The woman's once beautiful, famous face was a bruised, bleeding ruin: her captor's had smashed that million dollar smile against the windowsill to shut her up, so their demands, or chants, whatever they were, could be heard as they shouted into the night...

"THE BROOD COMESSSSSSSSS!"

"If that son of a bitch pops his head out, can I kill the bastard?" The young police officer asked of his superior. But he meant it largely in humour, to relieve the tension, the feeling of impotance. When the Lieutenant ordered the strike, it would go smooth, he knew what he was doing, unlike the dipshit politicians downstairs!

"We wait, if we can talk them out, and save us all a lot of trouble, I'm willing to wait." They were, for once, in a cushy spot, a luxury restraunt in a mall, that fortuantley overlooked the city's art museum, where the latest hostage crisis was unfolding. The SWAT team were helping themselves to the finest lobster and viands the stock market Yuppies normally had the privilege of consuming. In less than three days the unit had been called to four such events--the city was going crazy.\par "Blade, something's happening..." One of the officers, listening into what was happening inside the building with the aid of an advanced "laser" microphone, informed the Lieutenant over his radio of events.

Peering through the sight of an enormous rifle, Lieutenant John Neil, or Blade, his nickname and call sign to the team, zoomed the computerized optics into the 5th floor room where the lady was being held. He had never liked ultra-skinny models, but she had been attractive: now she was poor, a poor frightened wretch. Despite his pity for her, he concentrated on his job: he switched to thermal imaging, and thanks to the thinness of the building's walls, he could see that two men seemed to be in confererence, one of them being the bastard who was holding the model, and who obviously enjoyed smashing her face off the now broken window.

"Gold, what are they saying? Can you patch it into me?" Blade ordered his chief audio surveillance technician. She routed her input into his radio...but a variety of problems degraded the sounds, he could make out something about "the Brood"--they'd been chanting that all night-- no surprises there, and "sacrifice the slut"....oh, hell!

"Shooter One to Command One, it looks like..."

But before he could inform his superiors of events...his 'scope let him see that the renowned lady was now screaming hysterically, her arms were bound behind her back. The maniac was holding tight to the binding, almost dislocating both of her delicate arms, but all Blade could see was the man's elbow as he was standing behind cover, beside the window.

"THE BROOD COMESSS! DIE UNBELIEVERS!"

As his radio was now on command channel, he didn't hear her screams from the mike turn into shrieks, but he saw her being tilted out the window, the other terrorist was below, lifting her feet up, and she tumbled out...

That beautiful, coffee-coloured skin steaked through the air in front of his eyes, she was naked, and the superb optics let the SWAT commander see the many additional wounds on her body. He didn't see the exquisitely refined face hit the base of a statue of a former Governor, and the brains that had taken her to the top of the modelling proffession burst out over the granite....dozens of flashbulbs popped in surrounding buildings as the gore-hawks took their grizzly trophies of a beautiful woman's ignominious demise--it would soon be headline news all over the world.