Short Fiction 3

I kinda like this one :) Sorry its a little longer than usual--just over 1000 words.  Inspired vaguely by The Gunsliger. 

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A new red sun crested on the horizon as the morning’s breeze brought with it a scent of honeysuckle and lavender and rotting flesh. The combination awakened the murderer from a sound sleep, the putrid mixture filling his nostrils with funeral smells. Only briefly. The light of the crimson glow made him grunt in protest and shield his eyes from its power as he rolled onto his side.

Not a murderer by choice, he thought. Not the murdering stalker who creeps in the night to make the kill and steel away in darkness, like in al the books. A murderer by chance. That’s what he was. 

The night had come heavily and suddenly, pulling the blanket of stars above him with hardly a warning from the dying sun to the west, barely shielded by the faintly glowing mountains in the far distance that disappeared into faint black peaks. It was blindness he hadn’t known in years, if the caves from long past were of any comparison to this brutal and scarce lighting. Then he had held the lantern confidently in hand, stepped surely over rock and past the streams, brandishing the hefty knife of his father in the other hand. Now, he was scared, alone, and without weapon; not even his mind could aid him with its increasing insanity. He had traversed the deserts for three weeks without seeing another human being, and scarcely a single animal. Water had run short even before food, and for an entire week he didn’t eat. Heat, exhaustion, starvation…he’d felt it all before, but not like this. Not this evil that accompanied it, not this curse.

He could sense the evil, could even smell it on the wind that scourged his face and arms with burning sand. It was all around him, all around the dying lands through which he had so mistakenly traveled. The occasional drifting scent of flowering plants caught him, but he was unsure now if it was his imagination turning against him now. 

He was sure of his mind’s treachery, and it was all he was certain of. It was a strange thought, both comforting and distressing, to be sure and to be unsure of the same thing. His mind was whirling, spinning, and leaping to the stars as he laughed weakly and wildly, blindly stumbling along some unknown invisible pathway. The whole thing was really quite funny, he thought. Very funny, actually. He couldn’t see his hands. He was invisible, and he loved and loathed it, feared it and revered it. An invisible man, like the movies. A secret agent, sent by the agency to take down their enemy. A hero even. That’s what he was here: a hero.

That was when he saw him.

It was dark, of course. Too dark to tell who or what it was, but his mind was not quite so far gone as to let a living being go entirely unnoticed. He had stopped and stared at the man, also stumbling and groping and groaning with loss. 

A secret agent. Double agent. The enemy. Take down the enemy. 

He grinned. A malicious grin that almost glowed in the nighttime, reflecting the stars and the world and his own insanity within them. 

The other man stopped, feeling his presence. “H…Hello?” he ventured. A feeble voice, trying to make him surrender, to pity him. Well, not this time, my friend. No, not this time, he thought. 

The cry was more a scream, a banshee’s scream that echoed for miles in the desert and the darkness, that filled the Enemy’s ears like piercing spiked notes. The Enemy cried out feebly, mumbled to himself, and fell back with surrendering sobs that shook him. He didn’t see this though. He knew what he really was. He was the Enemy. They’ll reward me at home, he thought. They’ll march me through the gates of the city and pin medals on my chest and we’ll feast and dance for weeks for my work. The Enemy must die. 

“TRICKERY!” he wailed, but the word was indiscernible. A madman’s calling. “INSOLENT BASTARD! STUMBLING GHOST! ENEMY!”

The scuffle was a brutal and bloody one, a one-sided fight between a hungry carnivore and his thin and perishing prey. He clawed the eyes, ripped at limbs, screaming all the while. The Enemy hardly fought back, hardly made a sound. Perhaps he had died long ago and this was only a ghost of that threat. Perhaps he wasn’t there at all. But nonetheless the blood flew and the dull sound and pelting fists in blood-soaked bone and flesh continued for near an hour. The rest was blurred in darkness.

The morning came just as suddenly as the night had, revealing the land and truth and lifting the veil of evil a little above the dead and the living. 

He sat in a daze, wondering at the blood. So much of it. It stank, not just the fresh liquid but also the darkness that seemed to still surround it. Slowly, he forced his new eyes to peer at the body, or at least at what was once its face. Not an Enemy, he thought vaguely. A being. A human. A man. Just as I am. 

The cheek of the face was flipped open to cover one eye, and the entirety of it lay still and red on the ground, bringing the occasional fly to feast. Even in this heat. The body lay apart from the face mostly, just as battered. He thought  he could see the remnants of a rib or two, or perhaps an arm, but it was impossible to tell. 

He felt numbness and nothing else. He held the knife in his hand, wondering how he had caused such damage, as if it were the fault of the blade, but the blade was completely clean. He had killed with only his hands, with only coldness and insanity. 

The knife turned in his hands and lightly scraped the pulsing flesh of his neck.

A murderer. Not by choice. By chance.  Please…

Please forgive me. 

He felt nothing as the blade cut through flesh. He fell and slept, watching the sun rise until it fell into blackness.

In the distance, the honeysuckle grew without consequence and the caravans began to move, wondering at the brutal beast they had heard in the night.