Toxicity (28 page)

General Bronson sighed, and
rubbed at his whiskers with a scratchy sound, and strode forward, spurs
jangling. Svool went pale. Bronson pressed the barrel of his pistol against
Svool’s forehead.

“You took up the badge, son. And
if you wear the badge, you are a symbol. And if you’re a symbol, you have responsibility.
And if you have responsibility, then you stand up for that responsibility. If
not, well then, you’re nothing worse than a worm in the soil and I might as
well exterminate you here and now.” He looked back at the other guys, and there
came a low rumble of gurgling laughter.

“But if I pick up the gun you’ll
shoot me,” squeaked Svoolzard.

“I’ll shoot you if you don’t,”
said Bronson.

“But... but... but...”

“That’s an awful lot of butts,”
grinned Bronson, showing blackened teeth, and half-turning to his men, who gave
another low rumble of gurgling chortling. It was like watching a particularly
bad comedy routine by a low-grade university comedy club.

Taking his opportunity whilst
Bronson was turned, Svool suddenly brought his knee up between Bronson’s legs
with as much force as he could muster. There came a
thud,
and Svool felt
the considerable impact, the connection, the squash of some dangling soft
tackle being heartily compressed, and the sour grunt that burst like
corpse-breath from Bronson’s mouth.

General Bronson took a staggering
step back, then righted himself, and took a deep breath. His pistol never once
wavered.

“That’s a good cheap trick, son.
Do it again, and I’ll beat you to death with my fists. Now, that ain’t a man’s
way to go. That ain’t a warrior’s way to go. Not when he’s chickenshit like
you.” He cocked his pistol. The sound was deafening. The whole world seemed to
be paused, and deathly silent. The sounds of the jungle and the chomping horses
had faded away into soothing infinity. The cock of the pistol was a screeching
metal intrusion and Svool swallowed. Hard. This was it. He was dead! He wanted
to cry. He wanted to scream. He wanted his mummy.

“Last chance,” said Bronson.

“Pick up the fucking gun, you
idiot,” hissed Lumar from her trussed-up position on the ground.

“They’ll shoot me!” squeaked back
Svool.

“Pick it up!”

Slowly, Svool bent down like a
woman in a short skirt bends down, a lowering of haunches, a feminine curtsy,
and at the end of it the long black pistol made its way into his paw and he
lifted it as if holding a rearing rattlesnake.

“Good boy,” breathed Bronson.

“Is it loaded?”

Everybody laughed at that.

“Now point it at me,” said
General Bronson.

“I’m quite sure that I can’t,”
said Svool, face drooping, lower lip quivering.

“Shoot me,” said Bronson.

“Shoot the motherfucker!”
snarled Lumar.

“This is a joke, isn’t it? The
gun isn’t loaded? I’ll pull the trigger, and it’ll go
click,
and you’ll
all laugh at me, and then we’ll head back to the saloon or whatever and eat a
pan of beans.”

General Bronson regarded Svool
with narrowed eyes.

“You taking the piss?”

“Er, what?”

“You think all we ever do is eat
beans and fart around a fire? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Er, no, it’s just I saw a pan of
beans back at the sheriff’s place, I thought, I thought you all, I thought
maybe...”

“Yes?”

The single word was like the
closing of a lead coffin lid; like the boom of the ocean against terrible
cliffs; the solemn chime of a solitary funeral bell.

“Oh, nothing,” squeaked Svoolzard
Koolimax.

Lumar took that opportunity to
attack. Yes, she was trussed up at her whip-wielding captor’s feet like a
turkey waiting to be stuffed for the festive season, with her arms pinned
tightly by her sides and the man’s flesh too many inches from her gnashing
teeth to allow the rending and tearing she would have desired. But her legs
were free, nearly from the hips down, and she was supple, and massively agile,
and slowly,
so-slowly-it-was-a-painful-crawl,
she lifted her legs around,
crawled around a bit, bent herself almost in two until her captor’s knee was
right
there
-

She stomped out, like a horse
stomps out, and the man’s leg folded neatly back the wrong way at the knee
joint. The
crack
was like dry tinder snapping. There was a pause, then a
scream like an animal in pain and
sudden chaos...

Lumar scrambled up, onto her
knees, face wild and teeth bared, and the man with the broken leg was writhing
on the ground; all attention was on Lumar, and she struggled to be free of the
whip. Bronson strode forward and pistol-whipped her savagely against the side
of the head. Lumar hit the ground, tasting copper, stars fluttering in her
mind. And as she lay there, on the ground, disjointedly feeling the men tying
her ankles together, listening to the blubbering of the man with the broken
leg, she could see the dwindling sheriff’s uniform of Svoolzard Koolimax XXIV
as he disappeared through the rusted car horseshoe...

“Goddammit!” snarled Bronson, and
fired off a shot. There came a metal
zip
sound as the bullet ricocheted;
but Svool was gone.

“Shall us boys go after him,
General?” said one man.

“No,” said Bronson, kneeling in
the dirt beside Lumar. “Let’s take this pretty green lady back to the saloon. I
know his sort. He won’t let his friend die. He’ll come back for her. And when
he does, then we’ll have our sport.”

Lumar heard the words through her
spinning brain, and she wanted to say
You’re fucking joking, right? Svool is
a bastard, a spoilt child, and a massive coward. He’s hot-tailed it away
thinking only of his own arse, he’ll throw his toys out of the pram because he’s
now alone, and his bravest course of action will actually be to run away from
here as fast as he can whilst convincing himself he’s doing the right thing...
going for help or some other such nonsense...
but instead, she managed only
a gentle deflating sigh before unconsciousness claimed her.

~ * ~

SVOOL
FLED INTO a twisted mess of trees and tangled foliage, his arms pumping, his
knees lifting high, doing perhaps the fastest three-hundred-metre sprint of his
entire life. Bronson’s pistol was heavy in his hand, but it didn’t exist during
his sprint, didn’t register as being part of the fabric of reality. Svool’s
singular simple focus was to
escape.
To
run away.
To
get away
from the bad men.
He ran and ran and ran, waiting with an itching feeling
between his shoulder blades,
waiting
for a soft
thump
and the
crack
of a pistol. Waiting to be shot. The run seemed to take a million years.
His legs moved through the thickest of treacle. His arms were punching through
water and the whole process was one of humiliation and despair and agony and
terror. He waited for that bullet. Waited damn hard. It became an obsession as
the picoseconds ticked by. The
bang.
The
thump.
The feeling of
hard steel wading through cloth, then biting into flesh, and pushing right
through to his heart to kill him dead...

When the bang came, it
did
make
him jump. Made him leap into the air like a comedy cartoon character being
zapped up the bottom by an electric cattle prod, and it was an age between the
pistol discharge and the
ping
as the bullet glanced from a knackered old
car. In that time, in that slice of life, Svool lived his whole life again. In
that split shard of infinity, he waded out into his past like a fisherman
getting into trouble in a very deep pond, and he looked at himself, looked at
his sexual conquests, looked at his poetical creations, looked at his writing
and performance and recitals and academic writings and his speeches and his
adoration,
dammit, his fucking
adoration.
He was loved. The people loved him.
And his PR and management and agents and publishers and marketing department
and his
brand
kept him locked in a cocoon, a cocoon of warmth and
comfort and safety and lies. Lies. It was all false, all fake, and here and
now, without those safety nets, some hairy, stinking cowboy bastard was trying
to kill him.

When Svool crashed into the
shattered stand of trees, a section of jungle that had been destroyed by some
kind of storm, he staggered, sprint turning into long loping strides as if he
really
had
been shot, then the loping strides turned into a tumble and
he fell to the floor on a platter of wood shavings. He leant on a fallen trunk
stripped of bark, as if something had been eating it, and reclined like a
Victorian lady who’d become overheated in the sunshine and was now lolling with
a fan and a glass of lemon-infused water.

“Oh, woe is me!” exclaimed Svool,
theatrically, and then remembered the big men with guns had shot at him, and he
looked fearfully at his back-trail as his chest heaved and sweat stung his eyes
and he panted, panted, panted, his sheriff badge gleaming in the sunlight
filtering through the high forest canopy.

When his puff had returned, Svool
stood up on jelly legs and tottered to the edge of the jungle. He hid behind a
tree and peered out. He’d covered a good five hundred metres. He squinted,
marking the place where the jungle took over from the town, then following the
line of buildings back to the horseshoe of battered, rusted cars.

Nothing.

He could see nobody and nothing.

But then, on the upside, there
was
no pursuit! Hurrah!

Unless... they were circling
behind him? Damn.

His head snapped round, his
pistol lifting, and he blinked rapidly. No. Nobody behind him, creeping through
the jungle to strangle him or horse-whip him. Svool looked down at the pistol.
It was long and sleek and black and heavy. It hurt his hand just to hold it,
and he held it in a way a man might hold a scorpion; or a woman might hold a
herpes-infused cock.

Ha! Bloody stupid thing. It was
all a tricksy, a set-up, a wind-up. Damn and bloody thing isn’t even loaded!

Svool pulled the trigger. The
BANG
was so loud it made his ears ring for ten minutes. Smoke spat from the gun
like it was on fire and the bullet
pinged
from a tree trunk and embedded
in the soil with a
whump.
The recoil slapped Svool’s arm nearly a
hundred and eighty degrees around, and the whole process made him feel like an
idiot. Hot damn. It
was
loaded. Loaded with bullets. Loaded with bullets
that could kill somebody!

“Hot buggery,” he said, and his
cheeks flushed red as he realised... realised he
could
have killed
General Bronson, and rescued Lumar, and they could have bush-whacked those
darned cowboys and stolen horses and hot-tailed it away out of there shouting “Yeeeee-
har!”

The flush in his cheeks went
redder.

General Bronson. Well. He must be
an idiot... or insane. To have Svool point a loaded pistol at him? Why would he
do that? Why would he put his own neck on the line for the sake of... what?

Sport,
whispered an inner voice.
He
was playing with you. He saw you. He knew you. He understood you. He knew you
didn’t have the bollocks to do what a real man should do. You’re a fucking
spineless jelly of a man, Svoolzard Koolimax. You talk the talk but tip-toe and
wobble and ballet-dance the walk, mate. You’re not a man; you are an amoeba,
all soft and jelly and without any real wedding tackle.

So.

What to do?

What to do
now?

Well, it’s obvious really, innit?

Is it?