Subject: [OTL]: HellsX 42 Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 04:39:10 -0700 (PDT) From: D Benway HellsX [42:45] The East Wing Produced by Benway. See notes for disclaimer. _______________________________________________________________________________ On the flight to Washington, no-one said anything. Logan had told them not to, and he was their Master. Summers was flying, the others were in the seats, and Kitty was curled up in a ball in the freezer, phased and floating in the air. Her Master was so far away now, so hard to hear, that she knew she could speak to someone if she wished to. She had nothing to say to any of them. She only had one word to say. "Amistad," she whispered, over and over. The plan had been outlined to her before they boarded the chopper. It was quite simple. A banquet was taking place that evening in the White House, and the President was going to be in attendance. Summers, Drake and Logan would directly attack the White House, Rasputin would take out any resistance from the West Wing, and she would be deal with any in the East Wing. Only Summers had asked a question. "Why?" "Get them before they get us," said Logan. Summers didn't land the helicopter. Instead, he crashed it into the state dining room, leaping out from 50 feet up seconds before impact. Kitty landed inches from the entrance to the visitor's centre, which, like the rest of the complex, was entirely dark. There were sirens somewhere in the distance, but no obvious threats within. A body blocked the main door open. It was a dead Sentinel, with three silver knives in his back. Further in, there were two more dead Sentinels and an unconscious one, lying under a crumpled metal filing cabinet. He was bleeding. It took all of her strength to turn away from the thick crimson richness being wasted there. Kitty phased through a concrete wall and into the Visitors' Gallery. It was the room where the visitors would have been re-acquainted with the role of the president in the War On Terror before being taken into the White House proper. A monitor mounted on the wall welcomed the leaders of the American Amateur Athletic Association for evening's banquet. The posters on the war showed the triumphs of the War; the massive camps on newly-freed Cuban soil, the armies of scientists working away on the latest detection technology, the legions of Sentinels armed for battle against the deadly foe. An entire wall was taken up with a photo mural of the Captains America standing with their boots planted on the corpse of a dead female werewolf, shot to death with elephant guns somewhere in the Scottish Highlands. Captain Britain stood a short distance behind, smiling but looking slightly sick. The sign beneath the mural told her that it represented a Special Relationship. A shriek from behind had her spinning. It had seemed human, but had come from a cage screened off from the rest of the room by bulletproof glass. The cage held what might have been six spectacularly plumed parrots, were it not for the fact that their heads were those of human infants. A sign indicated that little was know of the creatures, captured during an expedition by the Amazon by the President. Kitty stared at them. They began to scream again. She smashed her way through the glass, and tore the inch-thick iron bars from the concrete. The bird-things stared back at her with the eyes of toddlers. "Fly, fly!" she screamed. They did not move. She snatched one, tore off its head and drank down its weak, avian blood. The remaining five flew, screaming, towards the window, smashing into it and falling to floor dead and twitching. "Forgot to open the window," she whispered, then started to giggle. A Sentinel staggered into the room, took one look at her, and passed out. She stepped over him and made her way down the long tunnel that took her into the basement of the White House. She was vaguely aware that she was still giggling. She stopped. From somewhere far off, a lot of things were being broken. She stopped in front of the guard post where a Sentinel lay dead with a silver fork buried in his eye. The stairs leading up to the first floor had collapsed, but the thick steel door into the basement was still open. There was prey ahead. In the basement corridor, serving trays and trolleys and food were scattered everywhere. There were more bodies, not of Sentinels but of busboys or waiters. They hadn't been stabbed, but instead had been burned in various ways. A figure staggered from a doorway, halfway down the hall. Her translucent wings reflected the red light from the emergency lamps. Jan grabbed the back of the lone intact chair among the chaos and vomited over its seat. Kitty pushed past her, into the room where Jan had been. What had once been a pantry was now an abattoir. There were sixteen bodies on the floor, some not quite entirely dead. One of the dead ones was Wanda Maximoff. Two waiters crouched, huddled in a corner, moaning. "He told me," said Jan. "No witnesses. None. But I can't do it." Directly under Kitty's feet lay a the corpse of a blonde boy of perhaps sixteen in a white uniform, curled into a fetal position, just like Doug before- Kitty lunged. Jan tried to get away, but couldn't shrink fast enough. Shrinking required concentration, concentration that was broken when Kitty caught Jan by the waist and crushed her. Kitty heard the high-pitched death rattle, then grabbed Jan by the legs and smashed her foot-long corpse into a hardwood table once, twice. She dropped the remains and turned towards the long streak of fresh, fresh gore across six feet of tabletop. She was on the table in milliseconds, lapping it up. It was so rich and concentrated, just like truffles. She wondered if a baby's blood would taste so wonderful. Her teeth scraped the varnish off the surface of the wood as she lapped up the last of it. She dropped to the floor, picked up a tiny twitching leg, and sucked more of the rich, warm goodness from it. She was dimly aware of the two waiters sneaking away, but they would never have compared to what remained in the other leg. As she searched around for it, there came a tremendous crash as the main staircase collapsed into the basement. The windows blew out and several trolleys of food overturned, revealing a large balding man in a tux. She was sucking on the last of Jan's blood when she recognized the face of her father. "Kitty?" he said. "Daddy?" she said, the leg falling from her lips. "You're covered in-" he said. She licked it off. "What happened to your tongue?" he said. "You're here" she said. "Why?" "Four-A," he said. "I got an invite because of you. They told me you were dead." "Because of me?" she said. "Because of how you died," he said. "But you're not dead." "Yes," she said. "No." "He said if I believed in Jesus, that you would-" he said. "Why didn't you stop me?" she said. "Why did you let me do that to myself?" "I don't know-" he said. "Why did you let me keep skating?" she said. "Skating?" he said. "Who cares about that? We have to get out of here." "I can't ever get out of here!" she screamed. "Tell me why you didn't let me stop!" "Your mother wanted you to," he said. "When your little friend Doug died, I couldn't tear you away from the rink. Going there and watching you, it was like she was still with us. I missed her so-" "Run," said Kitty. "Through the window, over there, where it's broken." "Come on," he said. "I can't," she said. "Go." "Kitty," he said. "I'm lost," she said. "Run and don't look back." "I can't lose you again," he said. "GO!" she screamed, baring her fangs. He went. He didn't look back. She watched him until a section of the floor above came crashing down on her. [Next: The Bunker]