Dead End Subplots - Part Two

Anyone who has watched an episodic crime series on television knows a good villain never goes away.  He's the uber-criminal, always ready to pounce at the least likely moment to battle our hero.  My uber-criminal was the boogeyman, Schoko.  I introduced Schoko in Ikons: Saint Nicholas the Wonder Worker and used him again in Banners: For God, Tsar and Russia.  In the final chapter of Banners, I left him in limbo.  Was he or was he not dead?

Schoko - My Uber-Villain

Since I already established Schoko as an informant for the Secret Police and a budding psychopath, it was not difficult to bring Schoko into my third novel, make him a member of Lenin's Cheka and hold him responsible for the atrocities to follow.  My subplot in Slogans: Our Children, Our Future called for Schoko to mastermind the slaughter of Hutava's inhabitants.  In this scene, Schoko learns of the villagers whereabouts and schemes his revenge.

* * *

Lenoid Schoko's smile made people shudder.  It wasn't so much the way his lips curled back revealing yellowed, misshapen teeth and the hissing laughter that followed, but rather the knowledge that when Schoko smiled, people died.  Today Schoko was smiling.

"They found the citizens of Hutava. They're in Unkurda, Chelyabinsk area, Siberia.  Thought you'd like to know."  Those few whispered words from a fellow guard were all Schoko needed and gave him an elation he hadn't felt since the drowning officers' screams.  At long last the blackness eating at what remained of his soul would be avenged. 

Like puss spurting from a infected wound, events from Schoko's tortured past erupted: his outcast life as Hutava's whoreson, the nocturnal visits from all those uncles who kicked him from his slumber seeking his mother's pleasure, his toil as the village pastok cleaning night soil and removing dead carcasses, the children's cutting taunts when he declared his true father was Tsar Nicholas, and the train.  Especially the train.

Nearly six years had passed since those same villagers of Hutava had flung Schoko from their railcar into the icy darkness. Every day since, the memory of the bitch-girl's vicious lies, the sham trail, and the humiliating punishment had festered and screamed for revenge.  Finally it was possible.  Schoko summoned the demons from the depths of personal hell and prepared to unleash them.  Before he was finished the entire village would grovel at his feet and plead for the mercy he would not grant.  But one family in particular would be singled out for special treatment.  The full wrath of Lenoid Schoko would come down on Boris Koscik and his bitch daughters.  All it required were the right words.

When Schoko strode out of Secret Police headquarters that night, his smile broadened as he envisioned the future.  "Yesss,” he hissed.  “The children."

* * *

Unfortunately, Schoko never got to carry out his revenge.  While Schoko was my best attempt at a true villain, he paled in the presence of the real culprits.  Nature and Lenin's government conspired to create one of histories deadliest famines.  Lenin knew from personal experience that revolution in Russia's cities sprang from hungry bellies.  So to spare the population centers, he sacrificed the rural. 

A communist confiscation team ferreting out hidden food

Government raikon, food confiscation teams, scoured the county side seizing grain and animals.  They even grabbed the peasants' seed grain, ensuring no harvest for the coming year.  The final result forestalled the urban counterrevolution at the cost millions of rural dead; a drastic, but according to the Soviet rulers, necessary solution.

Alas, I had to delete poor Schoko.  His fictitious evil plan and my well constructed subplot could not match the villainy exhibited by real life.