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Show ?L bring her down. And the heavy book slowed her, that damned monster of a book. She ran with it clutched to her chest but as soon as she heard the heavy pound of his shoes gaining on her she shifted it to one hand and with a strength she didn't know she possessed ran with both arms swinging, faster now, but still the book kept her off balance, impeding her. And yet she could not let it go; it was Milt's, hers, everything, her very life. But he gained so rapidly that she could not hope to beat him to die next light, even if gaining the light would save her, and so when she heard him almost upon her, felt him almost ready to seize and drag her down, she stopped abruptly, turned quickly and raised the book high over her head with both hands. Her sudden move pulled the man up short but he could no more than stop before she brought the book crashing down upon his head. He wilted, staggered back two steps and sat down heavily. Wrenched from her hands the book flew off into the dark but she did not see or hear it fall, turning and running. Lightly now, as if liberated, she ran faster than she had ever run, almost past the door of the women's dorm before she realized what the building was. Again the dorm was her refuge. After blurting out that she had been chased by a man she dropped into a chair and huddled there, numb, stunned, shrinking back from the curious faces, from these strange faces of the world, cowering deep within herself and wanting to cower ever deeper, aching to pull her knees up to her chest and close her consciousness in upon itself until all was blotted out. Instead, she sat primly with knees pressed together and tried not to believe what she had seen, that moment when she had stood legs apart and arms high over her head-that moment with the book already starting down when she had first looked into the man's black face. Her muscles had not hesitated and the book had crashed down upon his short black kinky hair with a power rising from the primitive mindless self of her freed of constraint, and yet even before the book landed her nerves had taken the shock which still left her stunned, and still with numb disbelief she saw the look on his face when she had hit him, an amazed expression as of a man who doesn't really believe in death until the bullet touches his heart, an exaggerated surprise and chagrin, mouth agape as he took his comic pratt-fall. She felt strangely abandoned, as if the world had skidded. And so when the two policemen appeared seemingly gratuitously 170 |