Max Annas - The Wall

“But what does the dog want here? Why did they even bring it here?”

“Be quiet. Very quiet. Do you understand? I don’t want you to say anything else. Not a sound, not a word. Can you manage that?”

“But… I mean…”

“Not a word!” Deep Voice was barely audible. That was how much his voice had dropped.

“Okay.”

The dog was barking incessantly.

“Out there,” Deep Voice whispered. “Something’s not right.”

“That’s what I was saying.”

“And I told you to keep your mouth shut!” They hadn’t heard Deep Voice speak so loudly.

“Okay.”

“The dog can’t help it. It’s followed a scent. And the scent has led it here. It can’t have anything to do with us. You may say something now. Fine by me. Say something if you want to contradict me.”

High Voice said nothing.

“Good.”

There was a flurry of activity outside. The dog kept barking. Cars pulled up. Doors slammed. Thembinkosi heard voices that were increasingly frantic. The dog stopped.

“Finally,” High Voice breathed.

The dog started up again. All he’d done was take a breath.

“Shit,” High Voice said. The dog barked continuously.

“Shit!” High Voice repeated.

But it sounded different somehow. Not as fatalistic as before. Not resigned. Not as a commentary on something everyone had known and seen for a long time.

“Shit!” he said again. And his tone changed from excitement to panic.

“Forget it!” Deep Voice urged.

“But look!”

“But he hasn’t seen us. Forget it!”

“That’s a pistol. He’s holding a pistol.”

“I can see it’s a pistol, but that still doesn’t have anything to do with us.” Deep Voice was trying to stay cool, which he was managing to do with effort. “Put. That. Thing. Up.”

“I won’t let them take me out.”

From what Thembinkosi had understood, someone outside was pointing a gun at the house. And one or two meters away from his hiding place, someone else was aiming at that same person. He had to do something. Anything.

“Put it away.”

“You’ve ordered me around long enough.” Footsteps moving around. Someone leaping. Someone falling.

“Stop it.”

“See that?”

“We have to consider how to get out of here.”

Thembinkosi opened his wardrobe door. He didn’t say anything.

High Voice was standing with gun in hand over Deep Voice. High Voice was the skinny man with blonde curls that had seen too much sun. Faded jeans, gray polo shirt, sneakers. Deep Voice was more powerfully built, no gun in sight.

Bald head, white t-shirt with an ocean wave on it, darker jeans, leather shoes. He hadn’t imagined the two of them so shabby.

They hadn’t imagined that someone was in the wardrobe.

High Voice pointed his gun at Thembinkosi. Deep Voice sprang up and grabbed his arm.

High Voice fired.

The bullet shattered the window.

After the shot and the crashing glass, total silence descended for a second. Maybe a little longer. Even the dog didn’t make a sound.

Then the silence ended again.

It was like a bad bit of dialogue. First the one shot, then the next, followed by a third after the same time span. And then everyone was talking at the same time. Moses had gotten caught in a shootout once that had escalated at a gas station. A robbery gone wrong. Everyone in close proximity had taken cover as best they could. By the end, the four thieves, two cops and two schoolchildren were lying dead on the pavement. He’d never forget that. Above all, because he’d been caught in the middle of it all. He had hidden under one of the delivery vans, hoping its gas tank wouldn’t be hit. The day that he’d come the closest to dying.

But that wasn’t anything like this situation. Back then he’d been lying under the delivery van, listening to the burst of individual gun shots. This time he could hardly distinguish one shot from the other.

The three men had immediately thrown themselves onto the ground. Even the referee, who had just needed support to walk, found a new lease on life in the moment he thought he might die. It took a few seconds for the three of them to realize that the gunfire was some distance away from them. They stood back up and took cover behind a shoulder-height wall. They then ran singly to the next closest hiding spot. Heading toward the shootout.

The referee left a trail of blood behind him.

The first shot—not the one that had gone out but the one that came in—finished demolishing the already damaged window. The next shot landed somewhere, but Thembinkosi didn’t spend long wondering where.

He had fallen back a few steps when High Voice had aimed at him. By the time the first two shots had been launched outside, he was already in the process of falling to the floor. His head landed against the wardrobe wall as Thembinkosi tried in vain to catch himself somehow with his hands. The blow hurt, a lot. But what shocked him even more than his own pain was Nozipho’s scream. She must have thought he’d been hit.

Timing. Thembinkosi fell deeper into the wardrobe. Now a barrage of bullets hailed in from the outside. Deep Voice leaped to the side to escape them. As he did that, he pulled a giant gun out from somewhere. And he glanced over at Thembinkosi—if I didn’t have other things to do, I’d shoot you. When Thembinkosi landed with his upper body in the wardrobe, he called: “Stay in there! Get down!”

Getting down was what the two others were doing even though his words weren’t meant for them. Shots flew into the room, and the two men didn’t risk moving out of their defensive positions. The response to the one shot fired by High Voice had been too massive. Thembinkosi pulled up his legs and tried to draw his entire body into the protection of the wardrobe. As he was about to pull the door shut behind him, a salvo of gunfire shredded the upper part of the door.

“Stop!” a loud voice shouted from outside.

He didn’t know if that was meant for the two whites hidden in the room or for the people out on the street shooting into the house. The shots slowly petered out. One last one struck a bedroom wall, but then everything was quiet.

Moses watched the bleeding referee and the two guards. The fat man who had struggled to climb over the wall was having a hard time following the other two. The second guard took the lead, followed by the referee, who was holding his head with one hand and stretching one hand out in front of him to keep his balance. After taking cover behind a car parked outside a garage, they checked their surroundings and waited on number three.

On the one hand, this is good , Moses thought. The attention was no longer focused on him. Someone had done something else, so hunting him down was no longer as urgent as it had been. Retreat. Take the furthest route to the exit along the wall. Try to escape. On the other hand…

It might be good to know what was going on over there. Maybe it would be helpful for him to know what was so important. Helpful for his escape.

The shots died down.

Moses looked around. In the distance, the mail carrier was standing and chatting with somebody who was hidden by a tree. Impossible to tell who that might be. A Polo drove up beside the two of them, came to a stop. A window was lowered, brief exchange. The Polo drove on and stopped in front of a house. Nothing in sight the other way.

Moses ran across the street and down the one the other three had already taken. They had a major head start on him. He took the first opportunity to hide behind a large, mid-height bush.

There was one thing he needed to avoid at all costs: The other three shouldn’t see that he was following them.