Dark Road by David C. Waldron Page A

by him, but there was more to it than that. The hairs on the back of his neck were standing up; his mouth was dry; he could almost hear alarm bells going off, and no, it wasn’t that his ears were ringing from getting hit.
    His fight or flight instinct was in high gear, and not just from the adrenaline. This guy was giving off some bad vibes in a major way, regardless of what he said.
    “I’m going to leave the restroom first. I’m backing out because I don’t want you passing that close to me.” The guy was starting to approach Dan even though he hadn’t started backing up towards the door yet. This isn’t going to go well. Dan thought.
    “Just stop and wait until I get out of the restroom.” Dan said.
    The guy didn’t stop but he didn’t walk any faster either. Then Dan remembered what he’d said before. “I’ve got nothing left to live for” he’d said. Crap. Dan started sidestepping to the doorway and then the guy started moving faster.
    Dan had never fired a gun in his life. The first two times he’d pulled the trigger had been less than twenty minutes ago in the dark, up the road. He was already pointing the gun at his previous, and now present, assailant—whose name he didn’t, and probably now would never, know.
    His hands were sweaty but he was holding the small 9mm plenty tight and dropping it was not going to be a problem. A second dose of adrenaline dumped into his system and he prepared to have to fight hand to hand if the gun was taken from him, or he somehow managed to miss with every bullet in the gun.
    If you’ve done any shooting at all it’s hard to miss at eleven feet, you have to try to miss at that distance. If you’ve never shot before and conditions are perfect, it’s pretty hard to miss at that distance too. If you’ve never shot before, and your life is in danger, and it’s dark, and the target is moving, and your hands are shaking, however, it’s pretty easy to miss at eleven feet. Dan missed.
    Dan was in the clutches of an adrenaline rush, though, and his trigger finger had a mind of its own. It was instinct to bring the gun back down after the recoil and Dan didn’t miss at nine feet—he hit his attacker in the right side of the chest. He was already squeezing the trigger for a third time as the gun came back down, and the shot hit in the left side of the neck at five feet as his attacker had started to spin and was falling forward.
    He was dead when he hit the floor. Three months of living on next to nothing and hollow-point 9mm rounds had been a sufficiently lethal combination in this case.
    Dan collapsed to his knees in the doorway, vaguely conscious of the slowly spreading pool of blood inching its way across the floor. What am I doing? I don’t think I can do this over and over and over, he thought.
    “Dan?” He heard Marissa yell from the end of the smaller dining area.
    Then he threw up.
    …
    “You did what you had to do.” Marissa said.
    “It doesn’t change the fact that I…” Dan was spiraling out of control.
    Marissa put a hand on both sides of his face and forced him to look at her. “Dan!” She said in a stage whisper, the kind of voice you use when you want to mock yell to get someone’s attention without yelling, because you are right next to them. “Look at me, focus on me for a minute.”
    Dan put his hands on her wrists, not to take her hands away but because he needed the additional contact. Dan was a healer, he was a fixer, he was a giver. What he had just done was unforgivable regardless of the reason!
    He closed his eyes and took a breath, held it for a second and let it out.
    Marissa didn’t flinch at the smell because he hadn’t had a chance to rinse his mouth out yet. It’d been worse after binges in college and he’d been there for morning sickness—she could deal.
    “I need you right now, the girls need you. You can’t check out on us.” She said. “If you pulled the trigger, and you did pretty quickly there from the