Dark Avengers

Graham Swanson

Written 10-5-2021

Ed lost all her friends once she graduated from the University with a degree in High Arts from the prolific professor of the arcane, Dr. Fairfax. Many of the club mates and roommates pressured her to abort the baby growing in her womb, but cold lonely night after cold lonely night she grew more dear to the unborn, and more in love with the boy growing inside her. She wasn’t sure she ever learned anything from the courses but she learned that if she stayed quiet and let Fairfax explain how toasters and air conditioners are the evilest things in the world, she easily earned A grades.

Ed’s best friend, the daughter of Sudanese war refugees, dropped out of school her senior year and ended up frequenting Tinder accounts, drinking cheap gas station wine in rotten apartments. Once she took up a job at the bank Ed seldom called nor heard from her dear friend. Since she was no longer at the same level as herself (the esteem pet of Dr. Fairfax), she saw no reason to waste time befriending who she saw as less worthy.

Ed’s guy friend, Paul, son of the wealthy owner of several buildings downtown in one of those obscure Midwestern cities a far cry from descent civilization, once indulged her through underground galleries hidden in the historic tunnels reeking of ale and 100-year-old dust. Once she graduated by the insisting fist of Dr. Fairfax, he broke her heart at the midnight of her diploma ceremony but leaving long nasty messages on her phone and social media. Paragraph after paragraph detailed how she didn’t deserve a degree, that they let her pass her classes simply because she had strange ancestors and a calmer set of genitals favored by the ideology Dr. Fairfax and his foreign compatriots believed in. They liked the promise she possessed.

Dr. Fairfax and his fellow professors agreed that a new sweeping wave of revolution was needed to arise from the dark corners of the world to heal the planet of all war, all poverty, all disease. Simply put, when those unwashed masses are kept alone and poor, deprived of opportunity, and taught that they are to be hated, one by one they will turn to arms. The Catholic Church. The Taliban. All of Fairfax’s professors agreed that to set the fall of respectable societies across the world, they needed people like Ed to fail in this life.

Fairfax told Ed that their ideology was the best weapon in the war against the privileged classes. The media lies to the people about them. It’s difficult to understand, but soon their small family would take over the planet. He had her supply names of “counter-revolutionaries”. Poor kids in the university who got there by working hard and paying what little money they could. He wanted to see them kicked out of school. More than one time the football statue outside of the mighty coliseum suffered vandalism. Fairfax felt pleasure every time because he knew that his movement respected results. He showed them what happened, and they were overjoyed at his accomplishments and awarded him the highest positions in the faculty of wisdom. Her one duty to him was to abort the pregnancy.

However, Ed already graduated and found work at the first publication she visited in the many lanes and overpasses of the magnificent city showering glitter over the murky slums. No reason persisted any longer to give in to the sway of Dr. Fairfax or his plans for world domination. Though she refused to date most men from her class and harbored deep resentments from the creepy uncles that liked to grab her and reach down into unspeakable places, she gave birth to a red-headed son. Alone with him in a world compelled by thinkers like Fairfax, she decided her son was destined to grow up to be one of the good men with their own car, their own house, millions of dollars, a college doctorate, an honorable job, and best of all he’d be nice to other girls.

Ed named him Poodles, after her favorite artist she slept with while living in dorms. She taught her son to walk by herself, she taught him to talk by herself, and potty trained him in a small craggy apartment overlooking the gunfire from the highway, and human traffickers in the playground. Radios barked of barbarians destroying police cruisers on the highway and marching into state capitols around the country. She remembered Fairfax teaching her not to worry about the chaos, for the real demons in the world rested among the “incels”, virgins who wanted to get married but never could.

As Poodles grew into a smart boy in glasses attending his first days in pre-school, more and more attacks occurred. Young men around her age took up arms and shot up Walmarts and shopping malls. Some drove cars into crowds on the sidewalk. It scared her more than anything, and so she tried her best to teach her son sentimentality and the power of kindness. Once he fell asleep, Ed stood on the balcony and smoked a pack of cigarettes, cussing into the wind, cleaning her glasses, and overlooking the never sleeping streets of dozing hobos.

By the time Poodles turned into a teenager, armies of darkness captured dams and airports on the other side of the world at the same time a new hero arose among the angry, drug-addicted, lonely men lost on never-ending bus rides and flooded city blocks. He sold all his property but for three things. His smartphone. His motorcycle. His MP42 submachine gun.

This champion of the downtrodden documented his journey on social media. Across the country, he found and killed meth cookers, then distributing the loot among his many followers who called him the Guardian Angel of the Plains. He chose to attack targets in the distant Midwest because A: Most small towns are so corrupt, and haven't been reformed since 1910, that their infrastructures are in the perfect position to let someone like him show up and start giving orders. B: The distance is too great, and resources too few, for the police and counter-terrorists to put up a serious defense. By the time Swat arrived his men already turned to shadows and vanished into the wheat fields with truckloads of money. Headless bodies littered courthouse steps. Radios broadcasted messages from their leader, a dark avenger, Ammon.

Poodles took up work at the factory screwing spades onto handles. Then he worked at a construction site mixing concrete. His shoulders bulged and his muscles thickened over his arms and chest. All the while he studied hard and pursued arts like his mom always encouraged to keep him away from violence, drugs, and sex. When she fell asleep in bed in the afternoon from working all night, he went to his friend’s gallery to smash the art of the old boomers in their marble galleries, snort coke from mirrors with hot women, and make love to them in the back of car wagons under the morning stars just as school bells rang.

“What the eyes don't see don't break the heart.”

One day Poodles asked Ed if she still talked to his father. She dated many men since giving birth to him and still slept with his father while her boyfriends babysat. He claimed the boy on his taxes and received the stimulus money among other benefits. She feared Poodles wanted to run away with him, and leave her alone in the city of fallen grace. “No. I haven't seen him in years.”

Before he graduated High School, a pandemic of Lung Parasites quieted the waves of violence and mass shootings, but the violence never found a cure. There is no vaccination for the kinds of torments that drive men to take up arms and murder their fellow humans. As the quarantines ended, and the parasites kept spreading, it took two days for an upswell of random violence to shock any sentiment, any healing, away from the weary minds of the parasite’s survivors. Gangs sought to reclaim lost turf, disturbed and untreated men drank more, vengeful factions escaped from prison and killed female police deputies and judges, left them hanging from lamp posts. Unemployed soldiers enlisted in private camps and attacked ballot counting centers.

Ed encouraged her son to get into a good school, the one where her faithful Dr. Fairfax still lectured on the falsehoods of the galaxy, that sciences and literature are mere cages, studies like psychology exist to imprison in the inflicted, the only truth lies in the blood magic etched on ancient bronze walls. She got him away from the city where the supporters of the new movement threatened to slap anyone who voted against them, and those who opposed the new movement threatened to get fired anyone who voted against them. She drove Poodles hundreds of miles in her own car, and kissed him goodbye, and went back to the chaotic radiance of the city just as the Dark Avenger lead his army against the government, its parties, and the drug gangs alike. She turned the radio off, and couldn’t stand to even have a TV on. in the silence warriors crashed down the very front gates of the city bearing weapons and waving flags. Poodles called his mom every day.

Fairfax considered Ed a traitor to his movement. The fact that she carried out the pregnancy meant that the faculty of his acolytes meant to cast Poodles out like the others. They only needed the purest of ideologists to graduate their academy, and since degrees are useless today anyhow, why the hell not? Fairfax sat in a penthouse surrounded by artworks talking to his most loyal partners and friends. One of them never read a book in her life. The other refused to follow school curriculum (“How to Inspire Your Students?” why the hell would I want to do that? I hate these spoiled brats, and no one can fire me, so fuck it.) in favor of his own preferred reading: Novels written the terrorists freed from prisons in the distant corners of the world.

When Poodles quit school it hurt Ed in more ways than her heart managed to process. She felt betrayed, let down, disappointing, but worst yet she signed off on his student loans, so she received monthly debt notices from collectors from New York calling her in the middle of the night. She called Fairfax to beg of him to let her son back into school. After all, he spent six years studying, why kick him out now? Fairfax only laughed at her. “you didn’t think we’d let your son through, did you?”

Ed didn’t hear from or see Poodles again until he appeared in the footage of the Dark Avenger’s attack on the university. Her son contacted them on Social media, told them what happened, and gave them names of the professors who campaigned against him. By morning all of Fairfax's best professors and proteges hung from pylons on the coliseum and blood painted the statues by the front columns. Fires consumed the English Department and its co offices. Books of the professors, especially the book of Fairfax, lay in ashy heaps in the morning’s social media. Fairfax went into hiding while his friends spoke out against the attack.

In the Dark Avenger’s army, Poodles found brothers, who like him, were impoverished, unmarried, and furious at the failures of the previous generations. He swore off art and let his paintings decompose in a slummy boarding house. He marched with the warriors in several campaigns, winning many battles, and spilling much blood on the dirt and cement alike. He even used his talent in the arts to make his own series of videos for the movement’s ritual executions.

By this time men and women started colonies on Mars, and robots on Earth did all the work. Anyone who caught the lung parasites received 10,000$ checks in the mail to be spent however the recipient chose. It’d been longer than twenty years. Poodle’s red hair turned black and silver, and he changed his name to Rolf to hide his identity from bounty hunters and FBI agents. He traveled in rags, unarmed and masked across the country like the shadow he trained to become.

60 years after Ed gave birth to her son, she became a shut-in who never left her apartment, got her food from drones, and kept everything her son ever left with her. Flying buildings casts islands of darkness over the city. Too many still remembered the trauma in the streets, the screaming of those drowning the bloodbath, rampant gunfire in the night as warriors celebrated victory in the smoke of burning roads. The young moved off to better worlds and left the old behind in buildings that slowly broke down as resources went to keep the flying structures working. She always assumed her son went off to one of those sparkling colonies on the moon, or maybe Mars where the hemp fields go one forever.

Instead, when Rolf came back to the door, she didn’t recognize him. Fairfax had escaped the chaos he manufactured, and the police let him come to her building because they all wanted to capture the evil professor more than another rebel. They hugged for the first time together in the warm wind. The wall of the building collapsed yesterday. Only she knew his sorrow. Only she knew about the battles he would be fighting for the rest of his life.