Killing Down the Roman Line

They each hooked an arm and hauled Berryhill to his feet, grunting and wheezing under the strain. “Move your feet, you fat bastard!” Puddycombe barked, blowing out his cheeks. “I can’t carry you!”

Jim looked over his shoulder. The house, the burning truck. The smouldering man. No Corrigan.

Keep moving.

Berryhill lurched and pitched on puppet legs. Clinging to the two men, a hair away from bringing them all down in a tumble. “Don’t you fucking leave me!”

Jim bit back the pain in his leg. He could feel it bleeding fresh, leaking down his ankle into his boot. Soaking the sock sticky and hot. Eyes front. Where to run? Hitch’s Tahoe sat in the rutted track where they’d left it. “Get to the truck! Move your fucking feet, Bill!”

“I am!”

They jerked and stumbled like tenpins. Hitchens had left the keys in the ignition. Jim remembered seeing them there.

A gun blast, the shotgun report cracking in their ears. All three went down. When Jim looked up, he saw the blown out front tire of Hitch’s Tahoe. Something shuffled in the darkness and the shotgun sang again. The vehicle listed as the rear tire was shot out.

The three men panted in the dark and their jaws dropped as flames appeared as if by magic inside the Tahoe. Escape route gone. Corrigan routing them from the darkness.

Over the crackle of the flames came the click and snap of the shotgun being reloaded.

They ran the other way. Back towards the house, dragging Berryhill along. Skirting around the other flaming vehicle and the headless carcass on the stairs. The husk of Combat Kyle, roasting in the flames, shifted and rolled over. One flaming hand flopped towards them, as if reaching for their ankles. Fire was everywhere, Hell landing a beachhead here in this world, this acreage.

They grunted and heaved and kept moving. Berryhill’s legs like spastic clubs as the dipping willow leaves raked their hot faces. Staggering uphill until they came upon the little family graveyard. Six low stones and the big monument toppled and broken on the ground.

Puddycombe tripped over a headstone and they all went down. The injured man taking the worst of it. Puddy wheezed, his face pink. “I can’t carry him.”

“Get up,” Jim ordered. Noble words, he could barely stand himself.

Bill swore and groaned. “Don’t leave me.”

The barkeep shook his head, refusing to move. Jim snarled at him to get on his feet.

Puddycombe got up too fast and staggered backwards with pinpricks of white beguiling his eyes. A loud snap. And then the screaming.

Puddy dropped like a sack of dirt, clawing at his ankle. Screeching in hot pain, flailing his arms. The rusty jaws of the bear trap vised around his shin. Iron teeth cutting to the bone.

“Get it off! Jesuschrist Get it off!”

Jim gaped stupidly. It looked unreal, some Wiley Coyote cartoon made real. Puddy’s screams snapped him back to life and he pulled at the iron jaws. No give whatsoever. Tight as death. “I can’t get it open.”

“Pry it off! Shoot it off! I don’t care.”

Bill and Jim tugged and strained but their bare hands were no match for the iron vise and they had nothing to pry it open with. The tire iron that Puddy had was gone, lost in the weeds somewhere. Jim slid the barrel of the shotgun through the jaws but had no way to pry it open, no leverage to work off of.

There was nothing to do and Puddycombe read it in their eyes. “No,” he pleaded. “No no no no.”

Jim took up the chain and followed the links to where it was anchored to the ground. Pulling and straining against it until the spike plucked free and Jim fell back on his ass. He dropped the chain into Puddy’s hands. “You’ll have to run with it.”

“Are you fucking crazy! I can’t even stand!”

The snap of a twig. Footfalls, somewhere in the dark. “Rub a dub dub, gentlemen.”

A glowing haze of light floating in the pitch. Corrigan bled out of the night with the lantern in hand like some nightmarish railwayman.

Jim dove for cover as Corrigan swung and fired from the hip. A red hot blast ripped into his good leg, his buttock. Hot and searing like a thousand bee stings.

Puddycombe bore the brunt of it. The skin flayed from his cheek, flapping wet and free. His back shredded to exposed meat. Pinholes of gunblack against red muscle tissue.

Berryhill took his share of spray. He lay face down in the clover making an ungodly noise.

Jim rolled up and popped onto his knees, drawing the Mossberg up fast and outgunning Corrigan. Faster than fucking Eastwood, getting the drop on the murderous sonofabitch.

Corrigan bristled, his gun frozen at the half cock.

Jim’s heart knocked into his throat. He wanted to spit words at him, something matching his rage but his brain emptied of all but the most banal words and comforting curses.

“Go to hell.”

Corrigan’s hand shot up to ward off the blast. A useless instinct. Jim pulled the trigger—

Click.

The sound all wrong. No righteous blast, no redeeming kick to the shoulder. He squeezed harder but nothing would move the trigger piece. Load fail. Gun jam. Death.

Glee stitched across Corrigan’s mouth. “Misfire.”

31

“DIG TWO GRAVES,” his father had told him once. “If it’s revenge you’re planning, dig two graves.”

Of all the bullshit, liquor-sodden advice his father had doled out to him, and there had been plenty, this one bonmot came rushing back to Jim now, of all times. The last time his father had hit him, a stinging backhand across the mouth when Jim was sixteen. Instead of taking the punishment as usual, Jim had snatched up a shovel with pure murder in his heart. And then his father’s warning about revenge needing two graves.

The old man was right.

It galled him to admit it but Jim had no other choice, staring down the barrels of the shotgun. At Corrigan, ready to blow his head clean off. He should have dug two graves. Maybe more. Puddycombe lay sprawled over his feet, bleeding out from the catastrophe of his head. He should have dug poor Puddy’s grave too.

His leg stung like a son of a bitch and Corrigan kept talking, yammering on about something. What the hell was he saying? Maybe the man intended to talk him to death.

“Jimmy.” Corrigan’s voice pierced through the white hum, foul and obscene. “Put the gun down.”

Jim looked down at the shotgun in his hands, surprised it was still there. He lifted a hand up in compliance. Everything screamed at him not to let go of the gun, useless as it was. What else was there? He forced his fingers to relax their grip. The Mossberg clunked to the earth, a dead stick of metal and wood.

“Get on your knees.”

The last humiliation of the condemned. Prostrate, made to beg for your life. He thought of Emma and Travis and how they would be alone. Crying for help when the end came and he wouldn’t be there. Left behind to pay the levy for his sins.

Jim didn’t move. What was the point?

A moan, low and guttural. Berryhill, forgotten in the moment, crawled away. Fingers scratching at the dirt, dragging his dead puppet legs.

Corrigan watched the pathetic escape. “Like the slug you are, Mister Berryhill.” He lowered the barrel and aimed the bores at Bill’s head.

“No!” Jim faltered forward, stupidly waving his hands like he was flagging a bus. “Don’t—”

The crack split Jim’s ear, the boom of the gun echoing over the field. Berryhill’s head was a smashed pumpkin, broken inwards to wet pulp.

Corrigan looked at the mess, frowning at the gore sprayed over his boot. He wiped it in the grass and then swung the shotgun back to bear on his captive.