Everyone Dies in the End #82

Cindy

Yeah, it was Darth Vader all right. Right there on the apse, where some middle-aged gay guy with a robe fetish would normally be saying mass. There was a woman, an almost naked woman, in front of him. Cindy and Ramzke stood behind a raised dais. She could see the altar, Vader, a strange-looking black woman behind him, a door across the altar and a pair of guards. The congregation was mostly hidden, but loud and raucous.

“But my children were starving,” the naked woman screamed, and Vader replied with a crack of a riding crop on her back. Cindy’s muscles drew taut, part of her sickened by the woman’s humiliation, part of her excited. The excited part shamed her.

“Don’t,” Vader whispered, misreading her tensing as a preparation for action. “It won’t help.”

She forced herself to relax, but Ramzke wasn’t finished.

“Not yet.”

Vader gestured to the pair of guards, and after a brief discussion the pair escorted the woman through the door on the far side of the altar. Vader continued talking while the guards were walking. Cindy quickly tuned him out. It was nothing but a rant that boiled down to, “I’m great. You guys should love me.”

It was obvious that he was king, meting out a strange form of survival justice, but of course it wasn’t all about the justice. The sweaty, mostly drunk, crowd wasn’t here to support fair play. They were here for the scene, for the nudity, the brutality. But what could he want with her? The thought sent a shiver down her spine, and it was not an unpleasant feeling.

Another woman, clad in a loose peasant dress that did little to protect her from Vader’s riding crop, was sentenced. “Where are the guards taking them?” She whispered to Vader.

“The pens,” he hissed back.

“For your people?”

“Yes, but it is not what my people want.”

You would kill them anyway, no?”

“Yes, but you do not understand. It’s complicated.”

He was wrong. Cindy did understand complicated. As she looked at the bloody streaks painting the back of the woman’s dress as the guards led away, she understood complicated only too well. The peasant dress woman was the last.

After a final invocation, which was no doubt meant to inspire the rabble filling the church, he walked from the altar. The black helmet and cape hesitated for a second when he approached. The plastic visage staring at her, and then he spoke to Ramzke. “Bring her.” There was something odd about the voice, something almost familiar. She opened her mouth to speak, but he was past, and then the black woman, swirled by, her eyes aflame, a menacing smile on her full lips.

Ramzke turned Cindy by the elbow, but before they followed he leaned close. “When the time comes,” he hesitated as if struggling for the right words, “will you help?”

           Cindy merely gestured toward the hall. “After you.”