Bad Company... , part 25

For moments that seemed so stretch into years Shea just sat there, racing heart thundering in her pointed, furred ears, as the fumes seeped up into her head, making her feel sick and afraid. Sheer terror roared and ripped at her thoughts like a mad, ravening beast, slowly stripping her of her ability to think clearly and try to puzzle some way out of this deadly predicament. There was no question in her mind that the stuff on the mask would kill her eventually...and thoroughly incapacitate her long before. If she'd been able to get some air that wasn't laden with the venomous sludge, it might have been a very different story, but with the way that mask dosed every breath that reached her nose with those vile, poisonous vapors... It was a threat she just couldn't evade. And time was running out fast...

Getting the mask off was obviously what she needed to do...but that insidious voice of doubt began to whisper again, slipping out from its hiding place in that dark, ostensibly "pragmatic" corner of her mind... Jeeringly demanding to know just how she was going to do that...how she could get the thing off her face with her hands as uselessly-pinned as they'd ever been in her life...and the straps of the mask so tight that she could feel her pounding pulse throbbing against them as it passed through her neck and scalp... But as the room spun and blurred momentarily in Shea's vision, and a whisper of muzzy sleepiness stole across her brain for an instant, the imperiled catgirl knew she was going to have to find a way and fast...or this would be her end...


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On to "Bad Company...", pt26