For May 17th, 2004
Amber
Amber put the pedal of her red and black Subaru Impreza to the metal, blazing down the Interstate like a comet, single-minded toward one mission: escape. For now. The Deadly Boston Terrier Assassination Squad was closing in, and those despicable demons would choke on the exhaust of her hellfire before she'd be a pawn for them again.
How many more teeth of theirs would she have on her necklace before the day was done? More, she guessed, if only they were better about oral hygiene. Seriously, some of those bastards were downright gross. She only collected the shiny ones, and those were few. Far between. Gapped, even. The broken ones weren't even a consideration, and how many of those had she discarded this week, alone?
The California sun bleached all beneath its painfully vigilant rays. High noon and hardship beckoned, and still she drove on. She was wise to have had that second gas tank installed, she mused, and she wondered if she could remember the last time it rained. Last Wednesday? Last Christmas? Last year? In any case, she wouldn't have to refuel for quite a while, and The Deadly Boston Terrier Assassination Squad was more of a worry than the chance of a few spare raindrops messing up her carefully-coifed hairdo, anyway.
She thought she'd lost them back in Palmdale, but it was hard to tell. Their craft was stealth, and as good as she was at evasion, she knew it was usually hard to tell how far away they really were until it was almost too late. Almost. She shuffled her necklace like a rosary, its "beads" rustling as a reminder that she was not, after all, powerless against their onslaught. But an enemy seen was better than an enemy unseen, so she felt her worrying to be valid.
Ah! On the horizon! It was Baron Beastly, the second coming of Christian Bale in a shiny black vinyl trenchcoat, topped by an officer's cap decorated with death's head representations of former enemies long-since (and not-so-long-since) vanquished. Her mind's eye saw him peering through his monocle -- grinning in a manner most sinister -- in pursuit of her, his imagined prey.
She slowed, slightly. In spite of her need to leave The Deadly Boston Terrier Assassination Squad in the dust, she couldn't resist a challenge. Especially when the villain next in line was so damned beautiful...
Amber had come a long way from her days of modeling for a colorful variety of Web sites like eroticBPM and Burning Angel; now she had her own site: Amber's Playground. All of this, of course, was a front to distract the casual observer from the fact that she was a deadly secret agent in league with a dozen global underground societies. On whose side was Amber, today? Baron Beastly was about to find out, and she hoped he'd been to the dentist recently...
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