'Never even had the occasion to draw my gun. I don’t know how to begin to do this.'
I reached into the box, grabbed a handful of shells.
'We better get going,' I said.
As we emerged from the shack, I looked back toward the boat. Rufus waved, grinning.
I led us into the thicket, following the trail of broken limbs, trodden weeds. The island was brimming with birds and the whine of mosquitoes. They swarmed us—a mild but constant stinging on every square inch of exposed skin.
In the unbearable humidity, we became drenched in sweat within five minutes, and crowded on all sides by curtains of varying green, I shunned the claustrophobic sensation of being trapped in a sweltering, leafy cage. Little could be seen of the sky above. Only flinders of bleached blue through the ceiling of scrub pine.
We could hear the young couple blazing the trail ahead of us, the woman growing increasingly vocal in her complaints.
'Damn you for this, Steve!' I heard her cry out. From the way her voice carried, I estimated them to be just seventy-five to a hundred yards away.
As we mushed on, my thoughts turned to Orson’s cabin in the desert and that shed and the things I’d done there. My insides warmed with an old, familiar numbness. I wondered if Vi felt it, too. I hoped.
She stopped suddenly, said, 'Listen.'
The woods had gone quiet.
'They either stopped or reached the slough,' I whispered. 'Come on.'
Several minutes later, sweaty, mosquito-bitten, scratched and bleeding from briar pricks, we emerged from the thicket onto the banks of the slough. Marsh grass grew up out of the desiccated swampbed, and a breeze swept over us from the east. I gazed up the slough—a quarter mile from where we stood, it opened into a sprawling tidal flat.
Two figures, scarcely visible, trekked across that coastal desert toward the sea.
Vi sat on the bank. I eased down beside her. As she lay the shotgun across her thighs, I put my arm around her and pulled her close. She let her head fall on my shoulder and wept.
'It doesn’t even feel real,' she said. 'We aren’t really going to do this. Are we?'
'They’re already dead. You have to think of it that way. They were dead the moment they stepped on that boat.'
Despite the heat, Vi shivered.
I said, 'You know how much they’d suffer if the Kites ever got them into that basement?'
'I know.'
'We’ll do it right.'
'I want it to be painless for them,' she whispered, unable to find her voice.
'Absolutely. They won’t know what hit them.'
'Oh my God.'
'Look, I’ll do it if—'
'No. We’ll both do it. I can’t put this all on you.'
Vi wiped her eyes and stood.
'There’s no other way, right?'
'This is it,' I said.
'Tell me there’s no other way.'
'Vi, there’s no other way.'
She looked off into the distance and slowly shook her head. Then she lifted the shotgun and stepped down into the slough. I followed, a few steps behind. Vi could barely breathe she was crying so hard, but she walked fast toward the flat.
# # #
Kim and Steve stopped to rest in the middle of the salt flat, with the dunes just a faint khaki ridge on the eastern horizon, and the pines of Portsmouth, a green wall in the west. Eerie black plants rose out of the alkaline soil—salt-sculpted formations, otherworldly and demonic, like the remnants of some nuclear apocalypse.
'I’m so tired, Steve,' Kim moaned again. 'Please let’s just go back.'
'Are you kidding? I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. I mean, it’s a desert out here.'
'Well, you’re taking me out for a classy dinner tonight. Tell you that right now.'
'Fair enough.'
Steve wrapped his arms around Kim’s waist and drew her into him.
'Love you, angel,' he said. 'Thank you for letting me do this.'
She kissed him.
'Maybe I’ll buy something slinky to wear to bed tonight. Something lacy and sheer.'
'Buy something cheap.'
'Why?'
'I want to tear it off of you.'
They giggled and kissed again.
As they pulled away, Kim looked over Steve’s shoulder toward the interior of the island and glimpsed two figures moving toward them across the flat.
'Look,' she said. 'They’re coming.'
Steve glanced back. 'Want to wait for them?'
'No, I like it just the two of us.'
Holding hands now, they continued on toward the dunes. But they hadn’t gone ten steps when distant shouting sounded across the flat.
Kim stopped and looked back.
One of those figures was waving at them.
'I think they want us to wait for them,' she said.
Kim and Steve stood side-by-side watching the other couple move swiftly in their direction. When they were less than the distance of a football field away, Kim said, 'I believe that woman’s carrying a gun.'
'You know, I think you’re right.'
'Could they be hunting?'
'That’s a shotgun she’s got there. Maybe so.'
'What are they hunting out here?'
'Birds probably. Quail. Yeah, I bet that’s what it is.'
The small blonde with the shotgun was now close enough for Kim to hear her breathless sobbing. A man with a severe limp trailed twenty yards behind.
'She’s crying,' Steve said. 'Something’s wrong.'
The blonde’s footsteps became audible.
Inside of ten feet, she stopped, pumped the twelve gauge, and aimed at Steve.
His eyes went wide, and she blew him in half.
Kim shrieked, then stood frozen, watching her husband try to put back what was falling out of him.
The man with the limp arrived, took the shotgun from the blonde, and pumped it again. Then he stepped forward, trained the barrel on Kim’s chest.
Another cataclysmic
'They’re still alive, Andy. Come on.'
The groans of the young couple were softer and more intimate than the murmurs of lovers. Witnessing someone die is more intensely private than watching them fuck or even masturbate—the ultimate moment of vulnerability.
The newlyweds’ eyes had glazed and they lie motionless when Andy rolled them over onto their backs and discharged into each of them another load of buckshot.
The reports died away across the tidal flat, and there was no sound other than their shirtsleeves flapping in the sea breeze.
# # #
I dropped the shotgun and looked over at Vi. She wasn’t crying. Instead, a sardonic smile spread her wind-
