by T. S Sharp
Boyd pulled the trigger once and felt the gun buck in his hand. The bullet struck Hughes just as he was turning to run, hitting him in the right hand side of his ribcage. Boyd saw the farmer’s jacket ripple with the impact of the round. He stumbled back against the side of the truck with his mouth open, unable to utter a sound. Boyd fired again but Hughes was sliding along the side of the vehicle and the round missed, punching out a window behind the farmer’s head. The dog’s barking grew more and more agitated from inside the truck. The animal was jumping from seat to seat, trapped in the cab.
Boyd knew the wound was fatal, but he would have liked a clean kill in the first instance. Hughes was struggling to stay upright and was now making a rasping moaning sound as the shock and pain took hold. He stumbled backwards but kept his footing with the aid of the truck and disappeared around the back of the vehicle, out of sight of Boyd.
Boyd calmly walked toward the back of the truck to dispatch the mortally wounded farmer. As he got closer he saw Hughes slumped over the lowered tailgate. He was still alive, but blood had soaked his clothing, making it look a sickly black colour. Boyd stood there for a moment, looking at the farmer’s back and hearing his rasping breath. He seemed to be scrabbling in the bed of the truck with something. Before Boyd could work out what he was doing, Hughes turned around and levelled a shotgun at him. He had been in the process of slotting a shell into it as Boyd walked over, and now he had the gun loaded and ready. Boyd took a couple of steps backwards when he saw the twin barrels of the shotgun swing toward him but was caught by the blast of Hughes’ shot.
The boom of the discharged twelve-gauge was deafening in the barn and Boyd was knocked backwards by the cloud of buckshot. His ears rung and his body was punctured in a hundred different places. He lay on his back looking up at the distant rafters of the barn, his mind totally detached from the destruction wrought on his body. Remembering Hughes and his shotgun, Boyd lifted his head to look at the man. The farmer was still slumped against the end of his truck, bloodied and dying, but was fumbling with a box of shells that had spilt across the opened tailgate. His shaking and blood-caked fingers finally grasped a shell and whilst still holding it he managed to open the shotgun. The farmer’s eyes glanced over to where Boyd was lying in the dust of the concrete floor. He saw Boyd looking at him and then doubled his efforts to load the shell into the breach.
With his body going into shock, Boyd glanced down and saw he had managed to retain the pistol when he was shot. He saw the farmer frantically trying to chamber the shotgun shell, and raised the handgun. Without even aiming properly he pulled the trigger repeatedly. Hughes’ body jerked and danced as several bullets punched into him. The situation had a surreal sense of serenity to it. Boyd was barely aware of the deafening report of the shots and the clinking sound the spent shell casings made on the concrete. Then he watched Hughes fall to the ground with a leaden, lifeless thud, the still-broken shotgun draped across him.
He could feel his mouth filling with blood, a sign his lungs were punctured. His body started to shake and he could feel a coldness gripping his limbs and torso. Boyd lay back down again and let his head loll to one side. He could see the farmer’s dog inside the vehicle barking uncontrollably. He could see the jagged white contours of his teeth as his jaws snapped up and down, but it was as if the dog was behind a soundproof barrier, for Boyd couldn’t hear anything besides a persistent ringing in his ears.
The man appeared alongside the vehicle, looking down at Boyd. The two men stared at each other. The man’s head was cocked to one side as he regarded Boyd’s broken and dying body on the grimy concrete floor.
“Well, I didn’t see this coming, did you?”
Boyd tried to reply, but no words would come out of his mouth. He could feel the blood welling up and spilling down his chin.
“So now we’re both dead. But at least I was buried.”
The man and everything around him started to fade into a blinding white nothingness until Boyd’s world vanished in its entirety.
The End
About the Author
T S Sharp worked as a video games tester, an asylum seeker project worker and now pretends to care about management information. When not doing that he writes contemporary fiction.
Visit T S Sharp’s blog where he writes about the writing process http://tssharp.wordpress.com/ or visit the author page on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/TSSharp.author