A/N: Yes, I'm a lazy bastard. I'm not really a shining example of initiative and drive, either.
Chapter 22: To The Face Of God
I wouldn't let something like that stop me. Even though pain shot through my body at even the smallest movement, getting up and acting tough could get that egoistical, arrogant asshole distracted, so Jenna could get him from behind.
I managed to push myself up, tiny flecks of ashes from the hole in my chest drifting through my blurry field of vision. This was the time to spite and taunt him, to really make him lose control.
"God? Don't fuck with me." I sneered with great effort, pulled out a crumpled cigarette from my hoodie pocket, stuck it in my mouth, lit up, inhaled and arrogantly blew a cloud of smoke in the man's direction. "That might be so many other things, but it's sure as hell not God."
He grimaced for a second, then lowered his gun and smiled. "Listen up good, girlie. I din't believe in no God either. Then one of your kind came, and I knew sure as my momma raised me good that God was watchin'." He smirked, a self-satisfied expression with no trace of humor, the smile of a killer I knew from myself. "Then I whacked its head right off with a shovel, and it din't move no more. And th' Lord right well told me that I'd done th' right thing for 'im."
His gun arm was still half raised, and his eyes were darting back and forth. Jenna seemed to have caught on to the idea and was waiting behind him with a pump-action shotgun that she seemed to have scavenged from one of the other hunters. At first her reason seemed unclear, but then I realized that he might just say too much and give his employer or superiors away.
I hadn't thought Jenna to be that bright.
Smiling half to himself, the man carried on with his tirade. "Then th' servants of th' Good Lord came to me, an' they gave me these here bullets and some folks willin' to fight with me. Of course, they weren't much use now, were they?" He lit a long, slim cigarette, as if to reciprocate my gesture of disgust. Now was as good as any other time to get closer to the truth. "The Church? Are you seriously fucking telling me that a bunch of old priests and bishops are supplying a PMC or whatever?" I instanly felt that this might have been too rough, but the man seemed to be content to demonstrate his superiority.
"Not that weak, spineless bunch of Commies you call th' Protestants. Th' real church, the one that serves a real God Almighty an' not a pitiful demon, has the guts an' the courage to give th' chosen ones shelter an' arms. Right here in this city, every Catholic church is in on it."
His face had a smug, faux-heroic expression on it, somehow serene, that didn't change before or after the click of the trigger that heralded his neck and upper back being torn to shreds by a shotgun round. Somehow, this time it was much harder to imagine that he was dead than it was with the other two. Still, his death left the hollow feeling of a Pyrrhic victory.
If the whole Catholic church was conspiring to exterminate vampires, and if all their forces were equipped like this, fighting would be hopeless.
Not every group would have the same weaknesses of a pathetic group led by a strong leader, a sentiment that was echoed by the man's severed head, longish brown hair drenched in his own blood and the cigarette still held between his paling lips in a surreal display of arrogant spite.
His body hit the ground with a heavy thump moments before his head, the cigarette falling out of his mouth and being extinguished in the rapidly pooling blood.
Marie was nowhere to be seen, and the thug's girlfriend seemed to have either fainted or simply mentally shut off. She was lying unconscious on the ground, beside the body of the man with the buzz cut, who had seemingly been killed with his own gun. Jenna was just standing there, smiling brightly like a child on Christmas morning, toting the shotgun in her arms.
With a sudden movement, she stepped over to the body of the duster-clad man, rolled his body over, peeled off his jacket, the collar of which was dripping with blood, and pulled it on. She picked up his hat, wiped it off and put it on and began trying out her mobility in the jacket, which reached her ankles, whereas it had reached the man to just below his knees.
"What do you think you're doing?" The screech came from my mouth before I noticed it. She'd just killed a man in cold blood; that was understandable, seeing how he'd acted. But putting on his clothes, without respect for the dead, without even thinking of burying him, just leaving his head rolling around on the gravel, was too much.
Still, I understood that there was no convincing her otherwise when I heard her one-word explanation, delivered with the gut-churning, sickening smile of a depraved sociopath.
"Trophy."