The Siege
By Dusty B.
Attack of the Amazons


Comments? dustybottums2002@yahoo.com. Warning: the following story is simple
fantasy -- it (hopefully) contains moments of redemption and worthwhile
sentiment. But it also has a notable share of extreme, super-powered violence
and extended interludes of a sexual nature. So, consider yourself warned. If
it isn't your thing, look elsewhere, and good luck to you. If it is to your
liking, good, I'm glad you enjoy it. There'll be more of it soon. And now....

I

TOP SECRET - EYES ONLY

Resource file: RF920758

Washington, D.C.

7840260-07467ARF

The following is taken from the memoirs of Daniel J. Pittman, a mid-level
security consultant employed at Kent-Allan Contactors, Inc., in Baltimore,
Maryland, from August 2004 to March 2009. The material here is provided
strictly as background information on the first contact made in reference to
PROJECT: BRAZIL (see file 8493262309ARF) yet found. No recommendations are
made from this testimony, it is provided strictly as resource material.

I guess it was around the beginning of April when I met Cassie.

I know that's why I've been instructed to write this, to put this all down,
but still. It doesn't mean anything unless you know at least a little about
me, about the situation first, or else you might misjudge her, and her
importance in the incredible turn of events that have followed my small part
in this...conflagration.

Anyway, my name's Dan Pittman. I'm 38 years old. I work as a security
consultant with Kent-Allan and Partners, Inc, a military contractor here in
Baltimore. Yes, the same kind of contractor that got such a bad name in the
events in the Middle East. We handled security considerations for diplomats
and military prisons all over the world, though, not just in the Middle East.
I believed it to be a good company. I chose to treat the hazy reports about
Blackwater with a grain of salt. Through Cassie's intervention, I've since
learned a little more about the affairs of the military-industrial complex,
and it's mostly information I wish I could forget.

I grew up in a small suburb of Columbus, and my background is pretty ordinary.
Parents who divorced when I was five but remained civil, with both active in
my life until lung cancer took my dad four years ago. One older sister who
died in a car accident at 17, two younger brothers. My school career was solid
but not particularly remarkable, I graduated high school with a 3.2 GPA and
went on to a junior college and later Ohio State, where I graduated with a
degree in history.

I joined the Army the week after I finished college. Most people are a little
puzzled by that scheduling, but it was as I had planned it all along. College
was tough, financially, since I came from strictly middle class roots, but it
was do-able. And this way, when I signed up, I went in as an officer. I
figured, I was too young for Desert Storm, and I'd be too old for the next
major engagement. As an officer at 23, I'd have a shot at making major before
my 20 was over. Then, I could retire from the military, score an advanced
degree, and get a teaching job at a community college or something, and have
two full incomes by the time I was 45. Pretty sweet deal, right?

Except it didn't really turn out that way.

A bunch of clowns decided to attack New York back in 2001, and that changed my
plans, big time.

I ended up serving in the big "I" for two tours...almost. Halfway through my
second stint, the 'Vee I was in hit a roadside bomb, and effectively ended my
active military career.

I was lucky. I could still see, and after a couple of weeks, I could mostly
hear again. After a few months, I could walk again, too. I pretty much was
able to get back to normal, except for this little limp on the right side that
I just can't shake. I guess losing an inch and a half of femur will do that to
a guy. I was lucky. Most of the guys in that 'Vee weren't. So I can't
complain.

Anyway, I was looking at trying to land that teaching job a little early. But
just as I was getting out, I bumped into an old squad mate, this Italian guy
from Brooklyn named Vito Pitrelli, and he told me about the contracting biz.
He knew I was a good soldier who couldn't officially be a soldier anymore. So
he turns me onto Kent-Allan, and the rest, as they say, is history.

I got lucky, I hired in making far more cash than I ever did in the Army, and
through a series of lucky moves (and some politically savvy machinations on my
part, if I do say so myself,) I was able to not have to go back to anyplace
hot and sandy. I did a year at a military prison in Germany, then I got
promoted to a training officer stateside, at Kent's facility just south of
Pittsburgh. A year after that, I was promoted again to a regional management
position at the company's Baltimore headquarters, and that was kind of a big
deal. It put me way into the six-figure salary range, which I never really
expected to ever see in my lifetime, and also put me on a solid track to maybe
be a bigwig in the company someday. I guess they saw something in me they
liked. The regional position carried quite a bit of weight, and if I needed
something, I usually got it. The main thing, though, that told me I had
arrived was the speed of information flow, however.

In my business, you talk to the military. A lot. Every day. Nearly every hour.
Which is nice, because ostensibly, they pay your salary. When I was working in
the prison system over in Munich, we'd request an information exchange with
the Pentagon, and it would happen...eventually. Definitely in the range of
several weeks, sometimes a month. But it would come.

Then, as a trainer in PA, it came faster. Maybe a week. Maybe 5 days.

Then, after I leapfrogged district manager and went regional, my access to the
military liaisons was exceptional. I mean, when I called, people jumped. I'd
have responses to my inquiries in hours. Hell, minutes. I knew I had arrived
when I got a call back from the Secret's assistant before I had finished
dialing my next call. I'm not saying I was on an ego trip about it. Well, not
much of one, maybe. But still, it was gratifying to know that yeah, I was
doing okay for myself, and that I was doing some good, real good, for my
country and her interests. At least, I thought I was.

Of course, this all came with a price. I had an apartment that stood cold and
empty. It was a nice place; I had gotten in on early on a new building in
downtown Baltimore. Okay, I'll admit...I used some connections to get in on
the deal, but still. It was a sweet place. And when I say new, I really mean,
old.

A developer had gotten the idea of taking old abandoned warehouses in the
middle of downtown and turning them into these posh new apartments. This
would, in theory, attract young, well-off professionals to live in the
downtown area again, helping the local economy, while the developer made some
cash to boot. It was part of this whole urban renewal thing that was going on
then.

The thing is, it worked.

I got a fourth floor apartment, which was a bonus, in a way. The building
itself was this beautiful old brick monster that had been abused for about 40
years of bad weather and bad crime. The first three floors were pretty nice,
and folks on the first floor paid a little extra for street access. me, I took
the opposite route. See, the building itself was actually seven stories high.
When they revamped it into apartments, the fourth floor places - including
mine - were given these incredible three story ceilings. I had two bedrooms on
the first two floors, and a combined loft/den on the third. The staircase was
this huge, amazing wrought-iron spiral thing, and the floors themselves were
connected by a webworm of these very spare, utilitarian-looking iron catwalks.
It was strange, this quasi-industrial space, but with a few homey touches, the
catwalks, staircase, and landings actually became very 'in,' very post-modern,
and very, very cool. And the best part -- the rear wall of the apartment had a
huge roll-up grate and a sliding door...and behind that, the freight elevator.
I was one of only four people with direct access, and you better believe I
made sure it worked before I moved in, especially with a slight limp that
seemed to get worse in cold or bad weather. As it turned out, it was handy in
more ways than one.

I paid a little extra for the huge space, but hey, I had the money. And there
were only four apartments on the fourth floor, that's show big they were.
Pretty cool stuff. After I moved in, my mother showed up out of the blue with
a few carefully chosen items of a domestic nature, and in the course of an
afternoon she had the place looking great; the couches became fashionable once
she dressed them correctly, the lamps were carefully and arranged, plants
brought in, and the recessed lighting high in the ceiling threw dim cones of
light here and there. I liked it immediately, it looked like a combination new
yuppie/utilitarian workspace and art gallery, rolled into one. And yeah,
before she left, mom made another little comment about how 'empty' the place
was. Meaning...yep. No wife, no serious girlfriend. I didn't even have a dog.
It wouldn't have been fair, I mean, I was working 80 hour weeks, sometimes.

It didn't bother me that much, not at first, maybe not for a while, a long
while. But...well. You know. A guy reaches a certain age, and it's time, you
know? Life doesn't look so hot after you spend a lot of time staring it down
alone.

Well, I had been in the regional position for a while, long enough to familiar
with the faces around the office, and for me to upgrade my security clearance
at the Pentagon. It was rare that we actually had to go there to make pitches,
but we did occasionally, and every once in a while our input was asked about a
new toy.

That's what Trevor Sainsbury had come to see me about. Trevor worked as a
military liaison for AdvanTech, one of the fastest growing military
contractors in existence. Remember those hovering gunships a while back, that
were incredibly impressive, but far too pricey and not quite mechanically
reliable? Yeah, those guys.

So Trevor comes to see me, since a lot of the time it's our guys who will
actually be driving AdvanTech's vehicles or flying it's gunships. That's the
way the world works in today's increasingly 'war-for-profit' environment.
Listen, I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying it's the way it is. And I
was getting pretty rich at the business.

I liked Trevor. He was a young guy, maybe only two or three years older than I
was. He was from London and he and his wife only lived about 45 minutes from
my place. They had a good spread, a little more in the country, about 8 acres
at the end of this private little road. Since only a few people in my building
had access to the freight elevator, we were really the only ones with our cars
right on the property; I parked my old Tahoe in the rear alley, in one of the
spots that the building's maintenance crew used so many years ago. It wasn't
out of the ordinary for me to grab the car and pop out to Trevor's place for a
game or even just a cup of coffee or something. Trevor's wife Lizzie was a
trip, one of the funniest people I've ever known and hanging out with them was
fun, even if they did have to tend to their two kids, George, 8, and Ellie,
15, from time to time.

So anyway, I was in my office that first week of April when I heard the door
open and I glanced up, expecting to see Tina, my secretary. Instead, I got an
eyeful of Trevor Ainsbury, who leaned in the door with a wry grin on his face.
He stopped by often enough that Tina usually didn't even announce his arrival,
she would just buzz him in. that probably would have rankled the brass, but
hey, he was my friend.

"Hey, Trev, how're you?"

"Tops," he said, and strolled in, the door closing behind him. "Tops, my boy."

"I'd ask you about the family, but I was just out there last week."

"Much to our great consternation," he said, his expression one of smug
satisfaction.

"Okay, I'll bite. What's up?"

"Can't a fellow just call on an old friend? Hmm? Must there always be a
reason?" he asked comically, a look of mock hurt on his face.

"All right, all right," I said, trying to not to grin. I closed the file
folder that I had been leafing through and set it on the corner of my desk.
"You have my undivided attention."

"At last," he said, and finally laughed a bit as his smug facade broke.

"So how long are we--"

"I'm going to retire a very wealthy man, Daniel," he said, his face suddenly
serious.

I wasn't sure what to make out of his expression. "You were going to do that
anyway, Trev," I said.

"No, I mean shortly," he said.

"Okay...like, how shortly?"

"Let's just say I'm on the verge of closing the biggest..." and here he
actually leaned forward after glancing around my huge - and very empty -
office. "...the biggest military weapons contract since the Second World War."

"Okay."

"No, seriously."

"Okay."

"Daniel!"

"I said, okay! I believe you. Okay, not really, but that's not the point. What
wonderful new gift have you devised for our men in uniform?" I asked, amused.

"I can't talk about it."

"And yet you show up at my office to gloat."

"Precisely."

I let out a long sigh and smiled at my old friend. "Are you saying you can
tell me? Or that you can't?"

"I can tell you that we're going to completely re-arm the United States
military."

"Um-hmm."

"I just can't tell you with what."

"That's not fair," I said.

"I'm not exaggerating," he shot back.

"I didn't say you were."

"Your face did," he laughed.

"Whatever."

"How clever. Were you on the debate team?"

"Trevor!"

He laughed and leaned close. "Pulse technology," was all he said, and then he
stood and walked back to the door. "So maybe we'll see you at the house? The
draft?" Trevor was a convert to American football. He had left his precious
Manchester United back in the mother country, it seemed, and had embraced the
NFL with an almost frightening abandon. He was a Ravens season ticket holder,
and I went with him to games Lizzie couldn't or wouldn't attend. The draft was
coming up in about three weeks, and it was a quickly forming tradition that he
and I watched the first round while stuffing our faces with Lizzie's desserts.

"The draft," I nodded back. "Looking forward to it."

"Very good then," he smiled, and ducked out through the door.

I gave it a few minutes, then I got up and crossed the floor of my office and
went out to the little waiting area. It stood empty, as it normally did; the
only movement was the little bob of Tina's head behind her desk as she typed
away on some miscellaneous report. Tina Hanson had been my receptionist ever
since I had transferred to the position, and she did a good job, she mostly
kept me from getting myself into too much trouble.

"Hey Tina," I said as I passed her desk. "Heading down to records."

"Ewww. Take a sweater."

"What does that mean?"

"It's always cold down there," she said, and shivered, as if that would
illustrate her point any better.

"Okay. Thanks for the tip."

The elevator ride down was uneventful; no one else entered the bare stainless
steel passenger compartment. I leaned against the wall as it went down to the
sub-basement where the records division was kept. I couldn't shake Trevor's
smugness, or his obvious excitement. Obviously there was a significant
conflict of interests in his disclosure, but he had only given me enough
information to get started. I dimly remembered something about the term he had
used, pulse technology.

Pulse...pulse technology. It rang a bell, I recalled seeing some kind of brief
about the name, I wanted to say it had something to do with new forms of
armament, some kind of firearms development, but I just couldn't be sure.

Luckily, K&A is, or was, just about the only security contracting firm with
its own records division. Sure, it was kept a floor below even the basement,
poorly heated (according to Tina), and was the next thing to a career dead-end
as my company had to offer, but at least it had one. K&A collected as much
data about weapons development and military intel as it could. My own personal
theory? I had a pet theory that Kent was actually looking to get into
manufacturing end of contracting itself. That way, the company could provide
both weapons foe the field and the personnel to use them. I thought it was a
pretty good plan, and kind of hoped it would go that way -- sure, it would be
difficult to break the stranglehold that Grumman and KBR held on the Pentagon,
but it could be done. And there would be a big payoff when we did it.

The elevator stopped and the door slid open. I stepped out into the
sub-basement lobby of the record division; there were no desks, no tables, not
even a chair. It was just a blank white room with a solid-looking security
door on the far wall, with a keypad on the wall to the right of the door. I
walked over to the device and typed my company ID number on the keypad, and
then pressed my thumb into the scanner below it. After a three seconds there
was a tiny flash of light beneath my thumb, the little LED flashed from red to
green, and I heard the lock in the door click open. Somewhere a computer
upstairs was logging my entrance to the room, I knew.

The door closed behind me and I heard the 'chunk' sound of it automatically
relocking. The room itself was quite large, about fifty yards long, with bare
concrete walls with a fifteen foot ceiling. the space was divided into five
rows of reference materials, mostly boxes, folders, and boxes of folders.
These were loaded onto steel shelving that went from the floor to the ceiling.

Yep, I thought. Gonna go full bore. The only reason to have this much material
on anything.

"Can I help you?" a voice beside me asked, and I jumped about three inches off
the ground in surprise.

I looked to my right where a waist-high counter was crudely attached to an
old, broken-down desk. I leaned over and saw the back of someone, a woman,
bent down as she taped a cardboard box shut with some of that tough brown
packing tape on a dispenser.

"Hi," I said.

"Hello. What can I do for you?" she asked, still bent over, not looking up.

"Oh, nothing, I was just down to pick through some-"

I never really got the chance to finish that answer.

Okay, this is the part that gets a little...well, cheesy. A person not knowing
anything about what happened would swear I was making this up, that I was a
lonely old widower who had read too many romance novels and this was but one
more in a long string of clichés. But it's true, I was asked to write down
what happened, as it happened, and this did occur. It's also difficult to
discuss...for a whole myriad of reasons, but we'll get to that later.

I didn't finish the sentence because she stood up, and my words died in my
throat, and when I saw her, I got really, really dumb.

I mean, the intelligence just went out of my head, out of the freaking room,
out of the building. Once, when I was a little younger, my family had kind of
a cookout-shindig type of reunion/get-together thing. One of my brothers
married young, and he brought along his wife and her sister, his sister-in
law. And it had been a lot like this.

Everybody knows at least one attractive person. Everybody has maybe seen
someone who is truly noteworthy, in the sense of real, striking physical
beauty. It's a type of face we're familiar with, from movies and TV, actors
and actresses of good physical breeding who seem to look far, far better that
what the masses could normally manage to produce. But then there's this other,
less definable category. There's this thing, this quality...it's...hard to
describe. It's elemental. Kids today would call it 'hotness,' but it's more
than that, that's just a crude term that tries name a narrow occurrence with a
wide swath of paint. Yes, physical beauty is part of it, but not all of it.
There's more...the best way to describe it is to describe what happened at
that family picnic.

So my brother's sister-in-law walks in, and within 10 minutes, every man in
room was rendered as stupid as a second grader, myself included, making stupid
jokes (and knowing they're stupid, and not caring). All the 'men folk' lined
up to make inane conversation with her, not so much to talk to her but just to
have her look at us. She was very nice, she was reasonably intelligent and had
a good sense of humor, but she had to know what was going on. Or maybe she was
so used to it she had become oblivious to it, the way the very attractive
sometimes do. The women in the family just rolled their eyes and gave each
other knowing glances; I saw them do it, and knew what it was they were
shaking their heads at, and still I persisted with the rest of the guys, I
didn't care. That's the kinds if extra "oomph" I'm talking about.

Well, the young woman that stood up, my words died in my mouth, and I got
really really dumb because she made my brother's sister-in-law look like a
dirt sandwich. She wasn't absolutely drop-dead gorgeous, but she had...she had
a thing.

She gave a new meaning to 'blonde and blue-eyed.' Her hair was shorter than
average, and cut in a fancy, but not overly dressy fashion; it was just
slightly lower than her jaw line, resembled a bit of a bob 'do, and was parted
in the left/center, half of it trying to flow down over her right eye. Her
eyes themselves were a crystal sky-blue, nearly electric in the brightness and
intensity. The striking eyes looked out from behind some glasses, not those
Ashley-Banfield-smart-and-sexy rectangular things, either; these were large
round lenses that were definitely out of style. Cute nose, nice face. A jaw
that bordered on being maybe just a tad too square than the ideal, but somehow
this tiny imperfection made her seem all the more perfect. She actually looked
a little familiar, like maybe she resembled a celebrity...I tried to think of
the name, but it just wouldn't come to my stunned brain. It would come to me
eventually.

She wore a gray business outfit, a loose jacket over a white blouse and
matching loose pants rather than a skirt. She was tall, nearly as tall as my
own 5'11", she was 5'9", maybe more. She was obviously young, maybe 25...and
yet not. Something...some kind of other indefinable notion I couldn't
describe...it hinted to me that she was probably a little older than that, but
not much. She had what looked like a decent figure; it was hard to tell, given
the fact that she wore that outfit.

So I hope that I have clearly illustrated the scene, and of her appearance.
Yes, she was young and attractive, but I swear it was more than that. The
second she stood up...I don't know. I don't know how to say it without being
cheesy, so maybe I should just be out with it. I've never been an overly
sensitive guy, and I wasn't looking to have my life changed, per se. And I
totally never believed in that 'love-at-first-sight' stuff.

Until the day I saw Cassie.

"Hey there," she said cheerily. Her voice was mid-range, her words slightly
clipped and girlish in their delivery.

I wish I could say I answered with some witty repartee, but I didn't. I just
kind of stood there and stammered.

"Uh...I....uh...Oh."

I was like a deer in headlights, anyone could have seen it, but she didn't
even pause, she acted as if she didn't even notice.

"Haven't seen you down here before," she offered.

"Oh...I...well. Yeah. I mean, no," I managed to choke out.

"Gee, you're talkative today. What floor are you from?"

"Floor?" I asked, and she blinked and nodded earnestly. "Well, not a floor,
I..uh. Well, I'm Dan Pittman. I'm the director. A director. Regional. Regional
director."

"Regional?" she asked her eyes going wide. If I hadn't been hooked by that
point, what she did next made me fall in love with her.

"Well, I guess we should be official, then," she chirped, and clicked her
heels together with a click. She stood stiffly at attention, looking comically
past me, and snapped off a sharp salute. "Cassandra O'Connor, at your service,
sir," she sang out.

I was still coming out of my strange initial shock but I wasn't so clueless
that I couldn't start playing along. I returned the salute and smiled. "At
ease, soldier," I smiled, and did the cool, casual 'I'm the commanding
officer' style of salute back. She grinned broadly at me doing that, and that
was it. Check, please. She could have asked me to jump off a cliff, and I
wouldn't have been happy about it, but I probably would have done it.

I guess women don't think men still think like that. I mean, in terms of
affection. Sure, of course attractiveness enters into it, it has to, but they
might be surprised that men still think in terms of courtly, nearly chaste
love. Well. Surprise. We do.

"So what brings you down here, Mr. Big Shot?" she asked, her grin widening
even further.

"Can't tell you," I said solemnly.

"Hmm. Top Secret?"

"Very."

She nodded, looked side to side, and leaned in a bit. I could smell her, a
perfume maybe? A faint, pleasant clean smell, like fruit. "I can keep a
secret."

"That's what they all say."

"And who exactly are 'they?'"

"Those who try to find out my secrets."

"Oh," she said, nodding, still playing along. She straightened up, and I could
see how tall she was. Probably only inches shy of six feet. "I see. We should
be wary of them."

"More," I said, comically serious. "Very wary. Ultra, even. Ultra-wary."

"Infinitely steadfast," she said, deadly serious.

"At least."

"That goes without saying."

"But I just said it," she muttered.

"But you could not have, 'cause it goes without it."

"Wow," she kind of sighed.

"Yeah. Listen, can I take you out to dinner?"

It just popped out of my mouth. I didn't think about it; I don't think I could
have thought about it at the moment if I had tried. My pulse had quickened a
bit and I could feel my ears burning. The feeling wasn't unpleasant.

"Oh, yes," she sighed; she relaxed and she finally smiled again. "I was so
worried."

"Worried about what?"

"That you wouldn't ask," she confessed, blushing a bit herself. And here we
stand, ladies and gentleman, two schoolchildren in love. I'll see you in study
hall.

II

So I got the files I needed, spending about six times as much time as was
necessary in the records department. So much time that we didn't actually get
to have that date: Instead of taking her out, I just ordered in and we had
Thai takeout at her desk sometime after seven that first night. I asked her
out for a drink later, and she said yes, but it would have to be after a short
wait; it would look better if the security system didn't record our departure
at the same time. She promised to meet up with me at Finnegan's, a small Irish
pub about three blocks from my apartment building. I stopped in, took a quick
shower, changed into a pair of khakis and white cotton shirt, rolled up the
sleeves. My heart was thrumming along a quick clip the whole time. I was
worried that something would happen, she would suddenly get cold feet. A find
like this? Something had to happen to screw it up, right?

So I sat at my window seat at the pub, watching , waiting. About twenty
minutes after I got there, a figure swung into an empty curbside parking spot
on an old yellow motorcycle. I've got something more than an appreciation,
call it a minor hobby, when it comes to bikes, so I watched, vaguely
interested as the rider stepped off, took the riding gloves off, slipped off
the helmet ... yeah, you can see where this is going.

She trotted in, helmet under one arm. She wore jeans and bulky black leather
jacket. She looked around, saw me, and skipped over, sliding gracefully into
her seat before I could stand to greet her.

"You're kidding me," I said, shaking my head incredulously.

"What?" she asked with a smile.

"A Honda? What is it, a CB 750?"

Her grin widened. "900."

"Yep. '78? '79?"

"78. You too, huh?"

"Yeah, I've got an old BSA."

"Get out."

"Yeah."

"Wow, look at you, Mr. Fancy Pants," she said, and kicked me under the table.
"So when is good for you?"

"Good for what?"

"For us to go riding?" she said, with an exaggerated 'duh' expression on her
face.

"Um, today's Thursday."

"Wow. Were you an honors student?"

"We have to work tomorrow."

"So that makes Saturday morning. 11:00."

"That was easy," I grinned.

"Not everything will be that simple," she said, her eyes locked on mine
suddenly.

"Okay," I chuckled.

"Too bad we have to wait, I'd like to go tomorrow. Plus, I've got no reason to
see you tomorrow, now."

"Well, I still have the files I took today," I said. "I'm going to have to
bring them back."

"Oh, yes."

"And I could be persuaded to do that around lunchtime? And I could, say, maybe
bring something to nibble on," I continued.

"Or I could just nibble on you," she said, her eyes still fixed on my own.

I think my heart stopped for a second. I felt about half the blood in my body
rush up to my face, and she burst out laughing.

"Mowrrr," she purred comically, hooking her hands into claws in front of her.
"Gotcha."

I started laughing too, and waved the waitress over. She was a cute little
college kid in black blouse with little shamrocks all over it, a sign that the
bar was definitely taking a turn for the cheesy.

"You first," Cassie said as she picked up a drink menu.

"Hey guys, what can I get you?" the server chirped cheerfully.

"I'll take a white Russian," I said.

"No problem," she said as she jotted it down. "And you, miss ... "

Something happened to her when she turned to Cassie, I saw it. I happened to
be watching the young waitress's face, and I saw it happen. She went from a
happy, cheerful expression to one of indecision, to outright distaste, all in
the space of about two seconds. Cassie didn't notice it, or, if she did, she
did acknowledge it, not at first. But I saw it, I did.

" ... What do you want?" the waitress finished.

"Uh ... can I just get a screwdriver?" Cassie asked.

"Sure," the waitress nearly spat, and turned away.

Cassie swung her gaze back in my direction. "Jeez. Sorry."

"For what?" I asked.

"For whatever I did to ruin her night."

"Yeah, what was that about?" I asked.

Cassie shrugged and looked down at the table. "Who knows."

A moment passed, and I realized with disappointment that some of the energy
had left the air.

"I do," I said.

"Huh?"

I know. Her problem. You."

"What do you mean?"

"Look at her," I said. "She's young, she's cute. Little Ms. Cutey McCo-ed. I
bet she gets 'em all going in whatever dorm she lives in."

"Uh ... .yeah. Okay. Not sure where this is going."

"And in walks you. And the rules change."

Cassie frowned at this. "Why?"

"Cause now the queen bee is here and the worker bee don't like it," I quipped,
and was glad to see Cassie grin anew.

"Stop," she said.

"Seriously. Do you own a mirror?"

"Huh?"

I was coming to my senses, though. "Sorry."

"What?"

"I ... .no. I just. Nah. Never mind."

"What? No fair!" she said, and grinned. "Finish."

"Nah, I was just going to say ... I just. Well. You're ... "

"What?!"

I looked down at the table, gathered my thoughts, and tried to make it sound
as nice as I could. "Well, obviously ... she's jealous. You came to her home
court and stole her thunder."

"By doing what, exactly?"

"By being you. And looking like you do."

"Oh, stop."

"Yeah, okay. You're right. You're absolutely horrid."

"Har har," she laughed, and kicked me under the table again. "Wise guy."

"Yeah," I said, and let the moment play out a little. "That's it, though. I
promise you."

"Yeah, well ... " Cassie said, her words trailing off as she looked away.

And that was another point that sold me on her, as if I hadn't fallen for her
at first glance. I know this sounds awful, but I was used to hearing a certain
cattiness from women my own age, and I expected to hear more, for Cassie to
sit there and spend the next two or three minutes verbally dressing down the
waitress. But she didn't do it. She shrugged it off; she let it go and was
ready to move on to something new, and I found that very appealing.

"So, about me seeing you tomorrow," I started, and she turned her vision back
to me.

"Yes?"

"Are we talking, in a business way, or in a social way, or ... ?"

"Which would you like it to be? Is the whole dating someone at work thing a
problem for you? Or for the company?"

"So we're dating now?"

"You were an honors student. I knew it!"

"I just wanted make sure."

"And now you're sure," she smiled.

"Has anybody told you that you're very ... "

"Pushy?" she asked.

"I was going to call it forthright."

"Hmm, forthright. Such tact."

"I try."

"And you succeed," she said. "Yeah, maybe I've heard that a time or two."

"You big flirt," I teased.

"Hey, it's only flirting if it doesn't go anywhere," she said, and I could
feel myself blush just the tiniest bit.

The conversation paused for a second as the waitress brought back our order,
and then vanished with a flash of her tray and one quick, slit-eyed glance in
Cassie's direction.

"So what do you want from me?" I asked.

"Excuse me?"

"For lunch," I grinned. "Tomorrow. I'm taking you out for lunch tomorrow,
remember? What do you want for lunch?"

Cassie stared at me over the rim of her glass, her bright - very bright - blue
eyes fixed on my own with laser-like, rock-steady precision.

"I don't know," she said. "Ask me that after you've bought me breakfast."

I nearly dropped my drink. The shock hit me, her words sunk in. Then, try as I
might, I could not suppress the little smile that crept onto my face, very
similar to the one she was displaying as well.

"Okay," I replied, careful not to trip on the words. "Deal."

"You said you lived around here?" she asked.

"Yeah, just a few blocks."

She drained the rest of her drink in one huge swallow. "I think we need to go
there."

"Okay," I smiled.

Cassie stood, and pulled on my shoulder, drawing me to my feet.

"I mean ... now," she said.

"So that's how I came to land a place like this," I finished as the metal
grate rolled up and we stepped from the freight elevator into my apartment.
"And over here is"""

My words were cut off when Cassie spun around and grabbed the front of my
shirt and pulled me forward into her kiss. It was easily the best kiss of my
life. After a moment she broke it and looked at me closely with a strange,
half-expectant look on her face.

"Nice place," she whispered.

"Thanks," I gasped. I shifted on my feet a little. First, her kiss and her
nearness, now combined with the sound of her whispering voice ... my pulse
began to gallop and I sprang to sudden and swollen life.

She studied my face for a moment, finally drawing her vision up to mine once
again. She smiled sweetly and whispered, "Hi."

I don't know what it was, if it was her perfume or what, but I could smell
something sweet, a sticky, thick, citrus-like smell - it was delightful. It
was almost like I could feel my lungs open up further to let as much of it in
as I could. I wrapped my arms around her and drew her closer.

"God, you smell good," I groaned. I squeezed her gently and took in the smell
of her, the scent of her hair.

"Thank you," she said softly, and I felt her lips pulling on an earlobe. My
hands traced the outline of her shoulders, down toward her waist. The thick
motorcycle jacket she wore made it hard to tell, but she seemed a little
leaner than I had expected. My heart pounded harder as I imagined slipping
first the jacket, then the rest of her clothes, off of her body.

We did the funny walk that couples sometimes do when they are embracing but
don't want to part long enough to get something done separately. A little
awkward shuffling, grasping, shrug off some clothing, then some shuffling
followed by groping hands and groping tongues. Finally we made it to the huge
leather couch that dominated the living area, and Cassie shoved me roughly in
the chest. I laughed and teetered backward, finally falling into the soft
material. She simply fell down on top of me.

I'll spare you a lot of the details. It was pretty typical at first, actually.
My relationship with Cassie was moving along much faster than I was used to,
but with the way she looked, I didn't mind. Plus, she seemed as funny and kind
as she was gorgeous. What more could I possibly have expected?

Eventually, my hands drifted up and I rubbed her thighs softly, then caressed
the swell of her butt through the jeans she wore. I raised my right hand
slowly and took hold of the zipper on her jacket. She had a strange, blank
expectant expression on her face. I drew it down, slowly, seemingly one tooth
at a time, with her watching, a slow smile appearing on her lips.

Her jacket swung open a little and my hands found the sides of her waist. She
was slimmer than I had first thought. Until now, I had only seen her in
unflattering business attire and a bulky leather jacket. But now, underneath
it, I was starting to see that not only did Cassie have an amazing facial
beauty, but she also sported a rocking bod.

My hands traced the slim waistline, the smoothness of her hips. I pushed the
front of the jacket aside, touching her sides, the surprisingly firm, smooth
surface of her belly. It was like a dream come true; I had always found
athletic women appealing, as long as they stayed feminine. By the feel, Cassie
was definitely an athlete. She was a 'sleeper,' as they called them in street
racing. An old, rusty car pulls up next to you, you bet everything you own
against it, and then it smokes you in the quarter mile because under its hood
is a perfectly tuned aluminum block 427 side oiler.

It was the same with Cassie. Gorgeous, sure, but I never would have suspected
she had a body like this under all those clothes. My hand wandered up, up as
we kissed. Finally I could feel the swell of her breasts under my fingertips,
and I fondled her through the blue T-shirt she wore under the jacket. Her
surprising physical appearance didn't stop with her trim waist and what I
suspected was a washboard of abs; I'm going to sound like a complete,
stereotypical male jerk here, but she had the best rack I've ever touched,
that I've ever seen. Our lips were locked firmly together as she straddled me
on the couch, and I caressed her breasts softly, marveling at their perfect
size, their firmness. To quote the old fairy tale, they weren't too big or too
small, too high or too low ... .they were just right. I could feel the active,
cognitive parts of my mind slowing to a stop as the deep, instinctual urges
took hold. Here I was, a mostly healthy male, straddled by a beautiful young
woman who could have easily had a career as a model. Let's just say that I was
responding appropriately.

Evidently I wasn't alone. Cassie's breathing deepened, and she began to rock
her hips slowly against my own. She moaned softly, almost a purr, and her
hands latched onto my own, which were still firmly fixed to her chest. She
rocked back and forth, a little harder now, breathing heavily through her
mouth, and her hands clenched down on mine, forcing hands to grip her even
more firmly. Now it seemed like I was kneading her breasts like bread dough;
harder than I would have on my own, but she seemed to like it: her breathing
shortened, became more rapid. She threw her head back and moaned, loud, which
both surprised and excited me greatly. Her hands dropped to my waist and with
a metallic jangle my belt was undone and my pants were unbuttoned ...

"No!" she barked suddenly, and then it was over.

She was off of me and standing in the dimly lit room, facing away from me,
hand clutching the front of her jacket tight around her.

"Um ... Cassie. What's wrong?" I managed, once my sense came back to me.

She shook her head, paused, and sighed. "Nothing. Everything. Hell, I don't
know," she muttered, and sat down on the edge of the sofa, still facing away
from me.

"I didn't ... I mean, was I ... "

"No, you're fine. You're great," she shook her head. "That's the problem."

"What?"

"Never mind. It's nothing."

"Obviously, it's more than nothing. It's definitely a something."

She glanced at me over her shoulder, the first hint of a smile on her face
again. "Maybe just a little thing."

"Can I help?"

Her smile widened, but it was a slow, sad smile at best. "I kind of think it's
a little 'ol me only thing," she confessed. She suddenly looked, intensely,
desperately unhappy, and a little bit of my heart broke.

I watched her for a moment. "Okay," I said.

"What?"

"Okay," I repeated, and patted her back from where I was laying behind her.
"Just know I'm here, and I'll help if I can."

She half-turned to see me. "You're a good man, Daniel."

"I try."

"No, I mean it. I'm serious."

"Thanks."

"I'd still like to stay."

"Okay."

"I mean, we can't ... we can't ... I mean ... "

"I know what you mean."

She paused. "And that's okay? You don't mind?"

"Of course not." I was a grown man, after all. Sure, my motor had been fired
up, but I was old enough to not go crazy if I didn't cross the finish line.

Cassie slowly turned and laid down beside me, her head came to rest just below
my own, on top of my right arm. She laid her right arm across my chest and
draped a leg over my lower body. She curled up around me and I was lost again
in the warmth and smell of her. I closed my arms around her and drew her
close.

"This is nice," she said softly at last.

"Yeah, it is."

"Thank you, Daniel."

"For what?"

"Pretty much everything," she said, and closed her eyes.

I thought for sure I wouldn't be able to sleep, that I would lie awake and
just watch her all night. But soon enough I found comfort in the nearness of
her form, and I drifted off to sleep.

III

Things progressed the next day, and the day after. I spent more and more time
with Cassie, in and out of the office. I made good on my promise, buying her
both breakfast and lunch. She politely declined my offer of dinner to make it
a perfect hat trick, but insisted on the motorcycle date the next day.

It turned out to be a beautiful day to ride. Spring was officially upon us,
and the chill of the early morning gave way to a perfect late morning ride.

Initially, I took point, the chrome on my old BSA winking smartly as we leaned
through the gentle curves in the suburban area outside of the city. Cass rode
just behind and to the right of me, and was I was struck at how expertly she
handled her bike. Her pace never wavered, she didn't have to keep adjusting
for speed to keep up or slow down. It was as if she was stuck to my side.

After about an hour of pleasant cruising, she pulled alongside me. I looked
over, and flashed her a smile. She wore a full face helmet, but I could sense
she was smiling back. But then she made a 'c'mon' gesture with her left hand,
winked, and nailed her throttle.

Her Honda opened up with its signature combination of exhaust growl and
transmission whine. She leapt ahead like she had been shot from a gun.

"Oh, boy," I muttered to myself, and throttled up as well.

I spent the next thirty minutes trying to catch her.

She tore down the now rural roads, doing 70, 80 miles per hour. Once, when we
came to a particularly sharp corner on the old road that lead around Lake
Porter, I thought she would either slow down to negotiate it, or worse, keep
going in a straight line and fly off into the woods that surrounded the
highway. But she kept steady, and tucked herself in around the engine, her
head barely higher than the handlebars. She stuck out her right knee and
leaned it over, and blasted around the corner; somehow she was able to make a
30+ year old 900 cc cruiser handle like a brand new crotch rocket.

For the record, it was more than I could do. I slowed down, way down, and
putted around the corner at a comfortable pace. I caught up to her on the
straightaway.

"You're nuts!" I shouted over the roar of the wind.

Her eyes sparkled back at me, bright and alive, slightly crinkled from the
grin I knew she wore. She shrugged, and with another angry-hornet sounding
burst of speed, she was off once again, and it was all I could do to keep up
with her.

Which pretty much describes out entire relationship. I had a hard time keeping
up with Cassie, she seemed to have an inexhaustible reserve of energy. We
could work all day, even putting in extra time, then grab dinner together,
then a movie, and as we would leave the theater, she'd say she wanted to go
out dancing. I'd shake my head, torn between two emotions. I was glad she
wanted to be with me for longer and longer periods, but also annoyed by the
fact that I, unlike Cassie herself, needed to sleep sometimes.

I was also growing steadily more concerned about our relationship as a whole.
Cassie was fun, incredibly intelligent and very well-read. She was a beautiful
young woman by all measure, not the most attractive woman I'd ever seen, but
not far from it. I was nothing to write home about, maybe a slightly better
than average looking guy who had never had trouble finding casual partners
before. And there was a definite attraction. I felt it. I'm sure she felt it.

And yet nothing happened. The same type of ritual as our first night together
played out over and over. We would begin with some joking and laughter, then
fall into some heavy petting, and then she would recoil at the last minute,
apologize, and then tell me that we couldn't be together yet. And after each
physical debacle, she would look even sadder than she had the last time. I was
starting to wonder if it was a sign of some deeper psychosis that I didn't
know about or understand, some fundamental flaw that kept her from opening up
to anyone new in her life. It became the only uncomfortable aspect of our
relationship; it created a strange tension by being this big subject that
neither of us would broach, let alone talk about.

I was having thoughts like these a couple of months into the relationship when
my telephone rang at my desk, and I saw her extension on the digital readout
panel.

"Hey there," she chirped.

"Hey yourself."

"So I was thinking."

"I thought I smelled smoke."

"Today is Friday," she said.

"Last time I checked."

"And tonight is Friday night."

"I don't know how to break this to you, sweetheart, but they usually go
together."

"So, if somebody was to say to somebody else, 'Hey, let's go to a movie
tonight,' I think the other somebody might tell the first somebody, 'Okay.'"

"Jesus," I moaned. "Do you always talk like this?"

"Was that an invite?" she laughed.

"Yep."

"Then I accept. But let's play dress up," she said.

"Huh?"

"This time I'm buying you dinner, and we're going somewhere fancy."

"So," I smiled into the receiver. "You saying I'm cheap. That I don't take you
nice places."

"Pretty much," she laughed. "You cheapskate."

"I accept that," I laughed back. "That has some merit."

"I hope you look good all cleaned up," she said, suddenly more serious.

"And why is that?"

"Cause if you do, maybe you'll get lucky," she said, and hung up quickly.

My smile froze, then faded slowly, and I could feel a tiny little surge in my
heart rate. She had never brought up the subject on her own before ... it was
going to be an interesting night.

IV

I think my jaw hit the floor.

She stood inside the freight elevator, ankles crossed, a long coat resting on
one forearm. She wore a short, slinky black dress that showed off her
hourglass figure perfectly. It fit her as if it had been tailor-made, and was
the perfect blend between classy and scandalous. She wore black heels to
match, and she had had her hair done, it framed her perfectly made up face
with flattering precision. She was a vision and a half, I tell you. "I took a
cab," she said simply, with a slow smile.

"Oh, wow. Cassie. Wow."

"Oh, stop," she said, waving me off with a smile.

"No, seriously."

"You too."

I raised my arms and glanced down. A dark brown sport coat, with a simple
white dress shirt and some khakis. Hardly dressed to impress. "Not really."

"Really," she smiled, and kissed me, slowly. Deeply.

"Nice," I said when she slowly pulled away.

She nodded. "Mm-hmm. But just wait till later."

"Do we have to?"

She nodded again, her smile widening. "Yes. I'm hungry."

"You're always hungry."

"Yes. But not just for food."

I gulped, she laughed, and off we went.

Dinner itself was an experience. The French restaurant was a mystery to me, I
limited my palate to things Italian, Mexican, and Chinese. The menu might as
well have been written in Greek.

When the waiter arrived, I leaned over toward Cassie, the dim romantic
lighting setting the scene, and I raised my voice just above the quiet piano
that drifted through the place.

"Cass ... I don't have a clue what ... "

"I've got it," she whispered back.

"Well, unless you speak Fr- ... ."

She rattled off a phrase in French to the waiter, who seemed as surprised as I
was at first, but whose expression melted into one first of appreciation and
then admiration. And she spoke it with none of the halting awkwardness that
plagues the casual language user. It flowed out of her mouth like warm butter,
to use a strange analogy. I had never understood the so-called romantic
attraction of the French language, it never really did anything for me. But
then Cassie used it. She made it her own. And then I realized that when it's
spoken by a beautiful woman, French is an amazing language.

When he had gone, she laughed when she saw my shocked expression. "Close your
mouth, you'll catch flies."

"Not in this place. Where did you learn to do that?"

"Paris."

"Paris? Jeez. What, did you live there, or something?"

"Yeah, for a while."

"It must have been a few decades by the sound of it."

"Not that long. But a while."

"Lady," I sighed, "there's a lot I have to learn about you."

"That's true," she said, and her smile faded a little as she looked down at
the table.

"Hey. Hey, I was just joking."

She nodded, and smiled, but it wasn't as bright a smile as she wore before.

We finished dinner, and as the cliché goes, walked a few blocks up the street
to take in a movie. The film was a standard romantic affair, where a young
woman who was very thin (nearly gaunt, actually) fell in love with a young man
who was also thin, had rumpled hair, and a two-day beard. Apparently they were
unable to be happy apart. After much angst and several scenes featuring
horrible pop music (soundtrack available on Capitol Records! the end titles
screamed), the walked off into the sunset together. Literally. Into a sunset.
Accompanied by a song by Michelle Branch. The movie had the ability to make me
feel a little queasy in the stomach, cynical about love, and very, very old -
I realized I had outgrown Hollywood with my 25th birthday.

Cassie felt the same, but she managed to laugh her way through it anyway. Just
being together was enough. The show ended, and we made our way back to the
street, our hands locked together firmly.

It's funny that you can't see huge life-events coming before they happen.

Looking back, it was kind of like a scene from a bad movie itself, you know? A
couple walks along a dark alley a little later than they should have. A chance
encounter with some hoodlums. Things go badly; their lives would never be the
same. Yeah, right.

Well, it sure played out like a movie. And I'm pretty sure we'll never be the
same again.

We were so into each other, into basking in the glow of the other's presence
that we hadn't noticed where our path was taking us, as we first left the
theater, then walked down the city street. Gradually, there were fewer and
fewer people around us, and before either of us had noticed, we were standing
on a deserted street corner. I least that's how I remembered it at the time.
Looking back now, I can recall things Cassie had said.

"Wait, let's go back."

"Is this the best way to get there?"

"I don't remember coming this way."

And of course, each of these I brushed aside, and on we went. Until the
silence of that street corner fell around us, and she stepped a little nearer
to me. I jumped a little when the first man's voice came to us.

"Say, lookit here," he said, and stepped out of the mouth of a darkened alley
to our left.

I took in a quick breath and shuddered when I heard his voice break the
silence, yet, just for a second, a tiny part of my mind noticed something
funny.

Cassie didn't jump at all. She just turned slowly to face him, as if she had
been expecting it.

He stepped out of the shadows, and I could see he wasn't much more than a kid.
He was wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt and gloves, but I could make out
enough of his lower face to tell he was black, and young, maybe 20 at most. As
I sized him up, two more figures stepped out of the gloom of the alley.

"Ah, shit," I said under my breath, and felt my heart speed up, a light
ringing began in my ears. One guy, maybe. But three?

The others were dressed like the first guy. Hooded sweatshirts all around. I
guess it was the uniform of the urban underclass, I don't know. One was black,
similar to the first guy in size and build, but the third guy was a huge white
guy, probably 6'3" or 4" and around 300 pounds. His forehead was low and
bulbous, like it was sliding down over his face.

"You don't want to do this," Cassie said, her voice soft, reassuring, yet
firm.

Waittaminute. That's my line, I thought.

"Yeah!" I added, and nearly winced at the sound. Cassie didn't move, she
simply stood statue-still as she watched the trio emerge from the mouth of the
alley and spread around us in a semicircle.

"No, wrong, honey. I think we want to do this. You know how this works. Come
on," the leader said, motioning toward the darkened passage.

"No way," I said, the blood pounding in my ears now.

"You really don't want to do this," Cassie said, her voice calm and even.

Leader-guy just kind of smirked, and in a flash he held a knife of staggering
proportions in his right hand. He waved it toward the alley, his grin even
broader. "Get in here, asshole," he grinned. "And tell your bitch to shut up."

I looked to Cassie's face and saw no trace of emotion there, which was even
more alarming than if she had been panicked. Instead, her vision fixed on the
eyes of the head of the trio and was completely flat and devoid of any strain
or emotion.

"What did you call me." It wasn't a question. I heard the strange tone in her
voice, and was worried by it. More than worried. Frightened.

"Oh, I'm sorry, bitch. I called you a bitch. Now get your bitch ass into the
alley, and we'll decide if you get to keep it. Bitch." He gestured with the
knife, and slowly but surely we were herded toward the darkened space by the
slowly encroaching young men.

Here, it was significantly darker than the street, but there was enough
ambient light to see things clearly once my eyes had adjusted. Cassie was
directly in front of me, with the head thug in front of her. Another goon was
to our right and the huge one brought up the rear behind me.

"No...first we gonna see what's in our pockets...bitch. Then we gonna see
what's under that bitch coat of yours," the thug said, his grin huge in the
alley's gloom.

I had pretty much given up hope of talking our way out of the situation. I was
slowly coming to see that the night would probably end with me stuck in the
guts and Cassie raped, maybe worse. I clenched my hands into fists, took a
deep breath...and froze.

Cassie smiled.

I had decided long before that night that I loved this woman. She was kind and
thoughtful, she was beautiful and I found her maddeningly attractive, even
after our noted lack of intimacy. In my eyes she was perfect, and I had been
waiting for the right moment to tell her exactly how I felt. But I must admit
that one movement, that one expression made question everything I had felt up
until that moment. Cassie had been verbally abused, threatened with physical
and sexual harm, and she had smiled.

And it had been evil.

As dangerous as these thugs were (and I believed they were, even with their
youth and probable criminal inexperience), Cassie's slow smile easily eclipsed
the depravity of their intent. I recognized the emotion behind her look; it
was one of cold, impersonal malice, of detached, bottomless hate, and the
freedom given by handing oneself over to it.

It was a look of murder.

The head thug took a single step toward us, bringing him close to us for the
first time. "Now, listen, bitch, this is how..."

That was as far as he got. The rest happened so fast I couldn't see it
properly or understand exactly how it occurred. It was like how you close your
eyes against the flash and thunder, but see an afterimage of a lightning bolt
on the inside of your eyelids when one crashes down nearby. I can only
describe my impressions of what happened in the flash of a split-second.

The thug stepped forward, and raised the knife. Cassie squared her shoulders
and took a single step forward, effectively closing the distance between them.
Her left hand shot out, lightning fast. She seized his forearm, about three
inches above the wrist. Before he could even turn his head, she simply rotated
her grip like someone would turn a doorknob. The thug's arm snapped like it
was nothing more than a matchstick, with a shockingly loud CRACK and bent
double on itself. The knife fell from his grasp. He opened his mouth and
sucked in a breath to scream. Cassie's right hand flashed out to backhand him
across the face; I saw flecks of white glitter away from him in the dim light
of the alley. Teeth. Without a pause, she pivoted and her right flashed back
in the opposite direction, smashing his face in a vicious right cross. His
face broke. She released his right arm. Cassie's left hand pistoned up,
fingers curled inward, her palm blasting his forehead. He recoiled. Cassie's
right hand flashed out, flattened into a knife edge that she chopped into his
throat. There was a POP! as his eyes went wide. Cassie pivoted on her feet
again, leaned in, and placed her left hand on the left side of the thug's
forehead. Her right crossed this touch to grasp the right side of his jaw.
There was no pause or effort. Cassie's hands flashed outward from this strange
cross grip. The thug's head spun one way, then the other, much faster than
seemed possible. There was a harsh, sharp report. CRACK! The thug slid to the
ground in a liquid heap. No movement. No sound.

Keep in mind this all happened, literally, in about two seconds. She had moved
so fast she had been little more than a blur.

The sounds made by her hands striking the young man were shockingly loud; too
loud to seem real. I had seen plenty of bar fights before, trust me. A punch
doesn't sound like they do in the movies. It's a flat, silly-sounding, light
slapping sound. But not these. When Cassie hit the guy, it was LOUD. A heavy,
concussive report; it was filled with a meaty thudding sound. Like there was
power in the blows.

I've been in combat. I've taken enemy automatic weapons fire, and returned my
fair share of it. I've dodged mortars. Defused land mines. I should be used to
extreme situations. It's a fair statement to say that my reaction to what I
saw stunned me. I hate to admit it. But it did. I froze. My brain literally
shut down for a few moments as I took in what my rational thought process said
was impossible.

The thugs froze, too. They looked at the body of their friend lying on the
concrete, and they didn't move.

But Cassie did. Again, like she had expected it. In a few unhurried, even slow
movements, she undid the belt of her overcoat, and slid it down from her
shoulders. She shrugged it off her arms and gently tossed it to me.

"Catch," she said simply.

And then she stood there, in that black dress. She reached down below her knee
and grasped the material in her fists. She pulled outward, and the material
split in a tear straight up the seam, revealing the smoothness of her thigh.
But her arms! When she had put pressure on the material, I had seen it. Her
arms swelled visibly, becoming fuller, the musculature far more defined. Her
shoulders went from normal, trim-looking shoulders to cut, and I mean,
professional figure-fitness model cut, in a single movement. She straightened
up to her full height (was she taller, now, somehow?), and squared her (and
wider?) shoulders. I was at a complete loss; she had changed fundamentally in
some way, but I was completely unable to describe how. She just looked...more.

Thug #2 snapped out of it and charged her just as she straightened up. Again,
she flashed into motion, nearly too fast for my vision to track her movements.
She pivoted on a single foot, spinning in circle, her left foot rising,
extended, in a picture-perfect spinning kick that struck the advancing thug
squarely in the chest. I expected guy to grunt, to hear a loud SMACK when her
blow struck home.

What I didn't expect was the thick, meaty bass note of the BOOM when her foot
whistled into its target. Nor did I expect the thug's body to rocket away from
her extended leg; he didn't stagger back a step or two but instead flew
backward as if shot from a gun; he rose in the air and sailed backward to slam
into the alley wall thirty yards away. His body smashed into the wall a dozen
feet off the ground with a cracking thud, rebounded, and smashed loudly into a
pile of half-empty trash cans on the street below, where he came to rest
without moving.

If I hadn't already been frozen by shock, I would have been after seeing that.
Her picture-perfect kick had blasted the guy farther than most people could
throw a football. I mean, a full grown man, launched through the air like he
had been shot from a cannon. Imagine it! I didn't have to; I had seen it with
my own eyes.

Thug 3, the behemoth, should have run. But he didn't. He moved around me and
charged her. Again, her fists moved nearly to fast to see, and I heard one,
two, three, four crunching, explosive impacts. The behemoth staggered, he
seemed to sink into his shoes a bit. Cassie seized his huge right arm, spun
him around, jerked the arm into an awkward position with a vicious tug. It
broke with a resounding CRACK. Thug 3 didn't cry out, his eyes were glassy,
I'm sure he didn't fully know who he was or what was happening at the moment.
Cassie reached under his arm with her right hand, clamped her left into a wad
of muscle at the base of the man's neck, and kicked out his knee with her left
foot. Behemoth sank to his knees without a sound. I stood there, still frozen,
unable to move. But then thought returned to my brain as I saw her look up
into my face as she held him. She still wore that flat, predatory,
terrifyingly blank expression.

"Turn around," she said softly.

Somehow, my mouth began working. "Cass-"

"Do it. Now." she commanded.

What could I do? Here I was, an ex-soldier in his physical prime, and I was
both shocked and intimidated, and I think rightly so, by my slip of a
girlfriend. I slowly turned on my heels and stopped to regard the far side of
the street. There was no movement, no sound for a few seconds. And then...

The gentle hiss of the movement of air. A thick, meaty crackle, a tearing
sound. A single low, soft grunt, a quiet exclamation of "Huhhn!" in a male's
voice. The sound of a large body collapsing. Silence. Then, a series of quick,
tiny, frantic scratching, clawing motions. Jesus.

He was twitching.

I was wondering what to do or say next, when she spoke in my ear, close,
little more than a whisper. I jumped; I hadn't heard her approach, not even in
her high heels which should have clicked loudly on the concrete.

"Don't move," she said softly, her voice still in that strange, scary flat
tone.

"Okay," I said, and began to turn anyway.

She grabbed my left arm just above the elbow. Her fingers dug into the flesh
like it was bread dough. My whole arm went numb instantly, then I felt a fiery
pain trace its way from my elbow to my wrist as she twisted my arm, pulling it
behind me and pushing up at the same time. I hissed in a breath and began to
stammer an unintelligible "Yi yi yi," sound, and felt her grab my right
shoulder in her right hand to steady me. She spoke low again, close to my left
ear. I could feel the warmth of her breath.

"I told you not to move," she said.

"Okay, okay," I gasped. She twisted even harder, my God, her hands were like
hydraulic steel clamps around me, I couldn't believe it. "Ow! ow,
ow...Cassie...you're hurting me."

"I know," she said, and I could hear the smile in her voice. She leaned even
closer, and whispered, "Good." Then she kissed my ear softly, pulling on the
lobe for a second with her lips. She paired this with an even harder twist of
her hands, and I groaned again as her fingers bit into me. I was still in an
utter state of confusion, but one thought was above all others.

"Cassie...you...you killed those guys?" I said in a half-question.

"Maybe," she answered, and my blood turned icy when she chuckled softly and
added: "Probably."

"Oh, Cassie, how..."

"Did you like it?"

"What?!" I nearly shouted back at her. She leaned closer, her lips against my
ear, and whispered her question again.

"Did you like it? Did you like watching me punish them?"

My confusion began to mix with the dawning sense that maybe I was in some kind
of danger here, maybe she was some kind of psycho, I don't know, I thought I
knew her, and how was she able to do what she had done, how was she able to
hold me like I was stuck in some iron clamp, and how--

"What? No! How can you ask that? And how did you--"

Her right hand left my shoulder and slid down my back, a pause, and then
suddenly she reached around and cupped the mountainous bulge at my crotch. In
my shock and surprise, I hadn't realized I was sporting the biggest hard-on in
history. We're talking enormous. The Titanic. The Hindenburg. An Apollo
rocket. Made of granite. She began massaging it through my khakis with her
hand, the same hand that had just apparently killed three men.

"Mmmm...I think you did," she said, and the smile in her voice was even more
pronounced.

"Cassie--" I began, and the rubbing of her right hand intensified, grew more
powerful. It wasn't painful...yet.

"Shut up," she commanded. "There's something we have to do now," she said, and
stuck her tongue into my ear. And then we were moving.

Or rather, she was moving, and I was trotting on my tip-toes to keep up with
her. She kept her fearsome, impossible grip on my arm with her right hand as
we walked, and I'm being serious when I say that I had a hard time keeping up.
I was practically running, albeit awkwardly, considering her grip on my arm,
but still....she didn't appear to be straining at all. The click of her heels
were solid and even, her legs scissoring back and forth powerfully as she
strode down the street, back in the direction we had come. Even her pace was
impossible; she should have been running, given our haste. But she wasn't.
Just her long, lean legs striding forward in a steady, purposeful pace. Her
eyes swept the street, surveying, studying...intent. She was looking for
something. No, more than that. She was hunting.

After a few blocks, we passed under the dark green awning of the
Fontainebleau, one of the snazziest hotels in town. Just as we reached the
strip of red carpet that led from its brass doors to the street, she suddenly
jerked me in another direction. She pushed me through the huge, slowly
revolving door and suddenly we were in the lobby of the hotel.

It was a huge expanse of dark green marble that reeked of money. Exotic plants
in tasteful planters decorated the huge room; leather and oak furniture of a
gigantic dimension was arranged around rugs that cost more than my family made
in a year when I was a kid.

I didn't get a chance to admire it long. Cassie's grip on my arm tightened
even further - I was starting to wonder about the extended loss of blood
circulation by now -- and she steered me over to the long, low counter that
ran the length of the room. A young, dark-haired guy stepped forward, his
hands resting on the inside countertop, his dark green jacket contrasting the
stark pale shade of his face. "May I help you?" he asked as he stared down and
the registry on his counter.

Cassie changed her hold, subtly reaching around me with her right arm. She
held me now in a half-hug, and crushed me into her tightly so I couldn't move.
She traced her left index finger playfully along the front of my jacket. Her
faced betrayed no effort as she held me in a grip stronger than any vice I'd
ever seen. She smiled at the clerk winningly.

"Hi there," she cooed. "We were hoping you had a room."

"No, I'm sorry, we're totally booked--" he began, and then his vision came up
from the desk and fixed on us. The kid's vision fell from me to Cassie, since
she was speaking for us. And I saw it happen. He kind of...fell...into her
vision. She smiled broadly at him, and I saw the kid's knees go weak.

"You don't have anything?" she pouted.

"Gee...no ma'am, I'm sorry."

"Nuh....thing?" she asked, leaning forward, dress dipping. She was putting on
a show.

The clerk just shook his head, but his eyes were riveted to the perfect
example of cleavage before him.

Cassie reached out with her free left hand (her right still had a fearsome
hold on my arm) and touched his hand. He actually jumped a little bit, as if
she somehow shocked him. He looked at her, and he looked like a guy that's had
one too many beers. She batted her eyes at him playfully.

"Well...maybe...maybe I could..."

"Yes," she said, smiling. "Could you?"

He wobbled a bit, his head clearly spinning. he started typing on a keyboard,
his eyes darting back and forth between Cassie and his computer screen.
"There's a reservation for someone coming in later tonight," he explained.
"But he's a corporate guest. A reservation made by my manager..."

"Yes?" she asked, concern on her face.

"But...I could say....well, here." He hit the delete key. "Without the
expiration date of his credit card, I can't authorize the charges in
advance....so, I guess I can't hold the room."

"Awww, what a sweetie!" Cassie cooed, and leaned far over the desk to give the
clerk a peck on the cheek, the whole while never letting go of my arm, which
was now screaming in agony.

The clerk's eyes actually closed, and for a second I thought he was going
over. But then his eyes opened and he steadied a bit.

"You're so sweet. Thank you."

"Thanks...thanks. You too. You're the most...I...thanks," he stammered.
"But...you should know...the only room left is the penthouse on the top floor.
It's very pricey," he finished, holding out the electronic door key. "And on
the 35th floor."

Her hand stole into my back pocket and pulled out my wallet. "American
Express?"

"Sure," the clerk said.

"Here you go," she said, and flipped him the entire wallet. "Amex, and
register it to his name. His license....waittaminute."

Cassie's brow furrowed in thought. The clerk paused, frowning, concerned for
the spirits of a woman he didn't even know.

Cassie spoke again. "Can you put it under another name?"

The clerk looked vaguely uncomfortable. "Look, I don't know if I should....if
I--"

"There's no trouble or anything," Cassie reassured him. "We just don't
want...we don't want his wife finding out, you know?" she said, and playfully
tweaked my arm until I faked a conspiratorial smile.

"I...well...okay. I guess. But...but the actual charge will still show his
real name."

Cassie paused, only for a second. "That's all right. They won't find that for
a couple of days, I think."

"They?" I asked.

She replied by gazing into my face, and her expression of mirth melted away.
"Yes. They. Your wife and the man she hired. Right, darling?"

Cassie twisted my arm a little, and I thought she might tear it off where we
stood. I gasped a little and nodded.

The clerk made a few selected keystrokes, paused, and nodded. "Well....okay,
then. Enjoy your stay, Mr. and Mrs......Anderson."

Cassie beamed her broadest, brightest smile at the clerk. "You are a complete
doll," she cooed, and snatched the keycard from his outstretched hand. "I
won't forget it."

"Oh, it's nothing," he said, flushed, and I could see the beads of sweat on
his brow.

"Keep the wallet. We'll pick it up in the morning," she said, and pushed me
toward the elevator.

"Uhhh....okay," the clerk said, but we were already moving. We turned a right
around the huge marble column containing the elevator, just as the doors were
closing.

Cassie finally released my arm, and gave me a shove in the center of my back.
She only used one arm and didn't appear to put much into it, but I took flight
just the same. I sailed into the elevator, slamming roughly into the far wall.
She stepped in as the doors slid shut. I wondered why the doors didn't reopen,
surely she had broken the little sensor, right? I didn't have much time to
wonder, though, her left arm shot out to hold her palm against my chest. She
slammed my back against the wall, and then she pressed. I mean, hard. Suddenly
my feet were six inches off the ground, and I couldn't breathe. I grabbed her
forearm, but it felt like I was grabbing at a stone statue. There was no give
whatsoever. She looked up at me, her eyes narrowed, a slight smile on her
face. I gagged loudly, and she pressed even harder. I whimpered a bit, and her
smile widened. "Shhhh," she said, and pressed the floor number with her right.

I got the same treatment when she opened the penthouse door. I was airborne
again, and I landed on the huge brown leather couch in the middle of the room.
The suite was amazing, the most incredible hotel room I'd ever seen, but I
didn't have time to appreciate it. As soon as the door was closed, she was on
me.

I'm old fashioned, okay? I'm a bit of a prude, even. But I was asked to relate
what happened, so I have to tell you. But...I'll try to sum it up without
being too caught up in details.

It was pathetic. She was like a cat playing with a mouse. My head was still
spinning. I kept seeing flashes in my mind of what she had done. Three young,
healthy men...nothing. Probably dead. Two of them, certainly. Her completely
inhuman grip on my arm. Making the clerk do a 180 by batting her eyes, and
leaning in close to him...and what else? That smell? I swear, she was giving
off a scent, one I could barely define, that clean, sweet smell....like
flowers. Like freshly cut fruit...I smelled it now, that, combined with her
touch, the look of her eyes...my God! My head was absolutely swimming. I can't
describe it to you. I should have been horrified, and at some level I was, but
on another level, I didn't care. All I wanted, all I could see, was her. The
second she touched me on the couch, my body responded, it betrayed my
emotions.

She grabbed me and pulled me to my feet. Her hands grabbed the front of my
coat and shirt and pulled, and to my already shocked mind there was yet more:
her arms leapt into stark relief again. Her forearms flexed, her biceps bulged
into shocking (though still feminine) mounds. She actually growled, like a
cat, her expression a snarl, as the clothes on me tore away from my body like
they were made of tissue paper. She curled a hand under my belt and tugged, I
heard the buckle squeal in protest and felt it give. A similar motion and my
pants were off, leaving me only in my socks. Another shove, and this time I
tumbled backwards, the more ridiculous part of my anatomy standing out hugely
from my form and wagging stupidly, through the doorway where I finally came to
rest on the bed.

Cassie strode into the same doorway, and stretched, her arms gripping the
doorframe, her body rising up onto her toes. She looked at me lying there, her
eyes traveling over my inert form, and she licked her lips, nearly drooling. A
low noise, a half-purr, half-moan began deep in her chest, and she stepped
forward, moving slowly, more gracefully than I have ever seen anyone move. She
stepped out of her heels, but somehow, her height didn't seem to decrease. She
shimmied this way and that, and the black dress fell away from her. My breath
froze in my throat.

This was the first time I had seen her, truly seen her. She had the best body
I've ever seen. Easily. She was firm, and awesomely fit. The small bulges of
her abs were clearly defined, tapering out to the gentle swing of her hips,
likewise widening to the breadth and depth of her chest; breasts perfectly
formed, standing out proudly from her chest, caps of defined, feminine muscle
padding her shoulders. Her eyes, now smoky with desire, traveled up and down
my body as I watched her come closer, a slow step at a time. Her movements
were deliberate, fluid; she moved like a wild thing, like a panther. Then she
smiled, sprang, and was on me. I don't know how else to say it.

She raped me.

By all reasonable measure, I shouldn't have wanted what happened to happen. I
had seen her kill three men and entrance another. But I too was under whatever
spell she was casting, and even if I had not wanted her more desperately than
anything in this life, I could not have made her stop. She played with my body
as she wanted. I'm a fit, full-grown man, yet my struggles beneath her were no
more effective than if I had been a child. Her mouth on mine, her scarlet lips
pressing against my own, her tongue in my mouth, darting, licking. Her breath
in my ear. Her lips against my throat, and mine on hers. Then I would come to
my senses and try to push her away; she would laugh, low and throaty, and
effortlessly push my hands away. That night she used me as I had never been
used before; it was nearly obscene. I ceased to be a man for a time, I was
only a tool used for her own pleasure. With a seemingly limitless strength she
would maneuver me into position after position, some seeming impossible given
the limits of human anatomy; others, painful at times.

And when she finally rolled me over onto my back, and with a fierce growl and
thrust of her hips drove my full length into herself, I surrendered totally
with no pretense. I came instantly, waves of pounding pleasuring radiating up
my torso to spike into my brain. On and on it went, and I became aware that I
was crying out, grunting with each second-long explosion coming from deep
inside myself, gasping from the force of the orgasm. I looked above me, and
saw Cassie's head thrown back in similar pleasure, her mouth open and gasping.
I looked down her body as the feeling continued, my very toes seemed to be
curling upward in a mixture of exquisite delight and pleasure. My eyes widened
even further when I saw her midsection; the abs that had shown such amazing
definition before were moving; they were crawling up and down her torso, her
midsection positively rippled, and I could feel the grasping touch of strange,
unknown muscles caressing me deep inside her, pulling me deeper and then
forcing me back out, pulling the very seed from me as the waves of sensation
went on and on.

Here, my conscious, reasonable thought left me. I only remember dim fragments,
and thank God for that. I remember my pounding, beating pulse beginning to
sound in my own ears. I remember grunting out with the force of the orgasmic
bliss that went with the experience. I remember Cassie above me, growling
aloud in her own world of pleasure. And I remember that strange, wonderful,
and somewhat frightening grip along my entire length; a pulsing, slick grip
that simultaneously goaded each drop from me and bent me to its will. The
normal ten or fifteen second limit to an orgasm came and went...now
more...longer...pulsing on and on!

I remember the pounding drumbeat of my pulse in my ear getting louder and
louder...and mixed in with the exquisite sensation, a new concern: how long
could a man's heart tolerate this? On and on it went, for 30
seconds....60....two full minutes....I began to thrash about, from pleasure so
intense my synapses began to mistake it for mortal pain. Two and a half
minutes...still it went on, her body pulling every drop, every breath from
me...

"Cassie!" I gasped. "Cassie.....uhhhhhh..."

Her growl turned into a howl, an animalistic cry of triumph, and something in
her seized me in a grip of steel. I screamed with what little breath I had; it
felt as if someone had put my most delicate part into an iron clamp. Cassie's
wail of triumph turned into a snarling laughter, and with a massive surge of
muscular power, she spun the two of us over, never for a moment relinquishing
her strange grip on me. Now we were in a classic missionary, and I actually
heard a fleshy WHACK! as her feet met and snapped together behind me. A new
feeling filled my sense; a crushing pressure on either side of my hips. I
gagged from the monumental pressure her stone-hard legs were putting on me.

"Ahhhh.....oh God! Cassie......I...." I cried out, but she merely moaned, and
arched her back. I tried prying her legs from me, but it was no use. It was
like trying to force apart steel jaws which had clamped shut around me.

Then, the squeezing inner grip began again. My hips thrust forward, and back,
in and out; yet it was not of my own doing. Cassie's own hips remained still
as well. It was only whatever force was inside her, whatever strange array of
inner muscle, that moved my entire form as if I were some oversized sex toy.

"Wait...no! Cassie, I...." I gasped, but to no avail. Her laughter and turned
back into that blood-chilling, cat-like growl. "Cassie!" I gasped, and was hit
again by the pounding waves of an orgasm. On and on it went again, pulling
from me every drop of fluid, every drop of energy I had...

With an exhausted form of reasoning, I realized my vision was darkening. My
pulse pounded in my ears, it was all I could hear. "Cassie," I heard myself
mutter weakly, but it sounded far away and muffled. I realized my heart was
skipping a beat....then two....then a whole stuttering number of them, taking
away what little breath I still felt I had in my lungs...the crushing force of
her legs constricting around me came again, but I didn't care. Something deep,
way down in my lower abdomen, down by my hips...something deep there groaned
in protest; I felt something shift, pop, and begin to give under the
unimaginable force she was putting on my body. But I didn't care...Everything
was fading, and I resigned myself to never waking up from the sleep she was
crushing me into.

But I did.

The room swam into focus. It was still dark. A shaft of moonlight came in
through the now open window, splashing itself across the foot of the bed.
Across her bare shoulder. She was sitting on the edge of the foot of the bed,
facing away from me, her legs drawn up so her knees met under her chin and her
arms held her knees close.

I went to sit up, but a sudden blast of pain from my tortured hips put me back
into the pillows. I gasped, and sparks danced in my vision. "Cassie," I began,
but the words stopped short in my mouth as I heard another sound, a softer
sound. I frowned lightly in the darkened room, not at the pain in my abused
body, not from the weak sound of my own voice, but because of this new, quiet,
stark sound I could softly hear.

She was crying.

V.

"Damn it!" Carmine muttered, and he fingered the speakerphone on his desk
again. "Bruno!" he shouted. There was no answer.

There should have been. When Carmine Dugino called, people answered. Unless
they wanted to find out what it was like at the bottom of the Hudson.

"What is it, Boss?" his bodyguard, known only as Nicky F., asked from the
shadows at the far end of the room. God bless him -- he would have taken a
bullet for Carmine, but he was a moron if God ever made one.

"What do you mean, what is it?" Carmine barked. "Nobody's answering the damn
phone, is what. Eight morons on the payroll, and nobody wants to answer the
fuckin' phone."

Dugino's secret little townhouse was in Manhattan's East side, built into the
rear of a commercial building that provided both cover for his underworld
dealings and a mean pepperoni pizza for those late nights when dirty dealings
left no time for a proper meal (and which Carmine Duglio could fairly be said
to have had one too many of. At 46, he was about 30 lbs over his recommended
weight. 'Well -- fuck it, he would have said. Life is for living. Gimme
another slice'). It was quiet, it was secure, and most of all, it was fairly
secret. Not too many people knew of Carmine's hideaway -- only a select few
from his syndicate, his bookie, and the few girls he would call in from Rita,
his madame. Hence, the call he was trying to make at the moment. All told,
there were two metal gates off of an alley entrance (the only one), a steel
door from a hallway, and five different rooms, about 3000 square feet's worth,
all poured concrete walls, and then Carmine's private office way in the back.
he liked the place because he felt safe there, like a bunker. When the end of
the world came, Carmine knew where he would be headed.

But right now he couldn't get anybody. Two staffers, and six of Nicky's boys
for protection, including Bruno, Nicky's own brother.

"What the blue fuck is going on?" Carmine roared, as he was not a patient man.
"I got that meeting later, and Rita was supposed to--"

He was interrupted by a loud knock on the heavy oak door to the office.

"Jesus. Fuck. Bruno! Get your ass in here," he shouted over the loud
lounge-style jazz music that still played on his custom stereo. The door swung
about halfway open, and someone stepped through, but it sure wasn't Bruno.

Long arm. Feminine. Body. Amazing. Long, lean legs. Brunette.
And....Holeeeee--shit. Time to give Rita a raise, a BIG one. This chick was
smoking hot, in a whole other league from what Carmine was used to seeing.

She was a stunning brunette, tall, easily 5'9" or 5'10', shit, maybe more.
Wide, athletic-looking shoulders. Amazing rack, stuffed into this tight little
black dress that clung to her narrow middle and ended in a short -- way short
-- skirt that bared every inch of her amazing legs. Her legs! Goddam! They
went on for days. She wore some of those shiny black boots that Carmine liked
so much, that went to just below her knee, on a long heel that made her calf
muscle and lower thigh swell as she walked....and goddam if she wasn't the
best lookin' woman Carmine had ever seen. Jesus!

Nicky must have thought so, too. Carmine heard him cough from the shadows.
Carmine made eye contact with him, and nodded toward the door. Nicky's
enormous bulk rose, and he stared at the woman as he went out the door.
Amazingly, he wasn't that much taller than she; odd, since he tended to
dominate any room with just his huge physical presence.

The woman stared him down with a strange little smirk on her face, all the way
until Nicky was out and she turned to shut the door.

Carmine's eyes were locked on the firm, rounded wonder that was her bottom.
The minidress hugged every curve, leaving next to nothing to the imagination.
She had already turned fully around to regard him before his eyes traveled
back up to her face. She still wore that strange little cocky grin, scarlet
lips raised to one side.

"So," Carmine said, and stretched out in the leather recliner he used behind
the huge, dark oak of his desk. "You're new."

"Mmm-hmm," was all she replied.

"Okay. Rita sent you?"

Her grin widened. "You could say that."

He smile back a bit. "Please," he said as he held out a hand before him, "have
a seat."

She positively slithered into the room, moving with a fluid grace that was
both entrancing and a little strangely unnerving. She sank down into the
overstuffed leather chair in front of his desk as if she weighed no more than
a feather. Carmine shifted in his seat a little; just being this close to
her...he felt himself growing aroused just by her presence. No little blue
pill needed tonight, he thought.

"So....what's your name, beautiful?"

"Angelique."

"Pretty name."

"Thank you."

"Pretty like you."

"Nice. You sweet talking me?"

"No. Don't need to," Carmine said dismissively.

"And why is that?" she asked, obviously not caring.

"Because either way, this night is gonna end the same," he said, his eyes
locking on her own.

"Is that so?" she asked, her smile widening further, he eyebrows raised in
amusement. "And how is that?'

"With me fucking you," Carmine said flatly.

She laughed out loud at that, and Carmine's demeanor faltered just a tiny
little bit. He had had girls exhibit every kind of reaction to that, his
standard declaration, but never had one simply laugh it off before.

"My my," she purred. "Aren't you just the most romantic little thing?" she
asked.

"Get your ass over here," Carmine said, unzipping his pants to relieve some of
the growing pressure there. "I've got a romantic thing for ya, but it ain't
little."

She rose gracefully and came closer, her hand on his shoulder as she sat on
the edge of his desk...the smell of her combined with her proximity was too
much, and he felt himself spring massively to life. She reached down and
traced the bulge under his boxers with a single fingernail; she could see him
tremble beneath her teasing touch. Her eyes met his as she leaned in close,
and spoke as much to his anatomy as to him.

"Hello there, precious," she said, and grinned as she leaned in closer.

Goddam, was all Nicky could think. Goddam. Hope I get to be a big boss
someday. For that fuckin' reason alone. Goddam.

He walked down the short hall, past a series of doors, to step into a small
office that served as a waiting room. Jesus Christ -- where the fuck was
everybody?

"Hey, where the fuck is everybody?" he said aloud. "Bruno? Guys?"

He glanced into a couple of the rooms, but to no avail. He used his keys to
open the small room across the hall, the surveillance room. Nobody here,
either. he walked around the counter, but the chair was empty, the huge bank
of black and white monitors displayed their images to no one. his brow knitted
in slow, ponderous thought. Where the hell was everybody?

As his poor excuse for brain matter did its best to examine the situation, his
eyes traveled over the empty chair...the console...the glowing monitors....and
it took him a minute to realize what he was seeing, far longer than a person
of even average intelligence would have...but to his credit, his slow-moving
mind did manage to put two and two together.

Nicky plopped his huge frame down in the office chair, and his eyes began
their rounds on the black and white monitors, the flickering images they
displayed soaking through the muddle of his mind.

Camera one: the outside gate in the alley. No one guarding it. And the iron
grating that formed the perimeter? Nearly an inch thick, iron bars. And they
were all bent. Bent and twisted, standing off in all different directions like
they were made of nothing more than pipe cleaners.

Camera 2: The iron gate just outside the door. Completely missing. Jagged
pieces of metal hanging off where the hinges were supposed to be...like
someone drove a truck straight through it...or tore the gate off.

Camera 3: The two-inch solid steel door at the main entrance. Hanging
awkwardly by the bottom hinge, the top third of the door peeled down like a
limp banana skin, with big dings all over the front of it, making deep craters
in the metal.

Camera 4: Oh, boy. Oh, boy oh boy oh boy.

There were three guys lying on the floor of the front office. One was sprawled
against the desk, another was in the center of the frame. The last, to the
right, was instantly familiar.

"Bruno," Nicky breathed softly.

His equally massive brother was lying on the floor, face turned toward the
camera. his eyes were wide and glassy, his expression a frozen look of shock.
Nicky stared at the image for a second, something about it wasn't right...then
it occurred to him what was off about it: Bruno's limbs didn't match the angle
of his body. His arms jutted out at weird, impossible angles, his lower left
leg was hyperextended so badly it looked as if he had died trying to kick
himself in the chest. His hips and entire midsection were tiny; they looked
squashed, giving him an exaggerated, cartoony appearance.

Nicky's heart began to thud heavily, his pulse beat in his ears. he swore in
Italian and stood quickly, his hand producing a nickel-plated .45 from the
holster under his arm. He turned and calmly headed back the way he had come,
toward Carmine's office. Damned if they weren't under attack, and by a whole
squadron of goons. Probably Chelli's men, and...

He paused, and threw open the door of one of the offices he had passed
earlier. Here, the story was told in color. Three more men were stacked,
lifeless, against the far wall. All along the left wall was a deep, thick
crimson smear that ran the whole length of the room, ending at Joel's head,
which looked oddly flattened as he lay on top of the other two hired guns.

"Oh, fuck," Nicky muttered, and jumped when he heard the scream.

The sound was short, fast, and male. It was strangely choked-off sounding,
too. From down the hall. Carmine's office.

Carmine.

"Shit!" Nicky sprinted the length of the hall; his right foot raised up and
smashed the heavy door open like it was made of paper; Nicky was a huge man
and his progress didn't slow when he hit the door. It burst open with a shower
of splinters, and he knew instantly two things: he was too late, and that he
himself was as good as dead, too.

Carmine was on top of this desk, his eyes staring skyward. His heels were
beside his ears. His head rested on his buttocks. his entire midsection was a
bright red from a great pressure and distention.

Someone had folded Carmine Duglio in half, backwards.

His arms were out, hands hooked into claws. His tongue protruded from his
mouth, probably from the pressure exerted on his torso. He was dead. Then came
part two of the realization, the less pleasant one for the bodyguard known as
Nicky F.

He turned slightly to the left when he caught the flash of movement in his
peripheral vision. But again, it was too late, and a part of his mind, the
only quick-thinking part, the trained killer part of his mind, already
processed it before it happened, before he truly saw the tall brunette step
close to him from her position in the door's blind 'kill zone.'

Whap! POP! Thud. CRACK! Wham. Unnngh!

It took less than two seconds. WHAP: the brunette seized the wrist of his gun
hand in her own grip. POP: her hand became an iron vise, his delicate wrist
bones splintered instantly. He grimaced and dropped the heavy pistol, where it
dropped to the floor with a THUD. CRACK: this fearsome woman with impossible
strength rotated her grip up with a jerk, and Nicky's arm bent 90 degrees in
the wrong direction -- his breath froze as his elbow broke with a startlingly
loud report. WHAM: She kicked out his left knee, her leg powering down like a
piston, demolishing his left knee as it bent in a direction it was never
designed to go, and he fell to his knees with a thud and breathless, wordless
cry. UNNNGH: In her final movement, the brunette placed two extended fingers
against his throat, just in front of and under his left ear, and with a
shockingly muscular burst from her upper body, drove them deep into his neck.

"Gurk!" he hiccupped, and heard the meaty crackle as something that felt
vitally important inside of him broke and tore in an irreparable fashion. He
started to topple to the right as she released him.

Two seconds. An instant-long series of surgical strikes delivered by a tall,
gorgeous brunette woman had reduced a huge, trained killer to a useless heap
of dead flesh before he could even cry out. Wow, she's really good, Nicky had
time to think before his vision darkened. He was dead before he hit the floor.

VI

Resource file: RF920758

(continued)

She was crying.

I don't know what kind of condition my mind was in after everything through.
Probably not Very solid. But I sure knew how my body felt.

It reminded me of the kind of pain I had been in after I had been wounded in
the military. not as severe, of course, but close. Damn! My legs were
throbbing. My arm sang a high chorus of pain from where she had grabbed me in
her steel grip. Hell, even my nether region felt sprained and abused. But my
hips were the worst. The sides of my pelvis, upper thighs, and lower
midsection...jeezus. It was like her legs had clamped me in an iron vise. I
went to move, and a fresh pain stabbed out through my core. Yikes. That was
going to be a long time healing, I thought.

And yet, I heard her sob softly, and she was all I could think about.

I dropped my legs off the side of the bed and spun around -- slowly, gingerly
-- so I could stretch out and touch her shoulder. "Cassie?" I whispered.

She jumped as if shocked a little, and turned her head to look at me. I could
see the single, shining streak left on her cheek reflected in the moonlight,
and dear God, even though she had waded through three attackers like they were
children and nearly killed me in bed...my heart broke a little.

"Cassie. What's....what's wrong?" She just snuffled a little and stared back
at me. "Cass...tell me what's..."

"I love you," she said.

I batted my eyes in surprise. Of all things, this was not what I had expected.
Up until a couple hours before, I had been convinced I loved her like I had no
other, and to hear her say those words to me, first, would have made me the
happiest guy on the planet. But now, it was odd. I still didn't know how she
had done it, but she had nearly killed me -- some deep, unnamable sense told
me that this was true. Yet, here she was, declaring her love...and being sad
about it?

"I...Cass, I don't under--"

"I was supposed to kill you," she said softly, and her face wrinkled up in
fresh anguish. I leaned forward further, ignoring the dull throb of protest
from my hips, and held her close. She buried her head against my chest and I
felt her shake softly for a time.

She stayed there so long, I thought for a moment that she had fallen asleep.
But finally she sat up a bit, wiped her eyes, and actually gave me a small
peck on the cheek.

"Thank you, Daniel," she said softly. I could see she was barely keeping it
together, that she was doing all she could to not break down again...but
things were so incredibly confused that I had to have someone -- anyone --
answer some questions right away.

"Cassie...I...I know it's probably not the time. But...I have to know...some
things."

She turned to look at me, and I could actually see her summon up some small
reserve of emotional courage from deep inside herself. Seeing her be so brave
gave me an odd sense of pride, and made me realize of some level that I did
indeed still care for her as much as ever, even after the whirlwind of that
night.

"I know. Okay."

"I need some answers about what happened. About what's still happening."

"Yes. I'll tell you what I can," she said, looking into her lap. But at this,
she looked up and her eyes bore into my own, the force of her gaze shocking,
even in the dim moonlight. "But Daniel" -- she never called me Daniel, until
now ... .it made me realize something was different, something had changed,
fundamentally -- "you may not like what you hear. And if I tell you what you
want to know...if I do...everything is going to change for you. Everything.
And maybe not for the better. I won't be able to guarantee your safety.
It...it may already be too late for that. There's a chance....a good
one....that's you're going to wind up dead."

"You're scaring me a little bit, Cassie," I told her.

"Good. You should be. But not a little. A lot. If you knew what was coming,
you'd be terrified."

"Well, I'll just have to deal with that as it comes," I said. She nodded. She
took in a deep breath, wiped her eyes and cheeks once more, sighed, and looked
me straight in the eye.

"All right then. Ask away."

A series of images flashed through my mind, disjointed and rushed. The three
street thugs. Cassie, tossing them around like dolls. The clerk at the desk.
My own vision, growing darker as she basically crushed me unconscious. All
whirled together into one huge, neon-flashing light of a question. I paused,
exasperated, then asked the question the only way I knew how to phrase it.

"Cassie...what are you?"

She studied my face for a moment, as if rethinking her promise to tell me what
I wanted to know. But then her eyes fixed on mine, and she made up her mind,
and she spoke quickly, matter-of-factly, with no hesitation.

"I'm an Amazon," she said.

VII

It wasn't even 7 a.m. yet, and already FBI Special Agent Jennifer Carnes had a
headache.

And it was going to be one of those real humdingers, too. It started in the
back of her head and threatened to crawl forward over the top of her skull,
with its restless dull pounding. The headaches weren't new, she was getting
used to them, but they did seem to be getting both stronger and more frequent
lately.

And now here she stood, standing over the corpse of one of New York's most
notorious gangsters, holding a cup of coffee in one hand and the smoldering
stub of a Marlboro in the other, coat open due to the unusual warmth of the
spring day, one of the budding young stars of the Bureau.

A little too 'budding,' maybe. Law degree by 23. A four year stint in the
Army, tearing through OCS like few before her. Left a white hot military
career (and a certain immediate promotion to captain) for a field agent
position. Near the top of her class at Quantico. Well-liked. Told she was
kind, upright, and funny. Most men found her to be attractive, medium height
and build, brownish-red hair and all.

But now she was in the trenches, trying to make a name for herself, and she
was starting to butt heads with those above her, who resented her easy rise
through the ranks. Easy to them, because they weren't there for the endless
nights of academic cramming, or the missed vacations and parties, the missed
fulfilling home life...the lack of kids, a husband, or even meaningful
relationship.

Jen sighed in frustration, took the last drag on her cig and put it out on her
heel. She looked around for a second, realized she was at a crime scene,
rolled her eyes at herself, and slipped the stub into her coat pocket.

Nice. Walking ashtray, Great.

Her cell phone rang, the simple, annoying bleep that it had come preprogrammed
with.

"Cripes, get a different ringtone," Nelson, the agent next to her muttered.

"If I had time," Jan said and flipped the phone open. "Carnes."

"Carnes?!" The voice on the other end of the line shouted. "So help me God, if
you had anything to do with this, your ass is grass," her regional director
barked in her ear. "We've been tailing Duglio for a year. A fucking year! And
now this mess!"

"I know."

"And now...fuck!" the gruff voice of Regional Director Roger J. McCall
stuttered to a stop. Jen could imagine him hustling out of his office to a
waiting car, salt and pepper crewcut at attention, teeth mashing down on a
cigar stub. "Jesus wept."

"Yes," was all she could say in agreement.

"I'm on my way, goddamn it. And so help me God, if you fuck up another crime
scene, you're through. You didn't smoke in this one, did you?"

Fuck.

Jen closed her eyes as her silence gave her away and a fresh string of
obscenities rang out from her cell phone.

VIII

Resource file: RF920758

(continued)

We didn't really talk as we dressed. I don't know where she went just after 6
a.m., or what store she could possible find open at that time of the
morning...but Cassie left the room, seemingly only for a moment, but she
returned dressed in a fashionable, tight-fitting dark blue sweater of thin,
slightly fuzzy velvet-like material, form-hugging jeans, and black athletic
sneakers. It was hardly a racy ensemble, but compared to what I was used to
see her wearing, it was like she was suddenly very risqué.

She also returned with some new clothes for me, since most of mine hadn't
survived the night's festivities. A white cotton dress shirt and new khakis,
socks and boxer briefs, all new and of the perfect fit.

"How'd you know my size?"

"Hmmm, not sure," she said as she began straightening up the room. "I've
always had an eye for sizes and measurements."

"Is that one of your superpowers?" I asked wryly.

She glanced at me irritably. I was trying to use humor to smooth over a rough
patch, like I normally do, but I guess it wasn't a good idea. She bent over to
pick up the tall floor lamp that had fallen over during our ruckus the night
before, and paused halfway up. She stood it in its corner, and slowly put her
hand on top of the television, which peeked out of the open cabinet. She held
her hand on top of it, head slightly turned in my direction, and I saw her
expression darken a little more, just a bit, even though mostly her back was
to me.

"Did they find them yet?" she asked softly.

"Cassie, I didn't--"

"It's still warm. Did they find them?"

I sighed. "No. Or, if they did, they're not saying anything." I wadded up my
ruined shirt and jacket and let them drop into the wicker wastebasket by the
bed.

She turned to face me, her expression curiously blank. "You think I'm crazy."

"No, I don't. Not at all."

"It wasn't a question."

Silence hung between us, much like the silence that had come after her
so-called confession and the few small bits of information that had followed
it. Information that was just so damn....wacky that I couldn't believe much of
it. Not even after what I had seen -- and felt -- her do the night before.
Hell, maybe she was a stuntwoman. A circus freak? Maybe a --

"I'm not any of those things," she said, looking at me with maybe a twinge of
sadness in her eyes.

"Damn it! How do you do that?"

"I don't know, she said, and shrugged, putting her hand in the front pockets
of her jeans.

"Are you reading my mind?"

"No," she shook her head. "I just kind of...well, I get impressions. Like,
ideas? Ideas about what you might be thinking? And when I put it together with
the conversation, it isn't hard to figure it out."

"And what am I thinking right now?"

Her eyes fixed on mine. "That I'm crazy. Or, if not crazy, I'm just over the
county line from it."

"No, really, I'm n--"

"...and also that you like the new outfit."

"Huh?'

"My face is up here," she said, her hands now in front of her chest, fingers
pointing up. I hadn't even realized I was doing it, but damn if she didn't
fill out the new clothes in an amazing way. Sure, her story about being part
of a quasi-mystical female warrior race was crazier than a shithouse rat, but
she sure had the body for it. My ribs and hips still ached as I remembered the
power she had poured on not long before.

"And now you're thinking about it again. Last night. What it was like."

"Goddamn it! Knock that shit off!"

"Sorry. Can't help it." she actually smiled a little at this, but the smile
didn't last. "If I'm only crazy, how was I able to do it? What....what I did?"

"I don't know."

"Come on."

"I said I don't know!"

"What are you, 6'3'?"

"Almost."

"About 216?"

"221. Quit it."

"And you bench what...210? You're in pretty good shape. Benching, you max out
at what, 250? 255?"

This was getting weird again. "260," I replied, adding five pounds to my best
lift ever. "So what's your point?"

"I'm a 28 year old female, right? Five-nine. Maybe 130 pounds, right?"

"I guess. I guess that's about right."

"But I'm not," she said, and took a single step closer to me. I could see her
chest rising and falling as she began taking deeper, fuller breaths. "Look."

Her arms rose a little bit, and she sighed a little. She tilted her head back
a couple of degrees, and then she...hold on. Waitasecond. What did she just
do?

"You look taller," I said stupidly.

"I know," she said, her voice different. Huskier.

Just for a second, there, I thought she...wait. Come on. What the hell was
going on?

"Wait...Cass. Stop. Hold on. What the hell? Are you...."

The fuzzy blue of her sweater now seemed much tighter than it had even a
moment ago. There was more of her pale skin visible at the end of the sleeves
now, they now ended only halfway down her forearm. And her forearm! I could
see creases of exceptional muscle tone there now, too. Her designer jeans,
snug before, now looked far too tight, her thighs swelling outward slightly. I
looked back at her face...and stopped. Her eyes had taken on a slightly glassy
look that was all too familiar. I hesitated for a second. She seemed to almost
be looking past me.

"Back up, Daniel. take a step back....oh," she said, and lowered her arms to
her sides again.

"What? I don't--"

"Get away from me!" she ordered, her voice full and stern. I danced back
several steps quickly, nearly involuntarily. She closed her eyes, and took
several deep, long breaths, holding the last one for a time before letting it
out in a soft sigh....after a minute or so, she opened her eyes and looked at
me from behind her blonde bangs with obvious shame.

"I'm sorry, Daniel. I didn't mean to get...that way. But I had to show you. I
think I may still have to."

"What the hell is going on, Cassie?" I asked. I was slowly building up an
anger, I was in the dark and I didn't like it much.

"I told you, you just didn't want to believe it."

"Cassie. Come on. Put yourself in my shoes, just for a sec--"

"Damn it, Danny. I was almost six feet tall right there, I could feel it. And
pushing 150, maybe 160 pounds."

"Wait. You just fucking grew?"

"Yeah, we do that."

"Who?" I demanded.

She was watching me strangely. "My sisters and I."

"Damn it." I shook my head. "Listen, Cass, we're gonna have to do something
here, we're going to have to go to the police. Something has happened here,
and we have to get you some hel--"

I didn't have the chance to finish my sentence. In a flash she stood before
me; she had moved across the room in the blink of an eye, much faster than
anyone should have been able move from a dead stop. Her right hand shot out
and she grabbed the thick leather of my new belt in an underhanded grip.
Without taking her eyes from mine, she pulled.

No, she didn't. I take that back. She curled. She kept her left hand planted
on her hip in the shape of a fist, and with her right, she pulled my entire
bodyweight off the floor. I began swaying this way and that, so I reached out
and grabbed her forearm with both of my hands to steady myself. It was like
grabbing the limb of a marble statue.

"Jeezus!" I gasped. "Cassie! What...what..."

Her eyes never wavered. With no obvious sign of strain, she began curling my
entire form. Up, down. Up, down. I lost count at a dozen reps. Her shoulder
and arm swelled a bit, the feminine curve of her bicep now pushed the
sweater's blue material out in a clearly defined mound of muscle of a very
respectable size.

She slowed down, and then held me out at arm's length. It was like I was
dangling from the end of a steel construction crane; her arm never shook or
wavered from the effort. There was the slightest hint of a lopsided grin
forming on her face, and she slowly arched one eyebrow.

"Well?" she asked.

"Put me down," I said.

The eyebrow went down and her expression darkened. "What?"

"Put me down now....please."

My feet met the floor with a soft thump as she let me drop. Already the
enhanced mass of her arm and shoulder were fading; not that it was all that
apparent in the first place.

"Well?" was all she asked.

"That didn't just happen," I stammered, and sat down on the bed. My head was
spinning. I felt like I was now somewhat disconnected from reality, like I was
stuck in some weird dream that I was waiting to end.

"Unbelievable," Cassie spat, and I could clearly see she was irritated.

"Hey, don't get all pissy at me. You can't just drop...something, I don't even
know what, on my lap like this and expect me to just--"

"You know, it's just like a man to ignore what his eyes tell him is true,
and--"

"--just accept what can't possibly......what?" I asked.

"Hmmm?" she asked, suddenly looking nervous, glancing at me sideways beneath
her blonde bangs.

"What did you just say? About men?"

"Huh?"

"Don't play stupid, Cassie, you're no good at it. You just said something
about men, and now...what are you?"

"Listen, it's not like that. I...men are great. But the sisters..."

"What, is it like a sorority? Huh? Some feminist thing? 'Cause if you--"

"Come on," she barked, and pulled me to my feet -- none too gently, either.

"Where we going?" I asked.

"You still don't believe me," she said simply as she led me by the hand
through the suite and into the hotel hallway. "So I'm gonna have to show you."

"Where are you taking me?"

She took me to the roof.

"Cassie, get off of there," I said, my voice low, deadly serious in tone.

Her sneakers were less than an inch from the edge of the building. She had led
me through the halls of the hotel, searching for doors marked "Staff Only,"
finding a series of them unlocked...all except one. The last door, the one
leading to the actual roof of the hotel was locked, a heavy steel door. She
had shielded as much of the view from me as she could, but I could hear the
high, squealing sound of tortured metal, and I saw the misshapen, waffled look
of the handle when she pushed the door open. And I caught the faintest whiff
of that flowery-clean, citrus smell just before the pale light of the breaking
day flooded into the staircase. But then we were on the roof, and she was
standing at the edge. Below us, I could see the loading docks where trucks
delivered supplies to the hotel's rear entrance. The truck down there looked
very, very small.

"Cassie, please, honey. You don't have to prove anything."

"It's okay, Danny. I'll be fine. It's actually fun. But listen. Just
remember...coming back I'm going to have to be quick. It's early, so hopefully
not many people are up yet. But still. Keep your eyes peeled," she said,
pointing to the apartment high-rise that was on the opposite side of the alley
from the hotel's rear entrance.

"What?"

"I'll be back in a minute," she said, smiled, and waved.

And then she stepped off the roof of a 35-story hotel. She dropped down below
my vision without a sound.

"Cass!" I screamed, and started forward. My hips still ached, and my bad leg
kind of crumpled a bit, and down onto the asphalt roof I went. I scrambled,
panicked, to the side, my heart frozen in my chest. The stumble didn't slow me
down much; three, maybe four seconds. I didn't want to look down. But I had
to.

I dragged myself up to the little elevated ledge of the building, fresh tears
starting in my eyes, and no one will ever know the sheer force of will it took
for me to turn my eyes toward the ground, where she would be laying in some
strange, awkward position.

But she wasn't.

Cassie stood in the middle of the alley, over 350 feet below me, with her face
turned up in my direction. She waved when she saw me, and something deep
inside me told me that she was smiling.

I think it was that point when I finally arrived at the place at which she
hoped I would get to. The point where I was done with the shock, the anger,
the irritation. The point where I laid my previously firm assertions aside and
was ready to listen, to really listen to what she was saying... and believe
what she told me. So she didn't really need to do what she did next. But she
did it anyway.

After looking up and down the alley to make sure no one was standing around
watching, she turned to face the apartment building. She took two quick steps
forward and sprang up, arms raised skyward, in a strangely graceful and
effortless leap.

Except she jumped higher and farther than what was humanly possible.

She rose as if catapulted, up and across the alley, where she landed, nimble,
catlike, and nearly silently, on the apartment building's fire escape. It was
with a foggy, numb kind of realization that I counted....one. Two...three. She
was standing on the third floor fire escape landing. She looked around for
observers, saw none, and then paused to wave at me once again. She stood,
crouched down, and sprang toward me, up, and at the hotel. She sailed under my
range of vision, limited as it was by the wall of the building. But after a
moment, she flew back across the alley, arms and legs outstretched like the
world's most agile dancer....except she was now MUCH closer to me. She landed
much the same way on the iron catwalk, this time on the 12th or 13th floor.

Back and forth, she continued these graceful and utterly impossible leaps
before my very eyes. After only a few more seconds, she stood across from me,
only two floors lower. She judged the distance, crouched, and sprang. Now that
I had a better vantage point, I could see the real nature of her motion. What
seemed delicate and graceful from above now looked fast and powerful up close.
She rocketed across the alley toward me, hair ruffling in the wind created by
her flight. She had misjudged her jump: she sailed over the hotel's ledge,
over my head before her path peaked. She completed her impossible maneuver
with a forward mid-air somersault. She tucked her head as her entire form
whickered through the air, her feet coming to rest on the hotel's roof with
barely a sound, her arms raised skyward. She turned to face me, her expression
one of curiosity, her breathing fast as she gasped for breath.

"Well?" she said between gasps, "Did I stick the landing?"

My mouth opened, but no sound came out. I just stood there in shock. After a
moment, I just closed my mouth again.

She nodded. "Come on," she said, taking my hand once more. "Let's go back to
the room. Somebody might have seen something. Besides, I'm hungry."

She ate like a person that had been starving.

I just sat there in stunned silence the entire time it took for room service
to bring up a tray. And the time it took for her to devour her eggs. And then
my plate of pancakes, after I shook my head at her obvious question. She would
look at me with a concerned expression on her face, but silence reigned all
the same. Then she ate the sausage. And the toast.

Finally, she finished, and sat back from the dining table, her hunger
satisfied at last. She sipped a glass of orange juice and stared at me over
the edge of it.

"So," she said.

"So."

"So you have questions, right?"

"Millions of them."

She glanced at the clock. "We'll let's start. We still have time."

"Why are you so concerned with the time all of a sudden?"

"I'll explain later. It'll make more sense later."

Silence.

"Well?"

"I'm sorry..." I stammered. I just...I don't....I can't..."

"Believe it?"

"Yeah."

She nodded. "I'm sure it's a shock."

"A little bit."

"Look, the easiest way to do this is for you to just fire away, and I'll
answer what I can, and that way you can sort it out the best way for your own
understanding."

"Okay." I sighed, my mind spinning. I couldn't believe we were about to have
this conversation. A part of me still refused the information, still refused
to believe what I had seen.

"It was real. You didn't imagine it."

"Please don't do that anymore."

She looked at her lap, ashamed. "I'm sorry. I can't help it. I don't mean to."

"Okay," I said, "Let's have it. You said you were..."

"An Amazon," she said, nodding. "Yeah."

"That's what you call yourself?"

"That what I am. Who we are."

"There's more of you?"

She nodded again. "Many. Lots."

"How many?"

"I don't know, we don't have a census bureau."

"Hey."

"Sorry. I was just trying to be funny. I don't know how many, exactly. Many
thousands, at least."

"All women?"

"Well, that's kind of the requirement."

"That's impossible. The society wouldn't survive. How would you reproduce?
Repopulate?"

Cassie's expression darkened, and she fidgeted. "All right, okay. I promised
you I would tell you everything. Right?"

"Okay."

"Well, some of it....a lot of it...is going to be very difficult for me to
say. Harder for you to hear. A lot of it isn't pretty. And it all comes down
to the reason I'm telling you this."

"Which is what, exactly?"

She looked up at me then, searching my face, and the anguished expression she
wore broke my heart in two as I knew the answer before she spoke. "Because I
love you. And I promise ... .I swear I will never hurt you again. Ever."

I paused, and nodded.

"Do you love me?" she asked. She seemed on the verge of tears, although she
would never have admitted it.

The entire crazy mess of the last 24 hours had confused me beyond my ability
to comprehend, but I was shocked by the finality of my answer.

"Yes. From the moment we met, I think. You scare me a little. A lot, actually,
when I take last night into account." She didn't reply, so I went on.
"But...it's almost like you weren't yourself. Like you were...another person.
Someone you didn't really want to be, except for the short time you were in
the moment. But yeah. Yeah, I love you."

She smiled sadly at this, and we touched hands across the table, and left them
there, clasped tightly for the duration of the conversation. "I thought as
much. I hoped so," she said.

"So I have to know. I have to know everything."

She looked into my face searchingly, nodded, and began to speak.

IV

Carnes couldn't believe it.

The interior of the strip club was in shambles. Chairs lay smashed into pieces
on the ground, tables were overturned, broken glass and broken mirrors made
elegant designs in the industrial carpeting of the place like flecks of mica
in a granite countertop. It was like a bomb had gone off in the place.

And the bodies. Bodies everywhere.

All of them prominent figures in the Duglio family. There were eleven of them
in all, of all different rankings in the family hierarchy. But their endings
had all been the same, each of them beaten to death with such force and
brutality that even the most cynical field agent among them had a queasy
stomach.

Here, Anton Chigleise, 61, mafia don. His head was visibly caved in, as if it
had been squeezed in a winepress like a grape.

Billy "Golden Boy" Frechetti, 42, bodyguard, and at one time a golden gloves
boxer. Two arms with multiple fractures, a spine twisted like a corkscrew.

Timothy Fentonelli, 52, accountant. His body was found on the east side of the
strip club's cavernous main room. And on the west side. And on the stage. And
behind the bar.

Burt "Finks" Walton, 30, bodyguard. The steel pole from the stage was tied
around his torso like a ribbon on a Christmas present, except the knot was
half as big around as Burt's torso was. Judging from the expression frozen on
Burt's face forever, it had been an unpleasant way to go.

And Tiny Tony Duglio himself, brother to the recently deceased Carmine, 32. In
some ways he was the worst. His body was on its back, on top of a partially
collapsed pool table, stripped naked. His midsection had been completely
crushed; the skin was a shiny purple from the trauma and distention. His hips
had been pulverized, the soft tissue damage enormous. His eyes stared at the
green felt of the table: his head was twisted 180 degrees on the stump of his
neck.

Carnes blew out a breath as she reentered the room, leaving most of the smoke
she exhaled in the outside air. Her eyes took in the scene around her as she
made her way to the small changing rooms in the back of the building.

Extravagant costumes hung on racks everywhere. The light was far too bright to
be comfortable, Jen guessed it made it easier to apply make-up in the huge
mirrors on the wall.

Several agents crowded around the huge barber-style swivel chair in the center
of the room. On it was Candy, she of the enormous boobs, bad perm, and
slightly saggy abdomen 10 years past its stripper prime. She regarded them all
-- Jen included -- with the same stupid, petulant stare she had worn two hours
ago when they had pulled her from her bed and dragged her here.

"Listen, I tell ya," she screeched in her nasal whine, "It's just like I
said!"

"Yeah, but the part where --"

"Listen, ya goddamn creep! It's just like I said, these guys come in, Tiny and
his whole crew, and I know, sometimes they get a little too much, ya know? Too
much booze. Too many girls, you know, the whole thing. So me and Sophie and
Peaches, we all clear out right away. We don't wanna be part of that whole
scene again. Fuck that, no way. So we see em come in, and everybody clears
out, I mean everybody."

"No staff stayed once Duglio came in?" Jen asked.

"Just Bennie. Poor Bennie."

"Bennie?" Jen asked, brow furrowed.

"Benson Gortley. Bartender.....deceased," the agent beside Carnes muttered in
her ear.

"Yeah. Poor Bennie. He was such a sweetheart. This one time, he--"

"Listen, once the Duglio family came in, there was nobody left in the club
once you decided to leave?"

"Right."

"Not one person?"

"Nope. Nobody besides Bennie."

"Okay, then. Well, I suggest we--"

"Bennie and Big Red."

Jen stopped, and turned back to the worn-out looking woman sprawled in the
chair before her. "Who?"

"Big Red."

"Who exactly, is Big Red?"

"Big Red the dancer," Candy spat, as if the entire cadre of federal agents was
too stupid to follow her simple logic. "You can't have a strip club without a
stripper on the stage, can ya?"

"So there was a woman in here when you left? A woman here when Duglio and his
men entered?"

"Fuck yeah, she had just gone on when they walked in. Bitch."

"Okay, so there was a woman on stage. Obviously you didn't care for her?"

"Fuck, no."

Carnes nodded, mentally filing this away. "Why not?"

"She was a bitch. I mean, class-A, 100% pure bitch. She treated all us girls
like she was better than we were. Are. Whatever."

"So...she was popular with the crowds, then?"

"Well....yeah. She was new, ya know, and normally it takes a while for a new
girl who's the hot new thing to build up a rep. But shit, she had only been
here maybe a week, and she had em lining up. Weird."

"Why is that weird, Candy?"

"Cause she was so big," Candy said, frowning. "I mean, she was big."

"You mean heavy? Fat?"

"Shit, no, the opposite. She was jacked. I mean, she was ripped. She had arms,
legs, ass, you name it. She had muscles on her muscles. And not in some,
growing-a-beard steroid way, neither. She was all girl, for sure. But she had
a six-pack; hell, an eight-pack. Big ol arms. Ass that wouldn't quit. And she
could do this thing, she'd hold her arms out and she'd make her boobs bounce
all around. I don't know how she did that. The guys loved that."

"Okay..." Carnes said, not sure of what to say next. "But you didn't like
her?"

"Well...she was okay, I guess. A lot of the girls...I guess they were a little
jealous, you know? I mean, she was in amazing shape. Amazing. Like, she could
have been in the Olympics or something. And normally, girls get all freaky and
sort of manly when they get like that. But not Red, she was all woman. Really
hot. And she could move, fuck could she move. So yeah...I guess maybe I was a
little jealous of the bitch. Even if she did kind of look down on us a little.
Kind of full of herself."

Jen hoped against hope and asked her next question. "You don't happen to know
her real name, do you?"

"Nah, I only knew her as Big Red. Cause of her hair. Huge head of dark red,
really red hair."

"So let me get this straight. She was here, in the club, when Duglio and his
men came in, and everyone left?"

"On the stage, yeah."

"Did you speak to her?"

"Yeah. I went up to the foot of the stage right before I left."

Carnes nodded. "All right. Why? What did you say?"

"I was trying to get her to get out with us. I could tell there was gonna be
trouble."

"And what did you say, exactly?"

"Jeezus. I said, C'mon, let's get outta here, there's gonna be trouble. What
do you think I said?"

"How did she respond?"

Candy's eyes flashed up to Jen's and paused there, concerned. "You know, it
was weird."

"How?"

"Red wasn't worried. And after I left, I wasn't worried for her anymore."

"What did she say?"

Candy's vision held Jen's own. "She kind of crouched there to talk to me, and
when I asked her to go, she kind of glanced up to where the high rollers had
come in and squatted."

"And?"

"And she smiled," Candy said, and shivered. "She fuckin grinned, like she was
expectin'

it. And she says, 'Don't worry 'bout me, babe, I got this.'"

Jen frowned. "Okay...that's a strange reaction."

"Don't you fuckin' know it. And I gotta tell ya...that look on her face..."
Candy shivered visibly once more. "If you could have seen her face...that
look. Tell ya the truth: when I left, I was more worried for them than I was
for her."

X

Resource file: RF920758

(continued)

First, you have to forget most of what you think of when you hear the word
'Amazon.' What's the first thing you think of?

Great big huge women.

Right, that's mostly wrong. Mostly. What's next?

Umm....Wonder Woman?

Right. Forget that too. Well, most of it. That's actually a really irritating
case for us, really. There basically was a leak back in the '40s, and for a
time our actual physical existence was almost discovered. A lot of information
came out with the invention of the whole Wonder Woman world, and some of it
came too close for comfort. But we managed to convince everyone it was simple
fantasy. Kind of like the vampire - Stoker thing.

Okay. Wait....are you telling me that vampires are real?

Shit.

Vampires are real?

This isn't going well.

I can't believe this.

Which is actually our strongest weapon when it comes to keeping our true
existence a secret. Our greatest blessing is the ego of mankind.

How?

Because it's impossible for mankind...humankind...to accept the idea of
anything, or anyone, being its superior.

You think you're superior?

As a species, as a race? Yes. Absolutely. That's the cornerstone of Amazon
culture. Superiority. But culturally? Me? I don't know. I don't think so. No,
I suppose.

You're different than most Amazons?

Yes. For a couple of reasons that I'll get to in a minute.

Where are you from?

I'm from Ohio.

Amazons are from Ohio?

Okay, maybe we'll get to it right now. Here we go...Amazons aren't part of
this world. Not naturally. There are probably physics to it -- I don't know
them, we're not really a scientific civilization -- but the short of it is,
that there are many different dimensions, and doorways between them.

Um. Okay.

You with me so far?

You just fell off a 35 story building and jumped back up to the top. I kind of
have to take you at your word.

I didn't fall. Not exactly.

Uh.....okay. So you....wait. Oh, God. Don't tell me. No. It's impossible.

I know it's hard to believe. But you have to ask.

I can't believe I'm going to say it.

Say it.

You...you can fly?

No.

Then how--?

Not exactly flying, no. Amazons can't....propel themselves, the way Superman
does in the comic books. So it's not really flight. It's more...uh...it has to
do with air, and sometimes wind. It's more like...like gliding. Yeah. Gliding.
We can steer, and determine direction, but it's not like, 'I'm going to Tulsa
-- zoom.'

You glided down for a landing? Just now? Outside?

Yeah. Side to side, kind of like a feather. It's a thing we can do. It's
almost like a controlled fall, if you get me. Especially if there's wind.
Without a breeze, it gets a little rough. It makes for a pretty hard landing
when we can only use stagnant air to slow down.

What if it's breezy? Really windy?

If it's windy enough, we can actually climb. Go up, not down. And once we can
get aloft, I mean, high up, there's plenty of wind currents to keep us up
there.

How long can you do this?

It's hard to say. It comes down to the individual. You have to remain relaxed,
yet at the same time maintain perfect balance at your core. It's difficult.
Some sisters almost never get off the ground. Some can stay up there almost
indefinitely.

What about you?

I'm not very good at it. I can't climb at all, under any circumstances. I can
only drop -- and pretty fast at that. Landings usually hurt. For reasons I'll
get to in a second. It's something we practice, back where I'm from. The
dimension I came from.

All right. So there's different dimensions. How many?'

No one knows. Maybe limitless. We've explored as many of them as we can. Some
of them are quite beautiful, peaceful. Others...others aren't. And some...

Yeah?

Some of them we...they....conquered. Enslaved. Burned. Destroyed.

Destroyed?

Utterly. Totally.

So...Amazons are warriors after all?

You have no idea. Imagine the most gung-ho, militaristic civilization on the
planet, and multiply by a hundred. By a thousand. Ten thousand. Fighting, and
war, and conquest...this is the basis for Amazon culture. You know the
Klingons on that Star Trek show?

Um. Maybe a little.

They're like, super-warrior types?

Yeah.

They wouldn't last a day where I come from. Hell, they'd be dead in an hour.
Minutes. Amazons go to war over the drop of a hat. Quick to anger, and they
relish in battle and blood.

Jeez. Okay. But aren't those male traits? Stereotypical, sure, but male
traits, usually?

I suppose. In this dimension. Rules don't always apply from one dimension to
another. From there to here. And vice versa.

What's it like there? The Amazon dimension?

Well, it's beautiful, for one thing. And that's one concept that got out with
the Wonder Woman thing -- it's mostly islands. Very Mediterranean-looking.
Warm. Tropical. Lush -- like Tuscany, I suppose. Parts of Greece. Corsica.
With clear water the color of light blue, light emerald green, like the
Bahamas. Mountainous islands. Waterfalls, tropical forests. It's beautiful. It
really is.

You miss it.

In a way. I have been away for a long time. Decades.

Yeah, well, I....waittaminute. Decades?

Yes.

But you're only 28...

Time also moves differently between dimensions.

Okay.

Sometimes, a decade in one place is only a single day in another.

So....so how old are you, in terms of here? In terms of this world?

Uh...well. I...Let's just say...I look good for my age. And with you added to
my personal life...I guess I'm officially a 'cougar.' A few times over.

I always liked older women.

Are you being funny on purpose?

It's how I deal.

So you must find this pretty entertaining.

Hysterical.

What else do you want to know?

What's your home called?

Again, that's another one that guy got right. It's called Themiscyra.

How big is it? Your home?

Small. Much smaller than the world of this dimension. But that's the thing.
That's why I'm here. Why we're....why they're here.

There's more of you here?

Listen, this is important. This world, your world; it's bigger than most other
worlds. Far bigger. Some dimensions are only a few feet across, I'm serious.
Others, maybe the size of a state. I'm not the most well traveled among the
sisters, but I'd guess Themiscyra is about as big as Alabama or Georgia,
spread out as a couple dozen islands. But here! My Goddess! The size, the
scope of the Earth here is mind boggling. It's really amazing.

After seeing you do what you can do...the hear you say anything is
mind-boggling is a little ironic.

I suppose it would be. But that's why they're here.

Why?

Space. Resources. Scope. You have it. And they want it. And they have watched
your science progress, your weaponry, and your technical advances have them
concerned.

Concerned?

(nods) Yes. We...they...are worried that they won't be able to use this
dimension as they have in the past, for resources, as they have...mostly
undetected...in the past.

So...you guys aren't here with a welcome-to-the-neighborhood gift basket.

No.

I was afraid of that. How did you get here?

Magic.

Knock it off.

I'm sorry, I'm serious. There are Amazon clerics that can open a doorway
between dimensions. They're never very big, usually only a few feet across,
and they don't last long, and they're hard to create. But that's how we...they
can move between them.

Why do you keep doing that?

What?

You keep changing it to 'they.' Aren't you one of them?

(Sigh) Yes. And also no.

Explain that, please.

All right. yes, I am of the Amazon world. Of their culture. Of their blood,
now. Of their rites and religion. But I am of human birth. Of this world.

What? How does that work?

I was young, little more than a child. I was...adopted by an Amazon regiment,
a war party, and taken back to Themiscyra with them.

From Ohio?

And traveling through what's Wyoming, now, I think. My family was traveling
west, and we were beset by natives.

Wait. Natives?

I told you, here, I'm much older than you are.

Wait, Natives? Like, Native Americans?

Indians. Yeah. We called them redskins.

Wait, you were in some fucking wagon train?

A small one. An unlucky one.

Oh, my God. Oh, boy. Are you serious?

I told you that some of this would be difficult for you.

Oh, fuck me. Goddamn. (pause) All right. Go on.

We were set upon by a tribe of Indians. I think they were Lakota Sioux, if I
remember correctly. I can't be sure, I was still very young. No older than 7
years.

When?

Daniel...

What year, Cassie?

1874.

Oh, shit. Oh....oh shit. (pause)

Do you need a minute? Are you going to be sick?

No..(pause). No. Jeezus. I'm sorry, Cass...but...Jeezus. This is like a dream.
Some weird, fucked-up dream.

I'm sure it is.

Go on, please.

The natives swept down upon us at sunset, hundreds of them, killing all but a
few of the women and children and a couple of teens. Those, they meant to take
as their own. Odd, since this is one way we Amazons maintain and refresh our
numbers as well. Anyway, it wasn't long after the slaughter stopped that
another one began. A doorway formed, and about half a regiment of Amazons
poured out of it, materializing around the night fires of the native tribe. It
wasn't much of a fight.

A regiment of Amazons?

Half a regiment.

How many is that?

Ten.

Wait. Ten? Ten women wiped out, what did you say? Hundreds of Indians? Ten
women?

No. Not ten women. Ten Amazons. It wasn't even a battle. It was barely a
skirmish.

Jeezus.

I told you. Power, conquest, and battle. The Amazon code. There's nothing, no
one in this dimension that can rival the blood lust of a battle-ready Amazon,
let alone nearly a dozen of them. So it was over nearly before it began, and
the sisters rounded up the survivors of my party. There were about 20 of us,
mostly children. A dozen girls, eight or 9 boys. A handful of adult women.

And you were all taken back to...to Themiscrya? (pause) Cassie? Cassie? What's
wrong?

No.

Cassie? What do you....oh, no. What do you mean? What happened?

The sisters....they...they did their duty by the Amazon code.

What did they do?

What they had to.

What did they do?!

They...took the adult women, first. So they wouldn't have to....so they
wouldn't have to see. They made it as easy as they could. They made it quick.
There's a protocol, a procedure.

Oh, God.

...there's a spot (indicating the back of the neck)...with the right pressure,
it's instantaneous and nearly painless.

God...

They weren't happy about it! Believe me. The sisters wept as they did it, but
after a certain age, the human body and mind are too rigid, too fully formed
to accept the rites and procedures that can enhance it to an Amazon form. And
anything less is an imperfect being, even if it is a female. (pause) So the
adult women were first. It was quick, it was merciful. But then...the
boys...(pause) that was not so quick. It was not merciful. And it is not so
easy to forget.

Oh, Cassie...

They drew straws, Danny. They had to choose among themselves who would be the
ones to kill the fragile young males. It was an honor, one they all
desperately wanted. Even at 7, I was shocked by it. Maybe that's why
I'm....I'm the way I am. Different.

Cass.

They killed them, Danny! They murdered them. Swung them like clubs, dashing
their heads on the ground, shattering their little frail bodies. One after
another, taking their time, the way a child would pull the wings off a fly!
(pause, weeping) And the oldest male survivor...Gods! He was still young, 12?
13? No older than 13 or 14. The things they did to him.... (pause, weeping)
it...oh, forgive me!

Cassie, stop. Please.

It was like you. Like you, last night. Only not so pleasant.

Pleasant?

You're still here to talk about it, aren't you? You might not be, if I
wasn't...if I didn't feel the way I do about you.

Cassie, come on.

There have been others not so lucky.

(a long period of silence)

All right. Go on.

They used him, as is they are wont to do. And when they had
finished...there...there wasn't much left of him. (weeps)

Cassie, don't cry.

(pause, extended)

The sisters traveled back to Themiscyra, taking the dozen or so young girls
with them. Me, among them. And we each became one of their number, in time.
Even me.

So...you're actually...normal? You started your life as...

A human?

I guess.

Yes. And that's probably technically correct. Like I said, I'm not a
scientist, and I haven't seen the Amazon genetic code mapped out recently. But
I have a theory. I think Amazons and what you think of as a normal human are
very close, in a technical sense. After all, they can conceive together. But
there are differences. Huge ones. I think Amazons are probably genetic cousins
to 'normal' humans. But with some big differences.

What you can do...I couldn't believe my eyes.

(nods)

If you're human to start, how can you do things like that?

I'm not human, not anymore, not in the truest sense of the word. I was young
enough, just barely, to warrant being kept alive and taken back to Themiscyra
with them. It's a long process, and continues for years. I was fifteen before
I had completed my Becoming.

What?

That's what they call it. The process. It's called 'Becoming.' At fifteen, an
Amazon is deemed ready to participate in all manner of society, and is drafted
to take part in military campaigns.

15?

(nods)

In battle?

Trust me...you don't want to meet a 15-year-old Amazon who feels she has
something to prove. You're going to have a very bad day once she gets a hold
of you.

So 15 is the end of the training?

Yes. But Amazon law requires she has to wait until 18 to mate.

Sounds familiar.

Umm..strange how that works out. Here, it's a maturity, become-an-adult thing.
With Amazons, I think it's a way to weed out the poor soldiers. Bad soldiers
die young. Those that are strong enough to survive get to reproduce.

Oh, jeez. That's pretty vacant.

It is what it is. But they have to finish the process of Becoming to even get
that far.

What exactly is the process? What does it involve?

There's education. Schooling. But not like here. Schooling in a natural sense.
Again, science? Not so much. Amazon culture is Earth-centered. Based on the
land. It's very different, more sustainable, I suspect, because in the long
run there's no negative consequences from what you'd call development. Amazons
still live in stone homes. Some even live in huts. Elegant ones, sure, but
huts all the same. There's no need to advance or change the behavior.

Why not?

Mankind used to live in castles. Cold, drafty. People got sick. Died. So
mankind moved on to wood frame homes, and central heat.

Okay.

Well, Amazons don't get sick. They don't get colds. They almost never, ever
die of natural causes. When an Amazon ages, she is expected to lead a war
party and die in battle. Anything less would be a disgrace. So if we were
walking around Themiscyra right now, you wouldn't see many women you would
consider 'old,' even though they really were ancient by your standards.

So how old in the Amazon retirement age?

By your measurement, they'd appear to be in their mid-50s, maybe.

But by your timeline?

Old. Hundreds of years.

Centuries?

Many of them. Several.

Wow.

Yeah.

If I could bottle whatever they have, I'd make a mint selling it to Oil of
Olay.

Sure. But there wouldn't be anybody left to admire the new, youthful
warrior-women.

Point taken. (pause) So, schooling, hmm?

Yes. About the culture. The Earth. Their history. (pause)

And?

And other things not so pleasant.

Fighting?

You have no idea.

So, an Amazon elementary school is like boot camp?

I'd say more like, umm, middle school. Early on, the girls are allowed to be
silly and just enjoy being alive. It isn't until their 6th year that they
begin their training. And every three years, there's a series of religious
ceremonies they must complete, performed by the Amazon church. At 6, 9, 12,
and the final one at 15 years.

You said you barely made it at age 7?

Yes, if an outsider doesn't begin by age 8...if she's older than that, she'd
meet the same fate as the mothers of my wagon train. Amazon law says that the
8th birthday is the cutoff.

Why 8?

I'm not sure.

So what do these...ceremonies....do, exactly?

It's a mark of progression. Think of them as a form of...well, graduation. And
the final one, at 15, marks her passage into womanhood. Of course, the way
time moves between dimensions, sometimes backwards, sometimes forwards....it's
hard to say. Time isn't quite the linear constant you might like it to be.

But the ceremonies...

They're tests, like mid-term exams. And the religious proceedings endow the
student with successive levels of ability. Of strength. Power.

From where?

From the gods of the ancients. Demeter. Hera. Athena.

Cassie, the gods don't exist. They were just stories.

You mean, here. In this dimension.

Uhh...

In Themiscyra's dimension, they are very real. Well, were real. They no longer
walk the Earth, but their spirit, their power, still does. I don't understand
the particulars behind it, I'm not sure that even the priestesses that conduct
the ceremony do...but somehow the power of those ancient ones is transferred
to each Amazon, in stages.

You're shitting me. Gods?

Yes.

What about God? I mean, you know, God, the singular?

The Christian God? He may exist. Or, as I like to think, She may exist. But if
She does, it means She created all worlds, all dimensions, including
Themiscrya and the deities there, as well.

Jeez. Okay. So, the transference. You had them, right? Given? To you. You had
them, right....transferred? That's how...

Yes.

What was it like? The ceremony?

It was...incredible. The feeling of all that power, all that knowledge...just
blasting down into my body, my mind. It's beyond description. The overwhelming
surge of...everything. It's beyond consciousness. Beyond sex. It's everything.
It's like...it's like being born. Trying to describe it is pointless. No words
could possibly begin to describe it.

So...what did you gain, when it was over? The ceremonies, the training? What
do you have that people, human people, don't?

You've seen it. Well, some of it.

Yeah, it was pretty fucking scary.

Please don't.

(pause) I'm sorry. It's not you who was scary, it was...

Don't lie. (pause) You were right to be frightened by it. So am I. But I can't
control it. But I'm trying. I have to. Soon, it will make all the difference.

So...what can you do? What...what differences do you have?

(sigh, pause) Well. I'm obviously stronger than a normal human female. Or
male, for that matter. Much, much stronger.

I believe it. But how much, exactly? I need a reference, something I can
gauge...

I don't know, I don't know if there is one figure I can give you.

You picked me up with one arm. You friggin' curled my body weight. (nod in
reply) And it didn't even phase you.

No.

So, how much could you do? How strong are you? As much as two people? Three?

No. More. More than that.

Five?

Uh...maybe more...more like...30.

The strength of 30 people?!

At least. Probably more, if I had to guess. 40, maybe.

40. Christ. Wait...I can't even imagine...hold on. How much weight could a
person, a human person, pick up and hold over their head?

You'd know better than I would.

Okay, say...say maybe 150 pounds. Wait, let's be conservative and say 100 lbs.

All right.

You could lift 40 times that amount?

Yes.

That's 4,000 pounds!

Yes.

That's most cars. You could pick up a car? A car?! And hold it over your
head?!

Then definitely, yes.

What do you mean?

Yes, I know I could, because I've done it.

Seriously.

Yes. And quite a long time ago. I was much younger. I might be able to manage
more now.

Jesus. I can't...oh, Christ.

I know it must be hard to accept. Being a man, and all.

What do you mean?

I know how it is. In this world. This male-dominated world. Hunter-gatherers.
Men make the wars. They do the fighting, the protecting. It's quite a blow to
be confronted with the kind of strength we're talking about....especially if
it's in female form. A woman.

Hey, I don't....I don't....okay. Maybe. Maybe that's part of it. But I'm also
working on the idea of trying to accept that superheroes....heroines, I guess,
are real.

Don't make that mistake. Amazons are real enough. But they aren't Wonder
Women. They aren't heroic at all.

But...40 times! Jeez. (pause) Okay. What else? What did you learn, or...were
given?

(pause) Well. There's a difference between strength and power. I...we are
given the knowledge of each, and the ability to use it in combat. In Amazon
culture, everything revolves around power. Around conquest. Around battle. And
we're given knowledge of battle, of the skills necessary to conquer.

Military-type stuff.

Partially. But more on the physical side.

Physical combat?

Yes.

Like, with weapons?

Sometimes. There are a few traditional Amazon weapons. Usually very simple.
The staff. The javelin. Bows and arrows. Swords and shields. But that's about
it. An Amazon, left to her own devices, will almost always ignore weaponry and
opt for physical, hand-to-hand combat.

Hand-to-hand?

Yes.

Like, what? Karate? Kung fu?

(smiles) Sorry. I've been in this world for quite some time. I know the words,
the ideas you refer to. But trust me. You have no idea what an Amazon martial
art is. You just don't.

What do you mean?

It's perfect. An Amazon, a full-blooded Amazon, engaged in physical combat, is
a beautiful thing to behold, if you're on the right side of the conflict. She
has beauty, superior grace and skill, and more power than you could imagine.
An Amazon martial art is like poetry in motion; a mixture of dance,
aggression, and conquest, and each blow is a killing strike. It's really
something to see.

I know.

Hmm?

I've seen it.

What? When? Oh...No. No, you haven't.

What do you mean?

I'm not full-blooded, remember? There's a limit to what could be done to my
mind, my body. I'm enhanced, but I'm not a true Amazon by any means.

Wait...

I'm a kind of ... half-breed.

Hold on....are you saying that a true Amazon, a full-blooded Amazon...are you
saying they're somehow...more, everything, than you?

Yes.

How?

They're faster. Stronger. More efficient killers.

Baby, you're pretty good.

They're better. Believe me.

How much?

Again, I can't say for sure. there's a huge range of Amazon ability, due to
the way they reproduce and the genetics behind it.

How much stronger?

(sigh) A lot.

Give me a number. Compared to a human.

I don't know. (sighs) Many dozens. A hundred?

A hundred times stronger?

Maybe. Probably. On average, maybe? Some, the smaller ones, maybe a little
less. Others, more. There are some Amazons, not many, but some that fit the
first image you imagined -- huge, hulking women, bulging with muscle. The
probably have the strength of...I don't know, several hundred men. Others, the
priestesses, for instance. They tend to be tall and lithe, like dancers. They
might only have my own level, or maybe only slightly more.

Holy shit. 200 times. Wait....hold on. That's like lifting...five or six cars.
Oh...oh shit. Are you serious? An Amazon woman can lift five or six cars?
20,000 fucking pounds?!

With the right leverage, yeah, some might be capable of that. Sure. Maybe
more.

And this fighting ability you're talking about? Just, how do you mean?

I really can't describe it, or guess at it. I...

But you've seen it, right? Tell me some things you've seen.

I'd rather not. I just ate.

Oh. (pause)

Look. I know this is probably blowing your mind right now. Just trust me on
this. Amazons are incredible creatures, by this world's standards, yes. Just
one of them, just one Amazon, alone, unarmed....she probably could have
altered the course of your history, had she wanted. Bunker Hill? Tet
Offensive? Troy? Who knows, maybe an Amazon could have turned the tide of all
those battles, alone. They've certainly dabbled in your history from time to
time, you just didn't know it.

What?

You have no idea how long they've been among you. Trust me on this.

Seriously?

Yeah.

But...

All the weird things that have happened throughout history? The battles that
turned for no good reason? Against huge odds? Yeah. But the main one is the
disappearances.

Disappearances?

Yeah. One here, one there. You know, guy goes out walking in the woods and
nobody ever sees him again. They never find a body. That kind of thing.

Okay. What about it?

Well, one at a time brings a lot less attention than a whole village. And when
you add up the single disappearances together, it's a huge number.

So what are they taken for?

(pause) We're talking about Amazons, remember?

Yeah, so? I don't see what....wait. Okay.

Yeah. For repopulation.

Okay....wow. But...but you said older Amazons go off to die in combat. They
can be killed?

Absolutely. An Amazon is a incredible combat machine, granted. Fast, strong,
agile. Superhuman in most senses of the word in this dimension. But it's not
like they're like...uh...invulnerable.

So what can kill them?

Anything that can kill a human. It's similar. An Amazon can be shot. Stabbed.
Blown up. Burned. It's all similar.

But not exact.

No. Amazons are far tougher. Far harder to kill. Remember how I...grew, a
while back? How I got a little more...pumped up?

Oh, yes.

That's the first step of an Amazon battle rage. She'll get all amped up,
she'll get strong, really strong, and her body will toughen, it'll...harden.
I've seen arrows deflected off of Amazon flesh when they're in this mode,
barely drawing blood. You can shoot an Amazon, and kill her, but it better be
a high powered slug and she better not see it coming.

Why?

That's another thing the comic got right, those bastards. Amazons almost
always wear bracelets, or long gauntlets into battle. If they can see it
coming, an Amazon can move just fast enough to deflect a bullet. Sometimes,
more.

Seriously?

Yes.

Can you do that?

Yeah. But not really well. I can do maybe five or six rounds, but not if
they're fired very rapidly. Some sisters are better than others. Once, years
ago, I saw a North Vietnamese soldier empty his AK47 magazine point blank at
my squad leader, an Amazon named Camilla. She was amazing -- her arms became a
blur and she deflected everything he threw at her, until he just stood there,
his trigger clicking.

And then what?

She killed him.

Oh. How?

I...you know, I'm not sure if...

How?

Why? Does it make you feel better to know? She pulled his arms off of his
body. With her bare hands. Before she took his legs. Is that what you wanted
to know? Do you feel better know? (silence) I'm sorry. I'm...I feel like
this...this is hard for me. I feel sick. Like a traitor.

Why, Cassie?

I told you. You're...you're supposed to be dead. I was supposed to kill you.
It was my mission to kill you. But...but I couldn't. I can't. It's wrong. It's
not right.

But...why? Why me?

It's complicated.

Tell me. It's my life we're talking about.

Your job. You're involved in a weapons advancement that they find very
troubling. They have a list of players involved in the path of a certain
technology, and they've begun to move to keep it from happening. I was ordered
to get close to you, to gain your trust. And then...then execute you.

Oh, boy. (pause, sigh)

Yeah.

(clutches her hand) I'm glad you didn't.

(laughs, wipes away single tear) Me too. But it won't matter.

What?

It won't matter.

What do you mean?

We need to move. We need to go, now. Last night was the termination of my
mission, you weren't supposed to see the sun rise. Those guys in the alley,
they were a coincidence, believe it or not. Sheer chance. They just made me
reveal myself to you. I wanted to, I have wanted to for the longest time, to
just be able to stop lying to you...and I probably would have, anyway, sooner
or later. But they just forced me into it. But not...it...in the end, nothing
matters.

Cass?

We're going to run. We're going to hide. We'll fight. And then we'll die.
They'll find us. And then they'll kill us.

Why?

Because that's what they do.

XI

"Thanks, baby," Doug Nueland said, and kissed his wife as they stood up from
the kitchen table. He dropped his plate into the sink and ran his hands under
the faucet.

"Why so early?" Nadine asked from behind him. "And on a Saturday?"

"Oh, it's that thing, that new contract," Doug explained, drying his hands on
the dish towel hanging from the oven door handle. "You know how it is with the
Pentagon. When they want something..."

"...they want it now," she finished, and sighed. Her eyebrows wrinkled down in
a slight frown, her head bowing a little in disappointment.

"You got it." He turned, paused, and saw her expression. "Hey now, come on.
Where's my girl? Hmm?"

She glanced up at him through her bangs, her frown changing to the hint of a
smile. She arched one brow, the way she knew he liked. "What?"

"I didn't forget, you know," he said, drawing her close in a hug. He kissed
her forehead.

"You didn't?"

"How could I? Married three years, today. And I'm grateful for every day. So
tonight....tonight we're gonna celebrate."

"Okay," she purred, and kissed him back, deeply.

They embraced a little longer, until Doug went to step away.

"Wait," Nadine said slyly, a light shining in her eyes. "Do you really have to
go? Right now?"

"Well, babe," Doug began, but she pulled him close once more, her breathing
faster now, nearly panting. She kissed the side of his neck, pulled on his ear
with her lips.

"Do you really have to go?" she asked, and one hand fell to the growing bulge
beneath his belt.

"Oh....uh, yeah, unfortunately, baby, I'm sorry. No, wait. Wait," he said
laughing, dancing away from her seeking hand. "The deal is definitely going
through today, and I need to be there."

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah."

"Oh, okay," she said, lip stuck out in a mocking, little-girl's pout.

"But I'll be back. Tonight. I promise," he said, as he kissed her forehead and
stepped away, his hand slipping out of her grasp.

"Doug," she said.

"Yeah?"

"Goodbye," she said, and pulled softly on his hand.

"Bye," he said, and turned toward her a little.

"HOOO-WAA!" she cried out, in a weird mix of shriek and grunt. Her right arm
flashed out, the knife edge of her hand blasted into Doug's exposed throat.
The speed and power of her lethal strike ruptured blood vessels, pulped
tissue, and cracked cartilage; Doug's larynx virtually exploded, his eyes
widened as he recoiled and slammed into the wall, gasping for breath. Any
single aspect of this injury would have been fatal, and the combined result of
her strike insured a hasty death.

But not quick enough for Nadine.

She stepped up to him, his wife of three years, and encircled his spasming
form with her arms.

How....how could she do this? Doug wondered. Have her hands met behind my
back? She is so much smaller...

But she wasn't. Nadine was looking him eye to eye now. And her body! He could
feel it suddenly grow tight against his own...then slowly she began to crush
into him, driving his last breath from his body. He tried to cry out, but his
ruined throat would make no sound.

"I'm sorry," Nadine said softly to him. "It's nothing personal, Douglas. Quite
the opposite. I quite like you, in fact. You're a kind-hearted, good person.
And quite a good lover, as good as a fragile male can be, I suppose," she
laughed, but there was no tenderness in the sound, only cold detachment. "But
your time has come."

Her embrace tightened even further, Doug could feel the dull thud of his
fading pulse beating in his ears, his mouth opened to scream but only a weak,
wet retching noise came forth.

"Shhh," she mocked, smiling. A fine bead of sweat coated her upper lip, and he
could feel her grind her hips against him instinctually. She began gasping a
bit, her entire form pulsing against his agonized body.

"You have no idea how hard it was," she gasped softly in his ear. "For three
years. Hiding in plain sight. How I wanted to just end it all, to crush every
pathetic person I met during this mundane existence. Ummm....and how hard it
was not to kill you every night you came to me. Every time you made love to
me, or at least tried to. You'll never know how hard it was for me not to just
wrap my legs around you and crusssshhhhhh you..."

She increased her torture further, a muscular pulse from her arms tightened
their steely grip even further; a few of Doug's ribs popped audibly, and he
gagged, head thrown back in semi-mute protest.

"But now...now the time had come to end you....Goodnight, my love," Nadine
sneered, and poured on a new reserve of power.

Doug bent backward at the mid-thorax under this assault, his entire ribcage
shuddered, cracked, and then shattered; his spine shifted, popped out of
alignment and then finally separated completely. His head dropped back, his
legs twitched madly for a moment, and then he was still. His vision darkened,
became a quickly closing iris of awareness, and he knew nothing more.

XII

Resource file: RF920758

(continued)

"So what did you mean when you said they were going to kill us?"

I was driving my truck, a black Tahoe SUV, down the Interstate. Cassie had
made quite a fuss, and had been adamant that we start moving, right now.

"They're going to be looking for us. For you, mostly."

"But why?"

"I told you, you were my mark. I was supposed to kill you last night. When
they don't hear from me...they're going to come looking. For you, initially.
They'll assume from my silence that somehow, unbelievable to them that it may
be, that you somehow found me out or I was stopped in some way, and that I'm
dead. They'll monitor the morgue reports, everything stream of data they can
plug into, and once they figure out that I'm still breathing, they'll come
after us both."

"How can they do that? Monitor reports? Stuff like that?"

"Remember, I said Amazons weren't a scientific civilization. I didn't say they
were stupid. Actually, they're highly intelligent. There are Amazon 'plants'
all throughout your world."

"Plants?" I asked, frowning.

"Yes. I'd say a few hundred, at least. Think of them as sentries. They keep an
eye on a particular level or category of your world, watching for anything
that threatens Themiscyra with discovery."

"Like, what? Politics?"

Cassie nodded. "Sure. For millennia."

"Do you know who they are?"

"Some of them. Helen, for one."

"Helen?"

"Of Troy."

I looked to see if she was joking, but her gaze was flat and unwavering.

"Seriously?"

"Yes."

"Who else? Who else were these sentries?"

She thought it over for a moment. "Mostly they stay in small, subordinate
positions as to not attract attention. But once in a while, it's necessary for
them to take power. There was a woman who posed as a...what did you call them,
umm...Vikings?"

"Okay."

"Yes, a Viking. They told stories about her, I think they called her
Brunhilde."

"Yes, goddam. Okay. Anyone else? What about Cleopatra?"

"No," Cassie laughed. "She was an imitator. And very human, believe me. She
weighed 225 pounds."

"Get out of here."

"Really. And she wasn't even five feet tall. That's another trait, mostly.
Amazons tend to be tall....but not always."

"What about Joan of Ark?"

Cassie shook her head. "Nope. You'd think she was one of us, but she wasn't.
We actually contacted her to find out if there was some latent connection we
had missed. Turns out she was just an exceptional human. In every way. Crazy,
for one."

"She was crazy?"

"I believe the term is 'batshit crazy,'" Cassie half-smiled. "Off her nut.
Totally."

"Huh. All right. What about now? Are there any plants, or sentries, or
whatever, that I would know now?"

"Maybe a few. The American ambassador to Germany?"

"Uh, nope."

"Well, she's a sister."

Hey, what about Oprah? Or Hillary?" I asked.

"Nope, neither one. But that thing with the governor of New York?"

"Uh, oh yeah, with the call girl? Wait! Her?"

"Yeah."

"No way."

"Yeah. He was watched, and for some reason, his career path made the right
sisters nervous, and she was introduced to him to ruin his future."

"Wow."

"And just think, he was paying thousands of dollars per hour to a woman who
could have snapped him in half with one hand."

"Uh.....yeah. Okay. I didn't think of it quite that way before. Thanks."

"No problem." Cassie turned to look out the window again. "Just remember,
they're everywhere. Even Hollywood."

"You're kidding."

"Nope."

"I can't believe ---"

"Carmen Electra."

I nearly drove the SUV into a bridge abutment. "What? Carmen Electra is an
Amazon?"

Cassie nodded, smiling. "Yes. Do you really think a normal human being could
ever have a body like that?"

"Well, I guess...well, she...damn...Carmen Electra is an Amazon warrior?"

"She's killed far more men in combat than I have, that's for sure."

I turned to look at her. "And how many is that?"

She turned to look out the window again. "A lot."

It was obvious that she wasn't comfortable. I'm not sure I was entirely at
ease, either. I mean, I had just found out that the woman I loved was a
150-year old warrior woman. As shocking as it was, I actually found that I
could deal with it once the initial shock wore off, which is what it was
doing, I was coming to terms with it quite easily. It wasn't hard to do after
seeing her throw herself off the hotel roof and leap back to the top.

But at the same time, there were elements that were more troubling. The
references she had made. Killing people. I wouldn't have been human if that
didn't bother me.

"I'm awful, aren't I?" she said suddenly. She turned to me and there were
fresh tears on her face.

"No. No, you're not. Don't ever think that."

"But I've taken human lives, Danny. A lot of them."

"Because you were ordered to, right?"

"Well, yes. But still..."

"There you go," I said, trying to be reassuring. "You had to. You didn't like
doing it did you?" I asked.

"...no," she said in a small, miserable voice.

"There you go."

"Not always."

I just turned to look at her, and she was staring back at me with an odd look
that was completely devoid of emotion. It was the scariest look I had ever
seen in my life, even if it was on the face of someone I loved intensely.

"...but sometimes I did."

The bottom dropped out of my stomach and I felt the hair on my arms stood up.
"Cassie ... "

"Don't do that," she said.

"Do what?"

"Be frightened," she explained, her expression softening a bit. But only a
little.

"I'm not."

"Yes you are," she said, and one corner of her mouth rose just a bit. Her eyes
narrowed the tiniest amount. Her lips parted as she breathed. "I'm scaring you
right now."

"No. No you're not," I tried to laugh, and it came out completely wrong. I was
never a good actor.

"Yes, I am, and you should be scared. You should be terrified. You say you
love me, and I love you...but you've seen me kill three grown men with my bare
hands. I broke them in two without breaking a sweat. It was nothing."

"Nothing?"

"It was nothing compared to what I've done before."

"Cassie, listen, you--"

"No, you listen. You listen close. So you know, so you understand what I am.
What I've done."

"Cass, I--"

"A lone motorcyclist in New Mexico 20 years ago. I hitchhiked in the desert.
Let him ride into the scrub brush and make a campfire. He tried to have sex
with me. No....no, he tried to fuck me. Instead, I fucked him, and then I
scissored him in half."

I didn't say anything, couldn't say anything.

"Right...in...fucking...half. Daniel, do you hear me?" Cassie was breathing
heavy now, her eyes gleamed like they were lit from within. "In half. He
split, like a goddamned sausage. He died screaming my name, screaming for me
to stop."

"Jesus....wait..."

"A software developer with a sensitive government contract. But he liked
hookers. Call girls. Ones with a kinky side."

"Wait, goddamn it, no, Cassie, I--"

"He wanted kink, so I gave it to him. I gave him a kink in his neck that you
wouldn't believe, and I came as I did it."

My words dried up and all I do was stare at the road ahead, my ears burning.
She began to lean closer to me, and I could smell her, that weird, citrus-y
smell of her arousal was nearly pungent. Out of the corner of my eye, I could
see that one of her hands had slid into her lap, and was making itself busy as
she spoke.

"A family --"

"Cass!"

"An entire fucking family in Glacier National Park, back in the '50s. Mom,
Dad, and three sons. The woman and one son died straight away, he was too
young. But Pops and the other two? I made it last. It was remote, and no one
could hear them. Umm..." her hands rubbed the V of her crotch furiously now.
She spoke around the little breathy gasps she took in. "I made it last. They
begged me to let them go. Then they begged me to stop. And finally...they
begged for death. And I gave it to them. But only after I took what I wanted
anyway. And that scares you. It terrifies you."

"Why are you telling me this?" I choked.

"So you know. So you understand what I am. What it is that is scaring you so
badly."

"No, I'm not, I just--"

"Don't deny it. I can sense it. I can smell it on you," she said, her voice
dropping. She shifted in her seat a little, facing more to the front, now a
little more toward my direction. "It's delicious," she nearly moaned.

"Cassie, what are you--"

"Yeah, you're scared," she said, and she broke into a cold, merciless grin.
"Oh, yeah," she sighed, and her grin widened. Her hand worked even faster,
harder. I could hear the friction of her grasp against her jeans. Her
breathing deepened, and came more rapidly. I could plainly see the twin bulges
her nipples made in her tight dark blue sweater.

"Cass--"

"Shut up, Daniel."

"Cassie, I don't know what you're doing right now."

"Don't lie. I'm turning myself on."

"I can see that."

"And you too," she hissed, and one of her hands darted into my lap. I nearly
drove off the road, from fear or excitement, I don't know.

"Successfully, I see," she laughed, and with horror I realized she was right;
I was sporting an enormous boner, a nearly painful one, as it was constricted
by my pants and the way I was sitting.

Suddenly she leaned way over, her face very close to my ear.

"So who's the sick one now, Daniel?" she asked, mocking.

And then it was over. She collapsed back in her seat, diminished. She took a
few deep breaths, and then turned her gaze back to mine. Now, her eyes were
brimming to the hilt with fresh tears.

"Oh, Goddess," she whispered, and began to sob softly.

I was completely flummoxed. Obviously.

"Cass....Cassie. Are you okay? What....what was that?"

"I'm so sorry, Daniel," she said, moaning in misery. "I...couldn't help it.
Sometimes...I can't help it. It just happens."

"What 'just happens?'" I demanded. I was scared, terrified even, and now a
little pissed. I felt as emotionally confused as she looked to be.

"When I...when we....sisters, I mean. When a sister..."

"Sister?"

"When an Amazon gets that way...when she talks about fighting....about
conquest. or when she does it, takes part in actual combat...it just happens."

"It's a turn-on?!" I demanded.

"Like no other," she sniffled, now a little more in control of her emotions.
She wiped her face dry with the palm of a hand, and sniffed again. "You have
no idea," she said, her voice stronger.

"Why?"

"I think it's part of Becoming," Cassie said, looking out the window, but far
past the passing cars. She stared off into space as she spoke. "You asked
about it yourself. How can a society made up entirely of women repopulate
itself?"

"Good question, but I think I understand the answer."

"You might think you do, but trust me, you really have no idea. Sure, for a
lot of normal humans, there's always been a bit of a connection between sex
and violence."

"Um...I guess so."

"It's okay. You're wired that way."

"No, it's weird, I know, but---"

"Just stop," Cassie said, looking at me lovingly, but a little sternly. "You
saw what I did to those guys. You just heard me a second ago. And on some
level, you liked it."

"No! I...I.."

"Don't lie. Your body betrayed you. As it does most men, most of the time.
It's okay. You're not sick. You're not a sociopath. You don't truly want to
see anybody hurt. You're still a good person. 99.9% of your brain is screaming
out that what I did last night is wrong, isn't it?"

It was useless to lie.

"Yes, I said. "It's...it's somewhat lessened, because I believe they were bad
people, and I firmly believe that people should get what they deserve."

"But still, you thought it was wrong," she said.

"Yes."

"So do I." she looked back out the window.

"Then why....oh, I am so frigging confused right now," I admitted.

"The only way I can describe it is this: I don't know about all people, and
probably not even most people, but for A LOT of people, there is a deep,
subconscious link between sex and violence. It runs counter to what their
conscious, thinking brain knows and wants. And there is a number of men -- and
I know this part of men, believe me -- that enjoy that link. You're wired that
way."

"Why?"

"Evolution," Cassie said. "Life is, at its core, about sustaining the species,
right? The human body is designed to live just long enough to reproduce as
many as times as possible, right? People only live as long as they do because
of science and modern medicine."

"I never thought of it that way before."

"Trust me, it's true. And not just in this dimension. We found one populated
by primitive men, you'd call them cavemen. They lived to see 30, maybe 35. And
that was it."

"Okay."

"So the reproductive drive is very strong. What humans -- and Amazons -- find
attractive in a prospective mate is determined by instinct. Either someone is
attractive, or not."

"Go on," I prodded, now interested.

"Now, admittedly, different people find different things attractive. Some men
could meet a curvy woman with some meat on her bones, with a big 'ol butt and
big thighs, and see a healthy baby factory."

"Yep. My mother called them 'birthin' hips,'" I offered.

"There you go. So for some, that's the look they interpret their 'wiring' to
want. For others, it's small women who don't pose a threat. And
others...well...it's the opposite."

"Strong mates make strong offspring?" I guessed.

"Exactly. There's a segment of the population, the male population, who is
obsessed with female athletes, right?"

"Yeah. I ...cough cough...I might know a couple of those guys," I
half-laughed.

"I figured," Cassie said, and nearly let herself smile a little. "So there you
go. Strong, fit women appeal to the same, unconscious drive in some men. A lot
of men, more than would admit to it, since it isn't exactly the traditional
female archetype."

"Listen to you. You sound like some kind of professor."

"I've just done a lot of thinking about it," she shrugged.

"So that's your theory?"

"Yeah. Why else would grown men tune in every week to watch Lynda Carter in a
red white and blue swimsuit? Which is totally outrageous, by the way. That
thing would never stay on in battle."

"Because she was hot. Hell, she still is."

"Sure. But it was even better. She was hot, and every week, she'd run fast,
jump high, and beat the hell out of a bunch of men."

"Yeah," I said, and grinned lecherously. "And tie them up with golden rope."

"Now you're getting it."

"But I'm still not sure I buy it," I admitted.

"Xena," Cassie said.

"Uh, all right. Hot girl..."

"Beating the hell out of platoons of soldiers every week."

"Yeah, but..." I tried to counter.

"Buffy."

"But..."

"Charlie's Angels. Not one, but THREE hot women, beating the hell out of men."

"Charlie's ---" I stammered.

"Diana Rigg in The Avengers. Dark Angel. Trinity from The Matrix. The Bionic
Woman. Every supporting female cast member of any action show on TV, since
they were all gorgeous and knew kung-fu."

"Hey."

"Look at computer games. The art on the boxes. They're female warriors, with
breasts as big as their heads."

"That's what the programmers think Amazons look like," I tried to joke.

"How'd they do?" Cassie purred, and thrust out her chest dramatically.

"Not too far off," I winked.

"And every fighting game? Filled with big breasted, muscular female fighters.
Some of them don't have male characters at all."

"But.."

"Comic books! Have you seen the superheroines in those things? They're all 6
feet tall, some nicely muscled, with huge boobs and legs twice as long as
their torsos."

"Again, not far off the mark."

"But you get my point. Men can poo-poo the idea of a strong woman, they can
make a face and talk about how a fit or even moderately muscular girl is
disgusting...and trust me, I've heard them say it. But somebody is buying all
that stuff. Somebody out there likes it. ESPN broadcasts the female fitness
and figure competitions in prime time for a reason. Even bodybuilding appeals
to the same sensibility, albeit an exaggerated level of it."

I was quiet for a time; I had sensed long ago that Cassie was venting and that
I should just let her talk. Not long after, she did.

"So that's why I don't want you feeling confused...or...anything. Even
embarrassed...or ashamed...at what you find attractive. You're not a bad
person. When you saw me do what I did...it wasn't actually the violence that
turned you on. At all."

"No. That was just scary. And wrong."

"Exactly. It wasn't that I committed an act of great violence. It's that I
could. That I was able to do it. That is what did it for you...then, and now."

It was like a light bulb went off in my head. "Okay, yeah, all right," I said,
instantly feeling better about myself, and the situation as a whole. But a
dark cloud immediately crossed my mind. "But...but the reality still stands.
You still killed those men."

"Yes," she said, her faint smile fading. "That couldn't be helped. That's what
we are. What we do. The same way human are 'wired' for reproduction, Amazons
are built for the kill. And for them, sex and violence are far, far more
intertwined than they are even for the most...salacious of humans."

"Really?"

She shuddered visibly. "Oh...you have no idea. Whatever process the Becoming
truly is, whatever it entails...it links the two together. Fully. They become
one and the same, honestly. To an Amazon, a good hand-to-hand kill is sex."

"Jeezus."

"I think it's to keep the Amazon population viable. It grew as a one-gender
civilization, based entirely on war and conquest. To them, conquest could be
on the battlefield or the bedroom. It's an Amazon's duty, her call, to
dominate her foes in both arenas, and give birth to a new wave of sisters."

"So, the men that are taken..."

She nodded. "They're used. Horribly. Of course, they may not think so, not
initially. As furious and terrible an Amazon can be, she's also built for sex.
Amazons have refined their strength, their anatomy; they've researched the act
over centuries, and they can do things to a man that would blow your mind."

"I know," I smiled weakly at her.

"Again, you only know part of it, trust me. Amazons are the best lovers in
this or any other world, their very bodies are their great gifts, and the
control they have over their strength and power extends to all parts of their
anatomy...an experienced sister can bring a man to ecstasy in mere seconds,
and prolong his performance for hours, if she so desires...but in the
end...it's going to end the same way for any that are taken. The way it almost
ended for you last night."

As she spoke, I felt a familiar twinge in my bruised sides, and nodded. As if
she could sense it, she looked into her lap in shame.

"I'm sorry I hurt you," she said softly. "Even while I was doing it I was
sorry, but when it happens, when the...the heat comes...I can barely control
it. It's like I'm being driven, like I'm possessed. That Amazon instinct to
crush, to kill, to conquer...." she paused, and took several deep breaths. I
noticed there were a few tiny beads of sweat on her lip now. "...even
now...It's hard....even to talk about it. Even describing it...it makes
me...makes me want..."

"Wow. I thought I had it bad as a teenager."

"Oh..." she sighed, and paused. Deep breath. Another. She sighed. "You have no
idea."

"But you're trying to control it?"

"Yes."

"And you're saying Amazons don't?"

"Quite the opposite. They give into it with great abandon. They revel in the
kill, and the time that is allotted after each conquest for sexual dominance."

"Seriously?"

"Oh, yes."

"What happens to the men?"

"They die. Horribly. Sometimes they might survive one mating session. Maybe
even two. Once in a great while, if he has a particularly strong constitution,
or an impressive...uh, well, feature, he might be allowed to survive a few
nights, but only through the highest restraint among the sisters. He might be
passed around from tent to tent for the better part of a week. And at the end
of it, when he's bruised, battered, and beaten...too sore and exhausted to be
of any good...he'll be put to death by an Amazon who'll come as she kills him.
Other times, it never even gets that far; often the survivors of a skirmish
are taken right on the field of battle, and once she's finished, he's
finished."

"Oh ... oh, boy."

"You wanted to know."

"Yeah. Yeah, I did. But you....you say you're different? You have remorse
about it."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"I'm not sure. I would say it's because I was born human...but there are
others in the sisterhood who were once human as well, and some of them are the
most bloodthirsty women I know. So it isn't that. I don't know what it is."

"Are there others....others like you?" I asked.

"An Amazon Fifth Column?" she asked. I nodded. "Yes, yes I suppose there is,
but you couldn't really call it that. There are a few other sisters who I've
seen express regret, but it's an emotion they squash pretty quickly. In our
society, questioning Amazon law or rebelling against tradition is strike of
shame on your house. It means banishment, at a minimum. More likely, it's a
death sentence."

"Christ."

Cassie nodded. "Yeah, the girls take themselves pretty seriously. I just...I
just hope you know...I want you to know...I'm not like that. I don't really
want to hurt anybody. Especially not you."

"I do. I believe it."

"You do?" she asked, watching me closely.

"Yes."

"That's good," she said simply.

"Why's that?" I asked. She took a moment to answer, but when she did speak
again, my heart stood still in my chest.

"Because I'm pregnant," she said.

XIII

"What the blue fuck is going on here?" FBI Regional Director Roger McCall
shouted.

The stub of a cigar was firmly nestled in one corner of his mouth, a thin wisp
of smoke that periodically issued from it was the only indication it was still
lit. The voice on the other end of the phone went silent while he expressed
his rage, as he was famously wont to do.

The Baltimore field office was called first, early, to help local officials
investigate a murder scene at a mid-level mafia hideout. Then, minutes later,
a second call, to investigate a bloodbath at an area strip club: among the
dead, more mid-level mafia figures. And now, nearly four hours later, a third
call, to help secure a scene at a industrial park. Following that, an
immediate retraction of that request, straight from the top.

Agent Jennifer Carnes, positioned in the seat directly behind McCall's own in
the big black Suburban shook her head and waited. They were at a loss for more
info if their superiors decided to hold it from them. Keeping information from
a field agent was one thing; keeping it from a regional director was another
altogether. Something was up, something big.

McCall snapped his phone shut with a growl. Silence descended among the number
of agents in the SUV. Randall Timmons, a young field agent with the face of a
ten-year-old and the body of a middle linebacker looked at Jen, half-smiled,
and made the 'oh-jeez-what-is-he-going-to-do-now' face. Jen smiled back, and
waited. Soon they had their answer.

"It's an industrial building, an office type building. Down by the river, down
near Tanglewood. They asked for us, and three minutes later told us not to
come."

"So what exactly are we going to do?" Jen asked softly.

"Fuck!" McCall exploded, "What the fuck do you think we're going to do? We're
going! We need to find out what the hell is happening in this town. Get this
piece of shit moving, mister," he snarled, and the driver laid the appropriate
amount of rubber behind them.

XIV

Resource file: RF920758

(continued)

I nearly wrecked the truck.

"What?" I stammered.

"I'm pregnant," she repeated.

It only took a few moments for me to get to the next exit, and we rode in
silence as I pulled off the freeway and into the parking lot of a Citgo gas
station. Cassie watched me with her brilliant blue eyes; they didn't waver at
all as I tried to gauge the look on her face.

"Are you serious, because I've had just about all the shocks I can stand
today."

"I know. I'm sorry."

"And it's barely even lunch time."

She smiled, sadly, and nodded.

"So...let me get this straight...if there's no men on the island...whose is
it?"

She turned to gaze to me, and it was flat and more than a little scary after
what I had seen and felt her do. "Mine," she said.

"Of course it is. But...who...you know?"

"You."

"Me!?"

She nodded.

"But that's impossible! We just....just...you know! We just had sex. And it's
only a few hours later! It would take..."

"Minutes," she said. "It takes only moments. And I'd know. Just as I did last
night."

"Holy God," I muttered, amazed once again. "Jesus. Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"Oh, boy. Oh boy oh boy, oh boy." I blew out a breath and tried to absorb the
new information as best I could. "So this....this is...it's an...Amazon thing,
then?"

She nodded once more.

"Have you done this before? I mean, you've hinted that you've...you know, gone
off to war or whatever for them in the past. And that fighting for them
against men leads to...well, reproduction. So..has it? Has it happened for you
before?"

She nodded again. "Three times."

"Three! You have three children?!"

Her expression softened, and I could see the hint of fresh wetness along the
lower rim of her eyes. "No," she said, nearly too soft to hear.

"Hey, I'm sorry, I didn't mean..." the words froze in my mouth, and my eyes
widened. She must have known what was running though my head again, because
she dropped her gaze and looked even more miserable than ever.

"Oh my God," I said softly. "Tell me it's not true."

"It's their way," she said weakly.

"But they were just children, Cassie."

"The wrong kind of children," she said, her voice thick.

"Unbelievable," I wondered aloud, and stared at the roof of the truck. "And
they probably made you watch, didn't they?"

"If only they had," she said, and her gaze met mine once more.

"Cass--"

"They made me do it, Danny," she cried, her beautiful face wrinkling up, tears
pouring down her cheeks. Her mouth made a crinkled 'O' shape, it was obvious
Cassie was a lousy crier; she never had a chance (or reason) to do it until
that day. Hell, it was probably a punishable offense where she came from. But
it didn't ease the shock of what she had said. "Oh, Goddess," she wept, "Why
did they make me do it?"

It took her a little while to compose herself.

We drove in silence for a long time, my mind reeling from everything I'd had
to absorb over the past 24 hours. Actually, I found it was getting easier; the
more info came at me, the more I just accepted. I guess it's the mind's
self-defense mechanism against sensory overload: don't worry, be happy.

Cassie eventually calmed down a little; in fact, her expression was now,
curiously, one of a blank, impassive nature.

"Are you okay?" I asked after some time had gone by.

She answered without turning. "Yes."

"Good. I'm glad," I offered, but she didn't reply.

We continued along for a few minutes, the tires humming pleasantly under the
truck.

"You need anything?"

"No."

"You sure?"

"Danny," she said, and turned in my direction. Trying to read her expression
was an impossible task. It was a mask of impassivity mixed with a poorly
hidden irritation. "Listen to me. I don't want you to get the wrong idea."

"Ooookay."

"I don't need your protection."

"I would agree with that."

"I'm here, actually, to protect you, as best I can," she continued.

"And it's appreciated."

"I just don't want you thinking ... I mean, before ... how I was just was ...
" she stammered, her brow wrinkling in dissatisfaction. Whatever it was she
was trying to say, it was having a hard time coming out.

"If you mean about being upset back there, hey, don't sweat it. Who wouldn't
be? You're dealing -"

"With things I can handle," she finished. "All right?"

I shrugged and let a moment pass. "Boy," I countered, "I guess Amazons don't
waste too much time talking about their feelings, do they?"

"Why would we?" she sighed, looking at me with a combination of fatigue and
rising anger. "It achieves nothing. Here ... pull over here," she said,
pointing.

"Why?"

"Because I'm hungry."

"Already? It's barely noon."

"You've got a lot to learn about us," she said.

Apparently, being the next thing to a superwoman makes a person hungry,
because I've never seen anyone pack away food like Cassie did. She ate a
cheese omelet, a pile of hashbrowns, some bacon, and an enormous stack of
pancakes in just a few minutes, her fork a silver blur between her plate and
mouth. The waitress at the diner we stopped at just kept filling out coffee
mugs and watching her eat from afar with a series of appreciative glances.

"I take it the food's all right, then," she said with a small smile on one of
her short visits.

"It's delicious," Cassie mumbled around a huge mouthful of pancake. "Thank
you."

"Sure thing, honey," the woman replied and sauntered off.

"Not quite the same reaction," I observed quietly.

"Huh?"

"Not the same reaction you got from the waitress at the pub not so long ago,"
I repeated. "I wonder why?"

Cassie shrugged. "Sometimes some women pick up on me being different. Maybe
it's a chemical thing. The pheromone thing. Some get catty, like at the pub.
Almost like their subconscious is telling them that I'm competition. But some
don't mind it. Some like it."

"And the men?"

"They all like it," Cassie grinned back mischievously over her now empty
plate.

"Even me?"

"Especially you."

"But I didn't have any choice in the matter, did I?"

Her smile faded a bit. "I can't help what I am," she said softly.

We drove in near silence the rest of the day. We headed west, out of the city,
and stopped at a motel off the interstate for the night.

"This will be the last night you can use your credit card," Cassie said. "From
now on, we either get cash or we have to set up a fake ID or something."

"Where are we going to get enough cash to live? To survive? I can empty my
savings and a couple of CD and stock purchases, but that will only keep us on
the road for a few months, Cassie."

"I can get money," she said.

"But.."

"Please. I can get money. And no, I don't have to kill anybody to do it. But
... I'm tired, Danny. Could you please just get us a room for the night? I'm
actually really tired. Thinking about all this ... "

A moment went by as I studied her face. "Boy, you're really scared of them,
aren't you?"

"Yes," she said softly. "I'm terrified. And you should be, too. You will be,
soon enough." She checked the clock in the dashboard of the truck, and
shuddered visibly. "It's only a few more hours left until it's going to begin.
In the big scheme of things, you might have survived, they might have let you
go. But my ... defection ... no way. Now it's a matter of honor. A matter of
their justice. They'll never stop. Never." She sighed. "Yeah, I'm scared. You
would be too if you knew what they could do. But trust me ... " Her gaze rose
to meet mine when she spoke again.

" ... you're about to find out."

END PART ONE

The Siege

Attack of the Amazons

By Dusty B.

PART II

XV

Arrowhead Military Facility

31 miles outside of Taos, New Mexico

Miles Keaton spent the last hour of his life being bored.

Spring had truly arrived; the bitterly cold desert nights that had plagued the
small military test site seemed finished for the season. The day had been
rather hot; actually, only now, just shy of midnight, had it cooled to a
comfortable level.

Miles spent most of his time inside the 10x10 checkpoint booth, his attention
fixed on the small bank of monitors that ran along one wall of the cinder
block shack. Each one showed a similar image: a long length of wire mesh,
electrified fencing; the scene illuminated in the familiar neon green of the
night-vision camera. The guardhouse itself was a squat, plain building. It was
still the slate gray of the cement clocks used to frame it; its makers had
never even thought it worthy of paint. It had a sliding Plexiglas door that
faced the unpaved drive leading into the base, and a row of three-foot windows
that ran around the entire structure, allowing a standing person to see in
every direction.

Miles often thought that the sheer number of cameras covering the area
bordered on overkill; after all, the sensitive nuclear testing of the '50s was
over, and now Arrowhead was reduced to relatively minor league assignments:
Humvee armor testing and the like. Not that Miles was complaining: Sitting on
his butt in Arrowhead's guardhouse meant he wasn't sitting on his butt in
Kabul. Or Baghdad.

Still, there were elements of his job that both annoyed and entertained him.
The sameness of the shack's interior always lit from within with that same
dull green hue ... and that last monitor. It was this last monitor that Miles
would always mention to anyone not familiar with the base. Like Stella, the
big old waitress down at Harvey's Atomic Café. How that place had managed to
stay in business, since most of the business left with the nuclear test ban
treaty, he wasn't sure. But open it was. And whenever he had a night free, he
would leave the barracks with some of the base's 1300 men, make the 15-mile
trip to Harvey's, and drink watered-down beer while listening to the 45s in
the jukebox that refused to break down, albums that hadn't been changed since
1987. Then someone would kick the machine (after all, how many times can a guy
listen to 'We're Not Gonne Take It' or 'Round and Round?'), and Stella would
get hot and bothered about them tearing the place up, not like the old days,
when soldiers had manners and such, and how ... blah blah. And then Miles
would tell her a neat little story to take her attention away from the
jukebox.

"So, Stella, you want to hear something funny?" he would ask.

"Not from you, fancy pants," she'd bark back.

"Well, I'm gonna tell you anyway," Miles would say, his speech thick from too
many beers. Sometimes the 'S's in his stories didn't make it through his lips
just right, and sometimes he'd forget parts of the story entirely, but he
would soldier on and recite it, or a similar tale, from memory.

"So, the guard house is fulla these monitors, right?"

"Okay, Miles. Monitors."

"Yeah, monitors. You call 'em that cause you use 'em ... you use 'em to
monitor the base, see?" he'd say, and then burp massively.

"That's a pretty healthy one," Stella would say, and then cackle.

"Thanks. Thank you. So, monitoring. Thass what I do. There. At the base. I
monitor. All the time. 24/7, baby. Something going on at that base, you know
who knows about it? Hmm?"

"You?" Stella would ask, wary, as if it was a trick question.

"Thass right! Have I told you this before?" Miles would mumble.

"Yeah, last week, honey."

"I didn't think so. So, I know about it before anybody. Cause havin' all those
cameras is like having eyes all over the place. I see everything. I know
everything. An Army tessssing facilily, with over 1500 men on base at all
times ... and I'mna one in charze of it. I know everything that happens there,
you bet."

"But do you know your tab is up to close to $40?"

"I didn't know that. But thass not important right now."

"Well, it's kind of important to me, honey," Stella would cackle.

"So, anyway, at the end of this big row of monitors ... the last one ... down
here," Miles would say, and hold his hand out to the right, "Down here is that
last one, see? Right ... here. And you know what's on this last one? Hmm?"

"The front gate?"

"No, no, you silly. The front gate. See?"

"Oh, now I get it."

"Right. The front gate. Which is funny. Cause if you're looking at the
monitor, like this ... right here ... it shows the front gate. And if you
don't move at all, if you just kind of poke your head up like this ... and
look out the window that right above the monitors ... you ... you know what
you see?"

"The front gate?"

"No! Haven't you ... haven't you been lissning, Stella? You see the front
gate. Through the window. They got this camera on the front of the guardhouse,
looking at the front gate, when all you have to do is look up out the front
window. Nuts."

"Yeah, that's a weird one, Miley. Now pay up," Stella would say.

"So I looked it up. Twel' Hunnerd Dollass! Thass what the United States
military paid for that little bitty camera. A camera to watch a gate that's
fifteen feet from the front window of a manned guardhouse. $1200 stinkin'
dollars."

"Yeah, well, I only need ten more to make it $40," Stella would say, holding
out her hand.

Miles wouldn't stop talking as he dug out the final required bills. "$1200!
And that doesn't mention the $350 for the monitor. And who knows what the
wiring cost. Or the amount to put it in. Crazy. Crazy, I said."

"I heard you the first time."

"Do you believe the Army is that waissfull?" he would slur.

"Oh, I believe it probably is," Stella would say.

"'S juss waissfull," Miles would sigh, and then collapse back onto his stool.

It was this wasteful spending that now drew Miles' attention, however.

He sat slumped in his cheap office chair, nearly asleep. In this slow stupor,
he actually frowned at the increasing brightness. He slowly began to stir,
slowly awakening, his eyes squinting at the bright green light coming from
last monitor. He blinked rapidly, as he sat up, but even now, the glow was
starting to decrease, even as he got the fleeting impression on a bright
bluish-white glow coming from the windows above him.

"What the fuck is this all about?" he wondered aloud, and first sat up,
leaning forward, and then finally standing up to look directly out the windows
set shoulder-height into the wall.

About ten feet beyond the fence, something shimmered in the black of the
desert night.

Keaton stepped out of the guardhouse, his eyes never leaving the strange sight
before him. He never thought to turn on the machine that committed the cameras
to video (Arrowhead was such a small, antiquated facility that the automated
surveillance system found on most other bases had not yet been installed). He
also never thought about radioing the base about the sight before him. Or even
picking up his handheld radio.

Miles stepped close to the fence, only dimly hearing the low, steady hum of
the electricity in the wire. His vision was fixed on what was before him.

The dim outline of a rectangle hung in midair about ten feet beyond the fence.
Its border looked like it was made from a thin, silvery blue ribbon-like,
slightly metallic substance that rippled, as if he were gazing at it through a
vast quantity of moving water. Tiny points of light, like stars, gleamed
throughout the ribbon, and a particularly bright one would flash and sparkle
for a moment in a purely random order. The center of the shape was inky black
and totally opaque; it blocked his view of the road behind it, which was
illuminated by the sodium-vapor arc lights that surrounded the gate. The shape
itself was about four feet high and around six feet wide. Miles guessed it
hung in the air, bobbing slightly, about four feet above the ground. It looked
as if some giant hand had used a rectangular cookie cutter to punch a hole out
of the scene, leaving behind a total void in space, bordered by a hazy,
ill-defined border of electric ribbon. Miles listened closely, but the phantom
shape before him didn't seem to make any noise over the sound of the current
in the fence, but ... wait ... a dim sound, so faint he wasn't sure he was
hearing it at all; he thought he could hear a clear, bell-like chime every
time one of the star-like flecks in the ribbon flared brightly. The sight was
utterly entrancing. Miles felt no fear or trepidation, only wonder. He had no
idea how long he stood there with his mouth agape before it happened.

As he watched, a woman stepped from the black center of the portal.

To use the simple word 'woman' to describe her was like saying that the Arctic
gets a little chilly sometimes. It was if God himself had stopped the conveyor
belt during a shift of people-making, regarded this new specimen, and simply
turned every dial He had to ten. This was Miles' thought as she stepped from
the inky black portal, appearing from seemingly thin air. First a leg, then a
hip, then a torso, then her head, arms ... she ducked her head and made the
long step down to the ground, planted her feet, and squared her shoulders. The
moment she did so, the dim shimmer of the bluish ribbon surrounding the portal
faded, and Miles' vision of the road behind her was restored; the portal had
vanished. But she remained.

Her physical appearance was such that Miles had difficulty even trying to
think about how to take in the sight before him. Should he focus on her entire
form? Or her eyes? Or her beautiful face? Or her impossible, Olympian build?
The gentle sweep of a hip, or the swell of her bust, the curve of her jawline,
or the apparent hardness of her arms? If Miles' mind had been a machine, it
would have been screeching to a grinding, sparking halt at that moment. Miles
cast his vision at her feet; from the desire to give his thoughts a clear
order, or out of some unconscious deference to her, he wasn't sure which.

She was tall, easily six feet if she was an inch, and outrageously
proportioned. Her feet and most of her calves were encased in boots of a shiny
black reflective substance, with a medium heel that spoke of the perfect
melding of utility and fashion. The upper body of the boot seemed to have some
measure of elasticity to it; as she shifted her weight, her extraordinary
calves would flex and dance in a muscular rhythm, and the boot seemed to
expand and contract to allow it. Her thighs flared outward in an impressive
quadriceps display; they bulged hugely, but not so large that they appeared
awkward or oafish. She was dressed in some kind of bodysuit, also black in
color, which clung to her tightly; it was tight and thin enough to reveal
every bulge of muscle and every separation between them beneath it. The black
material was taught and vaguely reflective, but not overly so, with an
appearance very much like a shiny spandex composition. As she shifted her
weight, Miles could see the dim, white highlight of reflection in the material
right at the area affected by the muscle movement in her taught thigh; it was
as if a painter had used a splash of white to highlight this area in a
painting to accentuate the muscular definition. She possessed the exaggerated
build of an ideal female athlete. Her legs were incredibly long, making her
trunk seem short in comparison; she nearly had the profile of the standard
comic book heroine.

Her thighs tapered to her trim hips and waist; above this, stacked columns of
muscle, plainly visible through the tight fabric and accentuated by the
highlights that danced across its surface as she moved.

Goddam, Miles thought. Forget 'abs of steel.' Those are abs of fucking
titanium.

Nearly every muscle group was visible through the black covering of the
bodysuit: abdominals, serratus, every group Miles could recognize from the
charts at the gym but could not name.

Her trim abdomen swelled outward, upward, into the most startling torso Miles
had ever seen. On some level, he knew he was taking in the whole of her body,
the impressive girth of her torso, the width of her shoulders, the thickness
of her chest. But he also knew that certain male impulses had begun to take
over his senses.

His vision had pretty much focused on her bust by now.

Epic. Astounding. Miles felt his mouth go dry. The black material featured an
oval cutout, a keyhole design that allowed the wondrous vision of her bust to
shine. Her breasts were large, but not cartoonishly so, and appeared firm,
riding high atop what was probably a foundation of pectoral muscle beneath.
They met in a classic display of firm, tight cleavage, featured perfectly by
the cutout design of her top.

Like the creamy skin visible through this cutout, the skin of her shoulders
and arms were likewise bare. The bodysuit tapered up from the armpit to loop
around the back of her neck. Her bare shoulders were wide, in keeping with her
athletic build, and capped with small mounds of feminine muscle. Her arms were
at her side, but revealed in the light enough for Miles to see an impressive
degree of definition there, too; her forearms were of an impressive diameter
and her biceps might even rival his own. Hell, no. Bigger. Or at least far
more defined. She wore bands around her upper arms, just above the bicep, made
of a similar material as the bodysuit, by the looks of it. Below her elbow,
she wore strange sheaths of chrome-like metal that caught the light from the
guardhouse flood lamps and reflected it back even brighter.

His vision traveled up, following the powerful yet graceful curve of her neck;
her chin, strong and square yet somehow also delicate-looking; her high
cheekbones and the dramatic, cat-like shape of her eyes. They were a clear
ice-blue, so bright they were nearly gray, framed above by high arching
eyebrows. Her hair was as black as the night she stepped out from; it was
long, wavy, a slightly 'bigger hair' look than what was fashionable at the
moment; it seemed to give off a healthy glow of its own.

She had a strange air of familiarity about her; Miles thought about it for
just a second before it came to him. Facially, she looked a little like that
one country singer, the dark-haired one that danced around in the little denim
jacket, the one who copied that 'Addicted to Love' theme in her video ...
however she was much taller, bustier, and had 30 or 40 more pounds of muscle
than the famous performer. And she was so mind-numbingly gorgeous that Miles
had temporarily forgotten where or even who he was.

Her vision turned to meet his own, and one side of her mouth rose in a slow
grin, slightly dimpling her perfect, alabaster cheek. Miles swooned at the
mere meeting of her glance, but something ... something about that grin ... it
made him uneasy, and he didn't know why. Something about it wasn't right. It
wasn't an expression of mirth, relief, or goodwill. It was a look of cold,
calculating cruelty. Something deep in his subconscious spoke to him, bubbling
to the surface, hinting at the true nature of this strange woman and her
seemingly impossible arrival.

Get away, his mind whispered. Get away from here.

"Who are you?" he demanded, taking a step toward the fence between them, but
his voice cracking a little with the last word. Damn.

Get away ...

The woman's smile widened, and she took a step as well, several, in fact, to
bring herself to stand at arm's length to the softly crackling fence.

"Who are you, I said, and what are you doing here? This is a restricted area!"
he barked, louder, but the deep subconscious voice in his head continued.

Get away ... turn tail ... and ...

The woman smiled again, and with a deliberate slowness, raised her hands,
hooked them into claws, and took hold of the electrified wire before Miles
could shout another warning. None of the events he expected happened.

There was no scream. There was no explosion of movement as she was driven
backward, heart skipping, or, worse, stopped instantly from the surge. None of
this happened. Instead, what Miles got was a show of fireworks.

There was a sharp CRACK! As the circuit was broken, the humming turned into a
loud electric sizzling sound. Two large, five-foot flowers of golden sparks
suddenly bloomed where the electric leads met the contacts of the rollaway
gate. Behind him, the small portable substation in back of the guardhouse,
which regulated the current flowing through the gate, whined, began smoking,
and finally exploded with a concussive BANG! He could hear the cooling fan, no
longer being driven, spinning on its own, but unevenly; one of the blades must
have come off in the explosion; with a single warning squeak, the fan tore
free of its housing and whickered off into the night. The two large
sodium-vapor lights above the gate flashed and went out, leaving only the
floodlights from the guardhouse lighting the scene.

Get away, Miles, now ... !

The woman stood steadfast, unblinking, apparently unaffected by the tremendous
surge of electricity that had just flowed though her body. Miles took a step
backward, now afraid, and saw her lip give the tiniest twitch. And then she
moved.

With no wind up, with no apparent effort at all, the woman powered her arms
down and to the right. She did it easily, as if she did it in mid-air, like
some Tai-Chi exercise. There was no pause for exertion, no grunt of effort.
She did it quickly, efficiently, and without hesitation. But the heavy wire
mesh of the fence, the strong steel of the framing ... for a split second,
Miles didn't believe what he saw.

The previously electrified fence simply tore away, folding in on itself; the
heavy steel reinforcement beams that ran through it bending backward under the
force of her grasp smoothly, in a single, sudden movement, accompanied by the
tortured squeal of bending metal.

Get away, his mind whispered.

With graceful, unhurried movements, the woman stepped through the gate,
formerly 1200 pounds of reinforced fencing that she had just pretty much bent
in half with no apparent effort. Her vision remained fixed on Miles.

Run.

Miles took too many steps backward, somehow afraid to turn his back on this
strange woman, and his feet got tangled. Down he went with a grunt. He
shuffled backward on his hands for a moment, long enough for his panicked mind
to see her take her first terrifying steps forward, toward him.

Miles sprang up and ducked through the open door to the guardhouse. His eyes
passed over the monitors, the small desk, his chair, the desktop radio which
he was suppose to use in case of emergency. His vision passed over all of
these and settled on what he sought.

She was now halfway between the guardhouse and the ruins of the fence. Miles
scrambled out of the building and came to a stop only six or eight feet from
her, half that distance bridged by the length of his M-81 rifle. "Hold it
right there, bitch," he said, sighting down the barrel, which was unnecessary
at best at this distance. "I don't know who you are, but make one move and
I'll ... "

With her now familiar grin, she extended a foot and began to take a step.

BLAM! The rifle made a flat, loud cracking noise as it expelled its lethal
contents. But somehow, Miles' vision must have been affected by the sound and
the brief muzzle flash.

Because now, the woman stood before him, one foot still extended, toes pointed
and resting on the ground, but now her right arm was before her where it
wasn't just a millisecond earlier. Her hand was clenched in a fist, her
metallic glove on her forearm in front of her face.

Miles heard the telltale PING! and successive whine of a deflected bullet, and
even saw a tiny puff of desert sand out of his peripheral vision. But ... that
was impossible, wasn't it? What his mind was telling him she did ... that was
impossible.

He lowered the rifle to his hip and squeezed off another round. This was
followed by similar results. The crack of a rifle shot, the metallic whine of
a deflection, and now the woman stood before him, her left arm raised now, her
forearms crossed in metallic-gloved 'X' shape, her grin and one arched eyebrow
visible behind her protective stance.

"What the f"" ... " He never got the chance to finish his declaration.

Once, years before, Miles had played paintball with his brother and two
nephews during a family reunion. It had been hot, sweaty work; much more
effort was required for it than Miles would ever had guessed. He understood
its appeal, but it was a little too similar to his standard military duties to
be much fun for him. But he vividly remembered crossing a clearing in the
trees, hearing a sound, and turning, only to see his nephew poke his head up
from a thicket and open fire.

Miles always remembered what the bright yellow paintballs looked like as they
streaked across the clearing at him (and directly onto his chest, for the
record). They made a streak in his vision, a colored blur, with the dimly
realized vision of the ball at the head of it. The speed was calibrated just
right, something like 200 or 300 feet per second, and they moved at an
incredible but obviously nonlethal velocity. The colored streaks would blast
through the air, just slow enough for you to see it coming and actually have
rational, complete thoughts before the impact, but more than fast enough so
that there was no hope of you being able to move out of the way. The movement
of this strange woman was a lot like that ...

As she killed him.

She took a single step forward, her right leg rising at the hip, her calf
chambered for a kick, her arms surged downward, fisted, channeling as much
force into the maneuver as she could muster.

What? No way, Miles thought. No one can move that fa""

There was a tremendous, blinding, explosive concussion as her front kick
smashed into the center of Miles' chest. The force of it shattered his ribcage
like it had been fashioned from glass; his heart and most of his internal
organs were half-pulped from the sheer force of the blow. A thin, faint ring
of desert dust, ankle high, exploded outward to a ten-foot diameter around the
two figures from the sheer force of the blow.

A quarter second later, Miles' corpse took flight, propelled straight backward
with unimaginable force; his body looked like a human-shaped missile shot from
a cannon. His form struck the guardhouse at the level of the Plexiglas
windows, shattering most of them in a shower of plastic shards. His body also
clipped the thick aluminum window frame as it passed through the opening; the
unforgiving structure sheared off one of his arms and his left foot as he
tumbled through the opening, the force of his impact even knocked loose a few
random bricks around the window frame. The momentum wasn't greatly reduced
yet, and Miles' remains blasted across the small office to come to a sudden,
crunching stop against the far wall of the structure. The incredible force the
woman had transferred to his body, it wasn't quite enough to send him through
a solid concrete wall.

Instead, Miles' body collapsed noisily on itself as it struck the back wall of
the guardhouse; bones snapping, skin tearing, organs liquefying. What was left
rebounded, sliding down the wall beneath a greasy crimson streak three feet
wide. Miles, now not much more than a pulped bag of tissue, came to rest
between the wall and the desk in the guardhouse of the Arrowhead Army Research
Facility.

And it is here that Miles Keaton of Winton, Illinois, son, brother to two, a
military man who liked to read scientific journals in his free time, and whose
hobbies included swing dancing and R/C car collecting, passes out of the tale.
He was the first official battle casualty of what was to become known
afterward as The Amazon War.

It wasn't the screams, or the sound of screeching metal, or even the rapid
tat-tat-tat sound of automatic gunfire that roused Private Jimmy Neely from
sleep. Instead, it took the low, rattling THUD of a small explosion to wake
him.

His feet hit the floor of the barracks just as it was shaken by another
bass-filled explosive rattle, and by then the sounds were all coming home to
him, cutting through the fog of sleep as it quickly dissipated. Around him,
some of the other men assigned to his unit were duplicating his reaction.
Wild-eyed, they hastily pulled on the tan hides of their Army-issue desert
combat boots and seized whatever weapon they had at hand. Some carried the
standard M-81 rifle, others only carried the classic infantry sidearm, the .45
pistol, the design still in service after 80 years.

A crowd of men, Jimmy among them, staggered to the exits, the world filled
with shouting and confusion inside the barracks, the sound of gunfire and
screaming outside. Some went into the surprise attack without their boots on;
forgotten in their haste; others, like Jimmy, had managed to get some pants on
but scrambled outside wearing only the standard brown tank top. The doors of
the barracks opened, and the men poured out into the facility's courtyard.

The scene was one of complete chaos.

Why didn't the alarms go off? Jimmy wondered. This is unbelievable.

He hunkered down involuntarily as another explosion ripped through the night;
a stack of 55-gallon drums loaded with engine oil ignited and shot skyward,
rocket-like, on the other side of the camp. Jimmy could see the outlines of
men tumbling through the air in the distance, backlit by the angry red ball of
fire from the blast.

The men stumbled out into the courtyard, shielding their eyes form the
brightness of the fireball and the multiple blazes burning all around the
facility. Somewhere, an alarm warbled to life, the hair-raising sound of an
air-raid siren, but was almost instantly cut off, which was even more
disturbing than the sound of the siren itself.

Jimmy staggered out into the courtyard, onto the densely packed gravel of the
drive, and heard raised voices coming from his left side. He planted his feet,
half-raised his rifle, and turned to face the rising tide of voices.

A number of men, olive-green clad soldiers like himself, scrambled around the
bend of the gravel roadway, coming out from behind one of the large aluminum
Quonset huts that served as a barracks. Some were at a full sprint, some were
scrambling backward on their hands and knees. All of them had the same
expression of stunned panic on their faces, a mixture of shock and sheer
terror that Jimmy had never seen in his young life.

What the hell is going on? His mind screamed over and over. Who hit us, and
why here?

The crowd of fleeing men thinned, and then she stepped into view.

Even at this distance, some fifty yards, Jimmy could instantly see that she
was no ordinary woman. She was as tall, or taller, than most of the men
struggling to escape her grasp. And her build, and her outfit, and her ... my
God, is she smiling?

And she was also smeared with generous amounts of blood.

The scene was filled with men running to and fro wildly, desperately trying to
get to their respective stations. One of these men, nearly oblivious to her
presence, strayed too near, to within an arm's length of the strangely dressed
woman. Jimmy couldn't believe his eyes as he watched the scene unfold.

The woman snarled, her gorgeous features wrinkling into an arrogant sneer, and
as easily as a man would lift a pencil, she reached out and snatched the man
from the ground, his feet still pumping comically for a second. With a hand on
his shoulder and one on his belt, she lifted him over her head, arms extended,
a man as physically big as she was, at least, and he cried out for a split
second. Not for long, for she barely paused before slamming him earthward. His
descent with interrupted, however, by an equally unmovable object: her raised
knee.

The man's body broke neatly, like a dried stick or broom handle, bending
nearly double, sideways, over her raised muscular thigh; his scream came to an
abrupt, ominous, sudden end. With a dismissive shrug, she tossed his body to
the side, where it flipped over itself to lie prone in the dust.

Jimmy Neely's mouth opened in a comical 'O' shape of shock and surprise.

A second solider, this one in full desert fatigues, rushed her from the side.
The woman was far quicker than he; she pivoted at the waist, her right arm
flashing out straight to clothesline him across the upper chest and base of
his throat. Even at this distance and with the high level of ambient noise,
Neely could hear the heavy concussive THUD of her strike, accompanied by the
soft, bewildered groan of the soldier as he died. His body continued in its
course past her, but flipping end over end backward before it crashed to the
ground.

She killed three more men in the few seconds it took Neely to decide to join
the crowd of soldiers fleeing before her. He could see her seize a fourth man
in her deadly grip, her left arm snaking behind the small of the man's back as
she pressed him close to her, her right braced across his upper chest. With no
apparent effort at all, she brought her arms together in a sudden surge of
muscular power; the man's back broke with a brittle SNAP as his torso bent
backward on itself.

Jimmy didn't see her drop her newest victim to the ground; he scrambled the
twenty-five yards necessary to join the crowd of ten or so men that had been
backing steadily away from her.

"What's goin on?" he screamed at the man closest to him, struggling to get his
voice over the din of screaming men, thudding explosions, and intermittent
sirens.

The private he addressed spun, his eyes huge and panicked, his rifle raised.
Jimmy held his hands up, palms outward.

"Hey! Carlson! What the hell is going on? Who the hell"""

"Oh, God!" the private screamed, sweat running down his dirt-streaked face.
"God, God God ... she killed them! She killed them all!"

"Who?"

"Everybody! She killed them all! They're all dead!"

"Who?!"

"The captain! Sarge! All of them! She killed them all!"

"How many? Who is she? How?!"

"All of them! She killed them ... with her hands!" he screamed, openly
weeping. A huge wet patch appeared on the front of his desert fatigues; the
ammonia smell hitting Neely like a hammer in the dry air of the night. With an
unintelligible cry of despair, the private threw his rifle down and scrambled
away into the night, as fast as his legs would take him.

Another scream, closer. Neely spun only to see the woman, who was now closer,
her legs in a wide, low stance. She was at the end of some equally
unbelievable movement. Her arms were extended in front of her, and Neely could
see why: A uniformed soldier streaked away from her in a tan and olive-green
blur, his arms and legs pinwheeling wildly as his body raced through the air
of the compound. His body was still moving what had to be forty or fifty miles
per hour when he came to an abrupt, bone-shattering stop against the concrete
side of a bunker 80 or 90 feet away.

The ridiculous, impossible nature of the scene somehow made it slow down in
Jimmy Neely's perception. His flummoxed senses could only observe the
spectacle before him. The strange woman was nearer now; and Jimmy could see
that yes, not only were the seemingly impossible acts of violence she was
committing with ease amazing in and of themselves, but so was her appearance.
She was tall, broad, strongly built, like some kind of Olympian athlete, and
gorgeous to boot; her furious, blood-chilling expressions of rage seemed oddly
balanced by wide grins and soft laughter, only to be replaced by more frowns
and audible growls of fury.

My God, Neely thought. She's enjoying this. She's having fun.

Another solider charged at her, hands reaching for her throat, and another
soldier died; this one killed when she spun like the most graceful dancer in
the world, only to extend her leg at the last second, blasting his abdomen
with a side kick that knocked the life from him instantly.

Neely brought his rifle to his shoulder and sighted up the lethal woman,
putting his crosshairs in the center of her chest. He exhaled once, twice, and
squeezed the trigger gently as he blew out a breath.

The trigger mechanism clicked softly as stainless steel teeth clicked once,
twice into matching spaces; the bolt slid back and the firing pin drove
forward, propelled by a high-tension spring.

Somehow, over the din of fires, sirens, explosions, and screaming men, she
heard this.

The pin struck the shell, the powder exploded, and the round leapt from the
rifle's muzzle, but it never hit its intended target.

The woman leapt to the side, her long, athletic body stretching out as it
tracked over the desert ground for a seemingly impossible distance; with no
wind up or preparation, she sprang an easy 20 feet to the side, her arms
stretched out before her, hair buffeted by the breeze of her shoulder-high
flight.

All of this happened too fast for Neely's eyes to track fully, much too fast
for him to react in kind. His finger stayed depressed, and the rifle went
fully automatic. A deadly hail of bullets filled the space where she had been
fraction of a second earlier, only to slam into the bodies of a group of men
behind her. Neely stopped firing and watch in horror as one... two ... five
men dropped in his kill zone, felled by his own weapon.

The woman, meanwhile, finished her incredible leap with an equally impressive
forward tuck; she landed softly, almost delicately, and rolled up to her feet
with uncanny grace and seemingly little effort; she dealt another death blow
in the same motion, her fist blasting up from knee level to smash into the
head of a nearby soldier. The man's face disappeared in gory red halo, his
body taking flight to flip end over end and land ten feet away. She seized the
next man nearest her and pivoted at the waist, tossing him gently, the way
someone would throw a pillow across a room.

Instead, the effect was dramatic. The screaming man shot across the thirty
yards separating them to crash into Neely and the men nearest him; they all
fell to the ground with a thud and various grunts and cries of pain and
surprise.

The man's impact knocked the gun from Neely's hands, and he lay still,
stunned, for a moment. A new sound rose over the din of the chaotic scene; the
high-pitched mechanical sound of a high-revving engine. A small vehicle darted
into the courtyard, and even in his harried state, Neely instantly recognized
it. It was the WWII-era Willys Jeep that served as the base's mascot. Some
soldier he didn't recognize was at the wheel; he was hunched over the thin
steering wheel like a man on a mission. He swerved this way and that, the pale
yellow headlamps casting its light on the dozens of men leaping out of the way
as he sped by. And then he centered the hood on the invading woman, who now
saw him and planted her feet in a wide, dominating stance and placed her hands
on her hips ... and smiled.

The Jeep accelerated across the courtyard, making a beeline for the woman; it
had to be going at least 35 or 40 miles per hour when it reached her. Neely's
breathing stopped for a moment as he watched from his position amid the tangle
of bodies; his eyes squinting, anticipating the impact. But he could never
have anticipated the result, even after all he had just seen. His mind seemed
to slow everything down into slow motion so he could take in the spectacle.

Calmly, almost leisurely, the woman extended her left hand to meet the vehicle
as it reached her.

It occurred then to Private Neely that he knew what it felt like to go mad.

The top of the grill and the thick metal of the hood in the area where she
placed her hand deformed, denting, bending around her palm and fingers like it
had been made of warm butter rather than steel. The Jeep was brought to a
nearly immediate stop; most of the momentum was directed at the rear wheels,
which had nowhere to go but skyward.

The Jeep, woman, and driver now moved together as if they were joined. The
woman was driven backward at first, but only a few feet; however there was no
give to her stance and no sign of pain or injury. Rather, she simply slid
backward; her boots cutting into the hard, dusty ground like plow furrows,
leaving an eight foot streak, showing the distance she had traveled. The Jeep
fared worse; the hood, heavily dented and collapsed around her hand, crumpled
further, and the rear of the vehicle rose until it was slightly past vertical.

The woman turned slightly at the waist, and raised her right hand to land,
palm flat, against the top of the dashboard. The momentum of the Jeep was
lowered enough that this latest hand plant was enough to stop its motion
suddenly, with this strange, remarkable woman holding the entire vehicle rock
steady at a vertical angle.

The driver got the worst part of the collision. His forward motion continued,
even if that of the Jeep did not; when its progress was arrested by the
seemingly limitless power of the attacker, he simply continued traveling; now
free of the vehicle, he flew in a gentle and shockingly high screaming
parabola where he eventually landed on the metal roof of one of the barracks
with a bang.

Neely's brain had long ago given up trying to process information. Faced with
something that was patently impossible, he had simply reverted to the basic
nature of human existence: survival mode. He pushed a body off of himself
(whether that man was dead or merely unconscious, he didn't care) and stood.
His eyes darted around the normally open courtyard, which was now choked with
wrecked vehicles, smoking fires, and bodies - lots of bodies. He didn't take
time to count, but there had to be at least fifty or sixty corpses on the
ground, some of them horribly misshapen, some simply torn, literally, to
pieces.

The high-pitched squealing sound of bending metal came to him, and he turned
only to see another feat his mind could simply not process accurately: the
fearsome woman snarled, her beautiful features now a mask of rage and effort,
her hand tensing mightily, with the fabricated metal of the dash crumpling
under the force of her grip.

Her arms, her legs, her entire body swelled; she seemed to nearly ripple and
grow before his eyes. Her arms thickened to a girth impressive for all but the
biggest fitness competitors, definition and striations of muscle around her
baseball-, no, softball-sized biceps seemingly beyond what was humanly
possible. Every knot of abdominal muscle was visible beneath her skin-tight
bodysuit, her legs swelled in a surge of muscular power, and with a soft,
feminine grunt, she lifted the dark olive body of the Jeep off of the ground
and held it at arm's length above her head. Small pieces of dented metal and
debris fell from the body of the Jeep, and dirt spun off of its still-spinning
tires; the motor chugged briefly and died.

And she laughed.

Neely could hear her, plain as day, as if they were together alone in a quiet
room, even though she was thirty yards away and they were surrounded by a
scene of flaming chaos. Her laughter was full, deep, and chilled his blood. It
was the sound of a victorious warrior, whose spirits were made even loftier
with every additional ounce of spilled blood.

An anonymous soldier, clutching a wounded arm, made the mistake of trying to
dart past the woman, back down the dirt road that led to the main gate. Even
holding the impossible weight above her, she was still far faster than he
could ever have been. With a smile, a twist, and a grunt of sudden effort, the
woman powered the Jeep downward, her right hand holding the dashboard bearing
most of the effort. The entire vehicle slammed earthward in an olive blur, in
a sense serving as a huge steel hammer. The crumpled, ruined grill of the Jeep
struck the fleeing soldier first, much as it had struck the hand of the
fearsome woman a few seconds earlier, but the effect was much different.

The full weight of the truck was amplified by the apparent strength of the
female attacker. In a flash, the Jeep slammed to the ground with a metallic
crash and sub-aural thud that Neely felt more than he could actually hear, and
the fleeing soldier, trapped between the propelled vehicle and hard, dusty
ground simply ceased to be; he was effectively pasted, his body liquefying and
becoming not much more than a smear on the gravel drive.

The woman, releasing the ruined hulk of the Jeep, gave a smirk of
satisfaction. She raised her leg, placed one of her glistening black boots
against the green metal surface, and pushed. The Jeep tumbled end over end,
many times over, crashing through a throng of panicked soldiers like a giant's
oblong metallic bowling ball. It rolled over a number of them, threw others to
the side, and eventually crashed into a barracks fifty yards away, where it
tore a ragged hole in the aluminum siding of the structure and exposed a
number of men hiding inside, finally coming to rest on top of a number of
them.

A soldier in fatigue pants and a brown tan top suddenly appeared close to the
base's attacker, weapon drawn. The young man raised his .45, his hands
together, curled around its grip, and squeezed off three quick shots from only
10 feet away.

Finally, Neely thought, it's over.

But it wasn't to be. Not yet.

The woman sprang into sudden, swift motion. In a movement too fast for the
human eye to track fully, her arms flashed up before her, her forearms raised
in a muscular 'X' shape. Small eruptions of sparks glinted off of the metallic
gauntlets she wore over her wrists and forearms, the high PING! sounds of
ricochets plainly audible. Two rounds went into the dirt, causing small puffs
of pale gray dust, but the third came directly back at the shooter. The young
man jerked explosively as the round struck him directly between the eyes. His
arms dropped limply, his head nodding back and forth forcefully as he fell in
a heap to the ground.

"No! No, no!" Neely cried aloud, screaming out his feelings about the
shooter's sudden death or his own feelings about what he was witnessing, he
wasn't sure. Somehow, over all the noise and confusion, the woman heard him as
well.

Neely's heart nearly stopped when the woman's gaze locked onto his own, and
again ... she smiled.

For the men at the base, the day was lost. Nearly all had given up trying to
stop this strange attacker who had appeared from nowhere and brought so much
death and destruction with her. Most of the men simply gave up and broke
ranks, fleeing for their very lives.

The woman squared her shoulders, and began striding across the courtyard, her
long, sleek legs scissoring back and forth in a purposeful, nearly strident
gait; her eyes never left Neely's position. Neely tripped over a corpse, and
skittered backward, watching her slow advance in growing horror.

Not all lost their nerve; a man charged the woman with a strange weapon.
Jeezus, Neely thought, is that a bayonet? The deadly attacker never even
slowed; she simply blocked the man's awkward attacking lunge and swept him up
in her arms, turning him to face away from her and she walked on. Her left
hand clutched the back of his head and the upper portion of his neck tightly,
the skin there a bright white, attesting to the power of her steely grip. Her
right arm was braced across the man's abdomen, pulling him tight against her
as she strode forward, his feet leaving twin trails in the dirt.

With a casual flex of her left arm, the woman pulled down on the base of the
man's skull, then suddenly reversed the force she was exerting, now pushing up
and away from his shoulders, her grip never wavering. His spine made first a
series of high, brittle clicking sounds, followed by a horrible, meaty popping
sound, the sound of untold amounts of cartilage collapsing.

"Gak!" the man hiccupped; an odd, chirping kind of cry, strangled and
choked-sounding. He immediately began to spasm, and the woman dropped him
unceremoniously to the dirt, where he lay in a twitching pile.

Her gait never wavered, and her smile only grew wider.

Neely scrambled back further, faster, unable focus his mind enough to remember
how to stand and run, like so many of his fellow soldiers were now doing.

But not like the one that suddenly stood before the strange invader.

The soldier had been lying on the ground, and even Neely had thought it was
just one casualty, one of many. But the soldier must have been only feigning
death, for now the invader was staring down the soldier's .45.

The soldier squeezed off a shot, point-blank, but even that was too slow. The
attacking woman threw her right shoulder back, pivoting the barest hint of an
inch in that direction, all the while slightly raising her left shoulder and
turning her head in a smooth, sudden movement that was nearly to fast to see
clearly.

A brief flash leapt from the pistol's muzzle, but too slow; the bullet went
wide, cutting the air where the attacker's head had been just a split-second
before. The invader wasted no movement; her left had continued upward and
seized the soldier by the wrist. The woman jerked forward and down suddenly,
rotating her grip forward. The soldier's arm offered no resistance; it folded
downward instantly in a direction it was not meant to travel. The elbow joint
popped out of place with an audible POP and the soldier's forearm shattered
with a grisly cracking sound. The soldier's knees went weak and the fatigued
form sagged earthward with a cry of pain; a high-pitch squeal that joined the
chorus of cries of the scene.

But Neely paused, as did the attacker. Something about that sound ...

The invading woman raised the soldier still in her grasp higher, the soldier
gasped aloud in pain, and the sound was high-pitched in tone, too high for ...

The woman snatched the military cap off of the soldier's head, and Neely could
see the shoulder-length blonde hair spill out from under it. Then the
diminutive stature and thin build of the soldier, concealed by the bulky
fatigues, was now more readily apparent. Neely wasn't really surprised, he was
a young man, young enough to have had women around him his whole military
career. It wasn't like he was one of the old guys, the lifers, who still
grumbled about how it used to be, and how the women among them would be better
serving their country by cleaning the mess hall instead of learning how to
dismantle an M-81. The appearance of a female in uniform didn't faze Neely.
But it seemed to affect their attacker.

The statuesque woman paused, and even though her reaction was fairly
short-lived, Neely saw it. The woman's eyes widened in momentary surprise, and
she stopped her advance. She simply stared at the female soldier who writhed
in pain in her clutches. The woman's brow furrowed in an expression that was
at once one of wonder, annoyance, and anger. She seemed as if she would speak
to the smaller women she held, possibly ask her some kind of question. For the
barest moment, the fearsome invader seemed totally flummoxed.

But it didn't last. Her expression finally settled on one of resolute anger.
She slid the outside edge of her right hand down the soldier's face and neck,
then down to her upper chest. The woman then extended the first two fingers of
her right hand, and drove them sharply into the chest of her captive, just to
the right of the sternum.

"Unnhh!" the soldier cried, and her head dropped and body sagged instantly.
She was unconscious, not dead, for Neely could tell she was breathing. But she
was very much out of the fight, rendered unconscious instantly, as if the
woman had hit her with a hammer to the head instead of two fingers to the
chest. The invader let the soldier's form slide earthward; not a touch with
kid gloves by any means, but still more gentle a touch than she had allowed
anyone so far that night. Her vision fixed on Neely once more, and as she
started walking toward him again, her expression changed from annoyance and
confusion back to her original look of haughty high humor.

Neely's back slammed into the wall of a concrete bunker, and he stood, trying
to shrink away from the approaching woman as far as he could. Part of him, a
larger portion than he would care to admit, had already given up, had already
written off his chances of ever surviving this night. Maybe that was what kept
him relatively still as the strange attacker approached and came to a stop
less than three feet from him. Neely reconsidered his original assessment of
the woman now that he saw her up close. She wasn't merely on the tall side;
she was easily a six-footer. And she wasn't merely attractive; despite all the
incredible, horrible feats he had just witness her perform, Neely knew she was
the most beautiful, elegant creature he had ever seen.

The young man stood somewhat slack-jawed before her, and the woman's smile
grew the tiniest bit wider; one of her high, arched eyebrows rose slightly in
malicious bemusement.

Neely's heart felt like it was about to leap from his chest; his breath caught
in his throat for a moment when he saw her begin to reach out to him. Her hand
rose, long, delicate-looking fingers splayed out in a fan, the nails a liquid
red color. The woman batted her eyes once, twice, and her touch settled on the
middle of his chest. Despite all his fear and the warning his rational mind
was blaring in his brain, Neely felt himself stir a little.

The woman smiled, a full, wide smile full of condescension and malice. She
mockingly puckered her crimson lips and blew him a kiss, just before her arm
powered forward in a shove of irresistible power.

Neely's body sprang backward, driven by her seemingly effortless touch. This
is it, he thought. I'm gonna hit that wall and that'll be it. But it wasn't;
his body rose just enough that he was driven through one of the building's
open windows. His head clipped the frame with a thunk! And the world swam into
a watery gray tunnel as he landed inside the structure.

He wasn't sure how long he was out of it. Not long, he realized, since he
could still hear the cries of the men outside the building and the
intermittent thud of small explosions as the base burned around him. Only a
few minutes probably. At least he was safe, in here. Maybe he could get away
before ""

His thought process screeched to a halt as his eyes adjusted to the relative
darkness inside the building, and all hope of escape left him once and for
all.

The dim light coming through the open window fell across her shoulder, some of
it gleamed in her hair, nearly sparkling as it reflected the pale blue
moonlight and dim orange of distant fires. Her face was lost in shadow, yet
Neely thought that he could nearly make out her eyes, staring out at him from
that inky darkness. Something new came to him, a high, sweet-smelling scent,
earthy, yet holding great promise.

It was if someone had given him a shot of adrenaline. His heart rate climbed
instantly, his body broke out in a thin sweat, and, despite his understandable
trepidation, he could feel the familiar tightness growing in the crotch of his
fatigue pants. And, somehow, he knew that she knew all of this, and he also
knew she was smiling. Even though his fear, he could feel the familiar
sensations burning in his body as he grew aroused; he closed his eyes and
tilted his head back involuntarily, his mind numbly trying to process the
conflicting emotions of fear, horror, and sudden, inexplicable lust.

"What's your name?" she asked, her voice husky, yet entirely feminine, and
oddly musical. Neely closed his eyes, as if to soak up the sound, like an
audiophile in a fit of aural nirvana.

"Jim Neely," he whispered back, slowly opening his eyes. She stepped forward
slowly, out of the shadows, into the pale shaft of moonlight. Her appearance
was devastating; Neely literally couldn't believe that a woman could look like
this, could look this appealing. He tried desperately, but found he couldn't
tear his eyes away from her as she came nearer. His mouth opened, he
hesitated, and closed it again.

"What is it?" she asked gently. She raised her left hand and placed it on his
right shoulder, and the telltale bulge in his pants was clearly evident, even
in the relative darkness of the room.

"Are ... are you an angel?" Neely asked, giving voice to his wonder, and fear.

The woman's smile grew in delight, her teeth flashing an impossible pearl-like
white in the dark; a soft, brief chuckle in the form of a 'hmmm' sound was
part of his answer.

"An angel? Is that what you think I am?" she countered, delighted.

Neely only nodded.

"But do I come from heaven?" she asked, placing her other hand on Neely's
other shoulder. The sweet scent grew stronger, and Neely's heart fluttered in
his chest once more. His hands almost began burning; he worked the fingers
back and forth eagerly. "Or hell?" she finished.

"I don't know," Neely whispered. "But I don't care."

The woman laughed softly. "And why is that, Jim Neely?"

"Because ... all I want ... "

"Yes?"

"All I want is ... to ... to ... "

Her voice dropped to match his own whisper. When she spoke, Neely felt as if
his heart would burst.

"To touch me?" she asked, curious.

"Yes," Neely whispered back at once.

The woman leaned forward, her face passing Neely's own, to where her lips were
a mere fraction of an inch away from his right ear. She blew a gentle breath
across his ear and the side of his neck, and saw with satisfaction Neely's
skin erupt in gooseflesh as the hair stood on end. She placed a single, gentle
kiss on the lobe of Neely's ear; he moaned aloud and shuddered. She paused,
and spoke the words he longed so badly to hear, despite the terrible feats he
had seen her perform.

"Then, go ahead, Jim Neely. Touch me," she said.

It was all the encouragement he needed. His hands, like two wild beings with
their own thoughts, sprang forward to seize the sides of her abdomen. Neely's
eyes widened as his hands explored the ridged surface of her abdomen and the
smooth, sleek slope of her hips. The bodysuit she wore was slick, nearly
greasy-feeling, but with no residue left after his touch.

"Touch all of me," she implored softly.

Neely's hands took in everything, they clasped the firm swell of her buttocks,
the muscled sweep of her upper thigh; they traveled up over her midsection to
first delicately touch, then more forcefully fondle her breasts, which stood
proud and firm on her chest. Neely couldn't believe the odd mixture of
absolute femininity and underlying hardness and strength he found in her form.
There was some give to her skin, a gentle dimpling on her breast, butt, and
thigh caused by his forceful touch, but beneath that was the feel of shocking
diamond hardness, and the impression of a strength he could not begin to
comprehend.

"Very good, Jim Neely," the woman said softly into his ear. "Was it nice?"

"Yes," Neely moaned in answer, his hands still making forceful circles on her
breast.

"Do you think I'm pretty? Do you think I'm beautiful?"

"You're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen," Neely whispered.

"What do you want me to do, Jim Neely?" the woman asked gently, and Neely's
touch ceased. His eyes met her gaze, then widened the tiniest bit in
apprehension.

"I ... I ... "

"Do you want me to touch you?" she asked, her whisper tinged with derision.

"Yes!" he exclaimed, also without hesitation.

With no effort whatsoever, her hands sprang to the sides, tearing the brown
tank top off of him with a brief ripping sound. Her hands seized upon the
waistband of his pants, and with a sudden burst of muscular power Neely could
feel in her suddenly iron-like body, she tore his fatigues in half, the thick
material proving inferior to her efforts. With a similar motion she reduced
his shorts to ruin, and after a mere moment, he stood shuddering before her, a
mixture of fear, lust, and full, throbbing erection.

Her right hand found the length of his member and closed around it,
alternately squeezing and releasing it. She leaned forward and kissed Neely
full on the mouth, her slick crimson lips sliding across his own, her tongue
first forcing his lips open and then probing the space behind his teeth,
slathering itself across his own tongue as she kissed him more deeply, more
passionately than he had ever been kissed in his life.

The strange woman sighed softly, felt a burning sensation beneath her skin,
and somehow pushed it forward, toward the surface of her body, the surface of
her skin. A heavy, thick scent, sweet, high-smelling, erupted from her body
and filled the space around their entwined bodies. It was a smell like ripe,
sweet, cut fruit, of health, vigor; it was tinged with the musky scent of sex
as well, and when she flexed some unnamable part of herself, it poured from
the exposed skin of her upper body, her head, her neck and shoulders.

Combined with her oddly delicate touch and the slippery ministrations of her
touch, it proved far too much for Jimmy Neely's senses. With a loud, forceful
groan, he came in great spasming bursts, coating her hand with a tremendous
amount of his primal fluids. She sighed in satisfaction, and broke the kiss.

"Nicely done, Jim Neely," she moaned. "A little ... soon, for my needs. But
... fortunately for you, you're still a young man. You should be able to do it
again, yes?" she smiled.

He only stared at her, his ears still ringing from the most forceful orgasm of
his young life.

Without another word, the woman pushed Neely backward until his shoulders
pressed up against the rear wall of the barracks. Her left hand lowered to her
most intimate region, and the fingers quickly and expertly opened a small flap
in the slick black material that had previously been invisible.

"What""" Neely began, but was silenced as she seized him once more, this time
for more roughly than before. She assumed a wide stance, and grabbed the bare
flesh of his buttocks roughly. She drew Neely toward her, and before he could
speak, he could feel the still throbbing tip of his erection slide down her
abdomen as she nearly lifted his weight from the floor and guided the most
intimate part of him toward her waiting body.

The feel of her bare skin on his own was nearly electric, and with a soft
sigh, she shifted her hips forward, essentially now straddling him while
standing. Neely could feel the soft pull of her sex on the tip of his
erection, and with a gentle moan, she pushed her hips out just a bit further,
and Neely felt himself slide into her.

This was when Jim Neely's mind stopped working in a logical fashion.

It was like nothing he had ever experienced. Neely was still a young man, and
though he had had only a few partners, he was schooled well enough in the art
of lovemaking. But this ... this was something new. Something as unbelievable
as the feats of strength he had witnessed only a few moments earlier.

A firm, slick grip tightened along the considerable length of his shaft;
gripping him almost to the point of discomfort. It felt like a silken iris of
muscle, spinning open and shut against his length, all while pulsing in and
out, in and out. The woman's grip on his buttocks eased, then vanished as she
instead grasped the sides of his face in her hands and kissed him deeply,
savagely, her mouth open and the slickness of her tongue and crimson lips
sliding across his mouth, his chin, his neck. It dawned on a small, rational
part of Neely's mind that their position was impossible. He was held at a
nearly 45-degree angle; without the strength of her arms about him, he should
have fallen over backwards, pulling himself free of her grasp.

But he didn't fall. He could feel her touch on his face, her kisses, but it
was the firm, silken grip below that fascinated him. The woman's hips were
rock steady and unmoving, yet the act of sex was occurring. The woman threw
her head back and moaned loudly, fiercely, like some wild thing, one arm
thrown back, the other cupping the back of Neely's head in a firm grip. Neely
looked down and he could see his length sliding in and out of the woman, and
his thoughts echoed dumbly in his mind as he struggled to understand what was
happening.

My God, he thought, she's doing it all. She's pulling me in and pushing me out
...

It was true. He could feel his own hips being drawn upward as she pulled his
length into her, using only the mysterious grip inside her body. Neely
realized that it should be painful for him, as roughly half of his body weight
was theoretically being suspended from his throbbing erection, and yes, now
that he noticed, there was a kind of dull ache forming around the base of his
groin, but all this was lost in the waves of unbelievable muscular contraction
surrounding his length.

The woman shuddered, and the silken grip on him tightened suddenly, pulling
him deeper into her than ever, and nearly out of defense, Neely came again in
a huge crashing burst.

On and on it went, his body twitching as he emptied whatever reserve he had
into her; he was dimly aware of the woman roaring in a mixture of delight and
savagery above him.

"Yes!" she roared, her voice suddenly huge and filling the room; it was the
sound of conquest and triumph. "Give ... it ... all ... to ... ME!"

Neely's body began jerking awkwardly as the woman's hips seemed to literally
chew into his own; the unnatural pleasure of the moment now mixing with pain
as he was drawn far, far, into her body, her silken grip now exquisitely
painful as she pulled far too hard on his most delicate part. But on and on
his throes of passion went, for more, much more than a minute, and then two,
as the orgasm wracked his body and he began spasming wildly. Neely's heart
hammered so strongly he thought it might burst through his ribcage and
literally leap from his chest; suddenly its rhythm became irregular. It
skipped a beat, then two, and his breath first caught, then left his body in a
gasp as the weird mixture of pain and pleasure continued ever onward.

Then his heart raced forward a few beats, then skipped several more. Neely
realized with dawning alarm that drawing a breath was suddenly incredibly
difficult; it was if his lungs had stopped working effectively. He tried
sucking in great breaths of air, but the oxygen didn't seem to make it to his
bloodstream. He could feel the huge, hammering beats of the thick muscle of
his heart, clenching wildly in an awkward rhythm, struggling to stay alive,
but the desperate beatings of his toughest muscle was nothing compared to the
surge of muscular power he could feel from this strange aggressor. All of this
occurred to him, even though it was diminished, as it was filtered through the
pleasure of the huge, unnatural orgasm that wracked his body for nearly three
full minutes. Suddenly, for Jimmy Neely, everything ended as the moment
peaked. Not for him, but for the woman ending his life.

The woman released the hold on his skull, and her arms reached up behind her
own head. Her nipples pushed the slick black material of her bodysuit outward
in inch-long tent-like shapes, and suddenly every muscle on her incredible
body flexed into sharp, clear definition; large and unknowably powerful, but
altogether feminine. She drew in a breath and roared out the sound of her
triumph.

It was a huge, primal sound, one of conquest, lust, and murder all rolled into
one. Her scream was deep and powerful, and the sound of it carried outside,
where it chilled the blood of the soldiers fleeing or still fighting the
flames and fires of her attack. And it was the sound that pulled Jim Neely
back to reality as he died.

Every muscle in her flexed hugely, in a massive surge of feminine power. Every
muscle. Including the ones that had held his body upright and used him for her
own savage pleasure. The silken grip around his still erect length exploded in
the throes of her passion, a final surge, a final flex peaked after her primal
scream.

There was a loud, audible click, a snapping sound, as of thick, bone-like
gristle being shattered in two.

Neely's mouth opened, breath suddenly filling his lungs to scream. But the
sound wouldn't come; the air was driven from him as his heart surged and
leaped in his chest, with a final huge, wavering beat ... and then stopped.

For a few seconds, his eyes drifted over the face of his tormentor, his
attacker, his angel. Her expression of satisfaction, her rosy glow of sexual
heat, and her cold, impersonal indifference to his plight were the last things
he saw as his vision first wavered, then began to darken, and finally faded to
black as oblivion took him.

The woman moaned softly to herself one last time; a sly grin, like that of a
cat which has gotten its fair share of milk, formed on her full, pouty lips.
She shifted her grip a bit, her thighs biting into the body of the dead man
beneath her. Her thighs swelled in a graceful dance of muscular power, and
there was a grinding, perfectly audible series of cracking sounds as the bony
frame of his pelvis was torqued beyond its limits. A final, bony POP! was
heard as his body gave way, and she opened her stance a bit. The still erect
length of the man, with an unnatural joint evident midway down its length,
slid from her sex. His body fell unmoving to the ground, his member still
gently pumping a tiny amount of clear seminal fluid onto his groin as the last
traces of life left him.

The woman smiled to herself contently. It had been far, far too long since her
last intimate encounter with a male, however fragile they might prove to be.
Her entire body seemed to sing, to thrum pleasantly; she felt the power surge
though her and relished the slowly dissipating afterglow of her arousal. And
she could feel it - what she had stolen, what she had taken from the man -
moving through her body. She could feel her inner workings pulling it further
and further into herself, deeper toward her core. There was a pause, and then
a dim, warm glow that spread outward, radiating gently though her as she could
feel the successful nature of her mating take hold. She sighed contently ...
and became aware of a new sound. Something coming in through the window,
followed by a soft, metallic sound. She cast her sharpened senses toward the
floor, the direction of the sound, and her eyes widened in surprise as she
ascertained its origin.

A fist-sized hand grenade was on the floor, not three feet from her right
foot, spinning on its side.

More quickly than a person should be able to move, the woman spun gracefully,
crouching, chambering her legs for a great leap. She turned sideways and
jumped for the window, her arms thrust before her, her legs powering her body
up and out of the building in a single huge thrust.

A blast of air, followed by the peppery spray of shrapnel struck her lower
legs; followed by the heat of the orange ball of flame that disappeared nearly
as soon as it had been born all chased her body as she shot through the window
and clear of the building. She tucked her head, and rolled gracefully,
effortlessly to her feet, snarling in surprise and the faintest degree of
pain, to come face to face with the soldier who had thrown the device.

Her right hand blasted upward, the fingers curled up tightly, the heel of her
hand smashing into the jaw of the surprised man. The lower half of his face
liquefied as his body flew up and away from her, the concussion far more than
his delicate brainpan was built to withstand.

The bastards. A group of them, numbering at least 20, rushed her suddenly.
They had been lying in wait and organized themselves while she had taken a
moment (too soon, in a mild violation of her mission) to pleasure herself with
the man known as Jim Neely. A few of them had summoned what little courage
they could muster, and now they rushed her in a single group, meaning to
overwhelm her suddenly.

How cute.

"At last!" she roared, her voice husky and strangely musical in its cadence.
"At last someone will show me what passes for courage among you!"

Her voice carried over the din of the burning base easily, falling on the ears
of the group of men as they made their final, desperate charge.

One of the first among them held a .45 in front of him as he ran, squeezing
off rounds as he screamed and strode toward her. The woman's superhuman vision
tracked the bullets as they left the muzzle; she had not needed to, actually;
the man's bouncing strides made nearly all of the shots miss wildly. Two
tracked near enough for her to be concerned, and with two tiny, incredibly
quick movements with her arms, the slugs were deflected harmlessly away from
her.

Now within her reach, the soldier thrust out the pistol to fire a round
point-blank, but he was never to get the chance. The terrifying woman's hand
clamped down on top of his own and squeezed savagely. The man's hand and every
finger on it broke with the loud series of crackles of collapsing bone now so
familiar to the terrified contingent of soldiers. Then the squeal of deforming
metal as the woman exerted so much force with her single-handed grip that the
pistol and the pulped remains of his fist ground together to become one. The
man screamed in agony and dropped to his knees.

The raven-haired attacker stepped in close to him, wrapping her metal-encased
forearm around the base of the man's skull. She spun, as elegantly as the most
graceful ballet dancer, her leg snapping up to explode into the chest of the
next man. It was hard to tell which CRUNCH! of snapping bone was louder, that
of the collapsed chest of her kick victim, or the snapped neck of the
pistol-wielder. Nevertheless, two more bodies joined the dozens of others on
the dusty and bloody ground.

The remaining force of men charged onward, but fared no better; their feminine
attacker simply took them apart, sometimes two and three at a time. She hefted
one man aloft like he was no more than a pillow; a quick jerk from her
diamond-hard arms snapped his spine like brittle kindling. Dropping his prone
form, she leapt into the air, above the heads of the next two men to reach her
position. She seemed to hang in mid-air, motionless for a moment. She extended
her hands, unhurried, cradled the heads of the men, and with a casual, easy
movement, drove them together beneath her. She made it look easy, as if she
put no effort into the maneuver as all; indeed, her mid-air pause and the
force she exerted on the men below her made her movements seem almost gentle.
The reaction by the men told another tale altogether: their skulls were driven
into each other with terrifying force, the sound a dreadful, hollow-sounding
wet CRACK! like two meat-covered coconuts being dashed together with terminal
force. The men choked out nearly identical grunts of pain, both abruptly cut
off by the impact, and they sagged to the ground, their skulls oddly
misshapen. Their attacker finished her leap: she did a gentle forward
somersault, her legs snapping down onto the shoulders of another man. His face
was buried in her crotch, her weight slamming down onto his shoulders. He was
driven to his knees, a muffled cry coming from deep in his chest; it ended
abruptly as the woman torqued her hips savagely to the side, a clearly audible
POP! erupted from the man's neck. She planted her feet and he too fell
twitching to the ground.

A lethal chop to the throat, and another man died gagging. A spinning kick of
such grace that the man who became its victim was entranced by her motion,
following every movement that led to his sudden, explosive demise. One man,
over six feet tall and well over two hundred pounds, held aloft like a
weightless child only to be slammed to the ground with mind-numbing, deadly
force, and then used as a club against five more of their number.

Man after man fell, until the utter hopelessness of their situation became
clear once again. The small number of survivors of the valiant 20 suddenly
turned tail and ran, and she came after them, running them down as if they
were children, her hands and feet, no, her entire body bringing the gifts of
pain and death to each of them.

"Is this all?" she roared into the open air, the cords on her neck in stark
relief as she screamed out her triumph. "Have you no warriors to give me even
the hint of a challenge? Have you no ... Agghh!"

Suddenly, a hissing, sharp report sounded in the night air. She turned at the
last split-second, and the dark blur flashed by behind her, nearly missing
her. It would have struck a normal person directly between the shoulder
blades; her speed and superhuman reflexes saved her. The bullet, a big,
high-velocity sniper round, instead grazed the exposed muscle of her back,
clipping the defined lower half of her right trapezius. A small crimson
explosion puffed into the air behind her as she snarled in rage and pain.

"Arrrghh! Coward! Where are you? Face me, coward!" she screamed, her face a
mask of rage, surprise, and pain.

But they had seen. The soldiers who had been fleeing, panicked, before her had
seen this first wound on her body, and now they stopped, unsure of what to do
next.

"Where are you, worm? Show yourself!" the raven-haired woman shouted into the
night air. "Show me where you - Ack!"

Another round blasted into her, and this time the aim was true and she was
unable to dodge the path of the projectile. The big round slammed into her
left thigh. The entrance wound was minor, petite, even. But the exit wound was
another matter. A fist-sized chuck of muscle blasted away from the rear of her
leg, the bright crimson spray turning into a torrent of blood that flowed
freely down her calf, over the shiny black boot she wore. The mere impact of
such a round would have driven a normal man to his knees, or blasted his lower
leg free of his body; this was no normal human, however. She staggered, but
did not fall.

The woman squeezed her eyes shut against the pain, gritted her teeth, and
roared her pain and anger through her clenched jaws. But she had seen the
flash, the flower-shaped muzzle flash from on top of the barracks nearly 60
yards away. She had seen ... .

Despite her pain from the huge, gory wound to her thigh, the woman knelt and
scooped a rock into her hand. She concentrated, and above the din of the
embattled camp, she thought she could hear the sniper chambering another
round. Her movements slower, more sluggish, but still more than what seemed
possible, she sighted her target, wound up, and let the inch-square rock fly.
Her granite projectile streaked the 60 yards to her target, and was every bit
as effective as his lead one: It caught him in the right eye as he sighted up
another shot. He choked out a hoarse cry as the stone buried itself in his
brain, and collapsed, unmoving, on the roof of the barracks.

But it was too late. The tide had shifted.

Two, three, then four flat, surprisingly unimpressive reports rang out, and
the woman jerked in quick succession as the pistol slugs tore into her lower
back. She spun, snarling, driving her hand down like a hammer and cracking the
skull of her attacker, killing him instantly. But her blood flowed freely from
her wounds, the same precious scarlet that ran in the veins of the men she was
attacking, and their spirits soared when they saw that as incredible, as
unbelievable as the woman and her abilities may have proven to be, she was
still an organic, natural, living thing ... and she could be hurt.

And what could be hurt, could be killed.

They came then, sidearms blazing. Yes, she was still able to deflect an
astounding number of rounds with the bright silver gauntlets on her forearms,
but many of the bullets hit home. A round buried itself in the base of her
neck, barely missing her spine. Another took a chunk out of her right bicep.
Three more plowed into her foot, making the simple act of walking an exercise
in pain. Three rounds fired by the same man buried themselves deep into her
bosom.

But she wasn't done, either. Her progress was slowed, and now she had lost
much of the uncanny grace she had exhibited before. But at close range, her
strength seemed undiminished, and the death toll mounted as she exacted her
rage on their number. More men fell, unmoving, into the dust.

"Fuck this," one bloodied and terrified man, a solider named Watts, muttered
to himself, over and over. "Fuck this fuck this fuck this."

Watts pulled the pin on a fragmentation grenade and lobbed it straight at the
woman's head from a distance of 35 yards. He hoped she would be too
preoccupied with the men scrambling near her feet to see it coming ...

He was wrong. With a snarl, she turned just in time to pluck the grenade from
the air. But she wasn't fast enough to throw it away.

The device went off with a heavy, concussive bang, a cloud of dark smoke
obscuring the woman and those around her.

Immediately, screams could be heard. Screams of men with hot shrapnel imbedded
in their arms, their legs, their faces. Some of them would not survive the
night. But among them was another sound, this one feminine in nature.

She lay on the ground, gasping. Blood poured in great torrents from the
various bullet wounds to her body. But Watts and the men crowding around him
crept close to stand over her prone form and their attention was fixed on the
ragged stump where her arm had been.

The tattered flesh of her wound was blackened and burned; a great freshet of
blood gushed through the meat of the wound with every beat of her heart. Her
eyes were wide saucers of disbelief, her mouth an awkward 'O' shape as she
gasped for air like a fish suddenly thrown onto the shore.

"Arterial blood," Watts observed matter-of-factly. "She's finished, boy---"

He was interrupted by a harrowing shriek, an ear-splitting war cry from the
dying woman warrior that raised the hairs on the necks of every man who heard
it.

With a burst of reserve power no one could have foreseen, the strange woman
leaped to her feet, and with her remaining limb seized the man closest to her
by the face. Her grip closed suddenly, the clawlike shape of her hand biting
into his skull with a muffled CRUNCH. He dropped to the ground, jerking
spasmodically. She knelt, then rose once more, and began attacking the crowd
around her with a new weapon, gripped tightly in her remaining good hand. Four
more men died from her latest savage attack, their heads stove in and their
bodies smashed by her deadly new weapon, the grenade thrower Watts among their
number.

She attacked them with her own severed arm, swinging the ruined piece of meat
like a club.

Roaring with a high-pitched, wheezing squeal, she descended among them,
spinning furiously, the disembodied limb a terrifyingly effective weapon as it
smashed man after man into prone, still submission. But even her superhuman
abilities seemed to have their limits, for after a few moments of this fresh
attack, she paused, wheezing. She took a single slow, shuddering step forward,
faltered, and fell to one knee. A soldier rushed her, a knife of huge
proportions held before him. She slapped his hand away, wrapped her remaining
arm around his torso, and squeezed once, massively. A liquid gurgle came from
his yawning mouth accompanied by a series of muted cracklings inside his body.
She rolled him out of her grip to collapse onto the ground, just as a pistol
shot sounded, then two, then three, and then the night erupted with the sound
of gunshots as the men gathered themselves in a semi-circle around their
tormentor.

Her body began jerking wildly, hitching this way and that as dozen after dozen
of rounds crashed into her body. In the thirty seconds that followed, more
than two hundred rounds of small arms and high-powered rifle fire slammed into
her body, and though she sagged slowly forward, clearly mortally wounded, she
was not yet dead.

A uniformed, blood-smeared man appeared behind her. He strode forward to stand
directly behind her and raised his weapon, a military riot-suppression
firearm; essentially it was an 8-gauge shotgun, its muzzle a double-barreled,
yawning, cave-like construction. With no fanfare or ceremony he placed the
barrel to the back of the frightful woman's head.

"Cowards," the woman choked, her blind, shattered eyes moving over their ranks
as if she could see them, the words coming though the splintered mess of her
ruined teeth and jaw. "You ... cowards, all ... " she choked, her head
sagging.

The soldier behind her pulled the trigger of his weapon, and twin flares of
death burst from the gun and took off the back half of the fearsome female
warrior's head. Her body pitched forward, sprawling face down into the dust.
Her body twitched once, then twice, and then grew still.

Silence descended then, for a time.

No one spoke, no one moved. Even the cries of the dying seemed to fade. The
man who had fired the final, lethal round, a captain named Jeffrey Dean,
surveyed the scene grimly.

It looked as if the entire base had been leveled by an extremely effective
airstrike. Everywhere he looked, fires raged out of control. The distant
thudding explosions from the direction of the armory had stopped for a time,
but the sky to the west had a dull red, rosy cast to it. And the bodies.

Dozens of bodies. Scores. Piles of military men, broken and twisted, some torn
completely apart. Hundreds. Nearly as far as he could see. Dean was an
experienced military man, he had seen more than his share of combat in the
Middle East, and never had he encountered a scene of such one-sided
destruction before. And all of it done by a single, lone aggressor. Alone.
Apparently unarmed. And a woman, at that. He stood there stiffly, fatigue
setting into his body as the adrenaline left him suddenly, and it occurred to
him that he was very, very tired.

The moment passed. The sound of the flames seemed to swell, the cries of the
wounded picked up as a semblance of order was restored. Men began running to
and fro with stretchers; on them was an assortment of the wounded, most
suffering from injuries to horrible to describe. Dean had never seen injuries
like these during wartime; instead of shrapnel injuries and burns, these
soldiers sported wounds more suited for a blunt trauma investigation. One man
was carted past, both of his arms broken and sticking out at weird angles.
Another passed; his head was crushed, his cranium grotesquely elongated, yet
he was still alive. Another obviously had his femur dislocated from his
pelvis, a huge purple knob of bruised flesh showed where the ball joint pushed
out against his skin.

But order was slowly restoring itself. Dean even did his part, shouting orders
to some men cowering in fear, getting them up, getting them moving, getting
them busy enough to try to put the horrors of this night behind him. A squad
of soldiers in silver metallic flame-retardant suits showed up with a portable
foam unit, and began combating the fires that had, until now, raged without
being addressed.

"You there," Dean barked, pointing at three men who lingered behind the
crushed hulk of the antique Jeep. "What's your difficulty?"

One of them snapped to attention. "Our squad leader, sir. He's ... " the young
man pointed to a greasy smear that used to be a man where it covered the dust
on the ground.

"He's what?" Dean barked roughly.

"He's ... he's dead sir," the man - hell, boy - stammered.

"Well, that's obvious, son," Dean snapped back roughly. "Do you think I'm so
stupid that I can't tell when a man is dead?"

The young man's eyes turned away from Dean's face as he stood taller,
straighter, his hands snapping down at his sides. His two companions did the
same. "No, sir!" the boy barked back.

"I didn't think so. Now what you're going to do is assist the men fighting the
fires in and around the communications building, as alerting the chain of
command is our best course of action right now, isn't it?" Dean roared.

"Sir, yes sir!" the trio of young men shouted back.

"Then what are you waiting for, gentlemen? Move! Move! Move!"

"Yes, sir!" they all barked, and scattered. But the first young man lingered,
his eyes still unfocused over Dean's shoulder. He took a step, paused, and the
resolute nature, an expression of the resolve that Captain Dean had helped him
find with just a few words, faltered. Dean could see it happen. The resolve
faded, his eyes widened a little, and his slackening expression betrayed the
reappearance of fear on his face.

"Sir ... " he said weakly. "Oh, no, no, sir."

Dean turned, afraid of what he would see.

Behind them, about 60 yards away, on the opposite side of the courtyard and
not far from the corpse of their deadly attacker, a thin, pale bluish-white
ribbon seemed to swim out of nothingness. Tiny white flecks in the translucent
strips seemed to sparkle, like diamonds, in the light of the fires. The area
spread, the ribbons reaching out, expanding smoothly, slowly at first. Dean
realized the fragile-looking, rippling ribbon of light was roughly rectangular
in shape, and it slowly expanded from about three feet across to about fifteen
feet, and about eight feet high.

The scene framed by this ribbon, of soldiers looking at it in the same stupid
wonder that Dean and the others were gawking at it from this side, slowly
faded, growing more faint, less distinct. The area in the center of the shape
grew more opaque, darker, the way a movie fades to black, until there was
nothing in the center except a black so dark and absolute, it became a thing
nearly tangible in appearance. Dean thought that if he was closer and reached
out his hand, that black atmosphere would have a physical feel, like crushed
velvet.

"What the fuck is this?" the boy behind Dean hissed, his whisper full of fear.

"I don't kn""" Dean began, but the words died in his mouth, and he felt the
strength suddenly run out of his legs. Someone stepped from the inky blackness
at the center of the door, for Dean was now sure that's what the rectangle
was.

A woman.

She was tall, far taller than most of the men that now shrank from her sudden
appearance. She had to be at least 6'3" or 4". And she was even more heavily
muscled than the woman that had so easily destroyed their camp. Her chest and
hips flared out from an exaggeratedly trim, muscled midsection, her legs a
bulging display of toned quadriceps, her generous bosom riding high atop a
sheath of pectoral muscle, her arms a vision of thick, rounded biceps. Her
long blonde hair framed her strikingly beautiful face, her features strong,
the jaw square, the cheekbones high. Her hair glimmered in the light of the
fires as if it had been spun from shining gold, her bangs unruly as they
spilled over her forehead and part of the way over her eyes, the remainder
pulled into two long groups roughly resembling pigtails on the sides of her
head, a little toward the back. She wore a red bodysuit, not unlike the dead
woman's. The blonde woman's was made of a shiny, slick-looking fire-engine red
material, with a vertical stripe of white stars running down the outside of
each leg. The top clung tightly to her muscled frame, running down from her
shoulders in a tank top-type of design.

Her bright, incredibly intense blue eyes surveyed the scene silently, but the
expression she wore, one of simmering contempt and icy malice, was all too
familiar to Dean and the rest of the soldiers who had gathered to see her
mystical arrival.

"Oh no no no," the boy behind Dean breathed, his voice a hoarse whisper. "No
no no."

The last vestige of hope left Dean - left them all then - for her arrival was
just the beginning.

More women began stepping from the inky black portal, with increasing speed. A
shorter woman, only 5'4" or so, but so heavily muscled she looked like a
cartoon character, with thighs so thick they rubbed together when she walked.
Another blonde, this one nearly six feet herself, but all legs, with the
figure of an Olympian athlete. A brunette, her raven-black hair pulled into a
rough ponytail behind her, her face painted with three blue stripes on each
cheek, the dark coloring of which was matched by the midriff-bearing,
bikini-style costume she wore, her abdominal muscles a series of sharply
defined, washboard-like ridges on her belly.

Another woman emerged, who wore a loose-fitting purple robe that was cinched
tightly about her thin waist with a black sash, only the lower half of her
face visible beneath the darkness created by the hood she wore. The robe
parted as she strode forward, her long, delicate ivory leg flashing like a
finely muscled limb of a champion ballroom dancer as she walked.

Yet another woman stepped from the void; her ethnicity less apparent, her
mocha-colored skin looking incredibly soft, nearly velvet-like as it covered
her considerably muscled physique.

On and on they came until there were more than two-dozen of them standing
before the group of men who stood silent and aghast. Some of them carried
long, pointed staffs that looked like finely-honed spears; one even carried a
shining blade, her hand gripping the sword tightly.

The doorway through which they had passed faded slowly from sight, the men and
scenery behind them becoming visible to Dean and his men once more. At first,
no one moved or spoke.

The massive blonde cast her eyes about the scene, taking in the visions of
death and destruction with a look of unmistakable satisfaction. Then her eyes
came upon the ruined, bloody shape of the woman on the ground before them.
Dean expected a display of anguish, or anger, or even pity, since he believed
that this cadre of new threats belonged to the same mysterious clan as their
original attacker. He got none of what he expected.

There was no softening of the blonde's expression. There was no pity. No
anguish. If anything, there was a tiny nod, as if in respect to the dead, and
that was all. The blonde looked up and about once more, opened her mouth, and
spoke, her voice loud, clear, and melodious.

"Our sister has fallen. Sheila had won the right to be the first in a series
of many, knowing she was going to war and that death was sure to be her final
reward. She fought well. She will be remembered."

The women around the statuesque blonde repeated the phrase aloud, together, in
disquietingly accurate unison: "She will be remembered." The massive blonde
woman continued.

"Her legacy shall live on. Yours ... will not."

The women spread out, assuming threatening, warlike stances.

"For you, for the world of men, we Amazons bring a gift," she shouted, her
voice rising, her tone more menacing than ever.

Amazons? Dean's mind repeated, shocked. Did she just say 'Amazons'?

The blonde's eyes narrowed, her crimson lips curled in a bitter snarl of
disgust and aggression. "Our gift to the world of men," she said.

By now, the remaining soldiers had begun to scramble away, fleeing into the
night, screaming for a rescue that would never come. Dean simply stood,
slack-jawed, and watched the end come with deadly, rushing speed. "A gift ...
" the woman said, and screamed her final words.

"Of death!" she cried, and leaped forward into a group of soldiers, who
exploded outward in a cloud of flying, tumbling bodies.

"Death!" the group of women cried, their voices a terrifying tide of violence
and power, freezing the blood of the surviving soldiers, who turned and ran in
blind terror; by then it was too late, for the Amazons were upon them.

XVI

At 12:01 a.m., March 21st, life as the world knew it changed forever.

According to some eyewitnesses who managed to escape the carnage on the
Williamsburg Bridge, the figure that stepped down from the curb and onto the
roadway was large, oddly imposing, and amazingly, quite feminine in
appearance. And according to these same reports, this woman stepped directly
into the path of traffic.

Not that it mattered, in hindsight.

The police officials taking the statements paused and exchanged wary, cautious
glances.

I know how this sounds, the people all said. But I'm not crazy. I saw it.

What happened then? the officials would ask.

The truck slammed on its brakes, there was a white cloud of burnt rubber. And
this chick, this big chick, she reaches down ... and she picks up this truck,
I'm serious.

A woman picked up a UPS freight truck, is what you're saying.

Yes! One of those big brown things. She just ... picked it up. First the front
then, as she worked her way down it, the whole damn thing. Pretty soon she
just hefted it up, and stood there, with this truck above her head, and she
was laughing.

She was laughing?

Laughing her damn head off. I know it sounds crazy ... but if you had seen it.
If you ... if you had ...

It's all right, take your time.

If you had seen her, you would have believed she could do it. I mean, this
chick was big, like, bodybuilder big. She just kind of lifts this truck up,
and then she throws this thing, I mean she just fuckin' chucks it, and it goes
bouncing down the lane, where all the cars had stopped. And it rolls down the
lane, and it's crushing cars and the people in 'em ... Oh God. It was
horrible.

Umm hmm. Then what did this ... this superwoman do?

Are you makin fun of me? Cause I know what I saw, motherfucker.

No, not at all, just trying to get a picture.

Well, then she just goes apeshit. All the cars had stopped; traffic on the
bridge was completely stopped, right? So she just starts walking along,
turning cars over.

Wait. She turned cars over?

I told you, this chick threw a muthafuckin' delivery truck, and you're gonna
tell me she couldn't turn a little car over?

Sorry.

She starts turning these cars over, and everything just went to shit from
there.

What did the people do?

They died, man. They just died.

"Hey, Lisa," Brett smiled, stifling a yawn.

Even though it was late, around midnight, the student gym at the University of
Georgia was hopping with activity. Semester exams were still a month away, so
no one was cramming yet, and the entire football squad had taken to doing
their second round of workouts later, and at the student gym rather than the
football stadium facilities. Probably to impress the ladies, Brett thought.
Either way, the large, open building was filled with iPod wearing,
iron-pumping coeds and the familiar, metallic clanking sounds of their
endeavors.

"Hey yourself, Brett," Lisa chirped back, her thousand-watt smile nearly
making his heart hurt. Lisa Simmons was the catch of the day, for sure. She
was a little on the short side, not much taller than five feet, but damn! She
was cute, a perfectly made little blonde girl with ice-blue eyes who compelled
every male she met fall instantly in love with her. She was a little shorter
than average, but she made up for it in other ways: She had sort of a compact,
squat build, with shoulders perhaps a tad wider than the ideal body image. She
was also a little more heavily muscled than a person would expect, but it
served her well as she led the school's gymnastics team. Her compact form was
mind-boggling flexible, surprisingly powerful and, unlike a lot of the girls
on the team, she was stacked, too. Round on the top and bottom, and little in
the middle. And cute as hell.

So, Brett Ritter, being single and male, was glad to see her as she stepped up
to his post behind the counter of the facility, her student ID in hand. It was
a ritual they often repeated when she came in to work out, a remedy for what
she called her 'raging insomnia.' Of course Brett had asked her out several
times, but so far to no avail. Maybe tonight would be different.

It was different already. When he looked up to see her come around the corner
of the entrance, he saw she was not alone.

Three other girls were with her, dressed in similar shorts and stretch-top
workout attire. Two of them looked quite a bit like Lisa, sort of smallish in
size, compact, and blonde. The other was a little leaner, but taller, a black
girl of medium, light coffee-colored complexion. All looked fit and sported
impressive athletic figures, and were startlingly attractive.

"Hey, who are your friends?"

"Oh, these two are friends of mine from the team. This is Kelly and Shonna.
The tall one there is Tandy."

"And she's not on the team?"

Lisa grinned, and stepped close, her hands raised in a mock-conspiratorial
fashion. "Tandy's a cheerleader. Don't tell anybody."

Brett glanced at the black girl, who smiled wryly and raised her hands and
shoulders in an equivocal 'sorry' gesture.

"Mum's the word," Brett smiled, and replied.

"We were just getting a little crazy and thought we'd make use of the new
24-hour schedule."

"Ugh," Brett yawned. "Tell me about it. These night shifts are killing me. And
my class average."

"So we're good?"

"Well ... I mean, yeah, I guess. Do ... do you guys have IDs or anything? I'm
supposed to you know, like, scan them," Brett apologized.

"I lost mine," the girl identified as Shonna admitted.

"Me too," Kelly added.

Brett and Lisa looked over at Tandy, who shrugged again and waved her hand
dismissively. "I never got one," she explained. "The line was too long. The
hell with that."

Brett nodded. "I hear ya. They really have to do something about the student
services building. Everything takes, like, forever in that place."

"So ... we're okay?" Lisa asked again.

"Well ... I... I guess so ... " Brett stammered.

"Oh, come on," Lisa cooed, and covered his hand with both of her own. Her
touch was nearly electric, she actually batted her eyes playfully a little.
Brett's heart fluttered a bit in his chest.

"Yeah, okay, okay. Just don't say it was me."

"Never."

"And now you really have to let me buy you dinner. Or some beers."

"Deal," she chirped, and with a lunge, leaned close and pecked a kiss on his
cheek. Brett could feel a slight warmth on his cheeks as Lisa laughed, waved,
and stepped away from the counter.

Just then, the flat screen TVs that were spaced throughout the gym flickered
and went to a storm of black and white static. Most of the students lifting
weights or running on treadmills paused, then dismissed it and went on with
their workouts.

Brett saw the four girls exchange a strange, knowing look. Lisa looked
concerned, the girl named Shonna gave a tiny, nearly imperceptible nod, and
Tandy actually grinned in silent answer. Lisa, with a strange expression Brett
couldn't clearly read, turned back to face him at the counter.

"Hey Brett," she said, "What time have you got?"

"It's ... uh... a little past twelve."

"Umm hmm. Okay. Thanks."

"No problem."

"Hey do you guys want to ... you know, like ... ?" Lisa asked, making a small,
noncommittal vague motion toward the exercise equipment with one hand.

"Oh, yeah," Shonna said strangely. "We sure do. Don't we, ladies?"

With that, the three of them split up and moved deeper into the exercise floor
of the gym.

"Lisa leaned over the counter once again, giving Brett a dose of plentiful
cleavage displayed by the tight baby blue of her stretch top. But Brett didn't
see it; in fact, he was still looking after the trio of new girls as they
walked - no, sauntered - into the gym. They all dropped the small gym bags
they carried, just let them fall to the ground before they even reached the
exercise floor.

Tandy approached a huge young man who grunted with effort while he pounded out
reps on the bench press. The boy's arms and midsection were enormously muscled
and incredibly defined; a testament to the long hours he surely must put in at
the facility.

He let the bar fall back into the iron supports with a clang, and blew out a
long, agonized breath. Tandy didn't even pause; she drew close to him, and
threw her right leg over his crotch, thumping down onto his hips with a
playful bounce.

"Oooof!" he grunted, and half-sat up, surprised.

"Hey there," Tandy grinned down at him.

"Umm. Hi."

"I'm Tandy."

"Uh. Okay. Hello, Tandy."

Tandy ran her fingertips lightly over the young man's arms and chest, tickling
the skin where his black tank top allowed his considerable musculature to be
displayed.

"What's your name?"

"Hunter."

Tandy laughed aloud. "Oh, that's awesome. How ironic."

The muscle-bound young man's brow wrinkled in confusion. "How is my name
ironic?"

"Because, baby, tonight ... " Tandy grinned, licking her lips, "you're the one
being hunted."

She balled up the front of the boy's shirt and pulled. He allowed himself to
be drawn up to a sitting position, and Tandy's lips met his own. His
expression of confusion faded, his eyes closing, his thick arms encircling her
trim waist.

Kelly was busy herself, talking to another man who was lying face down on the
hamstring machine. He was curling a stack of weight with his calves, pulling a
padded bar forward and up toward his rump while he braced himself on the
bench, face-down. Kelly knelt close to him, and spoke into his ear. He was a
little older than Tandy's mark, a grad student maybe. Either way, he was
similarly enjoying the contact; he was chuckling softly while still trying to
complete his workout. Shonna leaned toward the closest concrete column, her
feet now bare. She extended her legs, stretching them out.

"So ... how are you? Don't see much of you these days," Brett asked, bringing
his attention back to the cute little blonde before him.

"Sorry, I've just been real busy," Lisa explained.

"Too busy to see yours truly? What, you studying hard?"

"Oh, yeah."

"What, you got some big test coming, or something?" Brett asked.

"Yes. Definitely."

"Hmm. For which class?"

"Uh ... History of Warfare and Male Suppression 101," Lisa laughed.

"What?" Brett laughed back.

"Nothing. Just an old joke." Lisa took his hand in her own, and to his
astonishment, began to take the few steps to the side to come around to his
side of the counter. "Brett, listen, we've got to talk," she said softly.

"What about?" he asked, his pulse quickening a little bit. Maybe he had a
chance after all ...

But he would never find out. Even before he had finished his question, the big
gym was filled with a series of new sounds. Brett's vision snapped up to the
source of the commotion, and what he saw astounded him.

A high-pitched squealing, noise, harsh and grating, came to him from his
right. He looked over and saw the bench where Tandy had been flirting with the
big weightlifter. But she wasn't flirting anymore.

The squealing sound came from the thick stainless steel bar that the young man
had been using. He was no longer lifting it. The bar was now bent, curved
behind his back, and around his considerable chest, with Tandy pulling the
ends tighter together in front of him. The feminine muscles padding Tandy's
shoulder, arms, and back came alive, swelling with evident power, her face now
a grimace of grim determination. She pulled harder, and the thick chrome steel
bar bent further, stretching, the last few inches curved up severely as she
used them like handles to torque the metal. The shiny bar looked like metallic
taffy as she pulled it tighter around the boy.

That's ... that's impossible, Brett thought stupidly.

Tandy grunted aloud, and the bar closed tighter around the boy suddenly,
crushing in on his thickly muscled frame. Evidently the hardness he had spent
so long perfecting was no match for the force Tandy was exerting on it; there
was a loud CRACK! then another, and finally a short series of popping crackles
that issued from the young man's torso. His arms were trapped at his sides,
his hands fluttered about weakly, his head thrown back. Tandy jerked the bar
once again, and with a casual over hand motion, the bar squealed horribly,
loudly, and twisted over on itself.

Fuck me. She's just tied him up with a steel bar, Brett's stunned mind
repeated over and over.

A scream, loud and definitely masculine, issued from his left. His head
pivoted, only to see Kelly atop the grad student. Her elbow bit into his back
as he lay prone on the hamstring machine. Her hand gripped the weighted bar
still supported by his legs. With a grin of effortless enjoyment, she simply
curled the weight toward her, extending the man's legs higher and further than
they were meant to go. He squealed once again, his arms thrashing about. Brett
could see the stack of weights rise. That's close to ... 180 No, 190 ... maybe
200 pounds on there. And she's curling it. With one hand.

Indeed, Kelly's left bicep bulged shockingly; her back and shoulders were
exposed by the white workout top she wore, and Brett could see firm, rippling
ridges of large, though still feminine muscles spring to sudden, flexed life
across her frame. Further and further she curled the bar over the back of the
squealing man, who thrashed about harder than ever. With a sudden, violent
motion which spoke of far more power than she had used until this moment,
Kelly slammed the bar up and forward; the steel cable connected to the weight
stack snapped, and the padded bar (and the legs of the grad student) exploded
forward until they rested on the upper back of the now unconscious man. His
hips popped out of joint with an incredibly loud report as she effectively
folded him in half. Movement caught Brett's eye; his head turned toward the
middle of the room.

Shonna was already in motion, her compact body a blur as she flipped and
leaped down the entire length of the gym. Her body tumbled end over end as she
executed a picture-perfect series of cartwheels, tucks, and handsprings, her
pace seemingly inhuman as she flipped down the length of the building.
Finally, she flexed her left leg and was airborne, her hair trailing behind
her, waving in the wind current created by her motion. Her right leg extended
out, swollen noticeably with muscle, her toes pointed forward sharply. It made
her long, muscled limb seem almost like a lance or similar weapon as her
entire body cut the air with a hiss.

Her outstretched limb slammed into a young man who stood in front of a huge
wall of mirrors against the far wall. He had been curling barbells steadily,
his back had been turned to her, he had been so into his workout that he
didn't even see her coming until a split second before her kick speared him.

He shot forward suddenly, as her momentum was transferred to his body. His
back broke with an audible, snapping CRACK sound, and he sprang forward, arms
thrown out to the sides, still gripping the barbells in his fists. He slammed
face first into the bank of mirrors, shattering the full-length surface into
thousands of glimmering, razor-sharp shards. He made no sound (in retrospect,
Shonna's initial impact was probably sufficient to kill him). Now slashed to
ribbons, his body rebounded a full six feet, where it slammed into the tensed
right shoulder of Shonna, who already stood waiting. She threw his limp left
arm behind her head, slammed his body close to her own with her right, tucked
her head, and gave a burst of muscular power with her lower back and legs. She
lifted the young man up and backward, hanging in midair, and then slamming
down with great force onto the back of his head in a perfect suplex maneuver.
This all happened very quickly, in the space of only a few seconds. Shonna
released her hold on the limp, unmoving man, and sprang easily to her feet,
laughing.

"What the fu ... " Brett started, turning toward Lisa.

It wasn't her lethal blow that silenced him then (although that was coming).
It was her expression. Her beautiful blue eyes were turned up to him, and he
saw no kindness in them at all.

Her right hand closed the distance between itself and his face too quickly to
see, nearly too fast to comprehend. She struck him with mind-numbing force
with the hard, flat surface of the heel of her hand, her fingers arched back
to allow the full force of her blow to be channeled directly into her target.

She struck him at the base of his nose, her lethal blow slamming into his
skull in a pronounced upward trajectory. The cartilage and bone of his nose
and the front of his face exploded into a number of sharp, jagged fragments
that were propelled by the force of her strike. They shot up and back, like
shrapnel from a bomb, to neatly sever blood vessels that fed his brain; they
sliced and impaled the delicate gray matter there.

As quickly as she had struck him, Lisa pulled back to regard her handiwork.
Brett was still standing, still blinking, his breath coming in choked, ragged
gasps as he stared skyward ... but, for all intents and purposes, he was
already dead. The middle of his face was a ruined, exploded horror, and after
a short series of galvanic twitches, he fell into the wall behind him and slid
down it, a shocked expression on what was left of his face.

"Goodnight, Brett," Lisa chirped, and smiled.

At 12:01 a.m. in Columbia, South Carolina, the night clerk at a 3-star, nearly
booked roadside motel was killed by the gorgeous woman in a tight blue
minidress. She didn't even have to come inside to do it.

Hooker, he had thought. Hot one, but still. Look at those legs. Goddam.

"That's $89.50," he said into the holes in the bulletproof glass of the night
window. The woman flipped a credit card through the four-inch gap at the
bottom of the thick, clear plastic. The man reached for it, and when he did,
her delicate-looking hand slammed down onto his own. The musculature in her
exposed arm leaped into sharp detail suddenly as she squeezed, and broke
nearly every bone in his hand.

He opened his mouth to scream, but before he could, the woman simply set her
feet squarely and pulled, a huge, massive jerk that could have felled trees.
The man's body shot forward, slamming his face into the nearly unbreakable
night window with lethal force. His head cracked open like a ripe melon, and
his twitching body slumped to the floor when she released him.

The woman spent the next half hour tearing the doors off the hinges of each of
the motel's 115 rooms, killing the inhabitants of each with her bare hands.

At 12:01 E.S.T. a McDonnell-Douglas manufacturing plant was taken apart. Only
a handful of security tapes survived to tell the tale. Over the course of
thirty minutes, half a dozen women of stunning appearance and proportions
raided the plant just a few miles outside the small city of Redding,
California. On the tapes, they appear to execute every employee on duty that
night, in a series of brutal slayings the likes of which local law enforcement
officials had never seen. After the 80 or so employees had been killed, the
apparent leader of the group of women could be seen to crouch beside a huge,
cube-shaped example of industrial machinery, several times taller than she
was. Amazingly, with an explosive heft, the entire frame of the machine
shifted, broke free of its bolted moorings, and began to rise. Then the image
on the tape was consumed by static as the plant went offline.

The entire plant burned to the ground, reduced to smoldering cinders by
morning. There were no survivors.

A similar raid was conducted in a much different place, but the same time. At
12:01 Eastern time, a cargo van pulled up to the front entrance of a Wal-Mart
in Derry, a suburb of Lincoln, Nebraska. The store, one of the large, big-box
affairs, was open 24 hours. The retail outlet was the only one in a 25-mile
radius, and that, combined with its proximity to a major college campus, made
it extremely busy, even at this late hour. Authorities credited these factors
to the incredible body count discovered the next morning when the welder was
finally able to cut the twisted steel from the doors. Something - or someone -
had wrapped thick angle iron through the sliding doors, sealing them shut,
making the store a prison.

The store's interior was a scene of absolute chaos. It looked as if a bomb, a
sizable one, had been detonated in the center of the linoleum expanse of the
sales floor.

The bodies themselves, over three hundred of them, were stacked like cordwood
against the far wall of the sporting goods section. While none of them
exhibited wounds attributable to the standard firearms the police officials
were used to seeing, each nevertheless appeared to have died a terrible
painful death, judging from the seemingly neverending parade of agonized
expressions on the still, silent faces.

While the building was still locked down, with most of the squad outside, the
SWAT team members scoured the building. In the center of the store, they found
a small island of neatness amid the rubble; a big screen TV was set by itself,
a small table next to it. On the table sat a camcorder, its price tag still
attached to it. It was smeared with the telltale dark brown tint of dried
blood. It was still on. Next to it was a stack of five MiniDV tapes. Each had
a simple message written in flowing, elegant script on their labels.

Play me, they said.

With some trepidation, the leader of the SWAT team fed the first tape into the
machine, and his gloved finger pressed the play button. He was soon to wish he
hadn't.

At first, he wanted to forget the bodies, wanted to think it was a prank. Some
college kids on a drunken tear. They sure looked like college kids, anyway.
The huge TV screen filled with a series of quick images, the terrified faces
of employees and shoppers on their knees, their hands clasped behind their
heads. The sounds of crying, of sniffles, of terror. And above that, the
laughter of a number of women - young women, really, there were six of them,
all told, on the tape, including the camera operator, and none of them looked
to be over the age of thirty. Please, please let this be some college prank
... yes, young, and attractive, from what could be seen. Attractive and
insane. Because the one in charge, the one that just addressed the camera in a
teasing, laughing manner, actually had the nerve to introduce herself and her
companions by name into camera, and to the future viewer. Her derisive tone
was unmistakable as she addressed the unknown 'Mr. Police-man,' putting a
weird stress on the word 'man' before erupting in girlish laughter once again,
before she seized the man at her feet with one hand and -

"Oh, my God," the SWAT team leader whispered. He had to shout his command over
the sound of the screams and horrible gurgling that came from the television.
"Turn it off. For the love of God, turn it off."

We're not even sure ourselves what you're seeing at this moment, ladies and
gentleman, we're coming into this as blind as you are at the moment. But we'd
like to assure you that everyone here at CNN headquarters in Atlanta is
working hard to get you the most accurate information as quickly as possible.
We'd also like to remind you that we don't want to cause alarm, we don't want
anyone to panic, but it seems that something is happening, there seems to be
some kind of coordinated ... uh ... event, happening at the moment, right now,
both here near our headquarters in Atlanta and in the nation's capitol. Right
now we're calling it an event, we don't ... we don't want to cause panic,
we're not calling it an attack until more details become apparent, but we urge
everyone who can hear this broadcast to remain in your homes, to stay off the
streets and -

Wait a moment. I'm being told that in addition to ... in addition to Atlanta
and Washington ... there seems to be disturbances in Detroit ... What? This
can't be right, Doug, I need this fact-checked before we can ... one moment,
ladies and gentlemen ... I ... ladies and gentlemen, it's been confirmed by
not one but two CNN field reporters that the city of Detroit in on fire; not
just one or two buildings, not some Devil's Night affair, but the entire city
is aflame. We're working to bring you pictures of this event, we're trying to
get a traffic helicopter airborne and the moment, but we're having a hard time
finding a pilot willing to go into the area, we're not sure why; most have
said that for some reason it isn't safe to fly. It says here that one asked to
go airborne, one pilot responded with the words, 'No, sir, I will not fly. It
isn't safe. Not even up there. They're everywhere, they're even in the sky.'
Obviously we're not sure what he means right now, but we'd like to remind you
to stay inside, keep your loved ones inside at the moment and we urge you to
prepare for any eventualities. If you live in the Detroit metro area ... if
you live in the Detroit metro area, I ... We just got this word, we just got
this update from the federal disaster agency FEMA, we have a brief from FEMA,
and it urges Detroit residents who live west and north of Woodward Avenue to
evacuate immediately to the north and west. Once again, FEMA urges residents
of Detroit north and west of the city to flee in those directions. Those
moving west are advised to head to the city of Dearborn, where the conference
center is being turned into a shelter. Those going north should head for
Flint; the old AutoWorld building is serving as a shelter there. Once again,
the city of Detroit is apparently on fire, it is burning out of ... and ...
just a moment, ladies and gentlemen, we ... we have a feed from Detroit now,
we have a helicopter in the air and ... and ... my goodness. Oh ... oh, this
is terrible. This is just ... this is simply unbelievable. As you can see, the
entire night sky above Detroit is just red; it's just this scarlet hue from
the fires below. This is like the great Chicago fire, maybe even bigger, more
severe ... this is ... I ... I'm like you at this moment, America, I just
can't believe it. We're surely looking at one of the greatest disasters in
American history right now, watching it unfold before us as ... as ... oh,
dear. Detroit, my prayers and the prayers of the rest of the country are with
you tonight.

Now ... now I'm being told that we have a feed coming in ... we have a new
report coming to us, we have a camera crew in New Orleans, and that we ...
yes? Yes? Ready? Yes, we're going to them now, and on the screen behind me
you'll see ...

Hello?

Hello, Kyra? Can you hear me?

Yes, yes, I can hear. I can hear you, Dan.

Ladies and gentleman, from New Orleans, CNN correspondent Kyra Phillips. Kyra,
what's happening down there?

Dan, we're here in the Lower Ninth Ward, and for the last hour ... no, the
last 90 minutes or so, there's been some kind of ... some kind of disturbance,
not far from here, about half a mile - and ... wait. Dan? There's ... static
... I can't ... there ...

What kind of disturbance, Kyra? Is it anything like the news we're getting
from Detroit and some of our major cities at this hour?

I ... I can't speak for other areas, our coverage here has been spotty at best
and this area still hasn't recovered fully from Hurricane Katrina. But this
area, this disturbance ... it's made the locals here uncomfortable, mainly
because of their memories of that storm. You see, most of the sounds we're
hearing, and over the last few minutes there's been a significant ... um,
increase in the sounds ... most of this disturbance is coming from the
direction of an electrical substation, the same substation that provides power
to the flood gates and pumps that hold back the waters of Lake Ponchartrain
... this was one of the stations that failed during Katrina and ...

Kyra, are you able to hear any""

I'm not sure ... Dan ... recept-- ... not since 1996 have we ... time ... OH
MY GOD!

Kyra! Kyra, what was that? I don't know if you can hear me, but your feed is
still live, we still have video and audio, can you describe what that sound
was, why""

Oh my God, oh my God, what the fuck was that?!

Kyra, Kyra, can you tell us ... can you hear me ...

Oh, shit, shit, shit. Oh ... oh, My God. Okay. Oooookay. Whew. I ... I ... Dan
... Dan? Are you there? Dan? I can't ... what? What, Steve? No. No, I don't.
Okay. Yeah? Yeah, I should. Okay. Dan, I don't know if you can still hear or
see me -

Yes, Kyra, we still have your feed, although there's some interference, some
static""

...But we're going to keep broadcasting in case you can. A few minutes ago
there was a fresh burst of gunfire ... automatic gunfire, quite loud, and it
seemed ... loud ... Heavy, machine-gun type ... extended time ... and ...
there were other sounds, a squealing, bending, metallic ... and just now, a
few seconds ago, there was a loud explosion, a huge thud that we all felt as
much as heard; I mean, this was close, it hurt my ears, they still hurt,
that's how close it was, we could feel the air move, the shockwave of the ...
the blast ... and ... over ... quieter now ...

Kyra? Kyra? We're losing your signal, your signal is breaking up ... we've
lost the picture but can still hear your audio feed ...

I ... can hear car alarms ... and then ... what ... Not sure what ... water?

Kyra? Kyra, can you hear me?

... Pretty sure ... oh my God. Oh, no. Oh, God, no. Not again.

Kyra, what is it? Can you hear me? What do you hear?

... Water. It's the sound of water.

Kyra? Can you""

Hold on! Hold""

Kyra! Kyra? Ladies and gentlemen, we seem to have ... we seem to have lost ...
we seem to have lost our feed, our feed from the city of New Orleans. We'll
get to work on that, and bring you an update on the fire that seems raging out
of control in Detroit. For now we urge you once again that if you can, we urge
you to stay in your homes, stay in your homes and off the streets. We've had
reports of confusion, and in some cases, downright chaos in the streets of
several cites: Detroit, Atlanta, Washington D.C., and now apparently New
Orleans among them, and believe me, right now, there's no place safer than
your own homes. I don't think anybody knows what's going ... nobody knows ...
all right, all right, Doug. Okay. Right. Okay ...

Ladies and gentlemen, at this time CNN is advising that the country, or at
least several parts of it, is experiencing some sort of shared disaster, some
kind of shared calamity, unlike anything in American history. It is surely
bigger already than the events of 9/11, although we cannot say with any
certainty that there is any kind of coordinated attack right now, but ... but
logic would tell us that this is more than a mere coincidence. We'll try to
bring you more information as it's made available to us, we're waiting for a
statement from the Department of Homeland Security, and when that comes ...
available ... we'll ... now ... now there's reports ... here ... and ...
Atlanta ... and we're able to bring ... however long ... sound? Hey! You! Get
away from ... the air ...

Static.

The bright circle of light thrown by the Mag-Lites was blinding him.

Men, at least eight of them, standing over him, over the bed. Why were the
lights still off? Their faces were blurry; he wasn't wearing his glasses. He
was still half-out of it from sleep, but he could sense their confusion, their
sense of earnest apprehension ... and fear ... ? As his thoughts swam into
focus through the haze of sleep, he could hear their voices, and the voice of
the man gripping his arm. It was low and hushed as he whispered orders to the
men with him, then addressed the man they had just roused from slumber.

"Turn those off! Yes! All of them. Keep it dark. And quiet! Sir? Sir, are you
awake?"

"Jack? What the hell is going on?" the elder man barked crossly. Jack
McCraddock, a tall man in his mid-40s, recoiled, his face a grimace, a raised
finger over his lips. The entire scene was lit by a single flashlight, and
even that was dim, for one of the men had most of it covered by the palm of
his hand.

"Shhh! Quiet, please. Quiet! There's a problem, sir."

"What?" the elder man asked, now more quietly, but wary. And, for the first
time, feeling the first twinge of his own fear.

"We're not sure, it's still too early. But we have to get you out of here.
Now."

"We have to leave?" the man asked, his eyes shining in what little light there
was.

"Yes. And we have to leave, now. Right now."

"But, why?"

"Because it isn't safe here, Mr. President."

"Are you seein' what I'm seein?" Luis Guzman asked the burly man behind the
wheel of the police cruiser.

Officer Marcus Dingle (and don't think he didn't get teased about that name,
oh, yes, he did! But only until he had his last growth spurt at the age of 17
and rocketed to a height of 6'5" and a weight of nearly 300 well-muscled
pounds. After that, those kind of comments pretty much stopped) didn't even
turn his head to answer his partner of three years. "Umm ... yeah."

Silence filled the interior of the Crown Vic; even the pimp they had cuffed in
the back fell silent as they all gazed at the vision in front of the car,
illuminated by the bright headlights.

The tall industrial buildings of the city's port district rose all around
them, out of sight above the upper border of the windshield. The familiar,
gassy whisps of steam issued from vents and grates at street level. The light
played funny tricks in there, bouncing all around and making weird shadows.
And, from out of this strange combination of steam and shadow, stepped a
woman.

She was fairly tall, maybe 5'9" or 10", and really leggy, she had a dynamite
figure, like maybe an aerobics instructor or something. That would make sense;
she was dressed for the part, in some kind of spandex-looking getup. She
flipped her long blonde hair out of her eyes, stepped up to the front of the
car, and smiled, waving at them playfully.

"Tell me she's one of yours," Guzman said to the pimp in the back. "Tell me
you're shooting for the new 'personal trainer' fetish."

"Naw, man," the man nearly drooled around his numerous gold teeth. "She ain't
one of my girls. She too fine to be one o' mine."

The girl skipped around the car, and leaned down to Dingle's eye level,
bending at the waist, putting her considerable assets on display in a
shameless motion. "Hello, officers," she chirped. "Whom do you have in
custody?

"Ma'am, we don't know who you are or what you're doing here," Dingle rumbled,
his voice deep, seemingly two octaves lower than one would have even
suspected. "But we received a report of some kind of disturbance down here at
the docks, and it isn't safe to be here."

"Isn't safe?" she asked, frowning. "Looks safe enough. Believe me, I can take
care of myself."

"I don't doubt it. But all the same, we're asking you to head on home."

"I would like to go home, officer, believe me. But right now I can't. It's a
very long trip, and at the moment I haven't the means to get there."

"Yesssss," Dingle heard Guzman mutter.

'Well, I'm sure we could arrange to take you home," Dingle offered. "But with
the suspect back here ... "

"What did he do, officer?" she asked, looking over Dingle's shoulder to gaze
at the two-bit hood staring back at her. "Of what crime is he guilty?"

Dingle noticed then just how perfect this girl seemed to be. It was startling,
really. Her hair looked like it was cast from the finest brushed bronze, her
trim, athletic build put on perfect display by the strange, clingy white
jumpsuit or uniform she wore. The curve of her hips, the line of her shoulder,
the gentle arch of her eyebrows over her ice-blue eyes ...

"Wh-what?" Dingle stammered as he shook himself awake.

She only smiled, like she had expected him to be distracted. "What did this
man do?" she repeated softly, smiling.

Dingle shook his head in refusal, but Guzman piped up, anything to keep the
conversation with her going a little linger.

"Lady, you're looking at one of the busiest pimps in the city."

Her brow furrowed in a questioning look. "Pimp?"

"You know, pimp? A hustler?"

"No. These terms are unfamiliar to me."

"Jeez, where you from, lady?"

"Luis," Dingle warned.

"What?"

"You wouldn't know where I came from," the woman answered matter-of-factly.
"It is quite distant from here. But what ... what is a, a 'pimp?'"

"Jesus. You know, a pimp. He sells girls. He sells girls to men who pay for
them, and then he takes the money."

The woman's eyes widened in genuine surprise. "He ... he sells women? But for
what purpose?"

"You don't get out much, do you?"

"Humor me, please," she asked, her eyes still wide in astonishment, but her
tone darker.

"Men pay to ... you know ... be with the women. And he takes the money."

The woman's eyes widened further, her mouth a round 'O' of shock. "Do you mean
to say that he ... he ... sells women ... . for sexual favors? He sells them
for sex?"

"Duh, yeah," Guzman said, slightly annoyed, no matter how fine this woman
appeared.

The blonde's look of amazement froze for a few seconds, then shifted, quickly,
and radically. Her brow fell low over her eyes, her mouth turned down in a
snarl-like frown, nearly baring her teeth, and her hands clenched into fists
at her sides. And for some unknown reason he couldn't even come close to
naming, the muscled hulk named Officer Marcus Dingle was actually afraid of
her.

Without a word, the woman took two steps to her right to stand before the rear
door of the cruiser. Her movements became too quick and too incredible for
either of the officers - or the pimp, for that matter - to process fully or
effectively.

With a flash of her arm, her fist punched out the window, spraying tiny chunks
of safety glass all over the back seat of the cruiser.

"Hey! Hey hey hey!" the pimp began to stutter, trying to angle himself away
from the shower of fragments.

The woman then used the same hand, her right, to seize the bottom border of
the door's window frame. She tensed her hand, and, unbelievable as it may have
been to the occupants of the car, the steel of the door creaked loudly and
crumpled around her fingers, as if it was made of a material no more
substantial than tinfoil.

"Jesus - " Guzman began. But his exclamation was never finished; with a
casual-looking jerk of her right arm, the girl tore the entire door off of the
police cruiser, the steel hinges shearing off with a metallic squeal. She
threw the door over her shoulder, where it sailed away into the darkness, out
of sight. In a flash, she ducked into the car, seized the neck of the pimp,
and pulled him free of the vehicle.

Dingle's eyes were round circles of shock. The girl had to be a gym freak
after all. Maybe she was all hopped up on steroids or something. She had to
be, because right now she held a full-grown man's body two feet off the ground
with just one arm, and it sure didn't look like she was trying very hard.

"You dare to behave in such ways?" she snarled. "Do you think women so weak
that you can use their very bodies to gain money?"

The pimp opened his mouth, but no sound emerged but a choked gagging sound,
and a low, meaty crackle that Dingle was afraid might signal a collapsing
vertebrae. He unsnapped his seat belt, hand falling to his hip before he could
even get his door open.

"Uh, wait," Guzman said, his face curiously blank as he stared out through the
windshield. Dingle turned his gaze in the same direction.

A new shadow made its way toward them through the same haze of mist and
darkness that the woman had stepped from. Something about it, about the way it
moved made it somehow familiar to him, yet the size, the sheer mass of the
thing ...

"No," Dingle said aloud.

The mist parted as another woman stepped to within an arm's reach of the
cruiser's bumper. But she was as much like the first as Dingle himself was to
his skinny partner.

The woman was massive. Even that word didn't begin to do her titanic frame
justice. The woman who stood before them simply looked like a huge hulking
comic book character come to life. No person - male or female - has ever been
built like this, Dingle thought.

She stood at least ... she had to be at least ... seven feet tall, Dingle
figured, maybe more. The frigging woman was at least seven feet tall! Looked
to be at least four feet wide at the shoulder, hell, maybe more, maybe five;
she had to weigh 350, maybe 400 pounds. She wore tiny black shorts that
gleamed in the twin beams of the cruiser's headlights, and they left the huge
swollen muscularity of her thighs bare for the world to see. Every muscle
group was detailed in stark relief, the deep lines of definition and muscle
striations plainly evident. Her abdomen was bare as well, her cartoonishly
small waist a hard, gnarled mass of tensed abdominal muscles. Her barrel-like
chest was covered by a shiny black stretch top, which left most of her upper
chest bare; huge, balloon-like breasts tented the material outward, like
volleyballs or even small beach balls mounted atop iron plates of flexed
pectoral muscle. Her arms, bared by her sleeveless attire, hung massively to
either side of her body. Her fingers flexed and opened, the tendons working
visibly on the undersides of her enormous forearms. Her head, looking
ridiculously small compared to her impossible body, sat atop a short, thick
neck; her hair a crewcut, short platinum blonde affair. Her dark eyes were
laser-steady on the two cops in the car.

And still, Dingle thought, she still looks like a woman. She's ... . she's
even kind of hot. Even with that body. She still looks like a woman, he
thought in amazement.

"Now I've seen everything," Guzman managed to choke out when he could speak.
"Including a woman bigger than you."

Guzman was being generous. Marc Dingle stood 6'5" and 300 pounds, and this
woman wasn't just bigger than him, she dwarfed him.

"I think we might be in big, big trouble," Dingle whispered.

"I think"" " Guzman started, but was interrupted by a grinding, cracking
sound, loud, and close. Dingle looked over his shoulder, and saw the pimp's
head slide backward until it hung loosely between his shoulder blades, and his
feet stopped twitching.

Sonafabitch. She broke his neck.

"Oh, God!" Guzman shouted, "No!"

Dingle turned his vision forward once again, and saw the huge woman move with
terrifying speed and grace. She took a single step forward (and he would have
sworn he could feel a deep thud of her footfall even though his seat and
through the suspension of the car), and with an expression somewhere between a
snarl and bemusement, she arched her back, her gigantic, rippling arms went
skyward. Her hands balled into fists the size of canned hams, huge knuckled
affairs at the end of her impossible arms; every muscle flexed into swollen,
engorged life, and she roared audibly, a deep, penetrating sound that spoke of
her power yet somehow retained a quality that reflected her femininity. She
arched her back, arms winding up, and then exploded downward with a fierce,
deafening bellow, her hands pounding downward in twin hammers of death.

Game over, Dingle thought.

The hulking woman's hands struck the cruiser's hood halfway down its length.
In a quarter second, the sheet metal collapsed, the engine was knocked free of
the motor mounts, the suspension collapsed, and the frame of the car was
driven down to - and three inches into - the rough asphalt below. The entire
front end of the car flattened, then bent up around her driving fists. The
back of the car rose, the tires coming off the ground; her strike had been so
powerful that it actually bent the entire frame of the car in a slight 'U'
shape.

Guzman was thrown into the dashboard with more than enough velocity to kill
him. Dingle survived the first strike, his nose a dripping red tomato from
where his face was driven into the steering wheel. He was dazed, but not so
much that he couldn't see the woman grin and thrust her massive arms out to
either side. The ruined front of the car tore in half, splitting up to the
passenger compartment like a log. It would only take a couple more pulls and
she would be able to tear into the compartment, and, he suspected, himself as
well.

Well ... shit, he thought through the haze of his shock.

Just then a shadow fell across his shoulder. He had forgotten about the other
one, the gorgeous blonde that had so easily killed the guy he had in custody.
Goddamn it, he thought. What the hell is go""

Darkness took him before he had time to move or speak.

The floodlights around the gargantuan processing plant seem to light the
entire world in an unhealthy, glaring blue-white color, and Harold 'Hutch'
Hutchinson hated it. He was around it so much, as the night shipping manager,
that it seemed to illuminate everything he saw, even during the day.

Man was not meant to live under artificial lighting, he thought to himself. Or
to push pencils all day.

As personally unrewarding he might have grown to see his position, it provided
him with the means to keep his wife and kids housed and fed, and gave them a
healthy start on Kevin's college fund. So he stuck with it, keeping the trains
... and trucks ... and planes ... and barges ... running on time.

The plant Hutch supervised 5 nights a week was the largest single Con-Agra
plant in the country. It was nestled where several major conduits met: The
mighty Mississippi, where enormous barges brought wheat in great golden piles
too high to fully comprehend; the largest CSX East-West junction, for shipping
material of great weight in great quantities, and the McLachy-Turner
Interstate Spur, which led to I-80, one of the biggest shipping truck routes
in the country. Hundreds of tons of food passed through the plant daily:
chicken, tuna, wheat, beef, pork, potatoes, fruit, you name it. It was sorted,
classed, inspected, prepared, sometimes even irradiated, right on site. Then
it was divided up and packaged, again, right on site, under what was, in
principle anyway, one roof. Then the prepared material went out again, to be
loaded on still more barges, more trains, more trucks, under several hundred
different name brands, headed to stores. Nearly a third of the food was
shipped directly to wholesalers, who would go on to ship the food to various
outlets, like fast food chains.

All told, nearly 35% of all the food in the continental United States passed
through this plant at some point on its way to the American - and global, for
that matter - dinner table. It was an undertaking of truly mind-boggling
proportion, and it ran fairly smoothly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Until tonight.

Hutch sighed. Karen was sick, and when she came down with something, it was
only a matter of time before he came down with it too. Yep. Any day now, he
would get feeling pretty bad, too.

"1 truck, 1 shipping container," a tinny voice crackled over the radio. "ADE
Trucking, gross ... 1-3-5-4-0 pounds. That's a little light, guys, according
to the lading info, isn't it Lady?"

Hutch heard Billy Gorman's voice on the box as the younger man addressed the
driver at the check-in at the east gate, and two things struck him: one, the
truck was light, far lighter than what was on the bill of lading, and that
Billy had referred to the driver as 'lady.' Sure, they saw female drivers from
time to time, but not many, never more than a couple per day. But today, it
was different; there had been literally dozens of female drivers that day.

"Another skirt, hmm?" Hutch said softly into his mic, and heard Billy snort on
the other end a little.

'That's an affirmative, control," Billy's voice came back on the little
speaker.

"Well? Is she wheat or chaff?" Hutch asked reflexively. It was their little
code for female drivers, who, usually, were not the most photogenic examples
of womanhood.

"That's wheat, control. I'd say it's major, major wheat," Billy muttered into
the mic softly.

"Well, that's interesting," Hutch said aloud to no one. He was alone in the
control room, high atop the tallest building in the gray cluster of the
plant's structures. Although, even from this height, his view of the east gate
was blocked by the roofs of nearby buildings, and, in the distance around
where the gate would be, he could see only the tall, thick shapes of elevated
water tanks. "Billy, I'd check it."

"Seriously?" the disappointment was evident in his tone.

"It' s off by three tons. That's a lot. Besides, it'll give you a chance to
check out Hottie McDrives-A-Lot." Hutch sighed, pulled out the correct
inspection form, and sat down, his feet up on the desk in front of him.

"Okay, control. Whatever you say. Ma'am? Hi there. Yes, could you pull into
that area right there? Right, that yellow area right there? Yeah, we're going
to have to check your load, ma'am. Right. Thank you." Then, lower, "Thanks a
lot, jerkoff. Now she's pissed."

"What'd she say?"

"Nothing, but I can tell. Jeezus. She's fine, but she could freeze beer with
those eyes," Billy's voice echoed tinnily on the radio. Under his voice, Hutch
could hear the truck pull away, and then the distinctive sounds of air brakes
as the truck stopped in the yellow zone.

"Ready, control."

"3117563," hutch read the number off the top of his form, and waited as Billy,
nearly a mile away at the east gate, copied this number down on the top of his
corresponding form.

"Ready, control."

"Open her up," Hutch advised, and smirked to himself a bit. "But be nice about
it."

"Sure thing control, whatever you say. Ma'am, if you could, could you open up
the container please, now? Right. Okay. Thanks. Just a second, control." A
pause.

A long pause.

Silence.

"East gate?"

Silence.

Uh, Billy, what's going on down there? Did you ... "

"Hey, control?" The tone of Billy's voice was changed; it was tense, now, and
hard.

"Yeah?"

"Better send somebody down here," Billy said, and now the tension in his voice
was greater. Even talking to him at this distance, through a radio, Hutch
could hear the unsettled quality of the young man's voice. He sounded ruffled.
Unsure.

Scared?

Hutch put his feet down, and pulled the Motorola handset closer to him. Ever
since 9/11, the plant had a security force, but it was small, and there was no
telling how long it would take them to get to the east gate. "Billy? What's
up?"

"Well, it sure as hell isn't a truck full of chicken," Billy informed him.

"Well, what is it, then, Billy?"

"It's ... it's a truck ... full of girls."

"What?!?"

"You heard me. It's full of ... girls. Dozens of 'em."

"But ... what?.... Is this a joke, Bill?"

"If it is, I'm not in on it. Ummm ... ladies, we're going to have to ... um
... run this past some people in the office, and uh ... . no, I don't think
... . ma'am, if you could just sit down for a moment, we'll have somebody ...
. hey, control?"

"Yeah, Billy?"

"Control, get somebody down here please? There's ... I ... hey! Hey, no.
Ma'am, please sit down, please go back and ... hey! Hey! You ... . Guh!"

Hutch eyes darted back and forth as he strained to hear was coming across the
radio; Billy's voice, growing more agitated, a quiet, rough sound, like
something scraping across something, Billy's warning, and then a guttural,
grunting sound. Billy?

Hutch raised the Motorola walkie to his mouth and pressed the 'send' button.
How the hell was he going to report this to the plant's security force? Seize
unknown truck carrying women into plant?

He never got the chance.

The entire office thumped, the deep reverberations coming through the very
floor, every window in the place rattled in its frame.

"What the hell?..." Hutch began, and spun in his chair to face the windows. He
heard a faint, high-pitched shriek, his college days as a welder's apprentice
reminded him what was causing it: it was the sound of shearing metal.

Slowly, in the distance, he saw one of the enormous water holding towers
shudder, tilt oddly to one side, and then, with the strange slowness imparted
by great size and distance, saw it topple down, out of sight behind the roof
of the building next door. Another huge THUD shook the grounds of the plant.
He raised the walkie once more, eyes wide, but someone beat him to it; in the
distance Hutch could hear the warble of a siren cycle up to its distinctive
wail.

Another thudding sound, bigger, deeper. Closer.

"Control, control! This is Abrams in F120. We've got a fire in here?" the
radio crackled, Abrams' voice dripping with the first signs of panic. "We've
got to get everybody out!"

Hutch watched with shock as the different channels of the radio came alive;
safeguard after safeguard tripping, all at the same time.

What the hell was going on?

Less than thirty seconds after FBI Special Agent Jennifer Carnes' head hit her
pillow, she sat back up, her head cocked to one side.

Through her open window, she could hear the distinctive high, long wail of the
air-raid siren. Memories of her midwestern childhood rose to the surface of
her mind; and a tiny, irrational part of her brain, still aged 9 years,
shouted 'Tornado!'

But this was Baltimore, and she knew better. She swung her legs out of the
bed, and flipped on the small flat screen on the top shelf of her armoire.
Static. She frowned, now officially concerned, and picked up the phone to call
the office. No dial tone. She grabbed her cell phone and clicked the side
button to light up the front display. No bars.

Damn. Damn damn damn, she thought.

Seven minutes later, she was dressed and back in her car, heading back to the
Baltimore field office, desperately scanning both FM and AM radio bands ...

... And finding only silence.

The sun was would be up soon, the first faint glow of it was visible to the
east, just beyond the darkened silhouette of Big Ben. But for the eight
uniformed policemen laying on the cold, hard cobblestones of the alley, their
limbs at strange and unnatural angles, it didn't matter. They had already seen
their last sunrise.

"Do it!" the larger of the two women snarled, her expression and body language
that of a warrior caught in the middle of a battle. Her tall frame was
crouched in a half-squat, her fingers splayed into claws. Her hands were
coated in a sticky crimson film; none of the blood on her hands was her own.
One of her heeled feet still rested on the throat of one of the Bobbies; his
face a frozen look of shock. "Do it now!" she hissed.

The smaller woman, who was at least 6 inches shorter than the other, and
obviously younger, returned the other's gaze with a nakedly worried
expression, her eyebrows raised, questioning. Her hair was drawn back in a
brown ponytail, the black cocktail dress clinging to her frame. She looked, in
fact, as if she were on the verge of tears.

"Kill him!" the first woman snarled, her face a mask of fury, her lips pulled
back from her tightly clenched teeth. Even in the half-light of the burgeoning
dawn, her height, her full, voluptuous build, and the terrifying savagery of
her tone would have struck any observer there.

A soft, gurgling cry sounded to her right, and the younger, slimmer woman
turned her clearly troubled eyes to look at the man she held two feet off the
ground. Her fist held a wad of his dark blue uniform in an underhanded grip;
she powered her hold on him a little, her substantial bicep swelling, the
muscles of her shoulder working under the alabaster skin. The man hitched in
another breath, but did not move. A thin trickle of blood and a more ominous
watery fluid ran from his left ear. Even still, the man was alive, and he
shouldn't be.

The larger woman became more outwardly calm, but her lips were still bowed up
slightly in the hint of a snarl. Somehow, her change to a more sedate state
made her seem even more dangerous than before.

"Charlotte," she said, softly, her full voice strangely melodious, and the
longer she spoke, the less her faux British accent was apparent. "You must
kill him. Now. That ... . is an order."

A tear formed in the corner of the smaller woman's eye. "I ... I ... " her
voice was softer, higher, more girlish than the first. At this moment, she
looked to be no more than 20, even though she was close to twice that age.
"Susanna ... I ... I can't."

Susanna's gaze was oddly flat, dangerous. Unwavering. Her stare bored into
Charlotte's until the younger girl had to look away; she cast her eyes down to
the street.

"You realize ... You know that I'm a full captain, yes?" Susanna said slowly.
"I took all seven of these other pigs. I've ordered you to take just one. Do
you mean to refuse?"

Charlotte didn't speak, she simply nodded, her gaze still cast earthward.

Susanne stepped over the bodies strewn across the alley, her long legs taking
her to stand aside the man suspended from Charlotte's apparently unsure, but
rock steady, grasp.

"Unngghh ... pl ... please," the man choked weakly, his eyes unfocused. One
arm stirred as if he thought to raise it, and found he couldn't.

In a sudden flash of lethal movement, Susanna lashed out, her closed fist
crashing square into the man's face with savage, bone-crushing power; the
sound was a heavy THUD mixed with the sound of cracking bone. The man's face
collapsed, the front of his skull a dished-in, pulverized mess. The collar of
his uniform, a thick woven cotton that made up his department topcoat, tore
slightly where Charlotte held it in her iron grip, and his body sagged a few
inches, now a just another broken, crushed body to dress the street with.

Charlotte's head drooped a little as well, her shoulders dropping in obvious
distress, a movement that spoke of defeat. She slowly lowered the battered
body to the ground, kneeling briefly to lay the man down with care that even
bordered on tenderness. A single drop of moisture gathered in her left eye,
swelled, then spilled down her curved cheek to fall the stone street below.
She sighed once, twice, quietly, and then stood, her gaze still lowered as
Susanna stepped before her.

"You have elected to refuse the direct order of your superior. You have
betrayed the trust of your sisters ... and of your Queen."

Charlotte winced at this last, as if struck. More tears, maybe these for
herself, began to form in her eyes.

"You know the penalty for incompetence. You know the penalty for defiance."

Charlotte nodded weakly.

Susanna's fingertips closed on Charlotte's chin, and gently - how gentle her
touch could be, and yet so horrible, Charlotte thought - turned her face up to
meet her own gaze. Susanna's expression was of one of furious anger mixed with
equal parts of regret and resignation.

"Your shame is your own," Susanna said, her voice strained as she struggled to
contain her emotions. "It will not be mine."

Charlotte nodded, tears spilling freely down her face now, her eyes and mouth
crumpled sadly as she fought back her despair.

Susanna brushed back some stray hairs from Charlotte's face with her left
hand. She was a warrior born, with four or five times the strength Charlotte
possessed, yet now her touch was gentle as it whispered along the younger
girl's cheek. Susanna bowed her head just enough to kiss her, their lips
meeting briefly. Charlotte closed her eyes, kissed her commander - and lover -
back, quickly but with feeling, and waited, blankly, expectant.

Susanna drew Charlotte's body closer, roughly, and closed her arms around the
younger girl's arms and body. She powered the bearhug down, hard, fast, and
she could feel Charlotte's body first resist, then begin to falter.

Charlotte's breath whooshed out of her lungs, and Susanna's grasp kept her
from drawing another. Her mouth opened, desperately gasping, working, but no
air was to come. Her eyes fell upon Susanna, who, until the past few weeks,
had been first her sister, then her teacher, and finally her superior, and who
now gazed back at her with a flat, icy stare of indifference. Charlotte's eyes
were wide, disbelieving even though on some level she knew that this had to be
her fate. Something deep and fundamental in Charlotte's torso gave under the
pressure and shifted with a muted crack and she uttered a soft, choked
whimper. Susanna lips neared Charlotte's ear.

"Be at peace, sister," she whispered, and only her voice, thick and
remorseful, showed any emotion at all.

She powered down even more, and a slow, soft grinding crackle began deep
inside Charlotte's chest. Susanne could feel her own form swelling, getting
bigger, thicker, harder, as bore down on the younger girl, her own chest
filling with her breath even as it pushed into Charlotte's and drove hers out.
Charlotte's feet came off the ground, slowly, and Susanna gripped her with her
left arm harder than ever; her right forearm crept up, her hand relaxing, her
fingertips probing, searching. Finally, they found it; a tiny, hard nub at the
base of the skull, where the cranium was attached to the neck, a small bony
protrusion on the first cervical vertebra. Susanna's first two fingers and
thumb seized on it with unknowable force, like a hydraulic steel clamp. With a
tiny, quick pulling, twisting motion, she torqued the joint; a low, meaty POP
was the only sound.

Charlotte's low, almost involuntary grunting stopped suddenly; her body went
rigid, as if struck by lightning. Her entire form twitched once, massively,
paused, and then twice more, then grew slack and still. Her eyes grew wider
than ever, as if in amazement, as if she could actually see oblivion rushing
at her. Maybe she can, Susanna thought sadly. Then, in only a few seconds, it
was over. Charlotte's eyes grew still, unfocused ... and then glassy as the
last life left her body.

Susanne knelt, laying Charlotte's body on the ground. She retrieved her brown
leather purse, a leftover from the ridiculous call girl disguise that she and
her ward had used earlier that evening, and placed it under the younger girl's
head. With infinite care she crossed Charlotte's hands across her chest and
straightened the girl's dress. When she was done, she knelt beside the body,
her head bowed, and whispered to herself so softly that only someone standing
next to her would have heard:

When the last of my days have come, and the last of my deeds done,

May I have half the peace of this scene.

For now I fight with staff and rod, as long as it please the Gods,

In loyal service to my Queen.

"Farewell, my sis"""

A black and white van, screeched to a halt at the mouth of the alley, its
sirens wailing. The doors opened, and half a dozen policemen spilled out onto
the street, where they drew their clubs and sprinted in her direction.

Susanna rose to her feet, her hands slowly curling into fists at her side. In
mere seconds, she could feel her regret and sadness drop away from her
entirely; it was instantly replaced by the burning, singing bloodlust of
battle and fury, the nearly mindless desire to hunt, maim, and kill. She
crouched low, the muscles of her considerable build thrumming, singing, her
arms bowed out, her hips dropping, her legs bending down into a crouch, ready
to pounce on the first man who was foolish enough to come within her reach.

"So be it," she growled.

And smiled.

Basir Al-Salaam was one of the richest men in Cairo. The vast fortunes he had
amassed from his international arms sales had made him one of the most feared
men in the region, although he, like many of his ilk, had mistaken that fear
for respect. Except he, unlike his competition, had enough foresight to employ
the greatest book fixers in the modern era. While his activities were widely
known to agencies like Interpol, they were entirely unable to track the path
of his money coming in. Instead, they were able only to track the funds going
out; much to the dismay of scores of law enforcement officials, his expertly
laundered money was invested in legitimate pursuits; a new form of genetically
engineered corn, several types of techniques for ethanol production, and even
an endowment for the arts, a rare thing for a man of his ethnicity. In fact,
the closest thing to an arms deal they could link him with was his investment
in Cytech Industries, a science think-tank with offices in the American
Southwest and Northeast, that did occasional contract work for the U.S.
military. As far as arms connections go, it was a flimsy lead.

But none of this was on Basir's mind as he drank the sweet amber colored
liquid from the tall glass in his hand. For now, in the middle of the night,
his attention was elsewhere.

The room was dark, lit only by a number of candles, the thick tallow of each
pooling around the base as they burned down. Basir himself sat on the floor,
atop a Turkish rug that cost more than the yearly income of all the street
vendors outside combined. He leaned backward, his back braced by the heavy
rolled pillow. A thin haze of smoke hung in the air; the tobacco of his hookah
was laced with a pinch of opium, and the combination of the smoke and drink
should have made Basir content, satisfied, maybe even a little sleepy. But it
hadn't happened. For now, he sat on the rug, comfortable, but enraptured: the
sound of the music washed over him, and the vision of the dancing girl before
him had struck all sense from his mind.

She was dressed in red, vaguely resembling the appearance of harem dancers in
Hollywood films of the 1950s. She had begun in a full-length robe, nearly
shroud-like, spun of silk-like fabric that seemed to hold the dim light of the
candles. But that was some time ago, and piece by intoxicating piece, the
outfit had come off in stages. It wasn't in the disgusting, sordid fashion so
popular in Western countries, no; here, it was long, slow, and delicate.
First, the pulsing throb of the music. Then, as the notes swirled up in a
blast of traditional music, the robe fell; revealing more crimson material,
but now cut to hug the form beneath more closely, to reveal the woman beneath
in layers, one piece at a time. Next, the sash from her waist, revealing the
first hint of skin; a firm, taut abdomen; a ruby ringed by gold in the small
recess of her belly button, the facets of the scarlet jewel caught the light
and reflected it back to Basir in a flood of prismatic color. And all the
while, the blood-colored veil swished gently from side to side as she moved,
and only her eyes - dark, wet, heavily made-up - were visible to him, the only
thing that truly mattered. They seemed to speak to him, to hold him with some
strange power. He wasn't even aware that he had handed over his free will,
such was her power over him. Nearly an hour later, when the recorded music had
finished and the stereo hidden in the dark reaches of the room had fallen
silent, she turned to face him. She stood before him, proud and unafraid. Only
the veil and the thin, semi-transparent loose pants remained; the rest of her
attire had been strewn about the room in the throes of dance. The ruby
glittered at him, matched only by the reflective charms on her necklace,
forming a traditional gold motif. Her body itself was bare, her appearance a
perfect representation of womanhood, easily the best female body Basir had
ever seen. And her eyes ... she stood nearly naked before him, there should
have been some level of embarrassment, of self-conscious concern ... and there
wasn't. She stood, legs slightly apart, one foot extended, toes downward, arms
at her sides, relaxed, her chest thrust out proudly, nipples stiff, whether
from the cool of the night air or excitement, Basir wasn't sure. And the
entire time, her eyes, like dark wet pools of limitless depth, caught him, and
held him.

Silently, she stepped forward, moving with unnatural grace. She stood astride
his sitting form, and those eyes held him with their power. "Basir," she said,
and it was not a question.

"Yes," he whispered.

Slowly, agonizingly slowly, she reached up with one delicate hand to remove
her veil. It swung away from her face, revealing her full beauty to him for
the first time. Basir actually gasped when she turned her full gaze toward him
once more. Her lips, a scarlet matching the jewel in her belly, parted, her
sweet breath entrancing him further, if that was possible. She knelt on top of
him, her weight surprising, and not unpleasant.

"You're mine," she said in his native language. Again, it was not a question.

"Yes," he said so softly it was nearly inaudible. Her lips rose again in a
slow smile.

It was three days before the smell brought some inquisitive visitors from the
street inside the ancient stone building, where they found Basir, his body a
ghastly horror of abuse. They also found four of his bodyguards, some
exquisite tobacco, and a stack of women's bedroom attire neatly folded beside
the bodies.

"Sir, we've got to get you out of here," Jack McCraddock hissed, and in the
confusion of being awakened in the dark, President James. P. Hargrove's
stomach did a gentle flip-flop when he saw that most of the Secret Service
agents standing around his bed had drawn their sidearms.

"What is it?" Hargrove asked as he pulled on a pair of slippers, his hands
searching the nightstand for his trademark low, rectangular glasses. "Is is
Pakistan again? Is it ... oh, no, it isn't India, is it?" he asked.

"Right now, we really don't know, sir," Jack said suddenly. "It seems that
something is happening, now, right now, in several places. It seems that
there's some kind of coordinated series of strikes."

"On us?" the President asked, now shocked fully awake. He had put on a robe
and was tying the belt, but now he paused. "Are we under attack?"

"Yes, Mr. President. But not only us, it looks bigger than that."

"What?"

"Sir, we really have to move now, please sir, if you could please ... "

"Jimmy?" Etta, her voice thick with sleep.

"Etta, dear, there's something going on and I ... "

"Sir, please, we need to go ... "

Another agent, a young black man, tugged at McCraddock's elbow and whispered
into his ear.

"What?! Are you sure?"

"What is it, Jack?"

"Jimmy, what is it?"

"Okay, we go with Marine One, then."

"Jack! You need to talk"""

A muffled thud, moderately distant, reverberated through the floor, the
distant rumble sounding like a brief thunder. Several of the agents swore
aloud.

"Now!" McCraddock cried. "Service agents, we are LEAVING!" he roared, and
pulled the President roughly toward him.

"Etta!" Hargrove cried, his hand extended to his wife, who sat up in the bed,
her face betraying her creeping terror.

"Mike, Tony!" McCraddock cried, and pointed at the bed. "You're her detail.
Take the armored car! Get her there!"

"Yes, sir!" Two of the agents hustled to her bedside and helped her swing her
feet to the floor.

"Wait! What the devil is going on?" Hargrove demanded. "Can you just tell me
that and then we can ... "

Another rumble sounded, the floor shook again, this time more severely.
Whatever it was, it was getting closer.

'Sir, we're leaving, now!" McCraddock cried, and he drew his .45 as the six
agents pulled the president toward the door.

The twin oak doors burst open, and a woman stepped in, another Secret Service
agent normally assigned to the First Lady's detail, a small, petite redhead
named Lisa Barrow. She wore a suit resembling McCraddock's, only tailored for
a smaller female frame. Her eyes blazed behind her fashionable, Sarah
Palin-esque glasses, her pistol at arm's length, pointed toward the floor, her
trigger finger extended along the side of the gun in a classic 'at ready'
stance.

"Jack!" she cried. "Thank God! We've got to get the Pres"""

McCraddock raised his hand without hesitation and shot her through the
forehead; a neat hole appeared in her forehead while a blast of red mist
exploded onto the door behind her. Her expression of shock didn't change as
she slid to the floor, and the shrill screams of the First Lady seemed to go
on and on.

"Sweet Jesus Christ!" the President roared. "Jack, what the bloody hell"""

McCraddock shoved him roughly into the hall, where he and the other 5 men
formed a protective bubble around the man elected to lead the country.

Oh, sweet Jesus, Hargrove thought to himself as they stepped over Barrow's
body. Blood was not unfamiliar to this man; unlike the string of recent
presidents, Hargrove had served in the military and had seen his fair share of
combat in Vietnam. He had seen his brothers in arms die bloody, and at the
time had even grown cold and callous about it, as they all did, as anyone
would have - you have to, to survive in that situation. But here? In the White
House? And now? And why her? Why Lisa Barrow? He and Etta had liked her, and
had even discussed arranging a 'chance' meeting between Barrow and their
youngest son, as soon as he was out of medical school, after Hargrove's first
term was over. And now she lay on the floor of a White House bedroom, with a
significant portion of her head decorating the door.

Another rumble, another shake, this one quite loud. And close, too; the
hallway grew brighter as light gushed in through the window at the end of the
hall. The hallway was a mass of rushing bodies, it was nearly impossible to
make heads or tails as staffs, escorts, security personnel, and aides
scrambled about, screaming.

"Sir, this way!" McCraddock yelled, and tugged at the robe. The six agents
barreled down the hall, knocking everyone in their path aside roughly.
Hargrove did his best to keep up, trying to move while staying hunkered down,
and, oddly, he laughed out loud as he was compelled to speak to those being
pushed aside.

"Excuse me, pardon me," he chanted loudly. "Coming through."

"Down hallway, make a hole!" McCraddock shouted. "Lancer on the move," he
barked into the microphone clipped into the cuff of his jacket.

A chorus of cries, screams really, came to them from the opposite end of the
hall. Hargrove and the agents paused, just for a moment, while another
pounding blast, this one quite close, close enough to hear shrapnel and dirt
hit the windows, sounded from outside. The hallway was lit once more in a
harsh yellow-orange light; and for a second, Hargrove could see the
silhouetted figures at the end of the hall. It was hard to make out, but ...
what the devil? What was that?

"Go! Go! Go!" Jack cried, and with a final rush, the six agents were able to
shield their charge and direct their motion enough to reach the elevator at
the end of the hall. The door slid open and the group of men tumbled through
it, collapsing into a shuddering heap as the steel door slid shut with a
quick, quiet shushhh of hissing hydraulics.

"What was that?" Hargrove asked, his eyes wide. "Who were those people?"

McCraddock didn't answer, only checked his pistol. He ejected the magazine,
inspected it grimly. Put it back. Cocked it.

"There were people ... in the air. They were throwing ... people? Did I see
that?" Hargrove asked.

"I'm not sure, sir. All I know is that we have to get you out of here, no
matter what."

"Barrow ... you ... you shot ... "

"Sir, we couldn't take the chance."

"Chance? What chance? What are you talking about?"

"Sir, I'm sure you'll be briefed later, and we don't have time right now to
... "

"My wife"""

"Mike and Tony will get her to Mount Weather, sir."

"Mount Weather?!"

"It's the safest place we could find quickly, sir. Right now you, your wife,
the Speaker, and SecDef are being evacuated there."

"What about Cooper?"

"The last I heard he was still being located. Glacier's a big park, sir. But
they'll find him."

"Good God. I'll feel a lot better when I know what's going on."

"Sir, when we hit the ground floor, we have to leave here running. Can you
manage it?"

"I was charging through rice patties before you born, Jack. With a 70 pound
pack and an M-16."

"Yes, Mister President, and I'm 44. It's not like it was last week."

"I'll still mop the floor with ya, you little punk," Hargrove grinned
humorlessly. "Say the word."

"That's what I like to hear, sir. We exit out the quad doors, then down the
steps, across the south lawn. Marine One's waiting."

"Marine One?"

"Normally we'd use Andrews, but it isn't safe, so the best thing to do is get
you into the air right away."

"All right."

The elevator car thumped to the ground level, and McCraddock held his thumb to
the 'close door' button.

"I guess it's time, Mr. President."

"All right, Jack. Thank you for what you've done so far gentlemen, and
whatever you may still have to do."

The circle of men around him simply nodded, tense, and at the ready.

"Give the word, sir?" Jack asked, looking back at the man he swore to protect
with his life, if necessary. Somewhere, he found the peace of mind to offer an
agreeable wink.

The President nodded, somehow managing to look hale, hearty, and nearly even
regal as he crouched slowly into a ready position, a man in slippers and a
bathrobe who was had turned 70 only a few weeks before. He even grinned a
little, and Jack felt a flush of patriotic affection. That's why I do this
job, he thought, and nodded.

Hargrove nodded back, his heart galloping in his chest. He felt younger than
he had years. But, if only Etta was here, now.

"Let's go," he said.

Hargrove made it to the chopper. So did McCraddock. But three men in the
detail did not.

No one knows which side fired first. In the end, it probably didn't matter.
All anyone knows is that, for some reason, somehow, sentries on either side of
the demilitarized zone separating North Korea from its southern cousin fell
suddenly and ominously silent at 12:01 Eastern Standard Time, and then people
on both sides started shooting.

By 8 a.m., tanks were moving.

Nice ass, Larry thought to himself.

The girl waved him goodbye, one of the cigarettes she had just purchased
dangling from her full, pouty lips. He even winked at him - his heart
fluttered a bit at this - and then turned, pushing the door of the convenience
store open, then stepping out into the night. Larry craned his neck around the
register and the lotto display to watch her go, that amazing can on display in
those tight jeans, swishing this way and that in a walk that was half strut,
half catwalk.

Damn.

"Damn," a voice said.

Larry jumped a bit, wondering if he had accidentally spoken aloud. But he
hadn't; the phrase had come from the next man in line, middle-aged guy whose
head had tilted a full 45 degrees to watch the young woman leave. "Damn," he
said again, shaking his head appreciatively.

"Wasn't that somethin'?" Larry asked agreeably. "We don't get too many in here
like that."

"No kidding," the man replied, setting a 6-pack of Rolling Rock down onto the
counter. "I think ... well ... . yeah. Yeah, I'd say she was about the most
beautiful young thing I've ever seen in this old life. Least since I was in
school, up in Hartford."

"Yeah, well, glory days and all that," Larry said, lapsing into his 'guy talk'
mode. He half turned to his left, his left hand automatically going to the
stack of bags hanging from a hook. "If I had to keep a list ... "

"What the hell?"

The customer's exclamation caught Larry off guard. He could hear the sudden
tenseness, the dawning alarm in the man's voice. He glanced up at the man, and
saw the customer was still watching the girl through the store's glass door.
He turned to follow the man's gaze.

The girl was doing something to one of the gas pumps outside.

As Larry watched, she kind of set her feet a little, squatted, and put her
arms around the metal rectangle that housed the pump.

"What the hell ... " Larry echoed, his brow knit in a confused expression.

Then with a quick twisting motion at the waist, the girl pivoted. The metal
frame of the pump squished in the middle, like it was a big toothpaste tube.
When she jerked, the girl tore it free of its bolted moorings. Then she stood,
explosively, her arms still wrapped around the pump.

Even inside, and at this distance, the two men could hear the squeal of
tortured metal as she ripped the pump free. Larry winced; he was involuntarily
ready for the big ball of orange flame. It didn't come. He ran to the door,
his eyes wide.

Gasoline gushed form the torn piping in three great amber floods, pooling
quickly around the concrete filling station island. The mangled pump was on
its side, ten feet away. The girl was walking away, her back to the store.

"Fuck!" Larry shouted, and shot through the door, out into the store's parking
lot. The customer, alone at the register, simply stared, confused, his head
turning. His gaze fell to the series of red switches on the wall behind the
counter. It was the bank of master switched for the pumps, and they were all
on.

"Goddamn you!" Larry shouted. "What are you doing?" he yelled as he trotted
across the concrete. "Look at this! What did you do to my pumps? How did you
do ... " his eyes went wide.

The woman, now nearly to the edge of the concrete, casually flipped something
over her shoulder, the way an adult would flip a coin to a kid. Larry's eyes
traveled up to where something glittered in the air above him, above the deep
amber pool of fragrant gas, above the gushing remains of the pump. Larry could
see it, clearly, and almost as if it was in slow motion.

It was a silver Zippo lighter, its wick burning with a small yellow flame.

Instinct took over. His eyes and brain measured its flight. His heart nearly
stopped. Without hesitation, he leapt forward through the air, his body
extending, his right hand flying out in front of him. His high school track
coach would have been proud; it would have been his best long jump ever. His
shadow, cast by the harsh glare of the streetlights, tracked below him as he
sailed horizontally over the brown liquid. And all the while, his brain
followed the events in that same slow motion, his eyes were fixed on the
falling lighter. He grimaced, it was ahead of him still; even with his great
leap, it wasn't going to be enough; his lips pulled back from his teeth in a
snarl, he growled aloud as he reached, he put everything he had into getting
his right hand as far forward as he could; at the last second he stretched out
his hand, and his fingertips actually touched the smooth, brushed steel of the
lighter ...

... As it fell past his hand.

People asleep in their beds ten miles away were awakened by the sound.

No one knows who was responsible. But the order was given, and once it was
given, it could not have been rescinded.

Shortly past 0430 hours, a squadron of B-52 bombers took to the skies over the
Aleutian islands, their extra wing-carried fuel tanks full, their bellies fat
with lethal devices the size of school desks. Just short of 0500 hours they
passed into Russian airspace, and engaged a number of Russian attack aircraft.
While the MIGs were far faster and incredibly nimble in the night sky, the
electronic countermeasures of the American planes were superior to anything
the Russians had developed, and the three B-52s that had escaped the melee
climbed into a protective layer of cloud, their radar position covered by wave
after wave of silver metallic chaff. The remaining MIGs patrolled the skies
until their fuel was spent and the pilots had to ditch in the frigid waters
below. The 52s continued on their pre-assigned path, on their pre-assigned
task.

At 6:47 a.m., the Russian city of Vladivolstock ceased to exist.

At 8.02 a.m., Mount Rainer was illuminated by two suns: one from the east, the
other from the white-hot coastal basin that was once Seattle.

Just after midnight, nearly every person in America that was still awake
picked up their telephone and tried to call a member of their family. Judith
McConnell of Daytona Beach, Florida tried to call her estranged husband, who
still lived in suburban Detroit. All she got when she dialed the number was
some kind of strange beeping tone. When she hung up to try again, she didn't
even get a dial tone. Burton Wallace of Springfield, Illinois went straight to
his cell phone to call his youngest daughter, Cindy, who worked as a sales rep
for a pharmaceutical company, and was traveling to Hawaii on business.

"All circuits are busy," a computerized voice informed him. "Please try your
call again later. Thank you for choosing Verizon Wireless." He kept trying
until daybreak, until the battery on his phone went dead. His call never went
though. Doretta Parks, an elderly woman in San Francisco, tried to get in
touch with her son, a young black man who worked for the Secret Service. She
was unsuccessful. The sudden, nearly incomprehensible load on the Earth's
communication systems was simply far too great for anything to work as it
should. To add to the disaster, several key tower centers, cell phone call
distribution centers, and even a number of power plants seemed to fall
ominously silent just after midnight, decreasing the level of efficiency even
further. In fact, only a few select people, in mostly rural areas, were able
to place a call, and even then, it was only fairly early on that night. By two
o'clock a.m., the only calls completed were between people using expensive,
rugged satellite phones. But by 3 a.m., even they had stopped working. No one
described here in any detail was able to place a call that night at all. And
after 3:00, no one else, anywhere, did either.

Neither did people from every state in the union. Or Canada. Or the United
Kingdom. Or France. Or Russia. Or Australia. Or the West Indies. Or Singapore.
Or India. Or Norway. Or Hungary. Or Peru.

Robbed of the most basic communications device in the home, most people with
cable and satellite connectivity tried the next best thing, and opened their
email boxes on their computers. The entire internet crashed at 3:12 a.m., and
for the first time since Alexander Graham Bell spoke into a crude but
serviceable prototype of an invention called the telephone, the world went
completely, eerily silent.

XVII

Resource file: RF920758

(continued)

I don't remember how long I sat on the edge of the bed, exactly. I just know
it went on for a while.

The reports were nearly almost the same, across the whole spectrum. Unknown
this, unconfirmed that, blah blah blah. Too bad I wasn't a talking head for
CNN or MSNBC, I could have clued everybody in pretty quick, as unbelievable as
the story was turning out to be.

One reporter would talk about some far-flung late-breaking news story, and
then the coverage would switch to something else, some kind of disturbance
closer to home. Lastly, the big-name reporter in charge of the program would
wonder aloud if somehow all of these events were connected somehow, that maybe
- and then the screen would go to furious dancing black and white pixels of
static. A switch to another network, another 'this just in' type of
interruption, and then ... more static. Credit was due to one local news
network, however; they actually managed to get a report out that revealed
authorities were searching for 'a trio of college-age women' that were wanted
in connection with a late-night crime spree. Then they too, fell to static.

After about three hours of this, I clicked the 'off' button on the TV's
remote, and silence filled the room. Cassie sat behind me, her back leaning
against the headboard of the bed. I didn't look, but I could feel her looking
at me, I could sense her gaze practically boring two small holes into the back
of my head.

"Well, you weren't kidding," I said softly.

She didn't reply, and when I turned around, I could see the strange mixture of
sadness and alarm that had been rising in her all day on full display. I moved
to the top of the bed, and started to reach for the telephone. I had a family
to warn, after all.

"Don't bother," Cassie said quietly. "It won't work."

"I have to try," I muttered, annoyed, but she was right. When I raised it to
my ear, there was nothing, not even the tiny hum of interference you get when
the phone is powered but not serviceable. It was like a cold, dead hunk of
plastic in my hand. I hung it up again, trying to make as little noise as
possible when I set the receiver back down onto its cradle.

We just kind of sat there, with neither of us saying anything, for a long,
long time. The window was open, and after what had to be close to an hour, I
could hear the faint warble of a siren in the distance. I saw Cassie's eyes
flash up to look at the window, but that was her only motion, only her eyes
moved. But I could tell she was edgy, alert. She was ready to spring into
action at a second's notice; she only looked relaxed.

"I should have called my family," I said quietly. It wasn't an insinuation,
and it wasn't meant to be one. It was simply a regret.

"Perhaps," she said. "But we talked about that. You agreed with me; we
couldn't take that chance. It might have made us easier to find."

"And maybe it wouldn't have."

"Well, it's too late to second-guess it now. Put it out of your mind."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Stop it. I didn't mean it that way, and you know it."

I sighed. "I know, I'm sorry. I'm just worried, you know? Two kid brothers. My
mom. And if this is all true, what you say is coming ... I should have
called."

"I didn't know it would be this soon. I thought this was still a few weeks,
maybe months away. I'm nearly as shocked about it as you are."

"Why would ... they ... move so soon?"

Cassie's vision dropped to the comforter on the bed. "I don't know," she
admitted. "I'm completely in the dark about it. Perhaps I was misled
purposefully. I can't say that my ... individualistic tendencies were
completely unnoticed back home ... I mean, back there."

"Really?"

She nodded. "I've always sort of marched to my own drummer."

"I hadn't noticed."

"Although, I think that's mostly ego talking. In the big scheme of things, you
and I are fairly small players in what's to come, I think."

Visions of Cassie jumping across that alley, with superhuman ease, of her
snuffing out the lives of a trio of street punks the way anybody else would
lift a finger ... her last statement threw me.

"Small player? You?"

"Oh, yeah. I've talked about the differences, remember? I'm only a half-breed.
I'm very nearly as human as you are."

"Lady, I can't bench press a Chevy."

"But you know what I mean. Compared to a true Amazonian foot soldier, I'm ...
what's the expression? Small potatoes?"

"And how many of them are coming?"

"It's hard to say. I'm not even sure how many there are, all spread across
Themiscyra. Thousands, for sure. Tens of thousands, probably."

"Hmm." Then, a new thought, one that hadn't occurred to me as of yet, broke
into my worried mind. "Hey. Thousands of them, how many like you?"

"What do you mean?"

"How many, you know, how many have been taken, like you were. I don't want to
use the term half-breed, but ... "

"You can. Gods know they do, all the time."

"Yeah, but they're assholes." I let the words hang there for a moment, and
Cassie glanced up at me, a slow, tired grin turning up one side of her face.

"Yes. Yes, they are," she agreed.

"But seriously. How many of them are there like you? You know, turned?"

"I don't know. I don't know that anyone's bothered to count. We're definitely
a minority. And an underclass. Looked down on."

"So much for women creating the idyllic paradise. They look like they got
prejudice down pretty well."

"That's true. We're definitely an underclass. Simply because we're not Amazons
born, we have fewer rights and less respect. But we still fight and die, like
the rest of them. Why do you ask about them?"

"I was just thinking," I said, "about something you said a while back. About
halfers being assigned posts in this world, almost like sentries?"

"Yes."

"Well, that would be a lot of them, right?"

"Many, many of them."

"I guess it would be too much to hope that a lot of them felt the way you do
about things, right?"

"I'm afraid so, Danny. I've seen ... no, I've heard some of them ... talk ...
as I do ... about this world from time to time. You know, thinking out loud?
Questioning. Questioning the dogma they've been fed since their Becoming.
Wondering aloud if the world of man is so bad."

"Well, that figures."

"How?"

"Cause, darling, if they look like you do, they're going to get attention.
Male attention. And it's hard to rip the throat out of somebody who brings you
flowers every Friday, isn't it?"

Cassie half-nodded in agreement. "I suspect you're right, about a number of
them. Of course, the number is small, and their fear of the discovery of their
doubts would make them hard to find. But ... but if you're entertaining
thoughts of me leading some kind of insurrection, you're mad. We wouldn't
stand a chance, we'd be wiped out in minutes."

"Well, it was worth a shot," I sighed, and Cassie regarded me with a level
look. She leaned over and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek. I flushed the
tiniest bit, the way I seemed to whenever she drew near.

"What was that for?"

"For just being you."

"Hey, all right. I'm just me all the time. Is there more where that came
from?"

"If you play your cards right, mister. But we should rest now. Tomorrow's
going to be a long day. And they won't be getting any easier, either."

We slipped into bed, the lights off and the room quiet. We both lay there for
a long time, silent, each knowing the other was still awake.

"So how is this going to work? What's their plan?" I finally asked.

"We should sleep."

"Well, until we do, we should talk. If I know what you know, our chances are
better, right?"

I heard her sigh a bit in the dark. "All right."

"So you've been on ... missions ... for them before, right?"

"Sort of. Not really. More like, hunting parties. Small, brief excursions."

"How does that work?"

"A small band of warriors travels through a doorway ... "

"Yes, but what 'doorway?' You say you travel from dimension to dimension, but
you've never said how, besides magic."

"There's a class of Amazon, they're like magicians. I don't know what power
they use, all I know is that it's mystical in nature. Given by the gods,
probably. They do this short recital, and summon a doorway. I don't know how
they do it; I kind of think they don't really know for sure, either. But all I
know is that it's rare, and very, very hard to do. It's not something they do
lightly."

"You don't like talking about it, do you?"

"No."

"Why not?"

She thought for a moment, and although we were still fairly new in each
other's lives, I thought I could picture what her expression was at the
moment, troubled, thoughtful, with a slightly wrinkled brow and one eye
pinched shut a little.

"Because they scare me a little," she confessed.

"What?"

"Yeah."

"Cass, after what I've seen you do, I can't picture you scared of anybody."

"You haven't met one of the Weird Sisters."

"What do you mean?"

"They're ... strange," she said, and I could hear the hesitation in her voice,
her trepidation. And, I must admit, the feeling was a catchy. "They're a
creepy bunch. Spooky. They wear robes, for one. They hide their faces, mostly.
And they talk funny, in tongues, sometimes. And they live alone, completely
alone. They take no mates."

"No men?"

"I said, no mates. Remember, Amazons only take men when they want to
reproduce."

"Oh. Then ... hey ... waitaminute." The realization hit me, and my silence
drew out a little, my shock evident.

"I thought you would have figured this part out by now."

"But ... but ... I ... oh, boy. Seriously? You, too? I mean, have you ... do
you ... you're ... "

"Of course. Does it bother you?"

"I just ... " I stopped stammering, but my mind was spinning, I'll admit.

"In a society without men, the girls will find a way to ... keep themselves
busy, Daniel."

"Well ... I guess. I ... " I sighed. "You're ... you're okay with it?"

"I have to be. And yes. I hope you're, as you say, 'okay' with it, too."

"Well, I have to be honest, I hadn't really thought about it."

"Believe me, it's only natural. For my kind, at least."

"Then I guess it's different, here," I managed to say. "It has whole other
meanings here."

"Does it?"

I struggled to answer. How could I put something I had never really thought
about into words? "Maybe not. I don't know. All I know is that right now, if
all Amazons look the way you do, honey, you're making the fantasies of
schoolboys everywhere come alive tonight."

She laughed a little. "Of course, it doesn't mean I ... I don't like some men
... like you, for example ... " She rolled over toward me a bit, and threw one
of her steely legs across mine, and draped an arm across my chest
possessively. "You're mine. I like you, too."

"So two women together doesn't bother you?"

"If they're expressing love? No. Not at all. The opposite. Two women,
intertwined? It's lovely. It's beautiful."

"What about two men?" I ventured.

She recoiled a bit at that. "Eww, gods, no! That's disgusting," she exclaimed.
I could imagine her nose crinkled up in disgust at the thought. Then she
regained her composure and chuckled. "Boys are gross," she said in a faux
little-girl voice.

"Nice."

"All of them but you," she said.

"Sure, whatever."

"I mean it."

"Hey, no fair. I can't concentrate when you do that. We were talking about the
spooks, remember?"

She shuddered hard enough for me to feel the mattress shake.

"Yes."

"And?"

"And nothing. They're just ... strange. Deep in my heart, I always thought
they ... and their powers ... were unnatural."

"Powers?"

"Portal summoning. Seeing the future, sometimes with frightening accuracy.
Making things move, but without touching them."

"Wait. They have ... like, mind powers? Telekinesis, or something?"

"Yes. They're like ... in this dimension, most people would call them witches.
They have some kind of control over the elements. I've seen one of them in
action, on a hunting party. Just once. And I hope I never see it again. A
strong witch can kill a man without ever touching him."

"Jesus."

"So one of these witches opens a doorway, and then what?"

"Legions of Amazons pour through. Into pre-assessed areas of attack."

"Assessed by women like you. Plants. Moles."

"Yes. But this time, it's different. This world, this Earth, has always been
the biggest, the most abundantly supplied world we've ever visited. Forgive
me, but the hunting here ... has always been ... extraordinary."

My blood chilled just a little, as I remembered her confession in the car
earlier that day ... her previous exploits ... and conquests ... in my world.
"What changed it for you?" I asked.

"What do you mean?"

"You said it yourself, hunting has always been good here. You've ... admitted
being here before, of taking lives here before. So what's different this
time?"

"I'd rather not talk about it. Let's just say I had a change of heart."

"But, why?"

"Dan, come on. I'd rather not"""

"I just figured I should know. As long as we're being honest with each other.
I mean, for all I know, maybe this, what we're doing, this running, this
hiding, maybe that's all part of your mission, too. Maybe you're just biding
your time."

Cassie grew very still beside me, and I could sense her anger. "Listen," she
said softly. "If I were going to kill you, it would have been long ago. And
you wouldn't have even seen it coming. And there's nothing you could have done
to stop it."

"You know what I mean," I protested.

"We should sleep now," she said softly, and this time there was a new
inflection in her voice. It wasn't anger after all.

"Cass, I'm sorry. Really. I'm just trying to understand."

"All right."

"I just want to know why you ... changed."

"It wasn't overnight. I've had questions on and off for a long time. Maybe
someday we can talk more about it."

"But ... "

"Don't push your luck, Daniel."

"Okay, okay." I sighed. "I just wonder, why now?"

"Hmm?"

"Why now?" I asked, confused. "You said it yourself, this world provided
everything they needed. Hunting, mates, resources. Right?"

"Yes."

"Then why now? Why mess with a good thing?"

Silence for a moment. "I don't know."

"I mean, are we a threat? Did the Amazons ever think about a massive invasion
like this before?"

"Once."

"When? Why?"

"By your calendar, 1945."

"'45? But why ... wait. The bomb."

"Bingo."

"Because Amazons aren't all down with science."

"I wouldn't put it that way. That makes it sound like they - we - shit - that
makes it sound like they don't have the mental capacity for advanced science.
They do. Believe me. Amazons are very, very intelligent. As bright as regular
people, regular humans, anyway. But when it comes to the sciences ... it just
doesn't grab them the way it does humans."

"I wonder why not?"

"Because they don't need it," Cassie went on. "Think about it. Amazons don't
get cancer. If they did, they'd have to look for a cure. They don't need a
rifle to hunt; a fit Amazon can run down a deer, outwrestle a bear. Why focus
on something you don't need?"

"Okay. I guess that makes sense."

"Amazons get science, they get technology, and they can use it. They just
don't have to. And that's our chance, I think."

"We have a chance? I thought you were all doom and gloom, 'Oh God, we're all
gonna die terrible bloody deaths.'"

"We still might. Probably will, in fact. But there's an old Amazon saying that
applies here."

"Which is?"

"Only a fool despairs while she still draws breath."

"Okay. Nice, catchy. But what chance do we have?"

"This," Cassie said, and gently rapped two knuckles on my head. "The old,
reliable human brain."

"Our smarts? But you said ... "

"Not your smarts. Your wits."

"Huh?"

"Amazons don't need science, so they don't use it, remember?"

"Uh, yeah."

"Well, Amazons have this enormous physical ability. Strength, speed, stamina,
you name it. They hold physical dominion over anything and everything in their
world, and most others as well."

"I don't feel better about our chances yet."

"And because they are so physically superior, they never have to think. They
never have to be inventive. Innovation is so extremely rare in Amazon
culture."

"So they're not perfect, I still don't see how that ... "

"They have no creativity."

I considered this. "Okay. So our only chance is based on the fact that they
can't think out of the box."

"Right. Amazons typically move directly from Point A to Point B, fairly
predictably, since they're used to crushing the opposition fairly easily.
There is some creative thought that surfaces sometimes, but it's usually
restricted to the designing new campaigns on the battlefield."

"So back to '45. Why didn't they invade then, if they were so scared of atomic
weapons?"

"We got bad info. Give credit to the State Department. They kept the Manhattan
Project pretty secret for a long, long time. We didn't find out about it until
it was too late to stop it. And, there was a faction in the Amazon hierarchy
that didn't want to do anything about it, anyway. Especially since the bomb
gave humans the power to destroy your world, not ours."

"Umm-hmm." It was a lot to take in. Fatigue, and the weight of everything I
had learned in the past couple of days suddenly hit me. I could feel the
burning sensation of tiredness in my eyes, and the magnitude of our situation
worried me. I was tired, and more than a little scared. And the questions
still spun in my mind: Why here? Why now? And, why me?

"Are you all right?" Cassie asked after a little while.

"Fine, just ... a little freaked out, I guess."

"That's understandable," she said, and snuggled a little closer to me. She
started stroking her hand gently across my chest, and moving the leg thrown
over my own up and down, slowly. I noticed her breathing slowing, lengthening.
But my mind kept repeating the same questions, and repeating the same visions,
too: three battered, broken bodies in a Baltimore alley. A strangely entranced
desk clerk. The terrifying, predatory nature of our last sexual encounter,
which I was lucky to live through. Her hand drifted down, slowly, exploring
... and stopped.

"Dan? What's wrong?"

"What? Oh, I ... nothing. I just ... I'm tired, and I...uh ... "

"Are you afraid?"

"Well, yeah, of course, there's an invasion going on and ... "

"No," she said in the dark. "Are you afraid of me?"

"No." Silence. "Yes. Maybe a little." I was a conflicted mess of emotions.
Yes, I loved her, and yes, I was simultaneously appalled by what she was
apparently capable of. I was afraid of her, of her strength, and what she
could do with it, and at the same time, I wanted her badly, all the time.

"Daniel, listen to me. I think you know how I feel. I've deserted my life, my
people, everything and every person I know for you. I'm here, I'm committed.
I'm pledging myself to you, if you'll accept it."

"Of course."

"I love you."

"I love you too, Cass."

"But you won't trust me?" she asked, and her hand tweaked me a little.

"I just ... you hurt me. Physically. Badly. I'm still all black and blue."

"I know, I'm sorry."

"How do I know you won't do it again?"

"That was battle-lust. I was incapable of controlling it. It ... it won't
happen again."

"But ... "

"Daniel." She sat up a little, very close to me in the dark. The digital alarm
clock threw off an extremely dim blue light, just enough for me to see twin
glints of light in the dark, where her eyes must be. I wonder if she can see
in the dark, I wondered, and felt myself shrink even further.

"Daniel, listen. As long as I draw breath, as long as I am living, I will
never, ever hurt you again. Do you understand that?"

"Yes."

"Yes, but do you believe it?"

"I believe you'll try not to," I said. "And I hope you don't. But ... but I
just don't know. If you could have seen the way you were ... "

"That's over now."

"How can it be over?"

"Because I'm part human too, remember?" she said plaintively. "I'm human, too.
And this is my pledge, my vow. Never again."

"All right."

Her hand continued her ministrations, but to no avail. I just couldn't manage
it. There was too much noise in my head.

"Sorry, sweetheart, I don't think I'm going to be able to tonight."

There was a long pause, where she grew very still. I could sense she was
considering something. Finally, she spoke.

"It would comfort you. It would comfort ... both of us."

"I know, I'm sorry."

"Do you want to? Is the mind willing? Just, the body ... ?" she trailed off.

"Something like that."

Another pause.

"I ... I could make it possible."

Here we go, I thought. That sure didn't last long.

She must have felt my heart rate increase, or sense my sudden trepidation.
"No, no! Not through force. There are ... ways. Things I know. Things I can
do. But you have to want me to."

"Umm...well ... okay."

"So do you? Want me to?"

"Yes."

"And I have your consent?"

"To what? You have to ask, now? I ... "

"This is part of my vow, Daniel. I'll not do anything a human couldn't do, not
without your consent. So ... do I have it? Your ... "

"Permission?" I interjected.

"No. I'm still part Amazon. Asking for permission is not in my genetic
make-up. But I do care for you, and I'm asking for your consent."

"All right."

"Very well, then. Relax," she said softly, her mouth very close to my ear.
Then she began breathing softly, very long, deep, slow breaths, and I could
sense her flexing her body, and then relaxing, flexing, then relaxing, in
waves. I didn't know what she was doing; it was like she was preparing herself
for some kind of physical test. She began to breathe through her mouth,
drawing deep breaths in, out, in, out.

And then I realized that my breathing had, for some reason, matched her own. I
became dimly aware that my heart rate had jumped a bit, and I could feel a
damp coolness on my brow where a thin layer of perspiration had leapt to the
surface of my skin.

Then, a scent: the same faint, citrusy-sweet smell that I had noticed on her
before, thick, sweet, and clean-smelling almost like a lemon-scented oil or
verbena, with the barest tinge of a deeper, muskier scent below it. It was
intoxicating; it seemed to come from her in waves and it filled the room, and
within seconds it was all I could think about, everything else dropped away
and I only knew that I was there, and she was there, and that was all that
mattered. With no command from my brain to do so, my arms reached out for her,
and she slid into them, naked now, her glorious, perfect body settling down
upon my own; my most intimate part sprang to sudden, swollen life. It was
incredible.

I've only been under the influence of drugs a handful of times in my life;
I've always been more or less a straight arrow when it came to that kind of
thing. But the closest thing I ever experienced to this happened when I was
very young, in college. A girl I was fascinated by and obsessed with, not in
the healthiest of ways, had lured me out with some of her friends to a dance
club in a seedier part of town than I was used to. But I was entranced by this
girl, so I went. And on the dance floor, she leaned in close, wrapped her arms
around my neck, and kissed me, deeply. I was halfway to being drunk anyway,
and I returned the favor. Then, she pushed something into my mouth with her
tongue, and, being in the state I was in, I just kind of reflexively
swallowed. I had a pretty good idea what it was that she had given me.

I spent the next six hours in quite a state. I walked around with a hard-on
that wouldn't quit, and every time she touched me, it created surges of
pleasure that just seemed to roll over me like a wave. We ended up back at her
apartment, where we spent three full hours rolling around on her living room
floor, in the throes of an artificial ecstasy. Soon after, I was dismissed and
some new guy took my place. In the long run, I was lucky - she was found dead
two years later, on the floor of her bathroom with a needle still in her arm,
and I managed to not catch anything from her. But the memory of the feeling
that pill had given me stayed with me.

Until that night with Cassie. I don't know what it was she was doing, but the
scent she was giving off in waves, combined with her proximity, her weight,
her body ... God, it was electric. I expected little blue sparks to erupt
wherever she touched me. Before I knew it, my heart was hammering in my chest,
and I felt a high, tight, pleasant and familiar burning in my loins.

"Yes," she sighed, close to my ear. "Show me your love," she whispered, and
blew a breath into my ear, down the side of my neck, where the skin rippled to
life in gooseflesh.

Incredible. In about three minutes, I had gone from frustratingly impotent to
a man on the verge, and with her command, I came in a huge burst, gasping for
breath. She nuzzled and kissed my neck as I gasped for air, and I could feel
her smile against the skin of my neck.

"See?" she said softly. "I told you I could be gentle. I don't even have to
touch you." He kissed me deeply, and when her tongue danced lightly across my
own, I felt myself begin to swell improbably once more.

"I wish you would," I gasped, and she laughed softly aloud, and the wonderful
scent of her arousal came again, and for a time, we were able to put
everything troubling us out of our minds.

The first rosy light was just beginning to peek over the dark of the tree line
visible outside the window when I woke from sleep and sat up suddenly in the
bed. My eyes were wide open, and I saw everything with clarity. Why hadn't I
seen it before?

Cassie had been up for a while, as was her habit. She may require more food,
more calories a day than I did, but she sure required less rest. I could see
her body silhouetted where she sat on the foot of the bed.

"Cassie."

"Yes, Dan."

"We have to go back."

Silence. "What?"

"We have to go back to Baltimore. Well, a few miles outside of the city,
exactly. We have to go to Trevor's place," I said.

"Who?"

"Trevor. Trevor Ainsbury."

"Who's that?"

"An old friend of mine. He's a military liaison for AdvanTech, this big
contractor. He's on the R&D side of things. We have to go see him."

"But Daniel, they'll be expecting this. It's not safe. We can't."

"Cassie, we have to go. We have to see him, no matter what. Even if the
Amazons do expect it, and even if they're waiting for us, we have to try."

"Why do we have to, Daniel?" she asked, turning to look at me in the light of
the coming dawn. "Why?"

I tried to keep my voice as level as I could as the realization blossomed
fully in my mind.

"Because I think I know why they're here," I said.

END PART II

The Siege

Attack of the Amazons

PART III

"I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable
to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of
the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar
care and attention is not paid to the Ladies, we are determined to foment a
Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws ..."

-Abigail Adams, 1776

Chapter 18

The first rays of light crept over the horizon, and the sun rose on a world
fundamentally changed.

Kevin Kidwell had always been a bit of a geek.

Of course, that moniker wasn't perfectly suited to him, just as any such wide
brush cannot possibly paint the entire portrait of a human life. But all the
same, he guessed he would have fit into the mode better than most.

He was of average size and appearance. He wasn't overly into sports as a boy,
although he was able to chuck a football farther than many of his future
classmates at MIT were able. He chased knowledge in high school the way some
guys chased girls. He wore glasses that were a little too thick for his age,
and actually preferred the thick black frames, even back then. He scoffed a
little at that now, now that he was in his 30s and far beyond youthful vanity,
that style of eyeglasses was popular once more. He did read the occasional
science fiction paperback, and yes, he preferred Star Trek over Star Wars. In
his defense, he kept his hair short, manageable, and non-greasy, and he never,
ever used a pocket protector.

In fact, those that knew him well came to understand that Kevin actually
exuded his own, quiet brand of cool. He liked foreign films and would often go
to the theater alone when he couldn't convince friends or a date to go along.
He wore flannel shirts of all colors, even in the summer, for the feel as much
as the appearance. He drove an ancient, battered Scout, and enjoyed the weekly
upkeep the testy vehicle needed to stay in operable condition. He liked rock
and roll, and often tried to thump out power chords on his old Gibson at all
hours (without much success), not that he had any neighbors to annoy.

Kevin lived ten minutes outside of the town of Weed, on the slopes of Mt.
Shasta in northern California, in a small, modest rental chosen precisely for
its isolation. He liked the quiet. It made it easier for him to think.

Which is what he was really good at.

Thorndike. KBR. CyTech Industries. McDonnell-Douglas. Morton-Thiokol. There
wasn't one member of the military industrial complex that hadn't pursued him
as he finished his collegiate studies, and with good reason. Here was kid with
more brains stuffed in his noggin than anyone could ever recall, who had first
blown his professors away and then turned down an entry position at JPL. And
it wasn't out of some ego trip, either, it was only because he just didn't
want the work.

His specialty was quantum mechanics, but much to the chagrin of his college
advisors, who espoused their belief that he was meant to further the study of
one branch of science over and over again throughout the course of his
studies, he refused to be limited by one discipline, by the rigid, remarkably
inflexible doctrine of the working scientific community.

For people who are supposed to be looking for truth, he would often say to
anyone outside the field, scientists sure can't see over their stacks of forms
and permission slips.

So instead, he took lesser positions in various smaller science organizations,
always being careful to avoid ones that had a large administrative wing, or
depended too much on office work. He'd rather be out in the field, literally,
than stuck in a cubicle. Of course, the treatise he'd written when finishing
his work at MIT, The Behavior of Accelerated Photons in Unstable or Negatively
Charged Space was, even after nearly a decade, one of the most frequently
discussed (and debated) works on record, and even while Kevin was enjoying a
position working on Legionnaire's Disease for HUD, or examining beetles for
the Forestry Service, his superiors would realize that he was that Kevin
Kidwell, and why the hell was he here, doing this job?

It was because he was a curious guy, and because he was able to move from
discipline to discipline with the kind of ease that made his coworkers
jealous. Kevin was a nice guy, sometimes even a little too nice; he was known
to occasionally give too much credit to a research partner if that person was
a decent worker and put in enough seat time. But even so, envy is the science
world's elephant in the room. It's always there, but nobody ever talks about
it.

So Kevin did his best to take himself right the hell out of that room.

In the last couple of years, Kevin had done some work for the U.S. Geological
Survey, based out of the office in Vancouver, Washington. He even spent about
two months camped up on the slopes of Mt. St. Helens, and once sat on the
crater rim for nearly two days during a minor eruption, using his binoculars
to watch the growing lava dome extrude four cubic yards of hot, sticky rock
every second. At that rate, the mountain would be a complete peak again less
than one hundred years after the 1980 blast. His work on the mountain led to
an increase in the USGS budget and the start of a new urban volcano hazards
program.

Try doing that while you sit in a cubicle.

All this had brought him to Northern California, and Mt. Shasta. He thought of
it as a forgotten mountain; not much was written about it and a lot of people
he conversed with in other places had never heard of it. Yet it was
California's highest point, had a base bigger than Rainier, and had recently
burped.

Six months earlier, a series of small mini-quakes had issued from the
mountain, a swarm of more than 200 in a single day, and this had been followed
by a large, sudden spike in carbon dioxide levels near the summit. Either of
these events alone would have captured the interest of those in Vancouver
watching the remote sensing equipment, but together they might be an indicator
of some large, messy trouble to the good people of northern California. It was
deemed worthy of some eyes on the ground in the area, and who better than the
brilliant guy whose intellect threatened every boss he had in the home office?

So here Kevin was, in a small rental on the slopes of the mountain, paid for
by the U.S. government, and watching a mountain that might decide to explode.
He had no idea that events were already in motion that would make that
somewhat improbable event look inconsequential in comparison.

The eggs he made were great, he had been getting them from Sadie down the
road, who raised her own, thank you very much.

"Free roaming," he said aloud to no one, and finished off the plate.

He turned on his computer, and brushed his teeth while it booted up. He
paused, toothbrush in hand when he heard the error alert. He tried logging on
again, and once again saw that the connection had failed.

"Hmm," he muttered.

He finished dressing (it was to be tan cargos and red flannel today), and saw
that his satellite television network was down as well.

"Hmm," he grunted again, his brow furrowed a bit.

His cell was dead too. And the landline.

He stayed silent, but his frown grew more pronounced.

***

Resource file: RF920758

(continued)

It was insane. There were cars everywhere, even that early in the morning.

I had a little more information than the average Joe was privy to, but I still
felt like I was in the dark. The sun had come up and we raided the breakfast
bar in the hotel meeting room (bagels, mostly, but they had hard boiled eggs
too, and Cassie ate nearly all of them). There were a few early risers in the
room as well, two couples and a guy who was obviously a trucker. There wasn't
much conversation, but what little there was focused on how the cable seemed
to be out and nobody could get a cell phone signal, either. Cassie and I just
exchanged a prolonged worried glance, and climbed into the Tahoe and headed
back toward the city.

Or tried to, anyway. The main arteries into the city were clogged with cars.
Our progress ground to a standstill.

She didn't say anything, but I could tell Cassie was tense, like a coiled
spring trapped in her seat. She started to speak, bit her lip and turned her
head, sighed, thought better of it, and then spoke anyway.

"I still don't think this is a good idea," she said.

"I know."

"But you're going to do it anyway."

"Yep."

"You know they'll see this coming."

"You've said that already," I offered.

"Because it's true. Right now I bet the ... upper echelons are hearing about
my failure to report. It won't take them long to figure out what's going on.
And then they'll come for us."

"Okay," I said. "I know you've said that you weren't in on the planning of
whatever this ... invasion ... is, but still. You lived with them. They taught
you. You're one of them ... kind of. What do you think their next move is
going to be?"

"I'm not sure. There was a plan that has been floating around Themiscyra for
some time, but it never had much traction ... but maybe now it does."

"Plan?"

She shook her head. "Not really, not in the sense of military campaigns you
might be familiar with. More of an idea. A concept."

"A concept of ... .?"

She sighed. "I don't know, maybe call it Operation Dark Ages. 'Cause that's
where they want to send you."

"Huh?"

"I told you, Amazons aren't all about technology. All things being equal, an
entire squad of human soldiers wouldn't have a chance against even one unarmed
Amazon warrior. But give the squad some new weapon ... give them The Bomb ...
or something more immediate, more useful, more ... portable ... "

"So something has happened that they see as a threat."

"I think so," Cassie agreed.

"And what's the goal?"

"I'd say the goal would be to set humankind back about 1000 years. Get rid of
a lot of that technology, and make the playing field a little more uneven.
More in their favor."

"How?"

"I don't know. But I think it would be a safe bet to say that they've probably
attacked the world's infrastructure in some big, fundamental way. And probably
a few relatively small, random attacks that are designed solely to impress the
witnesses. Mental warfare. To kill morale."

"So what would be their next move?"

She shook her head. "I don't know. It's just a guess, but I'd say they would
actually pull back. Maybe leave entirely. It wouldn't surprise me if they're
still trying to be stealthy about it."

"You call an outright attack 'stealthy?'"

"If they pulled back entirely, absolutely. The entire world hasn't has the
same experience you have, my dear. It doesn't know about us. Most people,
probably the majority, who met up with some Zons last night didn't live to
tell about it. And those that did, well, imagine how crazy and confused they
would sound. And then add to that the complete media blackout? No cell phones?
It would be tough, but conceivably, they could keep mankind in the dark for a
while, if they wanted to. And they probably do ... they were happy with the
status quo. They'd love to go back to you guys living in huts and castles,
ignorant to their existence. It would make hunting better."

"You sound like you're a little in awe of them."

"It's hard not to be. They're probably waiting around to see if what they have
done has started any wars."

"Oh, my God. They can do that?"

"Honey, they've done it."

"Really?"

"Yeah. But that's my idea. I think most of them might be gone, even now. And
right about now, they're compiling their reports of victory, and soon - if not
already - they'll notice one report missing. A report about the demise of a
certain Daniel Pittman. And then they'll send the Hunters."

"You say that like it's happened before, Cass."

"It has," she said, and chuckled when she saw me start a little bit. "What,
you think this is the first time somebody like me ... has had ... you know ...
feelings ... for someone like you?"

"You make it sound oh-so romantic, dear."

"It is what it is."

"Hey."

"And it's happened before. A few times, actually."

"I just figured with how you described them, you know, so warlike and all ...
I didn't think any of them would ... let something like that happen."

"Come on," Cassie said, nearly rolling her eyes. "You know enough about love
to know that you don't 'allow' anything to happen. Sometimes, it's there, and
it just can't be controlled, you know?"

"Boy, do I." I gave her a smile.

"Sometimes it's like this. Sometimes it's a scout, like me, who knows this
world better than most. Who might meet someone, and spend a lot of time around
them. And there's a few others who kind of think the way I do now, remember.
Not many, but some."

"Okay."

"And other times, it's after an attack, after a scouting party. A breeding
partner is brought home, and stays ... and kind of ... well, stays ... and
sometimes he lives a little longer than he should."

"Jesus."

"Well, it's happened. Sometimes, certain feelings develop, although in that
case, it's usually more of a motherly instinct kicking in, I think."

"Don't ever use the word 'motherly' when you talk about breeding partners,
okay? It's weird."

Even in her tense, aggravated mood, she scoffed a little at this.

"So, what then? They bring a guy home, do him a bunch of times, and suddenly
it's love?"

"Not usually. Usually, he wouldn't survive the night. Once his function is
done, so is his usefulness."

My blood turned a little cold the way it did when she talked like this.
"Okay."

"Hey, you wanted to know."

"Yeah."

"But yes, sometimes, if he's especially good or ... you know ... notable ...
he might be allowed to live for a while. And if it's long enough, certain
affections can develop. It's natural."

"Wait, so you think that the Amazon culture is, by its definition, a little
unnatural?"

"I'm here, with you, on the run, aren't I?"

"Point taken. What happens then?"

"The sister in question comes to her senses, and usually she'll ask a friend
or superior to make a visit, and ... resolve the situation. Usually while
she's away on a hunt, or errand."

"Oh boy."

"Yeah."

"What about when it's someone like you? Here? You know, away from the
motherland? Someone who maybe feels the way you do about how they do things?"

"Well, that's a little more difficult," she said.

"Lucy, you got some 'splaining to do," I chanted in poor attempt at a Cuban
accent. Cassie just looked at me, unsmiling. "That's ... that's from a TV
show. I Love Lucy. Way back in the ... "

"The 1950s. Yeah, I know. I was there, I went to a few tapings."

"Huh?"

"Laugh track?"

"You were in the studio audience?"

"Three times."

I shook my head, smiling. "Right. Sorry. I keep forgetting my girlfriend is a
nearly immortal Amazon. It's a thing."

"You're forgiven. I like the idea of you thinking of me as ... you know. Like
you. Normal. Ordinary."

"Honey, you're anything but ordinary."

"Thank you."

"So ... romances ... in this world?"

"Yeah," she trailed off, her eyes unfocused, distant. "Yeah, well. There's a
special unit. A squad of sisters, you could say. These romances, that scouts
sometimes fall into ... well, they're really rare, but when they happen,
there's a pattern. First, they get quiet. Then they report again, but way too
much, trying to cover themselves. It's obvious, but they do it. Then more
silence, and then they run. And when they do, sisters are sent to run them
down."

"Like bounty hunters?"

"Pretty much. But they don't like to send them out, especially when they're
trying to keep a low profile. The methods of the group ... of the leader ...
well, they're not exactly subtle."

"You sound like you have a grudge."

"Little bit." Her gaze fell, and she stared at her lap in silence.

"Hey, you okay?"

"Yeah. No problem." Cassie said, and pinched my cheek.

"Good," I said. "And also, ouch. Super strength, remember?"

"Sorry," Cass laughed, and leaned over and gave me a peck on the cheek.
"Better?"

"Definitely. You get lucky, I might let you pinch me more, later."

"Oh, mowwwrr," she laughed.

"So tell me more," I said. "This is kind of fascinating. Terrifying, and
fascinating."

The snarl of traffic before us loosened just a bit, and I was able to sneak up
few car lengths.

"This is no good. We need to be moving," Cassie said, her face placid but her
voice betraying her agitation.

"The traffic's too thick. I can't go any faster."

"Then we need to get off the road."

"The GPS is down, too. I could get off, take residential roads. But I'd
probably get us lost. What's the hurry? I thought you said going to Trevor's
was a bad idea."

"It is a bad idea, and if it were up to me, we wouldn't be doing it."

"He's my friend," I said. "And on top of that, I think he might have something
to do with why all this is happening."

"Care to enlighten me?"

"He came to me with some information about a new weapons technology his
company is developing. Or, was developing, now, I guess. Really strange stuff,
real cutting edge. They were calling it 'pulse technology.'"

"Okay. What is it?"

"I don't know. The science of it was beyond me. It dealt with supercharging
individual rounds of ammunition, making even a flesh wound a lethal injury.
But I think it might be more than that. But I have no idea how we're going to
follow it up. I'm hoping he can tell us."

There was a long pause in the conversation then, and I could feel Cassie
looking at me.

"You know what I'm going to say, don't you?" she asked.

"There's a chance."

"Daniel ... I ... I just don't want you to get your hopes up. If you're right,
if he is involved in this somehow, then there's a good chance ... "

"I'm still here, right?" I asked, a little too sharply. "Supposedly I was set
as a mark too, right? And I'm still alive."

"Only because I allowed it."

Her tone was as flat as her gaze, and I got that weird little chill again. I
loved this woman, but I could see just how strong the entire belief system of
her upbringing was. And every once in a while, it caught me off guard and was
a little disturbing.

"But I hope he's okay," she offered. "He's your friend, and I hope he's okay."

***

The entire world had gone crazy.

The system of governmental checks and balances, law enforcement and public
safety systems, and vital economic infrastructure of the western world really
was a marvel of modern complexity. However, like all things which have
outgrown their original design, the chances for disaster increase
exponentially with every increase in complexity.

Right now, every system was in chaos.

Special Agent Jennifer Carnes actually bent over in her seat and rested her
forehead on her desk and closed her eyes. She had always been an action
junkie, true, but this was ridiculous. She was going on her third day without
any sleep. Incredibly, even with everything she had seen in the past few hours
and with the storm of thoughts swirling in her head, her eyes slipped shut. A
dim, distant part of her mind realized she was falling asleep.

Good, she thought. Can't function like this. Can't concentrate. Maybe after
...

"Carnes!"

Her eyes snapped open and she sat up quickly, blinking the mist from her eyes.
She had expected to see McCall standing before her desk, his cigar stub
smoking, his grating voice barking some new order at her.

Instead, it was the face of Randy Timmons. He held a steaming Styrofoam cup in
front of her face. When the aroma of the coffee reached her, her senses came
back into focus a bit, and her stomach growled. She started as she realized
she hadn't eaten in nearly a whole day.

"Morning, sunshine," Randy grinned.

"Thanks," she said, taking the coffee. "What are you so happy about?"

"Are you kidding? This is what I signed up for. Action. Excitement."

"Randy a lot of people died last night. We think."

"Well, those people at that lab sure did."

He was right about that one. When they had finally arrived at the industrial
complex last night, the check-in McCall had expected at the gate was
unnecessary. The gate had been destroyed, torn from the track and nearly
ripped in half. The guardhouse had stood empty as well. And when they had
finally gotten to the lab ... well ... it was a scene that Jen would find hard
to forget. Whatever technology they had been scheduled to test the next day
was toast, the computer banks had been smashed, the physical equipment little
more than piles of twisted steel, ready for the trash heap. And the crew for
the test, both the mechanical tech services guy and the theoretical guys, the
statisticians? What bodies they could identify looked like they had been
dropped through a giant meat grinder.

And now there was a complete loss of communications. With everybody. So far
the bureau was starting an actual physical line of communication to
Washington, with messengers in cars trying to ferry information back and
forth, although it was still early enough that none had yet returned.

The default position of the Bureau, and what they guessed was the rest of the
government, was that a small coordinated strike against the country's vital
infrastructure has occurred, and that soon the situation would right itself.
Jen thought that it was even bigger than that, due to the ominous lack of
information from other parts of the globe; however, the rational part of her
mind scoffed at a worldwide coordinated attack. Some things just weren't
feasible, right?

But she still couldn't shake the feeling that whatever was happening was big.
Really big, and that it involved everybody, her included, and especially the
carnage they had uncovered at the lab's industrial grounds. There was a
certain tendency toward ego in this view, she knew, to believe that what she
had seen was so important when so much was going wrong ... but all the same,
it was a feeling from which she just could not escape.

"You're tired," Randy said, suddenly serious.

"Hell, yes. Aren't you?"

"Sure. But Brubaker came in to help cover our sector, I nabbed some shuteye a
little earlier." On McCall's order, any agent who could walk was being
summoned, in person, to report for duty. Even with this new standing order,
they were still painfully short-staffed. The office was never intended for use
as a day-to-day branch of the local police force. And this, along with
everything else, was compounded by the inability to talk to anyone, about
anything.

"God, I wish somebody would get the phones up."

"Listen, if you need a break, you know my place is right around the corner,"
Randy offered.

Jen was careful to nod and acknowledge this in a neutral fashion, without a
smile or frown. Randy had made his feelings about her plain some time ago.

It was a strange relationship, not because they worked together but because
they so often didn't. It was odd that their paths didn't cross more often,
being assigned to same field office. But quite often they were working
different cases, and it was fairly rare that they shared the same assignment.

Randy Timmons was a good guy, and Jen liked him well enough, but that's about
as far as she had wanted to take it. After considering it briefly, she had
decided he was a little too loose, a little too outgoing, loud, and well,
young for her. Which was strange, because Timmons was actually four years
older than she was, at least by the calendar. But the same laser-sharp drive
that had propelled her with so much notable force through her education and
stint in the service all too often also propelled her though her personal
life. Anyone who came off as less serious about their career (and presumably
their life) than she was became simply unacceptable as a potential partner. As
a result, she often felt like she was the adult, and Randy was just a big,
enthusiastic kid she had to look out for, even though she was the younger of
the two of them. A distant, remote part of her mind understood that this way
of thinking was probably unwise and elitist, but she couldn't help it. In the
end, she felt it was better to just roll with what she knew.

But that hadn't mattered to Randy. He had cornered her outside a downtown bar
one night the last December and had confessed both his feelings and his
awareness that nothing would come of them. Randy might have been a trifle
silly from time to time, but at least he had the self-awareness to recognize
the fact and own up to it. But he also told her that it wouldn't change the
way he felt, and he just wanted her to know that.

So, as gracious as the offer was, it was something that she had to politely
decline, even if three hours worth of sleep on a couch would have been just
fine at the moment.

"Thanks, Randy. But I think I'm needed here. We both are, I think."

"Right-o. Just know it's out there if ya need it," he said, with a perfect
balance of good manners and poorly concealed regret.

"Thanks."

"So ... what are you working on?"

"Right now, not much. Falling sleep at my desk, maybe," she said, and took a
tentative sip at the coffee. It was bitter, and strong, the way she liked it.
"Thanks for this, too."

"No problem," Randy answered. "I was just trying to pick your brain a little
bit."

"Not much there to pick, at the moment, I'm afraid."

She grew quiet then, thinking, sipping the hot, bitter brew intently. She
started a bit when Randy spoke after a moment.

"Man, listen to that," he said softly.

"What ... " Jen started to say, and then stopped as she realized she had
nearly whispered. She looked around the office. Full of people, most were
working dutifully at their desks, a few others were talking amongst themselves
in the same hushed voice she had found herself using. Every few seconds there
was a gentle rustle of papers. No phones rang, there were no loud exclamations
of laughter or irritation. It was a full, bustling FBI field office and it
sounded like a tomb.

"This is weird," Randy ventured. "I know most people are in the field, but
still ... "

Then the lights went out.

Somebody uttered a startled, strangled cry, and Jen turned her gaze toward the
now darkened ceiling.

The backup floodlights came on, filling the room with a sickly yellow glow.

"Oh, no."

"What is it?"

"Come on," she said, standing and pulling her dark blue blazer off the back of
her chair. "Let's go for a walk."

It was the same outside. Every once in a while, Jen hated it when she was
right. All up and down the block, there was a steady stream of people pouring
out onto the street.

"Damn."

"What is it, Carnes? What are you thinking?"

"I'm thinking we're in big, big trouble," Jen said, her brow knitted in worry.
"The entire city ... hell, the entire country goes dark, communication-wise,
in the middle of the night. Internet's down. Cell phones. And now, ten hours
later, we've got blackouts."

"Yeah?"

"So how many hours do you think the city could be run on battery power, on
generators?"

"Oh, I don't know. Half a day ... maybe a little ... .oh, boy. Power, too?"

"I'm just thinking out loud here," Jen said, glancing both ways down the
street.

"And what else are you thinking?"

"Water."

"That's what I was thinking, too," Randy nodded.

"Still ... "

"So you're saying somebody took out all social services and utilities?"

"Like I said, I'm just thinking here. And I'm starting to think that McCall
should get in touch with somebody in DC, and I mean pronto."

"Who?"

"The National Guard."

"Holy shit!" Randy exclaimed. "Are you serious?"

"As a heart attack. People can live without phones. Power is a different
story. Hospitals? Schools? Grocery stores? Without power, you won't be able to
even pump gas for a car."

"Oh, shit, I hadn't thought of that."

"Come on, let's go get Brubaker and Mellon, they can do the water check."

"But where are we going?"

"Call me crazy, but I think this has something to do with that thing last
night. That lab in the industrial park."

"Come on, Carnes, that was just one event. One of many. What makes you think
... "

"I don't know, okay? I just have a hunch. Something about it was off, and I
just have a really bad feeling about all this. But we need to move, now, and
get on this."

"Okay. I roll with you."

"What was the name of the lab's parent organization?"

"AdvanTech. Military and defense contractor. They owned the lab outright,
along with another testing facility down near the harbor."

"Not too shabby, Timmons."

"We aim to please. Also provided IT support and systems design for a few
private firms, mostly in the security and law enforcement field. Wells Fargo,
freight companies, Kent-Allan Security, stuff like that. Just inked a big deal
with that contractor, um ... CyTech Industries, I think."

"Nice. Who's there that we could talk to, I wonder?"

"On a Sunday? Probably not many. Especially given this," Randy said, and waved
a hand at the steady influx of people into the street. "Even if there is
someone there, the phones are down. It means going there in person."

"Corporate offices?"

"Outskirts of town," Randy nodded.

"Bingo."

"I'll drive," Randy said grimly.

CHAPTER 19

It was pretty quiet.

"Maybe they're gone for good," Kerrigan said, his fixed on the house in a
blank stare.

"But maybe they'll be back."

"How many times have you known anybody to come back after doing ... that?"

Detective Mitchell Herndon gulped a little. He had seen quite a number of
disturbing images in his 14-year career, but what they had stumbled across in
the early hours of the morning had upset him badly. The family in the house
hadn't just been murdered ... they'd been ... toyed with. By giants wielding
machinery, by the looks of it. And the father ... something in his guts rolled
over and he groaned a little, trying his best to forget the image.

"I'm really tired," Kerrigan whined.

"Jesus Christ, will you shut up for a little while?"

"But I am."

"You fall asleep and I'll report you."

"You would, wouldn't you?" Kerrigan groaned. "Nobody would know, and if they
did, they wouldn't care. But not you, not Mitch Hern.."

"Just, you know, shut it awhile, okay?"

"Mr. By the Book himself."

"Give it a rest."

Mitch looked out over the steering wheel of the plain black Crown Vic. He had
parked up the street just a little, just at the top of a gentle rise ... but
all the same, it was hard to conceal the car very well. It was a private road,
and there were only four houses on it. The one they watched, a big colonial at
the end of the turnaround, sat on the most land of all of them and it made
staying near it difficult. He had nudged the Crown Vic up to the edge of the
road, getting most of it under the low hanging branches of a willow. It would
have to be good enough. He checked his watch, sighed, and picked up the radio.

"Dispatch, this is BPD 597. Checking in at 1100 hours."

"Copy, car 597," the voice crackled back through the small speaker. "Logged at
1100."

"Dispatch, are the phones still down?"

"That's affirmative," the female voice said, and with that Mitch thought he
heard the first human emotion in her voice that he could recall ever hearing
... and it was one of irritation. "Phones are still inoperative. And most of
the city seems to be losing power as well."

"Oh, great."

"Exactly."

"Okay, dispatch, will radio again in approximately one hour."

"Copy that car 597, one hour."

"597 out."

He hung the mic back on the dash and sighed, and shifted down into his seat,
trying to get more comfortable. They had been waiting for nearly three hours,
ever since the coroner's van had left.

"You don't really expect them to come back, do you?"

Mitch allowed himself to think of the house's interior, the way he had seen it
hours earlier. It had been completely ransacked. Furniture overturned, tables
smashed. The inside of the house had been a study in rage and ruin, the bodies
an example of depravity itself. But the study ...

The study had been immaculate. It was well-equipped, with the newest ink jet
printer still warm on its desk. The chair was still neatly tucked under the
huge oak desk, papers and documents were still stacked neatly in plastic
trays, filing cabinets seemed in order ...

But something had struck Mitch as wrong, something he couldn't put his finger
on ... it took him nearly an hour to finally realize what it was that was
nagging him. The office was in fine shape, seemingly undisturbed ... but the
computer was gone.

The modest flat screen monitor still sat atop the oak desk, but the space
below for the tower itself was empty. And given this guy's position, it wasn't
hard to put two and two together. No, he didn't think the people responsible
were ever coming back, but right now, they didn't have much to go on. It was
best to sit ... and wait.

"Patience," Mitch said softly, and sighed.

It was as if he summoned the vehicle with his word. As soon as the sigh had
left his lips, he heard the soft crunching of gravel in the distance behind
them.

"Heads up," he said softly, and turned his gaze to his rearview mirror.
Kerrigan stopped in mid-yawn and craned his neck around. "Stay down," Mitch
whispered. Both men sank into their seats and tried to stay out of sight as
much as the design of the car and the tint of the windows would let them.
Mitch looked over his shoulder, waiting.

The truck rolled past on the gravel road, its tires crunching softly on the
gray rocks. It was a black Chevy SUV, the windows nearly as dark as the ones
on the cruiser, and there was no indication the occupants had noticed them as
it passed fifteen feet to their left. Mitch and his young partner held their
breath as it pulled in front of the house, paused, and then came to a gentle
stop in the turnaround in the street.

"Holy shit," Kerrigan muttered, a fine sweat breaking out on his brow.

"Behold. The wisdom of Herndon," Mitch whispered back, never taking his eyes
off the truck.

Whoever it was, they were acting as dodgy as suspects would have been. For a
good three or four minutes, nothing moved.

"What are they ... " Kerrigan started to say, and then stopped as they saw the
passenger door open.

A young woman got out, and walked slowly to the front of the vehicle, never
taking her eyes off of the house. She watched the front door for a moment, and
Mitch saw late morning sunlight reflect off her blonde hair as she turned her
head to the truck, she said something to the driver and then he got out, too.
He was a tallish guy, with dark brown hair, in a white shirt with khakis. He
joined her at the front of the vehicle, and Mitch noticed he moved with a tiny
limp in his right leg.

"You seeing this?" Kerrigan asked unnecessarily.

"Yep."

"Should we go down there?"

"Wait ... .wait for it ... "

The two moved the front door, and even from this distance, Mitch could see the
enormous amount of caution and care they were using. It reminded him of a
National Geographic film he had once seen, where a herd of zebras had crept up
to a water hole in the middle of a dry season, even though they suspected it
contained crocodiles. And when the reptiles did spring forth, it was still a
surprise, even after all that caution.

"Look at that," Kerrigan said softly. "What are they waiting for?"

"They don't want to go in there any more than we do," Mitch answered.

The duo seemed to nod to each other, and they slipped through the front door
into the structure.

"Then why did they go inside?" Kerrigan asked.

Mitch pulled his 9mm from its holster and clicked the safety to the 'off'
position. "Because there's nowhere else to drink," he said.

"What?"

He shook his head. "Never mind. Come on, let's go."

"Danny, I'm sorry."

He just nodded, silent. His eyes wandered over the wreckage of the inside of
the house, his expression curiously blank.

Cassie stepped closer to him and laid a gentle hand on his shoulder. "I'm
sorry. But now we know. And we can't stay. We have to go."

"Maybe they weren't here."

"Danny ... "

"Maybe Trevor and Lizzie had taken the kids somewhere, maybe they weren't here
when they came."

Cassie's eyes met his own, and even though she nodded half-heartedly, he could
see the gentle look in her eyes. "Maybe. Maybe so."

Dan just shook his head sadly from side to side. "They loved this house.
Lizzie, especially. They were such good people, Cass. You would have liked
them."

"I'm sure I would have, Danny, but we need to go, now. Seriously. Please."

"I can't believe it looks like this now," he said, the slightest waver to his
voice. "it was always so neat. Tidy. And now ... " his voice trailed off
weakly, his arm raised in a pathetic display gesture, waving in the direction
of the shattered living room. His eyes were distant, vacant, and he didn't see
Cassie's expression darken in concern.

"Daniel, listen. There isn't time for this, all right? There isn't time.
Later. Do you hear me?"

"What?"

"Later. We can mourn them later. I promise you. But right now you have to
focus. I need you to focus."

Dan turned away from her suddenly, a light gasp his only sound. Cassie looked
over her shoulder, and immediately saw the cause: a large brownish-red smear
had been drawn across the white stone wall near the fireplace. There was a
big, thick round spot, with several passes drawn back and forth below it, each
one a little less distinct than the one above it. She touched the dried stain
with her fingertip, and rubbed the tip with her thumb.

"Hmm ... this is older than I first thought. This probably didn't happen last
night."

Dan didn't answer her, only looked at her with his same blank stare.

"Which is good, in a way."

"How the hell is that a good thing?"

"Because it lessens the chances of them still being here," Cassie explained
patiently. "But we still can't linger. We have to go."

"Why? You just said ... "

"Yes, I know. They might not be here, but other people are. Did you see that
car we passed on the road?"

Dan didn't answer that he hadn't; he didn't have to.

"Well, there were two people in it, and I think they're police officers.
They're watching the house, right now, and they're probably on the way right
now."

"But..."

"Daniel, we need to go. Now, soldier. This isn't the mission right now."

Something clicked into place for Dan then. It was a change so fundamental, it
was nearly audible. It was certainly visible. He blinked his vision clear,
straightened his shoulders, and nodded.

"Okay. Right. But first we should get some information. The reason they came
here at all, I think."

"Okay ... .but hurry, please," Cassie said. "We have to go."

"No, you don't," Herndon said from the doorway. "Don't move."

***

The bunker looked like something from a bad 1950s thriller, but McCraddock
supposed that the facility fulfilled its purpose well enough. From this large,
darkened office, the President theoretically could contact all branches of the
military, as well as have an open line of communication with the White House
Situation Room. Various rooms branched off the West Tunnel, each one providing
a specific function. One served as a cafeteria. Another was the compound's
hospital. Several crew quarters. And, of course, the living quarters for the
President.

The Army Corps of Engineers had hollowed out a good portion of the Virginia
mountain's granite way back in the early 50s, in the hopes of creating a
nuclear bomb-proof refuge close to Washington. They had succeeded, although
the facility had never been tested for that specific purpose, and, God
willing, never would. But the 34-ton blast door at the mouth of the tunnel
afforded a sense of security, and the compound proved useful during the Cuban
Missile Crisis, a sudden and mysterious northeastern power outage, and again
during the events of 9/11. Mt. Weather was designed to keep 200 people alive
for over a month, in perfect seclusion and protection, filtering air and
treating its own water, keeping those inside removed from whatever events that
had brought them there.

And now, the cacophony of voices and chaos faded as they were all ushered from
the room, and the heavy door clicked shut behind them with an echoing report.
The Naval officer with the nuclear football sat in a metal chair by the door,
his back stiff, his posture one of steadfast vigilance. Merton Banks, special
advisor to (and longtime friend of) the President lay on a cot against the far
wall, his tie loose, his collar unbuttoned. Hargrove himself sat in office
chair at a small metal desk near the center of the room, his exhaustion now
evident.

The old guy's spirits had been pretty good up till now, but now the inevitable
'crash' had arrived. Heavy bags of exhaustion swelled under his dark eyes, and
his craggy face seemed even craggier by the minute. He had finally been
brought a proper suit after nearly an hour, but he had left the coat off and
left his collar unbuttoned. Hargrove wiped at his eyes with his fingertips,
and sighed.

"Is there any word from Washington, Jack?"

"I'm afraid not, Mr. President."

"The Secretary of Defense? Billy?"

McCraddock shook his head. "No, sir."

"What about your people out in Montana? Could they find the Vice-President?"

"We're not sure, sir. Right now, it seems all communication systems are still
down; cell and internet access is nonexistent, and we're only getting
intermittent reports from Washington, and that's over the radio."

"Radio?"

"Yes, Mr. President."

"What kind of radio?"

"Citizen's Band, Mr. President."

"Cripes. I'm the President of the United States, and I'm talking to truckers
and ham radio enthusiasts."

"Salt of the Earth," Banks volunteered from his cot, and Hargrove waved him
off in a motion that spoke at once of minor irritation and time-tested
familiarity.

"I feel ... .like a mole in here," Hargrove complained, and sighed deeply. "I
never thought I would run from a fight."

"You had to," Banks offered.

"What?"

"Constitutionally bound, right?" Banks asked, and gestured to Jack. Hargrove
turned to the man in charge of his security detail.

"That's true," McCraddock agreed. "In this case, we're somewhat limited in
what we could have done, sir. We're legally bound to keep you, and the chain
of command, safe."

"And you have, but at what cost?" Hargrove asked. "My God, Jack. Lisa Barrow?
What the hell is going on?"

In the confusion of the evacuation and the laser-focused determination to do
his job, Jack had managed to put the episode out of his mind. Now, with time
and distance, it swam back into focus. Lisa's uncomprehending look, the way
her head snapped back when the slug traveled through her forehead ...

"Based on our intel, it seemed the right thing to do at the time, sir. It may
still be the right thing, even now. We won't know for quite some time, I
think."

"What intel?"

"Just as the situation began to spin out of control on the grounds, sir, we
received some preliminary reports of a series of security breaches, each one
closer to the White House. Then, one by one, we started losing contact with
sentries, and then the decision was made to get you and as many advisors and
staffers out of there as quickly as we could."

"But what does that have to do with Li ... .with what you did ... with what
happened?"

Jack sighed, his cool, calm demeanor cracked the tiniest bit by the strange
nature of his information. "Sir, the only intel we had at the time referred to
a woman, or women, who ... somehow ... contributed to the series of breaches.
I am simply unable to describe it any better than that, sir; the information
was sketchy at best, but we received several reports that warned of female
members of the security and staff detail, and that they apparently were in on
the events that transpired."

"Jesus. But what did happen, Jack? We don't even know exactly what happened,
let alone who is responsible."

"I'm afraid that's true, Mr. President. But I'd say it's a safe assumption
that there was an attempt on your life last night."

"Not just his," Banks piped up from the other side of the room. "We couldn't
find most of the Joint chiefs, remember. Or many members of the Cabinet."

"What about my wife?" Hargrove asked. "Is there any word about my wife?"

Jack paused, then slowly shook his head. "No, sir. I'm sorry. Nothing. But ...
but I'm sure she is fine, and will be here shortly. There are good men on her
detail, and ... "

"Stop treating me like a mushroom, Jack."

" ... and ... what? Uh, what, sir?"

"Isn't that what you do to mushrooms? Keep them in the dark and feed them
shit?"

Jack shifted on his feet, unsure of himself, and relaxed only when he saw
Hargrove and Banks exchange a weary, tired smile.

Hargrove nodded, and gazed at the floor. "I wish she were here," he said
softly. Jack shifted his feet uncomfortably, and glanced at Banks, who only
watched Hargrove with a mixture of sadness and concern. And then the moment
passed.

"I'll tell you what, though," Hargrove said, his gaze firm, his mouth set.
"People died tonight. And not just in Washington, either. And when we find out
who is responsible, we're going to make them pay."

"Yes, Mr. President."

***

Resource file: RF920758

(continued)

I froze, and even though I had never broken any law more significant than a
speed limit, I instinctually raised my hands the second I saw the pistol in
his hand.

He was definitely a cop, I could tell right away. He was a couple of years
older than me, and he wore a plain, generic suit. He was starting to lose his
hair a little, and sported the ever-present 'cop mustache,' which matched the
same shade of black as his receeding hairline. His eyes were bright and his
gun hand didn't waver.

I couldn't say the same for his partner. He was a younger guy, probably only
in his mid or late 20s or so, with dirty blonde hair and the beginnings of a
pot belly. He was definitely the more squirrelly of the two; his eyes darted
back and forth between me and Cassie every couple of seconds, as if he
couldn't decide on which one of us to watch more carefully. Eventually he
decided on me ... if it had been one of her 'sisters' instead of Cassie, that
might have been a fatal mistake.

"Okay, keep your hands up, please. I'm Detective Herndon of the Baltimore
Police Department," he said calmly. "You've entered a crime scene, and we're
just going to have a little talk about that, okay? All right. This is
Detective Kerrigan here, and he's going to check you for weapons, and what
not, and then we'll talk a little bit, all right?"

Kerrigan stepped forward, turning his finger around in a circle gesture to
Cassie. "Turn around, please. Hands on your head."

Cassie obliged, and just for a second I saw both of the officers take in her
figure as she raised her arms skyward, her hands laced together on her head.
Her gaze met mine, her eyes worried, her face holding a strange pinched
expression. She made a tiny tilt of her head in the direction of the cop as he
bent down behind her; I immediately frowned and tried to shake my head a bit.
She rolled her eyes and sighed.

"Do you have any firearms, knives or needles on your person?" Kerrigan asked
routinely.

"No sir," Cassie answered.

"Okay then. Spread your legs apart just a bit, please. Thank you."

He patted her down quickly, his touch pausing just a bit when he tapped the
inside of her lower thigh. I could see his surprise at the firmness of
Cassie's leg; he tapped the same spot twice more, his brow rising a bit.

"Okay," he said, rising, and with a click of polished metal he had one of
Cassie's wrists in a handcuff, and pulled her arm down before her. She looked
at me again, rolling her eyes in annoyance, and slowly dawning irritation. I
shook my head again, and once more she sighed in frustration. After a moment
the detective was finished and she stood handcuffed before him.

"Thank you, if you could just have a seat, there, ma'am. Thank you," Kerrigan
said, and again there was the slight hesitation as he was caught again by
Cassie's appearance. She flashed him an irritated smile and sat, her cuffed
hands in her lap, on a wooden kitchen chair which the other cop, Herndon, had
turned upright for her.

"And you? Any weapons, knives, or needles on you?"

I shook my head, and waited with my hands on my head as I was checked as well.
It was clear which of them was the one in charge of the operation.

"My name is Daniel Pittman, I'm a friend of Trevor Ainsbury, the man who owns
this house," I said.

"All right, Daniel," Herndon said. "Do you have any I.D. on you?"

"In my wallet, in my truck," I answered.

"Okay. And you, miss?"

"My name is Cassandra O'Connor. I'm Dan's ... I work with Dan."

"Right. And do you have any I.D.?"

She shook her head.

"Okay. And where do you all work?"

"For Kent-Allan. Downtown. They're a defense contractor that does security
work for the military and industrial ... "

"Yes, I know who they are and what they do, Mr. Pittman."

"Trevor works for AdvanTech, we met professionally and became friends."

"And why did you come out here today, of all days?"

"Well, with everything that was going on, I ... I just wanted ... to check in
with him, you know ... I couldn't get in touch with him and I became concerned
... "

"So you ran right here, is that it?" Herndon asked. His face was the perfect
picture of impassivity. I couldn't tell if he believed me, or was mocking me,
or genuinely asking me a simple question. I found it disconcerting. He was a
good cop.

"Yes, sir." Kerrigan had finished and now I had my hands cuffed in front of me
as well.

"All right," he said, nodding. "Okay. I appreciate the information. What we're
going to do is pretty simple, all right? We're going to go out to the car, and
I'll have to run a background check. If everything checks out, you guys can be
on your way, all right?"

"Detective, please, my friend, Trevor? Did something happen here? Can you tell
me, please?"

"Sir, I'll be happy to answer your questions as best I can, but only after the
checks, all right?" Herndon asked, and then gestured toward Cass with his left
arm. "Miss? Could you come with me, please?"

Cassie stood, and looked at me as she stepped closer to him. For the first
time, she looked unsure of herself, unsure of what to do. We really have
entered the undiscovered country, I thought to myself.

I gave her a shake of the head and nodded in the cop's direction. She frowned
and allowed him to take her arm just above the elbow (he paused, too, looking
at his hand on her arm in surprise). He led her outside. After a moment, I
couldn't hear their feet on the gravel anymore.

"You say your I.D. is in your vehicle?" Kerrigan asked, trying to copy the
easy, authoritative voice of his partner, and doing a poor job of it. He then
asked me a few questions, most of which had already been asked by his partner.

"Where is he taking Cassie?" I asked, trying not to sound overly concerned.

"They're just going up the road to our cruiser. It's easier for us to ... it's
better if we get separate statements on an occasion like this."

"We're not lying or giving you guys a hard time. Things are a little crazy out
there today, and I wanted to check on Trevor."

"Um-hmm."

"I know that sounds fishy with whatever obviously happened here recently, but
it's the truth."

"All right."

"If you just check on our information ... "

"You say you have your I.D.?"

"Yes, sir, my driver's license. My keys ... " I said, gesturing with my head
toward my left front pocket. The detective made a motion to get the keys when
we heard the new voice come from the top of the stairs, and we both froze.

"Uncle Danny?" it said.

***

With the traffic as bad as it was, it took Carnes and Timmons far longer to
reach the AdvanTech corporate offices than it would have on a normal day.
People hadn't panicked, exactly, but there was a low, simmering unease that
pervaded the day in the faces of the drivers they passed.

"This is weird," Randy said as he swung the bureau's black Mercury around a
stalled station wagon. "This whole thing. This whole day. It just feels ...
off."

Jen just stared at the faces as they passed, knowing her own expression must
seem a lot like the ones she was seeing. "They're scared," she said softly.
"They don't know what to do yet. So I'm not worried ... yet. As long as their
confused, they're ... " she sought for the word. It took her a moment to find
it, and when she did, she found it left a bad taste in her mouth.

"Confused?" Randy offered.

" ... manageable," Jen finished.

"But what happens after that? If things don't change? If they don't get
better?"

"Here's to hoping that doesn't happen," Jen muttered and then fell silent,
watching more sullen, confused faces glide by.

"Okay, so, we quiz them about the lab, right?"

"That's the plan," Jen answered as they strode toward the huge black glass
doors of the building. The structure itself was quiet, on a quiet street more
than three miles from the expressway. There were a few cars scattered
throughout the parking lot, but no visible activity to speak of.

"How far do you think this goes?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you've gone all Sixth Sense with this whole thing. You said you think
whatever is going on is connected to that lab?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I do."

"Well, what about all those other defense contractors? Kent-Allan? CyTech?
Shouldn't we check on all those, too?"

Carnes sighed as they stopped in front of the glass doors to the lobby. "One
thing at a time, Randy. If something stinks here, I get the feeling it'll
stink there as well."

"Okay. Sounds reasonable."

Randy went to take a step into the glass, and stopped short when the doors
didn't open automatically. He paused, confused, then rolled his eyes. "Power,"
he said aloud, more to himself than to her, and stepped back with a shake of
his head. He pressed the 'talk' button in the gray keypad next to the door,
but there was no sign of it working. Half a minute passed.

"Uh ... "

Jen reached out and rapped on the dark glass four times, hard enough to make
the glass vibrate loudly in the frame and make her knuckles protest. Nothing.
Randy repeated her knock, and again they waited.

"Nobody home, I guess," Randy said, and shrugged. The agents stepped back from
the building and gazed skyward at the tall glass façade.

"Yeah, but ... " Jan thought aloud, her brow furrowed in thought. Something
wasn't right. She didn't yet know what it was, but something was ... off...

"Maybe after some crews get out here and they can get power back on we can"""

"Hey!" Carnes nearly shouted, her eyes wide in sudden realization. "Look.
Cars, right?" She pointed to the two dozen or so vehicles that littered the
building's parking lot.

"Yeah. People might have left them here, or they're just inside and can't hear
us knocking, or maybe ... "

"Yeah, but look." Carnes made a sweeping motion at the building with her hand.
"What do you see?"

"A building we can't go in."

"Because?"

"There's no power," Randy said, and when he looked back at the building he
froze.

"Which is strange because ... "

"None of the windows are open," Randy finished, and looked at Carnes with an
obvious mixture of admiration and poorly disguised affection.

"Yeah. With no AC, that building would get to be like a sauna, and I mean, in
a hurry. So, cars means people, but ... this."

"Uh-hmm," Randy nodded, but he had already turned away and was halfway back to
the door. Jen trotted to catch up, and as they stepped onto the door mat they
both unconsciously pulled the hem of their jackets away from their belts,
putting their Bureau badges on full display.

Randy raised his hand to knock on the darkened glass once more, but he didn't
get chance. The door swung open and a tall brunette stepped out, her shoulder
squared against the heavy glass.

"Hi there," she half-grunted against the obvious weight of the door. "We saw
you earlier, but with no power we couldn't figure out how to get this door
open. It's automatic, you know," she said as if in apology. "What can I do for
you?"

"Well, ma'am, we're with the local office of the FBI and we're trying to
collect some information about some rather odd events last night," Carnes
said, her voice falling into the usual pitch and meter it took on when
conducting official business. She glanced at Randy at the appropriate time, as
well, at the point when they made eye contact and Randy would offer her a
supporting nod or glance.

She didn't get it this time, however; Randy's attention was fixed on the woman
holding the door open. She was tall, really tall. And leggy. She wore a skirt
that was an inch or two above the knee, dark green in color, and a frilly
white blouse that was just the right size to show off how trim (and relatively
busty) she was. She wore small rectangular glasses, and her jet black was tied
in a loose bun on the top and back of her head, twirled in a loose pile that
seemed the very definition of stylishly unkempt, yet somehow business-office
appropriate. Sure, Carnes could see that the woman was very attractive, but
Randy's eyes seemed glued to her.

"FBI?" the woman said with audible alarm, her mouth open in a small "O" shape
of surprise.

"Don't worry, we just have a few ... a few questions," Randy half said, half
stammered.

"Questions?" the woman repeated, and raised an eyebrow, her gaze stuck in
Randy's direction. Incredibly, Carnes could see a thin, fine sweat break out
on brow of her partner.

"About the ... the incident at your lab last night. Down by the river, the
waterfront district?"

The woman pulled her gaze back to Jennifer, but it took an obvious force of
will. "Oh, that," she said, as if referring to a minor office mix-up rather
than an assault on a multi-million dollar laboratory. "Yes, that was just
awful, wasn't it?"

"Uh ... .well ... that's one word for it, I suppose," Carnes agreed slowly.
She struggled to keep her voice even, but inside, her mind was whirling.
Something was off about this whole exchange, more than just the exceptional
events of this day. Randy would have made a comment about her 'spider sense
tingling' if he had been more aware of anything but the woman's hemline. "We'd
like to ask you a few questions, if you don't mind," Carnes finished.

"Well ... I ... I'd love to help, Agent ... ?"

"Carnes."

" ... Agent Carnes, really I would, but ... well, gosh, I'm just the
secretary, I don't really think I know anything that you'd find important."

Did she just say, 'Gosh?'

Jennifer glanced sideways again, and was dismayed to see Randy just staring
on, gazing at the woman in undisguised fascination.

"Well, then I'll just talk to you and some of your co-workers, then, just to
do some information gathering. The more things we get, the more complete our
investigation will be."

"I don't think so. I mean, I'm not sure ... I just don't know how to ...
.gosh, Mrs. Carnes, I don't know if I ... "

"Ms. Carnes."

"Oh."

"Could I ... could we speak to your superior, then?"

The woman bristled a little, visibly at that question, at that term. She had
turned back to gaze at Randy, but now her head jerked suddenly to face Carnes
again, and just for an instant Carnes could see her brow darken in surprise
... and maybe the first hint of anger?

"My superi ... ..hmm. Well ... my immediate commander isn't here at the
moment."

"Commander?"

The woman looked Carnes up and down, and now obvious irritation flashed in her
strikingly bright blue eyes. "My boss. She's not here. Nobody here can answer
your questions. I suggest you come back later."

"That's a suggestion?"

"Hey, Jen. Come on, maybe we could ... ." Randy said softly, finally coming
out of his temporary fugue.

She raised a hand slightly in his direction. "All right, well, surely you'd
want to help a federal investigation, right?"

The woman's sparkling blue eyes were fixed on Jen's own, and now Jen could
feel the spite burning in her gaze.

"Of course," the woman said with poorly concealed venom.

"Then, perhaps we could come in and do some preliminary questioning around
your office?" Jen's phrase, given her tone, was only a question in terms of
sentence structure.

The woman's gaze remained locked on Carnes' own for a long moment, long enough
for Jen to worry to herself, Damn, she really isn't going to let us in. But
then a cold, icy smile spread across the woman's face and she broke the
stalemate by looking back to Randy.

"Surely. Come right in," she said, and pushed the door open wider with one
hand.

"All right," Randy said with a falsely genial smile and the awkward tone of a
man who is aware women are quarreling before him and doesn't precisely know
why. He stepped inside while Carnes waited, her brow furrowed in thought.

The woman led them down a long interior hallway, the quiet of the office
building oppressive around them. They let her get a comfortable amount of
space ahead of them, and then Randy leaned down to Jen as they walked.

"What's going on? What's with the fireworks?"

"I don't know, something's wrong."

"Jesus, here we go. You and your hunches."

"I'm telling you something is up. She doesn't want us in here."

"Neither would I after your little routine out there."

"And did you see her open the door just now? Before, it was all she could do
to get it open and hold it there. But now? Whoosh," Jen finished, and made a
one-handed pushing gesture. "What's up with that?"

Randy paused for a moment, now unsure of himself. "You're paranoid," he said,
but with a trace of uncertainty.

"Don't think so. She's up to something. This place is up to something. This
whole thing is just ... off."

The woman before them turned abruptly, letting them close the distance with
her as she shrugged, now as seemingly good-natured as she ever was. "See? Not
much going on," she offered. "Mostly just administrative stuff, clerical
matters. A lot of what happened last night in still being sorted out, by the
higher-ups, you know," she said with a 'give me sympathy' nod.

Another woman dressed in stereotypical secretarial fashion stepped out from a
doorway behind her, although this woman was blonde and a few years younger
than the first. She was just as tall though, and of equally striking
appearance. "Uh ... um, hello. Who are your friends, Dina?"

"These are two FBI agents who are going to help us get to bottom of last
night's ... .occurrence ... at the waterfront lab," Dina replied with a
shit-eating grin that set off every alarm in Jennifer Carnes' mind.

"Oh, all right. How ... how nice," the blonde said, her shock quite evident.
She looked around, almost comically, at the hallway, at the wall, at the stack
of manila folders in her hand. "Uh ... that's great," she finished lamely.

"Yes. I'm sure it is. Maddy, could you tell everyone that the agents are here,
and would like to take a few statements as to recent events."

"Really?" the blonde's shock was even more evident, and now bordered on a
minor panic attack.

"Really."

"Uhh ... okay." In a flash she was gone through another doorway.

"She seemed a little nervous," Jen remarked carefully.

"Did she? I didn't notice," Dina said dismissively. "Can I get you some coffee
... .?"

"Timmons. Agent Timmons."

"Agent Timmons?"

"No, no thank you."

"Ms. Carnes?"

"Agent Carnes. And no, thanks. We'd rather get right to it, rather than, you
know ... stall for time."

"I see. Very well. You can follow me."

The woman named Dina turned and took them through a large open work area, with
rows of desks and computers that filled the room. Maddy, the nervous blonde,
passed by them, going the other way, and Jen though that she looked more
concerned than ever. They slowly made their way through the maze of desks,
stepping over trash cans and around three-sided cubicles.

In addition to the desks and computers, the large room was also filled with
secretaries.

Jen's eyes darted around the room, taking in the surreal scene quickly. There
were 25 or 30 desks in the long, open room, and probably a dozen or so women
flitting about, moving stacks of manila folders from place to place, shuffling
papers and the like. One was even moving a computer tower from desk to desk. A
quick glance to the side told her that Randy still hadn't picked up on
anything amiss; his face still bore the same, sleepy/happy expression. But to
Jen, it was obvious.

A large number of secretaries, but no bosses. And no men. Of the dozen or more
people in the room, none were male. And each woman was a magazine
advertisement come to life, the epitome of the stereotypical 'attractive
female office professional.' Most were dressed in nearly the same fashion as
Dina: a sensible skirt, a white frilly blouse; some wore light business
jackets. Nearly all of them wore glasses. Most of them were tall, and
extraordinarily leggy; a handful were downright striking in their stature; Jen
was sure that at least four of them were no less than six-footers.

She could see Dina eyeing them as she led them through the room, and trying
hard to conceal the furtive glances she cast at the two agents. Once on the
other side, Jen held Randy back and spoke quickly in a hushed voice.

"See? What's wrong with this picture?"

Randy was practically drooling. "Nothing. This is the most ... amazing ...
office ... ever."

"Look. They're shuffling around, but not actually doing anything."

"You're paranoid. Look," he said, and gestured.

Dina was waiting for them at the end of the hall, one hand on the edge of an
open door, the other resting on her hip, which was cocked fetchingly - and a
little arrogantly -- to one side.

"See? Not much going on, I'm afraid."

"I couldn't help but notice that you and your co-workers are just moving some
things around? It looks like you're removing a lot of files."

"Mmm-hmm. Reference materials," Dina said curtly.

"Reference materials?"

"Out with the old, in with the new," Dina intoned humorlessly. "We're just
using the spare time to archive some of the old materials that have been
stacking up around the office. We're storing them in here," she offered,
gesturing into the small room, which Jen and Randy could see was a small
storage closet. The left wall was nearly hidden by tall stacks of boxes filled
with file folders.

"Reference materials," Jen repeated, her eyes locked on Dina's.

"Yes. Please, come on in," Dina said, and waved them into the space. "You're
more than welcome to check the material, if you like," she added, with a grin
that Jen thought could be described as only chilling.

Randy followed her inside, and Jen stepped in after him a little more warily.
He turned to inspect the wall of boxes before him.

"So this is the bulk of the work you're doing?" he asked vaguely.

"Yes, for instance, these boxes to the right, up here ... ." Dina began,
pointing.

She was very fast.

Randy looked up to where Dina pointed, close to her gesturing hand. In a
flash, her hand was against the side of his head, palm flat, and with no
obvious effort, she thrust sideways, driving Randy headfirst into the wall.
His skull impacted the wall with a sickening, hollow 'bonk' sound, and he
collapsed with a sigh into a motionless heap in the corner.

Even though she half-expected something to happen, Jen was shocked at the
speed and ease of the other woman. Dina had moved so fast she had been almost
a blur. Jen's right dropped and began to pull back her jacket as she went for
her gun.

"Fre---" she started to say, but didn't get to finish.

In a flash, Dina turned and was on her. A chop with her left hand sent Jen's
gun-seeking hand off to the side, everything south of her elbow numb and
throbbing. Dina's right hand, its fingers curled into a strange, blade-like
shape, landed on Jen's upper middle chest.

In that flashing quarter-second that seemed to go on forever, Jennifer Carnes
saw the brunette woman's eyes flash with an icy malice that nearly made her
own heart stop, her mind simply saying 'No, no no - nobody is that fast,' and
then the woman's hand moved with a strange, tiny pulsing strike against Jen's
breastbone, and the world went suddenly, completely dark, and she knew nothing
more.

***

"Uncle Danny?" the tiny voice said.

The hair on the back of Dan's neck went up as he instantly recognized the
voice. He craned his neck around to lookup the huge staircase that filled the
right side of the room, and the detective, Kerrigan, copied his motion.

She stood at the top of the stairs, looking exactly as he remembered her. Her
dark blonde hair was in total disarray, though; it stood off from her head in
frayed and knotted bunches. She wore a rumpled white T-shirt that was two
sizes too big (probably one of her father's, Dan thought), and a pair of red
and green checked plaid pajama bottoms. Her bare feet were dirty, her toes
curled over the edge of the first stair at the top.

"Ellie?" Dan called.

"Ohmigod-ohmigod-ohmigod!" the girl chanted as she ran down the steps, her
voice nearly lost over the thrumming of her feet on the carpeted steps. She
didn't even make it to the bottom of the stairs; she jumped the last four
steps, a teenage bundle of tussled hair, tear-streaked cheeks, and hoarse
sobbing.

Danny tried to raise his arms to catch her, but the handcuffs he wore made it
difficult. Ellie landed on him with a thump, her thin frame hanging from him
as she encircled his neck with her arms, and drew her face to his chest, her
body wracked with sobs of simultaneous anguish and relief.

"Who ... what's going on?" Kerrigan asked shrilly.

"It's the daughter. Ainsbury's daughter," Dan explained, and tried to return
her embrace the best he could. "Hey there, Ellie," Dan said to her gently.
"Are you all right?"

"Noooooo," she moaned, her shoulders quivering, her face wrinkled up as she
struggled to cry, breathe, and talk all at the same time. "Not really."

"It's all right, sweetheart, it's okay. You're going to be fine. You're gonna
be fine."

"Where have you been?" the cop asked her, his expression one of wide wonder.
"We've been going through this house for two days! Where were you all this
time?"

"Hey, hey, relax, all right? Look at her," Dan said, annoyed. "Christ, man."

"All right, okay, sorry. But what happened? Were you here the whole time?"

Ellie released her grip on Dan's neck and slid down to stand on the ground,
down to the 5-foot-2 height that Dan remembered. Her face was still red and
flushed, but she managed to get herself under control, for the moment, and she
swiped away the wetness on her cheeks with quick, savage wipes of her left
hand. "I ... uh ... I was here, I was in my room."

"The whole time?"

"Yeah," she said, nodding. "The whole time," she said, and began crying again.

"Shhh, come on now, El. Deep breath," Dan offered, and tried to console her as
well as he could with his hands bound.

"Why ... .why do you have ... these?" she asked, looking at the steel manacles
encircling Dan's wrists. Then sudden mistrust darkened her eyes. "You ... you
didn't ... you couldn't ... "

"No! no, sweetie, no, of course not. There's no way I could ever have had
something to do with this. But you ... what happened?"

Ellie thumped down into a plush leather recliner, the very image of physical
and emotional exhaustion. "I don't know," she cried, her hands trembling. "It
was so ... so weird. It was horrible ... ." She began to sob again.

"You've got to try, honey, you've got to try to tell me what's been going on
here, what happened here, okay? It's important."

"O ... okay."

"Where's ... where's your dad?" Dan asked her gently.

Ellie's eyes flicked up to meet Dan's as her face turned a new shade of
scarlet. She tried to speak, faltered, then steeled herself, fresh tears
spilling down her cheeks.

"He's dead," she said in a tiny voice.

Dan blinked slowly, nodded his head, and looked at the floor in silence. He
had been hoping that she hadn't been here when it had happened, but now it was
obvious she had.

"You were here?" Kerrigan asked brusquely. Ellie simply ignored him, her eyes
remained fixed on Dan's own as she began to speak.

"Mom, too. And George. I'm the only ... now it's just me. It's just me now."

A strangled choking cry escaped her at the end of the sentence, and Dan held
one of her hands in his own. He simply waited.

"They came at night. I didn't know any of them. These people ... these people
came, and then Dad came into the room, and he told me to hide, he said people
were coming. He said to get into the closet."

"The closet?"

"There's ... a room. A little space, really small. Built into the wall. For
hiding. If you didn't know it was there you wouldn't find it."

"Panic room," Kerrigan said to no one.

"I ... I got out of bed and Dad said he loved me and then he pushed me, hard,
he pushed me and I fell backward over the bed onto the floor. And then he went
across the hall, to go to George's room to tell him too, but they ... by then
they were in the hall. They were in the hall already and they were shouting,
and he was yelling. I couldn't see much, just feet from under the bed. And
then a little bit when Dad was yelling, he was trying to push them back and he
was y ... .yelling ... he was trying to hit them but it didn't bother them
much ... and he was swearing and yelling. One person, a woman, came into my
room, I could see her feet. But she ... she went right back out again, and
when Dad was yelling I got up and got into the closet. There's this sliding
door that you go through, but I had a shoe rack in front of it, I had to move
the shoe rack and I was so scared that they would hear me too, I was so s ...
s ... scared ... "

"Did you see any of them? A good look?" Kerrigan demanded.

Dan cast a disapproving glance at the cop, but Kerrigan didn't notice. Dan
just shook his head - this cop was young and had a lot to learn. The guy who
had taken Cassie out to the car sure wouldn't treat Ellie this way.

"Not really. Just for a second, from the back, from inside the closet. There
were a few of them, four or five ... and ... it was weird, 'cause they ...
they ... "

"They what?"

"They weren't men. It was women, all of them. No guys."

Kerrigan frowned. "Really?"

Ellie just nodded, a motion that Dan returned. An image, very brief, flashed
through Dan's mind, of a young street punk taking flight, probably already
dead, propelled by only the force from the arm of the woman he was sure he
loved. Her abilities constantly both impressed and frightened him, more often
than not, and now he was hearing about a group of them, an honest to God group
of them, each of them with a purpose less pleasant than hers but with even
greater strength. His blood ran cold at the concept, and also at the thought
of them standing in the hallway, tossing his friend Trevor about like a
pinball.

"And then?"

"Then I got into the closet. You slide the door shut and you lock it from the
inside. I did it ... and ... then ... .and ... "

"What?"

"Then I ... I heard ... I can't. Uncle Danny, I can't."

"It's okay, El. It's over now."

"I ... heard ... .my Dad ... .he ... he was shouting ... and then ... he ...
he started screaming."

Dan's gaze locked onto the detective's; his expression one of expectant
disgust, the cop's one of mild confusion.

"He screamed so loud, and for so long, oh, God ... I was crying but I had to
try to be so quiet. They were downstairs, down here, and I could still hear
him screaming, and then Mom, too, they were both screaming, but then she
stopped, she was yelling and screaming and then that just stopped, like, real
sudden, and then it was just Dad, and he was screaming 'No, no' over and over
again and then louder, like they were ... like they were hurting him."

A fresh gush of tears spilled down her cheeks. Dan patted her hand.

"It's all right, El, we're going to take care of you now."

Ellie sniffed and her eyes met Dan's. "We?"

"Me ... me and a friend. She's going to help us now."

Ellie looked around the room, eyes darting back and forth. "Is she here? Who
is it?"

"She's outside with another officer. But we're going to take care of you,
okay?"

Ellie sniffed again and nodded, and made a valiant attempt, given the
circumstances, to return the comforting, sad grin that Dan made.

"And then what happened?" Kerrigan asked.

"Jesus, maybe we should give her a minute," Dan said.

"Nothing. It just got really quiet. I wasn't sure if they left, or what. It
just got real quiet, and I waited. I just sat there and didn't move. I was so,
so scared. I just waited and waited. And then ... then I ... I ... I fell
asleep," she said, embarrassed.

"You've been up there this whole time? Asleep?"

"Well, I ... "

"What about when the police came? Why didn't you come out then?" Kerrigan
demanded.

"I heard people, but I thought maybe someone had come back, they had been
looking for something, I think, I thought maybe one of them or some of them
had come back and ... "

"That's kind of hard to believe ... .ah, Ellie? Right? Ellie, that's hard to
believe."

"But that's what happened," she said, her eyes red, but finally starting to
dry. She wiped her cheeks on her sleeve and blinked her eyes clear with a
sniff. "That's what happened."

Kerrigan simply stared at her, long and hard, so long that Dan thought he was
going to have to say something. But finally the detective moved, and made as
if to go toward the kitchen.

"Do you want anything? Something to drink?"

"Could I have a glass of water, please? I'm so thirsty," she said, her voice a
little hoarse.

"Sure, one second," the cop said, somehow taking all the kindness out of the
gesture with simply the tone of his voice.

Ellie watched him turn and walk away, her eyes taking in his full measure with
some obvious trepidation.

"You're going to be all right," Dan repeated. "I'll make sure nothing bad
happens to you."

The young girl nodded, and ran her hands through her hair, trying to smooth
down the dark blonde, tangled mass. "Oh, jeez. I feel so gross," she said with
disgust.

Dan forced a little chuckle. 'Don't worry. You're fine. And we won't tell any
of your friends."

Ellie smiled the same blank, sad little smile and rubbed her eyes. "I'm tired,
too."

"You've been through a lot," Dan offered.

"I was wondering," Kerrigan said when he returned with some water. "How did
you know your father was ... you know ... gone? You knew he had ... .passed
away."

Ellie nodded. "Umm-hmm."

"How?"

"Well, I saw him."

"Oh."

She took the glass when he offered it and took a several long huge, long
swallows, the ice clinking on the edge of the glass. "Oh, good. That's good.
Thanks."

"Don't mention it." Kerrigan brushed off the ottoman before Ellie's chair, and
sat down carefully on it. "You ... you say you saw your Dad?"

"Yeah," she said, her vision locked on the floor before her.

Detective, really, I think it can wait until"""

"But you also said you had been in the closet the whole time, until just now."

"Yeah."

"Well? Which is it?"

Ellie's brow lowered in a frown. "I don't understand what you mean."

"I think you do," the detective answered.

"Hey, I don't think we should be ... " Dan began.

"I'm not sure, you know, it was late, and it happened so fast. I mean, all
this happened so long ago ... " Ellie said, her hands raised in the beginnings
of frustration.

"Excuse me?" Kerrigan said. "What do you mean? It was only two nights ago."

Ellie paused, suddenly, obviously unsure of herself. "Really? It ... it seems
so much longer."

Dan was about to object to the detective's questioning once more, but now he
too stopped, his eyes narrowing, his head turning to face the daughter of his
best friend. "El?" he asked. "What do you mean, 'It happened so long ago?'"

Ellie waved her hands about in frustration, and gasped. "You know, it ...
there was so much ... and it was so ... confusing. And then ... "

"I get the feeling there's something you're not telling us, Ellie," Kerrigan
said grimly.

"But there is! I mean, there's not! God, I don't know what I mean. It's just I
... I mean ... God, I just ... it's like ... time went by so fast, and I was
... .I ... oh ... ."

As Dan watched, he saw Ellie, the girl he had known since she was practically
a toddler, he saw her face knotted in anguish, frustration, and irritation ...
.he saw her face change. Not just her expression, but her entire face. Her
movements slowed, no longer those of a harried teen, and her hands dropped,
and her gaze became cold and icy as her entire face shifted somehow.

It happened very quickly.

"Ah, fuck it," she spat.

"Jesus, no," Dan breathed, and then louder, to Kerrigan: "Hey ... look out!"

"What""" Kerrigan began, but it too late.

The young girl drew her leg up, knee cocked, and drove it forward, almost
leisurely, into the chest of the cop sitting across from her. Her foot
connected with his torso with a heavy THUD sound, and he tumbled over
backward, the breath pressed from his lungs like the air from a bellows.

Dan stood, a motion mimicked by the girl, who had spun to face his direction
now. He raised his hands to defend himself, knowing already that it was
probably hopeless if what he feared was actually true, and remembered he
couldn't raise his arms, not well, anyway, his hands were still bound by the
cuffs.

As agile as Dan may have been, even with the cuffs, it didn't matter. Ellie -
or the girl who looked like her - was so much faster she resembled a child
playing with a toy as she turned on him. She clutched his right arm, her grip
like a hydraulic vise on his forearm, and even as Dan drew in breath to shout
Cass! at the top of his voice, she pivoted and her right hand flashed out with
a hiss. She slammed the meat of her hand between her extended thumb and index
finger into the base of his throat; golden stars of pain exploded in his
vision and the air in his chest was driven out in a feeble wheeze. Ellie
jerked his arm downward roughly, and Dan heard a muted POP come from just
above his wrist as the lower part of his right arm suddenly swelled with a
searing hot pain. He gasped again, meaning to cry out, but only a strangled
wheeze hissed through his tortured throat. Ellie gave him one last parting
shot, a right, open-palmed little popping blow to his chest that was nearly
playful in comparison; all it did was send him tumbling backward into the easy
chair where he thrashed about in a foggy state of panic.

Kerrigan was up now, his eyes wide, his tie thrown comically over one
shoulder. His right hand reached under his jacket for his service pistol, but
he fumbled the motion a little. Ellie sprang forward, moving with the same
weird grace that Dan had come to know so well, to stand before the much larger
policeman.

"Hey, cutie," she growled with a chilling grin, and reached out to wrap her
arms around him, pinning his arms to his sides. She wasn't big enough for her
hands to meet behind him, but it didn't seem to matter. Here he stood, a fully
grown man trained in self defense and the use of standard issue firearms, and
he was held, helpless and gasping, in the embrace of a 16-year-old girl.

"Hey, goddam it, let me go! Get the fu ... .uuggggh!" His words collapsed into
a thick, croaking gurgle as Ellie bit down with only the strength in her arms.
He tried to reach for his sidearm, but the powerful circle of steely arms
about his middle sent his hands further out, away from his body.

"Mmmmm, nice," Ellie laughed, and intensified her hold even more; the T-shirt
didn't look so big anymore, now fitting her about how it should have. Her arms
became steel cables drawing tighter against him, the ridges of the hard
muscles in her forearms standing out in ridiculous definition. Kerrigan's
breath was completely gone and he was panicked to find that he couldn't draw
in another, such was the power of her embrace. He jerked this way and that as
best he could, trying to throw her balance off, but he might as well have been
struggling against a stone pillar. He kicked out, or at least tried to, in
response; Ellie just grinned, increased her hold even more, and with no
visible effort at all simply hoisted his frame into the air; as a result,
Kerrigan's feet simply kicked ineffectually in space.

Ellie turned to face Dan, who was sprawled on the overstuffed easy chair, his
wounded right arm clutched close to his chest, his left hand held cradling his
throat. His heart fluttered in his chest, his eyes stood out from their
sockets. Somewhere a part of his mind told him that the blow she had dealt his
neck was not intended to be fatal, and he believed it, mostly. But all the
same, it was nearly impossible to draw breath through the agonizing pain in
his throat, and his lungs burned for air. He felt like he couldn't breathe,
and he was panicking.

Ellie watched his squirm in the chair, bemused. Her expression showed no
effort at all, even though she held the detective off the ground in her arms.
"Relax," she teased, "You can breathe, you just feel like you can't. You'd be
unconscious already if you couldn't," she finished, and then directed her
attention back to the cop she held aloft. She flexed again, harder, and a
terrible, barely audible gurgle came from the man. A thick, meaty CRUNCH
sounded from somewhere deep in his chest, and he grew still, his eyes fixed on
her own, filled with unspeakable pain.

"So, where's your little bitch? Hmm?" Ellie asked, the first signs of anger
showing in the tone of her voice, the set of her brow. "Huh? Where's your
whore?"

"C ... C ... ." Dan gasped.

"Yeah, we all know her name," Ellie spat. "Where is she? Huh? Now that you
really need her? And trust me, you do. 'Cause when I'm done with him" - she
punctuated her phrasing with an extra squeeze; another one of Kerrigan's ribs
snapped with a brittle report and he twitched madly, head thrown back, eyes
squeezed shut - "you're next on the menu, 'Uncle' Danny."

Another jolt, accompanied by several more muted crackling noises from the
torso held aloft before her.

"E ... .eh ... .Ell ... ." Dan choked out, his voice little more than a raspy
hiss, "H ... .ow ... .?"

"They took me, asshole. The sisters took me right after they came here, and
they told me about themselves, and you, and her, and they showed me things, Oh
Goddess, the things they showed me, and you have no idea how ... fucking ...
good ... .this feels!" she barked, tensing against Kerrigan's body with each
word, his abdomen and lower chest becoming more narrow with each passing
second.

"B ... B ... but h ... ."

"Jesus, you want me to lay it all out, you old fuck? Time doesn't work the
same everywhere, Danny. A year somewhere else can be a day here."

Dan tried to rise, tried to stand, but the grating pain in his arm and the
fiery pain in his throat kept him down.

"You came out here, what a few months ago? For dinner? I was 16?"

Ellie pulled in even tighter, an unpleasant squishing noise now accompanied
the intermittent poppings and cracklings coming from Kerrigan's body.

"Well, months to you. Years to me. I'm at least 18 now. Maybe older. Did you
ever see a 16-year-old look like this, anyway?" Ellie said playfully, her face
now lit up in a radiant smile. Indeed, Dan could now see how she filled out
her clothes, differently from even a few moments ago. The pajama bottoms were
now tight against her legs, showing how defined they were and how the thick
swelling of her quads bulged out at the thigh, half of her smooth, tanned
calves now visible past the bottom of the pajama leg.

"Come on, won't you just fucking die?" she hissed in irritation, and then
poured on the power from some hidden reserve, her arms cutting into Kerrigan's
torso like a knife through butter. A thick, liquid squishing sound came once
more as Ellie's hands met behind the cop's back. Another surge of power, and
his back broke with a loud, crystalline SNAP. Ellie's eyes rolled back in her
head, she bit down on her thick lower lip and made no effort to conceal her
obvious pleasure in doling out the man's deadly punishment.

"Mmmm, goddess," she sighed, and pulled in suddenly with all her might.

Kerrigan's head rose straight up, more out of reflex or response to internal
pressure than anything else, for even in his pain-wracked state, Dan was sure
that the cop was already dead. The eyes opened, and actually bulged visibly
from their sockets, attesting to the inhuman power the small blonde girl was
exerting on the cop's torso. As Ellie closed her eyes and nuzzled her face
against the man's chest, Dan could see blood bead up in the corners of
Kerrigan's eyes, and being to spill down his cheeks in tiny twin rivers of
crimson. His tongue, thick and swollen, was driven comically out of his mouth
by the great pressure. After a moment, a thick trail of blood began to flow
from one nostril, and then the crunching ceased, and then even the squishing
noises stopped as the space between Ellie's arms became an iron-rimmed circle
no more than six inches in diameter.

With a bored sigh, Ellie opened her eyes and tossed the corpse she held to the
side where it flopped bonelessly on the floor. A tiny bead of blood had landed
on her tanned cheek, and as Dan watched she met his gaze with her own, wiped
it off with a fingertip, and sucked it clean, her lips pulling at her
fingertip playfully.

"That was nice," she said. "He wasn't my first kill, they showed me how and
made me do it plenty of times, to show that I could. To show that I was
worthy. They even let me take a couple of them before I killed them, I got to
mount them first and that was even more fun," she nearly giggled with
excitement. "But you ... .you're going to be special. They said I could do
anything I want to you ... anything I want, for as long as I want, as long as
it gets done."

Ellie leaned down and caressed Dan's groin with her right hand, but her touch
was utterly different than Cassie's; it was rough and hard and devoid of any
tenderness.

"This is what you want, right, Danny? Is this what she does? Is it?" she
hissed.

Dan just writhed around in the plush chair, trying to protect his wounded arm,
shield his throat, and get away from her touch all at the same time.

"Huh? Is this what she does, Danny? Or, wait. I bet she calls you Daniel,
right? I just bet she does. So, how does this feel, Daniel? Do you like it?"

There seemed to be no escaping her. No matter how Dan turned and squirmed,
there was no getting away from her clawing, rough hand. He tried to get up and
she sent him backward into the chair again with a casual push from her bare
foot, the toes splayed out against his chest. Dan's eyes darted around the
room, hoping, searching. Ellie pushed down with her foot, driving out what
little breath Dan had managed to inhale, and held him fast, pinned to the
cushioned leather of the chair. She gazed down at him, her arms at her sides,
only one foot pinning down a grown man, and he could see the flashing of a
terrible mirth in her eyes.

"I'm going to do things to you, Daniel," she said, relishing every word. "I'm
going to do things to you that you won't believe are possible. Some of it you
might even like ... at first. And when I'm done, if you're still alive ...
.I'm going to tear ... you ... apart," she finished in a predatory growl.

Dan's eyes fell from her gaze and saw a glint of light from behind her, a
splash of light that drew his eye. It was the polished steel front wheel of
his Chevy, visible across the room and through the open front door. His hands
were moving before he even registered the idea as a detailed concept in his
mind. He steeled himself against the white-hot pain in his wrist, and reached
downward, stretching his bound arms across her bare foot.

"Squirm all you want," she hissed. "Squirm for me, worm."

With a grunt of pain and effort, Dan turned at the shoulder and his hands made
a groping, pressing motion on the outside of his pocket and he hoped that his
feeble version of a plan would work.

"Ma'am, a little faster please," Mitch Herndon said, and gestured with his
left arm, his right still maintaining a light grip on her shoulder. Cassie
craned her neck around every twenty feet or so to see the Ainsbury place, her
agitation and worry showing clearly on her face.

"Please, officer," she said, "Could we please go back? I don't want to get to
far from Daniel. I think this place isn't safe, with all that's going on."

"Safe from whom?" Mitch asked. He had no reason to suspect this young blonde
woman of anything; in fact, he had already pretty much accepted the fact that
she hadn't done anything wrong and was exactly who she said she was. Yet
something about her was just not right. True, she was fairly tall and looked
pretty fit, and on top of that she was a pretty good-looking girl, sure, but
it was more than that. Something wasn't right, wasn't normal.

"There's just a lot of stuff going on right now, and I don't think I ... I
don't we should leave them alone down there," she said, her voice tense and
agitated-sounding.

Mitch glanced at her face as they walked along, only twenty feet or so from
the cruiser now, and something in her face, in her eyes, brought it home to
him. This young woman carried a weight on her that he couldn't see, but he
could damn sure feel.

"You're not a very happy person, are you, Ms. O'Connor?" he asked.

She stopped in her tracks and her gaze locked onto his, a look of surprise
finally cutting through her guarded nature. She opened her mouth to reply,
didn't, closed it, paused, and didn't know how to respond.

That's when it happened.

Far behind and below them, the alarm on Dan Pittman's SUV went off; the horn
honked loudly, with maddening insistence, and the lights flashed, bright even
in the late-morning sun.

They both turned to see it, but while Mitch took a second to take in what was
happening, Cassie was already in motion. She raised her hands before her and
with a sudden, swift, and alarmingly easy-looking motion, she separated her
hands and the chain between the cuffs broke like it was made of nothing more
substantial than peanut brittle. The cuffs broke with a metallic plink sound,
and Mitch half turned to face her, his eyes wide.

"What the --"

In a flash she was on him, her arms shoving him around like he had no weight
to his body. Resisting her touch wasn't an option; in a second she had him
wrapped up in her arms as she now stood behind him, one arm across his chest
and grasping his opposite limb, the other gripping his right shoulder. Cassie
straightened her fingers, making a blade out of her hand, and brought it to
Mitch's neck.

"Trust me, detective, this won't hurt you. You'll be fine in an hour."

"Hey! St.."

With a tiny burst of power from her right arm, Cassie drove the tips of her
first three fingers into Mitch's neck, directly into a cluster of nerves under
his ear and just behind his jaw. It wasn't a killing blow, although with more
force it would have been. She merely meant to incapacitate him, as much for
his safety as her own.

The bundle of nerve fibers fired instinctively as she irritated them with her
blow; the muscles around them clenched as part of the muscular reaction to the
stimulus, and the sheath of muscle in Mitch's neck clamped down, effectively
stopping the flow of blood to his brain for a few seconds before the effect
passed.

"Guuuuhhh!" Mitch half-groaned, half-grunted, his eyes rolling up into his
skull. A black veil fell across his vision, and two seconds later his body
jerked reflexively and then went limp; he collapsed in her arms, totally
unconscious.

Cassie knelt, gently laying the detective's prone body down just off the edge
of the road. She rose, her brow knitted together in a frown, her heart pumping
madly. In a flash she was running, her long legs powering her down the
asphalt, seemingly far faster than what was naturally possible.

"So do you like it?" Ellie hissed down at him, her right hand a claw which bit
down painfully on his groin. "Am I as good as she is? Huh?!" she demanded, her
fearsome grip growing ever tighter.

Dan's arm was a symphony of misery where Ellie seized it and twisted the
keyless entry device from his hand. He could feel the jagged edges of
splintered bone grinding against each other, feeling like it was filled with
coarse, burning sand. He gasped and the key ring dropped to the floor.

Ellie drew even closer, her body pressing against his own, her eyes closing
for a moment as she savored the feel of him against her. Her breathing
deepened, and Dan was instantly aware of a familiar high, sweet scent, one he
had come to know very well in the last few days. It came off her in waves, and
he barely had time to think, oh, no not this, please, not this, before that
thought to was driven from his mind by the overpowering smell and closeness of
her, and as hard as he tried to fight it, he felt a wave of amazement and
alarm as he felt himself begin to stir against her. Her lips pulled back in a
feral, primitive grin as she leaned in even closer to him and acknowledged his
arousal by grinding her hips against his with a growl.

No, oh no please not this, not her, no ...

Ellie voice came from above him, mocking, full of malice and selfishness even
now, even in the first acts of lovemaking. She gazed deep into his eyes and
asked him a brutally simple question.

"So, Daniel ... is she as good as me?"

She didn't get the answer she expected.

"Better," Cassie said matter-of-factly from behind her. Ellie straightened and
whirled around impossibly quickly, her hair a blur of motion.

As with the other occasions he had seen Cassie in action, it happened nearly
too quickly for Dan to see. It was almost as if he was left with visual
impressions which he had to put together after the fact, like he was a
secondary character in a film with a personal frame rate 1/3 slower than that
of the characters around him.

Cassie blurred to a stop, already prepared for action when she spoke. She
knelt, her curled, deadly-looking fist nearly at floor level, and when Ellie
began to turn, she started her swing, leaping up from the floor and pivoting
at the waist as she powered the blow upward in a flashing arc.

She timed it perfectly; her fist crashed into Ellie's left jaw, and Dan felt -
and thought he could nearly see - the THUD of the crashing blow; it was a
heavy, loud, concussive blast that Dan could feel deep in his chest.

Ellie simply rocketed away from him, up and out, as if she were shot from a
cannon.

She slammed into the wall to Dan's left, her arms and legs flopping madly
about from the force of the blow, and proceeded to tear through it. Her body
blasted through the sheetrock in a burst of powder, snapping not one but two
2x6 wall studs, and then exited the building entirely, tearing through the
framing to explode through the stucco on the outer wall of the home ... and
she kept on going. Cassie and Dan could both see her tumble to a stop on the
lawn twenty feet away. Incredibly, after a long moment, they could also see
Ellie's shoulders shudder a bit, and carefully, gingerly, she drew herself up
into a standing position.

Dan started to scramble to his feet, but Cassie just held him fast and shook
her head.

"Don't worry, she's had enough ... for now."

Ellie turned to face them, one hand held to the side of her face. She turned
slowly back to regard the pair of them through the woman-sized hole in the
wall. She snuffled back a breath through her smashed face, and spat a huge
clot of crimson phlegm onto the ground through her mask of rage. A long, gooey
gout of blood trailed out after, sliding from her mouth as she tried to make
her ruined jaw work.

"Oh, my God," Dan murmured softly. He'd known Ellie since she was just a kid.
And now ... well, two weeks ago, he would have been really spun, would have
needed some serious help to work through it all. But now he found it was
starting to come a little easier. It still upset him to see her, of all
people, like this; while he couldn't necessarily accept it, he could accept
the idea of it, and for now, that would have to do.

Ellie's snarl, incredibly, weakened, and slowly turned into a humorless grin,
her blood-smeared lips spread over cracked and bloody teeth. Another bloody
clump of drool slid from her mouth, and even though the words that came out
were as much a ruined heap as her jaw apparently was, Dan and Cassie both were
able to make out what it was she gurgled in their direction.

Another time. Soon.

The grin widened even further, and with barely a hint of a wind-up, Ellie
dropped to the ground in a squat, the muscular ridges of her legs tearing the
seams of the thin flannel pajamas open at the thigh, and with a singular,
powerful movement that was as smooth as it was quick, she powered herself
skyward and to the left, out of their line of sight. While she vanished from
Dan's perception, Cassie could make out the sound of her landing, many tens of
yards away, and the soft pad-pad-pad sound of her bare feet as she retreated
from sight and hearing.

"Jesus jumped-up-Christ," Dan groaned. "What the hell is going on, Cass?"

"Do you really need me to do a play by play?"

"But you said ... .you said they never take any girl over the age of eight.
Ellie is ... well, she was ... twice that old!"

"I said they don't, I didn't say they never have. It's pretty rare."

"Why?"

"Because they wind up like that," Cassie said simply with a shrug. "She's the
worst possible news right now to anybody she might meet up with. She's
completely crazy. Off her rocker."

"Uh ... "

"Come on, imagine it. You're a teenager, your hormones are going crazy anyway,
the world is this crazy, scary mixed up place. Then a race of superwomen come
along, murder your family, probably in front of you, and then they take you to
another ... I don't know, dimension, and then blast you with supernatural
energy left over from gods you've never even heard of, let alone believe in,
brainwash you, and poof! You're one of them."

"Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound."

"Something like that, yeah. It would be enough to make you crazy."

"So she's ... she's gone? There's no hope for her?"

"Daniel, I'm sorry," Cass said, kneeling to be on his eye level. "But whoever
that girl once was to you? She's dead. That girl is gone. Forever. I'm sorry,
but it's true. She died with the rest of her family. What's left ... what's
left is just her shadow. A trace of who she once was, and that shadow is
filled with all things hateful, and spiteful, and wrathful. They took
everything she once was and replaced it with a hollow, mad thing."

"Like what they did to you," Dan asked, not sure if it was a question.

Cassie's face maintained her usual warrior impassivity, but he saw, with
measure of instant regret, the flash of pain sweep through her eyes.

"Yeah. A little like that." She saw him holding his arm. "What did she do?"
she asked, the tiniest hinter of a waiver to her voice.

"I think she broke my arm. I heard something pop."

"Here, let me see. How does it feel when I ... damn. Sorry. Yes, it's broken.
Oh, Daniel, I'm sorry. What should we do?"

"I think I need to go to a hospital. Where's that cop who was with you?"

"He's sleeping."

"Nice."

"I try."

CHAPTER 20

It was Randy's moans that woke her up.

The second Jennifer Carnes opened her eyes, a heavy, thick bolt of nausea
rippled through her, and she grunted aloud with it. "Oh, ugh. Oh, oh ugh."

Randy sat up and rubbed his eyes, looking around blearily at the small closet
they were locked in. "What happened?" he said foggily.

"I'm not sure. I..I'm not exactly ... ouch!" Jen hissed in a breath sharply
and raised a hand to her chest. It hurt like a mother, a spot in the center of
her chest, right at the top of the breastbone. "Jeez ... ow. I ... uh ... I
kind of remember you getting your ass kicked by a girl, though," she finished.

"What?"

"That woman you were drooling over, she rammed your ... wait, you're saying
you don't remember?"

"I'm asking, aren't I?" Randy said uncharacteristically. He was cradling his
head in his hands, blocking out the light with his palms the best he could.

"Hey, come here, you," Jen said, and gave his head the once over. She dimly
remembered the woman slamming Randy's head into the wall, and then turning on
her, but after that, it was pretty much a blank.

"I don't know, you seem ... hold on."

She turned his head from side to side in her hands, and paused when she could
see his left ear. A thin trickle of blood and an even more worrisome clear,
watery fluid had run from his ear and down into the collar of his shirt.

"Umm, Agent Timmons, we might have a problem."

"What is it?"

"I don't know. It might only be a perforated ear drum. Does your ear hurt?"

"What?"

"I said, does your ear hurt?"

"What?"

"Okay. Your head? Head?" she asked again, thumping on her own noggin.

"Oh, yeah," Randy nodded, and looked as miserable as anyone Jen had ever seen.
"It feels like it was cracked wide open."

"It nearly was. She bonked you really good. She ... .umm, she must have really
known what she was doing. Looks like she got the drop on us both."

"I would like to go home, please," Randy said weakly, and rested his face in
his hands once more.

"You and me both, brother," Jen said, standing up and fighting another wave of
nausea. "But I think we need to get you checked out. It's the hospital for
you, kiddo."

"Oh, no."

"Oh yes," she said, and tried the door, which was locked, of course. "Umm.
Okay. Well, we could ... " she pulled out her cell phone, and stared at the
blank face of it for a moment, remembering.

"Well, shit."

***

Kevin Kidwell cruised up Weed's main drag in his old Scout, and was alarmed by
what he saw. People he knew well didn't return his hand waving, or, if they
did, it was with a quick furtive glance as they climbed into their cars or
ducked into the various small stores along the street.

He had a sneaking suspicion that it was like this everywhere, that the general
sense of unease after the recent events was pervasive. After all, most of the
major networks were down, and even local TV station had gone to battery or
generator power ... and even that wouldn't last forever.

There had been print news delivered yet, and most radio station had no news to
report, either. It was as if the entire society was one long string of
Christmas lights, and someone was going down the line, taking one bulb out at
a time.

No internet. No phones, not even cells, it seemed. Fewer TV stations with each
passing hour. And one of the last reports from the Associated Press, repeated
breathlessly on the air by an intern on the local NPR station, was that
several big cities in the East, Atlanta, Boston, Washington, and Baltimore
among them, had begun to lose power. Without power, sewer substations couldn't
function; now water sources in those areas were suddenly suspect. In NY,
public transportation had ground to a halt; vast numbers of residents had
began fleeing Manhattan on foot, the Williamsburg bridge had become nearly
impassable.

Kevin pulled to the curb and sat for a moment, the engine idling. The enormity
of the situation the country (the world? Some early sketchy reports mentioned
trouble in Paris, Moscow, and Hong Kong) was in started to sink in, almost
seeming to press on him with a physical weight and an icy feeling in his
chest.

"This ... this could be bad," he said out loud to himself. "This could be
really, really bad."

His first thought was to talk to Billie.

Kevin had been dating Billie Casperson for about six months. She ran a
medium-sized stable on the outskirts of the town, where she housed and cared
for the horses owned by the town's more well-to-do types. She was a tall,
athletic, brown-haired woman of 30, who could swing herself up onto a horse
with shocking ease, and who rode circles around him whenever they would go for
a ride together. She seemed content to run her small business and live in a
small town, and she didn't say much. In fact, it was the only relationship
Kevin could remember where he was the more talkative one. It wasn't that
Billie was taciturn or ill-tempered; she wasn't, she laughed quite easily and
had a generally pleasant disposition, but she tended to be a little on the
quiet side. Billie Casperson, as the old folks in town said, doesn't talk
unless she has something to say.

This personality trait was a blessing and a curse to Kevin. They had met at a
local park eight months ago, bumped into each other at the grocery store two
months later, and then had begun a casual relationship soon after. But it had
been a relatively slow process, with true physical intimacy entering the
equation only a month ago. Kevin was having a hard time gauging where
everything was going, how he was performing as a boyfriend, and questioned
even if that was how she thought of him. He was growing weary of simply
calling her a friend when mentioning her to a co-worker in a casual
conversation. He'd tried to broach the subject with her before, the direction
of their slow-moving relationship, but all he got in return was a quiet stare,
a couple of shoulder shrugs, and an occasional nod, followed by a thoughtful
"Hmmmm. I don't know."

As bewildering as it was, it was also attractive, in a way. Billie didn't
babble on constantly, she didn't feel compelled to discuss the latest reality
show on NBC ad nauseum, and as far as he could tell she had no interest
whatsoever in pop culture. He knew she read a lot, one room of her small cabin
was lined with bookshelves filled to overflowing, and she seemed to like music
enough to listen to him play (or try to play, rather) his acoustic guitar late
at night ... but beyond that, she was a bit of a mystery. He knew he was fond
of her, and he suspected she felt a similar way about him, but he couldn't
prove it, and neither of them had said anything about it yet. And at this
rate, they might never get there.

She was outside when he pulled up, her tall, slim figure bent to the side as
she lugged a small training saddle toward the open barn door. She looked up
and gave him a obligatory smile in greeting.

"Hey you," Kevin said as he stepped down out of the Scout.

"Hey yourself," she said, and set the saddle down on a weather-beaten picnic
table by the barn door. She dusted off her hands a bit and hugged him
carefully, giving him a peck on the cheek as she pulled away.

"Is everything okay?" Kevin asked.

"What do you mean?"

"I just wanted to check on you. You know, coupe of weird days, now."

"Oh, yeah," she said, and took off the wide-brimmed hat she wore. "Weird
stuff. Coffee?"

Inside, he sat down, his mind uneasy. Billie seemed pretty carefree,
considering the circumstances. She sipped her steaming mug quietly, watching
him.

"So ... none of this worries you?"

She was slow to answer. "Sure, I guess it does. A little. Seems like they
always get these things worked out in the end, though."

"All right ... maybe they do. But ... but don't you think this is
extraordinary?"

"Extraordinary how?"

"Well, nobody can call anybody, all the phones are down. And the internet is
history, even for people eon cable modems or satellite connections. Most radio
stations are off the air, or at least all the reliable ones. All I could get
on the way over here was old Burt.

Burt Haymans lived on the outskirts of town in a tiny old Airstream trailer,
slaving everyday over a generator that didn't run as much as it did, and
raving over fifty square miles of airwaves about how this month was the final
one in the cycle of the End Times ... except he had been doing it for about
fifteen years.

"Maybe Burt's getting to you," Billie said without much humor.

"I don't know, I just find it kind of strange that I'm more worried about it
than you are," Kevin explained.

"That bothers you?"

"Well, maybe a little."

Billie shrugged a little. "Maybe you need to relax a little."

Kevin was at loss for words; he just stared at Billie across the table, but
she didn't drop her eyes. For a long time neither one of them spoke.

After a while, Kevin turned his hands over, palms facing up, and ventured a
suggestion. "Maybe ... I was thinking ... thinking that maybe we should
prepare, you know? In case this goes on longer than anybody thinks?"

"What do you mean?" Billie asked, her brow wrinkling in a slight frown, the
first emotion she had shown all day.

"Well, I'm just saying ... have you noticed the road? The highway's been empty
all day. And I parked over by the grotto and looked across at the Interstate,
and it isn't any better. People are staying home, I think."

"So?"

"So that means that trucks aren't being driven. And in this country, when
trucks aren't being driven, people don't get ice. Then they don't get milk.
Then eggs, or cheese. Then food in general. And I don't have a supply of
canned food, honey."

Billie seemed to consider this. "Yeah, all right, that sounds like a good
idea. Better safe than sorry, I guess."

They took Billie's F150 into town since it had more cargo space than the
Scout. On the way into town, crackling static on the radio covered nearly all
the bands ... and then it wavered. A sound, far off in the distance, full of
interference, but a sound all the same.

Kevin recognized it at once: It was the sound of the emergency broadcast
signal, a high, droning whine designed to get the listener's attention.

"Hey, pull over ,babe, quick! Pull over."

Billie pulled to the curb and killed the engine. They both leaned in close,
struggling to hear over the crackling static. The tone beeped three times in
succession, and then it fell quiet.

"Well, I guess it ... " Kevin started to say, but Billie stopped him with a
hand to the chest, her ear turned to the truck's dashboard speakers, her light
brown hair pulled clear behind her ear.

" ... .as of last night. No more word is available at this hour," the small,
tinny voice said, barely above the background noise. "Once again ... the
nation's capitol is engulfed in flames at this hour," the voice went on. "The
condition of the government is unclear as communications appear to be down
across the entire country. Martial law has been declared in the city. Once
again, the status of the President, the vice-president, Congress and the key
members of the Cabinet is unknown at this time. Reports of ... similar
conditions have been reported in the cities of Atlanta, Detroit, Los Angeles,
New Orleans, Miami ... .phis ... Minn ... ..deliphia and Boston, but again,
these reports are unconfirmed. There have been unconfirmed reports of some
kind of major event occurring in or near the city of Seattle, Washington, but
the reports were early this morning and totally unclear ... "

Kevin sat stock still, his eyes widening a little as the story unfolded. He
could see Billie, feel her watching him, gauging his own reaction. Behind the
speaker now, he could hear something else, another sound. More people,
talking, one's voice raised in alarm but he was unable to make out the words
over the guy who was now speaking directly into the mike, overdriving it,
distorting his voice just a little bit.

"Citizens are encouraged to stay in their homes for the duration of this
event, as it appears that a major, coordinated attack on the nation has
occurred, and ... and ... "

"You! Get away from there ... "

"Help!"

The broadcast, as weak-signaled as it was, was now devolving into a
static-filled chaos.

"Citizens should stay off the roads and remain in their homes until more
information can be gained ... and ... what? No, I will not. Get your hands off
of me, damn you! Citizens should ... aaaaggghh!"

The transmission ended with a final, authoritative click, and then a strange,
fuzzy silence. But not before the final, gagging, mewling cry was choked into
the microphone. Kevin's blood ran cold. To him, the final sound of the
broadcast was clear: a weak, pitiful scream, mercilessly choked off before the
broadcast ended.

They sat for a moment in silence. When Kevin looked back at Billie, he saw
that her face was still a mask of impossible, placid calm.

"Doesn't this bother you?"

She seemed to think about this. "Obviously."

"Then why don't you react to it?"

"Would it help if I panicked?"

"Well ... No, of course not, but ... "

Only her voice showed any emotion at all. It rose just a little, giving her
irritation away. "Would it help if I was a wreck, if I was worried sick? If I
needed you to come save me?"

"What are you talking about?"

"Does it bother you that you don't get to play the hero, Kevin?"

"You're not making any sense," he said in exasperation.

"It's nice to be so easily dismissed."

"I think we better get moving, darling," Kevin said, motioning ahead of the
truck.

Billie didn't speak, she merely turned her attention back to driving as she
pulled the big truck back out onto the road.

***

In the end, no one would ever find out who sent that weak, feeble signal over
the airwaves. No one would ever know the names of the three people who
wouldn't survive to see the natural end of their broadcast, let alone the
madness of the days that followed.

But it was enough. While most communication hubs were down, smaller hosts
caught the signal, and passed it on. The faint, crackling message was relayed
by HAM radio operators all over the country, the more dedicated among their
number with nearly the power of small radio stations themselves. The key
elements of the message traveled by handwritten, hand-delivered means and in
the tiny town of Uteppa, Wyoming, it even traveled via telegraph lines that
had sat dormant for decades. But mostly, it traveled by the most ancient
device known to man - the spoken word.

And as the slow, sweeping current of the message spread west in the weeks that
followed, people across the land listened ... and prepared.

***

The hospital was a nightmare.

It was now nearly dusk; they had arrived in the early afternoon, but the
emergency room was a hideous bottleneck through which no one seemed able to
pass. The setting sun was casting its orange light through a thin, black acrid
haze; most likely it was from the fires that were supposedly burning in
Washington. There were far more people in the streets as there should have
been, and even though Dan knew the actual formal attack was only a few hours
old, he was amazed at its effectiveness. People everywhere were isolated,
confused, and angry. He knew enough to realize the East Coast - hell, maybe
the whole country - would soon be a virtual powder keg waiting for the
proverbial spark.

The pain in his arm had increased for the first few hours, but had now receded
to a dull, throbbing ache that only flared up when he flexed or moved his
forearm. Hours spent waiting ... waiting ... dusk was now coming fully on now,
and still he waited.

But he was much better off than many of the people who had passed by him. The
snarls of traffic on the city's highways kept the number of accident victims
down, but the few who did pass by were in terrible shape for having to wait so
long for care. A large number of people had come in with broken arms, legs,
various cuts and scrapes; in several cases it was obvious that they were
combat injuries. It didn't take long for the word to spread through the room
(and presumably the country) these injuries were the result of looters
beginning to smell opportunity in the darkened, deserted storefronts of the
city.

As the sick and injured filed in, their numbers growing quickly, Dan and
Cassie met each other's gaze. No words were necessary, neither gave voice to
the growing anxiety between them until Dan felt compelled to lean over and
mutter to her under his breath.

"So I guess it's started, then? The breakdown?"

Cassie merely nodded, a mixture of sadness and expectation on her face.

"It was fast," Dan added, his face grim. "Too fast. Much more than I expected.
It's only been hours, days ... and now this?" He shook his head in disgust.
"Maybe we're not worth saving."

"Don't say that," Cassie said firmly as she visually scanned the room, much as
she had been doing since their arrival. "It's not your fault. Society's. It's
a different world now than it was even 50 years ago. Everyone today is used to
cell phones and drive-thru dinners. The ideas of inconvenience and discomfort
are new to some people. It'll take some adjusting. It's bad, and will probably
get a lot worse, but then it might actually get better for a while, if ... "

"If, what?"

"If they let it," Cassie finished. "At this point, I have no idea what to
think. I have no idea what they will do. Having you alive, with me, is a big
unknown. Either we're of little importance, or huge importance, I have no way
of knowing on the outside."

"Or maybe it's up to us to decide which it will be," Dan offered, and Cassie
paused, nodded, and offered him a tiny smile.

"GODDAM it," shouted a middle-aged woman near the door. She was filthy,
smeared with dirt and what looked like grease, and wore a tattered shawl over
her shoulders. Yesterday Dan would have guessed that she was homeless, but
today anything was possible.

"How long do I have to goddam wait?" the woman half-screamed, half-wailed,
putting a strange emphasis on the profane elements of her speech. "I just want
to see Dr. Wyatt, I always see Dr. Wyatt. I need to see him, this goddam lady
kicked me in the goddam guts. She killed the other guy, but me she only kicked
and goddam it hurrrts ... "

Where in the past a squad of hospital attendees would have rushed out to treat
her, this time only one came, and this one obviously only an intern. The woman
continued to rant, her voice only marginally lower in volume.

"Hey, Daniel, how's your arm?" Cassie asked casually enough while she turned
to look at him.

"Hurts like hell, but as long as I don't move it ... "

"Gee, that's nice," Cassie said flatly, and then, lower, with a small false
smile still on her face: "Listen, look at me and don't look away, okay? I
think we're being watched. Or, more precisely, you. You're being watched."

Dan's heart leaped into a familiar gallop in his chest as his stomach lurched.

"Okay."

"Play it cool."

"The coolest baby," Dan replied, and offered a dazzling, genuine-looking
smile. "Do I have to ask?"

"A woman, on the other side of the aisle, four rows back. Sitting next to the
guy with the icepack on his head. Got her?"

Dan feigned a cough, his face moving down into his curled fist, the business
suit-wearing suspect a colored blob on the fringe of his peripheral vision.

"Yeah," he said in between fake hacks. "What do we do about it?"

"Nothing. Nothing yet, anyway. Too many people, too many questions. Since
they're going with a stealth approach, I think we're okay for now. But ... "

"But, what?"

"They're not paying any attention to me."

"So?"

"So I don't think they're with the Am ... .I don't think they're with them."

"Why not?"

"Because one of them is a guy," Cassie said, and managed a little grin, and
gave him a quick peck on the cheek. "That's like, the first thing they check."

"Right." Dan sat back in his chair and tried to stretch without moving his
arm, to little success. "So who is she?"

Jen couldn't believe it.

"I can't believe it," she said softly.

The diamond-hard perfection she strived for in her professional life didn't
leave a lot of room for chance; yet here it was, staring her in the face. And
still she couldn't believe it.

"What?" Randy asked through the fog of his concussion.

Carnes held up the personnel file in her lap so it was easier for him to see;
it was a dossier describing a relatively unimportant mid-level manager for a
military contractor.

"And?"

"And the guy works for Kent-Allan. Who shared a joint contract with AdvanTech.
Who employs women that beat you up."

"Hilarious. And?"

"And, who we were going to head over to find this guy as soon as you're fixed
up," Jen said.

"All right. And?"

"And ... " Jen pointed subtly in the direction her eyes were locked, "He's
sitting right there."

Randy did a triple take between the photograph on the dossier and the
nondescript guy sitting on the other side of the emergency room. "Hey. Hey!
Holy shit."

"Yeah," Jen nodded. She slid the file back into a folder, put this into her
bag, and gathered her jacket, tossing it over her left forearm as she scanned
the room, careful to keep the guy in her peripheral vision the whole time.

"What do we do?" Randy asked, the tone of his voice betraying the misery of
his concussion-induced headache.

"We wait," Jen said quietly. "This is all tied up in something bigger. I can't
explain it. It just is, I know it. And maybe this guy knows something about
it. So we wait and see what he does."

***

Mitch Herndon had never lost a partner before, and he was damned if he was
ever going to lose another.

He watched the front of the apartment building over the rim of his coffee cup,
the events of that morning replaying over and over again in his mind. He
remembered the house, he remembered detaining the couple that showed up in the
SUV. He remembered leaving the guy with Kerrigan, and heading out with the
woman to do a background check. But that's where his memory started to get
fuzzy; he couldn't recall what happened next. He had a vague sense of a
physical event that he couldn't describe fully; all he could mentally process
was a deep sense of surprise, of shock, at some physical act. The next thing
he knew, he was lying on the ground beside the road, the world coming back to
his senses with a strange fuzziness, with a sore neck and a terrible headache.
He had staggered back down to the house (noticing the SUV was gone), and
inside he had found his suspect gone, a strange, piano-sized hole punched
through the side of the house, and his partner's corpse on the floor. It had
looked like he had gone through a winepress; Kerrigan's body had undergone
some weird trauma; he had been literally crushed to death.

As fuzzy as many of that morning's details were in his mind, Mitch could
remember one thing clearly: the guy's name: Dan Pittman. A quick check
revealed 6 men in the greater metro area with the name; a browsing of DMV
files which would normally have taken seconds took hours, due to the Net being
down ... .but still, they had managed to find 5 Dan Pittmans listed for
licenses ... the antiquated mode of searching had come through, quickly
revealing the guy he was after. An APB went out on the guy and the car, arrest
and domestic search warrant issued for his name. Mitch mentally gave thanks
that the police department used short wave radios rather than one of the
newer, network-based services so popular with other cities. He was still able
to call in information, even while others were completely stymied.

And so now Mitch Herndon sat as low in an unmarked cruiser as he could,
sipping coffee, waiting in the hopes that the guy would come home, and that
he'd bring that blonde woman with him. While Louis Kerrigan hadn't been one of
Mitch's favorite people (far from it, in fact), he had been an honest cop. He
deserved better than he got, and Mitch, along with two other officers watching
this apartment and the additional pair watching Pittman's workplace, were
determined to make it right.

***

The door opened, and the head of the bar's five patrons and three employees
all turned to watch the entrance with thinly veiled suspicion: the looters had
come out not long after the power had gone out, and there was no telling who
would try to ransack the place. The bar's owner, a hulking, round-faced guy
nicknamed B.B. (for Big Brian), even reached under the bar to lightly touch
the sawed-off Louisville slugger that hung from a small metal hook there.
Another moment showed that he didn't need it, though. If these were looters,
he could be looted anytime, preferably over and over.

The first one through the door was a little blonde chick. Young, really young.
Probably not even old enough to drink yet. She was on the short side, but
curvy in a nice, fit way. She was packed into faded blue jeans that were a
size too small and a white T-shirt of similar proportion. Her hair was pulled
back into two little tails, the way a lot of the sportier college girls had
taken to wearing their hair a couple years back. She was kind of smiling, in
weird, nearly smirking way. Brian bet she was kind of bitchy, he could tell
these things within seconds, usually. But a hot little bitch all the same.

She wasn't alone, though. A tall woman in a hooded sweatshirt came in with
her, equally attractive even though not much more than the tip of her nose and
her chin were visible beneath the hood which covered her head, and she was
followed by an even taller black girl with a light, coffee-colored complexion,
who was easily the prettiest of the three. The three of them exuded a strange,
unnamable athletic quality - Brian immediately just assumed they were on some
college team or something.

"Wow," Brian heard Billy, the bar's busboy (and line cook, on slow nights like
tonight) mutter behind him. Billy was only 20 himself, but he was a good kid
and Brian trusted him to mind the place when he wasn't around.

But Billy had spoken too soon. The hooded woman backed up a step and held the
door open, and then she walked in.

The most beautiful woman Brian had ever seen stepped across the threshold into
his bar.

She was tall, 5'10, at least. A six-footer, maybe? It didn't matter. She had
the same strange, indefinable quality, like that of an athlete. Maybe it was
the way she moved, a fluid, graceful motion, nearly lazy in its initial
impression. She moves like a wild animal, Brian thought. Well, wouldja look at
that.

She wore a red cocktail dress whose gold trim glimmered a little in the dim
light of the bar that somehow didn't look too dressy for a casual night out,
its gold-encrusted design fanning out across her generous bustline in dual
sweeping, wing-like shapes. If the girls with her (for that's the station they
had been reduced to by her appearance, that of mere girls in relation to this
woman) were pretty, this woman was a goddess.

Close, but not quite, as B.B. would soon find out.

Long legs, curving hips, pleasantly broad shoulders partially bared by the
wide straps of her dress. A body made up of gentle curves and fit, toned
muscle. A huge mane of raven-black hair, looking stylishly disheveled and neat
at the same time, impossible as that seemed. High cheekbones, a strong chin,
perfect skin, high, arching eyebrows above eyes so blue and bright they seemed
to be illuminated from within, with the arching, cat-like shape of her eyes
seeming to be the very model of the brunette ideal. She was perfect, just
perfect, and Brian knew his mouth was open in an "O" shape, and he didn't
care.

"Oh," he heard Billy say, and then silence as everyone in the place, even
Heather, the waitress, stopped in their tracks, silent, for a long, long
moment.

The group of young women stopped inside the door and surveyed the width and
breadth of the bar, the dim lighting, the sparseness of its clientele. The one
in front, the brunette, was obviously the one in charge, she carried the
definite yet unnamed air of leadership as easily as her beauty eclipsed the
considerable appearances of her companions. With a few slow steps, the group
made its way to the plain oak bar, the eyes of each woman passing over the
people in the place as they went.

Brian was no stranger to the rough stuff. He owned a bar in downtown
Baltimore, for one thing. But he also had lived through a stint in the Army,
too. After that, he had spent some time in the Outlaws, and then later as a
gang member riding old rail lines through the Northwest. And he was still a
relatively young man, still only in his early 40s. He had seen his share of
mud and blood ... and yet there was something ... there was something he
couldn't name, something about this group of seemingly innocent young women
that just felt ... wrong.

"Hello there, ladies," he offered somewhat warily, and noticed Billy's
questioning look in his peripheral vision. Billy had heard the tone in his
voice, how it lacked the usual certainty. "You sure picked a strange night for
a bar crawl."

The brunette turned her gaze on him, and sure as the day he was born, Brian
felt his knees go a little weak. It was almost like she had slapped him
lightly, he could almost hear a ringing in his ears. Her gaze was flat,
haughty, a little presumptuous. Definitely a woman used to getting her own
way. When she spoke, her voice was full, a little low, and throaty, and oddly
musical in its cadence.

"A 'bar crawl?'" she asked, and somehow this innocent question carried the
weight of a demand.

"Uh ... yeah. You know ... going from place to place? Drinking a little at
each one?"

The brunette's crimson mouth spread wide in a grin, the impossible brightness
of her teeth glinting in the bar's dim lighting. Her expression seemed to
somehow be both beautiful and predatory at the same time.

"Oh, we have come to this establishment only. And we have not come to drink,"
she said softly. She turned to face the little blonde who stood next to her,
and tilted her head in some sort of knowing motion. The women split then,
fanning out across the bar in a slow, easy spread.

It was innocent enough, but damned if there wasn't something about it that
creeped Brian out. He stepped up and he touched the rough wooden surface of
the bat under the bar.

"Well, things are pretty rough right now," Brian offered. "Everything shut
down like it is, and the power even went out. Only reason we're open is the
generator out back."

The brunette slinked up behind and then around one of the guys hunched over
the bar. She stared at his face as her hand trailed across his shoulders, not
taking her eyes off him as she sidled up to his side. "Is that so?" she
answered Brian without looking at him.

"Yeah. But it means we have some cold beer, though. Probably the only cold
beer in Bal ... "

"I told you we did not come here to drink," the woman snapped, her gaze
turning to Brian suddenly, the icy malice in her voice clearly evident.

"Well, okay lady, what did you come in here f ... "

'I like you," the brunette interrupted, speaking to the guy she had her left
arm draped around. She touched the left side of his face lightly with her
right hand, a strange, bored, expectant smile on her face.

"Well, that's nice," the guy said, gazing back at this stunning woman as if
she had materialized out of the air beside him. "I'd say that's a good ---
gaaahrk!"

The fingertips of her right hand had moved so quickly, so effortlessly that
her sudden touch had seemed almost delicate as she tapped the man's throat
just under his Adam's apple. She was already resting her hand on the bar
before the man shuddered visibly, eyes going wide, his breath stopping after
his single, soft barking cry.

"What the fuck?" Brian wondered aloud. The eyes of everyone in the bar were
riveted to the scene as they all watched, fascinated, seemingly unable to
move.

The big bearded guy at the bar was choking, or something like it. His chest
hitched up and down, but he made no sound; no harsh gargling, no gasping came
from him ... only a quiet, understated liquid croak escaped his mouth. It was
as if his airway had been completely sealed off. His arms jerked in a spasm of
growing alarm and panic. He would have risen from the stool, but the
brunette's arm was still draped across his shoulder, and even though it was
preposterous, it seemed like her single slender but toned arm kept him glued
to his seat. Beads of sweat sprang to the surface of his skin, and his face
was suddenly a flushed, bright crimson.

"He can't breathe," the brunette smiled matter-of-factly at Brian. She spoke
as if she were discussing the weather or some trite, commonplace event.

"Why? What happened?" Brian demanded over his shock.

"Because I closed his throat," the woman said, her tone that of an adult
explaining an obvious fact to a petulant child. "He cannot speak, or, more
importantly, breathe. He is suffocating. He is suffering."

"Stop! Stop it! Help him!"

"First you will tell me what I need to know," she said calmly, and nodded to
the smaller blonde.

The blonde woman stepped forward, producing a 4x6 photograph from the back
pocket of her jeans. She held it up so Brian could see the picture; it showed
a plain, nondescript-looking guy in his 30s with brownish hair and an
expression that could be called somewhat sleepy yet still intelligent.

"His name is Daniel Pittman," the brunette said. "It is said that he is known
to frequent this establishment. We require any information you may have as to
his whereabouts."

What is it with these crazy bitches? Brian thought. And why does this brunette
chick talk so funny? And what the hell is she doing to this guy?

"What the fuck!" Brian exclaimed, and pulled the sawed-off bat from beneath
the counter, holding it in his big fist. "Help this guy, he's turning fucking
purple!"

The guy's eyes had rolled up in their sockets, his quiet liquid burbling
growing weaker by the second. The brunette turned to regard his appearance,
measured Brian's state of outrage, and then she shrugged her shoulders in a
motion of vague indifference.

"Very well," she said, and placed the heel of her palm under the guy's chin.
She still held her left forearm across the guy's shoulders and neck, and with
little warning and no obvious effort at all, she drove her right palm upward
suddenly while bracing with her left.

The guy's head pivoted backward with a sudden jolt, a thick, meaty POP
sounding from somewhere deep in his neck. The brunette released her hold, and
the man's considerable bulk slid off the stool to the floor, silent and still
at last.

No one moved. No one spoke.

"Holy shit," Billy breathed softly. "I think he's dead."

"HUT!" the brunette suddenly cried, her voice shrill and suddenly very loud
and piercing. At her call, the three women with her burst into swift, sudden
motion.

The little blonde girl spun on her heel, her left hand pistoning out, striking
Billy in the chest and pinning him to the rough wall behind him. The black
girl seized the hair of a guy sitting alone at a small round table, and drove
him face-first into the rough wooden surface; his head connected with the
table with a loud, hollow BONK noise, and he grew motionless upon it.

Brian took a quick step forward, his foot rising to rest on the plastic milk
crate on the floor behind the bar. He hadn't gone over the bar too often
lately, but this was going to be a good one.

Except it wouldn't. The tall woman in the hooded sweatshirt stepped quickly
beside the brunette in what was obviously a sudden protective stance; her
hands dropped down to her sides, fingers extended. Her face was nearly
completely hidden in shadow under her hood, only the very tip of her chin
visible. She stood straight, becoming suddenly rigid.

Brian froze.

But not of his own volition.

He couldn't move.

It was as if a huge, unseen hand had suddenly wrapped itself around his entire
body. He could feel a huge, invisible pressure surrounding him, trapping his
arms against his body, pressing in from all sides in an even, yet strangely
amorphous shape. Tighter this unseen hand pressed in on him, tighter, and with
a dawning sense of panic he realized that drawing breath was noticeably more
difficult. Even in his disjointed, panicked state, he knew the weird hooded
bitch was doing this, but how? She wasn't even touching him! He tried to
speak, to roar out his fury at them, but all that came out with a forced
groan.

"Huuuuhhhnnn," he gasped.

The brunette smiled broadly and stepped back away from the bar, squaring her
shoulders, thrusting out her chest and drawing up to her full height - wait,
was she taller, somehow?

"Now, you must listen. Mulita is always so eager to demonstrate her
considerable power, and she is so very, very difficult to control. Isn't that
right, Mulita?" the brunette said, smiling at the hooded woman.

The only reply was a strange, soft hissing sound, a whisper that was barely
audible and in some weird, sibilant language no one in the bar could
understand, yet it made the skin of all who heard it crawl in sudden
gooseflesh.

" ... ..sai ahdameh nongali," the woman said, but the sliding, slippery sound
of her hushed whisper seemed to come not from her hooded form but instead from
another place, very close to the ear of those who heard it, making each person
jump in surprise, their noses wrinkling, as if they had been suddenly forced
to touch something slimy and unpleasant.

With the new hissing words, the invisible grip holding Brian grew even
tighter; it was painful, now, and he groaned anew, the cords on his neck
standing out a little.

"You mustn't struggle," the brunette said, still smiling. "There is no hope of
ever escaping her grasp."

Brian could only grunt in pain and fury once more, his muscles tight and
burning as he strained against whatever strange force held him.

"Hey..." Billy began, but was silenced when the blonde holding him to the wall
pressed in suddenly, her hand compressing his chest. His breath left his lungs
with a whoosh, and he seemed to fold around her hand a little. As everyone
watched, the blonde simply smiled and raised her offending hand while
maintaining the pressure of her hold. Incredibly, Billy's feet turned down,
and then rose from the floor as the young woman drove him up the wall. Billy
gripped her forearm weakly, his eyes wide, unable to draw a full breath
against her grip. His feet dangled a full 12 inches from the floor. The
blonde, obviously drawing delight in her casual dominance of the seemingly
bigger and stronger Billy, smiled up at him, her bright blue eyes nearly
sparkling with their own inner light.

"Princess," she spoke for the first time, "Please, may I have this one? May I
have this one to play with?"

Brian's whirling thoughts were spun anew. Princess? Did she just call this
brunette woman fucking 'princess?'

"Patience, Caitlyn, patience," the brunette chided gently. "Perhaps if we get
what we seek, we may indeed have time for you to ... to indulge yourself."

"Oh, thank the gods," Caitlyn breathed, staring up at young man she held aloft
so easily. Billy, even stunned as he was by his predicament and the not
inconsiderable discomfort her hold had on him, saw the expression on her face
and heard the tone of her voice and recognized it immediately for what it was:
lust. The blonde called Caitlyn held him against the wall, her compact,
athletic form seemingly more than equal to the task, her eyes shining, her
breathing a barely controlled panting, her tongue stealing out to actually
lick her lips into a glistening moistness as she gazed up at him. He noticed
something then, a scent, a hint of a high, unfamiliar sweet smell that was
utterly delightful, and despite the discomfort of his predicament he felt the
first faint but unmistakable sensations of his arousal, of the slow thickening
of his own intimate anatomy. He tried to focus his thoughts, tried to remain
alert, and a part of his mind knew that it was strange he could be so
distracted while experiencing such an unbelievable event ... yet another part
of his mind, the majority, evidently didn't care. All her could see was her,
all he could feel was her, all he could think about ... her. As the young
woman smiled up at him, a strange, wicked light in her eyes, he gave into the
sensation as felt himself spring to full, pounding life, his physical desire a
real, sudden, all-encompassing reality.

Brian had no such sensation; all he felt was confusion and a dawning sensation
of pain as the invisible fist holding him tightly bore down harder. He grunted
loudly, sweat stood out on his brow.

"The man we seek," the brunette, the princess, asked. She was obviously
drawing some pleasure from this exchange, but nothing like the one named
Caitlyn. Instead, hers was more professional, more businesslike ... but it was
also undeniable. "Pittman. Do you know where we may find him? And, perhaps
more importantly, have you seen anyone with him?"

Brian stared at her, frozen, whether it was in shock or in defiance even he
was not sure. After a moment of silence, the brunette nodded to herself.

"Contessa," she said without her eyes leaving Brian's trapped form, "Show
these ... people ... .that we are serious in our request."

"Yes, Diana," the young black woman said as she approached another guy at the
bar, this one a thin, older gentleman who seemed frozen to his seat. In a
flash, Contessa's arms were wrapped around him; one across his throat, the
other around his forehead. A gentle "Hah!" exclamation sprang from her lips as
she jerked to the side in a sudden powerful movement. The man's neck broke
with a loud, brittle SNAP like the sound of a large tree branch breaking; he
shuddered violently as Contessa released him and he slid down to form a
quivering heap on floor. Contessa merely stood over him, staring at the
corpse, her eyes wide, her breath coming in large, excited gasps.

Brian tried to shout his outrage, but again all he could muster was a
strangled choking sound. The fist around him grew tighter; it was now
difficult to draw even the tiniest of breaths. The chill of panic settled in
his chest and wrapped its icy fingers around his heart.

"You see, we require this information, and we do not have time to spare," the
brunette, this Princess Diana, said in low, threatening tones. "You will tell
us what we wish to know."

The eyes of the waitress, Heather, flashed between the brunette, the strange
hooded woman, and Brian in desperation. Diana saw her indecision, and motioned
with her head in her direction. Heather saw the black girl, Contessa, move
toward her, and her expression went from indecision to terror as she shrank
backward against the far wall of the bar.

"P..p ... please," she cried.

"You know of whom we speak," Diana said plainly, her eyes seemingly boring a
hole through Heather's own. "You will tell us what you know."

"But ... But ... if I do, will you let ... "

But Diana interrupted her stuttering question with a single, loud word, a
name. "Mulita!" she cried.

The strange hooded woman reacted immediately, as if she knew what was to come
next. Her arms rose outward slightly, her hands closing into fists. More of
the weird, hissing dialogue slid out of mid-air, almost in the ear of everyone
who was in the room. Once again Heather, Billy, and those left alive shuddered
and recoiled instinctively.

" ... pallifune dagga quintola ... " the slimy, liquid-sounding voice hissed.

Even though the small, rational part of the minds of the bar patrons
registered it as impossible, it happened. Brian's body rose three feet in the
air, his arms and legs trapped tightly together, his choking cries that much
louder as the invisible clutch on his body bore down with new, fearsome
strength.

"Please," Heather begged through her tears.

"Mulita," Diana barked once more.

Brian's body spasmed visibly as something in his chest gave way; a lump the
size of a softball suddenly sprang to life on his upper abdomen, pushing his
T-shirt out in a rounded bulge as the sound of a brittle, bony CRACK sounded
from within him. Brian's eyes went wide in shock, the forceful, muted sound of
a breathless scream coming from his throat.

"Oh, God!" Heather cried, tears running down her face.

"Speak!" Diana commanded, her figure towering over the tiny, quaking form of
the waitress.

"P..p ... please," Heather choked out once more, her hands held out
protectively before her.

"Again!" Diana barked, and a grisly, muted popping sound accompanied the sight
of the right side of Brian's chest collapsing on itself as ribs splintered and
the unseen force compressed his suddenly frail-seeming body. Brian's eyes were
wide in shock and terror, but this time no cry followed this new abuse;
instead, his head slid forward as the muscles in his neck spasmed from the
pain.

"No!" Heather cried instinctively.

"Again!" Diana roared.

Brian's torso spun violently to the right a full 90 degrees in a quarter
second; the vertebrae of his lower back cracked with a single clean, resonant
POP sound; once again his entire body shuddered, but this time his cry was a
weak, muted mewling sound. He was fading.

"Okay! Okay! I know the guy! I know him! He was here! He comes in a lot!"
Heather said, her eyes wide in terror, snot from her nose now streaming down
her face much like her copious tears. "He comes in all the time! Twice a week,
at least! Please! Please!" she cried.

"Yes?" Diana asked, her left eyebrow arched very high, her lips pursed in
mocking expression of doubt.

Heather was totally outside of herself now, whatever self control she might
have once had was now history as words exploded from her, coming faster and
faster the longer she talked, tumbling over each other in a rapid dash from
her mouth.

" ... he comes in all the time and I think he might like me sometimes but
other times he doesn't seem to be any different I don't know where he works or
what he does cuz sometimes he pays with cash and other times he uses a credit
card I forget which kind and its never been declined and he drinks a lot of
White Russians and they aren't cheap so maybe he has a lot of money but I
don't think that matter as far as I go cuz the last time he was in here it was
only a couple of days ago he was in here one night and this girl there was
this girl that met him here and I don't know her never seen her before but she
was here came on a motorcycle cuz she had a helmet and it was obvious he was
into her he kept undressing her with his eyes and she was blonde but I didn't
know here and she just sat there talking to him the bitch and they only stayed
long enough for one drink because they were so totally into each other and I
can't blame him because she was pretty hot and even though she wore a jacket I
could see she had a nice body and so they left oh fuck me and please and they
left and I haven't ... .oh, God ... oh, please I haven't seen them since ...
.oh, God, please ... .please don't hurt me," Heather finished with a gasp, the
words finally slowing down, coming to a close. "Please," she gasped,
exhausted.

"Shhh," Diana said softly, her hand gently cupping Heather's chin as she
turned her head up to meet her gaze. "Quiet, little one," she said with a
chastising grin. "You've been very helpful. Your service will not go
unrewarded."

Heather merely stood there, gazing up into the eyes of the impossibly
beautiful woman who stood before her, holding her chin in a firm, irresistible
grasp. All Heather could do was quake in fear and make a low, shuddering
moaning sound of terror.

"So I will allow you to live," Diana finished. "However I can tolerate your
pathetic mewling no longer. I will hear no more of it."

Diana's right hand curled into a fist, the first two fingers extended, and in
a flash she drove them an inch into Heather's throat, just above her
breastbone. Heather's eyes went wide, her breath frozen in sudden pain and
shock. Diana then rotated her fingers 90 degrees with an equally swift motion.

There was a deep, fundamental-sounding CLICK that issued from Heather's
throat, and her eyes lit up with a pain the likes of which she had never
known.

"Guk!" she hiccupped awkwardly.

It was the last word she would ever speak. Years later, upon her natural
death, the surgeon performing the autopsy would claim that she must have
experienced some kind of strange localized degenerative disease, or suffered a
catastrophic injury that surely should have killed her, judging from the utter
ruin that once was her voice box.

Diana released her and Heather's hands went to her throat, her mouth opening
and closing soundlessly like a fish's. "Now ... look at me," Diana commanded,
and even in her panic, Heather's eyes met Diana's own ... and after a few
seconds Heather's gaze began to glaze over.

"Be still, now," Diana said softly, and Heather's movements slowed ... then
stopped. She stood, completely motionless, staring uncomprehendingly at the
brunette woman before her.

"Sleep," Diana commanded simply.

It was like someone had hit Heather with a hammer. Her eyes rolled up in their
sockets and she slid to the floor to lie in a heap. Diana gazed down at her,
her eyes shining, and after a few seconds the tiny sound of Heather's soft,
feminine snoring was audible. Diana's smile widened as she gazed around them
room once more; Caitlyn still held the boy aloft, but her effect was evident
as the boy was ready to burst through his jeans; Contessa was ready to pounce
on the next bar patron; Mulita still held her unnatural grip on the bartender.

"Lita," Diana said softly, and nodded.

A soft sigh slid by the ear of everyone in the room.

Brian's body nearly imploded, the brittle symphony of cracking shockingly loud
and his form collapsed on itself, followed by the graceless fall to the floor
as the hooded woman released him.

"Caitlyn," Diana said with a knowing grin. "You may indulge yourself, but
quickly, please."

The glimmer of excitement in the little blonde's eyes became a shining light
of expectation and utter glee. She still Billy aloft, pinning him to the wall
with her left hand. With her right, she took hold of Billy's belt and jeans,
and jerked downward suddenly, tearing every layer of clothing wide open with
one easy-looking motion, revealing the quivering length of the young man. The
blonde encircled him with her free hand, and the reaction was immediate: Billy
shuddered visibly, his eyes closing, and he groaned aloud with the force of
his arousal. A long rope of fluid shot out and away from him, and Caitlyn
laughed aloud, a sound with no mirth or goodwill in it.

"That's one, worm," Caitlyn half-moaned with laughter as she pulled Billy from
the wall and held him close. "Let's see how much more I can squeeze out of
you."

"Be quick about it, girl," Diana ordered, but the joy and her own arousal at
the sight of Caitlyn's easy dominance was plain. "Quickly, now."

"And the rest?" the young woman named Contessa asked, her face flushed, her
breaths coming in tiny gasps of excitement.

A feral grin of cold malice spread over the beautiful and terrible face of the
brunette woman, an expression that quite literally chilled the blood of every
man left alive in the room. Her ruby lips glistened in the dim light, her
electric blue eyes shining.

"Kill them," Diana commanded simply. "Kill them all."

CHAPTER 21

"This is really all you have?" Kevin asked, incredulous.

"Yep," the older man answered matter-of-factly. "Sorry, Kevin."

Kevin and Billie a wordless glance, and both silently regarded their
half-empty shopping cart. A few tins of corned beef, some canned soup, and a
few boxes of Ramen soup were all they could find in the entire store.

"I can't believe it," Kevin said, the wonder in his voice nearly masking his
disappointment.

"Stocking up, eh?" the older man asked. "Well, I don't blame you. Hell if I
know what's going on. I don't think anybody does. Never saw anything like it
in my time, anyway."

"But, John, you must have some stuff somewhere that we could ... "

"I'm sorry, Kevin, but no. The only reason I have that is that Joley Wilson
ran out of money, or she would have taken this stuff, too."

Nothing seemed to crack the cool, impassive face of his companion. Billie's
demeanor had been constant throughout the day, a plain, even keel. It was
reassuring, but it slightly disconcerting too, all the same. Some emotion
would be nice to see, even if it was some mild trepidation.

"Well, I guess we'll have to make do," Kevin said, and hefted the box of
supplies.

"I ain't never seen anything like this," the elder man offered. "Even back
when the Ruskies put that Spootnik thing up in the air. I thought, Lord,
people have gone and lost their minds over a little itty bitty ball beeping up
there in the dark. But this? Jesus H. take away people's damn TVs and cell
phones and you'd think it was the everlovin end of the world."

"Yeah, I suppose so, John."

"Thing's gonna be all right, Kevin," the old man said. "They always are.
Things're gonna be all right."

"I hope so. Good luck, John. Let us know when the trucks come again." Kevin
realized with a sense of dawning horror that he had almost said if the trucks
ever come again. He shuddered at his near Freudian slip.

"Sure will. Have to put out sign, I guess. We'll find a way. Always do."

"Okay. See you, John."

"Bye now."

The drive back to Billie's ranch was quiet, since they both strained to hear
anything of note over the soft fuzzy whine of interference on the radio.
Nothing came to them over the airwaves.

Billie parked the big truck in the turnaround, as near to the house as she
could get it. She killed the engine, blew out a long, slow breath, paused, and
spoke.

"You really think something is going on?" she asked.

"I don't know," Kevin said, a strange sense telling him to be guarded in the
conversation. "I don't want to get all riled up for nothing, as ol' John would
say. But, yeah. Something's up. Cell phone, internet, cable's out. No
communication. And it's not just here, this area ... the TV dish would still
be up if it were. I just ... I just don't know."

A small silence fell as she considered his answer, her brow knitted in
thought.

"Why?"

"I was wondering what you want to do about it."

"Me?"

"Is there someone else in the truck?" she asked.

"Well, I don't know what I could do," Kevin said simply.

"You're a smart guy. Super smart, even, let's be honest. Science is your
thing, you could probably solve some of these problems. Why aren't you trying
to help?"

Kevin studied her face before answering. "I thought I was. Trying, anyway."

"I can take care of myself."

"I noticed."

Her hand fell to his forearm, her grip surprisingly strong. "You are, though.
Helping."

"Thanks. And, ouch. Take it easy, She-hulk," Kevin said, rubbing the place on
his arm she had touched. "Jesus."

"Sorry. I get carried away."

"I guess so."

"So ... "

"Yeah, so."

A longer silence drew out between them.

"So, are you going? To try to help whatever situation is happening?" Billie
asked without looking at him.

"What are we talking about, Billie?"

She turned to face him, her expression still one of cool impassivity ... but
beneath it Kevin thought he could detect the first tiny crack in the façade.
He just wasn't sure what he was looking at, what she was telling him.

"Because if you're staying, I'd like you to really stay," she said.

"What?" he replied.

"For a brilliant man of science, you're a little dense sometimes."

"Thank you."

"I want you to stay. Here. With me. Together. Move some stuff over."

"Do I get a box? Or a shelf in the closet for my stuff?"

"I might even give you a drawer in the dresser."

"Wow," he said, a slow smile on his face.

"Yeah."

"Oh ... okay. Uh, I guess we could do that, if you want."

"Only if you want to."

"Of course I do, it would be good. It would be nice. Simpler," he offered.

"Yeah."

"Why do you want me to ... you know, move in?"

"Something is happening," she said, her eyes locking onto his. "You're right
about that, and ... well ... I think you're important. I want to keep my eyes
on you."

***

The lights in Dan Pittman's apartment turned on, lighting the windows with a
pale yellow light.

"Holy shit," Mitch Herndon muttered to himself in soft wonder. He nearly
dropped his coffee in his surprise; part of him has given up on anything
happening here. He got the Styrofoam cup into one of the cruiser's holders and
grabbed the Motorola walkie from the dash.

"Marty, I've got lights on up front. Lights on."

"What?" The disbelieving tone was plain, even in the poor, tinny sound coming
from the small speaker. "Who went in?"

"Nobody up front. Did someone get by you?"

"Nobody I saw. And I've been staring at the freight elevator all night."

"Damn. All right. I'll meet you there in a second. We go up."

"Okay."

Mitch was out of the car, and he adjusted the firm bulkiness of the flak
jacket under his gray sport jacket. He paused, considering, and then leaned
back into the cruiser to unlock the small-stock Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun. He
checked the load, double-checked the safety, and trotted across the street and
down the darkened alley beside the apartment building, his vision fixed on the
illuminated window in the apartment above.

Martin Ridgeway, a cop of about Mitch's own age and strikingly similar in
appearance, met him near the rear corner of the brick building. He clipped his
radio to his belt with his left hand; his right held his service revolver at
the ready.

"How the hell did they get past us?" Martin asked, his tone giving away his
annoyance.

"I don't know, doesn't matter now," Mitch replied. "You know that code?"

Ridgeway had tracked down the building's super earlier that day, a task made
maddeningly difficult by the present circumstances. Two days ago, a simple
phone call would have done the job. Now, precious man-hours were lost just to
get an electronic door code.

Four buttons pressed on a keypad later, they crept down the darkened hall. It
was a fairly dingy space, given the upscale nature of the apartment building,
but then again, it was mainly an unused freight entrance, after all.

Ridgeway motioned toward the metal grate over the elevator, his head nodding
toward it questioningly. Mitch shook his head. Too loud. Ridgeway nodded and
slowly pulled pone the staircase door. Mitch, shotgun raised, stepped silently
into the stairwell, checking every 'danger zone,' just as his training had
taught him to do. He tilted his head, and Ridgeway followed, the door closing
behind them with a soft click.

They slowly made their way up the stairs, pausing for an extra moment at each
landing, listening for anything out of the ordinary, their every sense
straining to pull some kind of information from the darkened atmosphere of the
building. Finally they arrived at the landing for Pittman's floor. No sound.

As quietly as they could manage, the two men slid into the hallway outside
Pittman's apartment. Mitch even forced himself to go into shallow breathing so
his ears could detect as much as he could. Ridgeway followed, head turning
from side to side, keeping a wary eye on their 6 o'clock. Mitch's eyes had by
now adjusted fully to the dark, and his breath hitched to a stop in his
throat.

The was a tiny sliver of pale yellow light across the floor and far wall of
the hallway: the door to Pittman's apartment was open, the inch-wide gap
allowing a tiny amount of light to spill out ... .along with the voices.

There was somebody inside.

Or, some bodies, more accurately.

The sound of hushed sibilant voices. It was hard to tell how many people were
inside the apartment, or how old they were, or even their gender. But the
barely audible sound of stealthy movement and the whispers were indication
enough that whoever it was, they didn't want to be discovered.

Then why the lights? Mitch wondered. He was confused. Something didn't add up,
didn't make sense. Did he really believe it was Pittman and that blonde woman
from this morning? No, not really. Pittman may have been a lot of things,
maybe even a murderer, but he hadn't come off as stupid. And that woman - she
was actually the one Mitch was worried about. The way she had carried herself
... it had been somehow extraordinary and strangely subtle at the same time.
He still didn't remember what had happened, why he had blacked out. Somebody
must have hit him from behind or something ... still, he should have a cut, or
at least a bruise, or something. Nothing was making sense.

And worse, he was nervous. Mitch touched his brow, just below his slightly
receeding hairline. His fingertips came away moist. Why was he sweating? What
was he so goddam nervous about, anyway? He concentrated on steadying himself;
deep breath in, deep breath out ... .slow that heart rate ... deep breath in
...

A sound came to the two cops at last, a muted, soft thump thump thump of
running feet, several pairs.

And it came from above them.

Herndon and Ridgeway's eyes both swiveled skyward simultaneously, and Ridgeway
gave quiet, hissing voice to what Mitch had instantly thought.

"The roof!"

Sonofabitch. Mitch didn't know how they got up there, but that's how they had
gotten in without being seen. Before he could acknowledge, Ridgeway was
moving.

"Marty, wait!" Mitch hissed, but the other detective was already past him and
halfway through the door.

It could have been a textbook example of the best way not to enter a room:
Ridgeway thrust the door aside with one hand, the other holding his revolver
in front of him at arm's length. And before it had even begun, the situation
was sealed.

Before Ridgeway had cleared the blind spot created by the door, before Mitch
could cry out again or even put out a hand to stop him, the eager detective's
gun had passed the far edge of the door. There was a blur of motion too fast
to see, the sense of a great force at work, and a hand shot out from behind
the door and seized Ridgeway by his leading wrist.

Ridgeway howled out an inarticulate cry, as much from surprise as pain, and
seemed to suddenly leap into the apartment as he was pulled forward with great
force. Then the door slammed shut before Mitch could see the offending
attacker.

"Shit!" he shouted, nearly in reflex, and tried the handle. Locked. A sound
came from inside, and it wasn't the sharp CRACK of a pistol shot he expected.
Mitch was pretty sure it was Marty, and pretty sure it was a scream.

Mitch kicked the door, once, twice. Damn - it was thick, sturdy. Solid. Not
that cheap laminate-covered cardboard crap. Heavy and durable. Still, with the
third kick, a heavy, jarring blow that seemed to reverberate a little
painfully up his leg, he thought he could see the door frame give a bit. Kicks
four and five came quickly as he saw a wide crack appear and finally the harsh
brightness of split wood in the frame. He threw all of his weight behind the
final charge, his shoulder slamming into the door; the frame gave way with a
brittle, fibrous tearing sound and the door fell to the side and downward into
the apartment where it sat at a crazy, raked angle in the entrance. Mitch
scrambled over it, bringing the shotgun up to bear against whatever he might
find.

He didn't have to look far.

A short hallway in front of him, a small kitchen to his right. Fifteen feet in
front of him, Ridgeway stood at a strange, canted angle, his hip turned to the
outside, one arm behind his back, the other draped across his own throat, his
eyes wide as he sucked in a ragged breath, the awkwardness of his position
evidently making even breathing difficult.

And behind him was a woman.

She was young, barely more than a girl, really. She couldn't have been more
than 25. She was slight, shorter than Ridgeway, with blonde hair tied down in
tight rows ending in short tails. She was in tight jeans and a plain white
T-shirt that showed off a curvy yet athletic figure, and somehow, amazingly,
she seemed to have some kind of controlling hold on the bigger, heavier cop.

"Hi," she said cheerily, smiling at Mitch as though they were meeting on a
sunny beach rather than a potential crime scene.

"Freeze!" Mitch shouted, training the Mossberg in the general direction of her
head.

Damn. Wrong weapon, he thought miserably.

If having such an imposing weapon pointed at her face disturbed her, the young
woman didn't show it. Her grin broadened, and her notably bright blue eyes
seemed to sparkle with their own inner light.

"Nice gun," she mocked. "Do all men here have such big, big guns?" she said in
a playful voice that Mitch unconsciously noted was far too cavalier for the
situation. It just added to the unreality of the whole scene, and just helped
to feed Mitch's weird feeling that something was amiss, something was just
off.

"Let him go, goddam it," Mitch ordered, his voice taking on the harsh, barking
tone of assumed authority. He took in the woman and his fellow cop; he
couldn't see clearly the hold she had on Ridgeway, it was some kind of odd
grappling maneuver; Mitch stared at the tangle of wrists and elbows, hands and
pressure-whitened flesh, but somehow her weird grip just didn't make sense to
him; he couldn't see how it would be painful or incapacitating.

"Him? Sure," she chirped, and made a tiny, sudden jerking motion with her
hands and one arm.

A strange, thick, muffled tearing sound filled the hallway, shockingly loud in
the small space. Ridgeway's hips turned right, his torso turned left, and his
head slipped to the side with a thick crunching sound.

"Aaaagh!" Ridgeway gagged; and then he was free as the young woman released
him. He fell to the floor, where he lay motionless, his eyes darting form side
to side in wide, sudden terror.

"Marty?" Mitch asked, suddenly unsure of himself. What the hell was going on?
What had she done to""

Reflex kicked in, and Mitch pressed the safety button in with a thumb and
squeezed down on the trigger. But before the bright flash and roar of the
report, he saw the girl blur, as if she ...

The flash and concussive sound of the blast passed, and Mitch's eyes opened.

She was gone.

What the fuck. He inched forward, his knees slightly bent, left hand working
the action of the Mossberg, bringing a fresh shell to bear. He peered around
the corner wall; carefully after Marty's costly mistake, and saw no one there.
Keeping his vision up, he knelt beside his fallen partner and stole a glance
at his face, and search for a pulse with his left hand.

Ridgeway's eyes had stilled, now fixing on Mitch's own, but his entire form
had stilled as well. Mitch's mind reeled; it looked like Ridgeway was no
longer breathing. A second, longer glance seemed to confirm this; Mitch heart
leaped into a quick, tight gallop in his chest when he saw Ridgeway's eyes
take on a wet, glassy stare.

Panting in mounting alarm, Mitch stood, taking a two-handed grip on the
shotgun once more. Goddam it, he thought wildly. I think he's dead! I think
she fucking killed him. What the blue fuck is going""

A sound, the quick, light pad pad pad sound of feet; Mitch spun in the
direction of the long hallway on the other side of the big, open living room.
He was aware of an iron staircase leading to a metal catwalk-style landing
above him. He stole a glance in that direction, saw nothing. He began to turn
around to""

WHAM!

"Ugh!" Mitch grunted as his body was propelled forward. The sudden, huge
impact in his upper back sent a heavy thud through his body; his left hand
came off the gun as he reflexively pulled the trigger. The Mossberg roared
again, throwing the steel shot into the ceiling high above him. The recoil
threw the muzzle of the gun sideways, but he kept his grip on it as he shot
across the room and smashed into the back of an expensive leather sitting
chair.

Mitch rolled over, bright golden stars spinning on the edges of his field of
vision. He fumbled with the gun, trying to bring it up to bear on his attacker
who had somehow snuck around behind him ... .or had flipped down from above.
Or ...

Fuck it, Mitch thought. I've about had it with this getting kicked around
shit.

He staggered to his feet, his head swimming, and raised the shotgun.

The young woman was halfway between him and the door. She paused, her
expression going from one of obvious, totally inappropriate mirth to one of
... was it hesitation?

"Don't you fucking move," Mitch said, his voice low and deadly.

A lopsided grin formed on the girl's face. "Like this?" she asked, and before
Mitch could even process what she had said, she sort of jumped, no, more like
skipped a single step backward, except this step put her all the way back into
the hall, outside the door.

"You're lucky I have to go, right now," she said cryptically.

"Don't you fucking do it or I'll"""

Whoosh.

The Mossberg roared once again; ragged circle a foot in diameter appeared in
the drywall on the far side of the hall.

She was gone.

"Fuck!" Mitch cried. He listened head cocked to the side. Nothing. Then, the
familiar soft thrumming of feet on the roof above him.

The fucking roof.

His feet were moving before the realization even had time to sink in. Out the
door, check your zones. Hallway. Clear. Run. Stairwell. Clear. Up we go ...

Mitch's lungs burned as he tore up the steps as fast as he could go. Still, he
couldn't see the girl above him, and he should have been able to. This was
wrong. This was crazy. What was she, some kind of fitness freak? Some kind of
fucking Olympian? Mitch had never seen anyone, male or female, athlete or not,
move the way this young woman could. Her speed, her strength, the effortless
way she did ... it made him feel fat, sluggish, like he was packed in heavy
syrup.

The last landing was dark, but there was no one there to greet him as he had
feared. He could see a lighter shape, a brighter straight line ahead ...

The door to the roof stood open, the night sky of the city shockingly dark
since nearly all of the lights were off. The moon shone down from above, its
3/4 shape casting the roof of the building in an eerie pale blue glow, bright
enough for Mitch to make out his shadow on the asphalt coating beneath his
feet.

She was there, running, although at not much more than a jog, moving away from
him, watching him over her shoulder as she ran.

As she ran toward the edge of the roof.

Huh?

"Freeze!" Mitch roared. Somehow this crazy bitch had gotten into his suspect's
apartment, and then she had somehow jujitsued, or some damn thing, his partner
to death, and now she was gonna do a double back flip off the roof into the
grave.

"Don't fuckin' do it!" Mitch shouted, and began running after her. But she was
too fast, even though he was sprinting and she was merely trotting, she was
still too far ahead, she was still going to get to the edge before he would
...

And as he ran after her, he saw her actually raise her right hand and give him
a little wave.

Mitch slowed to a walk in amazement.

She took a long, skipping step up onto the raised edge of the roof, bunched
her legs beneath her, and then uncoiled them in a huge burst of muscular
power, knocking a dozen bricks loose from their mortar, and propelling herself
not down to the street but into the sky.

Into the fucking sky.

Mitch stopped, his mouth slack, wide open. All logical thought processes in
his mind stopped as he saw what he thought - no, what he knew - wasn't
possible.

The blonde shot up and out away from the building, arrow-like. Her leap
carried her a good forty or fifty feet out and up a little, then her momentum
seemed to fade; Mitch was sure this was merely the start of the long arc that
ended with her dead on the street below. But instead the girl just swept her
arms back, on either side of her body, like she was doing a long, leisurely
breaststroke in an invisible pool, but now her arms rested alongside her body,
her head arched upward a bit.

And she fucking rose. Up. Higher in the air.

Her momentum was regained, she wavered for a second and then rose again, as if
buoyed by some unseen hand that drew her skyward. She continued this, series
of long, slow inverted parabolas with renewed speed in their centers ... Mitch
got an impression of her bemused glance at his inability to follow her further
(or, more likely, his shocked, slack-jawed expression) ... and then she was
gone.

The shotgun fell from his grasp and clattered to the ground beside him.

***

"You know we're being followed," Dan said evenly, his eyes darting back and
forth between the road in front of them and the headlights that glowed dimly
in his rearview mirror.

"Yes," Cassie replied simply. She sounded unconcerned, amused even. Dan shook
his head slightly in wonder as he glanced at her craning her neck around to
star out the rear window.

"What?" she asked after a moment.

"Oh, nothing. Just that you seem so unfazed by this newest development."

Cassie smiled wryly a little, but didn't take her eyes off of the headlights
behind Dan's SUV. "Well, I don't know who they are exactly, but I know who
they're not, so ... I don't know. I'll take a break whenever I can."

She did look away know, and Dan saw her look at him briefly.

"Okay, what? Did I say something wrong?"

"No," she said. "I was just thinking the same thing myself. About you, I
mean."

"Huh?"

She leaned over quickly and kissed his cheek and sat back again. Dan caught a
faint whiff of her clean, distinctive scent for the briefest of moments, and
felt his heart flutter a bit in his chest.

"What was that for? I mean, I love it, but did I do something right or
something?"

Cassie grinned. "I was thinking the same thing about you. You've only had a
small amount of time to process all this, hours really, this whole huge, huge
thing ... and here you are, reacting pretty well. Strong. Solid. Like a
soldier. A good one, at that."

"That means a lot coming from somebody like you."

"Still. It's good. It makes me happy, and glad. And proud. I'm proud of you."

Dan felt a swell of goodwill bloom in his chest, one that made him - no,
compelled him - to smile, even though he tried to suppress it. He just nodded.

"What was it like?" Cassie asked. "The combat you saw?"

Dan snorted short, amazed laughter. "Are you kidding me? You're ... you're a
mythical warrior. A full-on, super-powered, ass-kicking Amazon warrior and
you're asking me about combat?"

"Yeah."

"You're full of surprises, you know that?"

"I suppose so. But it doesn't answer the question."

The skin under Dan's eyes tensed and rose up just a little in the dim light of
the truck's interior, a normal person wouldn't have noticed. Cassie saw it, of
course, she saw far more than even Dan suspected.

"It wasn't very much fun," Dan offered quietly.

"The classic Pittman understatement," she said, only half joking.

"I guess you could say that."

"Good, because I did," she said, and they shared a strained smile.

After a silence, Dan spoke. "In some ways it was the worst thing that ever
happened to me. I saw people do things, awful things. People I thought I knew.
Doing things I never thought a human being could do to another. Among the guys
I was sent over there with, and among the people we were trying to protect.
Everybody. Just...awful.

"And of course, just me personally, this whole thing," he continued, motioning
to his right side with his hand. "It gave me all these wonderful cold mornings
when it feels like my right side is made out of glass. And the way I start
pulling to the right if I have to walk more than a couple hundred yards. It
doesn't really hurt anymore, at least not like used to, but still, I can feel
that it just isn't right, and never will be."

A silence. Then:

"But ... ?" Cassie offered, her gaze fixed on him.

"But ... but it was also good, in a weird sick way. Good because it wasn't all
bad."

"Yes."

"I saw things, terrible things. But I also saw things that shocked me, that on
their own would be the most amazing, most uplifting things you could imagine."

"Like?"

"There was an explosion, a car bomb, right? Leveled the entire market area of
this little square in northern Baghdad. And it's not like the movies, okay? A
bomb like that goes off, it's not like there's this huge orange fireball that
engulfs everything in flame. A true IED goes Pow! And there's a flash of
fairly brief flame, sort of, and it's the blast and shrapnel that kills
people, and actually, mostly it's the blast. And a cloud of dirt. Dust. It's
not this big, long, fiery 'boom' that catches everything on fire. It's more of
a fast 'pow' that explodes your lungs if you're too close.

"Well, usually. This time, there was some kind of secondary incendiary device.
Maybe it was a fuel oil mixture, or maybe just some tanks of gas, I don't
know. But this car bomb goes off, flattens everybody, and this wet,
sticky-looking shower of flame just ... blossomed, right in the middle of the
square. All over. And all over this produce cart, where this guy had been
selling vegetables.

"The blast had killed him. His cart gets doused in what looks like napalm. The
whole thing burned a long, long time."

Cassie's brow knitted together in a slight frown. "This is uplifting to you?"

"Of course not. But there was this little girl ... "

Silence descended for a time.

"And?"

Dan looked away, through his side window into the inky darkness beyond it.
"Maybe some other time."

"Okay."

There was a long silence between them then that was not uncomfortable.

"I have some questions for you, though."

"There's a shocker."

"Seriously."

"All right," she said.

"There's a thing. A huge thing. We haven't talked about it at all."

"Ah, yeah ... .that."

"What you said was true? I mean, it is true?"

Cassie nodded. "Every word. Right here. I can feel it." She patted her flat
belly. "How do you feel about it?"

Dan shrugged a tiny bit and balanced it with a half-grin. "I know how I feel
about you. I had pretty much given up hope of starting a family, didn't really
feel the need for it until fairly recently ... but then in came you ... of
course, given our present circumstances ... your ... well, history ... I'm
concerned, of course. But I'm glad. I feel pretty good about it, mostly.
Great."

"And ... ?"

"Well," Dan said, blushing, "I'm kind of proud, too."

"Proud?"

"Yeah. I mean, it turns out Supergirl is a real, flesh and blood person."

"Oh, no. Don't say it," Cassie laughed.

" ... and I knocked her up. I gave a superheroine a case of the preggers."

"Oh, jeez."

They laughed together at the sheer silliness of the entire situation, their
hands interlocked over the center console of the SUV. After a moment, their
mirth faded.

"But you're worried," Cassie finished, her smile fading.

"Of course I am. We're at war now, as you so fondly like to point out. Doom
and gloom, right? No possible chance for survival, let alone happiness?"

"I"""

"What are we going to do, just run until we can't run anymore? Until they take
everything over?"

"No. We run until we can take care of this," Cassie said, her voice low as it
took on a tone of deadly seriousness as she patted her belly once again. "We
take care - I take care - of this, and then we fight back."

"A two-man army, huh?"

"I'm thinking three." She patted her belly again.

"What?! Don't tell me that Amazon kids come out of the womb swinging."

Cassie chuckled. "Nope. No such luck. It usually takes a while to develop. I
was thinking more about finding us some help. We're going to need it."

"I suppose we are."

She paused, and her slight smile faded. "This is probably a bad idea," she
said. "This is almost as obvious as going to Trevor's house. They're going to
see this coming."

"Yeah, I guess they might. But if I'm right, the information Trevor passed me
is a must-have item."

"And you think this is why they ... you know."

"What?" Dan smirked. "This is why they sent you to kill me?"

The good humor fled the SUV's interior like a physical thing. Dan saw the
sideways glance and the pained expression on Cassie's face and was instantly
sorry he'd said it.

"Hey, that ... that came out all wrong. I didn't mean ... "

"No, it's okay. Don't worry about it. But yeah."

"Well, then, yes, actually," Dan answered. "Not long before you entered the
picture, Trevor had passed me some information about a new weapons system that
he thought would revolutionize warfare. He claimed he'd be able to retire
early."

"And you believed him?"

"Trevor was a lot of things, but he wasn't a braggart," Dan continued. "I
believe what he said, or at least that he believed it. I was going to follow
up on it, but I sort of got ... distracted."

Cassie smiled wanly at this, and patted the back of Dan's hand.

"But yes. I'm sure of it. Whatever it was Trevor and his guys at AdvanTech
discovered, it was deemed dangerous by these sisters of yours. And that made
him a target."

"And you, too."

Dan nodded. "Guilty by association. Which might work for us; I'm hoping that
Team Super Bitch might assume that I knew what I had, and that I would take it
home, or lock it up, or take it somewhere safer."

"None of which you actually did, of course."

"Hell, no. It's sitting on my desk. An interdepartmental envelope filled with
folders and papers, and some stuff on a pocket-sized external hard drive."

"And you really think that's the key to everything?"

"Well, babe, at this point, at least it's something," Dan offered. "Which
leads me to, these lights behind us. What are we going to do about that?" He
glanced over to the passenger seat, and saw Cassie grin coldly.

"Leave that to me," she said.

"Leave that to you," Randy repeated.

"Yep," Jennifer Carnes answered.

"Right. Super Fed to the rescue," Randy spat. "Just because somebody got the
drop on me today ... "

"Somebody got the drop on both of us," Jen said, her gaze fixed on the red
taillights in the distance. She was trying to keep her distance, but the power
outages and the general sense of unease had kept most people home, and the
freeway through the heart of the city was eerily quiet. She feared that the
lack of other cars had made their presence known already; if so, it would be
even harder to get to the bottom of whatever was happening.

Randy rubbed the side of his pounding head. "Yeah, and it hurt," he added. "My
fuckin' brain hurts. I haven't had a concussion since I played football."

Jen didn't answer him. Her eyes narrowed as she watched the big truck in front
of them make its way down the freeway, turn off on an exit, and then slow down
to carefully pick its way through a pack of stalled cars.

"What's with this, anyway?" Randy wondered aloud. "What's with all the cars
just sitting her in the road?"

"I think they ran out of gas," Jen offered. "No power, no pumps."

"But the power's only been out a little while!" Randy complained, somewhat
petulantly.

"And they must have been on 'E' already. Just wait."

"Why?"

"In a two weeks, nobody will be driving."

Randy just stared at her, his face betraying his slow, dawning horror. "What?
You mean ... you don't think ... you don't think it'll go on that long, do
you?"

"Who knows? Who even knows what's going on? Until we figure that out, I'd say
anything could happen." Then she grimaced. "Shit."

"What?"

Jen pulled over against the curb, trying her best to blend the nondescript
sedan in with the cares cluttering the side of the city street. "I think we've
arrived," she said. "I was afraid he was coming here."

"To ... his job?" Randy wondered as he peeked over the dash. "I'll be damned.
Who would go to work on a night like this?"

"Hopefully, we'll find out," Jen muttered. She carefully pulled her sidearm
from its holster under her arm, checked the magazine and safety, and replaced
it. Randy, eyes wide at first, did the same.

"Talk to me, Carnes," he said softly, his vision tracking over the silent
scene, the darkened buildings, the stalled cars, the idling SUV further up the
block. "You think this is trouble?"

"I don't know," Jen said, her expression unreadable, impassive. "I just don't
know."

"I don't know!" the voice crackled over the radio.

Mitch pressed the pedal down harder, the Crown Vic surged forward with a
muscular growl. "Then tell me what you do know!" he barked.

"We've got the two subjects who just entered the building. Pittman and this
blonde woman you described," the SWAT commander replied. "They had some
trouble with the door, maybe the power is out and made the electronic access
limited or something."

Herndon swerved around a bakery truck that had somehow come to rest in the
middle of the street, and had a sudden flash of gratitude that the roads were
nearly deserted. "How did they get in, then?" he demanded.

"Not sure of that, detective. From where we're sitting, we couldn't see
everything. It looked like he couldn't get in, and then the woman came over
and somehow she helped or something, cause now they're inside. Looks like they
jimmied the door or something."

Mitch paused. Something about that ... .something about that wasn't right. It
seemed ... .he had seen it coming. Like he had expected it.

"What did she do, exactly?"

"I told you, we can't really see the door that clearly, over."

"All right, sergeant, listen. You're going to stay right where you are until I
get there, you understand? You stay put and stop them only if they leave
before I get there."

"But.."

"No buts about it. I'm 20 minutes ... light traffic, make that 15 from your
location. Repeat: do not go in under any circumstances."

There was a slight pause, just enough for the full nature of the SWAT team's
displeasure to be expressed nonverbally.

"Roger that, detective. It's your call."

Mitch nodded a little. "All right then. How many men are with you, over?"

"Normally we'd have a crew of 15 jammed into this little wagon, but given
tonight's circumstances, we're a little short handed. There's nine, plus me,
which makes 10. Over."

"Ten?"

"Sir, the city is nearly completely shut down, you're lucky that you got even
close to that ... .hold on."

The radio seemed to go dead in Mitch's hand.

The bottom dropped out of his stomach. This made Herndon even more annoyed
than he already was; ordinarily he was a even-keeled and sure-footed. The
events of the past day had knocked him for a loop, and it was a feeling he
didn't enjoy. And now ... dammit. Something was up, something was wrong. He
didn't know what, and these damned ... instinctual feelings ran directly
counter to his meticulous, empirical nature.

"What is it, over?"

Silence.

"I said come in, SWAT, I do not read you, Over. I say again, SWAT come ... "

A burst of static broke in then, and the sergeant's voice came over the radio,
but this time it was different, it was suddenly less sure, less commanding.

"Uhh, detective, something might be going on here, we have a bit of a
development. We've got other parties on scene, apparently, sir. Looks like
they're going to enter the building as well. Over."

"Shit!" Herndon barked and pushed the big Ford even harder, the speedometer
climbing past 60, now 70 ...

"Two new subjects; one male, mid-30s, well dressed; one female, early 30s,
both professionally dressed, she's in some kind of business suit, or something
and ... hold on. Shit."

"What is it?" Mitch barked into the mic.

"She's got a gun," the SWAT leader replied. "Repeat, the female subject is
armed. They've gone inside as well now. Permission to ... "

"Denied, permission denied; I'm only a few minutes out, sergeant, you and your
men will wait for me before you attempt any breach of the building. Over."

" ... but.."

"No breach, I said! Not until I can get there and we can sort this mess out
and find out who these people ... "

"Fuck!"

The word was hissed, a sound of real anger and desperation caught and kept
quiet only at the last second. A second passed, and then the SWAT team
leader's voice came over the radio again, this time practically seething with
anger.

"All right detective, I don't know what kind of joke this is, but either I'm
assuming tactical command of this situation right now or we are leaving and
busting up your stupid little joke right now, is that understood?"

"What are you talking about? What joke? What the fuck is going on there?"
Mitch demanded.

"A whole new bunch of people are joining your little party, detective."

"What?!"

"We've got ... three, no ... wait ... .four, count them, four more people
arriving on scene; four new female subjects, repeat four new female subjects,
arriving on scene. I'd say early 20s through mid-30s, all casually dressed
except the tall brunette in front; she's in a goddam dress like she was going
to some kind of formal or something. Over."

Mitch was silent, his frown deepening.

"They've just walked onto the scene, detective, walked on and now they're ...
yeah, that's affirmative, they're entering the building ... "

In his mind's eye, Mitch saw a cute blonde girl crack Ridegway in half again.

"Looks like there's gonna be quite the party in there," the SWAT team leader
said.

Mitch saw her leap out of his line of fire, into the hallway, off the roof,
into the fucking sky. These images replayed in his mind even though he knew
they could not be true.

"We're going in. Over."

"Negative!" Mitch said, his voice even, controlled, but barely. "Do not
breach. Repeat, do not breach the building. I'm calling this in, wait for
backup and my arrival before you breach ... "

"Backup?" The sergeant's tone betrayed his confidence. "There's ten heavily
armed men here, most of a major city's SWAT team. To breach a building holding
a total of eight people, one lightly armed, most of them women? Are you
kidding me?"

"Listen, I ... "

"We're going in, and we're going in right now, detective, and when you get
here we'll have them all lined up in a row, cuffed and ready to answer
whatever questions you might have. Then I'll be able to go home and see if I
can save the steaks in the freezer."

"Goddam it, sergeant, listen to me! There's a woman ... maybe more of them,
maybe more than one ... more than one of them I believe to be extremely
dangerous; she's already killed one cop today and I think ... "

"Then you'll have a row of prisoners and one corpse, detective. Over and out."

"No! Wait, goddamn it! Sergeant! Ser ... goddamn!" Mitch roared and dropped
the mic.

Well, the hell with pedestrians, Mitch thought, and floored the accelerator.
If one wanders out in front of me, he's gonna get pasted.

He gripped the wheel with both hands and took a deep breath.

Dan jogged down the dim hallway, his steps as light and quick as he could make
them. His heart was thrumming in his chest in the same familiar pre-raid
cadence he had known so well in Iraq. It was a strange combination of
adrenaline and queasiness.

This must be what and actor feels like before he goes out on stage, he
thought. As weird as it struck him, he could understand how some people could
become addicted to the rush.

He reached his office and took his keys from his pocket, keeping his fist
tightly closed about them so they wouldn't jingle in the gloom. Some careful
selection and a turn of the knob, and he was inside.

There was just enough light in the room to see the envelope and small gray
rectangle of the hard drive on his desk. He blew out a soft sigh of relief and
took them up, dropping the drive into his pocket and clutching the heavy
manila envelope tight enough that in his haste he wrinkled one side of it.

There was no way he could have known for sure if the information in the
packet, and on the drive, was the reason he had been targeted specifically ...
but somehow, he did. On some gut-deep, instinctual level, he knew. Just as he
knew its survival was more important than his own.

In less than 30 seconds he had turned and was out of the room, now moving past
his secretary's empty desk. That was as far as he got before the sound of the
man's voice came to him.

"Daniel Pittman?"

Dan, even though he half expected to make contact, jumped all the same. He
glanced up to see the speaker, a 30-something guy in a suit, step out of the
gloom with a small pistol leveled in his direction. Three seconds behind him,
and to the left, was a companion, a smartly dressed redhead in a similar pose.

"Don't move, please. My name is Randy""ugh!"

Her speed and agility still took Dan by surprise, and he knew that no matter
how many times he would see her in action, the unnatural speed, strength, and
grace of the woman he loved would always mystify - and frighten - him.

Cassie stepped out of the gloom of the mouth of an adjacent corridor, moving
quickly, much too quickly to fully track her motion in the semidarkness. She
was blur that passed over the man's gun hand; a thin, whip-crack of a blow
could be heard, and his weapon clattered to the ground, accompanied by a gasp
as he clutched his wrist.

Cassie pivoted, her hand clamping onto his forearm, and she spun him like a
top while maintaining her grip. He faced away from her once more, but this
time his arm was stretched across his body, Cassie's grip holding him tightly
as she stepped in behind him. Cassie drew him close to her, crushing him up
against her with only one arm; his breath whooshed out of his body as she
struggled against her steely form.

The redhead turned, trying to bring her gun to bear on the intruder, but again
Cassie's unnatural speed won the day. Her right hand shot out and clamped down
on the woman's arm, just below the wrist, and raised it skyward. The woman
hissed in a breath through her teeth, in both pain and frustration. Cassie was
taller, and the woman was practically on her tiptoes, trying to win the battle
over her little black pistol as she grunted with effort.

After a few seconds, the tendons on the back of Cassie's hand pulsed, the
sleek muscle of her forearm shifting as she powered down her grip. The redhead
gasped, the tail-end of the sound one of real pain, and her hand opened
reflexively. The small pistol fell to the ground beside her partner's.

"Wait, we're fed""" the woman began, but Cassie released her grip on her arm,
and the woman teetered then dropped back to down to her feet, but only for a
moment. Cassie seized the front of the woman's business suit, balled her hand
into a fist, and thrust it skyward. The redhead rose again, this time bodily,
to dangle at arm's length, her feet kicking in the air a little.

This will never get old, Dan thought as he watched Cassie disarm and control
two grown, armed adults like they were playthings. Struggle as he might, the
man couldn't break free of Cassie's controlling arm, and the woman was held
aloft as if she were weightless, her hands locked around Cassie's steely
forearm.

"Who are you?" Cassie asked, her voice firm and betraying no sign of strain
from the seemingly impossible feat she was performing. "Who are you with?"

"We're federal agents," the woman gasped as she dangled. " ... FBI."

"There's a lot going on tonight. Why are you here?"

" ... let ... .let me down!"

"You're not in the position to demand anything, ma'am," Cassie said
matter-of-factly. "I have no wish to hurt you, but I could, easily, and I
promise you that I will if you make any sudden movements against us."

Cassie kicked her foot backward lightly, twice, and the service revolvers
skittered across the floor toward Dan. He picked them up, tucked on behind his
belt and held the other one at the ready.

"How- ... " the woman gagged.

"We're asking the questions here," Cassie interrupted. "Again, I have no wish
to hurt you, but if you make the slightest movement against us, I will not
hesitate. Do you understand?"

The redhead nodded, strategically going limp in Cassie's grasp, and the other
agent simply gagged as he struggled against the arm braced across his chest.

Cassie released them, the woman staggered but stayed upright, the man tumbled
to one knee, his mouth open as he gasped for breath. But their eyes rose to
watch Dan and his impossibly strong companion.

"Why have you come here?" Cassie demanded. "Who sent you?"

"I don't know who you are, but ... " the man started, but his female partner
cut him off.

"No one. We were looking for you, Mr. Pittman, and happened to locate you at
the hospital. We simply followed you here."

"You received no orders, then?" Cassie asked sternly, her brow knitted in a
frown.

The redhead just shook her head.

"Why were you looking for me?" Dan asked.

"We're not at liberty to divulge that information at this time," the man spat
as he rubbed his chest.

"The Bureau is investigating an incident involving a series of organized crime
figures, important ones, who were heavily invested in the private contractors.
Military contractors," the woman finished as her partner gave her a dark,
wondering glance.

"Kent-Allan," Dan added.

She nodded. "And a testing facility with KA ties was nearly demolished
recently. It's just ... now ... the situation seems to have progressed beyond
... local limits."

A moment passed where they watched each other warily.

"It's connected, isn't it?" the redhead ventured boldly. "Whatever is
happening out there? These crime figures you speak of. The test facility. Now
the city, maybe the country."

No one moved, or spoke.

"And you," she added, nodding toward Cassie. "Whoever you are. Whatever you
are. You're a part of this."

Cassie nodded slowly.

"Who are you? How can you do ... .what you did? It's ... impossible."

"I'm sorry, Agent ... ?"

"Carnes. Jennifer Carnes."

"Agent Carnes. I'm sorry, but what you think is possible is going to go
through some unpleasant changes soon."

The gazes of the two women locked, the razor-sharp acuity of the woman's stare
was not lost of Cassie. She was a woman to watch; she may not have been one of
her fearsome sisters, but she was a woman of great intelligence and strength
of another sort nevertheless.

She's sizing me up, Jennifer said silently to herself. I can feel it. Jesus,
who is this woman?

"Do you believe what I have told you?" Cassie asked.

Carnes didn't believe in instinct, or hunches; her empirical nature was far
too scientific and exacting for such romantic inventions. But now, in the
single strangest situation she could ever hope to encounter, she found herself
disarmed and overpowered in front of a mysterious stranger ... and yet
Jennifer trusted her.

"Yes," Carnes answered, and Dan saw the other agent's brow rise in surprise.

Cassie nodded. "I'm glad. It may help keep you alive. Because if you think
this bad ... "

"It's going to get worse?" Jennifer finished without humor.

Cassie was the only one who didn't give a small jump of surprise when other
voice answered from the shadows behind the two agents.

"Yes," a throaty female voice said from the darkness. "Much, much worse."

The SWAT team was still moving through the gloom of the stairwell two floors
down when they heard the first cry; a high, shrill warble that was not quite a
scream, and definitely female. Whatever it was, it was impossibly loud and
reverberated through the stairwell, its fierce, harsh tone and sheer weirdness
raised the hair on the neck of all who heard it.

"Jesus!" the sergeant exclaimed, pausing for an instant. Then, the flat
pop-pop-pop crackle of small arms fire.

"Shit! Move!" he barked, and the team of 10 men double-timed it up the steps.

The spiraling war cry echoed out of the dark, and the first thing Dan saw
emerge was the compact shape of a smallish young blonde woman, already
airborne, her arms thrust our beside her, her hands raked into claws. She shot
past the two federal agents who ducked reflexively to either side of the wide,
darkened corridor.

The woman sailed toward them, very quickly, and even now Dan's brain had
trouble processing that which he saw.

There's no way, he thought dumbly. That's a forty-foot jump. Nobody can jump""

But by then Cassie was already in action. She spun, grabbed Dan by the front
of his shirt, and completed her turn, her legs bending deep, her arms thrust
out in front of her. Dan simply followed her lead; it was if her were
weightless. He was airborne himself, briefly, then slid on his back across the
slick linoleum, behind his secretary's empty desk.

The rest happened very fast; Dan would think later that it had seemed like a
fight from a cartoon, a roiling cloud of debris with a hand visible here, and
a foot sticking out there. It was as if an omniscient projectionist was
running the movie at double the frame rate, and normal humans could only get
impressions of the speed, power, and grace of the true combatants.

The young blond took advantage of Cassie's self-sacrifice. She shifted while
she streaked through the air, now her right leg extended, arrow-like, her foot
canted inward, the outside of her foot slicing the air like a blade.

The foot slammed into Cassie's back squarely between the shoulders with a
hollow BOOM. Her leap completed, she seemed to step deftly down out of the air
as her forward travel ceased, into an action-ready crouch, her fists raised.

All of her momentum was transferred to Cassie's body in a split second. She
grunted, loud, a sound of real pain and shock that hurt Dan's heart, and then
her body leapt into the air and shot past Dan's position as if fired from a
cannon. Cassie slammed into the thick oak door of Dan's office, and it didn't
even slow her down. The door, its frame, and the narrow windows on either side
of it exploded inward as Cassie's body disappeared into the gloom of the
office. The woman straightened, her head turning suddenly in Dan's direction.

"He's here," she barked, pointing, turning her attention back down the hall.

"Excellent," the voice replied from the gloom.

Dan turned, leaning on one elbow. He could see two - no, three - women
striding into the faint light at this end of the corridor. One tall,
dark-skinned ... another wore a hood that obscured most of her face. But the
one who walked between them, a tall brunette ... Dan blinked, hard. Even in
these dire straits, he could not help himself.

My God, he thought. She's perfect.

The male FBI agent was just picking himself up as the trio advanced. The black
woman placed a hand on his chest casually and shoved as she walked past; he
was lifted bodily into the air and slammed into the wall six feet off the
ground with a guttural "Ugh!" as the impact knocked the air from his lungs.
The redhead waited prudently for the trio to pass before going to his aid.

It was that moment that Dan came to his senses, and the life he had wanted to
leave behind came back to him in a rush.

He turned a little to his side, just enough to pull the pistol from his belt
and draw a bead on the small blonde in front of him, and he thumbed the safety
off. His finger squeezed down on the trigger as he fired three times in quick
succession.

The blond had been caught off-guard, she had been looking at her advancing
friends. Even so, she was still incredibly fast, and she got her arms up as
the first shot left the gun. Dan saw she wore things on her wrists, like wide,
silvery bracelets, and then there was a flash and a pinging whine as she
deflected the first shot with one.

Had she been further away, maybe even just a few feet, rather than practically
standing over him, she might have had a chance at the other two rounds as
well. But the slugs got past her crab-like defense and slammed into her left
shoulder; a fine misting spray of red bloomed behind her and she lost some of
that otherworldly grace for a fleeting moment.

A moment was all Dan needed. He tracked right, and fired twice more. His third
round struck the young woman in the center of her chest; her mouth opened in a
small "O" of surprise.

Even now, wounded as she was, she still possessed an unnatural speed and
economy of movement. Off balance, wounded, and bleeding, she was still able to
get her right arm up high enough to deflect the fifth round. It flashed off
her bracelet with a metallic whine and Dan could hear - no, he could feel -
the round zip by his own head in a ricochet; but he was as steady as the young
woman was resilient.

Dan barely paused; he raised his hand the slightest amount before the woman
could adjust and fired once more.

A small, neat, utterly black hole sprang into existence directly between the
woman's eyes. A soft sound, a grunt of "Guhh!" left her lips, and Dan's saw
every muscle in her head and neck fire once as the circuitry in her head
reacted to the mortal wound. Deep striations sprang into being in her neck,
her shoulders, even her arms.

Then, her lights went out.

She toppled over backwards to lie in a heap.

"NO!" the word came a scream of shock and rage. Dan picked himself into a
crouch, and saw the thin black woman explode into a sprint. She was closing
the distance between them with shocking swiftness, and somehow Dan was less
than surprised when he raised the small pistol, squeezed the trigger, and felt
it jam in his grasp.

Damn, he had time to think. I guess that's it, then. That was quick.

The black woman was a streak moving through the gloom of the office, now only
a few feet from him. All Dan could do was watch as---

---as a boxy white object shot past him like cannonball, coming from the
interior of his office. Even at such a velocity, Dan recognized it.

It was his office laser printer.

Two and half feet square, its 40 pounds of metal and plastic struck the
charging woman full in the face. The device seemed to explode with a sound
like a small traffic accident; bits of plastic and even bits of paper exploded
outward in a flower-shaped cloud of debris. The black woman's head snapped
backward like a heavyweight boxer who had just taken a tremendous blow on the
chin. Her feet flew from underneath her as the printer's impact stole her
momentum; she thudded to the floor on her back with concussive blow that Dan
felt as much as he heard.

Cassie leapt from the shattered doorway to land deftly before him. She
crouched low, ready, her fingers splayed into claws, her shoulders squared,
eyes shining. She stood over him that way, watching the brunette and hooded
woman as they approached warily. Her breathing was in deep, ragged gasps, and
when she spoke, Dan almost didn't recognize her voice for all the barely
suppressed fury it held.

"You can't have him," she snarled.

There was something so unnatural, so nearly elemental about these women,
Cassie included, that anyone there would have instinctively shrank from the
sheer different-ness of them, of Cassie and her tone ... but the brunette
merely smiled wanly.

"Cassandra," she said softly.

"Not him," Cassie growled again, and Dan suddenly knew how a baby grizzly must
feel when its mother addresses a perceived threat.

The brunette shook her head in mock dismay. "Cassandra, please. Please don't
tell me that you ... have feelings for this ... worm, do you?"

Her tone as she finished her sentence was telling; the brunette's mouth tuned
down at the corners as if she had to spit the detestable sounds out before
they poisoned her.

"Diana, no," Cassie said, the tiniest bit of harshness leaving her voice for
the moment as it took on the barest hint of a request, of a plea. "You're
taking this world. You're taking everyone else. Leave him alone."

"Cassandra -"

... please."

The tone of Cassie's voice was plain, the enormous weight of obvious emotional
need giving it an almost tangible weight as she said it again, her incredibly
bright blue eyes shining in the gloom.

"Please."

Dan saw the brunette, Diana, waver. But it was only for an instant. She was
unsure, for a fleeting second, the raw emotion of Cassie's request had
unsettled her. But then her eyes fixed on Cassie's own and then the hint of
her dangerous mirth returned.

"Cassandra, please, my dear, you're embarrassing yourself. And how would you
protect him? You, a half-breed. Isn't that the correct term? Against us?
Against myself? I'm royalty, my dear. After all ... " the brunette said
lightly, and then, as her smile faded to a look of malicious contempt as she
finished her statement with a cryptic reply.

"Her strength is my strength."

Dan didn't know what Diana meant with that phrase, but Cassie evidently did.
She wavered, visibly. She took a single, small uncertain step backward. Dan
could see a sudden perspiration on the back of her neck.

Oh my God, Dan thought wonderingly. She's terrified.

He had finally come to grips with Cassie's origin, of her story, and her dread
of what was to come. He had seen her manage feats that a week before he would
have deemed impossible, the stuff of comic books and fantasy novels. He had
witnessed a strength in her that staggered his senses. And now, seeing real,
tangible terror in her filled him with a dread he had never known.

The woman known as Diana balled her right hand into a fist and took a single
step forward, and Dan felt himself shrink back from her tiny advance out of
some strange instinct for self-preservation. Why he should be physically
terrified of a woman in a short red evening dress, the most beautiful woman he
or anyone else anyone had ever seen for that matter, would be lost on an
observer to the scene. But it was a feeling, a sensation; Dan supposed it was
the same mindless terror that a mouse feels when hunted by a cat.

Cassie, visibly shaking, matched Diana's forward step with her own.

The dark-skinned one was up now, though shaken. She swayed ever so slightly on
her feet. The creepy woman stood by in an odd posture, her arms slightly
raised alongside her body. The two federal agents stood back, unarmed and
unsure about what to do, the male in obvious pain, his arms protecting his
chest.

"You have shamed us all," Diana spat, real venom showing through her calm
demeanor. "And now you will die in dishonor."

Cassie didn't answer; she merely crouched lower, and balled her hands into
small, deadly-looking fists. Diana crouched low, her lips pulled back in a
feral grin of anticipation, and began to spring forward""

"FREEZE!" boomed a voice, loud, as a dozen bright white beams of light shot
through the room at odd angles.

The Crown Vic skidded to a halt, and Mitch Herndon had the door opened even
before the heavy cruiser had come to complete stop. He charged up the steps to
the Kent-Allan building, his right hand clutching the shotgun tightly. He had
barely made it to entrance when he heard something in the eerie silence of the
deserted city street ... a familiar sound he almost expected, and dreaded.
After a second, he zeroed in on its location, and paused, listened, backed up
a few steps, and looked skyward.

There, many stories above, he saw the silvery-black tinted windows of the
Kent-Allan building flashing from within with a muted strobe effect,
accompanied by the faint rat-tat-tat-tat of automatic weapons fire.

"Shit," he spat, his heart sinking.

Then, on the same floor but to the right of his position, one of the windows
exploded outward in a crash of thousands of diamond-faceted shards. They
twinkled in the moonlight for a second, surrounding the bulky, black-clad form
of a SWAT team member in the center of the ice-chip cloud. He shot out away
from the building, seemed to hang in the air for a second when his forward
momentum faded, and then dropped earthward, his speed accelerating. Mitch,
surprised, watched him the whole way, unable to divert his eyes.

The man never made a sound. He struck the ground at a speed near terminal
velocity; his body slammed into the concrete with a sound unlike anything
Mitch had ever heard. It was a heavy, reverberating thud mixed with a hollow
crack that made Mitch blink instinctively against it. The body bounced
bonelessly two feet back into the air before settling, leaving a crimson
grease spot on the rough cement where it first struck.

"Shit!" Herndon said again, but this time with anger. His lips mashed down on
the cigarette between them and he rushed through the building's door, which
lay to the side, twisted and deformed.

The sergeant only got the one word out.

It was almost as if the strange women had expected it. They whirled in the
direction the SWAT team had come, out of the dark, low, with automatic rifles
and night vision goggles at the ready, and were upon them before the
approaching cops knew what was happening.

The dark-skinned woman shot across the room, again a streak in the gloom, and
set upon the sergeant. She completed an impossible 20-foot leap to slam into
him, her legs wrapping around him at waist level, her feet locking together
behind him. He staggered for a split second under the shock of the impact and
her weight, but he didn't live long enough to do anything about her advance.

She straightened her legs, ankles still locked together. The sergeant's pelvis
cracked first in half, then into many other blade-like fragments, offering no
resistance at all to her strength. Before he could scream, the woman seized
his head roughly on either side of his face and wrenched his head and neck to
the left in a sudden, savage jerk. His neck made an audible CRACKLE sound as
several vertebrae literally exploded from the force she exerted on them.

"Hey!" one of the other cops shouted. Only now was there a reaction, the beams
flashing in her direction, such was the speed of her attack.

The woman planted her feet on the ground, the sergeant's ruined, misshapen
form visible now. Still cradling the dead man's head, she bared her teeth in a
snarl and pivoted at the waist, jerking upward and to the side as hard as she
could.

"Jesus CHRIST!" one of the cops screamed in horror as he saw the sergeant's
head leave his body, the sound one like thick, wet burlap being torn in half.
A thick jet of blood burped out of the stump of the sergeant's neck, leaping
up into one of the white flashlight beams like thick red water in a decorative
fountain.

The sergeant's body toppled to the side, and the woman unceremoniously
released the head. It fell to the floor with a heavy BONK sound, much like a
dropped bowling ball would have made.

It was then that things got confusing.

Dan would remember the scene later, and it reminded him quite a bit of the
firefights he had seen in the Middle East. Gunfire, bodies flying about, the
endless flashing of muzzle blasts, people screaming but unable to be heard
over the deafening roar of their weapons, and slathered over all this, a deep,
nauseating terror. He saw only bits and fragments.

The cop nearest the black woman raised his weapon, but she grabbed its muzzle
and jerked it away from him without any effort. She jabbed it back at him, the
butt of the gun obliterating much of his face. Someone started firing; white
muzzle flashes lit the scene. The hooded woman raised both hands skyward;
incredibly, one of the SWAT team members rose into midair in return, legs
kicking, fully six feet off the ground. She paused, then tore savagely at the
air, her hands ripping out to either side, her fingers hooked into claws. The
dangling SWAT officer followed - both pieces. He tore in half at the waist,
his legs shooting to the left, his torso to the right; in the brief muzzle
flashes Dan had a fleeting impression of the rope-like innards in mid-air,
still tying the halves together. More weapons began the firing, their staccato
voices joining the chorus. One of the men staggered from the fray, and brought
his rifle to bear on Diana, who approached the center of the chaos. She seemed
unafraid of her danger, and began to raise her bracelet-covered wrists, but
the female Fed leaped before her, hands thrust out toward the cop.

"Wait""!" she shouted, but it was too late.

The cop's rifle bucked as it fired a dozen rounds in a burst, most of them
stitching up Jennifer Carnes' abdomen and torso, making small, neat dark holes
in the front and huge ragged, bloody ones in the back.

She made a harsh, loud barking sound of shock and pain; the one sound that
oddly enough Dan could hear over the din. She staggered, then slumped backward
into the arms of Diana. NO!, Dan could see the woman's partner scream out, his
eyes wide in disbelief. Diana's were equally wide as she cradled the woman,
her face and chest covered with beads of blood as if she had been spritzed
with the stuff.

Behind them, a scream was heard as the dark-skinned woman made some
weird-looking gesture and a SWAT team member leapt skyward, crashing up
through - and disappearing into - the drop ceiling twelve feet above them.

Diana knelt, cradling the dying woman in her arms, her icy exterior dropping
away for the smallest of moments. Then it passed, replaced by sheer,
unadultered rage, her classically beautiful features now contorted into the
epitome of seething anger. She gently laid the agent's body down, stood, and
closed the distance between herself and the offending cop in three quick
strides. The cop, still in shock over his mistake, didn't have time to bring
his weapon to bear again.

Diana's strike began three feet behind her as she wound up the most
powerful-looking haymaker Dan had ever seen. She paused, then released the
blow in a blurring strike nearly to fast to see, her fist an iron cap on the
power ram of her arm. She screamed out a strange cry, half roar, half shriek
as she struck the cop square in the face.

His head exploded.

A hand fell to Dan's shoulder and jerked him to his feet as if he were
weightless. He turned his head and saw Cassie's face close to his own.

"Come on," she screamed over the racket. "We're getting out of here!"

"How?" he asked stupidly, but she was already in motion. She dragged him a
short distance to the right, behind his secretary's desk. She released him as
she accelerated, turning sideways. She lowered her head and right shoulder,
closed her eyes, and hit the wall at speed, in a powerful, low stance that
would have flattened any linebacker in the NFL.

She tore through the wall, sheetrock and 2x6 studs yielded to her momentum
with a thud and a cloud of gypsum dust. In the nearly constant white light of
the muzzle flashes, Dan could see her tumble out into the hallway beyond, then
pick herself up to her feet. Come on, she motioned, flapping her hand at him
impatiently.

He didn't hesitate. In a second he was out in the darkened hallway, trying to
keep up with her as they ran down its length.

"Who is that woman?" Dan asked.

"That group? Those were the Hunters I told you about. She's their leader."

"She's stronger than the others?" he panted as they came to the end of the
corridor.

Cassie nodded. "Much. She would have killed me in seconds. I can't believe how
lucky were are, those men showing up like that."

Dan turned to look back down the darkened hall. He could still hear the
gunfire, lessened now. And now, interspersed with it, he could hear another
sound.

The sound of men screaming.

"Yeah. Lucky," he said softly.

"I didn't say for them," Cassie said, and turned her attention to the silver
steel doors set into the wall.

"There's no power, so we'll have to take ... "

"No time," she said simply, and set her fingertips into the narrow seam
between the doors. She bared her teeth, and pulled.

Even in the gloom, Dan could see the musculature of her neck, shoulders, and
back come to life, swelling into visibility, becoming more defined, even
through the thin blue top she wore. And, although he should have expected it
by now, her might proved too much for even the steel doors. With a creak they
parted enough for her to get her hands into the gap between them. She paused,
then poured it on for real.

This time, there was a harsh, metallic squeal from somewhere inside the
elevator door mechanism. A sharp, creaking sound followed; some vital part of
the inner workings was shearing, but she did it. She pressed outward, enough
for them to get through the doors.

The elevator car wasn't on their floor. They were greeted with an empty space
and a series of greased metal cables. They both leaned over the abyss and
looked down, the shaft lit by the faint, final light from the battery backups.

They could see the passenger car, far below.

"Shit," Dan hissed. "It looks like it's at the damn lobby."

"Climb on my back," Cassie said, her gaze locked on the roof of the car below.

"What? Are you kidding me? That's at 20 stories, we'll never--"

There came a loud, hollow booming sound from the darkened corridor, from the
direction they had come, followed by a blood-curdling shriek of a man in
untold agony, all sounding closer than before.

"Okay!" Dan piped up, and climbed onto Cassie's back.

Even though her frame was slightly smaller than his, being near her when she
was in this state was always a surprise. It was like climbing into a tree made
of iron, such was the feeling of strength in her rigid frame. He locked his
feet together around her hips, and wrapped his arms around her abdomen. He
buried his face against the back of her neck, and closed his eyes.

"Okay, go!" he shouted.

Cassie sprang forward, Dan's added weight seeming to have no effect on her
agility or balance. The muscle of her back and shoulders shifted as she moved,
becoming harder, fuller. Dan thought that it felt like he was clinging to a
statue made of living steel as she travelled into the void of the elevator
shaft.

Cassie's hands locked onto the cable, a smooth surface of steel threads woven
together into a ropelike structure. She grasped tightly, the tendons standing
out on her forearms. Even with her preternaturally strong grip and the help of
her feet pinching the cable, the black grease coating the wire was too
effective; they were slowly starting to slide downward.

"Here goes!" she called, and eased up on her grip.

They went into a freefall, the slick metal surface singing through her hands.
Even with the grease, she felt her skin heat up and sing out in protest. A
section of cable, rougher than the rest, passed through her hands in an eye
blink; a single stray thread of wire, thicker than a pencil lead, had sprung
free from its winding. This punctured the meat of her right hand between her
thumb and first finger. On a normal person, this wound at this speed would
have been quite serious, it would have ripped a good portion of his or her
hand away; now, it made a small ragged hole in her flesh but the wire was bent
double by the force of the impact and pulled back through the wound it had
made as they shot down the darkened shaft. Cassie hissed in a breath in
surprise, and pushed the pain to the back of her mind.

"Shiiiiiiiit!" Dan moaned, his voice rising. He could see the roof of the
elevator car getting closer, closer, very close now, so close that he could
better see the rate at which they were falling.

With only 20 feet left to go before a final, likely deadly impact, Cassie
closed her eyes and closed her fingers with all the force they could muster.

"Eeeeaaarrgghhhhh!" she squealed through clenched teeth; the friction was even
worse than she had anticipated. It felt like the skin of her hands was tearing
away in bloody chunks.

But it was enough. Dan felt their movement downshift suddenly with a thump,
then a tremendous THUD ran through his body, much like a small traffic
accident. His teeth clicked together and he was momentarily stunned. He
dropped off Cassie's back and slid to the ground, slightly dazed. He looked up
to see Cassie standing in the center of a dish-shaped depression in the roof
of the elevator car, her hands still locked around the cable.

"Cass?"

"Are you hurt?" she asked, her voice oddly tight-sounding.

"No, I don't ... .I don't think so."

"Then let's go," she said, and knelt, grasping the small square emergency exit
door with her injured right hand, which was a blood- and grease-smeared ruin.

"My God, your ha--"

With a casual-looking jerk, Cassie tore the entire emergency door from its
frame, the thin steel folding nearly double in the process. Without a sound,
she dropped through the opening into complete darkness.

Dan followed, lowering himself down slowly, careful not to put too much
pressure on his wounded arm. He let go of the edge of the opening, and landed
in the center of the car with a thud.

"Ground floor; electronics, women's hosiery, pet supplies," Dan said softly.

"You're a strange one, Pittman," he heard her say in the darkness.

"Agreed. Let's get the hell out of here, huh?" he asked.

"All right. Stand back."

Dan took a step backward, even though he had no idea which way was toward the
rear of the car. He could hear the soft sound of Cassie's hands moving over
the smooth surface of the car, looking for the seam in the door. Then he heard
her grunt softly, and the doors rolled back with a creaking sound of buckling
metal.

There was just enough light in the lobby for Dan to see a man standing in the
opening, the business end of a shotgun nearly touching the smooth skin between
Cassie's eyes.

"Don't move," he said coolly.

The last of them died horribly. Diana seized him by his shoulders, her
clawlike grip crushing muscle and bone like it was paper. Contessa, the
dark-skinned woman, grabbed him around the waist from behind. They jerked him
in opposite directions at the same second, his spine first snapping, and then
separating, as they effectively tore him in half.

They dropped their halves unceremoniously, pausing to give each other a
victorious smile and to drink in the sudden, welcome rush of heat from the
battle. Mulita glided to their side, her weird grace and perfect silence
unnerving even to them.

Diana's eyes passed over the room; the shattered, mangled members of the SWAT
team lay in great piles of broken bodies, some of them literally torn into
pieces. Her gaze came to rest on their blond companion, her still, silent form
still lay on the ground, arms akimbo. Diana felt the barest touch of ... was
it sadness? Remorse? Then it passed.

"She died in glory," Diana stated, as if it were a eulogy.

"Glory," Contessa repeated softly.

A sound came to them, a soft, bubbling, choking sound.

The woman.

Diana knelt beside her, and turned her over onto her side. The redhead
shuddered, wheezed, and a huge glut of thick arterial blood ran from her mouth
to pool on the floor. Diana raised her torso, one hand gently cradling the
side of the woman's face.

"You were brave, little one," she said, her voice tinged with the barest note
of real regret.

"Never mind her, Diana," Contessa said. "We must find the traitor. There is
yet time."

"No. Surely they are gone from here by now. We allowed our ... passions ... to
distract us. But this one ... "

"She is but a frail, Diana."

The woman wheezed, shuddered, and coughed another glut of crimson onto her
chin. Her eyes, clouded by pain and her obviously mortal wounds, batted open,
then shut in a quiet, dignified, deeply personal mortal struggle.

"She is that," Diana agreed, "but frail as she is, she has great strength. She
is a sister in heart, if not in body. She does not know me from a stranger,
yet she threw herself to my defense."

"Let us leave before--"

"I will decide our present course," Diana said flatly, her ice-chip blue eyes
blazing, her sudden stare in Contessa's direction disquieting in its
intensity. " ... and I alone. Or do you forget yourself?"

Contessa shrank back like a chastised child, her sudden obedience - and fear -
suddenly obvious. "Yes, Princess," she said, with a small bow.

And with that, Diana made her decision. She stood, pulling the dying woman up
with her, her left hand scooping her up under the legs, right hand supporting
her back.

"Mulita," Diana said, her tone one of command. "Bring it forth."

There was the slightest pause, the hint of indecision in the air.

Diana turned to regard the witch. "Now," she said, her tone flat and deadly.

Mulita rose to her toes, spread her arms wide, and the familiar, slithering
language sounded close to the women's ears. Before them, the air seemed to
ripple, to shimmer, and slowly, it began to grow hazy, then dark. A shifting,
silvery ribbon formed at its edges.

Contessa stepped forward uncertainly, not wanting to incur the full wrath of
her liege ... yet, what she suspected troubled her greatly.

"But ... Princess ... surely ... ..surely you don't ... you wouldn't ... ."
she stammered.

"My business is my own," Diana said with hesitation. "As are my burdens. It is
my decision to make, and mine alone."

"Yes, Princess," Contessa said, casting her gaze downward as she took a step
back.

The silvery ribbon and the inky blackness at its center seemed to solidify.

"Now. Let us away," Diana said.

And from the shadows, hidden among the tangle of broken bodies, Special Agent
Randy Timmons looked on, his breath nearly frozen, his eyes wide in wonder, as
he watched them take his partner into darkness.

"If you so much as move, I'll turn your head into a canoe," Mitch said
matter-of-factly. "Believe me."

"Yes," Cassie said simply, her eyes fixed on his own.

"Well, that's a start, isn't it?" Mitch said. The, his eyes widened visibly as
it struck him. "Holy shit. It's you," he said wonderingly.

Cassie said nothing. The detective's eyes darted to the side, for a second, to
take in Dan standing just behind her.

"And you, too. You came here? You actually came? You know you'd be looked for
here."

Dan just nodded grimly.

"Detective, we have no time," Cassie said levelly.

"You just hold it right there, miss, I'm-"

"Please, we have no time," she implored, and the sheer emotion conveyed by her
voice made him suddenly a little less sure.

"What the hell is going on here?" Mitch asked, wincing at the sound of his
voice, which for some reason wasn't as forceful as he had intended it to
sound.

"We have to leave, now," Cassie said, her tone somehow making her demand into
an urgent request. "If you heed my warning, you'll leave as well."

Mitch's gaze rose skyward, briefly, involuntarily.

"Don't go up there," Dan warned.

"And why not?!"

"Because you won't like what you find," Cassie said softly.

Utter silence surrounded them, the racket from the floors above had faded.

"What did you people do?" Mitch asked. His nerves were crying out; he felt as
if the flesh on his arms and the back of his neck and shoulders was actually
crawling.

"We did nothing, except retrieve some documents that will help shed light on
recent events," Cassie said. "But now we must go, or we will likely die."

Mitch studied her gaze, sweat beading onto his brow.

Cassie dropped her vision for the first time, looking first at the barrel of
the pump-action shotgun, then back to Mitch's face. When she spoke, her tone
made her outrageous assertion simply a statement of fact, and not the threat
it would have been coming from anyone else.

"Detective ... you know I could take that weapon from you, yes?"

Herndon paused, and then, incredibly, he nodded.

"I could disarm you at will, and then, perhaps, worse. You know this to be
true."

Mitch wondered silently at himself as he nodded again.

"But I give you my word, I will not. All I ask in return is your trust."

Dan glanced skyward, the growing sense of urgency seemingly to crawl under his
skin like ants. "Cass ... ."

Mitch looked between them for a moment, and then, slowly, he lowered the
shotgun and thumbed the safety on.

"Thank you."

"You're welcome," he heard himself say. Jesus! He thought to himself. She's a
felon! Maybe a murderer! Why don't you offer her a smoke?

"Please, detective, please do not go up there. The danger may have passed for
the moment, but I cannot guarantee your safety if you do. There are people
there...who would do you harm."

"People ... like you?"

Cassie nodded, a slightly pained expression in her eyes.

"I know. I've ... I've seen ... someone. And she did ... things ... things I
can't explain." Dammit! his mind cried. Why are you talking?

"Then you know nothing good can come from facing them again. Please do not
pursue it."

Mitch considered this, then sighed, and shook his head.

"It's ... .it's my job," he answered slowly.

Cassie paused at this, and nodded. "I should have suspected this. You are a
stout and honorable man, Detective ... "

"Herndon. Mitchell."

"Herndon. I sensed this about you. If we are all very lucky, you will have a
large part to play in the drama when the time comes."

"Cassie ... "

Mitch just nodded again, and she slowly, gently placed a hand on his shoulder.
"We will find you when it is time. Until our paths cross again, Mitchell.
Until then, be wary. Be careful. And be true."

And with that, they were gone.

It was a horror show. Mitch fought it as long as he could, his flashlight
playing across the bodies. The crime scene literally looked as if it had been
hit by a suicide bomber. Tangled, twisted bodies were strewn across the room,
some whole, some not. None were left alive, and there was no sign of the
perpetrators of the slaughter.

Mitch sat down in an office chair, leaned the shotgun against the wall, and
slumped forward, cradling his brow with his hand. It also helped to cover his
eyes.

"Jesus," he said quietly to himself. "What the fuck is going on here?"

A soft, nearly stealthy sound came from beneath a bloody tangled mass in the
center of the room. Mitch looked up and saw a single, trembling hand reaching
skyward.

"Hey. Some help here?" Randy Timmons asked quietly.

***

In Weed, California, Kevin Kidwell and his girlfriend Billie Casperson spent
the night trying to tune in a signal, any signal, on the old radio she dragged
up from the fruit cellar. They were unsuccessful.

The trouble, the real trouble, began around the same hour in Cleveland, Ohio.
An argument in a Circle K, over two packages of chocolate Zingers - the last
products on the shelves - escalated into first a shouting match, then a
shoving one. An hour later, two dozen young men met outside, more shouting
ensued, and one of them brandished a chrome 9mm pistol. One shot rang out into
the night, then another. Soon, the street became a warzone, and only one
police cruiser was dispatched to quell the disturbance. The officer was killed
immediately after her arrival, and the car torched. Then, the storefront
nearest the scene was smashed, the nearly worthless junk in the window stolen,
and a flaming chunk of the cruiser's plastic dashboard was hurled through the
space. Twenty minutes later, the storefront was fully ablaze, the crowd had
swelled to become a mob of over one hundred people and growing every minute,
and it began to move west, deeper into the city's downtown, and then out
toward the western suburbs. Two packages of cheap pastries. All with all great
conflicts, this one began over something very small, and grew to consume the
fate of hundreds, of thousands.

The Great Riot of Cleveland had begun.

By morning, most of the eastern seaboard was dark. By the next night, so was
most of the western one.

Across the country, that night saw the first deployments of National Guard
troops into civilian areas, panicky town selectman and urban planners
everywhere were declaring martial law. The terrified citizenry, cut off from
its steady stream of communication and outside information, panicked. Rumors
of terrorist attacks sprouted before even the lights went out. Then came tales
of Washington in ashes and a president deposed. A coup de tat. The citizenry,
in mere hours, was whipped into a froth of paranoid frenzy. The citizenry was
also well-armed. Enter National Guard troops, with orders to shoot to kill.

Unfortunately, even on that first night, they often found reason to.

Hargrove was alone.

Not in a true sense, since he was surrounded by subordinates, even his best
friend, who was a part of his cabinet. He watched McCraddock try in vain to
stay awake. The Secret Service agent's eyes would droop, then slip closed,
then snap open again. He was fighting to stay awake the way an anxious puppy
sometimes does, but finally the exhaustion was too much for him. His eyes
closed, and his head sagged back against the couch, and after a moment he
began to snore softly, like many of the people in the room. So while he was
surrounded by people sworn to advise and protect him, Hargrove was actually
alone.

There was still no word from Washington. There was no word from his wife. For
him, there would be no rest tonight.

***

They rode on silence, directionless, for a time. No one spoke. The roads were
completely empty, it was if they were the last people on Earth. The bright
lights of the big SUV lit the road before them, illuminating everything but
what they should do next. Finally, Dan pulled the truck to the side of the
deserted highway, and turned to face his companion.

"What should we do, Cass? You know what we're up against better than I do."

She shook her head dolefully. "I only know what they can do, not what they
will do. Your guess is about as good as mine."

"You think they've given up on the stealth thing?"

"Did any of what you saw tonight look stealthy to you?" she asked with a
humorless smile.

"No, I suppose not.

"They're going to take over, they're going to enslave everyone."

"They can do that?" Dan asked. "There's enough of them to do that?"

Cassie nodded. "Probably. It won't be easy, here, or in other big, well-armed
countries. But you saw what even just a few of them can do. I bet some
smaller, less advanced countries are already finished. I bet there are some
countries that already don't exist anymore."

"Jesus."

"But it won't be easy. Because of people like you."

"Huh?"

"You don't even realize it, do you?" Cassie said. "You killed one of them,
Daniel. Tonight, you defeated an Amazon warrior. A fierce one - an elite. A
hunter. That's impressive. And rare."

"I didn't 'defeat' her. I just shot her. I surprised her. I got lucky."

"In my experience," Cassie said, sliding across the seat to lean over the
center console and give him a discreet peck on the cheek, "Luck doesn't exist.
Either things happen, or they don't. We make our own luck. As a woman, your
woman, I love you. And right now, as a warrior ... I respect you."

Dan looked at her, her bright blue eyes, her tired, sad smile, even the tiny
flecks of crusted blood under nose from when she has smashed through his
office window and door. Even now, tired and beaten, she was beautiful and he
loved her. He felt his heart swell with a pride he had scarcely known.

They kissed now for real, deeply. He caught a hint of her scent, that high,
sweet smell, and felt his heart leap in his chest. Her right hand, wrapped in
an extra shirt since they had no proper bandages, rubbed his thigh, and moved
about, exploring.

Finally they broke the kiss and looked at each other once more.

"What do we do?" Dan asked again.

Cassie slowly took his hand in her own, and placed it against her flat, taut
abdomen. "First, we take care of this," she said.

Dan nodded. "Is it ... is there, you know, a difference? Is there anything ...
are you going to become Supermom, or will it be Superbaby, or ... "

"It's the same," Cassie said with a strange little smile. "Completely normal.
9 months. A full term. Then, a normal birth."

"Will it ... "

"It?"

"Okay, he ... or she ... will they be normal? Or, you know ... exceptional?"

"I don't know. There's never been an ... .an Amazon child that wasn't given
over to the Becoming. Until the ceremony, the children seem normal. And those
... ." She sighed. "Obviously, those were all girls."

"So we're moving into the undiscovered country, then."

"We appear to be, yes."

"So ... this is important," Dan said, patting her belly softly. "He - or she -
is important. And to more than just us."

Cassie nodded, her eyes shining. "Yes."

Dan blew out a breath, returning her nod. "Well, that's it, then."

"What do you mean?"

"For us, it's over," he said decisively. "At least, for now. You want to try
to stop what's happening? To fight them?"

Cassie nodded, watching him closely her eyes glued to his own.

"Me too. And we will. Together. But not now. We can't now, because of this,"
he said, patting her belly once more. "This comes first. Above all else.
Because it's important. More than me, more than you. It's more important than
anything."

Cassie nodded, on her face an expression of complete love mixed with an
infinite sadness.

"So, for the next 9 months, planet Earth is going to have to get by without
us."

He kissed her again, quickly, then he restarted the truck. He pulled back onto
the road and carefully maneuvered around the cars that had already stalled on
the road.

"Where are we going?" she asked.

"I think I know a place," he said. "It's pretty remote. It'll take us a few
days to get there, long days. A lot of time on the road. But not in this rig,"
he finished.

"Why not?"

"One, it's big. It's noticeable. Plus, they might be looking for it. We're
still the stars of Amazons' Most Wanted, right?"

"Yes. We may not be the headliners of that show, but we're still in the
lineup. Especially now."

"What's different now?"

"You killed one of them. The brunette back there? The one in charge?"

"Yeah?"

"She's in charge of that group of hunters, and she doesn't play around. You
killed one of her captains. She's won't forget it. You just made an enemy for
life, and she's powerful."

"Powerful?"

"She's royalty."

Dan eyes widened. "Seriously?"

"Seriously. A princess."

"Princess?" Cassie nodded and Dan shook his head in disbelief. "Oh, great.
I've pissed off the princess. Is she, you know, special, or something?"

"Let's just say we're lucky she got distracted when she did. Otherwise she'd
be washing pieces of me out of her hair right now."

"Really? Or are you, you know, exaggerating for effect?"

"I wouldn't joke about this. She could crush this truck like a sardine can,
with us in it. As different as an Amazon is from a ... a normal person, she's
that different, or maybe more, from the average warrior."

"Oh, my God," Dan sighed.

"Yeah."

A moment passed, and then Dan spoke again. "So if she's royalty, and she's a
princess, and there's no men, and therefore no king ... that means there's
like, a queen, right? An Amazon queen?"

"Goddess!" Cassie cried softly, her eyes wide. She made a quick motion between
her forehead and her chest, almost as if she were crossing herself. From where
he sat Dan could feel her sudden, yawning terror at the thought like it was a
real, tangible thing. "We will not speak ... of ... that," she said quietly,
nearly meekly. "It is forbidden."

Dan stared for a moment, alarmed.

"It's just ... we do not speak of ... her. Ever. She is real, I even caught a
glimpse of her once, but at a great, great distance. Her reign is total in its
nature. Complete."

"No one ever questions her rule?"

"If you knew more about us ... .about them ... then you would understand the
utter folly of that question. We mustn't speak of her anymore."

Dan considered this as he watched Cassie's face closely. "Okay."

When she could speak again, Cassie touched his arm lightly. "So, the vehicle?"

"Right ... like I said, they might be looking for it. Plus, this thing is a
gas hog. Trains are obviously not running on time, and people are going to
panic. Fuel might suddenly be much harder to find. We need something more
efficient. Smaller. Easier to fill, easier to get around on."

A faint smile came to Cassie's face. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

"I might be. It certainly would be easier to move around on them. But it's a
couple of days away. Our fannies might be a little sore by the time we get
there."

***

Her hand slipped on the smooth rock, and she nearly fell.

Her left hand shot out, instinctively, and found a solid hold. The shoulders
bared by her tank top were deeply tanned and the small, hard muscles of her
shoulders bunched impressively as she arrested her fall with just her upper
body strength - of course, if she had failed, the safety harness wouldn't have
let her drop far, anyway.

She blew a hard breath out, as much out of frustration at her carelessness as
at her luck. A steady drip of perspiration ran down from underneath her helmet
and down the bridge of her nose, to drip onto the rock with regularity; the
headband she wore under the fiberglass and foam helmet had soaked through
hours before.

She planted her feet in a couple of good toe-holds and ran her ascender up a
few precious inches on the guide rope. She would have rather climbed without
the guide rope, but some things they just wouldn't let her do. She was lucky
she was allowed to take her enthusiasms as far as she was able.

She let go of the rock face and leaned back, her harness going taut and her
weight nearly fully on the rope, the single lamp in her helmet now shining
into the night sky rather than at the white-beige rock face she was in the
middle of conquering. She was plunged into darkness, and she hung like that
for a time, reveling in the perfect silence. Not many people understood
climbing at night, but those who did, they really understood it. Imagine
taking a solitary activity, and then taking away light, your only friend, she
would tell them. You're completely alone. There's nothing in the world except
you and the rock. It's all up to nobody but you. And, deep inside, you know
you're going to beat the mountain.

She flexed her hands, felt the bones shift and heard a tiny muted cracking of
knuckles. She felt the first inklings of the exhaustion that awaited her, and
welcomed it. She sure wouldn't have any trouble falling asleep tonight.

She smiled to herself, totally enjoying the moment. She stretched out an arm,
found the next inch-deep crevice, and began to pull herself toward it.

But instead, she felt the harness around her chest and hips grow tighter,
pulling at her weight. And then, the cliff face began sliding by her,
seemingly of its own accord.

"Hey!" she shouted. "Stop! You up there!"

Her watchers paid her no heed, she continued to rise, faster now. She gave up,
let her head droop in frustration as she went slack in the harness.

I only had 50 feet to go, she thought miserably. Don't they get that? I
wouldn't have bothered if I had known I wasn't going to finish.

A few seconds later she was at the top, and some tugging and hushed
expletives, she was over the ledge, on the flat top of the ridge.

Bright lights, blinding and somehow nearly obscene after the quiet serenity
she had known just seconds earlier, exploded all around her, throwing her
headlong into a bustle of noise and confusion. She was suddenly surrounded by
a dozen people; some of them held clipboards before her, two were already
working on getting her out of the climbing harness, and one even held a
Blackberry out for her to see the screen, which was blinking a single two-word
message: Network unavailable. One man stepped especially close to her, and she
looked him in the eye when she spoke.

"What the hell is this about? Why did you people pull me up?"

"There seems to be a problem, ma'am. The entire country just went dark."

"What are you talking about?" she asked, her annoyance fading, and replaced
with a growing sense of unease. "Here, let me get that," she snapped at
someone's bumbling hands about her waist. She unclipped the quickdraw attached
to her harness so she could finally get off the guide rope.

"We're not sure."

"What do you mean, you're not sure?" she barked, shrugging out of the black
nylon webbing of the harness. "This is supposed to be a vacation, you know."

The man close to her was direct and didn't mince words.

"We haven't been able to contact Washington for some time," he said.

The bustle of activity around her faded, the scene seemed to grow quieter. The
man's message seemed to almost come through a tunnel. This was it. The moment
she had secretly feared would happen.

"How long?"

"Hours."

"Why not? Is it a communication thing, or ... ?"

"No, we've even lost the satellite phone network."

"The President?"

"No word. Nothing. Nothing on the emergency channels, either."

Someone handed her a bottle of water. She paused, thinking, took a long draw
on the bottle, took a deep breath, and nodded.

"Okay. Well, I guess that's that, then. Protocol?"

"We get you somewhere safe. Most likely, Nellis, or maybe Offut."

She nodded grimly again. "Okay," she said, took another gulp of water, and
held the bottle out for someone to take, which someone did. "Let's get a move
on, then, shall we?"

The man before her returned her nod and grim expression when he spoke again.

"Yes, Madam Vice President."

***

It was well past midnight when Dan pulled the Tahoe into the parking lot of
their destination. They got out and approached the door warily; at this hour
the business was closed, but with the condition the city was in, Cassie
reminded him, they had to be particularly cautious. She watched the lot and
the street beyond while Dan peered into the dark showroom, trying to see
through the decal of the familiar circle-shaped logo that was stenciled on the
window.

"I think they'll have what we need," he said, squinting. "But I'm not sure how
we're going to get in there."

Cassie glanced at him with an expression of half bemusement, half
exasperation. She unwound the blood-splattered T-shirt dressing on her hand.

"Oh, God, Cass," Dan said in real alarm. "Your hand!"

"It looks worse than it is," she answered.

Dan frowned, unconvinced, but if it still pained her, she didn't show it. She
grasped the fixed door handle with both hands, braced herself, and pulled.

It occurred to Dan then that he would never get used to this; it was simply to
strange and too far removed from his experience for his brain to recognize as
an actual, real, and permanent phenomenon.

The handle, made of thin aluminum, bent back fairly easily, to a point. Cassie
reset her feet, and pulled again, applying a slow, mounting pressure. Any more
would have simply torn the handle off.

A quiet, nearly gentle creaking issued from the metal door as it subtly
deformed, a metallic groan sounded as she pulled the fascia from over the lock
mechanism. With a sudden, hard tug, it was torn away, leaving the half-inch
bolt in plain view. Cassie gripped it and pulled the bolt free with her thumb
and forefinger.

"Here you go," she said with a nearly embarrassed grin, and dropped the bolt
into Dan palm. He shook his head in amazement; he could feel the warmth from
the friction in the piece of metal. She paused, and leaned closer, looking at
his shocked expression and the sudden, thin film of perspiration on his brow.
She sniffed the air by his neck, and pulled away, her grin going from one of
embarrassment to a sly sideways glance. "You still like it when I do things
like that, don't you?"

"Huh? Well, I ... .you know ... "

"Get in there, stud," she said, dropping her voice an octave lower for comedic
effect.

Once inside, Dan reached instinctively to turn the lights on, but was rewarded
with nothing but more gloom and shadow. Arms extended before him, he made his
way over to the accessories counter, and fumbled through a few small cardboard
displays. Finally, after a minute or two of rooting about blindly, his fingers
brushed across a familiar shape. He returned to Cassie's side in the middle of
the room.

"Okay, here goes. Surprise!" he said, and flicked the wheel on the cigarette
lighter he had found.

The small yellow flame leaped into being, making a small circle of golden
light in the gloom. It was enough, apparently, for them to see more easily.

"Oh, Daniel," she gasped in delight. "They're beautiful."

She crept forward to caress the fiberglass fender of the nearest bike with her
wounded right hand, the surface smooth and cool under her fingertips.

"Yeah, these should do nicely," Dan smiled.

Two brand new BMW GS1200 Adventures stood on their kickstands in the dim light
cast by the cigarette lighter. One had blue trim, the other red. The
fiberglass bodies were streamlined and modern-looking, while the rear and
lower half of each motorcycle hinted at the machine's true purpose. There,
wide, knobby off-road tires and a high suspension gave the bikes an
aggressive, capable appearance. They looked like exactly what they were: a
long-distance cruiser combined with a capable off-road dirt bike. They were
the ultimate enduro: More than capable on difficult terrain, yet fast and
stable on the tarmac.

Each bike was fitted with large silver panniers on the rear, one on each side
and another large storage compartment behind the seat. Both also sported large
magnetic tank bags for extra storage.

"You think anybody will mind if we borrow these?" Dan asked, smiling.

It took a few minutes to gather what they needed. Knowing that they were truly
on their own, Dan and Cassie decided that they had better use as much safety
gear as possible. They were each able to find riding gear that fit them well,
including light gray Gor-Tex jumpsuits that were cool yet water-resistant, as
well as jackets with protective skid plates sewn into the elbows and over the
spine; the jumpsuits had a similar setup to protect the knees. Gloves, boots,
and helmets were located as well; the latter being true cross-sport helmets,
having the long fiberglass visor of a motocross hat but also the plastic face
shield of a high-speed cruiser design.

When they were suited up, they nodded to each other and stepped toward the
pair of bikes before Dan laughed out loud.

"Keys would help, hmm?" he laughed.

Behind the counter they found a large gray metal box hanging on the wall. It
was solidly made, and a big chromed padlock with a thick hasp held it tightly
shut.

"Well, I'm not sure how we're--" Dan began.

Cassie's right hand, now properly bandaged and protected by the motocross
gloves, pistoned out in a blur. There was the heavy, thudding sound of a great
impact and of buckling metal as the front of the two-foot square metal case
collapsed around her fist; the jingle of many keys inside it was plainly
audible. She turned the left edge of the case's door up with her fingertips,
the steel growing warm to the touch from the pressure she was so casually
exerting on it. The she jerked downward, tearing the door free on the hinge
side, leaving it to dangle from the heavy padlock, exposing row upon row of
keys hanging on hooks.

"Or, we could do that," Dan said dryly.

They shared a quick smile and after some searching found the keys to their new
machines. Dan turned the ignition on and glanced at the gauges.

"Full tank of gas, too," he said. "How thoughtful of them."

"Quite. But Daniel, I'd feel much better knowing exactly where we're going and
what we're planning to do."

"Soon," Dan said. "Let's just pick up a few things and get as far from the
city as we can, okay? When we stop, we'll talk more about it and then we can
decide on everything."

"All right."

"We've got a long way to go, though," Dan said. "And we should be ready for
anything."

"Agreed."

"Then we have another stop to make."

Their raid on a local sporting goods store took longer than it had to get the
bikes. But when they were finished, over two hours later, they truly were
equipped to handle almost anything. The panniers of the bikes were stuffed
with clothes, maps, and various MREs, the kind of dried food packets Dan had
come to know (and despise) in his military days. But the meals were
calorie-dense, easy to prepare, and had a shelf life measured in decades.
Compasses, first-aid kits, and a set of walkie-talkies were also included,
along with things like blankets and batteries, some vitamins and small
chlorine pellets for making potable water. The large seat containers were used
to carry ammunition: with some nylon webbing with plastic buckles and some
hose clamps, Dan was able to fashion an ugly but functional way of fixing some
slip cases to the bikes, much like how rifles were slipped into the saddles on
horses in old Westerns. He slipped a pump-action Remington 12-guage into
Cassie's holder and stood back, admiring his handiwork. Even though it was a
big, long gun, it sat behind the seat on the right side. The panniers and rear
case, topped by two bedrolls in weather-proof cases attached by bungee cords,
made such a large hump of material that the stock of the shotgun wasn't all
that noticeable. He made a similar setup on his own machine, but included a
Browning .30-.30 with a small scope. They both ran the straps of small
shoulder holsters through the magnetic tank bags, and in these they both
included a pair of 9mm pistols. Again, with the small mountain of motorcycle
and camping gear, the weapons were not all that noticeable, at least from a
distance.

"We have to go," Cassie said. "This is good, but has already taken too long."

"I second that, sweetheart."

"All right, then. I'll follow you," she said, and pulled her helmet on and
lowered the clear visor.

"Okay. Just out of the city. Then we find some nice quiet spot, park it, and
rest. We might want to consider moving only at night, too, right?"

Cassie made a motion, half a nod, half a shrug. Dan buckled his helmet and
returned the gesture, toe-clicked the bike into neutral, and thumbed the
ignition switch. It rasped into life, thrumming pleasantly beneath him. Once
again he was pleased at the exhaust note; it was quieter than he had been
expecting. Good, he thought, the quieter the better. It was difficult to
operate the throttle with his wounded arm, but not impossible. It was sore,
and he thought it would definitely be begin to ache much sooner than he would
like, but with slow, careful movements, he found he could still ride.

He cast a glance into his mirror and saw Cassie behind him, her bright blue
eyes clearly visible, watching him. They made eye contact and she gave a
little nod and fired up her bike, giving it the double "I'm ready" engine rev.

They carefully walked the bikes through the sporting good store's front door
(Cassie had opened the steel door much as she had the BMW dealer's, figuring
it would be faster and easier to load the bikes with the machines actually in
the store). They idled through the lot, pulled onto the road, and two minutes
later they were doing 50 miles per hour on a deserted urban highway, heading
west, out of the city.

***

There was very little pain, after the first few minutes.

At first, it had been agonizing, nearly incomprehensible in its intensity. She
had never felt anything like it before, it had been like ten men had lined up
with 5-lb sledgehammers to batter her torso with abandon. But now, that pain,
and every other sensation in her body, was fading; it went from a searing,
paralyzing agony to a painful, deep throbbing, then became a dull ache, and
finally subsided to a distant buzzing.

She realized she was dying.

For a moment, the barest of seconds, she was angry. Seething, in fact. So much
left to do. The entire world was before her, she had worked so hard and yet an
early end was all she was to be given in return for her efforts. It wasn't
fair. It wasn't fair at all. It wasn't right.

But even that rage, a pinpoint of fiery emotion in the very center of her,
wasn't enough. She felt it go, and released it almost willingly. It winked
out, its remains a mere smoldering ruin to go with the shattered body
containing it.

Her rage was replaced with sadness.

There would be nothing more for her, then. For her, the struggle was over. A
sadness so great no amount of tears could sate it spun in her mind, and in
that moment she wished only for sleep, for rest.

So weak, now. So weak. And cold.

Then, the yawning blackness opened beneath her, she felt herself teetering on
the edge of the infinite, and a grim, crawling sense of mortal fear bloomed in
her mind. It was a mindless, gargantuan apprehension that reduced her, shamed
her for her childlike wonder at its scope.

So weak. So cold.

Her thoughts dimmed. Their voices faded, growing indistinct, jumbled. And then
quiet. Years, decades, an eternity of quiet darkness spanning only seconds,
and lifetimes. Her center loosened, became unhinged, and free. She floated
away from herself, allowing it to happen, and she welcomed it.

Something changed.

A sudden brightening. A dark maroon instead of darkness. And from the silence,
a hollow hiss.

Her lassitude was dialed back; while she seemed to still float she could feel
a part of her click into place with a nearly audible snap. A distant rumble
and a hiss. Somewhere in her, her non-face smiled.

I can hear the ocean, she thought. Waves on the beach.

What strange thoughts to have in the final seconds. What strange, insane
thoughts to entertain as life drains from its prison of flesh and bone, while
...

Something, a feeling, a sensation, brushed by her face. Lighter. A dim,
remembrance. Warmth.

Sunlight?

With an effort no one could ever know, she fell back into herself, gasping at
the return of the throbbing, pulsing agony of her broken, shattered body. And
she used her iron will to open one eye to a slit. She saw in the glaring
brightness things she knew she recognized, but she had neither the energy nor
desire to name them, to know them.

Waves. A light sea foam, frothing at the edge of emerald green waters.

Something in her physical body shifted, and her mind screamed out against it.
She moved, or was moved, she knew. The knowledge of herself as a sovereign
entity returned to her. Her eye-slit vision flashed again.

A small waterfall. A pool of greenish-blue water. Bright rocks, sporting
patches of soft lichen.

Trees. Tropical trees with strange umbrella-shaped limbs. An earthen footpath.

Her body shuddered with movement again, jostled, and she gasped.

Shadows now. A doorway.

More jostling. She began to drift, to fade, her final collapse of self truly
beginning.

Pressure, and coldness. White stone steps. Golden figures around her. A riser
made of smooth, cool marble. An altar?

She slipped sideways, and welcomed it.

Words. They echoed in her ears, and in the fading sphere that was her mind.

They were equally known to her and yet mysterious, like the sound of a song
that is new yet familiar. She felt the words move over her, around her,
through her. Then, she faded into a perfect dark, made of perfect silence, for
an eternity.

And then the sky opened up.

A cone of white fire slammed into her body, her mind. It singed her, blackened
her, exploded every part of her; it crushed her utterly and remade her. It was
everything; it was the alpha and the omega and all that comes between them. It
was white hot fire and thunder that both soothed and consumed her.

She fell back into her body with a thump; her sideways slide was arrested as
every nerve cried out, as every synapse fired, as every fiber of her being
caught fire and burned with a blinding brilliance. Her pain ended; it was
blasted from her in an instant. The searing, all-encompassing flame replaced
it, fed upon itself, and seemed to grow. She arched her body, her mind, her
soul in shock and the sense of it all; even her sex blazed into a sudden
white-hot fury as her mind was literally born again, bathed in the light of a
billion suns, and in this light she was reborn and recreated as the universe
was born in a flashing, unknowable second. A voice that was not a voice and
without sound spoke in her shining mind, and her sense of self returned,
changed, heard this voice, and welcomed it; yes, yes! anything to make this go
on, anything.

Anything, she thought from outside herself. Anything at all! Anything I am, or
will ever be, is yours, as I am yours! her mind cried out. Impossibly, a new,
even greater blast of light, of heat, of power, of thought coursed through
her, and she shrieked out the exquisite pain, the indescribable ecstasy, and
the burning, blinding fury of her birth in a clear voice that rang throughout
the world.

Yes! she cried. Yes! Oh ... ... MY ... ...

... GODDESS!

END PART THREE

TO BE CONTINUED