I’m not quite there as I walk over to him, my boots splashing and sucking and slurping through the muddy water. I’m not quite whistling either, as I heft Nail onto my shoulder but there’s a tune somewhere in the back of my mind, going around like a broken top, wobbling and teetering. I think it’s one of Pandion’s but, ah fuck it, it’s so hard to tell.

           I step over mud pannes and skirt around the bones of something vaguely equine where they lie in a flattened circle of marsh grass. Ahead of me, the Barrow boy’s downed body twitches all over and starts to move. As I watch, he hauls himself up on his elbows and begins dragging himself through the muck of the swamp one frantic foot at time. His lower body trails behind him like a fat snake, legs limp and unresponsive, and he leaves a dark, spreading stain as he goes. I catch a whiff of it on the air as I casually close the distance. Blood and shit. The biological stench of ‘I’ve been hit.’ The olfactory red flag of an approaching kill. Fuck me, I think as I near, I wish I could remember the song in my head.

           I wade through one last soggy patch of ground and now there’s crimson in the stagnant water beneath my boots. A whole lot of it, floating there on the surface. I splash into it. Make it a point to kick up sprays of mud and gore and marsh water as I come to a stop above the boy’s laboring body. He tries one last desperate scramble to put some space between us by launching himself forward on his hands, but I rest a boot nicely on his upper back and that puts an end to that.

           We don’t say anything for a long moment but he’s not quiet either. Beneath my weight he pants and gasps- a landed fish hauled into the bottom of a boat.

           With Nail on my shoulder, I consider him. He’s absolutely filthy, dipped head to toe in fetid bog mud until I can’t even tell what the original color of his clothes were and somewhere in here he’s lost his boots to the swamp. The bullet has found a home deep in his lower back, right above his ass, and the wound gushes blood in seemingly inexhaustible pulses. I’ve hit his spine with that shot, or at least clipped it well enough that I might as well have shot both legs out from under him. Something in here is broken, some essential connection has been severed, and now half of him is ruined.

           He killed the Capra from behind, without giving her a chance to look him in the eyes one last time but I’m not him and I kick him over with a swift nudge to his ribs. It’s not that I haven’t slit a throat from behind before, it’s that this way clicks into the hole left by the Capra’s phantom pain and soothes an ache I don’t even notice until it’s gone. He stares up at me with wide eyes that are already going glassy from shock and blood loss. They are the whitest things in his face because his skin is also coated in dark gray mud and his hair’s spiky with clumps of it. Blood from a bitten tongue fills his mouth and dribbles down his chin.

           His lips move but nothing comes out right away.

           “Funny,” I tell him. “And you were so chatty before.”

           He tries again but chokes on the gore and mud in his mouth.

           I study him. I don’t know what I expected to feel here and now but the answer is not much. I suddenly want to smoke, need to smoke, but I’m out of twitch. Compared to the Ri and that day on the Crossroads, compared to the nameless three I’d shot down all those years ago, one after another after another, this, all of this, is less than nothing. It’s-

           “Smaller,” I say. “Dirtier. Pettier,” and then stop for a moment because I can almost recognize the song in my head. I chase it around for a bit without success and when I come back to the moment, the boy’s finally found the word he’s been trying to say for the last several minutes. It falls from his bubbling, clotting mouth and drops softly into the air between us.

           “Freak.”

           I raise an eyebrow at him. “Why’d you kill her?” I ask conversationally.

           “Other-fucker.” the boy breathes, his words all shuddery and mushy around the edges. He sucks in a lungful of air and fights for the words as I wait patiently for him to find them. “It’s us…against them…you…fuck…kill the ones…that bleed…burn those that…”

           “Don’t,” I finish for him. “Annhilist are you? All the way out here in that shit stain you call a village?”       

           He ignores my question. “Falseman,” he snarls and his teeth are all slimy with blood and spit. I nod at the word not because I care or even really acknowledge what he calls me but because I’m unsurprised to hear that word come out of his mouth.

           “You think you’re better than me?” I ask, lightly, easily, like we’re discussing the weather. “You think spilling some old Goat’s blood makes you the next Ix Alterus?” I grin a not quite grin but something that’s all edges and teeth. “The great Cleanser of Barrows, that you?”

           “They let them in…in ones ‘an twos,” the boy gasps. “An’ they take…root…like a hungry seed beneath…our feet…”

           Annihilist creed bullshit and the little rabbit isn’t even parroting it back to me correctly. I’m already bored and we are fast approaching the end of our conversation. The boy fights to draw breath in the mud beneath my foot. The marsh below him is soaked with the blood that leaks from the bullet hole in his back- like a punctured wineskin, he’s slowly deflating into nothingness. And he knows it too. He can feel it, because he starts squirming around in the muck and scum of the rotting swamp as if by flailing his upper body back and forth he can force the life back into the rest of him. Some bright knowledge settles behind his vapid eyes then and his gaze snaps back to my face as he opens his mouth and laughs. “Pandion’s Peace is dead,” he chokes, “it’s dead you goat fucking whoreson. It died with her the day the Goats cut off her fucking head and made a pattern out of her corpse! So why the fuck are you still here? How the fuck,” he screams, spraying blood and thrashing as he tries to rise on his elbows, “how the fuck can you kill me for killing one of them? A Goat! A fucking GOAT!”

           I take Nail down off my shoulder with an accompanying twinge of ghost pain in my back and arms.

           “Fuck you!” the boy rages. “Fuck you!” Tears sheet down his face, pouring from his fever-bright eyes, and his expression is so contorted with hate and rage that it’s twisted into an unrecognizable shape. “Us against them,” he snarls, raising a clenched fist into the air, dripping mud and filth. “Us against them! Us ag-”

           I lower Nail’s barrel until it’s touching his forehead and don’t even look as I pull the trigger. There’s a tiny flock of snow geese passing overhead and they are infinitely more interesting than the explosion of blood and skull and brain that erupts into the air when my finger closes gently. Their honking calls as they fly above are more than enough to drown out the quiet sigh of an ended life and I watch them as they ignore the marsh and fly straight on and away, into the gray rain, until they vanish from sight.

           Nail goes onto my back as I collect the corpse.

           I’ve been lucky so far: no bleeders or Lanterns or mire wyrms, but that doesn’t mean I continue to push things and I carry the boy’s body in my arms on the way out. Dragging warm meat for any distance over this ground will pull hungry, nameless things up from the deep.

(8/14/2016)