Zach Meets Harth

• Don Woods, Grade 8
• Short Story
• 2013

Zach looked back. He could still see his three attackers behind him and they were gaining fast. He looked ahead again and turned the alley way corner. Then Zach realized that barely ten metres away there was a six foot wall. Heart racing he jumped. As he jumped his hands reached out, touching the wall and then he pushed off, crashing back, back first into the biggest of the three attackers. The large man crashed to the ground, blood coming from his broken nose. Then as another of the attackers came closer Zach spun round and kicked him in the groin then ran back towards the wall. Zach was almost up to the wall when he jumped up onto an old wooden crate and used it as a boost as he jumped over the wall. Zach didn’t look back he just ran till he could run no more.
About twenty minutes afterwards Zach met up with Harth, a wanted criminal who had paid him to steal the priceless artefact. Zach had already been paid the $100,000 that was their pay agreement. He handed over the artefact then pulled out a Taser from his jacket pocket and shot him, causing him to fall and twitch on the ground. Then Zach put a pair of handcuffs on him and dragged him to the back part of the seat on his old motorbike, sitting outside the abandoned hotel and tied Harth there.
As Zach zoomed along on his motorbike in his jacket, jeans and sunnies he thought about how he had come to be this way. He did secret missions like the one he just did and he was only nineteen. Then a thought struck him that he had only ever met young people like him ever on the front lines. But he quickly decided that it was because older people couldn’t handle all the running away and such and the fact that being a secret agent meant leading a lonely life and not many lived to the age of thirty.
As the night sky lightened into the sunrise of the morning Zach pulled up at the local cop shop glad to be rid of his now fully awake captive. The foul language coming from Harth’s mouth made him extra glad to be collecting his reward for him. There really was no need to be so foul mouthed.
Then as he rode home to his old shed his pockets full he stopped to get a well-earned breakfast at the road house. There he walked straight into a massive brawl, so he walked briskly out and got on his motorbike heading for home once more. Maybe a nice rest before he made a report to his boss on what happened as well as to get his next mission, hopefully an easy one he thought.