Texas
Her strong colors cut through the dark as I followed her down a dark, steel-lined hallway just after midnight on test day. I caught a glimpse of her cherry-red lipstick and the heavy black eyeliner that seemed to pull her transparent blue eyes into strings. My mother would love her. I wondered who the Aztec God was tattooed on the small of her light brown back. She talked over her shoulder to me. The air was thick with cheap cigarette smoke. The straps of her white-lace bra were frayed at the edges.
She is perfect, I thought.
“I’m sorry my friends can’t come with us. You should’ve come to see us earlier,” she said as she hooked her thumbs in her hip-hugger blue jeans. “Are you really a doctor?”
She laughed as we passed a half-dozen shipping containers converted into rooms, where young, naked prostitutes danced and fucked. The brothel was an abandoned freight warehouse on the SBX canal a quarter-mile south of Brownsville.
“But I’m good for all two-hundred fifty,” she whispered as we left the building. “You’re gonna be so freakin happy with me, baby.” She climbed into the black panel van and smiled at me as I climbed into the driver’s seat.
“We don’t have to go to all the way to Brownsville,” she said. “We can fuck right here. Is that something you would like?”
I just smiled, reached out with a needle and plunged it into her carotid…
*
I watched on the monitor as she woke up on the side of a gravel road, clutching her purse, shivering and spitting blood. She looked around and saw nothing but flat scrub and a single street-light 50 yards down the road.
“Hello? Hello?” She stood up on shaky legs and turned her purse inside out. Condoms, e-cigarettes and gum spilled out. “You didn’t have to take my phone, did you? Fucker!”
She staggered down the road toward the street-light and passed an infra-red camera hidden in the scrub. It tracked her as she walked by. She gently lowered herself to the ground and sat with her back to the steel street-light, closing her eyes for a moment. When she opened them she saw the Lobat 6 racing toward her across the road. She opened her mouth to scream and the beast suddenly leaped. It landed on her and enveloped her mouth with its powerful jaw and razor-sharp teeth. The whore shuddered as it bit down, crushing her jaw and tearing out her tongue. She vomited blood from the hole where her tongue used to be as the Lobat’s claws tore the flesh from her face.
She is perfect.
My Lobat is perfect.
*
Test day was successful. Proceed with phase two as ordered by myself and Doctor Ayer…
*
Mosquitoes looped and collided in the hot, still air outside the window screen of guard post Alpha. Private Bill Collins, a sleepy 19-year-old with a crew cut, dug around for something inside the upturned shell of a security phone with a pair of pliers. He clamped down hard, twisted and yanked. There was a metallic snap and he came up empty.
“Okay, I give up, you win,” he said as he studied the pile of screws, plates and chips next to the shell. “You beat me.” He picked up a microchip and flipped it across the back of his hand. “Gimme two cans and a string anytime,” he laughed.
Collins looked up when he realized someone was standing in the doorway. It was his commanding officer, Ron Phillip, a 35-year-old British expat, with patchy, cropped grey hair, a beer belly and a tattoo of a Derby FC ram on his neck.
“Appears to be a blinding success, Bill,” Phillip said as he surveyed the wreckage of the phone on the table.
“It’s a little complex for me, sir, seeing as I graduated from a California high school.” Collins handed him the pliers.
“Bollocks. You’re no good to me, yourself, or your country if you can’t take things apart and put them back together.”
“I’m a good shot.”
“Video games don’t count. You come back to me when you can pull a trigger looking in a man’s eyes. Did you inventory the weapons and ammo like I told you?”
“Not yet. No, Sir.”
“I know you’re in America, but we’ve got some real work to do.”
“Yes, sir.”
Collins turned out the lights and locked the door whe they left the guard post. They crossed the parking lot to the main complex, a cluster of squat steel buildings surrounded by triple barbed wire, and entered the building through an unmanned south gate, passing several empty offices.
“Will Derby ever beat Man City, sir?”
“Be quiet.”
“Will they ever beat Arsenal?”
“Shut your hole.”
“Will they ever beat Wolverhampton?”
“You’re asking for a thrashing.”
“Would they even stand a chance against the Queens Park Rangers?”
“Remind me to beat you to death,” Phillip said as they came to a door marked Armory.
He entered a 12-digit code and the door locks sprang back…
