4:00 AM.

Oh how Katrina Perry loathed waking up this early, and the screeching of the hotel provided generic looking alarm clock wasn't helping matters much.

Grumbling, she shook off the covers off her body and tossed them down to the foot of the twin bed she still felt she paid too much for and slid her legs onto the floor, sitting up in the process. The typical morning grogginess followed suit, drowning her momentarily with the not so sudden urge to fall back into bed and sleep for another six hours but, scrounging up all the self control she could muster, she pushed herself up off the bed and into the wall. She yelped a mix of both pain and shock as her forehead collided with the plaster barricade, and she brought her left hand up to the site of impact, hoping that rubbing it would halt the progress of the impending, inevitable headache.

With her hand still pressed against her forehead and her vision still clouded with the presunlight darkness of her room, she made her way blindly to the nightstand where the only currently activated source of light in the whole room; the still blaring alarm clock, sat. Shaking her head and releasing a sigh, she drops her hand atop the clock three times before it finally relented and stopped buzzing. Muttering something to herself, she examined the wooden surface of the nightstand, sweeping the hand used to turn off the alarm across it. Her fingers slid across the base of the brass lamp that sat almost directly behind the clock, sending a subconscious signal for her to stop the search. She lifted her hand, brushing it along the shaft of the lamp long enough for her to find the switch and push it in, immediately filling the room with a level of illumination much greater than the barely there red glow of the alarm clock. In the process, the lamp also revealed to her the other items she left on the stand: which consisted of a prepaid, burner cell phone and a white pill bottle, sans a label.

Groaning, she opened the bottle, tossing the lid onto the mattress before taking two pills out of it and popping them into her mouth. Sitting down on the edge of the mattress, she chokes down the pills and grabs the phone off the stand. After flipping it open, she punches in 10 numbers and hits the green call button before pressing the receiver to her ear.

"Hello?" the voice on the other end said sluggishly, a yawn intruding on the one word question.

"You ready?" Katrina shot back in response.

"Yeah, yeah..."

"Wake up."

"I am awake. If I wasn't awake, how could I be having this conversation right now? Besides, sleep is for cowards and the ill. I haven't slept in a week."

"That explains a lot," Katrina said with a laugh.

"What does?"

"Nevermind. I'll be there in a half hour. Forty five minutes tops."

"No. No nevermind. What does that explain?"

"Not important."

Before the voice on the other end could respond, she pressed the red end call button and flipped the phone shut, placing it back in its designated spot on the nightstand. Standing up and rubbing her eyes with the palms of her hands, she blindly made her way to the bathroom, elbowing the lightswitch upwards as she crossed the threshold. As she uncovered her eyes, her hands floated over to the faucet and pressed down on the drain stop before twisting the handle marked "cold". As the water filled the bowl of the sink, her mind wandered to what was going to happen today, if all went well. Although she was already dressed to leave, having prepared before going to bed to maximize the amount of time she'd have to actually sleep; she felt like hopping into the shower again, if only to wash away the rest of her doubts and moral objections.

But as the water filled the bowl almost to the top, she figured this would have to suffice. So, turning the handle back to its original position and letting the water settle for a moment, she pulled her hair back and dunked her head into the bowl of near ice cold water.

***

"It's beautiful, is it not?"

"Beautiful is one way of describing it, I guess."

For that remark, Katrina was shot a death glare from across the table she was seated at; in the middle of which sat what could probably be described best as a suicide bomber's wet dream. A retrofitted down jacket, stuffed with explosives that replaced the down, which was strewn across the floor and stamped into the concrete. Staring her down was Amy Reese, a palish woman whose high strung and hyper active nature was highlighted in the fact that despite the fact that she was trying to appear pissed off, she couldn't shake her paranoid suspicions over Katrina's loyalty to the project. Her eyes darted from every point of her face before she finally looked down at the table and back to the suicide jacket. A sight that on its own would be more amusing than frightening, was made much more so due to the black ski mask covering most of her face, excluding her eyes and mouth.

"Is there any other way of describing it?"

"Sick is the first one that comes to mind."

"Sick as in slang for awesome? Yeah, I guess it is pretty sick in that case."

"I was meaning sick as in disgusting, but that works too."

"Get off your high horse Perry, you're worse than Duncan!"

Her voice came out exasperated, as she began to drum against the edge of the table. Wildly, frantically she scanned around the room for the fifteenth time since Katrina stepped into the building, looking for something yet never seeming to find it. With a confused and nervous cough intended to clear her throat of a particularly obstructive bit of saliva, Katrina piped up with a question, drained of her previous confidence.

"Duncan?"

"Yeah, Patrick Duncan. You know him; the one who knocked that girl's teeth out? For god's sake you ranted about that to me for like two hours."

"That wasn't what I was referring to. What'd you bring him up for?"

"Someone has to bring that thing in," Amy said rolling her eyes and then tapping her front teeth with her fingers, "Good. They're all there. He kinda punched me when I told him the news. Hence the mask."

"What?"

"I bruise easily! He really has some issues with suckerpunching women; I'd request getting him some mental help if he weren't going to die in the next few hours."

"I thought we were just going to drop it off!"

"Ohhh, that! How could we? It's a pretty big shift in material, feathers and explosives. I mean, I could've kep some of the feathers but that could've caused all sorts of ruckus and ruckus is not what we need right now. We need success and success will be achieved with Patrick wearing it. Besides, it's not like he has a family who cares about him or anything. At least I don't think he does."

Katrina was having a hard time picking her jaw off the floor fast enough to say something back so instead she shot a wide eyed, one half confused and the other half outraged expression at her colleague. Amy all the while, simply shrugged and added in with a low mumble: "I'm not seeing the big deal. You do know what we're doing, right?"

"Yeah, but still."

"Still what? It's all or nothing here; you can't just pick and choose and you certainly can't go halfway on something like this. Besides, I'm sure Duncan's already accepted his fate and telling him that he isn't going to do it would do more harm than good. Trust me. It's science or something."

"You're fucked in the head."

"It's one of my better qualities, I'll admit."

Then came the knock at the door. Almost as if a lightbulb, or more accurately, a series of light bulbs went off in Amy's head, she hopped out of her seat and made a mad dash for the door, making sure to look through the peephole before even thinking about undoing the almost comical amount of locks that kept the door shut tight and gave her some sense of security. As she expected, it was none other than Patrick Duncan, misty eyed and red faced on the other side.

"Give me a minute! Or three!" she exclaimed as she raced to unlock every single lock on the door.

"It ready?" Patrick asked, trying to retain his composure, as the door swung open and Amy ushered him in.

"Yes. When I told you you could gut me if it wasn't by the time you got here I was being serious. I like my guts being where they are."

"Right. Kat, you ready for this?"

Katrina's face twisted into a forced, plastic smile as she shook her head no.

"Of course. Are you?"

"As ready as I'll ever be. Let's go."

With an anguished sigh, she pushed herself out of the chair and walked over to the door, passing by the frantic, Amy running towards the table to retrieve the jacket.

"Don't forget this!" she said on her way back to the pair at the door, handing it over to Patrick.

"Oh, wouldn't dream of it."

"I could do without the sarcasm, thank you very much."

Rolling his eyes and keeping a careful hold on the jacket, he backed into the hall closely followed by Katrina. As Amy slammed the door shut and went to work fastening all the locks again, Patrick whispered loud enough for Katrina to hear: "Two cars, right?"

"Yeah, yeah sure," she said, her mind a thousand miles away.

***

Fast forward a few hours.

No longer night, the sun was out in full force, bearing down on everyone out walking the streets. Prime, perfect time for the plan to be enacted. The seconds counted down till the moment of truth, 4:00 PM.

3:58 PM.

Katrina was sick of waiting. Admittedly, she was sick of this whole thing and if she could get away with just not doing it, she would. However that wasn't the case so there she was, sitting in the driver's seat of Amy's car. Amy, who had previously decided not to come along for the ride later changed her mind. She wanted to be here, to watch her handiwork be put to use. With a giddy, childlike glee she bounced around in the passenger's seat, being held back only by her seatbelt.

The car was parked in some empty lot just down the street from the target: some office building that looked to be more glass than anything stable.

3:59 PM.

"How big is it gonna be again?"

"Huge."

"You wanna call it in?" she asked, offering Amy the burner phone.

"You have to do something, you lazy bitch."

4:00 PM.

With a sigh, she flipped the phone open, dialed a string of numbers and pressed call.

"You might want to start driving, like now."

BOOM!