by Andy Remic
General Bronson took a staggering step back, then righted himself, and took a deep breath. His pistol never once wavered.
“That’s a good cheap trick, son. Do it again, and I’ll beat you to death with my fists. Now, that ain’t a man’s way to go. That ain’t a warrior’s way to go. Not when he’s chickenshit like you.” He cocked his pistol. The sound was deafening. The whole world seemed to be paused, and deathly silent. The sounds of the jungle and the chomping horses had faded away into soothing infinity. The cock of the pistol was a screeching metal intrusion and Svool swallowed. Hard. This was it. He was dead! He wanted to cry. He wanted to scream. He wanted his mummy.
“Last chance,” said Bronson.
“Pick up the fucking gun, you idiot,” hissed Lumar from her trussed-up position on the ground.
“They’ll shoot me!” squeaked back Svool.
“Pick it up!”
Slowly, Svool bent down like a woman in a short skirt bends down, a lowering of haunches, a feminine curtsy, and at the end of it the long black pistol made its way into his paw and he lifted it as if holding a rearing rattlesnake.
“Good boy,” breathed Bronson.
“Is it loaded?”
Everybody laughed at that.
“Now point it at me,” said General Bronson.
“I’m quite sure that I can’t,” said Svool, face drooping, lower lip quivering.
“Shoot me,” said Bronson.
“Shoot the motherfucker!” snarled Lumar.
“This is a joke, isn’t it? The gun isn’t loaded? I’ll pull the trigger, and it’ll go click, and you’ll all laugh at me, and then we’ll head back to the saloon or whatever and eat a pan of beans.”
General Bronson regarded Svool with narrowed eyes.
“You taking the piss?”
“Er, what?”
“You think all we ever do is eat beans and fart around a fire? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Er, no, it’s just I saw a pan of beans back at the sheriff’s place, I thought, I thought you all, I thought maybe...”
“Yes?”
The single word was like the closing of a lead coffin lid; like the boom of the ocean against terrible cliffs; the solemn chime of a solitary funeral bell.
“Oh, nothing,” squeaked Svoolzard Koolimax.
Lumar took that opportunity to attack. Yes, she was trussed up at her whip-wielding captor’s feet like a turkey waiting to be stuffed for the festive season, with her arms pinned tightly by her sides and the man’s flesh too many inches from her gnashing teeth to allow the rending and tearing she would have desired. But her legs were free, nearly from the hips down, and she was supple, and massively agile, and slowly, so-slowly-it-was-a-painful-crawl, she lifted her legs around, crawled around a bit, bent herself almost in two until her captor’s knee was right there -
She stomped out, like a horse stomps out, and the man’s leg folded neatly back the wrong way at the knee joint. The crack was like dry tinder snapping. There was a pause, then a scream like an animal in pain and sudden chaos...
Lumar scrambled up, onto her knees, face wild and teeth bared, and the man with the broken leg was writhing on the ground; all attention was on Lumar, and she struggled to be free of the whip. Bronson strode forward and pistol-whipped her savagely against the side of the head. Lumar hit the ground, tasting copper, stars fluttering in her mind. And as she lay there, on the ground, disjointedly feeling the men tying her ankles together, listening to the blubbering of the man with the broken leg, she could see the dwindling sheriff’s uniform of Svoolzard Koolimax XXIV as he disappeared through the rusted car horseshoe...
“Goddammit!” snarled Bronson, and fired off a shot. There came a metal zip sound as the bullet ricocheted; but Svool was gone.
“Shall us boys go after him, General?” said one man.
“No,” said Bronson, kneeling in the dirt beside Lumar. “Let’s take this pretty green lady back to the saloon. I know his sort. He won’t let his friend die. He’ll come back for her. And when he does, then we’ll have our sport.”
Lumar heard the words through her spinning brain, and she wanted to say You’re fucking joking, right? Svool is a bastard, a spoilt child, and a massive coward. He’s hot-tailed it away thinking only of his own arse, he’ll throw his toys out of the pram because he’s now alone, and his bravest course of action will actually be to run away from here as fast as he can whilst convincing himself he’s doing the right thing... going for help or some other such nonsense... but instead, she managed only a gentle deflating sigh before unconsciousness claimed her.
~ * ~
SVOOL FLED INTO a twisted mess of trees and tangled foliage, his arms pumping, his knees lifting high, doing perhaps the fastest three-hundred-metre sprint of his entire life. Bronson’s pistol was heavy in his hand, but it didn’t exist during his sprint, didn’t register as being part of the fabric of reality. Svool’s singular simple focus was to escape. To run away. To get away from the bad men. He ran and ran and ran, waiting with an itching feeling between his shoulder blades, waiting for a soft thump and the crack of a pistol. Waiting to be shot. The run seemed to take a million years. His legs moved through the thickest of treacle. His arms were punching through water and the whole process was one of humiliation and despair and agony and terror. He waited for that bullet. Waited damn hard. It became an obsession as the picoseconds ticked by. The bang. The thump. The feeling of hard steel wading through cloth, then biting into flesh, and pushing right through to his heart to kill him dead...
When the bang came, it did make him jump. Made him leap into the air like a comedy cartoon character being zapped up the bottom by an electric cattle prod, and it was an age between the pistol discharge and the ping as the bullet glanced from a knackered old car. In that time, in that slice of life, Svool lived his whole life again. In that split shard of infinity, he waded out into his past like a fisherman getting into trouble in a very deep pond, and he looked at himself, looked at his sexual conquests, looked at his poetical creations, looked at his writing and performance and recitals and academic writings and his speeches and his adoration, dammit, his fucking adoration. He was loved. The people loved him. And his PR and management and agents and publishers and marketing department and his brand kept him locked in a cocoon, a cocoon of warmth and comfort and safety and lies. Lies. It was all false, all fake, and here and now, without those safety nets, some hairy, stinking cowboy bastard was trying to kill him.
When Svool crashed into the shattered stand of trees, a section of jungle that had been destroyed by some kind of storm, he staggered, sprint turning into long loping strides as if he really had been shot, then the loping strides turned into a tumble and he fell to the floor on a platter of wood shavings. He leant on a fallen trunk stripped of bark, as if something had been eating it, and reclined like a Victorian lady who’d become overheated in the sunshine and was now lolling with a fan and a glass of lemon-infused water.
“Oh, woe is me!” exclaimed Svool, theatrically, and then remembered the big men with guns had shot at him, and he looked fearfully at his back-trail as his chest heaved and sweat stung his eyes and he panted, panted, panted, his sheriff badge gleaming in the sunlight filtering through the high forest canopy.
When his puff had returned, Svool stood up on jelly legs and tottered to the edge of the jungle. He hid behind a tree and peered out. He’d covered a good five hundred metres. He squinted, marking the place where the jungle took over from the town, then following the line of buildings back to the horseshoe of battered, rusted cars.
Nothing.
He could see nobody and nothing.
But then, on the upside, there was no pursuit! Hurrah!
Unless... they were circling behind him? Damn.
His head snapped round, his pistol lifting, and he blinked rapidly. No. Nobody behind him, creeping through the jungle to strangle him or horse-whip him. Svool looked down at the pistol. It was long and sleek and black and heavy. It hurt hi
s hand just to hold it, and he held it in a way a man might hold a scorpion; or a woman might hold a herpes-infused cock.
Ha! Bloody stupid thing. It was all a tricksy, a set-up, a wind-up. Damn and bloody thing isn’t even loaded!
Svool pulled the trigger. The BANG was so loud it made his ears ring for ten minutes. Smoke spat from the gun like it was on fire and the bullet pinged from a tree trunk and embedded in the soil with a whump. The recoil slapped Svool’s arm nearly a hundred and eighty degrees around, and the whole process made him feel like an idiot. Hot damn. It was loaded. Loaded with bullets. Loaded with bullets that could kill somebody!
“Hot buggery,” he said, and his cheeks flushed red as he realised... realised he could have killed General Bronson, and rescued Lumar, and they could have bush-whacked those darned cowboys and stolen horses and hot-tailed it away out of there shouting “Yeeeee-har!”
The flush in his cheeks went redder.
General Bronson. Well. He must be an idiot... or insane. To have Svool point a loaded pistol at him? Why would he do that? Why would he put his own neck on the line for the sake of... what?
Sport, whispered an inner voice. He was playing with you. He saw you. He knew you. He understood you. He knew you didn’t have the bollocks to do what a real man should do. You’re a fucking spineless jelly of a man, Svoolzard Koolimax. You talk the talk but tip-toe and wobble and ballet-dance the walk, mate. You’re not a man; you are an amoeba, all soft and jelly and without any real wedding tackle.
So.
What to do?
What to do now?
Well, it’s obvious really, innit?
Is it?
Oh, yes! I have escaped simply to put myself in a position where I can go and get help. I will travel to the next town and rouse the Law Makers of this toxic world, and then we will come back in force and rescue Lumar! Hurrah!
She might be dead by then.
No, they wouldn’t kill her...
How do you know?
I just know!
How?
I fucking know, I’m telling you, so shut up and let me get on with the rescue!
(yeah, a rescue from a distance in two weeks’ time, you coward)
I am not a coward!
Oh, yes, you are.
Not!
Are.
Not!
Fucking are, you spineless, jelly-brain, weak-kneed, yellow-belly turd.
I have done brave things!
Like what?
Like when I stood up on stage at the Spingo University Academic Conference for Academics. That took a lot of guts, a lot of bravery; there were five hundred of my peers there! It was most traumatic!
And if you had done something wrong, what was the worst that could happen?
I could have been... discredited!
(oooooh)
Laughed at!
(oh, dear, oh, dear)
Mocked! Mocked and berated!
(oh, you sad pathetic little fizzle)
They might have stopped publishing my work, stopped attending my lectures and poetry readings! I might have lost my chance at being a movie star and rock star and poetry star all rolled into one!
(ha and ha and fucking ho-ha)
Will you stop muttering in the background, you fucking insane and separate part of my self-mocking brain? What are you, anyway? Where did you come from?
I’ll tell you where I came from. I came from the part of you that knows. I came from the part of you that understands. Inside every single one of us is a mechanism for comprehension; no matter how hard it gets, no matter how bad it gets, no matter how fucked up you become, you fucking know, deep down inside yourself, what you really are; you fucking know deep in your heart whether you do the right or the wrong thing; and you fucking better know in your soul whether you are worthy of that gift called life. When some scumbag hits an old woman with an iron bar to steal her purse, that cunt knows in his soul he’s done the wrong thing; the weak thing. He might blank it out for a time, but trust me, it comes back to haunt a person. When that shitbag coward fucking serial killer beats another woman with a hammer and buries her out on the soothing singing sighing moors, the fucking weasel might have his twisted reasoning, be able to quantify his actions in his own deviation soup; but trust me, deep down in his soul, in his darkest place, in the fucking core of his being, in the distillation of his humanity, he knows. He knows better. There may be a Hell, Svool. There may be a place of Eternal Torture for those who cannot bring themselves to do the Right Thing. Maybe not. Maybe that’s just a bucket of pigshit. But what I’m telling you now is you have a choice. Not everybody out there chooses the right path. But you need to, buddy, or I’ll break your spine over my knee like kiln-dry tinder and cast you out to wriggle with all the other maggots.
Svool sat there, mouth opening and closing silently. The feeling, and the words, drifted away like smoke in his brain. So that’s what it’s come to? Being threatened by my own rambling psychosis?
He stood up. The sun tickled him with strands from the high canopy. His panting had stopped, and he lifted one hand to his breast, and spread his fingers, and looked down at the dirt, and the tears, and the snot. He took a deep breath, and lifted his head. His eyes focussed.
How could he leave Lumar?
How could he run away?
Easy... whispered a soothing nag at the back of his brain.
No.
I must go back for her.
I must save her.
Svool looked down at the pistol. It had a thick barrel, with chambers holding the bullets. Svool played with the weapon for a few moments, found the switch, and there was a click. The barrel swung out and with tinkling sounds seven bullets fell to the ground. Svool dropped to his knees, cursing, and found the bullets - well, found six of them - and he was cursing even louder. How could one have gone missing? They were gold and bright and sparkling. How could he have lost one already?
That left him with six. Shit. There were seven of those bad cowboy men.
Svool breathed deeply and took his time, sliding the bullets back into the pistol and closing the barrel. He spun it, and it went clicka-clicka-clicka. Svool grinned, and a kind of light-headed feeling rushed over him.
Goddammit! He was going to rescue Lumar!
For the first time in his life, for the first time was going to do something completely selfless.
He was going to rescue her.
Or die trying.
And it felt good.
~ * ~
SVOOL CREPT FROM the broken jungle an inch at a time. He held the pistol in both hands before him, and he was shaking, and the gun was shaking, and he crept forward, imagining at any moment a gunshot would crash towards him from some unseen location and he would be punched backwards off his feet, broken and bloody and bleeding, and die right there in the dirt.
Finally free of his cover, he stood there for a while, and when no murderous death came at him, he started to walk back towards the scene of Lumar’s capture. Back in the jungle cover, when he’d come to the realisation he would do the right thing, it had felt good; better than any orgasm he’d ever experienced. But now doubts started to creep through him, and obviously, because he was a genius with a genius imagination, his inner TV screen started to air a thousand eventualities, where in every single one he got shot and died and ended his budding silver screen career.
“Bugger,” he muttered, and as he started to get close to the horseshoe of cars, he slowed his pace even more, if that was possible. Svool wasn’t conscious he was taking shuffling, one-inch footsteps, and if somebody had pointed it out to him he would have commented on how ridiculous he was; but that’s what he was doing. Jungle snails were overtaking him.
The cars were close now, close enough for Svool to see whether the cowboys, or whatever the hell they were, had gone.
Crawling into view, he realised there was no sign of them.
Suddenly, he spotted Zoot on the ground and stumbled forward towards the PopBot.
“Zoot!” he hissed. “Zoot, buddy, are you okay?” But obviously the little PopBot was far from okay. Svool touched the black casing and it was cool under his fingers. He scooped both hands under the PopBot, obviously with the intention of lifting the tiny machine, but to his very great surprise Zoot was too heavy to lift. He grunted and heaved and strained for a moment, again with the curious sensation somebody was having a laugh at his expense and would jump out with a full film crew, shove a boom mic in his face and shout, “Svoolzard Koolimax, you’ve been FUCKED! Ha-ha-ha!” But that didn’t happen and Svool found himself kneeling next to Zoot, and staring around with nagging fear, and then eventually tapping the PopBot with his knuckle.