“I think we will find him, ah, here,” the God said, and pulled the tremulous man closer, and made him sit down with him on the ground in front of the fallen corpse. He increased his grip on the man. “So, you see, all those things you have mourned, all that we have lost in the city—art and culture, beautiful parks, a sense of safety—those are nothing compared to a human life. Because as long as there is life we can hope that things might change, even though they probably won’t.”
“Wait, just wait—”
“No, no, have some patience,” the God of Mayhem said. “You have to be patient. Tell me, do you believe in God?”
“I don’t, I don’t know. In times like these, with all that has happened to us—”
“No, the times shouldn’t matter. Either there is a god or there isn’t.”
“I can’t believe a god would be so cruel—”
The God of Mayhem laughed. “Sometimes it’s part of the job. I’m a god, and I’m right here in front of you.” He took the man’schin and turned the head to face him. “Can you believe in me?”
The man looked terrified. Hesitantly he nodded. “Just please don’t kill me.”
The God of Mayhem made his sad face then. “I’ll be honest with you. I’ll consider it, but once I start to kill someone I don’t stop until the job is done. It’s one of my rules. Hesitating, having second thoughts, that’s how I might get myself caught or killed.”
“How … how?” He tried to kick his feet. The God raised a finger and wagged it in warning.
“I do have some ideas as to what I’m going to do, unless I change my mind, which I’ll just say again, is highly unlikely. Although I prefer the quickness and efficiency of a gunshot to the heart, or into the back of the head, or under the chin, ammunition has become much harder to come by. Have you ever tried it? Do you own a gun?”
“N-no.”
“I believe you. Now if I didn’t believe you, or you had answered yes, I would have made you take me to your home and I’d take that gun and all your ammunition. Hell, I might just leave the gun behind, if it’s one I already have, and I have plenty, and just take all your ammunition, because that’s what’s really important. A gun without ammo is just another piece of iron to beat somebody with, you dig?” The man nodded shakily. “Oh, and then I would kill you, of course.
“Now I use a shotgun from time to time, but I don’t really care for them. I shot a man in the head once with a sawed-off and the man’s head just completely disintegrated. Imagine my surprise! I thought that just happened in those old movies. Hey—when you talked about things you missed, things that had been lost from the culture, you didn’t mention movies! I used to love movies! Anyway, I’d lured this fellow into my house and did it there—always a mistake but at the time I felt I needed to seize the opportunity. The clean-up took most of a day and the house stank for weeks!”
“I—” The man looked sick. He started to cough and choke up.
“Don’t you vomit on me! You vomit on me and I’ll be beyond angry!”
The man’s eyes went red and he kept licking his lips. Finally he didn’t look sick anymore. “I avoid poisons—they never really work for me. Sometimes they will vomit when you feed them poison, and I hate vomit. If I happen to find the right amount of cyanide that’s okay—I know how to use cyanide. Everything else is too unpredictable and likely to have a messy, drawn-out, and generally unpleasing outcome.”
The man’s nodding looked strangely eager. The God assumed by that he didn’t want to be poisoned.
“But stabbing always works out pretty well, if you have a pretty good sense of anatomy, which I do. I know just where to stick it in. Just like I know how hard and where to club someone in order to kill them, as opposed to stun them, depending on what I club them with. It’s all about knowing the job, understanding the craft. It’s good to know a craft, but it doesn’t come easy.
“Of course it’s hard to make a precise strike if there’s a lot of frantic wrestling around. It’s best to blindside them, catch them unawares. Otherwise you’re exhausted and covered with someone else’s bodily fluids by the time the job is done.
“So, should I club you, or stab you?”
Daniel squirmed, if squirming meant anything without a body to squirm with. Aware that Daniel had risen back into consciousness, the God of Mayhem swatted Daniel’s self-awareness away. I’m busy.
“No!” his victim cried explosively.
The God covered the victim’s mouth with his hand and brought a finger up to his own lips. “Shhh. If someone hears I’ll just have to kill you and leave. You’re not ready for that, are you?” The victim shook his head. “I didn’t think so. And by the way, that wasn’t a Yes or No question. So, no stabbing, no clubbing. For now. So what else can we do?” He scratched his head in an exaggerated fashion. “Let’s use our imagination. Not a good thing in general, by the way, but I’ll get to that later. But when you have a specific problem to solve, an imagination can be useful. Simply for variety’s sake if for no other reason experimenting with your killing methods is a pretty good thing. You don’t want to get stale—and that applies to any line of work.
“I once shot an arrow into a fellow’s eye at close range. He died eventually, but not without making a lot of fuss—so you’ll be happy to hear I won’t be using that method again anytime soon. I also once set a couple on fire while they were sleeping.”
The victim began to sob. “Please, I have a child. Please let me go!”
“I won’t warn you again—not so loud. Don’t make me rush this, okay? And if you really have a child, I’m curious why you didn’t mention it before. Anyway, I hadn’t planned on using fire—don’t make me change my mind.” The fellow nodded. Daniel wanted to weep for him, but as soon as he thought that his self-consciousness evaporated. “I once killed a man who lived in a shack, a real eyesore, simply by pushing the shack over on him. It was that easy. People should take better care of their property. Hey, lie down. I’m getting a cramp sitting this way.”
The man wavered, but finally lay down in a slightly fetal position but with his face skyward, because the God of Mayhem had him firmly by his shoulders, and then when he was at last still, by his neck. “You c—could let me go,” he said to the god hanging over him. “I won’t tell anyone.”
“To be frank, what are you going to tell them? I’ll tell you what, if you happen to get out of this, which you won’t, but if you did, tell them God did this to you. Is this too tight, what I’m doing with my hands?”
“G—guess not.”
“I knew that it wasn’t—I know what I’m doing. I just wanted to see if you’d be honest about it. I know how to create the right amount of pressure with my hands, how to support, how to caress, how to kill. See, you can feel my palms on either side of your neck, and the fingertips, they’re near the base of your skull, just below the ears? That’s your sternocleidomastoids. They hold a lot of tension, and I have to say yours are really tight right now. When’s the last time you had a good massage? Never mind, I realize people are too busy just surviving anymore to get massages, but they really should—it would improve their quality of life. There, doesn’t that feel good?
“Once I let some rats eat a fellow down in an old abandoned cellar. No, don’t tense up again. I’m just telling you a story. It was hard to get the both of us down in there, and that in itself was a little exciting. Dragging him through narrow spaces, and climbing down a shaft. At least it was different, kind of an adventure like you fantasize about when you’re a kid, you know? It ended up being just too much trouble, too much of a time investment. But it was an experiment. Not all experiments are bad.” He paused, and grinned. “Well, depending on who’s the scientist, and who’s the lab rat. But I brought all of these spreads with me—mayonnaise, mustard, peanut butter, whatever I could think of. And I spread them on different parts of his body. He was tied up, of course, otherwise he might have eaten everything.” He stopped. “That was just a joke. Anyway, see, I wanted to see which parts the rats went for first. What they liked, what they didn’t like. What they wanted to eat most. When he was all done up I just stepped back as far away as I could and watched. But the screaming went on way too long for my tastes.”