Twisted Desert – #2

Daryl “Devil” Johnson

I stood in front of the doors as they swung back and forth in the wind. My leather jacket shone — it shone red. A shade of bloody red took over my blue scarf. I limped forward and pushed on the doors to reveal the pub full of silent gawkers. The whoosh of the wind and the swirl of dust rolling in added to the moment — as I stood between the men and the wild west outside, blood soaked and gun armed. 

“We thought you’d never make it out alive!”, shouted a man from the back.

I shot him a look, and that was all it took for the expression on his face to change into one of retreat.

Soon after, the crowd started to separate, and an elderly Uncle Shaun staggered up the line until he got a view of his blood-soaked trophy in front of him. His eyes brightened; a light smirk appeared; his face went up in pride.

“You got ‘em?”, he asked, in an airy and surprised voice.

“All of ‘em”, I said, staring at him through the gap in between my hat and scarf.

Uncle’s face rose further.

“Where are they?”, he asked, frantically excited.

I signalled backwards, out the pub. Uncle looked up at me one last time and shuffled out, followed by an army of big men. The other men gathered around the doors to get a view, standing on their toes to exceed the wooden frame.

Uncle pulled his scarf up onto his nose as he went out. The moment he step foot on the sandy ground, it splashed. He step foot again, and it splashed again. He looked down, and pulled his scarf in the same direction, revealing a look of intense shock.

Tan – coloured grains of sand were floating and bobbing from side to side on the surface of a red, shiny and dense liquid. As he looked up, the definition of shock in his eyes became more evident. 

A river of the red liquid flowed its way all over the grainy earth, leaving little to no spots of the dry sand. But that was not all — hacked bodies of men bathed in the shiny red were garnished over the river of blood. 

Upon further inspection, Uncle found that each of the blood – masked faces had the same final expression — fear — and a very intense one at that. The incoming sand breeze did little to overtake the bloodbath of horror. Calling it a change of colour palette would be timid — rugged brown to brutal red in seconds; even the sky seemed to have turned red — and no one even knew of the hell unleashed outside.

By the time Uncle returned, I was seated at The Big Table, cleaning my gun as the men in the pub continued staring at my monotonous routine. From where I sat, it was clear that he was not the same person he went out as. Taking slower and fewer steps, fixing his expression to a stare at the floor, and clutching his golden walking stick hard as ever, he approached me. I stood up. 

He didn’t have to utter a single word for me to know his state of mind — his face said it all, every inch taught with fear, eyes wide open and swivelling from side to side in unspeakable horror, with drops of sweat rolling over the eyebrows and falling past his eyes to the wooden floor below.

“I have never had the fear of going to hell, but I had a fear of the devil. Of the unknown evil he symbolises. Little did I know I was nurturing an evil monstrosity myself — a devil”, he said, slowly panning his head up to look into my eyes as he neared the end of his sentence.

I was still unsure of whether he was afraid of me or proud of me. His eyes showed a mix of both. He reached out to my hand, and lifted it up to reveal a shiny, silver gun with stripes of red splashed over it.

“8 years. 8 years ago, I handed you this pistol of your Dad, hoping you’d be a great gunslinger like him — an outlaw. You turned out to be something far more enormous, far more sinister, and far more outlandish — a story that would make any cowardly bugger watch their back for you — for the Devil”, he said, ending with a smirk and cheeky pride on his face.

The crowd huddled around, as Uncle pulled me closer by the shoulders.

“Daryl Johnson — the shedder of blood. My Devil”, he said, beaming and clutching my face, as the crowd erupted into a shower of hoots and enthusiastic agreement.

I stood there, rock solid, as Uncle embraced me. I could ironically feel the lack of feeling in me, nurtured by my actions. But it all gave me a sense of power. Daryl Johnson. The Devil. The Devil to be reckoned with. And not to cross paths with.

(To be continued)