Forever After - By David Jester Page 0,19
their accent. But the undead, of which there seem to be so many, were as opaque as the night.
“Good morning!”
A smiling vicar passed Michael on the winding footpath, nodding pleasantly as his incense-scented aroma wafted by. Michael didn’t return the greeting.
He didn’t believe in God or religion when he was alive and still wasn’t too sure in death. The vicar, a man who had never glimpsed the afterlife and had spent the majority of his adult years preaching about a martyr he would never meet and praying to a God he wasn’t sure existed, probably knew more about the afterlife than Michael; a man who had been dead for thirty years.
Michael liked religious people, it took a certain type of dedication to devote your life to an ideal and it usually created a pleasant and peaceful character, but Michael knew Reverend Edwards, there was nothing pleasant or peaceful about him. The only good thing about his existence was that it would be over within the decade.
He sat down on a bench and watched the vicar disappear out onto the street; waving to people he passed on the pavement, chatting jovially to the ones friendly enough to stop.
Michael turned away in disgust. The Reverend had a history. He had more skeletons in his closet than Dennis Nilsen; because the holiest man in town had, in his youth, gotten away with rape, robbery and assault, and currently spent his days dreaming up plans to get into the pants of his eleven year old step daughter. A few years from now he would find a way into her pants, right before she found the machete he hid under his bed and used it to hack him into Michael’s hands. If Michael still had his job by then that was -- he couldn’t be certain of anything in a world he barely understood.
The dark ones had an energy that was unmistakable and made them easier to read. They stood out likes flares in the darkness. Their deaths and their lives had a bigger impact on the lives and deaths of others, thus weaving an illuminating web.
Michael watched Jonathan Marks with something resembling awe and contempt. The youngster was a hundred feet away. He was on his way home but had been approached by three bullies heading the other way. The leader of the group was Dean Moore, a short, bulky kid with bright white hair gelled into meticulous spikes on his head.
Dean pushed Jonathan to the floor, the laughter of the three bullies filtered through to where Michael sat. Dean’s was the loudest laugh of them all.
When the feeble victim was on the floor he threw his hands in front of his face to protect himself before any punches or kicks had been thrown, this yielding posture was enough to incite more laughter, followed by a barrage of kicks and stamps.
Jonathan’s dad was just as bad as Jonathan's school friends. The laughter, the taunting, the occasional beatings. His dad was also a poacher and a drunk. Jonathan planned to steal his dad’s keys when he passed out drunk, use them to unlock his gun cabinet, steal his shotgun and then slip it under his bed for the night. In the morning he would hide the gun under his coat, walk the two miles he walked to school every day and then shoot every kid that had ever bullied or taunted him.
It was a simple plan and one that would give Michael a lot of work and a lot of credits, but there were many variables at play. The only thing that was certain was that Jonathan had the means and the motive.
Michael didn’t want the business, he wasn’t that desperate for credits and he certainly didn’t get enough of them to warrant bearing witness to such an event. The town was bad enough as it was, he couldn’t bear living amongst the sorrow and the spectacle that it would become should Jonathan find the right moment to go through with the act.
He wasn’t the only youngster whose life was on the line. Dean Moore, the youngster driving the majority of the kicks into Jonathan’s crumbled body, was also in Michaels’ sights, with a little more certainty over his future.
The brutish bully was a closet homosexual who had sexual fantasises about the people he beat up, including the aspiring sociopath presently on the receiving end of his frustrations. Like a six year old boy that taunts and mocks a girl he fancies at school, Dean