It was hot.
That was all Mervin could think of as he sat, bored out of his skull, on a bench in the waiting area of the bank in Sevenhill.
The extreme heatwave that had begun almost two weeks ago giving no sign of abating, people stayed inside as much as possible, trying to avoid the heat in their homes, where at least the sun could not reach them.
At least, that was the theory.
The reality was that he was now almost 40 minutes into sitting in the waiting area of the bank, his ass feeling like it was stuck to the not-exactly-cheap fake-leather seat so tightly he was wondering if he would even be able to get up at all when it would finally be his turn. For the umpteenth time, he wiped away the sweat of his face, wishing he had thought to bring something to drink. If he had known it was going to take this long, he would have.
His eyes made a lazy sweep around the room and came to rest on the large old fashioned clock that was hung above the three open booths where the clerks were making absolutely no effort to hurry up the proceedings, feeling just as hot as everyone else in the room, and then also working on top of that. Despite understanding their feelings somewhat, he could not help but feel slightly annoyed at the slow progress the numbers on the screen were making. Checking those numbers at the electric bell sound that chimed every time they changed, he saw that he was still several chimes away from getting his turn, as a middle-aged gentleman stood up and walked to the central booth, where the clerk was lazily waving him over.
Bored out of his skull, he allowed his eyes to drift shut as he leaned back into the bench, and thought back at everything that had happened the past several weeks to make him end up here, back in his hometown, staying with his parents while he was suspended from his college for entirely unfair and illogical reasons.
See, Mervin was usually at the top of his class when it came to designing new contraptions, and liked to build and tinker. He had even hired a somewhat smaller room far away from campus, because it had a shed, and he used that shed for his engineering projects. This was widely known around in the school.
What was also widely known around the school, was that if you gave Mervin a challenge, he usually would not back down from it. And it was the combinations of these two facts of knowledge that had led to that fateful incident.
A girl, a first year who was also in the engineering department, had come to Mervin with a request: she said she needed a drone with a camera on it, that could hold very stable for prolonged periods of time, and was preferably able to zoom in no things that were reasonably far away. Since cameras like that were usually on the heavier side, getting a standard store-bought drone simply did not cut it, so she had asked Mervin to design and build a drone that would be strong enough to hold up the camera, had enough battery life to stay in the air for a while, and was stable enough to take quality images. Mervin, not really caring what the design was for, was easily convinced by the girl telling him to not worry about the money involved, and had thrown himself with gusto at his new pet project.
Several weeks after the completion of this camera drone, he learned the hard way that he should have asked more questions. He was called to the principal’s office over the intercom, which was never a good sign to begin with, and was then told in no uncertain terms that his drone had been used in a spying and blackmail scandal between the girl and her bullies. Since the university already had proof that he had ordered the parts online, combined with the fact that he left his initials in most of his projects, there was really no denying his involvement, and no matter how he argued that people who made guns were not complicit to murder, that he could not have known what the girl’s intentions were, there was no swaying the principal, and he was informed that he would be suspended for at least the duration of the police investigation into the matter. Of course, accusing the principal of throwing him under the bus to take the focus away from the bullying going on in his school had in hindsight been a little stupid, but Mervin simply hadn’t been able to help himself. It was just so unfair… his engineering study was one of the few interesting things in his boring life, and now he would have to put that on hold for who knew how long the investigation lasted…plus another two weeks for being rude to that sourpuss of a principal.
He had not expected his parents to support him through all of this, and indeed, aside from allowing him to come back and stay in their house, they had mostly been judgemental at his lack of common sense. Not that he could help that much – it was just who he was. When he thought something, he just came out and said it. He was usually right anyway, so he felt there was usually no reason not to say what he thought. This had brought him in trouble several times as well.
See, Mervin was the kind of person to try to think of something rationally first, and only after that think of the moral implications. So, when one of his friends told him his girlfriend was being so secretive lately, his knee-jerk reaction had been “maybe she’s cheating.” He was right in the end, but that did not make his friend anymore thankful at the moment. And when they were learning about moral implications of engineering decisions, he completely understood the feeling that saving money might be more important than saving lives when it came to the best decisions a company could make. Of course, he then argued that, since a company would have to document this decision somewhere, future lawsuits would be much more expensive than saving lives now, but his teachers and class mates had never forgotten that “because it’s morally wrong” was not a logical argument according to Mervin.
And so, once more, his overly logical personality, analysing capabilities and his utter inability to keep his mouth shut, had gotten him in trouble once again. Or, well, more trouble than he already was.
Feeling himself getting annoyed, he opened his eyes again and looked for something to distract himself with. There were three new people who had entered the bank and sat down somewhere while he was reminiscing, so he decided to focus on them. People-watching was something of a hobby to him and a good way to train his keen eye.
The first person was an old man, who was just walking away from the ticket machine towards one of the empty seats. The wet stains on his shirt were a good indication of how hot he was feeling, just like everybody else in the bank. He had a little dog on a leash that was waddling after him, its tongue almost touching the floor as it panted up a storm. He looked like someone from the poorer side of town, probably living in one of the tinier houses, yet looking at his face he did not seem to be too unhappy. He supposed some people were simply happy with less. Or maybe the old man had gotten used to telling himself not to expect too much out of life. Whichever it was, if he could live like that, then good for him.
The second person was a teen or adolescent who was playing on her phone – with that face, she could be 15 or 20, and you’d never be able to tell. Although, the fact that she was in a bank by herself was a soft indication that her age was more towards the latter. Combined with her lack of any kind of skin blemishes that came with teenage hormones, Mervin could say with some certainty she was probably 18 or 19. He felt a slight pang of annoyance that he had not thought to bring his own phone, but then again, he had assumed that, because of the heat, it would not be that busy, forgetting that the heat made people slow, and that went for the people who had to work as well.
It made Mervin think how he did not really want to be there, and he wondered how many other people were feeling the same thing. Mervin felt that, if someone actually cared to know how he was feeling, they would be able to see immediately that he felt like shit, and did not want to be there at all. It made him wonder why the other people around him were pretending that this was okay. It made him wonder why other people did not simply show, honestly, what they were feeling. Just like the principal that took out his frustration on him, even though it was his own fault that there was a problem in his school, people hid behind masks. They never showed who they really were. People were just so… fake. Mervin felt more annoyance at this thought. It was not the first time in his life that he had thought like this, and it would probably not be the last. It made him think that, even though his honesty and quick mouth might get him in trouble sometimes, he honestly preferred it to the alternative of keeping his mouth shut and hiding his true feelings.
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Feeling slightly better at his self-validation of his own character flaws, he focused his attention on the third new person who had entered the bank while he was lost in thought, and he raised his eyebrows in disbelief. The man was wearing a trench coat of all things. In this heat! That had to be the stupidest… unbelievable. And not only that, he was wearing a hat and sunglasses that hid most of his features. Seriously, in a bank? It was like this dude was trying to get people to be suspicious of him, and if it wasn’t for the heat, someone would probably already have told him to show more of his face or something. As it was, Mervin could hardly tell anything about the man. His posture, however, indicated that he was not feeling the heat at all. He was sitting straight, seemingly paying attention to his surroundings, his shoulders showing no sign of relaxation ad all, and his head fixated on the windows with the clerks. Almost like…
Mervin sat up straighter, realisation beginning to dawn on him as the man stood up and started walking to a window where a woman had apparently just finished up. There was no way… right? He couldn’t be…
But it was looking more and more like he could. As the man reached the window, the clerk sitting there looked at him in annoyance for a moment before his eyebrows shot up in obvious surprise, and his eyes widened in fear. The man was hiding his movements from the rest of the bank with his coat, but Mervin was starting to get a reasonable idea what was going on there. He started to get up from his seat in order to get a closer look, and that is where everything started to go wrong.
The god-awful sound of sweaty jeans ripping loose off of a fake-leather seat cut through the lazy silence in the bank. For a single moment, every eye in the bank was on him – including the eyes of the man in the trench coat. Seeing his attention, the man kept his head turned in Mervin’s direction a moment too long. The clerk, making use of his momentary distraction, dove behind the counter, and before the robber had realised his mistake, a loud alarm started blaring through the building, chasing away the remnants of the silence that had made everything seem normal only seconds ago.
The robber cursed and turned fully around, revealing the gun in his hand that had the clerk so frightened a moment ago.
“FREEZE!” Roared his voice through the room, “EVERYBODY ON THE GROUND NOW!”
Shooting in the air twice to make the people who were thinking of running reconsider their options in a hurry, everyone in the room quickly went down to the ground.
“FACES DOWN! HANDS BEHIND YOUR BACK! NOBODY FUCKING MOVE!” Thundered the man. Mervin found himself between an older woman and a teen, both of them seemingly scared witless, trying their hardest to comply and stay as still as possible in the ordered position.
As the robber started barking orders to the clerks, Mervin’s curiosity got the best of him as he felt a need to know what was going on. Ever so slowly, he started moving his head sideways in an attempt to get a view of what was going on. With the woman lying next to him, he was able to move his head without the robber noticing, and when his head was fully turned, he lifted it up slightly to look over the woman’s body.
His eyes presented him with the classic movie cliché of one man standing in the room, barking orders over the sharp sound of the alarm that was tirelessly blaring its warning to anyone who did or did not care to listen, while terrified clerks were doing their best to comply with the man’s commands and people on the ground tried to be as still as the corpses they were afraid to become if they attracted unwanted attention from this madman.
He also could not help but notice that in his position, he was half-hidden by the bench he had been sitting on before the whole fiasco began. Since the robber was looking away from him at that moment, he took a bit more risk to look a little bit more around him, and saw that, if he was very careful, he might be able to get behind the bench completely.
He waited until the robber had just started saying something again, pushed himself off the ground, and with a quick hop, placed himself behind the bench. Between the still blaring alarm and his focus being on the clerk, the robber did not notice him.
Now that, at least for the moment, he was safely out of sight, he started considering his options. For now, the robber could not see him, but when he would inevitably leave, the same alarm that prevented the robber from hearing his movement would mask the robber’s movement in turn,
and if the robber saw him hiding there, who knew what would happen. On top of this, while no one had died so far, there was no telling what would happen once the robber had his money. All in all, waiting was probably not the smartest idea. As the only person hidden from the robber’s view, there had to be something he could do.
He started looking around for something to use, and his eye fell upon the potted plants right behind the bench he was now hiding behind. They were big enough to be heavy, but not too big to lift and maybe throw around. It seemed ludicrous, but at the same time, he could already imagine the headlines if it would work. Florida man takes out robber with potted plant would at least make him internet-famous if he actually managed to do this.
Grinning slightly at the thought, and also because of the nerves, he came up slightly in order to see if the robber was still occupied – and noticed the man looking straight at him. In the fraction of a second it took him to get his head back behind the bench, the robber had whipped his gun around, and as he was still moving down, the potted plant he was going for shattered in his direction, spraying him with earth and pieces of hardened clay. A few people screamed at the bang, and he cursed loudly. This was bad. Time seemed to slow down as he lay behind the bench for cover, considering his options but finding no solution to the imminent arrival of the robber. He looked around, trying to find something, anything. The other plants? The robber would shoot him before he could so much as pull his arm back, so using them as a weapon was out of the question. And he had just seen they could not be used as a shield; the bullets went right through them.
He kept looking around for a way out. There had to be something else. A tiny, rational part of his mind thought about using one of the other people as a meat shield, but he rejected the idea almost instantly. While it was in his nature at least consider any possible solution, he refused to sacrifice someone to save his own life, which was what that would effectively entail.
Maybe he could use the bench itself somehow? But it was anchored to the ground, he saw at once as he looked to the floor, so aside from the temporary cover it was providing him now, it would function as neither a shield nor a weapon for him to be able to use. He had to figure out something, quick, for he had no idea how much time he had left but it could not be much –
And indeed it wasn’t. In fact, his time was up. The barrel of a gun peeked over the edge of the bench he was hiding behind, and spat out three loud flashes, accompanied by the obligatory loud bangs that seemed to cut through all other noise in the world. A pain as if a blunt, hot sword was rammed through his body shot through him, eliminating al rational thought. He tried to scream but found that breathing was suddenly much more difficult than he remembered. A face that was a contradiction between the mouth twisted in rage and the cool, unfeeling black of sunglasses hiding the man’s eyes looked down at him, as the robber had apparently foregone walking around the bench in favour of simply stepping on top of it. Gun still pointing at him, the robber looked down at the now helpless Mervin. He tried to move, tried to say anything, but found himself unable to, as his pain started fading away. He heard his killer, for it was getting more and more obvious that he was going to die, shout at the surrounding people if anyone else was feeling like a hero today, and felt stupid for trying anything as his eyes grew unfocused, and the bright ceiling light turned blurry. Only a few moments later, the light started turning to black, the sound of the blaring alarm growing weaker with his heartbeat, and after several moments of a world fading from light to dark and from sound to silence, both silence and darkness finally turned into nothing at all.