In Laymon's Terms

Blood flowed from the man’s stomach. A large puddle was quickly forming on the floor under him, tainting the bones and the rotting hay with its redness. The man held his stomach with one hand and one of those long bones with the other. Blood seeped out of his mouth as he looked up at Mark with a dazed expression.

“You fucking little bastard,” he said, followed by a long howl of pain. “You damn bastard! You fucking shot me.” Bradley coughed, letting a small rivulet of blood escape through his parted lips.

Mark didn’t respond. He stared back at the man with a horrible sense of fear. He had actually shot the man. He had made the man bleed. As his fingers clutched to the shotgun, his whole body trembled.

Bradley clawed toward him, gritting his teeth with pain. “I’m gonna kill you now,” he moaned as he heaved his body forward, inching ever so close to where he stood.

Mark lifted the gun and pointed it down at the man, his trembling hands sending the barrel into a quivering fit.

The man laughed. “Oh, I’m gonna git you now.”

His fingers were barely a few inches away from Mark’s feet. The man laughed again, blood flowing out of his mouth in great streams, an effervescent glint of madness glowing brightly in his eyes.

Mark closed his eyes and fired the shotgun for a third time. In the darkness of his mind, the thick silence melted with the stinging stench of gunpowder to leave him feeling dizzy and numb with terror.

When the third shot came bursting through the night, Billy felt everything inside him sink. Mark couldn’t be alive, not after the shotgun had been fired three times. He stopped running again, one part of his mind telling him to turn around and run home to his parents, the other part, the one that was shouting at him and which refused to remain unheard, telling him to go and save his brother from that horrible man.

There wasn’t much he’d be able to do against Bradley. Not with that gun of his. But that was his brother back there. Mark had always been there for him and would never have left him alone with that man had the situation been reversed. The fact that he’d run away from his brother, the fact that he’d left Mark there to die in order to save his own life, was swallowing him whole with guilt.

All the fear he had felt dissipated. He couldn’t leave Mark to die like that. He had to try to help him.

He had to save his brother.

He didn’t want to step over that man’s body. Bradley was clearly dead, his whole body covered with a very thick film of rust-colored blood. He could see the large hole the last bullet had made in the middle of his forehead. But the corpse lay between the door and the place where he stood, turning him into an unwilling prisoner of this dark, damp place. If he wanted to escape, if he wanted to get out of there, he’d have to step over that body.

He threw the gun away from him and heard it land on the cement floor with a loud thud somewhere to his left. He didn’t care about prints. He didn’t care about what the police called damning evidence on those TV cop shows he liked to watch with Billy. He was too afraid to think rationally, too shocked by what he had done to make sense of things.

He took one step toward the body and waited. The man didn’t move, didn’t even seem to be breathing. He took another step, and then another, feeling more and more confident with each step that the man was truly dead and that he wouldn’t grab at his leg the moment he tried to step over him. And with all that blood seeping through the cracked cement floor, like tiny red veins, Bradley couldn’t be alive.

The toe of his sandals touched the man’s body. He gave it a little kick, just to make sure Bradley was very well dead. When the body didn’t move, Mark took it as a good sign and stepped over the body. His foot was about to touch the ground on the other side of the body when he felt his foot slip forward in the growing pool of blood. He lost his balance and fell, landing hard on the ground next to Bradley’s dead body. His head slammed against the floor. A trail of shooting stars dashed all across his field of vision. Warm blood instantly covered his whole body, though he didn’t know if it was his or Bradley’s.

His world went gray before turning black as the pain in his head turned from a distant hum into an unbearable hiss.

A lightning of pain shot through his body. For a brief moment, the whole world went white, then green, then blue, like some strange fireworks show played out for his own entertainment.

When the world came back to him, Mark found himself lying against Bradley’s body. He tried to stand up, very slowly at first, unsure that his legs would support him after the fall he’d just taken. He went on his hands and knees first, then pushed himself upward, very slowly, keeping one hand safely on the ground for balance, just in case his legs would suddenly decide to give out.