I tried to stop that rock. I really did. Everything happened so quickly, though, and by the time I started to move my hand to block it from hitting Caleb, it had already taken a chunk out of the side of his head.

  For a second or two, Caleb stood there like nothing had happened while blood seeped into his hair. The whole thing couldn’t have lasted longer than a second or two, but every part of the memory is brighter, more detailed in my head, and it felt like it took twenty minutes for him to fall to his knees and then onto the ground. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. One second, my brother was there, walking, talking, a human being. Then suddenly he just… wasn’t. He stopped being.

  It’s fucked up to think about, but that was the moment I realized that I was starting to love my brother. Some part of me believed in a scenario where we kick Alec’s ass, I kick Mickey’s ass, and then Caleb and I ride off into the sunset, musing about what other brotherly adventures we might get into next. I should’ve known that there wasn’t going to be a happy ending to this.

  I stood in shock, looking at Caleb’s exposed, useless brain, and I damn near forgot that Alec was standing right behind me. Good thing Mickey didn’t. It seemed that he liked Caleb too, because he was pissed. He punched the air with both fists and sent a vibration wave at Alec before charging at him in a blur of homeless fury. He lashed out wildly, giving up all pretenses of proper punching form and just clawing at him like a rabid squirrel. Alec evaded every attack like they were hardly an inconvenience to him. He could turn into a cloud of dust and reform himself almost faster than I could see. He quickly got bored of this tiff and perched on top of a roof.

  I was still standing there doing nothing like a fucking idiot.

  “Come on, boys,” Alec said in his stupid fucking Foghorn Leghorn ass drawl. “There’s no way y’all are getting out of here alive. Nobody’s getting out of here alive but me, as a matter of fact. I’m gonna kill y’all just like I killed that boy right there.” He looked over at Caleb’s fresh corpse. “And then I’m gonna kill every other man, woman and child on this abomination of a planet.”

  “Why the fuck would you do that?” I replied. “You’re gonna kill everyone on the planet? That’s so fucking stupid! Holy shit. What are you gonna do after that? Sit on a throne and stare out at an empty fucking Earth?!” I was already pissed off beyond belief, but hearing his stupid-ass motive for all of this destruction sent me to a level of pissed-off-titude I didn’t know I was capable of achieving.

  Alec warped down from the rooftop and appeared directly in front of my face. “You really still don’t understand, do you?” He said. “I shouldn’t be surprised. You were not chosen. You stole the power of God and used it against him.” His eyes were dark but illuminated, like I was staring into death itself, and his face was unnaturally tight and angular, his chin coming down to an almost knife-like point. Looking at him face-to-face, man-to-man, all of the hubris I felt only a few minutes ago completely evaporated. The Reverend was not a marked man — he was a god. I had angered a god, and now I was going to face the consequences.

  “I thought you would’ve been able to hear Him at least, having come so far with your stolen gift. Haven’t you heard the voice of God, son?”

  The changes in his facial expressions were dramatic, shifting from extreme hate, to overwhelming pity, and then back to indignant rage all within the span of a sentence, and I felt each one in my soul. Moving my mouth and pushing air from my lungs felt like pulling a truck up a hill.

  “God? You mean the fucked-up voice in my head begging me to kill? That’s God to you?” I said through shuddering breaths. “We’re not blessed. We’re infected. And you’re fucking patient zero.”

  He backhanded me and I fell to the ground right next to Caleb. Mickey charged at him again, but he flicked his wrist without looking away from me and lifted the earth under Mickey’s feet, sending him flying over our heads. Alec shook his head, full of sorrow.

  “So you do hear Him, but you reject His calling. That’s much worse. You know, I wanted a partner in this at some point, Augustus. My son was going to be my prince, and cleanse this planet with me. But when you drank his elixir, he was inconsolable. We only had a small bottle left — barely a jigger — and so he settled for that. He was weak, couldn’t fight his way out of a wet paper bag, so I had to kill him. Now I have nobody. You are strong, Gus. I thought for a moment that maybe I could make you see reason, see what a den of sin this world has become and how we could fix it. But now I see that I was being foolish. I am His only cleanser. I am the Big Bang. I am The Flood, and you’ll be washed away with the rest of them.”

  He molded the earth into cuffs around my arms and legs and pulled me down. I lubed up my limbs with slime and slipped through. He sent a rock hurtling at my face. It was caught in a mask of sludge.

  “You’re so lonely that you wanted me to join you in bringing on the fucking end of days? Holy shit,” I said with a bitter cackle. Fuck this guy, seriously — what an asshole.

  “He is a forgiving God, and will forgive you if you repent now and —” Alec started.

  “But He has to kill everyone on Earth?!” I replied.

  “Humanity’s sin has grown too great, and now it must be —”

  “But isn’t He all powerful? Can’t he just get rid of it without brutally murdering everybody?”

  “It doesn’t work like that.”

  “Why?”

  “He has blessed us with free will, and so he can’t just —”

  “Free will that we are killed for using in a way He doesn’t like?”

  “Can you stop fucking interrupting me?”

  “It just doesn’t make sense that you think this is God’s work and not some fucked-up amoeba or something.”

  “A fucked-up amoeba? Seriously? That’s your theory? Wow. Everything thing you’ve been given — all this power — is from a ‘fucked up amoeba’? That’s the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard.”

  “At least I know amoebas are real, unlike God. I’ve seen them.”

  “Oh you have? You’ve seen an amoeba with your very own eyes?”

  “Well, I’ve seen pictures.”

  “I’ve seen pictures of God, and I’ve felt him inside of me.”

  “You’ve seen paintings, maybe, and you probably could’ve phrased that better.”

  ”HOLY FUCKING SHIT CAN YOU GUYS SHUT THE FUCK UP?!?”

  Mickey came out of nowhere and headbutted Alec square in the nose. Black blood came from his nostrils and he sucked it back up into his head.

  “You’re right,” he said. “There’s no sense in talkin’. I’m gonna love wipin’ you shitstains off of this planet.”

  He lifted his hand into the air, his palm facing down, and the ground below us went soft. Mickey phased through it with ease and found solid land, but I wasn’t so lucky. My feet were stuck in the sinking sand. Trying to pull myself out just made me sink faster. Mickey was trading blows with Alec, sending wild slashes of his hands and gnashes of his teeth, just trying to get good enough contact to pop him.

  I closed my eyes, tried to focus as my body was being swallowed by the Earth. I conjured a ball of sludge and shaped it as quickly as I could into a man. It tried to pull me out, but it was too weak — way too weak. My legs were completely submerged. I held my hand up and formed a hammer. It was solid in my hands, but not rigid. I extended it as long as I could, and curved the end into a hook shape. Swinging it down, I was only met with more soft sand. The shit was up to my belly button now. I turned and swung it again — more sand. The third time wasn’t the charm, either. It wasn’t working. Was this really how I was going to die?

  Of course not.

  I broke the hook apart and formed the sludge into a dozen tiny men, and sent them all after Alec. They were fast and swarmed him like gnats. He swatted at them, and Mickey took the opportunity to run over to me. After going blurry, he jumped into the sand, grabbed me, and suddenly all of the resistance I felt was gone. I was nearly weightless, moving through the sand like it was nothing, until he threw me onto solid ground and the weight of my body returned.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Could’ve done that from the beginning though.”

  He just grunted and turned back to Alec, who had obliterated my little guys. I stood up and donned a sludge suit, bracing for an onslaught, while Mickey sprinted towards him again, ready for round three. A shower of rocks flew at him and went right through his body. Surprisingly, it looked like a stalemate between the two of them. Neither could do any significant damage to each other. I couldn’t phase through solid objects, so that wouldn’t be the case for me. At first, I tried to help turn the tide in Mickey’s favor from afar, sending slime and sludge traps behind Alec, shooting booger bombs at his feet, but he saw them without looking down, and moved around them without issue. Seeing the speed of those two fighting made it clear that Alec would kick my ass in a hand-to-hand fight. I had to keep my distance, but nothing I was doing from a distance was helping.

  I skated closer to the fight, behind Mickey. Alec was pushing him back with floating fists made of solid rock. Mickey couldn’t do much besides dodge, dodge, dodge. He was being pushed back, closer to me. I whipped up a couple of hands of my own and caught the stone fists out of the air. My sludge fists slammed into the rocks, swallowed them, and they turned back into dust.

  Alec teleported away, into the middle of the neighborhood’s street. Seemed like he wanted to put some distance between us. He tore someone’s entire front yard up from the ground and compressed it down until it was roughly the size and shape of a tiger, or a cougar, I don’t fucking know. I was amazed by the speed and nimbleness of his sculpting. It all seemed to happen in an instant. Mickey attempted to close in on him, and I lobbed everything I could at him, but within five seconds he had ten big cats ready to pounce on our asses.

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  They were dense, rocky, and quick. Two at a time, they dashed from the street and into the grass. Naturally, we fucking obliterated them; Mickey took one out with a single poke to the head, and I blasted one back into rubble with a booger bomb. Easy fuckin peasy — except they just kept coming. Every time we would destroy one, two more were running towards us from the road, and Alec was nowhere to be seen.

  “Fuck, is he running away?” Mickey asked as he absentmindedly destroyed another cat with a slap to its cheek.

  “Not a chance. But we need to find him, quick. Who knows what bullshit he’s up to,” I replied while whacking a cat’s head off with a sludge hammer. “He’s got to be close by if he’s still sending these fuckers at us.”

  “I’ll check the neighborhood. You go into the woods,” Mickey said.

  “No. We need to stick together. Apart, we’re useless against him. Together, we actually might be able to whoop his ass.”

  “Fuck yeah. Smokey and the Bandit. Lead the way.”

  “I’m not a fucking car…”

  I didn’t feel like it was the right time to take that conversation any further, so I dropped it and skated towards the neighborhood, Mickey and twenty-five rocky cats following behind me. One of them nearly caught up to me, tried to take a chunk out of my calf, and Mickey whacked it on the head with his pole and sent a shower of rocks flying in every direction. They were some fast motherfuckers for sure, and I didn’t reckon I’d like feeling their fangs in my ass cheek, but we couldn’t focus on them right now. Alec was clearly preparing something big, and this was a man who was fighting the entire US military earlier today (maybe still is?) — anything big would be devastating.

  I looked into houses, blowing up doors as I skated by, but didn’t see him anywhere. Meanwhile, even more fucking cats came up behind us; there had to be at least forty. I didn’t know what in the world we were going to do about them once we stopped moving, but I was just taking shit one step at a time, blowing up the fronts of houses and coming up empty handed.

  “Wait,” said Mickey. He stopped and kicked his shoes off, revealing his gnarled, yellow toenails to the world. “Take care of these cats for me, will ya?”

  “What the fuck are you—”

  “No time to explain. Just give me a minute.”

  He walked into one of the destroyed front yards, and sixty cats all turned to him at once. He didn’t move.

  God dammit, Mickey.

  I stood in front of him and cast a sludge shell around the both of us, but there were too many of them. The cats sank their claws into the shell and quickly bore holes in it, just barely big enough to flatten their cat skeletons and slowly squeeze through. My hands were occupied mending the shell, so I sent a booger bomb at one particularly ornery rock cat. That was a bad idea. It killed the cat, but also blew a big fucking hole into the shell, and ten more cats clamored to get through it. Five more were making pretty good progress behind me.

  “Mickey, whatever you’re doing, hurry the fuck up.”

  “Shhhh,” he replied. His eyes were closed, and he looked positively zen. Holy shit did I wish I could’ve dropped that shell and smacked the shit out of him.

  I shot wads of sludge from my mouth and kicked them up with my feet to hold the cats back. Between that and mending the holes in the shell, I felt like I was rubbing my belly, patting my head, walking and chewing gum all at the same time. They were replenishing much faster than I was killing them. They had completely surrounded the shell, clawing and biting at every inch of the perimeter.

  “Alright, I’m done,” Mickey said nonchalantly. “Drop the shell.”

  I dropped it and it was like every fucking cat in the jungle had come to pay us a visit. The street was filled with the fuckers, and they spilled into peoples’ yards and between their houses. Mickey cracked his knuckles and put his hand on the road. The Earth began to shake violently and split apart and divide the street into two. I cemented my feet to the ground just to stay upright. A gulf opened up and swallowed any of the cats that were unlucky enough to be near it, and the rest fell over, knocked into each other from the force of the seismic event. The longer he held his hand to the ground, the higher it climbed the Richter scale. Car alarms went off. Houses started to collapse into themselves and fall into the abyss. The cats disintegrated one-by-one and created a massive cloud of dust that rose into the air.

  But even when they were gone, he didn’t stop.

  I thought he was going to split the goddamn planet in half if he kept it up — or at least break my legs. It was all I could do to stay upright. I could barely think, and I just wanted him to stop — the cats were fucking gone, after all. So I pointed a hand at him, about to sling some slime at his face, just enough to startle him, but he stopped before I had to make him stop. The world was stationary again, but the sensation of rocking back and forth lingered in my body. A silence fell over the neighborhood, but the sound of crashing houses and exploding cats still rang in my head.

  I turned to Mickey to ask him what the fuck was all that, but he held a finger up to stop me. He didn’t look at me; he just looked down the cracked street, waiting.

  A few seconds later, a geyser of dust shot through the abyss and took the form of Alec. Mickey smiled.

  “I could feel him squirmin’ around down there,” Mickey said. “Just needed some time to figure out where exactly the little fucker was.”

  Alec was pissed. Even from yards away, the look of vitriol on his face was clear as day. Massive bits and pieces of a golem shot out of the abyss behind him. A finger the size of my entire body shot up and landed on the rubble of a house, crushing the splintered pile down even farther. The lines on his face grew deeper as his hatred for us dug into his body.

  He wasn’t expecting that from Mickey, that’s for sure.

  I was beyond tired of seeing this man’s face. Every time I saw it, I saw Beth’s face; I saw Caleb’s face; I saw myself. He’d taken so much from me — damn near everything. He killed the two people I had ever come close to loving, and my humanity was dying along with them. And now he wanted to kill me too. I might’ve went ahead and let him if I wasn’t so damn stubborn. Sometimes, thinking about everything that’s happened makes me feel like dying wouldn’t be so bad. But looking at his face, I didn’t want to die. I wanted to kill.

  “Enough with the bullshit!” I roared. My voice echoed down the ruined street. “If you want to kill us, come fucking try!”

  “Yeah, quit hidin’ underground like a bitch!” Mickey added.

  “Yeah, you little bitch!” I concurred.

  The look on Alec’s face was fucking priceless. Pure shock and pure rage somehow combined into one expression. If he wasn’t a damn god, I’m pretty sure the vein on the side of his head would’ve popped like a pimple.

  He disappeared.

  I put my back to Mickey’s anticipating Alec’s appearance. He appeared right in front of my face, and I spat on him. I don’t know why that was my first instinct, but I hocked a loogie right on this fucker’s nose. Then, the rational part of my brain seized control of my body again, and I sent a sludge boot right at his nuts.

  All’s fair in love and war, right?

  He didn’t budge, but his left eye twitched ever so slightly, just enough to tell me that he felt it. He countered with a right hook to my face. I wasn’t nearly as fast as him, but good ol’ Freddie Kidd’s lessons had done their job. I saw him cocking that punch from a mile away, and dropped my shoulder to dodge the blow. A gust of wind travelled behind his fist and blew my hair around. He wound up a left hook, and I slipped to the right and buried a fist into his liver, right below his rib cage.

  And — holy shit — it actually knocked the wind out of him.

  Mickey came up behind him and grabbed his arm. He tried to pop him, but there was only a muted thump from inside Alec’s chest. He elbowed Mickey in the nose and sent him stumbling back. Blood flowed down to his chin.

  There wasn’t a scuff on Alec, but it was plain to see that our attacks were affecting him. He was clearly at more of an advantage at a distance, but his arrogance couldn’t ignore our shit-talking. Still, he was far from out of the fight.

  He teleported away again and rose into the air, above the trees. Dirt rose off the ground towards him. It collected against his body, creating layer after layer of dense sediment until he was cocooned in rock. He floated over us and something tore into my cheek. Tiny, barely visible shards shot down at us. I had gashes all over my face and shoulders by the time I got my sludge shell up. Mickey was a blur next to me, but still, a few were connecting with him. He took off running through the woods, and Alec followed him from above. There was a faint pitter-patter like rainfall that trailed Alec as he hovered over the woods. I followed behind.

  With the cover of trees, Mickey was able to phase past most of the shards that flew down, but not all of them. Occasionally, one would connect and a stream of red would fly off of his back. The rock-covered Alec loomed above us like a vengeful moon. I sprouted a dome of sludge to cover Mickey’s head, and Alec immediately teleported in front of Mickey, shards still shooting from his armor. Mickey was getting nicked left and right.

  “Get down!” I yelled.

  Mickey hit the deck and the shards embedded into my suit. I took inspiration from that finger-whip fucker, and formed a slime whip in my hand. It was so light, it barely felt like I was holding anything. I cracked it at Alec and took a slice out of the front of his armor. He looked down, looked back up at me, and teleported away.

  God damn that’s annoying.

  He took inspiration from me too, evidently, because a second later, a gang of rock-shaped men sprouted up in the trees. We were surrounded by them and they all closed in on us at once.

  They latched on to my arms and legs without a care in the world that they were sinking into my shell. Once they were through it, they dug their rough hands into my skin. I tried to shake them off, but they kept coming. I thought about the clayhounds, how relentless they were, how they wouldn’t stop coming. These were so much worse. But I was so much stronger. I slammed them into trees, crushed their heads against each other, tore their limbs off and tossed them over my back, until one latched on that was more solid than the others.

  Alec had sunk into my suit. He took off his rock armor to look me in the eyes. His nose was pressed against mine, and I could see every detail in his black eyes. They weren’t just voids — there was something there. Ripples, currents, bursts of activity, a network of pitch black veins coursing with energy.

  I opened my mouth and shot a stream of slime at his face. He didn’t care. He pushed right through it with his mouth open, and sunk his teeth into my neck. The sides of his hands became jagged obsidian blades, and he sawed into my shoulders, through my arms, until they barely dangled from my body. Hot blood filled the shell.

  I’m not too sure what happened next.

  I blinked. Then I was on the ground.

  Mickey and Alec fought. There was screaming.

  I blinked again and I was alone in the woods. Not where I was before.

  Everything faded to black and I went to sleep.

  I woke up in the middle of a fight. I didn’t know what I was doing; it was an out of body experience. The desire to kill was the only thing driving me forward. My arms were replaced with ten black, sticky tentacles that whipped at Alec in random, twitchy motions. I was screaming, I think, and a torrent of clear pus shot from my mouth, nose and eyes. Tiny black creatures crawled all over my body and jumped onto Alec when they saw the opportunity. They slid into his head from whatever hole was available and knocked him around from the inside. The lashing tentacles tore through his suit and left red streaks over his tattooed chest. We plowed through trees, houses, and cars like they were nothing as we pushed him back farther and farther. The tentacles wrapped around each other and formed into black claws, and I stuck them into his ribs.

  He tried to teleport away, but I could see him now, crumbling into a cloud of dust before he blew away. I wasn’t having any of that shit; I tensed my shoulders and we were encapsulated in a giant dome of slime. The dust cloud bumped against the slimy membrane, but it couldn’t permeate it. This was the world he and I lived in now. The old world around us was a distorted, blurry memory. He reconstituted himself and hurled a bunch of bullshit my way, but we both knew it was no use. I didn’t even bother to try and dodge them. I let him hit me — I didn’t fucking care. There was pure terror in his eyes when I got within arm’s reach.

  “You don’t want to do this,” he said. “You’ll become just like me, only worse. You won’t have a mind of your own anymore. You’ll be a killin’ machine, and that’s all you’ll ever be. Think about it before —”

  I grabbed his jaw and tore it off of his face. That shut him up quick. I tossed the lower half of his mouth to the side. Dirt collected around his face — a sketch of a new jaw — and I smacked that away too. I wrapped my sludgy, slimy fingers around his scalp, and twisted until his head separated from his shoulders and black blood spurted from his neck hole like fireworks.