It had started out like any other Friday; no dramatic drum roll, no ominous thunder clouds, nothing. Lisa and I went to our morning exercise, an all-girls program to keep housewives in shape, after which I had a shower and made my way to the office. I always picture myself as this corporate hotshot; skirt-suit and all. Instead, I ended up as a PhD student of Psychology, Research. I didn’t choose my topic, I went to the lecturer who specializes in Interpersonal Relationships when I was still applying for my Masters and asked to be on her team, and so ended up with a project on father-adolescent daughter relationships among low-income families. I’ve always been interested in the dynamics motivating human behaviour, especially human interaction, and hence ended up here. I have my own office in the psychology department of the university and am in charge of an undergraduate module on psych theories and works of fiction, aka Narrative Studies. Nothing particularly glamorous, but I enjoy it nonetheless.
After work, a few of us got together at a local sushi bar for the weekly recommended allowance of social interaction. Ryan and James are the ‘young working’ guys in the group, the others are all postgraduate students at the university, and both are into finance related pursuits. Samantha and Richard are the only couple in the group, both engineers in the making, and a tendency towards nauseating public displays of affection. William is the odd one out, somewhat incomplete in the absence of his ever faithful lab buddy, Theo, both of whom are electrical engineers in the making. Lisa and Danielle make up the arts faculty in our group, both of them pursuing PhD’s in Philosophy.
I’ve always felt just a little out of sync with my friends, some of whom I’ve known since early childhood, but on this day everything felt somehow removed and disjointed. I distinctly remember moments throughout my life where I was staring off into the middle distance and found myself idly wondering when I would wake up from this dream. I usually just shrugged them off, thinking with a smirk that the Matrix must be glitching again. On this Friday, however, something went click in my mind the moment the door to the sushi bar clinked open with the sound of the once cheerful bell, and I felt the dread rise like an inexorable wave of ice wind from my toes right up to making the hair on the back of my neck rise. It was as if my body just took over and reacted without having to take order from my stunned brain. Our table was closest to the door, my seat right next to it in fact, so I could slam the man’s arm up, punch him in the stomach, and grab his gun before anyone could make a sound. I fired the gun at him and fired off another quick succession of eight shots into the men behind him, through the window; eight shots, eight men dead. I turned back to my friends and told them to follow me, for some reason they all did. We ran to an apartment building down the road, entered it through a service entrance and made our way up some stairs and down a few hallways, before entering a room that looks like a basement but isn’t. I had no idea how I’d found the place, but I just knew that it was a safe place to leave my friends. They all trooped in behind me and made themselves comfortable on the couches that occupied the right half of the room. They just looked at me, somewhat dazed and surprisingly calm. “Wait here, I’ll be back before sunrise”, and then I just walked out and closed the door behind me. Memories were stirring, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on anything. I went outside and started walking back toward the sushi bar, waiting for something. There was a faint whooshing sound and I just turned and ran in the direction opposite to where my friends were hiding.
What followed was hours of running and dodging bullets, climbing over walls and fences, sliding down fire escapes and jumping through windows. Most of it’s just a haze of impressions, acting purely on instinct and not stopping to consider the improbability of the moves I was pulling like rabbits from a magician’s hat. What I remember most clearly from that chase was the idea of luring my pursuers to a particular time and place, and the one unforeseen moment where a street kid stepped out of a shadow in an alley unexpectedly. How he stood blinking in incomprehension at me and then turned to look at the men chasing me, the way I nearly tripped over my own feet at the sudden change of direction, the burning as the shot aimed at the child slammed into my heart instead; the determination as I ran right through them all in a desperate bid to distract them from the child and lead them to the trap. I jumped up onto the fire escape right in their midst, forcing them to follow me up. They fired off a few more shots, but nothing hit me. I ran across the roof of the building, down the fire escape on the other side, slipping and landing with a twack on the tarmac...
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