Dreams of Stars Part 12

Sorry on the shortness of this section.  Probably should have posted it last week, but the next section starts a new scene and it would have felt weird.  Ah well.

            The door snapped open.  "Glad to hear it."  L’lorne gestured for Deborah to follow her.  "Let's go, I've bought us some time."

            "Time?"  Deborah reached the door and paused for a moment.  "What about that guy?"  She pointed to Sergeant Blake, lying half naked just inside the small data room.

            "He'll be fine, his friends will get him out."  L’lorne stepped over a second person sprawled out on the office floor.  "Well, as soon as he wakes up," she indicated to new body on the floor, who groaned and started to move.  “Which will be sooner rather than later I suppose.”

            "What happened?

            L’lorne sighed.  "This guy, and another one who got away, must have been friends with Blake there, and they saw through my attempts to fool them."  She should have sounded upset at her failure, but she didn't even seem a bit depressed by it, as if she meant for it to happen.  "Got him with the tape dispenser, missed the girl with the stapler though.  Sloppy work."

            "Oh, well, um, two out of three, I guess," Deborah said.  "So what happened then?"  The office door opened just as the data center door closed, and the two stepped out into the hallway.  All around, up and down the passageway, were bodies.  Deborah caught her breath as something like twenty men and women all dressed in uniforms clung to the floors and walls in various poses.  The only movement was the occasionally rise and fall of their chests, otherwise they were motionless.  "Oh my."

            "They'll be fine," L’lorne said flatly.  "I put them down when they tried to rush the office.  Guess they figured a woman couldn't defend herself."  There was a snicker.  "Or even attack.  They learned though."

            Deborah bent down and touched one of the soldiers.  "Looks painful."

            "Pain is temporary, they'll be fine."  L’lorne looked down the hallway in the opposite direction from which they arrived.  "We should get going, I'm sure they're going to send more people to check on their friends." 

            Deborah nodded and began a light trot back they way they had come.  "So we're just going to go down the elevator?"  L’lorne didn’t reply, but kept moving.  At the doors to the elevator, Deborah stopped and pushed the call button.  The light didn't come on, so she pressed it again.  Still nothing.

            "Don't bother," L’lorne said quietly.  "They've shut them down."

            "How do you. . ." Deborah never finished.

            "HALT!"  Right at the turn in the hall, a man, dressed in heavy combat gear and wielding a large, impressively intimidating weapon, yelled at the two them again, ordering them on to the ground.  He was quickly joined by three more soldiers, each with their own impressively intimidating weapons, all of them looking almost as scared of what it was they were aiming at as Deborah immediately felt upon seeing them.

            "Time to go," L’lorne said quickly, and she grabbed Deborah.  In a moment, the girl was flung up into L’lorne's arms, and the combination charged away from the weapons and the people who held them.

            Deborah could only just see over L’lorne's shoulder, and it was enough to see the leader give the order and the flashes of the weapons as they fired.  She had seen guns before, Danny occasionally brought one out for whatever effect he was trying to pull, and sometimes the cops did too, but never had she seen one fired, especially not at her.  The sight and the sound caused Deborah to want to bury herself into L’lorne's body and hide, but the shock of seeing it at all froze her.

            The bullets came.  The bland carpet was dotted puffs of dust and splinters as each piece of metal exploded into them.  More explosions, this time of plaster and bland paint, followed L’lorne's running body down the hall, tearing the walls apart and leaving ripped chunks of walls and small holes.  Bullets that should have hit their targets, however, seemed always to veer at nearly the last moment, passing by harmlessly or suddenly diving away and ripping into the walls and floor.

            Deborah's initial shock passed into questioning as to how these soldiers and their impressively intimidating weapons could miss so poorly.  This was all superseded when L’lorne suddenly turned around.  In an instant, the shooting guards were replaced with walls and their newly acquired bullet holes, and finally the glass of the lone window.  The light jump Deborah felt ripple up L’lorne's body was enough for her to turn her head and duck down.

            L’lorne's back shattered the glass.  Fragments passed by them, almost in slow motion, and Deborah could actually watch the individual particles of glass floating with them as the two moved through the empty sky.  She was screaming now, though when she had started she wasn't sure, but she was, and even more so since the bullets seemed to stand out against the bright blue sky that much more.  Then the fragments stopped moving, or at least didn't move the same way.  They looked almost like they were going backwards, back to where they came from.  As she watched and screamed, the fragments did indeed go back, and the window reformed behind them, only to have bullets create a bright flash behind them as the glass stopped each one cold.

            A sudden thump indicated that L’lorne had landed, and Deborah was able to stop herself from screaming.  She was confused, bewildered by the sudden turn of events, but time wasn't on their side, and L’lorne tugged on her arm to keep her moving.  Even so, Deborah managed to look back long enough at the window, some five stories up, and the impact blasts of a dozen bullets that it contained.

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Questions

1. What kind of person is Lcorn Llorne? What does she look like (in your mind)?
2. What kind of person is the Deborah Ignigus? What does she look like (in your mind)?
3. Does the setting seem fitting? Would you like to know more?
4. Effectively, this is the halfway point of the story, so what do you think so far?