Must Read: Paradox Of Abel - Season 1 - Episode 5

Episode 7 years ago

Must Read: Paradox Of Abel - Season 1 - Episode 5

Unlike Mark, this young hostage was visibly terrified, and he was shaking no less than a leaf on the stream. The robber with the filthy picture was behind the boy, and he was having his free hand around the lad’s chest, thereby pinning the hostage to himself. His other hand was clutching the deadly pistol so much vigour that veins stood like worms over the back of his hand. Their leader was wielding two guns; he was poised bravely and ready to open fire at any adversary. The other three robbers were carrying big guns, and big bags of which were evidently filled with money.
Mark looked closely at the robbers, then his gaze shifted to the policemen ducked behind their vans––and he concluded that the robbers were more armed.
The first stone was cast by the police.
The gunfire sounded like the cracking of a whip, and its shot caught one of the robbers in the front of the neck. The shooter had not missed a class in the police shooting lesson; the shot was a perfect one. The robber grabbed his own neck with eyes wide open in surprise. Blood seeped out from between his fingers, and when he took his hand away the blood gushed out like a leaking water hose; it sprayed on his co-robbers and across the walls of the bank.

The shot throat gaped like a giant mouth, toothed with dangling veins, arteries, ganglia, muscles and some other stuffs that made up the neck. He maintained his standing position for about ten seconds before he fell down lifeless, his body rolled down the porch onto the pavement. Mark was not ready to die by such horrible means; so, he prayed: he prayed to Jesus, he prayed to Allah, he even prayed to President OBJ. Although his prayers were not those that resembled divine utterances; all that he was muttering were mostly incomprehensible balderdash that seemed as if he alone placed a monopoly over their meaningness.



Then all hell broke loose immediately thereafter; everything was going from bad to badder in leaps and bounds. Bullets and pellets began growing wings, and both robbers and police were shooting sporadically but occasionally ducking the flying bullets. The remaining surviving menagerie of robbers were now bravely shooting at the police, with little or no care for their own survival. The policemen, too, were not any less cowardly; they left their hidings and faced the robbers squarely and it was as if they all had totally forgotten the rules of safety they were taught in the police academy, their guns and the robbers’ like mirror images to each other. In the course of the fracas, the happy-faced robber caught sight of Mark hiding in the cabin––he smiled warmly and raised his gun to shoot at the boy, but before he could pull his trigger a shot caught him in the arm––his smile faded and he screamed out as the gun fell off his damaged arm, a scream not unlike the derailment of a speeding train. He still managed to bend down and pick the weapon with his other good hand, but a bullet smashed his left ear as soon as he rose up. The sight was quite ugly for a seventeen-year-old to behold.




The whole of the ear was shattered, presenting therefore a topiary image of flesh, skin, blood and bones, and leaving thereon a hole large enough to accommodate a mobile phone.



The fat, happy-faced robber became a corpse on the instant, and Mark rejoiced at this––he had never liked the robber in the first place. If given the chance, he would kick his corpse in anger or borrow a gun and kill the killed.



The boy was not one to panic over the prospect of killing another human, especially the kind of human which he hated; books he had read had greatly affected his thoughts. He had read that Hitler had killed twenty million people, Stalin fifty million, Mao Tse-tung as many as a hundred million. Earlier, two million had been murdered in Sudan, another two million in Rwanda. The list of holocaust that had plagued humanity went on and on; there were the political assassins, men who killed their pregnant wives, mothers who bathed their children in very hot spas, sons who shot their erring fathers for old sins, and including university students who shot their lecturers and classmates out of sheer hatred. So, Mark felt no qualm, if opportuned, about sending just a single enemy to the other side.


The gunfire continued; nobody, except Mark, took a sneak-peek at the dead fat robber.



Three policemen kissed the dust in less than fifteen seconds after the dead fatso. The robber with the hostage had released the boy. He had thought wisely that holding someone hostage at the moment was a useless effort. This was a fight with the police, and the three surviving robbers were particularly ready to fight to the finish.




The released boy was a fool, Mark decided.




After being freed, he ran himself into the teeth of danger, instead of out of it. Perhaps, his panic had robbed him of his reasoning faculty.





He was running towards the police at the time when bullets had taken possession of the air.




Amidst the fusillades of gunshots was a policeman screaming at the running boy to lie down flat on the ground, but the boy was not listening to him. He continued running towards the police until two bullets took off a portion of his skull.



Seeing this scared most of the formerly brave policemen and they ran back to the safer side of their vans; their taste for survival had won over their civic duties. And this gave the robbers enough time to reach their car and drive off. Mark saw it all. Something unknotted in his brain and he began to think about how he was going to use this misfortune that had befallen this bank for his own good.





He quickly ran out of the cabin and jumped over the corpse of the fat robber––he did not kick the body. He dropped his own bag of money and carried the heavier one which belonged to the robber. He cared less if anybody was watching him or not. He dragged this heavy bag to the car that brought him, opened its already ajar door wider and placed the bag beside the driver’s seat. He was about climbing into the driver’s seat when another thought occurred to him.





He made his way to where the dead boy was lying; busy ants had established a new course and they were approaching the feast of the cratered skull. He quickly searched the corpse––he could only find a small scrap of paper with a mobile phone number, and an identification card. He put all these in his pocket and brought out his own card. His image on the ID card was very different from the corpse. The dead boy was light-skinned while he was otherwise. It would take anybody to see that the picture on the card was not the boy’s. He immediately scratched the surface of the card, where the picture was, on the hard ground, thereby, in the process, distorting the image on the card.





Having done that, he gently placed the card faced-down on the ground by the corpse––all these he did in less than one minute. And by the time the cowardly policemen were coming out from their hidings Mark was already behind the wheel of the car. The driver had.been teaching him how to drive since about six months earlier.




Now that the driver was dead, he’d have to put the skill he had learnt into practice. He turned on the ignition and drove away from the crime scene, dried blood from the massacre had caked his cheek and his attempt to wipe it away was not successful at the moment.
As he drove on, Mark’s mind was very busy doing some plottings. He knew why he had done what he did. He was not going back home, he was now a very rich boy. The first thing he needed to do now was change his own name. He thought and thought about a name for himself but he was not able to come up with a suitable one. It was very important that he changed his name now; very important indeed. He remembered the card he had extracted from the dead boy’s pocket and brought it out. He looked at the picture on it now. The boy was a very handsome fairly-complexioned boy. A pity such a promising lad had to die in such a ghastly way. Mark’s eyes drifted to the name printed under the picture and he smiled––he had found his new name.




The next morning, the affairs of the robbery made the front-page of numerous tabloids of the nation:
ROBBERS INVADE DREAMBANK, KILL THREE POLICEMEN
AND A SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY