Negotiated (Excerpt 1)

I thought it would be good to put an excerpt from an as yet unfinished piece of work. Like so many pieces, I started to diverge from the original plan I had. So often, it seems that things happen that way. Maybe I lack the required discipline to stick to the original plan. But often it seems that as I'm writing I decide on the fly that I don't like the character that I'm creating, and as soon as that happens, I start to change them. Not every character has to be likable, (and the definition of likable is very broad) but if it's a main character, I kind of feel as though they have to have something appealing about them.

Anyway, this excerpt is the start of the piece. I enjoyed writing it, and I hope it manages to evoke the chaos of the scene.

Oh, and just in case you're wondering, no, not all my writing involves guns, violence and crime.

The gunshots assaulted my ears with brutal force. I’d heard a gun fired before, but the reverberation and volume were amplified many times over from the close quarters and the featureless space of the bank. I’m not entirely certain what happened in those first few seconds. I was so shocked by the alien explosions that I couldn’t say for sure how many shots were fired.

An epidemic of panic tore through people’s minds, and I imagine half of them expected it to be the precursor so a bomb explosion from the way they almost killed themselves or any one in their path trying to escape. Others simply cowered helplessly on the floor in abject terror, unable to bring their bodies to move from the weakening fear that paralysed their muscles as much as their mind. Screams and shouts shattered and attempted in vain to overwhelm the terrifying blast of the weapon, as if it would somehow lessen the threat posed by the reality that had probably not been realised yet in most people’s minds except for recognising a source of danger.

Once the initial shock of the sound how registered properly in my brain, I realised there wasn’t any inanimate agent of death poised to blow everyone to oblivion. Of course, this wasn’t to say that there was no imminent danger, gunshots don’t get fired for no apparent reason. I had instinctively dropped low to the ground upon hearing them, my body reacting to the noise despite my conscious brain not having made sense of the situation immediately.

All of this took place in an adrenaline induced slow-motion scene through my eyes. The whole effect was a surreal and marginally disconcerting perception. While my life didn’t flash before my eyes as it is supposed to do before your death, seeing the ensuing chaos unfold in what felt like a detached position left me feeling strangely safe yet brutally cold. Unable to react as I saw a little girl’s legs swept out from underneath her by a businessman running for the door, watching helplessly as a young mother’s head diving to the ground after she tripped over a cowering teenager, and finally, the sheer terror written on the young bank teller’s face as she looked at the ominous black pistol that was pointed at her face.

I am certain it was only a few seconds from the time that the gunshot was fired from when I saw that standoff, though given my rampantly ethereal perception of time during that period, it could have been a minute and I would probably not have been able to say for certain. But I knew at that split second the pure horror that gripped the teller’s mind as she looked that instrument of death. The abject, paralysing dread was written unerringly over her in entirety, as though her body had been chiselled from stone merely to extol that one emotional state. It seemed to be combination of a desperate plea for her life in the face of the fearsome looking pistol directly in front of her, and a wail of despair at that failure of the supposedly failsafe security screen to drop and serve its only purpose of protecting her life, just as had they had done for all the other tellers.

As they so characteristically are, the criminal appeared entirely nondescript. Average height, average build, white male, somewhere around early 30s, brown hair; someone you could pass without ever considering them with a glance, except as another nameless individual to live out their life in complete obscurity. Not this one. He would be known, even if it was for his brief 15 seconds of fame as news headline, or be it only etched in the memories of the people in the bank.

Everyone had finally realised what was going on, though the complete silence from the part of the robber left some of them in two minds as to what to do. Some still fled the building, and the man seemed unperturbed by this. One man, however, had other ideas. He was not far from the gunman, and being low to the ground and behind, had the positioning to be able to reach him unawares, and the look on his face made it clear that was what he was about to attempt. I averted my eyes from him, and instead focused upon the teller and her plight, in case I should alert the gunman to the other man’s presence. I waited in anxious dread, fearful of the attempt escalating to a bloody mess.