07/05/2009
A Tale of Hope
A single week after this blog opened, the pieces of the first short story have come together. For a more refined read, I’d suggest clicking on the section under Fragments to your right, and then reading from the bottom up. This, especially in future, will help keep you focused on the story at hand, rather than have you read through several plotlines or segments at once.
Thanks for reading.
[007] Success! – END
Through the enclosed events, Hope’s vision constantly swam and she found it hard to focus on anything clearly. The dust in the air and the dim laptop glow certainly didn’t help her with this task. As the mental-fog began to recede, the memories of her actions leading up to the explosion re-aligned. It was only when they snapped back into place she groaned; not out of pain, but out of frustration.
‘Shit, I am so sorry,’ she began, rubbing her forehead.
‘It’ll be fine,’ said Jake, though there was no sympathy in his voice. ‘What happened?’
Hope got to her feet, using the wall for balance. ‘The fuse wire ended up being too short. I had to set the charge with a shorter delay. I couldn’t run across the foyer, though, or the cameras would have picked it up before the blast. I guess I got here too late.’
‘You were lucky,’ said Laura, casually. ‘A few seconds later and you’d have been buried. Maggie, see to the vault would you?’
Silently the administrator picked her away around the desks and the corpse, talking in hushed tones about the vault activation.
‘Can you walk?’ asked Jake.
Hope found him staring at her. ‘Yeah, I’ll be fine in a few. I’m really sorry.’
‘Had the manager not been among the people trapped here, I’d feel inclined to berate you on your performance,’ he said bluntly. ‘However, this is your first job and curiously, the manager was in the area, so things can proceed as planned. You’ll still have to carry your share though.’
The sound of the vault door creaked through the space, the mechanisms keeping the thick door locked coming undone one after the other. A few seconds passed, and the door began to slowly slide open, bathing the scene with a comfortable white glow of light. As expected, the vault’s own power was still running.
‘Damn,’ grinned Laura. ‘That makes it all worth it.’
‘Too right it does!’
‘Okay, enough gawking,’ cut Jake. ‘Let’s get it loaded up and head for the pickup spot.’
‘Hey! Hey! Come on man, what’s this about?’ pleaded Terry on deaf ears as he watched the small group carefully stack the money into canvas sacks and zip them up.
‘Make sure you set the timer right this time,’ Hope was reminded as she fiddled with the small stack of explosive in the centre of the vault.
Four minutes later, three women and one man exited the emergency vault door and made their way through the foundations of the building and into the sewers. From there, they made their way up to the surface in an alley where a beat up van had been parked. It took only seconds for them to climb aboard with their rewards.
‘I hope you set those explosives correctly,’ threatened Laura.
The blast that caved the rest of the building inward then down answered her before Hope could.
