The Hunter, The Dragon And The Smokey Mountain Angel

Julia awoke with a headache. She was glad that it was dark and cool. Then she wondered if the fire in the fireplace had died out but the floor felt odd. It was too hard and too smooth...

The feeling that something horrible had happened to her crept into her mind and then her heart began to race. She tried to sit up but something held her down. She was about to call out when the sound of a door sliding open came from behind her and light filled the small room.

The whole room tilted and she realized that she was strapped to a metal table hovering a few feet above the floor. The table had moved.

A voice she barely recognized said in a raspy tone, “Don’t worry Julia, my little angel, the effects of the drug I gave you will clear in a moment. I want you to feel everything I’m about to do to you.”

From the shadow emerged the feminine form of a beast. The creature looked beautiful with short purple hair that covered most of her body. The purple hair was so dark and shiny it almost looked black. Upon its shoulders set the head of a Jaguar. The mask looked so perfect that Julia’s heart jumped with fear. Glowing white spots highlighted her hourglass form from the curve of her breasts to the bend of her hips. Pink skin revealed her perfectly shaped breast, narrowed and then stretched down her belly to the top of her vagina.

She smiled and Julia inhaled sharply as she watched what she had thought was a mask became fully animated. This creature was not wearing a suit and she suddenly remembered hearing the voice over the radio that said, “I’m going to make you a real angel.”

The memory of what had happened to her in the SUV returned. She pulled the pistol out from under her armpit and shot her directly in the chest.

The cat woman took a step back as the bullet passed through her body. The woman looked at the gun and raised her eyebrows. She said, “That was an odd sensation, I haven’t allowed myself to be shot in a while.”

Julia said, “Good! You can feel it again.”

She fired three more times, keeping her shots in a tight group but the woman only flinched as each bullet passed through her.

“That wasn’t nice,” the woman said with a mock frown.

Julia fired again but this time the woman disappeared. The ringing in Julia’s ears hurt as she wondered what had happened to Cat lady.

Maybe she’s dead on the floor.

Julia tried to lift her head so she could see the floor but a strap was held her head down.

“Looking for me?” said the raspy voice from the other side of the table.

Julia swung her pistol, aiming to blow her cathead off but the woman caught her wrist, twisted the gun in her hand and pulled it free.

The woman said, “The demonstration is over.” She looked up at the ceiling and said, “Now strap her arms down to the table.”

A transparent spider dropped from the ceiling and Julia screamed, “Get that thing off me!”

The cat woman smiled as the glass spider crawled across Julia’s body. The spider looked like flexible glass filled with different colored liquids. One of its legs stabbed her right shoulder and then it hopped over to her left arm and did the same. Both arms went numb and dropped to the table.

“That’s better. My name is Martha, Julia.”

The spider began weaving a web, starting at the base of her left elbow. It extended its web across her chest ending at her other elbow pinning her upper body to the table. She tried lifting her whole torso but she couldn’t move. The web felt strong like the straps holding her head and the rest of her body down. She imagined the spider crawling allover her body when she was unconscious and she began to panic.

Martha said, “Take her clothes off but be careful with the stitching we will need them later.”

Julia screamed as the spider sliced through the seams of her clothes then removed each article leaving her naked.

When the spider had finished, Julia’s throat hurt but the pain quickly went away. She was out of breath and felt like she was on the edge of insanity.

“I thought you’d enjoy my pet. The intelligence I gathered from your comrades was worth the effort.”

Julia turned her head to Martha and said, “What did you do?”

Martha’s voice changed from the raspy sound of a woman that should have looked much older to that of a smooth and comforting tone, “A lot has happened over the past year. That space–lightning did a lot of damage.” Martha shook her head, “But it had the strange effect of not only hitting my humble ship but also hitting you. It took me months to repair my scout ship.” She placed a soothing hand on the ship’s wall and then said, “But when I returned to find my cruiser it was missing?”

Martha’s face turned dark. The more she thought about her missing ship the more her sharp teeth shown. Her eyes focused on Julia and she smiled. She continued in her casual tone, “So, I did what I do best. I Hunted... I retraced the events that led to my ship being downed and do you know what I found, why I found out about you. My cruiser was gone but you had also disappeared. I thought this to be very curious.”

Martha shook her head. “They did a good job hiding you too. Everyone I, uh... talked to have no idea what happened to you. I searched every military base you had entered and, spoke, with your piers but they were all ignorant of where you could be. Then I checked every hospital but apparently, they kept rushing you from one place to another, without bothering to tell anyone where you were going. The doctors and nurses who worked on you missed you and loved you very much Julia. I like that about you.

“Then I found an ambulance driver who remembered something about a girl with a strange scar that stretched the length of her back but when I arrived at the hospital he had taken you too… again you had gone.”

Martha touched a panel on the wall and a drawer opened. She reached into it and pulled out a small gold case. She continued, “I lost track of you again. This time an army MP said he gave you his emergency go bag and extra clothes but you vanished. He wasn’t even sure why he had given you the bag or clothes. That too was curious...

“Then, like a miracle, I was scanning the news and the internet and wow, The Smokey Mountain Angel just jumped out on every channel. I even saw a video of you telling your boyfriend at Waffle House that there was a dragon in the mountain.”

“What do you want Martha?” Julia said as she tried to buy time. She didn’t like the box Martha was holding. “And what’s up with the name Martha? Who sent you? What made you; Russian scientist?”

Martha smiled, “I wasn’t always this perfect. Once, long ago on a world I called Terra or Earth as you say, a world very different from the paradise your people are so rapidly destroying, I was an old woman getting ready to die of kidney failure. That’s when my master came and recognized my world. He too was searching for someone like you and he had a few experiments he had to run but once the rebels were converted, he took me. He liked my attitude, upgraded my nano’s and programmed me as a Hunter to find certain kinds of targets. I had to find a single target on each Earth who’d been struck by lightning. Many people are struck by lightning but we need only one person from each Earth who fits the High Lord’s experimental criteria. So far they have all been men, until now.”

Julia thought about the scar on her back.

Could this be what happened to me?

She said, “I don’t know your High Lord.”

“Perhaps not but the circumstances surrounding you tells me a different story.” She opened the gold box and with two fingers, she presented a golden pill. “After we have this inside you, I will know the truth. Unfortunately, if you are not the one, I will have to terminate all the nanos. That’s not good for you. These little guys were designed by the High Lord for your type alone.”

Martha looked at the pill and sighed. “I wish I was worthy of this gift. They are the strongest, best networked meta–nanos I’ve ever seen.”

Julia didn’t want the nanos. The idea was beyond anything she had heard of. Some of her military gear had been call nano–materials but it just made her electronics work underwater and her clothes resist stains... However, if these things were somehow stronger than what this woman was using, and if she had no choice but to take them perhaps she could use them to escape.”

Martha smiled, “Of course I have the off switch. The High Lord would only allow me to give you this instead of him giving them to you if extreme circumstances called for it. Considering what I am about to do to this world, I think it’s best I preserve you and place you under my total control.” She looked Julia in the eyes, “So you want to just take this pill or shall I call my pet spider to inject you with it. What will it be, the easy way or the... very scary way?”

Julia looked away. She was terrified of spiders and this woman knew it. There was only one thing more terrifying than spiders and it was being under someone else’s total control. Every fiber of her being would fight to the death to be free and to help others have their freedom.

“Okay,” Martha said in her raspy voice as she placed the pill back into the box, “It’s going to be the very scary way.” Then the spider descended from the ceiling but its legs were now needles filled with a silver liquid. The spider landed on her abdomen. Attached to its rear were long clear strings.

Julia started breathing loudly. She yelled, “Get it off me! Get it off!”

It crawled to her upper thighs and quickly injected both her arteries.

Julia screamed! The spider jumped and pulled on the string bobbing up and down as it injected her neck, heart, wrist and lower legs.

Within seconds, her vision blurred and then they refocused. A loud humming sound began to vibrate the table and her spine started to get hot.

Martha said, “The nanos are on line. They estimate that the titanium in your body can be combined with our special alloys and used to lace your bones. It’s more efficient than removing it from your body. Smile Julia, you’re becoming unbreakable.”

The vibrating changed pitch and the spider climbed up its string and disappeared into the ceiling. Julia felt every metal rod in her body turn red–hot. A bright yellow light turned on above her and she went blind even as her inner body began to cool.

The metal inside her spine, shoulder arm and leg popped. Julia cried as shattered metal dissolved into her blood stream. The spider descended again but Julia didn’t move. She suddenly felt like only her skin was holding her body together. The spider began injecting her again with something that looked like shiny metal.

Her vision began changing. The blobs of bright light changed to static–grey and black. The feeling of tiny bugs swarming the inside of her blood vessels made her scream.

Then she could see what was happening to her from the inside. Billions of tiny spider–like things crawled throughout her blood vessels and entered her glands, nervous system, vital organs and muscles. She trembled as if her body was infested with parasites. Then they bonded the titanium to the shiny liquid metal coursing through her body and they began spinning the new kind of metal, like a web, around and through the hollows of her bones.

Julia’s heart pounded and the pain became so intense that she felt lightheaded. She welcomed the blackness to come but instead the pain stopped. She felt them repairing her damaged nerves and in that moment, a thought came. She wondered if this being, this monster could really be her friend.

Does she really mean to help me? Julia shook the thought away.

Hours passed as the spiders inside healed every muscle fiber and then stimulated new growth in damaged ligaments. Her muscle mass increased 20%, fat burned as some was redistributed to exactly where needed. Then the spiders started working on her brain...