Genesis - Keith R. A. DeCandido [39]
But the wind had gotten worse; leaves and the grit of the ground were being buffetted about the air now, and was in danger of getting in her eyes. She made a grab for the door—
—only to be grabbed around the stomach and pulled inside.
She struggled initially as the man—for it was a man, but not the man in the wedding photo—dragged her inside, but she didn't put up much of a fight, mainly because of the bright lights that now shone through the window.
Something was happening.
"Don't touch me!" she screamed at the man. "Get away from me!"
He let go, but not through any impetus from her: glass shattered as something that looked like a hockey puck came crashing into the room. One second after it landed on the wooden floor, it let loose with a blast of cordite that sent her and her would-be abductor sprawling to the floor.
Her head swam, the cordite in the air making her vaguely nauseous and leaving a bitter taste in her mouth. She wondered how they could make a hockey puck do that—and what a hockey puck really was, since she associated the round, flat black disc with that phrase, but had no idea what the individual words actually meant.
Or, for that matter, why she knew what cordite was.
She shook her head, trying to clear it, hoping to stave off a headache that was starting to build.
Then more shattered glass, an endless stream of it.
Looking up, she saw five people dressed in all black and wearing face-covering masks. They came in feet first, apparently swinging in on cables. She couldn't imagine anyone moving like that, yet the maneuvers had an odd feeling of familiarity, like she'd done them herself.
The five people were loaded for bear. Each of them carried at least two guns that she could see, and a variety of other pieces of equipment she couldn't quite make out—it was all black on black, and the hockey puck's blast still had her blinking spots from in front of her eyes.
The man who'd grabbed her was a tall man with very short brown hair, wearing a dress jacket over a light blue shirt. His pants were also dark, but didn't match the jacket. As soon as the five people burst in through the windows, he pulled out a gun from a shoulder holster.
In an instant, she realized that the man was a police officer, and his weapon was a standard RCPD-issue Beretta.
If only she could recall what the "RC" in RCPD stood for.
As soon as the cop had his Beretta out, one of the black-clad intruders grabbed his right wrist and, in one fluid motion, pulled his arm behind his back, knocked him face-down onto the floor, and forced him to drop the pistol.
"What're you doing? I'm a cop!"
One of the other intruders pulled his jacket and shoulder holster off.
"I told you, I'm a cop!"
The first intruder removed the cop's own handcuffs from his back belt loop while the second one rooted through his jacket to pull out his wallet.
"You're breaking my arm," the cop said as the intruder handcuffed his arms behind his back.
She watched all this with a combination of confusion and dispassion. No one seemed to be paying any attention to her. Another one of the black-clad people ran over to the mirror on the far end of the room. He opened a panel with two knob switches, which revealed a socket of some kind.
This particular member of the invasion team had some kind of minicomputer on his left forearm. It flapped open to reveal a small monitor on the upper portion and a keyboard on the part still parallel to his arm. He took a wire that was attached to the minicomputer on one end and plugged it into the socket.
Two more figures walked into the room through the now-shattered windows. One of them headed straight for her. She sat up. One of the straps of her red dress had fallen off her shoulder, and she pulled it up.
Looking up at the figure, she couldn't make out any features behind what she now