“You’re making a legend of yourself again,” Rock said, stepping over broken pews. “People are starting to call you the Black Reaper.”
The old wharf was a maze of shipping containers, rusting cranes, and the oily black water of the bay. The rain had stopped, replaced by a thick, choking fog that turned every light into a blurred halo.
“You could walk away,” Rock said, sitting on a fallen pillar. “Go back to the Lovelace estate. Garcia writes to you, doesn’t he? He loves you.” black lagoon: roberta
“She’s right,” the scarred man muttered. “This ain’t worth it.”
She went. Of course she went. She went with her hunting rifle, two stolen pistols, and a bandolier of grenades she had made herself from tin cans and military-grade explosives. She was a walking apocalypse. “You’re making a legend of yourself again,” Rock
“You will live,” she whispered. “You will live for weeks, maybe months. You will choke on your own fluids. You will lie in this chair, unable to move, unable to speak, while the cancer eats you from the inside. And in your final moments, you will think of me. You will think of the jungle. And you will know that I won.”
“Do you understand, Rock-san? That boy—that wonderful, innocent boy—looks at me and sees a protector. A guardian. He does not see the hands that have strangled, the eyes that have watched the light fade from a hundred faces. If I go to that wedding, I will bring the stench of death with me. I will taint his happiness. The only gift I have left to give him is my absence.” “You could walk away,” Rock said, sitting on
She lifted the rifle, sighting down the barrel at a stained-glass window of a saint. The saint’s face was long gone, shattered by some long-ago bullet.