The 29th Fire: A Tale of Blame

I wrote this, then I found a neat-o story to tie in! Looking at how people react to negative circumstances, we always seem to blame what we ourselves are most guilty of. It's called projecting and it's something I do, too. But if we just stop and think, for like ten breaths, we'll realize that the problem isn't the situation, it's our negative reaction to it. Fix it and move on.

Cursed

He didn’t know what is was, and he didn’t care. All that he knew was that people wanted it, therefore it must be worth stealing.

He didn’t realize that the weapons grade plutonium was leaking next to him, slowly irradiating his body. He had puked a few times already, but it must have been the McDonald’s he had for lunch: That shit will kill you!

It wasn’t until the blood starting becoming more prevalent in his vomit and flowing freely from his nose that he became worried.

This black suitcase had to have gold, diamonds, or something of equal worth, even for an easy snag out of an unlocked car in the hotel parking lot.

But maybe the curse was reactivated when he stole the case. His eyes widened in terror as he looked at his pale, sickly face in the rearview mirror. Maybe it was and he was dying from an ancient Indian curse, only recently postponed by a very expensive medicine man.

Well, the only way he knew to appease ancient Indian curses is more blood! The medicine man had told him to lift the curse, the body of the disturbed must be placed with a living sacrifice.

He stopped at a local hotel along the highway, headlights off so that none of the sleeping occupants would arise from their soon-to-be final resting place.

He kicked down the door of the closest room with the lights on, a man and woman jumping up and trying to escape. They didn’t.

Two blasts of his sawed-off shotgun sprayed their flesh and blood across the room, their screams cut short along with their lives.

Their lives should have alleviated the ancient spirits haunting his body, but all that was happened was his vision became blurry and boils started erupting on the right-side of his rib cage.

Grabbing the last survivor hiding in the bathroom, he punched her so hard that she instantly went unconscious, her head hitting the back of the shower, leaving some blood from her newly fractured skull.

“The curse must be finished”, he kept repeating in his mind over and over as he drove to the ancient Indian burial grounds that he had upset so long ago.

He brought his barely breathing, sometimes convulsing living sacrifice over to the grave he had dug up, the one that had started this whole damned curse. The skeletal remains of the chief he had picked were long gone now, picked by coyotes and buzzards looking for something to gnaw at.

The beads and bone armor had fetched a high price on the archaeological black market. The instant he sold it, the curse has become permanent, unable to be broken by him returning the objects.

First, his family had died in a house fire, caused by one of his carelessly tossed cigarettes. Then, his dog, the only one who had survived the inferno, contracted rabies from an errant raccoon. Finally, this last theft of his, this suitcase, seemed to have been the last straw, the final catalyst for the curse to take hold in his now-cancer ridden body.

This caused much plight and our protagonist cursed the day he had ever dug up the Indian burial ground and stolen Chief Heyafycu’s cursed curiosities.

As he began burying his now awakened victim, struggling and screaming through muffled duct tape, he wondered what was in the suitcase. It had better be worth all the trouble that he had gone through, scratching at the boils that had spread to his neck among other body parts.

He padded down the last of the dirt, fully filling up the desecrated grave with the body of a now-suffocated living sacrifice. It was done, the curse would be now forever lifted, if that medicine man was telling the truth.

Deciding that now he could see what his haul was, what was in the troublesome suitcase, he grabbed it and headed over to a large rock to smash it open.

Slamming the black case hard onto the red rock, the lock broke open with almost no resistance. A large lead-looking rod failing out and on the ground. Curiously, he picked it up and was amazed by its weight and its warmth.

Turning it around to inspect further, his vision went from blurred to completely dark.

His hand felt like it was on fire, as the rod slid out taking his melting palm with it, landing with a solid "tink" for the rod and a sickening "splat" for his bubbling hand-flesh on the rock.

Choking on his own oozing windpipe, his skin bulged and bloated from the puss and cancerous tumors growing on and inside him. His panicked mind finally understood what he had stolen. He died, the curse finally lifted.

The plutonium core melted down into the sand, irradiating the area and leaving it inhospitable to life for the next thousand years, keeping its secrets and its curse safe for some time.