Thread: Too late for entry into LM Challenge (Language)

I finished this up today, based on the LM Challenge "Six pictures found in a camera."

Too late for entry I'm afraid, but I thought would share it just the same.

Best of luck to those who entered on time.

Mark

Speed Trap

By MJ Preston

I set the camera down beside him. He is a brute, tattooed skin covering bands of muscle. He has fists like river stones, hard and unforgiving; able to pound tissue and bone into a bloody pulp. He’d hurt me if he could, but the beast is bound and I am the master.

“Do you know who I am,” I ask smiling.

He stares for a moment, bloodshot eyes searching for a memory, he shakes his head. “No.”

“I am the last horseman. I answer to no one. I have no conscience to haunt me in the hollows of darkness.” I lean in close enough so that my nose almost touches his, purposely to show that I am not afraid. “It was not always this way you see. I was once a man who had love; whose soul was filled with faith, but that man is no more. He was destroyed, burned out of existence. I am what emerged from the ashes.”

He shakes his head unable to speak, a bit of dried blood cakes the side of his unkempt beard. The duct tape holds his words prisoner, exiles the questions he might, but will never get a chance to ask.

“Two years ago you were in dispute with another gang. That quarrel was over drugs, or territory, or whatever else it is a scumbag like you makes his money from.”

I watch for recognition.

Nothing.

“Whatever it was, you decided to up the ante and began killing the other guys. There is nothing quite as gutless as a man who won’t do his own dirty work. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Recollection emerges, his eyes widen, and he shifts uncomfortable with this knowledge.

“They were on their way to the farmers market, my wife and son. It was something they would do together every Saturday morning. I had to work, so I couldn’t go, but my boy Cillian, he’d always tell me how I missed out.”

Terror permeates from him now.

“They were a block away from the market when the Oldsmobile Integra trunk began to ring and ignite the shaped charge on the gas tank. One moment they were there and then they were gone. Cillian was thrown forty feet, his body burned beyond recognition. He was only 8 years old.” I pause and watch him closely. “My wife Sarah was cut almost in half by a jagged piece of fender.”

“You remember me now? Don’t you Speedy?”

His breathing increases, cheeks expand and contract with panic.

“The only thing worse than killing a man, is taking that which he loves. Everybody loves somebody don’t they Speedy?” I push the button on the digital camera and it lets out a low mechanical whine.

He turns his head, eyes straining to see, but I set it just beyond his line of sight.

“I wanted to kill you a thousand times over. Wanted to cut you into little pieces you fucking scumbag murderer, but then I had an epiphany.” I pick up the camera, scrolling through the pictures. Six people stare back. All smiling, all unaware that they are staring into the face of death. A woman with reddish blond hair, a man who undoubtedly is Speedy’s brother, and then there are the children. There are four of them. A teenage boy, maybe 13, his three sisters, I guess somewhere between seven to eleven years-old.

I turn the screen toward him so that he can see the group shot.

“Goodbye Speedy,” I step back and close the sliding door, sealing him in.

He goes mad! Muffled screams echo behind the steel door. Begging, crying...

Pulling my car from the warehouse lot, I toss the camera out the window and it tumbles onto the shoulder. In my rear view, the light from the viewer illuminates the darkness.

Radiance fades away, and into black.

It is done.

***