The third and most damning photo, as far as he was concerned, was of the love brats, Jade and Sal. Their smiling faces were cheek to cheek, but it was the locket dangling between her perfect fuck’n cleavage that had sent Lorraine into emotional and mental meltdown. He glanced over at her. She hadn’t moved, still eyeing the flickering flames of the wood burner, knees to her chest, eternally silent, like the bodies he’d buried at the back of the Johnson farm next to the humpy.
Perhaps just as damning was the identikit photo on page three (Yes, Maxy, actually more damning). Anyone who actually knew him would know without a doubt know who this identikit photo represented. His short dark hair, his brooding brown eyes, his square jawline, even the 6 o’clock shadow, it was him to a fuck’n tee. Hell, it even had the scar line in the middle of his forehead between his eyes where the bitch had crunched him with the tree branch.
No fuck’n prizes who gave the coppers this description, he thought, absently rubbing the little souvenir she had left him. He reached for the bottle of Jack Daniels and poured himself the penultimate shot. Tic-toc, tic-toc, Maxy boy. Time’s a tick’n, and downed the glass.
He picked up the newspaper, folded it and went to the wood burner. He opened the glass door, tossed the paper onto the flames, and went back to the kitchen table. He emptied the remainder of Jack Daniels into the shot glass, holding the bottle upside down for over a minute extracting every ounce of whisky available. He watched the very last drop gather at the rim, swelling millilitre by millilitre, taking an eternity to grow in size, clinging to the rim like a man desperately holding onto the edge of a precipice he had just slipped over, until, finally, it had grown too fat and too heavy to remain on. It slipped off the rim and dropped into the brimming amber pool beneath it. As it fell, Max thought he could hear it scream.
For a long time he just stared at the shot glass, biding his time, thinking, contemplating his final move. Lorraine still hadn’t said a word, or even seemed to notice his presence. “I, I never wanted you to know… to see what I…” he began.
Lorraine stirred, awakening from whatever dark spell she was immersed in. “All this time I thought…” she whispered, then shook her head and turned back to watch the flames that had briefly flared with the crisp, dry pages of the Adelaide Sun. Then, after a moment, she stirred again. “Why Max? Why’d you kill them?”
Max lifted his gaze from the shot glass. “You gotta understand, Lorraine,” he said, the words sticking to his throat despite the liberal lubrication it had received over the past couple of hours. “Not one of them was a good person… My whole life, I’ve been noth’n… people mak’n sure I knew it. People like them.”
Lorraine turned back to the flames of the wood burner, saying nothing for several minutes. Then she glanced over at the Remy leaning against the table. “What are you going to do now?”
Max heard the fear in her voice and the direction of her gaze. He glanced at the Remy, then at Lorraine. “Christ, Lorraine, I could never hurt you. Not like that. You gotta believe me.” He hesitated, as tears welled in his eyes and his voice began to crack. “I’d never hurt you, Lorraine… I, I love you. You’re the only reason I’m still here.”
“Stop it!” Lorraine said, tears also welling in her eyes. “You don’t know what love is!”
Max eyed the brimming shot glass, reached for it, then withdrew his hand back to his lap. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Sorry for what I’ve done to you… I, I’m not that roadman anymore, Lorraine. You changed me, made me a better person.” He stood up, reached for the shot glass and downed the last drop of whisky. He wiped his mouth with his forearm, grabbed the Remy, and said to Lorraine, “But you’re wrong about one thing. I do know what love is.” He paused. “It’s sacrifice.”
Before she could reply, he grabbed the car keys from the key hook and opened the front door. Lorraine spun around and said, “What are you doing, Max? Where are you going?”
“Putting things right,” he said. “So you don’t have to.”
Lorraine stood up, visibly trembling. “Max, you’re scaring me. I want you to stay. Your son needs a father.”
Max felt a tug in his heart and in that moment almost surrendered to her. But he understood that everything that had happened in his life had built toward this moment. This was his fate, and if he was ever going to do something right, something good, something decent, it was now.
“Take good care of our son,” he said. “Don’t tell him what I done.”
Lorraine moved toward him, sensing this might be the last time she’d ever see him. “Please, Max,” she begged. “Don’t go. You’re my Sonny…”
For the briefest of moments he hesitated, the flash of the dream they could have had, of paradise, of Xanadu, then it was gone. He stepped outside into the rain and shut the door behind him.
Max stopped the car outside the gate to the Johnson farm. The headlights fell on a web of yellow crime scene tape barring entry and a newly erected signpost that read: CRIME SCENE. ENTRY IS FORBIDDEN. AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY.
Beyond the gate and the farmhouse was nothing but blackness. No lights to indicate any police officers were guarding the scene, perhaps, he figured, because they’d already gathered all the evidence they needed.
He ripped the crime scene tape away from the gate and drove into the farmstead, past the burnt ruins of the farmhouse to the clearing where the humpy once stood. As the car came to a halt, its headlights arced onto the large granite boulder upon which he’d once sacrificed a rabbit all those years ago. The memory brought him no joy. Around him, nothing seemed to have remained. Within the squared off area of more yellow police tape, he could make out the gravesites of his old man and Gerhard where their bodies had been exhumed. Just beyond them was a huge dark hole of nothingness where he’d buried Jade and Sal in their car. Nothing remained of the humpy; all of it had been taken away for forensic examination. Nothing remained at all that indicated he had ever been here, that he had ever been alive at all.
He reached for the Remy next to him on the passenger seat, flicked off the safety, rested the buttstock between his knees, and put the end of the barrel into his mouth pointing up towards his brain. The metal felt cold and cruel and he could taste residual gunpowder at the back of his tongue. Before squeezing the trigger, he switched off the headlights. Suddenly, everything was swamped in total darkness. The heavy cloud cover meant that not a speck of light reached the ground from the moon or stars, and for just a moment he imagined that this was what it had been like inside his mother’s womb.
“You don’t haff ze balls to do it,” said his father next to him in the passenger seat.
Without turning to face him, Max felt for the trigger with his thumb. Out of the corner of his eye he could see smoke rising from the old fucker’s Magic Pudding cigarette. He could hear him wheezing and chortling to himself.
“Veak as piss. Alvays have been.”
Max sniffed in contempt. Nothing the old fucker said had any effect on him anymore. Without removing the barrel of the Remy, he said, “What would you do in my circumstance, huh? Just what the fuck would you do, you gutless piece of shit?”
Frank sucked on his Magic Pudding cigarette, saying nothing for once, seemingly pondering the question Max had put to him. Max glanced at him out of the corner of his eye, waiting for some or other fucked up answer or derogatory put-me-down. Amazingly, since the beginning when the old crout had started showing up for his unsolicited and unwanted father-son chats, the cigarette began to shrink, little by little, millimetre by millimetre, with each prolonged inhalation of its cancerous fumes.
Max turned to make sure he wasn’t seeing things. But it was true. The fuck’n thing had lost its magic and was actually shrinking.
Shrivelling like an impotent prick, more like it.
What’s more, as the cigarette shrivelled so did his father’s apparition, like a snake swallowing its own tail and devouring itself with each bite. Max watched with gleeful fascination as his father sucked hi
mself out if existence.
Schadenfreude, I think the Germans call it, Maxy.
With each drag of the cigarette, Frank sucked himself smaller and smaller until, in an anticlimactic ending, Frank disappeared without a sound and into oblivion. Didn’t even say another word, not even a “Fuck you!” or a “Your mother should’ve had an abortion and saved us all this fuck’n misery.” Then it struck him like one of the drunken crout’s backhanders across the face. Suddenly, for the first time in his life Max felt as though—no, he knew with utter certainty—he was truly free of his old man. This time it was for good. This time it was for fuck’n eternity.
It still didn’t stop him doing what he had to do. He was repositioning himself in the seat, readying the courage to squeeze the trigger and meet whatever fate was waiting for him on the other side of this pathetic existence, when someone else caught his attention in the rear view mirror from the open tray at the back of the ute. He figured it was the bewitching hour, ghoul time, because Gerhard Winkler had finally returned, as he knew he always would.
“Come to pay your last respects, have ya?” he said to the reflection.
Gerhard pressed his face to the cabin window much like a hungry beggar pressing his face against a restaurant window to stare at the patrons inside. His deadpan eyes stared at Max in the mirror and maggots wriggled out his gaping mouth and rotting nostrils.
In the past, Max would’ve shrunk away in terror and screamed at the German backpacker to fuck off back to wherever he’d come from and leave him alone. But not tonight. Tonight was different. Tonight was the end of days and he didn’t give a rat’s arse about his drunken father or the rotting apparition tormenting him from the grave.
“Anyone else wanna say goodbye? Jade? Sal? Got anything to say, too?” he said to the dark void.
When nobody answered, Max thumbed the trigger, fully ready to get it over and done with as quick as fuck’n possible. Just then, outside the front of the vehicle, Max saw movement. Somebody had answered his call, a shadow darker than the night moving across the hood of the car. Then he saw it again, this time coming towards him. He didn’t have time to react or think who or what it could be before it was at the driver’s window. It wasn’t Jade. It wasn’t Sal.
It was a boy.
The same boy he’d seen on numerous occasions—here at the Johnson farm, at his boss’s backyard, even running away from the burning wreck on Sellicks Hill. Max looked into the boy’s brown eyes and saw his whole life reflected in them. And something else.
Still with the barrel of the Remy inside his mouth, Max smiled. He had found his peace at last. He was setting things right. At this moment he was exactly where he should be.
“Thank you,” he said to the boy, and squeezed the trigger.
Somewhere outside a kookaburra laughed.
Other Titles By
Scott Zarcinas
Ananda (*Thanksgiving Day)
by Scott Zarcinas
ISBN: 9780994305404
eISBN: 9780994305411
Publisher: DoctorZed Publishing
*First published as Thanksgiving Day (ebook)
Available in print and ebook.
What will you sacrifice this Thanksgiving Day?
In the years approaching the New Millennium, Michael Joseph and his wife, Angie, seek the services of fertility doctor to help conceive the child they have always yearned.
One climactic Thanksgiving Day their newborn child, Ananda, is kidnapped, heralding the anxious search for her safe return.
Michael is propelled on a frantic quest to save his baby’s life and along the way must decide between what he believes to be the truth and what he refuses to admit about himself.
His decision leads to the perilous battle for control of his daughter’s soul and the destiny of mankind and the whole world.
www.thanksgivingday.doctorzed.com
Samantha Honeycomb
by Scott Zarcinas
ISBN Parent: 192120702-7
ISBN International: 0 9775969 3 1
eISBN: 097759630-3
Publisher: DoctorZed Publishing
Available in print and ebook.
“Enchanting and full of joy.” ~ Inner Self magazine.
Wrongly punished for breaking the ancient laws, Samantha Honeycomb is expelled by the queen into the wild and untamed Crazy Lands. Her only hope of redemption is an impossible quest—to find the fabled hive of Beebylon and bring back its secret of Infinite Richness. But there are others who would see her fail.
Evoking the wisdom of the ancient sages, Scott Zarcinas reveals through the trials and tribulations of Samantha Honeycomb that the surface appearance of unpleasant and torturous experiences are, in fact, essential ingredients in the melting pot of our future joy, security and acceptance—our destiny.
www.samanthahoneycomb.doctorzed.com
The Golden Chalice
by Scott Zarcinas
ISBN: 978-0-9875975-9-5
eISBN: 978-0-9775969-2-8
Publisher: DoctorZed Publishing
Available in print and ebook.
How far would you go to save the person you loved?
Fleeing the dreaded plague that has struck his village, the orphaned Giacomo heads to the mountains and its mysterious Golden City in search of the Elixir of Life, the only thing that can save the village and the woman he loves.
His quest brings him face to face with the Six Thieves, cunning enemies who will stop at nothing to see him fail, and even with the Angel of Death herself.
In the tradition of The Pilgrim Chronicles set by Samantha Honeycomb, The Golden Chalice is a compelling adventure story of self-discovery.
www.thegoldenchalice.doctorzed.com
DeVille’s Contract
by Scott Zarcinas
ISBN: 978-0-9924473-5-9
eISBN: 978-0-9-872495-4-8
Publisher: DoctorZed Publishing
Available in print and ebook.
With your thoughts you create your world!
Louis Hugo DeVille, CEO of the giant pharmaceutical company, Global Resolutions Network, suffers a heart attack in his office, only to wake up in the underground tunnels of LeMont International Enterprises.
Louis has been headhunted by The Boss of the mega-corporation to help restructure its flagging corporate image, with the promise of limitless power and money.
There’s only one catch. He must sign an unbreakable contract, one that will bind his services to The Boss for an awfully long time. For eternity.
www.devillescontract.doctorzed.com
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