The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit by Richard House

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    A crowd obliterated the open bays in front of the station. The road, monitored by armed soldiers, remained passable. Behind the coach station rose the slim stone minarets and the gold-ribbed dome of a mosque, behind that, five miles north, smoke guttered up from a refinery. An eggy stink clotted the air and stuck in his throat. His thanks came out dry.
    Determined to be gone, Ford kept his head down as he straightened the straps on his backpack. With a final hasty goodbye he walked round the back of the vehicle, then slipped immediately into the crowd. His relief at escaping the journalists was tempered with alarm at being back among so many people after a week of near absolute solitude. Even as he entered the crowd he felt separate and distinct, in no way part of them.
    Once inside he watched over men’s shoulders as the jeep inched out of the forecourt. A bus, however slow and meandering, remained his best option.
    He bought a bottle of water, paid with an American dollar, and washed himself over a corner basin in a small mirrorless room. The heat made him dizzy and the water caused the small cuts in his face and hands to begin to spot and bleed. He changed his clothes, found a place to sit at the back of the waiting room and when he settled he caught his reflection in the mirrored side of a soft-drink dispenser. The plastic compressed his face, which appeared in any case longer; his cheekbones so pronounced that it took a short moment to recognize himself. Used to shorter hair, a fatter face, the change fascinated him. With a beard, his skin dark from the sun, abraded and cut, his eyes sharper, a little harrowed, he could pass by people who knew him and be ignored.
    While he waited he kept his eye on the soldiers and security guards, the men at the small booths selling halva, cashew nuts, and Coca-Cola, men in couples loitering within the bus station, and the loners stalking the darkened bays. Soldiers armed with rifles minded the entrances. Across the aisle two others slumbered arm in arm, one man’s head rested against the other man’s shoulder. The floor crammed with civilians who slept head to toe. Men in drab suits with their arms wrapped about their luggage.
    Now bored, Ford sat forward with his chin on his hands and decided to steer away from the border and the coast and head further inland. He would find a small hotel, a hostel, a pension. He would keep away from the larger hotels and bars, the cafés that catered to westerners, the tea houses and public thoroughfares. He would sleep and wait, and while he waited he could be certain that anyone searching for Sutler would push forward and lose momentum.
    For most of the evening Ford sat with his head in his hands, miserable with the cold. A child slept beside him on a heap of gathered coats while her mother kept watch. These pauses and delays tested his nerve. Wherever there were refugees there would be police and security forces, roadblocks and checks, and they needed to be avoided.
    At midnight the electricity failed, and in the darkness broken by the tiny lights of soldiers’ cigarettes, he at last felt secure.
    In this silence he concerned himself with the attack, and consciously dismissed every thought of Kiprowski. At Camp Liberty the threat of such an attack had sat with them through every moment, awake, asleep, so he now felt a kind of deflation, commingled with relief and alarm. Relief that this had happened, it was over:
and what were the chances of it happening a second time?
And alarm at how the event remained unresolved. He couldn’t easily dismiss his concern about Kiprowski.
Think of something else now. Wipe him from your mind
. But as he consciously sought less troubling thoughts, his skin prickled in memory of the heat riding over him, bullying him in one hot complex shove, a mess of hands shunting him head over heels so fast and with such force that it stripped the boots off his feet. Surely: if he had survived, then so had Kiprowski.