Magazine

July 25 meeting was to write something about magazine. 
I had fun writing this, I hope you enjoy trying to follow it.

The view and the heavy curtains were good reasons for choosing this hotel, that and its rear lane access and easily disabled cctv. The drapes shield me as I scan the roadway outside again, I'm checking doorways, corners, and café seats for bystanders. The long window allows me a wide range of sight and I check that my movements do not betray the stillness of the drapes. I glance back across the bed as I hear people walk down the corridor outside the room. A crack of sunlight from the gap in the curtains cuts a diagonal line across the disheveled sheets and I recall the knowing smile the maid gave me when I tipped her well and requested no room service.

That was yesterday and thankfully, as I look down on the street my cover doesn’t seem to have been compromised.  As a reward for my escape I gently tear the cellophane off my last Puro dÓro and catch its thick spicy scent. I drop into the armchair by the window kicking off my shoes and anticipate the bitter chocolate taste and the warm leather smell I know will come as I draw slowly back.
My glance falls again on the beautiful shapes laid bare on the bed. Deathly still now, spent and cold. Not ever to be co-joined again, just grey-blue forms, bereft of their heat and void of their urgent energies, I am deprived forever of their tactile activity. I see them as used and now useless but I note they retain a fragrance from the oils I rubbed over them. From their recent activity they still exude the wondrous odors I anticipated initially. I must be rid of them. I regret the decay they will suffer when abandoned and I chide myself for becoming attached to them. Without thinking, I blow a ring and stream of smoke over their lifeless shapes and that line of sunlight cuts whitely between them, highlighting the depressions their dead weight makes in the bedding.
Tonight I will bind each of them separately and dispose of them individually, one well-weighted will be drowned in the deepest channel of the river, heavy enough so the spring flow will not dislodge it. The other will be slid down the ventilator of a mine shaft many miles from here as I leave this city for the last time. And that will be the end of all of this. No witnesses, no vacuous media idolatry.

I rise and check the footpaths, benches and shop-front awnings again, still no stooges, no one undercover, I am calming by the minute.
There are seven hours before the curfew is lifted and I can leave this room. The view in here however is unsettling, I throw the bedclothes over, not wanting to keep looking at them.
Today was always going to end like this, from the moment Ashif introduced them to me this morning. I knew they would be ideal and I was excited at the prospect of using them in ways I could never do in my own country. I guessed by just looking at them they would enjoy being used. I had rebuked myself for imbuing them with desires similar to mine but I owned them now and they would serve me as I wanted. Ashif gave me some clear warnings which I ignored and he left me alone with them in this room. I stripped them bare and ran my fingers over their every curve and treasure, teasing the tension in them and enjoying immensely the coupling and re-coupling. It took a few hours but I was confident, when needed, they would respond to my every touch and that the urgency, fear and darkness would only enhance the experience.
I had felt ready then, I knew Hakem was leaving at dusk for the private meeting venue and I had ensured the event site was all scoped out.

When dusk eventually came and in the the fading light I grabbed at them perhaps too enthusiastically and with thick woolen coats as disguise headed out into the chill, greying evening. The weather thankfully had turned sour, the wind was driving thin icy rain horizontal through the city canyons and it ensured the stragglers looked down to the pavement and not at me or at what I was gripping. The battered and overflowing rubbish skip was blocking the entrance to the alley just as I had left it, leaving space to get by and providing excellent cover. Without checking for observers I calmly turned into the alley, released them to rest against the wall within easy reach and I un-chocked the skip allowing it to roll forward and block the alley. The first of the police escort bikes crawled past and with flashing lights and loudhailers cleared the sidewalks and stopped all traffic coming from my right.

I was shielded from view and the landings overhead provided protection from the rain, an ideal sniper nest. The angle of the skip gave me a clear view across the intersection and I could see Ashif was parked up and ready to create the diversion. Satisfied that civilian casualties would be minimized I turned to look at my treasures still shrouded in their coat and leaning against the wall. Did I imagine it or were they actually anticipating the slaughter that lay ahead? No time for that sort of thinking. I flung the coat off them and briefly marveled at their raw beauty. Grabbing one in each hand I first released the safety, opened the gate and crashed the magazine into the stock, checking that the first cartridge slid cleanly into the breech. My timing was perfect, the main police escort had crested the hill and Ashif immediately pulled left into the intersection and deployed his water and smoke release. A grinding noise screamed from the truck’s engine and Ashif jumped out, threw up the cab and wildly gesticulating, he made a convincing show of exposing the smoking engine as the source of his problem. The cavalcade had no option but to turn right in front of me and I commenced.
The first six cartridges were incendiary into the fuel tanks of the lead and tailing bikes creating a flaming barrier around my target.  The next six were armor piercing and I dispatched the driver and backup in each vehicle. The convoy, now immobilized in the middle of the intersection had stopped Hakem’s limo adjacent to Ashif’s now abandoned truck and it was time for me to leave as well.  The explosive force from the truck which evaporated Hakem’s Mercedes would have blasted my battered skip back into the alley but I had retreated in time and was well clear.
My return via the hotel’s rear lane was undetected and my return into my room was well within time for me to respond to the emergency procedures the hotel instigated. I had thrown the magnificent weapon and its empty magazine on the bed where they now lay under the covers and had begun my long and systematic checking of the street outside looking for secret police or for any of Hakem's minions who would be intent on finding me. I took another look down the street, all clear still.  I returned to my cigar.
The End.

The following is an email I wrote when I first heard the topic was Magazine upon returning from holiday.  I wanted to record it here as I may write some stories based on the ideas I had then.

Magazine?
.......Located deep underground and safe within the fortifications , piles of rough edged wooden cases, copper covered walls and floors, round brass nail heads securing the soft metal in quilted squares behind pyramid rows of stacked lead projectiles, canvas load-bags full of chain and scrap, the reek of saltpeter and black powder, wax water-proofing soft to the finger's touch, a maze of dark dry corridors whispering the impending disaster of one small spark, one flare of flame or one minuscule act of clumsiness. that would obliterate this entire magazine...
OR, perhaps..... a crowded street, the hard click of a full magazine crashing 30 rounds into it's breech so quickly that their ejected predecessors have not yet reached the ground , the staccato pops of not so distant light armoury echoing off the pitted and graffitied walls of another downtown slumlord's empire.... the innocent public standing stunned or scattering for cover in the classic pattern of mass panic so often seen since the police cut backs.....
NO?... .... maybe a fiction piece on an immoral media giant with the police and politicians in his pocket, secrets, scandal and threatened global financial meltdown should his share prices plummet, no, too far fetched.  maybe I'll just go along and listen..

From all of that the story that did emerge above was probably triggered (pun) by the second idea but I wonder now if the idea wasn't better than the story it spored.