NaNo 2006: Machine Break 03
The first indication that something was wrong was the fact that the backdoor was flung wide open. Allen never left the backdoor open. No one in the family did. Big Guy was out with his wife and children, and Damien had left the shop to them for most of the evening as he had work at another shop.
Cielo’s heartbeat ran fast.
“Stay here,” she told Arashi and the little boy. She approached the door, a hand going into her pockets to see what she had in them. All she found was a pen, and while she had a moment of inner dismay - it was a pen, of all things, and what could a pen do against a knife or a gun? - she went on, wary and tense.
The light was on, and as she made it to the door she heard scuffling sounds. Thieves, she thought angrily, and as she walked in, silent as she could be, a hand grabbed her at the elbow, and she swung her arm out, pen in hand. It was blocked by an arm, and thankfully she didn’t injure whoever it was that grabbed her.
“I said to stay outside!” Cielo hissed in a low voice at Arashi, even though the expression on his face plainly answered her with a “no fucking way”. The grip on her elbow tightened, and she took this as her cue to put her hand down, and she did, glaring knives and daggers at the man. She turned her attention back to the front of the shop, her senses extending out from her, intangible threads of consciousness touching on the shells of the objects in the kitchen, and the first thing that she found was Allen unconscious and hurt, a prone figure lying on the floor near the divide between the shop entrance and the hall into the stockroom. She gritted her teeth.
“Grab a knife, will you?” She told her companion. She didn’t like how this looked, and judging from the sounds in the shop they were trying to force the cash register open. Tough luck, she thought. That register’s very special.
“Where the hell do you keep your knives anyw- HEY!” Arashi made a sound of distress as she ran into the shop without heed, her feet flying over the floor silently as anger took over her mind. She didn’t notice the minute changes in her steps, didn’t notice that her actions now lacked any sound, lacked any tangible substance that could be felt, and when she saw the men who were trying to smash the register open, she just kept moving on her own. She flicked the pen so that the writing end was pointing out, and she held it between her index and middle finger, and she uncapped it with her thumb as she came close. It took her two seconds to make it to one of the men, as there were three, and then she felt her arm swing forward, felt it come up in a graceful arc and then the pen went in, into the man’s back, and she heard, more inside her head than in her ears, the sound of the pen pushing through the cloth, pushing through the skin, and then the sound of bone snapping.
Then suddenly reality snapped back into focus, and Cielo stared on at the blood spurting all over her arm. She had embedded the pen right into the man’s shoulder blade.
And just as soon as she got back to her senses, something hard and cold came down on her head, and she let go of the pen and fell on the tiled floor. She felt blood trickle down on her face; she touched her forehead to confirm what she thought her injury was and when her hand came away from the skin she already knew she had a gash on that part of her body. She made a low sound in her throat.
The man who had hit her was a full-grown (bald) adult, with the face of a pug and the leer of a pervert, and the man’s clothes smelled of too much alcohol and cigarette smoke, though by all accounts the man looked sober and healthy in the lungs. I say it’s bad company, Cielo thought. The man was carrying the fire extinguisher - so that was what hit her.
He pushed herself off the floor and dusted off her clothes. The other man, who had a mask on and was trying to wake the man on the floor, looked at her and told his accomplice to beat it, that they should just take the register itself and leave. The police weren’t coming by anytime soon, anyway. That thought suddenly became clear. There wasn’t any breaking in, there weren’t any loud sounds, and there definitely wasn’t any report about what was happening here in the shop yet.
She lifted a hand and pointed at them with her index finger. “You’re both dead.”
The bald man gave a snort, laughed coarsely and started to swing the fire extinguisher menacingly. “You’re gonna pay for what you did to Johnny here, bitch, so shut the fuck up!”
Cielo thought it looked incredibly stupid - then the masked man gave a loud cry of warning, and the bald man turned, and Arashi slammed a wooden chopping board down on the man’s face, breaking his nose in. Arashi kicked him in the stomach right after, sending the adult crashing down and thudding against the legs of a table, and as the man reached for something inside his jacket Cielo moved and kicked the man at the crotch, and this sent him curling into himself like a little dog, and as she looked up she saw Arashi run after the third man. There was a loud sound of metal hitting brick and cement, and that was probably Arashi and the other man slamming into the trash cans, and then the sounds of a scuffle ensued, while Cielo frantically looked for duct tape and rope and phone, but she only found the tape. She stuck tape over the man’s mouth, and then scrambled for the chopping board on the floor as the man grabbed one of her legs, and she hit the man again on the head, making him lose consciousness this time around.
She was now shaking, the adrenaline wearing off, and she kept an ear open for the scuffling that was still going on outside. She had just finished taping the man’s arms behind him when the sound of a gun firing off echoed through the alley, and this time Cielo panicked. She sat there on the floor, her hands having stopped moving, and then she was on her feet again, running through the shop, into the kitchen, then out the backdoor - and she skidded to a halt, her hair and clothes in disarray.
The masked man was on the ground, his left thigh bleeding profusely. In Arashi’s hand was a gun, and his face was pasty and paper-white, his breathing shallow. He looked like he didn’t see what was in front of him, and he was visibly shaken. The little boy was crouched behind the lonely dumpster in the alley, trash strewn all around him.
Relief started to drain Cielo of her nerves, and her knees forced her to sit on the cement.
They were safe.
It was almost half an hour later when the cops finally arrived, and Allen was conscious by then, saying that his head felt like it was full of cotton and rocks, and Cielo was being tended to by a kind-faced neighbor while Arashi explained to the forbidding police officer why he had a gun in his hands when they had arrived. The officers took statements from the three of them and from the little boy as well, but Arashi pleaded that his little brother be exempted; he says that their statement should be good enough, but the officers persisted and the boy finally agreed to answer in short sentences. They were told that all the men would live, especially the one that Cielo had stabbed, and they gave a collective sigh of relief at that.
And then the night was over, although it was only barely ten and a half on the clock, and when Damien arrived, he found two boys and a girl sitting on the soles of their feet in the alleyway with soda and random junk food, bandages and patches covering parts of their faces, and a little boy sleeping quietly on a kitchen table.
He promptly panicked when he saw the mess in the shop, and Cielo, Allen and Arashi argued on about the merits of a chopping board and a pen in a fight.