Author's Note:

This was originally an assignment for my Creative Writing class, but, well, I liked it (even if the story starters for that week had me really buggered at the time). I think I may have missed the point of the assignment, but who cares, I got a decent story out of it.
The first three sentances are paraphrased from the book, but after that, its all mine. =^_^=

On the Bridge
LH-chan '03

The man stood balanced upon a railroad bridge, looking down into the swift water flowing beneath his feet. His hands were behind his back, tightly bound in leather cord. A rope was tied closely around his neck, attached at its other end to a stout cross-timber above his head.

A hangman's noose.
She watched the man with grim satisfaction, and with equally grim certainty.

His eyes were wide and frightened. She could hear the screams of her family in her mind, even as she watched him. Her daughter, sobbing with terror. Her husband, shouting her name.

The bound man struggled vainly against his bonds, giving short gasps of terror, as the first sounds of his fate coming to meet him filled the air.

In her mind's eye, she could still see the gutted ruins of her former home. Everything she had ever known, blackened, consumed by fire.

The dark shape appeared on the horizon, little more than a speck at first, but swiftly growing in size, even as it's sound grew louder.

Her captive cried out, begging mercy.

Once, she had begged him mercy. Begged him to spare her family.

He had given her no mercy.

Struggling, the man overbalanced, falling forward toward the water with nothing but the rope about his neck to catch him. The noose tightened, and he lost his footing with a strangled cry.

She watched him for a moment--as he dangled helplessly over the water--thinking only of the years she had spent wandering the desert after that terrible, fiery, night. A hot, unforgiving place, where her tears turned to vapor before they could touch the ground. Seeking answers the burning sun could not give.

She caught his belt and pulled him back onto the bridge. He cried out, both relieved and terrified, believing--for a moment perhaps--that she had changed her mind, that she could not go through with her plan.

Her plan had not changed.

There would be time for him to swing still.

The shape in the distance grew steadily closer: massive and black, dark smoke streaming in it's wake. With it came the sound: the roar of powerful engines, and steel wheels against steel tracks.

The train came, inexorably toward the man on the bridge.

Struggling, he cried out once more.

Mercy!

Spare me!

You can't do this!

Her family had plead such things before they burned.

Before he burned them.

The train roared on, closer and closer to the man with each passing moment.

And she watched him, with grim satisfaction.

Owari.