‘All Earth was but one thought
— Lord Byron
and that was Death.’
‘Stop fighting…no, stop at once,’ spoke the guard
with a lazy and careless air
in his tone; almost like a
yawn rather than a
command; sardonic and
neutral, verging on the
brink of indifference.
‘Stop fighting, or I will spray you,’ he continued.
The perpetrator paused
for a moment,
the briefest of moments
that seemed to go on forever;
everything hung
on that moment,
hinging
on the words
of
the guard,
as if he had spoken in an alien and inhuman language.
‘YA GONNA HAF TA SPRAY
ME THEN, BITCH!’ replied the
invalid, every syllable laced with
venom as he returned to the beat
down he was sending towards his
much smaller prey.
‘SO BE IT,’
was all the guard said,
his tone still the same,
yet somehow it was colder, darker, HOLLOW, unhallowed,
undeniably evil
from a time
before
the
gods and demons.
Something had changed,
something in his eyes,
in his swagger,
in the very way
he stood his ground,
though he had not moved an inch
from before,
I felt all of reality shift,
ever so slightly,
into the horrific;
the subtlety of the shift
was
heart-wrenchingly
cosmic,
malicious,
devious,
devoid,
and despicable;
like a thousand needles
piercing into your dying heart,
one by
one by
one.
With the same calm demeanor, the guard reached down and unbottoned his holster, opening the cage of his weapon. Everyone who wasn’t involved in the altercation promptly stepped away with urgent haste, many covered their faces, preparing themselves for the oncoming onslaught overcast cloud of pepper-hell.
Yet before anyone had fully reacted, another shift had occurred: a sinister pulse that came crashing down like a tidal wave of sick and bile,
and disgust and ugliness,
and everything else we hide
away from ourselves.
With an unreal
show of
quickness, the
guard raised and
aimed his weapon: a
fully automatic
submachine gun —
a PP-19 Bizon to be precise.
Where it came from, no one knew for sure, and everyone can attest, it definitely wasn’t there to begin with, in any shape or form.
The poor soul of the aggressive inmate did
not know what hit him. With a simple
squeeze, and I swear to whatever God or
gods there may be, a flash of a twisted
smile, the guard unloaded what felt like a
never-ending stream of leaden thunder;
filling the inmate with so much lead that it
replaced iron
as the primary metal in his
now lifeless body.
One
shot
then
another and another —
sometimes it sounded
like everything doubled,
tripled,
quadrupled,
echoed,
reverbed,
sounds on sounds,
shots on shots,
bullets on bullets;
an unnecessary
barrage
of carnage and gore;
blood,
bone,
flesh, and sinew
all turned
into vicera.
Then as suddenly as it began,
everything dropped silent;
dropped like the inmate’s corpse;
dropped like an uncomfortable topic,
save for the repeated click-click-clicking
noise of the empty gun magazine.
Smoke and sulfur filled the immediate area.
Opposite from where the
guard stood, the
inmate’s remains lay,
riddled with so
many holes that
nothing recognizable remained of the front of his face and chest.
‘I told him I was going to spray,’
the guard began to say,
his voice still
in that disturbingly
NEUTRAL tone,
yet just
below
the
surface
I sensed a
sickening joy
in his words.
His face was blank, but there, on the
corners of his mouth, I could see a
sliver of a smile. Everyone stood like
statues, distraught
from what had just occurred.
The firearm mysteriously
vanished as quickly as it had
appeared.
‘Guess he was expecting mace….‘
FIN
A Place for Stories 