With a crack it was already there, almost instantly, the whole way through the valley and into the ass of a coyote. The creature made off, limping and yelping until it found cover from vigilance--shrouded under the shade of a tall free-standing rock.
"Missed," exclaimed Zec, with the same inflection as somebody eating a cockroach. His rifle work had been getting shoddy since the supermarket opened in town. It was a shame, having something so convenient for a place so rural and quaint. The picture that always formed in my head of places like this: where the sun and dust swirled together and invaded your breath like a chain-smoking aunt, where the people were still truly the salt of the earth, by reason of merit or death--something akin to a Wal-Mart or Target in such a desert shanty town was like bringing a soda machine into a village of starving Congo people.
It seemed such overkill, such unfair competition to the rest of the area, but they did have damn good steaks, and Zec could scarcely resist a good deal. Now the only hunting he was doing was for the broad side of Coyotes and the occasional wayward scorpion or diamondback, and his aim was starting to reflect that.
The cacti wave at him from along the trail-head to his house. Out in the middle of nowhere would be a bit of a stretch, since he was only a days walk away from a place to hitchhike, but when he stepped onto his front porch, sipped his coffee, and listened to the squealing planks under his feet to beg for euthanasia, Zec looked over the whole of the country side and decided that this was near enough in the middle of nowhere.
There was a fine film of dust in every crevice imaginable. The smallest lizard had dust on it, as did the biggest cliff. Every cactus, animal, mineral or vegetable was coated in a fine film of the stuff, so much so that even Mike Carnegie, the town of Little Rabbit's one and only police officer, seemed to enter every building in a wisp of arcane steam. The door filter filtered in bands of light that betrayed the pattern of their intricate descent onto the ground