And I am overcome
holy water in my lungs
and I am overcome
--Live, "Overcome"


Sirens wailed as she walked through sharded glass and rubble, her bare feet uncut though the ground was bitterly cold. Havoc reigned, ambulances pullling up near the smoking remnants of a storefront, the police beginning to desperately guide bystanders around the carnage, rescue workers starting to move in. Shattered concrete, glass, stone, steel....and blood and body parts strewn around like a cannibal butcher shop. /

/The wind was icy with winter, whipping around her gown, though she was curiously detached from the feeling....the cold was there, but did not chill./

/A bobby looked at...no, through her, moving on as though she wasn't there. She shuddered, stepping around the bodies and the almost unreal red color of the spilled blood smearing ground and skin and cloth alike../

/It was all so distant, and at the same time horrid, to see the corpses. Death and dismemberment had given the final indignity to them. They looked human, but were not, not like the wounded sitting there screaming and wailing in agony, praying for God to help them. They did not move, or breathe, or speak. They were no longer people, merely people-shaped lumps of meat; objects with no more personality than a chair. In an absent, distant way, she noticed a woman's pale face still wore too much frosted lavender eyeshadow; all the worse for the face no longer being attached to the body./

/As if not willed by herself, she walked--drifted, rather, near the epicenter of the blast. There was some distant cursing and talk about "IRA" and "casualties" from the workers on scene, trying to heave debris off of people that might still be living. Little success seemed to be had: more of the stretchers moving off carried more still, completely covered forms than partially covered with worried paramedics hovering around./

No....I don't want to remember....no.... /she cried... But her feet kept moving, towards the worst of the destruction../

/Two forms ahead...one unrecognizable with burns and slices, lying face down. The other was on its side, dark hair covering the face. A paramedic dashed over, closed his eyes, then grimly worked on trying to turn the second body face up, the hair drifting back, revealing--/

She doubled up with a scream, sitting up in a puddle of icy sweat, wrapping arms around her knees and sobbing, black hair hiding her face.

"The Hell? *Anne?*" The light flared on, causing her to squint. She curled up even more on the sofa-bed, able to do little other than shake, getting a vague image of a nightshirt and an angel's halo of long, disarrayed golden hair silhouetted by the hall light.

"G---guh.... nn....nnnhh..." Anne sat there and shook.
Trish was by her side immediately, wrapping an arm around her shoulders, looking groggy but worried. "Are you okay? You screamed like..."

Anne tried to get her racing heart back under control, taking deep breaths. After a moment, she managed a hoarse "Nightmare...."

Trish cursed softly. "Oh, Anne...."

"...don't even know what it was..."

"...the nightmare?"

"dead people....sirens...bombs...." Anne's accent had thickened, a musical lilt strengthening with fear. "was there, couldn't do anything....oh God, no....don't make me remember....NO...."

"Shhhhh.....shhhhhh.....easy....easy....." Trish gently took the smaller woman in her arms and rocked her gently. "It'll be okay....it'll be okay...." Anne wept quietly, mortified at her weakness and the fear still running in her veins like poison. Eventually, she calmed down to empty bleakness, though Trish carefully kept holding her.

"...do this more times it seems sometimes....heh...." Trish muttered absently to herself.

"mm?"

"Eh heh. Nothing much." Trish's shadowed face smiled crookedly. Anne nodded tiredly, not feellng like pushing.

"You okay now?"
"No," Anne whispered. "I'll live though."

Trish nodded, rubbing her back. "Do you still want to go to Alexandria tomorrow, then? We can hold off if you need."

"NO! No...no holding off....got to do something...."

Trish paused, then nodded faintly. "...All right. Sleeping Beauty won't be getting up until one anyway, so we can probably steal the Goat Monster until then. At least it'll get us out of DC for a bit."


Anne had managed to get some sleep, though her eyes were shadowed and grim even in the bright morning light as they slowly made their way south towards the Potomac. Trish couldn't help but notice it even as she steered the decrepit red Dodge Ram pickup around a lagging Toyota, the detached muffler causing the engine to whine in protest as she shifted gears.

Internally, she spared a few seconds to mutter profanities at Dante for not keeping the truck in better shape. She'd managed to get the front cleaned out, but the back was still a haven for the unmentionable contents of old MacDonald's lunch bags, cups of half-full cold coffee, and probably worse. And he had the *nerve* to bitch about the decor of Mallet Island.... Trish pondered and considered that given the nature of the now-destroyed island's master, perhaps her partner in crime had a point.

Still, that was *no* call for him to try to recreate the evolution of life in the truckbed.

Anne startled.

"Trish, did something just move in the..."

"Don't think about it. Just don't. I don't know what the *hell* he puts back there. Or when he last cleaned it out. It was before I came on board."

Anne looked green and definitely did *not* look at the back through the rearview mirror again. Trish grinned under her sunglasses as the truck dragged onto US 66 and then Arlington Memorial Bridge over the Potomac. Anne proceeded to distract herself with wondering eyes being drawn to the back side of the Lincoln Memorial and beyond that, the reflecting pool and Washington Monument as their path brought them close. Trish gave her a glance and grinned a bit more; it was obvious that amnesia or no amnesia, Anne'd never been in the capital city of the United States before. Trish remembered feeling much the same way, after Mallet....

"Messy place...but it has a kind of uh, charm under the scummier bits," Anne remarked absently.

"Kind of like America in general." Trish chuckled. "Ever been in the States before, that you can remember?"

"Oh, yeah....went to university here. That much I can remember."

"Not DC though?" Anne shook her head. "Good, well, there's at least things to see here." Trish let her take in the sight of the Capitol and Washington Monument as they paced the Potomac on the Virginia side of river. "People are still a bit twitchy after well...a few months ago, but life goes on."

"Mm?"

"You'll...well, probably see in a few minutes. We'll be passing by the Pentagon," The Goat Monster groaned complainingly again as Trish got the thing onto 233.

Anne was silent for a few minutes, eyes wide and brow furrowed, before speaking again. "What happened?" Trish boggled a bit under her shades at the honest look of incomprehension on the other woman's features.

"You....honestly don't remember."

"No," Anne replied in a small voice. "I don't even know what you're talking about." Their route brought them in view of limestone walls, serried ranks of windows in four levels, low but enormous in scale. There was a spartan sense to it and the surrounding area that all but sang "military" to Anne.

"That the Pentagon?"

"Mm-hm. The north part of it, anyway. The real fun happened on the south and southwest faces....wonder where they're at on it. Heard it might take as long as three years for them to rebuild.....Anne?"

Anne stared fixedly at the massive military complex, the stench of something burning and acrid suddenly clutching her nostrils, her eyes shining abrupt raw silver--

/The massive commercial jet shone white in the clear morning sunlight, circling above the nation's capital, the sun glinting off the American Airlines logo on the tail of the plane and off the waters of the far-below Potomac. It was a serene and lovely sight, from above. /

/Below, workers fled their heeled dress shoes and ran for their lives, sirens screaming in the background, the defense forces scrambling, but delayed, too late, far too late...
Inside the passenger cabin, there was braced numbness and horror...nobody knew it explicitly as of yet, but the dull peace of animals waiting for the slaughter was all too real, all too felt. There were muffled sobs, quiet assertions of love as cellphones clicked on and off for their final times./

/Inside, the pilot cursed, his eyes scanning the city below. The primary target couldn't be found in the landscape. The marble dome nearby beckoned, but that was already selected by his comrades on another flight. It would make their sacrifice redundant, and the Americans' air force was coming closer to thwarting him by the second. With a final decision and nod at his copilot, the circle was finished, and begun its penultimate approach into the secondary target./

/He grinned fiercely, dark eyes glazed and fixed in fanaticism, fear, deadly resolve. Soon, he would be with the virgins of Paradise, reaping a martyr's reward. Fear and triumph warred in his breast with the last few beats of his heart as the jet plummeted, roaring in as the wall of the Pentagon grew to meet it, thin screams rising from the passenger cabin in counterpart to the unified shout of the red-headbanded pilots and their cohorts./

/"ALLAH'U AKHBAR!!!"/

/With a rendering crash, American Airlines Flight 77 and the southwest face of the United States Pentagon met, consumed by a secondary sun of erupting jet fuel./

Anne doubled over, keening shrilly, hands twisting in her hair, honks of protest arising outside as Trish courted accident several times before she wrestled the Ram to the side of the road. Inside, Anne kept screaming.

"Anne! Dammit, ANNE!" Trish shut off the engine and frantically grabbed her companion's shoulders. Anne was in no state to hear at first. Trish shook her hard, causing the shrilling cry to be stopped and be replaced by whimpers, Anne's eyes rising to meet hers, lost, terrified, tormented, apocalypse playing over and over in the now mirrorlike irises.

Trish wasn't a woman used to fear. Her origins and the kind of work she was in burned the more trivial sorts of it out of after a while. But the expression and the alien, inhuman shade of those eyes made her blood run cold.

Anne looked at an inner vista best not described for a few infinite seconds more, then closed her eyes, collapsing into wild shakes. Trish ignored the intermittent annoyed honks outside and rubbed Anne's back while the horror ran itself out. When Anne opened her eyes again, they were their former silver-streaked brown, though the terror remained.

"What. Happened?" Trish hissed, her sunglassed eyes wide.

Anne fought to make words. "the plane.....they flew the plane in.....they killed so many people....so many dead..."

Trish cursed. "*What*?"

"all for a fucking cause...they killed themselves and innocent people...why..."

Now it was Trish's turn to shake, for several minutes, and desperately wish someone, Dante, *anybody* was there to hold herself as the enormity of Anne's ramblings began to sink in. It took an enormous amount of resolve to regain her own control back.

"Screw it," she said at last, once she thought she had control over her voice again. "We're going back to DNC. Yesterday."