Belle of the Ball

by E.E. Nalley

 

Chapter Seven

 

My flight took me to the least likely place you’d expect to find in Atlanta.  While the New South warred with the Old South on the architectural field of battle, modernism, Art Deco, Art Nuevo and Environmental Post Modernism moved like infantry and artillery across the landscape of the South’s Largest urban sprawl.  Yes, I hear you talking about Dallas Fort Worth.  So what?  The Twenty Five county Metro Atlanta area (That is the God knows how many little towns and cities that everyone refers to collectively as Atlanta) is one hundred and fifty miles across. 

North of the I-285 Parameter, nestled between the Cities of Roswell and Alpharetta lies the White Huron Dojo of Hopkedo.  It’s a Tokugawa Style compound complete to the stone and bamboo fence, Zen garden and the Furo or Japanese style bathhouse.  It was the residence of my Hopkedo Sensei Yagimura-san.  I’m not sure why I wound up here, but as I alighted on the shoe stone, the stepping stone where you remove your shoes, I realized there was no better place to answer the questions flying through my mind just then.

“Tadaima!”  I called as I worked off my boots.  It meant, literally, ‘I’m home’ and Yagimura-san had insisted it was how I should announce myself.  As if he’d been waiting for me, the paper screen door slid aside to reveal his diminutive form, given only a bit of bulk from the kimono he wore.   

“Good evening, Anderson-san,” he said in his soft, mildly accented voice, as wind through the reeds on a lake. 

“Ah’m sorry to just drop in like this, Sensei,” I told him with a bow.  “Ah, Ah guess you would say Ah’ve lost mah center.”  His thin eyebrows accented his bald head.

“Indeed.  I have not known you to be centered at all, Anderson-san, but that you will admit to your problem is a great step forward.  Please, come in side.”  My boots off, I stepped up to the wooden porch that ran the length of the building, collected my footwear and followed him into the open space at the front of the house I called the parlor. 

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that he already had a tea service set out there for two.  Sensei’s abilities to predict me bordered on precognition.  “Please, have some tea,” he bade me as he swept gracefully into the room.

“Ah don’t know who Ah am, Sensei,” I blurted out.  I would have launched into quite a tirade, but his endless black eyes had that ‘shut up and listen’ look in them, so I did so.

“There is a time and a place for everything, Anderson-san,” he drawled as he busied himself with making the tea; green for him, Earl Gray for me.  “This is one of the lessons you have had the most difficulty learning.  You Americans have no patience.  Everything must be now.  I have come to expect this from the others of this city.  But you purport yourself to be a symbol of a more graceful age by your uniform, do you not?  Were not manners a matter of a great concern in the Old South?”

His words stung, but he was right.  I nodded, contrite.  “Please forgive mah rudeness.  Thank you very much for taking the time to talk with me.”

“You are welcome,” he said, gently sliding the cup and saucer across the small table to be within my reach.  A hesitant sip proved that somehow he had divined how I take my tea (strong and sweet) and had managed to prepare it expertly to my taste.  I smiled at him in appreciation of his work, to which he responded with the briefest of nods and the smallest of smiles.  “How was your ceremony at Capital this afternoon?”

“About what Ah expected, Sensei.  The press loves to read sentiments into my uniform that aren’t there.  Ah would have thought that mah actions told them what Ah stood for, but it’s easier to attack someone than admit a snap judgment might be wrong, Ah guess.”

“Oh?” he asked a touch of surprise in his tone.  “That is remarkably wise, Anderson-san.  Men without a conscience can still use the conscience of others against them.  But this is not why you have come to me, is it?”  I shook my head.  “So, what happened after the ceremony that has opened your eyes so greatly?”

“Ah went on a date with a friend,” I whispered, more than a bit of shame clouding my voice.

“Ah, so desu ne?” he chuckled, slipping back into his native language.  “And the Yang still in you causes you great distress over the enjoyment your Yin has had at this?  I see.  Very distressing.”

“Ah don’t want to hurt him, but Ah don’t know how to answer when he asked me who Ah was.  Ah don’t know who Ah am, Sensei.”

“You ask a deeply fundamental question, Anderson-san.  I think the root of your problem is you are still filled with Fire.  This Fire gives you your drive and the strength to use the power you have been granted.  Yet, this power also filled you with Water.  Water is the nurturer in all of us, but women are mostly blessed with its strength.  My dear wife was a shining example of Water.  You must understand, Anderson-san, Water is the great strength of the Universe.  All of the elements must bow to it, for in time, Water defeats them all.”

“How do Ah do that Sensei?  How do Ah balance mah Fire and Water?”

“You cannot, Anderson-san.  They are Yin and Yang; opposites.  They will war within you until the Water is triumphant, or you are driven mad by the struggle.”

I gasped.  “That’s it?  That’s your great advice?  Just give up and become a woman?”

“Anderson-san, you are a woman.  Do not let your Fire keep you from hearing what I say.  I have no medicine or technique that may undo your form.  Has the Science that created that which has changed you offered you any remedy?”  I hung my head in horror at what I was being told.

“No,” I whispered.

“Then, what cannot be changed must be embraced.  You have the power to put your Fire and Water at peace.  Use that power, Anderson-san.  You have been a dutiful student.  I must admit to a certain fondness of you.  You must let go of the thoughts of yourself as you were, and accept the thoughts of who you are.”

I took another sip of my cooling tea, aware of the emotional firestorm raging inside of me, but distanced from it by the calm setting around me.  “How do Ah do that, Sensei?”

He chuckled as he took a sip of his own tea.  “I shall tell you, if you can control the Fire and not yell in my house.  Do I have your solemn word, Anderson-san?”  The china in my hand rattled as it was shaken in the tremors of fear that suddenly ran through me.  I set it down on the table to make it stop and worked on my breathing to master myself as he had shown me.

“Yes, Sensei.  You have mah word.  Ah am ready to hear what you will tell me.”

“You must stop testing the water with your toe.  It will not ever be completely to your liking on the beach.  You must fly out to the deep water and submerge yourself with out a second thought.  For a time, that may extinguish the Fire in you.  Or they may strike their own balance in you.  That is for greater wisdom than mine to say.  Do you understand, Anderson-san?”

“Hai!” 

He gave me one of his deep, measure stares and seemed satisfied.  “Good.  For now, the bath is hot.  Come, and relax.  You may take your dive here.  I would be honored to be of assistance to you.”

*                                  *                                  *

A good bit later that night, I took my leave of Yagimura-Sensei.  In my uniform, my civilian clothes in a fanny pack that clipped onto the back of my utility belt, my flight took me towards home as the somewhat muted, but still profound thoughts lapped wave-like in my mind.  Not the least of which was, I have got to buy a car.

While my fear was abated somewhat by my time with Sensei, I realized I had no idea how to go about ‘embracing’ my woman hood.  I had a number of general ideas, but I think my great problem was not actions so much as a state of mind.  As I flew, being mindful not to stray too high into the air traffic lanes, (the things you never find Superman worrying about!) the silence of the night was disturbed by the beeping of my Irregulars communicator.

I came to a stop as I removed it, certain I would be greeted by the concerned voice of Ed, trying to apologize for some error he would have convinced himself he had committed in our time together today.  “Southern Belle here,” I said into the speaker.

“Belle, this is Spirit Wolf,” was the reply that shocked me.  So much for my powers of precognition.  “We’ve got an emergency.  Where are you?”

I looked down.  “At the Cobb Cloverleaf.”

“Start heading towards Dobbins at once.  There’s been an Outbreak.  We have a berserker.  Gravity and I will meet you on the way.”

The coldness of the air seeped into my bones.  I began flying at my top speed.  “Where?  How?”  I demanded.  “Who else can you get?”

“I don’t know.  I can’t raise anyone else but Cavalry, and he’s downtown.”

Shit.  Way to go Jennifer.  “Ah can go get him…” I started.

“NO!” shouted Spirit Wolf and I could hear the fear in her willowy voice.  “The berserker is fantastically strong.  We have to have a brick and you’re closest!  Gravity and I can’t stop it without you!”

“Ah’m on my way.”

*                                  *                                  *

The berserker wasn’t hard to find.  Heading towards Dobbins Air Force Base his (?) path of destruction was visible for a long ways.  This was the dirty underside to Mckimpson Strain.  You might recall I told you it was unpredictable.  That’s true in so much as no one knew which of the three paths it would take.  You could get a horrific ‘cold’ that actually killed a number of people before they found a way to treat it.  Or you could get some crazy set of super powers that, again, there was no way of knowing before hand what or how they would manifest.  Then there was the third option.

Berserkers.

There are those that do have paranormal abilities manifest in themselves, but the act of it drives their bodies out of control in wild mutation.  Not to mention either destroying the mind of the person infected or taking what ever emotion ran strongest (usually rage) and magnifying it to obscene levels.  A berserker becomes a wrecking machine, destroying whoever and whatever is in front of it.

They were, nominally, the reason Congress could get away with the draconian laws and regulations aimed at paranormals.  At least that’s what the Supreme Court said in The United States V. David Mackleby AKA the Crimson Commando.  As I followed the trail of destruction I was able to link up with Gravity who had Spirit Wolf on one of his flying disks

“What happened?” I yelled once I was close enough.

Spirit Wolf shrugged her shoulders and looked on the boarder of real terror.  Of all us, MS had changed her the least.  Sure, Joe Average was in the for the beating of his life, and I didn’t know of any dedicated martial artists who were in her league, but the fear that a berserker with only Gravity and the Fucking New Girl was way out of our collective league was plain on her face.  “We received an emergency call from Dobbins security about ten minutes ago,” said Gravity more calmly than I would have.  “The berserker evidently teleported onto the base and began destroying.”

“Out of nowhere?” I demanded.  I had a twinge that something was Rotten in Denmark.  They both nodded as I got out my communicator.  “Cavalry?” I shouted into it to be heard over the wind of our flight.

“Yo?” was his response.  “I’m on 75/85 now, code three.  Be there in about ten minutes.”

“Don’t come here,” I ordered him. 

“What?” was the collected shout, over both the radio and beside me.

I waved at both my comrades in arms to be quiet.  “Do not come here,” I ordered him again.  “Go to HQ and sit on that alert monitor.  Keep trying to contact the others, but keep an eye out.  This whole thing smells like a diversion to me.”

“Roger,” came his voice after a moment.  Maybe I was new on this whole woman hood thing, but it certainly seemed like there were about a thousand layers of emotions I could pick up on crammed into that single word.

I’m not sure why, but something made it worse that the Berserker was a young woman.  If her face wasn’t bunched into a mask of fury she would have been breathtakingly beautiful.  The phrase blonde bombshell (ok, bad pun, sorry) would never do her justice.  She was somewhere around six two if my guess was right, with honey blonde hair in a braid that fell to the top of her perfect butt.  Hell, there wasn’t anything about her that wasn’t perfect.  High, firm breasts, a figure that would have made Marilyn Monroe jealous about her gig being cut in on.  Topped off by a heart shaped face dominated by huge doe like eyes of sky blue over a Cupid’s bow mouth.

In any other circumstance, this would have been funny.  Here I was the New Girl in every sense of the word and I was jealous.  She caught sight of our approach, picked up a Humvee and, one handed, almost casually tossed it at us.  I caught it with a grunt.  There was a lot of kinetic force behind it.  A quick look over the Hummer told me it was destined to be the Motor Pool’s new parts vehicle so I threw it back.

She tried to out do me with a catch, but I was flying.  Ground doesn’t give.  The Hummer went to pieces on us, well on her anyway, while knocking our Dorothy Lamoure want to be backwards a good twenty feet.  Gravity and I shared a glance.  “Bet she can’t use that strength off the ground,” I told him.

“On it,” was his response as I flew down to get Blondie’s attention.

She was in the process of climbing out of the mortal remains of a Duce and a Half that was probably older than both of us.  “Hey, Blondie!” I shouted, getting the focus of her rage.  “Bad hair day?”

“Get back!” she snarled, tossing the axel assembly at me. 

This was a much easier catch.  “Ah thought we had this lesson in Newtonian Physics?” I chuckled as I wound up my throw.  Then, I must admit, she took me by surprise.

“You want re-actions, Red?  Try a new look,” she jabbed.  Now that was hitting below the belt.  Then she jumped the fifty yards or so between us, and slammed into me, bearing us both back to the ground.  She laid a one two on me that rang my bell and sent the axel flying. 

I hooked my foot between us, got a good hold just above her diaphragm and kicked.  As she flew backwards I realized that she had said something right before the Woof! of escaping air from her lungs.  “Don’t make me hurt you,” my brain told me she had whispered.

What the fuck is going on?

As we had (mostly) planned it, Gravity had caught Blondie in one of his beams and had her suspended about fifty feet in the air.  I flew up, taking care to be out of reach to get a better look at my sparring partner.  “What gives, Blondie?” I demanded as she put on a huge show of spittle and mindless rage.

I danced into her flaying and slapped her sharply across the face.  “You’re not a Berserker,” I challenged her.  “Now fess, or do I let my Arab friend here work on his fast ball?”

“Put me down, bitch or so help me…!”

“You’ll what?  Act even less like a lady?  Hell, Ah’m not sure how you’ll pull that one off, sugah, but fire away.”

She set off a string of obscenity that wouldn’t look at all nice in print.  (And I should know!)  But as our eyes were locked, I could tell her heart wasn’t in it.  This was one huge act.  Maybe it’s something about blondes with blue eyes, maybe I was just enough of a man still to fall for this, but I was certain her eyes were really saying ‘Help me.”

This job is so much fun!

“Where the hell is...” I started, but was interrupted by a ‘pop’ below me.  “…Mortagain!  Nice of you to join us.”

A quick glance told me that either Ginnevia was going for an even more disheveled look, or she had set the land speed record for getting ready for battle from a shower.  “Don’t get your panties in a bunch,” she said testily.  “I’m here already.”

“Can here be somewhere else nice and quiet?” I asked in my sweetest voice.  It’s a Red Head thing.  You wouldn’t understand.  There was the very disorienting sensation of movement without moving and suddenly we were in the UCS, same marks as the previous scene.  “Alright, Blondie, spill it.  What’s with your sudden urge to redecorate in Beirut Modern?”

The fight went out of Blondie in less than a second.  It was very disturbing to watch.  “I had too,” she stammered, on the edge of tears.  “They’ve got Jason.”

“Who are they, sugah?”

She looked cross.  “Do you really talk that way?  I thought it was just a secret ID thing?”  I’m very proud of the fact that I didn’t slap the mess out of her.  But that probably would have cost me two months pay considering the crazy way this out fit was run.

“Tell you what, Blondie, ya’ll tell me your name and Ah’ll let the crack slide about mah accent.”

“Can Gravity let me down?” she asked somewhat plaintively.  “I promise I’ll behave.”  The four of us exchanged looks.  An agreement was silently come to, and then Gravity lowered her to the floor of the Simulator with me dropping down as well.  She looked around, seeming to shrink in meek fear, like a kid caught with their hand in the cookie jar.  “My name is Holly.  Holly Macbein.   Not that it really applies anymore I guess.”

“Honey, your name is going to be a number if you don’t start spinning a really good tale in about five seconds,” I growled at her.

“I didn’t hurt anyone,” she said defensively.  I counted to ten to keep my anger in check. 

“Hold the phone,” interjected Spirit Wolf.  “Holly Macbein?  As in Senator William Macbein’s daughter?”  That had been emergency call number four last month.  Holly Macbein and another student went missing from the dorms of Kennesaw State University which had set off a state wide manhunt.  And, when dear old dad is a US Senator, well, Super Heroes get turned out too.  It had been almost a week, but I recalled Holly being about my age, shorter than me by a good bit, and a fellow red head with freckles.

Before Blondie here could try to cash in our little math lesson of two and two, I demanded, “Prove it”

“Ok,” she said softly.  Then she started to shrink!  The blonde hair went crimson, undid itself from the braid and shortened to one of those spiky page boy’s hair cuts.  Then Hugh Heffner’s wet dream became an almost cute co-ed whose most flattering feature was a bust that could feed Ethiopia.  It was the girl from the photo we’d been given.  “Before you accuse me of being a shape shifting imposter, my emergency code phrase is ‘Soylent Green.’”

“What is the fake code you are supposed to give out under duress?” asked Mortagain, who evidently had a memory for these crazy government cloak and dagger escapades. 

“Citizen Kane,” was her answer.

“What’s with the crappy Hollywood movies?” I demanded.

“Important figures are given phrases to identify them in events such as this,” said Abin casually, evidently convinced.

“Citizen Kane is not crappy,” Holly protested.  “It was the original Independent film, made for the pure art of cinema.”

I put my hands on my hips.  “Citizen Kane was a rent piece from a guy whose only true genius was in convincing everybody else he was a genius,” I fired back.

Ahem, came the deep voice from the door way.  “As fascinating as this little debate is,” interjected Marshal Graham as he crossed the room, still trying to get his suit on straight.  Evidently it had been put on in something of a rush.  “It is not so important as how has Ms. Macbein been exposed to Mckimpson Strain and why she was destroying Dobbins Air Force Base,” he finished with a stern look that was only slightly compromised by his five o’clock shadow.

“Jason Carnegie and I were kidnapped by Sovereign,” she said in a rush. 

Carnegie was the other student that was missing from KSU.  But his dad wasn’t a senator so we hadn’t gotten a picture of him.  If you’re ticked about the inequity of that, write your Congressman.  The tree is already dead, might as well use it for all the good it will do.  It hadn’t been spelled out for us per se, but the prevailing theory among the cops I searched with was that Mr. Carnegie was playing hide the trouser snake with our Miss Macbein. 

“He injected me with something that turns me into her,” continued Holly.  “He kept ranting on about how the ‘Princes would see their own defiled’ or something like that.”  Cavalry had joined us with the good Marshal Graham.  I turned to him on this bit of exposition to ask,

“Does he really talk like that?”

Ed hung his head in shame.  “Yes.”

“Go on,” pressed Geoffrey with a look promising mayhem at the next interruption.

“He told me if I didn’t do my best to get all of you into a fight at the Air Force base he’d kill Jason!  Then a man in a black costume touched me and I was there.  I didn’t know what else to do!”

“Trapdoor?” I asked once I was pretty sure she was finished.

“Trapdoor,” said Spirit Wolf with a nod.

“How did you know you could stop being her?” asked Ginnevia slowly as she stepped forward.  Holly blushed.

“They…they taught me how to use the…power for the last week,” she confessed.  Then she turned to me.  “I’m sorry if I hurt you.”

“Nah,” I told her with a dismissive gesture.  “Don’t worry about it.  So, has what ever he did worn off?”  She shook her head and started to grow.  In a second the bombshell was back and the men folk where having to make discrete adjustments to their clothing while my jaw about hit the floor.  “You…you can turn it on and off?”  In a twinkling the old Holly stood before us once more.

“It makes me very hungry, but yeah.  Do you have something I could eat…?” she started to ask before she fainted.  Gravity caught her and we got her to the infirmary to start a glucose drip.  For me, though, this was the final slap in the face.

Even as we got the nurse roused to look out for her and over see the carefully extracted blood cells for the lab boys, I was already certain of their outcomes.  Through out the all night meeting that followed as we tried to figure out how we were going to deal with this little wrinkle, on top of the good news/bad news talk Senator Macbein was going to get (you can bet I volunteered for that one.  Denied of course), on top of the fact we still had another missing student who was most likely a hostage.

There was still the uncertainly of my relationship with Ed, if in fact I had one at all from the way I treated him today.  And through all of this, one thought pranced over and over in my mind.  Maybe there was a cure.  Maybe I didn’t have to be Southern Belle any more.  Now there was hope, if anything so selfish could be called hope.

Sovereign had somehow perfected Mckimpson. 

*                                  *                                  *

 

Continued in Chapter 8

 

since 02/19/04