Chapter 6 What does not kill you makes you stronger

She sat in bed and lit a cigarette. The man next to her was still sleeping. It was still early in the morning and they had finished pretty late at night. He had had quite a lot of energy, but she had had more. Kelly couldn’t help thinking that this image was starting to become familiar. Her sexual desire had skyrocketed to levels she could not remember even from her blossoming years. It was hard to believe that it had been below the freezing point just a few days ago. The truth was that she wasn’t getting much sleep, since she kept on waking up earlier and earlier. She did not feel tired at all, though.

The sudden burst of her libido had come together with her old addiction to tobacco. She had quit over three years ago, after a late start shortly after the events in her hometown. There was no point in denying it: when the pack of cigarettes she had so carefully hid was out, she bought two more. And before she knew it she was smoking before and after meals and not only just after sex. These last cigarettes were still the ones that tasted the best, though, the first cigarette of the day being a close second.

A noise from the door startled her. Someone was trying to open with a card. Looking at the alarm clock she wondered who the hell had had the wonderful idea to clean her room at 8 in the morning.

“Come later please” she shouted in an annoyed tone

She heard the door opening.

“I said come later, please” Kelly repeated, her voice even more annoyed.

With the shades closed, there wasn’t too much light in the room. When a shadow got out of the small section at the entrance and faced her from the foot of the bed she instantly knew that it was not the cleaning lady. Then, a second shadow joined the first and she heard:

“She’s awake”

The first shadow replied:

“She’s not alone”

Kelly yelled. This woke up the guy she had fucked. She could not remember his name. She did not care. He was startled, having had to go from deep sleep to wakefulness in just a second. He tried to incorporate next to her as quickly as he could, still not knowing what had happened.

The voice of the second man that had got in the room said:

“Collateral. Not his lucky day”

She heard two muffled banging sounds. Next to her, the guy was pushed backwards by an invisible force as two splashes of something dark burst from his chest. Kelly needed a second to realize that it had been blood.

She yelled again.

The next thing she felt were two terrible hits in her stomach and two incredibly hot slugs burning inside her. She only had an instant to realize that she had been shot before everything went black.

When the guard opened the small window of her isolation cell to pass a tray with her breakfast, Casey jumped from the bunk where she slept and yelled at her:

“Why the hell am I here?”

The guard was not the same one than the night before, she realized. She simply said:

“I don’t know. As far as I know you spend more time here than outside” she said, obviously exaggerating.

“I haven’t done anything!” Casey protested

“Go tell the warden, then” the guard said as she closed the window and left.

Casey stared at the food for a very long while, still thinking on what in the hell could have happened to have her sent here. She had not had any fight since the last time she had got out, and she did not remember any smuggling activity that could have been relevant enough to have her sent here with such celerity.

An hour later, the same guard opened the window and said:

“Where is your tray?”

Casey had not touched her breakfast yet.

“I’m not done, yet”

“Time’s up. Too bad” the guard said

Casey knew that inside Isolation, either she ate what she was given or she would not have the chance to get anything else. She was not too hungry, but she was not going to send the breakfast away.

“I’ll be quick” Casey said, trying to sound like a good girl

“Don’t make me come in” the guard said

Bringing a spoon to the whitish porridge, she took a first spoonful and repeated:

“I promise, I’ll be quick”

The guard came back 15 minutes later. When Casey did not reply to any of her calls, she tried to peek through the small window used to pass trays in and out, but could only see her feet.

“Don’t play tricks on me” she warned

Still, Casey did not reply.

She hit the door with the nightstick.

“Stand up where I can see you” she commanded

There was no movement inside. She waited ten minutes, until reinforcements arrived, before opening the door. Casey Morgan was dangerous and she was not going to take any risks. When they did open the door she regretted not having done it before. She was lying face up on the floor of the small isolation cell, with foam all around her mouth.

“Ron” Lisa said as she opened the door. “What are you doing here so early? I was not expecting you” she added. A quick look at Ron’s face told her that something was wrong. “Come in, come in, we were having breakfast” she finally added

Ron followed her to the table. Joe was as surprised as his wife to see him there.

“Ron, what’s up?” he asked

“Nothing, I was on my way to the lab and I just wanted to check that everything was alright” Ron said

“Are you sure everything is alright, Ron?” Joe asked

“Sure” he said

“Ok” Joe replied, his expression still surprised

“You know, I’ve been thinking… I just wanted to tell you that I really appreciate you a lot. After what happened back in Henford I could not have expected that you would forgive me and treat me like a friend” Ron finally said

“Come on, Ron, you are a friend” Lisa said. “And you guys have treated us so well” she added

“That wasn’t me” Ron shrugged

“It would have been different if you had not been around, and we know it” Lisa said

Then, he abruptly changed the subject.

“Have you talked to Kelly, lately?” he asked

Lisa was surprised. So was Joe.

“No… I haven’t talked to her for over 2 years” she finally admitted

“She came last week. For tests” Ron said

“It had been a while, hadn’t it?” Lisa asked

“Yes, it had been a long time. You know what? She is a good person”

Lisa remained silent for a while and finally said: “I guess she is. After all these years I’ve realized that the only person that knows how Kelly is, is Kelly herself”

“Somebody may have heard her screaming”

“And if somebody did, they will call the front desk, where they will conveniently calm this somebody and conveniently ignore the call” the other man replied

“Still, we should rush a little bit. I wasn’t counting on the guy”

“Yeah, it was too bad for him. She was a red asset, though, so it was more than justified. There is nothing to worry about”

Looking at the corpse of Kelly still sitting naked on the bed, with two red pools on her stomach, the first man said:

“The bitch was smoking hot”

“Yeah, she has always been”

Kelly felt an incredible burst of life rushing along her body as she opened her eyes wide and looked around, alert, all the muscles in her body tensed. Remembering the strong heat inside her belly, she moved her hands down to it only to find that whatever pain there had been was quickly fading away and to feel two small pellets that were being somehow pushed from her stomach. She took them and had a look at the deformed and bloody metal slugs as she felt her skin quickly closing around the spot they had come through. She gasped for air.

The two men that had broken into her room turned just then and their jaws dropped. They had been working on getting the guy she had slept with into a black body bag, just on the other side of bed.

Her mind was rushing through the events immediately prior to the blackness. It had not yet been able to provide her with a clear picture but, instinctively, she knew that the two men were dangerous. One of them made a gesture into his jacket; she realized that he was looking for a gun. Out of instinct, she reached for the heavy ashtray at the bed table and threw it at him with all her strength. She got him spot on the head, making him collapse. The second man had been in a worse location to confront her, to start with. He was trying to turn as he reached for his gun when Kelly jumped at him as if she were a panther. She realized just after pushing herself towards the man that it had been a stupid move. Which chances did a woman like her have against a bigger and quite obviously strong man?

He was so surprised by the attack that she managed to make him lose his balance, though. She rolled on top of him and searched for some blunt object to hit him with. She did not find any. Out of frustration, she just punched the man.

The yell of pain and the feeling of something broken were unexpected. Especially because they had not come from her. Rushing away from the man before he could strike back, she remembered thinking:

“Is he really bigger?”

The man scoot backwards, to try to get some more space between him and her in order to stand up. When he did, Kelly realized that he barely reached up to her generous chest. Her eyes opened wide in surprise. The man’s showed fear.

“Oh fuck” the man muttered

Instead of attacking her, he turned and tried to run. She knew she could not let him, so dashing forward she blocked his path with a hand on the wall. His head crashed with her right breast, which was quite similar in size. Kelly felt him bump into her soft mound and then felt her tit moving over his face.

“I’m not moving and he’s not either, so what the hell does it look like we are?”

An explanation quickly came to mind. Grabbing the man by the shoulder and taking a step back, she looked down at his terrified face and said:

“How tall are you?”

The man did not reply. He just stared at her. Annoyed, she pushed him against the wall and then stooped, bringing her head closer to his:

“I asked you how tall you are”

The man then muttered

“I’m… 6’2”… bitch”

She pushed him back against the wall as what he said sunk in. The fact that she had been expecting it did not make it any less weird. If the man was as tall as he was saying, she probably close to 8’ tall!

The man had slid down the wall and was now sitting in the floor in front of her. She looked down at him and then she fixed her stare on her bare feet. She soon realized what she was looking at. Her feet were expanding at a very slow rate, but they were expanding.

“I’m growing” Kelly finally said.

The man looked up at her and she could see something else beyond the fear. It was failure. Then she realized what he had failed at: killing her.

Feeling her blood boil when she thought that this man and his colleague had shot her and her unnamed lover just a short while ago, Kelly crouched in front of him and reached out for his throat. Her hand was now so large that she had no problems in getting a good hold of it. Standing up again, she dragged the man up, forcing him to stand too.

“Why did you shoot me?” she asked in a cold voice

“So that this would not happen” the man finally said

“You mean, me growing?”

The man did not reply. He just moved his eyes away from hers.

“How tall am I going to get?” Kelly suddenly asked

“I don’t know” the man said

She felt a sudden burst of anger and she raised the man to eye level, not realizing until she had done it that she was holding a full grown man single handedly a couple of feet off the floor and that it was not too much of an effort to do it.

“How much will I grow?” she repeated

“I don’t know. I swear. No one knows. That’s why we were ordered to kill you” the man said

“By whom?” Kelly asked in a very angry tone

The man did not reply.

“Who do you work for?” Kelly asked in the same angry tone, closing her hand around the man’s throat

“The FSD” the man finally managed to say with a very thin voice

Kelly needed a second to let the news sink in.

“Ron?”

The man did not say anything. She thought she could see a trace of a smirk in his face, though.

A flash of Ron Howard by her side on the bed of another hotel room not two days ago ran through her head and she felt betrayed, no matter how absurd it could be. The next thing she knew was that her head had violently hit the ceiling and that, surprised by it, she had released her hold over the man, letting him drop three feet to the carpeted floor. Stooping, she could feel the expansion of her body accelerating and was soon forced to her knees. After the brief spurt, she felt the stretching feeling cooling down once more.

The man tried to stand up and run for the door once more, but Kelly could easily prevent it as soon as she realized it, grabbing him by the shoulder with a massive hand and pulling the man towards her.

She decided to sit down and finally placed the man on her lap, facing up.

“You are not going to go anywhere until I say so” Kelly said, serious

Kelly’s body now dwarfed the man sitting in her lap, as if he were just a pigmy. Relative to her he couldn’t be much taller than 3 feet.

“If you know how big I’m supposed to get now it would be a good time to say it” she said

“Are you afraid of dying crushed in this room?” the man asked with a sneer

The truth was that Kelly had not even thought about that. Somehow, she was not. The fact that the man seemed to find some joy in the possibility of her being crushed as she grew inside a confined space bothered her. Rolling her eyes, she just punched the wall in front of her. When her first easily tore through it and into the bathroom, she said:

“Not really”

The truth was that this was not the first time Kelly grew, and she had had some experience about the resistance of buildings. She loved the sudden change in the man’s expression, though. It made her chuckle.

She was still wondering how tall she would get, and she was beginning to realize that, in this new scenario, it was important. Back in Henford she had grown first to about thirty feet and then over a hundred.

“Well, I guess we’ll have to wait and see how tall I get, then. I was really not expecting to grow again. But since it looks like I’m at it, I hope that I get big enough” Kelly said

The man was still looking at her incredulously. She shrugged and explained herself:

“I’m well past the point where I can get out of the room and crawl out of the building, so hopefully I’ll get big enough to get out of it in some other way”

The man’s eyes opened wide:

“The hotel… is full of people” he finally managed to say

“You mean, like the guy you just killed?” she asked in an icy tone

The man was clearly taken off guard by her comment.

“It was for the greater good” he finally said

This made Kelly mad. She had managed to keep a calm demeanor for a few minutes, but the stress of the situation had been building on the back of her mind and it broke out just then.

“FOR THE GREATER GOOD?” she yelled. “So killing me was for the greater good, as well? You fucking shits! I saved the fucking town, just like Lisa, and then you just tossed me like a used tissue. My life has been miserable over the last years and you just did not move a finger to help me in any way, even if I have done everything I committed on doing. Now I know that you’ve been following me 24/7 all this time, which makes it even worse”

The man realized that he had made a mistake. Kelly went on:

“I could have done anything I had wanted, back at Henford. I held myself back. And believe me, I would have enjoyed it if I hadn’t. But to you it’s all the same? You will never forgive me for having taken Ron’s formula and having grown, no matter how well I have behaved. Sure, you did not throw me into jail right away, but you threw my life to the trash bin and now, when I was starting to make something out of it, you just think you have the right to kill me! For the greater good?”

He tried to say something but couldn’t. Then she finally said:

“For all I know, I would not have grown if you had not shot me. So, in a way, all of this is your fault. And the fault of those big fish who think they can kill me just by picking up a phone. Including that fucking rat of a nerd!”

Things got quiet for a few seconds, neither Kelly nor the man saying anything. Then, she finally rolled her eyes and said:

“It’s not the fault of the people in the hotel, though”

Grabbing the ever-shrinking man with her right hand and placing him next to the phone she said:

“Here, call the front desk. I suggest you say there’s a fire. I doubt they will believe there is a giant woman growing inside a room”

When the man hung up she asked:

“Did they believe you?”

A second later, the fire alarm provided her with the answer.

“What happens with me?” the man asked

“Oh, you stay with me until this is over” she said

Her growth had made her head touch the ceiling once more, even if she was still sitting. A few seconds later she had to stoop too low. Getting too uncomfortable, she said:

“I guess it’s time to get out”

She crawled and then sat on her knees, keeping the man between them. And then she straightened her back and started to push.

Kieran was taken out of bed by the sound of the fire alarm.

“I hope this is not a fucking drill” he said as the hurriedly put on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt.

He was looking for his shoes when the floor of his room shook and he was thrown off balance.

“What the hell was that” he said as he tried to regain his footing again. Turning, he saw that the carpet in the center of his room was raised from the rest of the room.

“Is this an earthquake? In the East Coast?” he wondered, suddenly concerned.

The carpet raised considerably more and chunks of the wooden floor below it started to tear through it. Kieran was thrown back once more when, in a sudden burst, something broke through the bulging in his floor. He protected his eyes from the debris. When he removed her hands from them he needed a couple of seconds to realize what she was looking at.

It was a face. A young woman’s face. And from the neck to the forehead it was about as tall as he was

The woman’s eyes caught him and suddenly her full lips parted for a smile. In a voice that he would have qualified as sexy under almost any other circumstances, the young woman said:

“Hi there!”

Kieran managed to babble.

“H…Hi”

“I would try to find some way to get out of this hotel, if I were you. There is more of me coming” the woman’s face said as it suddenly rose quicker and it hit the ceiling of his room, sending some plaster raining down.

“Ouch” the woman said. “All this would be easier if these spurts provided some kind of warning” her voice added

Kieran just nodded and then she said:

“Ooops, here comes another one!”

Her head broke through the ceiling of his room with quite a lot of violence. He was still trying to make some sense out of what had happened when the floor under him bulged upwards and he felt it breaking under the carpet. He tried to stand up but it was impossible. Soon he realized what had been pushing upwards: her massive tits. Kieran had needed some time to comprehend what those two massive soft mounds breaking into his room where. By the time he did, he felt himself sliding down them and into the room below.

Kelly was now in a room two floors above hers. Or at least her head was. This one was empty. She felt some cracking under her bent legs and she realized that the structure of the fifth floor would not hold her expanding body forever.

“At least there is something positive out of having the smoking rooms in the lowest floors” she thought ironically. She was going to fall, sooner or later, and 5 floors looked less of a challenge than 15 would have.

Her hands were still in her original room and there was something she needed to do before she got higher or was dropped lower. The speed of the whole process had startled her, but she was a woman true to her word.

Searching blindly around the room, she soon found something soft and warm. She was about to pick the man that had shot her up when she felt someone else. She realized it had to be the guy on the top floor. The solution to her problem was easy enough. She would have to keep both of them. Maneuvering her hands with skill, she grabbed both men and placed them in her left hand, closing it slightly to prevent them from escaping. She did not know how tall she already was, but her hand was big enough to hold them.

She had timed her movement right, since just a couple of seconds later, the floor under her legs collapsed and sent her down. With her weight and with the force of her fall, none of the remaining floors between her room and the ground could hold her, so soon enough her shins and knees were resting on the spot that had once been the breakfast buffet.

The three people in the rooms between hers and the first floor just had a second to realize that the roof was coming down on their heads. Luckily most of the people having breakfast had been among the first ones to react to the fire alarm and get out to the street.

Those people, who were now in the opposite side of the road and looking at the hotel, wondering what was going on and waiting to get back in their rooms, were the ones that saw with the greatest detail the windows of the bottom five floors of the hotel shattering and dust getting out.

“Was that a bomb?” someone asked

It had definitely been as loud as if it had been. No one could imagine what was really going on, inside, though.

Trying to keep the men in her hand safe, Kelly waited for a couple of seconds for all to stabilize. She knew she had hit the first floor. In her drop her bent legs had broken through more of the other five floors she was at and how she had a little room to maneuver which she had not had when her body had just been breaking into higher floors. She decided that this was as good a moment as any other to stand up. She would need to, sooner or later, and now she had some room around her and above.

By the time she finished standing, her head was back in her top neighbor’s room.

“So, I’m 6 stories tall?” she wondered

The feeling of her body that kept on stretching made her add: “and growing”

She reached the tallest point she had been at in no time. This meant that her brief moments of quiet were over. She would need to break through more stuff if her body kept on stretching.

Down at the first floor, the people that had still been in the lobby were recovering from the massive quake that had sent them off their feet as the ceiling collapsed over the breakfast restaurant just by them. When the dust started clearing away, someone asked:

“What the hell is that?”

It too them a while to realize they were two human feet, just a lot bigger.

People on the top floors had not been as lucky as the ones having breakfast or staying in bottom floors. Ignoring the basic emergency protocols, many had rushed for the elevators. They were stuck on them, now, the hotel having lost power a while ago. Others were still pouring through the doors of their rooms, startled, trying to find the way to the emergency stairs.

Kelly’s head went through two more empty rooms, which made her think that the fire alarm had actually helped in getting most of the people out of the hotel. She was unaware that this was far from the truth.

As she grew, Kelly’s stance widened, now no longer fitting into her former room. In the fourth floor, a young man was desperately trying to make her way through the corridor and to the emergency stairs. He managed to keep his footing despite the constant and ever stronger shakes. He could already see the green light that marked his destination when the wall to his right burst into chunks of concrete and was replaced by something else. To Kelly all this just registered as an itch in her shapely behind. To the man in the fourth floor the effect was a little bit more noticeable as her ass kept on breaking upwards and the floor under him gave way, sending him all the way down to the second floor.

“That makes ten” Kelly thought as her head burst through another floor into a room in the tenth floor. Unconsciously she was expecting things to slow down from now onwards. She had long ago realized that she was not going to get stuck at thirty feet which made her think that she would go all the way to the other size known to her of somewhere over a hundred feet. Kelly knew that this meant she would end up somewhere between the tenth and eleventh floor, just in the middle of the tall twenty story hotel. “I wonder how the hell I’m going to get out of here when everything’s done” her mind added as she was getting ready for the process to stop.

Ironically, her head was inches short of the tenth story ceiling when the biggest spurt yet hit her. It sent her eyes all the way up to the fifteenth floor; part of her face was still on the fourteenth now, her scale truly massive.

For the first time she felt the building groaning around her and she knew that her expansion was beginning to put too much stress on the structure. This last spurt must surely have been hard for the building. It had even been hard for her too, she thought, when after recovering from the surprise she realized that she did not hold her two hostages in her hand anymore.

“FUCK!” she complained and made the windows of the room she was at rattle. She would never learn that her would-be assassin and the guy on the room upstairs had dropped all the way down to the lobby, where her expanding feet were getting dangerously close to the windows, now without any close witnesses to tell. They had not been the only victims of this spurt, though. Another itch down below had actually been caused by one of the elevators being crushed as if it had been made of tinfoil when her hard ass had broken into the elevator shaft and trampled it. If they had more time to realize what was going on, the people inside would have understood why elevators could not be used in case of emergency.

“How tall am I going to get?” Kelly wondered, realizing that now she was into wholly unknown territory, a much bigger size than any she had known before. And growing.

It was surprising how many people remained in front of the hotel, trying to understand what was going on as explosion after explosion could be head from within the tall building. The last one had come together with glass shattering and falling off the façade in the twelfth floor. Something dark and brown poked over the new opening in the façade, quickly followed by a pinkish mass that was growing through the hole and upwards. Noises from the ground floor made people divert their sight from up above to see more windows shattering and something breaking through them. It was a while before someone had enough imagination to recognize them as two massive breasts and two humongous feet.

Inside the building, Kelly sighed and decided to let herself go until it all was over. She was only distracted by the water of the hotel’s roof swimming pool raining over her. It was far from enough to drench her completely, though. Not at her present size.

Her head finally broke through the roof and she could at least breathe some fresh air. It was as if this had sent a signal to her body, which started to slow her expansion down and finally stopped it when her entire head and neck were out.

The people out in the street finally saw what had happened. Most still did not understand it, but the breasts, feet and now the head of the young woman offered no explanation other than the fact that she had grown to massive proportions inside the hotel and now was effectively taller than it. It could not be possible.

Over twenty stories above, Kelly’s mind was also startled, only she knew that what had happened to her was perfectly possible. She had experienced it before and she had recently admitted that she had not enjoyed it enough. She had no idea on why it had happened to her again or why it had come back with a considerable bonus in size, but she was huge, she knew it was true and she knew she had to deal with it.

The screams from down below took her away from her thoughts. There were plenty of them. She had never seen so many from this perspective, even when she had not been that big. And they were ridiculously small.

Smiling shyly at them, she said:

“Hi there”

No one would ever know whether it had already planned on doing it at that precise moment or whether it had been caused by the vibration of Kelly’s voice, but the fact was that the W hotel chose to collapse just then, creating what would have been an almost perfect climatic moment for any movie director that had been shooting that scene. There was no director, though, and the only spectators where those that had been observing the entire scene from the other side of the street.

All of them immediately fled. The ones that had not been buried by the falling debris, that is.

Kelly just coughed and started to dust herself off as the consequences of what had happened still failed to weigh down on her.

“Team Kilo, report” the agent in the C&C post repeated under the alert overview of Colonel Sykes. The man turned to the senior agent in charge and shrugged: “Still nothing sir”

“Try with Team Charlie” Sykes repeated

There were some voices on the other end of the line, finally. The watch-stander sighed and said:

“Team Charlie, report”

There were some words no one could understand and finally the voice of one of the two agents assigned to the task at Blackrock federal prison addressed them.

“It’s a… fucking disaster… the mission… is a failure… you have to call… the army”

Agent Sykes got nervous and literally pushed the watch-stander away as he pushed the communications button and yelled:

“What the hell has happened? Report!”

“Sir… I’m sending you a feed” the agent in the field finally said

Someone else diverted the images, apparently being sent from the agent’s cell phone into the monitors on the wall. Agent Sykes had to take two steps back and look for his chair in order to seat before he lost his footing. His legs were shaking.

The images on the screen were blurry, but they were unmistakable.

He could clearly see Casey Morgan’s face, a face he had learned to hate over the last few years. She would have been dead for a long time, if it had been up to him. The three of them would have. The more he reviewed what had happened in Hollner, with the limited A/V material available to him, the more he was certain of it. It was not because of her actions. It was because of what they had become. No one should ever be again in a position such as the one these three teenagers had been. Thank God, the consequences had been even mild, but he knew they could have been much worse if just another of the girls had been close to Casey in the bitch-scale.

Not everyone else saw it the same way, of course. He had pleaded to the director that avoiding another incident in a more densely populated area was a much higher priority than anything else, and this meant getting rid of every trace of what had happened, including the girls. The director had not been moved by humanitarian reasons when he denied that, though. He had just been lured by some into starting a program to weaponize the nerd’s invention.

To make him shut up, he had just given him executive authority over a program to prevent anyone from ever growing again in American soil and to prepare the necessary contingencies in case it happened. But as long as the girls were concerned, he could only follow their moves while others in the newly formed FSD were analyzing them with hopes of being able to redo what the nerd had done and was not working anymore.

He knew that he had thrown his career to the trash bin when he had ordered the elimination of targets Charlie and Kilo, but he also knew that he could not be court martialed. The literality of his assignment allowed him to do that if there was enough cause to suspect an incident could happen without checking with superiors, and he had rushed to do it. The results of the analyses would be enough proof in any trial. That was the reason he had not been able to give the same command for Lisa.

He needed some time to react. When he realized that his men were watching he did his best to straighten out and look calm. It was hard. It was very hard, when the low resolution images on the screen showed him the face and nude torso of Casey Morgan having broken through the roof of one of the buildings in the maximum security prison they had thrown her in. Her expression was still startled, he could see, but it was also obvious that it was quickly evolving to satisfaction.

Then, something else hit. She was horribly out of proportion. Behind the prison’s tall walls he could only see a few buildings, including the one Casey’s head had burst through, but what she could see of her seemed too big related to her surroundings. Then it came to him: she was sitting!

He stood up and looked at his team. They were as startled as Casey had looked a couple of seconds ago. They looked significantly more scared, too. Trying to keep a steady voice, he started barking orders:

“I want information from Hollner, now! Get the field teams there on the street, get a helicopter. Get anything that’s needed, but give me a sit rep! And start Operation Goliath immediately”