Jane opened her eyes.
“How long have I been here?” She thought.
It was dark and she was lying face down on the cold, wet concrete floor. A searing pain shot through her shoulder. She sat up and inspected the damage: her left shoulder was fucked, laser burned and bad. She could barely move her arm and for a good reason; the tendons and ligaments in her shoulder had been burned away leaving a hole through the bone and muscle.
The next few hours were a blur for Jane.
She woke up again in her bed, her shoulder bandaged. She couldn't remember how she’d gotten there; did she walk? She didn’t know.
She poured her self a glass of water and sat down at her table. She was tired, but it felt like she’d slept for a long time; she wondered how long she had slept, but a second later it didn’t matter.
She read her BPM it was at one hundred and ten. Her resting heart rate at one-ten! She knew it was too high and she was stressed, but she couldn’t shake it. She couldn’t shake the uncontrollable will to survive. In her mind there was only one way to do that and that was to track Ari down, capture his ass and hand him over to Oren so she could get herself a new heart. She hadn’t thought about it for a while but it was at the forefront of her mind right now.
“You need a new heart. Get a fucking heart"
She could feel it beat in her chest; she could feel it getting weaker. She could feel her body willing her to replace it. She looked at her heart rate again. It was at 120.
“Stop looking you'll only make it worse,” she thought and she was right: it did always make it worse. She calmed herself and she could feel it slow a little, but it was still pounding.
“John,” she thought.
Jane arrived at John’s apartment which was on the fifth floor of a high rise not too far from Jane's place. John was a militia man Jane met at a bar once. She could tell he was in to her and she thought he'd probably come in handy at some point so she took his details. She figured, being a militia man, he probably had a nice stash of weapons. She knocked his door. No answer. She knocked again. Nothing.
Jane looked down the hallway noticing that the nearest apartment was a good distance away. She looked at John’s door, stepped back a few paces, ran forward and thrust her foot in to the center of it. The door swung open.
She felt a blast of pain run through her shoulder, shook it off and then entered the apartment.
The air in the apartment was crisp, the design was minimal, a painting of an antique gun, an ak47, hung on the wall and the place had a chemical smell that clung to the inside of Jane’s nostrils.
She turned the apartment upside down and found an Blacks semi-automatic pulse rifle. An expensive piece of equipment in itself, but not quite expensive enough to provide her with a heart. It would help her though, so she slung the strap over her shoulder.
As she was leaving the apartment she noticed an curious looking ball on the table near the entrance, so she picked it up and then immediately recognized it as a disruptor grenade.
“Fucking Jackpot,” she thought. She grabbed it and slid it in to the inside pocket of her robes.
It was 3am on Thursday morning and Ari Sarkisian was lying in bed, shacked up in one of his safe houses, when he heard the unmistakable sound of a pulse rifle being fired on the street outside. He threw the covers off of himself and was immediately awake. He darted out of the bedroom, through the short corridor and in to the kitchen. He stumbled in to the kitchen table and then realized he was wearing nothing but boxer shorts. He could hear that the shots were moving closer. Bang, an explosion. He grabbed his shoes and hopped in to the them. In nothing but boxers and shoes he swung the kitchen door open and started to run as fast as he could through the pitch black garden, he made left and jumped over the chain link fence that rain around the perimeter of the house. It was the wrong way. Pulse rifle fire whizzed past him; it was close enough to singe the hairs on his arm.
Jane shouted, “The next one’ll be on target.”
Ari didn’t look back, he carried on running and rounded the corner. There was his grav-cycle covered by a dirty tarp. He flung the tarp off, hopped on his bike, jammed the key in it’s slot and turned it. The bike sprang to life; a symphony of light and heat. He kicked it in to gear and threw his foot at the peddle. He reached about 100 miles per hour in around two seconds rounding the corner at top speed, but it wasn’t fast enough because about ten seconds before that Jane had launched her disruptor grenade in Sarkisian’s direction. The bike went dark and cold. Sarkisian controlled the bike until it slowed to a stop. He jumped off and started running away from Jane.
Jane pulled the pulse rifle up, aimed and let off a single shot. It went straight through Sarkisian’s thigh. He fell to the ground.
“Alright, alright, fine, you’ve got me,” he shouted.
Jane pulled Sarkisian to his feet and marched him at gun point to one of his now deceased guards vehicles. As she was stuffing him in to the trunk he noticed Grant. He was lying on the floor. Sarkisian couldn’t tell if he was unconscious or dead.
Jane closed the lid of the boot.
She drove down the speedway, it would take a long time to get to Oren’s. She could hear Sarkisian shouting something or other but she just ignored him.
A rush of pain spiked her chest. She pulled over and read her heart rate: 190 BPM. She’d pushed herself way too hard.
“Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck."
Jane pulled her seat belt off and threw open the door. The pain was unbearable, she clutched her chest and bent over breathing deliberately, slowly and deeply. She got it under control and then it tightened again this carried on for about five minutes.
Jane noticed headlights in the distance and then all at once It felt like a vice was crushing her heart, like it could explode at any minute.
“Stop panicking, calm down,” she thought.
Jane started to cry, tears streamed down her face and then she blacked out.
Her body lay limp at the side of the road with the headlights of a parked car illuminating her body.
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