Final BreathEpub Read online

  Final Breath

  Clint Lowe

  About The Author

  Clint Lowe’s stories are a mix of the weird, the fantastical, and the heartfelt. Visit him on his YouTube channel Write Heroes, where he analyses various aspects of storytelling and creative writing.

  Write Heroes http://bit.ly/2qa2wdYWriteHeroes

  Amazon Author Page http://bit.ly/33yqbDGClintLoweAuthor

  Newsletter http://eepurl.com/gsOvIj

  Also by Clint Lowe and available at Amazon:

  Swimming In Puddles https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07L24SSNC

  Copyright © 2018 by Clint Lowe

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the author.

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN: 978-0-9876412-0-5 (ebook)

  978-0-9876412-1-2 (paperback)

  978-0-9876412-2-9 (hardback)

  Cover picture by Clint Lowe

  Heroes Press

  Final Breath

  A Robbery

  The spaceship’s engineer lay unconscious at my feet, a state I had put him in. We were in the engine room of the mighty Welkin, at the rear of the space-travelling craft. Before us were the source rods – spares in case the ship required more fuel. They might’ve been orange glow sticks held by a child, but, instead, they were one of the most expensive elements in the known universe, a power source running this ship all the way from Earth to Cerulean. The price that one rod could be illegally sold for would easily start a new life. Perfect for a broke, single young girl – well, technically a broke engaged girl, but I’d only fooled Dante into believing he had my heart so I could make this flight. I’d leave that gangster behind on Cerulean.

  I took a tense breath, then exhaled onto the foggy laserproof glass that protected the rods, preparing for my heist: steal the source rod before me. It was a simple procedure of cutting through the glass, grabbing the source rod, and scramming before the engineer woke – an important factor given the penalty for my crime would be death.

  The engineer was dressed in a white-buttoned shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his biceps, trying to show off his pathetic twig arms. It appeared he was attempting to grow a beard but had only managed a grassy, darkish-blonde stubble. His brown slacks were light years out of fashion, and one of his bootlaces was left undone – talk about untidy. The tiny red nerve-neutralizer disc I had shot him with remained stuck upon his neck and glowing red, but the engineer began to stir, offering little shifts from his eyelids and tiny nose twitches resembling a mouse sniffing cheese – surely he couldn’t wake through a neutralizer disc.

  “Stop stalling, Evita,” I whispered.

  With great nerves twisting my stomach in more directions than the numerous pipes running along the walls, I used my heat cutter to begin slicing a hole through the glass, creating an opening big enough to reach through. Too scared to use my fiancé’s money card lest he discover the purchase, I’d been forced to use the small allowance on my card to purchase a cheap cutter – a Súper model from Mexico – but it failed to live up to its super name. It flicked and sparked as the red-hot beam lacerated the glass. My hat-sized circle was merely inches from being complete when bang! the worthless cutter sparked a crimson bloom that more resembled a laser gun. The instrument heated to furnace temperatures and I dropped it. It landed on my boots and skidded onto the ground, fiizzeed as it short-circuited, then a puff of smoke signified the cutter’s days were zilch.

  Like my days could be.

  “Damn it.”

  My mother, who passed when I was seven, always told me You have a sweet singers voice, darling, but my cuss came out more like a miserable boss’s scolding. I stomped back and accidentally kicked the engineer in the head. A grunt escaped his lips, and with a small twitch, he opened his eyes.

  How could he wake?

  I possibly have to kill the young man, I thought. Could I even do that? Well, it will be him or me.

  The engineer’s hazel eyes caught me for a moment, hazel and hazy as a Saudi sand storm. He didn’t appear to register me or even his own whereabouts and quickly slipped back into dreamland, blonde hair slipping over his eyes.

  Okay, this is going bad, I told myself. But I haven’t survived for years with the mob only to quit my mission because a cheap dealer sold me a crummy cutter in Calexico.

  I needed another plan.

  Across the room lay a sturdy cross-wrench, the old kind used to undo sockets in case your core drill went flat or on some rare occasions, exploded. I hopscotched over the sleeping man, retrieved the wrench. The way to the rods lied before me: a small reach through the glass and then drill one from its socket. I tapped my already cut area of glass to check it for strength. It still felt sturdy, robust. It would take a good wrench whacking to bust it open, and the racket could wake the young engineer. I glanced down at him. “Please don’t wake,” I whispered, “or I might have to kill you.” Then I arched back and rammed the wrench into the glass.

  The boom echoed around the engine room, but the glass did not break.

  I checked the man. His nose gave another slight twitch, but that was all.

  I returned to beating the glass, a boom boom of shattering ricochets, and after some muscle-tensioning pounds, the glass circle snapped with a loud crack, and the round piece popped through the room and tinged onto the floor as a near perfect circle.

  I took my core drill from my hip pouch, then snuck it through the hole in the glass. The rods were attached to the wall with tiny silver screws, and I stuck my drill in a screw-head as tight as possible, knowing if I couldn’t get the screws out, the heist was over, and I’d be destined live out my days in misery as the wife of Dante. In desperation, I held my breath and pulled the trigger on the drill. The drill-bit bumped and ground and spun over the screw-head and fortunately it unwound the screw.

  The silver piece plopped out and fell onto the ground with a mousey ting.

  While my free hand rested against the glass, I drilled out three screws. The rod now dangled precariously on an angle. I dared not let it drop lest it could explode and not only kill me, but it could ignite the rest of the rods and blow a hole in the back of the ship.

  “Steady, girl,” I told myself, wiping a drop of sweat from my brow.

  All I had to do was detach the final screw, then drop my drill and catch the rod before it struck the floor.

  Easy, sort of.

  For extra reach, I pushed my body against the glass and then started unscrewing the final piece. The drill rumbled in my hands, slowly, gently, deliberately; I readied to catch the rod.

  My breathing intensified.

  The screw almost out.

  Then a person’s murky shadow reflected in the glass.

  “Don’t be stupid,” they said from over my shoulder. A young man’s voice, kind of innocent and sweet. But also dumb. Another glance into the glass confirmed it was the engineer.

  How did he wake? And shouldn’t he be stressed over a thief stealing such a priceless commodity? Why such confidence? Maybe he has a weapon pointed at me. Hell, does he have a laser gun?

  In all the thrill of the robbery, I had forgotten to check.

  My body was still constrained against the glass, one hand bracing myself, the other stretched in holding the drill to the screw that sat perilously in the hole. I couldn’t move. I could not turn around and sock his chin. The only defense against him: bluffing.

  “If you shoot me,” I told him in my rough-gangster tone. “I’ll drop the rod and we’ll both die.”

  The young man shuffled in beside me, the disc on his neck flickering precariously from red to green before dropping to the floor.

  That’s why he woke so fast. Stupid cheap neu
tralizer gun. Damn cheap dealer.

  The engineer looked down at the disc, then peered at me. “Seems you failed in frying my nerves, lady.” I simply glared back. A glare intended to scare him. Maybe it would work; his body was barely thicker than the cross-wrench. But he didn’t run cowering from my scowling. Instead, his boyish face clutched an arrogant grin, his eyes a little shrouded by scraggly hair. He looked flamboyantly old-fashioned, like some hippie surfer from many centuries past. He focused his hazel eyes upon the drill in my hand. “Screw the rod back in,” he said.

  After being bullied by Dante, there was no chance of taking orders from a hippy engineer.

  “I’m taking a rod,” I told him. “Then if you let me leave, I’ll let you live.” I had no clue if that was a genuine warning or an empty threat. But even if he did allow me to depart, he could easily tell the patrols onboard and help them find my face on the computer. It was settled: two of us were in the engine room, but only one was walking out.

  Could I really kill the young man? He couldn’t have been more than nineteen, perhaps a year older than me. And not to mention he was sort of cute in a stupid, injudicious way, like a grown dog that hasn’t figured out it’s no longer a puppy.

  “How’d you get into the engine room anyway?” he said.

  As if I’d tell you, I thought. Now what to use for a weapon?

  I had no laser gun, and the broken cutter at my feet had shot its last beam of heat. The only viable option was to whip the drill from the screw, hope the screw doesn’t fall and release the rod, then jam the drill into the man’s temple, driving the bit into his brain. The thought of it – all the blood, the gooey flesh, the brain matter – made me wince, my face screwing into untold angles.

  The engineer noticed my crinkled nose. “Do I smell bad?” he questioned.

  “No,” I said, and he actually smelled clean. “Just thinking of something messy.”

  He tapped the glass with his finger. “Well, get to thinking of screwing that rod back in. This ship could lose power and float off course without it.”

  It’s not going to float. “The ship will fly fine,” I told him. “It’s merely a backup rod.”

  “You sure?” he said, eyes slowly turning from the glass to dropping me a sly peep. But why was he questioning me? Shouldn’t one of the ship’s engineers be educated?

  “An engineer should know these are support rods,” I said.

  He fully faced me and folded his arms, cocked one foot over the other – untied shoelace as out-of-place as his hair – then lazily leaned his shoulder against the glass like he was resting against a tree while watching swans glide upon a lake. “I’m the cleaner,” he stated without any hint of humiliation over his demeaning job.

  “So you couldn’t even fix one of the maintenance pods, let alone the ship?”

  His eyes narrowed, perplexed, then he scratched a hand through his early beginnings of a beard. “What’s a maintenance pod?”

  I shook my head in frustration and also pity, but also relief. A stupid cleaner would be too dumb to stop me . . . maybe, perhaps. He could still report me, though. I sighed in desperation for an answer, a solution to my predicament, and dropped my gaze to my feet. And there lay my remedy, as if delivered by mail.

  The heavy wrench.

  Perfect for whacking him over the head – not a lethal blow, merely a blunt thud. He wouldn’t die; he’d only fall unconscious and wake with a headache and likely wouldn’t remember me. His unintelligent grin made him appear he wouldn’t recall much at the best of times. And even if he did recollect my face and got the patrols onto me, I’d just say He’s a cleaner and a fool and delusional from the knock to his skull (that he obtained by falling over), and being the promised wife to one of the richest men aboard this ship, a known mobster at that, they would see I had no need to steal the rod for extra money and would believe my story over his. Dante might even have him thrown into the ship’s lock-up for telling such a tale.

  I threw a haughty glance. “Look here, boy.”

  “Tanton,” he said.

  “You’re a cleaner,” I said, “so clean up my broken glass.” I smiled coyly and returned to the rod and prepared to pull the trigger on the drill.

  Then an intruding hand slipped inside my pants pocket. Tanton swiftly plucked out my identity shield. He angled the reflective card back and forth, investigating my picture – a half-Mexican girl on a mad hair day – yes, mad hair day. The picture was taken the day after my fake engagement. Dante made me update my card so it appeared I had a rich, opulent upbringing.

  I wanted to snatch the card from Tanton’s hand, then to sock him across the chin. But my body remained all tangled up, prepared to steal the rod, rendering me helpless.

  “Evita Sánchez,” he said and then offered a sly grin. “Every Mexican is a Sánchez.”

  How racist. “My card goes back in my pocket or I drop the rod,” I said, offering my mob-threatening stare, and his cheeky grin slowly drooped from his face because he knew I might be loco enough to do it.

  Then he put on a fake stare, the kind a cowboy wore before a duel. “The rod won’t explode from that short fall.”

  Possibly not. “Want to test that theory?” I said, and his dueling stare blew away like a tumbleweed. Then I nodded to my hip and said, “My card. My pocket.”

  As he was about to return my card, he stopped, and a cockiness confidence took hold of him again, and he shook his head in little annoying jerks. “Second thoughts,” he said, then slipped my card in his own pants pocket. “I’ll keep a hold of this.”

  Screw him. “If it’ll keep you warm at night,” I said, then regained focus on the drill and squeezed the trigger.

  Ziiinnng . . .

  The screw dropped.

  The rod dropped.

  As the rod plunged toward the floor, threatening a death-dealing explosion, Tanton’s eyes amplified in horror, but I dropped the drill and reached forward and snatched the free-falling rod. The rod was slightly warm and felt so good to hold in my hand. Not good because it didn’t explode and blow me into little bloody pieces, but because it felt like my very first taste of freedom. Soon I was to leave Dante, change my identity so his goons couldn’t hunt and kill me, and start a new life.

  A life just for me, where I could have everything, with no one giving me hassle.

  Carefully, I extracted the rod out through the hole in the glass, Tanton’s eyes staring at me, me staring back, then smiling as I placed the rod in my hip pouch. The blameless look in his eye made it obvious that he would report me, so I dressed my face in seduction so he wouldn’t expect the cross-wrench to the back of the skull.

  I smiled, sexily. So, so sexily.

  I traced a finger across his cheeks, sliding the tip of my rose-painted nail toward his lips while he stared perplexed.

  The wrench waited at my feet.

  I slowly started to reach down for the weapon. Rather than a tightening of tension before the blow, an opposite sensation took me, a relaxing of all my bones and muscles and a heightening of awareness. I could do this. Would do this. It was required for freedom. Freedom deserved after many horrid years.

  But Tanton wasn’t a supporter of my newfound liberty.

  Tanton’s eyes pierced into mine, and he said, “You’re not going to try anything with that wrench?” Before I could answer, a noise rattled from the end corridor, sounding like a tall building tumbling to the ground, a vile succession of thuds that sent sirens through my head and shook my bones down to their quivering marrow. The iron door at the end of the corridor blew open, and a cloud of smoke accompanied by a blistering-hot fireball roared through. Pieces of shrapnel flung across the hall, spanking into the walls opposite. If we had been standing in its line of fire, our bodies would have been peppered with bloody holes.

  Despite the heat, me and Tanton stood motionless as if an ice wind escaped through the locks and froze us. The flame continued unceasingly like a bush fire raging. Perhaps we were both waiting for the fla
mes to die down and the wafts of stinking smoke to clear, and then we’d move our backsides.

  But the flame roared on.

  Fear kept my boots planted to the floor.

  Then I heard Tanton say, “Lady, we gotta scram before that flame eats us.”

  His voice snapped me from my trance, and I looked around to the image of his hazel eyes glowing in the firelight. At the rear doorway, a ball of flame funneled toward us as if a dragon desired us roasted.

  We turned and ran toward the exit, scooting across the room while heat from the flame tore at the back of our necks, preparing to blister exposed skin. I tried calling out to myself Faster, run faster but couldn’t manage any words. But it didn’t matter – my body seemed to recognize my orders. My legs and arms pumped like pistons, and I pulled away from the cleaner who was stumbling over his undone shoelace. I could hear his breath distancing – he might not make it, but my chances of escape increased, as before me was the end of the corridor and the solid exit door. I swung it open and dashed through and instantly my mind worked – as it always had – to preserve my life, and I spun around and grabbed the brass door handle, ready to pull the door shut. The cleaner ran hard toward me with flame billowing behind, and it would have been polite to wait, but the world is a gangster and waiting was an unnecessary risk. I yanked on the door to slam it, but somehow the cleaner made a mad dash and dove through the gap between door and arc. I slammed the door behind his trailing boots to a thud that mimicked the earlier explosion.

  Tanton stood on one side of the door while I laddered against the other, breathing as heavily as a lady who just gave birth to twins. Strands of my hair rested on the sides of my cheeks. It didn’t feel soft. It felt singed. The heat was so intense it charred my hair. It scared me for it indicated how close the fire had been to taking my life.

  Tanton’s chest rose and fell in erratic rhythm, the panic in his eyes doubling the effect of horror. But it was all right, it was. I now stood on the other side of the door. Surely the oxygen in the engine room would be quickly eaten by the hungry flames, then the fire would die.