by Drew Bell
Chapter 10
Lalia had Terr removed the restraint on her left hand, and then led her towards the door, Terr’s legs limply carrying her in front of Lalia. The door hissed open and one of the guards was asleep, both jolted awake when they realized the hostage situation.
“What is going on?” Terr asked the drugs in her system causing a slur of words, her head began to fall, and she was quickly falling into a coma. Lalia backed into the sterile white painted hallway, CLERGY 5’s hospital was void of color or shapes, the white walls blended into the reflective white floors.
The two guards cut off Lalia’s exit, the guard’s chuckle revealed to her that she had, in fact, mistakenly ran towards the wrong end of the hallway. Lalia directed with her bony finger that the two guards needed to set down their weapons; she was right: Doctor Melric had provided them two of the Convoy’s old guns.
“Set down the guns, boys.” She said as intimidating as possible. Her neck flicked from side to side, she needed to find an alternative exit, and likely by the time she reached the end of the hall she would be arrested by even more of Melric’s goons.
“What are you going to do Doctor?” asked one of the dimwitted guards, both rhetorically and literally.
The other guard’s eyes darted towards his gun still within reach.
“Hold it!” Lalia screeched as the guard sprung at the gun. The Callos reached the gun and fired a shot at Lalia despite the hostage; Lalia pulled Terr through a door into an empty patient’s room as the shot’s hot plasma singed her cheek. The guards ran at the room, but Lalia held them back by hoisting the limp Terr higher into the air:
“Stop both of you!”
The two guards entered into the room taking the opposite corners, one guard motioned to leave to Terr’s desk to signal for help.
“Stay here. Both of you.” Lalia warned; “Doctor Belar is in a medically induced coma, she will die if I don’t reverse what I did.”
She was lying; Terr had been injected with a powerful sedative and nervous desensitizer. Terr would likely forget the last three days and maybe how to solve complicated math problems, but she would ultimately recover, albeit angry with Lalia. The two guards took the threat seriously; one guard closed the door behind them. Somehow, Lalia needed to incapacitate both of them in the next five minutes before a patrol came around. She glanced at the bedside console’s clock: she had four minutes now.
“One of you, grab that tubing and wrap it tightly around her left arm.” She ordered, but the guard wound it too tightly and she would lose her arm without blood. “Not that tight.” She added.
The guards set about preparing a mock operation room with the scarce medical supplies in the room; it was a psychiatric bedroom without anything remotely useful for a surgery or an escape.
Two minutes left the clock read, Lalia needed to act now or lose her chance entirely:
“Could you hoist this sheet up?” she asked both of the guards. The two complied and raised a bed sheet like a partition; Lalia threw a punch at the sheet into the face of the guard with the gun. Not the brightest idea she admitted, but she was without options and only two minutes to escape. The guard stumbled and fell over a chair, the sheet acting like a net and keeping him down. The other guard swung his fist at Lalia, with a quick deflect from her wrist, she then leveled a kick at his groin. Her long legs provided adequate reach, her morning regimen of exercise provided ample strength; the guard fell down his face in the grip of pain. Lalia turned to run, but the guard beneath the sheet flailed his leg tripping her. The three were now on the ground: one guard still holding his hands between his legs and another guard dragging at Lalia’s leg.
Lalia’s memory provided natural warrior instinct; her leg was being pulled tightly with no chance of his grip breaking. She bent her leg at the knee and squatted in a sitting position, her free leg then contorted around the guard’s neck bending her back she wrapped her long arms around the guard’s torso. She flexed her abdomen, she screamed in pain but the guard was unable to breathe the faintest slur. She relaxed just as a chair was batted into her back.
The second guard struggled to find a suitable piece of the broken chair to slam into Lalia again; Lalia leveled the gun towards the guard but the metal frame of the chair batted her hand. The gun skittered underneath the bed, Lalia and the guard dove after it. The two fumbled in the small space under the bed, the unconscious Terr moaned as she fell deeper into her coma.
Lalia’s boot connected with the temple of the guard’s head, his grunt was more furious than in pain. The guard dragged at Lalia as she held on to the bed frame, she was exhausted; the clock chimed signaling morning and Lalia was out of time. Whistling down the hall signaled that the next shift was arriving, Lalia tried to grasp at the gun just a foot out of her reach. The guard opened his mouth to shout for help. Lalia reached above her head to reach for Terr.
The guard’s face turned to the replacement guard and mouthed horror as Lalia Tarrus wrapped plastic tubing around his throat, she bared her teeth at the replacement savagely. The replacement reached for his gun, but Lalia was too fast, she whipped her hand to the gun on the floor and raised and fired. The window pane shattered and the third guard dropped. Lalia gingerly stepped through the broken fragments of the window, the pieces crunching beneath her feet.
“Sorry Terr. I’ll make it up to you later.” She promised sadly through the gaping hole in the window as she left down the hall.
The guard coughed blood; she dug her boot’s heel into his throat.
Lalia then ran down the hall, clacking as she did so, a small blood trail following each of her steps. Callos can be dangerous if they give into their warrior instinct: Lalia cried as she left, she had failed rational thought.