His flesh scorched and blackened in the flames of the cruiser, and Hugh screamed. She had left him to die – her own husband! He kicked and kicked until the melting windshield bent and broke, and climbed out onto the grass, his black uniform burning off him as he fell to the ground.
After a minute, he decided he wasn’t dead and got to his feet. It was surprisingly easy. One ear had succumbed to a constant ringing noise, but he had the use of both eyes and when he tried experimentally to speak, he found that his voice was barely affected. This would come in useful, as the telltale rumble of an approaching car was humming in his good ear. He snatched his revolver from its holster on his belt and heard a noise like cooking bacon, but felt nothing. The nerve endings must have burned off. He touched a hand to his face and felt the wet red muscle that showed through his peeling skin dispassionately.
The car was stopping. Of course it was. A cop cruiser was crashed on the side of the road. He lurched to the window, gun clenched in his sensationless hand.
“Get the fuck out,” he said. To the poor guy in the car, it looked as though he was living through Return of the Living Dead. He got the fuck out.

Blake thumbed the hammer on his gun, his scorched skull-face grinning manically. There was still flesh on it, if not a whole lot of skin left. He aimed the blue-black steel between the gambler’s legs and the staring blue eyes made contact with the gambler’s ice-grey.
“You want me to shoot your cock off?” said Blake.
“If I say no, will you leave?” said the gambler. Blake laughed, a croaky death-rattle that chilled Rita to the core. She’d never heard him laugh like that.
“I like you,” said Blake. “I wish you weren’t trying to fuck my wife, or I might have let you off for chasing Marion out earlier.”
“She needs a hospital,” said Heather. Blake spun around, his gun suddenly between her eyes.
“YOU THINK I DON’T?” he yelled. Then he sighed, covered his face with his free hand, and said: “Sorry. It’s just – I’m so sick of hearing from you. In fact-”
He pulled the trigger. This close up there was almost no face left, caved in by .45 inches of lead through the middle of the skull. The wall behind where the thing that had been Heather stood for a second was instantly painted red, flecked with pink specks of matter that slid down the wall.
Behind Blake, the door clattered as the woman with the short hair ran out. He heard her emptying her stomach on the step as Heather’s body got the memo and very slowly crumpled up onto the floor.
“Bitch,” said Blake, as if as an afterthought. “Fucking bitch.”
“What do you want?” said the gambler. Was his voice trembling just the tiniest bit? No, thought Blake. He was cool as a cucumber in a chest freezer. He laughed.
“This and that,” he said. Then he abruptly stopped. “Sit down.” The bar was full of frozen faces. “Everybody else, get out!”
All of a sudden, they were alone. Blake and Rita and the gambler were the only ones left.
“I want a lot of things,” said Blake. “Lots of things. I want people to tell me the truth when I ask them. I want my family to do what I tell them, because I always know best. I’m not like other people,” he tapped his temple with the barrel of his gun. “I see things a different way. More clearly.”
“You’re just a psychopath.”
“‘Just’? I strenuously object to that.” Blake lunged forward and grabbed the gambler by his coat. “Now siddown!” He yelled, and threw the larger man towards the table where the poker game had been ongoing until very recently.
“Hugh…” said Rita. She was struggling. Blake grunted and lurched over in her direction, his revolver swaying crazily between her and the gambler.
“Yes, darling?” he said with a cruelly sarcastic note in his voice. “Yes, o light of my life?” For a moment his finger twitched on the trigger and she thought he might end her then and there, but he apparently thought better of it and laid his index finger on the trigger guard parallel to the barrel.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and lifted a chair over her head, bringing it down like hell. Blake recoiled and his gun went off into the floor and kicked up splinters, and the gambler lunged forwards and grabbed his hand.
It took some control not to instantly recoil from the bare flesh and bone of the hand, but it was no matter either way as, to the gambler’s shock, Blake seemed to feel no pain at all no matter how hard he fought. He waved an arm and threw the gambler aside, thumbing the hammer of the revolver.
“Sit,” he said. “Before I make you suck the lead out of this fucking thing yourself.”
The gambler glanced at Rita, who had her head in her hands, and raised his own over his head. “I don’t want any trouble,” he said.
“Funny way of showing it!” said Blake with a hollow laugh. “Sit. There,” he said, pointing to the table with the abandoned half-finished poker game still left there in mid-hand like the legend of the ghost ship Mary Rose. “And deal them. Clean, mind. I’ll be watching.”
The gambler picked up the cards from the table and quickly cut the deck, dealing out cards one, two to himself and Blake. Then came the flop, the turn, the river. Five cards between them.
“What’s the stake? My life?” he asked.
“Your life,” said Blake. “Or hers. I win, you die. You win, she dies.”
“I don’t agree to those terms.”
Blake raised the gun. “You want me to do you first, or her? You play, or you both die. Remember who has the fucking gun.”
“Alright big man,” said the gambler. “Check your cards.”
Blake glanced down at his like he’d seen the big-shot players do on tv, the kind where the tables had the glass bottoms so the viewers at home could keep track of who had what. This table didn’t have a glass bottom. It was made of a hard, stable wood. But just like Blake it was rotten under the surface. That surface was on full display now, snarling and vile.
“No messing me around now,” said Blake. “Or I’ll do you like I did the bitch.”
“Heather,” said the gambler, and turned over the three flop cards. They were a seven, a king, and a four. Blake’s poker face was impeccable, only helped by how little of his face there was left to show emotion. The gambler looked down at his cards again. He was faking nervousness, and Blake knew it. What he was counting on was that his double-bluff would be taken for a single – or maybe a triple. This really was a bad start for him. He quickly composed himself, or made a show of pretending to, and looked coolly at the horror opposite him, his head inclined downward. It was as if the cards were really what interested him, and the man was an afterthought.
“If I fold, what happens?”
“I kill you,” said Blake.
“And if you have to fold?”
“I kill her. Then we keep playing ’til I kill you.”
“That hardly seems fair.”
“Life isn’t fair. I have a gun.”
“I thought you said you’d let me go if I won.”
Blake shook his head. “I said I’d kill her. I didn’t say you’d walk.” He played with the hammer of the revolver.
The gambler turned over the fourth card. A two of hearts. He noticed that Blake was favouring his left side. There was only the river left.
“Seems like my only choices are to die.”
He turned over the river. Ace. Spades. Obviously.
“That’s the only choice any of us get,” said Blake. “Time to find out.”
The gambler turned over his cards and then flung himself to the left. The revolver boomed and splinters flew up from the floor, and Blake stood up, knocking the chair back behind him.
They struggled over the gun briefly, frantically. It went off once, but they struggled on. It boomed again. This time they stopped. Blake fell forwards, a hole punctured through the bottom of his bloody jaw and through his brain. One of his eyeballs had burst from the pressure, and the clear jelly was leaking onto the gambler’s shoe. He had his own problems. Namely the slug in his belly.

He walked as far as he could with Rita towards the white light of the hospital on the edge of town, but after a while the pain got too much and he had to sit down for just a moment. She was a silhouette walking down the side of the road as he died.
Maybe she made it to the hospital, got the help they could give her.
Maybe was as good as any of them got.