The Dead Kids of Orlando's Becoming

The sunset was beautiful with clouds arranged in clusters like vaprous grapes and spilling and flowing in graceful curves and blooms like the convections cream poured in coffee. The late light hit different clouds at different angles and distances so that the oranges, pinks, reds and the all transformed into each other along myriad subtle inspiring awe and thoughts of infinity and of birth and of the meaning of life, death, fire and water. But then before one could truly recognize the enormity and the profound poetry of what one was witnessing, it had changed and faded and transformed into dark night.

Things flower and fade and haunt us only to flower again then to fade, Orlando thought to himself. He was a sensitive poetic soul even though he was preparing to become a monster. He felt the poetry of the moment as he sheathed the blade he’d been sharpening. He thought of life and death and beauty. The sweet ache of the breathtaking ephemeral sunset, sweet pain of pleasure’s evanescence.

He thanked God for the sunset and took a long sip from his canteen before crouching down, sniffing the air, cocking his head and listening intently, his eyes slightly blank with listening.

He knew that they (the Vicious Kids) would soon strike again and he knew that he, Orlando, was one of the very few people anywhere who knew what they really were and what they really did, and that therefore it was up to him to stop them.

He was almost sure they’d killed every other witness to their existence. If there were survivors or escapees they were too scared and scarred to talk about it or if they’d done so were dismissed as crazy and no part of their story believed. That could happen out here especially for the natives and especially the native women who were exactly the demographic who was targeted the most.

Orlando was a wandering Navajo who lived in an RV parked on public land at the edge of some state hunting and fishing land out in The Desert of The Real in southern Arizona. His kids lived with their mom in town.

Cops and feds were always looking for missing people out in The Desert of The Real but Orlando didn’t think they knew anything about The Vicious Kids or the people they’d killed and eaten, even if they’d been told by someone who’d survived.

“I have not done anything meaningful in too long,” Orlando sighed wearily to himself before going back into his RV and smoking weed and sharpening his knives, his daggers, his machetes and his sword. Outside the night grew dark quickly. For some people in this desert it would be the darkest night of their lives.

A raven appeared out of the darkness and perched on the edge of the roof of Orlando’s RV. It looked out into the darkening desert night. It became very still and listened.

A pack of coyotes began to howl to the northeast yipping and ululating crazily not far from the highway where the rush hour and evening casino traffic were quieting down. There was a Yaqui casino hotel on Valencia not far from there. These were the usual sounds of this place around this time.

But then off to the southwest, from out toward where The Desert of The Real turns into a vast Nowhere, the raven heard laughter, high pitched and childlike but not heartarming, somehow disturbing.

Orlando came out and stood out a few feet from the RV door and cocked his ear to the air and listened so that he could hear the laughter too. It sounded delirious and demented to him.

“That’s them,” Orlando said to the raven. He was familiar with that particular raven and could tell it from all other ravens and he often spoke to things he was familiar with as if they were friends.

He had lived in this same area for a few years now, moving his RV only when he could find someone to tow it. It would need a lot of work before it would run. It was a rat’s nest under the hood and the wires and tubes were chewed up and there were twigs and leaves and garbage that the rats had put everywhere. Orlando held a large dagger with a wavy blade in his right hand. He’d traded a Yamaha generator to a stranger in the city for that dagger. Soon the youthful disturbing laughter died down and the raven flew off toward the highway. Orlando re lit the joint he had in his mouth and went back into his RV and resumed sharpening the dagger.

The Vicious Kids were feral youths out in the wilderness beyond the edge of the national parks and state hunting and fishing land in the thorny cactus-packed bush of a remote swath of Bureau of Land Management land in The Desert of The Real in southern Arizona well southwest of Tucson near (or what counts for near in those sparse spaces) the Tohono Ood’ham Nation and Old Mexico which was just over the mountains.

It was hard to tell how old The Vicious Kids were, they were all kind of tall and strong but they were prepubescent in their features and could be very childlike even in the midst of committing the most shockingly violent acts. There was a stark contrast between the viciousness of their actions and the youthful innocent quality of their overlarge eyes and soft hairless faces, their high voices and quickness to youthful exuberant laughter.

Under cover of darkness they swarmed out of the bush into someone’s camp, beating them into submission as they issued childish taunts in perfect unison. First they beat the tent while the people were in it and then they tore the tent apart and swarmed on the three young adults inside in a gleeful frenzy.

“Nyah nyah, nyah yah, we’re gonna kill yah!” Laughing with girlish and boyish delight as they brutally beat the campers with sticks, rocks, hands, feet, knees, elbows, teeth. The occasional aggressive grinding of genitals more theatrical than straightforwardly lascivious in nature, with the quality of a five year old imitating dance moves from a music video and reproducing them very well but without the sensual, sexual quality of the actual moves in the video, which are intentionally sexy and performed by adults. They were like wild animals and the sudden chaos of it stunned the victims, who were bigger, stronger, smarter, and wealthier than the children, but who were fully domesticated and scared easily and were therefore enjoyably easy to hunt.

The kids would not have such an easy time when Orlando came for them.

One boy, smooth in his skin and savage in his soul, was very expressive with his face, and cheerfully cherubic in a manner that was very shocking and strange in the context of the violence of attacks such as these. He came near one of the campers’ faces and giggled coyly before he sank his teeth into the young woman’s ear and growling and snarling he shook his head violently back and forth with her ear in his mouth as the woman screamed insanely. One of the other kids started pissing everywhere as he made high hooting sounds like some kind of febrile hairless little ape in the grips of a primal frenzy.

They did not kill the campers right away. They beat and terrified them until they were dazed and nearly senseless and they kidnapped them, taking them bound and gagged but otherwise naked (and colorfully wounded) to the ceremonial firepit, by the sacred bone pit. The campers hung down by their hands and legs from long paloverde poles that the Vicious Kids carried on their shoulders, passing the poles agilely to share the load as they walked, all singing nursery rhymes together to the rhythm of their stride as they marched in effortless unison.

They sang:

“Whistle while you work,

Hitler is a jerk!

Mousilini bit his weenie

Now it doesn’t work!”

And then:

“Nobody likes us

Everybody hates us

Think we’ll kill and eat,

Someone anyone

Let’s go out

And kill the first we meet!”

They sang joyously and the love they had for their labors was simple and obvious and somehow strangely pure. The campers had gone from wildeyed squirming and muffled inarticulate grunts to dead eyed slack bodied silence. They had burned out on pain and panic and the adrenaline had stopped flowing and they’d abandoned all hope and dissociated completely retreating into blanch-faced resignation. The Vicious kids had broken their souls. But the Vicious Kids’ spirits were high and they sang as they carried the kidnapped campers to The Great and Ceremonial Fire Pit where the only one of them who ever did anything alone, The Silent One, who was both a boy and a girl, or neither a boy nor a girl, and who spoke and sang only with the spirits and the animals and never with the other children, drank a foul smelling hallucinagenic tea (made from various local cacti and scorpion venom) from the skull of a ram, holding it by the horns. The Silent One regarded them warily over the jaw of the skull and taking one last sip before placing the skull down on a flat level red rock, balancing it so that the horns held it up at the right angle, and getting up to gather wood to add to the leftover coals and revive the fire. The ceremony was about to begin.

The Vicious Kids chanted rhyming verses as they cooked the campers over the fire. After finishing the rest of the potion in the skull the Silent One walked away from the gathering to a shadowy place among rocks and tall cacti and thick thorny trees.

There was a raven’s nest in a tall saguaro with four arms shaped kind of like a hand with the palm up and the fingers curved but open. In the palm of the hand as it were lay the raven’s nest made of twigs and leaves and paper and string and tinsel and shredded strands of police tape and other things twiggy twiny and fibrous.

The Silent One made an elaborate hand gesture at the nest and burbled like a raven and then began gathering wood from a pile of mesquite branches and small logs and carried the wood back to the fire pit and put it all on the coals as the raven who’d been at Orlando’s flew into the nest and sat down and surveyed the scene.

The Vicious Kids cooked the dead campers slowly over the fire. The three victims had been young adults, white, early twenties, university graduates, two males one female. All conventionally attractive, athletic and blessed with sharp senses and quick minds but inexperienced in life and death situations and being attacked unexpectedly. Fully domesticated adults. The children had dominated them psychologically through the suddenness and savagery of their ambush so that they’d been relatively easy to subdue and put over the fire. One of the adult males had even been so cowardly and submissive as to take his clothes off, get on his elbows and knees and present his ass as a sexual offering. All while crying like a baby. And while none of the children had shown any least interest in copulating the ass, one of them had stabbed it forcefully with a sharpened palo verde branch, causing the man to shriek in pain and alarm, not to mention humiliation, all of which brought great joy to the children, who giggled with delight and began to tease the man playfully, whereat he’d begun to wail like a soul suffering the torments of Dante’s hell.

After cooking the campers completely the children chanted to the night and danced around the fire energetically, throwing their hairless arms up into the air in exuberant celebratory gestures. Their faces were still greasy and shined with the hot fat from campers they’d killed and eaten. The raven emerged from its nest and came nearer the fire and the feast. It perched on a saguaro not far from the spot where the ceremonial cannibalism had taken place.

After a round of feasting a few of the kids performed little skits and some theater, using human blood and glitter to make themselves up so that they looked like prepubescent intergalactic death clowns. Something about the ceremonial cannibalism made them even crazier and scarier than usual. They became intoxicated and flew into ecstasies that could be very wild and violent though never sexual in nature.

Soon they all became sleepy and fell asleep around the fire pit as The Silent One continued to tend to the fire and drank more psychedelic cactus tea from the skull of a ram, holding it by the horns. The pale low flames played fluidly back and forth over the glowing embers in the pit and the light and subtle color reflected in the child’s silent brooding staring eyes. Soon The Silent One too became sleepy, lay down and slept. Out in the darkness an owl hooted who who who. A meteor streaked and faded across the night sky.

The raven flew back to Orlando’s where Orlando had finished sharpening his knives, machetes and carbon steel jet black war sword. He was out in a clearing across a dry river bed from his RV practicing moves on some melons and old tires and thorny mesquite and palo verde trees and cacti of various sizes and a dummy he’d made out of some old lumber and tent poles. He had several bladed weapons of varying shapes weights and sizes. He was dressed all desert khaki and he moved quiet as a shadow and swifter than sound.

The raven watched from a nearby mesquite tree. It could not help being fascinated and impressed by Orlando’s display of sheer animal deadliness. He was executing combinations and doing full spins and hitting things behind himself and way off to the side with perfect accuracy. For his finale he sent a series of melons into the air and sliced them all before they landed and he did it with a kind of effortlessness and athletic, sportsmanlike enjoyment. He had noticed the raven’s arrival and after finishing his finale he bowed to it.

“I am almost ready,” Orlando told the raven. “Now I must rest.”

The raven cocked it’s head and regarded him with bemused interest. The night grew very quiet and came to a point of almost absolute stillness. The stars seemed to cease in their wheelings and the earth in its turning. Orlando and the raven both felt the world become very still with their bodies and quickly thereafter their souls and each managed to consciously hear the silence and the stillness and feel the timelessness of that otherwise very brief almost imperceptible (from the outside) moment into which all of life’s music and meaning had been condensed but it was as a dream and in truth passed in a mere flicker and they snapped out of it when they heard machine gun fire off in the distance and then roosters and sirens and howling dogs at various distances in several directions. A helicopter approaching from the northeast, from the city which lay behind the mountain range to the northeast. Tucson, Arizona.

“Goodnight,” he said to the raven, who listened and nodded and flew off toward the highway as Orlando went inside and smoked another joint while putting his seven sacred blades away. There were 8 Vicious Kids and Orlando hoped to kill seven of them with seven separate blades each ceremonially distinguished and imbued with special power and significance through rituals wherein he spoke in ancient archaisms from mysterious esoteric traditions he’d studied for years in scriptures without titles written by hand and passed down among nomads through generations.

He would let the eighth one, The Silent One, live. That decision he’d made with the raven.

When he slept he had many vivid dreams, most involving fast paced battles to the death. When he awoke he felt cheerful and refreshed and he made some coffee and smoked a joint. There were more mourning doves cooing than usual in the cool glow of that time of morning in The Desert of The Real where the sun was just crowning the mountaintops in the east, the light breaking out over the vast plains to the mountains ranges to the west.

The raven returned and perched on Orlando’s RV as Orlando stepped out into the morning light in loose-fitting khaki linens and prepared for battle with his seven blades all in place: one small springloaded stiletto in the ankle, one bowie knife at the left hip, one machete on the right thigh, one wavy dagger on the right hip, one slightly more wavy dagger on the right inner forearm, one machete across his back with the handle sticking out over his right shoulder and then across that on his back diagonal in the other direction with the handle sticking out over his left shoulder (which was the best spot possible for grasping with the right hand first) was his war sword, which was medium in length, about 28 inches, but broad and well-sharpened on both ends. It was jet black every inch of it save for gray iron eagle shaped hilt with silver eyes and inlaid filigree that looked like the secret vibrations that cradle the stars in the infinity of the universe.

He knew the general direction of their camp because he had heard them laughing at night several times from the same general direction. He recognized the laughter. He’d once witnessed them at the peak of one of their hunts, laughing as they broke a woman’s hands and feet by smashing them with stones before hog tying her and carrying her away on a long pole. He’d avoided being seen that time because he’d been unarmed and outnumbered. But he’d followed them at a distance and spied on them. He was lucky he had not been caught for The Vicious Kids had sharp senses and were very observant. He hadn’t followed them for long and he hadn’t actually seen them cook and eat the woman because he’d become very afraid and fled just as he saw them preparing to hang her over a sixfoot wide firepit ringed with stones and full of glowing coals as The Silent One gathered wood to add to the coals. The woman had begun screaming and they’d all begun to laugh and that laugh haunted Orlando. He burned with shame and dishonor at the memory of how he’d been overcome by fear and run away. But this time things would be different. Much different. Not only would he redeem himself after his disgrace, he would do battle on sacred ground against demons who were unquestionably evil and who had been kidnapping, murdering and eating innocent people out in The Desert of The Real for God only knows how long.

“I have not done anything meaningful in too long,” he told the raven, who listened and burbled briefly in reply..

He’d spoken more about The Vicious Kids to a local brujo named Hermano El Otro (“Brother The Other”) who told him of things he’d seen in dreams and visions and heard from the ravens, coyotes and saguaros. When Brother The Other saw worlds in dreams these were not mere personal fantasies they were actual other worlds in worlds near to ours that for all their closeness never actually touch for they exist along parallel planes above and below and to the sides whose geometry was consistent to the shores of infinity. The brujo had said that the Vicious Kids were indeed like children in many ways but that they were monsters from some other worse world who’d somehow lost their way among worlds or had perhaps done something like break out of prison at the cosmic metaphysical interdimensional level and needed to be sent back to the lower levels that are their rightful place.

“How do we send them back?” Orlando had asked the Brother The Other.

“Through the consecration of an individual blade for each of the seven of the eight of them that you must then slay in combat. Confer with the raven and the raven will confirm that the eighth one is different and should be spared. The one called The Silent One, who is both boy and girl or neither boy nor girl and who speaks and sings only to the plants, animals and spirits. Who talks to the ravens and the coyotes and makes potions that let people look into parallel worlds. Cacti juice, rain water, snake blood and scorpion venom. Words whispered. Who will speak to the dead when older. Who should be spared and given a new life out here.”

“This is a rare and miraculous opportunity,” Orlando said, amazed at and not at all skeptical of what Brother The Other had told him. “But it is an enormous responsibility and a very serious matter.”

Up above them a hawk shrieked as it took off from a high utility pole looming like a vast crucifix hung with slightly sagging power lines that ran along a series of utility poles a couple hundred feet apart on down the desert highway into the shimmering heat and expanse of space and dry dust.

They were walking down a dirt road that ran along the opposite side of a wide concrete wash from Ajo highway after going to the Speedway gas station on Ajo for some beers that Orlando had to buy the brujo as part of the deal. Natural Light, which struck most people as cheap and watery, worked for him like a magical potion that allowed him to witness (and occasionally even walk into) other worlds.

“I will teach you a ritual to prepare your weaponry with,” the brujo said. “And I will make a gift to the raven and the spirits in the sky, the spirits of the wind, and when your time comes you will be as fast as the wind and as hard to see, and you will howl and bite and be fierce and deadly in combat even when outnumbered by formidable opponents. But once you have slain them you will need to contend with the monster you will have become in doing so.”

“What if I don’t become a monster though?” Orlando asked, a little incredulous now for the first time in the course of a conversation full of wild and fantastical details. Ah but such is life in The Desert of The Real.

“If you can remain the man you are now then you should indeed remain among other people after you have completed your deadly bloody task; but in all likelihood you will become a monster as a matter of course in your battle against such challanging opponents as these. There are seven of them and only one of you, and they are as bloodthirsty as any living man.”

Orlando nodded. “I have seven blades and will kill one with each,” hen said solemnly. “Now teach me the chants and poems to speak over the blades as I prepare them.”

“If you become a monster you must exile yourself so that you do not do things even worse than those evil ones whom you will have vanquished in the process of your grotesque new becoming. If you do not heed this warning you too may be dispatched through violent death to a lower world. These things can happen. There are ravens made of shadows who will come by the hundreds to carry you off after you come to a gruesome and painful end, suffering for a prolonged period of time as you are tortured and mutilated and die.”

“So if in fighting these demons I become one I must exile myself into the deep wilderness.”

“Yes. And there is no place where the shadow ravens will not find you. If you kill yourself they can still come to take your soul down below. You will know the right thing to do but you must choose it and do it too.”

So he’d learned how to chant the sacred spells and prepare his blades and he’d been practicing in the clearing by his RV for a while now.

He remembered what the brujo had told him as he walked in what he reckoned to be the general direction of the Vicious Kids’ camp, based on the direction he’d heard them from at night a few times and what the raven, who was usually pretty reliable, had told him.

As he approached the highway and waited to cross at the light, the only traffic light for miles around, he saw the raven approaching in the low sky. He watched it perch on the traffic light as the light changed and he crossed the highway and it watched him as he crossed and he looked up at it when he’d finished crossing and it took off and flew to the southwest slowly so that he could follow and he followed. This side of the road was all open desert as one finds off the highway in The Desert of The Real as one gets far enough away from the city and the mountains. The raven stopped to wait for him atop a high saguaro easily visible from a distance.

Not long after catching up with the raven at that saguaro Orlando suddenly got a funny feeling in his gut and he stopped and became very still. He wasn’t sure why, it may have been pure intuition, but he felt strongly that he was on the brink of walking into an ambush. They’re on to me, he thought to himself. He could just feel it in the air.

For some reason he was sure they were laying in wait just over the next dry river bed, which was deep and rocky but also sandy and pebbly and crowded over with thorny trees and cacti. You couldn’t see one side from the other and there was only one spot where it was relatively easy to pass through openings in the prickly foliage on both sides and cross on a naturally occurring stone staircase and bridge of just a few broad thick slabs of red stone. And he felt like he just knew that some or all of them would be waiting to pounce on the other side.  He didn’t know how, he just knew.

So he didn’t cross there. He knew that if he backtracked a little and then shimmied on his belly at a smaller opening a short ways back down the bank he could creep stealthily down into the river bed which was deeper and had more cover than most of the other little dry river beds and gulches in the area. It was one if the first drainage channels to flow with water when the rains came. The coyotes and the javelina traveled by it during the dry seasons.

He turned back and crept unseen in a low crouch to a spot that was thick with foliage but had a small gap that he could shimmy through on his belly and he crawled through using only his arms. It took a little extra work compared to if he’d just been out hiking because he had all of his blades on him. There was the weight of them and making sure sure the machete and war sword didn’t catch on the tangle of gnarled Black Mesquite and Jerlusalem Thorn. The little gap in the prickly tangle of branches was held open by a small rocky outcropping shaped like a wolf skull where the bank was otherwise sheer like a wall.

He shimmied ably through the gap without disturbing the bush and slid almost in a free fall down four feet of nearly sheer wall into the sand and the small round river stones, rolling when he hit the ground to minimize the impact and the sound of his movement. That was the loudest thing he’d have to do until he could take the would-be ambuscade by surprise and start killing.

The bed was just a tiny bit moist on the bottom. The Desert of The Real is technically a desert but it is the wettest desert in the world owing to the heavy rains of the monsoon season. This particular desert had its own unique properties and ecosystem owing to the combination of its unique climate and geochemistry. Compared to other drier deserts it is positively lush with vegetation and it can get very green.

And the light in the river bed was green as he crawled on his hands and knees back up toward the area where he believed that the Vicious Kids were likely laying in wait. He crawled carefully, keeping himself relaxed and quieting his mind so that he could listen better to his surroundings. And yet while he was indeed relaxed and quiet in his mind he was also completely ready to spring into action and start killing everything that moved at any time. He was well trained and understood the nature of his task.

He was in a state of mind body and soul that comes only to certain people at certain times. The incomprehensible immensities of a situation like this one can loom large. Anyone might struggle with feelings of being overwhelmed and in danger. With racing thoughts from anxiety or a perfectly natural adrenaline response. With imposter syndrome. (“What if I am not good enough to kill all these young kids?” etc)

But there is another way. One enters a calm state of grace with full knowledge of the life and death nature of the situation and an understanding of the evil and violence of a world within the world that one has entered of one’s own free will. So he kept his cool im saying, and he crawled quietly toward the bigger gap in the cacti and gnarled thorny trees on the banks where people and animals commonly crossed.

He was not far from the opening when he saw a change in the light, a brief moment of shadow. Someone had passed in front of the opening on the side of the crossing where the sunlight beamed through. He stopped and became still and he looked forward without focusing on anything specifically and listened intently, making sure to stay relaxed but also ready to spring directly into action and kill when the time was right. Keeping in mind that that time was coming. Listening.

“I thought he was coming, where’d he go? Who said they saw him?”

“Nobody actually saw him on the way here, but he did cross the highway onto our side. Someone saw that.”

Their voices were high and they were childish in their general manner of speaking. They did not fully pronounce their words and they were kind of naively loud even while practicing stealth. Like kids in a library.

They were far more used to being a sudden unilateral aggressor and stunning unsuspecting victims who had no idea they were coming than they were to being tracked and hunted by a trained assassin who knew the bush as well as they did.

“Where are the others?”

“Eating and scouting.”

They sounded like precocious children pretending to be in the military but they were also in fact seasoned paramilitaries conferring as such on practical matters involved in high risk tactical situations.

For just a moment Orlando wondered if he should abort his mission and turn back before things got serious. He knew that he could still just go home and keep to himself and move on with his life if he really wanted to.

“They found another camp to raid,” a third voice said. Obviously a girl. “They said it’s all women so it will be easy and fun.”

“Women taste better,” one of the previous male voices said. The other two laughed.

“Ew,” the girl said, but her heart wasn’t in it.

“I’m going to cross and check around the other side,” the other boy said. “Don’t worry.”

Orlando realized that the time was almost upon him as the light that had been coming in through the opening was again interrupted. He rushed up to the opening as the boy appeared and hopped from the edge down the sheer drop into the sand and pebbles of the bed. The child was lanky but graceful and moved quickly but had been careless on the way in because he was looking at his companions instead of where he was going.

Orlando was very swift and set in his purpose and he pounced on the boy and caught him off balance and pulled his head to the side and cut his throat with the bowie knife he’d had on his left hip, cutting across not only the major veins and arteries but through the soft youthful windpipe as well. He dropped the boy and the boy died quickly as Orlando burst up through the big gap in the foliage through which the boy had come.

Upon emerging he saw a girl, probably the girl whose voice he heard. She was just a little thing. She trembled with fright and even became paralyzed from what he could tell. It really seemed like she could not even scream. Judging by her eyes it seemed like she desperately wished that she could. But she was frozen and could neither cry out nor flee.

Orlando leapt at her with one of his daggers in his right hand and she managed a barely audible whimper as with his left hand he grabbed her by the hair and pulled her head to the side at which point something snapped inside her and she finally began to scream and she resisted and tried to escape but she stumbled was briefly stunned. That part of her neck was still exposed and he stabbed her in the side of the neck several times deeply and quickly and her voice gurgled and then she lost her voice and lost her strength. He left her behind as she bled to death and her eyes turned into brute inanimate things like stones.

Then on an impulse he could not explain he leapt to the side just as the boy whom he presumed to be the third of the three he’d heard talking suddenly came flying at him snarling, teeth bared. Orlando could tell by the boy’s eyes and movements that he was completely crazed and did not understand what was happening. This would be an easy kill.

Orlando took the long sharp machete from his back as the boy howled at him from just a couple of feet away, his mouth in a big 0. Orlando chopped with all his might into the side of the boy’s face. The boy in his crazed state had not seemed to understand the value of getting his head out of the way of the machete. The jaw being open as it was, the machete managed to break the jaw at the hinge on the side of impact and chop through and cause some heavy bleeding though he did not manage to hit the main blood vessels in the neck. On the second shot though, (which he had some time to set up for owing to the boy’s being stunned by the first direct machete hit to the face,) Orlando aimed for the neck, hoping to swing with such strength as to decapitate the boy, which he did not in the end succeed in doing, though he did manage to sever the carotid artery and the jugular vein.

He watched the life drain rapidly from the boy’s mutilated face until the eyes went blank then chopped at the dead face on the ground one more time just to be sure. The skull split open like a melon and the brains spilled out. Orlando felt the thrill of victory in battle and a sense of excitation at the sight of the boy’s brains falling out, but then he became disgusted by and afraid of the previous excitation which then disappearted or became shame and rage. Then he realized that everything was much too quiet and he needed the thrill of battle to the death in his ears and he remembered what the brujo had told him about becoming a monster and he realized that it was a very serious thing but he already felt that he had not only become the monster but that it suited him and that he liked it and was good at it.

He saw the raven in a nearby palo verde tree and it gestured with its head before flying off, moving deliberately slowly so that he could follow. He followed it, leaving the three blades he’d already used behind, stepping quietly but quickly. The raven led him away from the remaining children and their camp on a looping route so that he came back on the flank of those whom he realized were now also trying to track him. Let it be said of this raven that while it had a brain the size of a nut it was a kind of genius and that this particular contribution to this campaign was nothing less than a tactical masterstroke.

There were four others, five if you included The Silent One, but The Silent One was to be spared and given a life after the other children had been killed. The Silent One was not like the others. The Silent One belonged to the desert. The others belonged to hell.

The raven led him to an area with a barbed wire fence about a hundred yards square and a gate hanging open and a path leading from the gate that passed between two big round pits about thirtty yards in. One pit full of smoldering ashes and one pit full of live vultures hunched over and picking at old bones. The raven did not guide him into the area though and after perching on a high cactus near the gate and making eye contact with Orlando itflew on past the pit yard, conscpicuous in its flight around the outside so as to be clear in its direction, to a patch of trees and cactus that probably concealed another dry river bed. He followed the fenceline around the outside of the pit yard and crept up to the patch of trees which did not conceal a dry river bed but a clearing. He heard high young psychopathic voices in the clearing.

This is going so much better than I expected, he thought to himself. I think all of the rest of them are here and they don’t yet know that the others are dead. They probably don’t expect me. Perhaps they know I am coming. But they certainly do not know that I am already here. I am at an advantage in a way. They’re used to preying on unsuspecting domesticated types and not being tracked, hunted and culled. It is a pity that they are children, and very much a pity that they are evil. And I must be honest with myself, I have already become the monster. I must be honest further: it is better that I am now the monster. It will not become a problem until I’ve killed them all and am left to deal with the aftermath of what my own freely chosen actions have transformed me into. Perhaps I can give my keys and blessings to The Silent One. Perhaps I really can exile myself into the deeper wild. Ah but now is not the time for thought, now is the time for action.

He quieted his mind and crept up to the needled thorny foliage at the edge of the clearing and stood very still as he peaked through. Somehow one of the Vicious Kids noticed, but only in that very vague instinctive way that people and animals have where they can just tell when they are being looked at, especially by a hunter or predator.

“Someone is watching us!” She said to the others, audibly distressed, her voice high and quavering. “I felt it on my skin!”

“Get the spears!” One of the boys said, and there was a rustling sound of hurried activity.

Orlando leapt through the bushes with his sword out and with a terrifying yell he swung the war sword and decapitated the tallest and most muscular of the boys, whose body crumpled slowly down in a heap after the head had fallen to the ground and rolled a few feet. The girl began to scream loudly and Orlando dropped his sword and crouched down and pulled his spring loaded stiletto from his ankle and then sprung forward at the girl who put her hands up but did not fight back as he swung the knife into her neck and chest repeatedly, managing to stab her seven times in just a few seconds, killing her quickly.

The two boys now had wooden spears and both lunged at him and thrust their spears but he leapt and turned a sumersault on the ground and came to a crouch and took the machete from his right thigh, which was shorter and lighter but a little sharper than the other machete he’d kept on his back and left back by the body of the boy whose skull he’d broken open with it.

He leapt at the boys as they turned and thrust their spears at him, but they were afraid and far too used to easily intimidated and defenseless opponents and they were sloppy in their maneuvers. He got in close between their two spears and with his machete he chopped at the neck and shoulder of one and split his shoulder from his neck from his chest and the other boy cried out in a very young startled voice and then he briefly stood up and thrust his chest out and tried to glower menacingly at Orlando but he soon lost his composure and began to weep intensely with shuddering sobs and wet snorting. He begged Orlando to spare him and promised he would be Orlando’s slave if Orlando let him live. Orlando told him that there was nothing he could do now, for he had feasted on human flesh, and had perforce to be removed to hell.

The boy fell to his knees and dropped his spear. Orlando dropped the bloody machete. He had only one blade left, the second curvy bladed assassin’s dagger which he now readied as the boy, understanding his fate, became submissive. The boy got on his knees and put his hands behind his back and closed his eyes and tilted his head back to reveal his neck. Orlando saw something of the martyred saint in the child’s posture. He was glad that he had used one blade per kill and that each blade had been charmed and his life after all of this would be affected by his having worked in accordance with the spells involved. He would need good fortune in the future for he had made a monster of himself. And he would become more monstrous still.

He was excited to finish his task now. He recited a chant full of old words from languages rarely spoken anymore anywhere and then he fell upon the boy and stabbed him repeatedly in a frenzy of crazed violence, building to a climax where he cried out and had a powerful orgasm in his pants and then fell down upon the child’s dead body. He briefly muttered something to himself before putting his face to the still warm dead body and licking the warm fresh blood off and sniffing at the wounds like a dog.

He was not aware of what he was doing until he got that feeling that he was being watched and he stood up and turned around to see The Silent One watching from up on a big rock that was well outside the clearing but afforded a good view into it. Suddenly he became afraid, first of The Silent One, then of the world, and then of himself, passing through each intensely and suffering confusion from the overload of it. He wondered if he would kill himself.

It really was as the old Brujo had warned. He felt a kind of shock of recognition and then he realized in a moment of clarity that he’d already known it would come to this and that were still things he could do to finish up properly even though he would never be able to go back to his old life or how things were. And he was supposed to help The Silent One start a new life, the brujo and the raven had emphasized that.

“I won’t hurt you!” He cried out to The Silent One who watched big-eyed and suspicious but not afraid. Orlando continued. “You are friends with the raven, I swore to the raven that I would spare you. Seek out the brujo who asks for Natural Light. I will give you the keys to my RV and you can start a new life with it and I will exile myself further into the wilderness in the most remote parts of The Desert of The Real.”

And he took his keys and threw them to The Silent One, who cought them and then immediately, without a word or gesture of thanks, took off in the direction of the RV, leaping off of the tall stone and disappearing among the cacti, low trees and scrub brush.

Now in the silence Orlando felt very heavy with the weight of what he’d done and he wandered further into the desert, with the raven helping him along until the night when it flew back to the RV where The Silent One sat roasting some mystery meat on sticks over a small fire over a small pit of coals.

The Silent One spoke to the raven in its own language and they agreed that things had happened as they should have though how they’d gotten so bad in the first place would forever be a mystery.

The Silent One asked the raven if there was any chance that Orlando would kill himself and the raven said we shall see, my child, be patient. We shall see.