* This is one of the more important and vital turning points in the story of QuixotiQ, and namely its main charechter Guy Kelton... this is when things start getting nasty!
CHAPTER 17
THE CORPSE OF THE BAR MAN lay still with the shotgun over his wobbly belly, a puddle of his own blood forming a perfect circle under his butchered head. Men’s jaws dropped. All were dumbstruck. They all knew that Barry would never have fired. He only uses the shotgun to frighten people, but he never fired and he would have never done - matter of fact, everybody knows he never keeps his weapon loaded – Beery wouldn't kill a man.
No one expected the young stranger to pull a gun and shoot dead poor Barry.
No one spoke a word. And no one moved. They waited for the stranger’s next move; which was to drink up the beer and depart the bar. He walked out, his gun in his hand, just like a cold-blooded murderer. He was indeed, for that moment, exactly that.
#
Having just killed a man for the first time, one would live through a mixture of terrible feelings. Fear is the most hideous of them. One would feel a rush, an urge to keep moving, running, to some safe place. But of course, nowhere would be safe, in a moment and a situation like this. If you killed a man, everything looks to you suspicious. You yourself become inconspicuous. Everything holds some degree of risk and hazard to the killer.
Slowly, you begin to realize that what you have done is something that will be within you for the rest of your life. Like a splinter in your head, you cannot shake it off. You cannot just run away and not get caught and be caught in its hellish webbing of remorse and guilt. This splinter will keep tearing you from within, tearing your brains, your heart, and your soul, driving you crazy.
Guy found a spot near a bunch of trees, off the main road, that he hid in for the night. He didn’t know what to do anymore or what the next day would hold for him. Only a few weeks ago he was a regular guy, working a simple job. Now he is jobless, almost homeless and a murderer. And there is no hope of rectifying all of this. You moan and bitch about your stupid silly life, then when it goes away and is replaced with something more horrible, a living nightmare of some sort, you wish for it to all come back. This is how pitiful human beings are, thought Guy, they pray for a change, they wish for something, and then when it happens, it hits them that they have forgotten what kind of change they had wished and prayed for, good or bad.
He sat in his jalopy and leaned on the seat, pushing it back so he could lie, maybe to have some sleep. The night was silent. There were no sounds of passing cars or late-night trucks. No noises of beasts or midnight creatures of the wilderness. Nothing. Only silence.
It is in situations like this that one would want to convince himself that what has happened was just a dream. That he would wake up from it any minute and find himself out of breath, his heart pounding, relieved that the fear of this being a reality is gone. But Guy knows it is not a dream. It is real. Very real and it is inextricable. He knows because he can remember. He remembers pulling the trigger, and the fat bartender lying dead on the floor murdered and bloodied. Guy just realized that in a dream, one would not remember things. While you are dreaming you can't recall images from your past, whether real or unreal, in a dream there is only present, there is only the moment you are in.
So Guy sat there, mourning himself, weeping like a mother does over the loss of her young child. Reliving the infelicitous moment, and by doing so, bringing more pain and disgust and agony.
Just before dawn broke, Guy felt drowsy. He could not hold his eyes open any more. Reluctantly, he fell asleep.
When he woke up again, so suddenly, he gasped for air. He was shivering although it was not cold. His eyes were burning as though someone had sprinkled peppers on them. All his body was soaked with sweat. His heart was drumming. All these things were signs of an ugly, fearful, monstrous dream.
Although it was difficult for him to recollect the whole dream, Guy knew that it was terrible and that it had something to do with the events of the night before. It always happens, when a person has an overwhelming dream and wakes up in less time that a blink of an eye takes. The mind struggles to reform it, the dream, straight away and as time passes it becomes even harder to remember any of it. Guy has always struggled to simply just let dreams go, always focusing so hard to recreate them in his head, trying to construct them again, hoping that by doing so they would reassure his conscious, that it would help him make sure they were only just dreams and not reality, that he actually has some sort of power and control over them.
His stomach was making funny noises. It was screaming for food. Digesting itself in search for what it thrives for, throbbing and thriving and flipping and flopping. It made perfect harmonic sound with the birds of the early morning. He didn’t have more than two hours sleep. The weather was heavily damp. Guy had to wipe clean his windshield, a thick layer of dew over it. He contemplated his fate, thinking what he should do, but he couldn’t think of anything else than his stomach. That ought to be his first mission for the day. After a couple of twists, the ignition started. Soon after, he was on the road again, in search of someplace that would offer his screaming tummy some consolation
#
Aaron Minster woke up that morning in sheer exhilaration and satisfaction, because lying beside him was the girl of his dreams. He has been fantasizing about it day and night for so long, imagining how it would feel to have her in his arms, to kiss her and caress her and make love to her all through the night, to wake up to her perfect, bright face. It was worth the wait.
Last night was the greatest night of his life, as he made glorious love all night long with this girl; he finally had the night he almost gave up on having, since that fateful night they parted.
He didn’t call her, didn’t break up with her, and didn’t even tell her what was going on. He simply disappeared after that glum night at his apartment, leaving her to find out for herself, to come up with her own conclusions. She herself never tried contacting him. She’s not sure why she didn’t. She’d let him go, blocked her feelings and swallowed her desires.
But when they met near the flower store yesterday, all of that – the turbulences and agonies and mistakes and hurt and pain – vanished without trace, and their true love for each other prevailed. It reigned like a little queen new to the throne. Aaron never saw again the woman he slept with the day he left Christina. He’s been single ever since. He couldn’t ever get Christina out of his mind. She stayed there, deep inside his heart and mind and soul.
Last night they worked things out, they talked about all the things they hated and all the stupid things they have done while apart from each other, and all that they needed to talk about. Christina even told him about her regrettable night with the stranger she met at the bar. She didn’t remember how or why she got drunk; she didn't even remember the stranger's face. That upset Aaron a lot, but he was ready to forget and forgive. He'd made his own mistakes. He was ready to do anything for her and she for him too.
Yesterday, after their fated meeting, Aaron Minister and Christina Heywood had gone to the local hospital in Aaron’s car to visit his sister, who had just had her first baby, a girl. He, Aaron, the 29-year old computer engineer, became an uncle.
His sister, Maryana, was married to one of the hospital’s resident doctors for the past three years. This was their first child. One they have been wanting for a long time, but couldn’t afford to have earlier, for reasons that only they knew.
They named the little baby girl Suzana. She was a beautiful and healthy child and Aaron was a very happy man indeed. He’d wanted to be there for Maryana, to be with her through the birth, but had been delayed a bit, by the rather fortunate, unexpected reunion with Christina. Maryana understood though; she appreciated him being there at all, in the absence of her husband.
Maryana’s husband had been called to an emergency, surgery for an old man with cancer and a bad heart. Of course, the old man died after the 12-hour operation. It was hopeless, his case. Doctor Sam Dumin knew that. But still he, being the hard-working, determined doctor he was, gave it a try, answering his noble duty, even though it deprived him from witnessing the birth of his first child. He did all he could, for that patient, not giving up until the last minute, because that’s the kind of man Doctor Sam Dumin is, the kind that Maryana had wanted to marry.
At the hospital’s maternity section, in a white and blue room, Aaron held his little niece, Suzana, in his caring arms while Christina stood beside him, thinking how beautiful her lover looked with the baby and wondering how their children would look, certainly prettier. She shook off these dreamy thoughts with a smile on her face.
Aaron, still naked in bed, under the white, sex-stenched sheets, stared at Christina’s pretty face, examined her straight nose, her large beautiful eyes, her smooth lips, as he ran the tips of his fingers over her silky soft skin. Her beauty was captivating; he felt his heart melting at that moment as she, with the most graceful of sleepy moves and cutest of yawns, began to wake. When she smiled at him his heart almost flew out of his chest.
“I had a dream,” she told him, her voice angelic and sublime.
“A dream?” he said “Was I in it?”
“Unfortunately!”
“Unfortunately?”
“It wasn’t a very nice dream.”
Aaron lay on his belly beside her and started playing with her long, chestnut hair, “Do you want to tell me what it was?”
“No. Not really,” she told him, even though she knew deep inside that she wanted to.
She liked sharing things, especially with Aaron. She missed having him around, knowing that he's right there beside her, listening to whatever she was going to say and share with him whenever she needed. But right then she had a bad feeling about this, about the dream she’s had. She preferred keeping it to herself, for now at least.
It must have been their lucky day, though, because the weather was perfect. The sun brilliantly shining, spreading its golden rays through the fluffy white clouds. The weather in Okay was getting better and better each day as autumn kicked into full gear, keeping dry and warm with a sweet, cool breeze. It was time for them to get out of bed and get out of town for their usual early morning picnic.
“Been a while since we had one,” said Aaron, as he kissed the forehead of the gorgeous creature in his bed, who was stretching her perfect, naked body, smiling and euphoric.
#
The sun was still making its way up, brightening the world. Little oak trees stood proud, their golden leaves thrown on both sides of the road, which looked to Guy different than the one he had passed on last night. Guy thought for a moment that he was going the wrong way. Things can look astoundingly different in the dark than in the light. They take on a different face.
There is a thin line between darkness and light that confuses a person.
As Guy drove down the road, he grew hungrier and hungrier. He couldn’t recall a time when he was as hungry a man as he was then. Not even when his dad punished him as a little kid and locked him in the basement for countless hours. Yes, his father has been very harsh at times. He’d wanted to raise his kid in a way no one did before. Of course Morris received some blows as well. But Guy had the worst of it. Jay Kelton was a more aggressive father with his younger son, for reasons unknown to Guy to this day. He wished he had had that same thought earlier, so he could have asked his father. Another frustrating twist in his and his father’s relationship.
As Guy, the murderer, spotted a mini-market ahead, he accelerated his speed. A pick-up van was getting closer and closer in front of him as he drove frantically, abiding to the needs of his stomach. The van was going slowly, or so it seemed to Guy, who hesitated before overtaking, slowing down, just to see a brown object being run over by the van and splintering into pink pieces. Guy, in one instinctive reflex, swerved, almost driving off the road and just missing ramming into a street lamp. After passing, Guy’s mind was playing the scene through in slow motion. The brown object was a poor little cat; the pink pieces were its guts. It was a sickening sight, especially for a person who hasn’t slept enough, who is dying of starvation, who had a frightening dream and who has killed a man the night before. Guy thought he was going to be sick, so he pulled over, but though he heaved, there wasn’t anything within his weakened body to be thrown out. The poor cat, thought Guy as he got back on the road, though it probably didn’t know what hit it. Strange for a man to think how a cat felt before it was hit and crushed by a car, feeling sorry for it, yet he hadn’t even thought twice about the boy who was hit by a car and died equally gruesomely. People and animals aren’t so different after all, he thought, as he felt a shiver in the center of his chest. Death. It seemed such an easy and simple thing. It doesn’t take much. To kill and to die. It only takes a car… or a gun. As he was having all these disturbing thoughts about death, image-by-image the inchoate dream he had earlier began to come together.
He was on a beach. The water was blood-red. The sky was orange and the sun was white. Guy was standing alone, only for a moment. A figure of a man appeared some distance ahead of him, lying on the beach, near the bloody water. He was dead. Guy couldn’t see this man’s face. The sea, he realized, was colored by this man’s blood. Then an angelic voice called on Guy, telling him that he had killed that man, that he had murdered him with his bare hands.
Murdered his father.
The voice was his mother’s. Or perhaps it wasn't exactly hers but it represented her. Guy wasn’t sure in the dream. There was static in the hollow air around him. Guy panicked. He screamed “NO!”
When he looked at his hands, he saw blood on them. They were bloody and had little black worms feeding on them. Another scream. The voice, which was supposed to be his mother’s, tells him of the punishment children who kill their father get, to be eaten alive by the black worms of Hell
Then, without warning, the whole place turned black with only a gun floating in the center of it. Guy could feel that it, the gun, was being controlled by someone, or something, he couldn’t identify or see. It was pointed at him now. He didn’t move, or even attempt to.
Then a shot was fired and the bullet came as fast as light towards Guy, stopping suddenly right at his heart, just an inch away. Just then he realized he was completely naked standing there alone in the vast blackness.
The bullet, so ugly and vile, began, at a pace so slow it felt like a thousand years passed, to move towards Guy’s heart, which was already hardly beating. The bullet was wrapped with barbed wire all around it. Its point was filled with little sharp edges. It touched his skin and began to rip its way into him and through his soft skin, very, very, very slowly, making him feel every curved sharp point injecting itself through his fragile flesh. It seemed to last forever. It pained him as nothing else ever did and probably never will. Just as the menacing bullet reached his heart, just when it was making its way through his heart’s tissue, he woke up.
#
The mini-market he found, which was called ‘Jo & Jo’s Store’, had almost everything a road-traveler would require: sandwiches, beer, soft drinks, burgers, fruit, chips, chocolate bars and even dirty magazines. Guy picked something from everything. Besides him, there was only one other young man doing his own shopping. He seemed healthy and affluent from the way he was dressed. What would a man like him be doing in such an area, and at this early time of the day? Guy was curious.
As he approached the counter, he remembered that he did not have any money. He was totally broke. There was no way that he could pay for everything he was planning on buying. But he needed to eat more than anything else now.
He placed his stuff at the counter.
“That’ll be thirteen-forty-five,” said the lady behind the counter, with her strong southern accent, after flipping through his groceries and punching buttons and numbers on the old teller.
“Ehm,” he began, not knowing how to go around it. “I…”
“Yes?”
“Can you... Umm? Can you just put it on the bill... please?” that’s the best he could come up with. He knew he sounded like an idiot.
“What bill?” she asked back, a frown on her face.
He sighed and rubbed his dry forehead.
“Look, I am going through hell here please work with me. Do something good in your life. I will take my stuff and come back later to pay you,” he said nervously, “You see, I lost my wallet.”
Of course he wasn’t going to come back. He knew it, and she also knew it. Right then, he didn't look, or act, like the decent type who would return.
“Well, thankfully I haven’t lost my mind enough to let you do that,” She stared at him and gave him a stubborn look. He glanced to the left and then to the right. He looked up and then turned back at her.
“I’ll be back!' he said, smiling falsely. Without thinking twice, Guy went out to the car and into the market again within seconds. The old lady noticed a change on her customer's face this time.
“Oh, did you find...?” unable to finish her sentence because Guy pulled out his gun and pointed it at her.
“Oh God!” she said in a low, hushed voice. “Oh lord!”
“Now, I am a very, very, very hungry person and I would like very much to have something to eat. And as you can see I am now a bit dangerous too. So stay still.”
The lady froze on the spot. Her lips were wide apart and quivering. She almost wet herself, tears on their way down her cheeks from the corners of her eyes. She was frightened and scared; she thought she was going to have a heart attack. She’d never had a gun pointed at her before.
Guy was busy picking his stuff up off the counter when the well-dressed man popped up behind him.
“Ma’am are you all right?” he asked in a worried tone.
Guy turned to him quickly and pointed the gun at him. Shit. He completely forgot that there was another person inside.
“Take it easy, man. Take it easy.”
“Step back,” ordered Guy, waving his gun at the man. “I'll be gone now.”
“I am afraid I can’t let you do that,”
What’s wrong with this guy? Guy thought. I am just taking some food. No money. Leave me be, he wanted to say. He would have even begged him to let him go. He was getting nervous and edgy, more so with every passing second. A sound drew Guy’s attention to the lady at the counter. As he glanced at her, the man attempted to jump him and take the gun, but Guy turned back at him sooner than he thought and three sharp sounding bullets shot out of the barrel and into the man before anyone could take another breath.
Three in the chest.
He dropped back against a display shelf and fell down to the floor. There was smoke, and then there was a stiff body, and lots of blood.
Guy, in less than half a day, had killed two men.
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