Tasìa had a choice to make when she merged back onto the interstate. Go left to El Hoyo or right to the recycling center?

The hit squad still roamed around Villa Marrón in an Audi. Given they were willing to give up the tail on her earlier when she flashed the Desert Eagle did strongly suggest they believed they could rejoin the hunt at a time of their choosing and their leisure.

Decision made, Tasìa merged to her right. She reasoned the remoteness of the recycling plant may entice the hit squad to try something.

Tasìa wheelied as she passed the storage facility where she wrecked so much havoc.

Perhaps, Tasìa considered in the form of an internal debate, she should take some time to trash the evidence left behind. The previous evening she worried that a massacre would draw attention to her hideaway town, Villa Marrón.

The police seemed not at all concerned about the activities in which she was involved, whether at the storage facility or the Hijos Lux brownstones in the very center of their downtown!

Did they not receive calls from residents about the shootings in which she was involved? As well, many cities had sensors to detect gunfire. They sent out drones to canvass the immediate area under suspicion, but here, nada.

The words of Romona, the food truck chef, came back to Tasìa's mind.

The old troubles, they are returning.

Before the Salvage reestablished some semblance of an orderly society, the regional governments had collapsed during the Cull Spore Invasion. Of course, certain border towns between the nations had always been anarchic smuggler's paradises for many generations.

Even still, those almost quixotic places had never descended into anything to match the savagery of the days after the Cull Spores invaded.

Is this what was occurring? The emergence of a second collapse? She recalled that terrible first year when her barrio was under lockdown.

Food was strictly rationed to where even her grandmother, whose fulsome rump attracted the attention of a Russian military-intelligence officer all those years ago, got skinny.

Her father and the general taught Tasìa how to be a little spider monkey thief. She stole from the supply trucks as they entered the gated communities of the much better-off government officials that remained behind.

She remembered asking her father why did they not leave the region like the other well-off people.

They would not survive very well in the outer world, darling, many of them are wanted criminals.

Tasìa sighed to herself. What a lesson in life that year turned out to be.

At the top of a hill, Tasìa observed the sprawl of lots, buildings, storage bins, solar panels, equipment, oil drums, vehicles, and machines that comprised the recycling center below her. Fortunately, it was strictly a daytime operation for the personnel who worked there.

Squat-legged drones walked the fenced-in parameter surrounding the main building.

The stacks of discards she had in mind for target practice occupied a graveled lot well enough away from the armed bots for her not to be overly concerned about their possible interference.

Tasìa turned off the interstate and onto the service road. As the road curved towards the recycle center, she took note of the line of sight available from where she planned to set up her shooting range.

Tasìa stopped the motorcycle at the apex of a curve just before the road cut towards the main lot. She placed two gas grenades three yards apart along the outer curve of the road's asphalt surface.

Satisfied with the placement, she drove further up the graveled lot circumventing piled discarded materials.

She got off of her bike and shuffled from bin to bin to see what she had to work with among the discarded glassware.

The discards were not permanent discards. Most of the free-standing bins were full of glass items, whiskey flasks, bourbon decanters, beer bottles, aftershave containers, all the items composed of brown and green glass, and antiques from the twentieth century.

Due to the chemical components involved in manufacturing the colored glass discards from the previous century, the materials were kept separated until at least ten tons of it had been accumulated, making the processing of it cost-efficient.

Which meant, Tasìa had a lot of shit to shoot up for her blasting away at shit pleasure. Between the two boxes of .32 ACP ammo, she had in her possession two hundred rounds worth of wanton destruction.

Tasìa assembled her TAC-50 rifle. She would have loved to have fired it off at the range, but she did not have the .50 caliber ammo to spare. She stockpiled it when she could, but in the last few years, the round was becoming more scarce to acquire.

You certainly would not find the heavy-duty sharpshooter rounds in a Quick Mart aisle, and yes, Tasìa always looked out for them wherever she shopped.

Perhaps, the hit squad would be so kind as to allow her to acquire some more practice with the TAC-50.

She checked the visibility of her immediate area. There was plenty of light flooding the property from both the rows of lamp posts along the Interstate and those mounted around the complex.

She was mostly concerned with her sightline visibility up the service road. Tasìa shouldered the rifle and peeked through the scope. It took her several seconds to spot the pair of grenades she had left on the side of the road.

Not good.

She walked several yards away from her bike and she shouldered the rifle once more.

Shit! Tasìa spat in a curse.

Again the grenades were obscured by their grey surroundings. This angle was even worse.

She tried to sight them with both the infrared and the low-light settings on her goggles. The latter was slightly better. That time it only took five seconds to find the grenades from a secondary position.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Tasìa marked a spot beside a bin to which she would have to return if she spotted the Audi.

Tasìa practiced her draw several times from that position until the grenades were spotted accurately in underneath a second.

She placed the TAC-50 level over the nearby bin so she could grab and raise it in position easily. This compromise gave her less tactical flexibility than she would have liked, but it would just simply have to do.

Before popping off the bottles, Tasìa did not forget her beer and donuts. She was starved and thirsty, after all. Even her bladder felt nearly empty despite her earlier consumption.

The beer tasted delicious, and her stomach thanked her in turn with a restive purring noise. She took several bites of the donut, and many deep gulps of the beer before putting the remaining morsel of fried cake back in the paper sack.

The contents of the bottle of beer Tasìa ruthlessly finished off. Looking at the bottle, she wondered if the beer would help take the wicked burn out of her pee stream. Tasìa decided that she needed to drink the remaining three bottles before she gave that a try.

Truthfully, after she had blown through four sets of eight bottles, Tasìa got bored. Her original impetus for dealing with her heated longings had mostly dissipated. Other events intervened, and now she was merely on watch, waiting for the hit squad to arrive.

She had an idea in mind.

After Tasìa finished off her second bottle of the Canadian brew, she cleared off some broken glass to set the bottle down on the plank.

Tasìa hopped on her bike and revved it up. Tasìa circled the graveled lot to gain speed. On her last go around she now drove at a steady fifty miles an hour. At sixty feet from the bottle, she grabbed the brace bar between the handles in her left hand, and her pistol in the other.

Aimed. Shot. Missed.

Well, there is something I can improve upon at the range.

Another idea occurred to her. She had a built-in cheat. Tasìa drove around the lot as she had done so before. When she reached the desired speed and distance, she tightened in her stomach after drawing in a deep breath.

The gut wrench triggered her sense of slow time. It was the first time she had succeeded at it without there being a dire need for it.

She had a chance to examine the effect. Her lips were numb, a chemical mist sizzled in her nostrils, and Tasìa could feel her eyes vibrate, yet her vision was never clearer.

The greyness of the evening was gone, replaced with a colorful delineation of form to every object. She could see the cathedral illustrated on the bottle's label clearly.

She aimed the laser bead at a round stained glass window on the label illustration. The bullet struck through it.

Tasìa whooped triumphant, but she checked her watch. Did she have the time to learn the proper technique of drive-by shooting?

As she asked herself the question, a light flashed across a window on the side of the main building. She glanced over to the road.

The Audi pulled into the service road without decelerating. Tasìa did not count on that. Her TAC-50 was too far away for her to grab in time to make use of the trap.

There was another way. She accelerated her Virago, braked hard at a swerve, and dropped it as she pulled her legs up in a summersault.

In mid-air, Tasia breathed deep, and her gut clenched, once again triggering her perception of slow time.

She landed on her feet, raised her pistol, and she took aim. She could see the grenades now with no obscuration, nor did she need the scope.

The Audi's front bumper lined up with the front grenade. Following her intuition, to compensate for wind shear and projectile deceleration, Tasìa rose the red bead up and to the left before pulling the trigger.

The grenade exploded beside the tire. She repeated the action on the second grenade.

The Audi flipped over on its roof.

While holstering the .32 pistol, Tasìa ran back to the rifle. She took cover and shouldered it.

The front driver door opened. The driver crawled out onto the asphalt surface of the road. He coughed from the smoke that surrounded him.

He pulled a machine pistol out when he stood up. Tasìa took the entire front of his head off.

His body fell back into the car. From the inside of it, came a piercing scream.

For nearly half a minute, nothing else occurred. Then someone peeked out from the side of an open door and quickly ducked back in.

Tasìa controlled her breathing. She would be ready for the next game of peekaboo.

The head darted back up. Tasìa clicked into her perception of slow time. It became easier every time she did so.

The head appeared frozen in place. A balding man who appeared frightened out of his gourd as his eyes quivered.

She drilled him in the right eye.

Another piercing scream accompanied the spray of blood exiting the back of his skull.

.50 calibers tended to leave big messes.

Several more seconds passed and a shirt waved from over the car.

"We surrender," yelled the last man of the squad.

She realized it was his voice that had done the screaming.

"I don't care," Tasìa yelled back. "I have no use for you alive. By killing all of you, I am sending a message to your masters to stay out of my town."

"Well then, if its a fight that you want . . ."

These were professional killers. You could not trust them. Mercy and negotiation were pointless.

Tasìa breathed in deeply. She was going to try something different. Her senses became more acute in slow-time perception.

She could hear the man frantically priming something. She heard a click followed by a higher-pitched click.

Of course, he was trying to buy some time.

He had in his possession a miniature drone. It likely carried a singular frag grenade payload.

With just her hearing, Tasìa had a fix on the drone, though metal and glass blocked her view, it did not matter.

This was a .50 anti-material rifle, after all.

She shot it dead center into the drone. An explosion occurred inside the Audi. She saw an arm tumble in the air above it.

Soon came feminine cries repeating, "don't shoot. I'm pregnant."

A submachine gun was hurled in the air in Tasìa's direction. Followed by a pair of shoes, a Ka-bar military knife, a skirt, a t-shirt, French-cut panties, and a bra.

"Alright, no tricks. Come out. I won't shoot you."

Tasìa switched to her Desert Eagle and its laser penlight as she walked closer.

The woman emerged from behind the car. Her cheeks were spread in tears. She was beautiful, with long hair and tall; the narrow, determined face made her appear all the more striking. Tasìa estimated from her lovely bump that she was around four months pregnant.

"Your trade doesn't suit motherhood," Tasìa said.

The woman only replied with a sniffle and a gasp to hide the fact she was crying.

"Are you crying for yourself, or the baby?"

The woman hung her head down. Now, she let out a sob.

"Think of how I would have felt," Tasìa pleaded, sternly. "If you had died like your comrades, it would have been the first time I killed an innocent human life. Mother and assassin don't mix."

The woman wiped her eyes.

"I would ask," even with only a few words, the woman spoke in a distinctive Balkan accent, "that you not to judge me too harshly, but then, I was sent to kill you."

Tasìa nodded, she wanted to like this person, but business was business.

"Alright," Tasìa began, stridently. "Turn around, lift up on your toes, and spread your cheeks."

Could not be too careful. They called them crackle beads. Buttholes and vaginas made excellent hiding places for those deadly weapons.

The Serbian woman complied. She was clean.

Then Tasìa noticed that on the woman's shoulder was a tattoo. An etching of two wolves ripping into the sides of Christ on the Cross. Beneath the illustration were the words.

Ordinis Sancti Romani de Novissimis Diebus.

She had seen those words and the illustration on an emblem before in the office of Hugo Brassi.

"What is your name," Tasìa asked.

"Silvia."

"Well, Silvia. It is a good thing I kept you alive. There are a few questions that I need to ask you."