[Author's Note: I'm taking a break from /r/WritingPrompts. Instead, I want to expand/combine a couple of the existing posts. This will continue from from where yesterday (Strider Mo) left off.]
Mo lunged forward away from the voice behind her. Darren did not. He stopped dead and turned slowly to face the person talking. So, Mo ran into him. It was not intentional, merely the consequence of their two different reactions. Mo, with the momentum[1], knocked Darren on to his back, his head hitting the concrete with a crack. Mo did not look at him, did not check to see that he was okay. It never crossed her mind. All she could think about was not getting caught. She pushed herself up and started running again. Only to stop when two shapes came out of the shadows in front of her and blocked her side of the sidewalk.
She looked over her shoulder. The one who had spoken was also accompanied by another shape and they were walking towards her. She looked forward again, the two up front were also closing the gap. Mo had no illusions about her ability to fight her way out. She had never been in a real physical fight, preferring to curl up in a ball until the pain stopped. She also knew that she could not outrun them. Waiter calves were one thing, but they did not impart aerobic conditioning. Neither did riding the bus or surfing the web. With her body in full fight-or-flight, Mo did the only thing she could think to do. She ran into traffic.
Despite the fact that auto-cars had been available for over five years with their innate pedestrian avoidance, basic human instinct had not caught up. The four... Mo assumed that they were soldiers, did not immediately follow her into the street. There were only two cars in the west bound lane, but that was one more than Mo needed. It slowed to avoid her and she ran to the back of the car, jumped on the bumper and spread her arms to the side, clinging on as hard as she could. The second car got a good look at her with its dash camera, but the person inside was too busy reading their tablet to notice Mo's problems. The first auto-car no longer saw her as an obstacle and resumed its route to where ever it was going, accelerating at the street mandated rate to the designated speed limit for that road on that pavement in that weather. Direction was not a high priority concern for Mo. West on Thirteenth Avenue was enough for her. She would get off in a few blocks and figure out what to do from there.
Looking over her shoulder, Mo saw that her four attackers had come out from under the overpass. Now that they were in the light, she saw that they were all wearing black military outfits and had large guns strapped across their chest. One of them raised his and pointed it at Mo and the auto-car for a moment before one of his partners put his hand on the muzzle and pushed it back down. All four started to jog after the car. Behind them, she could see Darren stretched out on the ground. Mo hoped that he was only knocked out and nothing more. Still, she was not about to jump off to find out.
While the car trundled along, mostly oblivious to Mo's presence, the person inside was not. After a few blocks, the dark shape behind the tinted windows pressed open a window and thrust her head out. Older, nice blouse, glasses (though it did not look like they were active, PTN glasses). No tattoos. Not even the faded stretch marks of the InvisiTrace stuff that Gabriel had used. "What are you doing?" squeaked the woman. "Get off of my car!"
"Sorry," said Mo. "Was dodging some muggers."
"Are they still around?"
"Kind of. They're chasing the car."
"Chasing? Then get off of my car! Now!"
"No." Mo clung on to the rounded back of the vehicle, her fingertips straining against the back window trim. The woman pulled her head back in and a few seconds later, the car started to slow down.
The head came back out of the window. "Get off, or I start reversing. No free rides!"
Mo hopped off, leaving dusty shoe prints on the back bumper. She looked around. The soldier types were still jogging along. The other auto-car had passed Mo's itinerant ride and the street was empty in both directions. On her side of the street, the entire block was chain link fence, topped with barbed wire, protecting an electrical substation: towers and transformers and hanging wires and humming. Across the street, the south side was an empty lot: opened, exposed, no place to hide. The soldiers had picked up their pace, seeing her stranded. She knew that she was unable to out run them, so she had to get off the street. She had to hide. She decided to take her chances with the razor wire.
Mo looked at the fence. The chain link would not be a problem, but the three strands of overhanging barbed wire would be. She had seen videos of people getting over the stuff using a jacket which she did not have. Her t-shirt was not thick enough to protect her and she did not have the time to take off her jeans. Mo decided that the best route was near one of the fence poles. There, she could at least grab the hanger that held the wire.
When Mo got to the barbed wire, she found herself hanging by the wires' support and not sure what to do next. Looking down the street, the soldier types where now only a half block away. She swung a leg up and tried to hook her foot over the wire. It missed the first time, but she got it looped over the wire on her second attempt. The barbs went right through her jeans and into her half. She bit back the scream and tried to use her leg to lever herself over the rest of the fence. She managed, but not without ripping one of her pant legs to shreds and scratching her own leg badly. And falling flat on her face, but on the substation side of the fence. So she had that going for herself.
The soldiers were now almost to her on the other side of the fence. Mo pushed herself up and limped in among the transformers, looking for a place to hide.
[1] Mo-mentum... get it? Heh.
