When Davis regained consciousness, he knew he was in trouble.

He’d been walking peaceably down Cemetery Road – a broad, tree-lined avenue on Milton’s outskirts – just after dinner. Dappled spots of sunlight peppered the tarmac and he’d stopped to listen to a thrush as it trilled and sang the start of the evening.

A pickup truck sped by, going much too fast. Davis shook his head. He knew the type: taking the wrong parts of life far too seriously and ignoring everything they didn’t or couldn’t understand. This is a lot to infer from a sunburned arm hanging out of the window of a battered red pickup truck; some would say the gun rack in the cab and the empties rattling around the flatbed were also somewhat indicative.

About a hundred and fifty yards up the road, the truck came to an abrupt halt. Davis wondered if they’d taken offence to his headshaking, and steeled himself for more semi-intelligible abuse. Each had their favourites: The ignorant young bulls would mock his skin colour, young women would giggle behind their hands at his dated clothing and mothers would gather their children close at his perceived uncleanliness. There was less of that nowadays, though. Nowadays, blessedly, the few people he encountered just ignored him.

With a worrying screech and a grinding of gears, the truck began to reverse. It came faster and faster down the road at Davis, until too late he realised that he should be getting out of the way.

 ______________________________________________________

Regaining consciousness was like a full-body cluster headache. There was a searing pain behind his eyes and a fiery sensation down the left side of his scalp, and the rest of his body hadn’t fared much better. He catalogued his aches, reasoning that if he could feel a body part, it must still be attached. By his initial calculation, he had several more body parts than he’d started with.

Standing over him were two young men – Davis struggled to think of them as anything other than Good Ol’ Boys, because that would be stereotyping, and as a frequent victim of the practice, Davis was vehemently opposed to it, even if, as in this case, the shoe very obviously fit. He was snobbishly egalitarian.

He held out his hand, in the hopes that the young men would help him up, but neither did. The boy on the right actually recoiled, and so slowly, without assistance, Davis stood up.

“Can I help you gents?” Davis asked politely, brushing himself off as casually as he could with his left hand, despite the pain. The boy on the left gawped at him, an air rifle held at an angle across his chest. He looked to Davis like a kid hanging on to a security blanket. “Was there something I can do for you?” he continued, hoping to at least assess the situation before he was shot.

“You shut your dirty mouth, you… You dusky bastard!” the first boy said, producing the words like an uncertain magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, a rabbit he wasn’t really sure was there, words that clearly weren’t his own. Probably his grandfather’s or his preacher’s. “We’ll do the talking, right, Ellis?”

Under his baseball cap, Ellis nodded fervently, clutching his rifle-cum-binky. Judging by the state of them, you’d think the boys had finally cornered the boogeyman. It took Davis considerable effort not to roll his eyes, but he managed. They were young and they were armed and they’d been drinking. Davis took no chances.

After standing in silence for nearly two minutes, Davis decided to chance his arm. “I’m sorry, but was there something I can do for you? You clearly have something you’d like to discuss.”

Dale, the group’s mouthpiece, looked at Ellis, who looked back at him, pleadingly. Dale returned his gaze to Davis, staring him unsettlingly in the face.

“Uh, now we wanna know what you people have been doing with our women!” Dale said, and regained his composure.  “There used to be lots of girls in this town, and now they’re gone. This was a nice town, and then you people started showing up, and it’s all gone to hell.”

Despite himself, Davis was relieved. This would be easy enough to explain: Economics. When the mill closed almost six years ago, the town had held out as best it could against the economic forces against it, but things had started to go south, fast. Families couldn’t make the mortgage payments, banks foreclosed, people left town. Soon, the sons and daughters of those who were still prospering in Milton were leaving town straight out of high school – for college and jobs and points unknown – never to return. Not permanently, anyways. These two young men had probably left high school and gone straight into farming or vocational jobs just before the mill closed. They’d seen their friends and plenty of others their age practically vanish overnight. It must have been one hell of a shock. Still, many of those who’d stayed behind were glad of the new wave of people moving to Milton: older folks, many of them well-off urbanites looking to retire to the country, snapping up vacant properties and creating a mini-land boom. Unfortunately, this meant that the young locals who had opted to stay were finding it harder to afford a house in their hometown. It was all just a series of…

Davis realised they were staring blankly. Dale was practically drooling.

“What is he saying?” said Ellis, his head cocked to one side, like a spaniel.

“I do not know”, said Dale, “and I don’t know why we’re bothering to talk to him, either. Most of them are so stupid that they can’t even understand proper English.”

Affronted, Davis drew himself up to his full height. With as much dignity as he could muster, he thrust out his bony chest.  “I am a Harvard graduate, I’ll have you know.”

“What’d he say, Ellis?”

“I dunno, Dale. Sounded like ‘Imma huva gruh’ to me!” The two good ol’ boys fell about, laughing.

Davis was momentarily relieved. Being a figure of fun was infinitely safer than being seen as a threat. Relaxing, Davis held his hand out to the boys in a conciliatory gesture.

Without warning, Ellis cocked the rifle, took aim, and fired. Davis, shot in the hand he still held outstretched, was too stunned and frightened to anything. The silence that followed the shot was still, and almost restful.

“Damnit, Ellis; what’d you do that for?”

A look of shame passed instantly over Ellis’ face, and then cleared, like clouds scudding across a summer sky. “Well,” said Ellis grinning, “It ain’t like he’s gonna feel it!” Their braying laughter echoed through the trees.

He was right. Davis felt no pain in his left hand, which had been shot clean through just below the index finger. The digit dangled oddly as Davis brought it up to eye level to examine the damage. There was no pain, only shock and surprise.

It occurred to Davis that it wasn’t their fear that bothered him: no, he was rather used to that. There weren’t many of his kind in these parts, and that made him a target for fear. He’d learned to live with it. No, what bothered him was the ignorance. Turning the hand this way and that to examine the damage done by the gunshot, he felt both the bile and the anger rise in his throat. The wilful ignorance of some people – and Davis was not a swearing man – but the wilful ignorance of some people really got on his fucking nerves. They’d stood here, the three of them, on a pleasant summer’s evening and had a quite civil conversation about the local economy, and then, for no reason other than because he felt he could, that little punk in the designer t-shirt shot had him. Right. In. The hand. Looking closely, he could see that the bullet (or possibly being hit by Dale’s pickup truck) had put rather a large nick in his Harvard class ring, and that, if you’ll excuse the phrase, is what really pissed Davis off.

Oh, he’d had quite a temper in his youth, did Davis, and so he wasn’t too surprised to see that Dale and Ellis were beginning to back away slowly. Dale had blanched, and Ellis had broken out in a considerable sweat.

In a moment of clarity, he knew immediately what he had to do: he threw his hand at Dale.

The severed appendage he’d been gesturing with shot out of his right hand and bounced limply off of Dale’s chest. Stunned, Dale looked down at the hand and ran. Ran for his ignorant, inbred, pissant life. Stumbling and grunting, he tore into the woods. Looking back for Ellis, he tripped on a branch and fell, knocking himself out with a sickening crunch.

Ellis, meanwhile, had missed this entirely: foolishly, he’d run for the truck. Davis followed him, pacing himself at a steady jog, and reflecting that if Ellis hadn’t been such an ignorant little shit, he might have stopped to wonder about how fast Davis really could move, and to wonder if he himself could move faster. Davis had lettered in track in high school, and had joined the tennis club at Harvard. He was fast. And quiet.

Dropping the gun, Ellis scrabbled at the door handle, fear and sweat robbing his hands of traction. His relief was palpable when he looked behind him and saw that Davis was gone. It was for the sheer joy of it then, that Davis tapped Ellis on the right shoulder to get his attention before smashing his knees with the air rifle in a solid backhand that would have done Harvard proud.

Ellis crumpled with a screech as his knees gave way. Davis stood over him, holding the rifle by the barrel. He paused to contemplate Ellis’ fate as the boy half-crawled, half-dragged himself away. Davis knew this sort of behaviour was contemptible and beneath him, but he had the wider community to think of. If these young men were capable of running down and shooting someone for nothing other than ignorant sport, was it not his duty to protect others from the same fate?

And so it was without remorse that Davis crept silently up behind Ellis while he wept, broke the boy’s scrawny, pink neck and ate his brains.

His tasty, tasty braaains.