The Hell With Earthside: A Novella (STRYDER'S HORIZON Book 1) by Daniel J. Kirk Page B

real wrath.”
    “This better work. I don’t believe the Dessup will let you trick them twice,” Alice said.
    Davis nodded. “I believe in Kimberley Stryder.”

16. NOT TO BE HUNG ON WALLS
     
    Let me paint the picture.
    All around us were flickering strobe lights. Orange, blue, green and red depending on which corner you stood in. There was a pulsing beat that both Alice’s sense of sound and my own found rather vile and unnatural. It was actually welcomed since it brought my agitation to a level where I might start killing the of ficers around me if the Dessup Gang didn’t turn up soon.
    Some idiot danced in the DJ booth like he was the only source of entertainment for the night. He was dressed like Frankenstein’s monster, but moved more like a jackass.
    Most of the other officers were disguised as famous politicians who were all very scary in their own right. There were a couple of renditions of vampires, including Alice’s.
    She’d been scratching the fishnet stockings out of her crotch for an hour straig ht. She was decked out in black, including a wig of straight black hair, and blacked out eyes. Her lips and chin were coated in bright red, while the rest of her skin had been painted a pale blue.
    She stood with her ass up against our costumed drill-runners. I was sure our gunmen, Clancy and Dent were enthralle d by her thinly veiled rear-end posed right in front of the targeting camera.
    “The things we do to get to kill some Dessup,” she muttered after I had asked her to repeat it. I doubt it carried through the racket they claimed was music, but I shuddered as I thought the Dessup might still be listening in.
    They might’ve recognized it was a trap anyways, because while I painted the picture of the gyrating DJ, the rest of the officers stood around like it was a social business meeting. They paired off into a couple of conversations here and there. There was no unchecked depravity, no loss of inhibitions. Alice and I weren’t helping the scene standing impatiently next to two giant black banshees, with jagged black wings and terrifying white skulls forever composed in screams. I wondered if our drill-runners felt as stupid as we did.
    What was I wearing?
    I was dressed like some nurse who would’ve caught infection on her first day in a hospital. If my breasts got any higher I wouldn’t be able to see over them. I could complain about the corset or the heels or the fake surgical knives glued to my neck and shoulder, or the stage blood leaking down my cleavage, but then it would sound like I didn’t want to kill the Dessup.
    Besides I kind of liked the insanity of the get up. I was starting to feel like the deranged un-killable nurse. What was her back-story? Something horrible happened to her, maybe she was picked on by her patients. Came back and haunted some hospital punishing the injured and ill.
    No.
    She had a brother once. A future too, her parents had helped her attain it, and now her brother was going to help her repay their parents.
    They uploaded the check to their account.
    Went to the bad part of town where the most fun could be had. It was her idea. She was so young and excited to experience everything, to know what it was like, to pass judgment based on her knowledge versus what other people had told her.
    Her brother was game. He was her little brother. He looked up to her. He wanted to protect her as much as she had protected him as they’d grown.
    There were sounds better classified as music that night. The whole drilling company was leaving the planet. It was one last hurrah for many who would never set foot on that planet again, for others, like that stupid girl and her brother, it was the last time they’d really have to work. They’d made enough to cultivate this new planet into a home.
    Oh, that stupid girl.
    It was easier for her to drive fast. Pay attention to the road. Forget about the past that she could never really run from. The past that finally had her dressed up