In the few seconds she was in plain view, Aishatu had aimed for any black figures in the central gallery, but it was impossible to say if she had hit any.  As the wall closed off her vision, she thought she'd seen one figure double over.  But she couldn't be sure. 

She'd seen four figures in black -- and a vague, multi-colored huddle of what were probably visitors.

The next problem was approaching down the central corridor of the galleries. Aishatu Ewaso raced for the entrance to the next gallery and began firing blindly into the corridor as soon as she reached it.

One armed man -- only a half a gallery behind -- was taking aim at the fleeing visitors. He fell immediately as Aishatu opened fire, but not before a few bullets hummed past her head like angry wasps. 

Without warning, glass shards flew everywhere as the tall vitrines in front of her exploded in a hail of gunfire from the middle gallery. 

Aishatu turned sharply away to protect her face. Opening her eyes again, she saw that the other visitors had fled further than the next gallery. She ran after them, alternating between running forward and skipping sideways to keep both pursuers behind her, and obstacles before her, within her line of sight.  Her ears were humming from the noise of the explosions and she knew it would only get worse before it got better. 

Backwards was clearly dangerous, but forward was potentially so. Still, she kept the rifle pointed behind herself ready to take down anything that appeared as she moved as quickly as possible forward. 

She could see the retreating figures of the other visitors running like harried sheep. They weren't thinking, only relying on animal instinct, and Aishatu Ewaso knew that one of two things would happen: they would find an exit and bolt to freedom, or they would run straight into the mouth of a waiting crocodile. 

Two galleries on, there was a large, grate-less window on the right-hand side of the room. Aishatu Ewaso veered from her path and looked out. A slight drop, perhaps a meter and a half, into a garden. She ran to the opposite wall from the window -- checking for pursuers in the middle corridor -- turned and shot the bottom section of the window out. 

Seconds after the crash of exploding glass ebbed, she heard two things. The deafening wailing of a security alarm and the coughing sound of gunfire. She couldn't tell which direction the gunfire was coming from, nor the panicked screaming that followed. 

Below the window was a square, metal radiator and Aishatu rapidly knocked as much shattered glass off it as she could. The cooler air from outside enveloped her and with a faint shudder she realized she had been sweating. 

Hearing the faint sound of running feet behind the alarm, she quickly climbed up on the radiator and busted out the remaining glass shards with the front of the rifle. Stepping through the window onto the outside ledge, she jumped down onto the damp grass of the small garden. 

The garden was walled in on three sides, but there was a stone archway with a closed, wooden door leading out and away from the building. It was towards that door that she ran. 

Aishatu Ewaso looked quickly over her shoulder to see the woman in the purple track suit jumping down out of the window, followed by the man she'd shoved and then the foreign woman. 

As she was weighing up the options of shooting the lock of garden door or attempting to scale one of the lower walls, a shout made her turn. The foreign man was on the ledge ready to jump, when gunfire erupted from inside the building. He looked behind himself and then jumped, but landed badly. His wife ran to him and attempted to pull him to his feet, but he stumbled and went down. 

The heads of dark figures appeared in the window. Aishatu lifted her rifle and began to fire. 

The woman in the track suit who was half-way across the garden didn't seem to know which way to run, but the man Aishatu had shoved returned to the foreign couple under the shelter of the window. 

With no time to think, Aishatu ran the few meters that separated her from the door and shoved her whole weight against it. Expecting it to be locked, she almost lost her balance as it swung open with a crack and she stumbled into another, smaller formal garden. A new spume of annoyance flushed her skin and caused her to clench her teeth. 

Using the stone wall as a shield, she kept a bead on the museum window. Every few seconds she fired off a few shots into the interior of the museum, but she knew that wouldn't work for long. 

"Come! There is no more time left!" she shouted to the four visitors. The man and the foreign couple were reluctant to come out from under their cover, but the woman in the track suit made a dash for the archway running straight past Aishatu without so much as a glance. 

"I give you ten seconds, then I'm going!" Aishatu shouted to the three visitors, as she fired off another few rounds into the gapping hole of the shattered window. 

The man who Aishatu had shoved said something to the couple but they shook their heads.

The sheep are too afraid to save themselves. 

The man seemed to come to the same conclusion and sprinted over the garden grass and through the archway, stopping just inside. 

"They're too frightened. The man --"

Just at that moment the couple took off running over the grass, the man limping as he ran. Aishatu gave them stronger cover, but as they were almost to the archway, a small, black object came flying like a sparrow through the window of the museum and landed with a bounce only a meter away.

Grenade, thought Aishatu.  And then she stopped thinking, and began running.