Rippling Retribution...

It was mid-May in the town of Stoagtown, and that meant the spring festival was upon the small town of just nine thousand residents, proud men, women, and children who would celebrate their country’s day when they won the war and the whole of the earth changed. Kids were already painting their faces the classic red and black colors day's in advance and even parents started to hang up their stark flags and play oldies on their cassette tapes as the days went by further into a blur. Until that day.

Elderly farmer Martin Hagen was the first to see the stranger enter the town’s bubble. A ripple in the air, then bam, he was there, calmly walking on the long stretch of paved road, without cracks and litterless from centuries of well-kept cleaning and care. It wasn't the stranger’s tight crimson and silver clothes or his platinum hair that alarmed the old man who thought he was ninety, was still lively enough to ride on a low to maintain his thirteen-acre stretch of land beside the road into Stoagtown, or the red cloak he carried behind him. It was his eyes and pale skin that raised alarm in Martin. As he rode his plow across the acres, the stranger turned his head, revealing most of his face shrouded behind a red scarf, with only an abyss for eyes showing. Martin felt as if  Jesus himself warned him of the man. Yet even though the man’s figure screamed an intruder, he just ignored the old man and kept walking, further and further into town.

Christiana Mannis was the second person to see the stranger enter the town. She was trying to round up her family of eight to get ready for Stoagtown’s event tonight, the three-hundred-and-eighteenth- a celebration of their family’s and country’s greatest achievement. Her golden blonde hair nearly turned gray and her sky blue eyes could have popped out as the stranger eyed her and her children. He quickly scanned them up and down, then kept walking, no greetings, no pleasantries, just silent. She quickly ran into the house and called up her husband, who thought, didn't need to go into work at the office, decided anyway to quickly come home and be on the lookout for the stranger.

Soon word spread across the town of the stranger. The elderly couples gawked and some urged sightings for the man as they watered their lawns for the day, while children were swept away by parents to go inside. Word went from neighbor to neighbor until nearly half of the town knew of this strange presence, all the way until they were scared enough to call the sentinels to valiantly and forcefully expunge the pest from their homes.  Only by the time the armed men in red, and black uniforms showed up, the stranger disappeared.

Many people didn't want to go to the marketplace and continue on with festivities. Some decided to lock their doors and until the Sentinels were sure the strange man was found, would stay there. The children wondered why their parents were so urgent and suddenly scared. What they had no knowledge of was not only was the stranger the first they had seen in over three centuries but was the most odd-looking thing in a long time. The residents thought they wiped them all out. They believed that the infection was gone. They had faith, that their god had ridden the earth of the inferior people.

Three hours passed, and the sun was setting, and while the main shining of hope faded, a new hope came with the lighting of torches, streetlights, and blinking red and white lights of downtown appeared. It was the once and only time every year, the people would get this chance to come together and truly celebrate and who gave them the right to not miss it all because of some strange man in town? Off they went, with their blankets, and picnic baskets, flags and paint and bags upon bags of fruit and sweet treats they made to share with all. Community: that was what the people of Stoagtown were religiously all about. The feeling of oneness, to sit beside your neighbor, to hug and laugh with your best friend, talk of old times and relish in your grandmother’s famous cherry pie, that was what they wanted more than anything. And nobody, not the Sentinels and not even this stranger clad in red was going to change that.

Jimmel Clark or “Jimmy” his friends called him, was off running around in the park, high off a sugar rush of ice cream and loads of pie when he was on the edge of the forest trail. Fate drew him there. He stood, huffing his breath not in exhaustion but in glee that his friends decided that hide and seek was their next round of games after the tag, and in both games Jimmy was it. He rummaged through the woods, going not too deep, but enough so that his friends wouldn't detect him when he would sneak up on them and grab them. He thought if they could hide, why shouldn’t he?

He thought he was beating them at their own game, outsmarting the fast and some of them, older kids. Only he found something else instead of Lauren. He jumped out of the shrubbery and onto the trail back to the park when he saw a dark shape in the distance. Thinking it to be his small blonde companion Lauren, he quickly raced off towards it, only when the distant lights of the festival and moonlight caught up to him, he saw it was not his friend, but a man, a Sentinel, sprawled on the ground, with a puddle of something beneath him. His bones were in an odd shape, reminding Jimmy of the time at his Uncle James' birthday party how after drinking enough “adult juice” he fell out. Jimmy almost laughed at the memory. Until the figure appeared.

The shadows came to life in the shape of a tall man, a ghost really, as his pale skin etched like a ghost in the pale moonlight. Silver hair streamed light across the forest floor as Jimmy looked up at him. He was in awe for a moment before the stranger let out a hand and got closer and closer to Jimmy…

Bethany Clark last saw Jimmy by the forest trail, which should have been lit, only each of the torch lights was snuffed out, leaving that area a streak of darkness. A cold feeling crept up her spine, but her husband assured her that Jimmy would be fine, that no matter how many years, the ecstatic child always would wander with his friends on the trail with Sentinels watching and would always come back. Bethany believed that too. In the past. Only the trail was dark and she hadn't seen a Sentinel for over an hour now. She asked Mrs. Mitchell if she had seen the armed guards and she said no. another neighbor and said the same thing. Bethany diverted her attention back to finding Jimmy. To her relief, the boy was by park benches, sitting silently. As Bethany got closer, her once soft blonde hair that was down to her shoulders etched cold fingers down her back. 

Jimmy was...dark. No-he was clad in a dark liquid. As Bethany got closer, kneeling and calling to Jimmy, the boy’s vacant eyes along with the invading scent of metal sent her screaming to the town. Everyone turned in unison, the hive mind of blondes and blue-eyed folks all either gasping or muttering prayers as Bethany appeared. She had her son in her arms as Mr. Brighton, the town’s physician and the doctor quickly scooped the boy up and assessed him. His blood turned to frost. Jimmy was only a hunk of flesh. It took a minute to find the bleeding, but when he did, Mr. Brighton found a small shard of metal sunken into the boy’s back. 

Another scream echoed across the town. Then another. The chaos didn't erupt until out of the shadows, a Sentinel limped to safety, away from the persecutor, away from him. He didn't make it to the market before a shiny projectile landed in the back of his neck. He was dead before he hit the ground. Out of the shadows, the stranger appeared. The crimson wasn't to celebrate the Spring Festival but permanently stained blood. His silver gauntlets and pieces of armor were dripping with it as sharp blades appeared from his hands. He took off his scarf, revealing jagged scars across his face and he spoke in a language that rippled terror throughout the people. It was a lost language, not spoken for centuries after the Axis decimated the once-great ally that helped them in conquering the United States. It belonged to their people who to the Stoagtown’s occupants were just small, yellow, and weak people who depended on swords and fish for survival and a sense of honor. Yet the man before them wasn't no weakling or no warrior. He was a butcher and he wasn't blonde hair and blue-eyed, not an angel, not a perfect being in god’s eyes and especially the Fuhrer’s. He was Japanese.

Liger let himself grin before he rushed toward the crowd of townspeople in a merciless glee. Liger had one objective, or “treat” as Victorious said: in the town of Stoag, eliminate all the residents, man, women- and children. Finally! Liger could satiate his bloodlust- and add to his trophies of kills. The people could run. They could hide. But other villages and even armies fell to the monster. He didn’t care whether they all appeared to be family, whether they were farmers, and especially if they were Aryans all celebrating the day the United States was defeated by Nazi Germany in World War 2, waving their swastika flags and painting their faces with a symbol used for hate for centuries. It was three hundred years since they saw anybody that wasn't a pureblood Aryan, that wasn't dead to the nuclear ash outside the dome. Now that they did, Liger would be the last person they see.