Shimmer walked next to Bradley and produced the handgun from his waistband. Bradley winced and once filled his pants with hot piss at the sight of the pistol. Shimmer raised the gun high in the air, then cracked Bradley in the back of his head with the pistol’s heavy handle. Bradley’s eyes felt like they were about to explode out of his skull from the force. He grabbed the back of his battered, now bleeding head with one hand and doubled over in agony. Bradley slowly recovered moments later.

  “Damn,” Bubbleguts hissed under his breath. “Don’t you think hitting him that hard in the head will make him forget the answers?”

  “I was just jogging his memory.” Shimmer pointed at the temple of his own head. “Then again, there’s probably not much serious harm I could do to his brain he hasn't already done to himself.”

  Regardless of what Shimmer had said, Bradley’s head said otherwise. His skull pounded with an acute concussion as his ears rang.

  “Feel like talking now?” Corsair asked Bradley. “You can play these stupid games with me all night because I have a lot of stupid prizes to reward you with.”

  “In my apartment,” Bradley said. “I kept a lot of the stuff I took from the truck robberies in my apartment where I lived with my girlfriend and my roommate. Then…then…please don’t get angry about what I’m about to tell you.”

  “Too late for that,” Corsair said. “But continue either way.”

  Bradley dry gulped. “I talked my roommate into fencing a bunch of the stuff I stole. Then we split the profits so that I could buy drugs, pay my rent, and get my girlfriend booze. That kind of dumb shit.”

  Shimmer nodded thoughtfully. “That explains why your numbers were so suspicious despite how long you’ve been working for us to become a full-fledged Grey Man. The money that should’ve been going into our pockets has been going into yours to fuck around with. I should have hit you harder.”

  “Feel free to have another go if you want,” Corsair said. “And make it really hurt this time.”

  “Gladly.”

  Once again, Shimmer smashed Bradley in the head with his gun as hard as he could.

  The pain was so bright and all consuming, Bradley briefly blacked out and fell face first onto the floor. He woke himself up by vomiting. His consciousness faded in and out like a dying light bulb, promising him the sweet release of oblivion for micro-seconds at a time, but something nefarious kept him attached to the damned material realm of Catto Occulo.

  At this point, Bradley didn’t even want to escape New Chemeketa anymore. He wanted to die because at least death would take him away from the trio of wolves he once called allies that were now tearing him apart for their own slow, heinous amusement.

  “Please stop,” Bradley begged. “If you’re gonna kill me, at least make it fast, I’m begging all of you.”

  The door of the office opened without warning. Everybody from Bradley to Corsair stopped what they were doing to look at the intruder. A man poked his head into the office.

  “Some panicking man and woman told me to get out of here, but I need to leak like a broken faucet. Does anybody here know where the bath-” He took in the scene before pausing. “Oh. I didn’t see a fucking thing.”

  The man slammed the door shut.

  “I thought you locked that twelvedamned door?” Corsair shouted at Shimmer. “Am I in this room with two utter incompetents?”

  Shimmer raised his hands in mock surrender. “I apologize, sir. That slipped my mind in anticipation of hurting Bradley.”

  “But like I was saying…I’ve decided to not have you killed tonight despite the disastrous amounts of attention you’ve brought to our operations,” Corsair said to Bradley. “In fact, I’m going to let you go despite your crimes against the Grey Men. I’ll call up a few of my men to escort you out of New Chemeketa. However, there will be a special cost for the betrayal of not just the Grey Men, but the betrayal of your Eurisian bloodline.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Bradley slurred.

  Corsair looked at the massive paper cutter on his desk then at Bradley’s trembling hands. “In the event a Grey Man, prospective Grey Man, or an associate of the Grey Men greatly harms the cause or violates his oath, he must forfeit his smallest finger to signify his unreliability. But in the event of great harm or an unforgivable violation of his oath, his brothers, his people, or himself, he must forfeit one of his hands to signify the loss of his usability. With all that said, tell me this…would you like to lose your left or right hand tonight?”

  Bradley’s body reacted to the sadistic question by dumping its last reserves of adrenaline into his bloodstream. He rushed to his feet with a sudden alacrity that stunned everybody in the office watching him, then attempted to go for the locked office door.

  “Grab the scrawny bastard!” Corsair said.

  Shimmer and Bubbleguts seized Bradley with ease. Despite their firm hold on him, Bradley wailed, fought, and gnashed his teeth like a madman being submerged feet first into a vat of boiling oil. Shimmer punched Bradley in the stomach, which did little to pacify him.

  “Wait! Wait! Wait!” Bradley begged despite the pain coursing through his abdomen. “I can do better! I can fix my fuck ups! I can earn back all the money I stole from the Grey Men!”

  “The time for that has long passed,” Corsair said, confidently leaning back in his big office chair like a king who just received orders of victory in a foreign land. “Some things just can’t be forgiven when you decide to betray the Grey Man.”

  Bradley managed to wiggle one of his hands free and grab Shimmer’s handgun that he had carelessly returned to his waistband.

  “Hey! Give me that back! Give me that—”

  Shimmer attempted to regain control of his gun, but an errant elbow from Bradley so boney it was like a blade, cracked him above the right eye. He stumbled onto the floor, dazed and bleeding from a fresh gash on his forehead. Bradley flicked the safety of the handgun off and pointed it at its previous owner first.

  While Bubbleguts still had a solid hold on Bradley, he shot Shimmer once in the upper thigh and once in his stomach. Shimmer cried out in pain and went boneless from the waist below. Based on how red the blood furiously leaving Shimmer’s leg wound was, Bradley had a fantastic feeling he hit something important like an artery. Shimmer’s legs also jerked and twitched uncontrollably, suggesting the second shot to his stomach had hit him in the spine, crippling him in an instant.

  Bradley turned the handgun on Bubbleguts, who was in the middle of raising one of his hands towards him to use his Touched power. The palm of Bubbleguts’ hand bubbled and gave off an awful, fishy scent.

  But before Bubbleguts was able to use his power on Bradley, Bradley pressed the barrel of the handgun into Bubbleguts’ rotund stomach. He pulled the trigger several times. The bullets went all the way through him and into the wall behind him. Blood and bits of bodily tissue dripped down it.

  Bubbleguts doubled over in breathless agony. He vomited a grotesque amount of blood on his shoes, Bradley's, and the floor. Bradley fortified the grip on the handgun, then slammed it into Bubbleguts’ temple.

  “How’s that for jogging somebody’s memory, you fat, blubbery fuck,” Bradley roared.

  Bubbleguts went down on his trembling hands and knees while a waterfall of his own blood splashed on the floor underneath him. The pool of dark blood grew at an alarming, lethal rate, yet his injuries left him with enough strength to look up at Bradley and the gun he held. Bubbleguts’ bulging eyes were full of pain, shock, and abject fear.

  “Doesn’t feel too good when you’re on the wrong end of a pissed off man, huh?” Bradley asked.

  Rather than entertaining the possibility of Bubbleguts saying any last words, he executed him without a shred of mercy or hesitation. The bullet slipped neatly into his head and exited with a messy spray of brain, bone fragments, atomized blood. Bubbleguts went limp on the floor. A gruesome puddle of his own blood and brain matter crowned him as the king of his death.

  With Bubbleguts and Shimmer no longer threats, Bradley turned the handgun on Corsair and grinned with sadistic glee. Bradley knew that Corsair’s Touched power, the ability to project large, unwieldy anchors from his body, made him useless in close quarters fights.

  Corsair raised both of his hands in front of his face to futilely defend himself against Bradley. He begged for mercy.

  “You already got the men who hurt you! I didn’t do anything wrong! I was just giving them the orders to do that! You don’t need to—”

  “Shut up!”

  Bradley took two steps towards Corsair and dumped the rest of the handgun’s magazine into him. Bullets ripped through Corsair’s chest, head, and the hands he had raised uselessly in front of himself. Corsair slumped over his desk, glazing it with his blood and whatever was left of the contents of his skull. Corsair’s position revealed the state of his perforated head. It looked like a watermelon devoid of its red flesh, rimmed with white, glistening bone.

  In the eerie calmness that followed Bradley’s frantic shooting, he examined the grim results of his work. It was a tableau of pure slaughter that brought immense joy to Bradley’s otherwise terrible night. A painful erection forged in the fire of pure excitement raged in his pants.

  “You traitorous piece of shit,” Shimmer said, breathing harder and faster with diminishing returns. His face was getting paler by the second as his wounds continued gushing rich, well-oxygenated blood. “He was going to let you go. We were all going to let you go.”

  “Yeah, after you wanted to take off one of my fucking hands,” Bradley screamed. “For even thinking you could get away with that, I should cut your head off before you bleed to death.”

  “You insane prick!” Shimmer screamed back. “Rules are rules for a reason in any organization, but you thought you were above them! You think you’re above everybody and everything! But look at what that mindset has done not just to me, but all of us, you murderous, bird shit for brains moron!”

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  “I might be the murderous, bird shit for brains moron, but who’s the last one standing, huh? Who’s the one that’s not bleeding out on the office floor of some asshole who thought he was better than me and could take one of my hands?”

  “You think you’ve won this, Birdshit, but that’s the biggest lie you’ve told yourself tonight,” Shimmer said. “Even if the gendarmes, the Triple I, or any of those neutered government dogs don’t get you one day or another, what about the rest of us? Can you answer that? Do you think you can really get away with murdering the Fiend Destromoi of New Chemeketa and live a full, happy life? You fucking idiot! You won’t see the end of this week once you get out of this room.”

  “At least I’ll see more life than you will in a few moments.” Bradley Shimmer approached Shimmer and pressed the barrel of the gun against his wounded forehead. “Tell Vullen I said hello before I meet Him myself.”

  Bradley pulled the trigger. The gun emitted a click. He pulled the trigger a few more times and heard several more clicks. Shimmer regarded Bradley with eyes narrowed in a rare mix of exsanguination-based exhaustion and unbidden annoyance.

  “You cannot be fucking serious right now, you incorrigible idiot” Shimmer said. “Where did you think you put all of those bullets?”

  Shimmer was right. Bradley had overlooked the gruesome fact he had shot all the bullets inside of his three opponents, especially Corsair.

  Bradley threw the empty gun on the floor in frustration, deeply embarrassed at his latest display of sheer ineptitude before somebody he had conquered moments earlier. He pondered leaving Shimmer to bleed out like the damned dog he was, but didn’t want his insults and injuries, both mental and physical, to go unpunished. Bradley looked around for anything that could be used to kill Shimmer until his eyes fell upon the bloody paper cutter underneath Corsair’s body.

  “Sit tight,” Bradley said to Shimmer. “I’m getting a very nice surprise ready for you.”

  “What are you talking about?” Shimmer asked. “What the Vullen do you mean by that, you lunatic?”

  Bradley pushed Corsair off the paper cutter, then broke the big, machete-like blade off of it with no little effort. The blade itself was thick, black, and unwieldy while its wooden handle was sleek, well polished, and ergonomic. Bradley swung the blade around a few times to see how it felt. It was a fine killing tool he liked.

  He liked it a lot.

  Shimmer’s eyes went wide at the sight of Bradley’s premeditated murder antics, but said nothing. There was genuine fear instead of rage or annoyance in his eyes now. Bradley liked that sight even more.

  “Nothing smart to say to me now, you chatty asshole?” Bradley asked Shimmer. “That’s fine, but you’re going to die screaming tonight.”

  “No,” Shimmer shouted. “Get away from me! Put that thing down and just let me bleed to death in peace!”

  Shimmer attempted to back away. He smeared his blood on the floor and whimpered without shame, but his new disability and the blood loss linked to it stopped any serious, substantial effort. He screamed with shrill frustration, his voice raw and primal.

  Bradley climbed on top of Shimmer while drinking his screams of terror. He grabbed the top of his head, then started hacking away at his neck like it was nothing but a tough hunk of meat and he was an angry, overworked butcher with a dull blade he was too cheap to replace.

  Bradley looked Shimmer in the eyes as he hacked away, fully intent on seeing his lifeforce leave his eyes as he worked away. Just like Bradley wanted, Shimmer screamed the entire time until blood filled his mouth, replacing his agonized screams with wet, desperate gurgles. Shimmer’s skin gave way like wet paper with the help of a few blows, but his dense neck muscles and tendons proved to be more difficult, requiring harder, crueler blows. Only when Bradley reached Shimmer’s spinal cord did his blows give truly diminishing returns.

  “No wonder they used giant axes or guillotines for this bloody bullshit,” Bradley screamed as he continued to hack away. “This work is killing my arm faster than I’m killing you.”

  Bradley’s rage kept him going until the grisly work was done. Shimmer’s head remained on the floor, drenched in blood while the glazed eyes stared at nothing.

  Bradley picked it up to examine it. Bradley chuckled madly at his morbid handiwork.

  “Any more words about my ‘negligible at best’ contributions to the Grey Men?”

  Bradley raised Shimmer’s bloody mouth to his ear. When it obviously said nothing in response, Bradley looked at Shimmer’s dead face once again. Then he spat on it. Bradley’s saliva mixed with Shimmer’s blood and dripped slowly down it.

  “That’s exactly what I thought. Let’s have a little trip.”

  Carrying Shimmer’s head in one of his hands by the hair, Bradley exited Carber’s office as a changed man.

  And not for the better.

  The comedown of pearl dust was usually a rough, unpleasant experience that included vomiting, some diarrhea, and sensitivity to just about every sensory experience there was, but this one was different. It felt like the great grandmother of all nightmare comedowns, a fact not helped by Bradley starting to feel every last injury he had suffered tonight. Bradley had a powerful feeling even if he received proper medical attention, he would die on the operating table.

  Just like he did, Bradley thought grimly.

  Every part of his body shook. His skin poured buckets of greasy, sickly sweet-smelling sweat. He puked every other minute, the emesis rich with blood, half-digested food, or other strange, unrecognizable substances.

  Many things were now deeply broken inside of Bradley, and it wasn’t limited to just his physical realm.

  The building was empty, but somebody left the music playing. It was a jaunty, danceable tune he didn’t recognize or really care to even think about. Not that it would matter by the end of the night.

  It turned out Jane and Jordan had cared about more than themselves when Corsair/Mr. Carber had let them go. Sometimes it shocked Bradley that other people cared about others, even total strangers. To him, humans were just either users or the used to him, with no grey space between those two distinct populations.

  Maybe that bleak worldview was what led him to this sordid conclusion, where he was trapped in the still, hollow heart of a party that had ended long ago with music playing for nobody but himself.

  Bradley found a flipped over chair then desperately scavenged around for something to drink. Manual decapitation, getting tortured, and engaging in hard drug use were quite the thirst building activities it turned out. He found an abandoned, unopened six pack of cherry soda in a cooler. It was still nice and cold.

  Bradley placed Shimmer’s head between his feet by the chair. Even the thrill of obliteration was fading much like the chemical rush of the pearl dust. Bradley doubted the soda would do anything for the trembling agony he was in, or if he could even keep them down, but he wanted to see if he could at least get one last sugar rush in before he was eventually captured or killed by the law or the outlaws he had made enemies of.

  Bradley opened the first soda and guzzled it. It remained in his throbbing stomach for a few moments before coming back up with an unsurprising amount of pain.

  “Fuck it,” he said while looking down at Shimmer’s head. “Let’s go for another one, huh?”

  Bradley opened the second soda and guzzled this one as well. Like before, it remained in his stomach for a few moments before coming back up with an unsurprising amount of pain.

  Again.

  By the time Bradley started on the sixth and final soda, he noticed that dozens of blue and red lights could be seen through the windows of the building. There was even a helicopter high above, shining a light through the slick skylights of the workshop.

  Bradley decided to ditch the last of the final soda and merely wait for what was to come.

  No more attempts at getting some sugar into him.

  No more attempts at running.

  No more anything, but the big, black boot of the law coming down on his neck like he had brought the paper cutter blade down on Shimmer’s.

  “Time’s up, I guess,” Bradley said to Shimmer’s head. “At least I have you to give me some company, you psychopathic cocksucker.”

  In the corner of Bradley’s eye, he saw a vision of his deceased father, the skull flensed of all flesh, materializing in the darkness of the building. Rather than stay at the fringes as usual, the paternal apparition approached Bradley and sat down before him, cross-legged. The scene was an uncanny, nightmare reversal of the adoring son before the proud, dutiful father.

  “What do you want, you old bastard?”

  “I want you to fight until the end.”

  “Fuck that and fuck you, old man. I’m sick of all this running, all this fighting, all for what? Jack shit, that’s what! If I’m lucky, the internal bleeding I have will kill me on the operating table like how those doctors killed you on the operating table when they tried to take that big, cancerous lump out of your head. That’s gotta be a great way you went out. Fading deeper and deeper into the abyss until it swallows you whole.”

  “But is that how you really want to go out?” the father-apparition asked him. “You know that you never would go down without a struggle, no? Even when you were moments from having your hand taken from you, you fought back, and you won.”

  The wailing sirens in the background intensified. The helicopter lights above became more searing. All the stimulation was starting to become too much, but Bradley focused on his father, or who he believed to be him, for the moment. Something was strange about this apparition, and Bradley failed to recall if he ever asked it if it was truly his father. While he was once high enough on raggabush to forget his name one night, Bradley vaguely remembered watching a fascinating documentary on fringe supernatural topics. An unwell-looking man with wild eyes in the documentary claimed that demons could take any form they wanted to manipulate sapients better, but if they were asked any question, they were bound by the Archdemon Vullen to never tell a lie.

  On one hand, Bradley had a feeling he wasn’t that foul enough of a human to attract the attention of demons. Bradley knew he did a lot of things considered bad or even evil, but he had great reasons for his offenses against others. And he knew he wasn’t some slobbering pervert that molested children, forced himself on animals, or hurt others just because he could get away with it like Shimmer, Bubbleguts, or Corsair/Mr.Carber.

  But on the other hand, Bradley knew he was destined for great things one day, and demons were just one unsavory, but still powerful stepping towards that goal. And he did just take the head off of a man who wronged him with a paper cutter blade, enjoying the entire process so much, it gave him excitement that was borderline sexual in nature. The decapitation and the powerful, erotic effect it had on him was a new, fascinating experience he wanted to taste again.

  “You don’t know shit about me, old man…or whatever you really are. You spent your entire life in and out of jails and prisons, somehow had two sons you didn’t care to look after, then got a big lump in your head some doctors couldn’t take out. Maybe that cancer was your guilt and all of your shitty actions condensing into something that finally killed you. Are you even my real father?”

  “Is it not obvious I’m not your real father?” The father-apparition asked. “You said so yourself. He died on an operating table years ago, and you are not one of those mind-melted mediums who claim to communicate with the dead.”

  “Are you a demon?”

  “I am what you want to see me as.”

  “Fuck you,” Bradley shouted. “That’s not a real answer and you know it.”

  “Then what kind of real answers do you want?”

  “How do I get out of this situation? There has to be some way out.”

  “I would suggest fighting back.”

  “And you know what I would suggest for you? Fucking off!” Bradley pointed in some random direction with a shaking finger. “Get the Vullen out of here already!”

  “If you say so.”

  The father-apparition stood up and turned around. When he walked away for a few moments, Bradley shouted at his back covered in dripped blood.

  “Wait!”

  The father-apparition remained standing where he was, but didn’t turn around.

  “Please save me.”

  The father-apparition shrugged. “Then do what I suggested and you might see how that turns out.”

  The father-apparition resumed walking until he melted into the shadows.

  Literally.

  Bradley remained sitting, stewing in his vomit-stained clothes and bleak thoughts until he heard some violent noises from the back and front of the building. A lot of armed people he didn’t want to see were here for him now.

  Moments later, two four man squads consisting of eight Exorcist Division operators breached the building. They moved towards Bradley until they surrounded him in a large half circle. Their rifles gleamed. Their black, tactical armor was cloaked in the shadows the dull, low light of the building cast. A rainbow disco ball high above the scene spun for a new audience that wasn’t interested in its presence.

  The operators shouted mashed together orders that told him not to move a fucking muscle and get face down on the ground with his hands behind his head. A few of them commented on Shimmer’s head between Bradley’s feet, their rage and disgust at the grim sight apparent.

  Bradley considered the mysterious words of his flensed “father.” He smiled, closed his eyes for a few moments then opened them slowly.

  “Got nothing else to lose,” he said to himself. “Let’s try this out, I guess.”

  Bradley stood up. He charged towards one of the Division Exorcist operators as fast as he could.