all the corners of his wide earth

The sun fell below the horizon and left its heat behind it. The moon gathered about her the shroud of storms, mortified in her pristine nakedness. All around in the dark there were only the brief, searing bursts of fire from the sky to light their pathless way.

The settler sat in the cab of the pickup truck with its missing windshield. The stick popped into neutral, never to leave it. The reins in his hand slapping across the hood as the two horses continued their steady, inexorable pace. Tireless facsimiles. The only things that still worked in the expanse of after.

He had the window to the bed open behind him and he heard the wife telling stories to the boy and the girl under the tarp tent. The tailgate rattling at the bumps. At each rumble of thunder, the sound of the girl hugging onto her mother – the boy too proud even though he wanted that embrace against which all fears fled.

If He takes them from me, I will tear aside the sky and pull down the very throne.

And there was a time, in Babel, when every little boy and little girl knew the same language, and spoke to each other the same way, and they all worked together for the same thing.

When wuz...zzzat?

Sssshhh, sweetie. That was a long, long loooooooong time ago.

'Fore you and daddy?

Shut up 'n' let her tell!

Now you be nice to your sister! Yes honey, it was before mommy and daddy and before our mommies and daddies and theirs and theirs. And the people all loved each other and everything was good. And they were building a tower that would reach up and up and up so they could meet God. But when they did, they forgot to glorify Him – they forgot His teachings and who was their Lord. So he punished them by knocking their tower down, and if any looked upon it they were consumed, and in the ruin of its shadow you could walk for seven days and still not be out from under it. And to all the corners of His wide Earth he hurled the people, and he made their skins different colors and confused their languages so they couldn't understand one another. That's why we are all of different colors and all believe different things, and that's why we must always remember to work for Him and for His glory and not for ourselves.

They did not listen very much to what she said. Only felt the comfort of her voice – the first voice they'd ever known – wash over them. He felt the first drop. The second. He put the tarp on with the hole cut for his head, and the fishing hat.

There rolled the thunder and there fell the rain. The water seeping out the sides of the cab and dribbling onto the cracked dirt of the plains about them. He could not see – the wife could not tell her stories for the noise. He shut the window behind him so the water would not blow onto them – the glimpse he caught of them was good, the boy forsaking his pride now and letting his mother hold him to her as he had in the times when she fed him from her own body.

He made sure the small bit of tarp on the seat next to him was covering the shotgun properly. It had the four shells in the tube and nothing more. Nothing ever again. The settler had long meditated on what he would do with the four shells. The settler had asked Him what to do with them, and in keeping with what the settler had experienced his whole life, He stayed silent and offered nothing but more tribulations.

Four shells. If on the horizon there are three, use the shells on them. If on the horizon there are five, use them on us. Mercy for them – hell for him.

Beneath the dimensionless dark of the lachrymose sky, they continued their pathless way, the children safe inside the paper-thin tarp, and in his lungs the gathering cough that the wet brought with it.

His wife did not know.

---

It was a hole and He, the fucker, had put it there. In the impenetrable dark and solid rain there was no avoiding it. No accounting for it.

It was right in the path of the horse on the right, and wide enough that it pitched face-first into it, but narrow enough that the body became wedged. The momentum shoving the horse into its own head, crushing it against the stone and bursting its face apart.

The pickup lurched over the rump of the horse and came to rest on it. Bodies thrown around in back, and he saw red burst across the window before he went sailing out the empty windshield. He could hear the beats of the other horse's hooves as it tore free of the trailer harness he'd rigged.

Find purchase. Blood. Their blood. Get up. His fingers slipping to find something firm in the mud, the water beating on him still, cold and stinging. Warning – this Equubot Model twenty-five hundred has sustained damage – cooling unit is not responding – it is highly recommended you vacate the area and notify a peace officer. The fake, recorded voice drowning out the screams from inside the bed. Got to get up. Get them out.

Stumbling toward the screams. Tearing aside the tarp.

The girl decapitated raggedly through the window to the cab. The boy's head on backwards. She wouldn't stop screaming, throttling both the bodies and saying their names over and over. She kept asking the fucker what she had done what had she done why wasn't it enough why weren't her prayers enough wasn't she good wasn't she His servant why why why why why

The concussive force of the horse's overheated reactor bursting open sent him sprawling again, and he passed out in the mud with the rain beating on his unknowing face.

---

He looked down at her for a long time. The scarred half-light of the morning shone cherry-red across the hair on the left side of her scalp. The rest a patchwork of ravaged scabbing. The eye on that side lidless, and he hoped unseeing.

Every few seconds, a single, rattling, heaving breath. The body forcing it. Incapable of letting itself go.

He was whole. Not unscathed – dizzy from the concussion, but not seriously injured. Water sluiced and sparkled through the deep-set cracks in the earth, reflecting the sun. The morning as peaceful as the night had been apocalyptic. Concussion. I'm not thinking clearly. If I wait another hour, it won't make sense to blow my own wife's head off with a shotgun. If I wait another few hours, something else will make sense. Something else will be the right thing. Something. Wait. Something.

Another breath. Deep. Shivering. Misery unending. Every breath a different circle of hell. The eye peering at him. You promised you wouldn't let it hurt if you could stop it. You swore an oath to Him.

Something else will be the right thing.

His finger rested on the trigger.

If I wait... something... something else will make sense...

---

The horse had run toward the only thing in the featureless flat of the plains – a range of mountains with a large gap in it, a canyon spewing forth water as it flowed from the hills surrounding. The tracks of the horse were deep enough that the remaining hour of rain had still left them – in the dry morning that followed the settler could see them clearly enough to follow along.

He tramped on, the shotgun over his shoulder.

Stopped next to a rock big enough to lean against and puked until he had nothing left in his stomach and then sat there heaving emptily over the steaming liquid.

When he looked up, he saw a man standing before him. Lanky, tall, hair the color of dirty straw with cloudy grey eyes. A long brown duster and a brown hat, an improbable navy-colored vest.

The revolver dangling by a loop of rope slung at the shoulder, connected to a metal loop in the gun's grip. An ugly, foreign thing, but so nonchalant as to appear as a tourist's camera.

Well now well now well now. You look like you've just had a wonderful day.