7

Alan opened another bag of sunflower seeds, and looked at the crowd below. He smiled when he thought about all those reporters. They were there to get a story, and he was going to make sure they got one. The rifle sat ready and primed on the windowsill, and he felt just as ready. He had been checking the house for two hours now, and expected the kid to come out any moment now. He liked waiting, but he was starting to get restless. He needed the kill now. Very soon, every headhunter in the country would be going towards this kid. After all, nobody wanted the world to end, did they?

If only his dealer had been faster delivering the rifle, he would have been able to make the kill when the kid opened the door this morning. He looked at the door, and made a gun gesture with his fingers, practicing for the moment.

“Bang, yar dead” he mumbled, grinning.

He looked once more at the reporters. Most of them seemed bored and tired. Most of them had been there since the early morning. He wondered how he would appear in the interviews that were likely to follow the deed. He was likely to be a hero. Someone who took action when action was needed, and saved the world when it needed saving. He was not stupid, he know that a lot of the liberal media would see him as a monster, but that gave him an ever bigger hard on. He was spitting the seeds on the roof floor, and he had quite a lot of garbage rolling around now. The seeds made him thirsty, so he took another beer and opened it.

“Here’s to you, kid”, he said raising his can towards the locked door he was looking at.

Only then did he notice the shadow on the background. He turned around to see a man dressed with a black suit, wearing sunglasses and an air of smugness around him. He was standing next to the door, with his arms crossed and was looking straight into his eyes.

“The fuck you want?” asked Alan, who didn’t like having company.

“I don’t want anything, Mr. Pitts, but my employers won’t be happy if you do what you intend to do, so I came to stop you,” said the man in black.

Alan cracked into drunk laughter, spit and beer flying everywhere.

“Sure thing, scary guy. Just fuck off and I won’t shoot you too.”

The man in black took his sunglasses off, and rested his hand on the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes. He sighed.

“You know, Mr. Pitts,” he said while Alan fished for his handgun. “I don’t understand why it’s always the people like you who do this.”

Alan hesitated for a moment, firing might reveal his position, but if this man didn’t leave, it might be the only solution. The man in black carried on.

“Do you even know what Eschaton means?” he asked. “Or status quo?”

“It mean FUCK OFF or get a face full of lead, that’s what it mean to me.”

“Listen, Alan, may I call you Alan? I know what you are thinking. The end of the world is a scary thing, isn’t it? You live a good life, you have a job, money to spend in beer and whatever vices you have, and quite possibly cousins with which to have intercourse, don’t you? And you are afraid that any change might take that away.”

Alan was getting restless, but at least the man was only talking. As long as he did just that, there was no way he was going to stop him.

“The people I work for were scared of change before, you know?” the man in black carried on. “But denying change now doesn’t work anymore. The world is headed for it, our whole evolutionary process relays on it, and it is the best way to reach our full potential. Believe me, the end of the world is going to be a welcome sight, so you do not need to kill this man.”

Alan laughed at that.

“I knew I would have to deal with people like you,” he said. The man in black simply smiled.

“Did you? Because if you knew what the people like me are like, I might have had a harder time poisoning your beer.”

Alan’s eyes opened wide, and he looked at the can in his hand.

“See, the fact is that if you kill someone, you’re going to get yourself in a lot of trouble,” said the man in black. “However, I’m paid to do it, to make sure that our interests are safe, we need to react and make sure that people like you don’t became stones in the road. That’s what change is all about, it’s a road and you people are stones. I need to clean up, to make sure that the train doesn’t get derailed.”

Alan was shaking now, with foam coming out of his mouth. The bag of seeds was spilling everywhere, and the can had fallen to the floor. The man in black looked straight into the sniper until he stopped moving.

“Damn,” he said. “I should have said rails instead of roads, trains don’t use roads.”