Lippe Simone - Blank

As she read she became sensitive to a rising feeling of undiluted elation. She was, here in Los Angeles where nobody’s anybody until they’re at least a little bit famous, a star. A giddy smile pulled at the corners of her mouth while a melancholy tear for her lost celebrity formed in her eye. It must have been one long and uninterrupted hoot but now it was gone and nobody knew Honor’s lore, not even Honor. She plucked the little wanted poster from the glass wall of the briefing room to serve as her new ID, her single touchstone to the past and her credentials in the future. And as the still face came away from the window it was replaced by another uglier, hungrier and much more animated face. The face of a police officer with no mind nor memory nor motive apart from eating and mating, and it looked as though he’d already eaten.

Honor assumed that pedigree of startled that can only be bred by a sudden face at a window and uttered a brief and high-frequency yelp. The policeman treated this like a starter’s pistol and immediately mashed his face into the glass and was startled in an altogether different way. Honor turned toward the door to find it blocked by a small coterie of police officers who had come from, by all appearances, nowhere.

The alpha cop was a generously obese desk sergeant and he held back the others with outstretched arms that indicated inarguably that they would have to wait their turn, and he approached Honor. She was trapped in the briefing room and backed quite literally into a corner. The desk sergeant, operating on a millennia’s old instinct and comprehension of sartorial apparatus, fumbled helplessly with his belt. Honor considered her diminished options, including that being so primitively proposed, and she realized to her horror that she had only one left.

Honor smiled at the desk sergeant a smile that she hoped would be interpreted as seductive in Caveman.

“Let me help you with that.” Honor said, and reached gently and maternally for the policeman’s belt. He gratefully held his hands away while Honor slid his gun from its holster, placed it under his chin, and blew the top of his head off. The noise and stench, while spectacular in the enclosed space, were hopelessly inadequate accompaniment to the fountain of blood and brain which painted the previously transparent walls and the remaining police officers. Never-the-less the kickback tore the gun from her hand and the smoke blinded her and she was completely deaf, apart from a persistent ringing the approximate pitch and volume of a steam whistle.

As the whistle subsided and the smoke cleared Honor could see that the policemen, having been introduced to their use, had drawn their weapons. They pointed them at her as though of one mind and pulled the triggers or, rather, tried to pull the triggers, which behaved exactly as triggers should when the safety catch is on. Honor recovered her gun and, holding it tightly with both hands, turned it on the glass wall of the briefing room and spread it like a vapor across the hall.

What should have been a victorious dash down the hall and back to the stairs was stalled before it started as Honor anticipated navigating the shards of glass carpeting the floor with only one shoe. But the policemen were recovering from this unexpected maneuver and there was nothing left to do but hop, so Honor hopped on one foot as fast and as with as much dignity as she could marshal and which the situation allowed, which was quite slow and with no dignity at all.

The policemen moved as a unit to cut off her line of escape, fortunately, because it meant that while they were much faster than Honor they were denied access to her by a limited understanding of the properties of glass and the important distinction between walls and doors. So Honor hopped down the hall and the policeman tracked her from panel to panel and from room to room like fraternal cocker spaniels pursuing a mailman from behind a lengthy picket fence, feet away from their prey but unable to reach her. Honor had to merely maintain the discipline of the hop and not panic and break into a doomed sprint.

A doomed sprint began to grow in appeal as Honor’s hopping leg, having already contributed more than should be expected of any standard leg during the drunken bicycle race, began to markedly lose elasticity. Her right leg would do its part and swing the team forward but with each leap the left knee would bend deeply and return slightly lower and appreciably slower. The policemen, however, showed their training and if anything were growing in enthusiasm for the hunt. They ran along next to her, stopping occasionally to batter at the glass with their guns and grunt romantic overtures.

But the sea of broken glass was thinning and was gone altogether in only a few courageous bounds and just beyond that were the stairs. Similarly, the invisible magic maze keeping the squad out of reach was coming to an end in the form of a bay of tributary halls. The race was absurd and lethargic and it was going to be a photo-finish.

Honor was at the door at the same moment that the policemen discovered themselves at the intersection of glass halls, one of which was a direct and unimpeded path to the woman for whom they harbored such mixed feelings. Honor fell through the door and pulled her shoe with her and kicked at the door which insisted on closing at its own agonizingly slow, spring-loaded pace. It clicked into position just as the policemen piled against it and Honor took a moment to breath, confident that her pursuers wouldn’t associate keys with locks for, conservatively, years.

She sat on the stairs and clutched her gun and her shoe and massaged her tortured leg. The door boomed like a kettle drum as the policemen threw themselves against it in what sounded like evenly distributed turns. And then nothing. A full two minutes of this same nothing passed and then a familiar explosion shook the door and a bullet passed through it and bounced around the stairwell. And after another short pause a cacophony accompanied dozens of bullets piercing the door and clattering about the landing. Honor returned to the parking garage.

The venture had been, in spite of everything, a success. Honor had visited the police station to get a gun and now she had a gun and as a bonus she had a glamorous backstory which almost entirely explained how she came to not be Chinese. All that remained to officially declare the plan a masterstroke was the all-important getaway. Honor used the bike light again to survey the darkened garage. She needed something slim and speedy, like a motorcycle, to zip between the stationary traffic and roving mobs or something that could just go over them, like a tank.

She panned the garage and the beam did a double-take as it nearly skipped past six police motorcycles in a uniform row, their wheels neatly turned to the left, like a chorus line. One of them would do nicely. And then it wouldn’t, because just beyond the motorcycles, parked in a dark corner and cordoned off with incident tape, was a tank.

She reasoned that this was some sort of riot vehicle but it looked like no vehicle that Honor could find in the same nebulous database that told her that she could drive a sports car and a motorcycle and bulldozer. It didn’t look very like a vehicle at all, as much as it did a metal boat with a battering ram on the front, assuming that was the front, and four massive tractor tires which gave the tank a clearance of marginally higher than the roof of a Ferrari. It was the ideal getaway car.

Dr. Tom Spivic looked out the window at the darkening city and reflected on his dismal options. The least appealing was the easiest — he could settle in with the newly formed society of primitive health care workers and patients and wait for the dawn when, in all likelihood, he would cease to be Dr. Tom Spivic.