Nine Meals: Frail Man by Mike Kilroy

Author:Mike Kilroy [Kilroy, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction, Metaphysical & Visionary, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Science Fiction, Post-Apocalyptic, Metaphysical, Dystopian
Amazon: B00TI77K7C
Publisher: Fishtail Publishing
Published: 2015-03-15T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

One Year Later: Everything Has a Price

Bray had felt pain before. When he got that tattoo on his neck, he gritted his teeth against the burn and blinked away the tears that had formed in his eyes. He didn’t think something like getting a tattoo on the tender skin of the back of the neck could hurt so much.

He felt pain when he was in the academy. He remembered lying in bed, the muscles in his legs seizing. He slept little those night, his calves and quads barking at him.

He didn’t mind that pain so much because he knew it was for a purpose.

Since Bray was a little boy, he wanted to be a police officer. He wanted to wear a uniform and catch the bad guys, make them pay for their crimes and bring justice to the world.

So fucking naïve.

The pain he felt now as he stumbled through the field was more intense than any he had felt before.

And it didn’t come from the arrow that was stuck through his right hand, dripping blood onto the burnt, brown grass.

It was from profound loss. Maggie was dead.

Murdered by one of the bad guys.

He felt like crying. But this was no time to cry.

He wept anyway, tears running down his thin cheeks and into his thick growth of tangled black beard.

Sweat dripped from his long strands of hair as he walked. He didn’t know how he kept his feet moving forward, but he did, his left hand clutched tightly around his right wrist.

Finally, he couldn’t walk any farther.

He dropped to his knees onto a dusty patch of land where grass once grew, but was singed and burned away by the sun. He toppled to his right side, the dirt matting to the side of his wet head in a cake of mud and grit, and he closed his eyes.

He thought he may never open them again. He thought perhaps that was a good thing.

He would see Maggie again soon.

***

Bray forced his eyes open; a bright light hovered above him.

For a moment he thought he was in heaven, that the glowing beam above him was God and he cracked a slight smile.

Maybe I should have taken my confession more seriously.

But, as Bray quickly discovered, it was not God. It was a strange sight nonetheless and almost as rare as seeing Him these days.

It was the first time Bray had seen light cast from an electric light bulb in more than a year. It shone from under an alabaster glass shade attached to a cream white ceiling and he stared at it until his eyes burned intensely enough that he had to look away.

He lay on a doctor’s exam table in a small room with bright, mustard yellow walls. An IV was stuck into his left arm. Set on a table attacked to the wall on his right was a bloody arrowhead and a bolt with fletching at the end of it. He peered down at his right hand to see it wrapped heavily in gauze, a spot of red seeping through on his palm and on the top of his hand.

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