BECOMING A MAN PART I: THE WAGES OF SIN
BECOMING A MAN PART I:
THE WAGES OF SIN
RUMP officers stand inside an Inferior abode
I remember the old days well. It was 1910. I was only a young lad, not yet a teen, but I was already five foot nine. My face was long and I was teased mercilessly for my nose. "Old Vulture" the other children would call me and flap their wings. But despite all of the teasing, I had a wonderful childhood growing up in Sandusky, Ohio, in the breadbasket of the Union. Everywhere I turned as a child was a pure slice of Americana. I would play rounders with the other kids in the neighborhood on Saturday afternoons. I would wander hill and dale entirely unsupervised, my parents just demanding I be home in time for dinner. I would go to the public school every week day from 9 to 4, beginning every class with the Pledge of Allegiance. On Friday nights at the park just down the street from my childhood abode a local band take up position in a gazebo and would play old classics and ballads. Everyone would picnic in front of the gazebo and listen, sing and eat sandwiches and share pitchers of the best lemonade I ever had. I was also an ardent member of the Custer Youth Brigade, learning all sorts of amazing things about nature and camaraderie and how to be a man. By golly, I was taller than my Brigade Master at that point! But above all else, my family was the most faithful, down-to-earth, and God-fearing one in all of Ohio.
Life didn't always make sense to me at that age. Many things seemed strange or peculiar, and my infantile mind couldn't always grasp the true meaning behind them. I loved being in the Custer Youth and thought it a great way to go on adventures and see the world around me--or at least as much as the woods around Sandusky, Ohio, would allow. But I didn't understand the core purpose of the Brigade until later. That is, the fact that it is the greatest way ever devised to raise up young patriots to take over from the last generation. The Brigade ingrained in me not just how to use a twenty-two caliber and how to pitch a tent, but also the virtues of creative thinking, problem-solving, people-skills, and love of country and devotion to duty.
I also didn't understand why my grandpa, my real best friend, was always so busy. "Grandpa! I miss Grandpa!" I would cry to my mother, Elizabeth, wishing that hulking man would come stomping in through the front door in those big boots of his and bring me a bauble from one of his adventures. Indeed, as a child I didn't quite understand what Grandpa did, but I knew the man was extremely busy and often gone for long periods of time. He was so exciting! One of my favorite times he came to visit he brought me a real, genuine pocket knife made in the Nordreich, where he had gone on business for the government. I didn't really understand what the Nordreich was, but I thought they made very pretty pocket knives. Another time he brought me a compass made by the finest craftsmen in Japan. Little did I know what my grandfather meant when he said he was fourteenth in line to the presidency! He would remind everyone of that fact quite often and he was very proud of his job as Under-Secretary of the Manifest Destiny Party's Internal Affairs, but I wasn't even sure what an internal affair was. I just knew the MDP was President Custer's party, and the MDP loved America and every American citizen.
He would always try to talk my father, Bruno, into joining the armed forces, but he never did, deciding to make his living working for Yankee Doodle Telegraph. My father wasn't a line-stringer or lumberjack, however. He was Vice-President of Yankee Doodle, and I thought that made me just about the proudest boy in Sandusky. He was always talking about how "those damn inbred Van Burens" were trying to "cut in on his business." Other than that, he was just a normal father. Some days, after dinner, we'd play catch with a rounderball or maybe he'd teach me a new boxing technique that I'd never use--I might have been tall, but I was far too thin to be an effective boxer. At least at that point in my young life.
But out of all the things that shaped me from a boy into a man, it was mostly two things which had the greatest impacts. The first was my visit to the Inferior ghetto just a few miles outside the city. I was about nine years of age. The second thing was the day when I was ten and I gave my soul Jesus Christ and the Prophet Burr, embracing the Way, Truth, and Light and becoming born again in the cleansing waters of redemption as attained by all God's Chosen Betters.
The visit to the ghetto was one of the most interesting and memorable days I ever had. It showed me the truth about the Inferior, and I began to see why this cretinous leech was, indeed, an Inferior before the eyes of God and Man. The Sandusky Ghetto was a wretched hive of scum and villainy, a place where Irish Papists and Slavic Orthodoxers mingled and miscegenated their bloodlines. A place where the air reeked of absinthe and cheap liquor, mixed with the scents of soot and sewage. Around every corner there was a rapist, copulating like a wild boar atop a pitiable red-haired female. My grandfather had decided to take me there to show me that "the wages of sin is death." We drove through the area in his armored Colonel Ford, the emblem of the Manifest Destiny Party painted on the doors. Two little flags decorated the hood, and the ornament was a custom-made party eagle, its talons clutching a trout as a symbol of Social Darwinism. I believe that was how my grandfather saw himself driving through that ghetto, as a mighty eagle skimming the foul waters above a school of the devil's trout. Behind us were three more armored cars, full of soldiers ready to defend us in the blink of an eye from anarchists or highwaymen. "Grandpa Horatio?" I began, nervously. Some ten feet ahead I saw an Irishman holding an empty bottle of liquor gazing straight into my eyes. "Why do we let these people live here?"
My grandfather was always a man to moralize, and he quickly taught me why America was the way it was. He was sitting there, calm as could be, wearing his Yankee blue overcoat with the collar up and his mustache perfectly waxed at the tips. He looked over at me and asked me a question in turn. "Well," he began, "Why does God let Satan exist?"
I was stumped about this for a while, as it had never really occurred to me. "I don't know," I said mildly, ashamed of my own ignorance. I went to Sunday School every single week, but I never really had considered this question before.
My grandpa took a sip of the Scotch he had sitting in the center console of the dash and said, "Son, you see, in this earth there are two forces that control destiny. There is Good, on the one hand, allied with our generous Lord Jehovah and Jesus Christ. Good is eternal, and has existed as long as God, which is, to say, forever. A thousand millions years in the past and Good still existed. For a thousand million more it shall also exist. But the earth has only existed for about ten thousand years. Evil has actually existed for less than that. Evil was born when Satan rebelled against the Lord and was cast out of Heaven and into the fiery bowels of the earth. Eventually, evil shall be extinguished forever upon the Second Coming. But in the meantime, this fallen earth exists as a means for which to prove one's devotion and loyalty to Jehovah, His Son, and the Prophet Burr. In your science classes, I'm sure you've read about Charles Darwin's survival of the fittest. Well, God uses the earth to wean the strong from the weak. As the Chosen, we are the strong. We fight for all that is good and right, standing up for faith and homeland. But there is also evil. Evil manifests itself in murder and debauchery, from Rome to this ghetto. The Inferior, pitiable though he is, is in his natural habitat here. Here he proves his own worthlessness to anyone but Satan. Here this ghetto stands as a monument to evil. It exists to show us what we will become unless we remain pure. Do you understand that, son?"
I was stunned by how it all made sense now. I finally saw why the Inferior was allowed to exist and procreate. "So," I said, "The Inferior is allowed to exist to show us that evil is real?"
My grandfather smiled and patted me on the back and told me, "Yes, you have the gist of it. Here in this human zoo, full of subhuman monkeymen, we allow these creatures to exist. They are fallen and lost, but they stand as a testament to the existence of godless hedonism and heathendom. Just as God uses evil to single out the Chosen from the Lost, the ghettos exist as a warning for what evil is capable of and America singles out the Betters from the Inferiors. These people were evil at birth, born and raised in evil, and will die evil. They were not created, as was Adam, from the salt of the earth, filled with the precious bodily fluids of the Pinnacle Man. They were formed from the pits of sulfur and the mud and muck of the swamplands, beasts of the field, by the serpent Satan, a twisted mirror image of God's creation. They appear human, so close, in fact, to real humans that they are almost indistinguishable. But in their blood, which lacks any of the proud Precious Fluid of the First Born that flows through our veins, there is blackness. Soullessness. These subhumans are incapable of love, devotion, or duty to anyone except their false gods and their popes and emperors. They are a portrait of sin itself, writhing in the agony of sin. For the wages of sin is death. We need not kill them, son. We should harness them and use them for tasks for which we deem them fit. For in the sweat of labor there exists Good. In the dirt on a man's hands, fresh from the factory. In the smut on his face, back from the mines. In the lines on his face, this too is divine. By forcing the Inferior to work, and work hard, we are elevating them. By taking the twisted and subhuman creations of Satan and forcing them to work, we give them a taste of the divine. Through laboring for the Chosen, descendants of the Adam the First Born, the Pinnacle Man of Genesis, these wretched fools are made purer. Irredeemable though they are, the Council teaches that the Inferior who dies with a pick in his hand and sweat on his brow is allowed to enter the embrace of the Void, rather than his unsoul, his inner character, being twisted into a vile demon or bugaboo, to be tormented forever. I know these are heady topics, son, but you need to understand them. Do you understand these things, Ryan? Do you believe them?"
"I do, Grandpa. We must work these unpeople, to bring them closer to the Light of the Word of God. Is that right, sir?"
I had never seen my grandpa more proud. "Yes! Yes, Ryan, that is correct. Now, see that paper store up ahead? O'Hara's Paper Supply?"
I squinted and looked down the street through the heavy pane of glass that was the windshield and spotted the structure. It was a disgusting one-story shack that had a crudely made sign over the entrance. "Yes, Grandpa. I do."
He took another shot from the whiskey in his cupholder. "That, my boy, is a nest of vipers. They are printing Beautelist manifestos and subversive papers to undermine God and Homeland. That is the real reason we are here today. They think that they can print their Satanic propaganda and get away with it. That the Manifest Destiny Party will just turn the other cheek to their wickedness. They are wrong. Son, open the glovebox. You should find a pistol in there."
I did as instructed, becoming more frightened by the second. Sure enough, I pulled a Colonel Pierce 1860 revolver out of the compartment. The barrel was blued and the handle was made of some sort of bone, inlaid with silver letters that spelt out the word "RYAN." "Granpda, is this for me?" I asked, marveling at the gun but still terrified at what might be about to happen.
Grandpa Horatio nodded solemnly as the paper store grew closer. "It is indeed, Ryan. It was my first gun. Your great grandfather Horatio Washington Hendrick carried it into the Great American War. I had the handle made for you. It is yours now. Now, we're about to go into this Paper Store and I need you to stay behind me. Do exactly as I say, do you understand?"
I looked up at him with wide eyed horror and slowly said, "Yes, sir." I was only nine years of age at the time, and this was quickly going from a trip to the people zoo with my grandfather into an active combat situation. Our convoy stopped in front of the paper store. The three vehicles in the rear now buzzed around us, parking first and surrounding our Colonel Ford with clockwork precision. Out of the rear hatches of the large vans came men, about 12 in all, all dressed in blue shirts, khaki pants and gaiters, and blue pith helmets. They all carried bolt action rifles and shotguns and they all sported MDP armbands and on the front of their helmets was the insignia of the Republican Union Military Police. My grandfather motioned for me to get out, and together we exited the vehicle. He drew his black revolver from his well-worn brown leather holster under his overcoat and, again like clockwork, the armed RUMP men surrounded us.
Our "squad" walked up the rickety wooden boards that served as steps for the paper store. All around us, Inferior standers-by ran for the hills, terrified of the sight of armed Anglo-Saxon men in their neighborhood on a policing action. They knew what was likely about to happen. Instead of knocking, my grandfather simply ordered one of the RUMP men to blast the door of the shop off its hinges. This the trooper did like a machine, without hesitation or question. As the door came blasting in off the hinges, my grandpa walked straight in, not even flinching from the gunshot which made my ears ring something fierce. "REPUBLICAN UNION MILITARY POLICE!" Grandpa Horatio bellowed, raising his pistol in the air and firing a warning shot. "Under the authority of the President of the Union, Governor Brewer, and by the law and ordinances of the great State of Ohio, we declare that everyone in this building is an enemy of the state for operating an illegal printing press and distribution of Beutelist and subversive content. You have thirty seconds to comply and lay on the floor with your hands behind your backs or lethal force will be authorized!"
Overhead in the small front office of the shop, a lightbulb flickered in its socket. A man behind the desk was curled up in a fetal position, crying and moaning in some sort of Slavic tongue I couldn't identify. Another man, an Irishman seated at a table where he had been reading, suddenly screamed "Long live the Revolution!" pulled a pistol out of his jacket and aimed it at my grandfather--only to be blasted from three different RUMP officers with both rifle and shotgun rounds.
"Clear!" one of the officers bellowed and we advanced into the next room. One of the policemen stayed behind kicking and beating the Slavic desk clerk with a baton until his ribs were broken. Then he cuffed his hands and threw the now unconscious man out into the street and loaded him up in one of the vans.
The next room seemed to be empty but was full of crates of paper and books piled to the ceiling. As we cautiously entered, a hidden door opened from behind a bookshelf and out came three Inferiors. Two of them held sawed-off shotguns and the third held a revolver. The first one to run out of the hidden door was shot directly through the brain by a RUMP man, but the other two managed to dive for cover behind the crates. I was just a boy and was so scared I almost pissed myself. I had never seen anyone die before, and now here in the last five minutes I had seen a man's head explode and another man so riddled with holes he was unrecognizable. A hail of lead went back and forth, and one of our boys hit the ground clutching his shoulder and screaming in agony. But we pushed on. I was standing right behind my grandpa, terrified for my life. After about twenty seconds of nonstop gunfire another shout of "CLEAR!" rang out, and we pressed on, stepping over the bodies of the other two men who now laid in pools of blood on the pinewood floor. It was rather foolish of them to try to resist like they had, as they now had revealed their secret bookshelf entrance. The RUMP officers forced it back open easily and we pressed on into the unlit darkness of the hidden chamber. Two of our men pulled helmets off their belts equipped with miner's lights, enabling us to see. It was the printing press. After several moments of searching, we found a light switch and the lights turned on. All around us were subversive materials--mostly the writings of that vile leech Meinrad Beutel, but also strange books I did not recognize embossed with a strange sigil of flame. One the walls there were posters depicting an Irishman begging on his knees, his hands clasped in prayer, and the caption below read, "AM I TOO NOT A MAN?" Below it read "THE FRATERNAL ORDER OF THE NEW ILLUMINATI SUPPORTS THE FREEDOM OF ALL PEOPLE."
My grandfather's disgust was easy to see in just his face. He quickly ordered the gasoline to be poured around the room and for the printing press to be smashed to bit. He kept staring at the posters talking about Illuminati before ripping one down and handing it to one of his officers as evidence. He did the same with one of the embossed books. "What is Illuminati?" I asked slowly.
He looked at me and said, "For the first time, son, I don't know. Especially what they're doing in Sandusky, Ohio. But we're going to find out, that's for damn sure!"
I followed my grandfather out of the building. After searching pockets, the policemen left the corpses of the dead criminals inside where they were. Now my grandfather pulled a book of matches out of his vest pocket and lit one up. Without any second-thought, he flicked it inside the doorway of the paper shop. Quickly, the flames spread through the building, feeding off the trail of gasoline. As the fire raged behind us, we turned back to the convoy of vehicles we had arrived in.
Grandpa Horatio stopped at one of the vans and climbed in the back. The desk clerk had woken up now and my grandpa was smashing him in the face and choking him like an animal, demanding to know what the New Illuminati were. I noticed something odd though. The way he handles the clerk and beat him was not with actual rage or hatred, but almost no emotion whatsoever, like skinning a deer or pulling the wings off a fly (one of my favorite childhood activities). "Now tell me, you mewling little shit, what is the New Illuminati?" he demanded for the third time, smacking the man across the face.
The Slavic desk clerk's face was now completely blue and his left eye was almost completely swollen shut. Through all the beatings he had endured he kept repeating the cry "No English! No English!" Now, with blood gurgling out of his lips, he looked my grandpa straight in the eyes and, through his heavy accent, rasped the word, "Fuck... Y-y-ou... Yankee c-c-cyka."
My grandfather released the man's shirt collar from his gloved hands and turned to me. He pointed to the man and told me, "This man has just refused to cooperate and blasphemed your grandfather! He has cursed at the fourteenth highest-ranking Union official in all the land in his mongrel tongue. Ryan! What are the wages of sin?"
With an eerie sense of calm, I drew my pistol from my belt, knowing what he wanted me to do. The man whimpered as I leveled my great-grandfather's pistol at the man's head, probably begging for mercy in whatever language he spoke. "The wage of sin," I said, "is death."
BLAM.
It was this day that I became a man. I killed that mongrel clerk. And he deserved it. For the first time I knew my purpose in life. I saw the light. I gave myself fully, aged just nine, to Jehovah and the Prophet. I saw why my grandfather served. I saw the reason these pathetic subhumans were Inferior. They wanted to destroy America. And that was not going to happen, not on Ryan Hendrick's watch.
The following has been an excerpt from BECOMING A MAN: THE RYAN HARVEY HENDRICK STORY (First Edition, Douglas Publishing, 1955) by Ryan H. Hendrick, Supreme Chief of the Space Force
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