Saturday, February 22, 2014

The GMO Killerz

The following tale is the first installment of several tales of horror I am offering up for public perusal.  I will post everything people say about this good or bad so long it is not just personal attacks.

This first tale is about a sadistic little beauty,  two drunken detectives, a mad scientific, a set of giant mongoloid twins, and a two-headed hunchback dwarf and a remote viewer.  All linked to a biological soup that turns people in to DNA zombies.  I hope you like it.




The GMO Killerz



By

Rick Carufel


© Rick Carufel 2013 all rights reserved




Prologue

Myron did not intend to murder his wife when he sat down to dinner. Lucille had made one of his favorite dishes, spaghetti and meatballs with her wonderful, made-from-scratch pasta sauce. The thought never crossed his mind. He loved his wife and had been happily married for twenty-nine years. They had two great kids, who were away at college, and were planning their dream vacation to Maui.
The problem was the TV. There was one particular telemarketer for some sort of cookware who was, Myron thought, from Australia. He had a very annoying accent, and his way of pronouncing his E's as I's was particularly grating on Myron's nerves. This commercial ran constantly and it was not unusual for the same advertisement to play over and over during a single show. It was when this intrusive telemarketer, with his annoying accent, said 'iggs' instead of 'eggs' that it finally got to Myron in some inexplicable way and caused the problem.
Myron and Lucille were eating in front of the TV, as was their custom, and the commercial came on. Myron tried to brace himself for the sound of the dreaded 'iggs' but all he could do was tremble. Over the past few days this commercial had, for some unknown reason, caused Myron to react violently to the sound of that particular word and each time the word had been spoken, Myron felt his control slipping away.
'Iggs' was spoken four times during the course of the commercial and with each utterance the pressure within Myron began to build. He felt that if he heard 'iggs' one more time, his brain would explode.
Upon the first voicing, Myron began to shake violently. On the second, he began to have some sort of seizure. By the third, Myron was bleeding from the nose and ears, his head rolling back and forth on the headrest of his Lazy-boy while he moaned softly, "No....no..."
With the fourth and final verbalization, Myron was quiet, seeming to have regained his composure, much to the relief of Lucille who had been sitting in her Lazy-boy, agog at Myron's display, a forkful of meatball halfway to her mouth. She had feared he was having a stroke.
Whether he had suffered stroke or not was never determined.
"Honey! Are you all right?" asked Lucille.
"I'm fine, dear," replied Myron as he rose from his chair and moved towards his wife. In one fluid motion, he grasped his wife's mid-way-to-the-mouth hand with the forkful of meatball and rammed it into her forehead, deep enough to pierce the skull. He then picked up her steak knife — she had a habit of putting out knives, forks and spoons for every meal, even with a bowl of cereal — and, using the fork as a handle, he pulled his beloved's head backwards and proceeded to saw off her head.
Lucille's lap dog, Pinky, a Pomer-Poo, sensed something was wrong and proceeded to attack Myron's ankles. Myron had never liked this dog, its name or its breed. Without pause from his sawing, he lifted one foot and proceeded to stomp Pinky into a mass of bloody fur and red gore.
Finished with his grisly task, he set down the steak knife and went to the bathroom on the second floor. After placing his bloodied clothes in the hamper, he showered, shaved, brushed his hair, and then dressed in his best suit. Appearing perfectly groomed, he went to the night stand and took the small Beretta, used for Lucille's protection, and placed it in his jacket pocket.
In the garage, he collected a few cans of starter fluid, a BBQ lighter, a small cordless cut-off saw, a machete, a filet knife from his tackle box and an old .45 automatic that he'd kept in his tool box with plans to restore it to new condition at some future date. After dropping these items in a deep attaché case, along with his laptop and iPhone, Myron placed them in the trunk of his car, opened the garage door and drove off.

Chapter One

The police are baffled in a way that is different from their usual befuddled state of mind. They are not baffled because of ineptitude or incompetence but because of the appalling brutality and apparent senselessness of the acts. There has been a string of grisly murders across the city of St. Paul and they have absolutely no leads. They are further confounded by the fact that in each case there is also a person missing from the home where the murders have taken place. All of the murders have a few similarities, but do not and cannot point to a serial killer. Several factors eliminate that possibility. First and foremost, it has been determined that some of the murders were committed simultaneously in different parts of town. Some sort of cult was initially considered, but that has been ruled out because cults always leave a message and there have been no messages connected to the murders.
Apart from the missing household members, all the murders took place in the living room, committed with whatever weapon was readily to hand in the room, and each attack resulted in severe mutilation of the victim. It appeared that all of the murders occurred while the victims were having dinner in front of the television. The press is running with this particular fact and is spinning a story of a mass murderer whom they call "The TV Dinner Killer." The police have the advantage of knowing the murders were done by different killers, which allows them to weed out the usual crank calls from would-be detectives - certain they have solved the crimes - to the mentally ill, who always call in to confess to media-hyped crimes.
The police have received some concrete tips from callers, which has only compounded the confusion. Witnesses have reported seeing several of the missing persons leaving the crime scene after the murders. This makes little sense to the police in general, and particularly to the unlucky two detectives who are charged with leading the investigation.

"If the perps are the missing people, how can they all commit virtually the same crime in the same way and around the same time?" asks Lt. Det. Jimmy Peterson.
"Fuck if I know," replies his partner, Maude Olsen. "I can't wrap my head around this one."
"We need to come up with something; they just found two more bodies this morning. Same M.O. and preliminary indications are same time of death."
"Shit, it's starting to look like all the murders happened at the same time."
"That's right, Oly. We're up to seventeen so far and you can bet your grandma's patootie there are more we haven't discovered yet."
"I wish you were wrong about that."
"You and I both know there's a chance some of the bodies won't be discovered for weeks, months even."
"You really know how to cheer a girl up, don't you?"
Peterson shakes his head and thinks, 'I'm getting too fucking old for this shit.'

Jimmy Peterson has been on the force for far too long. The job has ruined his marriage, ruined his health, and ruined his life in general. Like so many other career cops, the job has been too demanding for him to have a real life beyond it. This is particularly true for homicide detectives. He started out ready to right the wrongs and save the world, and now he can barely save himself. He is fifty-eight and looks ten years older. He is seventy pounds overweight with high cholesterol, hypertension and bad knees. He is seven years from retirement and every day he wonders if he will make it. The last thing he needs is to have a case like this dumped on him.

Lena Whycke is cold and wet. She has no idea why she is sitting in the bushes on the property of a state senator from Wisconsin. The last few days are like a dream, blurry and surreal, with flashes of terrible carnage. She remembers sitting down to dinner with her dad in the living room watching TV as they ate. Then something very bad happened and from then on, everything went hazy.

The senator drives up to his house and gets out of the car, which he parks under the portico adjacent to the side entrance of his large home. He catches a movement out of the corner of his eye. He turns and sees a young girl, no more than sixteen or so, wearing a Catholic school uniform. She is a lovely little thing with large blue eyes and blonde hair. She is soaked from the light rain and shivering.
"Are you all right dear?" asks the senator.
In response to his question, she lifts her plaid skirt, revealing she is naked beneath and says," There's something inside me, it hurts."
While the senator stands there, shocked and speechless, she reaches between her legs and pulls a small automatic pistol from her vagina. It is bloody, since she was a virgin before she jammed it into herself. She raises the gun and shoots the senator in the face. He falls back against the car and slides to the ground. She hits him on the left cheek and his face collapses in ruins. His jaw is detached, hanging down at an askew angle beneath a gaping wound. He is still conscious but dazed, and watches as she approaches. She shoots again and again, six times in all, until the senator's head is nothing but gore. She then takes the gun and methodically beats the savaged head over and over until there is nothing left. What once was a human is now a body with a piece of spine sticking out of the remains of the neck. Lena takes her gun and replaces it in her vagina and as she does, a shot is discharged that travels up through her body's soft tissue and lodges in her throat. She is already dead when she hits the ground.

Ben Rallo of the Department of Homeland Security is not happy. Something is going on that could soon spin way out of control. Disturbing reports are coming in from Minnesota and Wisconsin, reports that give the powers-that-be nightmares. There have been a string of related murders in St. Paul, all connected in some way, but executed by separate perpetrators who have no connection to each other that can be found thus far. But there is more. Ben has just gotten off the phone with an agent in Wisconsin who has reported a bizarre killing/suicide that involves a senator. Another report involves the murder of a prominent wealthy Republican official and a twelve year old boy - another murder/suicide with the boy as the killer. Very disturbing. Some action needs to be taken quickly to prevent the independent news agencies from running with this. The mainstream media is basically controlled, but the indies and alternatives are not and are constantly looking to make one government agency or another look bad.
Ben can already feel this is one of those situations where careers are going to be made and destroyed before there is some resolution in the matter. The fat cats are already screaming for answers – answers that are sorely lacking.

"Shit, Shit, Shit!' says Jimmy as he pounds on the steering wheel of his department car.
"This really puts the screws to us now, doesn't it Jimmy?" asks Oly.
"Fuckin' right it does. What in the hell is going on?"
Jimmy and Oly have just heard some very bad news. A report has come in on their radio that links the murder/suicide of a prominent senator with a missing school girl from one of the murder scenes in St. Paul. It would seem that the young girl left her home after the murder of her father, then went to the senator's home in Wisconsin and killed him and herself. Jimmy doesn't like this one bit. With many other killers on the loose from the known murders in St. Paul, this could be the start of a very ugly trend.
"I need a fuckin' drink; this case is gonna kill me," says Jimmy as he pulls up to a bar. "You coming?"
"I think this is gonna be a very long and horrible case that will require many a medicinal beverage before it's done," says Oly as she gets out of the car.

Maude Olsen, aka 'Oly', is forty. She looks younger and has piercing green eyes and light brown hair. She is attractive enough but plays it down. She clothes her trim body in baggy attire and tries to conceal her lovely figure. She's been dating the same guy, a corn farmer, for many years and they are both comfortable with the relationship. She has her own place in the Twin Cities, and goes out to the farm on weekends, when she has time off.
She has worked on the force for ten years and has been Jimmy's partner for eight. She is an avid reader of murder mysteries and thrillers, and loves the challenge of solving murders for a living. She comes from a police family with a brother, her dad, and two uncles on different forces in nearby cities. Only she is a detective.

They enter the tavern and sit at the bar. The TV is on and there is a news report of another killing/suicide, this time with a prominent Republican businessman and a twelve year old boy. The boy was the killer.
"…..and the circumstances around this tragedy are still sketchy, but it's clear the young boy is the killer. After he apparently chopped a gaping hole in Republican Evan Miller's chest, he then chopped off both his own feet with the same hatchet. This unbelievable story is just the latest in a series of maniacally savage murders that have taken place in the Twin Cities in just the past few days. This is Amy Holmes for KTPP news, Minneapolis."
"Great! Another happy little story to brighten our day. Scotch, a double," orders Jimmy, as he seats himself on the barstool.
"Same here," says Oly.
"Boy, ain't dees here murders sumtin'?" asks the barkeep as he pours generous amounts into two glasses.
"I'll say. They got us pulling our hair out," says the mostly bald Jimmy.
"Enough to drive ya' ta drink, I tell ya'," says Oly as she throws back her double. "More."

While the detectives are having a liquid lunch, things are getting grim at the station. The chief is being pressured by the mayor; the mayor is being pressured by the governor, who in turn is being questioned by the feds.
"Sorry, Mayor, criminal investigations don't work that way. I don't care who is demanding some break in the case, it doesn't just happen because a bunch of politicians feel a few votes are threatened. Nothing is going to happen until we find out more about this, no matter how many people wish it would. The best thing to do is to stop wasting my time with phone calls when I got more important things to do than listen to whining politicians," says Chief Lewis, and hangs up. He thinks, 'Boy it felt good hanging up on that bastard', and smiles.
He has done everything he can to get some perspective on this case, but it is going very slowly. With no motives for the killings and no links to the deaths, there is little to do but wait. He has everyone available working the case. He has been on the phone and is coordinating with the FBI and DHS. They, too, have contributed all their resources and nobody is getting anywhere. There are just too many wild-cards to get a handle on this thing. The count is now up to twenty-three murders in the homes, with two more murders linked to the original twenty-three and two suicides. At least the suicides, as terrible as they are, end any further murders by the two kids. He dreads to think where this whole thing will end up.

Chapter Two

Although Dr. Lev Neiman works for the Satanos Corporation, a multinational GMO conglomerate that makes the most deadly poisons on the planet, he is first an agent of the Israeli government. He was recruited as a teen and the Israelis paid for his education in genetic engineering. Sent to America, he studied at M.I.T. Before graduating with honors, he had been recruited by Satanos, which was exactly what his handlers in Israel wanted. He is now a lead researcher at the Satanos facility, east of Morehead, Minnesota.
On the surface, the Morehead facility consists of a few warehouses and some test fields for GMO crops, but beneath the warehouses is a vast underground complex that is the heart of the Satanos Corporation. It houses the main research complex that hides all the dark secrets that go with unrestricted genetic research. Here are all the chimeras and abominations, the result of decades of genetic experimentation gone awry. Some of the monstrosities have been created under contracts from the US government, most have not. Some are so aberrant from the norm that even the government will insist upon their immediate destruction, if they become aware of them.
But many things go on here that few know about beyond the actual research teams. One particularly secretive team is led by Dr. Neiman. His team has gone beyond the manipulation of the physical form and delves into the manipulation of organisms through the use of programmable DNA chains. Lev and his masters in Israeli intelligence want to be able to manipulate the actions and behavior of organisms on their cue. They basically want, with the introduction of chemical agents into certain segments of populations, to absolutely control them.
Animal tests have been less than rewarding. Mostly the animals, even chimps, don't have the cognitive ability to exhibit changes in the mental makeup beyond behavioral changes, usually of the extremely violent kind. So Neiman and his team have resorted to testing human subjects. These are mostly volunteers who have answered ads in the newspapers for subjects to participate in a study in behavioral modifications.
Although Satanos has no qualms about creating genetic monsters in the name of research, they are sticklers when it comes to human testing.

"The investigation of Lena and the senator has yielded some further evidence into the circumstances of this bizarre case," announces Chief Lewis during the morning briefing.
"It now appears that Lena Whycke not only murdered her father by digging a hole through his chest you can put your hand through, with a fork, but then went on to kill Senator Thompson and herself. The new evidence from her home shows that she showered and dressed in clean clothes after the slaying. After further examination of the other crime scenes, we've discovered this is the case with all the murders. We have not investigated the whole crime scene in each case beyond the room of the crime, but now have noticed several things.
"First, from an examination of the bloody clothes, we have found it would appear that each killer had experienced minor bleeding from the nose and ears prior to the crimes.
"Secondly, from statements by other household members who were absent at the time of the murders, certain items were taken by the killers before they vanished. Laptops and smart phones are reported missing, as well as weapons and combustible fluids. The fact that weapons and flammables were taken from each crimes scene means, I'm afraid, that we can expect more killings before this thing is over.
"The Whycke autopsy revealed that she fired her weapon while replacing it into her vagina, apparently where she had concealed it. It is unclear whether the weapon was intentionally fired or not. So we will have to assume the worst - that it was accidental, and she may have gone on to commit more killings had she not shot herself."

"What a lovely briefing we had this morning, eh?" asks Oly facetiously.
"One of the best by the Chief since the I-35 collapsed," agrees Jimmy.
"Now we've got armed and extremely dangerous —what, twenty-two? — perps running around ready to kill again and maybe again and again."
"Correct, partner, so we should be tripping over suspects to haul in."
"Except they all seem to have fallen off the map except for the schoolgirl with the loaded sausage wallet and the kid with the hatchet."
"Must you be so crude this early in the day? It gives me acid stomach."
"It couldn't be from the gallon of coffee and half a pack of cigs before nine, could it?"
"Never; they just help hone my investigative skills to a razor's edge."
"Well what do these amazing investigative skills lead us to on this fine morning?"
"Squat, nada, I got nothing, you?"
"The same. But I was thinking that the schoolgirl had to have gotten to where she was at the senator's place somehow, and the missing car and other stuff from her house haven't turned up yet, so I suggest we head across the river and snoop around the area of the senator's house."
"That's outside our jurisdiction, you know."
"All agencies involved have promised full cooperation in the investigation; that means, luv, we can go snoop around."

The senator's home is located in rural Wisconsin, amid pastoral farms and wooded areas near Arcadia. It's a two hour, 125 mile drive from St. Paul, so Peterson figures Lena had to have a car stashed nearby. Although there are not a lot of roads on the maps of the area, there are many unmarked dirt roads that run between farm fields used by the locals. These take time to find and explore but after several hours the detectives get lucky. They find a Buick that is registered to the deceased Mr. Whycke.
"Well, Oly, looks like yer hunch paid off. I knew there was a reason I keep you around," says Peterson with a grin.
"Let's get out and see what's to be seen."
They get out and look around. It has been drizzling for two days so most of the area around the car is clue-free. The car is unlocked and the keys are in the ignition. Oly opens the driver-side door and sees a gym bag on the passenger seat and a blood stain on the seat.
"Look, Jimmy, she must have driven here with the gun shoved up inside herself. Why would she do that? It must have been very painful."
"Forensics said there had been some sort of event that caused the nose and ears to bleed before the murders. Do you think we've got some kind of biological terrorist attack that makes people go mental and kill?"
"It's safe to say these people are deviating from their normal behavior after their incidents."
"Geez, this shit gets creepier and creepier."
"Don't it? Suppose they put sometin' in the water and it takes a longer time to affect some than others?"
"Christ, don't say that, Oly; you know how much coffee I drink everyday?"
"Enough so's we have to stop and let you piss every twenty minutes."
"So I think we can rule out poison in the water."
"I s'pose."
After snapping on some rubber gloves, Oly takes the keys out of the ignition. She opens the trunk and is astonished by what she finds.
Lena Whycke had lived alone with her dad. She was an only child and her mom had died a few years earlier when she was hit by a snowmobile while walking the dog. Therefore, there was no one to tell the police that Mr. Whycke was an avid hunter and had a large collection of guns.
"Wow," says Jimmy as he comes around the car. "She was loaded for bear. There's gotta be fifty guns there."
"Along with a few cans of gunpowder, some lighter fluid, and her laptop and iphone."
"I think it's safe to assume she shot herself accidentally and had plans for more killings."
"That looks like a fair assumption at this point. We'd better call Lewis and give him the good news."

Chief Lewis is having a very bad day. The call from Peterson was bad enough but now the feds are freaking over the possible terrorist attack on the water supply that the detectives have already ruled out. They are talking about quarantining St. Paul and putting up roadblocks. That would be disastrous. People will panic, people will die.

Mitch Baldwin just keeps driving, not knowing or caring where he is going. He had been sitting at home with his brother, watching ESPN, having a few beers, when something happened, something very bad. A commercial had come on and he'd felt a pressure building behind his eyes. The man in the commercial had said an uncommon word several times and Mitch had blacked out. He had snapped out of it just long enough to calmly go over to his brother, who was sitting on the couch, and jam his Budweiser long neck beer bottle into his brother's mouth with such force that the neck protruded from the back of his head. Then he went to shower and change, loaded the car and drove away.
Mitch has finally reached his destination. He doesn't know whose home it is, but it appears to be affluent. He goes to the trunk of his car and gets a garden sprayer he has filled with kerosene and a flare. He walks around the house, spraying as though for insects. Once he has completed a full circuit of the house he puts the sprayer back in the trunk and pulls out a Samurai sword. He kicks in the door of the house and enters the dining room where a family of four is eating. He attacks the nearest person, a boy of twelve or so, and chops down on his shoulder making a savage wound several inches deep. The father rushes him and Mitch slices his lower belly open. His intestines fall to the floor. By now the wife and teenage daughter are against the far wall, screaming. He slashes the mother in the side so deeply that the sword hits her spine. As she falls, he turns to the teen and swings low, catching her below the knees, severing one leg and lodging the blade in the other. All members of the family are still alive when he goes to the door and lights the ring of kerosene around the house. They all live long enough to fall victim to the flames that soon engulf their home.

It takes the authorities a day to determine that the fire was not only arson but murder. The charred remains take a while to identify and examine. The home was the property of one Owen Smellson, 54, geneticist. He was among the victims as well as his wife Natalie, 42, and their children Kimberly, 17, and Ben, 11. They had been hacked up and then burned alive.

Dr. Neiman is pleased with the results of his latest human test. He has been able to inject programmed DNA into an alcoholic to end his addiction to booze and make him love chocolate ice cream, something he disliked before the test. He has also secretly encoded a specific behavior the subject is to perform once he leaves the test site in Minneapolis. Equipped with a tiny gun that will inject a drug, he is to use it on twenty-four random people on the street. The injections are needle-less; the gun employs compressed air to blast the drug into the skin. The recipient of the injection will only feel a bump from the man and never know an injection has been administered.
The injection is a complex chain of DNA that, once activated, compels the victim to perform a complex task, in this case to dial a phone number. From there, Neiman will give them further instructions that they are compelled to follow. This is by far the most complex coding ever used to date. Neiman has secretly used the Satanos supercomputer to grind the numbers for over a year. His only regret is that he will never receive the recognition he believes he deserves for this breakthrough research in behavioral modification at a molecular level.

Little does Dr. Neiman realize his experiment has already spun out of control with horrifying consequences.

Chapter Three

Marissa is in downtown St. Paul, heading home from school -- she is a student at St. Catherine University -- when the drunk who has been altered by Dr. Neiman pricks her with the genetic soup.
She feels the bump and wants to murder the drunk on the spot. But she controls herself. She doesn't like going to the loony bin, as she calls it, and knows she will be able to find him later, in one of the homeless areas, to settle the score.

The genetic soup doesn't quite affect Marissa as it does the others. She already has serious chemical imbalances in her brain which is the reason for her aberrant behavior. Therefore, when she sits down for dinner with her drunken mother in front of the TV, she is fully aware of what is happening.
She feels a compulsion to make a phone call. She does, not because she must, but out of curiosity. She wants to know what is causing this inexplicable urge and where did this number come from in her head? She gets her cell phone, complete with all the extras, and sets it to record the call, save the number and trace the location.
The call rings a phone in the private lab of Dr. Neiman. He answers quickly, eager to instruct another of his genetic zombies to kill.
"Hello?" he answers coyly, well aware he has one of the twenty-four on the line.
"Hello," says Marissa, speaking in a neutral voice. She doesn't want to offer any information, not even from her tone.
Dr. Neiman mistakes her response as subservience and goes into his spiel.
"You have called this number because you have been chosen to participate in a great experiment. You will forget everything I tell you but still follow your instructions to the letter. You will go about your everyday life as normal. Your instructions will be triggered by a keyword you will hear as you watch television. Your keyword will be Shamu. When you hear this word repeated three times, you will kill whomever you are with. You will collect all the weapons in your home and put them into whatever car is available. You will shower and dress in your best clothes and then drive to the home of the state senator from the sixth district and kill everyone there. You will gather whatever cash you can find and drive to the Best Western Select on Pilot Hill Road in South St. Paul where you will wait for further orders. Do you understand?"
"Yes," replies Marissa. She plays along to give her phone app enough time to get a direct lock on the caller's location. She thinks it was a good thing to subjugate one of the computer geeks at school to get her phone loaded with all sorts of custom apps. Somehow she knew it would come in handy, sooner or later, to own a geek.
"Repeat your orders to me," says Neiman. She does as requested and the doctor hangs up.
She activates the tracking app and sure enough, it has pin-pointed the location of the call to somewhere near Fargo.

Marissa is a very disturbed young woman. She has been in and out of institutions since she was eleven years old. That was when a drug addict tried to rape her and ended up nearly dying because little Marissa used a razor on his genitals. He had lost both testicles and his penis no longer resembled anything more than a tube of skin that constantly oozed urine. She was a victim in that case, but due to the horrendous damage she inflicted upon her assailant, she was remanded to a mental institution for ninety days observation. During that time, several patients made the mistake of touching her. One lost an eye from a pencil Marissa had been holding at the time. Another lost a finger she bit off. A third was beaten unconscious with a food tray. After that the patients stayed away from her.
The doctors were at a loss when trying to diagnose her problems. Outwardly she was a sweet, polite eleven year-old. She was tiny and looked like a little elf. She answered all their questions and was completely co-operative. But sometimes, something would trigger her, and she would become a raging maniac intent on murder.
After six months she was released. This was mostly due to the patients spreading the word to never try to touch her and the staff already knowing better.
The doctors had no clue as to what was going on inside of Marissa. They hadn't realized she was a pathological liar, well aware she was deceiving them all.
Early on she realized she liked to inflict pain and suffering. Before the attempted rape, she had tortured her school mates. They were so terrorized by her that none had said anything about their torments.
She would use pins and sewing needles to inflict intense pain on them in ways that would not leave any outward signs. She would find smaller children she could physically overpower and force them into an abandoned gas station near the school. Once there, she would tie their hands and use her pins and needles on their most tender areas. She worked fast, as any delay in their arrival home after school would cause suspicion. She quickly became a master of the fifteen minute torture session. She was able to cause a lot of pain in fifteen minutes.
She would straddle her young victims as they lay on the floor with their hands tied behind them, and use her toys on the inside of their mouths or nostrils. It excited her to see them buck in agony beneath her. In the beginning, she was too young to realize that she was being sexually aroused by the agonized thrashing and the screams. She learned about sexual pleasure from watching her mother couple with various men, and soon put two and two together. Once she had that figured out, her tortures became much worse for her victims.
She began to experiment with her "toys", her pins and needles, and soon was able to make her tiny victims do anything she wished, in order to avoid further torture. But it was never enough and it always ended in pain.
She demanded tribute from her victims, forcing them to steal money from their parents. Graduating from mere pinpricks in the mouth and nose, she found that needles inserted and moved around under the arms or in the groin area caused much more pain. She chose areas of the body that would not be evident to the parents, without great embarrassment to the children. She inflicted savage torture to their genitalia and anal regions and the outward results were nothing but an occasional red dot.
The rape had been set up by her. She had fantasized about slicing up an adult; in particular, the testicles fascinated her. She couldn't understand why they were so sensitive and why the little boys screamed so when she pierced them with her toys. The girls were easier to hurt within the folds of their genitals where it was easy to conceal pin pricks, but the boys would sometimes faint from the agony of a needle to the testicle. She wanted to find out if this was the same for grown men. So she had let the junkie see her pull down her pants to pee in an alley and then lingered to talk about drugs and sex with him. He was very high and soon concluded she was offering to have sex with him. This was true, but as soon as he pulled down his pants to let her suck him, as she had asked, she had gone at him with the straight razor she had bought with some extorted money. After he was sliced up good, she took off her panties, smeared some of his blood on them and on the inside of her legs, and ran for the police. The junkie had nearly died and she was institutionalized for six months.
When she later returned home to her drunken mother, she picked up where she had left off, much to the horror of her victims.
She did very well extorting and torturing her schoolmates. They not only provided her with entertainment and pocket money, but also did all her homework.
As time passed, she occasionally had run-ins with the authorities, usually for ultra-violent assaults. By the time she reached her current age of nineteen, she had been to the mental hospital on five more occasions, once for killing a girl who had attempted to take her leather jacket. Fortunately for Marissa, witnesses stated she had been attacked by the girl who had wielded a board. They said she had grabbed the board in self defense and killed her assailant. Because Marissa received a minor concussion from the first few blows, it had been ruled she was in a dazed state at the time she killed her assailant; however, due to the extreme brutality involved, she was admitted for observation. As before, she was able to completely deceive the doctors. She led them to believe she would simply black-out when attacked and only come to her senses when the threat was motionless.

Dr Neiman is ecstatic; he is soaring on transports of power and glory. He envisions himself as a puppet-master, choreographing events on a global scale, manipulating behind the scenes to make the world run as he sees fit. He can hardly contain his pleasure with himself and calls in his young secretary. He secretly used his cocktail on James early on, and the young man has been a virtual slave ever since.
"You called me, sir?" asks the attractive young man.
"Yes," says Neiman. "I need you to remove your clothes."
"What?" asks James, in shock.
"Oh, I'm sorry -- Geico," commands Neiman, and James immediately begins to disrobe.
"I want you to slowly suck me as if it were your god you are worshiping, and be sure to swallow every last drop when he graces you with his sacrament."

Chapter Four

Marissa plans to visit the person who phoned her to demonstrate the error of trying to force her to do something she doesn't want to do. She fixes dinner for her mother and herself. Her mother has stopped screwing half the neighborhood but drinks more than ever. Amazingly, she has managed to hold down her job as a bookkeeper at an auto dealership all these years in order to pay the bills and never run out of booze.
Her mother sits in front of the television set every night, drinking herself into oblivion, never eating until Marissa prepares a meal. She is the only person in the world whom Marissa loves, and would never hurt.
Tonight she has made goulash for the two of them. After fixing the plates, she brings them into the living room and sits down in front of the television with her mom. Marissa decides that after her mother has fallen into a drunken slumber, she will return to her own apartment to have some fun with her human toys. She will call one of her many victims, and make the chosen one come to her for some torture.
They commence eating and a commercial comes on. As the salesman starts to say Shamu--the same word the man on the phone told her to listen for-- she feels a nearly uncontrollable urge to get up and kill her mother. Due to her already altered brain chemistry, she is able to resist. Instead of wanting to kill her mother, she turns the urge into rage. Rage at the voice on the phone, rage at the drunk in the street that she somehow blames too.
The urge is very strong and she sits and shudders with rage for several minutes after the commercial is over. Then she calmly cleans up the dinner plates, takes them to the kitchen and washes them, goes into the living room, kisses her mother goodnight and is out the door to her apartment a few blocks away.
Tonight she plans to torture her geek. He has information she needs and he will have a huge erection she can ride if she tortures him in just the right way.
Marissa has turned out to be a stunning young lady with a shock of wild black hair and light blue eyes. Her body is amazing from her obsessive running and workouts. She is only five feet tall and weighs a mere hundred pounds, but is extremely fast and vicious in a fight. Few women or men would last long in a fight with her.
When she gets to her place, she orders the geek to come right over and bring his laptop.
The geek, Ben, arrives within fifteen minutes and is surprised that he is not ordered to strip and be tied up when he arrives.
Instead she instructs him to set up his laptop and do some research for her.
"Ben, I want to find this motherfucker on the phone," she says, "He tried to order me to kill my mother. Can you imagine anyone trying to order me? I want his balls," she says as Ben frantically searches for the information connected to the phone number. He knows full well her history and has no doubt that she means to have this man's testicles, literally. He finds some curious information. The phone is a land line that belongs to the Satanos Corporation. Specifically, in the laboratory of one Dr. Lev Neiman at a facility in Moorehead.
After a little more delving, Ben has a bio on Neiman. A biochemist and geneticist.
"Nice work! Perhaps I'll let you ejaculate tonight after your punishment," says Marissa as she orders him to strip and gets out her toys.
As she tortures Ben and takes her pleasure from him, she thinks about the drunk and how she will kill him tonight. The urge to kill has not been canceled in her, just re-directed. After she keeps her promise to Ben and permits his relief, she makes him dress and drive her to areas where the homeless hang out.
After an hour or so she spots the drunk. He is sitting against a concrete abutment eating a quart of chocolate ice cream. As she approaches, he looks up without fear at this tiny beauty approaching him, dressed in a tiny black dress and leather jacket.
Far too late he realizes she means him harm. She gets close enough to unleash a vicious kick to the side of his head that nearly knocks him out. She then reaches into a hidden pocket in her jacket and pulls out a long needle, nearly a foot long. The kick has stunned him so she has no problem opening his pants and plunging the needle through both testicles. He screams and tries to tear the needle free. But Marissa has a firm hold on it, and in one swift move, jerks it free and plunges it into his open, screaming mouth, up through his pallet and into his brain. He becomes very calm after the first jab and she casually plunges it into his brain several times more to insure that even should he survive, he will be a vegetable for the rest of his pathetic life.
She wipes her weapon on his shirt and replaces it in her jacket.
She jumps back into Ben's car and tells him to drive to the Holiday Inn.

After violating his secretary, and instructing him to forget everything that was done to him, Dr Neiman sits and ponders what his next move should be. He had previously ordered the twelve year old boy to chop off his own feet to test just how deeply he could control with his genetic soup. Clearly his control has proven itself. He had not planned what to do with his subjects at first, but on the spur of the moment decided to have them murder not only loved ones, but also political and community figures who were staunch opponents to genetic engineering. Now there are twenty-two of them holed up at the Holiday Inn, awaiting further orders. To what use can he put them? Could he somehow use them to manipulate the Board of Satanos so he can gain control of it?

At the Holiday Inn Select, Marissa gets a room and pays cash. She uses an alias so the man on the phone will have no way to link her to a room if he happens to know her name. For some reason the night manager seems nervous.
"Is there something wrong?" asks Marissa.
"I wouldn't say wrong but I have been getting people checking in, not knowing how long they will be staying, same as you. I find it a bit odd that so many don't know how long they are staying with us. It makes scheduling reservations difficult," says the manager.
"Well, how many people do you have here that don't know how long they're staying?"
"Unfortunately, over twenty."
"Is that an unusual amount?"
"Oh yes, usually it is never more than one or two."
"How long have they been staying?"
"The first came in just two days ago; since then, more have been trickling in, you being the last. But I must say that you are the most talkative of the lot."
"What do you mean?"
"Most of them seem drugged, almost vacant. They say the absolute minimum to get the room and engage in no polite conversation."
"Indeed, and they give no reason why they don't know how long they will be staying?"
"When asked, they say they are waiting for someone."
"Who are they waiting for?"
"They don't know. That's the part that creeps me out."
"Are any of these people in the bar or restaurant?"
"No, none of them have left their rooms."

Chapter Five

Ben Rallo is at his wit's end. So far he has reports of twenty-eight ghastly murders, two suicides and twenty-two missing persons, all suspects in the murders. To top that off, three of the victims are prominent political figures and all the crimes have occurred in the same area in the upper mid-west, centered around St. Paul, Minnesota.
Unbelievable pressure is being brought to bear, from agency heads down, to figure this mess out.
Ben hasn't had more than six hours sleep in the four days since this crisis began. He's drunk way too much coffee and eaten mostly antacids for meals; his stomach still feels as if it is on fire. He has a splitting headache he's been treating with handfuls of aspirin, further aggravating his stomach.
The car the two St Paul detectives previously found, used by the dead schoolgirl, has been the only break in the case so far, and that was far from good news. The girl had been armed for bear and it appeared her self-inflicted gunshot wound was accidental. She wouldn't have needed fifty guns if she had planned to kill just the senator and then herself.
This is definitely a terrorist attack of some sort; the choice of the secondary victims leaves no room for doubt.
He hates to do it, but he is going to have to call in some of the real spooks that work for the government. He has little faith in remote viewers but they have proved, over time, to have an amazing track record of coming up with valid information. These people make him very uncomfortable on both a professional and personal level.
Rallo finally makes the call to get the remote viewers on the case. He faxes everything they have thus far and sits down to wait for their report. He has another meal of coffee, aspirins and antacids and within two minutes he is asleep at his desk.

Gerald Richter is a real jerk. He is rude, arrogant, ill-tempered, unkempt and grossly obese. He is the type of person who is repulsive by nature. He does have one redeeming grace. He is the best remote viewer in the world today. He lives with his mother and sister who, because of his huge salary from the US government, wait on him hand and foot. They are, in fact, his paid servants. He is on twenty-four hour call by the government, for which he is paid very well.
The call he gets from his handler at the CIA is urgent. He is to fly to Minneapolis in the helicopter that lands on his lawn before he is even off the phone. He lives in an area of Virginia he has determined to be the least likely to suffer some sort of catastrophic event in his lifetime.
When they arrive four hours later he is in a surly mood. They have thus far refused to divulge why he is desperately needed in Minnesota. He demands food --lots of food--and refuses to talk with Rallo until the food arrives. He enjoys forcing people to watch him pig out while they are trying to talk business; it makes him feel superior, like a king feasting while his subjects beg for help.
"So what is this great emergency that has dragged me from the comfort of my home, Rallo?"
"It looks like we have some sort of terrorist attack going on, but we can't get any traction in the case," responds Rallo, as he watches in disgust as Richter stuffs himself.
"So you need my help to figure out what you and your people can't?"
"Obviously, or we wouldn't have sent for you would we?"
Rallo has known Richter less than ten minutes and already he is developing an intense dislike for the man.
"So I'll need the locations of the crimes, some drawing tablets, several felt tip pens, and a metronome."
"A metronome?"
"Yes, you know, one of those devices that musicians use to keep the beat."
"I know what a metronome is I just wonder why you need it."
"If you must know, I use it to concentrate on the subject I am trying to view."
"I’ll see that you get everything you need. How long do you think this will take?”
“That depends on several things. Clearly you have multiple targets, each with one or more factors to consider. We could get lucky in a day or two or it could take weeks. It’s all a matter of chance.”
Rallo decides to cater to Richter’s every need until he gets what he needs from him, then he will get him out the door as fast as possible. He only hopes that this remote-viewing business won't take more than a day or two. He dislikes this mumbo-jumbo remote-viewing crap. It seems too much like voodoo to him and makes him feel very uneasy; but so do the murders.

Dr. Neiman has come down from his delusions of grandeur enough to concoct a plan to use his new, godlike power. The first few killings he ordered were of staunch opponents of GMO's. They were outspoken and had specifically targeted Satanos as an evil that needed to be eradicated. Granted there had been some damaging research into the effects of certain GM crops, but that is always the case when a new field of research is opened up.
Now he intends to target not only the Israeli Mossad, but also a few stock-holders in the Satanos Corporation. He plans to have a few of them killed and then blame one of his zombies, indicating that he is a member of a terrorist organization who is out to kill all the major players in the Satanos corporation. Meanwhile he intends to quietly offer to relieve some of the more flighty board members of their stock in the company, at a discounted price of course. He will explain that things have to be done quietly and out of the public eye, otherwise the public will get the impression that stockholders are running scared and the stock will crash.
Neiman knows that his handlers from Israel must be the first to go. Having been a trusted agent for over twenty years, regularly feeding them intel about the genetic research conducted by Satanos, he has been privy to many secrets of the Mossad. He is aware that all the operations in Canada and the Midwestern United States are run out of an office in Minneapolis. He also knows that the staff is small - only six or seven agents. Each of these agents in turn handles a dozen or more spies from which they gather information. He has contact information for them all that will allow him to find their home addresses. Once done, he can eliminate anyone who stands in his way to complete control of Satanos. From there, who knows how far he can go?
Neiman not only has control of his secretary, but most of his staff. Up until now, he has only used James for anything questionable. Now that is going to change. He calls the head of the computer division and has him start tracking all the leads he has on the Mossad agents. All the Satanos staff are top of the line and in a few hours he has all the information he needs to put Phase One of his plan in motion. He delights at the thought of what chaos this will cause with the Israelis. They will be as baffled as the American authorities have been over his test killings.
He decides to have a single killer attack the Mussad office and take out as many as possible at one time. If he has any luck, he will get them all in on shot, if he times it just right. He knows they all gather once a week to compare notes and plan for the coming week. This is usually on a Tuesday morning. He plans to use the same killer, Mitch Baldwin, as he did for the Smellson family.

Mitch is sitting in his hotel room watching TV. He really doesn't know why he is here; he just knows he is waiting for someone important to contact him.
The phone rings and he answers.

Chapter Six

They straggle in one by one. They intentionally try to arrive at different times over the course of two hours. Although their station here in Minneapolis is a cushy assignment, and spying on the Americans simple due to their influence with congress, the Israelis are always cautious. It starts off as every other Tuesday morning meeting. Once they are all gathered they begin to compare notes and discuss their plans for the coming week. They receive their new orders at this time by use of an encrypted Sat-phone. The phone rings and their group leader begins to write down instructions.
Unexpectedly, there is a knock on the door. This does not overly concern them; after all they are in an office building that houses many other businesses besides their front. It is not unusual for them to receive deliveries or for someone to have the wrong suite of offices. The junior member of the group gets up to see who it is. They are in the conference room so he has to go to the outer office to get the door.
When he doesn't return after five minutes, another member of the group goes to check it out. In the outer office he finds the junior member sitting in a chair with his head cleaved from the crown to the base of his neck. The head is split open, each side resting on a shoulder. Before he can say anything, the agent is hit just below the nose with a slash from a samurai sword that cleanly cuts the top two-thirds of his head off.
The sound of his body hitting the floor arouses the suspicions of the remaining five and they investigate with guns drawn.
Mitch is ready for them. He is behind the door and before they have a chance to react he has cut three more down: cutting off a gun arm, slicing one from shoulder to hip and plunging the sword into the heart of the third.
The last two are veteran combatants and don't go down so easily. The eldest of the two gets off a shot that hits Mitch in the upper right chest, puncturing a lung and tearing a chunk of flesh and rib out through his back. This doesn't slow him down and he retaliates with a slash that cuts through the pelvis and slices off the leg and a good portion of the hip and buttocks. The last one shoots twice and hits Mitch in the upper left arm and wrist as he twists to deliver the last slash with his sword that takes off the back two inches of the man's head. Mitch has effectively eliminated the seven Mussad agents in less than six minutes. He picks up his trusty garden sprayer, and sprays everything with kerosene: the bodies, all the files, everything that could provide any information to the police and lights it with a road flare. He leaves the office and takes the elevator to the lobby. When the doors open, he is lying in a pool of blood, unconscious.

The fire Mitch started takes out three floors of the twenty-story office building and takes several hours to get under control. Fortunately, the authorities are summoned very quickly when Mitch is found, by people waiting for the elevator. The paramedics are able to save Mitch and he is treated as a victim of a murder attempt. That is, until Jimmy and Oly start wondering why there is a garden sprayer and a sword in the elevator with Mitch.
"I'm thinking this is the same guy who sliced and diced the Smellsons before he torched them alive," says Jimmy.
"Nice detective work, Sherlock. Was the sword and the sprayer full of kerosene any help with that shrewd deduction?" asks Oly with a sarcastic smirk.
"They may have played some small part in my awesome reasoning."
"Let's hope this guy pulls through and we can talk to him."
"Well he came out of surgery an hour ago and isn't expected to be awake till tomorrow at the earliest."

Dr. Evan Roteng is doing some blood work on the man they have brought in from the crime scene downtown. He notices something unusual in the blood but at first doesn't know what to make of it. It appears to be a strand of genes floating around outside of the usual place in cells.
At first he thinks it is debris from the gunshot wounds that has infiltrated the bloodstream. He has seen such things before, but when he notices a second strand, he decides to investigate. After some work, he isolates the two and places them side by side for comparison. He is shocked to find they are identical. The odds of two gene fragments being exactly the same is astronomical, far beyond any chance of a natural occurrence. This means they are synthetic and have been intentionally introduced into the patient's body.

Word of the injured killer spreads fast through the different levels of law enforcement and is viewed as the first positive break in the case. Chief Lewis orders two men to keep around the clock security on the injured man, who has been identified as Mitch Baldwin, an unemployed construction worker and Iraqi war veteran -- and the chief suspect in the murder of his brother. Based upon the evidence found in the elevator, he is also a good candidate as the killer of the Smellsons.

Director Rallo is happy to see that he won't have to exclusively rely on the loathsome Richter as his only source of info on this case, and hopes this is the break they have been waiting for. The pressure from above has been brutal and he eagerly dials up Washington to report a break in the case.

Chapter Seven

Richter is in a foul mood. He is finding data with his remote viewing that doesn't make any sense. Instead of the usual slowly emerging answer to his probing, this is starting to look more and more like something from a grade B horror movie. His viewings on this case have so far shown him a secret underground facility, a mad scientist hell-bent on world domination, dozens of random killers and killings and a beautiful young woman who is a dangerous psychopath, all linked by something to do with their blood. And bodies -- lots of bodies -- savagely butchered.
"Mother, call for two large pepperoni pizzas, extra pepperoni and two bottles of root beer," he screeches, his already shrill voice cracking from the extreme frustration he is experiencing.
"Yes, honey, please don't let these government men upset you; you know how bad your blood pressure is."
"Fuck my blood pressure. Order my pizza."

Marissa has followed Mitch from the hotel and had observed the show. She is now convinced that the solution to this mystery -- and she loves a good mystery almost as much as torturing her slaves -- lies in Dr. Neiman out by Moorehead. It looks to her like he is behind a rampage of murders. What she doesn't know is why, and since she is fascinated with the turn of events so far, she decides to not go track him down and tear off his balls just yet. So far she is the only person who has connected the dots and tied Neiman to the slayings. She and Ben return to the hotel and watch the news to see what the latest media spin is on the situation.

Jimmy and Oly are at the hospital waiting for Baldwin to wake up. The doctors have assured them he will survive and will be waking very soon.
"I just hope this guy agrees to talk to us, Oly"
"Just let me talk to him alone first, Jimmy. We don't want to have him think he died and is getting grilled by a zombie."
"Hill-fuckin-larious," chuckles Jimmy.
They don't have to wait for long. In a few minutes a nurse tells them Baldwin is awake and alert. They enter his room and find a good looking young man, early thirties, with a bandage covering his chest and shoulder and most of one arm. He looks at them and smiles.
"The nurse tells me you want to ask me a few questions?" he says.
"That's right. Do you remember what happened?"
"Sort of. It's pretty vague, like I've been in a daze or a waking dream."
"What do you mean?" asks Oly.
"I mean, I remember what has been happening, but it's like I am watching a TV show, not really part of it."
"Well, what do you remember about your injuries?" asks Jimmy.
"I remember going to some office building downtown and getting into a fight with some men. I don't know why I was there or why we were fighting. I remember thinking at some point that it was stupid to bring a sword to a gun fight. Other than that, the next thing I know is waking up here a few minutes ago."
"What about before that?"
"I had been kicking back at a hotel, watching a lot of TV, waiting for a phone call."
"Who were you waiting for to call you?"
"No idea."
"Why were you at the hotel?"
"No idea."
"What about the Smellsons"
"Who are they?"
"A family that was hacked up with a sword and set on fire."
"I don't know anything about that; in fact, I can't remember much of anything that happened in the last week or so except sitting in the hotel waiting for a phone call."
"Do you remember what hotel it was?"
"The Holiday Inn Select on Pilot Hill Road."
"Thanks, we'll be back," says Jimmy as he leads Oly out of the room.
"There's something very odd about this guy. He don't seem like the serial killer type; in fact he seems like a regular guy."
"Is that your expert opinion, Freud?" asks Oly.
"Yup. He was as cooperative as he could be, but shows signs of being hypnotized or sumthin'."
"I agree. Seems he has been brain-washed or is a schizo with personality fragmentation. Either way, we're gonna have to get a shrink in here."
"I'll get a log of calls to the hotel and you call for the shrink."
The phone log proves to be a dead end as Neiman used an encrypted land line for the calls, to leave no trails but it's a different story when you have a direct connection as to him as Marissa had.
Oly contacts the doctor the Department uses for psychiatric evaluations, Dr. Walleski, and he agrees to come by in the morning to see what is what with Baldwin.

Dr. Neiman is frantic. The subject he sent to eliminate the Mossad agents has been injured and is in the hospital, in police custody; it is all over the news. He doesn't know what the subject will say or how much he remembers. He had the foresight to tell him to forget everything up to the time he checked into the hotel, but when injured and questioned by a state psychiatrist, what can they dig out? Even worse is what they will find when they do some blood work.
Nieman's particular genetic soup contains DNA fragments that will replicate themselves until they are present in sufficient amounts to affect behavior. At that point they are also easily detectable in the blood. He cannot allow his DNA to be inspected and analyzed. He decides upon a two-pronged attack on the hospital. One subject will eliminate Baldwin, and another will torch the hematology lab at the same time.

Chapter Eight

Myron has been sitting in his hotel room, crying for three days. He hasn’t eaten or slept much; all he can do is think about what has happened.
He has vague memories of decapitating his wife, Lucille, and stomping Pinky to death. He knows he didn't want to do it - he just couldn't stop himself.
He is roused from his depression by the ringing of the phone.
"Hello?" asks Myron.
"Is this Myron? Have you had your iggs today?" asks Neiman with a snicker.
At the sound of the word 'iggs,' Myron tenses up and begins to quiver. "Yes."
"Good. I have a little job for you down at the hospital; you know the one, where they took that man injured in the shootout on the news?"
"Yes."
"Excellent. Go down there at 3 a.m. and start an extensive fire in the hematology lab. Talk to no one unless you have to, and forget everything but what you have been instructed to do. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"Oh, and one more thing, Myron. Stay until everything is burned up completely."
"I will," says Myron and the phone goes dead.

The phone in Marissa's room rings and she answers.
"Yeah, what?"
"Is this Marissa? Did you buy those Shamu towels?" asks Neiman.
Marissa knows this is the time to play dumb and not give any indication to Neiman that he doesn't have complete control of her.
"I did."
Good. I have a little job for you. I want you to go to that hospital where that man from the shootout downtown was taken, and at exactly 3:15 am I want you to kill him. He will be asleep and on an I.V. So get a syringe and inject a big bubble of air into his line. Do you understand?"
"I do."
"Great, don't talk to anyone unless you must and forget this conversation, but not your instructions. When you are done, return to you room and await further orders. Understand?"
"Yes," she says and Neiman hangs up.

Marissa decides that she has to find out why this Neiman wants the man in the hospital dead. She will go to the hospital at the appointed time but instead of killing the man, she and Ben will take him from the hospital and bring him to a place where she can interrogate him. She wants to know what the Neiman character is up to.

Myron has everything he needs to start a fire in the blood labs. He has a three-gallon container of gas and some road flares he's bought at a gas station. He is sitting in the hospital parking lot waiting for 3 a.m.
When the time arrives, he gets his gear and walks into the hospital. He has concealed the gas container in one of those canvas shopping bags with strap handles and topped it off with some flowers. He needn't have wasted his time, because at this hour in the morning he hasn't seen a soul.
He enters hematology and begins pouring the gas throughout the labs. Once he has poured out all three gallons, he pulls a flare from his pocket and lights it. He stands in a pool of gasoline and simply drops the flare to the floor. As he begins to burn, along with the lab, all he can think of are the wonderful years he had with Lucille. He makes no sound as the flames consume him.

Marissa has decided to arrive a bit early to reconnoiter the area in order to avoid any traps. She has dressed in the nurse's uniform she wears when she tortures some of her slaves, and decides to wear a blonde wig as a disguise. She has Ben wait in his van by the emergency entrance where she intends to bring her target. It takes a few minutes of chatting up a few nurses working the nurse station to find out the patient she is looking for is Mitch Baldwin. She has one problem: there are two policemen guarding the door to Mitch's room. She putzes around in the hall by his room, trying to figure out what to do, when the fire alarm goes off.
At the sound of the alarm, the police run to see what is happening. Marissa takes advantage of the fire alarm to get into Baldwin's room. She enters and finds a young man with a large bandage across his chest and down his arm sitting up in the bed watching TV.
"Hello," she says.
"Is it time for my pain medication already?" he asks.
"Not quite. I'm here to evacuate you because of the fire. Let's get you into your wheelchair and get out of here."
Mitch is still on an IV drip and monitors. Marissa quickly detaches these and helps him into the wheel chair. She wheels him to the elevator and is out of the building and gone before anyone returns. The fire in the blood lab rages and will take hours to get under control. Long before then Marissa has Mitch back at the hotel.
Mitch has figured out this is not a move by the hospital staff. They would have used an ambulance to move him, and there would have been police present since he is the prime suspect in nine murders. He is more than happy to play along, as he is away from police custody and all those questions he had no answers for.
"Who are you people?" he asks, once Marissa and Ben have wheeled him into the room and closed the door.
"I am the person Dr. Neiman sent to kill you," says Marissa.
"Who is Dr. Neiman and why does he want me dead? Is he related to one of those people I'm supposed to have killed?"
"No, he is the person who ordered you to do the killings, as you well know."
"I don't know where you are getting your info, but you seem to know more about this than I do."
"Don't make me get nasty, Baldwin," says Marissa as she pulls out her favorite toy, a twelve inch needle. "I know you must know something."
"Listen, I can't remember much of what's happened in the last week. All I can remember is some ugly shit that seems like a dream. It's like someone has been inside my head or I've been hypnotized or sumthin."
"Tell me everything you remember or I'll start poking at those bullet holes with my toy here."
"I remember watching TV with my brother several days ago. A commercial came on and I had an uncontrollable urge to call this phone number that just popped into my head. I don't remember the number or who I talked to. I went back to watching TV and drinking a few beers. From there things got very blurry. I think I killed my brother and then went to a house and killed some people there. I came to this hotel and just sat in a room for a few days. Then I got a phone call and I went downtown and killed some more people, but they shot me, and I passed out in the elevator. Next thing, I woke up in the hospital and was told I killed nine or ten people. That's all I know."
"You're lucky that the info I have jives with what you just told me. So tell me, how do you like being controlled by some sick bastard who wants you dead?"
"It sucks. I wish I could get my hands on him. Do you know where we can find him?"
"I might have an idea."

Jimmy and Oly are at the hospital trying to sort through the mess.
"Why in the hell would this guy go to the blood labs and light himself on fire?"
"I don't know, Jimmy. I think he found out he had AIDS and wanted to end it. This is the lab that gave him the bad news and so he came here and burned it and himself to ashes."
"So you think that this and Baldwin's escape are coincidental?"
"I think that the opportunity arose and Baldwin bolted at the first chance."
"And he took a wheelchair and wheeled it down the street at three in the morning and to where? His house is four miles from the hospital and he ain't been back there. Where did he go? He had no ID, no dough, and no clothes. Someone has to have helped him."
"What other theory do we have to work with?"
"I think it's all related and the fire was a diversion to get Baldwin out of the hospital. Maybe the pyro lit himself up by mistake and hadn't planned on being fricasseed."
"Let's question the guys who were on Baldwin's door. Maybe they saw sumtin'."
"Now that's a good idea, Ollie."
"Don't ever do that, Stan."
They go down to the lobby where the two policemen assigned to Baldwin's door are sitting, looking like little kids waiting to get scolded.
"Gentlemen," starts Oly, "tell us what happened and why you left your posts?"
"We were at the door to Baldwin's room when we heard the fire alarm go off. We looked at each other and at the nurse who was hanging in the hall...."
"Whoa, back 'er up boys, what nurse?"
"The nurse who was messing around with the linen cart in the hall. She had been putzing for about ten minutes when the alarm sounded."
"What did this nurse look like?" asks Jimmy.
"She was a little doll," says the other cop, "About five feet, toned up with a short nurse's uniform that showed the tops of her stockings. Wild blonde hair and light blue eyes."
"And how many nurses do you think are hanging around at three a.m. wearing what sounds like an outfit from Victoria's Secret?" asks Oly. "Jimmy, go get the records for who was working last night. Wait for photo printouts so we can determine if this nurse was working."
"Her skirt wasn't all that short, but she kept reaching up to the top shelf on the linen cart and it would rise up to her ass."
"So you two are drooling at the show and the fire alarm goes off. Then what happened?"
"We ran to see what the commotion was," says the first cop. "We stopped at the desk and the nurse working pulled up the fire diagrams and it showed there was a fire on the fifth floor of the west wing in the hematology labs. We rushed there and found the place in flames and some guy on fire just standing in the middle of it. He collapsed a few seconds after we got there. We used extinguishers and a fire hose to fight the fire as best we could until the fire department arrived. They say there could have been much more damage if we hadn't got there so quickly and tried to put it out."
"It wasn't till an hour and a half later that we realized that Baldwin was gone."
"So you discovered Baldwin was gone around four-thirty?"
"More like quarter till five."
"So he basically had an hour and forty-five minutes to make his getaway?"
"I guess so."
Jimmy comes back with photos of all the staff who were working the night before.
The two policemen look through the pics but as Jimmy and Oly suspected, they fail to see the nurse.
"Gee, I guess she must have been moonlighting as a nurse while waiting for the alarm to go off and had the chance to spring Baldwin, huh, guys?" asks Jimmy.
"She had a few minutes, between her nurse fetish tricks to tidy up a bit," adds Oly.
"You guys are pathetic, but heroes for fighting the fire. I want you to go down to the station and look at every single mug shot we have until you find our nurse, understand?"
"Yes sir, we will identify her."

Chapter Nine

The ambulance brought Jerry Merch to the hospital two days prior to his regaining consciousness. He was near death when they brought him in and the ER doctor couldn't determine what was wrong. He just seemed to be in a coma but why he was could not be ascertained. It was only when he woke and began screaming that they finally discovered he had been the victim of a vicious attack. He suffered from the same effects one would have after a severe stroke - slurred speech and partial paralysis.
Jimmy and Oly are sent to interview him since the same strange DNA strands have been found in his blood as were in the bodies of the dead killers. It is suspected he is somehow connected to the murders.
"Hello, Mr. Merch. I'm Detective Olsen and this is Detective Peterson," says Oly, "Can you tell us what happened to you?"
"I was thtabbed with a long needle."
"Where were you stabbed?" asks Jimmy.
"In my pallet and in my ball thack. Thhe thtuck me through both my tethticulth and then in my mouth."
"You say 'she'. Was it a woman who attacked you?"
"Yeth."
"Thhe wath an elf with black hair wearing military boothth, a thort black dreth and a leather jacket. Thhe kicked me in the head and then thtuck me with her needle in the ballth. When I threamed, thhe thtuck me through my open mouth and up through my pallet into my brain. Thath why I talk like thith and can't move tho good anymore."
"Do you think you could identify her from a picture?" asks Jimmy
"Maybe. The doc thays my brain damage ith bad and I can't remember thome of my patht. But I'll try."
"Do you know how you may have gotten altered DNA in your bloodstream?"
"Maybe it wath from the experiment I thigned up for at the univerthity a while back."
"What experiment was that?"
"It wath in the paper. They thaid they wanted to try thomething new to try and help people thtop drinking and thmoking. Before that I wath an alcoholic. They thtopped that and made me addicted to chocolate ice cream."
"When you say she was an elf, what do you mean Jerry?"
"Thhe was tiny, maybe five foot and maybe a hundred poundth. Thhe had a little turned up nothe and a wide mouth, cute little thing, like an elf. Oh, and a lot of black hair."
"What else do you remember about the experiment? How did they make you stop drinking?"
"They justht gave me a thot and I liked ice cream inthtead of booze."
"Do you remember who was running these experiments?" asks Oly.
"Thantanoth. It was run by the Thantanoth Corporation."
"You mean the Satanos Corporation?"
"Yeth. Thath what I thaid."

Jimmy and Oly head back to the station to check out the test project Merch has told them about.

“Well, I checked up on that research project at UM. Seems it is run by an outfit owned by a corporation that is a subsidiary of another corporation that is run out of the Cayman Islands. It belongs to a Swiss company that is owned by the Israeli Government,” says Oly after three hours of research on the internet. “So basically we ain’t gonna get nothing from them.”
“It usually ends like this on these human trial projects,” says Jimmy. “That way none of these bastards will have to take any blame if something goes south.”
“Let me call upstairs and see if the guys from the hospital have found anything in the mugs.
They go upstairs and the officers from the hospital are just finishing up with the mug files.
"We were just coming to see you. We got an ID on the nurse from the hospital. The nurse is a young lady named Marissa Pfundskiller. She is quite a piece of work; a real psychopath who has been in and out of mental wards for extremely violent acts. She's even killed a girl," adds the younger cop as he hands Oly Marissa's file.
"Great work, guys. This will fill in a lot of the missing pieces," she says.
"We hope," says Jimmy, "So far nothing in this case adds up, and I'm betting this is only gonna raise more questions than it answers."
"Have I told you lately just how wonderful it is to have a perpetual optimist as a partner?"
"Every day, my dear, and it's greatly appreciated," he replies. "Time to go drink lunch, pard. Coming?"
"Let's go back to Mr. Merch and see if he can identify Ms. Pfundskiller as his assailant. Then we can have the warrant for her arrest processed while we have dinner."
"Splendid idea, Ollie," says Jimmy, doing his best Stan Laurel impersonation.
"I told you not to ever do that!"

"Thath her alright. I would never forget that fathe. Thhe lookth tho thweet there in the photo but thheth viciouth," says Jerry Merch. "Itth thad that a girl tho pretty ith tho violent."
"Thanks Jerry. This helps a lot with solving not only your case of attempted murder but another more confusing case we've been working on."
Outside Merch's room, Oly says, "So we got the multi-murders and we got Ms. Pfundskiller. We got some rogue DNA strands from the schoolgirl, the kid with the hatchet, the ex-alkie, and I'll bet our torch man has it too when the lab results get back. I'd even bet Ms. Pfundskiller has some too. But what's the tie-in?”
"Got me. I can't see psycho girl being behind this, although she is somehow involved. I say we find her and go from there."
"Right. I'll call downtown and get the warrant for her set up."

Baldwin is feeling much better. He and Marissa decide it's time to try and find Dr. Neiman and find out what he's done to them. Marissa has Ben drive them to her storage locker and they pick up several automatic pistols, a shotgun, an Uzi, several assorted knives and Baldwin’s favorite, a Samurai sword.

They head out to Moorehead to find the laboratory where the doctor works. It's a long drive and when they arrive they check into a motel so they have a base from which to conduct their investigation.

Neiman is giddy with power. He has subjugated everyone at the Satanos facility to his will with his DNA soup. He has become progressively more mentally unstable as his control over others grows. Since he is now in complete control, he no longer has to hide his megalomania. Whereas before he had to be discreet, now he openly physically and sexually abuses his associates. He has sent those who displease him to the genetic modification labs and has instructed the staff there to do all the experiments corporate has forbidden over the years - terrible intrusive experiments that usually result in horrible mutations and ghastly deaths.
Through some manipulation of the facts and some heavy handed tactics, he has convinced the Board of Directors of Satanos to hold their shareholders' meeting at the Moorehead facility, luring them in with the promise of a fantastic breakthrough in genetic engineering. He plans to gain control of the board and all the major stockholders, forecasting that by the time they leave he will be the CEO and sole stockholder in the company.
They arrive with their usual air of superiority and aloofness, determined not to be impressed by whatever he shows them. They learned a long time ago that being impressed by developments always costs them money. But impressed they are, even before being controlled. It will take several hours before the agent introduced into their bloodstreams will propagate enough to easily manipulate them. In the meantime, the doctor has prepared a show they will never forget.
He first has a young man walk onto the dais to demonstrate his complete control. The young man is wearing only a pair of gym trunks and carrying a hacksaw. The doctor talks to the man normally and even cracks a few jokes. He then asks the young man if he would cut off his own leg. The man is astonished and appalled at the suggestion. But when the doctor says the trigger word, in this case Lego, he becomes completely submissive to the doctor and when asked a second time to do it, he readily complies. The onlookers are shocked and very alarmed. The doctor allows the man to saw through only until he hits the bone and then stops him. He has a medical team rush in to aid the man. The guests don't realize that the man has been taken out of the room and allowed to bleed out on a gurney. Soon nothing matters to Neiman's guests.
Neiman has also initiated a program whereby he can use airborne deployment to release his 'soup' and is preparing the complete subjugation of the Twin Cities' area. Once that is done, he will have the resources to control the entire planet.
While waiting for his airborne delivery system, Neiman has everyone working at the Moorehead complex infect their families, and anyone else they come in contact with, using little CO2 guns. By now, he has control of all the personnel at the complex as well as 87% of the population for fifty miles in all directions. Neiman doesn't like that number. In lab tests he had ascertained an effective rate of 99%+. So what has kept 13% of the sparsely populated area from being affected?

Chapter Ten

Marissa is not one to sit around. She has friends in the area and after a phone call she, her slave and her kidnapped killer are off to meet with someone named 'Tonto', at a biker bar called 'Hoots'.
'Hoots' is home to a gang of violent psychos identified as "Hooter's Scooters. Marissa has been here several times and knows most of the members. She soon spots Tonto in a booth.
"Hey you dinosaur," says Marissa.
Hey, brat, what's up?" says Tonto, as he stands and gives Marissa a hug. He grabs her ass and she tears out a bit of his mustache. They lean back from the embrace and grin.
"Some weird shit coming out of your 'hood, man."
'No shit! We got most of the locals turned into some type of zombies."
"Zombies? How so zombies?"
"Friggin' zombies, but they ain't dead. They act normal, but say certain words and they go into zombie mode."
"What words?"
"Satanos, GMO, hybrid, corn, experiments......words like that," says Tonto, taking a sip of beer. "What does that tell ya?"
"I'd say someone is very smart and very naïve."
"How?"
"Very smart to have figured out how to make people zombies; very naïve to make them so easy to read."
"It's gotta be some chemical or drug. None of us are affected but everyone else is."
"Then.....what makes you guys different?"
"We got that figured out too. The difference is our designer drug, exclusive to us. We got a friend who mixes up a batch of 25% mescaline sulfate, 25% MDA, 25% cocaine and 25% vitamins and minerals in a convenient powdered form. We call it Reality."
"How original, where's mine? I need enough for three that will last sixty days."
"You don't want much do you?"
"These bastards tried to make me kill my mother. I have to be armed against their bio-weapon."
"What fuckin' bio-weapon are you talking about? Has it started? Is this it?"
"It could be if you don't help me stop this sick bastard that needs some playtime with us."
"You bet we need to play; my Ma is one of them zombies. We were trying to figure out a game plan when you called."
"Let's do it. Where is this Satanos place?'
"There's the catch. We can't find it. All there seems to be of the place is a few barns and some fields of corn."
"The place is there; it must be dug in."
That may be it - an underground installation. Under the fields and barns."
"Has to be."

Ben Rallo is losing his grip. At every turn this case is becoming more and more like a grade "B" horror flick.
"What the fuck do you mean: the mad scientist is gonna let the monsters out of his underground facility? Are you trying to give me a stroke? Don't tell me shit like that."
"Sorry, Rallo. That's what I have been viewing, consistently. I am never wrong about these things," says Gerald Richter, the remote viewer Rallo has had forced on him.
"Do you have any idea how bat shit crazy this sounds?"
"I do, and that's why I am calling you, to tell you my info may be compromised. My mom thinks the Domino's Pizza people have been putting drugs in my pizza. So I remote viewed it and found nothing but a few boogers in the pizza sauce. Then I checked the local water supply. Nothing there either. I would like to move my base of operations to a more isolated spot where we have more extensive control of the variables. We must leave today."
"I'll get you to our safe house in Red Wing. Nothing to worry about. But what if? What if there is a mad scientist about to unleash monstrosities from an underground lair?"
"You make it sound unlikely with that description, but the facts as I have ascertained them to be are thus:
"Fact: Satanos has been taken over by one of their researchers.
"Fact: Satanos is the world leader in Genetically Modified Organisms. Therefore it's highly likely they have some experimental monstrosities hidden away somewhere.
"Fact: Satanos has 14 UG facilities in the upper Midwest. I suspect the one in Moorhead is the one of interest."
"You're fucking killin' me, Richter, you know that? Not only do I have to brief those local people on this but I gotta tell Washington, fuckin' Washington the same shit story!"
"Sucks being you," says Richter. "Bye."

Chief Lewis has news for his detectives at the morning briefing. "Early this morning I got a call from director Rallo of DHS. He informed me that this situation is very dangerous. This is to be considered a terrorist attack of an unspecified nature. Someone is doing something so bad we can't figure out what it is. This gets the Washington types real nervous. They don't much like a crime wave of murder going on in the Twin Cities and not knowing how it's being done. They don't like finding rogue DNA replicating in the bloodstreams of people, somehow causing them to kill. But you know what they don't like the most? It's their own spooks telling them this is all connected to some mad scientist in an underground lab about to unleash monsters. They really, really don't like to hear that.
"When they hear something they really, really don't like, they throw money at it. That means all available detectives on the case and, yes, paying overtime for investigative purposes.
"I want all underground facilities larger than 10k square feet. I want everything on any corporation that is applying for permits that seem vaguely explained. I want full forensics work-ups on that DNA thing and I want Marissa Pfundskiller picked up for questioning in the attempted murder of Jerry Merch and possible connection to a test conducted by the Satanos Corporation. I want the capture of Mitch Baldwin, the only suspect in eleven murders. I want to know what the fuck is going on in my town and I want to know by lunch. Now go find me some answers. Dismissed."

"My, the chief was particularly cheery this morning, wasn't he?" asks Jimmy.
"Indeed he was, Jim. I suspect he can taste it. I can taste it, can you?" asks Oly.
"I can taste it all right. This is the once in a lifetime case that has a real villain and will make or break many a good man before it all comes to light. The shit books are written about and movies are made of. Yeah, I can taste it. This is the shit that usually leaves a wide wake of shattered lives and careers. Got any antacids?"
"We have a ton of info on this case and I don't see why we can't be civilized and take all our files and occupy a discreet booth in some dimly lit dive and mull the data over some nice single malt. It's the only way to escape the stress and still work."
"You read my mind; I was just about to suggest an early working lunch."

Dr Neiman has finished sexually debasing every employee he fancied at the facility and ponders what a tiny lab tech said while he was molesting her. She'd inferred he would be surprised how deep this place went. His curiosity whetted, he sends out a call over the intercom.
"Anyone who has knowledge of lower levels of this facility with higher clearance, come to the director's office."
Within five minutes there are nineteen people ready to tell the doctor everything they know of the lower levels. They know everything.
"So tell me, Dr. Wells, what is it you do here?" asks Neiman.
"I do growth, intelligence and aggression studies relevant to GMO bio-agents."
"And where do you do this?"
"On level 9, sir."
"What level is this?"
"This is level 3, sir."
"So there are six levels below us?"
"No sir, nine. Rumor has it there are a total of twelve levels."
"Each level is unaware of the levels below it?"
"Yes."
"Good, well let's see what's down there, shall we? Get maintenance to get in the elevators and rig them to go to all floors."
"When they have the first elevator rigged, call me. I want to do a security sweep starting on the lowest level."
Nieman inspects each and every one of the fifteen levels to the complex. The lowest is a vast room with huge tanks, where the bio-agents are brewed and grown. Nothing but tank after tank being serviced by robotic arms from overhead.
Level 14 consists of thousands of identical machines, of unknown function, all running.
Level 13 is all plumbing of one sort or another.
Level 12 in Neiman's domain, is where he first became unstable with megalomania and delusions of world domination, His grasp on reality is cut loose when he encounters Professor Hu, a twisted little abomination of the naturally mutated human variety. The creature's head is disturbingly rodent-like, with small, black, rat-eyes and jaundiced skin. His other head is the same, but lolls back and forth, with eyes crossed and out of focus, the tongue hanging out and drooling. All this is jammed onto a hunch-backed, dwarven frame which makes for a disgusting sight. But if that isn't enough, there is a moment when both heads sync up and then the opposite head takes over, and the head one was just talking to is drooling, and the one that was drooling is now talking and wiping its chin.
Neiman literally faints at the sight of Professor Hu. When he comes to, he screams, "It has two heads and is wearing a lab coat," only to be comforted by 'It.' Three more faints and Neiman finally regains enough of his senses to remain conscious and calm enough to talk to Hu.
"Sorry to have startled you. We get few visitors down here. I am Dr. Hu. I care for my menagerie of failed experiments and nature gone out of control."
"I own this company and you now. I want to see your collection," demand Neiman.
"And I, sir, would love to show you all our pets. As I said, we don't get many opportunities to show off our little zoo.”
"How lovely. Let's look over the monsters shall we?"
"Good choice. On our schedule today is another session in our attempts to communicate with the twin brothers, Ray and Ray-ray. We have yet to illustrate to them that killing and eating everything that moves may not be their best survival choice. The Rays are massive creatures of 12 feet and 900 pounds. They also have Down's Syndrome. They're still growing and are always starving. Full-on cannibal giants with the collective IQ of a German Shepherd. They make Wednesdays a treat. Some say it's their total ferelity and lack of any trace of humanity; others their insatiable appetite for flesh. I say it's the look in their eyes when they focus on you that says, "Food, I want to devour you."
"I'm not interested in that. I want to know what you have that is usable in an urban environment. I need weapons; offensive and defensive weapons."
"Not a problem."

"Well, pard, what do we have here?" asks Oly.
"We have here the worst threat to ever rear its ugly head. This is a threat to the entire world!"
"So you don't see the tie-in with Pfundkiller either, do you?"
"No."
"But Jimmy, we've nearly kilt a fifth of the best Scotch. I fear we can'na take noo moore," says Oly in a slurred Scottish accent.
"Think we better switch to beer?"
"Let's do. We still need to figure this mess out."
"I'm thinking that needle girl is the loose cannon on deck here. She must have been part of this in some way that has spun out of control. Maybe she's immune to the programmed DNA; maybe she was told to kill Baldwin. God knows he's a terrible loose end that the brains behind this crap would be wise to clean up," says Jimmy.
"So the mad scientist, as identified by government spooks, is desperate to have Baldwin gone. He sends Burnie to torch the blood labs, to destroy any blood samples we have, and sends the needler to finish off Baldwin while the burning labs distract everyone," ponders Oly.
"But Marissa is the joker in the deck and instead of killing him, she's taken him, possibly enlisted his aid, possibly killed him. Why would she take him? She knows something that neither Baldwin nor we know."
"Maybe she knows who's behind all this and wants help getting to him for personal reasons. Maybe she was ordered to kill but was able to resist the compulsion to do so."
"But she's pissed because someone tried to use her and seeks revenge."
"Not bad, pard. Almost believable after half a bottle of Scotch."
"I do some of my best detectiving behind half a bottle of Scotch," says Jimmy with a smirk.

For the next two days all the Satanos facilities in western Minnesota are watched closely by either men on motorcycles or in white vans, the biker club's second vehicle of choice. You can get a bike in a van and there are millions of white vans. Finally, on the morning of the third day, they find out what they are looking for.
A chartered bus pulls up to a large metal storage building at 5 a.m. Nearly fifty people get off the bus and enter the building; a few minutes later, as many people come out and board the bus.
Tino, one of the club members, videos the whole sequence of events and on later review it becomes clear that the people boarding the bus are not the people who disembarked.

"Go get that case I put in the trunk, Ben," orders Marissa.
"Yes, Mistress," Ben answers obediently.
Ben returns quickly with a case similar to one in which a pool cue would be kept.
"Check this out, boys," she says as she lays the case open on the bar in the clubhouse.
Inside is a pair of weapons none of the guys had ever seen before. They are fashioned after brass knuckles, but have a skewer coming out of the knuckles over a foot long. They are clearly custom work done in a steam punk style.
"I've been dying to get a chance to use these babies on someone; now's the time. I'll be giving this Neiman worm a taste of these," she says. "Now get ready to pull a raid on the UG place Tino found. We'll hit them just after the bus leaves. Let's make this a stealth attack with no one along who can't be completely silent. Baldwin just hang here and suck some beers. You're in no shape for a fight."
“Not a problem all this murderin' is thirsty work.”

Neiman has regained his composure after seeing some of the most phenomenal grotesques on the planet. He has no stomach for this sort of thing and wishes to be rid of them all -- all except Dr. Hu and the Rays.
"Dr. Hu, we are going to discontinue funding for all your projects except the Rays. All the other creatures you house here are to be released, if they can pass as natural mutations, and those that can't are to be fed to the Rays. I want housing constructed by both elevators and one of the Rays put in each. I want the area by the elevators to be set up in such a way that a Ray can be released into the hall with whomever comes out of the elevator, is that clear?"
"Yes, of course, Dr. Neiman." says Hu. "I'll get right on it."


Chapter Eleven

Hu is not happy with Neiman's decision to eliminate his beloved zoo of oddities and monstrosities. He is compelled to follow Neiman's orders but he has been left enough leeway to save most of his pets.
The vast majority of his charges are merely natural mutations and he can simply release them. Most of them are indigenous to North America, they were in fact collected as specimens suspected of having mutated as a result of GMO crops. These are always quickly bought from farmers for sums that are impossible to resist.
As Hu goes about his work preparing for the release, he decides on an area not far away that is a great farm with a stream running through it. The property owner, from what Hu could gather from his clandestine forays to the area at night, is a good man who loves animals. This would be a good place to release many of the smaller animals and one not so small.
Otto is a strange case. A super smart river otter who got that way from his mom eating fish contaminated with both GMO crops and herbicides.
He is a little bigger than most otters and has two tails. He also is as smart as most 7 year-olds and has learned to us sign language. That and the very large, highly intelligent eyes make him very creepy at first but easy to get to know. Hu is hoping the farmer and the otter will find each other and become friends. Hu gives Otto extensive instructions before they hug and say goodbye at one of the many secret exits to the surface. Otto is only 3, barely a teenager in otter years and Hu knows that Otto will get much smarter in the next few years. He had been with Hu a year and in that time his intellect had doubled.

Neiman has been on the phone, busy spreading his evil empire. He has instructed all the people he's had sitting in the hotel to go on a spree of butchery at the Mall of America. What better way to strike fear into the hearts of the masses than to massacre a mall full of people in the most horrible way imaginable? After that they'll have no alternative but to do his bidding or pay the consequences.
Neiman's mind has detached itself from reality and he no longer sees that actions by him will cause reactions from the dozen or so alphabet agencies who have become very interested in his activities. So it is no surprise when the word gets to Jimmy and Oly the tap on the hotel phones has paid off.
The multiple calls Neiman has made to the same number from the same number has made it easy to pinpoint the origin of the calls.
A task force composed of every cop for a hundred miles is assembled and heads for the Moorehead facility.
By the time the first police can get to the hotel Neiman's zombies have vanished. The authorities are unaware that while Neiman was talking on the phone he was also texting details of the attack on the mall to his slaves. They were to hangup and leave the hotel directly. From there they are to meet at a warehouse in Minneapolis to get arms that Santanos had stockpiled in the event of a genetic emergency of one sort or another. They never realized the genetic emergency would utilize them.
Now armed with state of the art weaponry and body armor they represent an assault team that far outclasses anything in the Twin Cities area.

Richter, the CIA's hotshot remote viewer is about to snap.
“Mother! Mother, where's my fucking pizza??? I'm starting to get faint from hunger.” he whines.
He hasn't slept in days and the info he's viewing has him wondering if he's gone mad.
His most recent remote viewing session has left him shocked to say the least.
He is faced with two very ugly possibilities, what he has viewed is real and the mad scientist in the underground facility has just ordered a full assault on the Mall of America while at the same time having hundreds of mutant and genetically modified organisms released into the wilds of western Minnesota. At the same time the Minnesota BCI has located the Mad Dr. and have launched a tactical siege of the facility but not before a very scary elf with a gang of drug-crazed bikers beat them there by 20 minutes.
The other alternative is he's gone bat-shit crazy like Rallo suggested. The more he views this case the more convinced he is that it is the latter case. This stuff he's viewing is what happens in cheap sci-fi movies not in real life. He decides to call Rallo and tell what he knows. He is honest and not nearly as arrogant as he usually acts.
“Yes, that's right, Director Rallo, the Mall of America will be attacked by the killers they are looking for in St Paul. Furthermore they raided a Satanos storage facility and acquired weapons and body armor. They also have grenades and plastiques, maybe some other stuff. I have to be honest with you Director, due to the outrageous nature of these viewings, and I'm having difficulty believing them myself, I have to question whether or not I am suffering from burnout and am getting inaccurate readings.”
“It's better to assume the info is correct and I advise you to act accordingly. Most of Minnesota's law enforcement resources are rushing to Moorehead to raid the Santanos Facility there so it gonna be all on you and other federal resources to defend the Mall.”
“Richter, I hope to hell you've snapped and are sending me on a wild goose chase. That could save a lot of lives and give me the pleasure of sending you to the loony bin for 90 days.”
“You're not the first federal flunky to be confused by my skills, they all hate me at first, and I do nothing to encourage them differently. But in every case, with the possible exception of this one, they have in the end been delighted with my nearly magical abilities.”
“This case however has me doubting my own sanity because of the bizarre events surrounding it. I haven't worked anything this fringe science before.”
“Neither have I, Richter, and I don't look forward to ever doing it again.” says Rallo and cuts the call.
Director Rallo is faced with the hardest call of his life. He has to contact the Whitehouse with news of a terrorist attack on the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota. This based on info from a remote viewer, a spook's spook. This call could be a life-changing event. Depending on how things pan out this may well be the last time he will be making such a call.
As he's dialing the call he gets a strange but familiar taste in his mouth. Just as he figures it out, the same thing Oly and Jimmy could taste, the president comes on the line.

Richter decides to try one last viewing before leaving this side show of a case. He starts his metronome and begins his routine. He gets very disturbing images. He sees giants, giants with Down's Syndrome, he sees a giant otter looking at a magazine, and he sees a hunchback dwarf with two heads running through the wood in a lab coat.
Always plagued with very high blood pressure, these visions run it off the scale.
Richter starts to hyperventilate and feels a stabbing pain in his chest. His vision starts to burn out into a yellow blaze and just before his heart bursts he scribbles a few words on a piece of paper on his desk.
His mother finds him an hour later in the study of the safe house in which the are staying. He is dead and clutched in his fat, greasy fingers a piece of paper that has scrawled on it:
Rallo, there be giants in the earth.......

Chapter Twelve

The Mall of America has the distinction of being the biggest mall in the US. With over 2.5 million sq. ft., it is second only to the Edmonton Mall the largest in the world. Both malls are owned by the same family. Over 40 million people shop there every year. It has a parking garage that is also one of the largest and there are dozens of entrances. In short it is a tactical nightmare for Director Rallo of DHS when he lands on the helipad to co-ordinate anti-terrorism efforts.
He is shocked to hear that Richter has died and that he left a last cryptic message for him, 'Just what I fuckin' need,' he thinks to himself.
I want at least two agents on every single entrance and emergency exit to this place. That includes delivery entrances too. I also want every service entrance covered. This place uses huge amounts of electricity and water and I'm sure once we get the plans for this place that we're waiting for, we'll find many UG access points as well. I know we're short handed because most of Minnesota's finest are off to put an end to the mad doctor's career. But people will be trickling in and soon we'll have the people we need.”
His people have taken over the security and the management offices and Rallo can't wait to get to the managers office, his for the duration, and rest for a minute to gather his thoughts. He has his best people here and come what may he and his people will do everything in their power to stop the promised massacre. With all that is happening he can't seem to focus on anything but that stupid message Richter left.

Strange things are a foot down by the Satanos facility in Moorehead. Marissa and here entourage' have been hiding in the brush nearby waiting for the arrival of the bus. Unbeknown to them they are actually a few yards from an emergency exit. They soon find that out when Dr. Hu rises out of the ground on an elevator platform surrounded by cages of animals.
Free, you are all free my loves.” he says to the animals as the opens their cages. Most of the animals on this trip he is releasing are small animals. Rats, rabbits, cats, dogs, and many varieties of birds. All heed their keepers words and rush off into the darkness to fins new homes.
Get me that freak,” orders Marissa and two of the bikers rush out and grab Hu.
They drag him over and Marissa looks him over.
What the fuck are you?” she asks with contempt.
Hu tries to compose himself and in his most dignified voice replies. I am Dr. Hu from China. I am a biochemist for the Satanos Company. I have seven master's degrees, nine bachelor’s degrees and am the victim of several severe deformities thank to my drug-fiend mother.”
Why did you release all those animals?”
To avoid killing them of course.”
And why would you kill them?”
Because Dr Neiman said to get rid of them.”
Neiman!! Where is Neiman?” screams Marissa fully charged up on the bike club's custom blend of drugs.
He's below of course. I think he's afraid to come out with all the trouble he's caused.”
He has no idea of the trouble he's caused. But he is about to find out. Can you lead us to him?”
No, he has ordered me to protect him and I sense you mean him harm.”
Damn right I mean him harm.”
Neiman has this DNA agent he injected us all with and we cannot disobey his orders. But he is not a well man, mentally I mean, and some of his orders are open to interpretation. Everyone who works here and all the board members are under his control. All except thirteen percent of the local population.”
What about thirteen percent?”
Who knows, I think that's one of the things that are making him crazy. He can't understand why thirteen percent of the local population are immune to his soup.”
Marissa and the rest of her pack all laugh when they hear this.
Marissa bends over and looks Hu in the face—the conscious one—and says, “Well my little two-headed friend would you likie know why some people are not effected? Better still would you like to be unaffected?”
I would very much so on both counts.”
You see we are the ones immune and that is because of a little designer drug the club has cooked up for them. Would you like to try it?”
Wi...will I get high?”
Yup, as a kite.”
Then yeah, I haven't had a chance to catch a buzz since this whole Neiman nonsense started.”
Marissa can't believe her incredible luck. She stumbled onto a back door, a guide and a person already under Neiman's control to try her drug on.
They fall back to the van and Marissa, Hu and the bikers sit around snorting line after line of the concoction having a good old 70's style van party.
Hu is ecstatic, these are the first people he has ever met that weren't instantly appalled by his appearance, never mind party with him.
He is perhaps at this instant as happy as he has ever been in his miserable life. Already extremely loyal to anyone who shows him the smallest kindness he is completely under Marissa's spell.
Hu is high and babbling but telling Marissa invaluable info about Satanos and Neiman.
.....and he's sexually molested everyone who caught his fancy in the facility. You, My Lovely Mistress, could waltz in there without a word from anyone and as soon as Neiman catches sight of you he'll be commanding you into his lab for some sex.”
You called me Mistress, do you know what that means?”
It means that perhaps the ugliest man on the planet may have a chance to be the slave of a most beautiful elfish Mistress.
By the way, Mistress, did I tell you that I actually have four heads?”
With that last remark the van, filled with bikers, Marissa and Hu nearly tips over with the out of control laughter from inside. Hu from that point on has, unknown to him, become accepted as a regular member of their already diverse group. Tonto is already thinking of what a great club logo a picture of Hu will make.

A new plan is concocted and Hu, now free of Neiman's control, and high as a kite as Marissa promised, will lead Marissa to Neiman. They enter the facility just as the bus leaves with it's passengers through the escape elevator. All of the problems of Marissa getting to Neiman have been resolved. That is all except the Rays.

With Neiman in full control of the facilities he could make thing happen immediately. No more committee reviews, no more funding proposals, no more toadying for favors. What would have taken weeks to get done he got done in nine hours. The Rays have been repositioned in the facility strategically to protect Neiman, with great difficulty. Great difficulty meaning separating them--never an easy task--and then herding them one by one through a maze of corridors and two elevators to a dead end where they had quickly welded up a prefab wall to block the other end hoping the Ray wouldn't figure out what was happening before the wall was solid. In the course of the operation the Rays have managed to kill and eat three employees. This Neiman considers an acceptable expense. He has come to the conclusion that the people he controls and indeed the rest of the human race are here to serve him. He has resolved that God has given him the ability to control humanity because he is chosen to be their ruler. Thus lost in delusions of godliness he is completely unaware that God may have other plans, plans about to become harsh reality.

Hu has tried to explain to Marissa that the Rays are huge retarded giant cannibals but all she'll say is, “I've dealt with big boys before.”
He suddenly realizes that DR. Neiman, with all his brilliance is an idiot. By placing the Rays where they are Neiman has effectively trapped himself with no exit except by one of the Rays who are too dim to be controlled by his soup. Unfortunately Marissa will have to get by a Ray to get to Neiman.
You'll have to kill him through the peep in the door that's the only thing we can do. Otherwise he'll eat us. Just crunch us up and swallow us, I've seen him do it too many times.” Wails Hu as they look through the bulkhead door into the Ray's area.
He's far too magnificent a creature to destroy. Maybe just a firm hand. Has anyone ever been near him or his brother who hasn't run for their life? Did anyone ever try to act like anything but food?”
Hu is not following this well, he is sure Marissa will be eaten. “Please, ….please,please,please, don't go in there he'll have you in his gut in seconds.”
Really? Do you doubt me and my ability to control this creature?”
There is no controlling him, that's what I'm trying to tell you.”
Marissa gives Hu a hard look—this is the other head, not the one she looked hard at previously—and pulls her newest toys out of their hidden sheaths and shows them to him and says, “I'll have to punish you later for doubting me, wait here I'll be right back.”
Marissa opens the hatch and steps into the corridor with a Ray squatting in the far corner.
Pew, you fucking stink. When the last time you washed?” she says as the Ray lunges at her.
She notices that the ray moves more like a gorilla than a human, probably because of low ceilings and short legs, relatively speaking.
She easily evades him and jabs one of her toys deep into the soft part of the palm of the hand that would grab her.
Ray rears up in a rage and with both arms attempts to crush her.
She calmly walks towards him under the blows and deftly sticks him clean through the right testicle.
Ray has never felt much pain being so big and all and is momentarily stymied as to how to react. While he is pondering this Marissa jukes him in the left one with both huge needles. He figures it out with the double tap. He flees as far from Marissa and her toys as possible and cowers in the corner covering his tender bits, whimpering.
You get more of this if you don't obey me. Do you understand?” ask Marissa as she raises her toys ready for another strike.
The Ray quickly give a tiny nod.
What? I didn't hear you.” demands Marissa and jabs him in the privates.
Yes, yes yes yesyesyesysyereysyee.” screams the Ray.
So you can talk! You and your brother have been playing dumb all along, haven't you?”
No, we are dumb.” says the Ray.
Can you talk to your brother?”
Yup he da smart one”
Which Ray are you?”
I Ray, brother Ray-Ray.”
You will do everything I say or I will stick your balls till they fall off, do you want that?”
No, no, I be good Ray.”
Ray, I will take care of you and keep you safe if you obey me, If you don't I will have to hurt you.”
Be good, obey.”
Good come here and Mistress will give you a reward. Can you say Mistress? That is my name.”
Ray cautiously creeps closer. Marissa reaches up and scratches Ray behind the ear.
Ray has never been the recipient of any sort of affection aside from hugging his brother in fear if that counts. Ray is overwhelmed, at this point Marissa has gained complete control and loyalty. Ray would face anything or do anything for Marissa so long as she would pet him again.

Hu watches with both mouths hanging open, although he usually has one hanging open and drooling anyway. He has seen bravery and fearlessness in some of the men the Rays have eaten but never the confidence and self-assurance displayed by Marissa in the taming of the Ray. Millions of dollars, years of research and dozens of lives spent to try and do what Marissa did in five minutes. Never had he dream he would be fortunate enough to witness such an act courage and self-assurance.

Marissa goes to the hatch and opens it. “Ray see if you can get through this hatch..”
But he's a monster he's eaten some of my best friends.” Hu yells from the far end of the enclosure. “You can't let him loose.”
Look who's talking, Ray why did you eat all those people.”
People taste terrible, we eat to scare em make em leave Rays alone.”
Ray just manages to squeeze through the door. They are now in the outer offices of Dr Neiman's labs.
Ray do you know who Dr. Neiman is? He's a very bad man who has made these people keep you locked up.”
Don't know, don't like.”
Well Mistress has to go hurt this very bad man. While I do that I want you to go talk to your brother and tell him he has to obey me too. He is through that door.”
K.”
Marissa stops for a moment and takes a deep breath. She opens the doors to the office suite and is greeted by a secretary who looks as though she hasn't eaten in days.
Can I help you?”
Yes I'd like to see Dr. Neiman, he sent for me.”
Name?”
Muffy”
Muffy?”
Muffy.”
Sir, I have a Muffy here to see you. She says you sent for her.”
I did? Well send her in, I sent for a lot of people today.” says Neiman absentmindedly.
The secretary buzzes the door open and Marissa enter Neiman's office.
With all the raping of the employees and plotting world domination Neiman's hygiene has suffered. He hasn't shaven in a week or showered for that matter.
So this is the great Dr. Neiman? You're pathetic.” says Marissa.
And you are?” he asks.
I am Marissa Pfundskiller, remember me?”
Just a sec.” he says as he scurries around his desk to the list of his zombies and their trigger words.
He finds Marissa on the list.
Yes of course I remember you. I sent you to eliminate Baldwin.” he is confident now even smug. “Have you tried that new Shamu I sent you?”
No but I got Baldwin out of the hospital. He's outside, recovering nicely.”
Perhaps you misunderstood, I ordered you to kill him.”
You ordered me to kill my mother too.”
Yes that was just to test if I had complete control.”
Marissa has been waiting for Neiman to get in just the right position to make her move. He does now and in a instant she has Neiman literally pinned to the floor. She has driven one of her toys through a testicle, through the femoral artery, though the femur and out into the floor.
Well lets just consider this a test shall we. This will test how long it takes you to bleed out once I remove my toy.” says Marissa, “But I don't need that one right now, I have another.”
Savoring the fear growing in Neiman's eyes, she slowly draws her other toy from its concealment in her jacket. While Neiman is fixated on her toy she deftly steps on one of Neiman's hands. She bends down and inserts her toy into the soft flesh between the thumb and forefinger. She stops when she feels bone, but only momentarily. Neiman is thrashing in agony pinned to the floor like a carp. Marissa continues to push her toy into Neiman's hand and soon the wrist, much to Nieman's discomfort. Marissa is getting excited and pushes the skewer in to the hilt forcing the point out Nieman's arm about four inches from the elbow.
At this point Neiman stops screaming and starts pleading. Just as he is about to beg and grovel gunshots are heard faintly in the distance.
Ever alert, Marissa senses it time to bail.
Listen carefully if you want to live.”
Yes, yes anything.”
Good I am going to pull the pin from your balls and you have to keep pressure on the wound till help arrives. This is the most important thing for you to remember.”
Marissa bends down and pins Neiman's head to the floor with a knee.
How would I ever forget that.......” Neiman begins to whine but is cut short.
Marissa has taken one hand and held Neiman's top eyelids back as far as they will go. With the precision of a surgeon she gives Nieman a quick four inch deep puncture under the eyelid between the eyeball and the boney ridge above. She feels a satisfying crunch with each thrust telling her she's reached the frontal lobe. I little jab in each for a double lobotomy and she seriously doubts Neiman will be cooking any more soup.
Because of that,” she says.
She jump up, sheathes her weapons and grabs the list off Neiman's desk. She quickly pulls the drive out of his computer and snags his laptop as she heads toward to opposite direction of the gunfire.
She enter Ray-Ray's lair and finds the Ray's taking turns scratching each other behind the ear.
Ready to leave this place Rays?” she asks.
Yes, Ray-Ray does not want the pain but would like ear scratches too, he obey you. We protect Mistress, Mistress protect Rays”
She walk right up to Ray-Ray and scratches him.
That's the plan. OK, we need to leave here. And we gotta get you guys cleaned up you really stink bad.”
They have little difficulty getting out unnoticed once Hu is convinced he won't be eaten.

Baldwin and the bikers have barely avoided a run in with every cop in Minnesota. Marissa had ordered everyone to lay low while she was inside with Hu. That had paid off big time because the Minnesota cops were not playing games. They tore the top off the facility and went in guns blazing. It could be heard that they were meeting stiff resistance.
Neiman had ordered everyone, in the event of something like this happening, to defend every inch of the facility with their lives.
Hu led them through a maze of tunnels to an area where there were still a few animals in cages.
I just have to let these last few loose and we're gone.” says Hu. “There is an escape elevator just up the tunnel that comes out quit a distance from where the shooting is happening.”
Great, let's hit it.” says Marissa as she helps open the last of the cages.
They emerge some distance from the entrance building and down a slope far enough so they can't be seen from there.
By the time the police reach Neiman he is still alive clutching his wound for all he is worth and Marissa has the Rays out behind the clubhouse hosing them off.

Chapter Thirteen

Jimmy and Oly have been invited to the raid. They have been instrumental in breaking this case against Neiman and Satanos.
That is all well and good but they know there is more, the Pfundskiller wild-card is still in play. They aren't all that interested in assaulting the Satanos facility, they are more interested in getting the whole story. They both suspect that Marissa is involved in this up to the nostrils.
So when the big assault begins Jimmy and Oly hang back outside to see what is to be seen.
There are other eyes on the activities and Tonto sees the two cops snooping around outside.
He runs back to the group hiding in the bushes but they are gone. He goes to where they had parked the vans and one is gone. The driver of the other has a strange tale to tell and keeps repeating that Marissa has tamed monsters and taken them to the club house.

At the clubhouse things are festive. Once she gets the Rays hosed down so they don't stink and has the guys rig up loin cloths for them made from curtains and rope, Marissa decides it is time to party.
Just as the beers start flowing and lines hoovering, Hu starts fretting over something.
Mistress, mistress, there is a problem that requires the utmost attention.”
What might that be?” asks Marissa as she snorts a line.
Uh, you know that list you took from Dr. Neiman? The one with the trigger words for his zombies?”
Yeah, what of it?”
Before I released my pets Neiman had called them and secretly instructed them to go to a warehouse in Minneapolis and suit up in full combat armor and arm themselves to the teeth. That warehouse is owned by Satanos and is all the equipment they would need to defend one of their facilities against armed assault.
Well they have been ordered to go to the Mall of American and kill everyone.”
And you waited until now to tell me this?”
I feared your wrath, Mistress.” says Hu sullenly.
How much greater do you think my wrath will be if Neiman gets away with his plan because you hesitated to tell me?”
Tonto and his driver come in from their return trip. He quickly finds Marissa and says, “Two of St Paul's finest are snooping around outside while the raid is going on. They are looking for something besides Neiman.”
“How long ago was that?”
“I don't know, 10 min.?”
“Baldwin, Ben, let's go.”
“Where we going?”asks Ben.
“To make a deal with the piggies.”
“Huh, what deal?” asks Baldwin.
“The deal where the cops forget me and you and they uses these trigger words we trade for memory loss to prevent the Great Mall of America Massacre.”
They make it to Satanos in record time and sure enough the gumshoes are still snooping.
“Ben go tell those cops that a couple of desperadoes want to parlay.”
Ben walks up to Jimmy and Oly just as they are examining a huge footprint left by one of the Rays.
“Jeez, will ya look at that Jimmy?” asks Oly.
“Ha, I seen some big corn-fed farm boys in my time but that's gotta be the biggest foot I ever saw.” say Jimmy.
“He don't need no water skis, that's for sure. If there ain't two sets of those prints here I'll kiss your grandma's pitootie.”
“Oh crap, you're right, got any antacids, Oly?”
Ben walks up and clears his throat, they look up at him and he says, “Excuse me, there are two people who have some vital information about Neiman's operation and a terrorist attack that may be underway at the Mall.”
“What two people? We know about the Mall and steps are being taken to resolve that problem.”
“Oh really? I think you better hear what my friends have to say and quick. We don't have a lot of time if it hasn't run out already.”
“Take us to them.” says Oly.
Somehow neither Jimmy or Oly are surprised who the “two friends” turn out to be.
“At last we meet Marissa, I have been a fan of yours for a while.” says Jimmy
“Lovely, here's the deal: there's a zombie assault team headed to the Mall. They left the hotel and headed to a secret stash of weapons maintained by Satanos. They are now armed to the teeth and in full body armor. By now you know Baldwin can't be held responsible for what he's done. So we want the authorities to clear Baldwin and I want whatever you think you've got on me forgotten. In return I have this list from Neiman's desk.. It's the words that trigger the zombies to obey. All you have to do is call this list to the Mall and use a bullhorn to stop the attack. I think that's a great deal for all involved.”
“Ya do? How can we let you slide for attempted murder?” asks Oly.
“Simple, if you don't you will cause the deaths of god knows how many shoppers and cops. Seems a simple choice to me. We are providing crucial information to resolve a deadly crisis with no loss of life. Oh, you may not know this yet but you won't be getting much out of Neiman if he's still alive. He's only a shadow of his former self since our little chat. Therefore you have no alternative but to deal.”
After a quick call to the commander in charge of the Satanos assault it was confirmed that aside from a hole in an artery he seemed OK but for some reason he couldn't talk or focus.
“See, I killed Neiman before you got there.”
“Ah...they just said he is OK.” says Jimmy.
“That's isn't Neiman.”
“Then who is it.” asks Oly.
“It's the piece of meat where Neiman used to live. But unfortunately, after the double lobotomy I gave him, there is no longer anyone home.
“So you see I'm your girl.” smirks Marissa.
“I have to admit she is the cutest psycho we've had the pleasure to deal with,” says Jimmy.
“A double lobotomy for the mad genius out for world domination ain't a bad ending.” agrees Oly.
“I guess you've finagled yourself the spot as hero of the day, Ms. Pfundskiller.” says Jimmy with a grin.
“Great, great, now let's stop those zombie fucks.”
“Couldn't have said it better myself.” says Oly as she takes the list and calls the circus at the Mall.
Jimmy, reading off the same list, relays the trigger words to the battle still raging below.

Regional director of DHS Rallo leads the futile attempt to secure the dozens of entries to the Mall. He soon realizes it's hopeless without four times the manpower he has.
Suddenly, gunfire breaks out a short distance from where he is standing.
He rushes to the sound and finds several of his men down but moving and they and unknown assailants are exchanging automatic weapons fire.
Just as he hears an explosion in the distance his phone rings. He, at first, just lets it ring, this is not really the time to talk on the phone. But as it continues to ring he thinks, with all the weird shit with this case he better just answer it. It is Oly.

The battle in the Satanos underground facility has not gone well. Both those who had been zombified by Neiman and ordered to fight to the death and the assorted law enforcement personnel from various sources around Minnesota are suffering savage losses.
Jimmy calls his boss, who has gone below, and starts reciting the names and triggers words to stop the slaughter.
Within minutes of the calls by Jimmy and Oly using the info provided by Marissa both situations are defused. By this time word of the Mall attack has leaked as well as the Satanos story. Press vans are showing up.
“So that's it, I'm outta here. I expect to hear my name on the news as the source of crucial info that saved many, many lives. That actually feels pretty good. You guys aren't too bad for cops; at least you've got a sense of humor.”
“It takes a lot of scotch and antacids.” says Jimmy with a frown.
“And you aren't too bad for a psycho.” says Oly with a smile.
“We'll keep our word but try to stay under the radar.” says Jimmy
“We'd hate to have to track you down for excess of one sort or another.” says Oly.
“Same here.” Says Marissa with smirk of satisfaction.

Chief Lewis of the St. Paul Police and District Director Rallo of Homland Security have a meeting the next morning to compare notes and neither one is happy with the tally.
Once the people who had launched the attack on the Mall of America were stopped, through use of their trigger words, they were found to be in poor condition from sitting in a hotel for days without eating. Some had been shot and some killed. Most made it through the ordeal and were hospitalized. The same was true of many of the people in the Moorehead facility.
The Moorhead facility would take weeks to sort out. The survivors were extremely cooperative in helping with the investigation but had been instructed to forget much. Even with the use of their trigger words they could not seem to remember everything leading investigators to believe Neiman had used a secondary trigger on some of his slaves.
What investigators could gather was far from reassuring.
“Where is the second list of trigger words?” asks Jimmy of Neiman's personal secretary, James.
“That would be on his laptop.”
“What laptop? We found no laptop.” says Oly.
“Neiman always kept his laptop on his desk. He never plugged it into the network or went online with it. He was very secretive with it long before he went mad and took over the facility.”
“What about the animals you people were experimenting on; what happened to them?”
“You mean the animals are gone? Have you found dead animals?”
“We found no animals, dead or alive.”
“Not good at all. Some of those animals are very dangerous and cannot be allowed to roam free.”
“Why is that?”
“Because many of them are natural mutants that Satanos collected. They are capable of producing new species. Many had exotic deadly diseases. Bad news if they got out. You better look real hard for carcasses.”
“Fucking great, more of Neiman's bullshit to clean up.” Says Jimmy as he tosses some antacids into his mouth.
“We had three people tell us there were two cannibal giant dimwits down here. Where are they?”
“You don't know where they are?” says James with a horrified look. He becomes very agitated, looking around as though he expects one of the giants to jump out and eat him.
“Calm down, they're not here.”
“The Rays are extremely dangerous. They've eaten seventeen people in just the last few months.”
“What about a two-headed Chinese midget hunchback?” says Oly with a laugh, “I'm sorry I don't mean to be disrespectful but if you wrote a story with a two-headed Chinese midget hunchback as the mad scientist's flunky nobody would believe it.”
“Pretty amazing but true. Dr. Hu is a brilliant biochemist and geneticist.”
“So who ran this place before Neiman took over.”
“Oh you must mean Director Eggars, Myron Eggars. I haven't seen him for days, ever since his wife was killed. We all assumed he was on grief leave.”

Jimmy and Oly are once again doing some liquid research in the case.
“So we got a list of secondary trigger words unaccounted for, we have Neiman's laptop and as it turns out his hard drive, missing, we have Dr. Hu a two-headed Chinese hunchback dwarf missing, are ya following me Jimmy.”
“Affirmative, Cap'n Oly.”
“We also have several hundred animals that are either natural mutants or have been altered in who knows what way, missing. Correct?”
“Correct, as usual.”
“And lastly we have twin giants, ten to fourteen feet tall, with Down's Syndrome who eat people, missing. Am I missing anything?”
“As I see it Marissa got into the facility before we did, veggitized Neiman, she admitted that, and stole the laptop and hard drive. She may have also taken the dwarf and the giants.”
“Nice detectiving. Now we need to recover Neiman's laptop and hard drive. We can't have anyone misusing that nastiness.”
“So how do we get the stuff back before someone looks at it and understands what it is.”
“This may be one we won't be able to solve. Let's just hope that if anyone ever understands it they will know the right thing to do.”

In a limestone quarry, within sight of the smoke still billowing out of the Moorhead facility, Marissa looks up and smiles. She and the gang came out here to do a little target practice. They are shooting at the thing Marissa knows will drive the authorities absolutely crazy and disrupt their sleep with nightmares of zombie armies. She savors the power she holds. She knows she is denying the authorities closure. They are shooting at Neiman's laptop. Next up, the hard drive. She know this info must be destroyed. But she also know she will keep the police and all the government agencies wondering and worrying what ever happened to Neiman's data.







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