Bystander - Novel - OG Myth-Weavers

Notices


Writers' Guild

A community for writers of all genres to hone our craft, with monthly exercises, challenges, and collaborative writing. Open to anyone who enjoys writing!


Bystander - Novel

 
Bystander - Novel

Empaths. Superstrength. Kung Fu Masters. Petting Zoo People.

There is a word for people like that. A pre-packed fluffy-feeling word the government’s spin doctors had come up with.

Peak.

Lucretia had her own words for her peer group: freaks of nature, science projects, and fanatics. They were all the people that had been born, transformed or self-willed into something that should have been bizarre, but was becoming less so.

All she wanted to do was live an unnoticed life in her brownstone, working at the library and chasing down idiot cops who took her books on stakeouts.

Of course, there are problems with that, such as the fact that she's considered an interesting research specimen by some of the more amoral companies. Her tendency to stick her nose in where it probably shouldn't be. A love-hate relationship with various alcoholic beverages.

Oh yes, and the fact that she's still on parole.

**************************************************************************

Bystander Kindle Print


Haunted Bystander - Coming 2011

Current prices are set to what is basically wholesale value (I couldn't make money on this if stores charged these prices, the chunk they'd take out would leave me in debt), in about 2 weeks, I'm ending the sale.

**************************************************************************

First Chapter

November, 2035

The woman was a striking figure, wrapped in a high-necked kimono in colors of purple and blue. Ice-blue eyes stared out from under her silver brows and her unwrinkled, snow-white skin. A light blue shading blended subtly into her skin, giving a hint, strengthened by the blue of her painted lips, of someone that had perhaps been in the cold too long, though no shiver touched her body.

The hair was not white, but silver, as if the precious metal had been mined and strung out into fine threads. She wore it in a traditional Japanese bun save for two long braids that hung down in front of her ears to rest first upon shoulders and then follow the curves of her chest to the level of her heart. The hair shifted lightly in a breeze that only heightened her ethereal appearance.

The woman’s age was difficult to determine. Upon first glance, the silver hair and outwardly austere styling might give her the impression of an old woman, but one look at her pristine skin would put the lie to that guess. Then there were the sensual curves that the kimono concealed and yet hinted at. The touch of experience and time did not appear stamped on her face.

The eyes held the greatest hint at what she was, and the greatest deception. She wasn’t old, not nearly, but she wasn’t young, hadn’t been for a long time. They returned the viewer’s thoughts like a mirror of the spirit, a lake covered in thick ice that might be wild or tame beneath, deep or shallow. Twisted the right way, they could reflect exactly what one would expect to see, but not necessarily what was there.

She glided through the mid-day crowds of her home, and, despite her unique appearance, few saw her that she did not want to show herself to. She was not part of the crowd, but did not disrupt it either. All about her, people traveled to their destinations and did not notice her.

Those that were merely walking from one point to the next stayed focused on their objective and never noticed her, for she never placed herself in their path. Those that watched themselves and their wallets did not see her as she only moved in a manner similar to the crowd about her. The thieves and predators did not see her as she maneuvered in and out of the eddies of the current and placed her small form behind others.

In the crowd, she simply did not exist for anyone else.

(Almost.)

But the crowd told her everything.

(Almost.)

A disturbance in the flow ricocheted from the source through the marching masses and arrived around her in patterns that she had seen repeated time and time again. She knew when someone was pushing through well before she could hear them coming, and she knew whether they were shoving or whether they were simply gathering that much attention. She knew when the crowd was avoiding spots, even subconsciously, and knew to expect watchers in those places.

She was everywhere and nowhere.

She stood by and watched without interfering or interacting.

That was how she liked it.

That was how she had liked it.

The amused smirk on her face faded as she moved along and tasted the path she had traveled through most of her life.

She looked up and noticed a building that caught her eye and memory, and, as quietly as she had entered it, she left the crowd.

Leaving the crowd meant that she lost her cover. She was visible now, and it was not long before she began to feel the gazes: casual looks that lasted only moments, lustful leers lingering on her chest and ass, the filtered sensation of someone peering through a camera to click a picture, the tingle as someone tried to catch scent of her perfume and even the delicate touch of an empathic peak trying to get a peek at her thoughts. She’d learned to recognize the characteristic feel of most forms of attention a while ago.

It didn’t take long, standing just outside the crowd, before the individual looks blended into a veritable barrage of examination that sent unpleasant shivers up her back that she suppressed as she moved around a pillar and the pricks of attention faded until all that remained was the occasional glimpse that would vanish almost as soon as it appeared.

Cricking her neck, she turned her attention to the building that had drawn her out of the crowd to begin with.

Standing before her was a short, three-story building with a large glass front standing out from a modernistic steel structure under a tall cloth banner held high and tight above the entrance and, even higher, the wide windows by wires stretching down to the ground. The courtyard bore a simple, perhaps elegant, fountain that was expertly maintained. To the left, a ramp descended into the underground parking lot, but the woman did not let her eyes linger long on it.

Guards flanked the entrance of the building, she could see the heat of their bodies through the cool glass as they stood just inside to watch and welcome customers. Just as the currents of electricity flowing through the wires in the wall stood out faintly even from this difference, with a thick enough density that walking through the entrance would feel vaguely like pushing through water.

Another person with the same gifts of sight that she had would call the interplay beautiful. The woman, however, was not focused on things as they were, but on how they had been.

****

Outside the roaming memories of silver-haired woman in a beautiful kimono, Isaiah Thomas sat in the cooling autumn winds as some side portion of his mind thought back to when he was a kid and people were almost literally up in arms about greenhouse gasses and their effect on the world’s environment. Many of those old environmentalists were still claiming, now in 2035, that Man was causing global warming even as new lows were recorded year after year.

“Personally,” Isaiah thought as the high winds blew over the edges of glass and steel canyons surrounding the Centennial Seal Bank below. “I wish the globe would hurry and warm up.”

As he spoke, a light dusting of snow started to drift down out of the sky. It was still too early in the year to last long, but the omnipresent rain of Seattle was turning into snow earlier and earlier as years passed.

“I’m getting a bit too old for this,” he muttered.

His skin was getting thin and the blood didn’t stay as hot against the air as it used to. His graying hair didn’t give him the insulation it used to, that too was thinning. His eye was as clear as ever, though, and the sniper still had his hands and his trigger finger.

Isaiah leaned back in his chair for a moment and stretched out a bit, scanning over the monitors and equipment about him for a moment. To his left, the almost thirty year old barrett rifle noisily rotated on its automated tripod in response to the motion of the binoculars in Isaiah’s hand.

Noting that, the man remembered himself and brought the binoculars to an eye level in the air, righting the rifle back to a safer position. Bring his eyes to the binoculars, he found a view there funneled from the electronic scope on the top of the rifle.

He had a clear view of the courtyard and straight into the bank below, the same view he’d been looking into off and on for an hour now, out in this code.

Suppressing a yawn that was unseemly in a man of his combination of age and
occupation, Isaiah rolled his fingers on a wheel attached to the side of his viewfinders, zooming in down below to scan from individual to individual walking in and out of the bank.

Face to face to face, the details changed, the fact didn’t. There wasn’t anything down there but a gaggle of civilians, mostly foreigners on work or refugee visas, in varying states of blissful ignorance.

He grimaced briefly.

This job wasn’t the sort he was needed for. In fact the plan only called for him to act if the first part of the operation was blown to hell.

The sniper was sitting over those people down in the courtyard like the Atropos sorting through the threads in her hand and deciding which thread to snip first. He could easily now eliminate any three of the civilians below and be gone before the crowd was sure of just what had happened.

His presence here was a necessary overkill given the environment.

Shaking his head, he pulled his viewfinder to an obscure portion of the bank courtyard, not really expecting to notice anything, but feeling he’d be remiss if he didn’t watch every spot he could. The rifle’s electric scope keyed on the area and found empty space, just what Isaiah expected.

As he scanned away from the bare patch however, a gnawing sensation grew in the back of his mind. Grimacing, he scanned back and saw only empty space, just as before.

The old sniper paused for a moment in thought and stared over his view finder down into the courtyard below. He couldn’t see anything among the ant-sized scurrying figures below that gave him any clue as to what he pay have missed, if anything, but the feeling was only growing stronger now.

For just a moment, someone was looking at him, he was sure of it. Then it passed. A scan of the roof around him showed nothing, and flipping through various cameras on the approach to his perch similarly gave him no useful information. Though several times he thought he had almost caught the person again.

The grimace was a full out frown now as he glanced down at his viewfinder and pushed a button. This time, as he raised the glasses to his eyes, the rifle to his side remained sturdy on its tripod and the view he found in the glasses this time was from a completely separate angle than it had been before.

The angle he was currently reviewing was impossible to see from the building he was on. Even looking up from his viewfinder and scanning down with his natural vision, Isaiah would have only the view of a sky-scraper’s outcropping between him and the hooking road that gave a view of the bank’s façade, but kept out of view of the wide open lobby within.

Half a mile away, in an empty office, a second drone was set up to control a second barrett and scan the most ideal staging area the police force would have to direct a siege on the bank. He was risking a bit now to scan the courtyard with this weapon as it had taken him nearly twenty minutes to get the drone pointed where he wanted for passive reconnaissance. And he’d given up that placement in exchange for just another view of the empty space on the edge of the courtyard.

Whatever it was he’d missed had moved now, though, of that he was sure as he worked the second drone back to where he wanted it. The third drone wasn’t even pointed toward the bank, instead it was meant to give him an eye on the best sniper positions to support whatever forces might be put around the bank.

That drone would give him no eye on his elusive friend. He switched his viewfinder to inactive before setting it aside this time. Standing up he walked over to the rifle, switched off the drone motor and rotated the weapon up to give him a look at the scope.

He knew what he was feeling now, someone had realized that he was about to notice them and they had moved out of the way. That was the only explanation that there could be. The Argus scope he’d attached to each of the drones was built to filter IR and UV light as well as use microlasers to detect light bending elements, motion and practically every known way to fool the sense of vision.
Jack “Invisible Man” Griffin couldn’t walk past his scope without him knowing about it.

But someone who’d seen a light flash off the scope could by simple stepping to the side at the right moment. Only, looking at the scope just now, he couldn’t see anyway that a light could have reflected off of the scope in any way that would have brought attention from below.

Shaking his head, he sat down and switched on his radio.

“Someone might have seen me,” he said.

“Can you give me a description?” Karen asked on the other end.

“No, I didn’t see them,” he returned.

****

As the crowd flowed along and individuals that had seen her were replaced with those who had not; individuals that would not be paying attention to a pillar and notice when the silver-haired young woman would smirk and glide out from behind it, moving towards the front doors of the building before her.

Looking into the sleeve of her kimono, she pulled out a pay-stub and checked it over, not pausing in her gliding approach to do so. There was only a brief glance at the paper before it disappeared back into her sleeve, not near enough time to actually read anything, just enough to ascertain that it was the piece of paper she was looking for.

Then another sensation started to brush over her, filtered through a range-finding camera and a long distance. She swiftly moved aside, letting the focus of attention slide right past her. Frowning she paused to look up over her shoulder towards the office buildings that loomed over the little courtyard.

“Shimatta,” she muttered to herself. “Should have just let it pass.”

She peeked out a moment and ducked again, whoever it was up there paid close attention to things. If he was any good he’d have thermals on his camera. She didn’t bother to question that there was a weapon up there aimed down this direction, she knew predators when she came across them, besides, the bundle of electricity to his side was too big to just be a camera.

“Tipped my ****in’ hand,” she muttered again, looking back to the bank and the wall of glass, electrified to power the alarms and other sensors, that would shield her from any thermal camera that would point her out as different and the most obvious person to have just barely ducked his eye.

Lucretia shook her head, ignoring the low headache that was developing in her left brow, and slid forward, taking a risk at moving straight through the center of the courtyard.

If she had a crowd to walk with, Lucretia would have no trouble getting to and from the bank unseen, but there was only a trickle here and there going to the bank. That made things a lot harder. She was avoiding the edges she’d usually walk in, since that would be the first place the sniper would look for her, of course, that put her in broad view of anybody in the bank.

Lucretia needed to be ignored, and that meant she needed to look unimportant, and one of the best ways to do that was to look like you thought you were important. As such she flipped her silver mane out of her face with a self-important gesture and a swift determined pace that defied any attempt to interfere with her. She continued on that pace straight up to the entrance and paused for a moment.

She had to think about this. What she was about to do was a lot different than pulling a wallet and leaving it behind where the cops could find it, or “accidentally” tripping a silent alarm during a hold up. This action was going to scream out that someone had interfered.

The silver-haired woman yawned with a bit of boredom as she reached out to look at herself in the glass walls, holding on to one of the thick steel cables fixed to the side of the building. Without looking, her fingers looped about the knotted wire and a bare sound of snapping metal was born and died with hardly a soul noting it.

Her control seemingly restored, she straightened and carefully moved back into the traffic flowing into the building on this late autumn afternoon. Left behind, the wire loop holding it to the wall was now a hook, slowly bending under the pull against it.

Most people were not born with silver hair. Most people did not move with this young woman’s sheer physical grace and most could not snap high tensile strength steel cable with two fingers and barely a hint of effort. Most people did not see, much less feel, the flow of electrical energy. There was a term for people like her; a pre-packed fluffy-feeling word the government’s spin doctors had come up with.

Peak.

The young woman had her own words for her peer group: freaks of nature, science projects, and fanatics. They were all the people that had been born, transformed or self-willed into something that should have been bizarre, but was becoming less so. Twelve years ago, she’d rarely seen anybody else like her save on a TV in a lab surrounded by scientists.

Now, as the silver-haired woman passed through the revolving door, she glanced over and caught sight of a little cat-girl out of a Japanese manga. The girl was impatiently reaching for the lollipops atop the bank counter. She had to admit, the girl was cute with those ears, eyes and tail, but she half-pitied the kid as she grew up.

The elder peak recognized what gave that girl her difference, it had been a highly publicized breakthrough in fertility medicine and competition to get into the first test group had been very fierce. Some genius had found ways to rewire the genetic code to avoid potentially lethal birth defects as a child was developing.

That was the intent, unfortunately, the treatment triggered parts of the genetic refuse that was still in the human genome. The mothers were infected and killed by the resulting mutations. Those that lived long enough to give birth had healthy children, but children with elements of various animals, mostly mammals. Most of the children had ended up being abandoned by their living families.

There was a media stink for a few weeks. People went to jail, and the government put most of the kids into a hospital full of well-meaning if naïve people. Lucretia knew that part, she’d been in there herself at about the same time, and those memories weren’t behind a haze of alcoholic fuzz.

Much of the bank was staring at that girl right now, and Lucretia was no exception. Looking up she saw the half-whispered comments behind laughing lips, the curiosity seekers that were analyzing the kid moment by moment and, here and there, a disgusted sneer. The little girl was putting on her own little zoo and didn’t know it.

The girl’s guardian, set aside by the manner of her attention to the little peak, was paying close attention to the silver-haired peak, but not the crowd. She didn’t seem to notice the crowd’s attention. Lucretia couldn’t blame the guardian, a simple looking woman who was probably just happy to have a girl to look after. She wasn’t a peak and wouldn’t understand how the staring would grate on someone. Fortunately, the cat-girl looked too distracted with candy to notice much herself.

The tableau did give her a good look at the character of the people inside. Not much here other than the other wage-slaves like herself coming in on a Friday looking to deposit their hard-earned paychecks. The guards were looking a bit dazed as the closing time got closer and another day passed without incident. She didn’t find much beyond what she expected.

Though there was one guy, standing in front of the heavy round table where she usually wrote out her deposit slips. He was working a bit too hard at looking bored as he stood near the prep counter in a long trench-coat, probably waiting for someone to get finished. He took care of his looks and more than brushed intently at his blonde hair trying to make sure it was in the right place.

The little buzz of extraneous electricity at his ear that he shared with a similarly dressed woman in queue did give him a bit of more interest. The woman had seen her and dismissed her already. A dark-haired woman with similarly dark skin, not quite African, probably Indian, though her mannerisms were pure American, and though she was trying to hide it, pure mercenary.

They were just standard headsets like anybody with a cellphone might own, though the fact that they were both actively transmitting and neither of the two she could see were talking certainly seemed odd. It was even more so when she considered that only one of the two had anything like a cellphone, and that was a characteristic bundle of stored electricity that screamed batteries in an off device.

Then again, who was she judge. She didn’t even own a cell phone. They might have come up with some sort of thing to do away completely with the handset recently.

Though she certainly didn’t own any guns either, and that bit of cold metal against warm flesh was hard to miss.

Lucretia rolled her eyes, as expected, there were more of them in here and pulled her paycheck out of sleeve. It would be best to get this taken care of quickly.

She looked aside toward the guard at the door, frown shifting so quickly into a smirk that it might have never been there. With a flippant wave she caught the guards eye and he flinched as if she’d just come into existence that moment right in front of him.

“Konnichiwa, Doug,” she said with a mixed accent as she jabbed her hand into the candy bowl, skittering it to the side and spilling candy across the floor which the cat-girl proceeded to dive for.

“Lucretia,” the guard gasped, hand backing away from his gun. “Don’t do that.”

For a brief moment, glances from around the room were drawn towards her and she kept the discomfort she felt off her face only with an extreme amount of effort. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a woman move forward to protectively gather up the little cat-girl, staring at Lucretia cautiously.

Lucretia winked at the parent over a smirk as she felt the recognition and the fear that she was being regarded with. Other looks faded fairly quickly, not recognizing the woman, as Lucretia did nothing else to hold attention and other concerns moved over people’s minds. Only two visions lingered, the woman and man she’d noted earlier, and even they moved off, failing to connect Lucretia with old news stories.

“Do what?” Lucretia asked with obviously false innocence as she looked about the customers in the room, away from the cat-girl’s parent. “Busy, n’est ce pas? Thought the military went out last week, hai?”

“It did, and you know what I’m talking about. You know what I’m talking about,” the guard said in the background as Lucretia noted exchanges of looks and subtle motions. There was a bit in the guard’s eyes that showed concern, but not surprise at her apparent drunk state. “Sometime you’re going to sneak up on something that’ll beat the crap out of you.”

Lucretia gave one, quiet humorless laugh in response as she turned back toward him and shrugged, unconcerned.

“Whatever,” she said. “I’ve gotta get the paycheck in, you know?”

“Right,” the guard said, settling back in to his job, perhaps a bit more alert than he had been before Lucretia broke him out of his end of day stupor with that brief shock and surprise.

Lucretia looked to the crowd of people, and considered the bored seeming man on the edge, trying to seem like he was waiting for a girlfriend or something. There was real boredom in there, and he was already tracing her form speculatively.

The situation was irritating: all because she flinched when a bank robber’s overwatch almost saw her. Now she’d have to do something about it or the damn sniper would notice her and try to do something about her before she interfered.

“What can they possibly do next to make a simple errand any more screwed up?” Lucretia wondered quietly.

At least she’d had a lot of practice at this sort of thing with Sightseer and the others.

Her thoughts drifted back casually, keeping emotions distant and she put on an arrogant appearance again and walked with a broadcast sense of self-importance. Something that would scream “look at me, I’m special.”
Most people tended to ignore that sort after a couple of seconds.

****

Jason, who had the misfortune to come into a family with the surname “Bourne” and a liking for early 21st century action movies, blinked as he took notice of the kimono for the first time, surprised he hadn’t seen it before. He scanned carefully over the shapely form, imagination filling in what the patterned silk at least nominally covered.

The kimono was a good bit of landscaping for what looked like a prime piece of real estate standing casually in an almost flaunting pose that gave most of the room a look at what the hostess had to offer, though there was little sign of the paint past the landscape. There was a smirking expression that gave a very definite image that the hostess enjoyed putting her premises on the market, and implied that there was a treasure in there worth looking for.

As she ended her little chat with the guard, the kimono started to walk deeper into the bank and coming in his general direction. Jason kept the smirk off of his face as he cased the location and noted a second layer of “security” in the form of what seemed to be a skin-tight black body-suit peeking through the kimono’s neckline and around her wrists.

Given all the advertisement, the goods were locked down shut. His initial thought, if he had to guess, was that the lock had a price, but he dismissed that pretty quickly. The flippant way the check was handled spoke that the hostess was certainly not concerned with money. The second guess was that the invitation was for private, and enthusiastic, hospitality to an exclusive clientele chosen specifically by the hostess.

The kimono was certainly a location built for hospitality. There wasn’t as much space as he was used to, but the dairy was well-stocked without being ridiculous. The curves looked comfortable and fitting and he suspected that the doorway would be just about perfectly sized for him feel he fits without feeling like he was exploring a cavern. The hostess took good care of it too, judging by how soft the white face looked under the shimmering silver hair. That last paint job a definite plus to divert from the traditional Asian black that ceased being exotic decades ago.

That left only the matter of entry and access to consider. The extra layer of security was problematic, the hostess could just be setting out a bit of false publicity for attention and favors. He’d seen it before where the welcome didn’t match the decorum.

That was always a touch and go situation.

Still, it definitely wasn’t the hardest lock he’d ever picked, and there were signs that the system would be responsive to a warm touch. Those gears were grinding under that silk just enough that he was certain access had been granted to other operators in the past.

The gears were well greased, and the hostess had certainly lit on the lights, he just had to use the right tools and everything would be opened up. Then he was in for the night and a little bit of a try out of the premises. Give the hostess a little thrill, get his business done and be on out the door and out in the world.
The thought was interrupted, however as he a harsh call assaulted his ears.

“…ason, get in the game,” the old sniper snapped, as if he hadn’t just been getting nervous over nothing but an odd feeling that was probably an old man’s upset stomach.

Why was it that little kids and old people all believed in the bogey man?

“Right,” he muttered in response. Well aware enough not to give a deeper hint to the civilians around him.

Glancing across the lobby he found no help from Karen, who was pointedly looking away and maintaining her cover for the thick-headed civilians and security. He turned away and grimaced as he thought of the dressing down that would be coming later.

Karen watched as the strutting woman make her way along through the lobby. The merc had to admit, she hadn’t seen many people able to put such a sway in combination of an arrogant strut so successfully. It was exactly the sort of woman Jason found most attractive, most particularly because they involved the fewest entanglements.

She couldn’t really blame him for not quite taking the situation too seriously, after all, this wasn’t there normal sort of job. Unfortunately, their normal contacts and employers were a bit indisposed at the moment. Leaving people like her, Jason and Isaiah to scrimp for other means than their normal.

The problems of taking sides.

Jason sighed irritably but took the hint. The kimono was moving close by and he started to shift aside to let her pass. As he looked over the woman’s shoulder to the window, something came to his attention. Outside, one of the cables holding the tapestry was shaking visibly, pulled left and right by what he assumed was the tapestry being pulled to and fro by the wind.

He didn’t have time to give a warning to the situation.

Like a bullwhip, the cable snapped free of its earth-bound mooring, slamming into the glass façade and spider-webbing one of the huge glass panes bringing a moment’s silence that proceeded a cacophony of screaming voices and moving feet.

People scattered everywhere as the cable continued to whip around and the tapestry started to fall rapidly to earth, only half-secured by a single cable. Lucretia stumbled into Jason, dazed eyes showing she wasn’t entirely certain what was going on. He pushed her aside quickly, not quite the chivalrous man he usually tried to present himself as being.

Unseen by anybody, the silver-haired woman landed softly and twisted about behind the table seemingly just rotating about the corner before leveling up to a crouching position on the other side of the table. A grimace on her now alert face implied that she had quite expected this vigorous of a response from her little sabotage. She winced with each impact on the glass.

Lucretia wasn’t sure which way to hope on this situation. On the one hand, breaking glass would mean lots of scattered glass all over the bank which might just scratch someone up, and that was all she needed to deal with.

Of course, if the glass did break, then this was no longer any of her concern and all she would have to do is wait until the cops handled it. And wait, and answer questions about what she saw or what she heard, and when did pretty boy do X and blah, blah, blah.

Either way, the rest of her day was ruined and there’d be no way for to even think about finding a good place, or even a bad place, to pick up a drink and a date later. And she really wanted a drink at this point She was already going to be late for meeting Eric.

The cable pulled clear of the top rung and the already crumpling tapestry was left hanging in mid air briefly before it tumbled downward, uncovering the bare concrete it was meant to hide and draping over the glass façade below it, hanging diagonally downward from the second, secure wire.

Lucretia shook her head and sighed before rising and rushing towards the bathroom, no window really broke, the electrical currents imbedded in the glass had miraculously remained intact. That meant no help, well, she could throw a pen and break one, but that would be a bit obvious.

Lucretia’s noiseless, helter-skelter charge for the restroom caught some eyes, but most were distracted by their own brands of hysteria, in many cases far from fake. The Indian chick was just ahead, behind some other parts of the small crowd that stood gawking at the criss-cross of near breaks in the thick glass.

The silver-haired woman clipped one of the poles holding the red ropes that funneled people towards the tellers. The heavy metal object clattered over with a bang that half-attracted Lucretia’s attention, even as Karen, ahead, took an instinctive backwards twist to get a look at the direction of the noise.

Both women had fractions of a second to respond before the silver-haired woman barreled into the older mercenary.

Almost.

Karen side-stepped, making it seem as if she’d almost fallen over, even as she pushed the silver-haired slut forward to the ground with a faint sound of groaning metal hanging about them. The bandit frowned, the woman managed to keep her feet amazingly and continue on toward the bathroom.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Karen demanded angrily.

“It was an accident, lady,” Lucretia snapped back, calling back over her shoulder.

“Damn slut,” Karen muttered under her breath, standing up quickly before anyone could get a look at what she was wearing under her trench coat.

The cable finally whipped free and loose, the mercenaries looked about and breathed a sigh of relief that none of the windows broke and set off an early alarm. Still, the situation upped their time table a bit.

“Ready, Jason?” Karen whispered into her earpiece receiver.

A slight nod from Jason let her know he’d heard.

“Isaiah?” Karen asked.

“My lines of sight in the building are gone,” he said. “I can’t cover you.”

“Understood,” Karen whispered. “We should be able to handle it.”

As they whispered in conversation, the security guards were trying their best to calm down the customers and figure out what happened. As a result, most of them were standing in a small group to show a unified presence.

Perfect for one guy with a shotgun to cover them all.

“Everybody, calm down,” Doug was calling out. “The situation is over and there’s been no real danger…”

Jason stepped forward, swinging up the sawed-off longarm and loudly and aggressively cocking the weapon.

“I’m afraid I have to argue that point,” Jason said smirking, his finger wasn’t on the trigger yet, but these rent-a-cops wouldn’t be focused on that.

As he was making his move, Karen drew out her gun and leveled it at the tellers.

“Everyone keep your hands away from the counters,” she shouted.

There was something about her heavy pistol as she leveled at the people behind the counters.

Something not quite right.

“All we want is the money,” Karen commanded, not looking back over her shoulder. “So if you’ll leave those stun pistols at my friend’s feet, we can get to…”

A ear-splitting crack radiated through the bank lobby, followed by the crystalline sound of shattered glass gliding downward toward the floor. Jason and Karen both looked toward the sound, and the woman at least saw the pen clattering down

It was a brief moment’s distraction and the guards took it as opportunity.
Jason saw the first guard go for his gun and, grimacing at the need, moved his finger to the trigger and pulled. He was almost a full second faster than the guard drawing his non-lethal weapon, but that didn’t matter.
Because there was no trigger for his finger to catch as he pulled it back.

He didn’t have time to get a good look at his weapon’s fault before he felt something like a punch from a world-class boxer as the first stun cartridge slammed into his body armor. The cartridge discharged its voltage into the non-conductive armor harmlessly, but the impact and the surprise combined to stun him just as surely.

Karen reacted almost as fast, turning about to fire her pistol into the guards. Her finger pulled the trigger. The hammer slammed into the back of the bullet, setting off the small pack of gunpowder and propelling the slug forward, but it couldn’t leave the barrel. Somehow it had been damaged, crushed in.

Just enough to cause a catastrophic failure, and not enough to be easily noticed.

The gun exploded in Karen’s hand, small pieces of shrapnel scratching past her face and shredding her hand. She screamed out in pain, dropping to her knees as panic renewed in the room and two more stun cartridge’s slammed into her partner, one into his leg, protected only by a pair of jeans. The voltage coursed through his body, painfully dropping him to the ground.

“What’s happening?” Isaiah demanded over the comm.-link, frustrated that there was nothing he could do.

“Get out, stay loose,” Karen whispered with a grimace as guards started to turn their attention to her.

Tight-lipped, but recognizing the wisdom of the order, Isaiah gathered as much of his gear as he could quickly assemble. He couldn’t effect the others’ escape with his current set up, he had to leave or join them.

As the scene played out a silver-haired woman peeked out from where she was hiding, stood up straight and flipped back her hair before gliding gracefully towards a teller booth with a deposit slip and her paycheck.

“Can I please deposit my check now?” Lucretia asked irritably, drawing more than a couple of looks from nearby people.





Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.8
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.
User Alert System provided by Advanced User Tagging (Lite) - vBulletin Mods & Addons Copyright © 2024 DragonByte Technologies Ltd.
Last Database Backup 2024-03-28 11:38:33am local time
Myth-Weavers Status