Sam's Story

In this chapter of The ShambElla Saga, Shamblin' Sam tells us his backstory.

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Sam's Story

“When the Turning went down, my girls were full grown adults, and I was newly retired," Sam began. He paused, gazing into the fire as if back into the past. "I was looking forward to winding out my years watching Cassidy and Jane pursue their careers and helping them raise my grandbabies.

Cassidy was a crime scene analyst, and a damn good one. Jane was a veterinarian. She’d always loved animals, so this didn’t surprise us one bit.”

David gave a quick mew, as if in approval, and this brought a welcome smile to Sam’s face, which helped him stave off the tears.

“The grandkids were getting on to being teenagers. I looked forward to telling Debra all about it when I saw her on the other side, and I still do. They were beautiful people, just like their moms and dads. Just like their Grandma. Tommy, Elijah, Kaitlyn, and Carrie. Tom senior and Sean, their dads, were helpful, respectful gentlemen.”

He stopped a moment to collect himself, then went on.

“You all know what ended up happening, of course, and I won’t talk about that. Not now, not ever. It hurt too much when it happened and scarred me deep inside.”

He paused again to take a deep breath, and everyone looked at him in a serious way. Colt nodded slowly, as if to say: We all understand. No need to explain.

“No, what I need to tell you is about myself. About what I did for a living. My family never knew. They thought I was a competitive shooter and consultant on gun safety.

I was a covert assassin.

It started in the military. I was in the service, late 70s, when Deb and I married. I did foul shit in the Middle East under one president and even fouler shit in Central America under the next.

I won’t talk about that either, except to say that at the time I had been so thoroughly indoctrinated to believe I was on the right side that I didn’t suspect the full depth of the corruption I was involved in until Gary Webb broke the Iran/CONTRA scandal.

It was the first time that I realized why evil so often wins. It wasn’t because we as a people are evil inside. No.” He emphasized this last word, his face pinched, his mouth turned down as if he tasted something bitter.

Sam thought this was really important, so he made sure to look each and every person, skeleton, and cat in the eye individually before going on. Measuring them. Measuring whether they were ready for what was both a tragic truth about human nature and the one brightest ray of hope that will ever remain that it all might change for the better. He said:

“Sometimes we are evil but most times you’re just watching good folks mishandle bad situations.

I ended my service over Iran/CONTRA as soon as my term was up. Deb was proud that I’d stood on those principles and never failed to remind me in all the years we were together.

Which is why I never told her about what I did when I was out on the road.

You see, there were more of us who were disgusted and shocked by what we had become. There were four other men and two women I knew who were appalled by what their superiors had done, especially when we went into the cities and saw firsthand what crack cocaine did to the community there.

We wanted justice. But we didn’t want either those we used to work for or the various terrorist organizations they funded to know what we had planned.

We also knew that the time and income it would take to pull it off wasn’t going to come from our day jobs.

So we set up the business together, the competitive shooting and gun safety business.

We popped major drug dealers. Not the small fry from the ghetto just trying to make a buck, but the dudes bringing it across the border to them.

Some of these same drug dealers also trafficked humans, including little kids. Without any prompting from my fellows, if I encountered any of those customers, I popped them too, and I will go on record here saying I don't feel an ounce of shame for that.

We popped the heads of terror cells. Extremists from every organization. The Feds used ‘em all, paid ‘em all, armed ‘em all, and played ‘em all.

We popped undercover government operatives from the acronym organizations. They were the go-betweens, the double and sometimes triples agents.

All these scum, we stole their money, and we laundered it through the business, which was, after all, partly legitimate. I did teach some folks to shoot, just like I’ve taught y’all.

You didn’t hear about it on the news because you weren’t supposed to know about it in the first place. For the Feds to make a public case out of us would have been as stupid as someone calling the cops to report their dope stolen.

They never caught us, but our efforts also didn’t stop them from pushing on with their stupid fucking agendas, as was evidenced by the debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq, which I can tell you were planned at least as early as the days when I was raising Cain in those areas in the late 70s.

By the time 9/11 happened—and I want to say, I don’t know if it was an inside job or whatever, but I know the official spin was bullshit. Even if it was a legitimate terrorist attack, which I think it may have been just blowback from an organization I know for a fact the Feds funded and armed, they were all too ready to use it as an excuse to plunge us face-first into perpetual war, and to repeal rights that were a nuisance to them when they wanted to keep tabs on certain suspicious people.

But by the time 9/11 happened we had to consider getting out and cutting our losses. When the surveillance state started full swing under the Patriot and Homeland Security Acts, we knew we had to stop to protect our families. We couldn’t keep ahead of the tech, and we didn’t want our loved ones to get hurt.

We’d pressed our luck long enough.

But I killed a lot of motherfuckers. Dirty motherfuckers, yeah. Corrupt to the bone. But what does that make me?”

Here he stopped. It was good to tell, but he felt bad all the same. He sobbed.

Siris and Ella came over to stand on either side of him with a hand on his shoulder.

David crawled into his lap, purring. Sam unconsciously scratched him gently between the ears. He could only imagine David might understand best of all.

“Well, Sam,” Siris said, in a thoughtful manner that he was becoming more and more accustomed to showing, “it sounds like it makes you a good person who mishandled a bad situation.”

“Thanks, buddy,” Sam said, “but I’ll always have to live with the fact that some of those dirty motherfuckers had kids just like I did. Kids that didn’t know. Kids that thought their papa or mama was just another hard-working, red-blooded citizen.

I'll always have to wonder if some of those folks would have had a change of heart, like I did. But we couldn't just turn away, knowing what we knew." He stared again into the fire, as if he could see it all playing out again in the lightning dance of the coals. "We couldn't turn away.”

“Sam,” Ella said, and she was crying. “Sam, you didn’t just save my life, you saved my dignity, and again and again you’ve shown me what honor is.”

This made Sam feel better. “The first point in telling you all this was to unburden myself, and I thank you for listening.

But the other reason is because I need you to help me figure out: why?

I don’t understand why the ones that are left—us, and some of the folks we left back north—are the ones who are left? Were we chosen? By whom? By what?

What caused the Turning? I mean, I can tell you the Feds were experimenting with all kinds of crazy shit, from chemicals to mind control programs to literal fucking occultism. What we saw back there in the park was something I’d never seen before, but I heard about stuff like that through the grapevine.

I wrote it all off as bullshit, but obviously it’s not.

So why us? We’re all pretty different.”

Ella thought about this a lot too, but she couldn’t figure it out.

Then the EYEGOONS buzzed to life, and Doose the Ghost gave them a clue.

***** * *****

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