Page 45 of So Far Gone

Shane used to have this recurring nightmare: it’s dawn and he’s outside their old house in Grants Pass, wearing flip-flops

(always, for some reason, he’s in flip-flops), looking up and down the street, when he hears a buzzing sound, and darkness

rises on the horizon, becoming waves of monstrous locusts from the Book of Revelation approaching as helicopters ( the noise of their wings.

.. like chariots with horses... tails like scorpions ) and demonic hordes of faceless soldiers (.

.. with hair like women’s hair... ) begin moving up the street, pulling people from houses (.

.. slaying a third part of men... ) , and in the dream, all he can do is stand there, rooted to the ground, watching as they approach, wishing he’d been more prepared,

more diligent, that he’d built a bunker, or moved them to the mountains, or put a better dead bolt on the door, anything—knowing

that his wife and children are inside and that he is helpless to stop what is coming... How long, he wondered, had he been

so afraid? Of something terrible happening to his family? To his country? How long had he suspected it was already happening ?

No, he knew fear.

But this—this was something different: immediate, primal, physical.

Systems beyond his cognition fired up: fight-or-flight amygdala signaling hypothalamus, pituitary gland releasing hormones into the blood, nervous system firing adrenaline into the mix, cortisol raising heart rate and blood pressure, skin pores tightened, lungs on fire, pupils dilated, mouth dry, tunnel vision—an enraged Shane running toward this man he’d thought was a friend, this man he’d thought could help protect his family, thinking, I might have to kill him , this man who was dragging the woman he loved by the hair, and that’s when—

A quick vision from the past interrupted this rush of pure instinct.

Nothing more than the synaptic spark of an out-of-the-way neuronal sensor—a fraction of a millisecond in mental processing

time, a day forever lodged in his brain—and, as Dean Burris dragged his struggling wife by the hair down the dirt driveway—this

was the memory that popped unbidden into Shane’s mind:

Junior year high school. First mustache. Hot Sharon Bell invites him to Young Life. (You mean Lame Life!) But Sharon Bell

has a butt you’d follow anywhere, even to church, and Shane goes to their dumb picnic where he meets a flock of bland, smiling-Christian

types, of no interest socially, so lame they are somehow lamer than his lame friends. (Shane is a gearhead, a motor monkey, always in the parking lot, comparing tires, speakers, horsepower.) Despite

Sharon Bell’s righteous backside, religion doesn’t stick with Shane that day at Young Life—it will be another twelve years,

many of them spent wasted, pissed at the world, before Shane truly hears the call of his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ—but

this one image from high school will stick with him—

—and it came to him now, in the instant he moved toward Dean Burris—

A slow kid at his school, known as Bones (because he’s so fat, an early high school attempt at irony), is being teased by a few baseball players in the parking lot

on a warm spring day as Bones waits for his mom to pick him up. They push the kid back and forth like a human Hacky Sack.

What did you have for lunch today, Bones?

Everything? You like to eat dicks, Bones?

Or just balls? Submental stuff—no one is more hateful than high school baseball players, hat brims low, chaw in their gums, a-hole subset of the most popular kids in school, and years later, when Shane hears people rail about “elites” and their vicious attempts to control and sabotage good Americans, it is these baseball players he will sometimes picture, confident jerks who come from places like Forest Lake and who think they’re so much better than you.

But on this day, no one at his school is dumb enough to stand up to these bullying princes, to insert themselves in the trouble.

And so, while Bones is tortured, they all look away, or wander off, Shane staring at his Sambas.

And that’s when one of the Smiling Christians he recalls seeing at the Young Life picnic, a small, nerdy senior in a red polo shirt, whose name might actually be Christian, steps between Bones and the baseball players.

“What’s the matter with you,” Christian scolds them. “Do you get

off bullying people?”

And that’s it. Predictably, the baseball players turn from Bones to Christian, making fun of the nerd’s clothes, calling him

queer, but Shane is impressed that Christian isn’t fazed by this—of course nothing changes that day, life goes on, it’s just

one of a million daily encounters between high school haves and have-nots—

But twelve years later, when Shane Collins, on probation for possession, found himself weeping at a court-ordered NA meeting

in a church basement in Salem, Oregon, he felt the Lord come into his soul and his chest seemed to crack open and his limbs began to tingle as he remembered brave Christian, or whatever

his name was—

No—it was something even weirder! Charlton, yes, Charlton!

Anyway, he remembered thinking: That is what God can do . He can make the fear go away. He can fill you up, the way He filled that smiling string bean in the red polo shirt and gave

him the strength to stand up to a demonic horde of baseball players, to stand up to the bullies and the elites—

That was the kind of Christian, the kind of Charlton, that Shane had longed to be, the conqueror of fear, not its slave—

And now, as his wife swung her fists over her shoulder helplessly, and Dean Burris dragged her toward his truck, and his battered jerk of a father-in-law crawled away in the dirt—typical—Shane looked quickly over his shoulder, hoping the kids weren’t seeing this— Oh, God, Asher, please don’t be watching —but if he was, Shane knew what he’d want his son to see, his father standing up to the bullies and baseball players of the world, standing up to the demonic hordes, and maybe, just maybe, it was never

too late to be a better Charlton, and maybe, if you could be born again, you could also be born again... again , because Shane yelled, “Hey!” as he wound up and threw a haymaker at Dean Burris, missing his intended target, Dean’s bulbous

chin, but landing with a dull thump on the man’s thick neck —Yes , Shane thought, this felt right, this was good, the endless fear turned now to fighting for the people he loved—as Shane swung again, brushing Dean’s cheek and nose this time, and he said

once more, “Let go of my wife!” which worked, because the spit-furious Dean finally let go of his handful of Bethany’s hair,

dropped her to the ground, swung his handgun up to the right, and shot Shane Collins in the forehead.

***

All cruelty springs from weakness. Seneca said that, along with: Ignorance is the cause of fear. Kinnick had always believed

these adages to be true, but now, bleeding on the ground, watching Dean Burris stand over his dead son-in-law, Rhys wondered

if Seneca might have been a little silly to believe in the causal roots of evil. He wondered if cruelty and its bride, fear,

didn’t just exist spontaneously, forces as elemental and eternal as gravity.

“Jesus, Dean!” Goateed Bobby was the first to speak, the shot still ringing in the air. “What the fuck ! What did you do?”

And then Bethany’s voice, screaming, begging, crying: “Shane? Shane? Shane!” She crawled toward her husband, who had fallen back ward, his head turned away, legs crumpled unnaturally beneath him. She reached his left side, weeping, trying to pull his limp body into her arms.

On the ground, Kinnick crawled in the opposite direction.

“Dean!” Bobby said again. “What the fuck! What do we do now?”

What rubbish, Kinnick thought, his Atlas of Wisdom . Now, at the end of life, how short, cruel, and pointless it all seemed, wisdom , what a waste that houseful of books before him had turned out to be. He looked up at Dean Burris, who stood in the middle

of the driveway, panting, handgun hanging at the end of his big right hand, while, just a few feet away, Bethany held the

newly dead Shane and wept.

“He attacked me,” Dean said flatly. He took in a deep breath, let it out, and turned to look at Bobby. “Well,” he said, “I

think we gotta clean this up now.” The coldness in his voice.

“No.” Bobby shook his head. “No fuckin’ way, Dean.” He put his hands out to the side, as if saying, I’m not helping you with this—but I’m not stopping you, either.

Kinnick had crawled all the way to his target, the air rifle, and he rolled over and picked it off the ground. We gotta clean this up , Burris said. Rhys remembered Chuck’s advice. If the man is wearing Kevlar, aim for his front pocket. From his side, he blinked

the tears from his eyes, brought the air rifle to his shoulder, flipped the safety off, and pointed at Burris’s left front

pocket (Kinnick always kept the Dragonfly pumped at least ten times, and loaded with pellets), and, as Burris turned away

from his goateed friend, Kinnick pulled the trigger, and with a pleasing pfft , a single pellet flew twenty-five feet and hit Burris, not in the left pants pocket or right pants pocket, but right between

them, right, as Chuck might have said, in the dickhole.

Of course, even pumped ten times, the pellet wouldn’t break the skin, or go through Dean’s jeans, but the shot must have really hurt, because Burris doubled over, and with an “Oof,” he dropped his handgun to the ground, and instinctively covered his groin with both hands.

Probably too far for Kinnick to get the gun, but he scrambled to his feet, and staggered, listing left, before finally moving toward the big man, pumping the air rifle barrel as he went. One, two—

That’s when he saw, over Dean’s shoulder, a plume of dust. A car turning up his driveway. Three, four pumps—

Kinnick kept moving and pumping the rifle—five, six—maybe he’d get even luckier this time and hit Burris in the eye. He wondered

if anyone had ever won a fight as badly outgunned as he was now.

But even outgunned, Kinnick knew he would not stop, not until Burris killed him, and he was filled with grim determination:

I will never give up . I will protect Bethany and my grandchildren, I will beat this man to death with the stock of this pellet gun, I will beat

this man with the broken bones of my own battered face—

He staggered toward Burris—seven pumps, eight—and from fifteen feet, raised and fired again, but he was on the move, and this

time the shot went right, pellet hitting dirt as the big man looked up, picked his gun off the ground, and rose to fire—Kinnick

realizing that he wasn’t going to reach him in time.

So, he threw the air rifle, which caused Burris to duck, and this gave Kinnick a quick view of the car that had come up the

drive, and that had stopped some eighty feet away: a Ford Bronco, Brian already leaning out of the open driver’s-side door.

Burris rose again, straightened slowly and said, “You fucking son of a bitch!” He raised the gun toward Kinnick, who apologized

again in his mind— I’m sorry, Beth, I really thought— when a crack echoed from what he instinctively knew was a larger gun, and Dean Burris’s right arm seemed to explode—slivers

of bone, mists of blood—the handgun dropping from Burris’s destroyed right hand to the dirt, the big man following his shattered

arm to the ground with a banshee’s scream.

Kinnick managed the last steps to Burris’s feet; woozy, he bent over and picked the handgun from the dirt where Dean had dropped it.

Recalling his brief firearms training (feet apart, left foot forward, barrel pointed slightly down, thank you, Crazy Ass Chuck) Kinnick pointed the gun at Bobby, but the goateed man had not pulled his own weapon.

He dropped to the ground and cried out: “No! Please!” and began scurrying under the truck.

Kinnick thought he might pass out. He steadied himself. Eighty feet down the driveway, he saw Brian, leaning out over the

open door of his Bronco, still looking through the scope of his .30-06. Exhausted, Kinnick sat down in the dirt, alternating

pointing the gun at Bobby, and at the screaming Burris, then at Bobby again, who was completely under the truck, now, only

the pale palms of his hands showing. Kinnick let out a deep breath as his daughter sat rocking her dead husband, her helpless

cries joining the whelps of the one-armed Dominion Eagle Killer, rising together in the still air.