Bad Company... , part 34

Images flashed through Shea's mind of what it was going to be like down there on that floor...as the last moments of her life trickled away. Trapped there, no way to move or escape, thoughts blurring and fading... Lungs burning as the foul, toxic slop slowly crowded out the air and flooded her system, poisoning her with agonizing inevitability... The terror as that seductive, hungry darkness dragged her down into its grasp, for good this time... She could already feel the searing frustration and anguish rising - the raw outrage at the unfairness that after all she'd been through, how hard she'd fought, it was all going to end because of one random mishap. That she'd known such a thing could have happened from the first lurching hop didn't make the sudden setback any easier to bear. Quite the opposite, in fact. She'd come so far...

"NMMMMPF!" she grunted in fierce denial of her fate, that one shuddering, hoarse-throated cry carrying all the fire in her heart with it...

Desperation fusing instinct and action flawlessly into one, Shea lashed out with her right foot and pushed off as hard as she could against the floor. She flung all her weight back and away from the direction of the fall, snapping head once more leading the way, sending the chair popping up onto its rear right leg and starting to spin back toward the left like a top. An awkwardly-wobbling top, beginning to fall backward and off to the left now, threatening to simply spill her over in another direction. Shea twisted at her shoulders and thrust backward with her hips, feeling the chair skip-scuff backward in response...and start to topple forward instead, in the latest stomach-lurching change of wildly-unstable direction...


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On to "Bad Company...", pt35