Your Next-Door Neighbor Is a Dragon (22 page)

“Teresa,” Kitchener said. “We were engaged.”

“She’s Mexican,” I observed.

“She is from Mexico, but she is as Aryan as you or me.” He reached up and took the picture from me. “We dated for over a year before we got engaged. I traced her genealogy back over three hundred years. She has never once bred with a lesser race. She is pure Spanish blood.”

“I didn’t know that the Spanish were Aryan,” I said.

“Not all of them are, but her grandfather fought on the side of the fascists in Spain. He helped to defeat the communists.”

“That made him Aryan?”

Kitchener nodded.

I had never considered that Aryan was like a religion that someone could adopt or lose through some terrible act of race treason. I felt certain some of the Aryan race scientists at the racist science institute might have a few problems with Kitchener’s theory.

Kitchener showed me the backend of his website and the system he used to create updates for his site. It was not too different from our system at Something Awful, reminding me that according to some corners of the Internet our mockery of furries and Otherkin makes us as much a hate site as Kitchener’s APU.

He then fired up his copy of The Sims 2 to show me how he had created a house filled with “apelike niggers,” which he trained to “service his needs as the white master.” “I love this game,” he confessed. “I love any game where you can sorta like, play God with people. Make them do stuff or build up the world.”

Kitchener also confessed that neighbors in The Sims that appeared “Jewy” or “tried to be gay around him” found themselves trapped in rooms without doors or in pools without ladders.

“If only it was that easy in real life,” he said.

I thought back to Reggie watering Kitchener’s lawn.

“People will be arriving any time now,” Kitchener said as he closed the game. “I gotta get the barbecue goin’.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You said you wanted to know how I used the Internet to be successful,” he said. “In y’all’s e-mails. You said that. Well, anyway, I invited a bunch of people from the APU. You can ask them about it.”

Frankfurters und Schadenfreude

The cognitive dissonance of Kitchener and his entire movement was on full display once the guests began arriving at his barbecue. They came in every shape, size, and beard type. Some wore suspenders and shorts and big chunky military boots. Others were dressed in polo shirts like Kitchener, young, professional, yuppie Nazis.

It was almost a diverse crowd, with one obvious area of homogeneity.

Kitchener and a stick-thin blond girl in an SS halter top were manning the barbecue. The privacy-fenced backyard was teeming with hateful conversation about a variety of hateful topics. Wagner was playing at a reasonable volume from speakers that looked like rocks.

I was talking with a young APU member next to the barbecue. The wind was steady, but an occasional breeze whipped smoke into my face and caused me to tear up.

“If the holocaust is real,” said the young man with the faux-hawk, “why are they so afraid to investigate it?”

His name was Doug and he had facial piercings. He was wearing a faded shirt from Beck’s
Odelay.
When he introduced himself he showed me a tattoo of a swastika made out of severed limbs on the inside of his left arm.

“I mean, maybe only a million Jews died, would that ruin their holocaust?” Doug asked. “Or what if it was ten million? I bet they’d love that.”

“I don’t know if ‘love’ is the right word,” I suggested.

“But what if”—he prodded my chest with his index finger—“what if, man, they find out that only like ten thousand Jews got killed and it turns out they were all criminals anyway.”

“That would be a pretty major revelation,” I admitted.

“Exactly my point, man.” Doug seemed pleased that I understood. “So why don’t they investigate? What do they have to lose?”

Kitchener wheeled up and said, “The Jews would just tamper with the investigation. Ruin everything.”

“I didn’t mean—”

Kitchener held up a hand.

“Don’t worry about it, Doug,” he said. “Hey, I’m going to borrow Mr. Parsons here for a minute.”

I felt uneasy about Kitchener using my name, as if simply by him speaking it aloud I would be added to some sort of government list. And I don’t mean the Zionist Occupation Government.

“There’s someone I want you to meet,” Kitchener said. “Follow me.”

I followed behind him as he navigated the concrete pathways of his crowded backyard. People moved out of Kitchener’s way. Some fearfully, but most out of respect. A few even gave him a Sieg Heil gesture, which he returned with a perfunctory wave of his hand.

“Here we are,” he said. “Chloe, come here.”

Chloe was a short and quite young-looking girl. She had long black hair and she wore a black velvet dress, black-and-white-striped knee socks, and huge go-go boots. It must have been a sweltering costume in the afternoon heat, but she seemed to be coping with it.

“Nice to meet you,” I said, offering her my hand.

She shook it unenthusiastically.

“Chloe,” Kitchener said, “this is Mr. Parsons.”

Her face brightened immediately.

“Luther told me you were coming to write about us,” she said. “He calls me his protégé.”

“Well, ah haha,” Kitchener laughed. “I thought Mr. Parsons should meet you. After all, young lady, you are the future of the APU.”

At Kitchener’s insistence, I sat down with Chloe underneath a shade umbrella. We drank ice cold beers and she told me about her involvement in the party.

“They’ve taught me to use guns, bayonets, and knives.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “They’ve taught me hand-to-hand combat and wilderness skills. I know how to set a snare for a jackrabbit and skin it now.”

“Those are, uh, great skills to have,” I noted.

“The APU are preparing me for the coming racial war. When Obama takes over my virginity won’t be safe from the niggers or the wetbacks.”

“I…uh…”

“They taught me Mexican language listening, too,” she said. “So I can watch from a hiding place and understand what they’re saying. I can’t speak Mexican, but I know what they’re plotting about.”

I tried to steer her away from descriptions of her syllabus at Hate University.

“Did you find the APU on the Internet?”

“Ohhhh.” She grinned. “That’s what Luther wanted me to talk to you about. I am the new head of the APU’s Internet outreach program. He said he got the idea from a church group. They have attractive young women go onto dating websites and set up dates with single guys, then when they go out on the date the girls convince the single guys to join the church.”

“Does that work?”

“I don’t know, but we’re going to try. I’ve got six girls lined up and we’re going to start going on all the dating websites and try to find Aryans who should be aware of their duty to the white race.”

“So is that how they got you to join?” I asked.

“No, no, no.” Chloe shook her head. “Luther went around to all the Facebooks and MySpaces for Aryans he could find in the area. Then he messaged us and straight up explained our duty to the white race. I was really bored with high school so I dropped out and moved here.”

“What exactly is your duty to the white race?” I asked.

“It’s the white race,” she said. “I mean, we spread it.”

“You spread the white race?” I asked.

“Yeah, well, I’m gonna. When I find the right Aryan man I will spread the white race.”

“But why?” I asked.

“Because it’s our duty,” she replied.

“Why is it your duty?”

“To the white race, it’s our duty to the white race.”

I sensed that we were entering some sort of Abbott and Costello nightmare vortex of repeating misunderstandings.

“I think I’ve got it,” I said.

“Good.” She looked over and squinted into the sun. “Is that…?”

She grinned.

“Hey, Bethany! Over here!”

She hopped up to greet her neo-Nazi friend and like that I was ditched beneath the umbrella. I was fine with that. I was a bit overwhelmed by all the hate. Hate stroke.

Towheaded children were chasing each other around the backyard with cap guns blasting. Near the back door of the house a few of the skinheads were trying to set up some hate-core karaoke. A fat girl with a spiky purple Mohawk was pulling up the back of her shirt to show her huge iron cross tattoo to a guy who looked like a Mexican biker.

“We’re just one big family,” Kitchener remarked.

He was sitting at my elbow in that damn silent wheelchair of his.

“All of these people except for Prison Jim found out about the APU on the Internet,” Kitchener said. “They all post on our forums. We’re it, man.”

He took a swig of his beer and cut his eyes at me.

“We’re the future of the white race,” he said.

Interdiction

I bid Kitchener farewell as the party was winding down. He tried to bribe me with a replica iron cross medallion. I was almost too tired to resist, but I knew if I accepted I would feel tainted by the exchange.

I thanked him for the hospitality and walked out to my car. On the way out, I saw Reggie working in his yard. We briefly made eye contact and I tried to somehow signal, with a wink and a slight shake of my head, that I wasn’t one of these people.

It’s a sad testament to race relations that Reggie couldn’t see past the color of my skin. He thought I was just another white power racist because I am white.

And walking out of a white power party.

It’s called reverse racism. Look it up.

Feeling chastened by Reggie’s accusatory stare, I started up my rental and roared out of the cul-de-sac, headed for the distant interstate and my last stop in the state of Texas.

I stopped on the edge of Grundy and began to fill my tank. The Grundy part of West Texas was as barren as could be imagined and the last thing I wanted was to run out of gas and end up as a sun-bleached skeleton by the side of a strip of woe-begotten Texas highway.

I think I was checking messages on my cell phone when they attacked. At first I thought they were skinheads from the party, but after the blow to the side of my head staggered me to the ground, I caught glimpses of dark suits and well-manicured fingers.

“You wasn’t supposed to hit him,” someone said.

“It was an accident,” whined another unseen attacker.

“Hold ’em,” shouted a third voice with more authority. “Get the bag on his head.”

A heavy canvas bag dropped over my head and my vision went dark. I could feel myself being dragged across the asphalt. I kicked and tried to lash out, but it was useless. Strong hands lifted me up and onto a bench. A car door slammed shut.

“Mistuh Pahsuns.” The person spoke with a heavily affected and heavily accented voice. “Y’all shoulda quit while you was able. That time has passed you by.”

The atmosphere was thick with mingled odors of hairspray and lies. That was weird in hindsight, because I was pretty much breathing my own air in that canvas bag. Maybe before they put it over my head they were using it to carry around a bunch of wigs.

Tires screeched. I was on my way to meet with destiny.

And the Fishes.

6 You are going to hear of wars and rumors of wars. See to it that you are not alarmed. These things must take place, but the end hasn’t come yet,

 

7 Because nation will rise up in arms against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places.

 

8 But all these things are only the beginning of the birth pains.

 

—Book of Matthew, The Bible

 

6 Your phone is gonna blow the fuck up with all kinds of crazy shit going down. Do not freak the fuck out. It’s gotta happen and it is cool because it is gonna totally rule.

 

7 All the armies are gonna start blowing the ever-living shit out of each other. And the King of England is gonna ride in on a motorcycle and chop the head off the King of France with a huge sword with a skull on the handle. And lo, blood hath sprayed all over his face, and he did strike down some other dudes that ran in with machineguns. And then there was a fucking earthquake and a big fireball shot up out of the crack that formed.

 

8 And that ain’t the half of it…

 

—Book of Super Matthew, The Super Bible

 

“W
e are living in the final age,” announced a male voice, smooth as margarine. “I am the visionary of the End Times. The prophet of the Alpha and the Omega. And I have witnessed the coming judgment of the Lord upon his children.”

A group of voices murmured in unison. Somewhere, off in the darkness, a synthesizer was doing a poor job of imitating a pipe organ. It sounded like the funeral for Tangerine Dream.

I was on my side on a hard surface, probably the floor. I tried to move, but my hands were tied behind my back. My shoulders ached from the awkward position. My head was still covered with a bag and it was hot in there, swampy humid from my trapped perspiration.

I heard and felt an approaching thump of footsteps. Then I was lifted up off the floor by my arms and manhandled upright into a chair. Someone tore the canvas bag from my head and for a moment I was blinded. I gasped and drew in a deep breath of cool, fresh air.

“Why did y’all come to Gideon Flats?” Canyon Fish asked me.

He looked like a bigger and slightly fatter version of his brother, Travis Fish. Pictures of both were available on their website. Canyon had lustrous black hair slicked back and arranged in neatly parted waves. There was a suggestion of jowls forming beneath his cheeks, on either side of his dimpled chin, but Canyon was not yet old enough to droop. He was an ox of a man, clad in a tight white T-shirt and a pair of work slacks. He had a pack of cigarettes crammed into the T-shirt’s tiny front pocket, some strange brand with a picture of a turtle visible through the fabric of his shirt.

“Why did y’all come to Gideon Flat!?” he repeated.

“I didn’t,” I protested. “I mean, you brought me here. Tied up with a bag on my head.”

Canyon was sitting across a coffee table from me, his beefy arms resting spread out along the back of a vomit-colored couch. Standing on either side of him were men in cheap suits and ties. They wore plastic-framed black sunglasses. They looked like dollar store Secret Service or the sort of Mormon missionary you might send into the Matrix.

“I haven’t talked to Barney Winston since you called me,” I protested. “I wasn’t even going to come here.”

“Aw, well that just is a funny story, Mistuh Pahsuns, but I don’t believe ya on account of Barney ain’t had one single call. And you was supposed to come visit today.”

Canyon lifted his arms off the couch and then let them drop back down.

“And here ya are,” he said. “Right here with us in the heart of Gideon. Here to witness the foretelling of the End of Days?”

“Peace be on you, brothers and sisters!” a voice cried through the thin, faux wood paneling. “And may we gird our loins and armor ourselves in faith for the coming battle. Amen!”

Synthesized organ music swelled and a chorus of voices began to sing a hymn. Something about battling angels and swords of fire. Very dramatic stuff.

A door banged open and a thinner, slightly younger version of Canyon Fish entered. This was Travis Fish, also known as Deacon Fish, leader of the Fishes. The Fish brothers were the sibling founders of a creepy extremist Christian sect that has grown through the Internet, attracting members from as far away as Iceland. Fish styled himself a revelator, capable of interpreting numeric codes buried in the Bible; he would use them to discern the specific events leading up to Judgment Day.

“Who is this, Canyon?” Travis asked.

He removed his scarlet vestments, draping them over a chair before sitting down at a metal teacher’s desk. He poured a glass of water from a plastic pitcher and drank it all in one gulp.

“This is our curious friend,” Canyon said. “The one who wanted to have a talk with Mr. Winston.”

“Ah,” Travis nodded. “Well then, I expect he’ll want to have a look around. See what we’re all about. Then take that information and twist every bit of it until we seem like lunatics and monsters. And then he will vomit his lies onto the Internet and defame our glorious works.”

Travis propped his feet up on the desk and inclined his head toward one of the two men in sunglasses.

“Lyle,” he said, “why don’t you go get Mr. Winston. I think he might have something to say.”

“Look,” I said, “why don’t you untie me? I’m not going to karate fight my way out of here.”

Travis gave the slightest nod and the other guy in the cheap suit stepped up behind my chair and untied my hands. The rough twine fell to the floor. I massaged the raw flesh of my good wrist, my hand clicking slightly beneath the black leather glove.

“I apologize for the rough treatment,” Travis said. “You understand, I’m sure, that we deal with enough harassment from your ilk on the Internet. We can ignore it easily enough. To think that you would dare come looking for trouble, well, that required some action.”

“I don’t know what sort of Branch Davidian bullshit you’ve got going here, Deacon Fish, and I really don’t care. If you didn’t want me here all you had to do was ask.”

“But I did ask,” Deacon Fish said. “Didn’t you get my messages?”

“I have no clue what you’re…,” I began, but stopped.

I did have a clue. Better than a clue. I knew exactly what Deacon Fish was talking about. That weird threatening letter from Anders was really from Fish. The threatening phone calls. There were even a few hang-up calls in the middle of the night that I had attributed to the usual Internet cranks.

Deacon Fish smiled. Not cruelly exactly, but it wasn’t a friendly smile. All I could think was that he had one really brown tooth and it ruined his whole smile. Your eyes were drawn to it.

“We were very clear with our message, Mr. Parsons. Now that you’re here, I think we can dispense with veiled threats. We didn’t want you here and we were willing—”

I interjected.

“You spent weeks harassing me with cryptic packages and messages and then when you finally ask like normal human beings I comply and you kidnap me and bring me here anyway.”

I shook my head. “This is dumb as hell. Just let me go. Drop me off back at my car.”

“I’m afraid we can’t do that,” Canyon said. “Sadly, we had to drive y’all’s automobile out to the desert and set it on fire to prevent any traces.”

“What?” I was stunned. “You what? You burned my car? I didn’t pay for the insurance!”

“I’m sure it’s—”

“You assholes! Did you burn all of my stuff?”

“No,” Canyon said. “We recovered some of your—”

“Jesus Christ,” I cursed and the mood darkened immediately.

“You will not blaspheme in my presence again or I will have you water boarded,” Travis said loudly.

I shut up. I had just bought one of those cardboard windshield panels to keep the seats from getting too hot. They were shaped like a pair of sunglasses.

“My iPod,” I muttered, imagining it melting into the center console.

The Bernard Winston they brought in was a transformed man. He slouched next to his escort; his hair was hanging over his face and he had several days’ growth of stubble on his cheeks. His suit was old, dusty, and too-big.

The man I had spoken to weeks earlier was a vibrant and excited man, looking forward to a life beyond the Gideon compound. He had a young wife he met on the Internet, another former member. It was her initial e-mails to me that had put me onto Winston. And now he had apparently paid the price for that contact.

“I plan to stay here and fight as a member of the Lord’s Army,” Winston announced. “I love Gideon Falls and I look forward to the return of Our Savior to this earth.”

His statement was stilted, rehearsed, and given to nobody in particular. He did not even look in my direction. Travis waved him out.

“There you have it,” Travis said. “He is happy as can be to stay here.”

“He looked delighted,” I remarked. “Can I go now?”

Travis clucked his tongue against his teeth in a scolding manner.

“Mister Parsons, you still have to write that article,” Travis said.

“It’s for a book,” I corrected.

“Even better,” he replied. “Even better. I want to help you.”

“I can’t believe you set fire to my fucking car,” I said. “What am I going to do? All of my notes. My phone. I’m going to have to pay for the car! I had just put gas in it!”

He got up and came around from behind his desk to stand beside me. He smelled like hair product. And lies.

“All your questions will be answered. I will show you around, give you a tour. Let you meet the family.” He clapped a hand on my shoulder. “I think you’ll come to see why Gideon Falls is such a special place.”

The Grand Tour

Gideon Falls was much too large to easily walk in an afternoon, but the Fish family had a whole fleet of old Army jeeps painted institutional blue. Some were covered with tarps, but most of them were parked in rows and baking under the hot Texas sun.

The jeeps seemed so tiny compared to the sort of modern cars with air conditioning and windshields and cushioned seats and my iPod that I preferred and that the Fishes hated so much. These things were barely larger than a golf cart and didn’t look very flammable. Each vehicle was numbered on the side and had a beveled cross icon on the hood. It was an ugly logo. It looked as if someone had just arbitrarily applied a Photoshop filter to a crucifix.

“We are almost completely independent from the outside world here at Gideon Falls,” Travis remarked as he guided our jeep out of the garage building. “The Internet is about the only thing we can’t produce ourselves.”

The Gideon Falls compound sprawled across four hundred acres of fairly barren Texas land. It wasn’t quite the cactuses and tumbleweeds of the desert, but it wasn’t far off. The roads were all dirt and we raised a huge cloud of dust behind us as we made our way to what Travis called, “the Lord’s Larder.”

It was actually a pair of filthy and dank-smelling hothouses where they were growing fruits and vegetables to feed the people who lived on the compound.

“The Lord provides,” Travis noted as he plucked a tomato from the vine.

He bit it and let the juices run down his chin. One of the slack-faced greenhouse workers offered him a handkerchief. Travis wiped his face and handed it back with a murmured blessing.

We left the sticky heat of the greenhouse and followed a dirt path to a large barn filled with cows.

“We do not eat meat,” Travis said, “but we drink milk.”

A woman in blue military-style coveralls approached carrying a silver bucket full almost to overflowing with milk.

“Would you like some?” Travis offered.

I was very thirsty, but raw milk from a creepy cult barn was not the sort of thirst quencher I had in mind.

“I had a bottle of water in my car,” I said. “I don’t suppose you saved that?”

Travis exaggerated his fixed smile into a sarcastic grin and dipped a cupped hand into the milk. He slurped the liquid out of his palm and then shook his hand in the air, shedding the remaining droplets on the dirty concrete floor.

“Delicious,” he announced. “Thank you, Mistra.”

The woman with the bucket walked away.

“It’s always best fresh and warm from the teet.”

Under normal circumstances I would be compelled to quip after hearing and seeing something like that. Something like, “At that moment I wanted to die.”

However, at that moment all I could think about was my rented car. All of my travel belongings, my clothes, my shaving kit, my notebook of random ideas, my vacation porno, all of it was gone. Weeks of spotty hotel Internet access and I had built up some pretty solid vacation porno. Past tense.

The tour continued with a swing by the dormitories. These were where the newcomers lived. Institutional housing for those recruited through the website or through community outreach programs. They were segregated by sex into two immense three-story slabs lined with windows about the size of ship’s portholes.

There was some attempt made to landscape around the entrances, but lack of care and the difficult environment had left the flower planters and rose bushes looking desiccated and feeble.

“We shan’t disturb them,” Travis noted as we zoomed past the women’s dorm.

One of the inhabitants had taped a colored drawing of a heart in the cell-like window of her room. Written beneath the crude cartoon were the words
PRAISE HIM
in fat black letters.

“Hey, do you think I could call my car in stolen?” I asked. “I mean, I’ll keep you guys out of it, but I can’t afford to pay for the car. You know they would charge me blue book plus a profit on something like that.”

“I don’t know,” Travis replied, although I could tell he didn’t care.

“You know, you guys did that,” I said. “You guys burned my car. Not me. Not me, I would have said ‘Oh, let’s park it in a parking lot somewhere and he can get it when we’re done.’ I wouldn’t have torched it. I mean you could have at least emptied my stuff out of there.”

“Hush,” Travis said.

“I’m just saying,” I muttered and looked away from him and at the ugly squalor of his stupid cult compound. “Torch this stupid place instead.”