Savage Gerry , livre ebook

Ecw Press - John Jantunen

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185 pages

English

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' John Jantunen consistently zigs where other narratives would zag, creating a story that is far stranger and disturbing. Shelf Awareness A thrilling apocalyptic tale that rushes from the inside of a prison to a world that feels even more dangerous. The End couldn t have come at a better time for Gerald Nichols. Dubbed Savage Gerry by the media, Gerald Nichols became a folk hero after he shot the men who d killed his wife and then fled into the northern wilds with his thirteen-year-old son, Evers. Five years after his capture, he s serving three consecutive life sentences when the power mysteriously goes out at the prison. The guards flee, leaving the inmates to die, but Gerald s given a last-minute reprieve by a jailbreak. Released into a mad world populated by murderous bands of biker gangs preying on scattered settlements of survivors, his only hope of ever reuniting with his son is to do what he swore he never would: become Savage Gerry all

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Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	13 avril 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781773056906
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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Savage Gerry A Novel
John Jantunen

Contents Dedication Epigraph 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 Acknowledgments About the Author Copyright

Dedication
For Drake

Epigraph
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
— Willian Faulkner

1
Four Harleys led the way. Their riders were clad all in black leather and had shaven heads, their faces painted as white as bone and their mouths tattooed with the imprint of skeletal grins so that they more resembled ghouls than men. They rode two by two under a star-fraught sky carrying hell’s own thunder along this country road, its two lanes enshrouded by spruce and pine and cedar trees broken at intervals by scattered settlements — groups of four or five houses clustered around gas stations and country stores and shuttered motels, their gravel driveways and unmowed lawns enclosing domiciles as dark as tombs. At their approach twitches, like nervous ticks, parted the drape of curtained windows, revealing prying eyes widened in muted horror as if these were but the vanguard for an army of the vengeful dead, or the crest of a wave they expected to rear up at any moment and whelm them under.
Onwards they rode ever north, espying none of the palpitations spurned in their wake, blind to the world beyond the scour of their headlights upon the blacktop ahead. At last they passed a lone bungalow moored some ten feet above the road upon a granite ledge. The house was fashioned out of wood panels the colour of honey and roofed with cedar shake and had an expansive porch cobbled together out of chinked logs. From its rails hung crudely embossed signs — Folk Art and Mennonite Furniture and Live Bait and Ice Cream and Cold Drinks and Fireworks! — and above these there perched a smattering of woodland creatures: a brace of squirrels upraised on their hinds and chipmunks poised in furious ascent along its vertical beams, a martin caught mid-slink and frogs mid-croak, racoons rearing with expressions of curious bemuse from each of its posts. Amongst them their creator sat hunched over in a pine rocking chair. He was an old man, clean shaven and wearing a long-sleeved plaid flannel shirt and a wide-brimmed hat made of straw and banded by sweat. In his right hand he held a hook-bladed carving knife and was using this to tease his latest creation from the block of rock maple in his lap, neither that nor the shavings scattered about his slippered feet giving any clue as to what it might become. Another chipmunk perhaps, or maybe a squirrel (and why not?). As the motorcycles sounded their trumpet, he looked up with the idle contempt of someone who’s seen everything and wouldn’t at all have been surprised if the devil himself had appeared at the foot of his stairs proffering to him his heart’s content, which at that moment wouldn’t have amounted to anything more than an ice-cold bottle of beer.
The Harleys had barely passed when there arose a splash of light and a rumble from beyond the southward bend in the road. These heralded the approach of a transport truck hauling a flatbed trailer on which loomed an excavator of a size amenable to moving mountains. Lounged upon its treads were a half dozen men and there were others sitting in precarious recline on the roof of its cab, all of them cradling rifles of a military grade and drawing on cigarettes with the plaintive deliberation of soldiers being carried off to war. Hitched behind that was a second trailer. It was smaller than the first and lit with spans of Christmas lights strung between the steel posts affixed to its corners. Within their festive glow the old carver could see it had been furnished to resemble a parlour now set to rocking and reeling with a motley assemblage of musicians: two men with fiddles on a couch and a man with a banjo sitting in an easy chair, another hammering at the keys of an upright piano and one plucking at the strings of a stand-up bass, a sixth astride a three-legged stool, pounding out a chaotic rhythm on a snare drum and cymbal. They were all garbed in the vestments of simple country folk — dungarees, coveralls and plain white T-shirts or bare-chested — and one of them was singing, the old man could not tell of which. All he could make out of the song itself was a single line, sung thrice with the exuberant lilt of an old-timey barn hall jig.
Raise a little hell, raise a little hell, raise a little hell!
The voice and the music were both then swallowed by the gust of wind spurned by the trailer’s passing and the old man turned towards the bend in the road again, seeking out with plaintive eyes any wonders this night might yet still behold. A moment later there was another splash of light and this heralded the approach of a white cube van, unremarkable except that it was followed by another grim rider, a perfect duplicate of the ones that had come before save for the flagpole affixed to the back of his seat. From this there billowed a standard emblazoned with a green and leafy tree cast upon a hilltop against a diffusion of reds and oranges such as might colour the sky approaching dusk.
The old man knew then whence this strange caravan had come and the only thing left unresolved was the matter of where it was going. He barely had a breath to ponder on that before he heard the crackling scorn of his wife’s voice straining through the screened window at his back.
What in the devil was that all about? she asked and her husband turned northward, scanning the road and probing deeply of its dark, searching out any and all of its possible ends.
I do believe, he said at last, they’re headed for the prison.

2
He awoke with Millie’s voice still ringing in his head.
Gerald! she cried, startling him awake from the dream and into the dark, his hands flailing, reaching out as if he meant to comfort her and finding only a cement wall, its cold and hard so at odds with her warm and soft that he was at a sudden loss to explain where he might have been.
His head ached as if it had been pressed into a vice and his tongue throbbed like a slug baking in the sun. When he inhaled, the air was enlivened by the stench of rotting meat, so rank he could hardly breathe, and only then did he remember where he was: locked in a prison cell with a dead man. He could hear the thrum of flies, and the traipse of them over his cheeks and within his bushman’s beard spoke to him of his own future, no different than Orville Gates’s, all two hundred and eighty pounds of whom lay stretched beneath a blanket against the back wall of the cell, dead now these past five days.
The stench of his putrefaction had soured the air with such a pungency that it seemed to have impregnated Gerald’s lips and his tongue, his very skin, curing him like a gutted pig strung from the rafters in his grandfather’s smokehouse. As he rolled over, burying his face in his pillow, he clung to this memory, conjuring in his mind the subtle waft of porcine-infused smoke seeping from its chimney, recalling how his grandfather always used white oak when smoking his hogs. There weren’t a wood that burned cleaner, he’d told Gerald no more than a week after he’d come to live with the old man on his farm at the end of Stull Street, Gerald then a boy of seven. His grandfather explaining, Everything else would be like if we used swamp water to make lemonade. The old man swore he could tell by the subtle variations in the smoke’s flavour the exact moment the meat was cured and when the time was drawing nigh he’d circle the smokehouse following its drift, his nose upraised, stopping every now and again to flick his tongue against the cleft in his top lip with the deft precision of a lizard, as if when the meat was ready he’d be able to taste it.
Gerald peppering this reminiscence with a myriad of details as if through sheer force of imagination he might be able to trick the stench into abeyance. The swish of timothy grass against his legs as he followed his grandfather’s endless circling. The crunch of pebbles beneath his shoes as he traversed the pile behind the smokehouse, left over from when the old man had dug the new well. The taste of clover which Gerald would suckle from the flower’s multiform spikes, same as his grandfather, who’d told him that the sweet perfume of its nectar cleansed the palate. Grasshoppers knocking against his legs and the pinch of their claws when one landed on his arm. The electric whine of cicadas from the woods and the trollop of frogsong from the ditch along the road, the restless fret of chickens scratching for grubs in the yard. How, whenever his grandfather stopped to take a whiff, his right hand would come to rest on the butt of the Smith & Wesson revolver holstered on his belt, which he always wore though it had been years since he’d retired from the RCMP. His left hand would scratch at the scruff of his beard and he’d look ever so much like a sheriff catching a whiff of trouble on the horizon in one of those old westerns they used to watch.
On and on he went but no matter how he inhabited the memory he couldn’t inure his thoughts to the embalming force of Orville’s decay. His right hand, in the meantime, had slipped beneath his undershirt and had come to rest on the plastic laminated shell encasing the picture hung around his neck on a shoelace. He had the sudden urge to pull it out but was stalled in this, a