-19-

Hi-5's Bentley left the city driving down increasingly narrow roads that dwindled from six lanes, to four lanes, to just two. Finally they drove down a gravel and dirt access road that lacked any painted line to mark one side from the other.

They were surrounded by trees on the very edge of a hilltop preserve only a few miles from the edge of the City's sprawl, and the skyline appeared every now and again through gaps in the foliage. Bonnie's eyes sought out the right-angled shapes of the the Ziggurat through the haze, and Casper's eyes were drawn to the pale, tiny holograms, still visible dancing on the rooftops of the distant FEZ.

The five of them left the comfort of the Bentley to march on a muddy path.

Hi-5 led the group, and Catherine brought up the rear with her pink plastic pistol. Bonnie, Casper, and Alvin were in the middle. Alvin doubled over and vomited every twenty yards or so. The sound of his retching and misery disappeared into the trees without a trace.

After twenty minutes of walking, Bonnie saw a very small clearing ahead. Rendezvous point. She moved her eye patch to her forehead, exposing the emerald eye, and the pain shot through her head from front to back as her optic nerve took the rude, unfiltered input from the multi-spectral transducer. It hurt, like it always did, but it was worth it because through the pain, Bonnie saw the heat from the four hidden Morituri gunmen on the far side of the clearing.

Their yellow, green, and deep cerulean bodies stood out from the blood-red trees and brackish mud. Their multi-colored silhouettes crouched, trying to hide. If it was a simple ambush, Bonnie wondered, then why weren't the gunmen hidden along the muddy path, where they would have had an easier set of bunched-up targets to set up for an easy crossfire? The gunmen waited discretely as Hi-5, then Bonnie, Casper, Alvin, and finally Catherine, stepped out from the wood's edge, and into the small clearing.

Bonnie felt like a sitting duck.

“Yo-de-lay, yo-de-lay, yo-de-lay hee-hoo!” Hi-5 yodeled at a volume that made Bonnie wince. Previously unseen wildlife scattered, birds took wing, and deer ran showing their white tails in alarm.

“What's the point of meeting out here if you insist on shouting loud enough to be heard back in the city?” asked a man with unnaturally dark hair and gray roots as he stepped out from the woods on the clearing's opposite side.

Padre Pedro wore brown slacks and a black turtleneck sweater. His stomach bulged slightly outwards over his pants, showing age that matched his true, undyed hair color.

“Padre Pedro,” Hi-5 said with undisguised disdain. “Where's Friar William?”

“Oh, you didn't really expect him to come all the way out here, did you? He rarely leaves that copper cage of his anymore... not since he heard some rumor of a G.S.A. mind-reading device being used in the city. Pretty crazy, huh? But, not to worry because, as you can see, I'm here to take these lost lambs off your hands.”

Hi-5 stared at him for a good five seconds before asking, “Is the money back in William's copper cage too, Pedro?”

“As a matter of fact, it is.” The Padre shrugged. “Friar William invites you to return with us. Come, we'll all go together for a visit. He's looking forward to it.” Padre Pedro smiled as he said it, and that didn't sit well with the biggest-ass gangsta-bitch in the forest. She rolled her eyes and withdrew a Sagami pistol from inside her vest. Its plastic body was matte black, and its barrel was snub-nosed and wide like a hand cannon. Pedro was only some fifty feet away, and well within range, but he looked disappointed not scared.

“Oh, Ms. 5, tisk, tisk.” Pedro's tone was patronizing. “Your Hi-ness, must have guessed, we are anything but alone.” Two of the four Morituri revealed themselves, and walked forward to stand on either side of Padre Pedro, carrying Mossberg auto-shotguns with pistol grips wrapped in cloth tape.

Ah, the classics, Bonnie thought. Shotgun designs hadn't changed in a couple hundred years because they still worked just fine... the same way that sharks and cockroaches hadn't changed much in the last fifty million years because their designs still worked just fine, too.

Bonnie wondered what the other two Morituri were waiting for. Then she saw them creeping behind the brush, on the opposite side of the clearing, to positions on each side, at her ten and two o'clock. “Don't worry, Ms. 5, you'll be paid, just come along, all of you. We're here to help. Remember who called who.”

As Catherine's eye caught the movement of the two other creeping gunmen beyond the clearing's edge, she suddenly realized that this wasn't a stop on the railroad. It was, more likely, the end of the line.

“Whom,” Catherine corrected him, while slowly leveling her pink plastic pistol at Pedro, “You said, 'who called who' and that is incorrect. The proper way to say it is, 'who called whom'.”

“I can see this isn't going to go as we'd all hoped,” Pedro said, punctuated with an affected sigh.

Loud detonations filled the air with dirt, rotting leaves, and waves of brain-rattling overpressure. Pedro's men had laced the opposite side of the clearing with remote concussion grenades, and as Pedro exploded them with a pocket detonator, the two shotgunners flanking him opened fire.

Hi-5 was thrown to the mud and leaves by the grenades, but not fully concussed. She rose and ran to the trees, slipping and stumbling for cover like Casper, Bonnie, and Catherine. The Morituri's first clouds of buckshot missed completely, and their second shots were high, too.

As Hi-5 reached the trees, the trunk of a eucalyptus partially shielded her, but pellets from the Morituri's third clouds of 00 buckshot caught her in the outside left rear of her spider-wool reinforced fashion statement. They spun her to the ground, bruised and breathless.

Bonnie made it behind a tree, and she saw Casper was already under the cover of a wider, thicker tree trunk. She saw Catherine dodge the buckshot and find cover, but Alvin wasn't there. Bonnie risked peeking out, and she saw Alvin's little body lying unconscious in the dirt. The rotting leaves that had been blown up in the air fell on him like huge, dark brown snowflakes.

Padre Pedro ran for cover on the other side of the clearing, and the gunmen that flanked him ran forward, firing with wild inaccuracy that was just good enough to keep everybody pinned. They were running towards Alvin, and they could have turned his little body to a mix of hamburger and buckshot, but instead one of the Morituri picked him up and started to run back across the clearing.

Bonnie watched helplessly as the Morituri who'd snatched Alvin made it halfway back across the clearing before he suddenly dropped Alvin and fell to the ground, reaching for something that looked like a tuft of red feathers stuck in his thigh. He twitched, relaxed in the dirt, and didn't move again.

Bonnie realized they and the Morituri weren't the only ones here.

Catherine snapped off shots from the pink pistol, but she missed the forward shotgunner, and automatic weapons fire from the two rear Morituri gunmen drove her back around the tree and kept her there while splinters of bark and wood burst from the wide trunk.

Bonnie covered the distance to Hi-5 and grabbed her wide-barreled Sagami dart pistol from where it lay, half-covered in the leaves near her crawling body. Bonnie fired a quick double tap at one of the riflemen. The cloud of darts from the Sagami spread wide by the time they crossed the clearing, and Bonnie guessed they were narco-tipped because the gunman who caught only one or two of them wasn't bleeding much, but he stumbled and looked lost.

His arms fell to his side, and as he inexplicably ran towards them, his rifle bounced off his legs. He tripped and fell. Then he rose, ran further into the open clearing, and fell face first in the leaves. Bonnie didn't see him get up.

The other rear gunman shifted his fire from Catherine to Bonnie, who was driven behind a tree that splintered with 7.62 mm bullets, as it received burst after burst, leaving smoking holes in the thick trunk.

The forward Morituri shotgunner, ran back towards his unconscious comrade with the red feathered dart in his leg. As he got close to his brother Morituri, he shot him. The buckshot tore across the man's neck and head, making him twist in the leaves. The shotgunner picked up Alvin and ran flat out for the trees on the opposite side of the clearing. The remaining rifleman covered him, firing bursts into the trees, keeping Bonnie and Catherine suppressed until the shotgunner reached the trees with Alvin and disappeared.

He fired two more short bursts before red feathers stuck in the side of his neck. He dropped his Kalashnikov and stumbled into the trees. They heard two more shots from beyond the far edge of the clearing as the unseen Padre Pedro killed his wounded man.

An SUV, barely visible through the fifty feet of foliage, approached, and stopped. It picked up Padre Pedro, the last Morituri gunman, and the unconscious body of the Buddha before tearing away from the scene on a dirt access road, leaving a plume of dust in the sunlit air behind it.

Bonnie watched Hi-5 swearing and cussing in rhyme at the fleeing vehicle, now that she'd recovered from the pellets of 00 shot that had stunned her, bruised her badly, and royally pissed her off. Suddenly she was quiet. Bonnie saw Hi-5 stare down at her thigh where there were short red feathers blowing in the wind. Hi-5 looked up and smiled at Bonnie. Then she fell forward on all fours, and rolled on her back.

Bonnie whipped her head left and right, looking for the source of the darts, seeing no one.

Catherine suddenly had a dart in her ass-cheek, and as she tried to turn her torso and her head to look down at it, she simply spun and fell to the ground.

Bonnie felt something like a bee stinging her right thigh. It went numb almost immediately. She didn't have to look; she knew there was a dart sticking out of her leg, and as she looked around for where it came from, she hoped like hell it wasn't poison. Before she could reach down to pull it out, the sky and the ground were trying to switch places. She fell backwards, and went quickly from standing to sitting on her ass, wondering how she'd got there. Everything went blurry and numb. She flopped on her side, and lay still.

Casper expected to find a red feathered dart stuck somewhere in his body any second. He heard crunching leaves behind him and when he turned, he was as surprised as he'd ever been in his life to see his buddy Otis smirking at him.

Casper was blinded by an insanely bright flash.

“Did you get the shot, man?” he heard Otis ask. After a second, the bright blue spots in Casper's eyes cleared enough to see a Mohawk wearing Asian kid in a skinny black mod suit and narrow tie grinning and nodding to Otis.

“Doood,” he said, “That photo was priceless... frickin' priceless.”