Hero watched the men in silence, waiting for her chance to strike. She had to be patient, to restrain the anger that was boiling up within her. Anger led to mistakes, and she knew that if she remained quiet she would be satisfied soon enough. These men deserved to die, and she would be the one to kill them.
There were three of them, two seated on dirt piles and a third leaning against the wall. There was a small, pitiful fire between them, barely enough to illuminate the floor around it, let alone them. Still, it hurt her eyes if she looked directly at it.
"Look at this," one said, holding up a book--improperly!--and waving it at his friends. "There's writing."
"Obviously there's writing," said the one with the bad teeth, grinning. "It's a book."
The third one laughed, while Book Thief ground his jaw. "Fuck you! I mean someone wrote in it, like with a pencil. On the sides here."
Toothy Grin ripped a page out of his own book and threw it into the small fire they'd started with A Modest Proposal. "Where did you find these anyway?"
"They were on a crate, that way." He pointed straight at Hero, although he couldn't see her in the dark. Most trespassers were stupid like them. They sacrificed their night vision for the limited comfort of a small light. She was a mere fifteen feet away and they could see nothing but a wall of black. If there was a silver lining to the loss of those books, that was it.
Jolly wiped a tear from his eye and pushed off from the wall and grunted. “Gotta take a piss. I’ll be right back.” He shuffled away from the fire, toward Hero. Gotcha.
Her crossbow was in her hand with barely a rustle of cloth, and she took aim as Jolly approached her, still smiling and chuckling a bit. She smiled too, and pulled the trigger.
CLACK!
Jolly fell backwards into a stack of rusty paint cans, which scattered all over the place and masked the noise of her shot. Hero plucked a bolt from her belt and started to reload.
The other two jerked their heads up at the noise. “Hey! You all right?”
“...Yeah,” whimpered Jolly. “I just… I gotta to catch my… my breath…” And then he took his last. It was interesting how many of her victims died without even realizing they’d been shot, as if they’d simply had the wind knocked out of them. She finished winding the crossbow, and took aim again, this time at Toothy Grin. She’d save Book Thief for last. He was also, coincidentally, the only one who was unarmed.
“Whatever, don’t make too much noise. We don’t want anyone to know we’re heACHACHACH--” The bolt took him in the neck, blood streaming everywhere. He clutched at it, disbelieving, trying to come to terms with the fact that he was going to die.
Book Thief scrambled up, grunting in animalistic fear. He heard her winding the crossbow for the second and final time, now recognizing the noise for what it was. “Don’t kill me,” he whimpered. “Don’t kill me, please.”
“Hsh hsh hsh hsh hsh.” Hero’s rasping chuckles arrested him on the spot. “Too late…”
“No, wait! I, I, I have drugs, you know? Really strong high! You want them? No, no.” He fumbled about, finally settling on the book he’d been playing with before. It was a collection of Yeats’ poetry, and one of her favorite possessions. For a moment, she thought he was going to hold it hostage, cast it into the fire if she didn’t back off. That would have been unfortunate. She was lucky he wasn’t that smart.
“Books!” he yelled, holding it out before him. “I’ve got a few books! This one has poems, see? It might be valuable! I’ll give it to you if you let me go!”
Hero hesitated, watching the man through the scope of her bow. This man--no, this boy--was what the human race had become. Book thieves. Drug addicts. This was why she hated them so much.
“The darkness drops again,” she began, her voice scratchy with ill-use. “But now I know that twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.”
A mad smile touched Book Thief’s lips. He had felt a shred of hope in an impossible situation. A tiny thread, but one that he would be foolish not to grasp at. He was determined to live, after all. Humans usually were. He knew the poem. It was the one he’d been looking at earlier, with her notes in the margins. He raised the book, opened it, and began to read.
“And what rough beast, its, uh, its hour come around at last--”
CLACK!
<><><><><><><><>
Back in her Sanctum, Hero placed the Yeats volume on her makeshift bookshelf, safe among her other favorites. The loss of A Modest Proposal and a few pages from Tess of the d’Urbervilles had been disheartening, but she hoped she’d be able to find replacements in time. She’d have to remember to stop leaving books out in the tunnels, but something had distracted her. She’d forgotten what. In fact, she’d been on her way to retrieve them. The arrival of Book Thief and his friends had been little more than inconvenient timing.
Hero scoured her bolts clean of blood and viscera and replaced them on her belt--which she hung gently on a hook--before retiring to her bedroll. She lit a cigarette and extinguished the match, placing it back in her matchbook so she could re-use it later. The smoke helped her collect her thoughts, and form plans.
She was due another trip to the surface.
