The Hitler Youth

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Joel raises the gun and aims it at the boy. He knows that shooting the child like this is both unethical and disturbing, but at the same time it is still something that he very much has to do.

Killing this boy has become nothing less than his sole purpose for being, with everything that has occurred up until now, his entire life expended so far, serving as little more than a convenient vehicle to carry him here to this necessary act of brutal violence; to this killing moment right now. This sacrifice of the child innocent, has become his destiny, his reason for existence, his very essence of being, the sum of all he has become. Even so, however simple it had seemed in his head, in reality this isn't so straightforward. Too many contradicting emotions have suddenly come into play and, although Joel has been many things to many people in the past, murderer has never been one of them. He is no hardened killer; if truth be known, this will be his first time at ever firing a gun, let alone actually shooting at someone, let alone a child, so this doesn't come easy at all. All he has ever done before is watch, observed from a safe distance while others did all the work. He has never participated directly in proceedings before, never actually harmed anyone, and all this sudden in your face violence is not a part of his world at all, this is all too raw, too real. Either way, if he is going to do it, and he is, then it will have to be done now, before people have noticed that the child is missing and set out looking for him. This is the only opportunity he will ever have to be completely alone with the boy which means that he has to act now, it has to happen now or it may never happen at all, and it has to happen because so much else depends on it. The ends more than justify the means. Cause and effect.

This affirmation hardens him, and without thinking any further he simply closes his eyes and squeezes the trigger. It is done.

A second goes past, then another, and yet there has been no shot, no scream, nothing, just a barely audible click from the gun and then nothing. Is this the way it's meant to happen? Cautiously, Joel opens his eyes again. It takes a moment for realisation to sink in and then, when it does, he could kick himself; he hadn't loaded the gun. What a piece of work. Call himself a Terminator? F**k. It's a joke. Beyond belief.

Quickly, so as to waste no more time, he pops open the breast pocket on his shirt and pulls out a fresh clip of bullets, cursing his own base stupidity as he rams them home into the empty automatic. Unbelievable, and of all the stupid piss poor things he could have ever done right now that has to rank as the sorriest, and if the whole situation weren't so damn serious he'd have laughed out loud at it all. Farcical. Biting back on any further self-reproach he steels himself again and then takes aim for a second time. The boy starts crying then; brutally aware that he is now in serious danger from this strange man, and Joel tries his best to ignore the pathetic sobs and steadies his aim. He has already pulled the trigger once so the boy is as good as dead already really, and if he hadn't of f****d up then it would all be over and done with either way; the child is only alive on a technicality. This is nothing more than tidying up, of correcting his mistake. Suddenly, the boy speaks to him; his voice barely louder than a whisper, and the sobbing combined with his heavy rustic accent makes it hard for Joel to understand. Sensing that he has been heard but not necessarily understood, the boy repeats himself, slightly louder this time, and Joel slowly translates the child's words in his head 'Please don't hurt me, I am a good boy.' Instinctively he lowers the gun.

The boy is small for his age and even though Joel knows him to be at least ten years old, to look at him you would think him nowhere near that. He has not developed anywhere near as well as his peers, and for a supposedly hardy country child he looks ill, sick, like a strong wind would up and blow him away. This child is far from weak though, and you only have to look in his eyes to see that. There is a fire there, a defiant strength that far outweighs his puny outer appearance. To Joel, it is these eyes that betray the child's true nature, revealing the evil seed that lies within, showing to all that would look the flame that must be extinguished, the flame that he must extinguish. The boy wipes at his face with the sleeve of his coat and cautiously speaks again 'Please, why are you doing this to me?' Joel tries hard to avoid the boy's questioning eyes. It really is time now; there is absolutely nothing more to be gained here. The game must end. He raises the gun again and squeezes the trigger.

Simultaneously, the boy screams out, the sudden shrill noise shocking Joel out of his aim at very the last moment, sending the shot wild. The bullet ricocheting off the plasterwork next to the boys' head and embedding itself harmlessly up in the ceiling. The boy instinctively drops to the floor and curls up into a ball, his hands clutched over his head for protection. Inside the confined space of the room the gunshot is deafening, and Joel's ears are ringing as he rushes over to the window to stare out at the empty street below. Everybody in the entire bloody village must have heard that. But a minute passes, and then another and still no one appears to be coming. No one heard.

Satisfied that he is still safe, for now, Joel turns back round only to find that the boy has disappeared. For a split second panic sets in, that in the few moments where his attention was diverted his prey has managed to escape him, but then he calms down and forces himself to think rationally; the boy must be here in the room somewhere, the only door out of the room is locked and the key to it is in his pocket. For reassurance, he quickly walks over to the door and pulls on the handle. Firmly locked. The boy is still in here all right, just hiding somewhere. Everything is still under control. Scanning the room, obviously what was once the main bedroom here before the house was abandoned, he quickly establishes that there are only two possible hiding places where the boy could be; under the old rusty bed or inside the ancient wardrobe. He checks out of the window once more, to make sure that there is still no one within earshot, and then he calls out, struggling to get the correct guttural sound of the boy's unfamiliar language 'Come out, I mean you no harm.' There is no answer. 'Come out, don't make me come find you.' There is still no answer.

The game has changed. Joel keeps silent and then gently walks across the room, ears straining for any sound of the hidden boy's breathing as he goes. The boy is good though, fear has made him undetectable, and the only sound Joel hears as he crosses the room is the creaking of the old floorboards beneath his feet. He walks back over to the bed and suddenly kicks the frame hard, sending it skidding away across the floor and crashing into the far wall. No boy under there. He turns to face the wardrobe and flings open both the doors. No boy in there either, and save for a faded old rag of a shirt the wardrobe is empty. Slipping the gun under his belt, Joel uses both hands and pulls the wardrobe away from the wall, in case the child has somehow managed to get behind it, but he is not there either. It's impossible; the child must be here somewhere. He spins around to assess the room again and there is nowhere else that the boy could possibly be; the rest of the room is completely empty. Where is he? There is only the one window and only the one door out of here, which is why Joel had chosen this room in the first place, for the containment. He backs over to the door again, pulling down harder on the handle this time, making sure again that it definitely is locked. It is. The child has simply disappeared. It's unbelievable. On top of everything else, now it would appear that the child is also a phantom.

He hears voices then, shouts from outside, so he cautiously edges over to the window and peers out. There is a small group of men out there, four or five burly farm workers all walking down the road in line. They are calling out the boys' name and examining the roadside as they pass. Obviously a search party has been organised already. Joel instantly recognises the boys' father amongst them, his large frame easily standing out from all the others, his frantic movements and gestures revealing a slight urgency missing from the other men searching. The men approach the road passing outside the house here and instinctively Joel holds his breath. For a split second it looks as if he is undone; one of the men walks toward the front of the house and peers in through the grimy window downstairs. If he decides to search inside the house it will all be over. Then one of other men shouts something that Joel can't quite catch, and the first man starts walking back away from the house to join the others. The rest of them keep walking on past oblivious, their eyes fixed on the ditch and the foliage alongside the edge of the road. Not one of them appears to be suspicious of the old house at all. Joel breathes a silent sigh of relief, and then he hears it; the boy shouting loudly from here inside the room somewhere behind him, screaming out with all the force his little lungs will allow "PAPA!"

The cry for help easily carries out of the window and down to the street below. Immediately all the men's heads snap back round to the house and look up. Time freezes and for an instant Joel's gaze locks with the boy's father as he glares up at the window. Then the men are moving, running for the front door of the house as fast as they can. They know that the boy is in here with him.

There is no more time now. He knows that there is no way out; he is too high up here to jump from the window and escape injury, and the men will be thundering up the stairs toward the only door out of this room any second. He is trapped. Joel knows that the flimsy bedroom door will not keep them out for long, and even with his gun, it is doubtful that he'd be able to stop all of the men anyway. He is done for. Finished. There are no more options. Well, only one; he can still achieve his goal; he can still do what he came here for. He knows where the boy is now. Quickly, just as the first man begins kicking at the outside of the door, he walks over to the bed and reaches down, pulling the boy out from under it. The clever little bastard had been holding on tightly to the underside of the mattress so when Joel had kicked the bed earlier, the boy had moved with it. Disappeared my backside! Why didn't he think of that before, the simplest of childish tricks, but even now it's only the boy's shout for help that has revealed the hiding place to him. Exactly how long would he of spent trying to puzzle out where the child had gone? A mere boy had outwitted him. No matter. He still has his chance now; just about.

Joel places the muzzle of the gun against the boy's temple just as the door breaks in and the men come spilling into the room. Seeing a chance at salvation, the boy starts to struggle violently, attempting to pull free at the last and Joel loses his grip on him for a second, just a second, but it is enough to delay the trigger for long enough. Before he can fire, one of the men throws himself across the room, crashing into his side and knocking both him and the boy to the ground, the three of them falling to the floor, a mass tangle of bodies and limbs. Joel fires once before the gun is knocked from his hand and there is the briefest flash of crimson and the man that had tackled him shouts out in pain. He quickly pushes the weight from off him and there is no resistance, but as he tries to stand the first blow from one of the others strikes him on the side of the head, knocking him back down to the floor again. As soon as he is down the feet and the fists of the other men begin to rain down on him in earnest. Kicking and punching him all over his body, each merciless blow opening up it's own little world of pain. At first he keeps his hands around his head, protecting his face from the worse of the damage, but then his hands are pulled away and a heavy boot comes crashing in, filling his field of vision, kicking him in the face over and over again, splitting his nose and loosening his teeth until his mouth fills from the taste of his own blood. The beating continues until he is on the very edge of unconsciousness then, after the vigilantes have seemingly all had their fill, he is roughly lifted to his feet and propped up in place by two of the men, one holding onto each side of him. He is little more than dead weight in their arms. He is bloodied and beaten and has little resistance left. There is no point in it anymore. He has been caught. He has failed. The odds are too highly stacked against him now for him to ever possibly prevail.

The man on the left pulls sharply on Joel's hair, yanking his head back and now he can see round the room. He can see all of the men in the search party standing around him staring; a mixture of anger and contempt written across their faces. The man that he'd shot is sitting over in the corner, one crimson arm cradled in the other, and appears not to be fatally wounded so Joel had even managed to mess that up, and at point blank range too. The worst of it all though is that the boy is safe. He is standing against the far wall with his father, totally unharmed. The two of them must have been standing together, watching as the others beat and kicked him, but even so there is no emotion evident on the boy's face, no visible relief, no sign of anger, nothing. His features are a mask. Despite everything that has just happened here in this room, his abduction, his near death experience, his view of Joels savage beating, the child appears completely impassive. He obviously feels nothing. A ten year old boy that can withstand the emotional turmoil of his life being in danger and then just calmly stand and stare as a grown man is brutalised down into a bloody pulp right before his eyes! He truly must be a monster. He is not human.

Stepping forward, the father leaves his son's side and stands before him. This man's face is just as unreadable as his child's, but to Joel his intentions are clear enough. Without a sound, he winds his arm back and punches out hard. Joel feels a sharp pain across his lower jaw, his head snapping back involuntarily, and he barely has time to recover before the fist comes flying in again. The punches come faster then, both fists over and over again until Joel cannot feel them individually anymore. The man releases punch after punch and Joel enters a kind of trance that is beyond pain, beyond reason, until all he is aware of anymore is the man's primordial scream of rage as he strikes out again and again and again at the man who would of harmed his son.

Joel can do nothing. He is to die here. This man will kill him with his bare hands. He knows that much. And who could blame him? To them he is a monster, an evil predator, and if Joel could swap places, had he been the father here, then in truth he might well have done the same. Maybe if he could explain? Maybe if they all knew the truth? But then how could that be expected, how could simple men such as these ever possibly hope to understand him? How could they ever comprehend his story? How could he even begin to tell them how he was not of their world, how he was not of their time. That he was from another place, a future time, that he was a Temporal Agent from the twenty second century, a soldier of the Red Sea Union sent back in time to the year 1899 to this small Austrian village just across the border from German Bavaria. That he had come here to Braunau Am Inn, on a fact-finding mission. That he was only ever meant to be an observer, to collate information, but that he'd decided to take matters into his own hands and attempt to divert the course of history, to take action that would prevent a terrible catastrophe from ever of occurring, action that would save millions of lives. How could these men ever hope to comprehend any of that? Impossible. He could barely believe it all himself. They would simply think him mad.

He had known the risks right enough before he had even started though. He had known full well that he was a man alone, that the buck well and truly stopped here. There was no way that the self-satisfied politicians of the Union would never have sanctioned such a controversial action as this, even if they had all secretly wanted to. He knew that the only real way to get anything done was to take direct action of his own. He'd smuggled the gun back with him and set off to find the boy straight away. That had been the easy part. The child had been at home, alone, and it had been relatively simple for Joel to kidnap him and bring him here, to where no-one would find them, to where he had time to talk to the boy, to maybe get some answers, any answers, to maybe glean from him the mistake that they all should learn from in the future before disposing of him for good. The boy had said nothing though, not a word, he had just sat and stared sullenly, and Joel had given up. If you cannot learn from a mistake, you can at least correct it.

It was all supposed to be so simple, so straightforward. Change was supposed to be good. Joel had been given the tools and he had been given an opportunity, and he had had to do it, he had to try; he owed that much to his ancestors that had died. And it had nearly worked too; he had been so close, so incredibly close. He had nearly changed everything. He would have been a bloody hero. An unknown hero, but a hero nonetheless.

But now he would simply be listed as another M.I.T.A His family would be informed that his whereabouts in downtime were currently unknown. They will undoubtedly send out a half-hearted search team on his behalf, but as he'd deliberately left his temporal pack back in the base during uptime, all their tracers would simply home in on it there. He was effectively riding the past bareback and no one would ever know what became of him; no one would ever be able to find him, or find out what had happened, what he had tried to do. It had all been for nothing. This relatively small altercation would never make it into any history books, so from the perspective of the future, from his time's perspective, it would be as if he'd simply disappeared. The game really was all over and he hadn't been able to change a thing. He was finished.

As if on cue, a final thundering punch from the big man sends Joel's head shooting back again and this time there is an audible crack as his spinal column snaps at the neck. He dies almost instantly and the two men holding him let his body slump forward onto the floor.

Alois Hitler looks once more on the human sack of refuse that lies still and bloodied before him. Using his boot to roll the body over so it is face up, he hawks and spits in its face. Finally a grim smile, of sorts, breaks across his solid rustic features and he calls his son over to his side 'Come Adi, it is over, you are safe now, we go home ja?' The boy comes to stand next to his father and looks down on the twisted and broken body fallen in front of him impassively, the flame behind his eyes still burning brightly. Joel has changed nothing.

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Infinite Improbability Drive

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