Medicine by TheMightyKhan

Medicine

TheMightyKhan, Black, Bluegrass, Character Development, Compassion, Controversial, Crime, Criminal, Dark, Death, Depression, Fear, Feral, Forest, Grim, Guns, Hate, Love, M/F, Massacre, Mild Violence, Modern, No-Yiff, Plot Development, Prejudice, Realism, Realistic, Revenge, Short Story, Solitude, Sorrow, Suicide, Tiger, Tigress, Vengeance, Violence, Violence (Not In Yiff), White, alone, america, blue eyes, brutal, combat, controversy, darkness, engineer, firearms, genocide, gritty, guilt, hard, hunter, kentucky, kill, killing, kkk, klansmen, ku klux klan, machinegun, murder, nazi, psychopath, racism, racist, rifles, sociopath, south, suicidal, wilderness

#7 of One Shots

Medicine

(This story is not sexually explicit; however, it's not recommended for children. Adult themes, foul language, violence, and other inappropriate material may be present throughout, so read at your own discretion. The author will not be held responsible for a lack of responsibility on the reader's part.

No one is allowed to take credit for this work apart from me. If you want to use it somehow, I would appreciate it if you were to get in touch with me first.)

(This story is roughly normal for me in terms of dark and depressing themes, and there are parts that are disturbing and somewhat brutal. There is no extremely gory violence or torture, though. The level and ferocity of combat depicted is about the same as what you might see in any action flick.

Another word of caution--there is frequent use of strong language in this piece. I wouldn't call it wanton, as every instance in which an inappropriate word is used is justified by the plot and the scene I'm trying to convey. But if you're seriously offended by foul language, watch out.

This piece will play into stereotypes about the American South and the people who live there, but you'll see that no offense is meant. Also, I'm adopting a new break scheme--one horizontal rule can be thought of as the end of one chapter and the beginning of another, and two horizontal rules can be thought of as the end of one part and the beginning of another.

I don't want to give much more away, but I will say that I doubt that anyone has done a furry story anything like this ever before. Now then, let's rock and roll.)

Suggested Music: Burzum: Glemselens Elv, Erblicket die Tochter des Firmaments, Die Liebe Nerthus, The Crying Orc, Det Som En Gang Var; Gorgoroth: Carving a Giant, Begravelsesnatt, Procreating Satan, Katharinas Bortgang, Will to Power; Agalloch: Kneel to the Cross on the Wall, You Were But a Ghost in My Arms, A Celebration for the Death of Man...

Suggested Drinks: Bourbon, moonshine, sweet iced tea, mint julep

Suggested Eats: Pulled pork sandwiches, biscuits, coleslaw, grits, steak fries, rhubarb pie, ribs, fried/barbecued chicken, cornbread

Suggested Smokes: Don't smoke! It's bad for you!

Fires burned in that old, forgotten corner of Kentuckian wilderness, and they were why it didn't quite smell late. The sharp scent of flaming black cherry wood rapidly billowed outward, upward, and in all directions because the fires themselves were large.

The cross, after all, was ten feet tall. And the swastika was seven feet by seven. The bonfire behind them had taken hours to build but when flame had been applied to it, every shred of the hundreds of pounds of gasoline-soaked wood caught fire in an instant.

What light the moon would have provided was blotted out by clouds. No more than a dull whitish haze reached the ground, but the men that looked into the fires did not notice this as they raised their arms into the air and chanted their slogans, over and over and over again.

"White power!" they called. The formed their hands into the vicious scythe of the Nazi salute and shouted phrases to the praise of Adolf Hitler, a man condemned even by others that shared their views on heritage and race and supremacy.

They didn't care, though. They rarely cared about how fake organizations viewed them, and that night, they cared even less. Because that night, they were mad. They had been attacked, and those responsible for the attack would pay, dearly... in blood.

There were more than a hundred of them, from all across the county. There were many more in other parts of Kentucky and the US at large, and there were even a few chapters abroad in Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia. But the gathering that night was an emergency, and so the only ones that had attended were those who lived nearby.

They were all male, and they were all "Aryan"--of northern, western, and eastern European heritage. While their organization didn't explicitly condemn or oppose southern Europeans, many of their members did, so it was simply good politics to suggest that any Italians or Spaniards interested in joining up were best off elsewhere. These men looked down on anyone without blue or green eyes and red, blonde, or brown hair--Hitler himself would have had a hard time fitting in among them; not a single person attending the gathering that night was anything but a Nordic, Slavic, or Celtic archetype.

They were all angry, too. And they were all armed. Those of them who didn't have rifles in their hands had handguns at their sides, and now and then, chatters of gunfire would pierce the night as bullets tore through the air. These violent displays of outrage were ubiquitously followed by explicit calls to violence against various entities--but in particular, the county's significant black population.

Their pale faces twisted with bloodlust as the minutes wore on. The red and orange flames consuming the pile of wood didn't quite match the hate in their hearts except for when a piece of wood shifted or twisted or snapped and broke. Then, angry clouds of magenta sparks would belch forth, as if spat from the fire--and although those displays didn't last long, they always drew cheers and roars from the surrounding crowd.

In time, the ground itself grew hot from the fire and the activity--few of the men were able to stand still for long. Those who didn't pace walked about and talked to friends and made new ones, and the few who didn't do even that sat on a series of benches some yards off from the fires and whittled or drank or smoked, staring into the fires with murder on their faces, in their hearts, in their eyes.

Some of them were old, to be sure, but many of the New Ku Klux Klan's members were young, and why not? Xenophobia and religious bigotry had slowly but surely risen when the economy failed to get back on track although years had passed--quickly, those that could offer food and shelter and clothing found that they had a great deal of sway indeed over the fringe elements of the American population.

And America, as far as they could see, was a dying country--and while a lot of the blame lay with white race traitors, there was no doubt at all that Mexicans, niggers, Jews, Muslims, chinks and all other kinds of minorities were overwhelmingly at fault for the fall of the US.

For the moment, the NKKK was just a fringe group that hadn't even been on national television yet. They'd appeared out of practically nothing just two years before, when a few friends had rallied around one leader, one man with a vision and the experience and expertise to save the dying white race. They'd failed to assert themselves even at the state level; most of the people that were aware that the large plot of land recently purchased from the state was now used as a practical training camp by the NKKK simply assumed that Klansmen were dumb, unwashed hicks with too much free time and not enough teeth.

How wrong they were.

It was true that many of the people that joined the group out of desperation rather than ideology were poor and stupid and weak. But the NKKK was not an organization that gave without expecting to receive anything in return--no, they forced their members to study and exercise and control their vices. They had lawyers, engineers, doctors, and business owners in their ranks already, and there were plans to fund the group's youngest members' college educations.

There was nothing funny or weak about them. All of their members were required to own and practice with firearms, and all forms of misconduct directed at other whites were severely punished. There was talk of starting a female corollary to the group, but the place of a woman was in the home, teaching and raising and readying the next generation of Aryan soldiers for war. They were so serious that already they'd created contingency plans for everything--nuclear war, military attack, natural disaster, or the sort of political and social upheaval that would force them to give up on the US for good.

But that night, there was no talk of the distant future. There was no discussion about the superiority of the Aryan race--of the beauty of white women, of the fine angles God carved into the Aryan face, of the physical and mental and spiritual prowess of white people from America to Britain to Germany to Russia. There was no discussion about anything but the violence that had been done earlier that night.

The police hadn't said a word about it, but there was no doubt in any of their minds. A white family had been killed; beaten and shot while being robbed of all its worldly possessions--and so everyone knew that it was a Negro who had done it. It was a filthy, stinking, depraved nigger, or a pack of the monkeys, high on drugs or drunk or simply acting out the twisted fantasies they saw in their rap videos, hooting and scratching their armpits and grooming one another for bugs the whole time.

White blood had been spilled, and therefore justice had to be dealt. And every drop of white blood was a fluid so rare and pure and precious that it would take a gallon of Negro blood to compensate for it.

These were the thoughts that were in their minds, but they would not act on them--at least, not until they had the explicit approval of their leader, and precise instructions on what to do. Many of them desired the idea of splitting up into squads and storming through the nigger town, the ghetto not far from the scene of the killing--but others weren't content with that. Some of them whispered that this was the last straw and that the time had come to start an all-out war against the federal government, against the fags and minorities, and against the whites that opposed them.

Some time had passed, by then, and although the fires still burned as strong as the hate in their hearts, some of them began to wonder where their leader was. Some of them began to question, some of them asked if something else had happened--and they all knew that if their leader had been hurt, there would be no holding back the wave of rage that would spring forth and wash out the nigger stain not thirty miles from them. They would go to war that night if they had to.

And then, rapidly, it grew silent. Apart from occasional calls of "white power", the Klansmen said nothing. Those that were seated stood up to watch as a figure, clad in white from head to toe, made its way through the crowd.

The tension in the air was so strong and thick that it could have been cut by a knife. Not a cricket chirped, not an owl hooted, and even the smell of the fire seemed to lessen in their nostrils although the sounds of the flames were still audible. Quiet snaps, sporadic cracks, and the more occasional hiss that came when a trapped bubble of air or water was released eerily made their way through the gathered men. And they watched, as the Grand Wizard of the New Ku Klux Klan walked toward the three fires still sending flame and smoke and heat into the night sky.

He wasn't alone, though. There was a man at his side--no, a boy. Although he was tall, he was a bit lanky and moved a bit uncertainly as if he hadn't quite grown into his body yet. Perhaps it was because he was scared to be in such a crowd at such an hour at such a time, but that didn't seem likely. He didn't walk as if he was nervous or frightened--no, he moved mechanically, as if he was a zombie. It was as if he was dead, and it was the Wizard who was acting as his mind by holding him around the shoulders and standing him up straight so that they all could see him.

His heritage was German, perhaps, or west Slavic. But there was no doubt that he was Aryan to the core--even in the darkness, it was clear that his eyes were the palest shade of blue. Even though those who looked at him struggled to see more than a silhouette before the fire saw his eyes glinting in the night with an emotion that was as dangerous as theirs.

True, his skin wasn't as pale as that of a Celtic man's, but he was far from being olive-skinned. His complexion could have been that of a fair Mexican's--but his hair was blond. It wasn't straw or platinum colored, although it may have been when he was younger. Rather, it was a sandy shade that could not be achieved with dye or bleach. He was one of them for sure--but why was he standing there, with his hands hanging at his side, calmly looking at the Klan as if he couldn't care less about who they were or what they stood for?

And then the Wizard began to speak. He wasn't a tall man, but he was big, with a tough barrel chest and a thick neck and hands capable of tearing apart soda cans. His voice, paradoxically, was soft and a bit scratchy--it was actually quite dissonant, although all of the Klansmen had grown used to it. They all knew that what mattered was the meaning of his words, not the unpleasant way that they were delivered.

"Ya'll've heard about what happened earlier tonight," he called. "A white family got killed... beaten up, and shot, not twenty miles from here. Now, the police don't know who done it," he said, pausing, briefly, for a moment of bitter, dark laughter, "but all of us do. It was a bunch of niggers, fellas... fuckin' pond scum, stinkin' niggers."

He played off the general sense of disgust rising in the crowd by raising his hand in the Nazi salute and shouting "white power". A moment later, the gesture was reciprocated by every man present, and so the leader adjusted the white sleeves of his robe and crossed his arms over his chest. He was the only one who wore the traditional uniform of the KKK that night, and so the amount of respect and reverence and near-worship given to him was greater than ever. Everyone present was hanging off of his every word... except for that strange blonde boy at his side.

"Now I know what ya'll are thinking," the Wizard said, "but I've done some thinking myself. We're not liftin' a finger against the niggers, brothers." He paused, briefly, and gauged the shocked gasp that the crowd collectively took. It was surprised and brief and sudden but there was no treachery in it--his rule over the Klan was not in jeopardy.

Good. But still, he had some explaining to do.

"I want to go into that ghetto and tear them up as bad as any of you," the Klan leader admitted, "but to win this race-war, we have got to be smart. The police know who we are, and even though they don't got a clue about what we do or what we're all about, they're gonna know whose doors to come knocking on if anything happens."

"So let them," one particularly angry, young voice in the crowd called. "We're ready for war, brother Matthew--we want to go to war. We're sick of retreating--let's just do it tonight. White power!"

A significant number of the gathered men quietly repeated the two-word chant, if reflexively--but at least some of the crowd seemed to support what the young Klansman suggested. And so the leader let a moment pass, as if he was thinking heavily on the matter again. For that tense moment, there was no sound, not even of breathing--even the fire itself seemed to have been muted as the NKKK waited for their leader to order them to war.

"No , brother Joseph. We're ain't ready and there ain't enough of us, either. Maybe we can keep the police off our backs, but if the National Guard comes out here, how long do you think we're gonna last? A week, maybe?" He paused again.

"Besides, the police around here are good guys; the white race has got a few friends on the force. I give it a month before they get every nigger that was part of it in jail for life, or executed. There ain't no sense in acting when we don't have to--let the police do their job, brothers, so that we can keep preparin' while we can."

The wizard's words made sense. Although the sheer emotion engendered by being in such a group made them all feel invincible, they knew that with only a few thousand members across the US, they didn't stand a chance against the government if things went to Hell before they were ready for it. If they attacked--much less that night itself--they would all be dead or behind bars before the Sun rose over the horizon again.

And so they were silent. They waited for Matthew to speak again, but he didn't, and so they began to look at the boy at his side. Who could he be; none of them had ever seen him before. What was he doing here, in such a secret place at such a grim time? And why did Matthew have his arm around his shoulders, as if he was a person... of... great... interest...?

Now, they were starting to understand why he stood there with his shoulders slumped and his eyes glazed over. Now, they were starting to understand why he looked like a being that was at the end of its life and not the beginning.

"This right here is brother Alex Kralik," the Wizard announced. "And from now on, he's gonna be one of us. Now, he don't know all of our ways just yet, but he's gonna learn. And until then, he's gonna be respected and treated just like any other brother; is that understood?" He paused. "Boy's been through a tough time, brothers... not too many of us lost our parents before we turned seventeen."

The Wizard's hand had never left young Alex Kralik's shoulder. His grip might have been called comforting if it wasn't quite so heavy and hard and firm, but in his state, Alex didn't notice any of those things. All he registered was that there was someone at his side, guiding and assisting him. Even when the Wizard gave him a nudge so that he was forced to step forward to keep his balance, he couldn't help but stare blankly into the night sky and think.

Three hours ago, he had been a normal teenager. He had played videogames, hunt and fished with his father, and shopped and talked about life with his mother. He'd been a somewhat quiet kid, but he'd had no doubts that he'd make friends as soon as school started up and he was around people his own age again. He'd struggled to get a driver's license and SATs had been on his mind--and then, three hours ago, his world had collapsed.

Even then, Alex was numb. He could only recall the vaguest, blurriest flashes of image and sound: blood and shouts and screams and gunshots. He had been in his room when it had happened--he had heard them enter and beat his parents and demand money and assets. He had felt his blood curdle when they cut his mother right in front of his father, and he had searched for a weapon for a full minute before he decided that he had to do something before they killed his parents out of simple frustration.

He had run down, then, and he had seen their dark faces and the hate in their eyes. He had seen and heard the guns as they fired, at least twenty times, and he had felt the slugs strike his parents, tearing them from their lives and their son. He had fallen to his knees when that had happened and had only vaguely registered that the ones responsible were leaving, running out of the front door and jumping into a car and driving away.

After that, he'd called the police, and explained what had happened so calmly and with such shocking detachment that several times, the 911 operator asked if he was serious. Everything after that was a blur--he was cuffed and then released and then taken to the station anyway and then he had found his way into a truck with a strange man. And then he had watched, with nothing apart from curiosity, as that man put on white robes and boots and a steep, pointed hood.

The entire drive from town to... wherever he was now, was not memorable. The man--now standing with his arms folded behind Alex--had tried to talk to him a few times, and then he had given up and simply placed his hand on the boy's shoulder from time to time. Alex barely realized that, because the whole ride, he was just reliving things--all sorts of things. His childhood, the happy memories he'd made with his parents, their smiles, their laughter, the warm feeling he experienced when they expressed their love verbally.

There were more specific things he remembered, too. And more recent things--like the way his mother screamed when they ran a knife through her arm, and the way his father never surrendered his dignity. He remembered the way his heart hammered at his chest so powerfully he was sure that his ribs would shatter, and he remembered the staccato chatter of their weapons, and the flowery explosions that even then overlay pulsating patches of yellow over his vision, and the blood and bits of bone and the bodies of his father, and his mother, dead on the floor right in front of him.

He winced, then, perhaps noticeably--and he realized that he was no longer in his house. He was in a forest in the middle of nowhere, with a swastika and a cross burning behind him and a hundred pale, hateful faces before him. The anger and the intent in their eyes frightened him and for a moment, he wanted nothing more than to leave.

But he couldn't leave. Well--certainly, he could leave, but then what? His parents were gone, he had no friends or relatives that might take care of him, and he was a legal minor to boot. He could wander around for a while, he supposed, but he couldn't dodge the foster home system or the call of drugs or eternal poverty forever. If he left that forest, and those angry white faces, he might as well tell the morgue to prepare another grave alongside his parents'.

For a moment, Alex was very sad. In fact, he cried--he'd just lost his parents, after all, and now it looked like he would have to do things so twisted and vile and wrong that they would squirm in their graves and wonder if they'd taught him anything in their brief sixteen years together. Tears as hot as blood began to stream down his cheeks, and then he realized that the pale faces in the crowd were no longer just in front of him. They were all around him, not five feet away and in some cases much closer than that indeed.

Again Alex was afraid. After all, he could see that they were dangerous men, and angry, and armed. But then he realized that they weren't angry at him and that they were so close to him because they had their hands on his shoulders. He saw through the more fiery of their emotions, then, and saw that they were sad as well--they were sad for him. They were sympathetic to him, because... he was their brother.

They weren't saying anything, and there was so little motion that Alex could actually watch the flames behind him flicker in their eyes. He could feel the heat of the fires on his back--they were so hot that he was sweating, a little bit--and he could see the trees beyond them and the stars above them. He could sense their emotions, somehow, and so he realized that he wasn't doing anyone any good by standing there and crying.

Alex swallowed, then. He tried to clear his throat, but he failed, and so he simply took in a deep breath and dried his eyes with a sleeve. As the sweetly-scented forest air entered his lungs, he forced past the sadness and the sorrow and the guilt and the loss and the hurt in his soul, and focused on finding emotion. He had it within seconds, and within a few more seconds, he'd stoked the first few embers of hate into a fire a thousand times as bright and hot as deadly as the flames behind him.

He raised his hand into the air and aimed it above the forest and past the clearing, past the crowd, past the confines of Earth and life itself. And then he opened his mouth and began to shout.

"White power!" he called.

"White power!" the Klan called back.

"White power!" Alex called again, with greater vehemence.

"White power!" the Klan replied with greater intensity.

Alex didn't repeat the two-word chant again--he didn't need to. Instead, he lowered his hand and tightened his fingers into a fist and let the rock-like tool his appendage had formed itself into rest at his side. He looked around, meeting each man's eyes--he almost glared at all of them in turn, but they understood the searing heat of hate in his gaze.

Before the night was out, Alex knew each of the Klan's leaders by name and face. Before the week was out, Alex had met and spoken to every Klansman in the entire county, and before the month was out, Alex Kralik had talked four other boys his age into joining the NKKK

And before the year was out, Alex had shown his loyalty to his family and his Klan and his race by doing what so few other white supremacists ever did.

Alex's seventeenth birthday had come and gone. He'd celebrated it with the Klan, of course, and a select few friends from school whose opinions weren't settled when it came to issues of heritage and race. He'd visited his parents--in the cemetery--the first time he'd done so since just after the funeral. Matthew understood his pain, after all, but the last thing any of them wanted was for Alex to waste his days talking to people that couldn't talk back.

As Alex was a legal minor, he couldn't have lived alone if he'd wanted to, but that was alright. He lived on the Klan's land, in a sort of dormitory set up by Matthew for young white boys that had lost their way or needed a helping hand. The house and the land that his parents owned were held in trust by the Commonwealth of Kentucky; Alex would receive them when he turned eighteen. Until then, he a "fortunate" orphan--one that had captured the heart of an adult with an income and the desire to take him in.

Under the close watch of his brothers--Klan leaders, middle-aged men, and peers his own age--Alex had read and studied. He had read and studied the kind of things they didn't teach you in school: for example, he'd essentially memorized Mein Kampf and he'd experienced every other word the Führer had written or spoken. He'd watched documentaries, he'd picked apart manifestos and diaries and biographies that in many cases weren't available even on the Internet--some of the best material out there about the movement was kept secret, and only handed down from father to son or from leader to follower.

Alex had learned everything he could, though, and he'd learned it well. Now he knew not to trust chinks and Indians, much less Jews, niggers, Muslims, and Mestizos. He knew better that to let even the shadow of a nigger come in contact with his food, and he knew that the blood that flowed in his veins was a fluid so sacred and pure that to spill it was to commit a crime against God Himself.

He knew better than anyone that sacred blood had been spilled. He knew it, because he had been there when it had happened, when those depraved apes had filled his parents' bodies with le fire and smoke and lead. Their faces were burned into his mind, although they had all been wearing masks at the time: every time his mind wandered he could see their thick noses, stealing all the white man's air; their evil, dark eyes and their hatefully black, leathery skin.

Alex had been to the police station--he didn't know how many times. He'd given a dozen accounts of the events, he's described the "suspects" to the last detail, and he had pleaded with the officers to do something to see that justice was done. But justice hadn't been done, and many in the Klan had suspected that that was how it would end up from the beginning. Alex hadn't gotten a clear view of the niggers' faces, and no one from the ghetto was saying a word. The police had no leads to go on, and without DNA fragments, fingerprints, or any other evidence to go on, the case would be left open forever.

Alex hadn't been told this, of course. But there was no denying that this was the case. Matthew and a few of Klan leaders had a great deal of respect in the county, despite their racist activities, and were close friends with some police officers. If anything was being done about the most serious crime in the area in some years, they would know about it. But months had passed without action or deliberation.

The fact that his parents' murderers would get away without punishment didn't strike him Alex at once--rather, it began to wear down on him over the course of several weeks. Every hour he spent doing homework or Klan-assigned reading, every minute he spent training with firearms or knives or his bare hands and feet, he felt the pain of undone justice deep in his gut.

He'd spoken about this to a few close friends in the Klan several times. He'd mentioned it to Matthew as well--after all, no Klansman had secrets from another Klansman. And even though the Grand Wizard of the NKKK had taken careful note of his words and promised to think on them more... nothing had come of that interaction. The days simply went on as they always did.

It was early in December when Matthew entered the boys' dorm across from his house. It was cold outside--just a few degrees above freezing--and so he was dressed warmly, although not quite as warmly as a nigger or Mestizo would have had to. All Matthew needed was a hoody, sized XXL to fit around his frame, and he was good to go. A baseball cap protected his head from the wind, as his hair was too short to keep him warm, and a pair of practical, fitted jeans completed the look of a man that was Christian, white, straight, middle-class American to the core.

The dorm itself was a fairly nice building--well insulated, well decorated (courtesy of Matthew's wife and other female friends of the Klan), and an overall friendly, happy place to be in. All of the boys got along, and the no drugs or alcohol policy wasn't enforced because it didn't need to be enforced. The place was kept clean and tidy, even though no adult members of the Klan bothered to do any sort of formal inspections--it simply seemed to be the case that those proud of their race took pride in other aspects of their lives as well.

Matthew made his way down the corridor, saying a few hellos on his way to Alex's room. Every boy he passed stood up the moment they saw him--but he simply gave them a smile each and waved them off. He was busy, and they could see that from a glance--but closer second looks told them that something serious was on his mind. There was an odd and somewhat frightening sort of determination on his face--in his posture itself, as he finally got to the door that led to Alex Kralik's room and knocked on it twice.

There was no answer--that was odd. Matthew stared at the painted wood surface, for a moment, and then he cleared his throat and said Alex's name.

There was still no answer. Matthew wasn't irritated--if anything, he was concerned. And so he reached out toward the door knob and was just about to open it when another boy approached him from the side.

"Hey there, brother Matthew," the boy said. He was another seventeen-year-old with a dark past. His parents hadn't been killed, however--no, they were just drunkards and drug addicts and who knew what else. He'd been born physically addicted to crack cocaine, and if he'd been taken in by anyone apart from a proud white community, there was no telling where he may have ended up.

And he knew that. And that's why there wasn't just respect in his eyes as he spoke to the Klan leader--but deep, powerful loyalty and love.

Matthew smiled, just a little, bringing light to his fair eyes that could only be invoked when he was speaking to an enlightened member of his race. "Hey, brother Danny," he said. "How're you doin' these days? You got that B in Chemistry pulled up to an A yet?"

"Well, just about," Danny said awkwardly. Matthew gave him a look, then, that wasn't harsh. It wasn't quite disappointed, either, but it made Danny flinch and feel guilt.

"We ain't had much besides homework since the last test," he explained. "But there's another big test next week, and I swear I'll do good on that, brother Matthew. I'm studying for it already."

"Glad to hear that," the older man grunted. He then remembered why he'd entered the dorm in the first place, and jerked his head at the door next to him.

"Say, you know where brother Alex is? He don't seem to be in right now..."

By the time Matthew was halfway through his sentence, Danny was grinning and nodding.

"He'll be out by the creek if he's not training, brother Matthew. Man, that boy's like obsessed with running and exercising and stuff--I can't even keep up with him. But it's just like I said--if he's not training again, he'll be out by that creek past the obstacle course. I can show you if you'd like," Danny offered.

For a moment, Matthew was seriously tempted to bring the other boy along. After all, he looked at all of the boys the Klan had taken in as his sons, and he couldn't show preference to one or the other. And yet...

"Not this time around, brother Danny," Matthew said. The boy hid his momentary sadness very well, but Matthew had known him for three years now and he knew Danny as well Danny knew himself.

"Listen, I'll tell you about it later. Right now, I have to talk to Alex Kralik and Alex Kralik alone."

Matthew looked at Danny for one more moment, until the boy nodded, smiled, and made his way back into his own room. After that, the light left Matthew's eyes again, and he left the dorm with a malevolence in his step that couldn't be mistaken for anything else in the world.

The obstacle course wasn't far from the clearing where Alex had first met the NKKK. The Klan held its large gatherings just five hundred yards from the final hurdles and stretches of barbed wire, past a creek and a forest and several underground rooms filled with food, illegal weapons, and enough ammunition to see the white race through the collapse of civilization.

Alex didn't know about those rooms, of course. Very few in the Klan did, outside of Matthew and the other founding members of the group. But very many in the Klan suspected that there was much more to that little corner of Kentuckian wilderness than met the eye, and Alex Kralik was one of them.

Right then, though, he wasn't thinking about what secrets Matthew and the other leaders of the NKKK might be keeping even from their loyal followers. He wasn't thinking about much at all, largely because he couldn't--he was breathing too hard, and sweating too much, and it took a great deal of concentration indeed for him to stay on his feet without visibly swaying.

He'd just finished running. Before that, he'd done other things, but he couldn't remember what they were. Maybe he'd done pullups, or crunches, or dips, or weightlifting--he couldn't remember. He could barely summon the mental capacity to stand, much less remember more than a few seconds into the past.

Maybe he'd overexerted himself. Maybe he'd been stupid--after all, it was fairly cold out, and now that his muscles weren't being worked and overworked the ambient temperature around Alex was beginning to plummet. If he wasn't careful, he could get quite sick and even pass out. And if that happened, no one was around to help him up--

"Don't know when to quit, eh, brother Alex?"

Alex would have jumped and turned on his heel if he wasn't so tired. As it was, merely turning around over the course of a second or two nearly overexerted his system again, and he had to blink for a few seconds to get his vision to clear.

But it did clear, and so Alex was shortly treated to the sight of Matthew walking through the forest to see him. Unconsciously, Alex immediately stood up a little straighter and forced himself to breathe a little slower. He wiped his brow with the sleeve of his shirt, and plastered an exhausted smile on his face.

"Hey, brother Matthew," the boy panted. "Sorry. I just... when I'm out here, pushing myself like this... I feel like if I'd've been doing this before, then maybe..."

For a moment, Alex's words didn't make much sense. But then, as he continued to trample across the several yards of branches and dry grass the separated them, Matthew understood what the boy was talking about.

"I wanted to talk to you about that, Alex. Why don't you take a seat right there on that log?" Matthew suggested. "You look like you need a rest, and besides, I got some pumpkin seeds." He smiled, then, and thought the rest of the words in his mind rather than saying them.

"And besides... you ought to be seated for what I'm about to tell you."

A few minutes had passed. Alex was breathing normally already, and although he couldn't precisely gauge his heart rate, he sensed that that too was normalized. It felt nice to give his exhausted muscles a rest, and besides, it was relaxing to sit there in the forest with Matthew, just sitting and chatting and alternating between cracking pumpkin seeds between his teeth and tasting the salty treats they held inside.

The air was just cold enough that when he and Matthew exhaled, their breathes condensed into semitransparent clouds of vapor in front of their faces. Soon, it would get colder still, and Alex and the boys would be able to have fires in their building every night of the week. It would be nice to sit there with his white brothers, drinking cider and just talking, or doing homework, or simply sitting there in silence.

It would be as it had been since the early days of the white race, when men and boys took shelter at night where it was warm and safe. It would be as it was meant to be--at least for those of the white race without fathers and families to call their own.

Alex remembered sitting with his father in front of the fire. He sat with his mother as well, on cold, dark winter nights, but he truly loved sitting there with his father. Sometimes they'd watch TV, sometimes they'd simply read. Sometimes they would talk to one another as well, but more often than anything else they would simply sit there, with the lights off, and listen to the wind and the snow outside while looking into whatever images the fire created for them.

These memories were all Alex had left of his father, and already he was terrified that he'd soon lose them, too. Already he could feel himself forgetting things--just how tall had his father been, exactly--and what about his mother? He remembered what she looked like, but what did she smell like--and what did her voice sound like? He could barely remember what she sounded like when she asked him how his day at school was, let alone what she sounded like when she told him she loved him, and only months had passed since he'd lost them. In the years of his life to come, would he remember his parents at all?

Alex didn't know the answer to those questions. In fact, he wasn't sure at all of what the future might bring. He always had the Klan, he knew, and his brothers--but what about him? How could he become a man when his childhood had ended sooner and far more abruptly than anyone could have imagined?

"You know, brother Alex, being out here with a boy like you... I tell ya, it makes me think that God ain't given up on the white race yet."

It was Matthew who said that, of course. Alex looked at the broad-shouldered man--their blue eyes met, then separated, as they individually returned to searching over the forest before them. Somehow, Matthew always knew what to say to stop Alex's thoughts from hitting even darker extremes--somehow, he knew how to bring Alex's mind away from a dark version of the future and back to the forest all around them.

The log they were sitting on was recently fallen. It wasn't at all rotted; it didn't yield an inch despite the almost four hundred pounds of weight placed upon it. Although it was brittle due to the cold, no splinters of wood broke off when they moved around and spoke, and although it had been dead for some weeks, its white-brown pattern was still healthy and vibrant.

Many of the other trees around them were similar in both color and nobility. They had stood, many of them, for much longer than Alex had been alive--some were older than even Matthew, and in many ways, they were like the white man. Despite the tangled bits of grass and fallen branches and insects all around them, they stood proud and tall and strong. They always reached toward the sky, and the Sun, regardless of what opposition they faced--they never gave up. And that was more than what could be said for a lot of white men and women in America and Europe alike.

Perhaps Alex's imagination was simply running wild, but that was another reason he enjoyed just being in the woods and sitting. It gave him a chance to relax and to think that he couldn't easily find anywhere else, regardless of who he was with. But being in the forest with Matthew, the man that had given him a home, hope, and purpose in life... Alex wouldn't trade his position for any other.

He paused, though. And then he turned to face the man at his side. Matthew was looking at him with an emotion in his eyes that Alex didn't understand--was something wrong? Alex didn't shave more often than once a week; perhaps the slight amount of fluff on his chin broke the NKKK's unofficial regulations for grooming? Or perhaps it was his hair--no, he'd just had it buzzed a week ago, and even then it wasn't more than a spiky inch in length. And Alex knew it wasn't his clothes--Matthew himself had bought them just after he'd brought Alex to the NKKK's land.

So what was it?

Matthew must have realized that Alex thought he was in trouble, then, because he grinned in a friendly manner and clapped the boy's far shoulder.

"I was just thinking, brother Alex," the big man said. "It's like I said--bein' out here with a boy like you makes me think God's still got hope for the white race. You're a real Aryan, kid--more than I was at your age; you know that?"

Alex almost solemnly shook his head. He could feel warmth on his face, and he knew that he was blushing. And thanks to his fair skin, there was no doubt that brother Matthew could see that very easily indeed.

Matthew grinned again. But this time, his grin was a bit more serious, a bit more thoughtful--it was more affectionate and considerate than a simple display of humor. He continued to look Alex up and down, then, and couldn't help but being continually impressed by what he saw.

"You're seventeen years old, brother, and you've got to be, what, six foot three already? You've got a cleft chin, blue eyes like the ocean, sandy hair like ripe wheat... how much are you benching these days, brother Alex?"

"Two hundred," the boy replied, sheepishly. "Five sets of five. It's not that much, brother Matthew--"

"It is for damn sure, Alex, when you're only a hundred and eighty pounds. I've seen you training, boy; don't be so self-conscious," Matthew said. "You can run like a gazelle; do pullups, crunches, and planks until people watchin' you get tired; and I know you're one of the smarter guys we got around here. Take my word, kid..." Matthew lowered his voice and leaned a little closer to Alex, as if he was going to tell him a great secret.

"Someday not too long from now, you're gonna make an Aryan girl real happy," he murmured. "Trust me. Any white woman would be honored to be with you."

Alex felt himself flush again. But this time, he didn't cringe from the praise Matthew heaped on him--rather, he basked in it. He smiled, and almost beamed at the man next to him. He felt himself smiling in a lopsided, somewhat roguish manner before he finally replied to Matthew again.

"Thanks, brother Matthew. I'm... I know I'm just seventeen, but... seeing you, and all the other older guys in the Klan, with your wives and families... it makes me want to be a man, too. I'd give my life for my race in a minute, but I want to have a life, with a family... you know what I'm trying to say?"

"I know exactly what you're sayin', brother Alex," Matthew said. "And that's what makes our men different from the rest of them. 'Specially niggers. Ever seen a nigger father, brother? Nah, me either."

They laughed, then, but Matthew fell silent several seconds before Alex did. Again he stared at the boy in front of him, so young and innocent and full of life despite what had been done to him. What he had in mind was something that could make or break Alex's life, forever--the stakes could not be higher, and Matthew was reluctant to involve a seventeen year old child in such a dangerous operation. Alex might have the body of a Navy SEAL and half the skills of one, too--but he was still a kid. And he was the youngest one that would be included in the operation by ten years...

In the end, though, the choice wasn't Matthew's to make: it was Alex's. And so Matthew sighed, slowly, and began to consider how to introduce the issue at hand. After all, fate might have pressured the boy into joining the NKKK, but Matthew would not pressure Alex into anything like this, ever.

"Brother Alex." Matthew said that in a firm, completely serious tone. Alex had rarely heard him employ such a tone before--in fact, he hadn't at all, not since he had joined the Klan all those months ago--and so he stopped laughing and looked at Matthew again immediately. And then, Matthew began to speak.

"I went over to the police station a couple days ago... just to say hello, and show my face so that those boys don't think we have a problem with them. I was just sittin' around there for a while, talk' to a few friends on the fence about the cause... and parents came up in the conversation."

Immediately, Alex froze. He couldn't help that, and he couldn't help but taking in a brief, sharp breath of air, either. No matter where he was or when he was, or, indeed, who he was with, if his parents were mentioned, Alex's mind was immediately taken back to the killing itself. For a moment that was as long as a lifetime, screams tore at Alex's ears and blood dyed his fair skin red--and then he was there on the log with Matthew again, breathing hard and biting his tongue.

Matthew looked at him sympathetically, for a moment, and did not take his hand off Alex's shoulder. And then, he continued, watching Alex grow increasingly numb and distant with every word he said.

"The police got no leads, and they're sick of going into the nigger town to talk to the apes. No one's steppin' forward, so... they gave up on it two weeks ago." Matthew paused, just for a moment.

"The police aren't going to do their jobs, brother Alex. So now it's up to you. What do you want to do?"

Alex was silent for a full two minutes. It was hard to say what he was thinking, exactly, if he was thinking anything coherent at all. Flashes of images and sounds raced through his mind, the most common of which were the niggers who had killed his parents in their ski masks and hoodies, laughing at him as they pumping bullet after bullet after bullet into the bodies on the floor in front of them. He imagined himself, too, but now he was the one with the gun--and now, he was the one pumping bullet after bullet into fallen bodies in front of him.

With a dull, shrieking sort of sound, as if Alex had just lost and then regained his hearing, he was pulled back into the forest. Matthew was nudging his shoulder--he jumped--and then he sat there on the log, staring at the big man in front of him. Slowly, his face changed from a numbed and somewhat shocked mask to a violent, fiery grimace.

"Brother Matthew," he said, trying hard to stay calm although vehemence was evident in his voice, "you better stop me right now before I grab a gun and go through that nigger town and find them myself."

By then, the boy was physically shaking. And so Matthew took him seriously. He moved to enclose a hand the size of a tiger's paw around Alex's wrist, but he was too slow. Alex darted out of the way and started to move--

But Matthew managed to tackle him from the side and muscle him to the ground. Alex tried to wrestle his way out, thrashing about and struggling, until he forced himself to calm and stop and listen through his own heartbeat, rapidly pulsing in his ears. Matthew was talking to him, he realized, grunting and reprimanding him for losing control.

And that made Alex feel bad. His limbs went slack--Matthew felt this and released him. And before Alex could stand up on his own, Matthew had held out a hand to help him up.

Alex accepted it. And he apologized, sincerely, before apologetically dusting the bits of dirt and dried leaves off of Matthew's hoody. He himself was a mess, but he didn't move to fix his own clothes until Matthew was relatively clean.

He sighed as he used his hands to brush the forest floor's offerings off his jacket. His heart was still racing, and he was still almost hyperventilating--it seemed that the exhaustion that had almost overwhelmed him just a moment ago was forgotten. Adrenaline had given Alex the ability to overcome what his body was normally capable of, but what else was to be expected? Even then, the thought that justice might not be served made him want to scream in outrage--

No. No, he wouldn't do that. He was a white man, after all, and it was time he started to act like it. After all, if he let himself go to pieces, how was he better than the niggers that killed his... no, it was too risky to formulate that thought entirely. Alex winced and turned away from Matthew, allowing his eyes to become unfocused as he simply stared into what he formerly perceived as a forest perfect for a white man--now, he simply stared into nothingness.

"You didn't answer my question, brother Alex," Matthew said suddenly. He took two steps, then, so that again he was face to face with Alex. "The police aren't gonna do their job, so... as your parents' only boy, what are you going to do about it?"

He was standing with his hands half-raised, so that if Alex tried to do anything rash again, he'd be prepared for it.

But this time, Alex didn't shake. His muscles didn't tense and his hands didn't form into small but hard fists, and the fire in his blue eyes was more focused, more controlled. There was a speck of dust in his hair--he wiped it away with a hand, and then, finally, he answered.

"I'm gonna get them, brother Matthew. I... don't know how, but I'm going to get the niggers for this. Because this is their fault," he said. Matthew didn't react, but Alex barely noticed it--he was just thinking out loud, rationalizing what his heart told him so that the other man present could hear it.

"When they decided not to talk to the cops, they got themselves involved in this, brother Matthew. On the wrong side. I don't know how they do it around here, but where I'm from, if you cover for a criminal you're as good as a criminal yourself. And if the cops aren't going to punish the criminals, then I guess I got to, brother Matthew," Alex said in a suddenly solemn tone. He stared directly into Matthew's somewhat darker blue eyes, and he nodded. "I have to do this. I want to do this."

Matthew nodded, very slightly, as if he'd expected an answer like that from the beginning--and he had. After all, Alex Kralik was a white boy with white pride, and when he was righteously angry like this, woe betide any force in Heaven or Hell that stood against him. And so he didn't go against Alex--and he didn't step aside and let things simply happen, either.

Instead, Matthew stepped forward and placed a hand on Alex Kralik's shoulder. He looked deep into his eyes in a different way than he ever had before, because now, he wasn't looking at a boy. He was looking at a man. So he thought to himself, very briefly, before nodding his head again and speaking.

"So you're gonna do it, brother Alex. And we're gonna be with you until that nigger town burns."

His heart wanted to race, but he was a man of discipline--he was a white man, after all, not a savage nigger who lived off of the most basic, barbarian of instincts. So, he could control himself, at least to a degree. He could fool everyone into thinking that he was as calm and cold as the rest of them.

Except, of course, for Matthew. Although Alex was in the seat directly behind the driver's and Matthew had the front passenger's seat, somehow the big man knew exactly what was going through his mind. Somehow, he didn't even need to look back to know that Alex was nervous.

"Relax, brother Alex," Matthew said. "You trained as hard as any of us, and you're more of a man than half of all the whites out there as far as I'm concerned. You're gonna do your parents proud, boy."

Alex tried to say something, but his voice caught within his throat and he ended up simply nodding. After that, he simply looked away from the front of the vehicle and instead turned to the side, staring out a window, so that Matthew wouldn't be able to see the fear in his eyes.

He'd never been where he was before. Of course, he'd been in a vehicle before--but he'd never been in a black Chevrolet Avalanche before, and he'd never been on that particular road before. And he'd never been in a vehicle with three other men as well-armed as him, and dressed in the same practical, militaristic gear that he wore.

Alex Kralik tried to keep himself calm. He tried not to think of what was coming--and so he simply thought of the trees that passed him by like grim, starved souls, clawing at him with their branches in a fruitless attempt to get him to stop. When he saw faces in the trees and words on their lips, he stopped looking at them, too, and simply looked into the darkness.

And there was much darkness, just then. After all, it was late at night and a new moon was out, and the nearest city was miles off. Light pollution was so minimal that any suburbanite--much less a full-fledged city-dweller--could easily lose himself on his back, staring at the cosmos above. For a moment, Alex was tempted to do that, but then he remembered his purpose.

He was going to serve justice that night. He, and Matthew, and Kurt and Luke, and the four other men in the Avalanche behind them. Alex couldn't see the other vehicle, because head and taillights had been disabled, despite the darkness. Although the only people who lived on that lonely road were white, none were part of the NKKK and so none could know what was going on. None could be allowed to feel the temptation of race treachery, because such temptation had fallen so many Aryans besides them.

For a moment, Alex wondered how he'd gotten to where he was. He wasn't supposed to be doing this--this was a Friday night, and he was a high school student. He ought to have been at home, safe in bed, or else having some innocent, clean fun with friends and classmates. Why on Earth was he holding a gun in a truck full of white supremacists hungry for blood...?

And then he remembered why. He remembered what had brought him there, and he remembered a night not so very long ago; a night a thousand times darker than any other he'd ever see in his life. He remembered his parents' screams and the horror on their faces, seconds before they were shot to death by animals.

Any traces of hesitation and fear in his mind vanished. When Alex looked forward again, it didn't matter that he was still seventeen. He and those around him formed a team so deadly and effective that they would have impressed the coldest killers of the Führer's einsatzgruppen.

"Alright, brothers," Matthew said coolly, "we're almost there. Load your weapons, but keep the safety on until we got boots on the ground."

All around the vehicle, magazines were slipped into weapons. Charging handles were pulled and bolts snapped shut with harsh, metallic clacks. None of them looked at one another, but none of them looked at what they were doing, either. Each of them had clocked dozens of hours behind their respective weapons; their rifles were like extensions of their bodies rather than external tools. They simply faced forward and sat up even straighter than they already had been, as the nigger town approached from the distance.

Even though they were still about two miles away, it was impossible to miss the noise. The noise, and the smell: a mixture of alcohol, marijuana, and kinky hair washed too infrequently. There was light, too, and that was because the spooks were partying--no matter that it was past two am. They weren't civilized creatures and they never would be, and Matthew and the NKKK knew this. They knew that Friday, late at night, the niggers would be too drunk and high and busy sleeping with dogs as well as apes to do anything about anything--much less a group of God's own white crusaders.

Alex's nose wrinkled uncomfortably. He pulled a black half-mask over his face, then, and cracked his neck. And although he'd loaded his rifle not a moment before, he held the bolt back and felt around until his finger made contact with brass. At last, he felt ready to fight, to kill--at last, he felt ready to show the niggers the meaning of justice.

Yet despite the fact that Alex knew that what he was about to do was right, despite the fact that he'd trained for that night for weeks, he couldn't help but feel himself leaving himself. That's how he would have described the out-of-body experience he began, right then, as the two trucks adjusted their speeds and positions so that they were driving side by side along that lonely country road, so that they might enter the nigger town together. He felt his mind leave his body and then simply watch, from a distance, as he took the safety off of his weapon and prepared to fight.

He was brought back, though, at least for a moment, when familiarity entered the situation. Matthew turned around in his seat and managed to make eye contact with all of the men in the truck at once. He grinned, then, in a way not even slightly removed from the happiness that showed on his face when he saw that Alex had achieved an A in class or bumped up his benchpress or had set a new NKKK record for a half-mile sprint. And then Matthew lifted his rifle so that the barrel pointed toward the ceiling of the truck, and began to chant.

"White power," Matthew said.

"White power," his followers replied.

"White power," he said again.

"White power," they again replied.

And then Matthew paused. He glanced back at the nigger town, for a moment, and then he faced his brothers again. And this time, he wasn't smiling.

"This is it, fellas. Remember why we're here," he said, and then spared a glance at Alex and felt a moment's sadness over the Aryans who he'd never meet. And then he continued.

"But don't be afraid to go fuckin' crazy," he growled.

There was relative silence, for several moments, as the two-vehicle motorcade entered the nigger town. The smell was almost overwhelming, as was the din--and just looking around was sickening in itself. The houses in the nigger town were only marginally different from the mud huts of their motherland, Africa, and the idea that such squalor existed in what was supposed to be an Aryan nation made them all violently angry.

And that was a good thing, Alex noted, as the trucks closed in on a source of noise, of light, of activity. Anger was power, if it was controlled properly, and Alex and his white brothers knew how to use control to shape their anger into precise, deadly knives. The niggers would learn that starting that night. Starting that minute.

The trucks pulled to a stop. Matthew issued a one-word command, and just like that, they were all out. All of them--not just the ones in his truck. All eight of the white supremacists had boots on the ground and weapons raised, aimed at the nigger party going on not a block from them. The houses around them seemed empty, but they rapidly realized that niggers made homes in the most pathetic of hovels. Within seconds, they were visually checking everything within a hundred yards of them... but it seemed that they hadn't yet been noticed.

"Hooey, can you smell that, fellas? Thank the good Lord we're burnin' these clothes afterwards--I don't reckon I'd ever get the stink out otherwise."

That was Mark who had said that, and his comments were appreciated. Even Alex cracked a brief smile at the Texan's joke, though he couldn't take his eyes off the party. He was literally looking at the creatures that had killed his parents, after all--and his finger was so, so, so close indeed to his trigger--

"Alright, brothers; just like we planned it. Mark, get on your rifle and cover us; Luke and Fred, after we open things up, you're driving again. This ain't training, brothers, this is the real thing," Matthew said seriously. "No mistakes, no risks, and we're out of here no matter what in a quarter of an hour."

Not much motion was needed in order for the men to follow Matthew's orders. Mark went prone, flipping open a Harris bipod in order to provide support for his rifle: a thirty-caliber magnum that could take down gorillas without a problem and would make mincemeat out of chimpanzees. He activated the night-vision optic attached in front of his scope, and then he gave Matthew a thumbs-up affirmative--he was ready to shoot.

And that meant that there was no reason to wait any more. Matthew, like his brothers, had already been anticipating the actions of that night for a long time--for too long, in fact--but one thing still had to be done before he and the rest of them could do their parts.

Matthew started to walk toward Alex. He addressed the boy with a word, and then, the two white men were side by side, weapons in hand, staring at the nigger party before them with equal parts hatred and determination in their eyes. They stood there, tall and strong, and then, after a moment, they faced one another.

"You got the first shot, brother Alex," Matthew said. He paused--he reflected that up until then, he'd looked down at Alex, no matter that the boy was taller than he was. But now, he was looking at Alex eye-to-eye for the first time in his life, because Alex was becoming a man right then and there before him.

"Shoot until your magazine's empty, brother," Matthew murmured. "Get revenge on them niggers for killing your parents."

Matthew left Alex, then. He stood several feet away with his rifle raised, mostly as a precaution--he and the rest of the group wouldn't fire until Alex was finished firing unless they absolutely had to. Alex had thirty shots, thirty individual chances to make it clear to the niggers that no one strikes the white race and gets away with it.

And for a moment, it didn't look like he was going to take it. For a moment, Alex simply stood there with his rifle half-raised, staring at the party, the drinking, the laughing... the life, the happiness, the emotion. He was shaking, but he didn't know why. After all, he wasn't doing anything wrong. He was just killing some niggers.

He had pulled the trigger before he realized it. His rifle kicked back against his shoulder--he felt it as he never had before. And then, he looked past the throbbing blotch of color overlaying his vision and saw a man in the distance clutch at his chest... and then fall. He heard the roar of his rifle echo through the nigger town, and this time when he felt his heart start to race, he didn't stop it. And when he pulled the trigger again, he did not let go.

Alex fired. Alex fired and fired and fired and fired and he started to scream. He reloaded at least twice, and by then, the rest of his brothers had started to open fire as well. For the most part, they aimed, but now and then they simply held their weapons at their sides and clamped their weak hands on their forends until the sheer volume of bullets they were delivering downrange made them let go to avoid being burned.

The staccato chatter of automatic fire and the strobing, flowery bursts of light shook their senses, but they were white men. They were creatures of discipline and control, and so, in time, they stopped firing.

Now the ghetto was alive. Now, the niggers that they hadn't shot were screaming and seeking cover, and those who could run in their overlarge monkey-suits did so. Lights were being turned on all around them--a house not ten yards away bristled with activity--

Matthew turned on his heel, then, and shot an old nigger offhand. He simply snapped his weapon up and fired, punching a single, perfect hole through the coon's skull--and then he watched as the dead man remained on his feet for a comical moment, before falling.

Luke and Fred were getting back into the trucks with their submachineguns in hand, and Mark was still prone, still picking off targets and potential threats the rest of them couldn't see. But the rest of the white men were starting to peel off to continue the killing, to raise as much Hell in the nigger town as they could in fifteen minutes--with two exceptions.

Matthew had emptied his magazine; he was reloading calmly, coolly, with all the deadly precision of a surgeon. He couldn't have been more at home--after all, he was the Grand Wizard of the NKKK, and he was doing what was right by God and his race. Shooting up violent niggers was second nature to him: it was what he had been born to do, and the same was true for Alex. Even more so in this case, as it had been Alex's parents who had been killed.

And yet, Alex wasn't moving. He was just standing there, stupidly, as if he had no idea what he was doing or even who he was, just as he had on the first night Matthew had met him. Gunshots were going off all around him, and the screams of dying niggers were rising into the air, but Alex wasn't moving. He was just standing and staring, right past Matthew at the old Negro that had just been shot through the head.

"Brother Alex," Matthew called, and his voice must have broken through some unseen haze because Alex seemed to jump, a little, before locking eyes with the older man.

"Yes, brother Matthew?" he said mechanically--and in response, Matthew just shook his head and grinned.

"If you want to have some fun, brother, you better start doin' it real fast. We only got ten and a few minutes left, and you can't have killed more than ten or twelve niggers so far. By my count, you got another fifteen to go if you want your parents to rest in peace."

Matthew started to move, then, running with surprising speed and agility for a man of his stature. He passed Alex--and in the process he raised his rifle and fired again, dropping a negress that had come out to scream some monkey-speech at them. Alex watched her go down, trailing blood through the air--and for some reason, that woke something in him. Or maybe it killed something in him.

He'd never know for sure. All he knew was that that was the moment--right then and there--that rage took over once again.

His boots were soundless as they raced across the ground, the street, and grass yards alike. None of the niggers knew when he was coming, or from where, and so none of them had a chance. More often than not, he caught them when they were looking away from him and he shot them in the back, severing spinal columns and shattering ribs and turning internals into hot, wet, viscous goo.

Sometimes, however, they managed to look at their killer in the face before getting it. And so Alex imagined that at least some of them were able to feel a taste of the horror and the sickness they'd made him feel when they'd killed his parents right in front of him.

He was breathing hard, but he was controlled. Although he never stopped moving his feet, his every step was fluid and balanced and perfect. His firing platform was extremely stable, and for that reason, his shot placement was dead on.

There had been near-accidents, once or twice, when Alex had rounded corners and found himself face to face with his NKK brothers. But it didn't take him more than the time it took to blink an eye to recognize the difference between men and monkeys and run past them or else drop to a knee and pour bullets into whatever poor ape happened to be nearest.

Sometimes, they called to him and congratulated him. Sometimes, they seemed shocked by how adept Alex apparently was, or else by the machine he had become. Many times, he saw targets they did not, took shots they could not, and his overall level of aggression was something they could never hope to match. They jokingly warned him to not run out of ammunition, but he seemed not to hear them. He seemed not to hear anything but the nigger screams that were to come.

In his crazed, obsessed state, Alex registered very little of what he did even as it happened. He'd remember even less of it in the days and weeks and years to come, but that was alright. As long as he could retain the sense of purpose being fulfilled, of justice being served; as long as he could remember what it felt like to have adrenaline-rich blood pulsing through his veins, maybe he'd be able to forget the expression on the old nigger's face, just before Matthew had shot him in the head.

All at once, Alex realized that he was having an out-of-body experience again. He struggled to regain himself--and then he froze.

There were still gunshots roaring through the nigger town, and several blocks behind him, fires burned. There was still screaming, and a lot of it... but Alex was far from the action, and he was all by himself. And although he couldn't be sure, he felt with a reasonable degree of certainty that he hadn't done any killing for several moments. He had no inertia, just then--he was just a lone white boy with a gun in the middle of a town of angry, awake, violent niggers.

The shacks around him suddenly began to look a lot more dangerous than they had before. Alex shouldered his rifle, flicked its muzzle this way and that--but he didn't lock onto anything. There were potential threats all around him.

He was in the middle of the road, he realized, but hastily sidestepping and then crouching at the side of a large, drooping oak tree didn't help very much. He could practically feel the niggers' eyes staring at him from all directions--and that caustic, heavy, heaving sound; what was that? What were the apes planning--

No. No, they weren't planning anything. Alex was just breathing hard, as if he'd run five miles rather than two. His nerves were his worst enemy now--at least, that's what he told himself. But he was a white man, and even though he was in a nigger town all by himself in the middle of the night, he would control himself.

There was a faint, digital _beep_ing, just then, that nearly made Alex fill a nearby toolshed with a magazine's worth of bullets. But he controlled himself--barely--and looked down at the watch strapped around his wrist. The digital face was glowing green; the alarm had been tripped.

Fifteen minutes had passed. The NKKK was leaving the nigger town--and he was still in the thick of it, he didn't know how far away from the trucks or another way out.

For a moment, Alex attempted to simply will himself to safety. He stayed as he was, kneeling, with his rifle half-aimed at anything and everything, concentrating hard--but nothing happened. He couldn't even force an out-of-body experience again. Then perhaps--

Something struck him with all the force of a thunderbolt, then, and Alex knew that if he hadn't been wearing body armor, he'd be dead. But there was no time to think of how close to death he'd come, not when the nigger that had fired at him was pumping another round into his weapon and lining up for another shot--

Alex got him first, though. Without even standing up, he shouldered his rifle and simply pointed it at the silhouette on the other side of the street, and then he pulled the trigger. Somehow, he didn't see the muzzle-flash or even hear the gunshots--but he did hear the nigger scream and clutch at his chest, even as exit wounds the size of dinner plates exploded out of his back, along with pints and pints of blood.

But this was no victory--not by a longshot. The rest of the NKKK was winding its operations down and rallying up back at the trucks and the niggers were starting to collect weapons and fight back. Even as Alex stood, gasping and checking that he hadn't broken a rib, he could sense them moving and this time he knew that it wasn't just his mind playing tricks on him. The niggers were going to attack him and they were going to kill him if he didn't leave immediately.

Once Alex realized that, he didn't waste any more time. He ignored the pain in his torso, and he began to run again.

Not thirty seconds passed before bullets began to chase him.

He fired back, of course, mostly to keep niggers at bay. But several times, Alex turned around, and, running backwards, he managed to drop some of the distant, dark figures still hooting and grunting for his blood. It occurred to him that he had little idea where he was going--but his feet seemed to know where to go. He seemed to be going somewhere, and after sprinting for a full two minutes, Alex saw his destination.

The trucks were there. Matthew and the NKKK were still in the nigger town, waiting for him, despite the risks they were taking in doing so. Alex could see that they were taking serious fire, and all at once, he was angry again--and all at once, he left himself again.

Alex's body controlled itself without his guidance or will. He watched his every muscle and bone work with seamless, perfect cooperation, in order to complete tasks with a degree of precision and ferocity that no man could ever meet. He watched himself jump, then dive, and then roll to protection behind a jumble of discarded machinery--and then he watched himself fire off the rest of his rifle's ammunition in less than ten seconds without wasting a shot.

And then he heard the trucks start to move, and he knew that he could wait no longer. And so he lowered his rifle, drew his pistol, and ran faster than he ever had before.

But the trucks could move faster even than the white man, it seemed. Even as Alex shouted for his brothers to wait, the vehicles--still over three hundred yards away--began to make their way out of the nigger town. He was going to be left alone unless he did something real fast.

And then he saw that the trucks were about to take a turn. He made a quick guess, and then he turned on his heel and sprinted in a new direction. The muscles in his legs started to burn, but he ignored them--if he slowed down even the slightest bit, even for a second, he was going to be torn apart.

Several niggers in baggy white shirts moved to stop him. Alex never saw if they were armed or not--he simply raised his pistol and shot them all and then leaped over their dead bodies and kept running. He reloaded his pistol and he immediately regretted it--the discarded magazine still had several rounds in it, and now he was on his last magazine. He had fifteen shots left to see him out of the nigger town; after that, there was no more reloading.

That thought, if anything, made him run harder and faster.

He could no longer see the trucks, but it didn't matter. He could hear them somewhere in the nigger town, and he could only hope that they hadn't driven past him already. He just kept running; if he could at least reach that main road a few seconds after the trucks then maybe they could see him--

Alex dashed onto the main road, the one that the trucks had been following throughout the operation. He had done so just as the drivers had started to speed up, and his vision had tunneled so much that he hadn't a chance of seeing them in time to stop them from hitting him on the side at over forty miles an hour.

That Alex survived that impact in itself was a miracle. That he regained consciousness not ten seconds afterward was doubly miraculous, and that he wasn't seriously injured stretched credulity beyond the breaking point. And yet there he was: rattled, confused, but on his feet and alive. His skin was clammy and even more pale than it was usually and he gripped his pistol so tightly that his fingers were starting to bleed, but he was alive and relatively unhurt. And when the NKKK saw him and recognized him and called his name, he regained his wits as well.

He turned around and faced the trucks, and though he couldn't see more than silhouettes inside, he smiled. He recognized the bright lights beaming down on him as signs of safety, of acceptance, of people that would call him their brother and would pat him on the shoulder and would welcome him to a home that was his. And then he heard their shouts change to warnings and he saw them raise their rifles and then he heard something behind him and then he turned around--

Alex didn't have time to think; he didn't have time to react. How he recognized that blur of motion as a threat, as a fatal danger, was impossible to say--but somehow, he did, and he managed to raise his pistol and fire shots.

He killed his assailant. But his bullets did not stop him from being tackled with enough force to knock him to the ground.

For a terrifying moment, the NKKK thought that Alex had been killed. Neither Matthew nor Luke--the two men in the front seats of the first truck--had seen the boy fire. When the nigger tackled him, it did so with such force that both bodies were thrown out of the swathe of light cast by the trucks' headlights--so, they had no idea what had happened or where Alex was. They couldn't even see him.

Matthew got out of the truck, though. He turned on the flashlight attached to his weapon and bellowed Alex's name, sweeping the area before him with his weapon. The beam of light crossed over something--Matthew did a double-take and held his rifle steady, then, on the jumble of bodies on the ground a full ten feet from the road. He called Alex's name as loudly as he could and then he told the nigger on top of him that if he'd killed a white boy, everyone he knew would be killed--and then he prepared to shoot when the nigger started to move.

But the nigger wasn't trying to stab Alex. He wasn't trying to shoot him, either, or beat him with his fists or assault him in any other manner that Matthew could think of. He was trying to get off Alex and let him up--and he was doing all these things with half of his skull missing...

Matthew lowered his rifle. He watched as Alex got to his feet, staring at the nigger boy he'd just shot. Although Matthew couldn't see it, there were tears on that nigger boy's face--and although Matthew hadn't heard what the nigger had said before Alex had killed him, Alex had. Alex had heard the young nigger shout that he was going to avenge his parents--killed moments before by the NKKK--and then he had shot that nigger through the head with enough hollowpoint bullets to tear his chimp skull into pieces.

Alex had heard the nigger's words, shouted in a voice scarcely removed from his own, shouted by a person scarcely removed from himself. He stared down at the body for a moment, and when he stared at the dead nigger's face, he saw himself. He felt his pistol shake in his grip--and then he heard Matthew shouting at him to get in the truck, that they had to get the Hell out right away.

Somehow, Alex tore himself away from the boy that he'd just killed. Somehow, he got into the pickup truck, and somehow he apologized for losing track of time and somehow he spent the ride home laughing and swapping stories with his white brothers. Somehow, he managed to get through the rest of the night without letting anyone know that every hour, every minute, every second, the image of the black boy he'd killed burned in his mind.

In the middle of nowhere, a nearly invisible deviation into the forest off a minor road led its takers toward what was undoubtedly some of the most untouched wilderness in the state. It was impossible to say for certain what secrets the area held, though--because not twenty feet from the road, there was a barricade made of barbed wire and logs and chain link fence. There was a sign, too, and the words on it were written in the biggest, most unfriendly of fonts. They read: Private Property--Trespassers Will be Shot.

Such a warning would have earned a chuckle in many parts of the country, but in rural Kentucky, it was plausible that whoever owned the property was entirely serious. And it wasn't like the people that lived in the area were less than proficient with firearms, particularly if they were white--after all, that entire part of the Commonwealth had gained national notoriety six years before because of a few men with guns.

But the property wasn't owned by the NKKK or anyone affiliated with it. There were no obstacle courses or impromptu football fields--in fact, there was barely anything artificial about the area at all except for a single, one-story house.

It was a small house, located at the very center of the property. It had purposefully been built near the bottom of a valley with mountains all around it, so that nothing and no one could have any idea of its existence. Even the dirt road that led from the main road didn't reach the house--its destination was a sort of hangar, barely big enough to hold two vehicles, yet structurally sound and even aesthetically pleasing in every way.

The house itself was some hundred yards from the hangar. It could not be approached by any motorized vehicle not specifically designed for intense off-roading due to the gradient of the mountainside on which it was built, and loose soil and fallen leaves served to make approach by large, military vehicles very troublesome indeed.

It was a beautiful house, though, and there was no denying that. Shadowed by trees dozens of feet taller than it and located not fifty yards from a tranquil stream, it was the 21st Century's take on the log cabins that had defined that part of the country so many years before.

Floor to ceiling windows dominated one entire side of the house. They offered anyone standing inside a view of the surrounding property that was, in a word, breathtaking: not only could the stream be seen, but so could the valley below. Farther still than the valley was the opposing mountainside, and the wilderness and ruggedness that defined it.

Although the house itself was small, it had been designed in such a way that nothing was missing. There were two entrances, and the several rooms inside were surprisingly spacious. There was a bedroom, two bathrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a study, and each of them were adorned with the most modern of luxuries.

There were paintings, here and there, and the sort of minimalist, ultra-modern decor that one would expect to find in a sci-fi film. Polished obsidian played a large role in defining what few extraneous fixtures there were; apart from that, almost everything else was metal and glass. The floor was slate, the leather sofa in the living room was black, and the TV was a 42" LCD built into the wall.

The computer desk easily dominated the study, simply because there wasn't much else in it. There were a few filing cabinets, some pens, some scraps of paper here and there, a powerful laptop computer, and that was about it. There had been plans to get a surround-sound setup in the study, similar to the one in the living room--but there was no need for that. The study had not changed in any manner for several months.

The two bathrooms in the house were identical to one another, except that one was used and the other was not. But they were both extremely clean and built almost entirely out of stone--even their walls had no drywall or paint or any other materials that would react negatively to water.

Even the most selective of trained chefs would have found everything to his liking in the kitchen. The gear was expensive but well worth the cost, and the pantry, refrigerator, breadbox, and cabinets were all well stocked. It was true that there weren't many of the ultra-expensive ingredients required to get the flavor profile of a given dish precisely correct, but a simple look around would suggest that the place was built for practicality, healthiness, and economy rather than taste. For example, there was no filet mignon, but there was plenty of round, and though there was nothing in terms of the high-sugar, boxed foods that many Americans used to jumpstart their days, there were at least five pounds of rolled oats in a cylinder next to the microwave.

The bedroom, however, was the focal point of the house. It was the one room that could have honestly been called comfortable--its loft bed was sized twin XL and was extremely soft. It had a dresser and a mirror and a closet filled with the sort of clothes that made anyone wearing them attractive and anonymous all at once. It had a gun locker under the bed, locked and filled with a full twenty thousand dollars' worth of automatic and semiautomatic firearms. There was a shelf of textbooks and manuals and maps and there was a workbench, too, for guns and electronic parts alike.

There was adjustable lighting, and the entire house was so well-insulated that even in the middle of the winter, a temperature of 95° F could easily be maintained. There were bricks of gold in the gun locker and important documents hidden under the floor in the closet.

And in the middle of the bedroom, there was Alex Kralik, lord of all he surveyed--passed out on the floor with so much alcohol in his system that it was a wonder that he wasn't already dead.

He had had a Hell of a week at work.

That was his first thought when he got up--that for a full sixty hours that week, he'd produced an amount and quality of good and documents and findings that most engineers would have been proud to have produced in a month.

There was no satisfaction, though. There wasn't really a sense of accomplishment, either, but he was so used to feeling nothing that he often didn't register that something was missing.

Or perhaps he was still recovering from his binge the night before. Perhaps when he got some food and coffee in his system, he'd sober up and feel like a normal man again.

With that thought in mind, Alex Kralik lifted himself off the floor and stood up. Instantly, he felt dizziness and nausea, but he forced himself to stay upright. He bit his tongue to give himself some point of reference to focus his intent on, and for that reason, only a moment passed before he was able to sense what was going on around him.

It was five thirty in the morning, according to the silver watch Alex had never bothered to take off the night before. And according to the thoroughly wrinkled dress shirt and slacks he wore, he had never bothered to undress the night before, either.

For a moment, Alex tried to recall what had happened after he'd gotten home from work, but his memory was drowned out by a full bottle of Jack Daniel's. All he remembered was getting home, eating something--he couldn't remember what--and then drinking until his body forced him to stop. Even then he smelled alcohol on his breath, and he knew that if he hadn't passed out when he had, he may well have poisoned himself.

For a moment, Alex wondered what would happen if his parents could see him then. He failed to come to any concrete conclusions, though, because his parents were now as strange to him as he was.

That thought should have made Alex feel sorrow, but it didn't. Nothing made Alex feel sorrow anymore, and nothing really had, ever since that night in the nigger town those six years before...

But that was a lifetime ago. Things had changed, since then, and so had he.

For example, Alex was no longer a seventeen year old kid. He was a man of twenty three, almost twenty four years, with a college education, a job, and a house of his own. He wasn't a tall albeit skinny ex-Yankee anymore, either--he was a muscular Southern man with a tanned face but the hair and eyes of the Aryans who had made their homes in northern Europe not so very long ago. He drove for himself and cooked for himself and lived for himself and he took care of himself the way no one else would, ever since he had left the NKKK.

These thoughts were the result of Alex's idle mind--he barely registered them as he rapidly stripped out of his work clothes and made his way into the bathroom for a cold shower. The temperature of the water shocked him; heat was rapidly torn from his body--but after that, he was naked, wet, and able to look at himself in the mirror without reeling.

He truly had changed over the years. His face was no longer boyish in any sense--stress and hate had lengthened his features to the point that he looked as scarred and hard as a war veteran, though he'd fought only one battle in his life. His nose--previously upturned and angular--was now just a little bit crooked due to a punch it had taken just a few months before.

But there were still similarities between the kid Alex Kralik and the man. Alex Kralik the man had no tattoos and wore no jewelry... and there were other similarities, too. He would confirm these similarities again very soon indeed, just as he did every Saturday.

It was just before six fifteen in the morning by the time Alex Kralik was seated at his dining table with a plate of oatmeal, eggs, and yogurt. He used neither sweeteners nor spices to flavor his food; overall, it was so bland that most would have found it unpalatable. But Alex Kralik ate rapidly, scanning the news on his laptop the whole time.

World, national, and local events were predictable: war, poverty, chaos; political drama, celebrity sensations; and almost nothing respectively. A few articles caught Alex's interest, and for that reason, he was able to keep himself occupied until he had finished his meal.

At that point, he washed and dried his dishes and that was all. He then went back into his bedroom--not to change his clothes, as he'd already put on a pair of cargo pants, a shirt, and his work boots--but to retrieve a rifle and a pistol. After that, Alex walked outside--and started to run.

Alex had achieved a level of fitness by the time he'd turned eighteen that would impress many Olympic athletes. By the age of twenty three, he really was a Navy SEAL--he swam, he ran, he climbed, all with a fluidity and rapidity that was stunning to behold.

Sometimes, Alex spent his entire weekend training. Sometimes, he didn't sleep--he spent the entire two-day period on his feet, awake, with his rifle in his hands and his pistol at his waist, sprinting up and down the mountains until fatigued forced him to rest for a few moments.

That day, however, Alex was taking it easy. He'd run five miles already; just another five and he'd call it quits.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps he'd keep running for some time after he'd done the ten he'd planned--after all, why not? He had nothing better to do on the weekends; he might as well do as he liked.

And Alex Kralik truly liked running. He liked the way the air felt against his cheek when the wind kicked up, and he liked the feeling of his feet flying across the ground. When he crossed swathes of dry leaves or foliage, he was treated to the pleasure of hearing the results of his motion--otherwise, he was silent. He was silent and practically invisible despite his speed, thanks to the camouflage patterns on his pants and the olive-drab of his shirt.

Eventually, he would start to sweat, and then he would feel the moisture on his forehead and nose until it dripped off into nothingness. If he was lucky, he would even taste the salt of his sweat--but it was unlikely that that would happen on a ten-mile run. Such a little jog was barely able to increase Alex's heart rate.

Still, no matter what reactions his body had to the stress he put it through, Alex would be able to experience the forest itself. He'd be able to smell the harsh bite of broken pine needles and the subtle, earthy tones of less definable trees and mulch. He'd be able to see green and brown fly past him on all sides, and when he ran by the stream, he'd see the blue of the water and the glistening, pale yellow of the reflected sunlight.

He might see deer and he would definitely see squirrels and birds. He might pick out paths in the wilderness that he'd never taken before, but no matter where he ran or for how long, Alex Kralik would enjoy himself.

His senses grew sharper and sharper as his run continued. First, they had been dulled by alcohol; then, they had been dulled by fatigue. But now, nothing was prevent Alex from buoying the power of his body to even higher levels--and so he started to run faster.

His heart throbbed and his lungs pulsed and his legs cycled at a rate that he couldn't easily comprehend. His entire body was a machine built for speed and agility and sheer, brutal, deadliness.

All at once, Alex jumped into the air. He dived forward and prevented his body from striking the ground by tucking his shoulder in and neatly rolling into a prone position. In the process, he shouldered his rifle, so all that was left to do when he selected his target was to aim and fire.

Alex's first two shots were directly on top of one another. The next several he fired weren't as accurate because he switched targets--he went from engaging a target fifty yards away to engaging a target two hundred yards away. But the volume and accuracy of fire Alex delivered was regardless intense.

He switched targets again. Again. Again. He exchanged magazines and then he stood up as he worked the charging handle of his rifle--and then he started to run again, firing on the move.

And over the next three minutes, Alex alternated between moving drills, swapping weapons, and shooting from all conceivable positions at targets that ranged from so close that he could almost taste them and so far that he had to use the scope of his rifle to locate them. He fired off a hundred and fifty rifle rounds and forty five pistol rounds with such rapidity that both weapons' barrels were smoking before he was halfway done. By the time he was completely finished, he was in such a state of mind that he had holstered his pistol and drawn his knife and was sprinting toward the next target before he realized that he ought to stop.

And so he did. Alex halted, slowly, and sheathed his knife. It used to be hard for him to perform such precision tasks after running and doing shooting drills, but these days, it took a lot more to make him breathe hard. It took a lot more to challenge him.

Perhaps the next weekend, Alex would forgo alcohol and instead run a marathon or two and then shoot. Or perhaps he would do circuit weight lifting for a few hours and then shoot. Or perhaps he would practice his extreme long-range shooting.

The idea of relaxing didn't even occur to Alex. He had become a man who was incompatible with taking rest for a moment longer than was physically necessary; psychological rest be damned. There was, after all, no peace within him--there hadn't been since his parents were killed, and what he had done since then had not calmed his soul.

The closest Alex got to resting was when he was testing his body beyond normal human limits, or immediately afterward. When power, like blood, was rushing through his veins and his every sense was attuned to the world around him, he almost felt at peace. And if he was really lucky, he could maintain that state for a full few moments...

He would not be able to that day. Perhaps it was the alcohol, he noted, as he cracked his neck and began to truly register his position. As he brought himself down from his hypersensitive, instinctive state, he registered where he was--he was in a meadow, or a field, a hundred yards by a hundred, with knee-high grasses all around him. Before him and to the sides were forests of tall, tall trees, and behind him was an older forest that was starting to become more of a swamp than anything else.

The grime and muck on his boots suggested that he had emerged from there, though he did not recall travelling through such an environment. This didn't surprise him--when he was running and exercising and shooting, his memories blurred together to the point that he couldn't keep track of anything he hadn't intended to. Ever since he'd gone into that nigger town those six years ago, every time Alex picked up a gun or broke a sweat, his body was taken over by a vicious, ferocious, deadly beast.

Alex wasn't able to put ten bullets on a man-sized target at five hundred yards in under twenty seconds. But the monster that took over Alex when he made up his mind that he was going to kill something could, and did. The sheet of paper Alex had set up was still smoking when he scoped in on it to check his shot placement--he'd struck the silhouette in the head with all ten shots. And the closer targets tended to have no multiple bullet-sized holes punched through them, but one.

Alex sighed. He worked the charging handle of his rifle to ensure that the chamber was clear, then he did the same for his pistol. He then simply looked around, for a moment, vaguely wondering what to do when his phone let out a brief, synthetic beep.

He'd received an email, it seemed. His boss was thanking him for putting in tough hours again that week, and informing him that he really ought to take a few days off to recover--but within a moment, Alex had fired off a reply. He wasn't taking any time off and he'd put in overtime the next week again if needed--after all, the job market was still tough, and the last thing a young guy like Alex needed was for HR to think he was less than obsessed with his job.

As he tapped out his reply, Alex began to make his way home. He walked slowly--after all, he was in no rush, and the forest was as comforting an environment to him as was his own house. It was almost as comforting an environment to him as NKKK land had been--but that was six years and a lifetime ago.

Regardless, the memories of his brief stint in the still active and still expanding white supremacist group brought an angry grimace to Alex's face. He had left them and yet he could not leave them behind. Perhaps it was because he knew deep in his gut that they had done so much for him--they had been his friends in his darkest moments and they had been his protectors, his guardians, his role models. They had almost been his parents, but the moment Alex got close to having that thought, he audibly snarled.

He had had two parents in his life and both were dead and that was all. Matthew had not been his father--no matter that he'd loved him like a son or that he'd taught him to shave or that he'd gotten the NKKK to fund his education or that he'd gotten him his job. Matthew... had a lot of the right ideas, but he was an extremist. That's why Alex had left the NKKK--that's why Alex had been forced to leave the NKKK.

It was fortunate, he mused, that he was such a dangerous marksman. Now that he thought about it, the faces of his NKKK brothers hadn't just shown admiration when they had watched him shoot down more niggers than the rest of them did combined--they had shown fear. Alex's skill with firearms had quickly become an NKKK legend. Within weeks of the routing of the nigger town, he wasn't being taught to shoot by the group's leadership--he was teaching them to shoot, and acting as their bodyguard when they needed him to.

Everyone in the Klan knew how deadly he was with a gun, and Alex suspected that the police did, too. It was true that there had been no evidence whatsoever linking the NKKK to the massacre--the SUVs they'd used had been given back to their original owners; there were no photographs or videos that could have offered law enforcement any useful knowledge; and no niggers had gotten even the briefest looks at their killers' faces.

Regardless, Matthew had been held, briefly, as the police scrambled to search for a reason to hold him--but they found nothing and had been forced to release Matthew. His alibi checked out and though he hadn't expressed sorrow or horror or even shock over what had happened, he hadn't admitted guilt, either. Police couldn't do much more than constantly come to badger him on and off NKKK territory, and after one incident at a convenience store involving three black cops the size of linebackers, Matthew had ceased to leave NKKK property alone.

Often, he brought Alex with him. Other times, when they were going farther from NKKK territory, Matthew brought the entire einsatzgruppen just to give the race traitors that got on the phone the moment the NKKK's leader was seen out and about something to tell their police overlords. In this manner, it was pretty obvious in the area who had done it--but there was still no proof and no evidence and just as the niggers had kept quiet about who had killed Alex's parents, the NKKK and its supporters kept quiet about who had killed the niggers.

Yet though Matthew and the rest of the NKKK's leadership never left their land alone, there had still been periodic trouble. Sometimes, it was niggers or liberal faggots from the area, but more often, it was idiot kids from the rest of the country in the world who got it into their heads that they were going to take on the NKKK. And so Alex's shooting skills hadn't just been shown to the cops or the community secondhand--they'd been displayed. Alex had killed no less than five men in the two years immediately following the attack on the nigger town, yet he had maimed none--and that was because he shot to kill and he did not miss.

Still, no one knew these facts better than NKKK members in general and Matthew in particular. He had seen Alex use deadly force in legal self defense on three occasions, and the other einsatzgruppen members had told him that Alex had been a true wolf in the nigger town. Matthew had the best idea of just how violent Alex could be when he set his mind to it, and that was probably the only thing that had kept him alive the night the NKKK found out that he attended a Jewish-owned medical practice to get antidepressants.

How they had found out, Alex still didn't know. All he knew was that one night Matthew had called him out of his room and taken him out to the field used for large Klan gatherings--and that night, there was a large Klan gathering. At first, Alex had been pleasantly surprised--he'd remembered that it was his birthday, that day, and so he'd assumed that the NKKK was throwing him a surprise party.

It had struck him, though, that no one seemed to want to make eye contact with him. And the few who did didn't smile or grin at him--instead, they glared. And so by the time Alex was ushered to the middle of the crowd, he had gone from feeling happy to curious to cautious to downright afraid.

Matthew had looked him in the eye and told him that they knew he was dependent on Jewish drugs--and that worse yet, he was getting them straight from their Zionist source. No one had questioned him and Alex hadn't said a word in his defense and so there was no need to question him. And, so, the only real question was, what sort of punishment was appropriate for a race traitor inside the NKK itself--a "white man" with Jewish affiliations?

Matthew had asked that question out loud and then he had faced Alex with the same cold, calculating look he'd given all the niggers he'd shot. And then Alex had acted.

He'd drawn the pistol in his waistband too quickly for anyone to do anything about it, and he had shouted at his "brothers" to put their hands up or he would take at least ten of them down with him. He had disarmed and taken Matthew himself as a hostage and then he had ordered the rest of the NKKK to the ground, and then he had walked all the way to the edge of Klan territory.

And then, away from the protection of NKKK presence, Matthew had become less of a man than Alex was. He had negotiated a lot less aggressively than he would have if someone else was there to see him and to make sure that he looked Alex in the eye and didn't flinch at his every move. He had sworn on Jesus Christ himself that the NKKK would leave Alex alone if Alex didn't go to the police and left the NKKK alone, and Alex had reciprocated.

They had parted ways, then, for the last time. Alex had upheld his part of the bargain and the NKKK had upheld its. So, there had been peace between them, and there had been peace in the NKKK. But it seemed that there would never be peace within Alex Kralik.

Eleven o'clock in the morning saw Alex Kralik driving around the part of Kentucky he called home. He gave NKKK territory a wide berth, of course, but that didn't stop him from looking across the idyllic plains and farms and forests that defined the area.

He had driven for an hour already and he would drive for another hour at least. He didn't know why he was driving--perhaps it was because doing so allowed him to believe that he was actually doing something. Or perhaps it was, in the smallest way, relaxing. After all, it was certainly pleasant, at least, to turn on a local bluegrass station and sit back in the seat of his pickup and watch the world pass him by.

Thoughts drifted through Alex's mind fluidly without leaving any lasting impressions on him. He tried to grasp at them, now and then, but he never succeeded. All he knew was that the most definable of his thoughts were simple observations, such as how bright the Sun's rays were as they reflected off the hood of his truck or how golden-brown the fields of wheat were when they shifted in the wind.

Back when he was part of the NKKK, he and his brothers would sometimes go out and simply drive, and why not? Kentucky was a white state in a white nation with still a fair amount of pride left, and there was nothing more solemn and peaceful and perfect than rural Kentucky in the late morning or afternoon on a weekend. These times were when all the people were relaxing or visiting or simply sitting on their porches, drinking iced tea and enjoying the tranquility.Alex had enjoyed driving with his NKKK brothers, and if he had someone to drive with then, he would have. But he had no one, and so he simply drove by himself. Just as he had used to spend entire days sitting outside and whittling with his brothers, he now sometimes spent his entire day after work sitting outside by himself and whittling.

He blinked. He realized, then, that his eyes had practically glazed over, and he'd spent the better part of the past hour driving the way he shot--without being aware of his actions. He hadn't put anyone in danger, of course, not even himself, but he hadn't realized how low on gas he was. And food--it was almost twelve o'clock and he hadn't eaten since breakfast. He needed gas and lunch, and he knew precisely where to get both.

Within ten seconds of regaining active consciousness, Alex realized where he was. He didn't consult with his phone in order to do so or to tell what he had to do to get to his destination, and he hadn't needed to sight any landmarks, either. He had driven around his home so much that he knew the roads as well as he knew himself--better than he knew himself, even.

It was almost stereotypical that a combination barbecue-bar-gas station was not an object of nostalgia but an active, modern business in rural Kentucky. Alex was vaguely aware of this, and he was much more acutely aware that the hole-in-the-wall he'd found was a local secret. After all, if the place ever got national or State-wide or even regional recognition, taking lunch there alone would quickly become impossible.

And Alex was taking lunch alone. He didn't know why--after all, he spent so much time alone already--but he preferred to take meals by himself. At work, he ate in his office, regardless of whether he'd purchased lunch or brought it, and at home, of course, he didn't have any option but to eat alone.

Maybe it was because he felt that there was a certain intimacy about eating. There was something sacred about taking food, and there was now no one in his life who Alex would like to share that experience with. Even the brown-haired man cleaning glasses behind the bar was too much company, as far as Alex was concerned--but as long as he wore his black sweater and Alex only caught glimpses of him through the corner of his eye, Alex could pretend that he was just part of the restaurant or something.

He ate at a leisurely pace, facing the seemingly-abandoned gas station and landscape before him. If it wasn't for his new and freshly-waxed truck, there would have been no way for him to tell if he was in the twenty-first century or the twentieth--there was no activity and what few artificial features he saw hadn't changed for decades.

Alex's meal was unhealthy by his standards, but he ate in such a manner so infrequently that it simply didn't matter. There was nothing remotely wrong with having pulled pork sandwiches, coleslaw, steak fries, and a root beer every other week or so--after all, Alex was a white man from Kentucky. What else was he supposed to eat?

The food was good, just as Alex had expected. Apart from his drink, everything was homemade fresh--even the pork had just finished its time in the smoker not ten minutes before Alex had ordered it. The crux of savory and sweet that defined barbecue had been perfected in Kentucky in general, and, as far as Alex was concerned, in that restaurant in particular. Everything had been made with a degree of perfection that would have justified a much higher price than what Alex had paid, and for that reason, the tip he planned to leave would be large.

Alex's mind wandered again, as he continued to eat. He couldn't say what he was thinking about--ever since he'd left the NKKK, his thoughts had become has unfocused as his life. His mind had been struck once when he'd shot up the nigger town, and when Matthew and the others had found out about his need for medicine, his mind had been struck again--but that time, it had shattered. So although Alex was still on anti-depressants, he couldn't think, couldn't feel, couldn't know what to do or even have a sense of what was right and what was wrong.

For all Alex knew, he was going insane. He was fairly certain that he had no moral compass anymore--he doubted he'd even have the guts to kill himself if he woke up one morning beside a naked negress. All that was left for him to do was to follow a routine, a very carefully crafted pattern that left no room for sin or downfall apart from alcohol and the occasional cheater meal.

He was finished eating.

He realized this several seconds after trying to chew food that was simply not there, and so he blinked and he looked around to make sure that no one was looking at him--but no one was. No one was there to look at him and see that the shell he had become was being eroded.

So, Alex cleaned his fingers with a napkin. He then counted out the money owed to the establishment--plus the sizeable tip he ought to have owed them--and then he left.

He had left filling up the truck for after he'd filled up his stomach, it seemed, so one minute later, Alex was watching the LED display tracking the amount of gas flowing into his trunk and the charge for it show ever-increasing numbers. Despite the fact that Alex's income vastly outstripped his expenses, he couldn't help but wincing at the ever-increasing bill--gas prices had gone up and up and up since the recession, and they had stayed there. Maybe if the NKKK took over the government and forced the Arabs to behave, it wouldn't be an altogether bad thing...

There was a vehicle approaching; Alex could hear its engine. It was coming from just beyond the final set of hills that hid the gas station from view of most of the rest of the world--Alex tried to peer past the grasses and the trees but he couldn't see anything and he wouldn't be able to see anything until the vehicle was within fifty yards of him.

Instinctively, his hand dropped to waistband. His shirt was untucked and so when the time came, he'd be able to draw his weapon in less than half a second. There were two extra magazines at his other hip and he could use them to fight his way back into his truck where there was a rifle--and then the vehicle drove into view from beyond the hills.

It was a pickup, like Alex's, but it was towing something behind it. It looked a bit like the sort of containers that were used to transport horses, but somehow Alex knew that it was something else. He felt curiosity, but none of the chilling sense of foreboding he always did when danger was close at hand--so he moved his hand away from his weapon and simply watched as the other truck pulled into the gas station.

Alex pretended to fiddle with his gas pump as two men stepped out of the other pickup. Both were wearing uniforms of some sort: practical trousers and shirts with boots and baseball caps and patches on their shoulders. They were armed, too--the passenger was carrying a shotgun, and both wore pistols under their arms. And yet Alex could tell from their demeanors that they weren't there to kill him--they didn't spare him more than a glance when they did see him.

Who were they, though? And what was the odd, massive enclosure towed behind their truck? It seemed so out of place, behind such a vehicle and against such an idyllic, peaceful landscape. It was a device that practically oozed fear into the atmosphere--Alex saw that before he saw it shake, violently, as if it had been struck by a powerful blow from the inside.

He was walking toward the truck, he realized. And the other men were talking--Alex didn't pay attention to their words, exactly, but he could tell from their voices that they were from the area. And so he kept walking, almost in a trance, until he forced himself to put a more positive expression on his face and cross the distance between him and the other men a bit more naturally.

"Afternoon, fellas," Alex called, distracting them from their conversation. They looked up at him, and by then, he was within ten yards of them and waving to greet them. "Sorry, I couldn't help but hearing--you fellas are from around here, aren't you? I can tell from your accents."

The other men laughed at that, and affirmed that they were both from towns twenty and thirty miles from their present location respectively. The man with the shotgun had a cousin who had told him about the gas station, it seemed, and when they had found out that they would be passing through the area, they decided to stop there.

Alex was able to maintain his facade of friendliness and normality as the three of them began to chat. The whole while, though, he couldn't stop himself from constantly stealing glances at the odd container attached to their truck. The attention he paid to them was so minimal that it was with a jolt that he thought to make sure that they were both white a full minute after starting to talk with him--but it was alright. Both of them were tan, to be sure, but gifted with brown hair and fair eyes.

And so Alex let the conversation continue for a few moments until they finally hit a lull in the chatter. That was his opportunity to gesture at the container behind the pickup and ask what was going on.

"Well..." the man with the shotgun began, "technically, we're not supposed to talk to anyone about this... for security reasons, you know. But..." He shared a glance with the driver, who nodded, and then he continued. "Just so long as you don't tell anyone... what we got there's a real, live, tiger."

Alex hadn't expected that answer. He wasn't sure what he had expected, but he hadn't expected that.

"Huh," Alex said, a bit dumbly, "a tiger."

He went over what he knew about tigers in his mind--it didn't take long, because he didn't know much. But he was fairly certain that fewer and fewer of them existed, not just in the wild but in captivity. Regulatory changes and increased inbreeding combined with a string of bad publicity a few years ago had taken tigers out of the hands of individual owners and many zoos as well. So, to come across a tiger in the middle of rural Kentucky... the odds of that happening had to be very long indeed.

Alex verbalized that last thought, and so the other men laughed. They then invited Alex to take a look at the animal itself--the metal cage had a few slots for air and as long as he stayed a few feet away, there was no danger.

A few seconds later, Alex was kneeling and peering through a gap no more than an inch wide at what the cage held inside. Honestly, he couldn't see that much--but he saw enough. He saw orange and white and black fur and claws and whiskers and teeth, and then he jumped back when the tiger lashed out and caused the cage to violently shake again.

"Dear Lord," Alex exclaimed. He glanced at the passenger's shotgun and breathed a bit easier as he stood up. He looked at the cage again with an increased sense of wariness, and then he shook his head.

"Whatever zoo he's going to's got its hands full," Alex said. "Damn animal's terrified."

"She," the driver corrected. "And she ain't going to a zoo. She's going to be put to sleep."

After that, he expressed humorous confusion at why thousands of dollars had to be spent on transporting the animal across two states, and hundreds more on sticking it with a needle when a rifle shot to the head would kill it just as well. Alex barely noticed this, however--because the moment he was made aware of the tigress's fate, he found himself struggling to stand still and maintain the mask he'd put on for the other men.

But he did. He managed to appear normal even as he lead them into the barbecue and advised them that he'd never had better pulled pork and steak fries anywhere else in his life. He said goodbye to them and then he went back to his truck in a daze.

He paid for the gas at some point--he didn't recall it--and then he was in the driver's seat with his hands on the wheel. He was practically shaking and when he tried to look out at the expanses of road and Sun and plains and hills before he, he failed, because he saw his own face, reflected and distorted by the truck's windshield.

Alex did not know who he had become. He didn't know who he would become, and he didn't know if he would even live to see his next birthday. And yet he knew with a clarity more potent than the hate he felt toward the men who had killed his parents that if he left without doing anything about what was going to happen to the tigress in the container not a hundred yards for him, he would regret it forever.

It didn't take Alex long to come to what he felt was a more meaningful decision than any he'd made in the past few months. He opened a compartment next to his seat, took out a small tool not dissimilar from a pocket knife, and then he jogged toward the other pickup as quietly as he could. He made sure to avoid the view of the several security cameras mounted at the station, and doing so took a few valuable seconds that Alex made up by sprinting as soon as he could.

As he recalled, the driver and the passenger of the vehicle had elected to sit at the bar, facing away from the windows. When he got closer to the pickup, he looked back to ensure that--good, they couldn't see him and were engaging the bartender as well. Alex would receive no better opportunity than the one he had right in front of him, and so he got to work immediately.

The cage was kept shut by five heavy padlocks--excellent. Alex knew how to take those apart with ease, and so did. The first and the second locks were disabled within a minute, and although the third lock took a bit longer, the fourth and fifth locks were as easy to open as the first. And so, with his heart pumping blood and adrenaline through his veins, Alex clambered on to the top of the cage and was about to undo the one latch holding the door in place when the tigress beneath him struck the cage again.

For a moment, Alex simply lay still. He... didn't have to go through with what he was doing, and there was no real reason for him to have done it in the first place. What on Earth was he doing saving a tigress--a killing machine which might well turn around and attack him the moment it got free? And supposing it did get free--what then? It would terrorize the community for days or weeks before it was killed by gunshot after a painfully long, traumatic chase, and so its death would be many times worse than the death waiting for it at its destination.

But somehow, Alex knew that it would be wrong for him to let the tigress be driven off to her death. He knew it was wrong and so it was his responsibility to do something about it, just as he had known it was wrong for him to kill the niggers in the nigger town just those few years ago.

Alex allowed himself to make that conscious thought for the first time right then, laying on the top of a cage holding one of the last tigers on the planet while he prepared to release her. Doing so made him shudder, but it strengthened his resolve: somehow, he was going to find a way to right the wrongs he had done and the wrongs he could prevent. And all that started right then when he pulled up the final latch and shoved the cage door open.

For a moment, nothing happened. Alex didn't know what was going on and so he placed his hand on his weapon as he always did whenever confronted with a situation that was unfamiliar to him--but still, nothing happened. And so Alex crawled forward, the smallest amount, and peered into the cage--

She almost took his head off with her claws or her teeth--he couldn't tell which--but the moment he saw her, she jumped up and then she ran and ran and ran so fast that Alex could barely track her striped body as it bounded across the plains and across the hills until it was out of sight.

For a moment, Alex simply replayed the moments of the tigress's freedom in his mind. He could practically see her bounding through the grass and over the hills until she was out of view--she'd disappeared beyond a group of rocks, and beyond them she'd find a forest and a stream and, potentially, the ability to live quietly and peacefully... for some time, at least. At least for some time.

Alex jumped off of the cage. And then, as quickly as he could, he shut the door and locked it again--and then it was back to his truck to start up the engine and drive away while the men charged with transporting one of the few tigers left in America continued to eat and laugh and live.

Alex's feeling of accomplishment had more or less subsided by the time he got home. He still felt good, though, and a lot better than he would have felt if he had simply returned back to his place after having a nice meal. He felt... energized, as if he once again had some sense of what he ought to do with his life. He ought to... well, he couldn't turn himself in for killing the niggers, and he couldn't--he hadn't really done anything else in his life that was really wrong. He... well, he certainly knew that from then on, he would have a moral compass that could guide his actions.

He felt almost restless. He ought to be doing something--he really ought to be doing something, but what? For a moment, Alex considered calling one of his co-workers and asking if they were interested in meeting up somewhere. Maybe they could go hunting for coyotes or wild pigs or maybe they could have beers and watch something on TV or maybe they could simply go for a walk out in the forest together.

Alex actually had his phone in his hand when he realized that he really wasn't very close to anyone he worked with at all. He was friendly to them all, of course--friendly, but distant, and it had been months since any of them had last attempted to get him to do something with them.

It wasn't long before Alex ended up in his study at his laptop. He had nothing better to do--and so, idly, he began to look at the news.

There was the usual, of course--chaos and tyranny in the Middle East and the Third World; riots and protests in Western Europe; continued economic downturn and more in America. And so Alex turned to the more local stories--and, for a few moments, it seemed that all was as it always had been. Some old folks had passed away; there were restaurant reviews; new businesses were opening; old businesses were closing. And then Alex saw a strange headline in the very corner of his browser.

"'Ten year old mauled by illegally-owned tiger'..."

Alex clicked the link. And just as he did so, he felt that dangerous sense of foreboding that always warned him that he was about to experience something shocking.

The article was brief, but despite that, Alex guessed that few had read it. Because below the article, there were photos--several of them--and a video clip, too. Alex tapped the play button and then he waited, briefly, as the video buffered--and then he jumped in his seat as screams began to pour out of his speakers.

From what he could tell, the incident had happened at a birthday party. Some kid was turning ten and to celebrate, his parents had had a leashed tiger brought to the party for the guests to pat and take pictures with and taunt from several meters away. Things had gone as planned for some time, but then the birthday boy had take a stick of some sort and struck the tiger directly on the face.

Alex watched the ensuing violence numbly, for a moment. He noted to himself that the tiger in the video looked familiar, chillingly so--but still. But still--even though the notes being added to the article as details were made available indicated that the tiger had been sent off to be put down--it was just a coincidence. There was no way--it was just far too unlikely. Even though the mauling had taken place not a hundred miles away, it had to be a coincidence.

Alex was about to close out of the article when one final update came in. It seemed that the entire article was somewhat inaccurate: the tiger that had maimed the child wasn't a tiger at all.

She was a tigress.

Six years had passed since Alex had left the nigger town of the county for what he'd intended to be the last time. And yet there he was, later that very evening, wandering the streets of the same neighborhood he'd once blamed for the deaths of his parents.

Now and then, he would recognize buildings and streets, and less frequently, memories of shooting and screaming and blood would flash up in his mind. He tried to feel guilty about what he had done--either six years ago or earlier that day--but he felt nothing. He felt numb, perhaps, but Alex's utter lack of sensation was hard to describe even as that.

He knew what he wanted, though: he wanted to die. He wanted the niggers to indulge in their sociopathic tendencies and tear him to pieces then and there, because he finally acknowledged to himself that he deserved it. Now that Alex was off of drugs--alcohol, antidepressants, and the lies the NKKK had brainwashed him with when he didn't have the mental fortitude to resist them--he couldn't delude himself anymore. He deserved death even more than the men who had killed his parents did.

His arms hung limply at his sides, and although Alex barely registered that he was walking, he knew that his motions were jerky and unnatural. His breathing was shallow and uneven, and although he hadn't had a drop of alcohol that day, he knew that the slightest nudge or deviation in the slope of the walk in front of him could drop him.

The neighborhood hadn't changed much, Alex realized, since the last time he'd been there. The houses and the cars were still in roughly the same state of near-disrepair he remembered, and the environment itself felt dirty and poorly-maintained. And the people--they still were lewd, cultureless apes who were up drinking and smoking and partying at that late hour. Alex had seen at least a dozen nigger gatherings immediately after he'd entered the ghetto, though, he noted, they seemed to disperse the moment he was noticed walking toward them.

And so Alex simply kept wandering. He strayed from the main road that bisected the nigger town and he made his way toward the poorest, most depraved parts of the nigger town, where prostitutes and drug dealers and murderers waited behind every corner. He looked back on his life, idly, but the massive vacuum of truth and meaning that had existed in him after his parents had been killed destroyed his ability to meet his death with a smile on his face.

Maybe when he was shot, he'd get it in the head. Maybe his brain would be blown out of his skull so that, poetically, the emotional void in him would be replaced by a physical one--and the nigger boy he'd shot to death at close range would have his own death avenged.

But the minutes dragged on, and nothing happened. Slowly, Alex got out of his trance and began to walk and breathe normally, though he was as determined to die as ever. And as his conscious mental facilities returned, he began to think: why wasn't he being killed? White men simply didn't go to the nigger town ever, much less at past two o'clock in the morning, so the niggers had to know that he was looking for trouble. And they'd seen him--he knew that they had at least a few times.

And then it came to Alex--they thought he was NKKK. They thought he was NKKK and they wouldn't dare to touch him, because, as the massacre had made clear, one dead white boy meant that at least ten niggers would have to die. And they weren't calling the police, either, because they thought that the police were with the NKKK--after all, the investigation of the massacre had been even more unsuccessful than the investigation of the massacre of Alex's parents.

So, Alex suspected, the niggers were hiding. Maybe a few of them were arming themselves, but no one would dare to shoot at him first. And as he wasn't going to kill any more of them...

Alex drew his gun. He felt its cold, metallic weight in his hand; by then it was so natural that it felt like an extension of himself more than anything else. And as always, simply touching a deadly weapon focused Alex's thoughts and his senses--when he looked up from the automatic he held at around again, he didn't just see blurred silhouettes and flickering streetlights. He saw entities and details and where he had to go and what he had to do to do what he had to.

He was in a backyard, he realized, or perhaps a plot of public land that was as good as such. Once upon a time, it might have been a nice place--but now, all that remained of what may have been a well-maintained garden were a few withered plants, some statues, and a stone walkway that led into a nearby alley.

When Alex looked into the alley, or attempted to, he felt a chill. His eyes were powerful, even at night, and yet the alley was like a void that no light or heat or sound could escape from. Somehow, when he saw it, he knew that that was where he belonged--he knew that that was where he needed to go to die.

And so he went there. Each step took effort to execute, because no matter what, Alex was a white man whose nature demanded that he oppose suicide. But Alex was also a human whose nature was to avoid the killing of others like him at all costs--so if he could massacre a bunch of unarmed, innocent niggers, he could certainly force himself to do what was write, for once, and take those final steps forward.

By the time Alex had finally entered the alleyway, he was sweating and his heart was hammering at his ribcage. His unarmed hand was trembling, yet his pistol hand was still and steady and controlled and precise, even as it pressed the muzzle of his pistol against the bottom of his chin.

He placed his finger on the trigger. He shut his eyes and he started to pull and he waited for the report that would mark the end of his pathetic existence--but then he became aware of a presence behind him and turned around with his gun raised before he could think to do otherwise.

Alex had dropped into a weaver stance and was aiming with both eyes open before he realized that even if something was coming to kill him, he would gain nothing by stopping it--just a few more gallons of blood to weigh down on his soul. And yet his survival instinct was so strong that even then, he had to strain himself to avoid killing her with a double-tap to the brain--

For a full moment, Alex froze. His gun was still raised, but he looked beyond its glowing sights at what lay before him--and then, slowly, he lowered the weapon in his hands. He drew it close to his chest and he took his finger off the trigger, and then he just stared at her.

Alex had seen her in her entirety for only a few wild seconds, and at that time, she had been terrified and angry. But now that she was calm, cool, and collected--now that she'd had time to think, it seemed that she had recognized that he had helped her. He had saved her, she'd realized, and now she had come to save him.

For a few moments, she didn't do any more than sit there, two or three yards from Alex, looking up at him with her reflective green eyes. He couldn't see her very well, but he somehow knew that though she was trying to look relaxed and unconcerned, she was deeply, deeply, worried and uncertain about what was going on. How she knew that Alex was at his breaking point he would never know, but she did--and she was doing something about it. She was looking at him and somehow she was telling him not to go through with it.

And it wasn't working.

Alex appreciated her efforts, and he was very glad indeed that she had come to thank him, but there was nothing he had left to live for. His life had been utterly pathetic and condemnable in every way, ever since he'd shot up the nigger town, and the one half-decent thing he'd done since then was to save her. If he let himself live any longer, he would simply hit new lows--so it made sense to end it all now when he was at the relative peak of his life.

With that in mind, Alex gave her a smile. He then began to lift his pistol again--but she was too quick for him.

Perhaps in the heat of combat, with adrenaline flooding his system, Alex would have had half a chance at beating her. But in their resting states, he was just a man and she was a tigress. She had trapped his hand in her teeth before he could do anything about it, and although he struggled, she neither released nor allowed his fingers to come to any harm.

And so, quickly, he gave up. He stopped trying to shoot himself--he told her this without words--and so she let go of his hand and apologized for being so aggressive with him by grazing his hip with the smooth bluntness of her head. He felt her whiskers taste the metal surface of his automatic and tell her to shy away, but she didn't--she had no reason to be frightened of anything he controlled, particularly when he set it down and knelt down so that he could run his fingers through her fur.

"How did you find me way out here, girl?" Alex murmured. He expected no answer, of course, but then she surprised him by responding in her own way: by purring quietly and nuzzling against his face.

Eventually, Alex closed his eyes and simply held her. She was warm--a lot warmer than he was, and a lot more alive, too. Being so close to her was truly inspiring for Alex, because, in many ways, they weren't so different. After finding themselves in unfortunate situations, they'd both done terrible things--but now, they were both moving on and in the future they would both be good again, somehow. Nothing could give life back to the ten-year-old she'd torn apart or the dozens of niggers Alex had shot, but there was a way to be good again. There was always a way to be good again.

With his arms still wrapped around feline in front of him, Alex's eyes opened. He wasn't sure why--maybe he had heard something, or maybe it was that chilling sense of foreboding he always got when things were about to get dangerous. Whatever it was, the moment Alex saw who had just entered the nigger town, he immediately collected his weapon, stood up, and left his body.

In a second, it was as it was six years before. Alex and the NKK were in the nigger town again.

As quietly as he possibly could, Alex crept toward the mouth of the alleyway. By taking cover next to a mess of weather-beaten wooden crates, he was able to see without being seen--and so he watched.

There were five men, it seemed, and they had just stepped out of a black car that had been driven into the nigger town. Alex didn't see any other vehicles in the area that didn't look like they belonged--so he quickly deduced that there were only five NKKK members in the nigger town and that the car itself was empty.

Their actions had no focal point, and that was very, very bad, because it meant that they would be able to disperse and move as individuals rather than units. Alex knew that that strategy was incredibly effective, because he had used it himself to kill more niggers than the rest of the NKKK combined. If they moved individually rather than as a squad, their actions would be that much more difficult for any counter-operative to predict and react to.

Alex didn't know what the NKKK had planned, exactly--they weren't in the most populated part of the nigger town by far, but they were all heavily armed. And they all had Molotov cocktails--but why? It was clear that they planned to start fires, but why? The shacks in that part of the nigger town were on the verge of falling apart without assistance, and there wasn't anything of note in the area--was there?

Even as Alex struggled to answer these questions for himself, the NKKK members began to ignite the cloth wicks of their Molotov cocktails. Dots of multicolored flame began to dance in the nigger town immediately, but Alex knew that they would be nothing compared to the fiery arcs that would streak through the air when the improvised explosives were actually thrown.

Alex had only a few seconds to leave before the violence began and the NKKK noticed him. That meant that he had to go. And so he backed away, as quietly as he possibly could, and began to consider how he would exfiltrate before the nigger town was plunged into chaos again.

Alex got as far as turning around when he remembered the nigger boy he shot--and then the parents he'd killed. The parents, the grandparents, the cousins, uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces, cousins, sons, daughters, and more, that he had killed when he was part of the NKKK six years ago. He remembered their screams and their blood and the terror on their eyes and faces when his bullets tore through their flesh, and then he remembered that even the NKKK didn't deny that niggers were, in fact, people too. They were people, and Alex had killed many, many of them.

Nothing he could do would ever bring any of them back, that was for certain. And yet...

Alex looked down. He felt the weight of the weapon in his hand, the coldness and the hardness of its polished surface against his palm. When he held it like that--gently, but firmly--he could feel the blood in his veins rush around it rather than pulsing against it, as if his body recognized it as a natural extension of itself. He knew what he could do with it, and he knew that if he didn't do anything with it, many niggers would die that night.

But if he killed again, just one last time, then he could save them all. He could save the apes he had been born and raised to stay away from and had come to hate.

A moment passed.

And then, Alex Kralik punched outward with his weapon grasped in his hands. He lined his target up with his sights, and then he began to fire.

His pistol was far from the ideal tool to use to dispatch men wearing body armor, but a triple-tap to the chest followed by a headshot took Alex's first target down before the first brass casing had hit the ground. The repeating, high-pitched report of his automatic shrieked through the air and its muzzle flash gave away his position--but that didn't matter. By the time the NKKK realized it was being attacked, Alex was on the move.

He didn't have the option to strafe, and as his goal was to wipe out the rest of the white men in the nigger town, Alex didn't fall back. Instead, he advanced, aggressively, firing several shots in the process in order to keep the NKKK occupied just for another few seconds.

But then, the NKKK did open fire. Alex dodged bullets for only a second before vaulting onto a porch largely constructed of steel sheets and other miscellaneous sorts of metal, and so he was protected. He kept his head down and he reloaded and he ignored the sparks and the gunshots and the NKKK's shouting--and then he saw his opening.

He dropped onto his belly and then rolled over, halfway, so that he could fire through a gap between two misaligned parts of steel. He held his pistol out and aimed, carefully--but his masked targets were moving and trying to regroup or flank or get an angle on the man who had already killed one of them. For that reason, it was a full second before Alex managed to draw a bead and then fire thrice--so that another NKKK member went down with a fist-sized chunk blown out of his head.

That meant that there were only three NKKK fighters left, but Alex was nowhere close to victory. The three other white men in the nigger town were spreading out, now, and absolutely blazing at Alex with their weapons. They were armed with rifles: long guns that fired much more powerful rounds than Alex's automatic at a much more rapid rate. Quickly, their bullets began to chew through the cover he'd found--

Alex felt something bite him in the shoulder, causing him to grunt more in surprise than in pain. Adrenaline staved off the worst of the shock of his injury, but he had the presence of mind to do a damage assessment regardless--and he wasn't seriously hurt. A bit of shrapnel had caught him just next to the clavicle, but his arm remained functional--so he returned to the fight before he could appreciate how close he had just gotten to taking a sliver of flying metal to the neck.

He fired off the rest of his magazine, but it didn't do him much good. The NKKK members had dispersed and dropped to their knees, methodically pummeling every square inch of Alex's cover with bullets. He'd already taken a hit, and it wouldn't be long before he took more, serious hits--and if he did, he would die and the NKKK would life.

That was unacceptable. Alex needed to force things to change.

Without really thinking about what he was doing, Alex sprang to his feet, dived out of cover and ran toward the nearest NKKK member. However, he didn't go straight for the other white man--he sprinted forward at an oblique angle so that when the panicked rifleman depressed his trigger and didn't let go, his bullets met air and Alex's didn't.

And even as the third NKKK member's head snapped back after being shredded by a flurry of pistol shots, Alex kept running.

He made his way across the road, entirely, to take cover behind a house. He reloaded again--and this time, he was on his last magazine. After this, there would be no more reloads--so he had to make his bullets count.

Again, however, the NKKK had seen where he had gone. After stopping and turning around, Alex didn't bother stacking up at the side of the house--chunks of concrete and siding were already being blasted off of it by repeated rifle shots. They had his position covered, and with their vastly superior firepower, they would win any direct contest of force. So, to win, Alex had to be unorthodox and take his enemy by surprise again.

After a second of thought, Alex had his answer: rather than continuing to fight a two-dimension battle, he tensed the powerful muscles in his quadriceps. And then, he jumped up.

He caught hold of a windowsill with his fingers, and, with difficulty, muscled his way upward until he was standing on it. From there, it was a simple matter to get onto the roof--and from there, if Alex was facing a normal pair of gunners, he would have simply moved forward and shot them to death from above.

But he had once been part of the NKKK--they knew how he fought. They knew to expect the unexpected and that to have a chance, they needed to be as dynamic and fluid as he was.

They had ceased fire, and one was moving in to check out the alleyway that Alex had disappeared into. The other had sprinted to cover behind the car, and even then, was going prone in order to provide suppressive fire without presenting a target. It would only be a few seconds before they realized that Alex had vanished--and when that happened, they would leave or call for backup or who knew what else.

If he didn't want to lose the momentum he'd gained by killing three of them without taking a single serious injury, Alex couldn't wait for a second. He had to move again immediately, even before the roar of the NKKK's rifles stopped echoing through the nigger town.

And so he began to walk. With his pistol in a low-ready position in front of him, but not centered on any particular entity, Alex crept across the roof. When his feet touched the rough, weather-beaten surface, he let his weight roll forward, slowly, in order to minimize the noise his motion made to insignificance.

In this manner, it took him only several seconds to approach the edge of the roof. And when he was just steps from re-entering the fight, he got to thinking--was there really a point in what he was doing? Did it really matter if he ended up saving niggers that night--did it matter that he'd killed dozens of them six years before?

Alex remembered his years in the NKKK. There had been bad times, of course, but there was no denying that without the protection of his white brothers and sisters, he wouldn't have been the man he was that day. He remembered Matthew, the man who become his father-figure without asking for anything in return except for loyalty to the Aryan race and the NKKK.

He remembered how his guilt had almost consumed him when he had visited the doctor who had given him a prescription for antidepressants--a Jewish act executed by a known, open Jew. Alex remembered shuddering at the scum's vile touch, at his false kindness, and at the complete, unquestionable sincerity in his eyes when Alex couldn't look away.

He remembered how his father--his real father, not Matthew--had once told him that right and wrong didn't have to taught to anyone, that everyone simply knew by gut instinct what was right and what was wrong. And he remembered that his mother had always told him that he was an old soul, how he was wise and thoughtful except for when he forgot who he was.

And then Alex remembered the nigger town. He remembered how he had left himself that night, or how he thought he had--because now, he realized that he had left himself the day that his parents had died and forgotten himself entirely. Only now was he starting to remember himself and now, he was only going to leave himself once more: so that he could kill the last two members of the NKKK who remained in the nigger town.

Alex Kralik too those final steps forward. He chanced a look down at the ground level of the nigger town to get a handle on where the NKKK members were and what they were doing, and then he took a step back.

He kept his mouth shut and instead saturated his lungs and his blood with oxygen by hyperventilating through his nose alone. And then, he envisioned what he was going to do before he did it.

And then, he moved.

But Alex did not have his feet on solid ground. He was on the roof of a house whose very ownership was in question, and so when he moved, his foot failed to gain traction. He slipped, awkwardly, and struggled to stay upright by stomping down with his other foot--and in doing so, he alerted the NKKK to his presence.

And so when Alex dived off the top of the building, the first thing he saw was the business end of an automatic weapon, leveled directly at him.

The next thing he saw was the starburst flash off its discharge--and then there was darkness.

Alex had been shot; he realized this immediately after he realized he was alive.

It seemed he had launched himself off the roof properly. He had flown through the air, and then he had come down and tackled the NKKK member that had come to check out the alleyway. Gravity had accelerated his body to the point that by the time he had collided with the other man, he was moving fast enough that the impact stunned him for half a second. Furthermore, he had bitten down on his tongue so hard that it had almost been cut in two, and even as he stood up and began to shoot at the remaining NKKK member, blood flowed freely from his mouth.

But he had avoided debilitating injury so far. Even as the remaining NKKK member broke through his shock and began to fire on him, Alex avoided debilitating injury--true, he took a bullet through the trapezius, but that was simply an annoyance he could shake off. Nothing would stop him from finishing what he had set out to do, nothing would stop him from wiping out the NKKK members who had returned to the nigger town: not the lone survivor, not the dull ache in his body that had painfully sparked up when he had half-fallen off the roof, and certainly not the fact that it was becoming increasingly difficult to move and shoot at the same time.

He took more fire. His left shoulder and his bicep were torn apart with multiple rifle rounds, and if Alex hadn't sidestepped, he would have taken those bullets to his chest. His left arm now hung uselessly at his side, but he kept firing with his right hand--and just as the blood loss and the trauma and the hopelessness of the situation grew to be overwhelming, the last bullet in his weapon entered the last NKKK member's head through his eye and exited through the base of his brain.

Alex saw his pistol's final, fiery cough. He saw the slide lock back so that the final empty casing could eject from the chamber, and he saw incoherent strands of smoke from burnt powder and burning impurities strangle one another in a race away from the glowing barrel of his gun. He saw the reflective sheen of his pistol sights, and then, beyond them, he saw the spray of blood and pulverized brain that told him that his final shot had done its job.

It was over.

As Alex began to reenter his body, the amount of adrenaline churning through his system dropped. He gradually became more aware of his injuries and the pain--but he winced and forced himself to stay on his feet. He staggered forward, slowly, breathing so loudly that the repeated thuds of his heart beating against his chest were almost drowned out--he had to confirm his kill before he lowered his guard and lowered the weapon in his hand, though he knew that it would do him no good anymore.

He almost collapsed onto the car's hood, but he kept himself on his feet by placing a hand on the sleek metal surface and hold on tight. His head swam and for a moment, his entire frame drooped, dangerously--but then Alex looked up and saw a body on the street with part of a head attached and an angry mass of blood and brain next to it.

The last NKKK member was beyond dead--Alex's bullet had done everything he had seen it do.

It really was over.

Alex's automatic was still smoking in his hand. He checked that the chamber was clear tactilely rather than visually--it was dark--and then he placed the unloaded weapon on the car's hood. It had served him well.

Again, it was silent in the nigger town. Alex realized that he really didn't know what to do at that point--every time he was finished killing or being around killing, he always felt a numbing sense of void and uncertainly that prevented him from thinking clearly. He needed someone to guide him--and this was the first time he'd killed without the NKKK and Matthew at his side to tell him he'd done well and that it was time to go home for dinner.

Blood was dripping to the ground, Alex realized--his blood. It was dripping from his mouth and his arm, and although he sensed that the bullets he'd been shot with had left him cleanly, he needed an ambulance. But he didn't have his phone--when he had entered the nigger town to kill himself, he must have left it in his truck. So, really, he was all alone--there was just him and the darkness and the empty, smoking handgun next to him and the dead NKKK members that he had shot.

Alex realized that he didn't know what had happened to her. One minute, they'd been embracing one another and the next, he had become aware of the NKKK. And then, he had attacked them and the area had erupted with gunshots... so, she must have run away.

He would never see or hear of her again, he realized--or at least, he hoped. He hoped that she would escape the nigger town and the area and recapture altogether, although the realistic part of Alex's mind told him that it was only a matter of time before she was found again and this time killed on the spot.

Ah, well. He had done what he could to help her, and he had done what he could do to help the niggers. So, all there was to do now, Alex realized, was to try to calm his breathing and to sit still among the blood and the bodies and wait for the police and the ambulances to come, and to wonder what on Earth that labored breathing behind him could be--

Alex turned so fast that his head swam and he almost passed out, then and there--but he did. He remained conscious, though off-balance and helpless--he tried to hyperventilate and he tried to force adrenaline and energy into his system, but he couldn't. He was too tired and he was too hurt and when Matthew shot him again, in the belly, he was knocked to his knees and further prevented from action.

Now, Alex knew that he wasn't listening to Matthew's breathing. He was listening to his own breathing and the own loud, rapid beats of his heart in his chest, even as they forced more and more of his blood to flood from his wound through his shirt onto the street around him. His hand had moved, reflexively, to apply pressure to the injury... but it wasn't doing much good. He was in such a pathetic condition that even looking up at Matthew was an act so demanding that it almost made Alex pass out.

Alex may have tackled him from the roof of a two-story house, but Matthew, too, had toughened up in the six years since they had last seen one another. He was still a man with more than a few extra pounds on his frame, but he was now strong and built for brutal combat. He did cardio and heavy weightlifting and enough training to have impressed Alex, and so he looked like a man of half his years or better. His eyes were still pale and bright and hatefully blue and open feeds into Matthew's mind, and so Alex didn't need to read the expression on the Grand Wizard of the NKKK to know that he was going to be executed.

And there wasn't much he could do about it.

He was injured, badly, and Matthew was standing too far away for him to use his knife or his bare hands to any effect. He tried to look for another option, but he was too hurt to run or escape in any other way, and he knew better than to try to negotiate when Matthew was staring him down like that, like he was a worm on the ground: like he was a nigger himself.

"Fuckin' race-traitor," the bigger white man spat. He was breathing hard and clutching his side--he'd fractured a rib and been knocked unconscious when Alex had taken him down--but he wasn't shot or stabbed or severely injured in any other way. He was on his feet while Alex was on his knees, and Alex's weapon was empty and useless while his own pistol was loaded and ready to fire and punched out straight in front of him, leveled directly at Alex's head.

"We should've torn you apart when you went to that Jew slime for medicine," Matthew snarled. "Should've known better than to trust a white boy who let his parents get killed in front of him. You're Goddamned sad, boy--you let your parents get killed without doing anything about it, and now you killed your own blood yourself--why?" Matthew suddenly demanded.

Alex didn't answer, though, so Matthew fired another shot that traced a clean, bloody line across his cheek and made his ears ring as the bullet's supersonic shriek tore at his eardrum. He almost fell over, but somehow, he remained relatively upright--he stayed on his knees and he maintained eye contact with Matthew, and in a moment, the hate on his face was as blatant as the hate on Matthew's.

"I didn't kill my blood tonight, Matthew," Alex said. Despite his injuries and his exhaustion, his voice came out clear and level. "I killed the real race traitors tonight. I killed a few guys who betrayed humanity."

Without breaking eye contact with the other white man, Alex leaned forward, slightly, and with his final reserves of energy, spat onto Matthew's shoes. And it was because the two men had their eyes locked on one another that neither of them noticed the massive silhouette padding, silently, ever closer to Matthew, until the glow of her eyes alerted Alex to her presence.

He looked at her and she looked at him. And she looked at him with such confidence that Alex was smiling before Matthew felt her claws pierce his flesh.

She was brutal. Brutal, efficient, and almost frighteningly silent: when she had jumped on Matthew and wrestled him to the ground, she caught his throat with her teeth and applied such extreme pressure that he couldn't scream. In the same process, she lacerated the underside of his forearm with her claws and disabled his firearm hand entirely, leaving him incapable of any real means of self-defense.

All Matthew was able to do was to feebly attempt to strike at her face with his bare hands and kick at the ground to try to get up, but it was pointless. Each of his motions allowed her jaws to constrict around his neck until her teeth had severed his jugular and punctured his windpipe so that he messily began to breathe out of his neck, but even that didn't last for long. Just when it seemed that Matthew would have to suffer an extended, painful death, she bit down hard and jerked her head--and tore his throat out.

It was a gruesome killing, to be sure, but there was no guilt on her face. She had saved her savior and she had done so in the most efficient, reasonable manner possible. All that was left for her to do was to lick the blood off of her muzzle and go over to make sure that the one she cared for was alright.

With that thought in mind, she padded over to his side rapidly. He was still sitting on his knees, but his head was hung and she could tell that he was hurt badly. Predatory instinct ought to have dictated that she kill him immediately, but somehow that set of instincts simply didn't apply to him.

He saw her place her striped paw on his lap before he felt it, yet he felt her nose nudge against his head before he heard her make a low inquisitive sound in her throat. And so, despite the pain that was now numbing his thoughts as well as his senses, Alex understood that she was asking him if he was okay.

And, really, he wasn't sure. After all, he had been shot to pieces, but even as he sat on the street in a pool of his own blood, he sensed that nothing vital had been hit. Bullets had entered and exited his body cleanly without striking bone or several major arteries. And although a few major muscles had been torn apart... Alex would live. Alex believed that he would live.

So he raised his head, with difficulty, and faced the tigress next to him. He smiled at her, and he knew that she understood what that meant.

He raised a trembling hand and moved to pat her, or something, but then they were both alerted by the sound of approaching voices and footsteps. Men were coming--many men, by the sound of it. Many of them were probably armed, and Alex doubted that any one of them would hesitate for a second before killing a tigress like the one at his side.

He looked at her again until she met his eyes. She was shaking--not with anger, but with fear--and her tail was lashing around rapidly behind her. She was asking him if she could go; she was begging him to let her go, and so he nodded.

"Get out of here, girl," he murmured. He patted her one last time, and then shut his eyes tightly.

"Go," he hissed--and then she was off. She was running so fast and so quietly that Alex didn't waste effort looking after her. She had bounded off into the darkness and vanished so completely that she may as well have ceased to exist.

Instead, he fought through the locks his body had placed on itself so that he would avoid further injury. His right hand dove into a pocket and came up with a large, switchblade knife a second later. After that, Alex muscled himself to his feet, stumbled forward until he was on top of Matthew's body--and then he attacked the hateful mass of flesh and blood beneath him as messily as he possibly could.

Within seconds, Alex's knife had removed any trace that Matthew might have been killed by a tigress. It was very possible that she'd left fur on him, but Alex couldn't do anything about that--he just kept stabbing and slashing and ripping until he had reduced Matthew's body, and the dark past he associated with it, to nondescript bloody mass on the street.

The men were very close to him, by then; they were no farther than twenty yards away and they were yelling at him to stop. Alex didn't listen to them, though--not immediately, anyway. It was a few moments before he finally stopped stabbing Matthew so that he could look up--and then freeze in fear.

The men who had gathered around him were armed, with shotguns and pistols, but that wasn't what intimidated Alex. What frightened him was the fact that they were all black, and that in his injured state, he hadn't a chance of fighting through them with only a knife. So, in a panic, Alex stood up and looked around, hoping to find some weakness in their perimeter he could exploit--but there was nothing.

Alex looked into their dark eyes and onto their dark faces. He felt their savagery close in on him so that he felt physically stifled--and so he prepared to die fighting a horde of apes too angry and dumb to realize that he'd just saved them all. He held his knife tightly in his hand as the first of the black men approached him... with his shotgun lowered...

Alex stayed his hand. He looked at the approaching nigger and listened, swaying on his feet, as he began to speak.

"We thought you was NKKK," the black man began. "But you ain't NKK... you the one who shot them..."

Alex's eyes flicked from left to right. For a moment, he toyed with the idea that this was just an elaborate ruse to get him to lower his guard--but he was dead no matter what he did. So he nodded, curtly, placing a hand on the hood of the car the NKK had driven into the town so that he could die on his feet.

"Damn right I ain't NKKK," Alex said. "And... yeah. I killed 'em. I killed 'em all."

The niggers seemed to bristle; Alex could tell that they didn't believe him. So he shut his eyes and waited for buckshot and slugs and bullets to tear him apart.

A moment passed. Alex's senses were so dulled, by that point, that he didn't hear anything, didn't sense anything until he felt a warm, comforting weight on his shoulder. And then he opened his eyes--and came face to face with a real, live nigger for the first time in his life.

"Thank you, brother," the nigger said. "God bless you. I don't know what they was going to do, but you saved us all, brother. God bless you."

Alex blinked several times. Was he simply dying; in his last moments of life was his mind simply trying to ease his passing? How could it be that a nigger was wrapping an arm under his shoulders to keep him upright--how could it be that many niggers were now calling for an ambulance and thanking him and smiling at him and lifting him into their arms? How could it be that when he looked properly, without the veil of hatred and fear that life had cast over his eyes, he didn't see apish niggers, but people that were, really, just like him?

He didn't know for the moment, and he slipped into unconsciousness before he could make sense of him. But the niggers--the black men and women that had gone to defend their homes and their lives from the NKKK threat--they took care of him until the ambulance arrived. They collected his pistol and they gave him the preliminary aid that prevented him from getting infected and losing his arm or his core muscles for half a year.

When he woke up in the hospital two days later, some of them were there, too, to thank him and to tell him that they had looked after his home and his land while he was unconscious. They had also told his employer what had happened to him and why, and they had kept the press away as well.

The hospital forced him to stay for another few days, but after that, Alex grew tired of the tests and the paperwork and the boredom and the inability to get out there, in the forest, and run and shoot and exercise and live. And so when he told this to the blacks who visited him daily--his friends--well. Tigers rarely escaped from cages and patients rarely escaped from hospitals.

But in that rural, isolated, forgotten part of Kentucky, where blacks and whites were just starting to talk to one another again, there would be two rare escapes not a week apart from one another.

"This just in; it appears that a white supremacist group that calls itself he 'NKKK' has shut down for good. Details are still coming in, but it appears that a struggle for leadership has divided membership and raised the eyebrows of federal, state, and local law enforcement groups. The NKKK was known for its proximity to the Watts Massacre six years ago, although none of its members were arrested--"

He reached forward and spun dial that tuned his radio so that the news broadcast immediately gave way to white noise and static. In doing so, he noticed that the shakiness in his fingers had gone entirely--now, he could be as precise and controlled as he wanted to. That thought, and the news he had just heard, made him nod with satisfaction.

"Good riddance," Alex Kralik thought to himself. "I'd've thought they'd've lasted a little longer... oh, well. Good riddance."

He had just finished driving along the lonely road that led from his house to the edge of his property. Habit had forced him to stop--but then he remembered that he had removed the multi-layered barricade that sealed his land off from the rest of the world several days ago. After all, he longer had to keep anyone out and he no longer desired to keep himself in.

So, he pulled onto the main road, feeling energy of his pickup create a dull hum that vibrated his entire body in a pleasant manner. It was a nice day out, he realized--the Sun was shining and it was neither too hot nor remotely humid. And whenever it did start to feel a little warm, a pleasant breeze would come along and rustle the trees, the grasses, and the bushes of blackberries that dotted the landscape.

Alex rolled the windows down. He felt the wind caused by the motion of his vehicle run its fingers along his angular face, through his sandy face--and then he realized that something was missing. He thought, for a second, and then adjusted the audio system of his car again, until he'd located the local station that played bluegrass 24/7 no matter what.

Then, nothing was missing. So, it didn't bother Alex at all that it took him twenty minutes to arrive at his destination--he enjoyed every second of travel.

This time, he wasn't going to the gas station-bar-restaurant combo that he used to frequent. He'd found a new favorite: it was a larger place with significantly more traffic, family owned and operated since the late 1970s. It specialized in barbecue, though the menu was large and varied, and everyone that went there was so clean and so polite that when Alex left his truck, he didn't bother to roll the windows up or lock the doors.

He entered the establishment with a smile on his face and said his hellos to a few patrons seated not far from the door. They were too busy eating to verbally reply--but they all offered him smiles with sauce-stained lips and waved as he passed by on his approach to the counter where takeout orders were picked up.

For a moment, Alex was left alone to stand and look around and drum his fingers on the wooden surface level with his chest in front of him. Before him were any number of spices and jars of condiments and fruit preserves and dried meats sold for prices that were incredibly reasonable, considering their quality. There were glass-covered displays at the level of his waist and below, where brisket, pulled pork, salad, sandwiches, and other foodstuffs that kept for several hours were stored--and behind the displays there was a slender blue-eyed man, too busy using a deli slicer to prepare a smoked turkey breast sandwich to notice Alex.

Alex coughed, then--it wasn't intentional. He'd gotten a cold or something like it not a week before, and now and then, it annoyed his throat enough to engender a significant reaction. That's why the slim blue-eyed man turned around and saw Alex--and smiled before he had taken a step toward the other man.

"Alex Kralik... it's been a while since you've been around here, boy. How've you been?"

They shook hands as Alex grinned and answered. "Same as always, Jim. Workin' hard, but enjoying every day I'm alive."

"Glad to hear it, brother," the other man said. He paused, then--but he didn't have to think for more than a second to remember the order Alex had called in several hours before, although at least two dozen others had been placed since then.

"Your ribs are just getting a little sear right now," Jim said. "They gonna be ready in five minutes. Trey's working the grill today," he continued, idly wiping the counter clean with a towel kept around for just that purpose. "He's a natural at it, but I'm glad you offered him that internship at your job, brother. You can't get a job barbecuing ribs in South Korea--and he wants to go live in South Korea. Can you believe that? Lord Almighty, South Korea."

The two of them laughed, for a moment, before Alex spoke.

"Looks like Kentucky isn't big enough for all of us, Old Jim," he grinned, and the other man agreed--but feigned an angry glare at Alex.

"You might be right, boy, but watch your mouth. I ain't that old."

Alex rolled his eyes. "Jim, you're ninety-four," he pointed out. "You're older than me and Trey combined, times two."

"True," the slender man allowed, "but you ain't old until you feel old, and I never felt old for a second in my life."

Just then, the door that led from the kitchen into the operational part of the establishment opened, and a much younger man with features similar to Jim's walked out. His eyes were brown but his skin was the precise brushed mahogany shade as his grandfather's, and although he dressed oddly--in jeans a size or two too big, a fitted tee shirt, and half-finger leather gloves--he was a nice kid, if not without his own idiosyncrasies.

"Hey there, Trey," Alex said to greet the youngster. "What're you doing these days? Still sweating to run two miles in sixteen minutes?"

The youngest man among the ground nodded, a bit shyly, and only explained after Alex looked at him for a moment. "W-well, I'm not sweating to do it anymore. I mean--I'm still sweating, but-but I'm almost there. Just... a little more work, and I'll be able to do it."

"I'm sure you'll get there soon, Trey," Alex said. He looked at the young black man for a moment with not a trace of unfriendliness or insincerity on his face as a large, hot, brown paper bag was passed into his arms. "Keep running hard, and give me a call tomorrow... I'm gonna go hog hunting after dark, and I need a partner to keep me safe."

Alex smiled even more as he said that, as if there was a second meaning to his words. It was as if he already had a "partner" to keep him safe--but he didn't, did he? After all, he was single and didn't seem to have any close friends, so who...?

Trey searched for a meaning to Alex's words in his pale eyes, for a moment, before giving up and simply smiling. "I'd be glad to, Alex. Thanks--and thanks again for the internship. And--and enjoy the ribs! I seared them just a little bit, just the way you like it. And--and--thanks!" Trey ended pathetically.

Although Jim looked at his great-grandson sardonically, Alex didn't make fun of Trey. He could, but he didn't, simply because he wasn't that kind of person.

Alex Kralik shared a few final words of farewell with Old Jim, Trey, and the others eating in the restaurant before making his way back to his truck. He slipped into the driver's seat and put the bag of barbecue down on the seat next to him, and after strapping himself and his food in, he began to drive. After all, he wanted to get home, soon--after all, now, he had someone waiting at home for him.

He didn't speed on the way back, though it wouldn't have mattered if he did. Alex was now friends with every person on the police force in the county, white, black, and otherwise, and they all knew what he had done for their community. He was free to speed as much as he wanted, but he did not--he didn't want to take advantage of others' kindness no matter how much they encouraged him to.

For that reason, he got home several minutes after he planned to. And although it was only late in the afternoon, clouds were starting to roll in. Already, much of the sunlight Alex had enjoyed just minutes before was blotting out, and within a half hour or so, it would be completely dark. Perhaps a dull orange glow would eerily emanate from the bottoms of the clouds, but that was all the light that part of the world would receive until the next morning.

Alex registered all these thoughts only in the back of his mind, though. As he parked his truck and got out, it was clear that he was looking for something--that he was preparing for something. He seemed almost jumpy, but not in a negative way--it wasn't that he was frightened. He was just on edge, and the grin on his face suggested that he knew that he was going to be surprised somehow.

His posture itself was odd. He was a lean man, and extremely fast an agile, yet he was not positioned to move quickly. It was as if he was prepared to be taken to the ground by someone even quicker and more agile than he was--but there wasn't anyone like that in the entire Commonwealth, was there?

Alex waited, for a few moments, as if he was expecting... to be jumped on, or something, and taken to the ground. But nothing happened--and something always happened, eventually. It must have simply been that she was being extra cheeky that day, and so Alex felt his way to the back of the pickup truck, intending to make his way into his house and search for her there.

He didn't get that far, though. She surprised him before he was halfway to the door, though not in the way she usually did. That day, rather than pouncing on Alex and wrestling him to the ground until he let her snuggle against him, she simply stalked up to his side and touched her nose to his arm and made him jump.

When he saw that it was just her, however, Alex simply smiled and placed a hand on her head. She enjoyed this, of course, and displayed this by looking into his eyes and purring, softly, before rubbing his face into his fingers in an attempt to get him to pet her. And he did, after a taunting moment, as if to show her that he, too, could be a cheeky so-and-so if he wanted to.

"What did you get up to while I was gone, girl?" Alex murmured. By this point, she was happy enough that she was headbutting his hip and sniffing at his clothes and hands to see who he'd met with and what he'd touched. But when she realized that Alex was talking to her, she stopped what she was doing and looked up at him for a moment as if to say: "I'm a tigress, silly--I can't tell you that!"

She was cheeky always. She loved to play jokes on him--although they had only been together for a few weeks, Alex already knew that she loved to hide his shoes and tap at his feet when he was sitting down to read or do work. She also loved to play with him, and he was strong enough to roughhouse with her for a period of time, anyway, before she overpowered him and muscled him into submission. She was good to him, though, and kind--he didn't use an alarm clock anymore, she simply licked his face at dawn until he started to move. And she looked after him, too--when he was exercising or simply taking walks on his land, if she wasn't at his side, she was somewhere close by, watching over him like a guardian angel.

Alex was grateful for everything she did for him, but he found that he was also extremely grateful for the fact that she was simply there. She tolerated him, and she clearly loved him and cared about him in a way that made him wonder if she somehow had a human soul. She did everything he could expect her to do, and, so, from time to time, he simply had to spoil her a little bit.

That was why he had gone to Old Jim's restaurant. That was why he'd bought enough ribs to feed a family of four--except for three or four, they weren't for him. They were for her, and she knew it the moment he took the bag out of his truck's passenger seat and showed it to her.

She accepted it as a gift, shyly, and held it in her teeth with her ears splayed out. She looked up at him as if to thank him, but he just smiled at her to reply. She deserved everything he could give her and so, so much more.

It was just starting to get quite dark by the time Alex had gotten a good-sized bonfire going. He hadn't planned to need a bonfire at such a relatively early hour; he'd presumed that the Sun would still be out, and for that reason, it had taken him time to collect dried pieces of wood from the ground and time to build them into a pile and time to set up paper and twigs so that all of it would burn.

It had taken time. But it had been worth it, because now, Alex and his greatest, closest friend at his side, good food, warmth, and light, all in the middle of the quietest, most peaceful forest he had known in his life.

The two of them were relaxing in a clearing, not ten feet from the fire Alex had made. He was facing it so that his extremities were kept nicely heated, and usually, this would have meant that his back would have gotten relatively cold. But now, he had a large, soft, striped, orange and white body curled around him to keep him warm on all sides.

Alex looked into the fire and allowed his mind to conjure what images it would in the flames. He knew that the red and yellow and orange tongues of plasma cast their shades on his face, and he knew that every few seconds the mixture of colors was just so--he knew that every few seconds, his body was indistinguishable from the purring, furred body behind him.

Although he now knew her idiosyncrasies as well as she knew his, he somehow knew that he would always find her a wonder and a source of knowledge. Simply being around her taught Alex so much; but more than that, she calmed him and allowed him to feel secure about himself. She had done wrong but she had found a way to be good again, and Alex, too, was finding his own way to be good again.

Or perhaps he already had found his own way to be good again. Perhaps the purpose of his life was to live out his life in the middle of the most distant, forgotten part of Kentucky. Perhaps he was supposed to work forty or fifty hours a week as an engineer, and perhaps he was supposed to help out those in his community whenever he could.

Or perhaps it was even simpler than that. Perhaps he was supposed to be at the side of the tigress who had saved him for the rest of his life, listening to her heart beat in her chest and watching as she cleaned the barbecue sauce off of her muzzle and paws with her tongue. Perhaps he was simply supposed to be around her--perhaps if he did that, all would be well in his life and in his world.

And Alex was more than satisfied with that.

In time, he reached out and placed his hand on her head, and although she was asleep by that point, she purred and nuzzled against him regardless. And for a few moments, Alex was still--he simply continued to look into the fire, reflecting on its dark past, its bright present, and its brighter future.

Eventually, he took a harmonica out of his pocket and began to play. The tune he played was bluegrass, to be sure, but his mind wasn't really on his music. His mind was on where he was, and who he was with: his mind was on the dark trees all around him, so tall and thick that even if the Sun was out, none of its light would have reached him. His mind was on the burning chunks of wood that filled the air around him with a gentle aromatic scent and that heated his hands and feet. His mind was on the light and the warmth of the fire, and the warmth and the light of the tigress wrapped around him.

(And that's a wrap. It would have been nice if there were more scenes with Alex and his lovely friend, but I got the feeling that I would be dragging things out needlessly by having more than just a few scenes after the killing of the NKKK members.

Anyway, what did you think? Extremely odd for a furry story, eh? Still, I hoped you enjoyed things. I know that I enjoyed writing this.

There is, of course, a message behind the story, and I've also stayed true to another common theme in my works: the presence of tigers. Apart from that, as always, we had a few scenes of brutal violence, so this piece is about as "me" as a story can get.

Comment, fave, watch, and vote as necessary, lads. My next piece is already beyond the planning stage... so look forward to it soon. See you next chapter.)

Back to search