Blundering out
through the staff door, I allow myself a few moments to gasp for
air before I let my eyelids peel upwards. I do it slowly, allowing
all of the fumes and soot to unstick themselves. Equally slowly,
the outlines of the shop floor make themselves comprehensible. The
lights, the walls, the shelves, the fallen Christmas tree…the girl,
standing, staring at me.
What the fuck?
The first
thing that strikes me as my vision unfogs is that she’s pretty.
Really pretty. Blonde hair, which can’t decide if it wants to be
short or long. Green eyes; the type that used to have some spark in
them, but which has since been crushed and given way to meek
subservience, as though she’s a Joss Whedon character being forced
to play a role in a Dickens novel. As my irises narrow a touch more
I realise that it was one of our number who crushed her; there’s
blood flowing freely from her nose, and tears streaming down her
cheeks.
I’m still
gasping, and I want to murder whoever broke that skinny, pale
little creature’s nose, but my mind has cleared enough for me to
know that needs to think I’m willing to finish the job Sid, Freddy
or Phoebe started. I go for my gun, still tucked in the back of my
jeans. I intend to grab it and point it at the spot between those
deep, green eyes, but I don’t realise that it’s scalding hot until
it’s already gone flying out of my hand. In one spasmodic motion I
try to clutch my burnt hand and duck in case the gun goes off when
it hits the floor.
Clack.
The girl
doesn’t duck or dive; she simply points her big, watery eyes at the
place where the gun bounced, unperturbed, against the tiles. I
guess she doesn’t watch as many movies as I do. A dropped gun
always goes off in the movies. I stagger back to my feet and tell
her:
‘Yeah, well;
still put your hands in the air.’ The words come out in a much
higher register than I’d planned, but - despite this - she
acquiesces. I suppose the balaclava and the accidental Batman eye
make-up caused by the soot from the fire must be intimidating
enough to make up for my personality. As she stands, rooted to the
spot, I bend down to pick up the gun. It’s still hot, even through
the gloves, but now that I know what’s coming I can deal with the
pain. I keep an eye on the girl as I’m bending down, but she’s
still like a mannequin. Shell-shock. The glimmer I thought I saw
behind her eyes is buried too far down now. Even the irises seem to
have darkened in colour. She doesn’t pose any threat, and there’s
no point in trying to keep up the scare tactics.
‘Come on;
let’s go,’ I tell her. She obeys.
Ten minutes,
thirty seconds down. It takes us thirty seconds more to climb the
stairs. Eleven minutes.
‘What the fuck
is that?’ Freddy asks as I reach the landing, and he sees the girl
trailing me. Something’s wrong. He’s not using the northern accent
he spent so much time perfecting.
‘Doesn’t
matter,’ I reply. I feel bitter resentment gurgling in my throat,
and a burning desire to chastise the other three both for letting a
hostage slip through the cracks, but I swallow it. I can’t
understand why Freddy would give me the same angry look when our
eyes meet; after all, I’ve done my fucking job, and I haven’t hit
any fucking women. I grab the girl by the wrist and drag her to the
employee break room. I fling the door open, and my gritted jaw
suddenly falls open.
All of the
hostages, except one, are huddled in the far right corner of the
room; even the big, heavy-set guy with the beard is cowering,
clutching his girlfriend. The left-hand wall is splattered with a
huge, grotesque asterisk of blood. Slumped against the floor
beneath it is a person-shaped bundle. The head isn’t the right
shape anymore. The remaining eyeball stares blindly at the ceiling.
Before my brain can put all of these pieces together and form a
reaction, the girl with the bloody nose makes one for me. She
screams. She screams the kind of scream that draws a sharp and
brutal contrast between my silence and her terror, between her
innocence and my guilt. I respond by doing the only thing I can
think of doing; I hurl the crying girl into the blood-splattered
room with the other hostages and slam the door behind her.
As I turn to
Freddy he quickly reads the question hanging from my expression,
underneath the soot and the mask.
‘Phoebe shot
one of them,’ he says, in a monotone.
I don’t know
what to say, so I check my watch. Eleven twenty-five. Thirty.
Thirty-five. Forty. Forty-five.
‘You got the
money?’ I ask Freddy.
‘Yes,’ he
replies. There’s something of an attitude in his answer this time,
but I’m past caring.
‘Then let’s
go. You get the others; I’ll find some getaway drivers.’
I look
around.
‘Where are
they, by the way?’
‘Sid wants to
bail. He’s seeing if we can get out through the fire escape without
the police catching on.’
‘And
Phoebe?’
‘Fuck
Phoebe.’
‘Just get Sid
and meet me at the walk-in freezer. Charlie will be wondering why
there’s a hole in the ceiling with no-one coming through it. It’s
nearly over.’
He turns to
go.
‘Oh, and chuck
me the keys, will you?’ I quickly add.
Freddy looks
over his shoulder at me.
‘This will
never be over,’ he mutters. He throws me the keys, and then
disappears down the stairs. I never had Freddy down as the
melodramatic type. It’s easier to be a hard-nosed dialectical
materialist in the midst of a politics lecture than in the midst of
a bloodbath, I suppose.
This is no
time for philosophising, you tit,
the devil on my shoulder
reminds me. I nod in assent, and turn back to the door of the
employee break room. I rap thrice, hard enough to make my knuckles
sting. Not surprisingly, no-one answers, so I fling the door open
without invitation. The hostages jump back as one, as though each
person is a spine on the back of a cowering hedgehog. I run my eyes
over them all, stopping when the corpse begins to slither into my
peripheral vision. It’s not difficult to pick the two best
candidates for the job: the girl I saw at the beginning of the
robbery, now being cradled in her bearded boyfriend’s arms, and the
girl with the bloody nose I picked up downstairs, who’s still
violently blubbing. Those are two of the psychological categories
we’re looking for, abandonment and hysteria, but where’s the third?
We need someone who’ll keep their shit together well enough to
actually drive the getaway car, combined with a misplaced sense of
duty that will make her feel as though it’s her job to keep the
other two safe, and alive - even if that means disobeying the
law.
On my third
scan over the crowd I’m close to conceding that there is no fitting
candidate among them, but then I’m struck by an idea.
Maybe I
can manufacture one.
There’s a slightly pudgy, Asian-looking
girl sitting alone, close to the edge of the group, staring blankly
at the left-hand wall. Since we took the hostages in pairs, it’s
not difficult to guess who she came shopping with today.
I raise my
gun, in what is fast becoming my trademark way of introducing
myself, and stride towards the crowd. The Asian-looking girl is the
furthest out of the bubble, so I go for her first. When I try to
ease her up by her t-shirt sleeve, she stiffens. A hint of a
backbone. That’s a good sign. In reply to such reticence I clamp
her bicep with my gloved hand, digging my fingers into the nerves
so that she can really feel it, and yank her into the corner beside
the door.
‘Stay there,’
I growl in my Batman voice. She nods. Suddenly I feel like a racist
for being scared that she wouldn’t speak English. Then I look at
the corpse and remember that I’ve got far worse things to feel
guilty for. It barely takes more than a glance to get the sobbing
broken-nosed girl to come and take her place with the getaway
driver. Despite knowing that there’s no-one guarding the stairs,
that they could easily run off and escape through the fire escape
or the unlocked front door, that there are now hostages both in
front and behind me, that it’s twenty-one to one against me, and
that there are only three bullets left in my revolver, I turn my
back on the pair of them, and hope that they’ll all stay in line
through sheer force of personality. I keep my pistol arm hanging at
an odd angle, however, so that I can easily fire off a shot at the
Asian girl if she makes any aggressive moves. The fact that she
still seems to have her wits about her after her friend was
murdered before her eyes means that she’s exactly the type of
person who might throw self-preservation to the wind in the name of
revenge.
It is with
caution, therefore, that I approach the final girl. As expected,
her boyfriend does not give her up easily. Swift and ruthless as a
bolt of lightning, I bring the butt of my gun crashing down into
the top of his skull and then swing it back around to point at the
Asian girl. The bearded guy groans, his grip loosens and I pluck
the final girl out of his clutches and pull her towards the door.
When I turn around, I adjust my pistol arm so that it points at the
wounded boyfriend.
‘Down the
stairs. Move,’ I tell the three girls. They do as they’re told, but
Duty gives me a vitriolic look as she does so. I smirk to myself as
I’m locking the break-room door behind me and follow them down
towards the shop floor. Hysteria has gone back from sobbing to
howling. Sensing an opportunity, I call to Duty:
‘You! Tell her
to shut her fucking noise!’
I get another
glower for my trouble, but she puts her arm around Hysteria and
begins to whisper in her ear. Her words are too quiet for me to
make out, but that doesn’t matter. The words, whatever they are,
turn the howling into a quiet whimper, and, more importantly, they
make the speaker start to believe that she is the only protection
that the other two have against me. I notice that Abandonment has
edged slightly closer to Duty.
The wheels are
in motion. The destination is set. Now I’ve just got to get them in
the car. I check my watch. Thirteen minutes and twenty-five
seconds. Judging by how jittery Freddy and Sid seem to be, I
wouldn’t put it past Charlie to bail out before the fifteen-minute
mark. If anyone does that before the diversion goes off they’ll get
picked up by the police, and then we’ll all go to prison.
‘Faster! Go!’
I screech at my captives. They scuttle onwards, following the
direction of my outstretched arm, to the staff-only area.
I know that
everything’s gone to shit as soon as I come through the
no-entry-staff-only doors, because Freddy and Sid are behind them.
If the escape route was open, they would’ve gone through it.
Neither of them says a word as I push past the hostages towards the
open walk-in freezer. I stop dead. Inside, illuminated by the
lights in the corridor, is a small dent in the blackened concrete,
about a foot in diameter and half a foot deep.
The thermite
didn’t work.
I guess that’s
why they build nuclear bunkers out of concrete.
‘We’re
fucked,’ Freddy whispers.
‘No. I’ve got
an idea,’ Sid interjects. ‘He pulls his phone out of his pocket and
prods his thumb at the keypad. ‘We call-’
‘NO!’ I
bellow. ‘Don’t touch that fucking phone! And for fuck’s sake, don’t
say any fucking names!’ The Batman voice is gone, now. My tone is
all panic.
‘Then what the
fuck else can we do?’ Sid cries back.
Duty steps
forward, turning the triangle of me, Sid and Freddy into a
square.
‘You can hand
yourselves in,’ she says. ‘You’re all cornered, all you’re going to
do now is get yourselves longer prison sentences, or-’
‘
SHUT
THE
FUCK UP
!’ I scream.
She takes
another step forward.
‘No.’
I raise my
gun, but not at her. Instead I lunge forward and grab Hysteria by
the waist. As I pull her towards me, I look Duty dead in the
eye.
‘What’s about
to happen happened because of you,’ I tell her. ‘As long as you
live, never forget that. If you say another word, I’ll do the same
to her.’ I gesture towards Abandonment. ‘If you say something after
that, I’ll go upstairs and kill one more person up there, then
another, then another, then another, until your big mouth has got
twenty people killed. But whatever happens here, I’m going to leave
you alive, so that every night, when you close your eyes, you’ll
see the faces of all those people. Do you understand?’
Tears are
welling up underneath her eyelids. She nods, and takes two steps
back. Her mouth opens, ready to plead for the life of the girl I’ve
taken away from her, but I cut her off:
‘Good.’ Next,
I turn to Freddy and Sid. ‘Stay here,’ I say, ‘and make sure these
two don’t go anywhere. Do not say a word to them. Do that, and I
guarantee I’ll get you both out of this.’
I don’t wait
for their reactions; there’s no time. I drag Hysteria into the
stock room, where the thermite fire was originally supposed to have
taken place, and close the door behind us. I lower my voice to a
shade of a whisper, and tell her:
‘Don’t say a
word, and you’ll live. I don’t want to kill you.’ I put the gun on
the floor beside me, so she knows that I mean what I say. To my
surprise - and God knows I’ve had enough of those lately - she
replies:
‘You’re not
going to do it?’
It strikes me
as a strange way to phrase it. I would’ve expected her to say:
‘You’re not going to kill me?’
‘Not if I
don’t have to.’
‘But you
do
have to; they won’t believe you if you just take me out
of sight and then tell them you murdered me. They won’t believe it
unless they see it.’
‘Are you
trying
to get yourself killed?’