THE ANDROGYNOUS youth stood in front of the mirror, laved his tired-looking face with cold water—he slipped on a t-shirt that was provided to him over the pair of shorts that he wore. He then bonded his flowing blond hair into a ponytail.

He stepped out, sojourned at the slightly ajar bedroom door where Joana was still asleep. He proceeding to the living room where he spotted Mrs Scott seated on one of the chairs, alone knitting...

She looked up at the Intersexual coming in sight, she spoke to him for the first time since his arrival the day before—she even has forgotten to thank him for bringing her precious granddaughter home safely from the battlefield...

"'Boy, there is some coffee on the table, if you want."

Marlin thanked her and poured a mug of the brew—a newly acquired taste he looked forward to along with beers since coming out of Tombscradle. He peeked out of the window where the sister-boy called Cynthia was removing the front two tires of his Toyota Camry and has placed bricks below—a measure to prevent the prisoner from escaping. The other one, named Lee was in the porch with a shotgun.

Marlin was brewing in agitation; he sat at his usual spot quietly in the living room and he sipped on his coffee...

He was thinking of ways to overpower the two sister-boys if they were to assail—and next was his exit strategy to escape—but his car was the only vehicle in the farm that he knew of—but there is a barn at the back— maybe that is where the Aryans concealed their rides...

His thoughts were interrupted by the knitting Mrs Scott who spoke up...

"So you are part of the terrorist troop—that God's Army rebels?"

He silently sighed inwards; since his arrival after deserting the fighting in New Orleans and coming a long way to the xenophobic Mississippi, he has taken a load of insults from his house-arrest by the internecine sister-boy bodyguards and also from more affronts of both of her sharp-tongued granddaughters—and now, was the old woman wanting the due of her fair share—ready to pick a bone on him for being part of the Preacher's outfit?

He kept quiet for a moment before he politely elucidated the actual situation about those who were adherents of the God's Army front—and at the same time she reminded him of his older guardian Dr Jane Morris—so he maintained respect to the host, who herself had mulishly spurned at the terrorist activities from her acuity of the Aryans Sisterhood outfit where both her intractable granddaughters have taken up arms to defend the Brand.

"Actually ma'am, we are not terrorists at all—we are just surviving from the genocide imposed by Madeline Cory's government against our own species. We just want her removed from the presidency command—and hoping the new government after her will be more forgiving to our kind."

After he said those words, he pondered and realized that he had uttered the same message the Preacher had exuded in the Mojave Desert. But he had his own recalcitrant personal disagreement on how Doran wanted to achieve that goal with an eye-for-an-eye intention. This lack of belief in the Preacher's dissident was also the cause of the reason of why he became a deserter of their mission after the AOG rebels fell defeated in New Orleans by the well and sophisticated President Cory's paramilitary enforcers...

The old woman's responded in return; it staggered him as he heard her...

"Cory is a bitch, a real evil bitch—and I have known her personally but that was a long time ago. Her cursed husband was also the most corrupted human being that I have known—and it is good how it all ended then when the bastard killed himself, and that brought justice to all the innocent young girls whom he had victimized."

Marlin digested her words for a moment before he spoke up again—he was getting curious about why Edna Scott was bitter to both the Corys—Mr. and Mrs.

'What did she meant by 'victimized-young girls?'

"Mrs Scott, you said earlier that you knew Cory personally—how was that?"

"It is a long story, boy, I don't want to go there. Ever since the Medusa happened, I have made peace with myself and I promised myself to never get involved in anything that is detrimental which is based on hatred...it has drained me out empty in the past, and also robbed me of the gift of self-love in me," she spoke straight from her heart but her eyes were still focused on her weaving. "I understand ma'am," Marlin responded softly.

He wanted not to pry because something was best left unspoken just like the suicidal thoughts that came often during his five depressing years of isolation in the prison cell. But there was something else that he had to know badly after the risk he took travelling the distance from New Orleans to Jackson to bring Mrs Scott's gunshot wounded granddaughter home...

"I have only one burning question to ask you," he paused for her approval to share—and the old woman nodded but her eyes never left her knitting.

"Joana looks very different from her older sister Roxy..." he said, and noticed Mrs Scott hands froze at that instance, Marlin continued to talk despite her reluctance...

"I know they are not of the same parent—who is Joana's actual mother?"

The old man placed her knitting aside and picked up a photo frame that was taken back in the '90s with two teenaged girls; she studied it, and found it hard to articulate—but she finally did it by looking at Marlin and saying ...

"Now you have forced me to reopen my Pandora box on Cory, young man, but promise to keep it to yourself." Mrs Scott was now pointing at the photo, "this is my oldest girl, Sarah who is Roxy's mother and this girl here, is my youngest daughter, Andrea."

The old woman told the past disregarded story of the pre-Medusa days—it was about her youngest, Andrea Scott who was ambitious and she wanted a career in fashion modelling despite her mother's discouragement that a small-town girl from Mississippi had no place being in a pool of shark of the big city—but on the morning of the first day of the new millennium, the mother found a goodbye note from her fifteen-year-old progeny—she had run away to New York to pursue her immense career.

During the same time, her oldest, Sarah had become pregnant at the age of sixteen with Roxy in her belly. A local boy named Lucas was the father—Lucas was also the son of a notorious rancher, Bruce Gailman who ran a hate group that was known as the Aryan Brotherhood of Mississippi back then.

Mrs Edna Scott was in her early thirties at that time, divorced from her husband Andrew Scott—and she took the risk by going to New York because she did not want to lose Andrea after Sarah had married into the Brand. She then spent three years searching for Andrea without any luck in every fashion modelling and acting agencies in New York—and later in the nearby towns and soon in the neighbouring states. Her personal savings soon exhausted and she finally gave up her search for Andrea temporarily—and took up a job as a midwife nurse in Pennsylvania.

Andrea in the meantime had changed her name to Annette Powell and was lured into empty promises by an uprising young politician in New York—Richard Cory who had kept her as one of his of mistresses.

Mrs Scott wiped her tears while Marlin looked on in solicitude—he stood up from his seat and sat cross-legged on the rug beside her feet and placed his palm on her hand before she continued...

The politician's wife then, Madeline Cory subsequent found out about her husband's extramarital affairs with his kept women—and instead, she framed Andrea for the murder of another model who actually died of suicide.

Andrea spent the next seven years in prison for manslaughter charges, and she refused to see her mother during her incarceration—but she did write once to Mrs Scott stating that she felt ashamed to face her and the life she led and had then instructed her mother to return back to Mississippi.

But instead, Edna Scott waited for that long seven years until her youngest daughter had completed her prison sentence so that she can bring her back home to the farm with her. She wrote three letters a week to her daughter so that Andrea would stay strong in jail—and she gave the girl hope that life will be good once again when they both returned back to Mississippi.

They were just hopes...

On the day of her prison release—Andrea slipped away from her again and went back into hiding. Mrs Scott desperately searched for her for another one and a half years thinking that her daughter had wanted a second chance in her modelling career. But Andrea did not pursue her ambition anymore—instead, she became a crack addict and lived in the streets. The mother was looking in the wrong places where else her youngest had become a hooker to feed her uncontainable drug addiction.

The police then found her on March 25th, 2012, dead behind an alley of a flophouse. She had apparently died of blood poisoning from the bad homemade crack that she used—a few years later, Richard Cory hung himself after a sexual scandal with a pop star that had ended his political career despite leading the race into the Whitehouse. Walter Rosewood was then sworn in and took the reign of the presidency.

Those were devastating times for Mrs Scott back then which followed by the Medusa Virus attacks in the west coast—and the latter pandemic breakouts were spreading in the east which had hospitals filling with lots of dead boys, babies and men—it was too depressing for the bereaving Mrs Scott who finally came to terms with her loss of her youngest daughter after her long transposed twelve years of misery in Pennsylvania; she then decided to tender her resignation at the hospital with the intention of going back home to the sequestered farm life outside Jackson, Mississippi...

"It was during my last days at work—a great miracle happened when Richard Cory's daughter Samantha was admitted in labour at the maternity ward. She gave birth to a set of twins—a girl and one of your kind," she looked back at Marlin seated by her feet...

"I took the baby girl and I came back home—that is Joana that you know of today."

Marlin smiled back and spoke after listening to the second deepest secret he had known besides his own surreptitious past —as he was born and raised as the son of his other mother figure for her involvement with the Three Kings—their surreptitious search for a cure of the pandemic that Mrs Scott just spoke of earlier.

"Thanks for sharing Mrs Scott. The reason I asked about Joana was that I know someone who looks identically to her."

"Oh, it is the other twin? Where is he now?" Edna Scott's eyes lit up.

"He name is Joe and he is a friend of mine, and he is now somewhere in California. He is also part of us in the same God's Army cause, and he is also running away from Cory's persecution."

An amusing memory of their recent heist made him chuckle to himself—one of Joe's goofy antics of choking on a burger when he was the getaway car wheel-man...

The old woman pondered, "what an irony that both the grandchildren of the President of the United States are also her own enemies—both of them who are serving the God's Army and the Aryan Sisterhood." Mrs Scott also smiled feebly as she shook her head slowly in disbelief to the contrariety.

Since he had initiated the icebreaker that stemmed the old woman to speak freely—Marlin wanted to know more...

"Mrs Scott, how did the Aryan Sisterhood get started?"

He felt there were lots of dots he wanted to connect since his conversation the previous evening with her elder granddaughter, the Aryan general who had called him as fish.

Mrs Scott scoffed back in disgust...

"Hah! It was formally just a silly old wife's club of widows of the Aryan Brotherhood—just a bunch of redneck miserable bitches who gathered around and spoke of the glorified White Supremacy days of their retarded dead husbands. My dumb-ass daughter Sarah is one of the pioneer members in the Brand."

It was a non-militia group at that time but when Madeline Cory came into the Whitehouse—she was fighting street gang crimes nationwide at that time while the children of the Sisterhood who were into law-breaking were affected by the crackdowns—and the new generation of the Brand started to stockpile arms ever since then...

"So was Roxy one of those children back then?"

Mrs Scott shook her head, "No, not quite so—in fact, she came in later after living some years in Ohio but she rose up in ranks very quickly, and the next thing I know—she had become their leader."

Roxanne Gailman was a rebellious child like her father Lucas Gailman—a year after his death from the Medusa, the eleven-year-old ran away from her mother Sarah; she then headed to Ohio to live with her older cousins. She started a motorcycle gang a couple of years later in Columbus while her mother was back in Mississippi suffered from depression from her husband's death—during that phase, Sarah came over and lived with Mrs Scott in the farm for five years.

In the absence of Roxy, Sarah raised the toddler Joana as her own daughter—and until one day, Roxy the prodigal child returned back to Jackson. In the matter of a year, she revamped the Aryan Sisterhood with her mother, Sarah—and they fought against the authorities in their gang-related crimes and illegal schemes that the Brand was running previously—mainly drugs and prostitution.

Over the years, both Roxy and Sarah have influenced Joana with all their ideology of racial hatred—and they both took her away by force from Mrs Scott to serve the Aryan Sisterhood Brand; like it was part of their organized family crime business...

"Today my little girl is lying on her bed thereafter nearly getting herself killed with her foolish loyalty to them," her voice was choking again, looking at the photo frame on her lap of Sarah and Andrea...

"My fear is that—someday, once Cory comes hard on them, I will also lose Joana again, just like how I lost my Andrea years ago." Marlin held on to her trembling hands to comfort her...

His questioning has now made him emphatically with the old woman's personal family plight—what could he do to get it right for Edna Scott before escaping from Roxy Gailman's restraining grip in Mississippi?