“Sal ‘Slugfoot’ Johnson Jr. left this world on November 12th, 2075 at the age of 53 in Cherokee, North Carolina. Despite his ongoing struggles with a foot injury, he retained his adventurous spirit until the very end and met an unfortunate fate while cave diving.

  “As a child, Sal told his parents that he wanted to be a park ranger when he grew up. Instead, he served his community as a police officer for over 25 years until he was medically retired. He was well known among other officers for his bravery in tough situations and his keen ability to deescalate.

  “Sal is survived by his brother, Alan Johnson and nephew, Jason. He will be missed by his family and friends. A pig-pickin’ will be held in his memory on November the 20th, 2075.”

  Chuck held out his phone and read the obituary to Woodrow and Bill Jones.

  That’s it? Woodrow thought, though he knew no obituary would ever be enough. A few sentences could never capture the spirit of a human being, but that never felt more apparent than when he was hearing the life of his friend summed up in a few seconds. Sal was so much more than most people would ever know — including his own family. They were right about one thing: he was fearless. Even with a foot that barely kept him up, he faced some of the nastiest creatures in the South and came out on top.

  But now he was gone, and Woodrow couldn’t help but feel like it was all his fault.

  Bill Jones’s living room was quiet. There was a piece missing, and it was clear they all felt it. But there was something else. Ever since they got back, Chuck had been off — even more off than the rest of them. He didn’t talk much. He would only speak when spoken to, and his replies were always short and had an edge to them. The three of them sat in the living room in silence for a moment, digesting the insufficient summary, and all the while, Chuck’s eyes darted between his two remaining hunting buddies.

  Finally, he let out what he was holding in.

  “Are you guys going to fucking tell me what was in that shit or not?” he blurted out. Woodrow and Bill Jones both knew what the shit in question was — he didn’t have to specify. Woodrow looked to Bill Jones, hoping he would give him an explanation.

  “Drugs. Strong drugs,” Bill Jones lied. “Amphetamines, mostly. I brought it alone in case of an emergency, gave it to Woody when he went into the cave by himself. That was five doses in that syringe, though. When the Buck shot it all up at once, I knew what was gonna happen.”

  Bill Jones said all of this with such coolness. If Woodrow didn’t know that it was all bullshit, he probably would’ve believed him.

  “I don’t believe that for a goddamn second,” Chuck said. “You think I don’t know what meth looks like?”

  “It wasn’t meth,” Bill Jones said. “It was a combination of—”

  “Are you going to tell me what that actually was or not?” Chuck cut him off. “Are you going to tell me what’s really going on here? When you told me you took somethin’ to fight that Wampus Cat, I thought you meant, like a supplement or somethin’. Not whatever that was.”

  “We’ve told you everything. Always have,” Woodrow said. Before today, that would’ve have been a lie. He glanced over at Bill Jones who didn’t meet his gaze.

  “So y’all are injecting meth now? And we just got our friend killed and your arms and legs broken so that y’all can try to avenge your father, a man who was killed damn near forty years ago?” Chuck asked.

  “You know it’s about more than just that,” Bill Jones retorted. “Do you like living under a wannabe god, Chuck? A man who writes our laws without asking us, does whatever the hell he wants… and is free to kill any one of us whenever he feels like it?”

  Chuck didn’t respond, but the anger didn’t leave his face.

  “I’m doing it for Pa, ‘course I am, but I’m not only doing it for him,” Woodrow said. “He ain’t the only one that’s been senselessly killed. Lord knows how many men Augustus has called up. And Lord knows what else he’s up to that we don’t even know about. Pa used to tell me about life before the war. Leaders were chosen by the people, and they weren’t above the law. We have a way to take these sons of bitches down a peg, and I’m gonna use it, even if it kills me.”

  Woodrow almost added I don’t got a whole lot else going on in my life anyway, but caught himself before it slipped out.

  A tinge of sadness found its way into Chuck’s angry eyes.

  “I don’t want it to kill you though, Woody. I didn’t want it to kill any of us, but it has now. I hope it’s worth it. I’ll see y’all at the funeral.

  Chuck grabbed his jacket and left without saying another word. Bill Jones hadn’t shown a hint of emotion throughout the ordeal, and didn’t look like cracking any time soon. As soon as Chuck slammed the front door, Bill Jones grabbed the remote and started to flip through shows on the TV.

  “Why didn’t you tell him what it really was?” Woodrow spoke over an episode of Bad Vibrations, a dramatization of Emperor Augustus and President Mickey’s mutual rise to power and eventual falling out that split America in two.

  “He wouldn’t understand. He doesn’t understand,” Bill Jones replied without looking away from the TV. “I probably wouldn’t have even told him about our plan at all if there was a way to hide that eye of yours away.”

  “He understands, I think. He just thinks it ain’t gonna work.”

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  “Which means he doesn’t understand. Not really. When I’m done with you, you’ll be a match for the Emperor and then some. He ain’t gonna know what hit him.”

  With that, Bill Jones looked at Woodrow and smiled. But it was a tense smile, and his eyes retained their cold stare.

  Bad Vibrations grew louder on the TV. It was at the scene where President Mickey and Emperor Augustus fight for the very first time, long before they rose to power. President Mickey touched Augustus’s legs and sent him to the ground, paralyzed. Footage from the War showed that he was capable of much, much more than that.

  “What about him?” Woodrow asked. He was trying to take everything one step at a time, but he knew that it was only natural that he go after the other god after he took care of the first.

  “I reckon he ain’t as bad as he looks,” Bill Jones said. Woodrow wasn’t sure he agreed. Sitting in his wheelchair, unable to move his limbs and only a Wampus eye to set him apart from other people, he didn’t the thought of someone like Mickey not being that bad felt a little crazy.

  “I think I need to lay down. It’s been a hell of a couple days,” Woodrow said. Bill Jones got up and wheeled Woodrow to the guest room and helped him slide onto the bed.

  “It’s a bitch not being able to walk,” Woodrow grunted through gritted teeth as he tried to find a comfortable way to lay. “Now I know how ol’ Slugfoot felt.”

  Bill Jones laughed. “Well don’t get used to it. Pretty soon there ain’t gonna be a creature on God’s green earth that’ll be able to hurt you like that.”

  Woodrow grunted again and Bill Jones left the room, closing the door behind him.

  The pain in his arms and legs nagged at him as he tried to take a nap, but it wasn’t the only thing keeping him awake. His stomach was in knots and there was a sinking feeling in his heart like he was falling off a cliff. It felt like the reality of the situation was really dawning on him for the first time. Sal was dead, and it was his fault; he was mutilating himself, and wouldn’t even look human soon enough; and at the end of it all, he was going to go head-to-head with someone — two people — with great, horrible powers. His heart fluttered weakly, then pounded vigorously, then fluttered again. He shut his eyes tightly and wriggled on top of the mattress, which suddenly felt itchy and riddled with lumps. His skin tingled all over and the Wampus eye throbbed in his skull. Suddenly, he wanted the damn thing out of his head. He wanted his old eye back. He wanted his friend back. But it was too late now. This was the path he chose, and now he had to walk it. He would either become a god or be killed by one, just like Pa.

  Woodrow shifted to the right until all he could think about was the pain ringing through his body. Then he finally fell asleep.

  It was a small funeral service on the old Johnson family farm, where Sal’s brother lived. They gathered in the middle of a pen where they used to house a dozen or so goats and where Sal was now going to be buried. Woodrow sat in his wheelchair in the middle of a row of black foldouts, with Bill Jones sitting to his right and Chuck sitting to his left. A few good nights of sleep seemed to do them all good. Woodrow was already starting to feel less stiff in his arms and legs, and his will to take on a god emperor was coming back in force. Chuck wasn’t acting half as ornery as he had been, too, which made him feel a lot better. Losing one friend was already bad enough.

  Bill Jones was the same old Bill Jones.

  Five old cops in their dark blue uniforms filled the rest of row, and one more stood in front of a whole roasted hog and doused it with a reddish sauce that he had in an unmarked squeeze bottle. It was a sunny day and unusually warm for the end of November. Someone could’ve mistaken the gathering for a family barbecue if it wasn’t for the dead man in a wooden box.

  Alan and Jason Johnson stood to one side of their kin’s casket and a preacher stood to the other. The preacher said some words in a slow southern drawl and the Johnson’s told touching stories about their beloved brother and uncle. Officers came up one by one and paid tributes of their own. Woodrow didn’t listen to any of it. He couldn’t stop staring at the box, thinking about the sorry state his friend was in when he found him in that pit, how he might’ve been able to save him if he just ran a little faster.

  Woodrow thought that he and the other boys would be asked to come up and say a few words too, but they weren’t. Once the last cop got through talking about his old partner, Alan looked at Woodrow for a moment, then looked away and said “Alright, enough of this sad shit. Sal wouldn’t want us to cry. He’d want us to get drunk of our asses. So let’s fuckin’ drink already!”

  Everyone looked to be in agreement that that’s what Slugfoot Sal would’ve wanted, so they stood up and each grabbed a glass filled to the brim with bourbon. Chuck grabbed two.

  “To ol’ Slugfoot, the craziest, best son of a bitch I ever met!” Jason raised his glass and said. Everyone clinked their glasses together and drained them of their contents. Chuck drank his first and then helped Woodrow with his. Alan powered on a big speaker and Ain’t Done Shootin’ by Dusty McGuthrie came pouring out. It was Sal’s favorite song.

  They tried to lock me up, tried to put me in the hole,

  But I ain’t done shootin’ til I say so…

  The music, the liquor, and the pig all did wonders to raise people’s spirits. With the formalities out of the way, the fun stories about Sal came out.

  A cop with a wrinkled bald head and a hard belly that stuck out past his toes recalled a time when he and Sal were on patrol and they pulled up next to a cocky young buck in a Mustang at a light. He bet Sal five bucks he wouldn’t race the kid, and you bet your ass Sal got his money, and damn near flipped the squad car over in the process.

  Alan told the tale of when they were boys: he was ten, so Sal must’ve been seven or eight. They were in the woods looking for bears, even though mama always told them not to, and they found one. He about shit himself and was ready to run away, but Sal pulled out a pack of crackers from his pocket and went up to feed the damn thing. The bear took the crackers and Sal pet the son of a bitch like it was a dog. He bragged about it to mama and earned a whoopin’ for both of them.

  “Oh man, he didn’t get any less crazy with age either,” Woodrow said, red-faced and laughing. “One time, we were all huntin’ and ran into a Snallygaster — a mean, flyin’ motherfucker. It was swoopin’ over our heads and we couldn’t hit the damn thing, but Sal knocked it in the head with his cane and whacked it over the head til it stopped botherin’ us.” Tears welled up in his eyes thinking about that day. “What a guy…”

  Woodrow was so engrossed in his own story that he didn’t realize that everyone else had gone silent and were looking at him like he belonged in a padded room. He was suddenly very happy that he decided to wear his eyepatch over his Wampus eye that day.

  “Yeah, maybe he shouldn’t have been getting wasted and shootin’ guns in the woods when he was fifty and could hardly walk,” Alan said coldly. “Looks like you shouldn’t be either, the way you look right now.”

  Woodrow wasn’t too drunk to take a hint — they all blamed him for Sal’s death, just like he blamed himself. He decided it’d be best if he and the boys got out of there sooner rather than later. Chuck took a few quick bites from the hog on his plate, Bill Jones placed his glass on the table while looking out into the woods, and the three of them left without saying their goodbyes.

  “They don’t get what we do, Woodrow,” Bill Jones said as he and Chuck loaded Woodrow into the bed of his truck. “But they will soon.”