SuperBad lit one of the foul-smelling black, hand-rolled cigarinos, and the tiny pinprick of angry red light was the only counterpoint to the bloodied orange bonfire outside the hut. A terrifically immense, fat black bug crawled across his Italian leather shoes. With a flick, he kicked it into the darkness of the strawgrass, and heard it scuttle up the sides of the wall, swinging from one dried twig to another in some bizarre, alien gymnastics.

Outside, the air was sweating wet heat and the smell of the filthy sea. SuperBad's sharkskin jacket was slung over his shoulder, his tie was loose around his open collar. Sweat stained his shirt, the sloppy dark bleeding of his patience and comfort.

The temperature in the hut was slightly cooler, more pleasant than the outside, despite the unwanted company of oil-slick-black beetles and lizards which smelled like wet dog and tobacco. So, it was with regret that he stepped out into the wet woolen evening, answering the summons of SugarBomb's lazy wave.

The bonfire still raged as the dust SugarBomb kicked up was settling around it, a hazy halo marking the trail she'd danced. In the inky midnight, panicked by the towering blaze, the divots of her dance steps flashed and disappeared into shadows. They looked like platters spinning.

SugarBomb stood up slowly, exhausted, the sweat on her burnt sienna skin was a shroud of lightning in the raging firelight. Sand clung to her legs and hands where she'd collapsed. She breathed in gasps, hungry for oxygen. Behind her Saigon shades, without which she'd be completely unclad, her eyes were dilated. Delirium hung on her lips as she spoke in a daze of divination.

"SuperBad, He is out in the sea. He stands on a tiny island out North. He waits for you, with a wall of fire and demons to stop you. He expects you and has a terrible message."

SuperBad looked directly into SugarBomb's glasses, as though peering through the dark mirrors.

"This is what the Fire and the Night have told me. It ..." she looked away briefly, out towards the ocean, "It cost me a great deal to learn this for you. I will owe the Spirit of Information, the God of Thieves ..."

SuperBad rolled his diminshing cigrino in his grimy fingers.

"He will have my form for a day, to walk among Man as a human." She paused again, looking for SuperBad's gratitude. "He will have my eyes for a year, to see what I see. He will have my soul for a century, in his palace, to do with as he pleases."

SuperBad looked at her, taking her in completely. He saw her vulnerability, her fear. She'd done exactly what he'd asked, at great personal risk, for no other reason than he was SuperBad and he was doing this for the Bad Mother, and SugarBomb owed these two a great deal. She'd done it without question, she'd done it happily. She wanted them to look at her like a friend, like a confidante. She was one of their few allies.

SuperBad spit a shag twig and threw his spent cigarino in the fire. The flames parted to let it fall, untouched, to the burning tinder below. "Well," he said, putting on his jacket, "Cry me a river, why don't you."

He disappeared into the Haitian midnight.

***

The beachfront of the small island was competely decimated. The deep-rooted trees had either been blown from their moorings and thrown into the nearby ocean, or were in the process of burning to the ground. In places, the sand had been fused into glass. SuperBad brought the heavy armaments this time.

The stink of the tiny island was palpable and overpowering, but worse than the choking smoke were the greasy charred carcasses of the defenders of the island, their hell-born gristle popping and sizzling as they stained the air with an acrid, cloying scent of creosote and filth. Superbad stepped among them carefully, up the tarnished sand towards the thorny crown of steep, sharp boulders at the lee of the island's prominent cliff face. Though the path was slippery with salt water air, Superbad marched deliberately, in plodding steps marking out a funereal dirge. Where he stamped his size thirteen Italian leather soles, the ground turned dried and cracked. And at the top of the hike, at the pinnacle of a half-mile trek up an incline sharp enough to cut steel wool, where he placed his hand to heft himself over the side, the rock split open and spiders fled from the crevice.

And encircled by painted stones, he was there waiting for Superbad. He sat there, resting on his knees in the middle of a deep mudpit, even as Superbad calmly removed his jacket and folded it for a pillow and sat, and glared at him with hateful eyes. He didn't move. He kneeled beneath his mud armor, coated from head to toe, wet earth flooding over him and making his bright and wide eyes seem like stars in the darkness by their contrast. Those twin orbs floating in darkness were fixed on Superbad. They were round with fear. They were the gates that held back his voice, locked behind a gate of terror.

Superbad spat "Chocolate Jesus, you muddy fuck up, I am a simple man and I make simple demands of the world, which is why I get so GADDAM violent when I find they aren't met. At this moment, I got two - you better be wearing a fucking bathrobe beneath that gaddam health club mud bath you got going on, and second, you better have what I came for waiting for me."

Chocolate Jesus stirred in his bog throne, his voice cracking as dryly as his cape of sod was wet and rich with soil. "I ... have the thing of which you speak ... so brashly ... mortal ..."

Superbad tried to light a cigarino in the humidity of Cocolate's domain, but the matches stayed wet. He grimaced as he breathed in, then spoke as if releasing smoke "And is your fool ass naked?"

Chcolate Jesus fell into a pose of defriance, as if familiarty with this petty feud gave him a sudden strength. "I am as the universe created me, I am bathed in the resplendence of the skin of man even as my godly self - FUCKING AAAAGH! MY SHOULDER!" Chocolate Jesus' filthy form flew two feet in a sharp angle of declination, slamming into the mudbath with such velocity he may as well have shouldered a marble pillar at a dead run. He clutched his arm, where the ruddy umbers turned alizarin slick.

"Next time you better be fucking dressed for company, and where is the gaddam Book of the Bad Mother?" Superbad pulled his Colt and layed it barrel-to-temple of the self-proclaimed swamp god. Thinking better of it, he shrugged. "Fuck this," he muttered as he pulled the magazine out, emptying bullets into his bare hand, "You got two seconds before I start driving these gaddam things into you with my BARE HANDS and a FUCKING ROCK!"

Shuddering, Chocolate reached between his feet, and pulled what only seemed to be a mud-soaked box from the depths of his pool. Superbad kicked him in the teeth as he was handed the prize.

The three-piece ronin wasted no time, setting his acquisition on a nearby flat rock. Wiping the mud off, he revealed a briefcase. "Typical. Predictable." he muttered as he hammered the cheap lock off with the butt of his pistol, opening the case to reveal it ... the Book of the Bad Mother.

He picked it up and looked at it. A Gideon Bible. Nothing more, to look at it. With contempt, he flipped it open, revealing blank pages filling the tome. "Gideons. Every time I see one of these in a hotel room, I paste wide-open pussy pics into the good spots. If I do it right, it ends up looking like explanatory illustrations for the verses. You know, like 'Jeheboam begat Azakiel, who begat Martin. See illus.381-A, This naughty coed can be in your room in twenty minutes, $65 special." He turned to look at Chocolate Jesus, who crawled piteously onto the the small dry shore surrounding his throne of mud. He looked to start weeping any moment.

Superbad turned back to the book, and opened to the middle. Precisely and with great care, someone had cut a particular shape into the pages, designed to hold the prize: an emptied Jack Daniels glass flask. Superbad's face was illuminated by the bottle's content, shining like a meteor entering the atmosphere. He picked up the flask and threw the book over the cliff.

Chocolate Jesus spoke as blood and dirt fell from his mouth. "This is not how the men of Earth and sons of Adam are meant to deal with GODS, Superbad. I am the god of Earth, the God of Dirt, and that prize I claimed by bargain between myself and your own Lord of Lies. It is mine, and mine alone, for the wealth of evils it brings."

Superbad neglected to so much as turn his eyes to the mud soaked messiah.

"Perhaps there is a deal we can reach. Considering what I have endured to win that glittering jewel, a little more bargaining is nothing," he hugged his knees as he sat in the sand "What will it be, Superbad? Power? Wealth? I can give both in abundance. Death? The mastery of men? It seems these things tempt you and your friend most."

Superbad muttered, but could not be heard. Chocolate Jesus perked up, as if sensing a weakness. "And what was that," he asked, "What can I tempt you with, Superbad?"

"Make a rock so fucking big you can't lift it, shithead." He held the glass aloft, compared its self-generated light to the glow of the moon, then threw it against the rock wall. The flaming contents sputtered and enflamed on content with the air, charring the rock against which it rested. "Bad Mother Fucker's ... soul ..." he said as he unzipped his pants.

Chocolate Jesus looked in wonder and shock as Superbad pissed the light out of his partner's soul.

He reholstered himself and spoke "Let's fucking face it, last thing either of us needs is a fucking soul. If Bad Mother Fucker didn't happen to be the least generous badass sumbitch on the face of this planet Earth, I'm sure he'd slur a 'thanks' for killing this gaddam thing once and for all. A man with a soul is a man burdened, in our line of work ... and burdens we don't need. Any questions, Chocolate Jesus?"

The mud-soaked messiah huddled against the furthest end of the rock wall, eyes wide again, but not with fear this time. No, this time he was amazed, shocked, and in his own probably deluded mind he struggled to come to terms with what he was sure was something unseen in his lifetime. He tried to put his disbelief to words. "A human man with no soul?" He shook his head in disbelief, "It's unheard of. It's your souls that make you men, it's the absence of them that make men demons, and it's the replacement of them with power that makes men gods." He looked at Superbad, who slowly unfolded his jacket and put it on, smoothing the wrinkles and folds, brushing the dust and grime from the fabric. "And yet so callously you deprived your friend ...." he looked directly into Superbad's eyes, turned ebony by the dark light and the fires from the beach below. "And you, Superbad ... what is the state of your soul?"

Fire makes masks of all things, so perhaps it was only the shadows cast by the dim blazes below that made it seem as if Superbad smiled. The playfulness of his serious brow turned comical, his dark eyes glinting mischieviously as the light caught them, the grim corners of his mouth turned into mirth ... all probably tricks of the light. In this state of formlessness, Superbad stood on the unsteady, wet soil, replaced the magazine and levelled his gun directly at Chocolate Jesus' head. "You tell ME, motherfucker..."

In the rapid fire strobe light of his muzzle flash, all questions were answered