He lay like a disassembled leviathan upon an ocean of liquid memory, a thousand soul Eskimos sharpening their blades, carving the flesh from his bone. A moan escaped him in the void, seeming to remain unheard, even from himself, for he was utterly alone.

Utterly, he drifted upon the awesome, limitless well of the Void, understanding in his every strand that he had been erased—killed, was it death?—yet drifted contentedly without a care.

Then it came, the cosmic pull, a tug—no an urge, a need to reassemble. A vast gray woman looked elephantinely down from her judgmental height and he recalled…

With a kick into his baby belly he spilled off the couch directly into the alley where a kind, chocolate-faced woman looked lovingly down, scooping him up.

She shook and cried as the blue-suited people tore him away in the night—a point of light appeared and blazed into a searing sun. If he had eyes he would have been blinded but he did not and looked limitless into its furnace of welcome…

Wantross Johnson, with a blinding flash of light, a great giggling of his fat-shelled frame, once again knew pain as he burst into smothered life to the sound of—Ah fuck, yoa goddamned rebel yell, like in that terrible movie about gods and confederates granddad had made him watch in which the comedian from the Bob Newheart Show wore a dead dog on his shoulders….

He was standing in a green field on a double-wide dirt trail next to Terry “Contrary” Mills, who looked as afraid as he was skinny. And before him, as a thunderclap announced his rebirth—for he knew it in his bones to be a resurrection—stood the racist boogieman of every brother’s nightmares, whooping to the sky like a white Indian, bald as the moon, tattooed with hard looking Nazi shit and wearing a trench coat that barely concealed an arsenal of modern and antique guns and knives—lethal shit even sticking out of his boot tops.

Terry had the shakes and could not talk as the man pulled the hoop from their hands and holstered his gun within the coated armory even as the golden hoop went over his head as a necklace. In the distance trees banked into the horizon on all sides. The trail they were on disappeared into trees to the right and wandered down to a riverfront town through a gap in the forest to the left.

“Where are we?” rang out a shout that seemed to emerge from his own mouth and call feebly into the stiflingly moist, mid-afternoon sky of a sweltering day.

“Back in the day,” came the cancerous reply, as the man looked about like a hunter for game, absently reaching into his pocket for something and pulling forth an open set of handcuffs.

“Come here, boys, extend your hands, Fatty, your left, Skinny your right.”

Terry stepped forward, extending his hand as he shook, but Wantross was in high dudgeon [Look it up, nigga, he thought to himself] and defiantly stepped up to the elongated fiend with his big meaty fists clenched and growled, “Who the hell—”

The sky rang with the thunder of the slap of all pimp hand slaps, a slap so hard that Wontross was still jiggling when he hit the grassy deck.

Oh, hell no! he thought, being a man who had lived lively in his mind in a sea of drifting morons. Then, recalling his duty to fight this white devil on behalf of his entire race, and remembering that he had not said what he thought out of habit and wishing dearly that ‘Oh, hell no’ would become the emancipation song in this weird-ass nightmare of Nazi abduction, he opened his mouth mightily—and was now sucking on the barrel of some ancient pistol, listening to Clint Eastwood with Cancer, snarl, “Mooke, haul your fat ass off the turf and mind.”

Standing up like Shugg Night doing the limbo in the middle of some white faɡɡot country line dance, Wantross managed to rise to his feet while sucking on the barrel of something that he did not want getting shoved down his throat, looking into the eyes of this Nazi, who winked playfully and said, ‘No hard feelings, son. Your friend here has ‘the dreads’ and you need to care for him. He then felt the click of a cuff—something he had escaped his entire life in Baltimore County and was now subjected to. This caused him to nod obediently to get that gun barrel out of his mouth, which it just so happened became the case, as the Nazi holstered the weapon within his coat and stepped back, broke out a pint of Bacardi 151, uncapped it, knocked back half of it with a disturbing lack of effect, and extended it with the good natured generosity of the executioner.

“None for him, it will fry his circuits. He should be okay in a day. Down it if the need is upon you.”

Wantross knocked back that numbing liquor, but could only get down a shot or two, handing it back reflexively as his insides burned.

Recapping the bottle and placing it back in an inside pocket the fiend then said, “Three questions, mooke.”

“Where are we?”

“Old Philadelphia Road, southwest of Havre de Grace, Maryland.”

“When are we, you Nazi motherfucker!”

The man laughed with something deeper and darker than sarcasm and it came out as a biting bark, “Seventeen-eighty-seven, if I recall correctly in my ecstatic state—all in Krishna, baby!”

“Okay, Nazi-man, just so I can tell the entire story and maybe plot it for my next videogame design when I wake up from this messed up nightmare, why have you abducted Terry and me?”

Taking out a big Cuban cigar and lighting it with a stick match struck off of the reeking, oily coat, the fiend puffed and seemed in great pleasure as he began walking away down the road with a nod for them to follow, which they did, wanting to know the substance of their nightmare before waking.

“If one wishes to show up back in the righteous Arуan day packing heat, wielding the Arуan god’s thunder, he needs two bodies. Now, the easiest single body to snag is a pig, but good luck netting two without having to kill one and I didn’t have all day. So I smoked me a bear and used his vehicle and aura of authority to appear to your sullen slave instincts.”

Wantross was experiencing a racing heart, sensing the sincerity of this Nazi fiend’s words and blurted, delving immediately into his elaborate mind of video gaming, role playing and imagining long ago and far away lives so much more fulfilling than his emasculating existence, “But dude, that cop had body armor and a gun and could be made an ally, you two could have been like Nazi Man and the Blue Wonder. Why us, dude—I mean we’re indie music promoters and I work at Sonic?”

The man stopped and winked at Wantross, “That was four. You do entertain, however. So more questions will be tolerated, if preceded, respectfully, by “sir.”

The deadly glint in the hollow eyes compelled him to agree and he did with a nod, “Sir, why us?”

Their abductor then stopped and considered, puffing on his cigar like Jason Statham dressed up like Clint Eastwood with Cancer pretending to be Gandalf in some god-awful spoof of the Fellowship of the Ring set on the last Mad Max location. Blowing three rings into the thickening air, the man whipped back his coattail and drew a bigger pistol from a hip holster and walked along, shooting off the pistol three times, the dirty gust of each report blowing the rings asunder. He then, seemingly in deep meditation, twirled the gun and holstered it, then considered Wantross anew with a wicked stare.

“I would have had to kill him or shackle him. Besides, I have no cash for this timeframe and don’t want to start out breaking the law—shit, I don’t even know if they had banks in this time for me to rob, couldn’t even tell you what the fuck the currency was. Well, the hell if I’m approaching Ben ‘Big-Head’ Franklin as a broke-ass white-boy.”

The man then walked over to Wantross like a stalking panther, every measured tread exuding psychotic menace, and finally, once coming to loom over his much wider captive, hissing like a snake, “Congratulations, boy, you’ve been monetized.”

Wantross went off, dream or not, “What, what the fuck! Oh helllll—”

“Hell what?” asked the man as the barrel of yet another previously unseen gun pressed against Wantross’ forehead.

“Yes.”

The barrel pressed with more force into the skin on his forehead and pressed against the bone.

“Sir, hell no, sir.”

The man stepped away without a sigh, and waved him on with a motion of the menacing pistol that confused Wantross as to the fabric of his dream, for he was something of an Old West and modern firearms gun buff—what with all of the videogames he’d modified. The first gun had been a Navy .36, the second a Colt .45, but this thing, he had never seen before, and the presence of a gun he had never seen or imagined in his dream was disconcerting to say the least as he and Terry—poor, shaking like a leaf Terry—walked off under a searing August sun, the very Devil himself waltzing with seemingly inhuman patience on their heels.

This ends the Randy-Wantross thread for Seven Moons Deep. Their story shall be continued and concluded in White Sky Canoe. Below is a link to the history book that grew out of my research for that upcoming novel.