The Last

3

Cognitive pile-up. On the one hand I was busy cataloguing the perceptual facts-Christmas cracker snap, puff of dust, clipped ricochet-to confirm I had indeed just been shot at, on the other I was already past such redundancies and springing-yes, springing is the correct present participle-into the doorway of a former Bradford & Bingley for cover.

One wants clean, 007ish reactions at times like these. One wants all sorts of things. Backed into the urinous doorway, however, I found myself thinking (along with oh for fuck's sake and Maikoa can publish the journals and what will survive of us is nothing ) of the refreshing abruptness with which financial institutions-B & B among them-had collapsed in the Crunch. Ads for banks and building societies had continued to run days, sometimes weeks after the going concerns had gone. For many it was impossible to believe, watching the green-jacketed lady in black bowler hat with her smile fusing sexual and financial know-how, that the company she represented no longer existed. I've seen this sort of thing before, obviously, the death of certainties. I was in Europe when Nietzsche and Darwin between them got rid of God, and in the United States when Wall Street reduced the American Dream to a broken suitcase and a worn-out shoe. The difference with the current crisis is that the world's downer has coincided with my own. I must repeat: I just don't want, I really can't take (in both senses of the verb) any more life.

A second silenced shot buried itself thud-gasp in the B & B brick. Silver ammo? I had nothing to fear if it wasn't, but no way of finding out other than taking one in the chest and seeing if I dropped dead. (This was so typically unreasonable of the universe. Apart from a few days to do what I had to do I didn't want any more life. What's a few days after two hundred years? But that's the universe for you, decades of even-handedness then suddenly zero negotiation. ) I got down on my stomach. The concrete's odour of stale piss was a thing of cruel joy. Low, moving in tiny increments, I stole a look round the doorway's edge.

The supermodel in the trench coat stood twenty yards away with his back to me. His left hand was in his pocket. Either he'd shot at me and was now making a suicidal target of himself for my return fire, or the shots had come from somewhere else, in which case only clinical moronism could excuse him from not having worked that out. The scene was an eighties album cover, his overcoated silhouette and the snow and the odd-angled cars. I was tempted to call out to him, though to communicate what, God only knew. Possibly words of love, since imminent death fills you with tenderness for the nearest life.

Hard to say how long he stood there like that. The big moments distend, allow intellectual expansion... a disused London doorway in a twinkling becomes a public toilet; the lower animal functions pounce the second the higher ones look away; civilisation remains in Manichean deadlock with the beast... but eventually he turned and began to walk towards me.

Flush to the wall I got back on my feet, inwardly loud with calculations. Hand-to-hand with me this marionette wouldn't last three seconds but somehow I didn't see it going that way. Between here and the junction with Collingham Road thirty yards away there was cover, four cars parked or ditched on my side of the road and a pair of old-style phone booths on the corner. Risky. But unarmed in the doorway I was a sitting duck.

Meantime my pretty young lord and his cheekbones had halved the distance between us and stopped again. For a moment he frowned slightly, as if he'd forgotten his purpose. Then, precisely as I opened my mouth to say, What the fuck do you want?, his left hand came out of its pocket, languidly, holding a silenced .44 Magnum, a tool of such prodigious bulk it was hard to imagine him having the strength to lift and aim it. He smiled at me, however-big sensuous mouth and brilliant teeth in a bony face ensouled by dark mascaraed eyes-then with a surprisingly steady arm raised the weapon slowly and pointed it at me.

The body gets on with things while consciousness prattles. Without realising it I'd bent my knees to leap (and there was the great futile ghost of wolf hindquarters, a feeling of exquisite useless memory); my hands were out, fingers spread, head full of gossip but a shame not to see the first crocuses and if there's an afterlife but no just something like your mouth filling with soil then nothing-

His hand-hit by a bullet-jerked and spat blood as the gun flipped away. He did a queer little simultaneous yelp and hop, staggered two steps forward clutching his wrist, then sank to his knees in the snow. His face, far from the Tragedy mask you might expect, showed something like bewildered disappointment, although as I watched, his mouth opened and stayed that way. A pendulum of spittle (a phenomenon all but exclusively appropriated by modern pornography) hung from his lower lip, stretched, broke, fell. The bullet had gone through his palm, which meant bleeding from the superficial veins only. If it had severed the median nerve there might be lasting damage, but with today's surgical top guns I doubted it. He sat back on his heels and looked about, vaguely, as if he'd lost his hat. The Magnum might have been a cigarette butt for all the attention he paid it.

The sniper's message emerged: If I can hit our friend's hand from here I could have hit you anytime. It was as if we'd been having a conversation and he or she just said this, quietly.

"Who are you?" I said to the young man.

He didn't answer, but very sadly got to his feet, left forearm cradled close. The pain would be transforming the limb into something big and hot and beyond placation. With careful effort he bent, retrieved the Magnum, put it back into his coat pocket. Then without a word or further look at me he turned and began trudging away.

I didn't doubt my reading, my risk assessment, my temporary safety, but those first steps out from the shelter of the doorway called for force of will. I took three and stopped. Pictured the sniper watching through the cross-hairs and, since every mutual understanding gives some sort of pleasure, smiling. My back livened to all the clean cold space behind me for a silver bullet to fly through. The smell of the falling snow was a mercy, though I was sure my clothes had picked up the doorway's vicious scent of old piss. I took four more steps, five, six... ten. Nothing happened.

The warmth of being watched never left me, but I walked to Gloucester Road without incident and boarded the last Circle Line Tube to Farringdon.

Maikoa had called and left a message while I was underground. She'd made it to the Foundation safely.