Amanda Pauline Moors died that day. That she already knew she would wasn't really something that made it better. When the day reached the end, she was as dead as she knew she would be in the morning when, for the last time, she woke up. As always, she kissed her still sleeping boyfriend before moving to the bathroom to make her self presentable. Not that she actually needed the make up and bath and all those things. One of the reasons she had been chosen was her beauty, and now, five years after, on the day of her death, she was as beautiful, or more, than then. If her boyfriend felt that she had kissed him with more passion than she normally did, returning from the bathroom, a robe on her body and nothing else, he never said. He barely woke up to say goodbye when she left for work. He would, in fact, only really wake up hours later at the tireless ringing of his alarm.
Amanda had decided, long ago, that this day should be different only because she would die and nothing else. So she took the same bus to work, she ate at the same place, talked shit with the same colleagues and even managed to advance a fair bit of her work before the time to leave for home. Bravely she managed to not think about what was surely coming, but deep in her mind there was a faint hope, as the hours passed and she lived still, that for some reason she would not die in that day. She, as it is with most of us, had no idea how she would die, where it would happen or even the time of the day. Only the day had been agreed upon five years before. On her way home she broke her contract. Somehow, the fact that the day lingered on and she still lived started to weight on her, so as she sat on the bus, she took out a small notebook that was always on her purse and began writing down:
"My name is Amanda Pauline Moors and five years ago I won the lottery. Not really, but it how my sudden improvement in life was explained to IRS and all that. In fact I signed a contract saying that I agreed to die five years after, or today if you are so inclined, in exchange for a pretty decent sum of money that would allow me to climb up a couple of steps on the social scale and improve the life of my family. So we moved out of the illegal tin houses where we lived an into " at this point she stopped, ripping the page out of the notebook, crunching it into a tiny ball and dropping it into the purse of the woman who was next to her, because the bus was stopped in the middle of the street by armed thugs. Everyone was screaming as one of them entered the bus, assault riffle in hand, screaming for some foreign god. He scanned the crowd for an appropriate sacrifice and seeing Amanda went to her, grabbed her by the hair and dragged her to the front of the bus while the rest of the terrorists held the remainder of the passengers under their sights. The man holding Amanda took a manifest from his pocket, turned to the crowd and demanded them to film, broadcast it live to the world, and then read the paper out loud. Amanda's mind was racing through the fear of death and acceptance so she didn't even register what it was that the man was saying. It didn't really matter anyway. He probably believed those words as much as Amanda believed in Harry Potter. He was doing this, not for the money, the reason Amanda had accepted to die in this day, but for his virgins or some other silly thing that some priest promised him if he'd just sacrifice his life for "the cause". For a few seconds she tried to make sense of the fact that she'd knew she'd die in that day and that this men here was going to kill her and how those two things connected. It made no sense. Could it be that she would die anyway but not as was intended by the men whom she had signed her contract that long ago? Not that it mattered. And the man had picked her out of all the people in the bus. The little girl standing next to the rear window would have been a more shocking sacrifice. Or the old woman who had sat besides her. Old people and children are always better targets for terrorists, better yet if they are women. In her mind, the fact that the terrorist had picked her was a sign that yes, this was to be her appointed death.
He was silent now as were the passengers. She wondered what it was that he had said. It wouldn't matter, why would it matter? Taking a deep breath she saw the gun muzzle being pointed to her and decided to go with a smile. So she smiled, wide and winking to the little girl who had her eyes fixed on her, she was shot dead. Instant death, as had been contracted.
She wasn't there to see the aftermath, the sniper shots that killed the terrorists seconds after, the relief, pain and sadness in the face of the survivors, nothing. She didn't see, in the days after, how her death was used to fuel a new rising hate for immigrants and eventually the rise of a fascist party to power. How it was that her death effectively began the war, the last war.
Later that day, the old woman found a piece of crumbled paper in her purse and threw it into the garbage, never to be seen again. On the same day, her building was caught in a industrial fire and burned to the ground. If the other copy of her contract still existed, all this years after, it must have been destroyed on that day as well. Two, probably unrelated, murders happened that day as well. A old man that used to work for a campaign management company and the boyfriend of the women killed in the bus by the terrorists, mugged and knifed to death on a main street.
