You’re minding your own business when he comes up to you, the way it happens to anyone. You sit on the floor, back against the wall, while you settle your stomach, settle your vision, your head feels hot this morning, never mind this chilly air. When you see him you shift as well as you can, it’s not easy with your crusted belly and thirty-two pounds of weight resting across your lap.
For a moment he only stares, the room is atrocious, plaster crumbled everywhere and wallpaper hanging in tatters, same as the hallways, the whole place looks like a mummy.
“I’d ask if you need help,” he says, “but I think I know how ridiculous that would sound.”
Your soul. He’ll want your soul, it’s as good as predestined. Even from across the room you can tell what he is, he’s wearing a ministerial collar, not Catholic though, Presbyterian maybe. He’s carrying an armful of blankets, it’s what his kind does, they find the homeless in their homes and bring them blankets for the coming winter, blankets with salvation, thanks, much earlier inhabitants of the region were brought blankets too, blankets with smallpox.
“I followed the blood upstairs. I don’t know what your story is … but son, I beg you to let me get you some help, I beg you not to do whatever it is you have on your mind.”
“Today’s Thursday,” you tell him. “You know why it’s called that, don’t you?”
No, no he doesn’t, you know it even before he opens his pale mouth to confirm it.
“Thor’s Day,” you explain, slowly. “The day they dedicated to the thunder god. The one with the hammer. How can you be a holy man if you don’t even know what’s holy? You’re as bad as the rest of them down there. No, worse — at least they don’t pretend to know much of anything.”
He’s asking if he can’t call for an ambulance, get you to the hospital, that’s a nasty-looking belly wound and maybe so but they take a long time to die from if you die at all, depends on how the rest of this morning goes.
“That’s—” He’s shaking, now why would that be, it’s not that cold. “That’s about the biggest rifle I’ve ever seen.”
He speaks the truth, across your lap rests a McMillan M-93 sniper rifle, each .50-caliber cartridge is nearly as long as your hand and each magazine holds twenty of them, it cost you every dollar you had in the bank and some you didn’t.
“You don’t know who I am, do you? You don’t even recognize me,” you say, then he tries to fool you, says sure, sure he does, the light was bad is all, but who’s he kidding, can’t trick the trickster. “That’s all right, nobody else does either. I’m used to it by now. Not that it matters today, right before.”
“Before…?” he wants to know.
“You really are in the dark, aren’t you? Doesn’t your god tell you anything?”
It’s the wrong thing to say, all the lead-in he needs, next thing you know you’re getting a sermon, for God so loved the world, well he doesn’t actually say it but you know that’s what’s going through his head, there’s a remarkable consistency to the sheep of the lord, and if anything knows sheep it’s wolves.
There’s a beauty in devastation that escapes the appreciation of most, they’re so attached to what has been they never think of what might be, never consider how a decomposing body can enrich a bed of roses, and that’s just the small picture. With the entire world become a graveyard there’s no telling what may grow in time, it’s the great potential that is Ragnarok, so rejoice you deaf, dumb, blind, and ravenous, a better world will sprout from your fat and clutching fingers.
“All of them down there?” you say, with a nod at the window, the street. “As a holy man you must be very disappointed in them.”
“No. Oh my, no.” The Presbyterian shakes his head, he’s even smiling a little. “They’ve given me good reason plenty of times. But then they turn around and delight me. And in between, there’s forgiveness to fall back on. I promise you, they
You snort at his desperate naivety. “If they only had longer teeth, they’d eat each other alive and sleep the rest of the time, they just don’t admit it. I’ve watched it for thousands of years and it never changes.”
For a moment he looks puzzled, still holding the blankets in his arms, he’s a befuddled emissary, and then you hear it, Fenris at last, the mighty howl whose pattern you figured out is trying again and this time you’re ready, it permeates the sky, it rolls through the streets.
“Hear that?” you ask. “I’ve waited for this forever.”
“It’s just the disaster siren, for heavy storms and such,” he says, he still looks befuddled and why not, he’s so desperate now he’ll say anything. “They’re all over town.”
You’ve never heard such nonsense in your life, you may be a trickster but that’s no reason for him to take you for a fool. Today isn’t the first day you’ve heard it, after all, sometimes you’d be off work and Fenris would howl, the sound seeming to come from everywhere and every dog in your neighborhood would join in because they all remembered, their instincts hadn’t dulled, their ancestral roots still ran true.
“It’s nothing to be afraid of,” the Presbyterian says, “the city tests it once a month or so—”
Fenris hangs at the peak of his first howl, he’s waiting for you, Loki unchained, the father of the wolf. You tilt the rifle up from your lap, you squeeze the trigger without aiming and it makes such thunder. One second the Presbyterian has two good arms and the next has only one, the other’s no longer there, you think it might’ve flown back out the doorway and into the hall. He sits down among the scattered blankets as though he’s been hit with a hammer and stares at his shoulder and empty space, it’s a good thing he had blankets since there’s blood enough for them all.
Fenris lets his voice fall, then it crests again, when you swing the rifle around to the window your stomach rips with pain and starts to bleed again. You rest the massive barrel across the windowsill, no trained sniper would ever reveal himself this way but at thirty-two pounds the rifle needs support and you have no need of escape anyway, the world will fall around you now.
You bolt a new cartridge into the chamber and peer through the scope, everything and everyone in your face again, they swarm like maggots on a corpse and are equally soft and hungry. You settle on the first, and five pounds of trigger pull later you’ve made thunder again, the recoil pushes back a couple of inches into your shoulder and you’ve taken the guts out of sacrifice one. The second loses her heart and lungs, now you’ve got the hang of it, you’ve got the rhythm and the roll, no different than practicing on milk jugs, and it’s time to get tricky, time to start
