The Innocent (A 'Finder' Fanfiction)

Shadow of Pluto - 42 - Aaron

The three last shots all came from suppressed guns, whose hoarse hisses only made it far through the labyrinth, as there was hardly any other noise left now. After each came a pause, and thereafter, a silence fell that even the commotion not too far down the hallway could disturb.

Even though there was definitely still some movement somewhere in the basement, someone alive, someone armed – it felt like the war was over. This now was the time to lick your wounds and flee if you wanted to make it out.

Nonetheless, Aaron stayed for a moment longer. He had crouched and kept his ears pricked for whatever he might hear around, his gun at the ready, his finger near the trigger. His eyes, however, he kept on the picture before him. Blood had built a puddle on the floor, and by now it was not only black because of the lack of light, but because it had started to coagulate. There was no warmth in it anymore, and there hadn't been for a while.

"Fucking idiot", he merely moved his lips, for the one he was speaking to would not hear anything even if he had yelled at him.

About one and half hour ago they had parted, and at some moment in the time passed until now his brother had managed to get himself killed – and Aaron hadn't noticed anything. It made him wonder ... there had been so little space between them: only a few corridors, just one or two floors. Yet, he had not ... felt anything. Maybe he had been too occupied to realize something had happened? Or perhaps ... there really wasn't anything that could have been experience at all? No snapping of some kind of mental bond, like a rubber band that had been pulled too hard?

For a moment, he stared up at the bricked ceiling. For 9 months, they had held on to each other and then had entered life together. But after that, they had been apart from early on. Too different in character, too callous their upbringing.

Probably there just had never even been any connection between them. Or it had been severed so long ago that he had forgotten about how it felt.

"Fucking idiot!", he spelled again, blinking once when the bricks suddenly seemed to become a bit blurred.

Then he got up and left. There was nothing else for him to do – and certainly Alex did not deserve for him to lose his life here as well. Not that the other had ever expected that of him.

Moving cautiously between the shadows, hiding again and again, and taking quite a long time, Aaron managed to finally get back into the garage. He checked for anybody around, then locked the door, went to the car they had arrived in before, opened the trunk to get out the corpse he had hidden there – because he definitely didn't want to drive around with a dead man's body – then he stopped.

Something had caught in the corner of his eye. Slowly he closed the trunk again, the corpse still in there; then he walked down the garage to the black and chrome of a car's rear that stuck out from a tarpaulin.

'You need to hurry', he told himself, yet pulled the covering sheet off still, to reveal a shiny black and silver 1966 Jaguar E type convertible.

'Get out!', his conscience tried to interfere again, and he just interrupted it: "That's what I'm doing."

He tried the car's front door, found it open, so he got into the driver's seat. He also found the key – lying innocently on the dash – including a switch for the garage door.

For a moment, he stared at it, and thought. Yet one car was as good as the other, wasn't it? The one was a long black limousine, this other an incredibly well restored Classic car. Both were worth a fortune, both rather conspicuous, especially once the sun came up. With both, he had to find a way through the gate to get out from the compound ...

So, it really didn't seem to matter which one he chose ... and now that he was already sitting inside this one – and there was still a corpse in the other ...

He pushed the key into the ignition and turned it. The car started up right away, its sound a low, honest growl. The tank was nearly full as well. Aaron pressed the button for the garage, and the door started to roll upwards, when he already reversed.

No one seemed to mind. He switched the lights off, anyway – just in case. With a brief look ahead, he checked if there was any obstacle until he would have to face the front gate, then realized that the gate was gone. Two vans and a ... firetruck had obviously gotten rid of it before. That explained the strange crashing noises he had heard a while back.

'Maybe ...', he started to think when he felt his foot on the gas pedal. ' ...maybe that one good deed has gotten you some good Karma.'

Not that he believed in something like that.

But he had let Arata go. He had been nothing but a charade anyway. Perhaps if he was a different person, he realized, he would be feeling sad or angry or betrayed. Probably if he was not who he was, he would have started to imagine how life could have been ...

In the end, however, he was who he was. He was not ashamed of it, or sorry about it.

Well ... but possibly ... he could quit and start something new.

He hit the gas pedal, the car sped off, passed the vans and several dark figures that even ran after him. He heard the shots fired behind him, of which not even one made close to its mark, then raced through the gate and was gone.

Thirty minutes he needed to get back to his apartment, grab his stuff and whatever had been left there by Alex, then rushed into his new car again. The border to Bosnia-Herzegovina was only a few miles away. He had his passport; he had the money to speed up things ... and by the time the sun came up he had already passed into Montenegro.