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

late, but that did not matter. “You stupid, scar-faced bugger, that almost hit me.” She re-aimed and charged forward.

Once five feet away, the world disappeared. Rusty and Linda were in a grand emptiness. No money. No warehouse in Andover. No yesterday. No tomorrow. No double cross. No bodies piling up. Rusty and Linda, and the bullet with his name etched into the steel. It was almost perfect. Landon Lawrence tried to kill him once before and here was his gun, finishing the job. Fate was real and he’d always been slated for nothinghood.

Rusty forced himself to look into Linda’s eyes and at the barrel. It would be the last thing he’d do. He’d see the last thing he’d feel.

“Go fuck yourself, Linda,” he said, calmly.

“Maybe later.” Linda made a squeezing face.

The dented and paint flecked front end of Christine’s Tercel zoomed into peripheral view—that beautiful, impossibly quiet bucket of a car. The shot went off the second the bumper connected with Linda’s knee. Nailing a hole in the warehouse roof. She tipped immediately, slamming into the windshield, shattering it before flying way up into the sky. Dollar bills seemed to explode, showering in a geyser of green, and auburn, and purple. The echo of the errant shot sang background vocals to Linda’s surprised gulping sounds.

Rusty followed her movement like he was at a firework display, craning his neck up and then starting down. She was sideways and cartwheeling while airborne, a gymnast doing a floor routine. A howl left her and the world began picking up pace before Rusty. Her arms stretched out like da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man the second before the asphalt rose to meet her and bent her neck, slamming her left ear into her left bicep with a tremendous snap. The rest of her pile-drived down onto her spine and her shapes went all out of wack.

Then it was mostly quiet, the rumble of Cary’s truck and the knowledge that Christine’s car was running somewhere nearby. A high whine left Rusty, like the air let from a spike hole in a tire. In a flash, the rest of the world came back and there was Christine, her car door open, breaking toward Linda.

“Where’s the gun?” she shouted.

The Tercel looked ready for the scrapyard, but somehow, the engine purred on, though much louder than before. The hood had a U-shaped dent. The windshield was only marginally better than the rear window of Cary’s truck—though the shattered and fallen window gave a much clearer view.

Rusty licked his lips. There was a fifty-dollar bill on his lap. He snatched it up and studied the face of the solemn chubster, Lyon Mackenzie King.

“Come on!” Christine screamed, waving the gun.

In the distance, but drawing closer quickly, were police sirens. Of course, shoot enough gunshots in small town Canada, eventually someone, somewhere nearby takes offense.

Rusty crawled, grabbing bills, half of them torn and worthless. The sirens were almost on them, surely within a block’s distance.

“Forget the money!” Christine stamped her right foot like an angry brat.

Forgotten, mostly. Rusty sprinted to the car and swung open the passenger’s door, fell in behind the spider web screen of glass. He slammed the door closed and Christine hit the gas. The front wheels dug divots in the gravel before biting down. Rather than turning and taking the road, she charged the dead end, nailing a curb and catching air. Chunks of glass tumbled onto the dash, but the brunt of the sum held steady.

“Ho-whoa!” Rusty said, bouncing in his seat as the car crested a hill and rolled runaway train down toward a construction zone.

Elements rose before them; a sudden, unplanned obstacle course. Christine skirted most of a gravel pile but not all and they rolled on two wheels. The shocks creaked under the weight. She jerked the wheel against it as a squeak left the back of her throat and Rusty felt his bowels going to water. But the car fell back to all four tires with a metallic crack that came from somewhere deep in the carriage. Immediately she had to pull in the opposite direction around the cement of the foundation of someone’s future home.

“Geez! Ho!” Rusty was rebounding off the door and the center armrest, his hands busy with money, too busy to grab on for life. He’d only saved a little and he didn’t dare lose hold of what he had.

The left side tires rolled onto a lumber pile, clanking the planks like chattery teeth before bouncing down into the soft topsoil. Another curb came at them, but this one fell two feet to the cut but unpaved street below. Christine slammed the brakes and they fishtailed, spinning two revolutions in the hard-packed dirt before facing the same direction they had been headed.

“Holy shit,” Christine said, panting, both feet pressed against the brake pedal.

They sat like that for at least a minute before Rusty reached over and put the car in park. Christine touched the key.

“Better not, might never start again. Probably won’t.”

Christine nodded and let her arm fall.

 24

The engine coughed and sputtered twice before smoothing out again, the air coming through the dash smelled burnt, and tendrils of smoke rose from around the dented hood. The scene out the windshield—where things were visible—was of an uncooked neighborhood where life had yet to come home. A few real estate signs sprouted from mud lawns, though it seemed unlikely that any regular traffic would be visiting the subdivision for a very long time.

Rusty rubbed the bills in his hands. He’d managed to grab $620 of usable cash. The torn partial bills were the bigger focus, they seemed to represent his life, his relationship, his future.

Out there was a world that would forever be beyond Rusty’s grasp. If nothing else had proven inarguable, the collective recent weeks of his life nailed a stake in the ground