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dropped down in places and shot up in others. A tectonic shift beneath him. Levi was far too heavy to be thrown into the air, but the movement left him reeling and staggering, fighting to maintain his suddenly unsure footing. The commotion didn’t hinder the escaping shaman, who wasted no time slipping away, out through the narrow passageway the other Kobocks had disappeared through.
    After a few moments of struggle, Levi regained his balance, drawing stability from the bedrock below the temple. He swiveled around, eyes tracking the fissures in the rock back to their source: the altar and the shaman’s spilt blood dotting the floor. Sickly green light—the color of death, of cancer and sickness—bled from the cracks, shot throughout with streaks of dirty red like infected blood.
    This, now, was unexpected.
    Levi reluctantly dismissed the escaping shaman and the murderous Kobocks, instead making his way toward the stone table.
    A tidal wave of movement pulled his gaze away from the girl on the slab.
    The bodies surrounding the altar were melting in the green light seeping up from the cracks. The flesh, muscle, and bone of every corpse liquefied in an instant, forming pools of gelatinous pink, like giant beads of living mercury. Another eyeblink and the various blobs of viscous goo merged together, swelling upward in a geyser of soupy meat, which coalesced into a figure thirteen feet tall, broad as a car, and shaped more or less like Levi himself. A rudimentary golem of sorts, though crafted from bodies instead of clay and dirt.
    But it was wrong . Broken.
    Faces jutted out like open sores all over its torso. Boneless arms and legs hung off in random places, dangling like Christmas ornaments. One of its primary, functional arms was as big as a telephone pole, while the other was withered and feeble. The creature teetered forward on two humongous, but uneven, legs, its gait awkward and unsteady. Its gaping mouth dangled open, lined with rows upon rows of oddly spaced human teeth. The creature looked at Levi with a single enormous multifaceted eye like that of a fly. Then it spoke.
    Instead of a single voice, however, it droned on with a multitude of separate voices—male and female, old and young—a chorus, blending into one.
    “It hurts. Oh God, it hurts,” the creature moaned, its grotesque arms waving about. “Kill us. Please God, kill us. End the pain.”
    The Mudman watched as the creature moved forward.
    Something had gone wrong here, Levi could see. That shaman was indeed experimenting, but this Frankenstein monster was no success. Oddly, the monstrous creature had a clean aura. Whatever it was , a killer it was not .
    At least not yet.
    The creature’s eye locked on Levi. “Kill us, please kill us,” it said again, its many voices sounding like the sigh of the wind through fall leaves.
    In all of Levi’s long years, he’d never murdered an innocent. Not even in self-defense.
    Better to flee than take the life of one without blood on their hands. The Mudman was a simple creature with a singular nature: remember and uphold the sacred decree. The thing before him, whatever it was, had not violated the divine mandate; therefore, Levi was bound to inaction.
    “Please,” it begged again, its suffering evident.
    Levi didn’t know what to do. The AA meetings hadn’t prepared him for this. His mind seemed to revolt at the idea of doing anything at all. He scoured his brain as the creature crept closer, diligently searching for some sermon, Scripture passage, or word of wisdom that might tell him what to do. Might guide him in this task. Levi was learning to think for himself, but at his heart he coveted instruction and direction.
    A snippet from the book of Romans ran through his head, the words ringing out in Pastor Steve’s voice. “Do not repay anyone evil for evil … Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay.’” There