Nova 1

Her eyes were twin, corposantic quasars in the dank room's inner night. Long had learned to move carefully towards such energy, and through such accretion of waste, the dangerous befoulment of this his perfect find. But tonight was different. No caution, no need. He was not expecting to live through this encounter. Long lit a match and then a smoke, exhaled into the dim galaxy betwixt them. No, he thought, nothing left to lose, nothing left to save. He sidled off his bar stool, towards her.

Long was a hitman, one of the best, but discreet, not flashy like many in his trade. Those who flaunted their skills, their inked-up biceps and latest gadgetry, usually busted down one too many doors and met the ice-cold stare of too many one-eyed greetings. Long had learned to keep low, work carefully. He was a skinny mess of tendons and bone, long, ragged hair cut shoulder-length haphazardly, and dress in the shabby cowboy style of old-time Marlboro commercials, like the smoke that dangled ember-first from his lips as he edged his way past rough-looking brigadiers in scuffed boots and jeans. He hadn't been out west in a while, and this little military bar outside Indianapolis, scab on the flaxen-downed leg of a Midwestern road, was conjuring up the worst sort of memories. He shook them aside, though, as he came within her orbit.

"Evenin', darlin'. Buy you a drink?" Twenty-one years of doing this, and he still couldn't break the tyranny of the cliché. For a full five seconds she didn't say a word, just stood there looking at him, sizing him up. She knows, he thought. The damn bitch knows, and now we're right in the thick of it. But then she smiled, a little maelstrom flash of fire that matched her eyes, and consented: a whiskey, double, no ice. He nodded and with an "I'll be right back," turned and returned to the bar.

She studied his back, shoulder blades protruding a bit from his ragged shirt. She matched his height, but was slightly wider at the hips and chest. Her wrists were the most fragile part of her, pale and hollow-looking, but the rest of her curved elegantly in one sloping hill of flesh, mapped by a pair of tight, black jeans and matching blouse. Her hair was also raven-black, and long. She wore no makeup or jewelry. Her eyes, as Long had noticed before, were ageless, insomniac points of light.

He returned with the whiskies, one for himself, and watched as she sipped deeply. He was thinking of what to say next when she asked him how he planned on killing her. His eyes shot up and into hers like a diver enters a pool. "I don't plan on killing you," he said. Then added, as an afterthought, "but I don't expect you to survive." There was a moment of depthless silence. Then everything began to happen.

She spun and made for the door, and he went to follow. One well-intentioned, mountainous man stepped between them, and the next second he was on the floor. Long had broken his leg without slowing down. She was through the double doors, into the parking lot, into the night. God she moves fast, Long said, sprinting to catch her as she crossed the road and disappeared into a maze of corn. Long followed, locating her easily in her crashing mêlée through the stalks. Sheaves whirred past his vision as he struggled to match her cuts and feints, back and forth through the crop. I shoulda' been a damned cereologist, I just figured out how crop circles are made. This thought occurred as a macabre moment in his chase, and faded.

The field ended. She whirled to face him, hands like claws in front of her, ready to fight. He slowed to a walk, stepped out of the corn. She seemed to shimmer slightly in the black night. She waited. He took another step forward, opened his shirt, slid it off. His frame was thin, and laced with the rigging of a hard life, veins, scars, and muscle fighting for space. He slid a long bowie knife out of the sheath on his belt. The blade caught the moonlight as he spun it from finger to finger, contemplating her. "Now what am I going to do with you?" he asked. She was silent, still in her stance. "I asked you a question, girl," he growled.

"You'll quit talking and playing with your little phallus, and come let me hurt you," she said, a touch of mockery in her voice. "You got me all tuckered out running away, the least you can do is bleed a little for me."

Long chuckled. "Well then, let's do it." He strode towards her, knife held slightly behind him, left hand up. As soon as he stepped within range, her left heel came up lightning-quick and nearly caught his jaw. But he ducked under it, slicing up with his blade, slitting the front of her blouse, which, as tight as it was, ripped loudly open, revealing her full, pale breasts and the black lace bra that held them, and below a smooth porcelain stomach. She hissed and made a grab for his eyes, just missing them. He backed off a few steps, and smiled. She glared at him, and her star-sign eyes had become wrathful comets of icy, cosmic phosphorescence. Baring her teeth, she shot forward, heedless of his weapon. He side-stepped neatly, and slit the back of her blouse as she passed, leaving a thin line of parted skin beneath the cut that with surgical precision had stripped the cloth from her shoulders. She gasped. A thin ruby trickle dropped gracefully down the nacre of her back, and with the sudden advent of pain her anger dispersed. The wound was not long, nor was it deep, but she realized what it meant. Long realized it too. She, who had never been bested, was going to lose this fight. She turned back towards him. Her bra had been cut away with her blouse, and her breasts hung free, kissed with sparkling sweat.

"You win," she said bluntly. "Kill me." He stepped towards her, still cautious, knife still ready. He had thought she would be better than this. He reached her, placed the knife's edge against her throat, saw the pulsing life beneath it. She stared at him defiantly. Was this the look she had given the magistrate when he had sentenced her to ten years in the labor camps for her role in the Magdalen Wars? Or the same gaze she employed when she murdered her guards with a makeshift pickaxe and fled into the tunnels? Was it, he wondered, the same inscrutable confidence she hid behind when, as a courtesan, she had pleasured so many of his government's leaders in what would be their last dance of love? And to be so easily beaten, in a corn field in some ignoble town, after the wars, the product of a loose-end contract bubbled up in the bureaucratic tar pits and passed on to him, a mercenary taker of life. They were both executioners, but in her was also the execution of ideals, in him only the base desires of logistics and employment: paychecks, food, whores, and beer. Here he was, the Pharisee, not even the Pharisee, the grunt centurion with hammer and spikes. He was Alaric, the Visigoth general, the first sacker of the city of Rome.

All this passed like a squall through his mind, but took no time, and his blade still rested gently upon her jugular. He began to press down, and her eyes closed. She did not see him lean forward, and when his lips caught hers she was not prepared for the molten rush that swept her body. When his knife slid blunt side down along her stomach, and cut away the clinging denim with a loud tearing, she was not certain the sound was not her own sanity, tearing loose from the supernova of her mind. Her jeans were shredded and pulled away, Long working blind as he continued to assault her lips and neck, biting down hard and receiving equal treatment from her catlike mouth and tongue. He winced as her fangs opened his shoulder and sucked the warm blood from him.

He placed one leg behind hers and pushed her forward, so that she fell heavily on the grass, and he followed, pressing his thin weight into her, both still clawing and panting. Her back lanced out in pain, and she rolled him over, straddling him with her muscled thighs, digging her knees into him. He tore her flimsy panties off, grasping her full buttocks in his hands, administering a stinging slap that made her yelp and kiss him harder. She pulled away and began to move along his torso, kissing each precious rib, before tearing open his jeans and feasting on him. He writhed in the dewy grass, counted every star and started over as the full tide of orgasm began to rise in him. He grasped her sable mane and hauled her up, kicking off his boots. She nuzzled his pants off, and became him fiercely in the dark. Her eyes were searchlights, their movements the trepidations of the planets, and her explosions the death of every star he had counted.

At last they were spent, and lay huddled together in the stillborn cold, tracing the warfare of each other's bodies, the marks they had left and the ones left by others. At the edge of a cornfield the two naked killers, one still and smoking, the other shivering slightly, unwound two strings of violence, and as the sun emerged from over the shallow, umber forest, they again embraced in that strange, illicit miracle of death and regeneration, the growing warmth.