Charlotte Ouk is dreaming again. In her dream, she was five, and was listening to the armored man degrade her family.
“Parasites,” Doc Toxic spat, “You are all nothing but diseased parasites.”
Charlotte didn’t understand the man eleven years ago; she had been a recent, and illegal, immigrant to this country, and knew only her native Cambodian. But after years of obsessively researching the insane chemist and his plots, she knew that’s what he was saying as he stood menacingly before the terrified masses of Third World refugees. There were Cambodians, Laotians, Chinese, Koreans, even a few Central Americans and Mexicans. Toxic and his men had rounded them up, taken them from their hovels and sweatshops and, in Charlotte’s family’s case, straight off the boat.
Doc Toxic’s pale, emaciated visage looked skull-like from behind his plexi-glass helmet, “But we’ll soon be rid of you. And others like you.”
The mercenaries who served the former government scientist began jamming hypodermic needles into the bare arms and legs of their prisoners. Before they injected Charlotte the young girl made a decision she would not give them the satisfaction of seeing her cry.
“This virus kills in 24 hours. Enough time for you to spread it to your fellow aliens back in their hidey-holes. Just like roaches,” Doc Toxic exalted.
The hazmat suited soldiers of the Plague Tyrant began loading the confused and oblivious people into a pair of semis. Charlotte, her parents, and her two older brothers were near the end of the line, so she got to see the roof of the abandoned bus garage tear open and the red, white, and blue figure of Mr. Epitome drop down to save them.
Except he didn’t. He captured Toxic and his men, of course; there was never any doubt that would happen. But he and the finest minds of the Center for Disease Control were unable to prevent the mutant smallpox strain from killing almost all of those infected.
Only Charlotte survived, and she nearly succumbed as well. Those tense, feverish moments in the makeshift trauma ward outside of Oakland play through her mind. She recalls the Exemplary Man himself injecting her with the vaccine, just in time.
“I’m sorry,” she thinks she heard him say, “I failed you. Just like I will again.”
That’s when Artemis wakes up. Briefly the archer is unsure of her surroundings. Then she remembers and curses.
“Bet Messenger never falls asleep on stakeouts,” she hisses.
Artemis peers through her blindfold enmeshed with low-light and infrared fiber-optic enhancements. Her target, a runner for Paradopolis’s drug lord Crushed Velvet, is still at home. The vigilante waits for him to leave and head to one of Velvet’s stash houses to make a pick up. It had taken her a while to get this far up the organization’s ladder, and tonight’s work could lead her to names on paper: property owners who might be squeezed for additional information to build a case against the criminal.
The apartment’s light goes out. A slim man in a hooded sweatshirt comes out the building’s front door and walks briskly away. From her position on an adjacent rooftop Artemis casts a swing-line arrow to a nearby edifice and prepares to follow him.
She adjusts her cap and smiles. It will be a righteous bust. Dad will be so proud.
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