by Charles Dean
“If they don’t know that Masha is the one in danger, would they send anyone?” Lee asked.
“No. They’d let everyone on this side die rather than risk not protecting the family,” Olga said flatly.
“Then why don’t we just call them? Let them know we need help?” Lee asked.
“I’ve already tried while we were running here. The number won’t go through. They’re blocking service from the cell towers at the moment in this area.”
Okay then, let’s play it the risky way, he thought, looking over at the wall separating him and the park. If it were just him, he had full faith he could get over that wall in record time. There was no way he could do it while carrying Masha, however, even with the extra advantage his enhanced stats gave him. If he had known he was going to try to get over, he could have made a makeshift ladder pretty quickly with the right tools, but this wasn’t a furniture shop, and there didn’t seem to be anything useful nearby he could use. In fact, the tallest object he could find was a chair.
Wait . . . Is that one of those dinky no-weight hybrids? Lee asked himself hopefully as he noticed the tiniest, cutest blue bubble-top car he had ever seen parked just outside. I’ll get arrested after this, but I’m sure any jury will understand, he argued to himself as he came up with his idea. “Okay, I need you to grab this.” Lee nudged one of the cafe’s chairs over to Olga with his toe. “Bring it with us. We’re moving quickly. We have to get over that wall before they realize we’re not in the back alleys or still in the cafe.”
“Yes sir,” Olga said, clutching the chair tightly.
Lee didn’t bother telling her when they were leaving. This time, he just slipped out the front door of the cafe and turned toward the compound. When he got to the bubble-top car, he set Masha down between that and the sedan behind it, figuring that it was the safest spot he was going to find in an otherwise open roadway. He then rushed over to the driver’s side window of the hybrid and used Glass Smithing to melt an aperture into the glass. He could easily punch his way through, but shattering glass would also likely draw attention. He then reached through the large hole he had made, unlocked the car and then hopped inside. He didn’t have the key to the vehicle, and he didn’t have a mold to work with, nor was he capable of hotwiring it, so instead he just threw it in neutral and got out.
“Olga, put down the chair and take the driver’s seat,” he ordered. It didn’t take her more than a second to be in the seat after he hopped out. “Steer it so that the car is scraping against the wall.” Without waiting for an answer, he slipped behind the vehicle, leaned against it, and heaved. Every muscle in his body tightened under the immense strain as he pushed the 3,000-pound car out of its parking spot. They only had a short distance to cover since the back alley had allowed them to traverse most of the city block without being detected, and Lee hoped that this would allow him to safely cover the rest.
The car slowly rolled forward at first but quickly gained speed, and a moment later, it crashed over the curb at the end of the road and came to a lurching halt as Olga slammed on the breaks. The rinky-dink tin can was practically rubbing up against the wall, and the sound of metal scraping against stone caused Lee to cringe as he imagined exactly how much money it would cost to repair the ruined paint job. Please forgive me, kind owner.
Lee ran back down the short stretch of street to where he had left Masha and the chair, his eyes constantly scanning the road for any sign that someone might have noticed them. He quickly scooped her up into his arms, awkwardly grabbed the chair with the tips of his fingers and hustled back to where he had left Olga and the automobile. Lee dropped the chair and then gently set Masha on her feet, taking only a brief moment to make sure that she was going to remain upright on her own. When she didn’t instantly fall over, he grabbed the chair once again, vaulted on top of the car’s hood and positioned the chair against the wall. Between the height of the car and the height of the chair, Lee hoped that it would be enough for the girls to make it over “Come on. Upsy daisy, you two,” he said, motioning up and over with his hands. “We’re short on time.”
Olga quickly climbed onto the car with Lee, but Masha took a minute to follow her up onto the hood of the vehicle.
“You go first!” Lee instructed Olga. The young woman didn’t need any more prompting. She moved as fast as her arms and legs would hold her, and she was over the top of the wall a moment later. Somehow, despite the haste with which she moved, she still managed to make her movements look delicate.
Masha tentatively started up next, but just as she made a move to climb over, one of the masked men finally made an appearance. He screamed out loudly, also relaying something into a handheld radio at the same time, and leveled a gun in Lee’s direction. Please be a bad shot! Lee looked back and forth between the gunman and Masha’s fumbling attempt to lower herself as gracefully as Olga had.
Unfortunately for Lee, his little internal prayer wasn’t answered. The man unloaded five rounds at Lee from sixty yards away and hit him twice, both times in the gut. Searing pain shot through his abdomen, and he was instantly reminded of what it felt like to be stabbed with a dagger in the other world. The wounds hurt like hell, but the pain wasn’t anything that he couldn’t stand. He had plenty of experience getting wounded at this point, and he knew that it was going to take a little bit more than that to put him on the ground. Still, he thanked his lucky stars the bullets hadn’t pierced a vital organ or something worse that could have put him out of commission.
“Go!” Lee shouted at Masha. He knew she was scared of the gunshots, but she was also just too scared in general to trust the fact that she could make her fall. She had frozen up. Wincing against the pain in his abdomen, he grabbed her hand and gave her a word of assurance. “I’ve got you. Let’s do this together.” Another blast of gunshots rang out, and he felt a searing pain as another bullet tore through his leg. Pain exploded from the wound, causing him to let go of her hand and fall down the wall where he landed hard on his side.
“Masha,” he said through gritted teeth. “Jump to me.” He did his best to fight through the pain as he struggled to stand up. He was using his magical healing ability as quickly as he could, but it didn’t seem to help him as effectively as it did other people outside of the competition world.
“I . . . I don’t . . .” Masha sucked in several quick, rapid breaths, and it sounded like she was on the verge of hyperventilating again.
“No, don’t tell me that. You can do it. They’re not going to shoot you, but they will take you if you don’t fall toward me. I’ve got you. You just have to trust me.” Lee’s assurances must have worked. After a moment’s hesitation, she finally tumbled down toward him, where he was able to catch her and soften her landing.
“There you go,” he said, shifting her in his arms so that he wouldn’t have to set her down. He just didn’t trust her not to collapse at the moment. “Didn’t I tell you that you were going to be okay?”
“Yeah, but . . . you . . . You’re bleeding. You were shot.” Masha touched the bloodied spots on his stomach where the two bullets had ripped through his gut, but both were nearly healed up now.
“So was Olga. What’s your point?” Lee asked. “It’s our job to get shot so you don’t have to.” It was a lame joke, but it was the best attempt he could muster at the moment to make light of a very tense situation.
“You were shot too?” Olga asked as she looked over at Lee. His nice Oxford shirt and grey slacks had both been ruined by the bullet holes and the subsequent flow of blood that had spilled out.
“Can we talk about this after we’re safe?” Lee asked. He hoisted Masha even further in the air, shifted her up in another a princess carry, prepared to bring her the entire way to her home. However, before he even got a chance, he was interrupted by the sound of barking dogs and men approaching on all sides.
“Breach in the perimeter! We have a breach in the-- Strike that, Masha has been returned to base!” one of the men said into a walkey
as a dog led him closer to the trio.
“Miss, please, we need to get you back to Alexander and the safety of the inner compound,” one of the guards said over the still-barking dogs. Lee could tell they weren’t barking at Masha or Olga, but at him.
“There’s no need to bring her back,” Alexander said as he walked out from behind a tree. “I’m here. I can walk her myself.”
“Sir,” the guards looked over, “I recommend that--”
“I recommend that you relax. That’s an order,” Alexander said, seemingly unphased by the entire incident or the fact that there was an attack outside of his place just moments ago. “Let me walk my daughter and her two saviors back home.”
“Thank you for your help, Lee, but what’s--” Alexander’s calm facade cracked when his eyes noticed the pool of blood around Masha’s side, and his voice fell flat and then hung in his throat before he even finished his sentence. Recovering his voice, he demanded, “What happened to Masha?!”
“We were ambushed,” Lee explained and instantly moved on to covering the important bits as quickly as possible with short, precise sentences. “They had dozens of men with guns. They were waiting for us to get close to the park’s entrance. They kept shouting to secure the target.”
“That’s what they were shouting? I didn’t understand a word. It all sounded like Chechen to me,” Olga said.
Lee was a little startled by this revelation. He knew there was a good chance that they weren’t speaking English, but he was surprised to find out that they were actually speaking Chechen, even though there weren’t any prominent Chechen communities in the city. The reason Lee hadn’t been able to tell was that a residual part of the competition’s system was always with him. It had been there since he first joined the competition, and it automatically translated every language he heard into one that he could understand. In the same way he learned words he didn’t know before, like ‘jentacular,’ he also knew and understood new languages--only they sounded just like English to him.
Alexander took a deep, steadying breath. “Not that. I could tell there was a firefight. I mean the blood . . . the blood . . . Were you shot, Masha?” He examined his daughter curled up in Lee’s arms. Lee was the one who had been struck multiple times, but he held her clutched against his abdomen exactly where he had been shot. As a result, she had become covered in blood as well.
“No, Dad,” Masha said. “I’m fine. It was--”
“It was nothing, sir,” Olga answered, interrupting Masha. “The ones who were shot weren’t us.”
“How come I wasn’t notified about this? How come none of the guards called to update me on the situation before you made it over the wall?” Alexander fumed quietly as he moved forward. Lee set her down, and Alexander immediately began moving around her and pulling aside clothes as if to make sure she wasn’t even scratched. “Why didn’t you report this, Olga? We have a team to help in these situations.”
“Service was down,” Olga explained. “I couldn’t reach you. I’m assuming it was the same for the guards.”
“Fine. I’m getting you a satellite phone in case this happens again. I had better be updated immediately if anything ever happens to Masha again.” Alexander stopped searching Masha for injuries and instead opted to pull her into a tight, suffocating hug.
Olga nodded and turned to Lee. She seemed to be searching him for something, but less in the worried way Alexander was searching Masha and more in the confused way, as if she was looking at an alien from outer space that had incarnated as a man in front of her.
Yeah, this one is going to be tough to deal with. Lee restrained a frustrated sigh as he caught her befuddled, questioning expression. He had enjoyed the simple life, and he had enjoyed this world’s lack of deification versus the other, but he knew what would happen once the confusion wore away and the moment passed.
It had been the same in Satterfield. He had saved the prisoners’ lives, and while they were puzzled at first, they had started to worship him as a god over time--some even more so than Augustus. They worshipped him even if he kept preaching about Augustus. It was only natural though. They had latched onto him in faith and begun to rely on him as the pillar of their society. The more he pushed their lives forward, whether right or wrong, the more they believed in him. Consequentially, the more they fawned over him, the harder it was to not lose a little bit of his respect for them. Regardless of his miracles, he still didn’t view himself as great or special. He only viewed himself as the man who had let Amber die--the man who had failed.
“Alright,” Alexander said, breaking into Lee’s contemplations. “How about we move this inside and get you three cleaned up. We can’t have your mother worrying about you, can we?” He patted Masha on her head lovingly and extended a hand toward the house, ushering them inside. “You might have come close to death, but if she finds out what happened, she might actually die, so let’s keep this between us.”
“Mmm . . .” Masha simply nodded as her father let go of her and she took a step back. “Shouldn’t she know?”
“No, we don’t want to worry her. Trust me, she already has enough worry to fill a whole jar. We don’t need to give her any more.” Alexander looked over at Lee, and his eyes roamed up and down Lee’s body as he took in the blood-stained mess that his clothing had become. “And as for you, I have some clothes that are about your size that you can use while we take care of that blood-soaked outfit. Let’s sneak you three in the back way, and I’ll have one of the butlers clean your clothes while we play a game of chess. I’ll see if my tailor can’t fix the holes for you.”
“No need for that. A cleaning is fine,” Lee insisted. “I’m ashamed to say that this outfit probably cost less than your tailors charge by the hour.”
Masha was still trembling just slightly enough to be visible, and Olga looked as if her whole world had been crushed, but Lee felt as relaxed as if he had just finished a round of drinking games with his friends. Things felt right for him. The violence, the fear, the worrying about whether he was going to die as he rounded corners to avoid the enemy, the busting through shops, the knocking down doors, and taking bullets in the gut--it was all natural to him. The only thing that irked him about the entire conflict was that he hadn’t had a proper chance to take the fight to them. He had needed to stay with Masha and protect her, so he hadn’t been able to hunt down the killers and eliminate them, something that he strongly wanted to do even now.
Grim musings ran through his head endlessly as he looked back on the conflict. He wasn’t bloodthirsty--that’s what he told himself at least. Rather, he knew that he simply hadn’t settled into the peaceful life yet. Even though he had spent time in this world since his abduction, he hadn’t gotten used to it. It simply didn’t feel as much like home as the other world did. Now, however, ever since he had spotted the first masked man, the only thing that occupied his thoughts was the game world. Even while worrying over Masha and Olga’s safety, he had felt a far keener sense of flow and belonging in that moment than he had in a while, and all it had taken was a reminder of a life full of danger on the brink of death.
Alexander just chuckled at Lee. “Nonsense. I have my tailor on retainer. I don’t pay her hourly. Otherwise, I’d have to explain the bill on my credit card to the wife every time my stomach expands from overeating, and I need to let out the waist on my pants. Really, it’s no problem at all. Come. Let’s get you some spare clothes to change into, and we’ll play a game of chess while she stitches up those holes. You earned much gratitude for saving my daughter, so I cannot have you dressed in rags.”
“Ah, well . . . If that’s the case, then lead the way,” Lee said. He was looking forward to his game of chess.
“You . . .” Masha looked over at her dad. “Are you serious? You’re just going to play a game like nothing happened? Don’t we need to make sure that we’re safe? Don’t we need to do something in case they try to attack again?” Her voice quivered a bit as she levied her complaints against
her father for his casual attitude despite the life-or-death experience.
“Masha . . .” Lee began. He grabbed each of her shoulders and turned her so she was looking straight at him, and her eyes automatically drifted downward before he even said anything. “Look at me. Take a deep breath, relax and know that you’re going to be fine. The problem outside is being dealt with. You’re safe. You’re secure. Nothing will happen to you. I’m with you, and you’re safe. Remember that. As long as I’m still here, you’re always safe. Okay?”
Alexander looked studiously at Lee and then gave his daughter a smile. “That’s good,” he said with a grin, “It’s good that you’ll do anything for her safety.”
“Indeed.” He didn’t know why, but he was also somewhat unnerved by the way Alexander had said that last line as he pulled Masha in for a quick hug.
“Hey, the father is still here,” Alexander said after a minute, prompting Lee to let go of her. Lee still didn’t know if she was processing any of it, and while he worried about her, it wasn’t enough for him to really feel uncomfortable or distracted. He actually felt focused and clear-headed, and he was ready for a good game of chess.
The four of them entered via the side entrance, and they all managed to change into fresh clothes before Alexander and Lee went into the study and set up a chess board. While Alexander was arranging the pieces, Lee took one of the bottles of vodka and poured the two of them a glass each.
“So, Masha seems pretty torn up about this incident,” Alexander noted as he placed the white pawns on the board.
“Yes, I’d say so,” Lee agreed. He finished pouring the second glass and adjusting the coasters. “It’s to be expected, though. She’s been through a lot today.”