Heart Like a Lion

"You never have to." Marcus picked up the letter. The sheer effort it took him not to crumple it into a ball radiated off of him in waves. "Just tell me. Did you deliberately try to influence her to this?"

"And just why the Hell would I do that," said Sonny, letting scorn into his voice despite himself. "This is exactly the kind of responsibility I try to avoid. You know that. Any of these decisions come up, you know, issues of care, housing, investments, whatever... well, read the letter. My only real function is to make sure she never has to deal with lawyers directly. The compensation it outlines is there for me to hire local representation to handle those details."

"Because you'll be far away from here," rasped Marcus bitterly. "Avoiding the responsibility. Making smut for the pervert masses--"

The beginnings of a full-blown rant, but at that moment, the day swung on a hinge. As they'd talked, the brothers hadn't noticed sudden signs of commotion outside the office window: Max leaping to her feet with breasts bouncing, a flush in her face and her lonely salad forgotten, the Mormon boys practically tripping over each other out to the front desk to answer a call.

Sonny was just about try to say "I'm sorry" to his brother and mean it when that commotion came bursting in on them: Teyson hammering excitedly at the door and shouting "Boss! Boss! Boss!"

The James brothers looked at each other a moment more, the silence drawing out, before Marcus called out: "Come, Teyson!"

The kid burst in. "Boss, we've got a situation at the south doors. They're trying to get in--"

"They've got in!" amended Kyson from the hallway. "They're racing around the first-floor concourse right now, the regulars are shitting themselves!"

"Who've got in?" said Marcus impatiently.

"Streakers, Boss! Two girls on bikes! They're calling us in!"

The energy among the best and brightest of All-American Mall security was as electric as if someone had just announced the sighting of a sniper or a suicide bomber. Even Marcus came alive as if at the flip of a breaker, the fervent light of conviction instantly melting away the black ice that had frozen him, his every muscle tensing in readiness for action... and a split-second glance of searing intensity passing between him and Max.

But he held back a moment more, saying to the Mormons: "Okay, you two get out there. I'll follow you and provide backup, Max will hold the fort here." No sooner had he spoken than the young men were gone like bolts launched from a crossbow.

Marcus was up to follow them. He stopped to give Sonny a last look and said: "Look, I don't give a damn who you doubt or what you believe. I'm going out there and do my job. I'll expect you to be gone when I come back, you understand me? You and I are done." Then he was gone, the last words hanging behind him with a knell of brutal finality.

Sonny stood there feeling disoriented at the sudden shift in gravity. Then he looked around to see Max watching him, her green eyes bright. This time she didn't look away. She walked up close to him, making it a struggle to keep eye contact as those enormous breasts jounced rhythmically under her uniform shirt. There was something curiously magnetic about her, like the hypnotic quality of an approaching cobra... and for all her pulchritude, Sonny was still disquieted to find his cock stiffening as she insinuated herself into his personal space.

"You shouldn't worry about anything," she said. There was a slightly husky tone in her voice. "Everything will be as it should. Your brother is a strong and righteous man. He knows how to show wayward souls the error of their ways... how to teach them truth and consequence."

She pointed behind her, over her shoulder, at the Bible verse on its backdrop of clouds. "Stern discipline awaits those who leave the path." - Proverbs 13:10. He looked at it, looked back at her. Sonny didn't know much about holiness, but he knew enough about certain other things to know that the fervour looking back it him was anything but religiously-inspired. The words streakers and girls on bikes flashed across his mind, with the details of a certain other story -- one the police hadn't believed -- swirling in their wake. He saw Max watching him, reading his reaction, with a curiously knowing and sinister little smile creasing the corner of her mouth.

"Truly, don't concern yourself," she said, her voice lower now, almost sultry as she came closer yet. Her curvaceous little form was near enough for him to feel the warmth of her, those supple breasts grazing against him with disturbing intimacy. "Marcus is in good hands. And so are those girls out there. Trust us... trust me."

It's funny, he thought. The more I hear you talk, the less I feel like trusting you. But what he said was just: "Marcus wants me gone. I don't see any reason to disappoint him."

That knowing little smile didn't budge as she stepped back. And just like that, Sonny was running as fast as he could out of the R.A.M.S. squad's offices... with a weirdly uncomfortable boner tenting his dungarees, the eyes of Marcus' mysterious colleague following him, a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach and no clear idea of just what he intended to do.

They had been halfway through the parking lot before the assembled two-wheeled crusaders of the World Naked Bike Ride began catching up to a certain set of facts: that they were moving too fast to be grooving to the sounds of Bob Marley's "Is This Love;" that they were who they were (the crossed hammers tattoo on Cami's left hip might have helped); that they were completely naked save for their footwear -- candid glimpses of their puffy pink pussies causing more than a few crashes in their wake -- and that they were riding suspiciously familiar-looking wheels.

By the time that last had sunk in with the assembled throng, they were almost through. Lennie's heart was already racing to beat the band: and it kicked into higher gear yet when the building hubbub of "WTF" behind them suddenly resolved into the outraged screams of two feminine voices. Risking a glance over her shoulder, Lennie saw a pair of dreadlocked cuties she'd only noticed out of the corner of her eye earlier -- presumably friends, or more-than-friends, of the unconscious hunks now lying in the courtyard yonder. The girls were leaning into their handlebars like sun-kissed topless Furies armoured in body-paint; they came fast, their various friends and companions still milling in confusion behind them.

"We got company!" Lennie shouted.

Cami looked back and grinned fiercely. "Then let's show those bitches how we ride!" And shifting to a higher gear, the blonde had let loose, with Lennie -- and the Twin Furies of Hipsterdom -- racing to catch up.

This race wasn't quite the mismatch that Cami's confidence had made it sound. Frankly, the hipster babes were in pretty damned good shape, and were apparently not the worse for multiple beers and a bout of recent vigorous fucking under the sun. They also seemed to have no little amount of adrenaline to spare, no doubt on account of being hot on the naked tails of the two skingirls they'd just seen seducing their boytoys minutes before.

That said, Cami and Lennie had the advantage of them in sheer recklessness, which counted for a lot as they went careening out onto the streets of Blossomville. Weaving in and out of traffic, the pair of them had swerved three times into the westward-bound oncoming lane -- and narrowly missed being splattered twice -- before their pursuers finally decided they were too crazy to keep chasing and turned back. When Team Slammerskin realized that their status as unofficial badass addition to the World Naked Bike Ride roster was finally unchallenged, they shared a loud whoop. Cami even flipped a celebratory bird at a plump Indian woman on the sidewalk, scrambling to cover the eyes of her son as they rode past, favouring her with a yawp of triumph: "Slammerskins forever, forever Slammerskins, WHOOOOOHHH!"

Having seen her life flash before her eyes several times in the last couple of minutes, Lennie at this point was laughing along out of sheer relief. It was as they swung north along Columbia Road that she realized something.

"Hey Cami," she shouted. "We going where I think we're going?"

"Fucking A!" Cami shouted back, flipping off one of the many passing cars that was honking its horn at her splendidly nude form in either outrage or approval, it was impossible to tell. "All-American, baby!"

One more time, Lennie felt caution twitching in her guts, but the momentum and the adrenaline were on Cami's side. Nevertheless, the small detail that both of them had been lifetime-banned from the All-American Mall after the last time compelled her to ask, for form's sake: "You sure?"

"Sure I'm sure!" Cami said. "Streaking the mall, how have we not done it before, it's gonna be fucking epic!"

Lennie had laughed along and followed, and though caution had kept squirming inside her -- serving up the face of that Jewish shop-keeper a couple years back when Cami and her boyfriend Eoin had tipped over his displays and yelled abuse at him and called him a kike, recalling the way the security guards who'd ejected and banned them had warned darkly that they were "getting off easy," and above all remembering the whispered stories among girls at school of monsters dwelling in the basement -- she'd ignored it. It simply couldn't compete with the cocktail of endorphins and adrenaline buoying her up.

The world was a blur of gawping faces and honking horns around them, and the high of being alive and beautiful and naked with the wind whipping through her Chelsea after a death-defying ride was too potent to let anything drag the moment down. All was right and good.

Time flashed by in fast-forward. Pretty soon they were bombing through the Mall's parking lot, thrilling to the yells of outrage as they waggled their hot asses at families of fat tourists, laughing at the slack jaws on all the teenaged boys. As they came up to the doors, she and Cami were the next best thing to Valkyries, soaring and invincible, capable of doing no wrong.

Of course they hadn't realized that Mall Security was already buzzing about their antics before they hit the doors. The first real hint of the hot reception they were about to get were the security guards already there to try to intercept them at the south entrance: a pair of fat old men who'd plainly been selected for the task in hopes of their sheer girth getting the job done. But the breadth of the Mall's auto-opening doors, along with the constant foot traffic and the milling confusion of onlookers torn between being appalled, amused and fascinated had wound up working in the girls' favour; the guards had wound up stumbling over and around gawkers as the girls circled back once, then twice, then made a charge for a fortuitous gap on their third try...

... and just like that, they were in! Officially streaking the All-American Mall.

At first it was like being cats set among the pigeons. The inchoate instinctive urge they'd had to streak right through the ground-level concourse got derailed by the ease of outraging the Mall's usual clientele -- something they'd always been more than able to do fully clothed, and that was ten times easier when you could ride up to a slack-jawed family, flash your naked ass and spank it with a knowing wink and then ride off again. Or, conversely, shake your tits at them and then take off with a parting "fuck you!" Seeing the assortment of pear-shaped middle-aged fathers trying to suppress their fascination at the graphic views they were granted in the process made every flash the more precious.

But then Lennie caught sight of them. A pair of all-too-young six foot bruisers with short hair gelled into perfect stasis, wearing black uniforms and sporting an assortment of tools at their belts that mall security guards, in the natural order of things, shouldn't have: batons and pepper spray and handcuffs and what looked suspiciously like tasers. As Cami and Lennie were whirling around the concourse in the quest for maximum public offensiveness, the two blank-faced youths seemed to appear out of nowhere, charging them at an almost unearthly pace. It was as if the mall had been keeping clones of marathon runners in underground tanks somewhere as a reserve. She had barely spotted the first one before he was almost on her; she swerved away from him just in time as he made a grab for her handlebars.

"Cami!" she yelled, pumping her pedals frantically as she switched modes from "cat" to "mouse," focusing every muscle in her body on escape. She could hear the boots hammering away behind her, astonishingly close to keeping pace as she did her level best to pull away and leave him in her dust.

What happened next came so fast that she had to reconstruct it in her memories later, working out what had occurred and in what order. Sharp wasp-stings of pain blooming out from a pair of pin-pricks in her soft rump, the world slowing into a bubble of surprise... and then everything going white as a Thor-worthy thunderbolt arced through her naked flesh and every muscle in her body went into an agonizing spasm all at once.

She was barely aware of the bike skittering away underneath her as she hit the ground. Rolling, rolling, rolling, the world whirling around her like a demented top.

As she came to a stop she was aware, curiously, of the sensation of drool wetting her chin and then of her bladder releasing, a pool of hot, rancid urine spreading underneath her. Aware and acutely embarrassed, and it was the embarrassment that motivated her to try to find her feet, to continue a getaway some part of her knew was already doomed.

Lennie desperately signalled her arms and legs and vocal chords to work, but they were all suddenly out at lunch, the lazy bastards, completely detached from her brain. She had the curiously novel sense of her bones somehow heating her from within as she flopped around helpless, a wayward Valkyrie felled by the divine commandment of a spotty-faced kid wearing too much product in his hair. She saw one of her pursuer's boots stamp down on the smooth, bright faux-marble tiles in her field of vision. She croaked at it like a felled crow trying to warn off a predator.

Cami! she was still shouting on the inside as the world kept reeling around her and her limbs kept right on mocking her attempts to command them. Cami! HELP!

The All-American Mall was just what the doctor ordered for burning off the frustration of having to cut off Cami's earlier encounter with that hipster's delicious body and wandering, nimble hands. It was release, powerful and glorious; she swore she could even feel her cunt getting wetter each time she flashed someone, never mind with each time she'd managed to cheat death en route to this destined-to-be-legendary escapade.

Lennie's warning shout had seemed to come from a distance as Cami winged across the shining concourse, hawking up a gobbet of spit and lobbing it at a brown-skinned guy whose sharp features shouted "raghead" to her Slammerskin-trained brain, her ultimate target a snobbish jewelry store which in her estimation had gone far too long without getting a candid look at her sexy nethers.

But then she'd heard the loud clatter and scrape of a bike flying out of control along the floor. And she'd looked back and seen Lennie on the ground with some weird-assed gel-haired psycho standing over her... and another one, stamped from the same mould, pounding his way toward her like a man possessed.

Fight-or-flight kicked in. In Cami's case, particularly as regarded her best friend's welfare, the reflex could have simply been renamed "fight." Her vision went red as she braked to a savage halt, spun the bike around and bared her teeth in a feral grimace as she pedalled furiously straight at her would-be assailant. She saw his stride falter as he saw her coming for him, saw him try to shift his stance belatedly to protect himself, but it was too late.

Cami kicked free of the bike and sent it flying at him, hearing a satisfying "Whhuuughhh!" as the hurtling frame plowed straight into his ribs. Even as it was happening she was diving, rolling, climbing to her feet and hurtling toward the second one... the bastard who was standing smugly over her friend with a taser in his hand and a look on his face as if he'd just caught the ultimate terrorist.

Her breasts bouncing and her firms thigh pumping, the gorgeous blonde skingirl pelted straight at him. Too late, he sensed her, turned, tried to unlimber the baton from his belt.

You didn't get to be a top-grade bootgirl by waiting around for people to take potshots at you, and she didn't give him the time. As she drew up close to him, she crouched and then thundered her steel-toed right-hand boot directly into his crotch, with every muscle in her body torquing into the blow. His features went abruptly pale as her steel toe found its mark in the softest part of his anatomy, his face contorting into a silent yowl of agony as he want down like a stone.

Grabbing the taser's handle and yanking the needles free, Cami was grabbing at her friend's hand even as the assembled crowd of gawkers was "Oooh"-ing with sympathy at the agonized thrashing of the security guard she'd just dropped. "Come on, Len!" she was shouting: "Come on, it's time to go! Get up! Get up!"

But her adorable bestie was dead weight, her eyes glazed and looking out at a world they barely seemed to understand was even there. Real fear sent shards of ice through Cami's innards and turned her guts to water as she met that gaze and realized she might have to actually carry Lennie out of the mall -- a feat that wouldn't be easy with the entire local security force coming down on them.

Then instinct -- and the heavy tramp of approaching boots -- alerted her to the latest arrival. Still yanking on Lennie's arm, she turned and saw him... and the fear got a lot worse.

He was a big guy. A big black guy, in the same uniform as his fellows but far more feral and menacing, corded with muscle and steaming at her like a freight train. But it wasn't just his mass or his colour that sent the dread through her and turned the air in her lungs to ice. It was his eyes: full of a cold, murderous, amoral rage that she'd only ever before seen in the eyes of two men. One had been her father, when he got angry or drunk enough to take off his belt; the other had been her boyfriend Eoin, on any occasion when he'd decided to go past just messing with some poor bastard and decided to straight-up stomp them into paste. It was precisely the same look: pitiless. Vicious. All negotiations and all appeals rejected in advance.

Fight-or-flight kicked in again, this time decidedly favouring "flight," every atom of her instinctively quailing away from the oncoming juggernaut. But the response came too slow; as she dropped Lennie's arm and staggered backward, her arms couldn't lift fast enough to ward off the open-handed slap that cannoned into her right cheek, snapping her head around and sending her spinning to the ground, belatedly realizing that the high, frightened scream echoing in her ears was her own.

Tears flooded her eyes as the world reeled sickeningly around her. She was still trying to scramble back to her feet -- every instinct shrieking run! -- when his boot hammered into her belly.

"UUUUGHHHH!" She dropped, folding around the pain in her midsection, her diaphraghm spasming with the futile effort to draw in oxygen as stars exploded in her vision and she floundered on the cold floor.