The smaller corpses were the first to rise. They came in pairs, thirty-five in total, all mutilated and wrecked upon. Gashes, bites, bludgeoned skin and torn muscle. It would have made the Fisherman freeze had he seen them. But he did not, for the bodies were far off and away from the Fisherman who kept his side to his reel and whose tired face clocked the time spent with the extra black rings underneath his eyelids. Like a tree stump. He had been at Lake New Hope since five in the morning and had experienced the wasting away of hours since the turn of the millennium. An old man.

He raised his hook and bait, not a single bite. Then he dropped it again in calm disappointment.

News reports of the days of terror this last month had worn him down and he figured today, today at least he would relax, on the lake waters. Maybe he wanted to drown into the tepid waters, to wash away the news headlines from his memory, those of the abductions and of the murders. But the more he dozed, the more they came back up. Haunted.

It was ten in the morning. Ten thirty-four to be exact when he got his first bite.

He awoke. The Fisherman put his legs against the timber of the boat and brought up his heavy, whining reel. His tongue smacked against the roof of his mouth and he could not hold his bucket hat from falling atop the water and floating like a brown lily pad. His muscles were strained and he wished he was younger. The metal fishing line cut his palm and moved him, dragged him to the inner walls of the boat. He wrestled, he added new scars. His white hairs stuck past his wet skin, what a thrill.

He fought against the bubbling waters, he fought against the rope and with one final yelp he fought against his strained heart. He collapsed on his back. Something went flying above him and landed in the boat.

It was a shirt.

Striped, a polo shirt. Torn to ribbons. His eyes opened and he felt stress wounding him again with a headache. He felt two more rings chiseled underneath his lids. His rod rolled away from him, on the seat of the boat. The Fisherman leaned back. He yelled into his hands. Yelling until his voice croaked.

He looked up, tired as if coming out of a sleepy haze. His red face felt the cool sting of air. He narrowed his eyes to the spot where he had won the shirt, then past that to the blur of a object that floated on the horizon. It was off in the distance, a bump in his vision that interrupted the blinding morning sun. He rubbed his eyes as the mist and dew often guttered his vision. When he opened again, he saw more bumps. More specks. More black foreign bodies. His heart began to beat wildly. The Fisherman looked down the side of his boat and saw spurts. A collection that grew like cancer and swallowed the hull. Festering, alive almost, as it rattled his boat with white fizz. He looked beneath the depths of the dark waters. Was he in a cauldron? Spun in circles from the wooden spoon? No. There was no witch or alchemist. It was something worse, it was the vomit of the sea.

Curiosity bit him as much as fear. He stuck his hand in the water. It felt warm, gassy. He brought it back inside and saw the pinkish red on his palm. It had a sticky viscosity to it. He stood, walked back and tripped over a cooler. He fumbled back to a seat. The violent sound had become all-encompassing, it sounded like an explosion underneath his small boat. He could felt it from his balls to his brains, the trembling roar of the lake. He was going to die. His face lost all color.

“Goddamnit.” He shouted. A geyser came out, a pillar of foaming white. It was erected fifteen, maybe twenty meters high before it shattered into small wet daggers. They struck him. The Fisherman put his hands on his face and against the spray and screamed for dear life as his boat rode the high tide. It jumped, it clapped down and struck water so fast that he could feel the wood break. His boat nearly capsized and he screamed, screamed at every crack and break of the wood. The Fisherman hesitated to stand up but did after a while. He felt bruises and a compression in his head. An eye, swollen. His body, pained all over. He had been thrown like a rag doll in the tempest storm.

His body was still and cold at the ends of his limbs. And the waters returned to calm prosperity, all the noise and all the movement, dead. He stood. His body felt limp. He wiped the water from his face and looked out towards the horizon. His heart stopped, his pulse went faint. The color in his cheeks faded and his eyes turned to humble grey. He stood dead, staring westward. What did he see?

Corpses. Corpses rising from their watery graves. In gentle rhythm. One, two, three, four, up and away towards the rising sun.

Vicars

July 15th, 2017

10:04 AM

The most peculiar thing about the nineteen-ninety-four Volkswagon was not the two demon hunters driving it, Vicars as they’re called. Nor was it the zooming eighty miles an hour pace they were working it to. Nor was it the incoming image of Havenbrook that superimposed itself on the front glass, that little gritty town sitting at the top of the little-itty mountain in the eastern parts of rural Colorado (yet somehow maintaining that new age industrial edge). No. The most peculiar thing about that car and about those inhuman men was the laptop sitting atop the passenger, Apollo. More than that, it was the images he scrolled through as he took lazy puffs of Camel gold-band cigarettes.

They were images of a corpse. What the Havenbrook Report called ‘The latest bite of the Vampire of Havenbrook’. Apollo sifted through the images of the corpse, copied them, saved them.

“Do you really need to do that right now?” Dion said (the driver). He turned sharp, the whole car nearly derailed but Apollo sat, comfortable in the intense cloud of smoke he fumigated the car with. It was hard to believe he could look through the black screen and into the laptop. Dion steadied the car, put his hand in front of him and wafted away smoke. He looked to the passenger, to Apollo, and stared at his eyes. It looked like he (Apollo) hadn’t slept for weeks and Dion suspected that perhaps he was the vampire spoken of.

The car bumped. Both of their tall heads hit the roof of the car.

“I’m sorry.” Dion half-smiled at Apollo.

“Keep your eye on the road.” Apollo exhaled smog. Dion looked forward, gasped, turned his wheel, and made his brake screech as he came around the bend. Apollo didn’t flinch.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize.” He closed his laptop with a ceremonious clap. “We’ll be there in thirty minutes.”

“Was that article important?” Dion asked, more out of nervousness than curiosity. He was taking glances at his partner to be, the intense fellow with the dark rings around his eyes and the brown skin and the unyielding gaze.

“It might be. It might not be. It’s just something to read to catch up on the recent history of the city.” Apollo said.

Dion looked ahead, both his arms were straightened out on the wheel. It felt worse now without the cacophony of typing or the buzz of a computer fan to keep the attention away from Dion. Now it felt, at least to Dion, that all the attention was on him. On his driving, or rather, skidding around.

“So, uh, is this your first mission?” Dion scratched his neck.

“No, it’s not.”

“How long have you been in the game?”

“Thirteen years.”

“Wow, you were young when you started.” Dion said in a tone he reflected might have been too patronizing. He took glances to see if the man took offense. On further inspection, he began to wonder if Apollo was even here, for Apollo was looking elsewhere, maybe to the sky or the smog or at the sun, as his face looked scrunched and wrinkled.

Dion licked his lips, fidgeted with his hair.

“A Vicar for thirteen years.” Dion said. “So you’ve seen them right? Creatures. Monsters. Demons?”

“Sure.”

“How was it?” Dion’s mouth was slack-jawed now in what looked like child-like curiosity. Well, as child-like as a twenty-two-year-old man could get.

Apollo looked past Dion to the window, then to the forest that colored the mountain range a drab green like cancerous ocean algae. He looked closer, to the lake and closer still to people he saw on the water surface, swimming and dunking each other in their wisp-like white clothes.

“It’s frightening.” Apollo answered.

“Oh, I’m sure." Dion said. "How many times have ya fought?”

“Is this an interrogation?” Apollo drew his sharp eyes to Dion. Dion felt the sweat upon his forehead.

“I’m sorry.” Dion went back into his seat. He waited a bit for the silence to pass. “Right. I get it. It’s rude to ask so much of you without introducing myself. Well, my name’s Dion and I - ”

“Don’t care.” Apollo interrupted. “I know everything I want to know about you. You were taken to an orphanage, a Japanese-American from Virginia. Poor and abandoned by your mother from birth. At the age of six, you were indoctrinated and spent the next twelve years training in that lonely hell you’d call the Vatican. You had your operation four years ago and after adjusting to your new existence, well here you are. A real church boy, fresh out the fucking archways in what I assume you assume to be the holiest fucking mission you could ever undertake for the Lord himself.”

Dion felt naked, exposed to a burning sun as it felt.

“Hey come on. You represent the church as well, don’t insult it.” Dion said.

“They give me work. That’s it.”

“What does that mean? If you weren’t raised there then where’d you get your training from?”

“Doesn’t matter.” Apollo said.

“Everyone has a back story, come on.” Dion turned and swore he felt the car drop inches closer to the pavement.

“A man’s origins are important to him and him alone. To strangers? It’s just a good way for them to play armchair psychologist. And let me tell you something, that’s the worst thing to be, in someone else's small fucking box. I’ve heard enough of that psycho-babble-injured-child bullshit to know I don’t want it or need it.” He said with finality. Dion stared, confused as to why he had even bothered asking. That was the end of the conversation in that car. And both of them it seemed had decided unanimously, through wordless agreement, to stay silent for the rest of the ride. Idle silence, a jumping and wobbling idle silence.

They passed a blemished sign, rust-red. Apollo turned his head to read it. ‘Welcome to Havenbrook’.

They both turned then to the city now sprawling and unfolding itself upon their eyes. It looked like a city about to dissolve into the forest. The road was broken into cracks, black shards of asphalt. The stores were of worn stone and from the crevices and gaps of brick and concrete, you could see the wild grass and weed growing out serpentine-like. There was a pharmacy. A goodwill store. A candy store and all of it was so barren and lifeless as to be mistaken for a photograph of some grim Depression-era stock photo. It had the same wasted palette too, gray, brown, black. Apollo almost confused it for those ghost town tour props, like the walls would fall down after revealing themselves as being cardboard cutouts. But it was real. As they came along the sidewalk and looked out, it was all real; the broken turbulent road, the empty-eyed people wandering about like zombies, an old factory chimney towering over them with its shadow. It looked like a pipeline straight into the heavens, there to deliver the all the obfuscating grime the city had to offer.

They stopped their car and got out. They stood in front of the pharmacy and looked across the street. There was a parking lot, the children were on the floor pulling out fistfuls of wild grass and driving their toy cars on uneven terrain. The adults were looking up to a man (a loud-mouthed man at that) and suckled on water bottles.

“Do you think we’ve been punished without reason?” The man said to a speechless crowd. “That this was some kind of cruel lottery we had the unfortunate pleasure of having won? Don’t be a fool! It’s all the Lord’s design you see. This punishment, this sin. All a test! A test we have failed, I tell you! We have succumbed to that vanity of vanities, just look around yourselves!”

“Amen.” Some old soul said in the background. The younger parents wanted to speak but felt choked to answer.

“Our debauchery, our gluttony, our worship of these false idols known as money, known as lust, known as man! Known as man! For all worship not of God is not of good faith. So can you see now, why we have earned this punishment? What it is deserved?”

“Amen.” A few more voices said.

The preacher rose and stood atop a turned over shopping cart. The wheels still spun and they pulled on his dirty vestment, a black robe botched with holes.

“You weep and moan for the freshly dead that litter the obituaries, I don’t! I tell ye. For they had deserved it! They’re sinners, sinners I tell ye! And I know! I know because I heard God, in the privacy of my lonely existence, I heard his voice. And what did you know? He reached out to me. To me! And he offered salvation. And it’s on discount, I tell ye. It is for sale, clearance! So long as you heed my words and put your faith in God, you will have salvation. It’s cheap, it’s not easy, but it’s cheap.” He licked his lips. “And know this. Know this! That this plague of death is His machination and if you listen, you too can avoid it! Let me tell ye!” He was spitting with the excitement. “He sends the trumpeters up and above the mountain, He sends the plague through the rivers! And the horrors, they live beneath us in want and wait like roots, there to tangle and strangle. So heed me, let me deliver you away from this evil. Let me tell ye. Amen!” The Preachers baritone voice seemed to ring with a sweet timbre and finally forced the rest of the crowd to cheer or gawk or leave.

He fell (the Preacher) back to earth, nearly taking off into orbit with that throttle of blood-rushed screaming. He settled himself next to the shopping cart and began shaking hands, talking privately, mingling as they say and handing out small pamphlets with a pixelated picture of his face on the front and the words in comic sans font that read ‘JIMMIES NEW CHURCH OF THE LATTER-DAY SAINTS’. Most people, however, looked afraid and ashamed of being afraid.

“I don’t think that’s in the bible.” Dion closed the door of the car with a gentle tap. He began to feel cold for a moment before he realized it was sweat and the gust of air.

“It doesn’t matter what’s in the bible. It’s a brand and he’s a smart salesman.” Apollo studied the Preacher. “And honestly, if you ask me, that was one hell of a pitch. For idiots, at least. I’m sure those poor fucks think he’s the next messiah.”d.

“Don’t be so snarky, man.”

“Doesn’t make me wrong.” Apollo watched as the people helped the preacher through the crowd and started throwing small coins from their light purses inside a fedora sitting on the floor.

“Look at ‘em.” Apollo’s eyes narrowed. “I never expected to find any rocket scientists in this dump but this shit still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. They’re like monkeys.”

“Come on.” Dion bemoaned louder.

“What? They’re rejects. The accumulative IQ of this city probably sinks into the single digits.” Apollo spat. Dion walked towards him, chest forward. He seemed transformed, completely different than the Dion in the car. Apollo made a mental note, a catalog he named Dion’s range of emotions.

“I don’t like bullies like you.” Dion frowned, in a dignified kind of way, with his chin up. “A servant of God ought to be kinder, more sensitive to the troubles of the common man.”

“Get your head out of your ass.” Apollo looked back to the people still huddling. “I’m not a servant of God, just His child. And one with a good pair of eyes, for I foresee nothing that resembles any kind of future for this shit hole of a city.”

“That’s what I mean. They’re just misguided and down on their luck is all.”

“Two hundred.” Apollo interrupted. “This city has seen two hundred rapes since last year from a measly population of about three thousand four hundred. Wanna know the only thing that outperforms the rapes? The rate at which a motherfucker kills another motherfucker. Five hundred out of three thousand four hundred. Wanna know what outperforms the murderers? The junkies.” Dion walked back. He felt trepidation coming onto him like a hot flash across his cheeks. His high pumped chest deflated.

“All right. All right. I get it.” Dion said.

“Most of these fucks can’t even read. Read, Dion, read. Wouldn’t be surprised if that Preacher carries around the holy book for show.” Apollo pointed to the false prophet (or honest one, to some circles) and the cart he drove with earnest excitement, the loose change was coming off him and the baskets sitting on the baby seat of the car. He stopped for a moment. Knelt down and picked up a quarter with shaking hands.. “I’ve made a fair judgment. These people, they’re like Neanderthals. I’m sure they’d worship a fucking tree if you told them it’d help.”

A shoe-less man passed them, hair longer than his arms, who ate from a loose packet of raw hot dog sausages.

“Look at that? Some of them even look prehistoric. Like they came right out of the fucking wax museum.” Apollo laughed.

“That’s enough.” Dion looked down at Apollo. Apollo looked up. Dion’s shadow was wide across the floor yet looking closer into Dion he could see the innocence in his eyes and it made Apollo calm. He was a child in a man’s body, he thought. A bit dafter than one though.

“These people need our help. With the recent killings, you could be a bit more sympathetic, ya know? Stop judging them. Only He has that right, after all.” Dion nodded his head, agreeing with himself.

“I don’t care to be a hero and I don’t care to be sympathetic. These people were already at the edge of self-destruction.” Apollo threw a sardonic laugh at Dion. “This thing is probably a huge fucking joke anyways, the cities so shit they’ve probably confused their problems for the work of a demon or anti-christ. I see this happen all the time.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Oh, I am. Nine times out of ten - from experience - these demon sightings tend to be false positives. I wouldn’t be surprised if this whole mission was a hoax.” He spat a cigarette and found another in his pocket. It was mechanical, the way Apollo lit and drew in his deep breaths and exhaled, like the giant industrial furnaces and chimneys towering over them. “You see Dion, sometimes people see violence so palpable and so outrageous that the only excuse they can imagine is that it was the work of a demon. Sometimes that’s right. Sometimes. But most of the time, most of the time… it’s just a man, just a regular ol’ man, exercising the capacity of his cruelty. A tragedy, so to speak.”

They both kind of stood there, existing but not exactly acknowledging each other. Dion’s neck was craned, his eyes yielded away from Apollo and stared at the floor. Apollo looked up, to the sun and then to his dragging shadow. His face scrunched a bit and he walked away towards the noise of people, a crowd on the sidewalk. And Dion stood there, feeling jelly-like as if the concrete pillars inside of him (those of faith and of courage and of honesty) had been reduced some and all that was left was a worried man. Worried, annoyed, angry.

He looked up, the sun was blinding and he mumbled to himself: "This is going to be terrible."

Mr. Molyneaux heard the whimper of the door as it opened but saw no one come through. He sat behind the counter with his glazed eyes and adjusted his glasses to correct the confusion. No one walked through, he assured himself. But there was a thud. Somewhere in the many aisles of his small shop, he could hear the thudding and tapping like light rain. His face shifted direction to the sound and the bag of discount razors that fell and scraped the floor. 

“Who’s there?” Mr. Molyneaux said, hopeful that it was nothing. There was another thud on another aisle and he could feel the creeping sensation of fear tapping along his spine and playing music with the rapid tempo of his heart beat. Things would not stop falling, noises would not stop rising and he swore he could hear a distinct crawling sound from the floor. 

“Who the hell is there?” He screamed out again and knocked over wooden shavings and miniature horses and blocks of wood. His carving knife rolled on the counter as he stood up, though he could not lock his legs. Between fear and old age, his seized knees could only hold a right angle and shake. He lifted his head as high as he could and saw nothing but a littered floor. 

But he still heard the crawling. Like mice or some centipede dancing along the floor. He tried calming down but remembered the newspaper and it fed his paranoia. He was remembering the words and pinching his legs for doing so, ‘two old homeless people found dead, half-bodied and dragged into the sewers’. He started shaking and it looked as if he was having a seizure on his two feet. 

Crawling noises, again. He walked back and bumped into a wall. He was going to die, he felt it. Then silence overtook the store. There was only his palpitations as if someone had thrown a wrench inside of a broken engine and turned the key to see it chug. He held his chest with his hand and pulled on his white hairs with the other. His breathing was uneven. His hand rubbed his scalp to fold the standing hairs back on his nape and balding head. 

That was when he felt the long breath. A cold breath that seemed to suck the heat in his body, blowing against his fingers. He fell to the numbness like a weight on his back that pulled him to the chair. His skull pulsed with rushing blood that fueled the frightening thoughts in his brain, I will die.

He was in the jaws of the beast, he figured. All he could do was jump and give the illusion of putting up a fight. So in one swoop, he did all he could: cry, moan, beg, take his knife and push himself against the counter to a proper corner where he could huddle. He did it in such a quick succession that he tripped over himself and landed on the edge of the glass counter top, knife crying out as it scratched the surface. 

“Don’t kill me.” He pleaded with that muffled voice as his face pushed against the glass. “Please, don’t.” 

And all he could hear was a maniacal laugh. 

A snorting laugh. 

A stupid, childish laugh. 

He turned and saw his grand daughter on the floor, red and turning purple as she chortled and suffocated herself with humor. Mr. Molyneaux’s shaking did not end rather, was transmuted. He no longer felt limp and oozing. His limbs felt like tree trunks filled with the sap of rage and he went up to her and grabbed her by the shirt. 

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” He screamed. She laughed. “I’m seventy-four, do you know how easy it would be to give me a heart attack?”

“I’m sorry gran-paw.” She tried to say in the brief moments of calm. 

“Sorry? You’ve made a mess of me. Scared the soul right out of me, girl. God damnit, Sophie. What the hells the matter with you?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all. I just thought you’d be happy to see me.” She cleaned the drool off her overalls and blue shirt that came out. The old man looked at his grand daughter's small face in surprise. He couldn't believe the wide grin on her as if it didn’t even belong to her, stolen from a mad clown. She looked like a snake with its mouth unhinged.

Mr. Molyneaux sighed again and relief filled his lungs as he breathed what he now realized was precious air. He sat back, laid the knife down and rubbed his temples.

“Why’re you here? Shouldn’t you be at school?” He said.

“Well, aren’t you happy to see me.” 

“I would be if it was after school.”

“They canceled school, got scared by the news today. Another abduction. Don’t you read the paper?”

“Are you lying Sophie?” 

“The hell I’m lying.” She lifted herself up to the counter and let her legs dangle. 

“Don’t curse.” 

“Hell isn’t a curse. It’s just a place.” 

“It’s both.” Mr. Molyneaux found his glasses on the floor. They looked bent to his eyes, felt bent on his nose. “Well, what’re you doing here anyways? Go play with your friends.” 

“I don’t like playing games. I’m here for merchandise.”

“Merchandise?” He looked at her through the diagonal spectacles. “You certainly have my blood in you. How long you been selling those candies?”

“They’re chocolates. The highest quality, processed and manufactured in Switzerland since nineteen-forty-seven.” She showed her gums with a wide grin. Her teeth looked like broken down train tracks with all the gaps. "Besides… what are you, IRS?” 

“What do you know of the IRS.” He reached for a half finished block of wood and began carving again. 

“Enough not to answer to you.” She took out a wad from her overalls. “I sell enough.” In her closed hands was a bundle of twenties.

“Let me see if they’re real.” Mr. Molyneaux dragged his eyes to the money. Sophie reeled it back. 

“Let me see the good stuff first.” Her tone became deeper and Mr. Molyneaux knew what the voice meant. Haggling. 

“You want a box?” He asked.

“Two.”

“That’ll be thirty bucks.”

“It was ten per box last time.”

“You didn’t have money last time. I pitied you, honestly.”

“I won’t take anything short of fifteen dollars for both boxes.”

“God damn girl. First, you try to kill me and now you try to bankrupt me?”

“Fifteen.”

“Twenty-five for the two.”

“Fifteen.”

“Who the hell raised you when you were young? Me. Who changed your diapers and took you to the doctor? Me. Who lets you run amok in his store? Me.”

“Fifteen.” She did not blink, did not move. She looked like a blue wall. They both drew their stern faces but the old man was the first to turn.

He opened his counter and realized a depressing absence of green. He began to sweat again and felt the chill of another kind of death coming onto him.

“Twenty-two.”

“Fine. Twenty.”

Mr. Molyneaux twitched a bit but ended up shaking her hand.

“I’ll give them to you after I close shop.” He had to rip the bill from her hands. “Stay on the counter and take up space. I want the store to look like it’s open.” Mr. Molyneaux said. She stood for a bit, it wasn't long. He turned, she was gone. Disappeared into the back where she climbed the gondolas, a little metal jungle, searching and inspecting with the kind of curiosity of a primate. He smiled. She was his grand daughter. Very small, though mentally too old for middle school. She resembled him more than his own daughter, Sophie’s mother. For inside of Sophie was that stubbornness he found in himself. It was a likeness that vindicated Mr. Molyneaux and his failing bloodline, a collection of reprobates. He wondered if his genes must have played leap-frog for a generation. The thought made him chuckle and in the humor, he almost lost track of the door opening again. The creak, the bell ring. 

Sophie dropped. She stared from the back room where her gaze locked on to the counter space, it looked like she would burn a hole through the glass.

Dion came forward first with a pumped chest and eager smile. Apollo was behind. While Dion wasted his time lurking the aisles with hungry eyes, Apollo made his way to the counter. 

“I want a pack.” Apollo pointed down to a gold-branded box of cigarettes. He eyed a map of the town and put it on the counter too. 

“You two new around here?” Mr. Molyneaux asked. Sophie felt pride from her grandfather's stiff face. He reminded her of an old oak tree, a slab left to dry and harden into a bulwark.

“Something like th- Put that back.” Apollo pointed to the bag of potato chips Dion came up with. 

“Please, I’m hungry.” 

“We’ll eat later. Put that back.”

“Come on.”

“Stop being obnoxious.” Apollo hissed.

“What?” Dion looked around for sympathy.

“It’s rude.” Apollo said.

“You of all people? Calling me rude?” Dion went over back to the wall of many-colored plastic bags and almost knocked it down with his firm placing. 

“That it?” Mr. Molyneaux rung up the number. Apollo looked at a silver wrist-watch hanging by the side and added it to the potpourri.

“Oh, but you’ll buy that huh. Real important to tell the time. And the cigarettes. You addict.” Dion said. Apollo threw an annoyed stare at him.

“That it?” Mr. Molyneaux repeated.

“Yeah.” Apollo said. He took out his wallet and set down some bills and when his eyes came up he saw the blond girl. Sophie felt cold as if the veins in her body had all stopped their transactions. She swore he would eat her, hurt her, kill her. She held her breath behind the wall though did not understand her fear. They were just people, weren’t they? No. Maybe. They were odd, she knew it, felt it. It was enough to justify her shivering legs.

“No, actually. I’d like some news if you don’t mind.” Apollo redirected his eyes to the wood-carved horse on the counter.

“We don’t sell the morning paper here.” Mr. Molyneaux said.

“Good thing you have a mouth and an ear, right?” Apollo could feel he had offended Mr. Molyneaux in some way. It was in the air like steam or mist. “I just wanna know if anything strange has happened around here.”

“Besides you?” Mr. Molyneaux said. He did not like them and it was clear on his face. Maybe it was because of how tall they were or the color of their skin or Apollo's rugged face, but they made him uncomfortable as if they were things pretending at being human and falling into uncanny valley. 

“With that attitude, I’m surprised you even have a business. I just want information.” Apollo said.

“This is why no one likes you city people. Always insulting us.” Mr. Molyneaux mumbled. “Why do you care about the news so much?”

“What business is it of yours.” Apollo said.

“None. And since it ain’t my business to know it ain't my business to tell. Maybe you should try being a friend.” Mr. Molyneaux said.

“Right? Right! He's not anyone's friend.” Dion chimed. He walked up next to Apollo and donned his bright, piercing, smile. “We’re just with the church. Just here to help the people with a little faith, you see."

“Don’t know what the bible can do.”

“About what?” Dion asked.

“About the crazy weather, we been having lately. Or the strangeness of the city. Or the killings.”

“Anything you know about them?” Apollo pressed and they could all feel something drop. It was the sound of the little rapport they had thrown away, into an echo-less pit. Mr. Molyneaux frowned again.

“No. I don’t know anything. Go buy the paper elsewhere or turn on the tube.” Mr. Molyneaux opened the register, took the money and they both kind of floundered. They looked like fish breathing hopelessly on land. Sophie saw the wide mouth on Apollo and laughed. She knocked over shelves onto herself. Then her fear came back. Everyone seemed to turn to her but only Dion ran to help. He extended his hand and she crawled away from his worried face. 

“Are you hurt?” He said. 

“Of course she’s not.” Apollo said from afar. Mr. Molyneaux looked helpless with his quaking hands. Dion lifted the shelf, he picked her up and stood her though she squirmed. She looked angry and bitter, he backed away. He wanted to apologize, started on it but felt a tap on his shoulder. They left with the plastic bag of things on their hands. Sophie looked at their shadows through the windows of the store and how they dragged along with the falling sun, she could not help but feel small. It was the smallest she had ever felt and it incited in her an anger. Anger grew into desperation, desperation for a relief she wanted from her frustration. 

She ran out. 

She’d give them a piece of her mind, especially the brown one with the mouth. 

Mr. Molyneaux called out for her, but she was too far ahead and hounding the men trying their way into the flow of pedestrians. She reached them almost but from the sideline, she saw darkness and then her whole face was smothered in that same blackness. When she looked up a man stared down at her, disgusted. His face was like clay, cracked and dry and beginning to harden and stay disgusted. She stood up. Rubbed her eyes and then she realized warmth on her nose. Warmth down her lips and on her chin. Her nose was bleeding and as the faces of strangers looked around to her she began to feel small again like some great weight was cast on her shoulders and forcing her to the floor.

She ran to her grand father and from the man with the blood on his shirt. He wiped his shirt and by now everyone around them had begun gossiping and observing. The strangers, the vicars. The bloodied man looked back at Sophie. He too was feeling nervous and he too experienced that same heaviness cast on his ankles. It was a strange thing, this moment, all four of them looking at each other. All ignorant to the nature of the other. The players all set, but blind to each other's allegiance.

Apollo and Dion who would kill the bloodied man. The bloodied man who would kill Sophie. Sophie who would die a lonely death.

They all looked at each other for a moment and split from the nauseous gaze of the crowd. All terrified in some way, all taking their separate ways down the same labyrinth.

It was only a few minutes into the murder and John Alestor was already interrupted. It was a knocking that came from his front door, a familiar tempo. He rose and stood in his sweat, felt it collect on his collar. He set down the fish bone blade on a table and left the room in darkness as he skated across the wood floor, into the stairs that he hustled down through. All of him was white, the boxers, the socks, the shirt. All of it except for a particular red stain on him. Realizing it, he started taking off his shirt. The knocking was getting angrier. 

“Hold on.” He moved button to button. Grunted. Ripped it, threw it inside of a closet to his rear to forget about it and walked towards the door. 

"Hold on." He screamed. It sounded like a battering ram was oppressing his walls.

Alestor looked through the keyhole and sighed. 

“You’re home early.” He opened a sliver of the door. His eyes spilled through the slit. The capillaries on his eyes throbbed, his iris's looked like black holes as if little red worms jumped into an abyss.

“I was studying.” The man behind the door said. 

"Right, hold on." Alestor said.

There were five locks in total, two chains, three dials that thumped and clanked as they hit the the wall and the floor. When they opened he couldn’t help but sweat, especially with his son in front of him.

The look they gave each other was standoffish with their raised and stretched chins to give the appearance of an under bite. Their noses bloomed. It was a long look between the two. He was a slim boy, tall too but you would not have noticed with how low his head was. His clothes were too big for him and it made him seem like a mummy underneath a ceremonial wrapping.

“Why are you naked?” The son asked. 

“Oh?” Alestor looked down. “Oh. Oh, some girl spilled her lunch on me. I wasn’t even mad, you should have seen her sad face. I took the clothes out, they’re in the laundry now.” The boy responded with a dull and pale look.

“Is that the truth?” He asked.

“Of course. What’s the point in lying about something so small.” Alestor said. 

“I don’t know, you tell me. What is the point?” The boy said.

By now he was getting nervous again like he had gotten earlier before. He looked around to see who else was outside, neighbors who watered their grass lazily with beers in their hands, another who backed his giant orange truck into a pole. That one was in a hurry. Moving houses, probably, and Alestor was not surprised. His panorama gaze grew more intense and with it that narcissistic paranoia that drew his eyelids shut and made his eyes beady. He wanted back inside his cove and yanked on his son’s arm.

“Come on, get in.” He said. He dragged his son who plopped down on the sofa.

“Are you hungry?” Alestor asked. 

“No.”

“How was your day at school?”

“Fine. How was your day at the clinic?”

“Fine.” Alestor bit his lips and looked up the stairs. He brought his eyes back to his son. 

"Just fine?" He asked.

“I dealt with a young mother, she left her husband and child. Didn’t know why she left them, only knew they made her feel terrible.” Alestor said.

“Sounds like it was rough.” His son turned on the television. 

“A little, for me. A lot, for her. I’m just the man she talks to.”

“Rough, huh. Would you still do it if it wasn’t your job?”

“Maybe.” Alestor began to climb up the stairs and hung by the rail. This is how it always was, his son sinking into a sort of vegetative state. Ignoring everything, distancing himself as much as he could. It always made Alestor a little relieved, then sad at feeling relieved. His son looked to his direction as he put another foot on a step. It felt like he was under a search light with the intense heat on top of his half naked body.

“I need to go find a shirt.” Alestor laughed. "Then some forms and stuff afterwords. Long day."

“Dad.” Isaac lifted himself.

“Yeah?”

“Let’s move.”

“What?”

“I’ve been looking into transferring credits. We can go anywhere.”

“Where’d this come from?”

“A couple months of mulling it over. And the city.” His eyes narrowed. “The city, mostly. It’s draining having to listen and watch the nasty shit going on. They closed off half the school the other day. There was graffiti all over the chemistry labs. Crazy shit written. Junkies did it, the police think.”

“I understand. If you want to go I can pay for it.” Alestor was leaning off the guard rail.

“I don’t want to go without you.” Isaac stood.

“Don’t worry about me.”

“If mom was here I wouldn’t have to, but I can already imagine the loneliness you’d feel without me. That stuffs unbearable, you know that...” Isaac grabbed his elbow nervously. It felt like an anchor.

“I know it better than you.” Alestor gripped the wooden rail. He could feel his fingers digging deep and beginning to crack it into splinters. “I study it, I live it.”

“I want us out of this city. It’s not good. It’s like a fucking dungeon in here, with the people, with the streets.” Isaac said. His father seemed unmoved and only grew worse. “I went out the other day to grab a burger. I saw some woman dragging around some flowers in the corner of the street, weeping, just fucking crying and walking around. She looked like a ghost. I turned and next thing you know, she almost became one. Jumped in front of a semi.” He gave a desperate chuckle. “Good thing there was a fucking red light.” 

“Don’t curse.” 

“Who cares about that? What about the sto- I’m fucking nineteen.”

“I don’t care. You’re in my house.” Alestor punched the wood. It bent.

“Alright, that’s fine. That’s fine…That’s fine.” Isaac held his breath. His animated hands orchestrated some woeful plea. “We need to move. For the good of both of us. We have the money, I know we do.”

“I know we have the money because I made the money. I started the business. Me and your mother. Both. We made an empire through all the shit in our lives.”

“Empire? It’s an office. An office you can leave any time you want, like mom would have wanted. Don’t confuse your crutch for a dying wish.”

“To hell with that.” The wood broke. It collapsed and sent Alestor forward had he not readjusted his weight. Isaac fell back on the sofa, he could not speak. “I will not fucking leave, I can’t. You’re young and brash and lacking in foresight, you don’t know suffering. You don’t know starvation, you live in the luxury of my spoils. With fucking food in the fridge! With fucking air conditioning!” He began to kick the pillars along the stairs. “My work feeds you. It feeds me. It fed your mother and it would have fed our daughter. It was what made us. It was what we were good at, what we were meant to do until - ” His hoarse voice stung Isaac. Alestor was looking for the words. “You don’t think I want to leave this shit hole? I do, but I can’t. I don’t have that stern stuff in me to weather a future without it.”

Isaac was tearing up. “And I’m telling you that’s a good thing. It’s good to be afraid.” Isaac managed to say between sniffling and slapping his thighs. 

Alestor ran down and put both hands against his sons face and he would have maneuvered them to his neck had he lacked the little sanity left. 

“Some people like the idea of moving on, they can’t bear tragedy and think it’ll change. That it’s possible to change. But I know the truth. Eight years of psychiatric training, two decades of anecdotal evidence and insanity have taught me this: people don’t fucking move on. They can’t.” Alestor shook his son. “There’s a hole in my heart and it's scary to look at. It’s the type of terror that makes people want to jump. But the smart ones? They learn to walk around it Live with it even.” He let go of his sons face. 

“Or live in it.” Isaac said. He rubbed the red markings off his cheeks. What a smite those words were that drew Alestor back. He raised his finger to his son but was too shaken inside, he could feel it in his chest.

“I’m not jumping in! I’m not letting go. I’m learning how to deal with her fucking death the only way I can. I’ll fix it too! Do you understand?” 

Isaac did not understand. He only felt his face swell and in response looked for a proper meditative pose to sit in. When he locked in place, he looked like those gargoyle's atop the sky scrapers all brooding like. He sat in silence and turned on the television, raising the volume until the green bars would not go further. Now it was time to be patient. A perfect catatonic state. He hoped his quiet existence would help him disappear from his fathers eyes but it only stung Alestor deeper. He felt his heart fall into his throat, down to his gut. He cleaned his face of spit and a nose bleed that was coming out. His hands were hot.

“I need to get back to work.” Alestor said to no one. "We're not having this conversation again. You hear me?" 

The air was cool against his naked body. He walked up, past a hallway to a corner of the house that seemed highest of all. There was a latch on the ceiling and he began working the lock. He looked back to the loud cartoons and silent son. His chest depressed. It looked clear so he entered, closing it behind himself. 

He was in that dark room again where he heard a shingle of metal and shimmy of a man strapped in leather. Alestor moved his hand into the darkness of the room until he grazed the rope and pulled. 

In front of him was a gagged man. Masked, devoid of identity. He looked like cattle to Alestor, disgusted him like cattle too. 

On his back were the runes that spelled out Bael, written around the circumference of a circle. Further within was another circle and more long lines that made it seem like a strange constellation or the lettering of some primeval language. Alestor spoke the alien tongue and began to feel the sharp designs on the sacrifices back. The tattoo looked gray underneath the buzzing fluorescent light, his body looked gray. A stool sat to the rear of the gagged man. Above it a cup that smelled foul like something gamey. It was a boiled mixture, it steamed. Alestor drank the muddy water and ran his fingers to the right of the cup to a line of cocaine now ruined by his greedy fingers. He sniffed, his nose bled even more. But it gave him courage and he tightened his face as he closed his mouth to muffle a scream. 

“He doesn’t understand but he will. Won’t he, master?” He said with a strained face. It was all hitting him like a diamond bullet through his brain and out his balls, shining out through his perforated body. Alestor pushed down on the gagged mans back with his palm and inspected the canvas. “You will too. Monster that you are. Rapist. Murderer. You will be redeemed and in your sacrifice we will all see the goodness of my cause.” He traced the seal with his fingers. “I’ve saved you from a terrible fate.” Alestor was trying to convince himself for his hands waned. He took another sniff of cocaine.

His heart would not stop slamming itself inside the cage of his chest. He could feel tingles up to his finger tips and at the touch of the blade felt his energy discharged, collapsing onto metal handle. 

“Don't weep. You will not be the last.” He said. They both cried. The blade rose high up. There was nothing for the gagged man but the comfort of their heavy breaths like bodies in heat. He could see his death coming, from the corner of his tired eyes where the light reflected from. It looked like a lone star in the night sky and fell like a comet.

"Does he have a name?" Dion asked.

"It doesn't matter. He's just the Priest. Might be the only one left too."

Apollo took two steps into the church courtyard and already a nervousness came upon his shoulders that made him shudder. It was the first time in a while since he had that visceral gut reaction like his belly had been punctured and everything acidic in him came out. His pace was slow and he looked with close attention at the miserable expressions on the statues around him. It was a mausoleum of pain. The statues of angels and of Virgin Mary and of Christ. His shoulders twitched again as he heard the sound of the giant wooden doors open. There was a clicking sound coming from within. The attendees were leaving and they wore on their face fresh humility.

“Ah, we missed the sermon.” Dion said.

"Good." Apollo said.

They slithered through the crowd, coming to the holy water and dipping their hands to put the wet cross on their foreheads. It tingled, it bit. It reminded them of what they were not. Human. 

The halls were large and arched, the noise of their footsteps reverberated back to them. They looked at the Gothic pillars and the way they converged into a dome and they looked at the feet of those pillars where the devout sat on their knees. They locked their hands into unbreakable chains of faith. Past them was the Priest. He was smiling until he counted his money.

He jingled the basket and had disappointment on his face as he saw the yield. 

“We’re here.” Apollo said. The painted glass followed them with their neon eyes. He looked side to side and swore their dull faces dragged.

“Who are you?” The Priest was shaking his little basket. 

“The Vicars?” Dion said.

“Who?”

“Uh. Hmm. You texted us? Right?” Dion said.

“Mmm. Maybe.” The Priest looked up. “Follow me.” Perhaps he played stupid, perhaps he was stupid. Either way, it didn’t help Apollo from feeling that grating annoyance that made his eyes twitch.

They headed to the graves, through doors upon doors. Doors into doors. Just as Apollo's blood was beginning to boil they made it outside. To the grave and grass and chorus of chirping and of crickets. They were at the graves and Apollo looked down to the piles of dirt, more doors. Entrances into the lives of the long dead who breathed into the two men a sense of mortality as they went past the erected stones. The recent years were the most frightening and Dion felt life come out of him as he read over a strangers grave, '1996-2017'.

Gust broke into the yard. The sound of bells broke into them, their concentration scattered to the all-encompassing sounds. They were hollow tings all around them, coming from the graves. The bells were strung up on the tops of small plastic poles like broken pipeline.

“Why would a corpse want room service?” Apollo asked.

“What? Room service? Oh.” The Priest laughed. “Oh! The bells?”

“No, just the sound, really.” Apollo said. 

“Aha. Yes. We install those into every grave.”

“Into? Install? What?” Apollo said.

“It's tradition mostly. Started out of a fear.” The Priest raised his hands up and away from himself like a whimsical jester. “We had an accident a few years back. We came around to move a body, Andrew Boyle - God rest his soul - Well about this Andrew Boyle,” The Priest stopped. Apollo sniffed, Dion rolled his eyes and looked at the butterflies along the slabs. "I’ll cut it short then. We found claw marks in his coffin.”

“What the heck.” Dion said. “Was it a dog?”

“In the coffin, you idiot.” Apollo said. “Not on. In. What kind of fucking dog digs six feet under anyway?” 

“Yes, it was very strange. Poor guy must have suffocated.” The Priest stopped at a worn grave, made a gross expression and moved on. “You could see the stiff fear on his face, like a statue. Like those poor souls in Pompeii who I’m sure saw death the same way he did, superimposed on their eyes. Blackness.”

"How bleak." Dion said.

“Should have made sure he was dead.” Apollo looked around to spit and decided better to do it on the path than the graves. 

“Aha. Yeah. Well it was a strange thing for us and since then we've added a bell and rope to every hole.”

“That’s some fucked up room service.” He rubbed the dirt off of a plaque. A small karmic gesture. “How can you tell if anyone's still alive when it's this windy?”

The Priest looked up. He closed his eyes and began scratching his head. That was all the answer the two needed to feel that sense of dread grow inside of them again. 

“Why’d you move the body anyway?” Dion asked.

“Weirdest thing. His wife wanted it moved.” He looked back and Dion could feel the grin pierce him as if nails had been hammered into the gaps inside his vertebrae. He hunched and cringed and then the Priest continued out of enjoyment. “She said she had a dream about him, that he was drowning. She had it four days in a row before she had enough and well...”

“And well.” Dion repeated. Sweat collected on his forehead.

The Priest held the tension with his smile before he broke into a jovial mood. The laugh competed with the wind and it drove his hair up. 

“Well, that was years ago. We’re better now. You make mistakes, you learn. That kind of thing.” The Priest said.

Out of fear, Dion laughed too.

The grounds keeper looked at them with his leaf blower aimed without care at a wall. He was driving grass trimmings up and to the vines that extended like green fingers. The Priest looked at him too and copied his dumb face.

“Who are you again?” The Priest said.

“Enough fucking around. We’re the Vicars from the Vatican.” Apollo’s loud voice straightened out Dion.

“How can I be sure of that?” The Priest said.

“On account of us being the only ones here and knowledgeable about the fact. You didn't exactly post up the job in the yellow papers. We have a schedule, a text, a name.” Apollo wanted to add more than that but tempered the thoughts.

“Us four. God is here too, you savages.” The Priest smiled.

“Us four.” Dion's face eased. He still smelled of sweat. 

“You have quite a mouth.” He looked to Apollo who rolled his neck like a newborn child, he felt something was about to take off in his skull. 

“But when you're right, you're right. Right? I’ve summoned you and for a reason. Come along.” He dangled a key. They were in front of a small shed, dense with the smell of dirt and oil. The planks on the wall were half eaten by termites, the room was full with tools; scythes, hammers, nails mostly. The Priest lurked inside of the darkness of the shed where they could only see the small rays of light from the holed ceiling and the ephemeral particles of dust.

He came out with two rusted shovels.

“I can’t kill anything with a shovel.” Dion said.

Apollo was still recovering from his headache and rubbed his temples. “I can come up with a couple ways.” He mumbled.

“You need to think harder.” The Priest pointed to Dion. “And you need to relax.” His finger shifted to Apollo. “Your friends brought your stuff in a very strange way. They buried it, didn't tell me where though."

"Because they told us." Apollo said. "It's under a 'Mrs. Ruth'"

“They didn't tell me.” Dion said.

"You'd probably forget it even if they did." Apollo said.

Dion kicked dirt towards him. The Priest kept shallow smile. 

"Why's it so elaborate anyway?" Dion moaned. His spade dragged along the stony road and hit every bump along the curve up to the site. 

“Because it's too dangerous otherwise." Apollo said. "They used to just hand them to the keeper but there was an incident before with a rogue entity. Killed the guy, stole the weapons and used them to kill the Vicars themselves. Real fucking character that one. They sent a dozen Vicars after her. Most of them never came back and those that did killed themselves shortly after. The church never made that mistake again and you shouldn’t either. Don’t trust a single soul.” Apollo blocked the sun with his hand. Dion’s eyes were wide.

"But...but. What was her name?" Dion asked.

"Justiciar Léona." Apollo said "Don't worry, this was a hundred and fifty years ago. I’m sure the hourglass turned her over long ago."

Dion could not close his eyes as he imagined it. Apollo looked to him, hoping to see a frightened expression but suddenly saw Dion's face contort and scrunch. He was smiling. 

Dion came out of the imagination, he looked at Apollo and returned his face to neutral before running up the hill. Something felt raw to Apollo as he processed all the faces around, Dion's moment of gladness, the priest, the wandering mourning characters, all black. He shook his head, it was nothing, he thought. But as he pushed his thighs up and put his shovel behind his neck he felt in his belly that acidic tingling as if, instinctively, he knew that the day would only get worse and that fact dragged on his soul.

Officer Jeremiah came out of the house holding his pants and trying to finish the belt around his waist. He was smiling. Nearly glowing and behind him you could see a young woman with her hair still messy from a supposed wild ten minutes that really were, just seven. Jeremiah was a thin man, and he still had those juvenile marks of youth, acne, a confidant stride, an innocent smile. And here was Officer Heinz in the police car waiting for him, some old and saggy sack who melted into his seat. He would have been bitter had it not been for the vicarious nature of their partnership. For no matter how much Officer Heinz complained, he could not help but feel a second wind of youth through Jeremiah.

“You said you had something important to do. I thought it was a family emergency. A death, a fight, something like that.” Heinz started the car.

“It was a family emergency," He put the seat belt around his heaving chest. "We were discussing the future of our children."

“I'm sure she wants kids.”

“Twins.”

“And you want another girl.” Heinz pulled into the street. "This is the fourth one in the last two months. That's not good." 

“This ones a keeper, I'm done doing rash things.” 

“All you do is rash things.” Heinz said. "Boy, you didn't even last ten minutes. That's rash."

“Ten? I thought it was fifteen.” Jeremiah began to laugh.

“You’re young. You’ll get better. Trust me.” Heinz said. 

“How do you  know? Does your cock even work anymore?” 

“Longer than yours.” Heinz said. He couldn’t say he wasn’t impressed with the little exchange. He smirked, Jeremiah laughed again. At fifty he was double Jeremiah’s age and it felt good to talk to a young man, he couldn’t deny that. 

They drove their banter around the town but after a while, even the comedy died with the rhythm of their job. They were police officers, policing nothing. Driving corner to corner, for nothing. They began to collect things. Half a dozen coffee cups, burger wrappers strewn on the floor like carpet, so many paper bags they could have polluted the whole western shoreline. That was the job in the nice cut of town where the fences were white and the lawns were trim and proper. Mundane, tiresome. It was such an anesthetic job that they did not realize the rosy sky falling into night.  All the cars and people went with it. At least the sane ones.

It was nearing the last hour of their shift and their yawning became an epidemic.

“Want some coffee?” Jeremiah asked. 

“Yeah, anything hot .” Heinz said. They pulled up to a sidewalk. Across from them was a shop, The Colonel Weiner and a construction site was across from it, to the left You could see the sulking crane and how it covered the moon and stars. It looked rusted, lonely.

“It was supposed to be a mall. They had to stop work a few weeks back though,” Jeremiah said. “Someone killed himself from the third floor. Workers couldn't work after that, too real for 'em." 

They stopped the engine.

“You just gonna watch or are you going to go get some coffee?” Heinz asked. Jeremiah looked at the front of the Colonel Weiner where the window was being used. A young man stood there, his hair spiked like a porcupine and shaved at the sides. He wore a denim jacket, ripped and punctured like it had been put in an iron maiden. There were pins all around him. Bands, musicians Jeremiah had never seen or heard of, words that made him giggle a bit, pictures that made him angry. He was what Jeremiah referred to as, a punk. And he seemed to be flirting with the girl in the front of the window with more piercings on her face than hair. Their phones were out and the flash of their screens highlighted the smiles they wore.

“What’s wrong? We can go somewhere else.” Heinz said.

“I’m watching.” 

“Oh, fuck off. Let ‘em flirt.”

“But he’s loitering. Flash your lights at him.” Jeremiah was beginning to turn in his seat.

“Oh, for fucks sake. Leave ‘em alone.” Heinz groaned.

“If you wont, I will.” Jeremiah rolled the window down and with his light began to pulse it towards the couple. 

“It’s a little late, isn’t it?” He screamed from across the street. Heinz shook his head. “Why don’t you head home.”

The two looked back. The boy processed the red and blue colors of the car in his head and immediately, off instinct, began to grow more feral. A kind of negative conditioning caused him to tighten up. His frown manifested, his teeth showed like fangs and at last, he rose his skinny middle finger up in the air. 

“Why don’t you go fuck off, pigs?” The punk said.

“What the fuck did you say?”

“Oh let it go, you started it.” Heinz started the car hoping the noise would interrupt them. 

“He’s obstructing the law. Right?” Jeremiah said to Heinz. He brought his head out the window  “Hey, you’re obstructing the law!” 

It was an arrogance born out of boredom. A boredom born out of the hours of nothingness. Heinz only shook his head, he was young, he thought. Both of them were. That was why he was not surprised when the punk began to walk away, further into the street where he found a nice dumpster and wall to urinate on and a nice alley to run into. It bled into the construction site. 

“That’s illegal.” Jeremiah could not contain his smile and grating teeth. He gained scent of the crime.

“You love causing problems.” Heinz moaned.

“Me?” He slapped his chest. “The fuck did I do? He's the one who defamed that dumpster.” 

“You can't defame a fucking dumpster, it's already defamed. Damnit, Jeremy.” Heinz said.

"It's Jeremiah."

"Fuck, kid." He rolled the car up next to the alley. "I just wanted some fucking coffee."

Both came out of the car to the bite of cold and although the heat of the argument was still warm in them, it was difficult to move. 

"Middle of summer and it's this cold." Heinz said. "This is unnatural."

Jeremiah touched his belt and tried to remind himself where everything was. 

“Don’t even think about using your gun.” Heinz said. 

“I’m not, man.” He responded. He flashed his light into Heinz face who put his hand against it and pushed it down. 

“I know you’re new but here’s a good lesson to remember. We’re here to solve problems, not to cause them. Just for future fucking references.” He said. Jeremiah nodded and they both began walking loud through the muddled alley water. It seemed like a covert river, this black bough with its oppressive walls. It was Havenbrook's urinary tract for all around were toxins and trash. The blue tarps, cut and ruined into ribbons. The fence broken, leering over them. Trash upon trash, mattresses, littered diapers, used needles. They looked to the walls. Graffiti overlapped graffiti, in a kind of artisan warfare amongst the ghettos strongest painters. They saw a large eye in purple paint, a crown in yellow. They must have meant something but they were hieroglyphics to the two police. The names, the style, it all confused them as if they had entered a foreign land and they desperately looked for the instructions out.

They were lost. They began to blame the gallery. A turn lead to another which lead to another and here they were, unsure whether they were inside the alley or the construction site or if they were even near the city at all. All they saw was the tarp and the torn fence link and they looked at each other. 

“Fuck it. We’re going back.” Heinz said. 

“Coward must have ran.”

“Don’t start again.”

“What?”

“I’m talking about that attitu-”

The silence broke. There was a cry in the air. Man? Woman? It was too shrill to tell.

“What was that?” Jeremiah said. He firmed his grip on his flashlight. 

“Let’s call it in.” Heinz began speaking into his shoulder radio. They muttered things to that broken processed voice who distinctly told them, ‘Stand By’.

“We’ll wait then.” Jeremiah said. They heard another scream. It sounded like something broke. Wood? Metal? Bone. The thump bounced off the narrow walls, into their brain like a hammer strike. It sounded rhythmic. Like a beating, they thought. It was a noise that froze Jeremiah and that summoned Heinz who began climbing the fence.

“They told us to wait, man.” Jeremiah said. Heinz ignored it and fell over the other side. He took out his gun and perhaps it was then that Jeremiah realized how terrible things were. 

He looked around and saw his partner run off. Dumb and brash, he thought. With courage, he felt. He was alone then with nothing to him but a fading sanity. He heard a hiss. It drew him mad and he climbed. He fell. He ripped his jacket and started chasing after his partner who stood on the wooden ramp up. They were both sweating and adjusting to the obscurity of night. 

It was strange to have so many tripods and lamps around them, none of them turned of any use. All that was left to them was the flashlight, a shield, and the gun, a sword.

The darkness was thick. They could not see past an inch ahead of themselves and often Jeremiah had to hold onto the metal poles and concrete pillars as he followed the sound of foosteps. A touch of tarp made him jump, the cold metal made him shriek. They were torture devices, they felt like it. 

“Calm down.” His partner told him and grabbed his shoulder. “Don’t point your light where I’m pointing. We’re trying to get as much coverage as we can.” He said. 

Jeremiah shook. They heard sound. It was something wet, something dripping, something masticated. 

“Lets go back.” Jeremiah said. Heinz went forward. It was a floor above them, on the third, and Jeremiah was taking inches forward. They came up a bend and up the ramp, up, up, inch by inch they made their way to the open area that tapered at the end to an unfinished hall. There they saw the outline of something, hunched over, vesicular, decorated with terrible boils, running with venation all across its body. They could only see its back but it was enough.

Heinz readied his pistol forward. It clicked. So did Jeremiah’s and the sound seemed to attract the thing that looked up. It turned and they saw it. 

Nothing had made them feel worse in their lives than the image of the creature.

It felt like a hook had grabbed their spines and tore them out. It was a nightmare. It looked at them. Bird eyed. They were large dark circles hued with a sickly yellow, as if two dying lanterns dragged and dissipated into the caves of its eyes. It was moving. Not like anything normal, more like a frenzied schizophrenic. Bath salts? Heinz tried reasoning. But those were mortal reasons and this was something worse. These spasms were not of human ownership.

Its face drew forward even more and all the courage in their hearts shattered into a thousand flaws. For from its mouth they could see two legs dangling, kicking away in the air, kicking from a beak that would not stop chewing. A rude eater. 

In its belly, the thin membrane hung out. From inside the full stomach, they saw a form. A human hand pushing out.

They broke then and there.

They shot. Shot. Shot. Shot. Shot at the light, shot at the dark.  Shot until they were out, shot even when they were out. They were in the deafening buzz. Light flashed on their faces. Jeremiah turned for a second to see his partner.

Someone was there. But his partner was further behind.

Screaming. Spitting. Holding onto a stake that pinned him and clung to his bleeding stomach. Jeremiah heard the sound of falling blood, he heard the sound of drool. He looked up to the figure next to him and ran.

They had worked well into the day. A woman and her child stopped to look at the pile of ever growing dirt and the two men whose rolled sleeves showed their sweaty skin. One Hispanic, the other Asian. Her eyes narrowed. She had always considered herself one to not assume but this was too wrong, the grave, the Priest who stood from above and the two men who dug with ferocity. The Priest turned and looked at the pair. He was sweating though he did not work, nervous though he was innocent.

“Hello ma'am, just an inspecting.” The Priest said.

“What’s there to inspect about a corpse?” She said.

“You’d be surprised.” The loud clank of shovel hitting wood alarmed the woman to put her hand over the child's face. Within moments the coffin shot up by Dion who leveled it by one side of the pit. The woman gasped and ran, shaking her head as the child looked back with a dumb, toothless smile. 

“It’s pretty light.” He said. 

“There’s no corpse in there, you know that, right?” Apollo opened it. Dion put his hand over his eyes out of reaction. A box came rolling out, without any particular flourishes. A simple red box that looked like a drawer ripped out and glued together with loose planks. They threw it over and rested the coffin back on the floor. Dion leapt up, grabbed the edge of the pit and lifted himself. Apollo walked up the slanted coffin with the box. The Priest looked at them.

“Aren’t you going to fill that?” He said. 

“That’s not our job.” Apollo shook the box and put his ear against it. 

“I’ll do it later, I swear.” Dion smiled. And he was being honest.

They headed inside, the Priest taking the lead with his angry wide stride. He slammed the doors, scratched the floor with a chair and sat. To his right was the basket of money. It was the only thing that comforted him. He tapped his hand against the surface of the box hoping to hear something mysterious. Hollow. The Priest snatched it from their hands. 

“You don’t get this yet. I need to tell you your job first.” The Priest started. Dion straightened out and put his hands on his knees. It was a tight grip that got worse as they sank deeper into the conversation with the buzzwords that inspired Dion; job, duty, honor. 

Apollo slacked in his seat. 

“You're here by my demand - ."

"Gerosa Branch, Alpha Omicron Phi. Reporting, sir." Dion blurted. Apollo put his head away to the side where he tried counting the tiles on the floor to distract himself. He couldn't. He felt too embarrassed. 

"Thank you, Dion." The Priest said. "As I was saying, I wouldn’t have called you if I didn’t need you but things, well, they’re bad. Unpredictable is the best way I can put it.”

“What’s wrong?” Dion leaned closer, he looked like an eagle with his neck pushing outward. “How can we help?”

“It’s about the state of the police and their terrible relationship with the press.”

“Yeah, that’s very, very, unique. Go on a fucking talk show, we’re not politicians.” Apollo said. The Priest frowned.

“They’ve been sabotaging evidence, hiding corpses for God’s sake.” The Priest said.

“Don’t use the lord's name in vain.” Dion interrupted.

“Yes, of course.” The Priest looked at the table. “They’ve been getting rid of bodies, forcing cremations and well, hiding them. The pieces of corpses at least.”

“Do you have any evidence to support this claim?” Apollo said.

“No. I knew the man though.” The Priest said. “He came to me for advice, he was a regular. I told him to commit to the truth. The next day, he was dead. The tapes don’t exist anymore. He doesn’t exist anymore. Shot in the head, claimed to have been mugged. Poor Geoffrey.” 

“How much corruption is there? Give me a percentage.” Apollo said.

“I don’t know, ten percent? Five? It’s a small group I figure, I don’t think they could maneuver as a giant body. It might just be a few heads on the police force and a few men. You don't need many to cause trouble.” He said.

“Well, that’s terrible.” Apollo searched inside his pocket for a cigarette. He lit. He puffed. He folded his arms. “But we can’t fix corruption.” 

“I don't expect you to, but the nature of the crimes, the few that make it through at least, seem strange. They’re obscene, cruel, almost irresistible for diseased minds. The victims were bled like pigs, cut up like dog meat. Random too. Ex convicts, homeless, prostitutes, college kids. I’m afraid of them branching out.”

“We're not here to solve homicide cases either.” Apollo said.

“Why don’t you shut up and listen?” The Priest said. Dion smirked. “They’ll call it homicide but I call it ritual. The way they’re killed, like offerings almost. Bodies burned behind rings of salt, cut with a careful design, tattooed in strange ways. Whoever is doing this has a kind of faith behind their craftsmanship. Satanic, probably."

“Don’t assume their monolith.” Apollo broke his stiffness. “I’ve dealt with people like this but they were just that, people. No demons, no anything. Just people. Misguided, dumb, people”

“Well, that’s why you’re here right? To find out what they are.” The Priest put both hands on the table. He seemed ready to pray and the desperation in his quivering eyes worried them both. “It’s getting bad. It feels like I can't even breathe the air without tasting copper in my mouth. You need to help and do so with extreme prejudice. I don’t think there’s any saving this lot.” They breathed in the tension in the air and filled their lungs with it. Their chests felt heavy like lead was inside of them, weighing them to seats they felt could break at any moment. 

"That's very spiteful for a Priest." Apollo said.

"There are limits to anyone's patience. Besides I’m Catholic, not Buddhist."

They heard a snap. The box opened and their first contract was here. There were two suit jackets out for them, a pair of gloves, and two long threads of what seemed like yarn. Apollo began to strip. 

“Why do we need to change?” Dion said. 

“They don’t teach you shit, do they? Consider it a loan. They’re letting your borrow your gear and they’ll take your coat as a ticket. They'll want their stuff back too. Can't let you take a joy ride, after all.” Apollo said.

“There’s nothing funny about that. Can’t they trust us?” Dion said.

“No. They need to know: alive, rogue, dead.” Apollo put on the blazer, he fitted his gloves and looked at the runes stitched inside of his jacket. 

“Why do you get gloves?” He said. 

“You should have asked.” Apollo said. Dion narrowed his eyes and tugged on the Priests arm.

“Hey, can you send in a reque-” He jerked back. The Priest yanked his arm away and slid back a few inches.

“Don’t touch me.” He said. His eyes were still and wide and staring into Dion, the wrinkles on the old father seemed more pronounced in his anger and his neck began to glow red with rising blood. 

“I'm thankful. But that's it. I know what unholy marriage you two are, man and beast.” His dagger eyes stabbed at them. The sudden shift took Dion by surprise who assumed his desperation earlier would be the start of a friendship. As if desperation is any good of a start for friendship. But now the truth was out. Apollo put hands into a cross hatch.

“Yeah. We’re frightening monsters. So keep far away and let us do our job.” Apollo said. He seemed experienced in weathering the storm of insults, you could see from his straight face, mocking face almost. For his whole life perhaps had been one insult after another. That was something Dion could admire.

“We won’t cause trouble. Just don’t get in our way.” Apollo scooted up. The Priest sat still in the back, tensed on his shoulders. But Apollo was not concerned with him, rather the two pieces of woven string in front of them. He grabbed them without caution, uncaring to the startled mess of the Priest. He held them in his hands and ignored The Priest completely, as he glared.

“Helen used to make these.” He said. “I met her before she passed away. Now her son handles the business.”

“Threads of life.” Dion said. He wrapped it underneath his arm. 

“Keep it hidden, let it touch your skin. When heretical arcana is close, they burn, when it’s even closer, they glow.”

“Are they supposed to be warm?” Dion asked.

“Of course, they’re picking us up after all. Let them calibrate on their own.” Apollo said. Dion couldn’t stop scratching his arm and each time he looked at The Priest he scratched even harder. They all felt on edge, all far and backing away from one another.

“That’s all we need from you. I’ll keep in touch if I have to.” Apollo put his hands on the table and dragged his whole figure towards the Priest. He left him a smile before he went for the door. “And only if I have to.” The Priest nodded. Dion couldn’t look him in the eyes. Discomfort was festering in his brain. It made his thoughts cloudy and fumbled his mouth, he did not know whether to thank or to apologize or to bad mouth. Whatever feeling it was, it tugged at every corner of his body. He walked out before it became too uncomfortable and closed the door. The Priest looked at them, then to the basket of money. He shook, it felt lighter. 

Both Vicars were out. Dion huffed, he didn’t realize how little he breathed until he was out of the room. The nuns that passed stared at him, some of them smiled, some scrunched their faces in disgust. Dion was sweating again.

“Is it supposed to be this hot?” Dion asked.

“What is?”

“I don’t know. My neck, my face. My arm.”

“Your arm?” Apollo asked. He searched in his pocket for the string and began to put it on his left forearm. It was the first touch, but one coil around his limb and he could already feel it searing into his skin. His eyes opened, he bit his lips and pulled on Dion.

“Hold on. ” Apollo said. “There’s something here.”

Oh, the stars would fall tonight.

They stood in a rented apartment room but could not fit themselves in it quite yet. For the last few hours, they had been in a fumble of fear. They sat around a table, hand out as they watched the pulse of the string of life. There was no movement, sometimes. There was, sometimes.  Sporadic things.

“Are they working?” Dion asked.

“Yes.” Apollo said. Dion wandered around the first few hours, Apollo kept his eyes on the string. He did not want to see it move, he did not want to admit to a fear that was pulsing in his heart. He wanted this whole thing to be over and done with, simple, neat, orderly. But on the third hour, he saw the coiling. The string, like a snake, wrapped around his arm, burned his arm, stung his arm with a tight grip. The faint glow of the string reciprocated in his eyes. Dion could see it across the room like torchlight and began smiling. He unwrapped his arms, the same symptoms were on him.

"What do we do?" Dion asked.

"We," He held his chest. "We find it, see if it's here."

"We know they're out there." Dion spat and could not hide his jovial face.

"We need to make sure."

"Alright, let's go then. Why wait?" Dion said. Apollo was trying to relax his chest. He looked to Dion whose irises turned red with the manipulation of his excitement. Apollo’s did too as he tried filling himself with honorable rage, punching and scratching at his own thighs and finally committing himself. 

“We’re leaving.” Apollo said.

“How will we find it?”

“Hotter the better, colder the deader.” Apollo chanted like mantra. He was bumbling between fear and anger. “That’s what she taught me.

“Well, alright.” Dion smiled. “Hotter the better, colder the deader.” 

Apollo reached into his coat and put his hand against that esoteric design stitched on the inside of his jacket. It was the smooth feeling of felt at first until his whole hand was on it. Then it slipped. It felt like water as he maneuvered inside this curious zone like going through a pond blind. When his hand came out he had in it a strange mask. Waxy looking, almost, white except for the area and shadows around the eye sockets that seemed tainted with black lines. It looked like a Rorschach, odd design. Was it wild plumage? Leaves on pale dirt? A broken porcelain road, black veins perhaps. Its face was neutral, it had nothing else to it but the leather straps that attached themselves to the back. 

Dion revealed his own, a simple smiling mask with crescent eye holes that dripped with blue-stained tears across the contours of its cheeks. These were their life masks, like thieves or jokes across the night. 

Apollo put his feet against the window sill, he looked up to the edge of the roof top across from him and looked down to the singular ladder shoot and lonely street. He jumped like a leopard across the sky, narrow-bodied, and landed like a storm. Shattering brick, disturbing gravel. For the night came and the hunt called.
  

Standing high above the edge did not help Apollo's pores from leaking. He felt death upon them both. His hands shook and he could feel the vibrations and heat wrapping around him. They were above on an apartment rooftop where the steam and smoke of a ventilation shaft contaminated them with the hot air, across from them was the faint smell of processed meat from a factory. Rancid and processed, like rot in bleach. It did not help Apollo. He was nervous, too cold to feel the warmth of vapors and his limbs felt tight like they were hypertrophied, full of an anxiety that was bound to explode. A balloon animal, shaped and bent by a clown. Pressed, pressed, pressed. Pop.

“What do we do?” Dion asked.

Apollo looked down with crimson eyes at the construction site that spanned half a block. They could hear noise. They could see details in the blinding darkness, their inhuman eyes adjusted, they were made for these things. Yet it did not help his mind for every new figure in the shadows made Apollo’s stomach clench harder.

“We’re going to wait until it comes out, then we’ll kill it. We’re in a good spot to see where it runs.” Apollo knelt on the edge of the roof. He was surprised his gloves did not slide off his wet palms. 

Dion tapped his foot. He shook his shoulders and began to kick around some plastic bags that floated. Apollo would have said something to him had he not felt the tightening of his throat. Then he stood.

Both of them got closer and reared their heads as they saw the first thing to come out. A man running, blood on his body. He fell. Something was thrown at him, a can of paint that spilled white all over and knocked him down. Dion tightened his hams to jump. Apollo held him. 

The creature behind the man finally made his appearance and Apollo could feel his brain focus, all petty thoughts disappeared into the backdrop of his primal instincts. Live, kill, eat. He felt sick looking around the blurred and slow time around him as his adrenaline high pumped through. He looked down at the creature. Tall, big bellied, but thin limbed. Neck-less for on the top of it's torso was a birds head. They mistook it for a plague doctor until its horrible mouth opened and the small ridges of its teeth showed like serrated blades. It to be something worse. It squawked and shrieked like a banshee’s siren.

“I’m not waiting any longer.” Dion said. Apollo wanted to tug him back but was too slow. Dion went forward, to a closer rooftop. He reached into his clothes and out came his instrument of death. It was too big to call a revolver, too heavy for any normal man. It was pointed forward and seemed to carry Dion with its own weight. Dion aimed up and it sounded like the heavens collapsing down onto the earth. Apollo felt the air break and push out. He opened his eyes and saw the meteor falling down.  

Pure silver, neon blue and heading straight for the beast. The creature heard it, too late but heard it and began to turn. His arm tore off into splatter and matter, black specks that turned the brown walls polka dot. Dion smiled behind his mask. So excited was he that he did not notice his own hanging wrist, the bone was sticking out, skin barely attached his hand to his body. He heard his gun fall and then realized the pain. Dion picked his gun with his good hand and pushed his broken hand back together against his chin. Apollo observed, it began to heal. Red mist came from the wound as the tendons and bones and muscles aligned themselves and reattached like self-healing machinery, red wires, red oil coming back to one another. 

“You fucking idiot, don’t push it.” Apollo leapt down to him. “Let’s go.”

But Dion would not move. He watched the arm of the demon regenerate as well, cell by cell, skeleton, then muscle, then that onyx flesh. 

Both of them seeds of the same breed, germinated in some unholy soil. 

The beast stuck its long hand into its mouth and out came something out of a carnival side show, a sword swallower. He removed the blade. It seemed bony, perhaps it was a part of his own body, Apollo thought. It was not a thought to hold on to.

“Move!” He screamed and pushed Dion to the side. The spear whistled by and struck through the metal vent behind them. The fan went flying, the building shed bricks. Down below the monstrosity was fixing itself up from its bad throw and vomiting out another weapon.

“We can rout it, start moving.” Apollo said. He began to jump roof tops before he looked back at Dion who was standing again by the edge and who with one strong gallop of his feet, threw the brick beneath him all directions and headed straight for the monstrosity.

“Listen to what I’m telling you.” Apollo spoke into the mask. There was nothing but static.

Dion put his hand against the side of the wall and stone broke into dust as he scratched it all the way down. He hopped like some maddened cat, knocking and throwing pipe and wood as he managed down. It looked like a deforested jungle of pipe and cement and plank. 

He was laughing. Apollo did not want to hear Dion laugh. He was sickly hungry. 

Dion was shooting smaller bullets all the way down from different chambers in his gun. And all the way down he was cut and ripped. More spears were chucked his way, more damage was done to both beasts.

He landed onto a broken floor. To his side, the unconscious body of Jeremiah, to his front, the beast staring back. Dion watched it. He was curious, falling into a desire for violence, just as Apollo feared. The beast reached into its beaked mouth, out came the skewer. He was a machine.

Apollo gritted his teeth as he looked down from above. He decided to move again when he had his fill.

“Just push him back. That’s all you need to do.” He told Dion. Static again. Apollo spat, slapped his forehead and headed on wards, past them, to the flat stone foundation, barely fenced by wood walls, where incomplete cement pillars erected upwards like albino evergreens.

Dion pointed his gun at the beast and stood. He listened, somewhat, to Apollo. But there was another competing muse in him, Mars.  

He shot. The thing ducked. It was quick. He was impressed. Both at the creature and his wrist that managed to stiffen itself better than before. He was only bleeding this time. He did not wait for his pain to subside or for the blood to stop dripping from his wrist, he shot again. Careful now, with tact to his rhythm, an uneven pressure of bullet shots as if a drum line had stopped and started only to trip over their abrasive beats.

The leg came off of the demon. It would not stop it though. It used its own stake to push himself back. The monstrosity hid behind the tarps and shot out its spears. Dion was stabbed in the foot. He grabbed the skewer and broke it, shattered it into bone dust. He would have chased through was stopped again. This one cut his shoulder and caused him to kneel lower. The creature was moving far and away. His body was fuming red.

Dion stared. His face clenched, his eyes closed as he held his bitterness back.

"You coward, come back." He shouted at the drifting footsteps. "What dignity is there in running."

So angry was Dion that he pushed through his healing feet, the pain, the blood and would have given chase but he stopped. For above he could hear groaning. A withered cry of death. This one was human. His heart was torn. Two voices, two desires roamed in Dion's mind. To help, to kill. He wanted to scream but he bit his tongue until it cut. He bled, drooled red. Hellish smoke released from his teeth as his tongue fixed its tip, it was the dying smog of his violent outburst. He fired an azure shot out at the sky. A flare. 

"It's not heading your way specifically. But close enough." Dion said.

"What the fuck do you mean close enough?" Apollo started. Dion cut the sound off his mask with a press of the button.

He looked around himself and it seemed like the world was finally coming back to his blurred vision.

Dion rested Jeremiah against a wall. He looked up to the moaning inside the castle of wood and decided to run. It was an excuse, he lamented, to not fight. 

Author Note: Now it's all caught up. New updates every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday!

The distant sound of gunshots died. The first thought that came to Apollo’s head was the idea that Dion had died. But then he heard the radio transmission. 

The second thought was the fear that he would have to deal with the beast himself.  

So it was. 

Apollo put his back against a pillar of concrete and waited minutes that felt like days before he heard footsteps. He wanted to believe they were Dion’s, but they were more nimble and he was not, they slapped the floor rather knocked it. He stopped his breathing at the realization. Everything was quiet and silence felt like another enemy to Apollo. A draft blew. Tarp slapped the trucks they strapped to. The top of the concrete pillar was full of what looked like small hairs of metal. The wind whistled. 

He waited. Until he could hear a screech, until he could feel the beast’s breath next to him he waited. This was the worst part, his hand in his jacket and his eyes peering out at the edge of his cover to a sudden nothing. Nothing was there. His eyes widened. His breathing started again like a high pressure vault at the bottom of the sea sucking in all matter. He exhaled and released all his intensity off the side of the concrete pillar. It was a high vault outwards.

The pillar collapsed into a storm of shrapnel that shot out every which way, that blew dust like a mushroom cloud up in the air and towards Apollo who could not see much in the warring mist. 

The pike was coming for him, straight to his rapid beating heart. He had no time to move. No, he did not move his legs. Apollo dragged his hands out of his coat and there was a sudden clank of steel that shot out sparks. The momentum broke, halted. The dust settled on their bodies. Their shadow figures defined behind the mist and spark like a Hellenian vase, with the silhouette of their bodies in tandem. A sword and a spear. Out before the beast was the long pike attached to its very long arm like a black line had been drawn straight through the horizon. Stopping it was the slab. A hunk of metal that Apollo had drawn from his coat, larger than himself, larger than any man, four feet wide and rusted all along its body. You could not see a reflection past its worn metal. It had no hand guard, it had no sharp edge, it was hard to call it a blade or a claymore. It was just steel and handle like a piece of metal had been chipped and broken off of Vulcan’s anvil.

Its tip was in the ground and as Apollo removed it from its cemented scabbard. The beast watched with an expanded yellow iris. He was far away from Apollo, wondering if the tall blade would ever have an end. When it was out, at last, the creature looked up as the long swing arced and rested on Apollo’s shoulder. A missile, a mountain top. All along its rusted body were the cracks and creases that spilled dirt from their crevices, a shattered, dull, slab of silver and steel barely held together. Yet there was nothing more frightening to the beast than that bludgeoning tool. It was better to describe it as a jagged cleaver. Horribly large, horribly hard to manage.

Yet manage Apollo tried. As swift as he could and whatever speed lacked was made up for in its strength. One swing is all it took to split the air into a shrill cry and drag dust across the wide slash like a vortex. Everything seemed to break, whether work of man or God, under the blade as he chased after the demon. They went at it in the complex. The poles shattered. The wood turned to saw dust. The floors were beginning to collapse. It was hard to tell if Apollo was hitting, only that he was too afraid to stop and think about much of anything. Under prepared, under pressure, Apollo could not manage to collect his thought. The beast smelled it, that frightened sweat.

The intimidation of the blade was starting to wear as they dragged their fight back out, towards the unfinished pillars and trailers and pickup trucks that pushed out with each messy blow.

It was beginning to end up terribly for Apollo. For between each thrust of his own blade out came five thrusts back. It was no dance of death as the poets would say of war and battle. It was the butchering of a chicken, the chase, and the dissection.

And Apollo was getting cut. He retreated. He stuck the sword back down like a worn white flag. The beast was not appeased and Apollo hid behind the wide metal. Apollo felt his elbows gashed as they stuck out from the metal shield. He put his shoulder against the blade to help hold it together as the pike hammered down. Apollo looked out and almost had his eye plucked. He could not gauge a good read on the slender fighter, he could not tell what was arm and what was pike. He only knew the beast had as much range as him and his was much more efficient. 

He tried removing the blade, tried swinging. But Apollo was kicked. He flew, blade and all, onto wheel barrel holding brick. It made him turn sharp. He fell on pallets and felt the shards of wood stab his back like deadly acupuncture. The creature ran. The red steam was coming off Apollo's back as his body rejected the wooden daggers. The splinters fell, the cuts receded. But not quick enough. The beast rushed him and he struck his blade into the floor once again. His body was not healing fast enough and he felt the air growing hotter. He wanted to run.

 “Move.” Apollo heard through his mask. 

There was a noise. A pop at first, then the sound of metal scratching. 

At the sound, he immediately kicked his blade up, back to his shoulders. He jumped backward and watched the dirt cover them like murk.  It would have fallen on him had he not moved and he could feel the strength of it as it pushed the air down and blew his hair back. 

It was the crane that fell. High and mighty, collapsing onto the beast and leveling the floor. Apollo landed on a metal container and watched. He looked up, Dion was resting his smoking gun. He looked down and was paralyzed at the image. The beast was ripping its limbs trapped beneath the crane. He was pulling himself from the indentation, limb from limb. It could not wait to stand, it bit at itself like a starved cannibal. It would have stood, Apollo thought. It would continue endlessly, a program of evil running indefinitely. The thought brought something to life in Apollo. He put the sword to his side and watched each crack inside his metal ruffle and deepen its vein into the blade, he saw the dry cracks fill like rivers of hellfire. It was a long wait, but he had time to wait. He spun. One, two, three, four. He counted. And on five, threw his sword out. It flew straight, landed inside of the creature and all the world could see afterward was the large explosion like a pillar of the earths core shooting up.

The whole city saw the explosion and the smoke that jetted up. The police were hesitant to go inside, opting to watch from afar for the fire to settle. It was perfect. Apollo dragged his legs through the heavy camouflage and picked apart the body like a hungry crow. The burning remains of the demon lay charred and from its chest and belly out came the stone. A red, philosophers stone at the heart of it all. Fuel for any Vicar. Apollo took it, put it in his coat. He picked up his blade that felt lighter. Metal shavings were coming off of his weapon and it made him bite his lips and groan. Then came the torpor. His whole body scraped the hot floor as he tripped. His eyes closed though he begged them not to. Whatever effort was in him he spent on the last leap, across the crane now on fire and sticking out of the floor like a harpoon into the white, ashy earth.

The police saw the masked figure but did not shoot for they were afraid. The fire dragged at Apollo’s heels and spread all around as he scaled up the black brick walls. 

“Monster.” One of the officers said. So it was.

He reached into his pocket for the red stone that pulsed. It felt rough in his hands and chalky as he bit into it. It got easier and his appetite became for voracious as he nearly ate his hand. He felt the drool on his palms and how it went down his arm. His legs that felt pruned, empty. He had hooks for feet, the way they dragged at the floor with their tiredness. And now they rose. His chest that took in hundreds of small breaths now relaxed to a proper pace. He could not say he recovered after all his stomach was still cut up, his back still bled and spilled onto his white shirt. At he was healing and more important than that, he was calm. He heard footsteps near him but did not bother to reach for his blade now half inside his jacket and half outside, like a magicians trick undone. The only crowd to laugh at him was distant, it was the helicopters cutting wind and the police and firefighters now drowning the flames.

“Are you alright?” The voice said. Apollo hung by the edge of the building and started to lift himself. Dion grabbed him by the arm to help. 

“I don’t need it.” He gave him a weak push.

“I guess I just can’t touch anyone today.” Dion said. He took his mask off and put it inside his coat. 

“We’re not home free yet.” Apollo said.

“We’re close. I don’t think we’ll be getting caught soon. Just as long as we properly come down from the roof.” He said. Apollo agreed though reluctantly put his mask back in. He let Dion go the way first and followed his clanking down the metal stairs on the side of the building. Apollo wanted his back just in case he did fall, better to do it on him than on the floor five stories below. 

“What’d you do? That was a big explosion. Hit a gas line?” He asked.

“No. It’s nothing you have to worry about.”

“We're fighting together. Of course, I have to worry about it.”

“The only thing you need to worry about is that impatience of yours. What the fuck was that?” Apollo gripped the hand rail to his rear and heard it bend into a sharp cry as he nearly dislodged it. He was breathing fast again. Dion looked at him.

“What do you mean? That guy needed help and I helped him. What kind of man would I be if I just let him die there and then?”

“A smart man.”

“I’d rather be stupid and moral than smart.”

“You’re neither smart or moral. You're just stupid.” Apollo said. “You didn’t think at all. Besides the fact that I could have died - We could have died. Did you ever stop to think what would happen afterwards? You think that thing would just stop at us and that stooge running out of the fucking building? Of course not. He’d go on and on. And then the problem wouldn't be just one or three dumbasses dying.”

“Four. There was another man that I saved. That’s what we do, save people. Remember?” Dion looked proper in his stance, with his chest primed with courage and his head high up above. Apollo was two feet further, up the stairs and yet he looked so small. So he evened him out. He grabbed Dion by the coat and put him against the ledge.

“You listen up, Superman. I thought I told already that we aren’t heroes. But I guess the words became lost in your empty skull. Or are you deaf? Or stupid. Or both.” Apollo said. “Whatever you think you are, you should stop. It'll get us killed. And unlike you, I’m not a warrior. I don’t care for the security of idiots, I don’t care to fight fair. I’m a hunter. I track, I plan, I execute. I don’t do anything but the steps that guarantee success. And you should too. Because failure is much more frightening than you think you know.” 

He let go of his coat and Dion pushed him back. Apollo fell down on the stairs and left his head to hang, his eyes fell to the floor. 

“Striking a weak man. At least you’re learning.” He said. “But you haven’t learned enough. You don’t know what cost failure is. That’s why you strut around with the fucking finger on the trigger, shooting just because you can. Acting high, just because you can. Keep feeding that fucking ego, buddy. You’ll find out what the price. When you’ve got so many fucking bodies on top of each that you can’t even see the sun rise, you’ll see what playing gung-ho gets you.”

“You’re sick in the head,” Dion shouted. He no longer cared being hidden from the spotlight of police. His voice echoed in the narrow passage they were coming down to. “You’re reprimanding me for saving two people? So what. I shot early, so what. It ended up alright and that’s all that matters right? The end game, whatever the cost. We killed it, we saved more people and we did it my way. That would be good enough for anyone. But not you. Oh no, not you.” He walked down as fast as he could. He sounded like a storm with the drumming he did. “You’ll call me the narcissist when I help others, but here you are demanding everything be done this way and that. Calm. Cool. Heartless." When he had the chance, Dion jumped on to the floor. "That won't sate God's tribunal. I promise you that."

“Oh, you’re so selfless, Dion. So. Fucking. Selfless. Was it a selfless laugh then? That I heard when the bullets started flying." Apollo stood. 

"So fucking selfless, with your boner as you beat the shit out of each other. A real Gandhi type of guy.” He was shouting down the alley to Dion who turned the corner. “You’re a modern day John fucking Lennon, aren't you. You god damn violent retard.” He was talking to no one now. No one but a man in the corner of his eyes, opening a door and throwing a bag of trash onto the floor. He stared up to Apollo, not as much afraid as he was confused.

“Fuck off.” Apollo said. The man gave him the middle finger and walked back inside and Apollo climbed down the ladder, walking out into the streets as he finally caught a second wind of energy. His exhaustion was at least not debilitating anymore.

He looked to the streets, a few cars would come by now and then but the sirens were low and the smoke was far off. It was a distant chaos that raged on in the city, like a shake of the earth slowly growing into a seismic raze. But it shook. Everyone moved, head to toe. Apollo could feel it. The Priest could feel it. Sophie could feel it. And so did Alestor.

He had left to his office after the murder and had spent the last few hours in his study. He looked out to the small spinning dots of light. They were clear even in the cloudy night. His arms were shaking on his chest and he had to sit for he felt his legs were getting weak. It was the first time he felt afraid of leaving out at night. He would sleep in. He looked around to the bookshelves and desks and small figures for something to entertain him as a fidgeting body infected him. He closed the window. He shut the curtains, the chill was inside. A strange, summer cold. He sat down on the sofa and looked up to the ceiling. He wanted to send the message to his son to stay in tonight but could not move. The cold was too strong and his body was turning stiff and long like an antenna. He heard a voice. He turned, something was speaking into his ear. It felt like every cell in him stopped their process like paralysis, like death. He felt the grip on his neck. It was his master's hand and finally, the words became clear.

“You’ve failed me again, haven’t you?” 

And Alestor froze.

Author's Note: New episode on Monday! Peace.

Sophie’s feet dragged on the floor as she was taken to the principal's office. The accusation was simple, a boy with a bloody mouth crying to his mother in the nurse's office. She had been reminded of this all the way there and how she should pity him, and how she would feel if she was there with the bloody nose instead of him. When they told her this she had looked at them, with her bruised cheeks and said “If I was him? Well, I wouldn’t be crying that’s for sure.” 

They didn’t ask her much after that and were glad when they sat her down in the soft, large chair. She was too small for it and it was too low to the floor and she had to stand to see past the horizon of the dark-wood desk. She looked around at all the memorabilia stuck along the walls, trophies, and pictures, vignettes and declarations of achievements. A panorama of the schools' success the principal had adopted over the years. Her eyes came to the window and the shadow there. A little figure, her friend Pip.

The judge was not here, she noticed. It was cold and quiet and Pip began to shout at her.

“Sophie.” He said. She turned away. “Sooo-phie.”

“So-so-sophie.” His front teeth were missing and he spat with each s. “Psst, psst. Sophie.” 

Finally, she threw a pencil at him and hit the window pane. 

“What?” She said. 

“Thanks.”

“You shouldn’t be thanking me. You should be depressed. You can’t even defend yourself and you’re supposed to be a boy.”

“I know. But he was fat and big, I got scared.” His voice quivered.

“I know you did. Wanna know how I know you did? Because I’m here with my hurt face.”

“I’m sorry.” He said.

She adjusted her lips into a neutral position, somewhere between resentment and pride. 

“Do me a favor.” She nodded her head. “Make yourself useful, start selling. I’m losing business because of you.” 

“At how much a bar?” He asked.

“The same price we always have.”

He scratched his head. “How much is that?”

“Two-fifty you dunce.”

“Okay. Where do I get the candy from?”

“What do you mean? What happened to your stock.” She walked to the window with her backpack. Her eyes were beginning to narrow. He knelt and look small under her gaze.

“I lost it.” 

She wanted to drag him up to her to eat him, a horror-movie monster. She scratched at the wood frame and looked up to give herself room to breathe. She undid the zipper on her backpack after reflecting - It was her fault, she shouldn’t have trusted him - and she dumped three pounds worth of chocolate on his forehead. She shut the window, tired of hearing his moaning and heard the door behind her open.

“Trying to escape, I see.” The Principal said. 

“What? No. I was just.” She bit her cheek. “Just looking outside at the kids.”

“Sure you were.” The Principal fell atop his chair. “I can’t keep one eye off of you without you wandering off and doing god knows what. You’re like a damn imp, girl.”

“You always say that.” She sat and crossed her legs. Her arms were close to her.

“And you seem worse every time. You’re too stubborn, it’s like a shield against good advice.” He shuffled paper and found a red note.

“Are you going to call my mom?” Sophie asked. 

“Yeah.” Her eyes fell. “I don’t think she’s home.”

“Cell phone?”

“She doesn’t answer it. Not at this hour.”

The Principal searched her face, what little he could see past her blond hair covered her face. It was just like the other interrogations and it felt just as bad, but he could do nothing but pity. That was worse. Leaving her like a castaway on her small island. He wondered if she was even aware of the S.O.S written on her face.

“Your grandpa then?” He put the pencil down and rung up the phone. 

“Yeah. Grand paw can pick me up.” She looked up. He left a message and looked her over again.

“Why don’t you find a hobby. Join a club, do something with your time. You aren’t dumb. I know that. You know that. But you sure as hell act dumb.” 

“I can’t be that smart if you say I’m acting dumb. I thought part of being smart was acting smart. Like a scientist or somethin’.”

“You’d be surprised. Plenty of people act smart without knowing the part and the dumber they are the more opinions they seem to have, probably trying to make up for how little they know.” He said. “You can find them on TV all the time. Loonies, the bunch of ‘em.” He was writing down information on a slip, that was his kind of justice. 

“I wish you’d act for your own self-interest, Sophie. You could do a lot with your life, you know that. Mrs. Breyer says you’re good at math.” The drag of his pencil sounded sharp to her.

“I am acting for my own self in-te-rest.” She mocked.

“Doesn’t seem like it. You’re like those dare devils, head strong and always shooting yourself out of a god damn cannon. The problem is, girl,” He sniffed. “I’m afraid you don’t even realize you’re flying straight into a dumpster. Have some sense.” 

“You keep calling me the senseless one, but have you ever thought that maybe it’s the world that acts a little dumb.” She said. “Everyone’s too selfish if you ask me. Too demanding.”

“Sophie.” He rubbed his nose bridge. “You punched a kid.” 

She lit up.

“I pushed him too. I brought him to the floor and got him three good times before he punched me. It reminded me of when I socked Clarice. She deserved it too, I don’t hurt nobody that doesn’t deserve it you know that.” 

“What I’m worried about what you qualify as deserving it.” 

“Hurting me or my friends. That’s it.” She crossed her hands and blew the hair from her mouth. The Principal raised his finger and all a sudden came the grandfather like a rogue white-strawed tumbleweed. He blew it, went across, looked around and kind of spun in his excitement. 

“Where is she?” He said. Sophie raised her hand. “What’d she do this time?”

“The same thing she always does. Got in a fight.” The Principal handed out the slip.

“Whatever she did she can explain. She’s responsible and I trust her.” The Old Man said.

“I know. You do this every time, I know the both of you pretty well. You’re frequent customers.” The Principal sighed. “I’m not even going to bother. She knows what she did, don’t you Sophie.”

“Yes, Nicky.”

“I’m Mr. Colefield to you.”

“You’re just Nicholas. Just another old person.” She said.

“Alright Sophie, alright.” He almost laughed and would have if he didn’t feel so red about the name Nicky. His father called him that and he hated him. “What kind of punishment do you think you deserve? Be honest.”

She looked at her Grand father and the dazed face he had, she looked outside to where she imagined Pip crawling. Her face still stung and it began to stain her white face.

She smiled. “A week suspension. I think I must’ve broken that prick’s nose.” 

“Don’t curse.” They both shouted.

“I’m not giving you a week. You might enjoy that, you’re getting three days instead.” He said. She smiled. “And don’t be so proud of that fact, for God’s sake Sophie.” 

He pointed them away to the door but with held the grandfather for a bit. 

“Have you considered sending Sophie to therapy?” The old man pried the principal's hand off. It looked like he hurt the grandfather. “I know a guy, he’s local too. I have a teacher who goes, she’s even recommended me about it too.”

“This family has never seen a quack doctor and never will. Good day, Nicky.” He puffed up.

The Principal sighed. The old man left and out they went to the car. Not a word was spoken as they drove. They sat in silence, the radio provided white noise as they toured the city. On the corners of streets were the drawn out flowers and candles. Sophie kept her eye at the offerings and the pictures, she did not want to forget their faces, she felt that maybe, that she was the only one who’d remember them and it meant that much more being the chronicler. 

She realized it had been like this for a while, staring out at the families and police and the pictures that had fallen and cracked their glass frames. It only got worse as she got closer to her house, by then the whole sidewalk seemed like a garden of misery. But there were no officers this time. There were only the lonely men and women on the porches sitting and scratching away at lottery tickets, the stray pit bull who barked a muffled warning at her. They stopped, there was a distant wail of a police officer car.

“I’m sorry.” She said.

“That’s good. Remember how sorry you are and behave next time.” He said. 

“You aren’t staying?” She asked.

“No, I got the store to run.”

“Let me help.” She tried closing the door but the grandfather would not allow it. 

“If I let you help this wouldn’t be much of a punishment. Stay home, behave, play nice.” 

“No one's here.”

“Good, God knows your mother can’t handle you. Lock the doors and study you hear me? Behave.” He said. 

She dragged herself out of the car and stood on the side walk. The old man felt bad for her as he waved at her. But eventually, she waved back. 

She turned around and the sound of engine roared before it died into a distant howling. This was home. The broken chain link fence, torn and bent. The ruined lock. It all reminded her of home. She pulled at the fence door, it would not budge. She hopped, opened it from behind and started for the back of the house where the trash was collecting into an overstuffed black container. The plastic bags and cartons of milk were spilling out as she rolled it to the front. 

Ah, this was home.

Grimy, unpleasant. It felt like a part of her she did not want, but it was hers. She walked into the house and found the phone on the side of the wall. Looking around at the sheet of dirt around her furniture, the broken glass face of the table, the clock ticking away, it all made her dial faster.

“Who’s this?” The voice asked.

“Pip. We’re going to work.”

“Right now?” He asked.

“When else? The business forecast looks good for the next couple of days.” She smiled. “We’ll follow those crazies with the money-baskets.”

“Ain’t they priests?”

“Doesn’t matter. They always bring a crowd.”

Alestor did not want to be here, working, the therapy room was too cold for him but he had to be here. It was demanded of him, as everything was always demanded of him.

Seven times they had been at it, Mrs. Breyer and Mr. Alestor. She was confidant that today they would get to the root of her psychiatric deformity. That’s what Alestor called it anyways, a bump, a mutation they could easy cull. An over grown limb to be amputated. That expression always gave Mrs. Breyer confidence. But today was different. Alestor had no patience today and she was beginning to get afraid that they’d actually get close to her problem. Then she couldn’t laugh, then all of her treatment would be very sincere and that would be terrible for her.

She sat in a tight position on the leather chair too big for her small frame. Her knees were tucked in, her back was far into the seat in what she hoped appeared as a guarded stance. 

"We’ll begin the auditing process." Alestor said.

"Can we do it without him?” She pointed to a man in the corner of the room with a black blazer over his shoulders. Alestor sniffed, threw his pointer finger elsewhere and he was gone.

“Back to the auditing process.” He said.

“Auditing process?” 

Her eyes were glazed and her face was vapid like the contents in her skull had been siphoned out. There was music in the background and a small drumline of footsteps, the man outside mingling with more people. Alestor knocked on the wall and the noise stopped. Mrs. Breyer was worried now and her thoughts filled with curiosity over the noise. In between them was a coffee table. They were scooted close enough to embrace at any moment. Or to kill each other.

"Yes, Mrs. Breyer. The human heart has an affinity for delusion and blindness. We are here to cure that, to see what is in you. Both of us, hand in hand. This is the last step of our healing process." He said.

“Yes, I think today we can get somewhere. I feel it.” She began to sweat. Mr. Alestor reached into his pocket for the rattle of a gold chain. It was a watch.

"I will demand you look at me behind this moving stopwatch. All you have to do is answer my questions, that's it. The quest for inner most reflection begins with an honest question after all." He said. His voice sounded raspy, antique like the medals and goblets and statues and books that decorated the room.

"Well, okay." She looked away at first and fidgeted with her jacket, nervous things and twitches. He stared into her and it was not until she stared back that they began.

"What is your name?" Alestor asked.

"Emily Breyer."

"Where were you born?"

"Utah. But I moved here a few years back."

"I did not ask that." He said. She looked slapped her leg. They began again. 

"What is your name?"

"Emily Breyer."

"Where were you born?"

"Utah."

"Did you have a family?"

"Yes."

"How big was it?”

"We were four, now we're three."

"I did not ask how many there are, only how many there were." He barked. She twitched. She felt her throat tighten and wanted to leave but could not, something compelled her to stay. Perhaps fear drained her legs of strength, maybe it was the hope of salvation. He asked her name again. She stuttered, he barked. She cried. Softly moaning, it had been like this before but never as quick or as harsh.

There were tissues for her and as she looked around she began to miss the stranger in the corner of the room. She felt alone in the dim room with the lifeless color beige wall paper all around her. She began to breath fast and felt a hand over her shoulder, it was Alestor. He would guide her she reasoned. Mrs. Breyer breathed in and she stared into the stopwatch and its movement like a pendulum. Although she felt pressed, although her chest felt filled with cement she continue with the guiding hand in front of her.  

"There are only two things the soul demands, Mrs. Breyer." Alestor said. "Honesty and will. I’ve never seen anything as deadly to vice and suffering as those two." He lifted her chin and their eyes fell on each other. "We will do this together, again. What is your name?"

"Emily Breyer."

"Where were you born?"

"Utah.”

"Did you have a family?"

“Yes.”

"How big was it?"

"We are four."

"How many do you have?"

The air suddenly became thick. "Three."

"Of how many there used to be, name them all."

"Michael, Carter...and...Abel." She muttered in between the rapid mouth breathing.

"Which one was your favorite." He studied her face. “Between them all, who did you love most?"

"I..." She wanted to believe she couldn’t say what was in her. That it was beyond her. But it couldn’t have been, she had felt it in her heart as intense palpitations every time she was asked the question. Her eyes looked to the speeding watch like a metronome to her rapid thoughts and she felt she needed to move to the rhythm. It was false courage. 

"Carter, my oldest son was my favorite."

"And who was your least favorite?"

I cannot, she thought. Not this one. She had no saliva in her mouth. No air in her lungs. No feeling in her body. It felt like she cast away, floating atop a dark sea and now falling dangerously low to the ocean floor. She sat staring at the watch before he removed it and stood up, rubbing his eyes.

"We always stop here. It has been like this for the past five sessions, Ma'am." He stared at the ceiling. "You’ve traveling a dizzying river bend and you’ve forgotten where it started. Oh well."

She was trembling and could not contain herself, the emotion was coming out of her eyes and nose and mouth.

"Say it." He slammed the desk. "Who was your least favorite."

"It was." She was choking. "It was. It was.”

“It was?” Alestor tapped on the wood.

“It was Abel.”

"Did you hate him?" He asked.

"I..."

"Did. You. Hate. Him."

"...Yes. Yes, yes." It  came out of her, a decade of guilt..

"What did you do to him, Ma'am?" He took off his glasses and got on his knees in front of her. He held her hand and gave her warmth. She was shaking worse and the words were jammed in her throat. But he held on to her anyways. And the more epileptic she got, the tighter he gripped, almost crushing it.

"I let him die." She shouted and Alestor looked from within his corner with a terrified curiosity. The white in his eyes grew in this small shadow. The other man looked at the door, afraid that someone had heard.

"He was just playing in the river. I didn’t think he’d drown. I didn’t think he was a bad swimmer and I and I and I” 

“But you did know he was a bad swimmer, didn’t you?”

“I let. I let. I let him drown. And. A-and die. No one was around, I thought, I thought no one would care. I just hated him so much. So, so much. And and and then the water bubbled and then. Then. He was" He leaned in to hold her. He wanted to lift her, help her and just as he wrapped himself around her, they heard a knock. It reminded him of yesterday.

His face was neutral. There were no lines or cracks, all his features were softened as Alestor looked perplexed at the door. He walked slowly to it and opened it. It was the man from before along with another group of people who could only be described as, important: the mayor, the police commissioner, a mailman. Alestor’s mouth was open. He could hear Mrs. Breyer settling down and could hear the walls of her heart, once again, closing shut. He felt anger all the way to his shoulders like little bumps had collected on them. 

“Whens the next the sermon? They want to know.” The unimportant one mumbled. “They need proof of the beast.”

Alestor growled. He closed the door on them and looked back at Mrs. Breyer who now lost her emotion to the interruption. They were both sad in a way.

“I should be leaving.” She got up and started to the door. Alestor ran past her to his desk.

“Wait, wait. Hold on.” He opened the drawer. 

“I mean, we can do this again.” She said. Her eyes stared down. “We can, right?”

“We can?” Alestor said. He looked down himself, to the drawer. Amongst its contents, in no particular order was a bottle of chloroform, tablets of DMT, cocaine and a black bible. 

“Yes. We definitely can. I’ll schedule it in the front.” He said. 

She smiled a bit and dried her eyes. “Thank you doctor.”

“Don’t thank me yet.” He closed the drawer. “We’ll break through next time. I promise you.”

He lead her outside, past the men, to the cold waiting room where the secretary typed away and on his way back he could not hold his grimace. The men saw it but they walked forward to question him anyways. He slammed it again, locked it and screamed as loud as he could until he felt his lungs rattle.

“I almost had her.” He ran around the room, banging his head on shelves and walls, he felt his forehead bleed. The walls shook now and above he could hear the low sound of rattling metal. 

A goblet stood a top a shelf. He reached for it. He looked inside to what seemed like emptiness, then slowly saw it coming down from the sides of its lips. Black goop.

“I was so close. She would have been mine, I know it.” He spun the liquid. “And he’s been getting more demanding.” The carpet looked ruined with how hard his feet struck the floor and tore the hairs out. He put his lips to the cup. “Maybe I should just do it, right now. Fuck it.” 

And as the blood came down to him he saw in the corner of his eyes the white bird. Yellow eyed, staring at Alestor. He was at the window still and did not chirp, did not move even as Alestor got closer. The bird turned to him, squawked once and flew away, worms in its mouth. Once again he fell to his seat, like the night a few days back and once again he called in the group of idiots at the front. He looked down, put his hands behind his neck and said: He’s coming to meet me soon.

He sat removing the contents of his burger. The lettuce first, onions second, tomatoes and finally pickles last which he put in neat piles around the plate. Dion entered the table with his own plate, staring at Apollo. His face convulsed as he looked at the man picking at his food like a confused surgeon. He looked around at the people who stared strangely at them now, to the customers who spilled out of their seats. The smell of grease lingered around them and around the orange and yellow restaurant whose mascot, a hot dog holding an onion ring, looked terribly happy and almost insane. 

Apollo looked out at the statue. You’d have to be insane to work here all day, he thought. Dion sat across from him and ate with giant gulps. 

“We’re finally talking? You were gone for a while.” Dion said.

“It’s your fault. You didn’t listen.” Apollo ate a fry. “I told you to wait and what do you do? Rush in. No plan. No anything but a hope to win.”

“I helped two people.” Dion ate. He was nearly done with the burger. “If I hadn’t come, they’d be in a grave with the freaking bells on top of their coffins.” 

“Don’t say freaking.” Apollo rolled his eyes. “It’s such a terrible word. We all know what you mean to say and what you mean to say is ‘fucking’. You put the word in our heads, fucking, but you save yourself the guilt of saying it. Terrible.”

“I freaking helped those two.” He grunted with the fries sticking out of his mouth. Apollo was just starting on his lettuce pile. 

“And what if we didn’t kill that thing? What if we were too impatient and it managed to get away. We’d be dealing with more than two deaths.”

“You already told me this. But I’ll tell you again, that didn’t happen so why does it matter?” 

“Everything matters.” Apollo brought his hammered fist down to the table. Dion looked at him and the eyes that seemed to look into a far reaching memory. “I know exactly what happens when we make mistakes, when we lose control of the situation or ourselves.”
 
 By now the other guests had begun to look around and with their curious eyes peered around the corner of benches and leaned towards the two noisy hunters. A woman came by with the baggy white pants and the bright Colonel Weiner hat that made her seem like a half-peeled orange. She smiled and stood carefully away from the table. 

“Is there an issue?” Her voice was peppy and nearly hummed at the end of her words. 

“No, thank you.” Dion smiled. She smiled back.

“No.” Apollo grimaced. Her face fell as she looked at Apollo and she retreated back. They waited a moment for the nosy eyes to look away and in the silence the two forced boredom upon the restaurant. 

“They really sent me some new guy.” Apollo shook his head.

“Who cares man. I held my own, I fought. As far as I’m concerned, I have as much experience as you. I’ve been practicing this stuff for nearly two decades.”

“There’s a difference between studying something in books and living it. I’ve shadowed under a mentor, I know these fucking things inside out. Their origins might be different, but deep inside, past the blood and guts, they’re all the same. It’s a mindless violence that grows in them. I can’t even call it evil, they’re too senseless for that. It’s more like instinct. They’re animals.”

“You're not as bright as you think you are, I could have told you that. I saw that last night. I know that.” Dion said.
 
“A one time affair doesn’t make you an expert. I have years of this stuff under my belt.”

“Years? We’re both twenty-four.”

“Physically, sure. Mentally, we’re about a century apart.” 

“Forget that, forget you.” Dion rose suddenly. He nearly spat and foamed at the mouth. His eyes narrowed to Apollo who was looking around nervously and beginning to feel the grip of attention at his throat. The people scared him more than Dion. His throat became dry. 

“Calm down.” Apollo said.

“Don’t tell me to calm down you hypocrite. I won't be lectured by you. I don’t need a lesser man who pretends that hiding and letting innocents die is any kind of sound strategy. Yeah, I rushed in and yeah, I’d do it again. A hundred times over, I would help a stranger out.” He got the words out and spat with his voracious mouth. The people again stared. The woman behind the counter shook her head and the manager nudged her to talk to them again because he had become nervous now. Dion was now aware of it all, finally and sighed.

“We should go.” Apollo lifted his tray before Dion stopped him.

“Don’t waste food.” Dion said.

None of them could believe it. Dion at the counter carefully putting everything in within the brown bag that soaked with grease at the bottom. He didn’t seem to care for everyone who watched, slurping their soda through straws that made an annoying draining sound.

“What the fuck is wrong with you. You’re not emotionally sound.” Apollo opened the door for him. They both left, Dion finding the nearest homeless man. A stray who wandered about with a half full cup of pennies. He handed him the bag. 

“That wasn’t yours to give. I believe that was my food.” Apollo said.

“And I gave it to those that need more.”

“So you’re still pissed at me.”

“This has nothing to do with you, narcissist. I helped him out, fed at least for a day.”

“And he’ll be starving the next, you should get him a job application instead.” 

“Is that why you brought me here? To make fun of me, of homeless people of all things?”

“I’m not making fun of anyone.” Apollo said. “I came to see if you’re willing to work like a professional.” 

“Always.”

“So you’ll listen to me this time around?”

“Maybe. If it’s morally sound.”

“Morality is flexible. Very few people ever think they’re evil. Even the rapists, or the pedophiles, or the murderers.” Apollo stopped him at a corner they were turning into. “I’ve come up with a few leads here and there, you’d be amazed how often evil makes friends with evil. A murderer can know a drug dealer, a drug dealer a corrupt politician, and so on and so forth. You start to wander around the underbelly of the city and you realize it’s like a facebook hang out for every piece of shit in a fifty-mile radius.”

“How’d you come up with a name?”

“If I told you what I did, you wouldn’t listen to me because I would not be moral. By your standards at least.” Apollo said. Dion was already rolling his head in disbelief and making a turn into the opposite direction.

“Hey, I don’t want you helping me either.” Apollo said. “But I believe in getting the job done and I’ll take whatever help I can get. I don’t have any pride or concern for anything but the job. I’m asking you if you’d like to help, if not, fuck off and go get me someone who will. Otherwise, we’ll meet up at our apartment tonight and leave.” 

“You wanted to ask me out?” Dion asked. “Send a love letter next time.

“Is that a yes? Do you want to cooperate?” 

“We’re not helping anyone, are we.” Dion murmured. 

“Is. That. A. Yes?” 

“Yes. Yes, whatever. The sooner we get this done the sooner I can get away from you.” 

“Great. I hope you enjoy clubbing.” Apollo said. “I know I don’t.”

The fire lapsed around him, it swelled and it grew up on the walls, it licked and ate and spread itself in streaks like tendrils, sporadic and gluttonous. He saw the fire grows and nodded to what he heard. His eyes were open wide and they watched as the fire came and went like a giant surf. Then he felt hot, though not for the fire that did not feel much of anything, he felt the heat of excitement.

“When will you bring her back. Like you promised.” Alestor’s voice broke.

“That’s up to you, isn’t it?” The voice repeated. Alestor nodded and watched as the fire began to turn sickly white, like rot. It turned and regressed. Alestor ran to the table, took out a bag of pink salt and pitched it into the fireplace that spat out like an ill child.

“When can I see my wife back?” Alestor asked.

“When the rapture is brought upon them all."

“But when? When do I do it? How? When? What do I do while we wait for you?” He said.

“Wait?” The voice screeched and the fire rode up to the ceiling where the smog seemed to lash out like a storm-ridden sea, the waves crashing about and foaming. “I’ve never taken you for a passive fool.” The sparks spilled and danced on the floor. “Every ritual needs its servants, every moment of worship needs its faith. And every summoning, you know, needs its proper penance. A human hecatomb. I want it, the highest quality lifeblood you can give me.”

“And the hunters?” Alestor sat on his knees throwing salt into the fire.

“The hunters?”

“They ruined the last pact I made. They’re here now.”

“I didn’t think people like that existed in your world.” The voice said.

“They're Vicars, I've heard rumors about them before. But I thought…with how small a city we are…I thought they wouldn’t bother.”

“Hunters…” The voice hummed at the word, amused. Alestor sat as he heard the voice of the demon chuckle. His eyes were to the floor, his body was prostrate as he waited for an answer. But the voice would not talk back. The demon was mumbling. It seemed distracted for once and Alestor sat with a growing pain in his legs and in his chest.

“What do we do?” He coughed.

“Oh. Yes. Of course.” It hummed again. “Give me proper retribution today. I’ll help you deal with them.”

“I already a killed a man. What more can I do?” Alestor slammed his hand against the floor. It seemed painful for him to say - killed - and it grew in him, a stabbing conscious that felt like it was bulging out of his heart. His chest hurt.

“You killed a criminal. Scum. Shit. And you got shit back. What did you expect? It’s an exchange, did you forget? If you want more, give me more. Give me virgin blood, give me nubile souls. That would be proper, those high quality souls.”

“What do you mean high quality?”

“The price of a man is weighed in his merit and his soul. Give me your best and I'll give you my best. Give me children." It said. There was silence.  "If you want help, if you want your wife and your child and me, there, with you, give me your best.”

Alestor thought about the words and they seemed to bounce off the cavern of his skull. There was nothing there but the words and his brain rattled. His hand fell and stiffened. The pink salt in his grips slipped out and drizzled onto the floor.

“Now you know my price. You do want your wife back, don’t you? It’s not like you’re really killing someone anyway. They’re coming home, to me. I’d say you’d be helping them out. I'm sure they’d forgive you when they taste paradise. When the burdens of life are cut and the shackles are thrown.”

Alestor was still. The flame began to die and he did not bother to fuel it, he let it recede and with it a piece of him. There was nothing left for him to hear. He walked back and stumbled onto a stack of books that collapsed on his feet. He held himself against a book cabinet and held it for fear of his legs giving out. Then he heard a knock, the ravenous knock of his students, the hasty knock that demanded of him a certain composure. He breathed. He evened his hair that had split and run from him throughout the conversation and collected all the bits of himself that seemed to escape or break. Some sanity, some confidence, some goodness. He was trying to make sturdy of this failing body. His body snapped into place on the fifth knock.

With his face taken back to a dull, assertive expression, he walked to the door. The men were waiting outside and sweating.

“There. You heard him, didn’t you?” Alestor told them. They were all lucid, drooling and heaving. The mayor was the first to speak. 

“Did you tell him what I wanted? The money, the boat. Did you tell him?” He was shaking Alestor.

“No, but he told me what he wanted.”

“Yes, we heard.” The police commissioner said. “Children.”

They were all silent and huddled together, their shoulders were in tandem as they thought about it. Who would break it first? Who would show his selfishness first?

“I know some routes.” The paper man said. They all swallowed spit, and one man’s courage led to the other, a boulder gaining stride down the incline.

“I know some men who can work it out.” The commissioner added.

“We’d have to do it after curfew, fewer suspects.” The mayor said.

“No, no. We just need to get the right people. The people no one would mind gone. Would that be considered high quality though, Father?” The commissioner said.

Alestor looked at them. He could understand the words. The mayor, a pudgy man with his suit tearing at the seams. The commissioner, tall and proud, thick jawed. The mailman, pious and desperate in his eyes. He could not understand their demeanors or their beings. They wanted this more than him, they loved this more than him and the idea of murder seemed too little a cost for their promised wealth. It was a lottery they felt was too easy to pass up. Alestor could not believe himself. That he ever convinced these men, that they weren’t faking their conceits. 

Was that all it took? Wealth and power and knowledge. Was it because they had finally experienced the demon for themselves? They had never heard the voice of God, though it supposedly lived in all things. But they heard the Djinn, the devils. They knew those to be real now and perhaps that’s what they moved them most, a higher power, regardless of what or where it came from. 

Alestor walked back, he hit the door and felt for the knob.

His wife was important but this was different and he felt the urge to run, but they all held him. The believers grabbed onto his black coat and pulled themselves closer to him.

“What do we do?” The lost lambs said in unity. And Alestor, like a father afraid of his new responsibility, reeled back.

“Do what you need to do, then! You heard him.” He lashed out. They all soaked in the words. Some of them frowned, some of them smiled.

“Alright then, we’ll get on it.” The commissioner said. There was no misinterpretation, no language barrier. They knew clearly what must be done and Alestor ran back inside as he realized it. 

“What have I done?” He asked to no one. He found a seat, opened his drawer and pulled the first drug he could find. A bag cocaine ripped and spilling. Then he pulled something out again, a flask. He ate them like a starved man and rubbed his head with powdered hands. Depressed and awake at the same times, a mind in dissonance with his rapidly beating heart.

Now he knew how Mrs. Breyer felt. Now he knew that he could not take it back.

They had not sold anything in the two hours they were there and it was enough to make them look into the sky and beg for a falling anvil. The sun was oppressive, though hidden, lurking in the gray waves of clouds like an invisible ray beam pointed directly to the back of their heads. Their brains were frying. Slow. Burning, slow. Their tired eyes wobbled underneath their strained necks. They were small, constantly looking up to the grimaced faces of customers. They were in a parking lot, made into a pseudo-swat meet but there was no one to meet. The littered streets were empty, the plastic bags of trash must have been dumped by ghosts. The frugal were at home, the frightened were at home,  Sophie presumed. They must have felt safe in their small wooden homes.

“Let’s go. My feet hurt.” Pip said. Sophie looked at him, her eyes went first before her heavy skull followed. She felt sweat in her overalls and her armpits were wet. Looking at Pip’s slick, bald head only made the humid feeling worse. 

“This is all your fault, you know that?” Sophie said. 

“I told you I was sorry, I didn’t think the chocolate would melt.” He said. She brought her hand down to the box and felt the clay like substance between two finger tips. Like turds, like the sewer was laid out on their small chair. She looked down to the jar of money next to the plastic table they borrowed. She could see the bottom of the glass, where the street ran broken and black.

“I’m not talking about this.” She continued. His head lowered. He rubbed his legs against each themselves and his knees looked just about to collapse. “I’m suspended. You know that?” 

“And I said I’m sorry.” His voice was high pitched, and his shaking body was getting angrier. He could feel his stomach knot tighten. 

“What’s sorry going to do for me?” She asked. He bit his lips and moved his nose around as his head struggled for an answer. He was sniffing for something that did not exist. 

“I don’t know.” He said.

“You never know, do you. I’m wondering if there’s even a brain in there.” She said. 

He put fingers into the holes of his shirt. They were at the bottom, where the red and blue stripes began to stretch out. He pulled, it was just a goodwill shirt anyways, wasn’t worth much and wearing it, talking to Sophie, he began to feel that he wasn’t worth much. When he felt a tear he undid his hooked fingers from the small mouths of his shirt and put his hands down on the table.

“Why do you always talk to me that way?” He asked. This was the first time he had spoken back and Sophie did not know how to feel. She looked around, expecting the faces of strangers to give her a direction but there was no one. They all had their backs to them. A homeless man wandered with a scarf dragging through the dirty floor. The wheels of his cart whistled her off. A local baker in the corner of her eye picked his nose, he was supposed to be brushing leaves and grass into the dry street gutters. It was a very lonely place, here in the parking lot. The silence made her angry. She slammed down on the desk this time.

“Why do you always mess everything up?” She asked.

“Why are you so mean?” He asked.

“Why are you such a coward?” She asked. 

"Why are you a bitch?"

"Why are you a pussy?"

He was silent. His gaunt face looked out to the street where the pickup trucks were roaming in their low hum that sounded more like a bee than an engine. It was the mild buzz of the city, like white noise, a television channel that no longer worked. 

“You never cared about being suspended before! How many times have you gotten in trouble? You can beat up half the school without caring.” He said “No, you’re mad because your mamma doesn’t care about you. No one does and I'm just here to make you feel less alone. Aren't I?” 

Her right eye twitched and she felt her hair split and move like bugs were crawling and picking at her scalp. These small sensations came to her neck and waved all across her body. She rose and kicked one of the table stands, it felt like the earth was shaking beneath Pip’s scrawny hands. They looked like spider legs and danced back to the sides of his hips. The crows above the roof tops heard the noise, they too ran and left half-eaten cigarette buds on the floor. Some people looked at them now. Most of them curious and not so much concerned with stopping them as they were with watching, entertaining themselves with folded hands over their fat chests. 

“Don’t you talk about my mom.” She pointed to Pip. “I’ve known you for six years but I don’t care to lose you. When’d you suddenly get balls anyway?”

“I’m just tired of you screaming at me. You’re a bully.” He said.

“Must be high school. You want to practice at looking cool for all your new friends, don’t you?” She asked, “You should tell them about how you ball up in the floor whenever you get punched or run to me.”

He grabbed her pale wrist. His hand was in a tight grip and he was tensing his muscles like he had never done before. It was a bad fist, she noticed. She did not blink. She was not afraid. She was ready for it, had been for a while now and she too began to tighten her own fist. But before they could pull each other into that deadlock of violence, they felt the shadow of a person. It was imposing and set over their bodies. It held Sophie’s shoulder and did not let go.

“Don’t fight now.” He said. It was a man, wearing too tight of a suit, black undershirt, red tie. His brown shoes did not match his belt and that was the first thing she noticed as she looked up to his tall presence. His bald head was spotted brown, his skin was ashy and cracked like sea water had been made to dry and salt his face. He was holding a sign that had fallen over. It was the advertisement, “SOPHYES FAMUS CANDYES, TASTE U-CAN TRUST.” 

She regretted letting Pip write. She regretted Pip. They pulled away from each other and Sophie detached the arm on his shoulder.

“I thought you were selling food, not a fight.” He smiled.  "I was hoping to get some lunch, though I'll settle for a good show."

Pip dragged his feet to the table and started looking for the cleanest bar. 

“I’m not selling anything.” Sophie closed the box on his hand. He whimpered and pushed her, she pushed back and the man stepped in again. 

“We found a customer and you don’t even want to sell him anything?” Pip asked between his deep breaths.

“We’re closed.” She huffed back. He began to convulse in anger and pointed to the floor near her feet to spit. She felt her shoes get wet and wanted to lunge but the man held her back. 

“I don’t want to be your friend anymore.” He said. “I’m done with this. We never play games, we never have fun. It’s just this dumb shit every day.”

“I don’t care. You mess everything up anyway. Why would I care? I’ll do better off without you. Now go on, run away like you always do.” She reached for her backpack. Pip’s eyes were swelling and he wiped fresh tears with his sleeve. It was discolored from the constant bleaching, the tears dampened the stain and made it his shirt darker.

“Fuck you.” He walked away. He knocked over a plastic chair and stood up to apologize to the nose picker it belonged to. It was an awkward goodbye, him fidgeting just to turn the corner. When she saw his body disappear into the city, she turned around. The bald man was looking at Pip's direction. His eyes were dead. Discolored. Gray. Were they used too? 

“Hey, you," She said. He turned down. "We’re - I’m not doing business.” She said. 

“Oh, won’t you sell me one. Sweat heart?” He undid a button on his coat. His stomach rolled out. “They’re famous, aren’t they?”

“I don’t sell. Definitely not to people like you.” She said. Some people were beginning to close in on them as they felt it in the air too. 

“What do you mean people like me?” His bearded face rustled as he twitched his mouth. It was unkempt and grew like wild bristles, she was afraid of getting scratched by it as he lowered his face.

“I mean weirdos.” She tiptoed though could not reach him even as he bent. She repeated, louder. “You hear me, weirdo?”

“That’s cruel, girl. Is that how you conduct your business?” He asked.

"Yeah. It is. I say what comes and goes, don't you think otherwise." She said. "And don't you butt in either. That's not proper to do."

"It's not proper to fight with friends."

"I don't have any friends." She said.

He backed away. 

“Well then." He showed her his loose teeth, it looked like a half a smile. "Have a nice day. Make sure you apologize. It's not good to lose a friend.” He walked. He bumped into a plastic chair and he walked, steady in a slow pace at first, then gaining speed as he neared the corner. When she saw him disappear, she felt a drop in her stomach like a needle had fallen down her throat and poked her. But in the heat of it, with her face flushed red with anger and with the noises of coming footsteps and loose sign posts creaking at the intersections, she could not make sense of her feelings. She wanted to get home. She’d be there for a while after all, it would be nice to start her nest.

She reached for her box of melted chocolates and gripped it. She felt the black, ooze onto her fingers and stain her skin. 

“Are you ready, Father?” A young woman said. They were not his children, rather, just children. They were in packs and in want of some knowledge. Four faces stared back at him, some old, some young, all with the same desire in their glazed eyes. Alestor walked past them. The dark room seemed to narrow as he went up the stairs and through the caverns of the halls. The light bulbs hung from the tops of the room as wobbling chandeliers. They did not light much, only gave a buzzing sound and parceled shadows across the walls. He was in a small room, it could not have fit more than two men at arms length but was wide. There were tables, mirrors that could not reflect in the obfuscation and the faint violet of flower bouquet resting upon one of the dressing room tables. He drained his sweat from a ragged coat hanging on the side of the table. He looked around, the rusted metal and brick whose rotted and chipped holes were homes for small hands of grass, lazy flowers. Alestor sighed and remembered the words, quality of a soul, he thought. It seemed to burrow into him. It planted a seed of some evil design in him, he knew it. He wanted to dig it out but couldn’t find a grip among dirt on his conscience. He looked inside of the table whose drawer squeaked. A black stole hung by the edge and he took it out and felt the velvet in his hand. 

He had germinated it, watered it, fed it. Man after man he had killed, picked up from the streets, murdered. He had started with suspects and criminals and moved on to the homeless and sick and now here he was. 

He felt his pocket. The knife was stiff. 

He remembered his wife then and there and the horrified face she made before she had died. Pinned against a tree by a car, a freak accident they said by a drunk driver. Alestor put the stole on his shoulder, wrapped it around his stomach and returned it to his side. He remembered the man who had killed her too. He had found him, had crashed his own stolen car into him. He had gotten out, felt the cool air and felt his cheeks which were colder still. He had walked to his drivers seat and dragged his hand past the dirtied car dice to the shit head's nose. He closed his mouth and watched his broken body squirm. He dodged the police, but would not dodge Alestor that day. The sound his wife’s murderer made when he choked on his blood, he had found to be too intoxicating. He was the first man he had killed, the killer of one love and mother of another. He was ashamed at first to have it in him, but grew with it and then the demon came after. Murder was always a small joy when they were evil.

But his joy ended today. There was no pleasure in this.

His head straightened up and the years of stress appeared like cracks on his stone face. He walked through two doors and settled it in his heart: there would be blood. 

The light was bright here, on the stage, or maybe the dusk of the halls had reared his eyes to blackness. Alestor put his hand to his face as he blocked out the overhead glare and looked up to the fleet of row where the plentiful sat. A symposium that stretched to the end of the rusty walls. Exhaustion pipes hung at the tops of the ceilings. This stage creaked. It was all cracked, jury rigged, this old theater that leered at him with broken gas tubing. 

He walked to a pedestal that stole his courage. His eyes were intense, narrowed, as he looked at the book… and the boy in front of him. The people around looked at him, their curious and doubtful faces painted white as he unveiled the child.

“We should begin then. Of mans first transgression, his rebellion and his freedom.”

Amongst the dozens there, only Alestor’s voice rung out.

Isaac watched his father from afar, from a balcony where the tattered red drapes were violent as the wind drafts roared.

“Our salvation, the morning sun.” The voice was loud.

Isaac looked below himself, at the steps and seats. He tried to remember their faces, but could only recognize the famous. The commissioner, the mayor. Everyone else was a strange to him and that frightened him. The idea that they ran around in his city, that they were here now like anonymous emissaries slithering around with invisible streaks of filth. 

When he saw an eye come up to him he froze. He laid on the floor, waited for something to happen but was made calm as he heard his father’s voice again. He was not found. There was no disrupting the murder. 

Isaac brought his head up again and he put his hands over his mouth. His eyes felt like popping out of his skull and all he could see was the red, waving above him. The red, wrapping over him. Red everywhere. 

He urinated himself, he only noticed it an hour later after the violent throes of death. After the noise and clapping. 

He was quiet up in the balcony with the golden rimmed edge and the ruined Victorian design. Time had eaten it away. He sat on his belly, on the floor for hours now. Heavy steps, light steps, monstrous steps. He heard them all. He begged his heart to stop. He put a second hand over his mouth when he realized he was crying too loud. And soon all he heard was his crying.

When there was absolute darkness he had wandered out. It was an hour before midnight and by the time he had made it to the main hall of this ruined theater, he had wished to get caught just to die and rid himself of the images. He pulled his hair, stretched his face. 

His feet were dragging and he fell.

“This is dad.” Isaac said. He looked around at the fauna and forest surrounding him. He looked westward, his red eyes pointed that way. There were no lights here, deep inside of nature, where the vile tendrils of nature reclaimed and wrapped over him. He was swimming in grass as high as his waist. He had trouble finding his bike and even more trouble riding it as he fell constantly on pocket holes and wild roots. 

Color was draining from him. He swore he could hear the voices in the silence of the forest. He heard it in the silence of the city. Death throes, monstrous screeches, his father’s roar. 

He thought for a moment of where to turn. Not the police who had betrayed his trust, not the city. Not the journalists, nothing made him safe. He wanted to run away, looked through his phone and began searching for the nearest train. All he saw projected on the screen, through his warped imagination, was the young boy dead on the altar. Burned. And the thing his body bred. 

He cleaned mucus from his phone screen. He cleared his face and looked up. He would confess. He rode on. His brain echoed like a mantra, confess. Confess. Confess.

He threw his bike when he saw the doors and slammed his body against them. He slapped with his hand. He punched. His bit, he tried everything and felt his face drag down the walls. Dirty, smelly, moping on the floor. He held his head and waited for a death that would not come.

But there was a crack. Then a tired, groggy voice. 

“Yeah, yeah. What can I do for you?” The Priest’s face looked out at the boy. He tapped Isaac on the shoulder. “My child? What can I do?” 

And he shook him.

The world looked slanted as she walked. Her friends were like walking canes, three wandering trees. She grabbed at their necks and their arms and held them as she fell. A few shots, a few drinks, a few dances had made her tired. Her body felt hot but she could not feel the sweat, only the cold from the outside that felt good against her skin and chilled her.

“That annoying prick wanted to fuck me for so long.” She said. A friend to her side only nodded and typed away at her phone.

“The uber is coming soon.” She said.

Another friend stood by the edge of the street with her hands wrapped around herself for the cold had become almost unbearable. They were beneath a light post that felt like a hot lamp right above their scalps. Though the drunk could not feel much.

“Yeah, he wanted to take you home. We saw.” The friend was annoyed, she always spoke low when she was annoyed. The drunk only giggled and looked behind to a door that opened from a bartender taking out trash. The drunk held onto her friends sweater and stood herself as she pushed down. She rubbed her legs together and suddenly felt how full her stomach was.
 
“Can I use your restroom.” The bartender stared at her for a bit. She grimaced, scratched her head. She didn’t say yes or no, just mumbled something and the drunk rushed past her.

“Sorry. She gets a little aggressive when she’s wasted.” One of the friends said. They looked at each other in the dimming light and smiled all the while the drunk ran through the bar, past empty bottles that laid on their sides on tables that laid on their sides, chairs with uneven legs up above the tables and the smell of urine and nail-polish scented whiskey that permeated the air. It almost made her want to gag and she ran to the bathroom faster. There she turned the faucet and ran the water down her head like baptism. She wanted to get rid of the layer on her face. Used makeup, spotty with dirt and sweat that seemed heavy on her. And when she was done and her legs finally could not bother being still she went into the restroom.

She sat and urinated and looked at the numbers of whores, mostly men and few hearts with strangers names etched in them. These were all around her. Some graffiti, too. 

It made her head ache, a pulsing that came in waves. This wasn’t the fun time she was looking for. 

She put her head down, away from her phone that buzzed and bounced out of her pocket. It cracked on the floor but all she could stare at was the cracked tile as her eyes were heavy and she wondered if she still had her makeup on as she drooled. The faucet ran, her leg tapped to keep her awake.  

All she felt was cold and relief. It was like that for a while, just the buzz of the phone and her head nodding off and her body slanting away on the porcelain throne that made her legs a little numb and prickly.

The phone stopped buzzing sometime in her fading attention and somewhere in that she heard the stall open. She thought nothing of the sound of the rubber guard scraping against the floor or the light footsteps, like hooves against rock. Clack. clack. Someone’s here. Clack. Clack. It was only enough to wake her up. She opened her eyes to the tile. Her neck was stiff. She heard the stall open now and the noise it made as it crashed against her adjacent wall. She did not breath. Only yelped slightly. The person did not hear her it seemed as it just rubbed against the walls and the toilet and dropped something into the water.

She listened. She stopped breathing. A strange sound. 

She heard the slobbering sound of eating. The wet gritting of teeth, a noisy hunger. The drunk hoped it was just her head and the half bottle of tequila and she begged it to be just that. But the noises became louder and when she stood and put her shorts up, the noises stopped. She wished they hadn’t, that they were just tricks of the mind. But they stopped. And she heard something plop again into shallow toilet water. It flopped, it fell out from the rim. She looked down at the tiles and saw the bloody fingers half eaten, she saw ivory and the knobs of bone. She saw blood pool and fill every broken crack. Her hair rose. Her body was stiff. And she ran.

Out the restroom. Into the bar room. Her heel snapped somewhere along the running line. It flew off like a bullet casing. She pushed herself off the wooden bar and looked back to see worse things. Her friends, what was left of them. She saw them in strange ways. Ways the human body should not have been shaped and torn. She saw them, strewn along the ceiling like ribbon decorations and across the floor like red lacquered wood. It was everywhere, the bits and the pieces that made her shriek and her eyes bulge. She moved. Almost slipped on Abbey. Moved and screamed out for her friends that were not here anymore. 

She did not notice her sprained ankle. She did not wobble anymore. She ran out to the street with her hands waved up in the air. The taxi had just arrived, only barely and braked hard. 

“Drunk idiot.” He nodded his head and looked at the blinking GPS on his dashboard.

“Are you-” 

“Get me the fuck out of here!” She forced herself into the passenger seat and he did not debate it. He was entranced by the look of her dirty face and the way it seemed broken and half-frightened, half-mournful. The nose dripping, the eyes glazed and unable to blink, the mouth trembling. He did not think much and switched gears on the car.
 
Then she screamed again. 

For the driver was gone.She scratched her face. There was only a body next to her, spilling out of his waist. It was over the clutch, it was down the seat, across the window. There was no driver. Only matter, and the slowly leaving blade like a sharp whip, coming out of the punctured body. 

Her voice cracked, she moved forward. There was a layer of makeup on her face again but she did not bother with it. She only pressed down on the twitching leg and felt the pedal pushed. There were howls all around. The engine, the girl, the beast.

“Try not to make a scene. We’re getting some info and then we’re ditching.” Apollo said. Dion stared at the flashing lights on the sides and top of the building and the figure of a man slipping and stuck in mid-air. Above this man was the word, 'Tipsies'. 

“I’ve never been to a club.” Dion said. His eyes were engrossed and glossy with the bright red and orange of the lights. 

“You don’t drink, do you?” Apollo asked.

“Nope.”

“Let’s keep it that way. Just do what I tell you and stay put.” Apollo said and he knew by the curious look that that, would not happen. “The man we're looking for goes by the name Mr. Lovinski.”

“Is he Jewish or Russian?” Dion got out of the car and felt relief. 

“Doesn’t matter. He’s scum. That’s his breed, shit. Son of a mob boss, a drug dealer. I want the names of his LSD dealers, I looked into the autopsies of all the victim in the past month. Nearly all of them had it in them.”

“Right.” Dion took the lead and Apollo narrowed his eyes as he looked at the quick stride Dion took. They came to the bouncer who eyed them both. Dion cut in line, he was mesmerized by the sound that caused his skin to vibrate. He pushed past three people, two men with pants too tight and a girl with a skirt too short. They all seemed to rip when they fell to the ground and Apollo felt his hairs rise and a sudden need to slink back and disappear. He grabbed Dion by the hand. 

“Watch out.” He said. The bouncer grabbed Dion by his other hand too. The bounder wanted to tell him the same thing, in a more intimate way. He cocked his hand and punched Dion in the jaw. His hand broke and Dion stood bewildered. The oversized man slunk into the ground and holding two fingers that now limped, swollen and black and blue. 

“Get in before the camera sees us.” Apollo pushed him. The line behind them stared at the fallen man. 

The two fell into the crowd and began squeezing themselves between the hot bodies so doped on ecstasy and heat exhaustion that their pupils began to look like giant black craters, from the moon, from the volcanic nether of the earth. A young man collapsed, Dion caught him and found a nice seat to put him on. He slunk, pushed Dion away and looked for his spot in the amalgam. His perfect pocket in this giant ocean. 

“Don’t waste your time on these idiots.” Apollo said. “They love killing themselves.”

“Why?” Dion screamed. The bright lights made the music feel louder than they were. Their ears had long since collapsed and all they heard were muffled waves of bass crashing against them. 

“These people, they’re hollow.” Apollo said.

“They look like they’re having fun.” Dion said.

“And yet they’re hardly conscious of it. Anyone having fun would probably want to be aware of it." He said. "These people need this. They’re like fragile pipes, ready to break at any time. Too small and weak for the world. This is the shit they need to fit themselves properly.”

“Sounds like your kind of people.” Dion smiled. Apollo pushed him and walked towards the bar. He whispered something into the bartender's ears that made her wide-eyed. She ignored the brutish catcalls of the drunkards falling from their stools and brushed away women passed out on the wooden counter with a mixture of vomit and drool drizzling out of their mouths and nostrils. She led Apollo and Dion to a fleet of stairs and the small neon lights on the corners of the hall that eased them with a blue hue. 

Deeper they swam in the shark tank, deeper they turned, past rooms that banged and beds that creaked and the sad laughter of people hitting themselves against the walls. They stopped at a pale man who changed his color skin with whatever the DJ was deciding at the time. He was a chameleon. The light was flashing through some glass walls around them. They had taken the stairs to a sort of penthouse and behind this man were the red drapes, and further from that were the sounds of coupling people. Apollo stood against the chameleon, Dion stood a safe distance away from the both and looked down at the people dancing on the flashing tiles. 

“I’m here to see Mr. Lovenski.” Apollo said. “I’m with the cartel.” 

Dion’s eyes opened. 

“You're alright, but he," The chameleon pointed to Dion. "He doesn't even look Mexican." 

Apollo took out a wad of cash rolled into a cylinder and flashed it, the man saw the hundred dollar bill behind the rubber band and wanted to grab at it.

“The rest is in the car. Your boss should already be expecting this meeting.” Apollo said. The man did not move though was growing tenser as his eyes fluttered left and right. 

“Do you understand? Muévete. Hijo de puta. O, te mato.” Apollo whispered towards him. He lifted the curtains and Dion drew him to the side before he could enter, around the corner.

“What the heck have you been doing?” He asked. “None of this is right.”

“What’s right is what gets the job done.” Apollo said. Dion grabbed his arm and shook him.

“What have you been doing these past few days?”

“Networking.” 

“This isn’t how we should do things. What kind of justice is this? When you do it with dirty hands you just stain the whole thing.” Dion said. Apollo took back his arm.

“Then just wait here.” He said.

“The problem isn’t me being there with you, the problem is this being done at all.” 

“You said you would be willing, you said would listen to me, right? Well, deal with it.” Apollo said. “This is the only way I can get what I want, the most convenient and best way and that’s what I’m doing.”

“I don’t feel good about this.” Dion was biting his lips and chewing on the inside of his mouth.

“There are a lot of things you wouldn't feel good about. And they still happen day to day, all over the world.” Apollo said. “But do you lose sleep over every atrocity committed? Over every grand or small act of injustice? No. Because that wouldn’t be convenient. So just stay put and relax. Pretend like you didn’t see it at all, that’s the best way for moral people like you to get through the day.” Apollo walked towards the red curtains. Dion regretted everything, he regretted mocking Apollo earlier, he regretted climbing the stairs and in the confluence of his mind, between a curiosity and a fear and an anger he went down. Rushed down. Ran down. To the people, down to the counter with the drunkards because they seemed like better company that Apollo. And Apollo felt better with Dion at distance, at an arm's length he could grab though very, very away. He could finally breathe as he stepped into the room with the satin curtains and the man at the center staring at a pole dancer across from him. Apollo looked, he should bear witness to it all. He frowned and saw the man with a woman wrapped around his thin arms and two bodyguards with their buttoned-up shirts looking across. They looked like vacationers, with the tropical flower patterns all across the fronts of their shirts. 

“They lost a bet, I made them wear them.” Mr. Lovenski said. The bodyguards smiled. What right do they have to be so jovial, Apollo thought. Lovenski slapped a seat to direct Apollo. Apollo grabbed a stool and sat with the pole dancer behind him. It was easier to talk to the man that way.

“I’m here to discuss a deal.” Apollo said. 

“Come on, you don’t even want to get to know me?” He said. Apollo eyed him, he was ashamed to admit that he was not ugly. Or greasy. Or hairy like the movies had painted villains to be. He was rather handsome, he treated his staff right. He smiled and it was warm and homely and it only served to make Apollo angrier. Anger was coming onto him. Dion’s words were still in the back of his mind like a painful cyst. 

“I like doing my business quick. How much product can you move within a month?” Apollo asked.

“A hundred fifty kilos, maybe.”

“That’s a lot for such a small town.” 

“It’s all supply and demand.” Lovinski said. His hair was neat but the few strands that dangled above his right eye. “Why would you want to do business with us if we weren’t profitable?”

“You’re right.” Apollo said. “I can get some in by the week. We’ll supply, don’t worry about that.” 

“Don’t you want a drink?” Lovinski waved for one of the girls to leave. 

“No. I don’t drink.” Apollo said. 

“That’s terrible.” He said. “The only men who don’t drink are men with secrets worth keeping.”

“And that’s why I don’t drink. Is there anything wrong with being secretive?”

“No, it’s not. Mr. Lorenzo.” He said. Apollo was afraid he had jerked at the fake name, even if it was the name he himself had given out days ago. 

“It’s absolutely fine to be secretive if you’re with enemies.” Lovinski grabbed the woman's shoulder.

Apollo’s head was getting hot. Here was a small, handsome man, who made his wealth from the suffering of others and here was a Vicar, inhuman as could be. He could have snapped his neck at any moment, killed everyone in the room and it would not make Apollo feel comfortable. He felt like he lost in some way and leaned closer to Lovinski. 

“Are you suspecting me?” Apollo said. “I’m not police. I promise.”

“I know you’re not. Because I know every cop in this town. Some FBI agents. Some CIA even.” He said. “But someone from the cartel would know about that, right? He would know how big of a business drug trafficking really is.” He smiled. 

A girl came in and set down a drink in front of Apollo. Apollo felt the music on his skin like a strong surf and he was getting hotter. He felt the girl dancing behind him, and the small wafts of air come his way. He looked at Lovinski and his smile and took a sip, then gulp of the drink.

“It’s good.” Apollo said. It came to him immediately, the movements and the plan all at once. His muscles, flexed beneath his coat and his legs veiny underneath their socks as he planned it. And Mr. Lovinski smiled. He got closer to Apollo and took the drink in front of him. He finished it for Apollo, smiling. 

Apollo stood.

He punched the first bodyguard he saw in the jaw and felt it snap out of place like a broken jigsaw. There was no rattle of his brain. His face turned and he was unconscious. Apollo reached to the other man with his hand and grabbed and felt two bullets enter his thigh but the glass was thick and to the crowd was too intoxicated to notice. Apollo slammed the second ones head into the pole and watched his unconscious body fall, the gun went off again and shot Apollo's foot.

But his body was healing and already he could not feel the pain. He picked up the pistol and felt Lovinski shooting at his back. He did not flinch. He only hurt for a moment and with precise hands dissected the gun and threw its pieces at the chameleon who peered in. It hit him in his temple and the veil of darkness was over his dazed eyes. 

“I can’t believe I lost.” Apollo winced. The bullet casings were coming out of his back and rolling on the floor and the women could not move as Apollo came closer to Lovinski and his shaking hands that fiddled for another clip. 

“What are you?” He asked.

“Give me a list of names of all your LSD dealers. Last name, first name. And tell me how much product each of these fuckers moves.”

“Fuck you. I’m not saying shit.” He was calming down and his face bore fangs. This was the famous stone wall, truly a man who was used to interrogation. Apollo snuck his hand under the table, under the cloth that draped it and suddenly Lovinski felt ill. He jumped, he put both his hands underneath the table now too and Apollo flexed his muscle. There was a groan. 

“Get the fuck off me. You’re crushing them.” He screamed. He tried slapping, tried punching Apollo. He loaded his gun and shot two bullets in Apollo’s skull, the rest in his chest. The bullet casings fell to the floor and blood that should have been there on his cheeks retreaded back into his body. The holes closed.

“Not strong enough. You need more power than that.” Apollo said. 

“What are you?” He asked again. Apollo flexed his arm again. 

“The list.” Apollo said. Mr. Lovinski was shaking and drew blood from his tongue.

“Fuck you. I’m not saying shit.” 

“A normal man would have confused this for honor.” Apollo said. “But I know you for what you really are. You’re afraid they’d break much easier than you. And that’s all under the implication that I won’t kill you, right?”

The man huffed. He struggled through the pain that ran up his head and caused him to sweat. The women were crying.

“You’re right. I won’t kill you.” Apollo said. His arm shook, the table shook. The man shook. His mouth was open and he was surprised at the warmth. More surprised than pained, more curious over the feeling and the blood that trickled down as if the satin had turned liquid and spilled over. The woman to his shoulder wanted to peer. She wanted to know what it was that made Lovinski silent and that had made his face dumbfounded. She tried unveiling the cloth. 

“Don’t look.” Apollo stopped her with his free hand. “This is a secret between us.

Lovinksi finally screamed. Pain found him. His legs shook, his body rattled and he was scratching at Apollo and trying to pry away from his iron grip. 

“You still have one chance to be a father. Start writing.” The man writhed in his seat. The women were screaming, there were shocked gasps coming from the hall now, but people were too afraid to go up the stairs. And most of them were still dancing below, still filled themselves with each others touch. Lovinski slammed himself on the table. He scattered everything. Glass shattered. He pulled a napkin up. 

“I need a pen. I need a pen. Pen. Pen.” He was shouting. He looked around, everyone's faces showed despair. Silent. Gasping. “I need a pen you stupid bitch!” Apollo wasn’t sure who he screamed at. Him or the girls or the people below. Apollo reached into his pockets and threw it at him. He wrote and each time he stopped to think, Apollo shook underneath. Like whipping a mule. 

“That’s the secret about men, ladies.” He said. “They’re easy to handle if you get a hold of their horns.” 

Lovinksi screamed and pushed the paper to the side. Apollo read it and thought about letting go. 

“That’s all you want, right you fuck?” Lovinski said. “I’ll fucking kill you. I swear it.”

“Don’t make promises you won’t keep.” Apollo said. “You’ll never see me again. Live with that pain. You will never get revenge.” Apollo said. He looked into his quivering eyes and at once pressed again. It was all gone. The man, the girls. They all gave into screaming and Lovinksi sat in his seat, grabbing his bloody groin. Apollo let go.

“I saved you the sin of having children. You’ll never bear any kin to take hold of your rotten business. You’ll never pass it on. That’s good. I hope this whole shit show dies with you, honestly.” Apollo said. 

“I’ll fucking kill you.” Was all the neutered man shouted between his crying moans. One of the girls was calling an ambulance. Apollo looked around, there were no cameras and he felt calm at last.

“When they ask you. When they mock you. When you're dying, fatherless. When someone asks you about the origin of your troubles. Tell them. Tell them! It was the devil, come to take his dues.” Apollo walked out. He hugged the dark walls and steered clear of the light and found the nearest window to drop from. He looked below, he sighed and felt his bones press down. He stood. He looked at his phone and held it with his fingertips, trying to find Dion’s name among the screens. The light made the blood brighter than it was and he looked at his hands with disgust. 

He should have put his gloves on first.

The crowd of people around him jeered and laughed. They pumped their fists and drank from red cups and bottles that fell into lakes of broken glass. Dion watched a man come from this crowd, shirt removed. He was not thin nor strong, but very tall and drunk. The man looked at him, clenched his face and pointed his fists before he shot out. He was pushed forward. Then he found stride. He ran. He put his hand forward to him and aimed it at Dion’s face.

Dion stepped to the side and kneed him. He dropped almost instantly. The crowd was silent for a moment, wondering what would happen next and disappointed mostly. But the man stood again and held at his abdomen and breathed with a voracious appetite as all the contents of his lungs had been taken from him. He was not as forward anymore. He put his shoulder towards Dion, only had one fist to him and kept his to its side like a knife. He went forward and Dion stopped him. He kicked his forward leg and watched him limp. He tried again and again Dion kicked. It was more a tap for him, more of a hammer for the limping man who had to stop and feel if something had snapped in his leg. The man would not rest though. He was too drunk to feel it fully and this all excited Dion. Though he tried to hide his grin and hide the feeling of his gut that jumped up to his chest with the growing cheers of the crowd. He did not want to enjoy it but he did. 

And the drunk man? The drunk man jumped out again. He did not realize it this time, when he was punched square in the nose and shot back, he did not realize he was down. He only held his knee and rested his whole body on his leg as warmth and embarrassment spread out from his face. Shame was growing in him. The only pain a drunk could feel. A pain that made his heart rush. He raised himself, hoping to uppercut, hoping to do something.

He was slapped. He laid out on the floor.

His arms were shaking as they stood him. His lip was burst and his violent heart would not rest as the blood ran down his face. He could not win, he knew that. But shame would not let him leave. 

At that moment, with his feet dragged on the floor, the drunk man had found a knife in his pocket and lunged out to Dion. The two men shouted. They tried pulling back. He screamed. His eyes were bloodshot, yellow hued. He felt himself stop and felt blood spill onto his forehead and was confused for a moment on what or who or how it was there. He looked up, his eyes dragged and slurred and they stopped at Dion’s hand. The knife laid there, in his palm. It was bleeding, he saw. Then stopped, he saw. And the drunk walked back with wobbly legs, fear and injury both catching him and causing him to slip on street water. 

He hit the back of his head and was out. 

And Dion looked at the people with eyes open.

“I’m sorry.” He said. He put his back behind him, he put his whole back against a wall and watched the people now silent. Two of the drunk’s friends were dragging him out. A woman came out of the crowd to see the wound. 

“I’m a doctor, let me help.” She said. He would not give her his hand and nearly ran from her and stopped when he touched another person's chest. It was beginning to feel claustrophobic. With the people staring, not laughing or pumping their jovial hands, not entertaining themselves. They just watched. He wanted to push them all. He felt palpitations. He felt like he was dying and asked how he got himself here in the first place. Why he was here. Why he had ever fought. Somewhere in the middle of his zigzagging eyes, he found the reason. The beautiful, brunette reason.

“Thank you.” A young girl’s voice said. “Thanks.” She was raising her hands in the air. Dion cut through the crowd or rather they let him pass. And with him gone, the whole thing sort of disintegrated into nervous laughs and the phones of people calling ambulances and police. But the young woman was there. A brunette, turtleneck sweat, hoop earrings and a ponytail style in between lazy and mischievous with how wild the hairs flew out. 

“You didn’t have to do that.” She said.

“I did.” Dion smiled. He wiped blood on his face. 

“Let me see your hand.” She said. He held it back and she seemed mad at his doing so. He felt bad at lying to her. There was no knife anymore, no wound. He felt looking at her eyes and feeling good in his stomach. For next to her laid her boyfriend, or husband, or what he hoped was her brother. His cheeks were swollen and he was looking in a daze at the half-eaten moon and the slow appetite of the clouds.

“I’m fine,” Dion said. “I couldn’t leave it like that. They ganged up on your brother.” 

“My fiancé.” She said. Dion’s smile died.

“Let me pay for your hospital bill at least.” She kept bugging him. 

“It’s fine, I swear.” He was trying hard to seem neutral, trying to hide a growing discomfort. But in his guts and his pockets he could feel it, the buzzing of annoyance or maybe disappointment. He thought, that he no right to think she was single or that he was deserving of any kind of prize for playing the white knight. Then he felt terrible for calling her a prize and it grew, as his face lowered, it grew. More she kept pulling at his arm and thanking him. And more he felt terrible, head falling and drooping. He was lost and felt the urge to run away. At least the drunk had put a fight, he thought.

“What the fuck is this.” 

Dion heard from a distance. He saw Apollo and the cell phone on his ears and he saw him coming up to him with his angry, wide stride and Dion felt relief. He was salvaged. Like a wave crashing against the shoreline, dragging all the mirth and garbage into the depths. 

“What the fuck did you do?” Apollo asked. Dion sighed. He felt air at last. 

“These guys were picking on her fiancé. I stopped them.” He said. The woman looked at the two. 

“You beat the shit out of some drunk asshole. Congratulations. That must have been real tough, real grand for you.” Apollo said. “But I’ve been fucking calling you for twenty minutes now.”

“I was inside most of the time, why didn’t you just look around. I was by the bar.” He said.

“I wasn’t interested in staying, alright? What does that have to do with you not answering your phone anyway?” He said.

“My phone? Your phone is ringing,” Dion said.

“Yeah asshole, your phone was ringing. So fucking answer it next time. I need you alert.” Apollo shouted. His foot tapped. His legs were uneasy and shaky.

“Your phone is ringing.” Dion said again.

“Alright, you’re breaking my balls now.”

“No, your phone is ringing. Answer it.” The woman interrupted. Apollo shot a glare at her and felt his pocket. He looked at the screen and grunted like a savage man, lost to time, lost to place. His brows collected on his nose bridge and he pouted as he answered. And all the while, the shadows were collecting on his face as the desperate words were being spoken. But the two did not care.

The woman tugged at Dion and they both turned away from him. 

“If he hadn’t started the fight.” She looked the broken man on the floor. “If he just relaxed after the first few drinks, you wouldn’t have gotten hurt. I’m sure your hand isn’t fine. I’m sure it’s going to cost a lot.” 

“No, no, I swear I’m fine.” He said.

“I don’t like being talked down to. This isn’t a joke. I feel guilty and I wanted to at least help you the way you helped us.” She began working her purse. 

“Believe me, lady. I’m fine.” He said but she kept working her purse anyways and seemed more anxious as Dion spoke.

“If you need some money. Maybe a place to stay, any help, give me a call. I don’t like owing people debts, I don’t like owing anyone anything.” She handed the paper to him. He wanted to shout. All feeling came back to him. His depression died, stabbed in his stomach and the wounds were being filled with some new excitement. 

He double checked to remember which hand wasn’t supposed to be injured and grabbed it. He tried containing his grin and looked down at the lover and his spinning head. He shouldn’t have smiled but did. He shouldn’t have wanted the urge to call but would, though tried saying otherwise. And the two shared that brief moment, of politeness and humility. Yet Dion’s feelings were anything but just. He came in to shake her hand. He wondered if he was too sweaty. She leaned in to shake his and they both felt the brooding face of Apollo. Like a fucking sledgehammer.

“We’re leaving. Right the fuck now.” He said. The sirens were wailing in the background like the violent voices of a shade.

“I think I need to speak to the police though.” Dion said.

“Fuck that, we have bigger problems.” Apollo said. Dion opened his mouth but understood. He looked back to the girl.

“What’s your name?” He asked.

“Ophelia.” She said. Ophelia, he repeated, every vowel of the word feeding the fire in his chest. He waved and they were gone. There was another sighting and it was time for sterner men.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that back there.” Dion said.

“Shut your mouth. It doesn’t matter now, none of it does.” Apollo said. Dion listened. His head was held at an angle as his ear followed the low roar. 

The fumes felt hot. They rode up Apollo, up from his leg and all the way out at the top of his suit where it was caught beneath his mask. The sweat collected on his collar as small stains and gave the illusion of rain. He did not know if the heat made him this wet or if it was the danger that raced across the streets, red-colored, like a comet plucked from the black sky. He could see the creature well as it hung low with many legs and many furred ends to his limbs, the tongue shot out at the car and stabbed it, a rapier's deadliness. The car hiccuped. The driver jumped. It fell into the dips of the uneven road and crashed into a fence whose metal dragged along the front of the car and filled the ground with sparks. Then it jumped again, past a factory, past another fence, into a culvert. So fast, so hot it went down, sliding against the diagonal walls of the culvert. 

Apollo saw it all but waited atop the safe balcony because he was scared. Every bone snapped into position. His whole body refused to move. Until he felt the rough hand. Until Dion tapped him forward.

“What are you waiting for?” He said. Apollo looked out to the screeching car. Dion was putting his mask on. Both wore the ivory on their face, rough and simple and chipped. It stopped the wind against their red eyes, it hid them well, it made them anonymous ghosts across the rooftops. They jumped off brick and concrete pillars that held the freeways above, they ripped through fences that dangled off their feet like caught weeds. It did not take long to find the car again, speeding into the small sewage shoot. Apollo took out his blade as he ran and rested it on his shoulder. The wind currents grazed it, scratched him until he was finally low and lean and his blade no longer suffered the molasses of drag. He was a half crescent moon. A failed abortion of the celestial bodies, half in shadow and half in blinding moonlight. Dion followed the searchlight his partner left to him. 

He tucked his shoulders and raced forward, his guns pointed to the floor. They looked like dogs, acted and hunted like them, heads forward, weapons forward as if in a four-legged sprint. Dion galloped, his mouth open, he felt his tongue dance and he shot at the height of his jump. The beast felt one of its legs go. It passed their racing bodies and drizzled blood. The beast did not jump. It had too many legs, to even feel a loss of speed. 

Dion shot again. The car honked. The creature shot back. 

It stabbed its tongue into the ground, the mighty Excalibur of a weapon it held. It vaulted. Turned, faced them, whipped his tongue around the floor and watched the rocks shoot out at them like an anchor sweeping against the ocean floor, uncaring of all the fauna and creatures harassed by its wide move. They put their arms in front of their faces and lost sight for a moment. It gained on the car. Three dogs after the shiny object.

“Don’t fucking miss.” Apollo ran ahead.

“I’m trying not to.” Dion watched him. Dion shot again. The air pushed Apollo’s hair. And he missed and missed and missed. And Dion spat. A clever animal it was, hiding behind the body of Apollo as the meat shield he was. And Dion grew hungrier. He went forward, past Apollo and nearly pushed him away. Rage was in his hands and his legs that raced forward. The wind snapped and broke at his ears as he was approaching the pace of the car with those inhuman muscles.
 
Forty, forty-five, fifty, sixty miles per hour. 

He shot twice. Too wild though. Too unrestrained. The floor looked molten where his bullets ricocheted and missed. The casings shed off. He was getting closer. His heart pounded. He forgot to breathe. His red eyes were stuck in that glazed craze like the drunkards before, so intoxicated by adrenaline.

He pulled the trigger. Click. 

Click. 

Click, click, click, click. 

Out of ammo. His tension died and he was afraid he would too. 

The creature turned. He stared. Dion was searching inside his coat for bullets that spilled to the floor. The barrel withdrew, the smoke rose. Red hot, steaming. He was about to be thrown away and stomped on the floor, turned to ash. Dead. He was going to die. The beast opened its mouth and Dion saw the circular teeth like a shark, a vortex, a blender, a black hole. Dion thought, a precious brief thought. The last thought. He asked himself, would the world die with me? 

The blade-tongue shot out. Apollo shot out. 

His shoulder pushed Dion aside. His giant steel was held firm in front of them. It did not matter. Through the steel, it went. Breaking the reflected light into a thousand brilliant flaws laid on the floor like a water surface. It stabbed through to Apollo and they all saw blood color the cement floor. Dion was still. The beast charged forward to the car.

Apollo was still on the floor. 

“Hey, come on.” Dion shouted. 

He was still. His body looked stuck into deadlock, crooked on the floor. But Apollo breathed. Dion breathed.

Apollo raised his hand. The hand went to his mouth, he was trying to hold what ever was spilling out. It felt like teeth, teeth in the river of blood, like paled-struck people dragged along flood waters.

“My hucking hace.” Apollo said. He had no bottom lip to say f. The mask was embedded in him and he his head could not stop rattling. 

“Let me help.” Dion said.

“Go.” Apollo shouted. "Go!" Or at least, Dion figured. Apollo laid out, he grabbed his face and shook it around, shook the pain, tried to make sense of his throbbing skull.

“Alright.” Dion said. There was a loud crash and Dion stared at the hot streaking marks. The smell of ruin was intense as if he was baptized in gasoline. He could smell so well he began to taste the bitterness, ash mostly, in the back of his mouth. Dion ran faster as he saw the creature inspect the car. He was looking inside. It would have grabbed her had the bullet not sounded off and had the rear mirror not snapped into the air. It hit the graffiti-laden walls and the creature took offense.

It shouted out, high-pitched. Like an after blast shock of a missile, a loud horror in the night, the stuff myths were made of. The devilish choir bells, here to alert everyone to the congregation of chaos. The fires that rose and danced like Satan’s tongue, the smell of sewage emanating from the dark hole behind the two, the dying woman, burning and bleeding. It was primeval. 

It spat. It ran. It raged. The rustling of it's furred face frightened Dion. It looked like a chimera, half-reptile, half-lion. It wore the crown of hair around its body. Yet it had no pride. It disappeared into the hole. 

Dion looked back to the crashed car, to the woman. It was like before, with the men, with a heart that could not decide. Or he thought at least, that it would be a hard choice. He thought his mind could argue better. But his adrenaline was too much, the thought of failure was too much, the thought of killing the monster was too much. 

He looked to the car. All he could see was blood on the windshield or what was left of it. It looked like netting. Though it caught no one, only piece of someone. A wheel rolled away, tapped along the surface like a drum line, and fell flat.

‘She’s probably dead.’ He thought. He reloaded his guns. ‘Yeah, she’s probably dead.’  He reasoned. 

He prayed for her.

"I need to go." He said. Like a child reasoning for play, for his toys, for his fun. Dion smiled. He walked into the hole, dipped his feet into sewage and his form disappeared into the darkness. 

The walls of rusted metal expanded outward into the small tunnels. He could feel the shit and piss up his leg and his feet that tried desperately to stay stable as he swam through the trash and murk. His feet felt like sponge. The ceilings were dripping with gunk and filth and the smell was oppressive. He held his breath. Rancid, putrid, it was like the rotten sweet smell of death was all around him and it made the small tunnel feel larger than it was. His shoulders could just fit. 

It was in this dripping darkness that he had stopped thinking. He was more so driven by a rapid beating heart and the pulsing in his fingertips that made his guns feel lighter than they were. He was close. The string on his arm showed it. He came to a crossroad, he looked at all six directions and the small light they showed from the curb gutters. He could hear clacking, cars hums, the deep moans of the city night. They came like small whispers through the holes and he made sure to steer clear of the light. He lifted his arm and chose the third tunnel, it seemed arbitrary though.

Is this it?

A bag floated past him, a rusted soda can cracked underneath his feet. He turned! 

Nothing. Just cardboard, spilling from a metal grate and fluttering.

He looked down and began to see the murky green. His eyes fell into the trance of his image and his muscles relaxed as his shoulders fell. It was almost enough to get him killed. Almost, had his legs obeyed him, had his heart stopped racing, had he totally relaxed he would have died. But every organ in his body knew. His lungs that stopped all of a sudden knew. For the feeling of air behind his head had broken, like a whisper spoken and draped around his neck. You’ll die if you stand still, ya know. He rolled forward. The blade went past him and up the wall. It scraped along and broke pipes that spilled water across his face and made him blurred. 

The water fell on his head and it felt cool. There was steam coming off him, he held the back of his head and watched the direction of which he was attacked.

The darkness devoured the monster. All he could tell was the snarl, the scratching walk like a dragging executioners chair. 

He cocked his gun. The creature ran. Under him. It aimed to trip him. It would have, had he not jumped. But in the air he felt wrong, the tongue shot out. He caught the broken metal pipe and lifted his legs from being amputated. He could not tell sweat from water or blood, only knew he had no time to breathe and held the air in his lungs with that tight face as he touched the ground. He shot, a bullet into the narrow space like a canon through a slide. It scaled the walls and ducked. Black hairs shaved off and fell. He could see its shape then. He could count seven legs, would be eight had he not blown one off earlier. It bled and dripped on the water but did not seem bothered by the septic smell. It was too focused to. Both of them were, as the light segmented them into slide shows of anger and rage, a new face, a new growl with each passing shadow of the bars. Dion was counting space, though he winced for somewhere in the tussle his thigh must have been ripped open and it bled now, faster than it healed. His eyes blinked and the creature was gone.

He shot. His wrist snapped. He shot. The tunnel was filled with the noise of his frustration, the ricochet of blue bullets, the smoke that rose up and his muted scream that had died underneath the buzz of his deaf ears. The cloud of smoke rose. It was enough to push away the smell. But not the demon and from the curtains of white, he saw the jaws of death.

He groaned and felt the teeth dig into his shoulders. Rows of teeth spun and eviscerated his flesh, he could feel each time the beast moved. It held this position. It tightened, he could feel its muscles tighten.

And Dion began to laugh. That’s all that went down the holes and the pipes, the laughter and the drop of his pistol into the murk. He was beginning to enjoy the pain, it felt like the embrace of a lover and so he hugged. He tightened his arms around the creature, squeezed it through until he could feel something pop and with a great push, slammed himself against the metal walls. He could feel their shape lump the concrete and metal. He could feel the dirt moving as he slammed himself and the beast against the wall. Laughing. Holding, caressing almost as he slammed away. After a while the chimera let go, its mouth was tired. Dion felt its breath yield. It was wheezing. He grabbed it by two of its legs, at random, and launched it one final time.

It drooled. It fell from the walls and drooled black blood. Dion felt his shoulder, he didn’t realize how much it was ruined until he began to slack from one side. When he couldn’t move his arm anymore he spat, he’d use his feet then. 

Dion reached for it. The tongue shot out in retaliation. It went through the palm of his hand, cut his cheek and dug itself into the ceiling above. 

“You’re tenacious. I respect that. But you’re only tenacious in the way an animal is, with the fear of death guiding you. I have more than that, more to fight for, more to die for.” He heckled. The mouth closed. He made sure of it, as he kicked it shut. The tongue was lopped off, it fell. It looked like a noose as Dion removed it from his arm and let it hang from the ceiling. 

He grabbed his pistol and thought to shoot it. But he turned it, last second, and pointed the butt of his gun on the monster. He could not help himself, it was what made his stomach flutter. It was what made him happy as he brought it down over and over, a mechanical swing that lifted the blood to his face. By the fifth bludgeon, the beast had stopped moving. By the tenth, Dion had stopped. He was ripping it apart, butchering it, looking at what to eat. 

He did not remember what happened much, only remembered as to why he left. There was a voice above, a curious group of eyes, obviously drunk with how they rocked standing. Dion did not remember what they looked like, he was too drunk by food too. He only remembered their hushed breaths, only remembered their eyes as they looked down to the sewer to the pair of ruby’s they had spotted. They stared down and Dion stared up, his mask half lifted, his mouth chewing on something that no longer resembled meat. 

One of them snapped their heels and it fell on Dion like a heavy raindrop.  

He looked around almost as if he had forgotten where he was. He looked in his pocket, the heart had long since been stripped. So why am I here?

He sighed, rubbed his head, slapped himself a bit. His legs felt heavy, his neck felt weak and he smelled like shit.

“I’m alive.” He gargled. “I’m alive.” 

His jaw was having difficulty growing back. He was having difficulty standing up. His arms could not lock in place, his arms dropped him on the concrete many a times and he was forced to feel the rough surface on his skinless jaw. He was bleeding everywhere, atop the dandelions that grew in the cracks of the culvert, atop the small stream of gutter water at the center, atop the piece of his mask now laid out everywhere. 

“No evidence.” He mumbled. He used his sword to stand, and fell. He put it inside of his coat and waited in a prostrated position for the pain to subside. It never did. When he was done resting, he sat on his knees. Apollo picked the small pieces of his mask, putting them in his coat. He was like a bird with bread crumbs, knocking and tossing ten pieces with each he picked up. His eyes were the first to heal and his blurred vision of the sky fixed on the north star that shined through the clouds. 

“No evidence.” He said. He was noseless, his voice sounded nasal and as he dragged his body around he noticed his teeth falling before they could find a grip on his gums. He was removing pieces of his mask from his mouth, they were like toothpicks, dug in between his loose teeth. He wanted to cry but had no tear ducts to, those came later. He was following the stars and after a while, following the bullet casings and putting them in his palm. He looked like a child in red, picking flowers and fungi from the forest, all bountiful with the shells falling from his fingertips. 

He came to the wreckage and the car that had tried to drive up the wall, only to fall at an angle upwards, lopsided against the wall with the top portion ruined into a scrunch. He dropped the bullets and watched with strained eyes. He swore he could hear breathing, though his head ached and filled him with false sounds. But he was sure this was a person, sure that it was no schizophrenia. 

He leaned in and the soft noise of strained lungs responded back. He walked closer to the car, put a hand on the trunk and jumped when it burst open. There was nothing inside, a false jack in the box. The car was just so wrecked that it took every opportunity to burst out. The wheel rims fell to his feet. The glass knocked back. And he was hearing the woman, somewhere in the cluster of metal, he heard her. 

He also heard the choppers.

The heavy blades that cut through the air, the light that was far off yet closing in. He saw it, it started at the knocked down fence wire and followed the trail of carnage. It was coming to him. 

“I need to go.” He said. “I can’t get caught.” 

He turned his legs to move and heard her breathe again. Softer now, more desperate like she was drowning. He heard the loud sirens of the police too. And wondered why they even bothered if the whole point was to catch people, why make any sound. That seemed counter-intuitive. But who was he to judge about bad hunting practices? He was beaten. He looked like a ghoul and felt like an idiot. 

“You’re not worth it.” He said. The car lit into flames and he nodded his head. He could talk now. And bitch. And he stomped the floor as his body moved towards the car and threw the door outward. It echoed off, the light was looking for the sound. 

“I must still be fucked in the head.” He said. Though he wasn’t, he was very clear and he punched the airbags that deflated with a droning waft. The girl looked up at him, she almost looked as bad as him and when her eyes opened to the sight of the fire reflected from his fleshless face, she cried. It wasn’t loud. She could barely breathe. 

“Zombie.” She said. She tried to push him away, her arms were trapped behind the dashboard. That was the first thing Apollo got rid and it seemed the more he helped her, the more frightened she became. He was getting slapped and she was getting frustrated and frightened, her hand kept slipping from him. 

“Will you stop it.” He said. He ripped the seat out, laid her on the ground and would have reprimanded her, his pointed finger was already in front of her, but he noticed her legs. What was left of them, and he just sighed. 

“How are you alive?” He asked. His felt weight on his face, his nose must have come back. 

“Zombie.” Her face would not move. 

“Look who’s talking.” He said. He looked back. They were arriving and he bit his now freshly formed lip. He was an idiot. He put his hand in front of him and blocked what little light he could. The other hand was wrapped around his lower mouth. 

"You don't know how lucky you are." He reached over to her and ripped a sleeve from her. He wrapped it around himself. 

“Freeze.” He heard an officer say. They were opening their doors in careful unity. Their bodies were hidden behind the white cars and their guns were pointed through the gaps of the row of cars.

"Next time you should fucking use those car brakes."

She wasn’t listening, simply mumbling, they’re dead. He nodded his head. He was staring at the barrels of the guns. Facing them, seeing where they ended.

"All units to 4622 Edmond St., near the freeway. Yes. Yes" 

Can I make the jump?

“Freeze or I’ll blow your fucking brains out.” 

You’re a little too late for that.

“No one has to die today.”

Except for me.

“Put your hands up. You’re surrounded.”

Like it matters.

They sang their warnings like a choir of fear. Apollo grinned, with what little face he had to grin. Somehow, they could tell what it was. His body seemed loose, ready to move and they all steadied arms. 

“Go fuck yourselves.” Apollo said. He ran. Up the side of the culvert, he felt the bullets hit his shoulder and he kept his head low. He felt his knees shot. He jumped with the single good one he had left. He stabbed his arm through the side of a wall, it was a storage house and it was being drilled through as he scaled it up. His back felt like it was on fire, an acupuncture of bullets had begun to bleed him. But he stood. He growled. He ran, jumped building to building with the light struggling to catch up to him. He held his leg, he shouted and put his hand against the stream of burning light.

“Fuck off.” He mumbled. 

“Fuck off.” He shouted.

He led them. A few gallops, a few miles away, he led them. And smiled once again, as the Colonel Weiner sign flashed neon across from him, on the other end of this very particular rooftop. Here, everything was heavy. The food, the smoke, the sign. He walked through the trails and puffs, he walked over to the giant E and watched it spark and scream as the metal was amputated. 

“You should have left me alone.” He said. They could not listen, if they did, they would have avoided it. The giant E shot off, throwing at them. It hit the glass and shattered it. They persisted. They would not stop, they flinched and shook in the air and shot down at him. He grabbed and L this time, L’s were sharper. This one he aimed for the light and watched as it flew off, like Medusa’s head, cut off and rolling in the air and spinning it’s vile gaze everywhere. They lost track of him. They shot at nothing and turned around the store that now read “Colon Weiner”.

They would have laughed. But the men with their rifles and heavy armor were too busy cursing. By the time support came, Apollo had disappeared. The grand escape. They cursed, where was he? How could he avoid us?

He went nowhere far, really and the police hadn't expected it. He was resting. He was on a bed of plastic bags and half eaten food. He had fallen into a dumpster somewhere in between a jump, an accident really, and had decided just not to move. And when the noise of the chopper was too loud, he pulled down on the dumpster door and rested his eyes. They were shouting, they never found him. No one did. Not till morning came and the opening pimple-faced burger artist came to him by accident. Until though, he slept. 

It had been a long time since he slept that well.

Apollo came to the front door and knocked four times before he realized no one was there. He sighed and fixed the cough mask the covered his mouth and nose, he still looked like a terror. He felt like one as he began to shove his shoulder into the door, wondering what tension would make it break. He was about to remove the knob before he smelled Dion. It was like a dung heap, creeping up on him across the hallway that seemed cluttered with the ghastly smell in the air. There were curious faces that showed their eyes, they took a whiff and they ran back inside.

“I forgot my key.” Apollo said. 

“You look tired.” Dion said. “I thought you said part of being a Vicar was not standing out?”

Apollo lifted his coat and showed him the bullet holes across his abdomen, where the blood had dried and where the scars protruded. The lead was still inside of him and moving to his desk in the room, sitting down, seemed to shake them and grate against his rib cage. 

“Please tell me you killed it and that you’ve got the stone.” Apollo said. Dion lifted the red rock from his coat, he threw it and Apollo ground it in his hand. He lifted his mask and show him the image, Dion looked disgusted, it was bizarre staring at such an injured man and it made him feel guilty. 

If only I had dodged. 

“I didn’t ask you to help me.” He mumbled. He was surprised the words had come out, something moved him to say it, like a second soul inside of him. 

“If I didn’t you would have gotten your head cut off.”

“I won’t apologize for what happened to you. You should have just acted like you always do, alone, calm. Collected. You had no right.” Dion said.

“I had no right to save you? Do you think I care about you?” Apollo shoveled the powder into his mouth. It tasted like candy, coating his tongue and fizzing, melting into him. “You’re church property. I was just protecting an investment. I understood the risk and I thought that me getting injured was a better alternative to you getting your head cut off.”

“Well don’t next time. You’re not my mother. So stop with your patronizing.” 

“Did I hurt your pride? Let me kiss your booboo, sweetheart.” Apollo mocked. His voice was high and it made Dion reach over, with anger in his fists, to remind him that he too was a man. He was about to swing before the door opened. 

“Another one.” Apollo rolled his eyes. He leaned back into his chair and kicked his shoes off, it felt like steam escaped him and he was only gathering the smell. He reached for his nose and fixed a bone in place.

“It never heals right.” He said to the crack of his face. 

“Did you think I wouldn’t read the news.” The Priest was screaming. He held the paper in his hand and waved it like a town crier. Here ye, here ye. Dion was trying to grab it but his hands flailed around and the Priest threw it on the table across from Apollo. He grabbed it and looked it over. 

“They almost got a picture of my pretty face.” He said. He felt his skin and watched it recede from a purple, burned and sickly color back to his tone of brown. Though lighter, less tanned. 

“You destroyed a helicopter. You destroyed a couple thousand in property damage. Roads will need to be rebuilt, fences will need to be re-stood.” The Priest was drooling. His dog face was drooping and his eyes would not blink. “It’s anarchy out there and you’re adding to it.” 

“A couple thousand seems like a better number than last time. It was just a couple scratches, some small infrastructure work.” Dion said. His head was low in reverence to the rabid holy man. 

Apollo touched his stomach. The bullets were coming out and falling on the floor. 

“We killed it.” Apollo said.

“I did.” Dion corrected.

“You’re right, I just got my face stabbed.” Apollo said. “The point is it’s dead. What’s the big deal?”

“You couldn’t have done it a little cleaner?” The Priest was slapping the back of his hand. There was no deal to broker though. 

“Nothing is ever clean with hellspawn. Maybe you should do it yourself if you want it done better. Assuming you have the balls to pick up the sword in the first place.” Apollo picked up one of the shells and laid it out in front of them all. The Priest slammed his hands on the table and watched the casing fall off.

“I’m your boss. Don’t you forget it. When I tell you to do something, you do it.” He said. He took his hands off it, he backtracked and touched the wall and looked at them both. They could barely look at him, only passed a glance before straying their vision away. 

“Are you getting closer to these freaks, at least.” The Priest said.

“Yeah. I have a name for a drug supplier that might have a connection to them.” Apollo said. 

“You dragged me all night for a name?” Dion asked.

“You seemed to have enjoyed yourself.” Apollo said.

“This guy doesn’t even know what the heck is going on?” The Priest rose and dropped his hands. “Maybe you should act, you know, like more of a partner.”  

“Another one with the fucking hecks. Is that hard to curse?” Apollo stood and threw his coat to his bedside. He walked over and laid himself on the mattress. His eyes were beginning to fall and he couldn’t help but feel wanting of another nap. 

“Whoever is doing this mess is an amateur.” Apollo rolled around. “He’s not really summoning demons, more so, personifications of demons. Very shallow stuff.”

“What do you mean personifications.” 

“I mean to say, they’re like puppets. He thinks the idea of one of the demons but doesn’t really call upon him. For example, the first thing we killed.”

“The bird.” Dion shouted, as if in a game show with the buzzard ringing off to his joy.

“Yes Dion, the big bird. That was a very simple rendition of Amon, one of the lords in the second layer of hell. Of course, it wasn’t actually Amon, more like the idea of Amon.” Apollo traced fingers into a sky, imagining the incantation that must have taken place. “Yesterday’s monstrosity took the shape of Bael, or at least, what we think of Bael. Lord of the third circle.”

“Why doesn’t he just conjure up the real things then?” The Priest asked.

“Because you can’t just conjure up princes and nobles and lords, they’re stuck in hell for a reason. For someone to undo the chains of God would require a godly power. That's equivalent exchange. For that reason, it’s very hard getting a real, tangible prince or noble up here on. Demons usually appear as shades, ghosts, as animals or illusions. They're more interested in haunting, pushing people. They’re rarely ever tangible and if they are, they usually aren’t very strong.” He said.

“Listen, I’m glad for your demonology lecture. But this only affirms one thing: you need to do your job better.” The Priest went off. 

“I’m putting the squeeze on them. It doesn’t matter why this person is doing it, who he’s doing it for, he’ll be fucked in a couple days.” Apollo yawned.

“You could speed it up if you got off your ass.” The Priest tapped on Dion. “Convince your partner to stop being lazy. Sloth is a sin, after all.”

“There’s no convincing him. He’s a dog. A stubborn dog.”

“Part of catching a criminal is giving him room to breathe and you do want to catch the right criminal, right?” Apollo asked.

The Priest nodded and rubbed his scalp. He looked around the room and the mess of clothes and papers scattered about with important, giant red circles over them. He looked at the map and the threads and pins that wrapped around the city and it made his head spin. He felt anger for his powerlessness, his inability to understand and remembering last nights face only made his feelings worse. The idea that people were suffering, the idea that they bled and died underneath what he felt was his city made him yank his hair. In the end, he took a deep breath of air. 

“By the way.” Apollo started. “How’d you know there would be a demon last night? You of all people.”

“Someone gave me a heads up.”

“Did you bother to get his name? Address? License plate?” Apollo rubbed his chin.

“No.”

“Right. Well, I’m going to sleep.”

“And if you’re going to sleep, then I’ll pick up after your slack.” Dion said. “I need to make the city safer since you won’t.” 

Apollo began to laugh. “Go ahead superman, just don’t cause any trouble.”

“Not any more than you would.” Dion said. The Priest exhausted his anger, felt something underneath his flesh that just disappeared into the environment like heat or energy. He could not move them, they were stones and he was too weak to push them on the incline. He felt like some Egyptian slave, empress-less, just pushing and moving and getting crushed. How could they not feel urgency? How could they not pity the weak? 

He sighed. He scratched his head and the spot where his hair used to be. He let the small gray threads fall to the floor. They looked like broken cobwebs. 

“Take some showers at least, you both smell terrible.” He said. And he was gone, getting ready for the new day. 

Author's Note: I did not forget to write Friday's chapter. I forgot to move it from pending published to actually published. Sorry! 

This had been the first time Jeremiah would see his partner since he was nearly killed and it frightened him. He had thought about leaving four different times on the way to the receptionist desk. He had hidden inside the restroom on the way to the room. He had stared at his feet for half an hour at the door, the big ‘601’ in black letters, and he had memorized the number of black tiles in the checkerboard pattern underneath his feet as he opened the door.

The first thing he heard was the strum of a guitar out of tune and how it made a hollow, low pitch note, like a bellow or a boat creak. He looked immediately from left to right. Everything was white and blue, clean and cold. He heard the noise of a machine and what it pumped into Officer Heinz’s tired lungs. He looked stuffed like a turkey roast, tubes and tape and bandages all over him to keep him from falling apart. Jeremiah dropped a bouquet of flowers he had bought for the occasion. The laid on the bedside.

His injuries felt small now that he looked at his partner, an injured arm, some cuts, that was it. He could not think of any of his aches as any kind of meaningful pain. He felt small in front of the man lifeless on the bed. And then he heard the guitar again. He looked to his side, his mouth was open and his face searched for the noise. There was a little person, quivering, strumming. 

Beady eyes looked back, they felt like bullets. It was a small face of a boy and he put his so close together as to seem like one small black tree brush, his hair like dead leaves, muddy, straying out.

“You must be his son, your mom told me you’d be here. How are you holding up?” Jeremiah said. 

The boy did not talk, only stared. It made Jeremiah feel cold.

“You’re here alone? I know your moms working but don’t you have any relatives?” He asked again. Nothing. Jeremiah smiled, it was fragile.

“I was his partner. He was very kind and brave, you’re dad that is. Funny too!” His face felt weak. “I’m just here to pay my respects.”
 
The boy nodded. He stared and when it felt like Jeremiah could not bear the judgment of his glare any longer, he started counting tile again. They were two mutes bound to by a respirator that was too oppressive for them. Jeremiah couldn’t look without being disgusted. None of what he suffered was enough, not enough to this coma. He clenched his fist and felt his stapled hands bleed. His knees shook. Then he just held his breath and the snot and tears that began to ride down his face. The beeping was so low but it felt like a hammer on his heart.

I wish I was on the bed instead.

He moved. He ran out. He would have reduced himself to a puddle if he hadn’t. The thought was too heavy. He put a stray rose into the sink and let it drip water that carried the aroma out the room, out the receptionist office, out the giant glass sliding doors at the front. The boy, the doctors, the crowd stared and he wanted to rip his eyes out.

I know I’m terrible. Stop looking, I know.

“Fuck. Fuck.” He told himself. A pair of doctors, smoking, moved aside as he came through the street. The hot air made his eyes burn and he just let go, all the way to his car, he wept. All the way to the liquor store, he wept. Through the day, through the night, he wept. 

Drunk by his sadness, drunk because of his sadness. Bottle after bottle, he hed himself the shots. 

Now, this is medicine. 

He was parked by a sidewalk. A giant man holding a donut hung leered overhead, an empty box of donuts rattled underneath him. He moved his hand across his face to see how bad it was, he counted twelve fingers on one hand.

“I should have manned up. I shouldn’t have let him take the lead.” He remembered the night, the bird that made his shoulders shiver. The darkness, the spear, the fear inside of his gut. He could not find a single scene of heroism from himself, not even on the ride back. Or in the medal of honor lying on the passenger's seat. He remembered his urine stain, he remembered that. 

Nothing felt good inside of him.

An hour into the stupor he had the idea to look outside, it was getting too hot and he opened his mouth thinking it would cool the burning in his throat.
 
“I need to let go.” He told himself. His face was strained like he had eaten something sour. “Why the fuck should I feel guilty. I only did what was normal, what anyone else would have done.” 

He pulled his wheel and nearly stripped it with his mad grip. 

“What the fuck do you expect of me. Huh?” He screamed at the sky. 

He looked up, proud of his outburst almost. His eyes kept to the slow-moving cloud and stars that looked like streaking lights in his blurred vision. They made lines of bright white and he followed them, followed them and where they lead. He faced the west, his upper half was hanging outside the window as he followed the light. And then he realized there were no stores. That these lines were not still, that there was a light dragging across the sky. He saw it. A comet tail, azure like a bright blade of water cutting through the dark horizon. He followed it to the donut man and his giant, plastic, smiling face. Then he saw the donut man, the statue of him, decapitated. The head, blown into molten, dripping plastic. Jeremiah laughed. Until the head fell on the rear of his car. Then he wobbled. Then he cried.

The metal was bending above, it anchored over him and he leapt out of the glass. The weight collapsed on his empty car and he crawled away, dragging his weak legs through the broken pavement. The light posts came down, the whole street looked like it would burst open and he found a nice corner, near a fence, to fall into fetal position. He kept his eyes shut as he heard the explosions, as the metal fell and collapsed and when it was all done, when all he heard was a raging fire he opened his eyes. The street in front of him, his car, were all swallowed into the sea of fire. There were people with him, looking, then firefighters, then paramedics. 

“He’s not hurt, just drunk.” A paramedic said.

Hah. Only drunk. 

The police officers looked at him, some of them familiar with his face. When it start, when did it happen, they asked. He did not know. He couldn’t explain much. He only knew what they knew. The street was filled with brimstone. And the lake of fire had tried swallowing him whole.

It had been three days since the sewer incident and they were pressed. Apollo bit his nails as Dion drove around the corner. They looked on outside to the shoeless children and the arcade cabinets they tiptoed in front of. Street fighter, or Metal Slug, they couldn’t tell with how ripped and broken the cabinet stickers were. There were liquor stores every other house, it seemed. Then the houses disappeared, then the road did too. Wooden fences became chain link, dogs roamed around, eating off sewer gutters. Crows picked and dragged carrion from the mud roads and from a sidewalk they could see a man in a wheelchair with a sign that read, ‘help a poor veteran’ and the cup that laid below him.

 The first thing Dion did when he stepped out was hand a few coins to the poor man. The second thing he did was shiver. He couldn’t tolerate the feel in the air, though Apollo did. This was the real heart of the city and the darkness was everywhere. They walked towards a parking lot half transmuted into forest. 

“They’re gon’ take me to the Saint Jones you bitch.” A woman was flailing her arms in the air, blue plastic bags hung on her arms like the swollen, rotten fruits of trees. Her hair was held together by a rag, a piece of an American. It was red and white. “Those devils are gon’ take me to the saint jones where the CIA live, let me tell you. They gon’ fill me with poison, ‘ell take my soul away I know it.” 

Another woman came by to drag her back to a small cove underneath a tree, a patch of blue tarp. She was apologizing to them with a very fragile smile.

“She’s sick.” She said. They sat and Dion couldn’t take his eyes off them.

“Don’t even try helping. Some things are beyond your control.” He said.

“It just makes me feel wrong.”

“Weak, you mean.” Apollo said. “You can’t punch disease in the face. You can’t wrestle it. You just fight it, endlessly, until it comes for you. For all of us, really.”

“Well, not us.” Dion said. “We’re different.”

Apollo spat. He whispered yeah in a dismissive tone and wandered.

There was no path to follow, just an endless patch of black asphalt that bled into the forest. The homeless were scared but they gathered around the flowers. Some slept, some drank, some picked the little joys from the floor. It had rained yesterday, Apollo was reminded, by the heavy dew collected on the poles and tarps that drizzled when they shook. It was as if they were sprinkles, watering these poor whithered souls. Well, it hadn’t done its job, Apollo thought. They all seemed dead.

“What are we doing here?” Dion asked.

“What’s the matter. I thought you liked helping people, why don’t you go around offering your services.” 

“I can’t help any of them.” Dion said.

“Hey come on, don’t be such a defeatist.” Apollo egged him. Dion frowned at the sound. “We’re just here to get a name, there was a murder nearby. Some kid, Matthew ‘Pip’ Lafayette. I have a belief that his murderer was one of our guys.  One of our many guys. I just want to see if anyone here has some information.”

“Jesus Christ, that’s horrifying.” Dion clenched his fist. “Are you sure it was them?”

“No. That’s why I’m here though, right?”

“What about the drug dealer?” Dion asked.

“He comes later. Don’t worry about him. Just ask around. Here.” Apollo threw a couple twenties into Dion’s hand. “Go buy some information. Don't. Give it. Away.”

“We’re just giving them twenties?” Dion asked. 

“You’re right.” Apollo reached for his hand. “That’s more than they deserve.” 

Dion pulled back and glared at him. Apollo smiled and watched him wander about into the little town of homeless.

The poor were everywhere, walking in droves, hanging clothes by the tree branches, hanging themselves by the metal stakes stuck in the floor that held their little bright-colored roofs together. They ate bread and crackers, they boiled water on small portable stoves and drank from little flasks in their jackets. He went around them carefully, watched them stack up on each other in the trees like a tower. The tall grass hid some sleeping on the floor and after a while Apollo became nervous to walk at all. It was like that for at least an hour. A dreadful hour, as he stared at their dirty faces and the way they looked at him like he was common place, like to some capacity, Apollo was like them. He hated being similar. He looked to his suit, it seemed neat and clean. He looked at his skin, it was not blemished or dirty like theirs. Yet they smiled, yet they passed him on as one of them. Apollo stepped on a man’s foot and looked away. He would have been caught in a disagreement if he didn’t hear the loud voice of Dion.

“There’s just no speaking to you, is there?” 

Apollo walked by. He touched Dion on the shoulder. 

“You talk to him.” Dion walked away. He opened the door of the car and slammed it and waited inside with his arms folded on himself. Apollo looked down to the man, it was the person holding the veteran sign who Dion had donated to. 

“You should be more grateful.” Apollo said.

“You should get the fuck out of my sun.” The vet said. 

“That’s probably the reason why you’re homeless, you’re unreasonable. I just want to ask some questions, old man.” 

“Ask away. You ain’t getting any answers though, you little shit.” He turned the wheel on his chair, Apollo stopped him.

“I’m not done with you.” Apollo said. “Were you here on July sixteen, at around noon, maybe dusk.”

“Get out of my sunlight.” He said. 

Apollo stepped aside and looked at him underneath the brightness of the sky. He wore a beret and over his black shirt he wore a green sweater. There was a marines patch on his shoulder, the pins of his service and sacrifice were attached to his hood. 

“What platoon did you serve in?” Apollo asked.

“Fuck off.” He said. Apollo put his foot in between the wheels again. The veteran felt himself stop and he looked up. He smiled and in one move, pushed Apollo. Tried to at least. He fell back to the chair and stood again to retry. 

“You’re not even crippled?” Apollo asked. “Did you even serve?”

“No.” The man answered. Apollo let go of his wheelchair. “I didn’t. What the fuck do you care?”

“I thought you’d be the one to care. Stolen valor and all that shit.”

“Valor is for dogs. So is pride, so is respect and decency. Ain’t no one ever been decent to me.” The old man said. He was wheeling down, Apollo followed himself and found himself jogging just to catch up.

“That’s shameful.” Apollo said.

“What the fuck are you going to do about it?”

“Nothing.” He held his wheel. “So long as you give me some information.”

The old man wheeled back to the streets and to the corner that he was yearning for.

“You think I give a shit about being blackmailed? If I cared, I wouldn’t have told you in the first place.” He said. “I’m not like you city folks. I have nothing to lose, I have no need or desire to stay here, no fear of being caught. Run me out of town and I’ll find a new spot, scream at me and I won’t listen. That’s the difference between you and me. You’re a dog and I’m a horse, I go where I please, I graze where I please.”

“I’m glad to hear you have so much to look forward to in your life, you old fuck.” Apollo said. “But a kid died. A kid that didn’t have a chance to go anywhere, do anything. He was cut to pieces.”

“What do I care for kids. They die everywhere all over the world, what’s one more body?”

“Everything,” Apollo said. “It’s everything to me. You tell me about this body.”

“Or what? You’ll take my life. Go on then. Do it here, let's see if you have the balls.” His voice was loud. His eyes were red, his breath smelled of cheap vodka. Apollo started to laugh, mostly to diffuse the staring faces.

“How about I just buy your information, you over dramatic fuck?” He asked. 

“I’m not selling anything for a shitty twenty your friend was offering me.”  He said. "Give me five hundred."

“He already offered you twenty huh…” Apollo said. He smiled. He could a vein crawling around his neck, he could feel his face redness. Dion could too, as he rolled up in the car. Apollo smiled, there were daggers behind his teeth and he felt the urge. He grabbed the man by the collar. Dion opened the car.

“I know exactly what to sell you.”

Pip’s death had made her angry at first. She blamed him for it, blamed his stupidity, blamed his meekness. It made her so frustrated she didn’t eat all day the day she found out. Then the next day came.  It made her sad, then, come morning when she was trying to remember a kind dream she had about him. She didn’t eat all day either. She committed herself to small things at least, to keep herself alive and sane. She showered, breathed, watched numbing television. She wept that night and she dreamed of Pip again. This one was a nightmare and this one she could not forget, though wanted to. On this third day, she was hopeless. She wandered to the police station asking questions to his death, to the whereabout of the rest of his body, to an answer, it took them an hour to get her off the premise. They almost tased her with how stubborn she flailed about. 

They said he was abducted, that they were on the case and that they had no suspects. She called them incompetent and came home late, her mother wasn’t home for the whole ordeal. So she spoke with Pip's mother instead. Mostly listened actually. Mrs. Pip was too busy crying to talk.

“I don’t know where he is.” She wept through the receiver. Sophie couldn’t answer her. No one knew where he really was, only where he had been kidnapped and only where they found a piece of him. The rest of Pip was out there and it hurt both of them. It was not enough to just die, but to be forgotten, to have an empty grave and a wandering soul. That seemed worse than just death to Sophie. She said sorry and hung up. 

She didn’t sleep much that night and on the fourth day, the twentieth of the month, she became resolute.

She spent all night planning it, there was no room for sleep and throughout the day she planted small siestas and naps whenever her racing heart allowed it. She almost slipped in the shower as fell asleep.

She had in her backpack, in no particular order: a map of the city, a fresh sweater and a few bags of treats. Candies mostly, she was still a child. She threw in a packet of jerky to pretend it was a healthy, good trail mix. She had the plan outlined, she rewrote it and redrafted in ten times throughout the day. It was simple, really, she wanted to know what happened to Pip. She thought it to be an easy plan, retrace her steps and interview the people around the scene of the crime. The places were named, Pete's Bakery, Lowdrie's Loundra-mats, The Devil's Tail. She didn't want to the latter in particular, it was a loud nightclub. But she would, like she would the other places and homes in the area.

“It’s not like the police are doing anything, right?” She said. She stood in front of her mother lounging on a sofa. A plastic clock ticked away, it was in the shape of a black cat and the pendulum tail swung for each second dialed. Eight twenty-four, it was about time to go. She looked down. 

“I’ll be back home soon. I left dinner for you.” Sophie said. It was just a styrofoam cup of noodles, now waterlogged. They looked like small slugs inside the cup. Her mother didn't care. She was snoring. It sounded like a cackle in the emptiness of the house. It was the first time she had ever felt the house to be too big but as she looked around, she felt small. The dark oak counters with linen cloths stained months ago, the rings of dirt that decorated the glass tables from cans of forgotten beer, the walls peeling their paint and paper like old bark. They seemed so far apart like small islands. Though she would miss it, horrible as the scenery was and she swore she would be back. It was enough to make her nose sniffle.

“You can’t even take out the trash.” She spoke low, her voice was strained. She walked to the kitchen and swung the black bag over her left shoulder. It was bigger than her but she carried it with ease. Her mother laid on the sofa, mouth open. There were green shadows around her mother's eyes from smudged makeup, her drooling lips dripped brown lipstick. Her cheeks were flushed red, though she was not afraid or ashamed or angry like Sophie was. Sophie found a cigarette bud on her mother's chest and flicked it to a glass cup. It had left a burned hole in her shirt. She kissed her mother on the cheek and wiped her lips of the taste of foundation and of rouge. Sophie wanted to put a sheet over her, the ugly sweater of hers, but her mother rolled to the side and dug her face into the soft cushions. 

“You’re all useless, aren’t you? The old men and the old women. You tell us to stop playing pretend and to stop playing games and here you are, years later, pretending to be good, pretending that this madness isn’t another kind of game.” She wasn't speaking to her mother though it didn't matter, no one listened. Her mother was too far gone in the drunken, tired, sleep. 

“I love you.” She finished. “I’ll be back soon.”  

Sophie did not sneak out. She did not play thief like all the Hollywood movies had made this kind of even to be. With tired, poor mothers like hers, she didn’t need to play false espionage. 

She walked out the front door, took out the trash until it laid on the edge of the sidewalk, and waved goodbye. She turned off the lights, closed the door and locked it and walked down the street. No one bothered to say anything to her, no one was there to care.

The broken lights of crooked posts rained down upon her pieces of light. She met travelers, some few minutes into her walk into the city who passed her smiles. Their teeth looked like daggers but she pressed forward, weak and wobbly, she moved on. 

She neared a park whose dry grass felt rough against her Achilles heel. She scratched herself going to the large tree at the center and climbed it like a conning tower and looked out to give directions to the worried captain, her heart, there was fear in her as she looked out to the thin veil of darkness and faced away from the wail of wild wind. There was curiosity in the small lights of apartments and of streets, like small stranded stars. There was mystery for her, but to you, dear reader, I will leave no surprise: Sophie would die tonight.

The sweat came off Alestor’s back and stuck his skin to the bed. It had been a night of strong images. He looked to his side and found a picture of a woman whose smile made a cold feeling drag across his spine and he put the picture face down as he became worse. The feeling would not leave. Not for an hour, as he went around the house looking for all the photos of his wife that smiled and stood and reminded him of the feeling in him that worsened. It was one-thirty-four in the morning when he was done. He fell on his bed and sat. It wasn’t long. He stood. He paced. 

He’s coming.

The stands of the knocked over photos shook like scared, wagging tails.

Alestor looked out to the moon and the dreary voice came to him underneath. It was in the floorboards. It was in the door frame. It was in the walls. The color, a light blue, he painted with his son years ago, flushed out. Everything turned malicious, everything closed in on him and the walls looked dark, like a black sea washing over him. He felt washed up. He sat down, catching his breath. He ran out the door, down the hall to a room whose locked doors annoyed him as he rushed through the combinations. It was his study. He struggled to the table on the end of the room. He quickly took out a brown bag. Like an addict, you could see the dependency on his face and his shaking hands when he felt the coarse pink salt pinched through his fingers and spilled all cross the floor and table. He threw, as quickly as he could. He threw in pinches, then handfuls. Then the whole bag all at once which gave life to the fire.

“Hmm?” 

The flames licked and he could hear the voice through the snaps and crackles of the fire. He immediately knelt and felt his shins bleed as they dragged across the rough floorboard. 

“I’m here, oh bountiful one?” Alestor said. The fire dimmed for a moment and all he could hear was the quick breathing of the being from beyond. 

“Be quiet.” It said. “I should have your tongue ripped off that you would suffer me another failure.”

“You said” Alestor started. The fire slapped the ground.

“I said? What does my saying have to do with your lack of action, with your failure?”

“We tried. We even gave you the boy.” Alestor said.

“And now his pride is wasted too. He tells me so.”

“You’re with him?”

“Where else do you think he’d go?” The being asked.

“Pip was his name. He’s as embarrassed as I am.”

“Pip,” Alestor repeated. It shook him. Pip. The familiar face, the blood. 

So that was his name.

He was rattling. “Is my wife with you too?”

Alestor felt the fire ride down to him and burn his hands. He broke from his prone stance and rolled away, holding his hand.

“Do you think you’re in a position to negotiate your wants? Another death and you haven’t even killed the hunters. Are they that much of a problem?”

“They’re durable. They’re getting closer.” Alestor said.

“Let them get as close as they want. You’re almost, right?”

“Yes but I’m afraid we’ll need at least another ceremony. I don’t know if we can hold on till then.”

“Then don’t.” The voice said. “Let them come, I doubt you have it in you to commit to the plan anyway.”

“What?” Alestor asked. “I won’t compromise this. I need this.”

“Oh, suddenly, you’re full of conviction.”

“I want my wife.” Alestor said.

“And what a nasty desire that’s been.” 

“I’ve only done what you’ve demanded.”

“Will that suffice?” The voice laughed. “When you stand in front of the tribunal, will that work? I was only doing as told. Will everyone accept it? Will your wife, if you ever meet her, enjoy this?”

“Why torment me.” Alestor cried. “Don’t you want this as much as me?”

“I’m beginning to want more. Those two vicars seem more the toy than you could ever be.”

“They’ll kill us both.” Alestor said.

The fire wrapped around the room and he could feel the grip, a manifestation of all the fumes and heat, choking him, squeezing his body and forcing him into convulsions.

“I would never lose. Thousands of years, I have never lost, thousands of years more, I will never lose. You’ve shamed me twice. Maybe I should cut my deal then?” The hand let him go, dropped him to the floor and receded. The walls were covered in soot, ash like the volcanic earth had been spread over his study room. Alestor was coughing, finding breath amongst the smoke and heavy air. He heard the voice laugh.

“But that would be something, wouldn’t it? Every day these two make me happier, is that love.” He laughed. “Lust, maybe. I’d like to meet them more. But for that, I’d need you, wouldn’t I?”

“I’ll have it done night.” Alestor massaged his throat. “No more errors. No more hesitation. Then we’ll see you soon.”

He could see the smile, the cool veneer and the rows of ivory through the heart of the flame. 

“Oh, by the way.” The demon said. “Keep an eye on your son. He’s got quite the mouth.”

It crackled and died, both voice and fire. Like a poor joke and its poor audience made to laugh and to pity him. 

And nothing remained but the pink salt turned to pink glass, like the painted church windows had shattered onto his fireplace. Alestor knelt, his pain now gone and he walked over to the fire pit. He reached inside, nothing burned and it felt cold. The life of the room had been sucked through this hellish vortex. He touched the glass and it shattered in his hands.

It was enough to make him cry for all that he was to do. He put his hands on his scalp and wept. He could hear his son and it made him feel worse, he heard knocking and he covered the sound with his hands. 

After a while, Isaac had stopped and so had Alestor. His cheeks were red, the scratched marks below his eyes glowed and his fingernails were covered in dead skin cells. He could hear the grandfather clock ring at six, a familiar alarm. It was early morning, what madness had warped time for him. He shuffled to his desk, what was left of it. Half of it was burned to a dead pile of ash. He picked up a phone on the good side of the desk. He looked in his drawer for something to help him cope, for he knew, that today he would accept his fate. The executioner's bell was ringing, after all, and it was loud in his lonely house.

“Puta madre.” Apollo cleaned the specks of blood from his chin.

“What’d you do that for? He’s half-dead.” 

“He said he knew something about the murder.” 

“So you beat it out of him?”

“No. I gave him a good reason to use that wheelchair, then I got it out of him.”

“What’d you find out?”

“Nothing. Really.”

Dion looked at him. He rolled his eyes and shook his head around. He was staring across the parking lot, at a man whose teeth now spread out across his shirt. He looked to Apollo and the growing concern of people now walking towards the beaten man. He started the car, it roared and they drove off. 

“You learned nothing?”

“Well,” Apollo spat out the window. “He said there was a police officer at the theater during the crime. It just confirms my suspicion, honestly. You can’t commit that much murder without the police knowing something or another, they had to have had men on the inside.”

“So what do you want to do?” Dion asked.

“Take me to the crime scene. I want to see if anyone's tampering with the evidence.” Apollo said.

“How do you expect to do that?” 

“Very quietly.” Apollo put a finger to his lips. “With you as lookout.”

Dion stuck his arm out of the window, he looked for the nearest road that drained into the wild lands along the edges of the city. The mist was growing inside and Dion looked up, he was surprised to remember that it used to be sunny. It seemed like the whole earth was steaming, bleeding smoke from the many cracks and crevices of the broken town.

La Croix Theater 4025 Mulbarry Drive, Havenbrook CO

The address was written in bold. It lay crooked on the side of the fence now half-swallowed by high-grass. Apollo fixed his fingers into the small gaps and looked at the two police cars parked at random around the premise. He found his mask from under his coat and wore it.

“You text me if you see something that looks like trouble, alright?” Apollo said.

“What does that mean? What’s trouble?”

“A small army, that would be pretty bad. If it feels wrong, you just tell me, alright?”

“I have the right mind to just leave you here,” Dion said. “That would be a fair sentence for your actions.” 

“Well, you’re not exactly of right mind, choir boy.”

Dion honked the horn. Apollo turned, eyes wide like a cat, to the police across from them. 

“Are you fucking stupid, shut the fuck up.” Apollo said. He shouted as loud as he could, under his breath. A very silent scream. Dion smiled and found a phone in his hands to fiddle with as Apollo climbed up the fence. He stretched his neck out and scanned the horizon. His body hung low. His body was a flash, white, that danced across the grass. He found a gutter pipe and climbed it, heard it snap out of its bolted place and dug his hands into the brick walls. Every step was a new hazard, the walls were falling apart. The long Roman pillars next to him showed this best of all. They were half broken, one even laid lopsided on the dirt. 

“Beauty doesn’t last. Nothing does, huh.” Apollo said. He carried himself to a window and propped it open. He slid in, he was above the set and standing upon the metal lattices hung by rusted metal wire. He heard the policemen and they heard the snap of metal. They looked up.

There was nothing.

They flashed their light, dragged it across but no one was there. Apollo had hidden behind the large cardboard set piece, a giant cherub, red blushed with his bow and arrow pointing down to the four policemen in the room. 

“I don’t think this place passes infrastructure safety protocol.” One of them said. He was fidgeting and making sure to stand below nothing, but even that seemed pointless. The ceiling was dripping small chips of wood like brown hail. 

“Don’t think too hard about it, things are only bad when you think about them.” Their voices were confusing from high above. Apollo couldn’t tell them apart. 

“That makes no fucking sense. Of course, everything feels better when you’re willfully stupid.”

“If you’re that lazy and afraid to look around the place, why don’t you go fuck off outside.” 

“Well, alright then.”  

“You all should go outside.” One of them hunched over the floor, above Pip’s chalk outline. His face was tense and he pointed to the two wide doors. 

“This job is fucked.” The clenched man said. All three gulped, the searchlights went across and Apollo found himself behind the curtains. “There’s nothing left for us to find. I’ll go call in the detective, he can deal with this rock-bottom shit hole.”

The three looked at each other. Some of them were relieved, others more curious. But the leader did not allow them a line of questioning, he walked back to the scene dock. The muted blue of cardboard clouds littered the floor, beyond them was the wardrobe room. He stopped there, Apollo saw. The other three had walked down, their steps filled the auditorium with the loud bangs. Apollo kept himself close to the single individual in the room. He followed him, climbed down the sky room and the metal jungle, he was hanging by rope and he fell a bit. The bags of sand tied to the end came up halfway to him and he held his breath. The policeman looked around.

“This place is falling apart.” He mumbled. Apollo breathed. He waited and kept still and saw the man feeling out the brick wall with his palms. He was a human seismograph, one ear to the wall and both hands to slap and feel the clay bricks. He stopped at one. It did not look particular, it was at the end of a long wall that had profanity and graffiti stretched across. ‘DIE YOUNG’ was in bold red, there was an Anarchy symbol right above. 

The only thing particular about this brick was how unremarkable it was, except for the single purple flower that grew from its cracks. The man took out a pocket knife, he chiseled around the brick. The worn stone fell, he inched his fingers in the gap and put the brick on a counter near him. His arm navigated the whole and Apollo watched to see how deep it was, it swallowed the whole arm before it came out. The object of interest: a knife. He was too far to tell its design, he could only see the crescent sneer like a cat’s smile and the reflection of light that came off it. 

The man looked for a pocket to put it in, he was about to tuck it in when he heard a sound. His body snapped and looked up. He was licking his lips, the nerves were growing on him. His shoulders looked like bad drum symbols, rattling and shaking mindlessly. 

He looked up again and didn’t realize his chest slammed the floor. His hair was held by its length, Apollo stood on top of him with his knee carefully placed on his back. It was lodged against one of his shoulder blades. One hand on the scalp, the other on his carrying hand. Apollo squeezed, the knife fell out. 

“Rock bottom is a myth. There’s always a way for things to get worse.” Apollo said. 

The man did not respond. He tried turning his head but it was locked. He turned his eyes, he could see the black leather of gloves, nothing more. But he knew who Apollo was. 

“What is that knife for? Who’s is it?” Apollo asked. He could hear a chuckle and slammed the face down on the wood. The floor was beginning to give way like the stage trap doors. He raised the face again. 

“Aren’t you tired, Vicar?” The man said. “Aren’t you tired of this circular life?”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“There is no secret to it. I asked, are you tired? Living life moment to pre-destined moment? Living the same existence over an infinite stretch of time. You’d call that prison, wouldn’t you? Every particle, every action, every decision already made. The path of all matter, all humanity, coming to dark oblivion. Isn’t that horrible? Don’t you want more?”

Apollo could feel himself sweat. 

“Shut the fuck up.” He tried breaking his fear. “Who does that knife belong to. What’s it for? I can’t imagine you’d stop at child killing, you fucking losers.”

“We’ve known about you two. We’ve known for a while now. He told us, He knows.”

Apollo slammed down again. He could feel the officer's mouth wobble and yield, his lips flinched. 

“Who the fuck knows?” Apollo asked. He out-stretched the officer's arm. All either of them was grunt as if it never hurt at all. Apollo felt the flesh of this man, his body was limp, he was like the sandbags from before, hotter but just as reaction-less. 

“You’ll meet him soon. You don’t have to worry about it, it’s already been destined. Astyanax has willed it so.” The officer curled his broken face into a smile. His free hand inched for his gun. Apollo let his face fall to seize the arm. Both were behind his back and both made him still, almost gentle, in the harsh caress. 

“Put your hands up.” 

Apollo heard the voice behind him. A gun was pointed towards him. 

“That won’t help either of you.” Apollo said. The broken man below him gargled blood, he was clearing his throat to laugh. He sounded like pond or lake vomiting a geyser, the blood splattered everywhere, the teeth like pearls rested between the gaps of floor. 

“It’s time, Michael.” The broken man said. "You're too arrogant, Vicar." 

Apollo switched glances between them, he could feel something in his stomach. 

The officer standing at the edge looked to his rear, the two officers were barely approaching. Their footsteps were far, an echo only. 

“Nam amor sui.” The broken man said. 

“Hold the fuck on.” Apollo let go of his hands and reached for the one pointing. He was too far. 

“Nam amor sui.” The armed officer said. There was one bullet, it splattered red across the graffiti and the floor. Apollo put his hand forward, he lunged. Bang.

Two corpses laid, their brains scattered, mush and pink across the walls. The body fell, the contents of his skull spilled out from the bullet hole, an open dam now flooding the wardrobe with the raging red waters. 

Apollo could not hold his surprised face for long. He was still longer than he wanted to, the two officers were fast approaching and he looked around. His eyes narrowed at the floor and he moved, his body, a giant blur of black across the room he dashed. 

When the two officers arrived. They called in more support. The fidgeting man fidgeted worse. The stern man kept his gun close to him as he went across the room. But there was no one, Apollo was low, below them. He went through the trap door, went through the floorboards that rained the blood of two lambs. The suicides, the promised. 

He was out before Dion could make his pocket rumble with warnings. He was out before he could think too hard about what just happened. All he knew was in his hand, the ornate knife, dried with old blood.

Author's Note: Going to rework these titles so they make more sense. 

P.S.S Religious Batman is back at it again.

Sophie

July 20th, 2017

11:13 PM

“Do you know anything about this boy? His name was Pip.” Sophie held the photo to the twenty-fourth bitter face she had seen today. He nodded his head, Sophie bit her lips and made the scorn clear with a groan. Useless. 

They walked away and she wandered, next to a metal unicorn barely recognizable. It looked like someone had sanded down all feature and paint, she sat upon it and put her feet up against the coin machine to her rear. The heavy bustle of laundry machines churned behind her.

All day she had to tolerate their faces. 

‘I don’t care. That’s not pleasant.’ She remembered an old man saying such. He was throwing unlucky lottery tickets out to the birds like breadcrumbs. She wished to say that he was the only one, but that was wrong. There were also the shaking, falling weaves of old women who ran from her at the sight of the picture. She did not understand. Are they even human? 

The unicorn below shook, she fell on her butt. She heard a man laugh to her rear, he was beside a soda machine chained behind a metal gate, she was sure, was there to keep the thieves away from wobbling and breaking the mechanisms. He was taking out money and collecting it into a small black bag held at his waist, she began to laugh. 

“Fanny pack. You’re wearing a fanny pack, loser.” She said. The man looked quiet. He was glaring, behind the shades and the folded mustache. 

“Why don’t you go home, kid.” He said. “Actually? Stay there. I’ll go call my boss.”

She didn’t stay there. She ran off into the light posts that flickered. They felt like vintage cameras, light bulbs bursting at the image. She ran through traffic, dashed through the honking cars.

“I’m the only one with balls in this town.” She said, her middle finger up in the air to the two guards across the street from her. She didn’t hold it for long, it was obvious they stopped looking for her after a while, and she walked down the street. Her map was out, her feet were kicking around a stray bottle that rattled with the pebbles lodged inside. Artisan Lager, it read. It smelled of urine. And it rolled down the corners, it led her through the streets and the growing noise and the bustling groups of people.

There was a buzz in the air from the red fluorescent lights, she felt it on her face. It was the hair on her body sticking out, pointing, attracted to the magnet of red light. The people around her felt it. It was on the streets, in the liquor stores. The people acted on it. She could hear the voices of smacking lips all around her, in the alleys, in the gutters she swore she heard it. There was nicotine and the nostril flaring smell of alcohol and the cooling agent, the herbal note of marijuana that made her calm though she did not know why. 

Then there was vomit. It was distinct. Bile. She had made it to The Devil’s Tail. This is where the scum is. One of the windows was broken, a plastic grey sheet had been put over it and the fabric breathed with the music inside. She didn’t feel so courageous anymore. She looked at the people going in and the weird ways they had made their hair. Could gel do that? She looked to the men. Where do their tattoos end? She shuddered. 

All she wanted was an answer, she’d settle for a hint of Pip. Sophie took a breath, fixed her over-alls and dragged her blond hair into a ponytail. She took a step and felt the breeze of a man. He looked studded, a robot with too many buttons, glistening brighter than the stars.

He showed her her teeth and unhinged his jaw for a laugh. The thought appeared only once, could what happened to Pip happen to her? No. She was stronger, she thought, better, smarter. 

She stepped on the laughing man's shoes and dug her heel deep in his toe. 

“What are you laughing at?” She said. He held his foot and the people around her, hanging by the walls of the alleys, began to stare. 

She clutched her pocket and the outline of her knife. Some of them went to stand and she walked quick, deeper in. Her hands were to her pockets, her eyes dashed along the shadows of the walls and the irking sound of people dragging themselves through alley water. When she caught her hands trembling, she punched herself. When she heard the loud creak of a straggling cart, she ran. She turned back to catch the fleeting feeling, the stalking sound of people. A mod, perhaps. There was no one. She did not feel courageous, she did not feel much of anything but a want to go home. Regret, bursting her heart with a constant beating. 

She hit something. Her body fell, a crash of metal resounded out.

“The fuck is your problem.” A man yelled.

“I’m.” She stood wide-eyed as if struck in the face. “I’m looking for someone.” 

“Fuck off.” He said and lifted his cart away. Sophie looked at the man and how he picked from the garbage and how the other villains in the alley knocked him aside. The homeless man spat, it looked like sludge hitting and filling the cavities on the floor. Sophie knew not to talk to him or the people who had shoved him. She walked away to the back end of the club and where she could see a bouncer throwing someone into the floor. He did not stand, rather laid on the parking lot, head sitting on the stone obstacle on one end of a lot. She groaned and almost felt his pain and imagined her own face scraped against the floor like that. It made her shiver and retreat, she stepped back.

“Where are you going?” She felt a hand on her shoulder.

She wanted to amputate it off her. It felt like a parasite on her that leeched from her all strength. An infection of the touch, a bite from Medusa’s head, petrifying her. Sophie turned her face, slow and careful. He wore no tattoos and no studs and was not particularly strange and that frightened her the most. The black shirt, the shaved face, and teeth that showed through darkness. His hat was thin and crooked like a birds beak. She felt like a worm.

“You’re looking for someone I hear? Maybe I can help you. I keep trying to tell the police but they don’t believe me. But maybe they’ll believe us together.” His eyes were beady and small and his breath smelled like something putrid. She could see the toxic stench as fumes, watched them go up like a spirit leaving his body. She moved her hand and the photo of Pip escaped her arm. It fell. The man picked it up and Sophie stared at him. She hoped the bouncer would help now, perhaps throw this man out like the other. But he was not there, only the door and the swishing sound it made as it went in and out. 

The man put a finger to one of his nostrils, he blew out the other. Sophie wanted to leave, but could not. She couldn’t shake the idea that perhaps he knew something. That he was involved. She drew her hand from him and put it over her heart, the other hand was to her knife and her eyes fell on the face of the man. A rat.

“I’m trying to find out what happened to him. Would you have any ideas?” She could feel her heart through her chest. Louder than the music, louder than the far-off laughs of fools and drunks.

“I might,” He said. “I might’ve seen him somewhere, sometime. Maybe you can help jog my memory.”

“You’ve either saw him or you didn’t. He’s dead already.” She felt his breath. 

“Well, that’s unfortunate. Maybe I know something about that too.”

She felt her blood freeze. The man threw the photo away. Sophie clutched her knife, she varnished the small blade. She swung. Horizontal, across from her. It cut him and he took a step back to hold the palm of his hand. The wounded dog.

“You fucking bitch.” He sucked on his wound. He was very much a stray dog with his famished frame. The small wrists and necks. He was a sick man, she figured, of mind and body. She held the knife to her side as she faced him. They looked like two crabs locked in dance, wide hands outward. She cut him again. This time made him howl. She looked around for help but there was no one conscious, not the frenzied men and women inside, not the drunks outside sleeping on bags of trash. Alone. Alone she fought. Stabbing, slicing, the small feral cat against the hound. She cut him and tattooed his arm with the tribal marks. But he pressed. Angrier each time he bled a new way. He backed her to a wall and she screamed when she felt it against her back. He grabbed her at last and she could feel his hand bleeding onto her own.

“Everyone thinks I’m funny. I swear baby, you’ll think I’m funny too.” He grabbed her neck. It felt slender and limp in his grip. He reached for her. “Come on, fight like you did before. Fight like your friend did.”

She swung. Her mouth could not fight a finger to bite, so she swung. She couldn’t reach him, but she swung. Nothing mattered much but the swing. Even as he laughed, as he felt her and pushed her further from him. She swung. 

And eventually, he fell.

Face first into the mud, nearly dragging the girl with him. He shook violently a bit, his eyes rolled up his skill. A police officer with his flashlight lit her face.

“Are you alright?” He said. He dragged her out of the alley and towards the street where he screamed at the club goers. “Nothing to see. You hear me?”

Another officer went to the direction they walked from with cuffs. She read the name tag of the man guiding her, Officer Palas.

“He’s yours.” Palas said. 

He took her to the car and sat her and immediately began typing on his computer screen. He wrote some things, heard the radio and slowly began to turn it all off until there was silence.

“I had a call in about a girl causing trouble at the Laundromat, then I got another from an anonymous tip. Apparently, she was watching the scuffle from inside the club. But not out of mind, I guess. I put one and one together.” He smiled. “Glad we found you when we did.”

“Me too.” She looked down and her depressed arms.

“You know what freaks are running around town at this hour. Why would you think of running around like you did?”

“I’m looking for a friend. Or at least learning what happened to him.” He presented the photo in her hands and let it droop like her arms. He grabbed it. His eyes widened, she saw and fell back to the wheel as he handed it back.

“I’ve seen him in reports. You must be the girl I keep hearing about, the mule, they called you.” He started the car. “You’re the one they couldn’t kick you out? The one screaming at all the officers a couple days back?” 

“I’m not ashamed. I was just trying to figure out what happened to my friend.” She lied. She felt her cheeks go red. He laughed then saw her and stilted his humor with a cough. They went off and followed the golden-yellow lines.

“You should really let the police handle investigations.” He started off with his arm dangling out the window. “Some answers aren’t worth finding out. The truth hurts, you know?” 

“I can handle it.” She said.

“It’s rare to see someone as young as you act like you do. You really are a mule.” He smiled. “And that’s a good thing. It’s good to be tough and to be stubborn. Even if it gets you into trouble.”

He looked at her, the red light reflected off his eyes. The air felt cold. His smile did that veer off.

“But boy is it stupid huh? To do something like that in public.” He said. 

She could not move. She was held by a fear as she looked at him. She looked at the badge and the numbers, she looked to the name and the face that looked excitedly out towards the street. She saw ahead, she knew they were driving but she did not know where.

“Don’t you need to know where I live?” She asked. Her breathing stopped and she felt her pocket for where the knife should have been. He confiscated it. 

“Homesick all of a sudden?” The windows rolled up, he threw down his hat to her feet. His arms looked flexed and the streets were empty. “I thought you wanted to know what happened to your friend?” 

Author's Note: I'll go ahead and change the older chapters, eventually.

Dion
July 20th, 2017
12:28 AM

Dion found Apollo winding around the corner. He hung by the dumpster and raced to the door.

“I always find you in the trash. I’m beginning to think you have a fetish for it.” Dion said. Apollo fixed himself and checked his cuffs for blood.

“That’s new.” Dion pointed to the red polka-dot tie Apollo wore. Apollo was grabbing his scalp. When he grew tired of scratching himself, he slapped at Dion's hand. Then the dashboard. It felt like a carnival game and Dion would have laughed if Apollo's face wasn't so terrified. He must have hit it five times and activated the air conditioner three before he calmed down.

“You alright?” Dion asked.

“Just shut up.” Apollo said. He was rubbed his face on his sleeve and dropped the knife hiding under his coat onto the floor. It slid and stabbed through the carpet rug, it sounded like the tearing of a leaf or flower pedal. 

“What’s that?” Dion started the car, he was growing antsier and shook his head across the window to search for the police he expected to be close by.

“Two men killed themselves.” Apollo said. “Worshipers, they made it clear.”

“The cultists?”

“Yeah, something like that. They mentioned someone, Astyanax or some shit.”

“What does that mean? I thought they’d be you know, Satanists or something.” 

“Me too. I guess they have someone else in particular that they’ve staked their desires on. They seem pretty convinced of him too.” Apollo said.

“I’d think so, they killed themselves, right?” Dion rolled to a corner of the street and began to push the tires into stress. The floor cried out with each sharp turn.

“Where do we go? What do we do?” Dion asked. He was driving into a frenzy. “We should get fingerprints right? Or something, blood samples?”

“Does it look like I have a  forensic lab in my back pocket.” Dion said. “Slow down before you add two more to the body count.” 

Dion stopped. There was a red above him, he felt his neck shake forward and hit the wheel. Drivers around them were sticking their middle fingers at them.

“You act too irrationally, just relax. We won't be catching them until they’re ready to be caught.” Apollo said.

“What does that mean, you’re talking like a damn monk. Just say it straight.” Dion said. He honked the horn at an old woman in front of him who was lazily taking a left. 

“I mean to say. There’s nothing we can do to find them, so we have to wait. And I don’t think we’ll be waiting long.” Apollo said.

“That means we’re giving them a chance to hurt someone. Or worse.” Dion bit his lip.

“Yeah. And that’s all we can do.” Apollo let his shoulder fall and nestled his hands to the side of the seat. He sunk inside, his body looked like black ooze dripping to the floor. 

“We can’t just wait.”

“Well, I am. I need to look up this Astyanax guy, I need to redraw some maps. Re-evaluate some sources.” Apollo let his head tilt.

“Well, I’m not. I’ll go out, I’ll investigate.” Dion pulled over. Apollo stepped out onto the noiseless street, a trail of smoke was warping the air and filling his lungs with the taste of tire. 

“If you find something, I know I can’t trust you to not rush in,” Apollo said. “But can you at least give me a call before you do. Can you do that?”

“Alright,” Dion said. “Are you sure you don’t know anywhere they could be?”

“Somewhere with as few people as possible. Abandoned places. Which considering the state of this ghost town, might be very hard to miss.” Apollo said. “I don’t expect much from you, but be careful.”

“You’re not very optimistic,” Dion said. “Have a little faith, wouldn’t you?” 

He went off. They shared the brief moment of a hand wave, the cut carpet floundered on the floor and reminded Dion every few minutes of a certain dread. The day kept growing worse. And nightfall came, and he was empty and he bit his nails and shed off the fear from his quivering hands. It was like that for a while in the silence of his car. Until he felt the feeling on his arm. Something brief, a flicker of heat like a lighter gently fanned across his fore arm. He shifted to gear and dodged three red lights. His arm felt boiling, his face grew worse and when he felt the most unbearable pain he knew he had made it.  

It wasn’t a factory, it wasn’t an apartment complex. It had the rotten words of wood at the front of the two halved door, Cosmic Sun News. He looked inside and broke into a stressed stance. A pipe fell ill with patina. The rusted color leeched into the water and the cats that hung around stared high-shouldered to the Vicar coming in. Dion was holding his arm that could barely make it to his pocket. The pipe was still rolling, still spreading until it died in the murmur of its echo. 

The shadow of moonlight cast out on the front desk. There was an old printing press, for show, adjacent to the empty secretaries desk. The knocked over typed writers looked small next to the giant machinery and its elongated metal hands, like puppeteer hands and string. He looked down to the shadow cast, to the long stretched lines like harp strings, they played to the orchestra of this sad song. 

The cats hissed. They ran.

“Angel of God, my guardian dear.” Dion stepped over glass. It cracked like a pained chuckle. “To whom God’s love commits me here.” 

He took out his phone and typed out the number. 

“ever this day be at my side to light and guard.” The phone rung. “To rule and guide.”

A rat walked under his feet, pale and dull. It looked up with a squeak and shook its nose to Dion. It watched him, stared and did not change its intense gaze. 

“Amen.” Dion said. He felt his hips and felt his guns for this lonely home felt of burial grounds, and smelled of death.

Sophie

July 20th, 2017

12:43 AM

The first thing Sophie felt was the feeling of some rough blanket all around, like webbing. Then the cloth lodged in her to keep her quiet. It made her gag, it tasted of gasoline and salt. Drenched in her sweat, a suffocating feeling that sucked into her mouth and left her gasping. Gasping that made her choke. Choking that made her struggle. She looked like a silkworm in its cocoon as she wriggled to and fro in the back seat of the police car. Rope bit into her legs and arms. She could not see behind her, only felt that they were going over rough terrain and jumping and dragging something below the tires. Metal, a sheet, cardboard. 

“Fuck” She tried to say. Her mouth coughed more than spoke. The car came to a stop and she rolled onto the floor and hit her head. It was a sharp bumpy pain across her chest and her head like jumper cables had been latched onto her face. It made her mad, much more than fear, she wanted to bust someone's skull open.

The laughing outside only made it worse. She tried standing but couldn’t and when she nearly made it to her knees, she heard the door open. Never had she roared that loud before that her own lungs would break into pieces, like needles prodding her insides. She wagged her legs around. The rope was cutting deeper into her.

“Get off me.” She said between the fits. She didn’t know why she wasn’t afraid. It was a surprise to her but hearing the laughing people, feeling her body dragged, it all frustrated her. Dust was rising, she could tell and she being dragged across the floor. It left her cloth brown and blackened her vision. Upstairs, she hit her legs across the sharp angled steps. There was loose wiring and wandering light bulbs that exploded underneath the footsteps of her kidnappers. She wasn’t even grabbed by her body, they were lugging the sack around like a confused Santa Claus, a gift giver possessed. They threw her. She landed on, something. She couldn’t tell what it was. A desk, the floor, she could feel something rough though, like splinters. It must have been wood, old wood. It was heavier than the cheap furniture they sold at the furniture stores, this was older. It felt it. 

Sophie bit into her sack as the people wandered about, going in and out of the room with pacing steps. She ripped a hole open, swallowed the cloth and spat it out onto the floor. Her nose was out first. She was glad about that. The air was better outside, even if it was dank and dirty like wet dirt rubbed across her nostrils. Everything smelled of mold, asbestos, it wasn’t just the desk that was old she figured. She lowered her head and peered her eyes. She wanted to take a good look at the monsters in the dusk. They looked human. Only looked.  They spoke English, they breathed and were upright. Their mannerisms, their poses, human. She was almost deceived. But the laugh. The stuttering, dragging laugh was anything but of someone sane.

Hyenas, madmen. 

She looked up to the grimly dressed figures, more so shadows in the light of the moonlight that seeped through broken windows. She tried to figure them out, they were wearing suits and above their noses, all across their foreheads and their eyes was a white cloth. Like guests at a ball, confused and blinded by handkerchiefs. She didn’t want to look any longer or to their purple iris flowers pinned on their chests. She took a deep breath, they caught her. All three veiled eyes in the room looked back. She spat at them through the small hole, it hit one on their leather shoes. The person smiled, then ignored her.

“Was there supposed to be another one? Who’s this extra girl?” One of them said. He had a birthmark on his neck.

“No. We already had what we needed but I can’t imagine she would hurt.” A woman spoke, her lips were yellow. A man nodded next to her, he had fat on his chin that shook with him, like a prideful turkey with its hanging neck.

“Do you think Mr. Alestor will be happy?” The woman was more desperate, giddier in her speech. She lept over five panels of the ceiling, nearly dancing across the broken floor and through the door. They weren't just dressed for the ball party, they acted the part too. Cordial, terrifying dancers, drunk on the feeling of their faith. It felt like a funeral for her. She spit again. It hit no one. She felt her face go red and she wriggled, she slapped the desk and rolled down to the floor. Her left side hurt, but she smiled when it finally brought one of them close to her.

“You’re just so obnoxious, aren’t you? A young girl should be a polite girl.” A man screamed. Sophie said nothing, only stared through the hole in the sack with the single eye. She laid on the dirty floor, she felt the broken tile, she felt the glass and stayed quiet. As the man dragged her feet, she stayed quiet. As the glass below her ripped her sack, she was quiet. Though bleeding, though angry. She was of mind enough to find a glass shard across the floor, and she was of mind to take it. 

For she would need, wherever she was going. She worked on the rope on her arms and listened to the scurrying footsteps. The paths confused her through the loud halls, there were faint voices, like ghosts in the walls. The stairs hurt her body with bump, but she would be ready. Arms being freed slowly, she convinced herself that these people, if anyone, deserved to be hurt most.

She came to a stop. She heard four sets shoes clank, a unified tap dance. The blare of a voice burst through the corners of the walls, it was filled with static and was coarse against her ears.

“The hunters are here.” The deep baritone voice said. “Do your business and do it quick, we need to prepare the dogs for them.” 

The whispered to themselves, they split. And with one twist of her glass blade, she felt her bonds break.

Apollo
July 20th, 2017
12:56 AM

It was the good, old call of the fight. He found it rumbling in his pants, the bold letters that read ‘Last Call: Dion, 12:45 AM’. He never picked it up, though he knew what it meant and looking at his desk he knew it would happen again, tonight. Another sacrifice perhaps, someone's death though he did not know whose. His mask was already laid out before him, his notes had been put to the side, the ceremonial dagger laid on the kitchen counter, sneering at him. His own sword, massive as it was, spilled quietly, chipped pieces of steel. He did not know how to fix it, the edge looked like an uneven set of toddler's teeth. Apollo nodded, it would do. He hid it in his coat, like a rabbit in the hat and strapped the mask to his face. 

Hopefully, we’ll catch him today. 

He thought. His mouth salivated, his heartbeat. He tried swallowing his spit but he felt his throat stop like he had been punched in the neck. 

I don’t think we will, though.

He galloped along the buildings, his neck was bent over to the bottom as he looked at the street signs that read the small street. When he stopped reading signs, when the streetlights no longer existed and the road seemed like some shambled thing, he realized he was not safe. They were all empty, the homes and the apartment and the warehouses with their giant pipes that rotted and collapsed onto themselves. He could hear the rats scurry inside the small holes. He dropped down the side of the building and ripped through fence link before he was at the spot. The sprawling, worn News Paper press. 

“Where are you?” He was talking to his phone. 

“I’m almost onto the third floor.” Dion said.

“Wait there,” Apollo said.

He went through the building and went over the small things laying about. The plastic pots of died trees laid on their side, the dirt was blended so well with the floor it was hard to see where it had spilled. But the flowers were there, their heads low and limp. Apollo stepped to the overgrown stairs laying on one side. There was cement collapsed into it, the stairs were blocked. He went the opposite end, looked at the machinery and was almost tempted to stick his hand and fiddle with it out of a curiosity. But there were worse things about, he went up a floor and met Dion half way who was running back, his guns drawn. 

“What have you found?” Apollo said.

“Shh.” Dion had his finger to his lips and pressed down on Apollo’s shoulders. They looked around. There was nothing but wind and the sound of rusted doors creasing and shutting. It was a high pitched sound. Apollo went forward, he looked around to the corner, nothing. There was raunchy graffiti, beer cans, and bottles. There was a condom lying in a pool of a mysterious liquid. It looked like a tapeworm growing out of the floor. A bottle dropped. 

Dion put his guns forward. 

“Fuck.” Apollo said. He knocked the bottle away. It went out the window and collapsed onto the floor.

They heard it then. The loud voice out of speaker phones they thought didn’t work. It was a threat, it was a warning. 

“The hunters are here.” It said. Their eyes illuminated red. 

“Should we call the cops?” Dion asked.

“Why? So they can cover this all up.” Apollo said.

“Citizens arrest it is.” Dion put his back against the wall.

“I don’t think either of us is capable of that. We’ll just beat the shit out of them, that’s good enough.” Apollo looked at the foggy windows and put his ear to the wall, he was looking for sounds. 

“Should we split up? I can climb the side of the wall. I figure there are six floors, I can come from the top and rout them down to you.” Dion said.

“No. They know we’re here and they don’t sound scared, that means they have an idea of something to kill us with.” Apollo started walking to the stairs. “Stick close and we won’t die.” 

Dion followed him up. Covered the flank which they exposed themselves to many a times. They were on the third floor now and they were just coming to realize how thin and small everything really was. There were small cubicles with their plastic and wooden walls all around them, they were high and blocked the view. Apollo could see the tops of small hooded heads on the other end and saw them disappear into the maze-like alleys. Dion ran. Apollo grabbed his shoulder.

“Together.” Apollo said. They walked carefully through the cubicles. Apollo stopped. His foot stepped over something. It was a plastic bag, white and it seemed to bulge out, underneath a desk. He could tell what it was by the smell and his mouth dried up. The blood was dried and it stained the bag, the corpse seemed light. It was a bony hand he had stepped over. 

“Don’t fuck around, Dion.” He dragged his hand past the body. Dion got a good glimpse of it and narrowed his eyes. “We’ll deal with it later. They come first.” 

They had made it to the other end of the room and where the walls closed in on themselves.

“The Mad Hatter must have designed this shit hole.” Apollo said. They had their backs to each other and were especially careful at turning each corner. The ceiling was falling, the floor sank and bulged at their light footsteps. They went past a few doors and swore they closed in. They went into an intersection and spun around like a dancing couple, the doors were closing all around them. Those anonymous rooms that held anonymous laughter. It sickened Apollo. He put his foot underneath a doorknob and pushed in. He looked inside and caught glimpse of a black hood and dress, the ends of it as it left and jumped away. Tiny dancers in the night. 

He didn’t even bother running after the image.

“They’re fucking with us.” Apollo said. 

“They’re just people, who cares.” Dion grunted. His fingers were undisciplined, hard on the trigger and ready to fire. 

The noises were coming stronger, the doors were shutting and closing all around them like an evil drum line. It sounded like heavy rain, it crashed like thunder. They retreated back to the intersection. Their eyes looked down four different halls and their faces turned to try and keep up with their racing heads. Something was drawing closer, it was a sound that was like bass at first, like a heavy chord against the clatter of the opening and closing doors. It droned though, a growl. It was a mad dog’s growl, drooling, sniffing into the cold air. 

“Dogs?” Dion asked. Apollo couldn’t answer. He took out his blade, it was too large to manage in the closed space but he thrust out anyways. He swung it, Dion ducked at the coming arc. It collapsed against a wall and broke the door and the brick in half, a small demolisher. The schizophrenic doors finally stopped. The light footsteps of people faded out, then came back above them, from the fourth floor.

All that remained was the growl and the hot jaws of death that Apollo could feel making its way around the corner. 

It smelled like shit, it felt like steam around his neck. A noose.

“Get ready to shoot.” Apollo said. 

Author's Note: I'm thinking about starting a collection of short stories to expand the lore and mythos of my world. What do you guys think?

Apollo
July 20th, 2017
1:02 AM

The Vicars did not see the hellhounds coming. Only felt them, the wind that rushed past them with each of their violent passes through the doors around them. They saw glimpses of them. Eyes that they traced, that looked like lines of blue and yellow across the black void of the building walls. 

They saw their fur like wild weeds growing into tangles of black knots. Dion shot out at a hallway. The bullet raced down, illuminating the area and eventually coming out a wall and into the abandoned building neighboring them. He hit nothing. They saw everything. Jagged teeth, snouts so elongated as to look like whips or tusks. They were deformed, awkward, drooping. Diseased hellhounds. With long, flat faces. Wide too, especially as they turned and tried napping at the two. Apollo stared inside their mouths and saw nothing. A void.

“We’re going to get cornered.” Dion said.

“We already are.” Apollo spat. His blade was resting on the wall he had just finished crushing. It was atop the pile of rubble.

“We need to move.” Dion kept his body low. He was breathing hard behind his mask, the fumes came from underneath his jawline.

“On my count.” Apollo said. 

"One." He looked around him. No exits near him, the doors were too far and there were three dogs in between them all. 

"Two." His eyes raced. He felt the wall with his sword. Like a walking stick, hearing for the low tap of wood. For any fragile walls. 

“Three.” He shouted. The three dogs rushed at him, north, west, east. Apollo rose his blade to the south and let it fall, down. The floor exploded. The rotten wood and pipe fell burned, smoldered, melting around Apollo and Dion who sank further down. They were in the cafeteria, atop the tables and chairs now dented or lying injured, arms broken around their fallen bodies. 

“Did you get ‘em?” Dion said. He was digging out wood from his legs.

Apollo said nothing. He tried to stand quickly. He couldn’t. The dogs were coming down, from the red, smoldering ring. Like fish in the lake of fire, jumping, flapping around. 

But they bit. They bit hard.    

The first thing eaten was Apollo’s hand. The jaw dug deep into his bone, into the veins that gushed violently, into the marrow slurped and sucked and dried. Then it climbed up. His forearm was gnawed it, it was meatier. More satisfying. And only when his flesh lay in ribbons in the air like some gory wind chime with its whistling tune did Apollo finally strike back. His sword lay on the floor, his only other arm was swinging strong. His fist was in the shape of a hammer as he brought it down on of the four-eyed great dogs. He dug deep into the furred darkness, he ripped hair out. He looked at its flesh, a cloudy mixture of gray and black. They were dead animals, demons, that much was sure. Apollo stopped punching. All four eyes looked at him and they bit harder into his arm. He couldn’t help but moan. It seemed to call the second animal. This one looked hungrier, he aimed at Apollo’s rear.

A bullet shot it down. The second dog spun in the air from in the impact, a ballet toss, and collapsed. It whimpered. One of its legs flew away. Dion smiled for a moment. Apollo struggled with the parasite on his arm. Then they both stared in awe as the leg regrew, as the dog mounted itself again.

“Don’t just stare in awe.” Apollo screamed. His voice was strained, high pitched. “Watch out for the third.” 

He grabbed the beast with his only free arm and swung it down. Both Apollo and the monster fell, he slammed it harder again. It let at last, pinched between a punch and the wall, its mouth opened and Apollo retreated his arm. He stared at it, his face looked dull. It was different. White and red all across, he couldn’t tell what it was. Splintered, eviscerated. He screamed, at last. Apollo held his shoulder, it was the only thing that wasn’t hurting. 

Oh, his arm was terrible. How it drooped on his side, lame and dead, and how it made him stand lopsided. He could not bear to look at it. He stood, his eyes focused. They were attentive. His body tried healing it, what little it could and the smoke rose up between him and the animal. 

Apollo reached with his left to the sword fallen near him. He walked or rather the dog let him walk. He put his sword back inside that insignia in his jacket and there, dropped the jacket as well. He ripped something from it, black cloth from the suit. Cloth he held, cloth he wielded inside of his blade. And then he faced the animal. Handicapped.

They were both low, both primed and high-shouldered. They were breathing and sniffing the air and running around each other in their private dance.

The dog flew out. Like an arrow camouflaged in the darkness. Apollo moved forward and in the middle of its trajectory shot his only good hand out. It broke the beast's teeth and the shrapnel shot out. It cut his cheeks and left him with a Glasgow sneer. And his arm was inside the mouth of the beast, his only good arm. He wiggled, he scratched the inside of the beast mouth and felt his arm beginning to hurt and stab. The weight dragged him down and the hound pulled, hoping to leave him armless. 

Apollo smiled. He bent his knee. He rubbed something in his hands, inside the steam and wet flesh of the hound's mouth. It was the very cloth of his jacket, sticky and damp. It was a special piece of his make. The only piece that mattered, the arcane symbol. He rubbed the embroidery of the design and his hand slipped in. Deep inside he thrust his arm and deep inside he removed the blade from its small scabbard. It was the magicians trick, the pull of the rabbit out of the hat. And he would pull it all out.

The beast growled. Then expanded as if to vomit. Apollo smiled, he kept dragging the blade out of the arcane symbol. it was too late for the hound to spit by then. It exploded. Too small to eat arm and blade. It was just too full. 

The dog cried out. It rained. The lower half was scattered about, the mouth, the face just stared off and away from Apollo, all eyes looking at each corner of the earth, a cross-sighted death. Its grip became limp as the muscles eased and Apollo dragged himself out. His own arms fell as well. He could not move them, he only looked at what was left of the hound. His eyes were heavy and the sounds of violence and of Dion’s struggle were low behind him like a shout in an empty tunnel, fading away.

Apollo shook his head. He looked deeper into the body of the monster, he found the glow of the philosophers stone and rubbed his mask upward with the knob of bone hanging barely on his wrist. His mouth salivated, his chin felt cold in the open air. 

Apollo reached down and dunked his head into the body of the animal. A carnival game, he almost laughed at the thought. He was bobbing for apples. And it wasn't difficult, there wasn't much left. He rubbed his mouth past some organs, past the stringy flesh and muscle, past the ropes of guts. 

He found the gem, the sweet fruit and swallowed it whole. His arms returned to him, muscles regenerating first, then skin. Barely healed, barely moving. But there, at least.

Alestor
July 20th, 2017
1:08 AM

They sat on their bellies and rolled on the floor with an intensity that made Alestor cringe, lost pets dragged themselves on the dirty floor with mouths hanging from their covered faces and the hope and want in their bloodshot eyes. They took steps forward, like lizards chasing the hot sun that had passed through the sky many hours ago. They were here for worship. Of Astyanax, of that demon who promised their family names the world and who had delivered nothing but the false hope and the anxiety. Still, they would worship. Perhaps he would listen today and even Alestor began to believe it. They were close, that was sure. 

The most excited for today's offering were those in the front, their knees were bleeding and their pants were ripped and stained with old floral wallpaper made to rot. They looked like scabs of the earth now, black and brown stickers that stuck to the worshipers as they slithered up the room. It was an office meeting once. Once, now it lay lopsided and uneven and on the end where an old projector screen once flapped around, was the makeshift altar. A collection of candles, of scripture and of those yellow flowers in broken vases. The cheap dollar candles stood lonely like acolytes in church. They flickered and illuminated nearly nothing. The worshippers came up. They picked candles and held them close to the heart. Like awkward pirouettes, they rushed round the table, the heartbeat of the fire shaking left and right. The tailcoats died at last and they stepped around to the maggot half-eaten roundtable to their rear. They propped them one by one and set a human femur in a certain place. They were forming crosses, tearing yellow flower petals and putting strands of hair onto the spots where the arcana symbol had been etched in. Unholy worship, unholy sacrifice. 

A cup. A goblet, bejeweled and stained looking, shaped awkwardly, like a dented half circle. Alestor came up to it. He put it at the very center of all the pretty sticks and bones and flowers. 

He looked back, the veil on his head was purple. Far different from the white they all wore, the eight others.

Alestor looked back at the girl, Sophie, lying in the corner of the room in a complacent manner. Her deep breaths sucked in the sack and blew it out like an artificial lung. 

“Bring the chair.” Alestor said. One of the degenerates rushed to the other end of the room. There was a chair there, somewhere in the intersection of moonlight that broke through the metal bars outside the windows. There Alestor could see the chair, the feet dangling from its high legs. The worshiper titillated the chair, rocked it some. It did not move. He dragged it and Alestor could hear it cry and moan as it came forward. There someone there. Someone young, long passed. The life bled out of her, dripping down one side. He raised the cup and put it under her. The blood would not come off the wood and he raised her hand and rested it inside like a siphon of her life force. Vampires.

She did not move. 

“Fuck.” Alestor began to sweat. I don’t want to kill another one. He thought. He felt the vibrations from under his feet. The struggle was continuing and his fingers were tingling with worry. Needle prickles, all across his chest, like his lungs, had become a living puffer fish. It seemed to pain him. He heard a man scream. He heard a dog cry. Now the other nine worshippers looked around, the seeming calm around the room somehow discomforting as they played with their hair and bodies like concerned children. 

But what’s another one to the mound? What’s one more sin? Alestor thought. 

It was time and he was closer, he could not wait and it seemed the world could not either. He looked to Sophie.

“Those hunters have made a martyr of you.” Alestor said. “They pushed me to this. Day in, day out with their nosy pickings. They dragged me and hurt me and forced me. Perhaps we could have used others. More deserving people than you, girl. But I don’t have that luxury anymore.” 

He brought himself up and shuffled his feet to Sophie. His whole body was opposed to the action with rigidity. He stopped all of a sudden. Sophie’s hair stuck out from a cut in her sack, her lips showed, she screamed at him. He almost forgot there was a person under there. He wanted to forget there was and felt his cloth slip from his face. His nose, his large forehead, and chin couldn’t keep it any longer and he shook. Two gaunt eyes showed back, Sophie saw. 

“You killed him. Didn’t you?” Sophie asked. Alestor reached down for the cloth. He wiped his sweat and put it back on. It felt dirty like grease rubbed across his face and all of him felt slippery. Unable to stand, unable to move without feeling a need to fret and fumble.

“Shut up.” Alestor said. He reached for the hood and grabbed it. She was heavier than he thought and his knees buckled at each step towards the chair. One of the members offered his help with extended hand.

“Don’t. She’s mine.” Alestor said.

“I’m no ones.” Sophie screamed. 

“Didn’t you gag her?” He screamed at the eight. They nodded and looked at their feet and pleaded with open hands.

“Just be quiet.” Alestor hunched over. 

“My name is Sophie and you killed my friend, Pip.” 

“Be quiet.” Alestor said. Names make it worse, just shut up. He thought. He stopped midway to the chair and let himself catch air, he looked up around him to the broken glass and the dirt and the furniture scattered like deforested lands. He walked over to one of his men, he ripped a piece of suit from the right sleeve of the follower.

“If you can't do your job then I’ll gag her.” He said.

“Why? Why not just send her off? We can do it quick” Another said. His voice was firm, booming. A natural orator. The mayor perhaps? Commissioner? What little importance, the sin was just as grave for either.

“Fuck you.” Alestor screamed. “I need to keep her quiet.” 

“You can’t keep the dead silent.” Sophie shouted. Alestor reached for where he thought her neck would be but could not figure, he grabbed a nose instead, a head that kept slipping from his grip. He pulled her. She wrestled him. His mask fell off again. His hair broke. Chaos, a tussle between the weak old man and the young girl. Lunge. Punch. Headache. Pain, slow, pain. Sharp.

He finally took the sack from her. He hesitated. A young girl, just a young girl. His eyes narrowed. Her fierce expression changed his consternation. She had their eyes, the hunters eyes, though human. She had that resolve or seeming resolve. 

"No one forgets. The world doesn't, you'll see." She said. "You'll face judgment, everyone does."

His heart raced with that same worry and he reached for her mouth to shut it. The rope from her arms now dangled from her, the other eight stared in that Mexican standoff, unsure if he could handle such an unruly child.

He got close, inches. He felt her bitter breath down his wrist like the hot knife. Up his sleeves, nothing hid. 

She shouted. She revealed the glass knife. She cut him. The world shook. 

The ground, the table, the bones, and candles all went dead and the room was filled with a renewed darkness that swallowed them instantly. It was a pop, a large jump that made them all fall. All furniture was pushed outward like an ocean wave had just washed them out and away. They rubbed their heads, all nine and looked around. The girl was gone. The door was rattling violently from its broken hinges like saloon doors. She was gone.

“I’ll go catch her.” Alestor rubbed his scalp.

“What was that explosion?” One of them said. Another looked outside, put his hands on the bars and faced down. The whole second floor was erupting with flames from the windows with the fury of Vulcan's furnace. Something was being worked, they all heard the noises of steel and of flesh and of mighty shouts.

“Don’t worry about it.” Alestor said. “Just get out, any way you can. There are plenty of escapes, you know them.” 

“And what if we can’t?” A young woman said.

“Then you do whatever you can to preserve our security." His eyes looked cold in the darkness. "Anything.” 

One of them raised his head and stepped forward

“Paradise waits for us. Why worry for any temporary suffering?” He reasoned. 

“That’s right.” Alestor said. He rubbed his nose, blood was leaking. He walked up shaky like a pyramid of cards desperately trying to rebuild itself. The parts would not click. He fell, shattered. His face landed down, towards the cup and he felt it in his hand. Goblet in hand, he composed himself, his courage was with him. He felt it, a guardian devil over his shoulders. He walked out the door. On one end were the sounds of violence, of hounds and man. On the other, nubile footsteps. He retracted a knife from his belt and went to work.

Dion
July 20th, 2017
1:16 AM

Dion heard his gun drop before he felt the bite on his shoulder like a bear trap had been clapped on the bone hinges of his arms and left there, to bleed him and to drain him and to leave him weak on one side. A bullet shot off as the gun landed on the floor. It made a hole through three walls, through pipe and concrete that spilled dirty water all over the floor. Dion pointed his other gun towards himself. He screamed, he aimed it at his shoulder and felt the beast fly off. Chunks of his body went with it. It did not die. It shook its wide, misshapen head, like a giant fan those Egyptian kings and queens used to satisfy themselves in heat. 

Dion could feel the air it blew, the smell of its rotten skin and then heard it growl. His arm was teetering. He could not move it. 

He shot at air, the smoke and the sound filled his ears with buzzing and made his nose stuffy. He turned his head to see where the creature ran as it dodged. It bounced around, it blended in with the darkness of the room and when he finally got a sight. He pulled. Click. Nothing, his gun was empty. From a distance, he could see the creature growling, four yellow eyes facing back. It looked like a piece of the darkness, a cancer that grew out from the corner of the room it hid in. It was facing him, he could see it and the intense expression on its face like Lucifer’s wrath. 

It did not let go of its gaze. It kept its lock on him. Dion looked down, he searched for the other gun that had slid away a while back and now he was searching the floor for nothing. A piece of wood. Dion’s face tightened. His legs locked, his knees were bent. He could feel cold from his legs to his thighs as if he had been submerged in the ice-topped waters of the arctics. And the mass had broken. He was sinking. His body felt colder. 

The dog lunged. The air whistled as its sharp face headed towards Dion. A torpedo, a giant nuclear warhead dedicated to Dion’s complete annihilation. Slobber, hunger all over the dusty air. Dust shot out, it painted the windows brown. 

“Ass. Down.” Apollo shouted.

Dion ducked. It was easy, his broken shoulder was already weighing him down. His whole body fell ragdoll like a puppet cut from its strings, he just laid there. He saw the giant sword in the air, spinning, like helicopter blades. He saw it hit the dog and go further out. Go through one wall, two, before landing in a hall, have submerged into the asbestos and the cheap wood. It exploded. A torrent of fire ran out. 

Dion could see it, go through the ceiling and the pipes. It looked like an engine exhaust, the way the flames flew out from the holes like clarinets filled with glycerin and brimstone. They made no beautiful music though, Dion covered his ears. It was nothing but crashing and violence and the explosion of metal and the ricochet of that metal. The shock wave made him deaf. 

When his eyes woke up he looked to where the blade had been shot. Apollo was coming up. Both his arms were in rags, of skin and of suit. He was going through the holes and now shot out smoke. He disappeared in that darkness, his outline becoming a deeper shadow in the pillars of smog. The fires were just beginning to grow. And from one of the mighty torrents, from one of the waves and licks of the fire wisps, Dion saw a philosophers stone thrown out. It broke off and Dion eyed it. He ate and when all limps and weapons were accounted for, he ran through the fire. It felt like a carnival game, the burning ring. He wished it was just a ring. But every inch of the second floor seemed about to be swallowed. Glass broke from a distance, the floor was holed up and he walked on thin planks. It felt like an ocean vessel, tipping and cradling a wound that had destined it to sink. 

"Where's the other dog?" Dion's eyes skidded. His posture became low, again.

"Who knows. We really can't go back now" Apollo said. "This place is going to collapse."

“Then let it, we're demon hunters, not construction workers. Let's go hunt.” Dion said. He ran to the stairs where the fire had not reached.

"Take it easy. I'm sure he'll be up there, with his master. They'll all get theirs. Trust me." Apollo said. Dion eased. He coughed a bit.

"The Priest won't like any of this." He said.

“Fuck the Priest. We’re not here for him.” Apollo said.

“You’re right. You're right...” Dion's eyes came up to the third floor, small clouds of black smoke were finding their way through the broken windows of this particular floor.

“I want them, to let the people sleep easy for one night. If I can at least do that, everything would be worth it.” Dion said.

“I just want to get the fuck out of here already. The sooner the better.” Apollo said. 

They surveyed the land. They pressed their ears against the walls, they could hear the fire eating away at everything. But Dion heard something else. Coughs, choking. And he smiled.

“They’re like bees.” Dion said. “A whole lot of fuss until you smoke them out.”

Apollo scoffed. They put their wrists to their mouths and walked. 

Sophie
July 20th, 2017
1:21 AM

It was a long struggle Sophie put up before she came to the spot of her death. Though she did not know it yet.

For at the moment all she knew was the sharp pain in her lungs from cold air. It transformed, it went to her lower body from a stiffness of her ankles and difficult twist as she came around a corner. She fell.  The glass knife in her hand cut her palm. She switched hands, rubbed her ruined skin on her garments and wrapped it with a piece of her sleeve. So much of her body ached, it felt pricked and prodded as if returning from duress in an iron maiden.

"Where are you girl?" She heard in the distance. An echo of an echo, her body slow and steady as it came up. Her bruised knees were made to shiver and she looked side to side. Half the wall was ripped and laid to ruin to her right. On her left was a small hole in the wall, she ran into it. A toilet blackened with the years lay on its side. Its contents spilled, tar or coffee looking fluid that smelled of something septic. She crawled away from it. In front of her, there was another door or the door frame at least. There was nothing there really, just a small stake on the side of the wall. There were stalls and there were sinks. And she ran past them all. 

“Come back sweetheart, I need you.” She could hear him. Closer now, a voice that boomed and seeped its way through every nook and cranny. She swore she heard something else, a bloodhound. Tender steps of something tactile slapping away at the floor. She came to the cafeteria, it was down the hall from the bathroom. Some tables were still there and the plastic bright blue colored chairs were there too. They fell into clutter and she held her breath for fear. Sophie looked back to the halls. She couldn’t bear the thought of watching him come through the hallway. She ran for the kitchen. There was a bar of sorts, a serving station that separated the two areas and she hid behind, where the rusted metal ovens now slept. 

She passed her hand past a handle. She jumped. 

The oven door opened and the pilot light rolled out. She could hear her heartbeat, felt it too, in giant pulses through her veins. 

He was coming. Running, screaming inside. She raised her blond head and saw through the broken glass of the food concession stand. It was empty, most of the kitchen was stripped. There was a hose, like a snake, dangling from the wall. A few pots laid about. 

“It won't hurt.” Alestor screamed. “I won’t hurt you, I promise. I’m just going to slit that tender throat of yours.” His hair was wild. His face, a blustering mess of grunts and deep breaths. 

Sophie held her mouth again. She begged her body to hush. Past him, past the madman, she saw the dog. The dumb faced lazy legged dog. Wide and grinning, slobbering over the floor and biting the concrete floor into granite. The mass of tendril-like hairs and darkness. It was tasting for her footsteps. Her body felt torn, tackled in two directions. To fall, to run. A seizure of her heart. 

She stepped over the pilot light. Oh, how she cursed, fuck, fuck, fuck. Maybe they hadn’t seen it? They turned. They knew it, though they could barely see her form and the fear shot into her skull, two wide, white bullets where her eyes should have been, they knew it. 

She ran for it. The metal sounded off like a barrage, like a coming army onto the fielding. Canon fire, the screams of the dead and dying. 

She ran to the exit. Ran past the leaking restrooms and the despondent libraries and the offices of writers and of editors and past the ocean of desks now breathing dust into the air. 

She ran to a window. Thought to jump, saw the smoke and the flames and thought otherwise. Fine then, up further, up as high as the sky. She ran. The stairs nearly fell on her but she ran anyway past the shattering floor and its shifty steps. The rubbled she shot down sounded off like a rolling rock down the great temples and mountains. 

The fire exit lay ahead. She pressed her body. Screamed.

“Open.” She yelled. The doors budged, the moonlight came in and her vision blurred. She fell and crawled a bit before her vision of twos cleared, zeroed in.

Alestor was there. All the loose robes and gowns on him pushed west. He looked like the dying sail of a sinking mast, the ship sunk. Her heart sank. She looked back. She could see four yellow eyes in the now obscure darkness. She didn't know how she managed to run through the nothingness, she didn't realize how bright the night was.   

“It didn’t have to be you.” Alestor said. “You were just the one most convenient to us.” 

She punched the floor.

“You shouldn’t have snooped. You should have just let things go. Don’t blame me for this.” Half anger, half morose. Alestor's voice died and inflected with the confliction.

“Your murderer.” She said underneath her breath. Alestor leaned in.

“Wh-what was that?” His hands shook.

“You murdering son of a bitch.” She repeated. Her nose dripped, her eye lids felt hot as if a hot ring was pressed against both sockets.

“I do what I do for who I love.” He said. He was screaming at the sky. “This isn’t the end. Trust me.”

“Shut up you liar. Shut up, shut up, shut up.” She stood. 

“There’s more past this, you little parasite. And it’s more than you deserve.” His mind was made up. His guilt and his fear shook off, Alestor gripped his knife. 

Sophie gripped her own. Glass, just a piece. She felt the weight in her hand and repeated as she had done on the school grounds, with the other bullies. With Pip.

She cocked her shoulder back, she brought her arm down and with one final throw, chucked it at him. The knife cut Alestor across the cheek. She cut the sympathy from his heart. 

“Where are you looking at?” She asked. “You freak.”

He touched the line of blood. His blood must have been glycerin, gasoline, something explosive because his face was red. His head, shaking and on brink of exploding.

“You ruined my face, you bitch.” He said. He came to her. And she stood still, proud for a moment, that she was not begging. Not in fear, and only just beginning to cry.

She felt the knife run through her. A warmth came to her that spread across her body. A strong sting spread across her belly. The air made it worse. She put her hands up, they fell limp after a while though she did not know why. Her brain and body struggled, split. She wanted to talk, couldn't. She wanted to move, but her limbs refused. The struggle ended after a while and she fell, face first. But it didn't hurt. Nothing much hurt. She tried moving her face, nothing. She was becoming a statue, a museum piece locked into some stubborn pose. It was all guesswork after that, to see what moved and what didn't. A toe, fingers. That didn't last long. 

And she went stiff.

And the burden of life seemed cut from her. The bark and the fire, the moaning and the screaming. Faded. Color faded. Of all things to last longest, she was glad it was her memories and her imagination and her dreams and her feelings.

The grainy film of memories in her head didn't know where to go or stop. So she thought of her mother and grandfather. That kept them focused and she was happy. And she was frustrated. A little worried and very sad. 

Sad, but relieved, that she was cold now, cold and calm.

Apollo
July 20th, 2017
1:30 AM

“You’re surprisingly calm.” Apollo said.

“Well, we’re working, aren’t we? I’ve already messed up enough to know what it feels like to get burned.” Dion came around the corner, barrels pointed to the hallway. 

Apollo turned as well, finger pointed to his lips. They both stood on opposite walls, ears to the walls. They could hear breathing. The house was alive. They opened the first door and looked around the room so dense with darkness and mold that breathing felt difficult, it was the dusty wreckage of the years harassing him. 

“What’re we doing here?” Dion asked. “The fire is rising.” 

Apollo hushed him again. They both looked around the room and the curtains that wafted lazily, they hung by one metal ring and dragged across the floor. Apollo watched them again, eyed them, and the contours they made. He came up to them and they breathed out. It was a quiet voice, like a mouse, an auxiliary creeping. He dragged the curtains out and watched them fly towards the hallway centerfold. A man was behind it, his suit ruined, he was on the floor with both arms to his face. 

“Look at what we found.” Apollo said.

“Oh, you’re in trouble.” Dion rubbed his chin. 

“Don’t you dare, I’m being watched over. He’ll punish you.”

“Who will?” Apollo laughed. 

“Astyanax. The king, he knows and his eyes are everywhere. His form everywhere, he is the universe.”

“Right.” Apollo looked around at the silence. “You worship demons and you’re telling me he’s everywhere? Ready to strike?”

“Yes.” The man spat at Apollo’s shoes.

Apollo kicked him with it and rubbed it in his face. He dragged him out and towards Dion, threw him. He cupped his hand and put it to his ear.

“I can’t hear his voice. I can’t see his face. I can’t feel him onto him. Well, shit, I think you just got conned, buddy.” He twisted the sole of his foot into the man’s belly and watched the breath come out of his lungs. 

“It’s time to get judged.” Dion lifted him. He put him over his shoulder and felt him slump. 

They came out of the room. It was a small study, was, now it was torn and thrown along and soon to be burned along with the rest. The stained books and sheets of wood would go with the building, they knew as they looked out to the window and the weary fire now growing. 

They came to a corner where the smoke was dense and saw someone trying to run. Desperation was in his eyes, he held a white cloth over his mouth and kicked the rusted knob of a window. It would not lift. Apollo came closer to him and offered his hand, he broke the lever and broke the glass and reached his neck around to meet the man’s horrified face. 

“You looked like you needed a hand.” He said. The man screamed. He fumbled towards his belt and took out a knife, dropped it, picked it up again and looked to stab Apollo. He was inches deep into Apollo’s body. His scream was wild, a doe caught out in the woods on some maze of branches, with the bristles choking him out. 

He looked up to Apollo’s mask, a little proud. He saw nothing. No pain on the dark, lines around the eyes, nothing on the white porcelain. Apollo simply removed the knife and chucked it out. It fell. It clanked when it hit the floor. And the second man began to sink. 

“Say.” Dion said. “Do you think he knows where the rest are?” 

“That’s a great question. It really, really, is.” 

They both looked down at the slunk man and his sucked-in face. His neck was fat and he looked like he was frowning three times over. 

They were done. Four of them were caught, three in a rusted chain, bound together and hauled around like cattle. Apollo held the chain. The other was hog-tied on Dion’s shoulder.

“This one went better than usual.” Apollo said.

“We burned a house down.” Dion climbed upstairs to the final floor, and from there, the exit at the rooftop. 

“Yeah, those things happen in this line of work.” 

“I’m just glad we caught them.” 

“I’m just glad we’ll have someone else to talk to when we get back.” Apollo grabbed one of their chins and rubbed it like a small child, an encouraging nudge. 

“You’re not going to torture them, you hear me?” Dion said.

“No, no. I promise.” Apollo yanked on the chain. “It’ll just be a firm, very firm, interrogation.”

“Please, stop.” Dion shook his head.

“This could have been done sooner if you didn’t lose your cool the first few times we came up against their little monstrosities.”

“Well, I kept my cool today.” 

“Only because I was here every step of the way. I doubt you would have done it yourself.”

“Why can’t you just appreciate some good fortune for once?” Dion pumped the head of the man on his shoulder. It knocked him out. “See what you made me do?”

“I’m just glad that soon, I won’t have to see your ugly mug ever again. We’ll finally be leaving. I can taste it.” 

“You’re already assuming one of them will talk. I hate that arrogance about you, it’s uncouth.” Dion walked up the stairs.

“Oh, trust me, they’ll talk.” Apollo stopped at the fire escape door. The rooftop was in front of them. 

“After you.” Apollo pointed the way. Dion rolled his eyes. He put one hand on the door. He pushed. They were silenced. The fire burned diligently, it ate and ate and in the quietness, they could hear the digestion of the building. It sounded like brimstone, like hell. 

In front of them was the last hellhound and next to it, they saw Sophie. And in that burning heat, in the smog and smoke, in the warping fumes of the flames of the fire, they both stood still. Frozen. 

“Dion.” Apollo grabbed Dion’s shoulder. 

But it was too late. All he saw was red.

And all Apollo saw, beyond in the horizon of the dark, was the blue meteor bullet shot out. It lept from building to building, eviscerating them with its fury. It stopped, finally, at a sign. A man holding a donut, and it exploded into a swarm of sparks. Like a migration of red doves had finally made their stop and scattered. 

It burned. And the destruction was laid out in front of Apollo. He tried lunging for Dion to stop, in fear that it would not end with just the wreckage. But he was punched, hit in the jaw and he laid on the floor, absorbing with red eyes, an oncoming darkness.

He was unconscious and stayed that way until Dion was done with his maddened massacre. 

The Priest
July 24th, 2017
5:03 PM

At five in the afternoon, for the last three days, the Priest was always at the ready. He stood in front of the door and knocked. And by five-twenty in the afternoon, he would leave. It was like that. He felt like a debt collector.

It wasn’t unreasonable. He just wanted to know what had happened. The news didn’t share much information about anything, other than the number of corpses found and the destruction wrought by the burning building. He wanted to hear it from Apollo. But Apollo would not say it. He did not open his doors. Not until the fourth day, when he had patience, when the bags of his eyes receded into soft wrinkles. His body was slop. His hood dragged down on his back, sweatpants tore at their bottoms, made him slide as they wrapped around his feet.

“What in God’s holy name is this.” The Priest entered the door. Apollo had just unlocked it and had not even given him the courtesy of opening it.

“You’re a mess.” He said. Apollo sat in his chair, marking maps and throwing empty white bottles of orange juice to his side and into the trash can. He rimmed them, though did not land them. They lay, the bottles, in groups like dead seagulls at the shoreline. 

“What do you want?” Apollo asked. He was drawing circles over pictures of men. Suspects, the Priest presumed. There were other papers on the floor, ripped in half or stained black with coffee. 

“What do I want?” The Priest walked forward, past the desk and to the window. The blinds were closed and lay stuck at the bottom by a truss. He broke the rope and the handle and watched as the cloth ziplined up and all around the room, the cold dark air thanked him. A ray of gold cut the murk like a water jet, slicing through the coal-colored darkness. The dust particles were illuminated, they flew gentle and serene and dissipated.

“It's like a temple.” The Priest looked to Apollo. “And you’re the mummy living in this sarcophagus.” 

“I don’t need a nanny, I don’t need a maid. Why are you here?” Apollo asked again. He ran to the table, he wrote a number down. His hairs were uneasy, he hadn't slept. Unwieldy.

“We haven’t spoken in a few days. Though I always expect that of you.” He said. “It’s Dion I’m worried about. I haven’t seen him come to church to pray, I haven’t spoken to him at all.”

“Why do you care?” Apollo asked. “You called him an animal the first day we were here. Or was it monster? I forget. Anyways, are you surprised he doesn’t want your company?”

“So what? I don't feel ashamed one bit by saying it.” The Priest stepped in front of Apollo. “I still think you two are monsters. Half-demons, ridiculous. Agents of god, they want me to call you that.”

“Not half-demons. Only part.” Apollo walked passed him. He tore a taped photo on the wall, it looked pixelated. “And for the second part of your question. It's not my business to know what Dion does, as a matter of fact, I think it's for the best.”

“He’s your partner.”

“Was. We had another spout.”

“You always have a spout. Your like cats, like children."

"Like animals or monsters?"

"Yeah, but at least you're half sensible. I trust you more than I trust him." The Priest said.

“Not my problem.” Apollo said. He looked around, his eyes fell to the floor. “Not Dion, not this city. None of this is my problem.”

“What are you talking about?” The Priest asked. 

“Don’t worry about it.” 

“Don’t tell me what to worry about. My coming here for Dion was only half the issue.” The Priest dragged a chair around the room. It was a small complex but it felt bigger without Dion, without the presence of his laugh or his kneeling body on the bedside. 

“I’m here to talk about the fire.”

“What about it?”

“So you admit it’s your fault. Is that why you’ve dodged me? So you wouldn’t have to answer for it?” The Priest asked.

“We burned a building down and captured four degenerates. Rats, they weren’t even people.”

“And then?” The Priest’s eyes focused on Apollo. He could feel his stare burning the back of Apollo's head. A magnifying glass. 

“And then the place burned down and the four went down with it. Or five. I forget.”

“There was another body though.” The Priest rested his head on his arms and leaned forward. “A small girl. Do you know anything about that?”

Apollo stood. The pen-marker in his hand fell and he looked to his side for it. It rolled some paces away and he went to go grab it but the Priest grabbed him. Held him firm.

“What happened?” The Priest asked.

“A murder happened. Dion lost it.” He undid the grip. “He knocked me out. Prick has a nice right hook."

"And then?"

"Then, well, I don’t know what happened after that. I woke up a few buildings away. In a dumpster, of all things. There was no one left. Just a howl of sirens, firemen, police... Paramedics.”

“The bodies were mutilated. You think he had anything to do with it?”

“Ask him.” Apollo swerved from him. He went to his suitcase laying on the bed. It indented the mattress and left it concave, the springs recoiled into a harsh swing up as he picked the pounds. He was looking for shoes, a shirt and undid his hoodie. The sweater revealed his lanky body. Thinner than the Priest imagined, scarred too, burned, mostly. Striped like camouflage, like the rouge of soldiers and commandos in the thicket of the wartorn jungle. Zebra striped. Brown skin, black marks.

“I want you to answer to me.” The Priest stood. Apollo walked up to him, he fixed his tie and set his tired eyes on his face. The air in the room felt swallowed, vanished and the Priest could feel his head empty as if in a vacuum. He was waiting, wondering, if his eyes would pop out, if his eardrums would shatter into bloodshed. 

“I answer to no one,” Apollo said. “Not to the girl, not to her prick grandfather. No one. Fuck this city. Fuck it’s deranged people, fuck you. I’d let it all burn if it wasn’t tied to my payroll, believe in that.” 

The Priest would have been afraid. If he didn’t notice his eyes blink, shift, scatter under the word girl. He rolled a bead of his rosemary. A prayer, not for him. For Apollo. 

“You’re lying. I smell it. I’ve sat through too many confessions to not tell the quiver in your conviction.” The Priest said. “It doesn’t matter though. Lie or not, finish your job. I don't care what you fight for. Alright?”

“Stop bothering me and I might.” Apollo went to the door. 

“I don’t expect anything else from you."

"Yeah." Apollo's voice was faint. Exasperated, the air was cold and steam came from his breath.

"I guess my prognosis was correct, huh?" The Priest said. "Your kind really are more demon than man. Degenerates.” 

“Yeah, you old fuck. I guess you were right.” Apollo waved his hands. "Aideu, shithead."

“You machine man. With your machine heart. Follow your programming. Do your damn job.” He screamed out the door. There was no one there, just some footsteps that faded into clatter down the stairs. He slammed the door shut. Then realizing it wasn't his home, opened the door in shame and shut ut gently. 

"At least lock your own door." He shouted down, to a car driving away. It skipped a red light and roared down the road.

Dion
July 24th, 2017
7:03 PM

He grabbed her by the mouth and looked like he would not let go with that iron grip pinching the corners of her moaning gasp. By the fifth thrust, she began to wiggle away. By the seventh, she had enough and with one hand against his chest, pulled him out of her and let him stand in the naked, cold air. Erect and sweating.

“Why are you rough today?” Ophelia threw a wet pillow at him.

“What do you mean?” Dion went towards her for a hug. He thought, at least, that it was just play and crawled back on the bed with his belly and elbows. She pushed his face back, kept the predator look at bay.

“I mean what I say. You’re rough. You were much more gentle the first time. Now it’s just…like a god damn dog, what the fuck?”
 
“I’m just, distracted.” He looked down. “Some things in my mind have come back up.”

“The things that made you come here?” She nodded her head. “I knew it. I knew this was a bad idea. I knew the moment I saw your crying, moping face.”
 
Ophelia stood up and reached for her clothes that hung by the edge of a bleached-oak countertop. A tank top, some pajama pants. She started working her hair into a bun and Dion just stared, with the rose water smell in the air and the velvet underneath like smooth, warm sand, his fingers dug into it and the mattress and he watched. He was naked, flaccid, and outstretched. 

It was cold. 

Amongst the hot room, amongst her radiated warmth, that made him think that her pink cheeks were some kind of candle flame (for they looked the part in the way they bloomed), he was feeling cold. 
 
She turned around and sucked in her lips. She could only massage her scalp as she looked at his sullen expression. He looked like a child, some lost animal wandering and shaggy with the dirty look of the streets caked like mud on his face. A heavy mud, a mud that made him downcast.

His forehead, his nose, his eyes, all down. His breath, sighing. 

“Before, I didn’t ask you why you came here.” Ophelia said. “It just sounded like you needed a place, and I owed you one. But now you’ve been here for four days and I’m starting to get the idea that you don’t want to leave. So I have to ask, why are you here? Where did you come from?”

He looked at the pretty cabinets and the reflection of the pleasant pink lights radiating from the corner room, a giant fixture in the shape of a salt rock or a totem. He couldn't tell. His clothes were in a corner and in a square plastic box, the faux-lion carpet beneath his feet felt comfortable, a massage of fur for his toes and a panacea for the growing tensions in his muscles that made his calves spasm. 

There really isn't a cure for nervous ticks though. Just suppressants, but no cures.

“I don’t want to tell you why I’m here.” He said. 

“Yeah, you said that.” She turned away, opened a drawer and took out a cloth. She left for the restroom and seemed to take the glow of the room with her. Dion put a pillow against his face to suffocate, it seemed, the last of his hope.

“I’m sorry I put this on you.” He muffled.

“Why?” Ophelia asked. “I made the choice just as much as you did.”

“You’re married though.”

“Was planning to marry, actually. And you were depressed and I was stupid enough to give into that maternal instinct of mine, and well, here we are.” She said. “You can beat most things, not biology though. It follows us from the womb to the grave. A slave master, a whip, and a reaper all at once.”

“You’re starting to sound like someone I don’t like. Please stop.” Dion said. 

"That Apollo guy?" She said. He groaned.

“I’m sorry I ruined your marriage, is what I want to get.” He said.

“Don’t feel guilty. My ex, he's probably fucking some other girl too. He usually does. Cat calls he calls business trips. There isn't a whore moan in this city I can't trace back to him, like a radiation trail. You find the hints over time, hairs, smells, neck marks. Then you confirm it, for me it, it was just a look. Or the lack of one. Like he couldn't even tolerate to look me in the eyes like the space between us grew, centimeter to centimeter."

She threw water at her face. Dion saw her imperfections. Freckles, a lazy eye, the years of strife on her forehead that made her wrinkle early.  Imperfections like anyone else. And it made him sad to ever think her anything else but human.

“You know? When you helped us at the club? I kind of wish you didn’t. I wish my shitty man, if I could even call him my man, was beaten up just a bit more. Just enough to let him know how I feel, even if only vicariously.” 

“You don’t mean that.” Dion said. “You’re better than that.”

“I wonder.” She said. She rubbed water on her face. She walked back in and sat next to him and rubbed his cheeks with tender hands. Then frowned. Dion went forward with puckered lips, she pushed his shoulders back.

“I’m glad you came, really.” She smiled. But he knew what the tone meant. “You made me realize I wasn’t ready for marriage.”

“With him, right?” Dion asked. 

“With anyone.” She said. He frowned.

“But. We’ve, well, we’ve been together?” He asked. “It’s meaningful, what we’ve done. It’s the consummation of love, you know? It’s sacred.”

He put his sad mask on again, the face he made that made her think of the night four days ago. The wrangled dirty boy. It was an innocent sadness then and it looked like it again, now.

“Dion. We had sex a couple times. That’s it.” She said. “You haven’t even told me who you really are. You said you were the son of a pastor, here to sell bibles.”

“I am. I’m selling something, I guess. Was...” His hands fell.

“You expect me to believe that?” She went to the closet and the small square package of clothes. A new dress shirt, some new shoes. She took the bundle and put it to his lap.

“I expect you to understand.” He said. He turned away from the clothes.

“And I do. I understand you were just a passing moment, I understand that I’m one too. For you at least. You’ll move on and I’ll move on. Like two passing trains.” 

“Well.” His shoulders sagged. “The difference is you know where you’re going. Me. Me...”

Dion wiped his forehead. 

“Me? I’m fucked.” The word came out difficult. It dragged, the curse word, it seemed to burn because he touched his mouth afterward and rubbed his lips and closed his eyes in silent prayer. She narrowed her eyes. He was strange.

“I can let you stay the night but you have to go home by morning. I thought you were with that one guy anyways? Uh.” She rubbed her head. “Apollo, that’s all you talked about. Apollo.”

“The prick.” He said. “I hate him and I’m afraid if I see him again, I’ll hate him even more. If that's possible.”

“He’s the only person you really talked about.”

“Well, when you get to know someone, whether they’re pleasant or not, they seemed to stick with you. Like a ghost.” He said.

“Or like toilet paper under your shoe.” She laughed. She rubbed his arm, just a child, she thought. He started fitting his clothes and finding them to have shrunk, so he tugged on the ends of his pants and his coats to fill the draft where the cold air was coming through. 

“You're just a runaway.” She said. “You look like it like I just found you crying in the middle of a store.”

“Are you calling me a kid?” He fixed his cuffs.

“I’m saying that you have somewhere to be and it isn’t here. Like me.” 

“And where’s that?” He asked. She smiled and fixed his tie which was sloppy and slanting to the side, and fixed his collar which was puffed up like a cautionary cone for a dog. She turned him and pulled up his coat tail stuck to his belt. She reached for his coat flaps, put a finger on them and he pulled away. Another secret, she thought.

“Right.” She laid on the bed and watched him from the meridian glow, he stood by the door frame and his face was cross sections, half in, half out. “ Where am I going? I’ll go back to school, I think. I hate this real estate shit. And you? I think you should go back. Consider couples counseling or something.”

 “You’re one to talk.” He shook his hip. His clothes felt tight, his whole body looked wound up. An explosive with a fuse that had run out days ago.

“We all have things to settle. Maybe it won’t be so bad when you settle yours.” She said.

“What I’ve done? What I've done.” He tried to remember, his eyes rose to the corner of his sockets and the baby blue painted walls disappeared. The picture frames of smiling youths, the vases and their flowers around him warped, the sofa across from him, a tomb. The flat screen television sounding static, a giant stone. Here marked Sophie. He shook. The images would not leave. One after another, so far down he went into the memory that he began to feel the heat of the room and his gun and the burning screams of the cremated like their long nails were up to his neck and making him sweat. 

His eyes opened. She looked sad and distant and he looked away. “I don’t think I can be saved from what I’ve done.”

“I can tell that’s what you think.” She said. “You’re giving me my ex-fiancé’s look. And I’ll tell you what I’ll tell him; you won’t know if you can be saved if you don't even make the effort to try."

“How can you say that? You’re calling off you’re marriage, you’re not forgiving him.” He moaned. 

“All apologies are selfish. You don’t do it for the person wronged, you do it for yourself. It’s like cutting a weighted rope. Yeah, you'll keep the scars but at least it won't be so heavy anymore.” She sighed.

“I'm supposed to be the pastor's son. The lord's servant.” He blew his hair and rubbed his scalp as if caught with lice. He couldn't stop scratching his hair 

“You know, this is coming from me, but don’t act so holy. It’s not like you’re guiltless." He said. "I mean, you cheated too."

“You’re right. I’ve got my problems to face too. And I’ll face them. But will you?”

"You're sounding like him again." He said. "But he's a lot meaner. Less caring."

He turned around. He put his hands in his pocket and went past the vases and pictures and other novelties, a bass fish that sang with a button press, a collection of postcards from all they’re favorite vacations, history on top of history she was willing to throw away, and it began to anger him. Like the strength of will in her was somehow stronger than in him, and he kicked the door open. And he kicked a garden gnome in half and watched its broken feet teeter from the sidewalk into the gutter. He kicked the dirt. She watched from the window, not mad as much as she was curious about what or whom he would kick next.

So he went out, into the streets from the white painted fences and into the broken roads, from the orange u-haul trucks of the rich as if wandering life buoys, to the miserable with clutch children behind barred windows, drowning, but too scared to try to swim. He looked to the sky, the sky was just setting. He kicked the floor and wondered where Apollo was, or with whom.

Apollo
July 24th, 2017
10:24 PM

Apollo was irritated. It showed in the way he scratched his neck and how he slicked his hair strands back and tugged on his suit with that firm and bitter touch. Pulling, rapid pulling and scratching. He had felt this way on in the early dusk, all throughout the gray day. The sky had not done him favors. It seemed like everything ran thin, sunshine, patience, emotion. Days that ended too fast, nights that outlasted his dreamless sleep. He wanted the antihistamine for his ruthless insomnia, the soft pillow, the clearing emptying chamber for his heavy and full heart.

It was Sophie.

He didn’t say it or even think it. The opposite. He repressed the memory, the scene of red. Forgot it, pretended to forget it. And now it was hurting, not in the way of a dagger strike that cuts and stings and bleeds, but in that harrowing numbing wave, starting as a drop of mercury, now a shower that poisoned the ocean of his consciousness. His mind was deteriorating, the animals of his devices dying on the shoreline with their long purple tongues falling out of tired mouths and their gills sucking aimlessly at harsh arid airs. 

His head hurt as he looked down. An old cable antenna was to his rear like a pitchfork to the sky or perhaps a lone hand in prayer. He could hear the person below him watching, laughing, a heckle he thought, aimed at him. Apollo bent the antenna. The man screamed at his static-filled television and Apollo jumped from the edge of the roof. The birds scattered to drop shit elsewhere, but not here, not anywhere near the lone figure in the night. His slick mask, cracked and glued with gold. He slid across the cornices, kicked off of statues that split and broke. The gargoyles looked away, faces down in shame. 

He was following a car. The license plate that read ‘AS5MAN’, the juggling pair of dice below the car spoiler that somehow managed to stay on even through the wild turns that screeched and skidded. Like testicles, old, saggy, desperate. Apollo followed the car and the skittish hands within that he saw through the rose-tinted windows. It looked like four hands driving the wheel. He looked just as timid as Apollo, but unlike Apollo, he was guilty. And to Apollo, this man (if you could call any monster a man) might as well have been Shiva. He sure left the trail, smoke, and smog that made all the sad and small homeless cough and turn. But he was guilty of something more. 

He was a drug dealer. A particular one. One Apollo had confirmed after many an interrogation and many a threat. And he was coming around the bent, trying to catch the freeway, going through the mountain range and wrapping around the black serpentine track. Drifting, slithering. Apollo followed him there.

The pines glared at Apollo like a platoon of archers. He was above the trees. His hands injected into the earth, his feet dragging his anchor like the swimming of sharks, his body a kind of rapid moving fin that shredded through earth and shot it out to the street. He was fortunate there was no one else driving. He looked ahead of himself and predicted where the driver would go, he saw the sharp turn up ahead and how it was flagged by a rebellious pine tree. He ran on the wall, ran ahead of the car with that inhuman speed and strength. He waited then, it wasn’t long. It was only a few minutes. He could feel the air vibrate with that masculine car engine, the assault of a two-thousand fifteen Dodge Hellcat. And Apollo knew, all the engineering and strength of that vehicle would be reduced to nothing. For it was just metal. Metal and fuel and sparks. Science and man, the devil’s instruments as he was taught. And they were right, for tonight he felt that same Luciferian anger. 

His eyes flashed red as the car came around. He challenged the headlights. His shadow moved. Darted, he sped faster and faster and the car could not turn. The driver screamed, but his closed windows left his voice powerless. The car turned right, Apollo tackled right. 

It flew. Five feet into the air.  On its side. The tires flew out, the sparks shot out like a derailed train. Apollo laid on the floor. His shoulder was feeling it now, hot and bleeding and dislocated. A tire rolled passed him and spun circles, undecided before it finally sat next to him. He stood. With his only good arm, he found his bicep and rolled his arm around to find where the socket was where it was supposed to be attached. He could feel his bone click, rub, and with one strong push, snapped it back in. Pain and relief. A bulge of bone receded. It felt like the harshest bruise he could imagine, the feeling of muscle and nerves twisted and shredded and forced to work again. But it healed. Like most of everything in his body. But no kind of healing, regeneration, miracle, could fix that wound in his heart. The solemn denial. The bad dream.

The car was on its side. The hood touched the ground and the tree and the guardrail, it was bent in. All of it was. Apollo heard the man groan, he saw the door prop open in the air and he followed the sight and the markings of wheels before he was led back to his feet. He picked up the lonely tired next to him. When he saw the man move his arm up like a white flag, Apollo aimed for it. He saw it bent and break, the elbow pop out. The driver retreated back inside. But there was no other exit, the front windshield, like the webbing it was broken into, caught him. He tried kicking it. Apollo heard the faint struggle of the broken man. He came up the car and let him try, almost taunting him. After a few minutes, he finally brought the whole car to the ground again. They both assessed the damage, the red car now compressed, the headlight dangling out like an eye falling out of its socket. A constant flicker, a hopeless flicker of the headlights. The driver looked at Apollo.

The same strobing light lapsed in his own eyes as he faced Apollo’s grim mask. He looked for his keyhole and turned it and begged the engine that no longer worked. It couldn’t roar, it couldn’t even purr. It coughed then went quiet.

“What the fuck, man. I thought - ” The driver spat blood. “I thought I ran you over, man.”

“You must have me confused.” Apollo pulled him out of the car. “I am no man.”

“I’ll give you whatever you want.” The driver tugged Apollo’s arm the same way a child would at the father, pleading, in prayer. Apollo dragged him to the tree.

“I know you will.” Apollo said. The car was on fire and Apollo was brought back to that night. He grabbed the drivers twisted arm and turned it even more. He could see the skin in the light and how it turned green, diseased. The driver did not scream though. It was a silent expression that emptied out of his mouth, his mouth was open, his eyes rolled back. It was the point in which he was wishing for death.

“You will live tonight. I promise you that.” Apollo said. “How you will live afterward, however, will be your own decision. Yours alone.” The fires fanned in his eyes. The child, for all Apollo felt and thought, was here, bleeding again. And the heat of passion now drove him more than he would admit. 

“I want a name.” Apollo said.

“Anyone! I’ll tell you anyone.” The man said. His stray teeth stained his purple blazer, his watch hung on his broken hand and with tears, he moved himself to offer the watch. Apollo stood still. The driver looked in his pockets and when his eyes and hands came up with the burning money, when he saw the face of death, he knew the gravitas of Apollo’s wrath. That impassive, silent rage. 

“Every drug on the streets of Havenbrook have seen your hands or passed your inspection. You have every route, every small-time dealer and big-time drug trafficker in your phone book.” Apollo said.

“Who? Who do you want?” The man cried.

“I want neither. Not your constituents, not your employees. I want the man you sell your hallucinogens too. This man. This man alone will suffice.”

“I have so many who buy them.” The edge of barter was in the driver’s tone now. 

"Give me your largest consumner." Apollo said.

The man bit his lips. He shut his eyes, in pain or in the imagination of a pain. 

“Promise me, at least.” The driver said.

Apollo reached for him, he dug his hands into bruised skin, cut through the purple blazer and the black dress shirt. His fingers wrapped around a gold chain, then they went deeper, into the ribs. He had not penetrated the skin, only barely, instead he found one of those long curbed bones and, with dispassionate glare, broke it. Crack. Apollo put his arms to cover the driver's mouth. He felt his fingers bit.

He detached himself from the man again and let him scramble to the wound.

“You are the polluter of this temple. You are the beast, the whore, and the money-changer all at once. You will not be forgiven, but you may yet find another life after today.” Apollo said. “Silence suffers you. A name? A name buys you a future.”

“Alestor.” He shouted. “Doctor Alestor. He always used an assistant with his deals. But…”

“But?” The fire roared.

“I spied on him. I tracked him, he’s into freaky shit man. He wanted to kill me once he found out I tailed him, he would have. But I promised him to keep selling. To shut the fuck. To help him.” The world muted. Apollo heard the words and he felt, immediately, like drowning. Like he sank to the bottom of the ocean and all the stress and pressure collapsed on his ears. The muffled, rock bottom silence, the drowning silence of the ocean above him. He helped, Apollo thought.

”Man, you got to keep me same from him. Fucking shit, man. Do me that at least? He does things, things you wouldn’t believe. It’s fucking magic. I swear, no one believes m-” The driver reached for Apollo’s legs to plead. Apollo picked him up. He slammed him against the tree.

“You will survive tonight. I promise. It is not my place to execute a man.” He said. The driver cried, thanked him, his nose dripped. Apollo let him go and let him weep for a moment of innocent joy.

Then he took off his jacket. Then he lifted his sleeves and showed the veins of his arms, the rivers of violent passion that now pulsed through him and through his heart.

“But I will judge,” Apollo said. The man went quiet. The fire crackled. “You deserve no tribunal, you will get no tribunal. No. This is no righteous beating.”

The driver looked side to side. He almost forgot his legs were broken.

“I look upon you the same way a farmer would look at the harvest or a shepherd, his livestock. Because this, like any other bounty or burden, is just a chore.”

He looked at Apollo and the way he leaned in with that gaunt and gaudy mask. His mouth quivered and he took a deep breath. He would need it, for his crying howl into the night.
 

Dion
July 24th, 2017
11:38 PM

Dion had called Apollo with no success, he had left a voice mail, texted, harassed the Priest who ended up harassing him back with questions. It wasn’t until four hours after the episode with Ophelia, four hours of walking and talking, of pointless wandering that he finally got a message back. An address. 

He followed it. Uphill, it all led up, where he could see clearly the city for what it was. The rolls of hills, the waves of trees and of metal industrial chimneys that poked the sky. He could not tell what was cloud and what was soot. It was all gray, then black as he went higher up and the hour changed to nearly midnight. 

The streets were better, cleaner, the cars sleeker. The chain link turned to white fence, turned to the giant bars of steel and the giant hedges. Every house was a kind of island. He could see the lights of their million dollar homes from the small, topsy-turvy streets. They were like the small glowing orbs of schools of fireflies. They moved around and looked outside at the wandering man, suspicious of him. Of Dion. It was practically a different city. 

He stopped at the address and looked in front of him. There was no fence, at least. But the front yard was wide and upon it was a concrete fountain left to dry, there was a statue of a man holding a cornucopia but there was no water. It cracked and its cracks were filled with vine and grass. In that sense, it was different from the rest in how neglected it was. Past the statue, past an oak tree casting off its leaves, was a door. There was no stone path and Dion’s feet sank in the weak grass. The unruly nature of the house was made up by the fact that the lot was so large.

He opened the door, the locks were broken in already. There was no security system, the house was too old for it. The floorboards groaned and shrieked, the chandeliers shook from the rough shutting of the door. It seemed like a strong wind would have knocked the house down, the blow of a wolf maybe. And as Dion came to realize, the wolf had already done just that. In the kitchen he could hear the destruction of the house, the opening and removal of cupboards, that clunky cacophony as if the house was being reclaimed by scavengers. Apollo was turning over a drawer, spilling knives and forks all over. 

“I’m surprised you came back.” Apollo said. He turned the fridge over. “It’s undignified to crawl back after what you did.”

“I stand by what I did. I’d do it again if I had the chance.” Dion’s eyes narrowed.

“You killed three people and left two to burn alive. You stand by that action?” Apollo looked underneath the table, went around, through a door underneath the stairs and peered inside the small safe room. 

“You saw what they did. They killed a fucking girl.”

“Involved in the murder of a small girl, we don’t know if they did it or not and we never will.”

“What do you mean?!” Dion slapped the wood. A piece of the stair guard fell on his head and landed on the floor beneath them. Apollo came out of the room, picked it up and looked at Dion. 

“I don’t really disagree with your choice. I understand it, really, I do. Even after the fact that you knocked me the fuck out.”

“I made sure you were safe.”

“Right.” Apollo said. He inspected the wood and the nice chipped end of which it came off of. It had been crushed.

“Did you tell the Priest?” Dion asked.

“No.” Apollo climbed slow and steady up the stairs. “I lied.”

“Why?” Dion climbed after him.

“Because what the Vatican would do to you would be much worse than any jail or any harassment that the Priest could ever give you.” Apollo said. “Death would be a very, very, merciful thing for you. If they caught you, of course.”

Dion stood. His throat felt dry and no amount of swallowing spit lubricated it. A hot dryness as if he had swallowed a handful of sand and let it chafe his insides. 

“I’m sorry.” Dion said.

“What’s the point of apologizing, to me of all people?” Apollo stood at the top of the stairs. “You’re much more tolerable when you actually commit to something. Even if it’s murder.”

“I can’t call it murder.” Dion walked up past him. “I killed child killers, they weren’t people.” 

It almost made Apollo chuckle. He went up, through the hall where the chandeliers fell close to their head, where it shook and spread their shadows out like and rotated them. Like a night lamp casting shadow puppets, thrown and left spinning on the floor. The light stopped and Apollo’s shadow fell upon a door, ivory oak. He put his hand to it. It would not move. Dion came to help but Apollo stopped him, instead, put his foot below the knob and pushed. It caved in. He took the hinges off with him. Dust flew back, wrapping around the falling door and hitting them with the antique smell of books and history.

“I can’t believe I’m just asking this, it makes me feel stupid, but why are we are?” Dion asked.

“It’s not just a feeling, Dion, but I’m glad you’re reflecting today.” Apollo said. Dion groaned. “We’re here to find the man who killed the little girl, Sophie. Or, the alleged murderer.”

Dion flared up again, eyes red.  Apollo shook his head.

“He’s not here, so relax. When I first came in I noticed a struggle and a missing car. The fight came from one of the lower bedrooms, into the garage, out the driveway. I thought I could find something of a clue in the kitchen. Nothing. Then you came.” He said. "Are you wearing gloves?"

“No.” Dion said.

Apollo handed him a handkerchief. 

"Well, make sure to wipe your evidence off everything. Everything.” 

Dion rubbed aimlessly, nervously, as Apollo inspected the room. He passed him glances now and then, looking where he searched. He knocked on the walls. Looked over the stacks of books, lines of them, some midway removed. Nothing. He looked over the tops of desks and of cabinets where the film of dust had been disturbed. There was a clean stain in the shape of a circle and they both only wondered. 

Dion came in at last. He went over to one end of the room and looked down at a rug.

“Don’t touch anything.” Apollo said. It was too late, with that wide mouth curiosity, Dion flipped over the skin of a bear and made it moan as he threw it off to the side with its body depressed. 

Apollo nodded his head and they both looked. The arcana symbol was on the floor, smudged a bit but there, visible, an imperfect circle. Apollo knelt to inspect it.

“It’s amateurish.” He said.

“Well this amateur is giving us a lot of trouble.”

“You think he’s getting help?” Dion asked.

“Astyanax.” Apollo said. “I looked him up. Son of Hector of Troy, he was stabbed in the belly by the Achaean’s and thrown over the wall of Troy. Or Ilium.”

“What’s that?”

“Ever read the Iliad?” Apollo tilted his head. “Have you ever read at all?”

“No, it’s too boring.” Dion said. 

“Right.” Apollo sighed. “Well, I thought it was just fiction. But who knows, maybe who we’re talking about is someone else. Probably a new prince in the upper levels of Hell, perhaps.”

Apollo looked back to the symbol, the geometry that was sloppy and the letters in Latin and in Hebrew, misspelled and misplaced. Amon was written there, at the bottom. On top of it, more Hebrew.

“I only know Latin.” Dion said.

“It says.” Apollo squinted. “Formless and Empty.”

“Oh, oh. Bingo!” Dion yellowed. Apollo put his finger over his mouth to hush him. “Jeremiah four twenty-three, I looked on the earth, and behold, it was formless and void; And to the heavens, and they had no light.” His voice was booming, his chest pumped like a proper preacher at the holy edifice, above the crowd and above the bible stand. 

“Right.” Apollo said. He shook his head and put his hand against the paint. He removed it. Electricity shot out. A loud bang that popped the glass and left them deaf. Apollo opened his eyes, his jaw was moving uncontrollably in muscle spasms. He was shaking his hand, blowing air against it. It had been burned, the nails completely burned off and the concussion leaving large bruises all around him like a brown Dalmatian.

“Fuck.” Apollo couldn’t hear his own curse. His ears were still ringing, Dion hadn’t suffered much of anything and was clearing his face from smoke. He looked at Apollo’s wound, watched him try and blow away the pain. He was the first to look outside and nearby. No one cared, not the rich and their lighted houses. They were too far to care. He looked back to Apollo who picked himself up, then to the floor and missing glyphs. 

“Fucking fuck.” Apollo said. “Self-destructing piece of fucking shit.” He was nearly foaming in his anger. 

He lugged his body around like a rag doll, holding his hand low to the ground. His mouth was scrunching hard against itself, Dion could hear the sound of grating. They both looked to the broken window, to a docile albino crow. It scurried away. Apollo looked up. His hand was getting better, he could walk now.

“Let’s look elsewhere.” Apollo said. “Before something else annoys me.” 

They wandered a bit. Apollo kissed his hand. It healed, mostly, and all that was left, mostly, were the twitches of damaged nerves. Those took longer to heal. The finer details always did. 

They came up to an end and to nothing. The light switch at the side did not work, they looked back at the hall now dark. Apollo was holding his hand, Dion was looking around and putting his ear against the wood. 

“Do you think the house can talk?” Apollo asked.

“Well, I saw you knocking. I thought I might hear something.”

Apollo nodded his head. He moved a bit in the darkness, then felt something over his head. A string perhaps. He raised his hands, the ceiling was too far from him. So he yanked the chord, Dion shuffled away. Stairs descended with what sounded like an annoyed croak of rusted metal. The sound of something wanting desperately to be ignored. And from what, both of them suspected, they would find out soon. It was immediate, almost.

The smell of death. Light came out from the small square in the ceiling where the smell came from.

“Are you sure you want to come up?” Apollo asked.

Dion’s face went still. His eyes focused, weighted, like they were a burden on his face. Two giant balls of cold, black steel.

“I’m used to it already, right?” He said. Apollo looked away then climbed. 

Dion followed and he looked nearby at another beaded string. Dion pulled this one. They reeled back at the image. 

It smelled of rotted pig, left to disintegrate in the heat of a dumpster. It almost smelled sweet, that same pig, drawn out and on top of it, cheap sickly sweet perfume poured over. A carcass, both rotten and sweet. A body dressed in that disingenuous sweet smell. 

There was a corpse in front of them. There was a knife lodged in his back. Both of them could not tell who it was, for the body was too engorged and glossy red to tell. It seemed like a giant ball, ready to pop, foaming red where the bug-eaten holes were formed. 

“Just another victim. Ten days old, it seems.” Apollo said.

Dion’s eyes fell. 

“I want to pretend that he was the first. But that would be a lie, wouldn’t it?” Dion asked.

“Probably.”

They both went silent. There was no need to inspect, there was nothing that could tell them who it was. All they knew was that it was somebody, all the knew, was that it was one amongst the many, a pile, a wall, that grew and grew and grew. 

And they felt for some reason, that this body was just another promise, the promise of more death.

Alestor
July 25th, 2017
12:35 PM

"This would be your thirteenth. Thirteen isn't that far from twelve.” The voice said. 

The candle dimmed in front of Alestor and the cool wind blew across from one end of the car window to the other. The hairs on his arms stood. His nose dried, he could feel it, smoke congesting him and filling his skull with the musk.

“This one isn’t just one more.” Alestor said. “He’s my son.”

“More of a reason to get rid of him, the betrayal of the son ought to be punished.” The voice said. “He’s sold you out once. He’ll do it again.” 

A candle (or maybe more apt to call it the telephone or receiver) sat in the glove compartment, eating string and releasing the smell of hot burning wax. It dripped on its sides and absorbed into the seats like white ink on for the draft of some great proclamation.  

“You can’t say that with certainty.”

“I can say it with good faith. I've seen it, in the church steps, in the quiet solitude of the small room he's called haven. Some dusty hotel, with the whores and abusers to his rear, moping and crying and contemplating with his loose tongue what else to say. And to whom? Oh, Alestor. This is good faith I speak with, and good faith is all you've ever needed.” The voice said. “He told the Priest, he’ll tell the journalists, the police, the world. And the few who believe in that mortal, flawed law, will fight for him. Fight against you. Few is all anyone ever needed to start a war. Or end it. You should know that.”

“You’re not fucking helping me!” Alestor slapped the dashboard and watched the radio compress and change its tune. “Just orders, always orders. For what? The promised land?”

“Paradise. Not just any land, but the land, the only land worth fighting for. To breath air and not feel death creep upon you, to live without the anxiety of the day to day. The mocking, the sadness. To live with your wife. Paradise. And it has room, room for your son. You know that, don’t you? Death isn’t the end. It’s a new journey.”

“I’ve lost so much. How could I give you the only thing left?”

“You’re still thinking in terms of what is lost and what is gained. You lose nothing but stand to gain everything. Don’t consider this a murder. It’s a displacement. You’ll see your son, you’ll see your wife.”

“You say that.” He reached into the glove compartment. He found a flask and drank. “But can you prove it.”

“All I have is my word. But was it not my word that saved you from the Vicars? Ten minutes, ten minutes sooner would have killed you.”

“And maybe I deserve to die.” Alestor said. He drank, it felt hot down his throat. 

“Maybe. But if you die, so does the dream. I can’t help you when you’re dead, not like your mother and your son. Paradise needs its key and you’re sitting on it, waiting on it. All it takes is one more death, blood for heaven. A cup, filled. That’s all this has been for, the chalice and your happiness.”

“This…” He held his nose bridge. “This is my son.”

“Your son, your faithless son. The modern Judas. I think he’d have more nobility in his sacrifice than his life. You know that to be true, too.”

Alestor teared up. They fell down his cheek and with it, sense, reason. The dribble, the stream, like a faucet on his chin. All of it, draining down that black hole. 

“What’s it like?” He asked. “Is my wife there. What about my baby girl? I never got to see her first birthday. Never got to see her fall, or walk, or yawn or cry or laugh. Never got to see her face for what it could have been.”

“She's beautiful. Blonde, like your wife. It’s all beautiful.” The air nipped at his neck. “Joy, happiness, like a drug. You'd think it'd be boring. But they keep going, smiling, laughing. There is no feeling of tiredness, no boredom. Just a stupid, pure, joy. Ecstacy. The fields of grass, the marble temples. It’s holiness. As best as it could ever hope to be.”

Alestor drank and with each drink, falling deeper into the words. A whirlpool, spinning and flushing him, crushing him, tearing him. 

“The sky is like a bubble. It feels so close, it wraps around you so tight and snug and comforting. A blanket of clouds. The weightlessness of it all. It's so close, the sky, you swear that by just standing, you might be able to touch it. The world feels so big here yet so small that you might be able to hold it in your hands. It's a goodness that swells your heart and that hurts me most. That you might not get to feel this. God has not promised you this land, God will not give you this land. I will though, I will, because it is birthright. All suffering is birthright to everlasting joy and you have suffered. Haven't you?"

Alestor's eyes glazed, he tilted his head up and down.

"It waits for you if you’re willing to fight for it, if you can muster the stern stuff to take it.”

“I feel weak. I’m scared. I’m chased and worried and waiting, waiting for them to kill me. Those fucking hyenas, the smell - My scent - The know it. My name, my home. They’ll chase, and chase, and chase. And it feels like the more I run, the more my feet and my body break away. It hurts, it fucking hurts.”

“Then let them find you. Let them come and face judgment. And you? You will be there too. As jury, when my guiding hand strikes upon them an endless fury and an endless pain. I promise you.”

He took a final gulp. The car turned on, the shield wipers sprayed and dragged across the foggy window. 

"Remember. It was your son that brought them to you in the first place." The flames flickered with the finality of the tone. 

"Is it necessary? His blood."

"Yes."

Alestor cleaned his face on his sleeve.

“I don’t need to make it hurt.” Alestor said.

“If only you knew what little pain means for true, good and proper eternity.” 

“It’ll be quick.” 

“If that will make it easier.”

“I won’t leave Isaac, not for a second. 'Till the very end.”

“As a father should. That's true devotion."

“Make me humble, please. Take me to him.” 

There was a silence. Alestor rolled up the windows and listened in the privacy of his car. To his side, an old cabin in the woods. A forgotten summer home. Nostalgic pain. The holes were plentiful on the dark wood planks that boarded the home, the patches to those holes were few. The whole house rumbled to the car engine and in front of the door stood the porch, slanted and sinking deeper into the wet mud. Loose foundation. 

A swing rested on the porch, next to a potted collection of roses now turned to rough, brittle black sticks. A swing set, two white ropes, and a dirt-colored plank. It jumped in the front of the porch. It swung. It went up, creaking, and fell down. Like the checkered flag fall of a race, Alestor drove. Like the pendulum fall, he chased. 

Isaac
July 25th, 2017
4:26 AM

The high screech of cars was out in front of him. He could hear the police chases like the wound up machinations of the gear rotations of the great clock. One tick, another dead, a second tick, two now. One after the other in the interim, all driving to the same place. 

He could feel it, not so much know it. Consciousness can only take so much from the murky waters of its underside before it has too much and he had too much. Isaac was moving, turning, not thinking of the future in precepts of months or days, not even in hours. He was thinking in minutes, thinking, with the sweaty upper lip, how he could make the best of the next five minutes he had. 

There was an argument off, somewhere in the other room opposite or next to him (the noise was too hard to tell in distance or location) and he put his fingers inside of his ears to try and concentrate. He shut the blinds, watched the keyhole on the door and let public television run in the background. An ad, a plastic smile. Two men staring back through the tube. They were selling turkey shears. Hundred dollar turkey shears. Fucking scissors. 

Fucking everything. He had his hands to his neck with the tight pressure of a man holding a wound, though he did not bleed. His neck sat on the incline and the air conditioner stopped breathing out from the ceiling panels above. He was in a cheap motel, with the cheap flower wallpaper and the cheap carpet gone coarse and blotched in spots from whimsical cum stains, perhaps a stray spill of lean. Isaac thought about it, the only thing he could think of that would cheer him up. He wondered if he was under the influence himself, his body felt that wrong disassociation, like his stomach had gone up and flown away from him. No. Fear was the real drug here.

A fear that he got when he looked at the screen of his phone and the lone message from his father.

Whre r u at?

He needed to leave. It came to him when he reached into the midget fridge and the beer bottle inside.

It wouldn’t be hard to leave, there weren’t any memories to keep onto. But for Isaac, the problem wasn’t the idea, but the execution. It wasn’t where he would go, he had enough money in his debit card to survive him the month. Nor was he in want for any particular luxury, a bed and roof and food were good enough. 

The hard part was the how. A bike could only take him so far, he reasoned with those two long fingers against his chin, rubbing the juvenile hairs. 

The police would find him. And the police would not help him. If not them, then another. 

So the hard part was finding the car, and finding the car was what he did. He ran. Slipped on his long jeans, then ran again to the yellow book in the corner of the room. A taxi service, he looked for one, a foreign one. One he could not imagine ever existing in this city. 

Ishmael and Friends Taxi Service, Family owned since 1964

He rung them. Did not hear so much as a voice as he was too busy screaming out his address until he ran out of breath and was forced, exasperated, to speak clearly again.

“I’m at the motel six. The one next to the bowling alley, yes. I need to get out.” Isaac said. “As fast as possible, to the nearest airport. Train station, whatever is closer.”

“Airport? Airport. That’s long way.” His accent was thick. Polish? It didn’t matter. Except it annoyed Isaac, so maybe it did matter. With how often he had to repeat himself before the raspy metallic voice could say a-ha, yes, done deal. 

He walked out, the rusted door flicked its loose handle back as if the room wanted him out too. He locked the door, at last, pushed it in a bit, then left. His neighbor came out, a young woman raised her middle finger then turned to Isaac.

“Fuck you.” She spat and left.

“Have a nice day.” Isaac said. His eyes were open, it was more of a murmur in the buzzing night, the fluorescent lights would not hush, the flies would not stop zapping themselves and dropping like small bits of ash against the beige floor.

He ran out, down two separate sections of stairs, past a couple kissing, past a young boy being slapped upstairs by an angry grandmother. He went down to the parking lot and the car, green with a white stripe, that honked at him. Isaac lifted the trunk. There wasn’t much in his hands, he never had much, just a backpack. In it, a copy of Paradise Lost and some underwear, a flash drive containing in it, in no order, lesbian porn, pictures of a book called Goetia (amateur demonology) and a PDF file with some plastered bible verses across the page.  He held the small flash drive and then thought, Though I walk through the valley of shadow and death, I fear no evil. He slid across the back. Fell. Fixed his hair and entered, it looked like the motions of a salmon in the middle of its heated lust, dashing through the air in an arc.

"The airport. As fast as you can." Isaac slapped the back seat.

"Alright. That hundred dollars, long trip."

"That's what I'm hoping for. I've got the money, don't worry about it. Get me far away."

"Alright, sir." And they were off. Through the streets bustling with life, the drunk drivers swerving. He heard all manners of noise, tribal, animal, human, so similar to one another he could not tell them apart from beast or war. Bass, so loud it shook glass, women hollering, men reeling into purses and bags reconditioned into vomit bags, the taxi driver screaming out profanities into the honking streets where people refused to drive slow. They turned two corners, five until they were on and about the highway that bled into the forest. The trees looked calm in the still air like bulwarks, guardians. He hoped to see some kind of protector, elf, fairy. Lord knows he needed one. 

He spotted a night owl, white and docile, who wrapped around a branch and turned its head a full a hundred and eighty degrees. He swore its eyes followed him as they got closer down to the ground floor and the mountaintops became the mountain floors, where the loose dirt skidded and broke underneath tire and metal.

A blaring noise.

A honk. The car turned, nearly bled paint as it touched railing. They were still somewhat high, the arrow tops of trees told him so. They were so close, Isaac could feel it.

"Ah, fuck, third time today." The driver said. A police officer blinded Isaac with the blue and red in the rear mirror. He could barely see into the car and did not notice the two men that came up to the driver.
 
"Step out of the vehicle, sir." One of them told him. Isaac could not tell them apart, they seemed like two brooding statues with the stone faces hidden behind night veil. Or maybe it was sanded off.  

"For what, What'd I do?"

"Can you please step out, sir." The second one said. He was smiling, Isaac could see that, the teeth at least. He saw the fangs and his stomach turned with the feeling of disgust. The creeping of it, like his stomach was an overflowing well with the poisoned water slowly steeping out and killing the grass and flowers and trees. Isaac studied their face, it was beginning to boil in him. Nauseas fear.

But the driver, he did not know better. He stepped, couldn’t afford another infraction after all. His hands slapped each other as he bartered. 

“Come on, it was dark. I sped a bit, let it go, would you? No one here.”

And the police officer smiled at him. One of them grabbed him. The other rose his hand and brought it down, a swing of the baton, like a scorpion bite across his neck. The noise of his skull hitting the floor was low, like a tremor in the floor, a tremor that rose to Isaac’s hands and feet. He turned the handle, nothing. He kicked, nothing. He kicked harder, the glass broke, trapped his legs and made him squeal with blood. Dragging his stabbed leg back made it worse, like tiny razors danced across his foot. 

The two were just finishing their beating. The sound of skull and brain turned to the sound of mush, the beating of ground meat. Isaac could not see, did not want to. He held his leg and tried with the other. He reclaimed his leg, prepped it fire but stopped. The glass above him broke, scratched him and he saw the batons. Shredding, pulling away from the sheet of glass. He was grabbed by the hood of his shirt, then by the neck and slowly they worked until his whole body was out. One of them got the idea to open the door from the made hole, and by then it was too late for Isaac.

"They ain't ganna find you." One of them said. "Who knew all you needed were a couple orange cones?"

“Fuck off me!” Isaac shouted. The birds flew from and reduced the forest desolate. He threw a piece of glass at one of them. It made a wound, nothing more, a small cut on the lip.

“Don’t get so mad, sweety.” He said with a low wisp. “The game was rigged from the start.”

 He looked down at Isaac. Pitied him, maybe. Isaac couldn’t tell what the bleeding smile/frown meant. He couldn’t stop to see it close enough to tell. He was shaking, shaking up until they tazed him in spasms and cuffed him and forced him to watch the taxi driver and the car speeding off. A brick, all you needed was a brick to kill a man. To hold down the pedal of the car, to make it raise off and through the railings. To explode it, into a shower of metal, like meteor showers of prehistoric days. The driver and the car, burned. The splattered brain, stained. And Isaac, Isaac with the two maniacs in a car engine roaring that bloodthirsty yell. Like a predator, warning others, with the lamb gripped by the neck, this one is mine. Steer away. 

They did not speak much. Laughed, some. It was terrible. What terrible fate, to be surrounded by people yet to feel so alone.

Isaac
July 25th, 2017
5:03 AM

He was led through the muddy floors of the forest where the wheels of cars stopped and rolled endlessly into the flutter of brown snow. It made the trees dirty, with the sputter of mud. The car engine went on for a bit in its mindless anger. The police officers slapped the wheel, nodded to each other and opened the back door. They pulled him from his feet like some kind of fish dragged about on the port floors, floundering and flopping the dark waters all around. He was gasping. His face was scratched and it went on for a while, hitting branches and snagging himself against shrubbery before one of them got the good idea of lifting him up. They cuffed his hands this time and undid the cuffs on his feet.

Isaac's first instinct was to kick. He did. Felt proud even, in having done it until he received two kicks to his stomach. Air escaped and he opened his mouth for the silent groan. He was led through the forest where the animals knew well from where to steer away. They observed, small auxiliaries, mute animals with their curved spines facing up to the three pairs of footsteps that sloshed around wet ground. Isaac turned to see them, a squirrel holding a nut now dashing through a fallen log, the log itself half eaten and a haven of spiders and of snakes. 

The birds were the only ones uncaring. They stood and sang atop the pines. The trees were shaved. They did not rustle much, they seemed to get skinnier the closer the three got to their destination. A lake house. He had never seen it before or at least never remembered it. Below him, he could feel with the hole in his shoes, a trail of dirt left behind by wheels. 

The rust-colored pick-up trucks were waiting. One of them flashed his headlights and they nodded, made some sign with their hands and walked inside. Cranberries were floating on the surface of the water, Isaac noticed the red from the small slits made along the boardwalk. There were vines peeking out. It smelled of fall though it was summer, it smelled of the late of the year where the bright flowers and the bright trees die, where the snowfall covers all and leaves the grounds desolate. There was no snow though. It was summer, after all, a strange summer he began to think. The mist jumped along the steady waters and it carried with it the parting fruity scent that felt more of a memory of a smell. 

When he came inside he saw all around him the white shawls and the suits and the bright yellow flowers atop their heart. A pledge.

The cobwebs were forming in the corners of the rooms where the fishing hooks and rods lay. The head of a deer was across from him, a glass counter to his rear with the round patina stained bell that no longer rung the call. It was an empty, dead store. A fish on a plaque reminded him. Its weight and name were rubbed out, filed out by time. He was taken further to the back. Through a hall and past a bathroom and some kind of storage room. He was brought to the garage (if a fishing store could ever have a garage) where the boats were docked and held. He waited inside with what looked like six other men, three women.

There were four boats, three were rudderless. He looked to his side and where the small room bled out to. The placid dark waters and the cold winds that shook trees out of their summer bliss. Now he understood why the trees looked like starved wraiths, the lake was killing them. Sucking them, draining them. Like their very life force was pulled out of them and thrown into the water. 

Isaac faced westward to the black lake, more a chasm than a mass of water. There was no sound from it. No sound of life, at least. He remembered there were fish here once, that constituted the very shop he was in. They were gone now. 

His father came in a bit after five thirty five, two men behind him closed the metal sheet and covered the lake from their view. The waters were silent below them, they only heard the creek of wood and the light bumping of boats hitting each other. A fight with slaps, like playground children would. 

Isaac was silent.

Alestor came up to him. He looked at him and put his hands on Isaac’s chin. He jerked away. 

“What have they done to you?” He asked. No one answered. Everyone looked at each other and Alestor’s nostrils flared, he faced the two men behind Isaac. 

“Do you think he’s a farm animal? Do you think it was right to treat him like one?” He asked. They didn’t answer. He slapped them, three times. Twice to make them think, the third to make them bleed. Their noses ran and they looked up with the white veil beaten off their face. They were middle-aged men who looked past Alestor and began repentance. 

“I am sorry father for we have sinned…” They went on, practiced verse. “And I plead upon the divine nine to deliver me from my weakness.” And it went on and on and on and on until Alestor slapped them again. A fourth to hush them. He yanked the keys from one of their sides and undid the cuffs on Isaac’s hands. He looked down at them as if surprised he even had them with that childlike skepticism. 

Isaac looked to his father who had his arms extended to hug him. 

He punched him. Square in the nose. It sent Alestor back and made him hold his face as he landed on the floor, half his arm was in the lake water. Four men came to apprehend Isaac, Isaac who struggled and bit along their arms and who shouted. 

“Let go, let go, let go.” 

It felt like a body cast, paralysis as the men held from him from feet to neck. A pool of pythons, suffocating. 

“Let him go.” Alestor stood. “He’s not yours to hurt or to judge, you hear me?”

They looked strange, surprised with the eyes behind their face masks low and beady. They hesitated for a while, kept close to make sure he would not attack but eventually turned away. And Isaac was back in the middle of the room facing his father, both of them dirty on the face. 

“Come here.” Alestor brought his hand close. He was rubbing the mud and the dried leaves from his sons face. Isaac pulled his hand away and everyone locked up into that fighting stance. 

“Enough with all of you,” Alestor yelled. “He’s my son, did you hear me? You animals!”

And Isaac was torn in that moment. For his body wanted to run but his eyes showed that strange resolve, not necessarily courage but anger. Anger over the night he had snuck into the theater and bore witness to the death of Pip. Anger for the child. The memory ran in his head until it came upon the demon and his legs felt shaky all of a sudden. 

“You killed a kid.” Isaac’s voice was unsteady, between a high pitched shriek and those anger driven grunts. “You did something to him.”

“How’d you find out?” His eyes were wide.

“I saw you with the dagger and the table. You fucking stabbed him, over and over. You fucking killed him, dad.” Isaac held his mouth, his eyes felt those salty tears swelling. But his cheeks were fierce, hurting in how long they held that mad frown.

“I do what I do for the family, you have to understand. And not just mine.” Alestor extended his hand and spun to point out the room. “All of theirs too. I do it for them as much as us.”

“Us? Are you fucking insane? What the fuck was that thing?"

“Thing? What thing?”

“Don’t weasel out of this.” Isaac clenched his hands. “The fucking monster, it came out of the kid.”

Alestor drank his spit. His adam's apple bobbed.

“The uteri, the heart, the demon.” Alestor rubbed his chin, undecided on which to start from. “It was a womb. I was just giving it a Cesarean cut. That’s all. A process.”

“Pr-process? Cesarean what? You fucking killed a kid.” Isaac held his father by the collar. “Someone with a mother, someone with a father who had dreams and hopes and a promised life. Someone who could have been me.” 

Alestor pushed him away.

“It was necessary. It was tribute.”

“For what? I don’t understand.”

“Because you haven’t seen it. That's the problem. The only problem. Yes, you haven't seen it.” Alestor ran to the back. He took out his pink salt, his wax candle, his flint and steel. And the cup. A goblet with a mixture so thick and so dark it was hard to call it wine. It did not spill, it did not leave the rim, it did not move. An unholy concoction. “If you see what I’ve seen, you’d understand. Let me show you paradise. He’ll tell you everything.” 

He held it all in his chest and walked over to his son like a child with his box of toys, wanting to share, wanting to show. Isaac pulled away. 

“Enough of this insane bullshit.” Isaac said. “I used to think it was just drugs, a sniff and that was it. Too much acid rotting your brain. But this, this is much worse.” 

“It started like that.” Alestor dropped to his knees and organized his materials. “We saw something in a fire once, when I went out to burn your mothers clothes. It was the first week. The first... It was in the fire! I remember, I promise. After that we started taking psychedelics, I just wanted to re-watch what it. Heaven, I tell you, Zac. Heaven."

"What are you trying to pull? You found god, is that what you're telling me?"

"No. God let me suffer, God let me go. It was the opposite." Alestor's eyes flared. "Let me show you."

“Enough. I don’t want to hear it. It’s enough to know my father is a murderer, it’s another thing to hear him pleading his excuses. Have some dignity! Admit to it.” Isaac yelled. "At least lie. Let me pretend, at least, that you still have a moral compass. Any compass."

“It was paradise, Zac. It was the best thing ever. Better than the trips to the Bahamas, better than the cruises or the old birthday cakes you used to get at the steakhouse.”

“Is it better than mom?” Isaac began to tear up. Alestor looked up.

“It is mom. And your sister. It’s both of them. Let me show you.” He started the circle of pink salt. Isaac came up, his mud stained feet left the imprints on the wood. He looked at his father, his balding head and the crazy hair that flew down.He rubbed his feet and ruined the circle and kicked the candle into the water. 

“You can excuse the act however you will, but you can’t change it for what it is.” Isaac cried. “Mom is dead and she took you with her, you’ve been dead this whole time. I can’t believe I couldn’t see it until now.” 

“You’ve evaluated so many people on top of the couch, you never bothered though, have you? To put yourself on it, to see what’s inside of the fucked up brain of yours.” 

Alestor lept up. He grabbed Isaac by neck and dragged him to the floor. The wood snapped and the plank fell into a plop inside the water. Alestor’s hands were hot, gloved in black flame. It burned Isaac, burned and suffocated. The more he put his hands around his father, the more he burned. His tears were vaporizing but his body would not. It was an empty pain, pain without the wound or the actual burn. Torture.

“I am trying to fix everything, you little shit.” Alestor shouted. The men around the room looked apprehensive. The contention exploded. The storm of their hearts orchestrated their fear. and they began to look, with skittish eyes, for a means of escape. They contemplated, so afraid of Alestor and his fire and his rage, to perhaps grab him away. But they were afraid of that even more.

“What can I do with a son that can’t see? That won’t see? Ignorance isn’t your sin, stupidity is.” Alestor spat. It hit Isaac’s scrunched face. He was shouting with what little air remained. “You’d dig the knife into your father? You’d twist it, wouldn’t you? You did it before, after all. You sold me out. You think I wouldn’t find out you shithead? Huh? Huh! Say something.”

“Off.” Isaac’s eyes rolled up. “Me.” 

Alestor looked at him. He undid his hands, he sat on top of Isaac now. Isaac who was wheezing for breathing, holding his chest to see if it would even work anymore. 

“I wish you had died instead.” Alestor said. Everyone seemed still at the confession, their bones hollowed out and the marrow replaced with some jelly-like substance. Isaac most of all wanted to collapse. But he was too busy holding his neck and reviewing the markings of his father's fingers. 

“I could have replaced you with the other. I could have had more. And the piece of her that exists in you is nothing more than pain in me. You’re acid. Corrosive, running through my veins.” Alestor stood away. He reached for chains. “It took a while to finally get my dialysis. But I’m proud to say my blood is pure now. I know the way, it was shown to me.”

“Killing people is the way? Selfish murder?” Isaac huffed.  

Alestor clicked his fingers. Two men came around and bound Isaac. Alestor reached and put the collar around his neck. He wedged it right, watched the skin spill out from the top and bottom. It would never be snug, it would never sit right. Every second Isaac would be reminded, with the yank and the pinch of the metal on his neck, that he was chained to the ground. 

“I hate the son I have now.” Alestor said. “But I hope, within the next few days, that you come around. I really need you to. For your sake, not mine. I’ll come around every couple of hours to see your progress.”

“I hate you.” He cried. “Let everyone fucking know, let the earth and the heavens and your gods and devils know. I hate you. Let it ring in your heart, I fucking hate you. A stab, a knife? Yeah, yeah, I wish I could right now. I wish I could fix you with the only way I can see you being fixed. I hate you, let the words ring you fuck.”

Alestor looked down at him. An animal, all his son was. The rottweiler gone feral. 

“It’s been a while since I’ve disciplined you, hasn’t it? Last time I yelled at you was when you were fourteen, just beginning to masturbate. You lied to me then. It seems as though I shouldn’t have stopped with just a yelling. Your whole life has been one giant wank. An annoyance, you gluttonous fool. To be given everything, yet to be so spiteful towards your father. Disgusting.”

“What father?” Isaac said. “I look and look but I can’t find any man you’d call a father. Only a fraud, a fraud with a belt. I can’t believe I haven’t stood up to you until now.”

“Well, our failures are the same. We never struck each other. You were never shown the man I could be, but you will learn. Consider this your therapy session, a correction to that faulty cognitive behavior of yours.” Alestor walked up to the door. The other men were beginning to leave. 

“I really hope you’ll come around. I can show you the things He’s shown me. They’ll really make you rethink this whole rebellious streak of yours.”

“You can’t rethink a murder. You can bullshit that way, Alestor.” Isaac said. The defiance in his tone made Alestor lower his head. A hammer strike right on his head, he could feel the pressure of a headache building in him like a band around his head slowly crushing his skull. 

“We’ll begin your conditioning tomorrow. Have a good night, Isaac.” Alestor took a final look at the chained son. It was short and he was stuck to a water pipe running up along the wall. Isaac shouted at Alestor, growled and dragged his fingernails against the floor to try and gain terrain. He couldn’t. He could not move more than four yards. He pulled on his chain, nothing. Steel was too much.

Alestor sighed, put his hand on the light switch and pressed. The room went dark. 

But Alestor could hear his son. His shouting went on, like the waves of water rising high with the blue surf and crashing down into that loud bevy: Help me, help me, help me, please.

Author's Note: Have a great turkey day.

Dion

July 25th, 2017

1:24 PM

“Try it.” Apollo said. “It’s the Mac-Dog. Seasonal.”

“What’s seasonal about it?” Dion asked. He looked inside the tray. 

“I don’t know. It’s just marketing shit.” Apollo said. “It’s half a pound of fried macaroni and cheese on top of a pure beef, quarter pound hot dog. With the house special Chipotle ketchup. All natural, fresh, charred.”

“How long have you been practicing that?”

“I'm a natural born shill. I get a quarter a line. Demon hunting doesn’t pay the bills, after all.” Apollo laughed though it resembled blowing out air more than anything sincere. He sat down to unveil the mass like a giant golden turd, stuck along the red plastic. It was so smashed together it seemed like a small bundle of papers, spilling grease, and putting it against his mouth, he could feel the butter and breadcrumb topping drip down his hand. 

“It’s the only thing I’ve enjoyed in this city.” Apollo said, pointing to the Colonel Weiner plastic stand atop the flat-topped roof. 

“What does all-natural beef mean?” Dion took a bite. 

“It’s a phrase corporations shout to make you think this hot dog is anything but a cow’s blended asshole.” 

“Disgusting. They should be held accountable.”

“It’s fine by me. I don’t mind ass as long as it tastes as good as this.” He was half way through and his bun was already soggy and deteriorating behind the pinch of his fingers. 

“When no one cares, it’s easy to get away with anything.” Apollo said. “It's the same with murder.”

“What kind of segue is that."  

“It's easy to get away with murder if no one cares. Killing completely random assholes won’t get you caught. Ask any cop, they’ll tell you that the hardest men to catch are those without reason. Because why wouldn’t it be? Who the fuck expects random acts of psychopathy.”

“Well, there’s a lot of random in this world. We should be better at safeguarding against it. Chaos is the devil's tool.” 

"Chaos is the natural state of the universe. Don't make such a blanket claim. That's dumb bible studies shit." Apollo said. Dion rolled his eyes. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and looked inside the window to his rear. There was an old man mopping the floor, an old man manning the register. There weren’t many teenagers at all. There was barely anyone at all and the building would have looked vacant had it not been for the occasional bobbing yellow cap running back and forth. 

His eyes came back outside to survey the horizon, the empty tables with the rickety metal table tops, stained by bird poop. The umbrellas were on their sides, they were yellow and red and they mostly blocked the wind. There was no sun. All grey, like someone, took an eraser to the ozone and removed every bit of detail. 

"I hope we're doing good." Dion said.

“We’re demon hunters, Dion. Not…”

“Not heroes. Not Superman, not super anything. I’ve heard this already. I didn't ask you to repeat it again.”

“I know but it goes in one ear - ” Apollo said.

“Out the other.” Dion said. “Don’t you have any new lines or is this the extent of your pretentiousness?” 

“How about this.” Apollo said. “I found where Alestor worked.”

Dion’s knuckles tensed. 

“But he wasn’t there.”

Dion slapped his head, he caked it in a layer of fat.

Apollo finished his hot dog. He searched inside his bag and found another, like a rocket in his hands. 

“Everything about him has gone up and left. Poof. He shredded his papers, most of them, he has no secretaries taking calls. It's all gone.”

“How’d you get in then, if it was totally empty?” 

“Through the roof. I made a hole in the ceiling. There weren’t alarms at all, the whole place looked archaic. A dungeon. Just books, Jung and Freud mostly. Some early stuff from his college years, I presume. And lots and lots of case studies. Most of those were shredded, last minute too.”

“If you didn’t find him, why are we having this conversation? Why call me out to dinner.”

“First-fold. I need you to be aware of one thing going forward.” Apollo cleaned his mouth. Gulped, swallowed. “We’re getting closer to him but I don't think it'll be a clean mission, not anymore than it has been already at least.”

“What do you mean by clean?”

“I mean this. Alright? I suspect some people are going to die before we can find an answer. We can only follow a trail of blood and for that, blood has to be spilled. The unfortunate part is how cleanly this guy's been. He’s wiped all his data, he’s gotten rid of all my leads. I couldn’t find his son. I couldn’t find anything, not an ex-college friend, not an ex-drug dealer. I just have a name, soem addresses that he'll never come back to. That’s it. The guy is slippery.”

Dion slammed the desk. 

“That’s not good enough. How can you expect me to just take that? Blood for blood? Be smarter. You're the brain, aren't you? Find this fuckers tracks. This thing, this beast. Think of the ruthless atrocity he's capable of.”

“And ruthless charity. From the few pieces of information I picked up I can tell you that his last few patients, those still alive, all received free treatment. There were no invoices, it seems that our friend was getting ready for the war a long time ago.”

“It wasn’t treatment then.” Dion figured. “ It was recruitment. An interview. Who the heck would join him? Who would be as willing as he was to murder as effortlessly as he's done.”

“One of those recruits, slaves, whatever which way you’ll call them, was someone by the name of Selena Breyer. You killed her at the press office. Burned her alive.” Apollo said.

Dion stood still, fries in his mouth. He put his head down almost in grievance and brought them back up in renewed conviction, anger almost, stubbornness in the righteousness of his action.

“She killed her kid a decade back before she even met him. I guess she wanted help all of the sudden. Or at least that's what the records show.” Apollo said. 

“So she was already practiced in the art. Well, makes sense that she’d go hand in hand with this creep.”

“She was schizophrenic. Took Olanzapine, probably stopped taking it when she killed her kid. Probably came to this town to forget she did, decided to see a doctor one day, then well.”

“It sounds like you want me to forgive this cunt. Doesn’t matter how much you try to excuse her, she did what she did. Live by the sword, die by it. Kill the weak, die weak.”

“You truly are holy. Indiscriminate with your acts of piety as you are with your acts of violence. You can’t justify everything underneath the holy book. That’s not how the world should work.” Apollo said. Dion stood. He left his food unfinished and on the table, growing stale. 

“If you’re going to humanize murderers, I’m going to leave.”

“I humanize them because the easier time you have in understanding how someone can go so wrong, the easier time you’ll have in avoiding those situations in the first place. Better to learn through someone else than one day, wake up, realizing you’ve become a monster.” Apollo said. Dion turned to walk. Apollo grabbed him by the arm, Dion who then tried jerking away from him. 

“You hit me cheap last time. Don't let it get to your head though, it was luck. This time you won't get so lucky. So sit down and stop and think. Think of all the times in which you've gotten in trouble and how they all have one origin of sin, your stupid anger. So stop, sit, and think.”

“You and The Priest, all you do is fucking lecture.” Dion said.

“Good, You’re learning how to curse. And yes, all we do is lecture dumb fucks like you. Except he’s an even bigger prick than me.”

Dion took a deep breath and relieved his lungs. His nose flared, like a bull, and ended calm and round and red. For the nipping chill had made his face swell with warm blood. 

“Don’t mix your food up.” Apollo came down to push aside the fries Dion had stacked on his hotdog. “The flavors get all fucked if you do that.” 

“Now you’re making fun of the way I eat, you jerk? You know what happens to people who feel overburdened, right? They explode.”  Dion slapped his hands down. The umbrella wobbled and the wind circulated around it, Dion could feel it cutting through his hair and blowing it to the side, covering his eyes. Like the ocean wave, collapsing and in its fall, pushing and crushing sand out to the shoreline. 

But Apollo was a rock. Weathered, already used to the sanding of time and the coarse feeling of his outer shell being thrown and ruined. 

“You’re right. I am a jerk, and this isn’t about food.” Apollo leaned back. “I want to get back to my point. I want to catch him but I can't predict the universe. Too much randomness. But I can predict men. I can imagine what lead this educated person to this part of the world, what terrible rolls of dice he must have had and what great love he must have summoned his strength from. Enough to grab the Dealer, to punch him and to reroll the weighted dice. Yeah, I know this Alestor guy. I'm sure I do."

Dion stared.

"When I find him, I need you to promise me something. Don't kill him."

“I can’t make that promise.” Dion said.

“Don’t make it then, fucker.” Apollo said. “Just keep it. We are not here to throw down the executioners sword. We're here for balance, the right of the blade belongs to one person, to -"

“God.”

“No. To the state.” 

They looked at each other with the intensity of the cold. The numbing feeling, the feeling of heat leaving their bodies from their breaths, steam, rising and becoming a part of the amalgam of the gray sky. A very cold, harsh, overwhelming intensity. Apollo found his pocket, he took out a cigarette and filled the air with the scent of tobacco. Dion put his hand over his nose and they looked out to the street, both having said their peace. 

“We wouldn't have to have this conversation if you just listened to what I said early on. Don't get too attached." Apollo puffed. “Vicars with big hearts always become big targets. Caring too much can kill you.”

“It’s what makes life worth living.”

“It’s also what makes life short-lived.” 

“I’d rather live a short life with my big, boring, cumbersome heart that live with whatever you have.”

“It’s called logic.” Apollo said. “I'm telling you what to do because I was like you, once. I know it's hard to believe because I'm a younger man, but it's the truth. I know what makes men and I know what breaks them, after all, they’re the same thing.”

Dion looked at him and the forlorn expression on his face, the gaunt in his eyes and the shadows the hollow parts of his face made. Apollo looked as if sinking into himself, disappearing into a singular spot, his event horizon.

“Those words sound loaded. You have something you want to tell me?”

“I know what caring too much means. I wasn’t born callous, I was made callous. I've seen plenty of men who thought they had that true and honest courage. But as well know, a true and honest courage is only one that has been tested and unbested. Most people don't have that.” Apollo said. “Not me and I think, not in you either, no. I just want to keep your little mind safe."

Dion felt insulted. Betrayed of his expectation of what Apollo was, he sneered and spat and denied all at once. His annoyed jerking, coughing, fidgeting ended with a dishonest laugh. 

“Well if you care about me so much, why don’t you explain what all this mumbo-jumbo means. What hurt you so badly? Hmm? Or are you saving it for your date with your psychotherapy friend. How Romantic.”

“Shut the fuck up.” 

The air went silent. The birds stop chirping and the wind ceased its howling and turned to whimper. Time to stopped and Dion lost track of the hour in that moment. He sat still, put his head down and waited for some kind of movement. Apollo did not move. He looked forward, into the streets and the buildings half-empty and now murmuring life like some diseased patient in the ward. There was a woman cleaning a carpet, wacking it against the wall from outside her window. There was a couple, screaming at each other. Otherwise, it was still and lifeless and Apollo carried that silence. Like Atlas, all the earth’s weight in awful, awkward silence. And he carried it. Did not protest, only looked out. 

It wasn’t until they heard a paramedics truck scream out that Dion finally breathed. Two cars followed the truck, they both crashed into each other. The harsh clang of metal like armored horses forced to butt into each other disturbed Dion who stood up. But they were alive, both drivers, uninjured even and he just watched, with Apollo. And he found himself more disturbed in Apollo, who stared at the angry people. He wondered if he saw something different. Dion nodded his head, annoyed, that he was even curious, for a second, at his partner's frame of mind.

Apollo stood. He looked to Dion and said: “We’re scouting tonight, every night, until we find them. Alright?”

It was the only thing he had said all day that made any sense. Dion turned to him and in that same solemn silence, shared his answer. Yes, of course. We’ll catch him.

Jeremiah

August 1st, 2017

6:33 PM

Jeremiah had been there when his partner, Officer Heinz had been stabbed through the abdomen and sent flying to the wall and he was there to stare, to open his jaw wide and gloat his eyes upon the scene of blood coming down from the wall in streaks, bleeding bark. The plywood breaking, Jeremiah breaking. His eyes falling upon the monster, a run and then darkness.

Jeremiah had been there for the bid his partner had made in the comatose room, on the bed, tranquil and steady. The son who watched from a distance, the wife who came every now and then to share her hand. He had watched the family come together and around the machinery and body. Jeremiah shared some of that pain, too much he probably would have said. For it collapsed him like a star and left him dwarfed by the emotion. The son, the wife, both looking at Heinz every day for the last few weeks, hoping and brushing away growing hair from atop of his head.

Jeremiah had been there for the blue comet. The bullet Dion had shot out, though, without the knowledge of the shooter, he thought it the wild gunslinging of the great almighty Himself. Just a comet from space, an act of God. The plastic donut man atop of a food shop had collapsed on the front of his car, melted plastic and melted metal mostly. It had blown his car to pancaked cinders and it was hard to explain to the insurance woman behind the line (some days after the fact of the 'accident') that a comet had destroyed a building and that the sign or face of the building (he exaggerated) had fallen on top of him like some booby trap of a temple in the forgotten Amazons.

The insurance woman thought it was just arson, honestly. He thought it was God. They were both wrong, it was just a man who had gone insane some miles off and who had nothing to lose in his anger.

He never got the full claim on his car.

Now, he was car-less. A few days later he turned in his badge and pistol, some part by the hand of the commissioner who had done his duty in hiding the details of Jeremiah’s testimony of the transpired attack on Heinz. The commissioner thought about it, what could have happened; hallucinations, insanity, foul play.

In the end, he (the commissioner) decided that the unruly trash (Jeremiah) had gotten drunk on the job and that on that certain night, in that particular place of the town, a group of gangsters had taken their turns at beating and stabbing Officer Heinz and Jeremiah was too disabled to do anything about it.

And no one questioned the changes the commissioner made because no one accepted Jeremiah's claim, that it was the work of a monster or a demon or a thing.

Who would?

No one. The next logical step was then to exile Jeremiah, the act of which exonerated Officer Heinz, who truly did deserve the honor of the medals and ribbons pinned to his hospital gown on his brain-dead body. Though, really, what merit of pride did any badge from the city of Havenbrook command? After all, respect is relative. Trash begets trash and the respect of thugs and murderers was not something anyone should ever be in want of.

That’s why it hurt so much for Jeremiah when Heinz died on July 24th, at around 5:56 AM. Interestingly, after a visit by the commissioner and after the doctor had made the claim that it was probably 'Colby Heinz would survive the coma.’

Well, he was wrong. Or right, so right in fact that the idea of a conscious, now dignified man, might have ruined the scheme the commissioner had made on behalf of Alestor.

And so the scheme finally distilled here, reader, and I know it to be a bit of a stretch but you must understand then when you get into the heat of the plan, the details become finicky and messy. I won’t describe the death (it involved needles and an IV bag), but I will say it happened.

Here we are then, the plan funneled down to its natural, as the natural end of everything, at a cemetery.

The bagpipes were loud and the men were playing with puffed and reddened faces. Jeremiah stood from afar at a healthy distance only describable as, cordial to Officer Heinz and his family but not necessarily to the officers and their loud bagpipes.

He was behind a tree. With a his coat so long as to be confused for a trench coat, and with one eye peering out from the side of the birch as he looked onward to the ceremony. A graves keeper came around with his leaf blower, he brushed his feet and shot the lawn clippings onto his shoes and pants. It stained and the mild dew carried the scent up his pants so that even his groin smelled of fresh grass. The rest of the family of officers or of blood were out on folded chairs, either weeping, pretending to weep, or wondering why they were here in the first place with narrowed eyes. Jeremiah stared at them and in small intermediate breaks of the congression, took pinches of sunflower seeds from his one of his many pockets to eat. All he ate were seeds and whiskey like a drunk squirrel. Though that might be an insult to the vermin itself, Jeremiah was worse than a mess. He was a dying mess, a landfill refuse burning a hole through the dirt. Burning of guilt and of anger and of shame.

“I don’t owe you anything.” He said, lips barely parted for the flask. He was looking at the falling coffin of Heinz. Then he looked at his child, the autistic boy. He wanted to take back what he said. That and many more things.

He leaned back a bit and slipped upon a tombstone, its name faded out and a long crack running through the middle of the stone. This all we are, Jeremiah thought, bones and stone and dirt on top of dirt on top of dirt until the last tick-tock of recordable time comes to put a stop to the spade.

“What am I doing here?” He asked. No one answered, not the Priest staring from afar, not the graves keeper and certainly not Heinz. He stood up and wiped himself of dirt and stood like a pygmy, half-hearted with his spine curved and neck bent. His eyes were heavy, watering. The ceremony was coming to its end and the people were standing, strangers and friends and fiends, all grabbing dirt and pouring it over the body of Officer Heinz, Colby Heinz, or to his family, Colby “Kobe” Heinz. The jersey went down with the coffin. Jeremiah remembered buying him that number, forging the signature of the famed NBA player too. He always thought himself clever. Heinz probably knew though, he always knew things and Jeremiah had always looked curiously and his factoids and strange love of hobbies and sport, he’d ask, “Is there anything you don’t know?”

And Colby would say, “Well, my wife says I don't know when to shut up.” And they’d laugh.

The silence hurt now.

But he didn’t know what to say, only watched as everyone around him left. He stopped hiding after a while and learned it didn’t matter, he was a leper to the force now and perhaps out of pity, they ignored him. Or respect, or the appearance of respect to Officer Heinz.

There were only three real people at the funeral by dusk hour. The son, the wife, and Jeremiah. And it was the son, of all people, his small black suited body, that came forward to Heinz. His pants were stiff and it was obvious he outgrew them two years ago. It made him wobble. A small penguin, pale-faced and black feathered. He came to Jeremiah and took raised his hand. He was holding a small bundle of dirt, his mother came up immediately after the reveal.

She smiled at Jeremiah.

“He doesn’t know how to act around people.” She said and tried with that I-want-to-appear-all-together-but-really-this-is-too-stressful smile to convince him the kid wasn’t trouble. He wrestled out of her hands and threw out the fist again.

“Stop it.” The mother said. “Stop it, Bartholomew.”

He didn’t stop. He threw the dirt onto Jeremiah, Jeremiah who instinctively strafed back.

“Apologize. Right now.” The mother said then. She slapped him on the bottom. He didn’t cry. He was pouting and his face was scrunched. His lips were shut and his eyes would stare up to Jeremiah. When he looked back though, the boy turned his head though tried to keep his glare from the corner of his sockets. Jeremiah smiled. He looked like those painting in the spooky houses, though malfunctioning. More hokey than haunted.

“Your dad named you after a song. You know that?” Jeremiah laughed. The boy eased, his shoulders leaned out. “I asked him what the band was, he said he forgot. He only remembered the song being good. Your dad was that kind of man, a little too free. Though you wouldn’t know it from the way he worked.”

Jeremiah leaned down. His eyes were still overbearing, his face was still drooping and he felt vacuous. His skin was pale and the dimples on his face looked like small puncture wounds. But he tried to smile.

“I saw your dad run two miles just to catch some guy who stole some playing cards, tackled him into a palette of dishwasher soap bars and napkins. He was always like that, free and honest and hard about what was right and what was wrong.”

The mother loosened her grip on her son. Their heads fell as they mourned in unity and after a while when the sun had fallen completely and the white-beige light posts around the winding brick road lit up, did he bend over and scoop the black dirt. It was moist and gritty, it clung together like play dough and he morphed it into a ball as he walked towards the mound. To the side were the tracks of a wheel loader now gone. In front, the round mound. He dropped his handful of dirt and closed his eyes.

He didn’t see the boy running down the hill and the mother failing in stopping him. He skipped across, his pants ripped around his waist and his undersized white shirt stuck out from the hole like extra pockets. He came to Jeremiah and slapped his hand. He awoke.

“Tell me more about my dad.” The boy’s eyes were looking down. His face was struggling, Jeremiah couldn’t tell in what way it molded. The tectonic plates of emotions within him were moving and he did not know how to express them. The boy moving back and forth in a rocking motion as if in the cradle. A sedation for his troubled heart. A distraction, that went up and down. The mother ran down. Jeremiah stared and put on that face of the boxer with the mouth guard, prepared with a squashed face for the incoming impact of a hook.

Bartholomew went flat. He struggled, his head fidgeted away. His mouth stuttered, but he said at last, what was fighting for his will the last few seconds.

“I want y-you to tell me what happened to my d-d-dad. How did he d-d-d-d-die?”

Alestor

August 4th, 2017

9:22 PM

Alestor stopped the routine flagellation and let his son catch his breath. He watched Isaac, clinging to pipe with the tight grip of both his hands as if hanging over a cliff. The desperation in his breath sounded heavy, a deep winding. 

Isaac's shirt was torn into pieces on his backside, skin clung in small centimeter long tears of flesh at the bottom of each of his lash wounds. His back was red. Swollen and Alestor watched the blood ooze out. The right side of Isaac's face was mutilated, bulged, as to appear as a second head altogether. It looked like an aborted Siamese twin clung to him and it weighed his head down.

“Just give it up.” Alestor pleaded. His breath was worse than Isaac’s, his legs struggled to lock. His eyes darted and his grip was lazy, the threads and ends that now had fresh blood on them spilled into the gaps of wood and wet themselves in the lake. 

His son couldn’t answer. He had his face to cold pipe that iced his bruises and wounds. Alestor could see him licking his teeth, what remained of them. 

“Talking never did anything for you. You’d nod your head, you’d pretend to listen but the minute I turn around you’d always backstab me.” Alestor threw the whip. “You said you’d be a doctor, you became an artist. I swallowed my pride. You said you’d always work hard, you dropped out. I had to force you to go to school, to get a job, to do anything. You lazy brat. But that’s not your greatest offense. You said you’d love me, that you’d love mom. I’ve never seen you once at her grave. Not once! Not for her birthday, not for yours. Not once after the fact.”

“It hurts.” He spat blood. His eyes were shaken, a ship lost at sea swaying course-less to the rhythm of the waves. “All of it hurts. All of me.” 

“That’s no excuse. It hurt me too. You know that? I lost a daughter that day, you lost a sister. I lost a wife, you lost a mother. You never mourned them like I did, you never cared. And it’s because of that, that I can’t say I was surprised to find you ratting me out.”

“I wanted to understand you.” Isaac wheezed. “Mom would have done better with you. She worked day and night with the rapists and the pedophiles, in prison asylums like this, hoping and squeezing what humanity they had left. Like fucking toothpaste.”

“Don’t compare me to those degenerates.”

“You’re right.” Isaac coughed. “That’d be an insult to the sick. No, you’re worse. Some people can’t help their nature, but you? You became this, you made this out yourself. Whatever you are. Child killer, murderer.”

“You think it was easy for me?” He kicked Isaac’s legs. They were purple and no longer worked and he had no energy to move them, only flinched a bit at the sharp pain. “Faith is never easy. I’ve worked for a promise, do you think that’s easy?”

“That’s what makes you worse, doesn’t it? I can say a psychopath has no choice in how he was made, but you? You do it out of love.” He looked up. “What great fucking love you have. Can’t say you ever showed any to me.”

“Everything is out of love.” He kicked his stomach and winded Isaac, Isaac who clinched and who laid out on the floor. “I’m doing this to save you, you fucking idiot. Ungrateful bastard. I don’t care what you think of me or what I’ve done, I just need you to make a promise. Promise to stay by my side, to never snitch. A promise to be quiet for the rest of your life. You can live any life you can so long as you do it in silence. You hear me? Change your name, change your background. I don’t care. Just shut your fucking mouth.” 

He was prodding his son with the tip of his boots, stabbing his elbow with the curiosity of a child and his stick.

“I can’t promise that.” Isaac sniffed. “I tried it for a week, let it happen more like it. I can’t ever do that again.” 

“You disgrace.” Alestor raised him by his shirt, all that remained of it at least. It resembled a scarf. 

“I feel the same way,” Isaac said. “If you ever let me out I promise I won’t just rat you out, I’ll fucking kill you.” 

Alestor held him close. He felt his son’s breath on him, it was shallow and rapid. He could feel his eyes swell with the anger he saw in his kin. 

“You’d rebel? Against your father?”

“What father?”

“You have no idea how hard it is keeping you alive or how close you are to the end of the rope. I can’t keep the others at bay so if I can’t convince you, no one can. And if I can’t convince you, then…” Alestor felt his legs shake. 

“It’s hard to convince someone when you argue as the sinner pretending to be the saint. How you convinced anyone is above you.” Isaac said. “I don’t think you ever loved anything. I think you loved mom the same way you loved work, with that calculating, cold, obsession. It wasn’t only after you lost her that you even started caring.”

“Obsession is love.”

“A corrupted love. A narcissistic love.”

“Well, it’s the only olive branch you’ll ever get from me. I want you to live, even if just to satisfy my ego, I’d like it for you to have a family one day too. Maybe then you’d have context about all of this.”

Isaac laughed. His throat hurt, it felt caved in but he laughed with that crackled, agonized howl and filled the room with the noise. His face extended out, his whole body was still and the moonlight broke through the small interstices of wood planks to hit him. It looked like his face was being cut in two as the moonlight scarred him straight down the middle of the face. 

“Whatever is in you must exist in me. The genetic curse. Why in the fuck would I ever pass that on to anyone else?” He said. “I was so afraid a few weeks back when I first saw the killing, the stabbing, the bleeding. But I lost that in here.”

He shook his hands and the sound of chains hitting and rattling broke silence. 

“I don’t fear much anymore but one thing, having to live with the fact that I never disobeyed you. That I let you run amok.”

Alestor snapped, his eye twitched and he swore he heard from the darkness of the room, past the boats that jumped calmly on top of the water line, he heard the voice and the words: kill him, do it now. The son disobeys the father, kill him. 

“Shut up. Shut up, shut up, shut up.” He roared. 

“Talking to your imaginary friend again? What was his name? Stix? Ass?” Isaac said. He was forcing the laughter from his broken mouth, licking loose teeth, snorting blood and snot to lubricate a warm pain in his throat. 

“Shut up, you fucking asshole.” Alestor screamed. He was slapping at the air, at the circus of sound. A carnival of noise wanting one thing, saying one thing. He pulled his hair, knelt and yearned for the black leather whip now camouflaged with the lacquered wood. He kicked it, heard it fall with a plop into the water and shouted again. 

“One last chance, do you hear me, Isaac? One fucking last fucking chance.” He went out, through the door. Went past the hallway, past a bathroom and the sounds of fornication, four maybe five. He went further, through an intermittent room where two of his worshipers laid on the couch with their tongues out and their heads slanted. High on quaaludes or perhaps so involved in the illusion of their acid induced journey that they were lost. 

He knocked the couch with his imposing walk. They fell further back. He made it to the small room. A janitors closet once now re-purposed into a place of worship, an unholy confessional stall. To the front was the skull of a cow laying on its side, to his right was a metal table that rattled with the closing of the door. Everything shook. The beads, the bone, the pictures and most of all, Alestor. He was finding candles, finding pink salt, painting the floor with insignia and rubbing out the rough edges of his lines. 

“Tell me. Tell me what to do, please.” He pleaded. Everything fell, the sand, himself. He lay in prostration. His hands dragged to his face to gather tears. He could hear knocking behind him and the collection of breaths waiting for him. 

“Is everything alright?” One of the voices said.

No, no, most definitely not. And Alestor held himself. 

“Is it wrong to do bad for an ultimate good?” He asked quietly. And from the corner of his eyes, he could see the light shining and answer forming through the skull of the cow. A fantasy, maybe. Or perhaps, a vision of a better time. 

And Alestor smiled. With those crocodile tears, he smiled. He grabbed his chest and shouted: “Of course, of course, that’s it!”

Apollo

August 5th, 2017

6:58 PM

“How long have you been up here, Batman?” Dion asked. He looked down to the streets where the crooked lampposts flickered into seizures of yellow lights. It was not dark out, only just beginning.

“It’s the best place to get a view.” Apollo held a pair of binoculars to his eyes, he was sitting on his hams and to the side of his boot lay a book, ‘The Corrux: The Fools Guide to Demonology and Vicar Culture First Edition, Vol. 1’, half opened and bent on its spine. His eyes were set like a sentry, hovering across the horizon and scanning with those cold red eyes. 

“Have you found anything?” Dion walked up. He used his hand to slant against a giant poster board where a car insurance firm had been painted over with penises and breasts, by children, both of them presumed. 

“Or are you just spying on people?” Dion’s voice was muffled and distorted behind the mask.

“No, I stopped doing that when you finally broke up with that girl. Ophelia, was it?” Apollo looked down.

Dion’s mouth was open but could not say anything. He coughed and choked on words, anger and shame and surprise.

“It’s not right to spy on people, you’re breaching our trust.”

“I don’t trust anyone.” Apollo said apathetically. His neck was outstretched as he checked the corners and the small alleys. 

“A woman had her purse stolen, there” He pointed to what looked like a small crack in the map of the city, there was a trash on the very entrance of the alley, it was pushed over and spilling into the gutter. “Another man was mugged some miles off, right in front of his job as he was about to get into his car. There was also a fight in front of the police office up in Central Street. One of them cheated on the other's girlfriend, some such other. Both of them lost when the tasers flew.” 

“And you didn’t help, I’m guessing?”

“No one died. Nothing of value was really lost. You have to treat the streets like the Amazon, with abject curiosity. Don’t touch anything and let nature take its course. They weren’t our targets after all. They’re not the pathogen, the disease we’re chasing after.”

“I think you should have been hugged more when you were a child. Want one, buddy?”

“No, you’re too loose with love. A bit of a manwhore, if you ask me.”

Dion exhaled in quit intervals and stood upright.

“Whatever, jerk. What about the cultists?”

The sky was setting maroon across the rows of clouds. The sun bled out and washed over them like the cut veins of a wrist. The light drizzled down, warm red. But it was not hot, not to the touch, at least. Dion pulled up his suit close to his neck. 

“I haven’t spotted anything. They’ve been quiet.” Apollo said. He turned his gaze to Dion and put down the binoculars. “But they’re still here. I can taste the iron in the air. It’s like my mouth is rusting over.”

“I know what you mean, I can feel it too.” Dion said. Apollo looked at his partners mask and how he could not keep that straight gaze, how Dion turned and looked around and fidgeted with his hair. How his arm twitched, how he flicked his ears and scratched himself red on his crocodile-skin elbows.

“Have you considered what I said? About letting them live?” Apollo stood, he could feel the trapped air in between his knees pop. He picked up his book and set it behind his belt. “I can pull some strings with the Vatican. I’m sure they’ll be more than happy to send more capable people to arrest these disease people. FBI, probably. More capable people, at least.”

“Do you think a fifty by fifty concrete jail cell could hold any of these guys? Arcana, demonic possession. We don’t know what we’re dealing with.” Dion said.

“It could hold most of them. Alestor, we’ll put him in a strapping chair. Maybe cut off his fingers, dress him in holy charms. Douse with so much holy water he’d wish he was in Guantanamo bay.”

“Good. Serves him right. No one should enjoy the pleasures of life, he who acts in selfish desire and ruthless ambition.” Dion crossed his arms and laid back on an exhaustion pipe. Steam was coming out, they could smell Dim Sum and Chinese five spice. But they couldn’t hear guests, or any noise from the streets. Only a mild rustle.

“All desire is selfish, Dion.” Apollo rubbed his chin. “Don’t be so vengeful. It’s easy to throw the stone, it’s much harder to imagine yourself as the man being thrown at.” 

“Some people don’t deserve empathy.” 

The red circles of Apollo’s eyes narrowed as if laser scanners, going up and down and searching for Dion. Apollo closed them at last, seemingly having found an answer or evidence that he’d never have an answer to Dion’s aggression. He stretched his neck and could feel more pressure points pop and crack across his body. Four hours had done this to him, had cemented his joints and left him still and aching. He was only just beginning to feel the blood through his limbs and it felt like sand coming down his legs and to his toes and filling him, a giant hourglass of a person waiting and sitting for danger that never came but felt like it was always here. 

Apollo faced down, by the edge, where the threads of white mist were beginning to fret and leave, a giant drainage that went eastward. He did not know what it meant, but would.

“You know, the offer is still on the table, you’re free to leave if — ”

They both felt it on their wrists, they moved their sleeves and felt with their fingers the constant shuffling of their threads. The burning glow of yellow, the way the string tugged and suffocated their left arms. It was reacting to something, something in the air and in the direction where the mist had funneled towards, out in the forest and the lake that he could barely see and only knew because of the flicker and glimmer of blood red light. It was coming, something. 

“Let’s go.” Apollo said. They both got ready, put their feet on the building cornices, felt the concrete crack behind the power of their kick. And suddenly, they stopped.

“What the hell.” Dion looked out. 

“What are you waiting for?” Apollo asked. And for a while he did not get an answer, no, he had to look to where Dion looked. Eastward. There was a fire, a pillar of smoke that wrapped up and contaminated the air like an inverse whirlpool, spitting out darkness, death, and anarchy. It was an explosion in the direction of the police office. And the paramedics? The firefighters? Who ought have been racing across the lanes? Gone or confused. Scared, maybe, as they scattered. There was more fire. More smog. It was ten miles off but they could hear the chaos, it finally crashed on their ears. A loud bang like an invisible hard barrier had been working itself towards them and upon hitting them, had ran off, bearing the message to all willing to hear; death has come. 

It was the sound of screams. Of glass and of concrete blown and destroyed, a demolition. Soon it smelled of it too, gunpowder, gasoline.

“What do we do?” Dion asked. Apollo gulped and look at both ways, he looked at Dion’s quivering hands and how they shook and unconsciously moved to his waist and his coat. The cowboy, reading up. And he thought, immediately, which terror would design more violence. The lake house from where the thread of life quaked and quivered or the burning bodies, the scared townspeople evacuating from the fire-licked streets, where he could hear the civilians, the police, and the help all screaming in a union; spare us. Spare us, please.

“Go to the fire. I’ll handle myself.” Apollo said.

“Are you sure? I can fight.” 

“You can also help.” Apollo jumped to the second rooftop, granite flew. “Helping isn’t my nature, anyway. Go on, Superman. Do your job.” 

Dion nodded and left opposite. Both unaware, ignorant, that in their adrenaline, in the reckless planning, they had never predicted the third attack. 

Isaac

August 5th, 2017

5:43 PM

It was the last chance Isaac would get to live, he knew it, he read the silence in the room and the rattling of his shackles around his leg and his arm and his neck. They had been added throughout the days after every tantrum he threw periodically and now, half of his body was immobilized, bulging red from the chafe of the metal or from the bruises of his beaten flesh. He put his ear to the pipe, it carried the sound of the store. He could hear mild chatter like the chirping of songbirds out. Then there was a shuffling of feet like the rolling thunder. Then a curious tone, a debate and finally a conclusion. They spoke with an understanding and said; hmm, yes, of course, we’ll do that. 

The meeting was done and it made the beads of sweat on Isaac roll down. The door opened. 

Alestor walked into the room. He shut the door behind him, soft with the precision of a concerned father afraid to awake his infant son. There were no babies here though, only beaten bodies. Isaac looked up, there was a swordfish with pale blue flesh right above Alestor and it stared down at Isaac with its pointer. 

“It’s time to make a choice,” Alestor said. “And no one else can make it for you, it’s a choice that’s been waiting for you for twenty-one years now. You’ve been making it all your life but now, not tomorrow, nor the day after, now. Now, you must make it. And please, make the right choice.”

Isaac looked at him, with the only eye he had that worked. Half of his face was heavy and bloated with purple or yellow flesh. He looked like a leper and felt like a defeated boxer, still fuming but knowing it was all for naught. His head sat on an incline, his chin rested on his bent knee, his whole body against the wall. It was a position best described as morbid laziness. He just didn’t want to stand. He tried moving his tongue to lick chapped lips but couldn’t work it through his swollen lips, the bruised balls of blood planted underneath his nostrils.

And yet. With his lethargy and his hopelessness, Isaac still found a way to summon his strength. It was strength born from anger. And anger? Anger can cure any kind of malaise. Isaac’s head rose. He sniffed, he could feel blood travel through his nasal passage and down his esophagus. It tasted like metallic mud. 

“Mom used to make me admit to the wrong stuff when I did when I was a kid. When I stole. When I got in fights. She always made sure I admitted the crime or at least gave my case. And she made sure to do it before the punishment came.” Isaac’s knees buckled. “She said it was important for a man to admit to the crime before the fact. Not after. Because it’s what makes the answer genuine. So if you want an honest answer, I want to be treated like an honest man. Remove the chains.”

The cronies arrived and they looked stiff at the front door, their white veils sucking in and out of their mouths. Alestor looked at his son, he swallowed spit and from his back pocket felt a key. He tossed it to one of the guards who held it with cupped hands and who went around to the pipe and the chain to find the pin to fill.

“I have to be reasonable, I hope this is good enough.” Alestor rubbed his eyes. They were swollen, bulging and dried. “I want that answer. Will you join? Will you leave? Or will you stay? Those are good odds, Zac. Two out of three keep you alive.”

Isaac walked forward and the felt the pull of the man behind him, holding his leash. It was a stern yank, it reminded Isaac to be gentile, to behave. He went forward anyway, shoulders pronounced like bullhorns, the hair growing on his sides and his neck falling down like a mane.

“What odds did I ever have? This isn’t a coin toss, this is my life.” Isaac said. “You made your peace a long time ago. I can see it in your eyes, you knew the answer before you entered the door.”

“No, I don’t.” Alestor said. “You have to make it, right now, Zac. Say it. What do you want me to do.”

“What do I want?” Isaac looked around and rubbed his chin and his face and stretched them, so his eyes looked bigger than they were as he pulled down. His body felt heavier though he was sure he had lost weight, having starved in his enthrallment.

“I wanted what mom would have wanted, to move on. That’d be normal, wouldn’t it be?”

“We didn’t get normal circumstances.” Alestor said.

“Of course we did. Death isn’t special, there's no conspiracy to it. No superstition. Sometimes it just happens.”

“Her death didn’t just happen. It was organized by a tyrant who stopped caring about His creation a long time ago.” He spoke with flamboyant hands as if wafting away dust from the air, though there was none. His hands were twitching. The flesh was ruined, bleeding, cut open at the knuckles. It was the injured hand of a man who had spent a good few days beating his son. Alestor noticed the wounds immediately. He put his hands behind his back and looked for a pair of white-leather gloves in his pocket.

“That’s insane.” Isaac shouted. “Circumstance is circumstance, shit happens. And it’s your choice in how you deal with it. And you’ve dealt poorly.” 

He felt his chain pull and everyone felt an urge to pounce, but they did not. Alestor was moving forward, with the intensity of a bird of prey. He was taking wide strides and his hands were outward, ready to clinch. 

And Isaac moved back. Until he hit the leash-holder. And finally, when Isaac felt trapped between the two did he look at his options. What terrible ones he had, to fight or to surrender to a fate that seemed dreadful. And biting his lips (and how difficult it was to move his face), he grimaced. He turned. Punched the holder of his chain. The man groaned and leaned forward. Isaac bit his hand then and there. He almost tore through two joints, index, and thumb. The man screamed, let go, and all at once the seven spectators started coming forward. But they stopped midway. Isaac held them back, with his chain spinning and cutting the air with a whistle and the feeling of wind turbulence. He looked like a medieval knight, with his mace swinging wildly through the air like a helicopter rotor. He shot out it. The audience leaned back to dodge and they all lagged themselves under the threat. The spinning chain a weapon, a centrifuge that seperated Isaac and his anger from one another, materialized it into one, hopefully hurtful, end.

And Alestor did not care. He walked forward. Hands out.

“Get away.” Isaac screamed. He sounded the mighty roar, but Alestor moved. The intent was clear in his eyes and it made no difference, weapon or not, he moved up. And Isaac realized this. He was losing ground. His foot went over the body he had just punched. Then it touched the wall and it seemed the whole room was out to crush him.

“Back!” Isaac screamed against the impregnable walls of the room. The shout didn’t go far.

“Fuck off!” He flung the chain out. He felt it hit Alestor, felt the vibrations up to his shoulders and heard the rattle as it dragged around the floor. It was then that he himself was tackled down by some odd four or five (it was too much of a mess to count) and as Isaac descended, he could see from the corner of his eyes, Alestor. Falling. Both of them, falling. Isaac into the floor, Alestor into the water where his arms tried desperately to grab onto the edge of the boat. He missed, he sank. 

“I split his head open.” Isaac screamed to the others who were confused by the act, they looked with fidgety eyes between Isaac and Alestor or rather the bubbles of Alestor that came through the surface of the water.

“Someone bring him up.” One of them shouted. Two volunteered to dive in. The boats shook as the three bodies descended. They waited. Their breaths were shallow, their eyes open and their bodies were sweating, cold sweat. There was curiosity, anger, in the bag of emotions, and for Isaac, a light pull of melancholy. It felt like the tug of the chain. The two came up.

“I can’t see anything down there.” One of them said.

“Keep trying!” Another woman shouted. Her voice sounded fragile like a broken croak. They began to grit their teeth the more time passed, the more time their anger had to fester. They directed their gaze from the water to Isaac, Isaac who was still down on the floor, a knee above his neck and three different pairs of arms around his body. Isaac who had not taken a breath the whole time, who felt it hard to do anything but to watch. His eyes were glazed. He looked lost, caught in a light so bright as to leave him stupefied. They picked him up. They dragged him through the store. He did not move much, only dragged, like a piece of furniture. They set him in front of the fishing store, not in the porch with the half-rotted wooden pillars (that was too dignified of a spot for Isaac), they set him in the mud, next to a pile of old firewood and furniture, some of it cremated, some of it still wet from the morning mist. He felt the mud crawl up his body, splatter. It made him wet and cold, but he did not want a fire. He did not want much of anything. 

“I killed my dad.” Isaac repeated. He was not proud, not ashamed either. His eyes were open. His skull must have been vacuous as there was nothing in him that or about him that resembled sentience. No, the silent death had left him silent. A scream, a person screams when the action inherent is to cause suffering. But a death, especially those intimate and quick ones, those are silent. Isaac was laid out on the floor like a sponge trying to absorb the seriousness of his action through osmosis. One half of his face (the half he could move) was open. 

There was crying for a moment, threatening, then screams. Calls to keep him alive to suffer, calls to kill him. And once again they debated. Once again they came to that conclusion; hmm, yes, of course. We’ll do that. 

Four of them surrounded him like eagles at Prometheus’s side, pecking at his liver. They were here now, to peck-peck-peck away at the solemn son. 

Isaac heard the click of a Glock. He felt the barrel behind his head. Smelled gunpowder. The bullet should have shot out, would have, had no one heard the sound.

The sound of bubbling and of the splitting waters. The sound of a second Moses at the red sea, bloody red. There was an image of a man, one distorted and volatile beneath the undulating waters. 

Alestor. 

He was coming out, one heavy leg after another, breaking out of those swamp-like waters (or so they seemed in the horrifying evening) with nothing but downcast hair to lead him. The twigs, the dirt and the mud all on him like a placenta. He was birthed in the murk, baptized in it. Two people came up to him crying with joy. He sent them away as he stood on his own. He whipped his hair back and from his pocket, out came the sticky cloth. A large square, soft veil that contorted and stuck to his face. Yellow and black, the king in yellow. It was his crown, that small square of leather. It seemed glued to him now, a feature of his face in and of itself.

Alestor came up to Isaac. Isaac could not look at him, only fidgeted in the mud. He was sad a moment earlier, now he was afraid. He didn’t know what was worse, the feeling of killing or the feeling of death above him. It didn’t matter. He knew both now. Alestor knelt down, he rubbed the hair away from his son’s face.

“Don’t make such a scene.” He said. “Or we’ll be late for sermon.”

Isaac tried to scream. But there was no air in his lungs and simply laid mute as the two white hands wrapped around his eye and neck.

Apollo

August 5th, 2017

7:39 PM

It seemed like a stupid thing to do, running and jumping from rooftop to rooftop in broad daylight. But Apollo had thought it over, had imagined the world in which he did not run as excitedly as he did, the world in which whatever he was chasing after had got away. It frightened more than the prospect of getting caught. 

It also helped that there was a distraction. Miles away from him, the city was ablaze and any helicopter that could have spotted him was most likely there, dropping water on the inferno and any eyes that could spot him were facing elsewhere, at the spewing fires at the police headquarters.

Apollo ran opposite of Dion, went west. He hit train tracks after ten minutes of his exhausting dash. Around him were the stares of sullen eyes that looked at what they thought was a strange masked figure in the middle of rusted train tracks. They were homeless. In the small carts they had shaped into lodgers, all of them too hardened by life to care for who he was but too afraid as to not mind him. Apollo looked back at them, at their dirty faces and the laundry hanging on the ends of broken cross guards. There were no demons here. He grabbed his arm and cursed.

“Fuck.” He kicked the floor, pebbles shot out into the backdrop of trees. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

His arm had gone cold. Where had he made the mistake? Heading West? Where was the path wrong?

His instincts told him to tread back and he did so, bringing up his phone and ringing it for Dion. Dion who did not answer and who let it ring before breaking completely. Answered, then hung up. He took a breath, felt the air, moved his body around to stretch his spin and his calves and walked patiently until he felt the lead again. The heat of the trail, physically and metaphorically, back on his arm. He had to go north-west off from the broken train station he had found himself in. North-west into an area more rural, where the forest had taken over concrete, where the long network of trees had consumed the floor and turned it into the tremulous playground of roots and dirt. Following this path that could only be felt, by a thermometer on his arm, he found himself tripping. Constantly.  Switching and strafing and twisting himself through the labyrinth of the forest as he tried to follow that visceral hotness that made his arm wiggle and squirm.

He felt he was going nowhere. It made him angry. And it was an anger that followed him through, that was made noticeable by the loud and pronounced shaking of trees as he stomped and rustled through the forest. It looked like a storm from above, where the birds flew and squawked. 

And that's why it took so long to make it to the small building near the lake, the store or what remained of the store that terminates and scavengers had not eaten. It was through accidental trial and error, through the pounding and the beating of his head against the bark and stone. It was through going the wrong way, marking on the trees with etched signs, ripping fauna. Through getting lost over and over and over. 

It frustrated him, it worried him. All that time spent searching, some thirty odd minutes which perhaps to you may appear small, but to Apollo, represented thirty minutes of life and death. 

For he was hunting demons and thirty minutes, not one more or one less, but thirty minutes would be all any demon would need to kill thirty dozens of people.

So he found the store. And he breathed relief for a moment and thought it strange to be relieved in finding a monster. But he was. He took a giant gulp of that fresh air. He felt breezes that did not move the pines and the fallen leaves, gusts that only sent cold towards him. And after a while, he made that stern face behind his mask. He clenched his mouth and oppressed the feeling of nervousness from his body, exiled it from his nervous system. He stopped his clattering teeth. He clenched his fist and reached into his coat. Out came the blade, broken, shorter, more jagged like the wide maw of death ought to be. Yes, broken, over the course of many battles throughout the weeks. Broken and worn and sanded down. But still very dangerous, he could feel it, the pounds of steel and silver that sunk his feet into the dirt as he rested the blade above his shoulders.

There were no cars in front of the store, there was no parking way as much as there was a small circle of tire tracks where someone had been. He went into the porch and perhaps by his weight and the weight of the blade, found his leg sinking through a board. Collapsing it. It made him shout. 

“Fuck.” It might have been the only word he knew today. 

He retracted his leg from the broken porch. He felt something slimy and slippery underneath his soles, worms. Maggots. Crushed and releasing the white bile. He scraped it off. Not because he cared about how it smelled or looked, but because it made his feet slipper and uneven and that ounce of difference was already too much of a gamble for Apollo.

So he prepared. He made sure his legs were ready and willing and his arms relaxed and malleable as he entered the door and the string around his left arm burned. A whip of fire it felt as he walked through the first room. His blade cut the side of the door frame. A notch one meter wide. Upon coming inside, he painted his blade at the shadows. Nothing. He looked around with that sentry gaze. There were so many stags and fish nailed up as trophies, their corpse a monument that did not inspire courage or pride as much as fear for Apollo.

They peered down. Those decapitated heads. Their eyes were empty, beady and black. Their mouths were ajar and it looked like they had died wishing for one final breath but now staring at them, lifeless, Apollo realized they never got it. So it went.

He walked around the aisles, kept himself low until he looked like one giant arrowhead, pointed upwards at an angle to the end of the room where the cash register sat upon a broken glass desk. Inside, past the glass, were the small specs of black, dead worms and bait, stuck under large shards of shattered glass like samples from a laboratory. To the side of that desk, a collection of bobbing lures. He reached for one of them, a red striped. 

But there was a noise. Clutter moving. Then whining. Then crying. 

A loud shrill sound that sent a chill through ventilation shafts above him. It felt like the inept gust from outside. Cold, unmoving, but very real. Apollo hunched. He walked to a door that lead into the back of the store, he heard it crawl open and he peaked one eye inside. He was following the noise of the infant cry. The hall was too dark for anything else but following noise. He moved through with those crimson eyes, only seeing minor details, like the white cotton torn and hemorrhaging out of a purple sofa. His back was to the wall and it felt like he was sliding against it more so than walking. He went further, past the sofa and a half-open door. He would have gone inside, a cow's skull was peering from the small gap after all, but the cry was more intense. And more important.

He stood near the door where a flaccid potted plant hung over the doorknob.

All sense had become lost. All that remained of feeling was the pain of his tight grip on his sword and the wetness of sweat that made his clothes stick. His hairs stood as he approached the knob.  His ear drums were inflamed. His breath, stilted. 

He put his foot under the doorknob. He pressed. Pressured. Kicked. The door hinges flew out and hit one end of the wall like shrapnel. His eyes scanned immediately, from the dark corners to the low glow of a buzzing lamp in the middle of the room. 

Where? Where are they hiding? He thought. 

No where. There was nothing here. Nothing but the boat and the cry that came from the boat, the only boat left in the back room. There was a chain. Some blood, but nothing else. The struggle here that Isaac and that Alestor had conjured was nonexistent, at least to him. The boats? Vanished. Sunken? Maybe.

Apollo's head looking over squared shoulders as he approached the cry. There was a fickle spotlight above, quivering in circles (it was still recovering from the sudden barge and entry) and he faced what seemed like a bundle of cloth inside the boat. He walked to it, his blade pointed towards it, 

He took them off, carefully, blanket after blanket until all that was left was one final yellow quilt. It looked like a baby from the outline, but Apollo knew. Felt it, on his arm. This was the source of that demonic burn. He focused, the adrenaline pumped into him with each of his furious heartbeats. He lifted the veil. His eyes opened for a bit. Speechless. They narrowed again.

And reader, the details of the creature should not be made particular. Must not be. What Apollo saw could only be described as an afterbirth, a malfunction in God’s hatchery that never earned a place in the evolutionary chain. A bad combination in the slot machine. An unholy monstrosity taking the form of an infant.

A mockery. A mockery that mimicked the cry of a small baby, but no more. For the minute its gold, purple-veined eyes glanced back up at Apollo, it began to laugh. Its stone-textured tongue slipped out of the slit that would be considered its mouth and with that retarded gaze, it started to laugh.

“Gotcha.” It said. Hoarse as if its small lungs had used all of their force to squeeze out the words from its malformed face. It laughed. With it’s scaly slit for a mouth, it laughed. Apollo only stared. His hands shook. And at last, when that sharp laugh had caused too deep a wound in his heart, Apollo brought up his foot in defeat. Not of strength as much as wit. And in his annoyed anger, Apollo stomped the creature. He felt the monsters black lungs pop like two rotten plums. He stomped again, this time through the boat and watched as the small shriveled body descended down the murk. 

The room was silent and he took out his phone. He rung again, went unanswered and rung another five times before he got the mechanical answer from voice mail. 

“Ahh. Dion here. I’m sorry I’m not here, but be patient and I’m sure I’ll be able to get to you soon. As the Lord says…” The machine recording went on. “Romans Eight-twenty five. ‘But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience—”

“Dion.” Apollo shouted at his phone. “Dion, please answer! Dion! Somethings wrong, we need to rethink the plan. We must have missed something, no one's here. Nothing. Is. Here."

Jeremiah

August 5th, 2017

7:52 PM

Jeremiah didn’t know if Bartholomew believed him. If what he said of monsters and of the night his father was wounded into a coma — a coma into a death — was any true. But ever since he had been told, the son, Bartholomew, for the last few days had spent most of his time with Jeremiah, scrutinizing him with a gaze that felt like a dissection. Jeremiah had taken him to school, had taken him out, had sent him to his mother’s house, had helped him with homework and so on as surrogate father. Because at the bottom of Jeremiah’s heart, he felt this was most justified, this, like the rest of his life, would be reparations for a cowardice he had committed on that windy night in that peculiar construction site. 

So it went like this. On this day and no other day it was requested by Bartholomew, specifically, that he would go to the church and that he would pray for who Bartholomew called “Daddy”. Who, Jeremiah called, Officer Heinz. 

“I don’t need to go to church, kid.” Jeremiah said. The car rumbled in front of the thin apartments and the small skeletal metal stairs that rattled with the footsteps of the other renters. There was a woman on the second floor cleaning her rug, dropping dust and grime a top of Jeremiah’s car. He could hear the small specks like the nimble tap of rain. 

“Yes, you do.” Bartholomew said. He was sitting in the car with his backpack to his feet, both hands crossed on his chest to hold himself. 

“And why is that?” Jeremiah asked.

“Because it’ll make you feel better.” 

Jeremiah rolled his eyes and blew his nose outside the car window. 

“A priest won’t do shit for me. If you don’t believe me, I don’t expect him to. And if he doesn’t believe me, how the fuck will his talk help anything?”

“I never said I didn’t believe you.” Bartholomew rocked back and forth.

“Bullshit. I know you don’t, no one does. Who believes in monsters?” Jeremiah held his head with his hand.

“Kids believe in monsters and I believe in you.” Bartholomew stared at his small boots. “That’s why we need to go and see Daddy. You’ve got things to say to him, you know.” 

“He’s dead. Fucking dead. There’s no telling him anything because there’s no one to hear anything.” 

“That’s not true.” Bartholomew’s nostrils widened as he took a deep breath. “He can hear us. The church people said so.”

“Fuck the church!” Jeremiah slapped his steering wheel. The car honked. “Those patronizing pricks. All of them. Those fuckers don’t know pain, they don’t understand. They just pretend to.”

“They’ll help us.” Bartholomew whispered. He repeated it like a mantra. Help us, help us. Jeremiah looked to his rear at all the people looking his way. He didn’t think there were so many eyes so clustered together on those steps and rails. He began to feel that needle-prick in his stomach again, the pop of his gut and that burning sensation as if his inner acid was spilling, disintegrating him.

“Alright kid.” He conceded. “I’ll go right now. So get out of the car.” 

“I’m going with you. I want to talk to daddy.” 

“I don’t get it, is this for me or for you? I told you I’d go. But myself.”

“I’m not leaving the car.” Bartholomew stomped on the floor of the car. He rubbed the mud in his shoes inside the carpet.

“I’m going to drag you out if you don’t leave.” Jeremiah opened the door on the passenger seat. The winds blew it open, almost tearing it off. 

“If you drag me, I’ll scream. And that’ll get you in trouble, won’t it?” He closed the door, muting the sound of the banshee wind. Jeremiah just stared, almost impressed at the small child, some odd twelve years old, and his capacity for stubbornness. 

“You really are like him.” Jeremiah said. He nodded his head and drove into the frenzy of cars. It looked like a foray and he couldn’t tell whether it was mass immigration or mass emigration. He only knew that people were moving, fast. 

It was a few minutes after seven-twenty that they finally made it to the church and to the heavy doors that looked down at Jeremiah. There were angels, the Virgin Mary, kings, all carved into the varnished wood. To his side were the white steps and a handrail stained and rusted, past that, in the yard, was the plastic grass and the plastic plants and the avians dancing in their ceramic bird baths. All white. Fake white, like a papier-mâché Hollywood set, so fragile as to shatter at the touch. But that was a deceit. 

Jeremiah put his hands on the handle and could barely push. It truly was heavier than it looked. It took his tackle, his shoulder, to nudge the doors and to scare the nun behind them. She glared at him, he didn’t care as much as the boy who looked down and tugged at Jeremiah’s pants.

“You’re the one who wanted to come here.” Jeremiah said. The boy tried to look up. He took a meek step forward before he put his hand in the holy water font. He (Bartholomew) looked like a bird, Jeremiah noted. Jeremiah did the same. Put his hands inside and dressed his forehead with the wet cross.

They went up towards the rotunda and the pillars and the people already praying on benches. Jeremiah stood, watched the cross and looked at Jesus high upon the wall. It became unbearable, the weight, the look. So he looked down at the tile and tapped his foot against the pillar. His eyes wandered before they were dragged back. Bartholomew tugged on him and pointed to the bench.

“Let me do it my own way.” Jeremiah said. The boy tugged (it actually looked more like a pull). Jeremiah sat and feel dragged the knee guard down with a slam and knelt before the cross.

And he closed his eyes and thought for a moment. And it was pleasant, almost. The scent of burning candle, the wet feeling of his forehead, the silence. And the memories. They came like rounds in a slide show, a snapshot in a catalog or a gallery. He felt his chest swell, he felt his nose swell. And he opened his eyes to find himself with with his back a bit bent and curved. He was oddly light, though he hadn’t asked or spoken as much as remembered. He opened his eyes, facing Bartholomew. Bartholomew who had both his hands together in front of him. 

He confirmed it, yes, he was lighter. And perhaps, if forgiveness was a thousand mile long trek deep in the trenches, then at the very least, Jeremiah could confidently say, he had taken a step forward. Maybe two.

“What’re telling him?” Bartholomew whispered. 

“Nothing. I’m not saying anything.” 

“Well, you better. Don’t waste his time, he’s probably busy up there in heaven.”

“What would he be busy doing up there?”

“Police stuffs with God. Like catching bad angels and stuff.” 

Jeremiah nodded his head. He smiled. The boy had taken the death better than Jeremiah or maybe he just didn’t understand it as terrible as it was. Whether ignorance or youth (if they were any different), Jeremiah admired the boy.

He looked around, the smile still on him. There were some odd fifty people here, some in black, others with pictures of the dead, some just here to be here. And it felt good to be united, even if just in suffering. It felt warm, all of it and suddenly he felt the urge to speak to someone. Not to Heinz, someone else. Jeremiah set his eyes on Jesus on the cross, so he rose from his bruised shins. His heart pounded. He hadn’t felt religious for fifteen years, but now, like no other time, he felt that deep need to speak. He took a step forward but stopped. 

Someone had beaten him to the front.

What seemed like dozens of hooded figures. What seemed like the plague manifest in all black and yellow and white. The odd, ugly folks with the veils and the suits and the yellow flowers, and the jeers and the rage and the horror. 

They came through two doors on the side of the main room of the church, past the choir stands, past the organ left of center from the cross. Past flowers, past candles, past nuns who looked at themselves in confusion hoping the other had the answer to this accost. 

No one knew. All the guests looked curiously as the cultists reared their heads around the pillars and wrapped around the room in what seemed like a long chain of black. It was a mockery. One of them had the thurible and flung it in circles and threw it at a picture of Saint Michael the Archangel that hung next to the confessional that was to the right. The thurible began to smoke as it lay broken on the floor. 

The boy stood now. He tugged on Jeremiah, Jeremiah looked behind him at the closed doors and started for them. He felt two pairs of hands grab him and drag him to the side of the room near a pillar.

“Get the fuck off me.” Jeremiah threw his head back. He hit someone and himself. Then he felt another hand grab his neck and hold it still. They faced him forward, towards the cross, the stand, the center of the room.

His eyes opened. He nearly gagged on his tongue as he gasped at what he saw. There was a body upon a small rectangular plane, and he saw that plane carried by four people. They had on them purple gloves. And behind the body, behind the people was someone he did not know but to you, reader, I will say whom. 

He saw Alestor coming up, masked and garbed. He saw his bloodied rags drag upon the floor and the false vestment he wore in gold and black and the mask upon his face, glued almost. The body was set at the top of the stage. Everyone now stared, wide-eyed, they all looked at Alestor’s hands. On one, a book, on the other, a knife. He opened the book and with that bold, booming voice said in cheer: 

“I’m glad for you to join us.” His faced dragged from one corner of the room to the other. “Let’s begin then? With what though? With what I wonder?” 

He turned the pages. Ripped them, threw them like feathers into the air. The other churchgoers took offense. They stood, some. They were beaten, hit on the temple with canes or the candle sticks or the busts of statues. It didn’t seem to bother Alestor though, that helpless screaming and rioting. He kept turning. Turning, turning until he stopped with flair. He slammed two hands on the podium. He leaned in and let them all; Jeremiah, the boy, the fifty odd people, absorb silence. When there was nothing but mumbling groans, he spoke.

“Yes. Here we are.” The drool was coming off his mouth, it dribbled onto the podium. “Of Man’s disobedience, his original sin.”

And they fell into it, a fever-dream. A nightmare, though the didn’t know it just yet.

Author's Note: Thanks to everyone who's favorited my book! It really helps!

Apollo

August 5th, 2017

8:09 PM

Apollo had to run all the way back, through the fires and the fanning fumes that dressed half a miles radius worth of city with the choking smog, he had to climb and to suffocate and call, over and over, until at last, Dion answered. And they spoke and they met, a top a rooftop far from the fires that ravages. Apollo saw his colleague, his hands bruised and stained, his mask blackened some, his eyes unmoving and his whole body still.  He didn’t bother to ask how it went, he knew it from the poor posture that Dion stood with, how he bent and how he collapsed on his rear and undid his mask and put his face down to his thighs to coddle himself.

Apollo watched Dion's soot-covered sweat drop, he wanted to touch his shoulder but had nothing reassuring to say so stopped midway. He retracted, looked out to the horizon and the swirling mass of clouds above as if hell descended from the skies.

“We need to go back.” He said, rather stern. “It was all a part of their plan, they dragged us out. Distracted us.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know why they wanted us away. We should go regroup at the church. It’s at the epicenter, we’ll be able to move more efficiently if we get th—” 

“Why were there so many bodies? Why were they all burning?” Dion’s voice was eerily calm. He did not blink, did not even seem to breathe as his chest was not going up and down like Apollo’s exasperated body. He neither looked tired, nor distressed, which may have been the biggest warning that he was distressed. Just forcing it down, deep down into his spirit. 

Apollo tapped him. Nudged him but did not exchange words. After a while, perhaps out of boredom, Dion stood, looked at the black mask in his hands and jumped. A cable antenna snapped from the strength of his gallop across to the other roof, it fell near Apollo and scratched the floor with a shriek. 

They came to the church or rather the low rooftop near the church on some apartment block across from it, they noticed the crowd and removed their masks as they slid down a fire ladder to the side. It was effortless, the conversion of Vicar to man as they supplanted themselves inside of the crowd now growing larger. The tops of heads shook, the whole crowd vibrated like a colony of bees distressed at the honeycombs death.

Apollo outstretched his neck. Being taller had its benefits, he thought. He looked to the broken glass around the church, then to the hole and the purple smoke coming out of it. The crowd was beginning to scream, most of them had their phones out and repeated to an emergency service. It didn’t help, Apollo knew it wouldn’t. Everyone who could have helped was too busy with the other fires, with the other bodies and the other sufferings. So he took it upon himself to drag the catatonic Dion through the crowd, shoving and pushing down many a people as they made it past, into the parking lot and into the graveyard on the backside.

There were some people waiting there too, with their faces wedged between the gap of black bars and the bits of brown burned and dried leaves coming at a crawl at their feet. Apollo ignored them, climbed over the pointed black fence and walked through the gravestones now blowing ashes from their tops. He began to run and looked for the door into the back entrance. Dion found it first. Well, he found the graves keeper first. And with the grave keeper, the dull face and the door.  It was them three, Apollo noted, and two of them wore the same dead expression like their eyes were looking past objects, at something imaginary and far in the horizon.  

Apollo bit his cheek. He tried nudging the doorknob. Shut.

“I have the key.” Apollo moved to his pockets. Dion kicked the door open. It broke, some screws and steel flew into the wall and stayed stiff and interred. The metal door was at a bent angle, they walked over it and heard it squeal. 

Dion disappeared in the smoke. 

Apollo ran through the fumes, coughing most of the time and covering his face with his hand as the purple exhausted out the door. It seemed to burn his eyes, whatever it was (and it was not smoke, for it did not carry that ashy smell) that contaminated the air. It was a bit denser than smoke too, it sat near ground level, especially as he reached the center of the church where it was strongest and appeared as a large purple cloud, roaming and dwindling out. It was not the time for the center though, not yet. 

Apollo went past a hall, most of the pictures and vases and statues were broken into shreds, some stained red. He stepped over a Virgin Mary, blackened and dressed with a reversed latin cross. It made him anxious. He came past a storage room where a little slit showed light, he peered his eyes and almost immediately removed his head. There was a corpse there, bisected it seemed, from left shoulder to right hip. It was a nun, he remembered seeing her face. 

He walked past her, into the principal office. Dion was already waiting in there, looking down. Apollo saw him from the door frame and saw his looming figure that stood with the listless face. He stepped up to Apollo, to the corpse laid out in front of him like skinned carpet. He was behind the desk, that Priest. He laid there, feet crossed, arms outward. Dead. Eyes open and staring back, dead. Grey. He had a wound on his neck. Apollo inspected the body with bent knees. 

“Stabbed straight through the heart from his neck. Then stabbed some more.” He mumbled and closed the eyes on the corpse. He looked up -- stood up -- Dion was staring down. His face hadn’t changed since recovering from the fires. And Apollo felt dread for him, or rather guilt for removing him from one fire and into another. 

He groaned. 

“J-just stay here.” Apollo walked away. Nothing would have filled the silence in that room, not the screaming of the crowd outside, not the breaking wind of helicopters above. Nothing filled that room but Dion and the body. 

There were more on the path there, to the center. There was also a voice inside of him, insecurity or sanity, one of those two that screamed retreat, retreat. It was that sharp voice that made him shiver at the feet, that made his head feel empty. He nearly collapsed some steps away from the ceremony room, he did not know whether it was the purple smoke or the feeling of disgust. Or his arm, his arm that felt like the surface of the sun. He rested his had on a wall, a defiled buttress whose painted glass sat below his feet in pieces. The picture of the three kings, dead and fractured on the floor. He looked at them, his eyes rolled back and he felt at last the limit of his stonewall spirit.

Apollo vomited.

He spat and faced forward with the spittle still dangling from his face, strings he cut with his sleeve. All along the halls were scattered bodies or scattered glass, cut in clean vivisections like surgery.

He made it to the church room, the post-Morten congregation. There were bodies here too, much more animated too. He heard breathing from one of them and ran. It was a man, no older than forty with a fedora knocked over to the side, stepped on. There was no boot print, rather a tri-forked footprint. The stamp of the devil.

“What happened here?” Apollo asked. The man looked up to him, he had a missing eye and his mouth could not form sentences.

“Hands.” He repeated.” Hands, hands everywhere. Hands hands hands hands—” So on and on he went in that mantra. He settled down on the floor, one of his arms was missing, one of his foot had been cut along the two skinniest toes. Bits of his flesh along his waist, gone. The dank air was strongest here, the purple aura made it a slog to walk through, but walk he did. He brought his gaze to the many dead and or few moaning, to the edges of the room where the black-suited cultists had died as well. Many of them; cultists, normal people, dead or missing with nothing but a purse or flower or picture frame to show that they were ever here. And was worse, Apollo felt, to not only die but to disappear. 

Most of them were dead, facing upwards, with their hands to the sky or their hands scratching along the floor as if to struggle against a pulling current. 

Apollo could only imagine what it meant. 

He nodded his head and walked, at last, to the very end of the room. A goblet sat on the steps of the stage, he grabbed it before it could roll down. It sat next to the foot of a man. 

Isaac.

He was dead. A giant gash was on his chest. And his body looked deflated. Apollo could not bear to look at the mutilation was partly thankful for the smokescreen of purple, for covering the wound. The corpse lay in shock, nearly nude, with nothing but a white robe on his genitals. He pitied him, this stranger to Apollo's eyes.

He pitied the living too and the dead and with a depressed neck, walked down to the giant wooden doors to break the giant wooden beam that blocked them shut. He punched it, felt his hand bleed but did not care. 

The floodgates were opened, the people came inside, most of them holding their mouths. They were looking for family, then all of a sudden crying for that very same family. None of them, much too preoccupied with Apollo who sulked in the background, who dragged Dion out. Who hoped, in his heart, that he could forever leave this hell.

For the goblet and the corpses began to piece in his head the picture of the incident, one he had read about perhaps, had heard myths about perhaps. 

"They went to hell." He said, briefly, as he tugged Dion along to the graves and the back and the car.

Dion

August 6th, 2017

10:17 AM

“I’m not saying that what you’re suggesting isn’t possible. What I’m saying is that it’s fucking stupid.” Apollo said.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s stupid, what matters is if it’s possible and if it is, that we should do it.” Dion said.

Apollo sighed and looked out from the window sill, in between the small interstices of plastic blinds that rested at a slant and from which dripped down the small trail of dirt. He took his hands from the window frame, brushed them across the wooden table to his rear and stained paper documents, labeled, ‘ARTIFACT FOUND, RICHARD THE LIONHEART, TEUFELSCLOCH #234 REQUESTING PICK UP’. A fax machine was set up in front of it, still warm from the usage. A laptop was clasped shut, depressed, humming from a hard drive that had just spent the last hour transporting and processing the long list of details of the event that transpired yesterday and for that matter, the weeks leading up to it.

And the goblet? The goblet used by the false prophet Alestor (the fool, more like it)? It sat on the kitchen counter like a shiny paperweight. Apollo walked towards it, he was in his underwear, tired, unshaven. He held it up, looked it over from bottom to top. There was something written on it that he could not translate, there were rubies across and a kind of gray stone that sat in between the cup and its stem. Inside was a blackened substance, it had the texture of mercury and stuck to the inside bowl of the cup. Apollo flipped the cup, watched the black substance seep down just below the lip, but no further. It would not fall or drip, as if gravity itself could not wrap her hands around the mysterious liquid.

“How many times do I have to explain this?” Apollo set down the cup. It rung with a low tune. “They’re gone. Gone straight to fucking hell, literally. I don’t mean to be hyperbolic, everyone in that church, those that did not die at least, have gone straight below and there’s nothing left to do with them.”

“I know that, I know that! But, but, but.” Dion blew the hair out of his face. “You said it yourself, there’s still enough juice in there for a round trip. So so so so. That means, we. Uh, you and I, we can go there too. And back.”

“And I’m telling you we’re not.” Apollo looked at him, a bit saddened, more sobered, less raspy than usual. “Do you have any idea what this is, Dion? This isn’t just a mug, alright? This is Witchcraft and black magic, this is the devil and his devices, this is literally a door to hell. A key straight to a plane of existence that should not be available to anyone but the most depraved.”

Apollo shook his head and rubbed his chin.

“Now you tell me, how would a fucking psychologist come about an artifact this powerful? Do you think he just happened upon it at a fucking garage sale? No, this shit was given to him. Or more likely, he was led to it. This cup, this weapon.” He picked up the cup again and rose it high above. “This is what it was all for. This fucking idiot spent a month, at least, killing and collecting as much blood as he could, from as many different people as he could, just to fill it to the brim. And when that was done, when all the dusty dead were laid in their coffins, this fucking guy comes out of the woodwork and transports himself to Hell.”

“Why would he do that? Why would he take so many people with him?”

“Maybe he didn’t know what it did. Maybe he was promised something else. Maybe he just wanted to go. Too bad he had to take half a hundred dumb fuckers with him.”

Apollo sat near the kitchen table, the refrigerator buzzed behind him and below he scratched his naked legs with his feet. The sun was hot outside, like the summer sun ought to be, the cicadas were amusing him with song. The birds chirped, fluttering in warm daylight. The cold, the mist, all disappeared like a bad season, seemingly to pass over to another town in another place far away. The city was okay or at least appeared right, just barely on the line of normalcy. If you could exclude the burn victims agonizing in the dark corners of a busy emergency room.

Aside from the murders. The trauma, the explosions, things were returning back. Where the crime was high, the illiteracy was common, the stupidity rampant, the diseased and the downtrodden, roaming. All in all, the city of Havenbrook was only slightly better off.

Apollo dragged his hand across the table. He went for his box of cigarettes and picked a clean one off, most of them were crooked and looked more like bent straws. Dion sat on his bed with his hands grabbing his thighs. He was shaking a bit, his face twitched and couldn’t decide whether to cry or to scream in dreadful fury. He chose neither. Rather, suffocated the idea and looked crazed, in that rabid wide-eyed glare.

“There’s a way in, there’s a way out. What’s wrong with trying to save them? How is that bad? He asked. Apollo huffed, he carried his head with one hand and fiddled with the cup with the other.

“Teufelsloch.” Apollo said, dismissively almost as if Dion wasn’t even in the room. He took up that aura of a professor. “Ludwig Van Müller coined the phrase some odd six hundred years ago. Called this stupid thing the Devil’s Hole because it supposedly granted you a small visage into the underworld. It’s been a lost artifact for four hundred years. Who would have thought we’d find it here.”

He set the cup down and massaged his face.

“I’m telling you, if anyone was dragged down, they’re not coming back. And I know that it doesn’t matter to you if that’s true. You still want to save them because that’s your nature.” Apollo exhausted smoke from his lungs. “But please, just listen to me. Hell is not something you and I are trained for. Do you know how many people have gotten killed down there? Last year, the Vatican sent an expedition. Around April, fifty-four Vicars in total. The finest hunters around. Only five returned back and of those five, two killed themselves. They didn’t even make it all the way. They stopped on the fourth circle. The fourth, out of nine. Barely four.”

“We don’t have to go that deep.” Dion clasped his hands, he stood. His eyes looked out and a cat-shaped clock framed on a wall rung out ten in the morning with a mechanical meow. Apollo went to it, turned it off and set it aside. “We just need to go wherever they’re at. A quick in and out.”

“And if they’re spread out, if some are deeper than others, what then?”

“They won’t be.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do, alright. I feel it, it’s something in my guts that tells me so. You can call that instinct or God or stupidity but it’s real and true.”

“Well that’s fucking swell, you trust instinct and faith more than Me?” He almost wanted to laugh and stopped halfway through a chuckle. “We’re not going. That’s final.”

“Then I’ll go by myself!” Dion walked to him and snatched the goblet. “I’ll do it alone and you can go home with your tail between your legs, you can be the man who tells the story and nothing more. Just a watcher, just someone who stood on the sidelines who could have done something but didn’t. You’re more than welcome to be that person.”

“I know you find it hard to believe but this but I’m making this decision for your own good too.”

“My own good is not what I care about!” Apollo ran to his bed and looked for his suit or the coat, rather. “What I care about is everyone else’s good. What’s good for the world, for society, not for myself.”

“I’m not going to stop you, am I?” Apollo paced back and forth and starting pulling on his hair and biting his lip. “This is what I warned you about! Very early on. I told you, said it so many times that I exhaust myself just remembering it. I told you: No man should mean too much. I told you to not get attached, to not make this brief sentence in this godforsaken town into a martyr mission. Yet here you are, trying to play as the greatest martyr ever: A fucking idiot who wants to go straight to Hell for the far off chance that you can save someone. You’re throwing away your life.”

“What right do you have to say anything about what I ought to do with my life?” Dion snapped. It sounded more bark than yell. “You’re not living. You? You’re just existing. A worthless existence filled with apathy and nihilism. That’s not a life. It’s a prison sentence. You’re just surviving, that’s all you do, the bare minimum so you can make it day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute. That’s not a life. It’s a waiting line, to the slowest, most dishonorable death anyone could achieve. You’re not living life. You’re not doing anything. You just take up space.”

“You can call it any which way, I call it living smart. I’m not dying for God and I’m not dying for idiots.”

“And is there anything you’d die for? Is there anything you’ve ever cared about?” Dion asked. Apollo stood silent. “Do you know how many people I’ve had to watch die in front me? How powerless I’ve been? Do you know what it looks like to stare down at a lonely, sad, miserable corpse? It’s a terrible feeling. It’s not one I want to have anyone suffer through. There’s nothing worse than living alone and dying alone. Do you understand? I can’t accept the claim that someone, somewhere, is alone and dying and miserable and that I have the power to do something and yet I don’t. How can you accept that? Don’t you feel anything?”

Apollo leaned back in his seat. He was quiet. The cat-clock stopped ticking, it felt like time itself had stopped ticking like every particle in the room had stopped jumping, an absolute zero.

“That silence says a lot about you.”

“Yeah?” Apollo mused. “Like what?”

“It says that you’re a coward.”

“Be quiet.” Apollo said.

“No, I won't. And I won't stay down either because the thought of doing nothing and becoming anything like you frightens me.”

“What do you know!” Apollo snapped back. His veins bulged on his neck. “What do you know of love and sacrifice? You haven’t seen the best things in your life disappear. You haven’t had to find out how painfully minuscule your existence is. Oh, you think you’ve suffered? You saw a bunch of fucks that meant nothing to you die? You think that’s hard? Have you seen your friends die? Have you seen your lovers disappear from your life? No? What right do you have to try and judge me then? You dipped your toes into the cold waters of existence, my friend, and it froze you stiff, didn’t it?”

Apollo felt his eyes swell, a memory in the back of his head seemed to unwedge itself from his skull as if his whole life had been transformed into a library, and there, upon the tallest and thinnest bookshelf, there the book fell from. A very sad book.

“I’ve lived my whole life alone and it wasn’t by choice. It wasn’t me telling the world t go fuck itself.” He rubbed his eyelashes. “It was world telling me, in its abject silence, that I was alone.”

They both fell into reticence. The room felt like the empty blackness of space and them, in the epicenter of the vacuum.

“I don’t even care about what happened to you. How do you expect me to when you’ve never cared about anyone else? Isn’t that sad? You’re like Ouroboros, eating your own tail.” Dion set the goblet down. “But who you were isn’t stopping you from becoming a new person. To do right by these people, considering how far we’ve failed them. If you want to keep pitying yourself, do it, but do it far away from here.”

Dion stopped, took his coat and left the room. Apollo could hear the car pummel through with a roar. He had nothing else in his head but the pulsing anger. He sat down in front of the table with the mess of papers, leaned back and let the air breath unto him the fresh morning air.

Apollo had an idea of where Dion would go, how he would come back and for what. But he, Apollo, for once in his life, had no idea what he would do.

Author's Note: It's almost time for a change in setting! It's a Christmas miracle! In Hell!

Apollo

August 10th, 2017

6:11 PM

He hadn’t left the room for days, hadn’t eaten, had only really taken up space like a piece of furniture in that small dainty apartment. But now it was time to leave and the final check had been left on that lousy small office at the bottom of the apartment block. He checked his pockets and found no cigarettes. Only an empty crumbled box. He had slept mostly throughout the day and now, waking up to a bright sun and the pyramid of orange juice bottles, had found himself uncomfortable and in a small daze. There was a note on the kitchen counter, a note that read ‘I’ve gone to the lake, West end, look for an X on a great on a pine tree, go four paces West, five paces North.’

It sounded like instructions to a pirates chest. And it was, kind of, in a way. For the goblet had been taken (presumably by Dion) and it would be used (presumably by Dion) and what remained of it would be left for Apollo to take. And he supposed that was the end of it all, of Havenbrook and of Dion and of the fifty who were gone. Because there was no coming back from Hell, Apollo was convinced. And there was no way to convince Dion otherwise, as Dion was convinced. And so it was. Apollo crushed the note into a ball and threw it into the trash bin.

He looked for his clothes, what remained of clothes at least. Most of his dressings were in a red suitcase that bulged and spilled with a loose sock. He looked at the floor and figured, upon seeing his coat, to just suit up. So he did, tie and slacks and shoes and all, it felt like a noose around his neck. He put the coat on, realizing he’d have to give it back soon and all the small magical gadgets it hosted for him. It’d be more than that, he was sure, he’d get more than an earful from those terribly strict administrators. Oh well. He’d suffered through worse. He stood from his bed, look at the walls and the floor and so he began his business, with tired eyes, of wiping the evidence of his existence off this city. At least, all that he could wipe of himself. He slapped on a pair of blue gloves and began to wash off the walls and floors. He rubbed the dirty fingerprints off the windows with the smelly ammonia substance, then off the refrigerator handles, then off the walls until everything smelled of urine. He went into the bathroom where he had shaved, where Dion had shaved and pressed against the glass frame. It opened the cupboard and he took out the hydrogen peroxide that sat unopened, purple. He poured it into the sink, into the bath, into the toilet, into the kitchen and flushed, washed, sprayed down until he could hear it move through the pipes. Then he did it again. A third time, making sure every strand of hair that was still there would be contaminated. He had done this time after time in the silence of the night, but now would be the last. He was going to be replaced by another group of Vicars, hopefully, a better group. One who would watch over the situation of the Alestor Cult (though he named it ASTYCLT 238 in the reports) for the next few weeks. Though he was sure no one important was left.

No. No. No, more fighting, he thought. It was time to go. He took a look at the small room, the two bent beds that now sat in a dip like a cup, the cat clock that lay dismantled on a table, the tables disarrayed to give anyone with even the slightest inclination of OCD a mild case of hives. He looked at it all, felt a rather wholesome warmth in him, and closed the door. It was okay, at best, a terrible job, at worst. He drove down the street, it wasn’t busy, nor was it empty, just kind of rattling with renewed strength like the whole town had come back into health from a bad fever. 

He fixed his mirrors midway, brought down his hand to his coat pocket and felt the emptiness. It made him turn. A car honked to his rear as he nearly sidelined someone. Apollo zoomed past cars, heading west, heading for the small store in the front entrance of the city, somewhere near the red-rusty sign and the old congregation of that false priest he had listened to many moons ago.  

Apollo parked a little crooked and hit the curb some and came out of the car with a jog. He stopped when he hit the door and cracked it open to a familiar jingle of bells. There was no name to the store, not outside at least, it just read GENERAL GOODS from neon sign within that had stopped glowing pink. He went through the aisles and looked ahead to an old familiar man who sat on the edge of a cracked glass counter and who shaved away at a block of wood. There were statues around the table, all lined up chronologically from their inception, all of them at a distance similar but as Apollo came forward, as he stepped through the empty and lifeless aisles, he came to the full image of the wooden figurines. They were birds. Growing more grotesque and simple as the statues went on along in a line. It looked like a long chain of devolution, from a highly detailed blue jay to a small blob with wings of a songbird that sat at the end. Apollo looked at the statues then to the Old Man carving away. The Old Man’s glasses were falling off, they teetered by the end of an ear.

“I’d like to buy some cigarettes.” Apollo said. The man said nothing, only kept carving. 

“Hello?” Apollo waved his hand in front of the Old Man’s face. “Could I get some cigarettes.”

The Old Man reached underneath and slammed them above a bed of wood shavings. 

“How much is that?” Apollo stood with his hands in his pockets, a bit far off from the counter and the knife blade.

“Don’t matter. I’ll be closing soon anyway.” 

“Is that so? Doesn’t look like you’re closing, the shelves are still full.”

“Don’t matter. Nothing does. It’s not my business to see to the closing or the selling anymore. I’m just here to be here.”

Apollo looked around. A box cart full of what should have been ice stood next to the glass screens of the refrigerators at the end of the store. The ice had melted. There were only bags now, dripping bags that had pooled water on the far west end of the store. 

“Do you remember me? I was the missionary.” Apollo said. 

“Oh.” The Old Man did not even look up. It didn’t seem like he even moved his lips, he was only kind of there, in space but not in time. 

“I had a frie—” Apollo gulped spit. “I had a business partner with me, at the time.”

“Oh.” The Old Man sat down his finished totem. It was a crow, or at least looked like one with how deeply black the wood was. On this crow was a beak, which pointed down and gave it the appearance of pecking at its own wooden pedestal. It had a wing, only one, the other was clipped and malformed and resembled more of a nub than a limb. There were no eyes, no details, only the rough figure of the specimen. He set it at the end of the line, seemingly finishing the abominations.

“Weren’t you making horses last time?” Apollo asked. The Old Man pushed the cigarettes forward, a polite way of telling Apollo to fuck off. So to speak. Apollo took them, chewed on his tongue and stopped himself from saying anything. He looked to his rear, to a small corner of the building where the back room sprawled, where the door had been left slightly open. Or rather, stuck open. There was a metal shelf stuck in the way of the door, and Apollo stretched his neck to get a better. There were boxes, still, on the floor and food, still, spilling over. And it hit Apollo, like an invisible slap that seemed to knock his brain and eyes out of their holding cells. There was a little girl here once, how could I forget her face.  

Her white face, her blond hair and he thought, briefly, the kind of thought that summons the visceral emotion faster than the abstract, such that in his gut he could already feel the sickening coil of disgust much before he could remember the bleeding body on the top of that burning building. He did remember that girl, though did not want to. 

His brain, his eyes, returned, rubber banded back by his nerves and veins. He felt sick.

He jogged, then paced, then walked. He could feel his eyes turn unintentionally scarlet and he could feel his lungs pressing for air and he closed his mouth to stop that urgent feeling. The feeling of a throbbing head and heart, the feeling of suffocation. He turned away from the Old Man and stood tall and calm to at least appear cordial. He almost reached the door and was one his eighth step, it felt like a plank walk on the end of a ship. Then the Old Man rose. Apollo could hear the leather chair stretch and scratch.

“You’re a missionary, aren’t ya?” The Old Man said, he pulled his head back and almost laughed in a burlesque tone. “Did you ever end up duping anyone into believing that garbage?” 

“No.” Apollo felt stiff as if trapped by a barb wire entanglement. Moving hurt, breathing hurt, living hurt.

“I thought as much.” The Old Man looked down again. He leaned over and from the floor picked up another block of wood, red oak. “Hope is a tough thing to sell.” 

The words sank into Apollo, like an ancient monument inside of him had finally corroded at its stand and fell, it collapsed on him and he could feel the dirt and dust pushing him away. His shoulder hunched over. He moved his hands to a shelf and left the free cigarettes next to a golden bag of potato chips. He left. The doorbell rung. He did not look to anyone as he made it to his car. He sat down, took a breath and fixed his rear side windows, there was a reflection of a stranger in the glass. He couldn’t make out the face, it was foreign to him. He could only tell that the face looked a bit sad, a bit teary eyed, and very pale. He closed his eyes, tried to remember what he looked like, a few words came to mind. Tall, brown, unyielding. He didn’t see any of that. Only the figure of the blond-haired, pale-faced girl.

He needed to drive. Away, anywhere. But where? Anywhere! But. Where? 

And he decided under some uncertain terms that he would just go to the lake, not to do anything in particular, but just to fill his lungs with fresh air. Not to meet or see or do anything, but just to live there on the edge of the body of water. Even if just for a moment. 

A moment, that’s it. He’d just go there for a moment.

The Day the Sun Fell on Apollo

Anno Domini Mors August 10th, 2017

8:14 PM

The car was parked some distance away from the lake, it was underneath the shade of a tree though Apollo did not know why he even bothered. It wouldn’t be long, he thought he knew. He had walked deep into the forest, past brown and white police vehicles and the yellow tape that squared off the fishing store. He went further, deeper, following the edge of the lake. He thought he was here for the cup, only the cup.

He went along the ridges of the mountains where the small pebbles cascaded down like the medieval boulder traps of castles old. The fish in the lake spun in circles and fretted away at the touch of his feet. He covered himself in mud, in water. He sunk himself knee-deep into the lake and came out finally at that tapered end where the frogs croaked to each other and where the fireflies were beginning to collect like small stars. And he came to the tree, with the X. Then further away, to the spot (a spot he had no difficulty in actually finding, because the mound was so big and obvious that anyone could have found it) and he cupped his hands to scoop dirt and inside found the cup in its shallow grave. It was as if there wasn’t even an effort made to hide it, or perhaps not enough time.

And he put it in his hands, rubbed the mud into the gems and shook the gold stem some. There was a drink left, he figured.

He walked away initially and felt the cool air brush against him and push his hair. He must have made it halfway before he felt short of breath, before his legs started to shake and weaken. And he knelt on one leg over the shore.

“He’s probably already dead,” Apollo said. “Or at least in the act of dying.”

He kicked rocks. They split water and forced the fish to swim.

“He doesn’t have a plan to get out, does he?” That wasn’t the question he wanted to ask, he rubbed his chin. “Why did he go in the first place? They’re just strangers. Nobodies. Fifty, a hundred, a thousand, a million. The world turns, doesn’t fucking matter.”

He looked up to the glaring sun that fell into crimson, the red flushed the water face.

“Nobodies who have families and children, who live and who love.” He slapped his leg. “But so what? What is a man owed? A couple seconds out of the womb, a moment to breath and that’s it. What’s a man owed? To live long enough, just barely long enough that you start to miss it when the ride is over? Who fucking cares. The world turns, the solar system spins, the universe expands. Everything goes dead, dying, or missing. Doesn’t matter. Fuck it.” He walked. His head was low and he steered clear from the view of the red glare on the water, the giant circle. His footsteps popped with the sound of stones shooting out from underneath his feet. A lily pad sunk.

“That's just the way it is. You’re not owed life!” He scratched his face. “But who has a right to take it, too? No one does. And yet it was taken. By the dozens. Over and over and over again. Fuck man, fuck!”

His heart beat fast.

“They didn’t live a good life or even a pleasant life. But it was still theirs, to resign or to suffer through. They never got to make that choice...”

He looked at the cup, swished the liquid around.

"What do I want?" He stared at that black substance as if a crystal ball. There was no answer, just darkness and the reflection of Apollo within that darkness.

“I guess I’d like to tell that retard Dion a thing or two, wouldn’t I? Call him for what he is, stupid. And if I could, I'd like to round up as many likeminded people too." He laughed, flat and lifeless. "So we can all take turns calling him a retard.” His lips trembled. “Yeah, I’d like that. That’d be fair in this very unfair world. Wouldn't it?”

Wouldn't it? The words rang into him. His shoulders eased, his heart eased, his eyes eased. All of him seemed to hunch over the small goblet and all of him seemed to fall into it.

"I'd like to help." His heart popped, a kind of balloon. And the stones within his heart, falling, falling down the cliff, down into the water.

And he drank. With his nose pinched, he took a gulp. It had the texture of cough medicine, a slow molasses or mucus that trickled down his throat. It tasted sweet though, a bit like metal too, like he had just been fed candied nails.

Then he vomited. Hard, for minutes. Vomited until there was nothing but stomach acid left, and then some more, until the floor was septic and beginning to smell of toxic waste.

Apollo sat near the lake. He vomited in fits between absolute stillness and angry convulsions. Somewhere in between, he fitted the cup back into his coat. It went like that, him kneeling over the water, his head finally submerged, the fish and the amphibians scrambling away, the birds of prey benched atop the drooping branches with the meek wind that to brushed their feathers.

Then those too, flew away. Far above. For whatever came out of Apollo came in waves and had only begun, that strange, almost bright purple substance. The color of unoxidized blood, and like unoxidized blood, turning red almost immediately upon contact with the outside. But it got worse. It spun in circles, a whirlpool. Apollo’s whole body fell into the water now, dragged by that current, into the deep cloud. He could not see between fuzzy, glossy eyes and the red (now turning black) substance. He only felt it, like tingles, like small fingers scratched all around his body.

Whatever it was, that ink-like substance, he drowned in it.

And when the murk and cloudy darkness cleared. Nothing remained. The fish came back, slowly at first, until the whole school had filled the vacuum. There they danced, danced and swam to the disappearance of Apollo.

And Apollo? Somewhere. He awoke somewhere and only noticed he was alive by the figure of a red ring in front of him, an oddity, that seemed to only retreat further away the closer he himself got and he (Apollo) floating in what he thought or felt was oblivion, though he was wrong, wrong so very wrong, because from those dark corners there seemed to be a materialization. Hands, many hands, and arms that gripped and clawed, that made him gasp and in doing so, releasing that precious air from his body. They grabbed hold of him, outstretched him.

He tried screaming. Nothing, there was no air to break and to vibrate. So he was mute. Bizarre, this infinite nothingness, that dragged and pulled until the very limbs of his body split and de-attached from him.

He would have cried was he not paralyzed with that toxin of fear. He saw his limbs cover the threshold, the little brown bits of him carried with delicate hands that receded and eventually disappeared. They fell into the ring and he did not know what to think; why he was not bleeding, why was he not dead?

Neither dying nor dead simply hurt. His face scrunched into silent agony. It was in between a face of defeat and shock like a tortured man hearing the footsteps of the executioner down the dungeon halls.

His legs were gone, arms too, most of his torso and his hips, disappeared. All that remained was a chest, a neck, a head. A torso that kept spinning in circles, eyes that looked outward to the myriad colors of yellow and red. He was being spied upon. He felt them creep up from that nothingness, those voyeurs. And slowly, they showed their primeval forms, whatever they were, chimera or demon.

A woman (more thing than woman), nude, full-bodied, scaly almost with the elongated neck and fangs across the wide mouth, looked down at him. Another, two men this time, welded together on their singular back who crawled on all fours and who turned themselves like a fallen tortoise. Siamese turtles, it almost made him laugh, he tried to but his eyes wouldn't stop crying.

And then the others came, the long dead and long forgotten, the pained, the pitiful. Those that carried men like dogs with the chains around their necks. Those that begged for mercy, creatures or otherwise. Most of them had no mouths or arms or will to beg, all of them watched Apollo fall.

His body turned like a satellite. He could not say he was facing up, there was no up, he only knew he was flipped and faced something. That amalgamation of disgust. That prime object of revulsion, a monster bloated and whose folds of flesh seeped out like waves of the sea. This creature who looked down Apollo from his broken seat of corpses. A sort of throne, and him, the king of filth upon it, floating too with Apollo. It was pierced, stabbed all across. There were smaller creatures, holding these chains, who stretched his flesh back so a face could reveal itself. This, the only creature that could seemingly stand and form a plane in the nothingness, this, that creature of yellow and green flesh. It revealed its small head, it revealed its gold teeth and its uneven eyes that looked carefully at Apollo.

“Toy.”

Was that what it said? He thought. His face went cold. The arm came closer, dripping skin upon him like a shawl of rotten flesh and past the arm, Apollo saw it. That infantile greed that brimmed in the creature's eyes.

Fortunately, it was too late. The last hand came to grab Apollo, came to send him down through the red ring and he did not know what to feel, only knew the storm of emotions that capsized his courage. Shock. Disgust. Curiosity? He stopped thinking. He couldn't bear to think. He closed his eyes and fell asleep and whispered to himself with silent words: What a strange thing, to have your soul amputated from your body.

Apollo

Apollo awoke with hands around his neck. He gasped and tasted sweet ocean water that burned as it came through his nose and mouth, it had a bitter aftertaste, like wine. Drinking and burning and confused, Apollo struggled with the firm hands still ringing his neck. He turned to the assailant. Phantoms, ghosts? They looked like ghouls, malnourished and deformed, rotting and vile looking, as if the very waters around them had turned these ghouls into mush. His stomach was full and at last, in that brink of death, he made an effort. Apollo gripped the hand. He felt the bony muscular limb and snapped it off him. It shattered. Glass, ancient bone, whatever this ghoul was was fragile and he saw that limb drop down to the bottom floor, to an off-putting darkness, where myriad glares had begun to appear. Corpses, the dead, bitter faced and angry. He thought immediately, knew immediately where he was: the long river Styx, where the dead do not sleep, where they kill and murder ‘till end-times. The restless river Styx.

He swam. As fast as he could, he did not check his body, did not even inspect the claw marks and grazes that found themselves around him. He burst into that frantic, almost flailing swim. They came after him, five, six, he couldn’t tell, only heard the muffled wail and only noticed the bubbles of their screams as they rose up from below and fizzled him.  

He broke the water, at last. Nearly jumped out of it too and clung to the nearest stone, both hands clawing for the strange black rocks around him. He felt another grab. He felt the chill of wet skin on fresh air, and felt it too of death's grab upon his feet. He could hear them now without that ocean filter. He could hear the high pitch, crazed, almost choking sound of the violent dead. He looked back. They were nude, deteriorating, drunk with violence. 

“Get the fuck off me.” Apollo brought his free leg up and then down on the persistent hand around his ankle. It broke into bone, then into dust and steam finally. Apollo crawled to high ground, though his body was low and properly balanced. He was watching the smoke, watching the ghouls and fiends desperate to latch on to him.

He saw how they scratched the stone and how they struggled to rise up the causeway. After a while Apollo pitied them. An even longer while after that, he began to be bored of them and instead looked to his surroundings. To the hexagon shaped stones that sprawled the shoreline as if a honeycomb had been split and desecrated on the river bank. Apollo turned, he heard splashing. Inside each section of stone was a small pool of water, orange colored. It felt slimy.

He climbed and made it ten meters high. When he came across flat land, he stopped and fell on his knees. His hands were spread forward and his body dripped with sweat and blood and that sticky water. It must have been heavy too, because Apollo collapsed chest first onto the floor. He put two hands on his face and rubbed the water away, then he turned his body and held his chest and counted his heart until it fell down to gentle rhythm. It was too much. The creatures in that abyss, the monsters in the river. Too much, too heavy. So he laid, his body on its back and upon that line of land where the black geometrical stone broke into gray dirt. It stuck to him and colored his suit white. He sighed, scraped some off and thought that perhaps he was making it worse. So he let go and looked to the sky. No clouds? No color either. It was beige, gray? He couldn’t tell.  The only object of interest, the only fixture of light seemed to come southward, where a giant red ring rested. It was black and familiar. Perhaps the same ring that had taken him here? It was near the horizon and sat immovable and from the low angle Apollo was watching it, gave the appearance of sucking in the river water. Like a faucet drain of filth.

He heard noise. More groaning, the gritting of teeth. He faced the waters and looked upon the dead that fought amongst each other. They gnawed, punched, bashed each other's head with an irresistible desire. He saw them dead and mutilated, saw them turn into smoke and rise high. Then he saw the smoke materialize, again, into more anguished souls. They dropped down, like rain. And the river, flowing down to that red ring as its natural ebb. This was the ecosystem of this unholy dominion.  

He was in purgatory. The truth didn’t make him comfortable, it only served to drive the cold knife through his bones, into the marrow.  He shivered. He looked away and was about to turn onto that flat dirt and to the great expanse in front of him. But he heard the sound, again. From the river, again.

A creaking of wood. A breaking of water. A boat. The size and strength of which shook the river into waves that slammed against the shore. Apollo put his hand in front of his face, he could feel the wet drizzle wash over him. He saw the dead too, latching onto stone only to immediately be dragged back. His eyes steadied. They narrowed in, back into the mist and back to the lanterns lit upon the sides of the boat. It was massive, yes. He could tell, even though it was only a shadow in the far distance. He could tell by the giant post and sail that cast a shadow over him and across water.  

What was that sound? He leaned in. He could hear it deep and steady, like a long stretching foghorn. 

And it came out. The onyx colored wood, the wide curved body, the pounding souls that colored the bottom red with beatings and slamming. 

It was Charon. Archiver of the dead. Charon, who sat fused to the ship, the living figurehead. His upper torso was out, erect upon the front of the ship. It looked heavy, he looked heavy. Muscular, disgustingly so, white-eyed as if he had two searchlights transplanted into his sockets. 

Charon was all at once, captain, crew, and ship. And he reached around with his wide body and picked a soul amongst the passengers who all screamed and shouted. They were normal people, dead people, Apollo thought. 

He picked a man, young, twenty perhaps. He dropped him into the waters rather carelessly. Apollo watched the body fall and watched the souls rip him apart, eat him, like sharks at fresh carrion. He brought his eyes back. Froze. Charon was glaring at him, twirling his long beard, twitching his pointed ears. He rose an oar from his side and pointed it to Apollo. He looked as if to throw it at him, but no. He pointed down and twisted his neck into a crane as he looked over the river. Then he fell into it. 

Charon brought his oar up, high above him, and down, to beat and break the violent dead. This was his job as watcher and caretaker of the souls in purgatory. 

Charon disappeared as quickly as he appeared. The shadow cast above Apollo spread out, then went away. Apollo brought his hands to his head and stared out into the wide waters, he couldn’t anything, only noticed a few red and orange spots, but nothing. It seemed endless.

“You missed your chance.” Apollo’s neck hairs rose. His fist tightened and he moved his hands into his vest and in, to his sword handle. “Charon could have taken you back.” 

A Striped Hyena stood behind him. White-furred with a long black streak across its uneven spine. 

“Who are you?” Apollo asked. 

“Me? Isn’t it obvious? I’m just a Hyena.” It pushed its head up to laugh, it’s mouth resembled a megaphone. “What else could I be, silly?”

“I’m not asking about your form, I’m asking about your nature.” He drew his sword. “Now, either you tell me who you are or I won’t even think twice about cutting you in half.”

“It looks a bit smaller than it should.” The Hyena laid down, breathing and calm. It grinned. “Your sword, I mean.”

“It looks bigger up close, believe me.” 

“Right, I’m sure.” It giggled, rolled a bit and covered itself in dirt. “What an awful question? My nature? My nature. Well, my nature is your nature, since we’re both dogs of circumstance. Children of the earth and of God. And I figure that makes us brothers? Or father and son? Lovers, maybe?”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Not the one you want, but the one that is.”

Apollo grit his teeth. He looked at the small animal and how it rolled on its side, exposed its stomach and its black-spotted abdomen. It licked itself, scratched its flesh and unhinged its maw into a smile. 

“I don’t have time to fuck around with you.” Apollo spat and began walking towards that sandy expanse, where the dunes had collected into sharp curved lines and where the small bushes had curled and dried up into barbed balls.

“Which road will you be taking?” The Hyena asked.

Apollo stopped and looked back, confused. 

“Ah, it probably doesn’t matter. All roads lead to Astyanax.” It laughed again, it sounded worse from a distance, morphed and nasally. He wanted to get a word in, to ease a sense of distress growing in him, but didn’t. His eyes were burning. The sand-carrying winds blew. Apollo could feel his lips dry, could feel that grating feeling upon his flesh from the small particles that hit him. He nodded his head - Just stay silent - and walked, as far from the river and as far from the Hyena that his feet could take him. 

“Or was it all roads lead to Troy? Rome? Which was it?” The Hyena said. His head shook to whimsical rhythm. The winds were not as harsh to the animal, or perhaps the animal was too harsh for the winds. Whatever, it didn't matter, Apollo thought. 

He walked. Faster, more frenzied.

“Too many empires, too many names. Two to pair, two to meet. The third will come across the reach. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Three for one. One for all. One to die, one to eat.”

So it went, on and on through those desert sands.

Jeremiah

Sand. Sand in his mouth. Sand in his eyes. Sand in his pants. It came out of him as he stood, it came into him with each sweeping foot step that shook up dust. He was with the boy, Bartholomew. And they were somewhere. Somewhere they never had the benefit of thinking. For if they thought, even for just a moment, they would have realized they were doomed and that this effort (the large jog they broke into it in this very large desert) was for nothing. 

There were small pockets of dirt and green like cut up pieces of paradise. But nothing more, just desert and as Jeremiah fell to his knees, he realized, ash. The soot was in his mouth like two used briquettes had been stuffed into his cheeks.

“Now, if you’re going to die the least you could do is die somewhere away from me.” A voice said behind the two. He was coming up from a dune, his black tie was wrapped around his forehead, his blazer wrapped around his hips. 

“I'm only saying so because they’re coming. I know it, you know it. So it's best you start running.” This character was breathing loud, his voice sounded strained and broken.

“Ishmael.” He took a breath for each beat in the word. 

“I told you," Ishmael coughed "Call me Sam."

“Sam. Maybe we should slow down for the kid.”

“For the kid? Fuck the kid.” He walked over to Bartholomew who was on his side, sinking into the sloping sand. “Stand up. You hear me? Stand up or you're dead.”

“He’s not lazy.” Jeremiah pushed his hands down on the floor and lifted himself. “He's not stupid either. He's tired. We’ve been running for hours.”

"And I'll run for hours more so long as it gets me away from th-"

Sam put his finger up, in that school teacher disciplinary manner. He wanted to say something, to get at least a letter in. But stopped. His large brow pointed up, then behind him. They could hear the footsteps. He moved again. He heard them, from another direction. All around them, they all heard them, even the sand that shook and spilled downwards to them. 

They were quivering now. All of them. The child, the youth and the old man. It looked like a current of voltage had run through them. They might have been, considering how charged and edged they looked, how red their eyes were and how quickly their faces turned red with life as they ran. South, that's where they bolted. 

Jeremiah wanted to reflect, even in that intense jog of his. He wanted to think back to how it began, those purple hands, that otherworldly grasp, the boy and the two men that landed on that shore. How they hid in caves and now, how they ran for dear life.  Ran from the things that sounded like banshees and that stormed the lands with spears in their hands and the high shout of war. Those things, those things they ran from. As fast as he could. 

Bartholomew fell. He landed on his side. Sam ran past him, Jeremiah stopped, picked him up and put him, horizontal, on his shoulders like a log, stiff, lifeless. He could feel the faint breaths of the boy down his neck. They felt like whip lashes, and him, Jeremiah, the horse that burdened on with feet that sunk deeper and deeper. 

“Where are we running to?” Jeremiah asked in that strained desperate voice.

“Doesn’t matter. Just run.” Sam slowed to gasp.

He was right though. It didn’t matter. 

They were already caught and only making it harder.

Jeremiah stepped over a small creature. A bug or a plant? He couldn’t tell, only knew it was hard shelled and made a gushing sound as it flattened underneath his feet. It looked like a scorpion or a small spider perhaps, and it made him trip. Both the boy and Jeremiah, who fell and rolled downhill. It must have been fifteen meters of a tumble before they stopped. And when he awoke, with sleepy eyes and a dreadful hot flash across his face, he looked for Bartholomew. He was next to him, on his stomach, vomiting a bit. And Sam was ahead. Running for a bit before coming to the top of another dune. Then stopping all of a sudden, then collapsing on his knees and looking back at Jeremiah with wide eyes. 

Sam’s whole body fell, that scrawny bony body of his with the long neck that looked a bit crooked to the left. It all fell and crumpled.  He looked like a brooding vulture. Starved, a bit desperate.

Jeremiah crawled up to meet him. He came to the sight that made Sam fall. It made his jaw drop for a bit, made him drool too. There was a group of five men - No, not men. At least not anymore - Demons, perhaps that was the accurate word to call those looming figures. Eight feet tall, bulked, as if five large trees with armor had uprooted themselves. 

The group of five demons looked to the trio, from below the dune. They smiled, their teeth were jagged like a serrated knife. Their feet were webbed and their tails were forked and their tongues were long and frantic as they fell and dressed their lips wet.  They had no horns like Jeremiah had imagined in his childhood, no, they had spots of rotten flesh and giant black rings around their eyes and hair either that grew wildly in patches around their scalps. Their skins were sickly looking and they all looked spotted. Pasty white, diseased green. One of them was missing a jaw. The wound was still there, it had puss coming out off it that gave him the appearance of salivating. This jawless fiend pointed to the group. The other four moved on towards Jeremiah and company, their faded red skirts moved gently, their armor, not so much. 

They were legionnaires. Or at least they wore the decore, wore the pride too, as they stepped up with armored high chests. Their movements were slow, trained, careful. It made the three timid, it made them feel small.

Jeremiah could hear the metal clank. It sounded like war. Like the bashing of steel, the crushing of bone. 

He turned. The others that had chased them had arrived, one of them plucked Bartholomew from the neck of his shirt and dragged him, ripping the blue cotton a bit as they yanked him about and put him (Bartholomew) under their armpits. Jeremiah stood, he wanted to kick, to punch, to do anything. He was slapped down. He didn’t even feel it, it didn’t register as pain. That fist that brought down on his head, that broke his nose into two, that left him ringing on his left ear, it didn’t feel like anything but a strong pull. As if gravity had forced him down. It took a while for him to feel the blood of a bruised forehead, even longer for him to scream. A toothless scream that sounded more like a whistle. He saw his molars fall, he tried grabbing them but was pulled up. 

“Three more.” One of the demons said. A large tumor-like growth was on his neck, like an oversized Adam’s apple. He had a raspy voice.

“I wonder how long they’ll live.” Another said. This one had a helmet on and long red plumes that swayed left and right. That one had a soft voice and it made it easier for Jeremiah to sleep, at last, a dreamless sleep.

Sam watched them all. The unconscious bodies carried about, the pain and blood coming off of Jeremiah's face. It made him weak in the knees, it made him docile and he sat in the sand. He got the best treatment of all of them; a slap across the face, a nosebleed and a long bronze chain strapped around his waist. 

Sam looked down at his hands. There were no cuffs. He began to process the scenario, opportunity, the idea to run again. Run far away. His forehead began to sweat and he thought, on the third rattling of the chain to risk it all. He bit his lips, it was coming, that third rattle.  He brought his face up. 

His blood froze. 

For Sam gazed up to a sharp, devious smile and the hot breath and drool that caressed his face. He knew it then. Ah, it came to him! In that private fear, in those dark corners of his mind. It was all a statement. The chase, the beating, the imprisonment. It was all a mockery as if to say to him and to anyone else who dared, what chance do you really have? 

He looked back down, for whatever idea Ishmael "Sam" Johnson had that moment, died.

Apollo

“How long are you going to keep following me for?” Apollo looked back to the Hyena who made circles in the sand with his tail and his ass, who kicked away giant clouds of golden dirt. He was like a child at the beach, destructive, maliciously kicking down the sand castles. 

“I won't stop until you meet him.”

“Astyanax? I don’t care about him. My concern isn’t with him, it's with the people he's taken hostage.” Apollo returned to walking. The land was flat and he could see from the distance the small plateaus that sat on the horizon. They looked like stone tables. 

“And do you think you’ll be able to avoid him?” The Hyena scratched his abdomen with his hind legs. “I’d be surprised if you could. Nothing lives without his knowledge that lives without his consent.”

“Is that so? Real Napolean type, that guy. Maybe he should find a hobby.”

“This is his hobby. One he takes very seriously, haven't you noticed? The lack of people on this island?”

Apollo stopped to look. He felt stupid, of course there was nothing, nothing but desert. He shook his head and walked forward, a mountain was coming upon his view and he put his hand against the orange stone and worked around the volatile terrain, the boulders lodged on the side and on the floor. The Hyena was jumping around, he looked experienced.

“You consider this an island?”

“A small one, too. There are bigger lands, as you’d imagine. Purgatory has to be a giant place to accommodate all the dead. You should see how dense it can get after a war.” It laughed. Apollo frowned. 

“Am I to assume that Astyanax is responsible for the population? Does he kill them, any unlucky soul stuck here?”

The Hyena laughed. A wind blew past Apollo, he felt sand in his mouth.

“Kill? Don’t be silly. They’re already dead.” The Hyena dropped and began to lead Apollo through a small underpass beneath the mountain. There were arches and encrusted inside were Topaz gems, stalagmites that pointed down. There was no shining light reflected though, everything was overcast.

“But you're different, aren't you? You're still alive, not like these marked men.”

“Marked?”

“Those that come here by destiny’s call are marked. Those who come unnaturally, like you, aren’t. It’s simple, dummy. You’re trespassing. And that means you don’t get the same treatment as the dead. So if you were to be killed here, well…” His snout came down, his mouth was wide and his tongue slipped out, red and swollen. “Well, even I don’t know what would happen to you. Maybe you’d be sent to that atheist oblivion? Maybe you’d be trapped? Saved? Reborn? Who knows. Do you want to find out?”

“No.” Apollo walked past him. His stare was strict and disciplined as he spotted a small bundle of tarps in the distance. “I get the point. I die, I'm done. What happens if you’re marked though? If you suffered that so-called, natural death twice?”

“Supposing you never got sent lower into the deeper circles, suppose you didn’t get placed in the river Styx. Well, you’d just be reborn and dragged out of the waters. That’s the cycle here, a death and rebirth. And forgetting. And repenting. And with time and hope...”

“A ticket. To heaven? If it exists.”

“Skeptic 'till the end. Here you are facing death and you still can't fathom the idea of heaven."

"Some things are just too good to be true."

"You might be right. Maybe." The Hyena's eyes wandered for a bit. Melancholy, almost. "No, most people get reborn. Reincarnated. New body, same soul.”

“Great, you get another shot at fucking up life. That’s just great.” The winds eased, his eyes were already red though. Red, throbbing, hurting from sand and dirt. It made him teary-eyed.

“You still didn’t tell me what any of this has to do with Astyanax. Or why there aren’t any people here.”

“There are people here. Just few of them, fewer than there ought to be.”

“Doesn’t matter to me. What’s your point with all this? What do I care about the cycle of death and rebirth?”

“Most people would be excited to know salvation awaits them. I thought you were Catholic?”

“Most people are stupid. The same fucking soul, the same fucking person making the same fucking mistakes. It doesn’t matter how many tries you get at life. It’s all a shot in the dark and you’re more likely to put yourself in a worse position being reborn than a better one. How’s that for a cosmic gamble? How's that for salvation?” Apollo looked back to the Hyena who sat with its ass on the floor and his head high. “Why would you guess I'm Catholic?”

“I just figured you’d be Catholic. Your friend was at least.” The Hyena said.

“What are you-” His mouth opened, his tongue was arid. It had white spots growing on it, near his tonsils. “Who are you talking about?”

“The man in the suit like the one you’re wearing. Right? Your friend, Dion. He went to fight the good fight a long time ago. I wonder how he's doing.” The animal was smiling, it seemed to revel as it licked itself and chewed on its arm.

Apollo didn’t know how to feel. His eyes became spastic. Around him were two giant stretches of stone if you could call them that, they looked like walls. Giant stone mountain walls that stretched miles left and right, with no end in sight. There was a crack though, a small valley where the wind passed. It was behind Apollo.

“Where’d he go?” Apollo reached for the animal;s throat. It kicked dirt at Apollo. 

“Don’t get so touchy! You haven’t even taken me out on my first date.” The creature laughed, its body was low to the ground as it beamed its yellow ringed eyes at Apollo. “I’ll tell you where he's going. That's the point. He went North.

“And what the fuck is Northward. There’s no compass. No time, no anything!”

“I’ll give you a tip. And don’t forget it, sweetie.” His laugh sounded like a howl, it was booming in the small enclosure between the two mountain ranges. “That hole in the sky. You see it, don’t you? It rests South in the sky. If you want to go North, just walk away from it. Run away from it, the further you are from that dark pit, the closer you are to Astyanax. And through him, your exit. You still have that cup, don’t you?”

Apollo’s glare focused in on the hound. He must have not been more than two meters wide but held in him all that grief and tension, it made Apollo freeze.

“Who the fuck are you?” He drew his sword, he rested it on his shoulder. His feet dug into the sand. 

“We’ve already been through this line of questioning.” His voice sounded warped. Was it the wind, the echo of the narrow valley? “I’m just a Hyena.”

“Bullshit, what’s your name?”

“What’s a name?” The Hyena asked. Apollo swung, out came the cloud of destruction and the small stones that shot out like shrapnel. He lifted his sword, there was nobody, no animal, just a hole and empty space and a few elongated creatures that scattered. The Spotted Hyena was behind him now. It did not growl, did not breath, simply looked on with its beady eyes. 

“A name is what tells me whether you're a friend or a foe. That's what it is to me. Now speak up before I chop your ass in half.” Apollo felt spittle coming down his chin.

“It’s a label then? An identifier? Isn’t that a bit too close minded for you? I can be anything you want, honey.”

“Call it that nasty human habit, call it a biological tick, call it whatever you want motherfucker. Cataloging the good and the bad is a great way to avoid trouble. And you, you are trouble. So you tell me right now where I put you, which file cabinet do you belong to, fucker? Who are you?”

“I’m an angel, aren’t I? Otherwise, your little cat string would have gone off, wouldn’t it have?” 

Apollo felt the chill down his spine as all revelations usually do, inspire fear. Yes, why hadn’t his little string gone off, rattled, shaken with that unhinged excitement? It should have worked, more so down here in Hell and Purgatory than any other place, more so with this creature in front of him. But it didn't. It was mute, dead. Why hadn't it gone off? What was the Hyena?

“I probably have as many names as there are stars in the universe. I don’t understand half of them though. They always call me the deceiver, the liar. But to you, Apollo, to you I am a friend.” It laughed, innocent and gentile. Or at least tried to appear as such. “Though I guess that’s a point of contention isn't it? The lying friend! How about that? Hah.”  

Apollo walked around the creature, began to calculate his range and his method of attack and his speed and his momentum. The Hyena, however, simply rolled. Rolled in the sand.

“It’s not like you’ve been honest, Apollo. Or should I call you by your real name? Well, as real as any name could be. Your first name, I believe. The one your degenerate crack whore of a mother gave you. Oh, what was it again? Hmm? August? Agustín? Yes! Agustín Octavio del Rio Jr. Did I pronounce that right? My, my that's a Mexican mouthful if-” 

Apollo swung again. Faster, much more malicious. His nose was flared, his eyes were crimson and shown through the cloak of gold dust. He was pointing that blade, pointing it to the sound of the voice, for he had struck nothing and in missing, seemed to feed his anger more.

“I thought you were the cool one? Even Dion seemed more together."

Once again he swung. The earth cracked and broke. 

“Who are you?” Apollo screamed.  

“I am the Virgil to your Dante.” Apollo swung at the voice. 

“The Obi-Wan to your Luke.” Again, this time with more gusto. 

“The Alfred to your Bruce Wayne.” Apollo turned. He felt his ankle twist and he fell face first into the desert. His sword spun a bit in the air before it injected itself some meters off from him. It looked like a nameless tombstone.

“Well, that’s fantastic! I was running out of examples.” The Hyena seemed to materialize out of that cloud of smoke. 

“What do you want?” Apollo asked, mouth full. His voice was shaken.

“I want what's best for my son. Though I must say, I am rather disappointed. I thought I reared you better, but it seems like you still have some ways to go before you’re ready to kill that man.” He walked towards the blade and bit the handle. He dragged it along the sand, it made a whistling sound as the wind passed.  The Hyena dropped it a few inches away from Apollo, though Apollo had no urge to grab it. “There are some things about yourself you still need to confront. That's kind of obvious though, don’t you think? And I'm not talking about your useless father or your useless mother. They're dead to you. I know that. No, I'm talking about your surrogate and more importantly, your friend."

“How do you know-” He didn’t bother finishing. He wasn’t even sure if the Hyena was real, maybe it wasn’t, maybe it was. The id manifest? Just an Illusion? His self-contempt materialized, finally, in this hellish plane. He thought that for a moment, tried to persuade himself at least that the Hyena was just an anomaly of the mind. But he felt a knock on his forehead, a paw that bopped him softly on the face. 

“Your friend had much more courage than you. It’s a shame you didn’t see him off, you could have learned something from him. You could have copied that big heart of his.” He howled. “And only his heart! He doesn’t have much of a brain, from what I could tell.”

Apollo laid flat on the earth, eyes open and staring into that hole in the sky. It seemed like something desperate, something sad and small was trying to escape from his pouty, black eyes. 

“You’re an important investment to me, Apollo. And it’d be great if you could show that same enthusiasm.” 

“That’s a lot to demand from a stranger.” Apollo coughed. His throat felt clogged.

“You’re no stranger to me, you’re my child. And one who’s needed a bit of discipline for a long while now.” The Hyena began to walk away. “This is all a loving warning, you see. So why don't you let me help? Heed my words. Tattoo them into your skull if you have to. You'll travel past this little valley. You'll survive too, it won't be easy though.  Northeast you'll find a barrack, find your survivors. If there are any, if not, make your peace and move on. Keep going north until you hit the dome.  Then you can see for yourself that fragile kingdom Astyanax has built, one of sand of one of hubris. I'm sure by then, he'd have found you. Go to him. Kill him. And listen well, don't you listen to him. No matter how much of yourself you see in him, remember this, he must die.”

“So that’s what you want. An assassin.” Apollo stood with both of his hands.

“No. I wan a messenger. I want a flag bearer. I want you to become a better man.”

"Why? What do you have invested in me?"

"What does the father want, of all things small and large?" The Hyena asked. Apollo stayed silent. "He wants to be killed by the son, he knows that to be his end."

"Well, if you just stood still, I could have done that for you right away."

"A symbolic murder. You know that. I want you to become a better person than I was." 

“And I want you to never talk to me again.”

“Wanting and willing are very different, Apollo. You need my help.”

“I don’t give a fuck about your help. Stop being so esoteric, give it to me straight. What's our relationship?” The sand was coming off his clothes. Apollo stood hunched. 

"I'll tell you if you survive. Sure." The Hyena unhinged its mouth. Its teeth were pronounced, sharp and stained yellow.
 
Apollo looked at him, he could feel his legs turning, begging him to move. His eyes wouldn't turn away though. It took some effort, a push by the wind, a distant cry, to finally make Apollo move towards the valley. The Valley where the tarps flowed gently on metal lines and where the little-broken huts of villages past sat aging in the sand. 

The Hyena looked on. His tail was wagging. He sniffed the air and began to dig a small foxhole. When he was ready, when Apollo was far and away and entering the shadowy valley, he sat on his bed. A grin on his face.

Apollo

He traveled long inside of that small crack, in between two monoliths of stone that went endlessly both sides. It was the only crack, the only opening, the Hyena had said. So this was the way, the only way, through this narrow and flat stretch. He had walked for hours or thought so, it might have been days. Time felt odd here, in this place. It might have been weeks, he didn't know for he felt neither hunger nor thirst, only a growing tiredness that gnawed on him. However long it was (and it was long), he was thankful when he finally found the sediments of life. Buildings and huts, small caves along ridges of both high walls that had clothes and tarps flowing from their openings. He smiled for a bit, then it fell again.

There was a buzz, like static in the air. He ignored it. For the hamlet was dead. It was killed long ago and left to rot upon the salted dirt. He could see the litter of white, the small specks upon the yellow sand. Maybe it was ash, the cremated corpses of the villagers. He looked around, the two walls of stone were winding and the city too, winding. Was it a village? Or a city? Whatever remained was too little to tell as to the history of this land. 

He climbed to one of the ridges where a blue tarp flowed out like laundry. It was the entrance to a small enclave, a home once. He saw the remnants of one at least, a black stain from a firepit at the center of the cave, some furniture broken into wood pieces, furs of animals that looked strange and foreign to him.

Apollo lifted the tarp and walked further into the cave, there were more stains. Human-sized stains clinging to the edges of the cave. He turned around and walked back and stepped on something. He looked beneath his foot. It was a doll. A doll made from husk and hair.

It brought upon that eerie chill, like a cold wind to his nape.

He passed by the tarps and the caves, the small houses growing more dessicate as he went on along the path until finally, he came to the hub. A large expanse, a fat little circle in this small little narrow way.

He looked past it. There was an exit, he was beginning to see the rest of the desert again. 

"What a strange feeling. I'm glad to see sand." He looked back, there was no Hyena though. No friend, no one and stepped through.

The houses were a mishmash of brick and dirt and the makeshift lid of thatch twigs covered them. Odd little huts that he inspected more closely, most of them were caved in. Stranger, they showed no wear of war or fire. The walls and beams were covered instead with penny-sized holes. It was as if they were nibbled, devoured. He left to the furthest building, the one least destroyed. He entered the low door frame, there was nothing covering it and he could hear a brick collapsing behind him, the loud thump and shatter. Apollo sighed. He was glad he wasn't superstitious.

His eyes scanned the room, studied the wooden beams that snapped at the touch. The dirt felt loose. There were jars around him, giant orange urns with painted histories along the sides. Though they were eroded. Apollo rubbed his chin.

“Red-figure pottery.” 

A vase moved. The sound of a shimmy. It was called to his voice.  

"Hello?"

Another rattle. He heard its direction must clearer, walked towards hit. Apollo's hand was inside his coat, he could feel the handle of his blade. He came to the urn that shook, that vibrated and waited. Like a practical joke, a prank, he waited for the load and spring of the clown.  

“Who are you?” Apollo said to the urn. There was a wobble, a turn and rumble that indicated the weight of something heavy from within. He walked closer, his footsteps vibrating and sending a silent signal to the urn to shake again. 

“I’ll say it one last time.” Apollo began. He made that sinister whistle of the blade as he drew it above of his head. A voice responded, muffled. It was enough to make Apollo bring his blade down with a wide arc, collapsing the floor beneath him. The thing inside the urn now shook violently as it fell lopsided, into the hole Apollo had just made.

Apollo knelt down, grabbed the top and inspected the shaking vase. It was not made of clay, nor of porcelain, rather some kind of hard black metal. The orange drawings were faded, they looked like strips of broken film. He could vaguely make out a man in the painting, a man holding a spear and commanding another man to kneel. 

Apollo narrowed his eyes. He brought his hand to the top of the voice at what seemed like a plunger. He swore he could hear buzzing, he swore the wind was bringing in the sound. He ignored it, instead, went back to the urn and to what was making the noise. He shoved his fingers inside of the top of the voice. A layer of wood above a layer of metal, he penetrated both until his fingers touched whatever was inside. It was wet, shaking, warm. 

In one move, Apollo flexed and draw his arm back and watched the lid fly in the air like a disk, watched it float like those old inspired UFOs and saw it stab through the thatch top ceiling of the house. Or what was left of the ceiling. It was stuck in there, the half disk. And Apollo stood again and walked away from the urn. He picked his sword on the way out, he could feel the steel crack and snap off like the molting of a serpent. 

Then Apollo waited. He was patient on his side of the house, where the roof came down like a small lip and where the hay poked at his hair.  There in the darkness, with his crimson eyes, he waited for whatever was inside of that vessel to come out.

He heard it at last. That scream, that moan of a crazed man. He saw a hand come out, pale and loose-skinned. The flesh looked waterlogged, the smell was terrible. A fermented smell of fish, then of something sour, like long due cheese curds. It looked toxic, this crustacean of a man as he came out of his shell.  He looked oily. His eyes lashes were white and he looked away from the light in the sky and ran to the other end of the house where the shadows were. 

“Πίσω τέρας!” The man screamed.

“What is that? I don’t understand.”

“Πίσω, είπα, Πίσω!”

"Can you understand me?" There was nothing but more shouting, more screeching. Apollo spat. He nodded his head and walked towards the urn man.

Apollo extended his hands and thought to grab the man's hairs before he realized he didn’t have many if anything. They were more like threads, loose hanging black threads. He grabbed the back of the man’s head instead and felt his drooping flesh. To Apollo, it felt like wet pigskin.

“Sorry. I can't be fucked." Apollo said. "I don’t mean to trespass, but I need to get something straight and I hope you don't mind my detective work.” 

The man stared frightened, trying to move away. His neck was weak though, fragile. He did no more than shake like a newborn. “You don’t know what I’m saying, do you? Well, that's fine, word association is good enough."

"Hell." Apollo said. Nothing, more screaming. 

"Hyena?" The man fidgeted.

"Astyanax?" There was silence. Apollo felt it, the pulse of a lead. He shook the man."Astyanax? Do you know who Astyanax is? Do you know where he's taken the people? Anything?"

The man was wide-eyed.

“Μην με σκοτÏŽνεις. έδωσα τα πάντα στους ανθρÏŽπους σου.” The voice rose from mumble to gasping scream. “Μην με σκοτÏŽνεις. Μην με σκοτÏŽνεις. Μην με σκοτÏŽνεις!”

Apollo let go.

“What was I expecting?”  

He watched the urn man struggle out, he watched him squirm and shield himself with a small piece of wood from the corner of the room. Apollo did not move, only studied him. What did he expect, really? This man was just a long-dead soul. There were no answers from the foreign creature.

So Apollo sat in that demure pose, with his arms slumped and his neck craned. And the urn man looked at Apollo, studied him just as much. 

And the buzz of the air was still there, and Apollo slumped over, his sword sitting beside him all broken and cracked. The urn man passed him glances every now and then, watched him as he went underneath the disk in the ceiling and lifted his hands to reach it. He couldn’t get to the lid. 

“He said the barracks would be north. He said I’d find him after that but I just don’t get it.” Apollo said to himself. “I gotta find the people I came to save. I gotta find Dion.” 

It was whisper speak, the self-argumentative talk of a man fighting doubt. And the buzz in the air was still there, and the urn man had none of it. He was jerking around, shaking. And he was growing more distressed, more afraid, more talkative to the point where at last he came to Apollo and shook his shoulders and pointed to that disk in the ceiling.

“What?” Apollo looked up. There was pointer finger on the roof. “You want it back?”

There were more greek ramblings. It sounded fast, cartoonish. The urn man kept shaking and pointing. At last, Apollo yielded. He struggled up, went over and lifted the disk from the roof. He passed it to the urn man who looked it, half bent and folded and crumbled like uninspired origami. The man looked at it, groaned and peaked out from the holes on the sides of the house. His eyes were tearing up, Apollo couldn’t understand much of it, only saw it, a growing tension.

“Well? What is it this time?” He asked. The man gasped. He scratched his face until it bled, Apollo stepped back. Half his body was out the door frame and he heard it now, that intense buzzing in the air. Not static, not thunder, but a rolling wave of cacophony. The violent throes of a mob. 

His eyes focused in on the sound. It was above, around him. It was coming from the narrow way. It appeared to him, a cloud upon the horizon, a long streak of black casting its corrugated shadow across him and across the land. It was loud, this cloud, loud and buzzing. He turned around to face the man, to see what was on his face, but he was gone. Hidden in that small jar. Apollo looked inside the house, to the walls specifically where the porous holes were. He looked to the jar, scratched and stabbed through as if millions of syringes had taken themselves to the brick and clay and metal of the place. 

He went outside, the wind was dead. It was still, his flesh felt tingles and his hairs rose. 

He cursed under his breath, took out his sword and looked out to the cloud. What chance was there in fighting that, though? He thought. The black cloud drew closer. No chance. He thought at last. 

And it came to him, that flood, that crackle of the air like water and thunder. They were locusts, he thought at least. Some deformed, rabid migration of locusts. Black and sleek. He felt one pass him. It cut his arm and Apollo watched the trickle of blood like a kind of thermometer for his fear, as it went down and down until finally, when all sense had come out of him, when he had no urn-man or homestead or God to consult, finally he ran. Down the narrow path, the walls enclosing, running so fast that the sand and dirt beneath his feet left a sharp trail. He looked like an ocean beast, with his body cutting through dirt, spreading it all out in the air like a sleek wave. He was no Leviathan. No predator. Rather, he was prey. Scared. His eyes and his head looked back. He cursed at himself. Why had he looked back? Why bother looking at the giant black wave, the miasma of insects that spread and chipped and ate away at all. 

He could see the animals fleeing. He could see what happened to those that didn’t. There was a reptile near him, near his feet as he raced along the curve of the small narrow-way, he noticed its body and how it was punctured and lifted and devoured in a cyclone of the bugs. Not locusts, he thought. They were worse. Carnivorous insects, desperate with the sniff of Apollo’s sweat.

He ran so fast, so desperately that he hadn't even noticed he was outside. Out again into the wild desert filled with canyons, long pillars, the giant stacks of boulders on top of boulders. Giant towers that did not shield him, did not give him relief, rather they fell. The boulders quite literally carried off, chipped, broken into thousands of meteorites upon Apollo. He could feel the pebbles hit his face, he could feel the rocks falling to him. He dodged left. Right, zigzag as all stones and all manners of flying evil tried at him. 

And at last, he broke. Crying his fake roar, his counterfeit courage, he put his shaking blade in front of him. He stood his ground at last when he came upon a pyre too large to walk around. He stood there, with the pyre behind him and a wall filled with small rocks. There was a draft, he didn't know what it was though, wind or fear. And he stood there, with his shaking blade in front of him, with his nervous ticks. He could feel his heart accelerate as he faced the giant wave of black, the millions upon millions of bugs, long-legged, syringe mouth creatures. Their eyes were bulbous, two ruby gems wide apart, all of them looking at the shaking Vicar. And Apollo tried hard to steady his blade, to put it horizontally next to him. 

To die stabbed in the back, eaten alive or to die in flames. He thought. It wouldn’t be the first time I burned a man alive. 

And he waited, felt the cuts across his cheeks and arms, felt them on his legs and thighs, the paper thin incisions of the insects that darted to him. He waited for the wave of bugs to reach its full, he waited until all his horizons were covered in that uneven, shaky blackness. And then, at that moment, when the veil of night seemed upon his face he lunged his blade forward. He could feel it in his arms, a roar and explosion, like his muscles had flexed outside of the boundaries of his flesh, like all of his strength had been blown out and all his joints and muscles were stretched and strained with the summons of his will. It was magicks, fear, dread, all of it coming out like the first night, with the bird-devil. 

And from his blade, from that hunk of steel, out came the fire. An explosion so strong, so uneven and disastrous as to having sent him flying back, through the wall of small rocks and into the pyre itself. He was falling through it and he had no reservations to stop it. His body felt spent. He saw for a moment as he flew in the air, that large swarm of arthropods writhing. Shriveled, turned to ash in a flash of bright white light. The blade flew past him, the rocks behind him shattered as his body collapsed into them. He saw darkness in spots in his eyes and in the vision remaining, blinding fire. His view was broken as if a photograph had been ripped and burned.

The locusts were dead, and what remained of them, scattered. The sky was in flames. It licked and twirled its primal heat around and above, encasing the horizon and spreading its wrath upon the locusts. 

When all was done, when Apollo lifted himself with his creaking joints and bones, he looked out to the hole in the cave. His strength felt wasted. A streak of blood fell from his forehead, his eyes were shaky as he looked at the ashen remains of the bugs. They were far from him, buzzing around him but away too. And he was gone, buried in this nameless Hell. He could only hear the carnage from a distance, for his body seemed too broken to crawl to it and his mind too scattered to think of it. But he knew this, in that brief moment of consciousness. 

He had killed them, at least. A few seconds later, his eyes closed. He fell into that sleep. Whether deep or shallow, he did not know though.

Jeremiah

And Jeremiah thought, only thirty-two remained of the fifty that had come here. Thirty-two people, with their broken clothes and their broken spirits, traveling with bleeding feet across the desert. 

They were not in chains because they were not threads. They wandered, endlessly it felt, endless in a world that did not turn and did not sleep. Like a projector with a never-ending film of grey, flat, lifeless picture. They spent days (or what felt like days) walking and had no hungers or thirsts to bog them down, only a growing weakness and ache in their limbs as they traveled through the hot sands and the pavement stones that felt cut sharp beneath their feet. 

Jeremiah looked up to that bright shine in the sky and he felt as if the red ring was glaring at him and looked around instead. There was an odd number of what he saw as the devil’s army, what he called them at least.

They came to a large hump of land and it was at that instant that Jeremiah had the inkling of an idea. A brief one and he went to Bartholomew who was some paces behind him and then to Sam who walked with a bowed head further behind.

“I’ll make a scene, you take the kid and run.” Jeremiah said. 

“Are you insane?” Sam said. He looked at Jeremiah, specifically to the torn lips on his face and the crooked nose that whistled with his breathing.

“No. I just figure that it can’t get any worse, can it?” Jeremiah said. They spoke in whispers, in nods and jerks. Jeremiah paced a bit further from them, Sam tried to stop him by grabbing his shoulders but he was too far gone. Then he waited, with quivering shoulders at what he thought would be the signal. Or the scene, rather.

Jeremiah moved fast. He moved right, mostly because his left eye didn’t work so right was all he could see and what he saw was a soldier, a demon, walking casually with his sword exposed. He grabbed it, held it with shaking hands and was dumb enough to pass glances at Sam and Bartholomew. 

They didn’t move. They were too afraid, too scared. And the demon looked at Jeremiah, he made what appeared to be a smile, toothless and sinister.  They were yellow, broken too. And he walked to Jeremiah, taunting him almost and all the demon’s around smiled and took turns at betting. Jeremiah made eyes with him, looked around to a circle forming and began to move rather stupidly in quick shuffles. He slipped. On his own feet. He fell, tried to stand and felt a hand grip his neck and force him down. 

“You’re the feistiest one here.” The demon said. Jeremiah could feel the spit running down on his face. It felt like grime, like sewer water washing over him. “How should I play with you? Breaking a man is only really as fun as how hard it is. You really need to savor the method and the journey, know what I mean?”

He put his send hand on Jeremiah's neck. It felt like lizard skin, whatever was underneath those gauntlets.

“Don’t.” A voice said at the front of the line. Jeremiah could only see the plumed helmet amongst the crowd, it looked like a walking peacock as it came up to Jeremiah and when it came to him, he could feel his neck ease and relax for the demon on top him came straight, tall, with his hand to his forehead to signal the commander. Or what Jeremiah felt was the commander.

“You don’t have a right to make a judgment. That belongs to the strong.” The commander said. He slapped the yellow-toothed demon and sent him down, holding his cheeks and lips.

“And you.” He turned to look at Jeremiah, Jeremiah who was stood by two more soldiers. “What compels a man to make such a rash decision? Who do you defend and why?”

Jeremiah said nothing. He only glared with that defiant intensity.

“What an odd and stupid look you have.” The commander came up to him. “ Odd, because I think you might have inspired the rest. Stupid, because I’m not sure that rebel spirit of yours has ever been tested.”

The air went cold. The other thirty-two stared at Jeremiah, looked at him for answers. These strangers they had only met in passing, these strangers that traveled and in their travels had shared that same sacrifice. And they looked at Jeremiah, fright-eyed, looked with weak and lifeless faces. 

I just wanted to help out the kid, Bartholomew thought. Just the kid.

“Well, let's test you then. We’ll see where your tension breaks.” 

The demons hollered now. A rowdy bunch that jeered and made small passing laughs at the people. They banged their chest armors, slammed their helmets on cacti and dead trees and stones and made drums of the desert, joyous, warring drums.

“Everyone, get in lines of eleven.” The commander turned to smile at Jeremiah. “As for you, I will give you the honor of the draw. Pick a number, any number, please.”

And those creatures of base desires kept laughing. Slapping each other into slack-jawed messes, drooling, rolling on the floor. Some started picking guesses.

“Well, are you going to choose?” The commander looked to Jeremiah who stood afraid and mute. Afraid to speak, afraid of what was coming next.

“Pick!” The commander shouted. Jeremiah shook.

“Choose what?” His fingers felt numb. “How do you expect me to choose when I don’t know what’s what?”

“Yes, there it is! It’s not what you stand to gain, but what you stand to lose.” The commander smiled. His teeth were jagged. “Choose a number or else I’ll kill everyone there. That should be proper inspiration, don’t you believe?” 

Jeremiah fumbled his thoughts, it was all too fast. He could feel it, all his life's experience leading up to this moment. All manners of juvenile joy, all manners of sorrow, all manners of redemption finally coming together in this singular moment. It overwhelmed him, his heart felt like it would break. He asked himself, a number for what? For how many will die? For how many will live? I don’t understand. His head felt the blood rush like a hot flash on his forehead. The sun seemed blistering now, so fiery hot as to ignite his scalp into flames. And he bit his tongue, and he began to sweat.

“Th-three.” He said quietly. “Three.”

The demons looked around. Then laughed.

“What a terribly low number.” One said.

“God damn, you’re insane!” Another one.

"Three? You really like killings, don’t you?" 

“Three is your answer then.” The commander said at last.

Everyone looked confused in their lines of eleven, wondering which three it would be. The question and chatter went on until a silencing smack fell upon them all. They looked to the front. One, two, three. The third man from the front of the line starting from the right, dropped dead. His body collapsed in two thumps, severed from the waist. The blood smeared against the shirt of another. 

The commander killed the third man in line.

They were silent all of a sudden, eyes wandering aimlessly as if they were falling into that deep, mesmerizing sleep. It felt like a nightmare, at least. For the thuds continued and the people kept dropping. And dropping. Every third person in every line of eleven was going to die. It was unbearable, counting down and realizing whether they were safe or not. How couldn’t it be? Facing death, knowing death, and being weak to it. 

“No, no I’m next.” A woman shouted. She tried to run. She made it two meters past Jeremiah before the blood splattered against his face. He looked to see and wished he didn’t. Her head was missing from a spear that had gone clean through her, that had landed and impregnated itself in a rock nearby. It had happened too fast for him to have shielded his face, and it had been too horrible for him to forget. And Jeremiah fell on his knees as he felt the woman’s life fade away into the ether. It was this instant, this climax, where he felt for the first time humility. And it was a strange feeling, humility, it was the feeling of powerlessness and the feeling of dread and the feeling of acceptance. It felt like the hot blood of a stranger dripping down his cheeks.

“Get back in line.” The commander smiled. “New numbers for everyone.”

Some breathed relief, others began to sob.

"That's unfair. She moved. It's not supposed to be my turn." A man said.

"Fairness? Where can you find that? Where if only in the lands of man? For fairness is what weak men invent when they cant come to terms with the unprejudiced chance of the universe.”

The man fell before he could make a rebuttal. He splattered quite horribly on Sam and Bartholomew, both who finally released their breaths as the soldiers passed them. Their bodies were tight, but they were smiling, not out of joy as much as relief, smiling and crying. For in one direction they could hear sighs and soft sobbing. And in the other, where the commander traveled like a walking scythe, they heard nothing but obscene silence.

Alestor

By sheer will, Alestor had come undone from that rancor of the river Styx. By tenacity, by strength, he had grasped the rocks leading up to the hill cliff above the waters. He had stripped himself from those phantom claws that grasped his skin. And he climbed, higher and higher. With his clothes ripped, his skin torn and scraped, his body bleeding and battered, he had climbed two hundred meters high up to the hill by the shoreline he had spawned from. It had taken him hours, half the time to moan and shout and hold himself anxiously. And the other half to do the effort of the slippery climb. 

Periodically he had looked up to the birds above with the long beaks that waited and squawked for his demise, he had seen them eat the snakes and other rats and bugs that burrowed and walked through the land. He had seen them spill the carcasses down to the waters below and had seen those phantoms of the river Styx gobble the giblets like starved piranhas. It made him turn when he saw it and it made the climb rougher. But he managed. He always did, he had too much on his mind not too. Too much fear, too much anger, too much curiosity. And when he was done, when he could finally put his body breast first upon the ground to breath, when he could take a calm breath and think, he looked and asked: Where is my family? The whole point of it, the drive that moved him. Where were they? He wondered.

There were two demons, conveniently, to answer them. They stood away, almost patient with their hands folded on their chests. One of them had their spear through the floor and the other moved up to meet the tired man, it was all convenient. Expected. He grabbed Alestor by the hair, brought his face up and narrowed his eyes as he inspected the shorelined man.  

“It’s time to meet the king.” The demon said and they went at it, headlong north, dragging and pushing Alestor him all the way there.

Where is my family? He asked himself throughout the miles of broken stones and hot sands. Where is my family? He tried looking for an answer above the high mountains. He tried hearing it through the heavy-blown winds. He tried to feel it through the intensely heated sand on his naked feet. No answer. And after a while, he stopped thinking altogether. He did not care what he was, honored guest or slave or walking dead man.

He figured he couldn’t have been anything special. There were no bells to greet him. No carpets, no trumpets. No family. There was nothing but the stiff, cold, mechanical movement of the soldiers and how they pulled him through a dark cave, into a dome-shaped mountain and through fields of flowered grass. He couldn’t even appreciate the landscape, for his head was down the whole way through. 

At some point, he made it into a building. At another point, he was pulled through a hallway. Then, finally, somewhere along his travels he was let go. The two soldiers that had accompanied him now set by the side of a hall entrance. 

“Is he here?” Alestor asked. They said nothing and Alestor looked down the bleak tunnel. No light showed save for the mild glow of torches that sat in even spaces down the path. The air was filled with the slow rolling yellow dust as if something far below was blowing back at him back. He went down anyways. The floor was cold and sleek, the walls coarse. He pushed most of his weight upon the walls as he descended and as he neared he could hear a faint sound. It was the noise of clanking, of screaming, of steel hitting stone. A terrible discord. Then silence. Cold again. A saw? Cutting? Slicing? It must have been a butchery considering all the surgical work he was hearing. Like flesh was being stabbed through, cut open, flayed.

He stopped at last. Alestor scanned the room, his body felt cold. His rags of clothes flew gently through and he could see the cracks in the walls of the room, the wind blew through the small interstices and it sounded like a whisper, gentle-like. There were roman pillars on the floor, burst open and wounded on the shaft. They lay docile and in shards, like torn stems left to decay. Alestor scanned the lengthy room and found bodies all around. Some of them ancient, some of them new. They converged to some spot, away, beyond what Alestor could view and as Alestor stepped forward, he couldn’t help but think, I have come here in hope of wife and child, only to stand witness to this garden of war. 

This was not the promised land.

Round leather shields laid face down, raised at a bevel by stricken iron-beaked arrows. The swords were many and most were broken. They lay stabbed through the dirt or at a length on the floor. And Alestor got closer. He could feel grass beneath his feet, he saw the pillars and the bodies and the weapons victim to overgrowth. The very blood of the fallen fueling the invasion of nature, the roots and ivy and vines all strapping themselves and devouring the building. It was more violent the closer Alestor got to the end of the room. 

And then he saw the source of the sound of flesh-cutting. It was a man getting a spear removed from his cut open belly. It was that very same man giving his last pneumatic sigh, tottering off a hill of corpses. He fell, rolled, and lay by Alestor’s feet, with his heels twitching and broken on the floor. On his chest, four bleeding wide cuts. Alestor looked up, his eyes catching glimpses of the sullen faces of the dead piling the mound. And there at the top, with his spear drooling blood, there stood Astyanax. Smiling.

Nude, body completely pale, well-built. His face, gentle. Like a cherub. His hair flowed shoulder length, curly and snow-white. His lips and cheeks and nose and eyes, all gentle. And Alestor was overwhelmed for a moment, this androgynous nude beauty. 

Astyanax faced Alestor. His full member came to view, everything of him came to view. And Alestor noticed his arms, his legs, stained red. Not paint, not blood, a complete dyeing of the skin. He looked like a backward fox, this hound of war. The warrior laid down his spear and stood tall. And Alestor’s lips twitched, his face contorted as if all the many grievances were finally overcapacity in his patient mind, so much so that they burst out of him in one loud sonorous shout.

“Where is my family? Where is my heaven?” Alestor stomped the floor. His feet bled out. “There is nothing here. Nothing but desert, desert and time.”

The man stayed silent.

“You’re Astyanax, aren’t you?” He asked. 

Silence.

“Keep your promise, demon! I want my child and my son, I want my good heaven. I want what is deserved to be mine. I want what was taken.” The saliva was spitting out of his long-winded shouts. 

Astyanax studied him. He sniffed the air, looked to the two guards now coming closer with ready arms. He waved at them, they stopped and put their spears back to their side. Astyanax walked over to Alestor, stepping over the broken tangle of bodies. 

He put his hand on Alestor’s shoulder. His matched his nubile yellow eyes to Alestor's.

“I pity. What a terrible fate, to love so much, to lose so much. To live and die a pauper. I’m sorry,” Astyanax said. “But you have me confused.” 

“C-confused? Where is my wife-” Alestor stopped midway. He groaned and opened his mouth to scream. There was a sharp pain in his shoulder and he looked over. Astyanax was clasping it, biting deep with his hand, crushing his right shoulder blade into compressed bone dust. It made Alestor bend over. At that, Astyanax swept him across the legs with a kick. He fell on his side, face first and felt the blood leak down to his eye.

“Look at what you’ve done. You’ve forced me to rectify this behavior of yours.” Astyanax said. His face was dull, cold.“Who are you to speak to me? Who are you to stand equal to me? Who are you to demand? Who are you, son of man, for I am a monarch.”

Alestor sat curled and wincing.

“I am King Astyanax. Son of Hector, breaker of horses. Prince-heir to long-lost Troy. I am king and this is my domain. And who are you?” He kicked Alestor away, into a pillar. “You are just trash.”

He looked at the writhing man who twitched at the touch of the king.

“You’ve brought two Vicars here. Hunters of men like me, and for that, you have my thanks. This whole meeting stands as testimony to thanks and to the pity I have for you. So I give a piece of my abode, to hopefully give you peace in this land.” He put his red foot over Alestor’s abdomen. “But spit in my hand again and you will be fed to the dogs. That is my right and mine alone.” 

“M-my wife?” Alestor managed in between puking.

“You still persist? Then let me alleviate your suffering.” He smiled. “Your family is not here. You forfeited them long ago. Even I can’t save them.”

“Betrayer.” Alestor spat.

“Sure. This can be a conspiracy if you so desire, or a practical joke if it humors you. Either or can satiate that animosity in you. But make no mistake in your sad story, this is no tragedy. Tragedy belongs only to the noble and the strong, of which you are, neither.”

He walked past Alestor who cried and bemoaned and coughed dust. 

Dion

During Apollo’s Arrival

“And you’re sure he’s this way?” Dion asked he held the map, the orders, the confidential papers in front of his face. It was stained with soot and ripped at its ends and below was signed Astyanax with black ink. The demon rested on his side, blood coming out of his ear and eye bludgeoned to a mass of purple.

“Yes. Yes! Please, you have to believe me,” He had his hand above his face, it cast a five-fingered shadow on the centurion helmet the demon wore. “I am a simple messenger. Please. That’s it.”

“Is that why you killed the people here? is that why you reek of death?” Dion pointed to the small huts around him with the shabby ceilings and the strewn bodies laid to waste, half interred in the floor or half-burned into ash. It had been a while since they had died and since Dion had had the chance to arrive.

“I didn’t do that. The others did.” The demon said.

“I found you joking with them all. It doesn’t seem like you tried to stop them?”

“I had nothing to do with it. It was a calculated attack by Astyanax’s orders.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. He doesn’t tell us why. He just has us sent, that’s it. That’s how it’s always been. For hundreds - No, thousands of years.”

 “Thousands of years of war on this small island?” Dion breathed in the smell of cremated corpses. “All those years of sin, all the years you refused to change. God can’t help you now.”

“No, no. Please, I only do as I’m told. Nothing more.” The demon said. 

“What would happen if I kill you? If I ate your heart? Would you face oblivion? Would you meet the empty darkness with dignity? No, you wouldn’t, would you?” Dion asked. The helmet slipped off the demon as he extended his hand out. He touched Dion’s ankles. “Evil is your trade, isn’t it? It’s been this way for thousands of years. I can’t help you now, and I can’t leave you now. That would be a half-measure, and half-measures cause mistakes. I know that now.” 

“No, no.”

“It’s over. The jury has spoken. I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance.” He snapped back the lever on his revolver. “And furious anger, those who would attempt to poison and destroy my brothers.”

“Stop, please! I can’t go there. Please, not there. Don’t send me further down.” 

“And you will know my name is the Lord.”

The demon crawled then, with broken legs, using his knees to push himself down the hill.

“Please.”

“When I lay my vengeance upon thee!”

The shot was loud, powerful and it rolled through the valley like a strong gust. And when it had ended and the echo faded, Dion was brought back to the soft licks of the flickering flames. He could hear his heartbeat. It sounded dull, monotonous. And he looked out into the horizon, where he could see a small blip the size of a pea. It was round, Bulbous, like a slumbering flower pod. It was the dome spoken about. 

He took a deep breath and faced back down the road and the corpses to his side with the holes in their chests. It looked like the work of machinery. Dion sighed, he put his guns back in his jacket and felt his wrists. They were aching, bleeding, and the dull pain seemed to extend to the rest of his body.

It had taken him what felt like a week of trekking and back peddling to find himself around the mountain range, the heart of Ida, as it was told by the messenger’s paper. He looked up to the giant walls enclosing the space and how the rocks encroached on the few dried sumac trees that were spread sparsely. It looked unnatural, this tumor of a growth and Dion found himself shaking his head, looking left and right to see how far it extended. He saw nothing but the few cave entrances scattered about. Small vulture-like creatures, with bony exteriors and lanky bodies, flew out and in the dark holes sprawled along the dome wall. He looked to a hole in front of him and the steep darkness frightened him. He breathed. He slapped himself. He dried his sweat and the remembered the girl, Sophie, and the others and with one gallop, jumped inside. 

It was not steep. It wasn’t cavernous. It was small, tidy, crushingly thin.

 His body squeezed and turned to its side as he began to teeter slowly through the enclosed space. It was an unknown darkness that he could feel, that seeped into his imagination. Closing his eyes, opening them, using that crimson visage of his, all of it was useless. It felt as if his limbs had disappeared and all his efforts were useless. He did not know whether he was going further up or further down, or even if he was moving at all. A trickle. The water hit his forehead, it made him jump. Water droplets that came from the closing ceiling above.

It was packed. So terribly suffocating that Dion found himself exhaling, sucking in his gut and his lungs just to squeeze himself through a band of mineral growth (at least it felt different, more chalky than the usual stone). It went on like that, the sounds of alien animals scratching through the walls of the tunnel, the sound of water dropping like false rain, the minutes of breathlessness as he scrambled for more ground, even if just an inch. 

It was terrible. His foot slipped. His body fell down. How much? He couldn’t tell, too dark. He only felt his face scratching, the earth cutting and scraping along as he went down. And then, land. Solid, he felt crawling on his shoulders. Cockroaches perhaps, (more likely spiders) that scoured the invader. He tried to jump and to flinch, there was no room though. And he grit his teeth and moved forward, he felt web brush against his forehead and tear to long threads. There was web? Then it was dry. And if it was dry, there was hot desert air. He moved his face around. He felt it, the draft of arid heat. He moved again, trying to use those thermometer cheeks of his. Air, dry desert air. It was a little down, a little to the left. He chased after it, forcing his shoulders and breaking stone just to make his way down to the little crack. He tunneled, thinking to himself, All my searches have been for this man. For the chance that there is someone - even if just one person - worth saving. And he’s held hostage, I’ll kill the bastard if I have to.

He came to a full body stop. His body pushed against the wall and he looked with his throbbing eye through a crack where light showed. And he thought as he licked his lips, I’ll kill the bastard just because I can. Just to remind him of everything he’s done, here and beyond.

He pointed his gun at the wall and pressed the barrel against the corrugated surface of stone. Blast. A deafening blow, dust that flew everywhere and forced his face to reel. Rocks that embedded in his eyes, in his nose. He wiped his face and blew his nose and felt the stone and dust and critters shake away from him. His suit was completely covered and he did his best to brush it away, stopping at his arms, his arm in particular that glowed in and burned. He undid his sleeve and saw the string, gold, vibrating, turning and coiling. It looked exactly how his innards felt. Squirming.

He looked up. 

The light at the top of the dome, the ring, was blinding in its intensity. His eyes adjusted slow and all the scenery came to him as a blur. Dion rubbed his face. He looked down to the fields, an ocean of green that rolled and waved with the gusts coming from the North. There were flowers, he could spot them if only barely, the golden flowers that waved at him. They were in patches, patches of gold, joyous light. It made Dion sick. Confused. The desert out there, the golden and green fields within. He slid down the slope of the dome and rolled down on the grass and laid himself out. It was soft and it made him uneasy. He took both pistols out, looked around and turned his head. It froze all of a sudden. His mouth went silent, his Adam’s apple jumped. 

There were crosses behind him. Crosses leading up to a road. A road leading up to that giant Villa. Or village. Or capital. The wooden crosses were laid about like makeshift castle walls, the dried bodies were there too, old and rotting, faced to the red ring of light at top. They extended out like lampposts, like signs, like greetings. Dion began to sweat. His eyes looked past the corpses, towards the roman pillars and the aqueducts they carried and he said, as he watched from a distance a little river of water falling into a pond. He thought, as he looked inside of that algae infected pond,  I’ll kill this monster. No matter the cost. For I can't imagine myself living comfortably otherwise. He must die.

He touched his hot arm and walked towards the road leading up to a set of arches and wooden doors.

Author’s Note: I decided to add an extra headline here just to give you a frame of reference. Since time doesn't exist as a concept in Hell (there is no movement of particles, there are no particles at all) everything needs to be judged relative to actions done before. thinkingfaceemoji.

Jeremiah

They came to the barracks and to where the giant watch towers loomed over them and where the heads of enemies past were posted on spikes, at even intervals along the wooden walls. The walls went high up and on small platforms, the demon’s looked down at the group of prisoners, slaves as they were called. They were eating something, organ meat, offal, perhaps a fruit. It was hard to tell, though the succulent juice came out of their mouths with each loud laugh as they counted the prisoners and watched them set foot inside. 

A chef in the corner of the barrack sat atop a wooden table with a cleaver in one hand and a centipede in the other gave. He slammed down. The head of the bug rolled. It fell. The demon slurped out the meat out from the creature and watched them. Jeremiah could hear someone barfing in front of him. He had to step over the vomit as they went on.  

So they went silently on. Making sure not to even breath louder than they could. Bartholomew tugged on Jeremiah as they went inside a building that looked a bit like a mission church. It had the large rectangular shape of one, with walls made of adobe and straw which felt rough to the touch. The room, the building, was orange and its interiors, dark. The square windows were boarded up and they passed through several doors, torches flickered and shook at their sudden pass. They stopped at a room with littered tables, where the stains of congealed blood and surgical gear and saws were thrown around like furniture pieces. On the walls, torture devices. Sitting around the tables, demons. Or soldiers. Or elites. Whatever they preferred, the slaves could not argue. Some eating, some playing games with strips of paper and small marble sized shiny stones. 

One of the demons lost, it seemed. He shook his head and ripped a golden tooth out of his mouth. Jeremiah turned. He gasped and put his hand over his mouth. A thread of blood followed from the demon’s mouth.

“You lost another one, Toadvine.” One of them said in that circle of evil, it caused a stir of laughter and a pounding of fists against the table tops.

Jeremiah stared at them and thought amongst the clammer of noise, It’s an exhibition. A zoo for them. And me, the monkey, to dance and to scream.

“What are you looking at?” The Captain of the squad came to the bars of the cell. The bars were closely packed together and the captain’s rotten hands could barely fit around the metal rods. 

“Nothing.” Jeremiah said. His eyes fell to the floor, away from the Captain.

“You have that American spunk. Toadvine was an American. Got scalped by an Indian though. He's the one who taught me how to speak English and how to break Americans.” The Captain said. “Where you from?"

Jeremiah stayed silent. 

"I asked you where you're from?" The Captain slammed the bars.

"Havenbrook, Colorado."

"Colorado, huh? Never heard of it. Do they breed good warriors there?" He laughed. "Doesn't matter, I guess. You're no soldier, no warrior, no anything. Down here you’re inventory, commerce. You’re the piece of fine robe. You’re the fur. You’re the stallion. You’re a slave. Something to be fought over and traded, nothing more.”

“Why? Why do any of this? Where is down here, where are we?” Jeremiah walked away.

“Well, I shouldn't say but you'll probably find out eventually. Might as well be now rather than later. I'm assuming you're a Christian man?"

"No."

"Doesn't matter. Many faiths have a word for where you're in. You may know it as Purgatory, or Hell. They might be the same for you, I suppose. Best to think of it as a prison." He pointed to the corners of the jail. "A bigger prison than this."

"Is this all you do? Terrorize people?" Jeremiah could hear the voices of people behind him, telling him, kindly, to shut up. To shush, to speak a kinder tone. He heard the whispers and ignored them.

"Sure. Down here, with this infinite boredom and infinite existence, we do the only thing we know. We fight. We fuck. We kill.”

“We fight. We fuck. We kill.” A voice repeated.

"We fight. We fuck. We kill." The chanting began around the room. The men and women in the cell began to crowd each corner as they stepped away from the loud voices. 

“We fight. We fuck. We kill.” They banged on the walls, banged on the tables. 

“We fight. We fuck. We kill.” The captain screamed, he brought his fist up. They were a final glorious hooray amongst the demons and then it died. The excitement still filled the air, made them nervous, like a blanket of static had wrapped around the slaves.

“We’re the eastern army of Astyanax. There are three more for each face of the compass.” He said. “And we fight and war with each other endlessly."

“That’s insane. Fight for what?” Jeremiah said.

“For pleasure. For honor. For slaves, like you. What else is there? Dirt, sand, rock. What would you do with an infinite amount of time and no hope of escape?” The captain asked. His mouth came to the small spaces of the bars. It smelled sweet, sickly sweet, like a corpse. “Whatever life you had up there means nothing. Whatever ambitions, whatever pleasures. Get rid of them, instinct rules here. Instinct and strength. There is no society but Astyanax’s and this is New Troy."

"New Troy. New Troy. New Troy." The animals began to chant again.

"It is this way and no other way. And it doesn't matter if you don't like it, you'll get used to it. You'll have an eternities worth of time to get used to it."

He left the bars and all heat seemed to come out of Jeremiah and Bartholomew who was clinging to his leg. There was silence for a moment before the crowd of twenty-odd folks broke into shrieks and wails.  

“You heard him. We’re in Hell.” A man said. Another fainted and the sound of his head hitting the wall made a low thump. 

“This is a dream.” A woman kept slapping her face.

It went like that for hours or what was perceived as hours before they came to accept it. And in accepting it, paced within the jail cell with heads lowered to find an empty space to take up post.

"We should have never gone to church. We should have stayed at home." A husband blamed his wife.

"And while we wait he sits above, smug in his throne." Someone blamed God.

"What the fuck are we going to do?" Sam asked. Faces turned, their eyes set past Sam, past the demons, past the walls. as if they weren’t even looking at anything, really.

“What can I do?” Jeremiah whispered. “Last time I did something, I killed a third of the people here.”

Sam bit his lips. He took off the first few buttons of his shirt and let the sweat break onto his chest.

“I’m beginning to think it’s better to die.” Sam said.

“Don’t say that. Not in front of the kid.” 

“Come on, you're smarter. You're the only one here with a bit of sense. Everyone else is a little delusional or too afraid to think. So lets reason this out.” Sam wagged his finger. “Do you honestly believe we have a way out?

“I think we’ll have plenty of time to think of one. I’m sure we will.” 

“Against soldiers? I don’t know about this Hell stuff, but you and I both know these people are willing and able to annihilate us. Without any pity or trouble.”

“You think I don’t know that? I saw what they're capable of. Don’t remind me.”

“What I’m saying is, there's a good way out. A real way, out.” Sam emphasized. He reached into his pocket. He came out with a small dagger no bigger than half a foot. “I pocketed it from one of these goons on our way inside, where the torches were low and dark.”

“Don’t even think about it. You heard him, didn’t you? We’re in Hell. What do you think would happen to us if we died here?”

“I don’t know but anything seems better than this. Even oblivion if that’s what it takes.”

“You’re asking me to kill you. To assist you in suicide? I can't do that."

“I’m asking you to think of the boy.”

They both looked at Bartholomew. Jeremiah felt his legs go weak, his stomach dropped. It felt like an anchor had stabbed through him.

“Don’t you ever suggest something that cruel ever again.” Jeremiah looked up. His voice was low and steady. 

“An eternity, pal. You think he’ll be able to handle this? An eternity! Look around you, look all this shit, look at how insane they are. Violence, mutilation? That’d be merciful. I’m sure I don’t have to describe what else these monsters could do. Beating and hurting would just be a start. It's fucked down here.” Sam stuffed his knife back into his pants. He looked around and watched the guards faces with shifty eyes. “Wise up. This is a bad deal, you know it, I know it. And sometimes the best thing to do is to just check out. Let someone else carry the debt. You understand me?”

Jeremiah felt his throat dry up as if the well or basin of his patience had finally disappeared, evaporated, shrunk.

“This boys father depended on me when he needed me most and I left him. I saw his dying face and I left him. You’re asking me to do the same thing again, to stare at the boys, to watch him die, to leave him.”

“It’s the smartest-”

“Stop.” Jeremiah walked forward, the rings under his eyes were gaunt underneath the shadow of the prison bars. “Don’t ever make this suggestion or any suggestion ever again. The next time you get an idea, kill it. Or better yet, slit your fucking throat in the corner of the room and leave us alone. I’ll figure something out without you.”

“You dumb motherfucker.” Sam pushed him back. He spat on the floor in between them. “You’re so dense you can’t even see that there is no out. You’re blinded by that pride. That guilt, whatever it is. And you’re gonna make us all suffer for it. Ain’t you? Those people up on that sandy hill got it lucky, I tell ya. We aren’t going to get as lucky and you’re going to make it worse. Well, fuck you, man. Fuck you.”

“Quiet over there.” The demon said at the group. Everyone hushed, both Sam and Jeremiah, who found themselves on opposite halves of the prison. Sam, who hissed and complained with shallow breath. Jeremiah, who slunk into calm demure and stared obsessively at the cell door.

Dion

Dion could not pass or rather, would not, for the wide arches and marble pillars were too imposing. He stood in front of the decayed bowels of the city, the small stone huts, and temples that had crumbled and shambled. Long spiral minarets, Gothic cathedrals, broken down into shanties of rubbles where the insects hid from light. As if someone, someone desperate, had chased after the eras and had failed, fallen to time. No wind blew, but he swore he could hear moaning, like a groan from those decayed homes. Above, dripping. Leaks from the aqueducts that surrounded the city into a circle. The small transports were broken at spots and sprouted waterfalls onto the shattered stone and hay rooftops of the lower level of homes. He breathed in and took a step inside, going up steps until he stopped at another set of arches. These were red and there was a temple further away, a pantheon stood in front. A false god of marble, the head broken and decapitated. He stopped.

His spine felt a chill and he turned his head high up. There were two giant pillars, impossibly high, he thought. Above the pillars, he saw legs dangling. He was being watched by something, he could not see them clearly though, only knew they were there by the shine their black scaled shoulder armor reflected. He narrowed his eyes to see the fine specimens. Their abdomens, exposed, rotten. The legs, skirted, and  the feet, with worn brown sandals. They sat at the tops of the pillars with golden spears. As if they, miniature Zeus’s, sat upon Mt. Olympus, waiting to strike the desecrater. 

Dion drew his guns out and rubbed the handles with his fingers. His heart stood still, his breath quiet. He sucked his lips in and started to flex his legs. One jump, a brief climb, he’d shoot them in the head, he imagined. And then - 

“Stop.” A voice said further away. “You’ll make a mess of things. Stop.”  

It was a voice past the pillars, taking form at the top of the orange stairs, past small shoots of lavender and primroses growing by the sides of the path. Dion could see the red feet descending, he could see the golden sandals and the knee guards that glistened and the loose cape and toga that flew gently. This figure, this heroic figure, waved at the two above the pillars and they sat down, their javelins stabbed through the stone. 

“They’re very protective.” Astyanax said. He came to stand still in front of Dion who still brandished both weapons and who still gripped them tightly. He could feel his fingers twitching at the touch of his trigger. 

“Who are you?” Dion asked.

“Isn’t it obvious? I’m the one who sent the messenger for you.”

Dion lifted a pistol high up to meet the king at the level sight. There was a click, the barrel stared at Astyanax’s pale forehead.

“So you’re the one that deserves a bullet, huh?”

“For what exactly?”

“For everyone you’ve killed.” Dion could feel his blood rise to his head, it made the air seem hotter than it was.

“What are you accusing me of? Defending my kingdom?”

“Don’t play dumb, it’s not just them. It’s about the people of Havenbrook. I’m sure the memory is already lost on you, your highness. But I remember. Always will.”

Astyanax extended both hands out, he flaunted his chest forward and Dion felt his barrel being pushed back.

“Is this modern justice? Oh, how standards have fallen for what is considered impregnable truth.” Astyanax looked up, the two guards had re-pointed their bronze at Dion. He put his palm up, again, and assured them. “Did I kill anyone directly? Did I push the trigger? Did I sink the knife? Tell me.”

“No, but you’re the reason people did. Demon.” 

“Demon? I’m just a man. Like you.”

“Don’t compare yourself to me.”

“And don’t confuse your contempt with dishonesty. I am like you and I deserve a say, considering how gracious I’ve been. I can have you killed, after all.” 

“Wouldn’t be a bad way to die, taking you out with me.”

“If you even could, Dion. If you even could.” Astyanax walked forward again. Dion stepped back “But now isn’t a good time to fight, not here. Let me state what I offer, I’m sure it’d interest you. I have what you’ve chased after this whole time.”

“And what’s that?”

“People. Of course, your people.”

Dion’s gun shook. He looked at the person in front of him. He was smaller, thinner. This man. Dion thought. This man who is pretending to be human, trying to reason like one, after all he’s done. Dion shook his gun. He bit his lower lip. He tightened his face. 

“Let’s talk over dinner.” Astyanax said. “Food and wine softens the soul.”

And then he sighed. He set it aside, let his anger escape him from his shallow breaths. He looked at that smug face that etched itself on Astyanax and walked, both, shoulder to shoulder, into the ruined city.

“Your guns.” Astyanax said. Only three rooms into the villa and already, Dion was upset. It was a narrow hall where small half-moon beams of light showed through the half-circles of the window frames. There were purple drapes, vases, dead flowers laying on dry fonts. It looked like a ritual room.

“I’m not giving you my guns.”

“You expect me to break bread with an armed man?” 

Dion looked around, two more armored men were approaching him. He shrugged them for a bit, walked a bit. But he was stopped again, a golden tray lay in front of him. He placed both guns on top of it and watched it get carted off. The wheel spokes creaked.

He couldn’t help but feel worried. He couldn’t help that strange curiosity either, those wandering eyes, as he went room to room through the sprawling villa and the pictures and statues that seemed to sprawl too, endlessly too. They were on the walls or in the latticed light of rotunda glass ceilings, colorful and giant, pictures of a mother and of a father and of a city in flames. 

“Do you like them?” Astyanax said. “I made them all, I stopped some odd five hundred years ago though. Got boring.”

And perhaps he was honest because as the tour went on, the pictures seemed to get worse and hinted at something dwindling. Sanity, perhaps? That's what it was, the flag markings of the King's sanity, like a long mountain climb straight to the cuckoo's nest. And Dion realized very quickly that this was no exhibit, it was the mausoleum of hope and desire. 

The pictures became more terribly violent, dressed with vibrant red lash strokes. There were pictures drawn of horse-dragged tortured soldiers. Dogs mauling people to pieces. Statues of lonely suicides with the expressions of pain permanent in stone. And then, a simplicity. Detailed photorealism became abstractions, geometry. He stopped at last in front of the dinner door. To the right, one final portrait: A single, simple head rolling on the floor. Fire, brimstone, Hell, everywhere around them. It made him freeze for a moment. He turned to look at Astyanax who stared back. Had he even blinked this whole time? Dion thought. His eyes were yellow. Sis red hands carefully moved over to the handle of the door. He nodded for Dion and they both went in.

A slave (he suspected she was a slave at least, by the way she wore her collar and the way in which her hair and her eyebrows had been shaved bald) came up to them and offered a small bowl of water to wash their hands in. Astyanax slapped it away, the bronze bowl rolled and crashed on a table leg to which she scrambled for it. 

“Go get my other guest.” Astyanax said.

She stood, bent herself to apologize and ran, dragging her beige-gray rags onto the dusty floor.

Dion could hear the crackling of kindling wood and above the flames, the long glistening body of a bug. A slug, perhaps. Fat and pale, green spotted along the wide body. It smelled like rancid chicken. 

“I apologize, our cuisine isn't as developed as you're used to,” Astyanax said. “This is the only reliable source of food to feed on.  At least on this island. Mammals are rare, people, even rarer.”

“You’ve eaten people? I thought you were trying to convince me of your civility.” Dion sat on a seat at the end of a long table some feet away from the fire.

“I don’t, personally. The others don't think the same, unfortunately. I’ve often caught them, those demon's as you'd call them, with legs scarfed down their throats. I usually kill them when I catch wind.” He removed one of the sticks and placed it in front of Dion. He reached around the table, found a container and poured. What was inside the cup smelled worse than the food. “It’s made from muddled Sucklefruit. You can find vines of it west from here. They grow like long webs below the dirt and sprout every now and then.”

“Why do they call it Sucklefruit?”

“Picking the fruit is difficult, the plant seems to have a mind of its own. Upon a touch, it's long red flowers latch onto you, like a leech. The name comes from the sound the tendrils make as they drain you, a suckling sound. If you’re careless, it's easy to get caught in the web of vines. And killed, eventually.”

Dion pushed back the drink. “I’ve lost my appetite.”

“I lost five men to make that small glass of wine.” Astyanax pushed the glass back to Dion. “And what a nasty plant it is. Supposedly, the roots run deep, straight down to the first circle of Hell. Though that’s a little far-fetched, even for me.”

Dion took a sip. His lips puckered, it felt like tar going down his throat and stuck to his throat. He coughed a fit, five minutes maybe, of that headache-inducing coughing before he could finally breathe normally. 

“Terrible,” Dion said. “Why do you even need to eat? You’re a soul, aren’t you? Just aether and empyrium.” He rubbed his fingers on his teeth, they came back purple. 

“And yet I see and hear and smell and taste. The qualia of a physical body. And I starve too.” His eyes narrowed. “And starvation here is worse than you can imagine. It’s more than a slow death, it’s like slowly dissolving. You get weaker, lankier, more ephemeral. And then one day, you’re gone, back to the river. You need to eat, have to.”

He took Dion’s plate of slug and chewed firmly down the body. A green liquid splattered on the wood table.

“Would you have preferred a heart?” He asked. “They call your kind the heart-eaters. Is that just hyperbolic or literal?”

“I’m a Vicar. That’s all you need to know.” Dion folded his arms. 

“I heard stories of your kind, your people come down every now and then. You’re great warriors and great wizards, I hear.” He chewed loudly, his teeth dragged the long threads of fibrous slug-guts up and down. “I hear even stranger stories.  That you have the hearts of principal devils inside of you? Of Lucifer himself?”

“That’s half a myth.” Dion pushed back his coat and showed a bit of his chest. A scar ran down his sternum. “And half a truth.”

“Funny.” Astyanax gulped. “What an interesting faith that must be, to be hated and chained and forced to defend the very force that wants you dead. What a hypocritical existence.”

"I've said enough about myself. Out of courtesy." Dion said. “But I didn’t come here to talk politics or philosophy.” Dion began.

“No, you came to talk about people and their fate.”

“I have the right mind to kill you, you know that?”

“Even if you could, it would just guarantee the deaths of all you wish to protect.” He finished chewing. “Would you like to hear my proposal?”

“What is it?”

“Your life for theirs.” 

“Is this a joke?” Dion scoffed.

“I don’t make jokes. My word is plain and honest. I’ve grown an attraction to you and your friend.” He rose. “I can’t have him but I’ll settle for you. I have more of an appreciation for your talents than that silly church.”

He walked over to Dion and rubbed his shoulders. 

“That artisan quality of war is what matters. Here, in this desolate, lonely place. Only strength matters. As it has been, as it will be. Strength. The difference between those that have and those that have not.” He whispered into Dion’s ears. “And I’ve stagnated.”

Dion shook him off, jumped out of the chair and walked away.

“For years the steady surge of slaves have kept the warriors sated. They treat them like trinkets. And like trinkets, I’ve become bored. There’s nothing to it. The shameless masturbation over trivial desires.” Astyanax said. “I want to feel the thrill of war again, I want you to help me.”

“All you want is a cheap thrill? You diseased madman.” Dion bumped into a table. 

“Cheap? What’s been cheap?” His voice rose. He slammed his hand on the table. The wine spilled, it leaked down into the tile floor. “Three thousand years in this Hell! Cheap? The scheming, the madness, the loneliness. Cheap? For what? My only crime was being an unbaptized infant. That was it! A holy bastard. And they stabbed me, threw me, just a babe, over the walls of Troy. Tell me, was that deserved? Was that cheap?”

“Considering all you’ve done, the trickery, the death-dealings. Yeah, it was appropriate."

Astyanax laughed, he grabbed his long hair and slicked it back. “Appropriate? Not even in hindsight. Nothing is appropriate. Nothing and no one is deserving of this prison. You can pretend to imagine three thousand years of solitude, but you’ll never understand it. How crushing it is.”

“All your little armies and all your little soldiers can’t keep you company?”

“The weak attract the weak, the strong to the strong. How could you call these vermin company?” He walked over, a guard stood in the corner of the room with his hands behind his back. Astyanax punched him, made a notch in his neck in the shape of his knuckles and both of them watched as he fell and choked and held his neck. It made Dion stiff with fear. “He fell. He did not struggle, did not hesitate. Did not even try, he just died. Like that. Slaves put up more a fight than these fools.”

“You spent all your life conquering the people of these lands and now you’re disappointed? What a shame, nothing left to conquer?”

“You’re exactly right. I rule this small ant hill, a very slave in the larger scheme of things. There is no freedom but in the base thrills, the pleasures of my nature. I want violence, nothing more. Violence and companionship. I can’t bear the thought again, not another year of this. Not another hour.”

“You’re so shamelessly selfish.”

“Selfishness? Is that contrary to your moral aesthetics?” He asked. His head was down, his voice was low. “Don’t fool yourself. Everyone is selfish. And greedy. And gluttonous. I’m just trying to find my piece. That’s it.”

“And if I refuse?”

“Then the people die. All twenty-four that remain.”

“Twenty-fo-”

“Twenty-four of the fifty-six that came.” Astyanax’s eyes were yellow, large. “And it won't stop.”

“I’ll kill you.” Dion said.

“No, you won’t. You can’t. But It’d be fun, wouldn't it be? If you tried, if you failed, and tried and tried. Endlessly, with me. Just dance and routine.” He smiled.

They eyed each other, firm faced, like two lions in the bone-dry heat, with the low Savannah prickling their feet. 

There was a moment, the height of tension, where they looked just about to pounce. But there was a crack of the wooden door, it sounded like a squeal and from it came the rat. Alestor. Nimble-foot Alestor who walked up and into the kitchen. Astyanax smiled.

“Maybe you could convince him.” He said. Both Hunter and prey unaware of each other, both unreasonably afraid of the other.

Apollo

Every dream has its monster at the end, and for Apollo, that monster appeared as a burning skull. Screaming, begging. Too hot, too hot, turn me to ash. What an induced terror, one that made him shout in his sleep. The terror of a relieved youth. He saw it, the young thirteen-year-old boy, devoured by a group of huddled creatures. A terrible fear. A familiar fear. It was a tradition at this point, to relieve this dream, under these circumstances. For in dire straits, he had always had this memory come back. The anecdote went like this:

A large rusty building that echoes the screams from its depths. Three Vicars. Two of whom, youths. One of which, master. Their heavy breaths, their heavy footsteps, racing across the wet and bloody floor of the rusty building. The meat hooks and large tuna fish dangling and bleeding from their cut necks. Scales upon the floor that catch themselves on the heavy stomping of their boots. The smell of sardines, stacked and so weighty upon each other as to collapse unto themselves into paste. Vile. Suddenly, three blurs. Three long black tongues and the yellow teeth that extended from their long mouths. Like anteaters, prodding, searching for the Vicars at the hunt. They find the scent. An attack. A lash out, one of the boys is struck. Nipped. He bleeds. Two of the hunters turned then plead, retreat, retreat. The master jumps upon the catwalk. Her footsteps are calculated, light and airy. The other thinks to do the same but stops. He looks back to the stubborn boy, the boy with the nipped leg and bruised arm. Apollo. His teeth are gritted, his eyes are fierce. Green like emeralds, fresh but in them still yet grows an uninhibited violence. Apollo, young, thirteen has made up his mind to fight. He lunges to the long mouthed demons. Clashes. Bone-teeth against silver-steel. Fish lopped and truncated, blood everywhere. Another clash. Disarmed. He doesn’t understand. He’s alone. Clank. His sword had flown to his side, slipped out of his hands. Alone. Trapped. He screams, louder and louder, he wants to let the whole building know. No one is there though, no one but the greeting of the three creatures and their long mouths like python snaps. He feels the hot breath upon. Feels the mist, the blanket of death then -

Apollo awoke from his dream. He turned his head, trying desperately it seemed, to remember something that had only come to him seconds ago, that now appeared as a soft blur in his head. He couldn’t remember the images though, couldn’t see or hear or even think about it. But he felt it. He felt in his chest which raced, he felt it in his eyes that swelled and reddened, he felt it on his body and the small dozen ball sized aches that scattered upon him like a constellation of pain.

“You were screaming in your sleep.” A voice said. He turned. His first instincts were to grab the sword that lay feet away from him, somewhere in a pool of muddy water and chalky sand. He reached for it and stopped, collapsed with his chest hitting the floor. He felt five different bones snap, decompress, or rub wrongly. As if the friction of movement was in itself too much work for his body. True enough, even breathing taxed him. The greatest pain, he noticed, was from his legs. He put his hands on his right thigh and started feeling for bumps or bruises or mismatched joints. But the voice was still there and he quickly became anxious, juggling his attention between the soft voice and his hurting right leg. Both afraid of being weak and weak in his fear.

“You were having a sweet dream, it looked like it.” It was the Spotted Hyena. It came from the murk of the cave, where the small holes of light from the collapsed boulder walls did not penetrate. It smelled humid in that direction. “I’m glad you're alive.”

“You don’t sound surprised.” Apollo relaxed his body and laid back down for a moment.

“I told you, didn’t I? I expect good things from you. You’re an excellent delivery man, an even greater exterminator. If you put your heart into it, that is.”

“Easy for you to say.”

The Hyena sneered. His sharp snout dug into a puddle. “I never had a doubt.”

He splashed water on Apollo’s face. It forced him up again and made him try to stand, again. His hands sunk into the mud, he slipped. Face first he went. He felt sharp pebbles dig into him, not so much as to cut, but to dirty and scratch and annoy. His black hair dipped into the water and his tips became a muddy bundle. His face was caked brown and yellow. He could taste it in his mouth, where the sand lodged itself in between his teeth. He rubbed his eyes which burned and he tried again to stand.

This time by rolling to his side and seeing where the damage to his leg was.

“It didn’t heal right.” Apollo rubbed his palm across his foot. He tried breaking it and pushing it back into his socket (his foot that is) but found himself too weak. He looked around and found a wedge between two stones. He dragged himself there, put his foot in between the pile and made sure his leg was still and immovable from that spot. 

“That’s a doozy, how are you going to fix-” The Hyena stopped. There was a snap. A break of bone and then a groan. “Oh, or you can just do that.”

Apollo had snapped his own foot. Well, re-aligned it, really. It pointed right this time and he smiled only briefly before he laid back down as the pain resuscitated. It felt like lightning bolts shot up his lower body, like an arrow through his Achilles heel, riding up the highway of his veins, straight through his heart and into his brain. That sharp, constant, flowing pain. His foot swelled. He could feel the pulsing bulge hitting the insides of his shoes. And to answer it? He put his hand on his mouth and laid on the floor. His other arm covered his eyes and in that muffled state he shouted. Mostly cursed.

“I know you’re busy,” The Hyena walked over to him. Apollo was biting his hand. “But I think you’ve rested enough.”

Apollo threw mud at it.

“Fuck you.”

“If you’re healthy enough to talk back, you’re healthy enough to stand.”

Apollo struggled to lift his body. It seemed like a deliberate effort just to inch himself up. He inspected himself a final time.

“I’m not healing right.” He felt the plenty cuts on his body, his finger hovered over the spots that burned the most. It was a strange feeling, one he hadn’t remembered for a while. 

“That’s good, now you’re remembering what mortality feels like. What a normal person endures every day. I feel drained, life essence, stamina, arcana. All drained. Like a dried well.”

He looked up, dismissively almost, and breathed heavily. “This isn’t good. I haven’t fed for a while.”

“Food? You need food?” The Hyena walked further into the dark cave and came back. It had in its mouth a four-armed creature, its pincer snapping wildly. “Say ‘Ah’.” 

The Hyena snapped the shell of a skittering creature, it was no bigger than half a foot long and wide and he threw it to the floor near Apollo. Roe, and guts exposed. It was a slimy green and blue and Apollo looked at it, confused whether to be thankful or disgusted. It was sobering, at least.

“I don’t mean like that.” He drew back his foot from his rock bracings and rubbed it. He was beginning to get his feeling back. It was the sensation of trapped sand running down his nerves, and filling his foot. 

“It’s a funny, in a way.” Apollo said. “I’m a demon hunter who hasn’t eaten a demon in days. And here I am, in Hell, without a meal in sight. But it’s usually never this bad. A Vicar can starve for months without feeling much of anything. But down here, I guess it’s different.”

“Maybe it has to do with how much you’ve hurt yourself.”

“Maybe.” Apollo looked to his rear for his sword. It was half its original length, a straight even half. From the first time he had taken it out at that skeleton of a construction site, it had worn itself down. All his troubles, a kind of file, shaving away at the edge of his blade. Now, he was impotent. He picked it up only to hear it break some more. He had no point now. He accepted it, nodded, stepped down harshly with his bad foot and felt the pain rise up his spine. He grunted. Closed his eyes again. Dream or wake, all reality seemed to blend into itself, a maelstrom of confused pain.

“Your sword looks rough.” The Hyena said.

“The explosions do that. But it won’t go out, it’s like small star in there.”

“A star?” 

“Yeah. It’s hard to explain, but just imagine the steel to be a kind of incubator, maybe. Or a generator. Something like that.” He put the sword back into his jacket. It disappeared. “It’s got some more life in it before I’m really fucked.”

“No offense.” The Hyena scratched his ass along the floor. He was laughing. “But you already look fucked.”

Apollo leaned himself against a wall. He coughed. 

“Yeah, I get it.” He said. “Make yourself useless, tell me a way out.”

“Oh, you’re trusting me all of a sudden?” The Hyena asked.

“Well, I figure that if you wanted to eat me, you would have done it already.”

The Hyena stopped dragging himself on the sand. He looked at Apollo curiously, then stuck out his tongue again. “Even if I did. I don’t think you’d taste well. You’re too salty. A bit spicy. And very, very rotten.”

Apollo spat. He heard the ball of phlegm and blood hit water.

“Enough banter. Shut up and show me the way.”

“Are you sure you’re ready? It’s only going to get worse.” The Hyena’s tail wagged. “You don’t seem as convicted about this whole thing yet, too.”

“Well, what the fuck. You were complaining only a moment ago.” Apollo said. “I got beaten up. I got blown up. And here I am, wide awake for the annoying drill sergeant. This isn’t enough conviction, for ya?” 

“Any man can suffer if he’s forced to. It takes another kind of man to see the light at the end and to hope for it and to run for it. It seems to me that you’re not that kind of man.”

“To be honest, no.” Apollo rotated his neck. He felt it crack. “I felt like an idiot coming in and I still feel like an idiot. The only way out is through Astyanax. Kill him, drain his blood, leave. It’s a simple a goal anyone can have. I know that’s what I need to do, but I just can’t imagine myself actually doing it. I guess you can say I have no hope. But I’ve always been like that.
“I’m a practical man. And what makes a practical man is his ability to reason, under any circumstances. Because reason and logic are there for you long after hope dies out. So I figure, I either spend the rest of my existence here in this dark place or I go out. Maybe I pick someone up along the way, maybe not. Maybe I die buried in sand, maybe not. Taking any chance is better than having no chance.”

“You? You’re taking a chance? That’s strange. Very strange. I thought you were the kind of man who would enjoy eating crabs in a dark cave for all of eternity.” The Hyena walked up with that cold and bemused veneer. “Isn’t that what you said? That you did not enjoy being disturbed. That you never wanted to help anyone, because you never wanted the burden of their expectations. And by extension, to have nothing mean anything to you. Didn’t you want that kind of ghostly existence?”

“How do you-” He eyed the Hyena. “What? I said that a while ago… How would you?” 

“Back in Havenbrook in your shabby shack on the third floor, with the clogged shower drain and noisy neighbors. With your small computer and your small snacks and your small time detective work.”

Apollo hid his surprise. He closed his eyes, took a breath and made his face stiff and dull.

“I won’t even ask anymore, Creature. Guide. Demon.” He steadied his shaking arms. “You wouldn’t even give me an answer if I tried. No. I won’t bother, just tell me how to get out and where to go, that’s all I want from you.”

 The Hyena picked up his tongue. He stared a bit at Apollo before turning, pointing to a small patch of darkness, indiscernible from the rest. There were a few bugs roaming around, giving off auras of green light like small neon orbs. Some of them settled on stalagmites and some of them floated aimlessly like cheery drunk patrons. 

“Call me what you will.” The Hyena started to walk. His form absorbed into the shadow of the end of the cave. “Guide or Creature or Angel. Call me any of those, but do not call me demon.” 

His voice echoed as he went further. Apollo waited a bit, looking around his shoulders. He gasped, held his breath, and let go. He followed the Hyena, limping and dragging until he himself became indistinguishable from that wide stretch of darkness.

Dion

They circled the dinner table round and round the feast of fruit and meat, round the thin dim light of the candle, and among the crackling wood, grew a hostility in Dion. He looked to the door and to the stranger and although not knowing who he was, felt his gut shift up and down. 

Perhaps it was the way Alestor stood that made him off-putting to Dion. How his shoulders hung and rags pulled like a fresh poach or how his eyes blinked, small and beady like rats of mice. Maybe it was the pudgy feet and hands, the long hair and the unshaven face. He did not know why he felt the growing contempt, only watched.

“Who is he?” Dion asked. Astyanax walked towards Alestor and wrapped his arms around him. 

“He’s a friend and more importantly, a normal person,” Astyanax said. “One of those people you’ve sworn to protect, right?”

It should have been easy. He was just a man, after all. But he couldn’t compel himself to agree. Dion eyed Alestor. His face seemed bitter, not defeated or victorious, just bitter. His face was old and wrinkled and his body was worn.

“Again. I’m here to be humiliated, again.” Alestor said. He didn’t look at anyone in particular. He stood lopsided and dull and stupid.

“No, you’re here to appease, like a whore. Though of a different kind of seduction.” Astyanax looked back to Dion. “You know this man. You’ve known each other for a while now, behind closed doors. You’ve heard of each other, smelled of each other, but never, ever, have you seen each other. Until today.”

Dion’s hands clenched into fists. He was expecting something. He could feel it coming like flood waters and him a lone tree at the center, torn and stretched and ripped out from the roots.

“Who. Is. He?” Dion asked.

“Go on. Tell him your name.” Astyanax moved his hands up Alestor’s forearms almost in comfort, before he stopped on his shoulder and his neck. He rubbed them. Alestor showed no signs of resistance. 

“Why should I?” Alestor asked.

“You’re being defiant again?” Astyanax tapped his fingers along Alestor’s nape like a spider crawl. “Don’t defy me. There are worse things than death that I can show you if you compel me enough. So it’s in your best interest to listen to me. Tell him your name.” 

Alestor rubbed one of his elbows. He looked around the room towards a servant holding a jar of oil in one corner, then to two soldiers standing by the door, spears in hands. They breathed heavily. And at last his face went towards Dion, who stood furthest from him, behind the colorful table. He was neither interested nor confused by the man and simply assumed he was either another victim or another of God’s abortion. Alestor tightened his face and said briefly, with an annoyed tone almost, “My name is Alestor.”

It was enough to make the room silent.

Dion felt his hand hurt. It felt like every blood vessel in his body back up all of a sudden, halted and started production on his adrenaline filled body all at once. He felt the blood, like small marbles of anger-laden blood, were forcing their way through his veins, into his head where he felt them break and scatter amongst themselves. It felt like they were crashing and scattering, those marbles of his, in his brain. He felt pain and an intense blood rush and a light-headedness all at once. The first dimmed for a moment, in fear almost and their tongues receded back to the ashy wood.

“He’s not saying anything,” Alestor said. “You’ve brought me here to meet a mime. Why do you waste my time like this?” 

He shook his head and turned to go out the door. Astyanax stopped him.

“That’s the second time you’ve acted without my say so. I’ll admit, you have courage. But watch. Stay quiet and watch.” Astyanax held him by the arm in that iron grip. It looked like his hand would turn blue. Alestor turned again, back to stare at Dion. There was a moment in that silence. He didn’t feel much but looked around to see the expressions on everyone's faces. Some of them were smug, others afraid, Astyanax’s was only curious, with one raised eyebrow and his yellow eyes thinned to slits. 

And the room became quieter and quieter. And Alestor aroused now, awoken from the lull, waited. They saw Dion shake, they saw his leg tap into sporadic beats. They saw the fire rise and the stoker collapse and the burning logs roll out into livid white pools of ash. Dion brought his face up again. It was horrifically featureless. Neither strained nor joyous nor sad. His eyes were red, no different than the fire and they looked at Alestor. And Alestor knew at the moment, as he stared back at those eyes, who and what he was facing. In that brief moment, he broke away from Astyanax. He looked for the door and thought, the bloodhounds have tasted me. They have searched me far and wide to see what they could have that Astyanax has not taken. 

He put his hand on the door and smacked it. Nothing but the loud banging. A guard grabbed him, put both hands behind his back and threw him to the floor where his face collapsed onto the tile. There was a knee on his neck. 

Dion tensed his legs. He leaned forward. He flipped the table and thought to fly forward him, to leap and to rip Alestor’s head off. All wine and manners of food spilled across the floor like a wrecked voyager, its passengers thrown, bludgeoned and bruised.  Dion pounced towards Alestor and he too felt the guards hands around him. Not without any effort on his own part to retaliate though. He squirmed and threw his head out and punched and saw the guards fall into a bloody-nosed mess. Astyanax whistled. The doors flew open. Two more men came out. These ones didn’t have noses, they had puss-filled wounds and gaps replacing features on their faces. They fell too, thrown against the walls and scattered. Armor clanking and helmets rolling like silver pots. 

Astyanax began to laugh. He clapped now. Five more men came in. That was the number he needed. And it was there, finally, after three of them laid on the floor with spinning heads, that Dion was finally restrained. One pair of bleeding hands wrapped around his chest and neck, a bruised knee was against his back. He was forced to the floor and forced to face Alestor. Both of them in that wine-stained floor, where the food squirmed and flew out underneath their wrestling bodies.

“He’ll kill me,” Alestor screamed. “You knew it. You knew he would kill me, you-” 

He bit his tongue when he saw Astyanax stare back at him.

“I’ll do worse than kill you.” Dion could barely hold his breath. His respirations were loud, quick-successive, sharp. “I’ll show you my Hell!I’ll bury you alive, shallow enough so you may hear yourself suffocate, deep enough so you’ll know you’ll have no chance to escape. You’ll suffer alright. You’ll suffer!”

“Oh, my,” Astyanax scratched his head. “Is vengeance part of Catholicism? Sodom and Gomorrah must have inspired you a bit too much.”

“I’ll kill him, I’ll show him wrath.” Dion tried to inch himself forward with his chin.

“You take those books too seriously, Christian. Why don’t you relax?”

“Relax? Relax!” Dion closed his eyes. He grunted and began, with shaking knees, to stand himself against the force of the two men behind him. Then he was silenced.

Astyanax punched him. He felt his chin hit the floor again and break the stone, his lower jaw leaving an imprint the shape of his mouth. 

“I’ve brought him here to make a deal. You’d do best to listen. And the deal is, your life for his. Your life, for everyone else’s. The innocent go free, the guilty-”

“Alestor.” Dion repeated with bleeding teeth.

“Yes, the guilty, I will up to you, as a gift if and only if you accept my terms of submission.”

“You’re selling me out?” Alestor screamed. “You promised me a home here.”

“And as your master, I have all the power in me to revoke that.”

“Demon,” Alestor screamed at the floor. His teeth scraped and made a long, scratching noise. “Everything a lie. My wife, my unborn. My son.”

Alestor thought it over in that loud room, with the two screaming men and the laughing demon. He thought, It’s been years and my eyes have been dried. It’s been years since I cried. He felt his dry channels grow just as Astyanax’s roaring laugh grew, just as his dagger-shaped teeth widened into that grim smile. Alestor cried. Two tears turned to two streams, his face contorted in between anger and regret. All a lie. All of it. Maybe he knew it, somewhere in his soul. His son definitely did, and he killed him for it.

“I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch.” Dion slammed his face into the floor and Alestor could only repeat it in his mind, the words, I killed him for it. I killed my baby boy for this.

Alestor sank. He couldn’t lift his head. His muscles seemed lax. He stayed, face down on the floor, mumbling and crying. From the turned table, the wine spilled, flowing from its bottle down to the floor and into a pool. A dark, red pool, tart and deep, that swallowed his body, head to chest.

“Is this all you wanted? To bring everyone down to your level. To see me rip him apart? To see me sold?” Dion jerked his head back. It hit someone. He felt a punch back. 

“Get off me!”

“Is it really my fault?” Astyanax put his palm up. The demon with the bloody hole for a nose stopped his assault. “Is it my fault I found something worth keeping, worth stealing and lying for?”

“Be quiet, demon.” 

“No. I’m no demon, only a man.” Astyanax brought his chin up. “A man with strange desires. If you could call any desire, strange.”

“Don’t act like you’re blameless.”

“Oh, but I am. For who was it that put those desires in me? I was certainly never asked. Is anyone really, ever, asked? No. And you of all people should understand what strange desires fuel men. After what I saw from you, in that small hole in the earth. The sewer, was it? Or that half-built sanctuary, a construction site was it?” Astyanax rubbed Dion’s smooth chin. “Aye, that’s where I first came upon you. In those thrilling hours, with the inklings of joyous violence in you. Behind that mask of yours, I knew it, I could see it, the giant smile you wore. Didn’t you? 

Dion stayed quiet. He sucked his lips in and tightened his skin.

“How could you call me demon, how could you accuse me of any strange desires. You, you who lives in the shadow of your own vile nature. You, angry and toxic human, you. How could you accuse me of anything? Thankless, cur. I’m offering you your people back. I’m also offering you homestead, a warriors homestead. For where else can you exist? Certainly not back there, with the plain people and the plain laws and the plain morals. You’ll never fit in. You know that, better than anyone else.”

“You’re not normal,” Dion repeated. “Not normal. Not normal.”

“And what is that? What would you consider the normal nature of man? Tell me. Tell me.”

“Man is…” He closed his eyes to think, to deny. “Man is. Well. Man is…He’s good. He can do good. He should be good.” Dion shook, he was still in the twilight of his anger though. Still pulsing, still raging deep inside. 

“He can reflect and grow.” He tried to think. All thought, all vision, seem contaminated with a superimposed screen of red.

“Acts of charity are as obscene as acts of violence, both are done out of an inherent and arrogant moral superiority one person assumes over another. What else do you have?”

“You don’t get it,” Dion said. “It’s about love. A person is here to love and to spread love. That’s what it means to be good.”

“There plenty of things one can love, truly, that would be considered sick obsessions to other people. What’s the difference between the two, between a disease in the mind and love? Is it in the harm it causes to the self or the other? Any innocent love can do that. Is it in the causal origin of the love? Well then, take it up with God then. For that is God-given. Every miracle, God-given. Every tragedy, God-given.”

Astyanax walked back to Alestor who was still moping.

“Look. See. Observe this fine specimen, Dion.” Astyanax grabbed Alestor by the hair and raised his face. “He follows your aesthetics to a T. He thought what he was doing was good. He thought he was helping others, himself. You should have seen the men and women he employed, the sick and lonely he comforted in his little club. All of it, out of a love. And what great love it must have been! Killing your own son, that’s something even Abraham couldn’t muster. 

“You killed your son?” Dion asked. His voice sounded broken. Alestor couldn’t say much, only mumbled incoherences.

“Yes, yes he did. And what immense strength of will that must have taken. Can I blame him then, for being stronger than the weak? Can anyone blame him? No. He took, and took, and took. And the weak either joined him or feared him, neither did anything to stop him. It took another strong will, your will, to end him. Can I call anything you did, necessarily evil or good? No. None of it was sin. It was just war. Just war…” 

“It’s wrong. It was all wrong.”

“You’re saying that as the victor. I ask again though, who cares? What’s wrong with any of your actions or any of Alestor’s? Nothing, really. Nothing really matters at all.”

“Just wait until I break out of this.” Dion tried to stretch his arms out again. The death grip tightened on them even more.

“Still throwing yourself around again? Good. That’s what I like about you. That’s what I love.

“How can you say he didn’t sin?” Dion screamed. The memory came back, the wildfire. “He killed children. Shamelessly killed them!”

“Oh? A child? Who decides why one life should mean more than other? Why any life should mean anything?”

“I do. You hear me? I do.” He tried again. His knees locked and then he felt a fist come down the back of his head. It felt like it would dislodge his eyes and his vision scattered for a bit.

“Well aren’t you a passionate tyrant. Well, okay. What was this child’s name? The child that meant so much to you, seemingly.”

They all stood quietly. Alestor head fell back down as Astyanax let go. Dion’s lips fumbled and he looked around, hoping for some reason, to see Apollo. There was nothing, no one to even jump-start his memory. That foggy, blurred memory of his. His head spun and he closed his eyes to concentrate, to see hopefully, a snippet materialize in the darkness of his mentalscape. What was it on the news article? The television headline? The Internet article? What was her name? 

“So…” He started. Then stretched his neck out, almost desperate to answer. “Her name was Sophie!”

“And who was she? What did she do? What was she like?”

Dion could not answer. He felt cold. He felt the wine and sweat dripping from him. It soaked deep. It made him heavy, like lead. He just stayed there, crouched and hurt and spinning, confused.

“What a lively answer. I’m sure she must have meant a lot to you, then!” Astyanax broke into laughter. It haunted the room with its echo. “She must have been important, right? Or was she just an excuse to validate your violence?”

He walked around, towards the door and stood Alestor on the way there. 

“I asked you what the nature of a man was and honestly, I find your answers lacking. Disappointing.” He left his mouth open and grinning. “Would you like to hear my answer? I’m a bit of an anthropologist, you see. Three thousand years of voyeuristic solitude does that for you.”

“No.” Dion put his face down. “No, shut up.”

Astyanax picked up his jaw.

“There are only two desires about a man that really matter. Only two. First, he fears death and does everything he can to avoid it. Second, he fears boredom. Which is another kind of death, the death of the soul. That’s it. There is nothing else to a man. Just those two. Read history, watch it, for it proves me right. That regardless of breed or color or place or time, all man seeks to do is resolve himself from boredom and death. Science, art, spiritual growth. All of it, frivolity. A dress up game for what is really just war. War of the mind, war of the heart, war of the soul. Children know this. That girl, Sophie, must have known this too. That games and war are the only noble things a man can do.

“Demon,” Dion repeated in defeat and denial. “Demon, demon.”

“Demon, man. You and I, all the same. A few minutes ago you were bent on decapitating this fellow.” He drew Alestor closer to him. “You act like your moral code mattered so much, but you can’t even argue the points. You’re a hypocrite. A compassionate, courageous, violent, hypocrite and I love it. I love you.”

The door opened again. Astyanax pushed Alestor through it. More people stepped through, and the door closed down to a sliver of light that began to cut down in between Dion’s body. From it, a warped voice.

“Think it over, Dion. It’d be no fun to just put a chain and collar around you. Why break a toy so early, right? So think it over. One soul for the many. That’s a very Jesus-thing to do so it should be right up your alley. Aha.”

They were gone and Dion was left almost comatose and lifeless. All the noise he made was simple and cold, the rhythmic breathing and rhythmic rocking of his head, like a storm had just passed through him. 

Eventually, he balled up. Alone, with the fire of the lags receding, he curled. Neither prisoner nor free agent, just hostage of a kind of guilt and fear.

Apollo

The Hyena mounted his back as he came up, past the hill where the rocks slid into small avalanches. He was out of the cave, back into the desert. To his rear were cacti and the pools of thick syrup, that they spilled out. There were small shells inside the droppings of the plant, oyster-like things that yawned at Apollo aa he came up. Eating the small things was a furry four-legged animal. Curled tail, pronounced mouth that dug into the earth like a spade. The Hyena leaped off of Apollos back and swatted it away. Then followed its flying body and paralyzed it with a neck bite. Apollo puffed his cheeks and blew slowly. He dried sweat from his face with his sleeve and sat on his ass on the hot dirt. 

He was out. Finally. He looked back down to the small hole he had come from, it made him feel like a mole. A ferret, perhaps. It was a hole coming out of a bulging corroded boulder, half embedded into the floor. He turned around again and atop the hill he could see it all. A forest of Joshua trees and the spiny vultures perching themselves atop dead stumps. 

“How far are we from those barracks you were talking about?” Apollo asked. The Hyena was finishing his meal. Coughing, and spitting out small bones from in between his teeth. 

“I’d say a couple miles off. You’d have to go past the trees.”

“And then? Any landmarks to help me navigate?”

“You won’t need them.  I'll lead you. Trust me.”

“Trust you, huh.” Apollo blew out. His hair pushed aside by the exhausted air.

It was hard to tell how long he sat, it felt like a long while, though the sky did not change. Nor were there clouds to pass, some wind, that was it. He could no longer hear the coast or feel the cool wind and behind him was the horizon, wavy and broken through the series of undulating grooves. He stood himself, the Hyena’s ears rose curiously. The tail wagged and they both went forward.

“I wouldn’t walk that casually if I were you.” The Hyena said. “Relaxed men are dead men here.”

“Why’s that?” 

“You’ll see. Be wary. Keep your head low.” 

Apollo did just that. His whole body maintained behind stone or dirt or tree. He did not know what he was looking out for, though felt the warning like a strong reverberation in his bones.  He was shaking. And somewhere along, when he cupped his hands by the side of a cactus and the water it spilled (or what looked like water), he felt the small pool vibrate. The sand disturbed and flowing in long threads from within the water surface. He looked up. The Hyena was aloof, biting his own tail. Grooming.

Apollo dragged his feet up to a corner, in between a small plateau and a Joshua tree with its long hands covering most of his body. His eyes peered out, past the little spines of green. He couldn’t see anything, just glistening from below like the stars had fallen. He rubbed his eyes. He swore those stars were moving, traveling and leaving little lines of white light from where they walked in synchronized tempo. 

He felt the earth tremble. The rocks skid downhill, the vultures with their bony wings traveled high. Four-eyed birds they were, all staring at a rough road ahead.

They were looking, all of them,  at the moving bodies. Clunky, shiny bodies like stars. 

Then he saw the banners. The giant red rectangle flags with the wolf head silhouette. He saw chariots driven by amputated creatures, not steeds though definitely burdened beasts, some of them walked lame and slowly, others with their missing lower halves crawled on their front hooves. Broken bodies forced to travel like a mistrung mannequin. 

The wheels spurred along. They made streaks in the soft sand and drove rote next to the warriors. 

Bastard Trojans, bastard Greeks, bastard Romans, with armor fashioned from trash and stone and bronze. Some properly armed, others more makeshift.  Some with metal, some with bone. Few with tags. Most completely nude with nothing but leather straps to contain them and their members. 

“Impressive. Isn’t it?” The Hyena said.

“Nudists and cosplayers, but can they fight?” He did not laugh. 

“They’re disciplined. I’m sure you could best them individually though.”

There were smaller mammals with them, predator types with long snouts who vacuumed the dirt in search of smell. Something of a cross between a hound and an anteater. Something both ridiculous and frightening. 

“Salpin. They're called salpines, after the instrument.” The Hyena  said. 

Apollo looked elsewhere. To the geared men with the odd leather. Odd in how faded color and amber the color was. Strange tanning, Apollo thought. What animal was that made out of? If it was made out of an animal, that is. He scratched his great head held his breath. His heart went still. 

Human, he thought. 

“It’d be stupid to go down there.” Apollo came down from his spot. “I can see my death already. All the numbers, all the people they’d throw at me until one of them would get lucky. Through carelessness, though tiredness. I’d be stabbed full of holes. Killed, if I’m lucky.”

“Oh, it can’t be that hard.” The Hyena smirked. “How many do you count? I’m sure you can wipe out a platoon or two.” 

“Logistics don’t matter. If I can’t kill all of them, there’s no point in even trying. I just need to get past them.”

“There are search parties all across. We’re entering their territory, after all. How do you expect to dodge them for however long we need?”

Apollo looked on again. His hand was above his eyes, shading him from the light. The fields were too wide, the Joshua trees too short in between. But there, to the left from where he stood, he saw a small cliff ridge. There was a long oak there too, growing by its side. He hissed, he clenched his teeth and looked back.

“Can you do me a favor? I have a plan.”

And the Hyena’s ears pointed up.

There were rows of five men, with four men to a line. A square then, of twenty, that walked together and in between one platoon from another,  a sizeable gap of twenty meters. It was a long chain and every other block hosted the strange hounds or the chariots. It was a sequence that went on for hours and that coughed up dirt and that filled the air with the noise of thunderous footsteps and a loud, blaring horn. An instrument hollowed from a double pointed tusk. A tusk of an alien creature. 

And by chance they chose a random block. And they stalked it. 

The two hid behind a small mound of dirt and watched it with scheming eyes. They looked at every person on that particular platoon, watched who lagged and who didn’t and when they were comfortable with their choice on the menu, Apollo moved. He went left.

The Hyena stared forward. There was a soldier with his gladius dangling uncomfortably low, who hesitated each couple of steps to fix the strappings of his weapon. And on one check, he had been too slow. The Hyena had ran low to the group, had camouflage its beige skin with the beige dirt and had swooped up to rip the weapon from this particulars hip. He ran with it. And all around his platoon, this unlucky soldier heard the hollering and the lip-smacking smear of insults.

“Must have confused it for a bone.” One said. He had an eye patch.

“Limp hands, limp dick.” More banter. 

“What? Legs broke? Go catch it!” Another one with two puss-filled holes for ears said. He pushed the unlucky soldier forward. And this soldier, angry at the school of laughter behind him, stuck his sharp tongue in the gap between his front teeth. He played with his gums and chewed on his inner walls and slapped his helmet firmly in place. 

“Bested by a bitch!” Another imbecile cried.

At last, he sprinted. Through the even dirt, pushing himself against trees, wrapping around trinks. Running, kicking dirt into the air. And at every corner, the Hyena outwitted him, forced him to trip on brushes.  Switched sharply, stained his ankles. 

It made the unlucky soldier angrier. And enraged, he threw his shield. The Hyena jumped forward, fell to the cliff and ducked the shield. It looked like a saucer as it flew, and crashed like one too. 

The soldier came to the cliff side and sighed. He looked the far distance his shield had traveled, not necessarily a steep fall but a long way ahead. He shook his head. He wiped the drool from his lips and with his stupid, bitter face, looked down. 

His mouth collapsed inward.

The soldier's teeth scattered. For a blade had been stabbed in his neck and out through his mouth. Apollo, whose feet gripped at the cliff wall and whose eyes stared up as the blood fell on his face. The demon twitched. He tried gripping the blood. And at last, through the shock of the blow, through the constant bleeding, he stood still and lifeless. Apollo could finally breathe safely. He undid his knife and heard the desperate attempts to scream the demon had tried, it sounded like gurgling where the gape in his neck was.

After a while, the demon fell like timbre, down the cliff and past Apollo who followed the corpse below.

Apollo lifted the corpses head so the blood could spray outward. He tried too at least, but the helmet slipped from his hand and the face planted itself into the floor. The blood would seep through the cracks into the floor, into the cavernous sewage of the desert below. He looked at the helmet, see how it fit and wearing it, began to strip the corpses armor. The bandages he wore on his legs, the skirt, the chest plate, the sandals. Every piece and every accessory until he too was rattling with bones and bronze.

Anything he could not keep he put inside his coat and let disappear through his insignia, that pocket dimension of his. Everything else he wore armor over. He fitted himself, strapped it tightly to his body and started to adjust himself to the claustrophobic gear. Not flexible, not good.

From behind he heard cutting. Then the spreading of muscle and flesh like surgery. He looked behind him, the Hyena was holding the demon's heart. It had some crystal like growths on it like a mineral tumor. It was brightly colored, delectable even (he was afraid to call it delectable though his mouth salivated). But it was human. Very human, still beating too.

“No, that’s not for me.” Apollo put his palm up.

“You need this, don’t you? You’re getting weaker.” 

“I do need it but not from him. Not from a human.”

“What human being do you see?” The Hyena slapped his tail against the lifeless face of the soldier. “All I see is degenerate trash.”

“So what? It was a human being once, long ago maybe, but once.”

“Oh, is this not the categorical example of a demon? Is it not in your textbook, in your code? Find me a difference between what you see and what you would call a demon so I may tell you how arbitrary it really is.”

“It’s not fucking arbitrary if it makes me feel awful. Alright?” Apollo knocked on his helmet. “It may seem odd to you but it makes me feel sick, the thought of eating that. It’s like cannibalism.”

“You’re not human yourself.”

“I’m human enough.”

“Oh. Rational Apollo? Thoughtful Apollo? This is your fence line?” The Hyena smirked. “How do you expect to survive through this with your trivial inhibitions? This is war. Eat it.”

“I’d rather eat shit.” He did not give the Hyena a chance to appease. He did not want to stare at the heart any longer either. Between his wobbling feet and his gelatin arms, he was being tempted and it was making him feel weak.

“We’re moving out,” Apollo said, dismissively. 

He couldn’t turn his back.

“Hmph. Fine.” The Hyena swallowed the heart whole. “Where are we going then? Back to the group?”

“No. They’ll find out where the body is eventually and I have no interest in hiding it.” Apollo walked. “We’ll go far enough, try to fool as many scouts as we can and hopefully we can make it to barracks before he does.” He pointed to the corpse. The blood was staining the naked body. 

“Hopefully they won’t find the murdered too soon.” Apollo tied his sandals.

“Calling it murder, now? They’re already dead.”

He did not answer. He fixed a balaclava on his mouth and rubbed sand out of his eyes as he pushed his body through the fleeting waves of sand.

Horace

Old man Horace stood in front of the satin fabric mesh. Behind it, a door. Behind that, a moaning phantom. As the only butler, the only housekeeper, it was his duty to know every in and out of the building. And these two guests made him nervous.

His head peaked inside the room. Sizeable, a room fit for a family of lions, with the cushioned bed and the yellow soft carpets like feeding grounds. On the walls were the pictures and paintings of stories and myths, most of whom revolved around the central pale figure, Astyanax. Stories of victory, of great hunts across the Hellish plane. Horace knew most of them were wrong though. A water font stood in one corner, it's placid pool hosting moss and small tad pool creatures. Nothing else stirred but the man in the cage. 

A rattling prison placed almost center of the room, bars ten feet high and thicker than the hands that wrapped around them. As if it was some kind of nautical cage descending into the den of sharks. 

Alestor was inside, crying. Alestor who poked his face in the interstices of the bars with his wiry face. A bucket of filth sat on its side in the corner of the cage, is filth spilled out. Past the dirty musk, an angry glare rested on the bed. Dion. Dion who sat at the edge of the purple blanketed bed with his feet hovering off the ground. Horace looked at the two, his eyes skidding across, slipping between the two who seemed just about to break. It made Horace nervous. He pulled his body back and lowered himself from his toes, the ornate door closed shut and the moaning hid behind the ornate flower covered door.

“Why is he taunting them? What trouble does he seek today?” Horace asked a guard to his rear. “Where is he, the young master?” 

The guard pointed through a window across from them, to a place opposite from them on the other side of the villa. A bulbous tower with a pointed tip. Horace shook his head.

“Is he with anyone?” Horace asked.

“One of the guards. Or a slave. I couldn’t tell, they were naked. Fair bodied, too.”

“Oh, no,” Horace held tight his black cloak. “He’s frustrated.”

He pushed his walking stick forward and let it lead him through the villa with a consistent hobbling and a long, dreary tapping as he went through the skeleton of the villa. It was his duty to pull his old body through, to drag it about like a mop in every lifeless and empty creak and cavern of this wretched fortress. For he was a helper (the only), an adviser (the only) and a friend (the only) all at once.  He was a butler. Not a servant. Always particular about that part, always making sure the guards and the slaves understood his place about them. No, Horace was no servant. He was the Old man and Astyanax the young master and that’s how it had been since he had stepped foot on this land the few millenniums ago.

A hammer dropped from the side of an anvil, Horace put it in its dusty place as he went through the armory. Inside the gardens, he scared away the piling ravens that feasted on his roses. And finally, he came upon the dilapidated conference room, what remained of it at least. There were standing torches, a map of the land that was torn halfway and cushions surrounding a rectangular table. Horace wiped dirt off the steps as he went up and past the room.

By the time he had come to the tower, looking up to the spiral staircase and the barred windows, he felt tired. He leaned himself against the wall as he climbed. He could hear something, grunting perhaps, a strained closed-mouth, lip-bitten grunt. The kind of strain only war and sex could do. He came to the top of the stairs, knocked on it, then opened. His eyes surveyed the long room. The first thing he saw were moths. Or butterflies, pinned to sheets of bark and laid out on display cases. Some of them were still writhing. 

The next specimen he saw was a set of bones from the many-legged, many-headed bizarre creatures of this island. He saw the four-headed serpentines stare back at him, biting and rolling around inside a glass container. They snapped at Horace. Their breaths stained the glass with steam. He remembered to avoid them, they’d paralyze you with one bite, melt your flesh with the second, kill you with the third and eat you with the fourth. As tiny as they were. He walked past the snakes (Hydralisks as they were called, Astyanax had nicknamed them such as more of a mockery than a categorical tool. The small-bodied Hydralisks of the East). 

The snacks rattled, bit, hissed. But none were louder than the grunting.

There was a veil separating the mausoleum and the bedroom. It was a room truly built for Astyanax’s pleasure, a pet pen as he called it. And he had many pleasures here with his many pets and toys. All of them, of all species. And there, furthest from the glass cases was the biggest display of all. A bed, with Astyanax in it and another man below him, enduring his thrusts. Horace walked up, not too closely, he had lost a finger the last (and only time) he had done that. The man below Astyanax had his head in the pillows and his ass pointed up for Astyanax’s member. And Astyanax turned. All of him released from the tight clench, he turned to face Horace. 

“Oh, it’s you,” Astyanax returned his attention to the man. “What do you want?”

“I’m wondering why you stuck those two together.” He breathed deep. “That’s reckless.” 

“Persuasion. Let him see what he wants every day and I’m sure he’ll come around to take it.” Astyanax said. “He’ll be convinced, hatred suffocates reason. With reason gone, temptation takes it place and from there. Well. It’ll be easy. Negotiation is just the art of temptation, after all.”

“And guile,” Horace said.

“And guile.” Astyanax pressed forward. A very steady and fast rhythm.

“If it was as simple as that, you wouldn’t be this nervous.” 

“What do you mean?” Astyanax stopped mid-thrust. He lifted himself of the soft olive skinned back of the man below. He paused to think and focused on a blemish of flesh in the man’s lower back. Then he smiled. Then he went back to thrusting. 

“You know what I mean.” Horace stepped forward. “Three thousand years is long enough to know your habits. And you always do this. These...deviant things when you’re nervous. What has you feeling raw?”

Astyanax did not bother turning. Sweat fell from his hair. 

“It might be that I won’t be able to uphold my end of the deal. Well, if Dion accepts.”

“What do you mean?” 

“I mean to say the West has them.” 

There was silence. 

“Oh,” Horace said.

“Yes. The West, an unruly bunch aren’t they? The untamed West, called themselves such even as I crushed their last mutiny.”

“Years ago you did and years is long enough for contempt to breed.” Horace scratched his head. “When’s the last time you had contact with them.”

“Months maybe. Years, probably.” Astyanax said. “I killed every single one of them and they still act up. I’ve assigned them my most trusted captains and still, I worry. Who knows what drives those demons mad? The desert, methinks. It’s scrambled their brains.”

“Forget the slaves or the boy, campaign and have those cretins killed.”

“They’re not cretins yet. I’ll send a messenger to see if the captains and commanders can settle the army down. They still have a chance.”

“Oh,” Horace looked down. “But doesn’t that mean you’re giving them a chance to kill the trespassers? The slaves?” 

Silence. Then the sound of slapping wet flesh. 

“Maybe,” Astyanax said. “Maybe I lose my bargaining chip, maybe I don’t.”

“Do you think the West will listen?” 

“Yes, no. I’m beginning to think it won’t matter. I don’t think I’ll let Dion go any which way.”

“You gave him your word.” 

“But will he keep his?” Astyanax licked the sweat from his mouth. “I figure if he kills Alestor then I have every right to do whatever I want to him. Hah. What would you call that, a safety net?”

“And do you think he’ll listen easily, follow your rule easily?”

“If he doesn’t then we’ll fight. Won’t that just be great?” There was spasm. A shaking of his legs as Astyanax came and removed himself from the man. 

“That’s what I’m worried about. The fight.” Horace said. “I’ve never lied, I will never lie. And I can’t hold my tongue when I say that boy is a threat.”

“I don’t fear the second death.”

“You should. There is no coming back from oblivion or whatever which God has prepared for you.”

“Three thousand years, Horace. Three thousand years of solitude and you still cling to this worthless life?” Astyanax put on his robe. There was a sheen to his skin. “I’ve a found a thrill and you’ve found a fear. We should be thankful that our old hearts still beat with the life pulse. What is there besides that? Why exist for the sake of existing? That seems worse than death to me, to live without passions.”

“And passions bring fears. And fear, suffering.”

“What false reason is that? I’m already suffering.”

“I’ve said this before.” Horace walked closer. “But redemption is still your reach. Please, give up your vanity of vanities. That senseless warrior spirit of yours. You stand to gain nothing, yet you gamble everything.”

“Gain nothing?” Astyanax bent over and let the air escape him with long-winded scoffs. “There is nothing worth gaining but the taking of one man's life by your own. Every other pleasure is second to that.”

“This is enough, don’t you think? I’ve seen you through many years. And this, this I must say is enough.” 

“I’ve foreseen it already, dear Horace. My victory. It’s already being sung by the muses.”

“You don’t know that. Not with absolute certainty.” Horace walked over to Astyanax who towered over him, soft and fair. 

Oh, Horace.” He put his arm down on the small old man’s shoulder. “But I do know. It came to me in a dream. A vision through God.”

“A dream? You put your faith in a mad dream?”

“Everyone does. And I dreamt of death. I’ve seen it, last night. A red glowing heart removed and raised to my face and a wide mouth that mauls it whole. Yes, I’ve seen it. Both of us, putting our lives on the scale, so evenly matched at each side that only the featherweight of tenacity can decide winner from which. Loser from winner, dead from alive. Oh, yes, I live and put my faith in that featherweight and that dream. And what a glorious day it will be when the angels of heaven shine down at me, their cluster of wings surrounding me.”

“Madness.” Horace tugged at his legs. “Please, stop this madness.”

“Three thousand years I’ve heard this from you and now, you didn’t change my mind the first time and you won’t change it now.”

And Horace stood quietly for he had nothing to say to that blinding confidence. Astyanax looked down at the old man, his smile dropped as he knelt down to Horace. He rested both hands on his shoulders, then rubbed the old wrinkles of his forehead. 

“I’m glad you’ve stuck around to see my passions through. I hope you’ll continue too.” Astyanax said. “You’re the only one I give that privilege of choice too. Remember that.”

Astyanax kissed his cheeks and it eased Horace. He was still soft, somewhere inside, he thought. Astyanax left the room.

“Passions…” Horace repeated as he looked back to the bed. He rubbed his eyes, they were wet. “Passions kills.”

The man still laid there, the color of his skin receding to a pale white. He laid with this butt up and high, his body cold and lifeless, for his throat had been slit long ago.

Jeremiah

“I want her.” 

“No. She belongs to me.” 

Two caricatures of men slapped and tripped and pushed each around and through every table in the room. The instruments, the devices of torture, all broken and scattered about, scratching and dragging across the floor as the two found themselves wrestling. Each eager to gain on the other, each attacking and scratching relentlessly. Of the six standing above in the room, five cheered and one settled into a grimace as he watched his underlings fight. 

One of them had found his balance. He pressed. His ponytail spinning wildly as he punched down on the face of his victim on the floor below.

“That’s enough.” The Captain said behind his tight helmet. 

The underling did not listen. Instead, he found a small hammer sitting by his side. 

“That’s enough!” The Captain said again. He tried to move forward but felt two hands grappling his chest. They pushed him away. He fell, just as the hammer fell. Having come down on one of the skulls of the demons. Four blows is all it took to stop the lesser warrior from breathing. Two blows is all it took to crush his skull. There was cheering, a delight in the viscera that flew in all directions and the growing pool of blood underneath their sandals and heels and boots.

“Half-face.” One of the demons said. “Half-face killed him.” 

He was smiling, running outside and spreading the gossip amongst the others. 

“Always half-face.” Another said. Almost all smirked, save for the Captain who had to look down at his dead underling. He stared at the open wound, then to the heavy rising of white smoke that came from the corpse of the newly dead. A dreadful, gaping mouth that he swore he saw within the mist. 

What was the conflict about? A dib. A dib for one of the women in the cage. To do what with? Best not say. 

It was already too much for the voyeurs who stared from their large cage. They backed away from the walls. They were shaking, most of them. Others were already in emotional stasis, doing nothing much but breathing. 

And from the crowd, Jeremiah stared. He was forward, one hand gripping a bar and the other above Bartholomew’s eyes. His had was cupped, blinding him from the murder.

“This is insane.” Someone in the crowd said. “They don’t value anything.”

His attention switched back to the Captain who walked up to the murderer, his poise a little ruined, his pride a little muddied. He was pointing his finger at the murderer. Jeremiah saw this. Saw how the rest of the group spat on the floor and passed shifty eyes, too. Wry smiles formed at the edges of their lips.

“You don’t think I’ll ignore this, do you?” The Captain said. “You’ll be reprimanded. I’ll be telling Astyanax myself.” There were small chuckles across all the soldiers in the lot. They had returned back to their clique, sneering. The Captain, annoyed, kept wagging his index finger.

“One of you, carry the body.” No one did so. He looked around, nothing but cold stares. His face flustered, color came back to its sickly pale complexion and he went to the cage to pick from the group. Two young men, a young woman and Ishmael.

“You four. Carry them, don’t think of running either.” They didn’t. They complied and when they returned some hours later, they were bloodied across their chest. A bit restless too, rubbing the dark rings around their eyes.

And those primal five? The deviants, the defiant gang? They played marbles with small gems and cracked jokes. 

That was the first day Jeremiah noticed the disobedience. 

The second discord would come tomorrow and it took the shape of a messenger, a crow with a letter tied to its small pitchfork feet who landed by an open window in the dungeon. There was still a mess, though most of it dried.

The crow rested itself above a torture device, a stretcher where four ropes dangled innocently. The crow began to peck at the braided rope, picking apart the threads before it was gripped. The message removed and the bird thrown out the window where the violent wind carried its shout. One of the guards looked at the message, he sat on a table and tried reading with beady eyes. He could not transcribe the scratchings. Jeremiah barely could too. The writing was sloppy, italic and bold. It was a foreign tongue or maybe a collection of foreign tongues, just a mess of letters and scribblings. The ink was rubbed and left streaks and it frustrated the demon who looked dumb-faced with squinting eyes.

“What are you looking at?” He shouted at Jeremiah. Jeremiah lowered his face. The guard kicked his chair out and went out the building. 

He walked through the door frame (the only door frame in this room) took the steps left and right and up and down and opening a door outside, rang a bronze bell. They couldn’t tell what it looked like, what the bell hung on or if even was a bell. But them, just as the Captain, heard the sound. It was obnoxious, constant and left a dissonant lingering tone. 

The Captain came immediately, shouting, “What is it? What do you want?”. Thinking, how have I failed today?

He read it, the reading sounded like mumblings from their distance. But they knew he had read, knew because of that creeping silence that came about them as if part of the atmosphere itself. One of many ingredients, the others being dread, and violence, and fear. 

The prisoners felt their postures straighten out.

There was a gasp. A screaming. A punching of adobe and wood. More demons gathered (their steps were loud, even from outside), the prisoners could hear their clanking of metal like a warmachine. There must have been a dozen, all there to listen to the contents of the letter.

There was a voice. A loud, nasal one.

“Oh? He’s finally decided to pay attention to us. Our precious king…” 

“It must be hard to leave that little bowl of his.” Of course, they spoke about the dome walls of New Troy. It was not, by any definition, small.

“Oh, piss off. Who summons us? Astyanax? King of New Troy?” Another scoffed. “Hermit of Old Troy. The desperate infant. 

The Captain took the note. His feet were swift. His gladius scratched the walls of the lot with his uncomposed stride. He walked immediately to the cage, his teeth clenched. His rotten, diseased face looking at them, his mellowed yellow eyes scanning left to right. 

“He wants you all.” The Captain said. “I don’t know what for, but he wants you even though we went through the trouble.”

No one spoke. No one knew a thing. Who wanted us? The king, king of what? This land, if you could call it land. Jeremiah thought.

“They won’t like this. I promised them some slaves, but he demands all of you.” The Captain shook his head. “They won’t like this one bit.”

He was wobbling, crushing the bars of metal in front of the prisoners.

Half-face hung by the door frame.

“Won’t like what?” Half-face said. 

The Captain turned to him. His eye was twitching.

“We are to bring all slaves, all troops to our king, Astyanax. No exceptions, no compromises.”

Half-face pushed himself off the wall. He walked up to the Captain.

“I was promised some of the women. I won them yesterday.” He said in a low growl. 

“You won nothing and you get nothing. Deals between scum aren’t worth anything.” The Captain’s voice was shaken, his loose grip on the chain of command slipping away. “All of them are going to the king, not a man or woman will be spared.”  

Half-face loomed forward. Jeremiah did so as well from his cell. His arms hung from their cage, his shoulders rested against the bars. They’re apes, he thought. Violent apes.

“Half-face won her!” Half-face said. “And I take what I win.”

A group was beginning to gather on the door frame. They were hollering, lecherous, hungry hollers.

They said (shouted): He won her. He won her fair and square. Take her, take them all. I want the small one. The boy? Yes. Give me that man, yes with the brown hair. Let me have a taste for that leathery hag in the back. 

It went on all and they formed a pressured dam wall against the door as half a dozen more began to swarm. The Captain took out his whip, he attacked the floor in front of them, he marked that line of which none moved past. He marked it with five lashings and his tired screaming. 

“You’ll do as I say. Or you’ll die wishing you had!” He slapped Half-face away. “Now go ready the carts! We’ll leave tomorrow.”

And not a single one crossed that line. Not yet. They smiled, chuckled, stone-faced the Captain. But they obliged him and after a while, stubbornly, they left.

The captain had his hand steady on his blade. His legs, ready to strike and his stance did not change until he heard the final group of footsteps leave the wooden floors of the building, out into the rocky lands beyond.

There was no one but the prisoners and the uneasy Captain now.

“I was under the impression that you were in command? Were. ” Jeremiah said. "Though...now you seem a little yellow now. do I have that right, Captain? Everyone inside looked at him, prayed for him to stop. Bartholomew tugged at his pants, he could feel his clothes stretching from the grip.

“You shut your mouth or I’ll rip your tongue out.” 

“I don’t think your king would like that.”

“I don’t think he’d mind.”

“Can you say that with absolute certainty?” 

Silence from the Captain. A despondent glare. One he would reserve for tomorrow as he left the building.

“You trying to get us killed?” Sam asked. 

“What do you care? Weren’t you thinking of slitting your wrists a couple days ago?” Jeremiah asked. Ishmael sucked in his lips and released a dry gasp.

“They said they’re taking us somewhere else. So I’m going to give it a try.” Ishmael walked up to Jeremiah. “Why don’t you cool down and think for a second?”

“And you think wherever we’re heading is any better than this dump?” Jeremiah asked. “Any safer? Any more promising?”

“I think we won’t know until we get there, kid. I know running away is all you got in your brain, hardwired like DNA, but the rest of us are going to be as compliant as we can be.”

“From suicide to obedience. And you say I’m the one who runs away? You’ve got no spine.” Jeremiah put his back against the bars, he slid down them and fell on his butt and looked at the crowd against him. The child too, who hung by an elderly woman. 

“Go ahead and do something stupid then, don’t expect me to help. Or any of us for that matter.” Ishmael said.

So it went for the rest of the day. The few who moaned, the few who sat, most of them who slept. They couldn’t tell what was night or day, not from the small beams of light that penetrated through window and brick cut, not from their onsetting exhaustion. They only knew it was time to rest when the demons came to snuff out the flames of the torches. Like cattle, herded and forced into routine. 

Jeremiah closed his eyes for a moment. An image flashed, that of Heinz and he opened them again. He saw the boy, he saw his obligation too. Or curse, whatever it was that made him sad and desperate as he stared into the innocent face. And he tried again to sleep. And he woke up again to that haunting image.

He didn’t try for the rest of the day and it showed when the demons came back. His tiredness, in his wide eyes, red and glossy and reflecting with a low hue the fire of the torch inside the hands of the demons. The bars opened with a cry. They were lead out, forced into a line. A rope was tied to all of them, like those mountaineer chains, all of them held accountable to one another around the waist.

They walked up the stairs. Jeremiah felt a tug on his body. An elderly woman behind him had slipped. He tried to help but saw a green hand travel past him. The old woman was slapped, pushed up and hit against the left breast with the pommel of his sword. It was a surprise (or miracle) she didn’t break into two. Though she coughed and wheezed most of the trail up through the building. Jeremiah grit his teeth, almost felt an urge to attack but saw the other four demons winding around them. He didn’t move, not yet. He held his anger like a small explosive in his body, ticking, idling. 

They came out of the madhouse. The adobe lots around them were dirty, the wood even worse, covered in a cake of soot that wrapped around the grounds of the barracks. There were spearmen atop towers, shields upon the wooden spiked walls. Jeremiah eyed a head sitting atop of a stake. He cringed and was pushed back into walking. They made it to one of the gates where the Captain took the lead, his red plumed helmet flowing wildly like horse mane. He had, on one hand, a sword. And in the other, a whip.

“We’re leaving. It’ll be a long walk so make sure no one gets left behind.” The Captain broke the floor with his whip. “And. Don’t. Run.”

“Not as long as the sword I’ll stab through your heart, prick. Just you wait.” Jeremiah said underneath his breath. The demon turned. He heard it, Jeremiah thought. He heard it and it made his blood coagulate and his body stiffen. A bite by a snake, a paralyzing thing. The demon walked up next to him. He looked at Jeremiah. His face dull, serious. 

Until he smiled. 

Chuckled even. And walked away.

Jeremiah felt beads travel down his forehead. He thought, what does that mean? 

“We’ll head out from the west end. We’ll go around the valley geysers, it’ll take a while before we hit the dome. A few days, perhaps.” The Captain said to one of the demons.

“We should just cut through the area.”

“We don’t know the lands well enough. We’ll die.”

“I do.” It was Half-face speaking. The puss out of his missing nose was leaking down to his lips. Was he mad? Jeremiah thought. It was hard to tell faces when they were missing most of it.

“We’ll do as I say. Because I’m Captain and you’re not.” The Captain pushed Half-face away with a finger on the chest.

Half-face released a grunt. A small, distinct grunt. A bit humorous, a bit taunting almost. And worse than the grunt? Half-face, who retreated back in file and line. An uncharacterized obedience. \

Jeremiah’s eyes widened.

It was bizarre to see. The platoon of demons behind him, the platoon in front of them. The few that hugged the line of slaves. Some of them stiff, others relaxed. Some of them sweating, others calm and enjoying the breezes. Some joking, others silent. Jeremiah looked ahead of the line, four places away was Ishmael. He looked behind. Three away was the kid, Bartholomew. Bartholomew who dragged a bit. Bartholomew whose shoulders were being rubbed by a monster. He felt a hot flash on his face and almost went back to say something. He shook his head though. He went forward instead, towards Ishmael, pushing everyone in the way aside.

“Do you still have the knife?” Jeremiah whispered. Ishmael did not turn his head. 

“I’m talking to you, do you still have the knife?” He butt his forehead against Ishmael who turned butt his own head against Jeremiah.

“Fuck off.” He said. Jeremiah would have said something back, but he felt a hand against him.

“Get back.” A soldier said.

Stubborn he went, still hot in the head. The rope of people wobbled like a bridge caught in a storm. The rope burned Jeremiah’s waistline. He wiggled, turned himself and noticed the Joshua trees and cacti around him. They were overgrown and seemed to span endlessly. A giant wall of needles of green. A wall that cast a shadow over them.

He eyed the forest of cactus again. White. A beady eye, he swore it upon God (whatever He was worth) and upon his time in the force and upon Heinz, he swore he saw an eye amongst the green, round-planked cactus walls. 

His neck went cold. His scattered. In front. Adjacent. Behind. Past the pedophile and past Bartholomew, to the platoon of soldiers who now riled. He saw one, then two, then a second pair, beginning to unsheathe. Others gripped their shields. More, gripped their spears. 

“Are we lost, Captain?” Half-face said. His leather and metal armor rattled, a particular sound amongst the heavy footsteps and the solemn wind. He was rattling, excited.

“Of course not. Get back into position.” The Captain said.

“Position? Where would that be?” Half-face said. 

“Behind him.” He gripped his whip. “Or under me. Your choice.” 

“My choice you say?” Half-face felt his sword handle. The Captain noticed. He gripped his own too, but said nothing, almost hoping him to strike.

“Death in obedience, obedience in death. What choice is that?” He smiled. “I choose neither, and leave you with nothing!”

His eyes went wide as he cocked his hand back. The Captain jumped away, sword in hand. Half-face lunged. His face slobbering fluids from his respiratory holes and his mouth. They clashed sword, brought dust-up upon them and it all began. That slow, process. The adrenaline rush, the chaos. Jeremiah turned around and he felt he could see it all in slow motion, the twitches, the charges, the screams. He ran towards Bartholomew. He felt wind, he felt metal, cutting his cheeks. He pushed everyone down on the floor until he got to Bartholomew. They both fell, closing their eyes and coughing from the dust and the cries of steeds falling and running past them. 

When Jeremiah looked up, he found the pedophile, the demon, looking down at him. He saw his hand reaching for Jeremiah’s throat, those long nailed, necrosis infested hands. Then he felt blood. Hot blood falling down his face, for the demon above him was the first to get a spear through his mouth. 

The body collapsed. Jeremiah wrestled with his bonded hands and from the corner of his eyes, saw a stampede of soldiers hoping to die.

Apollo

Hours after the battle

The legionnaire came around the Joshua tree, sword in hand and a burning question in his throat. He sized up the phony with his hostile glance, toe to head. His grip tightened and he asked: Who are you? Where do you come from? Where do you go?

Apollo decapitated him in seconds.

He died immediately but had it in him still to twitch on the floor, shaking dirt and dust up into the air. His hands clenched to his throat and his head rolling to his side, near his feet. Apollo shook with one hand and gripped his quivering blade with the other. When he was calm, he lowered it and strapped the silver steel to his hip. The leather belt was tight around his waist. 

“It’s a good thing your sword is short now.” The Hyena appeared from the shadow of a tree. He rubbed his head against the bark. “Makes it easier to hide, doesn’t it?”

Apollo dismissed the words. He moved his hands to shield his eyes from the burning hole in the sky and looked out into the horizon. 

“How far is it?”  Apollo asked.

“Turn to your right.”

Apollo did. He saw the smoke rising that way, the black rings that made the air undulate and shake with heat. A rising cloud of smog covering the implosion of the locale. 

He looked around himself, checked his armor, checked the small cape that hung by his shoulders and spat on his hand braces. He was rubbing dirt and blood off them as he walked towards the wreckage. The corpse lay behind him, the Hyena having urinated on the body and walked. Both of them chasing destruction, having already laid waste behind them. 

That was the fifth demon Apollo had killed in his time down here. It would not be the last.

  
When they arrived at the doors (or what should have been doors) Apollo hugged the walls carefully and peaked through the corner of his eyes. He noticed the quietness. There was no sound around them past the crackling and popping of wood and adobe. No cries for help. No moans, nothing but the distinct sound of a dying city, pops and wheezes and collapsing wood. He pushed the doors of the barracks aside, they nearly collapsed at his fingers. The pointed-tip wood walls were splitting into logs in front of him, separating, rolling down like some kind of medieval trap. He jumped over two. Nearly burned his feet on the second. He heard the roof of a building next to him fall, he jerked away. Behind him, skewered heads and scalps now burned to crisp like giblets at the campfire. He wanted to shout, but couldn’t. His mouth was covered by his hands, the fumes were seeping through his fingers and down his lungs. He just nodded his head in sadness, in disgust. There was no time for anything else. 

He came to the other end and suspected this was the source of the flame, an archers tower laying on the floor as ash. It had no more fuel to give, it laid smoking with the charred remains of soldiers buried beneath the ash, their armor still a hot red, their leather burned and either ash or glue upon the floor. Next to the tower was the opposite door of the barracks. He went through it. He heard the wooden arc behind him collapse. There were bodies on this road that stretched on, into a field of cactus, into a trail of even more smoke. 

He heard breathing. Apollo jumped back, his hand on his sword handle. A demon lay on the floor, his nose (or rather, hole) dripping blood. The Hyena pointed with his snout. He was pawing at the armor of the soldier. 

Apollo walked over, still cautious. He knelt, picked up his ponytail and raised the demon’s head. 

“Are there any survivors?” Apollo asked. The demon inched his face towards Apollo. He spat. It hit Apollo across the forehead, the mucus and bloody substance that was sticky at the touch. 

Apollo slammed the demon’s head down on the pavement. He did this twice until all that remained of the foul green face was red and dirt-brown. He brought the face up to him again.

“I’m not in the mood for your shit. My body is killing me and I’m out of time, you understand?” He said. “I’ve got a deal. Not a good one, but a deal. And I'm very fickle, I'll have you know. You tell me where this road is heading. You tell me what this caravan was doing. You tell me it, now. Or never, and enjoy the nothingness of death.”

“Why should I trust you not to kill me, smooth-skin?” It was Half-face, his voice reduced to rasps.

Apollo slammed his face on the floor. “There’s my evidence.” He bashed his head on the floor again, teeth flew out. “Who are you, a monster to judge me, a man?”

“I’m...I’m not a man?” Half-face whistled through the gaps in his teeth. “What do you think I am?” 

His rotten face peeled. The Hyena sniffed the air.

“A couple seconds away from worm meal. Answers, now.”

Apollo raised his blade. Half-face reached his hand underneath his belly. A slight move.

“You’re weak. You think weak. You will not be my killer.” He was breathing through a broken mouth. It sounded like a long winding wheeze. 

“You’re talking but you’re not saying the right things.”

“Oh?” Half-face found his grip on his sword. “Let me show you want I know. All of it, boy.”

Light reflected from Half-face’s blade. It struck Apollo in the face. Half-face rose, his eyes with that glare, yellow and strained. His face wet with spit and mucus and blood and puss and mud, the makeup of warriors. Apollo opened his eyes again. He was staring at the point of the blade. Getting closer, closer, closer. Coming up. High, to his head. Straight through, yes, to his brain and he imagined it then, as he moved quickly to bring down his sword. He imagined the sword through his lobes, down to his stem, severing it all. And he thought, maybe I can kill him with me. Maybe my momentum will carry out the kill.

But Half-face never made it to his mark. He was gripped. 

The Hyena had bit down on his neck and immobilized him. A growl. A crunch. The Hyena mauled through bone and flesh spilled everything every which way. The shattered spine looked like small white seeds below Apollo’s feet. The small nerves like curled and split hairs inside the gelatin of marrow from the now open spine. 

“Fuck,” Apollo screamed. The birds scattered. The Hyena came up, jumping and prancing atop the body. He delivered five more clamps, almost enjoying it.

“Get this shit off me.” Apollo was wiping his face.

He looked down at the body, then to the Hyena and looked around to the other corpses, almost collapsed. His hands were on the blade handle and his upper torso was low. 

“Almost died again.” Apollo breathed heavily.

“But you didn’t.”

“Well isn’t that obvious!” He screamed at the Hyena. His eyes flaring crimson. They stared at each other, standoffish before Apollo looked down. “Sorry. And thanks.”

He took off his balaclava from his face, took his helmet too and wiped everything off. Then seeing the bone and blood on his cloth, dropped it to the floor.

“Look at this mess.” He poked the body on the floor. “What happened here?”

“How would I know? It could have been anything. It could have been nothing. Maybe it was an idea, maybe it was for fun. What do you think?” 

“I think everything is fucked, is what I think.” He threw his helmet on the floor, he rubbed his eyes, they still felt blurry. “I feel like the world is collapsing and here I am, standing on a little piece of dirt as it all falls down around me.”

“Well, it is Hell after all. There’s only one way.” The Hyena almost laughed at the claim. “What did you expect?”

“What did I expect?” Apollo said. “If I expected anything I wouldn’t have come down here.”

“But you did.” 

“Great idea that was. They should give me a fucking Nobel.” He kicked his helmet away from him. “I didn’t want to be an ambassador.”

“If we all knew what trouble would come to us at every moment, who would find the courage to do anything?” The Hyena. “I reckon they’d be too afraid to get out of the cover of the bed.” 

“You’re damn right they would be.” Apollo snickered, a little high pitched too, the noise you’d find in an Asylum perhaps. “Especially if they knew they’d be in another plane of existence, in a fucking desert, with a bunch of walking Roman corpses chucking spears at them.”

“You’re right. And then no one would do anything in the face of danger. And if people did nothing. If they held their breath upon every terror that came their way, nothing would change.” The Hyena sneered. “That’d be pretty boring, don’t you think?”

“I hope for boring. I would kill for boring. Boring is a godsend in this godless place.”

“Well, there’s the price for making a decision. They’re not always all good. But at least they’re yours.”

“Yeah, mine.” Apollo took his sword out of the dirt. “These great decisions of mine.”

“That’s free will for. Surprise, suffering, freedom.”

“Fuck surprise. Fuck suffering. Fuck freedom.” 

The Hyena’s tail straightened. His face became unusually stern, his snout tight. He walked to Apollo.

“Freedom is everything. Take it away and you’re left with machine men with machine hearts who pump that cold oil through their mechanical bodies. Who live only to exist.” He looked up to Apollo. “Don’t be mad now, that for the first time in your life you’re beginning to feel what it means to be a free man.”

“Free? When have I ever been free?”

“You were a slave before.” The Hyena said. “To your church, to your philosophy.” He paused. “To your teacher and your friend.”

Apollo winced.

“And now, for the first time in a long time you’ve made your own decision. And you want to take it back all of a sudden? Because it hurts a little? Because it’s a little awful?” The Hyena kicked dirt to the corpse of Half-face.

“This isn’t just awful. It’s insane.” 

“It’s a test, nothing more. A test to see how easy you break and how easy you fix. And if it’s too much for you, go ahead and take that little cup in your back pocket and get out.” He said. “Because if you can’t move forward, you were never meant to.”

The air blew across and pushed smoke away. Apollo saw the road ahead, the many bodies still waiting. Some of them, with their chests still breathing low and steady. He put his blade to his side, sighed and walked ahead.

“You’re such an asshole, you know that.”

“From you? That’s a compliment.”

Apollo shook his head, rubbed his scalp with his free hand and walked through the mounds of bodies. He picked out a helmet from the dead, a nice shiny one if there was ever one. It was lean, oval and came down on his nose bridge snug. It blocked the light from the top and made it easier to see the empty expressions of the corpses past him. Most of them, demons. Some, some few, humans. He spent a lot of time killing them, for all had nothing left of them but a painful death. It was mercy. 

He sucked in his breath. His face showing a renewed resilience. 

He came upon a demon with his body hunched over, two spears through his chest. He was fatigued, still breathing and screaming. And he faced a direction, a trail of footsteps that wandered into the cactus and Joshua tree forest to his rear. He looked back to the pinned figure, the demon spitting and coughing at him. Below the legionnaire, some unidentifiable flesh. He was eating - No, cannibalizing, mindlessly and baking in the sun. Apollo had nothing to say. A thank you, for the road, perhaps? No. A farewell. And a welcome, a message maybe, for Astyanax or any other legionnaire.   

Apollo picked up a gladius sword to his rear. He raised it high and brought it low.

The spears pinning the demon to the floor vibrated. They made a desperate rattle and shook for minutes. Then, stillness. 

“I thought you’d let them suffer?” The Hyena said.

“That wouldn’t be proper.” Apollo jumped up to the steep hill. He grabbed a cactus and felt a prickle. He looked at his hand, to the small dribble, like a red pearl. The wound did not close, but he did not stop. The trail was hot, fresh and he knew there was someone, or something, at its end.
 

Dion

The bars hurt Dion’s hands when he punched them. Indented them. Made them cry and shake in the silence of the room. 

It had finally been enough for Dion. Having to come into the room, having to see the bitter and anxious face of Alestor, a face torn between anger at his circumstances and reflective on his future death. And it was Dion who made him think and feel this way. It was him who had brought that chill of death. Brought it down on the bars, the little cage as Astyanax called it. Over and over and over again until the room was filled with the sound of slapping metal. Pummel after pummel, a successive beat of blows that had stung his knuckles. 

“Stop. Stop.” Alestor screamed. Dion looked down to his knuckles, the flesh was out, his bone exposed. His wounds were regenerating and opening at the same rate and all he could see was a distinct pink and white where bone and muscle was trying to replace itself. He looked at the bars. Only small dents, scratches, here and there and blood that stained and that evaporated. 

“Why should I?” Dion clenched his fist again. He pushed against the cage. It rose. Alestor hung to the bars as they did and collapsed to the floor as Dion let go. Like a pinball machine, and Dion the angry player. 

“Did you stop?” Dion grabbed the prison again. He put both hands forward and pushed with his knees, against the floor, shoulders forward. He could hear the metal scratch the floor as he dragged the box across and slammed it into a wall. 

“Hear me out,” Alestor screamed. “Stop.”

Dion reached his hand inside the bars. He tried fitting himself, body and all, through the gaps. With one hand outstretched he waved wildly inside. Alestor hugged the wall and waited there.

Every now and then, Dion would switch, chase him from another side, make him run inside his little cell. It went on for hours before he gave up. 

“What’s this made out of?” Dion mumbled to himself. He sat on his hams, a look of defeat on his face.

“Harder than any metal you’ve ever seen. They mine it from the third circle, you idiot.” Alestor wheezed. He was gasping, bent over. His head was a mess of stray hairs. 

“Shut up. No one asked you.” Dion kicked the cage. There was an audible yelp from Alestor, a bit high strung and tired. 

Dion looked around. His eyes were red, two giant balls of anger.

“I should go out.” Dion was smiling to himself. Alestor could hear his ramblings, forced to hear them. “I should go out and kill that guard. Take his spear, yeah, yeah! And I’ll…I’ll!”

He made a stabbing motion with his hands.

“They’ll kill you fool, as soon as you do. And then you won’t save anyone.” Alestor shouted.

“I can fight it out. I’ll take them all out.”

“No. You won’t.” Alestor pleaded. “Revenge or freedom, you can’t have both. Not at the same time.”

Dion looked around his cell, out the window, around the walls, almost confused. 

“Maybe I’ll just take his deal. If it means killing you, at least. I can tolerate Hell. I can live with it.”

“For how long?” Alestor bargained. “Eternity is a very, very long time. How long do you think you’ll last before you become as insane as him?” 

He pointed to the drawing of Astyanax on the wall.

“You? You’re talking about insanity?” Dion rushed to the cage. “How many people did you have killed? How many bled to death, offered to your little demon god?”

“It...It wasn’t like that.” 

“How else could it be? Huh?” He punched the cage. The whole room seemed to shake. The font in the corner of the room vibrated. “It wasn’t your hand that gutted the poor girl? It wasn’t your words that riled a cult of freaks? How many dead? Do you even remember them?”

Outside they could hear the shuffling of the guard, a large heavy sound as if a sentinel had just awoken from his thousand year slumber. A soldier of clay, of metal, of little humanity. He peeked inside, took a glance at the two and smiled. Yes, they were at it again, he must have thought and enjoyed it. Dion looked back at him, glared at him. He hadn’t worn a different face since and it began to worry Dion, only a little, if he would ever be able to take off his frown again.

The guard closed the door. Dion looked around, the small pots of flowers hanging by the sides of pillars in the corners of the room. A table with a long-faded candle whose smoke still filled the air with a strange scent, a bit fruity, a bit like incense too. Burning oranges. Can I wear this face forever? Dion thought. With him? 

On a table, where the candle burned, a dribble of wax came down and onto the floor. It hardened immediately. 

Can I live here forever? Dion thought. Astyanax did. And look at him. Look at all the things he feels or thinks or does.
 
It made him nervous to look at Alestor again. He felt it down in his stomach like a full bladder. 

“It was a mutual ritual. I was lead to believe that I was purifying these men and women, bringing them somewhere closer to God, you see. God, for fuck's sake!” Alestor threw his arms in the air.

Dion sat. His whole body felt weighed. Morose. 

“You thought,” He almost laughed. “You thought killing someone would purify them?”

“Yes, well, I was lead to believe it. He told me, he said - “

“He told you but you did it. Thinking and saying and acting are all different things. You can think all the things you want, but finding the strength to do them. That’s something else.”

“Listen! My wife was dead. My second-born, dead. I had to, it was for them - “

“And think of all the children you killed. All the mothers and the fathers you stole. All the families, ruined. And you..You, who created the very misery that brought you ruin.”

“Some of them…some of them… They were!” He bit his tongue and paused. “They were criminals. Murderers, rapists.”

“Shut up.” Dion stomped on the floor. “Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.”

Once again the room was filled with that decisive silence. And once again both were left to their own corners, like boxers in the ring. A stack of books besides the bed entertained Dion with their bright covers and their tails for bookmarks. They did, at least, up to a point. Dion opened one. He saw scratches, weird glyphs, and pictures. Some strange, some horrific. He felt his head hurt and he threw the books aside. It hit one of the pots on the pillar. Something of a vase of roses. He walked over to it and looked at the dirt all spread out on the floor. He could see worms, maggots even amongst the shattered clay and bruised green stems. He knelt. Then stood again for Alestor.

“Why’d you do it?” Dion said. His voice sounded easy and steady. “What compels a man to do all this?”

Alestor sunk a bit. His bearded face brushing against the metal. He gripped his rags and pulled them down a bit. His scarred collarbone showed. 

“I did it for love.” He said. “A love for a family I lost. That’s it.” 

“I won’t even ask how much you loved them. I know it.” Dion walked back to the cage. “The whole city knows it, experienced it.”

“I’m sorry. He told me, he said it.” Alestor articulated with his hands. “He promised me they would get fixed. The broken, he called them. The pedophiles and the rapists and the murderers I helped kill. I swear it started like that. Out of pity, out of hope.”

“Then you killed children. Why?” 

“Astyanax asked for it. He’s the one who demanded it. For the ritual, he said. But I promise you! I promise we went for orphans, the sick, the decrepit. The kids with no future.” Alestor was crying, though he didn’t notice it. Maybe it was just second nature at this point. “He said he’d deliver them unto God. He said they would live eternally in peace. It was a compassionate euthanasia!” 

Dion wanted to vomit. He wanted to scream. He wanted to tear this man's head off. He could feel his hands shaking, his pupils dilating, his nape going cold. He felt inside his pocket. What was in there? Something sharp?

Nothing he would show today. He removed his hand and took a breath. In, out. What does the scripture say, Dion? Of those who throw stones. What does it say? If I loved as hard as he did, would I have done it?

He couldn’t answer. But he couldn’t attack either.

“What was originally planned with all the blood and bodies? What did you want from Astyanax that could have only been done through a black Sabbath?”

“Well, does it even matter?” Alestor’s face was low, his body against the wall and bars behind him. The standing torches inside the room shook, waved, then fixed themselves and through the embers, Alestor’s face was lit. Nothing more. The rest of him was in a kind of shadow made by the lowered ceiling and the covered windows. 

There was a wind. It blew out some of the curtains and subsequently, some light.

“I thought. With his cup, that we could summon him. Bring him to earth. That’s what I hoped. And then from there…”

“The cup doesn’t work like that. Hell doesn’t work that way. He’s marked. There’s no going out for him.”

They spoke of course, of a branding neither had, as they were living dead. In a way.

“I know that now.” Alestor slapped his forehead. “He was supposed to come up there and raise the dead. He was supposed to bring us all into a kind of rapture. Just us, just the chosen.”

“Well, he brought you somewhere. Didn’t he?”

“Yes. Yes, he did.” Alestor could barely talk. 

Again silence. They both sat around, fiddled with their fingers and their feet and let the hot breeze outside cool them. Dion was the first to break the silence.

“I heard you were a Doctor.”

“I was a licensed therapist,” Alestor mumbled.

Dion sat on the bed. A bit easier, his shoulders less strained, his chest less winded. 

“How’d someone as smart as you get duped? I thought you’d know everything about liars and psychopaths.” 

“I guess I was desperate. Sad and desperate.” He said. “When you see a miracle performed in front of your eyes, when you see countless acts of magic. When that same miracle-giver promises you hope and family, how can’t you see them as the next coming of Christ? No one can resist that.”

“I can see it, I guess,” Dion said. “Magic is hard to do.”

“So there are others, huh?” 

“Not many. But there are a few practitioners, yes.” Dion walked up to him. “But I’m not one of them. So don’t ask.”

It didn’t matter. Alestor had lost hope long ago. He slumped down on his metal bars.

“Must be an interesting world you live in. Huh,” Alestor rubbed his eyes. “I wouldn’t know. I don’t know. Not anything, not a thing. And now I’m even less than stupid. I’m alone now. My baby dead, wife dead.” He paused. His voice choked. “My son, dead.”

Dion let him weep a bit on the floor. Only a moment, that’s all he would give him.

“I can’t forgive you. You know that, right?” Dion put both hands on his sides and clenched his fists.

“I know.”

“But at least I understand you.” He said. They looked at each other for the first time it felt. Both of their eyes were weak, both of their heads were low. He didn’t want to understand this man. But seeing his weak face, his spirit in a loss, he couldn’t help but feel some kind of kinsmanship. It was a disgusting feeling, to be similar to someone so disgusting, to see how thin the fence line was between them. And worse. To imagine, somewhere along that fence of good and evil, to imagine a rotating door. Perhaps he was going to go through it, perhaps not. Perhaps it had bled into each other that each side didn’t even matter. 

There was a knock on the door.

“The king wants you.” The voice said, a bit of a haughty voice. “Don’t make him wait.”

Dion stood. 

“Tell me, Doctor,” He breathed heavily. “What do you want now? After all is said in done, now that you’re here. What do you want?”

Alestor looked up. He pushed his head to the side in a slant.

“I want to stay here.” He said. “I want to rot here and repent. I don’t deserve oblivion, I don’t deserve the peace of nothingness. I just want to be here. Forever and maybe, with an eternities worth of pain, I’d have suffered the price of what I’ve done.”

The door opened. Horace burst in. Yelling, hurry, hurry. Screaming, you’ve made a mess. Fuming, in the throne room. Horace went over to the vase and began piling the pieces, fixing the dirt into a mound. Dion walked past him, towards the door. He heard a dying voice behind him.

“And you, Vicar? What do you want of me? What would satisfy you?”

But Dion didn’t look back. He didn’t answer. He walked and disappeared into the light of the door frame. It was time, after all, to settle the deal. 

He thought.

Jeremiah

Jeremiah held the arm and the leg and rested the bleeding body on his shoulders as he ran. Far, further down the incline and into the large valley of corrugated stone pillars. Steam shot forth that burned his arm and burned his hairs off and left his skin shaved and red. The body on top of Jeremiah struggled for a bit. The boy, Bartholomew, stood behind Jeremiah at a close distance with one hand wiping sweat and the other pulling on jeans. That was the scene, the three. The boy, the man and the dying, going through the valley and the geysers that shot forth around him. 

A woosh of air blew past him. A large push of hot steam blew past him. It was colored green, it smelled ill and also strangely of chemicals, like ammonia. He pulled his face away from the steam. His sideburns were burned, his face a bit charred. Most of his skin was red behind his juvenile beard. He had to stop and looked around. Below him, the giant holes and the small gasses that escaped. It looked like the surface of a meteor, porous and frightening. To his left, away from the drop, the side of a mountain. He clung to it and the warped arches of stone. They were warped, he could tell, shaped by the heavy and hot air. He could see where the stone had been touched because it drooped and because it was red and glowing from heat.

It reminded him of his burned face. It reminded him of the pain and his wincing body and his blinking eyes that tried to wash out their blur.

“It’s so warm,” Ishmael said in that gentle voice. He was atop of Jeremiah’s shoulders.

“Yeah, it is. Isn’t it?”

“Reminds me of California.” He coughed and expelled himself on the road. “It was nice. On the beach. In the sun.”

“Keep talking, Sam,” Jeremiah said.

“Never liked that nickname.”

“Yeah?” Jeremiah looked at the boy. He was getting curious around the edge. “You get over here, alright? Stay close.”

“Mm-hm” The boy ran back and mumbled. His head was low. His eyes now focusing closely on Ishmael’s discharge.

Where did this begin? Jeremiah thought. He heard a rock slide past his feet and down to the geysers and blowing gasses below. It made an echoing noise that tapppppeeeed-tapppeed-tapped. Until no more, until it was lost into one of the smaller holes below. Jeremiah stared off ahead. He never realized how tired he was, didn’t notice it until he waited here on his knees with the body above his shoulders, dangling and turning. 

Was the road going to get smaller?

He shook his head and walked. Better to remember, better to re-feel that cold shiver down his spine. 

How did it come to this?

He tip-toed. There was nothing but a small ridge now, more like a crack on the side of the mountain. A ridge and the floor and the queasy vertigo. 

“You scared, Ishmael?” He tried to laugh it off. 

“Huh?” The voice was nothing more than a hum.

“I said, are you scared?” Jeremiah screamed. He couldn’t stop staring at the floor and laughing, he couldn’t understand it. 

“Oh,” Ishmael whispered. “I'm just tired. So tired.”

“Hard to sleep when your this high though, right?” Jeremiah felt his legs shake. Steam jetted by. He hugged the wall. What would his body do if it fell, like the rock? Would it tap, would it crack, would it disappear?

Better not think of it. 

“I bet you were rich back home. Right?” Jeremiah asked. The boy dragged a stone. It fell and it made Jeremiah snap up right.

“Where I worked?” Ishmael leaned onto Jeremiah. Jeremiah almost slipped. He could feel his heart working, it felt like a heavy pulse on his limbs. “I worked? Where did I work?” 

He was mumbling. Jeremiah stopped and pressed both feet firmly on the ground and stood there breathing heavily. The boy was close behind, aping Jeremiah’s fear and hyperventilating. 

Imagination. Reality. It all frightened him.

Where did this all begin?

The first spear. He thought. A little after, he remembered. The images began to appear like a slide show, increasing in speed as he focused. His body adjusting, moving across the ridge in rote fashion. He’d rather remember the blood and the violence to this, the steep fall below.  

So he thought of that violence as the vertigo crawled up to him, grabbing him leg first with anxiety. He remembered now. The heavy dust clouds and the sound of spears and their feather fletchings as they tore the air with that vile hiss. Like a snake bite, coming and going, their brown tails flying like the open fanged-mouth. He remembered holding Bartholomew and defending his scared body and watching the men and women fall all around him. The feeling of his stomach as it scraped along the floor and as they crawled on their bellies towards Ishmael. Ishmael who had taken his small knife, the knife brandished at the cell and who had started working on cutting his own rope bondage. Who freed his arms, and who worked on his feet and who pushed aside the corpses of legionnaire demons. 

The sound of the soldier as he choked on his blood, helmet rolling on the floor, armor stabbed through with a javelin. He also remembered the face of Ishmael and remembered wondering if he would even help them (Jeremiah and the boy). 

Ishmael who looked at them in that cloud of violence with the sharp ring of clashing metal and the faces of confused demons staring wide-eyed at their deaths. Ishmael who amongst that crowd, had decided, with a pained face to run for Jeremiah and Bartholomew. Who told them, with an anxious voice, to be quiet and still. Who took out his knife and cut their ropes and looked around at all the people around begging for the same treatment.

More rocks skidded. He saw a small Joshua tree fall with them. A gust of heat pushed it up. Burned, then washed the fires as soon as they came. It looked melted. It made him think of his own death. He tried to shake it off again, back to the memory.

Monster horses who dragged with their ghost-white faces, howling and rising to show the hooves that stamped upon the bodies. Unholy steeds who dragged and stampeded through, trampling every other dying person. Jeremiah remembered that, ducking and pushing the three of them aside as he heard the sound of shoehorns. 

He had worked hard to avoid the soldiers or demons or steeds. All of them had. And it took them a great strength of will to ignore the crying sounds of their cellmates. They had to though, there was no time. No time, no courage, no hope for them. They were dead. Most of them, speared through, most of them. Dying, most of them. And the ones who survived were too stupid or cowardly to even make the effort to run. Some had even succumbed, reasoned it, and had laid on the floor hoping for death. Wishing, only, to have it be done quickly. That was probably the most painful memory for Jeremiah. The shouts for help. It almost was enough to have him turn back. But the boy was with him. The boy. The boy who meant it all, who was the cause of his being here. Who he hated, and who he loved.

They had made it out of that arena of chaos, had taken the steps through the cactii and the trees, had pricked themselves with the needles and were so close to the empty and safe space of desert. So close, almost there. A few steps. But the spear whizzed by. Had torn through the greenery and shrubs and plants, had ripped them all out of their stems and roots and had landed promptly on Ishmael’s side. Ishmael collapsed there and had not stood up since then.

He shook as he watched his fallen companion struggle and contort and flex, like a worm. Then he jumped. A chariot had collapsed near him, the wheel rolling innocently past him. The horse and the driver smashed together on the ground, turned into a paste of red. A spear through the side of the metal vehicle. This is what the first spear had aimed at. It was all to kill this vehicle, not Ishmael. It made him sick.

But that’s how it was. Jeremiah who had leaned down and had treated Ishmael and had lugged him around his shoulders and backs. Not as paid debt, but as goodwill.  

The last of his memory, the two of them, looking back at the demons who clubbed each other and beat and stabbed. The rising clouds of dirt, like golden clouds as each body hit the floor and the hell mounts that drove through and pushed aside the smog with snarls. The skewered bodies of demons, of men, of women. The confusion of death everpresent on most of them, calm and happy on others. 

A circus of murder, Jeremiah had thought at the time. Confused, violent ghosts who played for fun and shock. 

His slide show, his film ended there. Nothing past it, exciting. It was all dull, rather. The travel, the coughing and spitting blood Ishmael shot out every few moments. 

He felt another geyser vomiting its anger out. He felt it through small quakes from the floor. Jeremiah braced himself and felt his shirt blow up with air. His stomach felt warm. He couldn’t tell though, whether it was anxiety or pain. 

“Come on, stay awake Sam.” Jeremiah ran. The road was wider, at last. “Where did you work? What did you do? Talk to me. Keep talking.”

“Stocks…” Ishmael mumbled. 

“Yeah. What kind? Win big?” Jeremiah sounded desperate. A rock fell again. It banged on the side of the mountain as it died, he wished it hadn’t.

“Stocks…That’s what I told my mom.” Ishmael breathed heavily. “I was just a vacuum salesman. Just a door guy, always a door guy.”

Even the voice sounded cold. Stern. Meaningful, in some strange way. It sounded like a long lost secret, that stupid sentence. But it hurt like a knife in the heart. 

Jeremiah felt blood down his chest.

“Yeah? There’s still time to do more though.” Ishmael jumped a gap. He braced himself with two knees and felt himself stop as he looked around him. The road was getting wider again, but he was still nervous, still sweating. 

“Come on? Speak up, yeah?”

The boy left his mouth open. He stared up at the man. Jeremiah tugged on the dangling arm around his shoulder, he pinched on the legs he carried, he shook and cradled and eased his shoulder over. He lowered Ishmael down to his chest, then down to the floor. He felt no movement. No pulse. No turning or derelict eyes. There was nothing but a fixed face upon the sky and eyes that looked out into an empty horizon. 

Jeremiah grabbed his hand. He sucked in his lower lip and stretched his face and held onto that hand for as long as he could, around the noisy and restless mountains. An exhaustion of heat came up. A shaking of the ground, an uncontrollable scream of the splurting earth. Astyanax’s rage, perhaps.

He let go of Ishmael. His hands were smooth, surprisingly smooth. Even in the arid, sediment-filled air. Jeremiah rested him on the side of the mountain. There was nothing there anymore. No pulse, no voice, no thought. Empty, like a doll. 
And they ran away. Scared of the body, scared of the geysers, scared of everything. Endlessly running, where? Anywhere. Anywhere.

Dion

He could feel his heart betray him. He could hear it enter that quick, monotonous speedy pace. He could feel his pupils shrink and the devil’s blood in him rush, in giant waves of muscle tensions through his abdomen and up to his cheeks. His toes were numb. His fingers were numb. His palms were sweaty and he spent so much time drying them on his pants, then waiting, then drying them again. Over and over, while the men in their metal suits lead him through the giant doored rooms. The villa with its dismal emptiness, with that moaning wind. He stopped, at once, in front of two wooden doors and there, his heart betrayed him again. For although he felt in him that urge to kill, the fleeting sensation of violence, he walked calmly. He waited calmly. Let the two demons move the metal machinations of the door to their side, let the iron chains fall to the floor. Horace came around from behind Dion, he struggled to push the doors. His clothes trapped between the the gaps, stretching and shredding his robes. 

Dion pushed him away. The cloak ripped in two. He looked at the door.

The bars, the chains, the locks all gone, the guards at last nodded their heads. Dion put his hands gently on the door. He couldn’t feel the puncturing splinters, the small beads of blood by the handles of the door and with loud squeaks, he pushed the two doors open. They crashed against the wall, a loud clamor for the room. Then they dangled again, moved back and forth like drunks, whining with their rusted hinges.

Dion walked in. His eyes were fixed on the pillars that cast two different sets of shadows. One black, the other short and gray like sets of clock hands. His eyes wrapped around, up to the ceiling. A gem cut into a pyramid, dividing and focusing light in three directions. The light ran to other, smaller gems. There were no torches, no. All light was divided, all light glistening and colored and frantic and overcast on the pompous pillars and fonts and urns was a rainbow. Dion wondered if he was schizophrenic. No, this was just a vile room. Gaudy and brilliant. Disgustingly illustrious, bordering parody.

The doors were sucked back in, creating a vacuum sound before they shut still. The old-woven tapestry on the walls (flags and stories mostly) blew violently. 

Dion walked up to the center, underneath the white colored gem on the ceiling. He looked in front of him, his eyes following the thirteen steps up. There, a seated Astyanax waited for him. Not so much on a throne, as much as a mound. A collection of stripped leather and bronze armors smelted down it seemed, contorting into a multi-layered stool. The gold colored breasts and sleeves of armor were spilling, giving the appearance of corpses trying to crawl out of Astyanax’s sitting position. Astyanax was hunched over, his arm rested on his knee, his hand carrying his head. 

“How have you been treated?” He asked. 

“How do you figure?” Dion asked. “You left me in a room with the man I’ve been chasing for weeks. How do you think I feel?”

“Like gold, I hope.” Astyanax moved his head from one hand to the other. “I just wanted to remind you of what you stand to gain. That’s all.”

“Yeah.” Dion walked forward. There was a guard for each pillar, twelve in total. The guards looked like clay suits and statues, might have been, had it not been for their quick reaction. A jerk of their round shields and spears. Dion took another step. They moved again. Astyanax waved them back and they nestled into their places, the man-shaped stains on the pillars. They were furniture too, in some capacity. 

“So what’s your answer?” 

“If you don’t mind. I’d like a recap. What is it that you’re offering me?” Dion put his hands in his pockets. It looked almost arrogant. Almost? Was. But it excited Astyanax. Ignited a flame and spasm in his stomach and groin. He clasped his hands and scratched his hair.

“Forget already?”

“I just want to make sure the wording is right. I don’t want to get tricked. After all, you are a demon, right?” 

“Maybe. That’s very uncharacteristic of you.” Astyanax said. “I thought your friend was the thoughtful one.”

“I’ve had time to reflect.”

“A Catholic or a monk, which is then?” No answer. Astyanax stretched his back. It made a cracking noise. “Well, I’ll give you everything that matters. The slaves, Alestor, everything, in return for your servitude.”

“You want one slave for the many.” 

“Oh, sweetheart. You make it sound terrible.” Astyanax said. “I promise your existence here will be everything but. All the islands we can roam and conquer, all the wars to be waged. The love to be made. What’s so bad about that?”

“Morality. You.” 

“You still call yourself a moral man? Oh, my. But I can work with that. What’s violence without prohibition, after all? White noise. Yes, I need a moral man.” Astyanax stretched his neck. Dion stepped forward. “Aha. I can be quiet endearing if you give me time.”

“Yeah. I’ll be giving you all my time. Every second and tick and drop of it. Forever is a very long time.” Dion said.

“Well, if you don’t want to take the deal, say so. You’re free to leave.”

Dion searched his pockets. He gripped something. He put his foot on the floor and stomped at what looked like a small fly, stomped it harsh and brutal until it left a green dime-sized stain on the floor. 

“I got a question,” Dion said.

“Spill your heart out, Hunter.” 

“Why are you treating me kindly - I mean, kinder, than the others. If politeness and civility is your deal, why not extend it to the other people - slaves. You’re inconsistent.”

“Inconsistent?” Astyanax said. “It’s only inconsistent if I consider those worms in the same category as you and me.”

“How can you say that they don’t have fears and loves, like you and I?” 

“And what of fear and love? Dogs can do that all the same, would you say they’re in the same category as us? Don’t work yourself over the other half, that kind of interspecies sympathy will get you hurt.”

“What are you getting at?” Dion pulled his shoulders back.

“Forgive the confusion. What I mean to say is that you and I are of a completely different make as them.” He stood. “I’ve seen over the years, the stupid modes people would use to differentiate amongst each other. Skin, tongue, flag. That’s a dishonest way to categorize. Wouldn’t you say? Especially when they’re missing the point.”

“Point? We’re all humans, you and I. We should be helping each other.”

“Didn’t you call me a demon earlier?” Astyanax took his index fingers and tapped his temples. “And you were right. I am a demon, as are you. We are part of a deadly species, we’re warriors. You and I. Why should we mingle with the weak? The only category in the census of man that matters, the strong and the weak. The haves and the have not.”

“Men are more than the way they kill.”

“Are they?” Astyanax walked four steps down. “All men are killers or leeches, never both. And they both utilize the craft that suits them best, either force or pity. I have no interest in playing the game, so I kill them all the same. That’s it.”

“How can you say that of all the suffering souls here and beyond?”

“I say it with ease. Pity and the laws they instigate are the means to disenfranchise the strong. Stop playing their games. Stop living for them. Do what you want, for yourself and no one else. There is no other way to live life”

“You’re crazy.” Dion walked forward. His hands on his side, his right hand gripping something discrete. 

“Because soothing my pain, my boredom, is of a higher order than soothing someone else's. That’s why. Because anything short of selfish greed is stupid and an exercise in suicide. Suicide of the self, the ego.” His hands were open, almost in an embrace. “There are hundreds of billions down here who suffer, who will suffer, seemingly for eternity. Will you help them too? Can you? Probably not. So why try? It’s much better to live for yourself.”

“You’re just bored?” Dion walked forward, his gripping arm carrying his stride. 

“I’m not crazy, I’m just trying to wake up from an abstract boredom. A three thousand years long boredom.” They walked towards each other. Have you ever watched the sky for years just to realize it never moved? Not a cloud, not a sun or star. That’s torment” Astyanax smiled. 

“It’s enough to make you cry, isn’t it? To harbor your sympathy?”

Dion ran forward. The guards tried to move. He avoided them. The wind broke past him. The tapestry fell from their hanging places from his gallop. Dion had in his hand a piece of clay, a shard of it, that very clay of that very potted plant in his room. 

The dagger was in front of him, he reached his arm forward and aimed for Astyanax’s neck. He skipped the first two steps of the stairs, jumped. He was heading for it, waiting for it. His eyes a hungry crimson as they sought the tender white-skin of Astyanax’s neck. All momentum, all forward. It was the quickest, he thought, he’d ever been or ever would be.

And all it took was a quick sidestep to dodge. 

A shuffle of feet, rightward, for Astyanax to turn. 

Dion watched it all slowly through that adrenaline high. It was just a dance move to Astyanax, just playground games. Dion tried to move, but in midair, knew it to be worthless. He instead braced himself, readied his hand to bounce off the floor and to try again from a new angle. His hands reached out again to touch the floor as quickly as possible.

They never did. 

Astyanax grabbed his arm with both hands, and in one move lifted him above his shoulders, then slammed Dion back down. A judo flip, as it was. 

“I haven’t seen this much enthusiasm since Troy fell!” Astyanax roared. “Since the butchering and rape.”

The floor shattered. The rubble fell down the steps. Dion tried to breathe but found himself caught in between screaming and gasping. His left shoulder felt broken, in four different spots and he clutched them. He could feel himself healing, slowly though. Weak from famish. It wasn’t fast enough to stop the pain, it might have worsened it even. Dion turned his head to look at his wound. He saw bone sticking out near his bicep. There was a piece of rock in his ribs and breathing out, he could feel it move and loosen from the hole. It fell, weighed by blood and rolled down four steps. 

The guards moved forward but stopped, almost afraid, as Astyanax raised Dion’s good hand and forced it to wave. Somewhat like a puppeteer. 

“Let’s see what’s in this hand.” He straddled Dion by the chest. Dion felt his air push out like someone had taken a rolling pin to his body, had flattened him and had forced every ounce of blood and juice and oxygen out into a defeated gasp. 

Astyanax worked on Dion’s hand. After a while, he stopped and just broke his fingers and watched the clay dagger fall to the floor. He picked it up, inspected it with childish glib, then shook his tips above Dion. It was almost playful, had Dion not wheezed and coughed blood.

“Now what’s this?” He presented the evidence to the court. Horace in the back stood, somewhat ashamed. “No one thought to baby-proof his room?”

Astyanax laughed. Alone.

“What an affront to my offer.” He slapped Dion’s face and pushed it side to side, letting him spit blood everywhere like a pressured hose. “In the old days, my people would have cut your head off and offered you to Zeus. Your scalp would have been made a weight for the holy scales of the tribunal.” 

Dion’s eyes rolled around like billiards on the break. 

“Could you heal that? Decapitation? Would you, would you?” Astyanax slapped him. “Aye, Vicar?”

Nothing but wheezing. Astyanax paused. Disappointed, almost, beginning to form a frown on his lips. He shook it off and stood off him. 

“My uncle, Aeneas, founded Rome. Do you know what the Romans did to people like you?” Astyanax walked down the steps. Two guards came to lift Dion. “They’d crucify you with three nails, no more, no less. They’d stab you and bake you out in the open sun and they’d play a guessing game of what would kill you first. The heat, the bleeding, or the insanity.”

Dion’s body dangled off the two men. His feet made a loud thump with each step he passed down.

“Maybe they’d all come at once like a hot fever. Would you like that?”

There was nothing to Dion, nothing but a string of blood and saliva that hung to his lips like cut webbing. 

“Well how about that then. If you can’t decide how you’ll live under me, then you’ll decide how to die under me.” He waved the men off. They saluted. “Send him to the dungeons.”

“Ave.” The demon’s said with their broken faces and their broken souls, all eager to satisfy King Astyanax.  

Jeremiah
Hours after the battle at the Barracks of the 23rd

It was strange to walk around the lonely desert and still, to feel as if someone was watching him. But maybe it was just a feeling. Just maybe, it was just the volatile winds of that green and yellow hue that spilled forth from that geyser hell from before. It might have just been the clouds of rolling dust along the desert floor. Or it was nothing (which he never believed to be true). What he did know was that feeling in the back of his head, the feeling of being watched was very true. It was, after all, a unique feeling that he could only describe as a cold yank at the back of his head. An acute sensation of unrest.

Jeremiah rubbed the back of his neck. All around him was the presence of sand, multi-colored and all of it fine. It looked like streaks of green running horizontal across the plain and it had a fine texture (he noticed because it dug deep into his feet). It looked like the mountains, if there were any here at one point in history, had been reduced, stone and gem and all, into the flamboyant sand. He shook his head. The gristle was in his follicles, in his eyes, filling every fleshy corner of his eye with the light coating of sand. He rubbed his eyes, looked at the boy. He looked like he had golden-green cataracts on him. It must have been the same for himself.

He pulled the boy by his shoulder.

Behind them were the fumes of the geysers past, like factory stacks. It was a cloud that carried itself and dispersed among the boundless expanse of mountainous sands. The valley of geysers so far that their little alleys and their cracked plateaus seemed to disappear into small smudges. He began to wonder if they were even here. If this wasn’t all just some big heat-stroke induced illusion. 

There was a sound. His eyes snapped.

He turned.

It was just foliage, dragging its thorny tails down a slope.

"Where are we going?" Bartholomew asked.

"Does it matter? We're going away. Far, far away."

"I know. But where are we going?" His small hands were together and it made him walk awkward with trepidation.

There was nothing in his brain that even resembled an answer. There was no answer. Where were they going? Nowhere, probably. So why run? Jeremiah asked himself. Why run, why struggle, why, why, why. Successive blows of questions that made him hunch over and gasp. 

Why? 

The strong wind blew. It lifted him, gripped his hair and his clothes and pushed them like an inept parachute. Jeremiah braced his face and felt gale like a blast, like a wave of the ocean. The boy fell, Jeremiah put his hands over him. A giant surf of sand rose high into the air, several feet above Jeremiah before it came down. It looked like the brown tongue of some hungry behemoth. But it left him dry and coughing.

All around, the hot and wicked wind was lifting the sand, and pushing Jeremiah back with tempests of sandy waves like currents. It was strong, even for him, an adult and it stung like lashings against his skin and it pulled his cheeks.

The boy was lifted off his feet. Jeremiah had to pull him back down before he started levitating.

He looked around with squinted eyes, there was no tornado, there was nothing but those toxic, hot, geyser fumes manifesting into wild currents as if the very soul of this island wanted him gone. And he saw the manifestation at last. Illusion? A mental distortion? It couldn’t be, he thought. 

He saw a lone figure out, from where those geysers had once been in his vision. He saw the black figure walking towards him, without any defining attributes but a shadowy vengeance, Jeremiah presumed.

He had the outline of those demonic legions, at least, someone tall and big and frightening and whose figure loomed over. Yes, the desert and island must have wanted him dead. And it must have sent this assassin for him, he felt in his heart. 

And now, Jeremiah couldn't even waste his time to think of an answer the question (if there was an answer) to why he was here. It didn't matter. Why didn't matter, running mattered. 

He pulled the boy from his arm and began dragging them both up the sharp incline of a sharp dune. He felt his legs sinking, he felt his eyes hurting from grit, but he ran. Bartholomew stopped only a few seconds after jogging. Jeremiah grabbed him and put him up on his shoulders like a wagon. He felt his feet sink, but he ran anyway, dragging sand up the hill with him. 

There were no birds that waited hungrily, none could survive the heavy wind. There were no creatures, at least on the surface, for they would have been lifted. There was no one but the three. A terrible place to be, Jeremiah thought. Too heavy, and he’d sink. Too light, and he’d fly.

He just had to outrun it.

With the boy on his shoulder, held by that death grip around his stomach, he braced himself through the rounds of heavy wind. They came in pulses, at least. One, two, one, two. It was an ocean of sand and he felt in the midst of the tsunami.

He looked behind himself. 

The figure was slowing, but still at a steady pace. He seemed to sink (he definitely had no problem with the ear-shattering winds, he looked heavy after all). No, this person kept his way and raised his hand to wave, as if to taunt. 

At least that's what Jeremiah figured, that's what he read in the movements and that's what kept his heart rate up and his senses sharp and his brain empty of those stupid questions.

"Slow-down." The boy said with that broken, dry throat. "I can't see anything."

"You don't need to see anything." Jeremiah was screaming though he was centimeters away from his ear. The air carried with it a howl. It was a strange noise, a bit like crashing waves and a bit like a collapsing building. It’s what he imagined those haunted tombs of kings to sound of. 

“Shit.” Jeremiah screeched.

He felt a whip of sand hit his back. Jeremiah put his hand on the injury. He could feel the swelling flesh, imagine the red skin behind his clothes. He turned to look and made a fool of himself. There was a decline in front of him. His feet rushed to balance himself. He failed, he slipped. The boy flew out of his hands and rolled like a log down to the base. Jeremiah followed him, with one foot forward and his body leaned to slide himself down. 

“Are you okay?” He rubbed the dirt from the boys face. There were no tears though his face looked hurt. 

"Who are we running from?" The boy coughed up sand. It looked terrible, the phlegm covered globs of packed sand. They looked like small tumors of earth.

"From them, from whatever and whoever is chasing us. And they won’t catch us, you hear me? We didn’t escape for nothing.” Jeremiah said. Sam didn’t die for nothing, he thought.

"Why?" The boy curled into a ball. Jeremiah covered him and the oppressive wind pushed at them again. Nudged them, prodded, poked, slapped with loud caustic concussions, spinning rocks and clothes into a fine whirlwind of chaos. The stones were hurled at Jeremiah. He couldn’t feel them much anymore, not with the adrenaline. But he noticed the blood, the long streaks covering his vision.

This wind, this sadist in heat, this abuser.

Jeremiah looked over the boy. He wasn’t hurt at least.

"You’re still asking that shit?" Jeremiah said. "Why are we going? Because if we don't move, we die. That's why."

The child, still low and on the floor, gripped sand. He flung it randomly, defiantly. His face, a contorted mix of strain and sadness.

"Where are we going." He said again. Less of a question, more of a statement. 

Jeremiah grabbed him by the hand and pulled forward. The boy shimmied out of the grip.

"I won't walk until I know where we're going."

Again, Jeremiah grabbed his sleeve. He pulled the shirt and the boy pulled back until it ripped. He arm looked like a broken flower, with half the petals strewn on the floor and the other half drooping hopelessly from the bud. The wind cast out again, grabbing the rags high and up into the air, tossing it like confetti in celebration.

"How can you ask me that?" Jeremiah screamed. "I don't know where the fuck we are! Or where we're going! Or why anything like this is happening!"

"Then why even try." He fell on his knees. "There's nothing. Just dirt."

"You need to stop thinking like that. The minute you give up is the minute you die." 

"And what’s wrong with that?" 

His heart sank. His lips quivered and he realized, looking at the boys face, that he had accepted the situation long before Jeremiah had. That for all intents and purposes, Jeremiah had been carrying a corpse on himself and this was their sepulcher.

He looked at the boy's empty face. 

"Because I made a promise, that's why."

"My dad’s not here. He won’t care. You don’t need to try anymore." Bartholomew said.

Jeremiah struggled to stand.

"No." He said in a voice so low as to be indistinguishable before the white noise of the sandy plane. But the boy could read his lips, no. No? "It’s easy to give up, isn’t it? Painless and easy. But it’s not good enough. Alright? This isn’t about having hope or not. Fuck hope. This is about putting up a fight the only way you can. You hear me? This is about not letting those fuckers get your tears, or your pain, or your joy. Because they don’t deserve it. You don't give them a thing. Nothing. And when you do that, it doesn't matter where you're going or where you're not going. What matters is making it as hard as possible for those tin-head fucks. Let them try to take your soul.

“This is all I can tell you. This is what your dad would have told you and I’m sorry he’s not here, but you need to take it from me when I say, fight. You keep going. You carry the fire, you keep going until all they have left of you is ash and a big, wide smile. You let them know they didn’t break you. This is how your dad was, always a troublemaker. Always getting into business that wasn’t his. Always trying, even if he couldn’t do much. Putting up a good fight even when you’ve lost is the essence of being a noble human being. It’s an important lesson, it’s one I was taught only recently and one I’m teaching you now. So you better learn it, your dad would hold it against me if I didn’t.”

“But he’s not here.” The boy screamed.

“He doesn’t have to be. You’d be amazed what a ghost can do to your sanity.” He laughed, for the first time in a long time. It almost felt foreign to him.

The boy rubbed the sand from his face with his small hands.

"You can keep going.” Jeremiah raised his chin with a tender finger. “I remember the first time I ran at a guy. Fucker was high on meth, running naked across the street. He ran laps around me. I tried ten minutes before I vomited. And you’re dad.”

“My dad?” 

“Took him fifteen seconds. I’ve never seen a middle-aged man run as fast as him. He looked like a god damn sprinting whale.” Jeremiah wheezed out a small heckle. “I asked him what his secret was and he said it was his fat belly. You see, he said, you put your weight forward and you run like mad.”

They both went at it, with their heads sharp at an angle against the assault of wind.

“Don’t you start philosophizing now,” Jeremiah screamed. “Save that for the egg-heads in their lazy, cushioned chairs, alright?” 

He smiled, however false it was and he was glad the boy copied him.

"I don't know why you got this kind of life, I don't know why God designed it for you in this way, but it's still your life. It's all you have, in the end. You hold on to it as long as possible and you don’t hand it to anyone. Not to monsters, not to men, not to God. You make ‘em suffer to try."

Jeremiah looked up, his head barely reached the edge of the dune around them but he could still see the distinct figure, the footsteps of the figure, in a place he hoped to be far away, but what was eerily close.

He wiped his face of sweat and snot.

"What the fuck am I saying?” He laughed to himself. “I'm in my twenties and I’m talking like an old man." He said. "Must be the climate, sun must be getting to my head. Scrambling it. 

“Keep going.” The boy protested.

Jeremiah sneered. “That’s good, that’s good."

The boy ran ahead. Through that molasses sand. They felt it in their shoes, between their toes, in their thighs. The heavy, grating feeling of sand like a file was working at them, shrinking them. 

Jeremiah looked at the boy. 

"It won't always be this bad, trust me."

They ran for an hour and at the end were rewarded at last, to the revealing flat desert ahead where dust turned into solid stone, where the road was cracked and hot and the image of the horizon shook with heat.

He felt glad, funnily enough, at the sight. 

And something else was glad beneath them. A rumbling had begun, something unnoticeable to the two weary travelers. It was a small tremor that they confused for their failing legs. And it was something large, living, crawling, underneath this new territory. 

He looked behind him to the lone figure still trailing them.

“Go go go. We’ve got a long way to go.” Jeremiah pushed the boy. And they both went at it, for whatever was coming, was coming fast. 

Jeremiah

He had turned his head over his shoulders twenty-three times and he kept count. He could feel the rocks that came through the holes of his shoes and the way the rubber soles slapped about sounded like a drowning man at the water surface. They clung, just barely, by sweat and will.  But it didn't matter much, discomfort that is. For all he worried about was how to get the boy to safety.  He felt two things chasing him, the demon with the large figure and the chasing tremors of a buried horror. He could feel the pulses of the creature, underneath the cracked and desolate earth. He could see the ground move up and vibrate and the twisting of stone as the creature circumvented and went around and played with its food. He saw a tree collapse to his rear. It made a loud bang on the floor and its stems and branches fell off into a rain of bark. Closer. 

Knowing this and knowing the child, Jeremiah wore his best face, something in between anger and determination. He put his hand on Bartholomew. 

"Split up from me when I say so. And when you leave you get as far away as possible, you hear me?"

The child nodded his head and looked around. It must have been a joke, as if there was any place to actually run.

They went for some ten minutes, far and steady. Jeremiah looked at the floor, where the bulge of earth was traveling and where the rocks flew out with intense thrashing, hitting his face and his teeth with small particles. 

The astringency on his tongue was harsh, as if his mouth was shrinking and with it, seemingly every muscle on his body. First, his mouth, then his arms, then his heart and at last, as if weakness had been pumped through his body steadily, he felt it in his heart. A quiver, a skip of the beat perhaps. Anxiety, was it? Something worse, worse than not knowing. Maybe knowing too well.  The sweat on his hair dragged his head low to the ground. He was done processing it, he knew what it all meant, his worry. He told Bartholomew in a whisper. 

"Run far from me, alright." His voice was abnormally calm. “You get as far as you can get, don’t you stop until I disappear to your small eyes. Till I'm a blip. Then you keep running. Don’t you ever stop, too.” 

The boy looked him and his face, eerily calm and still. There was not a single crack on Jeremiah’s young face. 

Bartholomew ran. Jeremiah ran opposite, stomping hard on the floor near the creature. And the simple animal, with his simple hungers, chased after the largest piece of meat. He swam through the desert rock towards Jeremiah. 

He was quick paced, he was light and he came to a simple oak tree somewhere in the few minutes of his running. There were no leaves growing on it and its trunk was filled with the shavings of bark. It was great here, Jeremiah thought. With the branches soft and uninterrupted with the chaos of the hunt. Jeremiah looked to see how far he was, maybe just twenty yards away from the creature. He slowed down around the oak and put his hand on it and felt it through his skin. It was strange to have his senses so heightened, to feel the texture of the bark, rough and frail. To smell the wood, somewhat sweet. To feel the breeze behind his ear and to have that sensation of ebbing in his body. His head faced the clear skies, he swore he saw an eagle. He hoped it to be a dignified bird. It was most likely a vulture, probably. 

Jeremiah ignored the closing sound of the burrowed thing. He made a hat out of his hands and looked to find the boy. The boy was looking at him, disobeying him. He could only sigh and raise his other hand and wave wildly.

Bartholomew understood the message but he stayed anyway.

Not again, he thought. He couldn’t scream now though. The sound of crushing rock was too loud. Jeremiah looked at the burrowed thing, like a shark, leaving his trail on the floor. He could see two deep-green antennas flickering and moving to every obtuse step Jeremiah took. He decided to just be still then and let it come with that ruthless discipline, the kind you could only find in the simplistic brains of animals. It was just programming, just instinct for the creature. Another day here. The last day, for Jeremiah.

It stopped in front of Jeremiah. The earth was still for a moment and peace only seemed to magnify the drama of the next event. Without conceit nor ceremony, it rose. A creature he could only imagine in Hell. A creature with a long-striped body, a trunk of sorts. With legs thigh and nimble, whose small claws latched to stone like feet. On it, a large set of pincers for a face, an armored body for a skin. Some nasty cross abomination between a centipede and a scorpion and through some abominable form of alchemy had managed to take the worst of both. It made no sensible noise. It was loud and screechy and it undermined the oppressive sun within moments. It was cold in the shadow. Jeremiah stood, his thighs forward, almost to a kneel. 

The centipede wrapped around Jeremiah, boa constrictor-like, with a slither with its shiny body. It threw rock casually away until the prison was constructed correctly. Jeremiah couldn’t even tell how large it was, most of the body still remained underground. Its beady eyes stared at Jeremiah, he saw his own reflection eight times. The antennas rattled. They sounded like maracas, he almost laughed. This stupid thing will get me, finally. He thought. A fucking bug? 

It lunged. Jeremiah jumped. He tried to climb out of that trap, pushing down with two arms as he vaulted the first circle of the centipede's body. He was pulled back with the pincer. He could feel them stabbing through his thighs. And it did not let go. It gobbled and ate with that bored, mechanical mouth. Chomping down, little by little, like a wood chipper. Jeremiah saw his clothes go first, his skin second and at last his flesh and bones. He had to look away at that point. 

A sloppy eater.

“Fuck off me.” He screamed. He struggled, trying to rip his leg (whatever remained of it) out. After a while, he was hoping for the natural opiate of his brain to deliver him unto easy death. It couldn’t. There was too much nibbling and shredding happening. He had to feel his bone scratched and drilled through. He had to feel the marrow leave him empty. He closed his eyes, like casual meditation. His forehead could not stop sweating. He could not stop screaming. Then finally, out of mercy it seemed, the creature stopped. Jeremiah could finally see what remained, the few toes and pieces of bone. He mostly saw nubs, the little-tender-bleeding-amputations.

He raised his fist into a hammer and brought it down. He felt his thumb break. The creature wasn't even aware. He moved his antennas around and returned to eating. Jeremiah had his body against the large expanse of the centipede. He could feel the digestive track running. I hope you choke on it, he thought. He punched again.

He hoped at least that it was just him, that this was just his punishment. Hope didn’t seem to come easy down here though and it didn’t then.

The child was still there. Watching. Holding his breath. Too courageous or stupid for his own good.

In a crying fit of rage, he ran towards Jeremiah.

Both his hands were up like a disarmed cavalry rider. He was running towards Jeremiah.

Jeremiah saw his tiny head through the slits of the slithering body. The small scalp of hair was bobbing. 

"Get away! Ah" He cringed. “Fuck off!”

He couldn't feel his leg anymore. Thank god he couldn’t feel his leg. He fell down on the floor. What remained of his foot was pale and contrasted sharply against the yellow rock. It looked like a disease shrub, with skin so mangled as if to look like the hundred ends of thorny plants.

He crawled up again, towards the sound of Bartholomew crying. The centipede was conscious of it. It turned and dragged its antennas, detectors of life and joy. They wobbled and picked up the signal quickly. Then it dug again, which sounded like the march of an army, which felt like numbness to Jeremiah.

A stupidly smart creature.

"No, no, no." He said to himself. 

“I said run!” He slammed the floor with open palms and immediately felt the motion underneath the floor. It was going towards the child, the child who came towards Jeremiah. Bait for bait.

Jeremiah pushed himself off the floor. Almost. He slipped on his blood and fell. He leg felt worthless, like dangling wooden parts of a rope-cut mannequin. Red and white, all his lower body was red and white. Again he pressed down. He could stand on a leg at least.

He stepped forward. Sharp pain hit him, he slipped and hit his chin on the floor. His brain felt scrambled. 

"Come on, let me run. Let me stand, come on." He said, to God, probably. 

Third time. He lost his balance and hit his shoulder on the cruel, cracked earth.

"Why am I asking?" Jeremiah said. "Why not just do it, why not just fucking move? Will you?"

He groaned as he came up off the ground. He took a step, a limped step. A button press, maybe a gift of his blood-drained, fatigued brain, but he saw his life coming before him. He watched every person who had insulted him and every person who had loved him, side by side, cheering and booing so fast together that he could barely tell them apart. It was like a strobing light. Just give up. 

Just stop. You wasted your life. You kept chasing after the vanity of vanities.

On and on and on, he walked down the path towards Bartholomew and towards the land shark.

Heinz appeared in front of him. Not smiling, not angry. Somewhat disappointed, wearing that dumb drill instructor hat, wearing the stupid whistle and the black boots. He was too embarrassed not to run. 

Jeremiah put his bad foot forward. He felt pain. Then his good, then his bad, even and fair with the insults. 

His eyelids were heavy. 

What was he doing again? He asked himself. The fog formed in his head, his eyes a constant blur into darkness, as if his body was sinking into the dark depths of an ocean and re-surging like a drunk diver.

Can I do it? The question of his life. Can I do it for someone else? 

He put his arms forward and stroked them. He put his head forward, it wasn't hard to do with how heavy it felt. His thighs carried his feet, feet that had been obliterated long ago, feet that could not even hold their own shape. They were deflated, cheapened.

I can't disappoint again, Jeremiah thought. If running is all I'm good for, then let me this be my best work.

The dust came to his lungs, he breathed it in. He ran. 

He bit his tongue and felt it bleed. He ran.

He could feel the sharp pain of air coming into his lungs.

He ran up. He felt the blood come down. He ran. He felt his head go light. He ran up. His eyes were tired. He ran. His mouth, bleeding. He ran. Ran. Ran. 

Without sweat, without tiredness, without anything holding him back. Not even life itself. He had nothing to lose, everything to gain. 

The boy was in front of him, reaching for a hug, to be held, to fight that useless fight. 

Jeremiah pushed him. He watched the boy hit the floor with a loud thud and watched the small hands reach over to rub the small bruise on his forehead.

The child raised his brow and looked, at first, with angry surprise, disappointment, betrayal. Then with shock. With his mouth open, wide, with tears following the contours of the strain on his face. He watched with horror.

“Behind you.” The boy shouted. 

Jeremiah didn't understand. Was there something funny about him? He sure felt funny. And heavy. His legs seemed to wobble, his lungs felt full, as if he was drowning. The heat seemed to disappear from him, escaping with the blood down his nose. 

Jeremiah’s eyes came down. He felt a sting, then coldness. Foam started up his throat like a seltzer had been shoved into his screaming mouth.

He kept looking down. He understood then.

Small armored hands stabbed through him. The spots of blood were forming on his perforated torso. They looked like little spurts, splashed of red ocean water. They stained his shirt. He felt funny.

Jeremiah reached for his chest to hold the wounds that suckled onto his shirt and that winked. He was lifted and raised high, then thrown to the floor. He stopped breathing then. Between the bones and the wounds, his skeleton seemed broken. The frame of his body, falling to small bone chips and pieces. His head was left to stare at the boy who had fallen on his back and who looked up to the monstrosity. Jeremiah wanted to smile, to comfort at least. He couldn’t move his face though. His thoughts dissipated into dark obscurity. All he could think of was fragmented, words and single pictures with long gaps of time between them. It was not a slide show of his life. And if it was, it was played through a broken projector.

He thought, by association probably, of that other night with Heinz. The shitty day, with the shitty coffee and the shitty punk and the shitty car. With the unfinished walls and doors and the tarps of blue and the headache pain and the nightmare of his sleep.

Air escaped his pursed lips. It was supposed to be a scream.

He looked at the boy, who had his eyes covered. And for an instant, only wished above all else, above family and friends and petty pleasures, Jeremiah wished for the child to be saved.

The behemoth of the earth rose. His body constricted the very earth itself, held it hostage. 

If I could beg. I would. A thought. It was hard to think now.

The sun sky went dark. There was a splash of liquid on his face. A dying cry of a monster. 

There was the sound of crying. The sound of small hands shaking his body. And for some reason, it was easier to sleep now.

If there was no calendar, no clock, no keeper of horrid history then let this stand as a beacon of place and time. Today, Jeremiah died. 

Apollo

Am I late? Apollo thought, a many far yards away from the centipede. He was following the tracks, his head close to the ground, feeling the dirt crumble in his hands and adjusting himself to the shaking of the earth. He was just coming out of those dunes, into the flatlands of scorched, cracked earth. He saw the beast rise high and watched the earth encroached upon and the mounds of dirt and sand exploding into swells of desert. It made him trip and fall from the high spot on the dune. The Hyena lowered his head and smirked. Apollo slid down. He was afraid, knew it, from the shake of his blade. He felt his sweat stick his helmet to his flesh and pull it with his bobbing head. The air bellowed, groaned almost. He landed on the ground and broke into a sprint. 

A scream from across the field flared his face with blood. His eyes shrunk. Still, too far, he thought. He looked around to see what he could do, there was nothing, few trees were here. There were pebbles, small stones, twigs stuck in between the interstices of the hexagon-shaped cracked floor. It’s not like they would have penetrated the armor of the creature anyways. His eyes glanced at his sword, he saw it glean back as if smiling. Apollo raised the sword to his chest and pointed out.

He spun. He felt his blood pushing out to the outer parts of his fingers like small centrifuged vials. His nose and lips turned red, his eyes followed. His hair pulled through from inside the gaps of his helmet. He spun five times, five full circles of confused dance, until the blade slipped out of his hands.

It flew high into the air, the half-sword with its tiny shadow, a kind of toothpick. And only by sheer luck it seemed, did it hit its target. Hard through the mouth. Apollo watched a pincer fly off trajectory, plunging into the tough earth with a swift swish.

The wound spurted out blood. Green, and thickly vile. The animal spun, like Apollo, writhed, like Jeremiah. A natural response to having its teeth and bones ripped from its person. Apollo ran to it at this time, with his head forward and his arms outreached to grab a hold of the creature. He found one of the many hands and climbed, digging his fingers deep into the little gaps separating the armored slots of the animal trunk. Ladders, he thought. Ladders leading to the face and the blade interred into the side of the creature's mouth. It siphoned the green blood, freshly warmed by the red ring in the sky.

A shake. All of his armor brushed and clanked. He tightened his grip. Both the creatures outraged thrashing and Apollo’s fear wanted him off. He clung anyways.

He climbed and felt for the little sword of his. He dug it out and felt the pieces of the exoskeleton brush his shoulder. It looked like a spilling dam with all the spilled blood leaking out. He raised it again, cut again. A set of eyes, an antenna fell off the monster. The animal shook again, Apollo lost most of his balance. He hung by a single arm only, his whole body felt the force yanking him away. It was made worse with the blood right above him, like a fire hydrant with the kind of pressure that could rip flesh from bone. He maneuvered beneath the spillage and felt only the mist of blood and small sprinkled wet taps. He was looking for a good spot, a gap of armor to dig his blade in. He found one, near the top where the neck (assuming there was a neck) would have been. Like a chisel, he fixed his blade in there and began tapping it inside flesh. He worked it with that same artisan intensity, his eyes focused, his palms sweaty, worked it inside the armor and inside the flesh. He felt the squishy body, the flimsy, gelatin-like pink mush for a body. Pushing, pushing, pushed. The injected blade came out another end. A piece of armor fell and a giant swelled wound burst into a shower of blood. Apollo kept his blade in. He was screaming, not louder than the shower, but loud enough to remind himself he was still alive. Like mad surgery, he pulled down on the sword and let go of the body. He let the blade guide him down like a monorail and watched as the wound widened with the stroke of the blade, length-wise through the centipede. It was an autopsy, a filleting of the creature. Apollo hit the floor and his blade followed near him, it whistled against the wind and stabbed its broken edge into the dirt.

The creature fell, with a cringing convulsion and seizure. The rest of the body still laid in a circle, piled up like a giant green and black rope. The wound poured blood out, that thick, viscous goo as if Apollo had struck an oil vein. It filled the pool green.

But it was somewhat comfortable, to be sitting in a pool of your enemies life force. To stay there, listening to the death throes of a behemoth disappear into the wind. It was good knowing even monsters bleed, that they die too. 

Apollo’s breathing calmed into a set interval of proper deep gasps. He stretched out his armor and his clothes. It was suctioned on to his flesh and opening the little gap, a small puddle of green good fell out.

Apollo wiped his forehead, he was watching the flow of the blood, following it as it extended out to the other end of the arena. 

There he saw a boy, still untainted with the green-stuff. He took a step towards him but stopped. He wanted to say something, to offer a hand, but watched closely with tired eyes. 

He was a peculiar boy who did not cry (not yet at least). Who rubbed his eyes and looked around with wide-eyed curiosity. Who looked at Apollo, then adjacent to him. The boy screamed. Not at the monster or to the red-eyed half-devil in front of him. He screamed at Jeremiah. He scrambled for the body on scraped knees. Then his head fell and his body drooped and he sat on his knees, with his nails digging into the dirty earth.

He was prostrated in front of the corpse of Jeremiah. 

Apollo couldn’t speak. There was a strange quietness about this all. The sound of rushing water was still coming from the body of the giant arthropod. It lent a calmness to the ceremony. There was wind, though it seemed to circumvent the coiled corpse. Apollo let his helmet fall, wind brushed his sweat-grossed hair past his face. It was greasy, wet, tacky. It couldn’t compare to the feeling in his heart though.

Bartholomew crawled over to Jeremiah. Tear-dry, red-cheeked. He shook the body and prodded the pale face. He looked back to Apollo, Apollo who had nothing to say or do and offer solemn rejection. His tired eyes looked dismally into Jeremiah, the boy knew what this meant, almost instantly. Why wouldn’t he? This wasn’t the first corpse. 

It didn’t hurt any less.

Bartholomew frowned. His face, undecided in emotional outrage. He grit his teeth, his cheeks swelled. 

He massaged the body again. He put his hands on his chest, pushed down. CPR like he had seen in the movies. Nothing. He slapped Jeremiah’s face. Nothing. 

He grabbed small piles of sand from the dug earth, compressed them as much as his little hands would and pushed them down on the holes of the corpse. Maybe, Apollo thought, maybe he thinks he could fill the holes. 

A small draft blew the dirt aside and left the wounds blood-blackened and exposed.

Nothing.

The boy slumped over, his dirty hands in front of his face to cover a new outbreak of tears. Apollo looked up into the sky. He saw birds. He rubbed his nose and looked around and tried to strangle the feeling in his chest. But it popped up, like a hiccup, like a diseased cough. That small uncontrollable tick. When the boy started to scream unintelligibly, when the sound of outraged sadness struck Apollo’s ears, he stopped thinking about suppressing anything. His body stopped shaking, his chest stopped stretching. His body let go.

It must have been the first time in eight years since Apollo cried. And now he remembered how bad it felt. 

Dion

The choir of men played around the white circle. They screamed vulgarities at Dion. Dion whom, just punched in the face, crumpled on the floor with his loose teeth hanging down his lips. They did not grow back as fast, as well, as they should. He sat there, on the floor, like a small teething infant, with his hands to his face and the little knobs of white forming on his bleeding gums. He faced down. His body was bruised and healing and bruising again, his flesh changing color from green and purple to pink to tan like a confused chameleon. 

All around him the men threw small bronze coins, crudely etched onto them, a different number and a different face of Astyanax. They threw them on the floor near Dion, somewhere outside a white chalk line. They were betting on him or rather the many things about him: whether he would stand up again, whether he would survive another five minutes, whether he’d win or live even. It went on, some demons taking tallies and small tips as people lost and won. 

The demon in front of Dion walked up. He was nude almost, with a brown cloth covering his genitals. He pushed his scarred and dry, flaking feet on Dion’s face and rubbed it down on his chin. 

“Come on, fight,” Astyanax said from behind the crowd. He was looking with suspicion more than pleasure. 

Dion spat blood on the floor, it tainted a bundle of bronze coins. 

The foot rose high above him. 

“Show me something, I tell ye.” Astyanax screamed. Dion closed his eyes and breathed heavily, the foot hovered over his skull. 

“You won’t heal that, you’ll die. Understand?” Astyanax said. It was coming down, Dion felt the air push back as it did.

“Stop!” Astyanax screamed. All the deranged creatures turned to stare at Astyanax. His chest jumped up and down, his breathing was quick and deep. He stood from his wooden rocking chair and walked to the wrestling circle.

“Why stop me?” The competitor said with that stupid, deformed smile of his. Astyanax eyed him up and down. His face soured and he cocked his hand back. Blood flew everywhere. The competitor hurled back. Astyanax grabbed his head before he could land and sunk a thumb into his left eye until he felt it pop underneath.

“Don’t you ever question me.” He said. The other men heard it better than the demon, who lay on the floor in throes.

 A deviant demon, a small imp-like specimen, shuffled below the feet of the other betters. He was collecting.

Astyanax knelled over Dion, who looked up with his half-healed, half-broken face. It looked like steel sheets at the forge, some of it mended and treated and the other red and dark and malleable. Dion whistled from his broken nose. He coughed some. Astyanax fixed two thumbs around the hook-shaped thing and felt for the cartilage and bone. He snapped it back into place. 

“You might redeem yourself if you’d just fight. I’d even forgive your transgression if you would.”

“I have nothing to fight for. I have nothing to apologize for.” Dion belched snot and blood. “I had a chance to kill you and failed.”

“The men will kill you and rape you and take from you everything. You will be a figure of fun for the rest of your days, is that what you’d like? O’ noble Dion?” Astyanax tapped his face, amicably. “You’re not a pacifist. It’s not in your blood, believe me.”

“If it makes you more miserable, that’s good enough for me.” Dion looked past the king and towards the candle holders and wicks circling the small room. 

“What do I care what happens to you?”

“Well, you’re here, aren’t you?” 

“You’re so stupid,” Astyanax said. “Feel free to meditate in your small box, then.” Two men came up behind him. “Take him away and don’t feed him this time. Starvation will break him.” 

Two demons came around with their beige tunics and lifted Dion, dragged him by his arms and legs through the doors and the many halls of the dungeon. He laid in their arms coming in and out of consciousness and caught glimpses of the blurry shadows across the walls. They morphed and curved.

He awoke again at the height of air. He was thrown into a cell. The four-inch-thick metal bars clanked behind him as he rolled down the filthy floor, stopping only at the end of the room. Near him, a bucket and the smell of excrement.

Time passed even slow down there, as if the everlasting sun wasn’t enough a prod and poker of sanity, there was darkness now. Torches that seemed to burn forever, brick and mortar walls with the small gaps that allowed dust and light inside. There was no change of day, he knew. No escape, he felt. Dion dragged his body up, two joints rubbed against each other wrongly around his shoulder. He snapped it back into place and rested his bad side against the wall of the prison. He was feeling residual pain, which was odd. 

Mortality, after all, was odd for Vicars. 

He laid in a corner of the room thinking that, with closed eyes and his cauliflower ear stinging and ringing. He just wanted to sleep. He just wanted to fall into it, to dream. His eyelids began to burden themselves, to overwhelm him. And just before he could close them fully, before the sound of distant footsteps could disappear, he slipped out of it. Rather, was thrown out of it. 

There was a loud bang in the front of the cell. A collection of successive blows against the metal bars, the sound made the local prisoners aggressive. They began to screech in strange languages.

Dion turned to face the source. He felt worse for some reason.

“What do you want?” He asked. 

Alestor sniffed and covered his nose with one hand. He extended a metal cup with the other, it barely fit through the bars. A drink? Something like it. It looked like that bitter black sludge he had earlier at the kitchen, days ago (or what felt like days). 

“I managed to convince him to give you this. As a diplomatic gesture.” Alestor said. “He wants you to know that you are not, in his words, a plebeian. Though you may act like one. And he would prefer that you, in his words, act with more dignity.”

Dion took the cup and drank. He felt better, his pain seemed to subside a little. Calories, after all, wherever they came from, were vital to that nasty process of revitalization and regeneration.

“I bet you feel smug and strong, huh? With me behind the bars now.” Dion said. “Does it feel good being a lapdog?” 

“Better out here than in there.” Alestor pinched his nose.

“So was your cry of guilt a lie too?” Dion asked. “Is that all it takes to make you feel good, a little air?”

“No,” Alestor said. “No, none of what I said was a lie.”

“Good.” Dion drank again. “Is there another message from your master?”

“No.” Alestor looked down.

Dion sipped. He limped all the way to right side of the wall and put his back against it to slide down gently onto his ass.

“It was stupid trying to kill Astyanax.” Alestor said.

“Is that what he told you to say too?” 

“You knew that you would fuck it up. You tried killing him with a potted plant, after all.” Alestor rubbed his forehead. “What a stupid plan. Why do it? You had a good deal.”

“You’re still so stupidly gullible, aren’t you?” Dion scoffed. “That’s what my friend would have said, anyways. And he’d be right. I may be an idiot but at least I still have a brain, doctor.”

Alestor wrapped his hands around two bars and pressed his face against them. 

“What do you mean?”

“You believed him when he said he’d bring back your family and you believe him now, with his convenient deal?” Dion asked. “That everyone is nice and safe and that they’re free to go so long as I comply? Did you even see these supposed prisoners?”

“No.”

“Because they don’t exist.” Dion said. “I’ve accepted that fact long ago.”

“He’s keeping you alive so maybe you should cooperate, make your life a little easier.” 

“He’s always wanted me here. It’s all a game to him and I’m the zoo animal. And if he’s frustrated, it’s because that’s part of the fun too.” Dion looked away. “That’s all he wants, company to harass. Company to destroy. Nothing more. Why would he tell the truth, after all? He has what he wants.”

Alestor bit the interior of his mouth.

“He has as many docile pets as he’d ever need.” Dion laughed. “Who am I kidding? He’ll probably be bored within the month. And out again, he’ll hunt for more. A living Venus fly trap. He’s probably sweet mouthing another poor idiot like you as we speak.”

“So that’s it? You’ve given up?”

“I’m taking things as they come.” Dion sighed. “My hot-headedness, my violence brought me here. If I was a bit calmer, more compliant, more thoughtful. If I’d just listen…”

“You could have stopped yourself.”

“I could have stopped you.” The torch fires flickered. “I could have killed you a long time ago. Now? Why does it matter now? Revenge? Revenge only makes my situation worse.”

“That’s right.” Alestor said. “You were a pain in my ass before, so why can’t you show me that same energy now and try and kill that prick again?”

“I’m sure you’d like that.” Dion said. “You’re always thinking about yourself before anyone else, after all, Doctor.”

The word doctor seemed to stab into Alestor’s guts. He twitched. 

“I’m angry at how calm you are with all of this. I’m frustrated that you’d let that demon run around, knowing he still causes that much grief. I’m frustrated you’re a pushover. Who cares what happens to me?” Alestor asked. “I’m already doomed. At least punish him too, isn’t that what you’re here for? Vengeance? Punish him as much as me. We both deserve it.”

“I am punishing him.” Dion laid on his back. “I’m boring him to death. I’m not even giving him the pleasure of watching me. If I suffer, I suffer quietly. That’s the thing that drives him wild, seeing his exceptional pet act in very uninspiring ways. He hates that.” 

Alestor banged on the bars. The other prisoners howled. 

“That’s it?! That’s your plan? Behaving like a fucking saint?” 

“Until my time comes, yes.” Dion said.

“You’re going to rot is what you’re going to do.”

“No, I’m not.” Dion closed his eyes. “I’m repenting. I’m making myself a meek man. And I’m sure the Lord will save me, one way or another.”

“Show some spine.”

“It eats away with me,” Dion said. “Knowing that whatever lives in your king lives inside of me too. That long-lasting desire, that primitive thing. I can’t keep fighting knowing each time I do I get closer to becoming a psychopath like him.”

“Stop being so pretentious, you little ass. Do your job and hunt him down.”

“Yeah,” Dion said. “I spent so much time hunting you down. Enjoying the process, feeling guilty and sad. I don’t even know if my tears were authentic, sometimes I think that maybe, deep down inside, I just wanted an excuse to kill someone. I just wanted to be mad to be mad. And my voracious appetite made me sloppy, it let you slip away. If I had worked as hard as Apollo, together with him, maybe…”

His head nodded back and forth.

“Stop self-reflecting, act.” 

“I’m praying now. For my soul, for yours, for everyone you killed down here. I’m just praying.” 

“I don’t need a Catholic right now.” Alestor kicked the bars. He felt another bout of melancholy coming up. “I need a soldier!”
 
“Then maybe you should start praying too.” Dion said. Alestor cringed, he pointed to the cup, demanded it. It rolled down, below the gates, most of it un-drunk and spilling on the floor. Alestor looked at it for a moment in his hands. He poured out the rest in front of the cell, hoping Dion would watch, hoping he would feel regret. 

He didn’t. He laid down with his back on a pile of hay and his head nodding off to some imaginary rosary, to some imaginary lines of scripture.

He wanted to scream again. But didn’t. He walked away and soon even his footsteps disappeared. He walked away, saying (screaming), into the ward of prisoners: “We both want the same thing, idiot. Why can’t you see?”

It sounded pained, like a groan.

Apollo

“You should say something.” The Hyena dug its snout into the ground and threw the black dirt towards the rising fire. A modest gesture.

“No.” Apollo said. Because there was nothing more seemingly frightening than having to share words with a mourning child. He could barely do it with an adult, even with all the years of toughening and forging. How could he then, help a fragile person? He didn’t have that inconsequential foolhardiness in him. Not now. 

The corpse of Jeremiah laid on a pile of dried wood, the cut-down tree lay some pile away. He burned quickly, efficiently, easily and that made Apollo somewhat glad. There was not much smell to it either, the wind kept blowing against the smoke. There wasn’t any difficulty to any of this, physically at least. He threw in sticks every time the fire looked just about to fall. It was an easy funeral to make, a harder one to tolerate and one that would not have existed period, had the boy not protested.

“Why does a corpse care if it's burned or buried or left to rot?” Apollo whispered to the Hyena. 

“He can hear you.”

“Then he should know we need to hurry up.”

“You’re absolutely, socially inept.”

“I’m practical. I didn’t know the man so I can’t say I care for him. What I do care about, though, is getting out and that needs to happen faster rather than later.”

“Practical?” His voice sounded sly, smug. His tail wagged left and right. “Was crying, practical?”

“No, but it was normal.” He said. “Even I’m not that cruel.”

“You’re not cruel in the right order.” He yawned, its wide mouth showing the sleek, yellow teeth. “Stern with your friends, merciful with enemies. It should be the other way around.”

“What do you know?”

“Everything.”

Apollo’s leg shook. He tapped the floor and rubbed his hair and stretched his arms.

“Are you anxious?” The Hyena smirked.

“Who wouldn’t be? You’re having me kill a man who by all accounts of reason, seems to be the worst thing on this island.” Apollo spat. “I’m getting fucked and I can’t even get a god damn reach around.”

“Still talking irresponsibly? It’s not me who's having you do anything. It’s all your choice and yours only. You’re free to leave, you know.”

“Right.” He stepped on the stain left by his saliva. He stretched his neck and those tensed muscles that tightened his face.

“You’re worried about Dion, aren’t you?” The Hyena laughed. The boy looked at both of them, quiet grief reflected from his eyes. It looked like a dying fire. Apollo threw a stick into the pyre and hushed the dog.

“Maybe. Maybe I’m just curious. I’m wondering if the retard managed to stay alive.” 

“I’m sure we’ll find him. He’s probably gotten to Astyanax already.”

“You’re probably right.” Apollo cringed, he felt his eyelid tense. “More of a reason to hurry this shit up.”

“I thought you weren’t cruel?” He giggled.

“Cruelty would be staying here. Letting the living die to watch a dead man burn, what sense is there in that?” 

Apollo came down the small slope.

These were warped lands, waving up and down and from them, an outgrown stretch of dried trees. Little seeds grew from their limbs, a mute-colored yellow. They looked like bells. There were no leaves and no solid shadows, the tall trees kept straying from the winds. It was hard to even call them trees, they looked and felt like weeds. Giant thorns, brittle and chalky at the touch. A forest of thorns.

He walked over to the boy, the Hyena following steadily behind. 

“Hey, we need to go.” He grabbed Bartholomew's hand. The boy wiggled out.

“I don’t want anyone to have him.” He said.

“Who? What?” Apollo asked.

“Not you or the monsters or this dump. No one should have him.” The boy protested. Apollo stared, confused. 

“He’ll be ash in a second. Specks in the air in the minute. And desert dust within the hour.” He put his hand on the child’s shoulder. “You being here or not isn’t going to change that. So let's go.”

“That’s not how you talk to a child.” The Hyena laughed.

“Shut up.” Apollo looked at Bartholomew. His face was scratched, his lips were burst and the scar tissue on his forehead was overlapping. Is he even a kid anymore? He thought.

“I don’t want to leave him.” Bartholomew said.

“I think your friend would have preferred if you did. Why waste all that effort getting away in the first place?” Apollo asked. 

“He wasn’t my friend.” Bartholomew threw a stick into the fire. “He was my father's friend and now he’s gone.” 

There was something to it, a truth hidden underneath that statement that almost piqued Apollo. But a squawk of birds above, a drop of a branch to his rear, a shaking of the trees pushed him away from asking. He waited instead, for the boy to be done, waited for him to throw every stick in his little piles into that fire. And he watched the metamorphosis. It was a funeral for the child too, he thought. 

The fire spat back. Bartholomew reached down for a stick and found nothing. He stopped then to look at the body, if there was even a body left, inside the tower of flames. A blackened figure showed for a moment, then drowned in the orange and red and yellow and white. More embers flew out. Apollo stepped away and worried for a second if the woods would burn down with the outraged fire. Then realized, he’d prefer if they did. That way he could hurt the damned island, even if just a little.

The Hyena raised his head, at last, shook some dirt off his fur and pointed his nose towards a direction. 

“It’s done.” He said. “Let's get going. We need to make it to the top.”

Bartholomew nodded waited a bit before nodding. He led the way.

“What’s your name?” Apollo asked. “Mine’s Apollo. Just, Apollo.”

“No, it’s not.” The Hyena said.

“Be quiet.” 

There was a pause.

“I’m Bartholomew.” He said. “Bartholomew, Heinz.”

“You sound familiar.” Apollo frowned. Of course he did, he thought. Of course, he is. Goddamnit, it could have been anyone and it’s this kid?

“My dad was a policeman.” The boy said in his monotone voice. “He died. It was on the new. You must have heard my name from that.”

He walked with indifference.

It had to be him, the boy of the man who had been stabbed that day, in the middle of that night. The start of the comatose, the beginning of his death. It just had to be the son of the man he had failed. Apollo felt his stomach turn like a wheel had tangled and twisted his internal organs. He felt the anxiety all throughout, the twisting pain and he tried very hard to walk straight and confident. He knew the boy didn’t know who he was, and that kind of ignorance was a blessing.

“I’m sorry for your loss.” Apollo said.

“Are you?” The boy asked. “People said that to me all the time. Usually when they wanted stuff. Like the Captain or the mayor or whatever person was my dad’s boss. It’d always go like that ‘I’m sorry for your loss, but…’ and I’d know they want something. ‘Cause they always continued with a but.”

Apollo narrowed his eyes. The mayor? The Captain?

“What’d they want?” He asked.

“For me to not talk to reporters. For me to be friends. I don’t think they wanted to be friends though.”

“Whens the last time you saw them?” 

“At church today. Or whenever today was. They were wearing black hoodies. Masks. They looked like moose's, pretty dumb.” Bartholomew stopped. “I can’t tell. Has a day passed?”

Apollo walked ahead of him. Guilt, curiosity, shame moved him. He stared at the boy's blank face. There was a dullness to the child, an apathetic stare. It seemed a bit bold, matured even. But something important was missing on his face, something taken. 

“Tell me everything about the church. What happened?”

“Why?” The boy asked. “I don’t like you.”

“I figure you owe me, for saving your life and for burning your friend.”

“Owe? I didn’t ask you for anything.” Bartholomew said. “You can leave me, what do I care if you’re here or not. Everyone leaves me.” 

Another silence passed over them before the Hyena exclaimed, with a loud breath.

“He’s a detective. A kind of detective. And he just wants answers.”

“What? Like for the police? What are you doing here then? Stop lying.” Bartholomew inspected Apollo’s face. “I’ve never seen him work with my dad. And I knew everyone who worked with my dad. Plus, he looks funny, like those dumb monsters with the big trashcans on them.”

“You little shit-” Apollo said.

“What are you going to do?” The Hyena asked. “Threaten a child for information? Answers to questions that don’t matter to anyone but you?”

“When you’ve been chasing a man and a thing for so long, you start to get hungry.” Apollo steadied himself and rubbed his shoulder. “I need you to answer me, kid. It’s just personal curiosity is all.” 

Bartholomew looked at the both of them. Seeing a talking dog, seeing a reasonable monster-demon-thing (as he thought of them), didn’t seem so strange. Nothing seemed strange, nothing surprised him. That was what his face was empty of, Apollo thought, innocence. 

“I don’t care anymore.” Bartholomew said. “I’ll tell you everything.”

He told them about the church, about the black sabbath and Isaac who had been killed and everyone who had been abducted. He talked about the Captain and the Mayor in their strange black dresses that made them look like mooses (as he described it) and about how this all happened so far back that the boy didn’t even care anymore. Not about the violence, not about the death. That everyone died around him and that he was used to it, whether he liked it or not. That his eyes couldn’t cry anymore, that he didn’t know where he was or where he was going or how he was getting there. It was like living in the nightmare, the kid said. And you don’t ask questions in a dream.

“The Captain? The Mayor? The black priest, Alestor. Where are they now?” Apollo asked.

“They both got killed real early. Stabbed with spears.” Bartholomew said. “Most of the weird black dress people died too. Except for that Alestor guy. I don’t know who or where he is. That’s all I know.”

“So, the mayor and the captain are fucking dead, huh?” Apollo said. “And those minions, the cultists, all dead? I can’t feel but help that maybe some of them didn’t know what they were getting into.”

“That sure sounds like pity to me.” The Hyena said.

“Maybe. I have pity for the kid and the bystanders attending church, sure.” Apollo said. “I might even have pity for the mentally diseased Alestor strung around himself. Madness attracting madness, like the orbit of stars and planets.” He paused. “But the Captain, the Mayor, Alestor himself? Fuck them. I’m glad they’re gone.”

“That’s the spirit.” The Hyena smiled. “Savage desires meet savage ends, always.” 

Apollo frowned.

“What?” The Hyena asked. 

“I get the feeling somethings wrong.”

“Relative to what? You’re in Hell.”

“What?” The boy chimed.

“Something feels off.” They both ignored him and walked ahead.

The wrinkles appeared on Apollo’s face like cracks.

“You’re weird and you say funny things. Not in a good way.” Bartholomew said. He hung his head at a slant. “Your talking dog is weird too.”

“He’s not a dog.”

“What is he then?”

“I’ve been trying to get him to tell me for the longest time.”  

“Oh.” Bartholomew walked past him. Up the hill.

“Is this really hell?” He asked.

Apollo scratched his chin, dismissive almost in his deep contemplation.

“Sure.” He said.

“I thought only bad people go to tell. I wasn’t that bad.” He said. “I don’t think…”

“It’s not by choice or will that you’re down here. You’re a victim of circumstance.” He said.

“Oh.” The boy said.

“You haven’t asked me where we’re going.” Apollo outstretched his arms. He started walking. “You should be more curious.”

“Oh.” Bartholomew repeated. 

They continued in silence. Behind them, the smell of burning wood, of ash, of dust and of the past. 

Astyanax
Weeks after the funeral of Jeremiah

He had gotten sick of it. Staring out through the window, in the corner of his eyes where the slaves towed the fields with their dragging stones of marble, like the slaves of Egypt. He had gotten sick of the lines in the dirt, of the sound of their slopping footsteps stepping onto soft clay and mud. He had gotten sick of Dion, at the head of the pack of six slaves, with ropes attached to his chest like a common barn animal, dragging the stones through. 

And the cathedral. The cathedral that stood near him, near the barracks and the common fields, the cathedral behind the whole palace. With a strange blend of Gothic, Roman corners and pillars, with the high towers and arches that blocked even the aqueducts. He hated seeing it, even though he, Astyanax, had made it. 

The looming tower, the slaves near the fields of it, the demonic legionnaires in lazy wait. All of it angered Astyanax, seeing a man he admired and loved, seeing them this docile, this stupid, this obedient. He felt disgust.

The beatings obviously weren’t enough. Starvation obviously wasn’t enough. Labor work? Dion probably enjoyed it by now. His body seemed to run on something else, something nonexhaustive, something that glistened his eyes each time he looked at Astyanax. It wasn’t anger, pleasure. It was something that, to Astyanax, seemed worse. Something extremely sinister. A symptom gone undiagnosed that now threatened to plague Astyanax, and worse, the rest of the slaves in the pen. 

Astyanax withdrew himself from the window sill and charged down the stairs. He didn’t waste time putting on his cape, or the large purple tunic. He didn’t wear his pins or embroidered fabrics, he came down with those peasant clothes as if to join the slaves in their toiling.

Out into the halls, through the first wall of his little city, he opened two wooden doors. The grassy fields blew gently, the little paradise in this desert hell. He ran towards the slaves. Horace followed behind, picked up along the way like like a ship in a storm, dragged and thrown about. 

“What are you doing, young master?” He rubbed his hands together and tried to get ahead of the king. 

“None of your business, get back.” Astyanax reached inside a wooden compound, an armory it looked. He plucked a leather whip from one of the boxes, the many ends licked the floor. The sound made Horace cringe. Muscle memory. 

“What are you trying to do? Everyones working as demanded.” He said. 

“Do I need a reason to beat someone?” He kicked Horace away and watched him roll on the floor.  “My heart demands I move, and I listen.” 

Horace struggled to fix himself up, his clothes were dirtied.

“Wanton desires will kill you, young master. Please be patient.” He said.

He didn’t listen. He went on through the fields, towards the murmur of moans and the sound of dragging earth. He went towards Dion, whose face was kept forward like a bold look of eagles. There was a tight rope around his chest and arms, they branded him with the design of threads. He turned his face only briefly, his hair didn’t even had time to rest before he felt the lashing on his chest. 

His rags went with his skin, off and away, like small paper strips. Paper airplanes in the air, bleeding red. He fell to the floor and the ton of slab behind him wobbled before being assuaged into standstill.  

“Is this what you want to be?” He shot out again. “A beast of burden?”

Flesh ripped, blood sprayed against the marble stone and the swirls of black and white mixed with red, Dion looked up. 

“You’re a warrior, aren’t you?” Astyanax screamed. Horace came around to pull him back, but he couldn’t. Astyanax cocked his hands and shot out six times. The lashings were quick and cut deep and on the seventh, when the leather straps seemed broken, when the ends of the whip themselves seemed dangle like busted limbs, Dion grabbed back. 

He tugged on the whip from the bottom of the floor. He had some anger in him, a mild flaring of nostrils and focus of eyes. But those subsided along with his wounds. He ripped his shirt off, it dragged with blood and sweat and he stood to face the king. 

“You’re weaker than before.” Astyanax pulled, like a master with his dog. “How long do you think you’ll last? Do you intend to make your death as painful as possible? With an empty stomach and empty strength?”

He circled Dion. Horace tried following but slipped, his old body caked with dirt.

“I want to see that look on your face break, I really do.” He said. “Should I make it slow then, just flay you live, make you beg for it? It wouldn’t be hard.”

Dion breathed deeply. He looked at the blank sky. 

“Is that death fit for warriors?” Astyanax slapped the floor with his whip. “Say something!”

“I’m not a warrior,” Dion lipped the words but did not speak them.

“What was that?”

“I’m not a warrior.” He said. “I’m just a man.”

The other slaves, those morphed and mutilated creatures, looked with their eyes (or eye), their mouths open and their faces drooling. 

“I’m just a man,” Dion said. “It’s all I’ve ever been.”

“No, you’re a boy,” Astyanax said. “A masochist too, a Catholic choir boy, too stupid to know what greatness and pleasure await you.”

“I’m fine being stupid and childish.”

“No, it’s not fine.” He whipped his legs and watched them turn red before healing, slowly. “I thought us kin. I still do.”

“Is that why I bother you? You can’t look in a mirror?”

They all heard the whip crack again. It snapped against the floor.
 
“Do you think yourself a martyr?” Astyanax said. “I’ve asked you to fight men, to prove yourself, to take yourself the title that of which is owed to you. I’ve offered you a place here.”

“I have no interest in entertaining you.” Dion focused his eyes. “I don’t want to be your friend. I don’t want to have custody over a desert, in the middle of Hell. To spend my years here, with you. No. Who would want that?”

“So that’s how it is.” He threw the whip to his side. “What do you want?”

Dion’s eyes narrowed. Was this a trick? There was a kind of defeatist posture to Astyanax, that low, boxed up posture.

“Well?” 

Dion said nothing, he kept his focused rage towards the king.

“Of course,” The corner of his lips twitched. “I’ve known what you wanted. The purpose, the stakes.

Horace came up and touched grabbed his ankles.

“Stop, don’t do this,” Horace said. Astyanax dug his heel into his jaw and pushed the old butler to the side.

“Do you think I won’t fight you? That I’m afraid?” 

“Ever since you invited me here, you’ve kept me de-clawed. You’ve taken my weapons, you’ve made me play the obedient dog. It sure seems like you’re afraid.”

“Afraid of what? I have thousands of years worth of experience on you. I’ve been in this Hell before your precious Jesus was even born, before your church was ever made.”

They both stared at each other, even eyed. The slaves now gawked with similar intensity, the guards became drawn to the conflict, more curious than cautious for their precious king's safety.

“We should have done this a long time ago,” Dion said. “Wealth didn’t work. Courtesy didn’t work. Stockholm syndrome didn’t work. I’ve known what I wanted.”

Astyanax rubbed his face. 

“I loved you. I wanted you, so, so much.” Astyanax felt his grip loosen. “I’ll be alone again, after you’re gone.”

“You were always alone.”

His hands felt loose, slippery. Astyanax took a step back and let his eyes fall on the nearest guard. They looked sharper, thinner, beady like a crow. His breaths were controlled and calculated, his gestures cold, stern. His regal nature, killed. His mood, sobered. 

“You won’t win.” Astyanax felt the wind between his red fingers and white hair. His eyes looked like two yellow moons, big and demanding and all imposing. 

“Oh no, no, no, please no,” Horace said. 

“Are you sure about that, old man?” Dion smiled. He tried to suppress the happy feeling in him, tried to convince himself better than the king. But his hands couldn’t help but tremble.

“Are you sure?” Astyanax asked. Dion nodded.

“It won’t be today. But it will be soon, very soon.” He turned. His face looked down. “We’ll need an audience for your funeral. If you won’t be remembered in life, you’ll be remembered in death. Are you sure about this?”
 
“I have God on my side, what am I to fear?” Dion said.

“Don’t we all? We’re all to His image, we’re all apart of His plan.” Astyanax slicked his long white hair back. “And if everything exists only with his say-so, that if my desire is also God’s will, then it’s safe to say that I have him on my side, as well. Right?”
 
“I’d like to think you’d have a chance to ask him yourself, but where I’m sending you, there’s nothing. No answers, no questions. A man without form, with nothing but his dark soul, I’ll send you to oblivion.” Dion said. “I’ll bury you here, in your own kingdom and whatever you were, or are, will be gone. That’s the truth.”

“No, no, no.” Astyanax frowned. His eyes seemed to drag in and around his eye sockets like loose billiards. “I’ve already foreseen it. I see it now, your body will be torn, bleeding, and dragged about my home. Like Achilles did to my father, I too will do to you. That will be your glory, as a ragdoll strapped to horses. I promise.”

There was nothing left to say. The wind too, seemed hesitant to blow. Astyanax left there, Horace followed quickly after and Dion, with the other slaves, stood indifferently.

The guards, as if in accordance to some unwritten law, left Dion alone. He was free, to some extent. He walked the grounds, looking for nothing in particular, seeing nothing in particular. And one seemed to stop him. He was free indeed.

And it was funny thinking then, that he’d wait in that room with the cage. That bedroom.

He’d wait for his call, the call for war and he wondered what it would sound like. A moan? A shout? A cry.

Horace

Horace followed Astyanax through the cathedral and its gaudy chambers. All around the main preacher hall, the wooden benches were broken and splintered, the round ceiling tops in the brink of collapse as the painted glass fell like stray drops of candy-colored water. Horace tiptoed and maneuvered around the stray nails and wood and sharp stone, his whole body small and hunched over. The wide, chubby face with the beard that touched the floor and the long-nailed hands he kept close to him to avoid cutting himself on the wreckage of the church.

“You should have never taken him in, you should have killed him from the very beginning,” Horace said. “You knew he was an assassin, you knew how this would end. And now, now-”

“Do you think I’ll lose?” Astyanax asked. They stopped at the very front of the church, where the floor was elevated for the preacher or would-be preacher. Where the baptismal pond, the ceremonial font vibrated with the loud shout of Astyanax. There were rusted organs, crude shaped things like the pipes of an engine that fueled this hell. A critter inside shook, made a scratching noise and traversed the copper.

“N-no, master,” Horace said. “But it’s my responsibility to worry about you.”

“It’s the only thing you’ve been good at. Worrying.” Astyanax said. “Thousands of years of worrying, doesn’t it get boring? Aren’t you dreadfully bored of thinking the same thing for so long? What do I even lose, explain it to me?”

“The only thing worth losing, master, your soul. It’s everything.”

“Is it though!” Astyanax kicked the wall in front of him. The vaulted ceilings shook, bits of stone fell off. The candlesticks, flat and dusty, toppled over. In front of Astyanax, a wooden cross fell down, anchored to the floor. The nail hinges it hung by were broken, the glued sections took with them the piece of the wall they had been stuck to. Both of them looked at it, Astyanax’s demure darkening underneath the shadows of buttresses high and above the glass walls. His form came in and out of that darkness, and with it, the sharp-blaring sound of the cross scratching the uneven floor. Bumps, pivots, like loud drum bangs as the cross moved around the steps and holes of the floor.

“Perfect,” Astyanax said. He took the cross out to the rear door, through a confessional chamber and through a gallery of statues. Priam, Aeneas, Hector. The old family of that old world, with their worn and broken faces, staring down at their heir.

“What do you mean?” Horace asked. “Aren’t you afraid of oblivion? There’s no coming back from that, young master.” 

Astyanax shielded his eyes from the sun and scanned the area around him. He tried to remember the years in which he built this cathedral. He couldn’t find the memory, only the feeling of what had made him for a brief moment, consider God. When was it? 

Those crusades, perhaps. Those long-lasting crusades that had inspired him to build this church. Not at first, of course. The Gothic inspiration came years after the wars. All he had to the church, at first, was a small house with a small cross. It hadn’t been until nearly half a thousand years later where he would witness the imposing fortress of a proper Cathedral. What a strange thing, he thought, looking out in the field and the shadow overcast by the building. He had held onto that faith for almost five hundred, maybe, six hundred years.

To build this gaudy church on this gaudy land to satisfy a God that had abandoned him, and the years… 

The years! He had crawled onto the steps of this cathedral and prayed in that foreign faith, abandoning those Roman gods of his, for an imaginary blessing. 

That foreign faith had failed him. 

He knew this, immediately, when he awoke on the turn of the sixth century of his drawling knee-scrapping worship. After that, he tried the rest of those Abrahamic faiths, whatever shape and form they took. Centuries of it all, all having failed him. The same God under different names. All of them, slow and painful lessons that perhaps he just could not be salvaged. Not like other people.

“I’m not afraid, my dear Horace,” Astyanax said. 

Thirteen steps led to the cathedral, he stepped down five. In front of him like a path or a fence were rusted swords. Shields, armor, laid around like makeshift grave markings. Which they were. Some were old, too old and now lost to time. Some were fresh, still glistening. What a strange place, this graveyard, and this church. And they both merited the pain it took to make them. Neither were easy tasks, building, and killing.

“I’m not afraid. I’m angry, you see,” Astyanax said. “I’m angry about playing games for gods, from all-seeing Heaven to all-consuming Hell.”

“Hold your tongue, please. This kind of speech is what keeps you condemned.”

“Horace,” Astyanax shouted. The servant looked up with a low brow, with his soft pliable face stretched down. “Won’t you mature? I’m three thousand years due for salvation. At some point, you just have to accept it’s not coming.” 

“It’s because you continue with these vanities. Piety can’t exist in your swollen, broken heart. There’s no room for it! Too much of this arrogance, too much of this fighting. Let it go, or kill it with this last young man at last. I beg of thee.”

“Have you considered, perhaps, that these Gods just aren’t worth worshiping?” Astyanax said. “It’s a revelation that might kick you out of that naivety.”

“Then what do you worship?”

“Myself.” The shadow of a cross appeared on Horace’s face, he blinked and shielded his face. A reaction to nothing that came, no, Astyanax ignored him and wandered into that high grass. Horace followed, spitting his white hair out of his mouth.

They went through the fields, the grass felt soft underneath their feet. The shallow graves padded their steps, the overgrown mounds, the fresh holes. They stopped at a patch, a small oval section of the field of grass where small tender yellow flowers grew. Yellow and white field flowers. Astyanax turned his shoulder over, he maneuvered his arms around the wooden cross and planted it deep into the floor; turned upside down. A bit rebellious, a bit bitter. With the arms of the cross close to the floor and the stem facing up, he put his foot down and dug it deep like a spade. 

“Here,” He said. “This will be a nice place to nail Dion’s corpse. Don’t you think?”

Horace put both hands on his face. 

“I thought as much,” Astyanax said. He looked around his little kingdom, the mountainous dome walls that wrapped around, the hole at the very top whose light seemed magnified to a burning glow. There were cracks in these walls, slow-building cracks where the light had wrestled to find home in, where the desert chipped away slowly. He had tried fighting it for a while, but come the turn of the century had decided not to. It was too tiresome. Home-keeping was too tiresome. And without a physical body to sleep, without rest for his tiredness, there was no use in even trying. Nothing short of eating and fighting and violating mattered, the essence of man.

“Are you sure you’ll win?” Horace asked.

Astyanax felt the draft of wind between his bloodstained hands. 

“Does it make you angry, Horace, when you think about God? When you think of the demons far below us, when you think of how small we are, in this world?” Astyanax asked. Horace rubbed his arms. 

“Look at how much has happened in our lives and how short and small it still, all is. A man can live a thousand lives and he’d still only exist in the mere blink of the universe. It’s absurd. It really is.” His tone fell. “There are creatures that live beyond imagination, that experience eternity. And us? We merely spectate the moving image of infinity. And it will pass us by. And we will be left alone. Victims of cosmic horror. A sideshow for God and Satan and their army of idiots.”

“Young master…” Horace looked at the floor and put his feet close together, his hands in clasp in front of him.

“I’m sick of it. I just wanted to say that, I’m sick of it. I hate being small, feeling weak.”

“Young master.” Horace tugged at him. “Will you win?”

Astyanax looked down. His face shrunk to an offensive dullness as if staring into the sad existence of a dumb animal. He looked at Horace, looked at his stupidity. He was shriveled and Astyanax sighed, speaking with tamed patience. 

Astyanax shook his head, smiled. He extended himself with gentle hands for the inferior creature and touched his cheek. 

Horace felt the smooth palm. It was cold. 

“Of course I’ll win,” Astyanax turned away. He straightened himself in front of the fixture of light in the sky, that red ring. With his haughty voice, again, he said. “It’s my fate to beat Dion, isn’t it? And you can’t beat fate.”

And his confidence grew into that sinister grin. Insanity and sadness strobing in and out of him so fast and strong that it was hard to even tell them apart. He laughed, earnestly, from the gut, an innocent sound laughter that made Horace reel. Astyanax faced the front of the dome, far away from them, he was looking at a little blip on the wall of that giant dome. Horace couldn’t tell, he was still off-put by the laughter but figured the king was staring at the doors of this Trojan wall. Two massive, metal doors that began to scratch and screech with an obscene salacity. A want to open. It sucked in and out. And whatever it was keeping out, whatever armies and legions waited for Astyanax outside of this door, desperately wanted to come in.

“I won’t fight for God. I won’t fight for the Satan, I won’t give either the pleasure of my glory! No, I will fight for my people. The serfs and the soldiers, the sick and the disturbed. Do you understand? I need no God or Devil, I need only my people.” He put his hand on Horace’s shoulder. “An execution without an audience is just masturbation. I need the crowd, I need them to hear the message, to feel it with. We need no heroes, we need no one!” 

The king started twirling to the imaginary shouts and praise.

“Yes, yes. Go ring the bells, dear Horace. Ring them now or I’ll kill you.”

His spine curled.

Horace left running, holding his gray coat above his knees and running across the fields, cutting his feet on the swords and armor plates of soldiers lost, running desperately to that cathedral once more. 

He opened the doors and let the echo rise through the building. He ran to the back of the place, towards a small wooden door just his size. He crawled through, took a torch from the wall and hit a flint in his pocket against the wall. The sparks went wild. The fire rose. He tripped and ran and tripped and ran all the steps up that tower, up to a chamber, out the window through the pointed arches. He followed the maze-like structure, wrapped his arms around the spires as if to not fall. The long way up, the only way up. Platform after platform he went through until he touched the thin-ice glass acting as the ceiling to the main room of the church. It cracked beneath his feet and he spread out his body along the material. The stains of his hands and feet littered the picture of the three wise kings. He apologized, mentally, and went past them near the top of the cathedral. Past the ribbed vaults and the clustered columns. Like bones compressed into a cage. A collection of skeletons, a macabre tall building this was. 

The wind at the top of the building blew harsh, he could see the villa miles away. It was all here, the history of insanity. He looked behind himself now, to the giant bell. A large, patina covered green bell. Cracked a bit at its ends, hungry to ring. He heard the whistle it made as the wind blew through its little cracks. 

His eyes felt swollen, his arms did not want to move. He crawled to the tall bell and the chain mechanism near it. 

Let him kill me, he thought, I won’t summon them. 

He began to sweat, thinking, better to let his passions die. 

But he crawled forward anyways. His right hand found the lever, his other hand pulled the chain. 

I shouldn’t, he thought. I’m feeding his desires.

He pulled it a bit, tugged it only and already he could hear the mechanisms at the top of the bell, creaking with the aged gears. They scratched against each other. 

He stopped. But then thought, coward that he was, he thought of the question he had asked Astyanax.

Are you afraid of oblivion?

Yes, yes he was. Afraid of the death of the soul. And afraid of the man he loved like a son. Afraid of them both, at the same time. 

He pulled the lever. He heard the wretched sound. It was booming, it pushed his body back. He barely hung by the handle of the lever and lifted himself back slowly. His hairs rose off his arms and chest and made his skin sensitive. As if lightning had begun to allocate itself around him, into a kind of shield that contained and encompassed all thrill and fear.

The sound of the bell was killing his brain. It haunted him, all the way down as he made his way back. A cry. The sound bled in and out of him until his brain was filled with it like a hemorrhage. Until he ran out of space to even think. He made it down, touched the floor and ran to away as fast as possible. His hands clasped to his ears, he ran away from the summons of Astyanax. 

The call of the Colosseum. The call for war.

And he wondered, only briefly in the small interval of one bell ring from another, he wondered if God could hear the sound from far up high.

Apollo

Bartholomew tripped on a small rock and hurt himself on the chest when he fell. They all knew then and there, as he lay rubbing his chest, that it was time to stop. He lifted himself with his small hands. He looked down, noticed his knees were cut and bleeding and blew on the wound. He rubbed the blood out, but there was no sense of pain on his face, there was nothing to read of anything on the boy. 

“Alright, we’ll take a break. We’ve been at this for hours.” Apollo said.

“It’s been days.” The Hyena added. 

Apollo didn’t answer, he blew out air and wiped the grime off his face. The dried trees were dense in this area, they looked like little stakes coming off the floor and were ubiquitous across the uneven horizon like small hairs on an old scalp. The little, black forks in the dirt.

“Aren’t you hungry?” Apollo asked the boy. “I’m starving here.”

“You can eat the child.” The Hyena bemused. “I wonder what he’d taste like.” 

The boy turned away from the beast and walked back towards a log.

“Stop making jokes like that.” Apollo walked over to Bartholomew. “Don’t mind him. He’s a prick.”

The boy said nothing and sat with his hands on his lap. Apollo sighed and went past him, towards the trees.

He took out his blade and started working on them. He could feel his weakness, his hunger, he felt it in his weak swings and his gait and how shallow his cuts were on the trunks of those thin, dead trees.

“Is there a reason why I keep confusing days for hours and weeks for days?”

“You’re losing your corporeal form, is all.” The Hyena said. “Physical beings are something of an oddity down here, in the land of spirits. I’m surprised you’re even material, still.”

“Is that why I can’t tell time anymore? Why I can’t sleep, or why I feel so hungry? I’m slowly dying?”

“I’m not hungry.” The boy cut in. 

“No, you’re not, are you?” The Hyena curled into a ball next to the boy. “However, Apollo isn’t a boy. Or a human, for that matters. Vicars starve much faster down here than any normal person.”

“What does that mean?” Bartholomew asked. He rubbed his legs, still. 

“Are you allowed to tell him, is that part of your church’s creed or would it be forbidden?” The Hyena asked.

“No, I can’t say much.” Apollo felt his hands tremble against the wood. “They’d imprison me for years.”

“Then I’’ tell him,” He closed his eyes and burrowed his snout in his fur. “A Vicar is a name, one of many, for the biggest transgression a mortal could commit. This young man before you,” Bartholomew turned to Apollo, Apollo kept swinging his sword. “This man has bedded a devil.”

“Bedded? Is he a monster or something?” The boy inched away from his little log bench, further from Apollo and now towards the Hyena.

“I’ll let him answer that.” The Hyena scoffed “Are you, Apollo? And how did it happen?”

Apollo stopped swinging. He pushed his shoulder towards the tree.

“Don’t you know? I thought you knew everything.”  The tree fell and shattered on the floor. Branches and twigs scattered.

“I do know, but I want you to say it. There’s a unique kind of peace you can only get by admitting your secrets. I think you’re owed to it.” The Hyena said. “And we both know how many secrets you have. Why not let some out?”

Apollo looked to the sky and let his sweat fall. He took off his armor, it hit the floor like the tree, dead and stiff. He took out his coat from the little gap it had hung on his plate armor. He was still wearing his suit underneath, the pants, the shoes, the shirt, the tie. Though rugged looking as it was, it was more comfortable. The torn holes in his clothes made him comfortable, the small holes that allowed air to enter like ventilation.

“Well, are you a monster?” The boy asked. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“I guess I am. Though what turned me into one isn’t anything, necessarily special. It’s rather tame, actually, for my line of work at least.” Apollo said. “It started when I was a kid, a little younger than you, a little more depressed than you. I was an orphan always getting into trouble, too much of a mischief for anyone to adopt or care for. So much so that one day I left the orphanage and never came back. I used to roam around the streets of LA, like the little rat I was. God, I hated it.”

Apollo looked out towards the sky, reminiscing. 

“Maybe it was okay. I don’t know, I met some people then, other kids like me without a place to go. But I guess I couldn’t really hang onto them, not with my luck at least.” He said. “It didn’t take a long time after I ran away to be adopted by the church, all it took were a couple free meals and a shower every now and then for me to buy into the whole thing. Scrounging trash cans loses its appeal quick and starvation isn’t any fun.”

He took a deep breath and hacked at the second tree.

“I had no future, not until they gave me one.”

“The church?” The boy asked.

“Yeah,” Apollo said. “A kind of church. One that sent me to strange places to get strange testing. Weird diagnostic checks, weird stuff with wires and groups of people who analyzed every little thing I did, from the way I breathed, to the way I ate, to the way I walked. Though I didn’t know what they were at first, I realized it a little too late. I just thought they were losers in white trench coats, weirdos with too much time on their hands. Then one day, one night, they knocked me out and operated on me. They cut my chest open. At least they were considerate, they made sure to comatose my ass for two weeks. Dreamt through the whole thing. I still feel like I’m dreaming, to be honest.”

“That sounds horrible. You were abducted and tortured.” The boy said, his voice showing a bit of life. Some pity, which was a strange thing to be optimistic about, though Apollo was.

“It sounds worse than it was. But how bad was it, really? Who did I have to listen to my protest? No one. What would I have done had I known ahead of time? Nothing. And if I died? The world would spin, without losing even a bit of momentum.” He looked sullen at the fallen tree. There were red bugs crawling out of it, long and slimy. They stared up before going back into one of the eaten holes of the tree trunk. “They said, after I awoke, that it was plain luck that I was alive. Luck! That the operation shouldn’t have worked. They said, those church surgeons, that I now had a devil’s heart in me. That’s not figurative either. It is, quite literal.”

The boy left his mouth open. He looked just about to ask a question, but held back, confused, afraid. 

“H-how does that even work?”

“Do I look like a doctor? If I had that kind of ambition, I wouldn’t be swinging swords at giant bugs and tin cans.” Apollo scoffed. 

“Believe me when I say, it used to be worse. Transformations of those types usually aren’t as cut and clean.” The Hyena said. 

“Let’s not talk about those times and those operations.” Apollo nodded his head. “How do you even kn- Never mind, of course. Right.” 

Bartholomew rubbed his head.

“Devil’s hearts.” The boy repeated. “How? Where? What?”

“You know these monsters down here?” Apollo smirked. “What if I told you they exist up there, on our little green and blue satellite too? Though rare. Much rarer than down here. And often times, scarier too. If you could believe that.”

“So. You kill 'em? And steal their hearts?”

“Or eat them! Aha.” The Hyena added with roaring joy.

“Sometimes, yes. There are particular methods and other Vicars who specialize in that kind of business. There are too many factors for me to ever consider that kind of work, I’d rather just kill them, quickly and easily.”

“So you eat hearts?” The boy stuck his tongue out in disgust. “Do you eat people too?”

“No,” Apollo said. “I’m still, somewhat, of a human being so that’d be cannibalism.”

“How does your body handle that thing. That demon heart thing?”

“How does anybody handle an organ transplant?” Apollo said. “With difficulty, of course. The procedure is so dangerous because of how many people reject the damn thing. That’s why the doctors said I was lucky. I wasn’t supposed to live. I was too frail, too much of a failure to live. But I got lucky. I’m just a lucky man.”

The boy dangled his legs up and down.

“So you’re a monster, huh.” He said, whimsical. “Is that why you’re strong and fast? And tall and ugly?” 

Apollo stopped. 

“Ugly?” He laughed, he felt it down to his stomach. “Yeah, I guess I am ugly. Would you believe me if there are worse people than me? I’m actually considered one of the weaker Vicars. There are much, much, stronger men than me. Some can even use arcana. Or I guess you’d call it magic.”

“Do they make rabbits disappear?” The voice rose on the boy. He was invigorated. The Hyena rolled tighter into a ball until his face was comfortably inside the fat, furry stomach of his.

“There are legends of men who move mountains and rivers and who rain fire for weeks on end. I’m not good with that kind of stuff, never liked it. It seems much easier to me to just chop someone's head off. But I know some magic. Basic stuff.”

“Show me!” The boy shouted. Apollo looked back at him and smirked. He reached down and found foot long stick. He pointed it towards the boy and let him watch it carefully. He removed his coat and held it in one hand, the stick in the other. He moved the stick towards the coat, moved it inside and revealed his hand. The stick was gone, Apollo demonstrated, as he showed both sides of his coat and let the boy feel the pockets for any foul play.  

“Where’d it go?” Bartholomew asked.

“Nowhere,” Apollo said. He put on his coat, reached his hands deep into the flaps and stuck his hands deep inside one of the little sigils inside, with the red string stitching. A stick came out. “It never went away.”

“How’d you do that?” The boy asked. 

“Believe me, it’s more the coat than it is me.” Apollo said. “It took me months to learn that trick, it takes most people weeks. Some mystic hermits from the church told me, in their haughty tone, that I had damaged Empyrean reservoirs. Whatever the fuck that means. It’s like a vein or something. The heavenly gift, they say.”

“It’s not a gift from heaven.” The Hyena protested. “Trust me.”

“As if it matters to me,” Apollo said. “Power is only as good as what you make of it or what it makes of you. And abuse seems rampant, in the church and outside. For every holy, pious mage there are five times as many corrupt fucks. The number is worse for half-devils like myself.”

“It’s necessary.” The Hyena said. “Demons are savage, and savagery must be met with savagery. It stands to reason, then, that you’d need a whole army of psychopaths to fight.

“I’m not getting into politics with you.” Apollo said. “This is just a small summary of my business, is all.”

“Oh,” The boy sat attentive, absorbing everything. 

“You’re forgetting one part.” The Hyena said. “You forgot to explain what made you, you. And it was no surgery, was it?”

“Goddamnit, and I was having a pleasant time.” Apollo sighed.

“Look, he won’t admit it.” The Hyena looked at Bartholomew. “Tell him, Apollo. Tell him about your tragedy. Unholy science might have designed your heart, but the cruel universe forged it.”

“Why would I? I barely know the kid.” Apollo walked in and out of Bartholomew’s vision. He was arguing, the child noticed. And he was carrying the bundles of sticks, he noticed too.

Bartholomew stayed silent. His brain seemed exhausted from the talk. He tipped from one side to the other, teetering between falling forward or backward. His eyes drifted, his lids were heavy. He was just about to fall, only inches off the floor when Apollo caught him. He raised him up. Bartholomew rubbed his eyes and looked in front of him. A den was made, a small collection of twigs and dried leaves and the soft bark upon the sand forming a kind of bed. The boy looked at Apollo who was dirty on his dark face, whose eyes too, seemed tired. 

“Go on, you’ll hold us back if you pass out. Sleep for now.” He said before sitting on a log, opposite the den, near the Hyena. 

Bartholomew nodded and though experience told him not to trust the hole or the place, that he could be attacked at any moment, his body disagreed. He could not protest and wandered into the small bed. After a few minutes, he drifted. And Apollo waited outside, closing his owns eyes though trying to hard suppress the feeling.  

“You two have more in common than you’d admit.” The Hyena said. “And he’ll end up just as bitter as you too if you don’t talk to him.” 

“Why would I care what happens to him after the fact? My job is to get him out, that’s it.” Apollo kept his eyes closed. “Besides, what do you know about me?”

“Everything.”

“Yeah, I figured.” 

Nothing was left to say. Apollo’s eyes too, were exhausted. He folded his arms on his chest and fell asleep, sitting on that log, pretending to keep watch. It was stupid, dangerous, and comfortable all around. 

Apollo

They awoke to the sound of church bells. The loud timbre that shook the trees and that caused Apollo to jump from his seat. 

“What the fuck,” He slapped his face awake. “It’s not Sunday.”

The Hyena pointed his sharp face up. 

“We’re out of time, but we’re close.” He said. “Whether or not you’re ready is of little relevance now. You’re going to face him soon.”

He felt the words down to his bones, the oscillation of the church sound up to his brain, both like a fearful rattling of his body. But it was much, much worse than fear. It was existential dread. An impending doom that made his brain scatter in thoughts, that made him feel ill in his gut from anxiety.

“How can you tell? It’s just a noise.” Apollo shook his hair. The boy came out from his den with his hands shutting his ears.

“No, that noise is special, extremely so. After all, how many churches have you seen in Hell thus so far?” The Hyena’s body stretched out. His back was straightened flat, his tail hung and wagged like a hypnotists watch. The boy looked at them both wondering what to do.

“I d-don't know man. Who says its bells? It can be anything here and from anyone.” Apollo could feel his heart palpitating. It sounded like the chug of a train, starting, only getting faster.

“This is his call. That’s a fact. We’re leaving. Now.” The Hyena jogged down the trail. The child and Apollo looked at each other, both afraid, both children in a way. They ended up following the Hyena. 

“I thought you were already used to fighting demons.” The Hyena said. 

“I haven’t fought many,” Apollo said. “And even with the few I fought, they weren’t anything like...this man you’ve described. Astyanax, or whatever.”

“Well it’s time for your graduation then, isn’t it?” Their breaths were hasty as they traveled the land. The boy struggled to follow. There was an incline, all of them felt their knees burn as they went up. And finally, on top of the hill, they saw it. The blight and tumor of this earth. The giant dome. With the chipped, collapsing edges. 

“What the fuck is this?” Apollo leaned away. 

“His home.” The Hyena said. “He built this, probably, two thousand years ago. Maybe further back.”

“We can make the travel in half a day.” The Hyena put his paws forward onto the hill. “It was good that you two slept, you’ll need the energy.” 

He slid down. Apollo took a deep breath, the sense of vertigo hit him. Anxiety hit him, all of it compiling on one another, weights upon weights. This was the feeling of being at the bottom of the ocean, the feeling he felt back at the river Styx. The feeling he felt when he saw Sophie’s dead corpse. The boy looked at him, his lips were quivering.  Apollo grabbed him, held him on his chest and they both slid down the hill. There were entanglements of shrubs and little rocks that cut them lightly and scratched them everywhere. 

They landed with a loud thump. Apollo felt the pain jolt up the heel of his foot, up his spin, all the way to his shoulder. 

“Don’t run.” The Hyena said. “We have to be careful from here on out.”

“What’s the problem? I’ve got some strength back.”

“And yet you’re not strong at all, not really. Not strong enough to fight an army, at least.” The creature pointed out, into the bustling oaks in front of them. There were leaves now, yellow and orange and wide. Cactus too. And the long reaching hands of thorny bushes. The tendrils moved, not by their own will, but by some other. There were people (in a very loose sense of the word) walking through the woods.

There were things, things that moved and stirred life into this lifeless desert. Apollo felt his feet shake. A tremor from a crowd. His arm felt hot, the string of life igniting heat into his forearm.

“What the fuck did you lead me into, demon?” He reached for his sword. The boy froze. 

“Do you think that call, those bells, were just for you? That you were anything special? I doubt the king even knows you’re here.” The Hyena lowered its body. “No, it was for someone else. Some other people.” He walked with a slow gait through the woods. “It was a summons, summons for every foul thing that lives on this island.”

The words were acrid to Apollo. His mouth fell into a grimace.

“It’s going to get more crowded as we go up. We’ll have to wait it out and go in late.” The Hyena said. 

“Why late?” 

“Would you rather go early, in the bottleneck of a horde of demons?”

“Alright then, why go at all? Can’t we wait?”

“You wanted to know whether your friend was alive, didn’t you? I have good reason to believe he is.”

“And how do you know that?” Apollo asked.

“Because I know Astyanax.”

“Then please enlighten me, genius. When I do get there, when I do meet this prick, how in the fuck will I even be able to fight him with all the damn demons in a fifty-mile radius there to back him up?”

“That won’t be a problem.” The Hyena said.

“It seems to me a huge fucking problem. A colossal fucking problem.”

“He’ll grant you an audience and you’ll accept. And you’ll fight and you’ll win.” 

“And how do you know that?”

“Because he is my child.” The Hyena said. “Was, at least.”

Apollo’s head felt empty as if his brains had been siphoned out. He wobbled, he put his arms on an oak tree and stabilized himself. 

“Your child. Your pupil you mean?”

“Yes.”

“You’re having me kill your protege? The fact that you even have one is alarming enough.”

“I am the father of many. Like you and many others. The difference in him, however, is his sanity or rather, lack of one. He lost his direction. He went off trajectory, got too full of himself, wanted too much, wanted too little. Astyanax is someone who suffered from bouts of ambition too deadly for his own good and bouts of depression to twisted for anyone else's good. And it was more than any psychological or physical disease could ever hope to be. It was a disease of a soul that broke his intellect; loneliness. You’re here to alleviate that now. Astyanax is someone who needs to be killed. Needs.”

Apollo held his ground. His eyes flared up. His fist tightened.

“I need to know who you are and what you’ve done.”

“What I’ve done?”
 
“I’m not smart. I’m stupid, which is probably why I ask so many questions. And I’ve got one that’s been burning me up. Call it intuition or a nasty knack,” Apollo breathed deeply. “But when I see desire, I start to get ideas of what kind of extremes those desires might cause.  So here you are, with the desire of having trained me, with the desire of wanting to kill Astyanax. And I’m wondering, what must you have done to make this all possible.”

“Hmm.” The Hyena walked a bit away from Apollo.

“I’ve got a feeling,” Apollo got closer to the Hyena. “That you had something to do with all of this. With the cup, with this island. With Hell, with Havenbrook.”

“Oh, my.” The Hyena looked up, he contained a smile behind his dagger teeth. “Will knowing change your goal? Will knowing stop you from killing him? You still need his heart don’t you, to get you all out.”

“It might.” Apollo barked back. “What did he try to do that angered you? What did you do to get me here? Who are you?”

“If you survive you might be worthy of those answers.” The Hyena looked back to his original direction and wandered into the woods. “But that’s a big if.”

“Hey, hold on.” Apollo chased after him as he turned behind a tree, he reached it, went around and saw nothing. The Hyena disappeared.

Apollo looked back to the child and flinched, there were noises afar, loud footsteps and the grumblings of a populace angry and hungry. Apollo stood dumbfounded, with his meek sword to his side.

“What do we do?” Bartholomew asked. There was no answer.

They spent their time in the forest, low to the ground. The feeling of worry building up with each successive sweep of footsteps, the menaces that harbored themselves behind the leaves and thin tall trees. They saw shadows amongst them, all of them heading to the singular direction: the loud, metal doors at the side of the mountain dome. The giant ringed handles, the giant wooden doors that swept swathes of dirt and dust. He could hear the chains, hear the dozens of soldiers at the front keeping everything orderly and proper.

Maybe I should just kill them, Apollo thought. It wouldn’t be too hard.

It wouldn’t have been, not the dozen soldiers at least. But the other three dozen demons? The looming creatures, odd shaped and fantastical looking, the very embodiments of bizarre homunculean creation? Those would be harder to kill, take longer, and supposing Apollo could even survive it would not guarantee the child would. 

He bit the edge of his thumb and spat out the chunk of flesh and blood and nail. 

“Wait here,” Apollo told the boy. He climbed a tree to his rear and sat on the branch, perched like a crow. He kept himself still on those arms and surveyed the lands. There were more creatures, not anywhere near him but coming closer still. He watched the gates and how they opened on groups of what he supposed were of twenty or perhaps twenty-five people (calling them people was a stretch). 

“I have an idea,” Apollo told the boy from up high. “But I don’t think you’ll like it.”

“What is it?” The boy said back. 

“Ever heard of a Trojan horse?”

They stalked the side of a road where the creatures came in droves of threes and fours. It was a little stretch wedged in an area before the doors and little after the woods, a slope down where the trees weren’t as dense and the crowds not as big. They waited behind small boulders and a dip in the land.

“Are you sure it’ll work?” The boy’s teeth rattled. 

“No, but it’s our best chance,” Apollo said.

The loud footsteps approached. 

“Be quiet, alright?”

Bartholomew nodded. He could feel the vibrations up to his knees and feet. 

The creatures were approaching. The first view that came was the image of the mammoth-like thing with a wide body and even wider sheet of fur that curtained down its humped back to its rough hooves. They extended up to its small head and shielded everything save for the smirk on its dumb face. The slobbering thing left drool like a string-trail that dragged along the floor.  Next to it, a lanky serpent whose elongated neck spasmed and jerked about, this creature was smaller, though still stall if compared to a grown man. A little behind the two, a smaller thing with a swollen head who turned in full rotation and whose bulbous white head frightened the boy. Like a sickly owl, plumed, wrinkled and fully-pale. 

There must have been a hierarchy to this world, an explanation as to why these monstrous creatures were not as dignified as they looked and acted and why they wandered like exiles as they did. Apollo didn’t care to find out though, he was too keen on killing them now as they approached his side of the road.

He waited, prone on the floor, his shoes digging deep.

He revealed his blade, broken and bleeding a red hue amongst the cracks. He cocked one hand back to throw and with the other, started working out a trajectory with his fingers. A bit like a game. In one move, he flung his arm forward and let it break wind. 

The creatures heard it too late. 

The snake was the first to go. His head squirming as it lay on the floor, decapitated. The body wandered confused for a bit, spurting blood out and venom before it fell, some yards away from the head. 

The blade landed on the floor near the corpse, Apollo jumped towards it. The small, white creature jumped back. Too slow. Apollo kicked his sword up and flung it, watching it spiral in the air. It stabbed through the chest of the creature, suffocated the lungs with blood presumably. 

He ran to that body now too, putting his foot down on the corpse to remove the weight. 

The tall behemoth was the last to die and the last to run. What a strange thing, for such a monstrous creature to run from Apollo. But it did, well, tried to at least. 

Starting its gallop was hard and slow, and it gave too much time for Apollo to run towards it. It didn’t take much after that. He got under the creature, past the hair-curtains, and punctured his sword into the side of the beast. It ran a bit, under the influence of pain, (the stupid thing). And its running extended the width of the wound until all his underside was burst open.

It must have gone a dozen yards before it realized it was dragging its guts. But by then it had lost too much blood and simply laid on the floor on its side with all its innards on display. It breathed, quick, painful breaths. Apollo walked over to the dying thing. Squinting his face at the scene, with all the large organs displaced about.

It was hard to tell what compelled Apollo, pity or efficiency, but he stabbed it nevertheless, right through its exposed heart.

He ate it, that heart, digging his hands through the carcass like some starved animal. His arms came out of the creature, blood covering them with a black coating. The child looked at him, shivering. And it made it that much harder to convince him to join. And even harder than that? Convincing him to climb into the corpse. 

He was wedged inside the body, Bartholomew, and he moved around to try and fit himself somewhere in between intestines and lungs.

Apollo

It was jarring to see the corpse of a creature, animated as it was. With Apollo underneath like an amateur puppeteer, with his hands firmly injected into the open chest of the beast and Bartholomew directly above him laying still in the corpse. Apollo dragged the heavy thing towards the crowd of demons and monsters. All of whom stared, all of whom laughed and joked and prodded the stiff mammoth. Smelling it, eying it. 

Apollo put a hand up towards the jugular of the creature, his whole body hidden underneath the hair of the monstrosity. He tried moving the head of the creature. It was surprisingly light, even with the long drooping snout, and thick tusks and bobbing eyes (three exact). There must have been no brain, or at least too little brain in the head of the demon corpse.

Now controlling the neck of the creature, Apollo had the advantage of nodding, of manipulating ticks and gestures. And the advantage of smacking the small impish creatures that tried to play with the dead creature by hopping on its back or tugging on its body. Apollo flexed his muscle. The snout came out in a sweeping motion, drawing a line in the sand. The other demons stared at it, some intimidated and moving back, others coming closer to taunt the creature (though, actually just Apollo). 

A guard wandered up. He saw the commotion and walked up, somewhat hesitant.

Apollo looked down, underneath the body everything was shadowed. He was looking underneath and behind him, to see if he had left a trail of blood. No, good, check. It had all been drained. He looked behind, to see if there were any entrails he hadn’t trimmed, check. He looked the part, now he had to act it. So, what would a stupid, giant, animal do here?

“Are you causing grievances in the capitol? Do you come here to trouble, the king of kings, Astyanax?” The guard asked.

Apollo jerked his arms, they felt like giving way to the body. They almost did, as the body dropped an inch. He immediately responded, moving his thighs to balance himself. His heart beat quickly as he shouldered the weight of the corpse. The sweat came off his hair like shoots of black, mildewed grass, dead and wet. He moved his hands again, though his arms were beginning to wobble from the weight. He hoped he had made the corpse nod. 

The guard scratched his chin, looked back to the other eleven guards and furrowed his brow. Flakes of skin came off his dead skin. Apollo could notice, between the small gaps on the curtains of hair. Was he suspicious? He thought. 

He gulped the spit in his throat.

“Is there something wrong, plebeian?” The guard poked the head, the corpse's eyes rolled around like those cartoonish googly eyes, loose in the head. 

Apollo moved the head again, nodding no. The boy, still in the stomach of the corpse, shook. The dead beast seemed upset now, or sick. The child stretched his hands, they poked out the side of the creature like undigested, live food. Apollo smacked the body from below, the vibrations scared the child who remained quiet. The guard came closer, his breath stinking of rotten sweet death. The scent came through the thin layers like a smoke screen of malaise just pouring in. His helmet rattled with his bobbing head as he inspected every corner of the creature.

His neck was now feeling that strange sensation of anxiety, the prickly feeling, the cold feeling, the shocking feeling. Apollo felt the urge, at once. He stuck his arm into his coat. He held his breath and thought, I’ll kill him. I’ll leave the kid inside, and kill the rest. That’d be the best chance. He felt for the handle. Holding his breath lowered his heart beat, a lower heartbeat eased his shaking hands, calming him from the presence of the prodding guard. 

He saw fingers peeling back the hair, going inside towards Apollo. His blade felt light, his knees ready to pounce.

But there was a noise elsewhere. A loud banging. Smacking. Slapping. Chaos, somewhere in the crowd of demons. Two demons were fighting.

“My shiny.” One said, rather stupid and slow, with a dragging lisp as if his tongue had been cut down the middle. It spat everywhere as it spoke. This creature, poor and lame, was fighting another for what looked like a small gem. A rock, a kind of treasure. It must have been something of importance at least because they dragged their fight through the crowd and rowdied everyone. The more brutish demons huffed and cowered. The human-sized ones, with language and desire and the kind of fetishized desire for violence, cheered them on. 

The guard looked away from Apollo and the mammoth corpse. He removed his hand from the body and left in a jog towards the fight. Three guards went as well. They dragged the two out of the crowd.

“Alright, that’s enough. I know you’re angsty.” One of the guards said. “But that’s no reason to sully the place.”

They pulled the two apart, faced them towards a guard and in one quick move, stabbed them clean through the neck.

Smiling even at the corpses now wiggling and dragging themselves through the dusty floor. Their hands to their necks as they wheezed out.

The nosy guard from before went up to them, stabbed their hearts and looked back as he cleaned his blade.

“All of you, in. I don’t want any more trouble.”

The doors opened. The air sucked itself inside as if the dome lived in its own vacuum, its own Hell within Hell. And the sensation of the pull made them all sluggish. Trepidation grew hold of the fleet of demons before they heard the scream from behind, the guards who egged them on. And they all walked, all towards Astyanax. 

The road was dark and there seemed to be no end. Apollo couldn’t see much of anything and only followed the sound of footsteps. His legs long since losing their feeling, he walked on numb trunks and showed as much when every other step had him flinching and kneeling. 

“Are we almost there? It smells in here.” The boy stuck his head out to breath.

“No,” Apollo whispered.

“We’ve been going for a while.”

“And we’ll go a while lon-” Apollo felt air push down from underneath, a warm breeze. “Almost there.” 

They came to a stop and no longer felt the brushing shoulders of demons large and small. They ran now, gasping and laughing like jovial children. He didn’t notice it, didn’t see what had all the others gasping and ruffling through what sounded like grass. He moved to the side, away from the entrance and simply laid there. When there were no more demons (or at at least the sounds of them), the boy crawled out. 

“It’s alright,” Apollo said. “No ones around.”

“Mhm.” Bartholomew hummed.

His small body came out of the corpse, his clothes sticky with a mucus-like substance. His hair and face, dyed orange. He crawled underneath the hair and was the first to step outside of the two. He gasped. His body was still. He stuck his head inside again and smiled at Apollo. He went out again and began running.

“Hey!” Apollo let go of the corpse. “Don’t wander.”

The heavy body landed with a thud, almost crushing Apollo as squeezed himself out.

The color of the sky nearly blinded him as he stuck his hands to find the boy. When the blurred image reappeared, he understood the clamor and surprise and awe. All across, in front of him, were the green fields. The patches of flowers, bright and yellow and the roof, a gaudy thing brilliant from gems and riches. They looked like stars, the floor looked like heaven. The green trees were sparse, but their noise was loud and wholesome. The light shaking of full-leafed trees. 

And further beyond the garden, further from Eden itself was the little black mark. A smidgen on the horizon. A fantastic blemish that began to drain the feeling of joy like a slit wrist. 

Apollo touched the sharp grass, each blade rubbing his fingers. The wind encompassed him, coming through the small cracks on the dome wall. The capillaries made a whistling noise that got quieter as they moved towards the center. Then, then there were just the bells. The loud bells, coming down from their rapid metronome to that lower, more paced beat.

It was no less oppressive, maybe even worse with hard the noise shook the ground and the air.

He was in enemy territory, he felt it now. Apollo’s head turned restlessly side to side. His body hunched down, below the grass line. All that showered the small blotches of black where the tops of their heads were.

“We’re not dead yet, which is good,” Apollo said.

“Mhm.” Bartholomew covered his ears as a breaking sound of a ring came towards them. Apollo felt his skin vibrate from the noise.

“It’s not as good as you think, is it?” Apollo asked. His ears were ringing. “We’re still in Hell, after all.”

The boy frowned again. 

“Our guide is gone, there goes any plans or answers.” He looked up with his hand shielding him from the bright ceiling. “All we can do is walk forward. Amongst the enemy.”

Bartholomew looked up towards Apollo.

And I’m scared out of my fucking mind, Apollo thought.

Dion

Alestor shuffled back and forth in front of Dion’s cell. 

“You idiot.” He said.

“Why are you here?” Dion stood amongst the pile of thrown hay, the rags of his slave life thrown to the side. He was fitting clothes. A suit. “Child killing bastard, don’t you have somewhere else to be, somewhere else to be ordered to?”

“This isn’t about me anymore,” Alestor said. “This is about you choosing the worst way to handle the situation.”

“I’m fighting him. Everyone’s wanted it for a while now.”

“You’re fighting him on his terms. Do you understand what that means?”

“It means nothing,” Dion said. “So long that I win, and I will win.”

“And how do you know that? The man is a liar, he’ll do everything in his power to win. He’s already done it once.”

“You would know, wouldn’t you?” Dion tied his shoes. He lifted them, the shiny black and scraped his heels off a bench.

“I do know what it means to be fooled.” Alestor hit the bars. “And that’s why I’m warning you.”

Dion laughed.

“You’ve been awfully helpful, haven’t you?” Dion asked. “Do you know? Somewhere deep down inside, I want to kill you. Are you aware of that?”

“Yeah, I am,” Alestor said. “And I hate you too. But I hate Astyanax more. Much, much more.” 

“Right.” Dion looked down. He flexed himself in his clothes and let them wrap tightly around him. His coat covered him snug and for a moment, he felt relief. There was silence as Alestor watched the Vicar. The man who had hunted him down, and for a moment, it seemed like he admired him. There was an intensity to Dion, a hunger for the fight. He could see it in the edges of his half-smiling mouth, in his tall pose. It was venerable, that kind of hunger. Not as degenerate as Astyanax’s was. A naive, honorable, fighting spirit.

“What do you think he’ll do?” Dion wiped his sleeves. 

“He has a legion of demons waiting for you. My guess is you won’t even fight fairly. They’ll all group up on you and kill you, whether you win or lose. They love their king, after all. Zealots, all of were. Are. I don’t know.” Alestor looked down at his naked feet. 

“Do you still love him?” Dion asked.

“No. Maybe I never did, maybe I just confused being afraid with being in love.”

“Stockholm syndrome,” Dion said. “That’s what my partner would say.”

“Maybe.” Alestor tapped the bars with his toes. “I’m telling you, this is a trap.”

“Someone like you would never understand him,” Dion said. “Astyanax is many things, but he’s no coward. He’ll fight me.”

“How can you be sure?”

“It’s just a feeling, from one warrior to another,” Dion said. “You can’t see how we see the world. You, who have lived your whole life running and chasing and taking and stealing. You, who have betrayed your own family.”

“I just thought.” Alestor’s voice fizzled, he mumbled something incoherent. 

“Stop projecting,” Dion said. “You’re supposed to be the psychologist, aren’t you?”

Footsteps approached them, loud bodies and deep voices. 

“Fine then,” Alestor hissed. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” 

Be backed away, down towards the end of the hall as two brutes opened the cell. They did not touch Dion, did not so much as even look at him. They looked past them, with their shields to their sides and their spears pointing towards the hall, and the direction of the king.

“I’ll see you later,” Dion said. “And then we’ll settle everything. Retribution is coming for you too, buddy.”

He made his tie around his neck like a noose and walked down the hall, up the building, through the small halls until he was outside. There were guards still, though fewer in numbers, leading him out the villa and towards a bustling roar of voices. 

They came to a stop in front of the loud source of noise, in front of a cathedral and in front of that, a pillar. A guardian, atop the roman pillar, eyed him. Dion said nothing, rather shared a solemn respect before making his way through the fields of grass and into a different kind of field. This new, stranger field, had swords laid all about, stabbed through the floor with the grime collecting on their handles. They surrounded the cathedral and made an awful tune as the wind blew past them. 

He didn’t touch one, didn’t even think about grabbing any of them. 

He walked past the grave sites and the swords and towards the giant cathedral whose dark walls and shadows hid the myriad yellow and white eyes, whose eyes themselves hid the myriad intentions of the demons. The loud, frightened and angry and sad and excited demons. The guests, the crowd, gawked at him and howled as they opened a line for him to enter. He felt spit hit his face, insults thrown at his ears, mockery after mockery as he came up the steps. The animals, the monstrosities, all cajoled into bedlam.

At the top of the steps waited Horace. His glare was worst of all as he pointed something towards Dion. He had in his hands a bag. Dion felt inside of it, something comfortable touched his fingers. He found his two pistols and nearly sighed relief, amongst the rowdy crowd booing at him.

“I’m surprised you managed to get them out of my coat,” Dion said.

“Amateur arcana,” Horace mumbled. Dion grimaced, he stuck his hands into the bag again and took bullet after bullet, by the handful, back into his coat. He saved twelve bullets, six for each of his pistols (he didn’t need the safety of an empty chamber, he wasn’t planning on having any kind of trigger discipline). 

He opened the unholy doors. The whole building felt more of a mockery than a blessed house and it made him shiver. The very air seemed to make his lungs hollow and his body empty. It was a terrible place to be in, as a Catholic as he was. 

Near him, a dry font. Around him, the broken statues and painted glass of some of his favorite holy figures. All defiled. All aborted. 

He scanned the room, the crowd held their breath for him. His steps left no echo, there were too many people. The monsters piled up on the sides of the walls, some of them hung from the roof with claws and with other appendages. The demons, the men who acted like demons, all hand in hand. Soldier and monster, all vying for the title of most wicked and most loud. 

But someone had won it, long ago, through many fights and many years. And he waited for Dion now, at the very front of the large Cathedral. He approached him. Dion only now figured the large scale of the building. The columns were plentiful, he counted twenty between four sides, making a square, with a little gap for the preacher podium on the upper center. There, Astyanax waited, on the seat of God; a simple wooden chair. The light came off his rusted armor. It must have been silver and brilliant once. It must have been forged by a sensible hand with a sensible heart. Maybe once.

Now it’s wear and its wearer, both, laid rusting. Astyanax stood. His gauntlets, his knee paddings, his leather skirt and his rusted-silver breast-plate. His helmet, plumed and imposing, the gap for his eyes and mouth, sharp to contour shadows around his face. 

Two braided tails of white hair fell down his right face. It seemed like an inherited fashion. Was he dressing up as his uncle, as his father?

It didn’t matter.

He pulled at something at the top of his helmet. A silver mask came over him. 

Dion felt his left leg shake. There were markings on this mask and helmet. Smiles and scars chiseled into the flesh of steel, streaks of painted red leading down from his eyes to give the appearance of streaked tears. This smiling, crying devil. He came forth, grey, like a diseased dove who had long since lost his wings. 

His muscles were pronounced, Dion could tell they could barely fit under all the gear. 

“I thought this would be appropriate,” His hands were wide and his chest exposed. A spear on one hand, a large leather-bound shield on the other. “To die upon your God, to bleed for him on these holy steps. This will be your greatest honor, a proper libation to your lord and savior Jesus Christ.”

I’ll kill him, Dion thought. I won’t give him a chance, I’ll kill him.

His leg shook worse.

“You wanted this.” Astyanax circled and spoke to the audience now. 

“Didn’t he?” He shouted.

The crowd rioted. 

“Trying to kill the king,” Astyanax said. “A travesty worthy of a hard death.”

The crowd clapped and screamed. 

“A heart-eater, a demon hunter. What better man to rip apart and share amongst these love patrons!” 

The clamor shook the building. The walls seemed to breathe from the ecstasy and joy of the crowd. Dion felt sick in the stomach. His leg could not stop tapping on the floor. Rapid still, harsher, louder. Fear and impatience ticking away.

“Hurry it up,” Dion screamed back. The crowd silenced. “I don’t need your theatrics, I need your head.”

There were sneers coming out from the demons now, low laughter and hushing blurbs and laughter again. Astyanax shouted back. 

"Silence!" Astyanax screamed. His voice was dry and hoarse.

“Are you a thespian or a soldier?” Dion put his left leg forward, fingers now on the trigger. “Let them cry or clap, they won’t decide a thing. That right belongs to God. God, and no other.”

Astyanax blew out wind from the small gap in the mouth of his mask. He sounded like a machine, breathing out and in, fueling the engine of rage in him. The crowd stayed silent.

“Then let it be so,” The mask screeched. “Here lived and died Dion, in the house of God.”

And he disappeared under that shield. Only a streak of red and the sandals of his feet showed as he inched closer to Dion, spear overhead.

Dion reached into his coat. He put his mask on, his head slanted down from the weight. He looked down to his guns and wondered, did they always feel this light? Was I always this excited? 

Apollo 

They stalked the lands and watched as the crowd thinned out. There were a few stray demons, wandering the fields in mindless bliss, grazing almost, on the heavenly nature of it all. Small critters. So stupefied by the opiate of the view were they, that none noticed or cared about Apollo or the boy traveling. They played and Apollo pulled the boy from the image of the husks, the monsters, in ecstatic pleasure at something as simple as a bit of grass and flower.

They came to the center of the dome, where the crowd who either wandered into or wandered away from and looked about the aqueducts lining the city. 

“Water slides.” The boy commented.

“Not exactly.”

There was a spillage of which they both traveled underneath. The water hit the tops of their heads, it felt cold and oily like something had lived in this water and subsequently died. Bartholomew tried sticking his tongue out, but Apollo tapped his head. He shut it.

“Don’t trust anything here,” Apollo said. “It’s all an act.”

There were small houses near the aqueducts in what seemed to be the outer layer of the place. Circular rings separated every class of building (and citizen). As they approached the center the huts grew into larger, crumpled buildings whose two-story floors now laid collapsed on and about the fields. These were atriums. Buildings of aristocrats, buildings with large broken marbled pools, spilling wild grass from their cracks. Large trees lined the lost gardens of the atriums, the trees overgrown and warping the land with its roots. The further up they went, the worse the land seemed to get and the dirtier it got, which was strange. You’d expect this of the poor. 

Apollo looked up, a giant hole was in the ceiling the dome. Dust came in and out, as did light from there. Maybe the ceiling had fallen? Sounded ridiculous, looked ridiculous. But maybe it was true. 

“Don’t you give up on me now,” Apollo said. The boy nodded and picked himself up from a high step onto the flat land. 

The giant villa of Astyanax was in front of him with all the frivolity of the architecture. The chaotic mess of culture and history that made it seem more theme park than home. Within the walls, the rooms, there were loud noises like a small crowd. Then, shuffling of steps.

“Shh.” He told the boy. Apollo wandered into the building from a side door. There was a moment of silence, then the shaking of metal armor, a yelp. Then two heavy sounds, the sounds of armor falling to the floor. Silence now.

Apollo came out with blood on his face.

“Let’s hurry up,” Apollo said. Bartholomew shook, then straightened out. 

“Alright.” He said in a voice low and uneasy.

Alright.

They traveled quickly through the villa, stopping every now and then to assassinate guards who wandered. And it was a strange sense for Bartholomew, to feel revenge and regret both at once as each guard fell. To want to get away and to want to see it through at the same time.

Apollo saw it in his eyes, black, tired rings of eyes and yet a face looking forward, hair split down the middle. He was like this all the way through the villa, towards the back courtyard and into the fields where the crowd gathered. Where giant pillars laid slanted. 

“I don’t like this, the air smells like iron. I can taste it in the tip of my tongue,” Apollo said. “Wait here.”

The fields and the swords planted for each grave lay in front of him, a rounded stretch that ended at the cathedral. Before that, before even the stretch of swords began, there was a slanted pillar.

He rubbed his arms and saw that the band, the string of life, that little sensor of demonic presence was burning him. His hairs on his arm smoked from the intensity and it was a heat that seemed obvious, right in front of him. 

“What’s happening?” The boy screamed from the little spot of dirt he was told to wait in.

“I don’t know, keep it down.” Apollo walked forward. 

He stopped at once at a pillar where his arm burned hottest. The marbled was cracked, the surface was rough and porous. He looked up. His eyes narrowed. His breathing started its hyperventilated gasps. Adrenaline, making his face and arms cold. Tingles, everywhere.

“Are you going to come down?” Apollo looked up to the top of the pillar. “Or am I coming up?”

Up above, the gaudy centurion rested on his pillar. A flamboyant looking thing whose wasted and dark rotting skin conflicted with the bright armor. He had a javelin, pila as it was, to his side. He looked down at Apollo with those two dark gaps for eyes and said not a word, did not so much as blink or move his face. He simply turned and Apollo, who upon seeing this reaction, knew what would come. He looked back at the boy. He stepped away, into the field of swords, where he tripped over a skull. On his knees, he crawled away, behind a round rusted shield. He watched, with one curious eye popping out of the corner of that shield. 

Apollo drew his blade. He has three meters of reach over me, he thought. 

His feet moved minutely, only centimeters forward as he pushed himself to his right with his toes. The centurion put his hand on his spear. The warm wind blew over them. 

Nice weather, at least. Apollo thought. 

A single drop of sweat fell from his cheek.

The sound of wind breaking stirred him.

The hellspawn was the first to strike. Throwing his spear. Picking up another. Jumping down the pillar. Breathing loud and screaming even louder. Apollo moved, the spear hit the floor to his side. The earth collapsed into gravel beneath him and he felt the large cut on his face, like a crescent moon that bled down to his neck. His face would not heal. 

With the smoke still filtering him and blurring his vision, Apollo pushed through. He charged his blade behind him, his arms stiffened. From the blade and its veins, the little crevices began to fill themselves with that intense fire. He struck the column immediately, once the fire reached the jagged tip of his blade. Immediately, the fire began to flood that bastard sword of his, wrapping around the pillar like a snake to a tree.

It exploded. The base of the column shattered and the rest began to fall into collapse. The wreckage left a cloud of smoke, Apollo sat at the center, coughing and wheezing from the explosion. 

Silence. Wind. Rocks tottering and skipping across the floor. 

Where is he? Where is he?! My right! Apollo thought. 

He felt the wind push in that direction and felt his hair move long before he saw the spear. The smoke collected, like a vortex, around that quick jab. He moved his head aside and felt the other side of his cheek cut now, horizontal this time, right below the eye. 

The centurion retracted, returned back to the smoke and turned himself into a shadowy presence. 

Apollo raised his blade again. He felt the blood and sweat co-mingle on his chin into large globs. His head felt light headed. It was death, this sensation. 

Again a thrust, again a shallow dodge. Bobbing and weaving, punctured and prodded, the smoke clearing with every thrust of the spear. The figure came into full view in his metal armor, behind his shield. Apollo, too, appeared amongst the smoke. Wounded, maimed all over with cuts that would not heal, with an arm that burned and warned him and feared for him. 

He was exhausted.

The legionnaire tested Apollo, almost arrogant in the way he jabbed meekly at Apollo. It gave him confidence, the demon. And Apollo could feel his morale slipping, down his bloody chin and onto the floor, each time his sword bounced off the shield and each time he missed with his own shots.   There was no back and forth. Apollo was losing.

Looking to his side, Apollo saw a passage. It was a small curved hall that held the broken aqueduct above. He ran away, immediately, into that enclosed space. The Centurion was hot behind him, his feet like jackhammers as they pushed and stabbed the earth. 

They approached the hall. And he (Apollo) felt, again the flurry of the spear strikes. Inside that tight space. The Centurion fired off, screaming, with confidence into that small enclosure.

The soldier, striking. Apollo, blocking. The soldier moving deeper and deeper in the enclose, pushing Apollo further and further back. 

And yet, with momentum on his side, and yet, with Apollo pressed back, the Centurion worried. A small anxiety that was only really an afterthought.

The Centurion kicked Apollo’s sword. Apollo’s feet ripped the floor as he was pushed back. It gave the Centurion an opportunity to look behind him, to see how far inside he was in this small canal. He looked up, the aqueduct tunnel trickled with impotence. He felt, from a loose brick above, a water drop touched his face and looked back down to Apollo who was meters away from him, who seemed to be smirking in the shadow of the alley.

Too late, Apollo thought.

The Centurion grit his rotten teeth, he thought to run back, out into the open space.

But it was too late. That blade of Apollo’s, that thought-to-be-neutered-thing sputtered a sign of life. As the veins and cracks of its widebody began to glow, and as it began to heat and flame up and for a moment so brief, the centurion cowered. He put his shield. Apollo pointed his blade forward.

Out the explosion shot. Contained, for a moment. Contained, until every brick began to spill with the hellfire. Contained, until it all shattered and broke down.

A cloud of smoke jet out the alley. Following it, a streak of fire like a jet engine. The aqueduct above collapsed and water came down onto the explosion. Steam and smog both coming out from the exploded base of the aqueduct. A figure appeared. Bartholomew rubbed his eyes.

It was Apollo. Who moved, tired. He looked for the corpse of the centurion, not noticing his damaged and bruised body, not noticing the burn marks on his left face and neck that now replaced his cuts. The fires screeched as the water hit it until it died into a crackle. Apollo wandered the smoke, looking for the corpse, for a heart to eat. But nothing remained of the centurion save for his calcified ashes and the outline of where he stood and died. It was just a shadow on the floor of a man holding his shield. 

Apollo sighed. He walked away from the explosion, towards the boy. He fell halfway.

The boy ran up, staring at him. There was no joy in victory, not for either of them.

“Are you alright?” He put Apollo’s arm around his neck and tried to pull him up. Apollo laid, prostrate on the floor. His sword (what remained) in his hands. It was reduced, no longer a large hunk of metal, no longer a bastard sword. It had been used and abused and now, in his hands, Apollo’s sword was nothing more than a stick, a rod of hot steel. A thin and sickly thing. It must have been a tenth of its original size. But Havenbrook and Hell had both done their job at filing it down and now, it was nothing.

Just a burning stick in Apollo’s hand that glowed and fumed. 

Apollo dropped the sword. The grass underneath it began to smoke. Apollo scrambled to pick it up again. Bartholomew squirmed at the sight of the weapon.

“What happened?”

“I overused it is what happened.” Apollo pushed himself.

“How are you going to kill him with that?” 

“It’s got some energy left in it. I might be able to burn through his armor,” Apollo grunted. It sounded more like sarcasm than truth. He limped forward, the boy helped. “I can’t blow anyone up anymore though, that's for damn sure.”

His voice was tired, hoarse. He wheezed in between his words and his eyes kept falling to the floor. 

“Maybe I’ll poke him to death.” Apollo laughed. He left his blade on a concrete step of the cathedral, the stone began to warm into a black and red surface. Apollo sat next to his warmer, arms clutching his sides.

“I can’t stand.” Apollo rested his head on the steps. The crowd behind him was loud, booming, and expanded the walls of the cathedral it seemed.

“You’re going to have to.” Bartholomew pulled on Apollo’s arm.

“God, I’m so tired,” Apollo said. “And so hungry,” He sighed. “And so stupid.” 

“Start moving,” Bartholomew yanked harder until he himself tripped. 

“I want to sleep, kid. Won’t you let me? Just for a moment, enough to let my eyes rest.” He shut them and lay there, breathing deeply. 

“Are you going to die on me too?” Bartholomew felt his nose dribble.

“I wish,” Apollo laughed. “Dying is a lot easier than living.”

“Am I going to kill you too, like I killed the others then?” Bartholomew put his hands in front of him. He cradled himself, shaking back and forth. His nose blew out snot, his eyes teared up.

“No, kid. If I die it’s because I deserved it.” Apollo said.

Bartholomew hiccuped. His throat was full of mucus.

“Are you worried you won’t make it out?” Apollo asked. He reached into his coat and looked for that cup, angrily throwing it towards the boy. “There’s your ticket. Make sure you take it with you when you go.”

The boy stared, confused.

“But what about you?” He began to cry.

“What about me?” 

“Don’t you want to get out too?”

“You don’t even know me, kid,” Apollo said. “Save your tears for the people who are worth them. Me? I’m trash.”

“No, you’re not.” He yanked at Apollo.

“You know, before this. At the campsite, you were right. When you called me a monster? You were right about that.” He looked up at the sparkling ceiling.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it.” Bartholomew pulled until he slipped away and fell behind Apollo. He hit the back of his head but didn’t feel it much. “I’m really sorry, so stand up. Don’t die like the rest.”

Apollo’s eyes returned to normalcy. They came around, black, like thrown coal as he stared up at the boy.

“Do you really think you killed them?” Apollo asked.

The boy dug his head into his knees. 

“Don’t get angry with me, but tour friends died because they were weak.” Apollo groaned. The boy suffocated his weeping. It sounded like choking. “And I’m going to die because I’m weak too. It’s a hard lesson to live through, not many do. And it’s an even harder lesson to learn from. But you will.”

“Why,” The boy let out. “Why do you make it so hard to be a friend? Why are you so mean? I don’t understand you. You say one thing but act out another, I don’t understand you.”

The boy rubbed his arms against his face. 

Apollo felt his fingers move. His flaming sword still burning into the concrete, reducing it to something molten.

“What don’t you understand? The weak die, that’s it.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about.” The boy screamed. “Why do you say mean things.” He hiccuped. “When you’re a good person.” 

And something stronger than any punch or stab or gunshot wound punctured Apollo. He looked away from the boy, from that crying, smart gaze of his as if afraid of the light of observation he had. He scrambled, shook his head and fell silent. The boy sobbed behind him, the crowd of demons in the cathedral drowned them both out. 

Apollo opened his mouth. He held it open as he thought of something to say. At first, to figure out a way to sugar coat his message and then, realizing he couldn’t, tried to figure out a way to admit it.

His hand twitched. He felt some life in him still.

“I killed my friend when I was your age.” He said.

The boy looked up, the tears dragging across his face like a windshield.

“I’m not lying,” Apollo said. “I killed my friend when I was young, just as I joined this stupid business of demon hunting, not by choice mind you. We went to the docks in San Diego, I remember it. The smell, the sound of the ocean slamming against the warehouses and wooden planks and boats.  The whole block was closed down, the church in accordance with the government had isolated the incident. The public would go mad otherwise. I remember it clearly, nothing since has been able to rub the memory off my eyes. Age won't, death probably won't. It happened when I was thirteen.”

His arm shook. He clenched his fist. 

“It was me, my friend, and my teacher all in the heat of the fight and chase, I made a mistake. I overestimated myself and I tried to kill three demons, awful things. Long slender, snake-like things that still haunt me with their waxy scales and terrible hiss. I was stupid to think I could kill them by myself. And I felt dumber when my friend decided to save me. He didn’t die with any pride or dignity, not like the Vatican says we would or could. He was bitten, ripped apart and eaten right in front of me. That’s when I realized a man wasn’t special, just a meaty body and some glue that keeps it together. I guess you’d call that the soul.”

The boy shook.

“I know what powerlessness feels like. It’s paralyzing, isn’t it? Like a snake bite. I know what it is to feel like a useless victim, to be saved and to hate yourself for being saved. To live every day of your life, to spend each living moment knowing that your time was borrowed from someone else. That someone else paid the bill that had your name on it.”

“You’ll ask; why me, why me, why men and no one will answer you. You’ll wake up late and angry every fucking day. You’ll want to kill yourself, then feel ashamed for having the thought and then you’ll drag yourself through knowing that this life does not belong to you. It belongs to people who died for you.”

“And you won’t make friends! Because they all die on you anyways. And you won’t get along with anybody! Because you won’t need friends. And you won’t change! Because routine is easier, even if it kills you.” Apollo screamed. “Why care, why put your heart out? So it can get stabbed again? So you can hurt again? I don’t need a reminder.”

Apollo dragged his arm to his face, he tried to stop his tears. 

“That’s why I’m mean, kid.” Apollo shook his head. “Because I’m too bitter to live and too afraid to die.”

He sniffled.

“Don’t end up like me, Bartholomew. You’ll hate yourself for it.” 

The boy walked up to him. He grabbed his arm and pulled, stronger, almost to cause injury. 

“I’m not going to end up like you.” He said. “I’m still walking and trying. I’m already better than you.”

“Why even try?”

“Because I’d disappoint the people who helped me if I didn’t.” The boy said, innocent, firmly, as he pulled and yanked at Apollo. 

“Who am I disappointing? My friend is dead.”

“You’re disappointing yourself. That’s who.” Bartholomew fell. He stood immediately, rubbed his knees and tried again at pulling Apollo. “It would be unfair of you to die right now. You haven’t earned it, so stand up.”

He stopped pulling and ran to the cup and laid it on Apollo’s stomach. Apollo looked at, the black liquid inside and saw his reflection. He felt a smile creeping on him. His body moved a bit, his legs began to stretch out. His fingers wandered, just a bit, searching for where his blade lay.

“You’re much stronger than me.” Apollo stood.

“I don’t have to be. You can change if you want to, you just need to want to.” 

Apollo took three steps. He tossed the cup at the child who fumbled it and who held it close to his chest. Apollo hunched over, the child grabbed him. He helped him up three more steps.

“If you had asked me a few weeks ago of what I wanted to do, I would have punched you in the face, grabbed that cup and gotten the fuck out of here.” He laughed. “I guess I can’t do that anymore, can I?”

“No, you can’t.” The boy nodded.

“And if I told you, you should drink it and get the fuck out of here, what would you say?”

“I’m not leaving without you.” The boy said. He nodded in affirmation, his face stern and his eyes focused.

Apollo stood in front of the doors now, his arm pushed against the metal. His sword in his other hand, his lungs pained and aching. He smirked.

“Then give me a second,” He said. “I’ll be quick, I promise.”

The boy walked up to him. He tucked the cup under his shirt and put both arms against the cathedral doors. Both of them pushed, slowly and the doors began to creak and scream as they did so. Inside the cathedral? The roaring sounds of clamor and ecstasy, an embassy house for every evil in every corner of this island. And at the center: The king, Astyanax.

Astyanax

Dion kicked Astyanax’s shield and pushed it aside, revealing the king behind the guard. They locked eyes in that instant, an intense stare in a space and time that seemed to span both blink and eon in their adrenaline stupor. Their breaths, their heart beats, the warping slow sound of the crowd, all blending and crushing and connecting together between the two. It was the first time Astyanax had felt a bond with another. Kinship.

And he believed it to be his last. 

Dion put his finger on the trigger, he aimed down at Astyanax’s face. He could see the barrel pointing at him, still smoking from a previous shot, still lingering with the acrid smell of gunpowder. Astyanax held his breath. And for that brief instant, with his head empty of all thoughts and perversions and scorn, he accepted death. 

Dion pulled the trigger. The hammer drew. The chamber loaded. 

Nothing fired. 

Dion’s eyes widened and Astyanax, hearing the click and nothing but the click, readjusted his spear. His mouth screaming behind his silver mask, the spear screeching as it broke air currents. Dion tried to jump away but looked down, he saw the spear in his stomach long before he felt the pain up through his nerves. He fell on the floor clutching his wound and Astyanax looked around, almost cautious of the victory. His breath was still held, his body still bound together tight by cautious muscles. But the crowd cheered, shouted and he laxed at the reaction. 

He looked at Dion, wounded and coughing on the floor with the pistols thrown meters away from him. His feet readjusted their stance, his arms extended out on both sides and his chest was left exposed. He shouted, he smacked his armor in arrogant showboating and with his chest open, absorbed the glory of the crowd like oxygen itself, like sunlight. Sucking it in, screaming it back, letting the chaos and bedlam of the cathedral fill his heart with joy. 

“He tried, certainly,” Astyanax walked in circles to face every angle of the crowd. “And what a foolish thing it was to fight God’s chosen. Wasn’t it?”

The crowd stood, the noises bizarre and plentiful. Shrieks, claps, roars, hisses. 

Astyanax walked a bit past them all, towards the topmost portion of the cathedral, up to where the cross had once been now laid chains and hooks like curtains. They had been placed here only moments before the fight and now they were drawn down.

“And those that defy the will of God should get their apt abuse,” He walked back, the rattle of metal filling the crowd with his promise for death. “For there is no greater crime,” Astyanax mocked. “Than to go against God.”

The demons laughed. 

Dion lay gasping, holding his wound. Astyanax grabbed hold of his legs and stuck the hooks through his heels. 

Dion shouted, tried to fight it with wild wriggling, but found himself too weak.

“Ready the chariots!” Astyanax screamed. “Send him to every corner of Purgatory, let him be flag-bearer and testimony to my strength and prowess. The mighty Dion, heart-eater, demon-killer; dead. A warrior of God, killed by my hands.”

They cheered and the chains shook and their noises morphed together into metallic shrieks, loud horrific inhumane noises, that boomed and quivered the glass panes and high ceilings. Astyanax once again grabbed the chains. He pulled Dion through the center of the cathedral. Dion’s voice switching between grunt and scream; all of it, noises of pain. He clutched the spear so that it would not wiggle within his abdomen but it only seemed to make the pain worse.

He stirred, he spat. But he did not cry. He groaned, shouted, lashed out in violence and in spite, but he did not cry. 

He would not give them his dignity away, even in death.

They went around three loops across the stage like a dog show display, an auction house where the item at the sale was the very pride of God himself. And there were bids, many of them, many calls of rape and terrible agony. Too many in fact that they began to lose their identity, becoming only more wild shouts in the ocean of noise.

And on the third loop, when he stopped at center mass, when the throes and roars reached their apex, the doors opened.
 
A quick flash, a lightning bolt in the sky. Pluto's’ fire and revenge, Jove’s thunderbolt, flung forward. 

The chains were cut and burned and the metal links lay busted and red-hot on the floor. Dion’s feet struck the floor with a thump. They twitched. Astyanax looked back, towards the flaming sword, towards the open door and the small pillars of light that broke through. The demons turned as well, scurrying from the entrance.  

And what a strange scene and strange hero it was that came through. A starved boy, Astyanax thought, and a crippled youth.

Apollo inched forward, his left leg dragging along the floor on its side. The bags under his eyes were pronounced, a deep purple color. His brown skin, now pale. His long hair, growing every which way and thick and sweaty. Like a mildewed untrained orchard, begging for the cut, begging for the knife. Somewhere too, on his chin, behind the ragged hairs, was a pout. 

The meek boy led Apollo like a blind man’s dog, getting him far and away from the edges of the room where the demon’s looked with curiosity and hunger. 

Branded men, they whispered, they’re not dead yet. Living people. Like the heart-eater on the floor.

They should not be here.

The crowd grew rowdier. The gossiping, more annoying. Astyanax walked some paces off, to a spear rack sitting near a column. He removed a spear and struck the floor with the blunt end. Everyone quieted. Astyanax looked around.

Everyone was quiet, everyone but Horace. Horace who bit his nails and stretched out his skin and who scratched himself bleeding. Every nervous tick going off all at once.

Astyanax slammed again. 

“Be quiet!” He looked back to the two. Apollo leaning onto the boy for stability. “I hope that even a common intruder like you would have a bit of self-respect. Who are you? Oblige me your name, plebeian.”

The boy began to shrink in front of the king, those bleeding eyes of his. The tall white figure whose red arms and legs and silver-masked face brewed feelings of disgust into the child. He shook. And Apollo, tired and bitter, put his hand on his shoulder.

“If things get out of hand, save yourself, alright? Don’t even think about it.” He said, kindly. 

He turned his face the monstrosity, Astyanax as it was.

“Self-respect? I never had any.” Apollo mumbled. He pushed his hair back. “The only thing I can oblige you is my sword through your skull.” 

Astyanax observed him, his face changing from a confused state to an almost nostalgic wry. It struck him.  He laughed. A singular, long-drawn ha.

“You’re the other one, aren’t you. Apillo, was it? Apullo? Apollo. Apollo!” He shook his head in affirmation. “Yes, yes. Of course, not related to the actual Apollo though, are you? You’re much more haggard. You don’t have that glow to you, that beauty. No, no. You certainly don't have the makings of a God. Or even a warrior, for that matter.”

“Jesus Christ, you’re insufferable.” Apollo wobbled. The demon’s hissed.

“Now that's a scary name,” Astyanax laughed.

Horace began to shiver. He rose from his side of the wall and ran towards Astyanax.

“Kill him now, while he’s weak, master.” He begged, tugging his leg. 

“Not now, Horace.” He nudged his leg. Apollo watched, breathing heavily.

“I can’t save you from him,” Horace pleaded. 

“Can’t save me from him?” Astyanax laughed. Everyone laughed with him, except for the three. The housekeeper and the two invaders. “You can’t save me from anything,” Astyanax added.

He thought about it again, save me from him. It seemed stuck, an itch perhaps. A humor of the brain.

Then it began to disturb Astyanax, the echo of the phrase that would not escape his head. Save me from him. He looked down at Horace, who looked up. His face sad, with gloomy eyes determined at staring down Astyanax. Astyanax returned to a dull face, he thought again. Save me from him. He tilted his head back and forth and looked at Dion who laid on the floor. He was holding his wound still. His guns were on both sides, the closest being only feet away from him.  One of them was in his hands, he must have crawled to it in the middle of the conversation. It should have given a reason for Astyanax to kill him, but he looked more closely at Dion, specifically his unconscious state and the fact that he was still pushing down at the trigger, awake or not. Over and over, like routine. 

But he wasn’t impressed that Dion could shoot (or try to shoot) in his sleep. Nor was he offended. He was surprised.

Astyanax walked to him. He picked up the gun and looked at it. Inspecting the bullets and the chambers and the lever. He pointed it at Dion’s head. Apollo shrieked, No and tripped forward as he tried to stop him. 

Astyanax hit the trigger.

Nothing. They were all confused. He checked the chambers. There were three bullets left still there. 

“What’s going on?” Astyanax asked. “What did you do?”

Apollo stood up. He got the boy and ran towards Dion.

Horace fell to his knees

“I only wanted to protect you.” 

“What. Did. You. Do?”

Horace pulled his rags down below his knees and bit his lips and begged, his head falling so fast as to bash himself against the floor. 

“I did everything I could to help you. I always have, young master.”
 
Astyanax dropped his spear and shield. Everyone stood in thralldom, the scene left no room to breathe or even move.

“What did you do, scoundrel?” He slapped Horace across the face, his blood splattered on the floor. 

“I saved you.”

“Tell me now, cretin!” He shouted. “What did you do!”

“I took away his strength,” The words spilled out quickly. “I ruined some of his bullets, that’s it. Only a few! That’s all it took and see? See?! Look at what victory it guaranteed.”

The gossiping began again. Foul play? Foul play, common amongst demons, were they regular demons. But foul play amongst New Troy, and her citizens? From the king, venerable king? Of course, they wouldn't resist to gossip.

Astyanax looked around.

“You…” His voice broke. “You shamed me?”

His eyes fell, his feet fell limp and he loomed over Horace. Horace put his arms around Astyanax to hold him, to apologize. 

“I didn’t know sir, I didn’t know.” Horace cried. “But to throw your life on the line like that, I couldn’t tolerate the anxieties sir. I had to do something.”

Astyanax put an arm around Horace, it felt weak.

“Oh, please master. I’m sorry. But you must understand.” Horace rubbed his head deep into the armor of Astyanax.

Astyanax dropped his spear. He put his other hand around Horace.

“You only wanted to help?” Astyanax asked.

“Yes, I did nothing but help.” 

The demon’s kept speaking in their foreign tongues, some laughing, some mocking, others afraid.

“Then you should be rewarded, my dear Horace,” Astyanax said. “Help is what you give, help is what you’ll receive. Help from this pitiful existence. The only help you need.” 

Astyanax wrapped himself around Horace. 

He held him close. And he pulled, closer and closer. Squeezing.

“L-L-let go.” Horace managed to let out. His chest was squished against the armor and body of Astyanax. 

“I’m sorry.” It sounded more like the hurt plea of a dog than a man. 

Astyanax stood holding the servant, squeezing him, feeling the bones and tendons and muscles break and compress. Slowly, methodically. His arms were the first to give out, the bones popped out of his elbows.

“Ah,” What a painful thing it was to want to scream, but being unable to. The air exhausted from his chest, Horace could only let out squeaks.

His legs dangled and flailed about. His eyes began to bleed, his mouth began to flood with all the fluids trying desperately to escape from his mouth. From his chest up, he was bleeding and going purple and dying that painful death as his heart and lungs and bones were crushed together into an amalgamation of flesh and ivory. He looked up, eyes blurred and covered with a layer of blood, he looked up to Astyanax who held him in his death grip.

Bartholomew turned away. Astyanax narrowed his eyes. Everyone else, the demons, shivered as Horace let out those dying sounds. The bone breaking, lung-popping, pitiful death.

And when he was done and the blood came pouring out of the lesions of his choked flesh and out of his nose and ears and eyes, he let him drop on the floor. The body made a wet plop as it hit the pool of blood and ejected fluids.

There was awe in everyone, awe to the violence save for one.  

Apollo, crafty as he was, adjusted to violence as he was, ran for his blade (as fast a run he could do on tired legs). He picked it up and ran close up behind Astyanax.

He didn’t make it two feet before Astyanax turned. He picked up his spear with a quick kick of his feet. He aimed the spear then flung it out, towards Apollo. 

Apollo stopped, caught in fear.

The wind brushed his hair aside. The spear went past him, to his rear. He turned his head slowly to watch where it landed. A tendriled demon (the awful, nauseous and many-limbed thing it was) lay behind him, pinned to a pillar. He had a weapon drawn, seemingly aimed at Apollo’s back just as Apollo had his own weapon drawn to Astyanax’s back.

Apollo stood still. Blade fidgeting, his breaths loud and quick as he watched the king venture back to the spear rack.

“I won’t thank you,” Apollo said. His voice had a frailty to it.

Astyanax compared spears.

“H-Honor really means that much to you, doesn’t it?” Apollo asked. “It must be terrible knowing you have a faulty win, then.”

“Be quiet,” Astyanax’s voice was low, stern. Like a quick, blunt punch. “Foul play made his death quicker. That’s it. Within minutes, mere blinks, he would have died inevitably.”

“If you were that confident in your victory, if things were really going to play out that way and no other, then why even bother killing your friend. Why make a scene at all? Shouldn't you have been confident, forgiving?” Apollo pointed to the corpse. “It seems to me like you weren’t just angry, it seems to me like you were trying to kill a doubt in your head. A doubt that maybe, just maybe, you would have lost if things played out normally.”

“I know I would have won.” Astyanax yanked a spear out. The loud jerk caused everyone to jump.

“You can’t guarantee that.”

“I foresaw it.”

“You foresaw shit.” Apollo spat. “Don’t convince yourself otherwise.”

Boos. Loud shouts of anger responded back. Astyanax moved his spear across in a sweep like a conductor, and they all silenced themselves.

“What compels me is honor, that’s it. Don’t confuse yourself, I am not delusional in my ego. What I foresaw, what I felt, what I know is that I would have won.” Astyanax said. “But you’re right. Foul play does disturb me. It deflates my authority, it hurts my spirit.”

Apollo slapped his hand like a disobedient pet, trying to straighten it. Trying to make it go still.

“So leave us be then, go on. I’ll give you that right. Take the boy and yourself and leave, let me finish things with this heart-eater.” 

Dion groaned. 

“That’s a kind offer.” Apollo looked back, Dion and the boy stood behind him. “But we’ll all be leaving, together.”

“And how do you expect to do that?”

“With your head on my lap.”

There were murmurs amongst the crowd. The sparks of a new excitement.

“Will you fight in his place?” Astyanax looked at Apollo’s blade and how it shook. “Can you?”

Apollo quaked in place. Astyanax nodded his head, he closed his eyes (cocky thing, isn’t he?). He walked towards Apollo, then past him, towards the pinned demon on the column. Astyanax touched the entry room with his red hands and to everyone’s surprise, cocked his hand back. 

He dug it deep into the corpse's chest. And out came the heart. He threw it, the glowing, heart with the mineral growth about it. Apollo looked at it for a second, then back at Astyanax who settled himself back to his original place. He switched his vision back and forth between the two before, cautious and hungry like a feral, starved animal. He settled for the heart. Apollo pounced on it, stuck his teeth deep into it, tasting and eating it off the floor. A messy meal. 

When he was done (quickly at that), he looked up. Astyanax stared, sad and disgusted.

“Can I even call you a man?” He said. “What depraved ilk you must have come from. Undignified fool.” 

“Dignity? Like him?” Apollo pointed to Dion who groaned. “If it leaves you on the floor bleeding, was it ever useful? I prefer more practical philosophies.”

Apollo could feel his wounds healing, closing, his bruises clearing up. He could feel his legs and arms and the nimble steel of his blade. 

“Honor is what makes the fight worth enjoying, honor and life, the only things worth putting on the scale. Nothing else matters but those two. Nothing.” Astyanax said.

“How you’ve lived this long, this conceited and this stupid is beyond me.” Apollo stretched his body. 

“Most things are beyond a wretch such as yourself.” Astyanax scoffed.

“A wretch, huh.” Apollo jumped up and down in rhythm. “I guess dying to me will be that much more embarrassing, then?”

Silence amongst the crowd. Astyanax twirled his spear.

“Tell me, heart eater. Had I been as injured as you, as rude as you, as crooked as you; would you have given me the same respect I’ve given you?” Astyanax asked.

“No, the golden rule is for fools,” Apollo said. “I would have slit your throat a long time ago.”

Astyanax laughed to himself again.

“Well, the weak fear the strong.” They walked in circles opposite of each other. “And I do not fear you. For what difference will you make of fate, with that simple renewed strength? None. ”

“Well then. You’re strong and stupid.” Apollo could feel a bit of confidence returning. His blade stopped shaking, his eyes were focused. He only hoped it was an authentic article, something that would survive him through the fight.

“I’ve fed you, I’ve allowed you your fangs,” Astyanax said. “So don’t disappoint me, put up a fight. Do me that favor."

Apollo was silent. His blade ready, his heart starting that momentous engine roar. Badum, badum, badum. 

Astyanax stomped on the floor. Both now ready.

“You’re amongst rare and good company, Vicar.” His silver-mask faced away from the light, gaunt shadows across the pale face. “Die comfortably with this knowledge: you are part of the few to face me in open combat. And you will be one of the many to die beneath me.” 

Apollo

They were close enough that Apollo could hear the chinking metal sounds. The loud scrapes were audible, even amongst the crowd that berated and that applauded. The heat of Apollo’s sword warmed him, its glowing edge pointed directly in front of him.

Astyanax hid behind his shield, only an eye remained of what was him. His spear was high above his head, pointing down towards Apollo. And Apollo began counting the meters of distance and range between the two. His lips quivering as he did so. His feet inched towards Astyanax, his clothes were wet with blood.

His courage had not survived even mere minutes. And for all his gloating, here he was now, afraid.

All of him was fidgeting and buckling and all he could find comfort in was that blade of his and its dying glow.

“Aye, what’s wrong heart-eater?” Astyanax took a step forward. The corner of his slight smile appearing past the shield.

“At a loss of enthusiasm, already?” Astyanax took a step forward. Apollo a step back.

“Aren’t you aware of what I’ve done? Doesn’t it make you angry?” He thrust his spear forward, into empty air. Apollo moved instinctively. There was no fight, not yet. Just tests.

Apollo moved his head and scanned the room, he lost track of all the demons around the two. He inspected the size of the building instead, every tower and its shadow, every corner and its set of curious eyes. The surrounding perimeter of the building was hidden, almost completely dark and what few torches were there could not illuminate past five feet. The center, where they fought, was the most illuminated and up above, Apollo saw the painted glass pane.

Jesus Christ, quite literally, stared down at him.

The demons hid in that darkness, cheering.

He returned back to the fight, surprised he hadn’t be stabbed in his absentmindedness.

Five meters of range, ten meters apart. Apollo thought.

He stopped moving. Astyanax took steps forward.

“The scum and the men,” Astyanax tapped his wide shield against the floor. It rang. “The women and the children, all dead by my command. All to deliver you and Dion unto me. All it took was a promise, words. A few simple words directed at a few simple creatures. Clever, don’t you think?”

Apollo twitched at the word ‘children’.

“Words lead men. Words destroy empires, delete religions, reduce cultures. So are you surprised then, that words could kill children? It’s not like they were that tough, to begin with.”

Apollo’s eye flinched, his stance changed. His face winced.

“Oh? Already hurt? It’s your choice to be offended or not, you know. And I don’t think someone who was so hurtful only moments ago should be this offended now. Don’t take it so hard, would you?” He paused two meters from striking distance. “She was just a child, a dumb child. I don’t even think she was aware of death as it happened. I was there, you know, as a simple rat. The albino.”

Apollo’s grip clenched. He felt something crawl down his spin, anger.

“What was her name again? Opie? Souve? Mmm. Sophie?”

And of all things to go wrong, this was the worst.

Apollo rushed first. Blade forward. The spear zoomed towards him. He dodged. The wind pushed his hair to its side. He heard his blade whistle, then bang.

Astyanax had his shield high in front of him, absorbing the blow. The leather began to burn behind the blade. The smell traveled up Apollo’s nose. He kept banging down at the shield, beginning to melt the metal. On the fifth, he was pushed away.

Astyanax riposted Apollo.

He exposed his body and kicked him. Apollo flew, his face dragging across the floor. He could taste the granite in his teeth, he could feel the specks of dirt stuck to the roof of his mouth. Blood was coming out from a cut brow, his temples rattled.

His left ear rung as Astyanax approached. The heavy footsteps were dulled to him, only a reverberation.

Stand up. He thought. He stabbed his blade into the ground, the stone softened underneath the heat.

The spear shot out again. He rolled to the side. It struck the floor where he was, rope and wood and the metal tip all shattering. The splinters shot out like a compressed shrapnel grenade, hitting Apollo’s sides.

It wasn’t good enough for Astyanax. No, not him.

Astyanax screamed, both hands out high above him. He grabbed his shield with both hands and slammed it towards Apollo. Apollo who put his elbows up to block. He was tackled. Thrown. Tossed. Pushed out, towards the edge of the cathedral where the demons laughed and taunted him. Apollo stood, only to feel another push from behind. The audience was pushing him forward, to Astyanax.

His chest ached, he could feel his broken bones stabbing his skin and muscles. He could feel his body trying desperately to repair itself, like a warm sting all across his body. A wave of heat and pain. The red steam rose from his inconsistent healing. Cuts and gashes were disappearing and reappearing all the same.

Astyanax struck him again, over and over, with the face of his shield, with the edge of it. Apollo dashed away after the tenth blow.

His legs were heavy. His grip was weak. He dropped his blade twice before he picked it up.

All the while Astyanax watched, spitting, screaming.

“Dion had spirit!” He walked towards the spear holder, a collection of barrels on top of a cart. He grabbed the handle and pushed it towards the center of the cathedral. “He stood and fought. He! He had in him the strength of will to suffer through agony. Do you?”

Apollo’s head rose. His lips were burst, his tongue rolled around to feel the wound. And he shook his head, trying to fix the triplets of blurry images that plagued his vision.

He could see the hordes of demons and their long tendrils or hands and bizarre shapes cheering who in his tossed-head looked like three times the people. He shook his head.

The three images aligned at once. Just in time. A spear was screeching, coming for him. Hungry.

He dodged to the right. The demons behind him were struck by the blow. The cathedral wall behind him broke, the head of a feline-creature was stabbed through the cracked surface. Apollo could hear the dying moan and further around the body, the frightened shock of the audience. It was an infection that grew and grew and all around the demons were beginning to fear.

Apollo caught it, eventually. A little later than most.

His heart beat fast, his eyes focused. He ran laps around the arena, the spears were shooting out. Like machine gun fire, whizzing and shattering air and concrete. The pops and sharp sounds of bone and stone breaking near him. The columns were collapsed, perforated and weak. The demons were killed for every spear Apollo dodged, their bodies hung and spasmed on the walls they were pinned to. The torches collapsed. The glass and ceiling broke. A new darkness overtook the arena, one filled with the sporadic caustic sounds of death and collapse.

He ran twelve laps, Apollo counted, twelve laps around the cathedral before the javelin's stopped flying.

Bartholomew and Dion were both low to the ground, Dion now silent in his deep state of unconscious, Bartholomew with his hands to his head as his body laid prone on the floor.

Some demons had decided to leave. They rushed through the door, trampling smaller creatures who could not manage. Some still stood, out of paralyzed fear or obligation. Some were forced to stay, half-dead on the broken Gothic walls.

Glass and wood and stone littered the floor. The once sharp and precise architecture was reduced to broken gaps and shattered cement. The building looked sieged, it was in a way, by a single man who stood, breathing heavily, at the center of the cathedral.

Apollo reared his head out of the trunk of a half-standing column. Most of it was lying on the floor, only the stem remained. He pulled his coat away from him, it was sticking.

All his clothes were sticky. Why?

He looked down. Blood. So much of it, trickling down his pants and filling his feet. He was still alive, barely. He wasn’t punctured, yet. Rather, he had been cut up by rosy-tinted church glass and other such gaudy shrapnel. His body had tried to heal but now, in his tired state. He couldn’t. His blade still in his hands, its bright glow now dimming, its radiant heat now cooling.

“I’m surprised you didn’t run with the rest.” Astyanax said. He reached inside the barrel, only one spear left. He raised it above him, eyed it against the unfiltered light of the broken glass ceiling and spun it like a propeller.

He slammed it three times on the floor, it had a good weight to it.

“Out of conversation, jester?” He painted towards Apollo.

Apollo put his blade forward, he ran.

“I guess you are.”

They went at it, the steel and leather and armor all clanking into a harmonious symphony of violence. The way blood rained and sprayed on the floor, the way their sweat trickled down, the intimacy of their bodies interlocked into holds and bouts of strength, all of it seemed like passionate theater. A dance, perhaps. Or lovemaking, to some perverted extent.

And like a dance, like the loss of the self in the moment, they stopped thinking after a while. Both of them.

Apollo just rushed. And rushed. And rushed. His blade banging down on the shield, the heat of his very sword beginning to melt and sawing through the bronze and leather. The sparks flew. The fire spread across the face of the shield. Astyanax pushed Apollo away. He looked at his flaming bulwark. The metal was melted through, it was branding his arm. He threw it to the side.

He looked at his spear. It was half its size, a portion of the wooden handle having been burned out. The ash came down from the ruined end like a used cigarette.

Apollo lowered himself. He galloped forward. An opening, he hoped.

A mistake.

Astyanax saw the man leap. He moved quickly and launched his spear through Apollo’s shoulder. His body would not heal that. It would not even reject the stake in his shoulder blades.

Apollo dropped. He rolled on the floor, away from Astyanax and faced him. He pulled out the wood. His wound suckled pursed and suckled air as the stake came out. Apollo felt the jolt of pain, then the burn, and eventually, the weak wetness of his blood escaping his body.

And Astyanax, weary and angry, annoyed and confidant, reached down to the side of his metal skirt. He took out his gladius and walked forward. His pace was slow. His head hung forward.

Apollo saw the shadow approaching. He could feel his stomach turning, his cowardice returning. As if all confidence had bled out of that wound as well and all that remained was the frightened fidgeting of a boy. He looked at his sword, then to Astyanax, then back. One of his arms was useless.

Of course it was. It was stabbed through.

It didn’t matter now. He had to try anyway, he had to fight. He stood and steadied his blade as best he could with his only good hand.

“This is the land of warriors,” Astyanax said. “And your existence here is a mockery. Coward and Clown, whichever you be, know that this charade ends here.”

Apollo looked around. Desperation guided him. The collapsed walls, the broken ceiling. The dark ring around the cathedral now growing and covering the corpses and stray observers. The torches unlit. A veil of complete blackness was nearly enveloping them both, and they remained just in the center, just in the last circle of light. Them and Dion and Bartholomew.

And he looked down at his shaking arm.

“Keep your blade up, die with decency,” Astyanax said.

Apollo could feel the king approaching, his long shadow covering Apollo completely.

And he looked down at his broken arm. It was warm now.

Was it warm? Why warm? It ought to be numb.

He looked at his useless arm, below the black coat, below the cufflink and even further below the white undershirt.

He looked around himself, towards the ring of darkness. Complete darkness. He looked at his sword. It wasn’t glowing anymore, still a bit hot. But not glowing.

His heart almost stopped. His breathing hastened.

His arm was losing blood, that’s why he hadn’t felt it at first. That terribly tight, terribly hot string of fate. That lasso, that bondage wrapped around his arm, bright and hot at the presence of demons and monstrosities. Though not to Astyanax, not that immortal monstrous soul of a man. But to the audience? To the very crowd Astyanax had invited? Oh, yes, it burned for them bright.

And it was hidden. Underneath the rags of his coat, underneath his shirt. Hidden well.

“How will you die?” Astyanax threw his helmet off. His white hair fell down. “Standing or begging. What suits you best?”

Apollo smiled. He ran away.

Far from Dion and Bartholomew. Towards the edge of the cathedral, into the absolute darkness where only the moans of the dying demons remained.

“With a sword through your back, then, is it!” Astyanax ran after him, thinking to throw his gladius. But Apollo had run too far deep into the darkness by then.

Astyanax stopped inches from the tapered end of the deep shadows, near a pillar. He tried to look inside the darkness and saw nothing.

“Shadows and trickery, do you think it’ll keep you safe?” Astyanax screamed.

He heard a scoff repudiate him. His face scowled.

“Die in the bowels of darkness then, snake. I offered you a quick death, but now you will writhe.” Astyanax put his blade forward as he came in.

Apollo saw nothing in the darkness of the edge of the cathedral. Not even with his crimson eyes. He was coming in and out of doors, passing walls and columns and disappearing further into the false night.

He touched something.

He jerked his foot away.

He stepped down on it, the soft flesh. Oh, just a corpse on the floor. His foot made a light noise.

Astyanax heard him. And he jumped away. He felt his hair move from the wind of a passing blade. Again, and again. He was fighting in that darkness, fighting invisible knives and noises. He danced. He dodged. He ran.

And once again bid his time in darkness. His heart raced. And he thought, only for a brief moment, of what he stood to lose. The thoughts flooded him, images of death and misery. The deaths of himself, of Dion, of Bartholomew.

Then, as if stabbed again, he saw the terrible image. Of the girl, Sophie, on that rooftop, split open.

He wanted to groan. He held his mouth shut.

He focused, holding his breath. The footsteps were coming closer, judgment was coming closer.

He hid his blade in his coat and almost as if in surprise, found something else underneath. Whatever it was, he held it in his mouth and bit down hard on it to stop himself from screaming.

Whatever he did was hot and painful and almost made him wail, had he not held the strange object in his mouth. He heard the footsteps approaching. His blade was still down, beneath his clothes, hiding its light glow.

Closer. The light, nimble steps. Closer to Apollo. Near him, next to him.

He heard the breath of Astyanax, he felt the hot air hit him.

And Apollo threw something forward.

Something that made a plopping noise as it hit cement. Something that sounded like flesh. Something that glowed in the dark.

Astyanax, near, and quick stabbed at it. His gladius struck flesh and bone and the floor, the sound was loud. Clear. Obvious in the darkness.

And they both knew at that moment what would happen next, with Astyanax in that darkness, having stabbed the floor and cement and having made that noise. With Apollo, behind him, with the steady hot blade.

He aimed at the noise, put all his strength into it. Astyanax moved, tried to.

Apollo felt his blade hit armor, then as the heat began to reduce the metal, felt it hit flesh. Blood boiled in the wound and escaped. His blade cooled within the human sheath. And with one final burst of will, Apollo reached for Astyanax in that darkness, his crimson eyes only appearing as a flash, and threw Astyanax back, into the light at the center of the church.

Astyanax rolled on the floor, each bump sinking the blade deeper into his chest. He laid there for a moment, above a bed of broken glass. Surprised by pain, of his injury. Surprised by the black leather wrapped handle of a sword sticking out of his chest.

So very confused, his eyes wandered around to Bartholomew and to Dion and to Horace. Bartholomew who screamed, not jovial or triumphantly, but in shocked horror.

Astyanax stood there in the center. He dragged the wreckage of the church, nails and wood and glass, below his trembling feet. He took his helmet off to see properly. His two braided bangs of hair falling down his face. Ruined. They looked like worn ends of a disciplinary whip.

Why am I so weak? He wondered. There are no lungs, no organs like the other three, living people have. I’m just a spirit, just a mighty soul.

Then why can’t I stand still? Astyanax thought again. He wobbled left and right.

Why can’t I fight? He thought. He tried looking for the gladius to his rear. He found it at last and widened as he looked at it.

There was an arm hanging from the tip of the blade. There was string wrapped around it, and it glowed gold.

He laughed. Then tried to pick it up like a broken crane, he took an inch off the floor only to drop it.

He couldn’t bend his knees. His poise was shaky, at best.

“Where are you?” Astyanax wheezed out.

There was a noise. Something in front of him, a scream, a scuffle that kept going and growing.

Oh, that’s why. Astyanax thought.

He looked into that darkness from where he had been shot out of. Towards the staccato. He smiled. He understood.

Apollo’s eyes shined through the absolute black of the cathedral. Those crimson eyes. Then a new face appeared, one Astyanax could only imagine, one that would haunt him to oblivion. Apollo came out, red-eyed, with his mask. That which hid in his jacket, that which possessed Astyanax with fear. The white mask, engraved with black lines. A rorschach that revealed something in Astyanax that he did not want to accept: he was to die, sad and alone in these remote lands.

The rest of Apollo appeared, slowly materialized. One armless half, the other tightly clenched into a fist. The knob of his arm was cauterized. The skin was burned black.

He walked close up to Astyanax who could barely stand. Astyanax fell to his knees.

Apollo pulled his amputated limb close to his chest.

Astyanax, as a final attack, grabbed onto Apollo's severed hand. He gripped the amputated arm, dug his fingers into the burned flesh and began some foreign enchantment. Apollo screamed, felt a bolt of pain stride his arm nerves, straight to his chest and his neck. He put his foot down at Astyanax and pressed him down on the floor.

“A gift.” Astyanax’s eyes rolled to the corners of his skull. “So you never forget me, heart-eater.”

Apollo looked at his wound. It felt strange now, weak and cold. He didn’t understand it, couldn’t, not in his ravaged state.

Whatever, Apollo thought. I'll deal with this later. He comes first.

He looked back at Astyanax who spewed blood from his mouth. 

“Was it worth it?” Apollo said. “Everything you did. Did you get the good fight you wanted?”

Astyanax focused his dying eyes back at Apollo. Yellow, hardened.

“Don’t patronize me, Apollo.” He said.

“I’m not. I’m trying to understand you.”

“But can you? Can you understand my loneliness, could you ever?” Astyanax said. “A loneliness so strong it makes you wish for love. For hate. For anything, just to feel. Can you understand that?”

Apollo kneeled down at Astyanax, whose blood sprawled out of his mouth and onto the floor.

Apollo put his hand on the handle of his blade. “Yes, yes I can.” He pulled out his blade. Blood poured out. It covered his armor, then overwhelmed.

The ceiling broke off a chunk and the cement fell behind him. The sound signaled a reaction amongst the crowd.

Behind them, frightened voices whispered in the dark. Some faces appeared through the doors. 
Astyanax rolled his head around. He was trying to find someone. He looked at Dion first. Then to Bartholomew.

He spat, a long string of blood came out and to his rear.

He stopped at Horace. Horace, broken on the floor, both sad and happy that he would join him soon.

At last, he faced Apollo who still had his foot down his abdomen. With his blade ready.

“Curious about me, aren’t you?” Astyanax asked. “Of who I was and who I am then?”

His head jerked forward, a last rebellious move.

“I was not born in Troy. I died there. I was raised, nurtured in Hell. Understand that.” He said. “Understand a man who did not get to experience his own history, but was forced to hear of it. Who was of noble line but stranger to it. A man who wanted more of life, but wished to die.”

He shouted now, his face shaking left and right. Tears coming down his face.

“I killed thousands and I would have killed thousands more.” Astyanax coughed. “And am I wrong for that, to kill for pleasure? As what was done to me? Only the naive say aye. Because only the naive make judicious claims of what a life, any life, is worth. For the wise know, nothing matters. And that every act of wills is nothing more than the chance game of the universe, of God. I lived. I desired. I took and killed. And you do the same, don't you, Vicar?" 

Apollo cocked his arm back. Astyanax felt the blood collect in his throat. He swallowed.

“You have no right to judge me, Apollo.” He shouted. “You who live behind that mask, fearing God. You who live, shamelessly in sin. You tainted soul. You mutt of man-!”

He looked at Apollo, solemn and tall. Past him, in the growing darkness of the room, somewhere where his vision could barely make out figures, he saw a form. A figure, coming together seemingly through the dissipative light and darkness of the outer edge of the room.

Not a pinned man, not a corpse on the floor. A four-legged creature. Walking with a passive gait, grin in full view. Spotted skin, he noticed.

His eyes widened. His muscles tensed.

“Trickster,” He whispered. His last words.

Apollo’s hand came down, through the hole in his armor, into his chest. He dug his hand deep into the cavity of the body. Astyanax stifled a scream, grabbed the bloody arm and held it tight. At first out of protest and instinct, then, as he felt his innards searched, out of merciful touch. He wanted to hold someone, for some reason.

And after a while, he wanted nothing. Had nothing to want, for there was no one there anymore. Just false-flesh, a puppet where a man once was. An empty vessel.

Astyanax let go. His red limbs receding to pearly white. The yellow in his eyes, turning white. All of him, going white and dead.

Apollo drew his hand back, the blood dripped from his gripping palm.

In his hand; the beating heart of King Astyanax, sultan of the desert, throne to degenerates, emperor of none. 

Bartholomew

He retracted his arm from the corpse. The drops of blood made a light trickling sound as they hit the cracked tiles of floor. Everyone stood in silence, the air felt heavy in their lungs, their eyes could not blink. Apollo stood. Above the corpse, his leg poking the body for a sign of life. The eyes of Astyanax slowly fading. It was a gruesome death, this slow degradation. The blood spilled out from every cavity of Astyanax. The muscles ripped open, bleeding. The chest cavity, open, bleeding. 

Apollo looked back to the two on the floor that had waited for him, Dion and Bartholomew. There was a murmur, some wheezing that was so pained and frightened that he could no figure who it came from, the boy or Dion. Apollo, heart in hand, moved towards them. The boy flinched at the sight of the bloody man. Most of the remaining demons did. They could not believe it, though they saw it. But Apollo, in the languor of victory, extended his hand out to the boy and the cup. He swiped it from the awestruck boy and squeezed the heart above it. The crystalline, cloudy heart. It looked like a ruby more than an organ, and it produced no more than a few inches worth of blood inside the cup. 

“Now you can go home,” Apollo said. He was just about to hand it when he heard a pained groan from Dion. It was something loud and furious and he knelt next to him to hear it. 

His eyes blinked, one lid seemed shut and the other was only half-open. As if he was in a stupor of pain.

“I lost,” Dion mumbled.

“Don’t worry about it, he’s dead.”

“I lost.” He repeated. His face dropped, his eyes seemed to look away from any human contact, staring off into emptiness. “How’d I lose? Wasn’t God on my side?”

Apollo said nothing. He rubbed his arm and stood up.  

“What’s wrong with him?” The boy asked.

“Too much, but he’ll live.” Apollo looked back to the boy. His shoulders relaxed. "Don’t worry about him. It’s time for you to go home."

The boy looked up, confused as to whether to smile or not. 

And again, the arbiter of the locale, the disruptor, and guardian angel. The Hyena appeared, crawling slowly with long nails that tapped on the floor. Everyone was forced to turn save for Dion who had fallen unconscious again, mumbling his grievances like lullabies. 

Everyone else, demon, man, boy, all turned. The Hyena stomped on the floor like an oracle upon the amphitheater. His eyes sharp and thin like daggers.

"But how do you expect to get out?" The Hyena asked. "There's only enough blood for two." 

"Then the boy and Dion go," Apollo said. His voice filtered through them mask gave him a bit of reverb. It was a haunting sound, low and brutish.

"Hmm." The Hyena mused with a kind of reserved playfulness. He’s hiding something, Bartholomew thought.

But what?

It was a secret, something very close to them. Something that waited further from Horace’s crushed corpse, something that hung by the side of the wall like a disgusting fly. Something drawing near with gentle footsteps.

A face appeared from that dark veil. A face that made Apollo run for the sword lying near Astyanax. The lone demon face amongst the hoard of demons. Or perhaps, he was just another kind of demon? Of a smaller make, but definitely of the same species.  

Apollo bent down to pick it up, the heart still taking space in his only good hand. His eyes flashed red again, widened, and his knees bent towards the direction of the oncoming figure. No, he wouldn’t need a sword. Not that dark steel, warped and cool and laying a pool of blood like a kind of lubricant. 

He stood, heart in hand, now nearly crushing it completely.

"Do you know this man?" The Hyena asked.

"Do I know him?" Apollo screamed. The other demons were seized, they froze. There must have been only just twenty, twenty from a large crowd of hundreds. "How could I forget? That beard can’t hide you, that darkness can’t hide you. Nothing can with that reputation of yours. Am I right, Doctor Alestor?”

Alestor did not speak. He walked forward with his bruised bare feet. He entered the jury, he met with the executioner, and now waited for judgment. It seemed like he didn’t even care anymore, with his arms lying to their sides and his figure a wreckage of the hostile, frightening thing he was once before.
"So you killed him." Alestor finally let out. “You were the most dogged after all.”

"Yeah, funny thing, huh. Madmen are dying left and right." Apollo said.

Alestor swallowed his spit. He seemed of a strong conviction, there was no tension in his face. It was all dullness. Dullness and acceptance.

The Hyena, smiling with his devil's teeth took turns glancing between the two, observing them both.

"What is there left to do, Apollo?" He asked.”Kill him, like he’s done to many."

Apollo stood straight. His eyes a strong crimson color.

"What’s one mortal man to you? It would be a merciful thing to do, wouldn’t it be? To kill him, to eat that tainted heart of his. I heard that warlocks have a nice tanginess to them." The Hyena laughed.

One death is all it would take. One death to ruin a man, one death to send him into that Fibonacci spiral of ecstatic self-destruction. One death, just one human death to earn his place in that dark abyss whether it be in this life or the other. And who would care, here in Hell? 

Demons, men, all the same. Why bother distinguishing between the two? Why worry at all?

"Have you killed a man before?" The Hyena asked. "It's easy, they’re so fragile. You just thrust and twist, like this." 

He made the motion with his head, turning it like a key in a lock until the bones of his neck cracked. The sound made Bartholomew cringe.

Apollo shook, he felt the hostility up his neck like a hot flare.

"You know what he's done, don't you?"

"I lived it. Of course I do." He said in a raw tone. 

And he walked towards Alestor. His tight grip still on the heart. He’d just need to punch a hole in him, that’s it.

Bartholomew stood and watched, the intent in Apollo's eyes striking him with a terrible feeling of numbness. The Hyena sneering, rolling, wagging his tail to the pace of Apollo’s walk.

He felt powerless, like before, the many times before. He had lost count of it, those moments of powerlessness. Powerlessness reduced him and made him shiver. Powerlessness had made him a coward. 

And he thought of the story of Apollo, second-hand killer of his friend. And he thought of Apollo, the lonely child. And he thought of Apollo, soon-to-be murderer.

He ran towards Apollo and lunged at his foot with a far stretched dive. 

Apollo stopped, he looked down at the child and tried wagging him off. The boy clung on with his nails on Apollo’s black pants.

"What are you doing? This isn't any of your business." Apollo said. He pulled the child by the back of his shirt and raised him to head level. The boy squirmed.

"Don't do this." He said, arms dangling.

"Do you know who this man is?" Apollo asked. 

"I-I've seen him before," Bartholomew said.

“But do you know?” Apollo asked.

“No. Who cares?” 

"This man killed your father. This man killed innocent men and women. This man killed children, kids your very age. Plenty of them, I'm sure." Apollo said. "This man is the reason your friend is dead. All of them, dead. This man, above all other men, deserves to go." 

Bartholomew looked at the stranger, Alestor. An odd feeling came to him. Anger, pity. it's not that he did not believe Apollo, it's not that he didn't care. It’s that he couldn’t care for death anymore. With Astyanax’s body still cold on the floor, with all the other demons still cold. With all his friends, still dead. He could not stand it. He could not stand the numbness, the feeling of life escaping, the emptiness of rooms where people once were, the emptiness of hearts where humanity once was. And it was not that he did not hate Alestor, it was that he hated the idea of what he was much more. And hated, further, the idea that Apollo would become just that.

For sin, like any other energy in the universe, like any other system, can be inherited and usually is, destroying the old vessel in favor of the new one. On and on like a curse. The curse of sin.

"So what?" Bartholomew asked. 

They all gasped a bit. The Hyena shook his head.

"Just kill him." He said. "What better judge is there besides you? Who else here is fit to represent God? And believe me, God would have struck him dead." 

"You're not God," Bartholomew said. "You're not anything but Apollo. And I think that if you kill him, you’ll stop being Apollo."

He sat the boy on the floor and kept walking. 

"I'm just trash kid, It’s all I’ve ever been and all I ever will be," Apollo said. "So what's there to lose?" 

Bartholomew ran at him again. 

"And then what?" Bartholomew asked. "And what changes when he dies? The people go on, the world turns. Nothing changes. Nothing but you."

He pulled him back from walking. 

“You're not doing this for me. You're doing this for you." Bartholomew tugged his pants. "And I'm telling you, I know, that killing him would hurt you in a way...in a terrible, permanent way. I feel it."

"How do you know?"

"I just feel it. I just know.”

“Then what’s the right thing to do?” Apollo asked.

“I can’t tell you that. That’s too hard for me to think about.” He said. “I just know that when the world is so mean and cruel, that it doesn’t take much to be mean yourself. It's easy work. Killing him is easy work, wouldn't it be? And if that's easy it can't be that good, right? It just can’t be. Being good is hard. It should be hard. I just know it."

"That's a stupid argument. Nonsensicle." Apollo said. "There are plenty of people I've already killed. What's one more?”

"Isn't that the problem?” He looked up. Apollo looked down “The fact that you're asking what's one more?"

He was silenced. The whole room was. Nothing but a lonely wind passed over them, a whistle that passed itself through every broken cornice and every broken window and every broken brick. Alestor came forward, only feet away from Apollo.

“Just do me in. Or leave me here.” He said. 

“Either way you’ll rot.” He said. “Spending eternity in Hell, pretending your suffering can pay for your crimes. ” 

Bartholomew looked up at Apollo whose face shook with silent rage. Whose eyes, glowed a vibrant red. 

“That wouldn’t be enough, would it, kid?” Apollo let go, not of anger, but of something much worse that had taken hold of him. Something the Hyena had tried passing onto him.  

“If I killed you, if I left you, you’d waste away. That would be God’s justice.” Apollo said. Bartholomew shook, afraid. 

“But that would not be man’s judgment.” He said. “And you owe Havenbrook much more than you owe God.”

“Just kill him.” The Hyena blurted. His fangs showed.

“The Priest, The Old Officer, The Little Girl.” He counted with his fingers. “Mothers and fathers, lovers and patients. There are too many people you owe and that you might not pay back. But you’re going to try, whether you like it or not. I’m bringing you back with me.”

“No, no, no.” Alestor took a few steps back. Apollo kicked his left leg inwards, so that he fell, clutching his knee. He screamed, in pain. And to the boy, that was a better sound.

“You’re going to bring back every corpse too. You and I, together. So that dead will be buried. I’m sure you can do that, you know a bit of magic, don’t you?” 

“Don’t take me back, please.” Alestor pleaded. “Leave me here.”

“You won’t die just yet, not like your son or wife. No, you’ll live on, regretting them. Repenting, as the Catholics say.” 

Alestor turned over. He rolled around, holding the broken bones sticking out of his knee.

“To fall victim to an ideal. Oh, pity.” The Hyena nodded left and right.

“I listen to no man. I answer to no God, and I don’t play well with filthy dogs.” Apollo shouted back at the Hyena. It almost made the creature smile.

“And how do you expect to get out now?” He asked. “Or to take those bodies back as you seem so obsessed about.”

“With this.”
He pointed to the cup on the floor somewhere near Dion.

“That cup worked half as effectively only because of the nature of its victims. Human souls produce better results, we’re not on earth anymore, boy.”

“How much blood?” Apollo quickly added. “How many demons would I have to kill to even make up for the equivalent of one, human soul?”

“Hmm, that’s hard to quantify. It’d be a great number and an even greater effort though.”

“How many demons did you see outside, those that showed up to this carnival freak show?”

The Hyena smiled.

“Enough.”

“And I wonder,” Apollo looked down at the moaning Alestor. “How much would I need to hurt you for you to do what I want?”

Alestor looked up at the large red eyes. His face losing color.

He tried to stand and found himself limping away from Apollo.

Apollo sighed, picked up Astyanax’s helmet and threw it Alestor. He fell. Flat to the floor, and slept there, unconscious.

“Deja vu, fucker,” Apollo said. 

“Are you sure you want to do this? You could just make things easier by killing him.” His tongue stuck out. He faced Bartholomew. “Or the boy.”

“I’ve already decided on it. I’m not changing my mind.” Apollo said. “And after we’re done, we’re going to have a long talk, you and I.”

The Hyena landed flat on the floor.

“Well, most things didn’t go as I wanted them to. But there’s some fun in that too. At least you did kill the poor mad boy.” He looked at the corpse still bleeding on the floor. The hole in his chest, budding and sprawling out like a spring rose. “And what a good kill it was. A tiring one, I'm sure. And if that's the case, how do you expect to live, let alone fight-”

The Hyena stopped. Even he seemed disgusted, or perhaps impressed, when Apollo took the heart of Astyanax to his mouth and raised his mask and ate it sloppily, every sound and mastication more pronounced in the echo chamber of the church. The demons (the few who stuck around) watching,  ran in full and wide strides outside. They looked shepherded, that large motley crew reduced to frightened instinct.

The boy waited a bit until Apollo was done and watched him put down his mask on his red, covered chin.

He picked up the cup and handed it to Apollo. Apollo put his open palm to him.

“Take a drink and let go of it. That’s all you need to do.”

“And you?”

“Weren’t you paying attention,” Apollo said. “I still need to fight.”

Bartholomew looked down at his feet. He put them close together and tried to straighten himself out.

“Do you promise to stay alive?” He asked.

“It’s not a good quality to be too worried about other people. It’ll turn you into a very nervous adult. Worry about yourself.” Apollo said. “But yes, I will be alright.”

The demons, still running out the front door,  blocked and stepped over each other. 

“Promise me.” He stuck a pinky out.

Apollo laughed. 

“Alright.” He closed with his own finger.

Apollo lifted the cup then. He put it to the boy’s lips and tipped it over and waited. Bartholomew swallowed, whatever it was that tasted bitter. He cringed as it went down to his stomach, and felt it swash around inside of him. A gross feeling, this feeling of nausea.

Trepidation made him worry for a moment. He looked at Apollo, who grinned behind his mask. It was an unpracticed, unsociable, ugly smile. But it was authentic.

And after a while his worry went away, when the darkness came to take him, when the last thing he saw was himself falling down, down to a black abyss, from a red ring of fire. 

And it felt good, in a way.

August 23rd, 2017

The smaller corpses were the first to rise. They came in pairs, thirty-five in total, all mutilated and wrecked; gashes, bites, bludgeoned skin and torn muscle upon them. 

Bartholomew saw them as he came up from that darkness, each passing body a blur in his peripheral. The water burned his eyes. His limbs were weary. His lungs painfully exhaling as he staved off a collapsing consciousness. He felt a fog come over his eyes and brain. It made everything blurry. His body felt light, weightless even and for a moment he felt the pull, a pullback down to a Hell that waited for him. 

And at last, with the last of his air escaping, at last, he broke the top. 

He shivered along the waters and drifted through the corpses, each one passing him by or rubbing on his skin. 

It made him scream out loud, to a boat off at the distance and the Fisherman standing on it, spitting water out of his mouth. 

“Help.” The boy screamed. “Help me, please.”

The Fisherman raised his head up to the edge of the walls and looked down at the child who swam towards him. He was afraid, for a moment, that the boy was just another body. But a constant flailing and desperation made him reassess. Just a boy, the fisherman thought. 

He looked for throw-ring in his boat, the hope shaped like a white circle, and tossed it at the boy. The boy, who grabbed it with his small, scarred hands.

He came onto the boat, struggling. The cold shaking off of him. A fresh blanket came over him, it stuck to his skin. He looked away from the bodies, down to the pink water spilling through the boat boards. His body closed off, shoulders coming inward, face coming down to his knees. 

And in his ball, with the Fisherman standing shocked and worried at sharp end of his boat, he cried. Alone.

The Fisherman gave him room to. He turned the boat around and away from the gruesome scene of corpses and drove. The engine sputtered two giant walls of pink, before they zoomed off into a roar. 

The boy cried as loud as he could, as loud as he wanted, for the engine overwhelmed everything.

It was thirty minutes before the police arrived, who believed the call (and for a very brief moment, the scene itself) a prank.

A volcano of dead people. The Fisherman had yelled into the telephone. 

Two police officers arrived, green and young. They vomited at the sight of the corpses circling around the water surface and left a trail of their green and brown particles back, as they retreated to the cop car. Ten minutes later, three boats arrived and a legion of cop cars. A few moments after, the water surface became cracked and shook by the intense spinning of helicopter blades hovering over. News stations, mostly. 

They littered the lake with sounds so heavy they shook the boy. 

Bartholomew was left inside a small shabby shack next to the lake, his face plain looking as the police officers went over him. Asking him questions such as; When did it happen? Where did it happen? What happened? 

Too long ago. In a place with too much evil. Things that should not be spoken. 

He stayed catatonic, not out of the trauma of the whole event, but out of a stubbornness towards the strangers. 

And they begun to rub their faces when they realized the boy would not talk. And one by one they left the small shack, disappointed and annoyed and growing more nervous as the bodies continued to rise above.

An officer came around after some time, offering coffee and a call from his mother. He put the phone up to her, her pleading “It’s been weeks, oh my god. Bart, is that you?” (Really, just two weeks? It seemed longer). Him saying nothing, just a solemn “Hello”. Her saying, “she thought he was dead”. Him thinking, a part of him was. 

The voice said, at last, in between joyous tears, “Is that really you Bart? It doesn’t sound like you? Oh, please tell me, it’s you.”

He looked at the phone receiver and his arms and the small cuts and bruises decorating him like military accolades. 

“Yeah, mom. It’s me.” His voice, calm and collected and worn and tired.

He put the phone away after his mother suggested her to pick him up. Then he looked outside to the police officers who circled the building, suspiciously, muttering the words, “It’s that dead cop’s kid.”

They annoyed him more than the beeping of buttons and the dead static noise from the radios amongst the shack.

He stood up and away from all the officers and all the sound around him. They didn’t seem to mind, some even preferred it.

He went out, observing the newest fleet of cop cars, they must have gone through four different groups of police officers. A whole rotation. Most of them couldn’t tolerate the image or the smell and most of them ran away crying or vomiting.

Bartholomew came to the dark waters, standing on a boarded walkway. The creaks and whining loud below him. His mother would be here soon, the day was coming to an end and his reflection was molded behind the color of the dying sun; a hazy red. 

He took a deep breath. It was over, he knew it. And he exhaled easy.

Behind him, an officer approached, in the midst of his meditative state. A seasoned man whose white beard hid a sympathetic frown. 

He walked up gently, waited a bit for the boy to pay attention and knelt down to him when did.

“Did anyone else survive?” The officer asked.

Bartholomew looked down at the water, his hair still wet and weighty. He looked onto that bleak surface, at the center of the heart of darkness where the red sun glared its reflection across the waterfront.

“Yeah,” Bartholomew said. “Yeah, I think so.”

“Can you tell me who?”

“No, not really.”

“Alright.” The officer pulled down his hat to nod. “We’ll keep searching then.”

Of course, they wouldn’t find them. But he was confident, as he stared into that dark abyss, with a long-lasting grin stuck on his face. Confident of what? An idea, a small feeling, one that would help him through the days and weeks and months and years to come, an idea, somewhere in the crevices and annals of his mind that would sate his tears and sighs and silent trauma, an idea that in this giant dark lake there lived a light. 

And maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t so dark after all.

Well then! It looks like I finished the first arc. Now, what’s next? Let’s see…

TL;DR

I took a week off (if you didn’t notice) and I’ll be returning this week. The first thing on the menu are the interlude chapters to bridge Book 1 and Book 2. I’m thinking I’ll have 4 interlude chapters before we get to the next story arc (though there may be more or less depending on the plotting). These chapters, as well as all subsequent chapters, will be bigger and posted on Saturday’s. I haven’t decided on the exact hour though, probably late.

This will be the new format, at least, for the next book: big chapter releases on a single day.

Why interlude chapters? Why not get straight into the second arc? For chronological reasons and to buy me time to actually plot out the second story and to edit my older chapters.

That’s the quick summary, if you want to learn more about how I feel about Heathens (Book 1), you can read below.

Mirror mirror on the wall...

I have a love-hate relationship with the first Book (Heathens). And between the two, I’d say I lean more towards hating it. But before I criticise myself, let's get through some positive things.

At least I finished it. Which is a huge achievement honestly, considering my shitty work ethic. I don’t know how many times I’ve started novels in my life without actually finishing them. And now I’ve actually finished a story. Even if I’m not satisfied with it, I’m glad I finished it. There’s a small victory in that.

Another good thing, I know what the identity of my book is now. I needed to sacrifice the tone midway (notice how it went from mystery/suspense action horror to dramatic odyssey?), but at least I know what the genre of the franchise is. Gothic Epic.

Gothic, not goth. Epic, not like the meme epic4thewindude. End me, please.

Gothic Epic, tales about great people doing bad things all slathered with a thick coating of dread and horror. Picture the image, Homer and Lovecraft tucked under the black blanket of a cold night, fucking each other senselessly in the proper Greek way, oily and groan-y (good luck getting that image out of your head) and out, out! A scream. Silence. The candles flicker and die and from underneath the sheets comes the creature. A tentacled, cosmic horror wielding spear and shield. A mess of a thing.

That's like, basically the story. There’s a little Berserk in there too, some Ligotti and a lot of Faulkner and McCarthy (I hope). These influences give me some direction, though I may followed them too closely. But now, now I have an idea of what I want my books to be like, what I want for the lore to be like. And I hope the tone of future novels aren’t as inconsistent as the first book, Heathens.

Shit, now I’m talking about inconsistencies. It’s almost as if this was a poor transition into my critique list - Oh. Look at what I found.

Oooo, boy.

Where do I begin? The micro or the macro? The abstract or the fine technique? How often and how bad were my mistakes? Yikes.

This week has allowed me to reflect and reflect I have.

Let’s go through it.

Grammar and Syntax. I won’t say my grammar is necessarily god awful, but I tend to get the same annoying problems. Problems where words aren’t misspelled but rather misused, often because of errors in my own vocalization and my fingers not being able to keep up. I tend to get syntax errors more often than simple misspellings or miss-grammarings. That’s not even a word. See?

So I’ll write sentences that don’t have errors in the letters themselves but in the way they are shaped in a way that they get confusing to read and weird and start to look like messes and and

You get the point. I like long sentences. And some brief ones too. Which is a no-no in with modern audiences. I like the labyrinth that sentences can make. That’s why I like Faulkner and McCarthy and Joyce. But part of the fear of making a labyrinth is getting caught in it too. And I did, which is bad.

It goes to show that I'm not at the master level yet, not even close. This doesn’t mean I’m going to stop trying to write long abstractions into the real, or stop creating mazes like an obsessed carpenter. I just need to get better. There’s no easy way. I just need to practice, hone my metaphors, be more precise, more rhythmic. I should probably take poetry up. I might, even, as a side hobby.

The Lore. There are things I wanted to keep secret that I didn’t. There are things that should have made sense, but that I didn’t explain. Namely, the cup. And the structure of Hell. And Vicar culture.

But this one's strange, because I still have an opportunity to expand on my lore. And I will. Expect ‘The Corrux’ out soon. That little book mentioned by Apollo.  

Tone. I foreshadowed this before. But I fucked up the tone. Or miss blended them, I suppose. And it shows, especially when I look at the ‘Pages Read’ stat. There’s a sharp decline when Apollo and Dion descend to purgatory. Why? Because the tone changes. From supernatural detective psychological thriller to action-adventure spiritual journey. I didn’t blend them well enough. I didn’t lighten the tone enough so that the transition would be harmonious. I didn’t foreshadow enough. I missed the cues and fucked it up.

This is not to say I won’t try again, but I need to make my transitions between tones better. Some useful tips for this, practical stuff, would be to bring up similar themes or phrases. To be more particular, maybe I should have alluded to the desert prior to the actual descent. Maybe I should have alluded to the Trojan tragedy before the descent. The Hyena could have been shown a bit earlier, maybe as a third observer (or even narrator if I was clever enough!). The word choice could have been more consistent, etc etc. These are all small and big things that annoy me now that I look back. Failed opportunities.

Dropped or ignored or under-developed plot devices. This is the one that triggers all the OCD fans. Moments in the story where something is mentioned or done and never bothered with again. What of Dion’s lover? What about the drug kingpin missing his testicles? What of the other cultists? Of Sophie’s mother? I think I got too scared and hasty, there were a lot of what if’s I wanted to mention but I didn’t out of a fear of boring you guys, the audience. I think for the future, I’d like a more disciplined story. If I’m going to bring a character out, I might as well go all the way.

I mean, just take for example Dion’s anger. It’s brought up as a plot point, he’s the ‘hypocrite’. Acts good, but deep down inside is a bit of a bloodthirster. This is kind of brought up later, especially before he fights Astyanax but in a strange way. Does he accept himself? Does he try to be better? Does he put his faith in God?  To be fair, this still CAN be developed later. But I probably should have gone all the way. I should have had proper transitional scenes, I should have rounded off Dion’s ‘argument for being a psycho killer’.

Apollo also has something like this but in the opposite direction. He goes from a hardball to a bit of a coward. Though his metamorphosis and growth is probably explained better, I’d argue. And the only reason it is explained better is because I gave him more screen time. Lesson learned. Give them more screen time. Which is a good segway!

Scenes and Screen time. It sounds romantic to just write endlessly over minute details like a true man of letters. But the fact is, that bores people. Bores them to shit, really. I’m a firm believer that a metaphor, a moment of abstract beauty, ought to be earned. And it’s earned by grabbing the reader’s attention.

And how do you get the reader’s attention? Conflict. Conflict in scenes, conflict in sentences. Conflict everywhere. And it needs to be effective conflict too. I think, personally, I had some good idea for scenes. But I didn’t make total use of them. There was a lot of missed opportunity for character growth. Just re-reading my word, I can tell how many times I re-used phrases. (his face tightened, his head hung low, his limbs felt limp). Yikes. I need to make my characters more expressive and distinctive. Plain and simple, they should feel unique. Their voices should read unique.

The Voice. This one's simple. My POV needs to be tighter. There are a lot of moments where I confuse third person limited with third-person omniscient which makes it seem like characters know more than they should. Just straight up, I need to commit to one or the other or to a proper artistic blend of the two.

Prose. It’s a hard thing admitting your prose is terrible. But there’s hope in that. For someone who understands his prose is terrible is someone with good taste. I trust my taste, not my writing. This one might be the hardest thing to master since it’s the thing that requires the most amount of time sunk into it. I'm talking years. Years to master language. Years to master long sentences, better metaphors, clever language. This all requires years or at least it will if I don't practice. And read. I definitely need to read more.

I need to read a lot, lot more.

The Plot and the Theme, what it’s all about. Finally, at the end of my critiques and at the biggest offender. I miss-used and missed opportunities of the genre tropes and genre deconstructions. There were better ways to show the villain, better ways to set up the suspense. Better ways to make a more compelling spiritual journey. I missed foreshadowing, I missed long, thoughtful soliloquies characters could have made. I condensed characters into plot devices (Sophie and Bartholomew).

The whole story was at both, contrived, and chaotic. And it shows. I ended up writing two different stories with two different narratives because of it.

So what’s the point of it all? I mean, shit. I guess as Astyanax would say, no point, really. But to me, admitting my mistakes will hopefully help me avoid them in the future.

It helped me think of some solutions and changes in planning, too. Things like:

No more pantsing. I’m plotting my next story, I want to see what it’ll look like with some proper structure, even if it kills the thrill of discovery that writing without a plan gives you. Might also make writing quicker to boot.

Character profiles. I wrote characters who I only knew a half about. I need to know everything. Every little detail. I’m writing character profiles to go along with my plotting.

Theme consistency. After my first rough draft of the plot, I’ll make a better effort to capture the theme or touchstone of the story. It’s important, now, for me to ask the question: What does this story mean to me?

Proper episode structure. My vision for the next novel, coming out next month or so, is something I figured after watching television for so long. I want to release proper episodes, that is, giant chunks of writing that come around 12-15k words long. This isn’t to say that the single chapters themselves will be that long (I still want to write in multiple POV’s). But I think, that if I plan my next novel with proper episodes, with the same sized episodes, weekly, that I’ll be able to structure scenes and therefore genres more successfully. This means writing more, but at least from now on when I do release my ‘episodes’, they’ll look like proper long-form serial fiction. Big, juicy chunks of writing that have satisfying structures.

That’s it. With that, I’ll end on an uplifting note. Thank you, the fans, for sticking through and for those of you who will continue to stick through. I’ve got 40 follows, which is amazing. I’ve got over 20k views, which is amazing. And I’ve got 11 reviews (with most of them being positive!) which is amazing.

Thank you, to all the readers. Even if you don’t follow or favorite or review, even if you’re just stealthily reading in the background, with my single tab amongst your other fifty filthy tabs full of hardcore doorknob porn.  

I still appreciate you reading my work. After all, what's art if no one pays attention to it? Masturbation, that’s what.

Alright. I’m done criticising myself. I need to start writing again.