Chapter 27 the story of the civil twilight vigilante nun

Civil Twilight (Civil Twilight, a period of thin light between the sun's center and the center of the sun six degrees below the horizon. The time between sunrise and sunrise is called "civil twilight", which is based on the minimum sky illumination required for normal outdoor work It is selected based on the approximate time, which varies considerably with latitude and season.) The average person stopped complaining about the price of gas that summer, and they stopped bitingly criticizing television programs that summer. On June 24, the sunset time is 8:35.Civilian twilight ends at seven past nine.A woman is walking up the steep Rue Louise.On the stretch of road between Nineteenth and Twentieth Avenues, she heard a bang, bang, bang.It was the sound of a pile driver, the heavy blow she could feel in her flats on the concrete sidewalk.Thinking every few seconds, louder and closer.The sidewalk is empty, and the woman leans back against the brick wall of a rental apartment building.Across the street, an Asian man stood in the bright glass doorway of a snack bar, drying his wet hands with a white towel.Somewhere in the dark between the streetlights, something made of glass shattered.There was another thump, and a car's immobilizer wailed.The pounding sound was getting closer, and something invisible was hidden in the night.A newspaper box was blown to one side and smashed into pieces in the street.There was another shattering sound, she said, and the glass of a public phone booth blew away just three parked cars away from where she stood.

According to a little report in the next day's paper, her name was Teresa Wheeler.Thirty years old now, an employee in a law firm. By this time, the Asian had retreated into the snack bar.He turned the sign over: "Break".Still clutching the towel, he ran to the back of the store, and the lights were turned off. The street is completely dark now.The car alarm howled, and the thud came again, heavy and close.The dark window panes of the snack bar vibrated, and Wheeler's reflection in it trembled too.A mailbox nailed to the side of the road sounded like a cannon, standing there trembling and shaking, dented and to one side.A wooden telephone pole vibrated, the wires hanging from it collided, and sparks fell like bright summer night fireworks.

Downhill about a street from Wheeler, the Plexiglas on the side of a bus shelter with a backlit photo of a movie star in only his underwear exploded. Wheeler stood there, flattened against the brick wall behind her, digging her fingers into the joint between brick and brick, her fingertips touching the plaster and clung like ivy.Her head was pushed back so tight that the rough bricks shaved her hair bald as she told the police what had happened. Then, she said, there's nothing left Nothing, nothing passes on the dark streets. As the nuns of the Security Council said this, they slowly inserted the tip of the knife under the nails and lifted the nails one by one.

Civil twilight, she said, was the period between sunset and when the sun was about six degrees below the horizon.These six degrees are equivalent to half an hour.The Sisters of Security said that civil twilight is different from maritime twilight, which lasts until the sun goes down to twelve degrees below the horizon, and astronomical twilight, which lasts until the sun is eighteen degrees below the horizon. Sister Security said that something no one had ever seen, beneath Teresa Wheeler, crushed the roof of a car waiting at a red light near Sixteenth Avenue.The invisible thing knocked down the neon sign for Tropical Lounge, shattered the neon tubes, and caused the steel frame to break through and hang in front of a third-floor window.

However, there is still no way to make it clear that it happened for no reason.An unseen commotion was rampaging down Lewis Street from Twentieth Avenue to near the docks. On June 29, the nuns of the Security Council said that the sunset time was 8:36. Civilian twilight ends at 9:08. According to a man who works in the box office of an adult movie theater in Olympia, something hurtled past the glass panes of his box office, seeing nothing but the sound of wind.An invisible bus passed by, or let out a huge breath, so close that the banknotes he had folded in front of him flew up.It was just a loud voice, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw the lights in the cafeteria across the street flicker, as if something cut off the whole world for a moment.

Immediately afterwards, the conductor described the loud bang first reported by Teresa Wheeler, and somewhere in the dark, a dog barking, which the child at the box office later told police was The sound of walking, something striding forward, a big foot he didn't see crossing, was right in front of him. On July 1st, everyone was complaining about the lack of water.They complain about the cuts to the government budget, the sacking of all the police, the increase in car theft, the increase in graffiti and armed robberies. On July 2, they made no complaints. On July 1st, the sunset time was 8:34, and the civil gaze ended at 9:03.

On July 2nd, a woman walking her dog found the body of Lorenzo Cody, half of her face dented by a beating.Dead, said the Sister of Security. "Subarachnoid hemorrhage," she said. The man must have felt something, a gust of wind maybe, or something, in the split second before he was hit hard, for he held his hands up to shield his face.when they found him.Both hands were buried in his face, the impact was so deep that his nails were digging into his battered brain. Walking on the street, once you reach the dark place between two street lamps, you will hear the loud bang, some people say it is the sound of footsteps.You could hear a second sound a little closer, right next to you, or, worse, you could be the next victim.Hearing the sound of approaching people, one sound, two sounds, getting closer and closer, they froze.Or force your own feet, go left, right, left, and take three or four steps to hide in a nearby door.They squatted down and hid next to the parked car, getting closer and closer, the next loud noise came, under the heavy impact, the car alarm wailed, all the way from the other side of the street, getting closer and closer Noisy, faster and faster.

In the darkness, said Sister Vigilante, the thing struck—bang—a black bolt of lightning. On July 13, sunset was at 8:33 and civil twilight ended at 9:03.A woman named Angela Davis had just come from get off work at a dry cleaner on Center Street when something hit her in the middle of her back, shattering her spine with such force that she flew up , Even the shoes fell off. On July 17th, the civil twilight ended at 9:01, and a man named Glenn Jacob got off the bus and walked from Porter Street to Twenty-fifth Avenue, the thing no one saw It knocked him so that his entire ribcage collapsed, his chest sunken and sunken like a squashed wicker basket.

On July 25, civil twilight ends at 8:55.Mary Leah Stanick was last seen jogging down Union Street. She paused to tie her shoes and check her watch for her pulse. Stanek took off her baseball cap and put it back on, turning the Her long brown hair was tucked under a hat. She ran west on Pacific Street, and then she died.The whole face was pulled apart by the skull and the underlying muscles. "Falling off," said Sister Vigilante. The thing that killed Stanick had no fingerprints, was covered in blood and hair, and they found the murder weapon stuck under a parked car on Second Avenue.

Police said it was a bowling ball. Those dirty, greasy bowling balls, you can buy them at any thrift store for fifty cents, and you have a ton of them to choose from.If someone buys on a long-term basis, say one every year at every thrift store in town, that person will have hundreds of them.Even in a bowling alley, walking out with an eight-pound ball under your coat is a breeze, or a twelve-pound ball in a stroller is a weapon. The police held a press conference, and they were standing in a parking lot, and someone dropped a bowling ball, slammed it hard on the concrete floor, and the ball bounced, making a sound like a pile driver.The ball bounced high, higher than whoever threw it.The ball did not leave a mark. The police said that if the sidewalk was a slope, the ball would keep bouncing, jumping higher and faster, like striding all the way downhill. They passed through the window on the third floor of the Police Headquarters. Throw the ball and it will bounce even higher.The news crew of the TV station recorded the scene, and every TV station played it that night.

The city council pushed a bill to paint all bowling balls pink, or bright yellow, or orange, or green, or whatever color you could see flying towards your face late at night on a dark side street.Give everyone a split second to dodge before - BOOM - smash their faces into pieces. Local bigwigs are pushing for bills to make it a crime to own a black bowling ball. Police are calling it a murderer with an unknown motive.Like Herbert Mullin, who killed ten people in order to prevent the Southern California earthquake, or Norman Bernard, who shot homeless people because he thought it would help control the economy, while the FBI called it a personal factor murderer. "The police consider this murderer to be their enemy," said the nun of the order of security. Everyone said that the bowling ball was a superficial excuse for the police, that the bowling ball was a distraction, a manufactured monster, and that the bowling ball was a special medicine to calm everyone down. On July 31, the time when the sun is six degrees below the horizon is 8:49.That night, Darryl Al Fitzhould was homeless and sleeping on Western Avenue.Fitzhould opened a paperback volume (Heinlein's sci-fi masterpiece, interested friends can go to Baidu) to cover his face, but his chest was smashed, both lungs collapsed, and the heart muscle ruptured. According to an eyewitness, the murderer came up from the bay and climbed over the sea wall.Another witness saw the monster, dripping with sludge, squeezed out of the flood drain.The men also said the forensic evidence coincided with a giant lizard standing on its hind legs thumping backwards with its tail, and that the collapsed chest did indeed prove that the victim had been stepped on by a dinosaur. Others said that something went by, low to the ground, and too fast to be an animal, or a madman on a rampage with a fifty-pound hammer.There was a witness who said that God in the Old Testament of the Bible was "chasing" us.Slapped by the genie's slap, that thing was black as night, silent and invisible.Everyone sees things differently. "It's important," said Sister Vigilante, "that everyone has a monster they can trust." A real and terrible enemy, a demon they could fight against.Otherwise, it's just us against ourselves. She stuck the point of the knife under another nail and said: "The important thing is that crime has gone down. At times like these, every man is a suspect.Every woman can be a victim. During the Whitechapel serial killings, during the time of Jack the Ripper, there was as much public attention as it is now.In those one hundred days, the homicide rate dropped ninety-four percent, and only five prostitutes died with their throats slit and half of one kidney eaten.Offals were hung around the room on picture hooks, sex organs and newborn babies were removed as souvenirs, burglaries were reduced by 85 percent, and injuries were reduced by 70 percent. Sister Security, she said that no one wanted to be Jack the Ripper's next victim, everyone shut their doors and windows, and more importantly, no one wanted to be accused of being a murderer, and no one walked around at night. During the Atlanta Child Murders, when thirty children were strangled, tied to trees, stabbed, clubbed, and shot, most of the city's citizens lived in a level of safety they had never experienced. Divider in Cleveland, Strangler in Boston, Ripper in Chicago, Sap in Tulsa, Knife in Los Angeles... When these waves of serial homicides started, all the crime rates in the local cities dropped, and there were only a few victims whose hands and feet were cut off and their heads were decapitated. Except for these astonishing victims, every city It's the safest time in history. During the New Orleans ax serial killings, the killer wrote a letter to the local newspaper, The Times.Promise that on the night of March 19th, he will never kill anyone who can hear the jazz in that house.Music blared throughout New Orleans that night, and no one was killed. "In cities with limited police budgets," said Sister Vigilante, "a notorious serial killer is the most effective way to regulate the behavior of ordinary people." In the shadow of such a terrible murderer, no one complained about unemployment, water shortages, and traffic problems as he prowled the city streets. When this angel of death walked from house to house, everyone stayed together, stopped swearing and behaved properly. At this point in the story of the Sisters of the Vigilante, Inspector Negative walked up, crying and calling for Cora Reynolds. The nuns of the Security Council said that it is one thing for someone to be killed, someone whose chest collapsed, wanted to take another breath before dying, propped himself up, groaned, and opened his mouth so wide that he wanted to suck in air.People with caved-in chests, she said, you can kneel beside them, in dark streets where no one sees, you can watch them lose their eyes, but to kill an animal, well, that's another matter.Animals, she said, a dog, will make us human, prove our humanity, it is someone else who dies, only makes us redundant, it is a dog or a cat, a bird or a lizard, let We are like God. All day long, she said, our worst enemy is other people, the people crowding around us in transportation.The people who get ahead of us in the supermarket line are the same cashiers in the supermarket who hate us for keeping them busy.Yes, people don't want the murderer to be another human being, but they want someone else to die. The nuns of the Security Order said that in ancient Rome, in the amphitheater, the so-called "editor" was a person who specially arranged bloody fights to maintain the peace and unity of the people, and this is also the real origin of the word "editor".Today, our "editor" (the newspaper editor) arranges a menu of murder, rape, arson, and injury on the front page of our daily newspaper. Of course, there are also heroic missions, purely by accident, on August 2nd, at sunset time of 8:34, a twenty-seven-year-old woman named Maria Avritz served as the night auditor The restaurant came home from get off work.She was standing on the sidewalk, stopping to light a cigarette, and a man pulled him back, and that's when the monster rushed by.The man saved her life, and the whole town cheered him on TV, but in their hearts they hated him to death. A hero, a savior, they don't want it, and it's not their life that stupid bastard saved.What the average person wants is a victim every few days, something to throw into the crater, a constant sacrifice to an uncertain fate. It ended when the monster killed a dog one night.A small shaggy dog ​​on a leash to a parking meter pole on Porter Street stood barking as the paparazzi slammed closer and closer.The closer the sound came, the harder the dog barked. The window of a shop shattered into spider webs, a fire hydrant fell to one side, and a curtain of water sprayed out from the cracked rusty iron cracks. The meter vibrated in place, the coins inside slammed loudly, and a steel "No Parking" sign fell down, tearing off the metal pole, which was still vibrating under the force of the invisible impact. sound. There was another loud bang, and the barking of dogs stopped abruptly. After that night, the monster seemed to disappear.A week passed, and the streets were still empty after nightfall.A month passed, and the editor-in-chief of the newspaper found a new terrorist incident on the front page of the newspaper.War somewhere, a newly discovered cancer. On September 10, the sunset time is 8:02.Curtis Hammond was leaving his weekly group therapy session at 257 West Mill Street.It happened when he loosened his tie.He had just opened the neckline, and at that moment he turned and looked down the street, and the warm air hit his face, and he smiled, closed his eyes, and sucked the air up his nose.Everyone knew him from the front pages of newspapers and TV shows a month earlier.It was he who saved the night auditor from being killed by the monster and not punished by God. He's the hero we don't want. On September 10, the civil twilight ended at 8:34, and then Curtis Hammond turned away at a sound, his tie loosened, and his eyes narrowed into the darkness , smiling, showing his shiny teeth, he said, "Is anyone there?" We found Comrade Tough lying on the rug in front of a brocade sofa in the foyer on the second floor, her blue face surrounded by her rough gray wigs piled together with hairpins, her body Nothing moved, her hands were bones, held together by tendons beneath her skin like black velvet gloves, the veins of her thin neck were like cobwebs, her cheeks and closed eyes looked sunken The ground is very empty and deep. She is dead. Her eyes, when the earl of slander opened the eyelids with two fingers, saw that the pupils were still very small.We checked her arms for post mortem stiffness, for bruises and plaques on her skin, but she was still fresh flesh. Now our royalties only need to be divided into fourteen parts. The Earl of Slander closed her eyes. Thirteen if Miss Sneezy keeps coughing.Twelve if the matchmaker worked up the courage to cut off his dick. Comrade Tough is now always a supporting character.A tragedy for the rest of us to tell.Saying how brave and merciful she was, she was dead anyway and was just a prop in our story. "If she's dead, she's food," said Miss America, standing at the top of the hall stairs, holding the gold railing with one hand and her stomach with the other. "You know she's going to eat you," said Miss America, clutching the armrest that was supported by a fat little Venus painted in gold. "She wants us to eat her, too." Says the Earl of Slander: "It will be easier to turn her over, so that her face cannot be seen." So we turned her over, killer chef on his knees on the rug, and pulled back the layers of skirts, petticoats, cotton underwear and lining, up to her waist, revealing yellow cotton panties, loosely draped Her flat pale ass. "Are you sure she's dead?" Miss America bent down, stretched out two fingers to stick to the neck of the fierce comrade, inserted into the high lace collar, and pressed against the blue-white skin.Chef Killer watched attentively, kneeling on the ground, boning knife in hand.A steel knife about the length of a finger, and with his free hand he pulled apart the pile of white and gray lace, yellow cotton, the pile of skirts and petticoats, and he looked at the knife and said, "Do you think we should put Has the knife been sterilized?" "You're not going to cut her appendix," said Miss America.Her two fingers were still pressed against the side of the blue neck. "If you're worried," she said, "you can cook the meat longer..." The Earl of Slander was busy writing in his notebook, and said: In a way, the Downer team was lucky, and the plane full of South American football players crashed in the Andes in 1972 The same goes for passengers.They are much luckier than we are, they have the cold weather in their favour, they can freeze, and they have time to debate the finer points of accepted human behavior after someone has died.Just bury the dead in snowdrifts until everyone's too hungry to care. It's not cold here, even in the basement, even in the basement with the dead bodies of Mrs. Tramp and Mr. Whittier and the Savage Duke wrapped in velvet. After starting to eat their own feast, she was wasted.The abscess is rotting, poisonous to the point that no matter how many turns it takes in the microwave, it can no longer turn her into food. Yes, unless we do it now—cut her up, right here and now, on the gold-flowered carpet next to the brocade sofa and the crystal candlesticks in the second-floor lobby.One of us will die here again tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow.Killer Chef would use his boning knife to slit our underpants from behind, revealing our flattened bluish-white buttocks and thin thighs, the hollows of our knees turning gray on either side. One of us is just going to spoil the meat. On one flat ass, the panties were pulled back to reveal a tattoo, a rose in full bloom, exactly as she had said it would be. The killer chef read about those football players trapped in the Andes in the book, and then he knew that he had to start cutting from the buttocks first. Miss America retracted the two fingers that were pressing on her cold neck, stood up straight, breathed warmly at those two fingers, rubbed her hands together quickly for a while, and then reached into the folds of her skirt . "Comrade Tough is dead," she said. Behind her the Chilblain Baroness turned down the stairs to the hall, her skirts creaking, the sound fading away as she went down, and she said, "I'll get you a plate and saucer you can use." She said. Said: "How to arrange the dishes is really important." She is gone. "Come on," said Killer Chef, "someone help me pull this shit out of the way." He pushed his elbow away from the skirt and the pile of stiff fabric so it wouldn't cover where he was going to strike. The Earl of Slander walked up to the dead body and straddled his waist, facing his feet.Those two legs disappeared into white socks that rolled up halfway to the calf full of veins, and they were wearing red high-heeled shoes.The Earl of Slander grabs those skirts with both hands, squats down, pushes them back, then he sighs and sits down with his ass on the dead shoulder blades of Comrade Fierce, his knees to the ceiling, his arms disappearing In the pile of skirts and lace, the little mesh microphone protruded from his shirt pocket, the little recording light glowing red. The killer chef stretched out one hand, spread his five fingers, and pressed the skin on one hipbone tightly. With the other hand, he pulled the knife down, like drawing a straight line on the blue and white buttocks of the fierce comrade. The longer the line is drawn, the thicker and wider it becomes.The knife cut parallel to the groin, on the bluish-white skin, the line looked very black, red-black, and finally red, dripping on the skirt below her, the red was on the edge of the bone-cutting knife On the blade, the red color is steaming.Killer Chef's hands were bright red and steaming.He said, "Can a dead man shed so much blood?" No one spoke. One, two, three, four, somewhere else, Sheng Gu Gut was softly saying, "Help!" The killer chef's elbow was bouncing up and down, sawing the small knife back and forth in the red meat, and the straight line he had drawn had disappeared into the red meat.The heat rising from the blood smelled of sanitary pads.In the cold air that smelled of women's toilets, his cutting movement stopped, and he grabbed a piece of red with one hand. A patch of red in the center.This steaming big flower is on the carpet in the front hall on the second floor, the killer chef shakes and holds up the red thing in his hand, the thing he can't look straight at, dripping, dripping dark red , he said: "Take it, who..." No one reached out. Her rose tattoo, right in the middle of that thing. Killer Chef still didn't look over there, but just shouted loudly: "Take it!" In a rustle of satin and embroidered dresses like in a fairy tale, the Baroness Chilblain came back among us, and she said: "Oh, my God..." A plate sticks out from under the bloody red piece of meat, and the killer chef lets go. On the plate is meat, a thin steak, like a thin slice of meat, or a long strip of meat, in the middle of the meat. The shop cabinet marked the kind of long steak. Killer Chef's elbow began to move up and down again, cutting.The other hand picked up strips of blood-dripping flesh from the steaming red center of the huge white flower.The paper plate piled higher and higher, and began to fold in half because of the weight, red juice dripping from one side.The Baroness Chilblain went for another plate, and Chef Killer filled that one too. The Earl of Slander, still sitting on the back of the corpse, shifted his body and turned his face away from the steaming place.It doesn't smell like cold, clean meat in the supermarket, it smells like an animal that's been half-run over by a car, dragging a crushed hind leg, fleeing a hot highway, leaving Long trails of blood and feces, and the messy stench of a newborn baby. Then the corpse, Comrade Fierce, let out a small groan. It is the soft moan of a person in his sleep. Killer Chef fell back, blood dripping from his hands.The knife was out of hand, and stuck straight into the red heart of the flower—then the falling skirt fluttered, fell even lower, and floated down to cover everything.The Chilblain Baroness dropped the first paper plate, the one full of meat.The flower closes up.The Baron Slander jumped up and left her body.As for us, we all stood back, staring wide-eyed, listening. Something had to happen. Something had to happen. Then, one, two, three, four, somewhere else, Sheng Wugut said softly, "Help!" His soft, timed sound like a foghorn. From another place, you can hear the Negative Inspector calling, "Come on, pussy, pussy, pussy..." Her voice was drawn out, then cut off with a sob, and she said, "To... .Come here, mother...my baby...." The killer chef's hands were stained with blood. He stretched out his fingers without touching anything. He just stared at the corpse and said, "Tell me..." Miss America crouched down, her boots rattling.She put two fingers into the lace collar, pressed to the side of her livid neck, and said, "Comrade Fierce is dead." She nodded to the Earl of Slander. "You must have pushed the air out of her lungs." She nodded at the now dusty meat that had spilled from the plate onto the carpet.Miss America said, "Pick that up...." The Earl of Slander rewinds the tape, and Comrade Fierce's voice repeats that same groan.our parrot.The death of Comrade Fierce overshadowed the death of the Savage Duke over the death of Whittier over the death of Mrs. Comrade Tough's cause of death was presumably a heart attack.Mrs. Clark said that it was a lack of thiamine, which is what we call vitamin B, or a lack of potassium in the blood, which weakened the muscles and caused the heart attack.That's how Karen Carpenter died in 1983 after years of anorexia, passed out like this on the floor, and Mrs. Clark said it was definitely a heart attack. Mrs. Clark said no one really starved to death.They would die from malnutrition causing pneumonia, and they would die from osteoporosis leading to fractures and thus fatal shock.They will die from cramps from lack of salt. No matter how she died, Mrs. Clarke said, most of us would die that way too.unless we eat. Finally our demon gave us orders, and we're so proud of her. "As easy as skinning a chicken breast," the Killer Chef said, dropping another piece of meat into a bleeding paper plate."My God, we love these knives," he said.