Macknally runs up the beach.
She does NOT call out "Freeze", while running with her gun flailing up and down (instead of expertly trained down on the target), like some bullshit movie about the sexy female cop with moxie and stiletto heels. She did the opposite: she pushed harder, ran faster, opened up her gait, and lightened her step, while lowering her breath rate and depth so as to be as stealthy as possible... all the while beading down the barrel of her massive gun dead center mass, her arms impossibly steady. The man was facing the woman, both of them apparently in a heated exchange, not looking at each other, just spewing words over each other like children.
Mac never stops running, squeezing off three rounds in smooth and steady succession. The first goes wild- up and over the man's head. Neither of the two silhouetted people even notice the .45 caliber munition silently whisk by and plunge into the water. The second just off to the left, directly behind the man's head missing the back of his skull by just inches. It strikes the surf a few yards behind and up the coast of the man with a much more prominent splash, and he seems to notice. He starts to turn his back to Mac, to look and try to see what cause the splash. Third shot blows the top of the man's head clean off. He stands there for several impossible seconds... not quite realizing he has quite literally lost his head. The pulverized mist of blood, brains, and skull, billow up and out to sea mostly, just the lightest of red splatter hits the woman's face. She is still fuming in anger at the man and doesn't even realize it's his blood. The man's corpse stands there, every so slowly beginning to wobble as gravity overcomes the lingering bit of unconscious muscle activity that keeps a persona balanced against the micro currents of planetary rotational gravity.
Macknally stops running to stand and watch the man topple over. The woman still seemingly unaware of what has just happened, sitting with her head in her hands muttering in anger to herself and crying. The waves lapping endlessly.
Mack stares at her a moment, before pivoting her hips in her direction, and in that moment realizes with horror that this woman is not McGee. She's some tourist. Similar hair, body type, skin tone... But she was clearly not Agent McGee. That man is not McGee's abductor, he's some emotionally abusive husband or lover. The sparkle of a massive wedding ring. Married couple. Innocent married couple. Mack is horrified. Gun still up at the ready, smoke curling up out of the barrel into the air... in cinematic grandeur....
The world stops still.
The woman slowly looks up... her eyes going automatically to where her husband's face had been just moments ago.
He's not there. She at first fails to realize he has fallen, she thinks that he has walked off somewhere in frustration....
Turning her head, first away from Mack, and then in slow motion, back towards where Mack is standing, the woman looks around confusedly for her husband.
Without hesitation or thought, Mack adjusts her stance and bears the gun's sights down on the woman, taking certain aim and squeezing off a round before the woman has time to even make out Macknally's shape in the middle distance or realize that she is pointing a gun at her face.
The gun, despite it's built-in silencer technology, sounds like a cannon in Agent Macknally's ears.
Time dilated out again, to the most impossible of slow-motion resolutions for Mack and the woman.
During this moment of intense hyper-awareness, the two women suddenly experienced a merging of each other's minds. They could each vaguely and quietly feel the other's thoughts and feelings simultaneously with her own as if they were telepathically linked. They each could see their own faces from the other's eyes.
There are no words that can remotely capture or do justice to what those two minds experienced in that brief temporal distortion wave that linked them together. But this can be said about the phenomena- it was lucid, vivid, and real. It was not a hallucination. Macknally felt it necessary to say to the woman (without words)
"This is really happening."
The woman's final thought:
"I know. I just didn't think it would happen again, so soon."
Then the top of her head was pulverized as quickly and terminally as her husbands had been moments ago.
The woman's corpse slumps over onto the sand and water.
The waves red already from the first body.
Tears silently flowing down Mack's face as she copes with what she's just done. She struggles to fight off completely losing her shit. After weeping uncontrollably for several moments, she gets her shit together. She scans the area looking for potential witnesses. There are none.
"What to do? What to do, to fix this?", the voices returning.
"Wait..."
Sounds. In the distance.
"Is that... what I think it is?", the voice, sounding like both her mother and Bobby at the same time.
She wasn't sure. Something... snippets of...
['Meditation', from "Thais" by Jules Massenet is playing, though at first it is quite faint]
"The turn-table" the two woman chorus in her head sang out with an urgency that got her back up on her feet and running.
As she runs back to the bungalow, the music grows stronger, clearer. Rushing into the bedroom, she almost stumbles to the ground. Steadying herself, she stares at the record player in disbelief.
The record's been changed, the volume turned all the way up.
No one there. Zero trace. She went over the place twice, inside and out.
Ticking Clock Ticking
Mack reloads her gun, and grabs some items to help her dispose of the bodies. She runs back to the spot where she killed two innocent bystanders... and both bodies are gone.
Vanished.
No signs whatsoever of anyone or anything disturbing the sand for yards and yards around the spot where the bodies had fallen.
This time, she really loses her shit... hard. She vents her rage screaming, pounding her fists in the sand, weeping till she passes out.
Time passes... No one disturbs her as she sleeps.
She wakes up on the beach, the quarter-moon is huge and low on the horizon. The tide so low, she can't hear the sound of any waves lapping the sands nor quite see the water at all.
Looking up, she is stunned by the sheer number of stars... the depth of field she perceives is profound and mesmerizing.
The whole image was simply breathtaking.
YOU ARE READING
zero hour
Action"Set in an experimental sci-fi comic book action adventure literary world-building project universe of multi-book series nested within other book series, 'The Zeppoverse' may be a bit disorienting to navigate at first... but you kind get used to it...
