No One Lives Forever

No One Lives

Forever

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Synopsis: It’s a typical day in Los Angeles for high school graduate Brittany Taylor: warm sun, busy streets, no job, and sudden death.

Author’s Notes: Brittany’s amazing tactical-combat skills were displayed in “The Daria Hunter.” How she got those skills is still a mystery, but she’s displayed combat skills on other occasions (e.g., “Monster”). Brittany’s birth mother Vivian lives around Hollywood, per The Daria Database. This fanfic was influenced by reading the first chapter in Thomas Harris’s novel, Hannibal.

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Thomas Harris, who almost gave me a heart attack with that first chapter in Hannibal, and thanks to everyone who sent me notes about this story.

The plastic clock on the checkstand said it was 9:11 a.m. when the twenty-something blonde’s cell phone went off, just as she was about to fill out a deposit slip in the bank’s lobby. She pulled the phone from the back pocket of her tight jeans, flipped it open, and tried to talk and write at the same time, holding the deposit slip in place on the marble checkstand with an elbow.

“Hi, it’s me!” she said in a cheery squeak, golden pigtails bouncing. “Hi, Mom. Yes, I’m fine. I’m at the bank.” She frowned. The deposit slip kept wrinkling on the glass tabletop as she wrote. “No, Mom, everything’s okay. Yeah. Well, I’m sure I’ll find an acting job soon. I still have enough left for two months’ rent on the apartment. Mom, thanks for looking out for me, but I’m fine, really. Yeah. No. Mom, please—”

The pen ran out of ink. She scribbled on a corner of the deposit slip to restart the flow, but the deposit slip tore in half. She sighed and put down the pen, turning in place to look out the bank windows at the midmorning street scene. It was a cloudless day in East Los Angeles. High palm trees lined the crowded boulevard outside the bank; half-dressed teens on in-line skates shouted in Spanish as they wove through crowds on foot. The thumping of rap came through the windows as a hopped-up muscle car with the top down cruised by. “Dad and Ashley-Amber are fine, last I heard. Brian’s grades suck, no surprise there. No, I haven’t heard from my agent.” Her face fell. She tugged on the hem of her short, low-neck yellow tee, which made her well-developed breasts stand out all the more. “He hasn’t called me since a week ago last Friday. I think he went to an island somewhere. I don’t know why, Mom. His secretary said she’d call me if she—”

A black, four-door Cadillac DeVille with the windows rolled all the way down pulled up to the curb in front of the bank with a screech of tires. A rusted-out Ford Fairlane station wagon stopped behind it, rocking on its springs. With the engines still running, the car doors opened and young men in trench coats got out and headed for the bank doors. Each wore sunglasses with a cap of some kind; several had gold neck chains and most were tattooed. The blonde counted five coming in, with a driver and a gunman left to each car, scanning the street and sidewalks for police. The men were all business, a typical L.A. ethnic blend of white, black, Hispanic, and Asian—the American melting pot at its finest.

“Mom?” said the blonde, watching through the windows. She maneuvered around the checkstand. “Mom, I gotta go. I’ll call you back. No, Mom, I promise. Real soon. Love you, too. Bye.” She shoved the cell phone back into her pants pocket just in time.

The two glass doors to the bank flew open. Weapons rose out of the trench coats as the men spread quickly through the lobby. “Down on the floor!” yelled a man with amber sunglasses and a head bandana. He swung around an AK-47 with a banana clip. “Get the fuck down before we blow your fucking heads off!”

Four bank customers and a portly security guard went straight to the floor. The pigtailed blonde behind the checkstand raised her hands to shoulder height and studied the five who were robbing in the bank. Each one knew his part. Three men carried bags and pistols, a big guy covered the customers and guard with a sawed-off shotgun in either hand, and the leader had the automatic rifle. The bag-carrying men threw their sacks over the counters to the tellers without bothering to tell them what to do next.

“Yo, bitch!” shouted a bagman, a tall rail-thin teen with acne and a scraggly goatee. “You deaf or what? Get your fucking ass down!” He walked toward the pigtailed blonde with his black 9-mm Glock held out sideways as any style-conscious L.A. teen thug would do, the barrel aimed right between the blonde’s blue eyes with a thirty-round long clip sticking out from the grip.

“Don’t shoot!” the blonde squeaked. “I’ll be good!”

“Yeah, you’ll be good, all right.” The bagman grinned and reached for one of the girl’s upraised hands. “You come with us and be extra good, and maybe we’ll—”

The girl’s right hand shot forward and the heel of her palm rammed the teenager’s nose, snapping his head back. Her left hand caught the underside of the Glock and forced it up, breaking the teen’s thumb and causing his trigger finger to tighten and blow a fist-sized hole through one of the bank’s front windows with a deafening bang. Then the teenager was whipped around, his right arm forced high behind his back. He screamed as blood spilled down his face from his broken nose. The Glock came around his right side in the blonde’s right hand.

“Drop your weapons!” the blonde yelled, but another bagman was taking aim and Bandana-Head had jerked the AK-47 around at waist level. The Glock in her hand jumped as both men fired at her. The teenager’s scream turned into a gurgle as the automatic rifle opened a half-dozen bright red holes across his upper chest. The plastic clock on the checkstand exploded. The dying teen fell to the left. The blonde fell with him, still using him as a shield, the Glock still flashing.

When she hit the floor she rolled behind another checkstand. A shotgun blasted away half of the checkstand’s top; deposit slip bits and marble shards rained down. She leaned to one side and fired twice around the base of the stand and saw the huge guy with the shotguns stop and rock forward. His second sawed-off blew a framed photo of Arnold the Governator off the wall before he fell flat on his face and stopped moving except to bleed out. A bagman near the teller counters was on his knees crying, hands pressed to his abdomen where a massive red stain soaked his shirt and pants. The last bagman and Bandana-Head were hitting the doors out, but the AK-47 was in Bandana-Head’s left hand because his right arm didn’t work anymore.

She was on her feet a second later, a focused look on her face. She shot the crying bagman in the forehead as she went by and was at the door before his brains slid down the marble façade of the tellers’ counter behind him. The third bagman had stopped on the other side of one of the glass doors, his .45 revolver aimed back at her. She fell backward, firing twice at the same time he did. The door burst into a shower of safety glass flying inside and out. When she got up and came out the door, she didn’t need to open it. The bagman lay on his back on the sidewalk, desperately trying to cover his sucking chest wounds so his lungs would work. She put a third bullet hole in him between the other two; his body sank back and relaxed. Dozens of passers-by on the sidewalks ran for their lives, shrieking and dragging children with them as they dodged into stores and fled across the boulevard through traffic.

Bandana-Head dived through the open back door of the DeVille with his AK-47. The passenger-seat gunner in the station wagon twisted around to fire at the blonde but she shot him in the throat, bent down to scoop up the .45 from the bagman with the chest wounds, then stood and fired with both guns straight out, left-right-left-right-left-right. The station wagon and the DeVille squealed away from the curb, tires smoking, but the station wagon’s driver slumped over and fell out of his half-open door. His legs caught on something in the car and he was dragged along until his legs came loose and he went under the left rear wheel. The Fairlane wagon then crashed into a parked pickup truck across the street and set off a half-dozen car alarms. The passenger-seat gunner in the DeVille hung half out of a window of the fleeing car, Cheyenne style, and fired at her with a MAC-10, but he was panicked and his aim was bad. She fired both guns left-right-left-right. The door gunner slid backward out of the window and rolled on the street until he stopped face down. The blonde threw the empty .45 aside.

Two police cars were coming up the boulevard four blocks away with sirens wailing, heading straight for the DeVille. The driver spun the DeVille around in a tight one-eighty, rear tires screaming, and gunned the engine and headed for the blonde, who was picking up the MAC-10 that the DeVille’s door gunner no longer needed. She planted herself in the street, straight-armed the MAC-10, and fired until the clip was empty. The DeVille’s windshield evaporated; the black car swerved and roared past her, the faceless driver lying on his side, then drove over a parking meter and across the sidewalk at 45 mph and slammed into the granite façade of the very bank the gang had tried so earnestly to rob.

She walked over to the steaming DeVille as a rear door opened and Bandana-Head tried to get out, leaving his AK-47 behind in his desperation to escape. He then saw her coming and raised his left hand in terror, his right arm still not working. “Don’t shoot!” he shrieked. “I’ll be—”

She shot him in the gut and he fell back in the car. She then fired into the rear of the DeVille with the Glock until the gas tank exploded. Bandana-Head tried to get out, but she shot him again and left him screaming in the fireball. She emptied the rest of the Glock’s magazine into the car, dropped it on the sidewalk, and went back into the bank through the shot-out glass door just as the police pulled up.

Once inside, the pigtailed blonde stalked over to an undamaged checkstand, carefully swiped her forearm across it to remove the grit and dust, found a pen on a chain that had ink in it, then pulled out a fresh deposit slip. She had just filled in her name when her cell phone rang again. She sighed, put down the pen, pulled out the phone, and opened it. “Hello?” she said. After a moment, her eyes rolled in exasperation. “Mom, I said I was going to call you back, all right?”

Original: 03/25/06, modified 06/01/06, 09/18/06, 07/03/09

FINIS