10th Addition - Susan

EDIT: Fixed. Apologies to all concerned, when I first posted this, I omitted the ... er crucial last couple of paragraphs. How do you guys feel about this direction?



Kira rose from her chair and stepped behind Brian, grasping his neck in her left hand as she moved behind his chair. She slid the knife she was holding along the edges of Brian’s wrists, and, sucking air through her teeth in a teasing manner, she sounded, “Tsk, tsk tsk…”

He thought that she had changed her mind about letting him live.

Kira abruptly and with deft grace pulled the knife through the ropes holding Brian’s wrists to the chair, not so much as nicking him. Brian pulled his hands around in front of him and inspected the swollen fingertips. They started to tingle as blood flowed back into his hands so he flexed them a few times to help speed up the process.

When Kira saw this weakness she chuckled low and kicked the back of the chair, sending Brian and his puffy hands sprawling onto the filthy warehouse floor.

When he looked up, she was gone.

‘I have to have her’, Brian thought to himself.

***

‘I have to kill her’, Mike thought to himself. ‘I am supposed to be a public servant, I am supposed to save lives, not dream and fantasize about taking them… What is wrong with me?’

Mike reached into his front pocket and pulled out a well worn black card. The corners were bent and the flat matte finish was marred by a few creases from being put into and pulled out of Mike’s shirt pocket since he was released from the military with a knee injury.

Gunny had given him the card and told him that he was the best marksman that he had ever seen and if he ever had a change of heart and wanted to put his skills to use to just call the number on the card and say the words, “My name is Mike Reese and I’m in.”

Gunny had continued with, “No need to go into any further details, they’ll find you and take care of the rest. You’re good, son. Someday they are going to need you.”

Mike had an idea of who and what they were.

Blade Runners.

Mike dialed the 888 number and spoke the eight words that would give him back control of his life.

They found him and started training him that evening. Mike had a feeling that they knew that he would be calling.

He was right.

What he did not know was that the man who was to be his partner was in love with his wife.

Kira left from playing with her little mouse, that laughable Blade Runner, and went to check in with her trainer. When she did, she usually entered a fugue-like state due in part to a program that R.E.S.C.O.R. had installed in her when she was reincarnated. Their resurrection program was not all benevolence, they had ulterior motives. Motives such as stealing information from the government or assassination duties and having “expendable parties” do their dirty work.

Expendable parties with no finger prints.

Kira was on assignment from R.E.S.C.O.R. and the government knew it. That was the first reason that their elite unit of Blade Runners were set in motion to take out the opposition. The Runners were the only ones who could ever get close enough.

Brian had been watching Kira for weeks, gathering information on her; he just happened to get caught, so his director set him with a partner, someone who would know more background on Kira. Her history, things that normal people didn’t see… her husband Mike.

Brian and Mike met up with Father Ambrose Callow, the Vatican representative. Father Callow had been sent to the city to check out the resurrection program that R.E.S.C.O.R. had in place. Brian had Callow in his back pocket for three years after the Third Parish Heroin sting. Callow had his fingers in the till on that one and Brian had washed them as clean as snow and let the papers get lost because he knew that the Father’s connections with R.E.S.C.O.R. would come in handy.

Callow balked at Mike and Brian wanting in on the facility tour but Brian insisted nicely.

Callow whined and started to sweat along his upper lip, “Cain, you can’t prove anything about what happened with that, that… that… bust, I don’t have to do everything you want me to do.”

“No, Father,” Brian replied, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “You don’t have to do everything… but I can prove that you had your fingers in the money jar and your cock in a twelve year old boy in the rectory. Now, you will make the arrangements to have us join you and Mr. Bersford at the facility and you will push him to give us a tour tomorrow. My partner and I will be billed as representatives from the Vatican as well. Do I make myself clear?”

The calls were made and Edgar Bersford finally relented to have Father Callow and his two cold fish cronies visit him at the facility. He hoped nothing would happen during their tour. There would be several resurrectees at ‘the shop’, as Edgar called it. They would be there for their debriefings. Or to put it more bluntly, the downloadings. Each subject was put in a state of hypnosis and the information that they had gathered was pulled from their enhanced brains.

He couldn’t help but wonder if this enhancement was the cause of the recent outbreak of behavioral changes… unsettling ones that he had been noticing. His reports were getting much thicker. The board of trustees must never hear of this, therefore this visit with these damn priests must go off without a hitch.

Edgar was in such a sour mood over his day being filled with entertaining a bunch of priests, that he took it out on his secretary with verbal insults and keying her intercom when she was trying to type notes from the Dictaphone.

Brian knew that Kira would be making her weekly visit to R.E.S.C.O.R. the following day; that is why he pushed Father Callow to make the appointment for that day. He had to get inside and find out what went on when she went back there. Could she be one he saved? He needed so much more information, but his direct orders were to kill her and to use Mike’s help to do so.

Mike couldn’t believe that he had been assigned to actually be on the team to tour R.E.S.C.O.R. and possibly hunt down a few resurrectees… the least of them being his wife. This was the purpose he needed.

He was flying right. He was no longer scared. He was sober. “This is my rifle, sir…”

Father Callow, Brian and Mike entered R.E.S.C.O.R. and waited on Edgar Bersford to appear. The lobby was cavernous and circular with marbled floors T-ing off to the east and the west. Muted paintings hung sedately on the walls, a copy of Michelangelo’s David stood on the landing of the stairs leading the second floor, and the soft strains of Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise could be heard even though speakers could not be seen.

Edgar rounded the landing from the second floor with a woman in tow.

Kira!

Her head snapped up as if she was coming out of a fog. Her nostrils flared once, twice and she turned her feet out and crouched as she spotted first Mike, then Brian, in their flowing robes. Kira blinked at the man in the middle, took a running start from the landing and attacked Father Callow.

He mewled like a wet cat when she caught him around the throat with her left hand and started clawing at his face with her right. She kneed him in the stomach and when he bent over with an audible “Ommmpfff”, she took his head in her hands and slammed his face into her knee. His nose cracked and Mike saw one of Father Callow’s teeth skitter across the marble floor.

Mike was not about to put his hands on his wife. He knew what she was capable of and that her beat down on this man of the cloth was just starting. Brian, however, drew his weapon from beneath the folds of his robe, took the safety off and pointed it at Kira’s head. “Kira, put your hands above your head and step away from Father Callow. Do NOT make me shoot you. You gave me mercy yesterday, let me grant you the same grace.”

Mike blinked at this admission and stepped out of the line of fire. His wife’s eyes were registering bat shit crazy. Brian was going to have to shoot her to keep her from killing a man of God.

Kira crossed her hands and placed them, palm facing palm, one on each side of Father Callow’s head. She was going to snap his neck.

Brian had already chambered a round.

He pulled the trigger.

A dark spot appeared in Kira’s temple to accompany the deafening roar of Brian’s weapon. The sound of Rachmaninoff could not be heard. All Mike could hear was his heartbeat as he stepped forward and caught his wife’s body as she fell.

Her head did not explode out the opposite side from the impact of the bullet, as he had been expecting from training. It swelled slightly and then settled into a concave as he lowered her to the floor and rested her torso in his lap. She blinked once, smiled slightly and was gone.