“Excuse me for interrupting, but I thought you might like to have a shower before dinner too.”
“N—”
She held up a hand to forestall my objection, “It wasn’t a request. You smell like smoke and explosives. Get in the shower.”
“Okay.”
“Do you have any clothes…um, any
clean
clothes I can borrow?”
“I think so, check in my room. Down that way to the left.”
“Thanks,” she said and turned to walk away.
I was a rat hypnotized by a cobra. She strode down toward my room with hips swaying, placing one foot directly in front of the other. I’m sure I saw a smile on her face as she turned to go into my room. My feet involuntarily took a step to follow, but she closed the door behind her. My heart hadn’t stopped pounding. I took a deep breath and headed in to the shower.
When I got out, Anka was sitting at the computer where I’d been when she exited the bathroom. She had my clothes on, but she made them look better than I could ever hope. My old Atari tee was covered by one of my plaid shirts. She wore my jeans, but rolled up and pegged.
“Nice,” I said, “Now all you need are some thick glasses and a slouchy to be a proper hipster.”
If there was a smile on her face when I stepped out, it disappeared with my comment.
“Just go get dressed…in clean clothes. I’m hungry. I think I’ve found a place near here that looks good.”
I got dressed and we headed out for dinner at the food cart pod down the way. It was one of those Portland joys where the barbecue cart is next to the Asian taco cart which is next to the rice bowl cart which is next to the coffee cart which is just outside the beer garden. It was one of my favorite places to get food, so it made me happy to share it with her.
I walked toward the ATM to get some cash when Anka grabbed my arm and pulled me back.
“No cards. We can only use cash. They can trace our cards and figure out that we’re still alive.”
“Oh. So do you have some money?”
“Yeah, get what you want.”
We found our food and sat down under the tent as it started to drizzle.
“So, I believe I was asking you about our plan.”
“No, you were making jokes about my name.”
“Can’t it be both?”
She actually smiled this time. My heart responded by pounding faster. She licked some barbecue sauce from her lips before continuing.
“We need to know who to trust. If my boss wants me dead, then our options are limited. We could go to the Cubans, but they just want you. That leaves me dead again.”
“Is there anyone else who knows about Dr. Fat-head’s research?”
“Excuse me? Fat-head?”
“Grosskopf? Gross Kopf? As in:
Sein Kopf ist gross, sehr gross.
”
“Oh. I don’t speak German.”
“Neither do I. I just had to know how to ask for beer and the toilet when I went to Germany last summer. I picked up enough from watching cartoons to be able to piece it together. But back to Dr. Grosskopf…”
“A few people know about his research, but not too many. There was his lab partner, but my boss picked him up for questioning a few days ago. I haven’t seen or heard from him since.”
“What was his name?”
“Dr. Phillip Beeh.”
“What’s the ‘B’ for? Bargain?”
“What?”
“Never mind, it’s a pretty obscure reference.”
“How do you ever get anything done while making all these references and jokes?”
“I don’t know—aw, you should have made a Dr. Phil joke, you know ‘How’s that working out for ya?’ That would have been hilarious.”
Anka took a big bite of her taco and just chewed on it for a long time. I felt the reprimand in her vicious crunching. If it wouldn’t have sprayed cabbage and fish all over the table, she would have sighed again.
“Look, I’m new to the whole secret-agent-lab-experiment-car-chase-drone-strike thing. Maybe I’m using humor to calm my nerves. Sorry if it bothers you.”
“You’re right, I’m sorry too. I just…this is my first assignment out of the academy and I’ve already messed it up.”
“Wait, how did you mess it up? Isn’t it your boss who screwed everything over?”
“I guess you’re right. But I still don’t know what to do. They trained me to follow orders and now I don’t have any.”
“I order you to feel better,” I used my most commanding and authoritarian voice, something between an eighth grade English teacher and a Trekker explaining warp drive to a Star Wars fan.
Anka chuckled a bit and showed off those dimples again, “Thanks. I’ll do my best sir.”
“Good,” I returned the smile, “Now, we know we can’t go to your boss, we probably can’t go to the Cubans, we can’t get to Dr. Grosskopf and we don’t know where Dr. Beeh is. Is that about right?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, so we need to do some research of our own to figure out what’s going on, why everyone is after me and how we can escape. Where can we go to get the information we need? Is it in the lab at OHSU?”
“I suppose so. I don’t think they’ve had time to get in and clear out all of Dr. Grosskopf’s notes. But how would we get in there. There are cameras all over the place, they’d catch us for sure.”
“Ah, but you’re forgetting that I now have super powers. I can do anything that I see. So all we have to do is find a way to get in, find a video and I can do it.”
“Right, I forgot. We could fight our way in, I suppose, but that doesn’t help with the cameras.”
“So we need to turn off the cameras somehow. Where can we do that?”
“From the security station, but it’s a voice authorization system. We’d have to get one of the security guards to do it for us, and I don’t think they’d be very keen on that.”
“…
I don’t think they’d be very keen on that.
” I repeated Anka’s words, mimicking her voice exactly.
“How? I didn’t know…How is that possible?”
“I don’t know, I just decided to try it. Do you think it will match a voice print?”
“I think it’s our best bet. We can go in tomorrow like tourists. We’ll pretend to be from the South and be all friendly. We’ll ask the guard his name and chat him up for a while, and then we’ll wander off. We can slip away to the recording station. I should be able to take out the guard and get you in to deactivate the cameras.”
“Awesome, we’re super-secret spies!” I said with a grin.
She smiled tolerantly and said, “It’s about time for us to leave. I think we should do some
other
preparations tonight. Just in case.”
As we walked back to my apartment Anka slid her arm into mine. Startled, I looked over at her sharply, but she just stared at the sidewalk ahead and kept walking as if nothing had changed. I swallowed and then faced ahead too. We didn’t say anything for the rest of the walk home.
When we got inside she walked over to the windows and pulled the blinds. It’s not as if my small, basement windows offered much in the way of light, but she shut it all out. She turned and looked around the apartment before deciding that the middle of the kitchen suited her needs. Whatever those were.
Anka bent down, pulled off her shoes, and tossed them to the side. A nod at me was command enough to do the same. I had no idea what was about to happen when she attacked me.
Without thinking I used
The Matrix
move to block and grab her arm. I tried to do it again when she swung her other arm at me, but at the last second she changed the direction of her punch and hit me hard in my exposed kidney. I grunted but kept her other arm pinned at my left side. She stepped back with her opposite foot and pivoted around the left so she was standing beside me, then she ducked down and gripped my left arm with hers, extricating her right and pulling my left painfully behind me. Her right arm slipped around my throat, she wrapped her leg around mine, twisted and we both fell to the ground. I landed on my chest with her still on my back. The air rushed out and I grunted again. Everything hurt.
“Alright, so we have some work to do,” she calmly got off of me and flipped me over before helping me to my feet.
“Ow.”
“Sorry, I just wanted to see what you could do. You took down the Cubans easily so I didn’t know what you were capable of.”
“I must have gotten lucky.”
“Yeah, you did. Now we need to teach you, so you don’t need luck.”
Training Day
We spent most of that night training. Actually, it might be more accurate to say, I spent the rest of that night getting my ass handed to me. I like to think I’m a well-adjusted twenty-first century kind of man, but I still felt some twinges of man-guilt when I repeatedly got my butt kicked by a woman. And by “twinges” I mean I felt like a freshly neutered puppy impotently humping a stuffed bunny.
I may have received super brain powers somehow, but I didn’t use them to apply logic while Anka was pummeling me into submission. I just went with her plan while she stood me in various positions and instructed me on how to block or counter or strike. Then she’d attack me and ruthlessly overcome my feeble defenses. Luckily she didn’t punch my face, or I would have had black eyes to go with my bruised ribs, aching knees and raw hands.
After a few hours of abuse I called for a break. She obliged—after taking me down one more time.
“I’m going to the bathroom,” she announced as she strutted from the room.
“Ungh,” was all I could manage with my face mashed against the floor.
Slowly I got up and wandered over to the table where my computer sat. I plopped down and automatically opened up my browser to make sure the internet was still there. Maybe the ruthless beatings kept me from thinking about it before, but I suddenly remembered the videos. I loaded up some of the MMA demonstration channels and quickly watched a few of the techniques that Anka had been trying to tell me about. I kept watching the clips as long as possible, but when I heard her flush, I closed the browser and walked back to where I’d been before.
Anka came out with her hair pulled back into a messy bun, wearing just my Atari shirt and my bike shorts. I guess I’d left them in the bathroom after my last ride. On cue, my heart started pounding as I devoured her form. She’d tied the shirt in the back so it wouldn’t hang loosely. The three curving lines of the logo stretched tightly across her chest. Just a hint of skin showed between the bottom of the shirt and the top of the shorts, which showed…well, everything.
“I was having trouble moving in your jeans. This is for training. You’d better pay attention to fighting and not my boobs or you’ll hurt even more in a few minutes.”
I tore my eyes away from her stunning body and searched for saliva enough to swallow. She came at me without warning.
It was the same strike combo she’d been trying to teach me to counter. But I’d just watched the video. In a fluid motion I dodged the first punch, blocked the second and grabbed her leg as she kicked. I then swept her other leg out, dropped her on her back and jumped on top of her. In a second I had both of her hands pinned to the ground.
Anka was almost as surprised as I was at the drastic turn. She lay there breathing heavily for a moment before smiling.
“Well done. It took you a while, but you finally learned something. I guess you’re not hopeless—aw, again?”
“Sorry, I—”
But I didn’t get to finish my apology. She brought her legs up behind me, crossed them around my neck and forced me backward. I tried to wriggle free, but she just squeezed tighter.
“Remember, if you have full-mount, you need to sit back far enough on the hips that they can’t lift their legs.”
“Err-gehr.”
Anka released me and got to her feet while I fought for air.
“Well, you finally learned something. Let’s move on to the next thing. It’s called—”
“Wait, Anka, I didn’t learn it from you. I learned it from watching a video online.”
“What?”
“For whatever reason, my brain is able to pick up and mimic anything I see. You weren’t showing me the fighting moves, just telling me about them. It wasn’t until I saw someone do what you were describing that I could do it too.”
“So you could do all the things that I’ve done, but you can’t do any of the things that I’ve just told you about?”
“Yeah, I suppose I could do the stuff you’ve showed me.”
“Prove it. Attack me with the combo I just used on you.”
So I swung one fist, which she dodged. I swung the other; she blocked it. And I kicked at her. She grabbed my leg, took me down and got into the full mount position. I tried to get her with my legs, but she was sitting on my hips.
“Well, I guess that’s that.”
Luckily she got off of me before I embarrassed myself again.
“So, what’s the plan? How should you train me?”
“It doesn’t seem like I need to train you at all. You’ve got YouTube and I’m tired. You watch as many videos as you can and I’m going to bed. We have a long day tomorrow.”
I watched her hips swing as she walked away. As she turned to walk into my room I saw her dimples clearly with her hair out of the way. She removed the smile from her lips, but not her eyes before she looked at me.