Yukon Psycho
But what an asshole, what a shitty cop! What a filthy little prick! What allowed him, this young cop, to come and piss off the world, here, on the Steese Highway? We were in the middle of Alaska, in October! She did not disturb anybody!
Tilda was, literally, in the middle of nowhere. She walked, quietly, to the Yukon River, without asking anything to anyone. If the Yukon River was a day's walk away, if there was only the expanse of forest and steppe around, that was her problem, right?
Tilda was more than fed up with all these assholes meddling in her life, telling her what she should or shouldn't do. She hadn't asked this fucking asshole anything!
There was no way she was going to make a phone call to certain people. If she wanted to, this puppet and his entire precinct would be liquidated. But no, she had come for a change of scenery, for a change of atmosphere, to forget her "relations".
This world of surveillance, of restrictions on movement, of health and security diktats, was really starting to piss her off. Everything had become narrow, subject to approval, to permission. Authorizations and passes were required for the slightest movement. You had to show a signed document for everything, put on paper masks, get inoculated with Big Pharma's crap, pee in jars, fill out certificates, forms, ask for forgiveness. You had to watch your language, think correctly, not yell, smile at the agent who lectured you. But fuck them all!
All this because a few hundred people who owned the planet had decided to lower the number of people allowed to breathe the same air as them. Tilda was well placed to know who was behind it all.
A BUSY PAST
It was the opposite of Tilda, of what she was, of what she had built. Since childhood, Tilda had done as she pleased. Even as a child, she kicked the shins of the teachers who made her feel bad, and slapped anyone who disrespected her. Yet she was born in COVID. She had been dragging it out for decades. She had survived fifty years of health dictatorship, digital dictatorship, planned global genocide. It had even survived the Big One, the disaster that destroyed much of North America's infrastructure. More than a hundred million Americans had died of bizarre diseases as a result of mass vaccinations. Tilda felt that having survived all this gave her the right to die as she wished.
Tilda had left home a million times before ending up in disciplinary homes for delinquents. When the staff were ex-military or sadists, she was beaten, humiliated, sexually assaulted. There was never a piece of paper, a controller, a computer program, an automated alarm, an inspector, to come to her aid when she was beaten or attempted to be sodomized at thirteen. Big Brother's control was only interested in the repression of individual liberties. The population control enterprise of the early 21st century was never about protecting the weak, but about eliminating them.
But Tilda had never lowered her head. She had burned two homes to the ground in revenge, gouged out a bastard's eye and made dozens of assholes cry, in addition to her parents.
She didn't count the number of guys in bars who had received a beer bottle on their face when they had the audacity to touch her ass without permission. She had suffered, in return, tremendous beatings, and two rapes. But she had, there still, never lowered the eyes. The bastards who had raped her, both times, had not enjoyed their genitalia for long, nor life for that matter. The others, all the others, had learned to respect her.
Tilda was not just anyone. She ran almost every biker gang that remained in the two Americas. Well, let's just say she had led. Now she was retired. She wanted to do something else.
For a while now, she'd been putting her foot down. She was tired of that life, that role. Getting people beaten up or killed, taking bullets, stabbing, spitting, working with psychopaths high on every possible drug, really wasn't fun anymore. In fact, she had organized all these poor guys to survive the globalist enterprise.
Since the beginning of the Illuminati dictatorship, the criminal world had become more radical. The poor and marginalized populations, who had been supplying the underworld since the dawn of time, had been put under unimaginable pressure. The outcasts were first on the list. They were locked up in institutions, camps, sedated, injected, eliminated. Marginal places were closed, watched. The consumption of drugs and alcohol had no brakes. The outlaws, in a totalitarian system, became radicalized. In such a system of regimentation, the marginalized individual was thrown into violence and despair. The gangs and criminal bands that had formed under the dictatorship of the New World Order were ultra-violent. Tilda had lived through the repression, the stifling, the crushing, but she had survived, had learned to survive. She had a business to run, she had to achieve financial results, she had to organize the survival of her company in front of the repressive apparatus. Her soldiers had been mercilessly brought to heel. It was necessary to resist without dispersing, each one had to hold its role.
Tilda had undergone more and more fussy police controls, administrative controls, surveillance by drones, by Internet, by networks, by artificial intelligence. She did not sail high enough to be able to free herself from this enslaved society. She had to be protected. The summonses of insolent young magistrates, financial judges, sanitary, veterinary and labor inspectors were piling up. These assholes thought they were formidable. They made big eyes, played at being big shots, believing themselves to be legitimate, their balls swollen by the appearance of world power, international standards, Big Brother. All these young shits thought they understood life, as soon as they left school, because they forced kings like her to stand up or sit down in their shabby offices of civil servants.
This repressive world, led, in appearance, by this army of arrogant clowns, was bullshit. All these politicians, these experts, these magistrates, these high civil servants, these golden boys, like Tilda and her tattooed ones, were slavishly obeying the orders of reptiles with leather aged by centuries of manipulation of the crowds.
Tilda's experience in drug trafficking had allowed her to see who was really in charge. The real estate programs, the companies, the banks, the elections were financed by the oligarchy. The billions they made from drug trafficking, prostitution and smuggling were only a small part of their income, but these activities served to control the masses.
In all these areas of activity, Tilda was able to navigate at high altitude. The gangs she controlled brought together thousands of people who did not know each other, and often even fought each other. It was she, Tilda, who was running the show, in the shadows. She had formed, by far, the most important criminal group in the Americas. The journalists, the police, the intelligence agencies, no one had been able to measure the extent of the organization, so much the groups were fragmented, separated, isolated. Only Tilda and the people who were above her knew. Tilda herself did not know exactly what was going on at the higher levels. She was just a cog in the wheel, and she could only vaguely guess at the purpose of it. But she knew that if she was allowed to survive, it was because she served the system and kept her mouth shut.
UNCLE PAL
It all started a long time ago with a casual encounter. Tilda was a very young woman on the verge of breaking away. She had been shuffled from an institution to a home, from a prison for juvenile delinquents to a squat, permanently separated from a family she hadn't been with for too long. She frequented biker bars, trying not to become a prostitute, trying to find protection from guys who weren't too psychopathic.
One day, a guy showed up, dressed plainly. Everyone called him "Uncle Pal." He had talked to the boss of the gang that Tilda was more or less in at the time. Uncle Pal didn't look like anything, he had a benevolent, quiet look. But he was accompanied by real tough guys, guys who didn't do a simple demonstration of strength and virility. They were discreet, sober, organized, trained, really scary. Tilda understood that this guy was important. It was this kind of guy she wanted to talk to.
The leader of the gang had been forced to talk about her, because of a scam, an investment deal, that she had engineered and that had made the gang a lot of money. The leader had tried to take credit for the idea, but it was clearly above his level. So Tilda had been brought into the "office." We closed the door. Uncle Pal had asked her some questions, kindly, in the presence of the uncomfortable boss.
Tilda was a kid, but she understood that this was an important moment for her. This guy was looking at her attentively. He was evaluating her, asking her questions. This was the chance she had been waiting for. Despite the presence of the gang leader, she had made her plan clear, her reasoning. Encouraged by Uncle Pal, she had gone on about how she thought the gang should evolve, about the things that could not yet be put in place, about the reasons for the blockages. The guy was listening to her, smiling, already complicit. The girl was clearly above the rest.
The leader of the gang, surprised, had immediately tried to shut her up, to assert his authority. The guy had stopped him: he wanted to hear Tilda. Encouraged, Tilda had answered the other questions, had continued her reasoning until the end, proposing reforms, exposing her plan. She was clear, precise, informed. She understood quickly.
The leader of the gang, excited by what looked like a ruthless criticism of his incompetence, had tried to interrupt Tilda again. The guy had made a sign. His guys had immediately grabbed the leader, beaten him to death in front of everyone. Nobody in the gang had moved. The tattooed, the crazy, the uncontrollable were subdued, stunned. The interview had continued, as if nothing had happened, between Uncle Pal and Tilda, the door still closed.
After two hours, the door opened again. Tilda was appointed leader of the gang, with three of Pal's boys delegated to her service. No one had objected to anything. Tilda was only eighteen years old, she had just been given a crash course in biker gang psychology.
She never knew Uncle Pal's real name. He came by regularly, sometimes leaving one or two guys with him for certain missions. Tilda, in a few months, transformed this second-rate gang into one of the most fearsome in the region.
"Uncle pal" had been interested in what was in her head, not in her ass, not in her story. The gang she had built was very well done, remarkably organized. The business she was handling was far above the usual level of a simple Midwestern gang.
"Uncle pal" was an emissary, a guy who worked to monitor the gangs, to ferret out more sophisticated profiles within them. In the pile of garbage that was a biker gang, that was sometimes difficult. But, out of the numbers, there were always worthwhile guys and gals. He'd kept an eye on Tilda, asked around, tested her. She was the most beautiful human gem he had ever discovered.
RON
"Uncle Pal" worked, himself, for a man who had, for a time, been perceived as important in the organizational chart of the American underworld. Ronald S. had first been wrongly listed in the organization chart of the Italian-American Mafia. He was much more important than those people. Shortly before the Great Reset, Ronald S. had suddenly disappeared from the files.
"Ron", curious to know this exceptional recruit, had finally brought Tilda to his home in Patagonia. He had spoken directly with her. Tilda had discovered what the world of power meant. Ron was one of the few men in direct service of the oligarchy. He lived in a sanitized, clean, luxurious world. He worked only with his head. In Tilda's world, if he had been alone, Ronald would not have survived long.
Ron had long been looking for an anchor in the biker gangs that remained strategic in the recently devastated America. Many of the big gang leaders had been physically eliminated by other gangs, by the authorities, by disease and by the Big One. The leaders placed since then, on an interim basis, were not good ones. The system was falling apart, in a part of the world that had accumulated many difficulties. This was a problem for Ron. Revenues were falling, balances were shifting. This criminal mechanism, this lever of power, had to be put back into operation.
Ron had received full reports on Tilda, both from Uncle Pal and from the various emissaries or correspondents he sent or placed in North America. But from the very first meeting, he had been surprised by Tilda's exceptional intelligence. She was a diamond in the rough. Little by little, he had grown fond of the girl. He had probably found in her the child he had not had. His children were dimensionless morons. He loved them, but he was frustrated. The caste system installed by the oligarchy was a problem. The offspring of the two hundred or so families of the ultra-class were not enough to renew the elites needed for the overall functioning of the New World Order. Most of them were suicidal kids, useless snowflakes, ultra-fragile.
It was inevitable that the pool of enslaved humans would have to be tapped for talent. But the masses were genetically damaged, made to suffer by COVIDs, condemned by planned eco-pathologies. We had to look for still living strains among the outcasts, the excluded, the marginalized.
A CASTE SYSTEM
Ron had patiently explained to Tilda the mechanisms set up, the financial circuits, the limits of the game she had to play especially. He had been the first to detect Tilda's extraordinary intelligence, her ability to understand, connect, guess and organize accounts. Tilda was a natural talent that had to be nourished intelligently. She had become almost his child, rather his thing from the world below. Ron was only interested in exceptional individuals. He could lose interest just as quickly.
For Tilda, Ron was one of the only men of power she had accepted without feeling repulsion, even though she was always attentive. With his small, round head, harmless looks and bright eyes, Ron was bound to be accepted. He was everywhere, but he controlled a part of the world and all the people in it. From his estate, thanks to Artificial Intelligence and the Great Reset, he and a handful of hyper-class men controlled and monitored hundreds of millions of digitally enslaved people. In particular, Ron was in charge of some of the Western criminal activity. The more dynamic East was allocated to individuals higher up in the hierarchy than him.
Ron never left his property in Chilean Patagonia. He stayed in the shelter of his caste, which had reserved a place for itself that was safe from the destructive madness it had unleashed. Ron was following an inhuman, relentless logic. He was one of humanity's greatest criminals, in a sense, but there would never be a court to judge him. Humans to him were just livestock, vitality statistics, investments, objects. But he remained for Tilda, as long as she played his game, a charming man. It was important to keep in mind that Ron was benefiting from the latest health tools of nanotechnology. He would probably live a hundred and fifty years in perfect health, like all the people in the hyper-caste. He was the past and future of people like Tilda. She was just an episode in his life.
Little by little, Tilda had discovered a profession, that of the discreet and omniscient leader. She had discovered and learned to master the underbelly of an organization of which specialized writers usually only knew the surface. It had taken more than ten years of intensive teaching, supported by private lessons and internships in specialized firms, for Tilda to be entrusted, at the end, with a tiny part of the building. She had kept at it ever since, through constant work, an exhausting war that had kept her boys away and killed her children.
The Midwestern girl certainly had potential. She had learned, learned a lot, as much as her exceptional brain could store. She'd done some brilliant editing, had expanded the business considerably. Ron had trusted her, recommended her, she had been protected. She was useful.
But she was never part of the upper circle families, Ron was the only one to meet her, only three times, physically, in twenty years. She had never been able to rise higher than Ron had offered her, she had only been able to aggregate other gangs, take control of them, be accountable, obey Ron's orders unconditionally.
Tilda's contacts and Ron's agents had been lawyers, financial advisors, always well-dressed, educated middlemen. Ron had taught her the codes, the language, the issues. All these costumed employees were fuses between her and other rows of tie-wearing fuses, including Ron, she knew. Far above them, above Ron even, were the real masters of the game on an international level.
Tilda had never met any of these oligarchs directly, there was no chance of that ever happening. But she knew, from having received many clues, that they were watching her very closely. Sometimes, some of them, men and women, had fun bringing her to privileged places, under some pretext. They would then observe her discreetly, under the shelter of screens. She had never met any eyes, she was an object of curiosity for the Reptilians.
BIKER GANGS...
So Tilda was left in charge of the biker gangs. She had the background, knew the codes and the language. Her background among the bikers was proven. She knew everyone. She was the one who had reorganized the tax system and the methods of these groups for thirty years. Without having gone to school, she was made to count fast, always several steps ahead of the analysts of the police, the customs and all the specialized civil servants who thought they were fighting crime. Tilda worked with the top accountants. She often found ways to teach them new tricks and invented new mathematical models.
Her job, during all these years, had consisted in maneuvering, managing human resources, defining the commercial strategies of all these gangs, registering them in a production and service flow, without them spotting her. She was known everywhere. You could tell she was important when guys disappeared because of a dispute with her, but it was not clear what her role was.
The cops also had a hard time with her, even people from the federal government or international agencies. With them, she still had to play it close to the vest, using her mentors, the ones who had fun watching her from behind the scenes and lifting a finger when needed.
THE MOMENT OF REFLECTION
After the last killing in Tampico, Tilda was forced to take stock of her life. She could not continue to run forward. She hadn't kept her three children, all of whom had died of overdoses or violent deaths before the age of twenty, had never kept her guys for more than two years in a row.
Her children had been born cute and harmless, like all children, only to become creatures of the devil. The weaker ones, like Justin, had committed suicide by alcohol and drugs. The other two had gotten their hands on guns at an early age and emptied magazines like they drank beer.
Even Tilda had been shocked by her kids' profiles. Billie, her youngest, had been the most enraged. By the time she was twelve, Billie was turning the toughest guys in town on the sidewalk. Even Tilda's buddies were uncomfortable around her. Even she, Tilda, had her moments of loneliness in the presence of this kid who seemed to be plugged into hell.
Billie had died the day before she turned fourteen, shot by police officers who had come to arrest her for the murder of four members of a Longmont teenage gang. The girl had thrown grenades at the cops from the house. Immediately afterwards, she had run out of the house with the grenades pulled out. She ran toward the cops, who had no choice but to shoot her. As she fell, she found a way to throw her grenades at the police and killed two officers who were hiding behind their car.
Tilda's buddies, who had stayed inside, had explained that the plan was for them all to get out with grenades. But only Billie had come out.
Already, after the episode, which had followed the death of her eldest child, Barry, executed by the Hells Angels; then, the death of Justin, by overdose, Tilda had been forced to ask herself the question of her responsibility in the fate of her children. She had loved her children, but her life context was heavy on kids. There had been no way to escape unscathed.
Her children had grown up with guns in the house; the occasional gun battle in their presence; a mother who often came home wounded; police and customs inspectors knocking on the door, searching the house in the middle of the night. Tilda's children had all known the homes, where they were sent when Tilda was questioned by a judge.
You would have had to explain to cops why Tilda had such kids. Her lawyers had done the job. She didn't have time to waste with cops, she had gangs to work.
NEVER IDENTIFIED
Tilda had never been convicted of drug dealing, theft or any other misdemeanor. She had always organized herself so as not to be identifiable and she was protected. She was the brains, never the doer. All that could be said was that she knew a lot of people who were in trouble with the law and she found herself a witness or a victim of the growing violence in society.
Every agency, every team of cops, generations of magistrates had tried to link Tilda to the criminal actions she organized. They had never succeeded. When they came close, the order fell to leave Tilda alone.
Officially, Tilda was the manager of bars, nightclubs, real estate agencies, temporary employment agencies, sawmill companies, and transport companies. No one knew that she indirectly managed thousands of them on and between the two American continents. She used hundreds of intermediaries, trusted people, people in ties or not, so that no one could link her to anything.
If the law couldn't make the connection, the mobsters took shortcuts. This world was hyper-violent. The anonymous and discreet Tilda had many enemies. Three of her cars had been blown up. She had officially been shot at five times, unofficially she had been shot at a dozen times, all aimed at her personally. The five official attempts on her life, Tilda had not been able to quell because she had been shot at in public, because the police had been called by witnesses. On one of those occasions, a security guard was killed by a stray bullet in a building lobby.
Each time, the police would ask her, "Do you have any idea who shot you? Why did they want to kill you?"
Tilda never knew how to answer that question. The cops who questioned her would smile or get out of the way so as not to slap her. Lawyers would step in to smooth things over, governors, prosecutors, or federal agencies would get in the middle to make the questions stop. Tilda didn't know, Tilda couldn't answer.
Despite all these precautions, Tilda was still a prominent member of organized crime. All the cops knew it more or less. She had obtained a licensed gun at one time. A prosecutor had tried hard to have it taken away from her. Since that time, Tilda had always gone around with two or three licensed gunmen, with, more often than not, other gunmen positioned in relays all around.
Tilda appeared in the organization charts of the cops, in the intelligence agencies, but always at two or three levels lower than the reality. The media, the researchers, the crime specialists often did not even know her existence.
AN IMPOSSIBLE FAMILY LIFE
His kids, his poor kids, had witnessed this strange life of an anonymous boss since childhood. They had only known power struggles, silences, double talk. They had seen simple looks from their mother that meant the death of a guy. Money had never been a problem, but you couldn't spend it too conspicuously. Everything was dangerous, everything was under control. You had to stay in shape.
In Tilda's milieu, a moment of weakness, a hesitation could mean death within a week. If a guy sensed that she was weakening, he might be tempted by the Judas kiss. She always had to be on her toes. It was exhausting, her kids had been fuses.
Her love life had also been a permanent crash. No man could live with a woman who surrounded herself with guys with big arms or disappeared, without explanation, for weeks at a time. His love, Marjan, his great and only love and the father of one of his children, lived somewhere, probably on another continent. He had fled one night, after two years of effort, leaving everything behind, after a final shoot-out. He had prophesied that the children would not reach adulthood in this atmosphere. He was right. She never heard from him again after that. And yet, she had mobilized people from every state to find him. He had disappeared at the Canadian border and then nothing. She didn't blame him, he hadn't chosen this life. He couldn't fight it.
These bloody episodes had taken place during the war that Tilda's guys were waging with the Sons of Silence gang. The Sons of Silence had decided to kill a man, or a woman, from one of Tilda's gangs, every day, until they surrendered. But Tilda had never surrendered. She eventually took control of the Sons of Silence as well as the others. By taking over one gang after another, she had methodically and patiently worked her way to the top of the biker gangs. There had been many deaths along the way.
NEED FOR A BREAK
If Tilda had been a believer, she would have known where her men and children had gone after their deaths. But Tilda didn't believe in that fable. She believed that souls were in the school of life on earth. Sometimes, for some, the obstacles piled up. Lives were hard.
But people were not made worse by what they endured. The little guys and gals who were born in the good neighborhoods, learned something in school, shot up with the dope Tilda's men sold them, graduated to work on Wall Street, do coke runs between Yuppies, and sell crappy mortgages that bankrupted millions. They were no better than kids exposed to gang or slum violence since childhood.
Tilda didn't judge anyone. Deep down, she had love for all humanity, for her biker buddies as well as for the anonymous people on the street. She knew so many stories, so many paths, so many circumstances that she didn't judge anymore.
She had gone to the Yukon to try to find this love in herself. She needed space, nature, solitude. She needed a lot of silence.
At first, when she left Fairbanks, the endless road, the majestic mountains and the vital energy of the Yukon promised her an extraordinary journey. She had hitchhiked to Fox, found another guy, a hunter who was going into the wilderness. He had dropped her off in the middle of nowhere, no questions asked. He had been perfect. She had walked for hours.
Tilda had been planning her retirement and this trip for a long time, organizing her estate. She had made this long flight in order to purify herself, to make a necessary break.
Where she came from, everything was dark, sad, hard. Tilda was a feared person, settled in her environment. Death, violence, pain and aggression were part of her daily life, as was the recognition of her peers.
Many of her old friends were dead, almost all of them in fact. At her age, in her fifties, she looked old. She was old, yes, worn down by a lifetime of injuries, full of rough edges, tears and battle cries.
But there, in the Yukon, it was cold, the icy rain had soaked through her jacket and jeans. She didn't care. Nature, hard and indifferent, but also devoid of judgment, had to unload the darkness of her life, her memories, all this accumulated hate.
It was quite pleasant, this deadly cold. Soon, the snow had begun to fall, hard. A storm was approaching.
BAD ENCOUNTER
Tilda was not well enough equipped for such an excursion. Logistics was usually her strong point, but this was not her goal. Tilda was ready to lose herself in the whiteness of this world.
After four or five hours of walking, a state patrol car had spotted her on the side of the road. Tilda didn't see it coming, she had her headphones on, AC/DC "You shook me all night long. She was a fast machine. She kept her motor clean..."
In the midst of her happiness, Tilda hadn't heard that asshole in uniform. He had startled her with his son-of-a-bitch siren. Coming to bother her so far... The snow was now falling in earnest.
She did not turn around. She continued quietly on her way.
The policeman turned on his siren again.
Tilda did not stop.
She wanted to delay the moment when she would be forced to look at this human shit. She was already imagining the picture: an asshole with big biceps, a square jaw, mirror glasses...
The cop turned on the siren again and got out of his car. He ran to meet Tilda. He placed himself in front of her to block her passage. He was a colossus.
She had in front of her all that she had imagined: "The idiot..."
The young cop asked her, "Why don't you stop when I call out to you?"
- Because I didn't ring your bell.
- But you have to obey the law.
- I have not committed any offence.
- You are putting yourself in danger by driving in the cold. You are not equipped for this temperature. There are bears...
- That's my business. I did not ask you anything.
- You have to follow me.
The young cop had quickly changed his tactics. He had the power to force her to follow him, including handcuffing, gassing or shooting her. He would do this "for her own good," just as people were vaccinated "for their own good. And everyone would give him credit for that.
Tilda was exhausted by the cold, she was preparing to die of happiness, there, in this immensity, in this beauty, in this splendor. This asshole, holder of a shitty authority, had come to sully all that. She was not able to fight against this trained and armed colossus, not at this moment. She followed him and sat in the back seat, like a criminal.
The young bastard thought he had a right to talk nonsense to her, that it was snowing, that there were bears around, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah... To these huge predators, Tilda was not a sandwich on legs. The bears would not eat Tilda. Her body was too poisoned by cocaine, tar and altered spirits. She was a Chernobyl-Tilda...
Tilda had not answered any of the cop's questions, he was an enemy. She would have slit his throat, but she didn't have a knife and this bastard was the kind of guy who knew how to defend himself. Besides, he was on the defensive and protected now by the grills inside the car. She didn't feel like listening to this jerk, she put her headphones back on her ears and listened to a good Molly Hatchett. She needed to warm up, to be able to think and act in control.
CENTRAL REGIONAL AIRPORT
Without hiding his aversion, the officer had led Tilda to the Central airfield, intimating to her to take the first plane leaving for Fairbanks or anywhere far from "his" road.
Tilda didn't respond, didn't look at the asshole. She found herself in a wooden cabin. There was no one there, no plane.
The cop hadn't listened to his instincts. He hadn't sensed how dangerous the woman there was. He hadn't even searched her, hadn't asked for her identity. It was a malpractice, a fatal mistake.
The farewell was as cold as the room temperature, the cop went around the cabin, found nobody. No problem, this crazy woman would wait there. He would come back the next day, when she would have been cold and would have put down her cackle.
So Tilda waited, alone, for a few moments in this shitty airfield cabin. Outside, it was the storm, it was night. There would be no take-off tonight. Now she felt the cold.
She was angry that she had been kicked off her path to white heaven. She hadn't wanted to talk to that sheriff who was blaming her for embarking on such a "foolish enterprise." The truth is, she didn't give a damn about dying. In the wild, in the middle of the Yukon, it was more pleasant than, mutilated and gagged, in a cellar or with her head in a bucket. She knew what she was talking about...
But this young man in uniform was not the kind of man to hear these realities... He was one of those young assholes, maybe a local redneck's son, who was tired of picking up dreamers on the edges of what he considered his road. This young asshole hadn't been born that Tilda was already sucking dick.
These body-built Nazis, with their puritanical moral lessons, were generally not in tune with Tilda.
Tilda had already spent too much time in the United States, she was getting tired of it. She was tired of their fines, of police checks by bodybuilders with sunglasses. She shared, at this moment, the convictions of those who were militating within the Citizen Watch, the Black blocks, the Marxists, the anarchists, the anti-globalization conspiracists, everything that could annoy these bastards.
Tilda's anger had resumed, dull. She knew the phenomenon well. The last time she had felt it, two years earlier in the Chaco in Paraguay, there had been deaths, many deaths. She had observed the surroundings through the snowflakes. There was not much to see. There was no one around, except for a guy in the distance, who probably worked in the technical department.
The cop hadn't taken his ID. That was bad enough. But wanting to leave her there, in that godforsaken place, was an even bigger mistake. Let her manage, didn't she...
The evening was about to fall. Tilda didn't know if there was a plane for the next day, for three days from now. She was left there.
The young asshole was ready to leave in his Ford Interceptor, pleased with himself. On a countertop, there was an old screwdriver. That would do. Tilda grabbed the tool and ran to catch the cop before he left.
She ran to the car just as the man sat behind the wheel. Snow was falling everywhere. You couldn't see two meters.
Tilda knocked gently on the driver's window, stepped back, waiting respectfully a meter away from the car, hands behind her back, apparently in a panic. She wanted to show herself pitiful, humiliated, miserable, harmless. She guessed the young jerk was smiling, satisfied. He lowered the window, condescending. "This bitch made less the malignant one..."
Tilda murmured, looking pleading, still at a distance. It was her confidence-building tactic.
The cop shouted, smiling, beckoning her to come closer: "What now?"
He stretched his ear, mechanically. She planted the screwdriver in his carotid artery, struck again at the Adam's apple. He wanted to protect himself, but he was already mortally touched. Tilda clutched at his parka collar, brought it back unceasingly towards her, striking again and again. She was literally hanging herself with all her weight to leverage with the door and force him to stay leaning towards her. She had to strike several more times before he stopped, dead. She was used to dealing with very large people. She could have thanked that cop for saving her life, but she didn't feel like it. She spat on it.
Out of breath, Tilda opened the door of the police car. There was blood everywhere, she swore. Damn it, she wasn't going to get blood everywhere!
She couldn't see much around, except for the service car of the guy who worked there, at the back of the lot. He probably hadn't heard anything.
Tilda wiped her possible fingerprints off the backseat and the inside door handle, then picked up the cop's gun. He had made the gesture of grabbing it from his belt. She checked to see if the Glock 22 was loaded and headed for the service vehicle that was parked over there, much further away. She could not see anything, she was cold. The effort had drained her. She realized that her afternoon ride had exhausted her. Tilda was no longer in the mood. She didn't want to die and she didn't want to get caught for murdering an asshole, even a policeman, in Alaska.
She approached the car and tried to open the door. A guy yelled, "What do you want?"
It was the guy who worked at the airfield. He was probably on his way home. Tilda walked towards him. As she approached, she saw that she was dealing with a jerk. She asked, looking natural: "Are you heading back to Fairbanks?"
- What the hell? I...
- Give me the keys.
Tilda pointed the gun at the guy. "Give me the keys, asshole. Hurry!"
The man stood still, instinctively reaching into his pocket. He immediately received a bullet that took his brain away.
Tilda rummaged in his pocket and found the keys. She went back to the car. She turned around and took the jacket from the guy. She was cold, the jacket would be useful to her.
She opened the door of the service vehicle, started the engine, turned the heater on high.
THE LEAK
Tilda could not see anything in this storm, she almost missed the exit. She turned left on the highway, towards Fairbanks. After about ten kilometers, she arrived at a vague intersection. She took the road on the right.
She did not drive fast, she was very careful. It was now very hot in the car, that helped her to recover and to think. She should get to Fairbanks to blend in with the crowd. After that, she would take the first plane out of this country tainted by cops and Puritans. So much for her dream of immaculate whiteness.
The storm calmed down after an hour, letting the moon light up the road. There was a lot of snow. Fortunately, with this 4X4, everything was fine.
There were very few people on the road, she was able to reach the northern suburbs of Fairbanks early in the morning. She took directly the junction in direction of the airport. She had to get rid of the vehicle in a discreet place.
ROTTEN KARMA AT THE LAUNDROMAT
Just after the exit, about eight hundred meters away, Tilda saw a small laundromat. It was open, she saw a woman, a Latina, get out of her car and enter the place. Either she was stupid to do her laundry so early, or she was working there.
Turning right onto Cushman Street and going around the traffic circle, Tilda parked a little farther back, behind a building.
She carefully wiped her fingerprints off the steering wheel and door handles. She first emptied the airfield employee's clothes into a brown container before heading for the laundry room. As she approached, she saw that the woman's back was to her. Tilda immediately attacked her, without a sound, hitting her as hard as she could on the skull with the butt of the Glock. The woman collapsed without a cry. She lay on the ground, her body trembling.
Tilda went around the room to check if there were any surveillance cameras in the room.
She came across a Chinese man who was fast asleep.
She walked over his face and looked at him for a moment. The man was obviously sleeping with his back turned, deeply asleep, serene. Tilda turned away. She found some money on the woman, the money from the box that her victim had just picked up. It was enough to make it look like an assault motivated by theft. She took the keys to her victim's car, grabbed the woman's green hooded coat and went outside.
Tilda took the wheel and headed for the international airport. On the way, she pulled over to the side of the road and threw the cop's gun into a roadside storm drain. When she got close to the terminal, Tilda parked her car in the long-term parking lot. She had arrived at the airport before nine o'clock. She had taken care, all along, to keep her hood over her head to walk to the building. She had entered the terminal hall, walked directly to the restroom.
These precautions would be unnecessary if the cop, or anyone else, had registered her identity. In any case, she had to get out of the country as soon as possible, to disappear. She hung the green coat on a coat rack in a utility room and went out.
She managed to catch the 11:55 a.m. Alaska Airlines flight to Anchorage, then the 3:40 p.m. Alaska Airlines flight to Seattle. She had to spend a night in the Seattle-Tacoma terminal before she could catch the 6 a.m. Delta flight to Los Angeles. It was not until 6:25 p.m. that she was able to board the Aeromexico flight to Mexico City without any problems.
At the airport in Mexico City, she called Emilio and asked him to come and get her and hide her for a while. That lecherous old pig had always wanted to fuck her, but he could wait a long time.
Tilda was exhausted, drunk with sleep, she definitely did not want to die anymore, neither in the snow nor in a penitentiary. Fear, survival instinct, running away from the police, that had been her whole life.
Tilda wanted to start over. She would not stay long with Emilio. She would not stay in Mexico, nor on the continent. She would simply organize her disappearance, this time for good.
A CHINESE MAN IN THE COLD
Liang was cold. Cao had sent him all the way to Canada to deliver a computer part, a sort of microprocessor, a complex and rare thing. It was mostly forbidden military stuff that Cao had managed to get out of China. Cao needed a trusted courier to get such a strategic, and expensive, part to its destination.
Cao had taken the boat to Halifax. He delivered the package to Toronto, then headed back to the West Coast, home, to China.
But things got complicated. The Chinese military didn't like the joke. They had let a whole bunch of agents loose and they were very upset. And that had made the trip complicated. Cao was afraid, and he almost begged Liang to hide. If the Beijing government got hold of Liang and traced him back to Cao and his associates, they would be sliced up.
In short, Liang thought he would go back through Vancouver. But everyone was waiting for him in Vancouver. He had almost been caught there by some guys who looked like Chinese agents.
Liang had to run away, disappear into thin air, avoiding Chinese circles full of government spies.
That's how he ended up in Fairbanks, sleeping here and there. He had no money, as usual. When the manager had entered the laundromat that morning, he had hidden. He was about to sneak out when the killer entered and struck first, from behind. Liang could see that the attacker was armed. He had seen the look in her eyes. This woman was a true demoness.
Liang had to think fast. He stood behind the washing machines and pretended he was asleep. If this woman realized that he had seen her face, she would kill him, without hesitation.
Liang had experience with humans. He had been traveling the planet for years. He had humans of all genders, of all races. He could recognize beasts, dragons, killers. This woman was really scary.
So he lay down and went to sleep with his best sleep. If he was going to die, he might as well do it comfortably.
He hadn't even heard the woman when she approached. He was already far away, hiding in his dreams, in China, in Chongqing, among his own people.
It was when he heard the store manager waking up with a soft moan that Liang realized the killer was gone. He was alive. He had bolted without worrying about the laundromat manager. He didn't speak English or Spanish. With his bad luck, she would accuse him of being her attacker. So he fled without lingering.
ACAPULCO
Liang was able to return to China a few weeks later by flying down to Mexico and boarding a ship in Acapulco.
There, while waiting to board his boat, he looked up. He was stunned, he could have sworn he saw the killer. She was there, on a boarding bridge. She was staring at him. Liang's heart stopped.
Tilda had an infallible memory, a memory that had allowed her to run a criminal empire of several thousand members. She remembered every member of her gangs. She remembered names, eye color, a thousand details, anecdotes about each member; even those she had only seen once.
This Chinese man was the one who "slept" in the Fairbanks laundromat. She was sure of it. He had looked at her in a way that could not be mistaken, even though he had immediately turned his head away. She stood there looking at him. This man had not spoken, he had never gone to the police. Otherwise, she would never have been able to get back to Fairbanks. We would have had his description.
Tilda decided to turn the page. Where she went, no one would ever know who she had been. To her new human environment, she would be a retired American, a quiet and harmless pensioner.
But today, precisely today, her past came back to her. He had the face of this frightened Chinese man, not of a psychopathic cop or an enemy of the underworld.
Tilda smiled at the Chinese man who was getting on the boat. She didn't blame him. He was a guy who had been in the wrong place and who, in the end, didn't want to hurt her. She looked at him for a moment. He didn't look up. She knew he wouldn't look up.
When Liang looked up to see if the slayer was still looking at him, she was gone.
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