The flash fiction challenge at
terribleminds this week is to feature DEATH in 1000 words. Incredibly
appropriate, I thought, because after the break-in at our house this week, I
felt like ki—ahem. Well. Let’s just say that if I was a different person than I
am, this might have been a flash NONfiction challenge….
“Four-fifteen,
right on time,” Dave teased as we pulled into my driveway. A double-decker
train was nearing the house as I parked the truck; we could already feel it coming.
Two-plus miles of cargo at less than forty miles an hour equaled almost seven
minutes of rumble. Right on time.
We were
sore and tired after another long festival weekend, too old to keep getting
smacked around with cutlasses anymore…but it was always fun. We were Captain
John Weston and the Crew of the Red Herring, with my neighbor Dave as my
trusty Quarter-master and a handful of other ne’er-do-wells for comic relief. Scallywag
fun for the whole family: three shows daily. I buckled my sword-belt, then
pulled on the leather great-coat and hat—easier to wear than carry them. The
jolly roger yard flag rippled in the passing train’s breeze and beyond it I
noticed a moving van next door at the empty house. Had there been a for-sale
sign? Maybe they were renting.
Dave
was fidgety. “Gimme the keys, man, my teeth are floatin’.” I tossed them over
while collecting gear to unload. He must have taken the porch stairs two at
once to get in so quick.
About
the time I noticed the gap on my living-room wall where the plasma screen
should’ve been, I heard Dave upstairs, shouting. And another man, yelling back.
Something crashed. More shouting. I ran for the stairs. There shouldn’t be
anybody else up—
BLAM!!
My
.69cal converted cartridge pistol discharged up there, rattling the house. I’d
left it on the workbench; had I also left a charge in it? “What the fuck!!
Dave?!”
More
breakage. A skinny powder-burned meth-head thundered down the stairs away
from Dave, who was limping, brandishing the pistol like a club. The guy piled
into me, clutching my laptop —my new laptop! —and a bottle of rum. Right
then I was angry enough to use him for every piratical torture method I’d ever known. The roar I let out as I shoved him backward and drew my steel was
no act.
He threw the bottle at me but I deflected it with the blade as he made a break for
the front door. The bottle crashed against the bookcase, filling the room
with a warm spicy vapor. I only had one rum that smelled like that.
“Motherfucker!
That was thirty-year Cuban!”
One of
Dave’s throwing knives whistled past me and caught Tweaker in the calf just as he
reached the door, sending him ass-over-teakettle down the stairs to the parking
lot. My laptop cartwheeled away from him to freedom, only to burst into
shrapnel on the concrete. Fuck.
The
moving van next door suddenly revved and peeled out of the driveway, careening
down the street with the door still up. They hadn’t been moving anything in
at all: they’d been moving me out.
Tweaker
flipped onto his back, pulled a gun out of his pants. The punk-ass held it sideways,
ghetto-style, which pissed me off so much I even stopped caring that he was
holding a gun.
Until
he fired it.
Time
crawled. I felt the slug pass close by my ear; it blew my tricorn off and shattered
the living-room window into a huge spider-web…and then I stopped thinking. Next
thing I knew, I was standing over a deceased Tweaker whose sternum had
sprouted my un-edged cutlass. Dave was behind me on his cell, screaming
panicked obscenities at an emergency dispatcher, and just like that, time resumed
its normal speed…maybe a little faster.
“Jesus,
I killed him! Oh my fucking God, I killed him! Ohshit ohshit….” Blood
was soaking his grimy shirt, pooling red in the fir needles. This wasn’t
an re-enactment and that wasn’t stage blood. I stumbled over to the
bushes and puked.
Police
cruisers showed up fast: lights and sirens. A sheeplike flock of gossiping
neighbors gathered across the street. Weapons drawn, the cops barked commands
and slammed us against the house: took awhile to remove the considerable arsenal
I was wearing but when I produced my ID things calmed down somewhat. They
seemed impressed that I could even move, packing that much weaponry, let alone
sword-fight. Tweaker had stabbed Dave in the knee —not deep, luckily—and hit
him with a lamp. Dave had grabbed the flintlock just to scare him, not
realizing it was loaded, although Tweaker hadn’t really ‘dodged the bullet’.
The gun’s stage-friendly powder charge wasn’t lethal, but it sure would’ve
burned at close range. It could’ve even set the office on fire. Adrenaline made
us jittery as we talked. Meanwhile, officers kept staring at us like they’d
never seen grown men dressed from cocked hats to bucket boots like authentic
Golden Age pirates. Three shows daily.
An
officer followed me around to inventory what was missing. The big-screen?
Gone—but the assholes left the remote, adding insult to injury. Three whole
shelves of CDs, high-end stereo gear, DVR, change jar? All gone. I stared at
the empty entertainment wall: something else had been there.
“The
X-box! Fuck me, they took the X-box…and the games! I was forty-two hours in on
Mass Effect 3! Shit.”
“No
great loss there, Mr. Weston,” the officer smirked, making notes. “Trust me,
you’d have hated the ending anyway. He did you a favor.”
Sometime
that evening they removed the body and let Dave go home. I wandered around in
shock. Didn’t bother mentioning that my hand-blown glass bong and herbs had disappeared,
but I could’ve used a hit just then. My shit was looted, pillaged, plundered.
Bloody pirates!
Eventually
the sergeant said no charges would be filed against us: it was “justifiable
homicide.” They were confident they could recover my stuff, too. Tweaker and
his ring were not the sharpest tools: county lockup was their second home. Their
rap-sheets were long enough to fill a filing cabinet.
“You’d
think when they saw the pirate flag they woulda known better than to try this
house,” he joked. “Looks like self-defense to me…Cap’n.”
