Six Bullets by Jeremy Bates Read Free Book Online

to be locked. It swung open. I motioned Sully
to remain low, and we dashed inside, taking cover behind the end of the bar. I
surveyed the long, rectangle-shaped restaurant. Graffiti covered the Outback
landscape murals that adorned the walls. Tables and chairs were overturned.
Broken bottles littered the floor. A number of the floor-to-ceilings windows
that looked out onto Sulfide were cracked or shattered, which was likely why no
one bothered locking the door.
    We proceeded through the restaurant to a large
high-ceilinged room where I used to play Two Up on Friday nights with Buzz and
some of the other boys.
    A passageway led to the bar. Like the restaurant, it was
trashed, the booze that once lined the shelves all gone. The only item left
standing upright was the pool table.
    In the mural-filled lobby we ascended the carpeted staircase
to the second floor. We paused at the top. I heard a rhythmic thumping coming
from a nearby room—the sound of the headboard of a bed striking a wall. The
door to the room was open. I crept toward it and peered inside. The room was
furnished with veneered furniture and quirky fittings. A single candle burned
atop a TV with an indoor antenna. One fatso was straddling a malnourished
brunette, missionary style. I could barely see the poor women beneath his
massive bulk.
    There was no way he didn’t hear the gunshots earlier, which
meant he must have assumed it was his mates doing the killing, not the other
way around.
    I gestured Sully over. He stopped next to me and waited for
instructions, the night-vision goggles making him look like some mad scientist.
I nodded for him to take the shot. He widened his stance so his feet were
shoulder-width apart. Keeping the elbow of his dominant hand straight, the
other flexed at an obtuse angle, he aimed the .38 Special at the back of the
fatso’s head and squeezed the trigger. The fatso fell forward onto the suddenly
screaming woman. A crescent of blood sprayed the wall.
    I was already back in the hallway, revolver aimed. A moment
later the other fatso burst from a different room, one hand tugging up his
pants, the other holding a shotgun.
    I put three rounds within inches of each other in the center
of his chest.
    As he fell backward, dying, he brought up the shotgun and
fired off a round, filling the left side of my body with buckshot.
     
    ••••••
     
    The women didn’t know what to make
of Sully and me. Some stared indifferently at us and didn’t seem to care
whether they lived or died. Others begged us to untie them from the beds to
which they were bound with rope. I would have liked nothing more than to free
them. But what would be the point? They had no food, no water, no shelter. They
wouldn’t last three days on their own.
    Besides, they knew about Sully and me now. If one of them
managed to survive and blabbed about us to the next bike gang that rolled into
town…
                     
     
    ••••••
     
    I burned the Palace to the ground.
The women would have died of smoke inhalation before the flames got to them.
     
    ••••••
     
    No respectable survivalist lacks a
fully outfitted first-aid kit. I disinfected and bandaged my scattering of
wounds a couple of hours earlier. The bleeding’s mostly stopped, and for a
while I felt good enough to get everything that happened down on paper. But I
think it’s all caught up with me, because I’m suddenly exhausted. I need to lie
down.
     
    ••••••
     
    Your brother’s gone, Walt. Sully
left.
     
    ••••••
     
     
    I tried to stop him. When I woke up,
the HiLux was parked out front the house. Sully stood next to it, scribbling
something onto a piece of paper. I was on the house’s roof, looking down at
him. I asked him what he was doing.
    His face flushed guiltily. “Leaving you a note, Dad.”
    “You going somewhere, Sully?”
    “I’m leaving.”
    “What do you mean you’re leaving?”
    “I’m going to