by Ben Stevens
At least, that was his intention. But he couldn’t pull the trigger; something was wrong with the gun. Jammed, perhaps. He’d neglected to clean it recently – something he’d always previously been meticulous about – and he’d been in a hot, dusty environment...
With a mixed roar of triumph and rage, the hog took his bloody hands away from his shot leg and wrapped them around Parker’s neck. Parker tumbled over, powerless against the hog’s size and strength, as the man with the eye-patch now straddled him.
‘I’ll still make it to where your wife’s living, and I’ll make sure that I fuck her extra hard up the ass, right before I make her suck my fucking dick. I’ll let you have that as your final thought, as I crush your fucking neck.’
With his final words, spit dribbled out of the hog’s mouth and fell onto Parker’s face. Parker’s vision was starting to swim, an impenetrable blackness emerging from the corner of each eye. The hog’s massive hands were choking the life out of him; he couldn’t breathe...
He tried throwing the hog off him, hitting at the meaty figure with his fists, but it was useless. He was going to die, and then this man would get after Carrie and...
The hog gave a sudden grunt and fell off Parker, his bloody hands moving to cover the back of his head. Coughing violently, Parker stared in amazement at the small figure of Abby, who was stood holding the shotgun she’d just struck the hog over the head with.
As the hog gave a roar of rage and turned his head to face Parker and the girl again, his remaining eye gleaming murderously, Parker leapt up and grabbed the shotgun out of Abby’s hands.
So close he had no need to aim. Didn’t think you could really aim a shotgun anyway. Just pointed the thing and fired, the recoil making the weapon buck.
...The hog was on his knees, screaming now, both hands clasped in between his legs. Parker realized what he’d done, shrugged, and pointed the gun again to deliver a messy coup de grace to the hog’s skull.
Then Parker paused, what the hog had said just a few seconds before repeating in his mind –
‘I’ll still make it to where your wife’s living, and I’ll make sure that I fuck her extra hard up the ass...’
Parker threw the shotgun as far as he could away from him.
‘Looks like you won’t be fucking anyone ever again,’ he told the hog, in between that man’s screams. ‘I’ll let you have that as your final thought, as you bleed out.’
He took Abby’s hand and walked quickly away, the hog continuing to scream, kneeling there by the bonfire, surrounded by the corpses of the other men Parker had executed.
Back at the bicycle, Parker knelt down to bring his face in front of Abby’s.
‘Thank you, honey – thank you,’ he said softly.
She said nothing, just embraced him. Then the solitary, almost whispered word –
‘Daddy.’
Parker held her as the tears began to fall from his eyes, his love for the girl as infinite as space.
More days. Time passing. Parker becoming more and more familiar with the areas he was cycling through. Entering one apartment, catching that sickly-sweet smell and then quickly leaving again. Apart from that, no more problems. Nothing to have to shoot – either hog or thing. (The pistol was working fine again after a good clean – Parker had made a couple of ‘test shots’.)
Yes, the neighbourhood becoming very familiar now. Because it was the one Parker had been born and brought up in. Never travelling far; certainly never leaving his country. A few jobs in construction and such once he’d finished with education, and then the chance offer of that janitor’s job at the school. Parker had never thought he’d get it but the interview with the intelligent principal who Parker would ultimately shoot dead had gone well and he’d started work the following month. Then meeting Carrie one night in a local country music bar and...
Life. Just turning. Then one day (so to speak) most of the world just got real sick and died, and shit changed. Irrevocably.
...And there was the closed-up, locked-up school, and there was Parker’s house. Only, it was not his house any longer. It was the house of whoever was keeping the small front garden in such good order.
The orange, autumnal sun, slowly setting. A faintly smoky smell in the air. Parker dismounted the bicycle as though in a dream, scarcely registering his aching thighs. Helped Abby down, but was deaf to her curious –
‘John?’
Staring at the house, windows boarded even more thoroughly than he’d done them before. Then the front door opened and out emerged Carrie, a shotgun held in her arms.
‘John...’ she said, her blue eyes wide with amazement. ‘You came – back?’
‘I had to,’ Parker heard himself saying. ‘I had to. Carrie – I’m so... I’m so sorry.’
From inside the house there suddenly sounded the wail of a baby. Parker started, and then a man – tall, dark, lean – showed himself, cradling the crying infant as he stood behind Carrie.
‘Maybe you’d better come in,’ she said, standing to one side of the doorway as Parker nodded and, taking hold of Abby’s hand, began walking towards the house.
The man’s name was Ted and he’d showed up in this town one day soon after Carrie had been attacked and nearly raped by a group of hogs.
‘...Maybe it was for the best that you left me,’ said Carrie, the three of them sat in the living room, Abby asleep on a couch, the baby in a cot upstairs. ‘When the fever or whatever it was just passed, and the boils went, I had to learn to start taking care of myself. Couldn’t depend on anyone else. So I got some guns, and kept a knife hidden on my person, just in case. And when those hogs looked like they were going to do... whatever, I just got so angry and...’
She shrugged, but looking in those blue eyes Parker saw a fiery strength where before there had been passivity and gentleness...
Parker had already told her and Ted – in part – about his encounter with the hogs gathered around the bonfire.
‘Must have been well over a year ago, back when I killed three or four of them and also took a man’s eye out,’ said Carrie, her tone almost musing. ‘And he was planning on coming back to seek his revenge, was he?’
‘Top up your glass, John?’ asked Ted, holding out a bottle of whiskey which was the drink the three of them were sharing.
Parker nodded, and watched the amber liquid fill the bottom of his glass before signalling that it was enough. He’d sized up Ted quickly enough. A ‘walker’, much like himself, who’d just happened to meet up with Carrie. Dangerous if sufficiently provoked, but otherwise just a pretty much normal, straight-up guy.
As well as Carrie’s lover, and the father of their child.
And that, basically, was the way things were.
A few days passed and Parker began to feel like a trespasser. Relations still perfectly civil, but this was no longer his home and Carrie was fine, well looked after and in any case more than able to take care of herself, and...
‘Abby,’ said Parker one afternoon as they took a walk, Parker showing her the town where he’d lived all his life until two or so years previously.
‘How,’ he continued, ‘would you like to go back to the desert?’
She was quiet for a few minutes, didn’t answer. But Parker didn’t disturb the silence. He knew perfectly how her mind worked by now.
Finally, she said, ‘Carrie was your wife, but now she has a new man in her house, and they have a baby, and you want to go back to that little town by the river in the middle of that desert?’
Parker nodded.
‘That just about sums it up, I guess.’
‘You’re not sad?’
Parker looked to the clouded, autumnal sky, and slowly shook his head.
‘Not so much,’ he said.
‘Okay,’ said Abby then. ‘Let’s go.’
Lane was patrolling by himself when he saw something flashing on the horizon. He’d come out pretty far from the river; had done so several times recently.
Just on a feeling...
He kicked the horse into a gallop, and after a while was just able to discern two shapes stood beside a third shape.
Lane smiled, one of the shapes becoming recognisable as a bicycle, the other a man and the third a child. Spurred the horse on to even greater effort, a dusty cloud billowing up behind.
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