As she sat there, more and more static close-ups mauled her consciousness:
… sitting on the hard leather of a jeep seat, bouncing along a dirt-track road …
… the grainy wood feel of a rifle butt in her hands …
… lips drawing on a cigarette, the nicotine filling her lungs, both calming and stimulating at the same time …
The visuals and sounds were superimposed on the alleyway, like a film projected on to a painted canvas.
It wasn’t just the outside world that was different. She was also herself and yet she was not. Her extremities felt heavy and unworldly, and when she lifted her arms, they lifted both in the alleyway and in the superimposed world. As she passed her hands experimentally in front of her face, she seemed to experience double vision. A beefy pair of hands flickered in front of her, overlaid on to her own.
The full-throated rattle of an engine echoed in the air around her, and just beyond them, a voice broke through.
‘Sara, Sara.’
Her name hung in the air, like two repeating chords played on a piano, over and over. She groped her way through the fog of her consciousness, her mind still jangling, moving from one world to the next.
She opened her eyes and found Baz looking at her with concern.
‘Are you OK?’
The other world was receding further and further with each moment, its colours washing away as the shapes and edges of the alleyway returned with sharp focus. The sounds of the other world were the faintest whisper now, and the superimposed world faded to nothing. In front of her stood Baz, his bulk filling the width of the alleyway.
The look of concern on his face touched Sara. She held out a gloved hand and allowed him to lift her up.
‘I’m …’
She didn’t finish her sentence. She stopped, staring over his shoulder at Lionel Dobbs, who stood ten feet behind Baz, his gun raised, its barrel pointing at Baz’s head.
‘No!’ screamed Sara.
Her shout merged with the report from the gun, although the gunshot was muffled, the sound of a carpet being beaten with a single swipe.
Blood and viscera splattered across her face and clothes before she could swipe her head away, and Baz’s body was thrown into the side of the fence, tipping the entire wall into the garden.
Sara looked down at him. The top half of his head was missing, replaced with a stew of hair, blood and brain.
Lionel limped towards her.
‘Let’s go inside, Sara. No sudden moves.’
Sara willed her legs to move, but they were rooted to the concrete. She could feel the panic paralysing her. Her fingers began shaking with an increasing tremor that spread to her wrists and arms. Soon it would take her over completely.
She squeezed both hands into fists and forced a breath into her lungs. Her chest rose and fell, and the action seemed to break the spell. She lurched to the side and ran.
A fencepost near her head exploded into splinters, and she clattered over the fallen fence into the small garden of number 327.
On either side of her were the two low fences that separated the garden from those on either side. The fence on her left had tilted to the side with the collapse of the back enclosure and she veered in that direction and vaulted over it into the next-door garden.
Lionel climbed over the damaged back fence and stalked into the garden of 327.
‘There’s nowhere to run, Sara.’
He hobbled quickly to the broken adjoining fence and stepped into the next garden.