It’s cold on his skin but smooth as it slightly shivers on his forehead. He’s been in this position many times before but this time it’ll end a little different. He releases a slow breath, half-sigh, half-disgust. He raises his eye to meet his masked assailant’s. There is no fear in her eyes as she steadies her grip on the gun pressed to his temple. “What will be the last thought to run through your head?” she asks him as she gazes even deeper into his ice cold eyes. “I’ll let you know when we get there.” he replies with a slight arch of his eyebrow. “But more importantly, how did you get in?” he inquires, seeking to buy enough time from her ego to think of a plan. He figures that she would love to gloat and that question would give him all the time he needed, or so he thought. Her mind is as focused as her eyes and locked on her prey. “I’ll tell you when your dead” she replies with a smirk. His normally distanced look quickly changes to desperation and his eyes dart back and forth as his mind races to find a way out his predicament. His mind is more dangerous than any weapon his enemies could ever dream of. During their brief exchange of words he picked his cuffs with the needle pinned to his sleeve. But with a 9 mm to his forehead and a shaky hand holding it, all the quick thinking in the world wouldn’t help. Her trembling finger begins to squeeze the trigger and he can feel it. Just then a thought hit his head, but he would only have one chance to pull it off. Especially already being on his knees and surrounded on both sides by some guys so big, he wishes they were linebackers. He would be able to handle the praying position but he wasn’t sure about these muscle heads. Brains will have to beat out brawn on this one. “I actually thought you were gonna make it out of this one, even I was betting on you” she says with an angry tone in her voice. “I like those odds!” he whispers back as he makes his move. He lowers his head in submission only to hop forward as his cuffs hit the floor and headbutts her in the stomach. She blindly fires 3 shots as she stumbles back and falls into some boxes. He braces himself for the hard part, the big boys. He figures that he has a max of 15 seconds before she recovers from the blow to her gut and comes out firing. That’s about 5 per hulk and another 5 to take out the bullet-bitch. He thanks God for that summer he spent in Beijing learning offensive acupuncture because he was about to put it to good use. He grabs the needle from his sleeve again and puts its away in a naughty spot on the neck of one guy while he kicks the other one in the knee. 7 seconds left, it would take another 3 for that needle to do its thing on Mr. muscles. Meanwhile, he has another muscle man to deal with while keeping an eye on the trigger happy troll who happens to be recovering faster than expected. He hates being rushed. Oh well, back to the big bald guy charging his way. He grabs the cuffs from the floor and dodges to the left, jumps on his back and uses the cuffs to make an uncomfortable necklace on this bear of a man. As biggie gasps for air and falls to floor he smiles and thinks to himself, “ 9 seconds, that’s gotta be a new record.” He suddenly feels a squeeze on his torso. His smile quickly fades as he realizes that he won’t be breaking any records today because of the bear hug that suddenly emptied the air from his lungs. As the squeeze tightens, it’s forcing his ribs to rub together he realizes that he miscalculated on the level of neck meat. The needle damn sure didn’t have the desired effect. “Oh well, plan B” he mutters to himself as he starts to slam his head backwards into the big man’s bowling ball cranium focusing on the nose and eyes. He knows it’ll be no use with a guy like him but it’s still a good distraction as he watches the lady get back to her feet in between his backward head butts. She coughs a few times, rips off her mask, and glares at him with a look so cold it could freeze a boiling pot. His heart skips a beat as he realizes who she is but remembering the situation he’s in, quickly regains his composure. She aims the gun again as he prepares to make his move. Long ago, he learned that a man is likely to have two soft spots, one for each head. And since the one up top was as hard as a rock, he hoped the other one wasn’t. His eyes focused on her trigger-finger as he timed his blow just right. He kicks the man in the “other” head and gets dropped to the floor as she fires her first shot through his pretty hard but not bulletproof head. With her having 6 more shots left, the odds were still against him so he decided to reshuffle the deck and threw his cuffs in the air, killing the only light in the room. “Bitch better not have night vision” he mutters to himself. She hears him and fires a shot in his direction. 5 left.

To be continued…..