AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I know I’m late,” I said in a rush, stumbling backwards as if putting some space between us would actually do me any good now. My back hit the front of the stove. “I just need a little bit more time.”
“Magnus is not a patient man,” he said. His voice cracked with the typical gruffness of a man who smoked a lot of the stimulant-laced, synthetic testosterone drug T-dust. “You pay right now. Or you come work off your debt.”
“Work off how? In one of Magnus’ drug houses?” I questioned frantically. “Because I can promise you right now that I won’t be any good. I failed New Toronto High chemistry.”
The man tilted his bald head, cracking his neck loudly before casting a coldly calculating eye from the top of my head to my toes.
“You’ve got a halfway decent face,” he grunted. “And a more-than-decent body. He’ll have other work for you.”
Uh oh.
I fought the urge to cross my arms over my chest, instead nodding my head over and over again like the antique bobble-head doll on the desk in the shift manager’s office at the factory.
“Alright!” I squeaked. “Um. Alright. How very, er, generous of Magnus. To allow me the chance to work off my debt! Let me just… Uh… Get my things…”
I moved as if to walk into my bedroom, my mouth going dry when I thought of the fire escape’s bars so tantalizingly close. But the goon didn’t budge.
“No things,” he said. “We go now.”
Well, that sure as hell was not happening. I hardened myself with the resolve that no matter what happened, I was not leaving this apartment with this man.
Not alive, anyway.
Maybe he saw something change in my expression, because his eyes suddenly narrowed and he lunged for me.
Growing up in the manufacturing district of New Toronto on Terratribe I was by no means a cushy experience, and I could scrap with the best of them. But this meathead had at least a hundred pounds on me, not to mention the effects of the muscle-swelling, fury-inducing T-dust. I had to be smart and I had to be quick.
I managed to dodge his hold – barely – before I wound my foot up for a colossal kick right between his legs. But, shit, it wasn’t anywhere near as effective as it should have been. Whether the T-dust had shrivelled his balls so damn much that I hadn’t made good contact, or the drug’s signature rage had left him impervious to pain, the guy didn’t fall to his knees howling the way I’d hoped. But he did lose his balance a little. And when he got tangled in the sideways chair legs on the floor, he did go down on one knee at least.
But I still wouldn’t be able to run past him to get either to the front door or the bedroom. And he was already trying to get up, taking a few seconds to swear at the chair and smash his fist down upon its hapless form.
Fan-fucking-tastic. Not only had I managed to not incapacitate the son of a bitch, I’d pissed him right the hell off. Six-months-ago Cherry looked like a goddamn genius compared to current Cherry.
Keeping the man in my sights from across the tiny kitchen, my hands moved blindly over the counter behind me, desperately searching for a knife. In my panic, I couldn’t remember if I’d gotten a knife out yet to slice up my protein block or not. The fact I couldn’t feel a handle or the naked bite of a blade against my scrabbling fingers was not a good sign.
But I did find something else. The now-warm handle of my cast iron pan.
I didn’t stop. Didn’t think. I made a fist around the gritty metal and swung it forward as hard as I fucking could.
It connected beautifully, smashing the guy directly in his piggish, angry face just as he was trying to rise from the floor. Stunned, he sailed over to one side. Before one meaty hand flew up to his face, I had time to see the fresh, furious pink of a burn across his cheek and forehead as well as the crimson froth of blood pouring from his nose.
And then I was running. Right out the apartment’s door and into the hall. I nearly took out Mrs. Calloway, and as she dove out of my way I nonsensically called out, “Thank you!” instead of saying sorry the way I normally would have if I hadn’t been absolutely on fire with terror. Somewhere behind me, just as I slid into the lift and slammed my hand against the close doors button, came the blood-drowned, nasal bellow of a man with a now-crushed nose.
“Repayment plan is off the table, you fucking cunt! You’re going straight to the bottom of Lake New Nipissing!”
The lift doors creaked shut, locking me in with myself under the harsh white light. I stared at my reflection in the grimy metal doors. My blue eyes looked absolutely massive with panic, my long brown hair coming loose from its braid. My face was very white, but not quite as white as the knuckles of the hands that still squeezed tightly to my cast iron pan.
The lift plunged downwards. As it did so, I made plans. Frantic, messy, half-formed ones. I had to get off-planet, that was for sure.
But go where? And with what fucking money?
The pale woman with the bloody pan looking back at me didn’t have an answer.
I tore my gaze from her, swallowing against nausea, my eyes roving over the advertisements bleating their tired slogans out from the lift’s screen panel to my left. I’d seen them all before, the familiar colours and words bleeding into each other.
Until suddenly, a new advertisement flashed.
The colours were so different from the preceding greys and whites that I found myself blinking against the change. The screen was lit up as if with sunlight, the kind of sunlight that never shone that brightly in New Toronto. And the scene it showed definitely wasn’t one from Terratribe I. No, it was a landscape of rose-gold cliffs and warmth. Tufts of yellow grasses waved prettily in the foreground and an idyllic little house sat in the distance, so charming and rustic that at first I thought it might be an image of Terratribe II, the pastoral, agricultural colony planet.
