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''JOHNNY COME LATELY'' 

                      I'd been tracking Johnny Sixkiller off and on for almost three months now.

Johnny was a vietnam vet who'd come back home a little worse for wear, just one of the many ''out of country'' vets who'd come back home wearing a prosthetic limb or a cheap medal pinned to their chest.  

At times he'd wished that he'd just died in country, in some disease infested trench bleeding from wounds sustained in battle, been a hero.

    Expecting a ticker tape parade but given a swift kick in the ass with a ticket to the streets attatched instead, Johnny had slowly but surely embarked on a downward spiral into his own private hell.

   In Johnny's world, the one in his head, he wasn't Johnny Kilsner, all american boy anymore, but Johnny Sixkiller, defender of the faith, personal assassin for his people, the forgotten people of the streets.

The pencil pushers, the apple sellers. The vagabonds dressed in camo fatigues begging for loose change, while the big guys up on Capitol hill sat on their fat asses fluffing their pillows.

      Some folks had told him it was all in his maniacal imagination; the '' big guys,'' didn't actually exist.

But he knew better; they were real to him, as real as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are to kids.  

            They were real, all right, and he could smell a conspiracy in the air, one drafted in blood and sealed with the kiss of death.

He knew they didn't want Johnny to talk too much, tell stories out of the classroom.

He knew too much.

Agent Orange, you ask?! Sure Johnny knew about it, he knew everything.

    He was a dangerous man, and he had to be dealt with accordingly, terminated with extreme prejudice.

    Johnny had never escaped the horrors of the war; he had learned long ago that he had to try to either conquer his own demons or live with them, and to pursue them into hell and back if need be. The past wasn't the past for Johnny; the past was the present, the present the past, and there was no inbetween.

     What should have been long ago and far way for Johnny was just yesterday, or today.

And the faces always came back; the faces of the dead and dying, the screams and the gunfire and the explosions, the ground covered in blood and body parts.

     When Johnny hit the streets at night, he saw a shadow within every shadow, heard an evil heart beating in every chest, and detected a cold look in every stranger's eyes.  

        They, these people who's honor he'd been so willing to defend, they didn't want to talk to Johnny, or even look at him.

He was too painful a reminder.

He was the enemy, an abomination in their eyes, and in the eyes of their God.

   Just a leftover liability from a war that shouldn't have been.

For Johnny, the war was never over, it had never ended.

    Now, the war between me and Johnny was about to begin.  
 

                                                                PART 2# 

                 I had trailed him to the Red Lamp Inn bar, some dive downtown that would have needed at least ten thousand dollars worth of renovation just to be called a shithole.

It was also a haven for your garden variety barflys; the walking wounded, the pissers and moaners, the groaners and loners.

    The inbred breeders, the lonely heart bleeders, the dollar short and a day late, the Aidsbait.

The gawkers and the non stop talkers. The hookers and queers, the drug addicted zombies that walked around in a permanent daze like rejects from Night Of The Living Dead.

A Cafe' Purgatory for those living inside their own hell, and seeking temporary refuge from a permanent problem.

    The perfect killing ground for Johnny.  

He had already shot five people; three were dead and the other two were still on life support.

  As usual, when it came to dealing with an unhinged veteran, it had been swept under the perverbial rug by the lawdogs, and left up to those less fortunate to deal with on their own.

     That is, until I stepped in.

I was standing across the street from the bar, in the shadows of an overhang in front of a flower shop. There was a big funeral display in the window, and I thought of how nice it would be for Johnny to have one of those on his grave, instead of a cheap wooden cross like most pauper's graves recieve. He had served his country, after all.

Johnny was oblivious to me, just strutting back and forth in front of the bar with his fists clenched in anger, his jaw flinching, a human time bomb ready to detonate at any second.

      I knew he was going to lose it soon, which meant at least six people could lose their lives before he re-loaded.

Johnny carried a Civil War replica Dragoon Colt .45, a powerful, six shot weapon that could probably drop a charging rhino at twenty yards. Johnny had been a crack shot in the service, too; he knew just where to place a bullet for maximum effect.  

        I had just lit up a Camel when I saw Johnny stop pacing and reach into his coat, pulling out the Colt .45 and cocking the hammer back.

It was time for the showdown at the OK corral.

Before I could even cross the street, he was inside, and I heard the first shot ring out, followed by screams. I ducked through traffic, horns blaring and middle fingers waving, to the front door and burst in with my Smith and Wesson .357, hammer cocked and loaded for bear.

    As I burst in, he was standing over the body of the first victim, a young woman of about twenty one wearing a red cocktail dress.

He'd blown her right out of her high heels, which lay close by and covered in spatters of blood. She had a gaping hole in her stomach, and was trying to hold her guts in with her bare hands. Her eyes were open, but nobody was home.

    He saw me from the corner of his eye just as I raised my .357 and squeezed off a shot, and he ducked to the left but it was too late. The slug tore through his right ear, blowing it to smithereens, as he hit the floor rolling. He fanned off two shots at me as the bar patrons finished ducking for cover, some of them still in shock or too drunk to get up from their seats, and the .45 slugs blasted a two holes in the end of the bar I'd ducked behind. The bartender, a little guy with coke bottle glasses, who was shivering and mumbling incoherently, managed to say, ''Up there,'' and pointed a shaking index finger at a shelf above my head, then tucked his head back down between his legs like he was preparing to kiss his own ass goodbye.  

       I reached up over my head with my free hand to find what it was the bartender was poiting at, a double barreled, sawed off shotgun, twelve gauge, loaded with deer slugs.

This guy took his protection seriously; too bad he didn't have the guts to use it.

I dropped my .357 and pulled both hammers back on the shotgun and arised up all in one fluid motion, seeming to move in slow motion, and leveled it at Johnny just as he rounded the corner of the bar, standing only a foot away from me.

    His eyes were like corpses, lifeless and bloodshot, as he slowly raised his piece.

''Don't do it, Johnny,'' I said. ''It doesn't have to be this way.'' I sounded like an actor in a bad grade B movie, but I didn't care.

       Suddenly, the sound of sirens blaring in the distance filled my ears and Johnny's as well, and his lifeless eyes registered recognition, like he knew he'd finally been had.

''Like I said, Johnny, it's over. '' I nodded my head at the front window, which was now illuminated by the flashing of gumball lights, and someone in authority started barking demands through a bullhorn.

     ''YOU INSIDE! DROP YOUR WEAPON AND COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS CLASPED BEHIND YOUR HEAD, NOW, OR WE'LL BE FORCED TO COME IN AND GET YOU!''

                      Johnny glanced towards the window, then back at me, lowering his piece a little bit. He flinched suddenly, as if he'd been slapped. ''The pain...'' he said, flinching again. ''It hurts...the pain in my head....the voices...the echoes...''

I tried to keep him distracted from the front door, talk to him. ''What echoes, Johnny? What are they saying to you?''

He flinched again, this time so violently it looked as though someone had punched him in the face. ''The echoes....,'' he said, raising his gun again. ''They're killing me....got to...gotta kill them first!''

         With that, he pressed the barrel of the Colt against his chin, and pulled the trigger.  

I lowered my weapon, dropped it, headed for the back EXIT door. As I reached the outside alley, I could hear the voices, the echoes of the bluecoats as they surrounded the body, guns drawn on him, hurling insults at a dead man, probably kicking him for fun as he lie there bleeding out. As I ran down the alley towards 38th street, with the voices fading from earshot and the color of neon flooding the sidewalk, I knew the war was finally over for Johnny now.

     He was the lucky one, I thought, as I disappeared into the darkness.