Below the Bay, Risk and the Killers Book One
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 – Up in Toxic Black Smoke 1
Chapter 2 – Delirium of Sex and Death 9
Chapter 3 – Below the Bay 25
Chapter 4 – Here’s Enough 42
Chapter 5 – We Hate this Place 52
Chapter 6 – One Sinister Fucked Up World 61
Chapter 7 – Everything Died to Get Here 73
Chapter 8 – Just a Touch of Prettiness 82
Chapter 9 – I Was Born Here 92
Chapter 10 – What’s Going On With Us? 101
Chapter 11 – A Plan to Kill All 109
Chapter 12 – It’s My Ass to Risk 116
Chapter 13 – Damn World’s Full of Surprises 124
Chapter 14 – K Kat Isn’t Just a Lion 130
Chapter 15 – Some Kind of She-Lion Crush 135
Chapter 16 – Sis, Play Along, Alright? 140
Chapter 17 – Whatever It Is, Don’t 154
Chapter 18 – That’s a Zoojoose Brain 159
Chapter 19 – Can’t Stop the Killing Completely 172
Chapter 20 – Screams and Cackles in the Dark 180
Chapter 21 – Just Like That, a Thousand 185
Chapter 22 – She’s Ripping Off Their Heads 190
Chapter 23 – They Got My Sis! 195
Chapter 24 – Her Most Enraptured Fans 205
Chapter 25 – We’ve Been Watching You 212
Chapter 26 – You Asked for It 219
Chapter 27 – Still, Who Would Know? 231
Chapter 28 – Such a Precious Little Girl 240
Chapter 29 – Lick It Up, Hungry Girl 248
Chapter 30 – It Just Took a Little Key S 260
Chapter 31 – So Much Better to Talk Dirty 279
Chapter 32 – My Delicious Lover Girl 289
Chapter 33 – Then, We Kill My Father 300
Chapter 34 – Get It Nice and Sticky 310
Chapter 35 – Mm, I Do Love You 315
Chapter 36 – The Sweetest, Sickest Orgasms 324
Chapter 37 – Their Insatiable Lovemaking 330
Chapter 38 – A Single Mane of Black Hair 341
Chapter 39 – The Pretty Girl’s Skull 349
Chapter 40 – A Double Dose of Female Flesh 355
Chapter 41 – Bite the Goddamn Brain 365
Chapter 42 – While She’s So Helpless 370
Chapter 43 – A Tasty, Horny Zombie Girl 382
Chapter 44 – A Soft, Smooth Little Doll 390
Chapter 45 – Such Hungry Little Babies 402
Chapter 46 – To The Crypt Building 409
Chapter 47 – A Proud DNA-Hole 418
Chapter 48 – Squeezed Into Just One Tub 430
Chapter 49 – When We Have Time 446
Chapter 50 – Where the Hell Am I Now? 455
Chapter 51 – We’re Hiking to the Reactor 467
Chapter 52 – I’m Killing Them All, Son 484
Chapter 53 – Fake Moon Phosphorous Ball 495
Chapter 54 – Like an Army Is Coming 506
Chapter 55 – So Much Stronger Now 520
Chapter 56 – Waiting In the Dark 526
Chapter 57 – We’re All So Helpless 533
Chapter 58 – Some Time Together 541
Chapter 59 – You Really Need to Fight Now 550
Chapter 60 – Make Love to Me 562
Chapter 61 – He’ll Have to Take Me 574
Chapter 62 – All You Can Do Is Fuck Me 582
Chapter 63 – I Really Didn’t Ask for This 590
Chapter 64 – We Can’t Let Her Die 600
Chapter 65 – I Still Have to Go Back 606
Chapter 1 – Up in Toxic Black Smoke
“Oh, those poor kitties! Sissy, they don’t deserve that!”
“No, Sis,” said Sophia. “They sure as hell don’t deserve it. Those were good cats.”
Marilyn’s long, wavy blond hair hung across her face, clinging to her skin from sweat brought on by the inferno so near. They’d paused their escape and stood in the recently discovered hidden chamber behind the back wall of the closet leading to Dayzee Dazzle’s mansion in the Flats of Beverly Hills. They listened to the lions howling and watched the charring and curling and crawling flames that crept along the wall in every direction.
“Sissy, not past tense, please! Maybe they’ll be okay?”
Beyond that burning barrier, two female mountains lions yipped and whined, but the path to follow Marilyn and Sophia was impassable. They’d helped the twins, whom Dayzee had named the Kildare Killers, and the rest of them put on a bizarre though thrilling performance in the hopes of luring someone or something through the portal to save them.
But major portions of the giant house’s ceiling and floors above, along with furnishings in the rooms in the upper floors, had succumbed to the intense heat and had collapsed before the lions could rush through. The only remaining exit for them had become a raging oven.
Everything not already burning in Dayzee’s luxurious house was being incinerated by bands of roaming Cadaver Collectors, whose flaming torch hands were touching everything, burning it all to the ground so that there would be no trace of them or the destruction they’d brought. The lions had tried lunging at windows and doors, but the heat and smoke had always driven them back.
Sophia looked away from the howling just beyond the fires and saw her sister’s hair, then fluffed it back over her shoulders. It fell gently over her tight white dress, which was shredded down the front and worn more like a robe.
“Thanks, Sissy. I won’t cry. I promise.”
“I know you won’t, Sis. I might, though.”
Marilyn turned to her sister and gave her long, straight black hair the same treatment, lightly flipping it back for her. Then, she held her waist with both hands, just above the waistband of her short skirt, and looked into her eyes.
“I just want to go back to Kildare,” said Marilyn. “We never had demented Collectors sucking up dead bodies and blood and guts, no headless guys looking for head, and—”
“Dead Firemen, too, Sis. Don’t forget them.”
“Yes, them too. And burning mansions, and all of our Earth friends dying, and such sweet lady lions about to—”
“They’re not dying,” said Kenzie, who joined them from one side and placed an arm around each’s waist. “Not my cats.”
The twins turned enough to look at her and in unison, each gave her long brown hair a gentle brush back over the shoulders of her tight, mostly unbuttoned blouse.
“Your cats?” Sophia with a smirk.
Kenzie didn’t smile, and she was about to defend her statement when Dayzee screamed up at them from the bottom of the ancient, circular stone stairway that they’d found only recently.
“We’re down here, girls! Come on already!”
Sophia didn’t break up the group hug, just leaned over the railing and yelled.
“We made it, Dayzee! Kenzie, Sis, and I are safe!”
“Alright, well, hurry up—there’s a bomb ticking down here, remember?”
“We remember!” Marilyn yelled. “We’re coming!”
Her eyes blinked heavily when she said to her sister, “Damn bomb.”
“Well, Sis, it was the only way to stop more of those damn Collectors from coming through, right?”
A loud, frantic lion howling got them all to look at the long fingers of twitching flames.
“They’re not dying,” said Kenzie. “I’m keeping those cats. Somehow, I’m not letting them go.”
“Kenzie, you can’t get through there. It’s not like we could take them with us through the portal anyway.”
“Sissy’s right, Kenzie. Those cats will just have to—”
Kenzie broke free and took a few steps toward the shadows and smoke blanketing the walls of the dark room. She looked around, tipping her head, then strode away from the twins, her high-heeled shoes giving sharp strikes to the old stone floor.
“Kenzie?”
“Where’s she off to now, Sis?”
Marilyn looked up, Sophia joined her, and they both studied the small square of light high above them. At the sound of smooth leather stamping on old metal, they tipped their heads back to focus again on Kenzie, who had begun to climb the wall with the crude rungs built into it.
“Oh, Sissy, that can’t be good.”
“She’s going up to that skylight?”
They looked up again and saw flames high above them, darting out from the walls and sometimes blocking the view of what they all thought was a skylight in an attic that even Dayzee had never visited.
Sophia rushed over and grabbed Kenzie’s ankle, stopping her ascent.
“Kenzie, no! You can’t go up there!”
“Fifi, let me go!”
Marilyn had followed close behind her sister, and she spoke just loudly enough to be heard over the roar of both the burning house and the panicky lions.
“She’s still calling you Fifi!”
Sophia looked back briefly and said, “That won’t matter if she roasts herself, Sis!”
Still holding her ankle, Sophia yelled, “Kenzie, there’s too much fire. Don’t go!”
Kenzie shook loose of Sophia’s grasp and continued her climb and said, “Those cats! I need those cats!”
Only seconds later, she’d been mostly swallowed up by smoke and shadows.
The twins stood side by side, arms around each other’s waist, and stared up at flames becoming more ambitious, sometimes reaching clear across the circular tower.
Sophia broke loose from her sister and started to climb, saying, “She’s not dying today. No way in hell.”
Marilyn grabbed at her lowest ankle and screamed, “Sissy, no! You can’t go up there too!”
“Dammit, Sis, let me go!”
“She’ll be okay,” said Marilyn. “Sissy, she’ll find a way. Come back down. Please!”
Sophia kicked her leg free and stayed up on the rungs, staring after Kenzie, but she climbed back to the dusty floor anyway.
They both looked toward the closet at the sound of a lion yipping like it had been stabbed. Another roar, high above them, caused them to look up again, and they saw that the flames had spread across the entire area, with Kenzie high above all of that and on her way to the skylight.
Sophia was still gazing upward when Marilyn laced her arms around her waist.
“We’ll find her again, Sissy. And those lions will make it somehow too.”
Sophia sighed and looked into her sister’s blue eyes, bright from the firelight in a dim, smoke-filled room. Marilyn couldn’t manage a smile as she wiped beneath each of her sister’s equally piercing blue eyes.
“We have to go, though, Sissy. Before that telepathic bomb thing goes kaboom.”
“Go where, Sis? We can’t really just decide to go back to Kildare.”
“Well, maybe we can ask him?”
“Ask who?”
“Whoever came to help us. Remember all that fun sex and danger stuff we just did, and how it sounded like somebody might be coming for us?”
“I remember. But I haven’t seen anyone. And what makes you think whoever comes through would take us to Kildare?”
Marilyn sighed and looked down.
“I don’t know, Sissy. But we have no choice. We have to go anywhere he takes us or burn to death.”
Far below them, Dayzee screamed from the bottom of the stairs.
“Hey, let’s go! Get your gorgeous Kildare asses down here already!”
Marilyn giggled, softly and briefly, and said, “You do have a gorgeous ass, Sissy.”
Sophia didn’t offer anything close to a giggle or even a smile.
“Yours is gorgeous, too, Sis. We’re twins. And, uh, so was Kenzie’s.”
“Sissy, she’s not gone. I promise, we’ll see her again. Oh, and those lady lions have very nice asses, too, in a lion kind of way.”
Sophia offered a quick grin and said, “Yeah. Those gorgeous she-lions. Alright, let’s go, Sis.”
She took Marilyn’s hand, and they began a careful descent, placing their pointy heels in the few remaining stable areas of old stone stairs that had been mostly destroyed by the Cadaver Collectors.
“Girls, you’re starting to sweat.”
Dayzee grinned and shook her head at the sight of them, which caused her wild, wavy blond mane to sway behind her too. She’d managed to place her own high heels on one of the few remaining areas of unbroken stone floor, and she stood with her hands on her hips, just above her short skirt which was taking on a layer of soot and ash. She’d kept her blouse unbuttoned low, and none of her exposed skin showed even the start of a bead of sweat.
“Oh my goodness,” said Marilyn, fanning herself with her free hand. “It’s so much cooler down here.”
“Oh yeah,” said Dayzee. “It’s way cooler so far underground.”
“Not for long,” the Boss said as he pointed up. “Besides a hungry inferno that wants to snack on us, we—”
“Sis is quite a tasty snack,” Sophia said with an unenthusiastic smirk.
Marilyn said, “Hmm, not if I’m roasted, Sissy. You neither.”
“Girls, let the Boss finish.”
The Boss, a handsome middle-aged fellow with graying hair, who appeared quite human, was the manager for the team of Dayzee, Marilyn, and Sophia for their mission on Earth. He’d only grinned during the interruption, then turned toward Dayzee after she’d cleared some time for him to continue.
“Thanks, Dayzee. These twins, huh?”
“More gorgeous than Earth deserves.”
“You too, Dayzee,” said Marilyn. “You’re the hottest.”
“Thanks, Mare. Fia, too, you know. I’m still astounded that no one ever knew that neither of you are from Earth.”
“Earth is just too easy sometimes,” said Sophia. “Uh, until it all burned.”
“Well, Sissy, it’s not all—”
“I thought I was allowed to finish?” the Boss said, smiling at each of them for a second. “Like I was saying, besides that fabulous mansion of Dayzee’s going up in toxic black smoke, we have a newfangled bomb from the lab back home. Things are about to blow, and we—”
“Oh, we’re back to blowing again?” said Dayzee. “Even at a time like this, all you can think about is—”
“No! I mean, yeah, all the time. But what I mean is that the bomb’s about to detonate, and it’ll wipe out that portal when it does. Don’t you think we should probably get going?”
“Wait,” Dayzee said, tugging on his sleeve. “Girls, where’s Kenzie?”
Sophia looked down, frowning, and kicked at the dust and chips of old stone. Marilyn gave that a glance, then looked back at Dayzee.
“She, um, she’s trying to save those lions.”
“What? Those two that joined in all that sex and danger stuff up there?”
“Yes, Dayzee. Those two kitties. She, uh, climbed up to that skylight way up there. Remember that?”
“Oh, wait,” said the Boss. “Dayzee and I wondered if that might be another portal.”
“What is with this house?” said Dayzee. “We keep finding stairways we didn’t know about, it’s so big we can’t find the elevators half the time, some rooms are—”
“Stocked with really sweet lingerie,” Marilyn said with a nod.
“Oh, and trapezes. Don’t forget that room with a trapeze too,” said Sophia.
“Mare. Fia. Yes, all of that. So, that barmaid from the Prism is climbing—”
“She’s an actress, Dayzee. She told us so many times.”
“Thanks, Mare. Yeah, and a damn good one. So, she’s climbing up for that portal?”
“She doesn’t know it’s a portal,” said Sophia. “She’s just desperate to save those big cats.”
The Boss tapped his wristwatch and said, “As for Kenzie, we’ll have to hope for the best. Unless you all want to be gorgeous, tasty, toasted treats.”
“Not me.”
“Me neither. Okay. We should go.”
“Yes, we should, Mare. Boss? Lead the way.”
“Because it’s my job?”
“Not so much,” said Dayzee. “Mostly because you like me bossing you around.”
“Aw,” said Marilyn to her sister, “they’re so cute together.”
“Yeah, Sis. Yeah. Not just them—so were—”
“You and Kenzie. I know, Sissy.”
“Girls, we’re all cute together. But we really have to—”
High above them near the top of the circular stairway, two lions screamed, and they all looked up. Thick arms of flames were reaching across the stairway, smacking the railings on the opposite side.
“We really have to move!”
“Finally,” said the Boss, and he started picking at the shattered remains of the old wooden door that led to the tunnel that led to the portal room. “Damn Collectors, always wrecking everything that they—”
Dayzee used both hands to shove him through, knocking loose many of the splinters.
“No time, Boss! Get your ass moving and lead the way, alright?”
“She’s quite a boss herself, Sis.”
“Oh, Sissy, she’s a hot boss. She can boss me around anytime.”
“When we’re all back in Kildare, you mean?”
Dayzee gave them both a smile before turning and following the Boss through the doorway and into the tunnel.
“Yes! Whoever the kind thing is that comes through that portal to save us, we’ll just ask politely.”
“And if they refuse?”
“Well, Sissy, we’re killers. We’ll just burn him up!”
Chapter 2 – Delirium of Sex and Death
Dayzee held the Boss’s arm as they stood in the dark room that housed a portal through which the mansion in the Flats had been invaded by the Cadaver Collectors, dozens of them. All had followed the scent of dead bodies, most of those without heads, and satiated themselves, sucking up every last bit of gristle and slime. Then, satisfied, they’d ignited everything to burn to ash the house, themselves, all of the dead bodies, and many of the loose heads.< >With her free hand, Dayzee brushed at the dust that she and the Boss had acquired, then helped Marilyn and Sophia clean themselves up too.
“That little thing is going to somehow destroy the portal, Boss?”
“Yes, Sophia,” he said, stooping down to pick up the compact briefcase.
After brushing dust and soot off of it, he flipped it open and showed them the flat screen inside, much like as if it were a laptop.
“It’s telepathic,” he said. “Some ungodly mix of sorcery crystals and irradiated brain cells.”
“Sounds wonderful.”
“Yeah, Dayzee, those lab boys, huh? It’s made to pick up on the thoughts and emotions of anyone close enough.”
They gathered around to look at a grouping of four images.
“Aw, that’s almost as cute as you two in real life,” Marilyn said while clapping her hands silently.
On the screen, there was an image of the Boss and an image of Dayzee.
“You’re both just thinking about each other?”
“I’m sure thinking of her,” said the Boss, and he leaned enough to kiss Dayzee on the lips, then gave her a chance to speak.
“Huh,” she said. “The thing’s malfunctioning. It should show me in my sadistic prison guard costume from that film.”
The Boss grinned and said, “That’s the image up here,” and tapped the side of his head.
“It’d be an X-rated image, too, you know.”
“I hope so!”
“Oh, those kitties are mine,” said Marilyn. “It’s not fair what happened to them. Not fair,” she said and stomped her white high heel on the dusty stone floor. “Oh, but look at that.”
She pointed to the fourth image, which was only a luscious pair of lips.
“Uh-oh, Sissy. I think we all know who that is.”
Sophia finally looked up and at the screen.
“Good memories, Sis. Even just that.”
“We’ll find her again. I know we will.”
“She knows we’re from Kildare, right, Sis?” said Sophia. “I mean, if we talk whoever came to save us into taking us there through this portal, Kenzie will know?”
“She’ll know, Sissy. She knows we’re the Kildare Killers.”
“She used to call us the Killer Kuties.”
“She will again. Oh, she called us Kool Killer Kuties once too.”
“Okay,” said the Boss, “as fun as this is, there’s not much time left. You girls have to follow right after us, alright?”
“Before that thing goes kaboom?”
“Yeah, Marilyn. Right. But more importantly, you’ll have a better chance of taking the fast lane to the same place as Dayzee and me.”
“Wait,” said Sophia. “You don’t know where any of us will end up, do you?”
“Uh . . . no, but—”
A crash from parts of the house falling in on itself sent a thick puff of smoke into the portal room.
“Oh, boy,” said Dayzee. “Just wonderful. Girls, we have no choice.”
She accepted the Boss’s embrace, his arms around her waist, and she put hers up over his shoulders. “Promise you’ll follow right away?”
“We promise, Dayzee.”
“Good, Mare. Fia?”
“Uh, yeah, Dayzee.”
Sophia turned to look again back through the tunnel, then faced Dayzee again.
“No reason to stay, I guess.”
“Alright, good. See you gorgeous twins on the other side.”
She locked her lips on the Boss’s, and they fell sideways into the shadows, making not a single sound and scattering up no dust.
“Alright, Sis, we have to—”
More crashing, louder than the last time, preceded a dusty, ashy wind that swept past them and swirled around in the room before clearing.
And closely following the smoky gust was the sound of agitated growling.
“Uh-oh, Sissy. Those big kitties aren’t so happy anymore.”
“Well, would you be, Sis? They’ve been through a lot.”
“Oh, true. It’s a bit much for such nice—”
They stopped at the sound of more growling, closer.
“Sissy, wait. Did the kitties get through? Did they make it down the stairs?”
“Uh, let’s hope not, Sis. Those are some angry lions now.”
“Oh. That’s true. Maybe they—”
“Hey, Sis!” Sophia screamed while pointing down at the clock on the bomb. “There’s only three seconds before—”
“Kaboom!”
“Yeah!”
The sisters hugged each other close, then turned to scan the shadows to locate the portal with their cheeks touching.
“Sissy, we’d better just jump into the shadows where Dayzee and―”
The entire room shook from a soundless wave of unidentifiable energy that drove the girls back a step. They fought to not fall, and they held each other even more tightly.
“Oh my goodness,” Marilyn said when a tall, muscular man stepped out of the shadows and swirling smoke, his fists firmly planted on his hips.
He wore his wavy black hair shoulder-length, and the black whiskers on his chin were neatly trimmed. He rarely blinked, letting his black eyes study first one, then the other.
Blue jeans, faded, ripped, and stretched over powerful legs, ended in gouged and scraped black work boots. His arms were uncovered, crowded with lean muscles, and with not a single tattoo visible.
His black leather vest had never had buttons, and it hung open, displaying ab muscles harder than the stone floor on which he stood.
Without a smile, he focused his unblinking black eyes on Sophia’s.
“Who are you?”
The Kildare Killers only stared and squeezed each other more tightly.
He shifted only his eyes to drill them into Marilyn’s.
He leaned toward her and said, “Why did you call me?”
The girls did nothing but stare, never looking away from his intense eyes as he gazed from one to the other repeatedly.
Softly, Marilyn said, “Oh, Sissy, I don’t think—”
“You’re sisters?”
Sophia cleared her throat and said, “Yeah. Twins.”
He gestured with both hands and said, “Face me.”
They turned toward him but kept their arms around each other.
He looked at both of them repeatedly.
“Yeah. I see it.”
He leaned in closer, examining each for a few seconds.
“Mostly the same. Different too.”
After his black eyes had stayed fixed on their blue eyes for a few more seconds, he began a detailed study of Sophia, first her breasts squeezed into a tight red blouse, then across the meager cloth of her short black skirt, then he slowed more to scan along her bare legs.
He focused on her high black heels, tied around her smooth skin with tight, thin black ankle straps. He offered a satisfied grin which faded almost immediately.
But it reappeared when he shifted his gaze toward Marilyn, her high white heels first.
He let that grin vanish, then let his eyes trace a leisurely path up along Marilyn’s legs, then all around the torn white cloth of her dress, held together by the Boss’s belt, then lingering for a few moments on each of her breasts.
He snapped his eyes up to again look into her bright blue eyes, then Sophia’s equally bright eyes.
With a grim smile, he said, “This can’t be Hell.”
His meager smile vanished, and he said, “I asked who you are.”
He was staring at Marilyn, so she said, “I’m Marilyn.”
He did nothing but gaze into her eyes, then he nodded.
Then, he leaned his head and met Sophia’s unblinking gaze.
“You?”
“I’m Sophia.”
He squinted for a few seconds, then nodded to each of them.
“I’m Risk.”
With more crashing from the mansion burning above them, and the wild howling of two terrified mountain lions, Risk looked down at the suitcase bomb near his boots. The girls looked too.
And they all saw its timer start up again, paused only due to Risk’s arrival, as it counted from three seconds to two.
“Uh-oh, Sissy.”
“Dammit, Sis.”
Then, from two to one.
Risk scoffed and said, “Fuck.”
Its clock showed zero, then it fell over without a sound, chasing up wispy plumes of dust.
“Don’t tell me,” he said.
“Uh, yeah,” said Sophia. “That took out the portal.”
Marilyn said, “It was our only hope to—”
Seemingly before the lion behind Risk had roared, he’d spun himself around and held his arms out to shield the girls. A single mountain lion with crazy eyes and bloody, bared fangs, crouched and stared up at Risk.
Risk crouched, too, and the twins held him around his waist, all eyes on the lion.
“Don’t,” he said to her, his voice calm. “You don’t have to.”
The lion stared only at Risk, her snout twitching and showing her sharp teeth as she continued a low growl.
“Just don’t,” he said.
She growled and leaped, and Risk just as quickly lunged at her. The girls had to let go of him, and they watched as two savage beasts tumbled in and out of smoke and shadow, both growling and both showing glimpses of fangs and claws.
After the battle had gone silent, the smoke began to clear, and Marilyn and Sophia saw Risk, on all fours beside the dead lioness, his mouth still closed on her bleeding throat.
He stared back at them as he released the lion to slump to the floor, then stood, blood dripping from his fingers and dribbling down his chin. He held their gaze for only a second, then started looking all around them.
Sophia leaned toward her sister and said, “Sis, who the hell is he?”
Marilyn embraced her sister and said to her, “Oh, Sissy, what the hell is he?”
A commotion caused the smoke clouds in the tunnel to wave and scatter with the sound of more cautious growling.
The second lion revealed her worried eyes as she crept out of the smoke-filled tunnel. She looked first at her fallen friend, slaughtered and bloody on the floor, then up at Risk.
She hid her fangs and panted. Then, she began a low whimpering.
Risk held his palms toward her and said, “It’s okay.”
She kept whimpering and whining while looking toward her fallen friend, then back into Risk’s eyes.
“Shh, now,” he told her. “It’s okay.”
She didn’t flee when he stooped near her and held her head in both hands. He tipped his head back once toward the dead lion.
“She didn’t leave me a choice.”
The lion relaxed with a single, raspy sigh, and Risk reached farther along with his right hand to pat her side.
“You, though, would have killed all of us.”
The lion looked into his eyes and panted quickly, as if laughing.
“Thanks for being kind.”
She gave his hand a quick, wet swipe with her long tongue.
Risk stood and faced the Kildare Killers, and his lion stood beside him, both gazing calmly at Marilyn and Sophia.
Risk shook back his wavy black hair as he gazed at the blond Kildare Killer and said, “Marilyn.”
She held his gaze with her eyes open wide.
“We can’t stay here.”
Marilyn nodded but didn’t speak.
He focused his intense eyes on Sophia, the blue of her eyes shining even as smoke engulfed them all.
“Sophia.”
She only tipped her head and kept hugging her sister.
“Show me the exit.”
Sophia shook her head, cleared her throat, and said, “There isn’t one. Not anymore. The bomb got it.”
With one hand, he scratched around the ears of the lion beside him and with the other, he raked his fingers through his unruly hair. He looked all around the portal chamber, then up.
“Not good.”
To Marilyn, he said, “Where are we?”
Marilyn said, “We’re, um, underground in a room that—”
He held out the hand not fussing with his lion.
He let a few silent seconds pass, then pointed up.
“No. Up there.”
“Up there used to be Dayzee’s mansion.”
Risk noticed Sophia giving a quick glance to the flames and thicker smoke that had begun trapping them, blocking any escape back through the tunnel, and he gave it a quick look too.
He turned back toward Marilyn and said, “No. The place.”
Marilyn said, “It’s Beverly Hills.”
He nodded and said, “Good. I’ll remember.”
The twins looked at each other for just a second, didn’t say a word, and looked back at Risk.
“Are we going to die down here?” Sophia said.
Marilyn began taking quicker breaths while looking around their prison, then said, “We don’t want to die here!”
He half-smiled at each of them.
“No one is dying here.”
He held the gaze of the lion beside him as she tipped her head back, her eyes darting between his and the flames.
A few seconds later, he said to her, “No. Not you either.”
She panted while looking into his eyes, then both of them turned again to Marilyn and Sophia.
“She wants a name,” he said.
Sophia gave the lion a quick squinting look, then said, “Huh? The lion?”
He nodded and said, “She’ll need one.”
Marilyn sighed and shook her head, then turned to whisper to her sister, “Sissy, maybe Kenzie?”
Sophia blinked her eyes slowly and kept them aimed at the floor.
A moment later, she nodded, still not looking up.
Marilyn said to Risk, “Can we call her Kenzie?”
He looked down at the lion, and she looked up at him. She yawned and kept her mouth opened wide, displaying her white fangs for a second.
Then, she snapped her mouth shut and leveled her gaze on the twins again.
“Kenzie Cat,” said Risk.
He tipped his head toward the lioness and said, “Her idea.”
Marilyn giggled once nervously, then said, “Can Cat be with a ‘K?’”
“Sis,” Sophia said in a strained whisper. “You shouldn’t—”
“Yeah. Even better,” said Risk.
All of them turned enough to see the flames that had reached the tunnel’s entrance to the chamber but went no farther.
“We have to go,” he said.
“How?” said Sophia. “Everything’s burning, and the—”
“And the portal is gone,” said Marilyn. “There’s no way.”
He offered them the first true smile since they’d met.
“You must do as I say.”
The girls looked at the advancing flames, which carried with them more choking smoke.
Marilyn nodded and said, “We will.”
“Yeah. Both of us.”
“Good. One of you, take out your knife.”
They looked at each other before quickly looking back at Risk.
“Uh, we don’t have knives.”
He shrugged and said, “An axe, then.”
They both gave their clothing a quick study. Marilyn’s makeshift white robe was tight and barely hid her physical features. Sophia’s short skirt and blouse didn’t even demand any imagination from anyone.
Sophia scoffed softly and said, “Uh, sorry. Nothing.”
Still scratching around Kenzie Kat’s ears, Risk wiped the last of the dead lion’s blood from his chin as he looked around.
“Oh, wait,” said Marilyn. “Sissy and I are the Kildare Killers. We can—”
“You kill?”
“Yeah,” said Sophia. “Easily too.”
“How do you kill?”
Sophia relaxed her hold on her sister and raised up her other hand.
She made it glow red hot.
Kenzie Kat yipped softly just once and pressed against Risk’s leg.
Risk nodded and said, “Good. You too?”
Marilyn showed him her glowing hand and didn’t try to stop her soft giggle.
“Good,” he said. “Cool your fires.”
Their hands instantly returned to normal.
Risk held both arms out, hands together, then slowly spread them to the sides.
The girls gave each other a quick look, let each other go, then took a step to each side.
Risk looked first at Marilyn, then Sophia, then Marilyn again. He focused on Sophia for a few seconds, then looked down at the big cat.
He scoffed and said, “Yeah. Either one.”
Kenzie Kat gave him a laughing snarl, then they both looked again toward the twins.
An explosion high above shook even the floor and walls of the underground room, and a wave of flames invited itself in, then branched to begin flowing around each way, encircling them.
Risk looked each way and said, “Dammit.”
“Can we get the hell out of here already?”
“Sissy, he knows how, he just—”
“Too close,” he said while scanning the hungry flames creeping along the perimeter.
“Can’t do it right.”
He rubbed around the lion’s ears as she looked up at him.
“It’s never easy,” he told her.
Then, he turned his eyes to Sophia when she said, “What do you mean, ‘right?’”
He ignored her question and studied Marilyn when she said, “Then, let’s do it wrong! We don’t want to die!”
He grinned for just a second, then patted Kenzie Kat’s head and said to her, “Wait.”
He leaned closer to her and said, “Until.”
He straightened up and said, “You,” and took three steps to stand so close to Marilyn that she had to look up to see his eyes.
Quickly, he shot his left arm around her waist and held her head with his right. She’d only begun to open her mouth for a gasp, and he covered her lips with his own.
Sophia kept her distance and stared at them, and Marilyn groaned softly and struggled. Risk didn’t release her from the embrace or the kiss, and she finally relaxed in his arms.
While still forcing her to kiss him, he began savagely tearing open her already damaged white dress. It came apart easily, and he snapped it back over her shoulders and down her arms, then tossed it to one side, where the flames welcomed it.
She’d started with her palms against his shoulders, pushing him weakly, but she reached up and cautiously touched his hair with her fingertips.
He used both hands to hold her by her waist and lifted her. Holding her up effortlessly, still kissing her, he waited the few seconds that it took before she wrapped her legs around him.
Breaking the kiss, he looked at Sophia and said, “You.”
He pointed behind Marilyn and said, “Here.”
Sophia only stared for a second, then she followed his demand and stood close behind her sister.
Still holding Marilyn with one arm, with her legs squeezing around his waist, Risk reached past her and began ripping at Sophia’s blouse until he could peel it from her and let it drop.
She never fought him and didn’t complain.
When he pointed at her skirt, she nodded and stretched it down over her hips and let it drop onto the dirty floor.
“Good,” he said, looking at Sophia over Marilyn’s shoulder.
Risk eased himself down onto his back and took Marilyn with him, freeing her only enough to kneel above him.
He made no effort to force her, but she leaned over on her own to continue their kiss with her hands on the stone floor.
He unclasped his belt and made himself ready for her.
Marilyn tipped her head up, still close and ready to resume the kiss, and he only looked into her eyes.
With minimal effort, she found the right place, right where he wanted her.
Sophia remained standing and watched the scene with her head shaking.
Until he held her gaze and tipped his head down.
“Um . . . I don’t think—”
“Do it.”
She cleared her throat, then knelt directly behind her sister, who had already lost herself to the pleasure of riding him, slowly and steadily, with her palms flat against his chest.
“Sex,” he said, looking into Marilyn’s eyes, and she never slowed.
He looked past Marilyn at Sophia and added, “And death.”
She still only stared down at him as he crossed his right leg over his left between her bare thighs. When he grabbed her waist with strong hands, she looked down to watch as he wedged her onto that highest thigh.
Sophia began to breathe more heavily as he forced her down onto his leg, then let her relax, then drove her into it again. After a few times, he backed his hands away, and she kept up her steady thrusts on her own.
He got a hold on Marilyn’s hips and said, “Sex and death. Same time.”
Sophia was shaking her head, watching her sister mounted on a man or something else that had just come through the portal, while she kept herself more than busy behind her, her hands on her sister for balance as she kept rubbing on his leg.
He looked into Sophia’s eyes and said, “There’s no time. It has to be all of us.”
“I . . . I’m already doing—”
“Touch her,” he said.
She repositioned her hands on her sister’s arms near her shoulders.
He scoffed and said, “Forget being sisters. Touch her.”
Marilyn only smiled at that, her eyes closed as she kept moving.
Sophia looked into Risk’s eyes as she reached around and held her sister’s bare breasts.
Risk looked at Marilyn’s breasts, each held by a hand with exquisitely manicured nails, then back into Sophia’s eyes. Then, he watched her lips begin to curl into a smile.
He shook his head, smiling, too, and said, “Good, but it’s not a game. You have to mean it.”
Marilyn said softly, “Sissy, we’re actresses. You can just—”
“No!”
Both pairs of blue eyes gazed down into a pair of insistent black ones.
“Feel it. Want it.”
Sophia sighed and began gently squeezing Marilyn’s breasts, and Risk nodded as he watched.
When he aimed his smile up to Sophia and nodded, then said, “More,” she began soft pinching and pulling and leaned close enough that her face was in her sister’s hair and her breasts were squeezed against her back.
All eyes looked to Risk’s side as the mountain lion lay close to him, rubbing her snout against his exposed ribs where his leather vest had fallen open.
“It has to be more,” he said. “All of you.”
Marilyn gave her bouncing more energy, and she reached behind her with her left hand to play with her sister’s black hair.
And she turned that way, too, just as Sophia leaned in closer, their noses touching as they gazed into each other’s eyes.
No one looked at Kenzie Kat as she started a low wail, her jaws working against Risk’s side.
“Do it,” he said. “Or we all burn.”
Their lips touched, and Marilyn kept up her steady gyrations on him. Sophia kept fondling her sister’s breasts and riding Risk’s hard thigh.
The flames had circled them completely and were trying to scale the walls.
“More,” he said.
Sophia gasped softly, then they made their kiss as passionate as any in their lives.
The lioness snarled and snapped a sharp bite into Risk’s ribs, sending streams of his blood down to form paste with the dust.
Marilyn kept her eyes closed and didn’t break the kiss when Risk grabbed one of her wrists and moved that hand to a place over his heart.
She nodded when he tapped it and said, “When I say.”
None of them stopped what they were losing themselves to.
The lion snarled and began a low growling.
Sophia quickened her pace, shifting her hips along Risk’s thigh, and she gave even more attention to Marilyn’s breasts, pinching, pulling, and rubbing them.
Marilyn was the first to moan when the girls heard Risk say, “Ah!”
Having found nothing to burn on the walls, the ring of flames began tightening around them, as if they sensed the only fuel left for them to digest.
“Ah!” Risk said while Marilyn sped up, jamming herself down roughly, and Sophia kept squeezing and pinching Marilyn’s breasts while kissing her deeply and grinding on Risk’s leg, and Kenzie Kat began sinking her fangs through skin, then sinew, then bone.
Risk, his eyes squinting, curled himself up and reached for both of them. Their kiss didn’t end until they were close enough to take turns kissing him, then each other again while he awaited his next chance.
Marilyn gasped and stayed down on him, snapping her hips repeatedly.
Sophia kept up her short, urgent slides on his leg, her hands still grabbing and pulling roughly at the pair of breasts in her hands.
And they all kept kissing.
Until.
“Ah! Now!”
Marilyn didn’t stop to look at her hand that had instantly become glowing hot, then began to sink into Risk’s chest. She and her sister smiled at the smell of burning flesh, but the sex and violence wouldn’t stop, and none had any intention of retreating from what they’d all started.
Marilyn broke the kiss only enough to say, “Mm, not just him. Me too, Sophia.”
“God, yeah, Marilyn. I know your name, but I can’t remember what—”
Marilyn stifled her with a kiss, and all of them stayed locked in a menagerie of sex and violence as Risk reached the peak of his own pleasure just as Marilyn’s killer hand sank all the way through his heart.
Adding death to a room already ablaze with sex and flames.
“Damn,” Risk said, and the girls and the lion paused to look at his face, which was contorted from both pleasure and the pain of Marilyn burning a hole through his heart.
With their cheeks touching and their hair tangled, they watched him smile as he lay back onto the floor. He tipped back his head, and it smoothly broke the surface of the stone floor like sinking into a frozen gray swamp.
A moment later, his entire head was lost in there.
Kenzie Kat resumed her savage biting, her wanton jaws snapping loudly through ribs while she shook Risk’s torso from side to side. She paused only once to wail at the twins before renewing her attack.
And still, Risk kept sinking. And the girls sat up on him, neither one slowing as they still used him to keep their ecstasy alive.
They turned their heads only enough to resume their frantic kiss. Sophia roughly squeezed her sister’s breasts, pulling their bodies together, and they both shifted their hips desperately on their own parts of him.
They paused only when a scream from the lion got cut off, and they watched as Kenzie Kat, with Risk holding the scruff of her neck, got pulled into the floor along with all of him from his waistline up.
“Sophia. Where the hell are we going?”
“Someplace with Risk and Kenzie Kat. Just don’t stop.”
“I can’t. I won’t. This is the strongest, sweetest one I ever—”
“Marilyn! Enough talk!”
Sophia groaned and forced her lips back into Marilyn’s.
The Kildare Killers ended their time in Beverly Hills locked in a starving kiss, and their climaxes spiked as they sank with Risk and Kenzie Kat into a silent world of stone and darkness.
And flames just as insatiable as all of them—started by the torch hands of Cadaver Collectors that had ignited Dayzee’s mansion in the Flats, then had eaten every floor and wall and ceiling, then had raced underground for any last prey to consume—claimed everything in that hellish pit.
Everything except the four who had escaped with their ravenous delirium of sex and death.
Chapter 3 – Below the Bay
Risk, his eyes barely open, gently rubbed the lion’s ears as she lay sleeping beside him with her head on his lap, angled so that her long whiskers pointed straight up. She drew in a deep breath and expanded her lean body, then let it out, followed by licking her chops comfortably.
Risk smiled and said, “Good girl.”
Kenzie Kat squirmed herself around to find a more comfortable position, then she lost herself to whatever dreams had gotten her paws twitching.
Risk studied those paws for a few seconds, then looked down at his worn black boots. The rough, dirty tarp where he sat added a welcome barrier above the cracked and stained wooden planks.
Just beyond his boots, part of a white high-heeled shoe extended out from beneath a thin burlap quilt.
He paused for a long, lazy yawn, then gave the shoe and foot a soft kick and waited. Nothing happened, so he nudged it around again, aiming for the sharp heel and sparing the expertly painted nails.
When the foot wearing that shoe slipped it out of sight, back under the blanket, Risk looked higher.
Marilyn, her wavy blond mane partly covering her face, yawned. But it never reached its full potential from her face being burrowed into the side of her sister’s neck, so she only licked her lips instead. Sophia’s black hair was mingled in with her sister’s, and it all stayed lightly tangled when they both yawned together.
Marilyn opened her eyes first, then blinked them several times but still hadn’t looked around them. Risk watched and listened.
“Oh, Sissy, what’s going on?”
“I don’t know, Sis. I just woke up, maybe because I felt you moving around.”
They stayed close, blue eyes looking into identical blue eyes, and neither smiled.
“I’m so tired.”
“Me too. Back to sleep for me,” Sophia said, then squeezed her eyes shut again and flexed her legs.
Marilyn’s legs were mixed in with her sister’s, so she stretched hers too.
Risk grinned at the sight of four long legs held straight and flexing for a few seconds, then relaxed.
He watched quietly, looking away from the sleepy twins only when he saw one of Sophia’s black high heels jut out from under their shared blanket, then tip lazily from side to side. He gave that a smile, then looked back up.
Marilyn took a quick look down, then back at her sister. The edge of their blanket was pulled up near their chins as the twins lay embracing against a collection of soft pillows.
“Thanks for the scratchy blanket, Sissy.”
“Yeah, Sis, it kind of is. Glad we have it. I didn’t put it on us, though.”
“Who did?”
“No idea. I just need more sleep.”
“The blanket’s fine. Oh, I’m still so sleepy.”
They both closed their eyes and yawned, and Marilyn began adjusting the blanket up even higher, keeping them both in the same snug cocoon.
After Marilyn had snuggled back in and stopped moving, Sophia said, “I’m sleepy, too, Sis. We need just another few—”
“Good. It worked,” Risk said.
They both raised their eyebrows and began to look around themselves for the first time.
Marilyn leaned away from her sister and looked behind them. She reached between them and pushed against the pillows a few times, then looked higher. She touched the wall behind the cushions and pulled her hand back quickly.
Looking at her fingers as she rubbed them together, she said, “Wicker, Sissy? And it’s oily?”
Sophia looked behind them, too, but didn’t touch what she saw.
“Weird, Sis.”
They both examined the low wall as it curved around them, forming a circular wicker enclosure around an area about the size of a spacious hot tub.
Their eyes fixed at the sight of Risk directly across from them, leaning against the far wall of the bowl that they shared. With a sleepy head resting on his lap, the mountain lion lay still save for her twitching paws.
He scratched between the lion’s ears and focused his black eyes on the twins, then he tipped his own sleepy eyes once toward the tired lion.
“Remember her name?”
“I do,” said Sophia. “She’s Kenzie.”
“Kenzie Kat, Sissy. Not the real Kenzie.”
Sophia reached one hand out from under the blanket just enough to point at him and said, “You’re Risk, right?”
He nodded and said, “Good. You woke up.”
The twins looked again at each other, then back at him.
Marilyn said, “Um, you weren’t sure?”
He closed his eyes and rubbed them for a moment, then he managed a meager grin.
“Nothing is guaranteed.”
He let his eyes roam all over them for a few seconds, prompting them to lift the blanket and look at themselves too.
They saw that they were naked except for their heels.
“You’ll get clothes,” he said.
Sophia scoffed and said, “Burlap?”
“Sissy, shh. Don’t make him mad,” Marilyn whispered.
“I won’t get mad,” he said. “No, Sophia. Real clothes.”
A whistling up above accompanied a shot of steam coming from a rusty metal tube, connected to something that could have been some kind of teapot. Following the puff toward behind the girls, the wicker basket rocked and moved slightly in the other direction.
The teapot was bolted to the side of a large metal pot, and a shadow of someone near it lifted its lid, sending flames and light straight up. Hanging by a chain from the bottom of the pot, another smaller container with no lid sent up its own modest flames, casting just enough light down into the basket to keep the shadows at bay.
The girls were craning their necks, staring intently, and the basket made a gentle move upward.
“Sissy. We’re floating.”
“How? What the hell?”
From the flash of light from the pot, they saw, above the flames, the open bottom end of a large balloon. All around its bottom opening, mismatched cables, ropes, and wires fed down and connected around the top ledge of their basket.
“A balloon, Sissy. This is so—”
“Weird. Yeah, Sis.”
They looked at Risk but only for a moment, just long enough to see him indifferent to the workings of all of that as he flipped around the sleeping lion’s ears.
Outside of the balloon, everything above them was black.
Not night because there were no familiar pinpoints of light.
Just the total absence of anything.
With another quick flash of fire and light from the pot, they saw that someone small, like a child, was hanging on up there. Tiny gloved hands held the taut wires and ropes and small, burlap-wrapped feet looked like they were reaching around and holding onto a narrow wooden plank.
“Like a little trapeze,” Sophia said to herself.
“For that kid, Sissy. He probably came from one of Dayzee’s neighbor’s—”
That kid snapped his head to look down on them while prying up the lid enough to light himself for them to see. His round red eyes with centered black dots watched them intently and didn’t blink. Between his staring eyes, a thick, tapered beak hooked down into a sharp point.
He let go of the wire with one hand and pulled forward the hood of his thin black jacket. His face merged with the darkness again but not before the girls had seen a face covered in tight feathers.
“Our navigator,” said Risk, unconcerned.
They looked back at Risk but pulled themselves closer together.
“Good eyes,” he said, shooting a quick glance up. “Important.”
“Um,” said Marilyn, “we aren’t in Beverly Hills anymore, are we?”
Risk shook his head, holding Marilyn’s blue gaze.
“It burned. Remember?”
“All of it?” said Sophia.
He shrugged.
“Not us.”
“Sissy,” Marilyn said, leaning closer to her sister, “I’m starting to remember all that. I remember the sex and—”
“And the violence, Sis. Yeah, then you killed him.”
“Oh, yes. I remember that now.”
They looked back at Risk.
“You’re not dead?”
“No, Marilyn.”
“That lion, she—”
“Kenzie Kat, Sissy.”
“Yeah, Kenzie Kat,” said Sophia. “Hey, let’s shorten that, alright? How about just K Kat?”
“Good idea,” Marilyn said. “Risk? Is that okay?”
He looked down at the lion whose mouth had lazily opened wide into a gaping yawn, showing rows of razors. She snapped her jaw shut and looked up into Risk’s eyes for a second or two, then back at the girls.
He looked at them too.
“She said okay.”
Marilyn shook her head slowly and tried unsuccessfully to laugh, looking first at K Kat, then at Risk.
“Sissy and I didn’t pack any clothes.”
Sophia chuckled just once, very softly, and said, “That’s funny, Sis.”
“There are crafters,” he said, his eyes blinking slowly. “Or from friends.”
“Where?”
He tipped his head up toward the edge of the basket, which was about chest high for the twins when standing, and said, “Down there, Marilyn.”
Sophia took in a deep breath and let it slowly rasp back out.
“Not Beverly Hills shopping, though?”
“No, Sophia.”
Marilyn frowned and started breathing more quickly. She pulled the blanket up under their chins.
“Where the hell are we?” she said.
Risk gave them a smile for a moment, then said, “That’s what I first asked you.”
“He’s not wrong, Sis. He did ask that.”
To Risk, Sophia said, “Seriously, though, where the hell did you take us?”
He stood and stretched, which opened his leather vest enough to show undamaged skin stretched over hard muscles, then leaned back with both hands out to his sides to hold the top rail.
K Kat sat up, close enough to rest her head against his leg.
“We all took us.”
“Oh. All four of us. Together.”
“Yes, Marilyn. When you called, I was here.”
Sophia scoffed and said, “And here is—”
He tipped his head back quickly, then said, “Look.”
The girls shared a momentary stare at each other, then reached up and behind them for the rail, using it to help themselves up onto their heels.
They held each other, still wrapped in their blanket, and looked out over the edge.
“Oh my,” said Marilyn.
“Sis, what the hell?”
Far beneath their basket floating from a balloon piloted by a small fellow with the face of a hawk, a dark city sprawled out to dim horizons in most directions.
Crooked streets, devoid of traffic of any kind, crisscrossed all of it with no set pattern. Between the streets, there were buildings, some short and some taller, open fields, expanses that were still and smooth and black, and small groups of things with wings flapping over the low structures and around the higher ones.
Dotting the tops of some buildings and along some of the streets, pinpoints of light flickered, dancing. And from each of them, a slender thread of light smoke snaked high up into the blackness, barely moving in the still air.
“Fires?” said Sophia. “Just fires?”
They didn’t turn toward Risk when he said, “Electric’s out.”
But they both got big eyes, looking at each other, when he said, “Damn reactor.”
Sophia shook her head slowly and whispered, “Don’t say ‘damn lions,’ Sis.”
“Never again, Sissy.”
The twins studied their surroundings again, looking out away from their basket and not at the perplexing sights far below them.
Directly ahead, a good distance away, a large fire burned, and clouds of things with wings were circling silently. Or they were too far away to be heard.
Far to the left, they saw another fire, low and wide. Spikes like fiery lightning cut up into the blackness slowly, like they were being painted upward one at a time.
To the right, near the horizon, the world ended in a jagged cliff, with a sea of flames burning all the way to that horizon.
The girls held each other close, arms around each other’s waist, as they studied a world that laughingly, horrifyingly, could not have been Beverly Hills.
“Risk,” Marilyn said while her eyes tried to see all of it, “what is all that down there?”
They didn’t look at him when he said, “There’s no name.”
Sophia turned to see him, and she saw that K Kat was standing up next to him, also studying the world that she’d helped bring them to.
“Well,” she said, “what kind of place doesn’t have a name?”
He pointed up and when Sophia looked up at the unbroken black, Marilyn did too.
They heard him say, “Far above, there’s water.”
“Okay,” said Marilyn, still looking up, “there’s water. What water? Like rain clouds?”
“No. San Francisco Bay.”
“What the hell?” said Sophia.
She looked around and swept her arm both ways.
“All of this is—”
“Below the bay.”
“That’s what you call it?”
He shrugged and said, “We can, Sophia.”
Marilyn blurted out, “How do we go home? I want to go home.”
“Sis is right. We don’t belong here. How the hell do we go back home?”
He laughed once and said, “You already know.”
Marilyn looked at her sister and wiped at her eyes.
“Sissy?”
“Sis, we do know. Think about it.”
She nodded and said, “I remember sex.”
“And violence, Sis. No, it had to be death.”
“Oh. Yes, I remember when Risk said that.”
They turned, still holding each other, when Risk said, “Remember it.”
The twins stared at him for a moment, then faced each other, their arms around each other’s waist.
They gazed into each other’s eyes, like seeing their own blue eyes in a mirror, as seconds passed and they floated over the dark city under a bay.
Marilyn almost grinned and said, “I remember all of it, Sissy.”
Sophia tipped her head and said, “I remember that acting doesn’t work.”
“Oh, no. It has to be real.”
“We have to feel it, Sis.”
“Yes, Sissy. Both of us. All of us. Even a lion if she’s with us.”
“It wasn’t just for fun.”
Marilyn sighed and said, “Not just for the cameras or some dumb reality show.”
A few seconds later, they shared their modest smiles with Risk.
“Good,” he said. “Don’t forget.”
From far behind the girls, the sound of a sharp explosion roared past them and echoed off into the distance behind Risk. The girls turned to look. A massive fireball was rising from the far edge of the landscape and convulsing toward the black sky.
It began to fragment and fade when it struck that ceiling, and swarms of black dots flew away from the impact site and raced around it. And their screeching, like voices of men impatient for death, was loud enough to reach their vessel.
“Oh, Sissy, I don’t know about this.”
“Sis, we’ll get home soon and—”
“Come here,” Risk said. “Not much time.”
They turned toward Risk and saw him waiting with his arms wide. K Kat was huddled close, standing next to him.
“Really,” he said. “It’ll hit soon.”
“Sissy, what is—”
“No time, Sis,” Sophia said as she grabbed her sister’s hand, and they ran the few steps toward Risk while holding the blanket over themselves.
He turned away and lifted his arms out as they rushed toward him, and each found a safe place, their arms around him, as he held the blanket around all of them. Even K Kat was wrapped in there and standing with them.
Then, a sudden blast of hot wind shook the basket and jerked the balloon with it, causing the hawk boy navigator to squawk madly.
Risk’s hair got snapped around, and Marilyn’s wavy blond hair and Sophia’s silky black hair fluttered out over the landscape beneath them. They all stayed pressed together under the blanket with bright sparks racing past and spiraling until they died in the dark.
Risk held the basket’s rim, and the Killers held him, and all of them, even K Kat, looked out at the dark lands waiting for them Below the Bay.
The basket shook, then swayed, then settled and continued its steady float. The girls still held Risk around his waist, Sophia to his left and Marilyn to his right, and he held the blanket over all of them, including K Kat to the right of Marilyn.
They’d watched the last straggler sparks drift past them then become part of the night, all while the hawk boy above them squabbled, his cursing more squawk than words. As the basket and balloon floated so smoothly as to feel motionless, he let out one final hawk-like call, then gave the teapot a chance to answer with a quick whistle.
In their arms, they felt Risk take a deep breath, laugh just once, then say, “Huh. Hawks.”
The girls leaned forward to see each other, and Marilyn shook her head quickly and looked over the edge.
“Oh my goodness,” she said and quickly turned back toward her sister. “Sissy, I hate this place.”
She looked up toward Risk, whose eyes were scanning side to side, and said, “Risk, I hate this place!”
She started wiggling to get free, but she couldn’t slip away from under his arm.
“Risk, let me go! I don’t want to be here!”
He released her, and she flailed her way out from inside the blanket, evoking an amused grunt from K Kat as she got nudged to the side.
Risk, Sophia, and K Kat turned, still under the blanket, to watch Marilyn, naked except for her high white heels, hurry back to where she lay with her sister just moments earlier.
She hurried to immerse herself in the pillows, using several to cover herself before she saw them all watching her, all amused. Even the lion.
“I hate it! I’ll do anything—all that sex and death stuff, I don’t care—just take me home!”
Sophia said, “That’s my Sis,” causing Risk to look down at her where he still held her close under his arm. He waited.
She finally looked up at him and promptly lost whatever small traces of a smile that she’d had.
“She isn’t wrong, though. Me too.”
She scowled and fought to get free, and Risk didn’t hold her back. He only looked her up and down as she defiantly strutted toward her sister, taking her time though wearing nothing but her high black heels.
Risk got the blanket around just himself and K Kat, and they both watched, charmed and grinning, each in their own way.
Sophia wiggled herself in close with Marilyn, and they both used strategically placed pillows to conceal key regions of their anatomy.
Sophia, satisfied with the arrangements, held Risk’s gaze again. She was about to speak, but she stopped to look at K Kat, gave the lion her own scowl, then looked back up at Risk.
“We both want to go home. Sex? Death? Fine. Let’s go.”
“No.”
“What?” said Marilyn. “You said that if we would—”
“Later, Marilyn.”
“Well, why the hell not now?”
“I was busy when you called me, Sophia.”
“Oh, so you’re saying that you—”
“Yeah. There’s work to do.”
Marilyn shook her head and Sophia smirked while they both stared at him.
“You’re scared,” he said.
“Not on your life,” Sophia said with a sneer.
Marilyn whispered, “That’s kind of funny, Sissy,” but she was ignored.
“We’re the Kildare Killers,” Sophia continued. “We can handle anything.”
Risk held his eyebrows up for a second, then looked to Marilyn and waited.
“Sissy’s right. There’s nothing in this stupid place that scares us.”
She reached up and patted around on the basket’s top rail.
“Oh, maybe just being so high up.”
Risk grinned and tipped his head toward the ground far below them, where dead, abandoned buildings seemed to reach up for them.
“It’s worse down there.”
“We’re not worried,” said Sophia.
“We’re killers,” Marilyn said, petulant. “Nothing here is going to bother either of us.”
He looked from one pair of blue eyes to the other, then back again. He gave their mostly bare bodies a quick glance, then shook his head.
“Alright. We’ll see.”
Risk and his lion turned away from the twins, then they both looked out over the dark, grim landscape shrouded in night deep below the San Francisco Bay.
The twins studied his broad shoulders and his protective arm around K Kat, then looked up at the sudden whistling from the teapot, an eruption of flame and light from the giant pot, and the perfectly understandable, well-articulated announcement from a boy with the face of a hawk.
“Ham! Ham is here!”
Risk turned to his right and looked where their navigator was pointing. K Kat leaned enough to look around him.
Sophia whispered in her sister’s ear.
“Ham? Ham who?”
“That would be funny, too, Sissy, if we weren’t trapped in this awful place.”
“Alright, I’m curious.”
She stood and tried to take with her the pillows that she needed, but Marilyn wouldn’t let go of two of them.
“Sissy!”
Sophia stopped, halfway up, and let her sister keep the pillows.
“Not like you have a problem with being naked, Sis.”
“Well, that’s certainly true. Just not here, Sissy. This is too weird.”
“Oh, yeah. I get it. Well, I’m looking.”
She rose up onto her heels, her skin picking up stray light from the burning pot above them, and looked for whatever was coming.
Without looking down, she fumbled around a hand, trying to find her sister but snagging only some of her blond mane.
“Sissy, stop that. You’re being silly. Fine. I’ll look too.”
They stood side by side, and their reflexes got arms around waists without thinking about it. Their free hands held only the tiniest of the pillows, allowing anyone in the basket to see major expanses of smooth Kildare Killer skin.
They didn’t care. Not right then.
They were watching a shadow, only somewhat lighter than the night it swam in, as it rose quickly with a glow, then drifted lower again repeatedly as it drew near.
“Risk,” said Sophia, “are we being attacked?”
He gave her a cursory glance, then resumed watching Ham approach.
“Not right now,” he said.
The twins looked at each other, then back out into the night.
Marilyn whispered, “Um, I know we’re killers, Sissy, but—”
“I know. This is just too weird. What the hell is a ham, and why is it about to attack us?”
“Oh, no, Sissy. Risk said we’ll be attacked later.”
She giggled softly, which got Sophia to smile back at her.
“He didn’t exactly say that, Sis.”
“Oh, I know. He kind of did, though.”
“Yeah, I guess. Wonderful, as Dayzee would say.”
“Maybe you should fill in for her, Sissy?”
“I could. Alright. Hey, you know what else?”
“Uh-uh. What?”
“She never called us Marilyn and Sophia.”
“No, it was always Mare and Fia.”
Marilyn waited, and her sister paused a few seconds, then looked toward Risk, who was still watching Ham coming out of the dark.
“Oh, Sissy, really? Would he?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Because he’s something that killed a lion? Remember that? He bit through her neck!”
“Oh. Yeah. That’s not such a cute thing. But I’m still going to ask him.”
Marilyn sighed and said, “Okay. But it’ll be weird if he ever meets Dayzee and they’re both calling us that.”
Sophia shook her head softly while scanning the night above and the ruins and fires below, then she held her sister’s gaze again.
“We might never—”
“Sissy, no, don’t even say that.”
Sophia sighed, then looked toward Risk.
“Hey, Risk. Who or what is a ham?”
“It’s a who. His name is Ham.”
“You were meeting him when we, um, called you to Beverly Hills?”
“Yes, Marilyn.”
He kept watching the approaching vessel until Sophia said, “Why?”
“Hawken won’t go any higher.”
Marilyn said to her sister, “Here we go again.”
Then, to Risk, she said, “Who or what is a hawken?”
Risk didn’t look their way, just pointed a finger up and said, “Navigator.”
Sophia said, “So, another word for navigator, here, is—”
“No, Sophia. It’s his name.”
“Because he’s a hawk?”
“Not entirely. Part.”
“The eyes,” said Sophia, nodding at Risk, who wasn’t looking.
“Oh, the beak, too, Sissy.”
“Yeah, Sis. And feathers. But Risk, what’s a hawken?”
Risk finally turned toward them, looked from one pair of blue eyes to the other, then said, “Not long ago, he was Ken. Just Ken.”
“What the hell are we talking about here?” Sophia said while frowning and shaking her head.
Risk scoffed, pointed up, and said, “Ask him.”
The twins looked up, and Marilyn said, “Mr. Hawken? Could we―”
“Sis, too formal. Try again.”
“Oh. Okay. Hey, Hawken, can we ask you something?”
He got a wider grip on a wire and a rope, then leaned closer to them as they stood below him in the basket. The darkness inside the hood fled when he flipped the cloth back onto his shoulders, revealing the feathers covering all of his head.
“Mutant,” he said with his eyes locked on Marilyn.
He blinked them twice, then rotated his head enough to stare directly at Sophia.
“Uh,” said Sophia, “what do you mean? You’re a mutant?”
She pointed up at him but when he didn’t respond quickly, she dropped her hand back down and searched around until she found Marilyn’s.
He swiveled his head and studied the region where abrupt cliffs led to a churning sea of fire. With no other reaction, he spun back and faced the girls.
“The reactor. It . . . does things.”
“Turned you into a bird?” said Marilyn. “You used to be human, but now you—”
“No. I can’t fly.”
Hawk eyes stared down.
Two pairs of blue eyes stared up.
“But you,” said Sophia, “are kind of sort of a—”
“Not afraid of heights anymore. Yeah.”
He trained his eyes on Risk, and the girls looked that way too.
Risk was looking up when he said, “Eyes are good too.”
He looked at the twins, then, and said, “But he won’t go any higher.”
Sophia said, “Wait a minute. He just said that he’s not afraid of―”
“It’s not the height. Something else.”
“Okay,” said Marilyn, “something like . . . what?”
Risk held up a hand, the girls got quiet, and he said, “Hold onto something. This isn’t easy.”
“What isn’t?” said Marilyn.
Still watching the rapidly approaching craft, Risk said, “He has to come in hot. The balloons are big.”
“Uh-oh. Okay,” she said, and both twins reached up to hold the top rail.
Ham’s balloon softly squeezed into theirs, tipping their basket just as a decidedly more oil-stained basket bumped into theirs. Risk quickly grabbed a hook on the other basket and dropped it over his own basket’s rim.
Then, he got busy hooking more of the many ropes and began tying their vessels together.
Chapter 4 – Here’s Enough
Ham, still standing in his vessel’s basket, waved to Risk and called out, “Permission to board your goddamn boat?”
With his long blond ponytail looped around to hang over a shoulder onto his chest, he smiled big enough for his perfect teeth to catch some of the firelight from above. A subtle sheen of sweat gave life to his clean-shaved face.
His short-sleeved t-shirt stretched over a solid chest, and his right shoulder was bare from that sleeve having been ripped loose and discarded.
Risk scoffed and said, “It’s your goddamn boat.”
“Which you’re fucking borrowing, which makes it fucking yours. For now.”
“Yeah. For now.”
“So?”
Risk scoffed and barely nodded, and Ham laid his left hand on Risk’s basket, then stopped when he saw Marilyn and Sophia.
He turned toward Risk, grinning, and said, “Well, what the fuck? The new arrivals are getting sweeter all the time.”
Sophia and Marilyn glared at him but made a better effort to hide themselves behind whatever pillows they could grab without looking.
“New,” said Risk. “Yeah.”
“Fuck, I’d like to have watched them do whatever the fuck they did to get here. Shit, sweet things like that? They must have—”
“I brought them.”
“So,” Ham said, laughing, “that means you must have—”
“Yeah. I did.”
“Well, fuck.”
He turned toward the twins and said, “Ladies, I’m Ham Sledger. Risk and I are running some operations together up here. Who the fuck are you and how soon before I take your fine asses home?”
He smirked and waited, his eyes all over them.
Sophia whispered to her sister, “What a creep. I’ll show him.”
“Uh, Sissy. Maybe, um—”
“Sis, shh.”
Sophia let her pillows fall as she got up on her heels, still totally naked, and strutted to within burning distance of the man in the other basket. She got her hand and part of her arm burning hotter than any fire tended by a mutant hawk.
Ham let go of Risk’s basket and stumbled back, smeared the smile from his face with a dirty left hand, and said, “Shit, just what the fuck is that?”
“I’m a killer,” said Sophia. “That’s what the fuck that is. You got any more smartass comments for a killer?”
She stared, waiting for an answer from a man who only stared back.
Behind her, Marilyn giggled and held up her own deadly hand.
“We’re the Kildare Killers,” she said. “Oh, and we’re twins. And don’t you forget it.”
“Easy, now,” he said, holding both palms out toward them. “Didn’t mean anything. Just, uh, messing the fuck around. Easy, alright?”
Sophia froze and let her fire fizzle.
She didn’t even look when Marilyn gasped behind her. She was too busy staring.
Ham had a normal left hand, but his right was ten times that size. And it didn’t appear fleshy and soft and likely to ever hear laughter from anyone. It was more a blunt force weapon than any kind of hand.
He lowered his hands, and his eyes, and said, “Really, I’m just kind of an asshole most of the fucking time. Ask Risk.”
The girls turned toward Risk, and he nodded and said, “Most of the fucking time. Yeah.”
He grinned at Risk’s comment, then looked again at the twins.
“I wish I could say I wasn’t always an asshole, but you know what? Coming to this fucked up dump didn’t fix my, uh, assholiness?”
Sophia tried to hide a slight grin, and Marilyn popped her eyebrows up. He gave each of them a genuine smile.
“Is that even a word? Making up stupid-ass words—just one more way to be an asshole, huh?”
Sophia broke, smiling and shaking her head.
Ham didn’t take his eyes off of her hand, which appeared normal again, and said, “Hey, uh, Risk. This is the dame that killed you? With that whatever the fuck it was?”
He kept watching Sophia but managed a grin when Risk said, “No. The blonde.”
Sophia turned and teased him with her best strut as she took the few steps needed to sit with her sister. She took her time in arranging pillows, with both Risk and Ham watching them.
Then, the twins stopped fussing with pillows and turned their attention back to the men flying their vessels around in a pitch-black sky lost somewhere beneath an expansive bay.
Risk shook his head once before looking away from the girls, then said to Ham, “Come on over.”
“Don’t mind if I do. Ladies? Sure you don’t mind? I sure as fuck don’t want to piss off either of you.”
“We don’t mind,” said Marilyn.
“Just watch yourself,” she added with a giggle.
He nodded and gave them another view of his white teeth.
“Oh, I certainly will. I’m too young to die.”
Sophia scoffed and said, “No one is.”
Marilyn giggled softly and said to her sister, “Sissy, you like to be cruel sometimes.”
“You too, Sis. When we have to be.”
Ham laid both hands, one normal and one gigantic, on the rail of Risk’s basket, then hopped over the wall and landed softly on the plank flooring.
With his eyes wary and focused on Marilyn and Sophia, he sat with his back to the wall near Risk, who also sat.
Sophia leaned toward her sister, snickered softly, and said, “This one, jumping like that? Part chimpanzee, Sis?”
Marilyn let out a single loud laugh, causing Risk and Ham to look their way.
Marilyn then whispered to her sister, “Oh, Sissy, that’s no monkey hand, though.”
Sophia snorted once, softly, then they turned and watched from behind their protective pillow blockade.
Ham squinted at the twins for a second, then turned, about to speak. But he met the resolute stare of a mountain lion just on the other side of Risk.
K Kat didn’t blink, but she licked at her whiskers once, then resumed her gaze at Ham.
“Just how many fucking ways can I die today?”
Risk scoffed silently, then said, “Pick a number.”
“A lion? A fucking lion? I’ve never seen one here before.”
“I brought her. Meet K Kat.”
“Nice fucking name.”
He reached his left hand across to shake her paw, but she only bared her fangs, very quietly. Ham withdrew his hand slowly and carefully.
“Brought her from where?”
“Twins said Beverly Hills.”
“You’ve been there? How was it? I heard the women are absolutely fucking gorgeous.”
Risk tipped his head toward the twins.
“Oh,” said Ham, grinning. “There’s the fucking proof. But why a lion?”
“Cat didn’t want to burn.”
Ham studied Risk, who offered no change of expression. Then, he looked at the twins.
Sophia stared back, and Marilyn shrugged once.
“Uh, yeah,” Ham said. “And neither did those Kildare Killers, I’m guessing. Sure would be a shame for them to burn up.”
Risk had no response, but K Kat closed away her sharp teeth, still watching the man with one giant hand.
Ham leaned to each side, aiming his eyes around the pillows, then looked up at them.
“Hey, even killers need clothes. I have a couple of shirts I can loan you.”
“Sissy, a shirt is better than nothing.”
Sophia elbowed her sister gently, then grinned at Ham while she said, “Sis, you do have some very nice high heels.”
Marilyn said, “Oh, I do. Yes. They are very high.”
She slipped one out from behind the pillows, then the other.
“You too, Sissy. I think yours are even higher.”
“Maybe. Yeah. You really have the legs for them, Sis.”
“Well,” Marilyn said with a soft giggle, “so do you. We’re twins.”
Sophia displayed hers for Ham, too, and he stared even when Risk said to them, “Hey, easy. He’s already crazy.”
Sophia kept her grin and Marilyn giggled as they both hid themselves more completely.
“Alright,” Ham said to Risk, “Shirts. We’ll talk biz in a second. Don’t go away.”
He stood and vaulted himself easily into his own craft, rummaged around low, out of sight, then stood with wrinkled rags in each hand.
“Here. Try not to burn the fuck out of them.”
He snickered and added, “They’re custom tailored.”
He tossed them toward the girls, who each held one out to examine.
Sophia smirked at hers, and Marilyn shook her head and said, “Oh, of course.”
Both button-down shirts were missing not just their right sleeves, but wide portions of where those sleeves should have joined the rest of the shirts had also been ripped away.
Ham laughed and said, “Well, fuck, what did you expect?”
“They’re fine,” said Marilyn. “Sissy and I are truly grateful.”
Still seated, they put on the shirts and buttoned them partway up.
“You’ll get more soon,” said Risk.
“Uh, I don’t know,” said Ham. “The last crafter down there that I knew of got herself eaten—I mean, uh, she isn’t around anymore.”
Risk showed no surprise and said, “Pauline, then.”
“Right. Fucking black leather everything.”
“Almost everything.”
The girls had finished but still held pillows close as they watched the two men and a lion across the basket.
“We’d better get up there,” Ham said, “before the next storm. Can’t predict those fucking things.”
“We do need them, though.”
“Well, fuck, yeah. Those few of us that want to keep on living, that is.”
“Storms?” said Marilyn. “This place has storms?”
“Just the one kind,” said Risk.
Ham, not smiling, said only, “Kaboom.”
The twins stared from one to the other.
Ham said, “There was one just a minute ago. You must have seen it.”
“That explosion, way over there?”
Sophia pointed behind her and her sister and waited for Risk to answer.
“Yes, Sophia. We call them storms.”
“For fun,” Ham said with a grin. “The only fucking fun to be had around here. At least before you two showed up to bare and share some of your sweet—”
Risk’s hand was a blur before it rested on Ham’s chest. The claws jutting out from each finger lingered a moment, two of them poised over Ham’s throat.
And the hand was more like K Kat’s paw than anything else.
Ham held his breath and stared up at Hawken until Risk let the claws retract, then he backed his hand away slowly.
Still looking up, Ham said, “Hey, Hawken, how come you haven’t been ripped the fuck apart yet?”
Hawken squawked once up into the mammoth balloon, then said to Ham, “Simple. Don’t fuck with Risk’s stuff.”
Marilyn said softly to her sister, “Sissy, we’re his stuff? Who said so?”
“Could be worse, Sis. Would you rather be Ham’s stuff?”
“Oh. No. No thanks.”
“Storms clear the air,” Risk said to them.
“Oh,” said Marilyn, “because of all the fires.”
“Wait,” said Sophia. “It’s just more fire. How the hell does that clear anything up?”
Ham said to Risk, “Allow me.”
He turned to the twins and said, “Ladies. Those explosions send up tons of fresh air from somewhere underground. If it wasn’t for―”
“My turn,” Marilyn said with a giggle. “We’re already underground. Right, Risk?”
He nodded and said, “Below the Bay.”
Sophia snickered and said, “So, this hellhole gets its air from somewhere below Below the Bay?”
“That’s just silly, Sissy. Sounds like it’s true, though.”
Ham and Risk shared a look, then faced the girls again. Both nodded.
Sophia addressed Risk.
“So, just what the hell is down there, then?”
Risk blinked a few times, then said, “Here’s enough.”
Sophia leaned forward, squinting at him.
“He means,” said Ham, “that you have probably zero chance to survive, especially looking so fucking fine, all the fucking—”
He stopped abruptly with the sharp point of a claw at the side of his neck. Risk grinned and waited, then bounced his eyebrows once after Ham had turned to give him a friendly snarl.
The claw stayed while Ham cleared his throat, then he said, “It’s just that, uh, there’s enough here to keep us busy.”
Behind Marilyn and Sophia, the sound of flapping wings and one short, sharp shriek zipped past. They turned to look, but all they saw was the same landscape below as before, with the same blazes raging farther away, and the same totally black underside of a bay far above.
They turned back and listened as Ham said, without a smile or even a grin, “Like that.”
“Alright,” said Ham, “why don’t we just get the fuck up there already?”
“Sure. How many?”
“Just one. The boys can’t handle more than one at a time.”
“One of what?” said Sophia.
Marilyn said, “And what boys are you talking about?”
Ham shook his head and said to Sophia, “One of those fucking things that just scouted us out.”
To Marilyn, he said, “Lab boys, we call them. Took them a while to build it, but they have a pretty good fucking cage. They pay alright for a complete unit.”
Risk turned to him and said, “Pieces sometimes.”
“Well, fuck yeah. If that’s all that’s left.”
“Sheesh.”
Marilyn giggled and said, “I’ve been wondering how long that would take, Sissy.”
“What kind of pay is worth anything in this place?” said Sophia.
“Food, for one,” said Ham. “Fresh stuff. Like fucking stuff for my navigator.”
“Oh, you have some kind of hawk too?” said Marilyn.
“Ziggy isn’t no fucking hawk. No, little ladies. Uh-uh.”
The girls leaned forward and tried to look high up into the rigging above Ham’s basket, but they gave up after a few seconds.
To Risk, Ham said, “Maybe you should wait to do your fucking shifting, you know? Spare the women folk that trauma?”
“They’ve seen it.”
“What? Just that fucking claw at my throat just now? Which I didn’t fucking appreciate because—”
“No. In Beverly Hills.”
“Risk killed a lion to save us,” said Marilyn.
Ham pointed at K Kat and said, “But . . . the lion is still—”
“Another lion.”
He looked at the twins, shaking his head, and said, “Lions? In Beverly Hills?”
“All day, every day,” Sophia said, nodding back at him.
“They weren’t dancing, though,” said Marilyn. “Not them. Just attacking people.”
“Oh. Yeah, well, that happens.”
He turned toward Risk and said, “So, they, those Kildare Killers, can wait here, and we can—”
“No. We all go.”
Ham shrugged, whipped his ponytail behind him, and said, “Whatever you say.”
He stood and pointed up at Hawken with a grin and got a happy squawk in return.
The girls stood and let the pillows fall, revealing their bare legs spanning from the bottom of Ham’s ripped and soiled shirts down to their heels. Their right arms were bare too.
“So, it’s like I’m fucking keeping those shirts after all,” Ham said. “They’re just wrapped around some living dolls.”
He reached out to grab his basket’s rim, then made a silent, acrobatic leap into it. He’d just turned when Risk’s basket shook and Hawken squawked.
“Fuck,” Risk said as he jumped up and toward two sets of sharp black claws hanging onto the rim of his basket.
The girls sat back down quickly, grabbed as many pillows as they could find, and hugged each other close.
Chapter 5 – We Hate this Place
As he took several strong steps toward their clawed attacker, Risk’s arms grew a dense layer of short brown fur, and they swelled with twice the muscles there before.
His animal arms were already reaching out, and sharp white claws sprang out on every finger.
His chest and back and shoulders bristled with new, tight muscle, all wearing a sleek coating of fur much like K Kat’s. His black leather vest had been stretched to its limit.
And his head, with an open mouth and bared fangs, could have been one of K Kat’s distant ancestors, one more savage and from a time when its world demanded all the savagery any surviving animal could muster.
Marilyn and Sophia gasped and kept embracing with their cheeks pressed together. Before either could say anything, Risk had snagged the uninvited beast, digging his claws into its paws and causing a mad shriek from over the side.
He roared once at the balloon or Hawken or maybe the black ceiling above, then yanked the beast up for all to see.
Its head appeared first, like a bat’s. But hungrier. Less kind. Much more of a monster—something carved of granite and snarling atop an ancient building.
But still, it said, “Wait! Before you kill me, just—”
Risk rushed one set of claws to grasp the animal by its throat just as its wings, wider than the basket and blacker than the sky, spread out and flapped madly. The wind from its wings blew around the twins’ hair and Ham’s shirts, anything loose in the basket, and the balloon above, giving the hawk up there another reason to squawk.
Another two sets of black claws appeared on the basket’s rim, and the thing’s sinewy, leathery legs tried pushing away. With the wings snapping and its legs pushing, the basket jolted every which way.
And Hawken, high above it all, squawked nonstop, sometimes articulating a very clear “Fuck!” as he spun around and blasted the hot spout.
Risk roared and swiped his other set of claws across everything that was trying to push against his basket, and blood erupted like a row of whips had slapped into a puddle of red slop.
The beast screamed, and Ham appeared next to Risk, where he balled up that swollen, mutant hand into fleshy hammer. He cocked it back and waited, timing the mad creature’s erratic path back and forth, then swung once.
Another scream erupted, but one wing hung limp, causing the battle to descend into further chaos.
Risk grunted something, and Ham rushed to his other side. He timed his strike perfectly, and the scowling bat thing hung from Risk’s grasp around its throat, its crippled wings beating slowly and pathetically.
“Oh, my.”
“I really do hate this place, Sis.”
The girls huddled behind pillows small and large and watched Risk drag the thing quickly toward him, aiming perfectly to strike its head on the basket’s top rail. It went limp, but its eyes still blasted hatred and hunger, and its mouth might have cussed or screeched or laughed insanely if it didn’t have claws perforating its throat.
Risk tumbled it roughly over the edge and pinned it to the scarred floorboards with a knee on its chest.
Ham positioned his bludgeoning hand directly over the thing’s head, and it calmed itself and looked up at what could easily splatter its face into a pancake of bloody mush.
Risk roared, up close and in the thing’s face, then stood and dug into its chest with one of his black work boots.
He sighed with a softer roar, shook a few times as his natural features returned, then twisted his foot into the thing’s chest, causing it to howl and Hawken to laugh at it.
Risk put his human hands on his hips and said, looking down at the snarling face, “Talk.”
“Then die,” said Ham. “You know you’re going to fucking—”
Risk held a hand out.
“It knows.”
“If I give good info, I can live?”
“No.”
“A little longer,” said Ham. “Keep us interested, you son of a bitch.”
It snorted toward Ham, then focused on Risk.
“There’s a madman down there.”
“More than one,” said Risk.
“Fucking dump is full of them,” said Ham. “So?”
“But this one has a plan. He wants to kill everyone and everything down here.”
“Why?” said Ham.
It turned its head enough that its solid black eyes could aim at Ham.
“Crazy needs a reason?” said the thing.
“Where, then?” Risk said, looking at the beast.
It looked back at Risk and said, “Somewhere. Not much time.”
“You’re already dead. What the fuck do you care?”
Risk looked up at Ham and gave him a very slight grin, to which Ham only shrugged, then they both looked down again.
And Risk twisted his boot again. Hawken laughed at the sight of it, but the winged freak was losing its resolve.
“We’ll find him. Risk and I. And the Kildare Killers.”
The beast tipped its head to look all around and fixed its eyes on Marilyn and Sophia for only a second.
“The lion too,” said Risk.
“Give me a chance,” said the bat thing, “and I’ll eat that stupid cat like—”
Risk stomped his boot onto its throat and stared down at it.
“Where’s the opening?”
It gurgled and struggled and its eyes turned up to the ceiling that held a bay of water high above all of them, then looked again at Risk.
Risk backed his boot away enough for it to answer.
“There’s no—”
Its neck almost snapped at so much weight bearing down on its throat. Risk waited, and the thing stared up at him.
He relaxed the choke just enough.
“Only some know where. Not me. I’m not special,”—it spat some bloody sludge to the side—“enough.”
“You’re fucking right about that,” said Ham. “Just another fucking bat freak, stealing people from up there, then enslaving them at the reactor. You’re a bunch of sick fuckers.”
The thing chuckled, with blood leaking out of its mouth both ways and adding to the stains on the wood floor, and said, “Fuck yeah. Fuck all of you.”
Risk clamped its throat and neck, grinding it into the floor, and looked to Ham.
“Just a body, then?”
“Sure. They’ll pay. Even though it’s a goddamn fucking ugly body.”
Risk scoffed and said, “The head’s worse.”
He moved his boot, leaned over quickly while growing one hand full of claws, and swiped left to right several times at a blinding speed. Each stroke sent a spray fanning out and with one final slash, the head tumbled that way, rolled over, and faced upward. Dead eyes staring.
Risk picked it up, never looked at it, and tossed it over his shoulder.
Only then did he turn toward the Kildare Killers, who looked like they might never blink again.
“What?”
“Sissy,” Marilyn whispered, “we still don’t know what he is.”
Sophia scoffed, then whispered, “A killer, Sis, obviously. Hey, maybe he’s the best and most famous Below the Bay Killer.”
“That’s funny. But not really.”
More loudly, to Risk, Sophia said, “We hate this place.”
His claws had retreated, but they hadn’t taken the bat’s blood along, so he shook his hand over the dark city below, shedding what still coated his fingers.
The blood on his face got no such attention.
He shrugged and said, “Huh. It hates you.”
Marilyn popped her eyebrows up, and Sophia scowled at him silently.
A second later, he said, “Well, all of us. Not just you.”
“It hates the absolute fuck out of me,” said Ham. “Every fucking minute of every fucking day.”
Risk gave him a glance and a quick grin. Ham rolled his eyes and looked back at the twins.
“Alright, it’s not always that bad. But still . . . this place is fucked up. If you can get your fine asses home, get the fuck going already.”
“K Kat too,” Marilyn said with a giggle.
“The goddamn lion?” said Ham. “Oh, sure, what the fuck. Risk, they don’t belong here. Take them home.”
Risk gave them both a smile, one that fled quickly, then said, “He’s right. Tell me when.”
He wiped at his cheek, smearing around some of the bat’s blood, unaware of it.
“Um,” said Marilyn, “that would mean, uh, Sissy and I would, I mean—”
“What she’s trying to say is that we, uh, we do want to go, but uh, you know, there’s always . . .”
“Tomorrow?” said Ham. “Don’t bet your fucking life on it.”
“Today. Tomorrow,” said Risk. “We do it right.”
“Oh,” said Marilyn, “you said something about that at Dayzee’s house. You said we had to do it wrong.”
“Yeah,” said Sophia. “There wasn’t enough time.”
“Well, no, Sissy. We were going to burn all up.”
Sophia said, “So, what’s that all about? What’s right and wrong about doing what we all did?”
“K Kat, too, Sissy.”
“The right way,” said Risk, “is just one.”
“Wait just a fucking second,” Ham said with a hearty laugh. “You’re saying that you and,”—he pointed at each of the girls several times—“both of them? Altogether at the same fucking time?”
Risk grinned and said, “Same time.”
“The lion too,” said Sophia. “Never thought I’d get pulled into some weird act like that.”
“Well, Sissy, you’re an actress. Maybe that lion is too?”
Sophia looked down and got quiet.
“Oh. Sorry, Sissy.”
“So,” said Risk, then he wiped more blood around on his face. “Who’s first?”
He looked at each staring twin for a second, then looked down as he reached for his belt buckle. He stopped quickly at seeing his exposed abdominal area streaked with blood, some of it drying where thin lines of it had begun to drip over and between the well-defined muscles.
He looked up at Marilyn first.
“Oh. Um . . .”
He focused on Sophia, who was shaking her head and smirking.
She said, “Uh, maybe we’ll stay.”
They all looked toward Ham when he said, “Whenever the fuck you all do it, I’m there.”
Risk felt K Kat nudging the side of his leg, so he looked down at her, and she gazed up at him.
“You don’t mind the blood?” he said to her.
She seemed to laugh.
“Good girl.”
He patted her head and rubbed around her ears.
Ham said, “On second thought, if that lion’s in on it . . .”
“Ladies,” Ham said with a polite bow, “my chariot awaits.”
“Not so fast,” said Sophia. “That guy up there, that—”
“Hawken, Sissy.”
“Yeah, him. He won’t go higher because of things like that?”
She pointed at the headless remains of a bat as large as Risk, if it didn’t have wings.
Risk nodded and said, “With heads. Most.”
“Sissy,” Marilyn whispered, “Everywhere we go!”
“Uh, almost, Sis. That thing isn’t looking for head.”
To Risk, she said, “What was all that talk about holes up there and taking people?”
“They take people,” he said and pointed straight up.
“We want to know where the fuck they go through to get up there. Not everyone can screw two fine Kildare Killers and a goddamn lion and—”
“She bit,” said Risk.
Ham squinted at him and said, “That counts? She didn’t have to fuck you too?”
“Feeding. Killing. Kinda like sex.”
Ham nodded and said, “Oh, right. Yeah, I get that.”
Again addressing Marilyn and Sophia, he said, “If there’s a goddamn way to the top, we all want to know where it is.”
“And there must be?” said Marilyn. “Because these gross things snatch people and . . . what, exactly?”
“Reactor slaves.”
“Risk means that they get put to work at that fucking toxic power plant. Things like piling dirt, trying to block some fucked up form of radiation.”
He noticed that the twins were looking at his enlarged hand, so he held it up and studied it too.
“Sure, I shoveled dirt, too, like a fucking slave. I ran my ass off just when this goddamn thing started itching real funny one day. You can see how the fuck that turned out.”
“One more thing,” said Sophia. “Bats? Giant bats, and they talk?”
“Timing,” said Risk.
“I’ll expand on that for him too,” said Ham. “The freakin’ reactor sometimes gives out blasts of some god-awful bullshit radiation. If someone’s downwind of it, they kind of, uh, get tangled up with things around them.”
“Oh,” said Marilyn.
“All that DNA crap gets spun together like bloody fucked up spaghetti.”
“Sheesh.”
“So true, Sissy.”
Marilyn turned to her sister and said, “Think about Hawken, Sissy. He got blasted when a hawk was flying by.”
“Is that for real?” Sophia said to Risk.
“Or it fucks you up,” he said.
Ham held up his giant hand and grinned.
“Alright,” said Sophia, “what about the bats, then? Some bat was flying past a dictionary, and the reactor sprayed radiation, so now they can talk?”
Risk shrugged and said, “Who knows?”
“Maybe they were already here,” said Ham, “before anyone moved into this place and built all this shit. I still think it had to be military.”
Sophia nodded and said, “And they moved out when—”
“When they started growing extra heads. Yeah,” said Ham. “Or maybe that was okay, but when the fucking extra heads started fucking complaining and trying to take over, maybe it was just a bit much.”
He grinned while they all stared for a few seconds.
“Well,” Marilyn said with a pleasant smile, “it could be worse. Your hand is pretty useful, actually. And Hawken seems nice. Oh, I don’t know about those bats, though.”
“So, there’s some weird shit,” said Sophia, “but it doesn’t sound all that bad.
Risk stared at her for a few seconds, then shook his head for a moment.
“Give it time.”
“Well, we can’t even imagine,” said Marilyn.
Ham, without any sign of a smile, said, “You won’t fucking have to.”