Amira considered for a moment, and then applied more pressure, ignoring his threat. “Susan, call the police. Now.”
As her friend dialed for help, Amira knew it’d be several minutes before the College Park Police Department arrived. Her father had warned her that like most police departments, there were only a handful of officers on duty during any given shift. If something happened to her, she’d be on her own initially. Fortunately, her father had prepared her for an eventuality she’d hoped would never come. As with most things, her father had been right once again.
“My name is Susan Li, and there’s been an attempted kidnapping at The Clarice Smith Center on campus. My friend and I are here, and two men just attacked us. Send help, now!” she implored the 9-11 operator.
Amira looked up at the main entrance, which consisted of a main set of glass double doors and an additional glass door on each side, and panic set in for the first time since the confrontation had commenced. Two more men were illuminated outside, moving towards the front doors. Both were Chinese, but unlike the two men inside, both held black pistols. Amira’s sense of preservation catapulted her into action.
“We have to move! Two men with guns are coming!” She hoped the 9-11 operator heard her, but it was irrelevant. She knew they were on their own. She felt a flash of rage and looked down, only to see the man she’d subdued smiling at her. Go to hell, she thought, released his wrist, and struck him in the chin as hard as she could with a right across. The downward force of the punch snapped his head to the right, and he fell to the carpet.
Amira turned, grabbed Susan’s hand, pulled her into motion, and fled back into the heart of the lobby.
The two friends reached the first tier of steps when the double set of doors crashed open behind them. Amira released Susan’s hand and bounded up the first three steps when gunshots roared through the enormous space, reverberating off the angles and surfaces of the lobby. The shots struck the theater wall to their right, well over their heads, and Amira realized they were warning shots. They can’t kill us. They need Susan alive.
Susan screamed in terror, and Amira risked a glimpse backwards. The two men had reached their fallen friends, weapons pointed in the direction of the fleeing girls. The man Amira had knocked to the ground was on his feet, even as the two newcomers moved past him.
“I told you…not to run. What happens next…is all on you,” he said in between breaths as he rubbed the left side of his face.
Amira reached the top of the stairs first, with Susan a split-second behind her. “Follow me,” Amira said, and ducked down a short corridor to the right just past the Kay Theater. This is really bad, at least for you. They obviously needed Susan alive, but Amira was expendable. In fact, she was now the only witness to the crime, and like her father always told her about witnesses after years of investigating homicides in DC, the bad guys didn’t like to leave them alive.
Chapter 2
The Kogod Theater was a small, multi-purpose theater without permanent seating. Instead, due to its theatrical lighting, it often served as the location for small theatrical performances, workshops, receptions, and even seated dinners. What made the Kogod unique was that it was literally a giant sound-proof box lined with black curtains across each wall. As a result, the students had appropriately nicknamed it the Black Box, often shortened to just the Box. When the doors were closed and the lighting off, it created an environment of pure, pitch, blackness.
Amira loved the theater for that reason alone. She’d spent hours in the dark, tuning her senses to detect the most minute changes around her. Her logic was simple – if she could move fluidly in the dark, she’d be that much more proficient in the light. It was a principle one of her early karate instructors had utilized, blindfolding the students once every other week to test their situational awareness as the sensei tried to touch them without being detected. Amira was proud of the fact that he’d never succeeded once with her.
Inside the Box, Amira turned and pulled the black curtains over the door, eliminating the glow of the exit sign above the entrance. “That should disorient anyone who comes in behind us. They’ll have to fight the curtains and the dark. Come on. Let’s get out of here. We can use the sliding door.”
In the rear corner of the Black Box was a corrugated, tracked door that slid upwards to reveal the entrance to the enormous prop area that spanned the length of the Kogod and the Cafritz Foundation Theater next door. Through the prop area, they could exit into the back wing on the east side of the facility, where multiple exit doors awaited.
“Are you okay? Do you have any idea what this is about?” Amira asked. “Talk while we move, as we only have seconds before one of these bastards comes in here.”
“Look at you,” Susan replied. “My own personal savior. I had no idea my roommate was such a badass.”
“Hey, I’m the daughter of a DC cop. What did you expect? And I had to come to your rescue. You pay half the rent on the apartment,” Amira quipped, attempting to lighten the severity of the situation.
The two girls had traversed two thirds of the space when more gunshots rang out from the lobby. They froze as a scream rose into the lobby, followed by one more shot that cut it off.
“That’s not
