Warrior Goddess by Frank Black The women gladiators of the 21st century Update: 02/11/1997 to misc2 Be Warned: The following is meant for Adults only. Minors are expressly forbidden to read this work or possess a copy thereof. It is further against the author's intent and wishes for this work to be given to a minor or placed where it may fall into the possession of a minor. This work is a work of fiction. All events, persons and places contained in this fictional depiction are not meant to be seen as reports of or speculations concerning real events, personages or places. The author neither supports nor encourages the events described herein. This work of fiction is intended as a psychological examination through the device of fiction of the thoughts and feelings generated by the imaginary events described, and should not be read by those who object to graphic depictions of sexual activity or violent activity such as unarmed and armed combat. No depictions of minors or activity involving minors is contained in the following material. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Warrior Goddess by: Frank Black Copyright 1996 by the Author Prologue: Sol California It is January 28th, 2001, and the new Republican President of the United States of America lays in bed feeling very much like the 76 year old man he is. It is an unspoken understanding by all that his younger, ( 62), year old Vice President is the real leader of the Party that now controls both the Legeslative and Executive Branches of Government. But a mild, ordinary war-horse could win the White House, where a proto- fascist in the pocket of the military-industrial-complex could not. The Public really beleived the #2 man could be kept on his leash by the older wiser man. They liked the team: tough talking voice of the white middle aged male backlash for a stick... and limp old carrot of a Party Hack as a Front Man to calm the Talking Heads on CNN. But great mischief has already been done. The United States needed money FAST! When Quebec succeeded from Canada, the US eagerly absorbed the nearly all white Northern County in an attempt to offset the voting block posed by the Middle Class frightening influx of non-white immigrants into the cities. With a declining white birth rate, more white voters were needed no matter what the cost... And the price we paid Canadians to join the United States was to adopt a Universal Health Care system like theirs had been. And only VICE:Drugs, Gambling and Prostitution could generate the kind of money needed to fund such a System. When Mexico defaulted on it's Debt to the U.S. A legal team representing Organized Crime in America went to the White House with a bold plan. If Mexico gave Baja California to the United States to cover it's debt, the Mob would run Baja California as a Vice Zone, a legal Red Light District where drugs, whores of all ages and sexes, and blood sports would generate trillions of dollars for the US,... In exchange for this special license, the Mob would close all gambling, legal and illegal as well as Prostitution and Drug smuggling in the other, now 57 United States. The Moral Majority could run the rest of America as a Born-Again Christian Fascist Country, while sin would be banished to Baja California where tourists from all over the world could come to sin knowing that in a Mob run town you could leave your hotel room door unlocked or walk the neon lit streets after mid-night, knowing you wouldn't get mugged or hassled by beggars. And as a side benefit, Baja California became a Prison State, a new Australia, where the maximum security prisons could dump all their Lifer's on a New Boss: either serve your sentence as gladiators in the Domed Arena's Blood Sports, or suffer Mob Justice for disobedience and be fed to the sharks in the pretty warm blue waters off the pretty desert coast. The President was truly an old fashioned man who deeply distrusted any single Solution to so many horrible Problems. But the Japanese had promised to build a World Class deep-sea harbor for the battery of six huge casino-hotels all for the rights to monopolize sea access. With so much money to be made the whole Resort would be open to the Public and satellite TV Sports Coverage 18 months from the day he signed the Paperwork. AS his wife had said: "The men and women who live and die there are already damned... It's your job to save America!" She slept soundly, a Good Christian, and the only solace he had in the World. As he lay in bed in the death hour of 3:00 A.M., the end of his index finger and thumb still throbbed from how hard he held onto the pen when he signed. The ink had been dry now six hours. Tomorrow he would give a Press Conference and explain what he had done to all the World. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Chapter #1: Death's Disney Land Eighteen Months Later I stride the sun blasted streets of Sol California City,... a free man for the first time since being sentenced to twenty years of Hard Labor for running a politically subversive Internet Web- Page. I guess I never really believed the Sedition Act of 1999 could survive a Supreme Court challenge.... Screw it. The National Security Agency visited me in my 8 by 15 cell at the Bend Oregon Federal Correction Facility and slapped me on the back saying: "We LOVE your encryption routines Jack, just explain them to this tape recorder here, and run a few errands for us and our friends at the Bio-Chemical Warfare Facility in Palm Springs, and HELL Jack, we'll turn you loose and let you have your Library Card back!" So I talked, and doomed thousands of Underground brothers and sisters who had come to depend on them for intellectual freedom of expression,... So I talked, and now had a Government issue unlimited VISA Card, and the freedom to turn my every Mission for my new Masters into a working Vacation! So I talked, and now I had an hour to kill before meeting my contact at the Kat Fight Klub, a blood-sport theater restaurant in the basement of the Coliseum 2000 Casino-Hotel. My job was to pass a Pimp a needle full of the C.I.A.'s latest combat-frenzy inducing drug. He in turn would dose one of his stable of Fighting Girls before this afternoon's High Noon Show-Down. I, in turn would take sub-vocal notes into my throat- implant vox-recorder for my Hidden Master's and guzzle vodka tonics and make nice with the Locals. And did I mention I was on a sixty foot wide sidewalk running along the most beautiful beach on Earth? Did I mention every halfway good looking female between 12 and 50 from every War Torn country in South America had hiked North to make a FINE living on these same clothing optional rich-tourist clogged sidewalks? My head was spinning from NOT looking at so much inspiring bosom, sweaty belly, and bare legs. I had left the jet black inverted pyramid of the Celestial Nile Casino-Hotel behind and was fighting my way through a flooding river of sex and greed heated humanity to the beach front entrance to the 100 story tall, half mile in diameter mirror-glass Coliseum 2000, which boasted a 200,000 seat Arena in the "Courtyard" of the Hotel Ring, where man-made lakes, man made hills and every zoo-bred beast or war toy or known to Man could be used in staging battles great and small. CNN Blimps floated overhead, making certain that every scream and spilled gut could be seen on Hi-Def Home Theater Screens in America, where public use of the words BOSOM or BOMB was illegal, but in the privacy of your home, cable or satellite TV could put YOU in the middle of the ACTION! The Concrete Assyrian Griffins and Nubian Lions that made a double procession flanking the causeway from the Coliseum 2000 to the bikini blasted beach signalled a left turn was in order and I "excused me'd" my way into the mob of tourists being sucked into the air-conditioned bowels of the Biggest Lobby in the World. Standing between the Black and White columns on either side of the electric doors I glanced down at my watch. I had 40 minutes to kill. I made my way south, (right), along a facing of rainbow painted pillars through some cypresses onto a four lane concrete ramp running down into the darkness where loading docks received the tons of imported steaks, fresh vegetables, and clean linen I supposed. What grabbed my attention was a noisy mob of tourists in a ring, pressed up against the shutter- steel gates that closed off the sub-basements from street traffic. Curious I muscled my way inward, ( hell, I WAS on Government Business!), and saw that in a space cleared in the center two girls faced each other in a fighting stance, standing about ten feet apart, both covered with sweat and breathing heavily. Seeing them, I started breathing heavily! The fighter to my right, who I learned was called Camille, was a Chicano girl of almost pure Castillian Spanish blood, her honey-dew melon sized breasts swelling over the black-lace cups of her bra like almost translucent white cream. You could see the web of blue veins under the soft skin of her swollen cleavage. Her gypsy mane was jet-black, and hung down her back in curly heaps of thick wet hair. Her talons were black painted as were her toes. The pubic triangle revealed by her black lace panties was lush, an Amazon Delta. Her eyes were worthy of Cleopatra, huge,...burning coals! Her mortal enemy was wearing a tissue-paper thin worn red flower print cotton shift, unbuttoned down the front so the front of her olive skinned massively voluptuous peasant girl's body was exposed. Her hair was waist length, falling strait, thick and black to her hefty buttocks. She left wet footprints with her bare feet as she gave a look of pure malevolence to the other girl. Her pimp, obviously a little uncertain, a heavily muscled yet well overweight country bumpkin in a tee shirt and baggy trousers, waved a machete and boasted how Aza was a pure Mayan girl, from her full, eagle beak-like nose, to the blood of the Jaguar God of blood-sacrifice flowing in her veins. A touch on my left arm caused me jump a little and I found myself looking Camille's pimps in his good right eye, ( his left being white with a cataract). "After this public appetizer I will have my Woman take you to the Private Club." His blue foil leisure suit glistened, shimmering as I palmed a syringe into his palm, answering his code phrase with my own. "I can only really relax in a Private Club." He nodded to a Goddess in a skin tight vinyl red dress standing behind us on the curb in the glare of direct sun light. Her mid-thigh length dress was scoop necked, her 44-d cup cleavage shining like olive spheres, oiled and shining. Her legs were long dancers legs, kickboxer's legs firm atop nine inch red stiletto heels. Her face regal, brunette hair a full mane for a Latin War Goddess. Her lover smiled, gold teeth shining in the middle of his face. "My ancestors came to the Caribbean from Africa where they were Kings,... Salma, now SHE makes ME a King." "Is Salma a fighting girl?" I asked, fantasizing how it would be to make love to such a royal animal. "She be my number one fighting girl, as well as my woman," he confided to me, "Camille is out here proving to me she has what it takes to fight as a girl in my stable,... Salma is my Queen,... It will be she who you drug will carry to victory in the Death Fight later inside...." A sudden cry riveted my attention to the spectacle of two magnificent girls flying together the two uranium halves of a nuclear bomb! An explosion of curses and flailing limbs spun out of control at the center of the circle as Camille and Aza rained blows on each others shuddering heads, dancing in a circle, boobs flopping wildly. Totally without thought of self-defence, the two bitterly battling amazons were like a tigress and a lioness meeting in a jungle clearing,... All attack, snarling through bloody bared teeth! Both girls mouths streamed blood, blood squirting from their nostrils as bare knuckle fists pounded like artillery shells onto eye-sockets and cheekbones, jaws and temples. Aza howled and rushed the ivory white Chicano, her brown shoulder slamming under Camille's arms into her wet bare belly, driving the other girl backward, black talons tearing open her dress and ripping gruesome red furrows in her shoulders. But Camille kept on her feet, and drove her right knee up into Aza's dangling brown mammarys again and again and again. Bellowing, palms shoved into Aza's shoulders, she shoved the Mayan warrior away. The crowd roars as the two hell cats closed again grappling desperately. Camille grabbed two handfuls of Aza's hair and shoved her head up, driving her own forehead into the Mayan girl's nose, attempting to drive the cartilage like a spike into the brown peasant girl's brain! Face erupting crimson, Aza, staggered back, then unhinged plowed back into the fray, wrapping her fingers around Camille's soft white throat and began choking her with all her might. Camille responded by strangling Aza back, as each girl tries to throttle the other and drive her to her knees. The two girls thrust their voluptuous wet bloody torsos together, elbows out, shacking, faces purpling with the incredible force with which they were squeezing each other's necks. Camille's eyes bulged out and her face went from ruby red to a frightening purple. Even thought she still had Aza by the throat, and Aza's tongue protruded, blackening, Aza was shaking Camille like a rag doll... Suddenly Camille's feet slipped out from under her as her rubbery legs gave way. She slammed onto the concrete on her back, limbs kicking weakly, gagging. Gasping, streaming sweat, the now completely naked Aza stood over her fallen foe and the light of realizing her victory came into her eyes. Camille's Pimp just shrugged his blue foil shoulders and winked to me as he went about paying off bets. Salma appeared at my side and guided me to a stretch limo at the curb. "We'll have to drive to the East entrance to get to the Club" she explained as I slid into the cool air and rich leather within. "Want some champagne?" I nodded as the door closed, watching the crowd follow the winning Pimp and Aza back out to the beach, leaving Camille to pick up her clothes and head out to the waves to wash up and recover alone. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> CHAPTER #2: Pit Bitches As soon as the stretch limo driver slammed the door on my side two things immediately happened. An environmental control sensor, much insulted by the molten Baja California air that followed me in, sent an arctic blast of air-conditioning into the roomy "den" sandwiched between the bullet-proof glass between the driver and the rear window,... And like all Nervous Young Moderns, as soon as her shapely ass hit the seat, Salma H. Snapped on the television hung above the passenger seats facing us. Her full scarlet painted mouth sagged into the "O" of those who see their Master's Face in the T.V., and for the time it took to pull out into the pedestrian choked main sea line street of Sol California, we were treated to seeing CNN's newsflash about an upcoming Senate Hearing on the problem of whether juveniles, who, convicted as adults for crimes carrying mandatory death-sentences, should be reprimanded to the gladiatorial death-sports here in Baja like their brothers and sisters over the age of 18. The all powerful Conservative Lobby in Washington believed those who where adult enough to commit and adult crime like murder, ought to take their place in the sun with Uzis and swords and whatever, providing socially useful tension release for Citizens who worked hard all day as productive workers, subscribed to Family Values, and used their hard-earned dollars as ballots to vote for consumer goods produced by Cooperations with Company Headquarters located in the 57 United States! Of course Bleeding Heart Liberals found reason to complain... Salma lost interest as soon as Arguing Talking Heads replaced the robot aerial mini-cam footage comparing a ghastly bloodthirsty war of rival Japanese girl-schools waged a month before in the main concourse of Tokyo's inter-Island Subway with a German Sports Channel's video coverage of a recent Interpol sponsored Girl's Prison Gang Semi-Finals, where a small girl army of teeny-bopper Basque Separatists arrested by Spanish security forces routed the much vaunted Mob made up of the daughters of Sicilian Mafioso. ( Editors Note: Italy had adopted the new, and controversial, practice of arresting and convicting the whole family when arresting and convicting a criminal.... ) "So,.." Salma said, purring wetly, as she raised her knee up, slipping off one crimzon stilletto pump, and bracing her heel on the leather ulpostery. Her naked crotch radiated heat and menace like a blast furnace when the door is opened. "It'll take twenty minutes to circle around the Coliseum-2000 to to main-enterence...." Her pubic bush was an Amazon Delta, mysterious and equatorial.... "Do you think you can keep me amused for twenty minutes?" She eyed the onset of an erection in my pants that was so sudden that my eyes swam from loss of blood... "Won't ...." I struggled to recall if I had ever heard her pimp's name and drew a blank. "HE mind?" Salma threw her magnificent mane of hair back and laughed so lustily her basket-ball boobs nearly bounced out of the scoop neckline of her skin- tight red dress. "Any man Man Enough to fuck me is Man Enough not to care what any other Man Thinks." Her eyes twinkled as she looked at me struggling to look at her face instead of her gaping vulva. "But Hell, you can just look at it if that's all you're Up For". I could all but hear out loud my penis telling me: "I can smell it and it's worth dying for!" Picking up on a missed beat in our conversation, Salma looked away, freeing me from her gaze, and asked in a not unfriendly voice: " So tell me Jack, where did this Wonder Drug that's going to make me an unkillable Wonder Woman in the death fights come from?" She looked back to me with a softened gaze, an almost serene Himalayan intelligence behind her huge brown eyes. "I've read the literature and all that Vietnamese war stuff the military cooked up in the MKSUPRA program like ZAM and MDRNA that produced uncontrollable apeshit soldiers. Kill everyone. Kill themselves. Attack Hallucinations...." She looked at me for a minute, "I go in to the ring sober Honey, with True Religion: Sorry Honey, I'm Gonna Win, you gonna Lose..... I've fought girls high on speed, booze, pills, whatever. They're all Collectors Video now. Why should I put my life in the hands of your Bosses back in Uncle Sugar?" "This is Something New, " I said thinking back to my informal "after the briefing" Briefing given to me in my holding cell by the man who would be Agent Handler in charge of my case, my spy-guy Parol Officer, you might call him. He was a Computer Guru for the National Security Agency who made his bones by putting the Secret Police in the personal computer of 80% of the households in the U.S.A. . In the early 1980s he figured out that the home computer would not only develops a graphical interface, so the average guy would be able to use it, but that all these computers would become a new kind of telephone EVERYONE would have to have. So when he saw Compuserve start to get popular, he told his bosses they should repeat their success with Rolling Stoned, a hippy-age magazine the C.I.A. had secretly bankrolled so they could monitor what the counter-culture was up to. His idea was to start U.S.A. Online, a graphic-interface magazine and meeting place on the Internet. Since articles would change every day, new graphics would have to be down loaded. It would be during the 30 seconds or so the guy at home drummed his fingers waiting for the graphics to download that the U.S.A. Online Super Computer would scan the PC owners hard drive for text files with works on a Flag List for the NSA, even copy them, address-lists, private letters, ANYTHING.... His genius was rewarded mucho power and dollars when U.S.A. Online easily outsold all other competing online service...using it's secret NSA techno-weenie software make it's service a little better than all the others. Frank had told me the story of Professor Henri Jeff, a French recombinant DNA scientist that the C.I.A. Had recruited to develops bio-chemicals for Military Applications. Henri Jeff had told my Control this Story: .... I will never forget the elevator ride down to MKCOMPLEX. It took forever, it seemed, to go down, down... A mile below the Pentagon in the bedrock below Washingto D.C., where a cubic mile of Secret Black Operations were headquartered. Thousands worked there, on six month shifts, like submariners. They had movie theaters. Malls. A university of Forbidden Subjects. Super Computers such as none else existed. MKCOMPLEX was the Home of the Secret Government of the World! Ten million dollars had bought me. A secret cover the French Secret Service could never break. I had developed a cell-level RNA transport virus that within 60 minutes of ingestion or injection would preform subtle grafts of DNA in the enzymes and hormones of the Host that would remain in action for several hours, until the Host's body replaced them as they were used up with unaffected chemicals. Many uses could have been made of this, but the Military uses, being those of National Security, meant that I could never publish again, except for THEM. And they wanted to created a Fighting Machine, a controlled Genius of Physical Combat. So this is what I gave them. The girl in the elevator with me had joined as my guide, or armed escort, as I said my goodby to my life as Henri Jeff above. Although I could see no weapons I had no doubt this 25 year old beauty of Vietnamese-French blood could deal very well with me! She introduced herself as Charlotte L., and her cold almond eyes never let me forget that within the 38 D-Cup/26/38 body of a University Girl dressed in a tight white silk short-sleeve blouse and mid-thigh length black leather dress, was, in fact, a She Cobra ready to strike! The elevator came to a stop and the doors of Hell opened. How can I describe my first Journey through the World Below? Leave it be we passed through many marvels until entering a passage guarded by a woman behind a bullet-proof window in a booth and a hand-print as well as a retna scan. After the heavy, blast proof door shut hermetically behind us my girl let me through a maze to a private theater in the round so to speak. An unlit ring of sumpteous maybe 81 box seats enclosed a brightly illuminated pit of stainless steel, maybe six meters across and four meteres deep, with two steel doors facing across it's diameter. I was introduced to Presidents and Kings of Forgeign Lands as well as Billionaires, Generals an famous faces, all accompanied by gorgeous male and female consorts, dressed as if for the Opera! Champague was served and we each eneted into a booth that seated up to six in velvet lodges. Conversation hushed in the theater as my companion slipped away without a word and left me trembling at what I might see. I was joined by a British born woman I knew from American television. As chamber music piped over speakers she slipped out of her little black evening dress and revealed a very voulpeous creamy white body, wearing only black lace bra and panties. I was stunned as she undid my pants and began caressing my cock and balls, her deep bosoms pressing into my shoulder, her child face framed in brunette masses of curls. Like a kitten she licked her lips and explained: "You are my prize, lucky Man. And I am part of your thank you from The Management." Before I could stutter a reply, a voice broke off the music and announced over the loudspeakers that the Evenings events were to begin! "Tonight we are please to play Host to a Great Scientist known above A Professor Henri Jeff. As France weeps for his tragic demise in small plane crash, he sits with us now, One of Us, One whom we owe much Gratitude. A round of applause please!" As I sat in frozen astonishment, Emma's head rising and falling enthusiastically in my lap, applause ringing in my ears I saw both doors open in the Pit below, my own girl, Charlotte L., completely naked, bare limbs and shapely torso bleached white by the overhead spotlights flooding the pit so it was without shadows. Coming to face her was a 25 year old All-American girl with straight brunette hair falling down her naked back. Freckles gave charm to her milky countenance, her exquisite child-woman's face. About five foot seven, her own breasts were honey- dew melons, swaying out from her ribcage as if gravity were nothing to her 40 D-Cup bust! She was introduced as Jennifer C., the mistress of the billionaire boy-wonder of a computer software empire. An aspiring actress when she met her Patron, he had forbidden her to pursue a career that might keep her from answering her telephone. .... She had an affair with a Japanese Industrial Empire she hoped would finance a film for her to star in and had been indiscrete enough to be seen in Public. Now she would fight to redeem herself in her lover's eyes. If she would survive, she would be the star of the most expensive private film ever made. Charlotte, I learned was an assassin for the NSA. The name of the last Prime Minister of what had been Canada was mentioned. The woman had been shotgunned in a sauna with her girlfriend. The scandal had shammed her Party and turned the tide to a vote for Union with the U.S.. In conclusion the Announcer described how my discovery worked, and how the drug had been fine-tuned so it took a physiological shock to the nervous system like a physical confrontation, a scare, or being startled to trigger the Battle Reaction. But when triggered.... We would all see what these two girl gladiators would become..... The sheer spectacle of two beautiful girls, fighting naked, to the death, hushed the crowd to a reverent silence, electric as the tension below in the Fight Pit! A starting pistol fired and both girls jumped comically,... then began shuddering, as if they had stepped in a puddle of water an electric kitchen utensil had dropped in. Then both fighting girls wrenched themselves, as if shrugging off a swoon, sweat suddenly pouring down their white bodies in sheets. Their eyes were all jet pupal, as they raised their gaze, panting, saliva foaming from their open mouths. Their gazes locked together, and with twin banshee screeches they threw themselves across the chrome finish plates of the floor, claws outstretched! The action was so furious and so fast it was hard to follow the first two minutes of the girl fight as kicks and punches were thrown with deadly accuracy only to be dodged or returned with equal intensity. Jennifer and Charlotte's hair snapped left and right like whips as they engaged in a circle dance of leaps around one another, lunging, exchanging bare knuckle blows to snarling faces and soft female organs, and leaping back only to close and battle and separate again and again and again! Yet as the fighting began to slow to a violent yet followable rate, one was thunderstruck at the martial science behind each feint, parry, wheelkick, and retreat. Their minds must have been as enhanced as their bodies were to this grim yet exceedingly exotic business.... Suddenly the whole character of the death fight transformed when Jennifer dropped to a stoop and kicked strait forward, heel slamming like a hammer into Charlotte's wet belly, knocking the wind out of her, and bowling the asian girl onto her back. Rolling even as she landed on the steel plates, she wasn't fast enough to prevent Jennifer from straddling the small of her back, wrapping her arms around Charlotte's throat, and brutally wrenching her head counter-clockwise to snap her neck! But Charlotte grabbed Jennifer's arms and cut off the twisting just short of having her spinal vertebrae dislocated by the wrench. Arching her back, thrusting up onto her knees, Charlotte, grabbing Jennifer's fore arms, suddenly curled forward, casting the American girl all the way over her shoulders onto the floor with a sickening crashing splat. But Jennifer, face twisted with fury, hurtled forward, even as she was rising to her knees, and the force of her impact into the French-Vietnamese girls torso drove both bitch battlers upward, bloody boobs and bellies smashed together, faces mirrored masks of wild-eyed murder-lust, blood squiring from their nostrils, and flowing copiously with boiling saliva from their mouths. Charlotte's knee rocketed up into Jennifer's sopping wet crotch, lifting the howling girl to her tip-toes, yet Jennifer stood her ground, and, elbows flared out, pressed the heels of her hands together on Charlotte's temples. The Asian beauty screamed as a crushing pressure was applied, vise-like to her head. She grabbed Jennifer's wrists, but...... "Her HEAD exploded?" Salma burst out, interrupting me. Her eyes incredulous. "That's what my Control Officer told ME that this guy who was there, Professor Jeff, told HIM." I let Salma H. just sit and boggle as our limo finally pulled into a que in front of the Main Endurance to the Colosseum-2000 Hotel-Stadium Complex. "I've never seen this stuff in action" "Jack", the drop-dead wonder woman in an ultra-slut red dress said, "If this stuff works for me I'll ball you to death before an other spies get a chance to torture and kill you!" With THAT comforting thought, I followed her into the crowd pouring into the Lobby. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> CHAPTER #3: The Kat Fight Klub The Grand Concourse de Or was fifty moving sidewalks, red carpeted, that carried the constantly arriving hordes of goggling international tourists from the cab and airport van ques along the quarter mile East Face of the Coliseum-2000 Resort Hotel Complex through the football field long stretch of air-conditioned colonnade into the vast cathedral like lobby within... I was able to tear my eyes from Salma H's bombshell contours in their skintight red casing, ( a little red dress ), only because she was looking cosmically bored to death with the refugee camp like confusion all around us and the deafeningly loud Country Music blaring down from the rafters at us with simultaneous German, Japanese, English and Spanish DJ commentaries, ( .... Welcome back pardners to KSPUR, and our special noon time album preview... Today we're featuring Reba and Clints duet release of songs from the "Turner Diaries" soundtrack,... ),.... A buzz like a knat sized demon cut through the cacophony causing me to look down at the black leather hand rail to my right... On it were little TV consoles the size of cigarette boxes spaced about every three feet. "Welcome to Coliseum-2000, select from menu" blinked on the tiny screen. I had a choice of 1: Orientation, 2: Hotel Maps,3: Pre-Room Registration, 4: Arena Pre-Views, 5: R-Rated Erotica... "For your pleasure!" Wow. With a series of mild bumps the conveyer belt passes through a series of gun and explosive detectors, a sound barrier and dropped us onto the black marble tiles of the "Largest Lobby in the World", the sound of thousands of one-armed bandits, (slot machines), loud speaker pages, ( "...Nippon Sex-Tours Group 666 please converge at the Information kiosk to the south of the roulette tables..."), and all around plain old- fashioned going-to-the-department-store-with-your-wife-and-kids HUBBUB! Salma snapped her cheek full of yellow banana bubble-gum, grabbed a daiquiri from a tray offered her by a bikini clad Courtesy Hostess and dragged me through the stampede for a full twenty minutes before we emerged before a set of glass doors under a flashing neon Members Only sign. Waving at the security cameras she pulled me through them into a narrow hall leading to another set of glass doors labeled "Iguana Lizard Lounge". But we wheeled left before a set of unmarked chrome steel elevator doors set in the black marble wall. Her red talons slipped a security card from god only knows where and fed it to the gizmo by the door. It spat it out and voila: the doors opened and we got in, Miles Davis from "Kind of Blue" piped over the muzak speaker. I just was getting into "Flamenco Sketches" and vertigo when it stopped dropping, and Salma, with a mighty shake of her gypsy mane, towed me to a posh black leather booth near the stage in the infamous Kat Fight Klub! "So whadda ya tink?" Salma said, sliding her World-Class ass across the leather in our booth, leering like one teen age boy showing another teen aged boy the Playboy Magazine he had hidden under his bed. I goggled, taking it all in. A chrome bar ran the length of the right side of the room, sitting about a hundred well fed tux-clad business men types and $1000 a pop Hookers, ( excuse me, I meant to say: Escorts!). Booths ran the length of the left wall, table-cloth and candle-lit tables filling the floor back to the stage or raised square canvas "ring" in the back. The sound level was hushed, a string-quintet sawing away at their violas, violins and string-basses in the corner. Mozart, of course. Snooty plastic like the Country Garbage playing in the concourse was low-brow plastic. But you had to have Serious-Plastic to eat here. She rattled on about the "Fight Game" and picked at a crab salad whilst I had the duck and a Singha beer, eyeing the three immense television screens, each at least ten foot by twelve, set over the ziggarat of booze bottles behind the bar. The central TV showed a dirigible camera view of the huge central Arena in the resort's Courtyard where orange vested chain-gang work crews struggled to rake mortar fire craters flat, scoop up spent shot gun and machine gun casings, and round up the stray broken broad sword and bowie-knife so this afternoon's group of boy and girl gladiators wouldn't twist and ankle on Hamburger Hill or by the man-made lake called the Bermuda Triangle in the brochures. The television to the right showed the empty stage in front of us, ready to capture the action when Salma H. demonstrated the C.I.A. Battle-Lust drug I had smuggled to her Pimp. It was Salma's nudge to my elbow that directed my attention to the bare breasted boxing match getting under way in the T.V. Monitor to the left.... "Oh, NO!" I sub-vocalized with everyone else in the room that was looking up on the screen just then, "She'll get CREAMED!" The camera had just panned from Rebekka F., a bare foot five foot five swarthy Italian Amazon in red Everlast boxer-shorts to the surprise on the card. While Rebekka, as focussed as an animal in the midst of a hunt, tapped her black boxing gloves together in front of the 44 inch d-cup boobs that bounced with her as she bounced on her toes, Hollywood's favorite bleached blond Party Girl climbed awkwardly between the ropes, naked but for a professional pair of rigid body armor boxing trunks and big red gloves that she obviously had trouble holding up in front of her in a defensive posture. Salma snapped her gum and snorted... "It's DREW....." I breathed as I and everyone else in the crowd read the text that scrolled across the bottom of the screen: Rebekka F_________, Mistress of the late Chicago Boss of the Trash Haulers Union, indited on 17 counts of consorting with a known target of a R.I.C.O. Investigation is challenged to night by Drew B________, weighing in at 20 pounds under the Middle Weight Sybil Brand Ladies Division Boxing Champ,.... ( And about 10 inches less in the bust, the announcer added with a wink in his voice....). The five foot two Miss B________ joins us tonight thanks to 800 violations of the conditions of her Parole for Running a Red Light in a Reform School Zone. The bell rang and Rebekka danced forward, alternating jabs at Drew's cute pug face and Drew in turn skipped backward, letting herself be herded around the ring., keeping her big red gloves up as if desperate to avoid thousands of dollars of painfull reconstructive surgery! Salma was snorting so regularly she sounded like a sow demonstrating the noise a train makes to her piglets. Drew pawed out at Rebekka ineffectively a few times and a man in a booth near ours pretended to snore loudly. Then, as if they could hear our unvoiced jeers, the two girls closed, hunched over, pummel each others gloves. But Rebekka broke to the right and dipping, fired a mean left jab under Drew's defenses and solidly connected with the creamy skin sheathed ribs below Drew's soft left breast. Drew hooted, and literally flung herself back into the ropes, and unintentionally rebounded right into the Italian girl's follow-up charge, wedging her narrow shoulders between Rebekka's gloves. In a split second you could actually see light dawn in Drew's powder blue eyes, and her right uppercut tapped Rebekka's jaw up for a round house left that dropped the olive skinned Italian girl to one knee. As Drew back petaled, astonished at what she had done, people all around the Kat fight Club threw back their chairs and applauded from their tables. Salma's jaw dropped. Suddenly Rebekka shook her head, ( you could actually see her mouth the words: Lucky Punch), and leaped back to her feet and stormed after Drew who barely got her mitts up in time to catch a blizzard of blows aimed at her face. Her whole frame shuddering from the punches Rebekka was throwing at her, Drew struggled vainly to bob and weave like she had a few weeks of training in Sibyl Brand to do. But the other girl was a real fighter.... And PISSED! Salma leaned over to me, her left hand straying into my lap causing my attention to stray from the fight on the Sport's Screen T.V.. I could smell a sea-salt/rose scented heat rising from her massive mounds, from deep in the golden cleavage, and I felt weak and drunken. "I remember MY First Fight..." she exhaled the words like cigarette smoke, curling, slow and heavy. "I was a thirteen year old girl who lived in what is called in Spanish: The Ring of Those Who Must Live Below Heaven....." The Ring of Those Who Must Live Below Heaven was, by 1989, (when Salma was 13), a nick name given by Martyred Marxist Poet to the vast masses of poor that lived around Mexico City in a circular ghetto without sewage, running water, of paved streets. Thirty million unskilled, uneducated men, women and children lived here, driven North by civil wars in the fallen Dictatorships U.S. Business Interests had maintained through the Cold War. When the USSR fell, so did US passion for World War Two Era Latin Fascists and their Feudal Kingdoms. The richer the Capitalists in Central Mexico City grew on oil profits and tourism, the less the Mexican Middle Class recalled their poor Catholic relations multiplying unchecked in the shadows of wealth that tripled then doubled then tripled when National Debt forgiven with the so called "sale" of Baja California to the Northern Anglos. Now all the previously frozen capitol could be pumped into rebuilding Core Mexico City and erecting "Family" tourist resorts on the west coast, where folks could stay in "respectable" resorts, only a twenty minute helicopter jump away from Big Fun across the Gulf of California. The Peoples Revolutionary Party, ( the ironically named Mexican Ruling Party, decades of single Party Rule under their belt), invited every toxin producing Company booted out of Germany, Japan or the US to build in this Ring of cheap labor. Salma's family had lived in a self made warren of pasteboard boxes and packing crates where her mother cut open beer cans and scraped off the labels for her father who then used a half of a broken scissor to cut and hammer dream like animals which her older sister sew together with bits if copper wire stripped from abandoned cars. These Native Arts Necklaces, Mobiles and Wind-Chimes her other eight siblings sold along the highway that ran from the Depth Petro Chemical facility through their squalid barrio to the Capital City. Even though she was a Middle Class girl by local standards, she, nevertheless had to join her local gang of Home Girls, the Steel- Cheetahs when pubic hair and breasts sprouted, making her old enough to draw Male attention, and thus threaten the local Pecking Order of marriageable females. This entailed going into the mountains of garbage and junked cars near her home, a place nearly a mile square, in which gangs of boys and girls staked turf and fought and died to hold it, fighting off cat sized rats, vicious dog packs, mentally deranged homeless men and each other. They would lavishly mural and furnish an old bus or lean to of scrap metal, give themselves a Gang Name, and move in to get drunk, high and fornicate enthusiastically. It was August 14th, a hundred degrees, and blinding bright as she found the goat skull on a fence post "marker" where she was to strip naked and wait for whatever was to come.... Her huge brown eyes and wild masses of hair gave her the look of a wild animal as she scanned every shadow for a revealing outline and listened to every creak and snap for the attack she knew would come. Suddenly three bigger girls erupted shrieking from every side! Instantly they were on her, fists driving into the hellcat they had trapped in their midst. She had been hammered into a crouch when suddenly something snapped deep within her, as softly as a cat biting through a mouse's spine. Red poured into her brain like burning liquid light. She returned to her senses what must have been only minutes later, looking up to see two of the now naked gang girls staggering away, limping on a full run on two legs and one arm each. Looking down she realized she was kneeling on the third girl's heaving chest. It was obviously pointless to hit her any longer. Standing, swaying, an unprecedented cool breeze swept through the stinking heaps, some a hundred feet tall. Her skin goose bumped. An hour passes. If those girls had seconds or reinforcements, they had found more pressing matters to attend to. Salma felt more irrevolkably changed than she had when raped of her virginity at eight by a local commissioner's strong arm man. Dragging the fallen girl to her feet, she all but carried her back to the overturned semi-truck the Steel-Cheetahs used for a Club-House. The other girls were waiting their,wide eyed, sipping home brew beer. They had a head band made of cat-gut she wore until ten years later it had come apart beyond repair. Even though fighting had already made her rich, she had sat on her bed and sobbed. "So you see, I can identify,..." Salma said throwing back her drink, and looking back at the T.V. Monitor where Rebekka was brutally hammering the now out of it blond girl into the ropes, "Somewhat..." She laughed and I joined her, "I sure hope the fights I lost I didn't look THAT bad losing!" Drew's head was lolling left and right with every punch, her knees wobbling, torso weaving back and forth, body held up by the ropes. She tried to raise a knee to push the Italian girl back, but Rebekka contemptuously slapped it away. Then she stood back, letting Drew stagger forward, before folding Drew over her arm with a murderous right hook into her soft white belly, then dropping the beaten blond to the canvas with a hammering slam to the back of her sweat matted head. Suddenly thoughtful, I wished that even if I couldn't win, sometimes someone I was for could win...just once. It would make up for being so owned outright. Such a predictable piece of property. Salma, sensing my change of mood, turned my face to hers and spoke to me in a surprisingly gentle voice: "I've got to go to the Dressing room to change for the Fight and take your stuff." Smiling so that it made me smile in return, she held me eyes with hers as she slipped her left hand under the table into my pants, stroked my erection to explosion, then with a deft twist of her wrist, caught all of my ejaculation into her palm which she bowed her beautiful head to suck clean with a lick of her tongue. "For Luck", she whispered and slipped out of the booth and vanished. Trembling I looked up to be equally astonished to see the most drop-dead beautiful All-American Girl rise laughing from a table of Japanese Business Tycoons. Her black lace dress evening gown had a breath taking low cut that exposed an amazing uplifted cleavage. Shoulder length chestnut hair tossed carelessly over naked white shoulders. But what made my heart beat so hard that it really hurt, was my conviction that I KNEW this woman from somewhere. But Where? She excused herself and disappeared to the back... where Salma had gone. Was SHE the woman Salma was going to meet in Mortal Combat? I felt confused,... But why? Who was she? I felt stricken. Something important was about to take place, and I had to know what it was before it happened. I had to get in some kind of Control! <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> CHAPTER #4: Girl verses Girl! She was standing on a high chalk cliff face over looking the Atlantic Ocean, which, one hundred million years ago, had been a ever widening valley, yet to be inundated in the peaceful interior heart of the super- continent of Gondwana Land. The souls of the ghosts of the Amazon Queens that led their nomadic warrior tribes back and forth across that pre historic world on long forgotten Quests now cried upwards through cold salty depths for their inheritors to hear their battle chants, incantations, and magical words of power.... And evoke by racial memory their Inheritance of Charm and Sword! She was in modern clothes, her flower print dress rolled down to her waist, exposing fulsome firm black lace bra restrained breasts to the goose bump raising gusts of cold, sea gusts. Her long brown hair fell back of her shoulders in Jamaican braids. She was looking over her shoulder as if to see if her lover had paused in his undressing to stop and watch her unfolding nakedness. Tall, maybe 25 years of age, she looked to me so good that,... If you could go back and erase every mistake I had ever made with my life, and add to that every happiness I had ever hoped of having, and then made THAT emotion into a figure of flesh and bone.... Then it would be embodied in That girl! She was, I realized mid daydream, the girl who I had just seen leaving a table full of rich Japanese business Tycoons for the backstage area of the Kat Fight Klub. But the girl in my fantasy was scrubbed clean of all the Gangster Moll paint and hard laughter. She was the way she would look as if I were her Lover.... in my dreams.... Where, damn it, had I encountered her before? Suddenly I was returned to my Body. Why. I looked up. A clammy feeling fell across my flesh like cold oil. Who,... Where? I looked back,... Then groaned, every gate of emotion in my psyche shut down. That's what I felt arrive! Your Grandparents will tell you they remember where they were when they heard that World War II was over. Your Parents will tell you they remember where they were when they heard that President JFK was shot dead. And your kids will never forget where they were when they heard that Canada had fallen apart and they had 6 new States and State Capitols to memorize. Me, now I realize I'll remember to my dying breath, sitting here in the posh Kat Fight Klub, sipping a Singha brew in the World infamous Coliseum-2000 Resort-Hotel in Sol City, Baja California, when dapper Death Itself nodded to the Maitre Dei to show him to the table always held open for him, in case he should come to town! The table was up front, Ringside, where women met in Mortal Combat for the diversion of Upstanding Citizens who were taking a little Holiday from the Family Values up North. Death was Frank, my Agent Handler, the Computer Whiz, the Turn-Coat Maker. As soon as I saw him sashay into the room, I knew it was the End of The World. I had wondered why I was given a task so simple as smuggling a C.I.A. Developed combat-lust inducing drug to some Pimp to try out on one of the Fighting Girls in his Stable. Now I knew, deep in my heart, they wanted a Cut Out. Someone expendable. They would hang back and watch me to see if someone grabbed me to steal what they would think was MY Secret fight-advantage giving Potion. When I get grabbed, they would ice me and grab the kidnappers! What a way to intercept the Competition. If they had simply mailed the Pimp the syringe U.P.S., no one would SEE him get a "package" just before one of his girls inexplicably wins a fight where she ought to have been out-matched! 2+2 would give the Enemy ME,... And I would be the bait on the hook to catch the Big Fish of the Opposition..... I could feel myself turning grey green as Frank tuned his cuff-links, pretending to carelessly look around the Room before taking his seat. He saw me all right. A momentary pursing of his lips, as if a kiss let me know I was one pinned down butterfly. I thought bitterly of poor blond mop headed baby faced Drew, who I'd just seen eat the green weenie in a brutal boxing rout. I identified with her, to my regret. WE were both put in the Ring in order to loose, in order to set up the real fight that was meant to happen... Right now I wished I could find that girl on whatever concrete holding cell bench she was waiting on, waiting to be sent to the punishment that was to be her thanks. I would through my coat over her naked shoulders, and steal her from the Bastards in Power. I would run with her South, somewhere we could hide forever..... Drink. Smoke. Laugh. Forget.... "Look sharp, my Man." It was the guy I only knew as The Pimp, electric blue foil leisure suit and shaved black head flashing in the neon lighting like He was Neon. But his hand was on my shoulder, the smallish face centered in his bullet plug of a head full of genuine concern. That He should be concerned about Me, really concerned me! "My I join the Party?" He slid in beside me as I nodded. "Do you see the guy I'm not looking at?" I asked, signalling for a waitress. He nodded, patting all his empty pockets. I passed him one of my Turkish Blends of Afghanistan hash and American Tobacco. "Have you ever...." He nodded and hushed me as he leaned forward so I wouldn't have to stretch out my arms to light his smoke. "Man, I would have never dosed Salma with that stuff had I know'd it come to us through Him." We pretended to letch the waitress as she leaned over to polish out table, letting us know how good a care she was taking of us. I tipped her way more than she dared hope and shrugged my shoulders at the Pimp as if to ask Why. He admired the smoke ring he made and started to talk without moving his lips much, real low, so his words died out about a yard from his face. "Let me tell you a little Story about that Dude. First of all, a friend of a friend of mine served with him in the Suppression of the Idaho-Oregon Uprising. The Cat's a fugging walking upside down Pentegram! Slick as shit through a goose, he pretends all he is is the Brain of a Tax Accountant trapped in the Body of a Soap Opera Hunk, but being able to print his own money mean Nothing to Him. Being a cold blooded stone killer is his idea of recreation. He's an all around Renaissance Man of the World." "He's my Nurse Maid." I hissed. "Speak nice or keep your Peace." "Yo a dead man." he continued, just as amused by being in mortal danger as I was. "You set up my Woman for a Fall?" I shook my head inperceptably. "Didn't think so. The other Bitch gonna get a nasty surprise, right." "I think that's the plan." "They don't need video of their shit in action do they? No, this is all about seeing who gets all upset with US! ". I nodded, deflating like a tired balloon. "Damn!" "You said `first', what comes `second'?". "Second," he smiled so everybody could see how at ease and casual he was feeling, "comes a Story that Salma told me about when she had travelled as an Official, on the Payroll of Uncle Sugar, Germ Free Army Whore with the Battalion sent down into Brazil to protect the loggers from international environmentalists and pygmies with blowguns who didn't like the Amazon rainforest converted into Sunbelt Condominiums...." It had rained for ten days straight, reminding all the Commanders of Vietnam, with mid-calf mud everywhere, bugs the size of cats, and beer served at 80 degrees tasting cold cause it was what they called double 100,... 100 degrees of temperature, 100 percent humidity. While she humped generals and such in a quonset hut with plumbing, all the rank and file grunts had to trudge 3 klicks up a truck route to a double row of fifty year old, falling down, miner's and logger's storefronts and such, all held together by decades of multi-lingual pop-star and cola posters and hand bills. This ville had no name, no police, no plumbing, no pavement. You could buy supplies at scalper's prices, get yo truck half-fixed and drink bath-tub beer and god knows what jungle home brew till you went blind. Bored and ready to raise hell Salma had sloshed into town only to see every grunt and out of work half-breed in twenty miles around making for a muddy soccer field. It seems Frank was Chief of Security, and had given up trying to settle a feud between the local born whores, (who worked along the truck road, squatting by little campfires, waving their tits at the drivers), and the better looking hookers that Pimps in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo had flown in to work off debts in their brothels. Frank's idea was to let them arm themselves with kitchen knives, table legs, broken bottles, rocks they picked up, whatever.... and battle it out until one side or the other eliminated the Competition. He parked a troop transport at the edge of the field and had set up a video camera on the roof. He actually fired his pistol into the air to start it off! All in all maybe sixty soaking wet women fought, staggering about in that muddy field, cursing in Spanish and a dozen dialects, oblivious to the cheering soldiers and loggers and the horror of their pimps who were helpless to stop this decimation of their income property. But almost instantly the slashing and stabbing between the lighter skinned city girls and darker skinned home-girls branched out into bitter in-fighting where old grudges were settled and the more plain girls ganged up on girls they felt given an unfair advantage in looks. Within two minutes, Salma said, it was a general malay, several bodies already being trampled into the brown goosh by furiously fighting girls. Woman everywhere staggered, stripped to the waist, barefoot, wildeyed, blood streaming from their heads down over swinging arms and flapping breasts. The Town Beauty was held naked and spread-eagled by her arms and legs by four jealous girls of Inca stock, while she twisted, protesting their betrayal. Since they had their hands full just holding her, they just stood there waiting for a friend of theirs to finish off the pale hooker she was fighting with, to come over with her concrete filled pipe to dash out their writhing hell-cats brains. Another mud and blood covered girl actually pulled a woman who was strangling her childhood enemy off of her, so she could throw herself onto the gasping prostitute and wrap her own fingers around the slender throat she felt was hers to throttle! Even the prostitutes daughters, dancing around the field in their tattered rags, soon became so carried away that they rushed in to fight along side their mothers against the daughters of the women their mothers were fighting. And in the midst of this Amazonian Combat a torrential downpour erupted from the sky, so that one could barely see a few yards in front of their face! This sky launched flood had the effect of splashing the combatants in every direction. Howling women chased screaming women out from the soccer field, where they burst through the encircling ring of spectators, and raced off into the jungle or into the village. Ropes were sought for lenchings. Shotguns were fetched from hotel rooms. Fights were broken off only to be renewed when the combatants met again later in different surroundings. Salma saw two women who had caught up to one another in an open storm drain, wrestling chest deep in the rapids muddy water flowing around them, shout and curses carried away on the wind. Two girls had driven another up a tree like dogs pursuing a cat. She said they were crawling up after her to do battle in the limbs! Yet another girl was seen staggering home to sleep off her drunk, swinging an enemies head by the hair like a handbag. The dispute was not resolved the way Frank had envisioned, but he had boasted the peace was restored by bringing the number of prostitutes down below the number needed to service all the loggers and soldiers. It seemed the girls remaining were too busy to fight. "That's really sick" I admonished Mr. Neon, as I now called him. Mr. Neon shrugged his shoulders. "I notice one thing though", he said drawing on the straw in his tall tropical fruit rum concoction, "I always notice people who get upset by seing or hearing certain things always seem to go miles out of their way so they can see or hear about those same certain things so they cane get good and upset." "I guess they feel it's a calling or their duty." I said making small talk. "What ARE we going to do?" Frank was making certain everyone in the room could see the wrist computer he wore, holding up his arm as he checked to see if he had any e-mail. "We're going to sit here, watch the fight, and act as normal as we can, guy. And watch each other's back on the sly." "Oh. No..." I breathed. She was back in the room. She was pausing by the table of Japanese Businessmen, smiling thank you, touching arms, looking drop-dead gorgeous in her black lace gown with it's spectacular cantilevered black lace bodice thrusting honey-dew melon sized bosoms together and up and out in a breath-taking display of marshmallow cleavage. She switched her back length brunette tresses, all eyes in the room on her. Mr. Neon looked at me and smiled as if to say: "Forget it!" Who IS She?" I whispered. "That" the Pimp said, "Is Jennifer Three." "Jennifer Three?" I asked, for the first time putting together a face and figure with the story Frank had told me about the first experimental use of the Fight Drug. "Yup, the stuff you passes me for Salma is the Battle-Field Standard issue offshoot of the stuff they gave her and the girl she fought. More stable. Different. Now she's called Jennifer Three as in Jennifer VERSION THREE, just like computer software. Jennifer One was Jennifer before being bio-chemically altered that first time. Jennifer Two was the fighting girl permanently, ( as they found out with that first formula), altered somewhat by that drug. Now here we have Jennifer Three, equipped with implanted, radio signaled pumps that send measured amounts of the fight drug into her blood-stream when her Masters want her in Combat Mode. I was only half listening as Jennifer Three left the table she had been visiting to walk over to join Frank at his. "Son of a Bitch!" I whispered. "And I thought you were a simple ordinary Pimp with a Stable" He laughed, mouthing the words: "Hell no!" But I was stricken by what I saw dangling like a charm from a thin gold chain looped around her waist. It was gold cursive letters spelling out: JENNIFER IV ! <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> CHAPTER #5 : Hawaiian Fighting Goddesses A crash of loudspeaker amplified cymbals plunged the Kat Fight Klub into jet blackness and a pulse accelerating drumroll. "Ladies and Gentlemen, Dapper Jack Gotta and Tong Associates are privileged to welcome you to the World Famous Kat Fight Club, and wish this afternoon's Brunch Show will be the highlight of your stay at the equally World Famous Coliseum 2000 Luxury Resort and Entertainment Empire here in sunny Sol City, Baja California !" Cheers filled the darkness as a brilliant ceiling spot dropped onto the Stage where suddenly tiki torches erupted into orange flames, carried around the perimeter of the fight area by local mexican girls and youths, all naked to the waist, oiled to shining, and wearing flower print skirts and leis around their necks. I guess we were to understand they were Hawaiian youths, preparing to make a sacrifice to Pele, the Goddess of the Volcano or something.... I could see my much hated, ( because he was much hateful), and equally oily control agent, Blank Frank sit ringside at a well waited table, being served champaign, scampi and Cuban Cigars all the time ostentatiously ignoring the noisy floor show that was taking place practically in his lap. The achingly All-American Girl, ( and busty Body Idol), Jennifer sat admiring his every tacky move, as if he were a Game Show Host and she were some Mobile Home Park Mom with a "lady's only" beer-bar bouncer build. I noted with some satisfaction that she too noticed his head flinch, and eyes dart sideways, when a wrap around skirt opened over a bouncing thigh and he could get a split second snap shot of one of the boy's, what he would call: "thing-a-ma-jigs". "And just for todays performance, we have a VERY special guest to preform a medley of his Greatest Hits, Ladies and Gentlemen, give a great big welcome from the heart to THE HAWAIIAN ORPHEUS, MISTER DON HO!" A Follow spot picked up a pudgy little white haired guy of about 90 walking down the center aisle to the stage, his cummerbund barely restraining his barrel belly, his piggy little eyes almost lost in a storm of deep wrinkles in raw-hide like suntan. He threw back his head and, in a surprisingly smooth tenor voice sang: " Tiny Bubbles, from the Sea...." As an unseen and unsuspected violin section kicked in I noticed Frank was smirking through the darkness in my direction. The guy I now called Mister Neon shifted in his blue foil leisure suit and, knowing he couldn't be heard, even by a rifle mike whispered: "Why does that guy hate you so?" "I had the audacity to give people a communication encoding program that could protect their communications from his Masters. And then I gave it away FREE. I think he sees me as some kind of Anti-Matter in his Universe. Then I got busted for distributing my Program as Freeware over the InterNet, because the Supreme Court ruled all Encryption Schemes The National Security Agency couldn't crack to be a National Security Matter `by Nature',... whatever THAT means. He must have Swallowed Big Time to get to be the one to hold my Leash." Suddenly a black out in which something massive could be heard being dragged onto the stage.... And with a deafening ROAR pyrotechnic flames rushed up from the jagged peak of a thirty foot high stage-set volcano with smoke billowing side vents and back lit "lightning" flashed accompanied by thunder provided by the lounge Combo's leering pompadour sporting lesbian drummer. Yma Sumac's yowling chestnut "Sacrifice of the Fire Maidens" romped atop all this noise as a truly heart-stooping figure of a feather festooned naked super woman made a stately ascent up the side of the peak, arms outstretched with swords draped in feather covered lame'. At the summit, a spot picked her out.... Salma H., (Neon's main squeeze and lead fighting girl in his Stable),... Her massive proud breasts thrust wonderfully out, ripe as young melons. Her Cleopatra painted eyes swept the room left and right, as if daring some woman to challenge her right to be Queen Bitch of the Mountain! A convenient ten foot "ledge" sat half way up the side of the noisy paper- mache lump for Salma, Chief Priestess of Pele, the Volcano Goddess, to meet her Rival for a Deathfight! I couldn't help but wonder if the serious business of Death ever got so silly in the Arena's of Rome. A cheer went up from the back of the Kat Fight Klub as a spot picked up the advancing stride of an AMAZON that must have stood 6 foot 3 tall, ( to Salma's more mortal 5 foot seven),.... Wearing only black leather panties and a half dozen leis some Stage Hand must have thrown over her head as she passed, she sneered with a high cheek-boned aquiline countenance that had indeed gotten very adept at sneering down at folks. With incredibly long Show-Girl's legs and 44-D Cup bosoms only a rib- cage like hers could carry as if they were the taut tits of a sixteen year old, she marched up the stage steps and up the side of the "volcano" without breaking stride. Mr. Neon muttered : "Julie S____, ..... Your shit better work" He smiled sickly as if he had half suspected this would be the woman his girl would have to fight a fight to the death with. I liked Salma. She had the easy acceptance of things the way they were without bitterness that I both envied and wished dearly I could emulate. I was worried for the second time that night about someone other than my own sorry self. I was just glad it wasn't that poor little butt-kicked blond Drew who was trying to defend that mountain from all comers! Salma flicked her fingers outwards, sending the swords and feathers out into the suddenly still audience. Like the woman advancing from below, she pulled off her leis and cast them away. Julie unsnapped her panties, and threw them to the crowd so now both magnificent female beasts closed the remaining distance between them entirely naked. Naked as girl gladiators slashing and stabbing with swords in the blood caked dust of the Roman Coliseum! Naked as two bitch tyrannosaurs fastening their jaws into each others necks in the heat of some prehistoric desert ravine! Naked, arms outstretched like wrestlers, claws extended like knives, teeth bared, fury burning like furnaces in their eyes,... Naked they burst together when they were but a body's length apart, screaming at the top of their lungs! Salma leapt into the air, flying downward at Julie's huge bosom with her knees and the full flying weight of her body. Roaring, Julie swung a back hand slap around, catching Salma on the hip, literally swatting her aside! Salma rolled down hill, twisted, leaping to her feet in a spit- second...but that was enough time for the big bitch to do a 180, and make a field goal drop-kick, with Salma's beautiful head as the football. Salma pitched out from the force of the blow, sprawled head down hill, legs apart, wet lush vulva open and exposed. Julie couldn't refuse this target, stamping down with all her might to shatter the pubic-bone to slivers. But Salma bucked her hips up, Julie's foot driving deep into the paper mache slope, then sprung from her shoulders to her feet, driving the palms of her left hand up under Julie's jutting jaw, snapping the raven haired Amazon's head up so she could slam her right fist like a hammer into the center of Julie's throat, as if trying to hammer an Adam's apple back through the spine! Choking on a curse, Julie slammed her fists together on both of Salma's temples, concussing the Mexican girl's brains, then butted her broad head downward into the center of Salma's face, trying to drive the nose cartilage up into Salma's brain, killing her. The angle was wrong. Salma's face exploded into frightening crimson blood, blood squirting from both nostrils of her broken nose. But Salma staggered back down hill, almost to the bottom, shaking her mane wildly, trying to clear her vision. Holding her own throat with her left hand, Julie loped down hill and twisting sideways, drove a bare left foot deep into Salma's wet belly. Salma folded over her tormentor's leg, and weakly tried to pull upward, in order to pitch Julie onto her back, but Julie just brought both hands together over her head and brought them down on Salma's right shoulder, hoping to snap the collar-bone! I shot a glance at Frank who was doing very well at looking bored. Jennifer's child-woman face was inscrutable as she observed the violence, the freckles on her nose and cheeks exposed by the bright spotlights. A chill went through me as she turned her head and seemed to look directly at me, although Neon and I were sitting in a booth, entirely in darkness. Her pupils seemed to fill her irises and a Mona Lisa half-smile played about her lips, setting my heart hammering in my chest. Could she see me? What was she thinking? I was jerked rudely back to reality when Neon grabbed my arm in a vise like grip, his furious bald head inches from my face. "What's going on Man? My Woman's getting killed up there!" I could just shake my head in denial. What WAS going on. Was Salma supposed to die,... Convincing the Opposition the Fight Drug was a failure? Was this all an exercise in Disinformation? Back up the Mountain, Salma had literally fled between the murderess's shapely gams, and crawled at a run on her belly onto the flat area half- way up the volcano. There she weaved upward, tottering on her feet as methodically as a tank, Julie S_____ plodded back up the hill to her, smirking, blood, Salma's blood, drooling from the knuckles of her fists. You could see the recognition of immanent Death arise in Salma's great sad eyes as she made a heroic effort to raise her fists up in front of her in a defensive stance. But it was too much for her. Her forearms were shaking like an old woman's. But suddenly, as if this realization of immanent death was a bio-chemical trigger to secrets locked deep in the cells of her body, a visible shudder passed through her lovely frame, color flooding olive flesh that had gone gray green from blood loss. She seemed astounded by her own recovery, but just for a moment. She realized the drug she had taken was fine tuned to require the body's immanent collapse to trigger it's reaction! Even Julie frowned when she looked up to see The New Salma grinning wolfishly down at her! This time when Salma leapt up.... It was a feint! She dropped to her ass, lashing up with both feet under Julie's swat, driving her heels deep into the Amazon's liver. Julie bellowed in rage and threw herself down on top of Salma and the two furiously thrashing women rolled over and over to the bottom of the hill. Being bigger by near 20 percent, Julie landed on top, forcing Salma's wrists down on either side of the Mexican girl's head. Then she wiggled her hips down over Salma's belly and over her thrusting pubic bush onto her thighs, all the time lowering her torso onto Salma's. Finally her 44 Inch D-Cup honey-dew melons covered and smashed Salma's 40 Inch D-Cup cantaloupes. The two women struggles mightily, wet buxom torsos wiping a slime of blood, saliva and sweat back and forth. But Julie remained in control. A smile of pure malice on her face, Julie bared her teeth, and sank her ruthless bite deep into the soft flesh of the throat just below Salma's left ear! The Amazon's powerful jaws worked, dentally sharpened teeth slicing through tender flesh, closing in on the pulse of Salma's jugular vein! Salma's eyes bugged out in rage and fear and agony as she felt Julie's teeth close on the throbbing river of her life's blood. With a desperate heave, she rolled Julie off, and scrambled on top. To Julie's incredulous reaction, she mustered the strength to force Julie's wrist down on either side of her head! Julie bellowed like a gored bull, and bucked. Salma stayed on. Her big bosoms bouncing. Ride `em Cowgirl! Suddenly Salma scrambled off, sprinting to the flame belching peak of the volcano. Shaking Her head, Julie lumbered to her feet, and then pumping her arms, sprinted up after her. Both woman fought with their fists on the rim of the volcano. Unforgiving fists punched into pillow like bosoms and soft flat abdomens, Heads snapped back and forth from the force of the blows coming in from the left and the right and again from the left and the right! Blood pours from Julie's mouth, her face a MASK OF HATE, as she wrapped her strong fingers around Salma's throat and began shaking the smaller girl like a terrier shaking a goose it has by the neck! Salma grasped Julie's wrists and by sheer brute force, dragged the hands from her neck, Julie's claws leaving deep bloody furrows from the back of her neck by the spine, down the nape and over the tops of her plump breasts. Still holding those dangerous hands out from her, she dropped to her ass, pitching the Amazon over her head. Then both women, on their knees, faced each other and wrapped their arms around each other's heads and necks.... What followed was a violent series of wrenches as each woman in turn tried again and again to snap the other woman's spine! They literally leapt into the air from their knees each time one twisted the other's head, and the other tried to stop the rotation mid-twist. Again and again the two naked sweat and blood covered women wrenched and rocked back and forth. Suddenly a loud crack like the breaking if a two inch thick sapling echoed in the now silent darkness surrounding the flood lit peak. Salma just let go.... And Julie's body rolled like a log down the slope to the floor, limbs slapping like broken branches as she rolled. Salma struggled to her feet, and raised her arms over her head in the timeless celebration of the Victor! It was over. Neon was chanting "Oh, Man!" over and over. Frank was grinning at me as the room lights raised. Jennifer was gone, her chair empty. I had to piss, to get my head together. To just THINK. So I made my way to the Men's Room and made a Random Choice from the battery of empty stalls running the length of one wall. Staring down at my reflection in the yellow water in the toilet bowl my anus tightened to an *. Someone was standing outside my stall! I shuddered in the headache inducing fluorescent lighting in the bathroom. Holding my breath, I turned around and opened the stall door.... A five foot four, buxom Japanese girl in a thigh length black dress with a scoop neck line stood there with a handkerchief in her right hand. Her jet black ass length hair was tied back in a pony-tail, and her heavy chest melons were white as creme, and smelled softly of jasmine. "Hello, Sir, my name is Madoka," she said, "Would you like me to clean your Penis?" I just had time to blink and say: "Pardon me?" When she slapped the cloth over my nose and mouth, I tasted candy, and all was darkness............. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> CHAPTER #6 : Red Helmets Over Little Tokyo That should be about it, I thought to myself. I was leaning with my elbows on my knees, head hanging down, almost between them, looking at the way my pants had bunched up around my ankles. My shows were sticking out in the front of the crumpled heap of material. Somebody else's cigarette butt lay, scarlet lipstick around it's butt end, in front of my shoes. I lurched to my feet, yanking my pants up, belt flopping, and reeled as if thrown off a cliff into an abyss. I slumps to the right, toilet-paper roll canister driving painfully into the meat on the outside of my thigh. The little phone booth like space of the green toilet stall reared around me like a nightmare. What? Suddenly my mouth was full of rotten fruit and vegetables spit, and I began to gag! Squinting at the prison like ceiling light in it's steel cage I suddenly began shuddering from the frigid air-conditioning, and scrambled out of the stall into the bathroom, and gawked stupidly at the row of porcelain sinks. Every few minutes the urinal's would gush water. What? What was I... ...I vaguely remembered coming in here,... How long ago? I lurched forward, splashed water in my face, zipped up my trousers, and made for the door, feeling the seat of my pants because I noticed I had been sitting on the toilet with my pants down, but my boxer-shorts still pulled up..... Bang! I was halfway into the Central Concourse before I returned to awareness. The Casino seemed deserted, halls empty, glowering maids, silicone chest expanded courtesy cocktail waitresses and janitors leaned against columns having a smoke in peace. Even the Great Slot Machine Pits were only half full, old ladies and half-blind old men pulling at levers like machines themselves. Oh....... I get it. It must be tea-time, four o'clock, when the Big Event takes place in the Great Central Arena with the fake lakes and midget mountains and the cast of convicted thousands... Or at least several hundreds. Everyone had fled to Sports Bars, Hotel Room Entertainment Centers, or plush Viewing Theaters,.... Those who hadn't coughed up the $500.00 for a seat in the stands with the literally hundreds of thousands of Tourists and Fans. Sit, I got wasted and I missed it. I was going to see.... Then I began pulling myself together. Something must have HAPPENED to me. I had, I glanced at my watch, lost an hour and a half at least! Vertigo and nausea was kicking in with a vengeance, now. That's it. I am a kind of Spy, now. Someone must have drugged me and made me tell all I knew. But then, I was still alive. It didn't make sense. Why was I still alive? I had delivered the fight frenzy drug. The girl who it was tested on Kicked Butt in the Major League. All I had to do was go Home, report, and get another low-life styled job like this one was for Uncle Sugar. I tongued a console on the inside of a left rear molar, and got a beep from the transmitter in my middle ear. A pixel of light also flashed in the periphery of my vision. My implanted electronics seemed functioning. Too bad this diagnostic was the only trick I could get them to do. It's only in cheap shot to wrist screen sized action videos that Heros can play back what these systems record, do cut-and-paste, and all that. I had to go to a lab and be downloaded and reformatted like a dumb 1960s Russian Spy Satellite. Returning to a really ill version of Normal all I wanted was OUT! The halls seemed canyon-like as I made my way to a causeway leading out to the Beach. I felt like Virgil wandering the empty streets of Rome, loathing the Deathfights, but glad they were pulling all the smelly, noisy proletariate out of the City and into the Bleachers... Leaving the atmospheric streets still and moody for a Poet out taking a walk..... The sun was half way down the pure blue Pacific sky, cloudless, but cool, the heat of day had broken with a blue breeze, and a blue sea and a blue sky California was privileged to share with Hawaii rolled out forever and "So what?" repeated like a blue riff in my ear. I bought a beer from a girl who had to hoist the tray out from under the shadow of her mountainous tits, then tipped the bitch five bucks for the courtesy brew. Wouldn't you? It washed the bitter taste of being just who I was out of my mouth and I pulled my shoes and socks off, and walked across the sand out to the line of an endless series of glassy curls. So what? So, fucking what? The sand felt just like it was when I was ten years old and Page Military Academy bussed us out to Santa Monica Pier for a day at the Beach. Far out. Far out. Out in the breakers really big Mexican girls would be floating like manatees, laughing and waving at their skinny Mexican boyfriends up the beach to pull off their jeans and jump in. But those kids with their brave new mustaches and cigarette packs rolled up in a tee-shirt sleeve just laughed and waved back. I was just getting my first hard ons then, having been exposed to toilet blow jobs and the bigger guys calling us kid "Bitches", and I would wade out in the waves and swim with them, wondering why they wore tee-shirts over their black one piece Mexican Wrestling Women bathing suits. I guessed after awhile they were being modest about their immense bosoms. But, so what? They and their boy friends and their sweet picnics at the pier and the used rubbers and the cheap beer.... They're gone with peace, love, and cheap gasoline for their FINE rebuilt 1954 Chevies, and Black Beetle Studebakers, and here and now was, actually, all right. Cool foam washed my hillbilly floppy pale white feet, and cool foam washes away the Cosmic Frown, the wrinkle waking up too fast from a Nap put in Baby's Brow. Then I saw Her. No, it was a Different Her. But a Her, for Sure! Splashing naked in the surf, rolling over and over in waist high little waves that, in reality were too weak too really turn her over. Pale as my feet, but a LOT sweeter, freckled white bosoms lolling that begged to be squeezed. And as if I had said that and she had heard me, the Naked Lady got to her knees, and took a long soulful pull on her bottle of Champagne, auburn hair, cropped into a spikey mop that clung wetly to her head. Her pubic hair was auburn too. She was maybe thirty five, five foot four, a hundred and two, bird limbed, she was a voluptuous pixy with huge sad eyes and full laughing lips that.... "Hi!" I waved and waded out to her, water soaking my trousers to the calves. "May I join you?" "Did you know the only thing against the law in this Fuck Factory is fucking on the Beach?" "do you," she said offering me her bottle, which I waved away with an apologetic smile, "mind very much fucking a very drunk Lady?" She got to her feet, and stepped into my Personal Space like she had Furnished it her own damn self, she seemed so at Home, breast pointing into my ribs, making wet spots, a knee sliding between mine. "... By the way, my name's Rosanna,...." she peered up with clear cool eyes, "Can you say Rosanna?" "I say, Rosanna, why don't we go to my room and screw until dinner?" "Great." was all she said. And that's how I came to walk with a Naked Lady through the doors and halls and up the elevator to my room, feeling all they eyes on us, and liking being me for the first time in Modern History. I'm sure if a Hotel Manager had been paged, or a House Cop had seen us..... But none did. Only the incredulous,... And as we went into my room, I thought: So what? "No Glove, No Love", she mumbled as she climbed onto the coffee table in front of the window and began to dance. "I've got some in the bathroom." I explained, shrugging off the unmade bed and the sorry heap of cloths thrown over the chair. I had to PEE in the worst way. That's how I managed to shut the bathroom door behind me, leap to the toilet, kick up the lid, and drag out old faithful JUST as he started to gush. That's also how I managed to empty my bladder and finish a long, long sigh before glancing right as the girl in the tub full of bubble bath giggled and raised a tiny little pistol from the heaps of bubbles and pointed at me. She raised a slender finger to her bee-stung lips. Shhh.... Right! I put everything back and obediently waited as she stood up smiling a demented little smile, letting the concealing suds flow away from a breathtaking fleshy figure.... For such a tiny girl. She stood maybe 64 inches tall and weighed maybe 90 pounds, ugh, dripping wet.... My eye did it's automatic thing, and I gauged her to be a wonderful 34.7 D-Cup, with a 22 inch waist and a 33 inch waist. But what would have stopped my heart, if her little baby gun hadn't already stooped my heart, was her breasts. Frankly she had the most beautiful formed bosoms I had ever seen in my life..... And I've tried to see as many as humanly possible! She was milk in the form of a little Japanese girl. Her huge mass of raven black hair was tied up in a pony tail. To my horror I was getting an erection. It wasn't that I wasn't planning on getting an erection. It just wasn't THIS erection I was planning on getting! She covered her mouth in mock horror, then stepped out of the tub. I didn't warn her about getting water on the floor, because I figured she had already taken that into consideration. I don't know why the fact she was Oriental seemed to stand out in my thoughts. I never found Orientals particularly insidious. I was guns, like the one she pressed under my jaw I always found insidious. "Don't make a sound, Mr. Mark," A little girl voice said with surprising Authority. I didn't tell her she could call me Jack. "I am your bodyguard, but only as long as you obey," She plugged her tits into the wet spots on my shirt Rosanna's tits had made. Boy did I notice that! But I don't believe she was aware of what she was doing. "But you be Bad Boy, and I be your Assassin! Understand?" I nodded. I stepped back raising my hands and inter lacing my fingers so she wouldn't have to tell me to do it. She nodded Approval. Music was turned up in the bed room. Her eyes slid to the door and back to me. "Who are you?" I whispered hoarsely. "Natsuko." she turned me around and nodded to the door knob. " You go through first and walk to the wet bar and wait for me to finish with your girl friend, then we talk about things,..." "....she's Nobody," I whispered desperately, "I'll give her a hundred bucks and ask for a Rain Check, Okay?" "No deal, Mr. Mark, she unlucky girl. Tough." Natsuko stepped behind me and I felt the mussel lift the hair on the back of my head. Trembling, I took a breath, strode through the door into the Room,.... .....And saw Rosanna, buck naked aiming a 38 right at my chest, mouthing the word: DROP! I dropped to the carpet, as a bullet sliced through sudden thunder over my head,... and tore away half of the Japanese girl's right ear! Blood exploding from the side of her head, Natsuko, dropped to one knee and squeezed off three shots at Rosanna's torso, but Rosanna had vacated that space the split second before and rolled sideways behind the bed, firing through the bathroom wall and tattooing the wall and mirror inside with shocking holes,... But the tiny white body had flattened to the wet tiles and slid sideways, out of sight. Rosanna realized she had only two shots left, ( my revolver had been in the bed side drawer with the Gideon Bible and the Koran), and I knew too, how many bullets it held. In silent slow motion, she waved me to crawl to the room door, and stay down, which I did, as she tip toed to the place in the entrance hall where she judged the corner of the bathroom to be. I raised crossed fingers as she put the blue metal barrel of the gun to the level of a girl's head if she were squatting in the corner of the bathroom, behind the tub. She squeezed off a round, then instantly raised the gun to about Natsuko's chest level, and fired the last round. I sprang for my suitcase and a box of ammo but my right ankle was yanked up into the air by a bullet, sending me sprawling, watching helplessly as Natsuko twisted around the corner of the bathroom door, snapping the gun around to shoot Rosanna, who was hurtling, in vain, across the carpet at her! The trigger pulled.... But the chamber was empty! No, jammed! Rosanna was almost on her enemy when a second pull punched a nickel sized tunnel through her soft white right breast, lung and shoulder blade. I actually her the round make a tap as it buried itself in the door behind her. Rosanna waved her hands as if she were a Magician trying to cast a spell to make the Japanese Witch go away, but Natsuko emptied her pistol into the other girl's soft tummy, hot lead tearing through her tender female organs. The horribly injured girl dropped to her knees, and transferring the empty gun into her left hand, Natsuko pulled back her right arm as she lunged forward, to drive her fist so hard into the center of Rosanna's throat, it crushed her windpipe. Rosanna flopped sideways onto the carpet, legs thrashing, eyes open wide, rolling in incomprehension. Suddenly five black leather suited female figures burst into the room from the Hall outside, wearing head enclosing red helmets, and brandishing black stubby machine pistols. On a nod from Natsuko who had pulled an identical outfit out from under the bed and dressed in a flash, I was hustled into the muted light of the hall, looking once back at Rosanna's form, writhing weakly on the floor, before Natsuko snapped the door shut. We wordlessly raced to a service elevator that dropped the 200 stories down to the seventh parking sub level where I was unceremoniously thrown into a black delivery van, that, flanked by the six women on super-charged black motorcycles, pulled out into the dusk, and peeled off for the highway out of Sol City, and into the bone dry desert of Baja California. I sat in the empty cargo space, walled off from the driver, and tried to pull together all I had seen. The seventh girl, the one driving the van, had looked maddeningly familiar. Where had I seen her before? Natsuko had called her Madoka. And Madoka, had, as the van's sliding door had shut, had spoken a command to the van's autopilot I understood, but then didn't understand. She had spoken the universal CPU attention getting command and then a destination that didn't make sense. She said, turning back to the driving console: "Computer..... Little Tokyo!" <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> CHAPTER #7 : Cat Women from the Moon The silver bullet faced Bay Area Rapid Transit electric commuter train rocketed up out of the bowels of the earth, having passed under San Francisco Bay in a little under 30 seconds, and sped like lightning across downtown Oakland, up through the Bohemian District of Berkeley, into the Mile High, Taiwanese built, mirror glass tower the world called the Pacific Rim World Trade Center. No milk-run, this was the Yellow Sky Dragon Executive Express, shuttling Management Level Papa Sans from the privately owned Civilian Near Orbit Launch Space Facility on Alcatraz Island, where the old prison used to be, back to their U.S. branch offices from early morning meetings in Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and various orbital Semi-Robotic Industrial Facilities. None of the smug passengers and their nervous caucasian secretaries knew that two teenaged girls had ridden from the Space Pad through the tunnel ON TOP of the speeding train, staggering when possible, clinging like monkey babies when not, on the rubber sure-grip strip that ran the length of each segment of the train. The GAME was to emerge, one after the other, from the rear most car as the train picked up speed,... and before the train pulled to a stop at its destination, one girl must successfully cause the other to fall from the train! This youthful Sport was accompanied by much desperate wrestling, the shouted delivery of grievous insults, and the use of various weapons, such as switch-blades, spiked iron balls usually tied to and spun from the end of long braids, or the newly popular heavy gauge chains worn upon peaceful social occasions as belts. Skin tight black denim pants were de rigor, as were black lace brassieres worn boldly under open matador vests. Black boots, of course, Black leather gloves... Optional. Young Ladies of Independent Spirit referred to such intense interactions as SOCIALIZING. Natsuko was fifteen years old the first time she Socialized, in 1999. She recalled the Pacific Rim Tower had yet to have it's Grand Opening to the Public when the Powell Street Jezebels' leader had followed her onto the wind-tunnel gale atop the half-passed-the-hour Direct from Alcatraz to the Orient's West Coast stronghold. Sitting, naked on the pine planks that girdled the sauna, she intentionally entered a meditative state much like sleep, her soft white body massaged by billows of steam. She remembered being a girl.... Across miles of desert, another much changed female also remembered being a girl. But she had not merely grown up, she had become Changed. More than a Woman, more than a Machine, more than a Combination of the Two, Jennifer Five emerged silently from a secret elevator hidden behind a wall-panel and stepped into the muted hush and pastel colors of the hotel corridor. The door panel snapped shut, and she stood like an antennae, fingers outspread at her sides, eyes wide, yet her face was as placid as a Buddha sitting in a temple garden. Twenty four months intensive physical training masked as preparation for an Action Film that never seemed to go before the cameras had transformed her from an aerobically healthy actress in her middle twenties into a vehicle that could preform equally as well as paramilitary commando or olympic athlete. In retrospect, this New Woman would be Jennifer Two. Doing small parts in films gave her the pretext to go around the world. She didn't actually start referring to versions of her upgrade path numerically until the genetic level modification of her hormone system at a nucleic level produced a super enhancement of her senses and rendered her as much a product of the laboratory as of her own lovely biological heritage. Genetic modification became known as Jennifer Three. Mechanical replacement and bracing or augmentation of her skeletal structure with hypo-allogenic super plastics with the strength of steel transformed her into Jennifer Four. Now, only three hours old, Jennifer Five looked with all her senses in the hall outside Room 316, her brand new sponge-matrix super-cortical implant translating the biological and electronic sensor inputs spanning the electromagnetic spectrum from earthquake waves up through x-rays into forms her brain could process intelligibly. Outwardly Jennifer was a drop dead gorgeous woman of twenty five, wearing a low cot deep emerald green evening dress that was figure hugging to the knees, then flared out in green lace skirts that fell in layers around her lovely ankles. From the waist up, the dress seemed to serve only one function: support her massive, largely exposed bust! Her shoulder length dark straight chestnut hair was piled high tonight, which helped conceal the tangerine sized swelling that now rose from her skull where the plates of bone knit together on the top of her skull. Inwardly Jennifer Five saw the trail of blood spots running from the door down the hall to a service elevator. A CAD reconstruction of the probable scenario played in the periphery of her vision, built up from analyzing the direction of the blood spot's spray, with selected wavelength light scans of the carpet which revealed in the residual compression of imprints into the shag carpet the footprints of four small bodied females, the larger male, and a scout and yet a possible sixth female covering their backs. The outline of a shoe with every step, suggested a foot wound. He had hopped at a run. Probably at gun point. Jennifer could smell the chemical signature of two weapons, but the distribution of chemical odors told her the gunfight had taken place behind the closed apartment door, and had taken place no more than fifteen minutes previously. She also cataloged the odor of all seven individuals, processed them for emotional spectra, and cross-correlated them with the perfumes the women were wearing, the prices of those perfumes, and the socio-economic as well as racial groups those perfumes were associated with. Commercial clothing plastics and leather revealed themselves to her nose. High estrogen levels associated with youthful females, two of whom were menstruating also suggested to her that her target had been abducted by a wolverine-pack of females in their late teens, blood types suggesting asian origin. Yes, folks, blood types could be derived from the break down of the various salts and chemicals in their perspiration! Each race's sweat decayed with a distinctive signature! Secretly Jennifer Five perceived her perceptions as a clock-work of scientific analysis that sailed like a ship on the rolling waves of what had used to be her emotions and personal reactions. As if the strata of her personality consisted of Five Jennifers, she experienced these as meshing like gears, but retaining discrete autonomous qualities. One part of her knew that her target had forged a stupid irrational attachment to her, a boy like crush for a girl seen across the room. Jennifer One smiled at this, while Jennifer Two pushed with all her will to make her new dimensions work together, to please... Who? Daddy? No. A Lover? No. Duty? Well.... Jennifer Three heard an incredibly faint heart beat that Jennifer Four had successfully filtered out from the overpowering background noise for Jennifer Five to identify as a person very close to death! Jennifer place her fingertips against the slot for the card key and channelled a pulsed electric current into the door. A part of her brain parsed the pulses in combinations of thirty four until, thousands of combinations, and milli-seconds later, the right sequence unlocked the door. Inside Rosanna lay in a pool of practically all of her blood, eyes open, unseeing. Closing the door behind her, Jennifer went to the mortally wounded girl and began to move faster than the ordinary eye could see.... Cop one stood beside my window on the driver's side, the barrel of his 45 mag pressed against the nape of my neck and angled downward so as to take out my heart and not shoot his buddy standing next to the passenger side window of my `99 Lexis Futuro. His buddy was sweeping his flashlight's beam back and forth through the front and back seats of my sweet little sedan as he were a guard tower and my car was a prison yard. Trucks roared by and they didn't flinch. I flinched. The rainbow rack on their skunk car turned the inside of my car into an acid Disco. It gave me a headache. I knew they wouldn't have any aspirin. Even though I was sure they couldn't search my trunk, like good boys every where, when stopped by the cops, I dutifully got all upset. I knew they liked it that way. They knew I wanted to be a good boy. They smirked as they terrorized me. We were all the best of Pals! Cop three leisurely walked back to the car, studying his clip-board computer screen. He paused to take in the raw beauty of the purple dusk, and already neon lit Hollywood Hills view of the Valley. "Mr. Mark." He spoke gravely. I tried to cringe with respect. "According to my read out the Supreme Court ruled today that it took only three matches of profile fitting Primary datum with 80% percent association backed up with three more Secondary datum with 60% or better correlation with Convicted Criminal Profile association to constitute justification for an Officer Initiated Search,... Do you understand what I'm saying?" I sure as hell did. I knew for a fact that a rented car was driven by well over 60% of individuals who when arrested, went on to be convicted of a crime. But hell, everybody rents, so fuck it. I was between 25 and 35, and currently unemployed, so that's another secondary. I was presently intoxicated above the legal limit, so, I' give them that Secondary. But the killer was the drop in Primaries from six to three. I had a copy of a text book on brain function enhancing bio-chemicals, which alone is innocent enough, but my car computer was protected by my own encryption schemes, not Government Issued and NASA crackable ones, so while their search couldn't legally open my hard drive, they could open the trunk with just one more datum matching a Likely Criminal Profile. I had thrown my hard copy print out of Black Bag, a hacker's Journal or of Norway on the floor on the passenger side. But Cop Two had seen it and grinned at me, as if to say: "How STUPID can you be, printing out that wire-head smut!" Right now I agreed with him wholeheartedly. Cop One had thought it took six Primaries to warrant a search but Cop Three, who followed the Supreme Court like horse-races wanted to double check the Common Wisdom. I wanted to urinate so much, it hurt like a knife. Cop One had said then: "Would you unlock the trunk and step out of the car please?" I sighed and complied, as they cuffed and shackled me, covered my head so I wouldn't suffer a painful bump, and sat me in the back of their car while they fetched my true set of I.D.s out of the trunk. Ones with the links to my criminal record unwiped from the hard drive on my driver's license. Cop Two looked in at me, and in a not unfriendly tone said: "Well, hell, we've got us a People's Hero." I smiled bravely and they took me away from my family, my friends, my room, my books, my computers, my cat and everything I ever knew and loved. They took me away and I would never go home again. I lay in utter darkness, right foot throbbing. I was in Prison. I am in Prison. I and I will be in Prison until I die. Like Janis said in a long forgotten song: " and I cry like a baby...." Natsuko poured beer from a silver urn onto the coals and was washed in steam. She took it into her lungs and exhaled, eyes flickering. She walked naked back to her seat on the highest bench in the sauna, and a red painted nail flickered along the cruel raw red tea saucer sized arc cut by Rosanna's bullet out of the perfect shell of her ear. She let the pain carry her back to San Francisco in `99 when she had made her bones on the roof of a bullet train between Alcatraz Island and the Pacific Rim Mile High Tower in Berkeley Heights. Shinobu had emerged from over the rear of the last car and crawled onto the roof, a graceful limbed but solidly built mid-sized girl, an inch shorter but heavier in the bust than Natsuko. Like Natsuko she wore black Dojo Slippers, black skin-tight jeans, but instead of a black lace bra her heavy bosoms rode jutting out proudly from her matador jacket. Natsuko waited on her right knee, left foot planted firmly in the sure- grip matting on the roof of the car middle most in the train. As the train got up to full furious speed, Shinobu stopped two meters from Natsuko and dropped to her right knee, right elbow on her knee, empty hand out, palm up, as was Natsuko's. As The train descended on it's track into the tunnel under the bay, plunging the girl's into darkness, they exchanged the traditional pre-fight greeting. "I am Shinobu, daughter of the Jezebels. I wear the brand of the blue tree spider on my right shoulder, as flag of my fidelity to my Sisters. I first killed defending my Sister's Honor. I honor you by allowing you to challenge my right to lead my Sisters. If you kill me, honor this honor by never dishonoring the Jezebels!" "I am Natsuko, born on the Home Island, I wear the black catgut headband of the Tokyo Subway Futensaku Banshees, daughters of the Meteoric Iron Yasuka. I am honored you have accepted my challenge. I will be honored to kill you!" Just the train plunged into darkness and the two girls crawled with great danger and difficulty towards one another. Every second a maintenance light in the roof of the tunnel flashed like lightning, making a flash-bulb snap-shot of incredible fighting, flashing on nasty blue steel razor sharp blades, faces caught in masks of ancient celestial war goddesses, limbs like swastikas. A snap shot of lunge. Feint and parry. A snap shot of jet black hair lashed bone white faces. A snap-shot of jagged zig-zags of red-black rivulets wet on arms and torsos. A snap-shot of an insane leap! A snap shot of figures spinning apart from a vortex of the unfurled banners of shocking arterial sprays. A snap-shot of one girl crawling onto the other..... Thrashing. Bucking. Howls carried away like kites in the Cyclone Roar! Then one slumped onto the other as the train erupted like silver lava into the blinding Daylight! Natsuko still wore a headband made of a strip of Shinobu's milk white skin on ceremonial occasions with the Jezebels. She descended into a deeper, imageless stillness, where memories fell slowly like petals from plum blossoms onto placid streams. There Pure Lands floated like wreaths on the waters, and beauties played lutes on grass as green as jade and as soft as the father's embrace of his sleeping daughter.... <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> CHAPTER # 8 : Queen Bees Battle ! The lights snapped on in my prison cell with such violence I wet my pants. Not a lot. But a fifty cent sized damp spot appeared on the fabric about fourteen inches down my left pant leg where my penis came to an end. I was horrified to see, sitting on a bench that ran along the far wall, Drew was looking at it too! Her powder blue eyes snapped away and she ran a nervous hand through her mop of bleached blond hair. She was definitely the whitest white girl I had ever met. She was wearing white cotton panties with little pink roses printed on them. Her breasts weren't huge,.... But really nice. I bet they were warm like muffins and safe to snuggle. She saw me looking at her and she asked "Hey,...you got any cigarettes?" hopefully. "Sorry", I said swinging my legs off the bench. My head was starting to throb like a Mother, "I don't smoke." Her mouth tightened into an impression of an anus,... I guess a nicer metaphor would be bee-stung lips, before she looked away, Utterly Miserable. Suddenly I remembered the nightmare of memories that had welled up in the pitched darkness, memories of my arrest in Hollywood, my Trial,... A lynching fueled by Justice Department leaks to the Press about how my Encryption Routines allowed gangs like the Russian Mob and the Chinese Triads to burgle America with impunity. I remembered my last glimpse of Rossana laying apparently dead on the carpet of my hotel room, the drugged horror of my kidnapping, and the terror of the darkness that began in the back of the van... And I covered my face and wept. The trademark of Hell is that it won't stop when you want it to... I wept with all my might. "You okay, Mister," Drew asked, my tears making her tears flow too. I'd seen her fight gamely in a Boxing Match just yesterday. She had gone into the ring knowing she was intended to lose. She lost of course, but won a lotta hearts. "You cried all night" She was here all night? Then I remembered. I had come to in a total darkout. "Yeah,..." I pulled myself together, "Why have they got you?" "I fucked up, and slapped one of the Bosses,... You saw me Box that canoli?" I nodded, "Well a delegation of Japanese sales reps for the company that has the toilet seat cover concession over at the Coliseum- 2000 bought me as a Party Favor from the California Department of Corrections. They bought out the Contract for my whole 18 month stretch, with first refusal for my 24 month Parole." She picked at a pimple I couldn't see but knew was blooming on the side of her mouth. She looked Utterly Bored. She looked over to me with a half stab at a Come Hither look. "Wanna ball?" "Gotta Mit?" I was a Safety First Boy Scout kinda guy. She shook her head and slumped, knees wide apart, totally disgusted. "Drew?" I said. She looked at me. "Your Posture." Her eyes hissed at me, but she waddled her hips back, straightening up. "Drew..." She studiously studied a booger under a fingernail, "Where the fuck are we?" " The Shoplifter's Holding Tank behind the Manager's Office in the Little Tokyo Mall." I was being held prisoner in a secured room off the vegetable section of a super market? "This whole Mall is a Japanese-and- their-Guests-Only deal the Japs built to service the Managers they brought over here to Baja California to run the Docks they built for Sol City. We're the only Gajaans in the whole fucking place. They got a Japs Only Sears, a Japs only Gap a Japs Only Tower Records, a Japs Only... Everything. It's like one morning Santa Monica woke up and everybody was Japanese,.... Or their fucking Chinese Gangs for Hire! " Drew rolled her eyes. Life Sucked. Great! I gingerly tested my bandaged foot. Someone had done a good job on the gunshot. Obviously it was cleaned, the bullet removed and a pain killer implanted. I could just about.... CLICK. Both Drew and I comically jumped and stared at the door. Buxom, black leather motor cycle jumpsuit, black snub nose machine pistol, Bone White Madoka strode in announcing: "New Prizner, nobuh-ee moov or I'rr zoot!" She stood aside as a stark naked five foot two, freckled and baby faced white girl in her mid twenties with huge heaps of strawberry blond hair grimly plodded in , then came to a sudden halt, spotting Drew, face contorting in fury. Drew came off the bench like a rocket, screeching: "Linda you cu...." But halfway through the word "cunt" Linda's bare white knuckles caught Drew on the jaw, snapping it comically sideways to the right. Madaoka swung the machine pistol around, but I came off the bench too, and fired a field goal kick sideways into Madoka's waist, bowling her into the white tile wall, causing bullets to stitch a path across the wall and ceiling, blowing out the double row of fluorescent tubes. Both girls had their hands buried deep in the hair on either side of their enemy's head, and were yanking lustily, jerking their upper bodies left and right. I, desperate, threw my body onto Madoka as she struggled to regain her balance. Madoka and I pitched into the trash barrel, twisting, me grabbing her shoulders as we fell to the floor, Madoka on top. Madoka had re-established control of her grip on the gun, but as we hit the floor, the barrel, which had been knocked sideways, tipped backwards, balanced on a rim, caught against the wall, driving the upper rim of the barrel square into Madoka's fore head, which split horribly open, skin peeling back from her eyebrows to her hairline like a kicked throw rug, blood gushing as her eyes rolled up into their sockets! I rolled the unconscious girl off only to find myself pinned down by furiously battling Hellcats! .... And saw the door had been knocked shut,...fuck! Drew had whirled her tormentor about, and drove the palms of her hands into Linda's shoulders, pushing her, face first into the wall. Linda shoved off backwards, blood streaming from her nostrils, and both girls staggered backwards on bare feet, cussing and grimacing. I got to my feet and tested the door. No joy. "I'll fucking KILL YOU!" Linda screamed and clutched at Drew's slender white neck. Drew competently crossed her arms at her wrists and thrust upwards, knocking Linda's wriggling fingers away, while stepping inward, driving her left knee up between her attacker's thighs, into her exposed crotch. Linda squealed, "no FAIR!" and went into a clinch with Drew. Both girls traded flurries of sincere looking punches to each others naked ribs. I searched the ceiling for the tell-tail dimple of a video- camera, while the two fighting girls, legs tangled, collapsed into a writhing heap on the floor, rolling over and over. Finally I spotted it and waved my arms. "Hey!" I yelled, "Send somebody before someone gets killed in here!" Linda had straddled Drew and was extrvagantly throttling her, Drew's head boobbing like it were coming off, her eyes bugged out, naked legs thrashing! I manfully pulled Linda off before she could kill the tossled blond, but Drew sprang instantly to her feet and delivered two mean spirited blows to Linda's eyes before I could let go of her elbows so she could defend herself. "Help!" I yelled at the spy camera, "Break this up before they kill each other!" I waved my arms some more for effect. Drew and Linda were engaged in a wild hair pulling match again, their tits flopping wildly, bare feet dancing. Both cute girl's noses were bloody, and Linda's right eye was beginning to swell closed. As unobtrusively as possible I rolled the unconscious Madoka over onto her machine pistol with the tip of my foot while waving some more at the camera for effect. Now the fighting Queen's of B-Movies were gasping for air, flanks wet with sweat. They couldn't last long now! Hurry! Just then the door burst open and Reiko amd Mari stormed in, Reiko pushing me back to the wall with her machine pistol, Reiko striding over to the heap of sobbing and struggling girls. I can't imagine where they had to come from, because Reiko was wearing a blue denim waist skirt and mini-bra, her hair piled up on her head. She could have been shopping for a picnic at the beach, I guess. But Mari was encased in a shiney black vinel dominatrix outfit that went from neck to crotch, with black vinal knee boots and elbow length gloves! Suddenly, as Reiko leaned over to shout orders at the girls at her feet, both rolled onto their backs, and, feet together, kicked upward into Reiko's torso, as if on cue! Reiko drooped her gun, staggering backwards. As Mari turned to face them I grabbed her gun and kicked the weapon under Madoka over to Drew, who snatched it up as Mari and I struggled for her gun. A deafening rattle of machine gun fire echoed as Drew emptied her clip into Mari, punching a line of holes in her black vinyl belly and breasts that immediately gushed blood as if fifteen faucets had all been turned on at the same moment. As Mari slumped dead onto the unconscious Madoka, Linda and Reiko became engaged in a For- Real deathfight. It was a horribly one sided affair as Reiko's attack cut through Linda's defensive boxing stance like a chain saw through a wicker chair. A wheel kick from the left, snapped the baby faced American girl sideways from the waist up, then Reiko dropped into a crouch and did a leg sweep from the right, bowling Linda over! But Drew stumbled over her fallen friend with the trash barrel raised over her head to smash it down on pretty Reiko's skull. Reiko, smirking, stepped into Drew's advance as the trash can fell behind her shoulders, it's lid popping off, spewing garbage, and stamped first on Drew's right, then Drew's left foot.... As Drew dropped, shrieking, to the floor, the asian girl brought her fists together onto both of the blond's temples, concussing her brains. Reiko stepped back, raising her foot to stamp Linda in the naked belly, but Linda grabbed the Oriental girl's ankle and heaved UP! Reiko dropped onto HER ass, cussing a blue streak, as Drew, on her butt, kicked the falling gang-girl away. Reiko rolled, and sprang to her feet, ready to face the two white girls, just as Linda swung the trash can lid with all her might in a whack to Reiko's skull that crossed her almond eyes, and had her weaving backward mumbling. But to everyone's surprise, Madoka shook her head and sat up, pushing out her feet, just in time for Reiko to topple backward over her legs. As the two gang-girls took a few seconds to sort themselves out, I grabbed Drew and Linda and hopped through the door into the hall, and supporting my weight on their bare shoulders, I kicked backward with my good foot, slamming it shut. The door CLICKed satisfyingly! We were FREE! Sort of. We stood shivering in the dark hall connecting the stock room with it's shuttered loading bays and the produce department of the supermarket. Beyond translucent strips of plastic hanging like a gate in the door, diminutive shoppers pushed carts full of cereal boxes, six packs of sodas, packages of hot dogs, frozen TV dinners and fresh fruits and vegetables through the aisles as if this WERE in Santa Monica, not the Middle of the desert, and they weren't all orientals, but the standard L.A. Rainbow Mix of housewives, hurrying to get home to their Soap Operas. That split second pause froze time, the two naked girls hugging and bird-peck kissing each other's lips, tears streaming, me hopping fee on one foot wondering why whoever was minding the moniters in the Security Office didn't unlock the door, so two pissed off gang girls could come roaring out to do us in for lumps and a loss of face. To my utter amazement, Drew smiled apologetically as Linda grabbed a mop and swiped me behind the knees, which buckled my legs. Then Drew slapped her palm on a fire alarm on the wall by the time clock, setting off the alarms. I just sat, back aching horribly, on the linoleum, as they fled into the light beyond. I could see them dissapear, dodging startled women, who seemed both nonplussed and confused. Within moments uniformed Security Guard surrounded me, guns drawn, admonishing me for a whole list of god knows what in Japanese. One used a card to open the holding tank door, and between his legs I could see Reiko and Madoka laying on their backs on the floor, blood running from their chests, pooling on the floor. One guard fetched the machine pistols they had used to kill each other in what was apparently a suiside pact. I guess being called on the carpet and getting a lecture was worse in their eyes then death. I sat, aching and dejected, alive , but unhappy at being the distraction allowing Drew and what was apparantly a girlfriend make good a get a way. Soon the bored guards were smoking and swapping lies. Probably talking down the dead women. I felt bad about everything just then, but felt much worse when a loading bay opened, and I was loaded into the back seat of a black stretch limosene, for a ride back to Sol City with Blank Frank, my supposed "mission control", sipping a martini, and twisting a wet curl of hair on the back of the head of a youngish boy slut laying with his head in Franks lap. Frank shook his Patrition raiser-cut cranium in disgust. "None of all this was really neccessary" was written in his eyes. At a stop light just before an on ramp to the freeway back to the Beach, he dismissed the boy to sit up front with the driver and turned to deal with me. "Talk to me, Frank, you could just kill me, but you don't. I'm easy to confuse. I'm nobody... You could tell me ANYTHING, but why.." He shooshed me with a white hand, and concidered the view. Hot and Dry. Checked his Rolex: 9:00 am. It was then I realized Frank wasn't gay in any conventional sense. He mounted Men to demonstrate to them that he was the Man, the one who does the "Mounting". Unmanning a man made him a Man. Inversely, his refusal to sleep with the droves of women who pursued him all the more fiercely because he never moved on the bait they showed him, was his way of "un Womaning" them. Mac was in very real sense...inverted. As Neon had said: "..the guy's a walking fucking upside down Pentagram!" "You have some secrets left, Mr. Mark." He turned his head to smile for me. He was being Compassionate. He flipped open an old fashioned file, and read scripture: " Only Son of Ted Mark and Elisabeth Page,... smart but stupid, young but on the edge of his own Grave..." How Wise Frank was, with his own Secret Blend of smarmy ad-copy salesman and Old School Tie British MOP at the Club. "What have you and the Negro discussed?" I smiled back at the husk sipping a drink across from me, and choked down my unholy fear. I answered: "You." <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> CHAPTER #9 : The Ladies Room/...and all you ever suspected went on there. Frank's lantern jaw dropped. The Girl Guard stopped jabbing my kidneys with her machine pistol. Hey, I was thunderstruck too.... The Television "Wall Screen" over the receptionists's desk was filled with a scene both deceptively normal, yet completely Wrong! The deck of the yacht, Samurai Nun, Universal Export's seagoing regional office, rocked gently in it's berth in the Arena Marina, the blue Pacific's rocking in the surrounding main deck window. On the screen a scene took place that seemed equal portions 1.) A girl Visiting her Sick Friend in the Hospital, 2.) Blood Donation for the Red Cross, and 3.) Madame Frankenstein. Jennifer, stripped to the waist, her white silk blouse down around her waist, her heavy breasts barely restrained by a black lace bra, long athletic legs crosses high, showing a lot of thigh below the black mini-skirt, sat reading a Cosmopolitan while a decorous black girl in a white smock chatted, laughing, tying Jennifer's long, straight brunette hair into Jamaican Rastafarian braids. Jennifer and her hairdresser were placed between two hospital beds. Both of Jennifer's inner arms were linked by vein needles and copious tubing running to her left, to needles placed in Rosanna's right inner-arm, and left inner-thigh. And behind the hospital bed, a heap of electronic equipment was stacked unceremoniously on a folding chair, two hordes of colored cables connected to a skull harness tacked to Rosanna's cranium with scary knitting needle length bone screws. A second set of cables and blood tubes connected Jennifer to a vague female figure in a second hospital bed on Jennifer's right side. A decadent looking Japanese woman, voluptuous in a black knit wool mini- skirt and long sleeve sweater emerged from the "Manager's Office", her red-rimmed eyes wry with concern. I noticed a tell-tale sniffle. Her name tag read: Kahori. She tapped at a clip-board computer in her fingers, and bumped Frank's shoulder with hers. "Jennifer's gone to Level Eight." "Impossible!" Frank hissed. The screen filled with Cindy Crawford's famous face, CNN logo in the lower right corner of the screen. "The World was as shocked as Hospital Personnel this morning when and unidentified American woman in her mid twenties entered a Sol California Emergency Clinic today with a desperately injured woman she called Rosanna. Staff has told CNN that she assembled this equipment from the brain surgery after preforming drastic and life saving open chest cavity procedures herself in the emergency room. Now, as you can see behind me, an completely unheralded and unheard of procedure is taking place,... For an explanation, I turn you over to Dr. Yasmine Wu, Chief Medical Officer at this Clinic., Madame Doctor Wu, what can you tell us?" The camera wheeled back to include a medium height, rather obviously muscled woman in her early fifties, scowling through her glasses at a stack of print outs. Without looking up she began to talk, as if to the stethoscope hanging from her neck... " That woman is cycling blood from the injured woman to the Blank." " A `Blank', Madame Dr. Wu?" Cindy chirped. "Oh, sweet Christ", Frank breathed as Kahori nodded. Blanks, also called "plugs" were vat cultured human bodies grown for replacement organs and body parts. Their cortical brain matter was retarded by chemicals, so that the Supreme Court wouldn't try to extend Civil Rights to them. Here we saw blood flowing from Rosanna to a Blank via Jennifer's blood stream where it was obviously being mingled with the blank's blood, and the mix of original Rosanna blood and modified Blank blood being passed into the blank where it was communicating on a genetic level with every tissue cell in the Blank. How Jessica was managing all this, whether some kind of Super Yoga or Mind Control was involved or not was a mystery. A Mona Lisa smile played on Jennifer's lips. I stopped being so afraid. I stopped thinking just of myself. The same sweet half smile that loosened my emotional chains seemed to infuriate Frank. His face was purple! "And you see those wires Miss Crawford?" Cindy nodded astutely. "I think our Girlfriend is copying dying woman's brain patterns to the blank. You know what I think. I think if we pop that blank's cranium, we see a newly full grown brain, intact and buzzing... And you know what else I think?" A camera zoomed into the face of the blank, a sleeping, peaceful face. But the albino hair was already blushing reddish, and the lips were swelling to a familiar oh so kissable smirk. "I think our Girlfriend isn't really a people like you and me...." "She's AWOL.... Out of Fucking Control. She took conscious control of her CPU implants," Frank snapped. "Level Six." Kahori mouthed. "And she can now apparently direct cellular level enzyme, hormonal, and perhaps even genetic modifications...." "Level Seven..." Frank cursed softly, "And if your guess is correct,... Level Eight." Kahori seemed freed herself, seeing the American Girl, giggling and bantering with the black girl. Two reasons God put a sun and moon in the sky over the earth. Silly Chatter as if nothing mattered. It was sunny day, and the cafeteria has shrimp salad tangy with lemon for lunch. Kahori knew she was seeing the end of her Game. Her eyes slid sideways to Frank,.... Frank didn't allow those kind of thoughts to exist in HIS Cosmos. She had noticed that the headset on Rosanna's head wasn't matched by a mate on the Blank. Yet already the REM was flickering it's eyelids. Memories, and even dreams were rising like fish to the surface of a pond in there. Direct Conversation. Level Nine. Jennifer was sitting on Level Nine, reading about tricks to play on your boyfriend in bed, swapping confidences, and flying like an hawk, high and solitary, in the sky above a crowded and very profane City. An Alien Intelligence, distant but not cold, watching the Earth as Martians might, through great telescopes. Not longing, simply curious. Cirrus at dusk. A girl. Jennifer Nine. The black man Jack Mark called Neon sat sweltering in the front seat of a red 1963 Lotus scanning the parking lot of the Little Tokyo Mall for his two little truants. Squinting from the glare, his new gypsy maned Bride, Salma, panted like a lioness on the African savannah, her blouse tied between her massive, and sweat drenched bosoms. Her skin tight blue jeans breathed better than leather, but oh, this weather! Both leaned forward in concert as they spotted two naked girls fleeing the hot pursuit of four Mexican and two oriental police. The comedic chase zig zagged between cars pulling out, lanes, and around islands of shopping carts. The blond Drew was screaming "My feet are on fucking fire!" as the case took them in the general direction of the Lotus. "So run faster!" Linda, the buxom brunette screamed as her hip painfully sideswiped a door handle..... "The Security Squad called the local Cops on this one!" Neon raised his eyebrows in surprise. "Our Double-Agent pal Frank must be pissing his pants word about the second snatch might get back from those girls to the C.I.A.." "Yeah," Salma agreed, "If the Feds connect him to the Yasuka Babes, they'll know he was behind the first Opposition grab." She popped open her door the very same moment Neon did, "Poor Jack.... You pin down the heat, I'll fetch our babydolls......" Drew, gasping for air, daggers of agony stabbing her lungs through her ribs, scrambled onto a furnace hot hood to escaped being grabbed by the two husky Malaysian security guards, and immediately howled in ever higher pitches of shrill pain from the molten hot hood. She felt two strong hands pull her down, as Linda disappeared behind a RV, eluding the four City Cops, who now were peering under car bodies, and waving their stun sticks like flashlights. She tried stamping back on her captor's feet, but the steel toed boots defied her. She was thrown painfully onto the asphalt, wrists already lashed. One woman grappled with her thrashing legs, while the other covered her with a stun stick, laughing at the indignity Drew was experiencing, trading crude remarks with her partner about Drew's gaping sex, as they rolled her onto her belly. BLAM! The sound of Neon's shotgun echoed above the roar of traffic, causing everybody to drop their groceries and bags and hit the ground, glancing around, wide-eyed in fear. Both guards had thrown themselves on Drew, fearing she was the target. Drew's eyes bulged, she was being crushed by the well meaning guards! Suddenly the weight lifted. Drew looked up to see a Mexican Amazon Goddess pitch one guard across a Lexis Minivan hood so hard, she rolled onto the roof of the Honda roaster next to it before dropping between two cars. The other Malaysian guard tackled Salma around the waist, carrying them completely over the stunned blond, onto the street. They rolled apart and closed, swinging their fists. Both women shuddered from the impact of the blows they traded, sweating and gasping in the hot sun. Both held back, taking the measure of the other woman. "Fuck it, she can box!" Salma said to herself, but the other woman read that in her eyes and grinned, before dancing forward with a flurry of meaningless punches at her head that concealed two or three well placed real slugs to her left breast and jaw. These carried the Malaysian woman's full weight, and had Salma dancing back, fists raised in front of her face as she shook her head to clear it. Salma ducked and weaved but the bitch was ahead of her, ducking and weaving like an echo, smirking. Then, boom, boom, boom, Salma was clobbered by a combination. Salma leapt back so she could us a kick but the guard blocked both it and the reverse kick follow up. "Are you gonna Lick me or keep licking me," The Malaysian Girl taunted. Salma streaked forward, threw herself onto the ground, rolling under the girl's arms, and snapped her calves around the Guard's ankles, bringing her down! OOF! BOOM! Neon's gun roared again, causing the Malaysian girl to wince just long enough as she got to her feet, that Salma was up first, and land two brutal left and right combinations to her head, then as she fell back against a car, Salma leapt into the air, delivering a knock out heel kick to the center of her forehead. Drew's shout caused her to turn around just in time to take a punch to the mouth! She grappled with the smaller of the two Malaysian guards, cussing, blood running from her lips. And SHIT, the four Mexican Cops were running up to the rescue! BOOM! Just enough of a distraction that Salma was able to deck the feisty guard with and uppercut, and charge into the oncoming line of female mexican police. All four woman sought to encircle Salma, but Salma moved quickly, using their lack of co-ordination against them, kicking the closest in the belly, throwing on into the other, then, using a judo move, grabbed the fourth by the lapels, twisted around, dropping to a crouch, so the astonished cop flew over her head and into a light post. The girl she had kicked leapt onto her back, yanking a night-stick backwards, snapping her head back, crushing her throat. The other two women waded in with their fists, actually getting into each other's way as they cruelly pummeled her breast melons and bare wet tummy! BOOM! This time nobody flinched or looked up! Salma, grabbing both ends of the night-stick choking her, hoisted her hips up. Lashing out with her feet, she was lucky! Her two attackers went down clutching their necks, gasping. Then Salma was able to drop to her knees, pitching the cop that had been behind her back, into the pile of her fallen comrades. Grabbing Drew by the wet hair on her head, the furious Mexican Amazon dragged her through two rows of cars where Neon pulled up in the Lotus. Drew yowled as she was rudely pushed into the little trunk. Then Neon drove up one aisle and down another before Linda stepped sheepishly out to join her pal in the cramped trunk. Neon lost no time in getting onto the freeway, and heading back to the City on the Coast. Six hours later both girls stood, showered and bikinied before Neon who waited at his desk for Salma to return to his Inner Office. No one spoke. The air conditioning seemed set to 60 degrees. The muzak was 1980's commercial jingles turned into pop songs, as was the current fashion. It was Heavenly! Salma, showered, but dressed in clean versions of what she had worn before, slipped in. "We just got the FAX. The Holding Company we sold their contracts to has accepted our settlement offer. Drew and Linda are ours again." Neon blinked and sighed. "We're sorry, Mr. Grier,...." Linda spoke up. Neon waved the explanation away, then walked to the window, and looked out,.... The pastoral view of wind rustling the wild grasses growing around a mid-evil Moslem border-Temple wasn't real. It was a video loop in a CD Rom. His relief, however was real. "You could have got killed," He gave them a stern look, "You could have displeased a Customer!", he winked at Salma, "...but the EndUser that hire the Holding Company to buy your Contracts was a Dirty Bird." He pecked at his phones battery of buttons. "A very Dirty Bird." "What do we do?" Salma asked. "With them?" Mr. Grier, Chief of the Sol City NSA filed office, otherwise known as `Neon' to our Hero, smiled as they tightened their tummies in anticipation. "We put the on Party Duty..." Their grins could have lit up a stadium the size of the Arena. "But we've got to find Mr. Mark. We don't really owe him, he's not one of ours, but his captor, Mr. Frank Bland, is." He looked at the visibly relieved girls, "Any suggestions, Ladies?" "....well, Mr. Bland", Drew piped up, "Told his Boss Witch Natsuko to get back to the Boat..." "The Marina!" Salma and Neon said together. I had been taken to Kahori's "office" which Frank referred to as The Ladies Room. I was strapped into a combination Dentists Chair and Gyn Exam Chair that obviously went to prove there was enough demand for torture chairs for them to be specially designed and manufactured. The room was circular, barely large enough to walk around, and rocked with the boat. I had been fed dinner hours ago, and left alone to "Stew in my own juices" as Frank had charmingly put it. I wondered if Rosanna knew how much I wished.... Wished..... Now it was 3:00 am, the hour most people who die in their sleep die. The Low Ebb. But Rosanna awoke, refreshed, without pain. How could this be? She opened her eyes. She was in a Hospital. A woman stood beside her, calm and patient as an angel. In fact, she looked like and angel in a floor length white cotton nightgown. An Angel with Dredlocks! She swung out her legs and sat naked on the bed, and saw a patient with the sheet drawn up over her face. Obviously she had passed away. The Monitor was dark, unplugged. The air cool and sober. But for some reason her Angel put slippers on her bare feet and led her to he side of the other bed, and drew down the sheet. Rosanna lay still and cold as marble, the bullet holes in her chest plugged with cotton. Huge staples clamped the two sides of her ribcage together. Rosanna knelt beside Rosanna, her great huge eyes open wide as she looked up at her Angel. Her eyes asked: "how?" <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> CHAPTER #10: Mermaid Hunt The anonymous grey van rolled to a stop directly behind the Public Bathrooms, keeping the little concrete huts on the line of sight between the vehicle and one particular yacht amongst the dozens rocking soothingly at their berths in the exclusive Pompeii Palms Marina. Not a single "boat" was under 60 foot. Many were way over a hundred. All required full time crews. Their running lights seemed multiplied by the black glassy water into a reflection of the awe inspiring display of stars over head. Silently the electric window on the passenger side of the front seat of the van slid down, Neon raised the infra-red binoculars to his eyes. Their tinted lenses gave no tell tale reflection. He scanned the length of the Samurai Nun, counting silently. Two on deck, two visible in the galley. The staterooms are shuttered." "No problem," Salma whispered into Mr. Grier's ear, "You take care of the guards while I get the kids..." Both snorted at the sarcasm in this. He turned his head enough so she could peck him on the cheek, before slipping out the back door into the shadows. Inside: Frank sat on the stool her sat beside the head of the reclined combo Dentist's/Gynecologist's Chair and leaned forward, forearms on his knees, so he could whisper past my left ear. "Let's just drop the rhetorical framework Good and Bad from this discussion at the outset, Jack. Men with courage admit to themselves that there's no God, and have the simple human decency when engaged in arbitration with others of like psychological Maturity not to pretend ideas like fair or just or any concern with what's expected or permitted has any place at all in the World As It Really Is. Do you take my meaning , Jack?" I had little recovery of my facial muscles from the drug he had paralyzed me with yet, so found it maybe more easy to pretend I was above giving him the time of day. He set a tray by my head and unfolded a cloth on it. Next he set a little row of tiny syringes, each with a different Mystery contained within. "Stoic fellow," Frank smiled down at his perfect shoes. I knew I would never own a pair of perfect shoes. Frank knew this and the three women he had stationed around the room pointing machine guns at my strapped down, but otherwise unremarkable body knew this too. "You know, " he continued, finding a piece of fluff on his pant leg,... That piece of fluff made him purse his lips in deeply felt, personally taken disappointment," "You know I've always thought that I might have had a whole different life if everything had been different and I had the discretion to follow my other chief avocation and become a Theologian." I could only grunt badly, my mouth was so dry. But I felt it was crucially vital to tell him that I too believed that I might have had a whole different life if everything had been different and I had the discretion to follow my own inclination to become a Theologian. But Life had been as Arbitrary a Bitch with me as it had been to Frank. Frank knew this. His little Army of reptile hearted Moon Maidens knew this. Fuck it, we all knew this. But it felt really good having him feel able to open up and lay all his cards on the table like that! He set a row of straws out on the cloth on his tray. Those would go into my ears. I began to struggle not to start screaming.... In the pitched darkness of the Men's Room Salma stripped completely naked, and by feel, withdrew a tube of water proof blue-black grease from her bag. Under two minutes later every square inch of her body was black: labia, eyelids, up her ass-crack, in her ears, everything. A pair of black leather gloves and slippers would be her only dress. She tied her heaps of thick hair into a tight bun, slipped on a black bathing- cap, and after strapping a black iodized Navy Seal Team knife to her thigh, she slipped out into the chill of a four o-clock in the morning silence, and flowing down a ramp like a black cat, slid noiselessly into the water, without as much as a ripple or a plop. "What is it about the C.I.A. that attracts Poets and Theologians and then buries them under a Mountain of Bureaucrats, Jack? Can you IMAGINE how it feels to be buried under a mountain of pencil-dicked failed ivy- league University Teachers?" In that I, at forty, still remembered High School very well, I very well could Imagine.... But my rubbery muscles still couldn't quite master voluntary motion quite yet. Why hadn't our wistful but warmly funny repartee cause the Moon Maidens to laugh softly, nodding in understanding? Frank went into a closet and returned with a black box with leads and terminals and green and red wires and I vomited upward, puke flowing down both sides of my face. Frank stepped gingerly back, but looked proud, like a hypnotist who knows he's picked a good subject from the audience! "I have NEVER had any beef with the context provided by the poles of Good and Evil per se, " he injected magnaminiously, "But in a World of Limited Resources, as this world has always bee, still is, and , (despite the fantasies of the Golden Age of Science Fiction in the 1930s ), will always remain, you MUST agree with me that the Loser's going hungry will continue to be the gravy on the Winner's meat. " He sniffed and jutted his jaw out sideways in a nervous tick, "Even the Church Father's, following Paul, represented Heaven as having a rim the Saved and Angels could gather at to savor the sweetest joy in Heaven. Do you know what True Christian's consider the sweetest Joy in Heaven , Jack" I mumbled the word no. He put his lips to my ear: "The sweetest joy in Heaven is looking over the edge and down into Hell and seeing the Sinners BURN,.... And of course all the other torments applied would be sweet to those Chosen as they would be bitter to the Condemned." I saw it, all right. Baja California and the Arena's were the Hell the Good Christians of North America could look down on for the most special pleasure God reserved to His Own. Frank was right,.. He was a theologian of sorts. " but what I have NO patience with AT ALL is the idea of universal Altruism, it just isn't Natural. The idea that the context Good and Evil is bigger than the context of Us verses Them is an insane invention made by forcing words into combinations the things they refer to would NEVER exhibit in the Real World. Pigs with wings. The Common Good. No way, Jose!" He was almost breathless with his insight. Like a liquid, Salma flowed up the bow line, and disappeared by seeming to withdraw into a black shadow under the anchor housing. The sentry came forward from where she had bummed a smoke from the stern guard, machine gun hanging by it's strap under her arm. She flicked away the match, peering suspiciously into the shadows ahead. A bat flew across her field of vision. Before she could refocus, Salma had closed the distance between them, popped the palm of her left hand under the guard's chin, and wrapped her arms around the guards throat. A single twitch, accompanied by a faint pop, and Salma pulled the woman's dead weight to the side of the boat, lowering the woman into the inky black by her arms. Ten seconds.... "Thank God Christians seldom try to really live the stuff they claim to believe. And Buddhists who refuse to kill, even to protect themselves?..... They can be safely ignored, the way a wolf with a full belly ignores a sheep! The Real Truth is that those Men in Power in all the WORLD'S Capitols know that the Little people are too uninformable, too undependable, and too Simple to Govern themselves." I had spit out most of the vomit. Me and Frank were getting to be on really intimate terms now. I knew I could fart and it would be OK. The stern guard proved more alert, twisting around to meet Salma's attack. A brief frantic exchange of moves too fast to catch was climaxed by Salma lowering the second and last deck guard into the water by his arms. " In exchange for feeding and giving them shelter, it the RIGHT of Rulers to take what they want from them. After all, in Nature, those who Can take something Will take it, and their taking it Proves they Deserve it!" I had recovered some muscle control, but I held my tongue. People who are congenital Sociopaths are not much improved in mood by being informed that they were the puppets of unrecognized impulses arrested at an Infantile level of development. Frank honestly believed Evolution's Goal was a single shark left swimming in the sea.... All the other fish and lesser sharks eaten. The Lonely Starvation of the Last Man Left on Earth..... This Vision was just Frank's flavor of Ennui. Frank's eyes snapped up as Hell broke loose in the Main Cabin! The guard nearest the door, a bored looking ski bum of a fellow with a kind of Burt Lancaster loony grin, rushed to the door, opening it, even as Frank frantically shouted to him not to.... An explosion of automatic fire threw him across my body, face a mask of astonishment, as the two female guards emptied their clips down the corridor, covering Frank's effort to shut the door. He succeeded. In the Main Cabin, Salma lay her borrowed, now empty gun down on the front desk and crawled on her belly past the unconscious form of the Secretary, down the hall towards the forward bulkhead: The Ladies Room. She paused in front of one cabin when she heard a rustle within. It came fast! The door burst open and two men emerged together, firing both ways down the hall. But vengeance came from below, as the Mexican Amazon, sprung up, twisting one guard around by the arms so the end of his burst knocked his partner off his feet! Then Salma butted his jaw up with the gun, and yanking it out of the startled man's hands, slammed it's butt into the side of his head, dropping him like a rock. She threw herself down on the floor, and crawled forward, bursts of small arms fire popping through closed doors over her head. "What are these tourists thinking of?" she thought to herself as she wedged herself against the base of the door at the end of the hall once she noticed it opened inward. "I can wait this out." She concluded, and curled into a black ball. Icy and motionless with rage, Frank stood with his back to the computer terminal embedded in the front wall of the forward cabin. A screen saver played on the 38 inch diagonal monitor. A cartoon cat named Boris was chasing a butterfly around and around. A "New E-Mail" alert flashed in the upper right hand corner. Minutes passed in silence. The phone rang, and rang, and rang. It finally stopped ringing. I was beginning to breath again. The two guards, Natsuko and Yuko flanked the door. They wore casual dress, tight jeans and bikini tops. Natsuko was looking at Frank with disgust. Yuko had wet her pants. Frank looked down at me like a Tyrannosaur looks down on a half eaten little mammal that he has just realized has made him ill to the stomach. A burst from an intercom: "Frank,..." It was Kahori, Tour Guide, Stewardess and all around stoned Lady Captain... "Frank, is everything alright now?" Frank smiled and punched a button. "We've had visitors, it's been taken care of,...." He arched his eyebrows politely, "Honey, we need you up front." "Okay. Coming..." Kahori signed off. Frank nodded to the guards, finger raised. Natsuko put her hand on the door handle, and the embarrassed Yuko prepared to charge through. Outside Kahori screamed. Frank stabbed with his finger.. "Go!" The door yanked open and Yuko hurtled forward and sprawled onto her face! Kahori was pointing at the floor in front of the door. But Salma was already in, rolling under the stumbling Yuko's legs, and after a flash of an arm, shot to her feet under Natsuko's arms. Natsuko's clip zipped empty, the barrel knocked up, but she instantly threw herself backward, curling as she rolled over me, dragging the dead male guard after her. Salma charged around the chair to my left and Natsuko emerged, snarling, the guard's 45 in her hands... But it was heavy, and Salma grabbed the gun, lacing her fingers through the trigger guard, and head butted Natsuko backwards, yanking the gun out of her hands. But Salma had a lousy grip on it, and wasn't able to get a real grip on it, when Natsuko flew forward, batting the gun and right hand aside, and delivered a thunderclap of a punch to the center of Salma's forehead. Salma dropped the Army Issue gun and began trading chops and forward kicks in the confined space with Natsuko. The battle raged back and forth in terrifying near silence until Salma caught the smaller woman be the wrists and repeated her head butt. This time it took, Natsuko was out cold! Salma unstrapped my ankles, wrists and waist and helped me to my shaky feet. "Where's Frank?" I said, as if he had just slipped from a Party. "Where is,..." Then I saw Frank. Blank Frank. Frank was sitting cross legged on the floor below the Computer Wall. He had just dropped into that position, I guess. Salma planted a foot on his sternum and pulled her serrated combat knife out of his chest. "When did you do that,..." I asked, mystified, "I didn't see you do that." Neon was waiting at the top of the dock for us, Kahori unconscious and hog tied at his feet. A sliding door was open on the side of the van behind him. I climbed wearily in and slumped into the vinyl seat, exhausted from relief. Salma climbed in, sliding the door shut and sat across from me, casual as you please, all painted black and buck nude. Neon pulled away from the curb and made for the highway. But he passed the Beach Cities off ramp. "Hey, we missed the exit!" I weakly protested. Salma began dressing from a black leather bag. Neon ignored me as Mexican desert passed, empty and forlorn. It was an hour to dawn. A radio flickered and Neon answered in low tones. Salma was now a black version of herself. She leaned forward and whispered to Neon. I began to feel ill again. "Where were all the cops..." I asked rhetorically. "And why did we let all those bad guys behind?" "Because we may need to do business with them again." Salma answered, her huge brown eyes unreadable. "Frank was an asshole. Frank thought he could steal from his Masters. Frank thought we didn't know from the start he had contracted with the Japanese from the beginning. We knew he was both the source for the rumors you were to be snatched, and we guessed the first snatch was a decoy so he might pull off the second." Salma threw back her magnificent head and licked her lips. "We watched both kidnaps to see his moves." "If he'd impressed us, hell,.." Neon laughed, "We'd a let him have you and start using him for real business." I felt clammy all over. "Where are we going." I asked. Salma looked out into the Night. Neon used the radio again and clicked off, before looking me in the eye in the Rear View Mirror. "Jack, Jack, Jack, I like you but I don't respect you very much. People too dumb to lie and too gutless to take what they want are a fucking liability. No offence, mind you, but you are a Loose End." "Will we be picking up Miracle Girl too?" Salma asked. My anus tightened. "Yeah, we pick her up at a rest area about half way to the border." Neon nodded backward, and, swift as a serpent, Salma handcuffed my wrists together and my right ankle to a seat support. I just let her.... "She seems real docile, but is doing shit of her own accord." Salma grinned.... "I'll bet the white-coat boys back at MK-Complex are wetting their pants to get her under a microscope." I caught a shooting star from the corner of my eye. "My info is she's invented medical techniques a decade ahead of anything anyone else can do." Neon watched me as he said this... I couldn't figure out why. "For a born and bred pleasure unit turned fighting girl, she's gone off there where the busses don't go..." "If She's become self modifying, they'll take her apart and leave the pieces scattered all over the Moon!" Now Salma was watching me for a reaction, too. "They can't risk a runaway experiment." I pretended they were talking about the weather, and pretended to ignore them. Then Salma said: "Did you know it was your almost girlfriend she played doctor on, Jack, honey?" <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> CHAPTER #11 : Jennifer 10 "Your Problem is that YOU NEED YOUR BUTT KICKED, Honey,...." Time Froze. Hell, I froze! Maybe Salma would be so pissed that she'd beat ME up for what Jennifer just said,... as casually as a Mom reminding her Husband to not forget to take an umbrella, because it was raining out. I stopped wriggling in the deposit-a-quarter-for-a- relaxing-message over-stuffed recliner chair that I was hog-tied into, and goggled in disbelief across the room where Jennifer was sitting in full Lotus Position, ( cross legged), on the grass green carpeted floor between the Television and the stubby guest refrigerator. Salma had just emerged from the billows of steam pouring out of the bathroom to tell us we were out of hot water, so nobody but her was going to get a shower. Now the five foot seven stacked like a brick shithouse gypsy maned Mexican Amazon Goddess just stood stock still in the narrow hall connecting the dingy motel room living room and the even more dingy motel bedroom. She resumed toweling her huge mass of wet hair and said softly: "Pardon me?" The creamy skinned, sweetly freckled All-American Next Door Sex Goddess considered that response for a moment, recrossing her skin-tight blue jeaned legs, and adjusting the black lace bra that barely restrained her full lush melon like tits. I guess Jennifer didn't want her Captor to think she was in any great hurry to go someplace with all this. Then , frowning just a little to show she had weighed her answer: "Is your EARS as PLUGGED UP as your CUNT?" Salma, with a little sigh, threw her towel around her bare shoulders, and paced back into the front room, hanging her hands on the corners of the lucky towel that fell across her wet breasts. I couldn't help but notice steam, ( or Something ), had soaked her tiny white panties, so the triangle of her pubic jungle could be plainly seen,. Plainly smelled, too. I tried to smile co-operatively,... through with a ping pong ball jammed in my mouth and a nylon stocking wrapped several times around my head, making sure the ping pong ball stayed in my mouth, made this a difficult effect to achieve. The drugs my ex-boss had pumped me full of last night to make me co-operative had worn off, but I thought it was in my enlightened self interest to pretend I still felt co- operative. Actually, since he was already dead, I would have been glad to personally kill anyone in this room. And that went double for my Good Pal Neon, when he got back from fueling the small plane in the little dirt airfield just behind this little dirt motel! Salma looked at me as if to say; "Whadda are we gonna do with THIS one?" And turned back to Jennifer who had her hand relaxed on her knees, and smiled cheerful as an eager puppy up at the Female Volcano she had just primed to explode! "You've been a real nice girl, Jenny, since we picked you up last night, just like we were lead to believe," Salma spoke softly, clearly and then dropped the room temperature about thirty degrees, while continuing in the same tone of voice... "But if you think you've waited to the right moment to fuck with me, let me promise you Mr. Grier wouldn't have make any difference to the outcome. I won't tie you up girlfriend,... I'll kill you." The scientists back at the Black Funding created Empire called MK-Complex, ( and built in the caverns beneath Washington D.C.), would hate that, but I don't think any of them would last long with a Professional Death-Fighter and Assassin like Salma. Salma leaned over, her boobs dangling in Jennifer's sunny countenance. "You read me?" "If I pull your hair..." Jennifer pouted, "Will you scratch my eyes out?" "Jennifer," Salma reasoned with her "the direction this conversation is taking leads Nowhere. I've put a lot of girls and boys there. They didn't like it. And it meant Nothing to me." Salma straightened up, and whipped her towel into a twisted rope that would just fit around someone's throat, "I know you've become some kind of genius, and I've notice you're Not Quite Right. But Honey the Rules I live and Die by says No deviations from the Gameplan. And with this girl No means No. This was my first and last warning to you. Take it in the spirit it was given." Salma had just disappeared into the bedroom and began disassembling a machine pistol and laying on the towel spread out on the bed, when Jennifer winked at me. I could see Salma in the mirror on the back of the half open bedroom door. She was gazing out the bedroom window at the airfield as her experienced fingers pulled the gun apart, cleaned it with and oily rag and reassembled it.... Like a mischievous child Jennifer tip-toed in big Stage steps over to me, whipped the nylon off-of my head, and, as I miserably spat out the ping pong ball, resumed her seat. My luck. The fucker rolled off of my lap and tapped three times as it bounced before rolling. Salma streaked without a word across the room and slapped Jennifer so hard across the left side of her face that a red handprint instantly appeared on the milk white skin! "Stand up and turn around," Salma, without emotion ordered, "You're getting tied up". Jennifer looked up at Salma sideways, as if there was something unclear about what was happening. In an childlike voice she said: "Make me." "Salma don't..." I rasped at a whisper. "Just tie her up." Neither woman seemed to have heard me, and neither had broken eye contact. I even think they had stopped blinking. "...oh, this is Stupid,..." I begged. It was obvious Salma was considering going back for the gun, but that would leave Jennifer unattended, if even for mere seconds. Salma stepped back and mouthed the word : Now. "I'll tell you what," Jennifer spoke with a conciliatory voice, "...if you get down on all fours like a dog between my legs and eat my Pussy real good, I won't kick the Bull Shit out of you." Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit. The Beautiful Mexican Amazon, face as impassive as a steel axe, began a motion to grab the American Girl by the arms or shoulders when Jennifer's bare feet shot out from being rested on her thighs in between Salma's ankles, and flipped out in a wide Vee, dropping her floorward,... But before Salma's knees crashed into the carpet, Jennifer's hands grasped Salma's arms at the elbows, rotating them outward from her body, so Salma's hands flapped uselessly out. It was incredible! Jennifer legs had slapped back under her thighs, so as she raised up from a kneeling position, she forced Salma to raise up from a kneeling position to her feet with her. Salma, face purpling with rage and effort, brought her elbows in towards her body, and yanking back, slapped a grip on the outside of Jennifer's elbows, so both woman now engaged in a tug of war trying to unbalance the other. But this only lasted two long violent seconds,... Salma tried to kick in between Jennifer's legs and sideways, to knock her right ankle out from under her. But Jennifer snapped her right foot up and echoed this move on Salma's right foot, which had to support her during this move. But Salma, too, snapped her supporting foot up in time. This repeated four rounds, till Jennifer snapped in fast enough to beat Salma's other foot to the floor, and shoved DOWN! Salma dropped to one knee, hissing. Both women still had each other by the arms. Jennifer began wrenching Salma back and forth. Salma fought back with full force, but her other leg broke out at the knee and suddenly Salma found herself kneeling in front of the other girl. Desperate, she yanked her arms back to get free, but Jennifer surprised her by letting go for a millisecond, and catching her hands, which she twisted outward, leaning into Salma, so the frantic girl's arms straightened. Her arms locked straight and rotated out, this way paralyzed Salma from the waist up. Both women quaked from the force involved in holding this position, and perspired freely, tits and bellies wet. Salma looked up at her tormentor with the fire of Hell's hottest furnace in her eyes! "Why are you disobeying direct orders?" Salma said in an almost normal voice. "I want my pussy eaten," Jennifer replied with an equally conversational tone, "And I think, no, I KNOW you are the Woman for the Job!" The Mexican girls eyes bugged out, but only for a moment,... Then an iron determination replaced it. For a long minute Salma forced her body up, first raising one, then an other knee an inch off the ugly carpet, only to be forced back. A kind of compassion rose in Jennifer's face.... Salma' s elbows had to have been pushed to almost breaking each time she rallied. "Why don't you just lick me Honey,..." Jennifer whispered silkily, her sweet face just inches from Salma's mask of hate, "I promise I'll cum real fast..." Salma groaned with fury... Did I tell you they had tied me up naked? No? Well, you need to know that to understand why, when Jennifer glanced over at me her laugh even startled Salma into looking over at me. Jennifer whistled and hooted: " That's the HARDEST BONER I"VE SEEN, ...EVER!" Yup. The hardest hard-on I have EVER had, (even since I was a hormonally gushing teenaged guy), actually seemed to hum as it quivered, sticking up through the ropes tying my thighs to the seat of the recliner, and the ropes tying my torso to the back of the recliner. "You like watching us FIGHT?" I actually looked sideways in shame. "Hey, no big deal! Everybody likes that shit!" Now I felt on the verge of tears. Knowing I was going to die was bad enough, but somehow this got to me. The girl I was born to fall desperately in love with knew I was one of the Sickos who got off on the stuff going on in the Arenas. Jennifer suddenly let go of Salma's wrists, freeing her , and stepped back as the other girl sprang up. "Okay, you gotta be hurt, " Jennifer told her, "But you need to know this is no accident for it to do you any good." Jennifer, palms up, flipped her fingers back in a Let's Go gesture. Salma back petalled, then shot forward, twisting sideways as she dropped into a crouch, firing her left foot into Jennifer's naked white belly..... Or where it had been a millisecond previously. Jennifer, effortlessly, had stepped sideways, turned 90 degrees inward, and catching Salma's calf, lifted up, like raising a lid, pitching Salma backward with such force the wind was knocked out of her when her back slammed into the floor. " I contacted an Alien spaceship in orbit around Bernard's Star,..." She said, apparently to Me. Salma rolled warily to her feet, and raised her fists as if to box. Jennifer returned the raising of the fists and closed with Salma, hammering away mercilessly through the other woman's defenses, taking plenty of hard blows to the head, but snapping her head back expertly, sidestepping their full force, and always paying the other girl back punch for punch in double spades. Jennifer's eft eye was closing and her nostrils streamed blood, but within minutes, the gasping Mexican girl was weaving with more punch drunkenness than skill, and both her eyes were slits. As the fight progressed both girls seemed less willing to risk energy expensive wheel kicks and fancy combinations of kicks and punches. Abruptly, Jennifer dropped Salma with a left hook that layed her out flat. Jennifer just let her get it together and resumed talking to me. "I plugged myself into the modem at the Hospital while waiting for Rosanna to come around, and hacked into the secret wide area SETI array that MK-Command runs in Argentina. My decoding and scanning capabilities saw shit theirs didn't, so it wasn't long before I was squirting my end of the conversation hidden in the TV broadcasts out of our local Sol City smut channel so it could be picked up by their hyperspace communication relay in orbit around Mars ." I imagined her with a finger plugged into a modem jack, doing all this electronic stuff with her new improved brains. To my horror she glance over at me and replied to my unvoiced thought: "that's about the size of it" Salma took advantage of this chatter to take a deep breath and hurtle like a line backer into Jennifer's belly. Both woman crashed into the floor in a thrashing tangle of arms and legs. One minute of hyper Olympic style wrestling ended with Salma, belly down, Jennifer straddling her ass, twisting her wrists outward again as she kicked her legs and bucked. "The point I'm trying to make is, they responded to my How-Are-You s because of my eight previous combat modifications. It seems they test the genetic vitality of all the species they contact by measuring how fierce and effective the females of that species are in combat." "Why not the Males?" I asked, feeling a bit peeved on the part of my gender. Salma was now curling to the left and right, twisting into contorted fetal positions, then jack-knifing out,... But each time Jennifer responded by shooting a leg out for balance, then forcing Salma's tits back into the carpet. "Because they view males as basically DNA shufflers. It's females that carry and rear children. It is the female that is the original format of the creature.... males are produced in all species by a secondary, additional reformatting." I guess I looked dubious. I could tell even Salma was listening. Hell, she was running out of gas! "Don't they see the Arena's as a regressive Phenomena? You know, ... Letting higher brain function succumb to lower animal emotions." "Not at all,..." she began laughing at me gently. "In most species ritual or actual combat between the Females, is considered an emotional tonic, and a good barometer of the species breeding pool's continued viability." "But it's a sexual perversion!" "That's all in you wrinkled brains, Jack. Combat by Females is an Undiluted Display of Life-Force that is meant to serve Sexual Goals, of course it's Erotic! The Alien's often view Virtual Reality recordings of the females of various species fighting as a sexual stimulation when impregnation is necessary, or one or both of the coupling partners are weary or aging,.... or just need a little spice." "But Mortal Combat!" I protested. Shit, let me die a Liberal! "Species perpetuation is serious business, even cast as recreation." look, she leaned forward, her irresistible doughy white melons swaying, slung down from her ribs, "... Do you know how obsessively Selfish you are being, twisting everything to the service of demonstrating your low opinion of yourself? Things have their own discrete reality, their own beauty. Revel in your brief stint in the flesh, Jack! The only justification you need to enjoy the sacrifice to Life another makes is to become the kind of Person who is ready to devote, or surrender their own Life, when the time comes, unselfishly, to benefit Others." She shook out her chestnut waves of sweat scented hair on her shoulders. "It's people who are by nature fearful and loath to give of themselves that make a fetish, a commodity, a strangled web of taboos out of the Diverse and Passionate Rituals of Giving." "Did you really talk to Aliens, or are you just saying this to make me feel better?" I said wistfully. My Maybe Rescuer was Insane. So was my raging erection. "Both!" Jennifer chirped, giggling, as she hopped off Salma and finished loosening my bonds. Freed, I staggered to my feet, no less unsteady than the near broken Latin Amazon, tears streaming down her haggard, but achingly classical face. "Now, Sister, before this guy leaves, I want you to let him see you get down on your back so I can sit on your face and let you Eat Me!" Jennifer's brow wrinkled to show everyone she was serious this time. Salma mouthed the words: Wait Right There, and went into the bedroom. To my horror, and just as I expected, she returned with the gun, and pointed it at Jennifer. Jennifer, muted, said: "I kicked your ass, Sister. That gun won't prove your Better than Me." "All it has to prove", Salma gasped, "Is that you're Deader than me." She thumbed the lever to semi-auto, turned and shot me once in the abdomen. Before I fainted, I felt the seat of the recliner against my shoulders, a hot slow pulse of fire in my belly, the shuddering of my outspread legs, and looked up to see Salma point the gun at my head, saying: "Now Behave." <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> CHAPTER #12 : The Girl Gladiators As if in a Dream........ .... Soft light is in my eyes from the white curtains blowing with the salty breeze off of the Pacific. Pain comes with consciousness. That's the deal. That's the deal,... whether Paralandra, Barsoom, or Baja California. Love hurts so much because by nature it bursts from the boundaries of the same flesh that grew to believe the wall of skin was the definition of the Person. Rosanna came to my bed and lay beside me as I healed. The Miracles they can do these days in Modern Times. She came every day, until they said immediate danger was survived. Then she said Good Bye. Rosanna, full lips still wet from a kiss in which we seemed to breath for hours, looked down at me with her Great Soft Eyes, her hair lit up like flames by the sunlight pouring through it. But it was not Rosanna in Rosanna's eyes. "Look", she stroked my hands, "I can see you loving Rosanna when you look at me. Retina scans, fingerprints, memory tests, even my Mother on the phone, everybody believes it's really me, not a duplicate, not a Xerox, but really me,..." She smiled wistfully, and began to softly weep, " Everybody believes I'm Me,...but me..." "But I know that Rosanna died in this very Hospital, and is not only Dead but reduced by fire to atoms. I'm an experiment that worked. I'm a clever Plug, a Blank, a forgery so exact, it's Evil." She shook her lovely head refusing my Protest, "Jack, I would stay with you and make you Happy, if I didn't really believe down the line I would have to Blow Out my Brains and renounce my false Citizenship!" She sat beside me on the bed, her gauze tennis blouse and skirt transparent in the backlight. I reached out to caress her soft breasts, and she pressed my hand to her flesh with hers. " I know I'm not Me, yet I'm Me enough so that I can't live with it. Darling, sweetheart,... I want to live, I want to make love with you every day. I want a baby to come out of my body. I want a Stupid Life, with coffee in the morning. I want to go shopping with my Friends. I want to die a tiny Old Lady who knows her children grew up to be Good People. I want Problems I can solve. But I can't Solve This. I can live with losing my Looks, losing at Love, not having my Dreams Come True, but Jack,...." she shook her head sadly, "I can't live with This." "Is there anything I can say to make you stay?" She shook her head. "Even I need You'"? Rosanna stood to leave and said... "Apparently Neon made some kind of deal with Jennifer while you were unconscious. Salma has disappeared, and Neon took Jennifer back to that Secret Whatever in Washington D.C.,... so I guess you're medical is being picked up by Uncle Sam, and I'm going to live on the income I made from exclusive interviews for awhile. I may be a Circus Freak, but I'm a fucking rich Circus Freak." "Then, what?" I asked. "Then you get on your feet, go back to running errands for the Secret Police until your Probation is up, and I do,... Whatever I will find that I do." At the door she turned back to me, and her last words were: "I got a call from Jennifer. She's a horrible fone freak. And we talked and talked and talked, and you wouldn't BELIEVE what she suggested the Cure to my Identity Crisis might be..... " Then Mysteriously, Rosanna was Gone. ------Alone, Jennifer 10 stood waist deep in the metallic mercury bath in which the three ton bulk of the sponge matrix brain bobbled like a trained killer whale. Her left arm was curled up to her pale blue breasts Her fist a cantaloupe sized snarl of quantum flux generated sub-absolute zero CPU chips like ice-cream sparkles glistening and twinkling as super-intelligent semi-autonomous crab-like mini- factories crawled over each other, blue and pink lasers playing in the seething living crystal robotics sewn with the fiber-optics that comprised her link to the Brainiax beside her. Calm as Saint Theresa in the eye of the hurricane of her orgasmic union with the Christos, Jennifer solved for and successfully derived a solution to her origami- like application of tile-matrix dynamics to a special form of set theory which combined quantum gravity with the latest super-string equations in her data banks. Now the left side of her Brain understood as much as dualistic analytical thought could, the workings of the Universe. Simultaneously, the right side of her brain had successfully invented a compression scheme that had been able to transfer the entire World-Web full of Data as well as the Brainiax's millions of years worth of parallel processing of that Data into her own super-cortical brain where she burnt it into a very special ROM chip her intellectually guided nano armies of micro-factories had constructed. She was ready to Become. Lowering her arm to her hip, the melting wad of connectivity drooled into the Moon Pool, leaving her icy fingers bare. She blinked, and began unfolding her consciousness sideways out from her center of attention in a sphere that expanded at the speed of light, including everything it passed through like a shock wave that rattled but left unchanged all it passed as it flew outward. She murmured, and her consciousness passed through the earth and the sun, the Ort cloud and there nearest suns, having successfully modified her processes so her propagation began exponentially expanding at faster than the speed of Light. In retrospect, the Philosophers of the 21st Century would come to understand that the Prime Mover of the Cosmos need not exist in a linear way PRIOR to the creation of the Universe, nor even anterior to the Universe, drawing all events to it, like iron filings to a magnet. The cause of the Universe could very well arise from within it, mid-History, so to speak, like a tent pole rising in the midst of a circus-tent. With a long sigh, Jennifer, Jennifer raised herself to the Infinite Power by simultaneously pouring through the tidal bulges of the countless sub-atomic white hole worm holes that are ceaselessly coming into and out of existence in the quantum froth that is the fabric of the Universe through-out Infinity. Thus, She poured into every square inch of the Boundriless Universe at the same Moment, inundating Reality with her Intelligent Presence. At 12:00:01 P.M. New Years Day 2006 C.E., Jennifer became god, became KALI ! ------At that very moment the sky was platinum blasted white in the High Noon over the Arena of the Coliseum- 2000, the largest of the combat stadiums in Sol City, Baja California. The Woman Gladiator squinted as she looked up, seeing the CNN/ESPN dirigible floating high above her helmeted head, it's telescope microphones and zoom lensed video cameras aimed down at the darkly splendid world below, where on the parched sands several dozen men and women had spread out amongst the man made hills, ravines and swamps that comprised the battlefield below. She knew that half a billion people would be watching this live on their televisions right now. The New Year's Day Games had become what they glibly referred to as a New Tradition! A siren sounded mournfully in the distance and the colored smoke that signalled the combat was to begin rose in the four cardinal directions from the circular roof of the 30 story high hotel that ringed the Arena. The Woman Gladiator focussed her attention 100 percent on the situation at hand. As every soldier knows after the First Battle, no matter what reason you were sent to War, the Soldier fights to stay alive. All other reasons are empty talk. Having experience over eighteen fights in the twelve times she had entered the Arena, she had neither illusions about or expectations for what would happen here today. As a new breed of professional fighter, with neither a crime to expiate or a death sentence to fulfill here, she knew what her few brothers and sisters knew. You tell everybody it's for the money, then keep your fucking mouth shut. She had come to a gully, and decided to seek higher ground to pick her first fight. But the sound of combat drew her around a bend in the ravine to a wider space with a half dried pond of cracked mud at the center. Cheaters! A phenomena new to the games, two men had conspired to hunt together. Since there were no rules beyond avoiding Combat, ( that would set a sniper with a rifle to work from a booth in one of the pylons), fighters who used this strategy used it with the idea that they would turn on each other when they figure the thirty minute combat period was up, and pretend to fight until the siren blew. But cheaters seldom prospered here, since cheaters are also liars, and usually you could depend on your pal to back stab you on the Time Tested Principle: Do Them Before They Can Do You! In this case, two out of shape bruisers in combat fatigues replete with camouflage, decals and survival doo-dads had a naked little female down and were jabbing at her with their bayonet tipped nightsticks, ( nightsticks replaced rifles in these events). She was gamely fending off their sadistic taunts and stabs with the leather covered shield strapped to her left arm, as she kicked at their legs, trying to make her way back to the short sword she had dropped about a meter away. The Female Gladiator smiled to herself. Maybe today She would find a Partner,.. And even live to tell the Tale! Being small bodied herself, she usually based her fighting tactics around moving fast. Like her grounded sister, she wore only leather sandles strapped by laces up her legs to the upper thigh, where her legs curved inward to meet at the crotch. Her shield had a copper blade catcher tacked around the rim, and a spike, anchored in the handle she held the shield by, sticking about eight inches out from the center of the leather covered disc, for those folks who didn't get the point from her sword. Her head was encased in a helmet that looked like the leather swim caps football players in the USA wore in the 1920s, except for a wooden scull cap, bolted on to soften any blows.... Otherwise, she was naked as the day she was born, and just as wet.... The desert air being 100 degrees, but unusually humid due to a squall due in later in the afternoon. Advancing slowly from an angle both men left behind their backs, she scrambled at a crouch, closing the distance. One man had gotten the girl by her long, jet black hair... God knows what happened to her helmet, while the other had managed to pin her sword arm down with a boot. The two inexperienced men were holding their nightsticks like baseball bats now, and were hammering downward, usually being intercepted by the shield, but often enough, brutally beating an exposed thigh or shoulder. "Aw, let's just stick her Ed!" One with a grey crew cut protested. "That's what you should have done from the start,...Ed" She agreed. When Ed looked up, her sword slapped downward behind the wrist. She had to yank it out half way through, but he dropped his stick screaming, staggering backward, and she turned to face the younger guy's mottle faced charge. The asian girl on the ground slipped her legs between his calves, and he went down hard! She thrust down into his kidney, then as he flipped over, yowling, crossed to a spot behind his head, and drove the point of the blade through the nape of his neck into his chest. He thrashed once. Backing up she saw the injured man disappear over the ridge. Instinct made her spin around.... In time to deflect Natsuko's sword with her shield! Natsuko scrambled backward waving her sword, and babbling. "I kill you one, I kill you two!" Then Natsuko charged forward parrying and thrusting like a maniac. Almost overwhelmed, she staggered backward through the mud, which cracking and braking from her weight, poured over her feet each step, squeezing through her toes. "Any other time this would feel good on a day like today" flitted through her mind as she shook stinging sweat from her eyes and kept the point of her sword pointed directly at the center of her enemies torso. After some fencing, during which both women recovered their wind while watching for an opening in their opponent's guard, the woman gladiator dropped her shield four inches, exposing a ripe full breast. Natsuko took the bait, lunging forward with all her might,... But found the shield grabbed her blade as her hated enemy drove it up to deflect her thrust. The copper snagged her sword just long enough for the white girl to drop her body with the same gesture, and slice at the inside of her sword bearing arm. Instead of following up, the attacker mysteriously backed away from the injured girl's frantic defensive slashing and calmly retreated to a spot halfway up the hill, with the sun at her back. Lost to her emotions she pursued, squinting through the yellow glare, seeking out the now dark form of her opponent. Just as she was rallying to charge the last length to her enemy she sobered, and backed up herself, hearing the word "good...good..." emerging from the heat. Suddenly she was fighting backwards for her life as the woman came down the hill using her sword like an axe, beating her down. But in her retreat she stumbled. Driven to one knee. Stabbing upward blindly. Cursing. Inexplicably the attack broke off. Bewildered she straightened,...but the attack resumed! This time from directly in front of her, so many thrusts she was again staggering back. Natsuko dropped intentionally to one knee, thrusting her sword up to her enemy, who leapt back, but not before feeling the blade drive it's angle into her belly! "Now!" She shouted. And Now the attack came, the bloody woman gladiator weighing in with a studied combination of thrusts Natsuko found easy to thwart. Laughing, she rotated to meet her attacker's slashing and stabbing, and delighted to realized She was gaining the high ground,.... As her eyes cleared, the sun now behind her, she saw a laughing woman. Why was she laughing? "Who are you trying to kill?" The crazy lady babbled. "You ! You!" Natsuko screamed. "Me! Me!" The madwoman babbled. Then became deathly still, pointing her sword at Natsuko's heart. Natsuko felt as if she were trying to keep her balance on a Runaway Train. Her own sword tracked her enemy's heartbeat. "I am the woman you seek" the woman gladiator said enigmatically. "I have become one with my good friend Kali." "Kali" Natsuko hissed, "You crazy." "....so is She..." the woman replied, and with a super human spurt of strength and speed, knocked her shield and sword aside, slamming her own shield against her chest. Natsuko gasped. A spike was pressed into the flesh of her left breast. "Drop your weapons." Surprised, Natsuko did. "Now walk away." She added. Amazed into compliance, Natsuko did. It was only later she realized that she was finished as a Fighter. She no longer could trust her own Mind. The Woman Gladiator waited a few minutes, letting the warm sun dry the sweat on her body, and soften the throb of the ache of the shallow wound in her tummy. The Siren blew, wistfully. "Now I realize why Jennifer recommended this to me", she thought to herself, "I am alive. That living is me. Fighting it is sad and crazy." Her full lips drew into a wide smile. "I can afford to retire from all this... I never really needed it". She walked back to the showers, and as she picked up her paycheck, she turned in her dressing room locker key. As usual it took forever to get a cab on the Service Entrance side of the Hotel. But once she slid her ass across the backseat and the door slammed and the arctic blast of cool air raised goosebumps on her arms, she asked the cabby: "Does your onboard computer have InterNet?" "Of coarse", he drawled, frowning at her in the rear-view mirror. "Please do a message-board search." "Which Boards?" "Try Desperately Seeking." "What Name?" She told him. There was over a 1000 messages, all from the same guy, with the same message. It was an address. "Let's go!" she said. "But that's in Cascadia!" "I", the Lady said, "Will; Tip you well!" <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 35,102 Words Frank Black 2:00 AM 06/08/1996