Here's how it's done

It's not that I've got anything against Armenians. I suppose I'd never really given them much thought as a people. One of my good friends was called Manoukian and when I was a kid we both used to cry over the stories her mother told us of the dreadful things that had happened to them. The chronology came through a touch scrambled but the sentiments were clear. I wouldn't say I was actively pro-Armenian either; just neutral. An observer, that's me; objective, disinterested--not uninterested, my school beat that distinction into me before I was ten.


I had been standing, observing, not really thinking at all, outside the hotel. There was a little old lady, well, not that little and probably not that old, say 65-75, in black, limping, a cane in her right hand, and handbag and Groppi's parcel -- pastries, sweetmeats, Cairo's best --in the other. Once of those ID labels travel agents foist on you dangled from her bag: Armenian Church Tours, it said. I wasn't close enough to read her name. Suddenly she stumbled down the steps in front of the hotel and I caught her and set her properly on her feet while she clung on to me. She was making, I supposed, for the tour bus parked twenty metres away. I was just about to say something --Take care, Look where you put your feet --when I sensed a disturbance in the pattern, light, shadow; something flickered in the corner of my eye. It took a nanosecond, I couldn't really have registered much; a blur of a covered face, eyes, a gun barrel.


I threw the old lady on the ground and crashed on top of her. I suppose I was trying to cover her, protect her. Afterwards I always said I thought she'd make a softer landing. I'm fairly tall and reasonably fit at 38, if not perhaps quite as acrobatic as I was as a young marine commando at twenty-something. And I don't like falling. So maybe both stories are true.


I thought the firing would never stop, bursts of automatic fire from two or three AK47s. It went on for years, centuries, the dinosaurs rose and fell. It must have been forty, fifty seconds. Beneath me the old darling was sobbing, silently but with great heaves. I nearly fell off her but clung on like a non-swimmer to a life-raft. I felt a sharp jab in my arm and thought she must have inadvertently stabbed me with her cane.


Then silence, awful, deadly silence, for several, long, haunting seconds, before the screaming began: dreadful screams full of pain and fear and loss. I somehow got myself and the little old Armenian lady upright. I remembered, as I started to push us up, the roar of accelerating, getting away, motor-cycles. The terrorist guns had got the hell out. The coast's clear, I said, to cheer her up. They've gone. And then a black hole, searing pain, spurting blood. I felt the wetness of it and the pulsing; a jet, a fountain. I thought it was her and I'd let her down.

The first five paragraphs of The Forwarding Agent by Austen Kirk.
Yes, it's damn good writing.