The Assassin
He lay silently amongst the rustling leaves, waiting as the terracotta house stood still before him. The heavy rain pounded against his cheap, torn up raincoat and he begrudgingly wiped the droplets from the lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses. His crooked nose protruded off a sagging, scarred face. His lazy eye twitched at the sound of a car passing and the passengers unknowingly glanced in his direction. Raindrops trickled in and out of his frown lines and he could hear the tick tock of his knock-off Rolex as the sound echoed through his mind. He calmly loaded the barrel of the rifle he held in his hands. Obviously, he had done this many times before. His lack of nerves was testament to the years of practice he had under his belt.
He noticed the flaking paint gathering below the broken windows, along with shards of dusty glass. The once radiant simplicity of the garden did nothing to disguise the decay over the years. The overgrown hedges cast a depressing shadow over the dead, brown grass. The faint smell of rotting flesh hit his nostrils; he could see that this came from a stray cat entangled in the barbed wire fence. Its fur was a morbid grey and its glassy eyes reflected the bleak landscape around it. The rotting flowerbeds lay there creating a deathly border around the house and the sad, lonely magnolia tree sat in the corner with its lifeless and empty branches feebly reaching towards the ground. He could see that an unwelcome visitor, in the form of overgrown weeds, had slowly crept up the front steps towards the door. The ivy, as he noticed, completely enclosed the crumbling walls.
