52 Project #32: Five Minutes (Patreon)

Five minutes from now a man shot me in the head.

It all happened so fast. He rang the doorbell, so I looked through the peephole and saw what looked like a UPS guy at the door. I wasn’t expecting a package, but I wasn’t expecting a guy with a gun, either. I unlocked the three locks, opened the door and there he was, gun pointing right at me. Before I had time to do anything, he fired.

I don't know why he did it. He could just be a racist asshole who’s trying to start a race war or something by randomly murdering a black teenager, but I don’t think so – there’s a lot of girls every bit as brown as me walking around outside on a nice summer day like today. I think it’s more likely because my mother's a researcher into Proximas and my uncle is a known Proxima who works with the Peace Force; he might have been here after them, or he might have shot me to get at them.

It doesn't matter. It's five minutes ago and I haven't been shot yet. Instead I run for the telephone in the kitchen and dial 911.

I hear the doorbell ring. It doesn't matter.

“911, what’s the nature of your emergency?”

“Uh, there’s a guy outside. With a gun. Outside my family’s apartment. I’m thirteen and my family isn’t here and this guy is trying to kill me.”

“What’s your address?”

I tell them, quickly. I add, “He’s an adult, a white guy with brown hair, medium height. Looks like 30-ish maybe. He’s dressed like a UPS delivery man.” I want to make sure they know it’s a white guy so my uncle doesn’t get beaten or shot if he comes home before the police get here. Rodney King was only three years ago.

“I’m dispatching officers to your location now. Stay on the phone with me.”

“Okay, how long until they arrive?”

“They’ll be there within ten minutes.”

That doesn’t mean much to me. Ten minutes can hold an infinite number of five-minuteses. “My name’s Alannah Foster,” I tell them. “My mom and my uncle are both doctors. Cynthia Foster and Daniel Foster.” I’m thinking that if I can’t hold this guy off long enough, the police need to know who to tell about what happened.

The gunman shoots the lock off the door and kicks the door open. I can see him from where I'm standing with the telephone. I could drop to the floor to get out of the line of fire; I’m standing in front of a counter. But to get out safely, I’d have to be able to crawl to the door that goes out to the hallway, and I’d have to do it so fast that he can’t shoot me when I’m not behind the counter anymore, and I’d have to do it before he can get here.

That’s not gonna happen. I don’t go to a superhero academy like my uncle did when he was my age, and I know I’m no action hero from a movie. There isn’t any way forward where I’m getting out of this kitchen before he shoots me.

He aims the gun at me. So I jump back five minutes ago. I don't have as much runway to work with this time. I jump into the middle of the conversation with Emergency Services, and pick up with barely a stumble-- I'm used to this. “--adult,” I say. “White guy, brown hair, medium height, UPS uniform.” He's been ringing the doorbell for half a minutes. In five minutes he'll get the door open and he'll come after me.

My uncle Dan’s a healer. He could maybe save my life if this guy shoots me in the chest – but not in the face or the head. My mom's just a scientist. She doesn’t have any powers. And they're both out for the day, Mom at a conference, Dan with his teammates. There's just me, 13-year-old Alannah, and there's no one I can call that could get here faster than 911 could.

I drop the phone before the 911 dispatcher finishes telling me she’s dispatching officers, and run for the fire escape. The window’s old wood, painted many times, and it jams as I try to lift it. I hear him shoot off the lock.

I jump back five minutes ago. This time as I get off the phone with 911, I don't waste time trying to force the window open. Instead I pick up one of the heavy iron bookends holding my collection of computer books on my desk, and use it to smash the window. I'm small enough that I can squeeze through without getting cut up too badly.

There’s a fire escape outside our apartment building. I start down it carefully, not wanting to move too fast and fall. But I hear him shoot the lock, I hear him head for my bedroom, and as I see him up above me pulling the window open and coming out onto the fire escape with his gun, I jump five minutes ago, to the point where I was smashing the window. This time I run down the fire escape as fast as I can go, trusting that if I fall, I'll just jump five minutes ago and be more careful.

There’s an alley below me, and it doesn’t smell great – garbage pickup won’t be until day after tomorrow. I jump off from near the bottom, and race around the corner, out of the alley and onto the street. He's probably following me. No reason to think he's not. Quickly I crawl under one of the cars parked on our street. With luck, he won't see me.

I can see his feet. I can see him looking for me. It takes longer than five minutes, which makes me nervous. And then he sees me. I scream as he kneels down. "There you are, you little bitch," he says, aiming the gun.

Five minutes ago I'm still under the car and he's out there, looking for me. I roll out from under the car and start to run.

Behind me he fires. The bullet slams into my back, and then I'm half a minute ago-- I can't jump my full five minutes until I've returned to my origin time. Half a minute is long enough to throw myself to my stomach as the bullet whizzes over my head, to roll behind a parked car, trembling. He starts to come around the car. I circle, keeping the car between him and me.

He's faster than me, and he runs at me, the gun out. At that range he can't miss. The bullet is a searing pain in my chest, and then it's five seconds ago, and I'm dodging, now that he's already committed to the shot. It hits my arm. Not good enough. I jump again, ten seconds. This time I dodge too soon, and he’s able to adjust his aim. It hits me in the chest again. Seven seconds. Just long enough that I can get all the way out of the way, just short enough that he can't change where he's aiming.

I drag myself under a car again. I wait until he ducks down to shoot me, and jump ten seconds, giving me time to position myself just where his head will be. As his head lowers again, I kick it with all the strength in my body.

He staggers backward, and I pull myself out from under the car, rolling to my feet and running down the street. We live in a residential neighborhood in Brooklyn, one that’s just expensive enough that everyone here works, so there’s no one on the street in the middle of the day. With gunshots going off, I don’t expect that to last. But I’m not expecting anyone to come save me, either.

By the time he recovers, I've got a nice comfortable margin, a minute or two. When he shoots me again, I use my margin to jump back, to know when he's going to shoot and duck it again.

"Goddamn, you fucking proxy bitch! Fucking stay still!" he screams, proving my theory that this is about me being a Proxima, and shoots at me again. He's got good aim; he hits again. I'm so tired of jumping, so tired of the pain of bullets hitting and the fear that I won't be able to evade the next time. I want so badly to stop... but I don’t want to die. So I jump again, and dodge again, and this time I make it to the cover of a tree before he can shoot me again.

I'm so out of breath. My knees and elbows are all scraped up from hitting the ground repeatedly. And I'm drained from so many time jumps. I've never done so many in a row. There's no way I can keep this up. The tree isn't big enough to shield me if I run now, not big enough to shield when he reaches me. I'm boxed in.

And then the cops pull up.

He runs. They tell him to halt and drop his weapon; when he keeps running, they shoot him. The bullets tear into him, leaving him on the ground covered with blood, and he doesn't jump five minutes ago. He stays dead.

***

They call me the hero kid, the resourceful little girl who stayed ahead of a hardened killer for fifteen minutes, long enough for the police to come. They tell me it wasn't about me at all; he was a small-time hit man, probably hired by someone to take out me out to scare my mother off her pro-Proxima activism. They don’t mention my uncle at all, so I guess secret identities are good for something after all.

My mom comes from her conference, and hugs me, and my uncle comes from where he's hanging out with his teammates, and he tells me how great I was, and how much control I've got over my powers (he says that part privately where no one can hear.) I appear in the newspaper in the local news section. Fifteen minutes of fame, much better than five minutes of fear.

But I want to take self-defense classes, and I want to enter the Peace Force’s superhero academy like my uncle did, and learn what superheroes know about using their powers to survive. Because someday five minutes might not be long enough to get away.