One Last One

Help me, Cage had begged on the phone. As if I was the Church. As if I could spare him from anything. As if I’d want to.

“Sit.” I gestured with the gun. My voice snapped off of the cinderblocks, echoed through the open door and down the empty corridor, growing more distorted as it traveled. Eerie, the way things come back on you.

The seat in the room I’d walked him into was an old high-backed dentist’s chair, the leather cracked, the fabric beneath the leather ragged and filthy. Cage sat. A puff of dust rose around him, and he coughed.

“C’mon, Benny.” His eyes were wild, the sclera red with dust and panic and lack of sleep. His voice was high, nervous. “What’s going on, man? You don’t need a gun.”

I lifted an eyebrow.

“Seriously, bro. I came to you for help, I’m not about to hurt you. These fuckers are chasing me, like I told you—”

“Mm.” I didn’t tell him that I’d hired the fuckers in question. Or why. That wasn’t important. Only that he’d finally caved in. Finally come to me. Finally sat where I wanted him. The past, echoing forward. “Take a breath.”

"I thought you'd be harder to kill."

Elie's gun hard against the short man's head, through the tight braids to press against the skull. His finger in the trigger guard. Four and a half pounds on a five pound pull. Ready. But not ready, not yet. Why does he alway talk? But he always talks. "I thought you'd be harder to kill."

"I thought you'd be better at finding me." The short man, Melton, is smiling, Elie can hear it.

The little ceramic skulls at the ends of the braids tinkle and click against each other as Melton laughs. It's unnerving.

"Shut up." Elie grinds the business end of the Beretta against Melton's skull.

The man snorts. "Shut me up."

This is new. Elie's had people cry, beg, yell at him. He's had them get mad. Promise him money, drugs. information. But this? This is new.

"No one's going to find your body," he tells Melton.

"Okay."

Around them, the night. The sounds of the river, and the city on the other side. Elie sees neon across the water. Not neon, now. Probably LEDs or whatever. Elie's getting old.

"That's not what I'm paid for. You're a problem, Melton. And my job is to make problems disappear."

"Cool."

"Don't you want to know why? Who?"

"My knees hurt. Woulda worn jeans if I knew I was gonna be kneeling in the gravel. So if you just want to finish the job?"

Would Elie himself be this relaxed when his time came? Not a chance. He'd spent his teen years fighting for every inch of turf, every breath. His twenties fighting for every dollar. Not a chance in hell he'd go out having a conversation. If he had a gun he'd shoot the guy. If he had a knife he'd stab him. If he didn't have anything he'd scratch and claw and chew his way through the guy's throat. Not just kneel there.

"How are you not afraid?" The pressure of the gun against Melton's skull slackens, just a little. This is when the guy would make his move. When Elie could pull the trigger. He'd have to.

"Why bother?" Melton laughs again. "I got my shit squared away, brother. My kid's college is paid for, his momma knows not to come looking. Just do it."

Just do it.

The adrenaline ran out of Elie. Fatigue set in. He'd been chasing Melton for weeks. Hardly any sleep, just the pills to get up and the booze to come back down. Constant reporting back to the guy who'd hired him. The fear that if he failed, he'd be next on the list.

Elie's hand starts shaking. The pistol shivers against Melton's braids, setting the skulls rattling again.

"Let's get this done," Melton says. "Someone's gonna come along. You don't want to get caught. And my knees."

Elie pulls the gun back. The skulls tinkle again. "I could let you go."

"You could."

"I could." The shot cracks out. Melton falls wordless into the gravel. He doesn't make much of a sound. Whatever he'd done and whoever he'd done it to, at the end of the day he wasn't a very big guy. "I could."

---

Challenge piece from https://www.reddit.com/r/SimplePrompts/

"Tell me more about this God of Soup."

Schluurp, Hallowed be His Name, is generally thought to be a benevolent deity. He's worshipped primarily in the common houses, where huge pots simmer throughout the day and a man with a trencher can get thick broth and some sort of meat for a few coppers.

Like all deities, however, Schluurp (HbHN) has a darker side. "Soup needs meat," are His Words, and in places where farmers fear to tread, his priests with their flensing knives lurk in the shadows, waiting. For what, no one but the initiated truly know, but one might imagine how the speculation spreads when a drunkard fails to make it home, or a man with no home disappears.

Still and all, His pots do provide; most men make it home with full warm bellies, and if they don't think too much about what they're eating, they are happy for His sustenance.

Hell is a Pie You Cannot Eat

Miss Sullivan around the corner bakes the best damned pies in this whole damned town. I swear, the smells are what heaven must be like. Apple, cherry, blueberry? Meringues, don't get me started. Key Lime. Coconut cream. She's got a pecan apple crumb would make you cry.

You can't eat them, of course.

Sure, They'll parade you past her house. Give her a wave, that sweet old lady, and she waves right back, and tips you a big old smile on top of it. Twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, whenever you walk on by, Miss Sullivan is forever setting her pies on the windowsill and waving out at you.

Even if that smile is a little forced.

Even if she doesn't wear oven mitts.

She'll wave you on over, smile fit to eat you up, but They hustle you past. You have places to go. Things to remember.

Sometimes you wonder what she put in her pies, back home.

But you're pretty sure you know.

------

This one wasn't a challenge per se, but someone on /r/writing said you can't make Miss Sullivan and her piemaking interesting, so...

A Clergyman, a Thief, Not Listening and an Escape

“You can’t steal a priest, Eric.”
“Explain Father Coglin, then.”
I opened the trunk. The bundle of rags inside twitched and Mare screamed a little.
“That’s kidnapping!”
“He’s no kid. Ninety-five if he’s a day. Practically a veg. Much more like stealing.”
“What are you gonna do with a priest, Eric?”
“I was thinking lawn ornament.” I closed the trunk. Gently. Father C was an old damn man, he deserved a little respeto.
“Jesus.”
“Not hardly.” I opened her door. "The things he knows..."
"I'm gonna be an accessory. To kidnapping." She looked back toward the trunk, but got in. "If we're lucky enough to get arrested."
"Petty theft at best." I closed the door behind her.
"Serious talk, baby," Mare said when I got in. "Why?"
"Father C used to be Jimmy Castiglione's confessor, back before the stroke."
"Jimmy--"
"The same."
"Oh, Eric," she said, all serious and big-eyed, with a hitch in her voice. "This is going to make things so much worse."
"Are you kidding? This is my way out. He calls off the dogs. I drop off Father C."
"It doesn't work like that, sweetie," she said. "You forget where we met?" As if. Mare had been tending bar for Sonny G. I'd had one Stella and paid with my heart. She was still just as beautiful.
"I know. But he's gonna kill me, Mare. I gotta try something."
"Not this, though."
Maybe she was right. Too late now, though. I'd already made the call.

--------
First fictioning in a while! This was a 250-word Flash challenge over on reddit's /r/writing subreddit. We had to include the things in the title.

The Door to the Winterlands

"We were twelve," I tell Dishes. His parents named him Richard, and he went by Rich to most people, but to me he'd been Dishes since we'd gone through every one of his mother's good Corelle dinner plates that October night. Neither of us believing the crossbow actually worked.

Dishes unzips the long gym bag with a sound like the end of my world. "Tell you the truth, I thought I'd find the Door a lot sooner." He drops a scabbarded sword on my desk. The sword clangs in a very real fashion against the wood, and I look past his lean, hungry frame through my glass wall into the cube farm. No one turned to look. Yet.

"Jesus. This is my job, Dishes. How I feed my kids. You trying to get me fired?"

"You're not hearing me," Dishes says. He comes to the edge of the desk I'm standing behind. Fixes me with his watery blue eyes. "I found the Door."

The Sad, Strange Ghosthood of Benjamin Bray

In a gray and lifeless office in a gray and lifeless town, a gray and lifeless man haunts the gray and lifeless corridors; his name is Benjamin Bray, and although he likes the taste of flan and believes strongly in hydration, he nonetheless believes he is dead.

Winner, Winner

Win a place among the worlds' first commerical time travlers, the email said, busted words and all. No entry fee!

The mail had been routed to my spam folder; there was no way it was anything other than a half-pound of horseshit. But I was tripping balls, and this was the funniest thing I'd seen in a month. I gave them a throwaway email address as a goof.

Even the followup mail that came to the throwaway a couple of weeks later, that was just a goof too. You know how it goes. I gave bullshit "information", didn't give my bank accounts or anything identifiable (I'm not stupid)... but I wanted to play them for everything I could, you know? Maybe I'd get a good /r/spammerbait out of it.

So we went back and forth for a while, and I was getting all sorts of funny stuff. Just a goof.

Until the guy in the suit shows up at my house.

A Goddess All Made of Words

Once upon a time there was a goddess in the shape of a girl, who danced barefoot in moonlight while the words of the worlds swirled around her and through her. From sunset to sunrise she would dance, and when her dancing was done and her hair and her body were limp with her sweat, the words would be scribed upon her skin, black lines on pale skin, all the words in all the worlds traced fine as spider silk upon her, and each day the words would fade in the sun only to be redrawn by the light of the next moon.

Chasing Time

They sold us the time machine with promises that we would see the dead again. We bought the vision, and we bought the machines. They got very, very rich. But they never told us the real price we'd pay.