Field of Bullets

It was Friday evening. The sun was going down, making the sky a dark shade of orange. The freeway was packed bumper to bumper. It was rush hour and everyone was going home for the weekend.

I felt eyes on the back of my neck and I knew it was him. I adjusted my rear view mirror and there he was, the man in the gray suit, sitting in the back of my car. "Why are you here?" I asked.

"You must be ready," he said.

"Ready for what?"

"It's happening," he said. "Now."

I looked outside, but couldn't see anything beyond the sea of cars. I looked back at the mirror but the man in the gray suit was gone. I turned back to the window and noticed that some people had completed stop their cars. They were opening up their doors and getting out. They were looking at me.

"Shit," I said. I looked around and saw that all of the people in the cars were getting out. Each one of them looked at me. Some one of them had expressions of anger, rage, some had those stitched on smiles I had seen before, and some seemed almost giddy. I noticed some of them licked their lips and blood dripped from their noses.

I got out of the car. The man to my right looked at me. I could see fire in his eyes. "You need to die," he said. "You need to burn."

I grabbed the gun and ran. Even if I put in regular bullets, there were too many of them. I would never survive this onslaught, this wave of people. So I ran.

It didn't help. There were more people ahead of me and they grabbed me and pulled at my clothes and my skin. I saw the fire in their eyes and then I saw a woman above them, a woman set against the setting sun. She wore a veil and her eyes burned into mine.

As the people grabbed me, I raised the gun and poured all of my anger into it. Then I fired a bullet made of wrath, a molten bullet, a red hot bullet. It hit the woman and the people grabbing onto me collapsed.

There were still people after me. I wasn't out of the woods yet. I could see the people who had smiles stitched on their faces, their limbs dragged haphazardly, their joints moving independently from each other. Was the woman who controlled them here? Could I use the bullet made of string?

The smiling people didn't target me then, though; that was the giddy people, the people who bled from nose and mouth. They gave me obscene looks and licked the blood from their lips. One man strode forward from the crowd and said, "The others want you dead, but I'd like to have some fun with you first. See if we can make you squeal."

I raised the gun. The man laughed. "Can you really use it?" he said. "Use up all of your love?"

He said love, but I was feeling something else. I felt a heat rising in me, a different heat then before; my vision began to turn red and my arms grew tired. The man looked at me with lust and said, "That's a good girl. C'mon, then, I can teach you to be bad."

My nose itched and I felt blood flowing down. I wiped it away with my hand and then raised the gun again. I felt my blood grow hot and then cool as all the feelings rushed forward into the gun. The man looked at me and said, "You can't kill me, dear. You can't kill love."

I shot him with a bullet made of blood. His head exploded in a shower of gore and everyone behind him collapsed into a frenzy, an orgy.

I felt tired, more tired than I had never felt before, but I couldn't stop. I began feeling the invisible strings around me like before. I took the string bullet from my pocket and I loaded the gun and I looked around. I couldn't see the smiling people, but I knew they were here.

I was pulled into the air then and then dropped onto a car. I felt the air rush out of my lungs, but I gripped the gun tight. I felt hands grabbing a hold of me, gripping me. I looked up into the sky and saw the woman with the stitched on smile. She wore a raggedy dress now and her skin appeared to be made of wood. "You can't shoot without any fingers," she said and motioned with one hand. I felt strings over my body. They felt like wires, cutting deep into me. Razor wire, she was going to cut me up with razor wire.

I couldn't move my hand, but my finger was still on the trigger, so I pulled it. The bullet went in the wrong direction, but as it moved through the air, it twisted and swept in a circle. The woman with the stitched on smile was laughing as I bled, laughing until the bullet hit her in the back of the head. Her face split and as she fell, the people holding me down fell as well.

I slowly got up. I was bleeding from a dozen places. I felt weak and tired. I wanted to stop moving and lay down and sleep, but I couldn't. I wasn't going to die here. I wasn't going to die.

As I walked down the freeway, a flock of birds swooped overhead. I shot them with a bullet made of lightning and wonder. I felt the awe leave my body as I did and the birds all died, their bodies falling from the sky.

I felt a mass of insects crawl up my legs, their mandibles chewing on my soft flesh, digging into my skin. I shot them with a bullet made of my own revulsion. Then I wiped away their corpses and kept walking.

The streetlights began to flicker and shadows stretched from their. Their dark fingers reached towards me, but I shot them with a bullet made from my own shadow. They dissipated and I noticed then, that my shadow was gone as well.

I had shot six bullets in the span of ten minutes. I felt more than weak. I felt empty. I walked until I couldn't and then I crawled.

The last thing I remember seeing was the man in the gray suit walking towards me. His shoes were black and shiny, their laces tied neatly. He looked down at me with a blank expression and I blacked out.

I woke up an hour ago in this hotel room. All my wounds are healed. My car is outside, my keys are on the dresser, and my clothes are neatly stacked beside the bed. I looked to see where he had put the gun and almost panicked, thinking that it was gone, that he had taken it, before I found it.

He had left the gun under my pillow.