AnotherArchetype
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106. Smarter, Not Harder
🕑 Added 2025-01-16 21:02:57 +0000 UTCThe Pied Piper Task Force jeep I had crawled out from exploded, lighting up the early morning sky with a great orange plume.
Three more dead, I thought, as I ran.
The driver, the passenger, and the gunner on the back.
I knew that if I somehow survived this ordeal I would want to remember every Pied Piper Task Force officer who had died trying to kill me.
But beyond acknowledging each death I had no mental bandwidth to spare.
It took me less than five minutes of flat out leaping and sprinting and sucking in the cold morning air, to clear the distance from where the upturned jeep had been to the first of the abandoned factories.
My ears twitched at the terrible sound of an approaching helicopter, which was shining down a great stark white beam of light.
Without meaning to, I just narrowly avoided being caught beneath the spotlight and, at last, reached the exterior wall to the first abandoned factory.
The old brick wall of the factory, made gray thanks to my heightened vision, loomed before me.
Several meters above was a large series of hazy window panes, some broken and others missing entirely.
Could jump through there, I thought.
The sound of the helicopter climbed as it banked slowly round to stay close to where I was.
The roar of at least two more jeeps rapidly approaching also told me I had very little time to decide which way to go.
I sprang into action again, deciding instead to go along the base of the factory to then take a sharp left when at the furthest end.
More factory brick and mortar sailed by to my left, with the expanse of barren soil trailing by to my right.
I knew I had let myself become complacent hoping to go unnoticed because the sound of bullets pummeling the wall beside me announced the arrival of Pied Piper Task Force jeeps I had heard approaching before.
A concrete bollard rapidly threatened to block my way.
I bounded up, kicked off from the bollard, and continued sailing upwards so that I landed with both feet atop an arched streetlight.
The bulb within the light fell from the impact of my landing and smashed on the cobbled ground.
I leapt off again, this time right through a huge series of window panes.
The sound of yet more gunfire and the breaking of glass tore at my ears.
What I hoped to be an easy landing within instead became a hard reality check when my chest collided with a steel beam.
Pain sang in my ribcage, making it that much harder to breathe. I managed to grip onto the beam just long enough to control my fall down to the ground.
The helicopter light shone through the new opening in the window I had just made. A frantic look around told me I was in some kind of old textile mill. Ahead of me lay a row of huge machines which had the long-since-forgotten remains of yet to be woven together fabrics stuck in place collecting dust.
I sucked in lungfuls of the dust-thickened air. My whole body was hurting and, I was sure, would hurt a lot more once the adrenaline wore off. My hair prickled from the pent up heat from the fox-hat atop my head. It also felt strangely silly and reassuring to know I had the frog rucksack on my back.
Need to be smart, I thought, need to get away before things get worse.
For a brief moment I remembered a nothing-anicdote Dad had once told me. Sometime after he had separated from Mum, and had lost his decade-long factory job, he had taken up the profession of a postman.
Dad had seen what carrying the huge bag of mail did to the other postmen and women who worked at the job; how they stooped and stood at a bent angle, hunched from the effort to do their jobs efficiently.
Dad, rather than break his back so much, purchased a little trolley like the kind old lady's used to cart around shopping. With that one small purchase Dad made his workday substantially easier.
The memory of my Dad telling me about that stuff flashed in my mind, seeming all the more random given how desperate my situation was.
But the underlying point remained the same.
A point which could be boiled down to: work smarter, not harder.
Even in a life or death situation. No, especially in a life or death situation, thinking smarter was the way to go.
But, I asked myself, how can I be smart about this?
The sound of a jeep rapidly approaching the building told me I had only seconds to figure something out.
Seconds later the jeep burst through the double doors at the far upper right corner of the factory floor. The headlights of the jeep shone brightly into the factory, catching on the countless motes of dust.
With the jeep having screeched to a hard stop four Pied Piper Task Force officers wielding assault rifles got out from the vehicle.
The zipping sound grew worse the nearer the officers got to me inside the factory, telling me that the sound was more than likely due to some kind of device they were wearing to use my heightened hearing against me.
Likewise, the torches attached to the ends of their assault rifles flickered with a strobe-like light. It was dim enough for normal eyes to make use of the additional light, but my heightened vision strained against the flashing, making me bring my vision down to a normal level.
One of the officers raised his fist, and the others stopped their advance.
The officer's gun rattled as he gestured up to the metal beam I had fallen against before. There, he saw my frog rucksack peeking out one side.
The first man opened fire, then, when the green of the rucksack began to move, the rest of the officers opened fire too.
The deafening hail of gunfire ceased.
The remains of what had been my frog rucksack fell in tattered shreds to the ground. But only the rucksack, with me not attached to it.
I leapt with every last bit of strength available to my body.
The Task Force officers were aware of my presence a moment later, but saw me only as a blur passing them by with the force and weight of a heavy vehicle.
The officers whipped round but dared not fire for fear of shooting their fellow officers. This was enough of an advantage for me to leap around them.
"Duck!" I yelled.
I was on the other side of them now. They spun round, trying to get me in their line of sight to open fire.
"Duck!" I yelled again, this time having moved to the other side entirely of their four-man-unit.
"Goose!" I yelled, finally.
The men, though wary of not shooting their fellow officers, must have decided it was worth the risk after all because they all opened fire.
The gunfire continued on for a few seconds before stopping all at once.
The men grunted, and let out pained rasps, but could no longer move.
Because they were wrapped up in a series of hastily woven threads. Though I had already caught them I kept bounding round them more and more, just to be sure they had no wiggle room to sneak off a live round into my skull.
After a few seconds more of bounding around them, I finally finished executing my counter-offensive.
The men were tied up, bound together with the old textmill mill fabric.
I stood before them, hands gripping the woven-threads.
It had all been surprisingly easy.
With the officers still struggling to get free I took the large woven rope of threads, which the dozen smaller threads had twined into; and I leapt onto the old loom and up and over the metal beam I had slammed with my chest before.
Using the four men as a counter-weight, I eased my own landing to the ground and came to a stop. It took every ounce of my strength to bring the end of the woven thread-rope to the nearest vertical metal beam which kept up the factory ceiling.
The veins in my bulging biceps throbbed as I tied up the woven-thread, thereby leaving the four officers caught and dangling off the ground.
"And that-" I began to gloat.
But there proved no time for wit because the second jeep screeched to a stop directly behind the second, flooding yet more light onto the factory floor.
"He's here!" shouted one of the tied-up officers, "Get him! Get him!"
The officers that stepped out of the second jeep didn't need telling twice.
They opened fire.
I was already halfway out the door.
It was then my left arm just above the elbow felt as if it were struck with the full force of a hammer and went limp.
I hurried on, racing down a long corridor.
Comments
حسين عباس عبد المهدي
I like his moves it’s just like Spider-Man
