The building was some kind of storage facility or warehouse, with massive wooden crates stacked up inside. One corner of the building was free of crates; this is where the girl and her captors were.
It was a motley crew of mooks, with automatic weapons slung low. They seemed to defer to a short squat balding man who looked battle-tested; nevertheless, another man, possibly his lieutenant, was the one interrogating the frightened girl, while the boss gazed in an almost bored fashion into the corner.
The lieutenant gripped her jaw in the vise of his left hand, hard. “Your girlfriend’s been making it tough on my boss! How’re we supposed do business when she runs around telling folks they ain’t got to pay protection? That ain’t right, she’s messing with our business, and we don’ allow that!” He smacked her across the face, also hard, making her lip bleed. The young girl heaved with fresh sobs.
“I know you think she got powers and we can’t stop her, but we can. She’s only protected when she glows, see – and she don’t glow all the time. All we need you to do is get her to come see you when she don’t know nothing is up, and a bullet to the back of the head will turn her off for good, freaky powers or no.”
“So you’re gonna do this for us, cuz you know what’s best for you, right?” He gripped her jaw again staring her dead in the eye. “Because ain’t nobody who can’t be killed!“
He looked at her, and despite her trauma she only looked back at him in despair, crying – but not giving in. He made a fist and drew back his arm, slowly.
I’d had more than enough; I was seething. I took form before them all.
This got boss-man’s attention, as well as everyone else’s. The lieutenant looked at me. “Who the fuck are you?” he demanded in surprise.
“The man who can’t be killed.” I replied.
Boss-man gestured to the others and automatic weapons came up pointing at me, firing.
This time I wanted to make a point, so I didn’t vanish. What I did instead was drop out of my body the instant I felt pain or impact, and pop immediately back into a new one, so quickly that my corpse barely had time to begin falling to the floor before it was erased as I resumed in a new, hale, physical form. I did that countless times in the space of seconds, as they wasted round after round of ammo attacking me. I have no idea how odd I looked with my form being hit, replaced, hit, replaced, like an insanely fast strobe, but after about ten seconds they stopped firing and looked back at Boss-man in confusion.
I too waited, to see what he would do.
He didn’t seem bothered, and he took his time. He looked at me, at the ground, and back at me again. He smiled, and began exaggeratedly slow-clapping. Then for the first time, he spoke, a good-natured expression on his face.
“Well done, well done. You’ve proven your point. You’re amazing, like a god, sir. And you have taken ol’ Frank Halloran’s breath away, you really have.” Frank gestured towards one of his men to give him an assault rifle, and the man did. Frank held it up, sighting along the barrel, pointing it right at my head. “But maybe a head shot, eh?” he asked.
I gamely waited for him to pull the trigger and reflected on how surreal my life had become.
But he didn’t. He smiled at me and lowered the weapon.
And fired a stream of ammo right into the young girl’s chest, killing her almost instantly.
The sudden noise of the discharge broke the temporary silence like a rocket. “No!” I shouted as she crumpled, her young soul quickly leaving her body.
When free of the body, souls melt extremely fast. Kev had gone in under a second. The girl’s soul melted away no slower. I didn’t even have the time to get into astral form.
Nevertheless, I just barely grabbed her soul right before it was lost. I almost didn’t get it in time.
Once I knew I had her, I did leave my body, immediately and instinctively taking us both on a fast but short astral trip into the closest public space – a local grocery store nearby. I rapidly brought us to a secluded back corner of the shop. “Stay here and wait for me, OK? I won’t be long.” Her astral head nodded, clearly not knowing what was going on, but accepting me as a friend regardless. I put her back into a new healthy copy of her body – like I had done to the assassin Joyce once and to myself countless times. I guessed that her corpse disappeared at the same time.
The girl, now physical, hunkered down.
“Good girl” I said, although of course she could no longer hear me, as she was no longer astral and I still was. I zipped back to the warehouse and popped out.
Everyone was still there, still processing the shock of seeing the girl and I vanish fifteen seconds ago. Frank shouted “Kill the bastard; maybe he’ll run out of lives!” as he himself ran back into the stacks of crates, deeper into the warehouse.
I ran after him, again strobing my body each time they hit me, shrugging off each bullet as it came – and then I, too, was in the maze of giant crates, stacked 20 feet high.
“A million bucks to anyone who gets him dead!” Frank shouted from somewhere up ahead. I could hear from the surprised exclamations that his mooks were definitely up to try.
In hindsight, I know what I should have done. I should have dropped back into the astral plane where I was invisible and untouchable, found Frank, and dealt with him. But my adrenaline was pumping, I was furious, and perhaps my subconscious had more dramatic plans, so I didn’t think to do that.
Instead I stalked through the maze of crates, pivoting to quickly check for threats at each junction.
One pivot brought me face to face with two mooks. Before they could aim or fire, I had pushed their souls out, which melted away as their bodies hit the floor.
A moment later I felt pain between my shoulders as another mobster got line-of-sight on me from behind. I dropped and popped 180 degrees to face him – push – and he was gone too.
One of them had the idea of climbing up on the crates for a better vantage point, but as soon as he started firing, I swept his soul away too. After running into a few more of them I figured that there couldn’t be many left.
In the middle of the maze of crates was an open area around thirty feet across. There Frank, his second-in-command, and two foot soldiers waited, and they began firing as soon as they saw me.
I had an idea. I ended the foot soldiers with a brief thought, and let the lieutenant run out of ammo killing me as many times as he liked, as I closed with them. Soon he did indeed run out. I could see the two of them sweating.
“You’re not natural, you’re not even human!” Frank accused me.
“Maybe yes, maybe no – does it even matter?” I asked, calmly. “Frank, I want to show you something.” I pulled Frank’s soul free from his body, but prevented it from dissipating.
All the lieutenant could see however was Frank’s body hitting the floor. He looked at me with malice, no fear, and said “You think you scare me? You think you bad like that? Sure you can kill me but you nothing! You ain’t got no family! You ain’t got heart! I’ve done everything for my family! I’ve killed men, women, kids, I turned my back on mom and pop – cuz I found my real family! And I die for my real family! You got nothing! Nothing!!”
I ignored him and turned to Frank’s soul, hovering there under my power, next to me. “Frank, you a Christian boy? Catholic maybe?”
Only I heard Frank’s answer, defiant even now: “I go to church. I confess my sins, and I do good for my people. I got nothing to worry about in the afterlife, no hellfire for me!”
I suddenly grinned under my mesh mask. “Frank, keep an eye on your buddy’s soul, will you?”
Meanwhile the lieutenant was starting to lose control of his temper. “Maybe we see if a beat-down can do what bullets can’t!” he said angrily, and came at me.
I plucked his soul from his form, holding that one too. “Watch closely, Frank.” I said. And then I let the young man’s soul go.
For the first time Frank witnessed a soul melt. Not flit off to heaven. Not mysteriously vanish. No he saw his lieutenant’s soul quickly fall to smaller and smaller pieces, vaporizing in it’s destruction, as soon as I released it.
He saw, with his own eyes, something I only just realized earlier myself. A soul is not indestructible and without a host – or powers – it dies, just like the body does.
The soul is not eternal, and now Frank knew that. No afterlife. No heaven. Just nothing.
I put him back in his body, and he fell to the ground weeping with his hated newfound atheism.
I turned to walk away, to leave him there, but Frank still wasn’t done. “No!” he shouted. “You don’t win! It doesn’t matter if you kill me or let me live, Marco was right. We’re a family, more’n a hundred strong. We will find you and we will find that young bitch Glory too, and we will kill you both, and if we can’t do that there are other ways to make you wish you were dead! You are NOT the arbiter of life and death!!”
I whirled around to face him, my fists clenched. Standing in front of me was all that was wrong with the human race. And there were plenty more where he came from. Maybe they couldn’t hurt me, but what about my family and friends? What about Denise?
I’d never been angrier than that. I lashed out at him with my hatred, him and all his family, dead in this warehouse or elsewhere, every one of his people who had ever hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it. I was blazing fury like a supernova.
Through clenched teeth, I responded intensely, “I AM the Arbiter of life and death.”
And then I released my fury on him.
My astral form from within my body erupted with an outpouring of dark energy, dozens of shards of my soul-stuff jetting from me, flying like shadowform sparrows, out into the world, at unthinkable speeds. In less than a second each had reached its destination and returned, diving back into my astral form and rejoining with my soul.
And in between I felt my will kill every deplorable member of Frank’s outfit simultaneously. Instantly. Globally.
Before I took my next breath, I noticed that Frank was dead too.
I had ended 153 very bad people, without even knowing who or where they all were.
And from that death, new life emerged. The birth of a new world.
With no anger, but replete with purpose, I repeated quietly, as if in amazement, “I am the Arbiter of life and death.”
And the Arbiter resumed his search for Glory.