The Outkast

Chapter 15

Something was wrong. Very wrong.

The Outcast couldn’t put his finger on it, but the curdling foreboding that kept swelling within his bowels warned him something just wasn’t right, and he’d better act fast before a chain reaction of catastrophes began.

But what? What? What was wrong and what should he do to right it?

For the first time in a long while, he became deeply discombobulated.

After he had snatched the boy from his bedroom and placed him in the backseat of his SUV, all doors locked, he had intended to return to the woman’s house, where the two deputies were. Had intended to return so as to kill them both. Returned he had, but killing both sheriff’s officers he hadn’t. He had fatally wounded one and then run off without even making an attempt to do the second officer in.

He had never left a job unfinished. Never. Until tonight.

What had come upon him? Why did he become so restless at that instant-at the very instant when he could have cut down two more enemies? And why had that antsy feeling haunted him till this very moment?

Sitting in the gloom of his room, he felt distraught.

Now, he was shaking. Shaking with rage and frustration. Rage because he had just failed himself for the first time since the start of this purging mission; frustration because he just couldn’t figure out why everything had started sliding south.

He rose from his recliner, dashed across the blackness of his den, blood pulsing through the veins on his temples. The thin-layered darkness in the lightless room blended into the thick one building up inside him.

What should he do?

First, he would need to find a way to decipher the problem. Then, he would have to understand the best action to take to quench the fire so as to prevent himself from being ravaged.

He walked out of his den, going toward the pantry now, going to fall off the wagon and relapse into his past life. For almost two years, he had been a teetotaler, an exercise engineered as part of the rituals he had to fulfill in order to accomplish his mission. However, two weeks ago, he had stowed away two bottles of his two favorite wines (in his past life). He had done so with the hope that soon, he would have a one-shot celebration, drinking with his True Blood as they both toasted the absolute fall of their enemies, but he hadn’t gotten the wines for the purpose of permanently falling off the wagon.

Steering clear of the deception and clutches of the bottle had enabled him to think and act with precision. But tonight, he might just as well fall into the hole of the bottle once more, because the power of reasoning had been stolen away from him. He just couldn’t think.

Tonight, his composure was falling apart.

He opened the cabinet, brought out one of the bottles, but quickly replaced it in its niche. He closed the cabinet door and ran out of the pantry.

He dashed across to his recliner and fell upon it. With his face buried in his hands, he let out a deep growl of frustration.

From a room, Robert Smallwood was shouting something in an urgent and sonorous voice.