Soul Stealer

The robbers threw open the doors and burst into the lobby, the one in the lead halting long enough to discharge one blast upward, causing people to scream in fright and duck for cover. My ears rang as the shot tore through one of the overhead fluorescent lights, making the fixture bounce wildly as it sputtered electrically. A shower of sparks and shattered glass followed a dusting of white powder from the ceiling tile which sprinkled over the shooter’s head and shoulders.

It was my guess that they weren’t making a last minute stop before an afternoon of duck hunting.

The guard next to me was frozen in place, his hand clamped on the butt of his pistol but holding it in place, not drawing it from its holster. He was watching the two apparent robbers intently, his eyes wide, mouth open slightly as he sucked in breath after ragged breath.

“Everybody hit the floor!” the first robber shouted as he worked the action on the pump shotgun, the unmistakable racking sound ringing clearly through the sudden quiet of the bank as the spent cartridge bounced away across the floor with a hollow plastic sound. His partner jumped nimbly onto the service counter and pointed his shotgun at the tellers who were staring up in shock.

People practically fell down in their haste to obey the nut with the gun. The guard and I exchanged a quick look and then slid to the floor like everyone else.

Well, almost everyone else. I noticed the gal behind me was continuing to read her magazine, which was not something I’d be doing after someone blew a hole in the ceiling and told me to get on the floor.

“Get down,” I hissed at her, but she continued to remain interested in the glossy pages she held in front of her. Given that her nose was buried in that magazine, it struck me that she could have been deaf, and therefore unaware of what was going on. I was about to nudge her ankle with my foot to get her attention when the bank guard muttered, “I gotta do something. I can stop this.”

I turned my head so I could look at the guard around the legs of the writing counter. Waggling my fingers to catch his eye, I made sure neither of the robbers would hear me before I spoke.

“Don’t be a hero,” I advised softly. “They’ve got the drop on you if you do something right now. See what happens.”

The guard studied the situation a moment longer before he nodded reluctantly in agreement. We both turned our heads to look for the lead thief and found him standing where he was when he discharged his weapon earlier, looking over the lobby and making sure everyone was obeying his order. Fortunately, he hadn’t noticed the presence of the guard, or so I assumed since he had taken no steps to approach the guard to ensure passivity or remove his weapon. Maybe the writing counter was blocking his view of our area of the bank, because he didn’t seem to notice the woman sitting on the bench behind me, either. Again, fortune was with me today.

The smaller of the two robbers had tossed canvas bags at each of the tellers; they got the message without a word being spoken, and they immediately began emptying their trays of bills as quickly as their shaking hands would allow.

The leader glanced at his watch hurriedly, briefly taking his hand off the pump of the shotgun to do so. “We’re almost two minutes in; we gotta wrap this up fast,” he muttered to his partner standing on the counter, who nodded in acknowledgement without a turn of the head.

I heard rustling clothing to my right and looked over to see the guard easing himself up to a kneeling position, his service weapon already drawn from its holster. He moved slowly, doing his best to use the counter as concealment so as to not draw attention to himself.

“Get back down!” I hissed, trying to put as much emphasis in my voice as possible without being heard beyond our area.

The guard ignored me, getting braced on his knees and raising his weapon to a firing position, squinting as he looked down the barrel and put the front sight on the leader. I had to admit he had the benefit of surprise.

“Rob! Look out!” the smaller criminal shouted in a distinctly female voice, causing me to look up. I could see she was pointing right at the guard. Apparently she had turned away from her task to look over the room and immediately noticed the threat.

“Don’t move!” the guard shouted, and everyone froze in place. I think everyone stopped breathing, it was so quiet. I was beginning to think that maybe the guard had managed to pull off his own rescue.

Then the other thief—Rob—quickly crouched and brought his weapon up to his shoulder in an attempt to take out the guard. He had to know that he had very little chance of making it; all the guard had to do was squeeze his trigger and Rob was going to be well on his way to having a really bad day. I could see out of the corner of my eye that the female thief wasn’t bringing her weapon to bear.

Things started moving in slow motion, the guard simply kneeling there, weapon pointing at the guy with the shotgun, finger on the trigger but making no move to squeeze off a round that would save his own life. The robber had almost gotten his weapon into a firing position as he crouched, a low growl starting to emit from his throat.

I kept willing the guard to pull off a round, hoping that he would be able to take out the bad guy before the worst could happen, but he was frozen in his kneeling position. Maybe he was hesitating because he knew that with that squeeze of his trigger, he’d take a life and wouldn’t be able to reverse that decision once the weapon bucked in his hand. Maybe he was paralyzed with fear. Maybe he was waiting for some other option to magically appear and take the decision out of his hands.

From where I lay, it was becoming apparent that he wasn’t going to shoot. He just didn’t have it in him to do it. I got my arms under my chest and jammed my toes against the floor, getting ready to jump forward to pull the guard down and, if all things worked in my favor—a rarity—out of the way of the coming blast. Hopefully nobody else would get hit, including me, and then I could get the guard to give up his gun to try and calm the robber down. It was a long shot, but things had already gone a lot further south than I had believed possible.

As the bad guy seated his shotgun against his shoulder, I launched myself with all my arm and foot strength—and something snagged my ankle, keeping me from moving more than a few inches. The shotgun roared, and I watched in horror as things sped up again. The guard’s chest pulped from the close proximity of the pattern, and blood sprayed from his back as the shot tore through him. He spasmed and flopped backwards, releasing his grip on the pistol, which clattered to the floor unfired.

Movement to my side caught my attention and I was surprised to see the blonde woman slip around the check station and walk over to the guard. I was even more surprised to see that the thief didn’t seem to notice; he just racked the slide of his shotgun to chamber another round, staring at the twitching corpse that just moments before was a living, breathing human being.

The woman knelt by the guard and rested her hands against his ruined chest a moment. Suddenly, her hands sunk into his body and after a long exhalation, she pulled her arms upward, a nearly transparent image of the dead guard coming up with her hands, as if she was propping him up to cradle him as he lay injured. She looked up at me, gave a sad little smile, and then was just…gone.

The shooter didn’t appear to notice any of this as he walked over to the dead guard and picked up his pistol from where it lay on the floor, sticking in behind his back, dispassionately. He evaluated the corpse before looking around and spied me lying nearby.