Moral Zero (30 page)

They swarmed over a lump
that hung from the porch, dangling in front of the doorway as though some offering or tribal wind-chime. As he stepped closer, suddenly feeling icy inside, the thing before him appeared for an instant almost like a bees nest, even though the flies were not bees and no bees had been seen ever in his lifetime. The noise was like static in his head and yet as he stepped further still this seemed to fade out, as though the flies had some sense of propriety and drew back to let him in and it was as though a great hush fell across the land even though this was not so.

He felt his heart slow and the only sound was its beat throbbing cold blood inside him. He stumbled and fell to his knees in front of that which hung before him as some gr
isly spectre welcoming him home or shepherding him away.

He touched the hair of the cat with his fingers and touched the stiff body
but it did not feel real. His head was bowed and he did not look up, but on his knees sprung patches darker than the material around them and they were not blood.

He took his hat off and
held it in his hands and to any onlooker his face was something deformed, full of parts that were trying to tear themselves away from the world.

The door of his home was lying flat and the frame
too was broken in even though the door could just have been pushed. On the rock wall nearby was an impression of a woman that had been drawn over and written over in ways both obscene and cruel. He did not see this for he was not seeing anything and nor did he need to.

Johnny pursued the tire tracks for two days without food or sleep, barely resting, and when doing so falling to his knees out of exhaustion and then just sitting and staring at nothing. He drank the water left on him from his last journey back from the Store, and when this ran out he drank from a well he passed and then he did not drink. He was dehydrated and blistering in the sun and his muscles and bones cried out and yet none of this registered to him. His mind blank, buzzing, blank. Flies and emptiness, and when unemptied searing white and red and black.

After two days at the height of the sun he found them in a gully changing tires. He came up on them quietly, his head swimming and his mind finally shaping something, forming a command to action, and he knew each new direction would follow the last and only then would it be known to him and not before.

He raised
the rifle he had taken from under the floorboards of his ransacked and ruined home. The one not used. Not taken with him on journeys. The one with a mere handful of bullets. With the wood charred as if it had at one time been in a fire. Old and worn, a relic of something past and now a promise of something new.

He fired and the man
furthest from him fell to the ground as the bullet took his leg. The shot echoed and deafened even in its echo as though God himself had clapped the heavens closed. The other man spun his head about almost comically, brandishing a machete whipped from his belt, and yet in the glare of the sun he could not see Johnny Black. He jumped into the buggy even though the tire was still off and he revved hard but it stalled and then the man’s hand was shot through. The man stared at the hole in his hand as though it some miracle that one such as him could turn holy and then he screamed. Johnny Black bounded down upon them like some mountain lion leaping to its prey and he smashed the man in the buggy in the face with the butt of his rifle and the man’s head jaggled bonelessly like a bobbing toy and the nose burst into scarlet blossom.

He moved around the other side of the vehicle to the man trying to squirm away like some worm
given legs. His small path of movement was soaked with blood and Johnny saw that the man was crying, actually crying, and despite everything he had done in his life seemingly the only pain real and cruel was that done to him.

Listen, listen,
said the man on the ground, and yet what there was to listen was not revealed.

You pestilent fuck
. Johnny suddenly felt the strangest dislike at his own voice, for no words said could put forward the dizziness in his mind, the walls of blood and bits of brain and the cacophony of screams to come.

The man tried to writhe away again, moving backwards and sideway
s with his arms which were thin and weak. He had no weapon on him. Listen, he said again, uselessly.

You think I
care
? thundered Johnny, his voice so hoarse and acidic you’d have thought it was not a man but some demon. His voice tumbled out without thought, choking out of him like falling scree, rocks sliding on blood and hate.

You think I’m
satisfied
with life? You think I don’t want to wreak my vengeance too, take the road of chaos and amorality? You think I’m okay with
any
of this? This inanity, this idiocy, this jumped up joke of a world? With people, people like
you
, worse people and better people, people of nothing and no consequence just like me? We’re a race of
insects
! Clambering over each other for the next meal. What more is there? What good are you?
What fucking good are any of us
? Why should you stay? You’re a piece of dirt to be ground under. You will
die
, and it is right that it is by me. If I can be anything in this world it is enough that I am the predator of men. Men like you. Sacks of meat! Blood and bone.

His voice was a terrifying roar as he raised a shaking finger at the man.
I am your end!
Snivelling wretch
! I am the Alpha and I am the Omega, and I am the end of everything!

Johnny raised his rifle and pointed it at the man, who hid his face in his hands as if this would be protection enough.
Time to die, brother, Johnny growled, and yet seconds passed and the bullet did not come.

The man moved the hands from his face to see Johnny with the rifle lowered. He sobbed and near-laughed, and then went quiet as he saw the grin on Johnny’s face.

It’s a little too soon to die, don’t you think? Johnny took a cigarette from a pack in his pocket and lit it with a match and smiled around the cigarette. He raised the rifle again except this time he aimed it at the man’s other leg and he shot it and the man screamed again and then he shot the man’s left arm and then his right.

Just to stop you gettin
g away from me, you understand, said Johnny, and he looked down at the pitiful mewling figure and smoked calmly. Then he walked to the buggy loaded with his few possessions and took the unconscious man in it minus machete and dragged him out by the cuff of his shirt and dragged him all the way to lie on the ground near his friend. He took out the knife at his belt and quickly cut the man’s Achilles heels and then as the man jerked awake cut the tendons around his left shoulder and then as the man shrieked and struggled held a boot down on his chest and cut into his right shoulder.

He stepped back as the man flailed like a fish on the rocks. He was likely still concussed for the pain did not seem to take him as much as it did the other, or perhaps
he was made of stronger stuff. Perhaps he had experienced brutality at the hand of others before. But he would not have experienced this nor anything that was to come.

Go to Hell,
spat the bandit, as Johnny approached again.

I’m already there,
growled Johnny with a curled lip. And now so are you.

Black tortured them each a bit at a time, switching back from one to the other as if trying to keep their agonies level and balanced, working with no emotion except care and attention as though spinning plates and not spinning the slow death of man. Their cries and ragged screams ripped the land around them and yet there were none to hear and if there was there were none who would save them.

The men on the ground grew feebler with each act visited upon them, and soon the struggles were non-existent even while the life within them still pu
mped blood through their veins and out onto the rocks. Johnny’s hands were soon slippery and dripping and if he stopped to wipe them it was on the bandits’ own shirts. Soon the shirts were too sodden for this and he smeared his hands on stone, wearing his skin almost to the point of bleeding himself.

Soon he could see the life draining from their eyes. Their limp bodies and their flapping jaws gave them the appearance
of playthings or of things dragged up from the ocean on hooks. He stood up and stretched, lifting his hat to wipe his brow with his shirtsleeve and then lowering his hat once more.

I guess our tim
e together has reached its end, he said, and he sighed, feeling tired through and through but knowing it was not yet over. He took a long drink from one of the water containers in the buggy and returned to the men. Their eyes could not focus on him and barely moved. And yet there was still a flicker.

Now let us see what people like you are made of
. He kneeled down by the man with his arms and legs shot and slit open his belly. He laid the knife down by his side and with his bare hands and great effort wrenched the man open until he could see the man’s jellied insides, his digestive tracts. He gagged a little but controlled himself. He reached inside and, curling and gripping with his fingers, started pulling guts out like spaghetti.

Now. Now then, Johnny said, straightening. I wonder where the third man is? His hands were on his hips but the two he looked at couldn’t answer because they were dead.

He
moved to a higher vantage point and shaded his eyes and looked out over the rocks. There was a figure way off in the distance, stumbling about like a man with fear and survival on the brain.

Ah.
Johnny smiled, and it was the smile of a new being.

              Johnny Black caught up with the last man on a terrain that had nowhere to hide. A store was just visible on the plain, far off. Too far off for this man, this last man of all vengeance visited.

             
The bandit had been taking a leak when he heard the screams of his brethren and had dashed off through the rocks and scrub, ducking and diving as if under heavy fire. He had always been the fastest, always been the one ahead, the scout, the hunter, the runner. Now he hobbled, his leg blown out from a long range rifle shot that came out from the low hills. A steady dribble of murky blood was staining the stones, casting some rambling, drunken path behind him.

             
Johnny took his time catching up. He made his progress slow, he allowed the bandit to look behind him time after time in frantic terror, to see that shadow bubbling in the haze of the sun come closer and closer, rising up like some dark beast to take over the land. He allowed the man to shoot wildly at range at this apparition, to use up every useless bullet and turn his weapon into a nothing, to make the man his own victim.

             
He enjoyed that slowest of chases across the plain more than he could have thought possible. It stretched out as though it were some epic quest in itself, as though these two figures moving across this cruel and yellow world were enacting some journey with no end, that perhaps they were in themselves symbols of predator and prey, or brothers in contest, or the strong and the weak, the just and the unjust, the sins of man and his punishment, the mortal followed closer and closer by the sickle and shadow of Death. They appeared universal, that the land existed for them and them only, and that every little movement and stillness and strain of emotion was watched by the world.

             
Johnny Black lapped up the terror like it was nectar. He drank it through the air in short little whistles, drawing the sugar past his pursed lips and clenched teeth.

             
Eventually the man stopped, and sat down on the ground, clutching his leg and moaning, watching Johnny take the last amount of measured strides onwards, and eventually stop, looking at the man with no signal of emotion or words.

             
The man panted for a while, and shivered despite the heat. Please . . . please.

             
Please what? Johnny's voice was flat.

             
Please . . .

             
Johnny had shouldered his rifle, and now he took out a big, cruel knife that he did not have before.

Why did you do it?

              It were just a cat . . . just a fuckin mog . . . for God's sake man . . . please!

             
What does just a cat mean? You are just a human. Is that the right kind of “just”? Are you better? You? What is there to you, do you think there is anything inside you that ain’t meat and blood and bone and a gut of piss and shit? You are nothing and were always nothing.

             
I'm sorry man, I'm sorry! I didn't know it were yours!

             
It wasn't. She was her own. She existed as something independent from all this, as a bastion against all this fucking wickedness about us. You took that from her. For what reason.

             
There weren't no reason man . . . it just happened. It weren't me . . . it were the others . . . they fuckin made me watch . . . I'm glad they're dead.