Free Revolution by Michael Sutherland

looked up at them, then down
to that well of an oil place. There was nothing there now but crates of beer
and barrels of Bremen.
    One of the
guys hunkered down and looked me in the eyes. Reaching out he took the gun from
me as easy as taking a popgun from a kid.
    "Pay-null-acht
Luger," he said to someone, but not me. And did I care anyhow?
    He stuffed
the gun into his pocket and dragged me to my feet.
    No one said
anything until they had me in the street.
    "Sind
Sie, okay?"
    "Huh?"
    "Go
home, Bruder," another said.
    They walked
away and left me there with a torn collar, torn off buttons, busted knees and
ruined chinos.
    No cops, no
nothing, I staggered back to the hotel and crashed down on the bed.
    #
    I knocked at
the front door. No one answered. I knocked harder until the glass broke.
    I stepped
over splinters and made my way into the front room. There was nothing there.
The father who had claimed he wasn’t a father wasn’t there either. It looked as
though no one had been living there in years.
    I made my way
to the mother’s house. It was the same thing; nothing and no one there, no
pictures, no passports, no cups, and no coffee.
    Three guys
were dead and one more nearly so, me.
    #
    I searched
through the archives.
    Hamburg 1943.
    I flicked
through pictures of destruction, faces of the dead and the dying, and the burnt
beyond recognition.
    Bremer Reihe.
    Thule
Orientals in green gloves chanting mantras to a machine in some basement under
fire. And there were six others standing in the shadows behind them.
    Some people
just don’t know when to die.
    I hit print
and the print slithered out like a dried up tongue.
    The picture
was grainy, but there he was, sitting in some sleazy little kneipe with two
young guys on one side of him, one on the other with five shot glasses up
front. Someone was missing.
    Take a guess.
    I looked at
their faces. I looked at his. They all looked like him, they all looked like
her. And I could just tell who was holding the Brownie camera taking the black
and whites
    Five glasses
and four guys and all of them were waiting for the Prodigal son to return.
    I took the
print back home with me. I looked at my face in the mirror.
    If I didn’t
know any better I would have said I was looking at my own father or maybe my
brother from a different time. An older twin if that was possible; one who didn’t
age.
    Something had
happened back then; something beyond desperation.
    "He’s
not mine," he’d said. "Neurologists checked him out," she’d
said.
    A big lie, a
radio wave from the past to rein me in, something to get me close to where that
machine had been, to get me back, to prove to them that the thing actually
worked; the right guy in the wrong time to help them all escape from the horror
they had created.
    It was dark.
I poured a vodka straight. The phone rang. I picked it up.
    "Yeah?"
    But no one
talked; just another dead end.
    Einstein.
Relativity. Tesla. The Egg of Columbus. The Torsion Tensor Effect. And the
Wenceslas mine.
    Und Schutzstaffel ,
SS General Dr Ing Hans Kammler.
    Mein Vater.
    I looked at
his pinched face, his eyes. Black and white didn’t do their evil justice. I
just hoped that at least the heels of my boots had.
    They had put
me in that machine along with my brothers after I had taken that picture. Alles
mein brüder und mich, and now everyone was after me for the sins of my father.
Me, the problem paperclip still being sucked back to that magnetron from the
past; the aftereffect
    Now their
mansions were empty. No traces, no signs, no mother or father to be seen. There
never had been, not in this time. That was all they needed though. Their machine
was still stuck back there with enough power to reach out with their bait and
drag me back into their trap. Enough to have me sucked back and let them know
it was safe; me, their own son, their test rat, the only rat who had survived.
If I had made it to here and gone back there then maybe they would have been
brave enough to use