OUTNUMBERED BY TWO, their opponent should have looked more worried, and that concerned Bogdan. If the guy in the leather jacket was deranged or suicidal, it could make for a bad fight. Worse, though, might be if he was sane. Only a seasoned, dangerous combatant would choose to fight three men by himself. Well, two men and a kid.
“We just want the lady,” Anatoly said, trying to sound tough. “Why don’t you walk away while your legs still work.”
The threat did not ruffle their opponent. Bogdan watched the man curl his fingers into his palms. Some people didn’t even know how to make a proper fist, but this guy did. And he wasn’t talking — no bravado, no taunts, no nervous chatter. When his feet did a quick warmup jig, the Soviet computer had enough data to chonk out an assessment, and it wasn’t good.
“Anatoly, forget what I said. Take your knife out.”
There was a warning in the words, but whether the kid picked up on it or not, he was eager to comply. By the time the blade flashed, however, it was already too late.
As the three men approached, Jake had been doing his own assessment. The ogre in the track suit was the leader, and the biggest concern; aside from size and muscle, his eyes showed a battle-tested confidence that was hard to miss if you knew what to look for. The tall, lanky ghoul was the second worry; his goofy gap-toothed grin did nothing to hide the murder in his eyes. The young wolf would’ve barely rated attention — but when he drew a blade, Jake knew that one had to be put down first.
Fortunately, the overconfident youth had gotten a pace ahead of the others. He clearly thought he was still at a safe distance, so while he took his time drawing the weapon, Jake sprang forward. Almost closing the distance between them, the gap was filled by his arm extending in a straight jab.
Calloused knuckles flattened the kid’s nose with a crunch. The bridge broken, blood spurted down his shirt. He yelped in surprise and shock. The knife clattered to the ground.
This flurry of action caught the ghoul flat-footed, but not the leader. His swing was well-aimed, but too slow. The heavy fist arced through empty air as Jake ducked it. This created an opening for a return punch, but instead, he focused on getting the knife out of play. His boot kicked the blade, sending it spinning across the asphalt.
Dancing back, Jake enjoyed the looks on their faces. He wouldn’t catch them by surprise like that again, but it didn’t matter. Warmed up and in his element now, time fell away.
The ghoul lurched forward, wielding the kubotan. Jake stepped sideways, keeping the lanky man between him and the leader, so for a moment they couldn’t double team. Jake dodged a wild swing and drove a fist into the man’s gut. Ribs and sinew absorbed the hit, but he doubled over, leaving him in a perfect position for the following upward jab. It connected squarely on the underside of the ghoul’s jaw, and with a loud clack, his teeth slammed together. Staggering backward, he dropped the kubotan and toppled into some garbage cans.
Bogdan backed up a few paces to reassess. He wasn’t fast enough to match the boxer. Wearing him down seemed unlikely; the man had yet to break a sweat. Under other circumstances, it’d be time to cut losses and let the guy walk, but Hector’s anger was as dangerous as whatever might happen here. Before Bogdan dove into a fight with a murky conclusion, however, he did some due diligence.
Pulling out his phone, he snapped a photo. Hearing the boxer swear under his breath, Bogdan grinned. Now, whatever happened, Hector would know who to look for. Hitting send, he put his phone away, and flexed his massive hands.
“Okay, boxing boy, let’s go.”
Whether he was fretting over the photo, or just didn’t want to take the initiative, the guy in the leather jacket didn’t move. Bogdan rolled the dice on a low grapple. Lunging forward, he counted on his size and momentum to carry him like a wrecking ball through whatever defense went up.
That was the last clear thing he remembered of the fight, however. His opponent saw the move coming, skipped sideways, and brought a hammer-fist down on the back of Bogdan’s neck. He just had time to think damn, that was fast, before he thundered into the pavement.
Jake tapped the big man with his boot to make sure he was out cold, then turned to face the other two.
The ghoul had clambered up from the trash and was ambling forward. Blood seeped from his goofy grin, which meant he must have bitten his tongue, and the murder in his eyes was clouded by pain. The young wolf, wobbly but erect, spat a thick stream of nose-blood onto the ground. He produced what looked like carbon-fiber knuckles from somewhere, but put them on wrong. Jake knew the first real hit would likely break his fingers.
He wouldn’t get that hit, however, because what happened next couldn’t really be called a fight. It was more like Jake dismantling two mannequins with his fists.
Shortly, both men had joined Bogdan on the ground. The lanky man was out cold. The kid, groaning, tried to roll up on an elbow and rally.
“Stay down,” Jake said.
He resisted for a moment, then looked almost grateful as he slumped back on the asphalt, closing his eyes to seek relief in the darkness.
Jake took a few deep breaths, clearing the adrenaline. The situation was resolved, for the moment, except for that goddamned photo. He didn’t know who it had been sent to, but regardless, it chilled him. It’s not as if he’d never had his photo taken before; surely in all the years he’d operated, surveillance cameras or a stray tourist had caught him in a frame. But to his knowledge, nobody dangerous had ever identified him, or linked him to the mysterious driving service. That photo, in the wrong hands, could prove catastrophic. There was nothing to do about it for the moment, however, and he needed to check on Kate.
He’d sensed her watching for the duration of the fight. She had to be impressed, right? He liked that thought, for some reason. When he turned, however, reality did not quite match his imagination.
Kate was by the dumpster, sitting on a cardboard box with her computer in her lap. Calmly typing away, she looked less like she’d narrowly escaped another kidnapping and more like she was jotting down some poetry she’d thought of on the bus.
“Don’t get up,” Jake said. “It’s cool. Just fighting for our lives over here.”
She remained fixated on her work. “You seemed like you had it under control.”
“I did, but now we need to go. They took our photo—”
“No they didn’t.”
Jake wanted to argue, but something about her confidence gave him pause. He stepped over and gingerly slid the cell phone out of the big man’s tracksuit pocket. Sure enough, the photo had not sent, thanks to a lack of network connection.
Confused, he turned back. Kate lifted up something plugged into her laptop. Red lights blinked away on a little silver box with eight antennae sticking out at odd angles. Jake had seen a similar device in Andrew’s workshop and realized Kate had jammed the signal.
Profound relief washed through him. He wanted to run over and hug her.
Seeing the look on his face, Kate couldn’t help but smirk. When the three men had approached and she realized Jake was going to stand his ground, her response had shifted from flight to fight. Ingrid hadn’t solely drilled self defense into Kate; with a high-tech project like Dr. Morgenstern’s, often cyber security was a more salient threat than physical danger. Anticipating one of the men might call for backup, Kate immediately thought of the spider. Her main concern was getting it out of the locker and powered up in time to make a difference.
“That was quick thinking.” Jake gave her a thumbs-up.
She knew he hoped for a pat on the head in return, but now that her initial relief at his arrival had faded, she was still pissed at him for participating in her abduction. She pondered something sarcastic to say while she stuffed the old laptop into her duffel and got to her feet. She’d just thought of a rejoinder when, trying to swipe the dirt off her filthy lab coat, her finger caught on something sharp.
A bit of wood had pierced the fabric. Plucking the jagged sliver out, she thanked her luck that it hadn’t pierced her flesh. Kate shivered as she remembered Bogdan’s hands on her. She’d been helpless as he effortlessly tossed her through the railing. Her eyes went to the big man, lying unconscious. The snarky jokes had left her mind.
“I take back what I said in the car.” Her voice was quiet and sincere as she spoke to Jake, but she couldn’t pull her gaze away from a puddle of blood on the ground. “You are dangerous.”
“Yes, I am. But not to you, so let’s go.” He waved her toward the alley. When Kate didn’t snap out of her trance, however, he grabbed her wrist.
She blinked, resisting his pull. “Look, I hyper-focus sometimes, I get that, but if I’m not listening, or it’s an emergency — try taking my hand? Not my wrist.”
“Oh. Noted.” Chagrined, Jake released her. Coughing, he looked around. “But we should go. These guys won’t be out forever. The car’s this way—”
“My computer.” She pointed up to her window. “It’s why I came. I absolutely cannot leave without it.”
Jake looked at the laptop poking out of her duffel, but Kate shook her head.
“Please, that’s two years old. It might as well be an abacus.”
Not wanting to seem naïve, Jake just nodded. Looking around, he assessed the risk of lingering. The few alley-facing windows showed no curious faces, and there were no sirens in the distance. Even so, any time spent in one place made Jake itchy.
“Five minutes, no more.”
Shortly, Jake was following Kate into her apartment. His heavy boots thumped on what he could only assume was hardwood floor, because every inch was covered in clothes, books, and scattered papers. In addition to what looked like a ransacking, it also appeared someone had been eating her food; dishes were left on every available flat surface.
“Shit,” Jake said, “they tossed your place already.”
“Huh?” Kate looked around. To her, nothing seemed out of order. Having a touch of neurodivergent object-impermanence issues, this was just how she lived. “I like everything out where I can see it. Otherwise, I forget where it is.”
Jake didn’t know what to make of that. The mess swimming at his feet was like temporal vertigo embodied in a cartoon. “I’ll just stand still, so I don’t accidentally… reorganize anything.”
“Great,” Kate was perfectly happy with him not disrupting her space, so she focused on getting to her workstation. Prior to joining Dr. Morgenstern, she’d worked freelance from home, and she still had a massive computer workstation set up. Multiple screens connected to several computers. A stack of hard drives rose up like a pylon next to the desk. Kate turned on a series of power strips, then had an idea.
“Still got that phone?”
Jake pulled the big man’s cell out of his pocket.
“Can you get that cable, the blue one, sticking out of the giant squid?”
Jake followed her gaze to an unbelievable snarl of cables that was boiling out the back of her desk.
Jake found the end of the cable, noting that it did not connect to her main workstation, but trailed over to a computer off the side that was powering up. He watched as Kate booted her main machine. Several computer screens lit up around her.
“You and Andrew will get along great.” Jake stared at the machine in front of him. He hadn’t spent that much time on computers, and felt a little intimidated. “What am I doing here?”
“That laptop is isolated from my network. I use it to make sure my phone hasn’t been hacked or compromised. But it can go the other way, too. Just plug in and I’ll tell you what to run.”
While Kate waited for validation from their secure message server, her eyes alighted on one thing in her apartment that was out of order: she had several potted plants lined up on the window sill. Other than one tiny succulent, they were all wilted and brown.
Kate blinked in confusion. “I watered these this morning…”
“You watered them three weeks ago.”
As her brain tried to reconcile this, Kate felt mildly nauseous. She sat in her creaky desk chair and processed the sensation.
Jake recognized her look, having seen it in the mirror many times. Carefully picking his way, he went to the kitchen. He found a clean glass and filled it from the tap.
She accepted it and drank.
“Some part of me wanted to believe the time travel stuff was just a con.” She stared at the wilted plants. “Is this what your life is like?”
“No, because I don’t keep plants. Or an apartment.” Jake looked around the place, brimming with Kate’s mulch. He remembered how he felt whenever he’d tried to rent an apartment of his own; even when things were neatly organized, to him it felt like a quagmire. Even the dust was dangerous. It was like radioactive isotopes sprinkled everywhere. The longer he stood still in it, the more contaminated he got.
“Well,” he said, turning back to Kate, “got what you need?”
Brow furrowed, she was distracted, studying something. Jake couldn’t help but look over her shoulder. Instead of English, however, or any other language he could discern, there was a long string of weird symbols. “You can read that?”
“We use our own cipher for messaging. Dr. Morgenstern gets weird threats, people snooping around. There are some big interests who would like to see her research fail…”
The message was from Ingrid. The security officer hadn’t responded to texts since Kate’s return, so this was at least proof she was alive. But the message was brief and cryptic. There was a video attachment, but Kate wasn’t going to open it with Jake standing there.
“The important thing is, I can see nobody messed with anything. It’s all still secure. I’m gonna set these local backups to wipe, and we can go.”
Jake peered out a window through the horizontal blinds, checking on the guys. They were still down, and nobody in the neighborhood seemed to be paying any attention. The late afternoon shadows were helping. He looked back at the computer in front of him.
“This thing is done running. I think.”
Kate rolled her desk chair over to look.
“Somebody did a little work securing this phone. I can’t access contacts, but I can see the call record. Nothing went out since they arrived here. Let’s see what kind of snooping they were doing before they got here.
Jake couldn’t help but notice how fast Kate could type, her fingers a blur on the computer keyboard as she navigated the file system on the hacked phone. Arriving at the web search history, she executed a command to open a (folder or link), and dozens of tabs bloomed on a browser. There were news articles from the hospital fiasco and some attempts at ferreting out more about Dr. Morgenstern’s work. Then Kate opened one that made her and Jake lean in.
Kate and Jake looked at each other. Before they could discuss what it could mean, a sound outside the window made them look.
The ogre in the tracksuit was sitting up now, blinking and rubbing the back of his thick neck. He leaned over to shake the foot of the kid, who groaned and gave him the middle finger.
Jake closed the blinds. “Time to go.”
Kate rolled back to her workstation, saved the video attachment to view later, then folded her laptop up and stuffed it in her backpack. She grabbed whatever clothes were in reach and jammed them into a cloth shopping bag.
Standing at the door, Jake cracked it and peered out. He waved the all-clear.
Kate grabbed the lone potted succulent, then hurried to join Jake at the doorway. She paused and turned to take a last look at the apartment she knew she might never see again.
Just this morning, it had been her cozy little escape pod. It wasn’t a great place, but it was hers, and filled with history; she’d studied and worked and fucked and fought in here.
Everyday details she’d taken for granted suddenly seemed important, and she tried to soak them in — the squeaky board in the floor, the faded ceiling fan, the books in her reading pile she hadn’t gotten to yet, the stupid collection of stickers on the side of the fridge, peeled from the outside of unripe bananas — even these seemed like a vital detail she needed to imprint in her mind. Because even as she stood there collecting data, the place was fading, turning into a ghost town in front of her eyes.
The strange nausea hit Kate again. She stood there, immobilized by acute executive paralysis.
“Kate,” Jake said softly, trying to keep his voice from traveling.
She might have stood there for an hour, if she hadn’t felt the warmth and strength of Jake’s hand taking hers. Blinking back to the present, she gave the place a last sentimental wave goodbye, and hurried out.
Just a technical issue…..the paragraph towards the end is repeated. Also, the not breaking a sweat line is good but again repeated. Loving the story Brad.