In Darkness' District: Six

This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to any persons, living or dead, or any events or situations are entirely coincidental. Some use is made of actual locales, landmarks and institutions. All of these usages are fictional in nature and intent, and are not to be misconstrued as attempts to disparage or recommend.

Part Six

The factory really wasn't all that much to look at, just a collection of warehouse-type corrugated steel structures located off of a side-road. It was quite unprepossessing from the outside. There was a small parking lot out back, and as it was far removed from what passed for civilization here on the outskirts of Frederick, Maryland, security seemed to be pretty lax.

There was security, though, and Lace cautioned Ron to be very careful not to cross any of the yellow lines, and to be careful to not stand on the blue lines.

"The White Zone is for loading and unloading only..." he quipped, and she flashed him another grin.

They entered through the door, which was equipped with a standard enough keylock, but once inside, Lace's palmprint on a glass plate was required to access the interior structure.

The inside of the interior structure resembled nothing so much as a hospital, or the "white rooms" where satellites are assembled. They stood in a small office/control room overlooking the production line. Robot arms swung to and fro, and picked up and placed and did incomprehensible things... and Ron just watched it for awhile, and remarked to Lace, "You gotta love the intricacy, but what the hell are they doing?"

She smiled mysteriously, and took him to another section of the facility.

If the previous section had looked like the inside of a hospital, this section looked like the inside of a germ-warfare lab. Great stainless steel tanks with thick glass windows bubbled everywhere, and again, robot arms were about their inscrutable tasks. Small robotic carts trundled along the blue lines, moving from yellow-lined area to yellow- lined area.

There was a great freezer room, which leaked clouds of vapor when opened, and liquid nitrogen tanks were much in evidence. Lace said mostly nothing when Ron asked, and finally begged for some explanation, some clues, anything... and while he was begging, a buzzer sounded.

He followed her to an ordinary loading dock, where there were young people, who (he suspected) looked about like you'd expect post-graduate interns to look. A white van lettered with the name of a local ambulance company was parked outside, and a young man with a clipboard and a labcoat stood checking off items from a list.

"HeLa, 16 units," he said, and a man in the uniform of the ambulance service loaded a Styrofoam picnic cooler into the ambulance. There was complex labeling on the side of the cooler, but what it mainly said in large letters was, "medical supplies, highly perishable".

"Check," said the ambulance driver.

A plug hung from the side of the cooler, and the driver loaded the cooler into the van, and inserted the plug into a receptacle. A light blinked green on the side of the container.

"A-positive, 16 units," said the man in the labcoat. The driver stacked another cooler into the ambulance, plugged it in and said, "Check".

At the other end of the dock, a man pushed a large hand-trolley towards a waiting van. He began to load the van with the boxes from the hand-trolley.

Ron turned to Lace. "HeLa cells? Aren't those Larson cells?"

"Why, yes, Ron! I'm a bit surprised that you've heard of them."

"Whatever my treatment was, it didn't erase my nonspecific memories. I still can do any math I've ever encountered since I was released, and funny skills keep popping up here and there. It seems to have only affected my knowledge of people, like who I am, and who anybody else is. I thought you understood that... but what's the deal with the Larson cells?"

"This company manufactures culture incubators for medical tissue cultures. Sometimes we supply the cultures as well."

"Awesome!" he exclaimed. I bet you do make a few bucks!"

"Yeppers, that I do. I'm pretty proud of myself, it's a valuable investment I've made, and it's paid off well, and it does some good. I am the market leader on the incubators, and I run a close second on the tissue cultures themselves. Now do you understand the reason for all of the security and sterility?"

"Yah. Hey, I heard that guy saying something about A-positive?"

"You did, did you? Well, I also am the patentholder and sole manufacturer for the Model 10 hemoculture unit."

"Huh?"

"C'mon."

It looked like nothing so much as a combination of Cuisinart and pressure cooker.

"Can I touch it?"

"Sure. I make them as foolproof as I can."

He ran his fingers over the smooth stainless-steel surface. It was warm to the touch, not surprisingly, almost exactly the same temperature as his fingers.

"I've had this one up and running for three months," she told him. "No problems with it yet."

"It's pretty cool, I mean, ummm... fascinating."

"I like it," she told him. "It produces almost six pints of blood, in this case, 'O' positive, suitable for transfusion, per month."

"How does it work?"

"Basically, you load the intake hoppers with a sealed nutrient pack, which you first must sterilize. Same with sealed fluid supplies. You add a culture starter pack, and it just grows on its own. It has to be kept attached to an uninterruptable power supply. I sell the Model 10, the Model 20, with almost three times the capacity, and also, I sell the Model 100, which are those big vats back in the big "white" room. The Model 100 I haven't got any customers for yet; they'll be mainly GSA to government hospitals, I suppose. I mainly use them for the main culture stocks. If you think about the infection risks involved in transfusing donated blood, you can see why there's a market for cultured circulatory tissues."

Ron noticed a button labeled "dispense" on the side of the side of the device. He depressed it for a moment, expecting a flow of blood, but nothing happened. "I thought you said this thing was running," he said.

"Oh, it is," she said. She stuck a Styrofoam cup under the output spigot, which had a standard Luer-lock tip on it. A yellow light lit, and a blast of steam came from the tip. It momentarily reeked of some disinfectant, and then it was just clean "live" steam.

She removed the cup, and then replaced it with a hose attached to a bag. She stripped a cover off of one end of the hose, and he suddenly recognized a standard Red Cross donor bag. She dipped the hose end into a small cup which had been quietly reeking of medicinal alcohol, and then shook it, and deftly twisted it into the tip of the dispenser. A light on the machine turned green, and a flow of red began to work its way toward the waiting donor bag.

"Now that is fucking cool as shit," said Ron. "Oops, pardon the French," he amended.

"I don't mind," she said, and smiled an amazing smile. "It is beyond cool as shit. It is the coolest thing I have personally ever seen, and it is mine, all mine."

An electronic chiming came from the machine, and she unhooked the hose. She replaced the Styrofoam cup, and pressed a button marked "purge". Blood flowed from the spigot, and then another blast of disinfectant-laden steam. She picked up the bag of blood, and marked an "X" on it, and threw it into a cooler nearby. The machine had stopped hissing, and the cloud of steam drifted away.

Coded Intercept Transcript 2246-99

(three pages of musical notation, MIDI transcription system, settings-file appended)

The FVK had never before encountered any such speech. It consisted of soft and whistled sibilants, glottal stops, varying frequencies of pops and clicks, and occasional direct tones.

They passed it around to every linguist they could find. Nobody recognized it. A Navaho-speaking linguist remarked that some of the usages that had entirely escaped the white-men's ears were similar to his own people's glottal usages, and suggested that they consult a linguist specializing in the speech of the Kalahari bushmen.

The linguist specializing in the speech of the !Kung tribesmen didn't know what to make of the vocalizations, but at least he was able to provide them with a transcription system, a notation using punctuation for sound denotation. Glottal stops became apostrophes and quotes, the pops and clicks became exclamation points, slashes and asterisks... soon they had a notation to feed into the computers, and the computers began to identify certain recurrences. It seemed likely that they could begin to establish the logic of grammar, and that and a few referents would eventually give them a wedge into understanding the speech.

The men they'd captured at the clinic defied their theories. They were indeed Men, that is, they were mainstream human. They really knew nothing other than that certain people were supposed to report for blood sampling, samples were to be forwarded to a certain address (a dead-drop Post Office Box) and that if these people failed to report, certain calls were to be made, certain words were to be said within the ensuing conversations.

The FVK unit in charge of this angle of the investigation couldn't figure this one out. Obviously, there was some sort of conspiracy at work here, but to what end? Were these Men part of the second group, the group that seemed to mostly restrict itself to chemical harassment? It didn't seem to be the case, no such activity had been observed at any time during the pre-raid surveillance. Just how many strange little subconspiracies were involved in this case?

It didn't really matter. There was so much compartmentalization within the FVK and the remaining newly independent Shop fragments that information gathered in one sphere of operation might never be received by other wings.

Tractor trailers formed convoys. The convoys headed in different directions, but all headed mostly south from Aspen Hill, Maryland. Some took Connecticut Avenue south, some took Georgia Avenue, quite a few headed west into Rockville and North Potomac. At every major shopping center, a rig would peel off from the formation, and park itself behind a shopping center. At every major mall, near every Beltway exit, all about the Greater Washington Metropolitan area, tractor trailers parked. The tractors were detached from the trailers, and they drove away, but not before the men driving idled for hours. The men popped the cabs open, and did something with the engines. The idling was accompanied by much shifting of gears, though the rigs didn't go anywhere, and by a strange whining, as if the rigs' powerful diesel engines were spinning massive generators up to speed.

The local National Guard units were called to order. The governors had no reasons to give... they just ordered mobilization standby alerts, and men and women around the area kissed their loved ones, and checked their inventories, and prepared to mobilize. The most common conjecture was that something would finally be done about the gangs that had turned the streets of DC into a freefire warzone.

A man, well and fashionably dressed, like so many of the people in DC, walked up to the clinic doors, and was promptly hit with enough tranquilizers to knock down a silverback gorilla. He was taken to a local FVK shop, and died under interrogation. The combination of the animal tranquilizers, veridical drugs, and some very unusual chemicals in his blood reacted synergistically, and his heart could not be restarted. A crew of "plumbers" was sent to his fashionable Georgetown residence, and the source of his very strange blood chemistry was found in a pharmacy vial marked with an alternative brand of generic synthetic thyroid medication. In the meantime, his body was forwarded to another medical lab for tomography, and samples were forwarded to a genetic sampling and analysis laboratory.

They went to work on tracing the bogus thyroid medication back to the source, and when, three days later, a Shop splinter assault team made a full frontal assault on the place, massive demolitions charges, obviously long in place, destroyed the entire facility.

It was twenty days later that people in Washington, DC, began to walk out into traffic, to respond to auditory hallucinations, to senselessly and violently attack random bystanders, and in general act as if they were completely insane.

The District National Guard was mobilized, but they, being composed of local citizens, were not doing any better at maintaining their sanity than was the citizenry-at-large.

A battalion commander managed to convince his troops that spaceships had landed on the mall, and were about to topple the Washington Monument. When they got there (most of them, a lot had wrecked their vehicles along the way, with massive concomitant civilian and property damage) it seemed that while the aliens were not in evidence, it might be a good idea to shell the Hirschorn Museum, since it was obviously a hangar for flying saucers. When another National Guard group arrived on the scene and began shelling them (shortly after a Marine helicopter was seen flying north at high speed, away from the White House), they decided to go to all-out displays of firepower.

The madness seemed to spread itself rapidly... and it spread itself along lines not dissimilar to the paths followed by the water supply. Every soldier had a full canteen, and as the May day heated up, all of the soldiers took drinks, and the genetically-engineered giardia took up residence within their intestines and began to produce ergotamines in relative abundance, all of the soldiers went mad.

Giardia is a parasite normally infesting bad wells and certain types of forest streams. Boiling water is often still contaminated, and Halazone water-purification tablets are usually ineffective. Generally, giardia causes severe diarrhea, bowel cramps, and can be quite incapacitating and difficult to treat, but this strain had been specially bred and engineered to produce ergotamines as waste byproducts, and also to be extremely resistant to commercial water purification processes. Suddenly, every bit of water coming from the District public water supply was contaminated with a hallucinogenic plague organism.

Ordinarily, a massive acid trip can be rather fun, if one is prepared for it, and has some idea of what to expect. Battlefield conditions are not ideal for tripping, nor conducive to an enjoyable buzz. Since both National Guard units were busily shelling each other and most of the surrounding real estate, none of the officers were thinking even as clearly as they might have otherwise been thinking, and so no thoughts of truce, negotiation or anything of the kind entered their thoughts.

There were people wandering through the streets, aimlessly, looking and acting like lost sheep. Most were struck at school and office, and were totally baffled. Their books, computers, and offices had become strange things indeed, and when they finally made it out on to the streets, there were stranger things still.

There were monsters lying in wait.

As they wandered aimlessly, people came to help them. Nice people, who were very solicitous... and very deadly.

They guided the bewildered people (who were also having severe intestinal cramps) into alleys, basements, and windowless rooms and corridors, and there they killed them. Some killed with techniques they might have been taught in a school-for-spies, some using strange technologies appropriate to ninja or other assassin cultures, and others simply ripped their victims apart with bare hands and feet.

These last fed to repletion for the first times in their lives. It was nothing they wanted to do, they had been planning a revolution of a more quiet sort. They had expected the final denouement of their generation-long attempt to quietly assume control of the workings of Government to be orderly and unnoticed, and had expected to fulfil their goals perhaps ten years down the line. There had been little or no warning that the timetable for the assumption of control had been greatly advanced, and they had never for a moment planned on trying to carry off their quiet revolution without the aid of their medications. It had been expected, though, that the first people eliminated during their bid for power would be the Mainstream staff of the Signatories Evaluation Board. It was widely assumed among the Caged that a contingency plan existed which would expose them should they ever attempt a power grab, and indeed such a plan existed. They expected to silently and unremarkedly slay all of the S.E.B. staff, and indeed they were able to easily do so. They did not expect that the contingency plan was multi-mode failsafe, and that there were people who were part of the plan who were mentioned on no records, who had detailed scripts to run should the contingency arise. However, at first, the Caged were able to keep their revolution quiet...

They were able to keep it quiet for about four hours.

A man ran screaming down the street.

"Vampires!" he screamed. "They got Johnny, they got him!" He continued to run, and continued to scream. He ran into a large crowd of milling, baffled people, who backed away from him, allowing him to run through.

A man came running after him. He was gaining very rapidly on the first man, and there was blood on his hands and face. He caught up with the first man, who was screaming, "Vampires! They're right behind me-" and the running man went down. The man who had been chasing him pounced and landed on the man with both feet. He dropped onto the man's back, and silenced the screams by grasping the man's neck with both hands and twisting. He got up and glared at the people around him, and then began to back away.

"Hey, he must be one of them," said somebody.

"Yah, he wouldn't have been trying to shut him up otherwise," said another.

"Get him!" screamed everybody, more or less.

He managed to severely injure five people, and killed two, but a crowd of fifteen men soon had him, and he was quickly torn apart. The crowd was terrified by the not-so-distant sound of artillery fire, and shocked and tripping, a known killer made a fine outlet for their frustrations.

They soon went in search of more killers, expecting to be guided by the sight of bloody hands and faces, but unfortunately, those killers driven by a sudden lack of support medications were really the minority among those who so studiedly slew the elected representatives and their duly appointed subordinates.

There had been a sudden fashion change in the Greater Washington Metropolitan Area recently, a fashion change that occurred no place else. Washington has always been a very fashion-conscious city, the sort of town where all of the men of power wore their suitjackets even in the stifling heat of summer, where the women of power wore the latest New York and Paris fashions, while the drab masses of career Government employees tended to be grey men and women in grey suits. Fashion only very rarely originated in DC, and this was remarked upon as it occurred by only a few. The fashion-change occurred almost exclusively among certain women, and it was not noticed that most of these women were fairly recent graduates mostly from certain institutions, nor was it noticed that they were all, or almost all, members of certain sororities employed within certain fields. It most definitely couldn't be known that they were all past victims of sexual assault, and also were members of a certain rabidly (and not entirely unjustifiably) anti-male cult. They were the women men never see, the women that men don't take notice of, the women that men would never fall in love with (and so would never cherish, honor and protect), but that men didn't mind being cruel to... these were hard, efficient women, with little to live for but the pain of the scars on their minds, and their dreams of so scarring another. The fashion was not particularly attractive, but it certainly was functional.

The thumb-ring, the broad smooth bracelet on the left wrist, the heavy, triangular dart-like pendant worn on a sturdy, fine chain about the neck, or wrapped loosely around the right wrist... The bangles included thin tubes, tiny vials full of colored liquids...

They had lists as well, and had convened little trials of various people, women as well as men, and they had appointed themselves guardians and conservators of the feminist movement which had been increasingly viewed by no small minority of American women as being increasingly "... anti-male, anti-child, anti-family, and anti-feminine..." in the words of one Sally Quinn. Most women seemed quite convinced that while there were still great strides to be made in finally converting the endless war of the genders into a cooperative race of humanity, they knew that they had educational, career, and lifestyle options completely equal to any that men had available to them.

These particular women, though, had often sat around, judging others, and unfortunately, their mental scars had healed twisted, if at all; their secret sessions mostly picked at the wounds in their heads, and instead of reaching the understanding and compassion that they so boasted women alone were capable of, or of reaching some Christian level of forgiveness, they convinced each other that forgiveness, indeed, Judeo-Christianity was a ploy by the Patriarchy to dupe them into submission, and reaching new levels of hatred, politicized themselves into rabid caricatures of anything nurturing. They called themselves the Sisters of Retribution, and they had an amazing repertoire of evil at their disposal. They had taken unto themselves a few of the twisted ex- Priestesses of Satan from the California Cannibal Cult, who had wormed their evil ways into this movement, twisting it into its present travesty of femininity.

They would hear of a man who was rumored to date-rape, and drugged, confused, and tranced, he would be led through consensual participatory fantasies of violent sex, dominance and submission, bondage, and rape. They had (these ex-Cult Priestesses) long ago, discovered the uses of penetrant narcotics, and a man would think he was loving a woman loving him, and a dermal transduction "patch" containing a strange witches'-brew of hallucinogens, veridical drugs, and sexual experience-heighteners would take him through strange worlds into which one of these women would practicedly guide him. They would tape these sessions, and edit the tapes, and blackmail would be the least of the possible results. Often, they would hold a meeting, and play the tapes of some babbling fool as he was guided into a "confession" of crimes against womens' rights. They would then sit together and decide exactly what to do to them.

One of the ex-Priestesses (perhaps ex- was not the proper term, she had certainly moved into a position of ideological authority over these poor lost souls) had told them of the ancient skill of twisting people. During the act of love (or was it an act of hate? A tender-loving-grudge- fuck was more like it) applications of muscle relaxers (with buffers included within the penetrants to localize the pharmacological activity) to specific muscle groups would allow the frenzied stroking of a woman faking orgasm to conceal an evil deep-massage, a studied twisting and realignment of structures and symmetries. It was a testament to the depth of control by the ex-Cult manipulators that they were able to bring medical technologies out of the hospitals for use in these activities.

The emotionally crippled vengeful wretches hearing this, knowing that any man who would sleep with them must be wicked enough to deserve such treatment, listened avidly, absorbing all of this eagerly. They learned to stick fine needles into the intersections of major muscle groups, to anesthetize men as they lay sleeping exhausted after some drug-induced sexual frenzy, to insert sterile barbed plastic needles beneath the eyebrows... where, years later, they would have worked their way into the foramenal holes (which lie slightly above the inner points of the eyebrows) leading into the interior of the cranium. All anyone would have to do would be to press hard and wiggle on those radiologically undetectable little off-switches, and they would scythe painlessly, conically, and unstoppably through delicate cerebral tissues, and what had been a man would be but a piece of flesh, with a beating heart, but not what anyone could really call a living man. They did all of this and more, and had been doing it for years, as cult Priestesses (and the much more ancient culture of witches they had learned these techniques from) had long been quite tired of the way that the men of the Cult had been treating them for years, even as they stayed with those men and the Cult, bound by shared tastes for evil and manflesh and shared culpability (but never guilt! they hadn't the capacity) in murder and worse things. They had developed these techniques preparatory to eventual elimination of the Cult males... and had mostly succeeded, in the wake of the Federal rousting of their California haunts. The surviving Cultists were almost exclusively female, but they were Satanists still, and not the more tame variety.

They searched for and found new converts, but they carefully didn't tell them anything about the stacked tiers of deceit, the onion-like layers of hidden agenda... they told them what they wanted to hear, with subtle twists that would lead conversations into the fields where the Priestesses ever more skillfully and completely co-opted them away from mainstream morals, and bound them within chains of culpability.

So it was that when the Priestesses requested their recruits to drink only bottled water for the next few weeks, and to wear their war- bangles, the rank and file of the invisible and heartbroken mind-wrenched results of changing mores and cultural patterns again gathered to pick the scabs from their emotional scars, tasted from each others' wounds the conceptual pus that the Priestesses had fostered and festered, and they donned the wide bracelet, and the thumb-ring, and slung about their necks and their wrists the components of their chain-daggers, filled their purses with poisons, and anointed their sharp little earrings with toxins, and wore steel dowels within their carefully dressed hair.

They were mainly waiting for all hell to break loose, and when it did, some of them had been ready for two decades.

They all had lists, and they all had weapons, and access... and now they had an opportunity. They weren't slow in using it.

A great many of the men on the lists they had prepared for this day.

A dose of strychnine that would barely stiffen most people caused a man (whose muscles had been carefully rearranged) to basically twist off his own head. First, he choked as his neck muscles tied his tongue in a knot around his larynx.
"You know," she said, "You've always been an asshole, Mr. Phelps." She placed a finger on the inside point of his left eyebrow, and described a tiny but forceful circle, and a tiny plastic needle freed itself of the monofilament that had bound it, split, and the highly compressed plastic within sprang into Mr. Phelps's brain, and suddenly struck dumb, he gaped at her as her voice suddenly became devoid of meaning, and then he fell twitching as his brain crushed under the hemorrhage.
She walked up behind the man who was waiting for the subway train, and hoisted her purse off of her shoulder, pulled the fine piano wire loop with its tiny metal locking mechanism (available at most mountain-climbing equipment stores) from within the thin strap of the purse, and dropped it over the man's head, pulled it tight, and hit the modified spring release. The wire, driven by the mechanism, snapped shut with such force that the wire bit the man's neck almost in twain. Another man saw this, and while he paused in stunned disbelief, she pushed a coil of chain back from her chain- dagger, removed the decorative sheath, and palming the dagger itself, she shook the remaining coils from her wrist into her hand, and when he rushed her, slowly, not wanting to hurt a woman, she threw the dagger low. He would have blocked it in time but as the chain paid out, she yanked her hand higher, and the tension threw the dagger into a vertical arc, and the razor edge of a ninety-gram fistblade sliced neatly through his carotid artery. The succinylcholine chloride arrow-poison on the edge would have killed him no matter where it hit, and as he fell limply to the ground, to lie in a pool of his blood, she snickered, and said, "Relax, motherfucker!"
She appeared to be putting hairspray on her hairdo, but as he passed, she sprayed him with Carisoprodol muscle-relaxer in penetrant DMSO, and as he fell to the ground, paralysed, she began to kick him around, screaming, "How does it feel to be weaker, huh?" He couldn't even lift his hands from the ground, and so she kicked him in the face until one haphazard kick pushed bone from his broken nose into his cranium...
She filled his cup of coffee with enough beta-carboline to terrorize a regiment of battle-hardened Marines. Soon enough, he was shaking in his boots, and she followed him around, making leering faces at him, and trying to touch him erotically. "C'mon, baby!" she said, with a smirk... Soon he fled to the only place that his ever-increasing unreasoning terror could not follow: through the sixth floor window, where death soon eased his fears...
She told him everything, especially about the needles that that weird chick he'd been dating last year had put beneath his eyebrows... and he recalled what he had long ago discounted as some weird dream, or a lingering paranoia from some acid he'd taken in college... he recalled the way his eyebrows had ached for a time after he'd stopped dating her (she really had been just too damned weird), recalled the sinus infection which had required a lot of Keflex to cure. The woman telling him all of this was a really good nurse, thought the doctor, and so he let her lead him to the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging facility. He wanted proof, and she had suggested this, since the needles were plastic and wouldn't show up on X-ray. Unfortunately for the doctor, the powerful magnetic fields of the NMR system quickly turned the tiny magnetized steel needle that she'd also inserted into his cranial foramen into a tiny electric motor within his brain. Of course it didn't hurt, the brain has no pain receptors, but as his senses turned off and motor skills left him, his last comprehension was of her saying, "You doctors think you're fucking God..."

They were on their way back into DC, riding smoothly down I-270, when they came to stalled traffic. She pulled over to the side of the road as soon as the immobile mass of vehicles ahead became visible. There was a great deal of traffic headed outbound from the Metro area, and they began to suspect that there was something amiss. They turned on the radio.

On most of the stations, there was a mad babbling. The announcers seemed to have run amok. As they continued to search the dial, Lace and Ron became more worried. They finally found WHFS-FM, which had gone over to its Emergency Broadcasting System repeater mode.

Lace listened for about a minute, and what came through that made any sense was that Washington DC was to be avoided at all costs. She had begun to get that idea on her own. She backed down the median strip towards the last exit, which fortunately wasn't far away, only about a mile or two. She didn't have to go all of the way, as there was an emergency vehicle turnaround at the median strip. She found a break in traffic, and cut across to the northbound lanes.

"Where to now?" asked Ron.

"Back to the shop," said Lace.

In a basement vault, a man began to trip heavily, and knew despair, and as his guts cramped and heaved and his reality began to twist around him and the mad voices coming over communications channels became madder still, or frighteningly silent, he and his partner (who had been watching real-time scanner displays with ever greater horror as blood flowed like water on the streets of the District and in the suburbs beyond) inserted keys into a special panel, and simultaneously, twisted.

They strode out of their vans. They were glittering, and matte black, and camouflage. They were made of metal, and plastic, and semiconductors. They had their own internal power supplies, superconductive storage coils which had been charging for weeks (and could possibly vaporize an M-1 Abrams tank if shorted out), and could parasitize outside power sources. Their mantis shapes walked out of the parking lots where the vans had been sitting for weeks, and they headed for downtown.

They were designed to be border defenses. They had rather massive armament well in advance of any presently deployed by any national military, and they were as strong as any forklift. Their behavior patterns were modeled upon those of bees, and they were swarming now. They had a rudimentary machine intelligence, and within that intelligence were several "ideas", all etched in shielded ROM. Their exteriors were coated with a conductive metallic/liquid crystal film, and the only route to the inside of their brains was specially modulated encrypted FM-sideband pulses received through their antennae. The charge on the body coating Faraday-shielded their sensitive electronics from electromagnetic radiation, and the armor beneath the coating shielded them from most portable weapons fire. Their very mobility shielded them from most large-arms fire. They faded into the back yards of Bethesda, Rockville, and Alexandria. The people who saw them couldn't believe their eyes; it was bad science fiction come to life on their homestreets. The border defenses paid no mind to people. They simply walked around them, tons of steel nimbly side-stepping. The people weren't hard to avoid anyway, as anyone who saw a border defender coming towards them immediately retreated to the limits of vision.

The border defenses were rather lame at first. They had difficulty maneuvering around fences. One of them managed to get itself trapped in someone's back yard. It walked around in the back yard looking for the gate it had brushed closed in passing, and it took almost fifteen minutes for it to arrive at the conclusion that since the fence was of a finite height of less than the height of its stride, it could step over it. The next fence it came to was immediately surmounted, the other border defenses had no difficulties with fences after the first one transmitted its discovery to the others.

The ones wandering down through Rock Creek Park spent a lot of time learning things. They discovered that water resists progress. They also found out about mud. The ones who strode purposefully down the bike paths made much better time than the ones that were in the mud, and after comparing learning experiences, muddy border defenses were seen hurrying down the bike paths to rejoin the vanguard of the advancing force.

The border defenses had the "idea" that the border to defend was the border between the District of Columbia and the surrounding environs. At the moment, their primary mission was to assemble at the District lines, and to assume spacing appropriate for securing the border.

The totally independent think-tank that had developed the border defenders concept had expected them to be deployed around military camps in hostile territory, and so they had expected the bodies of their product to be directed by substantially less flexible machine-minds. They had rather envisioned a limited response capacity for their telefactors, responses such as: shoot on sight, pursue and apprehend/shoot on failure. They had never expected the rather indestructible bodies to contain terabytes of flash-memory coupled to semi-independent parallel processors in analog neural networks with the absolute latest in fuzzy logic/AI/learning machine soft-and-firmware.

Internally, the machines had octuple redundancy, capacity for multiple restart, task distribution restructuring and procedural streamlining. The machines were almost as complex, "mentally", as the average mouse (though they "thought" orders of magnitude more rapidly), and were designed to be coldstarted with absolutely minimal "knowledge". They were expected to learn, and did so quite well, considering that they were the products of a mere five years of intensive research piled on top of a few decades of general accumulation of knowledge instead of millions of years of evolution.

So it was no surprise that when a man in the early stages of hallucinogenic giardiasis ran into a border defender in his '72 Toyota Corolla that it reacted by picking itself up, stumbling a bit as it adjusted a bit to two suddenly dysfunctional legs, and began to take his car apart. It hadn't yet considered the possibility that the man within the car was a separate object, so it took him apart as well.

It learned a lot. It determined (through laser spectrography) that the object it had disassembled was a source for lubricants. It had no need of lubricants at the moment so it merely stored the information and transmitted it. It noticed that there were very similar objects nearby, and it took one of them apart as well. Despite the dissimilarities, it classed the objects under a single type, which it filed under the set of objects having four wheels. One of the objects, though, had had an internal component of greatly differing materials and construction. That object had moved. The other object in the same class had no similar component, and did not move. It looked for similar objects.

It found many, and all of those that moved had one or more of those greatly different internal components. Several of the four-wheeled objects were moving slowly down one of the hard, blackish surfaces that it itself preferred to travel on. All had the soft fluid-filled internal components within. It advanced to intercept them. Most of the vehicles stopped moving, and the internal components separated from their vehicles and moved rapidly away from it. It compared images of these objects with each other, and extracted a statistically central "idealized" image, and hunted within ROM for matches, and found that these were HUMANs. It was greatly constrained (at a very basic level) to avoid HUMANs by at least five feet if possible, and it had disassembled one of them. It sat still in the street for a few minutes, and then, unable to come up with any other options, sent a signal to the other units to globally-receive a limiting-set. This was the equivalent of a last cry of horror, coupled with a picture of the procedure leading to the horror. It transmitted its "idealized" image of HUMAN, and HUMANs within a four-wheeled moving object, and its action of stopping a moving object resulting in a violation of rootlevel restrictions and constraints. The other units acknowledged reception, and all of the border defenders logged off of the general band.

The unit sat there and in its machine mind pondered towards a solution of a basic conflict. It needed to get into the assembly zone, ideally at its assigned location of Chevy Chase Circle. It also needed to avoid any possibility of allowing the four-wheeled vehicles with their HUMANs inside to move to within five feet of itself. HUMANs it could avoid, as per instruction; it had avoided several already. It noted that with the exception of the HUMAN it had disassembled, all of the other HUMANs had been moving away from it. It finally came to a decision, and started towards Chevy Chase Circle again, but this time it stayed on the sidewalk.

It had progressed about a mile when it became aware of recurring impacts on its armor. It localized the impacts as to quadrant-of-origin (assuming projectiles, it hadn't bumped into anything) and turned a sensor array to the right side to scan for the projectile source.

Its sensors indicated momentary point sources of high intensity infrared. A processor array associated with the sensors accessed its flashRAM and noted the source as a RIFLE. It ranged the source object at 135.2241 meters. Computing the lag between the infrared emissions and the impacts, it determined the muzzle velocity, and classed the RIFLE as a .30-06 bolt-action RIFLE and dismissed the instance from "threat" status. It continued towards its destination.

It was a quarter-mile from its intended post when a HUMAN approached it. The human was almost within five feet, and the border defender had already been projecting potential courses which would simultaneously bring it closer to its post, avoid the human, and avoid the strip of hard, blackish substance where four-wheeled (and a few two-wheeled) objects moved. The human stopped, and the border defender continued on its way.

The optical sensor array of the border defender noted that an object attached to the human was now oriented so that the axis of the cylinder aligned with the sensor array. The optical processor had a very low-level routine designed to detect close-range cylindrical axis-orientation, and when it noted the cylindrical axis alignment, it triggered an alarm within the greater mind of the border defender.

The great mantis shape halted its stately 15 KPH march towards Chevy Chase circle, and the head ducked as a blast of buckshot flew through the air. From a point between the sensor arrays, a barely visible violet beam traced a line from the border defender to the man with the shotgun. It hit his head, dead on between the eyes, and his head blew steam and brains all over the pavement. The shotgun clattered to the ground, and the mantis shape resumed its march.

No more of the humans approached it, and it reached the assembly point assigned it without further delay.

Lace and Ron got back to her facility and turned on the news.

Network stringers had been flown into the DC area, and advised to eat or drink nothing they hadn't brought with them from their unaffected areas, and they were broadcasting from the vicinity of 16th street and East-West Highway.

"... we see these devices just sitting there. They look like giant metal insects, sort of like a giant spider or mantis, and they aren't doing anything at all. They're just sitting there. I sure don't feel like approaching them. They're all around the area, and if you approach the DC line, you'll see one. We don't recommend approaching the DC line, though. Here's what happened to one of our men..."

[The picture cuts to another newsman. He and the cameraman are approaching one of the mantis shapes, which stands at the intersection of Spring Street and US 29, commanding the prospect overlooking the Silver Spring Metrorail Station where twenty or so others are cutting through the fence to get into the station. It does not move, it does nothing. It looks like nothing so much as a huge metal sculpture. Behind it, another huge mantis shape sits, about 100 meters away, similarly motionless atop the next hill, commanding the intersection of Route 29 and Georgia Avenue. The cameraman approaches.]

"We're going to come closer to it. We're about fifty feet away now, and it still isn't doing anything. Closer, closer, damn this is spooky. How did this thing get here? We've gotten reports from local citizens that these things came out of a trailer down at a local shopping center, and when we checked that out, there was a trailer there, and one of these was standing in front of the door. This was the first we'd encountered closely, and we were just about to investigate, when we were called up here to see this one.

"It seems that these... devices... have taken up a cordon around the periphery of Washington. We know that Washington seems to be under attack of some sort, but that's all we know at this time... are these attacking units, or defending units? We don't know that either... They seem to be trying to command the high ground, but they're down in the Rock Creek Park as well, hidden in the woods, mostly. Well, here goes..."

[The reporter approaches the device.]

"Hello, hello."

Machine: "Hello."

Reporter: "You can speak!"

[The device makes no response.]

Reporter: "Say something else! C'mon, talk to me!"

[The reporter walks to a spot near the machine. When he approaches to within five feet of the machine, it takes a step to the side.]

Reporter: "Hey! It moves. [Turning to face the camera] Well folks, it appears that whatever these devices are, they can move on their own. Maybe it's radio controlled? I don't know how I could tell... but hey, Bob, let's come around and walk around it. [He walks close to the device, again it sidesteps. He laughs. He tries to walk behind it.]

Machine: "Do not attempt to cross the border."

Reporter: "Wow. It speaks again, everybody... Ummm... Mr. Machine what do you mean?"

Machine: "Do not attempt to cross the border."

Reporter: "There's no border here, that's just the District line."

Machine: "Do not attempt to cross the border. The border is the line between this unit and the next units."

Reporter: "Who says this is the border?"

Machine: "This is the border. Do not attempt to cross the border."

Reporter: "This thing isn't too bright. I wonder what will happen if I try to cross the border? This has to be some sort of hoax, and I'm crossing."

[The reporter begins to cross the line, and suddenly screams, as his leg falls, severed, to the ground. The camera jumps, and the sound man rushes over to the reporter and helps him up. The sound man screams at the machine.]

Sound man: "You can't do that what gives you the right? What the fuck is going on here?"

[The sound man helps the reporter up, and the reporter, obviously in shock, tries to reach out for his leg. There is a flash of light, and the reporter's arm falls to the ground. The sound man screams, and runs at the machine. On the hill behind the first unit, the second unit turns their way, and beams from both units slice him into many pieces, none bigger than a foot across. The pieces fall inside the border, steaming slightly.]

The camera is lowered to the ground, remaining pointed at the machine, which sits impassively motionless.

"There you have it. These devices have some sort of energy weapons that they fire at anyone attempting to cross the border they've established. In related incidents, people are fleeing the immediate vicinity as the National Guard rolls arms into the area. Also, any crossings from the inside to the outside are also being stopped, with a difference. Anyone approaching the District Line from within DC is fired upon with no warning as soon as they get within about a hundred yards of the 'border'. There has been no explanation for the mobilization of these machines... but any listeners are advised that there is no good reason for anyone to even consider coming anywhere near Washington DC at the present time. Here's more footage...

[A man drives a tow truck at high speed towards a sentinel. The sentinel fires a beam into the windshield of the tow truck, and the beam penetrates the clear glass, and the man slumps to the side, his face charred. The tow truck continues to speed towards the DC line, and from an aperture upon the belly of the machine flash a string of incandescent sparks, moving too quickly for the camera to really register. The tow truck explodes into a cloud of smoke and a spray of steel. Whatever has hit is powerful enough to stop all forward momentum.]

"These devices seem to react in proportion to the threat, whatever the threat might be. Massive fast-moving objects are destroyed as soon as the machines decide that the vehicles are aiming towards them. Humans on foot may approach them. The machines allow no one to approach to within five feet of them, and will step aside rather than have someone come too close to them, but fire if you attempt to cross their 'border'..."

Ron and Lace stood stunned. Washington DC invaded by robots? No way.

Ron summed it all up. "Gort, Klaatu barada nicto," he said.

Downtown there was carnage. DC had seen nothing of war in almost two hundred years, and few were prepared.

"Soldier-Man Tembi" Jones was ready.

Soldier-Man was a big fan of the Sixties radicals, such as the Weathermen, and he was particularly fond of the political stand taken by the Black Panthers, and fully subscribed to the theory put forth by Malcolm X: "By any means necessary, wage a mighty struggle." Soldier-Man had gotten his name from his unceasing harangues on the subject of white-supremacists, racism (he was not at all against anti- white racism, but the ofay stomping on the black man was indeed a sin second to none in his book), and the need for armed revolution. He had gone quite a ways underground at many different times in his career, and had emerged from various levels of concealment only for a very few reasons. One reason was to take care of the administration of his ever- expanding web of continuing criminal enterprise, to occasionally take care of business in his own personal little wars, and to occasionally burn the hell out of any uppity chess player who might think that he'd ever have a chance against Soldier-Man Tembi Jones.

Soldier-Man was never going to get into any tournaments, he had just too damned many unserved warrants for his most expeditious arrest, but he was indeed a Chess Grandmaster. He was extremely studious, fluent in Arabic and Cantonese, perhaps more so than in English, where despite his excellent command of the mainstream language, he really preferred to speak in the argot. He was a superb strategist, a quality that had not gone unnoticed when he'd been drafted during the Vietnam conflict. He had been in the Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrols (LRRPs), and had been quite the insurgent. He had been hoping that someone else would give him an excuse to throw his revolution for a long, long time, and so he had worked unceasingly to be prepared, to be backed by organization, personnel, materiel, discipline, and loyalty. Strangely enough, though, despite his intolerance of whites and their ways, as far as Soldier-Man himself was concerned, he would equally rather battle any foreign invader. He was less certain about the motivations of some of his subordinates, though. He figured that most of them were in it for the money, the drugs, or just because they relished the thought of an opportunity to kill people.

Soldier-Man was ready as a man could be. He'd been ready since about 1993. He'd been collecting weapons for a lot longer than that. He was fifty now, but since he was twenty-five and had run an enforcement arm of the notorious Frog Street (You gots to hop on Frog Street, my man...) Crew, he'd been settling up drug-debts with two, and two only, currencies. Cash or weapons, the bigger the better.

Soldier-Man was much better armed than the police routinely were. He was almost as well armed as the National Guard was, and since he and most of his crew only ever drank bottled water (he had long been convinced that the white man was keeping the black man under control with drugs in the water supply), they were unaffected by the giardia plague. He led a crew over to one of the arms caches, and set the boys on some errands, mostly just giving them the call to arms...

There was a cop in the coffeeshop, holed up in the corner, trying to make some sense of the noises coming from his radio, and wondering why his gut hurt so much. Odd thoughts were flitting through his mind, when suddenly, a 9-millimeter wadcutter flitted through his brain.
Two more cops in a wrecked cruiser were put out of their misery. They really didn't care, since they were deep in the throes of giardiasis. They almost welcomed the sight of two grinning youths aiming guns at them; at least this they could understand.
The police station at 17th and U streets Northwest exploded as a total of forty pounds of C-4 plastique was set off in timed cascade. Pieces rained down on the surrounding blocks, but nobody cared. They had been looking at worse things all day long, and as the sun set on a city gone mad, it seemed that worse things still were soon to be seen.

At night they came out. The sudden withdrawal of their support medications had provoked a massive surge of maturational hormones, and their natural nocturnalism was greatly exacerbated. They had horrible sunburns, most of them, and the steroids responsible for rapid healing were being produced at metabolically destructive rates. Their hunger flamed within them, and their emotions burned as well.

They had come from all walks of life, from all parts of the country, and their parents had raised them in various ways. They all reacted differently to the sudden onslaught of full maturity, a process that would have normally taken years. Some tried any and all means available to slow or halt the insidious slide into a life of predation, and some really didn't have a clue as to what was happening, or were at least unwilling to face up to their vastly changed prospects for the immediate future.

The young vampyrs' powerful immune systems had quickly sloughed off the effects of the mutant giardia. No longer tripping, no longer diarrheic, young pretty K'at sat in her basement apartment off of Park Road, Northwest. She tried to dry her tears. She was actually getting somewhere with getting her emotions under control, when she opened her reddened eyes to look at herself and her party dress. It was shredded, and stained through with blood. It had been her favorite dress, and now it was little better than a rag. The noonday sun glared through the slats of the venetian blinds of her flat, and she tried desperately to forget the previous night.

She had been out drinking at a major party. All of her friends had been there, there had been five bands, and more kegs than she could count. She'd been incredibly drunk, and had been stoking up on water when something had happened to her.

She probably shouldn't have gone to the party. Something had held up her re-supply of The Cure. It was five days overdue, and standing orders were, should there ever be a hold-up on re-supply, she (like any other of her Caged brethren) should have waited at home for re-supply. All of her friends were at the party, and she was really sweet on the drummer for The Impudents (who were headlining the party), even if he was a Normal... so she had gone anyway, despite orders. Hell, she was only twenty, how the hell could anybody expect her to follow orders? It wasn't like she was in the Army.

At the party, though, things had gotten really weird. All of the Straight-Edge people were tripping, and that was incredibly out of character. Ordinarily, Straight-Edge people totally eschewed drugs and alcohol, maintaining (often quite rightly) that they were fucked-up enough without the use of drugs. They had gotten progressively weirder throughout the night. Most of them had begun getting rowdy, which was generally a bad sign, but tripping Straight-Edge rowdiness was insupportable. They had also, most of them, seemed to be rapidly coming down with some strange stomach-flu, and had generally left on their own, although some had been unceremoniously pitched out onto the street by main force.

She had been drinking beer only for the entire evening. Drunk as a lord, she had taken two aspirin, and drunk almost a gallon of water, and she and her friend Tillie had headed up the street. Tillie was going to spend the night (well, actually the morning since it was about four by now). They planned to walk up 16th street towards Park Road, and then cut down Park towards home. About the time they got to Park Road, it was apparent that there was something incredibly strange happening here in the District.

The Hispanics were out in force, not at all unusual since this was Adams-Morgan, a largely Hispanic part of town. The strange part was that they all were dancing and chanting in the middle of the street. They cut over into an alley to avoid the howling mob. There didn't seem to be any violence there in the streets, other than the usual Hispanic hell-raising and machismo. This seemed to be more of a religious mania. Whatever it was ought to be avoided, especially since they were both more than a bit tipsy. K'at wasn't too concerned for her own safety, but she didn't want Tillie to risk getting hurt. She was pretty sure that she could cover their asses if they were in an alley. In the alley, Tillie complained of stomach cramps. K'at didn't feel altogether well herself. She had never been sick a day in her life, not for more than a few hours, and stomach upsets were a new thing to her. So was tripping. It was now apparent that someone had severely dosed one of the kegs, and by the time they made it to her security-grated door, reality had taken many odd turns.

Tillie was crying, bent double in pain as they went inside. K'at gave her a Coke from the 'fridge and told her to wait for her. K'at, who was not really a very brave person, dithered for a few minutes in increasing hallucinations, and decided that she was going to risk going back outside for some antacids. She didn't feel at all well, but Tillie was in agony on the toilet. K'at hopped onto her Cannondale trailbike and headed back out into the alleys.

There was rioting in the streets, and more than the usual amount of gunfire. A police car was burning on the street as she locked her bike behind the 7-11. The 7-11 had been broken into, and all of the alcohol had been stolen, and most of the food, but there was quite a bit of Pepto-Bismol and Kaopectate still on the shelves, and she loaded up. Other than the abandoned burning cruiser, there was no sign of the police. Outside, a flock of people ran past, laughing and shrieking wildly, looking like a scene from a Bosch painting. Where were the riot cops? K'at was terrified, but she had gotten what she had come for, and it was time to go. She ran out of the door, cringing a bit as the edges of the shattered safety glass loomed at her like tiny cubical knifes. She rounded the corner to go behind the 7-11 to retrieve her bike, and a man grabbed her. He was covered with blood, and when he grabbed her he ripped her dress and smeared blood all over it.

He screamed a torrent of Spanish at her, and slapped her. She didn't understand a bit of it, but she felt, strangely felt, as if his feelings were hers: terror, rage, horror... she spun, and kicked, and he lay gasping on the ground. She saw waves of unreality washing over her, and emotions lashed her like waves lash a hurricane beach. She'd actually hurt one of the Normals, and shame washed over her, and curiously enough, pride washed through her as well. She'd fought to help a friend. She wasn't a fighter... oh, she knew how, all of her people did. It was basically built-in... but all of her life she'd been constrained by her socialization. "You must never hurt anybody" had always been drilled into her, long before she had known how capable she was of violence, long before she had been told the story of where her people came from, what they were, what they must never be again. As a child, she'd "pussed-out" of fight after fight... and now, she'd easily countered a man much larger than herself. She unlocked her bike and rode away.

She got home and unlocked the door, entered, and secured it behind her. Tillie was in the bathroom, moaning. When K'at greeted her, Tillie almost fell over, she was so startled. She stared at K'at in such a way that K'at wondered what Tillie could be seeing. K'at gave her the unopened bottle of Kaopectate, and Tillie stared at it for a few moments as if wondering what it was, and then she tore the safety seal off of the container, and drank the entire thing. K'at thought (reading the label directions) that roughly thirty doses of that stuff should certainly plug up poor Tillie. K'at herself felt a little better, ever since vomiting twice en route to and from the 7-11. The hallucinations were still with her. Tillie's old-fashioned "acid-house" patterned dress was shifting around, but K'at no longer felt as if she'd lose control. Instead, she felt rather more like helping Tillie.

Tillie was getting worse.

Tillie had stopped being sick; the combination of Kaopectate and total systemic evacuation had eased her nausea, but she was really bumming. K'at helped her clean herself up, and walked her into the bedroom. K'at had no experience tripping herself, but Tillie was obviously gone as shit, and stared around the room as if frightened to death. What could she be seeing? Abruptly, Tillie began to talk.

"They're rioting out there, they're killing each other, they're crazy they're all crazy they're gonna get us K'at, K'at, they're gonna get us..."

"They can't get us, Tillie, we're inside..."

"They'll get in, K'at, they'll get in..."

It went on like this for hours. K'at reached a level of hallucination that got no worse and seemed tolerable, but Tillie seemed to be getting worse. K'at was tired, tired, and it was obvious that Tillie was near exhaustion. Despite her obvious agitation, she drifted off into a fitful slumber, a slumber that was more like a trance or a delirium of fever. K'at still didn't feel entirely well... she felt hungry. Very hungry... but the hallucinations that she was going through kept her from asking why. Curled up against her best friend, she slept. When the sun rose at six-thirty, she got up to firmly shut the blinds against the blinding rays. She went into the bathroom for a minute, and looked at her face in the mirror. Her pupils were dilated greatly... probably from the effects of whatever drugs she'd been dosed with... perhaps that would explain why the sun hurt her eyes so much. She simply was unable to consider the other possible cause. It had been a week since she had taken the little yellow pill that made her a "normal" person.

She returned to the her bedroom. Tillie lay there, asleep, occasionally twitching as some horrible dream chased her across the landscapes of her dreams. K'at crawled into bed next to her. She was hungry, horribly hungry, as if she had not eaten all week. She didn't want food, though... her stomach was still unsettled from all of the drinking of the night before, and from the effects of the drugs. She forced calm on herself, and went to sleep.

She woke from a very pleasant dream to see Tillie staring at her in horror. What could Tillie be seeing that so horrified her? Perhaps it was the way that she gripped Tillie's arm near the wrist, and lapped the blood from a small cut on a vein on Tillie's hand. That must be it. She almost drifted back off into the pleasant dream that still gripped her, but there was some inconsistency that forced her back towards wakefulness. Perhaps it was the contrast between the image from nightmare and the feeling of dreamjoy. She let go of Tillie's wrist, and licked her lips, and as she woke fully, she realized that this was not a dream. Tillie continued to stare at her in horror. K'at sat up in shock.

"Are you going to kill me now, K'at? Now that I've found you out? Now that I know what you are?" Tillie looked terrified, and winced in pain as she held her stomach. She groaned. K'at's mind whirled. There was no longer any sensation of hunger denied, and she knew that any residual effects of her medications were fading fast.

"Tillie, I'm not going to kill you... you're my friend! Are you OK?"

"You've been sucking on my hand for an hour! Some friend! How many times that I've stayed over have you done this?" Tillie was still scared stiff, and her pupils were hugely dilated. She groaned again and clutched at her stomach. Beads of sweat rolled down her face, and she shuddered.

"I've never done this before, Tillie, never! How do you feel, dammit?" K'at was beside herself. She'd thought to take care of Tillie, and she'd wound up mostly taking care of herself, and scaring the hell out of Tillie, who was not in any mental state to handle any of this.

"I feel used, you bitch!" Tillie got up and ran to the bathroom. She vomited explosively into the toilet. When she was done puking, she yelled, "Bitch!" and slammed the bathroom door. K'at heard the shower running.

K'at sat stunned on her bed, and licked her lips again. The taste of blood was still there, on her lips, in her mouth, and in her mind, probably forever.

Tillie came out from the bathroom a few minutes later. "Well, are you going to let me out, bitch?"

K'at watched strange incongruous emotions chase themselves across her friend's face. Tillie was still tripping, even after six hours of sleep. If anything she seemed worse. "Tillie, do you really want to go outside? Do you think your head's together enough to get through out there? Listen!"

Tillie paused long enough to hear the sound of gunfire and screams. One was pretty close. The scream went on and on, tapering off into whimpering Spanish moaning.

Tillie's face set in a look of determination and loathing. "Anything's better than being locked in a basement with a vampire. Now let me out!"

K'at couldn't stop her tears. She didn't even try. "I'll let you out, Tillie. You might not think so, but I am still your friend... and I'm sorry I did that to you... I didn't even know that I was doing that. Here you go," she said, unlocking the security grate, "Go in peace. I'm sorry!" she said again.

"Not as sorry as you will be, you bitch! Vampire!" she shrieked.

K'at stood there stunned as her best friend of years ran down the alley, screaming.

In Rock Creek Park, Richard Thurston crept through the underbrush between two of the border defenses. He was having a wonderful time. The sensations of scalp itching had, weeks ago, synesthesially transmuted into sensory data that was totally integrated and easily assimilated and interpreted by his mind. With all of the practice he was getting, it would become a part of him as much as was sight or hearing.

The border defenses could not fire on him, any more than they could fire on each other. Their senses detected the metal in his body, and they sent queries to his operating system... that is to say, the RF pulses they used for Doppler imaging induced eddy currents in electrodes which stimulated a portion of his brain to trigger other portions, which in turn changed the conductivity of certain portions of his electrode harness, and hence slightly modified the return signatures of the query pulses. His person was inviolable, and without discrete, direct instructions from the command node (Richard) the border defenses could not turn their weapons systems against him, nor even target some of their more active senses (such as the hi-resolution synthetic-aperture phased- array Ku-band tactical radars) against him.

He had directed two of them to flank him as bodyguards. This in no way thinned the ranks of the border defenders, as they were emplaced in a periphery four miles inside the DC lines as well as at the line. The lines within the city were moving slowly towards the outside lines. All citizens they encountered were flushed out of their houses, checked for ID, and were herded towards the suburban borderlines. There was a line of citizens marching slowly and dazedly up Connecticut, Georgia, and Wisconsin Avenues, River Road, MacArthur Boulevard. The people flushed out of the neighborhoods nearer the PG county line were marching up the banks of the various branches of the Anacostia River, Pennsylvania Avenue, and similar main thoroughfares.

Whenever the border defenders encountered resistance, they countered it with force equivalent to intent. If there was obvious lethal intent, they were quick to react, and rather given to overkill. When citizens were found, they were asked for identification. If they presented identification, their IDs were taken from them, and the border defenders inserted them into niches, from which they emerged with a new coating of laminate over a pattern of foil which greatly resembled barcode. They were instructed to present these to any border defender they encountered. Those persons without ID were instructed to remain near the border defenders who had "captured" them. Anybody was allowed to flee the border defenders, as long as they ran towards the outskirts of town. Anyone trying to flee towards the center of the city was warned twice, and shot down. Anyone carrying more than three pounds of metal was also shot down, again after being twice warned. Some persons were simply burned where they stood at the instant of sighting. The border defenders had been programmed to fire on sight at any sign of certain skin- reflectivity spectra.

Border defenders severed all C&P and AT&T trunk lines going into and out of town. They also captured all of the Government satellite-link facilities. There were a few pitched battles at these facilities, with a whole lot of ridiculously well-armed black men wearing Malcolm X "X" caps getting well and truly crisped in the confrontations, which were really rather well-fought. Soldier-Man Tembi Jones was beginning to experience a few setbacks in his all out war to conquer DC. For one thing, a substantial percentage of his men had evidently been killed by their girlfriends. They must have gotten tired of being beaten. All non- Emergency Broadcast radio transmissions were tracked and destroyed, with the exception of cellular facilities. The TV stations were taken off of the air, and cable distribution points were seized.

At Metro stations around town, scores of the border defenders emerged from the escalator tunnels. They didn't climb the escalators well, but enough of them made it to the top. On each corner of Washington's business district a sentinel was soon waiting.

At the border, National Guardsmen gave injections of anti-psychotic drugs and anti-giardia medications. The weather was beautiful, dry, mid-May blissful, and once the effects of the hallucinogenic bowel parasites wore off, most of the citizens adapted well, though the sight of a border defender could send them into a near-panic. The National Guardsmen didn't like the sentinels much either, but orders were orders, and the orders were to not interfere. They were to take care of the citizens, under a modified natural-disaster drill.

Overflights of helicopters and gigantic C-5A heavylift aircraft distributed anti-giardia medications and anti-psychotic drugs, all labeled pictogrammatically for easy use by illiterate or hallucinating persons. The Pentagon and FEMA had quickly identified the cause of the epidemic madness, and had been ready for years for such occurrences.

The giant metal mantis crouched immobile for a few moments, and then returned the George Washington University ID to the young woman, and as she cramped stiffly in pseudo-Parkinsonian effects of anti-psychotic injections, and swiftly returned to the vastly changed but suddenly non- hallucinatory reality of Dupont North, it spoke to her. "You are a student at George Washington University." It then recited a list of courses that she was attending, and recited a list of course cancellations. "Your remaining courses are still continuing. You may elect to remain within the District and to continue to attend those courses. You must leave the District if you do not continue to attend classes. You must choose now. What is your choice?"

There was only a week to go, and all of her finals were within that week, and if she passed, she'd graduate.

She vomited up a stomach full of antibiotics and dead giardia. Around her, a crowd of people was engaged in similar activities. A group of Maryland National Guardsmen surrounded a group of wild-eyed citizens, and a Medical Corpsman selected one, and hit her in the arm with a pressure-injector full of Haldol. He stuck a tube into her mouth, pinched her nose shut, and pumped the handle on the antibiotic dispenser (which looked rather like a caulking-gun) and waited until she swallowed, then released her nose, and another Guardsman moved her along to another group. A line of shivering, cramping, bilious-looking people led up to the border defender, which seemed to be radio-linked to some vast unseen information system. Even to those unaffected by the giardia, the scene was nightmarishly surreal.

"Hell," she said.

"I do not understand," said the border defender. "Can you choose? What is your choice?"

Tillie thought, sheepskin! One week! "I'll stay," she said, and puked.

It was quite dark now.

K'at was making up her mind to leave her house for the streets. She'd been listening to the radio all day, and there was nothing on except emergency broadcasts. A great deal of the emergency broadcasts made no sense to her so she tuned across the dial. Everything else was off of the air. Cable service was down, and when she unhooked herself from the cable and tried to get standard reception, she got nothing but blue-filled screens. The phone didn't work. She was going to go get a supply of The Cure even if it killed her. She was wondering if anyone was going to come over, or if she'd have to go to them. She'd decided on the latter.

She had changed into something suiting the weather, a lovely evening about seventy-five degrees, fairly low humidity. She chose a pale green outfit, and was preparing to depart into the night, when there was a knock at her door.

It was Donovan. Donovan was known to be close to the agency of the Signatories Evaluation Board. Most of her cohort held him in a rather vast contempt, as he was a prime example of the general sociopathy that seemed to prevail among most of her kin. His motto was: What's in it for me? If he had ever had a soul, he'd long ago sold it, and sold it cheaply for anything remotely resembling power. He was a manipulative, devious fuck, in K'at's eyes. But he was her resupply connection, (and secretly her political checker) and so she had to tolerate him. She didn't have to like it though...

She just looked at him, and he signed a request for entry.

"How ya doin'?" she asked him, not opening the door...

"Fine, K'at. How are you doing? Can I come in?" he responded.

"Yah, I guess so," she said.

After he was inside, she asked him, "OK, so where's the re-supply?" He just grinned at her.

"There's not any re-supply. There's not going to be any re-supply." His grin got bigger.

K'at was aghast. "What do you mean, no re-supply?"

"The factory got blown up. I got this through channels."

"What are we going to do?" K'at exclaimed.

"What do you think we're going to do? What we used to do. Fuck up a bunch of humans. Goddamned Normals deserve it anyway, keeping us slaves for the last fifty years..." His grin got wider.

"Damn you! They haven't kept us slaves! Compared to a lot of them, we've been given everything... the best schools, preference in certain jobs..." K'at trailed off as Donovan's teeth became ever more visible. His grin could not be considered a smile now, not by anyone.

"Yah, so we could do a better job of hopping when they say frog. Well, they've got no more hold over me, and they'll kill me after what I did if I ever get questioned. I'm out of their loop now, for good."

K'at's eyes grew wide. "You didn't," she breathed, knowing full well that he had.

"Yah, I did. I was on my way home from that party, and some guys tried to fuck with me, and I fucked them all up! Killed at least two of 'em... and I'm not the least bit worried about re-supply." His teeth were all showing. He scared K'at. K'at was not used to being scared of anybody. She went to Church regularly enough to not be greatly worried about God, trusting to the mercies of Jesus' redemption and intercession. She wasn't worried about the Signatories Evaluation Board for about the same reasons. She kept her nose clean, and behaved within the limits. She certainly wasn't afraid of most Normals, since she knew she could fight... but Donovan truly frightened her, and not because of his physical capabilities.

"Damn you, you bastard, I'm freaking out because I woke up this morning with my teeth in my best girlfriend's hand and you're gloating about killing people? What the fuck is wrong with you!"

"What's wrong with you? These fuckers have kept us down all of our lives, and what for?" He suddenly shut up as he realized his argument led nowhere, in fact was counterproductive.

"What for? Look, dumbass, they let us live, even as we have been living, so that they wouldn't have to kill us all off! They had us! They had us cold, dead to rights, and why didn't they kill us all off? I can't understand it myself, in their position, I would have killed us, but they felt sorry for us! They have this stupid fucking set of ideas about good and evil, and choices and a lot of other stupid things none of us will ever understand, but they let us live, and we fucking owe them for that!"

Donovan let that sink into his head for a second. "Don't you think that it's because it'd be too much effort for them? Maybe it'd interfere with their precious rights?"

"You still don't get it do you!? It's because of their precious rights that they allowed us to live at all! They hate us! They should hate us! We prey on them, or at least we used to... Damn, I can't say that anymore. Now we do prey on them! My best friend... I grew up with Tillie, and we've always shared anything everything... and when we got sick last night, I tried to take care of her, I went to the store through the riots, to get medicine for her, and why? Because she's my friend, and it was the right thing to do... and I woke up sucking off of her hand, and she knows me for what I am and she hates me for it! And she's my best friend? What the fuck do you think someone who never did believe in us is gonna feel when they find out that we're real, we're active, and on top of it, you stupid fucking asshole, that we definitely kill!"

"That's their problem, not mine," retorted Donovan, not in the least repentant.

"Wrong, Bucko, it's gonna be all of our people's problem! You and everyone like you! Anyone making that choice, and from the way you're talking, I bet you did make a choice, you sick son-of-a-bitch, I bet you decided to kill to see what it was like, and I bet you liked it! They're not going to hear anything good from your dead witnesses, and I bet you left them with their throats torn out, and I bet that every motherfucker in town is gonna be looking for you, but you'll be too slick for that, won't you? So they'll be looking for you and find us instead!"

"Count on it," Donovan said with a smirk. He was leering condescendingly at her, and when she was about to start in on him again, he said, "We can all work together on this. You know how we've been harassing everyone we can out of town, just to make room for more of us? We could kill them instead, and nobody would be the wiser. We could replace most of them, and well, all of those people we've run out of town who told tales? No more tales. Everybody who comes to DC is either one of us, or they never get out alive."

"You're insane! Don't even think about shit like that! Haven't you ever heard of the neutron bomb? The success of The Plan depends on us keeping a low profile, on us being unseen and unsuspected! And you want to try to usurp control openly, through main force and violence?" K'at was completely bewildered. She of course supported the ongoing efforts to bother normal people, hell, it was great fun, wasn't it? But this idea was to her nothing but megalomania. K'at, of course, due to the communications blackout, did not know that when the plague had first hit, over ten thousand people had been killed, more or less secretly, in a studied effort to remove anyone sufficiently competent to direct rebuilding or retrenchment efforts should the Plan prove to be less than a success.

Donovan spoke up then, and turned for the door. "K'at, you know how close I am to the Board. You think I'm just their trained dog and a puppet and a lackey, but lemme tell you this: they not only don't have the Cure to control us any more, but they're pretty much out of control themselves. While they thought that they were independent, they've been getting taken over... redirected, and usurped. I've been doing secret shit for a while, K'at, and I've been working a lot more than one side, and you don't know that what you've been casually participating in is just the tip of the iceberg, a real serious iceberg with so very much weight behind it... Now lemme out, or do you wanna fight for your keys?" He held out his hand for her keys, and she glared at him, and reached back to the wall around the corner from the door, and pulled the emergency fire release. The security grate fell out of the doorway.

"Get the fuck out!" she yelled, and was somehow able to keep a tremor from her voice.

At one in the morning, K'at was still sitting there when there was another knock on the door.

"Go away, Donovan, you asshole! I don't want anything to do with you, you evil motherfucker!"

There was another knock. K'at wondered at the wisdom of staying at home, and steeled herself to answer the door. Had Tillie gone to the cops over that incident this afternoon? Would they have believed her?

K'at decided to face the consequences. She went to the door. It was Tillie.

"Tillie!" she gasped, "What are you doing here? You're the last person I ever expected to see tonight!"

"I'm surprised to see you're at home, K'at. I thought you'd be long gone."

They looked at each other hard for a minute, neither saying anything. Each was afraid to speak. The Tillie broke the silence, and said:

"Aren't you going to invite me in?"

K'at didn't know at first what to say, and then she said, as she unlocked the door, "Are you sure you want to come into a vampire's house?" She couldn't help sounding reproachful.

Tillie came in. "Oh, K'at, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean it..."

"Tillie, Tillie..." They hugged, and K'at thought that her heart would break. "Why did you come back?"

"I'm sorry K'at," Tillie sniffed, wiping away a tear, "It was the giardia talking."

"The what?" K'at was mystified.

"The giardia. It was in the water-supply. Somebody got a genespliced parasite into the water supply; it was engineered to produce LSD as a waste product. Everybody in town spent last the last day or two tripping. Didn't you read the insert on the antidote packs?"

"I didn't get one. I thought the keg was dosed and it just wore off." K'at was baffled.

"Well, how'd you get well?" Tillie was mystified now.

"My immune system must have fought it off."

"But nobody gets over giardia on their own, at least not so fast... what are you trying to say?" Confusion played over Tillie's face... and K'at thought of a way out.

"Tillie, you know how some people are depressed all of the time and have to take Lithium?" She looked deeply into Tillie's face, and saw understanding and compassion there. Tillie nodded, and K'at continued.

"You'd never know that these people weren't totally normal, as long as they take their Lithium?" Tillie nodded again.

"You know that Lithium treats what is essentially a problem metabolizing salts in the brain?" Tillie nodded again.

"What happens to a person whose supply of Lithium is interrupted?" K'at looked hard at Tillie, and Tillie thought for a second.

Tillie said, "They begin to feel bad. As the pressure on their mind builds, they begin to act strange. They might get suicidal, or go into mood swings. I'm a psych major, you know that..."

K'at looked at Tillie with her best pleading look. She paused for effect, and continued, "I have a problem a lot like someone who has to take Lithium, but it's a little different."

Comprehension gathered in a cloud on Tillie's face, and K'at cut her off before she could speak.

"Don't hate me, Tillie, we've been friends forever... but I have a problem like that, but it's iron deficiency. My medicine has been delayed, and it's starting to affect me..."

Tillie stood stock still. She spoke: "What you're telling me was that what I remember was no hallucination."

"Tillie, please don't hate me! I can't help it, I'm sick! This has never happened to me before, and I don't know what to do! I don't like this! I'm afraid!"

"K'at, are you really a bloodsucker?" There was no expression at all on Tillie's face.

"You hate me! You hate me... why Tillie, why? I'm the same person I've always been, but now my medicine isn't here, and it's affecting me! Can't you find some pity in your heart?" K'at was moved by her own speech more than she thought she could be. She was well aware of the general lack of empathy most of her kind exhibited, it had been drummed into her often enough.

"I can find pity, K'at... I can find other things as well. Fear, disgust, hatred..." Tillie paused to let her words sink in. K'at was heartbroken, and fearful as she could be. Would Tillie hate her again, when she had told the truth, when she had come clean, and begged for forgiveness and understanding?

"I told you the truth! I could have lied, and everything would have been fine, except it wouldn't have been fine, I would have been living a lie, and our resumed friendship would have been based on a lie! Can't you forgive me for what I am, for something I can't help, for being a way I don't want to be?" K'at was crying openly, copiously, but through her tears she saw Tillie open wide her arms, and Tillie said, "Just don't bite me, K'at," and K'at said, from within a loving hug, as soon as the sobs subsided...

"I won't bite you, Tillie, not now... Can you forgive me?"

"K'at, can you forgive me for hurting you this afternoon?" K'at pulled back, and said, "I'll try never to bite you, Tillie... and yes, yes, of course I forgive you..." and Tillie looked K'at square in the eyes, and told her, "If you need me, I'm right here."

K'at responded, "We all need and depend on our friends." Her eyes cleared a bit, and she said, "I never dared to hope for understanding from one of you! We've kept this a secret for so long, all of this fear and paranoia..."

And Tillie said, with the most serious look K'at had ever seen from her, "I'm not 'one of us', K'at, I'm Tillie. You had better keep that in mind, and you'd better keep that paranoia." She paused reflectively, then said, "What exactly are your needs?"

"I really don't know. This is the first time this has ever happened! Tillie, I guess if I am giong to be open about this, I had better go all the way, rather than let you have misapprehensions, be misled by superstition and supposition. For instance, like I can fight... I can fight better than any of you can without weapons, and better than most of you can armed. I'm very fast, and very strong... but this is not a matter of pride to me... it's been a very heavy responsibility for me for all of my life... and I've always had my problem medically controlled...

"Yah, I remember when we first met, I used to give you such a hard time, back in grade school... You could have kicked my ass good, couldn't you?"

"Probably. I wouldn't do it now, Tillie, I'm all grown up, and all childishness is behind me."

Tillie thought, and said, "I guess I can leave all of my childish fears behind me. Do you want me to stay over, and we can talk?"

"I really wish you would. The worst part of all of this is all of my life I've been trained to think of what I'm becoming now to be the worst thing that could ever happen to me, something to be avoided at all costs... and now it's happened and the embarassment alone is almost enough to kill me...""

"If you need... some blood... tell me?"

"As soon as I know."

"If you waited too long, you might hurt me couldn't you?"

"I think I might."

"Don't wait," said Tillie.

Perhaps you'd like to read Part Seven?
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