He used the handrail on his way down the stairs.
“Kill them all,” his father whispered again.
He did not even bother to answer. His father had become irrelevant, and Gregory was acting now on his own reasons, for his own purposes.
The house was silent and the sound of the wind and sand outside was maddening. His head was aching, a sharp pain that seemed to run down the entire left side of his body, but the pain was good and he was grateful for it. It spurred him on, enabled him to remain focused on what he had to do.
Hunt down his family and kill them.
Bill Megan had been lucky. He’d been able to take out his family easily, with no difficulties or complications. Gregory wondered if he’d had a silencer on his gun. Maybe that had been the problem, not having a silencer, and he cursed his Molokan upbringing for not allowing him to be more familiar with firearms.
His mother would pay for that.
He staggered through the living room, reached the front door, pulled it open. The wind and sand stung his face, blowing into his wound and amplifying the agony tenfold. He looked down, steeling himself against the onslaught—
And something caught his eyes.
A key ring.
He bent down. Smiled. The stupid bitch had tried to steal his keys, but she’d dropped them on the porch, right on the welcome mat, like a present for him. He laughed, the laughter spiraling upward, out of control, until he finally forced himself to cut it off.
He walked through the stinging sand out to the van, got in.
He could see out of only one eye, but there was not much to be seen in the sandstorm anyway, and he drove by instinct, drove from memory, heading up the drive, down the road, through the dirty black night toward the center of town.
He drove directly to the gun store, and as he’d hoped, its doors were wide open. The place had obviously been looted, but there were still plenty of weapons available, and he chose a revolver exactly like the one he’d had. He was familiar with it, knew how it worked, and he wouldn’t have to waste any time adjusting to a new weapon. He walked behind the counter, grabbed a box of ammunition from the cupboard beneath the display case, loaded the gun, and put the rest of the ammo in his pockets.
Outside, through the blowing dust, he saw what looked like Paul’s car parked in front of the café, and he smiled. He should’ve known that little pussy would be living in there now. He was probably crying himself to sleep. Or trying to hump the chalk outline the pigs had drawn around Deanna’s dead body.
Or both.
He was glad Deanna was dead. He’d never liked that bitch, and it served her right that she’d met her end in her husband’s café. He wondered what her last thoughts had been. He hoped they were desperate and despairing.
He walked against the wind, keeping his head down, until he reached the café. The door was closed and locked, but he raised his revolver and held it against the door handle, pulling the trigger.
There was a loud report that was swallowed instantly by the wind, and the door swung open, its lock and handle shattered.
His night vision was still intact, and, out of the sand, he could see clearly, though there were no lights on in the café and no illumination filtered in from outside. He didn’t see any sign of Paul, but the café owner was a lazy fuck, and Gregory knew there was no way in hell that Paul would walk home and leave his car. Especially not in this kind of weather.
Revolver extended, he walked along the side of the counter to the short hallway that led to Paul’s office. He kicked open the office door.
Paul looked up groggily, squinting into the darkness. “Who’s there?”
“Hello, Paul.”
“Gregory?”
“Who else?” He remembered what it had been like to see his friend’s hand shoved all the way down his wife’s open pants, fingers working on her, and he was filled afresh with rage and hate. “Didn’t expect to see me here again, did you?”
“N-no.” Paul could obviously tell that something was not right, and Gregory smiled at the wary expression on his face, enjoying the slight hesitation in his voice.
He thought of the last time they’d fought, the words that had been said. He advanced slowly. “ ‘Milk drinker’?” he said softly. “ ‘Faggot’?”
His head hurt like a motherfucker, but the pain cleared his brain, sharpened his thoughts, and he was able to remember in vivid detail the particulars of the fight, the unfair way he had been kept from complete and total victory. Paul was going to get what was coming to him this time. There was no Wynona to save his ass now, no teenage bim who was going to arrive at the last minute and rescue him.
Paul could still not see him, but the café owner stood, facing the direction of his voice. He walked out from behind the desk, and it was obvious that not only had he been sleeping—he was drunk.
Good.
“You called me a homo,” he told Paul.
“Did I?”
“You’re the homo.”
Paul grinned into the darkness. “Then why’d your wife want to fuck me?”
Gregory shot him in the knee.
Paul went down screaming, a bloody spray of bone and cartilage flying out every which way, splattering against the wall and the desk, soaking the carpet. Gregory was surprised the shot had been so true. He could see perfectly in the pitch-black room, but it was out of only one eye and his depth perception was completely gone.
God must be looking out for him.
No, he thought soberly, not God.
Paul was screaming nonstop, a piercing, agonizing cry that sounded more animal than human. It was an irritating sound, an excruciatingly grating sound, and he stared at the writhing figure on the floor, willing it to stop.
He realized dimly that he and Paul had once been friends, but that seemed so long ago and so far back that it was almost as though it had been in another life, in another world, in an alternate universe.
The screaming did not abate—got worse, if anything—and Gregory took a step forward, reached down, placed the barrel of the gun next to Paul’s Adam’s apple and blew a hole in his throat.
Blood was gushing, spurting everywhere now, and he knew instantly that he’d made a mistake. Paul was thrashing around and was no longer screaming—he no longer had a voice box, no longer had a throat—but he was dying, and Gregory had wanted him to suffer longer, had planned to draw out his death and torture him before finally allowing him to give up the ghost.
He stared down at his dying ex-friend. In a suddenly lucid moment, it occurred to Gregory that something was wrong. He was not the person he used to be, not the person he should be. He knew it, and he wanted it to be different, but his thought processes seemed to be overridden by an outside imperative, a will greater than his own, and the insight vanished as quickly as it had arrived.
Paul died.
And that made him feel good.
He walked back through the café and out onto the street, bracing himself against the coldness of the air and the strength of the sand. He thought for a moment, then started down the cracked sidewalk toward the bar, the bar where his father had been humiliated and where for the past few months that smug prick of a bartender had made it clear that he was doing him a big favor just by allowing him to drink here.
MOLOKAN MURDERERS
Whoever had spray-painted that graffiti gem had been more right than he’d known.
And the bartender was about to find that out for himself.
Gregory clutched the revolver tightly, holding it out in front of him. He didn’t know what time it was, but it couldn’t have been that late because through the sand and darkness he could see the glowing neon of a battery-powered beer sign, colors that he knew to be red and blue but that appeared to him as shades of gray.