Randy Bracken’s dreams were not for the faint of heart. That would not surprise those many people who had met, would decline to know, and would forever fear Randy Bracken. What would surprise them is that he slept in a fetal position and held his right thumb in the vice grip of his lean hard left hand so that he would not suck it. On this particular sweltering night, as he lay on the workbench in his Doomsday Van, curled up on iron fillings, next to an empty half-pint of Bacardi 151 and the cell-phone that never posted an incoming call, his old standby, the stock nightmare of his youth met his new worst dream, like two B-movie villains fighting on a low-budget film set over his dubious soul…

…He was laying curled up on the hardwood floor in front of Mom’s bedroom door, trying to dream about good times in West Virginia, poaching with Pa Bracken, wishing he could be back there with Dad and That Woman, his half-brother Jay’s mother. Instead, he had been shipped off to Mom for the summer. Mom was a Korean prostitute that Dad had knocked up back in Seoul and had brought to the States, but had never married.

You could have done the right thing Dad.

I know, Pap would have disowned you for marrying into mud.

Then you go and get killed driving around with That Woman you loser…

That Woman had just brought his little bald freak brother home from the hospital. It had immediately occurred to Randy that he looked much more like Dad and Pap than Jay did. But Jay was bald, and of course Dad and Pap shaved their heads. So Randy had shaved his head. They all thought it was out of empathy for the bald baby-Jay but it had just been a way to be more of a Bracken and less of a Korean.

He had just turned ten and this was his first summer in Baltimore. Mom had just moved here from Romney West Virginia to be an expensive girlfriend that stayed in a high-rise apartment overlooking the Harbor. He kind of liked Baltimore because no one knew him, and he passed easily as full-White…

…Fantasy’s of being accepted as a Whiteman—a boy ten feet tall—on a South African safari put him fast asleep…

…He was awakened by the low electrical ring of Mom’s phone and then her hushed voice in her room behind him. Within minutes he heard the eager tread of some rich man at the door and was looking forward to Mom tripping over him when she stepped from her room, hoping to ruin the entire thing.

Sure, you’re only ten but you are the man of the house, and she shouldn’t be putting you to bed at nine just so she can call in her boyfriends.

Instead of Mom tripping over him on the way to the front door he heard the click of the door opening.

The hair prickled on his nape as a tall form in a suit walked down the dark hallway toward Mom’s room, while little skinny Randy lay curled up on the cold hard floor outside of her door. Eventually, after what must have been only seconds but seemed like minutes, the toe of the hard polished shoe pinched his knee against the floor even as the long arm above reached out for the door to Mom’s room.

Randy had always been quick and Pap, the Nazi killer who had been an Army sniper on D-Day, had taught him to be cold and calculating. After the ‘Godforsaken Sixties’ Pap claimed he had started feeling bad about killing Nazis and declared to anyone who would listen that he had fought on the wrong side. It was no surprise that his hate had rubbed off on Randy. As much as Pap hated the liberals and the Mud Peoples he loved Randy despite his mixed parentage, simply declaring that Randy would just have to work harder for the right to be a pure Arуan spirit. That credo began with defending what was yours by right and that included the family home and Mom’s bedroom!

As the towering man above him grunted and looked down and whispered into the door, “Didn’t know you had a dog Cee—quietest dog…”

The man’s deep voice turned to a squeal as Randy thrust upward between the legs with his purpose-made shank, a bamboo shish-kabob skewer mounted in a snack-box of raisins fixed to the base with electrical tape. By the time Mom opened the door and the light from her room illuminated the scene outside her door Randy was standing over a tall well-dressed blonde-haired man in late middle-age who was curled up moaning on the floor, regarding Randy’s dripping weapon with horror.

He expected Mom to slap him around and cuss him out and could have accepted that. But instead, she bent lovingly over this rich dude that Randy didn’t even know and took care of him as she occasionally flashed a hurt look of disgust his way. Those looks burned in his chest for the next thirty years and erupted now in his sleep as his latest terror stalked into his darkly shadowed dream-life…

…The tall calm future freak just walked slowly toward him commanding its suit to expand to cover his vulnerable face. The flames licking from the taxi that Randy had blown up illuminated his own pathetic attempts to stop the time-hunter that was closing with him. Sensei—Randy’s team-leader—was down behind the freak and Burton, the principal they had brought forward from 1868, staggered like some malfunctioning 1950s sci-fi robot out the side door of the East Baltimore row home that Randy had just turned into an inferno…

He emptied one pistol…

He emptied another pistol at pointblank range…

He was flying through the leaping flames and crashing into the Ukrainian smeared concrete floor as the Puerto Rican he had just waxed bled out on the stairs above him…

…And there it stood above him, just like Mom’s John, but unharmed; the Perfect Freak, the Ultimate Whiteman, manufactured by some godless 24th Century geek squad, mind-fucking him with his maddening telepathy even as he used Randy’s smoking blood-soaked chest as a worktable to remove some type of jewel-like tracking device from the base of the burnt, half-de-fleshed and unattached skull of ‘Bub’, the Ukrainian cabbie who now resided in Hell; that place where Pap had always assured him that half-assed Arуans belonged…

He woke in a cold sweat, sober again already, and looked around. All of his old west gun-fighting irons and knives had been refurbished. His tech-9s, mach-10s and German-made 9-milimeter autos were all sighted in, strapped into well-oiled leather harnesses designed and crafted by himself. They would, however, produce nothing but inconvenient lead rain to shower his enemies from the future. There would be a new op this year, maybe even Archimedes, and he wasn’t about to go against the Future Freaks spitting into the wind again.

That’s my baby there, but we can’t take her.

He looked at the broken down remnants of his prized weapon, the 37MM automatic antitank gun that he had stolen from the nose of an A-10 warthog at Martin’s Air Force Base on one drunken night in the late 1990s when he was getting this ‘War Wagon’ as he had called it ready for Y2K. The War Wagon was a converted bread truck, was armored, got horrible mileage, and had served him and his friends well in the extermination of a trio of Future Freaks the year before last. The gun he had named Brunn-Hilda was a vehicle-mounted weapon, and had torn loose from the floor plate as it was. Actually carrying it anywhere was out of the question, and he had broken it down to its component parts in frustration long ago, its remains all but useless to him, other than as the focus of a comforting reverie.

I need a shoulder-fired semi-automatic armor-piercing weapon of at least .50 caliber.

Brother, you need a Barrett.

I know, but I’m on a Federal watch list. The ATF traitors will fuck me in a Chinese-subsidized millisecond.

Never say die brother.

There is Fatboy O’Neal in Knoxville. He might know some good ole boy from the gun-show circuit…