Murderous by David Hickson (best ereader for comics .txt) 📕

was a long shot of a man in jeans and a dirty rugby shirt staggering onto the field. He looked terribly drunk, and already the crowd was jeering. He stopped and threw his head back as if he was about to howl.

It was Hendrik.

Hendrik had told us it was his greatest dream to walk through the tunnel at Newlands. But I imagined it must have been a disappointing fulfilment of that dream as he limped through the tunnel today.

All alone. There was a security guard who had shouted something at him but had been too terrified to approach this man covered in blood, swaying from side to side as he struggled up the ramp and onto the field. There was no team around Hendrik, it was just him and his fifteen kilograms of explosive, and his thoughts of the pinpricks of blood that he had seen on the buttocks of his girl and the lies she had told him about those pinpricks. And perhaps the memories of his father’s many harsh words and the constant humiliation of having failed to gain his father’s respect.

He emerged onto the field and was probably taken aback by the sudden sense of space and openness. Certainly the close-up camera shots of his unexpected arrival that played on the big screens in the stadium, and on the widescreen TV in the Media-Mark box showed him hesitate as he reached the field and blink as he looked around. The floodlights were on because, although it was early, the heavy rain clouds had spilt a dark ink into the sky, and from his position at the edge of the field it might have seemed to him that Roelof had released the button and that he was standing on green grass that would take him directly to the difficult questions he would face at the gates of heaven.

Hendrik squinted up towards the boxes in the North stand. He was probably wondering why Roelof had not been true to his word. Wondering why his deviation from the planned route had not had the effect that had been promised. A shadow of a confused frown passed over his face, but by then the crowd had identified him and a great wave of jeering applause was making its way across the stadium. Hendrik started a slow limping jog onto the field. Security had moved in already to protect the players who were being herded to the far side, and from behind Hendrik a trio of security guards sprinted after him.

They must have called out, because he turned to see them, stumbled and landed on his knees. The guards approached him, but he struggled to his feet and in one smooth movement removed his sweat-stained shirt. The crowd cheered at the prospect that this was going to be a nude ‘streaker’. Hendrik’s reputation for unpredictable behaviour and excessive alcohol consumption promised something entertaining. Hendrik looked around at the uplifting sound. The cheering of the capacity crowd might have momentarily eased his desperate need to be noticed and appreciated. I like to think so. Maybe his heart beat a little faster as he felt the adulation. But as the lifting shirt revealed Roelof’s handiwork and the crowd realised that Hendrik’s state of undress would not be all they had hoped for, they fell silent.

A few whimpers and cries burst into the silence.

Hendrik raised his arms above his head as if he was holding up a trophy and showing it to us all. He turned slowly about. The security guards who had been about to drag him from the field backed away. Hendrik found the North stand and looked up at the boxes. A camera below us provided a closeup of his swollen pink face. He was crying now; the tears clearing a path through the bloodstains. His mouth opened, and the world tried to read his lips.

“What the fuck is he doing?” said Piet in Afrikaans. “What … what is he saying?” His voice was strained through a throat that allowed no air to pass, as his confusion turned to horror.

Another camera showed us a slightly wider view of Hendrik. Under the duct tape over his heart, a single blue light shone. It started to flash.

Hendrik looked down. I don’t know whether he saw the flashing light, but he reached down with both hands and grasped the wires that Roelof had insisted should not be removed. He looked back up towards the box and happened by chance to look directly into the lens of the camera with the closeup.

Then he pulled the wires out.

Roelof was not yet dead, but I think he was far enough down the path to the place he was going that he didn’t see the expression of loss on Piet van Rensburg’s face.

But I did.

I couldn’t look at the bright flash and ensuing fireball that removed a ton of Newlands’ pristine field and mixed it with Hendrik’s flesh and scattered it a hundred metres in all directions. Instead, I found myself looking at Piet’s face, and saw for myself the wave of horrified realisation pass over it. It started in the eyes as the pupils dilated and the tear ducts overcompensated. A slow-motion blinking of the eyelids in a desperate attempt to hide the truth and block the passage of time. Then the mouth opening to say something, but there was no breath because by then the mind had seized up and a paralysis had struck at his lungs and his heart. His voice box was an empty, echoing chamber with no breath and no muscle control. A small, stifled moan passed through his lips and his knees collapsed so that he dropped to the floor. For a moment he was kneeling before the burning altar, his eyes fixed on the place where only a moment before had stood his son, and then his head sagged and he crumpled to the floor.

Twenty-Eight

Chandler regained consciousness from his medically induced coma at 11 that night. The surgery to