Nick Cutter - Little Heaven

“You are poor representatives of our species,” Gardener went on. “I do not know how you came to be as such. A man cares not if the mad dog was once a good dog. He cares only that the dog has gone mad and that it must be dispatched.”

Dispatched. This was how Gardener had once viewed his bloody work. Dispassionately, as a mailman viewed his job. The mailman delivered letters into mailboxes. Gardener had once delivered men into coffins.

“You do us a grave disfavor,” said Horace mockingly.

Gardener opened his coat to show them the Mauser holstered on his right side. Horace Bilks angled his head to that same side, the cartilage cracking in his neck, eyes wolfishly set.

“Tell me, nigger,” Eldred said with casual venom, “do you stick up Texaco stations with that lump of pig iron? A-cause we ain’t no Texaco.”

“You joke to cover your fear,” Gardener said. “But I can smell it.”

Eldred’s pistol hand came up, pinning Gardener between the eyes. “I will kill you,” he said bluntly.

“Ah. But will you act honorably?” Gardener asked. “Shall you be sporting, as your forefathers were? The great men who first colonized these empty lands?”

“Wait, are you… are you challenging me to draw ?” Eldred barked laughter. “What year do you think this is, y’old fart?”

“How old-fashioned,” said Horace. “But you have to understand, my brother and me, we do everything together.”

“Including raping and mutilating women,” said Gardener.

“Oh hell yeah, especially that,” Horace said. “So what I’m saying is, you’d have to be faster than both Eldred ’n’ me.”

Gardener kept his peace.

“Okeydokey.” Horace cracked his knuckles, enjoying this game.

“You mowed your last blade of grass, jig,” said Eldred.

“Are you square with your creator?” Gardener asked them both. “I can give you some time to make that peace.”

“No need,” said Horace. “It’s you who’s gonna stop breathing.”

Gardener nodded evenly. “Shall we settle on a count of three?”

Eldred holstered his gun. The brothers stood side by side, fingers twitching near the butts of their pistols. The sweat shone on their foreheads like diamond dust.

Gardener’s right hand hovered over his Mauser…

…while his left slipped slyly through a vent on the opposite side of his coat for his hidden gun.

“Who will count?” Gardener said.

“You do the honors there, old man,” Eldred said. “Can you count that high?”

Gardener began. “One…”

He fired the Paterson twice. The slugs ripped through his coat and slammed into the brothers a split second apart. The men staggered and fell into each other, their skulls knocking together. Gardener unholstered the Mauser swiftly and emptied its clip, for he was lethal with either hand. One bullet tore Eldred Bilks’s jaw off, spinning it across the dirt. The man toppled and fell with his tongue hanging out of the fresh hole in his face, purple-rooted and unsettlingly long, like a skinned snake. His brother died with a little more dignity, but he died.

Gardener had used this trick in his old life. It wasn’t sporting, but then neither was dragging young girls down gravel roads by a trailer hitch.

It was this night—the night he’d killed the Bilks brothers—that Gardener mused upon as he sat in Clayton Suggs’s bar with a scorpion’s stinger buried in his hand. He had killed many men in his lifetime, both deserving and less so. The fact rested uneasily within him, yet he could do nothing to dislodge those acts from his past.

“There is a sect of monks who make an art of the act of self-flagellation.” Gardener squinted at Suggs, the venom and liquor blurring his sight. “Do you know this word, Mr. Suggs? Flagellation?”

Suggs swallowed with great effort. “I do not.”

Gardener poured himself another drink. He gripped the glass with his scorpioned hand this time, raising that hand to his mouth. The Deathstalker thrashed, pincers snapping. Gardener drank. His hand did not shake.

“They thrash themselves, yes?” he said. “Using short, many-tongued whips tipped with metal spurs. They walk the streets, uttering psalms and rending their flesh. The gutters run red with blood. It’s penance, Mr. Suggs. They do so to alleviate the stain of sin from their corporeal body, letting those sins escape through the flesh.”

“Your neck, man,” Suggs said queasily. “It is plainly bloated. I’m thinking it’ll make breathing a chore.”

“Penance is a very human need, Mr. Suggs. Yet I fear it is useless. A man does things in his life. Things he cannot repay or outrun. That man can spend the rest of his life paying and running, but he can never quite find the required distance. The toll is too high, because that man set it that way.”

Gardener reached over the bar and coiled his fingers around Suggs’s wrist. Suggs stared down at the man’s fingers, hard as obsidian, digging into him. It was all he could do not to cry out.

“Do you understand, Mr. Suggs? Do you share my view on this matter?”

When Gardener released him, Clayton Suggs fled the Glory. Gardener let him go. Perhaps he would run to the pharmacy and return with antivenom. But the sting of a scorpion wasn’t nearly enough to kill Gardener. There were some things, terrible things, that preferred to kill you slowly—over a lifetime, or perhaps even longer.

He wished Suggs had not left. He wanted to tell him of the dream he’d had just last night. It was the same one he had dreamed every night for the past fifteen years. He awoke each morning with his skin screaming as the terror fled from his veins.

In this dream, he saw the face of God. For this had been his wish—the deal he’d made with that thing that lurked in the black rock.

Show me the face of God.

And Gardener saw it. Every time he closed his goddamn eyes.

God’s face was vile. The first few times, Gardener had suspected trickery—the black thing invading his head and twisting his thoughts. But in time, his soul moved against this proposition. He had been granted his wish fairly. And now he had to live with it.

God’s face was that of an idiot. The moronic, drooling, palsied face of an enormous infant. A face covered in seeping boils and a-crawl with insects not to be found anywhere in nature. God’s eyes stared with malicious cruelty—and there was vast power in that gaze, yes, although it was witlessly applied. That gaze took aim at anyone, disregarding goodness or worth. It ruined people chaotically, without wisdom or just cause. This was the purest terror Gardener felt each time he shut his eyes: at the fact that the universe was lorded over by an infant of incalculable wrath and directionless evil who had not the slightest sense of right or wrong, guilt or innocence, or the hope of a better life.

And all of humanity worshipped that mindless, gibbering thing .

When he awoke this very morning, Gardener had found the scorpion sunning itself on the front steps of his home. As if it had been waiting for him. And Gardener had known, with a certainty that lived someplace outside his flesh, that his old friend was coming. With that, he understood that the days marking his existence could perhaps be counted on the fingers of two hands. Perhaps only one.

Pinching with his fingers, he finally released the scorpion’s stinger from his flesh.

“Go on, now,” he said to it, setting it on the floor. “You have had an eventful day.”