It had been two hours since Mistress Damned entered the White House. But Sin could feel it; she was safe—and for the time, alone. He wanted to see her he really couldn’t stand being away from her, as much as she said they couldn’t be together. He jumped to her. He appeared in a bathroom, his Mistress was bent over the faucet with her mouth in the low powered stream coming out. Blood poured out into the drain as she frantically tried to clean out a small cut in her mouth. He stood to the side quietly, unsure of what to do. “Go get some paper towels from that dispenser next to the sink,” she ordered, without even turning around to acknowledge his appearance. He did as she told him and handed her a few sheets.
She shoved the sheets into her mouth after shutting the water off and rubbed them along the cut. Once satisfied she removed the towels and handed them to Sin who tossed the handful into a small can under the sink. She stood up and took in a deep breath, the fang cut was still bleeding slightly but most of it had stopped, that was good. It looked like she cleaned it out, at least enough to be manageable.
“Hello Sin,” she greeted him formally, “Looks like I’m going out of the country for a while,” she glanced over his left hand. His pointer finger was a few shades darker than the rest of his fingers. The nail had grown slightly further than the rest of his nails. She smiled, finding his mark as a Darth. “Go find someone who no one would miss, kill them, and dump their body a few thousand miles off the cost, use that nail.” She pointed down at the darkened finger, “Then I got an Secret Service man I want you to kill a few days after I leave for whatever country I’m being sent to. Make sure his body is never found either.”
“Yes Mistress,” he responded.
“I’m opening the door now,” she said heading for the bathroom door, “shoo.” She waved her hands at Sin as he vanished. She weeded her hands through her hair as if trying to admire the highlights in the mirror then opened the door.
“Better?” Charles questioned, impatient.
“Yes, looks like the bleeding stopped.” She flashed a fake smile at Charles and let him take the lead.
The pair weaved through the halls which kept going slowly down until she was sure they were underground. The halls underground looked newer. They were probably built sometime during the Third World War, almost twenty years ago now. Terror frightened many countries to build hidden underground passages such as this.
***
A dark room, a long table, and lights hanging far above their heads dimly glowing down, she was certainly in some sort of hidden underground conference room. The walls were dark concrete and sucked away all the light. It probably doubled as a bomb shelter, and even more interesting, full of important people. She was dragged to a meeting, and sat at the head of the table. A heavily decorated general sat at the other end with every possible leader and advisor to him along the countless chairs that lined the sides of the table. Everyone in the room wore uniforms with medals proudly pinned to them. Lilly felt underdressed in a jacket spoiled with her own blood.
The general at the far end of the table spoke after a long silence that occurred when Lilly entered the already full room with Charles, “So, we have new means to the matter at hand,” his voice echoed through the room only slightly. The decorated men closest to Lilly leaned closer to the table to see around the others and to make sure they didn’t miss any information. Lilly leaned back in her chair and gazed only slightly at the general.
The general went right to the point without even acknowledging Lilly’s presence, “The fortress has been a known illegal weapon distribution center for an unknown cult located in the Sahara Desert. The fort was used heavily to smuggle weapons from the Slash Federation to Firo during World War Three. Previously this location was too heavily guarded and fortified for us to make a successful attack without alerting other countries of our presence. We couldn’t be quick enough to avoid alerting the Egyptian government of our soldiers in their land. Now, if our newest recruit is up to the task we have been allowed to drop a single assassin off a few hundred miles from the fortress. The plan is to have this single assassin remove all the cult members guarding the fortress with no American casualties, then attempt to steal or destroy all known paperwork and weapons that may be stashed at the location.”
When the general mentioned the ‘single assassin’ his eyes shifted from the advisors and other officials to Lilly at the far end of the table. Yet he presented the information as if it was directed to everyone except Lilly. His eyes then didn’t budge from a single location—Lilly, “Miss-” he paused cueing to Lilly to fill the gap.
“Damned,” she said a single word.
“Miss Damned,” he seemed a slight bit puzzled over the name. He disregarded it and continued, “Miss Damned, are you up to the task of single handedly taking down a heavily guarded fortress that currently has well over two hundred armed men protecting it?” Lilly tried to respond but he cut her off, “Are you willing to face the consequences if you get captured or killed?” she tried to respond again but once again he talked over her, “ARE you ready to fight for your country and take place in an underground war that has been raging on for over a century!?” His voice thundered louder than ever.
The room went quite; Lilly realized that finally he had allowed her to talk. She said in a firm voice, “Yes.”
***
It had been a day now since his Mistress left him to fend for his own. She was still in the capital but somehow he knew that wouldn’t be for much longer—she was going to Egypt. He looked down at his finger; the nail had grown almost two inches past the skin in the last day. The finger had darkened even more, it looked sick—diseased. He was far from home right now, Seattle; he kept jumping away from the capital until he hit the coast and Seattle was where he ended up. The sky was overcast and chilly light fuzz was dropping from the sky. Moss covered everything as if it had been raining for months nonstop, it probably has.
Now, he had to find some nobody to kill. He looked up at the sky, letting the fuzz speckle his face. The rooftop he was on gave him no cover at all—but it was high and easy to look down into the city. He could see a stadium and a large fenced off pile of rubble that covered several blocks in the middle of the city. He allowed his eyes to glaze over the torn rubble. Someone has to be living in it, most certainly someone no one would miss. It looked like miles of garbage in the center of a metropolis, a perfect home for the breading of lost and worthless people. The destruction must have been from a terrorist attack, but there was no reason why it still sat there, untouched. A monument to the moment maybe? He was sure sites like this lay in rubbles all over the world, the perfect home for those that would never be missed. He liked the rubble.
He jumped and appeared in the center of the trash heaven, he was surprised when he didn’t see a soul around him. Typical, everyone was buried underground, away from the rain. Being drenched for months on end was not a life for anyone. Not even the life for the poor and homeless to stand. Sin rubbed his skin, the air was cold—almost freezing, it felt like summer had about come to an end. Fall was fast approaching. He wondered if snow was forecasted for the night, probably not.
He sucked in his new surroundings, rubble and crushed concrete was everywhere, it looked like he was standing on asphalt—it had aged yellow lines on it—maybe it used to be a parking lot or road at one point in time. Further along was a stack of concrete at least twenty feet high. The mound had many holes and gaps in it—a perfect spot to hide. He admired the green tinge on everything around him and imagined what the wreckage looked like before disaster stuck.
He imagined a four lane street below him, several large buildings shadowing its cleaned streets. It looked as if one of the buildings was thrown upwards from below, that it tilted on its side and crashed down on another. That the single building destroyed countless others—screams and death followed, loud crashing, smoke, dust, fires, hell on earth. Maybe this wasn’t an act of terror; maybe this was something natural, a massive earthquake. Either way he was surprised he never heard of the disaster, maybe it was from before he was born. At least eighteen years ago. Eighteen years ago, that was well after the Third World War. It had to have been internal, but not being cleaned up, that confused him.
He felt the ground below him rumbled slightly, as if some underground train sped by under his feet. “Hey!” a single cracked voice yelled at him, trying to get his attention. It was from the twenty foot tall mound. “You get above ground it kid—that spot’s not safe,” the voice yelled at him once more, a hand reached out of the rubble, about ten feet in the air—well above his head. It was beckoning Sin to come closer.
He felt warmth scream up from under him, the wet mush surrounding him began to steam. Heat? Then he noticed, the moss covered the mounds—it engulfed them—but was nonexistent on the surface. Miles of untouched wet road and dirt, yet no moss at all, he could feel the heat simmer from below him, “Come here kid!” the voice was heard again, the hand dangled further out of a man sized gap in the rubble. Sin went for the hand, another reach out and pulled him up. He looked back at the ground as he was scraped across the broken bricks on the way up; there were two rubber prints where he was standing.
He was sucked into the hole. It was dark but his eyes adjusted quickly, he fumbled around until he managed to get his shoe in front of his face, the rubber on the bottom had been melted. “Yeah, you had a close one, we need to stay above ground otherwise get burned alive.” The hands simmered deeper into the darkness, Sin crawled after. To his surprise the manhole opened up a few feet in, flat musky marble covered the floor, the lobby of an old building. Then he noticed the roof, light was coming from it, electricity—a chandelier was somehow strung up and hung from the broken brick and barbed steel poles that held the roof from crashing down. Then he realized the twenty foot mound wasn’t natural, it was manmade. A home disguised in wreckage.
“You almost died out there,” the man who pulled him in sunk further into his single room hideout. Sin took his eyes from the interesting roof and pointed them towards what was right in front of him. A few rugs covered the ground. No water was seen anywhere, he was amazed the entire place stayed dry. In one of the darker corners was a mattress that was placed right on the ground, the other side was a small gas grill and mounds of canned food. Behind the canned food was what looked like a small fridge. The man had moved in between the bed and the food—he was on a banged up laptop, the computer had its power cord connected to an orange extension cord that weaved out of the building through one of its many holes.
He looked filthy, a perfect outcast to disappear. His blond hair was long and matted, if straightened it would easily go down to the center of his back, but knots made that impossible. He had a blue shirt on, the shirt had a few holes in it—and it was only a t-shirt, the temperature in his hideout was quite cool, easily the forties, it looked like he didn’t have anything heavier to wear, but he did have several blankets around him—he probably huddled up in them for warmth. “Name’s Thomas, you can call me Tom. And this is my home,” the man introduced himself. From behind the laptop he was on.
Sin looked down at Thomas, he had the same dark smirk that he’s seen Lilly get a dozen times before, that same look she had before a kill. Thomas noticed it as well. It looked as if he knew what it meant too. “I saved your life out there you should have known not to enter a strike zone, they, they are always dangerous.” The man sounded like he was in his forties—whoever he was he had a hard life and was for some reason or another living in a hideout in the middle of a pile of rubble.
“Strike zone?” it was the first thing Sin said since he left his Mistress. His voice sounded and felt as if it hasn’t been used for weeks even if he last saw her the day before.
“About twenty years ago,” Thomas started keeping an eye on the slowly advancing Sin, “the American government tried turning on its top secret anti-nuclear shield, this was an attempt to tip the balance of the cold nuclear conflict after the Third World War. It was an attempt to—against ALL treaties—tip the scale to the American side. The American people didn’t know of this, they didn’t know where the factories and generators were built, or how these monstrous buildings appeared under the cities without prior knowledge. The generators were just turned on one day without notice. The entire concept was flawed. One hundred and twenty generators where built deep under the ground, under strategic locations and cities. It was a slaughter. It’s what tore the great USA from its top of the ladder status to a second rate county. Out of the one hundred and twenty generators over sixty of them exploded when turned on—they devastated everything above them for miles, killing tens of thousands of people. About thirty just never worked, but the other thirty worked, at a great cost.
“Every two hours the generators emit such intense heat everyone and everything around and above them is melted and burned. This very home of mine is reinforced by thirty feet of concrete, is lifted a total of fifteen feet into the air and is on a, for some reason, dull location. For the last two years my home has been safe. Since that day twenty years ago twenty-eight of the thirty generators overloaded and failed, now only two are left—Seattle and the generator in the middle of the Death Valley. They are called the Strike Zones.”
Sin still needed to kill – and Thomas still looked like the perfect victim. His short history lesson was no excuse. Thomas noticed no change in the look Sin was giving him. Sin vanished in black smoke—wind blew past his face as Sin appeared inches away from him. “Stop!” Thomas begged, “Don’t kill me, whatever you are, I saved you—you owe me one.” He didn’t seem too surprised about the teleportation, then and again Lilly had been all over the news doing it as of recently.
“I have to kill I’ve been ordered, with this finger.” Sin lifted his left hand, exposing the blackened finger with the extended nail.
“Okay, that’s creepy… but stop—I can find you another!” Thomas pleaded.
For some reason Sin felt remorse for this man, he pulled back, “Who?”
They both went quite; it was as if Thomas was struggling to think of another victim.
“Hey TOM!” a voice bellowed from the entrance, “I want my damn money now—you think if you just ignore my calls and don’t go outside for me I’ll go away. You owe me for keeping the hounds off your hideout; I’ll tell them exactly where you are if you don’t pay off right this second! You’re going to jail you scum,” a brown haired man who looked as if he’s missed a month of showers wiggled himself through the hole.
“Him,” Thomas said under his breath without moving even a finger.
Sin backed away from Thomas and turned around to look at the intruder, “Hello, I’m Sin,” Sin and waved his sharp nail in front of him. He wasn’t sure how the nail would work, but he would figure it out. His murder look drilled onto the new man, he smiled.
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