Foley’s expression relaxed a little, and became something else: crafty and knowing. “Will it keep out of that box?”
“Yes.”
“Then, yeah, I’m bad.”
“How bad are you, exactly?”
“I’ve killed a couple of fuckers in my time. Did one piece of shit with an iron pipe, first his hole and then his face. Did another with my fists. Left a third piece of shit so messed up he’s been lying around on his back for ten years, broken below the neck and shitting through a tube. Not even brain-dead, neither. Awake so he knows every day what I done to him. I ain’t one of those sick serial killing shits who does that kind of thing for fun, but I got no trouble taking care of business if business got to be done. Some people got it coming. You need somebody for that kind of work, someone who won’t talk back or argue, someone who won’t forget who’s in charge now, I’m your guy a hundred percent. I‘ll make you proud.”
The boy spent several seconds absorbing this before offering a slight nod and pointing toward a spot on the horizon, chosen at random. He said, “All right, Foley. Walk in that direction until I look like a dot in the distance. Then sit down and keep an eye on me. When I wave, run back and kill the man I’m with.”
The big man nodded, because when one was trapped with an omnipotent being it was always best to be offered an opportunity to prove one’s worth. He got up and ambled off into the distance, shaking his leg a little to wring his pants as dry as the circumstances allowed him.
The boy waited for Foley to travel the prescribed distance, and sit on the cold featureless earth. It was clear that the big man would sit there for hours or days or years, had such things still existed, and not move until summoned. All things being equal, it would not be much of an improvement over the environment in the box. It would only be lighter, more peaceful, and less crowded. That struck the boy as all the incentive he needed to trouble himself with offering.
Next step. He pulled Stupid-Face from the box.
Stupid-Face shrieked and fell back to his knees, tears rolling down his face in waves. “Oh, please. Don’t put me in there again. I promise, I won’t ask any more questions. Just let me stay out here, I beg you.”
“You were right, before,” the boy said. “I am just a kid. I don’t think I’m a freak or a mutant or any of those other things from the movies. I’m not even particularly smart. At least, I wasn’t ever all that good in school. I was just sitting around one day, thinking, when I suddenly figured out how to do something nobody ever knew how to do before. I was just lucky to be the first one to ever have the idea. But really, it was easy. Even you could have done it. You can ask me a question now, if you want.”
Stupid-Face cast about in a mind close to bursting, and after three or four visible false starts, managed, “B-but even if you could… why would you…?”
The boy picked his nose. “I didn’t like my Dad.”
“What?”
“Don’t get me wrong. He didn’t beat me or anything like that. He wasn’t a bully or a drunk or a perve. He was just, you know, a guy like you, going to his job in the morning and coming home to his family at night. I’ll give him credit for trying to be a good Dad, for making sure we were fed and stuff, and for spending time with us when he could, but every once in a while it was hard to look at him and not know that when he got tired from trying all the time, he looked at me and my Mom and my two sisters and my Dog and kind of wished we weren’t there, because life would have been so much easier for him if we weren’t. When I figured out how to do what I could do, I first made him forget all of us and then put him in the box. Then I did my sisters and my Mom, because I liked them even less. It wasn’t hard.”
Stupid-Face fell to all fours, and shook his head, addressing the dirt because it was solid and beneath him and no less reasonable or empathetic than the boy before him. His shoulders trembled, and he too released urine, the way the big man in the orange jumpsuit had. He muttered, “Oh God, Oh God…”
“Now I have a question for you. Were you a good man?”
“What?”
“I’m gonna get really bored if you just keep saying what whenever I ask you anything. If you bore me there’s no point in not just putting you back in the box. So that was the last time I want to hear the word what from you. In fact, just to be sure you don’t say it by accident, I’m gonna make you forget it right now.” The boy shifted the box. “There. You can’t say that word ever again. That’s not too bad, because it’s only one word, but if you keep wasting my time I’m gonna also make you forget and and the and is, and that’s gonna make it really hard for you to say anything at all. So you might as well answer me. Were you a good man?”
Stupid-Face’s mouth moved, providing a moment of silence where he normally would have uttered another what to underline his lack of understanding. It was as if the one key word removed from him had shifted everything that remained, and placed them on unfamiliar shelves, requiring vast internal adjustments until he was able to provide a response. “I think so.”
“But were you really?” the boy asked. “I could have asked the same question of my Dad, and he would have said the same thing, even though he was like most people, just doing what he was taught to do, without ever understanding why. I don’t think he was ever really good or evil, because he was never really asked to do anything but what he was. At least, he was no hero. So I ask you again. Were you a good man?”
Stupid-Face’s mouth continued to work silently, as his mind churned through any number of possible responses and rejected every single one for being attached to too many possible causes for offense. “I’m sorry. I don’t know.”
The boy’s shoulders fell in disappointment. “That’s what I thought.”
He stood up and waved at the distant dot on the horizon, which stirred from its chosen spot and began to grow in size.
Stupid-Face followed his gaze and noticed the other distant figure for the first time. His eyes clouded with dread. His jaw fell, and chewed air for long seconds as the right words were pulled from their shelves. “Who’s that?”
“That,” the boy said, “is an evil man.”
The hulking figure in the orange jumpsuit approached in no special hurry, his clenched fists hanging from arms like coiled springs. His eyebrows were knit over slitted eyes, and his mouth was a lipless grimace. Together they made the kind of expression that drew a straight line between the impulse to murder and the target of that impulse, a straight line that ended in the same spot where Stupid-Face began.
There was no way for Stupid-Face to interpret the still distant figure’s approach as anything but what it was. He said, “No,” and whirled toward the boy, hoping for mercy, but finding nothing in those placid features but detached curiosity. He rose, stumbled, and said, “No,” again, but mere denial of his circumstances accomplished nothing at all, and so he said, “You can‘t, I‘m no fighter, look at the size of him,” but that made no difference either. He spun in a circle, searching for havens in a world that no longer had any shelters or bolt-holes or doors to close or trees to climb or authorities to summon, that in fact had nothing at all but the killer coming for him and the boy who could summon more killers any time he wanted. He took a couple of steps back, but then stopped, paralyzed by the awareness that he could run a thousand miles if he wanted and never step outside the reach of what was coming for him. At long last, the only remaining reaction available to him burst from him in a cry so primal that it cracked in his throat. “I loved my children, you little shit!”