Tim McGregor - Killing Down the Roman Line

Puddycombe trembled so hard the tank rattled. “Tell me you have more ammo for that thing.”

Jim wiped the last shell against his shirt, drying it off. He slid it up the breach, landing it into the ammo tube. One pump on the forearm and the round snapped into the chamber.

One round. Make it count.

He looked down at Puddy’s hands. Empty. No gun, not even the tire iron. “Where’s the other rifle?”

“God knows. Hitch had it.”

Hitchens lay in the wet grass, his feet propped on the bottom step. Lit up in the flames of the burning vehicle.

There, next to the body lay the rifle. Out in the open, in full view of the house, the bolt action smack in the middle of no man’s land. It may as well have been on the moon.

“We have to get it.”

“Screw that,” Puddycombe said. “We need to get the hell out of here.” He flipped onto his belly and crawled away, keeping the tank between himself and the house.

The shotgun roared. Buckshot rippling the grass before his hands, Puddycombe scuttled back to safety. “Oh Jesus.”

Jim cast his eyes into the dark, seeing nothing. “Where’s Kyle?”

“No idea. Probably dead.”

“Kyle!” Jim hollered the name over and over. No answer came. Was he expecting one? The man never spoke.

Puddycombe snatched him by the arm. “Quiet. Do you hear that?”

Jim cocked his ears. A cold vacuum. “I don’t hear anything.”

Then he heard it. Corrigan’s voice calling from the darkness. Calling out Jim’s name.

He edged an eye past the corner of the tank, seeing only a bit of the house. Didn’t dare stick his neck out any further. “Where is he?”

The pub owner listened, trying to triangulate the voice in the dark. “I can’t tell.”

“Jimmy!” Corrigan’s voice bellowed again. “Throw out your weapon and we’ll talk!”

Jim felt his balls shrivel. They were trapped and Corrigan knew it. How fucking stupid were they? Was he? They had walked right into this mess. He had led them all into this.

Puddy was shivering. “We gotta make a run for the truck. There’s no other way.”

Corrigan kept calling to them, his voice anywhere and everywhere. “Put down your arms,” he hollered. “Let’s talk about this like civilized men!”

Jim felt his legs cramp up from squatting so long. He shifted positions, working the blood back into them. It only made the stinging in his calf worse. The shredded leg of his jeans was black with blood and clinging to the skin.

Their position was beyond bad, pinned down behind a rusting tank. Waiting to be picked off.

Their position! Listen to him. Jesus! Clichés from a hundred movies rattling around his brain. Whatever. Use it. What did soldiers do when they pinned down like this? They used a distraction to cover their run. Lobbed a grenade and ran for higher ground when the thing exploded.

They had no grenade. He looked at Puddycombe, shivering and close to tears. They weren’t soldiers. Just two soft, middle-aged morons who deserved to die for being so fucking stupid.

Puddy nudged his ribs. “Jim. The Molotov.”

The wick was still burning but the bottle lay out of reach. Ten, twelve paces away, near the useless bolt action. There was no way he could make it in time. Run out into no man’s land, hurl the bottle at the house? How long had it been burning? It would blow up in his hand.

“Come out, Jim!”

The voice was closer this time. For all he could tell, Corrigan was on the other side of the oil tank. “Come out, Jimmy, and I’ll reserve some clemency for you! I know your heart wasn’t in this! You were led astray by the petty bastards of this town!”

Jim couldn’t help himself. “Go to hell!”

Puddycombe snatched Jim by the collar and shook him. “Shut up. You’ll lead him straight here.”

He pushed him away and stared at the burning bottle. He could make it.

It’s not that far.

Do it.

When Corrigan sounded again, the voice rang from somewhere else. “Didn’t go as planned, did it? You cocksuckers come for the kill but this time the Corrigans were ready for you!”

Puddy gave up. Gurgling up dry sobs and a web of drool blowing down his lips. “Oh Jesus. What have we done?”

Corrigan kept calling from the darkness. Come out! I’ll show mercy! Jim listened to his name echoing in the night and in a flash, it all clicked together. Puddy’s question and Corrigan’s bellowing. What had they done?

“We walked right into this—”

Puddycombe wiped a fist under his nose. “What?”

“He planned it this way.” Jim felt his heart banging off his ribs. “We walked in here with guns and he kills us in self-defence. He’ll get away with it too.” Jim felt his guts empty out. Outsmarted and played for a fool. Local bumpkins go after city slicker, wind up dead in gun battle.

Puddycombe saw it, as clear as Jim now. His jaw worked up and down stupidly and he was blubbering all over again. Sobbing for what they had become.

Dead men.

EMMA MADE TEA. She didn’t know what else to do. Trouble reared up, you put the kettle on. It was how her mother handled a crisis, her grandmother too. Cancer, war, plagues of locusts? Make the tea and then we’ll deal with it.

Her lip was still swollen and hot to the touch. The ice had done nothing to get the swelling down and the thought of anything hot touching it made her wince. She pushed the tea aside and reached into the hutch, pulling down her dad’s response to crises. She poured a lethal dose into a rock glass and knocked the bar off the first finger. It burned, just not the way tea does.

Make it hurt.

Of all the bloody-minded things to say. Her last words to Jim flinging back at her like an angry boomerang. She’d meant it in the moment, pure revenge in her heart, but that moment was over. She had sobered up in the stillness after he left. Those stupid words tumbling through her head. The implications of it. Consequences.

Corrigan was armed too. The gun on the mantle. She’d spotted it there when he tore at her clothes and clawed her skin. If she could have gotten her hands on it, she would have shot him dead herself. But that’s not what had happened. When it was over, she had simply pulled her clothes back into place and walked out the door without even looking at the rifle. It mocked her from its perch, just out of reach.

She had sent her husband off to a gunfight. Given her blessing to blind revenge against a dangerous man. A violent ex-con and killer by his own admission.

Make it hurt .

She killed the glass and poured again and her eyes latched on the phone in the hall. She scooped it up and dialled his cell. She would tell him to forget what she’d said and come home and everything would be all right. It rang and rang without an answer.

The linoleum creaked. Travis stood in the doorway. His face a drawn disc of white.

Emma put the phone down. “You okay?”

“I heard something,” he said. “I think it was a gunshot.”

“Are you sure?” An instinctive response to allay her child’s fear, assure him that everything was okay. A lie she’d told at least once a day since Travis was two years old. “I’m sure it’s nothing. Just a tree branch falling off. Something.”

As if angry at the dismissal, gunfire cracked through the still air. Bang, bang, bang. All of it downwind from the old house down the road.

Emma’s hand shot to her mouth, bumping the tender lip. Gunfire, without a doubt. Travis sprinted to the door, flung back the lock and ran outside. She barked at him to get back inside and rushed after him.

“Something’s on fire over there,” he shouted.