I'd always thought having your life flash before your eyes was just an expression. Turns out, I was wrong. My earliest memory was from before I was old enough to speak, I'd been conscripted into the pioneer regiments alongside another forty-thousand-odd kids in my generation. We were going to terraform a planet and while some people dreamed of doing something like that, the reality wasn't half that romantic.
I'd known hard labor ever since I was old enough to swing a mattock. By the age of eight, I was clearing forest trails, building roads and railways. At twelve, I was given a rifle and sent to the untamed wilds to hunt ripper-cats and giga-toads for a holiday. I was assigned to a permanent garrison in the southern tundras at age fifteen but I spent more time camping out at work sites than I did sleeping in the bunk I hot-swapped with a half-dozen other kids.
I knew what would be coming next as the years flew before my very eyes. My time in the arctic. The doomed mission that had forever changed me. A ship had crashed. We had to go and do what we could. What we could do, it turned out, was die one after the other. The rest did what we had to in order to survive. I tried not to remember the scent of cooking meat or the bloated heavy sensation of it sitting in my frozen guts while radiation from the ship's damaged reactor fried our DNA. I tried not to remember the details. The starvation, cannibalism and being so ungodly cold that I spent every frozen second praying for something, anything else. I tried, and I utterly failed.
Yet there was one part of my time in the arctic that haunted me for entirely different reasons. In the brief gaps between days-long storms, I'd watch the southern lights dancing over the night sky. I recalled the shapes they made, the eerie allure they had and that inexplicably strange feeling that reached me through the gnawing permafrost that had settled into my bones. I remember hearing things I knew I didn't know, things about the flow of the cosmos and the ambient energy of all things. I relived hearing the stars groan a question that filled my mind.
"I wouldn't mind being warm again." I chattered through lips so frostbitten they were locked in a rictus scowl.
And then I was. My nerves felt like white-hot copper wires heating me up from the inside. It was like magic. That miracle kept me alive while the men and women I'd grown up with died all around me. I survived when by all rights I shouldn't have.
The rest of my short life, all seven-odd years after that impossible fact, passed in a blink. I got my walking papers, I wasn't a pioneer anymore. For a time, I was an animal in the wilds and I survived. A time later, I was a criminal in his element and I thrived. I had a small place all my own and I adorned my new cage with baubles and trinkets until it was well-gilded by my illegitimate wealth. I survived in comfort yet it never scratched the itch. Nothing I owned answered the question. What did I desire? Not stuff, not a life of painting houses with their deserving occupants. I wanted something more, and whatever that something was, I wouldn't find it here on my homeworld of Intatenrup.
Which brought me back to the present some 27 or so years from the day my life began.
I took on a job from someone outside my usual circles. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. A change of scenery to keep things interesting, keep me on my toes. I was a painter who made house calls but this time I was working out of town. It should have been just that. Nothing special.
My deader had a name but I never liked using names. He was paint to me. Paint, I was going to splatter across a wall or two. That was the job, only this time there were some strings attached. You see, this deader had a thing for kids and he'd had the poor luck of stealing from the wrong man— which is where I came in. Paint some walls, save some kids, get paid. That's what I'd thought going into this. A normal job for someone in my line of work if there ever was such a thing.
When people hear the word 'crazy' this was the guy they thought of. While I was doing my legwork ahead of time, everyone who knew him had the same things to say. 'He's a little off,' 'I try to avoid him,' 'He's creepy,' 'I don't know why but I don't feel safe around him.' The same story again and again; dozens of people all coming to the same conclusion.
This house was on the smaller end of my usual workspaces, a basement sublet in an upper-end arcology mid-rise neighborhood. It was a normal evening in suburbia save for the gun in my pocket and murder in my heart. Normal stopped at the door; furniture in shrink wrap, ferrocrete walls smashed and floor gouged in rutty symbols. Portraits hung at head height, painted in the familiar reds I often used but patterned so the portrait had depth; dried blood building the layers of the painting more than any change in color did. The overhead lights had been smashed and the wall-mounted emergency backups only had enough power to dimly illuminate the room through the gore glazing them. Needles and bottles littered the garbage scattered all around to the point where finding a silent path through the rubbish was almost impossible.
Then there was the muttering… Words half-choked and broken with new ones smashed into the gaps. It was a blend of the common tongue and what sounded like three others that shifted and rose and pivoted around the house in the worst kind of sibilant echo imaginable. It was a pleading, desperately wretched noise not unlike what I'd heard in the arctic years ago or in the shaded drug alleys for months afterwards. This was the voice of someone who needed something more than they needed life itself. It was a mocking echo of my own voice when I'd called out to those impossible cosmos while I loitered at the threshold of death.
My skin was crawling, the hairs on my arms capturing the house's charged atmosphere like a thousand tiny antennas. This space was a disgusting pervasion of the conductive warmth within me. The static charge clinging to me was a hateful mockery of the ionic blizzards that haunted my dreams. I'd rarely taken my painting job personally before but this place held an atmosphere of wrongness that battered against my very soul. My deader was still paint, but he wasn't just paint. He deserved what was coming for him, I could feel it in the air.
I drew a heavy four-shot revolver from my unassuming day clothes. The cartridges were right for the job, 20-gauge bismuth slow-shot. I had a spare load tucked in my pocket, more so for comfort than necessity. I only needed one shot, everything else was just to send a message. I moved slow, trying my best for quiet despite the litter of crushed glass, rubble and rubbish underfoot. This house seemed bigger than it had when I was studying the floor plan. I'd just walked past the second bathroom when there should have only been one, both decorated in mirrored sigils that sung out to me with sirens' songs of perverse delights.
The kitchen held a banquette table crowned with a trussed kid no older than five, throat slit to the bone without a drop of fresh blood in sight. I'd been quick about my pre-job legwork hoping it wasn't too late for the kids. This one looked like he'd been dead for weeks, there was a withered kind of dryness to him that shouldn't have been possible in the two days since his abduction.
I checked over my shoulders a dozen times, the infinite space stretched on into darkness behind me everywhere but the square room's five corners. The last door on the left drew me in, it was pulling me closer like a hatchet buried in my spine. I couldn't shake the impression that I'd been here before, done all this before. This twisted realm was profane and sickening but I wanted to see more of its horrors. I wanted to weigh these new horrors against my own and take their measure. To see what was beckoning me closer. To cross that point of no return into this strange and alien world I'd found myself creeping in.
I reached out a hand to open the door.
"She needs… Enter."
I stayed my hand. Had I been made? Did he know I was here? I cocked an ear and leveled my pistol at the door.
"Entry… Entry into something? I don't understand your words, my dark goddess!" He wailed to the stench of spilt bowels and fresh entrails.
So I wasn't made, he was still muttering in his unwords and the common tongue. Was he… praying? I opened the door enough to draw a bead on my man. The room's single window caught the city's ambient light along with a single overlapping ray of the twinned full moons. He was sitting on his knees, back to me, facing a living altar of the foulest sorts.
The girl was alive. The reason I was here. Not for a rescue, she was too far gone for that, but a mercy for her and justice for the wailing man who'd taken the knife to her over and over again. I squared my aim on the back of his neck and took in a half breath.
A voice whispered inches behind my ear.
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I quickly checked my shoulders for the whisper's source. I was alone in the impossibly dark hall. I let out my shaking breath, licking my lips as I collected myself. It was scat like this that made me want to take up smoking again. I'd eaten men and women froze half to death, yet I knew this place would stick with me when the work was done. The horrors I'd seen and the things I'd done were paltry deeds in a place such as this.
"Goddess, yes! My dark goddess." The wailing man cried. "Show me the meaning in the entrails of my offering!"
"More prey? More praying? Both? Command your loyal slave!" The wailing man raised a curved blade and brought it down on his altar's haunch. The girl didn't even whimper as the blood left her. I brought my trembling gun to bear a half-meter from the wailing man. His death was a sure thing.
I pulled the trigger, and for the first time since I'd started painting houses, I missed.
The wailing man had tilted and twisted his head aside at the last second, his torso hardly moving. The angle was impossible, his neck should have been broken and his spine twisted into paralysis but it wasn't. His face found mine down the length of a gun, his milky white eyes locked with my own and he smiled.
"You bear the mark of She."
I snatched the trigger again, aiming for his head in a near-panic but blowing craters out of his shoulder as he unnaturally dodged another point-blank shot.
"We are dark brothers, soon to be bonded in blood!"
Now his torso moved, spinning in place to line up with his face opposite his knees. How his guts weren't wrung from him escaped me as his knife flashed through the moonlight to lick his own wound. I dropped my aim and pulled the trigger again.
Flesh burst throughout the room in a meaty spray. The deader's hips finally flipped to the common reverse plane as the rest of his body, now facing me. If he noticed the bulk of his thigh missing, he didn't show it.
"Hey buddy! You're supposed to be dead!" I rarely spoke to my paint but the words slipped from me as something primal knotted my guts.
I pulled the trigger a fourth time, landing my mark high of center. Brain-smeared bone scattered across his altar of innocence and the wailing man toppled back to the floor— thankfully silent. I hadn't wanted to get paint on the girl but nobody's perfect. I popped my four-shooter's cylinder and fumbled half my fresh rounds to the ground from shaking fingers as I reloaded.
"…ill…me." The girl croaked.
She might have been a beauty when she grew up. Present circumstances aside, she was already a real looker. Long black hair, like silk in the moonlight. A slim build that was well on its way to womanly. A heart-shaped face that all the boys would have loved. Not the face then, the family would want a final look.
"Working on it, sweetheart." I plucked my ruby-dyed cartridges from the ground beside the twitching corpse and locked the cylinder. I aimed for low chest— heart and spine. "Sorry I took so long."
An arc of biting pain slashed up my calf, a full spread of pellets blasts a fist-sized hole in the wall next to the girl's chest. I sag to the ground, bore down by something unholy.
"We shall be united in her courts on the other side, Brother!" My deader bellows. Half his brains were splattered across the room and he didn't seem to much mind.
The half still in his skull looks like a writhing mass of shapeless things caught between death throes and ungodly regeneration. I spot a glint of metal in the dim light and then pain. The not-dead man has me down in the gore, one arm driving the knife in my shoulder deeper, his unnaturally bent knee pinning my gun arm. My arm is locked, but not my wrist.
"I'm an orphan Pal." I bend my wrist until I can feel the tendons creaking and pull the trigger. Pink mist paints a wall and the gun flies out of my hand, snapping my trigger finger along the way. The pinning leg goes limp.
Something like an icy nail spikes into my mind, driven in by a mental hammer blow right in my forehead. I could feel my skull blown wide open, both of my shoulders were mangled and everything below my ribs was a grey blur of chilling nothing.
My life flashed before my eyes in an impossibly real way. I had the strangest feeling of déjà vu when I reached this moment. I couldn't shake the impression that this had already happened, that my mind was going in circles and every time I reached this point the cycle began anew. I felt like I was dying and I always would be dying but never dead.
I felt a cold that kept growing with end.
All the warmth I had ever known eternally being drawn from that spike in my head. From blazing summers to winter bonfires to burning radiation, every notion of heat I'd ever had was robbed from me until only one remained. It was the wordless sensation of a candle's final flame defiantly lighting the darkness that failed to smother it. I was corpse cold, but by some miracle I wouldn't freeze.
I blinked my eyes clear. Not-dead was still on top of me. My head was splitting under his driving thumb, his other hand working the knife deeper into my failing flesh. His eyes lolled in euphoria, while mine struggled to find my gun. No good. Too far away… My eyes rolled back to his, exhausted. Not-dead was draining me twice as hard as the blood loss was. I was dying, but I sure as scat wasn't dead yet! His eyes came back around and met mine. Deep within them, as if by magic, I saw a fire.
Not-dead's eyes exploded into two steaming craters.
He rocked backward howling in agony, both hands clutching at empty steaming sockets while hot gooey gore splattered my face. I crawled for my pistol, my broken trigger finger flopping uselessly. He heard me moving and came back for the knife in my shoulder.
I snatched up my gun and put a spread through his reaching hand into his chest. The pellets beating him back just as well as any maul would have. While he was wailing on the ground I put the barrel in his mouth and gave him another— very nearly severing his neck.
"And stay dead." I growled.
If I'd had the energy in me, I would have worked over his skull some more with a boot, just to be sure. I didn't have the gas or the time. It took some doing but I got my disposable comlink out and dialed. My fixer picked up on the first ring.
"It's me. Job's done." I uttered, barely able to get the words out of me.
"Boss's kids?"
"No. Neither." I couldn't keep my voice from shaking.
"You sound rough. How'd it go?"
"Rough. Messy and rough. Get Stitches on the horn, I'll make my way there tonight."
"That bad?"
"Worse. Let boss know I'll be chatting him up when I can. Need a vacation."
"How long?"
"Might be forever, I'm thinking." The words felt like an admission of defeat but I was beyond caring.
"We'll be sad to see you go. I'll make the arrangements."
I snapped my comlink and stowed the pieces in the pocket I used to keep my smokes in. I'd have killed for a single cigarette right then, but that would have to wait. I put a hand on the knife lodged in my shoulder and gave it an experimental tug. It was buried deep, a good stab. My hand fell away from the hilt, settling on my empty gun. Eight shots wouldn't have gone unnoticed, I needed to beat feet. I tucked my pistol and stood.
"Kill me… Please." The girl pleaded, in little more than a whisper.
"I'm outta bullets."
"Please." She sobbed.
The moonlight had disappeared, lost to clouds and the omnipresent glow of an unsleeping city. The girl's wounds mingled with shadow and blood, vanishing then resurfacing as I teetered on my feet. Dangling intestines spooled out onto the dead pet I hadn't noticed before, her womanhood had been cut out with enough skill that she wouldn't be dead when someone came looking for the shots. She'd be dying and dying and dying but death was a long ways off— same as me. The room filled with the sound of my labored breathing, and the weak pulse of her exposed heart sac. Kinder this way.
"Okay." I whispered.
My hand went for the knife again, but I thought better of it. She'd tasted the blade's kiss too many times already. I wouldn't put her through that again. Not even as a heartless mercy. My hand floated to the throbbing mass in her open chest. I should have, but I wasn't man enough to take a teen's beating heart in my hand and crush it. I bowed my head.
"Sorry darling."
I lifted both hands to her throat and took her thin neck in my bloody fingers.
"It's okay." She whispered.
Her breath was a fresh breeze that cut through the foul stench of the room; it smelled like vanilla tea with mint. I steeled myself and raised my eyes. Then I squeezed.
I wished she would have closed her eyes, but she didn't. The girl was a fighter. She saw it through to the end, her emerald green eyes never wavering from mine. She would see her final embrace to the finish. What kind of man would I be if I couldn't do the same?
In her final moment, she did the unthinkable. She smiled at me. Her teeth were a thousand-watt beacon in that dark place. Her smiling face forever burned into my memory. Then, she was gone. The light faded and darkness reigned.
I held my misty eyes in check until her pulse had stilled in my grip. Once it did, I held back no more. All her light had left the room but it still wasn't dark enough to hide my falling tears. I embraced her as I clenched down on her throat longer than I needed to. I had to be thorough. I didn't want her to wake up and be back in this place all alone.
I broke from our embrace when I heard the sirens in the distance. The muscles in my hands were seized tighter than I'd thought possible. My manic strength deserted me. I was one man too slow and too weak to save a couple of kids from a monster. I closed her dead eyes and headed for the exit.
Job finished, I made my escape, just another criminal slinking into the shadows.