One Day in a Small-Town Desert, chapter 2, page 2

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Bhanar Narak watched as the distant auto faded to a red pinpoint in the blackness. A second bullet sat in his rifle’s chamber, ready for the Zhéporé-spawn gunmen to return.

Bhanar had not been shot, he could tell that now. But his truck’s driver’s-side window had been shattered, right where he would’ve been sitting. That bullet would’ve gone right through his head.

But it didn’t. He wasn’t sitting there. Bhanar grinned. He’d out-hunted the hunters.

He lay atop squished cardboard boxes, silent except for his heaving lungs. The desert lay silent, too. All Bhanar could hear was his truck’s engine idling and the wind blowing through the adjacent bushes. No distant engine. No more gunshots.

The bastards weren’t returning. Not right away, at least. Evidently they were easily scared. They didn’t expect Bhanar to have some teeth! Bhanar let out a laugh and relaxed his rifle, but didn’t release it.

“What were you expecting?” he called at the distant pinprick of red light. “Don’t you know who I am?” The real Bhanar, not the spoiled-brat pseudo-emperor in a suit and necktie the media showed.

He wasn’t even really the emperor. No, his Koro-brained grandfather had abdicated the throne long ago. But the public liked having royalty to kick around. And to shoot at.

Police. He should call the police. Or whatever passed for police out here in the middle of the Sarıman desert. He needed to find a phone. Plagues. How was he going to drive his truck with a completely cracked windscreen? He’d be damned by Pétíso if he was going to walk. He erupted in laughter at the thought of himself wandering down a deserted highway, dying of dehydration or heatstroke after some Zhéporé-spawns had failed to kill him with bullets.

The laugh mutated into a shiver. Deserts got cold at night, Bhanar knew that. And yet he was lying out there under the twinkling stars, wearing nothing but denim pants and a thin singlet.

Still chuckling, he pushed himself to his knees and climbed over the rail of the tilted truck’s bed.

Lights!

Bhanar slipped down to the gravel and froze. His blood pounded in his ears. Which way was the auto coming from? He couldn’t hear it. He peered down the highway. Darkness. And the other direction. Darkness.

And then it dawned on Bhanar: the lights came from ninety degrees off the road. Cradling his rifle, he crept forward to the truck’s front bumper, noting a mailbox on a wood post laying underneath his truck. Bhanar poked his head around the bumper and spied a house with a hundred-yard-long gravel driveway aimed straight for the garage door which covered the right-hand third of the house’s front. Attached to the wall of the house, four bright floodbeam lights illuminated the desert rocks and brush as if it were noon.

The wind tugged at Bhanar’s singlet and he shivered again.

To the left of the garage, at the house’s front door, stood a fat old man, rifle in his hand, staring straight at Bhanar.

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