Short story

Choice.

Part one


In spite of what people say, nothing happens for a reason. Each person creates the event. They do it by choice. Good or bad it always starts with a choice.
He knew this before he fired the first shot. He may not have thought it, but he knew it. Always a bad decision maker, he did it anyway.
One second; long enough to aim, squeeze and feel the recoil.
The guy had the girl by the hair and he was screaming about her eyes or something. He had a knife in the other hand. She was naked from the waist down, about 16 he figured.
"What the hell," he put a well placed shot an inch above the guys right eye.
The back of his head exploded like a cherry bombed watermelon.
Still, he stood, hair in one hand, knife in the other. Not knowing that he was dead.
Then he fell on top of the girl and that was it.
The shooter was Hadley Phelps. A 48 year old on again, off again drunk.
He was driving a 15 year old Ford ½ ton pick-up truck. It was his home now as he was on the run.
But he didn’t know what he was on the run from.
He had simply driven away from his small shack in southern Missouri 11 days ago. His wife and 4 small children had just stood in the dusty yard and watched him go. They weren’t really his kids. She wasn’t his wife ether.
Just a gal he had been with for a while.
It was no big loss to the woman. Someone else would come along.
This one didn’t work all that much anyway, and he drank a good bit.
No body even waved as he bounced along the gravel drive way, he didn’t wave ether. Decision made. By the time he got to the highway it was as if he had never known them.
He had taken the truck, a small backpack, three bags of Beef Jerky, his gun and a camping knife. $82.57 was tucked into his back pocket.
He headed north.

On route 55 he did his best to keep up with traffic.
But the old truck would heat up and slow down to about 45 miles per hour.
Then the engine would cool off and it would go faster.
It didn’t matter because he had no idea where he was going.
Stopping in St. Louis, he ate at a homeless shelter for a few days, shoplifted some liquor, siphoned some gas and broke into a car, but there was nothing in it to steal.

He did pretty much the same in Chicago. But he added putting fifty cents in to a tribune box and then taking all of the papers and selling them.
Working day labor for two days produced $70.00
In Lincoln Park he stole a bicycle and a fishing pole. But no one would buy them.
He drove through Wisconsin stopping to shop lift in Madison, and then on to the upper peninsula of Michigan.
That’s were he had gotten lost and was running out of gas when he saw the town that would shorten his life by many years and change what was left of it for the worse.


End part one.