by Sergio Black
“Uh, look, kid. I didn’t know your mom or your dad, don’t pretend to; all I know is what the Chief tells me, which is very little. The files linked to this case were immediately sealed, the circumstances regarding the details of this investigation are very perplexing. I can only guesstimate that something is amiss. So, if I am on the right track, and you know something I don’t, then tell me the truth, if it was the doing of a rogue Superior, we will catch him. I promise you, I’ll pull some strings, and personally see to it that you end up in good hands, you know catered to and what not. I suggest you really give my offer some thought. Usually someone in your position being crippled and all would be sent to the Gas Chambers, seeing as you can’t fight for the Neu Empire. But the Chief ordered I let you go. So, consider yourself lucky. I’ll ask you one more again. What events occurred the night your mother died?” Sergeant Bradford spoke with a soft German midwestern charm. I looked down at the moth-eaten orange shoes the Neu hospital had given me upon furlough and swallowed my congested sob before talking.
“If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me. No offense, mister, but not you nor anyone else could stop the Man known as HIM. HE is the strongest being in the universe.” The Gestapo Sergeant gave a light-hearted chuckle, then walked in front of me and knelt so we were face to face.
“I doubt that, kid, apparently you have never seen me in action, so enlighten me son, who is the Man known as HIM?” As he waited for my response, the lingering seconds turned to minutes, making it appear to Bradford that he would never find out. “Okay youngster, I get it, I wish you the best of luck on all your travels. Don’t let this one moment in your life define who you are for the remainder of it, just because you are in a chair does not mean you can’t possibly serve the NEU EMPIRE. Heck, you’re ugly and a cripple, but contact me when you’re older and maybe I can get you into the Army, you could still spit shine shoes, maintain guns, and unclog the shitters. Best it will get for someone like you.” The Sergeant gave me a light hug, a pardoned document signed by the High Heretic that he crammed down my shirt, just in case I was arrested for being a paraplegic. He stood, clicked both heels together, followed by the traditional salute then disappeared into the distance. The tears I had been fighting during our conversation stung my face and leaked freely, then froze to my icy, red cheeks as I cried hard between gushing sobs, cursing God and whoever else controls the working universe. If there was a God, why would he let all these bad things happen to me?
I stared at the blank headstone that had no engraving or adorning, because the Neu Empire didn't want to front the cost. So, I sat behind the casket and began to write a letter to Dear Agony but didn’t finish it, fuck that bitch she didn't deserve my misery. I fumed on the inside and crushed the thorned roses in my hands, embracing the sweet welcome of liquid pain that leaked between gripping, small fingers, my warm blood pattered the snow with faint drips of afflicted red. Is this what my life has come to? To live in this existence as nothing but a slave to the government who hates my kind? I am neither a Nazi nor a Superior so what am I? A mistake? Crowned the King of Nothing? A useless shitter cleaner? The questions I was forced to ask myself made me question my function among my place in the world. The mask of sadness I wore slowly morphed into hostility, and struck a match within me that burned with an infinity for retribution and anger. At this moment, I realized that this world and my greatest loves had left me both empty, forsaken and hollow. “Mother, Father, I promise you if I can help it, this isn’t the end. You will never be just a memory.” In a fit of my own fury, I twisted, contorted and turned the black roses into tattered bits, soaking in every ounce of prickling, pleasure the once beautiful roses had promised. Only when the roses were nothing more than mangled pieces did I toss them into the empty casket… Several minutes passed before a subservient to the Nazis in the form of an African American lady with an afro and a brown overcoat from Child Protective Services eventually trudged to where I sat in numb silence. She turned to face me, speaking coldly but with tenderness.
“Ready to go, kid?” I looked toward her and with my impaired vision I could only make out a faint shroud, because her hot breath stung the air. I didn’t make eye contact with her but instead focused my exploration and glared into the casket of bloody roses. “Let’s go.” The CPS woman nodded with sympathy then rolled me to where a white van sat idling and let down a steel ramp. Wheeling me into the van’s cabin, she fastened my wheelchair into place using green ratchet straps to ensure I wouldn’t bounce around. She buttoned up her brown overcoat and closed the double wide doors, then drove for several minutes before she dropped me off at Bill Duncan’s Home for the Wayward and Youth.
I stayed there for several weeks where I was tormented by the more fortunate boys and girls who had longings of joining Hitler Youth. They always whimpered and complained about how bad their parents were, the spoiled rotten assholes never shut up, always complaining about frivolous things that would never fertilize to a modicum of significance, Sally likes Jonah, Jonah likes Sally. Hearing all the nonsense further enraged my soul. It was here that my damnation for humanity began to fester like a disease. A sunny afternoon when I was dwelling by myself, a blonde, blue-eyed boy named Noah Powell spartan kicked me from my chair, jumped on top of me and punched me repeatedly with his fist until his knuckles bruised. I embraced the infliction that coursed through my body, the abrupt stimulation created by the onslaught of anguish and smell of iron in my blood alleviated the pain I felt in my heart. At one point, I began to throw my face into his balled fist to increase the clobbering, lifting my head as close to him as humanly possible and stared up at him through my one good eye, and wiped the slick blood from my brow and smeared it on his face. Using the distraction, I grabbed a dense, crow shaped stone, and bludgeoned him with it, over and over again until he was comatose and my face was covered in his sticky warm blood splatter. Exhausted, I breathed heavily, pulled him close and whispered in his ear, “You fucking idiot. To be in the Hitler Youth you have to be 100% Aryan descent to even be considered. Your misery is just my beginning.” Several weeks passed and I was relieved to find out that I had been released to a foster family, however, the relief was brief. I realized hastily that this foster family was very Machiavelli. I never thought in a light year’s chance I would happily go back to the Wayward Home... I was convinced my foster parents would kill me as the tormenting's escalated, until one night my foster father nearly flogged me to an early grave with an oak bedpost for collecting a simple spider that scared the wits out of my foster mother, Cindy. My psychopathic siblings in the home were just as cruel, oftentimes making it their Sunday night entertainment to see who could top another in their acts of barbarity at the expense of my wellbeing. Sometimes, depending on the severity of my false penalties, they would lock me away in a shivering, wet basement, forced to sleep on an old flea ridden cot, my meals usually consisting of dog food which they force fed me until I was sick, and oftentimes they would treat me worse than the pets. I recall many times, eating my own vomit and forced to sleep in my own fecal matter for weeks without a cleaning. Shower time was grueling. If I was good, my body was hosed down with icy water like an animal. When I was bad or misbehaved, they would lock me in the family shower bin upstairs and put the temperature on full heat. I remember the sweltering infliction slicing into my skin being so unbearable, I would black out and awake, shaking, in a puddle of my own piss.
I planned my escape for months until everything was perfect and in the silent dead of night, like the infamous magician Tadesh Tada, I pulled a Houdini, waiting until everyone was comatose from ingesting Novocaine, I vanished into thin air. I had used a medium sized silver paperclip to pick the locked door of the filthy, depressing Disappointment Room that acted as my small housing quarters. They separated me from the other kids, so they could stop the cripple virus from spreading to other members of the family. Using a red broomstick, I shoved the hardwood handle between my stained mattress and dilapidated bed frame, then used my weight as
a fulcrum and applied as much downward pressure as I could muster, snapping the broomstick under my 90-pound body with a loud BRACK! Following that, I tousled my smelly mattress away from the beaten-up bed frame and stripped the plain grimy sheets away, making a knapsack that I packed with 2 soft apples stolen from the kitchen, a scratchy grey wool blanket, and what few changes of ill fitted clothes I owned. Once ready, I clawed my nails into the floor until they ripped from my fingers and bled. I made my way from the cramped, Disappointment Room, and slithered down the winding staircase like a snake with a lame tail, carrying the knapsack by my baby teeth.
Upon reaching the blue carpet downstairs, I pulled myself onto a bland wooden chair and stole 100 Nazi banknotes out of the glass swear jar that sat on the disgusting countertop. That night, the most undemanding task took me hours to complete. I struggled for what felt like days, trying to hoist myself off the dirty floor that was festering with cockroaches and into my squeaky wheelchair. The last time I attempted the feat, I knew it was now or never. I struggled with every ounce of my will, the negative memories flooding my body like uncut cocaine that fought against the chronic ache throbbing through my spine, finally ending in triumphant success. Exhausted, I took more than a minute to catch my breath then descended into the hypothermic night of December, fading into sheets of merciless blizzards.
Sleeping by day and most times traveling by night, I rolled my way across the country to the West Coast where the weather wouldn’t be so harsh. I wheeled by city after city, the masses of privileged people walking by me like I was nothing more than a bad mark, a shit-stain that scourged the sidewalks of San Francisco. I was terrified to ask for help and would often accept handouts in the form of meager Nazi Pence or half-eaten food. I always pondered my thoughts, wondering if the man known as HIM would come back to finish what he had started, I never knew. But the fear was always there. Or even worse, our Neu government who hated cripples and those deemed unfit to contribute to society’s standards would imprison me within a Dissection Lab.
The only friend I made years later, during my rough travels, was a catchy young girl who had the same birthday as me. I never knew her real name; she only liked to be called Lily on account of her favorite Peter Pan character, usually wearing a fluffy pink, ballerina dress, pretending to be a Disney princess. At first sight, I didn't trust her, she seemed privileged like the other kids I had encountered, but her eyes were so sincere, the resemblance she bore to someone far and gone was baffling, the red hair with green eyes that shimmered with life. At sunset, Lily would sneak away under cover of darkness to bring me homemade food and other amenities. She would watch me eat like a ravished grizzly bear. “Wow, you’re really hungry,” she would say kindly with care, then hug me tightly and hold me while I filled myself with luxuries I could only dream to afford. She would say we were best friends forever and I believed her. Several weeks passed and I grew to trust her with my life, those weeks being both the happiest and most sad days of my life.
We would frolic and play through the woods as most children do. One evening when the sun was setting, she brought me to her gated community to meet her mother against my protests. I sat there in my wheelchair enamored by the archaic beauty of the blue Victorian house, waiting patiently in Lily’s gravel driveway and said nothing. Her mother walked outside smoking a stubby cigarette, wearing a Neu American black smock with a matching hat and a dark veil pulled over her lovely face. Fastened to her shoulder was a white Neu America pin with a Swastika inlay, and the proud term that said ‘I VOTED.’ She looked down on me with silent condemnation, narrowing her eyes, then began speaking in a tongue of disrespect, “Whatever your name is, wheel yourself back to whatever landfill you crawled from, boy.” She pulled the yellow cigarette butt from her pink lips and flick it at me, the smoldering cherry tip burned my cheek and bounced to the pavement. I dared not flinch from the blistering sting, I just leered forward with resentment. She smiled at me with mock on her face, ignoring my glare, she knelt down and wrapped her polished hands around Lily’s petite shoulders. “Dear, understand, he is trash. Remember there are people in this world we can, and cannot be seen with. He is not one of us, and he will never be.”
That night, I rolled out of my only friend’s pathway and back into the harsh, unforgiving world. I hated myself for believing there was a glimmer of hope out of endless, senseless tragedy. I wheeled down the street of the boulevard of broken dreams and out of the quiet cul-de-sac under broken street lamps, back to a small well-hidden wooded area that ran off the suburbs of Boise, Idaho, to where my temporary lean-to shelter was built. My friend was unique and different. I can only explain it in so many words. Lily was the only good-hearted person outside of my parents that I connected with like I had known her my whole life. Lily didn’t care about her parents’ lack of approval. She had told me we would still be friends forever and held my hand as we’d lie on our backs and point at the stars that zipped by and out of sight like fleeting thunderbolts. We even named many of them ZACHARIA, CASTIEL, MICHEAL, etc, we imagined the stars were entryways into Mt. Zion, a Utopia, where true peace reigned and everyone was united and equal. One night, she snuck out of her bedroom at dark to play with me and some jealous boys followed her to my small campsite. The resentful boys ran off and told her parents that their daughter was congregating with a sub-par human. Her mother forced her father to beat me with a vengeance like a stray dog and that was the last time I saw or heard from Lily ever again.
The years circled by while I drifted from city to city, as I grew older and started piecing my parents’ past together, easily hacking into Neu Super Company servers at different locations. Several months before Eden’s death, dozens of soldiers, a part of the Neu Superior Weaponization Team (N.S.W.T.) captured my father. Killian Grayeson Killstar was a hero among many heroes, the youthful, energetic powerhouse could absorb and sustain quantum's of energy that would make a nuclear reactor look mundane in comparison. With the touch of an electrically charged finger, he could generate electricity for an entire metropolitan city for years on end with little to no debility. There was almost no limit to what he could do. My father was also gifted with a vast understanding of the world and how everything in the universe is connected. He could sense any source of energy no matter how small, from any distance; that’s how he kept us alive and on the run for so long.
My mother and father met while attending a Neu Anti-Superior Rally in Washington. The protest went as well as it could go until protesters started to openly brag about acts of barbarism they had taken against Superiors. The Superior who called himself Fire-Kracker got fired up and let off a rainfall of explosions that ripped into the protesting activists. My father was quick to react and absorbed most of the destructive pressure but was forced to stop his blitzkrieg by clapping back at Fire-Kracker in a situation with a double-edged sword, Killian saved countless victims. It wasn’t enough the final outcome of the opposing movement left 10 dead, including the high aristocratic NAZI leader who led the rally against Superior Kind. He was dispatched on orders to oversee the Anti-Superior rally from Neu Germany itself, the splenetic, sickly, Nazi doctor, Josef “Angel of Death” Mengele. Right after his demise, Neu Germany demanded retribution, enacting martial law they flooded the streets of Neu America with ‘Tiger 11 tanks, deplorable war-machines meant for mass annihilation, and foot soldiers that paraded up and down the sidewalks invading homes and businesses, hunting and executing Superiors or their affiliates. Any Superiors who surpassed the White Level, on the Neu Superior National Power Rating, was either given the choice to join the Neu Regime or be gunned down on sight. With the events that had taken place at the rally, my father’s name made headlines; he soon became the world-wide poster boy for the advancement of Neu Germany’s ideology. Fear Neu’s Network and Superior Neu’s International were calling him a hero to Neu Germany’s cause and he was fabled to become the equivocal influence of what Winston Churchill was to England, and helped promote the enlistment of strong young men an
d women into the classes of the Neu Germany’s Kill Squads. In the eye of the public, Killian convincingly acted the part of a Neu German advocator and patriot, but in secrecy, he had his eyes set on opposing the Neu Reich and ending the oppression of Hitler’s tyranny.
Months later, Killian married my mother and together they founded The Minutemen with the support of many Superiors, their sympathizers and classified connections. A few months later, with the help of an inside official, he obtained knowledge about a confidential organization said to covertly run the government. Shortly following, my father learned of my mother’s pregnancy and they both walked away from everything involving the Minutemen. Without the leadership of my father, the Legion separated into several radical factions across the world with different beliefs and methods of committing acts of justice. By the early 2000s, The Minutemen and all its affiliates was branded a global terrorist organization by Hitler the 2nd, and the persecution of non-registered Superiors and their sympathizers had become a No.1 agenda item by the Neu Superior Political Registry. Eden and Killian were placed at the top of the Neu World Leaders Most Wanted and was actively hunted by the full might of the world’s governments. Forced to move from trailer park to trailer park, we would change identities and often start new lives more times than I have fingers and toes.
The things Eden could do rivaled that of even Killian’s Superior-Ability, but it was not her magic that amazed me. It was her humanity, her charity for forgiveness, kindness and sympathy, the empathy she had for everyone including her enemies, an endless reservoir of compassion that called for nothing less than adoration. In many ways, she was more human than 95% of the world’s population. When I was a child, she would use her Superior gifts to amuse me for hours on end, by constructing tiny ballerina figurines made of pure white energy, dinosaurs made from pure essence. They would dance, spin, roar and rampage with the grace and benevolence of wonder, the demonstrations leaving me transfixed and in awe.
