The White Devil Traitor was safe in the bushes below the road surface, the fat white man was soaking up lead as he walked forward into fire, the scrawny white one was dead, and Usef was trying to run past him as the avenger thundered two rounds at Noble, the weapons expert and the traitress whore.

“Ah!” screamed The Shaykh of Fake, as the avenger skewered him with the great knife and brought him forward as a meat shield that immediately began eating lead. The Shaykh shield lurched, squirmed, groaned, spattered and shat.

The Desert Eagle was bulky, but took down the traitress whore with a single shot to the body armor vest.

The weapons man turned the Shayke shield into such a mess that he threw it at him while opening up on Noble, who caught the avenger in the shin, dropping him, which was lucky as that head shot from the weapon’s man went overhead and the avenger was pleased to take the weapons man in the groin with the .50 caliber slug, sending him to The Pit in indescribable agony, so that he would still be there suffering when the Ghost of Akbar Qama arrived to continue his hunt of the wicked.

He sat down on his hip and took a shot in his right arm, causing the blade to fall. This ruined his shot on Noble. So aligned with her on her own suffering plain, the avenger sighted in on the traitress whore, who yet laid back clutching at her bruised breast beneath the vest, and let go around that turned her pretty face into the gory approximation of a doll head filled with jelly and then stepped upon on the sidewalk outside Mamma's house. He wasn’t sorry when he had done this to his older sister’s doll and wasn’t sorry now.

The avenger rolled back to traverse his weapon to take Noble into his field of fire and the man was already stomping on his wrist, disarming him.

“You’re finished, Mister Poet. Go easy.”

In answer he snarled and dislocated his own wrist so that he might grab the ankle of the offending foot and squeeze it, believing in his extremity that he could break the leg bones therein. To this Noble put a nine-millimeter round into his elbow.

As the world pulsed and swelled, and he began to lift within himself somewhat in preparation for the Hellward flight another figure came into view above him, The White Devil, the supposed traitor to his devilkin that had lured him here.

The man grinned down into the face of the avenger and said, “Do not be hard on yourself, Mister Poet. God surely never expected you to outwit the White Devil and you did fight the good fight. You wiped out Supervisory Agent Noble’s entire unit.”

Noble holstered his pistol on the left and the avenger croaked, “I should have known you were a left-handed devil the way you shift-jabbed.”

Noble then grew dark in the eyes and handed his gun to the genius Devil and said, “You do the honors, Ken.”

“Certainly,” replied the other, with a vacant look in his eyes as he took the weapon in his hand, pressed it to Noble’s skull, and blew his commander’s startled look from his face in a shower of pink and white.

The man then bent and placed the gun in the flexing and broken right hand of the avenger and pressed the twitching fingers around it with an audible crunching sound.

The avenger looked at him questioningly as the blurred view of the forested canopy behind the guileless looking face of the big-brained White Devil was framed in the imagery of nature to which it was so foreign.

The man then seemed to regard him with pity and patted him with a kindly hand upon the chest. “Mister Poet, novels and stories must make sense. Real life does not. It is enough to know, that your people will know, that you took some of the devils with you. You, Akbar Qama, died a hero. Congratulations."

The man then rose and looked icily into his eyes as the avenger tried with a herculean, snarling effort to command the broken hand, bent at the end of the shattered arm, to raise the weapon it held, but to no avail.

The man that his supposed friends seemed to have called Ken before he killed them, then said, seriously, from behind eyes cold like wind-polished mountain ice, “You have my respect, Sir.”

With those word he raised the heel of his hard-soled shoe, designed apparently for nothing more than to carry a man from door to door and brought it down on the jaw that had never before been broken, until now.

The final installment of Poet is The Anubis Gate, an Epilogue, which will be available in the print edition.

Thank you for reading, and to those readers who have stuck with this story for the three years of its execution, a debt is owed.

-James LaFond, a Wednesday in May, 5/18/16