Bowie Brown: Bleeding Kansas, Chapter 1

Created and Written By Brandon K Montoya

January, 1955. A foggy morning on the rural outskirts of Manhattan, Kansas. The house was almost still. The light of the television lit up the room as “Lucy Learns to Drive” played for the first time ever across the screen. The laugh track clashed horribly with the eeriness of the house. The sink in the kitchen dripped incessantly, the sound echoing off the walls of the Kansas home. But it wasn’t the only liquid sound. There was another drip. It was slower, far less viscous.

A man was crying. It wasn’t the sound of a man who had stubbed his toe or a man who lost a bet on a sports team. It was the despondent, hopeless lament of a man who has absolutely bottomed out.

Plantation owner Caldwell Beauregard Hargrove was hog-tied and found himself in a kneeling position. His youngest son of nine was downstairs with his mother, bound, hooded, gagged, and spared from what Caldwell was forced to witness with his older children.

“Why…” he sobbed. “They were just kids!”

“If they had been slaves, were they old enough for you to whip?”

“Screw you, you #$%ing mangy savage!” Caldwell bellowed his rage at the shadow at the other end of the room. There sat the figure of a man, or some similar rendition thereof, sitting in a chair made of books. “I hate you! I hate you! I hope you go to hell and burn forever! God damn it!”

The shadow leaned forward; its features were hominid but not human. The shadow belonged to a slave. He was a mutant human engineered from bits of human and fox DNA. “Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them.” The slave smiled, a glint of light catching the scar over his eyes from brow to cheek. “Comfortable?”

“Fuck you!”

“We have afforded you the treatment you have afforded others. This is justice.”

There was a low laugh from the man standing near Caldwell to his right, the only human in the room besides himself. The smoke from his cigarette was slowly wafting up in the room. Caldwell growled, further annoyed by cigarettes in his house. To Caldwell’s left was total silence; another slave stood there, but he said nothing. He was a lot like the one in the shadows, but he looked different than the aged one in front of him. Both the man and slave held two large blades still dripping with the blood of their lineage. Two cinder blocks, wet for the same reasons, had been placed nearby. Their purpose is as stark as the outline of the man in the shadow.

“Dad,” the slave on the left spoke to the mutant in the shadows. “We’ve been at this for a while.”

“This is the last one.” The man took an extra-long drag from his cigarette. “There were only four families in the area.”

Caldwell choked and glanced around wildly at the men who had his family captive. He was waiting for mockery or laughter, but no one said a thing.

“In good time, son. We are doing the Lord’s work.”

“The Lord, my ass!”

“Don’t you take the Lord’s name in vain, sinner! You are about to face his judgment; be humble! I am but his sword! It is he who shall judge your soul!” The mutant stood and came closer to the light. He was older, around 50, and had clearly lived a hard life. “What say you? Do you wish to confess your sins before you face the almighty?”

Caldwell took deep, raspy breaths, spitting out blood from when he was punched repeatedly earlier. “Screw you, filth!”

The old mutant sighed and changed his posture, placing his hands behind his back and closing his eyes.

“Bowie, sir?” the human asked.

The old man Bowie took a slow, deep breath and seemed to say a prayer quietly to himself. “Amen.” He slowly opened his eyes to both of his companions.

“Owen, Kaji. Send him to God.”

The slave owner’s jaw dropped, but no scream came out. He panted in fear as Kaji eagerly cut his bonds and retied his hands to the cinder blocks. The screams didn’t start until the blades wielded by both men cleaved into his shoulders and began to hew their way through Caldwell’s muscle and bone.

Old man Bowie Brown stood there motionless, his eyes cutting into Caldwell’s soul as their gazes met, his eyes sharper than the blades removing his arms. A final moan escaped his lips as he was jerked free from his own limbs and Kaji slid behind him and gripped his hair with lethal intent, the short sword in his other hand. “I won’t wish you well. Just go.”

Bowie watched the last man be dispatched to God’s judgment and waited for both men to stand up, stretch, and wipe their hands clean of the slaughter. “Kaji, is the road mined?”

“Of course. I saved the best bits for the foot trail leading up the west trail by the Big Blue River. I’m going to send some one-legged men home.”
Owen grimaced as if personally in pain. “You enjoy this too much.”

“I am but a professional!” Kaji raised a finger in the air confidently. “We have to strike fear in these dough boys.”

“That is all good and well,” the old man, Brown, said. “We are God’s sword. A sword must cut.”

Owen’s jaw tightened. “Yes, Dad.”

The sound of hurried footsteps cut the low talk as a very tall White man entered the room with concern on his face. He was a Scandinavian-looking man with strawberry blond hair with a slight curl to it. “Hey,” the man spoke as he popped a shoulder. “We’re hearing Northern Bobwhite calls a few. I’m pretty sure it was Oz who signaled. The guard is heading this way.”

Bowie looked approvingly. “From the West then?”

Kaji smiled at Owen.

“Yes sir,” the Nordic man responded calmly.

“Thank you, Plummer. We should go. Get the others. We disperse as planned.”

“Roger,” all three men said; they saluted their insurgent leader and ran outside to organize their gear and get the others.

The old man walked over to the basement door, unlocked the handle, and opened the door slowly. As he did so, he could hear the muffled screams of the women below, who expected that the violence from the upper floor would flood downstairs.

“Do not be alarmed. We are not savages in spite of what your men say.” Brown called down the staircase into the darkness, his voice loud but somehow tainted with an odd kindness. “Love God and follow his commandments. You have one boy left. Raise him to be better than the others were.” He slowly shut the door and locked it in consideration of intruders besides the law enforcement of the slave state. Without a further glance, he walked out of the home; his shoe prints left faint trails of red where he had stepped through the remains of his enemy.

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