An uninvited face peered around a slatternly bookshelf like a panchromatic
pigmy sizing up her potential victim from behind a company of charitable trees with a
telephoto blowpipe. It was Iron who had insisted on investigating this supposedly
derelict public amenity for signs of any governmental activity which in any case could
hardly be termed 'life'. Always keen to place a ventral punch into the savrian sacrum of
the asphyxiating authorities; if such a concept was logically possible; he had failed to
comprehend the irony with which recent history had converted the hunter into the
hunted and vice versa. In all fairness though, the two designations proved fiercely
interchangeable; one day they would be pursuing a likely litter of undertrained
authoritarian footmen in their own inconspicuous although entirely legal hideaways; the
next ducking droves of burgeoning bullets from the gratuitous gun barrels of bestial
bounty hunters. They had happened upon a lonesome hussar outside an abandoned
public library who had assured them when questioned with a scurry of fisticuffs after a
brave apprehension attempt on his part that nothing unusual was going on here, which
the upstart duo consequently took to infer that a high profile security impeachment was
underway somewhere within these four gluttonous walls. Iron; like a young passenger
nagging his dad to drive all the way to the top level of the car park just so that he could
entertain disturbing fantasies of the vehicle leaping off the ten story structure in a
glorious but irrationally unscathing stunt; had opted for the penultimate level of the
reprehensible repository while Lincoln fended off the former felons one brace of
heaving shelves and sickly red carpet below.
With little occasion for elaborate epistemology given the standing social
climate, she wondered why this whole place hadn't gone up in flames by now. Come to
think of it, it was probably a posse of pernicious pyrotechnitions who strolled through
this swollen scholarly citadel today about to reduce the thing to a literary crisp; which
might mean it was she who would be next in line to fry like a stuffed guy on a
celebratory pyre. Unable to decipher the sallow whiff of burning, she reveled in her
own inaccuracy and resumed a rebellious reconnaissance.
Iron leant a glance to the right, then one to the left as if offering prayer;
registering information with the speed of the most prolific computer calculator.
Nothing but books. They swamped the shelves; they soaked the walls. He leant his
head back against a bulging shelf as he rubbed a pair of exhausted eyes into focus and
pulled at his ears like a fidgeting monkey as if to stretch the eardrums. "A font of
knowledge." he remarked to himself in the deaf silence; "today's governments have
little time for such things." True to form, libraries had been closed along with
hospitals, police stations, movie theaters and mental hospices. Even truer to form, the
space had not been used for anything more profitable. The doors were constantly
locked and bolted and the warehouse of fact and fiction left well alone.
There was a low crunch of carpet under the reckless appliance of an implied
footstep. Iron instinctively dropped onto his hands and knees, then shoulders and head;
gazing through the gap between the bottom shelf of the wide row in which he had
stood. Sure enough, between this and the very next line of dull metallic free standing
shelves stacked solid with volumes of argument and literature deemed too dangerous
for the new regime’s survival, a matching duo of camouflage military boots plugged
themselves to the spot as if fastened to the bobbly carpet by nine inch nails. Iron
dragged himself forward in tenacious silence and swept an arm under the swaying
shelving as if demonstrating a swimming stroke; catching a shocked officer of the law's
ankles and sending him reeling to the ground. As his downward inertia propelled him
face first into a king sized volume discarded by an over anxious student whose
academic eyes had been too large for his intellect to stomach in a long gone, semi
civilized era, one officer Jacobs concluded that perhaps security was not his forte. Iron
harbored no such ill confidence, but urged himself not to pluck an unnerving sprig of
enjoyment from the varitable mulberry bush of brutality in which he admittedly only
half heartedly resisted involving himself in. Within seconds, he had hopped through an
opening and into his counterpart's catastrophically narrow aisle, where the suitably
embarrassed Jacobs had stuttered onto weary feet and produced a comparably weary
punch. Iron ducked forward and blasted a straight punch into Jacobs' exposed ribs
before running his face through a shelful of books on social equality and consumer
politics. He proceeded to thump a knee into his stomach and hurled him into a flimsy
tower of volumes on law and order with a reverse half roundhouse for good measure.
Iron could in all honesty proclaim that he didn't like brutality on an ideological level,
but realized every beast has two faces. There was something in the martial artist's
psyche that alluded more to the 'art' than its application.
Lincoln meanwhile, felt like a lonely soldier in a lost war; faced with an infinite
supply of book shelves in square and rectangular regiments built up around her as if she
stood in an army trench flanked with sandbags. Utilizing a combination of sound and
logic, she sensed an approaching figure on each of the adjacent parallel rows and broke
suddenly to a dead halt. She watched shadowy footsteps catch up and go in front, then
resumed her earlier speed some five paces behind. She squinted; half a meter further on
on the right hand side a shelful of books had been removed at just below shoulder
height, creating a two foot gap. "Ah, luck can be the kindest, most unpredictable
thing." she reminded herself as she sidestepped faster in ghostly silence, overtook her
opponents by a single step and snapped a foot through the gap and into the
unsuspecting Officer Bilec's left cheekbone and back into her own walkway with
uncanny accuracy. "And not a book out of place." She took this momentary
opportunity to roll forward to the tumultuous reception of a crazed repertoire of
machine gun fire which tore apart paper and metal alike as she span out of the firing
line like a hexed hedgehog tumbling away from a perilous predator like a roving rubber
ball. The problem with declaring your intent so forcefully is that whereas one half of the
opposition may have been put out of the picture for the moment, the other's attention
will invariably be whipped into a ravenous frenzy with you as its target.
Placing the cold metal of her gun to her face as a precaution she would in
fairness not stoop to take should something go ridiculously wrong, she headed for a
beckoning crossroads which offered two new directions to choose from; a pair of
differing fates on the road of life. Behind, Officer Gimenez had eased the noise level as
he realized his glorified instinct action had been in vain, but this only heightened his
thirst for salvaging a candy sweet victory where his partner had so tactlessly failed.
Lincoln stepped into the junction and slipped her weapon back into her jacket without
having used it; too much blood and too little restraint is the devil's way of trying to
make you feel at home. Of all the things he could have expected, Giminez should have
expected this one, but had never been over cautious in his mental preparations for such
a routine task as checking out what everyone had previously known as an abandoned
building for reported signs of reactionary activity; and consequently suffered for it.
Simplicity was to be the order of the day as Lincoln sent her striking foot into his
midsection with sufficient conviction to drive him a step back, then whacked him back
further with a sidekick from her trailing leg into the sharp edge of a nearby tower of
free standing shelves which creaked and wobbled threateningly but refused to give way
as if with an extraneous passion. Giminez consoled himself on the merits of hand to
hand combat as his gun stammered out of his grasp while Lincoln appealed to his poor
span of concentration as she raised her guard and distractingly waved her fingers as if a
mother sending her kid to summer camp. Giminez assumed superiority and recalled the
bloodied noses, facial scars and black eyes of an 'illustrious' career in underground
boxing. But Lincoln was to make the art of boxing a boxer look like a walk in the park
as she ducked below a dozey hook and planted a left hand under his guard and onto his
chin before putting him to the floor with a thundering right hook to the other side of
the face.
Now Giminez was on his knees like a peon at the feet of a sapient king; and far
from happy. Adjusting his jaw with a clunky hand, he regained his footing with the help
of a recently vacated shelf and persuaded himself of the validity of the term 'beginner's
luck'. Having trained and battled; toiled and in a roundabout way triumphed for more
punch drunk years than his ailing membranes could recall, he knew the only notable
effect of a strike to a numb and stricken body such as his own would be to drive him on
to greater things as long as he refused to allow potential mortification from afflicting
his time toned technique. If he was anything, Giminez was orthodox when it came to
fighting. If Lincoln was not anything on that subject, it was the same thing, if that made any sense. She threw a
stiff jab as if she was offloading a knockout blow, which required a full stretch of the
arm and shoulder, and sped at him from such an unpredictable angle that all Giminez's
bobbing and weaving of the head suddenly appeared sadly negligent with that particular
jackhammer shot squashing his nose like a ripe tomato that failed to live up to EU
agricultural standards. The roving revolutionary kept her eyes firmly on her adversary
like a wily master fending off with acquired ease a young pretender's enthusiastic if ill
considered offensive. The unappreciative recipient failed to decipher the approach of an
ambidextrous left hook to the jaw then another right of similar vein before it was too
late; Lincoln was like an invisible gnat buzzing around at a ferocious pace; biting
unannounced here and there and flitting off to another target before the victim could
swat it out of harm's way.
But while Giminez cursed his lack of judgment, Lincoln was already
contemplating that final, fatal chomp. Noting a clear shelf just off floor level on the
right and another a little further up the wall on the left, she decided that perhaps when
available, the promise of a glorified finish surpassed that of a comparably laid back one.
She hopped onto the shelf on the left with her nearest leg, placed the other on the
opposite as if climbing a step ladder and achieved the desired influx of height and
velocity as she first swiped his guard aside with the left before snapping his head round
from one side to the other with a cross face right legged spinning heel kick. All this was
enough for Giminez; who fell predictably backwards; crumpling to the floor in unison
with his oppressor; who landed belatedly but a significant degree more respectfully
from the otherwise unattainable height she had made for herself. Giminez's unspoken
decree was that he'd had enough, and his haggard legs duly agreed.
One floor up and several paces to the left, Iron squatted like a praying mantis
behind an unstable rack of uninspiring looking titles on economics. It felt like an age
had passed before the glugging footsteps on the other side had stumbled into the line of
fire, and he had begun to distract himself as he eyed the titles of countless valuptuous
blue spined volumes. Realizing all in an instant that he had almost neglected his chance,
he took hold of the bottom of a shelf and drove his weight into it; toppling the whole
gaunt metal structure onto the shocked foot soldier's now dizzy head to the climatic
outcry of both man and rack as the entire section tumbled unerringly to the floor.
Downstairs, Lincoln rolled her eyes like a disgruntled adolescent asked to do
her household chores and sniggered perhaps impolitely at the uproar. A rabble of
security men on her own floor clearly took the unannounced symphony of crashes and
bangs emerging from upstairs to be some divine announcement of armageddon as they
treated the whole occurrence as an excuse to waste their ammunition; thereby
providing a decent alibi when god arrived that the empty gun barrels ensured no
thoughts of homicide had existed in the potential perpetrator’s minds. An unwise
decision; Lincoln imagined; since not only did this mean that the sharp shooter had
nullified his own weapon before even acquiring a target to fire at in the unlikely event
that rather than biblical revelation this was merely a stack of shelves dying on their feet,
but also that clearly god would have known that the damn gun had been loaded from
the very start. This protest duly lodged, she performed a backward roll, landed on one
knee and drew her own weapon from her inside pocket in one flowing movement and
pointed it squarely with an outstretched arm at the fatalistic felon's quivering brow
having accurately calculated his position through an obscure mixture of the faculty of
hearing and common sense. Security officer Mayreb was so surprised at this he
dropped his gun and raised his hands; forgetting inconveniently that in fact he was the
cop and her the trespasser.
Upstairs, Iron caught a glimpse in the corner of her eye of a rush of orange at
the far wall, but by the time he had turned it was gone. "Think I'm seeing things."
Orange was not a hue typically associated with militia color schemes; "It hardly
compliments camouflage. Knew all those shots to the head would catch up with me
eventually." But this was a welcome change; some mystery to pursue. And besides,
persuit would ensure heading out of this tedious maze of annuls on the most mind
numbing subjects of the academic universe and into the more intriguing sphere of
philosophy and literature; trusting, of course, the premise that we are made by the
surroundings in which we base ourselves which admittedly was entirely dubious.
Down in the lower reaches of the lugubrious labyrinth of insensate shelving
which appeared to stretch on ad infinitum in all directions, Lincoln was growing
decidedly drained by this soporific saga, and was less than comforted to see the
interminable incursion elongated with the fumbling arrival of another two inscrutable
adjutants; expanding the officious conglomerate to a substantial four. She breathed
prounouncefully like a passed over pensioner on a ventilator desperately seeking the
attention of a doting nurse. There must have been some chronic cloning machine
somewhere which burgeoningly begot these battalions of brainless brutes automatically;
how else could wave after wave bare down so perpetually and persistently on her as if
bloodhounds to a bountiful hunk of meat. Come to think of it, given the existence of
such a device, it would probably have been negligent to the apathetic authorities to not
use the technology to spawn an army of perfect war machines. Only the essentially
inadequate abilities of these accused automatons rescued them from that charge. She
sneaked invisibly down the adjoining eilse and admonished herself to postpone her
perennial preoccupation with petty pugilism until the quartet of dutiful foot troops
dispersed sympathetically into more manageable pairs. Her own inimitable and almost
organic style demanding artistic application, she submitted to the most difficult and
dangerous of tactics; scaling a tumble-down bookshelf which shook and rattled like a
cheap balsa stairway being climbed by an overweight repairman laden with clanking
tools as she vaulted single handily over the top to land as noiselessly as an agile
gymnast directly behind the first two rankled security guards, who gaped in
unrecommended hesitation before a speedy sidekick to the jaw snapped one of their
number into an archetypical burst of venomous vexation, offering a philanthropic
baseball pitch of a punch which Lincoln almost irresponsibly ignored; preferring to turn
away from her opponent, spin around airborne with one leg aloft and drop it like a
weighty beer keg on his face when the moment arose. Lieutenant Hex Jensen; the
commanding officer of this perditioned platoon of insatiable illiterates; screwed up his
face dumbfounded like an unwanted paper bag. His companion; flummoxed by the
unannounced and only partially provoked attack, fell back gracelessly against an
unyielding stack of heavily thumbed volumes and into the unforgiving wall beyond like
a vertically challenged racehorse fatally misjudging the water jump.
Jensen drew a repugnant serrated blade reminiscent of some huge prehistoric
carnivore's canine tooth as Lincoln nodded in eager rapport; unwary of the noisome
narcissist's presupposed battle hardy expertise, and briefly slashed apart all of his
lifelong over confidences by drooping her head below his helacious hack like a
motorized playground swing then twirling a right foot unnervingly close to Jensen's
nose as she sent the intentionally ineffective roundhouse across his guard. Jensen, of
course, fell for this deception hook, line and sinker; stepping in to profit from Lincoln's
supposed clumsiness and straight into a taut heel strike to the face with the same leg
which she unleashed with little energy before dropping the attacking appendage to the
floor, thus forcing her opponent to suffer the brunt of the assault coupled with his own
momentum as he realized her ploy in time to appreciate the severity of the blow but nor
quite soon enough for his brain to get the message to his body to avoid it. Lincoln
wasn't finished; she seized this opportunity to leap at her disoriented foe, lift both legs
off the ground together and snap each a different way simultaneously; twisting her body
almost horizontally in the air to allow her to cross her feet over and back; left heel and
the ball of the right foot striking at once in different directions like a huge blunt pair of
scissors being opened before the crippling ailment of gravity brought her to an enforced
squat. This produced the strange sensation of Jensen's head being rocked one way then
the other as if being socked around each side of the head by twin sparring partners at
the same instant. He couldn't fall left and couldn't fall right, so some defeatist
mechanism in his brain came to the delayed conclusion that he had better fall
backwards. With that, Lincoln reverse peddled out of harm's way, careful not to cross
the other bungling guard’s field of vision like a scuttling rodent squirming out of the
glare of car headlights and into its grassy roadside sanctuary. By the time the battered
lieutenant and his right hand man had realized where they were, she was gone.
Iron, on the other hand, was practising the opposite strategy; pursuing rather
than escaping. His curious target swerved and looped in and out of aisles in a confusing
near stationary saraband which defied apprehension. This colorful countenance was not
your everyday hoodlum; he navigated the corridors with both skill and familiarity, but
eventually Iron's cunning manipulation of the place's geographical predictability allowed
him to corner the suspect in a crooning cul de sac, although the figure he saw far from
legitimized his expectation. With orange-red robes, shaven head and weighed down
with a wealth of old and sacred looking volumes, he assumed through a forgotten
history, sociology or religious education lesson back in the institute that this was a
monk; even more unusually one of the East Asian rather than Benedictine variety.
He rubbed his eyes to make sure this apparent hallucination was in fact genuine
and not some unauthorized exposition of the divine's subconscious pulled accidentally
out of his true environment and placed here in a combination of bad luck and unpaid
penance. But despite his absurd conjecture the strange character remained; a middle
aged man of an at once humble and self assured demeanor; an alarming anachronism.
"You're a monk, right?" The comment was half intended to shock the creator into
realizing the error in this scene and magicking the stranger back into his intended time
and place in the great scheme of things. Rinpoche Chen nodded and in remaining silent
answered a hundred questions.
This display of apparently groundless calm worked like a bout of snake
charming on Iron, and allowed Chen to turn and take a book from the shelf to add to
his expanding collection as if the whole maze chase which had just reached its untimely
conclusion was simply a byproduct of the monk getting to the section he had been
headed for all the way in the swiftest manner, his pursuer all the while under the
impression that it was he who was dictating the direction they took. "Well;" Iron was
still scratching his head like the fourth monkey, who he could only imagine had to be
dubbed 'think no evil'. This didn't fit the trend; it was a deviation from the plot. There
were no monks in Manhattan. Religious persecution had been the first thing on
Volscenzi junior's 'to do' list from the beginning; it had been banned for years and its
practitioners had slipped off to Brooklyn or further afield if they had not decided to
stay and campaign for the democratic resistance, which almost irrevocably resulted in
hardship and probably assassination.
"What am I doing here?" Chen helpfully asked Iron's question for him, then
proceeded to walk past the dumbstruck rebel and on towards a semi hidden stairway as
if his body was oblivious to his presence while his conversation continued; indicating
that his mind, at least, was. Iron, for his part, tagged along like a novice to the master.
"My name is Rinpoche Chen, but you can call me Chen." Iron shrugged; at least that
premise made sense. "A few years back I and a number of colleagues were on our way
to New York on a humanitarian mission. We were headed for the outskirts; US held
territory. The poverty on the other side of the waters causes much suffering.
Unfortunately your local warlord has an over active siege mentality. He forced our
plane to land in his own territory and we were arrested and imprisoned, but some of us
managed to escape. We have all had brief military experience; the war affected most of
Asia as well as Europe. I myself was a field doctor in the war before entering the
priesthood. Unfortunately this island is a fortress, although it is far easier to get in than
to get out." Iron recalled his own attempted incursions into US controlled territory;
"Yeah, tell me about it. So what happened to the others who escaped?"
"There are only two of us left." Iron, despite his generally optimistic view of human
nature, was well aware of his unelected monarch's terror tactics; "I guess if there was
still a UN or some tangible treaties to contravene you'd have some sort of diplomatic
protection, right? They'd bust a gut to get you out."
"Fate has an intriguing way of directing you to the necessary task. There are many
inside the fortress walls who require help; medical or otherwise, only here compassion
invites you to transcend legality." That was an eloquent way of admitting criminality,
but to be a law breaker in the eyes of a regime which violates human rights on a daily
basis is perhaps praise rather than condemnation. "So you're a rebel like me, huh; a
revolutionary?"
"Let me just say that the eye of the law is on me, which reminds me, I must thank you
for blinding that particular gaze, at least for the time being." He bowed slightly which
prompted Iron to awkwardly mimic his gesture as if a traveler trying to fit in with local
custom; "so how do you combat the authorities?"
"Combat is not an auspicious term. I prefer to heal; to defend rather than attack. I and
my last remaining friend run a field hospital of sorts beneath this building. We cater for
victims of this regime; the poor and starving, the ill and wounded to whom health
services are not available; and those outcasts who; like myself; are targets of this
government."
"So a stroke of luck working under a library, eh? Mixing business with philosophy?"
"As I say, fate has its way, and in times like these people find comfort in religion."
Lincoln did a double take as she met the pair halfway up the dark and decrepit
flight of stairs and wondered if the light, or lack of it, was playing devilish tricks on her.
"Wait a minute, you're a religious guy; a monk, right?" She felt as if she had
inadvertently stepped onto the set of a vast historical drama or a shaolin kung fu B
movie. Chen grinned emphatically and bowed in identical pose. "And another
revolutionary" Iron chipped in; desperate to allude to the fact that their numbers
seemed to be growing. "So you're one of those humanitarian guys?" Lincoln appeared
to posses a similar grip of virtual telekinesis as the priest, who saw it as only polite to
nod despite the negation of verbal or physical communication which such an ability
would entail. "I've heard of you guys; you run a kind of sanctuary underground
somewhere; its an urban myth." Chen pointed down with a bony index finger, at which
Lincoln realized the fore mentioned presence of fate; "looks like if we hadn't turned up
they might have found it."
"And now," Chen appeared far from disturbed by the prospect; "their operatives will
undoubtedly report their skirmish to a higher authority, leaving our cover exposed."
Lincoln frowned like a kid who had just been told by an eminent vet that her beloved
pet would have to be given the lethal injection; "so what can we do?" The priest;
displaying neither the nervousness or frosty hopelessness of a man on top of a savage
junta's near boundless hit list, smiled with more than mere expectancy, which often
fools semi believers to protest that such men of the cloth hold the enviable advantage of
being able to tell the future; "if you leave the rope alone it will automatically untangle.
If you see through problems they will solve themselves."
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