Becoming The Overman

FATE moved through the air as unseen as a ghost and as silently as a cloud of smoke, as another spirit was to be enduringly changed in the war on Mutants.

“Jeez, I haven’t seen anyone that nervous watching TV since my old man bet the rent on last year’s Super Bowl.”

A dirty bar room, filled with the smell of cigars and tequila, an addictive smell that burned the eyes and blazed the nose, swelled up the atmosphere. Beer bottles and pictures of women covered the walls like a shroud of filth across the place. A group of hairless men in worn leather vests, with tattoos seared all across their bodies, stood by a pool table, not paying attention to the game nearly as much as they were to the large, odd man with long, black hair sitting at the bar, enigmatically wearing a Hawaiian shirt, shades and a bandana, with a duffle bag of clothes laying next to his stool, watching with horror at the evil news.

“What’s the matter, freak? You scared the Sentinels will drop in for a beer on their way back from L.A.?”

The man continued to stare at the wall away from them in confusion.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, sir, but I was under the impression that the Sentinels were only after Mutants.” he replied. His voice was pleasantly deep, but educated, ringing through the shot glasses and liquor bottles accentuating the bar like a baritone note. The biker guy looked at him and sucked and puffed on his cigarette.

“Well, if you ain’t a Mutant, how do you explain those ugly, gorilla-sized feet of yours, dude?” he said, laughing and snorting roughly with his friends.

“Was mom making out with Mighty Joe Young behind your daddy’s back or what?”

The mysterious man’s eyes narrowed and his lips curled; his voice glowed with an undertone of anger and irritation.

“I’m sorry, friend, but I think you’ve mistaken me for someone who walked in here looking for trouble.”

The biker stiffened his clasp upon his pool stick so intensely you could hear the wood straining under his fist, like a tree ready to collapse.

“Yeah, well I reckon you just mistook me for someone who cares, fat boy!”

And with that he picked up his stick and swung with all his capacity at the stranger’s back, expecting to do nothing less than shatter a bone. However, by the finish of the swing he had succeeded in shattering nothing but bottles on the tablet, ripping debris toward the startled bartender. The previously offended man had vanished into thin air. The biker’s head had spun left, right, and everywhere between, when the ceiling fan started to cough.

“Ah-Hem…”

“Oh, Sh…”

The large stranger back-flipped from the sky, his hands crashed against the bar, and he used them to swing his feet out from beneath himself and smash his heels against the biker’s jaw with an uppercut, knocking him back onto the pool table.

However, amidst all of the panic and disorder, the bartender had managed to reach for his shotgun, cocking it furiously.

“Get out of my bar, you filthy animal,” he screamed to the now relaxed, squatting outsider, “or I swear to God I’ll decorate this entire place with every brain cell in your head!”

“Are you serious? The guy came at me with a pool cue.” the big gentleman said in bewilderment.

“That’s right, freak, just keep mouthing off and giving me the excuse I was looking for to pull this trigger.”

The big guy just sighed and picked up his duffle bag.

“Okay, okay, I’m going…” he said walking towards the door, “… but the only reason I feel I can walk out of here with any dignity is that I didn’t flush the toilet when I paid a visit to your men’s room.” he said, flicking a quarter backwards at the bartender, and landing with a faultless "ting" in the tip jar.

He left the hatred serenely, without as much as a slam of the door as he left out the rear exit. There, waiting for him, leaning against an alley wall, was a shadowy figure accompanied by an alluring, attractive voice.

“Don’t you ever wonder what it would be like to live in a place where the locals aren’t organizing a lynch mob the second you walk through the door, Henry McCoy?” it said, almost urging him to explain his whole life to a shadow, but he knew he couldn’t do that...there was too much to tell.

All of his life he had been considered a freak, a virus, nothing more than an animal destined to be slaughtered. The voice was all to right; he had been an alien to all of the regular people, no chance of ever being normal. He had tried though. He had even thought of death as the best answer. He would think, “Why am I so hated, why when people see me do they turn away, why does no one love me like I need them to? Maybe in heaven, if there is one, everyone is the same; everyone is normal. Why did God do this to me? All I did was be born…” His head buzzed frantically with questions through the knit-woven pockets of his mind, one of which seemed the best for the moment.

“Who the heck are you?”

Out of the shadows emerged a skinny, read-haired woman in leather.

“The best thing that’s happened to you since they started doing Reebok in a size 42, handsome.”