by Andy Marlow
would choose a hole like this for her home.
There was no insulation, no running water, no electricity, no gas- yet this suited her. Being the middle of the desert, there was little need for padded walls and double glazing, and a well just five minutes from here provided her with all her water. Peter knew this from the intelligence he had gathered about her. He had been staking her out for several days now and knew her routine. Right now it was seven o’clock in the morning, and she would be on her way back from berry-picking in the woods beyond the ridge.
The house was, therefore, deserted; yet Peter still felt the need to maintain an air of caution. He did not go blazing into the property, but was carefully, slowly, softly treading his way towards it. Presently he reached the garden path: a cobbled affair completely out of character with the rest of the property (or, indeed, the rest of the natural environment) more suited to an English country mansion than this desert hellhole. On either side were similarly out of place shrubs and foliage, plucked from various corners of the world and arranged in terms of colour and size. Given the run-downness of the interior, it was surprising how much care the owner took of her garden.
The door was ajar. It stood on hinges and only one of them was working, so the rectangular plank of wood normally used to provide a block to unwanted visitors, and normally used to standing up straight, was now doing neither of those things: it balanced precariously, still, in a lopsided position, leaving a permanent crawling space big enough for a grown man to fit through. Big enough even to fit a gun through.
It was tight, but Peter managed it. He even avoided getting any splinters, and as his gaze hit upon the inside he found it airy and light, with an inexplicable gust of cool wind coming from somewhere to his left and cooling his parched, dried, cracked skin. He would have smiled at the freshness of it, had his mind not been a disciplined, thoughtless mechanism of murder.
The first thing to do, now he was inside, was to find somewhere to hide. This room was as good as any. The hallway was a simple affair: rectangular floor space, two doors on either side, a staircase on the left. From one door came bright light and breezy sensations; from the other, darkness and the vague image of a bare, boarded-up room, perhaps abandoned or disused. There was no furniture inside it.
From what he had viewed of her movements, Miriam would be entering from the brightly-lit doorway in precisely three minutes, so he had until then to find some concealment from behind which he could aim.
Under the stairway, like under most stairways, was a cupboard. And like most cupboards under the stairs, it was most likely crawling with insects and snakes, spiders and scorpions. While somewhere like Britain or Scandinavia would have rendered such worries to be mere vanity, here in the desert the arachnids and scorpions could be deadly. If you were unlucky enough to be bitten by one particular species of spider, Peter had heard, you had only ten minutes before death became you.
Nevertheless, it was the best place to hide. So, forgetting himself for the moment, Peter climbed into the cupboard and waited.
It was a terse wait. Within a minute, the nerves on the back of his neck were tickling and he knew that something had taken an interest to his skin and was crawling about on it, upwards and downwards and side to side in that scattered fashion which characterises an insect’s gait. It may have been something with six or eight legs, or maybe even ten. He did not know; but what he did know was that, whatever it was, its bite might be deadly. If he was really unlucky today, the hunter might become the hunted.
He stayed perfectly still, like a coiled cobra. His training told him that whatever it was, its sting or bite could most likely be avoided if he refrained from doing anything to scare or anger the poor creature. So it continued its merry walkabout on his flesh for a further minute, unencumbered by worries about oncoming hands, before mysteriously disappearing down his shirt, or back into the woodwork.
A noise distracted him: the doorbell rang, the door-knob turned and a woman came home. Miriam as yet could not be seen, but he could hear her footsteps and she was coming this way.
She had come home with many berries today. Her load was heavy, evidenced by her groans and the jangling noise of berries on basket, but her mood was light. Such a haul would see her fed for many days to come.
Peter stayed where he was, listening. The door she had come through led straight into the kitchen and there she was now, setting down her load and reposing herself for a while. She poured herself a drink, like a normal human being. She began muttering to herself, like a normal human being. Peter tried to listen in to her musings, the last thoughts of a soon-to-be dead woman, but found her language strange, her dialect foreign. His brain sought out the meaning of her words in all the various languages he knew- in vain.
She was happy, though. He could hear that. She spoke with the tone of someone who had just heard some good news, or made a happy plan; someone with much to live for- a family, perhaps, or a new job; or a personal success, like the publication of a story, or victory in a race. Or collecting many, many berries for the oncoming winter.
Her muttering stopped and her pacing ceased. Something had come to block her thoughts- a worry, a memory, a new idea, or something. Whatever it was, whatever she now had to do, it lay outside the kitchen and out in the hallway.
As she stepped through the doorway, Peter gained his first glimpse of today’s victim. He had never seen her before, although her name was famous in his circle of friends. She had been discussed many a time before, always with vicious words and accusation- always spoken of as if an idea, an animal; certainly not a human.
Seeing her now, then, he was struck by her simple humanity. There was nothing special about her, sure, but it was what she shared in common with other human beings which gave her the value he now saw: her eyes, her legs, her smile, her hair, bundled up in a bun in common with most of the women round here.
She was tall for her age, and fit too. The shrinking that had befallen most women in her generation long ago had not affected her yet, and nor had that mythical “middle age spread”. Though seventy, her body could have been that of a forty year old. She wore a scarf round her neck which, no doubt, had recently been used to cover her head to protect her from the sun, and she wore a smile on her face, constant and unashamed, hopeful and secure, as if life could do no wrong to her.
She was wrong. Just yards away from her was a camouflaged gunman hiding in her cupboard, waiting for the opportune moment to strike- and that moment was now. Blissful in her ignorance, she took just a step closer to the painting on her wall that had caught her attention and gave him the perfect shot: point blank, in the back.
Yet he did not want to take it. He wanted to watch her fear, her squirming and fright, as the understanding reached her eyes that this was it. This was the end. This was the moment when all was over and the future she so looked forward to would vanish in the blink of a cold, dead eye.
So instead of taking the shot, he jumped. He leapt out from the cupboard and imposed himself and his gun into her personal space.
The crash of noise as the masked gunman came out from her cupboard made her nearly jump out of her skin at the shock of it; and then, when she had hoped relaxation would kick in and she could say something like “oh, it’s just you, Muhammad”, she realised that she never could say those words ever again. The man had a gun, and he was pointing it straight at her.
Words failed her for a second as she glanced from man, to gun, to man again. Then she realised her predicament and that words may be the only thing which could save her, and said the only thing that came to mind in that dreadful moment.
“Please, who are you?” she asked. Her words betrayed a falter of confusion, a complete lack of understanding about who he was or why he might be here. Evidently she thought that maybe she could reason with him; find out what he wanted and spare her life.
He didn’t reply. Instead, he took one step closer so that they were nearly touching; the barrel of his MP4 was now resting on her sca
lp.
“Who are you, sir, please? Please, maybe we can talk about this. Maybe I can help you.”
Peter allowed a sliver of emotion to pass through his defences and reach his face: a snigger, a faint smirk of derision at her foolish remark. She finally understood.
“Please, please, no!” she screamed out, more for the benefit of anyone who might hear rather than herself or her gunman. Words would not work now: so she turned and ran, headlong and forthright, back into the kitchen she had come through; back into the woods she had picked her berries from.
At least, she would have done. That was her aim. Yet she only made it as far as the kitchen table before the sound of gunfire rattled in her house and she found herself sent to the floor by a series of bullet wounds to her leg.
She screamed bitterly in pain, but mainly in terror- for she knew her fate. The pain was unimaginable, worse than she had ever known, but she could have coped if she knew everything was going to be alright, that she would heal and live to see her future. He could not have understood what she had been saying in the kitchen; that she had received word of a new baby boy in the family, that she would have a grandson. A grandson! Ideas of seeing him grow up and playing with him as baby, toddler, child and
