“THE MORE I SEE OF THE WORLD, THE LESS I UNDERSTAND IT,” Cowboy McCreedy said morosely to himself, static lining his voice. He was spitting up blood, shot to hell… But he wouldn’t die.

  Not here.

  Delicate rain pattered the corrugated roof gnarled and twisted by what had occurred only minutes prior. Only minutes prior had the rain been a torrential downpour, shutting off suddenly as if the Blue-Blooded God had Its finger on the handle––only minutes prior had everybody been alive. Water dripped from the torn metal onto the carnage in the RV; eyeballs dangled from their sockets, a man’s jaw and bottom teeth were several feet from the top of his skull, the guts of multiple bodies mixed together like the wonton carnage of a Sisyphean war. Despite the damages, the Western continued to work on the busted TV inside. The movie’s dramatic conclusion was over. The battered, blistered cowboy could rest easy: he’d won. Nursing his wounds, holstering his revolver, he limped out of the bullet-riddled saloon as a sunset beckoned him and his horse as black as a starless midnight—the credits rolled.

  For a stretch of time there was only primordial darkness, then came the lightning, splintering like hot veins and dragging momentary shadows across the pale, dead world. Far below the miasma sky, Jazz dragged a corpse onto a tarp; he was big, so it wasn’t impossible work, but he was getting older, no denying that. His partner, Vertigo, appeared lost, however. Sinuous wind flapping her drenched suit against her stiff body gave her the appearance of a forlorn marble statue. She wore headphones connected to a portable tape player, as she often did when cleaning up a crime scene. Sometimes she would even dance while she did it, as she had tonight. He first chalked it off to that—lost in a memory induced by music and the droves of hypnotic rainfall—but there was more to that stare. In her was a vacancy unspoken of reminiscence; it was the stare of somebody truly lost in their mind.

  At her feet were the mutilated, charred remnants of a man, adrift in the sea of grotesque. Half his face was melted off, and the remains of his teeth—some ripped out by the sheer force—shone through the ash. The cloud-obscured moon drifted across his face, acting as a momentary spotlight to better illuminate the image for her.

  Jazz tapped her shoulder, trying to reach her through the unimaginable distance of her memories, or whatever remained of them. Her distant stare was unusual from her typical aloofness, and he was desperate to know why. Vertigo removed her headphones. He fixed his damp balaclava into place and asked for help. “Please,” he strained to add through a cough. This turned into another fit. When he finished his throat was raw, his stomach muscles ached, and his eyes felt as if they were bulging from his splitting skull. Like the poor men in the RV, he thought with little humor.

  “You should get that cough checked out, mon frere,” Vertigo advised, returning to planet Earth as if she had been here the entire time.

  Breathless, he said, “I have. Doc recommended I get a partner who can carry their weight.” Jazz spoke with an almost tediously slow demeanor. And a dryness too, so you never knew whether what he was saying was a joke or not. But Vertigo could always tell.

  “That’s funny.” It was said without laughter or even cracking a smile, a reaction he had grown accustomed to in his partner in these dark works. Another flash of lightning caught her face; her white eye became engulfed in light, while her black eye appeared to absorb all the energy in the world. The light faded and they were left in darkness again. “Ready,” she asked without a question mark, as usual; bending down to pick up the man. When Jazz bent down, his old knees cracked and it sent a numbing twinge up his spine. Don’t fail me now, body. I’m needed for a while longer. A little longer, and then you can turn to dust.

  He gripped the man by his wet pants; she by his filthy blood-coated hands. With a heave, they threw him carelessly onto the tarp of mutilated parts. He went to pick up the next body, but she kept staring at the dead man. He hobbled back over, coughed into his arm. “What do you see?”

  “No– Uh– Nothing… Nothing at all.” During the few years he had come to know her, she always knew what she wanted to say. Always agile in equal parts tongue and mind, regardless of the excessive testing done on it. So he cast a line—gently, curiously, something he himself wasn’t apt to do. It seemed that tonight of all nights, a lot of irregular behaviors were bobbing to the surface of this miserable event.

  He asked: “Is the man familiar?”

  “I think so,” she said, toying with the idea, trying to find a frame of reference. “Yes. Looks like someone I knew–” her head turned like a dog trying to make sense of something, “–know. Someone a lifetime ago. Before I was reborn, maybe. He died… too.”

  Her face spasmed then, like a snake trying to writhe free from a net. It was the most genuine emotion he had ever seen break the surface, and this both intrigued and chilled him. There was only one other instance that had happened in their several years together: Vertigo's first kill.

  Vertigo had been standing at the edge of a four-story veranda, having pushed a man off as instructed by Mother; as his screams faded into a dull splat, the muscles in her face completely slackened. Her eyes became bottomless. When Jazz had asked if she was okay, a single tear streamed down her cheek, and by the time it hit the floor the aloof Vertigo had returned. And they continued on as if nothing had happened. Vertigo was only eleven years old at the time.

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  He couldn’t allow a moment like this to slip through his fingers again. He thought best on how to approach the sensitive topic regarding Vertigo’s life before the syndicate. In the end, he knew the correct words would never emerge; he could only sustain his faith that everything would happen as it was designed to, as he had done with every matter since his time in the Second American Civil War. “Do you remember anything before your rebirth?”

  “Not really,” she said with stone eyes and a flat voice. “Glimpses. Flashes. Like a photo or a roll of film. But it carries no meaning. The photos are blurred, the film cut. I’ll see a park I’ve never been to, or a man on a metro. A cherry tree, one amongst many.” She paused. “Nothing significant.”

  “And now—do you see a photo now?”

  “Yes,” she said, the word left hanging. “But this photo is clearer than all the rest. Perfectly intact.”

  Maybe Dr. Horowitz’s work isn’t as foolproof as the syndicate suggests. Her mask is slipping—something is wrong. “This man reminds you of somebody you knew.”

  “Yes. Mother had me kill him,” she replied colorlessly. He watched her, trying to peer through the armor her face recoated in an instant. A frail smile trembled on her lips, then it was gone like a rabbit in the underbrush. “Let’s not forget why we’re here. We must remember we work for Mother, not the Niece.” But it seemed to Jazz that statement was more for herself than for him. Sometimes, like now, he felt a touch of sympathy for what she and Moki’s other Children of the Abyss endure. But always behind that, not far behind at all, a feeling of fear. Not for himself—for the world. As if those lost children were to band together they would snip humanity by its delicate strings, and everything would come crumbling down.

  Then she said: “You know she’s scared of you.” She was referring to the Niece.

  “Most people are.”

  “I can’t say I blame them.”

  “No,” he said wearily. “I can’t blame them much neither.” You frightening old beast, you.

  They pushed on with their objective, cleaning diligently and in silence. Once everything was wrapped inside the tarp, she took a deep breath. There was a convergence of energy swirling at her feet, and then she and the wrapped bodies were gone; she had teleported them and herself inside the RV with the ease of a nomad as trained as she was. He stayed only a second after her, used his water arcana to help wash the blood down the hill and into the ground. In the RV the new weight squished the mesh of bodies underneath, causing a deluge of blood to snake past her boots and, poking from the bottom, was the contorted head of the kid. His neck twisted almost 180° around itself, a clean hole bored through his forehead. And at his side, a cowboy hat. She picked it up by the crown, commenting as she spotted the blood soaking its brim, “L’enfant sauvage. We should have killed the brat while we had the chance.”

  “Mm.” Jazz entered, lowering the RV a degree from his immense weight. The air was heavy with iron. He could muster the smell at this point, but it also left him with an intense headache. Coughing isn’t helping none. After the fit resided, he folded his handkerchief neatly and wiped his forehead of sweat. Looking around with eyes heavy to the carnage, or maybe just heavy eyes, he went silent. After so many years he was used to it but his eyes never stopped looking. Why? Why did he look? Maybe there was a secret part of him that enjoyed the depravity of it. Maybe witnessing it was a form of retribution. He didn’t know. And it wasn’t his job to ask many questions of Mother or the Blue-Blooded God. His role was here, he was led here by fate’s tendrils, a malformed beast with a body turning to dust, and he would keep moving till he breathed his very last. “Where’s the briefcase?”

  “Maybe the cleaners will find it in this mess. Doubtful, but…”

  Exiting the RV, they headed for the last body outside—tarps were whipping about, flying off down the muddy slopes when he asked Vertigo something. He didn’t know why he had asked it, to be truthful. Maybe he was getting old. The carnage getting older. Maybe it was seeing Vertigo’s stare as she lost herself in the remnants of that torched soul. It was clear to him now that underneath it all, she was still just a child. He asked: “Is there something you’d rather be doing than this? A hobby, or a place to call home. An idyllic field to die in?” He paused, trying to gauge her. Sometimes a soul lost in the world for too long can never return home no matter how desperate one tries. He thought this, but he couldn’t say it. It wouldn’t reach her anyway.

  Vertigo likely didn’t know the last time he asked her a single question about herself, let alone several. “No,” she said simply at first, then the intensity of her declarations slowly increased. “Pays too well. Besides, this is what I was made to do. That would be considered a failure and I don’t fail. Why disrupt the status quo. I’m one in a hundred. So, why would I go and do something peculiar. We are a simple solution to an unfolding list of complicated problems. Without me, without you, the order doesn’t get fulfilled. So, no. To answer your question simply, no. What about you,” she said, taking in a big breath from her small mouth. “Haven’t you been doing this sort of work since before I was born. Maybe it’s time to retire.”

  They hovered over the final body, Jazz contemplating her questions—why he had brought up his questions at all. It seemed to have such a purpose until it was said aloud. But he was a soldier, Vertigo a weapon. This is what they had been designed to do, so to speak, but hell if it wasn’t compelling. “No,” answered Jazz resolutely. Then he looked up into the infinite darkness of night, letting the rain pelt his leathery, blemished face, a face that only his Mother ever loved, and thought as a way of answering the question, if not for himself: It is not done with me just yet. It which gives me the last of my failing strength. It which guides my shaky, wrinkled hand. Tell me what to do next and it will be done. Even if that means to die a thousand deaths. Bury me under Your great purpose so I can rest these weary bones.

  They bent down, reaching for the second body, and she stopped again. She made an audible noise of confusion. Something of a breath being taken away, of a prayer left unanswered. Like a grandfather clock striking its next fateful hour.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Jazz.

  “This one too,” said Vertigo, just as thunder rolled across the owl light.

  Jazz knew without a shadow of a doubt, lightning was soon to follow.