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* Title : #019 : HOLY TERROR *

* Series : The Destroyer *

* Author(s) : Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir *

* Location : Gillian Archives *

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CHAPTER ONE

Many things are holy, but few of them holy men. —HOUSE OF SINANJU.

When the Reverend Titus Powell saw the bodies being loaded on ox carts in the outskirts of Calcutta, he asked himself if he were willing to die.

More specifically, was he willing to give up his life for a white girl?

Even more specifically, was he willing to give up his life for a rich white girl whose father, just two decades ago, had made Reverend Powell ask himself the identical question over the value of a cup of coffee. He remembered it clearly. You don't forget facing death.

"Ain't no one stopping y'all from drinking that cup of coffee, Reverend. But they ain't gonna be no one stopping them from hanging y'all from the big elm at Withers Creek neither."

Those had been the words of Elton Snowy, owner of Snowy's Pharmacy, Snowy's Mill, Snowy's Drive-in, and Snowy's Farm, in Jason, Georgia. Mr. Snowy, who was a Jason on his mother's side, had stood with the Silex still bubbling at the lunch counter in his pharmacy, with the young Reverend Mr. Powell sitting in front of an empty coffee cup and a crowd of jeering white youths behind him.

"I'll take cream and sugar," Reverend Powell had said, and he saw the two dark barrels of a shotgun stuck in his face. On the triggers down the barrels was one fat pink finger. The nail was grimy. The nail, the finger, the hand, and the gun belonged to the saw mill foreman who, everyone in Jason knew, was the leader of the local Ku Klux Klan.

"One barrel or two with your coffee, nigger?" asked the foreman.

Reverend Powell heard the laughter behind him, saw Snowy hold the pot over the cup, smelled the aroma of fresh-ground coffee, and knew if he lived he would never drink coffee again.