Belle Starr, Confessions of an Ark Hunter: Episode 5 – Terror Forming

Belle Starr, Confessions of an Ark Hunter: Episode 5 – Terror Forming

Belle was loved and she knew she was loved from the warmth emanating from the two big people in the clean white room. Not only were the two people big to Belle, but everything in the room was big to Belle. The couch, the chairs, the tables, the curtains, were all huge to Belle. Even the white teddy bear she hugged tightly was big. Everything was also so white and clean. The carpet she sat on was soft, white, and clean. The long lab coat her father wore and the pretty frilled dress her mother wore were white and clean.

Belle stood up but was very wobbly, having to grab a leg of a huge table to stay standing up. She could just peer over the edge of the table and saw lots of white files and papers on top of it. One of the files had her name on it - Belle - although the last name was not Starr but had many syllables and was partially obscured by another file on top of it. Also on the file her name was on were the letters VBI, and the words top and secret.

"We have to get out of here, Tom! The terra-forming rays are falling all over Houston, and it's only a matter of time before they reach us here in Kingwood," Her mother sounded terrified, "We have to get Belle and ourselves to safety!" Her father embraced her mother, who had begun to cry, "Dear, you know we are already dead, it's only a matter of time. The toxins and nanites in the air from the alien terra-forming have already infected us, but we should have more than enough time to get Belle to Mr. Boudreaux in New Orleans. I've made all the arrangements with him, and the car is packed and ready to go."

"But what about Belle? Her mother, still sobbing, hugged her father even tighter.

"The shots and conditioning we did in the lab, along with the gene manipulation and grafting we did before she was born, will protect her," He smiled gently to his wife, "We made Belle a superior human being!"

Belle reached her arms up to her mommy, her right hand still clutching the teddy bear. Her mother, tears still in her blue eyes, reached down and picked Belle up and held her tight. As Belle played with her mother's pretty blond hair, she looked over her mommy's shoulder and saw the look of concern on her daddy's face.

Belle woke up alone in her bed in her blue trailer back of The Crater, the one without any graffiti on it. Her trailer was without graffiti because she likes it that way, and the people of Paradise respected her, and some even feared her, because of her work of eliminating the dangers on the roads of the Bay Area. The powers the EGO unit gave her made her seem strange and formidable, and the job she did provided an important service to the ranchers and miners in the area, so they pretty much left her and her stuff alone, which included her trailer and White Challenger parked outside. That, and the fact that she made it well-known that she had state-of-the art booby traps on both - lethal traps!

Belle blinked her blue diamond eyes several times and shook her head as she awakening from the dream, even though it was the same dream she had virtually every night since her encounter where she and her team had inadvertently released the Grid in Silicon Valley while ark hunting a big score. The dream had only become more vivid since the terra-forming of New York last week, and she had still not heard from her family and her friends at VBI who lived on the East Coast. She hoped that her uncle had not yet reached New York when he left the Bay Area with Belle’s Viscera head. Mr. Greenstreet is a cold SOB, but he’s the only living family I have, thought Belle to herself.

However, another thought nagged at the back of her mind. Belle couldn't get rid of the feeling that the image of her EGO in her mind resembled her Daddy from her dream, and the Teddy Bear from her dream was the same one sitting on her bed in her trailer, although no longer clean and white, but more of a dingy grey. Furthermore, Belle's head hurt! She had finished a bottle of Champagne all by herself last night - or was it two? Now she was suffering the consequences. All Belle wanted to do was lay in her bed and be miserable, but she sat up suddenly, much to her head's regret, when she realized she had an appointment.

She shook her head as she swung her long shapely legs out of the bed, immediately wishing she hadn't done either as a wave of pain moved from the back of her head to the front. As she sat on the side of the bed, she brushed a lock of honey blond hair out of her eyes, although it promptly fell back where it had been, as it always did.

This is important! Get your pretty rear out of bed! Belle often gave herself motivational speeches, but she also felt it was true. Belle went to the sink and splashed water in her face to wake herself up. She brushed her teeth and then put her makeup on and placed her diamond stud into her nose. Never know when a photo-op will happen, Belle thought as she regarded the pretty girl in the mirror. Belle looked at the freckled pale face that many found attractive, but she thought rather plain, opening wide her blue eyes as he glanced at her right profile and then her left. As always, her eyes were drawn to the scattering of star tattoos that spanned from her right eye to right ear, once again regretting the impulsive decision to get them.

Belle went to her closet and took out the Liberty Trooper armor within. VBI had placed surveillance devices all over her possessions including her armor and she had thought she had found them all, but a friend had found yet another bug on her party dress just last night, and that had embarrassed Belle, so Belle rented Varus' personal bug detector for a lot of scrip. Varus was the local crime lord and one of the most paranoid men she knew, but he had good reason as a lot of people were out to get him, not so much for his criminal activity but because he is so conniving and worse, annoying. More than once, when having finished a job for him she was tempted to turn her SMG on him.

Varus Soleptor is such a male chauvinist pig - and kind of looks like a pig too! Belle giggled out loud at her own joke.

Belle scanned her armor with Varus' bug detector and upon finding none, quickly donned it. She got a hard roll from the small kitchen table and put it in her mouth as she grabbed her gear, and went out the door of her trailer. Belle electronically locked her trailer's door while unlocking her car, throwing her SMG and overnight bag onto the passenger seat, and fairly leaped into the driver’s seat. Belle almost hit the white fence around the trailer park in back of The Crater when she backed up, and almost hit a miner as she raced by The Crater and fishtailed south towards the Golden Gate Bridge.

The rest of the drive was fast but uneventful, and as she reached the middle of the bridge she got out of and secured the White Challenger. She looked up to the highest point of the bridge. Belle would sometimes climb up there to think as she watched a sunrise or a sunset over the Pacific Ocean, and perhaps dance on occasion - and once, she jumping off it into the ocean.

A year ago as a new ark hunter, Belle entered one of her first ark falls, when three vicious men cornered Belle, beat her senseless, and - did despicable acts to her. Immediately after the sexual assault by the three men and after they left her for dead, she had found her gun where they had thrown it and put its barrel into her mouth with shaking hands, tears still flowing from her closed eyes leaving clean streaks on her blood covered face. Belle couldn't pull the trigger, because she was still alive. The glass was still half full to her at that point.

Belle was nineteen then, an awkward lanky girl in a torn machinist uniform, so the more she thought about the rape, the emptier she felt and the less full the glass was. She started believing that it was her fault that it had happened, so weeks later she climbed to the top and jumped. When she hit the water she went unconscious, and woke up on the shore, not knowing how she got there. It was then she realized that life is always the choice for her, until the option is taken off the table. The glass is always half full became her mantra from that point on!

Belle was no longer the awkward lanky girl blaming herself for something she had no control over. She had grown up and filled out in the last year, and she only blamed the men who wronged her for what happened. Someday, she would fulfill the promise she made to hurt those three men as much as they had hurt her. But that was for another day. On this day she was visiting her friend, and friends are precious!

* If you want to read more of Belle's adventure against the Grid, read the shared story RP thread on the Defiance Forums called "In the Belly of the Beast".