Red Rock

Chapter 16: Labeling for Communication (Part 2)

Jacob was left out of the cannibal's selection. He was too much trouble to bring along, even for them. Blud yanked on the Daire's scalp and forced him to his feet, pushing him to walk with Sasha and the others who were carrying the rations. Daire could barely stand up straight. His sense of balance was still inoperative to the rest of his body and the long walk did not help.

"Here," Blud said plainly, pointing at the ground.

The twenty carriers dropped the rations on the ground and waited for further instructions. No one made any movements. The cannibals had frisked them before leaving camp, making sure none of them had any weapons, leaving no chance of an uprising.

The cannibals brought the group into the middle of nowhere. From east to west, only patches of grass and red sand could be seen. The desolate habitat where they had brought them had no land markers within thousands of meters.

Blud took out his pistol and started to admire its figure, looking at the weapon from all angles with satisfaction. "You wanna know how I got this?" he said, taking a step toward Daire. "There are only a handful of them on Mars. Rich Marbles going to Paradise pay millions to smuggle these here, only to get it taken away from people like me. It's almost better not to have one of these then it is to have one. Everyone is looking to take it from you. The amount of hands this gun has gone through is almost comical." Blud put two fingers below Daire's chin and forced them upward showing his swollen face and closed right eye. "Look at me when I'm talking to you."

Daire looked into Blud's eye unwillingly and shamefully. He was in under total control of Blud and had no strength to fight back. Even if he did, he wouldn't have.

Blud felt satisfied from Daire's humiliation and continued his story. "I met this old man before things got cold last year at a bar faraway from here. He was a lone wanderer and never let anyone close to him. I've seen with my very own eye, ten, fifteen, maybe twenty people try to take this gun from him and he'd shoot each and every one of their heads clean off. He was good," he said with a smile and a slight laugh while reminiscing of the man. "I buy him a beer as a compliment to his skills and he accepted it with his thirsty hands, motioning me to sit with him. We talked until the place closed, telling crazy stories and sickening hobbies for hours. He said his name was 'Rico'. He was the only level headed Marble that I'd ever met. We talked like this for days and days, getting wasted from morning till dusk until one day he showed me his pistol. A beautiful eight shooter with a bright silver cylinder hanging below its heavy barrel. The gun was the size of my head!" he said, putting the pistol to his head for comparison. "He offered the piece to me. He said that he was getting older and that he didn't want to die because of it. He wanted to settle down and live a modern life. So he handed the thing over to me as a gift and said 'happy travels.'" Blud stopped to let the story sink in and the anticipation grow. "As soon as he handed the gun over to me, I turned it around and shot him right in the lung." Blud pointed the pistol at Daire's right lung, reenacting the memory. "Now, why would I do that?" he asked as if he was the one concerned. "Did he do something to me? Had he wronged me somehow? No!" he quickly added with a smile. "I killed him because I wanted to. Purely impulse. I could've walked away and we would've been lifelong friends, but no. That's too predictable, too perfect. I looked into his shocked dying eyes and told him, 'settling is for the dead'. Then I walked away."

Daire was frightened. Though he didn't care much for the story because of his aching head, the manner in which Blud told it was terrifying. 'How could someone live like this?' he thought.

"Can we go now? We've done what you wanted," Sasha said, trying to end the cruel focus on Daire.

Blud turned to Sasha in a flash then turned back to Daire, looking affected. "I fucked some girl who looked exactly like her at the Inn I was just at." He looked at Sasha from top to bottom. "She's a pretty one," he said, stroking her cheek.