Up until this moment, the minutes had been speeding by with the bullet-like speed of trains hurtling past each another in opposite directions, but now their passage seemed to slow down to a treacle-thick, stretched-out dripping.
‘Come on,’ Chloe muttered to herself, her voice as shaky as her hands. ‘One minute.’
Thirty seconds passed with the slowness of a geological aeon.
Thirty … twenty-seven … twenty-five … twenty-three…
Icy beads of sweat had beaded on her upper back, and these maddening droplets were running down her spine to pool in a humid, itchy mess around her midsection, the irritating intensity of which grew in exponential leaps with every passing moment. All she wanted to do now was to scratch her back, to relieve herself of the itching, but the impenetrable armour that encased her entire body was keeping her eager fingertips with frustrating tenacity from her burning skin.
‘Shit!’ she spat in frustration. ‘Dammit!’
The seconds marched on with unrelenting speed.
Three … two … one.
Exactly on cue everything was plunged into darkness. The cloying blackness was almost tangibly dense for a second, after which dim red emergency lights flickered on, bathing the restroom in a blood-tinged hue.
It was on.
With her heart jumping in her chest, Chloe slipped the helmet back onto her head and clipped it in place, and then stepped out of the stall. With the helmet’s night vision, Chloe’s surroundings were almost as clear and visible as day. She popped open the compartment on her wrist, whipped out the key and then hurried over to the janitor’s closet at the back of the restroom. With adrenalin gushing like a spring melt through her veins, a dull howl roaring in her ears, and a scuttling of a swarm of rodent claws around the region of her diaphragm, she fumbled briefly with the lock before throwing open the door.
The sight of the weapons stashed therein smashed the reality of the unfolding situation home with the force of an axe to her sternum, and the blood-slicked gleam of the combat shotgun in the emergency lighting was a sight that pierced her eyeballs with hypodermic needles of fear.
‘You can do this, you can do this,’ she hissed through clenched teeth that were on the verge of chattering uncontrollably. ‘Come on, you gotta do this, you gotta do this!’
First, she grabbed the bandoliers of shotgun shells, slinging one over each shoulder so that they crossed over her chest. Next, she strapped on the thick mesh belt that had the grenades clipped to it, along with extra ammunition clips for the nine-millimetre pistols. After this she grabbed each of the pistols and strapped their holsters around each of her thighs. Before continuing, she whipped out each firearm and flicked off the safety switches, and then slapped them back into their holsters, leaving them somewhat loose so that they could be drawn rapidly if needed, pausing, in a moment of cutting self-reflexivity, to reflect on just how bizarre her relationship with firearms had become; from hater to expert markswoman in weeks. Snapping herself out of the sticky trap of chaotic thoughts, and doing her best to both fight back the rising tide of terror and panic and to hone her focus, she then pulled out the combat shotgun and slung it over her right shoulder, where it hung close to her right hand for easy access.
She was now ready for battle, at least in terms of equipment. She drew in a deep breath and spun around on her heels, the merciless momentum of the clock driving her on, but when she tried to take a step forward, towards the unfolding battle, she simply couldn’t move. An invisible wall had been thrown up in front of her, as if by the sinister hand of some hidden magician. Terror and panic, paralysing in their ponderous, bone-chilling iciness, doused the entirety of her being. To even continue to breathe, to merely regulate the ongoing beating of her heart, seemed like impossibly complex conundrums. The task of putting one foot in front of another seemed to require a herculean effort, and even remaining upright and retaining her balance began to seem insurmountable.
‘No, no … no, no, no’ she gasped, drowning in the perfumed air like some deep-sea creature hurled by a violent storm onto a rocky, waterless shore. And then she could no longer do any of it; she couldn’t stand. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t do anything. With her wildly-hammering heart drumming its mocking rhythm into her ears, she collapsed into a heap on the floor, hyperventilating.
It was over. She had reached her breaking point and could do no more. And there, on that bathroom floor, she began to weep, with bone-pulverising, muscle-shredding sobs of sheer helplessness tearing through her body. There was only one path open to her now; the precipice of failure, at the bottom of which lay death, waiting with open jaws.
***
Ranomi crawled through the duct, inch by tortuous inch. The metal was cool against her skin, but the tight confines of the space, constrictive even for her diminutive body, made progress slow and difficult. Straining with effort as she pushed through the pain of aching joints and burning muscles, she managed to free her left arm to check the time.
She breathed out a sigh of relief; she was still on schedule. With a few swipes across the touchscreen of the smartwatch she pulled up the blueprints of the air conditioning system and quickly perused the maze of pipes and ducts. She made a note of her current position in relation to where she needed to end up, and
