Chapter 7

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"Has there been any news from the agents?" asked Mrs Black, tapping her overlong fingernails
against the desk with a clicking sound.
"No ma'am. Reports indicate that the house collapsed." said the kneeling messenger, nervously.
"The targets car was seen leaving the area moments later."
"I see. Then they are dead."
The messenger was silent. Black gave a dismissive flick of her hand, and he rushed out of the
room gratefully.
"You have something to say, Sarah?"
"No, Mrs Black," said Sarah from the shadows in the corner, bowing her head slightly. Three
sharp red scars glowed on her left cheek, gouged by Miranda's fingernails when she hit her after
her last failure.
"Speak, Sarah. Silence does you no favours."
Sarah was silent for a few moments, the only sound in the dark room that of Mrs Black tapping
her fingernails. "She will come after us now."
"What of it? Do you seriously think she can get to us here? These are our headquarters, our base
of operations. And besides... how would she find us? None but us know of this location."
"It would not do to underestimate her, Mrs Black," said Sarah, narrowing her eyes.
Black's tapping stopped. "Indeed. You know that first hand, don't you Sarah?"
Sarah was silent again. She dared not respond. The tapping resumed. "We will increase
defences and divert extra energy to subliminal mind-control. Anyone who enters this building will
become our mind-slave. We are too close to be stopped. You are dismissed."
Sarah bowed. "Thank you, Mrs Black," she said, turning to leave.
"One last thing, Sarah," said Black. Sarah paused at the door, listening. "Let me know when Peter
Gunn gets in. I need to speak with him about recent failures. I fear it is a conversation he..."
Miranda's teeth glowed as she bared them in a savage smile, the first sign of emotion Sarah had
seen from her. "...will not enjoy."
"Yes ma'am."

Night had fallen. Leona crouched in the bushes, adjusting the focus on her night-vision
binoculars. The cold wind had picked up, and seemed to blow straight through the long black coat
she had retrieved from her car. The car itself was stashed in the thicket behind her, surround by
makeshift camoflage. She looked over the dark plain at the building she had found at Brian's co-
ordinates. She had passed it before, but never given it more than a cursory glance.
"So that's their home base," she muttered to herself. "In retrospect, why the hell didn't I work that
out sooner?"
Even at this time, the creation museum was lit up like a Christmas tree, a simile that seemed
fitting if a little tacky to the author. The life-sized plastic dinosaurs out front looked somewhat less
jolly in this light. They seemed to have very few customers: she wasn't surprised. This museum
wasn't meant to be taken seriously: it was cover for something far more sinister.
Well, okay, moderately more sinister.
Leona traced the paths of the armed guards patrolling the grounds and car-park, their faceless
helmets, Kevlar body-armour and automatic weapons belying the nature of the supposedly
peaceful museum. The small mounds of freshly turned dirt all over the plain were also noticeable
to the trained eye, and could only be one thing. The question was, why would a museum need a
mine field?
Mines and guards. She'd expected worse. They were either suicidally overconfident or, more
likely, had never expected to be found.
She looked at the car. This was going to be fun.

The sergeant reached the end of his patrol path, and turned back to walk it again for the eighty-
seventh time. He was bored out of his wits but he had to admit, however grudgingly, that he was
lucky to be alive. He had been a captain during the crazy woman’s last attack on the pregnancy
centre. She had caught him off guard and strung him upside-down in a tree. When Sarah had
found him, he had been demoted and put on patrol duty.
Oh well, it wasn't so bad. At least he wouldn't see her again. Nobody knew about this location.
Even he and his fellow guards weren't entirely sure where it was.
This was weird, now that he came to think about it. He wondered why he'd never...
... was that a car engine?
Why the hell was there a car coming out of the forest at high speed? The entrance road was on
the other side of the building...
Oh shit.
The private next to him raised his weapon, but he put a hand on it and pushed it down.
"The minefield will take care of it," he said, his voice betraying a note of panic. "Besides, I doubt
she's in it. She wouldn't risk-"
His sentence was cut of by a dull but incredibly loud 'whump', and the ground erupted under the
car. The machine, totally destroyed, flew into the air over their heads, tumbling down towards
them. The sergeant pushed his colleague out of the way and dived to the side himself.
For a moment a female figure was outlined against the moon as she leapt from the roof of the car
in a perfect swan dive.
And the car smashed viciously into the ground exactly where the sergeant had been standing.
Leona landed, rolling into an upright stance. Behind her, the car erupted in a fiery gas explosion,
illuminating the area with orange light and blowing Leona's long hair in front of her face
dramatically as she strode away from it.
Stunned, the sergeant grabbed at his gun and frantically pointed it at her. He received an elbow
to the face for his trouble, knocking him unconscious.
The remaining guards ran around the corner, and stared in shock at the burning car, looking as if
it had been driven vertically into the ground, and the woman in front of it. Leona glared at them,
and cracked her knuckles as the gusting wind whipped her long coat and hair about her.
"Who's first?"
The man in front raised his eyebrow. "Uuh.. we surrender?"

Leona dusted her hands as she walked towards the Museum's well-lit main entrance.
"Well that was easy," she said in satisfaction.* She noticed a security camera turning to watch her
as she walked past, and glared into it, lifting the gun she had retrieved from one of the guards
towards it. "I'm coming for you, Black."
The camera exploded under a short hail of bullets.
She glanced at the plastic dinosaurs as she walked past them towards the entrance, and shook
her head. So tacky.
Although the saddle on the triceratops was surprisingly tempting.
She checked the entrance of the building for defences. There wasn't any, so she went to step into
the building...
... and stopped as she heard a noise behind her. But there was nothing behind her except...
"Oh, you have got to be kidding me."
She spun. The dinosaurs were moving. The triceratops moved back as the tyrannosaur stepped
in front of her, lowering it's head and baring sharp metallic teeth. The movements were jerky and
independent of each other, but they were also fast and precise.
She dived to the side as the giant robot charged, biting at the spot she had occupied only a
moment before. Bringing her weapon to bear she opened fire on the side of it's head, the thin
scars revealing that underneath a thin plastic coating was shiny metal. Her bullets had little effect,
and the machine lunged at her again.
Sliding under it's legs, Leona remembered the under-barrel grenade launcher the author is now
blatantly ret-conning into the story, and fired one at it's head as it turned. The resulting explosion
tore off the side of its face, revealing more chromed metal and a red ocular sensor underneath
the cosmetic eye.
She focussed fire on the red-light and was rewarded when it shattered and dimmed. The machine
roared, trying to turn towards her.
A noise reminded her of the other dinosaur, and she turned just in time to see it fire it's three
horns harpoon-like at her. She ducked, and the horns thunked into the wall behind her. As the
robot ejected more spikes from some internal storage, and the t-rex turned around enough to get
her in sight again, she ran towards the triceratops. The spikes fired a second time as she vaulted
over it's head, smashing into the side of the T-Rex as she landed in the saddle.**
Forgetting it was a robot for a moment, she thunked her heels into the triceratops’s side and
shouted "Yah!" Unsurprisingly, nothing happened: the machine, unable to get at her, stopped
moving.
The T-Rex, on the other hand, opened its mouth wide, revealing a minigun not unlike those
normally mounted in attack helicopters. With a slowly increasing whine, the six barrels began
spinning.

"Fire!" shouted Sarah.

"Need to warm up the barrels ma'am!"
"I said fire! Kill her!"
"We can't until it's spinning fast enough, ma'am! Just a few more seconds!"
"Dammit, what's she doing?"

Leona frantically tore open the triceratops’s back, finding a mess of wires underneath the metal
panels. She tore at them, slamming her heels into it repeatedly and shouting madly.
"Yah! Go! Charge! Giddyup! Yip yip!"
Nothing happened.

"Ready to fire, Ma'am!"

"Then for god sake FIRE!"

Leona looked up into the barrel of the minigun, finally spinning at full speed.
"Well, fu-"
As she relaxed, one of the wires she had pulled out came into contact with another.
The minigun started firing, filling the area with shrapnel and bullets.
The air blurred.
There was a massive thump.
And out of the middle of the chaos flew the triceratops, surrounded by disembodied mechanical
parts, the creatures crest flared aggressively and it's eyes glowing bright-orange.
Behind it the Tyrannosaur, a gaping hole torn out of the middle of it where the triceratops had
leapt through it, stumbled awkwardly for a few moments before collapsing with a ground-cracking
thud.
It's large remaining eye glowed red for a moment, then dulled.
Leona, clinging tightly to the dinosaurs back, opened her eyes. Warily, she felt her body. All the
usual body parts seemed to be accounted for.
"I'm alive. Ha, well. That's a surprise," she muttered.
Patting the Triceratops on the head dazedly, she sat up and slowly fell off the side, face-planting
elegantly into the ground.
"Ow."

"Dammit!" shouted Sarah. "How can she still be alive?"

"You fret too much, Sarah," said Miranda, behind her. Sarah gasped in surprise, and bowed.
"But Ma'am-"
"My intention was never to kill her. She could be a valuable ally. And she's just about to enter the
building."
Sarah licked her lips nervously. "But ma'am, she was able to resist the mind control last time..."
Unexpectedly, Miranda slapped Sarah. Sarah stifled the urge to raise her hand to the new set of
stinging cuts on her face, and gritted her teeth. Miranda examined her fingernails, and spoke.
"That was field indoctrination. Sonic mind control requires perfect conditions, that we don't have
in the field. But this... this is a place designed to sap her free will, to take her ability to think... and
destroy it. Every corridor, every exhibit, focuses it into something overwhelming. It's not even
audible, but the moment she steps through that door... she is ours."
Sarah stared at her feet silently. She had always felt a dull horror when she considered the nature
of mind control, and had often wondered if Miranda was using it on her. She didn't think she was
but... how would she know?
Was the end worth the means?

Leona slowly got to her feet again, leaning against the triceratops. She glared at the wreckage of
the tyrannosaur and stood upright.
It was time to finish this. Black was going down.
She checked her weapon and strode to the entrance.
She went to step over the threshold...
"Leona, wait!"
Leona spun, and Peter Gunn found himself looking down the barrel of a grenade launcher.
"Please wait! Don't go in there! Just give me a chance! One chance!"
Leona resisted the urge to beat him up with a robotic triceratops. So did the author. Yes, he was
an annoying soppy little fundie ass, but maybe...
Maybe he was worth one chance.
"You have ten seconds," Leona said begrudgingly.
Peter's face lit up with hope.
"Miranda's calling card is mind control." he said, quickly. "She'll try to indoctrinate or convince you
to join us... I mean... to join her in any way she can. That was my mission: make you fall in love
with me and..."
"Yeah, 'cause that worked out so well," said Leona sarcastically, rolling her eyes.
"More than you know. Meeting you, it... it broke through her mind control. I... Leona, I..." he
stuttered nervously. He glanced at his feet, then looked up again determinedly. There was a
pause as they stared into each other's eyes. "I love you Leona. I think my love for you broke me
free of her control."
"Or I damaged your brain with that nuclear warhead," Leona said thoughtfully.
"Also possible," he conceded. "Where the hell did you get that anyway?"
"I always carry a disarmed nuclear warhead with me," she said, producing the referenced item
and putting it away again.
"Why?"
"A friend of mine suggested it. He said if I didn't then eventually then I'd be caught out, and then
I'd find myself thinking "now why didn't I bring my disarmed nuclear warhead today?""
"That's... weird..."
"Yes, but true. You don't ever want to find yourself in a situation where you're thinking that."
"Well, I suppose that's true enough, but only because..." Peter shook his head as if to dislodge
the thought. "But that's not the point. The point is... well, the point is, what Mrs Black is doing is
evil. She needs to be stopped. I want to help."
"You're the guy that gets beaten up by everyone. How could you possibly help me?"
"You were about to step over the threshold into the museum?"
"Yes, of course."
"If you do that, you will be instantly mind controlled. This place is a temple to indoctrination."
"I know that."
"I meant literally."
"Oh," Leona looked thoughtful. "I see. So what do you think I should do?"
"I... don't know. I can't think of anything."
"Load of help you are. Well, if I know it's coming and know what to expect from last time, maybe I
can resist it."
"I don't think that's..."
"Any other ideas? The longer we wait, the more time they've got to prepare."
Peter looked at his feet. "No."
"Then I'm doing it. If this doesn't work, run."
"You think you'd try to kill me if you were indoctrinated?"
"Trust me; I'm having trouble not killing you now."
She narrowed her eyes, and with Peter looking on swung her foot over the doors threshold and
stepped into the museum.

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Will Leona become a mindless slave? Will Peter Gunn actually become plot relevant, or will he
simply be put through an elaborate and extremely embarrassing death sequence to make up for
how irredeemably annoying the character is? Is Sarah indoctrinated by Miranda Black, or is she
just a natural minion? Is there a whole bunch of hidden Chekov's Gun's ready to fire for the final
chapter, or is the author just planning on going on a massive ret-con spree? Is the author capable
of subtlety, or does he have to lampshade everything he does? Is the epic climax ever going to
be written, and if it is will it be epic, or indeed climactic? Is this sequence of questions ever going
to end, or will one of the characters have to physically drag the author away from the keyboa

Hey, maybe I'll drown him in a toilet, that sounds like fun...

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* You'll have to decide for yourself if she beat the crap out of them or let them run away.
** Oh c'mon, if you didn't see this one coming there's no helping you.