THE SAINT KILLER

At first, he plays the part of a dutiful soldier. "I'm not proud about what I did," he says, "but I ain't sorry for it, neither. I was given my orders, and I followed them, to a tee." 

"They call you THE SAINT KILLER," I say, and his mask slips—he beams with pride. 

"Yessir," he says. 

"How'd you get that nickname," I ask? 

His smile fades as he remembers the role he's supposed to play. 

Well, sir, I killed a lot of fuckin' Mormons. That's how. 

And your superior officers ordered you to do this? To kill Latter-Day Saints?

Well, they ain't put it quite like that. They didn't even call 'em Mormons, much less "saints." They called 'em "terrorists." 

They said reps was terrorist weapons. They talked about how reps could be used to produce drugs, guns, even really bad shit like chemical weapons and improvised explosive devices. So we needed to secure the border, take out the terrorists, and stop the reps from spreading. 

This is what they told me, at least. They said that for every Mormon I killed, I'd be saving countless American lives. And I believed 'em. 

It wasn't violent right from the start, was it? 

Nah. Up until the end of that May, the military had been trying to contain the threat using more peaceful measures. They was just arresting a bunch of folks, seizing their reps, maybe subjecting them to some interrogation, to learn more about the distribution network. 

I guess they pretty quickly figured out that it was mostly the Mormons that was causing the most trouble. Other people, be they gentile or Jew, didn't seem nearly as determined to distribute reps to their neighbors. But for the Mormons, it was an obsession. You could say they had a religious fervor about it. 

Now, before they brought me in, things had started to get a little violent in some rare instances. In the weeks before the Kobek thing blew the lid off the story, there was an incident with this one guy who had used a replicator to make a bunch of grenades for a grenade launcher. They took him out with an air strike. A few times, too, I heard that the Air Force shot down two or three planes full of Mormons who was trying to escape over the border with reps in tow. 

The fuckin' Mormons was trying to spread the damn things all over the world. That's just how those people was, man. Same way they used to send missionaries overseas, they was tryin' to send the reps. They called it "God's bounty," to be shared with all mankind. Crazy motherfuckers. 

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But when I got called in, everybody understood that the gloves was really off. For the first few weeks on the job, the feds and the military still thought they could stop the reps from spreading, so long as they could keep the Mormons under control.

The unit I was in was supposed to be a secret. Even a lot of the military guys didn't know about us. But we was gettin' our orders from the same people everybody else was. They told the army boys to arrest people.

My unit had different orders. They told us to shoot the motherfuckers. 

How many guys were in your unit, would you say? 

I can't tell you that. All I can tell you is what I did. 

And I'll tell you this, I shot a hell of a lot of them fuckin' Mormons. 

I was shooting them in their cars. I was shooting them in grocery store parking lots. Hell, I was camping out near their homes and shooting them through their bedroom windows. 

My superior officers started handing out these little decks with playing cards that had top Mormon officials' faces them. A lotta old-ass men. And they all had these fuckin' crazy titles. Apostle, Patriarch, High Priest, Elder. The ruling class of the Mormon hierarchy. I hunted them down like dogs. The big, top-ranking guys—the ones calling all the shots—weren't easy to catch. But I was persistent. 

I remember this one guy, I had been staking out his house for a day or two. I had a pretty good line of sight on his house. My ass was up on this hill about a hundred yards away. An easy shot with the rifle I was using at the time.

Well, this guy didn't want to go down easy. Motherfucker must've known he was being followed, 'cause he was careful as a cat. He had a drive-in garage that he parked his truck in, and he always left drivin' like a damn banshee. Swervin' and shit, so I couldn't get a bead on him. 

Probably two or three times this happened. I knew this guy was going out and spreading reps, but I couldn't stop him. 

Why not just call in the police to arrest him? 

That wasn't my job, man. I was paid to shoot people.

Anyway, it started to bother me a little bit, that this motherfucker was eluding me. So one day I gave up on tryin' to snipe him. 

Instead I waited in a bush right by his garage. Spent almost a whole night that way. 

He came roaring out of his garage in his truck at like four in the morning, heading God knows where. 

As he peeled out of his driveway, I snuck out of that bush and rolled under his automatic sliding door, into his garage. And I just waited there for him. 

Ten, eleven hours, something like that. Waiting on his ass to get home. 

When he finally came pullin' in, I had nearly fell asleep. I'd been sittin' there in the dark. Gettin' leg cramps. Feeling pretty sore about all the shit I had to go through just to get this one fuckin' guy. 

But I'm a professional, you know, so I didn't drag it out.

As soon as he got out of his truck, I popped him.

Put one clean shot in the back of his head with my pistol. He never even knew I was there. No need to scare the guy, you know? Just get it over with. That's how I operated. Clean. Efficient. I had probably two dozen Mormon scalps to my name before the guys at the top called in all the dogs. When the feds gave up on trying to keep the reps contained, they stopped payin' me.

The "scalp" thing isn't literal, right? 

What?

You thing you said about scalps. You weren't literally scalping the guys you killed, right?

Nah, man, whatchu think I am? I may be a killer, but I'm not a sicko. Jesus.