The raindrop falls. For miles. Then it strikes the outstretched barrel of a rifle and splatters into smaller drops, which bounce off into the air and continue to fall. For miles.
The rifle’s master sits crouched in the shelter of a ruin. He rests his weapon on the lead fixture of the broken stained glass window that runs down into the darkness below. His eyes wander over the mangled chaos of mouldered stone bricks and rusted steel girders across the chasm. A city once. Then a ruin. Then a city built on the ruins. Then gone to ruin again. And again and again, extending beyond the scope of history.
The chasm itself rises up into the clouds above and extends far beyond the imagination of the sniper. Somewhere up there, a pale sun has forgotten what is down here.
He waits for something to move. That is his duty. Anything that moves is to be his doom. To be the doom of the empire. So he must be theirs.
Time passes. The rain falls, growing neither harder nor getting softer. A constant deluge that taps the lid of his hood and chimes across the labyrinth of abandoned structures above and below him. He hears it rattle away in structures so distant they might be settled on other continents. He is reminded that in this infinite architecture, he is a mote of dust settled in a sandstorm.
He hears them before he sees them. They emerge into the bleak light caught in the chasm, crawling out into a tall house that, like its neighbours, has lost half its mass to the ancient schism that birthed the chasm. And lost more later to rain and time.
The leader of their pack begins to arrange ladders and ropes to ferry them over a ledge onto the next structure. A group of nine. Unarmed. Ill-equipped. Women and children, besides the leader and the young man he sets to holding the ladder in place. His son, perhaps. Doesn’t matter. The sniper knows these types well.
For money or for faith or for whatever dark reason, these people smuggle the vulnerable, the sick, the unworthy, into the borders of the empire. Those that cannot do it alone. Interlopers. Harbingers.
The enemies of the empire are many. Some march under flags in great war hosts. Others crawl up from the briny depths of the chasms in ravenous hives. And others, like those aligned in his sights, creep and crawl through the ruins of the dead empires into the fringes of the living one.
Invaders all the same.
He keeps this in his mind as he rests the crosshairs of the scope over the chest of the young man. It hardens his heart against the pangs of doubt he gets sometimes.
A powerful thing, the scope. He can see the young man hasn’t shaved this morning. He can see he is afraid, but hides it well. He gives brave smiles to the children as they cross the ladder. Without his sturdy grip, the ladder and the women and children upon it will fall into the depths of the chasm. The leader holds the other side. The sniper holds his aim on the young man.
He waits for the last child to climb the first rungs of the ladder.
The sniper takes a half-breath and holds. His finger rests on the trigger. The young man is lost in the concentration of what he is doing, idly watching the child cross the gap.
The sniper holds his breath. Holds his aim. Motionless. His finger is calm on the trigger.
For the empire.
Paddy Dobson
7th August 2021