* For example:
  • My leg muscles are getting creative on me. As if now would be a good time to start questioning 28-year-old assumptions about gravity.
  • A suit of invisible armor I'd been wearing my entire life suddenly dissolves and falls off of me.
  • My lungs draw air from some other planet's atmosphere. (This just isn't the same air I was breathing 5 minutes ago. Is it?)
  • My voice sounds like somebody else's voice, coming out of a speaker located about a meter to the left of my head.
  • I'm aware of physical fear, like a tidal force persistently tugging me away from the sound of gunfire. I can ignore it.
  • I realize I've arrived at the place I've always wanted to be -- the battlefield -- the place where the Future is made. I can feel that crazy, chaotic, fractalline magic at work here -- like we're on the Edge of Everything. This is my true spiritual home.

Yanking her backward by her burqa seemed
like a good idea at the time.

That heel of hers, never saw it under the burqa until it exploded into my solar plexus.
Where'd she learn moves like this?

The whole world watched me go down like a sucker. Still, I had a fistful of her burqa, and she came down with me.



















No...
And again, I'd hear Lucchese ask: "Why?"
When the seal would finally be broken?
But hadn't I always known this moment would come?
I buried the memories that night... Sealed them away, so immaculately, I'd forgotten that I'd forgotten.
 
...Things I knew I couldn't remember and still remain sane. Things I had to forget if I were to go on living.
 
That whole mission, I'd kept my head while those about me were losing theirs. Even after all those things I'd seen....
 
I had to prove them wrong.
Those senile cavemen in the Pentagon always saying, women can't serve combat arms duties because they're "too emotional."
I almost lost it, then. Ordered her to get a grip on herself...
"Why?"
Tough struggle, but I finally got her up against the wall. Shouted her name until her eyes focused on mine.... The next word out of her mouth... sounded like a thousand wounds tearing open at once:
Never seen her like this before. Trembling. Tears streaming down her face... Telling the guard to shut his fucking mouth...
The guard was stripped naked, except for a gold cross dangling from his neck. Lucchese had him down on all fours... had the muzzle of her M-16 shoved right in him...
I'd found her in the very last classroom. (The rape camp had been a school before.)
I shouldn't be remembering this.
Big-boned girl, Lucchese. Six foot three. Solid as a rock. Had my hands full, holding her back. Struggled with her, just like this. I had to.
Since Lucchese. In 1999. Miljevina.
I shouldn't be remembering this.
My own voice terrifies me. The voice of a woman drowning on the ocean floor.
My words are bubbles, wobbling and fighting upward against a pressure of 400,000 pounds per square inch.
And thanks to the miracles of modern technology, I can see myself freaking out from a hundred different angles.
Victory!
It occurred to me, I hadn't struggled this hard with another woman, since......
My muscles felt like rapidly melting ice cream all of a sudden. If she'd gone for my eyes, she probably could have broken free, but for whatever reason, she didn't.
Of course I wasn't going to pistol-whip her. Knocking a person unconscious is never as quick and neat as it looks in the movies.
Whacking a person's skull with enough force to bring on concussion usually also means cranial fractures, severe brain trauma, and/or gouts of blood pouring out their lacerated scalp. I couldn't do that to her.
Pistol-whipping's okay though.
Drug effects* are just mission friction, Captain. Nothing I can't handle.
Good to hear. Secure the sniper and stand by. Your escape window's gonna open in one minute, twenty seconds.
My directional sense is kinda fucked, Captain... Gonna need some help getting out of here.
You'll be taking the south pass.
Roger. Working on getting you a chain of strobing snitches to lead you out, but...
Thanks to the sniper, we're in the middle of an emergency recompile...
Whoa!
Miller, you've only got a minute before you have to run.
Fifty seconds, Miller...
Forty seconds...
Thirty seconds, Miller...
Twenty seconds...
For fuck's sake, Miller... You've got TEN seconds...
Nine...
Eight...
Seven...
Six...
Five...
Four...
Three...
Two...
One...
Zero...
MILLER!
And all had been well these past three years.
 
And those memories would spill back out?
She didn't mean, why was I protecting this scumbag. She meant... why did this place even exist?
And this time, there's no place to run from that "Why"... no place for me to hide...
I'm suffocating... Heart slips, spasms, won't beat right. Cold stab of panic. I flip the sniper off me.
Miller, RUN!
    No, I.....    
Miller.
Listen to me carefully.
Bosnia was three years ago...
Miller.
what are you...
Oh.
Oh shit...
next



The Spiders: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3.0
electric sheep comix
Your escape window's gonna open in three-oh seconds, Lieutenant.
Jesus, Miller,
WAKE UP!
The sniper's escaping!
You still with us, Miller? Looked like that gas almost got on top of you there.
The attorneys are saying don't shoot her, Lieutenant.
Out go the lights!
KICK HER ASS, MILLER!
The chick in the burqa... Whaddya suppose her alignment is?
Hmmm... I'd say, chaotic neutral with evil tendencies.
What are you waiting for? Pick her up and get the hell out of there!
Captain....
Miljevina.
You're in
Afghanistan, now.
You're in danger, now. You've GOT to pull yourself together.
The
rape camp...
The rape camp is gone, Miller. You liberated it.
The women are all safe. The rapists are all in prison. You were a hero that night.
I... forgot...
to do something that night...
Something...
important.
What, Miller?
What did you forget to do?
    Scream.