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He couldn’t remember anything before several months ago, before being a derelict, another lost homeless person without hope or reason. Dirty, disheveled and unshaven, he had no identification on him, so no idea who he was or what his former life might had been.
He spent most of this time in seedy bars near the [...]
He couldn’t remember anything before several months ago, before being a derelict, another lost homeless person without hope or reason. Dirty, disheveled and unshaven, he had no identification on him, so no idea who he was or what his former life might had been.
He spent most of this time in seedy bars near the docks of New York, getting free drinks for his feats of strength, amazing strength from so wrecked and ruined a human specimen. He could easily lift a table with six burly stevedores sitting on it as though it were nothing more than a cardboard table piled with rag dolls.
Sometimes in a drunken haze, he would dream of a man wearing a stars and stripes costume, who seemed to be his friend, but it was all so far away in a different time and place. He doubted it was a true memory, for he detested all men that much he knew; something about humanity revolted him, angering him although he knew not why. He felt strangely humbled, as though he had once been someone extraordinary but couldn’t quite remember.
Another image that came to him frequently was of him flying as easily and lightly as a bird, a regal figure of the air, and he felt powerful for an instant. But it quickly passed.
He worked occasionally on the docks, unloading freight from ships, his incredible strength getting him a job when he wanted one. The labor gave him enough money to eat, drink and sometimes sleep in fleabag hotel for the night.
But a soft, clean bed made him dream – of the stars and stripes man, of flying, of fighting against a mighty army, some great dark force in another land. A burning man, who was somehow not consumed, fought along side them, but this strange memory made no sense to him, just another confusing image in his addled brain.
One day in May, a hotheaded teenager came into a bar where the derelict was sleeping fitfully on a table. The fiery young punk ignited his hand, much like the man in the dream, and skillfully shaved his bread and cut his hair with controlled fingertip fire.
Men in the bar jumped to their feet, and everyone began yelling a name at him, a name that meant nothing to him but apparently a lot to everyone else. They stumbled over themselves trying to get away, to escape from the bar.
The teenage suddenly burst fully into flame and lifted the derelict into the air, flew him out of the bar and to the docks. The clean-shaven derelict wasn’t sure any of this was really happening to him; it seemed surreal, like his dreams, and was probably just a whiskey hallucination.
Circling over the choppy waters, the flaming teenager dropped him, and as he fell deeper and deeper into the ocean, his clothes floating off, he began breathing the water as naturally as oxygen, realizing instantly who he was, what had happened to him, the years that he had lost, why he hated humanity and what he would do now to them in revenge.
Rod Drake observes, thinks and writes in the neon wonderland of Las Vegas. Check out Rod’s longer stories posted in Fictional Musings, Flash Forward, MicroHorror, Six Sentences and AcmeShorts.
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