The picquet had seen him. It turned and ran down the nearby alleyway. His predatory eyes had given him away.
Sigurd gave chase, leaping from the bushes that gave him cover in the black night and sprinted after the panicking picquet. He was gaining. His war knife was out, dulled against the orange nightlights above them. Sigurd was enraged that this one ran – he’d been waiting for the perfect moment to grab this one and silence his life.
Now it was imperfect; it had to be done now.
The distance between the two was lessening. Sigurd’s sprint was silent, he knew, but he made himself just loud enough for this bastard to hear him over his deafening heartbeat.
He was a second away.
Now the Colonel’s hand was around his mouth and Sigurd moved into the cunt’s body, throwing him off-balance, kicking behind his knee and punching his dagger to the hilt into this one’s side. He knew it wouldn’t be enough to kill him just yet.
He told himself that this mission was important. He told himself that he wouldn’t give into a rage in combat. He told others that he wouldn’t do anything stupid.
He told himself not to care.
This one lived. This cunt defied his intention. This one measly soul was under his killer’s grip.
He needn’t make this quick. He didn’t want to. He pulled out his war knife slowly like a guilty rapist from the bloody wound.
Sigurd scrambled onto this one’s back and bringing out his rifle. In a frenzy he threw the butt of his rifle into this one’s spine. Again and again, travelling up the body and breaking each vertebrae he fell in a bestial arc, not feeling each crack beneath his grip and feeling only his rage.
Sigurd didn’t know nor cared if this one lived now. Tossing his rifle to one side he grabbed the clotted hair and brought the head up in a painful angle above the ground.
He smashed the face into the concrete floor with a sickening crack of bone. The nose had collapsed. Teeth and their chippings had been thrown free across the floor.
Another crack, quicker than the last.
Another, and another, until blood had pooled around the bodies and the face, unseen to Sigurd, was now a bloodied mess of a ruined skull.
A stream of blood had followed the paving of the floor some distance away. When he’d finished, the only real sounds to be heard were the buzzing of a nearby electric light and the panting of Sigurd’s own lungs. His anger spent, he got up cumbersomely and looking at the mess on the floor threw his entire weight into his boot to break the neck of the picquet.
Only then did it stop breathing.
He wiped the blood from his eyes, collected his weapons, and continued.
– by Kier Sparey
© Copyright Kier Sparey 2013
Kier Sparey - Writer. 