The Plot Calls #31 : "A Prejudice Verdict"

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination and/or Ai-assisted-content-generation. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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Judge Harmon Rudd didn’t become a judge to uphold the law.

He became a judge to wield it.

Justice, as the world saw it, was just a word. In Harmon’s courtroom, justice wore his face—tight-lipped, sunken-eyed, smug with power. The gavel wasn’t a tool for order. It was a weapon. Every swing was a strike against the world he hated.

He was a bitter man. And bitterness, like rust, had spread across his soul.

By reputation, he was “tough on crime.” The media called him firm. The D.A.’s office called him dependable. Political donors called him electable. The communities he targeted called him something else entirely.

But Harmon didn’t care what they called him. Especially them.

To him, they were statistics. Public nuisances. Overgrown mistakes from broken neighborhoods that never should’ve existed in the first place. Young Black men in oversized shirts. Hispanic kids with loud shoes. Girls with sharp tongues and sharper eyebrows. Drugged-up white boys with lazy stares and ungrateful smirks.

All of them unworthy. All of them beneath the system. His system.

He read their names before they entered the courtroom and made his mind up before the bailiff called them in. When public defenders begged for mercy, Harmon dismissed them like swatting flies. When they tried to show empathy, he rolled his eyes and muttered something under his breath—"bleeding hearts" or "charity case." When parents cried, Harmon just drummed his fingers and thought about lunch.

He wasn’t interested in reform. Only rulings.

If the defendant was young, he made an example of them. If they were old, he made them regret living this long. His sentences were harsh, arbitrary, and cruel. No context. No care. Only outcome. Only punishment.

In two days, he sentenced:

A Black teen to 18 months for having a dime bag of weed.

A Latina mother to 9 months for shoplifting diapers.

A white boy to 2 years for graffiti, calling it “a hate crime” because he spray-painted “eat the rich.”

A transgender youth to 14 months for “public indecency” for using a restroom while homeless.

He didn’t write opinions. He didn’t justify his reasoning. He just signed the papers and dismissed the cases.

Then, he went home.

Every night, Judge Harmon Rudd sat in a cedar rocking chair on his back porch, glass of warm bourbon in one hand, Mein Kampf in the other. Not to learn—he had read it enough times for that—but to reaffirm.

Reaffirm that history was right. That order was divine. That some people were simply inferior and deserved correction by someone like him.

His walls bore the portraits of generals, politicians, and judges long dead. All white. All male. All cut from the same stone of silent violence. They were his idols. His saints. His validation.

The media wouldn’t dare ask about his personal life. He kept it clean. He knew the rules. He coached his statements. Voted how he was told. Donated where it mattered.

The only truth Harmon believed in was his own.

He looked at Black Lives Matter protests and saw animals tearing down a house they didn’t build. He saw immigrants as beggars pretending to be kings. He watched poor white people ask for help and felt disgusted at their weakness. If you’re not strong, you’re not worthy.

And he was strong. He had the robe. He had the power. He had the final word.

That robe—black as judgment, thick as armor—shielded him from introspection. It allowed him to look at a boy crying in handcuffs and think, Good. Let it sink in.

He didn’t believe in rehabilitation. Only retribution. Only cleansing.

Harmon’s office bore no family photos. No personal keepsakes. Only framed newspaper headlines from his earliest convictions, and a quote from his late grandfather that hung above his desk:

“Don’t let the wrong people feel too comfortable.”

That was Harmon’s creed.

He lived for it. He sentenced with it. He let that bitterness build into his bones, until all that was left was wrath—silent, smoldering, and somehow... righteous.

And the wrath grew.

Until, one night, something heard it.

Something deep. Something waiting.

A whisper—not sound, but presence—curled under the hedges of his yard, slid between his ribs like vapor, and settled into the marrow of his thoughts.

It said nothing.

But Harmon understood it.

The plot had called.

And Harmon Rudd was ready to answer.

The whisper returned the next night.

No sound. No wind. Just pressure. Like something pushing against the back of Harmon’s skull. A reminder. A request.

He was sitting on the porch again, same bourbon in hand, same book in his lap. But he wasn’t reading this time. His eyes were locked on the yard. Specifically, the garden.

It had rained earlier. The earth was damp. The flowers wilted. But the soil—something about the soil looked... off. Darker. Denser. Like ink soaked beneath the roots.

The whisper curled again. Not from the sky. Not from the wind. But from beneath.

Harmon stood.

The night around him didn’t move. No crickets. No breeze. Just stillness, heavy as breath held too long.

He walked toward the garden. Step by step, the air grew thicker. Like walking into humidity made of static and judgment. The hedge at the back of the property was twisted now, as if turned inward. A small clearing had formed where no clearing had ever been.

There, the soil pulsed.

Black-violet. Breathing.

In the center, a porcelain hand emerged. Slender. Smooth. Perfect. Upturned, like a prayer or an offering. Or both.

Harmon didn’t hesitate.

He gripped the worn copy of Mein Kampf and knelt before the soil.

“This nation was never meant to be shared,” he whispered.

He placed the book in the porcelain hand.

It closed. It sank.

The garden exhaled.

Harmon Rudd stood taller.

The next morning, he barely remembered what he’d done. It didn’t matter. The point had been made.

Cases started pouring in.

Juveniles. Protesters. First-time offenders. Immigrants.

All guilty. All sentenced. No appeals. No questions. His court moved like a machine.

Three-year minimums for possession. Five for graffiti. One for loitering.

He denied bail for a sixteen-year-old who “looked likely to reoffend” because of his hoodie. He sentenced a Black woman to six months for "aggressive tone" during a traffic stop. He scolded a deaf boy for “disrespecting court protocol” when he didn’t respond to instructions fast enough.

The press noticed. The higher courts didn’t.

Every ruling built the tower higher.

And the whispers returned.

Not nightly—hourly. Every time he picked up the gavel, he heard them. Every time he passed a sentence, they echoed.

More. More. And, more.

The hunger in the soil was mirrored in Harmon’s soul. And he fed it—fed it with lives, with punishment, with a system rigged tighter with every ruling.

Each sentence he gave stripped something from him. A little color from his face. A little warmth from his voice. But it gave him something too—presence. He could feel the world notice him more. Respect him. Fear him.

He liked it. He deserved it. He was a Judge. Capital J. He stood for Order. For Power. For Truth that looked like him, spoke like him, ruled like him.

But deep down, something else was shifting. Quietly.

He began waking at night, kneeling by the garden without remembering how he got there.

His wife started locking their bedroom door.

He stopped going to church. Replaced prayer with long, empty stares into the yard.

He turned the music off in his car.

He threw away his old family photo albums. No explanation.

He started mumbling to himself during trials.

His clerk said she thought he was speaking German, though he never studied it.

His eyes dimmed. His rulings sharpened. And still, the hunger grew.

The porcelain hand emerged again—this time without a whisper.

Judge Harmon walked out mid-trial and returned home. He found the garden already pulsing.

He offered the wooden gavel he’d used for twenty-five years.

The hand accepted it. The soil shimmered.

The next day, the state appointed him to oversee all juvenile sentencing for three counties. No hearings. No review boards. Just his discretion.

A blank check.

He signed rulings without reading them. Processed hundreds of kids a week. Names and faces blurred. They were fodder. Meat. Fuel.

His wrath became automation.

His legacy, a prison pipeline.

He stopped attending dinners. He stopped answering calls. He started wearing black robes outside the courtroom.

Neighbors complained about chanting late at night. About strange lights in the yard. About guttural sounds echoing from the soil.

But the whisper only told him one thing now:

“Not enough.”

Judge Harmon Rudd began to wither. His skin paled. His reflection blurred. He didn't care. His eyes were focused on the garden, always.

The Plot had tasted his wrath. But now it wanted more.

Not his judgments. His judgment.

Judge Harmon Rudd no longer showed up to court.

At first, they sent questions. Then complaints. Then officers.

None returned with clear answers. Some didn’t return at all.

His yard was a mess of warped hedges and choked vines. The garden looked scorched and overgrown at once—like something had bloomed, died, and come back wrong. Neighbors said the birds never flew over his property anymore. They said the air buzzed there, even when it was still.

Inside the house, Harmon Rudd no longer resembled a man.

He wandered in silence, speaking only to the soil. The only words he uttered were fragments—sentences half-formed, delivered in dead languages, or worse, in no language at all. Just sound. Weightless, meaningless sound. His skin looked waxy. His lips were cracked. His robes, once tailored and pristine, hung off him like drapes on a corpse.

His wife had moved out two weeks ago.

She said he stopped eating.

Stopped sleeping.

Just kneeled. At the edge of the yard. At the edge of reason.

Muttering about corruption, about cleansing, about wrath without waste.

Until, finally, someone noticed.

Officer Gunn.

He didn’t come with backup. He didn’t ask for permission.

He came because the reports were familiar.

He’d seen it before. He knew the signs.

The whispers. The disconnection. The glint of rot behind once-righteous eyes.

Gunn parked on the curb. The house radiated silence. Not the peaceful kind. The vacuum kind. Like noise was forbidden there.

The air got colder as he approached the front door. The hinges creaked open with no resistance.

Inside, it smelled like metal and burned paper.

He walked past rooms filled with court documents—crossed out, re-stamped, rewritten by hand with new, harsher sentences.

Every wall was covered in phrases: “THE LAND DESERVES BETTER.” “THE VERDICT MUST CLEANSE.” “WRATH IS THE ONLY JUSTICE.” “THE PLOT KNOWS.”

He stepped into the backyard.

There, Judge Harmon Rudd knelt in pitch-black robes—facing the garden.

The soil pulsed like a heartbeat, purple-black, steady and unnatural.

The porcelain hand had returned.

But it wasn’t reaching up this time.

It was pointing sideways.

Harmon didn’t move.

Didn’t blink.

Didn’t breathe.

He was frozen—Idle.

“Judge Rudd?” Gunn asked cautiously.

No answer.

He stepped closer.

The whisper came—not from Harmon, not from the Plot, but from behind Gunn’s own thoughts. Like a frequency shaking loose in the corners of his mind.

You’ve already ruled.

Gunn stood still. The garden shimmered. Then, it began to twist.

Not spin. Not collapse.

Twist. Sideways.

Like reality turned on an axis it shouldn’t have.

The soil, the hand, the man—they all bent unnaturally to the side, turning out of view. Like closing a book.

Harmon didn’t scream. He didn’t fight.

He just disappeared.

Gone.

A stillness settled over the garden. No shimmer. No soil pulse. No porcelain hand.

Just an empty patch of warped earth, faintly scorched.

Gunn stood in the quiet. It was over. Or as over as these things ever were.

Behind him, Harmon’s wife trembled, still processing what she saw. “They just turned…” she whispered, “…sideways?”

She looked at Gunn, desperate. “What happened? What happened to my husband?”

Gunn sighed. The weight pressed into his bones. The same weight he carried from Alvarez. From Marcus. From the rest.

He took a breath. “The Plot called,” he said softly. “Judge Rudd answered.”

She blinked. “What does that mean?”

He paused, lips thin. He didn’t want to say it. Not again.

But rules were rules. Themes were themes. Truth was truth.

He crossed his arms, nodded at the scorched soil, and whispered:

“The Plot Thickens.”

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