The Six Messiahs

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The scorpion sat motionless on the back of the gambler's hand. A tremor racked its ribbed, leathery torso, but the insect's aggressive instincts were overruled by a superior force its simple nervous system had no capacity to question.

It only knew: Not yet.

The gambler felt the same power pin him to the ground like a mantle of flat rocks. Spread-eagled, muscles and bones fused. His eyes could still move, wild and wide, and he could see the scorpion but not the humpbacked Preacher Man, pacing behind him, boots crunching in the crusty dirt. Terror sang in the gambler, caterwauling loud as that Eye-talian opera he'd seen in St. Louis. His thoughts melted like spring snow before they could form, the mind he'd labored so hard to educate useless to him now as a dry well.

The Preacher Man came into view, stopped, spat a hot splash of tobacco juice across the gambler's rigid face, and smiled down at the hapless dandy in his vest and spats, pegged taut as a tent in the dust.

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