1 - Introductions

Jack couldn't see. The darkness surrounding him was all pervasive. He raised his arm and the darkness swirled around it, like smoke, and he couldn't even make out his hand in front of him. It was hard to even bring himself to move, claustrophobia was kicking in, and he felt his throat close in terror. It was utterly dark and utterly cold. This is what dying feels like, he suddenly realized. I am dead. Or close. So close.

Slowly, Jack forced himself into motion, to take a step forward, and it felt like the hardest thing he had ever done. His foot felt as if it were encased in in a block of frozen lead, and, lifting it, he almost lost his balance. Righting himself, Jack felt his heart racing, and knew that, has he fallen, the void would have swallowed him up forever.

His foot landed, though with what he couldn't tell; the oily darkness was obscuring his legs from the knee down, making the idea of walking even more terrifying.

Jack took a second step, then a third, with each footfall sending chills down his spine. His head was spinning, his heart pounding in his chest. He lifted his leg for a fourth step, and the darkness exploded around him.

Razor shards of pure black shot past him, shredding his skin, tearing at his flesh. Blood spurted from a thousand wounds, the agony unbelievable in its magnitude as the void raged around him. Choking on his own blood, Jack collapsed.

Yet he was not dead. He lay there, blood pouring down his face and choking his throat, staring up into the calm, cool white that had replaced the absolute darkness. It was eerie, the white nothingness that stretched before him. Jack turned his head slightly, watching as the crimson fluid dribbled from his mouth run down his chin and dripped off, falling far, far away beneath him until it disappeared into the aether. Jack tried to take in what would be his dying sight, take it all in and treasure it, except he found that he couldn't. There was nothing to take in. Even the metallic tang of blood in his mouth, the dim roaring in his ears, the gurgle in his throat as he struggled for air – none of them had any substance, any reality.

“Kill me,” Jack pleaded. The pain was so intense. Breathing was hard, so hard. “Kill me now!”

Even if there were people to hear him, he realized, they couldn't understand what he was saying. His words were coming out burbled through the blood.

Yet, incredibly, someone heard. And someone understood. And Jack received a reply from a startlingly familiar voice.

“No. Not yet.”

Jack rolled his head towards the direction of the words, hoping, begging for clarity, who he was, and why he was here in this impossible realm. Instead, what he saw just hurtled his mind farther along the path to insanity.

“Dad?”

It was his father, Tom. And quickly, not just his father, but his whole family, emerging from the white nothingness.

His whole family, who had been dead for fifteen years.

They stood stock-still, quietly watching him. Tom stood slightly in front and to the side of his mother Angela, who was holding hand with Jack's little brother, Mikey. And Grandpa John sat in his wheelchair to her side, gnarled old hands gripping the armrests, knuckles white.

“How are you, chief?” Tom asked walking up to him. “You look as if you've seen better days.”

“I'm fine, Dad,” replied Jack, although he wasn't sure why. He had never felt so far away from fine in his life.

“'Course you are, chief. You're my son. You're tough. Like your old man.” Tom laughed, a deep chuckle that sent icicles down Jack's spine, then indicated to his forehead. "Still, guess it couldn't save me from these. Here. Take a look.”

He bent down to give Jack a better view, and Jack saw what he dreaded, what he wished would go away, would leave his mind and stop haunting him.

Tom's forehead bore two holes, separated from each other by a few inches. They were both about an inch in diameter, and blood ran freely from them down Tom's face, which was ghastly pale, down his neck, to be soaked up by the plain white shirt he wore.

“D'you like them? Your mother says 'the red from the blood complements my new complexion' or something like that.” Tom smiled. “I usually can't understand her when she talks like that, but if she means what I think she means, I agree. They suit me fine. Do you know who went to all the effort of making sure I got them?”

Jack could feel the panic building in his chest. He knew the answer, knew it very well. It was the answer he he had turned over in his mind, over and over, the answer he knew didn't make sense but was right nonetheless. He opened his mouth to protest, but found he couldn't speak; his throat had closed up.

Tom looked at him with a curious expression on his face, then said matter-of-factly “It was you, son.”

“No...” Jack managed to croak out, but he was silenced when Tom started to speak again. “You were so generous too, you got something for the whole family!” Tom gestured to the smiling group behind him. “You got your mom a new necklace...” and he pointed to the still-bleeding slit in Angela's throat. “You fixed your Grandpa's heart...” – a gesture to the dark, glistening-red stains in John's chest – “and as for Mikey, well, he doesn't have to worry about seizures any more.”

Jack tried to look away, to not see what he was about to see, but he couldn't. He was paralyzed, his body wouldn't respond. God no, he thought. Don't make me see this again. Please.

But it was too late. The all-too-familiar boom of a shotgun sounded out, and Mikey's head exploded.



“NO!!!”

Jack sat bolt upright, his breathing harsh and ragged, sweat running down his face in thin rivulets. He looked around wildly, trying to decipher where he was from the hazy world spinning above him. It was too much and he was almost overwhelmed before he took a deep breath and let the words of the army therapist flow through his head:

“Try to relax. Take in your surroundings, plant yourself in reality. That's where you are – reality – not some sort of dream world. You're real. The ones in the dream – they aren't. They don't exist. You're safe.”

Safe. That was the last word Jack would use to describe how he was feeling, but he steadied himself, and placed one hand on the ground beside him, running the other through his short brown hair in an attempt to ground himself in reality.

Pine needles. Dirt. A few leaves. A branching tree root.

Okay. He was in a forest, probably consisting mostly of evergreen trees. Now for the air.

Cool, bordering on cold. A slight breeze. He opened his eyes. Not much light. A reflective source, judging from the soft, silver glow.

Night. It was night, and he was sitting wrapped up on a bedroll in a pine forest.

Ah, yes. It was all coming back, like it usually did when Jack had these kind of nightmares, albeit this time it was taking longer than usual for him to return to reality.

He was Jack Warren, twenty-three years old, a mercenary currently working for the New Mid-American Army. Brother to Samantha “Sammi” Warren, twenty years old, and his only surviving relative. He led a small team, consisting of Sammi, and a friend, Andrew O'Connor. They were sleeping about a hundred feet from a small back road, on which they were traveling, their current contract being to deliver a package to the capital city of Philadelphia.

Relaxing, Jack felt a gaze upon him, and looked up to see that Andrew was watching him silently. At least, that was what it looked like – Jack never could tell what was going on behind that gas mask. It was, to say the least, disquieting, having those blank lenses fixed on you, staring wide, with no indication of the humanity behind them, which led to most of the people being intimidated by Andrew when they met – Jack most certainly had been. But there most certainly was humanity there, for Andrew had proven himself over and over to be one of the kindest people Jack had ever known, and carried, along with a sniper rifle and deadly aim, a wickedly sharp sense of humor.

The mask was a shame, really, because sometimes it was hard to understand the jokes Andrew told until later, when you had a chance to think it over. The gas mask also made Andrew exceptionally hard to read, which was where Sammi came in.

Besides being team medic, Sammi was also responsible for, as Jack would say when asked what exactly she did, “negotiations, general interactions, and peaceful interrogations.” She was good with people, and didn't need a face to tell what was “going on” with someone – she read their body language like a book, and this had proven particularly useful on several occasions. It was for this reason, coupled with her surprising in-field skill at first aid, that Jack had let her onto the team, and it was more conducive to group cohesion than thinking of her as the “tag-along” member, anyway.

“You all right?” Andrew asked. So you were watching me, thought Jack, before replying.

“Yeah. Just a nightmare.” He paused, then asked “Sammi. Did she – ?”

“She's asleep. Didn't hear a thing.”

“Good,” Jack sighed. “Make sure she doesn't find out. She's worried about me enough as it is.”

“That's fair enough,” said Andrew, nodding. “She won't.”

“Thanks.”

“S'cool.”

There was silence for a few moments. Jack picked up a stick and poked the dying embers of their campfire, which sparked feebly before resuming their path to becoming ash. An owl hooted in the distance, and a moth was hit by a stray spark. It careened, flaming, into the ground before burning to cinders.

Suddenly, an uncomfortable thought thought struck Jack

“Andrew...”

“Yeah?”

“You said Sammi didn't hear anything. What was I...?”

Andrew looked into the coals burning weakly in the shallow pit. The flames echoed eerily in the blank lenses of his mask.

“Screaming,” he said finally. “You were screaming. Loud.”

An tense silence settled over the makeshift camp, punctured only by a cool night wind, which stirred up the embers and made them glow brightly. Jack began to poke the fire with his stick again.

“It's quiet.”

Jack looked up from the fire pit to see Andrew looking around at the woods.

“Too quiet.” Andrew paused, before continuing. “You know, I don't mean to break that beautiful stretch of awkward tension we just had, but I've always wanted to say that. It's been my primary ambition. Now, thanks to you, my life is co – ”

Ratatatatat.

“Shhhh...” Jack held up his hand to silence him. “Listen...”

Ratatatatatatat.

Andrew' voice grew serious again. “Is that...?”

“Yeah,” replied Jack, who was already readying his rifle for combat. “Gunshots. Wake Sammi. I'll put out what's left of the fire. Someone's got themselves into a shit-load of trouble, and we need to move.”



I’m going to die.

These four words raced through Alice’s head, repeating themselves over and over as she ran, the dry leaves of the forest floor crackling beneath her feet and the wind whistling in her ears.

I’m going to die.

I’m going to die.

I’m going to diediediediedie.

Even as she leaped over a large rotting log, Alice took a quick glance over her shoulder to check whether or not she was still being pursued, though the sound of branches snapping and huge metal feet slamming into the ground made it obvious that it was so, and that her pursuers had no intentions of letting up the chase.

The pursuers in question, two Beta-Heavy-Class Thor mechs, each thirty feet tall and sporting twin-linked mini-guns beneath each arm along with shoulder-mounted, heat-seeking missile launchers, were the pinnacle of post-Cataclysm technology, with only the Alpha-class mech being able to pack more firepower.

These facts, however, were not what Alice was considering at that moment, as she snapped off a quick, horribly ineffective burst from her machine pistol and turned her head back, just barely managing to duck a hanging tree limb. The only things going around her mind were four words, which repeated themselves like a broken disk hopped up on fusion:

I’m going to die.

The simple statement whirled through Alice’s thoughts, more unconscious than anything, but ever present as she hurdled a downed trunk. The running was no longer about survival; it was about prolonging an inevitable death. Hopefully, that death would come quickly. If things went really well, she might not even feel it. If not... well, fuck it. She had never wanted to live forever anyway. Living was fucking overrated.

Her senses now incredibly acute, Alice took in everything, as these would probably be her last moments alive – her breathing, her heart pounding in her chest, the screech of an owl disturbed by the heavy footfalls of the mechs – everything. Every sound, every sight, everything was precious. Hell, this might just be the best experience she'd ever had.

It was then that Alice heard another noise – a low whirring, which was quickly increasing in speed and pitch.

It was the sound of a mini-gun revving up.



Jack halted and held up a silent fist to motion for his team to stop, before powering up the scope on his night-vision goggles and zooming in through the branches on the sound of the gunfire.

“Ah, shit,” he swore quietly.

“Problem, Mr. Boss-Man?” Andrew's voice came in through the comm-link.

“Yeah,” replied Jack. “We've got Thor mechs. Two of them. Beta-Heavy-Class, standard array of weapons – twin-linked miniguns, heat-seeking missiles on the shoulders, the whole 'blow them half to Hell' works.”

“Human-pilot model?”

“Yeah, looks like it.”

“Good.” Andrew laughed. “Do you know how hard it is to hit those stupid sensor nodes on the automated ones? I mean, I'm good at sniping, but those things are a bitch! And then, if you do manage to get them, the whole mech just explodes, and then if one of you are too close when it goes off, I have file fifteen pages of useless paperwork on how you died that HQ doesn't even care about because we're mercs!”

“Can we just get this over with?” Sammi cut in, now. “You know I hate the whole shooting-blowing-things-up part.”

Jack sighed. “As much as I love to hear you talk, Andrew, Sammi's right. We need to get this done. Now get in position. I'll slow them down and Andrew can take out the pilots. Sammi, if there are any enemies on foot, stop them. Quietly. I don't need the person who stitches our heads back on unable to perform said tasks.”

“And the person getting shot at?” asked Sammi. “Where is she?”

“What makes you think it's a she?” shot Andrew over the comm-feed.

“Well, it could be a she.”

“And it's more likely that it's a he.”

“Why is it more likely?”

“Because, my dear, only a man would be manly enough to provoke an attack from someone with access to this kind of firepower.”

“Stupid enough, more like.”

“Stupid? Did I ever tell you about the time when a girl I knew – ”

“Can it!” Jack whispered harshly into his mic as he turned up the zoom on his binoculars and scanned the area for any signs of who the mechs were shooting at.

         

Alice felt strangely calm, even as the  bullets whizzed past her head and chewed through the trunk of the tree that was her only cover. It wasn't the normal, survive-in-combat, kill-the-shit-out-of-someone calm, either. Even during those situation, there was tension, harnessed and controlled though it may be. No, this time it was different. It was a sort of calm Alice had never experienced, never imagined, and it felt good.

Damn, she thought. If this it what it feels like to know you're going to die, I could get used to this.

She looked up at the stars twinkling in the night sky overhead, and wondered if that was where good people went. It didn't matter, though. She wasn't going there.

Well, no use letting Hell just come to me. Maybe I'll even take one of them down before it's done.

Alice pulled out her shotgun and checked the ammo reading. Loading one last shell to bring it up to full, she cocked it, broke cover, and charged.

         

“And it was only after that happened that she decided to...”

Jack rolled his eyes behind the lenses of the goggles. Those two... did they ever stop bickering? It suddenly didn't matter, though, because through the grainy green display Jack had found what he was looking for.

There was someone, a figure, crouching behind a large tree for cover, holding what  looked like a large shotgun to his, or her, Jack thought grudgingly, chest. The goggles didn't allow for many details on the visual display, so further observation was useless and, if the way the mechs were going at it said anything, likely to lead to the death of the person they were trying to rescue.

That is, if that person didn't get himself killed in the process. He was just leaping out from behind the tree, and now –

         “Shit!”

“What is it?” both Andrew and Sammi spoke through the comm-feed at the same time.

“We've got a problem,”replied Jack, peering through the goggles at the suicidal runner. “Our 'victim' just broke cover, and is charging at the lead mech. Andrew, get your rifle ready. Sammi, be prepared for a messy cleanup job. I'm moving forward.”

“Jesus-fuck.” Andrew cursed. “Well, if you survive, you can call yourself 'World's Most  Suicidal Squad Leader'. See you in the afterlife.”

But Jack wasn't listening. He had already sprinted forward towards the mechs, grenade launcher at the ready.

         

It may have sounded cliché, but it was only in combat when Jack felt truly alive. Since the loss of most of his family, living had become something of a joke. So much work to keep your life, so little work to lose it. There was a cruel irony in that, he had mused many a time. But when he was fighting, when he could almost see what was behind the curtain, when many of his friends actually found out, he found purpose: to kill every sunnavabitch who messed with him, Sammi, or anyone close to him. And, so far, it had worked. It was a win-win situation – if he survived, he could continue to save his friends. If he died, well, good. World was fucked up anyway.

As one of the mech pilots noticed him and began to turn his vehicle, Jack fired off the grenade launcher, sending a round arcing through the air towards his enemy. It wasn't the best shot he could've made – it only hit the left shoulder-missile, but the resulting explosion rocked the mech, stunning the pilot and sending the guided robot reeling, and giving Jack enough time to throw himself behind a boulder and reload the launcher.

But before he could click the barrel back into place, a missile impacted the ground to his right, and Jack was sent flying, his armor's kinetic shields completely shorted out. He pulled  himself to his feet, and as the ringing in his ears died down, Jack heard the whirring of the mech's minigun starting up.

Realizing that he had about two seconds before the bullets started to fly and rip his body to shreds, Jack reached for a small device HQ had labeled as a “Hardware Annihilator Module for Sensors/visuals – Prototype Alpha Model (HAMSPAM), or, as the soldiers referred to it, “evidence that someone up top has a weird sense of humor.” It was, in short, a grenade that worked on mechs, robots, and those with mechanical sensors or vid-feed like a flash-bang did on human soldiers – overload the target's senses and disable it for an easy takedown. It was perfect for this situation.

Of course, that was provided the other mech stayed out of this, and Jack was regretting more and more his decision to help the poor bastard who had pissed off the guy who had access to the mechs. Still, it was too late to turn back now, and even as Jack primed and hurled the HAMSPAM towards the first mech, he completed the reload of his grenade launcher, and as that oddly-named little device did its job, leaving the machine stumbling and waving its arms around, Jack fired off a second round, which flew gracefully through the air before hitting the cockpit and detonating, sending the mech, now with no pilot, crashing to the ground. The high-pitched beeping of a self-destruct sequence sounded, and the wreckage exploded in a titanic fireball.

One down, one to go. Where the hell is Andrew? Jack thought as he turned, pulling a sticky grenade from his belt and prepared to prime it. If he managed to get it close enough to a joint in the other mech's armor, he could potentially incapacitate it and still have a living pilot for interrogation. He whirled around, expecting to face thirty feet of metal and death.

Instead, he got a large amount of metal – scrap, now, remains of what used to be a Beta-Heavy-Class Thor Mech –  and a good view down the inside of the barrel of a shotgun.

Tearing his eyes away from the impressive and rather intimidating view of the end of the barrel, Jack instead diverted his view to the weapon's wielder, expecting to see a man, probably tall, scarred, slightly stupid, and definitely insane.

Which was partially correct, though, as he would muse later, he only scored 3 out of 5 on the “Guess the Shotgun-Wielding Maniac” game.

His potential assailant stood there, barely hitting what he guessed to be five-foot-six, and at first Jack thought he was looking at a teenage boy. It took him five seconds and a second look to realize that the aforementioned teenage boy was, in fact, a woman in her early twenties.

She wore a dirt-covered, white, sleeveless t-shirt, camo trousers, and heavy combat boots that looked liked they were used for staring riots (which, if the shotgun barrel in his face told Jack anything, they probably had been at one point). Her dark brown hair was a mess, and it seemed as though she had taken a pair of wire cutters to it only as an afterthought. It was short, too short, a sort of mop that didn't do anything to help her face, which might have been pretty if it hadn't been so gaunt.

Still, she would probably escape detection in most major cities, even with multitude of piercings and the strange four digits tattooed beneath her left eye, Jack thought. With so much variety in all those urban centers, she'd probably fit right in.

Then the woman rolled her head to crack her neck, and Jack, while not giving away any outward signs, was shocked.

A horrifyingly deep scar traced its way from just above her hairline down the left side of her face, disappearing down the back of her shirt. Cut horizontally across the main line were short, slightly shallower scars, in a precise, exact manner that showed that the markings were not accidental, and, judging by their location, not self-inflicted.

Yet even as Jack tried hard not to stare at the scar, his gaze was drawn to her eyes, pulled in like light to a black hole, and he was disturbed by what he saw.

Rage. Pure, unfiltered, undiluted anger and rage emanated from their dark green depths, a hatred for life and all it stood for. The pits of hell had nothing on those orbs. Jack had seen plenty of criminal scum, including quite a few who had extensive murder lists, and only the most depraved of them came close to matching this level of... inhumanity. This woman would pull the trigger and probably enjoy every second of it. Jack didn't exactly have an aversion to killing – hell, it was part of his job description – but he would never go out of his way to hurt someone. The person before him, though – she was a different story.

Then she spoke. After feeling that soulfilled hate, it almost surprised Jack that she could talk at all, but talk she did. Two sentences in a voice that sounded like a doe if it had had its vocal cords ripped out and replaced with a grizzly's:

“On the ground. Hands behind your head.”

Jack complied, slowly placing his grenade launcher down upon the forest floor before kneeling and putting his hands palms-down on the back his head.

“You've gotta have some other guys around here,” the woman continued, her voice surprisingly even, and carrying a strange accent that Jack knew wasn't from anywhere in Mid America. “People don't come out here alone, and if they do, you assume they're bat-shit crazy, and you don't look quite fucked-up enough to be one of the bat-shit crazies.”

Despite himself, Jack smiled and looked up, hoping his words wouldn't get his  head blown off while Andrew got himself into position. Jack hadn't heard from him, but that hopefully meant he was busy setting up. “And you? I'd hate to assume anything, but, uh, considering those criteria you just laid down, well...”

The woman smirked. “Look at me. I'm definitely sane. Yeah, make me a prison shrink, I got myself sorted, now on to helping others!” She snorted, but her eyes never left Jack. They were unnerving. Without the emotions  behind them, they would have been normal, fairly nice-looking green eyes. But the ferocity, the seething anger that they just barely contained, it destroyed them, made them as if they were giant pits, with witch-fires burning in their depths.

Jack was torn away when Andrew's acknowledgment light blinked green on Jack's HUD and a tone sounded, a short beep from his earpiece that told Jack that his sniper was ready and able to take any shots necessary. He heard it clearly, and unfortunately, so did his captor.

“What the fuck is that?” she snarled, indicating to his ear slightly with the end of her shotgun.

“That,” replied Jack, “is the answer to your question. It's my squad's status tone and this particular one tells me that my sniper is currently hidden somewhere around here, ready and willing to put one bullet directly between your ears.

“Now,” he continued as the woman opened her mouth to speak, and (Jack noticed) her finger tightened on the gun's trigger, “he won't fire unless he feels that I, or any one else on the team, is in danger; however, if I die, he has no hesitation about taking you down.”

The woman bit her lip, and her trigger finger loosened slightly.

“So what the fuck do we do? Coz I'm not stupid, and I know that you're the only reason I'm still alive, and I'm not giving you up,” she snapped back.

Jack usually thought fairly fast – his resourcefulness was what had secured himself a place on the his high school's lacrosse team. Of course, he hadn't had shotguns pointing in his face when he had made decisions on the field.

He tried to relax, and in doing so, Jack's gaze slipped past the end of the shotgun barrel to the wreckage of the mech the woman had single-handedly taken  out. All that was left was a heaping pile of broken metal and glass, with sparks shooting intermittently from the power supply – and suddenly, Jack had an idea. It was stupid, crazy, and if Jack had thought about it for a few moments longer, or had been in a more favorable situation, he would have dismissed it, but his present position left him little choice. He couldn't even signal Andrew to shoot the maniac; only the really high ranking, official special forces guys got comms equipment compatible with neural implants, and even those weren't very reliable. No, the only way he could see out of this mess was to hire the homicidal woman pointing a shotgun at his head. Besides, if she turned out to be some serial killer or something, HQ would just arrest her, most likely jail or execute her, and Jack's team would be on their merry way.

HQ's either going to tear me a new one, or give me a medal - probably the former, Jack sighed inwardly, before slowly addressing his captor. He'd figure out this mess later.

“Look,” he said, more calmly than he felt. “I don't want to have to shoot you,” (the woman snorted derisively) “and I sure as hell don't want you to shoot me, but I see a way out of this. For both of us.”

The woman looked at him, with no change of expression. “Go on.”

“You took out a mech all by yourself. Pretty impressive.”

“And?”

Jack took a deep breath, then let it out as he spoke. “We – my team and I – were delivering a package to Philadelphia when we took an... unexpected detour... and found you. Considering the fact that we also found two hostile mechs, I figure we're going to need some extra firepower. And, considering you managed to destroy one of those mechs, I'd like you to be that extra firepower.”

Andrew's acknowledgment light immediately began to flash red. Jack ignored it. There was nothing to be gained from backing out now.

The woman looked at him, boring into him with her piercing green eyes for several seconds, then said slowly “And... if I don't shoot you, what's to stop you from shooting me?”

“If I had wanted you dead,” replied Jack. “Why would I have risked my own life to take down that mech? Think about it.”

The woman considered it, then nodded slowly. “Fair enough. I owe you. But if you want me to come with you, you got to make it worth my time.”

“Well, there's usually a nice paycheck at the end of a job,” Jack said. “My team and I split it, and you'd count as part of the team. Therefore, you'd get paid.”

“Team?” the woman snorted derisively. “Fuck that. I'll do it for the money, though. Hell, if it's enough, I might even stay on for a few months.” She lowered her shotgun slightly, still keeping it just high enough to blast Jack's legs off. “Now where are the other fuckers? You know, your 'team'?”

Jack stood up and switched to the team channel on his earpiece. “Jack? Sammi? Things are cool now. Come on out.”

There was a quiet rustling near a shrub about a hundred feet behind the woman, and the lenses on Andrew's mask glinted softly in the moonlight as he made his way towards Jack, his rifle slung over his shoulder. Sammi, meanwhile, was in the process of lowering herself from the tree branch she had been sitting upon, dangling by her hands for a moment before dropping to the forest floor and following Andrew to stand next to Jack, facing the woman.

“Right,” Jack said awkwardly after a few tense seconds. “Introductions. Sammi, Andrew, this is-”

“Alice,” snapped the woman. “No last name, can't be bothered. Don't ask about that – as a matter of fact, don't ask me anything.”

Jack gritted his teeth and smiled, trying to ignore both the furious 'What were you thinking?' look Sammi was giving him and the thought that he had never seen a woman who had looked less like an 'Alice'.

“Well... um...right...” Jack looked from Andrew to Sammi, silently pleading for one of them to say something, anything, that would focus the attention away from him. “I guess... we're Oscar Mike?”

“Not yet,” replied Alice. “Just realized I got unfinished business.” She now was staring intently at the wreckage of the mech she had taken down. “Pilot's still alive.”

Jack gestured to the burning slag heap. “Go ahead. Just make it quick, we need to get moving.”

If she heard him, Alice gave no sign. She was now walking away from him, with a pace that could be best described as 'restrained'. It was like she wanted something, wanted it really badly, but had just enough self-control to not break out into a run.

Jack watched as Alice bent over and lifted what appeared to be the badly-burned body of a man by the neck. His age was impossible to tell, he was so horrifically scarred, but he was alive and breathing, and he might even have lived.

Then Alice pulled out the knife.

It was at least six inches long, and looked wickedly sharp, with notches carved into the inside of the curve and letters scratched into the blade. It was a weapon designed with only murder in mind.

She bent over the man, and brought his face to hers. As Alice stared into the man's eyes, Jack swore he saw her lips move, though he could discern no sound above the crackling of flames.

Then, with a quick slash, the nameless man's throat split open, spraying blood in short bursts. Alice looked at her kill one last time, before standing up and walking back to and past the group. She didn't seem to care that all three of them were watching her, that the expression on Jack's face was one of obvious shock and revulsion.

The three stood there for a few seconds, and Jack tried to figure out what to tell his team and why he had screwed up, since he had obviously done so, in hiring a psychopath. Thankfully, Andrew broke the silence first, stating what Jack figured the whole group must be feeling: “I was going to ask you if we could get some sleep soon, but now, I'm not so sure.”