The Bedlamite Obligation (A Matt Savage Adventure) Chapter 53

[seymoure]

Rabbit Season - - Duck Season 

“You’re Despicable!”
                -D. Duck 

It was a good five steps to the bedroom. There was nothing like a sanctuary there, the walls were a single layer of sheet rock, and the door was a joke. This place was thrown up to sell to students as a place to crash between classes. Nothing permanent was built into the place.

But in there was a pair of guns that could stop even this charging mammoth.

He picked me up by my coat collar and placed me on my feet.

“Now, how can I do this?” he grinned, the only one who thought this might be funny. “I could stop your heart with a punch, but that doesn’t seem to work for good.”

He pushed me backwards. I tried my best to stay on my feet and retain whatever tiny modicum of dignity I might.

“I could blow your head off.”  He weighed the colt revolver in his massive paw and then changed his mind, “But that would just be impersonal.”

Then he backed me up against the wall.

“I wonder how many punches you could take to the head?” he said as he tossed the gun in the corner and raised his hand.

I am not proud of what I did then, but when your life is in the balance, you do what is needed.

I brought my foot right into the goods with everything I had. I knew this might just make him madder, but what did I really have to lose?

Surprisingly it froze him for a second. He didn’t react any other way.

I took the moment to turn and run into my bedroom. I locked the door behind me and rushed to the nightstand.

The guns were not there! What the hell had happened?

I looked around the room.

MacPherson crashed his fist through the wall and looked at me with the kind of look no man ever hopes to see again. Then, I knew, he was going to the door.

I looked around the room and still didn’t see the pistols.

The door knob attempted to be turned, but refused.

Then I remembered and retrieved the gun from the drawer I had placed it in so that I wouldn’t let it be seen by anybody coming in unannounced.

“I’m going to kill you, you little son of a bitch!” he sang like a little girl in the playground.

I couldn’t give him the chance.

He would be behind that door.

I blasted all five shots I had loaded right through the door.

There was no sound.

I went to the door and opened it.

MacPherson’s giant hand grabbed my throat and pulled me out of the room.

He was breathing hard. Something had hit him, but had not finished him.

The air flow to my brain was cut off and I was losing consciousness. Then I heard a set of gunshots.

He dropped me and moved away.

I looked up and saw Hugo standing in the doorway with a smoking gun in his hand. The sound of the gunshots must have brought him down.

But now MacPherson was stumbling toward him, but slowly.

My garbled mind looked in the corner of the room and saw the gun he had dropped there.

I picked up the Colt and emptied it. I hit three shots in the head, two in the throat and have no idea where the last one went.

MacPherson slowly turned around and looked at me. He didn’t seem angry, just confused.

Then he crumpled from the legs up and slowly fell down. He made a gurgling sound for a couple of minutes, and then he was quiet.

I tossed the gun away and dropped onto the couch.

“Somebody call an ambulance for him,” I said, but I didn’t mean it.

© C. Wayne Owens
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