Kate got the call a week later.
“Get down to the lab.” It was Dr. Fletcher. “I’m starting now. We’ll meet there.”
“But what is it? Why?”
“Some of those damn demonstrators. I’m calling the police.”
Before she could ask any more, he had hung up.
She drove rapidly, noting, as she reached the lab building, a helter-skelter parking arrangement of a pickup truck and two dusty old oversized cars with gigantic fins and headlights, blocking the street. She had to stop a hundred feet away and look around for Dr. Fletcher, the police, for anybody except whoever owned these cars. There was a small gathering near the entrance, just down the steps from street level.
They called out, “Hey, lady, this ain’t the place to be.”
“I work here. It’s no place for you, certainly.”
“She works here.” A laugh. “Then it fucking sure ain’t no place to be.”
“Tell her,” someone said.
“Hey, lady, word’s got out what you’re doing in there.”
It was late afternoon, almost evening. A low slant of sun shot past the lab. She shaded her eyes. How could they demonstrate if nobody was around to see? Just up the slope of the street behind her, there were odds and ends of off-campus buildings belonging to the university. But if this wasn’t a demonstration, what were they doing? About to splash on painted slogans? Could they be breaking in?
Kate crossed the street and walked toward them, recognizing no one. “Who are you? Where are you from?” She said later they might have come off the moon. Hair a yard long and crazy writing on their shirts. One wore nothing but a pair of gym shorts; another was in a knee-length T-shirt with orange lettering: FUCK THE PIGS.
“The war’s got to stop, lady.”
“It’s my job you’re stopping! Not the war.” Still no Dr. Fletcher. No police. Kate got furious. “Get out of my way this minute!”
Quite alone, mad as a harpy, she plunged at them. The line took one step forward. Arms linked, the crowd might have been one body together. She wound up on the sidewalk, purse flung wide, spilling open. Her keys! “Help me! Help!”
Her knee was bruised and beginning to bleed through her torn stocking. She was crawling nearer her keys, scrambling for them, but saw herself beaten to them by a small barefoot waif of a creature, boy or girl, with a snakelike rope coiled around its neck. It threw the bunch of keys to the giant one who had actually stopped her, blond soft beard trailing sparsely down his jaw, the one in the orange-painted shirt. Filth, was all she could think, grasping toward them once again. If only she’d had a gun.
There was one up the hill, in her glove compartment. Why had she forgotten about it? From the back of the lab, as she made for the car, legs numb and knee stinging awake from the fall, she heard the tinkle of breaking glass. Running steps closed on her from behind. Arms caught around her waist. She was stopped and held.
With her back to the lab, her only view was before her. She smelled the reek of young bodies holding her and heard the sounds of her own cries, cut off numbly as her breath ran out. How long?
The two battered cars streamed past her; those souped-up antiques could still run, carry a load, escape from a scene. Their license plates were covered up. The arms holding her slackened, and the two who held her ran to leap toward arms held out to them from the back of the dusty pickup.
Too late, the first wail of a siren coming off the highway toward the tangle of streets that led to her. She heard how they mistook directions, backtracked, turned, and resumed their approach. By now she was hanging on to the side mirror of her car, leaning against the door, panting as she tried to open it, climb in to collapse on the seat. No need for the gun, but fearing what might have happened to the lab. Her work….
A black car stopped smoothly.
“Oh, Dr. Fletcher! They got my keys!”