Nightfall: Nightmareland Volume One (Nightmareland Chronicles Book 1) by Daniel Barnett

Author:Daniel Barnett [Barnett, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-05-30T22:00:00+00:00

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Just before the highway, John came across a big man in a blue deputy’s uniform. The man was sitting on his cruiser’s trunk, smoking a cigarette with a hand that could barely hold it. He nodded as John walked past.

John paused. That nod, that one small act of recognition, was more than most people currently seemed capable. The night had brought humanity down on its knees, but here was someone who was still upright, still trying.

Maybe it was the badge, John thought. Sometimes a badge could be enough to lean on, when everything else was giving way.

“I know you,” said the deputy, and though he might have looked like a man at first glance, his voice betrayed him for a boy. “You’re John Hawthorne from up on the hill. My boss, Sheriff Andy, says you’ve got a streak hard enough to break your teeth on. Or he used to, anyway. Before he died.”

John said nothing.

“I’m Dante, if that matters to you.” Dante took a sip of his cigarette and let the smoke out through his nose. “You’ve got blood on your hands. You know that?”

“Yes. I do.”

“Me too. That guy over there, I shot him. He’s dead.”

John glanced at the gas station, where someone was sitting in a drying puddle of blood. “Looks that way.”

“He was looting. So were a lot of others. I tried to stop them. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time. Like the only thing to do. I kept thinking that if I could just stop them, if I could just set one little thing straight, the rest would figure itself out somehow. Sounds stupid, probably.”

“No. It doesn’t.”

Dante’s heavy shoulders sloped beneath his uniform. His boots dangled above the ground, swinging ever so slightly, and John thought of Nicholas Krauter—of the tree branch he’d been hung on to die. “That guy . . . there’s a gun in his belt. He reached for it, and that’s why I shot him. But I can’t stop wondering what made him reach. Was it something he was planning? Or did he do it because of what my own hand was doing? I think about it—over and over again, I think about it—and it’s all mixed up in my head so I can’t put it in order . . . but I’m pretty sure I was the one who pulled first. And I wonder if I pulled because I was scared, or because I was mad. See, I was just a nigger to him. He didn’t come out and say it, but he wanted to, it was right there on his lips, and maybe that’s the real reason I shot him. Maybe I just couldn’t stand being hated anymore.” Dante paused as a shivering breath ran through him. “Do you think that’s true? Do you think I shot him to make him stop hating me?”

“It doesn’t matter now.”

Dante looked at John, and he kept looking at him for a long while. “You’re probably right. But I hope you’re wrong.

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