Chemical Burn

by Quincy J. Allen

  I smiled, added another tablespoon of sugar to my coffee, a little more cream, and then went to the patio. I sat down in a lounge chair and enjoyed the sunrise, a gentle smile stuck on my face brought about by the absence of secrets.

  O O O

  “Hi there,” Rachel said as she bent over and kissed me. Xen was still at the laptop in the living room while I sat on the porch with a large piece of paper and a hand-drawn and fairly detailed map of an industrial plant.

  “VeniCorp?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said, squeezing her. “Laying everything out. It’s like a chessboard. It lets me work through all the permutations.”

  “You’re the man with the plan, aren’t you?”

  “Always.”

  “Did I hear you talking with Marsha this morning?”

  “Yes. I had to let her know that Abby would be having vehicle problems Saturday morning, and that Kenny would be late.” Rachel gave me a questioning look, so I told her all the details about what I intended to do. Her reaction was identical to Marsha’s, except for the embarrassing correlation to old Saint Nick.

  When she released me, she looked at me with a serious face. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you … for a long time now. I never did before, because I figured it wasn’t my business and my paychecks always cleared.” I gave her a sly look as she sat down next to me, having a pretty good idea of what she wanted to ask. “Justin, where the hell do you get all your money?”

  “I’ll answer this one because it’s you, and I won’t be holding anything back. But, like everything else, you have to keep this one under your hat. I’ll bribe you to silence with a shopping spree. How does that sound?”

  “Okay,” her grin indicated I was in for another big bill.

  I looked her square in the eye and spoke very clearly. “I make it,” I said simply.

  “Uhh … come again?” She gave me a blank stare.

  “I make it,” I repeated slowly.

  “You’re a … counterfeiter?” She looked shocked, almost appalled.

  “They’re not counterfeit,” I said, easily. “They’re as real as … well, as real as the real thing. And counterfeiting is such an ugly word.” Her jaw dropped as she stared at me. “I do have to launder it, though,” I added, as if I was talking about business suits. “It helps knowing the people I know … Yvgenny being one of them. Casinos help, too. But I’m quite diversified … well, not me actually, a bunch of people. I have seven different identities I use for banking, houses, insurance, vehicles, that sort of stuff. I’ll show you all that later. We’re going to have to get you some new IDs as well.”

  “But how?”

  “It’s a small e-mat translator. Takes non-living matter and duplicates it exactly. Doesn’t work so well with live things, though.”

  “That’s incredible! Does everyone have those where you come from?”

  “Oh, hell no. They take incredible amounts of energy.”

  “Where do you get the power?”

  I smiled and winked at her. “I’ll show you that, too … but later. Let’s take care of DiMarco first.”

  “You know I hate to wait.”

  “Yes, I do.” I gave her a wink. “One day at a time, gorgeous,” I added, chuckling.

  “Hey!” she blurted and slapped my arm. “I think you enjoy making me wait just a bit too much.” She stood up and glared down at me with a half-angry, half-joking face.

  “I’ll work on it.”

  O O O

  “Justin?” Marsha called.

  Engrossed in my planning, I sort of heard her, but not really.

  “Justin!” she repeated more loudly as she stepped up behind me.

  Jolted from my thoughts, I turned around. “Oh, hey.” I checked my internal clock. “You’re early.”

  “I decided to take the rest of the afternoon off. Light day, and they’ve got everything covered at the diner.”

  “That works out perfectly. Have a seat.” She did. I’d been meaning to talk to her about something. “There was stuff your dad never told you about, right?” I asked.

  “Of course. As a girl, I used to press him on his work, but he’d always brush me off. He finally explained something that I’ll never forget. He’d just returned from a mission overseas, and he’d taken a bullet. He had his arm in a sling, and a pretty severe limp. I desperately wanted to know what happened.”

  “So, what did he say?”

  “He said, ‘When people need to know, they need to know. And when they don’t, they don’t.’ He hugged me for a while with his good arm. Then he told me I didn’t need to know. I never asked him about his work with the Seals again.”

  “Eloquent as always, your father. I miss him,” I said.

  “Me too,” she replied with a distant, long-healed sadness.

  “Well, it’s time I show you some things, because you need to know. But like your father, this is stuff you can’t ever talk about to anyone. If certain people ever got wind of who and what I am, they’d make it … difficult for me.”

  “I’d never put you in danger, Justin. I hope you believe that.”

  “I do. It’s why you’re here and why we’re talking. Come on,” I said and stood up, heading for the front door. “Mag! We’re going home for a while. Come on, girl!” Marsha followed me, and I felt Mag come quietly up behind us from the bushes someplace. “So, what did Rachel tell you about me,” I asked.

  “She said that we would be using some special technology with the doors to get into VeniCorp and that it came—along with you and that cat of yours—from another world.”

  “You handled it well, I must say. And you didn’t press me for more.”

  “I spent ten years in Vegas. I’ve seen it all … well, almost. And I figured you would show me when you were ready. Hell, I always suspected there was something very different about you.”

  I placed my hand on the panel, ran through the combination and looked at her as I pushed on the door. It swung wide, opening on my loft rather than the front yard, and Mag darted between us and ran for the closet.

  Marsha stood there shell shocked. Hearing about it and seeing it were two entirely different things. I put my arm behind her and pushed her through. She stepped in and stared around the loft. She’d been there a few times before, but we’d always gone in through the garage.

  “Want something to drink,” I offered casually. She shook her head with her mouth still open. “Okay … now comes the fun part. Turn around.”

  She did. I put my hand on the panel, ran through a different combination and pushed it open. She expected to see the house again, but instead, she saw an entirely different living room.

  “Go on,” I suggested, encouraging her to move on her own.

  She stepped through into a room she didn’t recognize and, turning around, noticed windows on either side of the door. The windows looked out on a lush, green yard surrounded by a tall hedge covered with orange blossoms. She looked back through the door as I stepped in, still not believing the loft was … and wasn’t … there.

  The door closed, and I led her out back onto the patio where Mag sat in the shade, waiting for us in her green and gray stripes.

  “Welcome to Costa Rica,” I said and spent the next hour telling a still stunned Marsha most of what I’d already told the other two.

  O O O

  Tuesday night was almost identical to Monday. We went through the forms, some three-on-one training, and a long session of two-on-one amongst the three students. After that I checked in with O’Neil to make sure that the cops were on track with bagging the dry cleaners and shutting down that part of DiMarco’s operation. So far, the bugs they had on DiMarco’s people, including DiMarco himself, were quiet. No one in DiMarco’s organization seemed to know that anything was coming down the pike.

  At two-thirty a.m. I checked the logs at VeniCorp and woke up Xen. We went on our nightly sneak, but this time we waited on the first level for fifteen minutes to see if the guards from the p
ost came. No one left the building.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go upstairs.” I strolled over to the stairwell, opened the door and went up to the second floor door with Xen close behind.

  “Wait here,” I told him and then ran up the last flight. I checked the door to the roof, and as I hoped, no one had locked it. I went back down, opened the second floor door, and we walked in. I showed him Xen’s workstation.

  “Why don’t we dig through the data now?” Xen asked.

  “Not part of the plan,” I said, smiling. Xen gave me a bored look, not believing it for a second. “Okay, okay. Because we don’t need to, I’ll still need you here on Sunday, and because you never know when someone might get tired of the alarm.”

  Xen spotted something outside. “Here comes one of them.” He pointed at a man stepping out of the guard post and heading towards the truck parked outside.

  “See?” I said, grinning. “Run!”

  We bolted down the aisle, slammed through the door to the stairwell, blasted out through the first floor door and ran through my front door as the truck pulled away from the guard post.

  “Can I go back to bed, now,” Xen said breathing heavily and laughing as he spoke.

  “Yeah. And we’re taking tomorrow night off.”

  “Good. All this REM deprivation is going to give me a psychotic episode.”

  “We can’t have that,” I reassured him.

  “No, we can’t,” he agreed.

  O O O

  We all slept in Wednesday morning, except Marsha who left extra early for reasons of her own. It turned into a lazy day for Xen and me. We simply enjoyed the sunshine.

  Later, Rachel and I were in the kitchen, putting the finishing touches on homemade lasagna, when Marsha walked through the front door with her backpack and a long gun case. Rachel slipped the foil covered pan into the oven as Marsha set the case down on the kitchen counter and dropped her pack on the floor. She flipped open the three latches of the case, and Rachel and I stepped around to take a look. Xen came in from the patio to see what was going on.

  “I’d like you all to meet Whisper.” An immaculate XM 110 sniper rifle with bi-pod attachment and night-vision scope lay inside, the whole unit set perfectly into a declivity in the foam. Also set into the foam rested a Beretta pistol with a military insignia on the grip. Marsha lifted up a corner of the foam and exposed not one, but two silencers. The first was more slender than the other, and it looked as if the foam had been hand cut to fit the much bigger cylinder.

  “Is that the 93R?” I asked, referring to the pistol.

  “Yep. My father’s … a gift from an appreciative general. The extended clip holds thirty-nine plus one in chamber. It has single-shot, triple-burst, and full-auto. It weighs a ton, but the triple hits like a freight train. The full auto is really just for scaring people and wasting ammo, though.”

  “Do you need to sight in the rifle?” I asked, running my finger across the larger silencer.

  “No. I went down to the range this morning and dialed it in … I did it in the dark, too.”

  “They let you on the range with those silencers?” I knew damn well the silencers were uber-illegal, and most shops would call the cops the moment they saw one.

  “I worked out something with the owner’s daughter when I joined the shooting club. She’s my age. She’s a … friend of mine,” Marsha added with a naughty grin. “She let me in early this morning before they opened so I could sight it in with the big cylinder.”

  “How much range do you loose with the big one?” I asked.

  “Conservatively, abut thirty percent. Will I be dealing with anything longer than 450 meters?”

  “About half of that, max … most of it inside a hundred meters, and all of it down-angle.”

  She turned to us with a wicked grin and deadly confidence. “Fish in a barrel.” She closed the case, set the case on the sofa, and looked around the remains of the cooking preparations. “Lasagna?” she said hungrily.

  “That’s right,” Rachel replied with a nod.

  “What’s the occasion?” Marsha asked.

  ***

  Of Bait and Traps

  “It’s show-time for you two,” I said, putting my hand on Rachel’s shoulder and winking at Marsha. “Everyone go get ready. We’re starting early tonight.”

  We all left the kitchen and met downstairs with our gear on. We went through a lengthy stretching session—I wanted to reduce the likelihood of injury—and then the forms. All through the session I caught Rachel and Marsha eyeing each other. They were hungry to see which one came out on top.

  “Go get headgear, ladies,” I called out at the end of the forms, “and mouth guards.” They went over to the cabinet, pulled out the padded headgear, and buckled them on. “Three rules, ladies. One, no bone or joint breakers. I need you both to be able to dance Sunday night. Two, the first one to three points wins. Three, if you make your opponent say maté, stop immediately and enjoy your victory. Am I understood?”

  “Yes!” they shouted together, facing me. Xen stood off to the side, watching closely. The two women bowed to me then to each other. They quickly moved into their stances, legs wide, hands up, eyes focused. Marsha used closed fists while Rachel held her hands loosely. Both of their faces were stoic, chiseled out of stone.

  “BEGIN!” I shouted.

  Marsha came in fast and hard with a series of punches at Rachel’s face, driving Rachel back. Rachel slapped each blow to the side, shifting her head left and right out of the way, drawing Marsha in. On the fourth punch, Rachel quickly sidestepped and shot out a sweeping kick under Marsha. Marsha jumped … too late. Rachel clipped her heel, and Marsha went down on her side as Rachel lifted her other leg to bring it down on Marsha’s mid-section. Marsha rolled out of the way and up into a squat. She moved into a ready stance before Rachel could move in closer.

  Rachel leapt forward with a front kick to Marsha’s chest, which Marsha stepped out of then came around with a back-fist at Rachel’s head. Rachel ducked out of the swing and came up right into Marsha’s other elbow. She managed to get a partial block up, but the elbow crashed into the side of her head and sent her sprawling.

  “Point, Marsha!” I yelled.

  Rachel rose slowly, shook her head to clear the stars, and moved back into her stance un-phased, the way she’d been taught.

  They faced each other again. Marsha came at Rachel again with a flurry of punches. Rachel backed up exactly as before. On the third punch, she blocked hard with a punch at the incoming arm, knocking it wide. She moved in like a cobra, driving a series of blows into Marsha’s mid-section and coming up hard with an uppercut.

  Marsha staggered back, stunned.

  “Point, Rachel!” I yelled. “Get to the center of the mat!”

  The women shifted and took up their stances.

  “BEGIN!” I shouted.

  Rachel came in low with a fast front kick, forcing Marsha to drop a hand to block. Marsha punched with the other hand, but Rachel ducked out, stepping to the side, blocking Marsha’s punch and pushing it away. She came in hard with an elbow aimed at Marsha’s head, but Marsha stepped away from it. As she moved back, Rachel stepped into her with a back fist that Marsha had to get both arms up to block. She blocked her own vision, and Rachel came in with a roundhouse kick that caught Marsha in the mid-section. It knocked the wind out of her and sent her backwards, but she didn’t lose her footing. She took her stance quickly, even as she struggled to recover her breath. I nodded, impressed with them both.

  “Point, Rachel!” I shouted.

  Rachel charged in, sensing weakness, but Marsha was ready for her. As Rachel kicked, Marsha caught it in both hands and twisted hard, forcing Rachel to drop to her side and yank her foot back out of Marsha’s grasp. The moment Rachel hit the ground, Marsha jumped and landed on Rachel’s back, driving a fist into the back of Rachel’s head and bouncing her forehead off the mat. Marsha automatically cocked her fist but stopped before I had to say
anything.

  “Point, Marsha!”

  Marsha stood up and helped Rachel up off the mat. Rachel nodded to her, acknowledging the solid move.

  “Back to the center ladies. This next one is for the money.”

  The women took their positions at the center of the mat. Marsha went straight into her hard stance with fists raised. Rachel, her nose red with the impact with the floor, set up in a wide, horse stance, her open palms resting gently on her thighs.

  I raised an eyebrow. I’d used the technique but never shown it to any of them. Essentially, I leave myself wide open, inviting my opponent into a trap. It requires lightning reflexes and quick thinking. I intended to show all of them how do to it, part of the reason I’d gotten them working on the pure defense technique on the first night.

  Marsha sent in a low roundhouse at Rachel’s leg. Rachel lifted the leg easily, avoiding the kick, but did not move otherwise. Marsha came in with a front kick that Rachel blocked and stepped away from. A jumping front kick came in at Rachel’s face that she leaned out of, and then a flurry of punches that she blocked with open palms. She stepped back only when she had to and made no attempt to counter attack.

  Marsha came in again, harder and faster this time, starting with a front snap kick and then a series of punches and elbows at Rachel’s head and chest. All of them encountered forearm and hand blocks or empty air.

  Marsha edged in closer, an inch at a time with her feet, arms tense and fists clenched. She shifted her weight forward and sent a blazing front kick at Rachel’s hip, hoping to knock her off balance. Rachel saw the shift and twisted as the foot came. Before it had gone past her waist, she stepped into Marsha and brought up a fast inside back-fist that caught Marsha square in the face. Rachel brought her knee up into Marsha’s belly hard and raised her arms up beside her face to block any counter attack, but none came. Marsha flew back and went down on one knee, coughing.

  “Point, Rachel! And match!”

  Rachel rushed over to Marsha. “Baby, are you okay?” Marsha gasped for breath but nodded her head and smiled. She held up her hand as she regained her breath. Xen and I stepped up, and Rachel had her arm around Marsha’s shoulders.