When someone holds a gun to your head for real, it’s not like in the movies. Not at all. No sly karate move came to MY mind, I had no lazy plot device to get me out of the latest peril, and pithy one-liners were far from my thoughts.
The fact is I was frozen to the spot, and it was all I could do not to puke right there. My knees buckled as soon as I felt the cold circular metallic shape pressed aggressively to my temple, and I had to reach out and steady myself against a wall. This reaction is all down to adrenalin, apparently, the body’s “red alert†system that has for thousands of years protected us against physical threats – tigers, crocodiles, snakes et cetera, but nowadays for most people is considered a hindrance when we are asked to give a presentation or tell everyone what job we do in the latest customer service seminar.
This ‘fight or flight’ response as it is often called, causes the adrenal gland to pump adrenalin in to our bloodstream, increasing heart rate, and preparing the muscles for explosive action. I guess all of this activity takes blood away from the stomach, causing nausea in some people like me.
Anyway I digress. Yes ‘fight or flight?’ is the question you ask when encountering a lion in the wilderness. However, having a gun pressed to your temple whilst waiting for a bus leaves you with an entirely different question.
‘Am I going to die?’
And so I stood there, about to die, with not a single action hero escape trick up my shaking sleeves. A career in engineering and software design had failed to prepare me for this moment entirely.
It seemed like an eternity passed between the gun arriving and the owner speaking, but in reality it was probably only a second, maybe less. At this point I still hadn’t seen the face of the guy – I continued to look down the street, avoiding any movement that might give him reason to pull the trigger.
Eventually he spoke.
‘Do what I say, Mr Coulson, EXACTLY what I say and you’ll live.’ A deep, confident voice, with an accent of sorts, hard to distinguish given my surprise and the pounding of blood in my ears.
And it was only at that moment that anything that could vaguely resemble heroism crept in to my mind, and it was in the form of a simple deduction based on what information I had.
1. The guy was serious. You don’t pull a gun on someone on a main road like this unless you are either crazy, desperate or particularly in need of me. Or all three.
2. This isn’t random, because he knows my name.
3. He wants me for a reason and whatever he was going to ask of me required a gun to get me to agree.
4. I’ve seen enough movies to know that the guy told ‘do what I say and you will live’ never actually lives.
5. My entire existence revolves around computers and my job, and so the only logical reason that he could want me, and was prepared to take me by force would be to do something bad at the airport.
And this is where the hero bit comes in. Basically I narrowed my options down in a split second to these:
1. Go with him and I die. Others will probably die too.
2. Get away as quickly as possible. I might still die but it’s a better option than 1.
I could say that I picked number 2 because number 1 involved others dying. The fact is I can’t remember – all of that thinking happened in a split second so how much was conscious and how much was instinct I’ll never remember – and believe me I have tried. All I knew is that getting away was the only logical answer, with the added bonus that I might live.
‘What do you want with me?’ I asked, my voice cracking mid-sentence.
‘Come with me and don’t do anything stupid.’ He said, in a commanding tone, pointing over my shoulder to a car parked ten metres up the road, with its headlights off. He then held my shoulder and I felt the gun move from my head, down to the small of my back.
Walking forward, I strained my eyes to see in to the car, but the illumination offered by the orange streetlamps reflected off the droplets of rain running down the windshield. Around me the street was deserted, which was odd given the time of the morning – people would soon be leaving for work, and I hoped that this would give me a distraction in the few seconds I had before being forced in to that car and driven off to do something bad before being shot in the face and left to rot in some park somewhere.
Almost as if he sensed my thoughts of escaping, the hand on my shoulder tightened.
It was then that something else occurred to me.
They were (I assumed that there was more than one, but to be honest I didn’t know) taking a big chance to get me, so they probably wouldn’t actually kill me.
This change in perspective gave me the courage to make a break for it, perhaps it was the adrenalin in my skull, perhaps I had seen Great Escape a few too many times, but it seemed that I had to give it a go, to jump that barbed wire, so to speak, and so I got myself ready.
As we approached the car I moved right towards the wing, and when the door clicked open (there WAS someone inside), I kicked against the wing above the wheel arch as hard as I could, pushing me backwards against my escort, sending us off balance, crashing to the pavement. In the scuffle his pistol went off to my left with a loud crack, but I didn’t hang around to see what it hit, I rolled on to my feet and headed off back down the street, as fast as I could.
I didn’t look back but I could hear car doors slamming, followed by another gunshot that echoed around the street, followed by a searing pain in my left thigh as a bullet ripped straight through it, sending me sprawling on the soaking pavement. Pain like I have never felt before shot through my entire body and again I fought to hold back the nausea as I drove myself up on to my feet again and limped desperately down the street.
It was at this point that it occurred to me for the first time that although they wanted me alive, it probably didn’t matter that much how alive I was, or how many functioning limbs I had, which is probably why guys like me in the movies do go along with the plan in that chance that they might survive, because with pain like that from one bullet in the leg, I’d rather avoid death altogether if there was any chance at all.
I could hear footsteps now, splashing towards me, and I knew I couldn’t get away, but the street was now coming to life – people were leaving for work, cars were starting and people were looking my way or running in the opposite direction after hearing two gunshots. But on that particular street, at that particular time, no one was going to come to my rescue, so I needed to think fast.
Across the road, the grocery store was open. George’s was my first stop in the morning, to get a hit of caffeine, some simple carbs and a selection of gentleman’s literature that was unrivalled in the area, and that was just the legal stuff. Limping across the road, I piled in to the door, which swung open with a ding, leaving me to collapse against a presentation case of the latest low-fat corn snacks, wet, out of breath, bloody and still trying not to vomit.
Behind the counter, stacked with waist-expanding sweeties, George looked on with shock at the crumpled heap of an engineer that vaguely resembled his best customer for black market Russian pornography, collapsed in his lovely little shop, and made to attend to me when his chest exploded in a puff of red, the force of the bullet shoving him back in to the shelves of cigarettes, before slumping out of my view. He’d caught me, he was annoyed, and he wasn’t alone, as I could hear another voice with a similar accent, taking in a foreign language. Again the gun pressed in to my temple, but this time the steel circle was hot, and the smell of ignited propellant burnt in my nose. His other hand grasped my neck, his nails digging in to my flesh, and it seemed for a moment that I would choke to death right there, surrounded by bags of lite wotsits.
The relative bright lights of the shop, utter terror and water or sweat in my eyes impaired my vision, but looking up as I was choking, I caught a glimpse of my assailant. Long dark, wet hair obscured murky eyes and a neatly trimmed beard. Early forties, I would later tell the police, but to be honest he could have been twelve for all I saw – a couple of kids in my class at that age were already sporting goatees, and even one of the girls had a moustache before I did. The other voice shouted something at him and he released his grip on my throat. At that moment I recognised one of the words he said, though I didn’t know where from.
Suzerain
The other guy stepped in to view at this point and took my arm. He was taller, maybe broader and nowhere near as wet or vexed as the first guy. The two of them lifted me to my feet. Dragging me to the door, when they stopped, presumably noticing the sound of sirens somewhere, as a Police car shot in to view and skidded to a halt across the road.
This clearly wasn’t in my attackers’ plans, as I could hear the hesitation in their voices as they decided what to do. They released their grip on me and I sighed with relief as I sunk to the floor. I figured that their car was now cut off from them and they couldn’t take me away, but they seemed to have different plans. The crack of gunfire returned as they fired on the Police car, leaving red splattered spider webbed cracks in the windscreen. Grabbing me they dragged my exhausted and bleeding carcass out on to the pavement.
By this point the street was alive with people. Those that weren’t on their way to work were peering from windows wondering what all of the commotion was about. Personally I cower under tables when I hear a gunshot in the street, let alone what must have sounded like the OK Corral by this time, considering that three people lay dead or close to dying, and my leg was bleeding. However my emergence from the shop carried by two gun toting nutcases certainly caused a stir at the bus stop, as businessmen, waitresses, students and Rastafarians clambered over each other to get out of line of site, leaving only an elderly woman and her shopping trolley on our side of the street. The chaos had, fortunately, cut off their preferred escape route – two cars had come to blows close to their parked getaway vehicle, preventing them from pulling out in to a road, which was now solid with stationary cars in both directions. Some still manned, others now empty as their owners sought shelter from my assailants.
Further incomprehensible discussion was followed by me being yanked off down the street, heading, presumably for the underground station around the corner. I guess that they figured that at least down in the tunnels and stairways they would be able to avoid the police, and perhaps even get me on to a train before they were found. But I wasn’t making it easy for them – my leg felt heavy and unresponsive and I wasn’t in the mood to help them kidnap me, so they were having to carry me – not easy when also holding pistols.
And here is another reason why I’m no hero – imagine the situation, you are being carried off by two unknown and rather trigger-happy assailants. The Police have failed to protect you and even your own efforts have been in vain. Now imagine you are in an action movie – there’s something up your sleeve, isn’t there? A gadget, a concealed weapon, or a sidekick waiting to give you that moment of opportunity when you can drop kick them and get away to fight another day.
This isn’t an action movie. No gadgets, I carry as much as a pen knife, and the closest I have to a sidekick is the side-board my mum gave me when I moved in to my flat. Fortunately there was one thing on my side, and it’s not all that heroic:
My nervous system.
You see the last thing I remember as I was being dragged down the street, was looking down and my wounded leg and noticing just how much blood seemed to have soaked in to my trousers. Of course by this point I was soaked through, but my left thigh glistened black in the dull yellow streetlamp lighting, and suddenly, I felt tired and weak.
The next thing I remember is waking up in a hospital bed, and noticing the rather pretty, if somewhat plump Police Constable who was watching over me. Although she wasn’t at liberty to tell me what happened, I would later learn that my sudden unconsciousness had made my assailants’ task even harder, and they had dragged me as far as the underground turnstiles before reinforcement Policemen scared them off in to the numerous tunnels. The resultant chase was pretty fruitless – the guy who held a gun to my head had gotten away, the other guy – the one from the car, was killed before he could put a gun to his own head – which is an ironic way to go I guess.
As for me, well, I got dried off, stitched up and cleaned up, and once they eased off on the painkillers, I found myself in fairly reasonable condition, bar some scratched, bruises and a bloody great hole in my left leg.
Unfortunately, my condition also seemed to be acceptable for a couple of detectives to come and find out why I had been the apparent cause of a Hollywood-scale gunfight in what was a fairly quiet corner of my neighbourhood.
And that, as they say, is when the fun began.
