Bad Blood

Chapter 17 - E is for Escape artist (that's me!)

Blood pours down the inside of my hand as I cradle my broken face. 

"What the hell?!" I yell at her as she steps around me and sprints through the door. "Brook, wait!" I yell after her as she zooms into the hall. I growl shaking the blood off my hand wincing as I wriggle my nose. The punch that had broken it was sloppy and misguided. It was a punch full of adrenaline, and she hadn't been taught how to uppercut since half her hand had struck my left cheek. It was just pure beginner's luck, and If I was right she'd never been boxing before. So when she met security in the hall, she'd be stuck with no way out.

I race out into the hall after her, only to find my assumptions had been correct. Three men and two women stood out in the hall, dressed in all black their mouths covered with a bandana, their eyes with deep black glasses. All but one had their guns trained on Brooklyn, who had raised her shaking hands in the air, trapped at last. 

"Hands up!' The woman at the front shouted at me as my eye darted around, desperately trying to devise an escape plan. "I said hands up." 

I strategically hide my throwing dagger behind my back, slowly tucking it into the school skirt. My eye was still swollen, and without proper eyesight, I couldn't throw anything without hurting anyone. With nothing else on me and a reputation for band-close contact fighting, I had no choice but to slowly raise my hands in the air. 

The woman standing closest to us waved her gun. "Back up towards the girl with the fringe." She told Brooklyn, and I waited for her to come to a halt next to me. The woman moved closer to us, cautiously and when she did I caught sight of the elevator at the end of the hall. If I could reach my dagger without anyone noticing, I'd possibly be able to nick the elevator button and barge through with Brooklyn just in time to get out of there, even with one swollen eye. Of course, though there were the guns they were holding, and I'd need a distraction for that. A distraction that I didn't have. 

Suddenly Brooklyn came right up beside me and whispered; "Just follow my lead."

"Excuse me, I'll be the one saving us here." I hissed back, and one of the men talked into his radio. "Without my help, you'd still be tied to a chair."

Brooklyn stood down on my toes, and I strangled a yelp inside my throat. "Just listen to me, Davis. I can distract them, and once I do we need to run to the elevator. Got it."

Biting my tongue, I nodded. Having no idea what she was about to do, and no other plan to get out of this, trusting Brooklyn would just have to work for a one-time offer. If she backstabbed me, betraying her later would be easy. Don't think I hadn't thought about this whole situation properly. There was a definite chance this was a setup. 

I could hear her smiling. "On three." The guy listening to his radio stopped and turned on us, his slick smile dripping off his face. "One."

"Two." She added when the woman shook her gun, signaling for us to keep our hands up. She crept closer. 

"Three." 

A cloud of black dust flew up into the air, causing the group of kidnappers to shield themselves from the soot. Brooklyn gripped my hand and we tore through them, shoving them aside as we went. The dust cloud cleared as we made our way closer to the elevator, and I ripped my hand from Brook's grip, fingering the dagger in the back of my skirt. 

Brooklyn turned to me as we ran. "What are you doing?"

I turned around my dagger, gripping the blade as I lined it up with the up button on the wall. "Getting that elevator." I flung the knife and it spun around in the air, hitting the button with the hilt of its blade. Brooklyn looked at me with an eyebrow raised, but we kept running.

"Hey stop!" A woman's voice called from behind us, as the metallic ring of the elevator opening sounded through the hall. I bent down to grab my knife and slid along the floor pulling down Brooklyn with me as bullets pelted the wooden interior of the elevator. We crawled in just as the doors began to close and turned around to look behind us. The dust cloud had cleared and the group of kidnappers were gaining alarming speed. Seeing this, Brooklyn scrawled for the door close button and jammed it until they did and the elevator started moving.

I let out a sigh of relief and shoved my dagger into the back of my skirt. 

"It's not over yet," Brooklyn reminded me, as she began to pull small gadgets, well what looked like gadgets, and laid them out on the floor in front of us. "We probably still got another few hallways of this. Plus now that the alarms are on, they'll be waiting for us."

I watched her with curiosity, and she started to assemble some of the larger parts to form a rectangular blinking light. "What's that for."

Brooklyn looked over at me, chewing her lip. "Well this elevator shaft might not go any higher than this level, because there's only one floor button, but it's got to be one of the easiest access points for technological things. There were security cameras in that hallway, meaning they had to get the feed down there somehow."

"And if we're really far underground," I added, already knowing what she was about to say. "Putting wires down the elevator shaft would be much easier and less costly than digging a hole for them."

Brooklyn stood up and slammed her hand down on the emergency stop button, and for the first time, I watched her smile. 

"Exactly."