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Just a little something to whet your appetites. Big stuff coming next. Excerpts from the book i've been working on for nearly ten years now.

This, however, is something else entirely.

As always - If you don't want to know, stop reading.

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He sat propped in the branches of the tree, partially held in place by straps holding him to the trunk. He was wrapped in a ghillie suit made from materials of a tree identical to the one he now sat in, invisible to anyone who looked up from below or in from beyond. You would have to climb into the tree to be able to find him. The rifle in his hands was pointed out, the suppressor not even exposed. The entire length of it, including his somewhat low powered scope and catch bag over the ejection port, also covered in ghillie material. The soft cone extending from the eyepiece was fixed as it had been for the past twenty hours to his eye socket, strapped in place to ensure perfect alignment.

In view of his scope was a single window of a single house some hundred yards away. The foliage made the shot difficult, but not impossible. A tree branch hanging next to the window gave him a perfect display of on-target wind conditions. Through the window he could see the empty chair that was part of his shot. If he didn't have to place his shot through a window from this particular angle he figured he could use the ironsights at this angle, but even then he wouldn't want to risk a graze. It had to be perfect. The semiautomatic rifle was braced against several branches, much of the 'stand' he rested in had been custom designed for this task and this task alone. His reasons floated across his mind as he eased off the safety. It was almost time.

His target came into view. Just the body at first, then the legs. When he sat in the chair that had been targeted for so long, his head came into view. He pulled the chair up to the table and his left eye was perfectly in the faint, center ring of the scope. An impossibly small red dot within the sight picture nearly covered the entire visible eye from that distance. As this old man sat, the shooter's truest reason flashed across his eyes. In every shadow he saw her smile, heard her laugh... The pain of his cramped leg was nothing compared to the pain of his heart at her loss.

A moment of indecision struck, and he cursed himself silently in his head as the target got up and moved out of the picture. He was about to abandon his plan when the old man sat back down, this time with the newspaper. He was talking to someone else in the room, presumably his wife. The shooter regretted she would have to see it, but did not feel sorry for her in the least for the husband she was about to lose. She could've stopped it. She could've stood up to him. She could've saved... her.

His finger slid slowly into position and he eased the trigger back, riding it to just a hair's pull away from discharge. The face in his scope turned, and once again the eye was lined up perfectly again with the red dot. Flashes went through the shooters ears and eyes, memories of her. Time seemed to slow. He spewed one final curse of hatred, focusing as if he could make the bullets burn with his fury. This old man had caused her death. He lived in a world forty years dead.

The branch stilled.

The shooter fired...

And in an instant, the old man's world wasn't the only thing of his that was dead.