those last parts of her

The clerk's first bullet put out the man like a candle. He stood with his head cocked back, all thought and personality canceled, the face shocked and the powder burns of such a close gunshot only beginning to appear.

The others – some nine men – had rested their rifles on their shoulders or stood with their weapons barely at the ready, and they were not ready to shoot when he executed the man who had grabbed his rifle and thrown him to the wall, and they were still not ready to shoot when he spun about and brought the heel of his left foot into the dead man's side in a roundhouse kick that might have decapitated a teenager – and as that was ending, they had time to process his left hand fanning over the hammer of the pistol and nobody could tell if they were hit or if the blood on them was somebody else's.

He let the empty gun fall without ceremony. It hung stewardless from the strap as he ran low to the ground, snatching up the rifle. He knew about how many paces to the nearest rock large enough to provide cover, and he scrambled for it, swinging behind it as bullets clattered across it and tore into the ground. He'd killed two outright – wounded a third and fourth to the point of dying. There were still too many of them.

From above he heard the high voice of Shep, heard another contingent of them scrambling down the rocks, putting more fire on him, yet another approaching from inside the cavern. He caught a brief glimpse of the store up at the top of the canyon - gouts of flame and smoke darkening the sky. They'd done an old-fashioned Zippo raid on it when they'd found out where he'd gone. He put the ear bud back in, hands working the revolver, flipping the loading gate open and ramming each chamber clear with the speed of a robot.

Saladin. Salaam alaikum.

---

Shep's machine pistol spat in a dangerous arc before him as he stumbled down the rocks alongside his squad of four. The rocks gave under one of his men, and that one went tumbling headfirst along the crags and debris, becoming at some fateful point in that journey an empty sack of flesh. The body crashed into the path of the bullets of those already on the canyon floor, perforated by them.

The marauders paused in horror at what they had done, and in the ringing silence that followed, there came the clear, impossibly loud cry of the falcon diving out of the sun toward the cavern entrance, within which there were still at least ten of Shep's men. Shep watched the grim thing barrel toward its own ruin, the metal of its body and wings searing red-hot as it intentionally cranked more power than the fragile body could handle.

The clerk rose. Six men on the canyon floor, one just emerging from the cavern. The clerk put a bullet in each of the six and ducked down just as the firebird struck the dumbfounded new arrival in the chest and drove him back into the cavern.

---

The man at the head of Shep's spelunkers had lost two men on the way down – stuck in the crawl space, still screaming, hyperventilating with claustrophobia and without any light to guide them. He'd become convinced this was perdition. All of the wandering over the world in Shep's band of demons, all of the murder and pillage and rape, all had added up to this. It was the tribulation, the end of days, and this, here, was his final reward – to wander in blackness unending, without depth or contiguity.

When he saw the light, he praised Jesus. And when he emerged, he saw the tall, golden-haired man destroy the lives of six of his comrades. The marauder stood there, the seven or eight others that had managed to follow him bunching up behind him.

When he looked to see the source of the shriek coming out of the sky, it was upon him. The hawk's face white-hot, the talons that sunk into his chest destroying the flesh that surrounded them. It was not some false construct that felled him, he realized, but the winged messenger of the gods themselves. The others staggered back, the darkness of the cave lit by the searing glow of the falcon for one instant as it opened its beak to unleash a final utterance, and then its valediction became light and concussion.

---

The clerk heard Shep's roar of frustration as the cavern erupted in flames. Man-shaped things came stumbling out of it one by one, each covered in flames that blotted out all distinction, featureless and uncommunicative, but aware. They tried to swat at the flames that cloaked them, and each in his turn fell to the rocks lost in his own agony.

Shep's voice spurred his last three men onward.

Keep fire on him! I want him!

Shep had the sun at his back, and the clerk fired up at them with the rifle, but couldn't get a good sight on them...

The clerk felt a bullet bite into the side of his left arm and the rifle fell out of his grip. He retreated to cover, falling into a sitting position.

Their boots beating down across the rocks, getting closer. He took hold of the pistol as Shep rounded the corner. They were surrounding him, guns up.

Nobody kills this asshole but me! Nobody shoot, got it?!

Shep grabbed the clerk by the vest and dragged him to his feet kneeing him in the stomach and then hurling him to the dirt. You smart now, huh, you fuck? I'll fuckin' fix you. He kicked the clerk in the face, sending him rolling back along the dirt.

Shep. The scraggly-bearded youth calling after him. Get that gun away from him!

Shep whirled around. His face-paint running, the skull-face becoming a dripping two-tone highlight of the sickly-thin contours of his face. The wound in his side from the falcon still oozing. I SAY WHAT GETS DONE AROUND HERE! HE FUCKED WITH US AND NOW I FUCK WITH HIM! DO YOU ALL SEE?!

Shep, the gun...

He shot six times, you fuckhole! It takes a year to reload that piece of shit! Pay the fuck attention!

The clerk stumbled slowly to his feet, hand still on the grip of the pistol. He spat blood out of his mouth. Well, you dress like a girl, and here I see you hit like one. It makes me sorry about having to kill all of you. Though, maybe one or two of your crispy friends over there isn't dead and can see after burying you. This climate is terrible for burn victims, I'm told... but great for consumption. I don't suppose any of you have that.

Shep let out a single laugh and regarded his prey as a mafia don does a shop owner. The three of his men stood bathed in their own cold sweat, their eyes fixed firmly on the clerk, the looks on their faces incredulous as their leader strutted about before this force of nature as if he could ever own it.

I'll forgive everything if you kneel down and beg me for it and promise to join me. I am also merciful.

The clerk had not really been addressing Shep when he'd last spoken, and he turned to the scraggly-bearded youth now, speaking as if Shep weren't even there.

How much is this guy paying you? Or you... yeah, you, with your mouth hanging open. I mean, what does it take to constitute gross mismanagement these days if this isn't it? Weren't there like, ten times as many of you a few minutes ago? How hard do you think it's going to be for me to whittle down the rest of you? I'm not saying, I'm just saying.

The sounds of hoofbeats echoed in the distance – grew closer. The scraggly-bearded youth wasn't sure anybody else was hearing it. Shep... there's a—

Their leader wound his fist back and struck the clerk in the stomach again, flooring him. How you think you're gonna take us now, huh? Tell me how.

Shep...

SHUT UP!

The clerk smiled up at his enemy from his position on the ground on his back. Still he held the pistol in his grip, still hanging from the strap. The same way I do everything – with a seven-shot pistol.

The clerk kicked Shep in the scrotum and put a bullet in the head of one of the last of the three other men. The clerk was up, dropped the gun to dangle again by its strap and had Shep in a human-shield choke hold, stealing the machine pistol from him in a single deft move, unleashing a completely inaccurate salvo at the other two, who leaped to cover.

The horse Saladin jacked thundered into view, and the clerk shoved the barrel of the gun up to Shep's temple. You are a special kind of dumb son of a bitch, and this is the last chance I'm giving you to run away from all of this and clean that stupid paint off your face and take up the ways of the monastery for the rest of your born days. Put my rifle in the horse's saddle.

He released Shep from the choke hold but kept the hand on the collar of his jacket. Finding his breath again, Shep spat out a curse.

Fuck your moth—

The clerk grabbed the man's left hand and twisted it up behind him and Shep's voice went high with pain. My mercy is that pile of original recipe henchmen over yonder. I'm afraid if you want a complete performance, I'm going to need a major credit card. Otherwise, you can put my rifle on the horse, if you see what it is that I am saying to you.

The clerk forced his captive over to where the rifle had fallen to the ground. No sound from the last two men behind their rock. When Shep had the rifle in the horse's saddle he whispered something to the clerk through the redness between just the two of them.

Kill me. Just fucking do it.

I told you how I wanted to see you die. I told you exactly how.

The clerk kicked him over to the rock and got up on his horse. Boy's I'd say it's been fun, but the world's a distrustful enough place as it is without us all lying to one another.

Shep wheeled around. KILL HIM! SHOOT HIM! F—

The scraggly-bearded youth and the other one – a man of forty with a gut and a shiny bald head, clad in a biker's jean jacket – came around the corner. Jean jacket leveled an old M1, but the scraggly-bearded youth brought his police Beretta up and shot him in the head, then turned and put his sights on Shep.

Shep stood there for a moment weaponless and without horde to surround him, the redness gone from his eyes in his panic and all the fragile regalia of his violent empire passed away with the wind. In the light of the early afternoon, he seemed to have shrunk in his biker jacket.

His last underling gunned him down there in the canyon. When the youth had put every last bullet into Shep and the corpse laid in an expanding pool of blood on the ground, he stood over it and kicked it and beat upon it with the butt of the pistol until he had nothing left in him but tears. The clerk watched this with some interest, and when it was finally over, the youth looked up at him and threw aside the pistol.

I'll do anything you want. Just please don't kill me. Please—

Anything?

Shit. Yes. Fuck. Anything, any good god damn thing, I swear it if you just don't hurt me or nothing.

Pick my hat up and bring it here.

---

The gunshot wound would not stop bleeding despite his attempts to bind it, and the injuries he'd suffered at the hands of Shep stung as he thundered out of the canyon into the sun. Eli and the girl had found the horse and made their way westward as he'd instructed. He rode him a lonely journey, all through the night without sleeping again, and his exhaustion brought him to the edge of hallucination.

At length he smelled the coast, if that were possible, and when he crested a hill he saw the great ocean spread out before him. The promised land spoken of in the girl's leaflet filled the horizon before him, glimmering with a billion little lights so many miles distant, all noise of it lost over the grandness and imperceptibility of distance.

He followed their tracks down to the rocky shore that had been created in that great cataclysm, and he found Eli beside the girl and a campfire. The clerk felt he might go into shock at any minute as he sat down.

Thank God you made it.

Thanking him again, are we?

I... I prayed. Like I told you I would.

Thank you.

They coming?

No, I— ahem. No.

I gave her the pill. There's one more. You should take it.

She needs one more dose. She might not make it without it.

Shit, YOU need it.

No. I don't need anything.

They sat in the glow of the campfire, both men staring into it for a time. Eli would cast glances up toward that other continent. The clerk saw that he was looking there.

There's another kind of purgatory in there. Do your best with her out here.

You'll be helping us.

I'm going to lay down here in a minute and I rather think I'm not going to get back up.

I need to help you. Take the pill.

The girl is your salvation. Do you understand? He got to his feet again, shakily, and lead his horse away, tossing the machine pistol to Eli. Do unto her as you would've done to your own daughter, and be saved. I'm outta here.

The sound of the horse's hoofbeats fell off into the night bit by bit until there was nothing to mark the solemnity of his passage. The man Eli sat up a lonely vigil with the girl until morning broke, and her eyes fluttered open.

---

She put flowers in her hair that summer, and when the rains came she could drink water from the leaves that rustled in a great ocean above her. In later years, grey with what wisdom the world had allowed her and toughened by her motherhood, she made the journey alone across the desert back to the white car, finding there the mummified remains of her grandmother and the men that had tried to kill them both. The desert's preservative dryness was almost respectful and apologetic.

The decay of decades had long since masked the single neat little hole that had sent those last parts of her heavenward. The old woman sat down in the driver's seat and took her grandmother's hand, and as she had done in ages long past, she lead her granddaughter along to where next she was ordained to go.

the smiting of necks

(Author's note: We resume the main story, joining immediately after the events of “it always is with heroes.”)

Shep smiled at the rejoinder. Sent a single snarling thought toward the clerk's head, into the shadow beneath the hat, where he knew there resided some equal intelligence to his own.

What do you have, little hero-man? Why are you so special?

Silence. Shep felt his band pawing the earth behind him. Besides the movement of the thumb and maddening motionlessness of his reply to Shep's first taunt, the clerk might have been a mannequin set out there to ward off the otherwise unwary. When it became clear the clerk would contribute nothing more, Shep gigged his horse forward another step, and from the redness in his eyes screamed silently at him.

ARROGANT FUCK ARROGANT ARROGANT PATHETIC —

Hey.

The single syllable from the clerk's shaded mouth cut Shep's rage-garbled thoughts off in the middle.

Didn't your mother ever tell you it's not polite to speak another language in front of people who don't understand it?

Shep would have been caught off guard by the comment enough on its own, but what entered his mind next had the effect of a sledgehammer striking drywall. The shrieks and keens and wails came from every direction. Shep squirmed in his saddle at the dissonant chorus and the screams they seemed to send right into his ears. The other men whirled around in their saddles, rearing their horses around, searching the horizon for the far-off sources of some of those lamentations, jumping at the ones near them.

Shep found himself again as he saw the clerk thrust the gauntleted hand into the air and send the raptor skyward with a tinny stereophonic war cry.

You idiots! It's in your heads! Get him, kill him —

The clerk had doffed the glove with a single violent thrust of his left hand and then had the rifle up, eyes smoldering and there was no telling if his voice came from his own throat or originated in the hellish corner of his imagination, broadcast to his hapless prey.

NOW WHEN YE MEET IN BATTLE THOSE WHO DISBELIEVE, THEN IT IS THE SMITING OF NECKS! SMITE THE NECKS AND SMITE OF THEM EACH FINGER!

There was no accounting for the bullets of the rifle as they spat into the midst of their unknowing prey. He shot at each man one, two, three times in the space of half as many seconds, acquiring another target as one man fell from his horse or slumped sideways in the saddle or sat straight up with his head bent back and the blood dribbling neatly down his face from the hole in his forehead. Each death as neatly thorough as it was swift.

He backed toward the storefront the entire time, and when he had run out, Shep still sat motionless at the head of his scattered crew, untouched by a single one of the clerk's bullets and struggling to free his machine pistol from his belt line. As he liberated it and pulled the trigger, the falcon struck him in the side and raked his armpit with its claws.

That marauder fell stunned to the ground, and in his ears were the screams of his own men. He looked up and saw the clerk ducking into the doorway of the store as bullets shattered the sliding glass doors, clanged off of the derelict shopping carts and puffed into the long untended pile of discount T-shirts sitting on the front-most display.

Shep gained his feet, his own blood cold across his body, and the falcon was tearing open the throat of Johnnyjohnnybobonny, the men blasting at the bird but in their panic dismembering their own comrade. The bird rocketed into the air again, a ropey trail of internal fluid leaking onto the floundering corpse as it fell to the ground with a gut-curdling squelch.

There followed a period of nearly a minute while Shep screamed at them to stop firing into the air after the damn bird, which seemed to be arcing far out over the canyon in an effort to get out of range. When he'd finally gotten them calmed down, the clerk leaned out of a gap in the storefront glass, shouting at them.

I GOT BLISTAS ON MY FINGAS!

His torrent of lead blew out the eyes of two of the horses standing in front and sent them careening into the crowd. The heart, throat, and right eye of the man standing next to Shep all opened up with a fwupfwupfwup like somebody punching a hanging slab of ribs with a boxer's glove, and that one looked over at Shep before falling to the ground. Shep took a step back. Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ.

When the shooting stopped, Shep and the dozen or so of his smarter men had their horses kneeling down, taking cover behind them. One of them, a spindly-legged, scraggly-bearded one maybe twenty years old whose name Shep did not know and had never cared to know dove behind Shep's great black horse and laid there on the searing-hot hardpan, quivering.

Sh-Shep, Christ, how we gonna—

Shut your goddamned mouth. Shep clutched his wound. The tightness of the damned leather jacket creaking and stifling him, making it impossible to figure out how hurt he was. You leave the thinking to me. Reaching out with the redness, he detected nothing. An impossible hole where the hero's mind ought to be. Not fucking possible...

What isn't?

I said shut up, shut the FUCK up! He could hear the sound of bullets clicking into the rifle's tube. He's reloading. Shep found his inner voice again, threw it at the group. Two columns, move up and take him while he's empty—

The clerk's voice came rolling out of the storefront, jolly and clear as a Broadway singer of old.

I never thought that I would climb / over the moon in ecstasy / but nevertheless it's there that I'm / shortly about to be! / 'cause I've got a golden ticket...

He's still got that pistol, Shep...

Yes, indeed, Shep, I've still got that pistol! It's a fine pistol and for absolutely free with your purchase of three rolls of film at five ninety-nine a roll, you too can witness a demonstration!

None of his men moved. He wanted to shout at them, but he couldn't show his enemy that there was hesitation on the part of his gang... couldn't have them back off or they would have left an offense unanswered— HE would have left an offense unanswered and that made him weak, it made him unfit...

A voice whispering at his ear. The voice of the clerk, the words casual and almost friendly.

You're thinking about bluffing to me that I haven't got a chance and I should just give it up right now. Trouble is, my good fellow, that just isn't the case. I have met your kind on many a flat and barren plain such as this, and here I am still. I was a liberal-minded individual before everything fell apart you see, and I believed in equal rights and sociopolitical sensitivity and all that, and the reason I tell you this is so you appreciate the level of disdain I have for you when I tell you that I have seen your worth, and that I have judged you to be a pathetic, pretentious, prepubescent little faggot and it is now my ambition to see you die like one.

Shep stood up, roaring.

Kill him! Kill the son of a bitch!

It was something his men could understand, and they sprayed the storefront with the bullets of their varying and mismatched weapons, exhausting their magazines and loading in more and firing until the brick storefront became pitted with craters and no glass remained in the door frames – the mechanism for sliding them open seized on itself as the misshapen door ground against the track it sat in. No answer from the clerk— neither bullets nor taunts.

Get in there! Fucking get in there, rip his goddamn head off so I can take a shit on it!

He leaped the side of his horse, spitting more bullets into the cavernous darkness beyond the doorways, the men following him, their yells a crescendo following him.

They burst inside, swarming the front of the store with footfalls and bullets. Bottles of nail polish along the cosmetics wall unleashing their own fonts of blood upon the floor. The two registers shattering, bursting open and the dollars within frittering away to dust in the air. Their weapons fell silent amid the mournful fluttering of the greeting cards through the gunsmoke. Through the shivering sound of their settling, there came no retort.

Fan out. Cover each other. He's here. You.

The scraggly-bearded youth straightened as Shep barked at him. S-sir.

On me. You three, too. I'm going to wear his face. You find him, you hurt him enough he can't fight. Nobody kills him but me, got that? He's mine. Move the fuck out.

---

The clerk crawled out from under the rock into the larger cavern, the rifle cradled in the crooks of his elbows like a child, the pistol dragging over the rocks with a clatter as the echoes of the gunfire drifted down to him from above. He had maybe two or three minutes before they discovered he was nowhere in the store, and then the smart one, Shep, would certainly find the hatch.

He'd shot down seven or eight men, wounded a few more. He brought out the little flashlight and clicked it on, drawing out the box of bullets for the rifle. They were no larger than thick nails. He had one more reload left, minus three or four shots. He could put a few more of them in the soil with that, but it wouldn't break them. The two boxes of pistol ammo he had sitting in his vest might do it, but that meant letting them get close, and he had no intention of doing that.

Time to move, he said, plugging the ear bud into his ear. Saladin.

Half a mile away, the bird responded. Warning – unit has sustained abnormal trauma. Estimated remaining battery life is one and one half hour.

Assess two equubots with highest functionality, mark as Rowdy One and Rowdy Two. Subvert navigation — set Rowdy Two for rally point two and execute. Rally Rowdy One to my position. Execute.

---

The falcon found the field of battle to be free of hostiles, all having flooded into the store. It ignored as irrelevant the shouts and battle cries and roars of frustration within as they continued to tear the place apart. It alighted upon the saddle of one and leaned in toward the mane. As if to whisper in their silent language of conspiracy.

When Saladin had finished with the two horses, they both came about and thundered along the rim of the canyon, the procedural workings of their manufactured minds as mercifully ignorant of the depth of their betrayal as the winged instigator above them was of its treachery.

---

The clerk came to the steep, low-ceilinged drop that made any ascent through the cold, lightless cave impossible. Tucking the loaded rifle again to his chest and skidding down it, raking his backside with the roughness of the stone. It was fifteen feet down at least, and at the bottom a fully-grown man needed to crawl feet-first on his back to go forward through the dark. That Eli and Fanny were not here proved the man had found some way of conveying her through – probably by dragging her through after first leaving her, crawling out and then subsequently reorienting himself so he could crawl back in and get hold of her ankle, he imagined.

It became easier after he got out from the smaller tunnel. The darkness widened out into a passageway that could be traversed while hunched over. The clerk searched his memory for any recollection of claustrophobia in his former life, and could find none. He saw the sharpness of daylight peeking through the hole up ahead just as he heard a shout from the tunnel far behind him, echoing from the chill of the unreal dark from whence he'd come.

He stepped into the wandering afternoon, the brightness and heat somehow mellowed and completely divorced from the hell that had broken all about it and would still—

The clerk went tumbling forward, the rifle wrenched from his grip, slamming into the canyon wall. He whirled about to find himself staring at a dozen of the filthy men with their ratty weapons, murder in every eye. The one that had thrown him clutched the rifle as a war prize.

Fuckin' dumb you think we are, all of us to bottle up for you like that?

The clerk grinned just slightly.

Gentlemen gentlemen gentlemen, dumb is no barrier.

The pistol was in his hand and pointed at the head of the one who held captive his rifle, and the movement was so fast none of them knew from whence it had come.

Slow... now that might be.

all good deeds

They carried on the fight with it – the soulless machine leaping from rock to rock, flying through the air and swooping down, but rarely daring to engage them in a direct attack any longer. It must have figured out they were wise to such a dive-bomb maneuver now that it had been used twice.

Berg, through his destroyed face, could only lay behind the car in pain next to the hobbled Yancy – both men had the entirety of the gang's sterile bandages upon them and it was not enough to bind all of their wounds.

Berg had his mind back, and the redness. In the expanding dusk, he had one red eye and the other curiously dulled. It had not yet dawned on him that this eye had gazed upon its last image – he assumed it was closed and couldn't open, and he did not think too hard about any of it.

Finally one of them hit the bird as it perched on a rock – winging it in the side. It responded with the high-pitched shriek again, capered about on the rock as if to take off but couldn't. Yancy wailed something out, leaped from cover, and fired the shotgun off.

The falcon caught the shrapnel and sailed off the rock, seeming for a moment to hang brokenly in the air. It struck the ground with a shattering noise – bits and pieces of itself drawing out some strange meaningless pictograph across the alkali.

I got it! I got the sumbitch I...

Shudfugup. Gimme the licker.

One of the others dropped down to his knees next to Berg and handed him off the canteen full of grain alcohol. Berg brought it to his lipless teeth and drank in the numbness. Coughs tearing his lungs apart from the inside. Warm flecks leaving his mouth from deep within him, and he had to hope it wasn't blood.

Berg, what about the girl? We don't know where...

Fug the girl. Fug fix me up.

The sun was sinking. As the two unharmed tended to Yancy and Berg, the grandmother sat in the passenger seat of the car, clearly expecting somebody to start driving. Harrumping and looking impatient as one of them would pass by, and they ignorant of her scorn.

---

The man on the horse racing toward all of it heard something from the mind of the broken bird, echoing from within that form crucified on the ground.

Status of Subject Fox unknown. Subject George is hostage. Hostile combat capability sixty percent. Four tangos. System has sustained damage outside of regular operational parameters. Initiating safe shutdown procedures.

He took the ear bud out and stowed it, kicking the horse's ribs a final time and leaning forward in the saddle as together they traversed the dusty expanse with the speed of a hawk's telltale shadow.

---

Pain thudded through all of them with a dullness that lacked specificity of any kind. Berg's mind sank into slumber and the pain clawed his mind out of it. Night fell and he was vaguely aware of the three of them starting a fire.

How he gonna head us up with no fuckin' face?

Yancy, shut up.

I'm just sayin'. How he gonna shoot with one fuckin' eye? How he gonna talk with no lips?

He's got the redness better'n we do. He's...

Fuck his red and fuck him. You know what Shep'd do.

Berg forced his eye open and fixed it on Yancy. Tried for some threat, but the pain in his head wouldn't let him form anything. Watched as the three of them stood over him, talking. The looks on the faces of the two others dubious and unsure. Yancy's speech disappearing in the depth of Berg's agony and he only had Yancy's wild gestures with the shotgun and the look of frothy glee on the man's face at the thought of murdering him.

Wait... what was that?

What you fuckin' talkin' about?

Sh! Fucking idiot, cork it for a sec...

The sound echoed from somewhere in the west – the voice low and mournful before spiking up again.

Do you don't you waaaaaaaant me to love yooooooooooou?

They clustered by the car all of a sudden, except for Yancy, who stood his ground.

Hey what the fuck is...

Three crunches in a row so quick as to be a single one. The head snapped back at the same moment the left shoulder seemed to try to jump away from the body and the stomach popped open. It was only a split-second after the bullets struck that the crackcrackcrack drifted from the great expansive dark surrounding the camp.

Blood dribbling down the whole front of his body, the rivulets joining one another and becoming a torrent on the alkali as he took a half-step back. Tried to lift the shotgun. A sneer of effort that turned into a whimper, and he fell to his knees and sagged forward, and the last revelation for him was that he'd shit his pants.

The shots had come from the east, but the voice came from the north, and it was a vaudevillian singer.

Oh you don't say fuck in the presence of a lady! / No you don't say fuck to a gaaaaaaaaal! / And though it slips out most times 'fore you know it / A proper-fine gal won't ask you to show it / and sure m'friend as shit she don't offer to blow it / if you drop an eff bomb on a gaaaaaaaaaaaal!

Berg tried to get up, but didn't have the strength. The other two were loading up their AKs, and god damn it, Berg couldn't tell them to stay calm, couldn't tell them that the bastard was clearly using a silencer, that the cracking was no report but the sound of the bullets going supersonic...

All the while the voice coming from a different direction each time. They sprayed into the dark, shouting at him to reveal himself, and after each volley he would snicker from the southwest or mock them from the north.

A whisper, directly behind them, the voice snarling and gravelly and filled with rage, savoring every word.

Tell me what thy name is on the night's plutonian shore.

They whirled around and fired themselves empty. As the last bits of brass clinked to the ground, they heard his boots on the hardpan behind them. When they turned, they saw him step into the light from behind another rock, the gun in his right hand, aiming from the hip, the left hovering over the hammer and a silencer screwed onto the end of the barrel.

They dropped the guns – one of them held up a hand.

Please –

—kill you? Not a problem.

A brief storm of high-pitched hisses, and they fell to the ground next to one another. Berg could not see the tall gunman's face as he approached the car, the fire backlighting him and leaving all in shadow.

The old woman's voice snapped from the car.

When are we going?

He gestured toward her with the gun without even glancing at her, the movement nonchalant and ingrained in muscle memory. A single sharp hiss. Berg felt the car jerk with her movement, and the clerk did not believe that those parts of her that were left on that sullen, resigned earth joined those already redeemed in their ascension. The round had no time to break the sound barrier and so no crack followed to mask the rattle of her final exhalation.

Berg found he could not move as the clerk stood over him with the pistol, carefully unscrewing the silencer and slipping it back into a pocket on the inside of his coat. With his thumb he slid open the loading gate and his fingers got to work on unscrewing the extractor, and he stood over the man Berg as the bullets clinked across the ground one by one.

He spoke as he started clicking more bullets into the gun.

I'd say I'm sorry I had to do that, but the world's a distrustful enough place as it is without us all lying to one another. Incidentally, that's also why I won't say it wasn't the most damn fun I've had in who knows. Now, what I will say though, and you need to believe me when I say it because I mean it – is that it was not my intention for Sal to go for your face like that. You just went after my little friend so fast it completely slipped my mind to tell him not to do that. Speaking of old Sal, I realize you and your buddies there did what you all had to. I can ask neither more nor less of a man. Well... I do suppose I can ask that a man refrain from destroying a helpless girl's car and planning on either putting his penis in her or handing her over to people that'll surely do the same... then again, things are different than when I was a boy, and who's to say what new societal mores have arisen in these freer times, what with flappers about on the street without so much as a respectable man to escort them, and ladies who have a condition walking about like it's nothing to be embarrassed of, and other such advances that reveal my latent nineteenth-century misogyny... I seem to have lost my train of thought.

Don' kill me...

The Koran tells us that for every man there is a purpose that drives his life, and that yours should be the doing of all good deeds. You have lived your whole life and done the precise opposite of that.

'm surry.

Strangely, I am too.

The bullet put out Berg's remaining eye. It bled only for a moment and then stopped. The clerk dropped the gun, and it dangled lazily down at his side again. As if twiddling its thumbs and whistling, looking away from its murder as if to slyly distance itself from what it had done.

The clerk brought out a small flashlight and soon found the trail of blood away from all the others – the one leading behind the rock that had been Saladin's last stand. She lay in a fetal position, curled up, hands covering a wound to the stomach. She was shivering violently. He took her in his arms and reached into his pocket for the pill bottle.

He put the pill in her mouth and massaged her throat until she had swallowed it. He kissed her forehead.

Not going to let you slip away just yet, little friend. I'm not as merciful as all that.

cool, dark places

The man Eli ate in the sterile, rotten-smelling break room. The clerk – who had not eaten in the break-room ever, for he hated the smell of biodegrading cardboard and stinky-ass stale fucking coffee and the wonderful accord such olfactory murder struck with the nausea of the fluorescents – reasoned the man would probably be fine by himself. The skies had opened for three more days since they had arrived at the store, and in that time the clerk fed the man from the frozen stock and always delivered the blue and white pills to him. Always the tray came back, set on the photo counter with the pills untouched, and the admiration of the clerk for this particular asceticism grew.

This fellow is altogether picaresque and principled, wouldn't you say so, Sal?

The bird shifted at the sound of its name – servos whirring in the talons, actuators humming as it moved on the glove, the end result of some laudable programmer's dedication to creating a facsimile of impatience. The reassuring and muffled feel of the claws biting into the thick leather.

Yes, you would. Doesn't it make you jealous, Sal, that such an archetypal construct walks this solemn earth? The world of this man and his antiquated ideas are far behind him. I don't know how in the world I should sympathize, and yet... mmmyes, and yet.

Still talking, the left arm extended to hold the bird's perch level, he reached over to the wall and withdrew the lever-action rifle by its strap from the nail where it hung. Pistol and longarm dangling from his body – more like luggage than anything else. The brown fedora perched comfortably on his head and the long brown coat seeming to trail behind him as he went.

The doors whirred aside, and he stepped out into the clearing air. Rain trailing its ghostly, misting fingers downward to tickle the earth to the west. Every so often the petulant murmur of thunder – threats shouted over the shoulder of a bully that has raged impotently and walks sulking away in defeat despite his strength.

No amount of rain would sate the soil. Water flowed into the parched cracks of the hard earth and the cracks remained. In the silence of the morning and the sun's reluctant climb, it was already hot enough to wither a rose.

His ears followed the flowing sounds. Searched for one of the cool, dark places. Every rain was different. The rocky canals, dry most of the time, could fill unexpectedly. A rock might come dislodged – earth might shift or give. God's or the universe's or fate's randomness loosing a torrent unto any unsuspecting fool camping in the otherwise suitably shaded recesses.

He found one with a muddy low-point, the water sparkling and still. In a few hours, when the sun reached its blinding apex, the water would dry up. The earth puckering like scar tissue in the baking heat. Any creatures unfortunate enough to need water were running out the shot clock on this one. Good a place as any, Joe. You listening?

The ersatz falcon made no motion. But for the soothing hum pulsing up the clerk's arm coming from its inner workings, it might have run out of batteries.

Saladin.

The bird straightened – tinny, disembodied voice issuing from within its beak, though beneath the hood it did not move. Recite authorization code, please.

He put on a thick Irish brogue and ended every statement as a question. I am Yusuf ibn Ayyud, the Righteousness of Faith. There is no God but God, and Mohammad is his prophet. Mine shall be the doing of all good deeds.

Remove hood and issue command.

He reached up and undid the hood, pulling it away. The sleek, curved head of the creature did not look at him.

Patrol for small-class. Paint blue. Recon potential hostiles. Paint red. Execute.

The bird shrieked the recording he'd snatched from a movie, adopting the tenor voice of a battle-crazed mameluke.

ALLAAAAAAAAAAAAHU AKBAR!

A single fierce beat of the wings and it took flight, soaring up as if gravity held no dominion over it. The wings briefly eclipsed the sun, the creature's silhouette imprinted on his retina.

They were out in the forest and he was the disciplined one and the serious one and he was the one who was on task. The three others that shared his features and his voice were splintered off among the rocks and he was the quiet in the center. The rifle in his hands, lever out so the action gaped open.

Shut up Danny, nobody loves you, not even Jesus!

I'm telling Mom!

That's because you're a fag.

You stay out of this!

He kept quiet. They'd wasted the .22 long-rifle rounds, the yellow jackets, on interesting-looking rocks and whatever seemed like it needed to get shot – this was the last one. They'd flushed a fawn out of the underbrush and run from the nearby doe that came at them in retribution – his scolding falling on deaf ears.

At present, he did not think of his squabbling brothers, running around in bare feet and swimming trunks. He put out of his mind the unpleasant line of thinking that naturally followed his parents' insistence that the four of them wander off and find something to do while they... straightened up the camp. At present, all of that was noise, and the snake crawling toward his youngest sibling's ankle was the most important thing.

Above him, the hawk circled. His eyes out of focus, the rifle still hanging from the strap, not even at the ready. Always at the ready, on the strap or in his grip and sighted – ever vigilant. He saw the movement before the hawk's gaze fell upon it and the machine painted the target with a wandering blue dot. A snake, moving as slowly and elegantly as it could. Waiting at the water's edge for much the same reason the clerk did.

The rifle was up and sighted. On the front sight he'd dabbed orange-pink neon nail polish from the cosmetics aisle. The straight bar of metal shown between the dark hills of the rear sights, the gyroscopic blue dot staying for one eerie moment fixed perfectly still across the back of the unknowing snake as Saladin pulled up just so – drag canceling forward motion for tiniest fraction of a second and...

The snake's head burst and his brother shouted and jumped what seemed like five feet in the air. The serpent was crawling one moment, dead the next. An absolute and unarguable dichotomy.

His youngest brother cursing and jumping around, the others laughing at him.

QUIET!

They were.

Maybe you'll watch yourself next time instead of relying on me to use the last bullet. He threw the rifle to his youngest brother, who fumbled with it and dropped it. Come on, we're heading back.

He saw the bright blue dot as it settled on the head of the snake. He brought the rifle to bear and he had to time to see it was a kingsnake, a sharp, solid black that betrayed it when it slithered against the alkali. His rifle's report rippled out into the empty air, and he heard the effect even a little bit of residual moisture had on the sound. By the time the crack of it reached the kingsnake, it was dead. The creature was a great granddaddy – nearly five feet long, as long as he'd ever seen one of that type.

Sal couldn't lift something that large, so it fell to him to decide whether or not he wanted to go down to retrieve it. He cast his glance back to the store, sitting on the precipice. The rain had eroded the soil that settled at the rock's edge. He saw no movement there.

He reached into his coat and brought out the little ear-bud with the small microphone next to it, plugged it into his right ear and spoke a simple command to his companion.

Cancel small-class patrol.

It wasn't a treacherous journey down into the muddy canal, but it was a journey. He found purchase and made his way slowly, with the sort of exaggerated care so unlike the rest of his behavior. The reptile lay destroyed, head beside the water, with its blood and brains in a drying splatter alongside it. There could be other things in the dark, hiding in the shadows beneath the rocky overhang, clustered there and waiting to drink the water -- or like him, waiting for those who came to it.

It was within reach if he just stretched a little...

The overhang gave way beneath him and he fell down into the waterway, plunging into the mud and the wet.

Mike with his bicycle overturned. The second son – always trying to prove himself better and stronger. The front wheel had struck the unyielding muck and he'd been sent flying over the handlebars. The boy's arm was broken.

I'm fine!

Yes, he said, hitting the kickstand on his own bike and dismounting. Why don't you get up and clap your hands in celebration?

Fuck you, I said I'm fine!

Or maybe you could do a cartwheel. Come on. He reached out his hand toward his brother's good one.

Mike slapped it away, and the violence of his motion excited the break and he held it to himself and bit back angry, furious tears. He'd effectively benched his whole summer and he wanted to be angry at everybody.

I can sit here in the mud with you until you see some damn sense, he said to his brother, or I could just carry you kicking and screaming.

I'll kill you.

Yes, yes, I know. I'll bet you could take me with one hand tied behind your back. Let's go.

Finally the younger one reached up and took the elder's hand. After a while, they were walking, the injured supported by his brother's shoulder. It was half a mile down the road to the nearest phone, and the frenzied shouting they got from their mother in the emergency room was just one other thing they couldn't care about.

He was uninjured, and the snake was still recoverable. The dark surrounding him seemed devoid of hostility. He sat there in the cool and found the water to be fairly clear, at least as water went out there. Saying nothing for once, he reached down and drank of it, then leaned back up against the rocky wall of the canal.

He abided there until the sun crested and began its decline, and when he looked up, the silhouette of the falcon perched on the edge with the western sun at its back was somehow not a new occurrence, but some chilling recollection.