The Last Judges Uncut Chronicles: The Chronological Account of the Last Judges

By Jedi Gong

Eight diverse Americans displaced by apocalyptic events struggle to discern their unique destinies... The Last Judges.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9781623094010

Book preview

1.1

Her brown eyes danced and shimmered with youth, contrasted by porcelain-pale skin despite the endless Arizona sun. Although sixteen-year-old Anima wore no makeup or jewelry, blue and purple strands in her short brown hair compensated. Sporting a loose, plain black T over long, baggy shorts and a ragged pair of blue hightops, Ani sped west through downtown Tucson, her skateboard hissing between the unsure traffic.

Almost blinded by the early-November afternoon sun, she muttered, F’ing desert, and slapped on some shades.

Her shiny black dogs didn’t seem to mind the glare; Suzy galloping in the lead, pulling the girl through the downtown avenues by her seven-foot rope leash, and Shamgar bounding at her heel, toting a makeshift array of bags.

Ani saluted the familiar homeless men laying on the sidewalk as she surfed past them.

In their stupor, the grungy bums waved adoringly.

She jumped a pothole for their entertainment and threw up a peace sign with her fingers.

They all smiled and hailed her with their brown bags.

Suzy knew the route well, but still waited for Ani’s instructions.

With a yank on the rope, she steered the dog right and squatted on her board against the force of the turn, using an outstretched left arm for balance.

They slipped north on a wide, deserted road. Determined to hit twenty miles-per-hour, Suzy bore down on her harness and dug into the asphalt while Shamgar strode handsomely along, forever at the girl’s heel.

Ani crouched low, reducing her drag.

The dogs were siblings, a Great Dane and German Shepard mix, both four years old and as black as oil. Besides their age and those black-stallion-like genetics, all that the canines really had in common was their love for Ani:

The stout Shamgar, with a super-shaggy coat that made him twice as giant, was a happy-go-lucky, everybody-loving, bouncy black bear of a mutt.

Suzy, however, was tall, lean and graceful with a short, silky coat. She was a barely-tamed bitch, a dark queen of anarchy, a what-the-hell-are-you-looking-at one-dog-army with an itchy trigger finger… except for with her love, Ani. Suzy wouldn’t even play-fight with Ani.

Approaching the West Sixth Street intersection, they heard, Qué onda, Punk Rock Girl?!

Ani knew her classmate’s voice before she distinguished him on the corner ahead, Cómo estás, Stepchild?!

Suzy! the teenage boy exclaimed, How’s it hanging, momma! He plucked his cigarette and stepped on his board, gliding toward the trio with a row of his foot. Shamgar sprinted ahead of his sister, charging for Stepchild, who bellowed boisterously, What’s up, Shammy!

Ani dropped the leash and let her momentum carry her in a figure eight with her short, colorful hair fluttering in the breeze.

Stepchild was seventeen years old, bald-headed, six-foot-two and still lanky. He hopped from his board in the middle of the street as Shamgar skidded to a halt at his feet. Hey bud.

Licking and petting commenced for a moment before Suzy broke in, pushing her brother away with her butt, attempting to tackle the boy. Standing with her front legs around his neck, Suzy struggled to slap his face with her outrageously long tongue.

Dodging it, Stepchild squeezed her with a big bear-hug, Hey ya crazy girl.

Ani kicked her board into her hand, questioning from behind her sunglasses, Why isn’t your white-bread-cracker-ass in school, honkey-lover?

Fuck school – propaganda from The Man. He wore high-top skate shoes, cut-off camouflage shorts, and a faded gray T-shirt which read PIRATES GET A LOT OF BOOTIE. "And why aren’t you in school, young lady? He casually removed a joint from his cigarette pack, tossed it between his lips, then answered for her, Cause you can’t chief weed in school; that’s why."

Ani laughed, Whatever.

Shamgar sat, listening intently, but Suzy was sniffing a roadside prickly-pear cactus.

Nah, the boy reversed, I’m finished with school for the day – on my way to work. Eyes squinting against the lucid blue sky, Stepchild sparked his lefthanded cigarette. He pulled hard, filling his lungs, producing smoke signals. Without exhaling, he grunted, Wanna toke?

Alright.

He forced out, Ere go, and extended it.

As Ani took the spliff, she spilled, I skipped class this morning, but now I’m on my way to work, too. She flipped her hair out of her face and smoked the J like a cigarette.

After taking two, she passed it.

Suzy wandered back, sniffing the air.

Stepchild swooned, If I became a zombie, I’d eat your brain first.

Um, thanks.

He passed the smoke again, suggesting, Let’s get out of the sun.

Ani took one last puff, then handed back the doobie. After a thick exhale, she declined, I’m late for work. She grabbed Suzy’s leash from the pavement and then pinned the tail of her skateboard to the ground so that it pointed up. Shamgar, heel.

Alright, Stepchild nodded. He pinched out the cherry of the joint before replacing it in the pack and extracting a half-burned cigarette. Adiós, Ani.

Later. The teenagers slapped hands and bumped fists. Pro’ly see ya later – it’s Friday after all.

Yep. He lit the half-cigarette and spoke with it suspended from his lips, I’m goin’ over to Ninth Street tonight.

That’s whats up. Ani stepped to her skateboard and snapped the leash, Come on…

Suzy trotted nimbly back and forth with her impossibly long tongue dangling from the side of her mouth.

Ani pointed north, Let’s go, and the animals moved that way. They took turns glancing goodbye to Stepchild as he mounted his board and pushed away, coasting eastward.

I’m late for work, Ani told the pups, then whipped the rope leash.

Suzy eagerly obeyed, like a little black stallion hauling her champion’s chariot, and Ani crouched against the asphalt for speed.

A moment later, Ani smacked her lips, thought, Dry mouth, then called, Shamgar! and reached for him. When he scrambled closer, she snatched a bottle of water from one of the customized backpacks on his side.

Agua… She stood and guzzled it as she surfed.

Thanks, boy! Ani crouched again and stretched the bottle toward Shamgar. When he jogged to her side, she dropped it into his sidepack.

Surveying ahead past Suzy, Ani called to her, Tear it up, girl!

*

About half a mile up the route, they swung left, then continued a short space before reaching the NewSong Music Studio.

The broad, brick one-story had a flat roof and a few narrow windows.

One of the regulars, a middle-aged guitarist in khakis and a button-up was on his way out carrying his instrument case by the handle. You’re late, kiddo.

Suzy stopped and glared at the man, but Shamgar trotted up and licked his guitar case, then his hand.

Ani smirked, Yep, then pointed to a crowded park down the way, What’s the ruckus?

I walked by there an hour ago, the man said, it’s some street preacher shouting–

–and people shouting back, finished Ani. I’ve never seen a street preacher before.

The guitarist shrugged, then waved goodbye as he departed toward the busy park.

Ani led the canines to the large double-doors, watching their reflection in the glass as they approached. At once she noticed a very dark cloud in the distance behind her and paused in her tracks.

Suzy and Shamgar shuffled impatiently as Ani turned to inspect the sky.

She mumbled, I must be super stoned – I could swear… but the sky to the south was in fact quickly hazing-over from a perfect-blue to a somber gray.

I’m late… Ani circled back to the entrance, pulling open one of the doors, but hesitated again when she heard the tinker of tiny pellets striking the pavement. Is that hail?

Weird…

After pulling the mutts inside, she commanded them, Lay down, but they were halfway there. I’ll get you guys water in a minute.

Suzy laid elegantly on her side and gazed adoringly at Ani.

Shamgar sat on his hind, swishing his giant tail against the tile floor as he searched for friends.

Ani returned to the front door, cracked it, and stood there enthralled, mumbling to herself, Wow – hail…

Wait – that’s strange… As the delicate stones struck the concrete perimeter of the studio and began to melt, they became a dark liquid instead of clear.

Ani pushed the door open farther and knelt to touch one of the pebbles as a red shadow eclipsed its icy-white color.

She brought her wet fingertips to her face, It looks like blood.

Suddenly the crimson moisture on her fingers burst into little flames. She stared at them, disbelieving for a second, then screamed, Ouch! as she smacked her hand against her baggy black T, blinking her brown eyes with bewilderment.

Outside, she heard shrill, panicked voices crying, It’s blood! … It’s blood!! and saw the well-dressed, middle-aged man that she’d passed on arrival running away with his guitar case over his head.

Shielded by the glass doors, Ani watched more of the settling hail melt into ruby plasma, then self-combust.

Minor fires sprung up everywhere as the hail waxed larger and more abundant, the patter becoming a rain and the sky increasingly opaque and lurid.

Soon, golf-ball-sized stones were assailing anyone caught outdoors.

Ani heard glass rupturing and metal being punched in every direction.

A desert shrub in front of the studio filled with flames.

Ani gulped hard, trying to assimilate the chaos.

Every fire station summoned its fighters, but the sirens were faint amidst the rumbling downpour of ice and the swelling throng of car alarms blaring across town.

Suzy and Shamgar had joined Ani by the doorway and jolted each time a baseball-sized stone exploded into icy hemoglobin on the concrete, miraculously igniting seconds later.

Patrons and employees from inside the building were also flocking to the entrance, and beside Ani pressed open the second of the heavy double-doors.

One of them declared, That one was the size of a softball!

The studio manager, Denise, a young Chicano woman in professional attire, blurted, Ay caramba, in Ani’s ear.

That place is on fire! announced a co-worker.

A customer added, So is that one!

It’s blood! shrieked one after the other.

Ani pointed and commented coolly, This oughta be interesting.

Together they observed a white SUV with gold trim, limo tint, and chrome spinners brazenly attempting to navigate past the music studio. Hailstones pummeled it as it drifted blindly into an old mesquite tree on the corner. But then the driver, a barely discernible caucasian man in a brown suit, opened the passenger-side door, eyes set on the entrance to the studio.

Oh hell no, breathed Denise, Estúpido gringo.

Everyone grimaced as the man climbed out. He was immediately struck, directly in the back of the head, by a grapefruit-sized ice-meteorite that shot out of his face and burst on the road at his feet.

Many of the spectators instinctively hid their eyes, but Ani thought abruptly, His blood will mix with the other blood, as she watched the suit on the nearly-decapitated corpse ignite beside the SUV.

Splotches and lines of burgundy dripped on everything outside. Fortunately, the thirsty desert sand absorbed most of the red gore as it trickled into pools. The stony earth suffocated most of the sparks that erupted from the fresh blood-puddles. Like an army of ants, the greedy flames hunted any dried wood, fabric, or foliage, and went to work assimilating them. Soon, a canvass of sooty, stormy smoke choked out the daylight. The downpour intensified until no hailstone was smaller than a baseball and its incessant, thunderous crunch muffled the citywide emergency sirens and security alarms.

At the studio entry, Denise yelled over the deafening symphony of destruction, Vamos! Let’s get inside! Rápido! and the group fell back in concert, abandoning the singed, splattered cityscape to the wrath of the massive hailstones.

The sealed doors hardly drowned out the oppressive noise of the outlying periphery.

No one in the lobby was receiving a cell phone signal.

The band of strangers struggled to breathe, anxiety on every face.

A million sledge hammers, Ani thought, Our building must be covered in fire like all the others.

Indeed, the lobby was warm and smoky.

They knew that the flat, tarred roof was a lake of flames. They realized that the blazing city held them captive. There were murmurs of death.

Ani ran her pale, petite fingers through her highlighted brown hair, listening to the bludgeoning storm and the fears of her company.

When they heard the enormous window down the hall, at the rear of the building, finally crack and crash in, Denise cursed and dashed off, shouting, Come on! Remedios! We’ve got fire extinguishers! A few of the employees and stranded musicians hustled after her.

Ani resigned to kneel on the beige tile between her canines, sighing, Hang in there babies.

The exterior world endured its beating and burning.

She inhaled the rancid stench of smoke mingled with the sweet, metallic odor of blood. Like rats in a cage.

However, as she listened to the punishing roar of the hail storm, Ani recognized a change in the frantic drumming racket.

Perhaps a momentary lull, but the stones seemed fewer and lighter.

She prayed the assault was truly fading.

Then someone exclaimed, It’s passing!

Yes! cheered another, It is!

With hopeful eyes, Ani revisited the doorway.

The scourge was definitely subsiding.

The ice continued to transform into rosy plasma as it melted, and seconds later the syrup would combust, but Ani noticed that the blood itself would only flare until it was dry. So strange. She wondered if the unnatural weather was victimizing Arizona alone or touring the country, or even the world.

*

Eventually the last ice-pellets salted the neighborhood, went bloody, then flamed and flickered out.

Almost as swiftly as it had arisen, the freakish storm finally exhausted itself.

At the NewSong Music Studio, speechlessness prevailed.

Outside, the alarms and sirens were eerily hushed.

Still dazed and disturbed, Ani found the fresh silence as unsettling as the blusterous bedlam had been.

Peering through the front doors, she saw many structures continuing to blaze and smoke, but the predominantly block-and-stucco desert town appeared quite resistant. The cacti, concrete, and sandy earth outside were all stained burgundy with dried, smoldering plasma.

That is when another storm began, christened with gunshots.

Shortly following came the distant screams of people, ambulances, and police cruisers.

Denise returned with a clock radio, plugged it in and tuned it:

…spread wildfires in the mountains. We have reports of looting and rioting from Tucson to Phoenix, the newsman proclaimed, and with emergency services entirely overwhelmed, merchants and homeowners are embracing martial law. Furthermore, similar hail storms are erupting globally – despite weather conditions – no continent seems immune…

Those listening in the lobby fidgeted, whispering over the broadcast.

…Currently, the scientific community has offered no explanation for this, or for the dark red liquid produced by the hail, or for its spontaneous combustion. One thing’s certain: If the storms were not moving so quickly, the death toll and destruction would be far, far worse. Stay tuned for more up-to-the-minute local news after this break…

Ay wey… Denise turned down the radio, repeating, Rioters? Martial law? then sighed, I guess I’d better call the owners.

Ani scoffed, Those pendejos are sippin’ margaritas at their beach pad right now. No offense, but screw this place… Ani shook her head, I have to go to my crib and check on my drunk-ass mom.

As if reading her mind, her faithful hounds stood and stretched.

Are you loca? Denise interjected, The roads are gonna be jammed – maybe worse – don’t you hear the gunshots?

Ani grabbed and raised her skateboard, I don’t need roads, then feigned a cute smile, "And why would anyone shoot me?"

Denise pleaded, You shouldn’t go out there unarmed, amiga.

I’ll be alright, Ani flipped her blue and purple hair out of her face and grinned, I’ve got Puppy Power.

Fine, the studio manager groaned, I’ll be here.

Alright, nodded Ani. She threw a peace sign to the others, Adiós, people, and then slipped out with her animals in tow.

Through the big double-doors, the scarred world seemed surreal. The rebounding sunshine camouflaged any remaining fires.

Ani stepped on her board, Let’s go easy, girl, and with the sun at their backs, the threesome moved east on the gore-caked sidewalk.

She scanned over her shoulder, digesting the apocalyptic scenery – the ravaged SUV, the charred brick studio, the blackened and bloodied landscape – surprised by a sense of loss.

Ani stuck to the least-populated routes, encountering the expected mayhem: scorched estates, wrecked, blazing cars, rose-stained everything, and residents retaliating with their water hoses.

Suzy and Shamgar galloped happily oblivious to the carnage and devastation. Whizzing along, they nimbly avoided the splintered lights and windows. Flaming porches, vehicles, and mailboxes did not concern a team of mutts on a mission to get their lady home.

Almost there, near Stone Avenue, the dwellings were all earth-tone one-stories with fenced-in dirt-and-gravel yards teeming with scruffy dogs and weathered cacti.

Ani felt her stomach drop. Something wicked this way comes.

Or someone, she revised as more than ten riotous men rounded the corner to the right ahead of her.

The boys appeared college-age, probably locals, definitely drunk. They missed a step when they spotted Ani and her black beasts charging toward them, but then recalled their bats and bottles and raged ahead.

Suzy instinctively sped up to out-flank the gang.

That’s my girl…

She dug in and swerved left but the mob followed, pouring out on the smoldering asphalt separating them with sights now locked on Ani.

Despite their adrenaline, the trio skid to a stop in the center of the artery.

Ani flipped her hair away and scowled with Suzy at the boys, whose faces were brimming with anger and anarchy. These idiots have lost their minds, she thought, A dozen rioting morons.

She wished that she had more defense than her pets. Suzy, however, was ready for war and glanced back at her ward with a sadistic lick of her ivory fangs, appearing as a shadowy hell-hound amidst the crimson carnage. Shamgar, whose gentleness usually masked his brute strength, puffed up his shaggy chest, resembling a woolly black Saint Bernard, and bore his teeth at the mob with a crinkled nose and twitching lips. The guttural, harmonious growl of the hounds almost seduced Ani to snarl in unison. Sorry puppies, she subverted instead, there’s too many of them…

Suddenly a burning roof to their left splintered, then crashed, collapsing into the abode.

Each second lasted a minute.

One of the marauders guzzled his brown beer bottle before going to work bashing the nearest mailbox with his metal baseball bat. The owner of the domicile, at the same moment, emerged from the backyard with a ladder and a garden hose. As the harried homeowner noticed his mailbox being smashed, another rioter pitch a rock through one of his windows. At that, the man dropped his hose and ladder on the blood-blackened ground and drew a small silver firearm from his waistband.

Popping the safety with his thumb, the man warned, Get the hell outta here! as he lifted the barrel with a straight arm toward the gang.

Alright, Ani reveled, wasting no time in pivoting her board with a, Let’s roll, puppies, as she pointed toward the detour route.

The dogs obeyed – Shamgar gladly, but Suzy grudgingly – and they retreated. As they escaped, Ani checked over her shoulder, relieved:

The rioters were fully distracted by the homeowner, who was swearing irately, waving his silver twenty-two at the young men. They were shouting back, pummeling his property with rocks and beer bottles. Then, when a stone shattered another of his windows, the man abruptly opened fire on the gang.

As Ani fled the block, the clamor of the pistol was hardly audible, and the last thing she glimpsed of that scene was the mob rushing to capture that gun.

1.2

With creamy-tan Hispanic skin and a doll-face draped with ebony curls, Jadyn Rivera mumbled through full, rosy lips as she tossed in her downy white bed, sleeping alone in her New York City apartment.

While dreaming, twenty-nine-year-old Jade always knew when she would wake up, often experiencing a heightened clairvoyance, a natural, effortless harmony with her abilities while asleep that eluded her in the conscious world. Her more passive telepathic faculties had always been intuitive, but her aggressive telekinetic capabilities absolutely terrified her ever since she tragically discovered them. Ever since then, she’d remained too frightened or ethically inhibited to explore much of her psychic potential.

As the sun rose on that mid-November morning, Jade dreamt a vision:

~

Two men draped in ash-black robes walked through the dusty outskirts of the sandy-brown Jordanian city of Amman, twenty miles east of Israel’s West Bank. Jade thought spontaneously, These are the Witnesses of the Seventieth Week, the two lamp stands and the two olive trees, and their power is great. But she didn’t understand.

She watched members of a local militia confront the duo. Suddenly, the pair of men blew impossible plumes of fire from their mouths that instantly engulfed the guerrillas. The ragtag soldiers scattered screaming as flames devoured their flesh. Although disbelieving, Jade knew, For three and a half years, this is how anyone who wants to harm the Witnesses must die.

She heard them prophesying on the road, evangelizing as they entered the town, exhorting and admonishing everyone they saw. They have the power to turn water into blood and to shut up the sky so that it won’t rain and to strike the earth with any kind of plague as often as they want.

Jade puzzled over the vision even as her own voice informed, And these things shall begin during your days.

~

Baring her eyes to the dawn, the psychic mused, Every morning she awoke to a reoccurring dream.

When Jade squinted against the glow of the window, the white vertical blinds snapped shut by themselves as if sentient, darkening the bedroom. She whispered, Very cool, her voice a mix of silk and velvet that blended a Puerto Rican and New York City accent. As she rubbed the sleep from her light-bronze eyes, the same vertical shutters rose gently outward in random directions, allowing the day in again. Whatever, she pouted.

A whiff of coffee from the apartment hallway helped Jade peel herself from the fluffy white bedding.

In her tight pink-cotton pajama shorts and matching T, she stretched in the full-length mirror. Then, with her hands on her hips, she practiced her pay-raise pitch, I’m a thirty-year-old Latina with proven skills. Maybe the best psychoanalyst since Skinner. She blew a kiss to her reflection. I’m a deadly monster. A perverse anomaly. A murderer.

Requesting a raise wasn’t necessary; Jade could easily implant the suggestion. Nor was the bedroom mirror; she could project her senses out of her body to view herself at any angle. To her, however, these were temptations to extravagance and blatant immorality that if entertained would leave her irreparably isolated from any normality, especially a real relationship. I’m enough of a scared, lonely freak already, she thought, without exasperating the situation by trying to capitalize on my curse.

Jade entered the hallway bathroom and stripped her pink T, impulsively stepping on the digital scale. One hundred and forty-four pounds. The curves of her five-foot-five frame combined voluptuous genetics – wide hips and large breasts – with a flat stomach and well-toned muscles from habitual aerobics. Hm… She dropped her little shorts to the floor, leaving only her cinnamon-tan birthday-suit. …Still one-forty-four.

Jade sat on the toilet and heard the bedside clock radio six-thirty alarm crackle on, tuned to the local Manhattan morning show, playing the last bars of ‘Hey Jealousy’. At least that crazy hailstorm didn’t screw up my Rotten Apple radio. Jade suddenly observed the deejays in their booth at the station, a familiar sensation, a frantic traveling of the psyche superimposed on her thoughts like a vivid, gripping memory:

The fat, well-dressed, middle-aged deejays sipped coffee, goofing around on the internet and prepping for the news report.

They look so happy. So normal.

In her sleepy stupor, Jade wondered for a second if the alarm clock had even come on, or if she was actually listening to the radio-waves themselves. Center yourself, girlfriend. Get that head straight.

The peppy, self-absorbed deejays babbled into their mics as the alternative-rock digressed into morning show banter.

While enjoying their juvenile exchange as it blared from her nightstand, Jade forcibly fixed her attention on her immediate surroundings. She concentrated on not reading the minds of her neighbors or co-workers, not peering into their homes by inadvertent curiosity and, as usual, wishing for a day that this meditation would produce total mastery.

Meanwhile, she incessantly feared a breakdown or mental overload, a hypothetical short-circuit, perhaps resulting in a coma or complete insanity.

The need to keep her mind from wandering, maintaining a constant focus, tormented her to exhaustion daily. Even then, despite the effort, her frontal lobe often exercised a frivolous life of its own.

The demon within.

Jade wiped, flushed, and started a shower.

Her apartment, a modest, third-floor, grand-a-month studio, overlooked Tenth Street in Manhattan’s East Greenwich Village between First Avenue and Tompkins Square Park.

Of course anything is modest when you can forecast the lottery, but Jade avoided such attention, even more frightened of exploitation than of mental collapse. She imagined fates more dreadful than becoming an endlessly-sedated government lab-rat, such as being captured by a twisted individual and coerced by torture or manipulated by extortion into serving their plots and whims. Please, she would envisage, Mr. Evil Genius, don’t make me demolish the skyscraper. What, you’re going to pull out my toenails first, then my fingernails, then start on my teeth? Well, okay, since you asked nicely. What type of drugs could tame her, or what restraints could hold her, she didn’t know, but figured, Even Superman has his Kryptonite.

She slipped into the white-tile stall and drew the clear plastic curtain, arching her back against the steamy water.

One of the baritone radio hosts announced the headlines, gravely reporting on floods and droughts, earthquakes and hurricanes, and on global trade wars, spent natural resources, the double-dip recession, and the latest measures of Homeland Security.

She brushed her teeth beneath the soothing spray as the warmth saturated her dangling raven locks. Wars and rumors of war.

One week ago, the fiery, bloody hailstorm had ravaged the globe in less than twenty-four hours, but a snowstorm on the previous day had buffered New York City against the phenomenon.

A third of the United States still burned in parcels. Aided by the fall rains, an augmented National Guard labored to manage the blazes.

Jade leaned forward into the sprinkling stream, rinsing her yawning mouth and rubbing the hot water around her bulbous breasts and over her dark nipples, around her lean stomach and over her shaved labia.

Enough chatter for this morning.

She pictured her bedside stereo on the nightstand, a giant pink bean of a digital timepiece. I’m going for it, damnit.

Jade breathed softly, Feel the zen, J girl. She visualized the alarm controls, willing the switch to the off position, attempting to exert only the slightly touch.

When nothing happened, she increased the effort by a fraction.

The receiver went silent.

It also began to melt inward directly around the tuner buttons.

Damnit!

Then the device stopped melting but levitated from the stand, also exuding smoke from its speakers.

Jade saw it plainly, helplessly.

Flames erupted from the seams of the floating pink bean.

She huffed, No more practicing in the morning, J, and terminated the shower prematurely, brooding, Should have conditioned my hair first.

Jade threw open the clear curtain, stepped from the tub, snatched a cherry-red towel from a door-top hook and wrapped her torso as she stomped, dripping a deluge on the faux-wood floor, into the bedroom toward the window.

She slid the vertical blinds aside, unlocked the window and heaved it up, then shivered as the freezing, exhaust-flavored morning breathed on her soaked skin.

Jade marched to the nightstand.

The clock-radio hovered ridiculously above it like a pink-bean balloon grounded by a black-wire string, no longer flaming but scorched and perfectly concave on top, a glassy bowl where the buttons had been.

When Jade approached, it fell defeated on the stand as if submitting, begging for mercy.

She yanked the cord from the wall and lifted the warped stereo by it. Tracking wet footprints and clutching the red towel around her bosom with the other hand, she carried the smoldering device to the open window with a straight arm as if the diseased thing was infectious.

Jade slung it into the dirty snowdrift on the fire escape and took a moment to sulk, I loved that damn alarm clock.

Do I really have to kill everything I love?

She locked the window and reset the blinds, then abandoned her drenched towel on a bedpost and walked nude to the kitchen, heavy breasts joggling and long black hair dripping freely down her buxom backside.

Coffee! she called ahead, Don’t you die on me! I loved the alarm clock, but I can’t live without you…

In the kitchen she grabbed a mug from the dish drainer, There you are! then sighed as she poured, No, I’m not talking to myself. I’m talking to a mug and a coffee pot. It’s fine.

*

Wearing tight bluejeans, tough black hiking boots, and a bulky black sweater over a white V-neck T-shirt, Jade strode from her building onto the windy concrete, ponytail sweeping her back from under a gray skullcap.

Along her routine stroll north on First Avenue to the Fourteenth Street subway entrance, the impact of the blood-and-fire hailstorm lingered. Though fresh snow had neutralized the fires, hail damage and crimson stains were plentiful.

That she hadn’t foreseen the extraordinary storm puzzled the psychic until she reasoned, Can’t see what you’re not looking for…

Therefore this morning, on some level, either she or her feisty frontal lobe must