‘Why isn’t he there?’ the sergeant asked. At least the green dot had gained pace. For a while it had seemed to falter, as if the dot itself had to cut its way through the dark backdrop of the monitor screen.

They saw Branner when he came into the cameras, as he went over the track.

‘Can you make this?’ the sergeant asked, bluntly into the comms.

They saw Branner, the rain somehow haloed around him, as if he moved in a bubble.

‘I can.’ But the voice was far off.

‘He’s leaving it late, Sarge.’

‘It’s Branner,’ said the sergeant. ‘He’ll shoot.’

The rain intensified again. A noise oncoming. The train transporting ten million gallons of water to the city at two hundred miles per hour.

Don’t go red, John, the sergeant thought. You’re not the type. You told us you were fine.

All he’d have to do is switch off his greenlighter and . . .

The digits fluttering, the rain collector swinging now.

‘Just leave it, Branner. Stay clear. It’ll be another dog.’

~

The rain hit with the rhythm of train wheels. Hit hood. Hit his hood. His brain was in a cave.

‘What is it?’ asked the sergeant.

‘I do not know.’

There was just the red dot, anonymous, a threat, superimposed on the undergrowth in the mid-scope of Branner’s rifle, moving sometimes minutely.

‘We cannot greenlight it without a visual, Branner. Take the shot,’ the sergeant ordered.

Branner could feel the train now in the ground. The shudder come, a growing shake, still the veil of dream, the image of the pine trees bursting. Explode. Explode with silence.

He thought desperately of his wife.

A shudder through the earth, his body.

The future now, a drop from a high building.

I do not want there to be time, to think of you in pain.

I could just switch off my greenlighter. That’s all it would take. The train guns wouldn’t recognise me. And they’d fire.

He imagined for a moment the thrashed material lifted in suspension in the air, a cloud of smashed greenery and blitzed stick, the thick earth orbiting through the pink miasma of his own obliterated cells. The sudden leap of everything, before settling down to ground.

He felt drips riddle down the body of the gun and well against his hands.

His soul was just there, curled up in the scope, as if he could witness it.

Hit. Hood. The rain. The train. The puddles gathered round him where he knelt vibrating, loosening. Ten million gallons of water, two hundred miles an hour.

‘Branner.’

There was urgency now in the sergeant’s voice, the rain, the air seeming to shatter ahead of the oncoming force.

Branner thought of the crossfire shatter clatter; the stub guns rippling like a millipede’s legs.

A great noise. Then I would be gone. I wouldn’t have to live with it. The doctor’s words.