Saint of Killers - Man of the Century

Unrelated stories that take place in a setting besides Star Wars...

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Gonzo Bodhisattva
Posts: 2657
Joined: Tue Feb 18, 2003 1:32 pm
Location: Hiding under my desk

Saint of Killers - Man of the Century

Post by xfiend1013 »

His Throne. Like everything else, His.

God. The bastard. Him. The biggest Tyrant the universe could imagine. It's always His way, no matter what.

Not today.

When I got there all the Angels in Heaven didn't want me to sit on that Throne. His Throne. They flew before me like a flock of doves across the plains, a slaughterhouse mess of feathers and flesh, a tangle of swords and sunlight and Powers that Be.

Didn't matter none. I had my guns. The Walker Revolvers. They never run out of bullets. They never miss. Each shot is fatal.

They were forged in the last fire in Hell from the sword of the Angel of Death.

They killed the Devil himself. He was an Angel once.

Like them.

It ain't no different. If you can kill an angel in Hell you can kill an angel in Heaven.

Feathers fly, blood in the sunlight, they fall and they fall - they have so far to go when they go down.

But they stack up through creation. I walk on them, the beautiful dead. They can't keep me from that throne.

HE is elsewhere. He is downstairs, in the world. Hunting Genesis. Hunting Custer.

And I'm up here in a blaze of gunfire and now there aren't any Angels.

Just me, and the Throne.

Oh but He's back. Doesn't want me to have that Throne.

"You." he says. All-knowing Omnipotence, there.

"Me."

"You... slaughtered the heavenly host?"

All the things He's seen and done, all the things He's let happen and made happen, all the shit that happens in this Universe He runs, and this shocks Him.

"Fools got in my way. You got this comin', boy. More'n anyone else, you got this comin."

"Your wife and child?" He asks. He did it. He knows. He knew what it would turn me into. He knew it would send me to Hell.

Yet here we are.

"Them. Them and the hell that you made of this world."

He's got the Wrath alright. Goes from white light of loving Spirit to the towering colossus that killed all those people for some tiny shit-hole wrong He thought they done.

"You do not hear me, Saint of Killers! This world is my creation to do with as I please! AND IT IS GIVEN UNTO NONE TO JUDGE ME, TO STAND AGAINST ME!"

But I got the gun. I point it at Him.

I don't say a thing.

"Please, don't." He says. He goes back to looking like a man.

"You don't know what it was like, to be the creator in the time before the creation. There had to be a world. It had to be the way it was. Men had to choose to love me."

"I was alone. I wanted to be loved."

He hangs his head. All the things down there and this is what He can't handle.

He ain't fit.

I pull the trigger. I end Him.

I sit on the Throne. It's my throne now.

I can rest. I've got peace. People can do what they want.

The Saint of Killers don't give a damn.
Gonzo Bodhisattva
Posts: 2657
Joined: Tue Feb 18, 2003 1:32 pm
Location: Hiding under my desk

Put Down My Bible

Post by xfiend1013 »

Afore all that, though, before I killed Him, before I was the Saint of Killers, before He had me killed, before I froze Hell over.

Afore all that I was a man. There was a time when I was a good man, when I had a family, a wife and a child and love.

He took that away. All of it.

But afore I was even a good man, I was a man all the same.

The men under my command thought me too ruthless, even in the seas of blood they called a Civil War, it was too much for them who didn't have the stomach.

But there were things I wouldn't do. Depths too low, things done not out of necessity. I always told myself it was necessary.

The Glanton Gang ain't like that. Or maybe they are. Maybe even scalp hunters think they've got their reasons.

They've spread to the winds now, but the worst of the lot came here. Judge Holden.

Too close. He ain't right. I aimed to fix him.

I put down my bible that morning, and I picked up my rifle.

I left it open. Luke 22:33. And when they came to the place Gol'Gotha, which is called The Skull, there they crucified him, and the criminals, one on the right and one on the left

I tracked them into the plains.

Years ago when I first came this way after the war, there had been buffalo, brown herds, a grazing sea.

Now the sun was low over the mounds of bone, the white dunes, ribs and skulls rolled into hills, legs and horns jutted out like dead cacti long dry. The sky had spilled orange across the stars, and blood on the horizon.

Dead buffalo stripped clean. I could hear gnawing deep in the mounds, rats. The grass would not grow here. Footpaths were eaten into the dust.

I stopped, looked down at the footprints. Small. Children.

Children disappeared when he came to town.

My rifle was loaded. The small bones crunched beneath my feet.

As the sun dropped below the rows of bones I came to a campfire. Strips of torn rags fluttered on three sagging ribs. Gingham. Patterns. Pink and white. A small button. The dress of a little girl.

Blood in the dust, between these hills of bone. They'd pulled four bison skulls up close to the fire, used them as chairs.

Only enough food and supplies for three men, though. Only three sets of bootprints in the dust. She'd gotten a chair, by the fire, and now there was nothing left but the torn rags and the blood.

I took their guns, I took their food, and I followed their tracks.

I'd seen the Judge, in Fort Griffin. Seen him dance naked on top of the walls as the meteors came down. He was a huge, alabaster albino, larger than any man I'd seen, not a hair on his body, not even a hint of an eyebrow.

He'd danced like some shaved bear, and we'd all been afraid. The children had gone missing the next day. I'd left. I'd seen things too awful, blamed them on the Judge, though truth be told I didn't know if it was him or not.

I found three horses, grazing on the scraps of grass that sprouted from the vacant eye sockets of the bison.

Three shots. They weren't going to leave. I broke the guns apart, burned the powder and threw the shot into the mounds. I held their food over their fire and poured their water on the ground. I used a latrine shovel to bury the embers and I waited in the dark atop one of those massive mounds, I lay prostrate on the dead, and I waited.

The sun came back first, I could see men standing on each side of the camp near the dead horses.

No, they didn't stand. They were tied to poles of bone, rawhide choked around their necks, twin rivers of blood from where eyes used to be.

One was still alive.

I looked for the Judge. I didn't see him. I didn't see anyone. Not rats, not the dogs, not vultures.

I went down between the hills of skulls to the two men tied to poles of bone. It was all strapped together with rawhide, constricting as the sun came over the mounds.

Their eyelids had been cut off.

"I saw him once outside an outhouse." I said to the man who still breathed. Blood dried down his face but no flies were in the air.

"d... did you... see what was inside?" The man stammered. He choked.

"Where is he? Where's the girl?" I asked.

"you.. you don't un-un-understand. I saw wh-what was in-in-inside the outhouse." The man said, and his throat collapsed. Air hissed warm and the blood trickled up at his burnt lips.

"So it seems that we meet again though I had not known you the first time."

The Judge was behind me. Naked, as white as the hills of bone, he'd been able to hide.

I pulled my rifle up. I aimed true.

"Where's the girl?" I shouted.

"She loved God, you know. So she welcomed death." He stepped closer, too fast, I pulled the trigger.

Bright red spray out his back, the only color on his skin, the only thing on the bones, the white sunlight bleached the dust except where the sanguine streams of the Judge spattered the long dead bison, poured on the ground.

He sat down.

"In Fort Griffin I danced naked with whores while the sky rained fire. You were there when I said I would never die. You were there in the crowd." He said. He didn't make a face. Blood streamed down his front now, pooling between the smooth white legs.

"I reckon you're wrong." I said.

"Man fights against his nature." The Judge said. "But it's his nature that makes him fight. We are war. When we dance, we dance the dance of horror, of bloodshed, of violence. It is all we know. You are the last of the true."

I shot him again, in the head, and I left his corpse there amongst the others.
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