Fake smile

An owl careens after you down a mountain. You feel the wings of the owl brush past you, feeling the tips of its talons slice the air just above your arm. The owl gives a defiant screech as it circles back.

The screech jolts you awake as you feel the train wheels protest against the too fast turn of the rails.

The centrifugal force threatens to knock you out cold again, but your arm managed to snag a handhold while you were fighting off the owl. The sudden force of 4 g’s almost dislocates your shoulder, but you manage to avoid bashing your brains against the wall again.

You feel a thin trickle of liquid dripping down your face, onto your neck, as you force yourself upright.

You look at the wall you think your head smashed into and notice a red-stained splotch. You carefully touch the throbbing part of your skull and notice your fingers are a little damp. You note the blood on your fingertips as you wipe them against your pants.

You wince as you remember you just purchased this cream-colored suit earlier that afternoon, briefly contemplating whether the stain will come out or not. You hear a feminine moan from across the cabin, about three seats down from where you’re sitting.

You stagger over to spot a woman in a tight red dress. It feels like you know her, or should know her, but you can’t be certain. Any attempt to recognize her, or form an association as to how you know her, comes up empty. You notice she has expensive looking shoes, matching the dress, and you also note she has a matching Yves Saint Laurent purse. Both her hands are clutching her purse.

“Hey! Are you o…” you begin to ask, cut off by her flipping around and aiming a gun at you.

You register it as a Glock 43, capable of firing 10 rounds. However, you also know at least one round has already been fired, noting a small hole in your jacket and shirt. You wince again as you remember how expensive this suit was.

“Back…off!” the woman shouts at you through clenched teeth, holding the gun as she finds her footing underneath her. As she gets up, you wait for the one instant she has her attention away from you before swatting the gun out of her precisely manicured hand, sending it to the far side of the cabin.

“We don’t have time for that,” you hear yourself say. “We have to stop this train.”

“It’s your fault I’m on it,” she spits at you.

You dash ahead of her to grab the gun. She claws at you and you hear, and feel, a rip in your suit as one of the sleeves partially separates from the shoulder. You reach the gun first and remind her that you have it.

Firing a shot at her shoe, she yelps back and screams at you, more in frustration than anger.

You think to yourself, “Why did I buy lunch for this chick?”

You discover that you’re wearing a holster, and, even more remarkably, that the Glock fits perfectly in it. You now remember that it’s your gun, and you also remember that the woman in the red dress made you purchase it and the holster after you had bought the cream-colored suit, and the most expensive lunch ever at an Indian restaurant in Soho.

The lunch was for you and the woman, whom you had just met at a conference in London. Her name, she told you, is Veronica. You had just boarded at Victoria Station, bound for a fancy Michelin-rated restaurant, Saltwood on the Green, near Dover. She had eaten there once before and was determined to introduce you to it before anyone else could. She walked through London with a grace that made even the most stoic Londoner gawk, and had electric eyes you found yourself getting lost in during lunch. You wished those eyes always gazed toward you.

It had been a good day up to that point.

She knew her way around London. She knew where to find a suit with tailors that could make alterations on the spot. The difference in your confidence as you entered the store compared to when you left, wearing the suit, was beyond vertical. It was because of that confidence that you felt you could pull off purchasing the gun. She said you looked “gangsta”, and she wanted to see you wear the look fully. You didn’t have the necessaries to legally carry a gun around London, which made the purchase that much more exhilarating. She guided you through the process. She knew exactly where to go.

She was a new thrill ride and you forgot when, or how, to get off.

Before you boarded the train she grabbed the back of your head and pulled you to her lips, kissing you with a passionate longing that left you desiring far more. As quickly as the kiss exploded into your every thought, she cut it off with a forceful slap triggering confusion and fury.

“We have to board now. I need you to focus,” she jolted those words at you, her smile full of mischief.

She led you through the train, holding your hand, periodically glancing back at you, and mouthing the word, “Focus”.

Before entering the sleeper compartment, she looked back at you one more time. For the first time you noticed a hint of sadness. She took out a compact mirror from her matching purse and checked her face. You watched her as she practiced her smile. It was the same smile she had been giving you all day. It looked forced now.

Fake.

She grabbed the gun from your holster and pushed you in the sleeper compartment, where you were manhandled by at least three others: one with his arm around your neck and the other ones each holding one of your arms. They spun you around to look at her, now aiming your gun at your chest.

You’re angry, but not surprised.

“That was…an evocative presentation you made at the conference today,” she stated, twirling the gun around her finger. “It got the attention of my superiors.”

The presentation was about source financing for Brexit.

“And their superiors more likely,” you think to yourself.

You close your eyes and exhale a deep breath. When you open them, you shift your position a bit so that the man’s arm isn’t against your trachea. Veronica has stopped twirling the gun and aims it at your abdomen.

“Do you mind? You’re right against my windpipe,” you say to the guy behind you.

The guy adjusts his arm and grunts, presumably at you. The other two grasp your arms a little looser.

You kick at the hand holding the gun while twisting your body at the same time. As you expected, she fires the gun while dropping it, you feel the bullet graze your midsection and hear a gasp from the goon behind you as his arm goes slack around your neck.

The gun is falling to the floor and Veronica screeches while lunging at you. Riding the surprise, you jerk away from the other two goons and bolt for the door, grabbing Veronica’s hands and using her momentum to launch her into both of the goons behind you. You hear the gun thud against the floor. You ignore the mess at the back of the compartment and grab for the gun. You hear the door open behind you and just spin around only to feel a sledgehammer bludgeon your skull, knocking you out cold.

When you regain consciousness, you’re on a runaway train with Veronica, and she’s furious.

Her mascara is all over her face, with a sizeable clump on her left cheekbone. You indicate it to her and she wipes it off, grudgingly nodding at you in thanks after flicking it from her fingers.

“We have to get to the front of the train to try to stop it,” you say, more to yourself than to her.

She chucks off her shoes and grimaces.

“The floor is kind of sticky.”

“Maybe from all the mascara?” you find yourself joking automatically.

At that, she snorts with laughter.

“I’m sorry I tried to kill you,” she still laughs, then her face contorts into an apologetic frown as she tries to stifle the laughter. “And sorry about ruining your suit. But your presentation…oh! It was a doozy.”

“It happens,” you say as you shrug and find your footing. “What happened after I was knocked out?”

She sits down again and takes a deep breath. When she exhales her hair is blown away from her eyes.

Still electric.

“The train hadn’t left the station, and wasn’t going to leave for another ten minutes. We had time to haul you off the train. We made it look like you had drank too much. We left Jules…the one I…shot, on the train. We covered him with a blanket off the bed and put a bottle in his hand. We locked the door when we left.”

“What about the blood?”

“What about it?” she dismissed it with one hand close to her face, looking disappointed when she turned toward the hand. The way she holds her hand, the position of the fingers, makes you sure she wished it had a lit cigarette. “The blanket covered up most of it. We did what we could. It’s lucky that they used crimson blankets on the train.”

“How did we get here?”

She paused and pointed at her neck.

“They stuck me with a needle and I ended up here…with you.”

There was animosity there for sure, but with a tinge of sadness, and maybe desperation.

The train wheels screeched before the force of the turn launched you both against the wall with her slamming into you, leaving both of you spooning each other.

After you pushed her hair out of your face, you saw the needle mark from where they had injected her with knock out juice. You could smell she used Suave “Island Breeze” shampoo.

Cheap.

She scooted away from you as soon as you were able to separate from each other. To your astonishment, she avoided making a grab for the gun. Instead, she gently patted your arm that caught the bulk of her.

“Thanks for that,” she admitted. “I owe you one.”

“No worries,” you say. “Let’s get to the front of the train while we still can.”

She nods at you and, holding each other’s hand to steady each other, you go through two more train cars before you reach the front. You don’t see any sign of an engineer or any wires you can pull in the engineer’s booth. You guess it’s being controlled completely remotely, or at least it was. You see an “Emergency stop” button and push it, repeatedly, waiting for something to happen.

Nothing happens.

“Figures they would disable that,” you say. “Any ideas?”

“Get to the back of the train and strap ourselves in as much as we can, facing backwards. The train has to stop somewhere.”

“After you,” you indicate she should lead.

She grabs your hand and you both run back to the very last car of the train, about two cars back from where you initially found yourselves.

Not surprisingly, you confirm that you’re both the only ones on the train.

“Any idea where we are?” you ask.

“Smells like somewhere under the Thames,” she sniffs as she replies. “We should lie down on the bench with our heads against the back of the seats, facing toward the back of the train. I don’t see anyway we can strap ourselves down. We’ll have to hang on to the bars by the windows.”

She goes to the end of the car and braces the back door open, using one of her shoes.

“In case we need to make a quick getaway,” she explains.

“Facing toward the back of the train.” you say as you ready yourself for the impact, settling into the seat while she readies herself in the seats in front of you.

“Hey, if it means anything…” you start to say.

“It doesn’t,” she cuts you off.

Then the impact happens.

You hear and feel the train accordion into itself as it slams into the end of the tunnel. With each percussive folding of the train behind the impact, the shockwave sends you bouncing in your seat violently, almost hitting the ceiling at one point before you come first to three false stops, then the actual stop.

Sprinklers start working above you, or at least you initially think they’re sprinklers. You smell a bit of smoke from up ahead. The water from the sprinklers doesn’t smell like sprinkler water.

You’re able to get up and peer over the seat at Veronica. Instead of being on the bench, as you were, you find her on the floor. Her neck is bent in an odd direction and drool is spilling from her mouth, mixed with blood. Both her eyes are open, facing you, but she’s not looking at you, or even registering your presence. You wave your hand and get nothing from her.

You stagger forward as the sudden weight of the Thames river comes crashing through the car, carrying you out the backdoor of the train, through the tunnel to within grasping distance of a ladder, heading upward. You grab the ladder and feel your gun slip away from you, washed away by the current.

Once you start up the ladder, you feel the Thames helping you float upward for a spell before the water reaches an equilibrium point and recedes a bit. It smells like rancid sewage.

You keep climbing toward the faint light at the top, growing brighter. You hear alarms, sirens, and imagine seeing blue and red lights above you. You ditch your suit jacket, now ruined beyond any hope of repair, and the holster. You hear them both splash into the Thames below you, not sure or caring if either of them floats.

You reach the top of the ladder, finding yourself in a small room that looks to be part of Picadilly Circus station, near your hotel. You see uniforms near by and grab one that fits you, ditching the rest of your clothes, except your shoes and your wallet, down the ladder to the Thames. You wash your hair and self as best you can in a sink and shrug off the stench of the Thames as best you can, before you emerge onto the platform full of people and bobbies directing the people to safe locations.

People keep a wide berth around you, and what you assume is your stench, as you trudge back to your hotel. You try to look like you know what you’re doing, walking calmly and fully upright. You notice street cameras following you as you enter the doors to your hotel.

You hope the cameras follow everybody.

You take mental notes of the people you see as you head across the lobby.

You take the elevator back to your floor and notice the maid’s cart outside of your room. You see her cleaning your bathroom as you duck in to grab your suitcase. She’s wearing headphones and can’t hear you.

You see two men from the lobby leaving the elevator on to your floor. Both of them are wearing bulky, ill-fitting suits. They haven’t seen you. You notice one of them reaching into his jacket as you quick turn and head down the stairs.

Can you run all the way to Heathrow?