L I S A M A R I E W A L K E R
Los Paradiso | 02:17AM
Ok, she hadn’t counted on this. Why,
why hadn’t she counted on this! She’d decided to throw on a mask – well, ski buff – hit the streets and try to become a vigilante, all the good stuff. Why oh why hadn’t she counted on the crooks and criminals, whose nights of doing bad-guy stuff she was going to be disrupting, to fight back?
To be fair, she had pictured it, but only in the vague, nonsensical, reality defining confines that comic-books, tv shows, and movies placed upon the event. She’d visualised herself, standing tall and strong in the face of adversity, handing out haymakers and clotheslines to wayward baddies and villains like they were candy, interrupting her delivery spree of two-fisted justice only to interject the odd one-liner, before finally concluding the confrontation with a totally sweet roundhouse kick, and ending on some sort of GI Joe-style pithy life lesson, something along the lines of ;
“crime doesn’t pay vagabonds, and your bill just came due,” before heading home to gorge herself on victory ice-cream.
That was how she’d picture it. Never, not in her wildest imaginings, had she even come close to the reality. Not once had she considered just how pants-wettingly terrifying it was to have a group of angry looking gang members charging full pelt at you, faces screwed up in rage, animal grunts and truly colourful threats emanating from their teeth-clenched snarls. Never had she wondered if, when faced with her foes, would her muscles lock up with terror and her limbs refuse to obey any command she set them, whether that order was to run or fight. She’d heard that old adage about the deer caught in the headlights, she’d just never thought she was one.
I’m going to die here. She realised with grim certainty. She waited for her life to flash before her eyes, frozen as she was, but instead the only image that came to her mind was her parents, tears streaming down their faces upon hearing the news that their daughter had been found beaten to death in Los Paradiso, leaning on one another for support while a grey faced Colton looked on, his own grief etched upon his features as he realised he was going to have to tell his eleven year old son that his half-sister was dead. Lisa realised with a start that she’d never seen her daddy cry in real life.
I’m so sorry that I let you all down. The first blow struck her like a hammer, made all the more powerful due to the fact that Lisa had never really been hit in her entire life. She’d been clenching her eyes shut without realising it, and now they blew open in shock as she rocked backwards. Surprisingly she stayed upright, though unfortunately that meant she was still in perfect position for the second punch, thrown by the brute with the bad artwork, to slam straight into her chest.
This time she was thrown from her feet, hitting the cold, wet, unforgiving tarmac with bone-shuddering force. Lisa wasn’t sure what hurt worse, the punches or the fall. The kicks that came afterwards certainly ranked high on the pain-scale, each one thundering into her unprotected sides and face, soft flesh giving way to hardened leather and steel toe caps. Hot, salty, iron liquid filled her mouth. Blood, she realised. The realisation made her jolt, and the jolt made her swallow, and the swallow made her choke. She was going to choke to death on her own blood, miles away from anyone who loved her, or even knew her. She’d come to downtown Los Paradiso to choke to death on her own blood in a dirty puddle.
I’m so sorry. She heard laughter, realised it was directed at her. They were
laughing as they killed her. These people
were monsters. What she wouldn’t have given to have taken them down, to show them that it’s not
right to hurt people like this. But, no. This wasn’t the comic books. The good guy doesn’t win just because they were the good guy, and the bad guy didn’t always get what was coming to them. This was real life, and she was dying.
Or … was she? Those kicks weren’t coming as hard anymore, and the pain in her chest and face, while still making her wish she’d stayed in bed that morning, was becoming far more
manageable. The sharp edges of burning agony had become a duller ache of continued suffering. Where they taking it easier on her?
Duh, Lisa you idiot. Your Hype gene. The one thing that convinced you that you could handle this vigilante biz. That must have been the answer. They weren’t going easy, she was getting tougher. She was still in a whole world of hurt, and she was still in a pretty dangerous position, but maybe,
just maybe, fate had been kind enough to give her a way out. Now she just had to make best use of it.
Sorrynotsorry. The tattooed gorilla’s boot thudded into Lisa’s side once more, though with considerably less vehemence than it had once held. Seemed the brute was getting tired of brutalising young women – even if they were masked, and he couldn’t really tell how young they were – and was struggling to put the same gusto into the beating. It was a shame really, because he’d regret that laxness when, quick as a viper, Lisa rolled onto her side and grabbed his booted foot in both hands.
“HuhhooOO
OOOAAAAHHHHH!” The peculiar sound – so peculiar that it may have been the first time that a human mouth made it – was due to Lisa pulling his calf towards her, then sinking her teeth into the meat as hard as she could. Usually it wouldn’t have done much, thanks to the light mesh of her mask and the heavy denim of his jeans, but thanks to her added strength she was chomping down with the bite poundage of an angry Rottweiler. Fabric gave way as Lisa tasted blood in her mouth for the second time that night, though this time it wasn’t hers. The thought that
someone else was in her mouth nearly made her gag, though she fought through the urge to vomit and clamped down even harder. The man continued to howl, though with his compromised position there was little he could do to free himself. He was the fox, and she was the bear trap, only it was Lisa who was chewing his leg off to survive.
The other gangers, Crew and Thirds alone, could hardly believe what they were seeing. This girl had been half dead a minute ago. Where did this fight come from? Who the
Hell was
she? Two of them leapt around to try and haul their comrade away from Lisa’s pearly whites, while another tried to grip her by the forehead and chin to pry her mouth apart. They made little traction, Lisa doing her best impression of a bad-tempered dog with a bone, until the fourth criminal, the skinny woman with the crew cut, leaned over and started to power body blows into Lisa’s midriff. The punches were hardly as troublesome as they had been – closer to lovetaps than knockouts now – but Lisa let go regardless. She figured they had gotten the message.
I’m not so easy to kill after all. I’m not going to be drowning tonight, not with a say in the matter. And sure enough, as soon as they’d managed to release their fat-friend from her rabid embrace, her five tormentors all scurried back, thinking they needed a few feet of safe space from the girl they had been until so recently curb stomping into street pizza. To say they were shocked to see her clamber slowly, ever so slowly, back to her feet, picking herself off the wet concrete like Rocky picking himself back off the mat after ten rounds in the ring with Apollo Creed, was an understatement. Yes, they lived in an age of wonders and Hyperhumans.
They’d just never expected to see one.
Lisa raised her face towards the gang-members, her mask hanging in haphazard strips from where her teeth had torn the fabric, though there was still enough left in place to conceal her identity. Her lips hitched back from her clenched teeth, forming a red-stained mockery of a smile, horrific and disgusting in equal measure. She looked like the cover art of a bad metal band, thought was now certainly capable of striking the
‘terror-into-the-hearts-of-criminals’ that she’d intended when she’d first struck upon the idea of being
IllAdvised MKII.
She lifted her right hand in front of her face, and clenched it quizzically, as if she’d never seen her own fist before. After a few moments of inspection her grin grew to even wider proportions.
“Yeah. This’ll work.” “What the fuck did she say?” Stuttered the crew-cut woman.
Fury looked up at the huddled crew, who suddenly did their level best impressions of statues, freezing to the spot in hopes that she wouldn’t see them, huddling in to each other, men and women that they had been trying to kill before Lisa had arrived upon the scene, perhaps thinking there was safety in numbers, perhaps hoping that she wouldn't strike if they circled their wagons.
Fury laughed, a dry, almost grating sound. It was a laugh she had never laughed before, something cold and harsh, a sound alien in Lisa's throat, and yet sounding so right bubbling from Fury's burst, bloody lips. The laugh was directed at
them.
Then she charged.
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