body image and the reverse image of Collins Hawks’ corresponding parts. Any excess latex poured out of several tiny side holes. In a while the molds dried, and he opened them. They were perfect duplicates of Collins Hawk, and the insides fit his own face and hands. He carefully cut perfect holes to accomodate his own eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. Once the latex was trimmed and ready, James sprayed special glue inside the masks, then peeled the finished molds down over his hands and head. Each one was a perfect fit. He patted them one by one so the glue adhered to all three latex forms and then onto his own corresponding body parts. He placed a wig with the right look on top of his head. Now, he looked and finger printed as though he were an exact copy of Collins Hawk. He returned to Collins body and used a blow torch to burn off several tattoos and moles which were identifiable aspects of his person. Then, looking to all the world like Collins Hawk, he filled the man’s grave and scattered leaves atop it. Next, he carefully rolled a large, heavy tree trunk over the grave which had been resting a few feet away. He placed large stones along the trunk so it would never roll away again, then left with his various goodies.
He first went to a rest stop meant for a single car and started a fire in the fire pit that the park officials had placed there for families to use for cooking and bonfires. It was evening now, so no one cared about the bonfire which he built with precut wood placed there for tourists to use. He built a fairly large fire on which he placed Collins’ head and hands. The fire flickered in orange waves around Hawk’s body parts and upon James Stone who stood far enough out to keep his latex face mask from melting in the bonfire’s awesome heat. Now and then, the ranger stepped forward to place more logs upon the fire as Collins Hawk’s remains turned to bone and then to ash. Collins’ head and hands crumbled minute by minute and hour by hour. Nonetheless, it took nearly five hours to complete the total destruction of evidence. After the fire cooled, James stirred it with a long stick. Only a few slivers of bone and teeth remained. He transferred all of those parts to a bag. When he was sure the fire was totally out and could not start a forest fire, he walked to his car and slowly made his way to the train station where he transferred to his original stolen car. He left Collins car there for the time being and drove the other one to the hidden area in the woods. He crawled into his bed and fell fast asleep.
The next morning, he cleaned up at a camp shower. He then changed into Collins Hawk’s clothing. The fit was perfect. He drove back to the train station and transferred the huge cache of plastic explosives, wires, disposable phones, and tools from his stolen car to Collins Hawk’s Lexis. He placed enough material and tools into the briefcase that Hawk had carried with him. All of these went with James who got into Hawk’s car and took off for DC.