Date: Tue, 19 Sep 1995 22:09:32 -0400 Reply-To: JillMari@AOL.COM Sender: Highlander TV show stories From: Jill Spetoskey Subject: Shades of Red and Black (1 of ?) Danger! Danger Will Robinson! This is my first attempt at a crossover here, so be gentle. As always comments, criticisms, and such are welcome at either jilkey@grfn.org or jillmari@aol.com Shades of Red and Black (A Highlander/V story) c. 1995 by Jill Spetoskey ***** Sara staggered toward the prone figure. She winced, feeling the deep cut to her leg that had severed at least one tendon. Trying to keep at least some of her balance in case the Brazilian had one last trick, she brought her sword across his neck, and cleaving his head from his body. "It was you who wanted the fight, not I." She said with a twinge of sadness in her voice. She heard the rustle of trash cans as the Quickening started to gather force in the dark alley . There was a crunch of something, and a howl of an angry tom cat, and the blue force found its target in her. As it flowed through her, she felt blind and deaf to anything outside of the energy. A part of her wondered if this is what it feels like to get hit by one of those blasters she kept seeing these days. And then it was over. Slumping to the ground, she grabbed for her sword that she had dropped when the Quickening had come, and started to twist it back into its place within the faded German army jacket. "Stop! Drop your weapon, and come toward us." The voice revibrated through the waterfront's late night air. Moving carefully, Sara looked up to see two pairs of black boots. As her eyes continued upward, she calmly noted the red and black uniforms, and the blasters evenly pointed at her body. She didn't know how much of the fight and fireworks the Visitors had seen, but she figured that she was in deep trouble regardless. Starting to rise, Sara collapsed back to the ground. She heard one person approach her as the other stayed back to cover his partner. Sensing her chance to act, she jumped up at the first Visitor, grabbing his blaster arm, and twisting him between herself and the other Visitor. The covering man fired, and she suddenly found herself wrestling with two hundred pounds of limp Visitor. Her hostage had dropped his gun, and she tried to balance making a grab for a weapon without losing her protective cover. Knowing that the other was probably signaling for back-up, Sara decided it was time to make a lunge for it. Pushing her hostage to the side, she dove for the dropped blaster. Rolling across the cement, she felt a beam of heat singe across her leg. Damn, now I've wrecked both legs of this pair of jeans. Her hand closed on the unfamiliar gun, and she came up trying to find the triggering switch. The Visitor fired another shot at her, missing this time. Two heartbeats later, she was rewarded by a blast of energy from her own gun as she hit a switch, and the other Visitor went down. Hurriedly scampering back to where her sword rested, she dropped the strange gun, and picked up her sword. With a half-sigh and a wish that she had more time to clean things up properly, she quickly wiped the blade against the Brazilian's pants before twisting it back into its hidden scabbard in her coat. Hesitating for a moment, she decided to grab the laser pistol as well, cautiously tucking it inside another of what she thought of as her coat's magic pockets, and hoping she had guessed right on what the safety was. "It would be just my luck if I just hit some sort of self-destruct switch on the thing," she observed as she started to edge away from the alley and cut back through the twist of warehouses and abandoned buildings that fringed the waterfront area, only for the moment thinking about getting as far away from the fight scene as possible. Getting far away. It's time to move on now, Sara. Even before tonight, you were starting to know that you've been in L.A. long enough that people were starting to wonder who your plastic surgeon was. She owned that land in Idaho, or was it Montana? Slinking against a warehouse wall, she started to go over a checklist of what she needed to do in order to make it to Idaho safely. Birth certificate. Check. She cut across an alley, looking for additional Visitor patrols and wondered if it was safe to circle back to where she had left her car. Driver's license. Check. With a little bit of sadness, she recalled the picture of the short-haired brunette on it, and thought of how long it had taken to grow her dirty-blond hair to waist length. Next street over, and wonder if she should try to make it back to her house that night, or if she should just find a dumpster to crash in and hide until morning. But then she remembered stories about a lot of homeless people just disappearing lately, and decided that it was probably best to stay out of whatever was happening on that front. Travel papers. Not at present, but probably doable. If she couldn't create her own, then she'd find someone who could. Funny that she hadn't heard any sort of commotion coming from the fight scene. The Visitors had seemed to be tight on security, and the missing guards should have been noticed relatively quickly. She started to make her way back to her car then, turned the corner, and her ears caught a whiff of the rhythm of automatic weapons fire. Forward or backward? She flipped a mental coin, and headed toward the gunfire, figuring it probably wasn't the smartest thing she had ever done, but hoping to lose herself in some crowd, any crowd that wasn't connected with dead Visitors and beheaded people. Edging closer to the gunfire noise and hiding herself behind a dumpster, she heard the unmistakable whine of Visitor lasers. Now what's going on here? A part of her mind filled in that the Visitors had some sort of small installment near this point of the waterfront. On second thought, Sara, let's move sideways from this thing. She carefully pulled her own blaster and started to move back towards where she had left the bodies. A crash and a desprate gasp for breath alerted Sara to the figure staggering toward her hiding place. Human-looking, and hit in the leg by a blaster shot. She winced in sympathy knowing how much he was probably hurting from the shot, watching him crumple to the ground and on top of his rifle from his injury. Two Visitors cornered the human, and the first took aim to finish the man who weakly tried to twist his own gun to some sort of aim at the Visitors. Failing, he yelled out. "Finish me off then, lizard!" "Wait. There is information we can get out of him before we kill him." The second stopped the first. "Grab him so he doesn't die on us." Then something snapped inside of Sara, and she opened fire on the guards who proceded to collapse as nicely as the guards in the other alley had. She cautiously moved to the fallen man. "Peace. I'm on your side here guy." "Who?" "Sara Ivnik for this particular lifetime, and I just don't like to see people threatened with torture. And you?" "Hector. I don't think I can walk anymore." "I got you. " She helped the man up so that he could use her as a crutch of sorts. "Now you're too hurt to fight, and I have no idea who the good guys are, so let's just duck out of the fight for now. " They ducked behind a trash pile, and listened to the voices of the fight. A few minutes later, the sound of gunfire was superceded by voices, human voices. "Ready to give it a try, Hector?" "Yeah." They shifted weapons around so that each of them could get a shot off with one of the Visitor's blasters. "Now how do we get out of here?" "Thataway." She found herself and Hector thrust northward into a small clearing in front of what looked like a small chemical plant. About a dozen Visitor and a few human bodies lay in front of the installation, and a humam voice across the clearing was screaming. "Move it people. We need to get clear of the area before the reinforcements start showing up." "Van's are that way." Hector pointed eastward. After a few steps in that direction, she found herself helping the blond man who had been yelling the instructions ease Hector into the blue Econoline. She followed Hector into the van, digging into her pockets for a Swiss army knife so she could cut away his pants to get at the injury. Seeing the burn, she half cursed. It had been a while since she'd had to do any nursing. "Anyone got something I can use to stop the bleeding, at least?" she yelled out as the van started to head away from the waterfront. Hopefully I have a little bit of time where they worry about Hector, and not about who the hell I am. "Now who are you?" The blond man demanded, a Visitor sidearm thrust against her lower back. "Sara Ivnik. I work on special effects for Meridian Film. I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time tonight, and darn near walked right into the fight. Too much weird stuff's been happening when the Visitors are around, and I didn't want to disappear." She shrugged. "I just have always had this real problem with acting impulsively." "And you just knocked out a heavily armed Visitor, and took his sidearm?" "L.A.'s a tough city. A girl has to learn to defend herself, you know." The man paused, and Sara hoped that he wouldn't shoot her on the spot. Definitely, she was feeling her age tonight without the additional pain something like that would bring. "Okay, we're going to pat you down here to make sure you don't have any sort of transmitter on you, and then we're going to blindfold you so that you can't see where you're going. After that, we'll have a few people in on the decision of what to do with you." While one hand firmly held the gun, the other hand deftly went through her visible coat pockets. Since her knife was already out, the only other things that appeared were her car keys on a single ring. If rule number one for a modern battle was to park your car far enough away that it wouldn't be affected by a quickening, rule number two was to give no connection between said car with its easily identifiable license plate and registration papers and your not as easily identifiable self in case one was detained near a duel sight, she thought wryly. The blond continued his search, checking her pants pockets and down her legs, but not seeming to notice the few feet of Toledo steel alligned down her back. Offering a quick prayer to whatever gods watched over immortals, she cautiously shifted herself into a more comfortable position. "No I.D., Sara Ivnik of Meridian Film?" "Guess you could say that was one of the reasons running into the Visitors made me so nervous. At best, without I.D. and after the so-called curfew, I was in trouble." "Time to blindfold you now, Sara. You're going to make it easy for all of us, aren't you?" "Yeah." The blond man seemed to want to say more, but stopped. Sara certainly wasn't going to encourage him to talk more. After all, she knew she didn't have much time to begin with to come up with some sort of almost reasonable expanation of why she had been down by the docks. End part 1 =========================================================================