• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Holding hands now, they continued on toward the dunes. But they hadn’t gone ten steps when distant shouting sounded across the flat.

Kim stopped and looked back.

One of those figures was waving at them.

"I think they want us to wait for them," she said.

Kim and Steve stood side-by-side watching the other couple move swiftly in their direction. When they were less than the distance of a football field away, Kim said, "I believe that woman’s carrying a gun."

"You know, I think you’re right."

"Could they be hunting?"

"That’s a shotgun she’s got there. Maybe so."

"What are they hunting out here?"

"Birds probably. Quail. Yeah, I bet that’s what it is."

The small blonde with the shotgun was now close enough for Kim to hear her breathless sobbing. A man with a severe limp trailed twenty yards behind.

"She’s crying," Steve said. "Something’s wrong."

The blonde’s footsteps became audible.

Inside of ten feet, she stopped, pumped the twelve gauge, and aimed at Steve.

His eyes went wide, and she blew him in half.

Kim shrieked, then stood frozen, watching her husband try to put back what was falling out of him.

The man with the limp arrived, took the shotgun from the blonde, and pumped it again. Then he stepped forward, trained the barrel on Kim’s chest.

Another cataclysmic boom, and she was flung back into the sand.

"They’re still alive, Andy. Come on."

The groans of the young couple were softer and more intimate than the murmurs of lovers. Witnessing someone die is more intensely private than watching them fuck or even masturbate—the ultimate moment of vulnerability.

The newlyweds’ eyes had glazed and they lie motionless when Andy rolled them over onto their backs and discharged into each of them another load of buckshot.

The reports died away across the tidal flat, and there was no sound other than their shirtsleeves flapping in the sea breeze.

# # #

I dropped the shotgun and looked over at Vi. She wasn’t crying. Instead, a sardonic smile spread her wind-burnt cheeks. She tilted back her head and let loose a hideous bellow.

"He’s right, Andy. Rufus is right. That," she pointed toward the slaughter, "is fucking meaningless! Isn’t it? Is that a fucking illusion?"

She sat down in the sand, laid her head on her knees, and wept.

"Vi," I said. "Vi, look at me." She refused. "You saved your son’s life. That’s all you did."

"And I took his."

"Yeah, and what was the alternative?"

"There was none."

"Ex—"

"That’s what’s so fucking wrong with this. There isn’t any alternative."

She stood up, wiped her swollen eyes.

"I protected mine," she said. "That’s all I did today."

"What else can you do?"

"I don’t know. Here come the monsters."

Rufus and Luther strolled toward us across the flat.

Vi picked up the gun, said, "Toss me two shells."

"You wanna get shot?"

Her eyes burning, she took the shotgun by the barrel and slung it. Then she came over, stood beside me.

"Tell Rufus what he wants to hear," I said, watching the old man and his son approach.

"What do you mean?"

"That value-breaking, good and evil bullshit."

"How are you so calm?" she asked.

"I just don’t feel anything."

She cried out suddenly, "Oh God!" and sank down on her knees into the sand.

# # #

The living carried the dead across the tidal flat. Thirty miles west, over the mainland, the sound country of North Carolina, thunderheads were assembling. Heat radiated off the sun-baked flat, thick and wet, updrafts from hell. When it rained here, the ground would steam, but that stormy relief was hours away if it came at all.

The smallest of the living fell and the body she bore crushed down on her. She screamed. There was hearty laughter. Then, lifting the body off of her, they all moved on again.

# # #

Vi and I sat across from one another as the boat traversed the inlet, the island of Ocracoke growing wider and more distinct, Portsmouth fading into a blurred-green suggestion of land in our wake.

The young couple lie sprawled across the deck at our feet, their skin beginning to assume a plastic, yellow pallor.