He heard a muffled thump as if his ears were stuffed with cotton and a box of crackers exploded to his right. His entire body was tingling as he turned and watched the box flip in the air. Everything was happening so slowly. It was amazing. Then he saw his fiancée. She was screaming something at him. She was pointing behind him. She wanted him to turn around.
Something stung the side of his right arm as two more boxes exploded. His mind was so in tune with the moment that he could see individual crackers breaking apart in the air. Before he even knew what he was doing, he turned and fired the pistol again. He felt the kick from the discharge against his shoulder and arm an instant before a man crash into him. He buckled, and together they flipped over the display onto the next aisle.
Numb to everything, all emotions, all sounds, all feelings, he stood with a dazed look on his face. The man who crashed into him struggled for a second to get up, before collapsing face first onto the floor. A jar of jelly popped beside him. He stared at the broken jar for a second and followed the line of fire back to the checkout registers. A woman was screaming and charging, and with every stride she took he saw a flash. He heard the soft, muffled sounds of raindrops hitting a tin roof behind him as more jelly jars popped. But the sound died after he raised the pistol and pulled the trigger.
He still had the gun raised when he heard a sound to his rear. He spun and with a pale, blank look on his face, squeezed the trigger again. For a timeless moment, the only thing he saw was her eyes as the spent casing ejected between them. They were the eyes he would love his entire life. Just as he started to smile, he saw the smoke drifting up in front of her face and his breath stalled while an unbearable weight suddenly pulled against his chest. Utter shock and despair displaced the life in her eyes. He witnessed the cringe in her face and slowly started shaking his head as all the emotions that had been absent during the gunfight, suddenly came rushing back in. “No…No…No…” The pistol slipped from his hand. His lips started trembling as the love of his life reached one last time for his shoulder. “No!” he cried out as his fiancée fell into his arms.
He grabbed her and together they crumpled to the floor. “No! Dear God…anything but this!”
Barely able to see through his tears, he held her as she reached up to feel the touch of his face one last time. “Somebody! Help me!” he cried out. “Get a doctor!” He started sobbing uncontrollably as he cradled her head and whispered, “We’re going to get married…you and me…we’ll be together forever.” He prayed to God as a tear ran from her eye while she smiled one last time. Then just like that—everything that he’d ever hoped for was suddenly stolen from him. A quiver washed over his body that climaxed in a pain-ridden wail as he closed his eyes and rocked her back in his arms.
Shaking and heaving with each gasping moan, he jerked around and looked for someone to tell him that it was just a bad dream and that he would soon wake up to find her sleeping by his side. But no one came to help. No one cared. With the gunmen dead, everyone was busy scooping up canned goods and bottled water into shopping carts. It was a free-for-all.
He glared at the people jumping over the checkout counters and screamed, “Help me! Somebody!” But as no one paid any attention to him. He turned back to the precious weight in his arms and pulled her face to his chest and then began to rock with her on the floor. As the pain of his loss quickly boiled up in him, the tears of remorse started to make way for something much darker. He turned back to those running past him with their cans of stolen food. With his face full of tension he screamed at the top of his lungs, “Why didn’t one of you stop me before I did this!”
Chapter 13
Chuck pounded on the door. He wasn’t sure where he was or how he got there, but there was something instinctual driving him; a deep rooted feel of belonging on the other side of the door. As his vision started to fade out again, his weight slumped against the door and he professed in one final garbled cry, “Let me in, damn it!”
The door popped open and he fell into the slender arms of a woman. His weight shifted again and just as he was about to fall over backwards, she reeled him in and kept him upright. Even in his bemused state of mind there was an immediate recognition of something familiar about her. “I know…you…” he gasped. Before she could reply, the room began to spin and his legs buckled. A second later he toppled over the sofa with her in tow.
~~
His eyes darted aimlessly about the room until they locked onto the woman straddling his midsection. As she held his face between her hands and screamed, he used every ounce of life that remained in his soul to distinguish the meaning in her words. “You’ve…gone…all day…where’s…truck…gun?”
His eyes rolled back and he felt her shake his head. He came back around and cried out, “Becky!”
His exhausted state gave him a brief moment of peace before his stomach suddenly constricted and sent him cringing in pain. He doubled over as a bile taste burned his throat and erupted over his face and shirt. In the midst of it all, he lashed out at the body on top of him and coughed, “I’ve…got to get back to…Becky…”
As if the outburst were his last gasp, he fell back flat on the sofa and felt the life leaving his body as every muscle in him went limp. Then something pulled open one of his eyelids. He couldn’t distinguish anything in the blurring movement of light and darkness. The eyelid fell back closed, and suddenly he popped back up to his feet. “Got to go…home.” He felt something holding him back, something trying to keep him there. He pulled free and for a second he felt himself standing. Then everything spun around as he felt himself succumb to gravity and crumple through the grasping arms that were trying to hold him up. His body came to a crashing stop, but he felt no pain. He just felt himself falling asleep.
~~~
Something cold and wet touched his forehead that lit him up like an electrical jolt. His back arched up high off the floor and he gasped. At the same time he felt a soothing sensation as cold streams trickled down both sides of his face. The small of his back touched the floor once more and then his head started shaking. He fought through the confusion and slowly opened his eyes. As his vision pulsed on a round shape in front of a dark background, a voice broke through the confusion and dispelled his fear. “Don’t go…don’t leave me.”
There was something deeply comforting about it that made him smile. He felt his head shaking again and he opened his eyes once more. The round object over his face grew larger and darker. When it was all that he could see, he felt something soft press against his lips while little wet drops fell against his cheeks. He smiled and said, “Love…you…”
Then everything went dark.
~~~
His eyes popped open as he jerked and tried to cry out in pain. He felt the muscles of his chest and back flexing all at once, fighting against each other, pulling at his ribs and spine, trying to snap his bones. He couldn’t scream; he couldn’t breathe. He felt the terror of nothing in his lungs, no substance to produce a sound. For a brief moment he recognized the ceiling of his living room and felt the sorrow of the dark figure holding his hand. Then flashes started going off and his vision was nothing but bursts of light followed by halos as he felt himself starting to bounce and pop off the floor. Again he tried to scream out as he felt the sharp, cold pain of knives plunge into his hands and feet. His mouth made the horrible movement but produced no sound as he felt the constriction of their blades dragging up through his limbs toward his heart—filleting him like a fish as the stars overhead closed in around him. His head jerked from side-to-side and he started kicking his feet against the floor. Then all thought and feeling left him.
Chapter 14
Jason wasn’t sure how long he’d been sitting on the floor with his back against the foot of the sofa. Time had slipped through his fingers like sand through an hour glass. The blood smeared across his shirt and the thighs of his pants was dry and stiff. He couldn’t remember if the shootout at the supermarket happened earlier that day or if
it was two days ago. A cold shiver ran up his chest that ignited a tremble in his lower lip. The dried blood was hers. The shame and remorse pulled at his chest as he forced himself to turn and face the object of his sorrow, laid to rest on the cushions behind him. How he got her home was forever lost to him. So too was why he still had the gun. Like an indecisive twitch, he slowly rubbed the hard steel barrel of the pistol up and down his thigh.
Only a few things remained clear in the aftermath of what happened. The police never came―no one ever helped him―they all left him there with the body of his dead fiancée. If anybody else had jumped up to help, his Leslie would still be alive. The only other thing he remembered was dumping the guns and rifles from the four he killed into the back seat of his car.
He brought the pistol up to a few inches from his face and studied it before closing his eyes and wincing in pain. In a fight of emotions, he gasped and rammed his back against the sofa. A heartbeat later he pulled forward and did it again. She couldn’t be gone! He threw his face to the ceiling and screamed, “Dear God, take me from this pain!” As his eyes strained in a desperate search for meaning, the burning truth became clear. He was alone. In an act of defiance, he pressed the barrel of the pistol to his temple.
There was no point in living without her. No reason to go on living with this pain. He clamped his teeth together, and with the cool steel of the trigger resting against the soft belly of his finger—he pulled.
Jason flinched as the hammer clicked, but there was no discharge. He immediately broke down crying and began to shake uncontrollably as he slowly turned to face Leslie. “I’m so sorry!” he wailed. He dropped his arm under the weight of the gun and when the pistol hit the floor, it fired. The kick nearly sprung his wrist as the slug slapped against the drywall and blew a hole through the vinyl siding on the exterior of the house.
Jason fell into a moment of shock. He stared at the wall, then at the pistol for several seconds. All of a sudden he broke into delirious laughter as the uncontrolled mixture of emotions boiled out of him. He threw his head back and stared at the ceiling again. “What do you want of me?”
That’s when he started thinking about all those people who could have stopped him, but didn’t. All they had to do was grab him. If they had, Leslie would still be alive. The more he thought about it the more the anger built up in him. These were the same people that he had gone out of his way to help every day of his life. Help without ever expecting anything in return. He had given everyone the best he had to offer his entire life and this is how he was repaid.
He turned around to face Leslie’s pale face one last time. One last kiss to last him the rest of his life. He started to push off the floor, but as he did everything began to spin and a warm feeling filled the back of his head. He grinned as he latched onto the sofa to keep his balance. They refused to stop him before he shot his fiancée. Now let them try, because with God as his witness, he was going to shoot every last mother fucker he saw until someone did.
A beautiful halo started to appear around everything he looked at. As far as he was concerned, it was proof from Heaven that he was on the path of righteousness. He let go of the sofa and stumbled toward the door. Out in the back seat of his car, vengeance waited for him with a debt of love left in the balance.
Chapter 15
Chuck had been staring at the ceiling for several minutes. It wasn’t the first time he opened his eyes, but it was the first time he had been able to keep them open longer than a few seconds. His muscles were sore, his back was stiff and the heels of his feet were tender to the touch. All in all, it felt like he’d been beaten to within an inch of his life with a wooden baseball bat. But those pains were only an afterthought given the difficulty he had in breathing. His throat was so dry and swollen that every inhale made him clench his fist and toes in pain. Every exhale made a scraping sound and like nails across a blackboard.
He let the weight of his head roll it to the side and saw the body of his wife less than a foot away. But it wasn’t an image that his mind was ready to accept. Even the dull, lifeless reflection in her eyes couldn’t elicit any emotion in him. For all practical purposes, Becky might as well have been a piece of furniture.
After the gut clenching irritation of another inhale, he painfully climbed up on one elbow and used the stiffness of her body to push up to his hands and knees. A loud moan rolled up through the dry skin of his throat as he arched his back like a cat and stretched out his sore muscles. The pain was evident in his face as he bit down and started pushing himself off the floor—a feat that on any normal day wouldn’t be worth mentioning. Today, though, was about as far away from normal as you could get. He found himself so weak that he had to grab the arm of the sofa to catch a second wind before pushing up the rest of the way. In fact he felt so beaten down that his first thought was that he had been in a car crash. That thought stayed with him as he hobbled his way toward the kitchen, pausing once to rub his lower back.
There were several jugs of water lining the counter top, but he passed them up. Instead he opened up the cupboard, grabbed a glass and filled it under the sink. He slowly sipped the first glass down in one continuous drink. The second glass he paused periodically and took the water down in gulps. He held the glass under the faucet and was about to go for a third, when his stomach suddenly cramped up. He flinched and dropped the glass. A second flinch doubled him over. Then in a blind grab to keep from falling, he pulled off several jugs of water before he collapsed to the floor.
He woke again—this time on the wet linoleum in the middle of the kitchen. As he slowly pulled his head up he saw a couple of Tupperware containers and an old plastic milk jug lying on the floor just out of his reach. That was as far as he got before he fully understood just how sore his stomach was. Slowly and gingerly, he rose up to where he was sitting. He slid backward on his rear to where he could rest against the bottom cabinets. He let out a few slow, deep breaths, this time without the rasping sound, and then reached up over his head and pulled one of the jugs of water over the edge. But as soon as the half-gallon jug pulled free of the counter, his arm crumpled under the weight and he dropped it. The plastic jug crashed to the floor and sent water flying everywhere.
After a moment of anguish, he wet his hand in the standing water and patted down the taunt, dry skin of his face. That was when he realized how much effort it took just to lift his own arm. He rested for a minute, and when he reached up to the counter the second time, he used both hands.
This time he slowly sipped the water and avoided the debilitating stomach cramps. When he was confident that he could stand again, he clutched the counter and pulled himself up. With his thirst satisfied he went to work on hunger. He angled over to the pantry and grabbed a bag of chips. Then with a small pitcher of water in hand, he made his way back into the living room, edged his way between the body of his wife and the sofa, and plopped down in front of the television.
He sat the pitcher on the seat next to him and tore into the bag of chips so savagely that half the contents flew out over the floor and surrounding cushions. But he didn’t care. Satisfying his need for a salty, greasy potato chip was all that mattered. He plunged his hand down into the foil bag and pulled out a fistful as he sat and stared at the static on the television. Any pauses were only long enough to wash mouthfuls down with a splashy gulp of water.
Midway into the feast, he scraped a handful of crumbs off his shirt and dropped them in his mouth. But he tasted the difference as soon as they hit his tongue. The pile of tempting morsels weren’t all potato chips. His shirt was covered in a crusty layer of flakes. He peeled off a large one and stuck it in his mouth. The flake dissolved into a bitter flavor that made his face cringe. It was the same acidic taste that burned his mouth when he had to visit the porcelain god after a night of hard drinking…it was dried vomit. He managed a subdued, “Oh,” of discovery as he began to brush the flakes off his shirt. Following a few half-hearted swipes, his hand was back in the bag and his c
oncentration back on the static of the television.
He continued in that state until he reached the greasy bottom of the bag. After the chips were gone, he stood up and brushed the crumbs and remaining flakes off his shirt. With a little bit of food in him, he decided it was time for a walk. He stepped over Becky’s body and turned the television off. But before he walked out the door, he turned, looked at his wife on the floor and said, “I’m going to go for a walk.” He waited for a second, then nodded and stepped out.
It was a beautiful day outside. Sunny enough that he had to squint and shield off some of the light, yet breezy enough that he didn’t have to worry about sweating like a pig. He walked down the middle of the driveway and in a matter of minutes he was standing at the end of his street. He took a right on Michigan and his stride grew as he started working his way down the hill. A few blocks into it he came across his truck abandoned in the ditch. He looked at it for a second, then opened the door and saw his rifle and shotgun on the seat. The keys were still in the ignition, and after a second of thought, that’s where he left them. He slammed the door and started walking again. The truck wasn’t stuck and it still had gas. But it was just too beautiful of a day to drive—he felt like walking.
Fifteen minutes later he was a few blocks from the river and approaching Main Street. Out of habit, he took a right and started walking over to his antique store. A beautiful day like this would bring several folk out—maybe even some shoppers from the city. He would open up and rake in the money.
He stepped over the broken glass and maneuvered around the discarded store merchandise that littered the sidewalk. Every once in a while a piece of trash or clothing would get snagged on a piece of broken wood or bent metal and flap in the wind. Most of it blew around like tumbleweeds in the breeze as he stepped over a body. A few stores farther down he came upon his antique shop.
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