Jonah felt the blood in his mouth. He didn't mind it at all. The pain was mostly gone now and his limbs swam in the sweet helium of his last vision. He didn't mind the taste of his own blood, his own heart beat, the feel of his own breathing. There were times when life came down to just that. Just those few things that separated the real from the impossible, or the far too real.<br/><br/>He looked like a murder victim. His mouth wound bled like a head wound and his whole chin gleamed, painted in the silk water crimson of blood and spit. Dots of it speckled his face  in black constellations around his sword metal eyes. And a jagged brown stain flowered down the front of the gray hoodie, the ties soaked at the top like surgical wicks.<br/><br/>Around him the world looked darker. As if the light had just seeped away, flooded into the gutters and run away to join the bacterial circus under the city.<br/><br/>It is black like a curtain and quiet. The wailing of the sirens is lathered away behind the hum of some low pitched sound that thumps through his body like phantom voltage.<br/><br/>Jonah slowly looks up at the streetlight and it peers down, tired and dim, just a faint firefly against the vaulted ceiling of night. He knew how it felt.<br/><br/>Then the ground shakes. It crumps as if under attack, the shock of faraway explosions hammering some distant place to abstract ruble.<br/><br/>Thoomp thoomp thoomp thoomp… Thoomp thoomp... thoomp thoomp<br/><br/>Cluster bombing, rockets perhaps. The muffled booming sounds rock steadily like hoof beats, or footsteps. A running rhythm, each step hitting the ground like an elephant without a parachute, or a hollywood T-Rex.<br/><br/>Jonah sees them emerge from the row of buildings. The two figures, they are stick figures, just lines connecting dots that move on the curtain of darkness around him. They come sprinting out and the booming of their footsteps fades down to a silent movie hiss as soon as he sees them. Even as cartoony gesture drawings each has a certain character.<br/><br/>The first one moves like a fighter. The casual mark that is its spine is bent and ready to snap, spring-like. Its legs pump, knees first. Jonah knows how is was, knees in case you need knees. The hands, crude scribbled balls, stay in line with the face , the front of the body. Those are striking balls, punching and kicking balls. She is clearly a Scrapper<br/><br/>In an almost comical contrast, the other drawing  comes bounding out with its spine straight and tall, ready to bend. The arms move freely and gracefully like vipers. The swish of its form is not hunched over in the least, not defensive but moving with the ball of its head upright. The figure seems to float on the scribbles of its feet. Jonah imagines pointed toes there, walking on its toes like a Dancer. Yes that was it exactly, it moves like a Dancer.<br/><br/>The Scrapper slows to a halt, scuttling forward still tucked and ready while the Dancer floats up with bouncing gazelle strides. The car is there somewhere with its shattered windshield and lifelessly reluctant passenger. He cannot see it. The world is dark save for the chalk figures now, but he knows that they must be near it, they must see it.<br/><br/>The Scrapper motions with one balled up hand bulb. There and there, it points. The Dancer leans forward interested as much with the Scrapper as the object of her martial perceptions.<br/><br/>Then they both look around. He can see the two dimensional balls of their heads change to mark the swivel. The glass. Jonah suddenly feels like a complete idiot, not for the first time certainly, but this time he has an audience .<br/><br/>A light riverbed of glass sparkled like a pixie dust trail from the car straight to the shadows in which he huddled. It shone in the moons mocking light like all the stars behind the bruisey clouds above. It even twinkled across his form, tucked into folds and glinting boldly from his shoulder and knees. Jonah groaned inwardly.<br/><br/>The figures move toward him in their individual ways, the Scrapper, panther ready, the Dancer, an agile angel. And as they grow closer they change. Like walking through the candied layers of a dream they alter with each step, as quick as a foot fall, slipping from one form into another.<br/><br/>Both scribbles become skeletons, then they are each a body cadaverous, skinless and muscled white, like the medical dead. Then they adopt their skins and for the first time Johan can see that they are women. And each with a distinct beauty.<br/><br/>The Dancer is obviously beautiful, very obviously, almost obnoxiously lovely. The fighter has a scary feline grace that is as hard to ignore as an oncoming car crash. For that one step they are both naked and, of course, things get complicated.<br/><br/>He catches  nipples and the curve of breasts. The Dancer's collarbones and shoulders are leaping deer beautiful. The Scrapper has her front covered and as soon as Jonah even thinks to look for thighs or any secrets they might hold, the next step lands. Suddenly the Scrapper has small metal pins biting into her flesh and a knife? Is that a knife, hidden? A piece of wire wrapped around something. The Dancer is covered in fasteners and buttons. Then she has glass globes of different sizes and shapes around her while the Scrappers face seems to rip off at the bottom leaving only a clean white skull full of teeth. It is too much to follow. After naked, everything just flickers in too fast to scan and tag.<br/><br/>Suddenly the street light came back to life with a god fearing POP, and there was her face. Her cobalt eyes reached out with the force of a vision grabbing him by his awareness and whispering “You better be worth it” without saying a single word. Her hair fanned out in a halo of night fired around its edges with the sodium glare of the resurrected light.<br/><br/>The Dancer looked on with her oddly violet eyes, her low, lacy  ascot waved in the fish water breeze from the coming rain. Captivating eyes. Jonah could not look away, not until the Scrapper spoke. Her words were as as dreadful as those eyes, ready, everything about her was ready.<br/><br/>“It's time to go.” She said and there it was! The voice! Jonah knew that voice, the voice of the Valkyrie. It spooked him and he jumped, feeling an icy frog scurry down his spine. As he sat there stunned she unceremoniously hoisted up across her shoulders. He half expected a mexican spin or a body slam, maybe something from the top rope, but instead she grunted "Let's borrow Henry's ride... you think?" And made a  line for the sedan with the ruined front seat and the still and quiet body Henry Bolinski crushed into the back. He noticed the hooked claws on her armored gauntlets and rather wished he had seen those a little earlier. The nipples had really thrown him off.<br/><br/>A casual shifting of the shoulders worthy of a judo master sennt him sprawling into the remains of the backseat still coated with chunks of  shatterproof  glass, shattered. The Scrapper tried to close the door but something in its gut was bent and it stubbornly wobbled with a grating metal on metal sound. She wasted no time. Going from zero to ninety, she threw a kick that rang the door like a sheet metal bell and it slammed in Jonah's face, likely never to open again. He blinked at his own surprised  ghost image in the dusty glass.<br/><br/>As the two women of action split to take their places in the car with the dented hood, the conquered door and a friendly neighborhood corpse, the whirling strobe of blue lights bathed the building row in moments of neon. The top of the hill glowed with the milky glare of onrushing headlights just below its rim.<br/><br/>Trapped between a corpse and a kick welded door Jonah wondered what else might go south. And that was when the first few fat greasy drops of rain hit the glass.