16 : Shoot

He fired six rapid shots at short range into the spine and the impact pitched my body forward in a series of jerks as the chips of bone and cartilage from the shattered vertebrae were forced out through the rib cage in an explosion of blood and plasma. As my face hit the snow I thought Schrenk you bastard I hope they burn you for this. Have to do better. Gut-think wouldn't help me. I listened to his footsteps along the corridor behind me. I estimated the distance at something like six feet, not nearly dose enough to do anything in safety. We kept on walking towards the door leading to the car park at the rear. He fired directly into the back of the head and the brain matter burst and splattered against the walls in a welter of skull fragments. There was no more time for conscious thought, even of Moira, even of roses: life was simply present, then absent. Executive deceased. Have to do much better, yes. A normal reaction to awareness of imminent death with the imagination running wild but gut-think useless and dangerous: survival possible only through rational thought, brain- think. Man in a worn brown overcoat and horn-rimmed glasses. 'Good evening, comrade.' Ignatov. 'Good evening. They say it's going to snow again.' 'Surely we've had enough!' A chance, obviously, to move extremely fast and get the man in the brown overcoat between me and the gun, but Ignatov might have fired precipitately and shot him by accident. 'Keep walking.' I quickened the pace a little. He had the gun in the pocket of his coat; otherwise the other man would have seen it. He couldn't take accurate aim like that but it didn't make a lot of difference: at this range he could hit me lethally with three or four shots, shifting the aim according to the visible point of impact. I didn't know if he'd handled firearms before but it seemed likely: Schrenk wouldn't leave me in the hands of an amateur. 'Open the door.' His voice was heavy, its tone entirely changed by his possession of a killing instrument. There had been no power in his voice before, no authority; now there was both, and something else, something like anticipation. I'd pictured the end of the world for him too often, with his three children asking Galya where Daddy had gone, and now he had the end of my own world in his hands and he was impatient for it. Once the eight lumps of spinning metal had gone burrowing into me he would be safe again, and go home to Galya and the children. You could see his point. The night air was freezing .after the heat of the apartment. The heavy door slammed shut behind us. 'Over that way.' He was closer, I thought. Or it might simply be that the wall of the building was projecting his voice forward and making it sound louder. I would have to watch things like that. His mud-brown Syrena was obliquely to our right, not far from the entrance to the car park and facing this way. I hadn't locked it after I'd got him out. The street lamps cast a sick greenish light across the area and the albedo was high, the reflections bouncing off the cellulose of the parked cars and the blanket of ground snow. Shadows were sharp. Pyotr. If he makes any attempt to get away, shoot at once, and to kill. But he was going to do that anyway as soon as we reached his car so I didn't have much to lose. He fired into the neck and I felt the spine explode - Steady. One, two, three . . . twelve cars. In the far corner, a pick-up truck. Thirteen objects of good cover, but too far away, the nearest car at least twenty feet from where I was walking: we were crossing an open space. No one in sight. A long way off, the drone of a tram. No sound of other traffic: the evening rush hour was over and in this city by night the streets are almost empty. What would she do with them? 'Make for the car. The Syrena.' Authority in his tone, the authority of death itself. Five hundred were an awful lot: they'd fill the whole flat and what could she do with them afterwards, change the water every day, sit and stare at them, what pretty roses?