Death of the Extremophile

by Stuart Parker

  *

  The cold candles were in rows on the sink where they had burned in a happier moment. Clothes, both his and hers, intermingled on the floor. An empty wine bottle occupied the soap ledge. One unused towel hung from its brass hook. Nothing had changed since Hope and Hawkshaw had shared a bath together the night before, except the water was now ice cold.

  The first thing Hope did upon reaching the Hawkshaw bathtub was to plunge into it. He had been sprinting hard and was sweating profusely. Far worse was the grime and stench from the quarry that had engrained itself on his skin. Sinking low into the bath left the water only marginally lighter in colour than the quarry lake. The crossbow wound stung madly. It was as though the water was mostly salt.

  He tore his clothes off, blindly flinging them away until he was naked. He grabbed the bottle of vodka he had brought with him into the bath and downed a bitter mouthful. Then he shared it with his wounded arm. The pain caused his legs to cramp. He drank some more.

  He gritted his teeth and let anger be his anesthetic. He began to work the crossbow bolt out of his arm. He bit his lip to focus himself through the pain. The bolt finally came away and blood oozed from the jagged wound, turning the bath water pink - he poured the rest of the bottle onto it.

  No time for stitches. He got out the bath, toweled himself down and dressed the wound as best he could; blood was seeping between his fingers all the while. He applied the gauze as tightly as he could manage and practiced some quick draws from an imaginary holster; once vaguely satisfied, he headed to his room and the black cargo bag for the real thing. Putting on anything other than the bandages and the gun holster was a mere afterthought.

  29. ‘I think they were going to get strange.’

  The Youngs’ dog was a five year old American Pit-bull named Pedro. It had lived an eventful life. Les Young bought it off a belly dancer in a traveling circus who had found it abandoned somewhere through Memphis. The Youngs’ previous family pet had not recovered from being thrown out the car during a drunken night on the town. No one could quite remember who had done the throwing or why, but the only way they liked to play was rough: it was not unusual for the day after a bender to come minus a tooth or a chunk of flesh, so why not minus a dog?

  This was the home life Pedro was adopted into and it had accounted for an odd assortment of scars: the deepest were the bullet wound from a deer hunting accident and a knife wound that had been punishment for an overly zealous bark. Other scars had arisen from not barking loud enough: the Youngs did not like strangers. If Pedro was chained to the house when a stranger ventured onto the property, it was to bark and raise hell; if it was off the chain, it was to chase and confront. Pedro had learned its role the hard way. It had its scars.

  As this latest stranger marched through the front gate, Pedro was roaming free. Pedro’s ears pricked, its eyes locked and without hesitation it charged. It was a mass of pent up energy, doubly irritable, for it had not been fed in two days. It remembered this stranger and the hard kick it had received in the ribs for not barking enough the last time he had come around. It would make amends now. It had tasted the flesh of humans before and had no qualms about tasting it again. Especially with its belly so painfully empty. Its only confusion was why the man it was set to attack was offering out a massive cut of beef steak that was its customary reward for its assault. Should it take the reward first? It stopped and barked furiously in its confusion. But it was so hungry it was salivating profusely. The stranger thrust the steak towards it and Pedro could resist no more. It bounded for it but just as its massive jaws were closing around it the steak exploded and Pedro’s head disintegrated into gore. The steak was being hung from the barrel of a shotgun.

  With the pit-bull out of his way, George Hope dispensed with the meat from the gun barrel. He was holding the shotgun one handed and had a Tommy gun in the other - the firearms were loosely aimed at the front door of the house; Hope waited for a reaction to his shooting the family pet. He had come dressed smartly in a charcoal grey flannelette suit and a brown fedora hat: the more the law was being broken, the more stylish the suit needed to be, for it would deflect police fire better than a bullet proof jacket, at least in the initial moments when being a well-dressed member of the community might still be equated with respectability.

  Hope picked up Pedro by the legs and flung it at the house. Then he fired off a burst from the Tommy gun into the roof. The police were yet to arrive so this was what he was going to do in the meantime. Taking the law into his own hands was never going to be pretty. He noticed movement through the windows. Someone’s silhouette. The person was moving freely so it certainly wasn’t Hawkshaw. Hope stood on open ground and waited.

  The front door swung open. Hope saw the shotgun first and then the man behind it. He discharged both his weapons into him before ducking across to the cover of a rusted out Buick to replay in his head what had just unfolded. It had been a young man, somewhat halfhearted in his actions; Hope gritted his teeth as he realised it was Joel, the inquisitive brother - the only reason he would have been sent out alone in this situation was if his brothers were too preoccupied to join him.

  Hope reloaded and forced himself to bide his time. The remaining brothers would make time for him now. Riled up they would be more reckless and a much easier proposition; Hope had few regrets about the way he had done it either, for the Young brothers were never so calm as when they were raping or murdering.

  ‘Joel!’ came a cry from within the house. ‘Joel’s been hit!’

  Hope’s expression of commiseration was another blistering flurry of gunfire. This time it was returned: he ducked low as rifle fire cracked into the Buick. Unaccompanied by further cries, he had no idea if his second sojourn had been successful. Machine gunfire emerged from the same window, spattering the Buick, the hot lead angrily deflecting away about as fast as Hope would need to run if he were to break his cover. But not yet. He hung his Tommy gun out and released another burst. He sat back then and braced for the reply. Machine guns, rifles and handguns were all awake now and bellowing from the house. The breadth of the arsenal gave the impression the Youngs were confused about what sort of mechanics they were supposed to be.

  Hope put down his Tommy gun and readied for a dash to the side. It would be risky but gunfights always were and he needed to get to the house before a stalemate set in.

  As the gunfire eased off, however, there were other sounds that caught his attention and got his head turning quickly: car motors and squeaking breaks at the entrance to the property. Hope swore under his breath. No ordinary cars at that. Three squad cars in a line. So, the police had decided to attend, after all. Probably they had been unwilling to face the Youngs with anything less than three cars. And the occupants would be heavily armed - some of the hands upon the weapons would be clammy, some bone dry. A little earlier and the guns may have come in handy to Hope’s cause. Now the only purpose Hope could afford the police was to clean up the mess.

  He regathered the Tommy gun. There was no time for a peripheral approach now. It could only be a direct assault. If lucky the arrival of the law would create a moment’s pause in further shooting. Or not. With one or two bullet riddled brothers on his account, he needed to keep his head down.

  He spun out from behind the shot up Buick and bolted for the house. As it turned out, the police presence was no impediment in the slightest to the surviving Youngs, their machine gun fire tilling the earth around him in furious crisscrossing strips.

  Hope discarded his own Tommy gun again in favour of desperately needed agility. He held onto his shotgun, however, and used it to shoot out a window to the right: not because there was gunfire coming from that direction but rather because there was not: it qualified it as an entry point. Still, there were plenty of glass shards remaining in the pane on which to impale himself, and even before that there were bullets flying through the air to pierce him and car parts littering the ground to twist an ankle on: odds, he supposed, were
like the age of a lady in that there reached a point when it was no longer polite to bring them up. And unless the police cars were developing a bad bout of backfiring, the cops must have been involving themselves in the gunfight too. With the Young brothers spraying the world with bullets, it was inevitable they would start to feel victimised.

  Hope held his course for the jagged window, amused by how relaxed he was feeling. The forty pound howitzer shells that had ripped to shreds the battlefields of France had left him this way: where other veterans were twitching messes he was dead steady. The exploding shells had come close enough but not too close. They had become his heartbeat. And the blood they pumped was as icy as trench mud. It was better than being a twitching mess. But he needed to keep that heart beating.

  He reached the house and leapt through the shotgun hole in the window. He slipped between the jagged teeth of glass and crashed awkwardly against a chair and a wall and as he righted himself there was a revolver thrust into his face that fired just as he knocked it away. The sound threatened to crack his eardrums - eardrums ringing furiously till his shotgun drowned them out. The blast hit someone away in the doorway. The scream confirmed it. Hope did not care who. He was shooting shapes, not people. He swung his shotgun across as he felt an approaching movement and whisper of death. Metal clanged against metal, the barrel of the shotgun blocking a fiendishly serrated dagger from in front of his neck.

  Hope looked up into the furious gaze of Les Young and smirked. They were locked in a stalemate, for both men were subduing the weapons of the other. It proved the other three brothers were either dead or incapacitated, for Hope would have been at their mercy. So there was only Les Young left. And here was his grief, directed upon the revolver and the dagger; he was rising onto the tips of his toes for extra leverage, leaning into the weapons with all his might.

  ‘I swear I’m going to kill you,’ he spat, ‘if it’s the last thing I do.’

  Hope turned his smirk cruel. ‘Swearing to kill me will be the last thing you do.’ He fired the shotgun out the window, the angle available to him spitting the shot harmlessly skyward, but the return fire from the police was low and intense and Les Young was exposed to it. Bullets ripped through his shoulders and neck, spinning him to the wall where he slumped down and out of life, leaving behind streaks and splotches of blood on the faded wallpaper.

  The revolver and dagger remained behind on the floor. Hope grabbed the revolver and emptied it out through the window. Then tossed it away. The dagger he took with him. He ran low to the Tommy gun lying on the top of Art Young’s bloodied body. Rex Young’s body was nearby and the room stunk like they had been lying there a month and that it would take a lot more holes in doors and windows to air it out. With cops edging out from behind their blockading cars, now seemed as good a time as any: Hope leapt up to the doorside window and sprayed the police cars with fire. The police threw themselves for cover with the kind of purpose and zest that the professionals seemed to be better at than the amateurs. Perhaps it was because there was nothing criminals could hide behind that they could keep.

  Ammunition exhausted, Hope let the Tommy gun drop back to where he had found it. The dagger was still in hand; he headed down the narrow passageway, leaving the retaliatory fire to shower the Youngs in splinters of glass and wood. He passed a bathroom that fielded mould the way the paddocks did its crops. The room was so filthy it was incomprehensible someone would step into it with a view to becoming clean. But that’s not what they had done in this case anyway. The rumpled clothes on the floor were Hawkshaw’s. Hope stopped to confirm it, keeping low, for the police fire was penetrating deep into the house - nothing of substance to impede the bullets.

  Hope continued down the hallway and its threadbare rugs. The next room along was a bedroom. Beside the unkempt bed there was the back of a woman bound to a wooden, vinyl padded chair. Hope’s immediate reaction was one of disappointment as this was a dark blonde, something Hawkshaw was not. And this woman was wearing an unfamiliar red and white check dress and caramel coloured clogs. Suddenly, however, her head turned wildly to look his way and there was mutual recognition, her eyes lighting up with surprise and relief. This was what he had brought the dagger for. He hurried to her and sliced away the ropes. Hawkshaw slumped exhaustedly into his arms. He put down the dagger and as gently as possible worked loose the knot of her tightly bound gag. Her chest heaved against him as she luxuriously sucked in air.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Where are the brothers?’

  ‘All over the floor.’ Hope rubbed her back. ‘What’s with the get up?’

  Hawkshaw’s voice was distant, withdrawn. ‘They made me put it on. After they had forced me to take a bath. While they watched and drooled. Perverts.’

  ‘Did they say what they were going to do?’

  ‘They started calling me mom and shouting that I was a bitch and deserved to be punished. I don’t think they like their mother very much.’ She shuddered. ‘I think they were going to get strange.’

  She went to take off the wig, but Hope stopped her.

  ‘Better leave it on,’ he said. ‘With four dead bodies on the floor and your past history with that kind of thing, I wouldn’t be trying to offer the cops afternoon tea.’ He pulled a pistol out from his belt and closed her fingers around the handle. ‘But cutting rope is all a knife is good for at a moment like this.’ He squeezed the hand reassuringly. ‘We’ve got time for a quick practice.’

  He gave her wrist a nudge and she did the rest, pointing the pistol straight outwards.

  ‘You want me to fire it?’

  ‘Only if there’s something you want to damage.’

  She held him aside and emptied the magazine feverishly into the walls and ceiling, blowing out windows and shattering the ceiling light with a spray of glass.

  ‘That’s the way,’ said Hope, taking her wrist again and easing free the pistol. He quickly reloaded it. He took off his fedora hat and shook free the fragments of glass that had collected on the brim. He put it back on and held the pistol out for Hawkshaw to take.

  ‘If that felt good,’ he said, ‘and you think you can run in momma’s dress, then let’s go outside and do it for real.’

  Hawkshaw took the pistol without hesitation.

  Hope nodded. ‘Back door.’