My Masked Assassin

Chapter Twenty Five: Breathe...

Breathe...just breathe...

I feel my heart slamming into my chest, I tried to calm it down as I look at the feet of the two criminals walking around the back storage room.

Chad's blood was trickling down the concrete floor and pooling up against the side of my cheek, but I resist the urge to pull away or gag at the suffocating stench of blood.

I've become too used to the smell of blood to have it affect me in any way at this point.

I didn't let my eyes get distracted or leave the targets I was stalking. I was waiting to get an opening, see any type of opening...

I started counting down to went Tom would call me and trigger a distraction so I could run out the door that the two heathens had left open.

I started to pull up my legs, ready to slide out and bolt for the door as soon as my phone started ringing.

But then something unexpected happened.

A huge, and I mean ginormous, woman shakes the earth as she rounds the corner and completely blocked the passageway.

Dear sweet Jiminy Cricket-that's a giant woman!

I couldn't see much passed her torso but she didn't look so much fat but just...big.

She invoked terror just by her mere presence and I couldn't help but shrink back further into my corner instead.

And right now qué my phone begins to ring from the corner of the other side of the room.

I squint my eyes, expecting the worse, and snap them back open when I hear a large gunshot sound.

"C'mon, Ma!" I hear one of the men cry, "Ye didn hav ta blow up the phone! I could've taken it as ma own!"

I silently curse to myself as I mentally reminded myself that Tom now owes me another nother phone.

"You numbskulls! Did you even check to see if this string bean was the only cracker in here!?" The woman, with the deepest feminine voice known to man, said.

"Duh...why would anyone else be back here?" The other, larger man said.

I hear the large crackle of a slap resonate through the room and I cover my mouth in shock.

"I swear, I don't know why I didn't just put you two up for adoption the moment you sprung out from between my legs," she seethed.

She stomps further into the small room, going around a set of boxes further left to where I was hiding under the bench.

"I've already taken care of all the other customers in the store," she continued. "The girl behind the counter was pretty cute, I'd have banged her brains out if I didn't put a bullet between her eyes," she finished in a smug sounding voice that I assumed ended in a smirk.

I hear one of the men, which I now knew were twin brothers and the giant woman's sons, sniff, most probably the one that got smacked, and says, "T-t-tha sounds great, ma..." He finished in a choked sob.

"If we raid this store, we'll be set for years to come!" His mom finished gleefully, downright ignoring her distraught son.

From under the bench, I see one of the brothers move in closer and was likely comforting his twin when he turned and asked his mom, "Shouldn't we probably start loading up the trucks?"

"Not until we make sure everyone in this building is dead," his mother retorted.

"Including us?" I hear the brother who was slapped mummer in anger to himself, to then get quickly hushed by his twin.

"We can't risk getting caught by da cops mama!" The more reasonable, not slapped, twin cried.

"Don't you dare speak to me in that tone!" His mother rage. "Besides, we could always just sacrifice your brother to them so we could get away." She waved at them.

Okay, I'm not even related to this woman and I've already had enough of her from everything I was witnessing.

"Are you sure this one is dead?" I hear her voice ask unbelievably close to me.

All of a sudden she was right on top of me, standing next to Chuck-I mean-Chad's head! How can someone so huge be able to move so silently at will!?

I try not to disrupt Chad's blood flow on the ground and restrict my bodies movements as his blood trails down my pants and exits through my toes.

If the trail of his blood wavered in any way it might reveal my location and land me in big trouble.

And as she was about to lift her head back up and turn away we both catch a sight, one that fills me with both hope and dread.

Chad's chest lifted ever-so-slightly up and down.

HE'S ALIVE!!! I internally shriek.

"HE'S STILL BREATHING! HE'S STILL KICKING!" Ma cried out and reach for her shotgun and aim at Chad's chest cavity.

Before I could scream and jump out of my hiding place to stop her, against my better judgement, we hear the sirens.

Relief washed through my entire being as I slumped back down onto the blood-soaked floor. I REALLY did not want to start debating whether or not to save Chad, my moral compass is already too severely out of whack.

"Shit! Who ratted us out!?" The mother bellowed with monstrous intensity.

"If we hurry, we can still leave with some of the goods-" the brother who was slapped tried to say but the mother cut him off.

"Not until he's dead and I find out who called the cops!" She screamed back, "no one else was here expect us! Their must be a rat somewhere! Find then and show them what we do to snitches..."

She aims her barrel back at Chester's-damn it-Chad's head!

Oh no you don't! I think spitefully to myself. I bend my arm around, scoop up some of Chad's blood and spray it in the mother's eyes.

The woman screams in shock and tilts back, the barrel of her shotgun veers off course and fires off with a loud bang.

The bullets tore through the top of the bench I was hiding under and chipped off a piece of my hair.

Fucking great...

Seeing an opportunity with her tipping back, I kick the bench out from under me and ram it straight into her face.

Upon sighting me one of the brothers lifted up his gun and aims.

"You really wanna risk hitting your mother?" I ask harshly.

He hesitated a moment and I use that to knock down a stack of boxes on them, one of them tries to sidestep it but slips on blood and crashes into an empty abandoned fridge.

I rush to jump over their fallen bodies and escape when I feel fat fingers wrap around my throat and clench tightly.

I'm yanked backwards and as the blood rushed to my head I hear-

"I haven't choked the life out of someone in a while, so imma really gonna enjoy choking you..."