One Off

She didn't have the face of a killer, he thought, adjusting his rifle in the pouring rain, his weathered hands stinging arthriticly in the cold. She didn't have his eyes, eyes that had seen too much and gone too far. Instead, there was a childish innocence to her, in contrast to everything he had heard, everything else about her he saw. He looked away, amused at how amateur he'd become, it had been two decades since he last killed, he knew clean shots don't always come around twice, and taking a few seconds to let his heart and breath steady, looked through the scope again.

His eyes, his weathered, killer's eyes, nonetheless left him frozen at what they saw. She stared impossibly up at him, despite the distance, more than five hundred meters away, and grinned devilishly, knowingly. He had the shot, knew he could put two bullets in her face before she hit the ground, but instead he stared, hypnotized, and watched her. She plucked a knife from her hair, with no fear or hesitation in her motions, and carved a line across the back of her hand. She lifted her blood tipped fingers to her face, still grinning, and smoothly, and with the confidence in motion that comes only from repetition, wrote delicately onto her face, NO MERCY.

In this moment, he saw her, knew her, and she saw him. He knew she was a monster just as he knew left from right or hot from cold, and she knew, she knew that he was but a corpse to her. There was no doubt, no other way things could be.

He stared through the scope and she stared right back, like children refusing to blink, for seconds or hours, it didn't matter. Her life was his take to take if he wanted it, and his finger grazed the trigger but a quarter inch a away. Deep down inside, not in his head, but deeper, he knew as she already did, that she would kill him. And the knowledge was as clear to him as was the nature of the monster in front of him, but he was wrong.

He watched her turn away and head deeper into the alley, all the way still in his line of sight, but that didn't matter. He saw her form slowly dissolve into nothingness as the distance between them grew. He stared into the nothingness she left behind, and despite a life of courage and tenacity, triumphs against insurmountable odds, found himself paralyzed and unprepared for the nothingness to stare right back at him.

But he was once a warrior. He dropped the rifle, his paralysis gone and with it the dehabilitating fear. How stupid, he thought. She was something else alright, but this had gone too far. He looked around, his head still spinning, and his amusement at how ridiculous he'd been acting turned quickly to anger. He had once been professional. What the hell had happened to that man? Furious at how soft he'd become in his old age, he swore that he'd kill her, swore that he wouldn't freeze up a second time.

But his world didn't stop spinning and her grin, her stupid grin, still haunted him. He was never the right man for this. Ashok had wanted his brother to go after the girl, not him. He remembered the torture and the promises.

Then he remembered other things. Lies that he told his first wife, promises he broke to his friends, the death of his father, the scissors his mom used to take to his skin. Through the pain of reliving all his sins and those witnessed upon him, of reopening all his old wounds, he knew what this was and he pleaded, promised he'd do anything, promised he'd go after the girl again, that he wouldn't hesitate, promised to be a better man, promised to atone for what he had done, and he cried, but only for a moment before his skull exploded onto the cold, wet pavement. Car tires futilely screeched, horns blazed, and voices cried out but he heard none of it, just a girl's innocent giggle, and the low roar of a beast far off in the distance.