Life is a funny thing. One day you’re sitting at your desk. You’re doing your job. Everything is boring and slow in your life. Somehow you’re comfortable with that.
Then the next day, everything is different. You find yourself running down dark alleys with vicious strangers on your back. You find yourself toting around a shotgun. There is so much going on that you don’t have time to think. Adrenaline and caffeine are making your decisions for you.
You duck behind a dumpster. Breaths coming hard and ragged. Lungs burning with effort. Gunfire and footsteps echoing from behind you. Who are those men and why won’t they stop?
With a half held breath and a prayer you sprint on aching legs from the dumpster around the next corner. You are completely lost. They have chased you into parts of the city that you never knew even existed. Further and further from the main streets, past the posh ghettos, beyond the real ghettos and into the dark places.
Hearing the scrambling of feet behind you duck into an alley off this alley. You weave left and right past people you can’t believe live here. You jump over their piles of blankets and newspapers. You thought things like this only existed in the movies.
You see men with tattered clothes and makeshift clubs standing at the end of the small alley. With a tired nod you throw your wallet at them without a thought and duck past. Just one more part of your life gone beyond your control. One more adrenaline decision.
Moments later as you round the next corner you briefly wonder why the homeless men in the alley weren’t afraid of your shotgun. You look down at your hands, they are still holding it. With a mental shrug you keep moving swiftly through alleys and paths. The sound of running feet pounding the ground still echoing from behind you as the pursuers keep pace.
Ahead you can see light outside the dark alley. Trees. Maybe a park? You find the strength to run a little faster, but once you reach the edge you pause. You look left and right. All you can see is a wide open park area. Something in the back of your brain tingles and you realize that if you run for it, they will surely pick you off with ease out in the open.
You dive behind the dumpster to your right. This is it you think to yourself. It’s do or die. You stare at the shotgun in your hands for a moment. Briefly you wonder what it feels like to kill a man and fear, while at the same time hoping, that in a moment you’ll know only too well.
Averting your eyes from the piece of chaos in your hands you peer over the dumpster. The men are now walking down the alley. They are yelling at you. Saying things you can’t understand. You can see now that there are three of them.
The man to your left is wearing a beige beret and has a stubby cigar hanging from the corner of his mouth. You wonder if he ran with that in his mouth, or pulled it out as a precursor to his celebration of catching his quarry.
The man to your right looks like nothing more than a brute. A brute trained in bar fights and weight rooms. His muscles are well defined and eerily thick.
The last man. The man in the middle is obviously the leader of the trio. He looks simple. Very forgettable. If he wasn’t trying to kill you, you wouldn’t even notice he was there.
While they are all different they all have one thing in common. They all look very smug. Assured of their victory. You quietly promise yourself that if you die here today you will not die alone.
You decide to do something stupid. Something the hero would do in a movie. You stand up and step from behind the dumpster. As you whirl around in your best John Woo spin you notice from the corner of your eye the leader put something away in his pocket. You think it was a transmitter of some kind but you can’t be sure.
With the acceptance that you are about to die you point the barrel of the shotgun at the three men. There is no fear in their eyes. They know you are not a killer.
“What do you want?” you shout at the men.
The leader of the men presses his lips into a thin smile. “We want you Mr. Cunningham. There are certain very bad people in this world who have promised a very large sum of money for your head.”
“Why? What have I done?” you ask the leader.
“We are not the type who ask questions Mr. Cunningham” the leader looks to the man on his left and then the man on his right. “We are the type of men who get the dirty things done.”
“But…” you stammer “I’m just a school teacher.”
“That’s very touching Mr. Cunningham. I’m sure. If I cared it might matter.” He points toward the gun in your hands. “Now if you will, please put that gun down. We know you won’t use it. If you come with us now there might still be a way to avoid death or…”.
They all raise their weapons in your direction. “Never mind, perhaps we will just end this matter now.”
You can feel your heart in your chest stop hammering, it seems to stop beating. Your breathing stops. Cold adrenaline powered sweat pushes it’s way out of your skin. That faint different smell as your body chemistry changes under the stress hits your nose.
Without a thought, almost as though you aren’t even in control you start pulling the trigger of the shotgun. One. Two. Three. Four. The empty shells eject and tumble to the ground. The clang of metal on concrete seems to come from far away. Somewhere in your mind you add the clerk at the sporting goods store to your Christmas card list as thanks for him recommending this model of gun.
The adrenaline fades from your system. You fall to your knees. Overcome by the scene before your eyes. Devastated by what you have just done; the sheer and utter carnage that you have unleashed.
Crawling on your knees you reach the body of the leader and search him for what you thought might be a transmitter of some kind. You find a cell phone and open it up. You check the text message history. You see the last message sent. “We have located Mr. Cunningham. The Teacher will be taken care of.”
You switch to the received messages and start flipping through them; stunned at the personal details of your life contained on this stranger’s phone. Where you were born. Where you grew up. The name of your first pet. Then the phrase “He is the last string” catches your eye.
You search more intently. Vague references to someone you apparently knew at one point in your life or who knew you. You think about the recent string of sad news you’ve been hearing. All of your old friends you haven’t seen in years and how they have been dying. Everyone just thought it was bad luck, they all seemed like unrelated accidents, but perhaps there was more to it…