Playing Blind Man’s Buff with Helen Keller…

5. Now laughing, stops, with “Silence, hush!”

Ruben Esparza…lost much of his family to the brutality of the Kingdom of America. He now seeks his revenge that he has warped and twisted in his mind into some sense of justice for his family. He rationalizes his vigilantism is warranted and this becomes his working definition of Justice…revenge because the laws of this nation have failed…

This is the year two thousand and twenty-two some thirteen years after the Kingdom of America was destroyed and the United States of America was reestablished with the help of Zombie-kind and the creation of the Zombie Protected Zone.

Ruben Esparza was a teenager when the Kingdom of America shock troops replaced some of the Military and the Royal Police replaced the men and women of Law Enforcement whose duty was to serve and protect the citizens of their community…now these same people faced a terrible decision…

It had come as such a shock that the President of the United States took on the role of a dictator…and gave himself the title of King. It seemed that those who served the common good were in the same situation as the citizens they once worked to protect. And at this time many were blinded by a hysteria…that such measures from our Executive Branch may have seemed as necessary as when Julius Caesar proclaimed himself emperor for life and abolished the Roman Senate in an analogous time of crisis…

Ruben Esparza sat in his geometry class on the day some of these Shock Troops and Royal Police came to Valley High School…Looking objectively at these early days of this radical regime change and Military Coup, too many this seemed at any moment one might expect to hear Charlie Sheen’s voice yelling ‘Wolverines’…and Valley High School and High Schools all over Southern California were targeted for an inspection. It seems that Powers that be above General Esenbach were in control of this little bit of Kingdom America’s demonstration of their might. Most of the High Schools, community colleges, and Universities were inspected for anything that might help or inspire anyone in the surrounding area, especially the students, to stage attacks they might see as attempts to restore liberty…but Kingdom America’s new Monarch and all his men saw this as terrorism.

By this time Jessica Andrews had already shared with General Esenbach her father’s secret. Although General Esenbach was in charge of Los Angeles and Orange County California, he had no control of these raids on schools…

Puente Hills High School wasn’t ground zero for a coordinated attack on the day of the raids to purge certain books, teachers, and place a special kind of fear in innocent school faculty and naughty students. La Habra High School, Fullerton Union High School, Fullerton College, Servite, and St Paul High School were among the tip of the iceberg of schools in Los Angeles and Orange County whose school faculty and students had been working to mount coordinated attacks against Kingdom America without harming officers or soldiers who had little to no choice but to work for this new boss…King George Bush…

And there was a false tip that implicated Valley High School among these other schools.

Ruben Esparza and Alison Zavala had skipped school that day. Alison’s parents were working that day and no one was home during the day…

Alison’s parents were rather progressive and allowed their sixteen-year-old daughter to have her doctor place an intrauterine device for contraception. The two families were very close as they had been neighborhood friends for much of their lives and knew that Ruben and Alison were vaccinated for the Human papillomavirus. They had been nearly best friends since childhood except for some nonsense last year at the homecoming game and following dance.

Now they spent most of the day in bed…

They pretended to go to school when their parents left for work. Alison’s parents would not return until eight in the evening but Ruben’s Abuela would spend much of the day at home watching television. Before Kingdom America had taken over, she would watch Spanish language telenovelas but now she would watch the news. She would watch the news although by now the new monarchy censored the news…freedom of speech went out the window along with Lady Liberty’s hope of enduring liberty to welcome immigrants whose homeland had become hostile to them and that government who violated its contract with the people…

Kingdom America’s movement began to overcome political inertia as Ruben reached that place men are always going and make a point to say that they are on their way…1144 Kwis Avenue is the address of the Zavala family. Their home is close enough that the two lovers began to hear the gunshots…

In Northern Spain, one to three percent of the population has red hair. Alison’s maternal Great Grandparents had been born near Pamplona and Oviedo. Her mom could never keep the story straight. Alison has red hair and green eyes and is almost fluent in Spanish and French…English was taught to her along with Spanish simultaneously. There were family stories that some of these great grandparents’ ancestors had lived in Basque and had spoken the language from that region.

Some of Ruben’s ancestors were Uto-Aztecan…although as previously explored, Oaxaca is fun to say, some of Ruben’s family came from a region of Guerrero Mexico where some still speak Guerrero Nahuatl an indigenous language related to the language the Aztecs once spoke. And somewhere in the past, someone in Ruben’s family’s ancestry may have been a man from Andalusia, Spain…although much of this is oral history passed down through the generations. Even though a cheek swab DNA ancestry kit might be more precise it leaves some bit of the romance or nostalgia of speaking about one’s personal history out of that equation. Percentages replace the look in your grandparents’ eyes, the moisture gathering in the bottom of their eyes which creates that special twinkle when you ask them about Our Family history…

Nearly half of the students at Valley High School were gunned down…

Of those who were killed their parents were arrested as part of this crackdown on any possible threats, Kingdom American forces might face in the early days of the bloody regime change. None of the other schools…None of the other students or faculty found that half of their fellows had been murdered because the Royal Police and the King’s Military had received a tip and so they added Valley High School to their list of schools to visit.

At the other schools, students were rounded up for questioning. Arrests of Students (and their parents) and some faculty were made. But only at Valley High School were nearly half of the students and faculty summarily executed. The King’s soldiers and Royal Police turned the students away from them. It might have gone unnoticed but some of the Police and Soldiers failed to hide the tears in their eyes knowing that this order was immoral, unjust, and made a mockery of…but this was no longer the United States of America, only Kingdom America remained. The idea of a king brings with it the idea of a just or even a kind ruler who rules with divine authority as Christ is referred to as the King of Kings or our Lord…a wise vision of Moses sacrificing himself for those who followed him in the hopes of salvation after their travels in the Sinai desert. A wise and humble esthetic sitting beneath a tree teaching his students then glorified after his death and some generation by a golden statue with his image reminding those on pilgrimage that we honor his humility with images that might last forever in the hopes the nobility of what he taught might live forever.

Moses…Christ…and Buddha Gautama’s sacrifice and messages might be remembered forever…

The massacre at Valley High School would be remembered forever as the danger of denying history…not learning from the past and putting a shopping mall where a prison with Zyklon-B was used in gas chambers disguised as showers without a memorial to inspire future generations to ‘do better’…

Like a beloved grandparent or parent dying slowly from Altheimer’s disease alone in a convalescent home never having a visitor…being cremated, with no funeral or memorial and their ashes sold at Home Depot mixed with tree bark and grass clippings to recoup the cost to cremate the aged with the only mourners the staff whose job it was to care to the elderly.

This massacre at Valley High was as likely to be remembered for its brutality as much as it would be covered up for its brutality.

Ruben and Alison held each other in her bedroom on Kwis avenue. There was a slight breeze that blew the curtains slightly letting some daylight into the not completely darkened room where they were making love on the day they skipped school. On the day they skipped school…many of their classmates were executed.

That was March fourteenth two thousand and two. Officer Sol David Droga resigned his position within a week after he pulled the trigger to execute outspoken high school students, the author would say regardless of their gender but this was a most brutal time…and if you have been paying attention, you might know what lesson the girls’ athletic, cheerleading, and dance squad were being taught while the boys’ athletic teams or some book fag who wouldn’t shut up…or this book fag’s little friends who made political alliances with classmates who were more likely to join criminal gangs than join the military or get into universities after graduation. That was the spark…some nerds who knew too much about political science or the constitutional rights protected by the United States of America…and felt this was worth a high school nerd teaming up with some of the gang members. These kids that seamlessly went from science club, Marching Band…had begun hiding guns inside the Chemistry Lab Closet, in lock boxes under the bleachers, in the kitchen, in the music room.