The next afternoon, Shadow awakens in the front bench seat of a non-functioning van, stacked on top of a pile of other automotive junk. This little front compartment, minus the steering wheel and column serves as Shadow’s resting place and has whenever she chooses to use it, for the last half year. She sleeps in her self-repaired ninja outfit with her mask/hood on, just in case she needs to be on the move in a hurry.
The outfit has many battle scars that have either been patched or sewn back together quite effectively. She would have abandoned this suit a long time ago if she knew how to replace or recreate the electrical system that is wired throughout the suit. The wiring is connected to her via her armpit. The suit’s fail-safe defense mechanism has gotten her out of trouble more times than she has felt comfort to be without.
She exits the van and heads into the office, which now reads, “Open”. Hardly anyone comes to the junkyard, but she still does her usual checks to make sure no one sees her. Once inside the living quarters, she stands behind Mike’s swivel rocker. Before she has a chance to announce herself, he turns toward her and says enthusiastically, “Good Morning, Sunshine!”
“How can a man who has never seen a sunrise, smile when saying something like that?” she ponders.
“Guess what today is, Betty?”
“What?”
“It’s our six month anniversary. It’s been six months since that fateful night we met. Trust me; I don’t forget about friends, even if they were thinking about killing me when they first met me.”
“How in the world did he know? And if he did, why did he still help me? He has to be able to see,” thinks Shadow.
As he stands and makes his way to the room designated for cooking, “Yup, that night you pulled something out on me and good ol’ Spot here, but we knew you weren’t going to hurt us. You were full of anger and still are, but not toward me and Spot.” The seeing-eye dog leads his way.
“How’d he know I pulled out my daggers? He’s not blind, he’s been faking the whole time. But why?” she thinks as the old man rambles around in the make-shift kitchen.
“So, for the special occasion, I made you a cake.” He brings it out to her, then it’s plain to see he must really be blind. The cake looks horrible, the icing is not lined up and the cake itself is slightly lop-sided. Written, but just barely legible enough to plainly read, is “For Betty”.
The old man holding the cake smiles and asks, “You like it?” even the dog tilts his head in attention.
Shadow says a word for the first time that she can remember, “It’s beautiful.”
Mike’s grin grows and Spot barks in approval.
Shadow looks at the cake that Mike’s still holding. It looks like a child made it. Shadow who had been battling glimpses and flashbacks of her past, as her mind tries to unravel lost and buried thoughts, has a flashback to when she was a child.
Little Betty Jean is sitting at the dining room table, enjoying the smell of the soon to be arriving birthday cake. Her mother brings the cake to the table as Betty is all smiles. Mark, her father sits in the living room watching a baseball game. Betty’s mom asks him if he wants a slice, he says no. Seeing little Betty’s smile disappear, she asks again with a plea in her tone. Mark gets up, comes to the table, and grabs a plate with a piece of cake on it.
“Are you happy?! Huh?! I got a piece of cake. I’m missing the game but whoa, I have a piece of damn cake, does that make you happy?!”
Betty’s mother’s eyes water up in anticipation of something bad about to happen, and Mark doesn’t let her down. He shoves a piece of cake in her face.
“No means no!” he yells.
As Shadow looks down at Mike’s cake, she feels the anger Mike referred to, boiling inside her.
“All I wanted was for my father to be part of my birthday. Is that too much of a child to ask for?! I didn’t ask to be born,” she thinks as she’s looking at the cake. Not being able to smell the cake because of the surgeries that her former employers, the Katsuya Corporation, had done to make her immune to most air born toxics, such as nerve gas, only makes her angrier.
She forcefully slaps the cake out of Mike’s hand, sending it against the near wall. Spot barks at her and growls, but Mike tells him to heel, which he does.
“You okay, Betty? You need to talk about it, dear? If you talk about it, “He” can heal you” asks Mike sympathetically.
“Heal me! This stupid gauntlet I wear can heal me, but nothing can give me back my life! Katsuya Corporation stole my childhood and it’s time to pay!” she fumes to herself.
She storms out of the front door of the office not caring who sees her.
“God, please look after her. Help her Lord,” pleads Mike.
Not caring or taking her normal routine precautions to make sure visitors to the junkyard do not see her, she heads straight toward her van-home. After a slight climb over junk, she enters the passenger side of the rusty van, shuts it and climbs back into the cargo section. A few seconds later, both back doors fling open and the sound of her motorcycle revving can be heard right before it, along with Shadow in complete assassin gear, shoots out the back and down a make-shift ramp. This ramp has a 1/4 loop, that with enough speed will allow a successful attempt to clear the outer wall of barb-wire. Shadow easily clears this with room to spare, landing and doing a power slide in the empty dirt lot behind the junkyard. Wasting no time, she accelerates as fast as the bike allows and heads into the main traffic with disregard for the other vehicles.
She had been going through this moment countless times in the last few months. Knowing who she was, was her one wish. It had been granted by a mythical being she encountered in King Foymama’s Tomb, a mission by her old employers. The mission was to retrieve a priceless gauntlet that gave the bearer near immortality, which she kept for herself as a severance package.
But ever so slowly were these memories resurfacing. She attributed it to all the patch work that the Katsuya Corporation did to her brain, to “enhance her abilities” and erase any knowledge of a past life. A perfect human drone, so they fatally misbelieved.
The recent flashback had been one of a dozen in the last few months. Most negative, all focusing on the abuse of one man, her father, toward her mother. A few were him hurting Betty herself, but not many.
For the last few weeks she’s wondered how she would go about re-meeting her parents. Study their behaviors for awhile? Naw, she thought this would be too much like an assassination plan. Come as their daughter? Naw, too awkward. She barely could keep a five minute conversation going with Mike. What would her and her mother talk about? It’s been 10-15 years since they spoke for only moments and was almost another decade before that time. Betty was only about 8 years old as far as she remembers when she first lost her mother. And what about Mark? Could she talk to him without hurting him? These were some of the things that made the decision so difficult, but not now. Now the decision was clear, as she raced angrily through intersections and red lights. Now it was time to kill Mark!
“It’s his fault I’m who I am! If he could have been just a halfway decent parent, Mom would have never snapped. Damn him!” speeds through her thoughts as she speeds through an intersection, this time barely missing an intersecting vehicle, causing it to swerve almost into another car.
“So what if they hit me. They can’t kill me! Nobody can kill me! And nobody can stop me from killing that bastard. I’ll finish what my mother tried, but he won’t be so lucky this time.”
Tears form in her eyes, blurring her vision through the visor of her helmet. She doesn’t slow down, as she easily punches 90 mph down the 35mph street. Then in a sick and twisted way, her cautiousness takes over, “But if someone hits me or the police get involved, they might somehow warn Mark and he might hide. I’ll find him eventually, but I want him now!” she slows to the speed limit.
Killing him would be too easy. It would be letting him off the net for all the years he cost me.” She’s too upset to notice her miss-stated, “Off the hoo
k,” phrase. She smiles a sinister smile with tears still in her eyes, “Yes, I’ve never tortured anyone before, always killed or left out cold, but I am learning new things everyday still. And this will go nicely on my resume.”
She attempts to laugh, something she’s only tried a handful of times, but like usual, it didn’t sound like a genuine laugh.