Lyudmila Kept the Blade’s Keen Edge
… just in case a perfect opportunity should ever arise- Planet of the Help Desks
- as the beasts in a menagerie
- For years.
- worried-looking men were sprawled
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Lyudmila kept the blade’s keen edge pressed firmly under my windpipe, ensuring my cooperation. She towed me to a pickup truck and stopped. Evidently we were waiting for Tessa to conclude her business with the garbagemen, which only took another few seconds. The two men in gray-green jumpsuits lumbered into view, followed by Tessa’s katana and then Tessa herself, who ordered them to lie on the sidewalk. In moments, the worried-looking men were sprawled amid the discarded gum of hundreds of anonymous pedestrians. Gum that had been burnished by the soles of countless other pedestrians, gum-chewer and non, walking to and fro in quaint Ipswich. For years.
As Tessa turned our way, Lyudmila released me. Her sword had left only a small nick just below my larynx, enough to leave a thin residue of blood on my fingers when I rubbed it. The women said nothing, and for a few moments I thought perhaps I’d misunderstood the whole ambush, that maybe it was a rescue after all. But then I detected the narrowing of my vision, the numbness of my limbs, and realized that Lyudmila’s blade had been envenomed.
“Get his legs,” Tessa said. They hoisted my body, stiff as a board, up and over the side of the truck. I thudded painfully into the bed and could only listen as they climbed in and got it started. What I overheard told me that Lyudmila had been assigned to learn how to bypass this type of alarm system… just in case a perfect opportunity should ever arise to employ such a truck in a kidnapping, presumably. Finally, the drug dragged me down utterly.
I spent an unknowable time in a haze of pharmacologically augmented dreams, a journey whose in-flight movie would have been Planet of the Help Desks. In my fugue, I struggled to debug printer glitches for clients as diverse and hostile as the beasts in a menagerie. When finally I opened my eyes and dispelled the phantasms, at first I could see only blue. What I mistook for the open sky was a heavy tarp. Throwing it off, I sat up in the bed of the pickup and looked around at the cavernous warehouse. Or was it a warehouse-like cavern?