"The suspense is terrible - I hope it'll last." ~ Willy Wonka (quoting Oscar Wilde, apparently)

Disclaimer: I own nothing, though I WISH I owned an evil laugh as great as Barry's. XD

Chapter 11: Spontaneous Salvation, Part Deux

Kate, unfortunately, was not a tracker. She only had a vague idea of what direction he'd gone in – and since she had no idea where his body was, she could not head him off. Shortly after leaving her apartment, she was forced to slow down, relying on eyewitness reports of a deranged suit of armor passing by on the street, offering a friendly death-threat here and there as it searched, desperately, for its body.

She despised the setback, but refused to give up. If he stopped somewhere, anywhere, long enough, she would find him – she was sure of it. Yet while her hope persisted, the daylight did not. Before she knew it, the sky was growing dark above her, and the streets grew emptier and emptier as nightfall descended upon Central. She grimaced; the later it got, the more dangerous the streets would be, even on a normal day. And with Barry and his body on the loose…

She shook her head. She had to find them – either one of them – soon.

As she began to run out of eyewitnesses, she began searching whatever seemed likely – deserted houses, back roads, deserted alleys. And then, just as she'd begun to lose hope, she thought, perhaps, that she had found something. At the end of a particularly dark and trash-filled alleyway, something was moving. Something big, although she could not see just what it was.

Reaching into her pocket, she pulled on a pair of black, fingerless gloves with twin transmutation circles sewn into the palms in blue. These, however, were not meant for reconstructing, as the tattoos on her hands were – these were meant for battle. After all, in the middle of a fight, there was no time to draw transmutation circles.

Cautiously, she approached the thing at the end of the path, wondering whether it was Barry the suit of armor or Barry in the flesh. She hoped it was the former. "Barry?" she called out, taking a defensive position in case she was wrong. "Barry, is that you?"

She heard a grunting sound, and tensed, deciding she was wrong. She fell into a crouching position, and was considering what attack she should use when –

"BARK BARK BARK!" A Great Dane the size of a small polar bear charged out of the trash towards her, galumphing across the pavement in giant strides. Caught off-guard, she hesitated an instant too long, and was crushed beneath the beast's weight as it tackled her headlong, thrusting her painfully against the ground.

"What the – GET OFF!" she snapped when the dog, rather than attacking, began to lick her face profusely, leaving a disgusting slime wherever its tongue went. "Urgh!" Rolling over, she shoved it off, and got up quickly, wiping her face with her sleeve. "Jeez, dog, you scared the hell out of me!"

The dog sniffed at her pant-leg, its tail wagging, and looked up at her hopefully, waiting perhaps for a scrap of food. It didn't look hungry to her – in fact, judging by how well-fed it seemed, it was probably a pet, escaped from someone's back yard.

She sighed, patting the dog's head. "Sorry for yelling at you. But don't you know it's dangerous—"

"BARK BARK BARK!" the dog interrupted, turning suddenly to look at something behind her at the entrance to the alley. "BARK BARK BARK!"

"What the—" She spun on her heel, just in time to see something large – much larger than the dog, even – leaping towards her, seemingly from the wall itself.

"RAAAARGH!"

She fell back down into a crouching position, taking the thing's weight with her hands and feet and rolling with it, doing a sort of somersault as, with a blue flash, she deconstructed the outer layer of its skin, leaving two hand-shaped wounds on its chest as she scrambled to get away from it.

As it writhed for a moment, roaring in pain, Kate finally got a good look at it, and realized with a start what she had already suspected: she had found Barry's body. Or rather, it had found her. To her right, the dog, whining in terror, had tucked its tail between its legs and run off, as to her left, the body finally began to right itself and looked at her with hungry eyes. She grimaced, realizing it had been planning on eating the dog for dinner, but had recently decided she would make a much nicer meal instead.

"Don't look at me like that," she snapped, backing away with her mind racing. How was she supposed to defend herself if she couldn't kill it? I have to knock it out again, she thought, just as it sprang at her again.

She dodged it, dropping and rolling to the right as it lunged, hoping it would knock itself out against the wall; though it hit the wall hard, it was only fazed for a moment. She gritted her teeth, looking around for something she could use, and seeing nothing. "Dammit!"

It pounced again, and again she dodged, this time barely missing being caught as it tumbled past her. Its arm knocked against her as she moved, knocking her off-balance, and she fell, grunting as she made contact with the hard ground. Hearing the thing behind her but unable to see it, she rolled over just in time to see it crawling towards her. With a yell, she delivered a swift, solid kick to its face, dislocating its nose and temporarily distracting it as she moved backwards, not daring to turn her back on it. Her hand suddenly felt something cold and hard beneath it; pulling it forward, she found herself grasping a heavy iron pipe. That'll work.

Barry's body, however, did not do as she had predicted. Rather than leaping on top of her, it crouched down and reached forward, seizing her foot as it dragged her to it. Crying out in equal parts terror and pain, she swung wildly with the pipe, at first missing it altogether and then, on the second pass, connecting painfully with its shoulder. Unfortunately, the shoulder she hit was not connected to the hand that had seized her, and all that she accomplished was to further anger it, causing its steel-like grip to tighten agonizingly.

With a roar, it took hold of the pipe with its free hand, snatching it away from her and tossing it away, far out of reach. Heaving, it dragged her closer, and she choked, overpowered by the stench of death as it drew nearer and nearer. She struggled, kicking and clawing wildly at it, but to no avail – it was much too hungry to be bothered with such petty attacks.

Seeing no other option, she let it drag her closer, so that its torso was in reach, and then she shoved upward, her palms slamming against its shoulders with a blue flash as she deconstructed its flesh a second time, removing a layer of skin beneath her hands. The body howled, but did not let go, and she was forced to remove her hands, fearful of letting the transmutation go too far.

Furiously, it shook her, and she saw stars as her head smacked backwards against the pavement, not quite knocking her out but certainly leaving her dazed and confused. She stopped struggling, her mind lost in a fog of pain as she struggled to get back to the surface, knowing she was about to die but unable to understand why.

The face of the thing moved closer, leering, and even in her groggy state she grimaced, her throat constricting as she once again smelled the horrible scent of rot and decay coming off of it. Panicking without full control of her motor system, she shoved up at it weakly, trying to push it away, but it knocked aside her hands as easily as it would a fly.

I'm going to die, she thought, and she wasn't sure if the scream that followed was her own or some poor bystander's.

"THERE you are! At last, I've found you!" someone shrieked; she frowned, fairly certain that that, at least, had not been her.

The body looked up, distracted by the newcomer, just in time to leap out of the way of a descending meat-cleaver. Kate cried out as the knife, having missed its original target, came dangerously close to carving into her own body instead.

"Oh, look, it's you," said Barry (the suit of armor) cheerfully, noticing Kate for the first time. Then the body lunged for him, and together they fell, each one trying desperately to kill the other without being killed first. "STOP STRUGGLING!" he shouted manically, his meat cleaver slicing cleanly through air as the body leapt out of the way. "Sit still so that I can CHOP YOU!"

Kate scrambled to her feet, coming back to herself at last. She winced as she put weight onto the foot the body had grabbed, and stood unevenly as she shouted, "Barry, stop! If you kill the body—"

But it was clear Barry (either of them) had no intention of listening to her; they were much too consumed with bloodlust and madness to listen to her logic and reason. Grimacing, she limped past them, scrambling through the garbage to find the pipe she'd had before. She heard the body cry out behind her, but forced herself not to look back, telling herself neither was dead yet. The continued sounds of war were a comfort to her as she searched; it meant both body and soul were still alive and kicking.

Finally, her hands closed around something cold and metallic, and with an effort she yanked the pipe – not the same one, but a similar one at least – out of the refuse, and turned back to the fight behind her. She was horrified to see blood streaming down Barry's body, from a wound she could not discern while they were struggling.

Knowing she had to be quick, she watched, waiting for the perfect moment – and then, as the body's back was turned toward her, she lunged forward, bringing the pipe down with all her might against the body's skull.

Following a sickening crack, the body collapsed, and for one terrible moment, Kate believed she'd actually killed it – until she realized Barry-the-suit-of-armor was still standing upright, looking down at the body with a gleeful expression. "At last," he said, "at last, I get to see what my own insides are made of!"

She raised the pipe, realizing she could not knock the armor out as well, but having a better idea instead. Swinging like a baseball player, she connected with his head with a solid CLANG and watched as it sailed through the air, rolling when it hit the ground until it came to rest a good twenty feet from where the rest of the armor was standing. "What the— Why, you little—!"

"Sorry, Barry," she said, and, dropping the pipe, slammed her hands into his torso, severing the top half of his body from the lower half with a flash of alchemic blue light. Ignoring the stream of cursing that followed, she dragged both halves away from his human body, severing the hand holding the meat-cleaver as well when he tried unsuccessfully to use it on her instead. Grabbing the pipe, she collected a few others like it and, placing them around the body, used them to form chains which wrapped around the body tightly, rendering it harmless – for the moment.

Taking a deep breath, she walked over to Barry's head and, picking it up, placed it once more atop his torso. "What do you think you're DOING?!" he demanded, having run out, at least temporarily, of his curses and oaths.

"Protecting… oh, I don't know," she groaned, covering her face and sliding down the wall to sit next to him, exhausted. "I don't know what the hell I'm doing."

"Then let me—"

"No." She leaned her head back against the wall, looking up at the sky as if it held all the answers. "No. If you kill your body, you'll die too."

"Maybe, maybe not. How do you know unless you try? LET ME TRY!"

"No, we're not taking that chance. There's got to be some way of fixing this." She paused, and looked over at him with eyes full of amazement. "You know, you saved my life."

Barry looked at her askance. "Oh, is that so? I hadn't noticed."

She rolled her eyes and turned her gaze heavenward again. "Well, whether you meant to or not… thanks."

"Well – what are you going to do now?" he asked, changing the subject quickly.

"I don't know," she said softly, looking lost. "I don't know."