16

Kendra didn’t wait to hear the terms of her surrender.  She lurched to her feet, scuttled to the far side of the buffet table, and shoved two slabs of smoked salmon in her mouth.  A half-dozen evil business types weren’t going to stop her from eating.  Kendra chewed quickly, savagely, then drank directly from a carafe of water.  The businessmen looked revolted.  They didn’t move, but with an outraged snarl on her face, Xenopoulos headed toward her.

Kendra shifted to keep the table between her and the spy.  Xenopoulos lunged to Kendra’s left.  Kendra moved to the right.  She grabbed a handful of curried rice from the hill of rice that rose in front of her, and stuffed that in her mouth.  One of the businessmen huffed with disgust.

Xenopoulos moved farther left.  Kendra mirrored her motion.  Lentil soup, that would be nutritious and easy to swallow when it cooled.  In a flash, Kendra used a soup bowl to scoop some from the tureen.  Without looking, she set the bowl in the ice piled under the sliced fish.

Xenopoulos used that moment of distraction to come around the table.  Kendra heaved the tureen of soup out of the steam table, and ignoring the burning pain in her hands, dumped it over the spy’s head.

The two goons barreled into the room at the sound of Xenopoulos’ screams.  They started toward Kendra, but were cut off by the five alarmed businessmen, who were in full retreat.  Kendra grabbed her bowl of soup and circled the table to scoop some curried rice into it.  It was then that her glance fell upon a dish filled with spicy pickled peppers.  She shoved some of the lentil and rice mix into her mouth while she had the chance.  The food really was delicious.

Goon One reached her first.  Kendra threw a couple of peppers in his eyes.  He howled, and crashed into Xenopoulos, knocking them both to the floor.  Goon Two circled Kendra, both hands up, as if to calm her.

Kendra grabbed the bowl of peppers, and moved toward the spot in the wall where she thought she’d seen the door.  Goon Two faked a move toward her.  Kendra countered by raising the bowl.  She warded him off twice more before her bare heel made contact with the wall behind her.  She shuffled to her left.  The door should be right behind her.  She bent her knee and pressed the sole of her foot to the wall behind her, never taking her eyes of Goon Two.  No door opened.

The goon grinned, and moved a little closer.  Kendra shuffled farther to her left and pressed again with her foot.  Nothing. 

Goon Two lifted a whole watermelon from the buffet table.  If he threw it, she would have to react.  Odds were good that in the process she would either be disarmed, or slosh pepper juice in her own eyes.

The melon flew toward her, and right underneath it the goon dove for her.  Kendra sidestepped both.  The melon and the goon smashed into the wall nearly simultaneously.  Luckily, they hit the door, which swished open.  The goon landed flat on his stomach in the doorway, blocking it open.

Kendra skipped across his back into the corridor.  Goon Two grabbed her ankle.  Kendra turned as much as she was able, bent forward, and swung the dish of peppers like a bowling ball into his eyes.  He howled, stumbled to his feet, and ran crookedly down the hall like a crazed cue ball.

Kendra followed him to a men’s room.  Completely oblivious of everything around him, the goon frantically rinsed his eyes at one of the sinks.  She studied the room.  There was no means of escape, but it was not a typical bathroom either, more like a locker room.  Yes, around a corner stood a central bank of lockers.  Fortunately, no one else was in the place.  The walls held all kinds of weapons and equipment.  Kendra’s eyes were drawn to two large fire extinguishers, and right above them, a fire alarm.

After she pulled the alarm, Kendra ran back past Goon Two who continued to whimper as he dunked his head repeatedly in a sink full of water.  In the corridor a strip of red lights lit a path in the floor.  Kendra followed it.  She encountered no one as she ran.

After a couple of minutes, her adrenalin-fueled burst of energy ran out.  Ahead she saw that the lights ended at what had to be another seamless door.  It seemed so far away. 

Kendra sank weakly to the ground and crawled on trembling limbs toward the end of the lit path.  Instead of giving her energy, the little bit of food she’d swallowed seemed to have sapped her strength.  It would take ninety minutes for nutrients to reach her bloodstream.  That’s a weird thing to remember.  Why didn’t I take an urban warfare class instead of physiology?  The fine grit in the cement floor bit into her knees.  She forced herself slowly onward.

The sound of booted feet erupted behind her, lots of booted feet.  The drumming footsteps grew louder.  Kendra wasted no time looking back.  She whimpered as each raw, bruised knee made contact with the hard floor.  Kendra reached the end of the lit path in the floor of the corridor, pressed her back against the stainless steel wall, and then used hands and feet to lever herself into a standing position.  Frantically she touched every bit of the wall within reach.  Nothing.

The boots stopped.  Kendra looked up.  Twelve soldiers in gray and black camouflage stood in a ring around her.  Did American Missile have a private army?  Kendra dismissed the thought, and focused her mind, slippery with starvation, on survival.  Ha, ha, it laughed in sarcastic refusal.

“Take her,” the leader commanded.

The soldiers closed in.  Kendra pressed even tighter to the wall that she had so hoped would be a door.  “No--”  Reflexively she raised her arms to protect her head as a half-dozen large gloved hands shot toward her face.

The wall behind her opened.  She felt herself lifted out of a backwards tumble and onto her feet.  She was then propelled backwards a few feet.  Something very solid stood between her and the soldiers.  Kendra heard them cry out in fear, but before she saw what happened, two arms, two stone cold arms, lifted her. 

She was outside.  Her surroundings passed far too quickly for her eyes to register them.  Whatever carried her moved so fast that Kendra’s hair was pushed back and wind rushed in her ears.  How is this possible?  She tried to turn, but was held fast.  They changed direction smoothly, but so suddenly that Kendra felt like she was in a movie that skipped.  After a dozen more sharp turns, she felt unbalanced. 

About the time Kendra developed enough motion sickness that she was sure she would vomit, the horrible speed stopped.  Her feet touched the ground.  She stood uncertainly in the dark.  She heard nothing, smelled nothing.  The air was windless and cool.  She shivered, still in her flimsy johnny and robe.  Where am I?  Despite the coolness the silence became suffocating.

“Hello?” she said in a shaky voice.  “Is anyone here?”  A minute passed.  “Thank you for rescuing me.”  Courtesy never hurt.

Light flared as several torches were lit simultaneously.   Kendra flinched at the sound and the sudden light, dim though it was.  When her eyes had adjusted, an incredible sight emerged from the dark.

She was in a cathedral…but no.  What Kendra had taken for organ pipes in the dim light were stalactites, elegant and encrusted with gold and jewels.  Between them stood beautiful marble statues, with eyes that glittered strangely in the torchlight.

Who had lit the torches?  Even as the question formed in Kendra’s brain, she knew the answer, and knew, too, that she’d better choose her next words and actions very carefully. 

She surveyed her surroundings once more, careful to keep her face expressionless.  There were at least three-dozen “statues” around her, and she stood feet lower than any of them.  One of the marble figures was seated.  He sat on a throne that, like the stalactites, gleamed dully in the dim light.  Was the whole place made of gold and jewels?  The feet of the throned figure were level with Kendra’s eyes, though fifteen yards in front of her.  She inclined her head slightly, and fixed her eyes on his shoes, so highly polished that they might have been obsidian. 

“Many thanks, again, for my rescue,” she said softly, then waited.  The sound of water dripping slowly from some far-off  stalactite reached her ears.  The only breath she heard was her own, of course.  She shivered again.

“Might I know,” she asked calmly though her teeth chattered, “why you chose to do so?”  Kendra kept her eyes on the shoes. 

No.  The word sounded only in her head, like one of her own thoughts, but her interior voice had never sounded like that, as empty as the last echo on Earth.

All light vanished.  Kendra felt herself lifted.  Once again she was carried at a speed that created a wind tunnel around her.  In seconds complete darkness was replaced with a flash of white florescent light, then an incomplete dark.  She made out the sounds of traffic just beyond the roar of the wind.  In the next instant, it all stopped.  She was barefoot and shivering in the lobby of the physics building at night.  Even as she peered up the elegant stone steps of the main stairway in disbelief, Kendra knew, without benefit of any of the usual human senses, that the vampire who had carried her stood in the shadows and watched her.