5-17-09

Chapter Seven

The bar's odor of unending puke, mixed with blood, and urine fouled the otherwise clean air to be found, a few miles south of Soledad, in the bar close to the whore house. The sounds of a slowly dying record player filled the bar, accompanied with the sobs of the lone inhabitant, George. Three months had past since Lennie's execution. Three months of nightmares, replaying the death…. at his hands. His entire mind was occupied by the thought that he should have done something else. It wasn't fair that he would have to kill the other half of his humanity. He couldn't get over it.

In the three months, he had received three stakes, every time it had gone to bars. He was drinking to forget, only to have his one permanent thought be of Lennie. The clocks being against him meant that George had to leave the bar now. The barkeep was showing him the door, as George knocked down bottles from the blood-stained countertop. He knew the barkeep once, but three months of near-continuous inebriation had erased his memories….. all but the ones of Lennie.

George reached the door and paused. He shook his head, trying to shake off invisible demons that haunted him. He blacked out. But his body kept moving, and it carried him to the brush. He woke from his trance-like state. His subconscious controlled him now. He had a flash of Lennie's body lying in front of him. He stood where Lennie had a bullet put into his head. His mind was a controlling and conniving

"Bastard," George muttered to himself. "You're such a bastard. You kill'd yo' best friend. You kill'd him." His mind was unforgiving.

Darkness overtook him once more. Light returned to him, minutes later, he was on the highway. His mind a haze, he couldn't compute these images he saw through his blood-red eyes. A bend in the road, and the faint sound of fate slowly driving towards his stumbling, drunkard figure. He stopped, pausing to listen. He heard it, Slim's Truck. It began to round the bend, going too fast for any difference to be made. George, sanity damned when Lennie's death consumed him, began to laugh a deep, hysterical laugh. Steel hit him at 40 miles an hour, hard. The velocity sent him flying, George hit his head on the gravel road, and soon, it was cut into an unintelligible mess. From his mangled body began to come blood, and bone. He knew this was the end. He knew, today he would see Lennie again.

The door to the truck opened, but lights still blinded George's vision of who it was that stepped out. He saw tall ears though. A- a rabbit? George began to cry. Slowly, tears of sorry, madness and sheer joy. A rabbit stepped into the light. A giant, human-sized rabbit stood before his mangled heap of a body. The rabbit's mouth opened, and the voice that came from it's mouth confused him. But the voice pleased him a little bit.

"George," came Lennie's voice from the rabbit. "I found you!" George stared in disbelief.

"Yeah, you crazy, got-damn bastard, ya did." Lennie the giant rabbit picked George up.

"I got you." Lennie said.

"An' I-I got you." George said, tears flowing forth instead of the trickle as before. George died in Slim's arms, as he carried George into the truck. Slim saw that George had died in his arms. Instead of heading to the ranch, Slim drove George's corpse to the brush, by the Salinas River. George was laid down in the river, to drift out to sea, a peaceful, respectful funeral, as with Lennie.

"Perhaps they'll meet somewhere down the river. They'll have each other, and perhaps be at peace."