Aim for the Head

As promised, here is my holiday short story.  It begins like this…

He hadn’t thought of himself as anything more than Santa Claus in many years. Since he’d been passed the mantle he’d just enjoyed the magic of the position. He spent three-hundred sixty-four days of the year in his village workshop, with just one night out to deliver toys to all the girls and boys who still believed.

It was a dwindling list of names, but more so this year. Around April the list very nearly cut by half in a single day, and steadily it had fallen until around mid May. After that is dropped in chunks every now and then with one more sharp decline in early October. By December first, when the village usually kicked into overdrive to finish all the toys, there we barely more than a hundred names left, less as he loaded up his sleigh on Christmas Eve.

… you can read the entire thing here.

As his foot crunched in the gravel between the tracks, Edward stopped and waited.  It had been more than six months since he’d seen another living soul, but he’d run into one of them just a few days before.  He kept his weight steady.  His right palm gripped against the stock of the rifle started to sweat.  He eyed the windows of the building, looking for movement.  Nothing moved.

He quickly took two more crunching steps and stopped again.  Edward was tempted to call out, but voices carried and there was no sense alerting anything that hadn’t already heard his footsteps.  Still nothing moved, so he finished crossing the tracks to the cement walkway.

Everything looked clear and dry.  He carefully leaned the rifle against one of the roof supports and slipped off his shoes.  After tying the laces together, he hung them over his shoulder and picked the rifle back up.  He momentarily juggled it from hand to hand, taking the opportunity to dry his palms on his pants.

The light was beginning to fade and he needed to find a room, preferably without windows and a single door he could lock and barricade, before night fell.  Edward approached the nearest door in sock feet, as silent as he could manage.

It was dark inside.  Electricity had first started failing within days after everything went to hell.  Some places, powered by hydroelectric had managed months of power before their mechanisms began to fail.  The last of Edward’s own working batteries had died out weeks ago, and he hadn’t been able to find any more.  Entering the building took several long minutes as he stepped forward into shadow and then waited for his eyes to adjust.  By the time he was a few feet inside, it wasn’t so dark anymore.

Most of the windows had been boarded up on the inside, which meant that someone had secured it at some point.  But the door had been wide open, so unless that someone had retreated to and was holding up in some deeper room, it wasn’t likely that any living person was inside.

Safety was important, but he didn’t have time to check the whole station.  He made his way down the first hallway and found a supply closet.  It wasn’t big, but he could see a small rectangular shape high up on the far wall he guessed was an air vent, and the wire shelves on the left and right would provide good support for barricading the door.  Opposite his closet was a boarded window, and if he needed he could use the shotgun on his back to blast a way out. He stared into the room for a minute, occasionally looking left and right down the hall in either direction.  Edward shifted his weight to his right foot, then patted his left foot on the floor a couple times.

Nothing moved.

He slipped into the closet, turned and very slowly shut the door.  Carefully he knelt down and placed his rifle on the floor, then unslung his pack from his back.  Reaching in with his left hand he quietly rummaged around for a candle and a lighter.  At this point his flash light was little more than a club, but he’d found a box of fifty disposable lighters long ago and had kept them.

Producing a candle and a lighter, he flicked the lighter to life and lit the candle.  On his left was a shelf of cleaning and janitorial supplies.  Quickly his inventoried it in his head, taking note of there was nothing to eat or drink, but there was a bottle of plain Clorox he could use to clean some water later and number of other chemicals.  There were buckets on the bottom shelf he might make use of tomorrow, and in the corner were three mops he could use to bar the door.  He found a stack of paper cups, possibly for a dispenser next to a drinking fountain somewhere in the station, and took one to use as a candle holder, which he did and set it on the same shelf at chest height.

On the right was a shelf of office supplies.  Some pens, a couple pads of paper, a stapler.  Nothing he could really use.

He looked up and saw the dark rectangle on the wall opposite the door had indeed been an air vent.  There wouldn’t be any heat or air conditioning, but it made him feel better about locking himself in a room if it wasn’t air tight.

Edward grabbed up the mops and wedged them into the wire shelves across the door.  It probably wouldn’t hold long if trouble came, but the noise should wake him up.  With that done, he moved his candle down to a lower shelf, moved his rifle into the corner the mops had occupied, and pulled his sawed off shotgun from his pack and placed it on the shelf with the stapler.

He sat on the floor and leaned against the back wall of the closet, then went searching through his pack for something to eat.  Edward came up with a water bottle still half full and one mostly full that represented the last of his clean water.  He also discovered a granola bar at the bottom, which was a surprise since he thought he’d run out last week.  He unwrapped and ate the bar, as well as a small bag of peanuts, and drank the half full bottle of water.

Less hungry than he had been, Edward blew out the candle and settled on the floor curled in a fetal position.  Using a t-shirt from his pack as a pillow, he closed his eyes and tried not to think too much about tomorrow’s trip in to town for supplies.  For now, he was safe in the station. Still he spent a long hour listening for noises in the night before drifting off into a fitful sleep.

One of the guys over at Ofasoft started up a little writing contest. The rules were as follows: Your story must begin with the phrase, “I don’t believe you”. The punctuation and context of this phrase is up to you. It could be a line of dialogue. It could be a message in a strange fortune cookie. It could a personal thought. If you need to sandwich a few words ahead of this, that’s fine. Second, your story must include the phrase “put it down” somewhere near the end. By “near the end,” I mean the last paragraph, or maybe the second to last paragraph. Again, this could be exposition or dialogue. Submissions must be at least 500 words in length, and may be no longer than 3000 words in length. I ended up being the only person to make a submission, even after an extended deadline. So here is my entry:

     ”I don’t believe you,” Mrs. Thornsdale muttered. She shifted in the back of the limousine, trying desperately to find a position that was comfortable, would not ruin her dress, and allowed her to avoid looking at Mason. Her faced continued to move, arching eyebrows and lips mashing together causing the corners of her mouth to pucker, as she tried to formulate her next thoughts in to words.
     ”I always told her she could do better than you,” came finally drifting across from her side of the car.
     Mason was warm. Not uncomfortably hot, but warm in a soothing manner. His black suit was still a bit ruffled, and there was a stain over the right breast that might not ever come out. The knuckles on his left hand were raw and split, still bleeding in places. And he tongued the inside of his lip to see if it was still swelling. His right eye was surrounded in red that in the days to come would surely turn a deep purple. It stung when he blinked, so he tried not to, but that only made his eyes dry which caused him to blink even more.
     His body was finally settling down, the adrenalin being worked out of his system. Whenever he lifted his hands from his knees they trembled. Mrs. Thornsdale was talking again.
     ”I told her you were a thug. And today of all days you had to prove me right. She could have had a husband with some breeding, some taste. But no, she had to fall for a ruffian.”
     He wasn’t a thug, not by a long shot. Harvard educated, he’d built and sold three businesses in his life, each more profitable than the last. The mansion they owned was larger than the Thornsdale Estate and it was only one of four residences they kept. Most days he would have argued all this with his mother-in-law, but not today.
     She was still prattling on about some boy named Dwight who would have made a much finer catch as Mason’s thoughts drifted outside the car, outside the window to the scenery passing by.
     The rows of headstones crept by as the limousine maintained a snail’s pace through the cemetery. Still fast enough that if he locked his eyes in place the names etched into the stones became unreadable. He did this as his thoughts drifted beyond the graveyard and over the last eleven years.
     He snapped back into the car as Mrs. Thornsdale’s narrative caught up to this morning. She turned to face him now, and he kept looking out the window.
     ”And then today, on the day of her funeral, you had to get into a fight.”
     There had been at least nine of them, maybe more. And they were laughing. Mason had overheard what they were saying, and every word of it was true, but it had made him angry anyway. He was sure he had broken at least three noses; one of them had exploded in a jet of blood on to his suit. After he’d taken off his jacket and picked up one of the poles that had held up the guide rope, he was sure he had broken a lot more.
     The rage in him was so hot then that even thoughts of it now began to raise his temperature. He’d wanted to kill all of them, despite the fact they hadn’t said anything that everyone else didn’t already know.
     Mrs. Thornsdale was getting angry herself now. “What exactly were you thinking? What was going through your mind to go on a rampage like that at Allison’s wake?”
     Mason barely heard her as he mentally lingered on the last moment of the brawl. Unconscious, broken and bleeding men lay around the front of the church. He had taken several deep breaths to gain the composure to remember the pole and to force himself to put it down. “They called her a whore,” he said.
     His mother-in-law slowly turned and aimed her gaze out the window on her side of the limousine. She breathed a heavy sigh, and placed her hand atop his, resting on the raw split knuckles, and they traveled the rest of the way to the funeral in silence.

I’m particularly happy with this because I wrote it, and I don’t just mean its an original. I mean, I wrestled with the theme, the limitations of the contest, a bit, and then I just started writing. It poured out, and when I was done, I didn’t revise it. Looking at it now, there are a few things I might change or enhance, and I’ve even considered using this in the context of a much larger story. But for now I’ll just let it stand.