The Bastard Hand

by Heath Lowrance

  When both nails were in, Hobby stepped back and looked at his handiwork. “Let ’em go, man. Let’s see how it looks.”

  Shotgun moved away, not looking at the cross. He’d lost his appetite for blasphemy, it seemed.

  The Reverend slumped on the cross, blood streaming from his wrists and his face. His head hung down over his chest, and he could have been dead for all anyone could tell.

  Hobby said, “What a fuckin’ friend we have in Jesus, huh?”

  Bee glanced at Hobby’s handiwork. “Jesus, dog.”

  “What?” Hobby said. “You don’t like it?”

  “Naw, man, it’s just—”

  “I didn’t take you for a pussy. You got some kinda problem with the way I do bid-ness?”

  “Naw, man.”

  “You got some kinda fuckin problem?”

  “Naw, man, I’m just sayin’, yo—”

  “Then shut up. We got more pressing matters, right?”

  A weird, self-righteous anger had taken hold of Hobby, as if he knew he’d crossed a significant line. He stormed over to Tassie and me, on the cot, pulled his gun from his waistband, and said, “Well? How ’bout it? You handin’ over the money?”

  “I’ll give you the money, but I’m not leaving. Not without Tassie.”

  He gritted his teeth, pointed the gun at Tassie. He pulled the trigger.

  The bullet caught Tassie full in the chest, and she jerked back against the wall without a sound.

  The gun had gone off less than a foot from my head and the boom of the bullet exploding out of the chamber left me nearly deaf for a long moment. All I could hear was a mad roar. I could tell Hobby was laughing, his mouth was open and moving, but I couldn’t hear it.

  In my peripheral vision, blood spread across Tassie’s torso, spat out of her mouth, and she didn’t look surprised or concerned or anything. She looked dead. It had happened so fast. Hobby shot her and she bounced back against the wall and slumped over and that was all.

  I launched myself at Hobby, vaguely aware of the scream coming out of me. He started to move back, not fast enough. My fist caught him in the throat and he tried to swing the gun around at me but I knocked it aside and hit him again, in the mouth.

  He said something under the roar, and Bee and Shotgun moved. I couldn’t hear the sound of Shotgun cocking his weapon, but I felt the result—the blast hit me in the upper thigh, hundreds of steel pellets like shrapnel ripping into my flesh.

  I raised my hands up to my face. Light played around my fingertips. I concentrated hard on it. The Reverend was out of commission, right, so the power inside me was back.

  Too late to save Tassie. In time to kill the gangsters, but too goddamn late to save Tassie.

  A bullet caught me in the shoulder. I couldn’t tell who it came from, but it didn’t matter. It didn’t hurt.

  The light grew stronger, a golden, amorphous cancer spreading into my hands, feeding on me, giving me strength. It spread down into my wrists, my forearms. The gangsters opened up, I could see them shooting at me, shooting with their silent weapons, their mouths open with cries I couldn’t hear.

  Bee stood only three feet from me. I took a step toward him, touched his face gently. He screamed and his flesh sizzled and he stumbled back and dropped his gun.

  Shotgun panicked. He bolted for the door, tore it open, managed a step. I pointed at the door and amber light arced out of my hand and slammed the door shut. He looked at me and his face was such a portrait of pure terror that I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

  With a slight push of will, I made the light swirl around him, up his legs and thighs and lower torso. I pulled, and Shotgun’s legs went out from under him and he thudded to the floor. I wished I could hear his screams.

  The light was flowing around me now, not just in my hands and arms, but everywhere. I looked down at my own body and saw that it nearly encased me. I was a creature of pure, golden light, alive with deadly luminescence.

  I raised my hands above my head and called it down, called it all down on the heads of the wicked.

  The Reverend stirred on the cross. The light swirled around his head and arms and chest, and he grunted and moaned. He had my attention only for a moment before I realized that Hobby was standing right in front of me, unloading his little gun at my chest. I laughed, willed an arc of light out of my head, and it leapt like liquid gold fire to gasoline.

  The light played at the scar on Hobby’s forehead, like tentative fingers looking for an opening. He screamed a scream I could almost hear, and then the light found purchase and his head cracked wide open.

  I willed the light around the Reverend, moving it over his arms and to his wrists. The nails moved, slowly pulling out of the wood, and his face contorted in agony before going slack again as he passed out.

  Shotgun was scrambling across the floor, trying desperately to find someplace safe. Bee, still clutching his face, cowered near the sink. I turned my attention to both of them.

  The light oozed across the floor toward them, pushing them back. Shotgun scrambled toward Bee, kicked at the light, like it was a rabid dog he could keep at bay, but there was no stopping it. I doubted if even I could call it off now. It was a force of nature.

  It enveloped them like lava. By the time the burning light reached their knees, even the screaming had stopped and they huddled together in death like citizens of Pompeii, their last agonizing moments captured forever for posterity.

  My hearing was coming back, just in time to hear the thump of the Reverend falling off the cross. The rusty nails rolled across the floor and into a leg of the table.

  And it was over.

  The light began dying away, retracting back into me. I heard something metallic plink-plinking on the floor in front of me, looked to see bullets dropping out of my body. There were a lot of them.

  I didn’t have to will the light back into me. It did it on its own, as if it was a living thing that knew the job was finished for now. The golden glow faded slowly, up my body and into my arms and finally settling in my hands, until even the slight amber glow in my fingertips flickered out.

  Silence. I could hear again, but there was nothing to hear. The Reverend lay crumbled at the foot of the cross, unmoving. Hobby sprawled in front of me, his head cracked open and blood pooling around it like a halo. Bee and Shotgun, huddled against the wall, burnt black and unrecognizable. And Tassie . . .

  Tassie, slumped on the cot, covered in blood, a gaping wound in her chest. Dead.

  I can’t explain what I felt. The euphoria of a moment before vanished and the most hopeless sort of grief replaced it. I stood there, the only one untouched by the carnage, the only one still standing.

  I went to her, touched her neck, feeling for a pulse. Nothing. Carefully, I picked her up. Her blood smeared my arms and chest and her head lolled back.

  Degrees of death, she’d said. There should be degrees of death. Vinnie and Bone rated better deaths, she thought, but no, that wasn’t true. They didn’t deserve better or more interesting deaths than anyone else. But Tassie, Tassie did. She deserved something better, something grander, than being shot in the chest by some half-ass gangster.

  I carried her out of the cabin.

  A cool, sunny afternoon, leaves of the trees whispering soothing sounds in the slight breeze. Moker’s Hill, in Cuba Landing, Mississippi. Jesus, what was I doing in goddamn Mississippi?

  I lay Tassie down as gently as possible on the ground, sat down next to her corpse, and stared at her for a while. My pocket bulged with money, twelve thousand dollars. Not a fortune, no, but enough to get away from this place, enough to make us comfortable, for a while. Me and Tassie.

  I took a deep breath, gritted my teeth. I got to my knees, leaned over her, and put my hands over the hole in her chest. I concentrated.

  The light flickered in my fingers.

  I concentrated harder, visualizing the bullet inside her disintegrating, picturing the wound closing up.

  My hands glowed,
and I could feel it, could feel her flesh moving under my touch. It wasn’t just death I brought, it wasn’t. It was life too, if I willed it so. It had to be. I wasn’t God’s bastard hand. I wasn’t his angel of death and destruction. It was my choice, and I chose to will life.

  The hole in her chest began closing up, and the rush of new skin coming into place tickled my palm.

  The light glowed over Tassie’s body, and I thought breath and she breathed. A great hitch of breath that lifted her torso up like a sudden explosion. Her eyes shot open, panicked life coming into her face, and then she was moving, hands going to her chest, knowing only that she’d been shot and nothing else.

  “No!” she screamed, and I lifted her head to my chest and held her there and said, “It’s okay, Tassie, you’re okay,” and it took another minute of her screaming before she realized she was alive and it was all over.

  We sat there on the ground for a long time, maybe an hour, with her leaning against me and me stroking her hair with bloodstained hands. We didn’t talk.

  But eventually I had to move. There was still unfinished business in the cabin.

  Tassie grabbed at my shirt when I started to ease her away from me. “No,” she said. “Please don’t. Stay.”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  “Don’t leave me, Charlie.”

  “I’m not. I’m going in the cabin for a minute. I’ll be right back, I promise. And then we’re leaving.”

  She started to protest again, then clenched her jaw and nodded jerkily. “Leaving,” she said. “Okay. Okay.”

  She sat up, wrapped her arms around her knees and watched me as I walked to the cabin.

  At the foot of the cross, the Reverend stirred. I don’t know how long he’d been conscious, but he was sitting half-up, slumped against the moonshine still, blood streaming from his wrists and his face white.

  He was mumbling under his breath. “Sonofabitch,” he said. “Sonofabitch.”

  I touched each of his wrists, allowed a trickle of golden light out, stingily, just enough to close his wounds. He didn’t seem to be aware of me. I went to the sink, grabbed a dirty glass, and filled it with water. I took it to him, put it to his lips and helped him drink.

  Most of the water ran down his chin. He mumbled some more, words I couldn’t understand, and a short cackle of laughter erupted out of him. His mind was gone.

  He said, “Damn me. . . . Goddamn me. . . .”

  Kyle said, Go ahead, man, do it. You know you want to.

  And he was right, as usual. I couldn’t resist it. I said, “Reverend, don’t blaspheme. It’s wrong.”