Fiction Short Story

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Fiction Short Story

by Laird Long

In Creeps the Dawn

His jug was empty. Bone dry. As dry as the super-heated, blast furnace air that crackled with the pent-up anxiety, frustration, and hatred of the thousands upon thousands of broken-down people who swarmed the crumbling stone tenements decomposing in the smoke-blackened, hope-dead neighborhood of Bleekertown.

Rag Top tilted the bottle upside down, again. And again. Its sticky-sweet mouth leaked not a drop. There was no mistake –– the jug was dry. He adjusted his ancient checkered bandanna, the article of clothing that gave him his name, and cursed. It was four in the morning, and still blazing hot. The sweat turned to mud as it ran down his dirt-caked face. He knew that as the heat kept building and building, something or someone would blow. Sky high.

Rag Top was a living, breathing shadow –– a darker dark spot in the dusty night, a blacker black patch in a shaded alley or doorway. Anything to avoid the scorching light of awareness. People got burnt out in the open, alone.

His home was the back alley and the empty lot. The places where garbage collected and rotted but went unnoticed because no one complained about the stench. His business was finding another jug.

He squeezed his head together with his grimy hands, trying to think. He felt like screaming, like tearing a hole in the blackness so the cold-shoulder world would stop and listen to him. Giving furious voice to the soul-busting, mind-numbing years of hard-scrabble living he had so far endured in graveyard silence. But, as usual, he held his tongue. Even if he had the words, he was short the guts. You yell, you tell –– where you are. Shadows don't talk. And they don't talk back; they slip in and out of decent people's lives every day, unseen and untouched. Besides, his throat was dry. Maybe when he glommed another jug and wet his whistle he'd have something to say to his tormentors. Just maybe.

He hurled the bottle against the pockmarked cement wall. It shattered with a deafening explosion. He froze. There, in the hundred-degree heat of his own private Hell, Rag Top froze in terror. Someone could've heard his anger. Someone, like everyone, who didn't want to hear it, and wasn't shy about shutting him up.

Sure enough, as the broken glass trickled down into the filthy concrete carpet of his living quarters, something moved at the end of the alley. The brick above Rag Top's head suddenly burst apart. Then came the sound: a gunshot! A second bullet bounced off the pavement in front of him. The message slowly leeched through his booze-sodden brain –– someone's shooting at me!

He scrambled to his feet. A dark mass was coming towards him from the back of the alley, firing as it moved forward, the gun's muzzle flashing like a warning beacon. Rag Top stumbled into the street. Fort Street. He lurched forward, running, falling, crawling, climbing back up, running, running, running. His dirty breath caught in his heaving chest and he spat it out in a chunk of phlegm. He slammed into a streetlight and grabbed hold. He threw a desperate glance backwards. The shadow with the gun was still coming. Fast! Rag Top grabbed a brief glimpse of a face in the limpid halo of a streetlight: Tomcat Thompson, biker goon. The shadows were alive and screaming now. To be seen was to be hated. A bullet banged into the light pole.

Thompson yelled at him, "Hey Rag Top, slow down, man! I just wanna talk to ya!"

Rag Top panted like a wounded animal. He rolled his courage into a ball and threw it back, "I heard what you had to say, and I ain't buyin' it!"

A bullet tore through Rag Top's bandanna and singed his greasy hair. Thompson was only fifty yards away and closing. Rag Top sprinted down the crooked mouth of an alley and the blackness swallowed him whole.

*

The following night, a hot wind blew a crumpled newspaper into the gritty face of a derelict. In the dim light of an abandoned, rat-infested warehouse, the cast-off read a story about a hooker who had found the battered and shattered body of little girl discarded in an alley off of Fort Street. He read and re-read until the scalding tears blocked out the words and churned up the memories –– the dark, twisted, dead and buried memories.

*

The cop glanced up as the bum stumbled into the station house and mopped his angry red face with a damp handkerchief.

"Drunk tank's full, buddy."

"I wanna talk to the Captain about the little girl," Rag Top responded. His voice was weary but sure. He stared firmly into the cop's surprised eyes.

The cop stood up and looked down. "You killed that poor little kid, you dirty son-of-a-"

"I know who killed her, you stupid asshole!" Rag Top yelled. He tried to look up at the cop, but the harsh, fluorescent light blinded the weak, inward-looking eyes so used to blankness. He toppled over onto the floor.

The police finished their interrogation of Rag Top at two in the morning. At three, Franklin 'Tomcat' Thompson was shot thirty-one times by a police tactical squad executing an arrest warrant. The first shot had killed him.

*

The red-faced cop watched Rag Top push through the front doors and wade out into the white-hot dawn. "He really spilled his guts, eh Captain?"

"Yeah." The grim-faced Captain looked at the small figure walking slowly and stiffly down the front steps. "He's out in the open now."

"Didn't want no protection, huh?"

"Nope. He was adamant about that."

The cop wagged his head back and forth as Rag Top disappeared into the noisy street teeming with humanity. "I wonder how a guy gets like that.
You know, lets himself go like that."

"He used to be a regular citizen like you and me," The Captain wiped sweat off his forehead with a gnarled hand, "Fifteen years ago –– when I booked him for raping and murdering a seven-year-old girl. He got off on a technicality."

© Copyright 2003 Laird Long

About the Author:

Laird Long pounds out fiction in all genres. Big guy; sense of humor. His writing credits include: Blue Murder Magazine, Handheldcrime, Heist, The Crime Factory, Orchard Press Mysteries, Futures Mysterious Anthology Magazine, Another Realm, Albedo One, and Dark Angel Rising.