AN: The butterfly has come to roost at home. All persons, happenings, and locations within this update do not represent real-life people, events, or locations and are a fictitious representation of another timeline as portrayed by the author.
If conservatives cannot win democratically, they will do so tyrannically.
The United States of America is bleeding.
Little trickles of blood seep from a thousand wounds from the mighty beast as it still stands high above all things in the world, unaware of the wounds dealt to its mortal corpus.
Here, a mother weeps and wails as her child is beaten and kicked in her own home, men clad in white cloth and wearing hoods taking perverse pleasure in the resounding snaps and anguished screams of utter pain within the woman, her child left behind as they leave the inhuman scene minutes later as a warning to the others. Broken fingers cradle the bleeding corpse of the child, barely a year old yet already taken, as the mother cannot do anything but whimper through broken ribs and shattered jaw, her arms feebly holding onto her dead son. None of the men would ever be tried, allowed to return to their families and children without a care in the world. One tucks in his daughter with a goodnight kiss that same day.
There, a second world war veteran sifts through the trash, seeking any scrap of food that the large bakery might have thrown away. Spying a soggy piece of bread, the man takes the discarded piece of processed grain and scrapes off what he can before eating. No help had been coming to him from the government, and the rewards and accolades promised for his service were denied and refused. His house was confiscated a mere three months into the Vietnam war as his only son died fighting, the banks coming to collect what "they were owed" from all he had left. Not even the silver locker with the picture of his dead wife was he allowed to have, though they did not go so far as to take the picture. Nature took care of that. And nature would take care of the man, too, as his cramping, spasming fingers grasped at the air, his convulsing body twitching on the ground. The bleach poured over the piece of food had gone unnoticed long enough for his death to be sure. The woman who had done so saw nothing wrong with ensuring pests and vermin would die if they attempted to scavenge from her belongings. The police assumed he had overdosed on some drug and dumped his body in a morgue that sold the body to a medicinal school to take care of the bills of the veteran's burial.
In a city, a protest of three thousand marched through the streets, fighting peacefully against an injustice that none would remember they fought for, there was no coverage of the media present, nor any mention in the newspapers unsympathetic to the plight of the unmarried single mother, the discarded homeless son, or the deviant homosexual trying to live in peace. What it did have were words spilled like flowing blood of innocents upon pages of their print against their crimes, their rioting, the injuries the police officers sustained trying to calm them down, and the property damage incurred as they smashed windows and looted. "Is this what America has come to?" One editorial would write in Dallas the picture of a bleeding officer holding a hand out to ward off an enraged man trying to strike him with his shield. There was no mention of the three gunshots fired at the same man defending his disabled sister in a wheelchair against an officer kicking her from her chair, trying to arrest her after she could not crawl away as fast as he wanted her to.
Underneath the shielding canopy of a forest, four teenagers, a band forged in blood, adventure, and time, stared down at an older man, bleeding and crying with snot running down his face, bloody bats in their hands as a diminutive figure watches from behind a tree farther away. The screams of the man resound, as does the crack-
crack-
crack of bones breaking whenever immovable bats meet feeble flesh and calcium. The man will die at the hands of the four in twenty minutes, the last sight he would ever see the boot of the brother of his latest victim. Nobody in the town would know what happened to the pastor, only that he vanished one day. The mother of one of the boys admonished him for hours for breaking his bat on
trees, of all things! A waste of money, one he would have to replace on his own! The boy did not mind and bought one made of aluminum, showing off the newly purchased weapon to the other three. All agreed it to be a good choice as they began to walk into town, bats secured and target in mind. Blood begets blood, and the fires of youth burn bright enough to evaporate all that fell on their righteous hands.
In an office, two men laughed and joked about the good old times, reminiscing about their youth and the dreams they held. "I wanted to fight for the poor, for free, remember?" One remarked to the other in a mocking tone, deeply buried resentment and shame about the choices he had made for selfish gain, no longer able to rise from the malaise of his blackened soul. "And I remember you talking me out of taking that case with the Unions!" The other spoke, no hidden depths long dead and stagnant and decayed buried within, only relief and enjoyment at a dozen things and a hundred others. Few would know the strokes of pen done within the room, shared and revised between the two, but millions would feel their effects. Who cared about some commies getting cheated and taken for all they were worth when there was money to be made? It was not as if these safety precautions were required; the workers just needed to be more careful, is all. Their own damn fault if they got injured.
Within a prison, a man opened a cell, and the man within looked up, sunken eyes and hollow cheeks watching warily as the white man, not a guard he knew, approached, a hand reaching into his pants.
'Is this it,' Martin wondered,
'the day they would kill him instead of having him rot and starve in a cell, far away from his family and any contact with the world?' The hand of the white man came out of the pocket, a folded piece of paper held in a firm hand. "You have two minutes," the man spoke, letting the letter switch hands. Familiar writing, oh-so-familiar words, and desperate hope bubbled forth from within the ink on the paper, his mind, and heart. She had not forgotten him nor left the fight. "Quickly," the man said once more, taking the paper from Martin, a nervous look on his white face as he left with tense steps, a key unlocking the cell once more. He hesitated, a glance shot behind. "Two months till freedom," was all he spoke, leaving a Martyr for the cause of equality behind.
Near a base of the United States Marine Corps, a man lies alone on his bed, a silver cross held aloft in one outstretched arm away from him, allowed to dangle and shift in the wind and the movement of his aching arm. The marine pays no mind to the ache, the distraction of slowly building pain welcomed by a mind clouded and left asea from years passed and events which had occurred past and present. He had been there that fateful day when the Iwo Jima had beached on Fairy Island and had to endure the humiliation and mockery made of them by the natives and the contempt the senate gave. What nation lets stranded sailors and soldiers within an enemy nation, surrounded by hostiles on every side, and does not even attempt to free them? What government willingly allowed itself to be humiliated and made a laughing stock on the world stage to avoid a war with a nation that could not fight back? And what country gives from itself millions upon millions to buy what they rightfully owned to keep the charade without ever trying to punish the deserters that fled or those who had no doubt been indoctrinated? What nation indeed, the marine thought, his worldview shaken and unsteady as his mind wandered around until it reached the tv soundlessly displaying the current president on its screen. Memories flash of seeing another president's death; the secret service's failure was only heightened by the killer being a black communist.
'What country indeed...' he wonders as a second passes, then another, and yet one more, as Rumford sits up.
Thinking.
And within an office of a white house that had informed and housed men of excellence, misery, greatness, and incompetence, a puppet sat. Watching with growing dread as country after country was pointed out, marked, and information was given, tendrils of fear spreading through a mind slowly eroding under disease and age. It was one thing to know liberties had to be taken to ensure that his country would not be steered into an abyss out of the false belief of brotherhood and concord with communism. Another to realize the threat was far greater than any had anticipated as nearly half of the world now glowed red in the blood of slain innocents. He had taken the seat reluctantly to ensure stability and a return to sanity could be provided in the next four years, seeking to mend what had been wounded.
Such could no longer be the case.
