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It's Dolly's Birthday
Chapter 14.
A clever disguise...
While Drummond dug out a sewing machine and a box of sundries, Pete sent a trooper out to rent a large van for their transport. Then Drummond showed the Trolls how to make simple wrap robes out of the international-safety-orange parachute cloth.
No sooner than he had demonstrated a process to them than they happily took it over from him, improving on his dexterity and inventiveness seemingly without effort.
In a very short time, the entire squad was engaged in producing robes for their disguises and Drummond found himself with nothing to do. Despite having always been an "officer" of some sort, he never felt comfortable in a supervisory position. He always wanted to be doing something.
He wondered, as he did frequently, how the Troll's ancestors, the gentle Neanderthal, could have ever been bested by Homo Sapiens. The Trolls as a group seemed to be larger, stronger, faster, possessed of greater endurance, smarter, more inventive, and more intuitive than humans. Surely there wasn't that much difference between the present and the dim, dark past. Not in the areas that mattered; not in the basic equipment the species came with.
The only place the Neanderthals seemed to be giving anything away was in the area of aggression. They didn't have it. Even in paramilitary service, such as the TATs, they had to be driven hard to extremes of violence. Homo Sap had it in spades. Was that all it was? Big piles of attitude equals evolutionary success? It was a disturbing concept, one that offended his bone-deep sense of fair play.
They finished the robes in short order and Drummond gave them some simple instruction on the gestures and attitudes to be used in carrying out the masquerade. Then they piled into the rented van and set off to rescue Dolly.
#
The second step creaked. Dolly froze, standing in the dark, listening. She heard nothing in the way of a response to the inopportune sound, and she was about to resume her progress down the stairs when a door crashed open to her left and light poured into the room where she stood.
With the sudden illumination, she could see her circumstances were somewhat different than she had pictured. Rather than the long flight of stairs she had imagined that she was on, she stood on the bottom step of three that led down from the level of the platform behind the altar to the floor of the room, which was at the same level as the floor of the sanctuary. The room she was in was about twenty feet square and empty. The one window, in the wall opposite, was boarded up with plywood. There was a third door, on the wall to her right that, presumably, led deeper into the church.
Standing in the just-opened door was one of her Meq captors. An M-16's butt was propped on his hip and he had the sling wrapped around his forearm in a showy manner that was bound to slow him down when it came to having to fire the thing.
"Well, well," Dolly purred in a voice that gave pause to those who knew her. "Dolph Lundgren. You know, you should treat me nicer. I'm the Ideal, you know."
"Of course I know that," came the patronizing reply that didn't need words to say, "But I can't for the life of me understand why."
"So you know you should let me escape. Hurting me has been known to have a... negative effect on the careers of your colleagues." Dolly waved her hands in front of her, as though she were chasing cats or chickens. "Shoo! Shoo! Go away, now!"
The Meq actually laughed. "I don't think so, little girl."
Dolly raised one eyebrow. "Small I may be, but I am not a girl." She shrugged. "It's your funeral," she said nonchalantly, and walked toward the other door.
When she'd gotten dressed for her workout that morning, she'd pulled her red-gold mane into a ponytail that hung down between her shoulder blades almost to her waist. Although she'd lost her hat, a green silk baseball cap with a CFXS logo embroidered on the front, her hair was still caught in the leather thong she'd tied it with.
Although she knew better than to place much hope in her chances of success, she also remembered that her teachers in her kind of warfare drummed into her head that fortune favors the bold. There was no point in her standing there begging for leniency from an alien storm trooper. That way led back to captivity, or worse. To move forward might mean her death, but it also proffered the chance of escape, so she moved boldly, doing as best she could to be ready for anything.
So it wasn't entirely a surprise to her when she found herself brought up short by a painful jerk at the back of her scalp. The Meq had grabbed her ponytail and now had it twisted over her head. The muzzle of the M16 was jabbed in her face and the Meq glowered at her. As if cued by the scuffle, the other Meq appeared in the back door. That deflated Dolly like a beach ball stuck with a knitting needle. She'd never had a chance. Chalk one up for the bad guys. Better luck next time.
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