Theme 126: Gold
“Why
don’t we just kill them all and loot their corpses?” yelled the bandit in the
weathered red balaclava, waving the barrel of his Zastava assault rifle at the
group of passengers lined up along the side of their motorcoach. By rolling the
flaming husk of a pickup from behind a boulder into the motorcoach’s path,
the three biker-bandits had easily ambushed this motorcoach on a particularly rugged
section of the interstate as it reached the bottom of a hill pinched between
two outcrops. Mr. Bentley, a fantods-prone man with a greasy comb-over, stood
near the rear engine vent at the end of the line, sweating abundantly. His
mouth was tightly closed.
“Naw,
if we did that, people might get too scared and stop trying to cross the
Badlands by the busload, with all their goodies,” the lead bandit replied. She moved
from passenger to passenger, holding out an oil pan for the passengers to deposit
their valuables into, thus forming a growing pile of wallets, chains, rings, and
watches. She gave each passenger a grin, revealing her chisel-sharpened
front teeth. In fact, because there were only three bandits and twelve passengers,
plus the driver, the lead bandit feared that the passengers would try to
overpower the bandits if they started shooting or molesting one of the women.
The
lead bandit reached Mr. Bentley and held out the bounteous oil pan. Mr. Bentley
placed his thin wallet atop the pile. Beads of sweat rolled down onto his sealed lips. The lead bandit thrust her face forward and bore her serrated
upper jaw at him with a wheeze. The smell of methyl alcohol and rotten meat caused Mr. Bentley to cough, which allowed the lead bandit to glimpse a flash of
gold in his mouth.
“Hey,
look at this! Gold teeth! You, hold him. You, find some pliers,” the lead
bandit ordered while probing Mr. Bentley’s mouth with her grease-blackened
fingers.
“No,
no! Please!” Mr. Bentley begged. As soon as he saw the tall bandit to the rear pull
a pair of pliers from the side case of one of the parked bikes, he panicked and broke
into a wild dash back up the hill. The bandit in the balaclava reflexively
unloaded four rounds into Mr. Bentley’s back. Mr. Bentley collapsed
in a rut in the road’s shoulder and shortly thereafter stopped breathing. The lead bandit
frowned and motioned for the tall bandit to get to work on Mr. Bentley’s mouth
with the pliers. She then set the oil pan of loot aside and herded the
remaining passengers back onto the motorcoach.
Three minutes later, the
motorcoach was underway down the interstate through the Badlands again, and
seven bloody teeth capped with gold had been
added to the bandits’ oil pan. Mr. Bentley’s body was left in a cloud of dust by
the bandit’s motorcycles, left for the gnashing beaks of crows to start
cutting into.
Explanatory Postscript:
When I say “picked randomly,” I mean picked from a Master List that I’ve
compiled of 999 themes intended to serve as creative writing prompts (from the
following sources: 501
Writing Prompts; 25
Creative Writing Prompts; Examples
of Themes; List
of Themes; 365
Creative Writing Prompts; 100
Themes Challenge Writing Prompts; List
of Journal Ideas; and Top
10 Types of Story Themes). To pick a theme at random, I roll three
ten-sided dice (the first for the hundreds place digit, the second for the
tens, and the third for the singles) and find the theme under the number I have
rolled. If I hit a theme I have already written on, I roll again. If I ever
roll 000, I make up a theme. The Master List is a secret, so don’t ask for it.
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