Free The Heart Does Not Grow Back: A Novel by Fred Venturini Page A

move, hoping that playing dead might prevent him from shooting me again.
    Another gunshot made me flinch, but it echoed differently, farther away. I rolled onto my side and saw the muzzle flash in the darkness, in the front yard, closer to the house. He wasn’t going to waste good bullets. Screams grew in frequency. Another flash. More screams, most of them of fear, but some were awful groans of pain, cries for help, dying teenagers begging for their parents, turned almost infantile by pain and impending death. I had no doubt that Clint was gut-shooting them, and was thankful that it was too dark to see the full scale of the massacre. Kids were scattering now, into the shadows, the woods, the fields, running for their lives. Another gunshot.
    I saw Regina’s body lying by the truck. Her face was nearly perfect, somehow bloodless. A patch of gray tissue was sticking to her right temple, where most of her skull was gone, her head looking like a bitten apple. Seeing her that way, the gun, Clint—none of it scared me. I wanted to destroy him. I wanted to rise up, absorb another shot, and make him feel pain and loss. I wanted him to cry instead of laugh, to hurt, to wail in agony, to know what it felt like to see people you care about lifeless on a country road. But Clint was beyond my reach. Men like him are beyond the reach of normal punishment, of real justice, making their violence all the more infuriating. If he lived it would be to gloat; if he died I was sure it would be by his own hand.
    Mack was still facedown on the pavement, showing no signs of life. My legs wobbled, and I knelt beside him, gunshots ringing into the country air, giving a triple crackle with each report as they echoed off the trees in the distance. Maybe Clint would come back for more bullets. Maybe Regina would stir, or give me some last words, or somehow be capable of living with her injury. Miracles could happen, couldn’t they? She simply could not be dead; we had not discussed her note yet. She still had good news to tell me.
    I stared into the sky, the stars masked by wisps of clouds that could not strangle their brightness. I think I smiled at how pretty it was. I heard Mack groan a little, stirring, perhaps regaining consciousness at the very moment I was drifting away.
    *   *   *
    Clint violated Regina with the barrel of his father’s .44 Magnum Colt Anaconda before putting his own flesh to work. Large-bore pistols were favorite novelty items for the hunting enthusiasts in the area, and despite the mule kick of that particular hand cannon, he handled it like a savage professional. The slugs disintegrated my hand and turned most of Mack’s shoulder into tendon shreds and bone dust. Yet another slug had killed Regina, leaving three in the barrel. He calmly reloaded on his way to the party, and killed three more kids with his next five shots. With one bullet left, he swallowed the barrel and pulled the trigger. I imagined him tasting Regina’s blood and juices mixed with gunmetal, the barrel burning his lips around the mix, gagging him with it, making it easy to pull the trigger.
    In times like this, people ask why. They try to assign blame. I remember the look in Clint’s eyes when we were banging on neighborhood mailboxes. He was crumbling inside, and when the damage was complete, he’d have the backbone for his endgame. For Clint, the humiliation of me thrashing him publicly, along with Mack besting him by messing around with Regina, had completed the collapse. After that, pulling the trigger was easy. It didn’t stop everyone from asking questions, from wondering what video games he played, what movies he watched, what his parents were like. They scoured his phone for text messages, for music playlists, for Internet browsing habits. They groped for reasons, as they always did. They found nothing. I drifted in and out of a numb haze. My hand hurt like hell, each pulse blooming into an explosive throb that made me want to scream. I