Shaking Hands

Elijah Dalton.

He stepped out from the building, leaving the scent of gunpowder closed off inside. Stepping off the porch onto the sand he slid the weapon into his holster. For a moment it bugged him, he couldn’t remember why he ever got the gun in the first place. 

“It wasn’t for this.” He squashed those words deep into the back of his mind.

The building erupted into flames behind him. Elijah’s traveling companions torched the whole town. They took they’re spoils of war and they wandered into the night. Whatever they couldn’t carry they left to burn. They left no survivors. 

Whatever they could carry would often be traded away. They never kept it for themselves. Not when the tribes they traded with could fill their needles. The needle. The one thing they knew how to share. The needle made being around each other sufferable again, even if it was just until the morning.

So they wandered the deserts by days and nights. The blurry faces and voices around him looking for nothing but a strong fix and a quick bloody thrill while they searched. Some sought the violence, some were just looking for a high. Elijah was that way. They weren’t always killers, once upon a time they were just the local junkies making trouble at the bars. Elijah used his head and acted somewhat clever to get his needs met. Then he decided to walk with men who cleaned the gore from their clothes on the daily. Wandering the desert aimlessly as if they only followed the scent of blood.

Elijah’s hands weren’t clean either. Robberies go bad. And the voices wandering beside him didn’t like any loose ends. Those voices had a nasty way of dealing with things themselves. Elijah’s first killing came from a place of mercy, but people rarely believe the way he tells the story. Pulled the trigger on the youngest family member and all. He just couldn’t handle one more chainsaw execution from the most violent voice among them.

After his first killing, it became easier. And with each shot, it became cleaner. Less screaming. No survivors left to track them into the dirt. And much less time debating over who walks away alive.

“First hits go to Elijah tonight!”

For most of the time Elijah walked with them, he did so hand-in-hand with a tribal woman. For Elijah, if it wasn’t the drugs, it was the way she could move her hips. Dancing all night next to the firelight. The embers would crackle, sending sparks into the air behind her. As far gone as he was those nights, one flame would look like endless atomic warfare. A stage set for the firelight dancer. 

But he wasn’t the only one who watched her. They all knew she danced nice. They all watched the way she would curve and swing by darkness. Dancing only when fueled by junk in her veins. But dancing didn’t fill pockets, it didn’t fill stomachs, and it didn’t fill needles.

They drifted until their throats went parched. Nobody, no matter how high, felt like they were in the clouds any longer. One dry spell was all it took. They would run out of morphine before midnight rolled over. One dry spell, and nobody wanted to share anymore.

It may have been deep in a canyon, or it may have been in the wide-open of a long since dried up lake. Elijah can’t remember where. Only that the wind had stopped blowing that evening. Only how his way of life collapsed under the weight of the desert. 

They were lost. They’re hands shook from withdrawal and starvation. They suffered enough for the violence to weave itself between them. Everyone had an equally awful idea to survive. In times like these however, only the strongest is heard.

Elijah threw punches, and couldn’t feel them being dealt back. But it caught up with him. He was the idea-man that used his fists instead. While he sat, blood creasing down his nose, the decision was made. The same hands which beat silence into Elijah picked up a chainsaw. He ripped the cord and painted a night they would never forget into the sand.

She danced in the fire one last time, then they passed her around in pieces. The most intimate of which were tossed into Elijah’s lap, as a reminder if he would ever feel inclined to trade fists again. 

The others. They didn’t seem to care.

Elijah sat there. Long after the campfire dimmed and the others had passed out. Elijah denied it as long as he could, yet he knew he couldn’t go any longer without satisfying the piercing pains in his stomach. He stared all night as the meat got colder. But he couldn’t hold out forever. With his hands shaking from the cold and the hunger he had a taste.

For one slow hour in the pitch black night, the only sound that could be heard was the grisly smacking coming from his lips and a whimper from his sober heart.

When daylight came back around and the heat started returning to the desert, his chill didn’t go away. He walked with one mission in mind that day. He pulled the trigger faster then he ever had and without the same remorse he once held. Nothing mattered, he just needed something to soothe the shaking in his hands.

Hours of impressive bloodshed and torture later they turned in their spoils for liquid gold. The same man that ran the chainsaw smiled as he handed Elijah his fix. But now Elijah could watch the firelight again. The sun began to set and the flame began to rise. Embers crackled like the sounds of bones snapping. Flames shot into the air like blood from the dancer’s arteries. The gusts and howling winds reverberated like a rumbling chainsaw. Gasping sharp and heavy he wrapped his knuckles around the needle in his arm. His greatest mistake haunted him in the images of an endless atomic warfare. He didn’t know where he was. He couldn’t remember why he was there. He ripped the needle from his flesh thinking: 

“It wasn’t for this.”

He stood up and sprinted towards the setting sun.

He ran through the night into the next day.

He ran from the most violent drifters in the desert and he ran from the person they were turning him into.

He ran, only collapsing down when he found a set of feet he could beg forgiveness from. Strangers never knew why he spoke to others with such abject self hatred. But no matter how many kind souls would admonish him, no matter how he changed for the better, his hands never stopped shaking from that cold night in the desert.