Messiahs by Matt Rogers (bookstand for reading txt) 📕

away from the closest streetlights, which did nothing to illuminate the stretch of sidewalk they occupied. Dark silhouettes against a dark backdrop of trimmed hedges. If they spoke, Mickey would hear, but if the gangster turned around, he wouldn’t see anything.

Slater hadn’t yet responded, so King mustered the nerve to hiss ‘What?’ under his breath.

Slater stared off to Mickey’s right, where Bay Street followed the shoreline, twisting into the gloom. He gestured with his chin.

King studied the darkness.

A man stepped out of it on Mickey’s side of the street.

Well, barely a man. The kid couldn’t have been more than a couple of years out of his teens, at best, and he carried himself with all the anxiety of youth. It’s hard for twenty-somethings to keep their intentions off their faces, and this guy was no outlier. He blinked a dozen times as he closed the gap, both hands stuffed in his pockets, his eyes darting in every conceivable direction with less than half a second’s pause between each look. Mickey didn’t notice, because Mickey was blind drunk. Drunker than King and Slater anticipated, because if he had a semblance of his wits about him he would have noticed the angry young man making a beeline for him along the promenade.

When Mickey finally sensed movement out of the corner of his eye, he turned.

The kid was practically on top of him by then.

Mickey saw the flowing brown hair, the pale skin, the strong cheekbones, the thin lips, and probably figured the kid was eighteen or nineteen.

He started with, ‘The fuck you doing—?’

He didn’t get any further.

One of the kid’s hands came out of his pocket grasping a switchblade with white knuckles and he thrust it all the way to the hilt into Mickey’s stomach.

Mickey looked down at the knife’s handle, smacked his lips together, and looked back up at the kid. ‘Shit.’

The kid’s eyes were wide as saucers, fearing the worst.

Fearing that Mickey was invincible.

His words slurred, Mickey mumbled, ‘What’s that for?’

‘F-f-from Mother Libertas.’

‘What?’

The kid made to let go of the knife and run.

Mickey grabbed the boy’s wrist with an iron grip and kept it on the handle of the blade lodged in his gut. ‘Stay right here, kid. You ain’t goin’ nowhere. You committed to this, son. Best tell me what the fuck you’re talkin’ about.’

‘You tried to take Dylan’s throne,’ the kid stammered. ‘Dylan was funding us. You cut off our cash flow.’

‘Oh,’ Mickey grumbled. He let go of the boy’s wrist, who backed away. Mickey turned back to the balustrade, now using it to keep himself standing. Blood ran down his legs and into his shoes. ‘You know what? Fuck Dylan Walcott, and fuck you, kid. I didn’t kill him. You got it all wrong.’

Across the street, King and Slater were frozen.

Mickey looked down at his shirt, now coated crimson. Slater hadn’t seen the knife fall, which meant it was still wedged in his abdominal wall.

Mickey said, ‘Guess right and wrong doesn’t fuckin’ matter anymore.’

He pitched forward and toppled over the railing.

Hit the beachrock and slid limply into one of the foamy crevasses between them.

The boy stared down with saucers for eyes, separated from reality by a profound sense of detachment. Had he really just done that?

Wind blew off the ocean, whipping his face. It felt incredible. Everything did. His dopamine receptors were firing.

He heard the slightest sound behind him.

Chalked it up as another figment of his imagination.

Then a very real, very deep voice said in his ear, ‘Looks like you lost your knife.’

8

The boy tried to run.

King caught him by the wrist and spun him like a top, and Slater grabbed his other wrist and slapped upon it the cable tie meant for Mickey. King fed Slater the other hand, and Slater cinched the plastic cable tight over his wrists, the coarse edges biting into the boy’s skin, pinning his skinny forearms together.

They led him out of the streetlight and into the shadow.

King thought about sitting him down on the sidewalk in one of the empty streets between seafront establishments, but Slater shook his head. They walked him back to their car under cover of darkness and Slater manhandled him into the rear seats. Sat him up in the middle seat, made sure the cable tie wasn’t going anywhere by cinching it tighter until it was just shy of cutting off his circulation, then frisked him.

In the boy’s jacket pocket Slater found an old-school Ruger Speed-Six with a pair of extra moon clips for holding additional ammunition.

Slater held it under the interior light for King to see.

King shook his head. ‘Why didn’t you use that, kid? Would have been a whole lot easier.’

The boy smiled. ‘Mother said make it personal. Mother said make it hurt.’

King didn’t offer a response. Just looked at Slater with a wince.

Slater shrugged.

Trust our luck to wind up with a lunatic.

Instead of drawing further attention to themselves, King and Slater piled into the driver and passenger seats respectively, and King killed the interior lights as they slammed their doors. The darkness enveloped them all, so when they turned in their seats to look over the centre console at the boy, all they saw was a silhouette still smiling.

King muttered, ‘What do we do with him?’

‘You let me go,’ the boy said. ‘Or it’ll be very bad for you both.’

No one spoke.

Slater elected to begin the makeshift interrogation. ‘Who’s Mother?’

The boy looked at him like he was stupid.

Slater said, ‘The only way you’ll get home safe, kid, is if you open your mouth.’

He relented. ‘Mother is everything. The whole universe.’

Silence.

The kid said, ‘Gaia.’

King said, ‘Did the voices tell you to kill that guy?’

Even in the dark, the kid’s eye-roll was visible, and suddenly he seemed a lot older.

Slater said, ‘You think we’re dumb?’

‘You think I’m dumb,’ the kid said. ‘No, I’m not schizophrenic, if that’s what you’re wondering. Mother speaks to us through Maeve.’

‘Who’s Maeve?’

‘Maeve Riordan. The messiah.’

‘You’re in a cult?’ King said. ‘That’s what this is? Telling Mickey that Dylan