Jack

Chapter Thirteen: There Comes an End to All Things

Jack, desolate and cold, sank into himself and relived a memory that he had repressed for eleven years. He could recall every bitter detail, every terrible word spoken--but then, he could do this with anything he remembered.  

His eyes closed and he slept, with the shaman watching as the bloody waters of the past folded over him. In his mind, the sky was a cool, midnight blue and a fire sparked and crackled before his eyes. The very air he breathed seemed tinged with violet. Sitting at the fire was his father, the prophet of the dead. 

Jack and his father had been living alone in the desert for many years. They had passed through deserted villages, avoided populated ones and slaughtered the entirety of those that they could not avoid. Throughout that time, Jack had grown much in body and mind. The attunement of his Tether had strengthened within him, and his father had taught him many things.  

On this particular night, the father and son were toasting their victory at having slaughtered Jack's largest village yet. Freed them from the living realm. Saved them from their living flesh. Sent them on to paradise. 

The blood was strong within them; having fed heavily, they were bright-faced and cheery, celebrating their duty and the joys of living to kill. 

"Well, son," his father said, "I have to congratulate your ruthlessness today. You moved and killed quickly. You spared none, fought well and as a matter of fact left me very little work!" He chuckled, teeth flashing in the firelight. "It's always nice to take a break once in a while. My gun arm was feeling a little tired, don't ya know." Jack smiled thinly at the man. 

He still saw the woman in rags clutching her children as bullets filled their bodies. Those bullets came from him, were delivered by his hand. 

He still saw the old man struggling to turn and run, terror like an aura about him, as the hand of death smote him into the desert dust. He heard the screams of people around him, and he had known that he was untouchable. Those bullets came from him, sent from hell to man. To woman, child and newborn. To pilgrims ready to move on. 

Across the months and years, he had learned to suppress and twist his recollections, to take the sting of remorse and turn it to righteousness. He did what he was called to do. 

Ashes flung themselves from the campfire into the abyss of the night air, fizzling out and falling, lifeless, onto the ground. Jack's eyes followed their brief arc into nothing, admiring their careless abandon. His feet danced lightly against the cracked earth, the tips of his boots dusty and caked with clay.  

His father was leaning back against his bedroll with a beer in hand - taken from the village they had left only hours before - and a hum coming from his lips, set into a state of grim contentment with the deed having been done. Jack still wondered at how a man could kill so many and never flinch at his past actions. Perhaps he would be granted such a blessing when he had been taking lives for long enough. 

He knew that what they were doing was intended to be for good; they freed the living from their mortal bonds and were responsible for their passage into a bright beyond.  

Still, even after all Jack was and what he had gone through at the hands of his parents, he regretted the killing. His childhood loomed before him every time he saw a corpse: that blackened pile of bodies in his hometown, flushed from life in a mass execution mandated by those they were soon to join. Fingers and dead bandits were nothing compared to the slaughter of innocents.  

Jack slapped himself hard across the face and shook the thoughts away. Such feelings were for the weak, which he neither was nor would let himself become. The way of the kill laughs at weak knees and regret, he knew, and he had surely heard the words before.