Chapter 12

"She's sleeping normally, now," Frank Junior said as he reached the bottom of the stairs. "I think Katie is a good influence on her, even though they haven't met, yet."

"It's nice to hear my daughter's name on your lips instead of the feudish little nicknames you kids use on each other," Tanya quipped.

"Hey! I love my kid sister!" Frank Junior expounded, cheerfully rejecting his mother's unwelcome comment. "I've saved her life at least a dozen times this year, alone!"

"Saved her life?" Jake asked, surprised. "I thought she was a teacher."

"That was years ago!" Tanya interjected. "Now she jumps off buildings for a living!" She was clearly displeased with her youngest daughter's career choice.

"She's a stunt girl," Frank Junior told him, trying to rescue his sister's reputation. "She hires herself out..."

"To be killed!" Tanya interjected unhappily, verifying her already known opinion.

Her son sighed and began again. "She does stunt work that other stunt people won't do."

"You mean snuff work?" Jake asked, his eyebrows raised.

Frank Junior nodded. It was called snuff work because, more often than not, certain stunts were practically guaranteed to send a stunt person to a hospital, or, just as likely, to the morgue.

There was a certain minority of people who specialized in that type of work. Often, they were people who lived for the thrill of almost being killed or people who didn't figure they had anything left to lose and needed to support their drug habits. They usually didn't live long, although a few had a reputation of somehow magically avoiding death – The Kinevil Syndrome, they called it. There was also a name for those people...

"Katie's a snuff girl?" Jake asked, incredulous. "Tanya's right! They hire themselves out to be killed! What the hell does Katie think she's doing?"

They had all seen Katie jump straight up into the air and back-flip over the second floor banister. Jake realized as he observed her supple movements that she was incredibly athletic, but he hadn't suspected from her lively attitude and perky smile that she had a death wish!

"Alright, everyone calm down," Frank, Tanya's husband said. "Katie's always been into 'edgy' stuff like that. During her 'Goth Girl' stage, she wore dozens of pieces of decorative jewelry pinned right to her – right into her skin!"

"You're right," Frank Junior replied. "She's almost always wearing five or six pieces of heavy body jewelry. When she needs to do a nude scene, she takes them out so her skin can heal. Then after the shoot, she sticks them back in. When I work on her, I don't even think about them anymore. I just work around them. I just figure it's Katie..."

Tanya didn't reply. She was remembering that that horrible blow-up when she'd walked in on her fifteen-year old daughter and caught her with two dozen safety pins attached in two neat little rows going from her barely developing nipples down to a 'V' shape between Katie's legs. As a result of that little encounter, Katie had disappeared for a week and Frank and Tanya nearly bankrupted their company trying to find her.

They finally located her in a section of condemned buildings where a teenage commune of runaways had settled. Katie was living with two older boys, Davie and Mick. They had her tied up on a mattress in the corner of a roach infested room.

'She gets too violent from the drugs, man; she keeps trying to fight us. She tried to jump through a window, so we tied her down. It was for her own good, man... '

Surprisingly enough, their family physician said that Katie hadn't been raped. The two young boys were simply trying to keep her from committing violence to herself after they'd shot her full of amphetamines. Tying her up was the only solution their drugged minds could come up with. And they were too stoned to take advantage of her.

'What? We don't do that to each other, man. We're just trying to get away from impossible family situations, you know, just trying to stay alive... '

Katie was never tempted to do drugs after that, though. She knew she wouldn't get high on that stuff. The special healing qualities in her blood would prevent it. Drugs would only make her very, very sick, and maniacally self-destructive.

"Incoming transmission," the wall console said into the shocked-silent room. "Restricted access. Code Alicia. Reject call?"

"What?" Jake asked, surprised out of his melancholy. "Um, No ... Yes! Open the line." 'Crap! Now everybody knows I've been refusing her calls!'

"Hello, Alicia," Jake said into the air.

A sad little laugh sounded in the air around them. "Well," Alicia said. "No visual? I suppose I should be grateful that you even took the call. It's nice to know there's a limit to how much you're willing to pun..."

"Alicia," Jake interrupted, before she embarrassed him even more by dragging out their private feud in front of everyone.

"Sorry. I just didn't expect to hear your voice," Alicia said quietly. "I assume everyone is there?"

"Yes," Jake admitted. "The immediate family – your mom and dad, and the two kids."

"Well, soon there'll be three kids," Alicia told him. "I'm coming to the wake. He was my son, too, after all." She was silent for a moment.

"He was your son," Jake said quietly. "It's too bad that Jake and I never met. I can see the telemetry on your call. We'll expect you in an hour?"

"Yes, that's why I called," Alicia admitted. "I'll see you then..."

"Transmission ended," the wall console said.

Frank Junior chuckled, mostly to himself, trying to lighten the mood in the room. "It looks like Katie's little 'horny toad' is still chasing Jake," he said. Everyone just looked at him. 'Boy, that was really lame... '