Here's another short passage I wrote a while back. Again, I hope you enjoy. This one's a bit violent in parts, so please don't read if you don't like that sort of thing.
They came for her with rictus grins and flashing steel, these three men. Strangers with matching hairstyles to go with their matching knives. Through the heavily scented steam of the tea house kitchen they loped, goading her in a language she didn't understand. There had been four of them but now one lay bleeding (dead?) on the tea house floor, a throwaway chopstick in his eye. He had swaggered over to her seat, a high stool by the window, and whispered lewdly in her ear and tried to touch her. She hadn't let him.
She was running for the door before his body hit the floor, not aware of how she had dispatched him with such efficiency and more than a little scared by the fact her body had moved through impossible motions without any conscious thought or command. Now she had hot liquid on her arm that might have been blood, might have been noodle soup. It didn't matter though, as she careened toward the exit, the man's clone cronies blocking her path.
A split second shift in perception blurred the three men into hyper-surreal slow motion, their scrambling efforts to intercept her reduced to a frame-by-frame dance of clumsiness. Her eyes focused on the knives in their hands and, for a very strange moment, her mind presented her with several options for disarmament and the subsequent lethal strikes she could (easily?) inflict.
As her senses returned to normal, she found herself skidding on spilled green tea, falling over a stool into another group of strangers then onto her back as someone roughly pushed her away.
She couldn't breathe now, her wind stolen by the impact with the tile floor, but she pushed herself up anyway and sprinted for the only other door in the place. She screamed for someone to help her as she ran but she knew by the way all the chefs turned their eyes down to their woks that no-one would.
So she was on her own...
Okay. No. Not okay. Gonna die.
Her fear became a tight ball deep in her stomach and she wanted to piss and vomit all at once as she blasted through a fire door and into a very dark alley. She had just enough time to look left and right, deciding which way to run, before the door was thrown wide behind her and she heard their voices at her back, smelled their drunken stink.
Suddenly she was running straight for the wall in front of her, and they were so very close behind her. She was unthinking now, driven by fear and an unfamiliarly heightened survival instinct.
A knife dove in for her ribs, its wicked edge finding empty space as her feet carried her up the rain slick wall, up and over her attackers' heads as she back-flipped and twisted to land silently behind them.
She sees her hands reach for the smallest one's head and his neck snaps like he was a child's doll. Her leg whips out in a too-fast crescent motion and her foot connects with the base of the fat one's skull, driving his face hard into the bricks. She hears his face crunch wetly.
The third turns quickly to face her, but not quickly enough, because she already has his knife in her hand and so she shows him how to use it properly and he never makes a sound.
Her legs are weak like jelly now as she stumbles clumsily, shaking and crying, away from the broken, the bloody, the dead. The knife tumbles from her fingers, her trembling body finally giving up, the floor of the alley spiralling up to meet her as all her world goes dark.
Copyright © A. Flood 2010
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