The Peacekeeper Memoirs
by Michael E. Bull
Chapter One
"Peace," I said, "be still." I hoped by these words to calm the inner storms that troubled the young men's hearts. They were the words of Christ, Himself, and I hoped they would recognize them and take solace from them. But their hearts were too hard to savor such comforts.
"Whaddaya want, man?" said the toughest-looking kid among them, the lanky Hispanic youth with the long scar on his face. The accent was south-central L.A. I'd heard it often, even here in the north quarter.
"I come in peace. I'm here to see your leader."
The toughs laughed.
"What are you, some kind of alien? Hah! That's good. Take me to your leader," he mocked. Scar nudged the tough next to him. "Get this guy. Can you believe him? Guess he doesn't want to live long."
The other kid, an oriental, laughed.
"I encourage you to seek life, not death," I said. "Please, choose life. The road you are traveling may soon lead to your demise."
"Man, get the ---- out of here, before I cut you!" Here, he used a word I can't repeat. It would be ungentlemanly.
"I cannot leave until I have accomplished my mission. I am here to consult with your leader, to see if we can find some peaceful solution and return peace to these streets. Your gang has caused trouble here, and I came to end it—I hope, peacefully, but end it I must."
The youth drew his knife, a long-bladed weapon, and came at me. He was quick and caught me off guard. He stuck the knife into my chest. I felt it pierce my heart. It hurt. His mistake was releasing the knife and leaving it in me. If he had pulled it out, it might have saved him from what happened next. But that insult, the sight of his dagger protruding from my chest, caused the power in me to awaken and stir.
Somehow, I had managed to hang onto my staff. I must admit, weakened as I was by the blow, I leaned on it now, as I pulled the knife from my chest and looked down at the wound, which gushed blood onto my hand. Through the sliced fabric of my robe and vestment, I saw the flow staunch, and the wound begin to heal and close up. Soon, there was no trace of my injury, just the blood on my hand and chest, and that which had soaked into my garments, a simple medieval monk's robe, black, with a blue emblem across the vestment that I wear over it, both now damaged by Scar's dagger. I would have to get them mended now, I thought, annoyed. I take pride in my habit and always try to keep it neat and in order. Feeling my strength return, I straightened, and held the knife up for them all to see.
Scar, as well as the lanky white youth I thought of as Slim, the ebony-black kid I thought of as Shade, and the short but muscular oriental that I thought of as Stout all stared at the weapon in my hand, and watched the blood dripping from it and down over my fingers, onto the ground.
I couldn't help what happened next. I felt the power swell in me, felt it surge, sensed it pulling force from the ground, the air, and the power lines overhead. Streamers of plasma flowed from my fingertips, encircling the blade, as hairlike tendrils of lightning played, first over the blade, and then spread over my hand and up my arm to cover my entire body. I was alight then with the force that was flowing through me. I glowed, brightening the alley where we all stood, beneath the blood moon, at the appointed time, for I was there under orders, whispered to me in my prayer time, and I knew that what was happening was meant to be, at this very moment.
A bolt of lightning shot out from me, from the tip of the blade in my hand, and leapt across the short distance between me and Scar. At first it was a slender tendril, like those that enwrapped my hand, but it grew in brightness and thickness, until the air crackled with the sound of its power.
Scar danced in place, a random series of involuntary movements, jerky, clumsy, triggered by the electricity flowing through his body, punching through the insulating rubber soles of his tennis shoes and into the pavement at his feet. As the bolt thickened further he became a blur of frenzied motion, but then abruptly froze in place, his muscles locked by the powerful current surging through every corpuscle of his being.
An odd smell touched my nostrils, that of human flesh cooking. Smoke was beginning to drift up and away from Scar, as his skin darkened. Then, as the lightning bolt flared its brightest, he burst into flames. No longer recognizable for the miscreant youth he had been, he was now a charred statue, standing as a monument to hatred and insolence.
The bolt vanished. All was quiet and dark.
The other youths, who had watched Scars transformation with a mix of morbid fascination and horror, broke and ran. I let them go. Then I was alone in the alley with the fried corpse of a foolish young man.
"I wish you had listened, while you had the chance," I said to the dead kid. I wondered if his spirit was still there to hear me, but I don't have the ability to see the dead, as I understand some Saints do.
I followed in the direction the living youths had run, in the direction of the concrete basement in which their punk of a leader—who called himself Nightfang, presumably to intimidate his foes—had made his new lair, after almost being caught in a police raid. I had been there that night, accompanying some friends on the police force, and I had relished their laughter at the name, scrawled in blood on the rundown tenement wall.
We had come so close to catching Nightfang and his gang that night, but they had gotten away, alerted by their version of a neighborhood watch that the police were coming. They were good at hiding, that much was certain, but their days of hiding were over. After some serious prayer and fasting, I had at last had a vision of their new base of operations, and I had come to shut them down. Their days of sequestering were over.
I hoped they wouldn't resist. I didn't want any more of them to die. But somehow I knew that my pleas to surrender peacefully and live would fall on deaf ears.
"Thy will be done, Lord," I breathed. "But either way, may I earn my name tonight, and bring some peace to these streets. Even if it doesn't last, even if another serpent's head grows to take the place of the one I must cut off tonight."
My name is Mark Thompson. I am the abbot at the New Saint Andrew's Abbey, north of Los Angeles, currently on loan to the Los Angeles police department. But that's a secret, a secret identity if you will, so that those I love will not suffer reprisals because of the work that I do in my efforts to bring peace to the streets of L.A. Those who have met me in my capacity as an undercover officer, working off the books and not according to the rules that bind our local constabularies, call me Peacekeeper. It is my paladin name, the name I have been trying, these last few years, to live up to, since the onset of Christ's Kingdom and society's adoption of a zero tolerance policy toward crime—all crime, both great and small.
Most miscreants don't laugh when they say my paladin name. Those who do are my targets, those who believe that they can thwart the law and avoid it's consequences. These will never know my true identity, and they will never see my face when they meet me, only the mask that I wear beneath my hood, and the insignia of a dove, emblazoned on my vestment.
Call me Peacekeeper. It is the name to which I aspire. And maybe someday, when I have brought peace to these streets, I will let my story be told, and release these Peacekeeper's memoirs.
Until then, I have work to do. May all the Saints pray for those of us who wear the badge—or in my case, a mask and insignia—as we fight against evil, so that our kingdom, the Kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ, may grow and prosper. And of His peace and of His reign may there be no end.
Amen.
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