The wind slipped almost quietly between the buildings that remained in the plaza, whispering tales of death and decay on its passage. The largest of the skyscrapers, the ones that formed the Exchange, showed no signs of doing any business, if anything it appeared as though these old buildings had cashed out many years ago.

If you were wise, you wanted no business with them.

Trash still covered the edges of the roads, stuck in gutters and inlets, pressing up against the buildings, mounded around poles, and caught in doorways and alleyways. Vines grew up and along many walls, and broke through openings in the litter much like the weeds fighting their way up through the pavement. One of the buildings, the First Regional tower, was the second tallest tower in the cluster, and was mixed use in its previous life. There were shops and restaurants and more on the ground floor, apartments on the lower few, and offices on the upper half of the building.

Lloyd sat, with his back against the wall of a 6th story patio, the highest residential floor, remaining perfectly still. He’d been in this building before, years prior. He and Rachel worked a few blocks over, albeit in different directions. He at the law firm, the most prestigious one in the city, and her at the recruitment center, always scouting for future marines.

They met at the Italian joint downstairs a couple of times for lunch, usually in the summer, and those had been some of the better lunch dates; since they were earlier on in their marriage. They were memories which he held onto dearly.

His grey camouflage didn’t quite match up with the stone colored bricks behind him, but they were the closest texture clothes he could find to match this west-facing wall. He liked this building because of the three exits on the ground level. Lloyd always liked to have options.

The sun was flirting with the horizon now, hues of orange casting a sheen on the open air; and he took plenty of time taking it in. Lloyd felt like in earlier life the owner of this apartment would have a cocktail in hand, would have smooth jazz playing, and wouldn’t be hunched against the wall with binoculars in their lap.

Lloyd kept his guard up, since he knew there was a chance he wouldn’t be alone here. She and her crew been chasing him for months and though he was pretty sure that he had this section of the city to himself, he couldn’t be one hundred percent sure.

The string and glass bottle alarm he’d set inside the apartment remained silent in the day plus he’d been here, and the only noise which came from below was the whipping wind and the occasional rodent scurrying nearby. He’d been out here for the past few hours watching the horizon through the glass railing and decided he’d soon retire himself to bed. Just as soon as the sun dipped below the horizon.

It couldn’t have been more than 5 minutes out from setting when he saw a new light on the horizon. It scattered rays of red through the glass, and his eyes focused, then squinted, his brows furrowing. Lloyd peered down at his chest, confirmed his suspicion, his fear, and saw the red dot fixed squarely over the area of his chest that contained his heart.

The sight took a few moments to fully register, but from the perspective of whoever was on the other end of this red dot, it might as well have been a full minute. Lloyd had given them plenty of opportunity in his delayed reaction.

He dove to his left, throwing his body onto the tiled patio, hoping to at worst catch the bullet with his leg. He heard the loud and sharp crack break across the sky and echo between the hills and the building. By the time he’d landed on his left side and started crawling toward the apartment, the bullet, which must have been huge, obliterated the glass railing and ripped a 3 inch wide hole in the wall behind him.

The slight delay taught Lloyd that the sniper was pretty far away, a quarter mile at least. As he shuffled his way into the apartment over bits of glass, which found their way into his hands and elbows, he groaned from the ache in his back. He pressed himself against the other living room wall which he’d noticed was at least a foot thick based on the space between the it and the exterior visible from the porch.

As he caught his breath, Lloyd froze, hearing shuffling in the alley a few stories below. Then, all of a sudden, a whoosh sound, and a small brown package landed clumsily on the porch, denting the corner of the cardboard box appreciably before coming to rest.

He backed away and into the room quickly, initially suspecting that someone had just lobbed an explosive right into his personal space. He listened for more movement in the alley below but all he could hear was a muffled noise coming from the box.

Upon closer evaluation, albeit with his head held low and out of suspected view, he realized there was a speaker in the box. He grabbed it hoping for the best, carefully cut the packing tape with his pocket knife, and found inside a two-way walkie buried in now yellowed packing peanuts.

He had heard noise from it previously, and it had been mostly quiet while it was unpackaged, but now that the radio was in his hand it startled him when it chirped again. A female voice greeted him, “You’re lucky there’s a northerly pushing bullets around today Lloyd”.

“God dammit Rachel, why won’t you leave this and leave me alone”. His words hung in the air for several seconds and he felt the contemplation on the other end of the radio.

“Why didn’t you leave that secretary of yours alone?” She said, and another round struck the wall behind and a little right of where he now sat.

“That was years ago! And it was nothing, she means nothing!” Lloyd explained, sounding exasperated and desperate for belief.

“Just like you”. Rachel said into the walkie. just a degree over whispering.

It was then that Lloyd heard the footsteps scaling the stairwell and the radios chirping. outside the apartment. He decided in that moment that he was tired of running from his wife, from his fate.

He slumped back against the wall, his head coming to rest against the unpainted concrete with thoughts spinning in seemingly every direction.

He took a deep breath and tried to push as many of those thoughts out of his mind as possible. He pictured the pasture at his parents house upstate, and a teenage winter, with a foot of pristine snow covering the hills. He remembered the silence, then sat up a little straighter just as the door to the apartment erupted. The white pasture in his mind started swallowing the blue sky until it reached all the way up to where Lloyd couldn’t see.