byChrisWhite-2025

Flash Fiction; the prompt word: The Orchard. Supposed to be 500 words or less, but I just couldn’t find a way to distill it further. At 800+ words, It was never submitted. So, it’s just for you.

The stove was old iron, black as a thunderhead and pocked from a lifetime of fire. It crouched in the corner like a protective uncle standing guard, and Merrick behind it, breathing quiet, leaning his shoulder into the cast-iron flank as though it were the last warm thing left in the world. The abandoned house whimpered under the weight of morning, a flour sack full of cash, fully counted in bundles of ten thousand, sealed in saran wrap. A child’s murmur, small and thin as a cat’s purr, came from the next room, and he turned his head a fraction to listen, to count that soft breathing as proof that something good still lived.

The kitchen windows burst open like the world had exploded. Then came the spat spat spat of bullets, faster than a man could count, shattering glass, blowing flowered curtains into confetti, and tearing through the walls with that splintering thock that meant the pine boards were bleeding into sawdust.

He smelled wood and cordite and the last supper’s lard still caking the pan.

Merrick cocked the hammer with a slowness that had nothing of age in it. His rifle was a lever-action, oiled and handled carefully, like it was some holy relic. He sighted through the hole he’d carved beside the stovepipe, and in the stuttered dawnlight he saw the white face of a boy in a uniform, crouched behind the fender of a county cruiser like he had someplace to get to after this murder was all done. The boy leaned to shout. No hesitation, Merrick’s shot found him in the mouth.

Merrick moved like a shadow through the smoke and plaster dust, rifle raised again, shoving open the back door with his boot and letting the second one come to him. An unusually fat man. Badge shining bright like a lie on his chest. They saw each other clean. The law shouted and stumbled, but Merrick shot. The man fell heavy back into the grass like he’d just remembered he had somewhere to sleep.

By the time he made it to the front room, he was breathing like a fire bellows, eyes burning. He had no plan, no high strategy. Just the weight of that child in the next room, the one he’d found two winters ago, blue-lipped and wailing in the wreck of a car he’d put the mother and father into himself with two clean shots and a whisper to the engine block. He’d meant to walk away. But the boy, naked as a peeled peach, bawling into the hush of snowfall, had reached out a hand. And Merrick, for reasons he never gave to God nor man, had taken it.

The boy is his now.

The third one came through the window. A shotgun barrel. Blind firing. He didn’t even see the deputy’s face. Just the spasm of flame and then the shriek of buckshot ricocheting off the stove. Something hot bit into Merrick’s cheek, his neck. The wall behind him bloomed yellow, then red. Shards of wood cut clean by hollow point bullets, rained into the room, each resembling tiny flowers of yellow pine and plaster, dropping to the floor all around.

Merrick stood. Shot once more. The barrel barked. The man dropped. Blood, hot from near-molten lead, dripped from Merrick’s face in heavy pearls of red onto the rifle’s receiver.

Then the storm answered.

A fusillade of fire erupted, like every cop in the county turned up for the slaying; the resume. Bullets hissed and sang and punched through the cabin in wild succession. One cracked the stove and spat iron like shrapnel to every corner of the room. Then another. The door behind him exploded into splinters.

He dropped to a knee. He was coughing blood into his long braided beard, trying to see. Trying to rise.

When the last round fell silent, there was only the ticking of cooling metal, the whisper of the stove’s death rattle, and a millpond of thick, red, gelled butchery.

They found him facedown in the hall, his hands empty. His blood had soaked into the pine floorboards, and the old boards drank the gore like they’d been waiting for this.

In the next room, the child was curled beneath a quilt stitched from feed sacks and the clothes of Merrick’s victims. He was quiet now. Big-eyed and blinking, clinging to the hand-stitched rabbit Merrick had sewn from a torn coat sleeve.

One of the officers, a tall, confident man with smoke still drifting off the heated barrel of his shotgun, walked in slow. He stared at the boy for a long time before bending down and lifting him up like a priest preparing for a christening. The child said nothing. He had seen this before.

In the yard, the bodies, five in all, were counted and zipped. No one spoke of the boy. Not in the report, not in the paper. They said Merrick died mad, a relic of Horse Mountain. They said nothing of the child. They said nothing of thier motives.

But the orchard behind the house re-wrought itself, a benefactress of the carnage, it bloomed that spring like it hadn’t in years, the trees drunken on the blood of men, the peaches fat as fists, sweet as sin.