Emily Grawiski

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER ONE

     A lady laid at the rooftop of a seven storied building at the lower east side of New York, her legs scathed and hair disheveled, all five foot nine of her. The July sun hid on shame in shining as bright as possible like a screaming banshee. It was barely four in the afternoon; the streets were filled with coffee ridden drivers who would do anything to beat the afternoon traffic. Their horns and constant yelling helped sprout the slight headache that woke her up, and as her eyes fluttered open the sun escalated the abominable migraine that refused to subside.

     Her body had lain almost lifeless till the irking noise, so I guess you could say she was lucky the truck drivers were loud. She tried to get up on her knees, as every memory of what she used to know disappeared. A shrilling sound came from behind her and all she could think about was how to make the sound go away. As exhilarating as it was for her to know that she wasn't dead, she got exasperated listening to the infamous tune of a rock band. She staggered unto her feet only to get right back where she tried to get from. Insufferable, it was.

     She crawled on the concrete floor, bruising her naked arms until she reached the mobile device. She tried to figure out how to answer the phone, all she saw was a green and red button with no description of how to answer and the person who was calling was unknown. It seemed like there was a black box blocking her introspection until there was a streak of light that remembered green was to answer and red was to decline. She didn't know what to do, after all this wasn't her cellular phone, she wasn't sure she even had one.

Click.

     "Hello?" She murmured to the phone.

"You have 5 minutes to get out of that building before it explodes, take the backpack and the gun beside you and run." An unrecognized voice spoke; it was disguised in distorted voices. It was a total of about five different voices at least that's what she counted.

"Who is this?" She spoke but the line had gone dead. Rude, she thought. A timer immediately set on the wallpaper on the phone, counting its milliseconds and seconds up to the minutes in five. She wasn't exactly sure if the bomb threat was real, after all she was just a girl stuck on the roof. What if there was no bomb after all? But somehow, she couldn't let something as big as that go. She panicked, the building was going to explode in five minutes and she was still trying to learn how to stand up. Beside the phone were a small black tattered looking backpack and a small hand gun beside it as the voice had said. She was shocked and bewildered at the same time. She had never seen a gun before, talk less of operating one. Time was being wasted, she had to act quickly.

     At the rooftop was a door that led to the inside of the building, but climbing down the stairs would take a long time. She got up as quickly as she could, staggering most of the time, her legs were bruised but one felt more than a bruise, she was limping. As she looked down at the bloody cloth of her jeans, she noticed that there was a cloth tightly tied around her thigh. She continued limping and didn't let the pain faze her. She pulled the hand gun at the waistband of her jeans and slung the backpack on her arms. There was no recollection of how she got here in the first place all she knew now was that the building was going to explode if she didn't get out of it.

     The floor was stained with her blood as she limped towards the edge of the roof. At the extreme part of it there was a pipeline that extended all the way to the first floor, it was built in such a way that it wasn't attached to the building, only the top and bottom. She didn't know what she was doing, she had no plan, and her actions were purely based on instincts. Her movements were dexterously impetuous as she removed her belt and clasped it around the pipe. She took in a deep breath.