it's like brick.”
He was a sucker, after all. “Ugghh.”I recognized the sound of teenage exasperation. “C'mon.” he ordered me kicking the tools in my direction. I picked them up slowly, gave Rist a nod, and let myself be directed to a hole already started not too far off.
Angus wasn't much of a communicator. "Here," he said, "get to it."
I took up the shovel and made a show of dashing its spade off the crusted earth, accomplishing nothing. Angus whined at me I was doing it wrong, do it right, no not like that, but I was just simple city folk. I'd never chipped away at rock out in Hell's waiting room. In short order, it became clear that he'd have to show me what he wanted.
Angus jammed my gun in his pocket, took the shovel off of me and scooped the few hard bits of dirt I'd managed to loosen. I considered just reaching over and snatching the pistol back, but it was risky; the boy was keeping himself a few strides away, and he'd see me move in his peripheral. I was confident who would win in a struggle, but one shout to Osmond - and his rifle - and things could get ugly fast. Especially with Rist unable to grab cover. No, if I was gonna make a move, I couldn't give this boy any warning.
I was standing there, watching Angus move pebbles around, weighing my options, when he looked up at me. "We'll?!" he demanded, "Dig!" He indicated the pickax.
Oh, Angus. You poor stupid boy. And after Mr. Osmond specifically told you not to let us get the drop on you. I worked the side of the hole furthest from him. It meant he had to move closer to have something to shovel, but it kept it his decision. I tried to be patient, make small talk.
"So, why are we digging again?" I felt nervous energy tickle down the length of my arms, and was grateful for the release of swinging the ax to keep me steady.
"We lookin." Dammit look away!
Sweat began to make the handle slick, and I tried to ease up. I'd need a firm grip. My opportunity might come up fast, and I had to seize that moment. "Looking for what, exactly?"
Angus stopped, leaned on his shovel to address me. "Something big. Something important. We're gonna save the world. Me and Mr. Osmond, we's doing important work out here." Get the hell back to work, you idiot kid! Can't you see all the fresh ground I've broken up for you?! Hurry up and let me do it already! Make the mistake that'll make you dead! "Out here in God's country!"
His voice rose, and I was worried his scuzz bucket friend would hear, but he stopped short of yelling, flashing me teeth stained pink in a ear to ear grin, and started slinging dirt again.
This time I stopped to lean on my tool, consider him. "Uh huh. So what are we actually digging for? What will 'something important' look like?" He'd turn to toss a spadeful away, and I'd grab up my pickax in a backswing, like I was about to hack away at the earth again, so he wouldn't suspect, even if he was paying attention. And I'd set it in his head.
He was fumbling around, trying get a really full load before he slung it. "You'll know it. You see it, and you'll know it." There was this little smile on his face. Good. Wouldn't want you to die unhappy. Wouldn't want to be inhumane.
He lifted, his grip tightened. He turned. The pickax went up over my head.
"It's gonna be bi-"
The words were his last. As he spoke them the pickax was swinging down. He was starting to turn back, maybe even saw me out of the corner of his eye, when the dirt crusted point went into the top if his head. It's edge must've been keener than I thought, or maybe my swing a little wild. The weight of it shifted awkwardly in my hands, bent back and I stooped a little to keep my grip.
I came out of my stoop, and Angus continued his turn toward me, the expression gone from his face. A panic gripped me; I had heard tales in my time of people suffering grievous brain injury, and still remain alive, or still capable of making sound at least. But, for some reason, the thing that really made me heft the ax over my head again, to drop frantically, was the thought of his eyes finding me.
I chopped again, keeping the tool closer to me this time. With the reduced range, the tip sliced a neat, shallow gash through his cheekbone, the wound opening like a red flower. Desperate, not wanting to be the one who made some disfigured simpleton ward of the state, I swung again, this time hitting square in the forehead.
I felt the pickax blade cut through skin, tissue, glide past smooth bone. Angus was unmasked. The boy's face hung off his skull by a flap of skin. Where it used to be - where it should be - was a mass of red shapes, white gleaming wetly that I couldn't recognize anymore, but then I never paid much attention to anatomy.
His eyes were still there, though. The skin gone, they were wide open round orbs in the blood. They were looking directly, pointedly, int mine.
The shovel clanged to the ground. What was left of Angus went down on top of it.
I breathed out. In spite of every other danger that was pressing in, I waited to feel some remorse, some disgust with myself for what I had done. No such sensation came. What we'd seen in the trailer had eliminated the possibility of it.
"Angus!" Osmond's shout brought me back to reality, and, without stopping to see what he was doing, I sprinted flat out for the cover the wood shack would afford me.
I hit the crotch where the building met the ground, and gathered myself up behind it. No shots had pursued me, I thought, just as a chunk of the building exploded next to my head. I scramble further back.
"I'm gonna end your ass!" He was yelling, but I heard a familiar, mechanical sound: his rifle was bolt action. He was pulling another round out of a jangling pocket. It had to be now.
"Get out h-"
I didn't give Osmond a chance to finish. I darted around the corner, throwing the pickax at him as I did. I don't have much experience flinging excavating equipment, but I was just going for a distraction to let me close the distance. It tumbled through the air, end over end, it's blunt side connecting with his shoulder even as the bolt slotted in place at his hands. The next moment I was on him, one hand on the barrel, keeping it pointed away from me, the other in the stock scrabbling for the trigger. We shouted in each others' faces, but the tip of the barrel moved inexorably toward Osmond's face, the rifle pushing vertical between us. I punched forward with a surge of strength I didn't realize I had left, and my fist wrapped around steel struck his Adam's apple. That's when I pushed his hand down with my other, his fingers in the trigger guard.
The top of his head vanished. Or at least was gone from his cranium. I suppose when it sprays over your face it can't really be called vanishing. I untangled myself from him, stepped back. He wobbled for a moment, then collapsed straight down, like a ragdoll, the barrel slotting through the new hole under his chin, forming a grotesque monument, his flesh serving to hold the long gun perpendicular to the earth.
I dug through his pockets, found the keys to liberate Rist. Trudging past the shack, a shock of cold flashed through my chest. Where was Rist? The expanse was in front of me: the desert, turned from dusky orange to rust, encroaching shadows filling up Osmond and Angus's hole with inky black. Angus's remains were ahead and to my left, but my partner's silhouette was absent in the light of the rapidly setting sun.
Panicked, I broke into a jog. Could Osmond have taken him somewhere?
"Calm down, Eddy. I'm sure as shit not going anywhere," came Errol's voice from somewhere indeterminate, but close, in the gloom before me.
I stopped short, my eyes boggling to try and see in the darkness at my feet. "Rist? Where the hell are you?"
The welcome music of Rist's lighter working came out of the shadows, but even with all the grotesqueries that this pit had held, I still wasn't prepared for what its flickering glow had to show me.
At first all I could see was Rist himself, apparently lying full length on the ground, his head resting on an arm casually stretched vertical to his body. The beginnings of a much-needed laugh at his casual repose died before i could give voice to them, however, as realization spread an awed terror through me. In place of the blood-slick ground I'd last seen Rist s
tanding on, the almost-black soil had given way to a vast, bottomless darkness, leaving my partner dangling by his restrained foot and wrist. At first I tried to convince myself that it was only a foxhole, that the shadows that were deepening with each moment simply kept the near sides from view, but then he moved a little, adjusting his grip on the light, and its beams caught the rough red of the rusted metal loops, having gone down into the dirt to reemerge out of the walls of Rist's pit, before extending down into the nothing.
I crawled along to aid him, afraid to tread too heavily along the pit's edge. I hauled on the chain at his arm, wrapping the slack back around the metal loop jutting from the dirt, each move bringing Errol a few inches closer to safety.
"How the hell did you end up like this?" I asked through grunted breaths.
His voice was equally strained. "After you and Angus went off for your little pal around, I started picking more at the dirt. Guess I picked too much, cause it just suddenly gave way beneath me. You wouldn't believe what it took just to get facing up again."
His hands were at the metal loops, above
Dreams: A Trio of Flash Fiction Tales Page 4
