Mere Minutes

The wrong side of town. That's what you'd call it. You'd hear the police sirens at night time, and you'd read all about it in your morning paper. You'd sip your cup of tea, and sigh, ever so grateful that you weren't one of them.
I walk this way every morning. First I pass one of the many night-clubs, it's cheap fluorescent lights still flickering. I walk under the street-lights, their poles smeared with graffiti. I wonder what scenes those lights had witnessed in the dark hours of the night. Each alley way I pass is the same. Their inky shadows leaking onto the sidewalk. The smell of rot, seething. Decaying bodies, decaying moral. The rats will still feed on whatever they can find. A woman in a a red leather top and ripped fishnets stumbles past, her Wallmart heels in hand.
'Mornin' honey,' she says. Her lipstick and eye make-up are smudged, and I try not to think of what she saw last night.
A truck drives passed, it's engine hardly making a sound. It was a nice machine, worth more than a couple of lives around these parts. Either way, it was a bit too nice. It's tinted windows reflected my dilapidated home.
The truck suddenly screeched to a halt, no more than fifty metres away. Then it just sat there, rims still turning, in the middle of the pot-holed, deserted street. I forced myself to relax. It was probably just some gangsters trying a scare tactic.
That was when the door opened. Never has such a simple gesture seemed so ominous. A body came next, forcefully shoved from the vehicle. The man lay awkwardly on the ground, but from what I could gleam he was still alive.
I backed against the filthy, decrepit walls. Bile bubbled in my stomach, burning hot. I deep voice rang out from the car, 'Get up,'.
The man on the road scrambled to his feet, where he stood, shaking, but not for long. One shot. Two. Bang, bang. Their echo as sharp as a rusted dagger. I looked up and down the street. I urged my solitary figure into the wall behind me. Fear scratched at my entire being. Headlines raced in and out of mind, kind of like a bullet flying through my skull.
Witness Shot Dead. Young Woman's Corpse Found.
I imagined the middle class population reading about my contribution to the death-toll, tutting with fake sympathy between bites of toast.

I heard laughter coming from the open door, a sound so vicious, so brutally inhumane, that it sliced through all my thoughts. The murderer's unrestrained vindictive joy was like a flame, eating at my soul. Any innocence I had retained had dissipated. Dripping into the cracks of the road like blood, to dry, and slowly flake away. Just gone. Like the corpse's life in front of me. One pull of the trigger had stalled his beating heart, and had left his eyes staring skywards, but never seeing.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Three more shots to the lifeless form on the ground. Each noise repelling heat from my body.
I was now as cold and unfeeling as the gun in his hand.
I ran back the way I had come, hoping against hope that I could run though time, and somehow escape what I had seen.