The Umber Squall (A Case File from the files of Harold Tempt)

"All flesh would perish together, and man would return to dust."

The Book of Job flapped against a weathered fence post, the brittle paper snapping like the skin of something long dead. It wouldn’t be long before the wind took it and swallowed it up with everything else. 

I used to imagine if Hell existed, it would be fire—scarlet and tangerine flames caked across canyons, licking at the bones of the damned. But that was a child's nightmare. No, Hell wasn’t fire. Hell was dust. Hazel dunes like dead high tides, stretching to the horizon with no relief or climax. 

The Dust Bowl wasn’t a tragedy—it was of consequence. One of several bowls of God’s displeasure poured out across the flatlands to remind men what they were in their fragile state and what they would return to.

I was folded from the Prohibition units into one of Hoover’s jackboots, the kind that only knows how to stomp on the throats of men with too much hope and too little power. My knuckles still held the memory of a tussle with union busting, pain lacing through them like bad whiskey.

I requested a place with a little less headbutting—just a quiet stretch of land where the law’s weight didn’t feel like a constant grind on your ribs.

This was it. Oklahoma.

This land is my land and it is far away from the Golden State.  A perfect assignment for a man with no more favors to call in could ask for. Out here, the land was as dry as a drunk’s last dollar, and the people had learned how to live without dreams. And that suited me fine.

The sun still hung heavy on the horizon like a forgotten cigarette burning out in the gutter. I had no business with the bright lights anymore.

Just the quiet dirt and the cracks—the kind that gets in your lungs and makes it hard to breathe, but never goes away. The sands took the sows and the stalks, leaving the earth split open like a beggar’s palm.

Withered green turned to sickly yellow, then to nothing at all. The wind didn’t howl—it whispered, low and knowing, slipping between dead rows of corn like a sermon meant for no ears but God’s.

I had seen famine before. Seen men break their backs for a dollar and die hungry anyway.

The clouds didn’t cry for the just or the unjust. They only loomed, bloated and gray, drifting like specters over the dying land. They weren’t merciful. They weren’t cruel. Just watchers, indifferent to the prayers and curses rising from the cracked earth below.

The people looked up, eyes hollow, waiting for rain that never came. But the land wasn’t waiting, it was was taken.

My eyes were soaked in the case files on the train; the pages yellowed at the edges like they’d been breathing in the same dust choking the land outside. The breadbasket had turned into Pharaoh’s famine, and the banks shut their doors with the same cold finality as a coffin lid.

Out in the hazel expanse, the only ones still moving with purpose were the bank robbers—men who weren’t just stealing; they were spitting in the eye of the machine.

They stuck it to the priests of Moloch and made sure the blood they took wasn’t just from the farmers choking on debt but from the ones who put them there. The bull had been their idol, towering over markets and consciousness, its golden form stretching from Wall Street to Washington. But out here, in the dust and ruin, it didn’t shine the same. It just looked like another carcass waiting for the vultures. We found one of them a pale imitation of Robin in a pale form.

District Court of the United States

Department of Justice

Southeastern District of Oklahoma

Haskell County Sheriff Report.

Case Summary:

On the morning of October 30, a local fieldhand, Mr. Eli Wainwright, reported a corpse atop an abandoned oil derrick on his property, roughly in eastern Stigler, Oklahoma. Sheriff Otis R. Langley contacted the Bureau due to Mercer’s known criminal associations, including armed assaults and train heists in Kansas and Oklahoma over the last decade. The subject was considered dangerous and found shelter with the local populace.

SCENE REPORT:

The body was discovered perched atop the skeletal remains of an oil derrick; the scarecrow form swayed slightly in the dry currents. Mercer’s corpse was contorted into a grotesque effigy—cross-legged, arms outstretched as if in final supplication. His hands and feet, wrapped cruelly in barbed wire, had begun to fuse with the rusted steel.

His empty sockets stared skyward, the flesh around them hollowed as if unseen hands had plucked away something. His mouth, sewn shut with coarse horsehair, had a trail of dried blood crusting his chin.

A sign, old and splintered, was nailed beside him into the platform’s rotting wood. The words, carved with an unsteady hand, read: “The soil has judged him.” Around the base of the derrick, the earth had blackened, as if burned, yet there was no sign of fire. Scattered among the singed corn husks and brittle coyote bones were tiny, rusted nails driven deep into the dirt.

MEDICAL EXAMINER REPORT

Dr. Harold Pettigrew, County Coroner, noted an unnatural dryness to the corpse, the skin drawn tight like aged parchment. Despite the arid conditions, there was no sign of scavenger interference, no insect activity—only the eerie stillness of something left untouched.

Mercer’s lungs contained a fine layer of dust, but it was not ordinary dust; under a magnifying glass, Pettigrew described it as “ashen, with flecks of something organic.” His stomach held only brittle wheat chaff and fragments of locust exoskeletons.

INVESTIGATION NOTES:

• Mercer, last seen in Dodge City, Kansas, on October 20, was rumored to be seeking refuge among Dust Bowl migrant camps.
• Mercers used stolen plates and left the car behind a broken fuel station.

• The derrick’s ladder showed no signs of recent use; no footprints, no disturbances in the dust. Yet Mercer had somehow been placed at the top.
• Nearby farmers reported unfamiliar strucrtues popping up over the foreclosed lands. Pillars. Men in gas masks were believed to be culprits.
• Mercer’s known associates denied involvement, but one, upon hearing the circumstances, muttered: "The land, don’t forget." He would elaborate on the promise to be transferred to a correctional facility out West.

CONCLUSIONS & RECOMMENDATIONS:

Mercer’s death bears no resemblance to traditional gangland killings or small-town retribution. The precision of his placement, the ritualistic elements, and the unnatural state of decomposition suggest a practice beyond human intention. The men in the trench masks remain a primary lead, though their motives remain unclear. Surveillance of regional transient communities is advised, as well as an investigation into historical land disputes in the area.

CASE STATUS: Ongoing. Pending further intelligence from collaborations between state and local law enforcement agencies.

SIGNED,

John H. Crowley

Deputy-Corner, Haskell County Sheriff's Department

I set the files down like I’d touched something sacred and defiled in the same breath. The weight of it lingered like dust caught in the air before settling on an empty chair. Mercer’s death wasn’t just a murder. It was a reckoning.

And it wasn’t the first.

There was a case out west. The locals pretended it never happened, but you could see it in their eyes when the wind shifted wrong. A murder of crows had dropped from the sky, not scattered, not struggling—just dead, like they’d flown straight into something unseen. They fell in a perfect line, leading to a body slumped atop a scarecrow post.

He’d been tied up tight, arms stretched like a marionette with its strings cut. His skin was dry as old paper, and his lips split like he’d been whispering to the wind even after death. The ground beneath him wasn’t just dirt anymore—it was something else, scorched black, though there was no fire, no heat, just silence.

People claimed they minded their own here.

But the ranchers locked their doors at sundown. The drifters packed up early. And at night, out past the fields, figures dug and built where no one should. Long coats. Round, glassy eyes catch the moonlight. Standing too still, listening to something only they could hear.

Who led you to the reaper, Mr. Mercer? My exhausted mind rebelled against the images, but they pressed in like a branding iron—steel barbs sinking deep, peeling skin in cherry-red ribbons along his wrists. Even in the last days of the desolation, he was crying out for deliverance. Those Sunday school hymns would offer little comfort as they left him on the pillars.

The press would gorge themselves, turn the carnage into headlines, and frame it in ink-stained righteousness. But the killing field wouldn’t stop with shotgun possessions hunting through the dust-choked breadbasket. This wasn’t justice. It was a spectacle. It was scripture written in blood.

Like a fevered tent revival, the art of murder had to spread. The dust cloud would carry it—through barbed-wire towns, past withered crops, into every telegraph office where jittering fingers would tap out the scene in clipped, urgent strokes. The land was starving, and the only thing left to feed it was flesh.

The slaughter didn’t have the clean precision of a heist. In a job like that, you left a man cooling on a lonely road, his ill-gotten earnings stuffed in your pocket, and you moved on. No spectacle, no mess. If Mercer had tangled himself up with the wrong married woman, her husband would have covered the tracks and rolled him into a dry ditch.

The wind does the rest. That was business.

But a display this grand—this was a ripple. The creeks here used to remember ripples Now they ran dry; their beds cracked like old skin. The only thing left to carry the ripple was the wind. And the wind never forgot.

These towns fought hard to stay far away from enlightened cities with monuments and art displays. There was a contagion; belief was a plague. Plagues don’t stay contained. They spread. They seep into the cracks, take root in hungry minds, and can’t be removed with flame or fervor.

They had to be burned at the root.

The people that left mercer to die had enough wheat and meat in their bellies to haul him up those pillars. And that was the reason I still had a job. Good people didn’t want to think about those details. They got stuck in the tiles and the frames of the mind.

The black blizzards had swallowed cattle, and yet they still had meat.

If I wanted answers I’d follow the people whose ribs didn’t stick out from their stomachs, people that hide their sins from decent folk. God always demanded the best from the harvest. The fattest calf, the first golden sheaf of wheat, the purest blood. Out here, where the land had turned against them, the rules hadn’t changed—only the offerings.

And someone was their brother’s keeper.

The outlaw was A young man, sharp-eyed and cocksure, still burning hot with the arrogance of the unscarred. Did you think of the chair before you drew on that bank guard? A veteran, steady-handed, but you had the speed of youth. You got the drop on him. It comes full circle; someone got the drop on you.

Mercer was made for the silver screen—too sharp, too restless for a small-town life pumping gas and watching the years slip by. 

If he hadn’t been an outlaw, he’d have played one, his face flickering in a smoke-filled theater, a cigarette dangling from his lips, a revolver slung low on his hip. I’d have tossed a quarter at the box office just to watch him ride to his doom. Gable is too old to play me; maybe my father, on the other hand.

The old man shed Irish blood on French soil. He recounted the black and brown fog that seeped into your lungs and how it dulled the senses before the figures emerged—men in trench masks, reaching from the churned dust of cannon fire like something half-born, half-buried.

These people out here in the wasted fields of Oklahoma were breathing in a different fog, but the fear was the same. The masks had changed, but the shapes behind them hadn’t. They still stood just at the edges of sight, listening to something no one else could hear. And just like in the trenches, the land swallowed the ones who saw too much.

How could this open-air wasteland close in on me harder than the trench lines of my father’s war? The dust moved like smoke, thick and clinging, curling through the cracks, slipping under doors, filling every breath. Out there, the masked figures stood at the edges of sight, waiting. Silent. Listening.

The trenches had walls. A front and a way through.

This was just an endless tide of dust and the certainty that once it took you, no one would ever pull you out.

"The killing fields tangled in California’s green vines and the hazel void stretching across the Midwest were cut from the same rotten cloth.

Long-dead rites never stayed six feet under. They just bided their time, waiting for minds to crack and fortunes to fail, slipping back through the fractures like smoke through a broken door."

I rested a hand on the cracked leather of my holster, the weight of my service weapon familiar, inherited like a debt. Out here, it wasn’t just protection—it was an offering. I carried a piece of iron and lead meant to hold the line. A few bullets between man and the specters that waited in the dust.

Black Sunday was coming, and it is best to bring a tithe.