Striper Assassin

by Nyx Smith

  “LEMME GO! LEMME GO!”

  She straddles his body, bares her fangs, and then roars. The air fills with the rank stink of his terror. That is the proof she demands, the surest measure of her power. Any hunters who come this way will smell the terror she has inspired and take warning.

  She flicks an ear with satisfaction, then rips out his throat. That is the price to be paid for turning on the hunter.

  The price Nature demands.

  It makes things right.

  * * *

  07-14-54/04:46:51

  Roll cam.

  The datajacked Sony CB-5000 in the steady-mount atop his helmet comes on-line with a shower of electronic snow and a quick burst of static. Skeeter keys the Bionone tridlink controller on his right forearm to overlay the view through his Seretech Evening Shade cybereyes with a complete technical readout. No point in risking his fraggin’ skin if the blinking dingo equipment isn’t going to record every gore-drenched bit of action.

  “Skeeter!” J.B. says impatiently. “Am I—?”

  Skeeter thrusts a finger at the dink-fragging biff. You’re on already! Start babbling, dithead! J.B. lifts her mike. “This is Joi Bang for WHAM! Independent News and I’m here on the Philadelphia waterfront where only moments ago a broadcast on police comm frequencies reported that a small war has begun complete with automatic weapons fire.”

  Skeeter lifts his right arm out to his right, then across his chest to his left to get some extra images of the street with the AZT Micro25 strapped to his wrist. The skank blasted street is deserted, of course. Nobody but a ditbrained newshead like the so-very-trid-o-genic Asian-faced J.B. would come into this part of town any time before dawn.

  Abruptly, an engine roars and tires scream. Skeeter jerks around to train his helmet-mounted cam on the street. A black van peels out of an alley across the street and goes racing up the block, smoke pouring from its tires. On the van’s roof is something that looks like a half-inflated black balloon.

  “Police have apparently not yet arrived on the scene,” J.B. remarks, so very muck-headed astutely, and then she’s off, running up the sidewalk and right into the alley at the side of the warehouse. “Skeeter! Skeeter, come on!”

  Un-be-fragging incredible.

  * * *

  07-14-54/04:49:12

  “Skeeter! Skeeter, look!”

  The damn fraggin’ biff is up on a loading dock at the rear of the warehouse. Skeeter marches up the steps and onto the dock. J.B. pulls on an open door and turns to face him, lifting her mike.

  “Am I—?”

  You’re on, dag-fram it!

  “As you can see, the door is open,” J.B. says into her mike. “Any possible perpetrators may still be inside.”

  Right.

  “This could be very dangerous.”

  No frinkin’ kiddin’ ding-brain.

  “We’ll take a look.”

  Damn ditheaded biff.

  * * *

  07-14-54/04:56:30

  Main lens, close focus. Three floors and six flights of stairs up, they find a freakin’ ripped-up mutilated mess of a corpse sprawled on the stairway landing. Skeeter’s thermographically enhanced view through his Seretech cybereyes show that the corpse is still hot, not quite at normal human body temperature, but close. J.B. immediately starts babbling. The effin’ scrod-headed newscoop is naturally just delighted over the find.

  “Here we have further evidence of the string of cannibalistic mutilation killings that have been terrorizing northeast Philadelphia!” J.B. gushes in an undertone. “What other monstrous mutilations have been committed here? Only—”

  The bimble-brained biff abruptly hesitates. From beyond the open doorway where the corpse lies comes a low, rumbling growl. The only thing Skeeter’s heard to compare with it is the animal growl of a troll, one who is very unhappy.

  Mouth open, yet damn-fragging miraculously silent, J.B. turns from the lens of Skeeter’s helmet-mounted Sony to face the doorway. That’s when something steps into the doorway. Something big. Very big. Its eyes glint blood-red with a phantom ray of light. Its face is a ferocious alien mask of bloody red and stripes of black. It bares enormous gleaming fangs. Its mouth, stretching open wide, seems easily big enough to swallow the very trid-o-genic head of J.B. in one gulp.

  “Oh my god oh my god oh my god!” J.B. babbles.

  Skeeter presses the PANICBUTTON button on his Toshiba portable wristfone. The monster in the doorway roars, and the roar is thunderous, reverberating through the stairwell. J.B. screams, turns and runs, ramming right into Skeeter.

  “OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD!” the muddle-headed dithead screams, racing down the stairs.

  Skeeter scrambles back onto his feet and charges down the stairs right on the damn fraggin’ dithead’s heels. The monster roars again. J.B. screams. Skeeter concentrates on running like he’s never run before, down six flights of stairs, through the ground-floor warehouse, off the loading dock in the rear and up the alley to the street. Even then, his dimble-headed muck-brain news snoop is still gasping. “Oh my god! Oh my god!”

  Yet another damn-skanking night on the town!

  Obviously, J.B.’s theories about cannibalistic orks is down the toilet. Obviously, some paranatural animal like a tiger got out of the zoo, the Philly zoo or some other zoo, and has been prowling the city, killing anything that moves. The one good thing about it all is that he got some fantastic footage of J.B. running away like her shorts were on fire and her behind was catching.

  That much is worth a chuckle.

  A short one.

  Part Two

  Were

  31

  The waterfront slums begin just north of the port. The streets are lined by three-and four-story tenements that go on for kilometers, on and on, flanking the Delaware halfway to Trenton. Tikki stops just short of the House of Corrections in northeast Philly. The district around the prison tends to be quiet except for a lot of police vehicles coming and going. Many are indistinguishable from the area’s regular sector cars and so, to some, the district seems heavily patrolled.

  The building where Tikki stops is just a little taller than the others on the block, five stories of grime-blackened brick and dark, smog-smeared windows. She turns off the sidewalk, pushes through a recessed door, and steps into the face of a Konoco Combat Master shotgun, pointed right at her.

  The slag holding the gun is dressed like a ganger and has bright orange hair and teeth filed to points. He sits on the stairs. He sits there because that’s his job, to keep everyone but tenants out of the building.

  He immediately lowers the gun and nods.

  “You know me?” Tikki says.

  The guy shakes his head. “Never seen you before. In fact, I ain’t even seeing you now.”

  Good boy.

  Tikki takes the stairs to the fifth floor, which has three small apartments. All three belong to her. Tonight, she decides to use the one on the left. She opens the door lock with a simple four-digit combination. There’s no other mundane way through the door except by brute force or major mechanic surgery, either of which would leave observable traces.

  The apartment is two rooms, main room and bathroom. The main room has a counter at one end that conceals a micro-kitchenette with a small refrigerator and a sink. There’s a low Japanese table and pillows and a mattress for sitting and sleeping and a portable trid for entertainment. The bathroom is micro-sized, too. Shower, toilet, sink. Both rooms have lighting fixtures on the ceilings, but Tikki never uses them. The windows provide adequate lighting, day or night, and if for some reason she needs more she’s got the trid.

  Standard lighting makes a target of people. So do windows. That’s why the first thing she does upon entering her doss is to draw the Kang and look out the windows of the main room across to the roof of the building adjacent. Tonight no one is about. Admittedly, windows like these pose something of a security risk; but they also provide a means of escape if someone should come smashing in through her front do
or. Given the choice, she’ll accept the added risk in exchange for the avenue of escape.

  The night is almost over, but what remains of it is not for wearing clothes. She strips naked, dumps everything, clothes and weapons included, onto the mattress, then turns on the trid. News Now 38 has a story about some suit called Neiman who got hosed in a parking garage. Nothing new about that. Like they say in the adverts for adventure trids, the modern metroplex is a dark and dangerous place. Somebody’s always getting sliced or diced or chopped to ribbons. What surprises her, though only briefly, is the absence of any mention of all the yakuza she’s been scragging for Adama. The cops or the corps must have the gag on. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  She goes into the bathroom to use the toilet, then checks herself in the mirror. The faint rash around the base of her neck has been annoying her for weeks. The redness is still visible. That puzzles Tikki because she doesn’t usually suffer from such problems, from any sort of physical complaint. Evidently she came into contact with some toxin that her body has not been able to cast out with its usual ease.

  Probably silver—the stuff is like poison for her.

  She rubs at the redness, but that’s a mistake. The more she rubs, the redder the skin gets and the more it complains. That ticks her off, and her sudden rise of anger speaks to her instincts. The change begins before she can stop it, before she’s entirely aware of having started; and once started she finds she hasn’t the will to stop. Somehow, it seems written into the fabric of the night. Fur rushes over her skin. Her body lengthens and swells. Her breathing becomes a rough, husky rumble too deep and resonant for anything even remotely human. She drops to all fours, and walks back into the center of the main room.

  Moonlight flowing in through the windows sets her back to bristling. She flicks her ears, feeling a sudden urge to grumble, to growl or roar, announce herself to the night, declare her dominion over the city, but she resists, keeping her silence. That’s the smart thing to do. Discontented, Tikki stretches and yawns and drops belly-first onto the mattress. On a night like tonight, when the moon fills the night and her predator’s soul yearns to run wild and free, she should be out in the wild somewhere, in the dark reaches of some primitive land, like the woodlands near Seattle, or the forests and river valleys of Manchuria and southeast Siberia…. Stalking…. Hunting…. rising out of the brush around some waterhole… striking like lightning…. Silent and swift…. Bringing down prey…

  Life in the wild is so simple. She was born to it. She understands it. She knows it well enough to act, and act correctly, without even pausing to think. By comparison, her life within the human domain often seems…

  Complicated…

  Hard just to think about.

  She lowers her head onto the cradle of her crossed forelegs, then rolls onto her side, looking up at the windows.

  Tonight, she took three humans as prey, and let two others escape. The three she killed, the one named Hammer and his cohorts, deserved what they got. The threat of death must be answered with death. Her every instinct commands it. If she had not killed those three men, they would be hunting her now, and they would keep hunting till they found and killed her.

  The contest between predators is as much a part of the world as life and death, and so it must be. The hunter who shares her land with other predators soon grows weak and dies for lack of prey. That does not mean that all killing is right or even justified, even to her. It means that it is better to kill than be killed, better to dominate than submit. Were Tikki meant to simply bare her throat and let herself be murdered by any animal, two-legged or four. Nature would not have given her the soul of a hunter or the weapons with which to hunt.

  What then of her human guise? What is the point of it? Is it merely a deceitful mask? She finds that hard to accept. Tikki has come to believe that Nature would not have equipped her to pass for human if Nature did not intend her to play some significant role in the human domain. Her problem is that defining the role, her proper role among humans, has proven as difficult for her as it was for her mother.

  Her mother often said that Tikki must find her own way. She has been doing that most of her life, from her earliest days in Seoul and Shanghai, to her recent experiences in Seattle, and now to the present moment, here in Philadelphia. She came here in search of a man who used her. That man, in order to further his own plans, sought to have her killed. She wonders now if she will ever find him, and what she will do if she does.

  However, for now that is not the real issue.

  Tonight…

  Things are not going as they should. That is why she came to this doss in northeast Philly rather than going to one of her usual lays, and why she hasn’t checked in with Adama yet.

  She doesn’t understand why she didn’t save Hammer for interrogation. She should have done that, if only to make him reveal the identity of those who hired him. Sure, she already suspects that Adama’s competitors hired him, but it would be good to have confirmation. She could just as easily have killed Hammer after the interrogation, and she’s somewhat surprised that Adama didn’t suggest it. Most Triad leaders she’s known, especially Red Poles, those in charge of enforcement, have been big on symbolism. Few things are more symbolically endowed than leaving the torture-mutilated body of an enemy’s assassin on the enemy’s doorstep. In some parts of the world, that’s standard practice. Doing anything less would entail a serious loss of respect.

  But that is not all that doesn’t seem right. What really bothers Tikki is the realization that she went to the waterfront warehouse intent on killing, slaughtering, totally annihilating the animals hunting her. That was very stupid. She knows better than to think in such limited terms, she’s known better since she was a child. Maybe she can afford to think that way in the wild, but in the city, she must be smarter, more scrupulous in evaluating the possible effects of her actions.

  There’s also the question of identity. In certain circles, a great many people believe Tikki to be a killer, and even more accept without question that she hires out as muscle. In recent years, however, she has taken steps to conceal her identity while taking two-legs as prey. The question then is how Adama’s competitors, the Honjowara-gumi yakuza, could have known that she is the one who has been dusting their mid-rank executives? How did they know to send Hammer after her? Just a guess? Did she commit some error? Could there be a spy or informant in Adama’s organization? Could Adama himself have betrayed her?

  Disturbing questions, for which she must find answers, but none are quite as disturbing as something else that happened tonight.

  Back at the warehouse, she let the elf media-girl and dwarf camera-guy escape, but she had briefly considered slaughtering them both just because they were there. Instinct seemed to demand it, telling her to kill them, tear them apart, sate herself on their meat. She felt the moon burning into her, reaching down into her predator’s soul. She resisted because she did not like that, did not like what she felt, did not like it at all.

  Now, she likes it even less.

  The elf girl reeked in ways that only mages ever do. The dwarf stank of cybernetics. Tikki would be hard-pressed to decide which is more revolting, the flesh of a metahuman or the metal-infected meat of the cybernetically enhanced.

  But that was beside the point.

  The point was this: Tikki decides what she will do, where and when she will kill, if she will kill. No one else makes that decision. No one. That is her absolute rule, her law. All must obey. Even she. Even instinct. Ruthlessly enforcing that law is how she has managed to survive for so long. If she had killed every time the desire arose, she would have been like a creature run amuck, and humanity would have banded together long before now to hunt her down and destroy her.

  Admittedly, her eternal argument with the darkest urgings of her instincts sometimes goes against her. She has done things even in the recent past that she now regrets. She does not moan and cry about it because that would accomplish nothing. Rather, she strives to l
earn from her mistakes so that the next time she will not repeat the error. So that one day soon she will know her place in the human world as well as she knows her place in the wild.

  She might take humans and metahumans and other species as prey, but they are not her natural prey. She would never hunt them for their meat. No more than she would hunt another tiger or Weretiger, or any Were at all.

  That is why taking the elf and the dwarf would have been wrong. What the humans call murder. What she has always thought of as simply unnatural. A crime against Nature. The two metahumans were neither predators nor prey. She could have no justification for killing them. They were just bystanders, as innocuous as they were irrelevant. She had every reason to let them go unharmed, and that should have been apparent to her from the moment she first saw them.

  What’s wrong with her?

  She shakes her head and grumbles.

  32

  The raid gets under way at about 05:45.

  Kirkland waits and watches from behind the wheel of his unmarked car. At first, nothing too dramatic happens. The sky is overcast. What little sunlight that gets through the clouds and the haze is barely enough to tickle the photocells of streetlights and security floodlights. Everything looks gray and damp.

  A van and a Ford sedan appear at opposite ends of the block. Five men in casual clothes emerge from the van; another four get out of the sedan and begin walking toward the middle of the block. The men are wearing neo-Kevlar insulated clothing and are armed with everything from heavy automatics to submachine guns, but at a glance the average citizen would never guess.