The Woman on the Beast_A Season for Horror

by Macie Holloway

  The children had bloody bare feet like Misaki, but didn’t appear to notice. They threw rocks at each other before ducking behind the cardboard sculptures.

  Misaki sat on the dirt and began to babble. While Mogadishu wasn’t known for having a large population of Oriental people, she sure no appear creepy enough to avoid any questions.

  The same old blue Nissan pick-up truck appeared suddenly appeared again in a cloud of dust.

  Misaki watched in horror as two warlords pulled a middle-aged couple from the cardboard house by their feet, letting their faces scrape across the jagged rocks.

  A shirtless boy in tattered blue jean shorts shot out from the crowd of kids.

  Like a blazing bullet he ran at Olympic speed, but Misaki saw it in slow motion.

  As he screamed, “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!” loudly enough to curdle anyone’s blood, the warlords ordered the parents to stand up and look their child in the eyes.

  It was their first test of their new R.I.P. bullet, which was designed to splinter into eight pieces of shrapnel upon firing. It was also made out of copper, which caused the bullet to explode within the victim instead of passing through to the other side. The R.I.P. bullet did not leave a deadly circular hole through the forehead, but instead made the head explode like a watermelon hit with a sledge hammer. There was no such thing as an open casket funeral for any victim of such a bullet.

  As the child’s bloody fleet sprinted through the dust, Misaki racked her brain.

  Turning the sun dial to laser mode and targeting the assassin directly wasn’t an option as the blue pickup was positioned in front of her target. The sun reflecting off the metal of the truck could easily redirect the laser and ricochet the light.

  She quickly turned the dial on the bottom of the fork to blind spot mode and created a temporary blinding sphere around her at a twenty mile radius.

  She was a fraction of a second too late and the boy in flight approached his mother just in time to see her head explode into hundreds of bloody chunks in every direction.

  Blasted by the sun sphere the boy fell to his knees along with the warlords and all others within the twenty mile radius.

  Misaki was on her bloody feat in seconds, dodging the truck obstacle and standing in directly in front of the temporarily blinded warlords.

  It’s time for laser mode, you sick fucks.

  She turned up the power dial to Blind mode, knowing she only had ten seconds before the sun spots cleared from their vision.

  She only needed five.

  She aimed her fork directly at the eyes of each warlord and fired the powerful blinding laser light into all six sets of eyes.

  She could have killed them with it, but that was too good for them. Being left alive, but completely blind seemed a more appropriate justice.

  She’d learned the local language to all places she’d been assigned to, and quickly summoned the survivors to cram into the back of the pick up truck even if in a pile. They didn’t have room to bring the weapons and so Misaki filled up her dirty bag with R.I.P. bullets and then quickly lasered a hole through the barrel of each gun.

  It was no surprise the key was in the truck’s ignition.

  She pulled off slowly, knowing the people were dangerously piled up in a heap.

  In her rearview mirror she saw the running boy and his father embracing each other in a flood of tears that streaked down their dusty faces.

  Devastated over the family’s tragedy, Misaki wondered if she was at fault for the millisecond she missed that resulted in tragedy.

  After a thorough analysis, she concluded she had done her best. Sun dial weapons were not toys. Lethal mode could only be used on an isolated target. Sun spot mode only gave ten seconds of temporary blindness, and metal objects with reflective surfaces could ricochet light faster than any bullet.

  She drove thirty miles to find a zero-density population with the appropriate radius for secrecy.

  She pulled on a stiff weed which turned out to be a handle to a dirt trap door.

  Eager to escape the terror of the warlords, the people poured into the underground shelters.

  Misaki made two more trips in an effort to rescue the persecuted neighborhood entirely.

  As she ushered in the final load of people she informed them that supplies would be coming shortly and that they were safe.

  She locked the trap door and retrieved her walkie-talkie from her dusty brown bag.

  “Requesting supplies to Shelter A-75. 125 refugees sealed for protection, one casualty. Coast is clear. Zero density confirmed. Requesting drone, Master.”

  Within’ seconds, she heard the light whipping sound of hummingbird wings as a nearly silent drone gently settled upon the ground behind her and its pre-programmed door quickly slid open.

  Before the door even closed the drone was fully engaged in eagle mode and on its way back to the Ninja Academy in Hiroshima.

  Haiku had already precisely preprogrammed the drones. His ninjas were to focus on apprehending the innocent, ushering safely to underground shelters, securing the entrances and above all ensuring the secrecy of tunnel entrance locations, because if even one shelter entrance was breached, the safety and security of the entire underground city would be compromised.

  HAIKU’S SECRET WEAPONS

  Allowing Haiku access to NASA’s nuclear tunneling devices and underground tunnels was a small price for President Matthew’s to pay for access to Haiku’s revolutionary weapons of mass destruction.

  His radar-resistant stealth drones were controlled by highly intelligent synthesized Android brains that controlled bombs patterned after R.I.P. bullets. The only difference was that the R.I.P. bullet only contained eight pieces of shrapnel, whereas Haiku’s R.I.P. bomb contained 1,234,865 pieces of intelligent shrapnel programmed with precise locations by an intelligent android brain capable of altering targets, tracking enemies, and using heat sensory X-ray vision to target weapons, biological or chemical warfare facilities. The shrapnel bombs were controlled by highly intelligent synthesized robotic brains that Haiku had programmed with information from all Google databases. The android brain was programmed with profiles, names, ages, histories, communication records, birthdates, race, sex, up-to-date-GPS location, current ages and addresses of every human on earth.

  The intelligent android brains were linked to satellites, giving them authority to disengage bomb detonation, scramble communications if necessary, and use live espionage capabilities to target individuals with deadly intentions.

  The shrapnel bombs dropped from his intelligent stealth drones did not kill innocent civilians. Every piece of shrapnel was programmed with its own mini-brain connected to the larger android brain, meaning a criminal guilty of plotting bloodshed via his own communications could be taken out in less than a second, with absolutely no harm done to any innocent civilians or children and only minimal damage to the building comparable to a sniper whole. But while Haiku’s weaponry was very important, his first priority was to rescue the innocent.

  Without haste, he immediately began tunnel underground shelters beneath cities that were not allowing aid workers in, or allowing them in only to steal all the food and supplies for themselves. Since families were starving to death as their nations’ dueling militias left town after town under siege, he started forming large shelters below as quickly as possible. People couldn’t come in the nations, and people were not allowed to leave, but the merciless militias could do nothing about them secretly escaping through underground tunnel entrances in the middle of nowhere.

  To keep an underground entrance safe, it would have to be created from the ground up in a zero density population area such as between two mountains, in the middle of the woods, or in a vacant desert, depending on topography of the land. Even if a field had no people anywhere near it, flat vacant areas were last resorts for the entrances because of their visibility.

  Haiku’s ninjas were ranked by ability, intelligence, and skill, to ensure that only the best of the best
were sent to the most dangerous areas. He had chosen 500 ninjas to be his Top Gun ninjas and commissioned with the most dangerous missions.

  Misaki was one of them.

  She had been assigned to war-torn Syria where she had already rescued thousands.

  She had ushered away orphaned street children from the slums of Kinshasa where the conditions were so bad photography was outlawed. She had been to Cite Soleil in Port au Prince, Haiti, where she was sometimes even able to rescue 20 or more children at a time. No one had ever even noticed the children disappeared. She had ushered many a child to safety underground from places like West Point, Monrovia, Liberia, a place where there were so few toilets, people used the bathroom in the streets.

  Ciudad Juarez Mexico; Rocinha Favela, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Salamat, Chad, and Niamey, Niger were only to name a few of the top 100 poorest and most dangerous cities that she and the top 500 ninjas were secretly droned in and out of for three months. The 500 Top Guns were so highly intelligent they had learned enough languages to be useful in only five days.

  They were limited to only rescuing small numbers of children at a time because the tunnels and shelters needed time to expand underground and be stocked with supplies. Using their Master’s drone technology they could easily return again and again to avoid flooding his underground cities with children quicker than the supply trains could stock them with food and water.

  The ninjas had specific rules to follow. For example, they knew to pass over anyone using drugs, not marijuana, as that was just a plant, but anyone doing real drugs.

  Master Haiku explained that his order did not stem from judgmental or religious reasons, but was common sense. “Drugs are expensive. The truly abused people don’t have the luxury of killing the pain, and we’re not the Hilton.” Of course the exception was children who were maliciously hooked on narcotics to imprison them for abuse. For that reason, many ninjas also carried needed withdrawal supplies and detoxifiers.

  Haiku’s ninjas were also ordered to pass over anyone who offered them money, made a sexual advance or asked for money. Rescuing children who asked for money was an exception because they were more than likely being forced to return it to an abuser.

  Haiku named their task: Mission Mercy. Their sworn motto was: May our eyes hunt down the humble.

  Master Haiku’s intense training also included courses on how to tap into intuition, detect energy, and notice minor details to size up a person’s OHF, overall humility factor. His Top Guns could sense dishonest intentions from a mile away, and they often looked over more adults than they rescued, no matter how poor or pitiable.

  They were to focus on children and adults with child-like souls and Haiku had revealed to his ninjas that it wasn’t rocket science after all.

  By the time they had completed their training, his ninjas could easily detect whether a person emitted light or heavy energy. The children had clean energy and their simplistic thought readings were not heavy or burdensome. But, often the ninjas came across the path of people whose heavy energies spoke of hidden agendas such as greed or possible opportunity. “Just because a person is poor or homeless, does not make them innocent,” the Master had instructed, and it was part of their job to determine that using the principle of attraction. “Like attracts like. How can you expect for the humble to gravitate to you if you are not humble?” Based on that principal, their periods of fasting and self denial where just as important as their martial arts classes and sun dial training when the Master chose his top 500 elite.

  Meanwhile, the rest of his 25,000 females ninjas in disguise were easily plucking up innocent orphans all over the world like Johnny Cash picking daisies.

  Master Haiku had his team of 500 Top Gun ninjas, but there were only five who advanced who advanced to the level of kamikaze, and Misaki was proud to be one of them. Her great, great Grandfather had died as a kamikaze pilot in WWII and bravery was a family legacy.

  For the most part, his ninjas found their jobs to be much easier than their training had been. Grabbing up orphans that no one knew where there wasn’t particularly hard, which was why they were constantly being picked up for organ harvesting or forced to be suicide bombers. Overpowering a defenseless five-year-old was easy for most adults. Pretty ladies could lure the orphaned child to safety with as much as a piece of candy.

  They were apprehension level ninjas – level one – apprehend. They were sent to places orphaned refugees were roaming the streets in hopes of rescue. The Top Gun Ninjas were called apprehend-and-defend ninjas – level two. While everyone had sun dials, these ninjas were the most proficient in using them for defense if they found themselves in a predicament, such as when Misaki needed to blind the Sudanese terrorists without blinding the child.

  However, the five kamikazes were required to have something none of the other ninjas had – a death wish. Their master had joked, “Before you were Top Gun ninjas. Now you are gun-to-the-head ninjas.”

  These kamikazes had the most advanced mission of all – infiltrate, and locate. Even though there were only five, they were hand selected by Haiku for the most unpleasant mission of all – finding and rescuing children and innocent victims from sexual slavery.

  In Indonesia, where sexual slavery wasn’t even illegal, Haiku’s five ninjas could sail through the country and “blind every one of those assholes in a day,” as he put it.

  The problem was finding the places where it was banned, or hidden behind the guise of something legitimate, like job recruitment. In many nations where prostitution was legal, what appeared to be a consensual female was really not.

  The sex trafficking trade was mostly hidden and highly complex and constantly in motion, even internationally. There was only one way for Misaki and her team of kamikazes to accomplish their mission and infiltrate the trade. If Misaki wanted to save those victims, she had to become one.

  THE SPERM RACE

  Sam and Haiku were drinking coffee on the balcony at 5 a.m. when Daphne burst through the double doors like a maniac. She had been waiting until Haiku returned from Japan to tell him the news, and she knew she had better tell him quick. He was so out of control with high-speed drones, he would pop up at home, stay thirty minutes to drink coffee with Sam, and then leave for Japan again by 6 a.m. At first she was mystified at how he disappeared and reappeared so quickly, then one day she dared travel to the West Wing to see if Sam’s mother had left some maxi-pads in her bathroom when she looked out the window to see Haiku’s drone in the back yard, completely obscured by a privacy fence and a mini-pine forest. Rich people always somehow managed to live both in the woods and in a neighborhood, which was a perk she finally appreciated. Now she knew she’d better hurry before he up and flew off in his rocket ship again like the super nerd he was.

  “I have news. You won’t believe it! Good news!”

  “You’re pregnant?” Haiku guessed.

  “Dammit, Haiku. I wanted to say it. How did you know?”

  “For starters, we’ve never seen you up before noon, and even at noon we’ve never seen you have this much energy. Furthermore, since when have you EVER had any news? Not rocket science, Daph.”

  Haiku was not going to kill her mood today.

  “Well I for one am thrilled. I’m gonna be a mommy! There’s a human growing inside of me and sometimes I can even feel it move!”

  “Feel it move? How far along are you?”

  Haiku knew she’d had to be at least three months.

  “I don’t know; I just thought I was getting fat. I never thought of pregnancy because birth control is supposed to stop all that.”

  Haiku rolled his eyes.

  “Daphne I’d be willing to bet the Bugatti that you take that birth control about as often as you go to church.”

  Daphne was not a creature of habit, and she was one of those chicks who never knew what day it was because they all ran together.

  But it didn’t matter what day it was, because it was the happiest day of her life.

&nbs
p; She was expecting them all to celebrate with her.

  But their minds were in a completely different place.

  “So whose is it?” Sam demanded to know.

  “Well how should I know? You have to wait until it’s born.”

  “No way. I KNOW they’ve got better technology than that. Let me make a few calls.”

  “Dammit Haiku! I want to be surprised. I don’t want to know.”

  They stared in disbelief.

  She finally caught on.

  “You douche bags. This has NOTHING to do with the ultimate lover challenge.”

  Now they both rolled their eyes.

  Then Sam cranked it up a notch.

  “Daphne that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard you say. The ultimate lover would clearly have the fastest and most efficient sperm. You’ll see. If a blue-eyed boy with a head full of blonde hair doesn’t come bursting out of there, I’ll do dishes for everybody – FOR A YEAR!”

  Here we go again. Now they are using me to race their sperm.

  “Sam, I’m faster than you at everything. How could my sperm not be faster, too? Not possible. If that baby boy doesn’t come out with slanted eyes throwing ninja stars, I’ll do everyone’s laundry for a year.”

  “That’s bullshit. He’s a Celtic Warrior, and an Arian God like me. I just know. I got a gut feeling, laundry boy.”

  “Oh yeah, well have fun with the dishes when a Samurai warrior flies out of that thing swinging his sword. I got a gut feeling, too.”

  “For crying out loud, you ass-munches! The baby is living inside of me, and I don’t even have a gut feeling. Besides what if it’s a girl? Yeah, that’s my gut feeling, LITTLE DAPHNE.”

  “Oh, well if it’s a girl then all bets are off,” Haiku informed her.

  Sam nodded his head in agreement.