The shots rang out around him, setting his eardrums pounding to their short sharp bursts of raw noise. Patrick’s eyes darted to the other members of the gang, squatting, little clots of humanity in the darkness around him. Then he glanced into the milky blackness ahead and in silence grimaced as the shadows of body after body lit up by the flare of rifle shots carved clefts into the ally wall with their deep opaque magic. Then with a start he realized that his own gun, firing in unison with the others had stopped, creating a shield of silence that enveloped and singled him out among the mass. He raised it again, too late realizing quit itself could be a target. His thumb moved for the stud, but slowly ever so slowly, as if in a dream, traveling through the dense murk of fear.
For a moment time stood still, then he was hit and sent reeling back into the depths of darkness. Pain, soul wrenching and everlasting, that and darkness were all that the tatters of his memory could provide about his time in the hospital. Convalescing they called it, gradually decreasing the dosage of anesthetic to increase the patients chances of survival, Of course it didn’t really matter whether he lived or passed into the emptiness between the ears, the death that in his torn state he would have almost welcomed. He was after all only a terrorist. Why should he live, taking the place of the many worthy and innocent who didn’t have the chance ?
He reeled the questions through his head, the ones they must have asked. Arguments and counter arguments swelling back and forth in a black sea of self-loathing, consuming him, feeding his pain as he knelt below the long low alter, weeping.
What is a day, a month, a year, save a gaping chasm, to the damned.
He glanced out a crack in the door at fingers seeming to glow with divine radiance, granted to their holiness, in the churches stained glass window. The hard part, he thought, staring at the sanctified projection, was not showing the revulsion you felt when they humbly bared their souls for introspection. Trusting as they always did, blindly, that they would save themselves from divine retribution. Praying, as they always did, that their puny little hollow husks would be saved, that their repentance would serve like some kind of cosmic lightning conductor for their sins. He laughed quietly to himself at the thought. Then screamed silently inside his head as the pain, the chain of lead he carried for his wrongs, hit him like a runaway train. Knocking out of him first his breath, then his will power as he struggled to stay conscious. His own particular divine retribution passed and he was able to think again.
Glancing out of the corner of his eyes he noticed the pink glow of the light telling him the other box was occupied, could have been for half an hour for all he knew. He controlled the urge to laugh, knowing as he did what it would bring, and opened the grill. Hot vile breath poured through the opening. In the light from the weak bulb he could barely see the mans silhouette, but his presence and the dank odor of alcohol and sweat filled the tiny rooms. The man began to speak.
Patrick’s breath caught in throat as the other continued in a dull gray monotone to list a host of inhuman acts. Like some ghastly catalogue of the criminally insane, or a novel by a chronic alcoholic, the list carried on, giving dates, names, places. Patrick half expected to place his hand on some proffered bible and take an oath. At any rate he didn’t have a chance. The silencer screwed neatly onto the smooth dull gray metal of the magnum, reducing the shots noise to a ghostly whistle. There the priest though, suppressing a giggle, another soul saved.