by John Moralee
Roberto stepped out of the room while Gregorius was occupied. He closed the double doors and bolted them.
Sweat and blood dripped off him.
“What are you doing?” It was Gregorius. “Roberto? Open the door.”
“No,” he stammered.
“No? What’s this? A rebellion?”
“I’m going to destroy you.”
The priest laughed. “And how are you going to do that?”
“You’ll see.”
A noise like a bull charging a fence rocked the doors. They held. It happened again. They wobbled but held. Even a vampire could not ram a heavy door and feel nothing.
Roberto stumbled outside. He grabbed a garden hose and hurried to the kitchen where he cut it into lengths. Then he went to the line of cars parked down the hill and removed petrol caps, pushing pieces of the hose in each. He sucked the hoses until petrol flowed, spitting out the vile liquid caught in his mouth. He could hear Gregorius tearing up the dining room, the shouts echoing off the hills. Simultaneously, Roberto siphoned petrol into five cans that he normally kept in the garage. With the cans full, he returned to his home.
He sloshed the petrol into every room. He turned on the gas ovens and opened their doors. Coughing, he walked up to the dining room, emptying the final can under the doors. The wood was heavily splintered. In a few minutes Gregorius would be free. Roberto could not let that happen.
When Roberto took out his gold lighter a small hole appeared in the left door. Gregorius had scratched a hole. Roberto could see a green eye looking through, suddenly widening as it saw what he was doing.
“Let me free,” Gregorius said, “and I promise to give you the gift. No deals. You can be one of us. You have proved yourself!”
Roberto shook his head. “I’ll never be one of you.”
“You don’t want to burn me,” Gregorius said. There was fear in his voice.
“No,” Roberto said. “I want to burn myself.”
The lighter snap-clicked alive. Its yellow flame licked the inflammable air.
Petrol, gas, heat and oxygen united, filling the night sky with an orange fireball that could be seen for miles.
Stalk
An inch over seven feet tall, Jim Mulloney sat awkwardly on the bar stool with his feet set squarely on the floor. He was the last guy in the bar that night. He raised the shot glass to his mouth and tossed back the Jack Daniels, enjoying the pain as the fiery liquid burned as it went down his throat. Jim had lost count of the number of drinks. He stood on numb legs and let the bar swirl.
Jed Stevens closed the till and looked at him with concern. “Stalk, you okay?”
Stalk. His fists tightened and the old rage grew, stirred by the alcohol into something bad. He held the anger in check as he looked at Jed. “The name’s Mulloney. Jim Mull-o-ney. My name’s not Stalk. Never has been, never will be.”
“Okay, I’m sorry. It’s just that everyone calls you -”
“Everyone’s wrong,” Jim said. He could feel himself losing his temper. “Now give me another for the road.”
“You’ve had enough already, St- Jim.” Jed flashed his digital wristwatch. The glowing red digits were blurred. “Anyway, I closed ten minutes ago.”
“So, open up again.”
“No way, man.”
“Okay, you won’t serve me I can always drink some place else.” Jim stumbled past the pool tables and through the neon-lit exit - out into the cool air of the parking lot. It was late, so late it was light. Dawn made the Texas desert a sad orange. Jim cast a giant shadow as he walked to his pickup and pulled the keys from his Sam Browne belt. Which key opened the door? He tried them all - one after the other - finding it hard to hit the lock. His coordination was all over the place. Finally, he slid the right one in and twisted, hearing a satisfying thunk. As he opened the door, he felt triumphant.
A crunch on the gravel behind him spun him around. He saw Jed was locking up the bar. Jed shook his head. “Hey, Jim!”
“What?” he slurred.
“Wait up, man. You can’t drive with so many drinks in you. I’ll drive you home.”
Jim considered the offer. Maybe he would get a ride. Maybe. And maybe pigs would fly. He wasn’t that drunk he couldn’t drive. “Why should I?”
“You’re coming with me,” Jed said. “Or do I call the cops? Well, Stalk?”
Hearing the nickname again, Jim climbed in his pickup and slammed the door. He started the engine and revved it hard, ignoring Jed knocking on the side window, hollering like a madman. Jim drove off at speed, tyres kicking up dust. I am not Stalk, he thought. I am not Stalk.
Swerving in a wide U-turn over the brush, Jim steered the pickup onto the road going south. The desert road was empty and featureless. He accelerated with a vengeance. To hell with the law! He was the law. Looking in the rear-view mirror, Jim saw Jed shaking his head and pointing at him, his mouth a big O.
He’s crazy, Stalk thought.
He hit the juggernaut dead centre.
*
“... just a concussion?”
“Man left the door unlocked, got thrown clear. Musta rolled a hundred feet. Typical Stalk - trashes two vehicles, don’t get a broken fingernail.”
“Hell.”
“Dude found him wandering in the dunes. Farm-boy don’t know when to die, that’s his trouble.”
“Goddamn you, Stalk.”
“Looks like he’s waking up.”
Jim opened his eyes, blinking his gummy eyelids until they stayed open. He was in a hospital room that smelled of bleach. Flowers from well-wishers stood on the dresser with cards and a water jug. Two guys were standing near the bed - one white, one black. Jim knew them from somewhere - but he couldn’t place them. Two guys with shaved heads and mean stares - both grinning, both wearing blue denim overalls, the same kind the Stanton prisoners used when in a road crew. Jim sat up. His head throbbed. “Who are you?”
The white guy stepped closer, smelling of roasted pork. “You don’t recognise us, Stalk?”
“Man’s dumb, Wayne.”
Jim stiffened. He knew that name. Three years ago. “Wayne Dolbey? You can’t be him.”
“I’m visiting an old fiend,” Dolbey said. “We figured you’d appreciate a little company.”
“You shouldn’t be here.”
“That’s ingratitude for you. Why we’ve come such a long way to see you, Stalk. Ain’t that right?”
The black man laughed. “Hell and back, man. Hell and back.”
Jim watched Dolbey casually adjust the get-well cards and pick up a rose, sniff it and sneeze. “Hey, Stalk, these gone off? Smell like rotten flesh. Don’t these smell like rotten flesh, Bob?”
The black man sniffed them. “Never smelled no rotten flesh, but I guess so. What you say, Stalk? They smell like rotten flesh?”
Now he could smell it. It made him feel sick. “I know you, don’t I?”
“Man’s quick for a farm-boy.” Bob dropped the rose and squashed it into the floor, grinding it under his shoe. “Real quick.”
“You served time in Stanton?”
“Yeah, sure did. I got out the hard way, like Wayne here. Name’s Bobby Franklin. Remember me now?”
Jim remembered, putting the facts together and getting 2+2=5. It had to be the concussion. This had to be a nightmare. But the two visitors looked so real. “You can’t be Dolbey and Franklin. They’re dead.”
“We sure are,” Dolbey said. “We’re dead, dead, dead.”
“We’ve been waiting for a long time to see you again, Stalk,” Franklin added. “Now’s payback time.”
The two dead man grinned and approached the bed with gleaming shivs in their hands. The blades looked sharp and deadly. Dolbey slashed a line across Jim’s cheek that made him cry out in pain.
*
Jim woke – alone and hurting all over. Sweat clung to the bedsheets. He remembered Dolbey and Franklin as if they had been real. He tried to shrug the memory away, but unlike a dream it was
clear and solid. He knew it was impossible. He must have dreamt it. He raised his head and swung his feet to the ground, then he saw the squashed rose.
Instantly, he felt as if they were watching over his shoulder. He turned - but he saw no one. The feeling persisted. Maybe the doctors shot me full of mind-altering painkillers. Maybe a visitor dropped the rose? He didn’t believe himself. He was picking up the rose when Sheriff Hammond entered the room. The man was over six-feet tall, but he looked small to Jim. “You feeling better, Jim?”
“Possibly.” Jim poured himself a glass of water. It tasted good. “What happened?”
Hammond recounted what Jim had heard already from the dead men – that he’d totalled his car and the juggernaut without getting a scratch. Jim wondered if maybe he had heard the medical staff talking and dreamt the rest. But the rose?
“Jim, are you listening to me?”
“Yeah, I was just thinking.” He found some of his clothes in the dresser and sat on the bed, pulling on jeans.
“I said you’re lucky the trucker survived, Jim. He’s in traction with a coupla broken bones.”
“Have I been charged?”
“No, and you won’t.”
“Why not?”
Hammond pulled up a chair and sat down, his voice becoming a whisper. “I found a quarter pound of marijuana on the guy. So, I had a talk with him. He took responsibility for the crash … and I kinda let the drug charge go. A favour to you.”
“But -”
“But nothing, Jim. I know you’d been drinking, but I like you. You’ve got guts. Anyone who does what you do needs to let off steam once in a while. I understand. Next time you get drunk, take a ride home, okay?”
“I’ll think about it.”
“You got to cut down the drinking, buddy.”
“Why? Got nothing better to do with my time.”
“It’ll kill you – or other people.”
Jim walked to the window. His reflection had swollen black eyes and a thick bandage covering its forehead. It also had a cut cheek. Somehow detached from his body, Jim watched the reflection nod. He watched Hammond leave. He was still looking outside when he heard the door open. He saw Dolbey and Franklin reflected in the glass. Their faces were cadaverous. They brought with them the overpowering stench of death.
“Payback time,” Franklin sneered.
He had the shiv raised to stab Jim in the back.
“No! You’re not killing me!”
Stalk ducked and spun around ready to fight.
There was someone in his room.
But it was just a nurse.
She looked terrified of him.
*
A week later Jim sat in his darkened trailer watching baseball with a six-pack between his legs and a shotgun on his lap. The can of Budweiser looked tiny in his fist. He crushed the empty can flat and tossed it on a pile in a corner. His nerves were wired to the creaks of the floor and walls. He was half-expecting Dolbey or Franklin to jump out from behind the sofa. For a week he’d been unable to sleep more than an hour a day and that was a fitful, useless sleep. He could not shake the feeling that the two dead men were watching him and waiting for a moment to kill him.
Alone, he had time to think about the past, his mistakes, and his nickname.
Jim remembered living on a farm in Iowa surrounded by miles and miles of flat and endless wheat fields. He remembered playing hide-and-seek in the wheat. He remembered being so gangly at the age of eight he had to crouch under the wheat stalks. When he had been “it” he merely stood his full height to see the other kids hiding. They had called him Stalk first as a joke, then, later, it became a term of abuse.
As a kid Jim had got into many fights that he never started, but he always won them, which made everyone afraid of him. The other boys hated him until the hate grew like a tornado into something too big to handle. One day six boys attacked him with baseball bats. He was beaten badly – but somehow he won. One boy gained a cracked a skull and reported the incident - suitably embellished - to the police. Jim had been sent to Juvie Hall. There the mental and physical tortures grew because suddenly he wasn’t the biggest of them all. The older teenagers bullied him every day. He had come out of Juvie Hall aged fourteen angrier than ever, his eyes cold as steel, vowing that he would never let anyone beat him again. He could not communicate how much he felt betrayed by the system, so there and then he had decided to change the system from within. In his naive youth, he had thought it would be so easy.
He had left Iowa get away and to start over as someone else – but someone of his size frightened most people. He ended up becoming a prison guard hoping to help a few men turn their lives around. Things went fine for a few years and he at last felt as if he was doing something useful. But his nickname travelled with him.
Stalk.
Everyone hated Stalk.
Gradually, his career direction was forced upon him by the perceptions of others. He was moved to Death Row, where his presence was like a tranquilliser to the inmates. The Death Row prisoners moaned his nickname in their sleep.
“Stalk … Stalk … Stalk ...”
Even the other prison staff called him Stalk when they thought he wasn’t listening with fearful reverence. And when he was given the duty of executioner, he accepted it as just another chore, like sweeping the floor.
Jim had tried not to think of it as an act of murder, of extinguishing life.
He had tried not to think of it at all.
But - in the week since his accident - he had thought about it often. He thought about Dolbey and Franklin dying in the chair. Had he really pressed the switch? Or were they alive? He had never wondered, even once, what happened to their bodies after the chair. So, after his accident, he’d checked out what had happened to their bodies. Both had been cremated on the requests of their families. There was no evidence one way or the other. Maybe they faked it ...
Someone rattled the door handle bringing him out his memories and back into the grim reality of his trailer.
Jim raised the shotgun. “Who’s there?”
“Jerry Goldman.”
Jim staggered to the door and unlocked it. The governor stood on the steps, hesitant to enter the trailer, which smelled of sweat, beer and stale foetid air. His sharp suit looked odd surrounded by the bleak trailer park. Trying not to look disgusted, he invited himself in and sat down, after clearing space. Jim realised the place reeked of booze and left-over meals.
“Sorry about the mess, sir.”
“That’s okay, Mulloney. I heard you’re having ... difficulties.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’ve been seeing a psychiatrist.”
“She’s says I’m getting better.” He had not told Dr Jansung about Dolbey and Franklin - just that he had been having nightmares, seeing things. He’d missed his last appointment because he found it too hard to talk about himself.
The governor looked uneasily round the room - at the plates stacked high, at the dirty clothes hanging from the open fridge. “How’s things with your wife and all?”
“She’s at her mother’s,” Jim lied. She’d left a year ago because she could not stand his drunkenness. Good to see the governor kept current.
“Good, good. The boys will be glad to see you.”
“Sir?”
“We need you back at work.”
“Why, sir?”
“For Carson.”
*
Jim drove his new pick-up through the prison gates and parked in the usual space. He did it as a routine, his brain in neutral. He got out and looked up at the guard towers. The guards were standing like statues, rifles slung casually. He was walking towards the main building when one called out.
“Stalk! You better watch your back!”
He turned around, angry. Squinting into the sun, he could see a black guard waving.
It was Franklin. Franklin grinned and pointed his rifle. Aiming. “I said payback time, Stalk!”
Jim ran for co
ver as Franklin fired bullets at his feet. He reached the building breathing hard, blood pounding, sweating profusely. He could hear Franklin laughing, laughing, laughing. He peered outside, but he saw nothing out of place. There were no bullet marks on the hard ground.
No Franklin - just an ordinary guard.
The guy was looking at him like he was insane.
*
The doors slid open and closed behind him. Passing three security doors, Jim entered a part of the prison most staff dreaded: Death Row. Jim felt there was always a feeling on Death Row of something about to happen. With a date on a man’s death, thinking night and day, day and night, about death and nothing but death, made them focused in a way a free man never experienced, never wanted to experience.
A lot of them found religion. A lot of them found razor blades, glass shards, make-shift nooses. Jim had to keep a constant vigil to stop them dying before their execution date. Now he walked the aisle, his boots ringing on the metal floor, thinking about Dolbey and Franklin.
“Stalk?”
Jim stopped, feeling eyes on him. Behind him, in the cell, Steve Carson raised himself off the bed and walked to the bars, hands gripping the cold metal, shaking them, knuckles white. The man had been convicted of raping and murdering his wife and three daughters, but he looked like a harmless accountant.
“Stalk, I don’t want to die.”
“There’s nothing I can do,” Jim said.
“But I’m sorry ... I loved my family ... I didn’t know what I was doing!”
Jim had to walk away with a foul taste in his mouth as bile reached up his throat, hot and burning. He could hear Carson calling out for mercy, screaming at him. Other men joined him - some shouting they were innocent, innocent!
