Lord of Order by Brett Riley (the reading list book TXT) 📕

Benn yanked. Kouf whimpered.

Benn rolled the loose intestines around the hook’s handle and yanked again.

Sweet God, Kouf cried.

Do it again, Clemens said, breathy and flushed.

No.

Boudreaux let go of Kouf and elbowed Clemens in the face. Clemens stumbled over his own feet and fell. Boudreaux whirled and shoved Benn with both hands, sending him flailing toward the wall, still holding the hook, yanking Kouf’s guts with him like a fish unspooling line.

Gordy Boudreaux drew his gun. He jammed the barrel against the top of Kouf’s skull. And then he pulled the trigger.

Blood and brains spattered Kouf’s wasted body, which jerked hard, just once, then stilled. Boudreaux’s ears rang like a struck bell.

Benn regained his balance and drew his gun while Clemens scrambled to his feet. Boudreaux holstered his pistol, tears and sweat stinging his eyes. He felt as if he had been hollowed out and filled with sewage.

Benn watched him for a second. Then he holstered his weapon and looked at Clemens, shrugging.

Huh, said Clemens. Killing him with sin still on his conscience. That’s cold, son. Colder than me even. Maybe you have what it takes after all.

Benn walked away, flinging Kouf’s blood and sweat from his hands. He left the hook on the floor, the guts trailing across the room. Clemens uncuffed Kouf’s body. And Boudreaux watched, feeling filthy and sick.

Boudreaux and Clemens dragged Kouf’s body into the hall, leaving a long bloody smear on the floor, and dropped it there. Kouf’s ruined head oozed. They had wrapped his intestines around his torso like macabre chains.

In their cells, the emaciated prisoners did not react, but they watched. A guard stepped forward to take the body, but Benn said, No. Let the rest of them look on their futures, should they refuse to confess and die in peace.

In their cells, the prisoners—men, women, even a few children—were already drifting back into themselves.

There ain’t no lesson here. Folks only fear you when they still have hope. Benn and Clemens walked outside. Boudreaux lingered, still nauseous. This man stole water and jerky for a child. If that’s sin, what about what I just did? I snuffed out Kouf’s life like a candle in a drafty room. I did it for mercy, but only after I stood by while they butchered him. Just one more Troubler I’ve killed, and for all I know, every one of em had a starvin kid. Lord above, were we ever right about anything?

The world seemed awash in guilt and gore. Lightning flashed through the barred cell windows. Thunder crashed overhead like gunshots.

Boudreaux looked at Kouf one last time, and then he followed Benn and Clemens into the storm.

Later, sodden and alone, Boudreaux rode down Pelican Avenue toward his house, a modest one-story wooden structure. A yard and a columned porch surrounded it. An ancient magnolia towered near the street. Seeing the house’s shape in the gloom of an evening had always helped ease the day’s burdens. But now, with Kouf’s blood stuck under his fingernails, Boudreaux thought the place looked like a wart-infested toad squashed on the road. Rainwater puddled in his yard and dripped off the magnolia’s leaves. The wind had shaken loose a mess of white petals that now lay clumped around the trunk. They would be shriveled and brown before the landscapers came back around.

He dismounted and hitched the horse and entered the house and locked the front door. Then he crossed the foyer by feel until he reached the great room, where he stumbled over the boots he had left out last night. He found matches and a lamp on a side table, the same lamp he had lit almost every night since Troy had given him the house. The place suited him. It stood outside the city’s most populated areas and faced east. Gordy Boudreaux was responsible for meeting attacks from that direction and holding the line until reinforcements arrived. The obligation had never weighed on him. It had seemed like a portent of his great destiny as a defender of the faith.

What hogwash.

Kouf’s death played on a loop in his mind. Each time, he thought of a new way he might have stopped Benn. Yes, the deputy envoys had been armed, and yes, Clemens had gotten the drop on Boudreaux. Yet with time for reflection, it seemed better to have died fighting than to live as a coward and a failure.

Boudreaux turned up the wick all the way, driving the shadows into the corners. Near his foyer hung an old silver mirror with ornate metalwork framing the glass. He had found it in the rubble of a Metairie building the Troublers had burned down years ago. The silverwork reminded him of what he had read of the old times, of great machines that barreled down roads faster than horses and ripped up the earth and knocked down buildings and flew through the sky. He had never been able to imagine what it must have been like to soar above the clouds like an angel. Now he could not stop thinking of the ancients’ efficient and terrible weapons. Guns that could pepper every inch of a city block in seconds. Flying bombs that could cross oceans and vaporize entire cities. A wealth of devastation.

Once, this very city had been pockmarked with rusting hulks, scarred by the destruction their crashing had caused: burned and smashed buildings, torn-up streets, acres of wood splintered in long trenched paths as if God’s own finger had written death in some unimaginable language. Over time, the Crusaders had cleared it all away, rebuilt, replanted. He had played a small part in all that.

Now Boudreaux had obliterated all his good deeds. What could put it all aright?

In his mirror, haunted eyes stared back at him. A corpse’s face, unspeakably old and ruined, a shattered, tangled mass good only for dumping in a landfill.

He set the lamp on the floor, drew his gun, and smashed its butt into the mirror.

In the shattered glass,