The wood-plank walls seemed to reflect none of the dim orange light as the sun itself dipped below the horizon. Thick clouds of cigar smoke pockmarked the barroom air, drifting lazily around their owners, themselves leisurely arranged around the room in forest-green booth seats with their men of business and their women of pleasure. Though divided, each group of suited men reflected one another, revealed how fundamentally similar they all were. The look in their eyes, these pasty old men and their decrepit culture, and the clench in their hands said nothing of the flair and royalty each and every one believed themselves to have achieved. They were relics, not in the sense of a new generation’s rise but in the very simple fact that from the glare of their eyes was primal fear as they watched their miserable end walk into the room by the front door.

The bartender noticed the change in atmosphere. The futility and the chaos of stubborn souls and burnt gunpowder. He stopped and stared with the rest of the audience. He was an onlooker from this point on. He felt as though his life was lived for this one moment: his troubled childhood and orphaned adolescence, his cheating girlfriends and his criminal compatriots; the decision to waiter at a colleague’s speakeasy front, and then move to tending drinks, and then to a real bar. A classy bar, was the thought that had run through his head. But it was not the reality, for this shiny red apple with a rotten core was about to be eaten alive. He should have gone to school like the rest of the orphan boys, he told himself as he poured a shot of bourbon. He should have found a woman to love and be loved. To have a real job, he thought as he downed the amber fire and followed it with a squeeze of a lemon slice on his tongue. He should—

The first shot was unnaturally quiet. The room itself had gone still and yet the sound was barely a pop. No one moved as a .45 shell casing hit the floor and a new cloud of smoke joined the others. This one was a different scent. An entirely new stench of death.

A drop of blood hit the floor.

All but one man went for their pocket guns. Most of them carried small revolvers, little things unsuited for a real fight. Some carried bigger, trading discretion for power. These men pulled real handguns. And then some didn’t pull at all, the defenseless cowards! These were the men who had their subordinates kill for them and die for them. In this world, they shouldn’t have lasted as long as they did. And now they paid the price of that luxury.

Four men had risen and three men fell. The stranger shot twice more, spraying a fat man’s female companions with pieces of his skull and brain matter as his massive form jerked into his table, spilling everyone’s particularly expensive drink all over the booth, and killing a sharply dressed short gentleman on the stranger’s left with a bullet through the cheek and spine, who welcomed the rough wood-planked floor with open, limp arms as his corpse collapsed forward.

Two men on opposite sides of the room retreated within their circular booths, pushing and shoving their screeching companions to the front with equal looks of bewilderment and contempt for their newly promoted lead sponges. They fired several times but were ill-experienced with the concept of moving targets as the stranger swiftly sidestepped behind a thin structural pillar and returned fire with two professional squeezes on the trigger.

It was almost calming to watch him, the bartender thought as he poured himself another drink without looking. The stranger’s eyes were calm, set either on his targets or the sights of his gun. His mouth was pursed in a sense of mild concentration, and his movements were fluid, almost graceful, like an actress floating across the familiar stage singing familiar words of poetry and prose, the bartender the attentive playwright in the audience sitting satisfied in the front row. The stranger spoke through his trigger finger with a calm urgency, taking care to place his shots and killing the two retreating men without flinching. The human shields were fortunate enough to face a man with what they hoped was honor as his shots found their targets with perfect marksmanship and zero error. The dead men fell silent and their friends were only glad that it wasn’t their blood staining the floor.

A bullet screamed past the bartender, shattering the bottle he was holding and cutting his hand with the exploding glass. He swore and ducked behind the counter; the fools in the booths had gone wild with desperation, firing in all directions now, it seemed. He examined the cut but it was of no consequence, and he sucked on the oozing blood with his mouth. The drapes had fallen over the actors prematurely, and now their audience was left blind and without a show: the gunfire continued for several more seconds, and the bartender sat dreadfully unamused behind cover. He craned his neck back, realizing his freshly poured drink still sat in the open above him. He hesitated for a second, listening to the cacophony of speeding lead and the all-too-methodical thumps as gravity claimed the newly dead, then he reached up quickly and snatched the shot glass from safety.

Almost in response, the trajectory of another bullet whipped by and claimed another glass victim from a shelf directly above, raining shards and expensive liquor on the bartender’s head. He groaned with frustration, checking his drink for debris before downing its contents swiftly.

And then the barroom was enveloped in anticipatory silence. Whispers of gun smoke curled playfully over the bartender’s head. Somewhere in the room there was a slow scraping and then one last thump. A shell casing clattered across the floor as the boot of the last man standing kicked it aside.

The bartender peered over the counter.

The bodies of many men lay still, some hands still clutching smoking guns. Blood pooled on their tables, soaked into their seats, and tainted the walls with arterial spray. Their expressions were mixed, some full of hatred, some despair and fear, mouths twisted in one last gasp for breath and eyes wide with shock. Some dead faces were calm with disappointment or acceptance. Perhaps they were the men that understood their fate. They had, at least, gone with the knowledge that their life was satisfying to a degree, and an understanding that a premature death had been written into the rules of the game since the day they picked up the cards.

In one synchronized moment the companions of the dead men rose from their positions and gathered center stage before bursting out the front door in a hushed frenzy of the desire to survive. Some slipped on pools of blood and spent casings, but eventually they were gone, and the only two men left breathing were the bartender and the stranger.

The stranger stood still for a moment before squeezing the magazine release on his .45 and sliding in a fresh stack from a harness hidden inside his coat. He pulled the slide back to chamber a round and then holstered the gun. He sighed almost inaudibly, and the bartender thought he was going to leave when instead the stranger walked to the bar and sat down on a rickety, uneven old stool, placing his hands firmly on the counter.

“Water.”

The bartender palmed a glass from the shelf and grabbed a pitcher.

“You a Catholic, boy?” The stranger murmured as the bartender poured, then gripped the glass and took a sip.

“No, sir.”

“What you doin’ with these here men?”

“Just trying to get by, sir.”

“Tryin’ to get by?” The stranger swirled his glass of water. “Don’t kid yourself.”

“Who are they to you?”

“Who?” The stranger turned and looked at the bodies. “Them?”

“Yeah.”

The stranger looked at them for a bit, almost longingly. His voice was low, and he spoke slowly and with care. “They are the products God’s Will. Dead men, now. They had a chance for redemption… They spit on it and kept walking.” He twisted back around and took another sip. “Now they cannot walk.”

The bartender didn’t reply, and he just shook his head.

The front door opened silently and two men entered. Monkeys in suits and automatics in their massive hands. The stranger didn’t hear them, and the bartender just blinked. In an instant they had surveyed the scene with disgust. Was one of the corpses their employer? Then there would have been no reason to stay. Mercs follow the money, and it dried up the moment the blood had spilled. They could smell it: the smoke was still drifting about, and the blood was pungent. They crinkled their noses and crept forward. They saw the stranger and seemed to recognize him.

The bartender wondered if he should have warned the stranger. Before he could exhale the breath he realized he had been holding, the men crossed the room with speed and stealth and came up on the stranger with ferocity. One of them took the butt of his automatic and slammed it into the back of the stranger’s head. The bartender saw his eyes. There had been nothing in them. He was sure the man was at least knocked unconscious, and his world had blacked out with nothing but a blank expression, or somber at best. His head hit the counter hard and left a little red stain before he slunked to the side, toppling from the stool.

The monkeys were silent as they beat the stranger with their guns. They raised their weapons and swung them at the body on the floor. Up, down, up, down. The bartender couldn’t see him, but he was sure the stranger was dead. A couple of times he thought he saw blood spatter upwards with the rise and fall of the guns, but he wasn’t sure.

“Is it God’s Will, or is it Man’s?” the bartender muttered.

The suits stopped. Their arms were tired. They took one look at the bartender, straightened their ties, and then left, shaking rivulets of red from their guns, leaving the bartender with an anticlimactic silence of stifling death.

The bartender poured himself another drink with an untouched bottle of whiskey plucked delicately from the top shelf and tilted it slowly down his throat, savoring the burn: it was infinitely better than the burn of hot lead piercing his lung and drowning him in his own blood. He took one last look around the room before gathering his coat and hat from the backroom hanger and walking out a side door, sucking in a lungful of fresh air with a pink sunset splashing light across his face. Back inside the bar, a half-empty glass of water sat on the counter.