Chapter Six:

  The Punk

  “I've seen it all in a dream

  I know just how it's gonna feel

  Like not to be alive anymore

  I'll be dead by X-mas now anyway

  Tell me will you remember me that day”

  -Hanoi Rocks

  Once again, Freddy saw the “right” answers before him but refused. He saw the path that they lay before him as if it were a red carpet, as if he should be oh, so grateful that they knelt down to eye level as if he were a child, as if he didn’t tower over most people he met. He could always taste the rot hidden in tainted fruit. Freddy was born defiant, knew he was gay before he knew what sex was and never shied away from it, from who he knew he was.

  Freddy had turned his bigoted old man into a decent one, though it took time and pain. Freddy wasn’t afraid of pain, grown to appreciate it maybe even loved it in fact, from bar fights to mosh pits. They were angry and belligerent. Soon after Freddy had convinced his father to accept them, Fredrick Sr., was on his death bed with colon cancer.

  After his death the drinking and fighting got bad, Freddy ending up alienating himself, that and the politics around that time were starting to boil. A bad night fighting off Nazi’s on the streets of Phoenix and Freddy found himself being violently arrested and then made an example of in the courts by a Judge who belonged to one of the more extreme Christian sects. For his radical homosexuality and being a danger to society he was sent to one of the new education camps that had been popping up in abandoned office buildings bought out by the US government.

  There he lay for the last two years, being fed through a tube, while his body, squeezed inside a haptic sensory deprivation tank, where forced into virtual reality he would be taught to follow a set path he refused to step on. Or else be punished in a forever nightmare where memories and time become a drugged soup.

  Freddy was visiting home from...college? He couldn’t remember, only knew he was coming home to visit. Right, it was Christmas time. There was bright plastic candy colored lights around an idyllic brick house. My house. A thought whispered to Freddy. He tried to think how he got here but couldn’t remember. He was in the driveway but saw no cars, looked around the street and saw no trash, saw house after house, cookie.

  A Demure, sapped, black women appears or was standing in the neighbors yard. Pleated skirt and forgettable blouse, holding cupcakes. She smiles at him, walks over. Wide smile and sparking eyes, he thinks of a mother’s warm hug. She complements him, touches his shoulder, flirty and magnetic, sick electricity like being radiated. Metallic tongue. Freddy slaps the tupperwared desert she offers hard to the ground, curses her, spits, punches, screams runs.

  Freddy, visiting home from college for Christmas. Looks around the outside of… his House.

  Sees no cars, no people.

  Hot, heart beating in his mind doesn’t match the one in his chest as he puts his arm to it.

  He turns quickly expecting, a women, a lover, his mom. But no.

  He turns to the left but arrives straight in front of the door, a door with a wreath, his door, father’s wreath. His father is there, door open, hugs, happy reds and greens. Fake tree, fake life, fake mom.

  “Who the fuck is this bitch?” Freddy asks his father, a tinge of regret running down his spine. The aggression coming bubbling from a suppression unrealized in the moment.

  On Christmas Freddy was home. His Father opened the door and introduced his new girlfriend. Freddy wanted to run, to fight the taste of peppermint stuck in his mouth like mercury coating, matrix, migraine.

  His Father explains how every man should have a women by his side, how that was the nature of things. Didn’t mention mom, Mary. Never forget Mary. Mother. Jesus. Christmas.

  Dad’s invited the the nice neighbor girl to come for dinner, then church. I yell, “Go Fuck Yourself!” and lose my voice.

  Freddy sits at the family dinner table staring at ghosts and monsters, He touches his face and has no mouth, looks down and finds arms attached to the unmovable chair. His eyes bulge and veins pop in his neck and temples but the airless sounds of twinkling EKG holiday tunes, devils whispering backwards, and the forced mansplaining of his ghost in a shell dad telling him how Men and Women are made, by God, to come together and have a family.

  The music detunes and the shadows grow longer as the conversation shifts into something ugly. He sees his father crying doesn’t remember ever seeing his father cry. Cancer, acceptance. Freddy’s Father is weeping for his son’s sins. Now they are all praying, a house full of familial ghosts praying for his soul.

  “Dear Lord, please help my son free himself from his sinful bondage” A crack of thunder pounds through Freddy’s bones, He thinks of Damian, his raccoon eye liner and pure spirit, he feels screws tighten pining through muscles and nerve. The Ghosts Continue, “Help me Lord proclaim a message that has the power to free my boy from the bondage of their suicidal love affair with themselves. Show him a new life in your light” His father’s face became young and twists into Freddy’s own face with hollowed out eyes and no heart or soul.

  “Concerning His Son, you were born of the seed of David according to the flesh. Do not be deceived neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality will inherit the kingdom of God. Burn will You in Fires of Hell!” The room erupted into explosion as the skin seared from Freddy’s flesh splitting and protruding flesh sacks of slick, wet, gray nothing, and blackness fills his insides.

  He is only a black hole of sin and misery, or that’s what the voices whisper to him in Freddy’s own voice. Malakoi. It screeches. Malakoi. It calls him. Malakoi! He screams within.

  Freddy, stared at the Christmas lights of a fake house, for the last time. He felt so close to breaking but didn’t truly realize it because his mind was wavering from the stress induced to it through volts of electric shock. He felt tired and had flashes of old memories but they were too distorted. Voices tried to break into his mind. He thought of going to church for the first time as a young boy, being invited by neighborhood friends to a Lutheran confirmation class. Then saw him in flames, blood, a tall grandfather clock, a young bloodied boy dying on the street, a noose, a cabin, words that when spoken cracked glass shards that sliced through his stomach into his liver.

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  The lights twinkled as his father stood in the door, smiling in anger, tears of blood.

  A bright light blinded Freddy and he awoke to feel weaker and more alive than he had in so, so long.

  Some time before

  Maria didn’t think of herself as a hero she only wanted to help, she was a nurse, it was her job. After the small town hospital she worked at had closed down and she had lost her job. A private tech company messaged her about a job offer with a high salary, when the email had come in she thought it was spam, she still thought that after a text message. It wasn’t until Maria had a phone call with a nice women explaining how the hospital had sent such nice words of recommendation, which seemed odd for them. She told Maria how desperate they were for Nursing staff especially with her years of experience and history with the military, back when the US. still allowed women in the military.

  At first it seemed strange and exciting working at a high-tech medical research facility. She signed the NDAs and watched the vitals of the young college aged participants while they sat in the large machines.

  Maria was told it had something to do with virtual reality and mental illness. She began to notice that it seemed it was always the same people, like they never left year after year. She never talked to them, and they were always in those large machines when she arrived. Still there when she left.

  Maria had never even seen their faces, their bodies, only watched EKG meters, trusting the machine’s vitals, and only notifying of changes. Taking down stats and filling out paperwork throughout the night, then passing it over to Dr. Taylor, if he was there, otherwise it would be Dr. Smith or Dr. Perkins when they got in for the morning shift.

  The Facility was an old dentist’s office on the edge of a small town, it’s back towards an ugly heavy Forest. Inside a waiting room with a receptionist during the day and a guard at night, both watching the badge locked double doors that lead into the nurses’ station which hugged a large hallway. Down the hallway four rooms sat parallel to each other each filled with five patients, inside pods. Maria was in charge of rotating between these four of the five patient rooms during the overnight.

  Dr. Taylor’s office, perpendicular, was at the very end of the hallway. Next to the other doctor’s offices and the lab, which was off limits. Across from the Lab was the fifth room, also off limits, to Maria. It was the other nurse, Sam, whose sole job was to monitor that room.

  It was usually empty and quiet for Maria during her shifts, besides Sam and the security guard. Scientists would occasionally lurk the halls, but that was usually at the bookends of her shift. Dr. Taylor would often stay sequestered in his own office or be off doing hell knows what. Maria found him strange, definitely military but too friendly, and off.

  Moments ago, one of the machines glitched out, went dark.

  Maria was standing near it, whistling a song to herself, when the screen flickered. The blue racing stripe lights of the white potato shaped human holder, blinked on and off with chaos. Maria had never seen this before. It was then she heard the scream from inside. It took a great effort for Maria to open the egg and inside she found horror.

  Maria found an older looking women, aged with deep wrinkling scars full of trauma costumed as a college aged student. She stared out curious, with full blacked out shiny eyes before shrieking at Maria. Maria fell back and watched as the woman leaped up from the bed onto atrophied legs that snapped like twigs as they landed on the edge to which she fell forward hitting the carpeted ground face first. Her neck snapped back in a similar sickly crack to her ankles. As her feeding tube was pulled taut it yanked and pulled out from her throat. Maria tried to calm to them, stop them from hurting themselves and get them to face her, with weakness they croaked.

  “Stay back, don’t touch me. I...I don’t love you. I love men. I’m... no Malakoi.”

  Maria held the women as she died and like a curtain lifted she saw the horrors that were hidden in plain sight. She went to the doctor.

  “Maria, sweetheart, been a while. How goes the rounds? Notice anything that needs reporting?” Dr. Taylor asked as Maria entered his office.

  “Don’t you sweetheart me! What is it that’s really going on here?! Somebody just woke up and started screaming at me. She looked tortured, she, she died in my arms.” Maria had tears falling, the womens face etched into the back of their eyes.

  “Maria, I’m.. I am so sorry you had to see that Maria. It’s hard when a patient doesn’t respond to treatment the way we hope.” Dr. Taylor offered with cold empathy, “Why don’t you take the rest of the day off and I’ll set up a referral to someone you can talk to.”

  “But Doctor, I thought we were treating mental health…I..”

  “Wrong! Maria, wrong. Sit!” Dr. Taylor interrupted and commanded to which Maria listened and sat in a chair near the front of the desk. “We are treating sin, Mrs. Rodriguez.” Dr. Taylor continued, “Mental Health has become a woke term for weak leftist medicine built on commie propaganda, to prepare American children to become an army for The Devil. Soon the President himself will name me a saint for curing the world of homosexuality, with science or death. Now, do you have a problem with that Mrs. Rodriguez?”

  “It’s wrong.” She said quietly.

  “Rodriguez, huh? Mexican. Immigrant. Have you been experiencing temptations, Maria? Maybe you need to see someone right away. I’m sure we’re well equipped to help you, with your… ‘Mental Health’.” He spat.

  “I agree with you doctor, I…I just need the day off to rest, is all. To…” Maria began to stand up and was about to make her way to the door and leave.

  “No, I think you should stay, you need help.” Dr Taylor opened a desk drawer and pulled a heavy black handgun out, pointed it at Maria. “treatment or death? You choose Mrs. Rodriguez.” Maria saw the weakness of infallible arrogance in Dr. Taylor, a fake superiority that was easy to spot and exploit, more so when he came near enough to touch her, Maria with unexpected ferocity fought the gun away from him, bashing his head in with a large paper weight in the process.

  Dr. Taylor lay on the ground, a large gash in his head quickly staining the carpet with his life. Maria didn’t want him to die, though if he did that to those kids then maybe he deserved it. Maria went to behind the desk, saw his laptop open to an email. She read…

  Dr. Taylor,

  How was the vacation? Lovely photos of you and your wife by the beach, especially your wife. Hope we’ll be expecting another boy soon, we’re always in need of more men like you!The second “delivery” has begun work and been shown their cabins in camp. Some issues with soldiers talking back but most seem to be enjoying the “reenactments.” I think if we build better quarters for them we’d see an improvement. Making it into a town like they did seems likely next steps, but the on-site lab you’ve drawn up is top priority. Deliveries will be ramping up so we’ll have plenty of workers soon. When can we expect more soldiers? Current count is 15:35.

  Come visit soon, I know you’re busy but it’s only through the forest to grandma’s house and I gave you such a nice ATV just sitting out back. Come down and we’ll have a good time!

  God bless America

  -SGT Micheal Bradely

  Maria looked through a file of photos in a folder only labeled by dates, she then took the ash tray back into her hand and crushed Dr. Taylor’s head into bones and paste.

  Maria wiped her face, and grabbed the gun and badge. She figured that the most recent patients would be in a state most likely to be woken up and still be helpful. Maria found that her wards were some of the oldest, her 5 years in the dark she now knew this was not a revolving door of willing participants but actually a forced conversion camp with kidnapped test subjects.

  Now, she walked the hall towards the most recent victims armed with the key card needed to free them one by one.

  Maria felt a lightness and assurance in her heart. When she touched the small gold cross she wore on her neck, she knew this was what God truly wanted.

  As the first pod opened, a young man named Johnathon stood confused and began to cry, but listened to what Maria told him and it all made sense. It was soon enough for him, so they awoke the others hoping for allies. Not realizing what some had become, what had taken over.