Lori Hoeck

The Judgment

———

Somewhere in the near future

“Trent Johnston, stand.”

The community judge’s voice filled the sweat box of a room, chilling Trent to the bones. He’d heard the tone before — the arrogant voice of someone trying to squeeze their viciousness and bullying into overly kind words. Appearance always mattered more than truth in the what once were called halls of justice.

The sweat-covered and all-too-eager bailiff started to wave the five community officers standing behind Trent to get him to his feet. Before they could move, Trent stood. Back straight despite the recent pummeling from the five behind him. His eyes stared like lasers, but were unable too meet the shifting eyes of the man before him.

“Trent, you stand before us today accused once again of Mongering. I can’t let this slide this time.”

After spending 10 of his last 18 years on unforgiving city streets, Trent placed a mask of contempt over his face. Scrapping and scraping as an urban wild child, the child of a convicted Monger parents, Trent knew what was about to happen.

“You would think your parents’ exile to UrbanPrison should have taught you a lesson, but no.”

The judge, a fat man in skinny community, looked at the FedState’s record of Trent’s LifeNotes and shook his head.

“Perhaps your parents’ Mongering tainted you. It says here you were an accessory in their first offense for conspiring to start unsanctioned, untaxed, and unsupervised community gardens on the rooftops.”  The man’s jowls jiggled as he shook his head and muttered a tsk, tsk noise.

“You know that Mongering — or anything related to buying and selling apart from the FedState’s benevolent care — is what caused the horrors of American arrogance and oppressiveness that left this world nearly dead from the greediness that is capitalism and the unchecked marketplace.”

The FedState propaganda rolled off the judge’s tongue like a wannabe’s badge of honor.

“Equally heinous, is that your parents sought to withhold their hybrid plants from discovery by the FedState so they could sell them for profit. These super-producing plants would have disrupted farming throughout the nation, causing farm-camps to no longer need half their workforce.”

Trent felt the revulsion for his parents roll around the room like a sickly smell. None of these community organizers, as they liked to call themselves, gave a damn for the families that relied on his parents’ work to avoid starving through the Dark Days after the Collapse. All they cared about was feeding their power through intimidation and lies.

“Young man, now we turn to your crimes. First there was the incident with the Oldsters on Jackson Street when you were 12. You willingly and knowingly deprived Community Workers — our own hard-working C-Dubyas — from helping those seniors by undercutting their services with black market goods and services…”

Trent could barely restrain himself from blurting out, “Your C-Dumbies were selling them dumpster-food from restaurants and calling it recycled foodstuffs!” He remembered the beatdown he’d received trying to argue that point so many years ago and remained silent.

“…and then at age 15, you sought to teach classes of first aid to your peers, thus undermining the credibility of our C-Dubyas on the Med-Force…”

The list of offenses, once honorable acts of citizenship, went on and on.

“At least I did my parents proud,” Trent told himself as he heard his supposed crimes against the FedState and Community. Finally the judge reached the most recent event.

“And now to yesterday’s incident. You have been accused and now stand convicted by my authority for once again undermining the credibility of our Community by using your Monger-learned first aid skills on a little girl struck by traffic. Bystanders all agree in these signed reports that you did not wait for the Community Ambulance Service and Med-Force to attend to her, but instead interfered, and by doing so, delayed proper treatment.”

Trent spoke for the first time. “She would have bled to death if I’d done nothing. But doing nothing is just what you leeches want, isn’t it? Make us afraid to act and you suck all our personal decision making out of us.”

The punch to his kidney from behind him dropped him to his knees. Most community officers preferred shooting, stabbing, or punching in the back because of a general adherence to cowardice. Trent recalled his parent’s words, “It used to be ‘To Protect and Serve.’ Now it’s ‘To Force and Convert’.”

In his agony, Trent couldn’t see, but he could feel the dog pack and mob mentality surge. He knew the five were practically salivating to be given the go ahead. He pictured the judge’s small smile of satisfaction race across his face and the bailiff’s fingers twitch with anticipation of forming a fist.

Trent knew even if he did make it through the next few minutes, he’d end up in UrbanPrison with too many injuries to survive the brutal welcome such a place was famous for. Fortunately for him, his parents had secretly taught him how to fight, both striking and grappling styles. He’d rarely used his skills, but now someone was going to pay.

Just as Trent steeled himself to launch into attack mode, the door burst open in the back of the room. All eyes turned to see who would dare interrupt a powerful community court session.

“Stop this immediately!” A familiar voice of authority brought everyone but Trent to attention. The figure crossing the floor toward them came surrounded by armed soldiers. Trent knew only two groups in the nation carried weapons — FedState Blackcoats or underground rebels in the Liberty League.

None wore black coats.

“Help him up,” the leader said, pointing to Trent. The armed men rushed to comply while the five bullies melted aside.

As strong arms gently lifted him up, Trent suddenly knew that voice. It was the voice behind the Liberty League’s Speak Free media broadcasts. The man, known only as Rafael, had an unmistakable Hispanic accent.

Walking up to the judge, Rafael growled his words. Trent could barely hear them. “You worthless wannabe bureaucrat. You would beat and imprison the man who saved my daughter’s life just to make yourself feel big and important?”

Drawing a menacing breath, Rafael added quietly, “What are you trying to compensate for little man?”

Trent noticed with satisfaction that the judge’s power was running down his pant leg. It made the judge speechless for the first time in a long time.

Now that he had the man’s full attention, Rafael made his words slice like a knife. “You will quit your job today. You will make all the reparations you can to the lives you’ve ruined. Do this and you will live.”

Turning away in disgust, Rafael made a quick hand gesture and his team quickly moved to tie and gag everyone but Trent. As they did, Trent found Rafael’s hand shaking his. “I owe you one, young man. Thanks to you my daughter is alive.”

Trent, unused to unabashed appreciation, simply nodded.

“Trent, the Liberty League needs men like you. Will you join us?”

“Yes,” came the immediate reply.

For the first time in 10 years, Trent felt like he was going home to a place where things were right instead of upside down, a place where honor, character, and merit were valued. Without a look back, he followed the Liberty League into a future he would help shape.

This is one of the fictional stories I wrote for Think Like a Black Belt, Take Charge of Your Own Safety – my e-book on self defense for everyone.

Meg vs. the Giant

Meg’s cheerleading practice had been over for an hour, but her brother still hadn’t arrived to pick her up.

“Jerk” she said to herself, “probably sucking face with that girlfriend of his…”

Meg was the only one left on the school’s darkening football field. She quickly realized she couldn’t Avoid the Vulnerability Factor, so she remained in code yellow as her parents and that book by the female black belt taught her. She wanted to call her brother, but her battery was dead from too much texting.

Moving toward the parking lot, Meg witnessed a car approaching her slowly. Observing her exits strategies, she paused a moment to see if she recognized the driver. It was one of the football players, a huge linebacker named Vince.

The huge teenager drove up close, smiled, and offered her a ride.

Meg declined.

Not put off, Vince spread an even more charming smile. “Why don’t I stick around to keep you safe from the bad guys?”

Meg was torn between knowing the guy and understanding that most rapes are acquaintance rapes. In her moment of slight indecision, he hopped out of his vehicle, sidled up closer and joked about her jumpiness. He kept eyeing the road into the parking lot as if scouting for anyone who might see.

He started to get too close, and she Set a Boundary: “Vince, I don’t feel comfortable with you here,” she said. “Leave now.”

Vince laughed mockingly.

With strong body language, she said, “Vince, back off. Get in your car and go home.”

She saw the flicker of a controlling, wicked leer cross his face. Grabbing her wrist with a cruel grip, his leer turned into a wolfish smile. “Looks like I need to teach Pretty Girl here a few niceness lessons.”

Fear started to swallow Meg with the realization that he must weigh 280 pounds.

Meg then realized the Media and Movie Myths aren’t always true and Vince must surely have some vulnerable spots.

She Chose to Fight instead of Comply and faked a knee shot to the groin, knowing he would probably block with a thigh. As soon as he did, she brought an arcing elbow down on his nose, shattering cartilage against facial bone. Vince let go in agony, holding his nose.

Meg figured the pain wouldn’t last long on such a big football player and decided to Toss Out Niceness and Rules. Knowing a few pounds of pressure can break smaller bones, she raised her knee high and stomped downward with her heel into his left foot.

As his body arched forward from the pain in his foot, Meg brought her knee up into his face. With Vince’s body suddenly brought upright again, Meg finished him off with a final kick to the now fully vulnerable groin.

As Vince collapsed into a pile of dust and defeat, Meg’s jerk brother pulled into the parking lot with disbelief etched into his face…..

—–

For information on self defense visit my site on physical, mental and emotional self defense:  Think Like a Black Belt.

Thank you for visiting,
Lori Hoeck

Photo Credit: litelover

“I’m sure you don’t want to do that,” he said. “It really wouldn’t be helpful to the company.”

The parental tone rang subtle, but commanding, from a superior to a subordinate. But this time the fatherly smile he put on his face like makeup didn’t ring as true.

Damn, she thought, this was going to be a long discussion.

Well, not discussion. He rarely let others listen or get a word in edgewise.

As her immediate boss in the company’s marketing department, he was automatically dealt the better and upper hand, and damn if he didn’t know how to use it to his best advantage.

She knew it would fall on deaf ears, but she had to say it anyway. “Actually I was trying to help the company with this new online idea.”

“Sarah,” he always used her name when he felt threatened and insecure, “you know what I’ve said about this. I love that you have enthusiasm and want to help, but I’ve been down this road before, and it never works.”

With hardly a pause he continued, “When I first joined this company, I took pride in how it stood on solid standards and ideas. We’ve never wavered from those. To do something new just to do something new is not good business.”

“But I’ve seen this work elsewhere with great success. I read an article in the main trade magazine that backs up how well it can help us.”

“Have I ever steered you wrong, Sarah?”

There it was — his switch-up in the conversation to avoid having to listen to her defend her ideas.

And what other reply did she have for the person who approved her paycheck? With the smallest of sighs, she bit off the word, “No.”

“Well then, you know I mean what I say when I’ve tried things like this before. When I first headed up sales, a man by the name of Jack Johnson came up with something similar …”

At that point her nods came diligently, but her mind ran long and hard from this twice-heard story he used to prove to the world why “things are they way they are and are going to stay that way.”

Each of his hand gestures and well-rehearsed emotional stage play weighted down her heart and shoulders. Why did I stick around for more of this? I left home years ago. I don’t need a Daddy-figure or school principal to keep make me feel like I don’t measure up so I keep trying harder to please.

Her self-loathing jumped a notch, but never bubbled up to her face. She’d learned a long time ago to peer through well-made masks. Otherwise, the conversations grew longer.

Somewhere inside her, as the drone of words played on, a sharp blade cut into her, slicing something old and moldy from her mind. The once quiet and dead-still inner sea moved as if whipped by a strong wind. Waves slowly rolled higher and higher as long-held indignation roared across the seascape.

With a new clarity crashing against the shore of her selfhood, she naturally sat up taller in her chair. The new body language commanded notice.

Sarah heard his words trail off as he noticed the change. His kind spent a lifetime controlling the small and large things of power.

She now she noticed them, too.

Leaping into the gap between the torrents of words, she said, “I understand your vast experience with this company carries a lot of weight for you, but I see stories like these as unhelpful. I value quality, standards, and making this company great, too, and those things don’t disappear when innovation and new ideas are tried.”

Before he could summon another gush of words, she plodded on.

“There is no harm in my suggestion. I’m the one taking the responsibility here. I’m willing to try it and if it fails, then I’m the one who fails. I’m not cowed by other people’s past attempts. Sure maybe they did fail, but maybe they just didn’t have the abilities I do. I own my successes and my failures, and I won’t let Jack’s story be a gravestone to innovation or to my creativity.”

Standing up, she added, “If you want to back me on my idea, fine. If not, there’s nothing more to say.”

Turning to leave, a power and a freedom raced through her body, a feeling that had eluded her a long time. Smiling broadly, she realized no one would take a parental role over her again.

—-

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For information on emotional self defense and how to deal with such controlling parental figures, visit my other website, Think Like a Black Belt — especially this short article: “Defense Against the Dark Hearts.”

Thank you for visiting,
Lori Hoeck

Dust floated, blew, or blasted into the house, depending on the wind strength. It filled the air with a choking dryness, a desert in every breath.

After fifteen years of high plains living, Margie longed every spring for the little green that would fill the sparse trees and wild grasses. Her friends in the city sighed at her lack of lawn or flowers, but her small well could never be allowed to run dry.

No, the water could never be wasted on a lawn or a rose garden. The few farm animals and chickens needed it, as did her vegetable garden.

She’d learned the ways of scarcity from her grandparents, who’d owned the farm for years. Grandma and Grandpa took her in after her own parents had died in a car wreck when she was ten. Now they’d both passed on within a year of each other, leaving Margie the farm.

Life on the harsh, wind-swept plains meant “doin’ without” and Margie had learned her lessons well.

“Waste not; want not,” Grandma always said.

“Fancy things are for fancy-pants people who don’t know nuthin’ but how to spend money,” Grandpa said whenever she wanted something new.

Taking these words to heart instead of as advice, Margie shied away from fancy things all her life: going to college, accepting a marriage proposal from a wealthy land owner, and her dream of becoming a writer in the big city.

One early summer day, as Margie dutifully dusted the house, she noticed a difference in the wind, the kind of thing a farmer notices, because so much rides on the weather. Walking outside to the porch, she looked to the west and saw a huge thunderhead building in the sky.

From years of watching storms come and go, she knew this one was a freight train headed straight at the farm. Keeping a wary eye on the storm, she shooed the chickens back into their pen, covered her still small tomato plants with buckets to prevent hail damage, and put the car in the old shed for the same reason.

In the house, she visited the storage closet to pull out emergency candles and the extra flashlights and batteries too see if they were all set to go, just in case the electricity went out.

Back outside, she looked up and gasped. Never before had she seen a storm’s cloud wall so menacing and swift or the color so green, the latter a sure sign of hail.

As she watched mesmerized, a small white cloud spun itself into a downward pointing arrow that stretched quickly toward the ground. Rising from the ground to meet it came the dust. They met fifty feet in the air and formed a now dark, twisting, writhing funnel of death headed straight for her.

Her feet would not move. Planted in the dust, she remained awed at the raw power in front of her. The tornado’s thousand-demon roar filled her ears and heart with a surge her scarcity-driven life had never known.

Before the swirling debris field hit, she dropped to her knees.  Without thinking, she raised her hands at the same time. Not in prayer, not in surrender, but in an embrace.

In that moment, the funnel danced up and over her, carrying its ripping and tearing winds a few yards away, where the tornado once again tore open the earth with its fury.

Margie jumped up and turned to follow the destroyer with her eyes. She lost view of it as the storm let loose with ice-cold rain. Fortunately for her and the farm, the hail would wait and drop a mile east.

Drenched, Margie walked to the farmhouse. Just inside the door, she paused. Something odd tickled at her mind. It took her a full minute to realize the house was somehow smaller and less of a home than a house. In the next few hours, as the storm raged with lightning and rain, the house began to feel like a sweater two sizes too small, the collar gripping the neck uncomfortably.

Finally the clouds broke and the setting sun lit up the back of the departing storm. Margie decided to put away her extra flashlights and candles, glad the electricity still worked. As she opened the storage closet and placed them on a shelf, her elbow knocked a box to the floor. Picking the box up, she noticed they contained her notebooks from high school, including her once much-treasured writing journal. As she put the box back in place, she grabbed the journal, blew off the dust, and took it back to the kitchen table.

With the smell of fresh rain still filling the air, she found a pen, pulled up a seat, and let the words flow.

—-

—-

I grew up in the Tornado Alley area of the country in Oklahoma. Storms still fascinate me, and I would be a storm chaser running down tornadoes with a camera if I could.

Thank you for visiting,
Lori Hoeck

Coffee in hand, she watched the morning clouds first glow pink, then slowly fill the sky with a canopy of fire.

“Red sky at night, sailors’ delight; Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.” The old timers’ saying made her wonder, did the sky know her heart?

Even with the warmth of strong coffee, she shivered, but not from the cold. The handgun on the kitchen table lay ready. She hoped she was as well.

Her friends all said she had choices, but from her viewpoint there was only one. He’d already made it clear he would never let go, never stop looking, never give her up. She’d lived through enough blood, bruises, and broken bones to know what he could do.

It was time to put a stop to it all.

Down the hallway, she heard their son stir in his bed. His birthday was next month, “The Big Fife,” as the boy called it.

At least this birthday wouldn’t include a trip to the hospital with the smell of cake and blood mixed together.

Visions of that day burned resolve into her soul. She carefully set down her coffee and picked up the weapon. It felt right in her hand, heavy and durable.

Then she heard it. The motor of his pick-up truck coming down the road, gears down shifting to make the turn into the driveway.

I will enjoy selling that truck, she thought, if only to never feel the fearful anticipation again.

She heard the door open on his truck but not shut.

He must be drunk. Again.

Then she heard the front door burst open with a kick, followed by the sound of a shotgun being cocked.

As he made his way through the house and toward the kitchen, he crowed triumphantly,  mockingly, “Honey, I’m home!”

Her jaw clenched. Not for long.
——–

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As an EMT who has responded to more than one domestic violence scene,  I don’t advocate this response, but I can understand it.

Thank you for visiting,
Lori Hoeck