Compiled from The Dreaming BBS continuing story board.
Cyrano
Lurch
"My love is in league with the freeway, Its passion will rise as the cities slide by...
...and the secret that burns and the pain that won't stop...
...eyes in the mirror still expecting they'll come..."
She had left Chicago, heading east (into the light, more irony she thought) hoping to find herself out of the reach of even their organization in a day or two. The car was old and heavy - its Chevrolet V8 engine providing a bass thrum to back the hum of her tires and the whistle of the air around and over his, well now her, car...
Another hour, another hundred miles - hopefully by tomorrow night she might even begin to feel safe again...
Muse
Lurch
Finding one of the associations she knew was not too difficult - it's front was a small-time bioengineering firm (she hoped that Lester wasn't getting slack - bioengineering as a cover seemed a little too close to the truth about the associations: When you make high-performance mutagens and phisiology altering drugs security is a must). She got past the receptionist with her business card (her real one - she hoped that the risk would pay off), and five minues later was greeted by Lester Fiume in his office...
Anais
"Doing well," they were the only ones in the office but he was using a cover. That meant the place wasn't secure. Damn, she really needed to talk to him in private. "I came for our brunch meeting. My car is down stairs, and I know a quiet place where we can have some coffee."
The Cafe Borgia was a place they had frequented when she lived here, and when she and Lester were closer than they were now. It had memories, which probably wan't a good idea, but it was small, safe and she knew her way around it.
"Certainly Ms. Ballentine," he rose, dropped a few orders to the recptionist on their way out and grabbed his jacket. The one with the gun in it. They kept up their cover of small talk until they got into her car, waiting out on the street.
Lucien
There was a time when you could actually drive in the city. No longer. To keep a handle on the rising insanity of cramming twice as many cars as could possibly fit on to the scarred roads, most cities had automated. A couple of pressed buttons and off you went, no worrys about some fool running a red light, gridlock, ambulences and police getting stuck. Of course it took you three times as long to get anywhere but that's progress for you. On the highway though, the road was still yours.
She regained control of the the car as it down throttled and pulled into the underground public lot a block from the cafe. Immediately she floored the pedal and downshifted, racing the car forward for about a hundred feet and skidding into a stall. Not particularly subtle parking, but trafficnet could suck diodes.
The cafe lay at the end of a long brightly lit hallway. The corridor's walls were covered with photo's, newspaper clippings, and a checked wallpaper that looked considerably worse for wear than she remembered it. She had always loved and hated the hallway, once you were in the dimly lit cafe it was wonderful. You could always see who was coming in before they saw you. But coming in, well, you had to take your chances.
They promptly took a booth in the middle of the far wall. From a waitress wearing a too tight skirt and sweater they orderd cappacino and blintzes. This place was a bad choice. Too many memories.
Lurch
"PJ," he cut her off, "I know, and I can't help you. The GET association has people all over the city, if I'm even seen with you I could get killed."
"What do you mean - I thought that Genetic Engineering and Technology didn't have any pull this far east!" A rising heat of panic.
"Well they do now. Look, the best I can do for you is give you the codes to my house up in Bangor and let you hide there for a week or two."
"Thanks, Lester, I knew that I could count on you..."
"...Yeah, but this is the limit of what I can do."
The rest of the conversation was fluff - mostly about sights in the city. They finished their coffees - taking long enough so as not to leave "too soon". As they got up Lester said "I'll hail a cab back to the office - here's a card with the codes on it."
"I'm in that much trouble am I?"
"Yeah, sorry PJ, I just can't risk being seen with you."
"Thanks, I'm gone."
Lester turned away, but halted - turning back and adding "Don't get you self killed Miz Belladon."
"I won't, Mister Fiume."
Anais
She was worried. She was really worried. This was a lot deeper and a lot worse into what was a huge mess in the first place. Now it looked trully large. She was in TROUBLE.
She looked at the codes for Lester's house. Hiding out there sounded like a real good idea. Shelter, food, saftey, a place to think and get her shit together. She needed space to think, to gather her thoughts and to plan on how to get her way out of the country; that's the only way that she could live through this. If she managed at all, and the prospect is becoming smaller and smaller.
She was glad that the car was on auto, she didn't fee like thinking right now. But her attention was drawn away from her inner musing. A peson next to her was DRIVING his car. He was darkly tanned with pale, white hair and large black glasses. His hands, on the wheel, were gloved. She noticed that while he wouldn't be with her on every street she was on, he constantly showed up.
Oh shit she thought. Oh shit, shit, shit and triple bloody motherfucking shit. She was in REALLY BIG TROUBLE.
She knew who he was, and she knew what he was. He was going to kill her.
Muse
The man in black drove cooly, almost as automatic as her own car. He barely moved, and when he did, it sent a chill through the car that she could feel as much as the night air.
Finally, he turned. "Hello," he mouthed. His smile was grisly, corpselike in its ear to ear arc. The figure gently lifted his hand onto the steering wheel, and she gasped as she saw the bones wryly wrap around the wheel. The thing in black turned once again, offering a final smile. As the illusion of tanned skin faded, the smile was even more grisly than before.
It was a corpse.
Jellicle Cat
Suddenly freed from the net, her car slowed. Scarcely pausing, she slammed her foot on the gas and wrenched the wheel to one side. The car slid down an alleyway as pedestrians threw themselves out of its path.
Blessing the planners who had decreed a two-carlength following distance for city driving, she emerged from the alley and cut across three lanes of traffic diagonally. Her pursuer was no-where in sight, and she breathed a sigh of relief until she saw the car emerging from the alley several hundred feet behind her.
Terror took her for a moment, but then subsided to another emotion: elation. She was free. She had a chance. And she was driving for her life.
Castigir
He shouldn't have let her choose the cafe. The damn memories made him nostalgic. And stupid. And desireous. Twenty minutes in the cafe and he hadn't been able to take his mind off of the way her skin felt, sweating under silk. Five years since she had left, and he hadn't touched a woman since. No one else could even compare to who she was, what she could do. And PJ probably never even realized why she had that effect on men. And what exactly her old bosses had to do with it...
Lester sat down on a bench in the park, and you almost couldn't tell he had an erection.
The man across the park saw Lester sit down, and smiled faintly. His sunglasses looked very high tech, and you almost couldn't tell they were binoculars.
And what he was carrying almost didn't look like a gun.
Lurch
"Well," she thought, "if an accident is what the good Doctor prescibes, then that's what New York will get." She grinned, hell she’d have to ditch the car sooner or later anyway.
All it took was one yank on the wheel - sideswiping one car into another and the worst pileup in traficnet history was on. PJ sped up and hit two more cars - effectively sealing off the road behind her and shutting down all traffic for six blocks. The last time she saw the corpse he (she just assumed...) was headed down a side alley.
She dove down a ramp onto I865 Northbound before the skeleton in black could find her again and shot out of the city, her planned route Bangor via Albany. She would reserve a room with her Bank of Nippon card there - at the Sheriton for a week - a costly but (she prayed) effective diversion.
Lester had given in really easily for the amount of trouble she was in, but PJ failed -- as she alsways did -- to correlate the fact that his resistance had collapsed seconds after she had started to sweat.
Anais
Her hands never loosened on the wheel and some discrete portion of her brain was alert enough to point the nose of her car down the diminsishing yellow line. But the rocking of the car, the lights and the ribbon of concrete and asphalt uncurling steadily ahead lulled her brain into dangerous territory... She began to remember.
First, images of when she was a child, seven or so, and the different institutions and foster homes she had been in. An orphan, there had never been a real home, only those endless doctors with their probing needles and violating questions. Only the dozens of well manicured, plastic people that wanted her to call them Mommy and Daddy. Only the tests that the government people, only somehow, she thought, they weren't government kept giving her. She always tried to do well on them, but whenever she got a new test it was time to tumble into a new world... a new Mommy and Daddy with their fake smiles and nervous voices.
God, she had been glad when, at the age of fifteen and a handful of days, she had gotten the hell out of there. That was when she had met Lester, way back then. He was a college kid then, and she had impressed him when he sat down to talk to her on the steps of the New York Public Library. She knew more about biology and genetic engineering than he did and that was his field of study at Columbia.
When they, the men in the dark suits and the calm voices, came to get her back to her latest plastic parents, Lester had given her his adress. They stayed in touch.
Lurch
Her college years - At the University of Chicago - were unexceptional except for the fact that her grades were. She graduated with a BS in molecular biology holding a 3.975 average. She never suspected a thing when a man in a dark suit recruited her to work at Genetic Engineering & Technology.
The job at GET was very good - the pay and conditions were superb and they even paid for her Masters. It wasn't until her lover (the memory of Paul draped backwards over a table in her lab, shot full of holes sent a convulsion rippling down her spine) began digging into her personell file that she started to distrust the company's dark-suited execs.
And, now, as she drove the last few hours into Maine (her diversion successfully set back in Albany) the pieces began to fall into place. The execs at GET had been tracking her since she entered her first orphanage, and all of her foster parents had been on the GET payroll. They had been tracking and grooming her since childhood. For what she didn't know. And, the purpose of all the tests and needles still eluded and troubled her.
Castigir
A week in Bangor had helped her pull her head together, get some facts straight and most importantly stay alive. She couldn't thank Les enough for the loan of the house, but with the memories the place brough back she had thought of a few interesting was to try. Double yummm. The fact that her sex drive was recovering after her last lover’s violent death was a sign of how complaicent she had become.
Using the autochef (which would soon need to be filled) was another. They'd find her soon. She gave herself one more week before they got close, nine days before she had to leave. Fool.
The corpse dropped the binoculars to his side at the same time he dropped the telempathy link. Let her have breakfast first. The weight will slow her down. More importantly, her ace in the hole, her unknown power, her phermones, wouldn't even slow him down.
"It's been a long while since I had any horomones to fuck with." Lazarus thought, and smiled grimly.
But then, with what was left of his face he always smiled grimly.
Anais
The corpse's lips tightened, grating a bit over his teeth in an expression, one of habit, which meant in the dark little world of his mind that the situation was within expected parameters. It had ceased to have any real emotion behind it years ago.
However, he was still, in a strange way, human. Or at least, residing in what was once a human's body. There was much debate over the exact nature of a corpse in the biology and philosophical fields. And assuming that he was more dead than alive was his only mistake.
PJ never knew when it would hit. The feeling moved from the base of her skull, where the brain stem and the spine meet, and traveled outward chilling her mind into that crystal feeling of threat that one gets in moments like this. The corpse was there. Somewhere. Wactching, waiting.
She wiped frantically at her nose, as if trying to remove an awful smell as she turned on the shower and closed the blinds and the door. He would think she was showering. And then she glanced around the sterile bathroom, standing naked in the center of its floor, without clothes or a weapon or even a nail file, and wondered what the hell she was going to do.
Lurch
She tore through the cabinets in the room, and as the corpse circled in on the cottage PJ found a loose pannel in the back of the vanity under the sink. She smashed it open with her heel - expecting to find a shotgun or at least a pistol. Instead the pannel slid down and away - a shiny steel chute into the basement.
PJ shoved her self into the chute feet first - she dropped rapidly into the cellar, and into Lester's armory and work shop. The first thing she grabbed was a black jump suit from an open locker, the second was an auto shotgun and a bandolier of shells.
She took a quick look at the computer sytems sitting on the work bench -- and focused on the one that ran the household's perimeter defenses. The menuing structure was simple and within fifteen seconds she had triggered the house and grounds into an active defense mode, with the instruction to leave a clear path for her exit.
PJ bolted for the garrage and her car.
Jellicle Cat
It saved her life.
As she turned the corner, the black-jacketed back of her hunter appeared. Without thinking, she leveled the automatic and filled his back with a jacketed lead. He went flying.
Her finger eased on the trigger, and the hail of shot dribbled to a stop. She stood for a moment, legs braced, eyes wild, smelling the reek of gunpowder and the tang of blood ... and the sharp, musty odour of machine oil. The corpse lay in a pool of reddish and amber fluid. As she watched, he began to twitch. Slowly, he pulled himself to his knees. With a clicking noise, his head came up.
PJ didn't need a second warning. She bolted back the way she had come. As she reached the first intersection, she heard the clop of running boots behind her. There was a little lag in one of the steps, and she desperately hoped she'd damged the cybernetic orgaism's hydraulic structures. It was, she knew, and almost forlorn hope.
She darted through the main part of the basement, and into the tunnels beyond. She rolled and went down just in time, avoiding the flash of a visible-light laser and hoping it wasn't driving her into an infrared one. Just what she needed. PJ was trapped alone in the incompletely-explored basement with the security systems live and a corpse on her tail.
Lurch
She opened the door - angling the auto shotgun down the hall - and began to retrace her steps. Nothing. No corpse, no blood. The only signs of what she had heard, seen, and felt - deep in her gut - was a section of wallboard that was blown apart - right where the corpse was standing - a cloud of acrid smoke and a pile of expended shells. Otherwise the floor was dry and bare.
PJ turned to the computer workbench - the household system was chiming madly, a large map of the grounds on its screen, with a trace of red dots leading inward from the bluffs to the house. There were no signs on the map that anyone had gotten within ten meters of the house - but that was about to change - despite another explosion. The intruder had crossed out of the controlled mine field and was now into the range of the house's energy weapons.
She wondered "could that thing have made me... hallucinate?" Her thought session was cut short by the household computer - its mad chiming had gone up two octaves into a rapid shriek: the household itself had been breached. PJ raced for the garage.
She could hear the house making a mighty effort to beat up the intruder as she punched the garage door open and dove for her car. The engine started immediately and she shot outward down the drive...
Anais
The thought was sobering as she clutched the wheel, her knuckels white under the gloves. The car was sweet, smooth and fast. The house was out of sight in moments, though she knew there wouldn't be much of a delay until the corpse was after her again. The damn thing wouldn't stop. Hadn't there been a movie in the eighties....
Shit, shit shit, triple bloody motherfucking god damned cock sucking SHIT!
She felt much better now. She had to think. Running wouldn't work - she had to have a plan of action. This was getting tiresome. She had to take care of the source of the problem...
Her mind chugged over her plan, pieces falling into place as her eyes scanned the roads behind her. She smiled a cold, eerie smile when the last bit shuffeled itself out in her mind. Then she frowned again. There, that car. It had been there for five minites and was gaining rapidly. But she was doing almost a hundred.
"Damn, doesn't that thing ever give up?" she sighed, panic far from her mind.
Jellicle Cat
All she had to do was be real, real sure that her car was out of range when the proximity fuse went... and she'd be home free to make it back to New York with an armory under the back seat. Then, just maybe, she could deal with her problem on a permanent basis.
Lurch
The pulse grenade landed squarely on the road - and Lazerus drove right over it. The resultant explosion (and wave of EM radiation) shredded his car's engine and 'brains'. It careened off onto the median, parts flying. PJ had been lucky - she was out of the pulse range, but one of the flying pieces from her pursuer's car took out a back tire. PJ pulled over in time to see Lazarus extract himself from his car and begin sprinting towards her.
She barely had time to grab out her shotgun before he was on top of her. His half-bared skull seemed to want to grin as Lazarus plowed into PJ - driving her into the side of her car and knocking the shotgun onto the hood. He grabbed her throat - his hands encircling her neck crushing it inward with unforgiving force. He paused for a moment, looking at her:
"Now that I have my hands around your throat I want to see the pretty face that has given me so much trouble turn red, then purple, blue, and then die."
That was his error. As Lazarus' eyes made contact with PJ's he felt all of his strength fade - for the first time since his death he felt the urge to flee from a living being. It was all she needed. PJ grabbed her assailant and spun him onto the fender. She pushed his chest back with one foot, and grabbed up the shot gun. "No one calls the shots but me mister - not you or the Corps." PJ shoved the muzzle into Lazarus' upper lip and fired.
The next motorist who happened by seemed more than happy to lend PJ his car. She was finally beginning to connect her sweat, eye-contact, and her effects on every one she knew. New York lay ahead of her, and now she had a score to settle...
Anais
She tried, a few times, to call Lester. He wasn't in and his secretary wasn't talking - not even to the careful, gaurded questions that PJ threw out. But he was a paramoid twerp and always doing things not quite on this side of the law so it was possible that he was just.... avoiding calls. He wouldn't avoid one from her but she certainly couldn't leave her name - the Corps would be on her like a rash.
A fatal rash.
She was in the passanger side of a mack truck on her last leg to Manhattan - the driver, Al, was quiet and unimposing. He had told her they would get to Manahattan at three AM or so. PJ had thanked him, planning to grab a hotel room and make plans there, before she turned and stared out at the rapidly flying highway scenery.
Things were beginning to click in her head, and she could all but hear the satisfying snaps as they fell into place. Her odd, and uncomfortable childhood resembled, more than anything, a controlled and prolonged psych experiment. The genetic engineering... GET had made her and raised her and now wanted to collect on it's investment.
But WHAT had they made her? What was it that made people want to kill her - and to kill for her, she thought, remembering the sucking, gory hole that had been her lover's chest. What made her capable of stopping a corpse - a terminator with longevity that surpassed even the old Schwazenegger movies? She seemed to have incredible luck, but it was luck too often. Once is accident, twice is coincidence and three times is concerted action.
But what was going on?
She shook her head - words flashed through her mind... phermones, empathy, eye contact... No, that was all science fiction bullshit. But what today wasn't science fiction bullshit from just twenty years ago? Genetic engineering? Smart Cars? Computers and corpses (though, she thought, the voodoo that the bio-mechanical engineers did to make corpses seemed more like magic - Black magic - than science to PJ).
She thanked the weary driver and climbed out onto the sidwalk in front of a dive hotel on 32nd. Bone teired, muddled from too much thought and not enough sleep, she ignored the raised eyebrows that the man gave her as she checked in. All she wanted was a hot bath and a clean bed.
With a lusty sigh, at the idea of finally getting these luxuries, PJ fumbled with the key card and finally opened the damend door to her room. 507, North. She pushed her hair out of her eyes and started to unzipp her jumpsuit even before she turned on the lights, but not until she had closed and locked the door behind her.
"PJ." the words were softly spoken, and very paternal. PJ snapped on the light and spun around on her heel, hand darting for the gun in her jacket. A man sat on the bed, shaking his head in a slightly dissappointed way, ignoring the muzzle pointed his way.
"Oh, PJ. Poor child.... you've been running so long... why don't you just come home?" the very tall man stood up, one hand out. He was scarred on one side of his face, and walked with a limp. He looked very kind and concerned about PJ and she stared at the gun in her hand, wondering why she pulled it. What had this man done that was threatening?
"PJ... why don't you come sit and talk with me a moment... my daughter?"
Daniel Abraham - Cyrano
Jenn Dutton - Muse
J. Amanda Nielsen - Anais
Brian Rogers - Castigir
Stephen Shipman - Lurch
Sarah B. E. Wishnevsky - Jellicle Cat
Jack Zaientz - Lucien
Cleaned-up and (lightly) edited by: Stephen Shipman, 1999
[ HOME ] [ Fun Things Index ]