David Jackson - Pariah

Shit! thought Doyle, and started his own sprint. He saw that Laura was also running, and that her trajectory was going to get her to Lomax first.

Lomax saw this too, and in the last moment before a confrontation became inevitable he cut to his left and raced up the steps of a graffiti-adorned apartment building. He disappeared inside, swallowed up by the gloom.

Seconds behind her quarry, Laura drew her gun as she too entered the building. Anxious not to get left behind and leave Laura without backup, Doyle picked up the pace and took the steps two at a time. He pulled his gun and dived into the lobby. He heard footsteps pounding up the stairs.

‘Laura!’ he shouted.

‘Up here!’ she called back. ‘He’s heading up.’

Panting, Doyle followed her, still jumping onto alternate steps. He listened to the heavy footfalls above him, growing louder as he closed the distance between them. Just as he thought one final push would bring him into sight of Laura, he heard the creak and slam of a door. There were more footsteps, then another creak and slam. And then silence.

‘Laura! Laura! Wait!’

He practically soared over the next flight of stairs, his strides covering whole sets of steps at a time. In front of him was a brown wooden fire door containing a small reinforced window. He crashed through the door, heard its hinges squeal in complaint. From the far end of the dimly lit corridor came the sound of yet another door being slammed shut.

Ahead of him, Laura was moving swiftly toward the apartment at the end of the hallway. Above its entrance, a light flickered on and off, over and over. Each time it came on, it illuminated a faded brass plate indicating that this was apartment 4D.

‘That it?’ Doyle asked, finding his words difficult to force out as he simultaneously tried to suck in much-needed air.

Laura, in similar discomfort, just nodded.

‘Sure?’

‘Yes!’

‘Okay, go!’

They would worry about the legal niceties later. About how the suspect’s flight gave them probable cause to enter the apartment. About how they both remembered announcing clearly and unequivocally that they were police officers, despite what anyone else heard or didn’t hear. For now, the main thing that concerned them was time. Every second they wasted now gave Lomax and whoever else was in that apartment time to arm themselves and prepare for an onslaught. Every second lost in hesitation magnified the danger several-fold.

And so Doyle hurtled himself at the door, raising his foot. He knew that Lomax had not had time to put an array of bolts and chains in place. When Doyle’s foot connected, there was a loud smash and a splintering of wood, and the door almost came off its hinges as it flew open.

Sailing into the room under his own momentum, Doyle had no time to register the finer details of his surroundings. He didn’t see the living room in terms of its faded and ripped green sofa or its flat-screen TV or its coffee-table collection of porn magazines. His radar was alert only to people and signs of danger. What that told him was that this room was clear. But what it also drew to his attention, as if it were lit up in neon, was the door to the bedroom.

The door was painted in cream, and a crack ran the length of one of its panels.

And Doyle could see that it was moving. It was slowly swinging shut, as though someone had just entered that room.

He was convinced of this. In that instant of time, he was surer than anything that the door was moving.

And so he called out to Laura, ‘Bedroom!’ and he raised his gun in cover and watched as, in complete faith, she headed toward the room he had just indicated. She had heard the unwavering conviction in his voice, was absolutely certain now that this was where their quarry lurked, and so that’s where she went, trusting to the experience and judgment and sincerity of her partner.

When Laura’s back exploded, the universe disappeared for Doyle.

If he was unaware of his surroundings before, they had now winked out of existence.

What remained was. .

. .Laura, a huge hole punched into her back, falling and twisting, her face contorting in pain. .

. .the sound. A blast that filled the room, its shockwaves bouncing and rebounding off the walls. .

. .and Lomax. Standing in the doorway of the room to Doyle’s left.

That room being the bathroom.

Not the bedroom. Not the room into which Doyle had just sent Laura. Not the room with the cream door and its cracked panel. The door that was moving. Because, so help me God, it was most definitely moving.

Lomax was not alone. He had a gun for company. A sawed-off double-barrel shotgun, one of its dark deadly eyes still smoking after its look at Laura.

And now the other eye, the one still capable of seeing, was turning in search of another victim. The gun was swinging in an arc that, in the next fraction of a second, would bestow upon that eye full sight of Doyle.

In the moments which followed, Doyle discovered something profound. He found an understanding that had eluded him before — something that is likely to elude anyone who has never looked death in the eye before.

What was revealed to him was that, in a situation like this, you lose control of your body. You lose the ability to think, to rationalize, to make conscious decisions. You become an entity that functions solely by reflex, a biological unit within which every muscle, every sinew, every neuron is acting in unison to the tune of one overriding message. And that message is to survive. At any cost.

And if that objective entails the complete obliteration of another human being, then so be it. There is no morality here. No appeals to God or to humanity. There is only the law as laid down in our veins through millions of years of evolution.

What Doyle found himself doing was pulling the trigger of his Glock not just once, or twice, or any accountable number of times. He found himself pulling that trigger again and again and again, absorbing the kick of the Glock as it spat its fire and took chunks out of the man in front of him. He found himself moving toward Lomax, every fiber of his being saturated with the necessity of wiping that motherfucker from the face of the planet. To Doyle, Lomax was not a man with thoughts and feelings; he was just a threat to his own existence.

Even when Lomax was on the floor, blood pumping from the holes already in his body, Doyle kept on firing, his eyes observing dispassionately as Lomax’s dying form jumped with each bullet. He tried to shoot long after the gun was empty, long after the sounds of its explosions had faded. His trigger finger just kept on twitching. And even when his subverted consciousness began to exert some kind of control, he still experienced an almost irresistible impulse to continue the devastation.

He understood then. He had never killed before, never come so near to being killed. And now he understood.

There have been numerous times that cops have been vilified by the media for being apparently trigger-happy. Even Doyle himself, despite being a police officer, had occasionally wondered whether such extensive lethal force had been necessary.

But here he was, holding his Glock 19, now empty of the fifteen rounds it held in the magazine and the additional one in the chamber, and still he felt the urge to ram its butt into the skull of the corpse beneath him.

Shoot the gun out of the man’s hands? In your dreams. A clinical and effective double-tap? Yeah, right. Fire three times and assess? Sure. Try standing here in my shoes and saying that afterwards.

Yes, he understood completely. And he would never be the same again.

It took some time before the world materialized around him once more, before he could tear his eyes away from the lifeless form of Lomax. He was that wired, it came almost as a surprise to him to see the second body in the room. He found it difficult to work out what he should do next. All of his police training seemed to have deserted him.