A Short Story a Day

by David Michael

“Are you sure this is the place?” the cab driver asked.

“Of course,” Ange told him, and handed him two twenty dollar bills. “Keep the change,” she added, and stepped out of the cab. Her designer business suit, gray with matching pumps, white blouse, and her dark hair pulled back in a bun made her look like a legal secretary. The tortoise shell frames of her glasses completed the look of someone who seemed unlikely to have intentionally asked to come to this rundown block on the ass side of the city. But this was exactly where she wanted to be. Where she had been paid to be.

Her heels clicked on the broken concrete of the sidewalk as she walked around the corner and down an alley. The cab didn’t pull away until she was out of sight.

A single guard leaned against the door. He straightened up as she walked up to him. He stood no less than six inches taller than her five foot nine, and she figured at least two of her could fit in his pants. Judging from his face as he looked her up and down, he was probably thinking much the same thing.

“Are you lost, lady?” the guard asked.

“Why does everyone think I don’t belong here?” she asked in reply. The guard’s expression showed confusion. Before he could finish thinking up a proper comeback and/or pickup line, she added, “I’m here to see Dennis.”

“He didn’t send word that a whore was coming.”

“Whores almost never come,” Ange told him. “At least not with their johns. That’s a trade secret, by the way, so don’t spread it around. It’s also beside the point.” She held up her right hand. “The point is,” she went on as the blue filament only she could see connected her hand with her gun where she had left it back in her apartment, “are you going to let me in, or am I going to kill you where you stand?” Her right eye twitched from the strain, but her once empty right hand now held a nine-millimeter pistol inches from the guard’s face.

Startled and panicked, the guard jumped backwards, slamming into the door hard enough to knock it open. He scrambled to pull his own gun out of a shoulder holster as he fell backwards into the building.

“What the fuck–?” a voice yelled.

By the time the guard, now prone, had drawn a very shaky bead on her, Ange had sent her gun back to her apartment and blinked away the effects on her vision. In fourteen years, nine as a government employee and five as a freelance gun for hire, she had never found a comfortable way to carry a gun. Fortunately, she didn’t need to anymore. There was no place in the world she couldn’t reach her gun now.

“What the fuck are you doing, you moron?” the voice yelled again.

The moron continued to hold his gun with both hands, pointing it at her from where he lay on the floor in the dark interior. “She pulled a gun,” he said.

Ange put both her hands away from her body, palms up, fingers spread to show that she held nothing.

“She ain’t got a gun.” Ange heard the impact of a leather boot on beefy ribs, and the guard grunted. “Now get up before I get a gun and shoot your jumpy ass.”

The guard got up, keeping his gun pointed at her as he did. “I’m telling you, she had a gun.” He paused. “Maybe you should search her.”

The voice materialized out of the dark doorway, another man, older than the guard, but built much the same. “Alright,” he said, giving her a long look. “I’ll search her.” He stepped and frisked her, more thoroughly than was necessary. “If you weren’t such a pussy,” he said over his shoulder to the guard, “you could’ve been grabbing…I mean frisking, some of this.”

“She had a gun,” the guard insisted.

“Then where is it, moron?” the man asked as he finished and stood up. “She’s wearing panties and a bra under what you can see just by looking at her. Maybe she flashed a tit at you and you panicked? Has it been that long since you saw a woman? Fucking moron.” He finally turned to face Ange. “What do you want?”

She met his gaze. She hadn’t said anything while he pawed her, hadn’t flinched or acted like she cared. “I’m here to see Dennis.”

“Yeah? I’ll see if he’s in.”

“So this is how a two-bit crime boss spends his afternoons,” she said after she had been escorted into a large room with a desk and chairs at one end, and stacks of boxes–remarkably intact after having “fallen off the back” of numerous tractor trailers–at the other.

Dennis Karnof, who had brutally killed the first and only reporter who tried to stick him with the moniker “the menace”, sat at his desk, leaning back in his leather chair, looking at her. A silver-plated semiautomatic, .45 caliber, lay on the desk in front of him. “Who sent you?” he asked.

The two of them were alone in the room. The guard and the other man had been sent back out to their posts after a quick word their boss.

“I’m the Gray Lady,” Ange said.

Karnof’s hand moved fast, almost too fast, before she could visualize the blue filament, but his fingers closed on empty air and she held his gun. She pointed the gun at his chest, braced with her left hand, and forced her eyes to refocus. The pain would pass.

“I guess you’ve heard of me,” she said, risking a single blink. “Don’t start yelling,” she added before Karnof could open his mouth. “Let’s keep this civil, as we discuss your options.”

“My options?” He was scared. She could feel it in him. But he was still in control. “I’ve got plenty of options, lady. The question is what are you going to do? Die now, quickly? Or later, much, much later, after I’m through with you?”

“You can continue trying to open that drawer with your left hand,” Ange replied, “and I’ll shoot you now. Or you can put both hands on the desk where I can see them, and we can talk.”

Karnof smirked, but he put his hands on the desk in front of him. “Talk? You want me to bribe you to not kill me? I can do that.”

It was her turn to smirk. “You can’t afford me, Dennis. No, I’m going to offer you a choice. You’re not going to like either option, but the same choice was offered to me once, and I like to pass on the favor.” She stepped closer to the desk, his heavy gun still pointed at his heart.

“A choice?” he asked, his eyes moving back and forth from her to the gun.

“Did you know, Dennis, that there are people born who can see the world as it really is? Not like you or even me, before I woke up. People who can really see.”

“See what? Are you a hitter or a Jehovah’s Witness?”

“You have no idea what I’ve witnessed, Dennis. But I can show it to you.” She tilted her head, and gazed at him down the barrel. “That’s your choice, Dennis. I kill you now, as I’ve been paid to do. Or you take your chances that you’ll survive having your eyes opened.”

“That doesn’t sound like a hard choice,” Dennis said, his eyes now fixed on her.

“That’s because you have no idea what it means. Either way, you’re taking a chance with a bullet to the head. One bullet has a metal jacket, while the other…is less tangible, but no less real, and can leave a much bigger hole. So far,” she added, “I’ve never seen someone survive either choice. But I’m always optimistic.”

“I got your optimism right here,” Dennis said. He pushed himself backwards as the door crashed open behind Ange.

Ange stepped to her left, turned and pointed Dennis’s borrowed gun at the man who rushed in. The gun boomed and bucked, but Ange kept it steady and the slug took the man through the chest, slamming him back into the next man behind him. That man, the one who had frisked her, grabbed the body and used it as a shield as he charged her. She got off one more shot, but it didn’t stop them.

Two heavy male bodies crashed into her, knocking her on her back onto the desk. One bled all over her while the other fought to take the gun.

She let the man take the gun as she visualized a green filament, the essence of matter and substance, razor sharp, that flashed through his wrist. His right hand, still holding the butt of the pistol, bounced off the desk onto the floor, as blood gushed from the severed wrist. She could barely see, now, her optic nerves overloading with neon colors and pain. The man’s mouth opened in shock but nothing came out.

Now she visualized a blue filament, this one looped around the body that held her down. With a mental heave that threatened to burst her eyeballs, the blue filament lifted the body and threw it across the room.

She couldn’t see now, but she didn’t need to. Another green filament wrapped itself around the neck of the man with the missing hand, a simple twist, and his head joined his hand on the floor. She heard the rest of his body fall a few seconds later.

Once past a certain threshold, Ange had learned, a little more pain no longer mattered. Her eyes felt like they were on fire, but the pain didn’t distract her. Nor did the mix of blood and tears running down her face as she stood up and turned to face Karnof. She wondered if maybe this time the blindness would be permanent, be more than she could heal, but at the moment she could locate Karnof without her eyes.

He huddled in the corner of the room. He showed no control any longer. She could smell his fear, feel his panic as she strode over to him. He seemed to be praying. She couldn’t be sure. She didn’t speak his native language.

She visualized the weave of red, purple, and gold filaments that would Awaken him. She would always remember that weave. It was the first one she had learned, burned into her memory on the day that Colter had Awakened her. She had asked him to, demanded it, as payment for what she had done for him. She had seen what he could do, what others like him could do, and she had insisted that he share that gift with her. She had, after all, saved his life.

“You won’t like it,” she said now, to Karnof. The same words Colter had said to her. “But you might not die.”

Her mind thrust the weave into his mind. His back arched, his body went rigid and a scream caught in his throat. She wondered where his breaking point would be. Would it be the eyes, like hers?

None of her targets had ever survived Awakening. Their breaking points always seemed to be fatal. Coroners across the world had examined the bodies left in the wake of the mysterious Gray Lady. There had been ruptured, collapsed, or failed internal organs, aneurysms, body cavity hemorrhaging, and more.

Sometimes she wondered if maybe her targets just refused to accept the world as it really was, and died from the shock of it. Her own breaking point, like hot pokers thrust through her eyes, could have been fatal. But she had mastered the Awakening–and the agony of really seeing the world for the first time–and she had survived.

Maybe she was looking for a partner among the wrong subset of humanity. But like she had said earlier, she was optimistic.

“If you survive,” she told Karnof as she visualized the weave of blue filament that would take her back to her apartment, to her sanctuary to heal and await her next job, “I’ll know, and I’ll find you, to teach you.”

Copyright © 2006 by David Michael. All rights reserved.