The Last Magician

The Big Gun Man

The body propped against the wall of what had been a supermarket twitched.

The sun faded overhead, but the heat remained just the right side of bearable.

Flies circled the body, large ugly flies. Mutants compared to their former selves, with teeth to bite and talons to hook into their feeding ground.

The man’s exposed flesh burned angrily, red and sore. Blisters raised whole areas of skin, and weeping wounds in the shape of circular mouths dotted here and there.

Yet still the body twitched.

And attempted to speak.

“Please,” he said, his lipless mouth uttered in nothing but a passing of air.

Blood matted his brown hair, which hung down over his face. He felt like his skin was sliding from his bones, that something was tearing him apart from the outside.
“Please what?” a deep voice rumbled somewhere in front of him.

He could only force his eyes open a fraction, and through the blurred crack he could only make out a dark form surrounded by sunlight.

He opened his dry mouth again, summoning all his strength into making his plea.

“Please kill me.”

The flat wooden butt of the shotgun smashed into the lipless mouth, breaking the fragile bones and cracking teeth.

Mutant flies darted back and forth, waiting to feed when the time came.

The gun butt tore loose of the remains of the dying man’s jaw, and plunged forward with mighty force. It struck between the eyes, shattering the skull and forcing both eyeballs from their sockets.

The weapon retracted and fell again.

And again.

And again.

The face belonging to a man who had awakened to an unfamiliar world, unsure if his name was indeed Robert as he believed it to be, became a mush of pulp and bone fragments spread across the ruined wall of the supermarket.

The gun butt withdrew completely, dripping gore in the dirt.

The flies eagerly descended on the stump of Robert’s neck and the bloody mass that surrounded it.

“It was my pleasure,” the gruff voice muttered, before starting to cough violently.

As he lifted the soiled end of the gun to his eye, The Big Gun Man regained control of his spluttering.

With his bare hand he wiped the remains of his third victim’s face from the wood.

He gained little satisfaction from his work. He did not know these people. Fuck, he barely knew himself! He simply did what he believed he needed to do. Just follow the instructions the voice gave him; the voice that had provided him so much and promised so very much more.

His name was Eldridge Black; that’s what he had been told anyway. Who was he to argue with the voice that seemed to know everything about him, even if he could recall nothing?

Black had wakened face down on a mount of broken stones, each bearing words carved neatly with a steady hand. Gravestones. Yet he saw no church, no sign that somewhere beneath his rugged, painful bed the rotting corpses of lost souls lay unmarked.

Then the voice had spoken to him. It told him his name, told him he was not alone.

Most importantly it told him he was in danger. There were others nearby, others that would appear in need of help but were really demons of the sands that he must make beg for mercy before sending them back to their furnaces.

He asked the voice its name.

And it told him, but it did not stop talking then. It whispered in his mind, filling him with knowledge of what lay around him, where he could find a weapon to protect himself, where he could find those who threatened him.

Eldridge Black, the hulking brute of a man who would be given a more suitable name by a child, felt he could trust no one in this damned world. Maybe he could not even trust the voice that haunted the halls of his mind.

The voice though could not hurt him, not like the men he had encountered. Had he given them the chance, he could have been their victim instead. An evil had entered the world. He had to protect himself against it.

That was what the voice told him, and never once did he doubt its words. As he had observed, the voice could not hurt him. Not in any way he would ever comprehend anyway.

So it was that with one remorseless glance at the mutant flies feeding on the pulp of a man called Robert, Eldridge Black, The Big Gun Man to some, moved on in search of the remaining demons; the ones who pretended to be men, women and children.

And all the while he carried the voice with him.

The voice that called itself the last magician.