Planet Purgatory Read Online Free Page A

himself a cigarette.
    “You’re making a mistake,” he said, smoke escaping into the night sky. “Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned in this godforsaken place, it’s that you seize opportunity. Especially when it comes to women.”
    I stared into the campfire, memories of my ex-wives playing dimly through my mind. I loved them. Or had loved them. Especially my first wife, Jackie. I was a fool pushing her away. Truth was, I missed having a woman around. Laurie was beautiful, and there were times I wondered if I should invite her for dinner and maybe get to know her better. But who was I kidding? It could never happen. The farm wouldn’t allow it.
    I fell into a daze, absently playing with one of Rosie’s floppy ears, when a demon landed on a tree branch not even twenty yards from where we were sitting. It surprised me. I hadn’t seen any since my death, and I watched with quiet appreciation as it took in the scene below, its pupilless eyes glowing in the twilight. It was such a curious thing, looking at one campfire to the next, little hands clasped together like a diminutive old woman. I was picturing a purse dangling from one of its arms when the Scavenger picked up his rifle.
    “Don’t!” I said
    The Scavenger merely looked at me, and with his cigarette dangling from his mouth, he shot the demon, sending its leathery carcass plummeting to the ground.
    “I told you not to shoot it!”
    With nary a word, the Scavenger ambled over to the demon’s carcass, hunting knife in hand, and proceeded to saw away at the dead creature’s spiral horns. He returned looking pleased.
    “Gonna make some money off of these,” he said, with a satisfied grin.
    I wanted to hit him. No, I wanted to more than just hit him, and I stood up from the table to grab my gun leaning against my parents’ trailer. I was angry, angrier than I’d been in years, and I pointed it at his chest. My intention was to scare him. Instead, he smiled.
    “What is that?” he asked, referring to my yellow SYS branded rifle. “A flare gun?”
    “David!” my father shouted.
    I knew I’d made a mistake. I was always so calm. Distant. That’s what the chikka was for. But this man, this Scavenger, he’d woken something in me, something dark. I continued pointing the gun at him, finger on the trigger, until the familiar weight of my indifference brought me back to my seat.
    My father and mother took turns berating me while I hid behind a mugful of chikka. That Scavenger didn’t know how lucky he was; one more comment about my gun and they would have been picking up his pieces from the neighboring campfires.
    I sat there, feeling the liquor chase away the adrenaline from my system.
    The Scavenger, meanwhile, looked unperturbed. In fact, I think he enjoyed my outburst, and seemed intent on provoking another.
    “You’re a miserable bastard, aren’t you?”
    I glanced at the gun at my feet and then into the fire. I wasn’t going to let him goad me into something I knew I would regret. Not now.
    “Was he always like this?” he asked, turning to my father.
    “What, you mean since the incident?” I could see my father was really beginning to dislike this Derek the Scavenger. He was hiding it well, but there was something in his tone that I recognized.
    “No. Before that. On Earth. Was he this miserable there, too?”
    “It’s the chikka. You won’t find a harder worker than my son. He pushes himself from sunup to sundown. He was like that back home, but since coming here, it’s like he’s forgotten how to relax. So instead, he drinks.”
    The Scavenger’s lip rose into his trademark ugly smile. “I guess that choice to come out here really paid off for you, huh?”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
    “Look at you,” he said with a sneer. “You’ve already died once, and by the state of you, it won’t be long before it happens again.”
    He was taunting me. Now it was my turn.
    “You died, too, you know.”
    The