Rifled purses, trees de-barked by gunshots, pieces of clothing.  The trail of blood started, ran, stopped.  Dogs with protective muzzles since shooter drug stuff was everywhere.  "Maybe it's good you missed your appointment Ma."  The trail seemed to "run cold" about a half mile before the hospice building.  Some had gone towards the road; some back into suburbia.

  Blood smear, cracked window glass at the front doors.  

  "It's the same all over Europe." 

  "Oh, you been?" 

  The group of ladies had taken revolvers and pistols out of handbags, stockings, bras, and waistbands. 

  "Just got back." 

  Duck!  Hide!  Within seconds all were out of sight. 

  "Then that'll be another one," the person knifing the hostage's elbow and arm behind back called back into the building.  "ON YOU!" He hollered and pointed the gun.  "Find out what they want."  The ear piece said.

  The North Carolina authorities were "all over it".  They sounded laid back all along the wires, but had a tempo and pace to their moves.

  "You kids better get back to school or training or whatever it is young professionals do these days," a somewhat shaky in the hand middle-ager everyone called Ma waved us back behind a perimeter being established in between Crime Scene and waves of foot traffic.  "Ma!  Put the pistolè back in your purse until I can check your blood sugar level." A frown, "Oh, alright."  She put it in her coat pocket.  "Na-ah.  Purse."  Ma looked at us "cubs" and sounded angry when she asked, "Whaddaya you the boss now?" One of us flashed a Detective's badge.  

  "Noooo shit." She opened her handbag, dropped the little .22 inside, and was closing it when she asked, "Wah, woo, woodya like I should empty the chambah?"  

  "I would like you to put the tape up, then come over here and sit with us for a quick visit.  We gotta go north." 

  "Alright kiddo." She put her hand back in her coat pocket.  "I forgot I had these," she pulled out lollipops.  

  The Detective flashed the badge again.  "The tape Ma." 

"I DON'T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT."

  The man gently slammed the door.  He closed it but not all the way.  The woman took two steps closer.  "Alright, I hearya darling, but you can't go around putting bullet holes in everything and," the door closed, "And not expect the rest of us to NOT WONDER if you might want to talk about something." 

  "Problem?" 

  "No, not really muttering." 

  "I DON'T have anyone for you." 

  "Really?!" 

  "Talk to me about the sheetrock." 

  "Like what about it?  Like the difference between horse hair plaster and gypsum?" 

  "How much the project needs." 

  "Guess I can head back home then.  Podunk's done with me." 

  "I don't have anyone for you since you exposed everyone's deepest psychological stress and desires." 

  "But I did not." 

  "But that's the word from Foggy Bottom." 

  "But it," deep breathing and suppressing an asthma attack, "It can't be.  It just can NOT possibly be so." 

  The man got up from a big desk.  "Seven newspapers on the West Coast say that you have done the very one thing YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO DO." 

  The woman collapsed.

"Come in, come in, but

  don't step on anything," a man finished the sentence as a tiny crowd hurried in and things were stepped on. 

  "I'll just talk on.  Probably everyone knows I lost my job at the University.  But I'm keeping up with my lecturing," he lifted a foot in a dress shoe from a paper mache rider on a horse.  He smoothed both rider and horse as he told, "You may not know that the University itself is no more." Someone gasped.  A woman came from a three foot deep kitchenette area.  "Oh dear," at the sight of eight or nine people.  She made way carefully around the perimeter of the room.  Snagged a pile of books and magazines and as timing would have it, a rocket flew overhead, she jumped, the books crashed down, and the rocket exploded. 

  The professor sighed.  But knelt to help re-gather the books.  A young woman pushed her way through semi-frozen people and also helped.  She handed the books one by one into the woman in the kitchenette.  Then asked, "Sir, what's with all the strings?"  

  Sprawling the floor was a patchwork of string and yarn and rags.  "My dear," the professor said, "I'm so glad you've asked." The man took in the creation by looking down at it from his height.  His eyes misted, he rang his hands gently, caressed a side of his face, and almost started talking a few times before more seeing what's inside of the design.  At long last he spoke.  "Waves."

  Jesus was asym-metrical too.  In a cultural landscape where it was mostly an eye for an eye, he said, God's got a better plan.  It's called forgiveness.  "It's a real game changer!"

  More than one man speaking in tandem.

  And an older woman who'd survived WWII, "Part of the Allied's distinction in WWII from just joining the warring was it's commitment to honor." Translators paused the conversation to clarify. 

  Back when at this type of world coming together and differing on some serious issues we tumbled into comparing and contrasting certain concepts like honor and warrior in and out of cultural contexts.

"That's IN NEUTRAL on the stick then!"

  The soldier was angry beyond words.  It was his duty to defend.  The peacekeepers had been slaughtered.  An observer was crouched in a corner ranting to himself, then blubbering, then stiffening, then speaking rationally--excuses, he chided himself as he knew he would be, or presumed he would be.  The sound of boots stalk-walking the sounds of a man "losing it" included stepping on glass, something hard sliding in something viscous, hard surface floor or ground.  Breathing, slow, steady rhythmic breathing.

  There is no reasoning with what they are doing.  Everyone had been warned.  Knights from both sides of the European pantheon had signaled no easy end in sight.  Soldiers weighed their insight more heavily than all of the media coverage combined.

  "You cannot," a woman in tactical gear stayed behind the lead and answered, "Can I leave now?"  

  Deep underground came the sounds of rumbling.  The steam, where it found outlet, blew objects up into the air.  An entire sack of potatos hiccuped.  The rumble moved off.

  Because it is and it isn't an org right now.  A mediator spoke on a sat phone conference call from the field.  The little piece of tore up plywood in front of him was not really "armor".  It is being used as a vehicle.  Soldiers quietly surrounded the mediator.  One gave a swift, short kick at the bottom of the plywood.  It fell over.  The mediator looked like he was on a toilet.  It was a bucket.  And after the team captain vented his anger in the comment, that's in neutral on the stick then, he tossed some loose gut, stop it up pills over to the man.  Another soldier said, "That could be a grenade." The little cluster of militarized left.

 Hummuna, hummuna the woman said when "the smugglers" took the alien mask off yet another sample.  "Where'dya git it?" Another woman asked. 

  "Long, long story probably best answered by the people it 'attacked', then resisted arrest, flung some friends into a wall," the wounded came forward, "And was 'apprehended' for not having identity papers!" 

  "This is gonna be good shug, I'll catch up." 

  "I really do think people want their court TV back." 

"I suppose you think it's black people."

  The woman had pulled me away from a little clutch of reporters outside a courtroom.  Dressed in Sunday best to my wrinkled four day old outfit.  "I probably don't.  I don't see color."  She undid a purse snap.  "That's what my grandson said you'd say." Her smooth, well-taken care of hands paused on the big handle of the purse.  "M'am.  What are we talking about here?"  She looked across the hallway at the flag.  "That did this.  Who did this to Our Country."  

  I reached out and patted her hands.  "I'm just me.  As a journalist I just report on all sides.  I wish someone had not used that word, infiltrated.  But, from what I understand," she gave my patting hand back to me.  "Yes?"  I looked at my little stack of reporter's notebooks in my lap not confident I really understood.  "The pieces add up to the facts that somehow people did.  I mean, you know, I talk to a lot of people, and, and most people were not thinking about spys and operatives that would, you know, want to harm us." 

  "I know that." One hand was reaching into the purse.  "My grandson said to get these to you," she pulled a taped up envelope from the purse.  "He trusts you to," she let the envelope fall on my lap when I wouldn't just take it, "Do the right thing." She re-snapped the purse and promptly stood.  Smoothing skirt on her backside.  "Nice meeting you," she said.  Her heels not noisy but not unheard as she walked away.

  "Here hold this," the man thrust the boom at me and dug through his pockets for car keys.  "I'm just gonna put this here," a woman said as she wheeled a camera mounted on a tripod on wheels to where I'd sat on a knee wall resting an elbow holding a boom on my thigh.  "I have to run to my car to smoke."  

  "Vhat are vee vilming today?" A man in a vintage 50's suit came and asked me.  "Not entirely sure.  It seems like housewives but, er, the people seem, uh, foreign." 

  "Great to see you got some work girl," a hooded person cupped hands and hollah'd.  "Oh, I did not." I muttered.  "Get up," the camera woman ordered.  She snapped the battery case on a light meter closed.  "What are you doing here anyway?"  

  "Process of elimination," I head pointed to a skyscraper.  

  "Sorry to hear it." 

  "Oh, I wasn't aiming for the Networks anyway." 

  Two of the actors arguing were getting louder and louder.  A man in a jogging suit came and asked the camerawoman, "Is this in the script?" She snapped back, "I wouldn't know.  I'm not her."  She pointed the light meter at a woman with a script.

  "You're chariot has arrived," the normally pensive writer smiled at complex mission accomplished.  The other woman frowned.