Part III

Resonance Front

Annebél pulled over and stopped the Jeep just below the warning mark Demona put on the map she provided them.

Tasìa lunged out the door and knelt to puke out the contents of the coffee and Donca donut.

Neither was nearly as delicious coming up as they tasted going down. She wiped her chin and reentered the vehicle.

Annebél put a palm on her back and rubbed against her shoulder blade to comfort her. It was working.

"I shouldn't have spiked that coffee I got you with a double shot of expresso. Likely, ripped your stomach apart given the condition you are in."

Tasìa grimaced. She felt a slight tinge of guilt that she wasn't being entirely straight forward.

"It's not your fault. I threw back some mezcal even after the vodka. A lot of mezcal, actually."

Annebél chuckled and brushed her cheek.

"I am so not surprised. You stay here while I check out this camera. You keep a scope in that fanny pack, right?"

Tasìa dug for the scope originally intended for a .38 semi-auto repeater pistol.

"Don't let the small size fool you. It has excellent magnification."

Annebél took it and with her other hand she curved her index finger and thumb close together.

"My dear, I am often surprised by what sort of capacity comes in small packages."

She walked into the woods beside the winding road just outside of Asunción - it was a circuitous and convoluted route that Demona gave them to the garage but necessary, she insisted, for maintaining their stealth.

Demona left a note by the mark.

Approach from the woods. At the base of the post, cut the wires.

Sounded easy enough; Tasìa could sit this one out. Her security systems expertise would not be needed.

Tasìa relaxed and chuckled.

Oh, the hissy fit that Annebél gave at Demona's insistence upon the detour! But, the spook was a master persuader, or manipulator, depending on one's point of view. She insisted that what she wanted them to do was critical to getting Val back alive.

That put the matter solidly in Tasìa's corner of what was in her best interest.

When Tasìa explained to Annebél her familial relation to Val, the brawler calmed down.

"I'll do this for you, mon petite démon," she said as she pointed a finger at Demona, "but not for you."

Tasìa slunk back into her seat. Now that she was caffeinated, and disengaged from any intense activities, something that occurred that she had no time previously to dwell on now bothered her.

That conversation she had with the Modality:

- This phase-drone is the last one. And for that reason, we need to let it carry out its plan. Kick your legs up.

But, I will knock me fool head into the window!

- Trust! It will reveal its purpose.

The Modality did not merely suggest a better choice of actions nor play a passive role in her defensive capabilities but insisted that in operative capacity the Modality took over.

It had its own agenda independent of her immediate interest.

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That simply would not do.

Still, currently, she had no means to back up that assertion. No means that she was aware to control an entity that existed intrinsically inside of her.

More frighteningly perhaps, if it had a purpose that was counter to her interest, how would she even go about eliminating it?

She thought affirmatively, that when all of this was over - her current mission to assure that her Aunt Tatiana and Val were safe and secure, she would hunt for that owner's manual for those who lived inside a Harvested body.

She imagined what the title could be:

So You Are Harvested? What To Do With That Neurologically Enhanced Body Of Yours.

In the meantime, she needed to relax and take advantage of her current downtime with meditation. She rolled down the window and breathed in the scent of wildflowers on the breeze.

She sat back and reclined her seat. Isolated individual woodland sounds were the ultimate de-stressor.

The birds were always the easiest to pick out. She heard three different species in the immediate vicinity. She switched her awareness of each like they were instrumental parts in a song.

From her experience with meditative technique, she could very well turn that selective awareness into a musical score.

The naturally rhythmic kis-ka-dee sound that gave the common bird its name rode through the air in a smooth mid-tone. Above which a pair of saffron finches trilled sharp and vibrant in an easy-to-distinguish clang. She could not identify the lowest-toned bird, however.

Some kind of goose, perhaps? It was definitely the sound of a loch-bound bird but not so abrupt as that of a typical duck or goose.

She absorbed the sound of the avian ensemble and made a song of it.

Her selective awareness played it in the order of the low tone to the highest, she reproduced several bars from Peter and the Wolf.

The sound of the kiskadee peeled away first, leaving a gaping hole in the middle of the tonal arrangement. The loch-bound bird's song fell off next, and soon it took flight in a grande spread of white plumage over the Jeep.

It screeched a most atonal squawk as it departed.

Tasìa took its warning to heart. She got out of the car, crouched down, and readied her Magellani .22 revolver chambered with the teflonrazor rounds.

An explosion a little more than one hundred yards in the direction that Annebél took off in occurred. Though she felt no force, Tasìa jumped back, and she embraced herself for any impact.

With her heart clenched with dread worry for Annebél, she stifled an urge to yell out to her. It could prove to be a tactical mistake to reveal herself, doing neither of them any good.

What just exploded?

The silence was very odd. She expected some reverberation and a chain reaction affecting the surrounding branches and trees.

Just before she attempted to move again, it rained down pine sprouts and nuts from a Paraná pine splattering on herself, the Jeep, and the roadway.

What, no wooden splinters, nor piney bark?

More morbidly, Tasìa was relieved to find:

No giblets of human body parts.

Tasìa crouched once more and moved silently into the woods. She found the deer trail that Annebél most likely used to move up a hill leading to the posted camera.

At first, no incident occurred as she kept on the track. She even spotted the pond hidden amongst the trees that the fowl had emerged from.

There was a line of cables that crossed across the pond. They led to the camera post that she could see now.

It was mounted on a telephone pole cut off at the halfway mark with a platform placed on top of it. Three lenses that could rotate around one another protruded out from the top.

It was hidden behind a false line of tree limbs covered in glassy appearing long green nettles. On this backside, their artificiality was obvious.

The other side of the green nettles seemed real enough to anyone who did not examine them too closely. Like a one-way mirror.

They swayed back and forth near hypnotically and provided cover for the cameras that could peer through them. It was not uncommon as a policing measure to have blinds up with one-way viewing camo along speed traps or sensitive securitized areas.

Did Demona miscalculate the security measures put in place? This was only the first of three spots they needed to neutralize before reaching the garage.

Her intuition told her that she was asking the exact correct question.

Demona was the eye in the sky. If she missed anything it would be due to that limitation.

When it came together in Tasìa's head, at the moment she heard the snap of twigs from a footfall, she jumped up to a tree branch and swung up several feet in the air with a double leggéd push-off.

A metal spear swooshed by near where she previously stood.

Tasìa at the apex of her ascent now saw what had occurred. A little man wearing a skin suit, after he emerged from the pond, made an attempt to sneak up on her.

When she jerked away just then, he pulled his trigger on his speargun before he had a good aim drawn on her.

Sucks to be you!

Tasìa squared up her aim in an instant, as she fell, and placed a teflonrazor round centered in his forehead.

She gripped a branch on her way down with one hand to soften the fall. Once her descent slowed, she let go and landed on her feet.

The leap caused her tummy to feel all shaken up again. She leaned down once more and tried to let something out, but her stomach wouldn't cooperate.

Oh, mi Santa Muerte, the dry heaves ever do suck.

After a minute she felt well enough to continue. Tasìa stood and looked around to catch her bearings.

Where was Annebél? There was no sign of any struggle in the immediate vicinity. No blood loss and curiously no exploded tree.

Did they drag her into the lake? With the surrounding mud, there would be more than the one set of prints there that came from her assailant.

She ruled that out.

Tasìa walked up to the little pigmy-sized man. Close up, she realized two things. That it wasn't a wetsuit that covered over normal human flesh, and it wasn't a human face that it bore.