The Blood of Monsters

The conveyer belt hummed as it dragged away Freddy’s fully assembled piston. He sighed as another heap of metal arrived at his station, just as he’d done four, eight, and twelve minutes before. Twelve minutes since his break, two hours and eighteen minutes until lunch. Freddy let the interlocking mechanisms engulf him again. It was numbingly dull work but today Freddy didn’t care. Anything to stop that letter resurfacing.

It had arrived just as he was having breakfast. His mother had layed it on the table beside him and he’d ripped it open, expecting word from back home. Instead … Her lips had still been smiling in the picture, as if liberation transcended the fact that she’d never smile at anything again. The photo had been in black and white but Freddy had seen the yellow star as vividly as the fire in his grandmother’s heart. The loss felt like jagged fingernails tearing his flesh to shreds.

A bolt clattered to the floor.

“Bernstein!” the wormy little foreman yelled, “Get your head out the clouds!”

Freddy tensed but bent down to retrieve the bolt. The conveyor belt sped away again. Two hours, fourteen minutes.

‘Dear Mr Bernstein, we are sorry to inform you,’ it had read. Freddy squeezed his eyes shut but he could still see the stiffly printed hand. ‘Your grandmother has been positively identified. Unfortunately …’

Freddy's eyelids flew open but his vision was blurred.

The ‘L’ for Central London Industries spun around and around. Freddy closed his eyes again and the dancing ‘L’s had formed the symbol of his nightmares. The lines grinned at him through a Swastika.

He gasped and forced himself to focus on something, anything. His eyes locked onto the foreman. He was fiddling with his pen, swinging it back and forth like an upside down pendulum. The gesture was achingly familiar but he couldn’t place it. From time to time he would switch to tapping his clipboard with it. Then back to the pendulum. Freddy's legs turned to jelly as recognition slid into place. The boredom in the foreman’s eyes, the power he held over all of them, even the random, arbitrary back and forth of his pen.

The foreman’s greasy black hair seemed to lighten and heal its dead ends before his eyes. His brown eyes with their pink whites turned blue and glistened. The blonde hair. The blue eyes. The foreman’s weasel-like nose sharpened, lengthened and straightened. Aryan. 'Lieutenant' Keiss.

"Get back to work, Bernstein!"

No. Not like this. Freddy was not going to let them have their way all over again. He grabbed the unfinished piston from the conveyor belt and vaulted over the merciless machine. If he turned back, if he even thought about backing down, then his grandmother had died in vain. He shook his head. She would be avenged.

Herr Commandant didn't notice him until he was seconds away. His brilliant blue eyes pleaded with Freddy to stop but Freddy ignored him, just as he and his fraternity had ignored the pleas of six million of Freddy's people. Blue eyes. Blonde hair. Freddy glanced at the useless lump of metal in his hand. He would bash this bastard's brain in, spray his blood all over the floor, all over his stupid overalls that took away who he was and turned him into a 'worker'. What colour did monsters even bleed?

He slammed the piston into his enemy's gut and forced him to the ground. He crouched over the monster's wriggling, struggling form. He snarled and raised the piston high above the monster's head, staring straight into his blonde eyes. The sliver of sunlight that always managed to filter through the windows glinted off the piston. He grimaced as it stung his eyes but when he recovered his vision the room had stopped spinning.

Eyes blinked and jaws dropped open. All around him, faces stared in horror. That image jerked at something inside him. His heart stammered and his stomach clenched like a fist. He glanced at the barely translucent window. A sharp image lunged out at him. He saw the snarl on his lips, his own arm raised to strike. The odd thing was that his eyes weren't his eyes. They were strong, powerful and dazzlingly blue.

Then it clicked. The unblinking, horrified eyes were a grainy snapshot of three years ago, on one of the countless days when fifty human beings were kicked into the ground by five Perfect Humans. He remembered wishing the blow would fall on him so he wouldn't just be standing by doing nothing any more. He remembered how they took his grandmother instead and how he wanted to reach into their brains and rip out what made them Human.

And he remembered the fear on his grandmother's face when she saw the hatred in his eyes.

But his arm was already falling. He tried to stop it, or change its trajectory, but he only slashed his palm with the angry teeth of the mechanism. The impact zapped like a lightning bolt up his arm and he choked on the shock. Blood sprayed from the wound at the foreman's temple, drenching Freddy in the crimson river of pain and misery he'd truly believed he'd escaped. Freddy's blood from his palm mixed with the blood of the foreman.

Freddy glanced at the ribbon of his blood staining the foreman's shirt. It seemed monsters bled red after all.