Viper

78

Parco Nazionale del Vesuvio News of the fresh body sites spread like a bushfire across the excavation site. Franco Castellani didn't know it, but this was the reason why he was able to slip, unseen, past the carabinieri and down the steep Vesuvian hillside.

As the rugged parkland gave way to the winding, potholed road that took busloads of tourists to the summit, he jammed the old Glock back into the waistband of his jeans. The retching had stopped but his head was still pounding and he remained desperately thirsty.

On the road below, filled with noise and crowds of people, he felt strangely alien again. Alone in the woods he'd enjoyed not being stared at or whispered about. Now that luxury was gone.

The old horrors were back.

A middle-aged man stepped from a Mercedes and frowned when he saw him; a woman crossing the road turned her head to check what she'd seen; a mother, bending down to fasten her toddler's coat, shielded the child's eyes when she spotted him. All standard stuff. All layers of humdrum humiliation that were regularly piled on top of him. But today Franco felt more vulnerable than ever. Today he felt bad enough to shoot them all.

Every fucking one of them.

The Glock could end their prejudice, wipe it all out in just a single, sweet burst of ear-splitting gunfire. His blood fizzed at the thought of it.

Umberto Leopardi kept an old supermercato on a road off the junction with the A3. He also kept bottled water in stacked trays just inside the door. Two litres of Ferrarelle, fresh from the nearby Val D'Assano, vanished before Umberto had even looked up from the counter. Near the front window of neighbouring Buscaglia's was a rack of stacked snacks. Two fat packs of patatine fritte disappeared with the same deftness as had the water.

Franco took his meagre hoard to one of the places he and Paolo frequented near the visitors' entrance of Pompeii. The rain started again as he sat behind the street hoardings near the railway line and hurriedly fumbled the bottled water to his mouth. From his shelter he watched families and couples passing on the street. The feelings of loneliness and isolation multiplied inside him – bred like the mutant cells that were silently murdering him.

Exiled.

An outsider. That's what he was. Sitting with the sodden rubbish behind the hoardings, he'd never felt as low as he did right now. His fumbling, claw-like hand found the Glock.

Soon he would use it.

Soon they would understand the true depths of his pain.