Time Sensitive Target

Part 42 - The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance

"Hold F3 and highlight the box there," my new supervisor, Marlene hovered patiently over the computer. I repeated what she'd shown me with a few clicks, and she stood back to appreciate the fruits of her training. "That's it!" She announced warmly. "You young ones can do it quicker than I can. There are some files over there, I need you to separate the ones missing any information. Then go through those and separate them into platoons, they need to be sent back to the right building with a covering document. You'll find the template for that under the access forms folder, called 'missing information template'. Print however many you need and staple one to the front of their original forms."

Marlene was happy and gregarious, with a thin gold chain for her glasses that hung loosely around her neck. I hadn't seen her actually place them on her nose yet, but as an accessory they suited her. She was short and overweight in a motherly, matronly way, her somewhat wiry brown hair styled with a nod to the bouffants of the fifties, plenty of lashings of hairspray creating volume in a Southernly fashion. I liked her immediately, and she'd been incredibly patient and thorough in her training throughout the morning and afternoon. We'd eaten lunch together, which she declared was time she normally spent reading 'trashy literature' but that she was glad to have somebody to chat to. I was replacing her colleague who had been on and off with illness, leaving Marlene to fulfil the work of two people herself. The hours I'd spent in Building 91 with her comforting guidance had been the happiest ones I'd had in longer than I cared to remember.

By the time I'd finished sorting the forms and had found the correct correspondence address for each platoon it was half past four. I'd been waiting for this time with anxious anticipation all day, wondering with feverish panic if Jase would arrive early and catch me slipping out. I'd actually told him I would stay later as I didn't want to seem like I was running out the door on my first day.

"Well dearie you've done a brilliant job, you go and get home and I'll see you next Tuesday," Marlene smiled proudly as the clock flickered towards twenty to. I couldn't believe my luck. I did believe in fate, or that things happened for a reason, and what other reason was there to Marlene letting me leave early, than so I could evade Jase's clutches and enjoy a walk across the shore alone? I thanked her gratefully after offering to stay and help with anything else, and grabbed my bag from under my desk. You're going to do this. You're going to really, really piss him off. 

I'd text him. When I could see the beach and it was nearly five o'clock, I'd text him. Just to let him know I was safe and that I was going for a stroll, that was all. I'd check in, and then he couldn't be too mad. There was some sick thrill in knowing he would, in knowing I was punishing him slightly by rebelling against his suffocation. You could be punishing yourself, too. I had been wrong before, but I was beginning to believe Jase wouldn't hurt me. His presence still struck a dagger of fear into me at times, but we'd spent night after night together in the quiet apartment and I hadn't been interrogated or tortured so far.

I peeked all around Building 91 before I turned in the opposite direction to where I knew Jase would be coming from. All I had to do was walk to the other side of the base, no more than thirty minutes if I hurried. Sea breeze whipped my hair as I scuttled along the military roads, careful to stick to the main one in case I accidentally ended up in the middle of a heliport or something equally as dangerous. The path would have been clearer if not for the airstrip in the middle, which I would have to divert around by the golf club. I'd spent some of my break checking my path online, and it was near enough one straight road. By the time I reached the golf course I felt unexpectedly tired, the rush of evasion obviously settling and making way for the exhaustion of a full day. It was five o'clock, just after. Shit. I typed out a brief message-

Let out early, gone for a walk on base.

That was all the information he needed to know. My gut lurched as I watched his profile switch to online, I quickly turned the phone off and shoved it in my bag. There, you can enjoy yourself in a minute. I paced down the road, gazing out to the empty airstrip and then to the horizon ahead. The base had its own private beach, fenced off from the rest of the island and I was approaching the parking lot, mere seconds away from my coveted moment of independence. I practically skipped across the sandy asphalt and through a path lined with tall waving palm trees until my shoes sunk into the slinky softness, relief at having reached my checkpoint flooding me.