Authors: Sezin Koehler
7:35 PM The Barona Estate
I
n the Countess Barona’s basement of pornography madness, Lily the cyclops starts to feel the effects of the muscle relaxant given to her by the nice lady whose name she can’t remember. Lily sips on a soda, feeling dreamy.
“Want something stronger?” Tawny Porthole, the kindly costume mistress, asks.
Lily’s eye is quizzical.
“Something stronger to drink?” Tawny forgets Lily is a young girl because of her lanking seven-foot frame.
“I dunno, do I?” Lily slurs her words.
“Most definitely.” The costume mistress brings out a small bottle of vodka from her purse. “This makes my day go by more…tolerably.” She hands the bottle to Lily who drinks deep. Then coughs.
“You okay?”
Lily feels a warm glow seeps over her body. Tingly even. Her eye relaxes. She’s finally stoned. The bitter taste of the pill rests on her tongue, along with the tang of vodka. She wants more. In a few minutes, as the costume mistress promised, Lily begins to feel wobbly. Her limbs are rubber, she can bend in half if she wants to. She floats outside her body, looking down at this bizarre creature in a Catholic schoolgirl uniform.
Maybe if I keep drifting up, up, I will reach heaven and none of this is happening to me.
Lily tries to get through the ceiling, but can’t. She hovers, refusing to look down at the body she’s abandoned below.
The Countess returns with four men. Huge. Hairy. Lily does not look down. She does not see the director leading her to the bed, telling her to lie down, look scared. She does not see the cameras whirring. She does not see the light check that highlights the oil spots on her face that the bitch of a make-up artist Jenna Juicy covers with finishing powder. Lily does not see the four men, naked, enter the room and surround the bed on which she lays, erections like swords. Lily counts the cracks in the ceiling. Seventy-eight, seventy-nine, eighty, OW!
A whoosh and Lily is back in her body. Screaming, kicking, anything to make him stop.
Pain! Stop!
Where the orphanage supervisor only attempted with his hands, this one was doing something else. With something bigger. He can’t get it in. And it hurts. Bad. But he keeps trying. Forcing. More frustrated. He calls for lubrication. They bring a spray bottle and cover Lily’s lower body with it. The other men grab her legs, pulling her spreadeagle, holding her arms down. Lily feels the gel sliding down her sides.
A rage rushes through Lily’s body with such fierceness that she remembers her gift. He thrusts at her. They hold her down. The sound of the cameras whirring. The director saying “Yes, YES!” The Countess Barona nodding and smiling her devil through. These images resonate in Lily’s brain. She remembers.
Lily opens her eye, focusing the anger, the pain, the rage, the horror, and sends it right into him. In a split second the force of Lily’s gaze turns this prick to stone. Lily head butts him off her and he crumbles to ash. It sticks to the lubricant that was sprayed so uncouth over her lower body.
Gross.
“What the fuck?” Scream the chorus of men functioning as human chains.
Lily sits up and focuses her eye on each of them, watching one by one as they turn to stone, crumbling to dust when she kicks them in the face, crotch, chest. The crew stops dead. Cameras still rolling. Jaws dropping.
This is happening,
they think, but they can’t move. They’re captivated by Lily’s Gorgon eye.
Lily turns her eye to the director. Next Jenna Juicy, the make-up artist who so coldly refused to help and slapped her for her pain. And then the film crew who have participated in this monstrous abuse.
The Countess Barona stands in the back, her pale face even paler, hands to her mouth, in denial about what is happening.
This shouldn’t be happening!
The moment reality hits her the Countess does something she’s not done since she was a child: cry. In a bundle of silk and tulle and high heels the Countess Barona makes a dash for the door, make-up streaming down her face.
Lily spots the escape attempt from the corner of her eye. From her vantage on the bed—the would-have-been gang-bang bed—Lily turns the doorknob to cement. Barona cannot turn it.
“Weird,” Lily says. She’s never done that before.
The Countess screams in frustration as she scrambles to open the door. She looks back at her coterie, all turned to stone, save the costume mistress known as Tawny Porthole. Lily looks at her and asks for her real name.
“Sophia,” she says, crying. “Please don’t hurt me.”
“Why would I hurt you?” Lily doesn’t feel so drugged anymore. “You’re the only one who tried to help me.”
Sophia cowers. Lily crawls off the bed and crouches before the pitiful woman. “Thank you for your kindness. This is your second chance to make a better life for yourself than torturing women.” Sophia weeps, ashamed. Grateful.
Lily continues. “You turn your life around or I’ll be back for you too.” Lily grabs the woman and shakes her. “You hear me?”
“I hear you!” Sophia cries. “Never again!”
Lily nods and lets go. The aged porn star falls to the floor with a sobbing thud, and crawls into a corner, hands over her face.
Now. For the Countess.
Lily turns to see the Countess whimpering, pawing at the door. “Please,” the monster says. “Please! Don’t hurt me!”
“You sick fucking bitch,” Lily advances, relishing the eff-word. “How many times have you done this?” Lily vibrates with rage.
Flashing in Barona’s mind are the images of bodies turned to stone by this child’s one eye. “Never!” she screams. “NEVER!”
Lily gets up in her face. Barona’s heart beats so loud Lily can hear it. “You misunderstand, asshole.” Lily spits. “How many times have you tortured children, you sick fuck?” Lily comes to love the taste of the eff-word in her mouth. Metallic, like blood.
A smug grin steals over Barona’s face.
I’m gonna go out my way.
“You want me to tell you about the boy I starved to death? Or the one I offered as a tithe to our local Catholic priest? Or the one I bled dry, collecting the blood and drinking it with my supper for the next year to come? Which? Which story do you want to hear? Monster? Hah! You belong in my collection, ugly girl. Who else would ever want such a thing as you, save for to torture it?”
Lily shudders, grief wracking her body, the ghosts of this house enfolding her in a cloak, magnifying her power.
Barona stands as tall as she can, her haughtiness a mask for her fear. “You cannot kill me. People have tried for centuries and failed.” But she sees a truth in Lily’s eyes, the truth of what this supreme freak is capable.
“Any last words, bitch?”
Before Barona can speak the one-eyed Lily takes the Countess’s face in her hands and looks deep into her eyes. “This is going to hurt, you twisted fuck. And it’s going to last for a really long time.”
As slowly as she can, Lily turns the Countess’s skin to stone. Bit by bit. Another thing she’s never done before, and one she accounts to the help from previous, less fortunate denizens of the horror house.
The Countess screams for mercy as her skin tightens over her organs. There is no clemency for her today, and her victims laugh or quietly watch as Lily’s magic takes root. Lily starts with Barona’s feet, working her way up, leaving her face and brain, enough to keep her alive.
Lily hears a carnival barker’s voice in her head.
Come one! Come all! Feast your eyes upon the world’s newest freak! Half human! Half stone!
The Countess cannot scream, breathing is excruciating as her lungs strain, encased in her stone skin. Her eyes flit here and there, desperate for redemption. Forgiveness even. Something that would never come.
Lily moves the Countess Barona to the bed on which the scripted gang rape was to occur. She finds herself a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, clothing that seems very much out of place amid the creepy and slutty versions of children’s clothing filling the so-called wardrobe department.
Lily looks at the Countess, whose face is etched in a horrific grimace of pain. Lily smiles.
In pain, but not dead yet. Suffer the hurters of children.
Lily walks up the basement steps, reaches the door, kicks it open. Turns back to take one last look at her handiwork. Satisfied. She goes to set everyone in the Countess’s employ free. The camera whirrs away, documenting the new and improved Countess Barona as she awaits a fate similar to her former wards: a long and painful death.
7:40 PM Spruce-Musa Hospital
C
olonel Ransom monitors the extraction team hovering above the hospital through closed circuit cameras on board the ship. He sees the Shark Girl leave the docking station. Women. Bladders like peanuts. He also watches the soldiers performing the subterranean assault of Spruce-Musa via cameras embedded in their helmets. The underground extraction team, having navigated the Los Angeles sewer and metro system, is lead by spider-human hybrid Spiederman. They have already penetrated Spruce-Musa’s basement and use the air vents to crawl their way up to the fourth floor. Nary a detection yet. Everything is going as planned.
On board the alien craft, the pilot’s voice intones over the loudspeaker moments out from landing.
“Time to suit up, boys!” Corporal Meat crows, slapping Shark Girl on the shoulder. She bares her teeth at him, he notices the blood and flesh stuck in her gums but is too adrenaline amped to process what that might mean. As they come in to land on the hospital’s roof, gunfire breaks out from the heavy police presence.
“Fuck!” Jason Mars screams as the craft swerves back into the air. “Just vaporize them!”
The spaceship pilot engages the weapons lock and shoots gamma rays at the SWAT team machine-gun firing below, wasting bullets on an impervious ship. The high-frequency waves turn the SWAT members to dust, one by one. Their bulletproof vests and accouterments fall to the ground in piles like anthills dotting the hospital roof.
With the coast marginally clear, the pilot opens the hatch and drops down a chain link ladder. The Roswell grunts go first, their black-suited bodies disappearing from the bulkhead and dropping onto the concrete.
Alerted by the ruckus above, police and more SWAT flood onto the roof, each one taken out by the far superior machinery wielded by the Roswell Institute’s paramilitary force.
More LAPD backup is on the way, but it won’t arrive in time to prevent the Roswell Institute extraction team from breaching the hospital.
The extraction team leader, Smash, takes point as the group enters the stairwell taking them down to the fourth floor wherein the Crane Massacre survivors are housed—future Institute residents all.
Tiburona takes up the rear, already feeling hungry again.
From the Roswell Institute, Colonel Ransom reminds the soldiers to disable the gamma rays before entering the fourth floor. “The subjects are to be taken alive!” he screams, making sure he’s heard over the guns.
Downstairs, Chamelia, NRG, and Secrete enter battle mode, knowing the ruckus above is Colonel Ransom’s handiwork, here to re-prison them in that underground hell. The Institute’s finally arrived.
“Get ready to fight these fuckers with everything you’ve got!” Chamelia screams, and the group collectively nods, bracing themselves.
The gunfire draws closer and closer.
In a phalanx the survivors look toward the emergency exit, hearing the sounds of heavy footsteps approaching fast from upstairs.
“Detective!” Chamelia shouts. “When you see them, get behind the nurse’s station. Don’t be a hero, okay? We’ve got this.”
The bird girl Asha Kinsella and Karma Devi take up the rear of the company of Crane survivors after silver-eyed Connie Jones tells them soldiers are coming from the basement and vents, as per her vision.
Hearts pounding, they wait. The gunfire finally stops. More footsteps. A herd.
Red Feather lets off a warning shot up the stairwell and backs away from the door, placing himself in a sniper position from behind the nurse’s station.
Chamelia looks at Teresa Chalmers, the screamer, as the thud of heavy-booted feet comes nearer and nearer. “When I say.”
Teresa nods, readying herself.
In a burst the first round of Roswell Institute strike team members bust through the emergency exit and charge.
“Now!” Chamelia shouts.
The survivors cover their ears and duck as Teresa screams the scream that so effectively shorted out hospital electronics hours before.
It’s different now: This time, she’s in control.
Helmets smash, glass exploding into eyes and mouths, thirteen of the human soldiers falling to the ground, dead.
NRG shoots knives at the open helmets of the eight still standing, killing the remainder instantly.
Panting, the women turn to each other, tempted to give high-fives, but the fierce look on Chamelia’s lizard face stops them.
“Was that it?” Trip asks, breathing hard and slobbering in her werewolf form.
“I seriously doubt it,” Secrete says, knowing firsthand Ripper Ransom’s penchant for bloody mayhem, but still hopes otherwise.
7:50 PM The Barona Estate
G
ünn pulls up to the gates, tires screeching and leaving a symmetrical rubber stain on the Countess’s pristine driveway. She pulls out her badge and unclips the holster of her gun. Two ways this is gonna go: bloody easy or bloody hard. She’s prepared for both.
“Detective Synthia Günn, LAPD, open up.”
“You got a warrant?” The security guard has beady hyena eyes and a hunch in his shoulders that deepens when he smells bacon.
“Don’t need a warrant. I’m just here to talk.”
The guard shakes his head. “No can do, Officer.” The corner of his lip turns up. “Unless you have some way to make it worth my while.” He would love to see this blonde LAPD pig’s head bobbing up and down over his lap.
“Open this gate right now or I’ll arrest for obstruction of justice and propositioning a police officer and open it myself.”
The security guard hears her flick the safety off her gun. He’s not getting paid enough to deal with this bullshit.
“Oink oink,” he says as he walks back into his booth and pushes the button.
Günn flicks him off as she drives in to the lush estate that only an unfortunate few have seen from the inside. The entire estate is sealed off by twelve-foot high concrete walls ornately carved in Baroque designs to look like paintings instead of a fortress. Günn hears the meditative trickle of a fountain just out of sight and imagines a swimming pool in the style of old Hollywood. The night is windy and the sound of bamboo swaying feels like ants over her skin.
She follows the driveway for an eternity until the mansion rises up through the foliage, an evil queen’s castle. Günn has the worst foreboding she’s ever had in her life. Swallowing bile, she drives on through the path that ends in a roundabout dwarfed by the massive carved-wood door, further dwarfing the off-duty cop who stands sentinel, arms crossed with a semi-automatic pistol flush against his chest.
Günn parks and exits her car, gun drawn. He walks over.
“Murphy? The fuck you doing here? I heard you’re suspended after you got that kid to lawyer up.”
Dimwit
.
Ex-detective Finian Murphy scowls. “Fuck you, meth-head slut. I’m here as private security. I’m packing my own heat.” He points his Glock at her.
“Get that thing out of my face, you sorry excuse for a douchebag. Out of my way.”
Günn pushes past Murphy and he stumbles. She doubles up the steps to the door when Murphy grabs her foot and she falls face-first, smashing her shin and chest on the stairs.
“You motherfucker!” Günn turns through the pain and kicks him in the face, sending him reeling and blood gushing from a broken nose and split lip. He covers his mouth and Günn sees that he’s crying.
Jesus Christ.
“I’m warning you, Murphy. Stay back. Don’t make me fucking arrest you.”
Murphy fires at Günn and misses. He’s famous for the worst scores on the range in the entire unit.
“Stand DOWN, asshole! I don’t want to hurt you any more than I already have.” Günn breathes heavy, she’s never had occasion to fire her gun on the job before.
How many more firsts will this day bring?
“Put the goddamn gun down and back the fuck away, Murphy.”
Günn fires a warning shot at Murphy’s feet, spraying shards of stone into his calves and cutting him.
“Do it, Dumbo! NOW.”
Murphy snarls at the nickname. “Fuck you.”
Günn knows he’s gonna spray her with bullets before he does. She puts a preemptive shot right in his shoulder, immobilizing his shooting arm. She feels his bullets whiz by. Missing her but close.
Murphy screams and crumples to the ground, weeping.
Günn breathes heavy, sonofabitch has been practicing apparently. “Stay down, fucktard.” Günn removes the clip from his gun and tosses it into the dense foliage surrounding the driveway. She handcuffs him to the squad car and slaps him across the face to make sure he knows who’s boss in this scenario.
Murphy weeps, mumbles something unintelligible, then passes out from humiliation and blood loss.
Günn takes the stairs by two up to the mansion’s imposing doorway.
I’m here, Lily. I’m here.