ICON OF THE FIGHT

Chapter 15

We quickly retraced our footsteps and turned down, coming to stop a few steps below the landing. By then I could hear the both approaching guards and I was trembling.

"S..s…say, this wasn't part of the plan, was it?" I asked.

Chido smiled. "It was not. It was an oversight on my part. I should have known the security guards will check the stairwell to make sure it was clean and ready for use, since the elevators are not working. Nevertheless, I find this situation a welcome break from the dreary trudge up the stairs."

"What!" I exclaimed in  hushed voice. "Are you crazy?"

"You seriously have to ask?" she whispered back. "So you deal with the one coming from below while I deal with the one on my side. Okay?"

"Okay? Deal? What am I gonna do to him, sing him to death?"

"No, silly," Chido chided me laughingly, pulling her hand out of the strap of the cane and gripping it by the handle. "You're a creative guy. Use your imagination."

"My imagination isn't gonna…"

"Shhhhh."

Kill me now, I cried out inwardly. How I wished I had turned down her job offer!

The barrel of a pistol appeared a step below me, followed by a black boot preceding a tall and sturdy looking policeman in his olive green uniform. His eyes widened for a second before he aimed the gun at me. "Hands up," he bellowed, "turn around and get on your knees."

I raised my hands and turned, was about to kneel when the other police guard appeared at the landing. His eyes bulged for a moment as he seemed to take in the scene before him. I guessed he had never seen a musician and a blind spy in a stairwell before. He swung the gun from me to Chido, clearly indecisive.

"James," the first guard said, "I have the man covered, take her."

Jimmy was obviously relieved to have someone make the decision for him. He aimed his weapon at Chido. "What's with the shades?" he wanted to know.

In response, Chido whipped up the cane in a diagonally upward swing, hitting James' gun hand and sending the said pistol flying into the air before it fell to the ground at her feet. Chido charged at him, swinging the cane at him again. James caught it in his hands and pulled, letting momentum bring Chido closer to him. Then he unleashed a brutal hook to her jaw, driving her back into the wall and dislodging her glasses. Jimmy was following through when he hesitated, no doubt having frozen to the spot by the sight of Chido's maimed face.

Chido moved then, leaping from the wall and executing a tight turn that enabled her to drive her right elbow hard at Jimmy's nose bridge. The guard tottered and went to his knees, his face disfigured and bloody, a gurgling sound escaping him. Chido hand-chopped him behind the neck and crashed onto the tiled floor of the landing, unmoving.

During all of that, the first guard was, like me, mesmerised by the fight. But now he grabbed my neck by a rough and calloused hand and drove the gun into my back.

"What have you done?" His voice sounded disbelieving. "You better pray he is not dead, bitch, or else I'm going to kill you."

Chido appeared not to hear, using her cane to feel the ground for her glasses.

"I'm talking to you, bitch. Are you deaf and dumb?" The officer removed the pistol from my back and pointed it at Chido.

Chido straightened herself, keeping her back to us. "I'm not deaf and mute," she said, turning her face to us, "just blind."

"The hell…?" The security officer's hand slackened on my neck while his gun wavered.

Use your imagination...

I grabbed the gun hand at the wrist with both of mine and brought it forcefully on my right shoulder. Once, twice, thrice. The gun fell to the floor.

Imagination.

With all my strength, I yanked the hand forward, intending to throw the officer over my shoulder the way I had seen it done on television. Alas, it's one thing watching something on TV and quite another to take part in it. I managed to pull him over my shoulder, but his other hand was hooked around my neck and he put his left leg in front of my right one. As I propelled him forward, the momentum also to me down with him. For a brief second I was atop him but be easily overpowered me and sat atop me. It felt like Mount Kilimanjaro was on my groin. His gnarly hands closed like a vice on my throat.

I tried to pry them off but they were tight, and getting tighter. I thought of punching him in the face and threw a punch. It only grazed his cheek and had no effect on his grip on my throat. My chest was on fire and my eyes were in danger of bursting out their sockets.

"Fucking die," he snarled, looming over me like a demon.

Darkness was creeping around the edges of my vision, covering more area with each passing millisecond. I could no longer feel my throat, my hands fell limp to my sides and I suddenly wanted to sleep without ever having to wake up.

Then the weight was removed from my waist and the pressure on my throat eased up. My chest hurt as my oxygen starved lungs rushed to expell the carbon dioxide to create space for the life giving gas. My ribs were in pain from the expanding and contracting of my lungs as they alternated between deflating and inflating like a rural iron-smith's blower.

I kept my closed for sometime as my breathing normalised, feeling immense fatigue in every inch of my body. Never before have I ever been so physically tired as I felt then.

"Wakey wakey, sleepy hen," a beautiful voice said.

I opened my eyes and beheld a pair of black eyes that resolved into glasses on a lovely face. A lovely face that I knew, that… I sat up quickly as the fuzziness cleared from my mind and everything restored itself in my consciousness.

"Whrrrr," I said and cleared my throat twice and tried again. "What took you so long? Why didn't you kill the guy earlier? I nearly died."

"I was looking for my glasses," Chido spoke off handedly. "Besides, you weren't close to dying. Anyway, it doesn't matter, let's get to work. We're running out of time."

Thus we got on our way. We ran down the hallway and stopped at the only metal door. It was locked but Chido made short work of it with a pair of small thin wires she had in her carry-all purse. We entered into a room approximately five metres wide and eight long. Here in the enclosed space the darkness was thicker and it took a while for our…my eyes to adjust. It was crammed with servers from end to end, all with multitudes of cables snaking in and under them, but the deathly quiteness seemed unnatural.

"Its creepy in here," I said.

"It won't be, in less than a minute when the effects of the EMP dissipates." Chido assured me. "You have to go tho the last row of servers, near the back wall. Choose the middle one and remove two cables, one from the top rack and another from the middle one. Hurry up."

It was relatively simple and in thirty seconds, I was done. I headed back near to the door where Chido waited for me.

"Good job," said she, "just in time."

As if in cue, the long fluorescent bulbs buzzed as they came on and long low whistle-like sound came from the servers as they booted up.

Chido's phone buzzed and she answered. "Good, I'll keep this line open."

"That's Erin, our eyes in the air," Chido told me. "She will direct us to the sub-basement level where we need to have a chat with a Judas Iscariot."