TORN: A Contemporary Poetry Collection ✔️

38

The sound boomed from a few rooms down. It didn't even make them shiver, like I did. Instead they load their guns. What the fuck??! Are they really about to go to war?

If righteousness didn't drive me, I would have been left...but my feet stay, and my heart takes on a heavy weigh. "Look, just take the jobs, I'll even let you guys move in....it's a big house." None of them pay me any attention.

"Casey, cover the hall." The dread head commands in a quick call. A tattooed, buff one marches and peeps over the frame of the door, his gun pointed in the direction of the stairs.

"HEY, HEY, THEY UP HERE!" He shoots. POP, POP.A body falls. THUMP.

I watch the rest of them post at the windows. The sage eyed one crosses into the hall, to hid behind a wall, and sprays rounds. Shots fire back at him, he ducks low. Footsteps pound up the stairs, whipping bullets through the interior as if it's made of dough.

Stuck, my body is stuck in place, I need to go. The shooting drills on from the hall and then from the windows. Crashing glass. Hot beads fly, the others crouch, and set their body's in a firm brace. I hit the floor like a fish. What else can I do about this?

No one changes unless they want to. After all these years of trying to course correct troubled cases, a part of me understood that truth.

My mind loses the count of the bullets. Hundreds, may have flown by now. I can't don't nothing so just leave. More rapid fire erupts from the windows. I stay flat on the floor. With a last observation of the gang as beads break from their guns. I see their animalistic characteristics as death slips out of their weapons. Their coldness and ruthlessness.

I crawl like a soldier on a war-field, the splattering soundtrack made that analogy real. I could down, knowing both parties would have to reload soon. POP. POP. POP, POP, POP. Then all the spitfire stop.

That's when I make a run for it.