That same day
Monday

St Louis
Missouri

I watched as the young girl began her morning exercises before breakfast.

It was always the same, running on the treadmill, while manipulating hand weights in her small hands. She was average height for her age, about four foot five in her bare feet and thin as the proverbial rake. She was definitely a morning person, always quick to jump out of her bed with a smile and start her exercises each morning, as per her indoctrinated training. As a nine-year-old, she was typically full of energy and always active. For me though, as I approached twenty-seven, I hated mornings and I was usually a lot slower to start my morning exercises. Though not as flexible as Stephanie was, I was still over a foot taller and I could hold my own.

I took a moment to glance around at our meagre accommodation and grimaced; the place sucked bigtime. However, on both a limited income and while relying on stashed funds, you had to be careful. That was also important when you wanted to keep a low, low profile, as we did. It had been six months since we had both awaken from our drug-induced haze that had made the two of us compliant and allowed us both to be trained in unspeakable acts. For most of the time since then, neither of us had been able to sleep in different rooms and it had only been in the past month that Stephanie had finally started sleeping in her own bed.

The nightmares were so very real and we both regularly awoke at night screaming and in floods of tears. It was heart-breaking seeing the look of horror on the young girl's face. The drugs had prevented the nightmares; indeed the drugs had prevented any form of conscience or knowledge of right and wrong. The girl was only nine, but she had already killed twelve people during her three years in captivity. Me, I had only been in captivity for a little over a year but I had my own kill-count... I had already had some skills before I had been taken, not many, but some and I was an adult. Stephanie had been trained in firearms and the use of knives, but any more-advanced training, except for the most basic Martial Arts stuff had been put off until her body grew further.

We had escaped from what had been our base of operations in Southern Chicago and headed southwest, to St Louis. There I had accessed some cash, hidden away for just such an occasion. They may have trained us to be compliant and to follow orders, but they had also trained us to think for ourselves. Therefore, we were distrustful (paranoid?) of our controllers and set up what you might call 'insurance policies' and in my case, a Safehouse that was totally off the grid.

The only problem?

We were still figuring out whom we were.

"Steph, you ready for breakfast?" I asked an hour later.

"Let me grab a shower first, Miranda, then I'll be right there." Stephanie suggested; which was a good idea as the girl was soaked in sweat.

Mind you, so was I; I headed for the other bathroom and grabbed my own shower. As I entered the kitchen, tying up my still damp dark ginger hair, I found Stephanie pouring hot water into a pair of mugs on the kitchen side, a coffee for me and a tea for her. It was the same routine every morning; nothing had changed over the previous six months. Stephanie's light blonde hair was up in a ponytail, still dripping from the shower as usual.

To look at the girl, nobody would ever guess that she was both a hardened killer and a crack pistol shot. She was also a mini-ninja who could creep up behind you and jam a blade into your side. There was something else different about the girl; she had British accent, which had given me cause to wonder from where she had been abducted.

Our life was full of never ending questions

When we had awoken one morning, six months previously, we had been unaware of where we were, or indeed, why.

We had even struggled with who we were. We instinctively knew that we were Miranda and Stephanie, but that had really been it. We both knew each other; our minds told us that, but not very much more... The confusion was also very scary. We had found ourselves in a large apartment on the fourth floor of a large but otherwise anonymous apartment block and we seemed to be the only ones in the place.

We were also more than a little concerned about certain other things, such as our clothing, which just did not seem right, neither for me, nor for a nine-year-old girl; it was too utilitarian, rather than comfortable. Stephanie had soon appeared from her bedroom dressed and holding two items in her small hands. One was a slim gun holster and the other a pistol! She held the gun by the frame around the trigger; something told me it was the trigger-guard, as if it was a dead rat.

Something in my churning sub-conscious told me that we should get out of the place as soon as possible. We quickly stuffed clothes, limited personal effects and equipment into packs, including some guns; something told me to take the guns. We also took some files and documentation that appeared to be about us; at least they had our photos on them. On the side in the kitchen were some car keys.

We walked around the garage beneath the apartments, pressing the remote, until the lights on a late model Jeep SUV flashed. We threw in our kit and I drove out of the garage with Stephanie strapped into the seat beside me.

..._...

As I drove, my mind seemed to kick into overdrive. My senses were heightened and I was observing everything, without even trying. I was watching everywhere at once, in the mirrors, ahead, to the side, behind. It was automatic, I scanned, I drove, I scanned, and I drove. Then I saw something that set my senses on fire and I instinctively floored the accelerator.

"What?" Stephanie asked, instantly on alert.

"We're being followed..."

Stephanie spun in her seat to look out the rear window. Three cars behind a dark coloured sedan was accelerating to keep up with us and pulling into the next lane.

"We need to ditch this car!" I said urgently. "They're tracking us..."

"Then what?"

I saw Stephanie's expression changing; one moment it was fearful and then the next it was hardening.

"I'll let you know when I've figured that out..."

What was happening to me?

For a moment, I was crapping myself at the thought of being chased, but then suddenly my fear seemed to evaporate. I started to look around me, taking everything in, processing potential threats and avenues of escape. I had no idea why I was doing it; my sub-conscious just said 'do it', so I did!

"Brace!" Miranda suddenly called out and I leant back in my seat and brought my feet up onto the dashboard in front of me.

I saw Miranda stare into the rear-view mirror and then stamp both feet on the brake pedal, slamming on the brakes, hard!

The Jeep slowed rapidly and then there was a sharp jolt as another vehicle slammed into the Jeep's back end; the rear window shattered. I looked behind and saw the dark-coloured sedan with its bonnet crushed back onto the windscreen. There were two men inside, struggling to escape their deflating airbags.

Miranda floored the accelerator and turned right at the next set of traffic lights.

We dumped the SUV after driving northwest for another twenty miles in complete silence. We then took a cab back into central Chicago, and then found ourselves on the 'L', followed by an Amtrak to St Louis.

We detected no further tails.

That escapade was not the first time that we started to 'do things' without knowing why.

We noticed things changing within a week of arriving in St Louis. After arriving at the station, I instinctively took three different cabs and never the first one that pulled up either. Stephanie was giving me strange looks, too, her mind grappling with what I was doing. Finally, we stopped outside a rundown apartment block and climbed up to the third floor with our equipment.

On the way to the apartment block, I had been able to obtain a large amount of cash and the key to the apartment from a secret location. Who stashed it? Why and how I knew to go there to find the money and key, I had no fucking idea!

The first surprise had been Stephanie herself on the third day in St Louis.

I was bored and curiosity got the better of me, so for some reason I reached into the backpack that had the guns in it.

I brought out the pistol that I had found in my bedroom, in Chicago. My mind said meaningless things to me as I examined the pistol in my hands and then a name popped into my head.

"Heckler and Koch P30SK..."

"Huh?" Miranda asked.

My hands started doing things of their own accord and step-by-step instructions flew through my mind faster and faster.

Clear the weapon and carry out a safety check

With the magazine removed, pull the slide all the way back and hold it there

Push the slide release upwards to lock the slide back

Hold the pistol so that your thumb covers the rear of the frame and your fingers rest on the top of the frame

Pull slide back and move it to the front as far as the disassembly position

Using your free hand, press the slide release axle in from right to left

Pull slide release to the left until it reaches the locking position, pull slide forward off the pistol's frame

Turn the slide upside down and carefully push the recoil spring forward and out to either the left or right hand side, separating the recoil spring from the barrel and slide

Pivot the barrel slightly forward and press downward on the barrel-locking block through the ejection port, separating the barrel from the slide.

I executed each step exactly, resulting in the pistol successfully 'taken down'! It had taken me little more than a minute, too.

"How did you do that?" Miranda asked incredulously.

"I have no damned idea...!"

What concerned me more was that I had been able to reverse the process, without having seen what Stephanie had done; as far as I knew, I had never even touched a gun before that day.

Stephanie looked pensive for a minute before she reached down and pulled out another pistol from the backpack; she held it up to me.

"Glock 17 Gen 4..."

I clamped a hand over my mouth. Where the hell, had those words come from? It was my turn; I pulled out a larger weapon from the backpack and held it up for Stephanie.

"Heckler & Koch MP5K... With Navy trigger group..."

Now it was Stephanie's turn to look shocked! She also looked a little scared.

What were we?

We both spent most days trying to remember who we were and how we had arrived at where we were.

There were fleeting flashes in our minds at night. We had no idea if they were dreams, nightmares or awakening memories. We compared notes on our 'visions' each morning and some of the notes were disturbing to say the least. More than once, I would wake up in a cold sweat with tears streaming down my face after witnessing something horrific. I would then find myself waking up the following morning in the same bed as Miranda. Several times, I had witnessed her struggling through her own nightmares.

I would lay awake at night, trying not to sleep; I knew that when I slept, they came – the nightmares came. The nightmares portrayed me as some kind of monster. Sometimes I would be viewing the 'action' from the first person, other times from the third person, as an observer. I would see through the eyes of a nine-year-old, as if it was somebody else. Alternatively, I would see myself...

I had difficulty saying the word and difficulty admitting it to myself. However, the fact that I knew how to use a gun, which scared me in itself, also made me think that the nightmares were just my memories returning. If they were, then I did not want those memories to return; if they were accurate, then I was a bad person, a very bad person. In some nightmares, I was teamed up with Miranda and both of us were...

There was that word again...

... Killing!