JusThis
a novel
by Curt Rude
Dedication
If you can think it, you can say it. If you can say it, you
can write it.
This
excellent advice was offered to me by my loving wife.
Thus,
Peggy, this work certainly must be dedicated to you.
Prologue
It was a typically
dreary Halloween evening, full of warning of a winter soon to arrive in all its
wind-driven glory. Driving fast, perhaps too fast in the cold blowing rain,
Martin felt things could be made right. A sickening thud and a shattered
windshield brought him back from his obsessive thoughts.
“Christ!” he thought. “A deer? Not a
kid—god, not a kid or a trick-or-treater.”
Life suddenly
downshifted from fast forward to slow motion. The screeching of tires seemed to
last forever.
Martin leaped from
the car, unable to deny the reality of what he was seeing. His eyes pulled him
toward the carnage and a gruesome spectacle, the result of being in the wrong
place at the wrong time.
A large, bloody
mass lay in a twisted, morbid position. Ribs, blown from the chest cavity and
pointing toward the cold, uncaring sky while holding the torso up in a macabre
fashion, met his gaze. What seemed to be a never-ending pool of gore engulfed
the scene. Thick globs of meaty paste were spattered everywhere.
Martin’s
shock-numbed mind told him to check for vitals, but his police training told
him that would be foolish—the reaction of the sort of untrained, stupid
civilians who were the butt of cop jokes. No, this spectacle that had once been
a woman, a daughter, or maybe a mother, was now a bloody puddle of steaming meat and broken bones. Without even realizing it, he had stepped on a chunk
of waxy yellow fat that clung to the sole of his shoe. This pile—a former
living, breathing person—was giving up its warmth to the cold, indifferent night.
The skull had been split in two from the force of the impact and the eyes
pointed in different directions and seemed to be observing, but not
comprehending.
Martin thought
about the size of the impending lawsuit, but then thought of the meat scattered
all over the road. Lawsuits, meat,
blood. He even thought of how the blood always reminded him of gutting a
deer. Thoughts were screaming through his adrenalin-fueled mind without any
real direction or order.
He must have been
in shock to be thinking so wildly. Christ, what next? He was brought back to
the present by a woman screaming that she had called 911.
“Do you need
anything else?” she called out.
“Yeah,” he
thought, “I need to get away.”
It was like that
airline commercial he saw while watching games on Sundays. He needed to get a long god damned way from that mess!
Martin couldn't
believe fate had put his sorry ass into such a situation. Such things were
supposed to happen to other sorry-ass bastards. He wasn’t a cop just doing his
job and looking for clues at the scene of a 10-54 fatal traffic accident. He’d
been the driver.
Jesus Christ, it
was different being the driver and not just a wise-ass cop on the scene. Oh,
for Christ’s sake, he had worked thousands of accidents, but never thought it
would happen to him.
He found himself
thinking, “Let this be some kind of dream.”
But it wasn't, and Martin, locked in a staring contest
with the woman’s dying eyes, suddenly realized that he had looked into those
eyes before.
