Flight, then Fright 8

[WP] Your plane from Orlando to London has just landed and as it taxies in it's surrounded by police and press. You disembark and a police constable tells you. "It's 2036, your plane went missing 15 years ago."

*****

I swallowed heavily, reminding myself to breathe and calm my heart rate, reminding myself that what one of those abductors had said was not any of my concern, and the professor and his group would handle the issue like they promised they would. But no, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was actually a bigger problem than I had anticipated.

I was finished if it was also bigger than what The Professor and the other woman had expected. They would cave in, and I would be handed over, and probably never get to see the light of day, talk less of getting back to my own time. The only remedy to this situation was escaping on my own.

"Stay calm, Edgar. Calm. I know you heard that and you're already wetting your pants, but calm down because that's nothing we can't handle" the woman whispered through her microphone, her voice reaching me through the receiving speakers in my room. She did not sound too tense either. I smiled. I was just being cowardly for nothing because they were not worried about the outcome themselves.

"Who's the broad there and who the hell is she talking to? I'm sure we all would like to get in on that wonderful conversation, now don't we boys?"

They all laughed.

The professor scoffed. "Now you're done with the toy parade, the command I issued stands, with a brief period of grace right now because I'm a kind man, or so my workers say. If you don't get off my Island within the next thirty seconds, It'll be headshots for three."

The men turned to each other, stunned shut and unable to process what the professor had said. I knew this because that was how I felt too, refusing to believe that he had just brushed aside their threat, hoping that his age was starting to get to him and he was now hard of hearing.

He could not have been risking all our lives by trying to anger those men. I couldn't wrap my head around it. But that was exactly what he was doing.

"I don't think your team should let a senile old man do the representing, woman, or whoever is in charge here. Because clearly, this b*stard cannot hear. I said, we have advanced defense missiles ready to turn this place to one large cooking fire and-"

"And I don't care about that. To be honest, when we found that beacon, we knew that if you people would be so brave as to come to track us down, you would know to get some sort of serious trump card or secret weapon to force Edgar out of our hands. Here we are, and here you are, and this is the joke you bring to this table?"

The men looked infuriated, but it did not seem like the professor was done. No, it felt like he was getting started.

"You know what? I'll even make it simple for you," he said, raising the gun and shooting the biggest of them all, the man who was the driver, in the head. I watched the blood and brain matter spray from his head as he fell to the ground, laying limp. "There, now there's one less idiot here, thanks to me. Angry? Why don't you push that button and let the missiles rain?"

*****

The sound of the gun was surreal. A surreal sound, an out-of-body experience, an unforeseen circumstance. Kronos felt the heat of the gun as it whizzed through the air past him, singed his ears, and hit Lucius right in the center of his head.

A tiny movement or shaking of the man's hands and that would have been him lying cold on the sands of the beach. He thought all this while he still struggled to comprehend that the man was not being forced into a corner. The man was not biting the hook, no, he was dictating the course of events here.

And when it clicked, he ran.

Wildly.

Towards the water, senselessly, not turning back when Tremaine screamed his name, or when the guns clicked.

Not even when the bullets hit his back, causing his body to do that awkward breakdance bodies did when they were hit with a rain of bullets. He was dead already, but his body did not know it. His brain had not gotten the memo, and his muscles still exerted as his body rain aimlessly towards the water, only stopping when it had been carried by the waves.

"That one's a lucky son of a - he really wanted to enter the water, didn't he? Well, I'm glad he was determined enough to get his wish, dead or alive. Thirty seconds are up, my man. Thirty seconds. I'd have told you that you had the chance to escape and blew it, but truth be told, I planned to kill you right here from the start. You didn't choose your battles wisely, young man. An unwise-"

Tremaine scrambled for the laptop that Kronos dropped. Frustration, anger at the loss of his partners and at the old man who outsmarted them with a game he knew they could not play; these emotions blinded his line of foresight. It screwed it all. Everybody on the airline could die.

"Nope," a voice said behind him, and bullets destroyed the laptop.

He turned to see the woman level her gun on his forehead. "The broad was making calls to Edgar, making sure he stayed put within the safe place we made for him. Goodbye."

He didn't even have time to react before she pulled the trigger. His muscles flexed, his eyes squeezed shut, his glutes tightened, and air left his lungs before all went dark.

The professor laughed. "Amateurs."

*****

TO BE CONTINUED.