Burn Scars, Eddie Generous [read full novel txt] 📗

Dwayne began shaking, slamming Rusty in the shoulders and chest—grizzly bear trying to open a garbage dumpster. Rusty gagged and wheezed, his world dimming and aching dully, as if it were someone else’s body getting pummeled and falling down Death’s hole.

He tried to beg for air, but the words never made it up his throat. Rusty had given up trying to roll and was only a little ways still conscious, knowing his end had come.

But the violence stopped suddenly. Huffing and gasping great whooping breaths, Dwayne grabbed his chest and the weight left Rusty’s abdomen, letting him fill his lungs like Houdini after springing from the water torture cell. A second gulp of oxygen seemed to awaken his injuries and a long whine escaped him as he brought his knees up and wrapped his hands around them, bending to the side in a fetal pose. Painful coughs erupted and he tasted pennies as he barked for air and his head swam on the influx of life.

“You…won’t…ruin…me!” Dwayne crawled to where Rusty had rolled and began slamming his fists into Rusty, undiscerning of aim or of vital spots, simply letting out the fury that refused to acknowledge any cardiac events.

When he nailed Rusty in a kidney, Rusty jerked forward and instinctively swung a round-housing hook into Dwayne’s face. The connection was wet and solid. Dwayne growled at this and latched meaty hands onto Rusty’s skinny throat, looking to choke all the soul out of the sonofabitching employee who was never all that great and had only kept his job thanks to Cary Watson’s insistence.

Rusty dug at the hairy grip, but the leather gloves kept his fingernails sheathed and Dwayne’s hands safe from any real harm. Deep red began to infringe in the periphery of Rusty’s sight as his lungs and organs fought for air once again.

“I can’t breathe!” Rusty howled, though only a wheeze crept from his lips, and keeping him from breathing was the whole point of Dwayne choking him.

This was different from the encroaching dark of only seconds earlier; this made that feel like a game. Not a pinhole let air in and this time Death was physically upon him, invisibly reaching through Dwayne’s hands.

Pink filled the center of Rusty’s vision then and darkened a hint with each erratic heartbeat. Rusty tried to scream and kick and punch, but he was fading fast, his right hand fell aside and then his left, the maniacal Dwayne Siegenthaler was snorting and slobbering, his face bright purple, a drop of blood and saliva from Dwayne’s lip dropped into Rusty’s strained and bulging right eye. It spread like dye over the bulb before dissipating on the steady flow of tears.

Then something clicked and Rusty fell into an interior zone, he saw Dwayne through the crimson fog, but also saw himself, inside. The calm space just before dying and he thought the fat bastard’s gonna kill me. The fat—

A pop echoed and a wash of blood spurted onto Rusty’s face like a near miss shot from a water gun. Hands came away from his throat and he gasped. The oxygen invaded with too much force and a life-saving spike drove through the meat of his brain by way of his lungs and bloodstream. For one second before blackness bloomed a red ink stain, he recognized that he was maybe going to live.

The world blinked around him, quick as a penny viewer, before it began slowing and growing darker and darker. The last thing he heard before passing out was, “Oh my god.”

Words spoken by Christine, and from very close by.

 19

Blood dripped into a puddle on the cement floor in a slow, but steady run. Rusty blinked at the reflection shot back to him upon the liquid red mirror, hoping the swelling wasn’t as bad as it looked. A hand fell to his shoulder and he flinched, shaking the rest of the way awake. The fight was not over. Dwayne wasn’t through and he’d only imagined a savior with the voice of his girlfriend—sister? He tried to skirt away from the impending punch his muscle memory saw coming, he juked and covered like Tommy Morrison after Ray Mercer beat him senseless, shadowboxing with a ghost, but it wasn’t the eventual will of Death at all.

It was Christine kneeling over him, not Mercer, not Dwayne. The floor was so cold beneath him and the pain in his back so great, he thought Dwayne had stabbed him.

“He got me. Take the knife out!” Rusty spat blood as he yelled. His ribs vibrated and he tried to roll away from the agony, as if it was something that could be left behind.

Christine was rough with him then. “Calm down! There’s nothing!”

“He got me!”

“You’re not cut, but you have to go to the hospital,” Christine whispered as she draped her arms around him and smothered his face with her soft breasts.

Reality filled his head with a spike a lot less pleasant than the oxygen that had knocked him out earlier. This was not over and there was no calling it off. The heist had to happen. He had to load the truck. There were no options otherwise because now he needed this windfall to lift him into a new life, a new world as the other option was a heinous thing he dared not face. “No.”

“Yes.”

“No, got to do this. Don’t matter, everything’s ruined. Got to do this,” Rusty said, his words a mumbled jumble.

“You’re hurt. Bad.”

Rusty closed his eyes and pushed his right arm straight beneath him, testing his weight, buttressing himself into an isosceles and then hypotenuse triangle, before letting the arm fall to his side when he was up on his butt bones, then knees. He leaned forward upon gravity’s demand, the blood flow coming on quickly and pattering at his bent knees, coming from not only his nose,