Tracked

by Rena Robinett

AIRPORT I – KALI

I was sitting in the United concourse at San Francisco airport sucking Cappuccino foam off a spoon when I spotted him. This was my third time tracking him out of SFO, using a TSA security badge from an old friend. He came out of Terminal Three, walking fast and toting a small carry on. In his dark green t-shirt and loose jeans, he was one of those guys, a scruffy, not quite pretty boy. The kind who get checked out by women and men. He had shaggy brown, “I don’t give a fuck,” hair and long legs on a straight firm body, a cool stride. He didn’t push anyone or swivel through the crowd, but just easily made his way. I took a quick slurp of my coffee, picked up my leather duffel bag, and eased into the walkway behind him.

I’d been tracking him for over a month now, so I knew he hit the same restroom before exiting the airport. We moved with the flow, two fish in a large sea. Finally, he arrowed off toward the men’s room. I timed my entrance to get inside just as he was entering an empty stall.

One guy stood at the urinal. I went into a stall and waited. When I heard his flush, I opened my door and, as he stepped out, I bumped him hard, grabbing his shoulder with one hand while I stuck a clear patch on the inside of his forearm with the other. Easy-peasy. Apologizing, head down, I pushed off toward a sink.

He looked surprised, but not enough to lose his cool. He shook off the incident as easily as he had brushed off the lovers in his life. Washing his hands, he nodded in my direction and walked out. Within 72 hours, Cody, the cool guy, should be dead.

I walked out, ducking into the women’s rest room next door. A woman standing by the sinks looked at me, but it wasn’t clear if I was a boy-girl or a girl-boy, and this was San Francisco. She went back to washing her hands. I slid into an empty stall and set my duffel bag on the toilet.

Stripping off my dark pants and metro jacket, I folded and set them carefully in the bag. I pulled off a tailored white shirt, balled it up and stuffed it in the bag while easing out of black loafers. Digging around, I pulled out a pair of skinny jeans and a burgundy t-shirt that said, “Fuck politics, I just want to burn shit down.” I shimmy danced into the jeans, pulled the t-shirt over my head, and slipped on a pair of step ins. The new wig of cascading brown curls was scratchy, but I wasn’t planning to wear it for long. With a red zebra make up case under my arm, I closed the duffel, and left the stall. At the rest room’s solitary mirror, I brushed on makeup until I was satisfied with the reflection of a new woman. Job done, I walked out.

AIRPORT II – KALI

The thing is, not all bad guys are rapists or wife-beaters. Of course, those guys deserve punishment and I hope they get what’s coming to them. But that’s not my job. My job is the other guys; ones who ruin women’s lives without a glance in the rear-view mirror. Those are the guys I target, and I don’t do it for free.

Say some guy, just like the guy in the airport, captured your heart and, despite fifty years of birth control, got you pregnant. When you realize he has no intention of being a father to your child, you have an abortion-totally against your principles. While dealing with the crisis, you can’t concentrate and lose your place in grad school. This puts you in a deep depression. Slowly, your life spirals down into a pit you crawl out of after five years of therapy. By that time, your life plan is hopelessly lost, along with the prince, who moved on to the next girl waiting to be loved.

You, my future client, are finally able to pick yourself up and put together a decent life. One day, you’re talking to some women friends. One of them mentions the latest urban legend. Curious, you call her later and ask where she heard her story. She was silent, breath heavy. When it’s clear you are not going to drop your inquiry, she gives you a number, which you call. Another woman asks you what happened, and you tell her your sad tale. She says, “Get a Go Phone and text me the number.” You do. She texts back an address and a time.

You meet her seated in a red booth in the back of a dark bar. She’s wearing a baggy blue coat, and a funny little hat snug on her head with black netting around her face. She’s sipping a Manhattan. You order white wine. She tells you she got fucked by a guy like your guy. Like you, she heard a whisper of someone who took care of these assholes. Her hands shake a bit while she gently rolls the stem of her glass, making wet imprints on the wood table. She tells you how she tracked down the source. How, like you, she called before going to meet another woman for a drink. She slides over a tiny piece of paper. “Be sure before you call. Really sure.” Her face looks haunted. You take the number off the table and stick it in your pocket.

That’s where I come in. Kali, the goddess of vengeance. You call me, I ask you about the guy, I find the guy, and I take care of him. He gets what he deserves. I text you a picture of a newspaper death notice if there is one, or a link to a death certificate, or whatever other proof there is. Then you mail a cashier’s check in a blank white envelope to the post office box I rent, one pick-up only. We dump the phones and I go somewhere else to spread the rumor. I give someone a phone number, they give someone the phone number, and another prick bites the dust. Sometimes I overhear a story, in an airport or a bar, at Starbucks, or grocery shopping; and I set up to take care of that woman. The key is, I only do jobs I can do safely and for profit. I’m not angry. I don’t crusade. I’m not righting the wrongs done to woman everywhere. I don’t get emotional about the stories. I’m like a carpenter ant clearing out a safe space for the rest of the ants. I never expose myself.

Wow, you think. Killing guys because they hurt women. Bit extreme, doncha think? My answer is, why don’t we kill men because they hurt women? Why don’t we fight wars because women are being hurt? We fight wars when men are hurt or offended or dissed or ripped off. While women are raped, beaten, and abused all over the world’ have been for a millennium. Rarely does anyone die over it, except the women. Maybe some women somewhere, said, “It’s about time we went to war over women being hurt.” Maybe that’s how it all started. I don’t know. I’m just a foot soldier. I was contacted the first time by someone like me. After that, I took off on my own.

The guy in the airport was my first serial asshole. I got calls from four separate women in four different parts of the country about this guy. I was suspicious. I thought it might be a sting operation. I got a friend of mine to search out Mr. Cool. This friend, Leon, is into bad stuff up to his puppy brown eyes, so our mutual trust society is limited. We have no idea who each other really is outside of cyberspace. He got back to me with some information about what seemed to be a real guy, which, as we know, is not proof that he wasn’t a plant. Although, as I’ve said, I don’t crusade, and I do play it safe, I do take the occasional chance. I started tracking this guy.

The end of the story should have been our little encounter in the airport men’s room…only that’s not how it worked out.

AIRPORT III – CODY

At first, I didn’t get it. The twerp with a cropped haircut, dressed in one of those Justin Timberlake outfits, bumped into me. No big deal. Then, when I went to stand by the sink, I felt a sting under my arm. Contact had happened. I bent over and washed my hands, looking at myself in the mirror. I couldn’t show any sign I’d noticed the sting. I hoped the stuff Geezer had cooked up for me would protect me long enough to get home. I nodded, strolled out, and ran down the concourse to the escalator which took me down and out of the airport, across traffic and into the parking lot.

I climbed into my jeep and maneuvered back on the freeway, driving straight up 101 for about two hours to Petaluma with Tom Waits growling off the speakers, “Well this stuff will probably kill you, let’s do another line…What you say you meet me down on Heart Attack and Vine?” My arm ached, my heart was pounding, and the base line thrummed through my blood while I envisioned keeling over the steering wheel. I could see the cars crashing into each other as I breathed my last.

Petaluma’s a country town about an hour north of San Francisco. It was revitalized in the ’80’s by huppies (hippy-yuppies). There are rows of restored Victorian homes and an odd downtown mix of upscale and lowdown, like Rodeo Drive in Tombstone. I pulled into the driveway by Geezer’s narrow three-story house. Vaulting out of the jeep, I ran inside and down the stairs to the basement. Geezer looked up from the other side of the room where he was standing over a microscope.

Geezer and I have been buddies since his family moved from London to San Francisco in the early nineties. His mom grew up around the Bay Area. Geeze was originally named after the bass player for Black Sabbath, and he grew up on reruns of Dr. Who. He’s 6’3″, unhealthy looking by California standards, Vegan with scruffy long black hair and sharp green eyes. He has a medical degree from John Hopkins and creds with the UN for working on the spread of vaccine- resistant Malaria in some dangerous places. We bought this house mostly with his UN money and he built a lab in the basement to play in.

“A guy tagged me in the men’s room.” I hold out my arm. He walks over and grabs my hand. He picks up a pair of tweezers off the nearby desk and peels the patch off my arm. The square underneath is red, raw looking, and swollen. “I have no idea what’s on it. I feel hot and my throat is scratchy.’ I look up at him, hopefully.

“Sit down. It could take a while to run tests. I’ll give you another cocktail of stuff until I can find out what this is.” He pushes me into an old wooden desk chair and walks over to a windowed cabinet which mists cold air when he opens it. Pulling out a few vials, he turns to the lab table where he opens a drawer and pulls out several packaged syringes. He lays the stuff on the table beside me. Rolling up my shirt sleeve he says, “This is going to hurt.”

CODY & FRIENDS

I was lying on my bed in my second-floor bedroom trying to figure out if I was dying, sick from the drug cocktail, or just exhausted. It felt like all three.

Several years ago, a friend of mine died. He was young, in good health, no weird stuff. He went home one day after playing basketball with a bunch of us, laid down to take a nap and died. We were devastated. Bruce, Geezer, and I had grown up together, went to school together, learned how to skateboard off the neighbor’s cement walkways, and noticed girls for the first time together. Sure, Bruce could be a California-style asshole, I was not the most responsible guy on the planet, and Geezer was seriously wired strange; but there was no way one of us should die. The coroner gave us a bunch of hypothetical bullshit, the police brushed it off, and Bruce’s family just wanted to move on. I couldn’t let it go. I started searching for the reason a guy in perfect health would go home and die.

I decided to look around, thinking it was just something to do to get over missing my friend. I went back into Bruce’s life before he died. It wasn’t pretty, and it made me wonder how we could have been such good friends. He did some nasty stuff. I pulled Geezer in and we made a list. We focused on the people Bruce had screwed over – mostly women. Geezer became interested in a woman Bruce got pregnant. She had an abortion and dropped out of Stanford. She ended up waiting tables at an old biker bar in Half Moon Bay. I’m not sure what made us focus on her, but something about her story summed up everything we’d ignored about our friend; his ability to use women like Kleenex.

It’s not hard nowadays to find out a lot about a person. Geezer worked the system while I moved down to Half Moon Bay. I was there for a few weeks, hanging out at Sam’s, when I caught a break. Dee, one of the waitresses, thought I was cute. I worked it.

After a couple of sleepovers and more than a few beers, she started to open up. I spent a few dates gently pushing to talk about old mates at work. One night, over more than a few Beck’s, she told a sad tale. A girl, Annie, came to work at Sam’s a few years past. Dee was curious about her because she did not seem to fit. They hooked up and Dee got the story the same way I was doing, sans the sex. Annie was a super brain at Stanford until she hooked up with this complete douche who got her pregnant. “The twist was,” Dee whispered, “a few months after Annie told me the story, she showed me a newspaper clipping.” Dee shook herself, looking over at me as we lay naked on her plush king bed. “The guy was dead and the look on that girl’s face gave me the heebee jeebees.”

“What the fuck, he died?”

“Yeah. Annie explained it was some weird thing with his heart, but afterward she seemed different. Then a week or so later, she quit her job and left.”

I threw my arm over Dee’s ample waist, pulling her to me. “What do you think happened?”

She moved into me, “I think she had him done in.”

“How?” Dee scrunched up against me, loving this part.

“Well, it’s just a story I heard, but there’s supposed to be a number you call and, poof, man problem solved.” My naked body felt the chill of night air pass through the room.

CODY – TRACKING

Soon after, I let things cool out with Dee and left Half Moon Bay. I signed up for unemployment, jobs for house painters being in short supply, and spent the next six months being the kind of self-absorbed dick Bruce had been to women. Contrary to soap operas scripts, most men do not aspire to be lying, cheating bastards. It was not fun. I like women. They are amazingly, wonderfully different than men. I did not like being so wrong to them. I kept telling myself I was doing it for Bruce. Okay, so he was not the greatest guy in the world, but he was my friend. And, in all truthfulness, I was strung out on finding out exactly what or who had happened to him.

I went on to the next lead, to the next girl, to the next bed, to the next round of tearful departures. Geezer and I knew it was against the odds that we’d ever find out what really happened, but we were willing to try. Then it worked.

I met Leeza through a friend of a friend. She was the first girl I didn’t have to fake liking. Leeza was special, a tall vibrant funny woman with long curly hair. We talked and laughed together right from the start. I was hard on her when we broke up because I was sick of myself, sick of what I was doing, and because it hurt. I’m sure she felt especially betrayed because she could sense we had something together.

You wouldn’t think that would be enough to order someone killed. Wrap your brain around how often this same shite happens to women. How they put themselves out there over and over and have the same kind of asshole give them the same sayonara after they have invested time and energy and opened themselves up. You have to think how many times that has to happen before something snaps and the woman says, “Something needs to be done. Something needs to change. Some drastic thing needs to start happening that motivates these bastards to change.” Then someone thinks up what that something might be and you’re off to the “kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out,” racetrack.

I didn’t know it worked until Geezer and I were checking surveillance tapes we’d set up on Leeza. “Check this out, Cody.” Geezer’s voice was soft. I stared over his shoulder at the cloudy video clip with a sick feeling in my stomach and watched a woman I might love taking steps to order me killed. It was the worst moment in my life. The acid on my tongue burned my gut. After a few months, we tracked her to a meeting.

From then on it was impossible to trace what was happening, so I waited, knowing that anywhere, anytime I could be subject to a deadly assault. It was a bad time. When I opened the bathroom stall and that little dweeb grabbed me, I knew. All the time I was looking for a woman, keeping my eyes peeled on all the women around me, and it turned out to be this stupid little bank clerk in a men’s room. That really pissed me off.

The front door banged open, Ty came running in the house shouting, “I got her…I got her.” Ty was our other roommate, also Bruce’s friend, and my backup. I had texted him at the airport so he could tail the guy out of the bathroom after I left. I pulled myself up and walked down the stairs, feeling hot and groggy. At the same time, Geezer came running up the stairs from the lab. Geezer grabbed me by the arm and pushed me and Ty toward the door.

“That has to wait. We must get Cody to the hospital now. He’s been poisoned with Abrim. It is seriously fucked up. He has to go to the hospital stat.”

Going out the door, I looked back at Ty. “Whatcha mean ‘her’? It was a guy who got me.”

“No.” Ty moved around behind us. Ty is a very physical guy. He does Insanity workouts to music that scares me. “It was a woman. She dressed like a guy, hit you, then snuck over to the women’s bathroom and turned back into a chick.

“We stopped in the doorway, a freeze frame of three guys in a black and white comedy; hair tousled, clothes wrinkled, matching faces of horrible surprise.

We continued moving out to my truck, where I shook Ty’s hand off my back. “Geeze, what is Abrim?”

“It’s a toxic plant protein that inhibits protein synthesis in humans – results in total organ system failure. Kills you fast.” Geeze was pushing me along, breathing hard.

I realized I felt sick, hot, nauseous, and sweaty. My chest hurt, and my throat felt like it was swelling shut. Ty grabbed my other arm, moving me into the truck. “Shit, Geeze. Hurry up. Where are we taking him?”

“Novato Hospital. I called a friend. He’s waiting for us in ER.”

Geezer could not stop talking. “All three rats died just from what was left on the patch. I’m surprised you are not sicker, but I guess we got it off quick and the stuff I gave you helped. There’s no cure for this stuff. We have to flush it out of your system fast.” He looked at me with his buggy eyes. “Man, are you sure we want to keep on this? This is a seriously bad reality.” Leaning my head back against the seat, I wasn’t sure about anything.

Ty spoke up. “Yeah. We must stop her. She did Bruce, man. She has to be stopped.” He pulled out his phone and started pushing on the screen. “I’m sending the photos of her to our computer. She is right here somewhere. We need to stop her before she gets another guy.” I could feel Ty’s military vibe fill the truck. He had an “information dominance pin” from Point Loma and was the best the military had to offer in cyberspace warfare. He burned his hands and ended his career. He came back home to Petaluma and moved in with us. Ty, bitterly, no longer cared about saving women or men. He was just a force contained.

KALI – TRACKING

Lounging back on an old beach chair on the roof of my place below Coit Tower on Greenwich, I’d had an itch between my shoulders since I left the airport, that feeling someone was tailing me. Something rolled around in my gut like balls bouncing outside the slides on a pinball machine. Sipping white wine, I pushed my mind around different angles, trying to find what was messing me up. It was the guy. Something about the guy. He didn’t feel right. I trusted my gut. I went back through everything about the job. When the cool air of the bay wrapped around me, I went inside to hunt.

I did not want to leave breadcrumbs, so I texted Leon. I told him what I felt and what I wanted to do about it. He said he’d get back to me. I went to soak in a hot bath while I waited.

Later, he sent me a list of what he’d pieced together. It was not pretty. I walked around in an old plaid robe mulling over my choices.

About six months ago I was tracking a guy. I was in New York on 42nd Street, down by the old Chelsea Hotel. I ducked in a dry cleaner while the guy walked past, but I’d cut it too close and he noticed me. That’s when I realized I was getting sloppy. I wasn’t focusing on the details anymore and each new job had started to feel like, well, like a job. It wasn’t that way when I started. I’d loved the details, figuring out how to do each sting perfectly. Precisely. I’d decided this would be my last gig. I was ready to take my earnings and hide myself away somewhere exotic, somewhere with unlimited Mojito’s.

Shit, I couldn’t leave like this. Running away. I had to finish this before I left. Easy to get rid of the guy, but he had help. I would have to do the helpers, who were probably tracking me right now. I needed to get at them without getting anywhere near them. That was the only way this would work. Lying back on my bed with another glass of wine. How could I draw a circle around this problem and wipe it out?

TRACKERS

Ty was all about planning, having a POA. Now, looking back, I can see how lame we all were. We underestimated this woman, even after we knew what she could do. We sat around our dining table, which we never dined on, which was covered with parts of old tech supplies, piles of jumbled cable, microchip boards, gun parts, motor magazines, empty beer cans, and a sad, dying Arizona succulent. Ty reached out to tap on the one empty spot in front of him, “We need to catch her off guard, offer bait.”

Geezer looked over at me, “Leeza?”

“No. We are not using Leeza. I won’t do anything else to her.” I took a fast, long gulp of beer.

We hashed over other possible ops, but none of us really knew what to do. Sometimes when you don’t know what to do, the universe does for you. It’s not always fun. Geezer went back downstairs to watch more videos Ty had hacked from locations around the airport. Ty and I sat around the table not knowing what to say. After another half can of beer, Geezer called up the stairs, “I just got a text from Leeza’s sister, Tamera. She hasn’t heard from Leeza in a couple of days. She checked her house and Leeza’s car is sitting in the driveway, but no sign of her.”

I knew, right then, that someone else had decided before us. I nodded to Ty. “Okay. We’ll head back and see if we can find her.”

A few days later, I was lying on my bed staring at the ceiling, exhausted. We had been looking for Leeza everywhere for days, talking to her friends and checking places she hung out. Raid poured down my bedroom window. I thought I heard someone knock on the door downstairs. Listening, I ran down and opened the door. Leeza stood on the step under the faint porch light, shivering, wrapped in an old raincoat.

I pulled her in the house and sat her down, words pouring out of her. “She grabbed me at Costco. Just came up behind me by my car and the next thing I knew I was stuffed in the back seat of an old truck with duct tape all over me.” I peeled off her coat and wrapped a wool throw from the couch around her shoulders. Her lips were tinged blue. I’d put water on for tea and was sitting across from her by the fireplace. “She wore a ski mask the whole time. We drove up in the mountains somewhere, maybe around Tahoe. She took me back in the woods, sat me on the ground, and told me I had to give you a message.” Leeza started crying. “She said she’s giving you one chance to lay off. If you don’t, she will kill us all.”

I made tea. Leeza cried and apologized and cried. I comforted her, but I could feel the anger rolling in my gut. This bitch had killed my friend and tried to kill me. Whatever had been done, it was too much. I sat there holding Leeza, wanting to punch something.

TRACKERS II

Geezer had heard Leeza’s voice and come running up the stairs to hear the end of her story. Ty came in later, and we filled him in. We all sat around in shock for a while. Finally, Ty got out a large paper pad and some pens and Geezer made a pot of Sumatra coffee. We sat around the table throwing out ideas all the way from running away to South America to Murder on the Orient Express. Finally, as often happens when some minds can coordinate together for a common cause, we mushed a bunch of stuff together into one plan.

The first thing was that Leeza called the number she’d been given in the cabin and left our “fuck you”. It only took a few hours before Geezer received a message on his throwaway phone. “Good to hear, boys. I love a good chase.”

Then we waited, in static mode, sitting together in Geeze’s lab. We’d decided; I was bait, Ty would run point, Geeze was backup, and Leeza would snitch. Geeze and Ty were mostly into the head game of it all, but I was sick to my stomach thinking of how wrong everything could go. Every time I looked over at Leeza, I wanted to run away. Their voices were background noise. I wanted it to be over.

I got up and went upstairs out to the front porch. I sank down into the cushioned lounge seat and closed my eyes. When I opened them, there was a girl standing in front of me in a black hoodie jacket and jeans. She was holding a 44 Walther pistol like most girls hold a purse, easily. She had her finger on her lips, shushing and motioning with the gun. I got out of the seat. She moved around me and prodded me down the steps and onto the sidewalk to a large panel van. She waved me into the back of the van. I knew she would shoot me. She vibrated the willingness to do anything she wanted. There were handcuffs rigged on the inside of the van. She pointed her gun at my head while I put on the cuffs. I felt resigned. This was where we had been going ever since Bruce died.

We drove for several hours. It was cold in the van and, although I had squished myself up against the side as far as the handcuffs would let me, I rolled around stretching my arms painfully. When the van stopped, I was thirsty, exhausted, and scared. I tried to keep the picture of Ty and his paper graphs in my head. She opened the back and I saw a small cabin surround by trees off the dirt track we’d drove in on. I started to say something, but she pointed the gun at my face. “No use talking. This is already over.”

Once we got inside, she’d hooked my handcuffs around a post by a chair she sat me in. It sounded like she was making coffee in the small kitchen. She came out with the gun in one hand, drinking out of a steaming mug with the other, completely at ease. “It’s a shame really. You are a gorgeous man. I almost hate to waste such prime genetic material. The world is filled with ugly babies.” She walked over to me. “Your friend was a prick. He treated women like crap. Did you think that was okay?”

I shook my head. “I had no idea until after he died. We were different together. He was my friend.” I looked into her eyes. “I still don’t think he deserved to die.”

“What do you think he deserved? A therapist? Support groups? A billion beat up women are waiting for that to happen. Fuck.”

She was not laughing now. She looked at me with clear eyes. “Men don’t change. They are wired to fuck women over for two reasons. We are smaller, we do things men cannot, and we have power over their penis. If those truths stand, men will hurt women. Nothing can change that. So, should women just keep taking it? Men would not. They would have wiped us off the planet long ago if we did to them what they’ve done to us. No mercy. Why should we turn the other cheek?”

“I’m not like that. Most of my friends aren’t. I love women. I love how they’re different.”

“Yes. That’s what most of you say, and most of you never go to the same extremes as your friend. But you protect each other. You support a system that allows abuse of women. You let boys be boys, and you ruin women’s lives without raising a finger toward change. You don’t do what they do, but you are who they are. No mercy.

“She had sat in front of me, arms crossed over the back of her chair. We stared at each other. She was beautiful in a strange way, with dark black bangs hanging down over her eyes and a strong body. It was like we were frozen in the moment, neither of us wanting to move into the next action that would take both of us somewhere we didn’t want to be.

I sat staring at the boy, wondering why I was stalling. I needed to shoot him, get rid of his body, and get out of here. Something about him held me back. Some smell of him, feel of him, look of him. It was pissing me off, but I couldn’t shoot him just yet. I sat there for a while sipping my coffee, then I walked over and laid the gun on the table by the kitchen. I had him handcuffed to a large wooden chair. I walked over, tilted his head up, and bent over to kiss his lips. He struggled, but I pulled back and slapped him hard across the face. Then I took his face in my hand, tilted his head back, and kissed him again. I pushed my tongue passed his tight lips. I was taking a big chance. He could had bitten my tongue off, but I didn’t think he would. I placed my hand on his fly, feeling around until I felt him get hard. I pulled back and unbuttoned his shirt.

He stared up at me, disbelieving, shaking his head. I bent over and sucked on his tit, moving from one to the other until he moaned. My hand was working his erection through his pants. I walked away, to sit on the sofa where I pulled my boots off. I stood in front of him and slid my pants down, sitting down again to slip them off. I stood up, took off my shirt, and unhooked my bra. I slid my panties down and off, standing in front of him naked. I walked over and unzipped his pants. He resisted me. I walked over to the gun, came back in front of him pointing the gun at his head, motioning for him to slide his pants off. He could barely do it with the ends of his handcuffed fingers. He got them down a bit. I laid the gun back down near the sofa. Then I jerked his pants down to his knees. His erection was beautiful. I crawled up on the seat of his lap with my legs over the chair arms and pushed him inside me while wrapping my arms around his head, pushing his head down to my nipple. It was intoxicating to feel him fucking me wanting to kill me. We fucked fast and hard until we both came, almost together. I was sweating, and my legs ached.

I twisted around off him, and reached down to pick up the gun when the door burst open and two guys and the gal, I had nabbed at the cabin burst in. The dark-haired guy in the front had a semi-automatic rifle in one hand, and the geek had a Taser. The girl stared at me and the guy, me still naked and him with his pants down. The military guy motioned me, and I dropped the gun. “Wow. Good timing. I was just going to get rid of your buddy. Too bad I had to fuck him first.”

Leeza and I were walking on the beach at Stinson, holding hands. It had been a month since the scene in the cabin and we had barely talked about what happened. Geezer stayed in hide out mode in his lab, and Ty spent most of his time working out or running around. Leeza and I hadn’t been apart since we’d all got back to our house. We ate together and slept together, but we still could not talk. The last picture in my head was that beautiful naked woman facing Ty and his weapon with a smile on her face. She whipped up her gun and fired off a shot, but Ty was fast, and his gun was meaner. She dropped at my feet. Leeza ran over, grabbed the keys off the table and uncuffed me. She backed away like she couldn’t bear to touch me. Ty stood in the doorway with his gun at his side. Geezer stood with his mouth open. I got my pants on, and we got it together. We’d decided we had to burn everything, and so we stood huddled together smelling acrid horror for a few minutes after we set the place on fire. Then we drove back home and tried to convince ourselves we’d done good. Sometimes at night, curled around Leeza, I could feel the slick, hot flesh of that angry woman and my heart would pound with desire and shame.

(Bio:Rena Robinett currently has eight short stories published in various magazines, ezines, and anthologies with international and national publications; and has self-published one Science Fiction novelette, BREED.
She has had an adventurous life, traveling the world and then living in Hawaii. for several decades. She now resides in Northern California, working at a world class modern art museum.
Rena has a BA in English Composition from California State at Fresno and has attended, by invitation, the Iowa Writer’s Workshop summer session and the Napa Valley Writers Workshop. Rena is currently working on a memoir in two parts and a short story collection.
Invitations: Napa Valley Writers Conference, June 2014 Chesapeake Writers Conference, 2013 University of Iowa Summer Writer’s Workshop, 2010

She can be found at http://www.renarobinett.com/ )