"Tales of the LadyCrow" by Ana Maria Salinas Norbakk

Chapter 1:

Crow in the dark.

Smogtiago, year 2058.

Night was falling, and there was not a single thing about that day, atleast for her, that could say that something terrible was about to happen. The weather had been nice, even thou many people would not qualify pouring rain to be nice, it was nice to Anita, she loved the rain.

The streets were empty, people very rarely left their houses after the sun disappeared in the horizon, a sight that had not been seen for many years now, not since the sky was burned by thousands of missiles that lifted a curtain of smoke that made a night last for 13 years before slowly dissipating into a soft twilight.

Anita was born a few years before the great dark came and she still remembered the sun, it was like a smile from the heavens she used to say. Now it was nothing but a soft smirk between the clouds that covered the city permanently, keeping it in a eternal winter.

Ah, the city. Many decades ago it was known as Santiago until some smartass decided that it was a way to antique name and re-baptised it, it’s name was now Smogtiago, a name well deserved as the city slept under a dense cape of greyish smog, so toxic that the first rain to fall whenever there was a storm was so acid that it burned bare skin. That was one of the reasons why Anita wore a leather trenchcoat, black and slick with humidity it seemed to shine like latex in the dying light coming from the street posts, the other reason was a more simple one, she liked it, as did she like her leather cap, black as night with one silver ornament right in the front, a small dreamcatcher. From under the cap a cascade of slightly reddish hair flowed down her back, bouncing slightly with each step she took.

Smogtiago had slowly fallen into lawlessness as the police force stayed only in the rich parts of the city, giving protection to the wealthy people, for a price. The rest of the population had learned to survive in a world of violence, it had become a dog eat dog world, people did never leave their houses after dark, when the city belonged to the gangs, the drug dealers and the prostitutes.

Yet Anita adventured out in the darkness almost every night, her need for roaming greater than her wish for security. Besides, she could take good care of herself. The sound of her boots echoed in the empty street, getting the attention of several pair of ears, a small gang.

There was sound of several running people as six or seven gang members moved to block the way of the walking woman. One of the gang members who’s name is unimportant leaned against a lamp post and spoke in a mocking voice. –Why in such a hurry pretty, pretty? Me and the guys here just wanted to invite you to a party. It is held right between your legs. And then you will take a walk with us because there is someone who is just dying to see you.- He grinned, showing that most of his teeth were missing, broken in fights most probably. The other members of the gang chuckled slightly as they slowly formed a circle around the woman, who for some odd reason didn’t seem at all worried, in fact she was smiling.

– Why should I want to go anywhere with you? – A sensuous voice filled the air, soft and smooth, yet with a rather dangerous undertone that made some of the men take a step back, away from her. The gang leader, stopped smiling at her insolent words snapped his fingers, making all the gang members take out their weapons from their hiding places, knives, clubs, lead pipes, everything that could cause extreme pain and killed slowly. –Don’t use that tone with me babe. Now, you can choose, you come the easy and relatively painfree way, or you got the hard and extremely painful way. It doesn’t matter to us you see.- He moved closer, a sharp knife in his hand. Anita lifted her head and looked at him, her green eyes seemed to glow in the dark as she smirked widly, the cold, metallic sound of a sword being drawn filled the air along with her words. – I choose... neither.- That smirk and the almost demonic eyes was the last thing he saw before his throat was slit open with a sword sharp enough to cut trough steel making him fall down on the ground making a gurgling sound, blood flowing from the wound and air wheezing from the open windpipe.

The rest of the gang saw their leader struggling on the ground and the bloody blade in the hand of the woman and decided that it was not worth it, turning around and fleeing.

Anita, known by many as The LadyCrow, tossed her hair away from her face then moved her right hand to her lips, licking the scarlet liquid away from the back as she smirked once more. – Idiot.- She sheeted her sword once more, hiding it in the trenchcoat before kicking the agonizing gang leader in the groin two times. – Don’t call me pretty, pretty. – She said to him as she walked away, leaving him to meet death and then the hunger of the thousands of stray dogs that invaded the city by night.

A few steps away a shadow freed itself from the darkness and trotted at her side. A dog, big as a foal and black as sin. The only friend of the LadyCrow in the hostile city, Aaron.

The steps of the LadyCrow led her towards the Bernardo O´Higgins park, a no go area for most people, yet she didn’t seem to worry at all, her movements slow and measured and one hand resting on the back of Aaron who walked beside her in the fading light.

The park had once been beautiful but the lack of sunlight had killed off most of the trees, leaving giant white skeletons in their place, the rest of the vegetation had somehow managed to survive by changing to fit the new and hostile environment. The leaves had become a deep oily green and their surface rubbery to endure the acid rain, the bark was covered with thorns that could tear flesh away from the bone easily if you had the bad fortune to run into one of the trees. Soon a dark and gloomy forest stood covering most of the park, a place where even the most brave gang members did not want to go, and not only for the vegetation. In the park lived the packs of wild stray dogs, there were several thousands of them now, and the population kept on growing.

These dogs were not your regular stray dog, many decades with being hunted, poisoned and shot at had taken them back to the same primal stage that wolves were in. They hunted for their food, not rummaging in the garbage nor receiving scraps from people, they had survived too many poisoning attempts to trust anything that came from human hands. And what did they hunt?

The answer was quite simple actually....Humans.

To be more precise they hunted people that were stupid enough to venture trough the park alone, even when they were armed with guns the sheer number of dogs was overwhelming and usually they ended up food for the hunters.

People had avoided the park ever since it was claimed by these creatures that in some remote time had been considered to be man’s best friend, now they were one of their most fierce enemies, hunting for the sick and helpless, for the ones stupid enough to actually enter their territory.

Yet the LadyCrow had no fear as she entered the domains of the wild dogs, her soft lips curled in a slight smile as she walked, her boots making small shuffling sounds on the dry leaves, many pair of eyes spotted her but none came close, one did not approach the alpha female without being called.

And she called, a strangely animal howl rising from her throat. The dogs came out of their hiding places and gathered around her, they respected her, they feared and loved her and she returned their devotion with gifts of food. She brought the pack new puppies that she found abandoned on the streets to strengthen their ranks if needed.

She greeted the dogs with names only she knew and they rarely recognised, a demonstration of affection from her part toward the creatures forgotten by the hand of God and loathed by the rest of humanity, greeted them as the brothers they were, both scorned by the humans that were left in the society, both of them hunter and prey at the same time. They came together as creatures of the same specie.

Over them a blood red moon rose.

In a other part of the city, a part where no dogs could venture without running the risk of being reached by the thousands of bullets shot by the paid police, a meaty man slammed his fist into a table, screaming at his henchmen. – She is only a woman! How could she escape so easily?!- As he spoke pieces of food sputtered from his mouth and spotted the shining surface of the table. In front of said table stood one of the members of the gang that had tried to take down the LadyCrow not an hour ago, at the moment he looked quite like a rat caught in a trap, a trap with shiny metal teeth that was threatening to break it’s back if it made the slightest movement, a scared rat.

-Bu boss, da crazy wench gotta frekkin sword ... it cut tru Tonio as he wasn’t there. She not be human. –

The man behind the desk glared at the gang member, his voice smooth as he spoke again, as smooth as the skin of a dangerous and very poisonous snake. –Did I say you could speak Lepe? –

Lepe took two steps back, suddenly shivering in fear. The boss had said his name, and when the boss said someone’s name in that tone it didn’t mean anything good. Cowering and bowing he stared into the floor, muttering –No boss. Sorry boss.- he added a mental ‘don’t kill me please.’

The man behind the desk waved a hand at Lepe, the movement short and almost careless. –Shut your trap and listen. She MUST be found and brought to me...and it must happen soon.-

Lepe bowed so deeply that his forehead almost touched the shining floor, his heart racing with relief, he could feel his back was wet with cold sweat. –We will find her, don’t fear Boss.-

The man behind the desk stood up and the black eyes of the buisness man became visible in the dim light of the room. The henchman nodded and looked at the man in the black suit and wondered what the woman known to him as LadyCrow could have done to anger one of the richest men in the country.

In a sector of the O’higgins park, where there one was a amusement park called Fantasilandia, was a deserted house that looked quite haunted, and that was not strange, it was the old house of horror. This house stood proud between the many ruins of machines that one gave great joy to both grown and little, and that now were only skeletons among the tall weeds.

In the depths of the house of horror was a amazingly cosy room, hidden behind a thousand different traps and a sophisticated alarm system perfected so it would only go off with the presence of other human beings and not be triggered by the many dogs that moved freely around the old house.

Inside this cosy room the LadyCrow removed her trench coat and cap shaking her head slightly so the long chestnut locks would dangle freely down her back. She was clothed all in black, not a single colour in her clothings, only the soft, silvery shining of a amulet that hung around her neck broke the blackness that covered her slender form. She threw the coat over a worn down sofa and hanged up the cap before heading into the room next to the one she currently was in. This room was far from cosy, it was the nightmare of every one that entered the O’Higgins park. Several sharp looking swords and daggers where neatly placed in what looked like a closet with glass doors, specially designed to show just how long and sharp the weapons were

Many a weapon collector would have given his left arm for just a glimpse at this particular cabinet. And if any of them were lucky, or unlucky, enough to get to this part of the house the most certain thing is that would loose not only their arm, but their head too.

Beside the first cabinet was another closet filled with quite a selective quantity of firearms, rare now since the only gunpowder factory in the country sold to the police exclusively, it was so hard to find ammunition in the city that it was commercialised to higher prices that the many kinds of drugs that were available on the streets.

Among the short barreled guns were a Magnum .45, a real antique but that she was rather fond of. Another of the guns in her display was a Colt 56.ACP and two Berreta Cougar 9000. Under the guns were two Fabarms semi automatical shotguns. She slowly lifted a finger and caressed the twin shotguns, the cold metal felt almost reassuring as she let the finger slide over the barrel. There were also a pair of air pressure pistols, designed specially to shoot darts.

The back part of this room looked like it was taken directly from a mad scientist movie, hundreds of small test tubes, some of them half filled with liquids of strange colours, and many strange and complex glass systems along with a few Bunsen burners and a large refrigerator with two doors along with a incubator. A large bookcase stood in the back of the room, filled with books that had titles involving both biology and chemistry. It was in this room the LadyCrow created some of her most powerful weapons, weapons to be used with the insignificant looking dart gun and with something else that was laying on one of the tables, a pair of black leather gloves, seemingly completely harmless, but in the index and middle finger were a small mechanism that was connected to two retractile and razor sharp claws. These claws and the way they were used was what had given Anita her nickname, in a fight she usually went straight for the eyes, ripping them out with a skill and ferocity that could only be rivalled by her name sisters, the crows.

Sometimes thou those claws were used on the simple purpose of letting some of her creations from the laboratory into the bloodstream of her enemy, creations that usually meant a painful and sometimes slow death. Because what the LadyCrow was specially good at was mixing lethal cocktails of virus and bacteria and some times simple poison. She actually enjoyed it, having specialized in diseases that were transmited from animals, specially dogs, to humans. She found that there was a kind of poetic justice in the act of infecting her enemies with something that could as well be rabies or a very bad case of scabies, poetic because these were illnesses that had caused mass extermination of the city dogs for a few decades ago in a futile attempt to get rid of the many diseases. She had tampered with the different illnesses in such ways as inserting time triggers or speeding up the disease. She could make a man die in few minutes, frothing from the mouth and getting drowned in his own saliva or she could carefully insert a carefully timed anthrax bacteria that would erupt only hours after the possible fight.

The poisons were no better. Hemotoxines that destroyed the blood cells causing massive haemorrhages and neurotoxines that paralyzed the muscles and caused heart arrhythmia were side by side with poisons so powerful that they killed mere seconds after entering the bloodstream.

The LadyCrow slowly walked trough the room and checked several of the test tubes, smiling slightly as she caressed the dangerous poison bottles a final time before heading to the workbench where something was growing inside a petri dish, a something that had her quite puzzled. It was something new that she had discovered when she was working with some avian flu that was easily transmitted to humans. A new breed of virus was growing among the one of the flu, what intrigued her was the different protein structure around the new virus, it seemed to be a kind of breed that would only affect human beings. Then why was it present in birds?

She was now cultivating virus of this new breed, she was puzzled about what damaged it could actually do to humans. And the next trespassers in the park would probably be her new guinea pigs.

A evil smirk came to her lips as she gently lifted the petri dish and looked at the small reddish spots on the agar. –Soon... oh yes, so very soon, I will find out just what you do.- She put down the dish and walked out of her laboratory and into the room that served as kitchen.

Soon the smell of fried meat filled the room, a crow had to eat no?