T20: Mona

Mona had always been a good runner. She'd competed for her county when she was younger, been one of the best track athletes at her School, made the first team at Uni. Running wasn't just a way to stay in shape, it was meditation- a calm, safe place where she could just let herself be free, with only the road, or the track, or the path in front of her. She'd seen the others looking at her, tottering on their expensive, designer-label high heels, when she'd turned up for duty in comfortable, flat-soled sandals. She'd seen their dismissive glances and she'd known that it didn't matter, because when the shooting started, she'd be able to run just as fast as a gazelle, while they were stumbling around trying not to break their own ankles.

Now here she was, running, and for some stupid reason she was running towards the bullets, not away from them. She knew if she stopped to think about it, she'd freeze with terror and stop running. She knew, with a sick sense of certainty, that the moment she stopped running she'd be dead; just like Toni, just like Aurora, just like all these other Agents whose sprawled, blood-soaked, bullet-pierced bodies she was running past now.

Keep going, she told herself, and she fired as she ran, seeing her bullets kick up puffs of dust from the polished concrete walls. Keep going, she told herself as she leaped over a body and turned at the fork, still shooting at the indistinct black-clad figure that jerked back behind a pillar. Keep going, she told herself as she saw more of them in front of her, even though there was another voice, buried somewhere at the back of her head, screaming at her to stop.

They can't shoot you if you're running... They can't shoot you if you're too fast... They can't shoot you...

The bullets hissed past her, first on one side, then the other. Only one of them hit her, but one was enough. She felt her lungs tear, felt bone break inside her body as the slug smashed its way in and then out of her athletically slim torso. She felt the ground disappear beneath her flailing feet and the ground lurched up to greet her, slapped her in the face the way it hadn't done since that time she'd been running too fast on her Primary School playground. The impact knocked out what little breath there was left in her body and left her slithering and choking on the path with grazed knees and scratched palms and a bruised chin and blood in her mouth. Her legs didn't seem to have got the message; they seemed to want to keep running. The rest of her just wanted to breathe.

She couldn't.