Operation Glitterberries
Chapter 06: Home Invasion I
** I ** II ** III ** IV **
Disclaimer: Daria and associated characters are owned by MTV and Viacom. This is fan fiction written for entertainment only. No money or other negotiable currency or goods have been exchanged.
** I ** II ** III ** IV **
Entering Jake's Morgendorffer office was almost insulting on its simplicity, in the early afternoon of a Sunday the entire Halcyon Hills Corporate Park complex was completely empty, with not a soul to be seen in the little distance she had to walk from where the cab left her. The building itself was in great disrepair, with the paint falling in flakes from the walls and a couple of windows were cracked and hold together with the help of masking tape.
Her first hurdle was how to enter the building, the front door was obviously closed and so was the back door; the windows in the first floor all had bars. Her entry point came in the form of a small window in the side of the building, too small for an adult to cross, in fact it was almost too small for her and for the first time she was truly glad she was so slim. After a somehow undignified landing she was able to exit the broom closet and get into the building proper.
Once there it was a matter of finding the correct office a fact simplified by the plaque with the legend 'Morgendorffer Consulting' in dirty gold letters. She was about to kick the cheap door down, even someone as small and weak as she was could do a lot of harm with enough time and a hammer from the broom closet, but remembering one of her instructors in lock picking, she tried the handle first just in case.
"Jackpot!"
The office of Jake Morgendorffer was a depressing place, it was in the same state of disrepair than the rest of the building; in addition to that it lacked enough furniture for even such a small place, with only a desk and an archive. The place was full of reference books, boxes of discarded publicity, and many knick knacks. The desk itself was full to the brim with piles of badly organized papers which were in danger of falling.
She immediately went to work, checking the papers in the boxes and on the archive, only finding the most common and predictable information of clients and suppliers. In the desk itself the only items of note were a key holder of some sort of malformed riding boot with a set of keys; and an old photo of a couple of rugrats and their parents who she could recognize as the Morgendorffers; making the children Quinn Morgendorffer, the poor teen in the chopper, and whoever she was replacing herself. It seemed that Jake was a good father.
"Let's go get our picture taken with the cardboard alien."
" Uh... sure, honey. Whatever you want."
These flashbacks were getting weirder each time, she had seen real aliens, and other than the acidic split they weren't something she wanted to go near, not even in a photo.
Then she focused once more on her job and checked the keys, they had a tag with an address on them '1111 Glen Oaks'. On a hunch she took the cheap plastic key holder that she found alongside her notebook and compared both sets of keys, and they were a match with the ones on the desk.
Then the only remaining thing to do was cleaning the office of as much evidence as she could, a determined CSI team would always find enough clues to track someone inside a building as long as someone knew they need to call them; once she let the place as close as possible to its original state she went out by the main door, which opened normally form the inside and leaved towards her next destination. 1111 Glen Oaks Lane.
** I ** II ** III ** IV **
Marianne Richmond was enjoying her free weekend, while she had gone to the office on Friday, unlike her demanding boss Helen, she had a comparatively relaxed day just filling files in the office and redirecting the occasional call from Eric Schrecter to Helen's cell. The rest of the weekend was gloriously hers and she had squished as much fun for her family as she could. Yesterday she and her husband took the children to the amusement park, and later to the nanny who care for them in her house for the night while they both took a short trip to a cozy hotel nearby.
Now she was returning home from the church and she and her family were going to eat a big fatty dinner composed of her specialty, roasted steak with mushrooms, and then maybe they would send the children to sleep over with Mallory's, they ought them one for doing exactly the same for them last month.
It was then that the dreaded phone started ringing.
"Marianne? Is me Helen, I need for you to go to my home to pick a few things." She sounded weary, although Marianne could almost swear it was not her usual tiredness, it felt different somehow, but could not put her finger on."
"Miss Morgendorffer; today is my free day, I'm sorry but if you need something I'll have to wait until tomorrow, I already got plans of my own." This time she couldn't afford to do whatever her workaholic boss wanted, if she allowed her to order her on her own house on a Sunday, she might never enjoy another day of leisure with her family.
"Please, this is really important..." She was getting desperate, Marianne could tell. But that only angered her. If she was unable to enjoy her family why did she had to punish those who did?
"No, right now I'm enjoying my time with my family and you should do the same! These are your vacation days… just expend them with your children." She was about to hang out, damn the consequences, but the next words of her boss stopped her cold.
"My daughter is missing. Please…" This time the anguish in her voice was unequivocal, this was not an Alpha woman obsessed with work and power, but a mother suffering.
"Helen wait, what happened?"
"We had an accident in the woods; all of us ate some hallucinogen berries, all except Daria. She managed to keep us together until they came for us; they tell me that she probably saved our lives. But when they were bringing us back the berries somehow had a delayed effect on her; she attacked the rescue personnel and disappeared. Jake, Quinn and I are locked in Oakwood General's psychiatric ward and they can't release us until they're sure we have flushed the berries' toxins out of our system."
That was every mother's nightmare, to have your own son, or daughter in this case, and to be unable to do anything about it. "Oh my god! What can I do to help?"
"Oakwood's police have been searching for Daria, but until now they haven't been able to do more than show a sketch of her but is not quite as good as it should be; it seems that her ability to pass unperceived has come to bit us in the ass…" She could hear the melancholy on Helen's voice, "if you could go to my home for a picture of her and a few papers, I would be eternally grateful."
"It's no problem; I'll go at once, let me go for my keys."
"There is something else, Lawndale's Police chief has been unwilling to expand the search to the county, Erik already used his contacts with the mayor to at least get him to fill a missing persons report, but he is demanding that I get Daria's birth certificate before he does anything, procedure he tells, but at least he was forced to send someone with you to open the house and take the documents as soon as you find them."
"Umm Helen, why would I need a police escort?"
"Amongst the thing we lost are our keys, so you'll have to break the door or a window to get in. The cop will do that for you and that ensure that one of our noisy neighbors won't cause any problem for you."
"Something else?"
"if you could bring me some clothes I would be grateful, the authorities were kind enough to drive our SUV to the hospital so we have about two days of clothes, but while Quinn is supposed to wake up any moment from her treatment, they detected a mild case of Arrhythmia on Jake, and they can't just hook him in a machine and cleanse his blood so he's staying here until the meds they are giving him do their job."
The rest of the conversation was the instructions to find the papers required for the missing person report and the medical insurance, the time of arrival of her escort and other details, she didn't miss the way that Helen didn't gave any orders nor gave a single reference of work other than to tell her she was not going on Monday.
** I ** II ** III ** IV **
This time Melody asked the cab to drop her more than six blocks away from Glen Oaks Lane, it just wouldn't do to fall into a trap by her enemies, so she treated her approach the same way she did an incursion deep within Indian Territory. She approached not in a straight line, but she went walking in a spiral, searching for parked vans with their plates muddled up, the usual way of staging a fast reaction force to support an ambush.
As she was approaching her destination she walked in a more relaxed and confident way, most people tend to , even if she grew warier with each step, she was going to a place that half competent agency would keep an eye on after neutralizing even a normal family, much less one that was her cover. Even if for some reason the place was lock down tighter than Fort Knox by now, there were neighbors who would surely know her, and that she in turn would be unable to identify with the black hole in her memories, any one of those might end raising the alarm even without trying, and then she would have her enemies homing on the gossip. And she didn't felt like killing innocent bystanders, even if she wouldn't hesitate a second to do so in order to accomplish her mission.
Then after running into a woman who waved her hand at her, and then looked her weird after she waved back, she arrived to her destination. The moment she introduced her key on the lock she had another flashback.
"Hold it, young lady."
"Funny."
"What are you doing out so late?"
"What are you doing out so late?"
"What do you mean? I'm always out this late."
"Then you can tell me how to sneak in."
"Well, for one thing, stop tiptoeing around like a geek. Have a little dignity, Daria."
"If I had any dignity, do you think I'd be out here letting you try and teach me how to be cool?"
"Whatever."
"What's going on down there?"
"More threatening."
"Let me handle it. Darn it, what's going on down there?"
"Jake, you sound like such a geek."
'My god, I acted like such a geek… I really hope that I was just pretending to be incompetent in the art of stealth.' As soon as she crossed the door she calmly analyzed her surroundings, the place would be well illuminated by the windows if the curtains weren't currently closed much to her relief; prying eyes sometimes saw the world through camera lens, but sometimes saw them thought a scope, and the later ones were regularly attached to a sniper rifle.
Once her immediate security was assured, the first thing she noticed was just how normal this place was, with an assortment of decorations that went from the expensive and tasteful to a few handmade articles that could only be considered as tacky, yet they were prominently displayed in the living room. Scattered they were many pictures of the family that lived here, some of those were hers, and always with an annoyed face, and so incredibly unphotogenic. Of course this being America, the place of honor was for the TV set.
Then she went to the kitchen, the fact that she was on a mission didn't obviate her need of sustenance, so she checked the pantry for something to eat, finding only a huge stock of frozen lasagna and other non perishable treats. Taking for herself all of the granola bars she then went to what she supposed it was an office.
The office was above everything functional, with a large desk of high quality wood, and a computer and printer set that, while not state of the art as far as the Farm agent was concerned, it was still top of the line for civilians. A bookshelf of the same kind of wood covered one of the walls, in it a mix of law, publicity, and leisure books, which ranged from 'Les Miserables' to some teen romance novels with covers that decidedly clashed with the rest. There were some high quality spirits in a showcase; she could also see a switch that would make the bottles shine from the bottom, giving them a luminescence effect.
In the desk there was a phone with an attached answering machine, so she pushed buttons to hear both the first the recorded message and then the calls received.
"Hello this is Quinn, I'm not going to be in this weekend so if you had a date with me… well I guess that I'll reschedule it if I'm interested, if not, tough luck." The voice was the one of a teen girl, and judging from the message a really egocentric one. Melody was relieved that this particular tone seemed to be a little out of the range of her current voice, she had played the part of both shallow and dumb people, but she didn't relish those occasions at all.
With that message there was no doubt that the people knew they would be gone for a while, and while that was almost an open invitation to rob the house, maybe the callers would give a little more information about their business than they'll would if they thought the family would be gone for a few hours.
"Quinn, stop playing with the answering machine! How this thing works? Let me see, maybe this one? Okay, next time buying it on Payday instead of to Jake's clients … You're calling to the Morgendorffer family; please leave your message after the tone. … Did I overwrite Quinn's message? … (A horn sounds in the background) … Jake, I'm coming!"
She couldn't help but to feel like smiling, this record was comedy gold, this is a funny family. 'No, it was a funny family to live with, I doubt that from now on they will laugh and fight and be just be normal, not for a long time, if ever.'
After that grim remainder of the odds she was playing with, she proceeded listening the calls made to the family during the weekend while she searched the papers on the desk for anything interesting.
Then she methodically checked the bunch of documents trying to find something useful without success. While they were some papers relating to personal and family data, and some others contracts from clients she could recognize as Mister Morgendorffer's, most of the papers were from Vitale, Davis, Horowitz, Riordan, Schrecter, Schrecter, and Schrecter relating to a plethora of civil lawsuits.
The first of the messages was a dud, just a kid, Jamie, asking Quinn for a date on Saturday and hoping that she would reschedule as promised; it was such a pathetic oral display of sycophancy especially after hearing the recorded greeting she gave to guys like him. Messages two to six were variations on the first one, by even more boys with different levels of lovesickness.
Message number seven at least wasn't a teen drama. "Helen, this is Erik. Your daughter hanged on me on the cell phone, and I really need to talk you about the depositions we did over the Coldish Restaurant case, talk to me as soon as you arrive." The next three messages were a combination of both this guy Erik and a girl named Stacy who was asking if Quinn had already left for the mall. Melody felt a little sorry for the girl for being stranded there for at least two hours.
The next message was worth the effort, and she stopped her search in order to hear and listen it with her full attention.
"Yo! I call after barely returning with my life and Trent's from the expedition to one of the darkest places of the old U.S.A., that Midwestern cesspool forgotten by the civilized world and then occupied by the squatters of the Lane family. Since your irritant sister hasn't picked up the phone by now Daria, I must regretfully assume that unlike me you weren't able to escape camping the same way I escaped our extended family reunion. I must then offer my condolences and ask you to take heart; If I survived dozens of mad, annoying, judgmental and early rising Lanes, you can survive three Morgendorffers who already live with you; and unlike me if you can't tolerate that existence no more then you only need to hold a picnic basket up high and then call for the bears to eat you and end with your larger than usual misery, or better yet, to use Quinn instead of a basket and then enjoy the show. Just be careful with Quinn's head, is too thick and swelled and it could give those poor bears indigestion, and as far as I know they're on a protected sanctuary.
The call was carefree and witty; something that would actually drew a smile from her face in most circumstances. She remembered the many times she had threatened to feed commies to hungry animals, even if she had never found a bear to do so with the ruskies, the irony on that would have been worth breaking on a zoo. However she did remembered the ordeal that the Morgendorffers suffered already, and she was in no mood for that.
She then went back to her investigation, turning the computer on and browsing in search of something relevant while using the blank cd's in one of drawers to copy as many files as possible for further study in a more secure location. Even when so distracted she couldn't help to keep thinking about the call and more important the caller.
The interesting thing about the call was that it was addressed to her alter ego and not to one of the other inhabitants of the house. Until now the few pieces of information she had been able to uncover from the life of Daria Morgendorffer painted an image of an introspective person who kept to herself, writing poetry, short dark stories and not even trying to fit with the rest of her peers, in fact the attempt had landed her in the so called Self-Esteem class. That was the kind of person that would be a ghost, invisible to everyone.
Letting the computer download and burn the files she went back to study the rest of the office. Once more following a hunch, after all they might be traces of her memory wanting to get free, she went behind the showcase and found there a metal fire safe with a combination lock, which she was able to open without even looking the numbers on the dial, inside she found insurance papers, a couple of credit cards once more in Jake's and Helen's name, and some other documents which she dismissed as unimportant after reading and memorizing numbers, PIN's and other miscellaneous information that might become relevant later. However the four grand in cash were a completely different matter.
"At least I can label the plan to obtain funds by robbing a bank as 'B'"
And wasn't a Jane Lane the other student which graduated from the Self Esteem Class with her according to the LHS newspaper? For some reason she had formed a bond with some random girl, something that definitely did not fit the profile she had done for her cover identity, and if the article in the Lowdown was right she had shared the class with her almost as soon as the last fashion column was published for the Highland High School newspaper by Daria Morgendorffer, and that couldn't be a simple coincidence. More important yet, there was this nagging feeling that Jane Lane was someone important to her.
"He doesn't know what it means. He's got the speech memorized. Just enjoy the nice man's soothing voice."
And she needed to find what, and how it was relevant to her current condition.
Finally considering the office as a dead end she took the cd and went upstairs.
** I ** II ** III ** IV **
When she went up she saw an open bath up front and then she was faced with a choice left or right; to the right, there were two doors, one old and rickety and a newer one with bright white paint almost in front of the stairs. To the left there was a single door which looked larger by virtue of the floor distribution. She decided to start her search on the left.
The room to the left ended being the parents', so already used to the routine of the entire day she quickly and efficiently went through their stuff, finding only common things in the closet: clothes and shoes; self help books and a bunch of miscellaneous documents of scarce relevance; and a box hidden in the deepest part of their closet.
She had great hopes for the box, until she realized that the only thing it contained were a few adult toys and disguises. Completely normal for a healthy couple, after all she used the same toys and played the same games in a number of occasions, not all of them to the real perverts or during missions.
Even then for some reason she couldn't just quite suppress the full body shudder.
The only other thing even remotely interesting was an agenda from Helen Morgendorffer that she found in the middle of the bed; unlike the cheap one she found in Jake's office, this one was full to the brim with names, addresses and directions, once more solidifying her impression of her being quite more dedicated, successful and definitely more organized than her husband.
Or at least far more busy and workaholic if the fifteen minutes blocks for eating and family were an indication, if not then the large amount of those that were blacked out and exchanged by 'surprise meeting with Erik' certainly did the trick.
Finding nothing else that could be useful other than pocket change and knowing that most of the important stuff should have been on the office downstairs she decided to go to the other rooms.
Once that was done she went to the right, towards the other rooms. The first one, the one that she wasn't fond of for reasons she did not understood, was a girl's room in white and pink tones, with a four posts bed, a large vanity mirror with a dressing table full of cosmetics and hair products underneath it, and a closet so full of clothes that it couldn't even be closed. For a second of two she entertained the idea that this could be her room, but the 'I love me' wall full of photos told her that the occupant was the same girl that she met on the helicopter, Quinn Morgendorffer.
It was seeing things like this that depressed the most in her line of work. To know that innocent Americans were hurt by the actions of the enemies of the state was one thing, to see the room of a little girl that would never again be normal was completely different. She took a moment to watch carefully the different photos, some were of the girl alone posing like a model and some others with four different girls, 'probably her friends…' she thought.
While she didn't expect to found anything, training and experience told her to let no stone unturned so she searched the room with as much seal as the rest. The only things that she found other than clothes, fashion magazines and a couple of agendas so full that each one only had half of the alphabet, was a laptop computer and this time she didn't even checked it, she just took it and its carrycase, this was a both a source of information and a tool, and right now both were equally important to her.
The only other thing she found was an old photo hidden in the bottom of the drawer where the girl was nine or ten years old and she was hugging a slightly older and clearly annoyed girl with glasses.
She realized that the girl was probably Daria Morgendorffer, the real one from Highland, Texas and that this was a memento of the sisters. She went with the photo to the mirror and carefully examined the features between both of them.
"I had to admit it, the medics at the Farm do know their jobs; I look just like her" she conceded in ushered tones.
Leaving that piece of the girl's childhood in the bed, and wondering what the help happened to the original one, Melody decided to leave the room and the memories, but not before taking one of the smaller make-up travel kits the girl had to correct the mistake she did of not buying one in the morning.
Then she went to the last door, the one that she suspected belonged to her.
** I ** II ** III ** IV **
The room was unlike anything she expected to find, especially because until now she had thought that Daria Morgendorffer was a shy and creative girl with only a little bit of a dark side, at least according from the diverse writings in the one notebook she found after the crash, and therefore she was going to have a shy and demure room, maybe with a few books of poetry or literature here and there, a little less blatantly feminine that her sisters, but still girly.
Instead she found herself looking at dirty grey padded walls almost absorbing the light with the furniture, or more properly said, the lack of furniture beyond the bare minimum, giving the room the illusion of a larger space while keeping the nagging feeling of claustrophobia in the back of the head. There were bars on the windows, but those had been cut, and a closer look told her that they weren't removed recently; another look at the door told her even more, the old door was thicker than the norm for a room and at one time it was closed by two locks: a conventional yet sturdy one; and a bar to close it only from the outside. However by the four small holes they had already took the bar permanently; the other lock closed from the inside and by the patches on the wood, they had changed the older bigger mechanism for a less sturdy one meant for common rooms.
This wasn't a cell, at least not anymore.
Even then it wasn't a comforting place to stay, much less sleep. About the only things that gave the room the feeling of being lived in rather than holding someone there were the different posters pinned to the walls, even if they were as morbid as the rest of the room, with 'Kafka's Metamorphosis' sharing a wall with an old poster of a half dug skeleton from an archaeological site; incongruously there was a white sock incongruently sewed to the wall. The models of a realistic human heart and a piece of cheese from all the possible things completed the look.
The only thing that was congruent for a normal teenager was the mess in the floor, there were books and magazines and notebooks in piles, big and small, al around the room, with folded papers between some of them. At least the clothes were on its proper place in the small closet so it wasn't full out chaos, and a quick look confirmed the fears she had when she saw the clothes on the duffel bag she had rescued from the chopper, they were all small variations of the same outfit with the same orange t-shirts and grey skirts, there was even a clone of the jacket she had disposed in the morning. Nothing that was of use other than a black hoodie which almost spelled suspicious to anyone not in a ghetto but that she took anyway in case she desired to pass through a ghetto; and another set of older, more battered glasses, that were a little slender and of a less powerful prescription than her eyes currently needed but better than nothing.
She went to the computer on the small desk and just like in the office she downloaded as much information as she could, and there was a lot of information, ranging from a series of poems by Edgar Alan Poe to the Terrorist Cookbook, and from a digital copy of Black Beauty to the autobiography of her mentor Virginia Hall. And those were only the ones in the hard drive, there were also dozens of archives with such common names as school, writings, poetry and other more tantalizing such as idiocy, payback, and blackmail, among others.
She tried opening a few of them, but the computer itself far too slow and even reading from one of the smaller files would take far too long, so she just crammed a cd full of the files and hit the button to burn the files. Since the cd burner was just as slow she did have quite enough time to do a thoughtful search of the room and its contents.
Checking the books on the floor it was soon evident that there was a method to the mess in the room, while the books where just about everywhere they were separated by topic, with the history books and magazines together with the notebook of the respective class between them and the random pieces of paper were full of related notes. It was quite curious to find mercenary magazines between all of the mess; she would have thought that having those would be anathema for any cover affair, no matter just how nostalgic she felt about a Direct Action assignment.
Far more worrying were some of the notes in the margins of a few of the notebooks were snippets of her missions were written. Nothing that could be traced directly to her, nor that anyone without a Top Secret classification and the correct Code Word clearance would ever have a hope of understanding what did in Honk Kong, especially the part of the elevator smash, but still that kind of security breach just wasn't like her.
"Did someone was messing with my head before?"
But there was something missing, she would never just left the information out in the open, there should be something else inside the room, somewhere the inhabitants of the house wouldn't stumble on it, yet it was easy to access. She went and more carefully searched under the bed and behind every piece of furniture, but there was nothing hidden there. Then she went to the padded walls, cutting the fabric on the wall and then sewing it again after putting there whatever you wanted to keep from prying eyes was a perfect hiding place for things that you wanted out of sight but just a slash with a knife away in case of emergency.
It took a little while but she found on piece of padding sewed together with a thread that was whiter and newer than the rest, she was about to use her knife to cut the fabric when a bout of inspiration struck and she carefully pulled a loose corner in the otherwise seamless wall. She wasn't too surprised when the entire square of padding comes loose after a bit of effort, much less than the necessary to rip the fabric, and a very familiar sound. Velcro, she had used Velcro to linen her secret compartment, and done it so well that there were no indication of sagging or other telltale marks that a frequently visited hidden stash would leave to the discerning eye. Sometimes her cunning amazed even her.
Inside the wall instead of padding there was were a couple hundred bucks that she pocketed automatically, and a brand new diary, one that instead of the usual decorative padlock had a sturdier combination one probably bought at a hardware store. She tried some of her favorite four digit numbers at first, trying to find if one of them would be the correct one; numbers important to her, like the date when the Pueblo had been captured by the commies, and with it her dad, the cubicle that was her first office in the Farm before she had become one of the most important field officers and had been given a corner office, the number of confirmed kills she had performed in the line of duty (and she was close to reach the fifth digit), her day and month of birth weren't even worth considering since no sane field agent would use something so freely available, yet she dialed those too.
She was about to give up and use a brute force method, either dialing all the numbers systematically, or finding an appropriate heavy object and bashing it until either the lock, or the cover broke, when she just carelessly put her fingers on the dials and before she could even realize it introduced the correct number. Her fleeting memory sure was frustrating, but for time to time it actually worked in her favor.
Then she focused back in the diary, first of all checking the covers for any hidden documents and finding nothing, and then reading the first page. The contents while not enlightening, much to her disappointment, were interesting enough for her to read, maybe the clue she had been searching for the last two days would be hidden between the lines.
'Dear diary, I will call you dear diary, too cliché for my taste. I decided to buy you as a way to record my new start in this little town of Lawndale. I seriously thought of burning your predecessor to commemorate that I will never again see that piece of land founded in the deepest recess of hell called Highland, but then I realized that future generations will have trouble understanding just how utterly stupid was our generation in reality so instead I left it on a box that is surely going to be buried in the attic for the next few centuries so that future archeologists can find it on its original state.'
Then there was a brief description of the voyage from Texas to Lawndale, describing the long weekend of ennui and desperation she suffered on the moving van while her father was trapped with Quinn on the car (apparently Mrs. Morgendorffer was smart enough to get there on a commercial flight days before to talk with her new bosses). Her description of the house and the following assignment of a room that used to be the previous home of a schizophrenic shut-in with skillfully concealed enthusiasm once more brought a smile to her face before she realized the uselessness of the information available, no matter how interesting it was…
I've said it before, I'll say it again: you have the coolest room.
It's got pros and cons. You can't hurt yourself in here, but you can't hurt anybody else in here, either.
And yet she needed to keep reading, because one way or another, this lecture was stirring forgotten memories in her head, and that was far more important that any code or world conquest plan she had ever stolen before. To stop whoever had destroyed the Farm she needed to know what the hell was going on.
Her musing were interrupted the worst way possible by the sound of a car parking in front of the house breaching the comfortable silence she had been enjoying until now. Swiftly she went to the window to check the new arrival. What she saw made her heart frost.
It was a police patrol.
She had run out of time. Now the enemy was at the gates.
