Out of the Black - Lee Doty [82]
The last invader is still tracking toward her, firing. He's about five degrees off target when her left hand wraps around his gun. She jerks the gun down and outward and the finger in the trigger guard breaks twice. The gun fires one last time as the finger breaks, tearing a divot out of the floor. Her right hand is tracking along the killer's wounded and recoiling arm. The impact is a knife hand that slides over his raising shoulder and hits where his jaw and neck meet. She feels the horrifying crunch through the hardness of her hand, and then he's in a heap at her feet.
What is wrong with me, Anne thought amid the corpses, trying hard to feel bad. Hawthorne stared at her in abject astonishment- unhidden, unqualified. Anne looked at the three bodies on the floor around her with much the same expression.
"What..." Hawthorne stopped, eyes flitting from woman to corpses to the broken footprints up the destroyed wall.
"Told'ya, Spinach." Anne said inside the cloud of falling gypsum, completely lost. Hawthorne moved her head back a few centimeters; it might have been part of a nod, or perhaps just partial recoil from the strange woman who stood before her, unmasked.
The stunned silence was broken by a confiden male voice from the hallway. "By now, those of you left alive are probably wondering what..." he broke off as he sauntered around the corner and saw his three men on the floor.
"I bet you are." Anne said through a sudden flash of fury. She favored the new arrival with a wicked grin because it seemed the appropriate thing to do. She wondered in passing if her new teeth had popped out yet. She probed with her tongue- nope.
He was athletic, a little less than two meters tall, black hair- crazy handsome. He wore an expensive dark suit and a quickly dissipating smile. Perhaps his most distinguishing feature was the stat-cast he wore under his suit from neck to wrist. It wasn't too bulky, though it could be perceived beneath the jacket if you were looking for it. The cast was most noticeable because it held his left arm fully extended downward and his neck completely straight. It gave him an aura of Frankenstein's monster, which Anne found amusing. She wondered when the wolf-man would put in an appearance.
"You've got some 'splaining to do." Anne leveled a finger at him, utterly failing to get the grin off her face. She hoped she was scaring him, because she was terrifying herself.
His initial answer was an ill-conceived dash back out the door. She caught him by his immobilized arm and throat. She spun him back into the room and tapped him against the wall for emphasis. The sheet rock cracked and partially deformed under the impact.
"Wait!" Hawthorne said behind her, "We need information." She came out of her chair, but then turned partially toward her fallen partner.
Anne had the strangest feeling. First it seemed that static electricity moved around and through her. Then the tingle became the gossamer tugging of water on a swimmer submerged in a river that had just changed course.
Things began to slow again as her combat awareness revved up. The ethereal current continued to intensify. She knew this feeling implied danger, but she didn't know why. Her skin crawled with caffeinated electric eels. Her clothes began to move. The man in her grasp was smiling now- eyes more than glazed. Perhaps it was a trick of light or perception, but a fire seemed to blaze there now, a cold fire composed of deep patterns of white and electric blue. Pressure built, phantom wind tossed her hair, rustled her clothes, a sound like a slow crashing wave filled her ears, then the unseen force ripped her off the floor.
Backwards through the air- upside down, then not- surrounded by sound and fury- impact. A cloud of misty white gypsum dust surrounded her from the damaged wall she was now pinned against. Across the room, she saw the hard face and burning eyes of the cast-man. Behind her, the wall shuddered and she was pressed a few more centimeters into it. It seemed to