Chapter 1 - The last penguin_Polymorph

Chapter 1 - The last penguin

Paul’s fingers were trembling and slick with blood, making it nearly impossible to stick his rake pick into the lock.

“Come on, Come on!” he whispered, desperately willing his hands to cooperate. He was usually good at keeping his hands steady. Heck, he was known for it. Steady-hands-Paul he'd been called. But, then again, his hands usually weren’t so slippery. He tried not to think about it, about all the blood.

There was too much of it, it couldn’t all be his. He glanced down at his body, at his burnt and shredded clothes, the hole in his chest, oozing with each of his bubbling breaths. He had to stop the bleeding, had to…

Pressure - have to put pressure.

He gingerly pressed his left hand over the wound, but then felt something sharp slip further into his chest.

He’d always heard that pressure would help a bleeding wound, but apparently nobody had thought to tell him this wasn’t a good idea when shrapnel was still buried in it.

Pain exploded from the hole, like an echo of the bomb that had sent this piece of debris into his lung.

His body spasmed and forced a cough to burst from both his mouth and chest wound, splattering the door with blood. His knees buckled and his fingers jerked. His set of lockpicks dropped to the floor with a jangle.

“Down here!” came a shout from up the alley, “I heard something!”

“Damn,” cursed Paul. He needed to get his nerves in check, needed to get out of here, hide from these guards. He grimaced in pain as he scooped up the picks, then fumbled for the rake and wrench.

Another guard’s voice followed the first “Are you sure you heard something? Last time you led us after a sound it turned out to be pigeons going at it.”

“Yeah,” joined a third, “and before that, it was a strip of cloth tied to a vent fan.”

“I'm telling you,” defended the first, “I just heard something. Like a ketchup bottle coughing up the last bit of ketchup, and then something tinkling, like utensils dropping on the floor.”

For a moment there was a strained silence between the voices, during which Paul did everything he could to get his ragged breath under control. He barely had the strength to hold his pick set, let alone keep his eyes open. He leaned against the door and tried to feel for the keyhole.

Finally, one of the guards broke the silence, “So,” said the second, disbelievingly, “you're telling me you heard ketchup and dropped cutlery, and you think that justifies going down this cramped, dead-end alley, when we've got a perp to catch with our necks on the line?”

“Hey, I might be wrong sometimes but I've got great hearing. People don't call me keen-ears-Jerome for nothing, you know.”

“Oh come on, nobody calls you that,” retorted the second.

“For Pete’s sake,” said the third guard, speaking over the others and getting louder as he started down the alley, “both of you shut up and come on. We’d have checked it by now. And it’s true, Jerome, nobody calls you that.”

“Well they might if they listened to me more…” mumbled Jerome, kicking a can.

Paul finally managed to slip the rake into the keyhole, as well as the tension wrench. He almost let out a sigh but caught himself before it turned into another cough. Slowly, he began raking the pick back and forth, trying to focus on the movement of the pins rather than on the three pairs of footsteps coming his way.

Paul hadn’t heard them say anything about the others of his group. Maybe they’d gotten away after the explosion. Maybe they’d - But an image flashed through his mind. Two other people, his team, standing in front of him when the bomb went off.

They’d shielded him from the blast. He remembered the heat, the deafening boom, the damp slap of blood on his body, the searing pain of shrapnel driving into his chest.

The boss probably knew about this screw-up already, he was probably shouting and cursing their failure right now. He liked to shout, calling them his stupid little penguins as they stood straight before him, dressed in black. Then he’d usually bind their legs together with his remote and laugh as he watched them waddle out of his office.

Paul liked penguins, or at least the thought of them. He wondered if this was how the last penguin had felt before it died, trembling and gasping for breath, covered in slippery oil, dressed in a black onesie. At least it probably hadn’t needed to pick a lock in its final moments. It’d likely been in its natural habitat, which was kind of relieving to picture.

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A single penguin, just lying back on some iceless shore, waiting for death.

Paul hadn’t had high expectations for his own death. He’d figured it’d happen because he couldn’t pay for medical care, sick and infected in some corner. Or maybe he’d be hit by a train or pushed out of a car. Even being shot or stabbed wouldn’t have been surprising.

He’d seen people die all those ways. But he’d never seen someone die slowly from a perforated lung, so he hadn’t gotten mentally ready for it. Turned out that a perforated lung made it difficult to stay focused on lockpicking, or even to stay on your feet and conscious. It even made it difficult to feel things, like hands grabbing you from behind and dragging you up an alley, back to the facility you’d just helped to explode.

It did, however, allow you to feel a bit like the last penguin, dragged away by some waves, covered in slick oil and struggling to breathe. But, compared to the penguin, Paul had it better for at least one reason: he was covered in blood rather than oil, which certainly had to taste better.

So, all things considered, as a way to die, this really wasn’t all that bad.

…