Business District, 2:37 AM
Sara swore again, dropping into an alleyway to try and get a breather as she dropped the
empty magazine from her gun. She had gone through six magazines, but had confirmed only a second
kill. Most of the other ammunition had gone as suppression fire to keep the spec-ops team's collective
heads down, but Sara had also wasted ten shells splattering a group of greenskins that had been firing
at several police cars with machine guns.
As she landed in the alleyway, the impact jolted her right wrist, making her involuntarily cry
out in pain as the shattered bones ground their ways into several nerve endings. *Well, I'm definitely
gonna go into hiding for a few hours, especially because my armour is getting to the point that if I
keep it active for any longer, my mind's gonna suffer a major meltdown.*
Sara looked around for a likely hiding place, and found it in the form of a recently condemned
building nearby. She remained on the ground for several minutes, looking warily around her in every
direction before she jumped up to an open window. Sara slipped into the building, and soon realized
why it was condemned. Half of the old building was missing, apparently crushed by something the
size of a medium-length plane.
Sara shrugged, carefully clambered into the basement, rigging the only access into the dank
chamber with a short length of the spider webbing that she had wrapped around her left arm. Not only
did she rig the line to be as tight as possible, but she also balanced five of her explosive cards on the
line, so if something larger than a rat disturbed the pale cord, all the cards would explode, most likely
seriously injuring whomever hit the simple trap.
After she finished her rigging, Sara shut down her armour and hid herself in a heap of wood
and cardboard debris as she slowly slipped into unconsciousness from the pain shooting up and down
her right arm in sporadic waves.
Several Rooftops Southwest, 3:02 AM
"Hold it. She's gone." The commander looked at the person who was holding onto the
expensive prototype of an EM scanner, and frowned as the remainder of his team surrounded him.
"That means what to me? Your hunk of junk could've been broken by that last howler she
shot at you, and she took McDonald's head off with one of those spikes she's been sniping at us with
for the last several hours." The commander looked at the readout on the machine, swore slightly, and
punched the flimsy metal. The machine, not designed to take such abuse, broke and spilled its metallic
guts across the soft tar roof.
"Fuck the machine, we're going to resort to our eyes. Now, her armour needs to be shut
down in just under five minutes unless our friend wants to become a vegetable. I don't think she'll
go for that course, so she's probably holed up somewhere where nobody will find her for a while.
"I'm betting that she's in a building that can be considered wasted, and will probably stay
there for a little while." Just as the commander finished speaking, the echoes of a rifle shot rebounded
down the artificial canyons on either side of the squat building, and a whistling smack was instantly
followed by a volley of swearing from Ivanova.
"Who was the bloody mother-fucking, father-raping product of incest that shot me?" Ivanova
had a sewer for a mouth, and it showed for several seconds before another shot, closer, rang out. The
second shot hit another member of the team, and he swore as the bullet smacked into the armour
covering his stomach.
"Bellinger, Tsier. Find that sniper and splatter the sucker all over the place. You have
permission to use your explosives."
"Yes sir! We're gonna give that person a ride he will definitely regret." The two men, laden
down with several phosphorous grenades and blocks of C4, moved south to where the only plausible
sniper's roost was. The two split apart to surround the building, and they both heard the crack of the
sniper rifle again as they saw the muzzle flare come from a window near the top of the concrete clock
tower.
Tsier moved first, throwing in his five blocks of C4 into the sniper's roost. Just as he let go
of the tower, a bullet from the sniper slammed into his chest. His armour stopped the bullet, but not
until the heavy slug had punched a fair way into his body. Tsier collapsed onto the nearest roof, and
knew he was seriously injured as his armour reformed, evicting the misshapen lump of metal that had
caused so much damage.
Bellinger, seeing his comrade collapse, muttered something and flipped two switches.
Inside the Clock Tower, Same Time
Jess smiled as she fired another slug at the person she had shot in the chest from just under
fifteen feet away. 17 was behind her, having just tossed the five blocks of C4 out the windows on the
west side of the small room. Jess heard a rumbling boom, then the tower shifted. "What the hell?"
Jess raised her head from the rifle's scope, but was surprised when the floor underneath her collapsed
and the top of the tower tilted enough to crash into the street, trailing papers, clockwork parts, and
other miscellaneous pieces.
M-17 had also dropped down two floors when the floor she had been standing on fractured
under the strain, and coughing up dust and some blood, she started to search for Jess. "Jess? Where
are you?" 17 saw something move weakly nearby, and started to clear away the debris from around
her friend. When she finally exposed Jess' chest and head, 17 just stared at her friend, overwhelmed
by a crushing emotion she had expected to feel only a few times.
Jess was barely conscious, sustenance dribbling freely from the corners of her mouth, and
gasping for air. Just to the left of Jess' breastbone, covered in the techno's glowing blood, was a
jagged piece of re-bar protruding from her shirt. "Jess?" 17's voice had dropped to a whisper, and,
in shock, she could only hold her dying friend's hand as Jess breathed her last, hastened by the metal
spike put through her heart.
Just before her body dissolved in the characteristic fashion of Fixed Ideas and technos, Jess
whispered something to her friend. "Sorry..." 17's face was bathed in green light as Jess disappeared,
and something in 17's mind, which had been growing into a stable platform, tilted suddenly, dropping
her sanity into the inestimable chasm of madness.
She started to giggle, then pulled both of Jess' pistols from the empty clothing. Still giggling,
17 walked over to an intact window frame and looked down at the two killers of her friend. She
broke out into a wild cackle, then jumped through the window and onto the standing trooper. 17 sat
down on the shocked person, and instead of shooting him, she started to pummel him with the pistol
barrels, relishing the sounds and feelings of her victim's bones breaking underneath her constant flurry
of strong blows.
The man's armour suddenly shut down, and 17 leaned towards the man's horribly beaten face
as she continued to pummel him with the now-destroyed guns. She licked her lips as blood spattered
over her face, dripping off the end of her nose as she methodically pounded her victim's skull into a
gooey sludge, scattering fragments of bone and brain in a small circle around her.
She then turned to the second man, who appeared to be unconscious. However, instead of
leaving him alone, she sat on his thighs, and prodded at the bloody hole in his chest. Bored of just
poking him, she then bit him in the neck, gnawing on the jugular vein until it severed, filling her
mouth with the coppery, thick liquid.
17 continued to chew on the person's throat, blood and saliva dribbling out of her mouth,
making her look like a mix between a vampire and a zombie. Not only did she kill him slowly, but as
the man's body cooled, she proceeded to chew her way through the corpse's neck, only stopping
when she exposed the vertebrae in the back of his neck.
She went back into the tower, giggling madly until she got to the floor where Jess' clothes
lay. When there, she seemed to retrieve some of her sanity, and sat down beside the glowing glass
and metal vial that was all that remained of her best friend. Inside the shattered remains of the
building, surrounded by clouds of cement dust, scattered bullets, and bloody footprints, M-17, once
known as Maggie, wept openly at the loss of her friend. Outside, lying beside the cold body of Tsier,
was a small metal badge that simply said 'Det. Valentine, OPP'.
Condemned Building, 3:37 AM
Sara remained hidden under her debris-based sanctuary, but her mind was in turmoil as she
rested in a state bordering on unconsciousness. Inside her mind, she was replaying all the events that
had eventually led to her current predicament, beginning with her infection with the virus that still
coursed through her bloodstream.
She remembered the extensive surgeries that allowed her to retain normal mobility, the drug
regimes that helped her with the crippling agony during her recuperation, and the eventual calling in
of her debt which sent her down the path to hell. She had trained in a hidden facility near Ottawa for
almost two years, got married to an old friend, and grieved for several more years when her family
was brutally destroyed.
Sara had been sent on several missions afterwards, most of them distasteful to anyone except
psychopaths. She had been forced to carry out several assassinations, including one where she had
to kill someone right in front of his son. That one still gave her nightmares, where she constantly
visualized the boy's face splattered in his father's blood. She eventually broke away from the
company, after the abortion of the slaving operation in Southern Africa.
She groaned in agony as she accidentally put pressure on her right wrist, and shifted around
to relieve the pain. Her mind soon settled back into her fevered memories, but they had shifted to
quick blurs of her travels around the world's hotspots, winning a name for herself as someone not to
fuck with. She had eventually travelled to Japan and China, learned the basic aspects of Pentjak Silat,
and had acquired her sword several weeks before leaving again.
The memories shifted once more, leaving Sara's mind balancing at the edge of an abyss where
she would not tread. Inside the abyss was the events of the April day that had killed her grandparents,
twenty young boys and girls, and which had started her current vendetta against the almost-mindless
creations of Von Reichter.
She then woke up, her pupils dilating to a size that made her irises disappear. Sara sensed
something moving around, then heard a repeat of what had awakened her. The wooden boards above
her head creaked slowly, allowing dust to sift through the cracks in the moisture-warped wood. Sara
looked up, letting her eyes finish adjusting to the darkness as she watched a thickening of the
darkness overhead slowly move towards the stairs that not only would bring the person to the
basement where she hid, but also into her trap on the seventh step.
Just as she finished waking up, the creaking footsteps stopped, but started up again, now
moving down the stairs at a fairly slow pace. Sara reactivated her armour, and quietly unsheathed her
sword, which began to glow in anticipation of being fed. The footsteps quit being stealthy as the glow
enhanced itself, bathing the room in lurid red light milliseconds before the person stepped on the
webbing, dislodging and detonating all five cards. The explosion was focussed up and down the
stairwell, and the blast sent the person who detonated it into the upper wall of the stairwell.
Sara waited a second after the explosion died to let some of the larger chunks of rubble land,
then charged up the smoking and damaged staircase, sword already up and ready. The cloud of
smoky dust was still shrouding the person who had tripped the explosive, and Sara swung her sword
in a short arc that literally disarmed the person. The return sweep with the long blade slammed into
his chest, liberally scattering most of his sternum, ribcage, and lungs down into a bloody cascade over
the steps.
The man collapsed like a ton of deadweight onto Sara, stunning her as the corpse's
momentum smacked her into the smouldering wall before being cut in half by the still-extended blade
of her sword. The upper half of the body continued on its tumble down the stairs, eventually resting
on the bottom step in a puddle of blood, with the rubbery intestines uncoiled and spread over the
bottom half of the stairs. The legs and part of the corpse's lower guts remained at the top of the
stairs, covering Sara's armour in blood and other bodily fluids.
She swore quietly for a second, then sheathed her now-sated weapon. Instead of going up to
the roof where she had originally planned to leave, Sara unhooked her large gun, stepped backwards
a bit, and aimed at the damaged wall before opening fire. The first slug was an AP spike, which
slammed through the thin drywall and exited the building without slowing down appreciably. Sara
ejected the casing, then chambered the next slug in the magazine.
The second slug hit two inches to the left of where the first one had passed through, and the
heavy explosive punched through the first layer of drywall before exploding and blowing out a fifteen-
foot wide chunk of the wall. Sara crouched through the smaller inner hole, then dropped into the
garbage and rubble filled alleyway. She ran to the end of the alley, and paused for a second until she
heard the angry shouts from the building as someone took a header down the stairs into the puddle
of blood and guts.
Sara jacked in the third round from the magazine and aimed the gun at the hole in the wall.
*Come on, the Widow's waiting. Now, please, come into my web...* Sara had braced the gun along
her right forearm, despite the arcs of pain that crawled along it from her wrist, and kept the heavy gun
aimed directly at the hole in the wall where she had exited. She saw something move inside the
building, and squeezed the trigger, sending off another payload of pain to her adversaries.
The bullet missed however, embedding itself in the wall only a few inches from the person.
In response, the person cut loose with a volley from an autoshotgun, several dozen impacts across
Sara's chest and arms telling her that the person was using buckshot instead of the potentially deadlier
rifled slugs. Sara reloaded quickly, noting that she had only one shot after this one was fired off. Sara
responded to the shotgun volley, but missed again, this time blasting another large hole through the
wall as her adversary dodged the explosive.
Sara retreated when someone took a potshot at her with a gauss pistol, which blew a hole in
the pavement four feet wide and threw shrapnel all over the place. Instead of standing and fighting,
she dodged around the nearest corner, fired her moaner at the now-sagging building, and ran down
the second side street into a still-crowded boulevard. She swore again as she skidded around a group
of drunken frat boys, and was involuntarily rewarded with some cover as a car stopped right in front
of her.
Sara jumped over the hood of the car, and when she landed on the other side, she was already
reloading her gun and leaving another magazine behind as evidence of her passing through. She heard
police sirens converging on the area, and sporadic gunfire could still be heard reverberating around
the city. Several of the more sober people had run off, but most of the people were smashed enough
to try and crowd around Sara like she was a succubus from their dreams. Naturally, Sara disagreed
with that, and was forced to clear a path through the drunkards with a few well-placed shoves,
generously assisted by her armour's enhanced strength.
Desperation added its own not-so subtle strength to her movements as she heard the gunfire
intensify for a few seconds behind her. *Dammit! Time to leave.* Sara decided to throw caution to
the wind, and jumped almost straight up, where she then could use her cape as a parachute and glider.
The result was impressive, as volleys of gunfire quickly trained themselves upon her until she landed
on a nearby rooftop. Thankfully, nobody had used the Gauss pistols, otherwise she'd have gathered
several holes through her chest and head.
Even then, Sara groaned in pain as her head felt like a bass drum upon which a psychotic
drummer was kicking around for giggles. Sara skirted the heavily populated area to the north, and
headed towards the concrete clock tower that she had fixed as a landmark several hours ago. Sara
jumped quickly to where she thought the tower had been, but was confused by the seven-story jagged
stump where a ten-story tower had once been. She noticed two lumps nearby, and went over there
to see what they were.
Sara noticed that both bodies had been horribly mutilated, with one having its head turned into
a sticky puddle of blood and brain matter scattered in a circle. The second corpse, which had
apparently bled out and was covered in blood, had its head nearly severed from its body, and the
moonlight shone off the slick wetness of recently exposed bone. Sara moved closer to the bodies,
then felt a dull pressure against the back of her head.
"You sent these after me, didn't you?" Sara recognised the voice almost immediately, but kept
quiet, not wanting to set the person off. "Stand up. You know that this gun will probably go right
through your skull, don't you? Better learn how to pray."
"Hold it. Why me? Because I tormented that shrivelled little midget for the last few months?"
"No. Because your two friends here killed my friend. Now, I'm going to kill you."
"Fine, get it over with. See if I care. However, you forgot something." As Sara spoke to the
person holding her at gunpoint, her armour's whip wrapped around the person's legs, which were
quickly pulled forwards, giving Sara the opportunity to drop backwards onto the person, stunning
her. Sara rolled onto her knees, and looked at the person who had attacked her.
"Having fun kiddo?' Sara wrenched the pistol out of the girl's hand, and noticed that the
barrel was bent sideways, rendering the gun useless. Sara silently thanked her armour's enhanced
strength as she picked up the stunned girl with her good hand. "Fuck you, bitch." The girl snarled
angrily, trying to twist free from Sara's grip on her shirtfront.
"No. Now, what's this?" Sara kept the girl restrained with her armour's whip, and knelt down
by the body lying in the large pool of blood. Sara used her knee to shove the corpse over onto its left
side, and picked up a bloody piece of metal which she recognised immediately. The missing badge
from her husband's police uniform sat in her hand, stained by the blood of his killer. Sara slowly
squeezed the polished metal, tears leaking down her face as she remembered the funeral. Reality
intruded however, when a gunshot ripped into the gravel-covered roof, plowing a ten-foot long
furrow that ended when it had smacked its way through a concrete barrier near an emergency power
generator.
Sara swore, dropped the girl onto the roof, and said one thing before taking her own advice.
"Run away, and don't look back." Sara had already fired two more shots with her gun at the
advancing spec-ops team, but both slugs went high, one of which went far enough to blow out an old
water tower, drenching the crowds that seemed to gather whenever gunfire went on for more that
two minutes.
Sara's cape took several large-caliber bullets, but instead of stopping the slugs, the cape was
liberally torn up. One slug managed to assist Sara in her headlong dash by slamming into the small
of her back, imparting enough momentum to send her over the edge of a building. The fall was short
and painless, but the landing in a dumpster did nothing to improve Sara's mood, especially as the
dumpster had smacked the side of her head on the way down.
She lay in the large metal container, head ringing like a gong, and tried to organize her
thoughts. However, she couldn't even think straight, and the lid of the dumpster, teetering slowly
above her, soon crashed down, sealing Sara in total darkness. Just before she lost consciousness, Sara
told her armour to shut down to the leotard, thereby saving her mind from the risk of being fried.
Near the Tower, 5:39 AM
"This is not good. We've lost McDonald, Bellinger, Tsier, Michaels and Davidson. All we
have so far is a trail of destruction that roams through almost a third of the city, several handfuls of
empty 30mm cartridges, and this bloody lump in front of us." The commander motioned his left hand
to where a young girl stood, held between the iron-like grips of two of his remaining troopers. The
girl was shorter than him by a good five inches, was wearing a metal bracer on her right arm, and
appeared to have bathed in someone's blood.
"You." The girl started as the commander walked up to her, then giggled quietly, chewing
on one of her fingertips. "What the hell happened to you?"
"My friend..." The girl giggled again, and looked wildly about her, as if she was going to try
and jump off the roof. "Your friend? Can you tell me what your friend looked like?"
"Tall, dark hair. Had a gun. Nearly shot me. Good enough?"
The commander frowned, then looked at the two troopers holding the girl. "Let her go."
"Sir? Do you think that's a smart idea?"
"No, but I can't spare any one of you to guard her, and judging by the looks of her, she's
pretty far gone anyhow. She'd be dead weight, slowing us down. Just leave her." The commander
turned to the rest of the squad, and saw that a lot of them were exhausted. "Look, I'll leave a scanner
to see if our little friend shows up. Now, all of you, go back to base and get some rest."
The spec-ops team scattered as the sky began to brighten in the east. The commander waited
for a few minutes, and walked over to where the crazy girl was sitting. "Look, I'm sorry if anything
happened to you from what we're doing, but maybe this'll make up for it." He then pulled out several
large-denomination bills from a small pouch, and pressed them into the girl's hand. With that, he
jumped to the warehouse where his base was.
Behind him, M-17 stood up, looking at the mass of money that had been given to her. Instead
of pocketing it, she folded several bills into paper airplanes and tossed them over the edge of the roof,
and she then ate the few remaining bills. She then chuckled, relatively calm, and went into the remains
of the clock tower to collect Jess' guns, clothes, and vial. Behind her, the first rays of sunlight broke
over the horizon, bathing the city in bright red and golden light.
Sara swore again, dropping into an alleyway to try and get a breather as she dropped the
empty magazine from her gun. She had gone through six magazines, but had confirmed only a second
kill. Most of the other ammunition had gone as suppression fire to keep the spec-ops team's collective
heads down, but Sara had also wasted ten shells splattering a group of greenskins that had been firing
at several police cars with machine guns.
As she landed in the alleyway, the impact jolted her right wrist, making her involuntarily cry
out in pain as the shattered bones ground their ways into several nerve endings. *Well, I'm definitely
gonna go into hiding for a few hours, especially because my armour is getting to the point that if I
keep it active for any longer, my mind's gonna suffer a major meltdown.*
Sara looked around for a likely hiding place, and found it in the form of a recently condemned
building nearby. She remained on the ground for several minutes, looking warily around her in every
direction before she jumped up to an open window. Sara slipped into the building, and soon realized
why it was condemned. Half of the old building was missing, apparently crushed by something the
size of a medium-length plane.
Sara shrugged, carefully clambered into the basement, rigging the only access into the dank
chamber with a short length of the spider webbing that she had wrapped around her left arm. Not only
did she rig the line to be as tight as possible, but she also balanced five of her explosive cards on the
line, so if something larger than a rat disturbed the pale cord, all the cards would explode, most likely
seriously injuring whomever hit the simple trap.
After she finished her rigging, Sara shut down her armour and hid herself in a heap of wood
and cardboard debris as she slowly slipped into unconsciousness from the pain shooting up and down
her right arm in sporadic waves.
Several Rooftops Southwest, 3:02 AM
"Hold it. She's gone." The commander looked at the person who was holding onto the
expensive prototype of an EM scanner, and frowned as the remainder of his team surrounded him.
"That means what to me? Your hunk of junk could've been broken by that last howler she
shot at you, and she took McDonald's head off with one of those spikes she's been sniping at us with
for the last several hours." The commander looked at the readout on the machine, swore slightly, and
punched the flimsy metal. The machine, not designed to take such abuse, broke and spilled its metallic
guts across the soft tar roof.
"Fuck the machine, we're going to resort to our eyes. Now, her armour needs to be shut
down in just under five minutes unless our friend wants to become a vegetable. I don't think she'll
go for that course, so she's probably holed up somewhere where nobody will find her for a while.
"I'm betting that she's in a building that can be considered wasted, and will probably stay
there for a little while." Just as the commander finished speaking, the echoes of a rifle shot rebounded
down the artificial canyons on either side of the squat building, and a whistling smack was instantly
followed by a volley of swearing from Ivanova.
"Who was the bloody mother-fucking, father-raping product of incest that shot me?" Ivanova
had a sewer for a mouth, and it showed for several seconds before another shot, closer, rang out. The
second shot hit another member of the team, and he swore as the bullet smacked into the armour
covering his stomach.
"Bellinger, Tsier. Find that sniper and splatter the sucker all over the place. You have
permission to use your explosives."
"Yes sir! We're gonna give that person a ride he will definitely regret." The two men, laden
down with several phosphorous grenades and blocks of C4, moved south to where the only plausible
sniper's roost was. The two split apart to surround the building, and they both heard the crack of the
sniper rifle again as they saw the muzzle flare come from a window near the top of the concrete clock
tower.
Tsier moved first, throwing in his five blocks of C4 into the sniper's roost. Just as he let go
of the tower, a bullet from the sniper slammed into his chest. His armour stopped the bullet, but not
until the heavy slug had punched a fair way into his body. Tsier collapsed onto the nearest roof, and
knew he was seriously injured as his armour reformed, evicting the misshapen lump of metal that had
caused so much damage.
Bellinger, seeing his comrade collapse, muttered something and flipped two switches.
Inside the Clock Tower, Same Time
Jess smiled as she fired another slug at the person she had shot in the chest from just under
fifteen feet away. 17 was behind her, having just tossed the five blocks of C4 out the windows on the
west side of the small room. Jess heard a rumbling boom, then the tower shifted. "What the hell?"
Jess raised her head from the rifle's scope, but was surprised when the floor underneath her collapsed
and the top of the tower tilted enough to crash into the street, trailing papers, clockwork parts, and
other miscellaneous pieces.
M-17 had also dropped down two floors when the floor she had been standing on fractured
under the strain, and coughing up dust and some blood, she started to search for Jess. "Jess? Where
are you?" 17 saw something move weakly nearby, and started to clear away the debris from around
her friend. When she finally exposed Jess' chest and head, 17 just stared at her friend, overwhelmed
by a crushing emotion she had expected to feel only a few times.
Jess was barely conscious, sustenance dribbling freely from the corners of her mouth, and
gasping for air. Just to the left of Jess' breastbone, covered in the techno's glowing blood, was a
jagged piece of re-bar protruding from her shirt. "Jess?" 17's voice had dropped to a whisper, and,
in shock, she could only hold her dying friend's hand as Jess breathed her last, hastened by the metal
spike put through her heart.
Just before her body dissolved in the characteristic fashion of Fixed Ideas and technos, Jess
whispered something to her friend. "Sorry..." 17's face was bathed in green light as Jess disappeared,
and something in 17's mind, which had been growing into a stable platform, tilted suddenly, dropping
her sanity into the inestimable chasm of madness.
She started to giggle, then pulled both of Jess' pistols from the empty clothing. Still giggling,
17 walked over to an intact window frame and looked down at the two killers of her friend. She
broke out into a wild cackle, then jumped through the window and onto the standing trooper. 17 sat
down on the shocked person, and instead of shooting him, she started to pummel him with the pistol
barrels, relishing the sounds and feelings of her victim's bones breaking underneath her constant flurry
of strong blows.
The man's armour suddenly shut down, and 17 leaned towards the man's horribly beaten face
as she continued to pummel him with the now-destroyed guns. She licked her lips as blood spattered
over her face, dripping off the end of her nose as she methodically pounded her victim's skull into a
gooey sludge, scattering fragments of bone and brain in a small circle around her.
She then turned to the second man, who appeared to be unconscious. However, instead of
leaving him alone, she sat on his thighs, and prodded at the bloody hole in his chest. Bored of just
poking him, she then bit him in the neck, gnawing on the jugular vein until it severed, filling her
mouth with the coppery, thick liquid.
17 continued to chew on the person's throat, blood and saliva dribbling out of her mouth,
making her look like a mix between a vampire and a zombie. Not only did she kill him slowly, but as
the man's body cooled, she proceeded to chew her way through the corpse's neck, only stopping
when she exposed the vertebrae in the back of his neck.
She went back into the tower, giggling madly until she got to the floor where Jess' clothes
lay. When there, she seemed to retrieve some of her sanity, and sat down beside the glowing glass
and metal vial that was all that remained of her best friend. Inside the shattered remains of the
building, surrounded by clouds of cement dust, scattered bullets, and bloody footprints, M-17, once
known as Maggie, wept openly at the loss of her friend. Outside, lying beside the cold body of Tsier,
was a small metal badge that simply said 'Det. Valentine, OPP'.
Condemned Building, 3:37 AM
Sara remained hidden under her debris-based sanctuary, but her mind was in turmoil as she
rested in a state bordering on unconsciousness. Inside her mind, she was replaying all the events that
had eventually led to her current predicament, beginning with her infection with the virus that still
coursed through her bloodstream.
She remembered the extensive surgeries that allowed her to retain normal mobility, the drug
regimes that helped her with the crippling agony during her recuperation, and the eventual calling in
of her debt which sent her down the path to hell. She had trained in a hidden facility near Ottawa for
almost two years, got married to an old friend, and grieved for several more years when her family
was brutally destroyed.
Sara had been sent on several missions afterwards, most of them distasteful to anyone except
psychopaths. She had been forced to carry out several assassinations, including one where she had
to kill someone right in front of his son. That one still gave her nightmares, where she constantly
visualized the boy's face splattered in his father's blood. She eventually broke away from the
company, after the abortion of the slaving operation in Southern Africa.
She groaned in agony as she accidentally put pressure on her right wrist, and shifted around
to relieve the pain. Her mind soon settled back into her fevered memories, but they had shifted to
quick blurs of her travels around the world's hotspots, winning a name for herself as someone not to
fuck with. She had eventually travelled to Japan and China, learned the basic aspects of Pentjak Silat,
and had acquired her sword several weeks before leaving again.
The memories shifted once more, leaving Sara's mind balancing at the edge of an abyss where
she would not tread. Inside the abyss was the events of the April day that had killed her grandparents,
twenty young boys and girls, and which had started her current vendetta against the almost-mindless
creations of Von Reichter.
She then woke up, her pupils dilating to a size that made her irises disappear. Sara sensed
something moving around, then heard a repeat of what had awakened her. The wooden boards above
her head creaked slowly, allowing dust to sift through the cracks in the moisture-warped wood. Sara
looked up, letting her eyes finish adjusting to the darkness as she watched a thickening of the
darkness overhead slowly move towards the stairs that not only would bring the person to the
basement where she hid, but also into her trap on the seventh step.
Just as she finished waking up, the creaking footsteps stopped, but started up again, now
moving down the stairs at a fairly slow pace. Sara reactivated her armour, and quietly unsheathed her
sword, which began to glow in anticipation of being fed. The footsteps quit being stealthy as the glow
enhanced itself, bathing the room in lurid red light milliseconds before the person stepped on the
webbing, dislodging and detonating all five cards. The explosion was focussed up and down the
stairwell, and the blast sent the person who detonated it into the upper wall of the stairwell.
Sara waited a second after the explosion died to let some of the larger chunks of rubble land,
then charged up the smoking and damaged staircase, sword already up and ready. The cloud of
smoky dust was still shrouding the person who had tripped the explosive, and Sara swung her sword
in a short arc that literally disarmed the person. The return sweep with the long blade slammed into
his chest, liberally scattering most of his sternum, ribcage, and lungs down into a bloody cascade over
the steps.
The man collapsed like a ton of deadweight onto Sara, stunning her as the corpse's
momentum smacked her into the smouldering wall before being cut in half by the still-extended blade
of her sword. The upper half of the body continued on its tumble down the stairs, eventually resting
on the bottom step in a puddle of blood, with the rubbery intestines uncoiled and spread over the
bottom half of the stairs. The legs and part of the corpse's lower guts remained at the top of the
stairs, covering Sara's armour in blood and other bodily fluids.
She swore quietly for a second, then sheathed her now-sated weapon. Instead of going up to
the roof where she had originally planned to leave, Sara unhooked her large gun, stepped backwards
a bit, and aimed at the damaged wall before opening fire. The first slug was an AP spike, which
slammed through the thin drywall and exited the building without slowing down appreciably. Sara
ejected the casing, then chambered the next slug in the magazine.
The second slug hit two inches to the left of where the first one had passed through, and the
heavy explosive punched through the first layer of drywall before exploding and blowing out a fifteen-
foot wide chunk of the wall. Sara crouched through the smaller inner hole, then dropped into the
garbage and rubble filled alleyway. She ran to the end of the alley, and paused for a second until she
heard the angry shouts from the building as someone took a header down the stairs into the puddle
of blood and guts.
Sara jacked in the third round from the magazine and aimed the gun at the hole in the wall.
*Come on, the Widow's waiting. Now, please, come into my web...* Sara had braced the gun along
her right forearm, despite the arcs of pain that crawled along it from her wrist, and kept the heavy gun
aimed directly at the hole in the wall where she had exited. She saw something move inside the
building, and squeezed the trigger, sending off another payload of pain to her adversaries.
The bullet missed however, embedding itself in the wall only a few inches from the person.
In response, the person cut loose with a volley from an autoshotgun, several dozen impacts across
Sara's chest and arms telling her that the person was using buckshot instead of the potentially deadlier
rifled slugs. Sara reloaded quickly, noting that she had only one shot after this one was fired off. Sara
responded to the shotgun volley, but missed again, this time blasting another large hole through the
wall as her adversary dodged the explosive.
Sara retreated when someone took a potshot at her with a gauss pistol, which blew a hole in
the pavement four feet wide and threw shrapnel all over the place. Instead of standing and fighting,
she dodged around the nearest corner, fired her moaner at the now-sagging building, and ran down
the second side street into a still-crowded boulevard. She swore again as she skidded around a group
of drunken frat boys, and was involuntarily rewarded with some cover as a car stopped right in front
of her.
Sara jumped over the hood of the car, and when she landed on the other side, she was already
reloading her gun and leaving another magazine behind as evidence of her passing through. She heard
police sirens converging on the area, and sporadic gunfire could still be heard reverberating around
the city. Several of the more sober people had run off, but most of the people were smashed enough
to try and crowd around Sara like she was a succubus from their dreams. Naturally, Sara disagreed
with that, and was forced to clear a path through the drunkards with a few well-placed shoves,
generously assisted by her armour's enhanced strength.
Desperation added its own not-so subtle strength to her movements as she heard the gunfire
intensify for a few seconds behind her. *Dammit! Time to leave.* Sara decided to throw caution to
the wind, and jumped almost straight up, where she then could use her cape as a parachute and glider.
The result was impressive, as volleys of gunfire quickly trained themselves upon her until she landed
on a nearby rooftop. Thankfully, nobody had used the Gauss pistols, otherwise she'd have gathered
several holes through her chest and head.
Even then, Sara groaned in pain as her head felt like a bass drum upon which a psychotic
drummer was kicking around for giggles. Sara skirted the heavily populated area to the north, and
headed towards the concrete clock tower that she had fixed as a landmark several hours ago. Sara
jumped quickly to where she thought the tower had been, but was confused by the seven-story jagged
stump where a ten-story tower had once been. She noticed two lumps nearby, and went over there
to see what they were.
Sara noticed that both bodies had been horribly mutilated, with one having its head turned into
a sticky puddle of blood and brain matter scattered in a circle. The second corpse, which had
apparently bled out and was covered in blood, had its head nearly severed from its body, and the
moonlight shone off the slick wetness of recently exposed bone. Sara moved closer to the bodies,
then felt a dull pressure against the back of her head.
"You sent these after me, didn't you?" Sara recognised the voice almost immediately, but kept
quiet, not wanting to set the person off. "Stand up. You know that this gun will probably go right
through your skull, don't you? Better learn how to pray."
"Hold it. Why me? Because I tormented that shrivelled little midget for the last few months?"
"No. Because your two friends here killed my friend. Now, I'm going to kill you."
"Fine, get it over with. See if I care. However, you forgot something." As Sara spoke to the
person holding her at gunpoint, her armour's whip wrapped around the person's legs, which were
quickly pulled forwards, giving Sara the opportunity to drop backwards onto the person, stunning
her. Sara rolled onto her knees, and looked at the person who had attacked her.
"Having fun kiddo?' Sara wrenched the pistol out of the girl's hand, and noticed that the
barrel was bent sideways, rendering the gun useless. Sara silently thanked her armour's enhanced
strength as she picked up the stunned girl with her good hand. "Fuck you, bitch." The girl snarled
angrily, trying to twist free from Sara's grip on her shirtfront.
"No. Now, what's this?" Sara kept the girl restrained with her armour's whip, and knelt down
by the body lying in the large pool of blood. Sara used her knee to shove the corpse over onto its left
side, and picked up a bloody piece of metal which she recognised immediately. The missing badge
from her husband's police uniform sat in her hand, stained by the blood of his killer. Sara slowly
squeezed the polished metal, tears leaking down her face as she remembered the funeral. Reality
intruded however, when a gunshot ripped into the gravel-covered roof, plowing a ten-foot long
furrow that ended when it had smacked its way through a concrete barrier near an emergency power
generator.
Sara swore, dropped the girl onto the roof, and said one thing before taking her own advice.
"Run away, and don't look back." Sara had already fired two more shots with her gun at the
advancing spec-ops team, but both slugs went high, one of which went far enough to blow out an old
water tower, drenching the crowds that seemed to gather whenever gunfire went on for more that
two minutes.
Sara's cape took several large-caliber bullets, but instead of stopping the slugs, the cape was
liberally torn up. One slug managed to assist Sara in her headlong dash by slamming into the small
of her back, imparting enough momentum to send her over the edge of a building. The fall was short
and painless, but the landing in a dumpster did nothing to improve Sara's mood, especially as the
dumpster had smacked the side of her head on the way down.
She lay in the large metal container, head ringing like a gong, and tried to organize her
thoughts. However, she couldn't even think straight, and the lid of the dumpster, teetering slowly
above her, soon crashed down, sealing Sara in total darkness. Just before she lost consciousness, Sara
told her armour to shut down to the leotard, thereby saving her mind from the risk of being fried.
Near the Tower, 5:39 AM
"This is not good. We've lost McDonald, Bellinger, Tsier, Michaels and Davidson. All we
have so far is a trail of destruction that roams through almost a third of the city, several handfuls of
empty 30mm cartridges, and this bloody lump in front of us." The commander motioned his left hand
to where a young girl stood, held between the iron-like grips of two of his remaining troopers. The
girl was shorter than him by a good five inches, was wearing a metal bracer on her right arm, and
appeared to have bathed in someone's blood.
"You." The girl started as the commander walked up to her, then giggled quietly, chewing
on one of her fingertips. "What the hell happened to you?"
"My friend..." The girl giggled again, and looked wildly about her, as if she was going to try
and jump off the roof. "Your friend? Can you tell me what your friend looked like?"
"Tall, dark hair. Had a gun. Nearly shot me. Good enough?"
The commander frowned, then looked at the two troopers holding the girl. "Let her go."
"Sir? Do you think that's a smart idea?"
"No, but I can't spare any one of you to guard her, and judging by the looks of her, she's
pretty far gone anyhow. She'd be dead weight, slowing us down. Just leave her." The commander
turned to the rest of the squad, and saw that a lot of them were exhausted. "Look, I'll leave a scanner
to see if our little friend shows up. Now, all of you, go back to base and get some rest."
The spec-ops team scattered as the sky began to brighten in the east. The commander waited
for a few minutes, and walked over to where the crazy girl was sitting. "Look, I'm sorry if anything
happened to you from what we're doing, but maybe this'll make up for it." He then pulled out several
large-denomination bills from a small pouch, and pressed them into the girl's hand. With that, he
jumped to the warehouse where his base was.
Behind him, M-17 stood up, looking at the mass of money that had been given to her. Instead
of pocketing it, she folded several bills into paper airplanes and tossed them over the edge of the roof,
and she then ate the few remaining bills. She then chuckled, relatively calm, and went into the remains
of the clock tower to collect Jess' guns, clothes, and vial. Behind her, the first rays of sunlight broke
over the horizon, bathing the city in bright red and golden light.