30 Massacre Highway: Day at the Museum

"Dearly beloved, forgive not, give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is yours; you may make them pay."

Neon Romans 12:19 (Unified Standard Edition)

- - -

"KEIKO!" Hitomi screamed as the older woman spun down into the asphalt, collapsing next to the two newly created corpses the sadistic sniper had turned the formerly injured young couple into.

Nurse Keiko Murata had done nothing wrong. She was just trying to stabilize the woman's gut wound.

Hitomi's right hand swung Mr. Pipe in an arc behind her head, slinging another bullet away in a sharp deflection as a PING sounded across the suddenly quiet street.

CRACK. The distant report of the rifle reached her a moment later.

With her left hand she grabbed Nurse Murata's ankle, pulling hard and dragging the injured or dead woman behind the nearest car so that the sniper wouldn't have a vantage on her. Keiko wasn't responding, and then three shots rang out, chewing up the other bodies in front of her - still exposed where they'd died in the opening between a few vehicles - splashing Hitomi with blood and flecks of skin tissue.

It was on her face.

Blood. Was on. Her. Face.

She screamed in rage.

Hitomi had never felt so angry: the word itself seemed so inadequate to describe the raw emotion that was burning her throat as she let out the pain, the frustration - the hatred - overwhelming hatred and fury.

It was righteousness. A righteous anger.

A pureness.

Holy.

The killer needed to die.

Right now.

KILL HIM, her mind screamed. END HIM!

That righteous anger lit inside her stomach and flowed up into her chest, curling and coiling like serpentine flame.

It wanted out.

She could make out the reflection of that tall blue glass building in the car window across from her.

There was a single window broken out on the fifth floor.

She had stopped screaming, she realized.

Now she was running.

Hitomi wove through the cars abandoned along the westbound lanes, jumping across a short set of concrete barriers separating the two sides of the highway. Cars were everywhere, of every description, and she didn't stop to process the fact that there were more bodies whenever she passed them.

Cars full of dead people, some hanging outside partially opened doors. Bullet holes absolutely everywhere. The sniper must've been using a different gun, she thought, not the rifle he was currently playing with.

Zips and sharp cracks kept sounding at random, destroying windows, biting at her heels, or erupting steel-jacketed holes in the metal bodies of the vehicles she passed.

Once in a while her body flickered ahead in a choice not taken while her power activated and threw her left or right to avoid incoming fire.

The sniper must think she was just too lucky or just too fast, because eventually he stopped firing on her, and then she was in the shrubs and trees bordering the highway, having jumped over another concrete barrier (this one also short like the lane dividers between eastbound and westbound traffic) and made her way to the north side of the building.

There was a chainlink fence, but it wasn't secured on one of its poles. She ducked through, still running, right into a parking lot full of police vehicles with their lights flashing.

Hitomi ran between the downed bodies of bullet-proof vest wearing officers. She didn't take the time to process what she was seeing as she ran straight for the building's entrance, until suddenly she jumped a half a foot into the air, avoiding a something metallic that skittered under her feet.

She didn't even see an alternate-Hitomi lose its legs after tripping the jerry-rigged claymore mine - one of two dozen - that had been placed all around the parking lot. The first responders had not gotten far: the sniper had set up an entire killzone in front of the building.

Rage. Pain.

The front door wasn't viable.

No door would be viable.

She spun suddenly, twirling, turning her forward inertia into an enormous slinging throw as Mr. Pipe went flying through a large glass window to the side of the building's entrance. The blue glass was thick but shattered in front of her as her trusty steel pipe demolished it in great long cascades of sharp glass.

Behind her she could hear yelling telling her to stop and come back.

No.

She walked right through the new entrance she'd just made and picked up Mr. Pipe, finding herself in someone's office. She sidestepped the desk and made her way to the interior door of the building.

Up. She needed to go up.

But if the killer had laid traps and managed to kill the first wave of responding police and firemen, then she would need to be careful.

Wait. No, she didn't. She didn't have to be careful.

Hitomi closed her eyes, breathing in for a moment, tightening her grip on Mr. Pipe. There was that fire inside her, she could feel it: no time for fear, no time for doubt. The sniper was picking off more people even as she stood here. She could hear the occasional shot ring out even from inside the building, several floors above her.

"OK," she said to herself, out loud, "You're a freak with guns and bombs. You're holed up inside a building. What do you do? You want to last as long as you can. What do you do?"

She stopped, looking around the room she had entered. It was a museum showcase full of guns: every sort of gun imaginable. There were racks and racks of guns - long rifles, historical and modern - and then she found the jackpot.

"OK, OK, think," she kept talking to herself, "Elevators: death traps. Stairs? Definitely death traps. I need something my power can use..."

She kept walking past the shelves of giant rifles, far too large for her and bulletless besides.

Then she found it. There was a small case containing a set of four pistols and a row of brass-colored bullets laid into the rich red velvet they laid in.

Well God Bless America.

They actually put live ammunition in the display case.

She gingerly smashed the case's glass top with Mr. Pipe and brushed away the worst shards with her steel helper. She plucked out the gun with the shortest barrel of the set, turning it over in her hands, trying to figure out the mechanism.

"How does this thing even -", she said again, but after depressing a latch the barrel drooped down on a hinge and she was able to see down the empty cylinder of the revolver. She experimentally placed a bullet inside and clicked it back together.

She pushed it as far away from her body as she could with an outstretched arm and pulled the trigger, aiming at a far wall.

Nothing happened. The trigger didn't move all the way in.

Were the bullets fake?

She brought it back again to look at it, then saw a picture of a guy - was that Clint Eastwood? - pulling back the little thing on the back of the gun with a thumb. She tried that. Then she pulled the trigger.

CRACK. PING.

The polished concrete a few feet from her earned a new gouge from her errant aim. The revolver was super heavy, even though it was the smallest one in the set.

She opened up the gun again and let the empty bullet shell fall out (which required a minor shake of her wrist). Hitomi's intellectual side handled the rest: she placed six bullets into their waiting holes and then closed up the gun, switching it to her left hand while Mr. Pipe stayed in her right.

Above her she heard a series of shots. No, not a series, a maelstrom. Multiple shots every single second. The shooter had switched guns, obviously, an automatic?

Hitomi started marching again, moving past the museum section of the building and towards the elevator. The fire was still coiled tightly in her belly. For the briefest of times during her acquisition of her new weapon it had stilled, letting her think, but now thinking time was over.

She walked straight towards an emergency stairwell despite knowing it was a trap.

Hitomi put down her pipe and turned the handle but her body froze, unable to move. A flickering version of Hitomi passed her and then fell to the ground, missing most of her midsection, blown backwards through the real Hitomi.

"Nutjob," she said, letting go of the door handle and looking around. He had obviously put another explosive on the other side. But she needed these stairs. The elevator would be worse.

More shots rang out from above: at least a hundred or two had been shot by now. How did he even have that much ammo?

There was a little closet next to the stairwell, and she tried the handle: it opened without any problem.

OK, not much to work with. A broom, a mop, a bucket, a bunch of cleaning materials.

Hitomi also couldn't carry much. She was wearing jeans and a hoodie, and she already had the pistol and Mr. Pipe.

Well, OK, she put the pistol in the pocket at the bottom of her hoodie - the one that had an opening on either side - hoping she wouldn't drop it.

She grabbed the broom, and used both hands to hold it steady as she manipulated the door latch and pushed the door open from six feet away and at an angle away from the doorway.

KRA-KOOM.

The door blew back at her with incredible violence, ripping the broom out of her stunned hands.

The front of the broom was gone: splinters only, but she had succeeded in setting off the bomb.

"Nice," she congratulated herself.

Hitomi dropped the broom stick and fetched the mop out of the closet, pushing the steel door, now heavily dented, back open, checking for any additional explosives.

None.

She grabbed Mr. Pipe up off the ground and decided, hearing the frequency of shots above her start up again, that now was the time to trust in her power.

Hitomi flew up the stairs, two at a time, breathing heavily, and simply jumped over an invisible wire, then ducked under another. The mop flailed around a bit next to her, maneuvered instinctively to avoid the same traps. She ignored the after-images of other-Hitomi's dying gruesomely to the explosives hidden around the stairwell and their tripwires.

Then she was on the fifth floor and the shots were incredibly loud; their source was probably only a hundred feet away, their cracks and pops piercing the thin office walls.

She tried the handle and was frozen in her tracks again by her power. She backed up, trying to get the mop to do the work of turning the handle.

KRA-KOOM. There it was again. But this time it had happened the moment the door handle had turned instead of when the door opened.

There was a large hole in the steel door of peeled back metal. Hitomi, smartly, had used the mop from a position further up the stairs (towards the closed off roof access) and to the side, avoiding the blast.

She used the remnants of the mop to pull the steel door open, and then began marching down the open hallway flanking the side of the building, towards the gunshots.

The fire inside her was stronger now.

Hitomi came around another bend and stepped over another tripwire. She laughed. Ducked under another, and another - this one at a strange angle - and laughed again, a short, barking, incredulous laugh.

In front of her the sounds of gunfire died. There were two wide oak doors with thick glass paneling, frosted, but she could see daylight on the other side. A boardroom?

Then she saw a small laptop on the ground in front of the boardroom with a little white light gleaming from the top, next to the webcam.

Ah.

The gunman knew she was here.

Bullets ripped through the frosted glass but Hitomi was already moving, her body sweeping itself away from the assault as she moved ever closer.

She knew, somehow, that her power simply wanted to avoid the fight altogether. It would stop her from moving forward if there was a no-win condition.

But the fire.

It burned inside her.

Hitomi was going to win.

Then she ran forward, smashing the laptop with Mr. Pipe and ducking down, avoiding another volley, opening the boardroom doors and diving to the right behind something large and heavy.

"WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU?" a voice yelled from the other side of the room.

Oh? The madman wanted to talk. Hitomi tested her power and stood up from behind the heavy concrete planter.

He had a long rifle pointed at her, but Hitomi didn't know what kind it was. She held Mr. Pipe ready in her right hand.

"What the fuck?" the man said again, staring at her, "What the fuck is this?"

No. That was her question.

The guy was surrounded with spent shells and burnt carpet. And bodies.

So many bodies. It looked like there had been a full executive meeting that the man had managed to slaughter, mostly in place in their chairs. She looked over only to see a partially disrobed woman's body near the shooter.

Obviously she had gotten to live a little longer, having made her way that far away from the conference room table.

Discarded pistols and an actual machine gun with a belt feed laid around him.

The man was short, slightly fat, thick glasses, a shaved head.

Why didn't he have pants on?

Hitomi looked again and the woman's corpse, her skirt missing.

Absolutely. Disgusting.

She noticed a camera aimed at him from the side, looking over his shoulder and down at the highway of cars and victims in the distance.

He was live streaming this?

"What the fuck," she repeated back, pointing at the camera with Mr. Pipe and then sweeping towards the dead woman he had undoubtedly raped before executing.

The man responded by pulling the trigger but her steely protector was already moving to intercept, deflecting his shot. The pipe smacked painfully into Hitomi's chest, but she ignored the sting and stepped forward.

"What, what ARE you?" the man stuttered nervously, "Some sorta fucking magical girl ninja?"

He didn't give her a chance to respond, pulling the trigger again, then again. Her body moved on its own accord and she slipped out of the way, and then threw Mr. Pipe in an overhand arc straight at his head.

"URGH!" was the only thing he said as the steel met his forehead and he dropped his gun.

Hitomi stalked forward, standing over him, just barely out of view of the camera.

She knew her powers wouldn't do anything now that he was disabled.

But the fire. Keiko. It hurt. It burned. It raged.

She whipped out the pistol from her hoodie pocket and took aim. He stared at her, his eyes uncrossing as he begged, "No, NO! Stop!" He scrambled forwards towards his dropped gun.

She pulled the trigger, blowing a hole into his right shoulder. He rocketed back, slumping a bit against the pillar he had been bracing on during his act of sniper savagery.

She pulled the trigger again, taking out his left shoulder.

"ARGH!"

It was so easy. She was only a few feet away.

She shot his knee. Then the other.

"ARGH GOD NO! ARGHHHH!"

Then his hands.

"AWWWWWWWWRRRRGHH!"

They mostly disintegrated, sinew and muscle erupting from his palms as he screamed and thrashed, unable to get up or roll over.

He alternated between whimpering and screaming.

Across the country the live stream continued as a half a million people watched "IncelRevenger" begin bleeding from every limb. Likes, hearts, guns, bombs, and every kind of emoji began flying across the screen as his horrified viewers - some supporters, most appalled onlookers - watched him being dismantled by some unseen attacker.

Not a cop. Not the SWAT team. That was for sure.

They saw a female hand come into the frame and pick up a length of steel pipe, pink fingernails on delicate looking fingers began dragging it into view, propping it briefly under his chin as the man blubbered, begging for help, for forgiveness, crying and screaming.

And then they could only see the back of his female assailant as she stepped in front of the camera, her back to it, lifting up the pipe and bringing it down.

CRACK.

Wordlessly.

Again.

CRACK.

The screaming had stopped.

It was quiet.

The pipe switched hands, then swept around and back just as Hitomi's body began turning into view of the audience, right towards the camera.

The feed disconnected.