Judged: A Novella in Five Acts
By Publicola

First Published: 10-15 June 2011

Disclaimer: Much to my surprise, I actually own this one. The Bible is public domain, but the characters are mine, as is the altered story-line. So... deal with it. Oh, also, I did publish this story on my blog three years ago, back in 2011. So don't report me for plagiarizing myself, or anything. That'd be silly.

Author's Note: The following short story was written as a proof-of-concept for a much bigger idea. I had been writing a series of reviews of Orson Scott Card's Homecoming series, which successfully integrated plot elements and characters from the Book of Mormon in a distinctly sci-fi/fantasy setting. I realized that it would take a similar creative leap to adapt content from the Bible into existing literary genres. Though there may have been a few attempts (Bill Myer's Eli is one that comes to mind), they are few and far between, and rarely if ever adapt material from the Old Testament, even though that is a unparalleled treasure trove for story-tellers. Am I alone in imagining the last chapters of Genesis as a road movie, or the first half of Exodus as a political drama, or 1 Samuel as a Lord of the Rings-style fantasy epic, or 1 Maccabees as a post-apocalyptic war movie? Surely Joshua, Ruth, Elijah, and Daniel deserve to have their stories told as well. There are more gems than these in the Scriptures, and with that in mind I present the following hors d'œuvre:

Judged

Dom exhaled deeply through pursed lips. It sounded more like a gasp than a whistle.

Dom Basilio stood on a plot of unremarkable but undisturbed plain, far removed from the bustle of the road and chaos of nearby Illini. But placid beauty had been savagely marred. Only an hour had passed since he had learned the house was in ruins. Smoke crested the trees. Eden was at war.

With his two guards – he had half-jokingly called them his 'goons' once – he walked from his parked car to get a better view of the house. But just as they cleared the patch of trees that blocked the house from passers-by, the three men came to an abrupt halt.

A single profanity pierced the silence. None of the men knew which of them had voiced it.

Basilio gaped. It was worse than he could have imagined. The house was like the wreckage of a downed monoplane, like a carcass on which vultures would feed. Debris littered the ground. The roof had caved, the walls buckled outward. Was it some sort of explosion?

He squinted in disbelief. Between the house and the field, just beyond the collapsed porch, he saw a dull streak of gray. He moved closer. His eyes did not lie. Somehow the damage was even worse than it had first appeared.

The house had burst at the seams, but the house had also moved. The whole structure had been torn from its foundations and dragged at least three feet. The scratches on the exposed cinderblocks proved as much. But what explosion – what force – could move a house and blow it apart?

The side door had fallen away, so he motioned for the men to search inside. They were good at their job, good enough to fear for their lives and not push against anything while inside.

It took a few minutes before the men returned from the silent suspense of their work. They brought him nothing but a pair of unlocked handcuffs.

Basilio looked incredulous. "What's this?" But he was compelled to look again by the grim looks on his men. The handcuffs were not unlocked after all. They had been torn to pieces.

"The hell? Who did this?" Then his mind returned to the previous evening. Basilio had received a call late that night about a man who had been caught sneaking around this very house. "Lawful stiff?" He had asked.

"Well, 'e don't work for us, so looks it." Antonio, the house manager, had replied.

"Beat it out of him, would you."

"Shor' thing, Dom. If he weren't stiff before, 'e will be after we're done with 'im."

A prisoner held in the West Gate: a bit odd, but nothing too unusual for a man in Dom's business. Such vigilante types were always poking into the Basilio family estate.

The Basilio estate had been passed from grandfather to father to son for a hundred years. His great-grandfather, the first Dom, had won the estate from its previous occupants, the Lindoro clan. That Dom had sent the Lindorosi sprawling towards the Oregon Territory many decades ago, and they had not heard news of that family since. The estate was secure.

Not that anyone could implicate Basilio in the business. Sure, everyone was wise to the fact that he ran it, but they were wise enough to forget when lawmen came asking. Dom lived quite comfortable out of a mansion at the center of Illini, near city hall. Men called it the Temple. All family business was conducted far away from town, divided between four houses: the "Gates" of Illini. Only the four local managers could ever contact Dom directly, at least on their own initiative.

But this was unprecedented. The four Gates had existed at least as long as the estate itself, and the Western Gate was the oldest of them. How could it now collapse? How could it collapse like this, with a plume of soot and unanswered questions?

Shaking his head in disbelief, he listened as the guards told him about what they'd seen inside the house: corpses piled against walls, bloodied heads and broken bones, and a single chair resting innocently in the middle of the floor. "That's where we found the cuffs, Dom. On the chair. Wrapped around the back. I think someone was being held there."

The guard paused, at once eager and ashamed to say it.

"And?"

"But there weren't any blood on the chair." The guards exchanged a quick knowing glance. If a stranger had been inside the Gate, it certainly wasn't for pleasantries.

"No blood on the chair? But." Basilio stopped himself. He didn't say, 'But I told Antonio to beat it out of him.' He didn't say anything. If the stranger had been spared, to sweat out his fear overnight, that was Antonio's prerogative. Certainly no one would expect the same man to break out of chain handcuffs, let alone to devastate the entire building as he had done. Besides, Antonio's men had been armed.

That reminded him. "Did you find any spears or darts?" Dom had never understood how the slang had come about, but they were so common people hardly used the proper words for 'rifle' and 'pistol.'

"Not one, Dom. Some holes in the wall, and some casings on the floor, but nothing else."

Basilio grunted. Worse and worse. The West Gate was down, and the cache was missing. The estate was under siege. It was time to return to the Temple and let the managers work their magic.

The three men returned to the car, only to find a surprise waiting for them: namely, the car was not waiting for them. Basilio's new Model A, the best car in Illini, was missing.

The two guards quickly dashed off in either direction to look, while Basilio cupped his face in his hands in disbelief. He was soon startled from his reverie by one of the guards.

He came running. "You see it?" The guard who had called shook his head. He was about to speak when the other interrupted: he had spotted tire treads of the car on the road back to Illini. Basilio might have kissed him on the cheek in instant gratitude, but an impatient grimace from the first guard made him attentive again. "Why did you halloo us, then?"

The guard pointed a short ways ahead: "Look!" Sure enough, not twenty yards away, was the West Gate garage, kept apart from the main building and evidently immune to the house's ill-fortune.

Within minutes they were driving back to the city, this time in much older Model T. The road was slow going, but at last they found themselves back in the city.

Basilio almost blushed at the ignominy of returning in a T. The car still ran, thank the gods, but Dom would have never thought he'd ever be found in a T again, not after he was given a Model A, still in prototype, as a sign of 'friendship' with Mr. Ford and more importantly Mr. Ford's financiers. He smiled at the memory: the family business had been good.

But now the estate was threatened, and the threat must be dealt with. The car slowed to a stop outside the Temple, and Basilio flung himself out and up the stairs. Just before he passed through the doors, he stopped, turned, and gaped again. The car, his car, his stolen Model A, was parked outside the house, parked where it had been parked every day since he had received it.

He shook his head with disbelief, then anxiously waved his guards to follow. Whoever had stolen the car may yet be inside, and whoever had stolen the car might have information on the person who had destroyed the West Gate.

They entered, and the other Temple guards quickly gathered around him. One of the men soon admitted that the car had been returned by a young man who had entered the house, claiming the car was abandoned and he was returning it to its rightful owner. This young man was at the moment in the sitting room with the Basilio's daughter, Dalia.

At that, Basilio waved the others to return to their posts. They fanned out, while his two trusted 'goons' followed him to the inner rooms. He would have words with this young man.

He almost knocked over the doors in his haste to enter. The young man quickly stood up. He had been sitting beside Dalia, leaning over to whisper in her ear, but he did not look self-conscious now that he was standing. Dalia, on the other hand, was still fighting a smile. Dom never had to fight a smile. His face was a vassal to his mind, and any wayward smiles had long since been routed. He glared at the youth.

Dom couldn't read this kid. His eyes were almost dancing, a riot of green, but his expression was calm and confident. Basilio waited, hoping that silence would subordinate the young man, and looked closer. Truth be told, there was almost a hungry wildness in his posture. It was like looking at an animal. Unconsciously his brow furrowed; consciously he maintained a steady glare.

After some time, though still without the expected fear and trembling, the young man stepped forward. "Forgive me, sir, for intruding on your hearth and home. I trust your man at the door told you my reason for attending upon you?"

Interesting, he thought: An animal and a wordsmith. Aloud, he spoke in monosyllables. "Yes."

"Good! I'm glad that you are well returned, and glad to be of service in returning your car."

"No."

Basilio expected this gruff reply would give the young man some pause. It didn't.

"Indeed? Pity. Well, I was just telling your lovely daughter Dalia my sad little story. Forgive me, young lady" (her eyes danced with his) "but it seems I am not welcome here."

"No."

It was only the ambiguity of this reply that made the young man stop. "Pardon?"

"You may stay."

Another pause. "Is that so…?"

"If" Dom paused "you tell me who you are and how you came to find that car in the first place."

"Oh!" His face lifted. "I saw smoke and thought I might help. It was visible all morning. But the place was deserted, and the only thing I saw was the car. It looked to be yours, so I figured the one who took it from you was the one who had burnt the house. So I took it on myself to return it."

Dom pressed him. "But how did you find yourself in the middle of nowhere? No one lives near that house for miles."

The young man seemed abashed for a moment – or perhaps merely confused – but soon took a second wind. "It was a lady, you see." Dalia looked crestfallen – simple girl! The youth hastened to reassure her. "No, no. It was" (he paused for half a beat) "my sister." His face brightened with hers, and Dom found himself almost buying this performance. "She had lately fallen on trying times and more trying suitors, and I was assisting her with both." He smiled lopsidedly.

Dom stood in silence for a few moments. The boy's tale was convincing, even if his face was not. And while Dalia still waited expectantly for his approval – or whatever she wanted for him – he was still troubled by the raw wildness that he saw beneath.

Before Dom could respond, however, the door burst open behind him. It was his son, an overeager pup of a man, a boy with no sense and no control of his senses. He was Donnelly, after his mother's godfather. She had insisted on the name. The runt of the litter, he was constantly rushing into ill-considered brawls.

The men of the Temple were instructed to call him "Don" and never "Donnie." But among themselves they knew him by another name, an even more insulting diminutive. They called him Donnicello.

Donnie had been in the East Gate when he had learned of the destruction of the West Gate, and then the return of his father's car to the Temple at the hands of a stranger. Putting two and a number not necessarily two together in that instant, he had rushed home, wielding the only blunt instrument he could find: a hand-crank he took from the Model T he had driven there.

The discovery that his father was both alive and, more distressingly, in the same room made him pause. But this lasted only a moment. His energy was consumed in fueling a deeper rage toward the stranger, who was clearly responsible for the destruction of the West Gate and the murder of his father. His loathing was not diminished by his father's evident survival, but was rather exacerbated by the kind and potentially puppyish look his sister was giving the stranger.

Donnie advanced, a menacing gleam in his eye and an inarticulate war-cry on his lips.

Basilio was exasperated by the interruption, but he was not in the habit of restraining his son from the verge of every new insanity. At any rate, he shared his son's suspicions, and was eager to see how the confrontation might be resolved. He saw Dalia pale visibly, but that meant nothing. It was the weakness of a woman, or perhaps girlish anxiety for a potential beau. Dom was more interested in the youth.

The young man held his ground, his eyes tracking Donnie as he approached. Basilio noticed that his hands were flexing slightly, and his feet and legs had tensed. Something approaching alarm began to dawn in his mind, but Dom did not yet realize it. After all, his son held the crank.

Donnie approached and swung the crank. It was a low arc, aimed at the body. His father nodded approvingly: the pain would incapacitate without death. But the young man had other plans. He had launched himself against Donnie, into the path of the crank. It shuddered to a stop within an inch of his flesh. The youth had pinioned Donnie's arm, forcing him to drop the crank and retreat from the pressure. The youth snatched the crank with his other hand as it fell, placing it on the nearby table.

Then, mere seconds after it had begun, a break in the action.

Dom Basilio was astonished. Only now did the thought finally occur to him to caution his son against this fight. But it was already too late.

Donnie, enraged at being so easily disarmed, had thrown his full weight into a punch aimed at the young man's nose. The young man turned slightly, and his jaw caught the blow. The punch landed with a crunch of bones and a cry of pain. Basilio did not understand: surely so quick a man would sidestep the blow? Then he realized that the crunch and the cry had not come from the young man. They had come from Donnie. His hand had broken on the young man's jaw, and the jaw was none the worse for wear.

Dom glanced, incredulous, between his son and the young man who had disabled him. Now, even in his own Temple, he was terrified of those eyes that spoke of so much wildness.

The young man spoke, and his words had a cold authority. "You made an enemy of me this day. This man abused me in your own house, and you lifted not a finger." His eyes flared. "You have led him and your people to the slaughter." He glanced to Dalia, the fire reduced to embers. "Dalia, dear, you are always welcome to my presence. But not as one who bears my enemy's name."

The young man looked down to the whimpering Donnie, who was only now getting to his knees. He grasped the hand-crank from the table, overshadowed by an aura of unimaginable restraint. "You provide the weapon. I wield it." He struck twice, brutally: the first just below Donnie's knees, knocking the breath out of him, the second against the legs as Donnie began to collapse. They struck with a sickening sound of bone, muscle, and ligament. Dom Basilio knew without a doubt that his son would never walk again. He raged inwardly, but was so far from his wits he hardly knew to move.

The young man looked at the bloodied cudgel and spoke over it:

"With the hand-crank of a T, I have laid him in a heap.
With the hand-crank of a T, I shall fell a thousand men."

In his fear Basilio managed to ask a single question, though weakly:"Who are you?"

The young man replied: "My father is Noah, and our family is Dan. We walked this land for many years, and now we are home." He gathered himself and walked out, turning to speak in Dom's ear as he passed: "Their cause is mine. I will deliver them from your hands."

At last Basilio found his power return in a wave, rage pouring through his every vein and pore. He did not ask but howled his demand after the retreating figure. "Your name!"

The young man didn't look back as he walked out onto the street. But his words rang through the Temple.

"My name is Samson."

Author's Note: As you've no doubt figured out by now, Judged is an adaptation of the story of Samson written as a crime drama set in a 1920's gangland-Chicago-esque town. Its name is Illini, a Native American word that originally applied to the general region south of Lake Michigan, from which we derive the name of the state. I had briefly considered using 'Assati' or 'Azza' or some other derivation of Gaza (the city of the Philistines and the original setting of Samson's story), but the name didn't seem to fit the midlands-American setting I was shooting for. The period is squarely in the late 1920's: Dom drives a prototype Model A Ford, which was released to the public in 1927.

The first break came by re-imagining the "gates of Gaza" (Judges 16:1-3) as local syndicates of a broader criminal enterprise. Once that was understood, it also became clear that the "temple of Dagon" (Judges 16:24) should be the headquarters of that empire and the necessary site for the initial confrontation and Samson's reveal. The Philistines themselves are in this case the crime family of Dom Basilio. His daughter's name is Dalia, a Latinized form of 'Delilah,' and yes, she's somewhat important to the story. After some fence-sitting, I decided to keep Samson's name, though I altered his father's name from 'Manoah' to simply 'Noah' (which share the same Hebrew root, meaning "rest").

This story was originally published on my blog, "A Sacramental World," in three installments making a single chapter or act. The title at the top of this page indicates that this story was conceived of as a five-act drama or a five-chapter novella. Sadly, I haven't picked up this story since it was first published in 2011, at least until I was reminded of it recently and started wondering if it could be published here. I enjoyed writing the story immensely, but have no notion of whether or when I might pick it up again, especially as my other projects must take precedence. For that reason, and because this first act is largely self-standing, I am marking this story as complete.

Finally, if you felt that some of the names sounded familiar - such as Basilio, Antonio, or Lindoro - that probably means you're either a fan of French theater or of classical opera. The names were borrowed from characters in The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro, two blockbuster plays written by Pierre de Beaumarchais and converted into operas by Rossini and Mozart, respectively. If those names were not familiar, leave this page! Go, now; read and listen, and let yourself experience truly incomparable music and literature. "Cherubino, alla vittoria! Alla gloria militar!"