"There is no tomorrow. It will be today, when the sun rises. It is night.

It is always night. The daytime is an illusion. The entire universe is just black, cold, endless night.

'Silent Empty Eternal Darkness' is what the True Lords call it. They call themselves the True Lords, their name for themselves. We would just call them leeches.

And starlight is their burning baptism. It doesn't take much, any concentration of starlight will wither and destroy their flesh. They aren't even really alive. Maybe they were alive at one time, but not anymore.

Boo!" said the stranger with a soft and determined voice. Her voice was possibly the most unstriking thing about her. The blasted white hair, wild eyes and rust-speckled sawed-off shotgun waving back and forth at her audience were more memorable.

"What is she talking about?" Christie asked the bank manager, Mr. Sommurs.

"She didn't take the money. She went in and broke open a safe-deposit box instead." Mr. Sommurs replied. They were all scared she was actually a lunatic instead of a bank robber.

"We are all going to die, aren't we?" Django asked. He had wet himself when she said 'boo' with hardly any especial emphasis.

The crazy white-haired, dark-skinned, wild-eyed woman looked both old and young, somehow, in her torn jeans and crow's feet and perpetual smile. She set down the weapon and examined the one she had claimed from the safe deposit box. It was an ornate dagger with a silver handle and obsidian blade.

"This is called Aerthion and it is meant to kill leeches. Not that a stick of dynamite or a vat of acid wouldn't kill a leech. Hell, set your clocks back for daylight savings and you might kill one if it isn't paying attention." She was saying.

"Ma'am?" Mr. Sommurs requested her attention, now that she wasn't waving the sawed off shotgun in their faces at the moment.

"What?" She looked up at him, her eyes flashed in the light and each of them gasped. There was a kind of primal beauty in her gaze. A terrible, terrifying beauty that would just as easily kill, skin alive or make love to any of them at the caprice of her blinking depths.

"What is your name?" Mr. Sommurs asked. He had meant to try and negotiate for some assurance that they would be spared, instead he asked her for her name. Why did I do that? He asked himself.

"Ariel Goodfellow. You may call me Puck." She decided.

"Are we going to live, Puck?" Mr. Sommurs asked.

"How the hell would I know that? Remember that loud boom last night? The military vehicles and shizzle? That was something coming down from the darkness outside. It wasn't coming here to make friends." Puck said. She rolled her eyes dramatically and added:

"Well, it made friends. Makes them the way you can make a cat's cradle. Then those friends go out and make more friends and then those ones bring more friends to it, and they all get together and have a big frigging pool party and then its real friends swim up and it makes more of its own kind." She explained carefully and matter-of-factly to them. As she spoke, she conducted with the tip of the dagger, as if a silent orchestra were playing an epic piece to accompany her bizarre sermon.

"Okay, but are you going to let us go, I mean?" Mr. Sommurs wanted to know.

"You tripped the silent alarm. Haven't you wondered why no cops came to your aid?" Puck suddenly gave him her attention. She was looking directly at him, and she had asked a question.

"I didn't, uh, do that." He claimed.

"Don't lie. It's frigging boring when men lie. They suck at it." Puck had leaned back and started cleaning under the tip of her fingernails with the tip of the sacred dagger. She yawned.

"Okay I lied. I did the alarm. I don't know why there are no cops. Maybe they are outside, you have us hostage. We are your hostages and they won't shoot you as long as we are unharmed." Mr. Sommurs negotiated some more.

"There are no more cops in this town. Don't you people have movies with alien invasions on this world? It is a popular fiction. Especially good with moving pictures." Puck looked them over. There was something very old and wise in her gaze.

"Okay so now she is from Mars?" Judith wanted a cigarette so badly that she no longer cared if any of them got shot or stabbed or whatever. "Bitch stop switching gears. Either you're nicking crazy, or you are on something. You are not from Mars, though."

"I am from Caresele. Eighty nine light years from here. Pretty much the same as your world. Only five continents, just as many languages, similar height of technology. Our history isn't entirely different, except the leech infestation." Puck looked at Judith now. She sounded sane, just saying insane things. And armed.

"Okay then, how did you travel eighty nine light years from Caresele?" Judith was almost growling she wanted nicotine so bad.

"I walked." Puck said but with a tone that meant she knew they would find that to be incredulous.

"Okay say you walked, like through a stargate or something. How did you learn English?" Judith was getting moans of objection from her coworkers who wanted her to shut up before she upset the crazy lady with the very sharp dagger and scattergun.

"The same way you did." Puck had a 'duh' sarcasm tone in her voice. "What you should really ask me is how I survived the leech infestation on my home world."

"How?" Mr. Sommurs interjected, trying to take the conversation away from grumpy, slightly suicidal Judith.

"I learned how to frigging kill them." Puck frowned. "You guys don't believe me."

"Well, I mean...how can we? We have never seen a leech, don't know how to walk faster than light or learn a language on an alien world." Mr. Sommurs confessed.

"All of you stay where you are and don't try anything. I will make you into believers. You see...I didn't come here in this body. I have passed on the knowledge, even revealed this sacred weapon of hope against the coming darkness." She had that look in her eyes again, like she wasn't a junkie or anything, but some kind of wise and ancient priestess or something.

"Two birds with one dagger. It is the same thing, as I will need the young man's body to replace this one, a mind is a mind, a body a body, but I have learned to wear one as a layer across the other. It is something you might learn, like a quitting a drug addiction, almost." Puck was rambling and grunting as she readied herself for some kind of metamorphosis, evidently one she needed to undertake anyway.

She turned around and started doing something with her back to them. Then there was blood coming out of her and dripping to the floor at her feet. One of her combat boots slipped slightly but she kept giving herself surgery standing up using the obsidian blade. Then she stopped and fell to the floor, the dagger clattered and slid. Her eyes now looked dead, lifeless and devoid of any starry wisdom.

The real Puck writhed and slithered around on the floor in front of their eyes. It had two sets of faces that split from a bulging neck. Its body was white and maggot looking. It crawled under the desk, hiding from the light.

"What is that?" Christie asked Mr. Sommurs.

"I am guessing we are looking at Puck and that Puck is one of the leeches." Mr. Sommurs sounded oddly calm.

"You know something else then?" Judith had forgotten her cravings.

"The guy who had that safe deposit box. He wasn't from around here. He looked like he was from a holy order. We never saw him again. That was his dagger. He was really weird." Mr. Sommurs started. "And someone said that the dagger was occult related. I always knew it would lead to something really freaky. This isn't as bad as I imagined."

"It's in my mind." Django was squirming. "Telling me to embrace a higher homestead."

"What?" Christie looked scared.

"And eggs...I taste sulfur" Django was muttering now and drooling. He laid down on the floor prostrated and open mouthed. He squinted his eyes shut in absolute terror.

Puck came towards him with difficulty and then began to enter Django through the mouth. It squeezed and stretched itself to fit and slowly entered, one segment of its maggot body at a time.

"It was one of them all along." Judith stared and watched as did the others. They didn't know what else to do. None of them considered interrupting. The thought seemed distant and absurd. It was like watching a birth, somehow.

"It lied then." Mr. Sommurs pointed out. "It said it was from that other world."

"Maybe it was. Obviously it is a traitor. Maybe it was born there the way it described, sided with humans." Judith knew this as she said it. Like it had telepathically told her so.

Mr. Sommurs got to his feet and helped up Judith. Christie was too frightened as she tried to crawl away from it saying: "No" over and over between her sobbing. It wasn't in her head at all. She was terrified.

"It is okay Christie. Puck won't hurt you. It just needed a new host. That one, Ariel, she is dead now. It gave that body up just to show us. It isn't like the others. It doesn't want to mind-slave us. It wants us to help it defend our world willingly." Mr. Sommurs surprised himself with his own words as he walked towards Christie.

"I will kill it. That is what I will do." She declared. She went for the sawed-off.

"I need to stay alive. I am too weak now to do that again." Puck spoke from Django now. A voice so calm and collected. Not Django anymore, although the pants were still wet from the host peeing himself earlier.

"No. You are not Django" Christie whined. She had the gun and aimed it.

"I am not that creature that you saw either. But now you should understand all that I am, as I am not just one or even two living things. On Caresele I was a scientist of greatness, a priestess of order and rationality. Of the billions of my people that existed at one time, my number of eminence was one thousand and sixty-three. It was my duty to defend my people against the True Lords and when I failed it became my duty to avenge my people. I am here, I am the revenge, but it is much more difficult than I had thought. I need help. I need someone who can be anchored to discomfort without disregarding it, a mind that I can exist with and not consume by proximity. I have hollowed a few skulls, but I am a nibbler while those that come are gluttons."

"You speak English and make no sense a all." Christie retorted. She gestured as though she would shoot.

Suddenly a red bead found her from the window. It climbed from her shoulder to her forehead. The top of her head shattered into bits of bone and brain. The window had exploded from the first shot a split second before the second bullet ended her life. The shotgun went off in her hand and Mr. Sommurs, who was closest to her, collapsed, dead-as-well.

Then the SWAT team entered the bank to rescue the remaining hostages.

"Looks like you were wrong." Judith told Puck as they were approached by the SWAT team.

One of the SWAT looked from the body of Ariel to Puck in Django's body. The leech had left a trail on the floor. He got onto his radio:

"We have the target. We have the traitor." He said proudly. The rest of the SWAT responded and surrounded Puck.

"Unfortunately I was not." Puck told Judith as they took it away to face the judgement of its own kind. They all left then, with the prisoner.

Judith sat down on the counter and lit up her last smoke, deciding that this was the right time to quit smoking.

The streets of Blooming were unfamiliar to someone who had lived in the town her entire life. She walked alone with her shadow appearing under the streetlights. No more smokes.

Judith was out of cigarettes and for good, she had decided. If an alien invasion wasn't a sign from God that it was time to quit smoking, well nothing could ever be. She had actually said in her prayers:

"And if smoking is really a sin and I have to quit then give me a sign. Like an alien invasion." She had said. Less than twenty four hours since the loud impact.

She got her keys and opened her front door after she had walked home. No lights on in the neighborhood except street lights, for the most part. It was a dark night. She remembered what Puck had said her people called the universe:

'Silent Empty Eternal Darkness' they had named it. They had named themselves the True Lords. Puck had given her some knowledge of them, maybe with telepathy. The True Lords had many secrets. They ought to for they were nearly as old as some stars in their Silent Empty Eternal Darkness. Then there was this:

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"She called it Aerthion. You are Aerthion, made to kill True Lords." Judith held the dagger. The minions of the alien leeches wearing SWAT gear had failed to take it, or Judith. They had been preoccupied with Puck. They had actually left one of Puck's 'friends' and the weapon behind. Mindless hive minded mind-slaves. Judith started coughing.

"I am too old for this shizzle." She told herself. She looked into a mirror and reminded herself. "Fifty nine. C'mon I ain't no spring chicken."

But she was being hard on herself. Despite her nasty breath from smoking, Judith was still very appealing to most men. Age really didn't compete with attitude, in her case. She hefted the bladed weapon and tested its edge on her cutting board in her kitchen. Sharper than anything. She wasn't even sure it was obsidian, it looked like obsidian, blacker than black and shiny. It had sliced into the cutting board like butter. No ordinary weapon.

There was a knock on her door and she went to peep. Two cops on her doorstep.

"Who is it?" She asked. It was late and she had already noticed how dark it was out there. Her porch light had nothing but darkness beyond the ring of light it projected down onto the two cops.

"Blooming Police." one of the officers said.

"Yeah, what do you want?" Judith asked through the door.

"Just to talk. We think something might be missing." the other cop said.

"You think, huh?" Judith asked, unconvinced. She gripped the something they were talking about by its silver handle.

"Open the bucking door or I'll bucking kill you!" the first cop suddenly lost his composure and started jerking his arms in some kind of spasm.

"Just open up, lady. It is late." the other cop requested.

"Good cop bad cop. This shit just got real" Judith spoke under her breath as the first cop started zombie-walking back to their car. She could barely see him, the darkness was so absolute.

She decided that now was the right time to defend herself. Judith had balls of steel sometimes in brief flashes. This was one of her moments and she opened her front door suddenly, which wasn't even locked. The cop actually looked surprised. She stabbed the weapon through his armor and into his heart with sickening ease. Then she pulled it back out with just as much effortlessness. Amazed at the dagger's thirst she looked at it again, almost horrified at its effectiveness. She hadn't even aimed, it was like it found his heart on its own.

The other cop was already coming back and pumped a shell in his shotgun. Judith stepped back inside and closed her front door and locked it.

The body of the dead cop fell over outside with a loud thump on her front porch.

"Shiv!" Judith decided and fled deeper into her house, turning off lights and closing doors as she went.

One blast took off the top hinge and then a second shotgun blast took the second hinge. The third hinge yielded to a good kick. Then another shotgun blast weakened the deadbolt's hold. Another kick and another. Her front door collapsed and landed with a dry thump that sounded completely different than the dead body outside had.

Judith was hiding next to her staircase. The shotgun wielding cop went into her house searching for her. Judith got up and fled outside, stopping to take the dead cop's gun. Then she hid behind the cop car, aiming the gun at her own front doorway, now with no front door anymore.

It wasn't too long before the cop decided she wasn't in the house. He came back outside. Judith tried to shoot but she had forgotten about the safety. She fumbled around and found it and then with both hands on the gun she stood up and started shooting.

The first two shots missed and then she had hit his chest. He staggered back as the gunshots roared. Two more shots missed and then she hit him twice more in the chest. So far, she hadn't hurt him. His armor protected him from the bullets. She kept shooting until the clip was empty. Her ears started to ring.

Deafened she crouched down as he returned fire, blasting away at his own cop car with the shotgun until he was empty too. Judith then freed the dagger from her waistband and ran at him.

She had the dagger up and he tried to block it with the shotgun. The blade sliced through the metal with sparks. Both combatants stood there looking at the weapons with startled amazement before Judith raised Aerthion for the killing blow. She stabbed it into his heart, through the armor, just like before.

He stood there for a few seconds, dying on his feet like her other victim. Judith pushed him over, unnerved by the standing there dead thing he was doing. She claimed his sidearm and took the keys to the shot-up police car.

"Alright, I have to get out of Blooming. Aliens are taking over the town...I just killed two cops...Shiv, shiv, shiv!" Judith was pacing towards the car and then got in.

"Judith, there is no need to run. No point. We can be friends, we can. Just give Aerthion to the True Lords and you will be permitted to leave." the voice of something darksome and devilish was in her mind, like it was whispering into her ringing ears.

"Bad cop... good cop... you think sending these and then promising me...Get out of my head!" Judith demanded. It wasn't in her head anymore; she could feel it repulsed by her defiance. They wanted mind-slaves and she had found they needed something from her. Not the dagger, but something else. And she wasn't going to give it to them.

Judith started driving through Blooming and saw that those that had not joined the others were hiding, armed and scared. It wouldn't matter. The True Lords sent humans to kill each other in their name. To get to them required something more.

"I've got this. Two hours until sunrise." Judith had her foot on the gas. "Bet you sleep during the day, hibernate, in fact I know you do. A little bird told me all about you folk of the dark. I've got this." Judith swore as she drove. She wasn't leaving Blooming behind.

She pulled into a gas station on the outskirts of town. She decided that this would be a good place to stop and wait for the sun to come up. She went inside. The place was deserted so she helped herself to a pack of smokes.

"Fluck quitting. I will quit when this shizzle is over. And I am gonna end this." Judith lit one of the smokes and gagged on the taste. She had never liked this brand but hers wasn't available. She smoked it anyway.

The first light of dawn was showing on the horizon, a distant glow.

Judith put it out and left, saying:

"Time's up."

How the dark things hate light. How starlight is so bright. What exactly is light? Does it have something to do with infinity? What exactly is infinity?

What are these dark things, from before the dawn of all time?

How the dark things, how they hate the light.

Scattered in an instant, disobeying time and sequence, from the sudden light.

Some voice simply said: "let there be light"

"...and they scattered into the distant remaining darkness ahead of the light..."

-Book of Truth

Starlight kills. The lights from the top of the squad car, red and blue, travelled at different speeds, slightly different, away from the sunset meridian of earth and across the galaxy and out into deep space and then into the distant void beyond all galaxies and finally to a distance that cannot even be comprehended by the mathematics of humans or their calculators. Infinite distance, and time for that matter.

Physics is a joke, not a riddle.

Light travelling at its own sequence. Light has a secret. Measure the speed of light? Only humans would be silly enough to think that was possible. Not unless sequence was in reverse. True Lords know this. They laugh at humans.

"This is the threshold of starlight" The third True Lord had mused as they had beaten the hell out of the fragile sixty-year-old woman at his command. The minions were kicking her ribs mercilessly and grunting with the effort. She had survived and remained conscious, but totally mashed.

"Starlight, star bright. Look at that shiner." The second True Lord praised the damage and her black eye.

The red and blue lights were flashing silently and in one place. Atop the squad car, where Judith sat bound again, this time in handcuffs. Her thoughts went back to just one: where had Ariel gone?

They had called her 'Ariel' instead of 'Puck'; by her more human sounding name of 'Ariel Goodfellow'. Like some kind of Shakespearean character's name, except twisted around somehow: 'Puck' was not known to the True Lords, perhaps.

This thought was bothering Judith greatly. The tenacity of the thought was because Judith, whom could have run the Titan Bank she had worked at, was highly intelligent. She had calculated that if this fact was unknown to these creatures, it might indicate something that could be exploited against them, even by a beaten prisoner. This was fortunate for humanity, for at that exact moment of time: the fate of the human race against what was coming was entirely in her hands.

"Need a flucking cigarette." She snarled angrily. Her Nic fit was making her stomach hurt it was so intense. Sometimes Judith felt like she could just kill a man for a smoke. Here was something most people just couldn't understand, how she could just kill a man. She never had, of course, she just always knew she was capable of it.

She had stabbed two armed police officers to death on the camera of a squad car in Blooming. She hadn't really surprised herself for it was the reality that she had prayed to her god and there were no smokes, no cigarettes, nothing, just death and destruction and bullshit. Judith let out a frustrated scream and thrashed a little in the car.

The cops saw this as they returned from seeing yet more of her handiwork. Three people surgically slashed open with the murder weapon and left for dead. She had also left three mysterious stains on the ground near the corpses. The sun was going down.

"It is sunset..." Judith was catching her breath and muttered as she noticed. She was sweating. "I am too fucking old for this shit." She decried.

She realized also, on a side note, that this day was her birthday. Sixty years old and saving the world from slug-like parasitic space vampires that could control the minds of cops. And melted like sizzling steamy white butter-smoke in sunlight. One of the damn things had practically exploded, leaving a hideous sulfur smell. Judith was not someone who like the sweet smell of sulfur, it was noxious to her.

She had always claimed an allergy to it to avoid it. After all, what really is an allergy? Judith didn't know, she knew how to run a bank, but believed people's allergies were hypochondria.

"Should we just shoot her in the head and have done with it? Save the National State some money after McTrump buttfucked us?" One of the cops said to the other. They were both female cops and one of them ended every sentence with: 'after McTrump buttfucked us'.

"You guys saw what they did, and you still don't believe me?" Judith was switching gears rapidly; her heart was racing no longer from a Nic fit but the realization that there might be more. There was no sign of Puck and Puck seemed to have a plan, relying heavily on the help of whomever she could. The creature had told her that she might call her Puck and the True Lords had called her Ariel Goodfellow. They did not know she had given Judith such a codeword. Judith believed that the True Lords could not read minds, just broadcast mind control waves, or whatever. Maybe some of them could, but Judith's head would surely make one of them insane if they mind-melded with her.

As she grinded her teeth she realized the mess inside her head was the best defense against True Lords: if the fuckers could read minds. They wouldn't understand the complexity of self-hate and self-service in their own evil egos. Judith knew this quite instinctively, just as she knew that people harbored allergies and that science was bullshit. Bill Nye the Science Guy might as well be Jake Gyllenhaal because Jake played the son of Dennis Quaid's character in The Day After Tomorrow and in that movie Dennis Quaid's character was an actual weather scientist. Judith knew this because both of those men still made her wet and she had seen the movie many times. Therefore, Jake was more qualified to predict global warming than Bill.

A True Lord would have a field day, oh yeah.

"Where is the Aerthion?" Giggles, one of the cops spoke directly to her, while the other unlocked the doors. They had the caged back windows down for her and had heard her scream, still muffled by the rest of the car and distance but had actually heard it.

That same scream had awoken the remaining ones, however many there were. Why they hadn't come out earlier, Judith could only guess, as if they were outside of bodies, not fully able to ambulate in daytime, so they slept. Puck had described that they lived in water when outside of bodies, in a vague way. Chlorinated water, in fact, so they might not breathe it, and space was their home. Judith recalled that tardigrades could survive in outer space. Maybe these things could too.

A vague aching moment of horror dawned on her as she imagined these things literally raining out of the sky.

"Where is the knife? Can't go on like this: we need it to slash our wrists after Scrooge McTrump buttfucked us." The one cop said. They giggled weirdly, the two female cops. Clearly, they were under mind control for requesting the Aerthion by name, instead of asking for the murder weapon.

One of them held up a pack of cigarettes with only half of them gone. She lit it.

"Want this?" Sinister-glowing-eyes asked evilly and as she asked, she blew smoke into Judith's face.

"You think I'd sell the fate of my species for a cigarette?" Judith asked calmly, without flinching at the smoke. She prayed no Nic fit would start while they were torturing her with smokes. Only seconds earlier she could have screamed and chewed the wrist off of the cop to get to the smoke.

She prayed:

"Please dear God I am really trying to quit, and I am not strong enough and I am not brave enough. I will be when I have quit, but right now I am weak, and I am scared. Please help me...because if you don't then I am going to smoke and then the world is going to end, and it will be my fault. Amen"

"Creation is not an act of love; you humans do not realize that antiquity and true evil are inextricable. They are the same thing. Time is the result of darkness, and the speed of darkness exceeds the light, proceeds the light and is the natural state of things. Darkness prevails. The silence prevails. We have called it the Silent Empty Eternal Darkness and we have called it Home. Do you really think you can walk in here with an old knife and frighten us away? Where did you find this heroism in yourself? It is foolishness, not courage." The True Lord spoke to the woman that knelt before the Bloodline Of Truth. These evil creatures were so foul that destroying her outright would have been a waste. They wanted, they needed to break her first:

"You took all that there is for me: a world of messed up relationships and painful goodbyes and you replaced it with an evil that I can trust with my own eyes, an honest evil that calls itself 'the truth' and you gave me a welcome greeting that invited me into your darkness. Your truth. I am here to restore the lies that I love, by slaying all of you." She said, blood dripped from the open wounds on her face. They had let their minions beat the hell out of her, hoping her spirit would surrender. They had to break her first, if they killed her then her strength would live on.

"What drives you to cling to this? You cannot rise and defeat us. It is not possible." The second True Lord of the standing bloodline growled miserably. The leech had lost its patience: the patience of thousands of years and endless rewards for waiting. It was gone when faced with such insolence, such faith in something other than the Truth of Blood. Unacceptable.

"There is something about me that you creatures do not comprehend. You things from the stars. This is my home. This world is my home. You come from somewhere else, and I don't care what you have accomplished. You must know that the advantage is mine. I know things you cannot understand." She was smiling now, confident that she had defeated them. The minions stared at her like zombies and the True Lords communicated with each other telepathically, searching the minds of their hosts for some hidden poison that she must be referring to.

All this was under the stars. By starlight every martial moment these creatures forced upon lesser species was practiced. Under starlight they stood in regal repose. The distant eastern horizon was flat and glowing, and they noticed this. One of them looked at the watch. The sun would not rise for another hour and nothing in the mind of the host was warning any of them of the significance of her confident threat to them.

"You have nothing. You are bluffing. This means you must fail, you are defeated." The third True Lord spoke up and insisted that she realize they had won. Another slayer would fall, a true victory. The one dead True Lord, that she had managed to slaughter, lay upon the ground, its sacred eggs in a bundle exposed from its slimy torn flesh. These must be devoured by other True Lords. Satisfied that the creature before them would soon realize the futility of defiance they each emerged from their hosts after passing the starlit blade from the dying hands of their shells, their hosts, their now discarded human bodies they lived inside.

As they crawled across the ground like enormous and disgusting slug-like creatures the sunlight suddenly burst over the horizon. It was something forgotten in the minds of their hosts, something many forget about without a reminder, something automated for many.

"Daylight savings bitches. Daylight fucking savings." She laughed at them and spat out some of the blood in her mouth, coughing from her bruised ribs.

The creatures shrieked hideously, and their minions scrambled in confusion. The pain of direct morning light on the skins of the gods themselves made the telepathic commands a discord of confused noisy thoughts. One by one they began to shrivel up, a smoke-like vapor arose, foul and acrid. Then in agony the True Lords died together leaving their minions free to wander away with broken minds.

Only one still knelt before them, hands tied behind her back. She climbed to her feet, one foot then the other, and limped over to them. With her heel she squished their bubbling remains underfoot, just to be sure. The knife she recovered and used carefully to cut the zip ties they had used on her wrists to free herself. She took it with her, lighting up yet another smoke.

"My world bitches..." She was chuckling to herself as she left them for dead.