“Ironic, isn’t it?”
“What’s that?” My nicely repaired body registers pain in a way I haven’t experienced since I broke my back. It focuses me: Dave isn’t here to help me; Daniel’s voice is telling me If you are gravely threatened, leave the body before it gets damaged. But not yet. Hunter wants to gloat; he wants to tell his clever story.
“Ironic that we can have a nice conversation while you bleed out, just like you had with Jason.”
“Yes, we should break out some cognac and have a toast to irony.” I’m feeling light-headed. Like Jason’s, my blood is seeping between my fingers as I hold my hand over the wound.
“When I called Jason and told him the bad news, he begged me to hold off on releasing the report. He wanted to use new money to drill more and show that the mine was feasible.”
“So why kill the geologists?”
“The other brother, Mark, wouldn’t cooperate. They argued and Mark was going to report what he knew to Jason and Mickey. When he died, James got cold feet and started threatening to talk, so we had to take care of that too.”
I wish I had Jason Hamel’s faith. The man had devoted his life to an idea I could never understand, but when his last moment came he was ready. I’m not.
“And the kid? Why did he do your dirty work?”
“His father talked Jesus at him until he wanted to pull the wings off flies. I taught him how to have fun. And his father gave him a few hundred here and there to do errands for him. I offered him ten thousand bucks to get me the reports by any means possible.”
“Well, like you said, he sounds like a bit of a loose cannon.” My voice is a pathetic croak. Fucking Dave.
“Yes he was.”
“What do you mean, ‘was’?”
“We’ve got a site manager down in Ensenada. He checks the mine property once every couple of weeks. He’s got friends in the local police department, and boy did he have a story to tell. Dead bodies, explosions, and one crazy meth head jabbering about a guy looking for his daughter. But no Jason or Luke. Anyway, there’s a loose end I’m guessing you tied up for me.”
“And I’m your final loose end.” I’m losing interest in this narcissist and his smug attitude.
“Not anymore.” Hunter aims the gun at my forehead and starts to pull the trigger. I leave the body and rise into the night sky until Jason Hamel’s house and yard are the size of a page in a book, and I watch pictures moving on the page as Alan Hunter’s silenced gun twitches three times and my head snaps back and bounces forward as the bullets strike it. I rise farther until something seems ready to snap and I stop. Daniel’s voice chimes in my head: Commune with your spirit. Ha! What else is there?
A miniature Alan Hunter far below me goes through my pockets, presumably looking for the geologist’s reports. He pushes my body out of the way and begins to pull the remaining cases of gold out of the ground. There’s movement from the other side of the house and I see Dave staggering up the path, his gun drawn. He nears the house and moves around it carefully until he is around the corner of the garage from where Hunter is scrounging in the hole.
Dave rounds the corner, gun pointing ahead of him. He stops. Hunter looks up. Do they exchange words? I don’t know. Hunter’s gun comes up, but not fast enough, and Dave fires. Hunter crumples into the hole that I had dug for him and Dave stands hunched over him, shoulders sagging, his gun at his side.
I hover, barely tethered. A shape approaches, an absence of light against the black sky, a triangle of darkness twice my size. I want to flee at top roaming speed, whatever that is, but once again I’m paralyzed. We’re ten feet apart, drifting slightly toward each other; dread gives way to surrender and, like Jason Hamel, I am at last free of all resistance.
The shape seems to undulate slightly, a ripple that starts at its center and moves like a wave to its tips, and then it dives with astonishing speed. I follow more slowly and watch as it floats several feet over my body and then, with another ripple, moves to Tanya and descends and twitches in a voracious frenzy, like a shark feeding. It repeats its rape on Alan Hunter and ascends, blue streaks of electricity sparking in its darkness like lightning in a storm cloud. It ignores me and recedes into the sky. The roaring sound begins and grows until it engulfs me.
Time and space compress. In a vision from the sky, my silver strand to the world frayed and spider-web thin, I see thousands of junkies, hovering over the planet, superimposed as a second vision, looking down, lusting for another second chance at life.
. . . The End . . .
About the Author
Earl Javorsky is the black sheep of his family of artistic high achievers.
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