The following is a work of fiction intended for adult entertainment. Ms. Americana and Got Gal are copyrighted character created by Mr. X and used in kind permission as detailed on his wonderful website. Rook.

SUPERHEROINE QUARTERLY VOL. 100 ISSUE 100!

 

Ms. Americana had the same problems that other duel identity super heroines had. The people who wanted autographs amidst a terrorist attack at a strip mall. The ducking of annoying paparazzi while in uniform, who only wanted to get peeper shots of a woman’s unmentionables. The adverse relationship between hard working heroine and the rather maladroit men of the police force. And of course the juggling act of keeping the public, press, and police from ever figuring out the privet identity from the public super heroine persona. This later meant clever subterfuge and often risky dual public appearances requiring split second timing of costume changes. It also meant that if one persona or other had some important or unavoidable engagement that the other one had to have a realistic excuse to be out of the publics eye for that same set of circumstances. But sometimes things just worked as a gimmie.

For example everyone in Delta City knew that Brenda Wade was going to take a few days off in order to have her wisdom teeth surgically removed. It would have been suspicious indeed if Ms. Americana, a very close friend of Brenda Wades would have also vanished from the public sight during that same period of time. It would have been far worse though for Ms. Americana to be seen on the streets of the city with swollen cheeks and slurring her speech through Novocain numb lips!

Luckily, GOT Gal had contacted Ms. Americana and being fully aware of her secret identity as Brenda Wade and the dilemma she faced with her dentist ordeal offered a proposal which would help both of them out. GOT Gal had been asked by the wealthy Camilla Bareass to house sit her new inherited family estate, and GOT Gal had suggested Brenda in her Ms. Americana regalia tag along. The general public would know that Brenda Wade was recuperating at Wade Manor and that Ms. Americana was busy helping GOT Gal at the palatial estates of Camilla Bareass. In reality, Ms. Americana could sit in a nice cozy chair by the fire and shut away from the world sleep off the effects of the dental operation with none the wiser.

It was a good plan and Ms. Americana welcomed it. Of course there was more to it than merely house sitting. In fact, it wasn’t house sitting at all! Camilla had recently inherited the old family estates only to move in with her staff and find the place haunted! It was absurd of course, but after just one week both Camilla and her entire house staff had fled. Not wishing to be ridiculed by the rest of the Delta City wealthy she had asked GOT Gal to look into the strange going ones at Bareass manor and do so under a pretense of watching the estate while Camilla took a much needed relaxing three months stay at the family’s Moroccan mansion. To give a greater credence to having two of the cities greatest super heroines house sit a privet estate no matter how luxurious while its owner went off on extended vacation, Camilla Bareass took this opportunity to have the famous Bareass jewelry downtown store’s entire security system redone and modernized. Announcing that the entire inventory of almost priceless world renowned stock would be temporarily stored at the family estate under the watchful eye of the ultimate super heroine team! GOT Gal and Ms. Americana! The entire underworld smelled a trap and sneered as both super heroines made a brief appearance at the Bareass downtown marbled edifice store and then escorted the kings ransom in jewels to the twenty mile distant Bareass estate. A few eye brows were raised in the criminal cartels when on their tv sets they noted that Ms. Americana rode inside the armored car alone and GOT Gal drove the famous flashy patriotic painted Ms. Americana mobile at point of the police escort. But it was forgotten with the marmalade and toast and the morning paper declaring yet another war brewing in the middle east.

There was a great irony in Brenda having her wisdom teeth removed, in that being an Aphrodite gene super woman her increased healing powers would naturally over come the effects of the operation and heal her completely in a matter of an hour at most, but the sleeping gas that would be used upon Brenda Wade in preparing her for the operation would have an unusually long de-habilitating effect upon her because of that self same gene. In fact all forms of chloroform gasses or drugs whose sole purpose was to render one unconscious for surgical procedures had an almost diabolical similar effect upon all Aphrodite gene super heroines, it not only rendered them unconscious with exceptional speed and ease considering their other super resiliencies, but it lasted longer upon them, producing lingering long term effects of confusion and an almost uncanny retarding of higher motor and intellectual functions. In short it rendered a super heroine some what ‘stupid’ for several hours after regaining consciousness. It also had the rather embarrassing side effect of removing all impediments in the individuals psyche against sexual arousal. An Aphrodite gene super heroine waking up from any kind of sleeping esthetic found her already difficult to control womanly ‘needs’ now a raging flood of lusts that her addled mind couldn’t comprehend the reason others might deem them unseemly or needing to be repressed. To put it bluntly a few whiffs of knock out gas and even the most ardent moral super heroine becomes a cock hungry mega-slut!

Naturally super heroines struggle to avoid such encounters and recoil in horror from those few pesky villains who use such techniques in their repertoire, but occasionally one has to bite the bullet and go into a situation of anxious returns and hope for the best. Such it was for Brenda now, those wisdom teeth would have to come out. And Brenda Wade who had never been sick a day in her entire life, would have to be put under in order for the dental surgeon to do his job. This meant Brenda Wade would than have to spend a few days ‘recuperating’ away from prying eyes and tempting innocent un-expecting males who might find their privets being brashly unceremoniously openly fondled in public by one of the richest women in the world somewhat shocking.

And yet for Ms. Americana to go into seclusion at the same time might start the tongues wagging as to who is really behind that star spangled mask. But one couldn’t have the Queen of Justice herself wobbling through the streets groping passersby’s to gauge their packages size and desirability in satisfying her needs or making salacious suggestive comments to a school yard full of Catholic girls! There was no telling how long the after effects of the drug would last. On a normal Aphrodite gene super heroine the effects could be measured in hours, but Ms. Americana used a sexual repression belt to bolster her super heroine powers and thus practiced the terrible price of utter sexual abstinence. As such any knock out drug did unusually longer more powerful effects upon her in releasing her sexual pent up kinetic energies, which the belt would undoubtedly magnify a hundred fold.

Still GOT Gals plan to make a slight public show of the two of them before the downtown media and escorting the jewels to the Bareass estate was about as low risk as one could ask for considering that the red faced drooling slack jawed heavy lidded partner of hers kept boldly staring at her tiny tops bulging cleavage and licking her numb lips. Still after a few close calls the public stunt was over and Ms. A was sequestered into the back of the armored car alone and the journey was then uneventful out of the city and through the rolling hills up into the low mountains where the Bareass estate was situated. Luckily the timing was good and Ms. Americana who as Brenda Wade had her four wisdom teeth removed just three hours ago and vanished into the downtown Wade manor house, was more sleepy than horny yet and GOT Gal managed to get her inside the Bareass estate and into a comfy chair by a fire while she saw to the armored car being secured inside the previously heavily fortified storage building behind the grand house its self. The small detail of police were then left to watch the building and the front gate in shifts while GOT Gal and Ms. Americana policed the deserted interior of the great house with its own priceless artifacts which Camilla had been transferring from her own scattered houses to the once regal family estate. GOT Gal carefully tuned her GOT Gem to the police walkie-talkies and told them to report in to her if anything seemed amiss.

With the jewels basic security taken care of, GOT Gal contacted Camilla for a brief check-in and then set about with the unusual task of settling Ms. Americana into her room. The girl was all hands! It was like trying to wrestle a horny octopus! But luckily her simplified brain was easily distracted and after a few embarrassing gropes of her breasts by those leather gloved hands and some slurred comments about Ms. Americana needing ‘fresh squeezed milk for breakfast’ in the morning, GOT Gal managed to get the lust drugged super heroine to shift her obsession of her tits to a child like wonder at the bag of books and magazines that Brenda Wade had stopped and picked up for herself before her operation.

Ms. Americana couldn’t remember much of anything immediately prior to the operation and simply yelped, “goodies!” In true gleeful wonder at the bag of surprises. After rubbing the shinny bright colorful pictures in the magazines she found a book full of monster and ghost stories called, “One hundred and one stories to affright!” She turned to the section on zombies and began to thumb through the title page. Newly engrossed in her new book, GOT Gal tugged her top back into place and breathed a sigh of relief as she quietly tip toed out of the room. She had a house to invest age, a little ghost story of her own to unravel and now that she new that Brenda was safely away in her room away from the prying eyes of the press and the jewels were safe under lock and key guarded by sadly men, but still within her immediate call to rescue, it was time for her to scourer the house and grounds for signs and clues for Camilla’s related tales of the haunting had indeed piqued the super heroines thirsty curiosity.

As she slowly closed the door, GOT Gal glanced behind her at the mere minutes ago simmering lustful sex pot now transformed into an almost juvenal innocent girl in a brightly splashy bikini cuddling up with a good book before a warm fire and smile and blew her a kiss whispering, “night hon.”

The door closing unnoticed behind her, Ms. Americana thumbed to a title which had caught her shimmering eye and pulling her booted knees up to her chest began to read:

THE WHITE STAR OF INDIA

The fog that roiled and boiled up the low uneven hills and spilled and filled the shallow swath of short valleys along the sea coast shimmered in the midnight pale with a consistency of toppled sedimentary sand bars through the cool hushed streets so many un-tuned still hours before dawn. The fog did not part with the sharp report of a bold step but struck and clung to all it bruised its self up against; so that Kristi found her leather booted small feet in a crushing wet white silky swirl of high backed hissing cats of fog as she strode purposely forward in the gray milky pitch, the crunch and clack of coble stones wetly echoing her skirting rustle and half deadened footfall of her blind listing search.

She bore no lamp and the oil wicks of the irregular street lights burned feebly in the heavy cotton air of clay swirled coiling strands of un-torn but elongated filament air of her uneasy wake. She paused with one dim ember of flickering street light behind her and nothing but narrowing dark all before, and the wisp and tangle of the slow dancing air stuck to her as if she were a sweaty laborer in a carding shed on shearing day. With her well corseted hart thumping madly in her throat, a stranger to this land, she plummeted forward into the mocking sublime ballet of the night fog until the agitated rhythmic lapping roar of the jetties over came the rifle shots of her uneven footfall.

A low swinging wooden sign on creaking salt blackened chain slick with dew reflected a winking light of a near by yellowed smoke smeared window, a glass mildewed eye in the dead face of the white shroud night, and she made her way to it, with the uneasy sinewy pounce of the fog imbued open water slapping about the invisible shore seemingly within an impossible simple arm reach of her cold blue ungloved right hand.

She never reached the warm light of the common house. A shamble pile of inky shadow soiled glimmer dripping casks, nets, and crates harboring to one bean pole leaning shunted corner of the wharf building spit vowels at her, and she was struck dead in the sudden cold night air, pinned in place as if by a headhunter’s spear. As a shudder of shadow divested its self from the shoal of hulking shape in the fog and pinched off bobbed and weaved in place, waiting for her to finish their mingled approach. She swallowed hard the copper taste in her parched small mouth and made three halting steps toward the oily shape but found she could will herself to go no further. The shape leaned forward as if realizing this and in doing so a soft nigh invisible shaft of the near by yellowed light twinkling off the rocking sign struck the shadow into the hideous figure of a way worn man.

The face was an impasto of gray fog, blue night, and jaundiced yellowed tavern spilt light, too quickly painted amidst the tatter and wet cloak of layers of unwashed gaudy garments stripped of all care into a moldering scum of base black hewn survival. The unsteady light lent the ragged age battered beggary features no warmth or personable glow, but as if by some cruel intent lacking respect of hard pressed wanton survival, it instead cast all in a hellish infernal impersonal cold humorless horror stripped of individual suffering and humanity, as a preacher dose God in his Sunday sermon.

Kristi recoiled despite herself at this image of damnation coughed up so suddenly before her. And the slack lips of the earth bound fiend trembled at the brief flash of acknowledgment of its lowly state impressed as recognition beyond its dried up well of pain. The sign creaked and it vanished into the dark, creaked again but only its voice was heard. It had leaned back into the wet pile of shadows.

“You are looking for Malcolm Star.” The creatures voice was not the rasp of street dust and turpentine she had expected but rather the even balm of a learned man of substance and means and this struck her with a shudder of revulsion she could not repress in the increasing cold bane of the disenchanted night. It had not been an inquiry but a statement and it did not wait out her initial shock for her to untangle a reply. “You will not find him. For three days now, you have been busy about the port asking after the ship, ‘The White Star of India’, but it is not a ship you are after, but a man you seek. You will not find him. His father Jacob Star, the former Governor of the Isle of Bantamie, has taken up residence in the great villa up in the hills of this island. But Malcolm is not there, Malcolm is no longer anywhere. But only the Governor of Bantamie can tell you anything about that. You should go home, Kristi Star, you should go home. Your uncle is not the man you once thought you had known, and your playfellow of youth is beyond mortal reach.” The voice stopped. The silence impeachable.

When Kristi fumbled her way the last few steps to the lip of the rubbish heap, there was nothing of the man to be found, his nest of coiled ropes was empty. Kristi thumbed the small scrap of paper left for her scarcely an hour before at her hotel that had lead her out into an alien landscape of impellent dangers to this odd and terrible place and the increasing strangeness of it all, she left off worming the small parchment in her dress pocket and rubbed her numb arms in the increasing cold, it would be dawn soon. At least she had some definitive word of her uncle. Her thousand mile journey was nearing its end.

India was not yet the indelible jewel in the scepter Isles crown, but several of her costal islands, a great pod of hump backed ringlets of high forested cuds of land, had already followed in sway to whatever flagged fortress was seated overnight on its rocky pocked shore and its long suffering natives pledging obedience within any glistening columns march. As such many men including her uncle, had found ample opportunity to find fortune through the great trading company to take up residence on these chains of jade amidst the cobalt and azure and squeeze money seemingly out of the very humid air. None of these Viceroys and Governors had generated so much profit over such a short time as had her uncle Jacob Star. His little conglomerate of three tinny islands had produced more tea and rubber than all the other smoky crater larger islands all put together. When he had sent for his son to come join him, Malcolm had joyfully resigned his Naval commission and gone readily to his fathers side. That had been less than two years ago. Since then some great tragedy had befallen the main isle of Bantamie and Malcolm’s pledge to write to her had failed to generate a single letter once he had arrived at the island its self.

The villa in question that Kristi set forth the following day to seek out was on the lip of the high cliff west shore and was only approachable by a precarious set of footpaths winding up the slumbering giant volcano that gave this island its name, Namor. The villa its self was known simply as the House of Namor as it was the only residence of substance on the island outside of the port shanty town which confusingly also bore the name ‘Namor.’

It took Kristi the better part of a hot humid day to brave the jungle paths and with the rapidly setting sun reach the gates of the villa with the long fingered night shadows already over spilling the rosy crescent of visible sky behind the houses slash of man forced glade. The island of Namor had lost much of its brief luster with the removal of the posted garrison some two months back and degenerated into its current state of a rabble pirate port within days of the tall ships leavening. The timber walled and gated compound of the villa hardly more than a month old, already showed the astonishing signs of rot and depredation in the short time of its governors removal with his troops. That her uncle would willing confine himself in such a place of reeking squalor puzzled the girl, and she brushed back the lose soft black lock of hair from her sharp blue eyes as a lone hunched figure finally answered her long shouts and poundings and as a desperate last resort a shot of the lone heavy pistol she now wore at her side. The crude palisade gate opened on a creak of leather hinges and revealed the lower half of the two story white washed house that did little to dismiss her misgivings at her uncles current choice of residence. She could only mentally remark that whatever terrible tragedy that had befallen Batamie and its two smaller nameless sister isles and sent her uncle fleeing to this even more remote and seemingly inhospitable place for refuge must have been truly monstrous indeed.

The smell of salt peter and sulfur was still wafting about her petty coats from her brash pistol call for admittance when she was unceremoniously ushered into the prescience of her uncle Jacob Star and she leapt into his arms despite her uncertainly of her environment and growing dread of what she would rapidly discover about her true friends fate. Her uncle Jacob and Malcolm were the only family she had left in the world and she was greatly relived when the notoriously obtuse man over came his obvious initial surprise and hugged her back and kissed her forehead in greeting.

The evening diner was sumptuous if spare and the table of two was cleared away by the same glum slack jawed hunch back who had opened the log lashed gate for her and in turn seemed to be the only visible servant and occupant to her uncles current household. He vanished to his duties and being alone with the curtsies and repast behind them Kristi could not bare the gnawing questions her uncle had shunted off again and again any longer. Her uncle sensed this at once and without any new prompt upon her behalf rose from his chair and proceeded to pour both drink and story to her hungry heat dulled senses.

“When first I beheld Batamie proper, I had little prospect of her real worth,” the towering barrel chested man began. “She was little to look at. Three mangy fishing villages and mile after mile of dangerous jungle rot. But I set to work and soon we had half the island burned down to good black soil and rows of tea and rubber trees imported and planted. I could not believe how fast things grow in this volcanic soil. Soon we were up and running. But it wasn’t until I met a seedy old Dutch man named Von Toth that the true prospect of profit emerged. He heard tell of this struck off priest, defrocked, out cast, from some near by island temple, a chap called Xerat. Now Xerat had this proposal, if we could help him re-gain access to the island temple he would in turn help out in our labor problems. You see ducky, the pinch of it is, the natives don’t want to work, and a great chunk of the land has to be used up in growing fodder for them and housing them and all that rot. But this Xerat fellow had a solution to all of that, but first we had to get him back into the temple. Which we did. In fact it was pudding, the whole ‘complex’ was nothing but some palm frond huts with a few dozen priests all hunched down around this black stone crude arch in front of a pit. A few good stout men and musket shots and that was that. Could have done the whole thing with sabers. Anyway, in goes Xerat down into this snug hole and out he comes with a staff and an armful of scrolls. I sent a few men in and they came out with some handful of semi-precious stones, but Xerat was right, his haul was the mightier.” Jacob paused looking into the embers of the dying fire and re-stoked the fire place with a blackened saber kept nearby for just such a purpose.

“We returned to Batamie proper and Xerat fell to work to keep his part of the bargain. Using a scroll and the staff to stir it, he worked up some foul smelling gruel that he said would make the natives work night and day. They would never tire, and never need to eat anything other than that disgusting ash pile of gruel once a day. It fell out just as he said. The natives never slept again, and only needed a mouthful of that slop once a day. We tore down their huts, made away with their gardens and covered the entire three isles with cash crops. In addition, the gray gruel made the natives unquestionably obedient, it was heaven! In less than a fortnight we were turning profit! But then ole Von Toth got squeamish. He thought it was somehow unnatural and wrong. But we took care of him and that gave us another worker and more profit for myself and Xerat. But then I began to question the arrangement? Could I trust that scoundrel Xerat? Of course not, because the workers were more loyal to him than anyone else. But it took me a while to learn his secrets. It was the staff in the end. No hocus-pocus there, the wood you see, that old gnarled black wood, had some kind of chemical in it that added the final ingredient to the stew as you stirred it. Once I ‘sussed that, it was just a matter of marching some men up to his shack and taking it by force. But the old bastard escaped, sans staff. And though he couldn’t make anymore of his living dead men, he could still over command those thousands we had choked the islands with. We had gathered them up from all around in raids. Thousands of the bastards. And now they attacked us.”

“It was during this time that Malcolm arrived with his ship of a hundred stout men. But even that fortuitous circumstance wasn’t enough. We had to burn the whole island to destroy them all. Still it looked like we might pull it all off, but I sent my last good man out with The White Star of India, the great pride of the ships under my command, to gather more reinforcements and much needed supplies. We saw her return shortly there after and rushed down to the gated dock to unload her, but Xerat was a clever bastard. He had sent out his minions on crudely made rafts and surprised the White Star as she waited for the tide to make it through the harbors mouth. They slaughtered and ate the crew, and hid themselves inside the cargo crates we lowered down to the dock. In a terrible paralyzed hart beat the beasts had gained access inside our walled compound. It was all over then.

In the end only a handful of us escaped that great plague of death. But Xerat escaped as well in command of the White Star of India herself no less, and has been hounding me for his staff ever since. He still has a few of his enslaved lot, but unable to make their gruel for them they decay on the hoof, though they seem incapable of dying proper. They devour any living flesh at hand, but it dose not seem to prevent their rot, only the soup of the staff can do that. Without that soup they are filled with an unquenchable hunger for blood.” Here again Jacob paused and turned to stare at the befuddled girl. Suddenly he started as if he had made up his mind and motioned to her.

“Come here girl, I’ve a sight to show you that will prove my tale to you.” And with that he strode from the room stooping in mid stride to pluck up a large heavy staff from the shadow of a corner and vanished without a backward glance. Kristi hovered uncertainly about her chair and then hurried after her departing uncle. He lead them to a back room and a closet cramped under a servant stair and tossing the small paneled closet door aside, reached in and struck match and lit an old whale oil lamp. He gave one quick look over his beautiful questioning niece’s face and then exploded through the small door and down a hidden stair contained within the white paneled closet.

Kristi paused but a moment and then ducked and followed her uncle and the dim light half concealed by his large corky bulk. The wood steps soon gave way to rough uneven rock and Kristi realized at once that they were descending into one of the many volcanic fissures which riddled many of these islands.

“The governor of this island had his house built over a fissure that leads down to a hidden cove, just in case he needed to escape any uncertainties to his rule.” Jacob raised the lantern and reveled a long serpentine crag filled with sea water and a large unmistakable ship; The White Star of India!

Kristi frowned craning her small white shapely neck, and moved from behind her uncle to stand next to him on the small ledge. There she could see clearly the great tall ship its masts almost touching the citadel of craggy rookeries above. Her uncle motioned her to a swaying rope ladder anchored by iron spikes into the rock at their feet and gingerly Kristi lowered her self down onto the first wooden rung careful not to snag her dress as she did so on the sharp harsh open rocks all about her. Her uncle set the lamp down next to them in order to help her start her descent upon the ladder. Kristi paused once she was away from the dangerous out cropping and swaying gently in the free black void. “I thought you said Xerat had captured and taken the White Star, uncle?”

“That I did lass,” Jacob now picked up the lantern and held it out above her to help light her descent.

“Then how did it end up here in your possession?” The ladder seemed to sway and buckle on some unfelt wind and Kristi wished her uncle would put aside the lantern and steady the ladder for her again.

“Well, now that be true. But our gallant Malcolm won her back for us and we all escaped certain death upon her and after some deliberation I sailed her here.”

“Then Malcolm didn’t die fighting the dead men on Batamie?” Kristi felt a sudden rush of joy swell up in her hart and nearly missed the next rung as she continued her descent.

“Watch your step miss. Well, it breaks my hart to tell it, but my own son turned against me. So in many ways he’s as good as dead to me, and yet a father and an only son, well, mortality is a strange grafter. Once the zombies had taken over the compound and we knew all was lost, there was no recourse but to try and recapture the ship and escape upon her. Malcolm did this, leading but the few men of the living we had left. But once on board and secured and made way to escape who should we find cowering away in an aft hold? But old Xerat himself. He was always a schemer and quick tongued, and away he went with this notion to me about how the laborers had not proved very attentive for tending living crops, but imagine what they could do if set to the task of working a simple mine on the mainland? Malcolm wanted to slay him at once, I wanted to hear some more details of his new prospective endeavor. Unfortunately, I had let Malcolm believe that I had been ignorant of this Xerat’s plantation scheme, and now it became unavoidable that he became aware as Xerat prattled on and on, that I was far from innocent and that we indeed had been fast partners in it. Malcolm did not take this well. Nor did he like the prospect of my interest in this new endeavor of Xerat’s.

Oh, how it pained me so to lock him up in chains and hear him howl with hunger and thirst in the ships hold for so many nights and days. Eventually he gave into base necessity and ate the ash stew I had made for him. And then a more obedient and compliant son no father ever had! As far as Xerat, I slayed him at once of course.” Jacob sniffed. “Well, after I had plied his contacts and details of this new scheme from him.”

Kristi swayed upon the rope ladder looking up at her uncle in horror. Her attention being diverted betwixt the angry tussle of the ladder below shook by the low wailing winds shuffled through the valley of rock and her bemused uncle’s face above. She decided to rapidly re-climb back up to him. Jacob pulled a short knife from his belt and slowly began to saw at the rope ladder. Seeing this Kristi stopped her ascent and reversed herself and began to quickly descend again into the darkness below. Suddenly a flash of light shot past her. He uncle had casually dropped the lantern and it sailed past her to shatter upon the rock floor not so far below. In its explosion of glass and tin and spray of oil light, it revealed a garish scene of horror, hundreds of milling slack jawed unblinking men, several who were poorly attempting to work their stiff ungainly limbs to climb up the ladder. At least two had managed to half the distance from the floor to her and in the flash of dying light she saw an unearthly hunger in their eyes above their salivating gnashing low moaning mouths.

From the dark above her she heard her uncle’s voice oddly calm in the growing darkness. “I’ve gathered a few hundred able bodies for my mines already, as you can see, well, if the lamp hadn’t snuffed it, you could see. But I have run out of some of the essential ingredients for the stew, and I have to wait for those to arrive by ship before we can set sail. In the meantime the natives have been getting a little restless and I need to re-stock the ships larder so to speak. If you don’t mind you can do me a service there, by continuing your climb down you can take a stroll around the ship I named after your mother whom you have grown so much a like and say hello to my son, or you can come back up here and give me a new son. The choice is yours. Just remember that terrible little accident that befell your mother and father when she chose my brother over me. Remember it and choose well.”

In the dark Kristi felt a clumsy clammy hand brush at her ankle and she screamed!

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The Bareass mansion was in its self, an out dated relic of the later 1800’s, with the newly crafted high security shed now housing the armored car and its contents being the most modern building on the entire estate. The next newest building was the pump house which replaced the original water wells and it was built in 1927! In fact, though the place had been gutted several times to realign it with the current trends in modern connivances such as electricity and indoor plumbing, the house its self still retained all the decrepit and rather repressive elegance and qualities of a starched collar bygone day. It looked and felt like some third world countries left over British grand hotel, missing only the bullet holes of uprising in the lath and plaster walls.

The history of the Bareass mansion like many palatal American estates was twisted and convoluted as much as the blood lines of its scandal riddled owners. The original opulent house of wood and stick construction built to emulate the fabricade of marble of the then more wealthy neighbors, complete with resplendent colonnade, had housed the first Bareass, the monarch Simon Bareass, who had made and squandered several fortunes in land dealings. Had passed from father to fist son for generations, despite the divergence in the 1850’s of the Bareass marrying one of their daughters into the east coast Blueball family. There were considerable lawsuits as the Blueball’s produced several male rivals to the Delta City Bareass estate when the Bareass’s had produced only females in response, and the original patriarchal Simon Bareass Will stating only the first born male heir could inherit the lands and home. A legal loophole was enacted by the females of the Bareass family in that they kept their family name even in marriage and somehow the Bareass’s had kept hold of the properties until in the late 1970’s the estate had finally fallen into the hands of the first born male of the Blueballs family; one teenage swinger named Barbary Blueball. Bar, as his friends called him or would have had he had any, had managed to squander away the entire Blueball fortune and properties and was amazed he had found himself out of hock and the owner of the Bareass estate as well as its still sizable maintenance trust funds. In a hart beat, the long greasy haired rail thin teenager in stripped bell bottoms and love beads had sacked the staff and set up shop with his latest mad cap scheme, a magazine called, “SUPERHEROINE QUARTERLY!”

To everyone’s wonder it was a hit! Subscriptions soared for the shinny perfect bound magazine that offered exclusive interviews with super heroines as well as blow by blow coverage of their latest battles and crime fighting efforts to bring justice back to the world. The mag was seen as being highly pro-feminist which was odd as the man producing it was well known to be an utter male chauvinist pig! Bar kept a harem of young women for his hedonist pleasure in his new digs and threw endless parties that became legendary for their sexual orgies, drugs, and booze. But still the magizine became the battle cry of women’s rights and liberties throughout the 70’s and early 80’s. In the latter 1980’s the ‘literary’ phase of the magazine gave way to pictorials and increasingly more and more risqué street images of with decidedly sexual over tones. This degeneration continued until by the early 1990’s the once prestigious premier feminist SUPERHEROINE QUARTERLY! Now was little more than a scandal mag with gossip columns on the various super heroines and chock full of paparazzi photos of nipple slips and up the skirt panty shots of famous super women. By the late 1990’s the magazine began to run its first ‘SUPERNUDES!’ a centerfold selection with look-a-like models in super heroine costumes or sometimes the down on her luck fringe super heroine needing to cash in on a career going south.

By the turn of the century the magazines most popular sections included ‘BEST SUPER ASS’ and ‘BEST BUST’ and had the readers vote for their faves. Every super heroine was outraged by this latest atrocity against their dignity while secretly picking up the readers survey poll to see how they placed!

At the same time, mounting debt from his personal spending even outstripping his magazines success and numerous lawsuits had forced Bar to relinquish control of the Bareass estates to Camilla’s army of lawyers and shut down his magazine. Nearly penniless the now middle aged man still roamed the streets with his camera still capturing nipple slip picks of unwary super heroines and selling them to the new generation of website super heroine webzines. The super heroines still called him the ‘cockroach’ for his scandalous pictures of themselves and his rather legendary sized penis and sexual appetites. In fact it was rumored that several super heroines had used his weakness of uncontrollable lust for a ‘quickie’ to reclaim a rather damaging picture the ‘cockroach’ had somehow managed to obtain of them in a compromising position..

Down, but not out, the women of the super heroine community eyed the cockroach with a wary eye, there were numerous rumors that the cockroach was planning a ‘comeback’ and nothing said comeback like unmasking a super heroine!

GOT Gal continued her saunter through the eerie halls of the mansion that was still a clutter with half opened cases of Camilla’s collections from her own travels and of those artifacts that the Bareass family had stripped from the house prior to Bar moving in in fear that he would sell the place bare to fund his pleasures, which in the latter years he in fact did!

Weaving through the hallways stacked with packing crates GOT Gal noted even some of the smaller upstairs rooms had been completely filled with packing crates of items left unsorted. In just two weeks Camilla and her house hold staff and security personal had fled in fear from the ghostly haunting. Camilla had at first naturally thought Bar Blueball was behind the spectral shenanigans, trying to drive Camilla Bareass from her rightful place, but this was no middle aged potbellied hippie sneaking through the twisting hallways at night and ringing bells and moaning and moving things about!

GOT Gal agreed, but she doubted it was some lost soul from beyond the grave as well. In fact, the buxom avenger had a pretty good who the culprit was, but she couldn’t be sure until she found what she was looking for and that for a moment had eluded the long blonde haired vixen.

GOT Gal had noted that Camilla was NOT the first Bareass to move back into the Bareass estate after the bankrupt Bar Blueball had been driven out. Though it had been her money and lawyers which had finally concluded the decades old settlement, as per Simon’s will it was the oldest first male Bareass who inherited the estate once Bar had been vacated by the Sheriff. And that person had been the elderly eccentric would be inventor, Ebenezer Bareass. Wheezer the Geezer, Camilla remembered all the Bareass children calling the old fart from their childhood. She didn’t care the absent minded old man was ushered into her victory estate, at least he was a true Bareass and wouldn’t keep trying to sell off the land like the broke Bar Blueball was attempting!

Besides the mumbling old skeleton surly wouldn’t outlast the winter in the drafty old mansion which Bar had let run down into a ruinous state in order to funnel all the up keep money into his own lint lined pockets. And he didn’t, after moving his few belongings consisting almost entirely of his books and experimental gadgets, he had vanished?! No foul play was discovered but the police did suspect some drifters caught latter in another state after killing a small family and trying to make off with their belongings had done the same thing to poor old Ebenezer. The drifters had done such things in a long string of killing and robbing isolated farm houses in a three month spree, unfortunately the two men had been killed in the attempt to apprehend them and the whereabouts of many of their victims seemed destined to remain lost for all time. The Bareass estates was in a direct path of their destruction and fit the m.o. perfectly.

After a few months of legal wrangling the extended Bareass family gave Camilla the nod and she began moving in and reclaiming the so long lost family estate. Only to come up face to face with what seemed to be the angry ghost of her murdered relative, Ebenezer Bareass!

GOT Gal had a different theory. The notion that an eccentric inventor moves into a large remote mansion, sets up his lab, and promptly vanishes, seemed to lead her personal experiences with the strange and unusual mind to the conclusion that the amateur eccentric had concocted some kind of device that had opened a door way and let something from another dimension through. Something with a puckish naughty warped sense of humor who didn’t want company in his house and who displayed a rather perverse horny design towards all women, if the statements Camilla and her staff had given GOT Gal were true.

Ebenezer had either been teleported into another dimension perhaps when the creature had come through or else been destroyed in the events occurrence. What GOT Gal needed and now sought was this hidden laboratory of Ebenezer Bareass. She felt confident that if two derelict wandering murderers in a rusted pickup truck had killed Ebenezer Bareass, they wouldn’t have then bothered to fill up their truck bed with numerous crates of test tubes and Bunsen burners, and yet several truck loads of such equipment had been brought to the house with Mr. Ebenezer when he had taken up residence along with a library full of books, which had also not been found when the police and latter family had searched the place from top to bottom! That the house had numerous secret passages were no secret, Bar Blueball had found several of them and shown them off to his house guests and there was even a ‘try and find a secret passage’ party game that they played from time to time.

But obviously old Ebenezer had found a room or suit of rooms somewhere discreet enough that no one else had discovered them and well hidden enough that no one since had relocated them. GOT Gal now needed to find these rooms if to further her investigation and prove her theory correct!

Ms. Americana had finished reading the short zombie story “The White Star of India” and feeling a little peckish had opened the little plastic camping cooler that GOT Gal had left beside her over stuffed chair. It was full of ice and bottles of water and most importantly a pint of “DREAM CREAM ICE CREAM” raw cookie dough! This stuff was as rare as uranium! It was made by hand by a small local dairy not too far from the Bareass estates and sold for seventy dollars a pint! But this ultimate luxury treat was simply delicious and the few stores in Delta City that carried it were always sold out. There had even been a police inquiry into a ring of alleged wealthy women in the city trying to unfairly purchase the product ‘before’ it hit the shelf! Rhonda Spears the wealthiest woman in Delta City and in the top ten wealthiest women world wide and also on most reporters top ten list of various super heroine alter ego possible identities and a major pain in Brenda Wades posterior, had been implicated, but the entire investigation had gone no where fast and suspiciously the police department unveiled fourteen new squad cars soon after the inquiry died down.

What no one knew about the scrumplicious dessert treat, was that it was being manufactured by none other than the ‘Porn-o-pine’ who discovering that in addition to the oils in his quills having a highly aphrodisiac effect on all women, that his sperm had this same effect but in an even more potent concentrated form. He had hidden himself away in a small dairy farm on the outskirts of the city and using his chemical genius had set up shop manufacturing the frozen concoction that made all women nearly swoon with giddy rapture, in hopes of being able to finance his further experiments and leave the small time knocking over of beauty saloons, health spas, and beauty pageants behind him. He found that running around the city at night in his costume was just to dangerous and nerve wracking for his more refined sensibilities and this current endeavourer was much more in keeping with his desires. Except he just couldn’t ‘make’ enough of the principle ingredient! It took several ‘loads’ from his nut sack to have enough sperm to manufacture a case of Dream Cream Ice Cream! The more ice cream he produced the less time and energy he had to work in his lab! It was a lose-lose situation and the Porn-o-pine realized the trickle of funds being brought in were not enough considering the toll on his time and the unhealthy interest that women and invariably the press and then the law were beginning to have about his product. Still, he wasn’t ready for his big ‘score’ idea yet, not in face of the ever present super heroine community just waiting for men such as himself to poke their heads out to invite them to play ‘wack-a-moe’ with their skulls!

But there was another possibility, he might be able to vat clone his sperm, and thus be free to work on his other projects while the little guys reproduced themselves which would solve his scarcity of saleable product supply problem as well. The trouble was, cloning wasn’t his field of expertise. In fact he knew nothing at all about it and it would take many years for him to learn such a difficult field of science, but there was an eccentric expert, a gifted amateur who was considered more of an inventor for odd gadgets but who had dabbled extensively in genetic theory. His notes might prove very useful as he had been working on some government NASA studies for advanced multiple reproductions for vat cloning of simple organic foods for starving third world countries. And the old nut had lived not far from his dairy farm! The eccentric fellow had gone missing some time back from the Bareass estates, but his lab had never been found and that meant that his notes and all his priceless equipment and experiments must still be there!

The Porn-o-pine gingerly slipped his super villain costume’s nut hugger skin tight bike shorts on over his sore small package and placed his goggles on over his small beady eyes, while Ms. Americana swilled down each luscious drop of her spunk laced ice cream, a squat rotund figure slipped out of the old dairy barn past the few dozen head of milking cows through the gate and down the road in the midnight pall before turning in across the fields toward the Bareass estate not more than a mile as the crow flies across the pastures away. While the icy concoction caused a slow warm spot of damp to spread across her own skin tight g-string bottoms, Ms. Americana was about to have an unexpected visitor who knew as nothing about her presence at the Bareass estate as she knew of his approach to it!

GOT Gal was flummoxed. Her search through a third of the great house had produced nothing out of the ordinary. Well, the ordinary of a great maze like mansion with dozens of secret passages which she had discovered and been lead from one floor to the next and back again in a confusing muddle of turnings and winding stairs. Most of the rooms themselves were bare or filled with stacks and stacks of unpacked crates or piles of furniture waiting to be properly placed. Only a few rooms on the lower floor and a few bed rooms on the third floor had been readied, but these had then been disemboweled when Camilla had uprooted herself and her staff for their European trip. This left the old mansion with its outdated antique lights (many of the lighting fixtures had been removed and sold by Barbary Blueball in his last few months of bankruptcy and had not yet been replaced by Camilla, thus leaving the already dimly lit house even darker!) scarcely cast a glow in the high ceiling hallways and did little to light the strange shaped rooms that seemed piled on to the house rather than carefully planed and laid out during its initial construction. It all added to a much more deserted and ruinous feel to the house than it properly deserved, and heightened the tense anxious nervousness that GOT Gal now felt as she silently crept along yet another musty carpeted corridor that seemed to have no other purpose than to lead her from one irregular room to the next and then dead end in a small niche, yet again?!

GOT Gal shook her head and began to carefully back track, other than the brand new security shed out side housing the jewelry truck and its armed police escort, the only other new-ish addition to the house its self was the few rooms that Barbary had gutted and refurbished during his brief tenor of the estate. These being the dance floor party room down stairs on the main level and an odd grotto stone swimming pool room built into one of the basement areas, both of those construction projects had unveiled secret wall passages and had triggered Barbary‘s occasional hunt and discovery of more such hidden rooms and hallways. He would have gutted the entire place if he hadn’t been spending his entire fortune on wine, women, and drugs! And all of it from photos of her and other super heroines tits and ass!!! It made GOT Gal shudder with repressed anger and she punched one powder puff blue satin opera gloved fist into the same accrued open palm other and sneered at the walls that seemed to almost defy and mock her with an near conscious malicious intent.

Doors seemed to close on waifs of sudden unfelt drafts and lock and lights flickered and went off and loud noises seemed to explode in empty hallways and rooms, but as unsettling as all of this was there was no sign of Camilla’s much warned lecherous ghost! According to the furiously feminist Camilla and all the members of her entirely female staff this particular ghost stole all their undergarments from their rooms, from the laundry in the basement, and in the last few days, even off their sleeping bodies! It pinched their bottoms and groped their breasts at all hours of the day and taken to fondling them as they slept! The very last straw had been Camilla being rudely awakened by what had felt to be a quiet sizeable male sexual appendage wedged into her sleeping mouth, she had wrestled free and upon flipping on the nearby lights had found herself alone in the room! The door and windows had been locked from the inside and she was certain that there had been only seconds from her shoving away from the horrible penis in her mouth and flipping on the bed side lamp, no one could have slipped away into a secret passage in that time. A thorough search of the house and grounds had found that the ghost had tied up several of her young staff and was undoubtedly planning to return to them to abuse them sexually at a later date, as he had left them naked and gagged and well hidden in seldom used rooms. Camilla was certain that Barbary was behind it all, but GOT Gal remained firm in her convictions that the true culprit was some fiendish creature some how either created or unleashed by the previous amateur inventor of the house and she had but find the laboratory to confirm this and establish exactly what kind of beasts she was dealing with. That the creature was obviously avoiding her seemed to reaffirm her belief that it was inherently cowardly and harmless and she would dispatch it easily, if she could but find it or the lab! If she couldn’t find the hidden lab, then perhaps a trap!?

Barbary Blueball slipped out from behind the heavy wooded slope to the east of the Bareass mansion and in a crouched position winged it up to the night shadows of one of the outer buildings a short distance from the main building its self. He clutched at the camera he wore on a strap around his neck, it had never been in a case since the day he had bought it (can’t win a Pulitzer with a camera in a case!) and he considered it his ‘lucky’ camera. It was the camera which had taken the most of his cover shots over the years and had been the one that he had used to take ALL of the now notorious theme issue of ‘do they bikini wax it trim or shave it bald?’ The resulting pictorial spread of up the skirt and panty slip shots of twenty of the city’s most famous super heroine beavers had caused the greatest and sadly last furor for his Superheroine Quarterly. The district attorney, a woman he suspected was a ‘cape’ herself had closed him down and filed multiply law suits against him. He had always spent far more than he made, but the lawsuits had stripped him of everything including in a roundabout way, Bareass mansion its self.

But he had been down and out before and he was certain all he really needed was a single ‘unmasking’ of one of the top echelon of the super heroine community to put him back into the good graces of liquid finance. He had unmasked two super villainess in the magazines early days and had received a plaque from the city and a handshake from the red white and blue Queen of Justice herself, he didn’t really see the difference in unmasking that self same woman now! If he could get a photo of Ms. Americana without her eye mask he could write his own ticket again! The problem with getting a shot of a cape without her mask was they always showed up rather unexpected and left quickly. But here Barbary had an ideal opportunity, he knew where both Ms. Americana and GOT Gal were located and knew the place intimately while they did not and he knew they were going to be staying in the place for several days at least. And that latter meant needing to bath, and that meant taking off their masks!

There were about four squad cars out front, with two police watching the main gate. He reasoned the rest would be positioned around and inside the well lit portable generator ran heavily reinforced shed in the back housing the jewels from the Barass downtown store under remodel. He doubted the two capes would stand around the shed and wasn’t surprised that they had taken up residence in the nearby house. They would undoubtedly do patrols of the grounds and such, but it would be inside that house were they would disrobe for a shower or bed! And that is where he and his lucky camera needed to be.

Fortunately he had his keys still and while he did not doubt that Camilla had replaced all the outer door locks to the house and garage and gates, he doubted she had yet had the small outer buildings done yet. He was correct, his key unlocked the small storage shed and he quickly slipped inside it. The climb over the outer wall had torn his trade mark stripped bell bottom jeans but it wasn’t the first time he had to shimmy over a wall and if he failed to get the goods tonight it might not be the last!

Barbary moved the rider lawn mower over to the side and pulled up the rusty floor grate inside the small shed. This secret passage which lead to the basement of the Bareass mansion was one of the very first he had discovered and as he had found it while alone he had kept the discovery to himself. An escape rout works best when it is for you and you alone! Now he would use the little runaway tunnel to gain entrance to the main house and begin stalking his quarry in earnest! Women were made for one thing and one thing alone, to be used by the superior sex of males to do their bidding and now those two fat titted cows inside were going to do ‘their’ job and make him rich again! Barbary Blueball let the iron grate clank shut behind him and flicked on the little belt light he always wore when he was on the clock, which was always, and moved cautiously down the narrow musty moldy uneven earthen tunnel.

Rhonda Spears was on just about everyone’s short list as the secret identity of most of Delta City’s Super heroines this was because she was tall, athletic, young (she had just turned twenty-three), and had a statuesque curvaceous figure that was the envy of every woman in Delta, and was fabulously wealthy to boot. Put her in an eye mask and a gaudy bikini and she simply looked the part. The irony in all of this was that Rhonda Spears was NOT a nice person. She was utterly self centered and didn’t care in the slightest about anyone or anything other than her own egotistical self. While a leading feminist and propionate of most women’s causes this was more to do with her sense of loathing and disgust for all things male rather than any feelings of sisterhood or will to help another besides herself. She constantly butted heads with Brenda Wade whose altruistic mindset absolutely baffled the golden haired large busted slim youth, who having inherited her fathers empire of weapons manufacturing had molded it into one of the largest arms manufacturers and dealers in the world. War was money for the woman who loved money more than anything and she did all she could within her considerable power to start and continue as many global conflicts as possible, much to Wade’s tremendous ire. That she should be thought of as the alter ego of one of the goody good shoes running around in public in their panties and thigh high boots was utterly laughable to the ice hearted woman, but it made for good press and she did all she could to keep the speculations going.

However, there was a little matter of the recent financial collapse and Rhonda found herself facing several large balloon payments that she desperately needed to make coming rapidly due. Tough times were great times for investing especially in war, but for all her capital and profits to be made, Rhonda found herself with staggering losses in her portfolios and in rather a bind in central Africa where she had to payoff an ousted government official now reestablished who had numerous evidence of some highly questionable dealings she had had with the previous administration. He wanted cash, no checks, and he wanted it in diamonds! And Rhonda couldn’t help but notice there were all these sparkly diamonds just sitting there in a little shed out in the middle of no where on her good friend the air headed Camilla Bareass estate.

Maybe Rhonda couldn’t wrap her head around the notion of risking ones life for another, but she could definitely understand risking ones life for profit! It seemed the whole world pegged her as a super heroine in disguise, what better cover then for her to don a costume and be a super villainess instead?!

Rhonda stood on the rocky outcropping just south of the Bareass estates main entrance and tapped the side of her eye mask which caused the mirrored lenses inside to go ‘night vision’. The resulting green imaging showed the lone two lane black top road bellow her and the main Bareass estate entrance connected by a short paved strip to its north, up to the main south entrance gate. The main building was not much further beyond the immediate fence and she could see that there were flood lights lighting up the back side of the main house. There were two guards at the front gate, male and worthless, and there would be four or five more around the shed its self in back under the flood lights. Camilla had unwittingly told Rhonda everything about the shed as she was having it built and Rhonda had already figured out a fools proof way to slip in and out easily!

There seemed to be only one hitch, while she was surveying the layout bellow her Rhonda had witnessed a lone squat rotund man awkwardly scramble over the far east wall to her right and fall into the estate grounds beyond. He had reappeared limping shortly there after and had waddled his way over to the darkened house where Rhonda knew two super heroines were sequestered supposedly watching the armored car of jewels in the security shed but which Camilla had told Rhonda were really searching the house for Barbary Blueball who was seeking some petty revenge on her and her staff by masquerading as a poltergeist?! She’d have no trouble from them. But the comical lone figure might cause some collateral problems as he seemed to be trying to gain entrance to the house its self! He might cause a ruckus as he inevitably got himself caught. She would have to hurry. ‘Hmmmm, Poltergeist? That was as good a name as any for a super villainess jewel thief. Poltergeist it is then!’ And the Poltergeist half leapt half slid down the rocky embankment toward the Bareass estate angling away from the south main gate as she descended.

Hayden Panties from the famous ‘Panties’ intimate apparel line of stores and manufacturer, had been a wild willed young club hopping girl who occasionally modeled for the family line of women’s scanty boudoir ‘romance’ under garments in world famous runway showings her top model looks gaining her instant celebrity status which she squandered on ‘A’ list parties and constant night clubbing. Then she had run away with a Latin lover who turned out to be a slimy con man who secretly ran several South American stripper clubs and white slavery markets. Hayden found out about this by accident one day when she had thought to surprise her fiancée by slipping into his apartment and hiding naked in his bed. He had ended up surprising her by returning home with several new auditioning strippers from one of his clubs?! She had run naked into the bathroom upon hearing all the voices and hid in the bath tub behind the shower curtain. The strippers had changed into their work clothes in the bathroom while she hid in growing confusion, taking their bags and clothes back out with them to the living room. One stripper had left behind one of her garment duffle bags by mistake and searching through it Hayden had found only a bra and panties of the tiniest cut some gloves a pair of thigh high boots that just fit her and a Zorro like bandana mask. All these items she had put on to hide her nakedness and thus attired slipped out of the bathroom to spy on her would be husband and all these half naked girls!

At first she thought it may be women he was interviewing for his bachelor party and she even half thought she might sneak out and mix in with the women who were dancing around him and give him a surprise! But she hesitated and as she watched her boyfriend became violent as one of the strippers refused his sexual advances! He beat her savagely and then had another man, the guy that actually ran his clubs for him, cart her off to sell on the sexual slave market! Her boyfriend was a white slaver!!!!

Confused and frightened the young girl still in her stripper see through bra and panties mask and boots slipped out through the hallway window just in time to escape a search by her boyfriend who had heard her knock over a vase. Half running half sneaking through the city streets which ran as a maze of buildings which were built upon each other in a haphazard fashion up the walls of the valley, Hayden found herself suddenly in the middle of a firefight between the Latin American super heroine ‘Jaguar’ and the techno-villain Aztecno! The villain who combined ancient Aztec sorcery and garments and charms with high tech gadgets shot a beam ray at the Jaguar and terrified Hayden was caught in the beam as well. In a flash, literally, the young teenager found her body transformed at the genetic level! Somehow the ray designed to remove the Jaguars powers instead triggered Hayden’s dormant Aphrodite gene and transformed some of the Jaguars powers permanently to her! In the flash of that laser blast, Hayden Panties had become a super hero, though it took her several days to realize it.

The very next day she had broken off her engagement to her boyfriend by entering his small legitimate companies offices and pouring a scalding hot pot of coffee on his crotch as he sat in a board meeting. She had then hurriedly fled the country back to the United States just escaping the police under his hire and discovering some of her new genetic attributes in the process.

Back in the USA, Hayden discovered other than her enhanced healing, all her other powers of enhanced strength and agility steamed entirely from the skimpy outfit she had been wearing during the beam attack. Not only did she have to be wearing the tinny see through garments in order to unlock the full extent of her super powers but it was ALL she could be wearing. If she put on any other article of clothing at all it rapidly diminished her powers! As such Delta City rapidly saw a new super heroine fighting crime on its streets wearing nothing but a few stitches of clothing and a big smile!

This new super heroine called herself, “Couture” and with her 44-22-36 figure squeezed into a tiny 32 G-cup lace bra and crotch-less panties, this new young beauty scoured the streets mainly targeting white slavers and those men who trade or sell women for sex. Though the other super heroines raised an eyebrow at her attire, they welcomed her to the fight and gave her the unofficial ‘nod’ to work their streets along side them, in the never ending battle of truth and justice against oppressive tyranny and wrong doings!

And so it was Couture, with her fake French accent, that now took it upon herself to enter the Bareass estate grounds from the wooded mountains to the north right on the heels of the suspicious character who had slipped over the west wall of the estate and disappeared into a small storage shed? Couture had thought GOT Gal and Ms. Americana might need some assistance what with such a temptation of jewels sitting in such an isolated location and had taken it upon herself to patrol the outer parameter of the grounds. Apparently it had paid off as she had witnessed this lone male slip over the wall and into a storage shed. He hadn’t come out after several minutes and Couture decided to go investigate the suspicious situation herself. Ms. Americana had just recently helped her capture some white slavers working out of the Delta City docks and Couture thought it was time to return the favor. With a lithe agile flip the buxom waif landed on the estate grounds and rapidly made her way to the silent dark shed.

Ms. Americana completely unaware of so many people nearing the manor from all sides, licked the delicious few dollops of ice cream that had fallen on her massive chest and hummed at the yummy taste and the even yummier feeling it made in her over heated loins! She was definitely struggling with her state of arousal in the after effect glow of the operation, though physically she was of course utterly healed thanks to her healing powers, but she was dimly aware that the knock out gas had turned her little pussy into a sweltering swamp! And she knew that she had to resist any… well, touching of herself!

Best to take her mind off of her body’s plaintiff cooing at her, and what better way than to read another story in her book! She thumbed through the pages back to the zombie section and began to read:

WIDOW OF THE AIR; WINDOW IN THE SUN

The Black Forest; ‘Scharzwald’, a wooded mountain range in Baden-Wurttemberg, southwestern Germany. It is bordered by the Rhine valley to the west and south which drains to the Atlantic. The highest peak is the Feldberg with an elevation of 1,493 meters. It is the birth place of the Danube which falls away to the Black Sea off its eastern spine.

The Black Forest, a twisted maze of glacier gouged gneiss covered in towering ancient pines and firs so thick that it blots out the sun, the moon, the stars, time its self seems to struggle in bubbling crust rimmed eddies. A place of winding paths rather than roads, that twist up into the high banks of gnarled trunk masses and jutting buttresses of lichen covered sand stone, dripping with a miter of centuries deeply lost in the folds of stagnate twilight, oozing into jagged toothless gapping mossy maws of wind moaning menace.

The Black Forest, more armies had marched into its fog riddled tracks and vanished without a trace than any other geological expanse in the brief histories of man. Captain Holland, ‘Hal’ to his men, stopped to wipe the grimy sweat from his brow. Three hours ago his patch work force of ninety men had stumbled across a small farm village of a dozen black gapping huts and had found it deserted. Such occurrences of entire villages vanishing without a trace were not unheard of in the Black Forest, but it had left a morbid and anxious pale upon his already weary and wary men and he had been unable to shrug off the lingering stench of foreboding unease tightening across his deep chest ever since they had hurried through the silence blighted abandoned huts where food of a last suddenly interrupted meal days past lay rotting on undisturbed tables. Oberst Hal now removed and replaced his damp field cap as one of his men came hurrying up to his second in command who was half leaning on one leg against the tug of the slope in a small knot of whispering men as he glanced agitatedly at the map he held. Hal had taken a small force on a personal recon around the other side of the small valley whose open floor housed the ghost village more to satisfy his own curiosity than of any sense of wayward danger to his units passage, but had found nothing of the villagers nor any physical sign of their means of disappearance. Only silence and a heavy oppressive stillness had flushed before his men’s steady creeping step, and like the clouds of gnats, hovered about them, seemingly giddy with malice haunting with sudden specter darting about their cold damp shoulder blades.

He approached his second who snapped a nod to him, “so tell me Karl, how fucked are we?”

Karl answered his grim smile with a half torn grin of his own, “We have found the track through to the target site. Can’t understand how we missed it before, about four clicks and we should reach it.”

“Before night fall?” Karl answered Hal with a shrug. “Let me guess it’s all up hill.” Hal looked over the worthless map that Karl handed him.

“Did you find anything?” Hal shook his head and Karl frowned. “Too bad, we could have used a guide for this last bit, no roads, all foot paths.”

“Gather them up, shallow flankers, I want the men tight as the terrain will allow. We aren’t going to reach this before darkness.”

“There’s something not right about this place. That track wasn’t there, then suddenly it was, I can’t explain it, but we covered that ground over and over again, and then it was just there.”

Hal grimaced, “just keep them moving.” Karl nodded and turned to bark the orders. But something definitely wasn’t right, he could feel it himself. And what ever it was, it was waiting for them like a giant coiled serpent, ancient as dust, just over the next pass in the little plateau beyond and he was certain that it knew they were coming.

It was three hours before sunset, but already Hal found he had to squint to make out his men from the long shadowy trunks they slunk silently through. They had crossed the shallow cut in the valley slope that let them wind through the rocky undulations into the next squat upheaval of relatively flat forest land. Once again Hal had been bringing up the rear guard when his second had brought the front unit to a halt and sent back a signal to him. The skirmishers had found the target just a few hundred meters up ahead. Hal had snaked through his tired men and found Karl whispering with the scouts.

“What do you make of this?” Karl gestured to the dead trees and dead under brush about them, as Hal approached him.

“Defoliant? Used to establish a perimeter as a security measure.” Hal hunched down next to the small group and gave a quick but steady glance at his kneeling men scattered about the dead forest around them. In the grim gray twilight of the dead trunks and withered brush, their standard German fleck camouflage army fatigues looked oddly surreal, like drapes of spider web shrouds clinging to mottled broken pieces of statuary amidst gothic columns of ruin and decay of some dead alien lunar city long lost to the ravages of fire and weather, splintered and worn, and instead of security Hal found the images of his own men filling him with trepidation and uneasy alarm.

“Yes it must be, for it is certainly not natural. It begins in a sudden arch about a kilometer back and the desiccation gets steadily worse as it approaches the buildings.” Karl was obviously uneasy as even in the dim half light filtering down through the dead boughs over head, Hal could make out the tick in his stone set jaw. Karl began to sketch in the sere pin needle dirt, the lay out of the buildings a head of them as the scouts watched and nodded. Hal reached down and felt the dust, it was like ash, all life had been leached out of it. It bore no resemblance to the thick fertile black earth of the rest of the forest, that lay on the cusp of the deathly ring of gray that they had entered into and which seemed to corona their long sought objective. This was not the forest of his youth, something terrible was going on here.

Hal sent his troops in toward the buildings in a small crescent made up of pockets of five men, after all these were not enemy buildings nor was this enemy soil. Still he ordered a silent advance at a stealthy pace. The skirmisher scouts had already reported back that the large building and its six sheds showed no signs of life and appeared to be deserted. Hal had found this strange echo of the small village in the lower valley disturbing and he gnawed at the corner of his lip as he watched the first group make contact with the outer most shed. The buildings were non-descript gray simple structures that looked dilapidated and disused, despite the fact that Hal knew these work sheds had been freshly built less than a year ago and had been busy with workers up until three days ago. Hal crouched and crept forward with a group of his patchwork elite men and weaved his way to the main structure. It was a large concrete bunker of cinder block and its mortar crumbled beneath Hal’s surprised fingers. His men began to leap frog into the open man made glade of the main building. He directed some into an outer picket force as he awaited Karl’s arrival. Instead an anxious scout came for him and together he left at a trot to where Karl was standing with several other men gathered around a corpse. A corpse in a black uniform.

“Waffen-SS. Can you tell me now what the hell we are doing in this God forsaken place?” Karl stood up from examining the body, and Hal could see that the corpse had been badly mutilated and its head was missing.

Hal raised his eyebrows, Waffen-SS, Nazi storm detachment, the regular German army had ridiculed and hated and then had grown to fear and loath these bastards. They had started out as hand picked political body guards, a praetorian guard, and much like those Roman past counter parts they had swelled in number and power and were now at odds with the regular German army. Politically Hal had refused to join the Nazi party and turned aside a lucrative offer at Waffen-SS command, his military career had then gone from sparkling merits to a dead end series of near suicidal missions. But he had said nothing and he had survived many purges and prods. But he wondered why the hell he had been selected for this particular mission. “I wonder what they did with his head.” Hal walked back to the main building and Karl and the men fell into a line behind him. “Spread out, heads on a swivel.” The men scattered into a cloud of gray kicked up ashen dust and Hal half turned his head to Karl who was now walking alone just behind his left shoulder, he lowered his voice so only Karl would be able to make out what he was saying, and nonchalantly spoke. “Our orders are to locate and secure this present location. As far as I know this was some kind of research facility that went unexpectedly silent three days ago. I would guess that the Waffen-SS were stationed her as a security detail, and I would further guess that if we had not been in immediate transit in the area that we wouldn’t have been shunted off our train to respond. I would also hazard that the SS is in the process of sending new units to take back over the areas security as soon as they arrive. We are just here to make sure what ever happened is done happing or bring it to a close and or contain it and wait for our replacements. I would advise that we do what is needed and see nothing but what is required and forget all when we leave, which for my part can’t be soon enough.” Karl said nothing, but gave a stern look into the amber darkening sky. Hal nodded at this and moved purposely a head. “I want into that main building as soon as possible, our portable radio is shit in these mountains and I want to establish contact with the train station as soon as possible. Understood?”

“Yes. Oberst!” Karl raced past him and toward the dim out line of the main building lying squat in the thickening air. Karl was a good solider, if a touch too emotional, and he knew these men better than Hal did, who had been traveling alone on the train when it had been stopped unexpectedly at the station with his surprise orders. He had obeyed it and commandeered those units he salvaged off the other cars. He had served with some of them before, but he would need Karl to make this work efficiently.

The door was even odder and more out of place than the headless SS soldier. In the jumble of leaning pole buildings and simple lean-tos, the main building was a squat short cinder block windowless bomb shelter of a structure, equipped with a steel door lacquered in rust. It was soon obvious that the obstruction was wedged shut from within and that none of the small arms and explosives his men were equipped with were going to do so much as dint or char that impasse of steel. As Hal glared at it and Karl questioned his men about anything of use lying in the out buildings that they may have observed in their approach, the distinctive metallic ripple of small arms fire echoed shrilly through the early night. Hal spread out his men to secure the main structure and left Karl with a bug up his ass to get that door open.

The fire was sporadic and had died completely by the time Hal and a squad of twelve men approached the point of origin. The brief spat of bullets had given way to shrieks and much to every ones shock a sudden large explosion of a hand grenade just as they were about to round the corrugated iron sheet sides of a small building blocking their view of the combat. They paused and then inched around the corner of the structure to find a body of seven men eyeing the dark fringe of dead trees before them while two others knelt over a wounded comrade who was cursing in obvious pain. Hal approached them rapidly having holstered his side arm, “What happened?”

“We were attacked by Waffen-SS”. A man snapped to attention upon recognizing Hal’s rank, and completed his report as Hal looked over the man who was wounded in the shoulder and leg and then out over the wet mingle of two black uniformed corpses. The grenade had ripped the bodies to pieces. Hal growled. “They just went for us, as soon as we put on our flash lights.” The man thumbed his own light dangling from its strap at his chest.

“You should have identified yourself!” Hal hissed. He didn’t need this shit. Friendly fire was always a good button hook for removing disliked officers. He could taste the acidic bile in the back of his throat as he thought of the report he would have to write and then defend.

“We did, sir. They attacked like animals. They came at us with their teeth and hands, as if they were going to devour us.” The soldier was wide eyed but calm enough.

“How many?” Hal could feel the strange cold damp and knew that a ground fog was rising about them.

“Just the two we killed. We had to use a grenade, bullets wouldn’t slow them.”

Hal had heard enough, “Bull shit, when you get done pissing your pants fall back to the main building, and get that man back to a medic. Fucking bull shit!” Hal gave one stern look out into the whispering veil sheet of inky black that now covered the tree line of dead hulks and cast a quick glance at the two Nazi bodies lying a few meters from him. In the milky rise of fog and the dancing light of the small hand held lights, it seemed to him that one of the corpses twitched and moved, despite its missing chest and organs. “Bull shit,” he muttered and shook his head to clear his mind as he rapidly returned to the main building and his primary concern.

Hal never reached the main buildings steel door. A scream tore through the night on his left from the very building that had blocked his initial approach to the recent conflict and Hal and the men about him rushed to its wide gapping wooden door. They poured inside and their weak beam flash lights lead them through the maze of storage crates and piles of construction materials. In a mad rush they plunged unexpectedly into a scene of macabre horror, so twisted in its naked brutality that despite themselves they froze in place as their minds sought to scramble through the debris of rationality.

There, in the collected pool of seven dancing hand lights was a young woman in torn clothes, her face a mask of fright, scrambling desperately for purchase on a teetering pile of wooden crates as below her a ghastly spectacle of three Waffen-SS blood splattered men moaned and hissed and clawed at her jerking dangling legs. Their talon like claws tore at her heavy skirt and a gurgling groan escaped from their twisted slack garish lips.

Hal shouted, “Halt!” raised his side arm and fired a warning shot into the crate above the nearest Nazi. Simultaneously, the Nazi pitched back, pushed by his neighbor in his hunger to grab at the shapely calves before him, and the bullet entered the Nazi’s left shoulder, splintering the shoulder blade. The bullet struck SS solider turned slowly and the face he slowly revealed was one of nightmare. In an instant Hal recognized there was no humanity in it, it was like a face of wax that had been left on a window sill under the unblinking gaze of an enraged sun. A thing of horror, it snarled with malignant cold dead eyes and from its open jagged mouth a slick drool of puss and maggots slathered down its worm riddled pocked face. It made a breathless moan of hunger and rage, the likes of which Hal had never known before, and could only liken to the time when he was fourteen and had gone out late at night to check the traps for his father who had been too sick to do so for several days and had come upon a wolf chewing off its own hind legs which had been crushed in his bar trap, that sound of rage-pain-madness-hate-hunger-insanity-that sheer unmitigated soul shriek as those half dead eyes of that torture cursed wolf had sharpened at the sight of HIM! He had run then in absolute panic as the shambling horror had pulled its self toward him in shattered snarling furry. He did not run now. Hal lowered his arm from the previous recoil and snapped off two shots into the things head. Bone splintered, sinew popped, a dry musty ooze of congealed blood splurged forth, but the thing only lurched toward him with growing vehemence.

Hal felt his shoulders tighten as he lowered his pistol for a fourth shot. The men pressing behind him meant he would have no backward step to maneuver to avoid the closing fiends attack. Just then he felt himself shoved violently aside from the press behind. Hal rolled in the dark and bashed his head hard against a crate. Stars filled his eyes and he shook his head to clear his vision as he scrambled into a sitting position, all the while feeling that bite of that mouth that had been honing in upon his face. But that mouth was now sinking and rending deeply into the soldier who had been roughly shoved half over the top of Hal as he had been pitched forward. The ghastly SS soldier ground his smacking lips into the man’s screaming side, as teeth ground on rib bone and hook like hands tore at the tender organs underneath.

Two more Waffen-SS had appeared in their rear and had leapt upon the small fear frozen group of German soldiers, this is what had sent the men pitching forward and Hal sprawling. The hand held lights danced nonsensically about the confines of the shriek echoing shed and lit the whole as an inferno of rapid licking flames would. It seemed as if everywhere shades of men in Nazi uniforms were biting huge bloody chunks out of the faces and limbs and bodies of his men. There was a great gaudy circus of bright blood spattered men firing and screaming and Nazi soldiers swinging loops of oily yellowed intestines about themselves as they hurried to gulp them down. Any living flesh that neared their putrid lips was set upon with wolfish gulps and snapping bites.

In the jangling lights Hal had lost his side arm in his fall and as the floor became smeared in the thick ripe ropey gore of his living disemboweled men, Hal gave up any thought to re-enter the fray on their behalf. Entire clips had been emptied at point blank range into these apparitions of Hell and had no noticeable effect, save to turn their ghoulish appearance into an even more monstrous aberration of humanity. Half faced fiends suckled upon the necks of gurgling crying men, only to have the sweet blood nectar they so desired run in rivulets down the gaps where bayonets drawn in close quarter desperation had gashed open their decayed throats. Nothing seemed to stop them or impress upon them any impact against their singular unquenchable need for fresh flesh. They gorged themselves until their bellies burst open and back washes of half chewed red flesh and bone fell back out of their chocked full throats, and still they chewed on with a snapping of bone and a wet stripping of tendons as their unblinking inert cat eyes glittered in stony maliciousness above their never resting mouths of splintered teeth and torn open jaws.

Hal slowly scrambled to his feet upon the uncertain footing of the seemingly giddy floor boards that buckled and bumped with the furry of the feast. It was then that the battle had speared out and debouched in its decadent desperate fight for survival and knocked the crates upon which the beleaguered woman had been clinging to for shelter. The pile wobbled and collapsed in the stiletto strobe of jerking lights and in the pitch dark where he heard her fall, Hal ran and caught her up and together he rushed them further into the maze of boxes and away from the immediate horror of the moment.

Hal had no flash light upon him and as they wandered in the pitch dark, her hand clasped firmly in his, the staccato aurora borealis of the mauling frenzy in the back ground offered little illumination for them to move at any pace more rapidly than a dead shuffle. The devilish smorgasbord behind them soon wound down from nightmarish screams to the slurping and guttural gulps of the low moaning victors, and it wasn’t long after that, that it became evident from the soft tread scrapping around them that the ghoulish saturnine host had not been sated and were hunting through the narrow confines of the passages of crates for the sole remaining two survivors of living flesh. Hal squeezed the haggard breathing woman’s hand and with taught pulls led her as rapidly as he dared through the twists and turns of the ware house.

It was near one wall of boxes that Hal made out the shrill commands of Karl. Grabbing the near exhausted woman he threw her bodily over his shoulder and clambered up a stack of boxes until he reached the juxtapose of corrugated tin roof and wall, where a narrow gap under the over hang was found. Hal shouted out to Karl, “Blow a fucking hole in this wall, and hurry!” Karl could just make out the Oberst face in the narrow slit and ordered his men to lob a hand grenade at the base of the wall. The resulting explosion ripped a four foot whole in the wall and caused the near by crates to burst into flame. The flames spread rapidly and in the leaping glare, Hal could make out the silhouettes of the shambling Waffen-SS milling about in their approach. He half climbed half fell down the wall of crates, dragging the woman with him in his hurried wake. He kicked asides several of the broken crates and shoving her before him just narrowly escaped the cold dead grasp of an iron fingered hand.

Outside coughing on the thickening smoke Hal barked at his confused second in command who was ordering a bucket brigade to put out the flames, “Don’t bother with that!” Shouted a horse rasping Hal, “we need to get inside that fucking bunker now!” Already he could hear the shouts and screams and report of small arms fire of the men who had undoubtedly found the front entrance of the shed and had entered into it in response to the sounds of the earlier battle. Behind him the fire began to roar in the building and the sounds of rivets popping in the blazing heat mingled with the warping of iron and tin and the thuds of rifle shots.

“We can not get that door to budge,” Karl frowned at the woman who Hal was helping up to her unsteady feet. “It will take a demolition pack or a mortar, none of which we have on hand nor found so far in the supplementary buildings.”

“I can get us in,” the girl quietly spoke and pushed away from Hal’s supportive arm. “But we must hurry if we want to live, for in another forty minutes death will come again for us.” Karl raised an eyebrow at the woman who was surprisingly beautiful even in the dim yellow light of the dozens of hand lights that glimmered on her in the ghostly swirl of white fog and acidic brackish smoke, and despite the blood which plastered her long black hair to her dirty face and neck. She moved off without further word and Hal nodded to those present to follow her.

She lead them to another of the outlying buildings, very small compared to the others and removing a hand pistol from her skirt waist band fired thrice into the large padlock and hasp upon the door. Hal recognized his pistol and reclaimed it from her and holstered it as he kicked open the burst lock and door. He called for light. He could smell the kerosene.

“A generator.” Karl had entered behind him, the girl followed and pushed past them both.

“We need to get past that.” She pointed to a man hole cover buried in black soot in the poured concrete floor of the small building. “It leads to a tunnel connecting to the building you wish to enter. But we will have to hurry. Usually it is raised by a hydraulic screw, but..” She trailed off as she looked about her at the destroyed mangled charred generator.

“I see,” Hal muttered, and he looked to Karl.

“We did find a hoist and supports in one of the sheds. Useless on the door, but it should lift that thing up if it is not locked down from within some how.”

“It is not. “ The girl answered and a light of some hope crept into her eyes.

“How do you know that?” Hal asked her as he puzzled over her sublime features.

“Because that is how I escaped from the compound, and it is how I had tried to return back into it when I found the forest crawling with those zombies, but it had been destroyed by some bomb or something.”

“Just a Kerosene fire from the looks of it, no explosives.” Karl noted and nodded for a soldier, “Go and bring that pulley and chains we found.” The soldier disappeared with several others.

Hal looked dubiously at the charred iron man hole cover, it obviously weighed several tons and was large enough to lower supplies through. “How long?”

“Maybe an hour? Take a while to clean this rubbish out of here so we can set up.” Karl jutted a chin at the gutted collapsed remains of the sheds interior.

“We don’t have that long!” The young woman removed a pocket watch from her torn breast blouse pocket and frowned, “if we are not back inside the compound in thirty minutes or on the other side of the ridge by then, then it will not matter if we manage to open this thing or not.”

“You heard the lady.” Hal forced a grim smile. “Thirty minutes,” and he walked outside and lit his first cigarette of the day, this was no time to break bad habits. Behind him Karl began to bark agitated precise orders and men rushed into the shed in a hive of activity. Hal glanced at the nervous woman who accepted the cigarette he offered and lit it for her, “don’t worry, he is the best there is. Just don’t tell him I said that.”

“Have you known him long?” Her eyes were large and dark and flashed even in the fog and smoke swirled night.

“Almost a day now.” Hal smiled at her frown, the look of disbelief pinched the bridge of her nose and made her look waifish and cute. He turned to meet the report of a bleeding and disheveled soldier. He nodded at it and then smoothly said, “Abandon the main building and disengage from any further hostilities with the Waffen-SS men, except in defensive measures. Order all remaining forces to fall back to this position at once. At once!” The man snapped a salute and vanished weaving between his busy fellows, swallowed up whole by the increasing fog.

They were ten minutes into the laborious back sweltering and loud cursing process of raising the large iron shaft cover when the first wave of Waffen-SS zombies hit Hal’s new perimeter he had set up around the generator shed. The continuous on going fire fight in the pitch black and flare and fire streaked incandescent swirled foggy night, was a grudging collapse back upon the nebulous nexus of the shed its self, amidst gun fire, explosions, and the howls of men being eaten alive. With ever increasing decibels, Hal kept yelling back at Karl for progress reports, and with ever dwindling troops, Hal was pushed back by the inexhaustible crush of undeniable tooth and jowl into the interior of the shed its self. With a savage yell and snarl of his own, Hal managed to get the corrugated tin and iron shed door wedged closed, using his empty and useless side arm for a lynch pin to the half mangled hasp that fell as easily within the building now through the twisted mangled door as without, and in doing so fastened the shuddering portal upon the pinned and squirming undead limbs that flopped and slammed about in blind furious grasps from under its crushing snipping half rented jamb. The molted arms of the undead looked like the rays of a dying sun or a deadly mane of a carnivorous plant insecurely pined to a mounting board in bloody froth and furry as they buckled and shoved with the dull dead force of brute mechanics, wrenching the door all but free with every ungainly erratic pulse.

Karl managed to get the man hole cover raised just enough for everyone to squeeze under its unstable several ton wobbling lip. Hal was the last one to squirm under its unsteady deadly bulk, just as the Waffen-SS soldiers crashed through the door and walls with great strips of their unfeeling flesh torn off by the jagged ragged gaps of metal and splintering wooden struts. Hal paused just long enough to fling the last of the special hand-grenades his men had fashioned in face of their unusual foe; three hand grenades tied together with wire and rigged to pull all pins with a single tug. Hal aimed at the base of one the straining tripod legs holding up the block and tackle hoist, pulled the collective pin and tossed the heavy awkward explosive, and let go of the top of the ladder and fell into darkness.

He fell farther than he thought he would, but how far he couldn’t tell, but he felt the explosion rip at his face with lips and fangs of fire even as the several ton cover fell back into place with what must have been the entire collapsing shack on top of it. Hal felt the ground leap up and bite his knee with the lancing needle teeth of an adder, and he rolled to his feet upon a twisted baulking ankle, limping into the arms of Karl.

It had taken twenty-five minutes for the last of Hal’s remaining men to enter the man hole and descended the forty rung ladder there within. It had galled him to not post a bridge head up above, let alone sealing his one known exit to him, but he accepted his gut instinct of the girl’s word of danger and had pulled all his men in before him. There was no way to raise that man hole lid in the foreseeable future with anything readily within their means, so that sole exit did indeed seem to be a dead end for them for now. And yet the young woman had rushed them down the short unlit tunnel, hysterical at the thought that the manhole cover’s seal may have been damaged, to the abrupt sealed door almost identical to the one now unerringly several meters above them. But this one had a conspicuous small iron box to one side and once its little door was open there was a slot for a key she carried and the door slowly responded to her clicking the key in place and pulling a switch. They rushed inside and repeated the process within as the now nearly frantic girl counted out the seconds until the deadline she had pronounced earlier. The heavy door snapped shut with a grating clank with just seconds to spare.

They now found themselves in more unlit concrete tunnels, though these had several radial off shot rooms set in the interior convex wall that displayed desks and office furniture and all the accouterments of slightly miniaturized offices, with half desks and demi-file cabinets. It lent to the mad jumble of senses with its warped perspective born of crowded necessity.

A low hideous moan began to whisper through the dark passages all around them. Karl was the first to speak. “There is still a power source some where,” he lowered his hand from the wall vent where he had held it to feel the cool slow moving moaning air being displaced there.

Hal turned to the young woman, “What can you tell me about this place and what has happened here?” The young woman only hug herself tightly in the low glow of the dying flashlights. Now that they were apparently out of immediate danger, the woman seemed reluctant to talk any further. Hal was exasperated by this and tugged off her identification badge from where it hung by a chrome clip at her shredded skirts waist. “Kristi Brite,” the woman’s face awoke back into an animated panic at hearing her name spoken out loud.

“My father is, was, the head research scientist here.” Her panic deflated back down into a stubborn torpor.

“Why did you flee this place? What happened here?” Hal gave her back her badge which she dutifully clipped on to the lapel of her blouse after finding her skirt in little condition to re-attach it too, though in truth the shirt was equally torn, she might as well have attached it to her exposed bra strap or satin slip Which were the only articles of clothing which she wore that were still recognizable. She smoothed down her ragged strips of skirt none the less and replied to him in an off hand manner, “I left because I had enough of the Sturbannfuhrer’s harassment. He kept calling me a little gypsy girl. All the rest of this,” she shrugged at the dark around them, “all happened after I set out top side and found those zombies in the woods. My leaving had nothing to do with any of this. It took me by terrible surprise.“ She shot Hal a deep knowing glance with her wide scowling flashing eyes and Hal straightened his stiff lacerated shoulders despite himself. An SS Major calling anyone a ‘gypsy’ was not a complement by any stretch of the imagination. Hal cleared his throat and asked Karl to take a roll of the remaining men, before they set out to find the nerve center of the under ground bunker and hopefully survivors or clues as to what had happened here and its radio room which he desperately wished to make urgent use of as soon as possible.

Thirty-six men, counting Hal and Karl. Thirty-six out of a rough commandeered ninety, mostly on leave, pulled from a passenger train less than eight hours ago. Thirty-six men and one half naked young woman, in an under ground bunker of some hidden research facility with SS Nazi soldier’s roaming around obviously drugged out of their minds into a painless primordial furry. Fucking great. Hal was certain he no longer really had to worry about filling out a self damning report, he would simply be shot.

If any of them survived that is; “Do you know the way to the command center?” The long raven tress girl turned her stubborn head away from him and crossed her lithe arms firmly over her opulent chest. “Fine. Karl, the hall bends in a crescent in two directions, obviously a radial outer circle with offices set into the inner wall. We will be looking for hallways acting as spokes into the next concentric inner ring hallway. The command center will be in the center, either above or below the floor we are on now. As these seem to be lesser rooms of importance and this seems to be a supply door we have entered, so I would hazard that this is a warehousing level. Let’s separate into two teams and branch in opposite directions. Time dose not seem to be on our side in this. The radio room is our chief goal, or the command hub, which ever comes first to hand. Keep a wary eye out for survivors, we need answers, so determine if your target is hostile, BEFORE you shoot. If there is power there must be away to turn the lights back on, considering our flash lights are fading out, let’s keep an eye out for any main switches which might restore the lights and anything else we may need to have power for like that main door directly above us. Right, you have your orders. With luck we will join up again in the master control room with all our secondary objectives achieved. Move cautiously, but keep moving.” Hal watched Karl and his men disappear in a hush of bobbling hand lights before nodding his men on down their own gentle arching hallway of intestinal darkness. Hal paused for a second as his men searched the open niches of little rooms of filing cabinets and steel chairs, and turned with a sudden thought to find the young girl. She was nowhere to be seen. ‘Must have went with Karl,’ Hal thought to himself and bit his lip in disappointment. Karl was much closer to her age anyway, but… damn. Hal hurried his men on down the tunnel of a hallway and winced as one by one his men’s flash lights went dead until they thumped their way along in pitch darkness, accompanied only by the odd low disembodied moan of the air vents. Damn.

Hal never found the main control center, nor the radio room, but his men did find a metal cased door well locked with a wire mesh and glass small panel window set squarely in its center from which spilled a luscious most welcome golden shaft of inviting light. They were considering their options on how to wrench open the solid door after a few useless tugs and kicks when to their surprise a small middle aged man’s face appeared quizzically in the frame of the window. He blinked at them and gapped, and after Hal spoke briefly to him through the glass, he disappeared. Hal sighed and began to look over the door hinges, when the door popped open and the small man stepped aside to usher them into the large flickering candle poorly lit room. Hal and his twelve men entered, scattering about eyes flittering, as the man re-locked and re-bolted the door behind them. The man was apprehensive of them and he asked meekly if they were the rescue team. Hal replied that they were, and this elicited the first smile from the man, but it quickly died upon his face.

“Oh dear, oh dear,” the mild rumpled and disheveled man muttered as he slowly began to pace through the gathering of soldiers. “I had thought I might never see another living soul again.”

“What is it? What is going on here?” Hal was feeling fatigued and his ankle was agony to stand on let alone go traipsing about uneven dark hallways upon.

“Terrible things, terrible..” the man seemed to inch away from Hal, and Hal pulled himself to a sitting position upon a cluttered table and began to rub his still swelling shin and ankle, he wondered if the skin would split? Surly it must be broken?

“Yes, I got terrible, understand terrible, lost fifty some fucking men to terrible! What is going on here!” Hal never looked at the man but he could feel him tremble as he shot nervous glances about him at the grim faced soldiers and their large shinny mostly empty weapons.

“Oh my, well yes, from the beginning then… You see, this place is a research center for a new brilliant power source. One that creates invisible energy waves and sends them out into the air where small tiny receiving units absorb them and are powered by them. It really is quiet ingenious! No more internal combustion engines, or large bulky batteries, or umbilical electric power, just imagine! All the power you could ever need just waiting there in the air.” He seemed almost giddy despite his unshaven face and blood shot eyes, which tended to transmute the good natured glee to something a touch more dreadfully hysterical.

“And then something went ‘terribly’ wrong.” Hal was still not looking at the man, but was delicately trying to remove his boot from his purple swollen foot.

“Well, no, err yes, I mean, everything worked perfectly until a day or two ago. And then it just went horribly… wrong.” The man began to scratch his red unwashed arms.

“It broke?” Hal had given up on fighting with the shoe and had pulled out a knife.

“No, err, at first we thought so, but now I know it was sabotage.” The man’s querulous voice had fallen away to a whisper.

Hal sliced the boot off his foot and it fell with a loud thud to the poured concrete floor. “Sabotage?”

“Yes. And the only person who had the means and the opportunity was the head of the whole project Doctor Brite!” The man glanced about him and chewed on his finger for a second.

“We just met Doctor Brite’s daughter.” Hal cut off the stretched sock from his tender foot’

“Doctor Brite has no daughter?” The man frowned deeply in thought.

Hal let the serrated sock fall to the ground beside the boot. “Kristi Brite.”

“That IS Doctor Brite! Doctor Kristi Brite! Though I have no idea why she would sabotage her own personal project? Such a gifted mind, yet so secretive, yes…”

“You are certain she is responsible for the project going haywire?” Hal received the wad of bandage wrap from one of his men who had dug it out of a blood splattered side pocket on his thigh, and began to gingerly fasten it about his ankle.

“There is no question about it. She seems to have been in a hurry and left much tell tale evidence behind her. Such a gifted mind, yet so untidy.” The man made a distasteful face.

I take it you have been trapped in here every since the incident occurred three days ago?” Hal tucked in the wrap and lowered himself off the table onto the cold tingling floor.

“Three days?! Has it been so long as that? Hmmm. And yet is that all the time that has passed? It seems so strange, like weeks and yet hours, hmmm.” The man began to wander off into the dark recesses of the large room.

Hal raised his voice after him, “What exactly has gone wrong? What happened to those SS men up there?”

“Oh, you saw them did you?” The voice trebled out of the black void. “Well, it’s the energy waves, you see. She did something to them. Something bad, very bad, but I can’t figure it out, just yet. She turned the waves from a harmless power source riding a carrier wave into a power leaching source that destroys living tissue. Terrible, truly terrible. You see,” there was a low building hissing growl and a sudden light of a single coughing match as it erupted into a spitting low roar glow of a kerosene lamp, startling all the men including Hal, revealing the distracted scratching man standing next to a large display table upon which a large model map of the surrounding area was built. “The initial carrier wave goes out,” he shook out the match absently as he waved his arm over the miniature forest and buildings, “then it collapses back upon its self. Re-traveling back over the same path.” He pointed at the table. “The wave initiates here, at the ‘widow of the air’ and it pours up and over the bell curve of here, ‘the window in the sun’, sort of like water welling up and flowing over a curved surface. It pools briefly there, and then radiates out in an ebb of concentric circles, like ripples in a pond. The range of the expanse of the out bound wave is equal to the time the center band of power is left charged between the ‘widow of the air’ and the ‘window in the sun’. Once that power is disrupted the core collapses and begins the tide fall back of the out bound carrier wave. It falls back to the center and begins to build again. And so on and so on. A sort of pulsing flow and ebb of power. It rides the wave out bringing power for all, and then falls back to re-charge and do it again. Except, she changed it some how. And now the wave goes out, destroying all living tissue. And when it collapses back in again, it some how reinvigorates that foul dead stuff. But how?” He frowned at the table and pinched his lower lip.

“I take it you can not turn off this power wave?” Hal limped toward the large sand table with its models.

“Wha- no, no. We are here.” The man pointed to some easily recognizable miniature buildings that Hal and his men had spent the better part of the evening fighting and dying along side. “This facility is called ‘the window in the sun’. Please don’t ask me why. The names like most of the science is Doctor Brite’s. I asked her once and she said it was what Icarus saw and drew him on to his death, ‘a window in the sun.’ Anyway, this is where we can cut off the initial power once it builds up enough and starts to flow over and out in the initial tide. Thus limiting how wide the out ward band will flow, and how soon it will return. But here,” he pointed at a large out cropping of plaster rock. “Is the old ruins of the Brite castle. This is where ‘the widow of the air’ is; the power source that initiates the energy band to flow out to this building and start its deadly journey. From here all I can really do is cut short how far the ring will expand outward, and its duration of effect. I have naturally cut it as short as safety will allow, but in doing so I have also subjected the immediate area to a high saturation of the strange duality of these altered waves. Had I not done this the very first wave several days back would have collapsed and surged exponentially so that within a mere few cycles it would have covered all of Germany! But all I can do is sit here and monitor the wave as it comes in, watch it build and then make sure my current setting is the shortest duration I can make it. So far it hits every four hours, builds for about forty minutes and then releases in an expanding dome shape about two kilometers in diameter for about ten minutes killing all living tissue, and then collapses slowly for about half an hour somehow re-energizing the dead tissue into some kind of powered life that feeds off the lingering effects of the power charged air. In truth, I do not fully comprehend it. It baffles me. To turn off the wave completely one would have to go to the energy source its self. The giant graviton wave generators buried in the bowels of the Brite castle. To turn off all the power of ‘the window in the sun’ would mean that the energy wave would swoop down from the ‘widow of the air’ and lacking its administrative binding force, swell up until it simply ignited the entire earth’s atmosphere and rendering the planet a burnt out dead hulk drifting lifelessly through the barren tracks of space. The deadly wraith of ruin can only be ceased from that source, upon the crags of castle Brite.”

“And is this the only way?” Hal traced a nasty trail through what must have been half a dozen twisting kilometers of jagged rock and forest.

“No, there is a much simpler way. There is a large steel door on this level which leads to the supply tunnel. I had assumed with the facility in lock down, that you must have came from that way.”

“We did, but there is no going back through that man hole to the surface.”

“Actually, you can just keep following the tunnel past that until it takes you directly to another such supply shed inside the outer perimeter of the Brite castle.” The man looked back at Hal who now frowned at him.

“If you could so easily return to the ‘widow of the air’ and shut down this disaster, why haven’t you?”

“The Brite castle is where the SS stationed their main security base and lodgings. There must be hundreds of them there, and they will have been subjected to the same deadly rays that those soldiers outside here were inundated with and you yourself have seen the results of that. I simply did not think I would be of much help to anybody by being torn limb from limb.”

“That is the smartest thing I have heard all day. But now we are here so you can accompany us and help us turn this thing off. And you can start making your self useful right away, by turning on some lights for us, and finding me an intercom so I can contact my men.” Hal rummaged out a u-shaped cigarette from his jacket pocket.

“Lights attract them, electricity of all kinds is like a magnet to them that drives them into a seething rage, but lights draw them on for kilometers around. I don’t know why. And yet they seem to hide themselves from direct sunlight. Very strange.” The small man swallowed hard. “They destroyed much of the equipment everywhere. They had managed to get in here by fellow soldiers thinking they needed medical aid. I had a devil of a time tricking them back outside again, and then initiating the emergency shut down. To keep them out and trigger the automatic distress code beacon.”

“But you are going to go with us and turn this thing off. You DO know how to turn this thing off don’t you?” Hal worked intently at trying to pull the bent cigarette straight.

“I…I.. I will do my best, naturally. But…” The man walked over to a series of glass gages and tubes on the wall and began to mumble, “oh that can’t be good.. Hmmm…” He frowned and then thwacked a glass tube with yellowish liquid and hash marks on its side with a firm flick of his finger. The small float inside jumped up several notches. “Ah, there, that’s much better.” He smiled to himself and beamed his grin around the room in rapt satisfaction, “it is safe to go out now. We will have roughly about three hours before the next wave is created up at ‘widow of the air’. We should hurry, as that is less time than it sounds.” The man quickly rummaged up a bag and began to toss items into it and his already over burdened pockets.

“Great.” Hal tossed the cigarette over his shoulder and dragged out another half broken cigarette from his chest pocket, “Is there a Major stationed here in the SS?”

“You mean Doctor Kristi Brite’s husband? He is in charge of security. Last I heard on the radio before it went dead, he was trying to deal with an attack of some kind back at the castle. I latter assumed it must have been elements of his own men. Only this bunker and a few key rooms at the castle have the proper metallurgical shielding from the energy waves. I mean, after all, they had proved to be utterly safe until the sabotage.”

The damp cigarette would not light. “Just great. Do you have a name, my friend?”

“ Virgil. So, we’re off then, eh?” And the small man pushed through the tired troops with a lively step and unfastened the door, and raising the lantern above his greasy head, launched himself through it upon his rapid spindly legs.

“You heard the man, let’s move.” Hal tossed the cigarette over his shoulder and began to limp after the small man who had disappeared out the door with the creaking hissing kerosene camp lamp swinging wild shadows flickering elongated licking horrors in his wake. “Just fucking great.”

They hadn’t gone far in retracing their previous steps back to the storage tunnel door through the guts of the twisting narrow serpentine track following the enflamed bent porter of Hell. When they where all thunder struck by all the lights in the tunnel hallway snapping blindingly on!

“My God! Some one has turned the power back on!” The middle aged man froze with horror and then recollecting himself turned down the lamp with a shaky hand until it expired.

“At least we can see now, and can make better time.” Hal winced forward finally catching up to the side of the man who was obviously struggling to pull himself together.

“You do not understand. Electricity draws them, it enrages them, and electric light is the worse by far. They will come now, in furious force.” The man whipped a sleeve across his damp brow.

“Let them come. They can not get past that door nor that man hole cover, that I can assure you.” Hal threw a stiffened arm against one of the white washed poured concrete walls to take some of the weight off his agonizing leg.

“The dead remember,” the small man mumbled at Hal’s frowning face, “…things.” And he shifted the bag and set the silent dead tin camp lantern on the floor.

“Where is the main power grid?” Hal asked the man who was chewing on his finger hesitant in deep contemplation.

Virgil motioned behind them and began to wind his way through the smattering of men and lead them down the hall past the room where the candle had gutted out and to another large metal door with a metal stair case just beyond. He lead them up the stairs which bent back upon themselves several times and shook and moaned indignantly beneath them at their passage. They passed through to the upper level and found another small room with a set of double swing doors and pushed through them into the above ground level.

Virgil had only gone a few dozen meters when he froze at one the new hallway’s junctions. He threw up his hand and howled, “The main door is open!” The men froze at this and Hal had to physically shove them aside to move toward the shaking guide.

He hadn’t reached him yet when Virgil let out a short horse scream and spun his head in the opposite direction he had been pointing and in a low steady voice whispered, “they are already inside.” The words had scarcely left his trembling lips when a mob of figures yanked him beyond the view afforded by the narrow hallways opening.

Hal froze like his men and they did not move for several seconds until lumbering shapes began to mill about the hallways entrance and then started rapidly toward them! They did not bother to fire at the Waffen-SS figures who in their grim horror now had several of their own previously lost comrades from the generator shed battle filling out their undead ranks. But turned instead and ran for their lives. Hal cursing at the teeth grating pain in his foot and leg, rocketed past the double doors to the stair well and several of his men careened past it with him. But even more made the hair pin turn and shot through the doors, their screams as the zombies caught up to them echoed flatly on the walls and warbled as the doors swung open and close, open and close, open and close. Hal and his remaining men knew better than to stop. The dead heavy slap of naked feet and boot leather was gaining on them as they grunted with burning lungs as they threw themselves around corner after winding corner desperately relived each time at not seeing a dead end or another horde of the undead blocking their way.

The upper bunker was not of a radial design as had been the lower level and its long and short angular hallways made each turn at the sprint a gamble against narrowing distance and time. The undead do not get tired, Hal mused as his lungs burned and his sides began to cramp. His foot was numb and at every long stride he felt it would betray him and he would pitch forward and be over taken by the horde closing behind them. One by one his men fell sprawling on the slick tile or turned to fire the last of their rounds as exhaustion brought them to an end of their mad flight.

Finally, Hal could go no further and even as he thought this, the last turn of the hallway revealed a dead end. He ran up to it and smacked the wall with the flat of his hand. He spun to meet his pursuers but found the hallway empty save for himself and four of his remaining men. They gasped and wheezed and waited as the zombies dealt with the fallen stragglers. They could see the zombies shadows on the wall of the hallway at its last bend and hear them as they feasted upon their comrades. Soon the squeals of the slaughter and piggish grunts gave way to the shuffle of feet as the zombies began to mill about. And the only sound was that of the light bulbs within the reach of the zombies shattering as they were broken or ripped from their wall sockets.

There was a large vent cover to their right about half way up the hallway and as Hal regained control over his pain dazed senses he realized it was a means of escape if they could but reach it. He gestured to it, too tired to speak and they shuffled cautiously to the large wire mesh cover, as if by silence and holding their stilted breaths they could reach the air vent before the zombies could remember they had been chasing them. It was an odd surreal moment and it hammered their blood in their temples as each man slide as rapidly and as quietly as possible both toward it and the sluggish shadows of the approaching zombies.

They had to hold one man up so he could cut the mesh with his wire cutters and he was the first to pull himself through. He then tuned and leaned out to help pull up the next man. It was during this maneuver that the Waffen-SS rounded the corner and slammed into them with silent furry. The men bellow were shoved back and surrounded and the man dangling from the vent was wrenched back down into the zombie horde. Hal and his last remaining man used the death wail distraction of their comrade to reattempt to escape through the air shaft. The first soldier leaned back down again and grabbed Hal’s arm as he was closest to him and tugged him into the shaft. Hal struggled past him in the close confines of the air vent and the soldier leaned back out to try and fish out their last remaining comrade. Hal watched the rear of the man as he struggled to pull the last man up. Suddenly the man began to slide out of the air vent back into the hallway as the zombies began to howl. Hal realized that the zombies had grabbed a hold of the last soldier that the first soldier was now trying to pull up into the safety of the air shaft. Hal latched onto the legs of the determined soldier and a grim tug of war began. It ended with Hal pulling the first soldier back into the air vent next to him. Gasping with sweat Hal looked down at the lower torso of the man, he had been torn in half. The shaft went dark and Hal saw the unspeakable face of a zombie raising himself into the air shaft. Hal pulled the pin from the hand grenades still fastened to the soldiers belt and pushed the gruesome remains toward the death head grinning at him. The zombie grabbed the entrails with both hands and fell back wards out of the air shaft he had been trying to clamber into, pulling the remains of the soldier with him. Hal clawed his way deeper into the tin air shaft as a sudden roar and belch of heat erupted behind him singing his exposed foot and threatening to suffocate him in the blistering tin coffin.

Hal was now alone and his broken foot was leaving a blood smear on the white wall as he slowly lowered himself out of a vent opening into a large room. He was exhausted and had no idea where he was. No that was not true, he was certain he was in Hell. He had died some where back there in all that mess, and he was in Hell. To prove his point the door opposite of him slowly opened and a Waffen-SS ghoul of bloody hunched malice slowly pushed through it and crept toward him with a ghastly leer. Hal could scarcely struggle to an upright position against the wall. He could only dizzily watch the shambling horror slither toward him with eyes of hungry glee.

The thing had closed within a stench of a meter from Hal when it was thrown aside by a barrage of loud hart stopping small arms fire. Hal turned to his left and there in another doorway was Karl and about six men emptying clips into the zombie. The sure force of the bullets impacts drove it back staggering into a crashing heap of carts and shattering glass. Karl yelled and a man raced forward and lifted Hal up onto his shoulder. Behind them the Waffen-SS creature wet with blood black in face covered gore as in uniform began to raise its self back upon its feet. Hal and the man shuffled back to Karl and the group who now parted as another soldier obeying Karl’s shrill bark rushed forward and the room was filled with the stench of char as a large gout of blue flame erupted from the flame thrower he wielded. The man half carrying half dragging Hal crabbed walked past the flame thrower as he incinerated the zombie. Karl and his men helped Hal through the doors into the relative quiet of the hallway beyond.

“Nice toy,” Hal nodded back at the flame thrower.

“Yes,” Karl grinned. “It’s proving surprisingly effective. We found it in the arms room.”

“Where is the girl?” Hal looked over the haggard remains of Karl’s men.

“I thought she went with you?” Karl frowned and ordered one of his men to rebind Hal’s ankle and foot with splints.

“Where did you find the power switch?” Hal winced as the man set to work on his leg.

“I thought YOU had found it?” Karl turned as the flame thrower man re-entered the hallway and joined them.

“It’s dead now,” the soldier with the flame thrower wheezed as he raised up his green tinted goggles from his blackened face.

Karl nodded at him. “Can you walk?” He asked Hal.

Hal nodded and Karl helped him to his unsteady feet. “I don’t suppose you have any more of those?” Hal glanced at the flame thrower and Karl shook his head.

“This is shit. Any idea how we are getting out of here?” Karl took an offered water bottle and took a swig out of it and handed it to Hal.

“It’s worse than you think.” Hal took a long pull of the stagnate liquid and put the stopper back on it and handed it to the next soldier. “We have to get up into the neighboring hills to a local castle owned by the Brite family and stop whatever is causing all of this.”

“Brite? The girl?” Karl puzzled at it.

“She is a part of it. Maybe a bad part of it. In fact she may be the one who started this whole mess and just now turned on the power to let the zombies in to kill us.” Hal watched Karl’s face closely, it showed no signs of his thoughts.

“What is it we are looking for at the Brite castle?” Karl’s face had set into an emotionless mask. He was waiting for orders.

“I don’t know but we have only a couple of hours to get there and find it. Or we end up like them.” Hal nodded back at the door where the strong odor of burnt flesh was over powering the gasoline smell of the flame thrower.

They burnt their way through the few remaining zombies that they found in their path, but surprisingly the vast horde had vanished and they soon found themselves outside of the open large metal door of the bunker where they had been several hours before this horror had started. Trying hard to remember the layout of the sand table he had seen earlier and hoping the men who had made it had done a through job on scale and detail. Hal directed them past the outer buildings and to the foot path he had traced his finger upon just a few hours before. Here they made a surprising discovery. The charred remains of a Waffen-SS soldier. Hal also discovered the small booted foot prints of whoever had dispatched the zombie in the ashes near by. “It would seem Ms. Brite has a flame thrower of her own. I wonder if she used it on the generator after she escaped from the tunnel and then stashed it in the woods?” Hal peered along the foot path in the dark of the deep forest night. “Appears she is going home,” he mumbled and then raised his voice, “She is armed and possibly hostile. Treat her as such.” And he nodded his men forward.

The Brite family castle had been destroyed under mysterious circumstances many years before. The once small but well made stone castle had stood guard over the valley and its near by passes for generations. It’s once opulent fabricade and lone towering tower that had been the wonder of surprised travelers, was little more than piles of blasted rubble and crumbling masonry.

Hal now handed the field glasses back to Karl who also surveyed the night shrouded grounds of silent twisted rubble.

“I thought you said this place would be crawling with SS zombies?” Karl did not sound relieved that it seemed deserted.

“The tunnel.” Karl lowered the binoculars and frowned at him. Hal raised his hand and pointed at the open shed just below and ahead of them. Karl looked at it through the field glasses again. “The cover to the tunnel has been raised up. I’m willing to bet that almost all of them went down that tunnel to get at the bunkers electricity or else expecting we would come from that way.”

“You mean these things can think?” Karl dropped the glasses from his startled eyes.

“They remember things. I’m not sure if that is the same as rationalizing thought.” Hal glanced over the Brite castle ruins again. “I wonder if she turned the power back on knowing it would draw them down into the tunnel and let her make her way up here unmolested? Did she open the main bunker door just to attend to some personal agenda of her own? Or did she reason that we would go through the tunnel and so would they, and she opened the bunker to let in the hounds to chase us to the hunters? I just don’t know.”

“You think she is controlling these things?” Karl was getting edgy from the lack of sleep and the on going ordeal.

“I don’t think these things can be controlled. They were attacking her when I fist saw her. I think she is just predicting their behavior, like a good soldier would. I just wonder what her agenda is?” Hal watched Karl rub his eyes. “Well, let’s get into that main structure. It looks like some of the Brite castle survived and it has been rebuilt and heavily modified into some kind of base of operations. I’m sure the power source is in there.”

“And where exactly is this building? I see nothing but rubble and ruins. And a ground littered with collapsed field tents.” Karl peered out into the fog shrouded night around them.


“Well, I am no engineer, but I would guess the source of power is some where below that.” Hal pointed at a long slim tower of glass and guide wires sitting unobtrusively on a large pile of shattered bricks. “Let’s keep together and go in, in groups of two in single file. I want that flame thrower in the third group. We need to turn off the power. We can’t risk just knocking down that tower. It’s possible that the thing could blow like a bomb if we just knock out pieces of it.”

“Like a bomb?” Karl put the field glasses away into their leather case.

“You don’t want to know.”

Sure enough as they snaked past the small shed and its open maw of a raised man hole cover out of which dim electric light leaked out, they found a door set into the pile of rubble upon which the long spidery tower was rooted and clung despite its very fragile appearance against the swirls of night fog. The door was open and dim bluish lights lined the low brick walls of its short hallways.

“These lights must be powered by the energy wave that is generated here. The zombies don’t seem to become enraged by them as they do normal electric lights.” Hal noted the blue light and slide down the hallway while Karl frowned at it all and motioned his men to hurry up.

Unlike the much larger complex of the ‘window in the sun’, the ‘widow of the air’ set upon the ruins of castle Brite proved to be much smaller in size. However it also seemed to make rapid use of the uncollapsed old castles cellars and substructures. For other than a patch of connecting fresh masonry hallway here or there, the entire building was housed in the ancient moldering catacombs of the castle ruins. Long serpentine coils of heavy cable ran along the wet floor or were tacked to the lichen covered walls, but other than those tell tale signs, Hal and his men could have easily been descending their way through the dungeons of some medieval city. And with each uneasy step upon the water pooled stone carved floors, the men felt they were stepping back through musty corridors of time its self.

With their only illumination the poor eye straining blue lights irregularly dotting the walls at uneven heights, the men found the smaller structure some how more ominous and expansive in its odd alien feel than the more reassuring walls of the larger bunker had been.

It still had only been less than twenty minutes before the lead man had found a sheet of heavy plastic over an otherwise doorless portal and the apparent convergence of the electrical lines which all seemed to run around its stone jambs and vanish past the opaque plastic sheeting. But it had seemed as if they had been wandering in a chilly blue-gray maze for hours.

The men gathered themselves and Hal took a moment to look at their faces. Seeing them clearly for the first time as individual men, and perhaps for the last time as living men, and he nodded them through the door way as he held the plastic sheet aside for each of them to pass.

He entered last after giving the hallway one last long glance for any signs of movement. He should have waited a second longer for no sooner had he vanished behind the sheeting than long twisted shadows began to descend the stairs they had just descended themselves.

The large high ceiling room they now found themselves in was crammed with every piece of machinery known to man, or so it seemed to the dazed small group as the spread out in its enormous vastness. The cool blue lighting was here as well but so was a wide spectrum of the color prism as every kind of gage and display of glass and light and numbers imaginable met their astonished wide disbelieving eyes. The whole of the large stone block walls and living rock gouged out sandstone was covered in every inch with black oily cables and bands of wires and large steel banks of machinery. It rose up in a tower above them and as they strode forward to a large circular railing running the center pit of the room, fell into the blindness of perspective below them.

“See an off switch?” Hal asked. And Karl laughed and shook his head. “Alright, we blow the fucker. Spread out and find me a way to bring this thing down in one blast.” Hal was cautiously leaning out over the railing and looking both up and down the enormous central shaft lined with tubes and wires.

“It won’t be easy,” Karl mumbled in awe of the structure. “We haven’t any idea what the hell we are looking at.”

“Everything goes boom, Karl. We just need to figure out how to make all of it go at the same time. And,” He looked at his crystal cracked watch. “We have less than twenty minutes to do it in. So, spread out.”

“I wouldn’t advise it. The facility is large and it is easy to get lost.” The voice was low and soft and Hal spun to find himself face to face with an SS Major. Behind the officer several SS soldiers were filing silently into the room from under the door ways tarp covering. “I take it you must be the relief party. Have you cleared the problem at the lower facility?” The Major looked idly over Hal’s men who had frozen in their steps and now watched the half dozen SS soldiers intently as they spread out in a half moon before them.

Hal noticed that the Major’s gaze hovered over the flame thrower, “I believe we have nullified the immediate threat to the ‘window in the sun’, sir.”

The Major raised his eye brows at the mention of the facilities name. “So, you have met my wife. Well, then…” He seemed to lose some of his official stance and walked past Hal and glanced over the railing above and below. “She was an amazing woman. It will be light soon. They burry themselves in the earth during sunlight.” The soldier’s face frowned, his mind seemed to be wandering. He looked into Hal’s face which was just centimeters from his own and spoke. “You seem up set Captain. Is something wrong?”

Hal swallowed hard and in a low even voice stated, “Sir, we must shut down this project. The ‘window in the sun’ was infiltrated and the creatures destroyed lighting, machinery, anything and everything they could get their claws and teeth into and rend or gnaw on. If ‘widow of the air’ is allowed to fire another pulse, ‘window in the sun’ may not be able to properly contain it. This whole mountain side could blow.”

“Then you have been sloppy!” A momentary unearthly rage blackened the Major’s face and vanished under its placid pallor. “The pulse can not be stopped. It takes days to shut down these works and none of us have the technological know how to accomplish such a task.”

“Then we must destroy it!” Hal shouted at the back of the Major who was wandering away from him and looking absently at the many gages and dials. “This is bullshit! You are not Major Brite! I grew up not forty kilometers from here. I know these woods. I have been to the Brite Castle ruins twice in my youth on school outings. I know the Brite story well enough, and Major Brite is a sixty year old man and he has no daughters and his wife is well into her fifties and you and that woman are NOT who you say you are!”

The twenty year old Major turned back to Hal and smiled. “Follow me Captain,” and he wiggled a finger at Hal and walked a short distance as he talked to the floor and ceiling and shadows. “I am Major Brite, and I was shot and killed in combat over a year ago. But such was the love of my brilliant wife that she would not let me go. And such was the whim of fate, that she was near by when I was shot and lay dying in the field hospital, despite her phenomenal surgical skill, she could not keep death from claiming me. But she would not let death keep me, she took my corpse and placed it in that.” The Major pointed at a large horizontal cylinder from which wire emulated out to all the machinery in the room. “In there she brought me back to life, but in there I had to stay. For over a year, I was a prisoner in that tiny shell, as my wife leaned over its simple portal window and wept tears at me. She seldom left my side except to design all of this.” He raised his hands to the heavens lost in shadow. “This was her master piece, to duplicate the very rays that brought me back alive and kept me alive for the whole earth to bask in its invisible glow. So I could walk out and hold her again. Imagine no more death, no more dying, no more sickness or disease.”

His hands fell to his side. “She worked ceaselessly at it, tirelessly. And after a year, I stepped out into this radiated freedom to walk and talk and live again. I never hunger, I never thirst, the pulse feeds my every cell, and it has made me younger. After a year in the cylinder at the mercies of its intense embrace I was made younger and younger. But there in a problem. For I emerged a twenty year old male with a fifty-seven year old wife. There were young local girls from the near by village who came up here and sold fresh produce to us, and my wife caught me in an indiscretion. She insisted in putting herself into the cabinet and rejuvenating her self as well. But I had been in there a year, she tired to duplicate it in a day!” The Major waved a hand at the cylinder but would go no farther toward it.

Hal cautiously leaned forward and saw a gray withered husk of a desiccated corpse inside the portal window. He recoiled despite himself, “But I saw her, we saw her today!”

“Her ghost. Her spirit. Her will, call it whatever name you want, it is a wraith that haunts me now. When the pulse goes out I grow stronger, when it returns I feed again, when it fades I live on the residuals of it clinging to the sticky molecules of the very air. So, it seems to be with her, save that she grows stronger when the pulse is at its weakest a paradoxical opposite of my own existence. When I pale to death, as I am now, she grows in substance, and with the pulse it reverses, she fades and I gain. I don’t know why?”

Hal grimaced again and shuddered back another step. “She’s still alive in that thing!”

“Well,” the Major grinned. “I’m not sure I would call that living, eh?”

Hal jutted a finger at the cylinder and the horror it contained. “We need to destroy that cylinder now!”

“No. No that would be bad thing. That cylinder tells all of this what it’s making, more or less. We need it just as it is. As far as her, it is true that she is working against us, but none of us know how to kill her without damaging the machine. A stalemate it seems.”

“I see.” Hal walked a few steps in deep thought and then grabbed a machine gun from one of his men and spun about emptying its clip at the Major and the cylinder beyond him. The bullets tore through the SS commander with little effect but they seemed to cause the apparatus to howl and spit steam and sparks. “Torch the fucker!” Hal yelled at his flame thrower soldier. He ran forward and a jet of blue flame squelched forth.

All about Hal his men and the SS soldiers were shooting at one another and hand grenades were exploding in ear popping concussions of blood and fiery tissue. Suddenly the Major, a shroud of flame, tore through the smoke and furry of battle and launched himself at Hal. His bare fists were like sixty pound sledge hammers and they broke Hal’s collar bone and two of his ribs in a matter of seconds.

Hal found himself on his hands and knees spitting blood unable to rise as the charred and burning demon straddled over him. “I shall feed you to my undead horde!” The Major hissed as he raised up his flaming fists.

Just then the Major was knocked from behind by a flying tackle that sent him and Karl over the railing and into the blue central shaft pit. The pit was swelling with intense blue light and a low humming was building. Hal struggled up to the rail and saw Karl there holding to the lip of the rim of the shaft with the Major clinging to his back. Hal forced his broken body up to the railing, desperately trying to lower his unbroken limb to Karl for assistance. But Karl only used his free arm to grab the last remaining hand grenade from Hal’s belt and then he let go of the rim and fell with the major into the blue pit. A few seconds latter and the explosion muffled out Hal’s echoing shout of Karl’s name.

The small explosion seemed to trigger a cascading chain of ever increasing detonations from within the deep bowels of the shaft. The whole earth seemed to pitch and sway and crack and shatter all about Hal. The room was nothing but choking smoke and white noise of deafening thuds. The very air was a blind seething swirl of asphyxiating blast furnace swelter. How Hal managed to find his way out of the collapsing structure and then down the ragged bluff of exploding ruins into the relative safety of the forest, he could not say.

He slipped in and out of consciousness and could not be sure of anything he saw at this time but the last thing he remembered was lying in the pine needles of the bright sun light filtering down between the high towering trees and seeing a bright eyed gypsy skirted peasant girl who walked past him with other young women who whispered and shot uncertain glances at his bleeding form. And then there were shinny boots next to his face and he painfully was turned over into the scowling gaze of an SS officers lowering face who shouted, “survivor!” And left him to a scurry of medics who shot nervous glances about them despite their business like mannerisms. The pain was a raft that kept spinning him away into a black lake rimmed in fire, but he struggled for consciousness as he heard one of the young medics mumble, “I don’t like the look of this place. It’s evil.”

“Well,” the other medic offered back, “it will be dark soon and then you won’t have to look at it anymore. Did you hear something? Sounded like a low moan, coming from the ground.” And Hal slipped into the darkness and knew no more.

************************************************************************

Ms. Americana fished reading the story and with a stretch and a yawn of her lithe body closed and set the small tomb upon the small wooden table next to her over-stuffed exceedingly comfy chair. Her body was now quiet healed and her mind a bit more her own, but she could feel all those raging hormones that the surgical gas had triggered in her still bouncing all about her loins in a wonderfully wet longing itch! At least her years of experience now paid off as the little voice inside her head was telling her to stay put in the room and no longer goading her to go outside and find some of those dishy police officers for a brief, ‘chat!’

She giggled at herself and stretched again enjoying the tug of her top against her large supple breasts and her pert naughty nipples. She stopped herself from giving one peaking out nipple a playful pinch, knowing that would lead only to a several hour ‘flicking the bean’ session that would only derive her of her sexual store house of sexual belt repression and leave her powerless for hours if not days to come! No, better not to even touch that nipple slip less the sure sensation trigger a lust too strong in her for her little voice to shout down, better to leave it and force her minds attention on something else? Like what?

Ms. Americana surveyed what was one of the few furnished rooms in the giant house and eyed the leaning stack of cardboard boxes against one of the freshly repapered walls. It turned out to be several cases of back issues of Superheroine Quarterly!? Ms. Americana, like most super heroines, had a love/hate relationship with the decades old magazine. It’s once pristine promise of feminist calling and support of all things of truth, liberty, and democracy, had sadly been tarnished by sinking into the mire of crass sexual exploitism of all things feminine! Ms. Americana and Brenda Wade had put aside their initial qualms and whole heartedly supported the fledgling magazine with interviews and name dropping at charity functions only to end up seeing cover after cover show Ms. American topless and her mouth oozing sperm, how did they get such pictures?! Understandably they felt doubly and deeply betrayed by the last few years of the magazines sordid existence and as Brenda Wade she had secretly done all she could to undermine its continued publication, pulling as many strings as she could to sink the popular super heroine skin mag! In the end it had been more Blueball’s own inability to curb his own hedonistic personal spending that had gutted the magazines lucrative success, but she still liked to believe she had had a small hand in bringing about the demise of the filthy little rag.

She did feel a few qualms about subversively torpedoing such a successful periodical in the land of ‘freedom of speech’, but… Ms. Americana reached for one of the back issues and began to thumb through it. Her shocked eyes were greeted with images of nipple slips and up the skirt shots of dozens of super heroine celebrities! But what really pissed her off to no end was that ‘Miss Astonishing’ was voted as ‘best breast’ three years running!? Obviously that bitch had them done! No one had cantaloupes that size! How did the slut even see to tie her shoes?! Obviously the whole thing was rigged! And that she was number TWO both in ‘best breast’ and ‘best ass’ proved it! Squirrel Girl had won best ass! “Top Tail” the headlines howled! Ugh! True Squirrel Girl did have a rather almost perfect spherical ass, and that skimpy costume of hers with the enormous tail did show off her posterior to an exceptional degree, but still! Her ass was WAY nicer than that nuts!

Squirrel Girl was an interesting super heroine to say the least. The accompanying article to the winning butt shot photo covered most of the basics but left out several important details which only a few other super heroines knew about. It stated that Squirrel Girl was of course Gwen Kashew, heiress to the great Kashew nut company, with a major plant just on the outskirts of Delta City. That she was a permanent residence of the Delta City Asylum for the Criminally Insane, that she escaped from her high tech holding cell almost at will, that she would commit these escapes only when a particularly vile male criminal was committing crimes of a sexual nature against women. (Gwen/Squirrel Girl were ultra-feminists!) That in her tiny super heroine outfit and armed with her famous giant over sized ‘nutcrackers’ which she welded as one would a three-section-staff or her smaller version which she called ’nut-chuck-ohs’, she would appear out of no where and render her foes incapacitated with apparent ease. She was infamous for being obsessed with the male sex organ to the point of speaking constantly in sexual double subliminal dual meanings, and had even developed the ‘cock cuffs!’ in which she would cock cuff her opponents penis and nut sack to his ankles and wrists leaving him helplessly hog tied until the police showed up. Her famous catch phrase was, ‘time for some assaulted nuts!’ usual delivered with a kick to the afore mentioned area! After dispatching her opponent she would vanish and shortly be found quietly back in her cell in the Asylum. She was considered the ‘only’ truly sexually aggressive super heroine out there, for despite her hatred of all things male, she exhibited a strong ‘lust’ for exceptionally large penises, which had resulted in her sexually attacking the male in question and often in her sexual ‘madness’ allowing the individual to get the better of her and ultimately escaping, But she always got her man, if sometimes on the third or fourth try! She was considered one of the most popular super heroines amongst the magazines subscribers despite her definite ‘B’ status on the super heroine rooster, mainly for her frank insatiable sexual appetite in face of all the other super heroines almost sexless demeanors.

What the mag failed to report was that Squirrel Girl was responsible for saving almost every super heroine from one sexual trap or another some time in her career. And that was one of the reasons every super heroine out there would not lift a finger to re-capture the brain rattled heiress every time she would escape. In fact, she had just recently saved Ms. Americana from one of the Booby Traps maniacal milking scheme traps. ‘Fresh squeezed indeed!’ Ms. Americana scowled as she rubbed her still tender breasts. It also failed to mention that the police had searched the Kashew nut factory several times and the great red wood forest immediately beyond it for the possible hide out of Squirrel Girl and had come up with nothing. It also didn’t mention that Gwen didn’t go ‘nuts’ until after her abduction by aliens, who apparently experimented upon her both genetically and sexually. Omega Woman and GOT Gal both inferred from their own investigations that Gwen may have actually subdued her captors by ‘out sexing’ them, literally fucking them into near comas with her genetically triggered nymphomania and then as they fled in escape pods, crashed the cloaked ship into the red wood forest behind her families factory. They both concluded that she must be using the still invisible ship and its alien technology to assist her in her seemingly incredible ability to escape any trap or bondage device at will! Regardless, the super heroine community had quietly excepted the some what mentally penis envy sex obsessed man hater as a staunch ally on those few occasions she deemed it necessary to slip out of her cell and into her costume to bring down some unusually male chauvinist pig! Despite the hushed up fact that Squirrel Girl more and more frequently ‘subdued’ her male adversaries by literally raping them into a near sexual spent catatonic stupor!

Ms. Americana flipped the ‘best butt’ page and scanned the ‘new hottie’ page. Though the magazine in question was several months old the Queen of Justice was surprised to see one new super heroine she hadn’t met yet. A young lady calling herself, ‘Monarch’. The magazine snoopers had already figured out that the super heroines real name was, Elaina King, that she was the daughter of a world famous etymologist, Baxter King, and that the Kansas born girl had once lived in a small Mexican city were the Monarch Butterflies winter, and where every year the children dress up in butterfly costumes to celebrate the beautiful invasion with a week long party. For some reason which the magazine apparently failed to find out, Elaina put on one of these very small children’s out fits and took to the street to fight crime! The accompanying photos showed a young intensely beautiful very blonde rail thing woman with exceptionally large boobs and hips (the hallmarks of an Aphrodite gene super heroine) in a very tiny several sizes too small orange and black one piece body suit that left little to the imagination with what apparently were two large functional butterfly wings on the back, as she was flying in the pictures, and a small orange and black eye mask.

Her father had died recently in an accident, leaving the girl alone in the world. It also noted that she had left Mexico and had been seen occasionally fighting crime in cities in the mid-western united states. She seemed to have adopted a new name to once again hide her day to day identity, but the snoopers hadn’t figured it out yet! There was the usual sexual slurs under each photo and an open invite for the new nubile super heroine to drop in the offices for a ‘nooner’ siesta with the staff?!

Ms. Americana wrinkled her nose in disgust at the sexual grossness of the rag and tossed it forcefully back into its box with the rest of the sleaze. Some young woman comes to this country to fight oppression and what dose she get? A rancid welcome from these losers! Ms. Americana noted that the vigilante group calling its self the ‘minute men’ had in the same page listed ‘Monarch’ as an illegal alien and promised to find her and export her back to Mexico. These ‘minute men‘, where the new Klu-Klux-Klan of their generation, with their thinly gilded hate crimes white washed in bold patriotism, they ‘patrolled’ the border of the USA and Mexico in pretence of stopping terrorists from entering the united states, but ignored the even less watched open boarder between the united states and the mostly white neighbor of Canada, and ignored the simple fact that every terrorist who wanted to enter America either did so with false papers through the major airports or slipped in on small water craft along the thousands of miles of unguarded coast lines, but had never nor would ever likely use the Mexican boarder crossing as it was the most watched of all of the continents boarders, well before the ‘minute men‘ had showed up. The raciest ‘minute men’ ignored these facts and kept up their armed hate watch, as bit by bit more and more reports of their ‘questionable’ treatment both to illegals crossing the boarder unfortunate enough to encounter the armed marauders and those legal citizens who just weren’t ‘white enough’ who lived in the path of these monsters leaked into the files of over burdened police departments.

Ms. Americana shook her head, sadly there was only so much she could do, the world needed more super heroines to out task such male dominated injustice, but only a few women stepped up to shoulder the task every year and most seldom kept at it for long. One good large cock gang rape sent most newbies right back onto the bus and home! Ms. Americana sighed, if only we super heroines had a bit more, ‘Squirrel Girl’ in each of us, who seemed to actually gain her powers off of forced sexual intercourse, well, then maybe the world would be a safer place. The queen of justice turned away from the stack of boxes and headed for the door. R & R time was over!

GOT Gal paused before the hidden wall panel she had just found and after several minutes of careful searching had triggered into opening. It was the eleventh secret passage she had found in several hours of focusing her innate awareness of heightened GOT Gem senses, but it was the first that sent her hackles into over drive! Her nipples instinctively hardened and she could feel her pussy lips thicken and pucker as her pubic hair raised up, all the signs of supernatural or alien presence! That she knew too well!

Before her a steel and re-enforced concrete stair descended to an earthen floor. A few steps past the hidden door and GOT Gal could see she was in a section of the mansion which had been completely gutted from earth to three stories above. An elaborate system of false walls and old doorways removed and lathed and plastered over hid the forty foot square wide shell, that contained in its center a three story metal cylinder. GOT Gal realized at once that she was looking at some kind of atomic bomb shelter added into the main structure from back in the mid-1950’s, though no record to her knowledge existed of such a construction taking place there was no mistaken the thick construction and its disheartening purpose. The large metal, ‘fallout shelter’ signs didn’t hurt in her arriving at the objects deductive purpose either.

“What better a place to house a laboratory than an old creepy bomb shelter?” GOT Gal approached the silent sealed silo and wondered how far into the earth the thing descended? “The Bareass family certainly were a strange paranoid lot.” GOT Gal reached the earthen floor which was hard packed and placing a hand on her jutting hip eyed the morbid monolith with some unease. “So… Where is the door?” Just then the earth beneath her high heeled shod feet fell away and in a shower of dirt and dust GOT Gal plummeted through a trap door!

The Porn-o-pine wheezed as he squeezed his fat bulk through the only unlatched window he could find on the ground floor and after awkwardly re-alighting himself he panted and wiped the sweat off his confused brow as he shot a wary glance out to the eerie illumination of the flood lights from the back of the house. ‘Why were the police here?’ There was a heavy ground fog swirling up on a sudden chill and the fixed spot lights from behind the house cast an uneasy super natural glow over the rest of the grounds.

After making certain that he had indeed not been spotted the rotund costumed villain slipped the sash of the window close and began to peer about the murky dark room. Certain that the house was silent and empty he took a creeping step forward and promptly crashed into the grand piano sending its case lid falling loudly upon the string sound board and in a start leapt back to send an entire cabinet of fine china smashing to the ground. The ruckus was so deafening that after what seemed several minutes of continuous crashing of glass that even in the silence that followed his ears rang from the previous explosions! In a panic the Porn-o-pine scurried in a waddle from the darkened room wincing at each new item he bumped into and sent crashing to the bare wood floor!

Barbary Blueball raised his head from dusting off his trousers and tilted an ear at the loud crashing noises coming from the house somewhere above him. “Sounds like a party and I wasn’t invited! Typical!” He sneered as he slide through the dark dirt floor basement of the old house through the maze of crates and old refuse to where he knew there was a connecting room with an old wooden stair case leading up to one of the storage rooms on the first floor, “Guess I had better show them birds how ‘I’ crash a party!” He hadn’t wove his way far through the maze of old furniture and relics when he heard another loud crash this one muffled and low key but obviously coming from an area to his immediate right and it was accompanied by the distinctive plaintive wail of a woman taken by surprise, a sound he knew by hart, and his instincts told him to seek it out before venturing upstairs.

Frowning he moved with a predators unerring instinct toward where he guessed the sound had come from through throngs of rubbish he had never even seen before during all his years living in the giant house and found himself pausing and back tracking again and again in the dim little circle of his belt light as he puzzled his way around dead end after dead end. Finally he found a simple wooden door behind a self of old broken jars of preserves. This door lead to a small earthen room with a small up raised rock and mortal well in its center. The well was caped with an iron cover, but it was rigged with a nearby chain and pulley system to be easily removed, that is easily removed once the six very stout iron shot bolts were forced back!

This he did and he then wrenched the iron lid up and swung it clear of the well opening. He then unclipped his belt light and shinned it down into the shaft of the well, only to be surprised to find, not the reflective sheen of water, but instead the rather bemused face of GOT Gal smirking up at him?!

With the loud sound of what had to be a massive fist fight suddenly exploding from the main building of the mansion its self on her left, the ever plucky super heroine, ‘Couture’ turned from the small outbuilding shed she had been racing toward and in a series of gold medal worthy flips made her way through the open window of a second floor room to race to lend assistance to her super heroine sisters in need! Besides she was glad to get out of that heavy sudden fog that was sending a terrible chill up her crotch-less panties!!!

Poltergeist halted a sudden loud sound erupted from the main house and as she crouched down on top of the roof of the armored car she watched with a smile as the guards argued and then broke up into two groups; one standing guard inside the security shed at the single over head garage door to the shed which she had ignored and the others pouring out the small single steel access door to run to the house. She had easily used her security lock pick device (made by the same company who had built the shed!) to gain entrance to the shed through the small metal door right under everyone’s noses who expected sirens and flashing lights to go off if anyone fiddled with the thing. She raised her small dart gun and dropped the remaining guards in seconds. Now to retrieve the keys to the vehicle its self and her diamonds!

Ms. Americana had no sooner left her room when she heard the most god awful noise echoing through the hallways! It sounded as if it was originating from the floor beneath her though in the maze of hallways and dim light it was strangely hard to be sure?! With a curse to ‘Liberty’! The over endowed crime fighter charged through the winding hallways in a bulrush to where the sound seemed to be originating! She had rounded one right angled corner after another until she slammed full into Couture who was running in the other direction towards the crashing sounds. The two didn’t recognize each other in the dim light for a second or two and a brief ‘tussle’ occurred. It only ended when a large fat silhouette of a man ran around the corner and shrieked like a girl upon seeing them! He flung his arms rapidly and dozens of highly concentrated aphrodisiac quills shot into both super heroines bodies! Within seconds both super heroines were tongue deep in one another’s hot boiling snatches and face humping one another in a fury of lusts!

Barbary Blueball shrugged, his gambit over, he half heartedly lowered some of the chain down to the stranded super heroine and helped her up over the lip of the well, He cringed under her ‘well well what do we have here’ but she took his camera and padded him down taking all of his rolls of film as well, despite his protests and he followed her as she commanded. They raced up stairs him calling out the route as best as he could remember and they found themselves back up on the main level and in the disaster that had been one of the music rooms.

More sounds of struggles sent them upstairs where they raced around a corner, he with a fire poker he had picked up on the first floor ready in hand, and found Ms. American savagely humping the face of another super heroine who was giving as good as she got! Barbary dropped his fire poker and in exasperation said to GOT Gal, “you can do ANYTHING you want to me, now and forever, please just let me have my camera for one shot of this!” GOT Gal pulled open the back of the camera and pulled out the film and handed the empty camera back to him. “Gee, thanks.”

Suddenly there was the sound of alarm sirens and the distant hallway exterior windows were filled with flashing yellow lights. GOT Gal raced to the end of the hallway and peered outside. Behind her Barbary whipped another roll of film from under his hat and slapped it into the camera, “Smile bitches!” He snarled.

Outside GOT Gal could see the police racing from the house over to the security shed where a fat rotund man had apparently ran smack into a woman in costume who had then dropped a bag full of stolen gems. The fat man was in the distance now puffing away like a steam train and had set off one of the trip wires to the alarm system. The would be thief woman was running away in the opposite direction, though strangely enough she seemed to have her hands digging at her ample breasts and sodomizing her ass through half pulled down skin tight leotards?! It was like she was uncontrollably raping herself as she fled?!

GOT Gal shrugged the bag of gems was still on the ground and the police were in hot pursuit, though she doubted mere men could capture even criminals as dumb as these, still she had her own mission to finish! The buxom super heroine turned back to Barbary who was watching the two face fucking heroines go at it with gusto and with his exposed reel of film in one sad hand and his empty camera in the other, GOT Gal grabbed the horny dejected pest by the wrist and told him to come on!

He followed her reluctantly as she quickly made her way back to the hidden room with the bomb shelter in it. She told him that here was a chance for him to be a real photo journalist but she doubted he was up to the task, still she couldn’t leave him anywhere near those two horny out of control super heroines no telling what they might do in their current state?!

Eyeing the several trap door traps she now could distinguish in the dirt floor now that she knew to look for them she lead both of them up to the side of the cylinder. It was coated in a rust primer paint, and it took several moments for her to find the door its self in the irregular surface. Surprisingly it opened fairly easily to her GOT Gem enhanced strength. With a slight shudder the metal wimpled and popped out of the door seal and slide obediently open. Inside the massive chamber GOT Gal and Barbary wandered through the brief maze of service tunnels and upper rooms until they found the main lower level stair case. GOT Gal was delighted that having returned the rolls of film back to Barbary he was diligently snapping photos of their surroundings as they progressed deeper into the recesses of the metal tower. What she didn’t realize was he was snapping photos of her crotch every time she bent over or her nipple slips every time she wrestled with an over head hatchway door!

In the lowest levels GOT Gal found the lab she had been searching for and within it the decidedly deceased Ebenezer Bareass. His decomposed body was still wired up to his humming machinery. And with a single staunch pull of the plug, GOT Gal sent the machines whinnying down to a dead silence. There was one lone shriek of an old man’s machine enhanced astro-projection howled and then echoed into a shuddered non-existence and then silence.

“Well, I think that ends Ms. Camilla’s horny ghost problem once and for all.” GOT Gal rubbed her hands together briskly and turned to lead the confused Barbary back up the steel stair case. Suddenly the hatchway above them slammed closed and locked into place! And from behind her GOT Gal could hear the raspy breathing of what could only be the corpse in the machine, “Or maybe not?!“ The super heroine raised her eyebrow.

Over her shoulder the reedy thin voice of the formally dead Ebenezer growled, “Now that is a pair of tits!”

Smashing a long dead zombie amateur scientist in the iron bowels of his bomb shelter lab was nothing new to the super heroine GOT Gal and as she explained the somewhat humorous details as Tanya O’Donnel to Brenda Wade over a quick power brunch in the new street bistro several days after the fact, both women laughed and laughed, “Did he really pee in his pants?” A crimson faced Brenda Wade asked for the umpteenth time about Barbary Blueball. And a chortle and nod answered her from the blonde anchor woman. “And if the zombie had anything resembling an urinary tract left I’m sure he would have pissed himself as well! It was an easy matter for me to rip a limb off and beat him to death (again!) with it! It was a matter of seconds and I had him a pile of dust at my feet!” Tanya blushed under Brenda’s flow of praise.

Just then one of Brenda’s sectaries rushed up and flung a magazine upon the table before the two startled women. “Can you believe it?!” the exasperated feminist sectary flustered, “ Barbary has brought back Superheroine Quarterly!” Both women looked down in disbelief at SUPERHEROINE QUARTERLY VOL. 100 ISSUE 100! Where a full color cover showed Ms. Americana, her face buried in the squirting muff of some super heroine called, ‘Couture’! And several insert photos on the cover lower corners showed still images of a helpless GOT Gal being seriously ass fucked by a zombie!!!!!!!!!! “Can you believe he’s making a comeback after all we went through to shut him down Ms. Wade?! I guess as long as sluts like this are out there any man can make an easy buck off of them! Right Ms. Wade?” And Brenda and Tanya could only nod and gulp their tea in silent thought.

‘I wonder if they have ‘best muff’?’ Brenda mentally shrugged to herself, ‘ I would surly win that one!!!!’