Pönitenz

 

 

“Please, father! I swear I won’t do it again! Please!”

The boy’s jet black skin shined with the liquid of fear.

It was no use.

“Stealing, back on Earth, in the 21st century was one thing, son,” said the tall and stern looking man who stood before the boy. “I know you’ve been studying the 21st century, pit stain that it was. You hope to change laws and traditions with your findings. Impossible.”

The boy stuttered, slowly gaining the courage to speak.

“You’d never get anything more than a slap on the wrist for such a thing, then. That was a sane world, father,” said the boy, horror etched into the fabric of every word he spoke. “This…”

“This isn’t the 21st century,” said father. “This is 35th century SuperLuna. Theft today is punishable by psychedelic time travel probation. You know this.”

“Dad,” said the boy, positively shaking now, “please.”

“Step into the booth, son,” said father.

The boy sighed. He stared at his father’s blank face in search of some form of mercy. He waited for a hint of pity to surface in those jet black eyes, but he saw none. There was no pity in the 35th century.

The Earth had finally been made uninhabitable by the human race one hundred years ago.

On Super Luna, there were new rules. On Super Luna, the rules stuck hard and fast.

The boy stepped into the booth. The moment his right foot touched the smooth and lustrous floor within, there was a brilliant flash.

BANG!

POW!

“Mine fuehrer,” said a clipped voice. An arm shot out at a risen angle and the flattened hand on the end of the arm stabbed the sky. The sky was dark with soot. The sound of heavy machinery blanketed the area that the boy now stood in. There were towering gates everywhere he looked. Beyond each of these gates, hundreds of people were huddled into a tight group. Each group was a writhing mass of weeping and dread and pain.

There was a smell not unlike that of roasted swine flesh upon the air.

The boy retched. He stooped and gagged.

The psychic ray pistol trembled in his right hand.

As the boy watched a group of the people beyond the gate nearest him, a rugged man in a strange uniform pointed a primitive rifle at the back of a kneeling man’s head (who begged in a strange and frantic tongue) and pulled the trigger.

Bang.

A painfully thin body tumbled into a trench.

As the boy watched, another person, this one a gibbering and wild haired woman, was pulled from within the group and forced onto her knees in front of the man with the rifle.

The boy’s disgusted stare at this scene was broken by the clipped voice that had spoken before.

“Mine fuehrer,” the voice said. “Will this barbarous but necessary wade into the depths of human depravity end soon? How many more must we exterminate to rid the world of this lecherous and greedy race of filth? How long must we carry on?”

The short, stout, and ugly man who stood beside the man with the clipped voice smiled and sucked on a cracked pipe. His mustache bristled jerkily.

“We will carry on for as long as it takes, Openhiemer. The Third Reich will soon come to pass, and this world will know the rule of the steady hand of the master race.”

The short man grunted, hitched up his dreary fatigues, and spat into the grimy air.

“Now prepare the abattoirs for increased stress and mass. Sherman has reported to me that we’ve got another shipment coming in tonight. The largest yet.”

The two men shared a laugh.

“Thirty second invisibility cloak deactivated,” said a misty and mechanical voice in the boy’s head.

The boy braced himself and felt light begin to assault his body once again. The light of this era, of this place, felt oily and diseased on his skin. A look around in plain-sight was enough to dazzle his senses, all ten of them.

The psychic ray pistol rose to chest level.

“You!” shouted a gruff voice from somewhere to the boy’s immediate right. “You there! Where did you come from?”

The boy had a second to think of what idle hands had gotten him into. He knew the risk of stealing; the consequence of it, but that hadn’t mattered at the time. He had stolen anyway, and now he would have to survive for a year in the dirty and primitive hellhole past for it.

“I will never steal again,” the boy said, gritting his teeth.

“Shoot him!” screamed a voice in that strange and nonsensical tongue that the boy still somehow understood. “Shoot him!”

The boy pointed the psychic ray pistol at the shouting man’s forehead and fired.

This was going to be a long year.

Reviews

[Ben Umstead]

I come back for a visit to the WC and get a cracking bang whiz story from the Man! Very trippy 60s Twilight Zone/Bradbury vibe on this one, which you know I always love. Though the ending made me grin sinister, I would had loved it to go further. Perhaps you can revisit in a little serial episode form.

[Constance]

Now THAT'S punishment. Yikes.
It held my interest, this short bit. If it went on for long, though, more characters with depth would have had to have been added to hold me observant.
I love the second line, the phrase, "shined with the liquid of fear", well done, that bit there.