One Shot

"Wait!"

The middle-aged man drew a relieved breath; the scent of mildew and mold from the dilapidated grocery store flooded his senses. It would appear the gunman was at least willing to listen to his plea. With his hands raised, he slowly inched his calloused hand over to his collar, and carefully removed a delicate heart-shaped locket. Keeping his eyes trained on his would-be executioner, he held up the trinket, showing that it was of no threat.

"My name is Sean," the hostage calmly stated with a slow and disarming voice. "I have a sick wife, and we desperately need food." Sean tossed the locket down the aisle, watching it flicker through columns of daylight. He tried carefully to spot where it landed so if needed, he could find his prized treasure among the debris. “Just let me go with what I’ve found, and everyone gets to walk away.”

Sean turned his gaze back to the armed man and paused for another second trying to gauge his intentions. Like him, the gunman was thin, perhaps a little shorter, and covered from head to heel in scavenged survival gear. Unlike Sean, however, this man was sporting a bulletproof vest, marred by a hole from when the vest had saved its bearer's life once before. Much to the prisoner's discomfort, he could not discern his captor's motives, as his captor’s face was obscured by a checkered bandana and the shotgun whose sights were unmistakably aimed at his torso.

Aside from the ambient sound of the breeze hitting the remains of the building, they each stared at the man across from him in complete silence, unsure of what to make of the other. The war that had wiped out the majority of mankind had nearly guaranteed that this moment would last until one of them made a move. There was a palpable tension between the pair; one eager to know his fate, and the other hesitant to deal it. After an eternity had passed, the armed assailant finally spoke with an awkward teenaged voice. “If you move, I’ll put a slug square in your chest.”

The teen anxiously stepped towards the locket, being sure to not break eye contact with his hostage. He hunched down, clumsily attempting to keep his advantage trained on Sean, using his off-hand to fumble around blindly for the memento. As soon as he had it in his grasp, he shot up, and nervously tightened his grip upon his firearm, as if to reaffirm to himself his control of the situation.

“Listen,” reasoned Sean. Feeling emboldened by the youth’s hesitation, he slowly started to lower his hands. “Tell me your name.”

“Brandon,” the teen curtly replied, still unsure of the situation. “Keep your hands up.”

Sean immediately resumed the position. “Ok, Brandon. Let’s just talk.”

Another awkward moment of silence passed between the two. Brandon finally shifted some of his focus towards the heart-shaped locket and he thumbed open the clasp. Inside was a water-damaged picture of a young couple from before the war. The photo would seem almost alien when compared to the hopeless sight of the world around them. A younger version of Sean, with his dark hair neatly groomed and the lines of hardships yet to crease his face, was captured in a moment of bliss. The reason for his joy was obvious; A bright-eyed woman with long flowing blonde locks was hanging onto him, arms draped over his shoulders in a loving embrace.

Brandon pulled his eyes away from the otherworldly image of a different era, tossed the keepsake back towards Sean, and watched it land on the ground in no man’s land. “I’m really sorry about your wife man, I really am. But it's a hard life. Everybody's gotta eat and the guy with the gun eats first. Empty your bag and give me all the food you’ve got.”

“It’s hardly even scraps, would you really kill me for it?”

“Only if you’re willing to die for it,” Brandon quipped back. He let out a low and sorrowful breath and reasoned “Look dude, you’re not the only one with a family. I have a kid brother who depends on me. Maybe my problems aren’t as bad as yours, but they might be tomorrow or the day after that. You’d do the same.”

Sean digested those words for a moment and didn’t offer any argument against them. Survival in a post-war wasteland was a herculean challenge, and a person would be hard-pressed to find another who hadn’t done something that would haunt them to see the next tomorrow.

The greater question still hung in the air nonetheless. Was Sean willing to die for the meager haul he had found? His wife, the love of his life, was an oasis in an otherwise miserable existence. Without her, all of the agony and suffering he has endured, all of the unsavory and impossible decisions he had made so they can survive would be as pointless as the war that had put them there.

Perhaps he could look elsewhere, but that was a gamble. Times have already become desperate enough that it could be days, maybe a week before he might come across some more food. Most of the obvious spots to find something to eat have already been well picked over, and he was lucky to find the few tins of food he did. The hunger pains were already insufferable. His wife was sick, and if she were to make it, she would need all of her strength. No, this was it. He had to make it back to her with something to nourish them.

Sean deflected Brandon's question and asked “Tell me about your family.”

Despite Brandon's face being covered, it was easy to tell from his shifting body posture that he was becoming annoyed with his detainee’s resistance to his demands. “My family? What about them?” he asked with a puzzled tone.

“Where is your Father, your mother? You sound a little young to have made it this far into the apocalypse on your own.”

“They’re Dead,” Brandon stated with a quiet and solemn voice.

“What happened?”

“We had scraped by for a few years after the bombs fell. My mom was a nurse so she insisted on helping any survivors who needed her, but they all came and went. I… I can't quite remember exactly what happened.” Brandon eased his grip on the shotgun, losing himself a little as he tried to recall his memories. “I was off playing somewhere and heard my dad call me. When I got to them, there were a couple men with guns and bullet-proof vests screaming at my mom. One of them was Injured and bleeding a lot. My dad handed me my baby brother and told me to go hide while he helped mom.”

Sean, realizing that he might have touched on a soft spot for the teen, ever so slowly started inching towards his captor. Even if he felt genuinely sorry for the kid, he needed to keep him talking if he was going to make it out of this.

“Why would they be screaming at your mother?”

Starting to choke up, Brandon continued to recall what he could, stopping only for a brief second to halfways collect himself. “My mom kept telling him ‘I can’t help him! I can't help him!’ but the angry guy just wouldn’t stop shouting. My… My dad tried to hold him back when he got right up in my mom's face but he...” At this point, He took in a deep snotty breath through his nose as tried his best to keep himself together, but the tormented youth was beginning to break down.

“It’s ok Brandon. No kid should have to go through that.” Sean kept creeping forward. It wasn’t clear if Brandon didn’t notice he was maybe a few feet closer to him now, or if the cathartic release of his trauma simply made the teen not care, but either way, Sean's chance of getting out of this and back to his wife seemed to hinge on him getting control of the gun.

Now that the teen had finally been given the chance to be vulnerable, probably for the first time in years, he became swept up in a hurricane of emotion. Brandon kept on with his story, his voice wavering as he completely broke into tears.

“He shot my dad! He shot him right there as I watched from around the corner! My mom screamed and tried to run, then he shot her too! I ran and hid with my brother for I don’t know how long. I finally went back and both of them were dead. The bleeding guy was also dead. I took everything I could carry, and ran off with my brother.”

Brandon had taken one of his hands off the shotgun and reached to wipe his tears from his face. In this fleeting moment, Sean decided this was his shot. It would have been better to wait until he was a little closer, but he couldn’t count on Brandon making this foolish mistake again.

Sean desperately lunged forward at the sobbing gunman, hoping he could at least gain enough control of the weapon so it would no longer be pointed at him. After a second, Brandon realized what was going on and let out a startled shout. He snapped his hand back to the shotgun, and in a panic, squeezed the trigger sending out a deafening blast. He was too late however, as Sean had scarcely been able to get his hand on the barrel, narrowly managing to divert the lethal payload away from his face.

The slug only by a hair's breadth missed its mark, but Sean immediately recoiled as the powder from the blast seared the flesh on his cheek and ear. Barely able to hold on to the gun, he threw a reckless off-hand punch into the boy's ribs, but in his famished, weakened state, his haymaker was effortlessly absorbed by body armor. Brandon was quick to take advantage of this, pulling the gun free from Sean's grip, and sent the butt of the gun into the man’s jaw. Dazed and staggered, Sean toppled backwards to the ground.

With his last bit of strength, the broken man pathetically attempted to crawl away from Brandon as he tried to come to his senses. The scent of mold and mildew was now replaced with blood and gunpowder, and the eerie silence was cut by the chilling sound of a shotgun ejecting its spent cartridge. Among the debris, Sean could see his precious heart-shaped locket, shining like a light at the end of a tunnel. He had failed his wife, and it truly broke his heart to know that now she will probably die a slow, agonizing death, too weak to save herself from sickness and starvation.

“You just had to give me the food!” the victor shouted, wiping the snot and tears from his face. The sound of Brandon’s footsteps crunching on the rubble grew closer to his victim. “I didn’t want this.”

Spitting out blood from some laceration inside his mouth, Sean turned over, taking one final look at the last person he would ever see. “Do you think this is what your parents would have wanted? Your parents tried to help people!”

Brandon’s emotions were now wild, swirling chaotically between sadness, confusion, and anger. With wrath dripping from his voice, he scolded the helpless man. “My parents would have wanted for me and my brother to survive.”

“So now you’re just going to shoot me?”

“No,” labored the teen as he began lifting a large piece of rubble. Brandon hoisted the massive load above his head and condemned his prey. “That was my only shot.”