by Aaron Saylor
“You think so. You think you’re just gonna run off, is that right?” Karen said.
“Damn right, I am” he spat back at her. “I suggest you go downstairs and wait for the cavalry to arrive.”
“John was right about you!” Karen snapped. “You bastard! You’ve gone against the family, and you think we’re just gonna let you walk out of here?”
Boone didn’t say anything else. Instead, he reached for Samantha, and she for him. Karen pulled back, but he was too strong, taking the little girl by the waist and prying her from her mother’s grip.
“Boone, you can’t do this.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Karen,” he said. “I can do this, and I will. I should have got away from here a long time ago, but you’re not stopping me now.”
He pushed the button, and the elevator doors slid open again. He was standing between Karen and the exit; she looked past him, down the hallway, as if she might run for it, but he silently pointed the shotgun’s barrel at just enough of an angle that it sent the clear message to his wife without showing Samantha anything.
Boone shook his head. Don’t try it. He put one finger to his lips, telling her to stay silent.
Karen glared hard at him, but she got the message. “What are you gonna do, shoot me in front of our daughter?” she said.
“Let’s hope it don’t come to that,” he answered.
“John will kill you, you know.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“Is that all you’ve got to say to me?”
It was all he had to say to Karen. The time for talk had long since passed. He gave her a hard shove towards the back wall of the elevator, hit the button that would send her down to the first floor, and jumped out with their daughter just as the doors closed between them.
With Karen out of the way now, he turned his attention down the hall, and took his first steps toward Walt’s room.
He led Samantha into the first open room he saw, at the end of the corridor nearest the elevator. There, he bent to her eye level, and said softly, “Samantha, honey, I need you to stay here by yourself for a minute, okay?”
She just looked at him. Soft tears ran quietly down her face. “Where did Mommy go?”
“Mommy went away. Can you stay here for me?”
The child nodded.
“Good girl,” said Boone. “I’ll be back in just a couple of minutes. I’m gonna close the door, and whatever you do, you don’t open it for anybody else but me. You got that?”
Once more, she nodded her understanding. He ran his fingers through her hair, kissed her on the cheek, and went back into the corridor, closing the door behind him.
Boone’s thoughts swam in the air and his heart quickened under his breastplate, but he never lost sight of what he had to do. He looked down the corridor and found John Slone standing outside of Walt’s room.
“Karen said you’d be joining us,” John hissed. “I have to say, I don’t think she was expecting you this soon, though. She was just here a few minutes ago. Maybe you saw her?”
“I did,” said Boone.
A moment passed between them, a long enough moment that both men realized this was not going to be a verbose Hollywood ending where each of them launched into a powerful monologue about righteousness and betrayal. This was not Hollywood, this was not the movies. This was Sewerville. There could only be one ending here, the same ending that befell so many other unfortunate souls in this place – Jimmy, Deputy Rogers, Elmer Canifax, Ellen Slone, countless pill heads and meth addicts, anyone who got trapped in the clutches of the vile Sewerville beast. Boone and the sheriff had oft witnessed this ending. But now, both men knew that one of them would finally experience it for themselves.
That end was death.
Each of them recognized the moment at precisely the same time. The sheriff reached for the pistol in his waistband, but Boone was quicker to grab his weapon from the holster against his chest. He drew and fired
KRAK! KRAK! KRAK!
The first shot missed. The next two didn’t. One bullet hit the sheriff in the abdomen and lodged there; the other spun through his right shoulder then blew a chunk out of his back on exit. Blood splatted a wet butterfly pattern across the wall and doorway.
The sheriff crashed to the floor, and managed to crawl into Walt’s room for cover.
Boone stood there and watched him.
Is that it?
So fast?
“Daddyyyyy!” he heard Samantha wail from behind the closed door of the room where he’d hidden her.
“Stay in there, honey!” he answered. “Daddy’s OK! You just stay in there and I’ll come and get you!”
No sooner had he gotten the words out of his mouth than the sheriff whipped his gun barrel haphazard out the doorway and fired a wild shot. The bullet ricocheted down the corridor, whizzed past Boone’s shoulder, too close.
Boone sprinted across the hall, into another empty room, on the opposite side of the hallway from Walt’s.
“I’ll get you, motherfucker!” yelled John.
“You got a ways to go,” yelled Boone back.
Boone stood just inside the hospital room, diagonal from John and Walt, waiting for the sheriff to fire his next bullet and hoping like hell that shot would be as wild as the first one. His heart thumped in his ears so hard that his vision blurred around the edges.
A minute passed. Nothing.
Two minutes. Still nothing.
“Fuck you,” said the sheriff. “Fuuck you, buuddyyy.” He sounded weak. Fading now.
Boone’s pulse slowed a bit – still a steady thud but at least he could see clearly again – as he realized that the first volley was over and he was still alive. Still he knew that John could be, and probably was, just waiting for Boone to make the next hasty move, the final fatal mistake, that would allow him to line up a clear shot at the center of Boone’s skull.
With that in mind, Boone peered around the edge of the door frame. Careful. He could see his adversary’s foot, and part of his leg, enough to know that the sheriff was in no position to line up anything at that moment. Instead, he looked like he was sitting up against the wall, barely moving.
“Fuck you, John!” Boone said.
“Fuuuck yooouuu budddyyy,” answered Sheriff Slone. Boone heard weakness in those words; he knew he’d hit the sheriff twice, was pretty sure one of the bullets had struck gut. John could be bleeding out already.
Boone felt his heart jump again. “I’m gonna come over there and finish you off, you son of a bitch,” he said. “I’m gonna be the last thing you see before you leave this godforsaken Earth, straight on to Hell. The Hell where you belong. You hear?”
“Come… come… get… some,” said John. He fired off a round that didn’t even make it into the corridor, cracking instead into the wall beside Walt’s bed.
Boone could hardly believe it. His life’s climactic confrontation, his final stand against the damned Slone family, overlords of not just his life but all of Sewerville, had come down to this. Karen was out of the picture, and though she would surely be back soon, he didn’t have to worry about her at that moment. Walt was incapacitated in a hospital bed. And the sheriff was shot through twice, propped up a few feet away, weakening by the second and likely dying.
All in the span of two, maybe three minutes.
Sewerville, which had taken decades to reach its current sorry state, changed forever in two or three minutes.
The sheriff got off two more shots
KRAK!
K–KRAK!
but both went far awry. Boone heard them ricochet around Walt’s room and wasn’t sure where they landed.
It didn’t matter. The sheriff’s foot kicked from side to side with the recoil of the gun, seemed out of control from the rest of his body. His injuries were so bad that he couldn’t otherwise move.
John slurred his words, as if he spoke from a luminal space, between wake and dream.
“Now… now you’re… n
ow you’re messin’ with… a sonofabitch….”
Boone called out, “In one minute, I’m gonna walk over there and put this shotgun in your mouth. I hope you’re ready, you worthless bastard.”
Then, he saw thick blood pooling out the door of Walt’s room, and any remaining fear subsided.
“Now you’re messin’ with… a sonofabitch…”
KRAK! He fired.
KRAK! He fired.
Useless. There was the sound of glass breaking, as one of these bullets careened into a window. The sheriff seemed no more of a threat now than did Walt. It occurred to Boone that the two people he hated above all else were both over there, easily available for him to come and finish them off.
“You hear that, John?” he said. “You hear that sound? Those are my brother’s footsteps. He’s comin’ for you. He’s comin’. Do you hear?”
The sheriff gave no answer.
Boone walked out into the corridor. He took a long, slow breath. This was almost over. His heart slowed; he felt a strange calmness wash across his soul. He went to Walt’s room, pushed the door open the rest of the way, and saw John lying face–up on the floor, pale as a sheet of cheap notebook paper, gurgling up his own blood. The sheriff clutched at a small bullet hole in his abdomen, and with the scarlet lake expanding from his back, Boone knew he was shot through. Another jagged wound gaped just below the neck, surrounded by bone fragments where the shoulder had blown up.
He’d dropped his gun next to him, too. Though it was only a few inches away, it might as well have been miles.
Boone stepped over the dying man, stood over him with one leg on either side.
The sheriff looked up at him with fading eyes. “Now you’re… messin’ with… sonofabitch… you… sonofabi—“
Boone stuck the black barrel of Jimmy’s shotgun into the mouth of his tormentor. John took it, too depleted to do anything else.
“I bet you never thought it would end this way, huh? Can’t say that I did, either, but here we are,” said Boone in a calm, flat tone. “So what’s it like, to be at the other end of the gun barrel for once?”
John closed his eyes. He kicked one foot weakly, nowhere near enough to move Boone.
“Look at me!” Boone commanded.
The sheriff’s eyes fluttered back open, and Boone could tell that for John Slone, opening his eyes that one last time was a final, desperate act of willpower.
Boone stared down the barrel, into the eyes of the man beneath him. “Around Sewerville, it always ends like this,” he said. “It always ends with one person on the wrong end of the barrel. I hope you think about that. I hope you think about all those people you put on the wrong end. The end where you are right now. I hope you think about them while you’re in hell, do you hear me, John?”
But John couldn’t hear him. Not anymore. Before Boone had a chance to pull the trigger, the sheriff’s eyes rolled over white and shut again. He took a quick breath, and another, then let out his final death rattle and breathed no more.
Boone watched him for a moment, in near disbelief that John was dead. But he was dead. He was dead. The devil was dead.
In the distance, the first police sirens screeched from the edge of town towards the hospital.
Boone stepped away from the corpse, over towards Walt’s bed. The old man lay there, still hooked to all the hoses and tubes, still looking like a middle school science project. Or some kind of monster.
Boone drew his pistol and pressed it against Walt’s forehead. “Goddamn you, Walt,” he said. “Goddamn you for all of this. Goddamn your son, goddamn your daughter, goddamn you and everything you ever touched. You deserve this, you son of a bitch.” He cocked the hammer back and held it fast. He held the gun there, held it hard, held it until his hand shook, his arm shook, his shoulders shook, his entire body shook from the core of his soul on out, as he tried to hold back all of the pain that the Slone family had caused him in his life.
He had to kill the old man. He had to see him off to hell, where he could spend eternity with his demon son.
But he couldn’t do it.
The day had seen enough death already.
In his hardened heart, Boone knew that. He tried to work up the murderous nerve, but he didn’t really have that nerve in him. He liked to think that was exactly what separated him from the likes of Walt Slone.
He lowered the pistol and walked towards the door ––
And he changed his mind.
To hell with Walt Slone.
Boone spun around quickly, fired
KRAK! KRAK!
KRAK! KRAK!
in Walt’s direction, and would have fired more if the clip hadn’t emptied and his last few pulls of the trigger produced more than sharp metallic clicks.
The police cars drew ever closer.
Boone figured he now had two minutes, at the most.
He ran down the hallway and grabbed Samantha, then took off for the fire escape. When he shoved the door open, the alarm went off. The fire alarm. A final absurdity in Sewerville’s epoch of absurdities. He raced down the metal steps with his daughter in his arms, came down in the parking lot, and jumped in his truck. The engine cranked, he stomped on the gas, and he tore out of the parking lot with his daughter strapped into the seat next to him. They hit the East Kentucky Parkway before the first flashing blue lights arrived at the medical center.
SAMANTHA
They drove.
“Where are we going?” asked the daughter.
“We’re going away,” her father answered. “Far away.”
“How far?”
“Far, baby. Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be fine.”
“I know.” She stared out the window. “When will we see Mommy again?”
He hesitated. Although he knew he would have to answer that question eventually, now didn’t seem like the best time. “Soon enough,” he said. “We’ll see Mommy soon enough.”
“Do you promise?”
“I promise.”
That satisfied the daughter, for now. She leaned her head back against the seat of the truck, but found sleep difficult despite teetering on the edge of exhaustion.
A few minutes later, the roll tide of distant thunder combined with rain’s delicate cadence on the windshield, orchestrating a lullaby that enticed the child into slumber. Her eyelids dropped close, like butterflies landing, and her hands came together, petite fingers interlaced on her chest. When her father looked over, he saw tiny hands clasped in prayer, just as the petals of the pearl white Mountain orchid seemed like tiny hands clasped in prayer. The Mountain orchid. The Mountain orchid. The mountain orchid, the flower which shimmered only on the hillsides of Seward County, Kentucky. The Mountain orchid that adorned the grave of Ellen Slone, the Mountain orchid that she loved so much, so many years ago. So many years before everything tumbled into the darkness. So many years before Sewerville. So many years.
FAMILY
After they switched cars in the next county (with some help from Harley Faulkner), Boone and Samantha headed for Frankfort. There Boone asked for a meeting with representatives of both the Kentucky State Police and the state Senate. He told them that he expected full immunity from prosecution, in exchange for all the information he could provide on the Slone family’s criminal empire. After some discussion the authorities granted his request and a day later, that meeting took place.
JIMMY
He sensed his brother, there, with him.
It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation.
William Tecumseh Sherman
THE END
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Aaron Saylor grew up in Kentucky and still lives there with his wife, Leslie. He loves movies, comic books, the Kentucky Wildcats, and the Cincinnati Reds. Let him know if you’ve got a good poker game going.
To learn more about the works of Aaron Saylor, visit and “like” him on Fa
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Copyright © 2012 by Aaron Saylor
Cover by David Rogers. © 2012 Point Nine Publishing
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? © 1968 by Philip K. Dick, renewed 1990.
“Lucky Now,” © 2011 by Ryan Adams.
“Hair of the Dog,” © 1975 Nazareth (Dan McCafferty, Pete Agnew, Manuel Charlton, Darrell Sweet),
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locales, and incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to persons, places, locales, or incidents is purely coincidental.
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