EVENING SEVEN

She pumped her legs as fast as humanly possible. 

Each stride out-stretched the last, punctuated only by the brief jolt of feet contacting road. Every sinew rippled wildy from the ground up. Her thighs burned with the threat of explosion; their muscular contortion barely contained by the skin. The long sorrowful siren wailed out through the streets and bounced back and forth between the buildings, making it hard to tell its origins. It had her name on it. Haunting in its imminence, the drone steadily bore down on her. 

Fuck, that sounds close. 

She wheeled around, fist clenched even tighter, and between the lashings of hair and shaken vision she could only just make out the quasi-rectangular shape of the vehicle.

She hovered three feet above the ground; eyes fixed on the culprit pool below her that caused her to slip. Arms and legs splayed wide and parallel to the road, she was paused, mid-flight. The world slowed to a halt. 

Tight with constriction, her lungs were at full capacity and struggling to be housed by her chest. Her heart was still beating at triple time. Adrenalin continued to surge to the very extremities of her body, flooding them with now-unnecessary waves of power. Her brain, swimming in the chemical wash of blood and synaptic electricity, acutely focused. Oxygen-rich blood still rushed throughout her body, furiously coarsing along its arterial pathways. The cry of the siren felt on top of her, echoing firstly in her ears then reverberating through her bones. Every cell was alive. This is what it meant to be human.

Why didn't I just listen to Greer? She'd warned me against this.

If it wasn't for that fucking shopkeep. Jesus, why'd he have to call the authorities? Arsehole.   

Even though she scrambled across her memory in search of someone to blame, it was no help. She was here now, this was it. It was over.

She stared at the miniature landscape forming in the bitumen below her; its borders expanding as she neared the roads surface. Her muscles instinctively seized in anticipation. Biting hard into the ground, her cheekbone took the first hit causing a shockwave to repercuss through her bones. The force emptied her lungs in one sharp expulsion and her limbs jarringly flailed before falling into an awkward pile about her. She struggled to breathe and yet somehow emitted a sound entirely instinctive and foreign to her own ears.

One of them crouched closely to her, huddled over her still-clenched fist. Admist the wincing pain she managed to make out the detail of his hands, albeit blurred. His steel-cold fingertips belied their flawlessly human appearance. Although she'd been told about the sophistication of technology here she still mustered surprise at just how seamlessly real his hands looked. 

He called out to his partner. 

"Yeah, Larry, she's carrying."

Larry's distant response came through a mock laugh, "Ha, no doubt...only pushers run like that".

He returned his focus to her and the contents of her fist. More in conversation with himself than Larry, he expressed his quiet confusion, "...wait a minute." 

There was a pause.

She saw the red of the scan before she felt its heat permeate  her hand.  Holding his hand a few inches above hers, the red light emanated from the centre of his palm, moving systematically across hers and the small pile of dark earth that sat ominously upon it. He processed the reading and paused again.

"Jesus," he muttered, "Grade 7, bio-organic material. Larry, you better come see this."

He remained crouched, looking over the heaped body. As if half expecting her to converse between the groans, he leaned in closer to the shuddering pile of muscle and bones and voiced his concerns over the foreign matter he'd just discovered. His steel fingers seared coldly through the sheen of sweat on her face and using her chin as leverage he turned her head to the sky, exposing her face to the perpetual dusk that hung above them. He reeled back in horror. The recent fall of acid rain had left a slick of slime on the road and as he scrambled bakcwards he struggled to gain a footing.

"JESUS, LARRY." 

This time his immediacy demanded Larry's attention.

"What?"

As breathless as the body that lay before him, he punched out his statement in shocked exhales.

"...she's.....she's bleeding."