Nurse Venus

He tried to get up. He couldn't. He had tubes coming into him . . .The curtain moved.

"Moms. . . .Minako? . . . Where's Minako?"

"In another ward. She'll be all right, dear."

"Bleeding . . . saw her bleeding."

"She'll be all right, son."

"I . . . thought she . . . she was an angel."

He faded out again.

John Crawford was the only journalist allowed in the emergency room when they started bringing the shooters in--because he was a patient, still waiting for someone to finish up the treatment of his clipped finger. He immediately noticed the feature common to most of the shooters: they were blind.

That is, most of the ones who were still alive.

Crawford stumbled onto yet another windfall: the boy he had seen throwing down his gun. Cops were guarding him while his ankle was checked, then put in a splint. He hadn't been injured when he'd seen him back away from the fight--and the winged thing that was floating in front of him. He managed to get the name from his chart: Louis Spotts. Spotts was whisked away as soon as his ankle was set.

He called in his story as soon as he could find a place to call.

The camera from the blimp caught the couple in the boat falling in the water, and then the boat blowing up, and then panned up to the men shooting, and stayed on them until the end of the combat. But the electronics were fried before the end, because Chibi Moon had been watching a TV in Chicago when she saw the battle start. She materialized with Tuxedo Mask and Kimi Moon just outside the gondola of the blimp, and helped by Kimi's eye, started firing precise blasts at the men who were still shooting at Sailor Venus. The cameraman did not see her beside the gondola, but two others did, including the co-pilot. The cameraman did see her materialize with Kimi Moon in front of Louis Spotts, but did not know his camera was dead.

Spotts and the little moons were fifteen feet away from Jean Sauvage, close enough for his microphone to pick up everything that was said.

But Jean Sauvage flew back to Paris that night. So the NSA was able to keep a partial lid on the story for a little while. Calls to the FBI secured the tapes from the TV crews at the dock end of the lake and the helicopter.

But there was a problem in Chicago . . .

Ishtar was with Ami and Cooan, the Ayakashi sister who was the best teleporter, and Hotaru, who could both fight and protect strongly, and whose healing powers might be needed to help a victim if they actually caught the man. With Mercury's computer-sensor, they hoped to get the most out of Ishtar's powerful ability to sense emotions. Shingo was also along, perhaps not a wise choice, but Usagi had not had the heart to tell him to stay behind.

They were supposed to stay in the center of the search. The other sisters provided teleport power for three other groups. The other Chibi sailors, like Chibi Venus, had good powers for sensing and could fly very fast, but they didn't have any attacks better than wing strikes yet. The first generation senshi were split up to support them. The strongest group was the four Asteroid senshi, Uranus, Neptune, and their children, both Chibi senshi--Nereid was the youngest of all; she had fantastic hearing, and could "lend" her power like Kimi's eye, though so far only to her mother. The group was so large because none of them was a very powerful teleporter, although together they could teleport anywhere. They were the south point of the search arc, moving furthest from the Lake Michigan shore, in position to intercept someone fleeing the city.

Mamoru, Chibi-Usa, and Kimberly formed the west point of the search, going along the path Ishtar's group should follow. Chibi Moon was the strongest teleporter, the best flyer, and had a strong attack. She could take Mamoru and her sister to any other group quickly.

The other three groups were north of Ishtar's group, searching through the more densely built up areas closer to the lakeshore.

The search would go on all day. If they covered the whole city, the plan was to double back.

That was the plan . . .

Ishtar began to be worried. It was hard to feel so many emotions, tuning in for the ones she was looking for. She guided in on two frightened children who had been locked in their bathroom for a long time, days, but their parents had done this thing. The senshi tried calling the police, but they just didn't seem to be coming, so Makoto had Karaberas take the abandoned children back to the mansion.

The senshi returned to the search pattern a little after noon. Everyone was upset at finding children who had been so frightened, but Ishtar, who had felt their emotions, was especially troubled. She asked to stop for awhile. They stopped at a mall. They found a place with one of Ishtar's favorite treats, hot cinnamon buns. She got one for herself, and two to take back to the children they had found. But when she took her to the restroom, Ami found that Ishtar was still upset. She wanted her mother. She started to throw up, and Ami took her to the only empty stall, the one on the far end. Ishtar insisted on going in alone; she was a very modest little girl. Ami let her. She stepped outside to get Cooan. But when they came back, Ishtar was gone. Cooan took down the door to the stall--not with powers but with panicked strength. They saw there was an access door in the wall of the stall--and it was loose.

Ami could smell something. She transformed and used her sensor. "Chloroform!" She called for help. Hotaru and Shingo came immediately. Mercury used her sensor to trace the service areas the access panel opened into--there was no one in them. But there was what looked like an exit not very far away. "Take us there!" she told Cooan, pointing out a spot.

They materialized in the parking lot, on the roof of the car. Mercury formed her wings and rose, scanning around, looking--a car was trying to leave, but a mall cop had stopped it. It was close to the exit. She couldn't scan well enough, so she tried the direct approach: she flew to the car.

The cop was about to let his stop go--he really didn't want to bother a father with a sleeping kid. But then he saw something big flying toward him. He drew his gun.

That is when the compassionate "father" drew his own gun and shot the mall cop.

Mercury launched a bubble cloud to keep him from shooting anyone else, and then a water stream--but she missed, because the man was backing up.

Then Cooan jumped with Hotaru in back of him. He slammed on his brakes, but not quite in time. Saturn presented her glaive, and it came in through his back window, and then went out through the front . . . along with his head.

Ami caught up. She checked Ishtar and found she was all right. Then she shouted, "The Policeman!" in Japanese. Shingo had already come to the policeman and was giving him CPR. Amy scanned him and showed Hotaru where to use her power. She healed the hole in his heart and the one that had hit a kidney, but she did not have enough power left to close the other wounds.

Ami was working so hard to save the man's life she did not notice the city policemen coming up. Neither did Hotaru, or Shingo, until they came up and put handcuffs on them.

Cooan was gone, with Ishtar. But, of course, there was a headless man in the car, and over a hundred people had seen Hotaru kill him.

When Cooan popped into the mansion, the first thing she did was shout for Usagi. But Usagi shouted for Cooan to come.

Usagi was back in the control room; she'd sent up Makoto, Ryo, and their children with the ones they had found before. She had just seen her family's group vanish from Chicago, and was trying to find it. But then she saw Ishtar in Cooan's arms.

"What happened?" cried Usagi.

Cooan said, "The man kidnapped her! We caught him just in time, but the police have arrested the rest of my group! Including your brother!"

"Is Ishtar all right?" asked Usagi.

"Yes, but she has been drugged," said Cooan.

Usagi called for Mako as Cooan set Ishtar onto one of the padded benches. Usagi returned to the screen controls, saying "Mamoru and my children are off the screen, and they don't answer my calls. I must find them with their tracers."

Cooan said, "No, we must get my group back first! The police will take their tracers and everything else as soon as they get them to a station! We may not be able to find them soon!"

Usagi made a difficult choice. She zoomed back in on Chicago, found where Shingo, Hotaru, and Ami were, and sent messages to all the senshi there. Cooan knew something of Chicago because of her Grey Company work, and she guessed the police were taking her people to their main headquarters. "That would be the best place for the others to wait."

Usagi said, "Thank you, I will send them there . . . try to find my children and Mamoru. Use one of the consoles."

Then Mamoru called to report the fight at the lake. He asked Usagi to alert Carmen and Ginger so they could get Minako and her husband into the hospital. Usagi called Kevin's mother to check on the babies and tell her where to meet her son and Minako; then she sent Cooan and Mako back to Chicago. And that is when the three police cars with Shingo, Sailor Mercury, and Sailor Saturn arrived at their headquarters, and the NSA got another headache . . .

Not surprisingly, the arrest of two angels interested the press. They were out in force by the headquarters--actually, the commissioner had called many of them in. He was in a difficult point in his career, and he thought a spectacular arrest would help. Costumed nuts who cut off heads qualified. It could take off some of the heat for failing to catch the latest serial killer . . .

Ami couldn't reach her earring, but her sensor was down anyway--the police assumed it was just an odd pair of glasses. Unfortunately it was set for microsurgery and she was quite blind.

But Saturn wasn't. Spying friends in the crowd, she said to Mercury in Japanese, "Bubble cloud now!"

When the cloud dissipated, the police had lost their prisoners right on the front steps, in front of the cameras. And the murder weapon, carried in held high like Lee Harvey Oswald's rifle.

The FBI had been interested in the man who lost his head in Chicago, and (with the help of some anonymous tips) had enough evidence to announce their solution to the case within 24 hours. The Police Commisioner pulled the ripcord on his golden parachute. And Chicago, a great newspaper town, had great columns about the about the angels. One paper ran the headline: ANGELS STOP KILLER, SAVE COP, GET ARRESTED.

Predictably, after two days, the only feasible way to separate Makoto from the children she had taken from their heartless parents was with nuclear weapons. Kurume sent lawyers and called in some favors, and the parents, facing prosecution, agreed to surrender custody. They were named Tammy and Philip, and they soon thrived in the love they found in their new home.

Kevin Jones came home after three weeks, not nearly fully recovered, but able to get along with professional care at home. Since he was married to a nurse, and there were three doctors living in the house, he did not lack for that.

Jones had changed his habits by then. He hated using earpieces or even headphones, so he tried some of Mrs. Chiba's books to pass the time. He loved having Minako read to him, but he could read pretty well by himself after all of Mina's tutoring.

Kevin liked TV and radio even less after the hit at the lake because there was so much news about the war Marvell was in. Marvell hadn't told him, and he hadn't asked, but he knew the war had started with the attempt to kill him and Minako. He didn't like to think of that at all. All the best things in his life had come from Minako. Was she going to get killed with him, for what he'd done? Or just to get at Marvell? Or just to clean house after Marvell was gone?

No reporters were allowed to see him at the hospital. Police asked him questions, lots of questions, but he didn't have much to say. No, he didn't really know how he'd gotten to the hospital; he'd had crazy dreams or hallucinations. Angels? His Minako was an angel, but not that kind. Why would people want to kill him? Ask them; he didn't have the damndest idea. Why would anyone want to kill a beautiful woman who had never hurt anyone and a harmless cripple like himself?

Actually, he believed most of that. Who would be stupid enough to try to kill him to get to Marvell now? Marvell could wipe any crew in the country. Minako was right; as long as his rep held up, the smart fighters would always want to work for Marvell.

If Marvell was even smarter, Kevin thought, he'd walk away from the business on top. Moms was always really wanting that now, but she didn't say it right out. Kevin didn't say it at all. But seeing Marv with the babies he'd made with Minako, and looking at him sometimes after, Kevin wondered if maybe Marvell thought Kev was the smart one, for once . . .

No TV, no radio, no papers, no magazines. Old books and the comics the kids were always reading. Old music Michie the green lady liked. Nothing to remind him of boys not old enough to grow a decent mustache dying in piss and shit and blood--that was what a fight was really like, and it ate up the baby bangers like the ones in the lead car almost as fast as the demons he'd fought.

Kevin was an old man now. Not old enough for a legal drink in California, but the last male survivor of his first grade homeroom. He knew that now. One of Mina's friends had looked them up. Seven gang hits, four overdoses, two HIV, one hepatitis, one shot by cops, one dead in custody, one lethal injection, two suicides, two in fires, one shot while being robbed, one shot while robbing, one shot in an argument, and one shot by a stray bullet. Four of the girls were dead, too . . .

B.Q. (William Quincy, not an acceptable street name) lasted less than a week. Marvell tried to stop the war after that, but it got more complicated. Two of the other underbosses died in the next week. The remaining three got together, for the moment, and decided that Marvell and the other Blues must have been planning to take over the Reds in California all along. The two Blue bosses in Southern California called on Marvell for help and he had to send some of his best men.

Marvell was at the top of a gang that had more than a thousand members in Northern California, but he never had more than forty or fifty real fighting men, and half of them were really managers. Sending a dozen men to help down south left him stretched thin.

The angel girls seemed to be staying out of this war, except for the Lake. Why had they saved Kev? Especially since they had attacked him, if Kevin's recollection had more truth in it than Marvell had believed earlier.

The police got nothing out of Louis Spotts, but Marvell's men inside the jail did. It sounded crazy--except that Spotts said things about the Lisette Pinatabo case that the cops hadn't released. Marvell had gotten it from his sources in the three police departments involved

Still, it just sounded too crazy. Those stories about the CIA testing weapons on blacks--they made more sense than angels wearing skimpy sailor-costumes out of some silly-ass Japanese cartoon. A lot of the Reds and even a lot of his own men had bought into that, but there never seemed to be any hard proof.

Marvell didn't have a lot of time to waste speculating on exactly who or what had saved Kevin at the lake. He had a war to fight, and a business to run.

Then, four weeks after the Lake Merrit incident and the Chicago Angels, Paris Match published frames from Jean Sauvage's video. And from then on, Marvell and a lot of other reasonable people started believing there were flying girls with strange powers.

By now, the rumor that John Crawford had started in Jackie Jones' kitchen was becoming a political problem. Pictures of young African-American men being blinded, or their heads exploding, or being reduced to cinders by violet blasts were burned into the national retina.

The only clear pictures of the angels firing were taken by the news team, and were now in NSA vaults. Sauvage's film showed the boat, showed beams coming out of the water, and showed the slaughter, but it didn't show angels until the end--and while they looked very odd, it was not a two headed monster, it was a little girl with wings and a littler girl with wings--and a third eye. The unnaturalness was canceled out by the sweet voices that were clearly recorded on the video:

"You helped the little girl in the van."

"Run away before the police come."

Since Spotts was also clearly visible, he suddenly became a VIP prisoner.

Crawford got wind of the confiscated tapes and started calling the people who used him as a source. Facing some critical runoff elections that could lose his party's majority, the President booted a few NSA butts. The tapes, "misplaced" by the FBI (which traded funding for a secret project for taking the heat) were released four days after the full Sauvage tape was first shown. They clearly showed the twin flyers firing the violet beams; with enhancement, it showed the angel that had risen out of the water firing a laser beam from her head, downing most of the shooters (including all the blinded ones). They also showed her carrying someone in her arms, and showed her resuscitating him on the shore, the other angels joining her with an unidentified man wearing a tuxedo and a mask--and then all of them vanishing.

Full disclosure. No secret weapons testing.

Of course, the next day, there were rumors that the government was secretly breeding mutants to hunt down young African-American men . . . but they didn't spread that far. Jean Sauvage's film made the "mutants" too sympathetic.