by Chris Miller
He was moving to his knees as the fancy gun of times yet to come was rising into the air in his hands as though in a dream. His knees splashed in the mud a second before he fired the weapon for the first time and knew in a whole new way what Mr. James had meant about the kick and the sound.
His hearing was utterly obliterated, only the faintest and highest-pitched hum rang in his ears now, and nothing whatever penetrated it. The gun bucked in his hand as though it had been hit with a mallet, the licking flame erupting from the end of the barrel let him know it was recoil from the monstrous round he’d just fired at the men in front of the church.
As he went down to his belly in the muck, his eyes fell on the glinting piece of metal on the breast of one of the men, the man who was even then twisting and grasping at his chest as a geyser of blood squirted under high pressure and arced into the air, chunks of red pulp whipping away into the air in front and behind the man. His face was a rictus of surprise and pain and horror and bewilderment. And the glinting metal on his chest continued to glimmer in the gray light and Denarius finally registered what it was as his hearing continued to be annihilated from the booming roar of Mr. James’s Magnum.
It was a Sheriff’s badge. Or a deputy’s. Either way, he’d just shot a lawman in a strange town he’d never been before and probably shouldn’t be in anyway. From the looks of the gaping and vomiting wound in the man’s chest, he’d just succeeded in killing the man, even if the man wasn’t quite yet aware of it.
“Oh, my Jesuuuuusss!” Denarius screamed as he splashed fully prone to the ground and he felt the wind of a half-dozen rounds zip over his head.
He began to roll toward the church, glancing up to see Mr. James throwing Mike to the ground in a wet splash before returning fire himself from behind the corner. One of his rounds ripped through the thigh of one of the remaining men. Denarius assumed them to be deputies, as well—as he saw them sporting metal badges on their breasts not unlike that of their fallen companion. Blood jetted from the man’s leg and he went to a knee, but managed to stay upright, still firing. The man Denarius had shot was on his back and coughing a shower of blood into the raining sky, his movements slowing.
Denarius rolled under the church and took aim once more, about to fire, when a new sound finally penetrated his hearing.
“Don’t move a goddamn muscle!” a man’s voice growled.
Denarius turned to see two more men, these in the alleyway behind Mr. James. One of them, a large man with a thick beard, was holding a double-barrel shotgun to the back of James’s head, baring his teeth through the thick thatch of fur on his face.
Denarius’s jaw went slack again. The big bearded man too had a badge on his breast, but this one was larger and more prominent than the ones the other men bore. The man he’d shot must have been a deputy like the others.
This man was the Sheriff.
“Hell of a way to come into town, you two!” the Sheriff said in a growl. Without turning his head from James, he addressed Denarius. “That’s right, black boy! I see you under the temple! Get your ass out here right quick and keep your goddamned hands where I can see them!
Denarius took several moments before crawling out, Mike’s face looking at him frightened from the mud, but not unsympathetic, James’s hard gaze telling him to do what these men said.
He rose to his feet next to the church, hands in the air, several weapons trained on him. From inside the church, he could hear the wailing cries of his family.
17
They were had for the moment, and James knew it. He could wait, bide his time, and strike when the moment was right, but it wasn’t now and he knew it, not with a pair of twelve-gauge bores nestled at the base of his neck.
He lay his revolvers on a barrel at the corner of the building he’d been using for cover, not wanting them to fall into the mud and get muck in the mechanisms. Then his hands came up to either side of his head, cool as ice and not a tremble one in them. He could hear the cries from inside the church, could see the torment on Denarius’s face, the tears which seemed to cut through the rain and make themselves known there.
He thought of Joanna, so far away from him and yet so terribly close in his heart. He’d come so far, through so many places and times and worlds. Was this it? A backwoods Sheriff getting the drop on him before he even got to the marker and dispatched the evil from the area?
No, his mind growled. This isn’t it. Not yet.
James turned slowly, his hands high and steady, and faced the Sheriff. He was a large man, a face full of whiskers and burst capillaries high in his cheeks and nose. The scent of whiskey told James where the rosy spots had come from. The man liked to drink.
“The Proprietor ain’t gonna be none too pleased with the likes of you coming into our town and shootin’ up the place,” the Sheriff said, an ever-present snarl around a few brown stumps which might have been the relics of teeth. “I do believe you’ve made one hell of a mistake, mister!”
James said nothing.
The Sheriff inched closer, his eyes narrowing in anger. James could sense Denarius being led into the alley by the other two men from the front of the church, one of them limping and gasping.
Good, he thought. I hope it fucking hurts.
“You picked the wrong town, mister,” the Sheriff was going on, an insufferable monologue that no one was paying much attention to aside from the Sheriff himself. “If you only knew what—”
“Shut the fuck up, fat man,” James said as flatly as he might tell a stranger good morning. “I’m here because I know what’s here. And I come to send it back to Hell.”
The Sheriff’s features transformed into a rictus of surprise. Gone were the menacing, brown-stumped snarl and the narrowed, icy eyes. Now his eyes seemed too wide, his mouth circling into an oh. The barrels of the shotgun drew back an inch.
“The hell you—” the Sheriff began, but something behind him cut him off.
James saw it before any of the others. Though these men must have seen it before, perhaps many times, they all fell silent in a sort of reverent fear. Denarius was the most shaken, however, as he’d never beheld anything of the sort, James reckoned. His jaw seemed more slack than before and his eyes so wide they threatened to pop out of his sockets and dangle comically about his cheeks.
“Silence,” came a deep and inhuman voice layered in harmonies and octaves. “Bring these two to the jail. The scout and the injured man will stay in the temple to guard the Elder’s prize.”
It turned to the wide-eyed Sheriff. “I believe you and this man have much to discuss. I want to know everything.”
The Sheriff looked back and forth between James and the thing, his gelatinous under chin wobbling beneath his whiskers.
“B-but, sir, he’s—”
The thing held up a razor-tipped stalk or tentacle, silencing the Sheriff. The large, red eye above the two which had been those of its once human host blinked in the rain.
“I have spoken,” the thing said, moving slowly through the muck, its human host’s body floating as the dozen tentacles or stalks skittered through the mud, protruding from the corpse’s back. The mouth was full of jagged shards of teeth and the chest was a razor-toothed cavity which dripped slime. The limp genitals quivered and shook as the thing moved closer and finally stopped five feet from them.
James saw Denarius’s trembling form collapse to his knees and heard him say, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, what is it?”
His whisper was not acknowledged.
The thing leaned its host’s body closer, the dead eyes beneath the red one looking in opposite directions without a trace of life within them, the blinking, smacking red one above full of life, excitement, and malice.
“I am The Proprietor,” the thing spoke through the ragged, open chest. “N’yea’thuul will be pleased to have one such as you to savor. But first . . . ”
The thing brought a sharp tentacle to James’s face and stroked it down his cheek. He could feel the skin split and wa
rm blood begin to ooze onto his flesh.
“We must find out what you know.”
The abomination began to laugh.
18
Seven years. Seven long years. That was how long James had been here, from the time he stumbled into the town of Duncan on the Chisolm Trail until this moment. He was here. Finally here. In Dust. The place one of the Elders had its emissary building an army while it slept in banishment. The place it awaited its calling forth to bring the final destruction.
The place James Dee had come through the cosmos to end it.
But they’d gotten the drop on him. In all his travels through time and space, no one—no thing—had ever gotten the drop on him. It was his own fault, he reckoned. Allowing Denarius to come along had been what’d done it. He was fond of the man, had begun to bond with him. Allowed the icy edges of his heart to thaw ever so slightly. Had James not been concerned with the welfare of his new friend, he’d have likely made it into the church and destroyed the marker and then the town without issue. Only he had been concerned for Denarius. Denarius, whose wife and child had been taken unbeknownst to him and brought here of all places as food for the gods or as a host for its minions. The incalculable odds of the coincidence were staggering, though it was a coincidence, of that he was sure. There could have been no cause for anyone or anything in this town to have known he was coming, to have known he was so close. No way they could have known about his chance encounter with Denarius and the men who aimed to chop the man up and sell his parts for profit.
No. There was no way. No possible way. And yet, all of these things had conspired together, leading to James Dee, The God Hunter, being caught unawares and unprepared. Snuck up on from behind. Something which had never happened.
He wanted to slap Denarius. Hell, wanted to slip back to the moment he’d met the man and merely watch from afar as the sick men had done what they liked with him. To not intervene. The coldness he’d developed since his time in the void, after he’d banished the first thing—the one which had nearly killed him and his friends when they were kids and had come back twenty-six years later—was what had guided him through the universe and through time to the right places and had kept him on task, never wavering, never hesitating. Cold efficiency. Get in. Kill the gods. Move on. The rest be damned.
You have a pure heart . . . but you’re not a good man. Perhaps you were once.
Perhaps. But what had Miss Dupree really known about him? More than he might have guessed, he’d gleaned that much from her, but she didn’t know him. Didn’t know what he’d faced, what demons had haunted him, both real and metaphorical. There was love in James Dee’s heart. A great deal of it, actually. Love for his daughter. For the woman who was the mother of his child. For his friend, the one he’d charged with watching over his child and her mother both in those final moments before he’d entered into the void and on to his mission which had spanned nearly two decades, seven of which were here searching out this damned elusive town. Yes, he’d been decent once, though plenty imperfect. It was the hunting which had destroyed that decency inside of him. The need for cold precision. When you hunted the gods, you didn’t have time for friends. You didn’t have time to do the decent thing. The greater good was at stake, and killing the gods could be the only goal. Secondary goals got in the way, got you killed.
He looked at Denarius again, not without pity.
Case in point, he thought.
The man’s face was haggard and defeated. It was streaked with tears as they sat in the cell at the Sheriff’s office while rain pattered away outside and ran through the roof in streams which were collected in a half-dozen metal pots about the building. Denarius was a good man. James had known it the instant he’d seen the man running through the woods, trying to get away from his pursuers. James had met a great plenty of decent folks in his travels since the void and what the Others had told him of the cosmos. Yet in no cases before had he deviated from his singular goal of finding and killing the gods of destruction to help a fellow person, be they human or some fantastic high creature from whatever world he’d been at the time. Not once had he helped. So why had he helped Denarius? Why had he risked everything after seven long years to help a man he’d never known?
You have a pure heart, but . . .
But. That was the problem. Her words had not left him since she’d spoken them to him. It was something he supposed he’d already known about himself, but had never taken the time to examine or dwell on. Since she’d spoken those words to him, he’d been able to think of little else.
Subconsciously, perhaps, he had been trying to prove her wrong. Prove to her and the world and to himself that she was wrong. He was a good man, both willing and able to do the right thing. Wasn’t that the crux of his entire mission in life now? Doing the right thing? Sending these cursed gods into the oblivion beyond the void for good?
But he knew even as he thought these things that it wasn’t enough. The world—the universe—was full of right things to do. Not just one thing. And he’d let himself become so singularly focused on the greater good, he’d forgotten all about the lesser good, the latter carrying as much dignity as the former.
“M-my family,” Denarius was muttering to no one as weak sobs escaped his lips. “A man gots to protect his family . . . ”
James leaned out, his thoughts of greater and lesser good, of pure hearts and decent souls swirling in his mind, and lay a hand on Denarius’s knee. He gave it a squeeze and Denarius flinched, his eyes blinking and darting around a moment before falling on James, as though he’d forgotten he was there.
James nodded and smiled through his grimace.
“They’re going to be okay,” James said. “These men can’t stop us. Just remember that and you follow my lead.”
Denarius looked at him confused, his lips quivering and skin trembling. His head began to shake and his mouth opened on silent words.
“Trust, me, Denarius,” James said, giving his knee another squeeze. “Do you trust me, my friend?”
Then clarity seemed to cut through the fog of Denarius’s grief like a razor-sharp knife, and his eyes cleared. The trembling skin and quivering lips stilled, and the tears seemed to abate. He began to nod almost imperceptibly.
“Yes, suh, Mr. James,” he said in a low croak. “I do indeed.”
James nodded and tried out a smile of encouragement. He wasn’t sure it was the right one, but Denarius seemed satisfied with it, and James leaned back against the wall of the cell and stared out at the Sheriff and his men, and the abomination called the Proprietor. They were all on the other side of the room, consorting amongst themselves quietly.
James could be patient. He’d learned it in all his years of travel and hunting the gods. You had to be patient to do what he did. All he had to do was wait for the right moment. These men, these creatures, none of them knew who he was. None of them knew all he was capable of. Of the magic he possessed. And what was more, he would have free reign of it here. He could slip through time and space with ease in this town, this damned town. Damned from its inception and because of the evil which permeated every square inch of its landscape.
Atrocities had been committed here. Were still being committed here. And while that was a bad thing, something that went against the pureness of James Dee’s heart, it was also a good thing. Evil made things thin. And for a bad man with a pure heart, that was oh, so very good.
James smiled.
19
Mr. Bonham crept through an empty building which may once have been a general store, but was now nothing more than a patinaed carcass in a dying town. He slinked past mostly empty shelves, past a forgotten sack of grain, its corner split open and the rotting remnants within little more than a pool of dust on the floor. A mostly empty barrel of oil stood near one window, its lip sitting several inches above the sill behind it.
Mr. Bonham smiled at this. Things always seemed to fall into place for him. It didn’t much matter what the situation was. Once, when
lawmen had been chasing him through a cornfield up north, he’d been in dire need of a weapon. Of something to fight the men off. A gun would have been nice, but he had no delusions of coming across one amongst the fallen husks. But he had needed something.
And while he had not found a gun amongst the husks, he had found the broken spoke of a carriage wheel, its tip nice and jaggedly sharp. Once that sharp tip had emerged from the lower spine of one of the lawmen—dripping great slops of black blood—he did get a gun. The rest had been easy.
Then there was the time he’d needed to quietly leave the Kansas town he’d been haunting for some time. And haunting was a more fitting word than most would realize. He’d been operating there for months, spying out winos and whores and the little sons and daughters of whores. Anyone he considered excrement. Mr. Bonham had no use for excrement, and he was not a live and let live kind of man. Not at all. Excrement was to be disposed of. If you saw it on your lawn or on the street, it needed to be cast out and away. If it got on your boot, it was to be wiped off.
No, excrement could not be allowed to perch on the streets. Not where he walked, anyway. He’d find them in the night, take them to his secluded place beneath the horse barn on the edge of town where he’d made his lair, and there he would dispose of them with patience and great pleasure, often shitting on the pile of body parts and slushy organs before hauling it all out to the pig pens a quarter of a mile out of town where all evidence of his work was devoured in four minutes flat.
Yet, the town Marshal had become a bit overly suspicious, so after feeding his bits to the pigs, he’d decided to get scarce before more lawmen came sniffing around. He’d made it only two miles out of town when once more, things had gone his way.
