Blayne turned and looked at him.Did he totally miss that part of the lecture?“Well, I better get out of here,” Blayne said noncommittally. “I’ll see you next week in class.” Blayne stood, grabbed his attaché case, slipped out of the auditorium with the stream of students and walked right by the security officer who hadn’t let him in earlier. There was not a hint of recognition on the officer’s face.So much for our crack team of security guards.
* * * *
Ms. Wilson
Ms. Wilson hadn’t had this much fun in decades. She may have appeared like a cross between a judge and a librarian, but she still had skills at sixty years old. Now she was just being inventive because she was waiting. She could only do so much business on a satphone. What she needed was to get her full communications array back up and working. She felt like an appendage had been ripped from her body, so she took great joy in returning that feeling to their unwanted guests.
Ms. Wilson turned the corner and gasped loudly, catching the attention of three hulking brutes. She wanted to scream, “Come and get me boys,” but she held back. “Oh no,” she said in her best little old lady voice. The three men took off after her.Perfect. She ran down a hallway and turned around just in time to see the last one run over a grate in the floor. She hit the wall light switch, sending a metal spike from the ceiling. It connected with the man, completing the electrical connection. Immediately, the sound of sizzling permeated the walls.
The men stopped and looked at their friend as his body convulsed. One guy tried to help his friend, but Ms. Wilson’stsking sound stopped him. “Sizzles like bacon. That smell is going to take forever to get out of here.”
The man growled at her. “I’m going to kill you.”
“Good luck with that,” she said with an eyebrow flash and a cheeky grin. “Come and get me, sweet cheeks.” Then she blew them a kiss. She wasn’t sure if it was the grin, kiss or calling them ‘sweet cheeks’, but the men came after her like two linebackers at the Super Bowl. She darted down the hallway and threw herself inside an open door, locking it behind her. Ms. Wilson crossed through the room and opened the next door, which she closed but left slightly ajar.
She heard the crashing sound of the wooden door as the men tried to punch and kick their way through it. “Use the ax in the fire case, you two apes,” she mumbled. Sure enough, seconds later, there was the splintering sound of wood cracking against the force of the ax.
She pulled up a small monitor on her phone to time this one just right. The men crashed through the open door and into the room framed by three glass walls. The first man crossed the room to the only other door and found it was locked. He turned to look for a second door. The second guy was just seconds behind him, but that’s all she needed. She triggered the containment cage. A glass wall slid up the middle of the room, separating the men. The second man turned to exit the way he came, but his path out was now blocked.
She flipped on the intercom and said, “Breathe deeply. It will go faster.” A chemical fog seeped in from the ceiling. Immediately, the man in the glassed-off room started coughing then choking, falling to his knees. He reached out toward his friend, but his body went limp. She glanced down at her watch.Tick-tock.The last man standing pounded on the glass walls. She turned on the intercom again. “Don’t bother. That’s a chemically enhanced borosilicate glass. It’s stronger than your average bulletproof glass. Your little meatpaws won’t break through it.”
“Where are you, you fucking—?”
“Language!” Ms. Wilson spat like a schoolteacher from the fifties. She walked around the glass, running her fingers over the transparent wall that separated them. The man turned and eyed her as she left fingerprints on the outer glass wall. “Don’t make me punish you.” She paused, as if reconsidering. “On second thought, please… Please, let me punish you.” She gave the man a Cheshire-cat grin through the window. She kissed the glass, leaving a bright red lipstick smudge for him. Then she purred like Eartha Kitt, and said, “Come and get me.” She hit a button on her watch, and the gas from the first room was sucked out via an HVAC system. When the toxic fumes were gone, the glass walls rescinded. There was an audible click as the glass door unlocked.
Ms. Wilson let out a cackle as she ran away. She was barely around the corner when she heard the glass door crash open, and the man tore off down the hall after her. Ms. Wilson turned, standing at the end of the next hall. The man came to an abrupt stop.
“Out of tricks, old woman?” the man asked.
“Gained any IQ points?” Ms. Wilson responded. “I believe a rodeo has lost its clown.”
The man seethed. The veins on either side of his neck pulsed in rage as his face turned a scarlet red, and the man barreled down on her like a raging bull. Of course, that’s exactly what Ms. Wilson wanted. He was the animal bearing down on the human, and she was the skilled matador. Sure, the bull occasionally caught someone with their horns, but in a bullfight, at least the matador knew what game was being played. The man lunged as she whipped out a can of bear spray and leveled it at his face. A scream pierced the hallway as the toxic chemicals clouded his vision, stinging his eyes. He grabbed at the air where Ms. Wilson had been a fraction of a second earlier, but she’d slipped to the side and used the man’s momentum to throw him off balance as she gutted the man with her knife. He landed on the ground, and she struck one more time with her knife into the center of the man’s lower back.
She crouched and wiped the blood from her hands onto the back of the man’s pants. “Clean up on aisle three.”
The man lay prone. If he didn’t die from blood loss or sepsis, he wouldn’t be walking again soon. The man grumbled something on the ground.
“Excuse me. You’ll have to speak up. I couldn’t hear you,” Ms. Wilson said to the man dying in the pool of blood at her feet.
“I’m going to kill you, bitch,” the man stammered between haggard breaths.
“I seriously doubt that.” She pulled out her gun and put two bullets in the back of his head.
Slow clapping from the other end of the hall caused Ms. Wilson to spin her head.
A woman with bright red hair in an American flag shirt, jeans and cowboy boots stood clapping as she leaned against the wall. “I never did like Frank,” she said.
Ms. Wilson cocked her head. There was something familiar about this person, but she wasn’t sure what it was. Ms. Wilson leveled her gun at the woman.
“Oh please, Ms. Wilson, put that little toy away. If I wanted to shoot you in the back, I would have.”
“What are you? Raggedy Ann’s evil stepmother?”
“Only thing sharper than your mind was that tongue of yours,” the woman said.
“I’m sorry. Clearly, you were forgettable the first time we met. Care to reintroduce yourself so I can forget you again?” Ms. Wilson asked with a smile that went nowhere near her eyes. She kept her ears open. Ms. Wilson heard people trying to be quiet moving around her. She took stock of her options.Keep her talking. “Did we go to high school together?”
“I’m not that old,” the woman responded. The bottle redhead tried to hold the disgust of that idea from her tone, but it didn’t work very well.
