- Chapter 1 -

God Blessed Texas

AUSTIN CLOUT: THE RELATION OF EUGENE NIX

By: Michael David Simmons

Volume 1

Chapter 1 — God Blessed Texas

Austin Clout was born during a thunderstorm over Fort Worth.

Not the polite kind of thunderstorm that taps on windows and gives old men an excuse to sit on the porch with coffee. This was the kind that made dogs hide under beds, blew trash cans down streets like runaway barrels, and turned the Texas sky the color of iron in a blacksmith’s hand.

The nurses at Harris Methodist would talk about it for years.

They would say the lights flickered when he cried.

They would say the rain stopped for three seconds, as if the clouds had leaned over the city just to hear him.

They would say his mama, Maribelle Clout, laughed through her exhaustion, lifted one trembling hand toward the ceiling, and said, “Well, Lord, if You’re sending him in like that, I reckon You’ve got work for him.”

His father, Harland Clout, had been a lineman, a veteran, and the kind of man who believed a handshake meant more than a signature if the hand was honest. He stood there in muddy boots because he had driven through half a flooded county road to make it in time. When the nurse placed Austin in his arms, Harland stared at his son the way men stare at distant storms they know they cannot outrun.

Then he grinned.

“God blessed Texas,” he said, voice breaking just enough for nobody to tease him. “And He gave us the Conductor of Justice.”

Nobody knew what that meant.

Not then.

Not when Austin was a boy chasing cicadas through the yellow grass of his grandmother’s backyard. Not when he ran wild through Fort Worth with scuffed knees, sunburned arms, and a pocket full of bottle caps he swore were going to be worth something someday. Not when he got suspended in fifth grade for punching a bully named Waco Dale Ribbins so hard Dale’s backpack exploded open and scattered math papers like white birds.

Austin told the principal, “He was picking on Micah because Micah walks different.”

The principal said, “Violence is not the answer.”

Austin said, “No, sir. But sometimes it sure introduces the question.”

His mama made him apologize.

His daddy bought him a milkshake.

That was Fort Worth justice.

By the time Austin was grown, nobody in Texas mistook him for anything but what he was: a thick slice of the Southland, broad-shouldered, stubborn-eyed, raised on Scripture, barbecue smoke, county roads, and the kind of common sense that could repair a fence, smell a lie, and spot a crooked man before he finished smiling.

He was not polished. He was not imported. He had no Old World coolness, no royal restraint, no fancy schoolboy sorrow wrapped around his voice.

Austin Clout was Texas-born, Texas-raised, and Texas-tempered.

And on the morning the first Sun Reich signal crossed the Brazos relay grid, Austin was standing in a Fort Worth diner arguing with a jukebox.

The diner was called Mercy’s Griddle, though everybody just called it Mercy’s. It sat between a pawn shop and a tire place off a road that had forgotten whether it wanted to be industrial or historic. The sign buzzed. The coffee burned. The biscuits could make a grown man re-evaluate his life.

Austin was in booth seven with a plate of chicken-fried steak, two eggs, and a folded newspaper he had not opened because the jukebox had betrayed him.

“Dolly is not optional,” he told the machine.

The jukebox blinked.

Austin leaned closer. “You took my dollar, you blinking thief.”

Behind the counter, Mercy Delgado, owner, waitress, bookkeeper, and unofficial judge of all nonsense occurring before noon, shouted, “Austin, quit threatening my jukebox.”

“It started it.”

“It’s a machine.”

“So’s a tank, but nobody lets one roll through a church picnic.”

Mercy gave him a look over the top of her glasses. “You compare my jukebox to a tank one more time and I’ll charge you extra for gravy.”

Austin pointed at her, accepting defeat with dignity. “That is authoritarian breakfast policy.”

The bell over the diner door rang.

Austin looked up because something in the air changed.

Most people believed danger announced itself with noise. Gunshots. Tires. Sirens. Screams. Austin knew better. Real danger often entered quietly, clean-shaven and well-funded. It wore expensive shoes. It carried folders. It smiled before it lied.

The man who stepped into Mercy’s was thin, pale, and dressed in a gray suit that looked like it had never known a wrinkle or a conscience. His hair was parted with surgical precision. His eyes moved across the diner, counting exits, cameras, faces.

Two more men entered behind him.

They wore plain jackets, but their posture gave them away. Not local. Not hungry. Not here for biscuits.

Mercy noticed too. Her smile stayed on, but one hand dropped below the counter where she kept the old wooden bat she called Customer Service.

The gray-suited man walked to booth seven.

“Mr. Clout,” he said.

Austin cut a bite of steak and did not look impressed. “Depends who’s asking.”

“My name is Halden Pryce. I represent a private medical research concern.”

“That right?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’re lost. Clinic’s six miles east.”

Pryce’s smile tightened. “We are not seeking treatment.”

“Well, that makes one of us.”

One of the men behind Pryce shifted his hand toward his jacket.

Austin saw it.

Mercy saw Austin see it.

The jukebox, perhaps sensing history, finally began playing Dolly Parton.

Austin smiled.

“Now,” he said, “that’s better.”

Pryce placed a photograph on the table.

Austin glanced down.

A boy stared back from the glossy paper.

He was small, maybe eight or nine, with hair too neatly combed and eyes too old for his face. He wore a white medical shirt with a barcode clipped to the collar. On the back wall behind him, partially blurred, was a sunburst symbol cut into sharp black rays.

Austin stopped chewing.

Pryce watched him carefully. “His name is Ace Neumanson.”

Austin picked up the photograph.

The boy’s eyes had a strange clarity, the kind Austin had only seen in people who had suffered quietly enough to become experts at silence.

“What is this?” Austin asked.

“A custody matter.”

“You bring three nervous suits into Mercy’s Griddle over a custody matter?”

Pryce sat across from him without invitation. “The child has been unlawfully removed from a secure developmental environment.”

Austin’s jaw moved once.

“Developmental environment,” he repeated.

Mercy slowly turned the volume down on the jukebox.

Pryce folded his hands. “Mr. Clout, you have interfered before with institutions you did not understand.”

“I understand cages.”

“This is not a cage.”

Austin looked again at the boy in the photograph. “Any place that puts a barcode on a child’s shirt is close enough.”

Pryce’s eyes cooled. “You have a reputation for theatrical morality.”

Austin leaned back. “And you have a reputation for having the kind of face that makes dogs suspicious.”

One of the men behind Pryce said, “Careful.”

Austin looked past Pryce at him. “Son, I was careful in 2009. Didn’t care for it.”

Pryce slid another item onto the table.

A business card.

It was black, thick, and expensive. No phone number. No address. Only a gold symbol pressed into the center: a rising sun with jagged rays.

Below it were two words.

SUN REICH.

Austin stared at the card.

The diner seemed to shrink around it.

He had heard whispers. Nothing solid. Nothing the papers would print. The Sun Reich was supposed to be a ghost network. A private ideology with public money. A laboratory cult dressed as a policy institute. Men who talked about human improvement while forgetting to be human.

“Y’all picked a stupid name,” Austin said.

Pryce’s smile returned, smaller this time. “It is older than you think.”

“Most garbage is.”

Pryce leaned forward. “Ace Neumanson belongs to us.”

Austin put his fork down.

That was the moment everyone in Mercy’s understood breakfast was over.

The truckers at the counter stopped talking. A college kid near the window lowered his phone. Mercy’s hand tightened around Customer Service.

Austin did not raise his voice.

“No child belongs to you.”

Pryce sighed, as if disappointed by predictable weather. “Your sentimentality is provincial.”

“And your vocabulary is begging for a knuckle sandwich.”

“You do not know what the boy is.”

Austin stood.

He was not the tallest man in Texas, but when Austin Clout stood up angry, a room became aware of old things. Fence posts. Church bells. Horses refusing bad riders. Courthouse flags snapping in dry wind.

Pryce remained seated.

“You should listen carefully,” Pryce said. “There are families involved. Bloodlines. Legacies. Relations you do not yet understand.”

Austin looked at the photograph again.

Ace Neumanson.

A boy with a barcode.

A boy with old eyes.

A boy somebody thought was property.

Austin tucked the photograph into his shirt pocket.

Pryce’s face hardened. “Return that.”

“No.”

“That image is proprietary.”

Austin barked a laugh. “You people copyright suffering now?”

The man on Pryce’s left drew a compact black weapon from inside his jacket.

He was quick.

Austin was quicker.

The booth table flipped with a crash, catching Pryce in the chest and driving him backward. Austin grabbed the gunman’s wrist, twisted, and sent the weapon skittering across the tile. Mercy stepped from behind the counter and introduced Customer Service to the second man’s knee with a crack that made the college kid whisper, “Dang.”

The first gunman swung with his free hand.

Austin ducked, drove a shoulder into his ribs, and carried him backward into the jukebox. The machine shrieked, sparked, and changed from Dolly Parton to a patriotic fiddle instrumental so violently triumphant it felt legally binding.

Pryce staggered up, blood at the corner of his mouth.

His expression no longer looked human.

For one second, his eyes shimmered gold.

Austin saw it.

Then the window exploded inward.

Not from a bullet.

From sound.

Every glass in Mercy’s Griddle burst at once. Coffee cups shattered. Light fixtures popped. The air bent. People screamed and dropped to the floor, clutching their ears.

Austin felt the signal hit his skull like a railroad spike.

A high tone.

A burning tone.

A tone that did not belong to music, machine, or weather.

Images flashed behind his eyes.

A sun made of teeth.

A white room.

A boy crying without sound.

A woman’s voice whispering: I want eugenics nixed.

Austin fell to one knee.

Pryce stood over him, no longer pretending to be polite.

“You have no idea what blood can be trained to do,” Pryce said.

Austin looked up through the pain. “Blood ain’t a dog.”

Pryce lifted his hand.

The signal intensified.

The diner warped. The black-and-white floor stretched into impossible angles. Mercy’s Griddle became a corridor, then a courtroom, then a field under a dead sun. Austin could hear people around him, but they sounded far away, trapped under water.

Then another sound broke through.

A train whistle.

Long.

Low.

Coming from nowhere and everywhere.

Austin’s right hand clenched.

The pain did not leave, but something in him answered it. Deep in his bones, under memory, under language, under all the polite lies civilization uses to keep evil wearing a necktie, there was a rhythm.

Steel on track.

Hammer on spike.

Bell in tower.

Gavel on bench.

The old storm over Fort Worth.

Austin stood.

Pryce stepped back.

The golden shimmer in his eyes flickered.

Austin’s voice came rough, but clear. “You picked the wrong diner.”

He drove his fist into Pryce’s chest.

The impact did not merely knock the man backward. It rang. A visible ripple burst through the air, a circular shock of force that blew napkins off tables and snapped the Sun Reich business card in half. Pryce flew through the broken front window and landed on the sidewalk beneath the buzzing sign.

The remaining gunman looked at Austin.

Then at Mercy.

Mercy raised the bat.

The man ran.

Austin stumbled, catching himself against the jukebox. The patriotic fiddle song clicked, groaned, and somehow went back to Dolly.

Mercy coughed in the dust. “You broke my window.”

Austin wiped blood from his nose. “Technically, sound broke your window.”

“You were present.”

“I object.”

“Overruled.”

The truckers began getting up. The college kid was crying and filming at the same time. Outside, Pryce rolled onto his side, reached into his coat, and pulled out a small silver device shaped like a tuning fork.

Austin moved toward him.

Too late.

Pryce snapped the device.

A flash of white light swallowed him.

When it cleared, Halden Pryce was gone.

Only the cracked sidewalk remained.

And one drop of gold-colored blood.

Mercy came to stand beside Austin.

For a while, neither of them spoke.

Then she looked at him. “You bringing trouble to my establishment again?”

Austin took the photograph of Ace Neumanson from his pocket.

The boy’s eyes stared back.

“No,” Austin said. “Trouble brought a child.”

Three hours later, the police had questions, the local news had helicopters, and Mercy had already boarded up the windows with plywood from the hardware store across the street.

Austin answered what he could and lied where necessary.

No, he did not know who the men were.

No, he did not understand the strange sound.

No, he could not explain why a grown man had flown through a diner window like he had been hit by a freight train made of judgment.

By late afternoon, Austin was alone in his garage on the south side of Fort Worth.

The garage had once belonged to his father. It smelled like motor oil, cedar shavings, and old summer heat. Tools hung on pegboard in careful rows. A Texas flag draped the back wall. Beneath it sat a workbench covered in radio parts, old train lanterns, courthouse records, and a Bible with a cracked leather cover.

Austin stood over the Sun Reich card.

It had split down the middle when Pryce hit the ground, but the gold symbol still caught the light.

He had placed the card beside Ace’s photograph and the single drop of gold blood, now sealed inside a small glass vial.

There were things Austin knew how to fight.

A liar.

A thief.

A man who hit a woman.

A judge who sold mercy.

A corporation that poisoned water and called it growth.

But this was different.

This had the smell of science without conscience.

He opened his laptop and searched for Ace Neumanson.

Nothing.

No school record. No birth announcement. No missing child alert. No social media trace. It was as if the boy had been manufactured inside a locked room and introduced to the world only when somebody needed him retrieved.

Austin searched Sun Reich.

The results were garbage. Message boards. Conspiracy pages. A defunct metal band from Ohio. A few dead links that produced warning screens.

He searched the symbol.

Nothing useful.

Then the garage lights flickered.

Austin froze.

A soft knock came at the side door.

Not loud.

Not forceful.

Three taps, a pause, then two.

Austin reached under the workbench and took hold of the old revolver Harland Clout had kept wrapped in oil cloth. He did not like guns as props. He liked them even less as answers. But he respected tools, and he respected timing.

He approached the door.

“Who is it?”

A woman’s voice answered.

“Someone who should have come before breakfast.”

Austin opened the door with the revolver low at his side.

The woman standing outside looked like she had not slept in two days and had spent both of them arguing with terror. She was tall, thin, and sharp-featured, with dark auburn hair pinned back badly, as if done in the mirror of a moving car. Her coat was too expensive for the dust on it. Her eyes were green, bloodshot, and fiercely awake.

She carried no purse.

Her hands were empty.

That made Austin more suspicious, not less.

“Name,” he said.

“Eugene Nix.”

Austin blinked.

She gave a tired smile. “Yes, Eugene. My father had theories. Cruel ones.”

Austin did not lower the revolver. “You know Halden Pryce?”

“I know what he serves.”

“The Sun Reich?”

At the name, something like disgust passed over her face.

“Yes.”

Austin studied her. “You work for them?”

Her mouth tightened.

“I worked inside their system.”

“That ain’t the same as no.”

“No,” she said softly. “It is not.”

Austin let the silence hang.

She looked past him into the garage and saw the photograph on the workbench.

Her composure broke so quickly it startled him.

“Ace,” she whispered.

Austin turned slightly, not enough to take his eyes off her. “You know the boy.”

Eugene swallowed.

“Yes.”

“Who is he?”

Her eyes filled with tears, but she did not let them fall.

“My son.”

The garage seemed to settle around those two words.

Austin lowered the revolver by an inch.

Eugene stepped inside only when he moved aside.

She approached the photograph as if it were a candle in a chapel. Her fingers hovered over Ace’s face but did not touch it.

“They renamed him,” she said. “They always rename what they intend to own.”

“What was his name?”

For the first time, Eugene looked ashamed.

“I don’t know what name he would have chosen,” she said. “I was not allowed to keep him long enough to find out.”

Austin watched her carefully.

“Start talking.”

She nodded, but her eyes stayed on the photograph.

“My cousin is Dr. Wrong.”

Austin’s eyebrows rose. “That’s his real name?”

“No. That is what the press calls him because his real name keeps disappearing from records. He enjoys it now. He thinks it sounds mythic.”

“Sounds stupid.”

“He is stupid in the way only a brilliant man can be stupid. He mistakes knowledge for authority and cruelty for courage.”

Austin leaned against the workbench.

“And he works for the Sun Reich.”

Eugene gave a short, bitter laugh.

“Works for them. Worships them. Hides behind them. Pick a verb. He is a closet Nazi with a laboratory budget and a messiah complex.”

Austin’s face hardened.

Eugene continued. “The Sun Reich is not a nation. It is an inheritance. A network of old evil wearing new language. Genetics. Optimization. Population health. Security futures. Human continuity. Every generation they rename eugenics so polite people will fund it again.”

“And who funds it now?”

Eugene looked at him.

“Shell companies. Black clinics. Strategic research grants. Foreign intermediaries. Communist China is one of the streams, but not the only one. The Sun Reich takes money from anyone who believes mankind is raw material.”

Austin felt the old anger rising, steady and hot.

“And Ace?”

Eugene closed her eyes.

“Ace is proof.”

“Of what?”

“That their theory can live.”

Austin hated every word of that sentence.

Eugene opened her eyes again, and now the tears came, silent and furious.

“My name is Eugene Nix because my father believed in eugenics. He bred his children like arguments. He wanted sons and theories. He got me instead. Eugene, his living thesis.”

She wiped her face with the back of her hand.

“I spent my life making a joke out of it. Eugene Nix. Eugenics nixed. I thought if I said it enough, I could turn the curse into a mission.”

Austin said nothing.

“I infiltrated the Sun Reich because I thought I could destroy the records. Names. donors, clinics, bloodlines. But Dr. Wrong knew. He let me in because he needed my genome. He needed relation.”

Austin looked at Ace’s photograph.

“Relation,” he said.

Eugene nodded.

“Their work depends on relations. Cousins. siblings, parents, hidden branches, stolen children. They map families the way generals map terrain. They believe blood is a railroad and history is the train.”

Austin’s gaze drifted to the old train lantern on the workbench.

The whistle he had heard in Mercy’s echoed faintly in memory.

“What happened to Ace?”

“They took him from me at birth,” Eugene said. “They told me he died. I found out three weeks ago that he was alive inside a Sun Reich developmental ward under Dr. Wrong’s supervision.”

“Where?”

“I do not know anymore. They move him after every breach.”

“Why come to me?”

“Because this morning you survived the signal.”

Austin frowned. “What signal?”

“The Neumanson Tone. It incapacitates most people. Scrambles perception. Opens the mind to directed hallucination. Dr. Wrong designed it using Ace’s neurological pattern as the anchor.”

Austin looked at the vial of gold blood.

“Pryce used it.”

“Yes.”

“It hurt.”

“It should have dropped you for an hour.”

Austin gave her a dry look. “I had plans.”

Eugene almost smiled.

Almost.

Then the smile died.

“Mr. Clout, you did more than resist it. You answered it.”

Austin thought of the train whistle. The rhythm. The ringing force in his fist.

“I don’t know what I did.”

“The Sun Reich will.”

Outside, a dog began barking somewhere down the street.

Then another.

Then another.

Austin turned toward the garage door.

Eugene whispered, “They followed me.”

The barking stopped all at once.

That was worse.

Austin moved to the front of the garage and killed the lights. Evening pressed against the small windows. Across the street, the neighborhood looked ordinary: parked trucks, trimmed lawns, a basketball hoop, a flag moving gently in the wind.

Then the streetlights went out.

One by one.

Down the block.

Darkness walked toward the house.

Eugene backed away from the window.

Austin reached for his hat on the workbench and set it on his head.

It was not armor. It was not a mask. It was an old tan cattleman hat his father had worn until the brim softened and the band darkened with sweat. Austin wore it when he needed to remember who he was before the world tried to make him something else.

Eugene stared at him. “Do you have a plan?”

Austin picked up the cracked Sun Reich card and slipped it into his pocket.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What is it?”

“Keep the child alive. Punch evil in the mouth. Learn the details as we go.”

“That is not a plan.”

“That is a Texas plan.”

A low hum filled the street.

Eugene flinched.

Austin felt it crawl across his teeth.

The signal was back, weaker than before but closer. The garage walls trembled. Tools clicked against pegboard. The old train lantern swung on its hook though no wind touched it.

Austin stepped toward the garage door.

Eugene grabbed his arm.

“If they take me, they get Ace.”

Austin looked at her hand, then at her face.

“Nobody’s taking anybody.”

The hum deepened.

A black van rolled into view outside, silent except for the signal vibrating through the pavement. Its windows were mirrored. On its side, barely visible beneath matte paint, was the jagged sun.

The rear doors opened.

Men stepped out in dark uniforms.

Not police.

Not soldiers.

Something private and worse.

At their center came a figure in a white coat.

He wore gloves.

He had silver hair, a narrow face, and a smile like a scalpel discovering religion.

Eugene’s breath caught.

Austin knew before she said it.

Dr. Wrong had come to Texas.

The man in the white coat lifted one hand in greeting, friendly as a preacher at a funeral.

“Cousin,” he called.

Eugene trembled.

Dr. Wrong’s smile widened.

Then his gaze shifted to Austin.

“And you must be the noise in my machine.”

Austin raised the garage door.

The metal clattered upward, loud enough to wake the block.

He stepped out into the driveway beneath the dead streetlights, Fort Worth heat rolling off the concrete, his father’s hat on his head and thunder gathering somewhere beyond the skyline.

He pointed at Dr. Wrong.

“Doctor,” Austin said, “you are a long way from right.”

The signal screamed.

The old storm inside Austin answered.

And somewhere in the dark machinery of the Sun Reich, a boy named Ace Neumanson opened his eyes.