Farewell

(Note to any examiners who may be reading this. The coursework you are comparing this to is not plagarised, I am the same Thomas Louden and this is entirely my own work! Thanks for your time.)










Davan pushed through the funeral shroud drape of a crooked door and breathed out slowly.

His assassin eyes darted around the sullen, empty shack. Thick smog drizzled in through a gaping grimace of crumbled wall and hungry tentacles of it oozed through the makeshift doorway. A glossy puddle had accreted in one corner and glimmered opalescently with oily hues.

Davan stepped over the ashen, charcoal ruins of a cooking fire and sat down slowly on the squat, lumpy bed. It groaned in protest, and a little puff of co-qui feathers tickled out of a broken seam and seesawed to the dirt packed floor.

He noticed a cynical scrawl on the opposite wall: ‘We are the damned’

Davan couldn’t help but agree silently as he cocked his pistol. The power cell charged with a petulant whine, and the weapon hummed with menacing intensity.

This was an unusual mission, as were its parameters. The jealous lords of the skyscrapers were a disagreeable bunch, wreaked with animosity, bloody rifts and hate filled oaths of quarrel. Their lives were a constant callous contest of tit for tat, and the lowly peasants of the slums that clustered around the towering foundations of their sky-tearing kingdom were pawns. Invisible, unregistered assassins, officially nonexistent, impossible for tiring authorities to track.

“I want him dead.” Rasped the synthesised voice. It was not uncommon for clients to eschew the use of natural speech; confidentiality was a vital part of the service. “If he is still breathing at the start of ninth segment, you can kiss those ten thousand credits goodbye.”

“I understand.” Davan growled.

“At the start of ninth segment I will call his shack. If you do not answer I will assume you failed.” Hissed the voice.

“It will be done.” Whispered Davan, hanging up with static laced cluck. He sighed wearily and unholstered his pistol, cradling the heavy, lethal bulk in calloused, greasy palms. It was not often one was required to kill a friend.

What could the client possibly hope to gain through the death of a nameless, worthless assassin from the slum town?

Davan stared down onerously at his killers hands. They were trembling gently, the way a candle flame will flicker in a breeze so slight you can barely feel it on your skin. He had known his target, Batura, since he was nine Earth years old. They had shared the sickness and pestilence of childhood, squandered their short lived innocence as one mischievous being.

As the monumental hardships of their adult lives began to bear down on them, they had been there for one another.

And Davan was supposed to kill him now?

Something rustled outside. Davan’s head snapped up, and the pistol was in his hands in an instant, trained unsteadily on the door.

His mouth became a grimaced slit, breath whistling franticly through his nose, entire body ringing with the tune of his quailing heart.

A whiskered, grey moss face peered underneath the door shroud and stared inquisitively with glossy black beads of eyes. The rat cocked its head and looked straight at Davan mockingly, its nose twitching as if in laughter. He scolded himself for being so edgy.

Why was he here? He tried to rationalise with himself. If he didn’t kill Batura, the client would just find another man to do it. Batura was dead either way, and Davan needed that money.

He smirked coldly. It was not so long ago that this twisted logic, this reassuring mantra, had seemed completely ridiculous to him. He remembered himself as an idealistic youth, that fateful time with his father. His rite of passage, his first murder.

“I won’t be a vulture; I won’t feed off of death!”

He had cried, and set down the rifle. He had expected his father to beat him to death for his disobedience, but instead he had praised him.

“Then I envy you Davan, for you will be a far better man than I.”

Davan shook his head sadly. Yet here he was now, waiting to murder his best friend. There was no other way to exist in this world. You killed who you were told to kill, or you starved to death. That was the way of it.

You will be a far better man than I…

Had there been a hint of sarcasm in his father’s voice? Had he known that Davan would be unable to find a peaceful existence, that he too would slip into the endless cycle of death that was life on this world?

“I’m not a bad man!” he growled under his breath. “I’m doing this for Elaine, not me.” The words caught in his throat. “I’m not a bad man.” He buried his face in his hands, feeling the steely chill of the pistol butt press against his temple.

It was a sullen, bulky black weapon, the grip rough to the touch like the tread of studded boots, the barrel snub nosed and gormlessly gaping. It was fragranced with dry metal tang and a whisper of oil, that light persistent smell that seems to cling to skin.

With a sudden sweeping swish, the door curtain was swept aside, and a man stood silhouetted against the dying light.

The pistol swung up as if under its own will, and a ghostly silence filled Davan’s throbbing head. Everything was so clear in that instant, as if a heavy veil had slipped and the murk had dissipated. The moment had been snatched from the relentless ebb of time.

A dry metallic click struck Davan’s ears like a thunderclap.

His eyes locked with Batura's as the surprise widened them until it seemed they must burst like over ripe fruit. They held that gaze for a timeless eternity.

Batura blinked lethargically, then his focus slipped down placidly to the thumb-sized hole in his chest. A wisp of smoke trickled lazily out of the rough, blackened lips of the wound. He looked back up at Davan, his starry eyes dulling rapidly. The corners of his mouth twitched, his lips parted as if he was about to speak, but nothing came.

“I’m so sorry.” Whispered Davan, as his friend keeled over and slumped against the doorway. Nerveless fingers scrabbled at slowly rotting wood as his legs gave way beneath him and he sank to the floor like a drowning man. He gasped deeply, mute face a mask of agony, mouth agape like a hooked fish, eyes bulging from a bloodless skull. Then he was still.

Davan’s finger still whitely clutched the trigger in a bony vice. He released his chokehold on the weapon. The gun clattered to the floor.

He stood precariously and took a few uncertain steps across the room to the corpse. The stench of burnt flesh invaded his nostrils and stuck obscenely in the back of his throat. Kneeling giddily, he reached out to feel for a pulse in Batura’s worn throat. Several almost fresh shaving cuts and little pink knit scars creased the rough skin.

Davan pulled his hand back, feeling sick. Cold blood pounded his skull. Silence assaulted his ears. His palms were wet and trembling.

A foul spit of static rent the air. His eyes spun and landed on the bulky radio in the corner.

At the start of ninth segment I will call his shack.

Ten thousand credits.

I won’t be a vulture; I won’t feed off death!

He was doing it for Elaine. He had to support her.

You’re a far better man than I…

“I’m not a bad person!” cried Davan. Everything was shaking, everything was buzzing, everything was grey. He looked at the body, he looked at his hands, he looked at the radio. He stood up. He ran.

As he leapt over the cooling carcass and bounded into the thick wall of mist, he heard the foghorn dirge of siren heralding the start of ninth segment, and it reverberated in the tortured depths of his soul. He kept running.

The little radio sat innocuously in the corner of the lifeless shack spluttered to life, and the voice of a dead man crackled out.

“First of all, I want to thank you. If you are listening to this, then it means you did what I could not.

The money you were promised has been transferred into your account, consider it a farewell gift from an old friend.

I was… too weak, to do it myself. But I knew you, my friend, of all people, would have the strength to carry it through. All I had to do was offer the right incentive. If you’re listening Davan, you’re a cold and heartless son of a bitch.”

The tape ran out with a weary bone like snap. The rat in the doorway twitched its velvet nose solemnly, then scampered out into the starless night.