A Girl's Guide to Guns and Monsters - Martin Harry Greenberg [49]
I pull open the door—
—and dodge the giant arch of a knife.
Raj pushes his way inside, kicks the door closed with his foot, and tries to knife me again. His eyes are glazed, and spittle runs off the side of his mouth.
How had I missed that?
I grab his knife hand and shove it behind his back. He starts kicking. Then he grabs my hair and pulls my head forward. Somehow he spins me, and gets the knife out of my hand. He jabs at my neck and succeeds in sinking the knife into the flesh above my right breast.
It’s startlingly painful. I break out of his hair- hold and grab him by both sides of the face. Then I twist.
His neck breaks with an audible snap, and he crumples, clearly dead.
I’m breathing hard. I’m not bleeding much—the knife somehow managed to avoid important stuff like arteries and nerves. But I have a hunch that some muscle has been compromised.
Then I realize I’m thinking like a person in shock.
Maybe because I am a person in shock. I’m injured, but that’s not what’s causing the shock.
What’s causing the shock is that jolt you get when your perception of yourself gets turned upside down.
The goat at the workshop, the person everyone wants to kill, the one who would generate the most suspects if he/she/it died isn’t one of the triumvirate.
It’s me.
I splash cold water on my face to force myself to think clearly. Then I put my magic laptop away and call the police. I try to sound like a damsel in distress, which isn’t easy for me.
I say, “I let him in and he stabbed me.”
I say, “I think he’s dead.”
I don’t say that I used a technique I’d learned in my assassin training to snap his neck.
The campus police arrive almost immediately, look in my room, and confirm with someone on the other end of their radios that indeed I’ve been stabbed and there’s a dead man in my room. They offer me an ambulance, which I accept as part of my damsel in distress disguise (hoping the whole hospital thing won’t take long), and then the real police arrive.
They take one look and start asking questions.
Like, “How did a little thing like you break his neck?”
And “Where did you learn how to snap necks?”
And “You really snapped his neck?”
I blink a lot and make my eyes tear up, and say things like after watching many episodes of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” I decided I needed a self-defense class, and there they taught us to grab someone by both sides of the face to distract him and then knee him in the groin.
I say he must have turned oddly when I kneed him, because I heard his neck snap.
I say I’ve never heard that before.
In other words, I lie.
Eventually, the EMTs arrive and haul me away to the university hospital where the emergency room doc X-rays me, pronounces me lucky that nothing much was hurt, and sews me up. Then he sends me out into the wild with a prescription for enough painkillers that I could sell them on the street and still have some left over for me.
I fill it, but take none of them. That’s for later. Instead, I arrive back at my room to find crime scene splatter everywhere (fingerprint dust, Luminol, and a general mess). No one has discovered my magic laptop or my weapons kit. (Thank heavens.) The last of the photographs have been taken, the body has been removed, and the room is being returned to me, blood and all.
My classmates have shown up. They actually seem concerned, but more that Raj has gone off the deep end (and that concern manifests in a “who’s next?” kinda way). They try to be solicitous, offering to feed me and comfort me and give me advice on how to take care of a knife wound (as if any of them has ever done that).
Hallerhaven shows up to let me know the university will take care of everything, including my tuition (in other words, please don’t sue us) and promises me I’ll be just fine.
I thank everyone for their kindness and plead exhaustion. Slowly, I get them out of my room and sigh