Chapter 3
709 Words
Chapter ThreeI’m on the couch, my awareness diamond sharp.
The commercial tune is still on, so I must not have been out for long.
The sickly older man in the audience leaps to his feet, causing everyone to stare at him and his gray skin.
“Stop him!” Darian screams, and a pale man in black starts running toward the stage.
The sickly man is painful to look at as he moves. He must have brain damage or a muscle disease because his limbs are uncoordinated as he wields them in jerky trajectories. Yet despite the apparent motor difficulties, the guy has enough energy to propel himself forward.
People shriek as he jumps onto the shoulders of the audience members in the second row.
Then his nondescript black shoes land on two women in the first row.
They scream, but the old man just uses his perches to leap onto the stage.
I’m too stupefied to move.
The black-clad security guy is moving like an Olympic sprinter, but he’s too far back and the crowd is in his way.
This would be a great time to run away screaming, but I’m still too petrified to move a muscle.
“Sir,” Kacie yells, her voice panicked. “You can’t be up here!”
The guy’s rheumy eyes glance at Kacie, but he must not find her worth his time because his gaze zeroes in on my neck.
The man in black and some of his colleagues are almost here, but it’s clear they won’t intercept the gray-skinned weirdo before he reaches me. I have no idea what he wants, but I don’t like the blank expression on his sickly face. He might be on something like meth.
One of the camera guys on stage leaps into the sicko’s path. “Sir! Excuse me, sir—stop. You can’t be here.”
The gray-skinned man flings the camera guy aside with shocking strength. I catch a glimpse of him rolling on the stage, and I go into a pure fight-or-flight response, tunnel vision and all.
I only have moments to decide what to do.
As a relatively small person, I ideally need a weapon for the fight option.
I have no conventional weapons, but a thrifty magician can always improvise. Maybe I can use the lock picks that constitute the stud in my tongue to stab him in the eye? Or create a card waterfall from the deck in my pocket as a distraction?
Settling on a more mundane option, I frantically slip off my right stiletto and jump to my feet, channeling Buffy by holding it in front of me like a stake.
I’m face to face with the guy now, and the most horrific odor assaults my nose. It smells as though I plunged head first into roadkill. The fumes are so nauseating I almost pass out.
Instead of fainting, I swing my makeshift stake at his face, aiming for his eye.
I’ve only stabbed playing cards before, and I’ve never done it with one high heel on. As a result, my weapon lands way off the mark—in the middle of the man’s chest.
To my utter shock, the heel penetrates a couple of inches into him, as though there’s a hole there already. His clothing is intact, yet I hear a rip of some kind.
Could there have been stitches in his chest? He does look sick enough to be post-heart surgery, though he’s way too spry.
Ignoring the shoe protruding from his chest, the man wraps his foul-smelling hands around my neck and starts to squeeze.
My hands fly up to claw at his strangling fingers, but he’s bizarrely strong, and I can’t inflict much damage with my short nails. So I knee him in the groin, using all my strength. Pain shoots through my knee, but I take solace in knowing no man could withstand such an attack.
I’m wrong.
The fingers around my neck don’t loosen, and through my blurring vision, I see his glassy eyes staring at me without blinking.
I claw at his face next, but with a similar lack of success. My lungs are now screaming for air, and though I’ve practiced holding my breath in order to one day perform a Houdini-like underwater escape, panic overwhelms me.
My body thrashes mindlessly, and my head feels like it’s about to explode through my ears as the world grows more distant.
With the last remnants of consciousness, I realize that this is it.
Blackness overwhelms me, and I die.
- Writer
