Although I'd never found myself in such a situation, when I looked at my surroundings, everything seemed normal anyway. Sure, it wasn't like an everyday thing to find myself crammed into a small ventilation duct of a 100-story high-rise with some female I'd never met in tight fitting leather, but I didn't question it one bit.

Normally, I would have even enjoyed such a situation. After all, being smashed into any small space with an attractive female isn't exactly a bad thing, but there were two very upset fellows with some sort of semi-automatic weapons below us, and that made things just a little bit more urgent. I would have liked to stick around for small talk, but as I craned my neck and looked past my feet, I could see several holes in the steel encasing where bullets had broken the darkness, no doubt to try and draw us out.

As my mind fixated on those holes, I thought I saw just the slightest amount of smoke drift up from each one, but it was probably just residuals of dust from inside the duct where we were crawling.

And besides that, I'd watched to many movies for things to not be as cinematic as humanly possible.

She leaned over and whispered in my ear something about getting the hell out of there and I agreed. Although they were still in the next room or perhaps down the hallway from us still, those faceless people with the guns sure seemed pissed off at us for some reason. Maybe we'd stolen information from one of their computers or something, but it really didn't matter at that point. The thing that mattered was that those bullet holes in the vent work were within 10 feet of us and getting closer.

We started crawling again, single file this time and I let her crawl ahead of me. The one time that I looked up, though, and caught a glimpse of her rear end in the tight pants, I actually felt guilty for having gawked. That was no way for a leading man to act, but I focused my eyese elsewhere instead. At least things weren't falling completely into cheesy movie cliche's.

After crawling along like that for quite some time and having the quiet of our breathing and scuffling along interuppted by gunfire every 30 seconds or so, we came to a break in the ductwork. We could go left or right, and even though we had somehow gotten into the building and did whatever it was that we did before crawling into the ductwork, I had no idea which way we should go.

When a bullet pierced the steel only inches from my left foot, we headed in the opposite direction and again started down some narrow crawlspace to the right. We rounded another bend and it started seeming like the right decision even more, as the ductwork actually began to get larger and larger the further that we crawled. After a few more feet, we were able to move up from crawling on our stomachs to crawling on all fours, and soon after that things widened out enough so that we could crawl side by side.

As we were crawling along, I looked over and caught her looking at me out of the corner of her eye. We both stared back straight ahead, and it seemed kind of funny to me that we were being so coy when our lives were on the line. By that point, we were making good time, and after 50 or so more feet, the path opened up enough that we could both stand upright and walk standing straight up in the ventilation system. As we walked, we could hear the voices of our pursuers grow more and more faint, but we could also hear the sound of something else getting louder and louder.

After what was probably about 100 more feet, we went around another turn and a stiff breeze hit us in the face. There was a fan with a diameter of about 6 feet blowing in air from outside, and it was the only thing keeping us from getting out of there. I'm not sure if it was a combination of our tight clothing, or the fact that the fan simply wasn't circulating that much air to begin with, but we walked right up to it and started looking for ways to turn it off and somehow get through to the outside.

With a minimal amount of work, we were able to break a few latches, turn the fan off, and swing it in like a door towards us. After doing so, we poked our heads out of the opening and saw that we were indeed on the top floor of the building, but there was absolutely nowhere for us to go from there. It was a sheer drop down the side of the building to the street below, and there was no helicopter or anything else waiting as a getaway for us.

I was going to check my pockets, but I knew that I didn't have anything that could be used to rappel down the side of the building, let alone anything else that would help us out. Hell, I didn't even know what we were there for in the first place, but that wasn't the point.

The voices of our faceless pursuers started up again, and this time they were in the ventilation shaft with us, not too far from where we were. Just as I was about to panic, she again whispered in my ear and pointed out the opening to another building on the outside.

Sure enough, there was a 70-story motel just next door, and as our luck would have it, there was a pool on the roof with a glass enclosure over it. It wasn't much of a chance, but it was the best thing we had unless we wanted get caught and shot full of bullets.

I was trying to build up enough gumption to actually make the jump when the two people who were after us rounded the corner and lowered their guns at us. In a weird slow-motion cross between the big jump in The Fugitive, True Lies, and The Matrix connected, my female companion grabbed my hand, smiled at me, and jumped while a hail of bullets went flying over our heads.

The slow-motion continued as we flew the 30 stories downward and went crashing through the glass roof over the pool before splashing down into the water. Just as we went under, I could hear the shards of glass tinkling as they hit the bottom of the pool and yet I knew I didn't have a scratch on me. While we were still underwater, my female counterpart (whose name I still didn't know) pulled me over to her and kissed me.

It was then that I finally woke up, and although the kiss at the end was a nice touch, I realized how cheesy the ending of my dream had been. Up to that point, there had been some nice elements of intrigue and a nail-biting moment of decision that was decided with a rather unbelievable action sequence and even cheesier ending. As I got up and went into the bathroom, I could almost still taste the kiss on my lips, but as I caught a glimpse of myself looking rather haggard in the mirror, I realized that the problem with my dreams was that I was simply watching too many bad movies.

back