by S T Branton
This equipment definitely wasn't right for the job, but it was what I had and I wasn't going to turn my back on it. After a few seconds, I grew more confident and sped up as I moved down the side of the building. A little hop against the side that brought me down a couple of feet gave me a boost of confidence, but soon, I hopped too hard and the wind grabbed me before I made it back to the glass.
I twirled around at the end of the fire hose while struggling to get back to the building. Above me, the length of hose kept unreeling from its metal wheel, and I could only imagine it coming loose and me gliding down the side of the building like an ice luge gone terribly wrong.
I finally fought my way back under control. Pure grit kept me in place as I made my way down to the next window. I wondered how many people were watching me and how many times I had ended up splashed across various social media accounts. It really didn't matter. As long as it didn't interfere with me, they could gather around and gawk.
I quickly realized I was only talking a big game. I sincerely hoped there weren't people down below watching and recording every move I made. Finally, I counted the right number of windows and realized I was almost there. I prepared myself, then reached into my pocket and pulled out my switchblade.
I doubted Solon ever pictured me using it for something like this.
He would be proud of me right now. I told myself to stay calm. After moving down the short distance to bring me right to the window, I looked at the tool in my hand. It was nothing short of perfect. The creation behind it was masterful, and I had gotten familiar and comfortable with using it in various different ways. There was no way a normal switchblade would do what I needed, but nothing about Solon was normal.
For that matter, nothing about me was normal.
I brought myself up against the window and let myself down a few more inches until I was in front of the right space. Then I unfolded the switchblade, touched the tip of the blade to the glass, and drew a breath. The switchblade cut through the glass like it was silk, and with a triumphant feeling in my chest, I pulled myself inside.
The interior of the building was impossibly dark. I quickly detached myself from the firehose and let it drop down the building. I heard something deeper in the apartment and followed it. The farther I went inside, the more obvious it became that the sound I heard was snoring. I let it guide me until I found the bedroom and carefully let myself inside.
The woman in the bed was Senator Cabot. I had seen her many times on the news and in print. I couldn't mistake her. I watched her for a few seconds, feeling guilty for interfering with her quiet moments. Knowing I couldn't wait any longer or more danger would come, I crept over to the side of the bed and placed my hand over her mouth. With my free hand, I reached over to the nightstand and flipped the switch on the lamp to turn the light on.
I leaned as close as I could while trying to find the line of being creepy and hoping I didn’t cross it. "Don't scream. I'm here to help you."
Chapter Seventeen
“Who the hell are you?” she whispered loudly at me as I held my finger to my mouth again. She might be a world leader and a brilliant politician, but she seemed to have a hard time grasping the whole ‘be quiet’ thing.
Although to be fair, I did break through her window near the top of a famous giant building and got past what was assuredly a well-paid and highly trained security staff to do it, so perhaps she was right to be rather surprised.
“Name’s Sara Slick. I promise I’m not here to murder you.” I offered her as much of a smile as I could.
This seemed to not have the calming effect I intended. Instead, her eyes went wide with panic and she seemed to back up on the bed, crawling away from me. I held out my hands to show there were no weapons, nor did I pose a threat.
“Get away from me,” she whispered again, then drew in a deep breath, no doubt to call the highly trained, very serious guards I had thus far avoided.
“Wait! Let me tell you who I am,” I whisper-yelled, and she stopped. For a moment, the panic and fear seemed to fall away in favor of curiosity. If I could hold her attention long enough, I might have a shot at avoiding going through the window the hard way. Or back to The Deep.
“So, you’re telling me you’re from another dimension?” She squinted with her head cocked to one side so her overall impression was not unlike a confused cocker-spaniel.
“Not exactly, no.” I shook my head. “But I’ve been there, and trust me, that place is bonkers. In the worst way. And forces from that side are out to get you. I’ve been doing this dance with bad guys from that side for a long time now, and trust me, you and your guards are not prepared for what they have at their disposal. These are some of the most vile, vicious, and magically inclined creatures any universe in any dimension has ever seen. They’re nasty and ruthless and will hunt you down until your last breath. I’ve avoided being dead by the absolute skin of my teeth and I know about them.”
“Ok, so what if I believe you? What can you do to help me?”
There was a mocking tone in her voice I didn’t much care for, but I understood it. This was a person who was almost sure I was a looney tune nut job who managed to get by her soon-to-be-fired security and was now conspiracy theory dumping at her in the middle of the night when she had important political bullshit to do tomorrow.
If I was her, I might think the same thing. Yet there was a small part of that voice, and through the words she chose, that told me I was getting somewhere. Maybe not fast enough, but I was getting there.
“Well, the first thing we need to do is get you the hell out of here. For one, you literally could not have picked a more conspicuous place to stay.” I gestured around us like I was encompassing the entire building. “This thing is a giant glittery beacon of wealth and power, and you’re staying in a secret room only given to super-secret special people? That means there’s fewer people who know when it’s been breached, and fewer people to eliminate when they decide to interfere. Beside all that, if I could find you, they can. I didn’t even try very hard. They have unlimited money to bribe people and spies in every imaginable level of government you can think of. These guys are everywhere and if they want you, they can usually get to you. You’re damn lucky I got here when I did.”
“But where would we go?” she asked.
“Well, I haven’t worked that part out yet, not all the way.” I pointed back through the window. “I have some friends who can help us, and if we can get you to them, we’ll find a place that’s secure for you and keep you safe until we can figure out what comes next.”
“And you’re sure these people are coming after me? That you can help me?” She stared at me like she was right on the edge of believing me and was waiting for me to push her over.
I nodded. “I am surer of both of those things than anything else in the world. You’re in danger. I can help.”
“Let me pack a bag.” She threw the blanket off her and stood. Part of me went on high alert, thinking she would make a break for the hotel room door and call for the guards, but she didn’t. She reached into her suitcase, which stood open on the couch on the wall, grabbed a few items from it, and tossed them into a designer handbag. As she debated between two articles of clothing, I looked around the room.
So, this was how the rich stayed? Not bad. Not quite my run-down, no electricity, no hot water flophouse back home, but pretty good. Certainly better than the mobile battle station that was Archie’s RV. From my vantage point, I could see into the little kitchenette area where a tray of cookies and fruit sat to welcome the guest. A bottle of wine sat behind that, and while I was never a wine person per se, nicking that and bringing it back might make the flat a little less stressful for everyone involved. There was a sitting area by the door with couches and a large TV, and a desk where a laptop sat, open but off in the corner.
It was a posh room, with all the little gold fixtures and fancy lighting and comfortable seating, but still a hotel room. After a while they all seeme
d the same, no matter how spruced up they were. My eyes drifted to the bathroom across from me and the fancy towels on the sink. They were white and fluffy and probably smelled like fresh cotton, and I wondered how terribly inappropriate it would be for me to break back into the room once we got her safe and take a bath just so I could use those towels.
Something bright glinted in the light and caught my eye. I stared at my reflection in the mirror while trying to place what it was that seemed so odd. On the other side of the room, Cabot was talking to me, but I wasn’t really paying much attention. I’d found what it was that struck me so oddly. It was under her pillow, a small part of it sticking out and shining in the light. Very slowly, I turned around and looked at the pillow. I couldn’t see it from my vantage point, but if I lifted it…
It was a knife. A really nice knife. A really nice, long knife. With elaborately carved hieroglyphs on it. A really nice, long, hieroglyph-covered and glowing knife. Clearly, this was magic-infused. Why the hell did Cabot have a magic-infused knife?
The world felt like it lost all of its color and oxygen all at once. My chest crushed inside of me and it felt like the inside of my skull was suddenly full of cotton balls. My face tingled and my eyes watered at the edges as the thoughts collided in my skull. Something else was different in the room.
Cabot was no longer talking.
I turned to her, and to me it felt like it took years to go from facing the pillow to facing her, but the time distillation evaporated with the springing sound of the taser she shot at me. The wires with the tiny, sharp prongs on the end flew out and caught me right in the chest. Electricity flowed through them before they caught enough of my skin to dig in, and a scream caught in my throat as everything went white.
I felt myself convulse on the floor of the hotel room, but it was as if my brain had paused. I couldn’t think or feel anything other than pain. Then it was over. The prongs were still in me, but the shock had ceased, and I breathed out heavily, a whimper coming out despite myself. I tried to put my hands under me and push myself up, but two hands were already under my arms and yanking me to my feet.
Two burly security guards hauled me up and toward the door where Cabot stood, taser gun in her hand. One of the guards pulled something from his jacket and shook it open. It was a black bag. As he flung it up and yanked it down, and it went over my head blocking out my vision, the last thing I saw was Cabot standing at the door with a large, weird, and terribly satisfied smile on her face. I made a sound and the electric volts wound through me again, and in the darkness of the hood, I passed out.
Chapter Eighteen
I woke to the sounds of a chair scraping across the floor. Everything was dark, and I smelled canvas all around me. My head felt like someone was driving a railroad spike directly in the center of my skull, and I tasted blood in the back of my mouth. So, you know, normal Wednesday in the life of Sara Slick. Things started coming together slowly, and it dawned on me what happened before I went lights out and woke up tasting my plasma.
That bitch.
Cabot played me so well. But what was the deal with the knife? Was she one of them? Or did she happen to have a rune-filled, super-nice, big-ass knife under her pillow in case intruders popped in on her on the millionth floor of a building? Which, to be fair, I did, so maybe point taken, but why the Far knife? As I wondered how she got it and what it meant that she had it, the world exploded in light.
Everything was washed out for a moment, a sea of brilliant white so bright I had to shut my eyes, then color and shapes began to fade in from the outside and work their way in. I was barely able to make out the shapes of the two big guards who grabbed me back at the room when a fist appeared in my cleared vision and immediately knocked it back out for a moment.
My head rocked back as the fist connected with my jaw, then snapped forward until my chin rested on my chest. I wanted to respond by whipping the ever-loving hell out of the owner of that fist, but my hands went nowhere. They were zip-tied to the chair. I struggled momentarily against them, more out of hope they were as bad at restraining people as they were at keeping rooftop intruders out. No such luck.
“Talk,” the owner of the fist said in the matter-of-fact tone every dumb thug thinks is the way to get someone under duress to confess to whatever it is they want them to confess to.
“I was born on a farm in upstate Kissmyass,” I told him. A hard punch to the gut ended my retort.
“Either you tell us what we want to know, or I keep hitting.” Another punch underscored the threat.
He was thick and so white he was almost translucent. His haircut screamed he murdered puppies for fun and made sure all his shoes faced west at night to keep the brain goblins away. Haircut would be his name as far as I was concerned, and his partner, another thick-bodied simpleton with a military cut and thick-rimmed glasses would be Four-Eyes.
“You’re pretty. You were always pretty. Don’t listen to what all the other boys say. They like you, that’s why they tease.” I stared at him without cringing.
Another really solid crunch into my ribs, and I couldn’t breathe for a moment. As I wheezed, Four-Eyes put his hand on Haircut’s chest and moved him away. Apparently, he was going to play Good Cop today. I nearly threw up. Whether that was because of the repeated body blows or the boredom of their terrible interrogation technique, I couldn’t be sure.
I tried to look around the room while they quietly pretended to argue about tactics and Four-Eyes twirled the chair around so he could sit on it backward. It was like watching one of those cop dramas on rerun for the thousandth time. I could almost write his dialogue for him, he was so predictable.
The room was dark and dank, with one bright, naked light bulb above us. I wasn’t sitting behind a table, so that cliché of cop shows was missing, but I was zip-tied to a folding chair that creaked when I moved and there was a hole in the upper part of the wall that had bars on it so I could see a dark blue sky with stars. I figured we were in some kind of black site and the room’s surroundings were designed to intimidate the prisoner. Considering I survived The Deep, it was damn near paradise.
“Listen, honey,” Four-Eyes began and instantly became the one I wanted to hit more of the two. “We only need information. That’s it. Just information. Like, what you are doing going after Cabot? What organization do you represent? Is this to set up a Califate or bring about the End Times? Or is it the fluffy bunnies you’re trying to protect? Which one is it?”
I stared a hole into him so hard my eyes vibrated, and I thought for a moment I might be able to use the Force to make his heart explode out of his chest like in Alien. Considering his weight-to-height ratio, his heart was heading that way anyway, and I would have given him a head start. Instead of taking the hint, he kept talking, adding more words I planned on stuffing back down his throat when I figured out how to get out of these zip-ties.
“You need to talk, darling.” I shuddered again. There were going to be so many missing teeth… “You need to talk or else my friend here will make your jaw incapable of talking, do you understand?”
“Wait.” I apparently surprised him by speaking. His late-night marathon cop shows probably never included a suspect smarter than them. “So, in order to get me to tell you why I followed Cabot here and broke into her room, you’re going to prevent me from talking? Smart. Really smart.”
This time, Four-Eyes got in on the action. A right cross whaled me on the eyebrow, and I felt blood trickle down the side of my face. Thankfully, it didn’t run into my eye. I could deal with a trickle of blood on the side of my face, since it wouldn’t be remotely the first time. These guys thought they were so tough. They had nothing on giant spider monsters.
“That’s what you get for being sarcastic.” He smugly sat back in his chair. I shook my head to clear what cobwebs hadn’t been whacked out of me and looked up at him.
“So, I guess getting my lawyer is out of the equation,” I sneered.
There was a moment of silence
before Four-Eyes laughed. It was one quick laugh, but then after a second, another followed it. Then an entire series of them. Eventually, and confusedly, Haircut mimicked the laughter. It seemed like it was a completely foreign concept to him, and he was working out how the sound felt in his mouth before he let it out into the world.
He struck me as one of those ‘energy is finite’ kind of guys who detested doing anything other than what was absolutely necessary because he thought it would extend his life. Laughter must have been too big a waste for him.
“You’re funny. Really funny. A lawyer.” He turned to his buddy. “She wants her lawyer. Do you believe that?”
Before he could turn back to me, I figured I would get a piece of him in the one way I had available. They forgot to zip-tie my legs. Amateurs.
I threw my body weight and twisted in midair while aiming the heel of my foot for his groin. At the last second, I worried maybe he wasn’t human and these were some kind of Far creatures after all, and his balls would be somewhere else entirely. Thankfully, when I made contact, those worries went away. A sound like an elephant having a heart attack came from his mouth as his cheeks filled with air and anguish. He fell over, and I struggled to my feet while spinning the chair so the legs were weapons and I whacked Haircut with them.
I spun back around and threw a kick low at him too, but he blocked it and swung. I ducked and tried to ram my head into his jaw. I almost missed, but got enough to knock him back a little. These guys were morons. If I had a few more minutes, I would knock them both out, get my hands free, get my hands on a weapon, then get out of here. Maybe after a few more kicks to Four-Eyes first, though.
