Chapter 5 – Minnie
FIVE
MINNIE
I kicked Dr. Trout in the chest as he ripped my lab coat off. He tossed the fabric aside and pounced again, pressing my back up against the glass wall as I screamed. I kicked again and he pressed his forearm against my neck.
“If you’re not going to learn your place in this office, I’m going to teach it to you.”
I spat in his face. He slapped me.
“LET GO!”
I kicked him again.
I realized how powerless I was. I couldn’t stop him from doing what he was going to do, but by hell, I wouldn’t make it easy for him. And if I delayed him at least, there was still hope.
He punched me in the gut. I cried out and thrust out again, but he was stronger than me and much larger.
I tried not to cry, to convince myself that I could fight him off.
Then we heard the the loud screech of ripping metal and then the glass between us and the MRI machine shattered and Vidar burst through, his half-naked purple body shuddering as shards of glass protruded from his skin.
His eyes glowed fluorescent green as he towered over both of us, his body heaving in rage, his fangs exposed.
His tail whipped back and forth like an upset feline. He was more tiger than house cat, thankfully.
Dr. Trout dropped me to the floor in surprise.
“Step away from her,” Vidar instructed.
Dr. Trout lunged for the pager that would call the soldiers outside. Vidar swiped it across the table and stepped between me and Dr. Trout.
“Step away from her,” Vidar growled again.
“AHHH!” Dr. Trout yelled as he grabbed the MRI computer and yanked it off the desk, throwing it at Vidar.
Vidar moved faster than Dr. Trout could keep up with, catching the large screen and tossing it to the ground. Dr. Trout reached into his lab coat and pulled out a weapon. A gun which I didn’t even know he possessed. Likely a last ditch precaution against Vidar’s escape.
“DR. TROUT! NO!” I screamed.
He fired. The bullet bounced off of Vidar’s chest. I screamed again. Vidar lunged for Dr. Trout again. Another gunshot went off. Vidar grabbed Dr. Trout by the neck. Dr. Trout pointed the gun to Vidar’s skull.
“NO! VIDAR! PUT HIM DOWN!”
Dr. Trout fired directly at Vidar’s skull. The bullet bounced off and entered the doctor’s jaw. Blood spurted from Dr. Trout’s neck. I screamed. Vidar dropped the doctor, his hands shaking.
“He’s dead! Oh my God… He’s dead!” I screamed.
The life had gone from his eyes instantly. I’d watched it happen as if in slow motion. But… he’d had the gun pointed at Vidar’s head. How could this be?
I retched, stumbling backward and covering up what parts of myself I could, and threw up in a trashcan in the corner of the room. Vidar rested his giant hand on my shoulder and whispered, “Minerva, we have to go…”
Shattered glass and blood had exploded all over the room.
“We have to go…” Vidar insisted.
“I can’t go anywhere… It doesn’t matter where we go… They’re going to kill us. They’re going to kill you!” I sobbed hysterically.
I was a scientist, not a soldier. I didn’t want to do harm to anyone, not even Dr. Trout. Not Vidar either. If the military found him, they’d kill him.
“Minerva, trust me.”
“He’s dead!”
“He killed himself. I would have let him go,” Vidar insisted.
I believed him. Vidar, impervious to bullets, could have killed the doctor before any time he wanted to. He hadn’t done that and I believed him when he said that he never had the intention to do so. He only wanted to protect me.
He reached for my hand and I grabbed him tightly.
“I’ll get you out of here, but you need to trust me. I only want to protect you, Minerva.”
“How are we going to get you out of here? You’re seven feet tall… and…”
“Purple?”
“Yes. That.”
There were tens of other alien traits he possessed too, but the purple skin had to have been the biggest one.
“I’ve prepared for every contingency. All I need is for you to trust me and for us to find a place to stay at least for tonight.”
“The U.S. government can find us wherever we go,” I whispered.
The weight of what happened settled over me at once, despite Vidar’s hand holding mine, providing a certain measure of comfort.
“We’ll leave now then.”
“How?”
“My ocular implant permits site to site teleportation.”
“What? You mean you could teleport out of here?”
“I can get us five miles from here on the surface, no further.”
“Can you get any more precise?”
“Not with this much magnetic interference from the soil.”
“How does it work?”
“You hold on now.”
Vidar gripped my arm tightly and then he closed his eyes, tapping the side of his temples.
Then it all disappeared as if sucked through a needle eye.
I tried to open my mouth to scream but no sound came out.
We rematerialized on flat earth with fresh forest air.
I fell to my knees and a loud wheezing escaped my lungs.
Vidar was unaffected from our teleportation.
Teleportation. I’d actually done something that had been a staple in earth science fiction for years. It was actually possible and my scientific mind was desperate for an explanation as to how on earth any of this could be possible at all…
“Are you alright?”
I dusted the dirt off my palms and rose to my feet, nodding despite the nausea threatening to knock me off my feet.
“I think so.”
The sun had already begun to set. I had no idea where we were, but if we were within five miles of the lab, we had to get moving.
“I can give you our coordinates,” Vidar offered, trying to get me stable so we could get moving. He might have been impervious to bullets, but I wasn’t.
“Coordinates won’t help me. I can hear cars. We must be near the highway.”
We were surrounded by trees, but I could hear the familiar sound of trucks whooshing down the highway and car horns honking like crazy. Rush hour would have the city grid locked for about another hour, so escaping by car would have been senseless.
“Can you do another one of these teleports?” I asked.
“It would help if I knew where we were going.”
“What about your ship? You said it was nearby?”
“Yes. It’s in Vermont.”
“Vermont isn’t nearby?!” I half-yelled.
Vidar wrinkled his nose.
“Of course it is. It’s not in England or anything.”
Right. To him, anywhere within this country counted as “nearby”. If we were to get to Vermont, and could only teleport five miles at a time, I’d be sucking my body through that tiny needle hole over and over again… I didn’t think I could take it.
“Surely there’s a more sophisticated way to get to Vermont.”
“I’m supposed to be here for six months. To get an emergency broadcast to my people I’d need a HAM radio and an amplifier.”
“I wouldn’t begin to know where to find that.”
“I need you to think, Minerva. Where can we be safe. Think.”
He grabbed my shoulders and gazed into my eyes with such fearsome determination. He’d protected me so far. It was my turn to protect him.
“If we can make it to the highway, I can figure out where to go next. I think I know someone we can trust.”
“Who?”
“Dr. Billings. John Billings. Things are a bit awkward between us but we’ve been good friends for years. If we explain everything to him, he’ll help us out.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“Yes,” I replied after giving it some thought, “John’s a good person.”
“Okay. You wait here. I can make it to the highway and back faster than you can.”
Not only could he teleport, but Vidar could move faster than any human being.
I rested my back up against a large tree, still gasping for breath.
The image of Dr. Trout’s neck as blood spurted forth from the bullet wound couldn’t leave my mind.
I gasped and sank to the ground, crouching and pulling my knees in close.
Pull it together, Minerva.
By now, the soldiers had likely discovered the bloody, gruesome scene in the lab.
I wanted someone to blame for what happened, but I had to admit to myself that Vidar was only protecting me.
Dr. Trout wanted to hurt me and he planned on it.
Vidar followed his instincts. His instincts to protect me were stronger than I could have predicted, just like my instincts to save him after we’d… bonded.
What had only happened a few days ago felt like aeons ago. And I couldn’t help but feels more strongly for him than I had for any man. He was strong, masculine, intelligent, quick and…
Vidar appeared beside me, his chest heaving slowly as if he were barely out of breath.
“We’re just off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway.”
“Okay. I think we can get to John’s apartment, but we should wait until it’s darker.”
“Alright.”
“I think we can make it in five rounds of teleportation.”
“That’s too many. I can only handle four before I need to recharge.”
“How do you recharge?”
“Without access to my ship? Sleep.”
Right. I should have been able to figure that out. The stress of everything that happened made me overly tired and I wasn’t thinking straight. Hopefully I was thinking straight about John. Hopefully I was right about him helping us.
“We’re only three miles away from the lab,” Vidar explained, “Will their scanning devices be able to pick us up?”
I reached into my pocket and found my cellphone. A lump formed in my throat.
“What is that?” Vidar asked, snatching it out of my hand.
“Cellphone.”
“A primitive communications device? They can use this to track us, right?”
“Yes.”
“My implant may be able to redirect the signal somewhere else. That should throw them off our trail for a while.”
He stared at the phone and a thin beam of red light projected from his eyeball. I gasped in awe. Vidar ignored my childlike fascination with technology that to him was quite normal.
“I’ve projected the signal about fifty miles South. That should put them off the trail for a while.”