Rake Over The Souls

HEAT

Matlacha

Chapter 1 - Part 2

It was warm for January - even the 23rd - the sun was intense - you could almost feel it burn the skin - and their was nothing that Lou Karres liked more than burning human skin - well maybe two more things - the delicious screams of those whose skin was being burned and then the 'raking' of their souls. Yes - soul raking dragged the agony out for millennia. Yes - if man thought his pain was over after his mere blip of an existent on earth he had a whole new pain coming - yes indeed.

It's impossible to ascribe human emotions to Lou - yes, we'll call him Lou from now on - but in the last 2 days he had experienced a mild equivalent of what humans would call pain - and now what humans would call bleeding. But having never experienced either before the reaction was one of puzzlement, because Lou couldn't die. It was just that after 13 billion years you'd think you'd have it all figured out - apparently not.

After 13 billion years, if something happens for the first time, there has to be a damn good reason and that was what Lou was working through. It might be time to harvest another human and rake the soul of the one he was inhabiting - it had lasted a 1000 years but maybe it was breaking down - but that would have to wait until he sorted all this out.

That said he did love the raking - oh the screams could melt granite - in other galaxies - and Lou loved pain - he couldn't feel any - but he loved it - it was his greatest gift.

He swabbed his bleeding nose, thinking through the last 1000 years of what could have caused this - who would have even the small amount of power to inflict this - it couldn't have been the Yangzhou massacre, because Lou had raked every soul - all 1 million; it wasn't Nanjing - Lou had raked all 200,000 (and how their souls still screamed - he could hardly wait to get back to torment them); it wasn't the Hamidian massacre - for all the same reasons; it wasn't Hitler, for the simple reason Lou was Hitler at that point - wtf was going on ....

Then of course - it came to him - there could be no other possibility - the soul that he absolutely needed to rake was on the offensive - somehow it figured out where Lou was and why Lou needed it. Shit. This was serious. For the first time in 13 billion years, Lou needed a drink - possibly a double. Lou now needed to probe everyone in Matlacha - and if necessary - rake every soul - yes - rake their souls - Lou sit upright and tilted his head  back - blood running from both nostrils - and laughed the laugh of 1000 hyenas - mothers held their children close - fathers thought of guns - Lou thought of endless pain and the screams - oh yes - the screams - this was going to be good - very, very good ....