Vermilion Widow, Issue #001

Issue #001 – – – – – controlled by Bill Treadwell – – – – – Credits 20

“Are you ready?” Thomson asked, unclipping his baton from its holster and thumbing the trigger on its side.  The weapon responded with its telltale buzz, all the confirmation that was needed to confirm the current was now live.
“Huh?”  Cassandra asked, momentarily confused.
“I said, are you ready?  Come on woman, wake up.  If you end up dead today it’s me that’ll have to fill in all the paperwork.”

Cassandra glanced around.  She stood at the entrance to a dark alleyway, crouched back behind a dumpster alongside her team leader, Thomson, and three other uniformed adults, two plain-looking men and a large imposing woman.  She knew their names. Jacob, Andy and Anne.  She knew them well, had been on missions with them, had done basic training with some of them some years ago.  And yet …

“Let’s go,” Thomson called, the trigger for the group to burst from their concealment and charge along the alley towards the small group of gang-bangers huddled around a metal barrel full of fire at the end of the enclosure.

Cassandra fell back a little while the others charged forwards.  She felt oddly detached, strange.  Something seemed wrong.  But she couldn’t put her finger on it.  Then all the shit really hit the fan.

Thomson swung his electrified baton at the head of the biggest gangbanger, a black man who was so large as to dwarf all the others in the alley.  But the black man was quicker.  He leant backwards and the baton passed harmless in front of him, inches from his chest.  Then he snapped out the most perfect side-kick Cassandra had ever seen, smashing Thomson so hard in the chest that he was hurled backwards against the alley wall.

Jacob went for his sidearm, but one of the gangers threw a knife.  It’s glittering arc catching the light of the flickering flames as it flashed through the air before embedding itself deep into the cops chest.  Jacob fell back into Andy’s arms, which delayed the other cop just enough for a young ganger, barely more than a child, to smash in the side of his head with an old lump of iron.  Looks a bit like a bit of old bike, Cassandra thought in her odd, detached way.  She should have been horrified.  Yet she felt separate to it all.  As if she were watching a movie.  As if she were not part of it at all.

Anne put up a better fight.  A veteran of the force she dodged a clumsy attack from a ganger and hit him with a taser that dropped the thug like a stone.  Two other gangers fell back as Anne approached, pulling out her own baton.  But the big guy finished with Thomson, picking him up by the throat and simply squeezing until the wind pipe burst, and turned towards her.

“Back off,” Cassandra said, her side arm in hand, trained directly at the big black gang leader.  “Back off or die.”  Her nerves were completely calm, her stance assured, her dark eyes flashing with warning.

“Why do you care?” The black man said.  “You’re not one of them.  You’re not a Bully.”

The word lit up in Cassandra’s head.  Bullies.  A nickname for the city cops, after their financiers, the Bull Corporation.  She knew this – and yet some part of her brain told her that everything she knew was wrong.  It was false.  This whole thing – it was as if it had been conjured up from nowhere and simply become real.  But that made no sense?

“Shoot him,” Anne growled.  “Shoot this bastard and let’s take them down.”

Cassandra did not.  She watched as the huge black man approached her partner and smashed her baton aside. Phenomenally strong, unbelievably fast, he open hand slapped the big woman to the ground and then stomped on her head.  Then Cassandra shot him in the head and he folded up and collapsed.

Just like that the alleyway was silent.  The gangers had fled.  All that remained was the fallen bodies of her colleagues and the gang bangers.  Cassandra watched the shadows dance with the light of the flickering flames and she thought: “What the hell is going on here?  Who am I?  Why can’t I remember?”