Chap two

By the time I found John again, I was huffing and puffing and my ankle had decided that if I wasn't going to cooperate it was just going to fill my foot with blood and then pout. It felt a lot like hanging upside down and having all the blood rush to my head, but I was more reminded of Eric Matthews, bashing his foot apart with that chunk of concrete. I know that's probably an exaggeration, but I was a gamer, which meant the worst injury I had sustained in the last ten years was when I bit my nails too low. Needless to say, I don't have a very high threshold for pain and I had passed it when I fell while trying to run.

I came up to the corner of building H and rested against it for a moment. In my boot I could feel my toes squishing as I moved them and I pretended like I knew, for sure, that it was just sweat and not my sock filling with blood like my brain kept insisting. Like I said, on a pain scale of Bella Swan to Wolverine, I'm that guy Hook puts in the Boo Box.

I looked around the corner just in time to see John kick his way through the back entrance of building G and slip into the dark hallway, the door swinging closed behind him. I took another wheezing breath and then hobbled on my heel across the overgrown courtyard. I looked around as I wasn't interested in getting arrested for trespassing, and then pushed my way through the door.

The hallway was dark, the only light coming through the door I was holding open and there was no sign of John. On the floor in front me lay a burglar bar that had probably been on the inside of the door, a mangled padlock lay several feet further. I had been trying to fathom how much force he would have had to put into a kick to break a padlock like that when I heard what I could only imagine was the cocking of gun from the darkness behind the door. A second later I stopped imagining when the cold steel pushed against the back of my ear.

I wanted to put my hands up, but I wanted more to not get shot, so I froze.

When he said "Surprise, asshole" I almost laughed out loud.

This guy was spot on. He even sounded like Bruce Willis. Suddenly he pushed me up against the wall and kicked my legs apart, pulling my bag off and frisking me all in the same motion. I gasped in pain as my ankle started composing another song in response to the rough treatment. The door swung mostly shut but stopped short of closing off the light completely and I wondered if I would end up a statistic on the news, found months later by some homeless guy trying to find a warm place to sleep.

"Why are you following me?" John asked when he finished his quick, but invasively thorough search. He spun me around and pushed me back against the wall. I could see his weapon now, and was impressed to see he was in fact holding a Beretta92. Matt Farrell had been right. Up close it looked really good.

I hadn't even had an answer when I asked myself why I had followed him, but with the gun pushed into my eye socket I peed a little and then stammered the only thing I could think of.

"Y-y-you're John McClane right?"

"How do you know that name?" He asked suspiciously.

I never got the chance to answer this oddest of questions though, as the sliver of light coming through the door winked out and it started to swing open when someone else pushed it wide again.

I may not have recognized John McClane right off the bat, but I suffered no such doubt about this new figure. Tall, lean, dressed in an impeccably nondescript black suit, tie clipped, shoes polished. Custom Blinde Design sunglasses perched on a too perfect face, his combed hair with not a single strand misaligned. Where did he even get those shades? They weren't available to the public. These weren't the $240 ones off the internet from ten years ago. These were frameless, designed by Richard Walker himself. He looked past me at John and when he spoke, I knew I had been right in my guess at his identity. Nobody else could deliver so much pleasure and disdain in the same sentence.

"Mr. Dallas." Agent Smith drawled in his friendly-as-a-shark manner. "And here I thought finding you again would be difficult. I see I gave you too much credit."

Dallas? I looked back at John, who had thankfully taken his gun off me so that he could point it at Smith, and realized immediately that he was right. The man I had followed actually looked more like Korbin Dallas than John McClane. The blonde hair should have been a dead giveaway and although the two characters were so close I still felt stupid that I had missed it. But this was too much. Both of these guys looked fantastic. Had I stumbled upon some high-end professional LARPing group?

I had never heard a gun fired in real life. I'd heard what I thought might be gunfire in the distance of course, but I couldn't really tell you the difference between that sound and say a car backfiring until the moment Dallas pulled the trigger on his Beretta. In the tiny hallway it sounded like a series of bombs going off one after the other. I saw the man dressed as Smith pitch backward into the dirt and Dallas slammed the door closed. I felt him stuff my bag into my arms and shove me down the pitch black hall.

"Run kid!"

"I can't see!" I said stupidly.

I felt a sweaty hand grab my arm and push it against the wall.

"Follow that. Fuckin' run!"

I pushed off down the hall as fast as my leg would allow.

"You shot that man!" I yelled into the hallway. I'm not really sure why, if this guy was on a rampage then he had just decided to spare me, and it was probably a pretty dumb time to point out that he was a murderer. I could hear him trying doors behind me as we went.

"Well kid, if it makes you feel any better I probably just pissed him off."

"Are you telling that really was Agent Smith?"

Light bloomed into the hall and when I looked back Dallas was peering through an unlocked door he had found. He motioned with his gun and I followed him into a stairwell lined by dirty windows. The enclosed room was hot as an oven and the light made me blink. Dallas ran up the stairs, checking the windows as he went. It took me several seconds to hike myself up behind him, and when I passed the window it gave me a vantage point to the door we had used to enter the building. The man dressed as Smith was gone. I saw what might have been blood stains on the concrete but they were a deep purple, like beets. Did blood look like that in large amounts? I'd only really ever seen it in movies.

"C'mon kid!" Dallas hollered from two flights up. My ankle was playing a full on orchestra of pain at this point and instead of trying to take it stair by stair I grabbed the handrails and pogo'd up on my one good foot. By the time I made it to the top sweat was running down my face and into my eyes, making them burn and my arms complained about the extra work. I was so out of shape it was pathetic.

I heard the gun go off again and when I looked up Dallas was pulling the shattered remains of another padlock off the emergency exit to the roof. He lifted the hatch and peeked through the slit and then motioned me up first.

I had managed to get almost to the top when the door to the fourth floor, next to Dallas, banged open. The sound startled me so much that I lost my footing and slipped off the rungs. I caught it several steps down but on the bad ankle and it let out a scream worthy of Kirk right after Spock was killed, but to its credit allowed me to stay on the ladder.

Dallas hadn't missed a beat. The door swung inwards and before it got more than a foot or two open he had put first his boot into it and then several rounds from the Beretta.

"Go kid go!"

I pulled myself hand over hand toward the hatch, but I had barely made it when Dallas was pushing me up from beneath. I spilled out onto the roof, scattering gravel and he landed beside me, lifting me back onto my feet and pushing me away from the hatch, our shoes crunching as we ran.

I looked around but there was nothing on this roof. A few old air conditioning units and exhaust fans, but nothing to solve my problem of being stuck between two overly dedicated cosplayers in a grudge match. Most pressingly the hatch we had used to access the roof seemed to be the only escape to be had.

I was about to ask Dallas about his plan when, and I shit you not, the man pulled a sonic screwdriver from his pocket. He shook it a couple times like it was a maraca and then started swearing.

"Piece of shit crazy ass kook. 'Just give it a flick! It opens right up! Push the button and Bob's your Aunt!'" It was probably one of the worst impressions of the Doctor I had ever heard. He tilted his head back and shouted at the sky "Just give me a goddamn phone next time!"

The hatch we had come in from shot violently into the air, the hinges spinning off in all directions. Before it hit the gravel Smith was casually pulling himself over the ledge.

Large, ugly wounds peppered his body, but where there should have been blood there were gooey eggplant colored craters. It looked like mashed cabbage. I'd seen wounds like that before, but I couldn't quite place where. His suit, rather than being torn and soaked in cabbage juice seemed to be made of similar goop. The meaty holes made it obvious his flesh and his suit were all the same stuff.

It didn't seem to slow him down though and he started walking across the roof toward us. Somehow, his polished shoes crunching calmly in the gravel, like he had all the time in the world, was one of the most terrifying sounds I had ever heard. I wanted nothing more than to be somewhere else. I looked at Dallas.

"Throw me the sonic!"

He looked at me like I was crazy, and maybe he was right. But I figured, LARPers or not, if their was a Timelord involved his plan would probably work.

"The Doctor gave you that right?" At the time it was the most preposterous thing to ever come out of my face. I've since one upped myself.

Dallas didn't answer and Smith was less than thirty feet away, if he started running he could close the gap in seconds, but it looked like my question had told him something he wanted to know anyway. He threw the screwdriver to me.

I had gone as three different Doctors, the Ninth, Eccleston was my favorite, and as I got older the one I was more suited to playing, but at one time I had made a very respectable Tenant, complete with functioning Sonic screwdriver. It had cost me almost two hundred dollars on EBay, but it had been worth every penny. Die cast metal, rechargeable lithium battery, LEDs on both the base, hilt and even sensor tips, capable of up to thirty different variations of the sonic sound clip and it even played all sixteen official theme songs.

The instant I caught the one Dallas threw, I knew mine was junk.

For one, this thing weighed nothing. I don't mean it was light, I mean it was weightless. Though I could see it gripped between my fingers, my brain rejected the notion that I was holding anything. If I didn't keep a firm grasp on it I had no doubt it would slip out of my hand as easily as the ring from Issildur's finger. There were no flashy lights, just a small diode of some sort embedded at the tip, a small grey button right at thumb height with a small tactile strip beneath it. It was brilliantly simple, enormously elegant and blatantly alien.

Dallas grabbed me by the sleeve. "Shit or get off the pot kid!"

With a practiced circular flick of my wrist the arms on the end extended and the diode somehow bloomed into a larger version of itself. I pointed it at Smith, ran my thumb all the way up the tactile strip and pushed the button.

The sound it made was beyond beautiful. Mine sounded like a child's toy, this one sprang into a symphony of science. Audible mathematics. It was orderly, yet melodic in its perfection, and it sang of knowledge yet to be grasped.

I wasn't sure what I thought would happen. I thought maybe it would deactivate him, or slow him down in some clever way, but instead he burst like Mikey when K hit him with the de-atomizer. Whatever it was he was made of turned from cabbage to coleslaw and I was covered in it like that poor state trooper, and probably wearing the same expression. Where the agent had been standing was now the familiar blue box in the middle of a rather pretty purple splatter not unlike Rorschach in the snow . No slow fade in. No whirring sound of the emergency brake being left on. It just wasn't there, and then it was, and poor Smith apparently got telefragged.

The door to the Tardis opened and David Tenant, the Tenth and arguably most popular Doctor, stuck his head out of the door and stared at me for a second. He had none of the surprised glee he normally sported upon meeting new people and when he saw the sonic in my still outstretched hand he reached out and took it with an annoyed scowl, closing the door as he turned away.

"Whoa! Doc!" Dallas jumped forward, purple droplets splattering against the faded blue paint, and stuck his bandaged hand in the door as the Doctor slammed it behind him. It banged against his scabbed knuckles, but Dallas left his fingers in the door jam, swearing under his breath.

I had been watching the Doctor for years, and like every other Whoovian out there I had always dreamed that one day this ship would show up and I would be allowed to go with the legendary man who piloted it.

I tell you now though, when Dallas grabbed me by the sleeve once again and shoved me through the door, a part of me screamed at the insanity of it. None of this could be what it seemed. It was obviously some elaborate joke.

But if it wasn't… If this was Korbin Dallas pushing me into a time machine that was bigger on the inside just seconds after having been almost caught by one of the baddest of all imagined bad guys ever, did I really want to put myself in a situation that could get more chaotic and or dangerous. I could die, or worse. Lots of worse things than death happened in movies.

Admit it though, even without the intimidating figure of Bruce Willis giving you a shove into a Tardis, you'd have taken that particular red pill without much fuss too.