Broken Tables

The blood on her hands gave off an odor of flesh mixed with tin. She sheathed her knife and started off back across the concrete foundation of the airplane hangar. The moonlight broke through the cracks in the grimy windows, but she did not waste time observing the whispers of blue nighttime.

No sound came from her victim as she left; he only lay there, dead or so close to death that his dying produced no noise. She did her job well. Each nice, she did it well, and she did not look back. Her old boots had seen so many fall before her that, if she were to stop, they would not recognize her at all. Her boots and her belt and her satchel. Those were all she carried with her. Clothes would change, lovers changed, jobs changed, hair even changed occasionally, but those prized possessions were always with her.

At last she came to the edge of the pile of the broken chairs, tables, and televisions where she’d descended to the hangar floor. She made no effort to clean the dusty footprints, no one ever found her anyways, but she took care to make as little noise as possible. The man would lay there dead or dying for days before anyone found him and the poor chap who did see the one true horror in his life would call for the authorities long after she had gone.

This time she’d gotten lucky; the televisions and tables and chairs were stacked high enough that she could climb all the way down from the window ledge jumping more than a few feet. Jumping from one precarious object to another was a hazard and she preferred to avoid those as a general rule. Carefully, she placed her foot on the first table; it held steady. She pressed into the table and pushed herself to a standing position. The wood did not give way nor did it creak as she talked across it to the next table. This one was on its side, so she swung her lung over its edge and half-tumbled over it to stand on the chair a foot below. This one moved slightly, but she did not lose her balance. Over and over again she tested surfaces and shifted her weight to accommodate them. It was a dance she had done many times before and she had grown to appreciate the silent focus that this kind of activity took. She was allowed to retreat inside herself however she faced no danger of overthinking her actions. Like climbing trees from her childhood, or hopping the fence at school, scaling piles of rubbish took just enough of her attention to keep her occupied. It was a challenge of both her body and her mind and she liked it that way.

Finally reaching the top, she unzipped her pack and unfurled the rope within. It hit the ground with a dull thud. She placed the magnetic abseil on one of the steel bars above her and clipped the carabiner to the rope. She then secured the carabiner and rope to her harness and secured her backpack on her back. The window ledge was rimmed with shards of broken glass so she took care not to cut herself on any of the exposed pieces. Feeding her body through the window, she braced her feet against the outside wall of the hangar. The rappel at the top of her rope caught, and she began to lower herself down. 10 feet. 20 feet. 50 feet. 100 feet. 200 feet. 204 feet down, just like the brief had said. Her rope still had many feet left, but this still a tall order for her taste. With a tug on the rope to release the abseil, the entire system fell the same 200 feet and landed at her feet. Although she’d been careful to position the device so it wouldn’t hit the wall on the way down, physics had other ideas. It had bounced off the window opening and fallen the rest of the way, but it was still more noise than she had cared to produce so close to the end of the job. 

She shoved the rope back into her pack with the care level of an eight year old putting school papers in his school backpack—she could organize later—and swung the bag onto her back. With a last look at the hangar, she took off along the sandy grass towards the grove of trees in the distance, running deeper into the night.