DESERT STORM

by: Sword’n’Quill (Susanne Beck)

21 January 1992 Rodriguez Compound Medellin, Colombia

What the winter holidays lacked gaiety, they more than made up for in brutality. Back from Indonesia, Geraldo walked in on a Kael that seemed but one step away from utter madness. This time, alcohol had become her drug of choice, and empty bottles littered the house. The staff had long since abandoned the crazed woman, too frightened to set foot in the huge house without Geraldo there to act as somewhat of a buffer.

Following the trail of discarded clothes and empty bottles, Geraldo had walked up to the master bedroom, where his senses were almost overwhelmed with the scent of alcohol and stale sweat. Kael sat before the fireplace, guzzling yet another bottle of liquor, rocking back and forth as she did so.

She had been totally unkempt, this shadow of his lover, her hair greasy and matted, her clothes stained and wrinkled, as if she’d slept in them for many nights running.

Dead drunk she might have been, but Geraldo had to perform an almost balletic move to evade the bottle thrown at his head with deadly accuracy. “Leave me the fuck alone,” she had snarled.

Jetlagged from the trip and heart-sore from the vision before him, Geraldo did what he did best, these days. He capitulated. Again.

*******

Kael stood in the middle of her room—and it was her room now, Geraldo having taken up residence in another of the bedrooms after his return from his Indonesia trip—half drunk, yet clean, staring down at an empty liquor bottle sitting somewhere near the middle of the teak cocktail table near the fireplace.

Rubbing her hands together, she took in a deep breath and let it out, then rolled her head around, cracking the vertebrae and relieving some of the stress in her neck. “C’mon, Kael,” she whispered, her breathed words unheard above the crackle and hiss of the fire as it burned, “you can do this. You’re an empty vessel, remember? An empty vessel.”

Clearing her drunken thoughts was a process doomed from the start, but Kael was nothing if not mule-stubborn. She tried to fill her mind with the image of the kiss she and Lao Ma had shared in that long ago time, but Ianna’s face and form seemed to always interfere, despite Kael’s best efforts to erase the dark witch from her thoughts.

She opened her eyes, but the damned bottle refused to budge from its spot on the table.

She tried harder.

And harder.

But it was useless.

Her face screwing up in a predator’s snarl, she lashed out with her foot, sending the glass bottle to shatter against the stone of the fireplace, the shards glittering like misplaced diamonds as they landed on the hearthrug.

“God damned mother-fucking son of a goddamn bitch!” The table was the next to fall, splintered into kindling by a well placed kick.

More bottles flew, smashing against the floor and walls, testifying to Kael’s rage with musical tinkles of shattering glass. “Lao Ma! How could you leave me?!? How could you do this to me?”

The mattress and bedding weren’t spared their own share of their owner’s anger, nor were the works of priceless, and not so priceless, art that adorned the walls of the large room.

Spitting obscenities and saliva in equal measures, Kael became a whirlwind of destruction, using her fists, head and feet to punch plate-sized holes through the room’s drywall. Plaster dust settled over the floor and destroyed furniture in drifts like a cocaine addict’s greatest fantasy come to life in white powder.

From his place in the study a floor below, Geraldo heard the tantrum from its inception. As they had become more and more frequent in the passing weeks, he ignored the noises from above as best he could until the sounds of breaking walls caused him to jump up from his chair and bolt from the room, his feet pounding into the thick carpeting as he navigated the stairs, four at a time.

What he saw, this scene from a poorly-made horror flick, wasn’t human. Kael’s clear blue eyes were dead as a corpse’s, lacking even the spark of rage that her body held as its very own.

Swallowing back his fright, he launched himself into the fray, sending up a quick prayer to the Blessed Virgin as he did so.

Kael heard him enter and stopped her deconstruction of the walls. She turned, her long fingers hooked into eagle’s talons and flexing …flexing …waiting to sink into his flesh and feast on it in an orgy of blood and death. Her face was a grinning death’s head mask, full lips pulled back from gleaming teeth in a wordless snarl, gums glistening and pink against the whiteness of her canines. “C’mere, little puppy,” she taunted, seeming not even to recognize him. “Let’s play.”

“Stop this, Kael. Now.”

Cocking her head to the side, Kael allowed her lips to curl into an exaggerated pout. “What’s the matter, Geraldo? Don’t wanna play with me anymore? You used to love to play with me. Remember?” Her hands relaxed, then came up, caressing her own breasts, pulling at her nipples and jutting out her hips in wanton seduction.

“Enough! Damn it, Kael, that’s enough!”

“Can’t get it up anymore, little man? Pity.”

“Stop it! You need help, Kael. And you’re going to get it. Starting now. I’ve been much too lax with you, but that ends here. I’ll give you a choice. You can come with me willingly, or I’ll drag you to a hospital myself.”

Kael sneered, dropping her hands from her breasts. “I don’t like either of your choices, Geraldo. Pick another,” she purred, beginning to stalk him. “One we’ll both enjoy.”

Geraldo retreated with each step Kael advanced, until his back his hit a desiccated wall. “No. I won’t fall into your trap anymore. I love you and I’m going to do right by you. You need help and I’m going to make sure you get it, willingly or not.”

“A eunuch can’t grow back his balls, my dear. You lost yours the day I met ya.”

Seeing his chance, he lunged at her. Kael twisted away at the last second, retreating back toward the center of the room, grinning wildly. “Ohhhh, so you do wanna play. I like this game.”

Geraldo made another attempt, but Kael dodged his advance, giggling in a high-pitched, almost girlish voice.

“Come and get me, little man.”

In an attempt filled with desperation, Geraldo managed to snare one of Kael’s thick wrists, a stroke of blind luck allowing him to twist it up behind her back, disabling her temporarily. Kael shrieked like a trapped cat, hissing and twisting as she tried to buck him away.

“Listen to me, Kael,” he said soothingly, his lips brushing against the softness of her ear, “you don’t have to live like this. Whatever’s going on can be fixed. Let me help you. I love you. Let me help you.”

Trapped within his strong grasp, Kael allowed her body to relax slightly, lulling him, making him believe she was actually listening to his pathetic drivel. When she felt his hold loosen minutely, she quickly reached out toward the remains of the couch, snagging one of the few unbroken whiskey bottles and shattering it on the chair’s arm, holding the jagged remainder by the neck.

Before Geraldo could even think to react, she brought the bottle to her side, slicing the arm that held her.

Hissing in pain, Geraldo drew away, clasping the bleeding wound, his eyes shooting daggers at the now-free woman. “You don’t want to do this, Kael. Give me the bottle.”

“Like hell I will,” she replied, slashing at the air just inches from his face. His hands flew up to protect the delicate skin as he backed away quickly. “You just made a very big mistake, Geraldo. A very big mistake.”

Fear curling deep in the pit of his belly, Geraldo fought to keep his breathing under control as his wide eyes followed Kael’s every movement. Her twisting, slashing form was hypnotic as a cobra’s and he prepared himself for her deadly strike. “Put the bottle down, Kael,” he tried again. “Let’s talk about this.”

“The time for talking’s over, little man. It’s been over for quite awhile now. Now’s the time for action.”

With blinding speed, the cobra struck.

Geraldo screamed as he felt the jagged glass plow a furrow into his cheek, narrowly missing his eye and continuing down until his jaw shunted the weapon away from his face. Blood sheeted from the gaping wound, covering both man and woman as Geraldo’s hands instinctively went up to clamp down on the tear in his face.

Kael grinned in satisfaction, but managed to quell the almost overwhelming impulse she had to stick the shattered bottle into his unprotected middle and twist until she could feel his spine stop her forward momentum.

Most of her wanted to just finish the job, but the tiny part that still held the last tattered shreds of her sanity was the stronger of the two, and so Kael pulled away, turning and stalking from the room, the remains of the bottle still clamped in one blood-slick hand.

She strode down the stairs and into the kitchen, leaving a trail of gore to mark her passage through the house. The maid, only recently talked into resuming her duties—albeit with a significant financial incentive thrown in to sweeten the pot—took one look at the blood-covered, armed and half crazy Mistress of the house, screamed, and promptly fainted onto the cool terracotta tiles of the kitchen floor.

Her blue eyes wild, Kael laughed at the sight and threw her makeshift weapon down on the floor, the remaining glass shattering and providing a grizzly halo to the downed woman as it sparkled across the tiles around her fallen head.

Walking out of the front door, she cut left and stalked over to the huge garage housing their myriad of vehicles slipping quietly inside its cool, darkened confines. Closing the door behind her, she leaned against one wall for a moment, allowing her heartrate to slow as she inhaled a mixture of motor oil and car wax. The scents helped soothe her. A little.

Sighing, she pushed away from the wall, somewhat irked by the blood that was slowly drying to a sticky crust on her bare arms. Walking over to one of the recessed cabinets, she quickly tapped in the security code, opened the door and pulled out a set of keys.

Then she padded over to the sleek, shiny little speed demon with an engine bigger than the interior, and slipped inside the leathered comfort, cranking up the engine in a satisfying howl of horses and filling the garage with the stink of smoking tires as she backed out of the open garage.

Shoving the car into gear, she executed a precise one-hundred-eighty-degree turn and headed toward the barred gate of the compound, baring her teeth at the frightened looks the heavily armed guards were throwing her way.

Trying to hold his face together, Geraldo ran out into the yard, followed closely behind by the now recovered and screaming housekeeper who was waving a blood-stained towel in her hand and running as quickly as her thick legs could carry her.

“Open the gates!” the drug lord screamed at his guards, well knowing that Kael would simply ram them down if given half a chance. “Then someone follow her! Don’t let lose her or I’ll have your heads! Do you understand me?!?”

Something, either the sight of their gore-covered boss screaming obscenities at them, or the sight of a shiny black demon-car bearing down on them, made the guards’ decisions for them and one ran to open the gate while the other jumped into the Range Rover parked by the guard-shack just outside the fence.

Kael shot out through the ever widening gap in the fence, more than a bit disappointed that she didn’t get the chance to ram the damn gate down, even more so with the fact that in her hurry she’d managed to miss the little pissant who was cranking the damn thing open while looking at her through white eyes half the size of dinner plates.

She jarred the wheel sharply to the left and the car took the turn on two wheels, shooting onto the street and missing a broadside collision with an oncoming bread truck by the width of a hair. The bread truck then did what Kael wished she could have done, taking out both gate and guard in one fell swoop of screeching brakes, squealing metal, and screaming human. The Range Rover finished the job, plowing headlong into the bread truck and smashing the guard flat against the gate post.

The screams mercifully stopped.

Cackling in triumph, Kael downshifted and sped out toward the milling city, a gore-coated specter whose sanity, what there was of it, cowered in a corner of her dark and empty soul.

*******

Forty five minutes later, she found herself on the very outskirts of Medellin, driving along a twisting road she’d never been on before, having no idea how she’d gotten there, and gripping the twisted remains of a blood-sodden business card tightly in one hand.