by Glen Frost
A thrill of almost orgasmic proportions shuddered through Debbie Jovacs as she watched the two lifeless bodies crumple to the floor. The male inmate's head was gone. He was no longer a threat. As for the woman...the former corporal put a couple of extra rounds into her to make sure, one in the belly and the other in her left breast, aiming for the heart. Her corpse twitched and jerked on impact, then lay still.
Walking forward to stand over the two bodies, Debbie noted with satisfaction that the grouping of her first two shots had been so close at to be damned near perfect. Still got it, she thought to herself with great satisfaction. The female inmate's eyes stared blindly up at the ceiling, her body completely devoid of all life. Then Debbie blinked, suddenly beginning to doubt her own senses. Something was wrong with her face. It was...shimmering, for the lack of a better word, like the heat haze of a mirage. The features were somehow twisting and distorting, turning into something else.
"Jesus!" What was appearing before Debbie's incredulous eyes looked like something out of a horror movie, a face that was so hideously deformed that it made her want to gag and puke. If she hadn't known better, Jovacs would have thought that somebody had gone to town on the dead woman's face with a set of power tools. What else could cause so much damage?
She raised the Smith & Wesson, instinctively wanting to put her final bullet into the ugly thing that lay on the floor in front of her. Then the face changed again, reverting once more to the attractive female set of features that had first threatened her, albeit covered in blood from the head of the dead man that lay next to her. Blood that seemed to be disappearing by the second, sinking into the skin underneath it and being absorbed like water into a sponge.
Debbie rubbed her tired eyes. Was she hallucinating? Going crazy? Her eyes had to be playing tricks...
Anya reared up and grabbed her between the legs, her other hand latching onto Debbie's wrist. The blood magick was making her stronger, leaping from cell to cell inside her body and empowering them to new heights. She snapped the corporal's wrist into fragments, bending it to an obscene angle. Jagged white bone ends protruded from the broken skin, dripping blood onto the rich shag carpet. The pistol fell from nerveless fingers. Debbie shrieked in pain.
"Stop. Fucking stop! I'm ordering you to stop, bitch!" Yet her attacker simply grinned, tilting her head to first the left and then to the right in order to show off the bright orange foam plugs that had been stuffed into her ear canals.
"Lip reading is a highly underrated skill," Anya said helpfully, releasing Jovacs' floppy hand and grabbing a fistful of fabric at chest level. Her other hand was squeezing her adversary's crotch. She felt the crunch of Debbie's pelvic bones breaking, accompanied by another screeching wail. The pelvis was so vascular, Anya recalled from her anatomical training, that there was a strong likelihood that Jovacs was already hemorrhaging internally.
Ultimately she would bleed to death without medical treatment...but why tempt fate?
Pivoting on the soles of her sneakers, Anya hurled the flailing woman across the warden's desk. She hit the window, breaking the glass, and fell in a tangle of expensive wooden blinds, hitting the asphalt of the exercise yard below with a sickening thud.
Anya stood in the empty window frame, gazing down on the broken body of her target. Jovacs lay face down, her head twisted unnaturally in a way that revealed her neck was definitely broken. A pool of dark blood was spreading out slowly from underneath her body.
Absently, the Agency operative traced the bullet holes in her chest and belly lightly, her fingertips drawing circles around them. She could feel them closing up already as the fresh blood did its work. They hadn't even hurt.
Had Jovacs' death hurt, she couldn't help but wonder? Anya didn't think so. She had hit the ground quick and clean, probably a much kinder death than she had actually deserved after what she had put some of the prison officers through.
Removing the plugs from her ears, Anya dropped them in the closest waste paper basket. There was still work to be done, she knew; the prison needed to be secured, first and foremost. Striding confidently out into the corridor, Anya knew that she was more than up to the task.
As the Americans liked to say, it was time to show the prisoners that there was a new sheriff in town. God help any of them who wanted to do this the hard way.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
It took less than three hours for Anya to clear and secure the Supermax. Something else that she had learned in The Finishing School: when dealing with a pack of aggressive individuals (usually men) you identified the closest thing to a pack leader, the alpha male, and you stomped on his ass; punished him; humiliated him; all of it very publicly.
She did exactly that with three of the biggest, baddest inmates, breaking the back of one, tearing out the throat of a second, and blinding the third with a very well-placed poke of two fingers. The blood flowed and her strength grew. After the third demonstration, the now-sullen prisoners finally seemed to get the point, trooping back to their cells and voluntarily submitting to lockdown once more.
One by one, the few surviving guards began to crawl out of the woodwork. Many of them were bruised and battered, having had run-ins of their own with the renegade prisoners who had stalked the halls with murder on their minds. Only fourteen were left, less than a quarter of those who had started out the day.
She felt truly sorry for them all, but none more so than a guard named John Anderson. Anya found him sitting in one of the corridors, his head in his hands and crying floods of tears.
"She made me kill them," he sobbed, rocking and backwards and forwards, "She made me kill them all."
Try as she might, Anya could get no sense out of him. The big man simply repeated the same words over and over, locked in a permanent loop of misery and self-loathing. She hoped that the shrinks would be able to help him, but somehow she doubted it.
One of the guards loaned her his cell phone. Anya used it to call The Agency. Twenty minutes later, a quartet of Black Hawks was hovering forty feet above the exercise yard while squads of special operators fast-roped down.
"The facility is all clear," she told the first soldier to reach her. The troopers fanned out anyway, securing the yard while a second wave of UH-60s swooped in to deliver the second wave of men.
Anya took the next helicopter out.
"You did one hell of a good job, Anya." Gina Hubbard was wearing a rare smile when Anya walked into her office. Commander Wilson looked positively ecstatic. Hell, even General Fellon seemed happy.
"Body count was high," the General said, "but that's hardly your fault. Like she said, good job ma'am."
"Thank you, General."
"We'll have a few questions for you during the debriefing," Wilson said, offering her a sloppy grin, "but that can wait a few hours. There's something else that needs to be taken care of first."
When Anya looked puzzled, Hubbard's smile grew even wider. She beckoned Anya over to come and join her behind her desk. Reaching down to open up a Skype connection, the Director ushered Anya into her high-backed leather chair.
The application rang six times before being picked up at the other end.
Anya nearly fell out of her chair with shock.
The face looking back at her was that of an adorable seven year-old girl.
"DARYA!?!"
"MOTHER!"
Suddenly they were both crying. Wilson could have sworn that even that crusty old bastard General Fellon had a glint of something teary in his eye. Director Hubbard ushered them quietly out of the office, leaving mother and daughter in privacy for their long-awaited joyful reunion.
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