The Chase
Blurb – The Chase
He murdered your husband. Now he chases you.
Sana flees from her husband’s murderer through a gloomy Kings Cross Station.
The murderer took her husband, with Sana next on his list.
When tragedy strikes London, the city plunges into the throes of chaos. And Sana battles with the ultimate choice.
To continue the chase, or to confront her husband’s murderer for good.
A suspense filled thriller short story by Muslim author S. H. Miah, featuring a spine-tingling chase through Central London you don’t want to miss.
Chapter 1
Workers convened for coffee like moths to a light, sipping crisp London morning Starbucks with four hundred calories and about as many milligrams of caffeine as there were grams of sugar. Bustling and hustling to work, morning commute in full swing, rush hour speeding its adherents to the most important hour of their day—nine am—where work, for which most dedicated their lives, would begin.
Sana, on the other hand, wrapped her abaya tighter around her body. Scarf nearly dangling from her morning hurry to get it on properly. Pins and all, proper so she didn’t show a single strand of hair. Feet tucked in despite her fast steps. Hurried steps. Panicked steps.
Her legs pistoned her across the paved floor of Kings Cross station. Lights overhead shining bright, a not-so-innocent white, bouncing off the ground and into her retinas. As though attempting to burn her. Fry her to a crisp.
Heat snaked up her spine, to the base of her neck. Coffee smells imprinted her nostrils as though she was a cow being branded.
Voices swirled around her, not directed at her yet she could feel their attacks. Slamming her eardrums. Shoppers and keepers bantering early in the morning without worries like Sana’s.
Sweat dripped down her neck to her stomach. And each movement of her body felt laboured, as though a hundred-pound vest was strapped to her back at all times.
Sana knew it was the weight on her shoulders.
The weight of his stares from ten metres beside her.
He was staring at her from nine o’clock.
She wasn’t part of the morning rush to work.
Hers was a morning run from danger.
And that danger settled a metallic taste on her tongue. A taste that slipped to her throat, then the pit of her stomach. Churned with the acid there as though a concoction of hell. Made her wish to release her stomach’s contents. If only in an attempt to get that disgusting taste out and away.
But the aftertaste would linger.
Like the stench of rubbish lingering outside where homeless people—forgotten by a government that had promised (oh, how they had promised) to protect them—woke up during the morning hayday.
Sana kept her head down, scarf shielding her face. Eyes locked onto the shiny floor paving. Slipping through commuters like water through a sieve.
She didn’t pause at the stairs. Railings glistening in the morning light poking through the hundreds of windows comprising Kings Cross Station. Pausing was a mistake. When you were being chased, there was no pausing.
Either motion or stagnation.
And if Sana stagnated—she’d be dead.
That was the promise made to her.
And that man—she knew—kept his promises.
And she knew that better than anyone ever could.
For that man—
—was her husband’s murderer.
And the murder of her husband—
—was yet another one of his promises.
Chapter 2
Packed Kings Cross Station led to a packed escalator on the far side, down which the exit lay waiting for Sana’s escape into the open air.
The air in here suffocated her, strangled her lungs like the murderer himself was squeezing them. Every breath as laboured as her movements. Every pant as though expelling more air than she took in.
Though Sana doubted the air out there was anything fresher, anything tastier.
The atmosphere of any world in which that murderer was chasing her—any of that air would taste like rat poison.
London escalators had those waiting for it to escort them up standing on the right. The left side existed for those proactive enough to hurtle down/up at breakneck speeds, as though wishing to break their necks.
To get away from the murderer, Sana was willing to break her neck. Break every bone in her body. So long as she didn’t let him fulfil his promise.
She pushed her way to the left, then stepped down as fast as her legs would allow her. Abaya nearly slipping on multiple occasions. An invisible ice almost causing her to fall on her back.
Yet she made it. Onto level ground.
She made it to the floor on which the exit was located. Through another swarm of bodies all rushing out to nearby offices.
But that burn in the back of her scarf—that burn of the man’s stare, of his stare—told her that he’d made it too.
Lunging down the escalator just as Sana had done.
And open air meant open season to catch her. She couldn’t hide amongst the sea of bodies no longer.
Once Sana made it out to the streets, nothing would stop that man from killing her. With his arsenal of many weapons. Just like he had her husband, unsuspecting, on one such morning commute. Her husband who worked in tech, drinking those same coffees in the morning, on the same rush hour as everyone else.
Killed. In warm blood. Not cold.
Sana couldn’t let the same fate befall her.
Yet—
Her mind whirred.
Try to hide.
Not going to work. Not in the slightest.
He’ll find me quicker than I can say coffee.
He knows me better than anyone, after all.
What about—
Running to a place he doesn’t know of?
But what place do I know he doesn’t know?
This is only my third time in Kings Cross.
A glance back. Smirk on the man’s face, hidden by a neck scarf tucked up to the chin. Hood to conceal his hair. Eyes blazing with a killer’s intent.
He’s getting closer.
Ya Allah, he’s getting—
Sana slammed into the back of someone. Breath catching in her throat.
A tall man, about a head taller than her, with broad shoulders and arms that managed to catch her in time.
“You alright, Miss?” the man said, voice soft yet gruff.
“Sorry,” Sana said, shrugging off his hands and shrugging her resolve back on and blasting down the length of the station floor.
Shops swirled around her, blaring lights displaying products that, on any other day out with her husband, she’d have jumped at the chance to buy.
But fear of death masked all other emotions.
Emotions that would’ve rooted her to the spot had she let them.
Emotions that could kill her if they wanted to.
She exited Kings Cross Station, daylight pulsing in her retinas, heart pounding, heartbeat slamming into every nerve of her body, smells of coffee leaving for the smells of stale air.
Hot air.
And what greeted Sana was a plane falling from the sky.
A fiery plane.
Crashing down onto the street before her.
Chapter 3
Sana didn’t pause to take in the scene, though her mind imprinted the image in her brain as she switched directions and continued hurrying away from him.
Fire engulfed the length of the plane, as though the engine’s flames had gobbled up the inside and wished to melt the outside. She could hear screams from those around her watching the plane, and screams from those inside the plane, pleading for their life when the chance of survival (given how fast the plane fell) was next to nothing.
Sana knew how they felt.
Knew it very well.
Because he was still watching her, closely and intimately, despite the disaster taking place right in front of them both.
Ignoring the commotion, and the pedestrians whipping their phones out to take quick pics of the tragedy to post to social media—
Sana sped down the cobbled streets where businesses blared their signs. Corporations. Those that either worked in the world for good or evil, all for profit.
His stares billowed up behind her. Snaking a heat up her spine. She ignored the corporate posters, climbed a set of stairs, then ignored more blaring signs of businesses.
Sana hated corporations, especially those in tech, with a passion.
Though she didn’t have time to think about that.
He was still burning a hole in the back of her scarf.
And Sana’s legs were beginning to tire. Heartbeat erratic, aches spreading into regions of her body she didn’t even know existed.
A place he doesn’t know about but I do.
Her mind whirred again, but came to the same answer.
Doesn’t exist.
Doesn’t exist.
You idiot, Sana, it doesn’t exi—
BANG.
The noise crashed into her eardrums, as though the heavens were splitting apart, ruptured from the inside.
The plane had crashed, no doubt, death and destruction behind Sana yet she couldn’t look back to inspect it even for a millisecond.
Sana sent a silent prayer to Allah. In another world, she’d be first to call the ambulance and get the victims help.
But she had to help herself here.
A glance back. Just a little one to satisfy the craving for certainty.
His eyes catching hers. Staring into her soul. Smoke billowing behind him from the crash. Yet he didn’t look back once. Focussed on her, always, as he always had been. His movements were robotic, as though implanted into him. Less a conscious act of will, and more a planned act of a human android.
Sana’s hands drifted to her pocket.
Who could she call for help?
No one.
You can’t call anyone.
Remember this—you can’t call anybody.
That’s what he had told her. The moment she called someone, she was dead. They would know—immediately—and that would soon spell the end.
Sana’s hand dropped by her side. Dangling, limp, as useless as her resolve felt in this moment.
Another grey street in front of her, smells of flames from behind smashing her nostrils with a pungent scent. Coughs raked her throat, her lungs, but a hand over the mouth—
One more cough ripped her throat apart.
—managed to get rid of the worst of it.
Good.
Because another snuck glance revealed—
Him getting closer. Striding faster. Getting closer.
And closer.
And closer.
She couldn’t outrun him. Not in her current state. Perhaps not ever.
And Sana feared this death game was approaching its final chapter.
Ending with her gruesome death.
Chapter 4
The threats had first started ten months prior. Letters in the mail, loads of them, with no return address and no indication of who had sent them.
Though Sana knew the culprit. Of course she did. It was obvious.
There were hundreds of letters, one after the other, stuffed into every place imaginable as though an attempt to flood Sana and her husband’s house.
As though it was all inspired from that early scene in Harry Potter where thousands of letters to attend Hogwarts were sent all at once.
Sana had read the first few, thinking they were each different. Yet all they contained was the phrase, printed in newspaper cutouts—stop your meddling. But eventually her patience wore thin—she was never the most patient to begin with, much to her husband’s annoyance—and she began throwing them out by the bin-load.
Recycling, of course. She’d never miss a chance to help the environment, even though most of the damage was being done by those evil corporations and not individuals using a few water bottles and plastic bags.
Andy, the postman with a bad back and about a year from retirement, hadn’t a clue where the letters were coming from. And apparently no one at the local Royal Mail depot knew, either, despite Andy’s asking at Sana’s request.
“Might jus’ be someone wanting yer attention,” Andy told her. “We ain’t reading them letters—not allowed to, we aren’t. It’s jus’ our job to deliver ‘em, even if it’s hundreds of ‘em. That’s all. M’sure there’s a way to block ‘em, though.”
Sana didn’t dare do that. That would be too direct a message. She needed to be more subtle about it, especially given who she and her husband were dealing with.
“Thank you,” Sana had said. Though the information had little use to her, at least someone else knew she wasn’t going insane.
That all the letters weren’t just a figment of her fast-deteriorating imagination.
She knew what would make the letters stop—well her husband did, anyway, and due to confidentiality wouldn’t tell her all the details.
But they couldn’t bend the knee to an evil corporation. Not when that corporation threatened to take everything they had ever loved and burn it to a crisp.
Sana couldn’t allow that to happen.
Not in the least.
The letters, eventually, ceased a month later. Of their own accord. Or maybe Andy himself had blocked them for Sana’s sake.
But the harassment was only just beginning.
Though she hadn’t known it at the time, Sana’s stubbornness would get her husband murdered.
In the worst way possible.
Chapter 5
Shouts and screams filled the air, smacking into Sana’s spine. Causing her to stumble once or twice, cough from the dashing smoke clogging her lungs, the traffic of cars halting her progress as she had to sidestep them to cross busy roads, crowds of people gathering and gossiping and speculating blocked her path forwards.
And each glance back revealed him staring at her, intently, following her as though she was blazing a trail and he was topping up the flames behind her.
She could hear his every step.
Each step sounding like a knell’s toll.
Relentless, Sana thought. As much in death as he is in life.
Though she didn’t ponder the meaning any longer, for a scream rang out from her left.
Sharp, loud, shrill scream.
A woman crawling—trudging, limping—across the street, on one leg. The other had been blown off from the plane’s impact, blood dripping to the floor. Not splattering the ground, but leaving a crimson trail that made the blood in Sana boil.
And every impulse within Sana wished to help that woman, wished to call an ambulance for assistance. Wished to help others that had, no doubt, been injured in the plane crash.
That tug of her heart towards justice—she clamped down on the impulse and turned back to her fate.
Of escaping from him.
And suddenly, as though whiffing into existence, an incredible heat enveloped her. Shrouded her body. As though her entire frame had been dipped into a volcano, molten lava coating her like she was yet another victim of Vesuvius.
Fires—raged around her, tearing apart buildings and cars and even people, from the plane’s impact, ripping Kings Cross from an idyllic tourist location to a hellish nightmare.
A nightmare Sana was living through. And couldn’t wake up from.
Sana stumbled, smoke billowing around her, towards another street.
Pungent fumes scarring her throat as she breathed.
Pedestrians followed her, phones out recording whilst they sprinted away.
One knocked into Sana.
Knocked her to th—
Knees bashed the concrete.
Pain shooting up to her head, sharp pain, hands scrambling in the dust. Scrambling to get her to her fee—
A hand across her back.
His hand.
Pushed her down.
As she turned to face him.
Back flat against concrete.
Body powerless.
The hoodie covered his face, but did little to conceal those sharp eyes. Grey eyes that had once sparkled. Eyes that were now dead. Destroyed. Killed.
Her husband’s murderer stared back at her.
“NO,” Sana shouted, leg shooting up from beneath her abaya.
On impulse. Without thinking. Allah causing the action more than she had.
Smacking the murderer in the nuts.
He keeled over, attempting to trap Sana beneath him despite the debilitating pain.
The murderer’s thirst to kill overtaking every other impulse.
But Sana rolled to her left.
Eating a mouthful of dust and concrete and smoke.
Her legs untangled from the murderer’s.
And she pushed herself to her feet.
Stumbling, swaying, balance in the fray.
World teetering as though perched on a knife-edge.
Yet she made it up.
And began running, ignoring the commotion around her, eyes scanning the streets for somewhere she could go. Somewhere she could run, take refuge, escape her destiny.
Escape what would happen to her.
Escape what she knew she had to do.
Must be another way, that voice in her mind said. Please, Allah, let there be another way. Let there be another—
But Sana knew, deep down, that only one path existed for her to take. One path she’d been ignoring for so long.
Not to run away, not to stall for time, not to escape his clutches—
No, it was to face the murderer, face her destiny, head on.
Chapter 6
Five months prior, Sana had been reading the news on her phone as normal after work. Articles, mostly just vapid gossip, flooded her social media timeline, but at times something interesting grasped her attention and didn’t wish to let go.
At that time, it was strange acrylic art videos on social media, one every other scroll it seemed. Sana had always been an avid drawer since she was a child, but this style of art was different from anything she’d ever seen.
And she was all for it, especially after work when waiting for her husband to return.
Cooking, cleaning, and shopping were all done since she was working from home today (and truthfully, most days working from home weren’t really work days at all), whilst her husband was returning from another gruelling shift in St Pancras working for a tech corporation.
Working as what he called a ‘consultant’, though his actual job role and day-to-day doings Sana hadn’t a clue. Only that he’d done a computer science degree long before she’d met and married him, and that he’d gotten the job straight out of uni as a graduate.
What consultant really meant, in Sana’s eyes, was tirelessly slaving away for nothing but a paycheck, though confidentiality agreements meant her husband couldn’t tell Sana about any of it.
Not a single thing.
Because the project was so important, so pivotal, that public knowledge of it could destroy everything the corporation, and her husband, was working for.
She wasn’t ready for when her husband returned home, however. Gone was the wide smile he’d give her when she opened the door. Gone was the bear hug as though they wanted to suffocate each other.
This smile was a wry one, a tired one.
Sana wasn’t ready, at that time anyway, to call it fake.
Her husband had never given her a reason to believe he was insincere. He was a man who feared Allah, prayed all his salah on time and in the masjid when he could, spoiled her a little too much, and wrapped her in a safety and security that no one else had done before him.
He was the embodiment of the verse in the Qur’an—a garment over her. Comforting and protecting. A husband in every sense of the word.
So she knew a dodgy smile when she saw one.
And the events of that evening would spike her suspicions even further.
Dinner was a quiet affair. Not unheard of after a long day, certainly. Sometimes work did take its stings and force them deep into your skin, and a silent evening was the only way to let those stings subside.
No worries there. No worries there at all.
But the issue Sana had was—the light in her husband’s eyes. It had disappeared. Gone, as though it had never existed. As though the work was so soul-crushing, so mind-boggling in its pressure, that her husband was about to collapse under its weight.
“Isn’t there a way I can help you?” Sana had asked him later that evening.
“No, there isn’t!” he snapped. He rounded on her, larger body towering, trembling, eyes ablaze with something dark, something she’d never seen before. “Stop asking me, Sana!”
So Sana had stopped. Hurt clogging the words in her throat. Fearing for herself, and more so for her husband.
Who didn’t seem like her husband at all. Losing himself to something deeper than anything Sana could fathom. Losing himself to one of those corporations, in ways Sana wished to know but wouldn’t be able to.
Secrecy, after all, if broken, could result in fates worse than death.
And it seemed her husband was teetering on the edge.
Because whatever his work was, whatever secrets he held close to his chest—they were eating him alive.
Gobbling him up.
Until, Sana feared, there would be nothing left of him to call a husband.
Chapter 7
Sana wasn’t an idiot—despite her clumsiness and bouts of forgetting things at times, she wasn’t stupid. She was tactical, and needed to be tactical to defeat her husband’s murderer.
Once and for all.
Ending the blight on her life for the last ten months.
His stares ate into her abaya, as though wishing to tear it to shreds and swallow it whole, whilst she battled the heavy smoke and thick, shouting crowds to find her way to another grey, infinitely grey street.
Clouds above glaring down at her. As though spectators jeering her whilst cheering the murderer on.
Wind fraying the fabric of her scarf over her face. Blocking her eyes for a second. Before falling back by the wayside. Cold. Cold touch. Pressing against her eyelids. Less tickles and more like stings.
She hurried her pace despite the—
Ache in her legs. Her arms. Her chest. Heartbeat banging about like drums.
Pangs of pain causing shivers to break out on her skin.
Goosebumps from both the internal chill and external heat.
Fires raging all around her, buildings on flames, cars exploding in adjacent streets, loved ones shouting over the dead and bloodied bodies of their family memb—
His stares and his chase being the worst flames of them all.
Feet pounding concrete, Sana broke into a jog. Arms swinging, mind hurtling at a pace her body could never hope to match.
Turned into the next street.
Glanced behind her. One-eighty angle of her head.
Just one, sinful glance.
Felt haram, almost, as though she didn’t trust Allah would protect her without checking first.
And he was there, jogging at the same pace as her.
Forcing himself to match her speed.
Forcing himself to be patient—he would get his hands on her soon enough.
The chase was greater, the anticipation greater, than the meal itself.
That was the message Sana received through those dark eyes, covered by the hoodie yet still blazing with hatred, a lust for causing destruction, as though the murderer was an incarnation of the plane that had earlier crashed into the middle of Kings Cross.
“Get the hell away from my—"
Shouts to Sana’s left.
Someone pushing into her.
Jostling her body and her heart.
Arms flaying, feet stumbling, catching the bottom of her abaya.
She regained her balance.
Glanced back again.
Him moving at a steady pace, matching her jog so carefully his movements seemed artificial, manufactured in a laboratory somewhere, fake and phony.
Face your destiny head on, that voice in her mind ordered. You know you have to. You’ve known this for months. Months and months. So many long months.
No more running away.
No escape from this.
No escape at all.
No escaping your—
Sana made the ultimate choice.
She turned the next street, pants shallow, heart hammering her ribs and threatening to break out of her body.
Then turned again. Brick transforming to brown blurs, people blotted out by a mind that was tunnel visioning towards one last scene.
She turned again, knowing he’d be following her.
She didn’t glance back this time as she headed to his final destination.
Heading back towards Kings Cross.
Back towards that plane crash.
Chapter 8
Slowly, as a few months passed from that incident of her husband snapping at her, Sana began noticing more signs of his mentality changing. She’d always known that husbands and wives changed as the sand in the hourglasses of their lives began tipping from top to bottom.
It was natural. People didn’t remain the same their entire life. Just because children now became adults didn’t mean every aspect of their development suddenly ceased.
But she also knew that those pure of heart—their core essence didn’t change. They would still be kind, religious, faithful, and a host of other good qualities. Perhaps they’d become more outgoing, or quieter, or prefer to sit and listen rather than stand and talk, or grow in wisdom when handing out advice to those inexperienced, or they would become mothers and fathers which would change how they viewed the world and this life around them.
But they wouldn’t lose that core part of themselves.
The part slowly slipping away from her husband as the months wore on.
The light in his eyes had completely died. The sparkle Sana had loved since their first meeting—gone, as though it had never been there. As though this current husk of her husband had always been as such, and it was actually Sana’s rose-tinted glasses that painted him as a great person.
As someone who stood up for what he believed in.
As someone who fought for their rights, and didn’t let evil play out whilst they could stop it. Whilst they had actions they could enact.
Secrets they could spill.
Whilst Sana hadn’t realised it at the time, her husband was all of those things and more. Yet darkness lurked beneath the surface, lurked in the shadows. Darkness the nature of which her husband explained to her one day, before his eventual murder.
On a day where, for a flash in the pan of three minutes, his old self made a great reappearance.
Chapter 9
Bodies flew past Sana, hurrying away from the raging flames and the screams and shouts and dead bodies on the ground and blood splattered against every surface in sight and thick ashes of pungent smoke raining down as though the clouds had fallen to the ground.
Sana, however, moved the opposite way.
Towards the source of the pandemonium.
With him matching her pace, following her, like she knew he would.
You’re making a mistake, that voice in her mind told her. This isn’t the play. This isn’t what you’re supposed to be doing. Sana, get your head in the game for Allah’s sake. You’re supposed to be—
SHUT UP! JUST SHUT UP!
She shouted back internally, heart slamming her ribs like a rugby tackle.
Did that voice think Sana didn’t know that? Did that voice believe this was the easiest choice of her life, to succumb to her fate? Did that voice think—
No thinking.
Just moving.
To the next street.
Feet pounding the ground.
Balance teetering on a knife edge, flames raging all across her vision, grey clouds glooming overhead turning black. Black as Sana’s heart would turn once her mission ended.
And then the first drops of rain fell. Wetting her scarf. Her abaya. Dripping down her cheeks. Prepping those tear tracks for when her mission ended.
Glance back. He was there. He was staring at her. With those same, stark eyes, hooded beneath the hoodie.
Her husband’s murderer.
The murderer Sana had to confront.
A few more minutes.
A few more minutes and her time would come. The moment she’d been avoiding for so long.
For so long had her heart been set on different motions of action. Trying to find different ways than the path directly forwards.
For life often gave you various branches, those branches all looking more attractive and shiny and flashy than the simple brown stick pointing straight ahead.
Slip of her feet.
Hand on a brick wall.
Balanced herself, nearly falling.
Her hand came back wet.
Scratched. Callouses already forming. Painful.
Stench of blood filling her nostrils.
Glance back.
He was there. Stalking her. Matching her pace as he’d done this entire time.
Threat imminent in every breath Sana sucked in. Mingling with her throat, making it harder for each subsequent breath.
I can end you, those eyes said, his every movement spoke. I could end this entire thing in a second if I wanted to. But I’m letting you live for moments longer. The hunt, after all, is greater than the feast.
The plane, fiery and hot, came into view. Wing first into the ground. As Sana had anticipated it would be. Blue of the outer paint completely charred. Smelling burnt. Metal melting off in the unbearable scorch blanketing the destroyed aircraft.
Sana approached it, abaya fluttering in the heat. Heart set on action.
No longer running. No longer giving in to this juvenile chase. No longer attempting to escape her destiny.
She turned and faced the murderer.
The crowd had completely dispersed, phone recordings complete, leaving the two of them alone with the harsh wind, stench of blood, raging heat, metallic taste of the air, blackened clouds as spectators to Sana’s last stand.
Sana stood, legs strong, head held high, back straight, and faced him head on.
Faced her husband’s murderer.
Faced her husband himself.
Chapter 10
Three months prior. At the dinner table. Another quiet affair in which Sana’s husband barely said a word, just ate with a mechanical flow that seemed so alien to the man Sana had first fallen in love with.
Smells of curry wafting through the air, colouring the house in a cultural aura that Sana had always wanted to preserve, passed down from her deceased parents.
The lamb curry she’d cooked tasted marvellous (if she did say so herself), and her husband even complimented her on the fact. Though the words felt hollow, felt forced, as though some robot was controlling her husband’s actions and inputting those words in his mind to say.
Something so disconcerting, as if the humanity from those loveable eyes had disappeared entirely. As if her husband’s soul had, somehow, been taken out and replaced by someone who didn’t love her.
Then, after Sana had washed her hands (and her husband too), she’d sat on the sofa with her phone, preparing to call her sister who lived hundreds of miles away from London in a small Scottish villag—
Hands grabbed at her face. Held it firm. Forced her to look to her left.
Phone dropped from her fingers. Thumped the carpet beneath her feet.
Warm hands touched her. Not the cold ones Sana had experienced in the past few months.
Warm hands.
Warmth she’d cherished for years and years.
Her husband’s eyes were alive for the moment, sparkling, vibrant, shining far brighter than the recessed overhead lighting shimmering above them.
And those eyes were panicked.
“Are you alrigh—”
Her husband, Hassan, interrupted before she could say another syllable.
“You don’t have time, Sana. I’m so sorry about this, s-so sorry. I never meant—never meant to—you don’t have time, don’t have time, don’t have time.”
“Time for what?”
“Time to save the wor—”
Hassan coughed, robotic as though the movement was manufactured as his every action and word had been in Sana’s recent memory.
Those hands never left her face, though, and turned at once from hot to cold to warm.
“There’s a plane that’s going to crash on the second of March in Kings Cross at rush hour eight thirty in the morning, in three months’ time.” Another cough, another robotic switch almost, Hassan’s eyes filtering from alive to dead to alive. “On that day, it’ll properly activate. And on that day, you’ll have to kill me. Please, you must kill me.”
Sana gave a nervous laugh, rooted by Hassan’s hands. Unable to move a muscle. As though he possessed some otherworldly strength.
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
“I don’t have time to explain. Please, don’t ask me to explain. You trust me, don’t you? You trust this me, not the other me. Not the me they put inside me, okay. You trust me, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“Then do exactly as I say. There’s…there’s people trying to take over humanity. People I work for—if they find out I’m telling you this, I’m dead. But I’m already dead as it is anyway. They wanted test subjects, test subjects for this new prototype of a robot. But it’s not a robot—it’s some AI chip they put into your brain and take over your mind, your will, every decision you make they can control it and they aren’t going to let go no matter what please you have to listen to me and kill me when the time’s right okay Sana?”
“W-what?” Sana stammered, unable to believe the words coming out of Hassan’s mouth.
It was all too…confusi—
Hassan shook her face, mania increasing in his eyes, lips trembling as he rushed his words. “I got it all set up I’m going to show the world what they’re really doing but you have to trust me Sana if you don’t trust me then this entire world is gonna go to hell okay you have to save yourself from me because it all starts with me.”
Sana had no idea what to say. What she could say. Because at that time, the shock had transformed her into a mannequin, reacting to the world rather than acting out her will.
“It will activate on that day,” Hassan said. “And I’ll try to turn the closest people to me first and then that person will infect the closest to them in the chaos of the plane crash and everyone will infect everyone else until the whole world’s infected and no one real will be left do you understand me?”
“I get it,” Sana said, not knowing what else to say. She swallowed the lump in her throat. “I understand, Hassan, I truly do.”
Those warm hands against her face, warm eyes staring into her own, eyes that she had chosen to spend the rest of her life with—
She had to trust him. Had to trust Hassan. Had to trust her real husband, and not the robot that had overtaken him for the last months.
So she did.
Two months later, a month before that inevitable plane crash, an email was sent to her explaining everything in great detail. An email sent from Hassan’s email, written in a code with a cypher he’d written on a note and given to her. Sana had thought that cypher was for a little code game Hassan had come up with—but the true purpose behind it revealed itself now.
Her husband was a full on robot now, likely acting without a will of his own, but this email was clearly written when her husband was real, was the man that she’d married.
Hassan might’ve been a robot, but he hadn’t yet fully activated. That experiment to see how quickly one person could infect the world hadn’t yet begun.
That email outlined exactly what Sana should do, from that very moment, without telling another soul.
And the weapon with which she should do it.
Chapter 11
Sana, with the hot flames racing around her like a halo of fire, and with the stale air nearly puncturing her lungs through every breath, stared at the sorry form of her husband’s murderer, wearing the hoodie and neck scarf and stalking her, ready to infect her at a moment’s notice.
Not her real husband—not Hassan—but the artificial intelligence that had murdered her husband from the inside and taken over his mind, his will, his autonomy.
In a disastrous experiment to enact the same fate on the rest of the world. A sick, twisted mind game of some sick, twisted corporation.
Sana stared into those once warm eyes, heart resolute on what she knew she had to do. Her hand reached itself into her pocket, fingers shaking, legs trembling as she continued stepping backwards into the molten rubble of the plane crash.
Please Allah, give me strength, she prayed as her index finger made contact with the trigger.
It was a gun.
A gun that Hassan had, one day, snuck out from work and stashed in a paid storage container out in Essex, away from where his company would be able to find it.
Sana had gone, this morning, and grabbed the gun and hidden it in her pocket whilst heading back home. Praying that no random security guards on the TFL decided to search her.
Her husband, this morning at exactly eight o’ clock, had acted as a normal robot. But he started to stalk her around the time that she got on the train to Kings Cross, at fifteen minutes past the hour, as Hassan’s email had outlined clearly.
The infection period wouldn’t start until the black box of that plane was destroyed in the crash. And once that happened, the chip would fully activate, and her husband would give chase instead of merely following her, seeking to infect her since she was the closest person to him in the entire world.
And then she would infect the one closest to her that had not already been infected, and the cycle would continue throughout all of humanity.
Invisible robots each infecting one another, with no cure in sight, with billionaires pulling the strings from the background such that no law enforcement nor government would be able to stop them.
After all, those with money had power, and those with power enforced their will on this world.
And nothing, except drastic measures, could stop them.
So Sana had to take those measures.
Withstanding the tremendous heat from behind her, and facing the whipping wind flinging her scarf and abaya to and fro, Sana pulled out that gun with the antidote wrapped over a single bullet in its chamber.
A new element the corporation had created that her husband had smuggled out. A single antidote they had created in case some internal experiment went awry. If that antidote was shot into the brain, it melted the chip and managed to deactivate the digital viruses that would spread to the brains of others when they became infected.
It would also kill the person holding the chip.
Which was why Hassan had pleaded with her to kill him.
Sacrificing himself so the world could be saved.
Sana had already set up the email chains to those people her husband had instructed, independent news journalists and media outlets ready to reveal the truth across social media to take down his corporation for good. Receipts and everything included in those email attachments, collated by her husband over months and months of secrecy.
A wildfire of negative press with concrete evidence couldn’t be shot down, after all, with a mere PR wave.
But if Sana didn’t hit her shot here, all of that would be for nothing.
The truth would come out. Those independent news sources wouldn’t skimp on exposing the reality of the world, of the twisted game these elites were playing.
But the world would also be infected. No one left to stop them. And the truth would soon be forgotten—no one left to remember it.
Sana steeled herself, feet stopping now. No longer walking backwards, but letting her husband’s murderer edge towards her. Stalk her. With that gleam in his eyes now. Teeth bared as though wishing to shred her to pieces with those fangs.
Her husband’s murderer had taken over now, the chip fully activated, and the murderer sprinted towards Sana, echoing the end’s arrival.
Sana’s husband Hassan was no more. But she prayed, in that split second as the murderer rushed her, that they reunited in Jannah. And that she could spend the rest of her life with him—not this life, but the more important afterlife.
Sana breathed in.
Out.
Aimed.
Steadied.
Pulled the trigger.
And, in that singular shot, saved the entire world.
JazakAllahu Khayran for reading!
Feel free to read any of my other free short stories, or click the all fiction tab above for info on where to find my longer works.
