The Tattooed Heart (Messenger of Fear 2)

He waved his arms and shouted, “No, stop, stop, this is against Islam, this is against God, you must stop.”

He ran until he was between the gunmen and the girls, some of whom kept running. But two of them seemed to have collapsed in sheer terror.

“Get out of the way!” a gunman yelled, and waved his rifle at Aimal. “It’s not you we want.”

Aimal shook his head, almost a spasm it was so quick and violent, like he could not control his bodily movement. He was terrified. He was terrified and barely able to keep his knees from buckling.

He saw what would happen.

He saw and knew and understood what would happen and still he did not back away.

“Go away! Leave us be!” he shouted at the gunmen.

“We are only here for the girls, get out of the way!”

He shook his head again, slower this time, slower, knowing . . . knowing that—

POP! POP POP! POP POP POP POP!

The two men standing, and one still in the truck, opened fire.

The high-powered rounds did not simply strike Aimal’s body, they dismantled it. Before he could fall his right arm was hanging by a spurting artery and his spine had exploded through his back like a bony red alien, and the side of his face was obliterated, turned to red mist and flying chunks of meat and bone.

He fell and now the two girls who had been unable to move cowered and screamed and died, their bodies jerking and jerking and jerking as the gunmen emptied their magazines into them.

One of the gunmen ran into the tiny schoolhouse and came out with a man so undone by fear that he had stained his clothing. The teacher was forced to his knees.

“School is not for girls,” a gunman said, and fired two rounds into the teacher’s groin. The teacher howled in pain and writhed on the ground.

“And since you are a girl now, it is no place for you, either.”

They executed the teacher with bullets in his head and neck.

Someone, Messenger or maybe even me, froze the scene then.

Shocked boys stood staring. One surviving girl lay slumped over her dead classmate. In the distance another girl was frozen in midstep, running. Aimal lay in dirt turned to mud by his blood.

I felt as frozen as the scene around me. I knew I was panting and yet did not feel I was getting air. The very skin on my body seemed to reverberate with the concussion of those gunshots.

We’ve all seen movies and games with shooting. Sometimes it’s in slow motion, sometimes it’s played for laughs, sometimes it’s shown as tragic and awful, but nothing in media prepared me for the real thing. For murder.

It’s always been an ugly word, murder, but still we manage to sanitize it. We jokingly say we’ll murder someone. I’ve said it. But I don’t think I’ll ever be able to speak that word lightly again. When you see it, in reality, right there in front of you, actual murder, you want to cry and tear your hair and claw at your own face and fall down on the ground and demand to know why such a filthy thing could happen.

Why would you shoot a fleeing child in the back?

What could possibly justify that?

What kind of god could ever sanction such a thing?

The murderers were two older men and one younger, so young he might be no older than me. What poison had been poured into that young man’s soul that he could do such a thing?

“Are we here for him?” I asked.

“No,” Messenger said. “A different justice awaits them. No, we have business elsewhere.”

He was looking at me with something very like concern.

“If you’re going to tell me it gets easier, please don’t,” I said.