Content warnings: Depiction of religious violence and someone being burnt alive.
Victor had lived in suburbia for years now, and while he got the occasional weird look for his metal band T-shirts, it never lasted beyond a glance. Most people out here worked two or three or five jobs to keep their houses and their cars and all the other trappings of “middle class” life. They didn’t have time to bother other people.
Yet here they were, the entire neighbourhood gathered on his front lawn with pitchforks and torches. Not Tiki Torches, real torches made with oil-soaked rags wrapped around branches of wood. They looked like something out of a fantasy movie, except with jeans and branded T-shirts in place of old-fashioned tunics and trousers.
“What’s going on?” Victor asked, though he suspected he already knew. American evangelicalism had gained significant sway in Canada over the past few years. Someone like him was bound to become a target eventually.
“There,” someone shouted, pointing at his tattoo. “Proof of his dealings with the devil!”
Victor rolled his eyes. “Do you really think I’d live in this mediocre suburb if I’d made a deal with the devil?”
A few members of the crowd exchanged doubtful glances. Most grew angrier, their faces contorted with rage.
“Get him!” someone shouted. The crowd surged forward, seven of them swarming him at once.
Victor punched the first one in the face so hard that a tooth flew from the guy’s mouth. Victor grabbed the next one and drove his knee into the man’s groin, tossing him to the ground beside the first aggressor. The third got another punch, the fourth a swift kick to the kneecap. The fifth received a head butt that sent him reeling to the ground.
The last two circled around their fallen comrades. The one on the left was wiry and moved with a speed Victor hadn’t been able to muster since his twenties. The other was as muscular as a Nordic god, and just as angry. They nodded to each other, then leapt forward to strike.
Victor ducked beneath the muscle-bound man’s blows and punched him in the stomach. That guy didn’t seem to feel it, bringing his knee up into Victor’s face and shattering Victor’s nose. Victor stumbled back, adrenaline pumping as surely as the blood streaming down his cheeks.
He saw movement at the edge of his vision and grabbed the smaller man’s fist, using momentum to hurl that man into his comrade. They collapsed in a heap. Victor roared with victorious, agonizing fury and—
A fist came down on the back of his neck, shattering his consciousness.
Victor woke to the stench of kerosene mixed with the smell of his own drying blood. His face throbbed and his back ached. His arms were raw and stinging from the rough rope binding them to… a stake, sticking out of a pile of kerosene-soaked wood.
The crowd formed a circle around him. Several sported bruises from the earlier brawl. The one whose kneecap he had shattered sat in a chair, his face twisted with the agony of his wound. Victor suspected he’d never walk again. Good. They might end him now, but he’d left marks they’d remember for the rest of their lives.
A man with a torch stepped forward. “You are charged with worshipping Satan and furthering his evil will here on this earth. How do you plead?”
Victor laughed. “You ask how I plead to give yourselves the illusion of a fair trial, but you’ve already decided me guilty. Set the fire and be done with it.”
The man was undaunted. “You must confess to your crimes. Only then will you be given any chance of redemption in the afterlife.”
“Redemption?” Victor shook his head, not caring that it made the ache worse. “So I can spend an eternity in heaven with you lot? Fuck that.”
The crowd gasped and murmured to each other. He wondered what offended them more: his refusal to bow to their God, or his desire to spend eternity anywhere they weren’t.
“You’ve had your chance,” the ringleader said. “Now you will burn, in this moment and for all eternity.”
He dropped his torch onto the pyre and stepped back. The flames raced across the wood, roaring as they consumed every inch of it. A wall of heat hit Victor, followed by a toxic cloud of black smoke. He coughed and choked and spluttered, but he did not scream. He would not scream, no matter how his skin blistered or his blood boiled. He wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.
And so, he died as he lived: defiant, proud, and unwilling to bow before anyone who wanted to control him.