Locke Begins Evolving

Flint Locke couldn’t remember exactly when he had decided to have the surgery and advance to the next level. He had been spending expanded hours on the Web, pausing only for an occasional meal, an increasingly occasional day at work at the textile mill (he was “on notice” with his boss and was supposed to see the company psychologist), and the weekly strategic briefings of his troopers at the Hole. Nor could he remember exactly when it was that he realized the Serpent Seed doctrine of the Christian Identity movement, of which he considered himself a part, had been seriously misstated by its proponents and misconstrued by its adherents. The Serpent Seed doctrine held that the inferior races, that is, the non-Aryans, were descendents of a sexual encounter between Eve and the Serpent. Therefore, the Adamic race, the descendents of Adam’s union with Eve, was the race meant by the Creator to flourish and have dominion over the earth. All of this was well and good, but Flint kept returning to the passage about the Sons of God visiting the Daughters of Man and couldn’t figure out where their offspring might fit into the racial and evolutionary scheme of things.

Late one evening, with a slice of pizza in hand and listening to “America Awake,” a radio talk show devoted to discussions of paranormal extraterrestrial conspiracies, he Googled “Sons of God” and found the answer. The first link, breadtraymtn.com, shot him into a blinding light of pure, distilled and heretofore hidden knowledge. The Sons of God were alien visitors. As anyone who watched television knew, the physical appearance of the saucerians was definitely saurian, the large unlidded eyes, the three-toed feet—the feet! They looked like the fossilized so-called dinosaur footprints found next to fossil human prints along the Taylor Trail in the streambed of the Paluxy River near Glen Rose, Texas. Yes, the serpent in the garden wasn’t Satan at all but rather one of the Sons of God bringing the cosmic seed to Eve. Eden had been in Texas. The three-toed aliens had walked hand-in-hand with the Daughters of Man in the Texas mud millennia ago. The Serpent Seed preachers had it wrong—the Serpent Seed line was the master race! The problem was that the descendants of the Sons of God and the Daughters of Man had interbred with the muddy human stock again and again, diluting the gene pool and stalling the progress of evolution.

What could one man do to reverse this tide of history and return his people to the straight and narrow evolutionary track? Raising awareness was a first step, along with setting his own biological assets back on track. Then he would bring his own courageous and inspirational example to bear on his followers. As awareness built and his movement grew, a sort of biological manifest destiny would rise like a zeitgeist and stalk the land. That’s how he thought about it anyway. Thus the surgery.

The first steps in what he called the Transformation would be largely cosmetic but highly symbolic. First he would get the tip of his tongue split so that it forked. He had seen a story about this on the Surgery Channel. It was the latest thing, after tattoos and piercings had become passe. He didn’t know if he wanted to tell his men about it now or wait until after the procedure and then, at the next strategic briefing, lean forward over his Mickey’s Big Mouth bottle and flick his tongue at them. That would make a statement. There was the issue of the lisp, which he knew was a common byproduct of a tongue-slitting. But, he thought, what better proof of his courage, manhood, and heterosexuality than to knowingly incur a lisp for the good of the race? Yes, his troopers would be impressed and eager to emulate him.

Then he would need to find a surgeon who would agree to amputate the second and fourth toes on each foot. He’d thought about just shooting them off like the draft dodgers did during Vietnam, but he knew that would probably send him to the emergency room, where he’d have to answer a lot of questions, not the least of which would be official curiosity about his accumulation of unregistered firearms, rocket launchers, and explosives. Depending on what the surgeon advised, he thought he would have the right foot done first, symbolically stepping out. Then, after the stubs healed and he’d made the necessary adjustments in his stride and was confident in his mobility, he would get the left foot done.