Killing Time OST – 7c – Hunting

<< 7b – Hunting

The problem with parachutes always was the amount of fabric. No matter how thin it was, the necessary span of it often caused the parachute to fly in your face when you landed.
Which is why, for about three seconds, I lost sight of my surroundings.
Which is why, for the third time, a law enforcement agent had the opportunity to tackle me.
I hit the ground face first, a man’s weight pressing against my back. The handcuff clicked around my left wrist. My damned assailant was fast in business. I rolled over, throwing the excess of fabric around. The man attempted to grab my right arm but got caught in the cloth.
With the flick of my free hand, I wrapped one of the parachute’s cords around my captor’s neck. I tugged on it once to cut short the “FBI! You are under arrest…” speech.
“If you wanted bondage, all you had to do is ask.” I said to the green and furious eyes. I quickly scanned the alley. The hunk of an agent was alone.
A rookie mistake.
I felt a gun pressing against my thigh; the tight fabric around the agent’s arm kept the weapon from riding upward.
“Seems we have ourselves a predicament.” I loosened my grip so my would-be arresting officer didn’t suffocate.
“Not for long.” The suit said with a crooked smile.
He wasn’t wrong. His right hand immobilized my cuffed left hand. My right hand could choke him but then his left could shoot my leg – the Kevlar would protect me but still, at this range, it would hurt like hell. His advantage? The guards would storm the alley as soon as they got down the hundred and five floors: I had about one minute and a half. My advantage? He probably thought the police was on its way and would round the corner in thirty seconds: Vexx allowed the in-building alarm to distract the guards but blocked the outgoing one to secure my escape.
Speaking of which…
“The FBI’s reinforcing private businessmen’s security now?”
“Only when you’re in town.”
The small chat fooled no one. We evaluated each other. Being FBI, he had the standard enhancement package: firearms training, reasonable muscular strength, recording device on the optic nerve and additional memory and analytical skills. However, his presence in the alley proved he had natural wits too; most of the security already covered the top floors due to the alarm so unless I planned to fly to another building, I had to come down eventually.
Or maybe I was overestimating him and he had just been staking out the street.
In order for me to devise an escape plan, two pieces of information were missing. Did he have other tech in his system? How could the mess of fabric tying us together be used to free me?
Seventy seconds left…
“You’re under arrest for the murder of…”
I shut out the man’s voice. Who would have believed that after a desperate attempt to capture me alone he would be such a sucker for protocol? As he listed my confirmed victims, I continued my exam. There was basically no sure-fire way to know how enhanced my captor was. Low quality tech left marks; he bore none of them as far as I could see. High quality tech was basically undetectable to the human eye.
My time was running out and I didn’t want to kill the guy. But he wasn’t privy to that information.
“You know he was a coyote, right?” I said, cutting the FBI agent mid-sentence.
“What?” For half a second, his attention was split. All I needed.
I pulled on the rope around the agent’s neck, raised my head off the ground and opened my right leg wide. My head butt stunned him a bit. He fired instinctively. The plasma bullet hit the ground between my legs.
My hand released the rope and rode down to the knife on my thigh. I slashed the parachute open before the FBI agent realized what was happening. I closed my thighs around his arm holding the gun and placed the point of my knife on his neck.
“Let go of the cuffs.” I growled.
Forty seconds left…
I saw it flash in his eyes, the thought of holding on until reinforcements arrived. I pressed the knife enough to make a surface cut. A tiny jerk of survival instinct weakened his grip on the cuffs. I tugged myself loose before his reason tightened his hold. His hand caught up with mine as I grabbed my Taser.
This would hurt.
I stuck the Taser in his thigh. The jolt ran through us both. If he hadn’t been on top, I wouldn’t have been in the path for the current to reach the ground. The pain was excruciating. That’ll teach me to let men have their way.
And to set my Taser on high by default.
At least, it was a second hand jolt partially dampened by the Kevlar suit. The FBI guy wasn’t so lucky.
Thirty seconds left…
Once the initial muscular spasms passed, I rolled the stunned and next-to-lifeless weight of the suit off me. His tech, though light, decupled the Taser’s effect. He would be out for a while. Cutting off the rest of the parachute, I dragged my non-cooperative body around the corner.
“Thank God I lifted that grate in the morning.” I mumbled as I pushed it aside.
Five seconds left… Ten if I was lucky…
Tears streamed down my cheeks when I lowered myself in the sewer. Dragging the grate back in place was the worst torture I had ever endured. I grunted and cursed. It clunked in place a second before the noise of the arriving guards muffled the sounds of my escape.
I inhaled deeply and winced. Even the muscles of my ribcage refused to work properly. My hands shook. No precision work for the next couple of days. Fortunately, the electric shock killed the standard tracker implanted inside the handcuffs, no doubt about it.
I forced myself up though it pained me to do so. If I didn’t move, they might catch me. All they needed was for one of the twenty guards to think about looking in the sewer. Out of sheer will, I half limped, half dragged myself around a few curbs of the tunnel.
That was when the real pain started.

8a – Cleanse >>