A WolfPack's Epilogue

You sometimes hear about the psychological fitness tests that Nuclear Submarine captains have to pass, because of the destructive power put into their hands. The same goes for Strikers. We're damn near immune to conventional weaponry, and the special gear and powers that only we use can cause a lot of damage in the wrong hands. There were failsafes, but no system is ever perfect.

Every role on your typical striker team -- Leader, Gunner, Tank, Cavalry, Support -- has a unique set of powers and gear on top of the standard D-Flux superhuman upgrade. But in recent years, they've devised a sixth role... the Overclocked. These Strikers dish out more raw damage than anyone else, and often have some crazy-useful tricks up their sleeve... but the trade-off is that their Infusion is unstable. Overclocks don't typically have long careers as Reservists, as their powers generally fade away in less than a year. That's also why most teams don't deploy their Overclocked member until after the team's established a solid threat assessment on their Incursion, a reinforcement saved for when they really need it.

So more than any other type of Striker, the Overclocked get psych tests upon psych tests -- because the candle that burns twice as hot and twice as fast, is also twice as deadly if that power gets into the wrong hands. I'd suspected a long time ago that that something went wrong in the evaluation process for D.J. Carter, and less than a month after Baron Khopesh's final defeat, I was proven right in the most horrifying way possible.

His arm was wrapped around the teacher's neck, his plasma plex-pistol to her head, his hands shaking like a leaf in a tornado. A dozen children huddled against the wall behind me, too terrified to move, for fear that they'd join their classmate, who was slowly bleeding to death on the floor in front of them after D.J. had stabbed the kid in the gut. I had to finish this fast.

D.J. was in full armor, and it would've been suicide for me to face him without doing the same myself -- but even then, that sidearm of his could probably punch right through my defensive screens and armor, if he put enough power into his shot. I had to handle this very, very carefully.

"Oh, I think I do, Red. I need this. I need this bitch dead, I need YOU dead, I need this entire school nuked until it glows, and... I need a war. I'm nothing without my war, you perfect bastard. You TOOK MY WAR FROM ME. So now I've made a new one. Nothing you can fucking do about it, Red. Not a goddamn thing. This bitch hurt me. This school hurt me. YOU hurt me. So now I hurt you back. Nothing can hurt me anymore, you hear me? YOU HEAR ME?!"

I stood alone before him. Roland was in California. Takeshi was in New York. I had no idea where Chang-Ying had gone off to after we'd officially disbanded. Melissa... was going to be trapped in a hospital bed for... God alone knew how long. Maybe forever. Strike Force Brickyard was already en route from Indianapolis and would be here in ten minutes, but the kid on the floor didn't have that long. And none of the other Striker teams or reservists were anywhere close enough when the call had gone out that D.J. had attacked a school. And sad to say, none of the cops surrounding the building had anything that would even slow a rogue Striker down. Much to Plex's horror, the remote override signal Striker Field Control had sent hadn't worked -- D.J. must have hacked it somehow. It was up to me. "I hear you, Green. But hey... that teacher..."

"DORIS. DORIS FUCKING BLEEKER! She's to blame! She emasculated me!"

I glanced at the poor terrified young woman. She was about Green's age, so maybe they'd gone to school here together or something. I had no idea if this was even who D.J. thought she was, or if he had just gone completely delusional. "Maybe she did, Green. But she definitely can't hurt you now. I mean, you're a Striker now! You're powerful, handsome, famous..."

"FAMOUS FOR BEING A FAILURE! FUCK YOU!"

Shit. "That's not true, Green! You defeated Countess Trebuchet all by yourself, remember? She was going to level downtown Chicago, but you stopped her when the rest of us couldn't! You! And the city loved you for it! I hear they still sell the Wolfpack Green Combo at Mister Beef, your favorite restaurant, right?" Well, not after today, they wouldn't.

"Loved. LOVED. PAST FUCKING TENSE! I FUCKED UP, RED! YOU KNOW IT BETTER THAN ANYONE!"

My fingers clenched. He wasn't wrong.

His helmet dissolved at his mental command, and he stared at me with a twisted expression of fear and self-loathing, his eyes wide and shaking. "LOOK AT ME! I DISOBEYED ORDERS! I WAS A BAD SOLDIER! I... I GOT YELLOW CRIPPLED! SHE'S PISSING HERSELF AND SHITTING HERSELF, TRAPPED IN A BED FOR THE REST OF HER LIFE AND IT'S ALL MY FAULT! I MAY AS WELL HAVE JUST KILLED HER!" He swung the gun away from the teacher's head, and right at me, the barrel taking on an ominous glow. "Is that what I have to do? After I kill you, I'll find Melissa, and I'll put her out of her misery! Will they love me again if I do that?" With no warning, the gun went right back to his hostage's head. "DORIS NEVER LOVED ME! I WAS NICE AND KIND ALL THROUGh SCHOOL! I LISTENED AND I BROUGHT HER FLOWERS, BUT SHE NEVER PICKED ME! SHE BLEW CHAD GORMAN IN THE LOCKER ROOM WHEN SHE THOUGHT NO ONE WAS LOOKING, BUT SHE NEVER TOUCHED ME!!!!"

His hostage's voice was understandably desperate. "I'm sorry, D.J., I'm sorry, I'm sorry.... Just don't hurt any more of my kids, okay?" The teacher was sweating a river, and I was doing much the same inside my helmet. "I know our classmates weren't very nice to you, and I'm really sorry that your time here was so bad when we were kids... but you didn't need to stab Richie! He's only thirteen! He'd never even met you!"

"SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!" He pressed the plasma barrel hard right above her eye, and she was silent save for a low whimper. "You shut your lying whore mouth, Doris. You had your chance to love a real man, and you blew it when you blew that fucking CHAD instead of me!"

I held up my open hands, palm out, to reinforce that I wasn't holding my own plasma sidearm. "D.J., please. Shooting Doris isn't going to solve this. If anything, it'll just make it worse. If you walk away from this with me, we can try to make it right, okay?"

"SHUT IT, RED! You always had it all figured out! You weren't even a real soldier, but you were Sandow's favorite from the moment you showed up at Striker training! You were balls-deep in Melissa every night before we even FINISHED training, while Chang-Ying never even fucking looked at me! Even the goddamn ALIEN women wanted to fuck you! YOU, the weak cuck who couldn't make the hard decisions that a REAL MAN had to make in times of war!" His hand shook and the gun swung back to me, the barrel suddenly ablaze with a severely overclocked firing charge. "JUST FUCKING DIE ALREADY!"

"NO!!!"

The next moment went by in slow-motion for me. From out of nowhere, Wing Chang-Ying, Wolfpack White, leapt forward as she called out. I'd had no idea she was even in this state, much less in the room with us. Her stealth-field dissolved as she reached for D.J.'s firing arm, but he pulled the trigger before she could reach him. She was between us when his gun went off, and I saw her back, just below her right shoulder, explode outward in a shower of blood and tissue, splattering my face and chest in red.

I heard myself roar with rage, and D.J.'s face twisted in terror as I lunged. The poor teacher had somehow had the presence of mind to slip his grasp when he'd fired on me, and thus was clear when my hand closed around Wolfpack Green's naked throat. Charging forward, I rammed him through the brick wall and into the parking lot onto his back, where I knelt on top of him, one hand around his neck, the other pinning his wrist and sidearm. Surrounded by policemen with weapons drawn.

"Time... time to make the hard call, leader." I squeezed, and D.J. gasped, but kept talking. "If you don't kill me, right here, right now, I will kill you just like I killed White, the Principal, and everyone in the Principal's office! I'll kill all these cops. I'll kill every last child in this CITY. And then I'll kill Melissa, right after I show her your severed head. But you're SOFT. You're not a real man. You never made the hard decisions, not once, not ever, because you were AFRAID. So what are you gonna do, Red? Harrison Halloway, Wolfpack Red. KILL ME OR I KILL YOU! RIGHT NOW!"

At that moment, his entire body took on a sickly green glow, and my heads-up display lit up with status warnings about his energy levels rising to catastrophic levels, my defensive screens eroding under that glow... His skin started to pulse with a blazing green fire, and he let out a horrifying laugh of triumph.

I wasted no more words on him. I crushed his throat in my gloved left hand, his neck and spine crumbling like stale crackers in my superhuman grip. And with another guttural roar, my right arm reared back, and as I remembered Melissa crumpling to the ground paralyzed because of D.J.'s idiocy, my fist came down through the center of his exposed forehead with every last ounce of strength I had. His head exploded, showering me with even more horrors, the green fire immediately died out... and I looked up.

Twenty cops surrounded me, I was looking down the barrel of twenty police sidearms, and a camera crew was less than twenty-five feet away, recording everything I'd just done. I pointed behind me, to the hole I'd just made in the school building's wall. "MOVE IT, people! There's wounded in there! Get the medics!" Without waiting for a response, I got up from D.J. Carter's corpse, and ran back into the classroom. Much to my relief, Chang-Ying was conscious, turning that amazing healing ray on her own open wound.

She looked up, wincing, blood bubbling from her lips. "Lost my right lung. But it's stabilizing. I'll grow it back." She nodded in the direction of the child D.J. had stabbed just before I'd arrived. "He'll be okay. Stopped his bleeding with the ray while you had Green distracted. Fuck, this hurts. Is the asshole down, Boss-man?"

I wiped what I could only imagine where bits of D.J.'s skull and brain off my visor, and flicked it onto the floor. "Yeah. Good job, Chang-Ying. It's over." I slumped to the ground, sitting back against the teacher's desk, and let the tears fall quietly inside my helmet. "It's over."

***

PRESENT DAY

I took a deep breath, and looked back to Melissa. "I know what you mean, hon. Sometimes I wonder if I could have done anything different then. If we'd somehow been able to realize how damaged D.J. was before things went too far. If he'd never been cleared for the Striker program to begin with. If, If, If." I rubbed my hands across my face. "But it did get to that point. I know the right thing to say would be that I regret killing him. But if I'm being perfectly honest with you... I don't. Your injury is on him, he'd already killed so many people that day, and... I killed him with hate in my heart. But in the end, I'm okay with that. It had to be done before he killed anyone else -- and I certainly don't think you should feel any guilt over being glad he can't hurt anyone anymore. He made his choices." I grimaced. "Back in a minute."

I stood up, and walked to the bathroom. I sat, did my business, cleaned up. Stood up, washed my hands very thoroughly, and then washed my face for good measure.

After I'd had to kill D.J. Carter, an investigation discovered that his uncle, a member of the Plex board of directors, had tampered with D.J.'s evaluation results, so that his favorite nephew could "be the hero he always wanted to be." The original evaluation eventually got found -- and that psychologist, had stated that in their opinion, D.J. should never be let anywhere near Striker Tech or any sort of infusion under any circumstances. That evaluator had been threatened into silence by that board member, but the truth eventually came out. Thankfully, Uncle Carter was now behind bars serving a long sentence without parole, and would likely die there. He deserves worse.

I looked at my dripping face in the mirror for a moment, and then raised a fist. "Are we good?" I looked into my reflection's eyes, and my face responded. "Yeah. We're cool. It's all good." I tapped my knuckles lightly against the mirror, giving myself a fist-bump.

The doorbell rang.

I picked up the laptop, and walked to the front door. I opened it, and Ex-Baroness Naginata stood there, still wearing a white cable-knit sweater and bluejeans so tight that looked like they'd been painted on. Her long hair fluttered in the cold autumn wind, and my heart skipped a beat.

"Trick or Treat," she said with a shy smile. Not a look I would have expected from her, but people can change quite a bit in five years. No doubt she'd been through a lot.

I stepped back with a beckoning gesture. "Naginata. We're really glad you're here. Come on in."

An hour's conversation passed. She lived in Montgomery, about a twenty minute drive north of here, and used the name "Natasha Steele" now, her cover story being that she had immigrated here from Australia a few years back. Sandow had helped her get everything set up, and she still had to report in to a sort of parole officer every couple of weeks, but by and large, she was living a normal American life.

"I support myself by teaching Aikido now. It's close enough to Imperial Form Seven that I was able to earn high belt ranking in a matter of weeks, instructor credentials two months after that, and opened my own Dojo shortly afterwards. Madison, the woman you saw me with, lives just down the street. She's my best friend and business partner -- and a terror on the mat. You'd both like her, I'm sure." She cradled my computer in her lap, looking down fondly at Melissa's face. "I'm so glad to know that you're healing, Yellow. I couldn't face you, either of you, after what happened. I felt responsible." I reached out a hand, and she clasped it with a grateful smile.

"We know who was responsible, Naginata." Melissa's voice was soft, quiet. "They can't hurt any of us anymore. My grandfather always used to say, 'Outlive the Bastards', and we did exactly that."

Naginata cracked a smile, wiping away a tear. "Are you sure we're not sisters, noble one? My own grandfather said much the same. He was a man of great pride, and greater honor. At least he passed on peacefully in his own bed, never to see the depths to which the Throne descended to."

Another hour went by. We were sipping at two glasses of honey bourbon together on the sofa, Naginata sitting right against my side so we could both see the laptop screen at the same time. "Melissa, did your lover ever speak to you of how he won our final duel?"

"You know... no, it never came up." Melissa looked up, thinking back to that day. "By the time that duel was over, the rest of us had been in the fight of our lives deep under Lake Michigan, and we were all too tired for a detailed debriefing. I knew that he won, but not the particulars."

Naginata made a small giggle, a sound I never thought I'd hear from her. "'Debriefing'. Such a naughty-sounding word." She took another sip of her bourbon. "Harrison, tell the tale."

I wet my whistle as well, enjoying just a small taste. "After our fifth duel, I was completely at a loss as to how I'd ever defeat you, so I started casting around for... unconventional inspiration." I turned slightly in my seat to face Naginata, and she turned to face me as well, while staying in close contact, her long legs folded up underneath her. "There's an old legend on Earth, of a duellist named Sasaki Kojiro. He defeated many men with a secret sword technique that was said to be invincible."

Melissa smiled. "I remember when you were deep into that research and training mode back then, Harrison. You were so intense, so driven. Sexy as hell."

"It is his drive towards excellence that attracts us as well, dear Yellow. You're a fortunate woman." She rested her head on my shoulder, and took another sip. "Say on, my crimson warrior." I glanced down in worry at Naginata, and back to Melissa, a guilty look on my face -- but my fiance was smiling from ear to ear, and gave me a meaningful eye-waggle.

I continued. "Kojiro's technique was called 'Tsubame Gaeshi', or 'Swallowtail Reverse'. It was said to be unstoppable, until he faced Miyamoto Musashi, who overcame this trick by virtue of sheer brute force. But since brute force was never your style, Naginata, I thought, well, maybe this might be the edge I needed. So I dug deep to find out if the Tsubame Gaeshi was actually real -- and it turned out it was."

"He was magnificent, Melissa. A perfect act of cunning. He made a powerful downward slice that he stepped into, going all the way down to one knee, which would have been deadly if it had connected -- but it was never intended to. Instead, it was a masterful feint."

I nodded, lightly stroking Naginata's ebony hair. "Right. The idea behind Tsubame Gaeshi is that you look like you're over-extending, making a big overhead strike that leaves you vulnerable when it misses, drawing your opponent in."

"Whereupon he reversed the sword's direction while keeping its power and momentum, slicing upwards from below. Only my defensive screens and armor kept me from being cleft in twain, but the shock and force of his cut ended the duel in an instant. I could barely move afterwards. My allegiance was most fairly won." She snuggled in, the scent of her hair filling my senses just as much as her close warmth. "I'd never seen such mastery before -- or since." She turned to look up into my eyes. "I do hope you've not let your skills wither these last five years?" She handed me her empty glass, and I set it down on a nearby end table, next to mine.

I pushed an errant strand of hair out of her eyes. "I practice every day -- but it's not the same, without a sparring partner. Would be strange to say that I miss crossing swords with you?"

Naginata reached up, and slipped her hand behind my neck. "I beg you to forgive my sin," she said, and suddenly I was enveloped in her embrace. My lips parted, and her tongue danced with mine. Too shocked, too aroused, too starved to do anything else, I met her need with mine, and a kiss that lasted an eternity broke apart thirty seconds later, when guilt stabbed both of us through the heart deeper than any sword. We parted, staring at each other in horror, and then as one, we turned to the laptop, and Melissa's face. For a moment, I thought I felt my world shattering around me... until I looked into the smile of my fiance.

She was beaming. With joy. "Naginata," she said, "do you trust me?"

The other-dimensional ex-noblewoman's hands folded contritely in her lap, her shoulders slumped, and could only nod.

"Then believe me when I say that nothing would ease my heart more than to see you kiss him again. Kiss him for me. Kiss him *with* me. And Harrison?"

I nodded, my throat tight.

"I think she needs you as much as you need her. I think you're the most amazing man in any world, and that it's time you rewarded her masterfully-won allegiance." She indulged a playful giggle. "Run her through, our Crimson Warrior. Sheath your blade deep inside her... and give me the show of a lifetime. I've never wanted anything more than I want the two of you."

Eyes tearing with relief, Naginata gently picked up the laptop, set it on the coffee table in front of us, took a moment to adjust the angle of the monitor and camera to make sure Melissa's view was clear... and then she lunged for me.

This ravishing beauty staddled my lap, kissing me again and again, clutching at my shoulders... and suddenly I felt her hands grab the hem of my shirt, and pull it off me in one quick motion, tossing it aside as Melissa cheered. Before I could react, she leaned back just enough to lift away her soft and thick sweater, revealing those gorgeous pert breasts and that flawless skin with that amazing hint of alien blue... encased in a red satin bra. I caressed her curves, marveling in her smooth perfection, and she shivered in delight. "The color is no coincidence, my crimson beloved. For all these years, I've hungered to have red against my naked flesh." She practically ripped the thin garment off herself, and pressed herself to me as our third kiss left me gasping for air.