Posted by Derby on June 24, 2000 at 23:55:28:
OPERATION NEW PROMETHEUS
by Derby
Part 1
In the future, Andy Warhol said, everybody will be world-famous for fifteen minutes. At 11:33 AM, when Victor Ainsworth left his cabin on the Amtrak Coast Starlight 11 carrying his silenced 9mm automatic, his fifteen minutes began.
Joy and Curt Renfro were making love in their sleeper cabin at the time. Curt didn't like the cramped conditions, but Joy enjoyed the novelty; it gave her a warm, cozy feeling to be closely enclosed by the walls of their berth as she lay atop him and Curt poked her where it felt oh-so-good to be poked. There was just room enough for him to rub his cheek through her jaw-length, straight blond hair, kiss her blue eyes with their long black lashes, and squeeze her breasts with his powerful hands. Their bodies rocked in time with the gentle rocking of the train.
There was a muffled bark as Victor shot the lock off the sliding door and strode through the curtain into the narrow room. Both Joy and Curt whirled their heads to look at him.
"Clark Kent?" thought Joy, for that truly was what Victor looked like: conservative black suit, pale skin, dark well-groomed hair, black-framed plastic spectacles, and a face that looked like it was normally shy and unassuming. Except nobody looks very shy or unassuming when there's a huge-ass silenced automatic in his hand.
Victor pointed the gun at Curt. Curt stuck out his hand, opened his mouth to say "No!" or something similarly useless, and Victor shot him through his palm. Blood sprayed from a dime-sized hole in the middle of Curt's rib cage, six inches starboard of his right nipple. Joy felt Curt's body jolt beneath her, felt his cock jolt within her, saw his mouth go wide and choking sounds issue from his throat. His eyes were beginning to glaze.
"No!" she screamed at her dying husband. "Not yet, dammit!" And because there was nothing else do, because she could not change the inevitable fatal outcome of this encounter, she began pumping her loins around Curt's member furiously, working harder and faster than she ever had before. After a long, exhausting effort (fifteen seconds?) she was rewarded by the warm, sticky feeling of semen spraying into her loins. Body wet with sweat, eyes wet with tears, Joy collapsed over the body of her dead husband, hoping that he had been conscious enough to feel his last orgasm. She began to kiss Curt's chest, tasting the mild-bitter skin, spicy hair and salt sweat, and she did not look up when she felt the hard touch of the pistol barrel against the side of her head, just over her ear. Her last thought was gratitude that they had not brought the children with them.
The silenced gun coughed, and on the other side of Joy's head her fine blond hair waved and danced as if caught in a gust of wind. She died instantly, beautiful blue eyes fixed and staring into Curt's.
As Victor walked out of the Renfro's cabin, he was confronted by a pretty black attendant dressed in jet black knee-length skirt, white shirt, black vest, and tie. Her white name tag said "Sandra Holt." She didn't see the automatic because she was standing to Victor's left.
"I'm sorry, sir," said Sandra, "you'll have to return to your seat."
Victor turned, leveled the automatic at the young woman's belly and fired. The bullet caught her well below her belt, turning her jet black trousers shiny with blood.
"Oof!" said Sandra, and fell right down on her rump in the middle of the floor, one hand bracing her body up, the other pressing hard against her abdomen. Her jaw hung open. Her womb, ruptured by the bullet, was filling up with blood. It felt warm and thick, like a lover's ejaculate. The pistol spat white pointed fire again, and the slug hit her in the pit of her stomach, a few inches above her belt buckle. She fell straight back to the floor, the blood pool growing beneath her, clutching the new wound with both hands, kicking feebly.
"Motherfucker," she growled through blood-soaked teeth. It wasn't a brilliant valedictory, but Sandra didn't want to leave this world with "you'll have to return to your seat" as her last words.
The next round burrowed right into her solar plexus, just below her sternum. The stunning impact knocked the wind out of her. She felt faint from shock and hemorrhage. She raised her hands, stared at the sticky scarlet on them, and then with resigned indifference dropped them to her sides. "Give me another. Finish me." she tried to say, but her jaw wouldn't work and she couldn't exhale. She closed her eyes, tried to think of Barry. She'd wanted Barry so badly, and he never even seemed to notice her. She imagined Barry kissing her blood-stained body, making it all better.
Another bullet crashed through her sternum, just too high to hit her heart, staining her white shirt a brilliant scarlet. Sandra didn't open her eyes. She realized she wasn't breathing. Didn't that mean death had to be close? The intense, piercing feeling of the bullet wounds seemed distant, like it was happening to someone else.
Sandra felt the fifth bullet hit her square in the middle of her forehead, but she was dead before it came out the back of her skull.
Victor turned and saw that another attendant had just entered the corridor, a huge, handsome black man with an extremely short fuzzy carpet of hair and an equally close-trimmed mustache. The man was frozen in shock, but he snapped out of it when he saw Victor turn around his dark eyes filled with fury. He shouted "Sandra!" and charged Victor.
Victor only got one shot off, and it hit where he needed it to hit. Even with his heart burst open by a 9mm round, the colossal attendant covered the distance to Victor and closed his hands around the killer's throat. But there was no strength left in his hands; the man fell to his knees, seeming to hug Victor, fell onto his side, and rolled over, dead. Victor idly noted that the man's name tag said "Barry."
About two minutes later, Rafaela Gutiérrez y Calderón finished washing her hands and headed for the exit of the women's bathroom. At 24, Rafaela was a stunning beauty and knew it. Her jean shorts exposed an inviting expanse of coffee-and-cream thigh, and her strappy sandals showed off her excellent pedicure. Her white, sleeveless shirt was tied up to reveal a smooth, toned stomach, and her small round navel peered saucily out from over her belt buckle. Her black wavy hair was gathered at the back of her head and hung to her shoulder blades. Heavy eyeshadow enhanced her natural smoky-eyed allure, and her cheeks were a perfect balance of youthful roundness and sophisticated triangularity.
Rafaela opened the door, turned to go back to her cabin, and saw Victor just as he jammed his automatic into her bare stomach. She gasped in shock, her eyes opening wide, and Rafaela's eyes could get very wide indeed. She looked down and saw that the muzzle of the silencer was touching her belly button, and realized that the attractiveness of her navel might have a downside.
Rafaela raised her hands. "Look, Meester, I give up. I do what you want."
The automatic pushed hard into Rafaela's belly. She was forced to step backward by its unyielding pressure.
Rafaela gave a dazzling, heart-melting smile. "You want I geev you sex? I take you here," she patted her groin, "or here," she patted her hand, "or here," she patted her mouth. She lowered her head and looked up at him from under heavy-lidded eyes. "I am very, very gude." And it was true - she was.
Rafaela walked slowly and carefully backward down the corridor, pushed by the relentless muzzle of the gun. The feeling of the warm steel pressed hard against her naked, sensitive navel made her feel strangely excited. It gave her a delicious feeling of vulnerability that she had not felt in even her most intimate sexual encounters. She tried to imagine what it would feel like to be shot there, right through the softest and slenderest part of her body, and to her own amazement, she felt her loins becoming warm and moist at the thought. She felt anticipatory pleasure rising through her with each backward step she took.
Abruptly, Rafaea stepped backward into the wall. She had run out of corridor and, she instinctively realized, out of time.
"Don't shoot me yet. Lemme kees you," she said. She leaned forward toward Victor, pushing her belly hard against the gun to reach his face with hers. She was only trying to delay, not to survive. She knew she was not going to live through this, and while she was more terrified than she had ever been in her young life, neither had she ever been more aroused. Rafaela had never thought of herself as one to be turned on by the threat of violence, certainly not by violence directed at herself. Odd, she thought, the things one learns about oneself in the presence of death.
As Rafaela's lips touched his mouth, Victor fired. Rafaela let out a wet, shuddering sigh - "UNNNHHH-unhhh-unhh!" - as she felt the 9mm bullet plow through her navel, blowing skin and guts and bone and blood out onto the wall behind her. As she fell backward against the wall, her hands groped blindly at the entrance of the bleeding, aching channel that had been cut through her middle, its walls tingling with all the sensitivity of an eager vagina, the throbbing pain sweeter than that of losing her virginity. She slid slowly down the wall, head thrown back, eyes closed and mouth open, and as her bottom touched the floor the jolt to her mortally wounded belly doubled her over. Spasms rippled through her lower back, her nipples went as hard as rubies, and suddenly her last, best and most savage orgasm was upon her. Her body shook in the grip of convulsions, she screamed with abandon, and at last her final ecstasy became so intense that she blacked out and slumped over senseless. She never woke up again.
Unconscious of the strange erotic effect he had had on the dead Rafaela - and indifferent to it - Victor went up the stairs to the second level of the train, ejecting the low clip and inserting a fresh one as he went. The magazine, heavy with gleaming cartridges, slid home with a satisfying snap. As he climbed, a harsh metallic screech rent the air and he felt the train begin to slow down. Someone had pulled the emergency brake. It would have alarmed him if he had still been capable of feeling emotions like alarm or fear.
In her deluxe cabin, Emily Cotter looked up from her laptop as it slid toward her.
"What is that horrible noise?" she asked over the screeching.
"I'll go see," said her sister Irene, and rose rose from her chair, adjusting her expensive tan business suit and smoothing her well-styled blond hair. Irene slid the door open. There was a short, sharp hiss, and the he back of Irene's suit coat erupted in red ruin. Irene stumbled back into the cabin, clutching her chest just under her right breast.
Victor followed Irene into the cabin. He saw Emily staring at him in wide-eyed shock and outrage: a pretty 35-year-old woman with brown hair cut severely short, and pale, sharp features, sporting a nice red sweater and black knee-length skirt.
Irene fell to her knees, turned and crawled slowly away from Victor, whimpering softly and leaving a thick trail of blood behind her.
"No! Leave her alone! You don't have to kill her!" shouted Emily. Victor calmly slammed the scalding hot barrel of the automatic across Emily's face. Emily yelped in pain, clutched her face, and watched through slitted eyes as Victor pointed the gun at Irene's back and the gun belched fire again. The bullet took her just under her left shoulder blade; Irene's head snapped back, then she collapsed with a soft grunt. Victor turned toward Emily.
Emily was a devout, sincere Roman Catholic. She had always believed that there was no person, however depraved, who could not be reached by God's mercy. Looking into the soulless shark eyes of the man facing her, she doubted that belief for the first time. With the slow, deliberate pace of a nightmare, the gun muzzle nestled itself in the middle of her throat, forcing her head back. The black barrel looked miles long. The touch of the muzzle was painfully hot.
In a hurt voice, made small by injured faith, Emily Cotter the ex-altar girl asked Victor Ainsworth, "Don't you have any pity?"
The insane, bubbling chuckle that emerged from the throat of the man facing her was more horrible than she could have imagined.
"Yes, I have pity, you miserable fool," he said. "That's why I'm killing you. Otherwise, I'd leave you for Sargon."
His finger tightened. With a puff sound, the gun snapped up into Emily's chin, and the bullet hole in her throat geysered hot crimson. Emily fell to her knees, eyes huge, clutching vainly at the mortal wound with one hand. Her mouth worked in a wordless prayer that God would take her quickly. Not because the pain was too much to bear, for shock masked the hurt, but because she could not stand the thought of another second in the presence of this hideous raving lunatic who bore an office boy's gentle face. She fell forward on her stomach, onto Victor's shoes. With a casual prod of one foot, he rolled her over on her back. Her glassy eyes were wide, her brow slightly furrowed, as if she had seen something puzzling an instant before she died. Victor turned and walked across the corridor to the next deluxe cabin.
The deluxe cabins had their own showers, and Gwen Weber was just stepping out of that shower, wondering why the train had stopped, when she realized two things in rapid succession. One, she had left her window drapes open, and two, someone was shooting the lock off of her door. As Victor tugged the door open, Gwen dropped the towel she had been about to wrap around herself, and grabbed for the snub-nosed S&W she carried in her purse. As Victor came through the curtains, automatic leveled, Gwen gripped the little revolver in both hands and thrust it toward him.
The blood-drenched man in the suit and the naked, water-drenched woman both hesitated. The next four tenths of a second seemed to take a very long time.
A transient white lance erupted from the silencer, and 115 grains of copper-coated lead smashed into Gwen's right arm, right through the bicep. The impact knocked off Gwen's aim, and the little .38 made a BANG out of all proportion to its size, smashing an angry hole in the ceiling. Gwen's nerveless fingers dropped the gun, and she backed toward the window, pressing her bare back against the cold glass, clutching her arm as if to keep it from falling off. Victor deliberately stepped forward and planted the smoking muzzle of the silencer exactly between Gwen's modest breasts. Gwen stared, wide-eyed, at the sleek cylinder of the silencer, smeared with every type of gore along its entire length - traces of gray and white matter from Joy's head, dark almost purple blood mixed with gut juice from Rafaela's belly, frothy pink lung blood from Irene, bright red carotid stains from Emily's throat. She knew her own blood was about to be added to that grisly collection. Closing her eyes with a grimace of fear, Gwen bowed her head.
The window shattered, blood fountained from a hole exactly between Victor's eyes, the two halves of his glasses fell off his face in opposite directions, and he dropped in his tracks at the feet of a glass-lacerated, terrified, but very much alive Gwen Weber. At 11:48 AM, Victor Ainsworth's fifteen minutes of fame had ended.
250 yards away, Lt. Gina Jefferson lifted her eye from her Bushnell sniperscope and turned to Sgt. Walls with a massive smile gleaming white in her dark face.
The smile told Sgt. Walls the result of Gina's shot. "Subject down and dead! Passenger in room 3 unharmed! Over." he said into his radio, and lifted his hand to high-five Gina.
* * *
Gina squeezed the trigger, and Gwen Weber's head flew into a thousand pieces. Gina screamed, threw her rifle away . . . and woke up. She looked at the hotel room around her, threw away the sweat-stained sheets, and glared at the pinkening sky through the window. 6:07 am. Her wake-up call wouldn't come for twenty-three more minutes.
This, she thought, was a hell of a stupid way to spend three weeks' leave. The Department had granted Gina the time off as an official pat on the back for taking Ainsworth out. By all rights she should have been in Vegas, or Cape Verde, or at least at her boyfriend's apartment getting some home cooking. She loved Keith's cooking. Especially his meat, she thought, and winced at her own terrible pun. She should have been just about anywhere except in some stupid hotel room in Tacoma, Washington. Except . . .
Except something about the Amtrak case bothered her. Something wasn't right. And the more she thought about it, the stranger it appeared. Gina had done well in criminal psychology at the Academy, and she knew that lone shooters are usually isolated, lonely failures of below average intelligence. Victor Ainsworth was a husband with two daughters, a successful software engineer who made good money, and his Stanford-Binet test had placed his IQ at 121. Then, one fine April 6, he had left for work and never arrived. And as far as Gina or anybody at the Department knew, he had not been seen again until April 30, when he had bought a ticket on the Amtrak Coast Starlight and proceeded to punch one or more bullet holes in seven people.
Nobody else was bothered by this. The Department had enough on its hands with serial killers, rapists, drug dealers; when a psycho like Victor Ainsworth was kind enough to stand up in front of God and everybody and get himself shot dead, it saved everybody a zillion headaches. Throw him in the morgue with the people he'd murdered, throw the photos in the file, and stamp it "Case Closed," with much relief.
But the other people at the Department hadn't put a .300 caliber rifle bullet through Victor Ainsworth's brain, and killing a man can have odd repercussions on your psyche. Maybe that was why Gina had this itch to find out why a seemingly stable and successful man had decided to play the increasingly popular sport of the random shooting rampage, to discover what had driven a sane man insane. So Gina groaned, threw her legs off the bed, and got up, resigning herself to the interviews she had scheduled with Ainsworth's co-workers.
Walking to the full-length mirror on the bathroom door, Gina looked herself up and down appraisingly. Lt. Regina Elizabeth Jefferson was 28 years old, standing almost six feet tall barefoot, and weighing 138 pounds. She was stark naked; Gina disdained nightgowns. Her skin was was one shade lighter than milk chocolate. Her older brother Marcus, who had a passion for genealogy, had told her that as best he could determine their ancestry was fifty-some percent Hausa, thirty-some percent Fulani, something over ten percent Ibo, and a few percent Anglo-Virginian white slave-master. Gina just called herself black and had done with it.
Gina ran five miles a day and lifted weights four days a week. Her body showed it. Her legs were toned and powerful, her buttocks rounded and taut, her stomach firm and muscular with a vertical slit of a navel whose interior was hidden when she stood upright but played peek-a-boo when she bent over. Hair grew thick and fuzzy at her groin, but it lay close to the skin and did not conceal the gentle inward curve toward her labia. She cupped a breast, searching idly for lumps; she felt none, but the touch reminded her that when she had been a teenager her nipples had ridden slightly higher on her chest. Her biceps did not bulge nor the veins pop out under the skin - and thank God for that, she thought, for she considered such physiques grotesque. But neither did she have the pencil-stick limbs so popular among models; her arms were smooth and fleshed out, concealing a power that could bench press 210 pounds and curl 125.
Her short neck supported a medium-sized head with thick, straight, almost black hair that she habitually gathered in a net that fell halfway down her neck. She had a generous mouth with full, dark brown lips, a strong jaw that ended in a gentle chin, and a small, distinctly bell-shaped nose. Under thin, arching eyebrows lay two huge, beautiful eyes, so dark brown that it was impossible to tell where iris and pupil met. With a .300 Weatherby, a good sniperscope, and no wind those eyes could guide a bullet into a six-inch circle at 500 yards ten times out of ten. Gina's eyeliner was her only concession to makeup; it was miraculously unsmudged after her nightmare-wracked sleep.
Deciding her body was still fit to live in, Gina opened the bathroom door and stepped through toward the shower. That was when she heard the lock on her hotel room door slowly turn and the door begin to swing open.
What the fuck? Gina thought. Some overzealous maid? Acting on impulse, she switched off the bathroom light and angled the bathroom door so the mirror reflected the entrance to the hotel room. It was indeed a maid coming through the door, a pretty little Oriental girl dressed in shorts, sandals and a T-shirt. Strangely, her hair was dyed blond. Outside the door was one of those maid's carts filled with cleaning supplies. But maid's cleaning supplies do not normally include a 9mm Beretta automatic. Leaving the cart outside, the maid crept slowly into the vestibule, pistol pointed at the ceiling next to her cheek. Good, thought Gina, she's obviously learned how to use a gun from some cop show.
The maid did not see Gina in the mirror; the bathroom was dark and her narrow pointed eyes were fixed on the bedchamber. Gina waited, holding her breath, being as quiet as she knew how. When the maid drew even with the bathroom doorway, Gina lashed out, driving the edge of her hand into the maid's wrist. The woman cried out in surprise, the gun flying from her grip to clunk on the floor. Gina followed up with a left to the maid's head, but she ducked and the blow was only glancing. The maid dropped to all fours, scrabbling for the gun. Gina's gun was in the dresser drawer; she would be shot before she could reach it, so she kicked the maid viciously in the ribs. The woman rolled over and over, clutching her side, but she had got hold of the Beretta and was bringing it around to point at Gina. The policewoman dived at her, slamming her gun hand to the floor, holding it there, but the little maid Would Not Drop The Pistol. Gina saw her enemy's hand snake to her waist, and come out with something long and thin and sharp - an icepick! The wickedly pointed weapon flashed toward Gina's side. Gina reached out and caught the maid's wrist almost too late. The tip of the icepick pricked Gina's naked flank, drawing blood, but only penetrating a half inch. Gina slammed the woman's wrist into the bedpost, and the icepick went rolling across the floor. The maid slammed a bare knee into Gina's midriff; Gina lost her grip on the woman's gun hand and clawed at the maid with her right hand, digging her nails into the woman's chest, catching hold of the T-shirt and tearing it wide open, revealing a slim waist and pretty, golden-brown breasts in a white bra. The maid struggled to her feet and again swung the Beretta toward Gina; with a gasp of effort, Gina rocketed from her sprawled position to her feet with a single thrust of her powerful legs. She drove her head into the little blond woman's chin. The maid staggered backward toward the window, stunned, but still would not let go of the fucking pistol. With wavering, unsteady hands, the woman managed to focus on Gina and tried once again to draw a bead. Gina took one step, raised her knee to one side with her haunch turned toward her opponent, and drove her heel into the middle of the maid's stomach with all the strength she could muster. The impact lifted the maid's feet from the ground and drove her backward through the window amid a clamor of shattering glass.
Gina's room was on the fifteenth floor. It took a little over three seconds for the maid to reach the street. It felt like three minutes: blond hair whipping like a flag, bare arms flailing, clutching desperately at the air, legs kicking and convulsing. She was falling amidst a cloud of broken glass fragments that glittered and flared in the newborn sunlight. Her torn T-shirt was ripped completely off by the speeding airflow, floating slowly down after her like tardy angel's wings. Her golden-brown body writhed, feeling no touch save the fierce caress of the wind.
The woman landed on her back in the street, spreadeagled. She seemed unharmed for a long moment, until the blood began to seep out from under every part of her body into a pool that was soon larger than she was. A car turned a corner and skidded to a stop in front of her, one front tire stopping three inches from her face. She never blinked.
Gina left the window and got her own handgun from the dresser drawer. She cradled it in her lap as she sat on the bed and telephoned the Tacoma police to report the attack and the death.
From this point on, Gina thought, this gun never leaves my reach. She was more certain than ever that there was more to Ainsworth's Amtrak massacre than she knew about, and now she was sure that someone was very determined that Lt. Regina Elizabeth Jefferson should not find out anything else.
[To be (possibly) continued . . .]