The Amulet of Power - Mike Resnick [3]
She began listening to the footsteps, making a game of identifying them in the semidarkness of her room. This was the heavy-footed intern. That was the idiot nurse who’d worn high heels to work and click-click-clicked up and down the tiled corridor. This other one was a doctor with his entourage of students, lecturing as he walked to the operating theater.
And then there was the thud.
A thud? Finally she figured it out. Some orderly must have dropped a pile of laundry while he went into the next room to strip the bed.
Suddenly the light from the corridor shone across her darkened room.
Why was the orderly coming in here? Didn’t he know this bed was occupied?
Then she saw that it wasn’t one orderly, it was two. And they weren’t dressed like orderlies. They wore the robes of Arab tribesmen from the desert—and one of them had a knife in his hand.
Lara tried to roll off the bed, but the IVs held her in place.
“Who are you?” she demanded, ignoring the pain in her arm. “What do you want?”
Neither man said a word. They were tall, over six feet in height, and carried themselves like warriors. The one with the knife approached her and raised the blade high above his head, ready to plunge it down into her.
“You’ve got the wrong person!” she rasped hoarsely. “I’ve never seen either of you in my life!”
The two men exchanged glances, and then the knife came down.
Lara twisted at the last second. The knife barely missed her, burying itself deep in the hospital bed. She pulled the tubes from her arm—it hurt like hell, and blood began leaking from the wounds she had created—but an instant later she was on her feet, confronting her attackers, trying to ignore the blinding pain in her head. She opened her mouth to scream for help, but one of the men, the one without a knife, gestured with his hand, and suddenly her voice was gone, silenced.
Instinctively, she reached for her pistols, but all she had on was a hospital gown. She tried to focus her eyes as the two men silently closed in on her, but a wave of dizziness and nausea swept over her.
The man with the knife approached her and held out his hand as if he expected her to give him something.
I’ll give you something, all right!
She landed a kick in his groin. He grunted and hit her across the face with a backhand blow that sent her careening into the trolley that held the dangling IV tubes.
The man with the knife grinned at her and charged. Lara grabbed a tube, ducked under his extended arm, sidestepped, and quickly wrapped the tube around his neck, yanking with all her strength. The man collapsed, gasping for breath, his knife clattering noisily to the floor as he clawed at his throat.
The second man was on her before she could turn to face him. She tried to twist loose, but she was too weak. Blood was still flowing from her arm, and her head felt like it was about to explode.
One bitter thought raced through her mind as she grappled with her attacker: After all the things I’ve survived, I’m going to be murdered by men I’ve never seen before, and I don’t even know why!
She forced herself to remain conscious, to fight off the pain long enough to sell her life as dearly as possible. Maybe she was too weak to stand, maybe her weapons were buried beneath the Temple of Horus, but she still had teeth and fingernails. They wouldn’t do much harm, but at least she’d die fighting, however futilely.
And then, through a haze of pain and nausea, she became aware of a third man in the room. Like her opponents, he remained silent, but she soon heard the sound of bones crunching, and suddenly she wasn’t being held any longer. She fell to the floor, then rolled against a wall to avoid the battle.
And some battle it was. The man who had just entered the room landed a haymaker. It would have decked any normal man, but the big Arab just grunted, shook his head, and hurled himself at the newcomer—and now she could see that the intruder was Kevin Mason.
Mason sidestepped the charge, picked up a bottle—she had no idea