Alien vs. Alien

kill her. I decided to table my emotions about this for later.
    We could have gone faster, but Jeremy and Jennifer weren’t going all out, presumably because there were so damn many people here they couldn’t go to full hyperspeed without bowling everyone around over.
    I’d done the daisy-chain thing a few times before, but no one else with me had. It was interesting. Buchanan and Tito adapted fairly well, but Armstrong kept րce="Times on knocking into people. White stopped, shoved Armstrong in between us, we each held one of the senator’s hands, and we were off again.
    Happily, this meant we were controlling Armstrong and so kept him from slamming into other people. Unfortunately, this delay meant we’d lost the Barones.
    However, Bruno hadn’t lost sight of them. He was ahead of us, but we could see him to follow him, and we did.
    With Armstrong between us, it was also easier for White to lead and control the daisy chain, and we caught up to Bruno, and then the Barones, in short order, massive number of people to wade through or not.
    They headed through the crowd toward an area with a lot of foliage. As we drew near, I could hear the sounds of struggle and fighting.
    We stopped, and I dropped Armstrong and Buchanan’s hands. They and Tito were busy retching anyway. White and I trotted after the Barones.
    A part of me was hoping we were going to discover Jeff and Chuckie here, maybe fighting for their lives or protecting someone, but here, nonetheless. Those hopes were quickly dashed—I didn’t know the people fighting in the foliage.
    There was a woman about my mother’s age. She had shiny, black hair, light olive skin, and was dressed nicely in expensive-looking clothes with even more expensive-looking accessories. She didn’t look American; I put her from somewhere in the Middle East. There was a younger man, late twenties probably, who had the same coloring, but he didn’t look like her, other than clearly being her countryman.
    There were also two other younger men, about the same age. One was taller with curly light brown hair and glasses. The other was average height with straight brown hair. They were both wiry and muscular, and they also looked Middle Eastern, but not from the same country the woman was from. And they, and the black-haired man, were all surrounding the woman, fighting nothing.
    At least, it looked like nothing. But from the way the men were reacting, either they were all crazy, or they were fighting something they couldn’t see.
    “Whatever it is, it’s moving too fast for us to see,” Jeremy said as I came up to him.
    “That’s the Bahraini Ambassadress,” White said as Jeremy lunged toward the clutch of people fighting the nothing. I took a closer look at the men. The one who looked like the Ambassadress was in uniform. The other two weren’t. Based on what had been going on and their looks, I took the leap and assumed they were Israeli.
    Whatever these men were fighting, it was strong enough to hit Jeremy and send him flying toward us. White managed to catch him, but they both slid back.
    This wasn’t good and was probably going to get worse. Well, Jeremy and Jennifer were agents, so they probably had the gas manipulation chips in their brains. And even if they didn’t, I’d worry about it later.
    I opened my purse. “Poofs assemble!” I looked up. “Bruno, my bird, drop the parrot and let’s stop whatever or whoever, right now.”
    Bruno released Bellie, who flew to White’s shoulder. She was screaming. “Tino! Tino! Tino!” I decided to table Bellie’s inability to say Tito’s name correctly fۀ">Bor later. Because Bruno gave the loudest bird shriek I’d ever heard as the Poofs jumped out of my purse and went large and toothy.
    “Poofies, surround those people and don’t let whatever or whoever’s attacking them get away!”
    The Poofs did as requested. Bruno, meantime, was flying in a circle, and he was going faster and faster. I got the impression he was trying to catch up to and then match the speed of the invisible assailant.
    During Operation Fugly I’d had to stop an A-C racing around Jeff at hyperspeed with a needle full of badness in her hand. I’d had a baseball bat to work with at that time. I didn’t have a weapon like that on hand, and I wasn’t stupid enough to use my Glock.
    However, I’d shoved my sweat jacket into my purse before we’d left the Dome. I pulled it out now. I so frequently had no options other than the crazy, I