Through The Valley by Yates, B.D. (feel good books .txt) 📕

at the weight in his hands and saw that it was the stone hammer he had dropped earlier, the flattened end of the head caked with gore.

Poke planted one foot on the floor and shook with effort as he tried to stand, his bloodied hands once more cradling the spear he had used to kill The Rev. Poke began using it as a cane, pulling himself up like a decrepit old man.  He was mumbling something under his breath. Emmit batted his eyes around the shed until he could half-see the dim silhouette of the weapon rack and shuffled towards it.

  Poke was holding the spear crookedly in front of him, staggering and nearly collapsing with each clumsy step. He looked like a hunchbacked monster with the fire pit casting angular shadows across his hate-twisted face. He was panting like a rabid wolf, and as he got within Emmit's small radius of sight, he finally saw what he had done to him.

  I couldn't have done any better if I had been aiming, he thought, backing up to the weapon rack and reaching around behind him to grab something.

  Poke's right eye was cocked sideways in its orbit, permanently fixed on the bridge of his nose. His remaining eye was impossibly wide and unflinching, locked on to Emmit's face like a human heat seeker. The actual wound in Poke's skull was difficult to see, but occasionally his lurching and swaying steps allowed some of the amber firelight to illuminate his goblin face, and Emmit could see a U-shaped indent mashed into the right side of Poke's temple. His eye socket had been caved in like the wall of a derelict old barn, and the only thing keeping Poke moving was pure, unfiltered loathing. He wasn't far off from being a Link himself.

  "Eye... for an eye, right, Poke?" Emmit goaded, his words slurring, misting blood. The room felt like it was lazily spinning around him, and Poke's broken body was the axis on which it spun. Emmit closed his hand around the wooden handle of a club, and he began to jostle it around and work at pulling it free.

  "Kill... you... fff..." Poke garbled, and he was close enough now that Emmit could hear the fat drops of blood pattering from his injuries like rain pounding a tin roof. His destroyed eye wiggled pitifully in the ruin of its socket, trying to keep pace with its healthier partner. Poke forced a disturbed smile, leveling the spear at Emmit's gut as a fresh rivulet of blood trickled across his rotten teeth. "Stick... you... like your... nig—"

  Poke never got to finish his final sentence. Emmit felt the club pull free of the rack, the hefty stone lashed to the end grinding across the floor. He tried to aim in Poke's general direction, but again he had to fight blind. He swung the club like a champion golfer, stepping into it, half using the dense stone's own weight and momentum and half using his waning strength. It swung up between Poke's hands, slamming the spear out of its way, and struck home right under his chin.

  To Emmit, the sound was like a sledgehammer striking a big bag of unshelled peanuts. Poke's head snapped back and out of sight so fast that Emmit initially thought he had decapitated him until it sprang back up into view, bouncing on his stretched neck like the spring-loaded clown in a Jack in the box. Both of Poke's feet left the floor, but he did not catch himself on the way back down. He crumpled up like an accordion, his spine and limbs contorting into extreme, unpleasant looking angles.  One boot tip tapped against the floor as his brain sent out a final few shocks, stuttering like the telegraph on a sinking ship.  Poke whimpered, the pitiful sound bubbling out with the blood that flooded from his lips and nose.

  Emmit finally allowed himself to relax, slumping against the weapon rack and gulping in breath. He hadn't realized that he'd been holding it in.

  Finish it.

  Poke was motionless; he remained still as Emmit stooped and picked up his cursed spear, knocking his slack hand free of it in the process.

  He's dead. But make sure. You have to be sure.

  Emmit turned the spear point-down and hoisted it with both hands like a man about to dig a fence post hole into sour earth.

  For Tim, for Pup, and for everyone else, he thought, with righteous vindication, and brought the spear down as forcefully as he could.

  It entered just under one of Poke's armpits (it was hard to discern which one it had been), stuttering off of a rib or two before lodging in his abdomen like a shovel in a mound of manure.  Poke didn't react to this new wound, not so much as a flinch or a cry. His twitching foot had even stopped doing its macabre tap dance. Poke was, finally, stone cold dead. Emmit stood alone in a room full of corpses.

  In a beaten and exhausted daze, Emmit imagined himself standing in the lower chamber of a giant hourglass, but instead of sand, a relentless stream of granulated snow was pouring down around him. It was up to his neck now; soon, he would be buried and finished. But he couldn't be done yet; there was still one loose end to tie up, one more to be brought to the gallows, and then he could give himself to the wilderness; throw himself upon the altar of fate, and let it decide what happened to him. The light would appear to him if it was meant to, and if it didn’t, he would die in the bed he had made.

  Roy needed to be put down too.

  Emmit found himself eying the weapon rack again, trying to calculate which one would be his best bet against the gargantuan leader of the