Keenan

Keenan had managed to escape the hall (named Fyvie Hall) without too much bother. That is to say that he was at one point in the last half hour required to extricate the cerebral matter of a beloved colleague, and that he is currently being stalked by a pride of octogenarian psychopaths.

Physically, however, he was almost entirely unmolested, thankfully. But he knew this wouldn’t possibly remain as the state of affairs for long.

He mentally took note of the fact that psychological trauma and the resulting fallout; having experienced a good lump of it recently; seemed to him to be a luxury that people who lived outside of the food chain could afford, but not him.

In any case, his therapist was most likely hunkering down on the gristle of one of her patients right now, as was her custom even prior to the great calamity.

And while the walk from Fyvie Hall back to the Imperial College Main Campus was only about 10 minutes’ as the crow flew, it was through one of the most highly populated areas in London, and it required him to walk astride Hyde Park for a good portion of it, or potentially through it. Which was concerning to Keenan, mainly because it seems to have attracted teems of animalistic inner-city residents with with the chief aim of stalking and eating each other.

But before he would have to cross that bridge, he would need to brave Regent Street.

Regent Street; a former High Street retail centre, with sales on everything from fast fashion to tablet computers.

Regent Street; whose former minimum wage workers now seemed to be taking out their minimum-wage angst on each other rather violently.

The Apple store seemed to have enough people in it who hadn’t lost their brains to Zoggite mind invaders to team up and lock the feral out.

But the ferals weren’t very pleased about this turn of events, taking to prowling out the front, some leering, some banging on the glass, and others headbutting it intermittently.

The staff inside looked on, ashen-faced, as their duty manager; who hadn’t managed to make it back inside after an ill-fated coffee run, was trampled to a viscous ooze.

Keenan by this point had made it all but one block from the Fyvie Hall Gate, and was holed up in a telephone booth. He had thought it looked as good a place as any, but he was wrong.

Soon enough, a group of employees from a new-age store (one of the ones that smell like patchouli and have every flavour of incense, as long as that flavour is cannabis) began banging on either side of the phone booth, fairly quickly pulling it from its foundations.

Keenan started feeling a lot like he was at sea, and he was about to get a mouthful of saltwater. Except in this case, in was far more likely to be a mouthful of his own bottom lip.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

And when everything felt like it was going swiftly downhill for Keenan, and when he thought that after the events of today, that it would be quite poetic for him to end his scientific career in a postbox outside a JC Penny - a white knight approached.

The white knight was, quite literally wearing a bright platinum suit of armour from the 17th century, buffed and polished and quite obviously stolen from the stately home of someone with a peerage appointment.

It was all the more impressive, as it had quite visibly experienced more combat than a French soldier at the battle of Agincourt. Blood and viscera covered him from head to toe, and he moved with a litheness one would normally reserve for those not wearing a 60-pound morning suit made of sheet metal.

The white Knight cleared the area outside the postbox with an enviable poise and machismo, punctuated with guttural grunts and moans worthy of a hotly-contested semi-final bout at Wimbledon.

Keenan winced as the white knights’ blade went SHING, swiftly separating and offending an interloper’s scone from its bodice, and grimaced when his blade went SLOOCK, straight between the eyes of another.

The area cleared, the white knight cocked his face guard down and opened the door to the booth. And to Keenan’s surprise, it was none other than Arsenal’s star defender Tully Ronson.

She looked at Keenan as if he were her funny uncle who’s gotten lost at bingo.

“You alright love?”

Keenan was at once dumb and lovestruck.

Tully wasn’t, but she had a sort of fondness for ineffectual middle-aged men, which was just Keenan’s luck.

“It’s not the best spot to hide in. I think you’d better come with me…”

Tully looked sympathetically at the sweaty balding man, who, though probably a foot taller than her - felt diminutive in comparison.

Keenan sputtered.

“I love you…your work. You’re the best running back we’ve had since Battersly-Simpkins in the 40s. Oh, and I have to say - in the Champion’s League against Crystal Palace - hoorah. You were - well you were very, very good. Has anyone ever told you that? My word!”

Tully looked a little bit flattered, but she also thought this wasn’t the moment for this sort of thing, and her facial expression reflected that.

“Ah-thanks. You watched it? That’s - I mean, but this probably isn’t the best time to-“

She looked over her shoulder and ducked with laser-like precision just in time to avoid a spear that had been flung from a nearby mobile phone repair shop. The time for that sort of thing, if it existed, had presently elapsed.

Tully quickly looked over her shoulder again, then grabbed Keenan’s arm, and before he knew it, one foot went on front of the other, and they were scampering into a shopping mall.

“You know, I always wondered - you and - wossername - Watkins?”

“Oh you mean Susie?”

They passed a makeup store and a boutique as they approached a food court. Keenan had also become acutely aware of a group of Priceline cashiers who were shooting malevolent glares from the top of a nearby escalator.

“Yes Susan! The midfielder - I always wondered - did you ever -”

Tully shot Keenan a curt look.

“You do know that not every female football player is gay?”

As they got closer to the food court, it became steadily more apparent that the whole area was a big fat nope. All sorts of menacing-looking creatures. Unearthly screams and scampering and chittering and general nope-like nope-ness. They reached an alley that led to toilets and a janitor’s closet.

“Yes - of course. Sorry for assuming! That’s just like me.”

Tully slammed a button on the wall next to the janitor’s closet, and a door opened.

“But in this case, you are correct.”

“Oh yes?”

“Yeah, I’m super gay.”

“Oh, jolly good. Good for you.”

“Thankyou?”

Suddenly, there was a piercing waller from over near the escalators. The cashiers were making a move.

Then Keenan was whomped on the head by something rather hard, and everything went dark.