The God Killers

by David Simpson

  Caiaphas grasped Florence’s shoulder and pushed her down hard onto her couch.

  She responded with horror to the treatment, but was unable to assemble a verbal response, other than a small cry of protest.

  “Caiaphas was not a bad man at all, Florence. You’ve been grossly misinformed. Shall I tell you the truth of the matter, my dear?” Caiaphas smiled and pulled his Luger, complete with silencer, out of his jacket pocket. Florence pressed back against the back of the couch, but she was now paralyzed with fear. “I shall take your silence as a yes. Caiaphas was a very good man indeed. He was God’s agent, and he did God’s will. How well do you really know the Bible, Florence? How often do you actually read it?”

  “I study it every day,” Florence replied, her voice choked into a tiny cry for the first time in many years.

  “Well, you have to study it harder. You have to learn how to read between the lines! Think about it. Do you really think a god—a true god—would ever allow Himself to be killed by creatures as pathetic and small as human beings?”

  Florence didn’t know how to reply. It was all too horrific.

  “Come on now, Florence. This is any easy one. Think! The answer is…NO! Of course he wouldn’t! Jesus wasn’t a god! He was nothing but a spoiled, ungrateful brat!”

  “Blasphemy!” Florence suddenly found the strength to shout.

  Caiaphas responded by shooting Florence in her kneecap, causing her to cry out in pain before sucking in an extremely long breath and clutching the wound.

  “I will tell you what is and what is not blasphemy, you bitch! Think about it!” Caiaphas said, pointing to his temple. “You consider Jesus to be a god? Your God? How can there be two gods? Oh wait...I know! The Christian story of God coming in three parts, right? How stupid can you be? That’s impossible!”

  Florence was now curled up on the couch, holding her knee, crying, and bleeding profusely. She wouldn’t be able to survive much longer with rapid blood loss like that.

  “Jesus came down from the heavens. That part is most certainly true. He was the offspring of the true God—that part is true too. But he didn’t like his place in the heavens. He watched his Father loved by the people of Earth, watched their souls nourish Him, and he became jealous. So Jesus thought to himself, I know! Since I’m an ungrateful asshole, I’ll send myself down into a human woman while my Father isn’t watching and I’ll become a man! I’ll make the people believe that I’m a god too and I’ll take their love away from my Father and feed myself on the souls of the people! And his plan worked, Florence, because humans are so stupid that they believed it. And when it started to happen, that’s when God took notice!” Caiaphas noticed that Florence didn’t seem to be moving any longer. He knew she couldn’t be dead already; it had to be shock. He shot her in her brittle hip to get her attention. “Are you listening to me, Florence? I’m getting to the important part here—the part about me! So anyway, God noticed that His souls were being siphoned away from Him and He realized that one of His ungrateful children was missing and He saw what was going on down on Earth. And He told his faithful agents—guys like Judas and me—that we need to do something about this...so we did.”

  Florence suddenly looked up. As much pain as she was in from her two gunshot wounds, Caiaphas’s claim to be the same man from the Bible was able to cut through the haze of pain and stun her. Could it be true?

  “Our Father told us to put a stop to Jesus’ nonsense once and for all, so that’s exactly what we did. We played everything out perfectly. Judas was the set-up man, and I hit it right out of the park. Pow! Crucifixion! You can’t do much better than that!” Caiaphas paused for a moment, as though he were enjoying a warm memory. “But then, those damn apostles, and Jesus’ mother, and his wife…they put their little spin on it. They made up the epic bullshit story about Jesus allowing himself to die and even coming back from the dead. The only part that was real about that whole pile of excrement was when he asked, ‘Father, why have you forsaken me?’ He screamed it over and over again while we watched him die.” Caiaphas looked down at Florence, who was looking up at him, despite the pain and despite the horror, in absolute awe. That made him smile all the more. “When he died and God got His hands on him in the afterlife, oh was Jesus sorry. Yet he had become more powerful, and, over the years, more and more people believed in him. It made him stronger, and stronger. Eventually, God worked out a compromise with him. That’s how they settled on this whole deal about them both being gods. I’m still amazed that you Christians bought it. How infinitely stupid is your species? Therein lies the answer.”

  “Why are you killing me?” Florence asked weakly.

  “Oh, my dear, don’t think of it like that.” He knelt beside her but made sure to keep his trousers away from the blood puddle that was forming on the carpet, running from the couch onto the floor. “I’m liberating you. You were told lies, and with your very small human mind, you believed them. Now your soul will be free. You can be one with the true God. Your soul will go to the right place.” Caiaphas smiled. It was important that Florence believed before he killed her. He wanted to send her big, juicy, stupid soul up to God as a gift, but that meant that it couldn’t be spoiled. “Do you believe in God, Florence?”

  “Yes!” she cried out with the pathetically small amount of strength that she had left.

  Caiaphas smiled. “Perfect!” he said as he stood to his feet and gleefully put a bullet through Florence’s skull.

  9

  Moments earlier, Natalie was pretty sure she could hear a man’s voice in the living room, speaking to her aunt. She supposed the police had arrived. She closed her eyes and put her head directly under the shower spray, letting the hot water soak her hair and rain down over her face; her goal was sensory deprivation. What was the use of remembering what was outside of the bathroom? It was better to be in there, in the little pocket of sanity, away from her aunt and away from the police and whatever it was that was happening to her.

  Suddenly, she thought she heard another noise. She pulled her head out from the shower spray and listened carefully. It sounded as if her aunt was upset and calling out in protest. She rolled her eyes. What else is new? Aunt Florence can’t even get along with the police. Why is she always so high strung? Why can’t she relax a little and be more like...me?

  At any rate, there was nothing she could do to escape the current situation. She was going to have to suck it up and head out and meet whatever it was head on. She told herself there was no real reason to worry. After all, she’d done nothing wrong. I’ll let them ask their questions, and I’ll tell them the truth. I don’t care whether they believe me or not.

  She turned off the shower and swept her long brown hair back so that it was out of her face, then gulped a long breath of air. When she wiped the water from her eyes, she thought she saw some silhouetted movement on the shower curtain. Had her aunt entered the room? I locked the door...didn’t I? She poked her head out of the curtain to see, and a little boy, no older than six, was looking back at her. Natalie’s first thought was to scream, and her heart jumped, but the boy looked up at her innocently with his brown eyes and appeared to mean her no harm. He was too young to be a pervert, but she couldn’t understand how he’d gotten into the bathroom? “Uh...hello. What are you doing here?” Natalie asked the boy.

  “I was sent here to visit,” the boy responded.

  “Sent? Who sent you? Does my auntie know you’re here?”

  “You’re auntie is going to die,” the boy replied, his tone perfectly innocent.

  Natalie froze as she absorbed his grim pronouncement. After a day filled with things that didn’t make sense, things that were macabre—that should have remained hidden in the dark, she suddenly realized that no matter what happened, she would not like the little intruder’s answers. “Wh-what are you?” Natalie asked, suddenly shivering behind the shower curtain, even though the room was still hot with steam.

  “I was sent here to visit you. You are my moth
er. You didn’t want me. Remember?”

  Natalie wished she didn’t know what the boy was referring to, but the truth was that she was instantly aware. She’d had an abortion when she was twenty years old, terminated the child that her lab partner had impregnated her with. He’d been there on a student visa and had to fly back home at the end of the semester, and the last thing she’d wanted was for him to stick around over some familial obligation to her or their baby. She hadn’t even liked the guy that much—she slept with him for fun. Florence was so rigid and religious—any chance Natalie could get to break out of that… “You’re...my baby.”

  “May I have a name, Mother?” the boy asked.

  Natalie didn’t know how to respond. The boy’s eyes remained sweet, but she knew something malevolent was at work behind them, and so she was on her guard. “Would you please pass me a towel, while I think it over? I want it to be just right.”

  “Yes, Mother.” The boy took the towel from the countertop and handed it to Natalie, who quickly began to dry herself.

  As she dried her face, the room suddenly went dark and became impossibly cold.

  “Mommy? The lights went out! I’m scared!” the boy called to her.

  “I doubt that,” Natalie replied, “but this is bad.”

  The room began to groan, as if the walls and floor were suddenly being compressed on all sides.

  “I’m scared, Mommy!” the boy screamed. Suddenly he reached through the shower curtain and took his mother’s hand. “Mommy, a bad lady is here!”

  The shower curtain was ripped away in an instant, and the lights came back on. Katie stood in front of the counter, soaking wet as always, her hair tangled in front of her jet-black eyes.

  Natalie screamed and ran to the door in a panic. She fumbled with the handle but eventually got it open. She was too afraid to look behind herself. She sprang into the hallway and toward the living room, where Caiaphas, Charlie, and the corpse of Florence were waiting for her.

  The little boy took her hand as she screamed, and Katie followed them into the living room, leaving wet footprints in her wake.

  “Ah, we’re all here now,” a smiling Caiaphas said to her. “What a great surprise we’re going to make for your friends.”

  10

  Cipher pulled the car to the curb outside of Natalie’s home and opened the door, but Han quickly reached over to stop him, clutching his jacket. “Wait!”

  “What?” Cipher asked, grimacing from the pain in his chest as Han’s maneuver raked the t-shirt across his burnt skin.

  “Look,” Han said as he pointed toward the platinum-colored Lamborghini that was parked opposite them.

  “We don’t have time to admire automobiles,” said Father Hurley from the back seat as he began to make his way out of the car.

  “No! Wait!” Han shouted. “That’s a Lamborghini Reventon.”

  “Oh shit,” Cipher responded when he realized Han was right.

  “What does that mean?” Father Hurley asked.

  “They only built twenty of those things. It’s the most expensive sports car in existence,” Cipher said in awe.

  “Well, that’s all very impressive boys, but we have more important matters to attend to at the moment then being impressed by some rich person’s toy!”

  “Don’t you get it?” Han said, grasping the priest now to keep him from exiting the car. “There are only twenty of those cars on the entire planet! Do you know how connected somebody’d have to be to get their hands on one of them?”

  Father Hurley suddenly understood. “Oh no. You’re saying—”

  “I’m saying someone is waiting for us in there, someone who’s as connected as it gets. He beat us here. It’s a trap,” Han asserted.

  There was a moment of silence as the realization sank in. Father Hurley was the first to speak. “There are no police cars, so they’re trying to keep this quiet, but it’s a sure bet that we’re being watched. What are we going to do?”

  “We should split up,” Han suggested.

  “What? Why? That sounds like a very bad idea,” Father Hurley replied.

  Han turned in his seat to face the old man, “Father, you may be the spiritual expert in this group, but kicking the shit out of ghosts and demons is our specialty. Trust us.”

  “You should take the car, Father,” began Cipher, looking at the frightened, yet kindly old eyes of the priest through the rearview mirror. “We need somebody to drive our getaway car. Drive around the block to the alleyway behind the house and make sure you don’t get blocked in by any cops or anyone else. You might be followed, so take this.” Cipher handed the priest his handgun.

  The father took the weapon and started at in his hands, as though it were the horrific black abyss itself. “If I have your gun, how will you protect yourself?”

  Han smiled. “We’ve got a lot more artillery in the trunk.”

  “So...what’s your plan then?” Father Hurley asked.

  “What do you think, Cipher?” Han asked.

  “I say we grab as many guns and ammo as we can carry and shoot the fuck outta the place.”

  “Fuck yeah,” Han assented.

  “Are you boys mad?” Father Hurley responded, aghast. “If you shoot up a house in broad daylight, even the police who aren’t controlled by God will be on top of you before you can get out!”

  “Not if we get out fast enough,” Han responded with a grin.

  “We don’t have much choice. We still have some daylight left, so any ghosts he has in there with him will be limited in their power and won’t be able to leave the house. It’s the only advantage we have.” Cipher said, trying to be reassuring.

  “Look, Father...” Han began; for once, his face actually displayed some semblance of sincerity. “We don’t know who’s in there. It could be Judas, it could be Caiaphas, it could be Pilate, for all we know. Whoever it is, the one thing we know for sure is that he’s going to be more powerful than any demon we’ve ever faced on Earth.”

  “We can’t just walk in there and try to keep it quiet. If we go in quietly, we come out even quieter—in a body bag. This is our only chance,” Cipher elaborated.

  “If you start shooting up the house, you might kill Natalie or her aunt—not that I’d mind terribly about the aunt,” the priest protested.

  “It’s a risk we have to take,” Han replied.

  “What? Boys, have you learned nothing about what it means to be good? You can’t just put people’s lives at risk!”

  “We’re out of options, Father. She better know how to duck,” said Han.

  “Let’s do this,” Cipher said as he began to exit the car. The other two men quickly joined him outside the vehicle. “As soon as we have the gear, get to the back of the house. If everything goes according to plan, we’ll see you in two minutes,” Cipher said to Father Hurley, who looked even paler than his collar. “And please don’t have another heart attack, Father. That’s the last thing we need. Just relax. All you’ve gotta do is drive.”

  “Yeah, Father. Have a little faith,” Han said with a mocking smile.

  The priest scowled in response as he got behind the wheel of the car.

  Han and Cipher each took a shotgun and put a handgun and ammo into each pocket. “How many rounds do you think we have?” Han asked his partner.

  Cipher quickly did some math in his head. “We’ve got twelve shells and half a dozen magazines with twelve rounds in each for the handguns.”

  “Let’s hope it’s enough.”

  Cipher grunted in agreement before closing the trunk and banging on it to signal that it was time for Father Hurley to go. Father Hurley looked at the two men one last time in his rearview mirror before pressing down on the accelerator and leaving them behind—leaving them in the hands of fate.

  11

  “Auntie!” Natalie screamed out in horror when she saw her aunt’s lifeless body, practically swimming in a lake of blood.

  “My dear,” Caiaphas began in his sultry voice, leaning d
ebonairly against the wall while gesturing leisurely with his Luger, “we’re expecting guests. You aren’t going to greet them au naturel, are you?”

  Natalie was still dripping and naked, but she clutched her towel in front of her. She took the opportunity Caiaphas afforded her to begin wrapping the towel around herself, trying her best to hide her private areas from his view as her hands shook.

  “Please, darling, don’t flatter yourself,” Caiaphas said in a bored tone. “My taste is a few leagues more refined than what you have to offer.”

  Natalie didn’t respond as she finished securing the towel; her whole body trembled as she looked around herself at the horror that surrounded her. Charlie Marlow stood in the center of the living room, leering at Natalie as phantom blood ran continuously from the wound on his head. He held his gun in his hand, ready to train it on his son as soon as he entered the house.

  Katie moved into the room as well, nearly brushing past Natalie as she did so, causing Natalie to jerk half a step away and against the wall. Katie wasn’t walking so much as phasing forward in abrupt, jerking movements; the uncanny nature of the movements made the horror even worse for Natalie, who was starting to lose her grip on reality.

  “Mommy, are you okay?” asked the little phantom boy. He nestled up next to Natalie’s arm, his ghostly touch like ice, and wrapped his dead fingers around her wrist.

  “Mommy?” Caiaphas nearly guffawed when he realized who the little phantom boy was. “I’m telling you,” he began, shaking his head while a huge, sadistic grin painted itself across his lips, “that God is a genius. What panache! He has such a poetic sensibility when it comes to the art of torment. Just think about it for a moment. Imagine a being so great that He not only keeps track of the individual souls He consumes, but He also understands the nuances of each individual’s pain and the connection of that pain to other souls. The concept is outstanding, a great web of pain that stretches out even beyond this mortal life and reaches through all of the planes of reality, connecting living and dead, and binding us together in misery.” Caiaphas took a moment and sighed as he looked upward, visualizing the web of pain and admiring its beauty in his mind’s eye. After a moment, he realized no one else in the room was as impressed with the web of pain as was he. “I suppose this isn’t the appropriate audience with whom I can share my admiration.”