The Men Who Killed God (Sinner of the Infinite Book 1)

by J Alex McCarthy

  The Men Who Killed God

  by J Alex Mccarthy

  Copyright © J Alex Mccarthy. 2016.

  Published by J Alex Mccarthy.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any others means without permission.

  First Edition.

  This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy. Find out more at reedsy.com

  Contents

  Foreword

  Epilogue as Prologue

  No Kind of Son

  Past and Future Reflections

  Failures

  Touched

  No Kind of Home

  The Faithless

  Saint Paul’s Massacre

  To Become Light

  Godkiller

  Killer God

  War of the gods

  The Eye of the World

  No Kind of Hell

  The Sinner of the Infinite

  A Man Amongst gods

  Outsider

  Tears of the gods

  The Man Who Killed God

  The Cost of Never Letting Go

  He is in his heaven, all is right in the world

  Postscript

  Foreword

  The Men Who killed God series was originally going to be a serial series released weekly. But after some thought, I decided to turn them into novels.

  I like to thank the people who supported my writing of this book and many others.

  Thanks for reading.

  Epilogue as Prologue

  The ocean shimmered white in the dying light of the sun as sparkling green lights traveled into the sky. The Pacific Coast. Cliff sides and mountains curved into the tan sands. August sat on the edge of a cliff staring out into the blue. The world was still beautiful.

  Even with a dead God.

  Dead because of him.

  August peered into the sun as he thought back to what he'd done, back to when he killed God.

  There it stood, a few miles away from him in a sea of blue and steel. The tower of the gods, the headquarters of Ifor, a skyscraper of glass and metal, a man-made building of awe. August stared at the ivory tower, his brown hair quivering in the wind. The buildings top exploded open and rained down hundreds of bodies and debris across the ground as screams rocked the city.

  Just how many innocent people would he kill? How many lives would be lost by his hands before he could dethrone the creator? He, the almighty and the creator of everything. Would it have been worth it? The sins he committed?

  In his heart, he believed that ending the rule of the gods was well worth the price, but in the back of his head, he knew what he'd done was just as vile as the crimes the gods committed.

  Ifor, the government created by the gods to rule over them. The gods watched from their towers in the clouds, controlling, manipulating humanity, forcing them to do their will. But they made a mistake. Just because they created humans, it didn’t mean they could control them. He needed to kill them. He needed to kill the gods.

  He peered at the concrete ground beneath his feet and the colorfully radiant blade in his hand. They created this world. And now he was going to take it from them. The blade shifted between every color imaginable without end. With this, he could separate the radiance from this world, he could kill the creator, the kings of kings. With this very blade, he could kill God himself.

  1

  No Kind of Son

  August sat in the passenger seat of a car, his head lying against the window. He watched as the trees went by. They never seemed to end, but they helped him think.

  He wondered how he would tell them. Tell his parents that he quit his job. Another mark on a long list of disappointments. His list of achievements was far too short for a man of twenty-nine years. Maybe he wouldn’t tell them.

  August glanced at the woman driving. Sara, his love, his life now that he had quit his job. Her beautiful face always calmed him. The slight mole under her right eye showed that even though she was perfect, that nobody was perfect.

  When they first met he was only twenty-two and she was eighteen. He was at a beach where he was supposed to meet up with his best friend, Garrett, to hang out. But he brought his sister Sara with him instead. August didn’t plan to fall in love that day, but as soon as he laid eyes on her, he knew that they would need to be together forever.

  That whole day, he spent his time getting to know her and eventually, he asked her out. Garrett was unhappy at first, but when he learned that August’s infatuation was genuine, he gave their relationship his blessing.

  Now it was seven years later and they were heading back to their home town of Sotira, in California, and they weren’t even married. She didn’t push for it because she knew that August was still getting on his feet. Even though he was a grown-ass man. It was another thing he loved about her.

  Two years, that was how long it'd been since he'd been back home. He would’ve never set another foot in the damned place if it wasn’t for Sara or Garrett.

  Sara riffled through her pocket as she drove and pulled out her phone. She called someone. But she let out a sigh. “Voicemail.”

  “Again?” August asked.

  “This is the twentieth time I called him in the last few weeks. I knew he was angry the last time I talked to him for some reason, but now I’m getting worried.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m sure he’s fine.” That was a lie. He knew what Garrett did in his free time and Ifor didn’t like it.

  Sara gripped the wheel with unease, her eyes on the point of tears. August said, “How about this? You can drop me off with our stuff and you can go see him if you’re worried.”

  “Yeah … Yeah that sounds good. I’ll just call him and leave a message.” She called again and said she was coming to see him.

  August worried about her, and Garrett, but he thought it would be fine. Things seemed to work out for Garrett in the long run. They still had a few more hours left on their drive before they would arrive home. So August closed his eyes and went to sleep.

  …

  Sotira’s town square was bustling. Built when the town was first erected over a hundred years ago, it was a popular destination for the town’s residents.

  But as people shopped and milled around, nobody went toward the town’s center. Some stared, some gawked, and some walked by as if there was nothing to be seen. It was better to fake ignorant bliss than it was to have the gods make a note of you.

  In the dead center of the town square was a monument. An ivory pillar stood twenty-feet tall, with chains wrapped around it. In those chains was a naked man, the life long gone from his body. Garrett’s lifeless eyes stared at the crowd. The eyes begged and pleaded for help, to be cut down and buried properly, but people knew what would happen if they helped. They would be in the same position as he was.

  Gashes covered his body as he was whipped to near death and left hanging for dead.

  As the insects crawled along the pillar to get to their feast, a plaque rested under him with the phrase. “He is in his heaven, all is well in the world.”

  …

  August’s eyes opened. Sara had a hand on his shoulder.

  “We’re home.”

  August rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. They were in front of his parent’s house. He got out of the car and unloaded their things. Sara rolled down the window as August leaned in.

  August said, “Call me when you
get to your brother’s place.”

  “Okay.” They kissed.

  Sara drove off and August paused before continuing to the house. It'd been two years since he’d been back. The house was exactly the same as he remembered it, the house he lived in for most of his life.

  Trees surrounded the house; they lived slightly off the beaten path. Not that there was much of a path in this town to begin with.

  He made his way to the front door with his things and knocked. His brother answered.

  “Bro!” his brother said.

  “Long time no see, Kevan.” They hugged and walked in.

  “Hey, mom! August is here!” Kevan yelled.

  Kevan was only four years younger than him.

  Their parents walked in, Barbara and Patrick Hedley. Barbara hugged August. She was a brittle little thing, his mother.

  “Glad you made it,” she said.

  Patrick tried to get one in, too, but August stepped back. Patrick sighed and pulled back. No one mentioned it as Barbara continued, “Where’s Sara?”

  “She had to do a few things.”

  Barbara looked at Patrick, but he didn’t gesture back.

  “Go put your stuff away and I’ll call you for dinner.”

  August and Kevan slowly walked off. August heard his mother whisper to his father as he was leaving.

  “He still hasn’t changed,” his father whispered.

  “He’ll come around eventually. You did.”

  He would never come around to like a man like that.

  August walked into his room. His walls were filled with posters and drawings from when he was a kid. His parents hadn’t changed a thing. He was sure Sara would love that.

  He saw one that he and Garrett drew when they were younger. It was the two of them fighting a dragon. Garrett was always the more creative one, so Garrett drew the picture while August colored it in.

  August paused. “Dammit.”

  Sara got him worrying about Garrett. He should call him.

  “Hey!” Kevan walked in holding a ball and a catcher’s mitt.

  “Hey,” August replied.

  “How about we play catch like we used to?”

  “I was thinking of calling Garrett and going to see him.”

  “Come on, man! You’ll have two weeks to hang out with him.”

  August looked down.

  “It’s hard to find good friends out in the real world, Kevan.”

  “So? It’s hard to find someone good at throwing the ball around.”

  “Look, I haven’t had a good real friend since I left this god-forsaken town. You’re my blood, you’re not going to drift away from me like the others have. You still have your high school friends. While I only have Garrett.”

  “What are you trying to get at? Why do you always have to turn our conversations this way?” Kevan asked.

  “I’m saying I have the rest of my life to hang out with you. But Garrett and I are growing apart. I want to hang out with him before we get to the point where I never see him again.”

  “You think you’re so special because you’re one of the few to leave town? I’m going to leave this place eventually, you know. I’m going to leave my dead-end job, dead-beat friends, but I will always have you as my brother. So what? Friends leave, people change, but family is forever.” Kevan played with the ball in his hand. “I was thinking we could make throwing the ball a tradition. Every time we see each other, we could throw this ball around and reminisce about the good ol’ days. Today can be our first.”

  “God! Okay, I’ll play ball with you. No need to get all sentimental.” August stood up. “Go on ahead, I need to call Sara.”

  As Kevan left, August searched through his phone and found Garrett’s name. He called him. Almost immediately, his phone emitted a tone.

  “The number you have dialed is no longer in service.”

  “What?” August said with shock. What the hell?

  He called Sara, she picked up immediately.

  “Hey, honey,” she said.

  “Why have you been lying to me?”

  “Lying? What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. Garrett’s phone is out of service. I doubt it was turned off since I was with you in the car.”

  Sara didn’t answer.

  “Sara.”

  “I didn’t want you to worry. It’s been out of service for a week.”

  “What the hell do you mean you didn’t want me to worry?”

  “You don’t get to just worry about me, August. I can worry about you, too!” she yelled.

  August looked down.

  “Sorry.” August sighed. He didn’t need anybody to worry about him.

  “I’m almost to his place. I hope he didn’t hit a rough patch.”

  “Me either, I want to see him before I go.”

  “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think that you loved him more than me.”

  “Only some days.”

  Sara’s voice laughed over the phone.

  “I’ll call you when I get there, I promise.”

  “Okay, I love you.”

  “I love you, too.” August hung up.

  He lay on his bed. This wasn’t looking good. His gut was telling him something was wrong.

  August closed his eyes and remembered back.

  …

  A teenage August and Garrett walked down a set of stairs into Garrett’s basement. Whenever August came over, Garrett’s parents never let them into the basement. But his parents were away today, so they had free reign.

  The basement had a couch and TV. There was nothing unusual about it except for a blackboard covered in charts in the corner. August approached it.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  On the board was a hierarchy, with hundreds of pictures of gods.

  “It’s a board my parents made. They researched and found the structure of the gods,” Garrett said.

  It was a family tree of sorts, starting from the highest-ranking god. He, the creator of everything, started at the top. Nothing was above him, but everything was below. There was no picture of He as no mortal man had ever seen him. August heard stories of men who saw He in person. They always went mad. Clawing out their eyes as they’d never seen anything more in awe.

  The chart went down to Queen, right under He and one of the first gods. She was a stunning brunette. Then it went down to the great gods: the god of fortune, the god of water, there were twelve of them. Each of them watched over different sections of the world and Ifor.

  August noticed one of them looked really young, like he was in his teens. Svante, the god of war.

  From the great gods, it branched out to hundreds of different gods.

  “Wow, there are so many of them,” August muttered.

  “I think everyone should know the hierarchy. It should be something that’s taught in school, but it’s not.”

  “How do your parents know all this? Why do they have something like this?”

  “If I tell you, you have to promise me that you won’t tell a soul. Not a single god-damn soul, August.”

  “Promise.”

  Garrett hesitated.

  “Come on, I promise!”

  “They are rebels against Ifor.”

  August stared Garrett in the eyes. He wasn’t lying.

  “What!?”

  “My parents hate Ifor and everything they’re based on. And I hate them, too.”

  “Why?”

  Garrett grabbed August and pulled him toward a small table with a blanket over it in the corner. He pulled the cover off and revealed an old CRT monitor. He turned it on with a click and searched through the files. A video popped up.

  “The gods created us, but they still treat us like the monkeys we’re made from,” Garrett said.

  The video showed a protest against the gods. It started off peacefully but when the police tried to shut them down, the people started to riot.

  “They violently put us down to keep us in ch
eck. They limit our technology, our advances. Limit our knowledge and prevent the media from showing us what they really do.”

  The riots were getting violent, with rioters rushing into the police. The screen flashed as a light struck into the crowd from the sky and the feed went black. August continued to stare at the screen. He was in disbelief. This was the first time he'd seen anything like that.

  The screen went back to the desktop. August clicked on another folder. “There’s hundreds of videos here.”

  “You think that was the only riot? There have been wars, August.” Garrett said.

  August went through the folders and files and paused on one that said “Ifor training and requirements”. He clicked on it but a password box showed up.

  “What’s this?” August asked.

  “It’s training for high-ranking human members of Ifor. I despise anybody who works for them, the things they have to do …”

  August looked back at Garrett. “So, do you hate my dad, then?”

  Garrett looked away. “Yes.”

  “Put in the password.”

  “No.”

  “Do it.”

  “No.”

  August gave up and sighed and looked at another video; this time the police mowed down protestors with live rounds. Bodies exploded as the bullets ripped through them.

  “Don’t worry, Garrett. I hate my dad, too.”

  August closed the video, the violence was too much.

  August said, “What did my dad have to do? What does my dad do?”

  “I won’t tell you what he had to do to get to a position like his. I don’t want you to have anything more to hate about him. He’s still your father,” Garrett said as he walked over to the couch. He turned on a game system and the TV.

  “Come on, let’s play.”

  August ignored him and continued to stare at the screen. August could play later. He clicked the next video.

  …

  A bang on the window knocked August out of his stupor. Kevan stood outside. Motioning him to come out. August rubbed his hands through his hair. Might as well get on with it so he would stop bothering him.