And then there was the matter of the future. If I continued down the road I was on, I’d be hunting rovers in earnest, carrying on Czarnecki’s crusade, a crusade that had always felt more like a curse. Driving around night after night with a monster beside me searching for other monsters, then becoming a monster myself in order to put a bullet into the brain of what was once a man, to stick a knife into the heart of what was once a woman, to saw the head off of what was once a child. Doomed to darkness, doomed to danger, doomed to death.

I couldn’t think of anything else but to put it in God’s hands. They say Jesus prayed so hard the night before he was crucified, he sweated blood. I don’t know if that’s true, but at 4 a.m., after hours of beseeching the Lord for forgiveness, for direction, for a sign he was even listening, my leg started to bleed again, a red rose blooming on the bandage, and at the same moment I heard a voice in my head, a voice saying, “All debts are paid.”

I’ve been a prayerful man all my life, a questioner, a petitioner, but I’ve never experienced anything like that. I don’t know if it was God speaking to me or through me. I don’t know if the debt was to Benny or to God or to the dead man, but I do know this: I received permission from someone I needed permission from to change course, to abandon the brutal path I’d found myself on.

I slept a few hours. My mind was clear and quiet when I woke, and the rock that had filled my gut ever since I learned of Benny’s death was gone. I decided to leave immediately.

There was one final horror to be lived through, though.

Beaumont, knowing it was day, was uneasy when I opened the crate. He tried to sit up, but I pushed him back.

“Don’t do it, Brother,” he said. “I’ve lived too long and suffered too much to have it end like this.”

“I’ll pray for you,” I said.

“Unchain me, and we’ll pray together,” he said. “That’s what God wants, Brother. Listen to God.”

I stuck an ice pick in his chest. His eyes widened, his heels drummed on the wood of the crate, but then he stilled. I used a hacksaw to take off his head, and he collapsed into dust, a king no more.

I loaded my things into the truck and drove north, arriving here at Czarnecki’s cabin around 4. I mean to be gone before dark, which isn’t far off now. I only came back to get the Econoline and cover my tracks some.