Bookshelf Battle

Zombies.  Werewolves.  Vampires. 

They made Slade feel helpless and he didn’t like it one bit.  He’d spent his entire adult life building himself into the kind of man who helped others and didn’t need any help himself.  As he laid there on the church’s front porch, his mind traveled back to the last time he felt this useless.

He was twelve years old, hiding under a bed in his family’s tiny house just outside Tucson, Arizona. He was shaking uncontrollably.  Gretchen, his mother, slid the wedding ring off of her finger and tucked it into his hand.

Green eyes peaking under the bed and a request to “keep this safe for Mama.”  Those are the last memories Slade had of her.

Downstairs, a fist was pounding on the door.  An angry voice.  “Open up!”

The door creaked open.  Footsteps.  A scuffle.  “You holding out on us, bitch?”

“No,” Gretchen said.  “Please take whatever you want.”

Slade remained as still as possible as he listened to the sounds of his house being torn apart.

“They aint got shit,” a second man said.  “Sam’s gonna be pissed.”

A third voice.  “What’s the hold up?”

It was Sawbuck Sam Donovan himself.  Like Smelly Jack Buchanan, Sam was another pile of human garbage working his way through the West, stealing whatever he could get his hands on and killing whoever got in his way.

“She aint got nothin’ Sam,” the first voice said.

“Horse shit,” Sam said.  “Everyone always has something.  What have you got bitch?”

“Please,” Gretchen said.  “My husband and I…we’re very poor but whatever you want please take it.”

“Aw fuck it,” Sam said.  Two gunshots.   All three men left.  Sam started shouting threats to the townsfolk outside.

“Unless you want to end up like this bitch, you all best start fetching your goods and bringing them out right now!”

Slade waited.  And waited.  And waited.  Nearly half a day had passed before he worked up the courage to head downstairs.

There, he found his mother, a hole in her forehead, blood covering her face, her green eyes blankly staring up at the ceiling.

He put her wedding ring in his pocket, sat down on the floor next to her, and held her hand.  He wanted to cry but he couldn’t.  He felt numb.

There he stayed for two more days until his father came home.  Lars Slade was a cattleman and he’d been out on a drive.  Tall, thin, and bearded, he was a serious man of few words.

Lars loved his wife and saw to a proper burial.  Once the preacher had finished the service and the casket was in the ground, father and son just stood there silently for awhile.

Finally, Lars spoke.  Rather than look at his son directly, he just kept his focus on Gretchen’s head stone.

“I realize this may be an awful way to feel,” Lars said to his boy.  “But I’ll never be able to look at you the same way again.”

Lars pulled a few bills out of his pocket and pressed them into his son’s hand.  “I left you in charge and as the man of the house you did nothing.”

Slade watched his father walk away from him and listened to the last word’s he’d ever hear from his old man.

“You’re a gutless coward and you’re no son of mine.”

Young Slade stood by his mother’s grave awhile longer, trying to convince himself that this entire experience had been a bad dream, but it wasn’t.  It was real.  And hope for a better tomorrow was no longer a concept he could comprehend.

After six years of working every odd job imaginable, he joined the Marshall’s Service, which he took as a license to shoot and/or hang ever miserable law breaking desperado he could get his hands on.  It didn’t matter who they were.  He always imagined they were Sawbuck Sam Donovan.

Alas, none of Slade’s subsequent heroism ever made him feel like he’d paid the debt he felt he owed to his mother, nor did any of it make him feel like his father would ever accept him again.

Happiness.  Hope.  Feelings he was sure he’d never know.  But at least being a Marshall meant never feeling helpless…never feeling like it was necessary to hide under a bed.

Yes, as Slade laid on the porch in front of the church, he developed an intense hatred for zombies, vampires and werewolves.  They had made him feel helpless for the first time in a long time.