Escape from the Tiger's Eye

This is the ninth episode of the Tiger's Eye series.

Dave's mind was a jumble of fragments the night they escaped from the Tiger's Eye. Dave's mind was in confusion as he and Margie and Anne walked from Amy's house into town...

Fragment: That horrible un-sky overhead, striated streaky tawny orange ochre brown, like the iris of some vast obscene eye... And Amy's remark, on that day so long ago when she handsmothered and kidnaped Dave: "You'll never see a blue sky again!"

Fragment: Dave's dream last night, another vivid lifelike dream about a woman who was so much like Dave's old ex-girlfriend, only it wasn't her. "You'd make a good scanner," Margie always told him. "Those girls you're dreaming about, they're real somewhere out there in the world."

Fragment: The pulse, like an alien heartbeat, that throbbed in Dave's bones here in the Tiger's Eye, that throbbed without ceasing in the perpetual tan daylight, like a cosmic metronome keeping time in serene indifference to the rhythm of Dave's own heartbeat...

Fragment: In town, nobody there but the abandoned sex slaves, for swap or for sale, lying alongside the public fountain, trussed up, hogtied, gagged, unable to speak. Nobody else was around. Town was empty. Almost all of the mistresses were at that party tonight, a huge party to welcome Lilo, and with her the dawning of a glorious new era for the Tiger's Eye...

When they came to the entrance of the gatehouse, Margie put her palm over Dave's mouth to signal for silence as she pressed the button on the intercom next to the door. A few moments later Roxanne's voice emerged, tinny and squawky, from the speaker: "Hello?"

"Roxanne, hi, this is Amy," said Margie. "Could you buzz us in? I've got something I want to show you."

"Sure thing." The locked door buzzed, and Dave opened it. Margie and Anne stepped through ahead of him. There was no guard inside the entrance; probably nobody in the gatehouse tonight but Roxanne, keeping watch in case of an emergency. The inner door buzzed and they passed through.

Down a long corridor, and past a thick porthole into the dark watery vastness of the sensory deprivation tank, where the scanners ran their searches of the world.

"Remember," said Margie, "you two stick to my script."

They passed through a final door, and into the skylit atrium which stood between the gymnasium and Roxanne's control room. The door to the control room was open, and Roxanne was sitting at her control panels.

Margie and Dave stepped into the room. "Mistress?" said Margie. "Mistress Amy will be along in a minute, but she wanted to show you this sex slave that she had altered."

Mouthless Anne stood in the doorway, raising her hands, gesturing at Roxanne, and going, "Mmmmmhhh, mmmmmmmm hhmmmmmmm mmmmmmmh!" Without a mouth, Anne was unable to speak. She could only make meaningless noises.

Roxanne swiveled in her office chair, her red ponytail bobbing in the air. She gazed, entranced, at Anne's face. "Oh wow, what a jolt! So Amy had this girl's mouth taken away?"

Margie: "Yes, Mistress."

"Isn't that something? Of course she's limited, with no mouth... Oh, how I'd love to hold my hand over that girl's--" Dave could tell that Roxanne was breathing heavily as she reached her large smooth hand out toward Anne's mouthless face...

Roxanne fastened the palm of her hand over Anne's blank mouthlessness. "Ohhhhhh... ohhhhhhh...." Roxanne's eyes went all dreamy like sex eyes as she moaned out loud and tightened her grip over Anne's mouthless face. "Ohhhh, there's nothing there on her face! It feels like nothing at all!"

Out of the corner of his eye, Dave could see Margie slipping a heavy paperweight out of her purse. Roxanne -- distracted by desire, lost in holding her hand over Anne's mouthlessness -- never even saw it coming as Margie brought the paperweight down hard on Roxanne's skull.

Dave caught Roxanne as she toppled out of her chair. He lowered her to the floor. "Good shot, she's out cold!"

Margie took a big heavy roll of industrial strength duct tape out of her purse, and she took to wrapping it around Roxanne's mouth and face and head. Around and around and around and around and around, every which way, more and more and more and more duct tape, until she had Roxanne's entire head encased in a tight thick heavy featureless cocoon of duct tape, no mouth, no nose, no eyes, just a faceless featureless silver helmet of duct tape imprisoning her entire head.

"Gee," said Dave, "isn't that a bit... excessive?"

Margie looked grim as she tightly wrapped Roxanne's hands, wrists, knees, ankles in duct tape. "This is the Tiger's Eye, she doesn't need to breathe. Do you know how many thousands... how many tens of thousands of sex slaves this woman has brought through into this hellhole? I came in before Roxanne's time, I was personally handsmothered and kidnaped by Sharrah and Beth and Juliette. But this bitch... this bitch Roxanne--"

Margie looked up at Dave. "Oh, you'd better get into the tank."

"Okay, now let me get this straight. You want me to scan on all the safe houses of the Tiger's Eye around the world?"

"Yes, there are thousands of safe houses, that's a large enough statistical sample for you to scan and look for--"

"You want me to look for the safe house that gives us the best chance of escaping for good?"

"No. No, this new science whiz mistress is a game changer. I need you to scan for the safe house that gives us the best chance of bringing Juliette and the mistresses of the Tiger's Eye down for good."

Dave found the sensory deprivation tank unsettling. Hanging there suspended in lukewarm water, zoning out, the boundaries of his ego dissolving, the safe houses like thousands of points of light in the dark... then sifting and winnowing, narrowing them down, thousands, then hundreds, then a few dozen, then four or five, then... Reno, Nevada.

Working Roxanne's controls, bringing up the safe house in Reno, setting a 60-second time delay... that was child's play. Dave had worked in IT for a large corporation, this user interface was well designed and quite intuitive.

"Mmmmmhh, mmmmmhh... hhhmmmmmm..." Roxanne was coming to, squirming on the floor, bound in duct tape, her entire head tightly thickly encased in a massive amount of industrial strength duct tape...

"Come on, platform one, we've got to hustle!" said Margie. "With luck, they won't find her until tomorrow."

Standing there in the gym, inside the rectangle painted on the floor... it seemed to Dave like an anticlimax. Counting down his final seconds here in the Tiger's Eye...

Flash! Margie and Dave and Anne disappeared, gated through to the safe house in Reno, Nevada.

They were out into the streets of Reno, in the dark, late at night, before it dawned on Dave that he no longer felt the pulsing metronome-beat of the Tiger's Eye in his bones. Its absence vexed him, like an itch.

As for Margie, she was lost in her own private wonderland. The colorful jitter of animated billboards, huge ads for smartphones, the styling of cars parked on the street... all were a complete novelty to a young woman who hadn't been out in the world since 1969. "Cars... we need a car." Margie saw a man down the block, standing next to his car and doing something with his keys in thin air, as the car's parking lights blinked once in the dark. "You two wait here. Let me handle this."

Dave watched as Margie approached the man, said something to him, pointed back toward Dave and Anne. The man glanced in their direction, frowned -- did he notice something wrong with Anne's face? -- and all of a sudden Margie had the man in a headlock, her left arm around his neck, her right hand clamped fast over his mouth and nose.

"Mmmmmmmh, mmmmmmh! Mmmmmh MMMMMMMMHH! Hhhmmmm mmmm, MMMMMHHH!! MMMMMHHH!!!" The man made frantic muffled noises, as Margie held onto him, keeping his mouth and lower face tightsqueezed in her large smooth strong womanly hand. "MMMMMMMHH! Hhhhmmmmm, HHMMMMMMMHHH!!" Margie was smothering him, he reached up and tried to pull on her big unyielding suffocating hand, but he couldn't get leverage. He squirmed, writhed, struggled, tugged, barked and gnarled, all in vain. Margie kept her hand clamped TIGHT over his mouth and nose for more than a minute, until he faded and passed out.

Dave and Anne approached as Margie laid the unconscious man down and picked up his keys off the ground. She handed them to Dave. "Here, you drive. If these twenty-first century cars handle as different as they look--" Margie broke into a mischievous smile. "And don't say I never learned any tricks from the mistresses in the Tiger's Eye!"

Once Dave was behind the wheel, his mind dissolved once again into a welter of fragments...

Fragment: Onto Interstate 80 westbound, steep downhill slope into California. Middle of the night, light traffic, distant headlights in the dark.

Fragment: Dave: "So where are we heading?"

Margie: "I dunno, I'd say follow your nose."

Dave: "I thought you had this all planned out?"

Margie: "I do. My plan is to trust to your scanning. Why would we have settled on Reno?"

Dave: "Well... only folks I know out in this part of the country are my old college roommate and his girlfriend. They live in Palo Alto."

Margie: "Okay then, back to the Bay area. Palo Alto it is."

Fragment: Pulling off the Interstate to get gas at a truck stop. Margie, perplexed, handing Dave three $20 bills out of her purse: "Gee, gas sure got expensive! What ever happened to 32¢ a gallon? What kind of little screen is that, never seen anything like that before! And... this gas pump... takes credit cards?! Far out! Oh, and... what in the world is 'Unleaded'?"

Fragment: Pulling off again in the light of dawn at a McDonald's. Dave went in and ordered, brought back food for himself and Margie. He felt famished now that they were out of the Tiger's Eye and food was no longer optional.

Dave felt guilty as he glanced at the mouthless English girl sitting in the back seat. Anne was staring back at him, silent, with a haunted pleading look in her eyes. With no mouth, Anne was unable to eat or drink. Out here in the world, this was going to become a serious problem very quickly...

That morning back in the Tiger's Eye, Amy was standing there, enduring the white-hot molten fury of Juliette. "So... your sex slaves... have escaped from the Tiger's Eye! Nobody... nobody ever leaves the Tiger's Eye! Nobody!!! Not since that debacle with Walter and Sharrah... has anyone ever escaped the Tiger's Eye! Never!!!" Juliette was shrieking. "Never in forty years has anyone ever gotten out of here! Not since Walter and Sharrah! You... tell... me... Captain Wilson, how your sex slaves ever managed to slip this one by you!"

Amy felt the fear within her hardening into a cold resolve. "I will take personal responsibility for leading the effort to recapture them, Mistress."

"Well, you'd better succeed. Because if you don't... if this situation is not contained and rectified... I will have you turned into a lawn ornament, Amy Wilson! I will have you turned into a lawn ornament forever! Do I make myself clear?"

"Yes, Mistress." Amy stood there, in the same room where Walter had been tried and found guilty in a kangaroo court. She stood there looking at Juliette, to all appearances a young woman in her late twenties, beautiful, sexy, with long tangled dark hair and sultry heavy-lidded eyes. Juliette, so cold, so deadly. Juliette, who had ruled over the Tiger's Eye for fifty years now, eternally youthful, building an entire secret world founded on female hand over mouth.

Juliette, who looked like an exceptionally beautiful young woman... except for her impossibly long curling fingernails, each of her ten spiraling nails grown out nearly forty-five inches long...

Juliette turned her head. "Can Lilo give us an immediate upgrade to our capabilities? Roxanne?"

"The gating system, you'd have to ask Lilo, but I'd say if we leave the core of the system untouched, we can add some new plug-ins within a couple of days." Roxanne stood there, looking somewhat the worse for wear. There were angry welts on her face where skin had been pulled off. And Roxanne's red ponytail was missing, all of her hair cut short like a boy's: they had to cut her hair to get all that duct tape off her head.

Juliette: "All right, then. That will be all. Roxanne, you're on probation too. Oh, and Amy... don't disappoint me."

"I won't, Mistress." Oh great... Now Amy had to keep the dragon queen satisfied, while she waited and counted on Larry to come through with the cavalry...

In Palo Alto Dave abandoned the stolen car, and they walked ten blocks until they came to the house which was their destination. Dave rang the doorbell. Margie stood there on the front walk. Anne was holding her hand over her lower face.

A young man, mid twenties, dark curly hair, answered the door. "Oh hey, Dave! Long time no see, whatcha doin' out in these parts?"

"Gino! How you doing? Jenny, hi there, good to see you! I was just out this way, I'd like you to meet a couple of friends of mine. This is Margie, that's Anne. Anne, Margie, this is my old college roommate Gino, and his girlfriend Jenny."

"Well, any friend of Dave's is a friend of mine," said Gino.

"Say, uh, I'm really sorry, but we're in need of a bit of help. Long story, but we're sort of on the run. From an organization that is very big, very powerful, very secretive, and very very nasty."

"Oh, la Cosa Nostra?"

"Worse." Dave glanced over at Anne, who was still sheepishly holding her hand over her lower face to hide her lack of a mouth. "Anne, please, your hand..."

There was a pained look in Anne's eyes.

Margie: "Anne, please, you're going to have to..."

Slowly, with obvious embarrassment, Anne lowered her hand from her face, revealing nothing but blank featureless skin between her nose and her chin.

A good ten seconds of awkward silence. Then, Gino: "That's, uh, it's... it's, uh, it's done with makeup... right?"

Dave: "No."

Gino and Jenny were quick to invite the three fugitives into their home. But by the morning after next, mouthless Anne was weak and disoriented.

There was no choice but the emergency room. The shock, the horror, the confusion, when the doctors and nurses saw a young woman with no mouth... "Get an IV started on her, right away!"

Dave argued with the surgeon. "You've got to keep Anne's case out of your system! The people who did this to her, they can hack into your hospital medical system, and if they locate her we're all in danger!" But the surgeon insisted on following protocol and entering Anne into the hospital's electronic medical records.

By late afternoon Anne was lying in a hospital bed in room 310, her mouth surgically restored, gauze like white lipstick over her reconstructed lips. "Feelhh hrretty goo' I canh hawwk again!" said Anne.

Dave, Margie, Gino, Jenny, were all sitting there in the hospital room. To Dave it felt as if his mind was in danger of coming apart into a jumble of fragments again. "I'm gonna head out, I gotta stretch my legs," he said.

"I'll come with you," said Margie.

Gino got up to use the toilet. "You're not supposed to use the bathroom here in the hospital room, that's just for the patient," said Jenny. But Gino walked into the small bathroom and closed the door behind him.

A minute after Dave and Margie left, suddenly there was a bright flash of light in the hospital room. Five women in black appeared. "Oh no," said Anne, "Amy, doan', mah mouff--MMMMMMMPHH!" Amy strode across the room and clamped her huge smooth powerful womanly amazon hand TIGHT over Anne's newly restored mouth. "MMMMMMMHHHHHH!!!" Anne cut loose with a tortured but muffled SCREAM as Amy forcefully pressed Anne's head back deep into her pillow, leaning hard on Anne's face, with Amy's large strong hand pressed thumb-down over Anne's mouth and nose. "Mmmmhhh, mmmmh hmmmm mmmm hmmmm, MMMMHHHHH!"

Anne squirmed and thrashed in the hospital bed as Amy pressed her hand TIGHT over Anne's mouth which had just been operated on. "MMMMMMMH!! MMMMMMMMMMMHHH!!!" Another woman in black was standing on the other side of Anne's bed, holding Anne's wrists down. A third woman in black was slapping what looked like little refrigerator magnets on the foot of Anne's bed, on the side of an electronic monitor, on a chair...

A fourth woman in black knelt down behind Jenny's chair, and she reached around and clamped her left hand hard over Jenny's mouth, her other hand over Jenny's forehead. "Mmmmmmmhhhh, mmmmm hhhmmmmm mmmmm mmmm hhmmmm, mmmmm HHHMMMMMMMMH!" Jenny jerked and struggled, reached up and pulled on the large warm smooth hands which were holding her mouth and head imprisoned. But she was unaccustomed to being attacked with her mouth held, and she couldn't get away from the woman's tight aggressive mouth hold no matter how wildly she mmmmphed and struggled.

The fifth woman in black stalked across the room and pulled the bathroom door open. There sat Gino on the toilet, his pants down around his ankles. He looked up in sudden shock. "What th--mmmmmmmph! Mmmmmmh, MMMMMHHHH!! Mmmmhh hmmmm ghhhmmmm, mmmm HHMMMMMMHH!!" The woman clamped one big soft warm smooth hand like a tight steel lid over Gino's mouth and nose, to contain his noises. With her other hand she reached down between his legs and boldly took hold of his male member, which immediately rose to the occasion. "Mmmmmmhhh, HHMMMMMMMMMM!" Gino was trying to yell, but the smiling woman held his mouth muffled with one hand as she rhythmically rubbed and stroked his stiff organ with her other hand.

"You like this, don't you? Has your girlfriend ever done this to you?"

"Mmmmhhh!! MMMMMMMMHHH!!!" Above the woman's tightclamped muffling hand, the whites of Gino's eyes were showing all the way around.

In the stairwell, walking down a flight of stairs, Dave and Margie suddenly heard a nurse's frantic voice over the hospital's public address system: "Code green in room 310. Security, code green in room 310, urgently!"

Dave went, "Room three--mmmmmmmmph!" Margie clamped her large smoothbacked hand very firmly over Dave's mouth. "Keep moving!" She kept her hand tight over his mouth as they continued on down the stairs.

The nurse's voice continued over the PA, as if she was in such a panic that she didn't realize the mike was still open: "We heard muffled screaming from the room, but they're all gone. The room is empty. The patient and her friends, all gone, no bed, no furniture in the room..."

The voice of another nurse: "Ohmigod, the toilet is sheared off, the room is flooding!"

Then the microphone cut off. Margie and Dave came to the bottom of the stairs, and she finally thought to remove her hand from his mouth.

"Out this door!" Margie pushed Dave outside, onto the lawn. At the bottom of the slope they saw a bus stop, and a line of people getting onto a bus. Margie and Dave joined the line as she dug in her purse. "That was the Tiger's Eye for sure. Seems they don't need safe houses any more, you can thank the new mistress for that. Oh darn, I don't have a quarter for bus fare!"

Dave: "It's been a long time since it was a quarter. Don't worry, I've got it."

Margie and Dave got on the bus with no idea where it was headed. They rode to the end of the line, then got off and stole another car. Amazing how some people will leave their car unlocked with the keys in the ignition...

They got as far as the city of Fremont before Dave carelessly let the car wander back and forth over the center line. Flashing red and blue lights in the rear view mirror told him they were in trouble. Margie and Dave ended up at the police station, on charges of car theft. Then on a peculiar whim Dave started talking, and Margie followed suit, and soon a police psychologist was called in on their interrogation.

"Now tell me, Dave," said the psychologist. "Tell me if I've got this straight. These women who kidnaped you in Minneapolis... these women in black -- is that anything like the Men in Black in the movies? -- these women in black have super-science, they can appear and disappear, and they smothered you and whisked you away to some secret other universe where they live--"

"It's called the Tiger's Eye," said Dave. "It's, they call it a pocket universe, it's just... somewhere else... and they really get off on holding their hands over people's mouths, on smothering people with their bare hands, it's a fetish for these women..."

"And then this woman, this mistress named Amy... she smothered and kidnaped you, and you were her sex slave?"

"Yes, I was her sex slave, and she would handgag me and overpower me and force herself on me sexually, because it really turned her on--"

"Handgag? Is that anything like handbag?"

"No, listen, Amy, these women, they've been building up an entire secret civilization in the Tiger's Eye, it's all based on their hand-over-mouth fetish, they've been at it some of them for fifty years, but it's the fountain of youth, they never age, and they kidnap thousands of sex slaves from all around the world, they can pop in anywhere, they've got safe houses. And we escaped from them, but they're coming after us. Amy, she'll find us. She'll handsmother us. That's what she does. That's all she does. You can't stop her. She'll clamp her hand tight over my mouth and smother me until she blacks me out!"

The police psychologist was trying hard to suppress his laughter. As he explained to the police afterwards, "This Dave is a classic paranoid, his delusions are among the most elaborate I've ever run across. It's ingenious, really, the way his delusions all fit together into a closed system. It doesn't require a shred of proof.

"I'd be inclined to say he's just crazy as a loon, with some very strange sexual fantasies, except that the woman, Margie, seems to share all his delusions. In fact she goes him one better, she claims these women smothered and kidnaped her way back in 1969. I said, sister, you weren't even born in 1969! In fact likely as not, your parents weren't born yet in 1969. I don't know, this Margie and Dave, they're a peculiar pair, an interesting case of a folie à deux, a shared set of psychotic delusions..."

It was late at night. The psychologist stopped at the locked inner door of the police station. "Let me out?"

The sergeant at the front desk pressed a button, and the locked inner door buzzed and opened. The police psychologist stepped out into the front lobby. As he was crossing the lobby his cell phone went off, and he was distracted as he stepped through the front door of the police station into the night. Stepped out the front door just as a young woman was coming in the front door.

The young woman walked in through the front door of the police station. She approached the front desk. She said, "I'm a friend of Margie Connor and Dave Strunk. I was told they're here, could I see them please?"

The sergeant looked up from his desk, looked up through the thick pane of glass at a tall athletic young woman in her twenties, with short brown hair, a thin beautiful face, slightly tomboyish, wearing an oversized camouflage jacket. "No, you can't see them, they're being questioned right now."

"Where are they?"

"Look, it may be a while, you can wait for them on that bench over there." He gestured through the glass at a bench in the lobby.

Amy glanced this way and that, looking around back and forth with her jaw set, as if she was sizing up the place. She said, "I'll be back."

Then she turned and walked back out the front door of the police station.

The desk sergeant chuckled. Who did that chick think she was, anyhow? The Terminator? Arnold Schwarzenegger, or something?

All of a sudden there was a flash of light from behind the officer inside the small locked room. He looked down and saw a shadow falling across his desk, the shadow of someone standing right behind him.

"What in--mmmmmhhh, mmmmmmmmmhhhhh!!" A large soft strong feminine hand suddenly clamped TIGHT over the sergeant's mouth from behind. "Mmmmh, HHMMMMMMHHH!" The hand clenched even tighter over his mouth and jaw. "MMMMMMMMMHHH!!!" He reached up and pulled on the hand, unusually large and extremely strong for a woman, but he couldn't pull it away. "Mmmmmhh, mmmmm hhmmmm mmmmm..." The hand pulled his head back, tilted backward and upward...

The sergeant found himself looking straight up into the face of that young woman in her camo jacket... now standing behind his chair and holding his mouth shut painfully tight in her large strong hand... "MMMMMMMMHH!! Mmmh, mmmmm..." How did she get inside this locked office? He tugged and pulled in vain on her big powerful amazon hand.

Then suddenly in a bright flash of light, Amy and the police sergeant disappeared.

In a room in the police station, Margie was nodding off during a break from the questioning. She was jolted awake as she heard a distant noise: after forty-plus years in the Tiger's Eye, she'd recognize the sound of mmmmphing anywhere! Then through the closed door she heard a policewoman's voice out in the hall: "What the hell was that--mmmmmmmmph!" Margie's blood turned to ice.

Beyond Margie's view, out in the hallway, Amy had just appeared in a flash of light. Her arm shot out as she pressed her hand, thumb down, over the policewoman's mouth, slamming her back against the wall. A policeman was coming out the door of an office to the other side of Amy: his wide open "O" of surprise was eclipsed by Amy's other hand as she shoved him back, handgagged, into the door frame. "Mmmmmmmmmmhh, mmmmmmm--"

Flash! Amy and the two police officers vanished in a burst of light. A scant second later there was another flash, and Amy in her camouflage jacket reappeared, minus the two officers.

Amy stalked down the hall, turned and looked into an office to the left of her, where a startled cop was getting up from his desk. Flash! A moment later Amy was standing inside the office next to him, and she clamped her large long broad athletic hand HARD over his mouth and nose. "MMMMMMMHHHHHH!! Mmmmmh, MMMMMHH!!!" He jerked and thrashed against Amy's sudden handgag for a second or two before they both disappeared in a flash of light.

Then Amy appeared back in the office, all by herself. She looked into the office right across the hall, where a policeman was frantically picking up the phone to make a call. Flash! A moment later she was standing next to him in his office, and her large soft engulfing palm squeezed over his mouth like a tight steel spring. "Mmmmmmmh, MMMM'HMMMMHH!!"

"Tell me," said Amy, "what good is a phone call if you are unable to speak?" The man mmmmphed and squirmed, and then in a sudden flash of light he and Amy were gone. The phone receiver clattered and bounced across the desktop.

Flash! A moment later Amy reappeared, solo, out in the hallway. Police were rushing to and fro. "What is it, a terrorist attack?-- MMMMMMHHHH!!" Amy reached out and locked her hand over the mouth and jaw of a policewoman who was within arm's reach of her. In a bright flash they were gone; almost instantly, in another flash, Amy was back, by herself.

Hiding in the room behind a closed door, Margie was trembling, shaking, as she heard the cries of confusion and the mmmmphing in the police station. The door opened; it was the police lieutenant. "Stay here!" He locked the door, then exited by another doorway to the office next door.

Outside, Amy was stalking down the hall toward a policeman. He aimed his gun at her, pulled the trigger, fired straight at her again and again and again. Amy's body flickered in and out, blink, blink, blink, blink, blink, disappearing and reappearing in perfect synchronization with the gunshots. She advanced on him, walking like a flickering ghost right into the hail of gunfire. His gun ran out of ammunition, click, click, click, as Amy reached him and clamped her big hand, thumb down, over his mouth. "MMMMMMHHHHH!!" For an instant his eyes were filled with shock and rage; then the two of them disappeared in a nimbus of light.

Flash! Amy reappeared at the end of the hallway. She reared back and her powerful basketball player leg kicked a closed door wide open. In the second room over, a cop opened fire on her, then dashed out of view across the room. Amy flickered in and out as his bullets passed through and struck the wall behind her. Then she disappeared, and suddenly in that second room over, there was a bright flash of light -- a sudden muffled panicked "MMMMMMMMM'WWMMMMHH!" -- and another flash of light as Amy took care of that cop.

Flash! Amy appeared again out in the hall. Police were dashing back and forth. "I got her! I got her!" They shot at Amy. She flickered. Suddenly she was standing behind a young policewoman, and Amy grabbed her in a headlock as she clamped her large female athlete hand TIGHT over the young policewoman's mouth and much of her face. A high-pitched "Mmmmmmmmmmhh!!" Amy and the policewoman disappeared. A second later Amy was back, at the opposite end of the hallway. Instantly, like the seasoned special forces fighter that she was, Amy grabbed a policeman's face in her large powerful female Marine hand -- "MMMMMMHHHH!!" -- and they disappeared.

Flash! Again Amy appeared, this time halfway down the hall, where she pulled open the door of a circuit breaker box. She flickered briefly as another cop futilely tried to shoot her. She slapped a refrigerator magnet on amidst the circuit breaker switches, and stepped back. Flash! The breaker box, and a roughly spherical section of the wall around it, suddenly vanished, and the police station was plunged into darkness, without electricity.

Emergency backup lights came on. Amy popped in and out, up and down the hallway, handgagging one cop after another, disappearing with them, then reappearing by herself. More gunshots rang out. Amy stalked down the hall, the grim look of a deadly huntress on her face.

The police lieutenant came out of an open doorway behind Amy, carrying a shotgun. He fired the shotgun at her from behind. Blink! Amy's body flickered in and out. She turned and glared at him. Flash! Suddenly she was standing right in front of him, and her large smooth squareish female athlete hand shot tight over his mouth, thumb down.

The lieutenant's shotgun was in between them, its muzzle pointed straight at Amy's stomach. Blam! He fired the shotgun at her from only a few inches away. She flickered, her hand over his mouth momentarily gone, then suddenly back again and clamped over his mouth TEN TIMES AS HARD. "MMMMMMMMMHHH!!" The police lieutenant tried to scream from behind Amy's inhumanly tight handgag, as the two of them vanished.

Now Amy was in the hallway again, walking down the hall looking back and forth to see if she had missed anyone. A policeman came dashing out, armed with a submachine gun, and he opened fire on her. She just stood there patiently, her body blinking and flickering in and out, until the gun's magazine was empty. Then she came stalking up to the officer, ripped the submachine gun out of his hands, tossed it aside, and clamped both her large smooth strong hands HARD AND TIGHT over his mouth and nose. "Mmmmmhh, mmmmmm HHHHMMMMMM! Mmmmmm hhhmmm mmmmmh, MMMMMMHH!!" She pulled him back into an office with her, and for some time the muffled sound of his mmmmphing could be heard as Amy handsmothered him while he fought and struggled against her in vain.

Margie was huddling underneath a metal desk inside the locked and darkened room. Suddenly she heard someone trying to open the door, then the glass in the door shattering. She got up and her heart did a flipflop as she saw a hand reaching through the broken glass and unlocking the door. The door swung open.

"Dave!"

"Margie!" Dave led her out into a scene of chaos and devastation. Lit by the wan glare of battery powered backup lights, the police station was a shambles. At the end of the hallway, a room was going up in flames. From somewhere else, the sound could be heard of a police officer's muffled barking and groaning from beneath Amy's tight angry handsmother: "Mmmmmmhh, hmmmm mmmm mmmhhh... Mmmmmh, mmmmmhh... MMMMHHH!!"

Together Margie and Dave hurried into a side corridor, and down the rear fire escape. By the time Amy came marching back through the darkened burning police station looking for them, they had slipped away into the night.

Early the next morning, a knot of police officers stood in front of the ruins of the police station. Squad cars were coming and going. Two fire engines were still standing there. A neatly dressed man, blond, self-assured, fortyish, came walking up to the police.

"Chief Willis? My name is Larry Outcault, and I'm with the U.S. government. National security. I want to assure you that we're on this case, and we're pursuing it aggressively. I know this is a very difficult time, but I'm wondering... if I might interview the survivors of last night's incident... and also, if there might be any video of what happened here last night..."

Later, Larry reported by secure satellite phone: "Sir, I know Amy Wilson sent us a lot of material to digest, but the time for dawdling around and 'assessing' the situation is past. This incident here at this police station... I've talked with them, I've watched their video. It was a woman in black. One woman from the Tiger's Eye. One woman took out an entire police station, singlehanded, armed with nothing but her bare hands. Nothing but her own bare smothering hands. She took out an entire heavily armed police station all by herself.

"I know. Watch it for yourself. While you're at it, check out an incident yesterday at a hospital in the Bay area, a sudden very peculiar disappearance. As recently as a week ago, the Tiger's Eye wasn't capable of doing things like this. I told you, they're entering into a phase of accelerated progress. We need to mobilize right now. Or else... Well, sir, there's not an army on earth that could hope to stand against a platoon of women like the one who took out this police station. We need to mobilize. Now! All right, sir, I'll see you there."

Larry chewed his lip. Left unmentioned: the woman in the video from the police station was Amy. It was Amy who handgagged and took out this entire police station singlehanded. Larry tried to figure out what was going on. Was Amy trying to goad them into action by demonstrating the power of the Tiger's Eye? Or was she hemmed in, without much leeway to chart her own course? Or what?

That afternoon, Margie and Dave were on an old logging road far up into the mountains in northern California. Another stolen vehicle, this one a Jeep Wrangler. It had four wheel drive, which Dave found he needed on this rough road of dirt and rock which wound around the steep side of a mountain. To their left, the nearly-vertical mountainside. To their right, a sheer dropoff with no fence or guardrail, two hundred feet down if it was an inch. Every once in a while this rough road widened into a turnout, in case you met someone coming the other way. But Dave thought it was unlikely they'd meet any traffic on an old unmaintained road like this.

"Are we home free yet?" asked Margie.

"Mmmmm, we've kept to the back roads most of the way, we're out in the middle of nowhere, we ought to be over into Oregon soon..."

"And then what?"

"I dunno... Follow my nose, I suppose? That was what you said."

As Dave came around a curve, he saw something a couple hundred yards ahead of them. "Oh shit..." Ahead of them, blocking the road, was a huge boulder. "That thing's about the size of a Volkswagen." Dave drew nearer. "And I'd say there's no way we can get through on either side of it. Or turn around." Dave came to a stop, thought for a minute, then shifted the Jeep into reverse. "Well, the last turnout was about half a mile back." Dave started backing, slowly, carefully, down the rough logging road, keeping well away from the brink of the two hundred foot dropoff...

All of a sudden... Flash! Looking back over his shoulder, Dave saw a flash of light on the road behind them. Not a hundred yards in back of them, a second gigantic boulder suddenly appeared in the middle of the road.

Dave stepped on the brakes. "Well, that's it. You see that boulder just appear out of thin air behind us? That's it. We can't go forward, we can't go backward. It's check and mate." Dave shifted the Jeep into park and shut off the engine.

Flash! Up ahead of them a stone's throw, two women in black appeared. It was Amy and Audrey. Margie got out of her side of the Jeep, and walked slowly toward them.

"Well, the two stray sheep have been found!" said Audrey. She smiled, a perfect white smile set off by her long wavy red hair and her exquisite pale features. "Come back home, stray sheep. Come back home. You know what they did to Sharrah. You know what they did to Walter. What do you suppose they're going to do to you?"

"You bitch," said Margie. "You fucking schoolteacher bitch! You will never be able to shut me up..."

"Oh yeah?" Smiling brightly in her black spandex, Audrey came running forward and grabbed Margie tight in her arms.

"Mmmmmhhh, hmmmm mmmm hhmmmm, mmmm HMMMMMMM!!" Audrey seized Margie, her right arm pinning Margie's arms down, her long slender smooth porcelain left hand clamped steely-tight over Margie's mouth. "Mmmmmmm! MMMMMMMHHH!!" Audrey's manicured thumb pressed down tight over Margie's nose.

"Can you breathe, Margie? Can you breathe? That's right, out here in the world I can make you smother..." Margie jerked and thrashed in Audrey's tight smothering grasp, but Audrey was strong and she had a good grip. "This is one of the things I do miss in the Tiger's Eye, is the joy of making a victim smother... over and over again..."

Audrey held her long smooth beautiful hand tight in place until she had Margie nearly smothered. Then she let up, and let Margie get a whiff of oxygen through her nostrils, but not nearly enough, as Audrey cut off Margie's air again. Over and over and over again, Audrey toyed with Margie like a cat playing with a mouse, tormenting her by nearly smothering her again and again and again... "Mmmmmhh..... mmmmhh..... mmmmmhh!!" Margie's eyes were bulging in mute agony above Audrey's merciless smothering hand.

Dave sat behind the wheel watching, horrified. But he knew if he intervened Amy would be on him in an instant.

"Oh, I imagine you like this, Margie, don't you? Because how else would you ever have gotten in with Juliette and gang, back in the 60s?" Audrey grinned at her smothering victim. "Not very talkative, are you? Okay, let's continue this conversation back in the Tiger's Eye." Flash! Audrey and Margie disappeared.

Dave got out and walked around in front of the Jeep. He looked around him, at the steep upward slope behind his back, at the logging road which was a dead end in either direction... and at Amy, in her big camo jacket, standing framed against the backdrop of a sheer two hundred foot dropoff...

Amy was being unusually quiet. But finally she spoke up: "Dave, Dave, you'll never know how badly you monkey wrenched my plans..." There was a look of pain and betrayal on Amy's long pretty face.

Then Dave charged. On a sudden impulse Dave charged forward, straight at Amy. Amy was taller and stronger, but Dave had weight and momentum on his side.

Dave charged right into Amy like a linebacker sacking a quarterback. She went flying... they both went flying together... right off the edge of the cliff.

And they fell. Amy clamped her huge soft warm strong oversized female athlete hand bonecrushing TIGHT over Dave's mouth as they fell.

As they fell.

"MMMMMMMMHHHHH!" Dave tried to shout but he couldn't, in Amy's painfully tight wondrous adamantine mouthhold. As they hurtled together toward the boulders and evergreens beneath them, the thought flashed through Dave's mind that he didn't want to die, but if he was going to, he wanted to die with Amy's smooth strong mammoth hand clamped over his mouth.

The ground rushed up to meet them. Amy's hand was clamped like steel much too tight over Dave's mouth. At the very last instant, Flash!, Amy and Dave vanished, gone back to the Tiger's Eye.