Dareen sat on the furry top of the toilet seat in Sherry's bathroom. It was night and she had been sitting there unclothed. Her powers had come a few minutes ago. She hoped she wouldn't be called tonight. It had been a while, fortunately things were quiet recently.
She had taken to waiting here in the bathroom, it being somewhere that being naked didn't seem so out of place. She didn't want to sit on the living room couch anymore, it seemed too exposed, even though everyone had gone to sleep. But here on the toilet seat she felt just like a normal girl after a shower, about to do her hair, enjoying the fluffy feel of the toilet seat under her bare butt.
She looked at the monitor button sitting on the side of the sink. She decided it looked like a cockroach with its legs folded up. She smiled, remembering her old boyfriend Omar's ratty apartment. Which had a serious cockroach problem, and an exterminator who was noticeably sympathetic to their plight. Called in by the landlord twice a month, he would rhapsodize while testing out the spritzing of his little pump. "They don't spread disease, they don't bite, they don't chew up the house like termites... they're just gross, that's all. It's their only sin. Well here goes..." And he would start his regular tour of the apartment's corners.
Good old Omar. He came from a real old-country family from Saudi Arabia, a tradition of arranged marriages, and just didn't know how to date. He tried to go "too fast" with Dareen in that apartment and she stopped him. It really wasn't his fault. She just wasn't interested enough in him. If she was a real raging feminist like some of the others at that college, he could have been accused of "date rape". It would have ruined him and would have been a terrible thing to do. The whole world was just too quick to judge and condemn. As a result good-hearted people were too shy about saying what they thought and expressing what they felt. One time she even wrote up these general observations in a letter to the college paper. They didn't print it, of course -- the tone wasn't hysterical enough -- but that was actually a relief. After she sent it off she realized she didn't want to become misunderstood and a center of controversy.
Cockroaches were misunderstood too, at least according that exterminator man. So was this monitor button, at first. It was too hard to hide so she had told all of them about it. She figured Colonel Mike and his team wouldn't mind. At first Elly and Jamal were suspicious, but actually the button had turned out to be a good thing. Elly and Jamal had been worried about being under surveillance; Elly was always peeking outside from behind closed curtains to see if there were any guys out there sitting in parked cars. But with the button, the feds already knew where Dareen was. No need for surveillance. It was a big relief, especially because with no one watching, the government wouldn't find out about Lourdes. Looking out for Lourdes was their no. 1 priority these days.
Dareen sat there, wondering when she would get sleepy. At that point she could go out and flop down on the couch. She looked down at her feet and flexed her toes. A normal girl sitting here would be painting her toenails. Elly had urged her to have them professionally done "you have perfect toes, Dar" but Dareen had never gone in for it. Still traditional in some ways. She sat up and pulled her shoulders back and looked down. Now she could no longer see her toes. The breasts seemed to stick out halfway to the wall. She hoped that someday soon, somehow, she could get that reduction operation.
And as she was looking down at her huge, dark brown nipples, they began to tingle.
She jumped up, still looking at her nipples, watching her breasts ponderously bob up and down before coming to rest. Then her shoulders slumped. Another "call", another naked flight to who knows where to be seen by who knows how many people. But the hesitation was only momentary. This was an emergency. This tingling could only mean a pulse bomb.
She prostrated on the bathroom floor for a quick prayer. The fluffy rug made a rather decadent sajjada. Then she grabbed the button, deftly hopped through the living room, past the sleeping Lourdes, and slid the window open and jumped out, holding the button in her hand. While hovering outside she carefully closed the window behind her. No one awoke.
* * *
She was getting close to the Alpharetta area and now she got a creepy feeling. Fear took hold of her. Hairs stood out on the back of her neck and her nipples got even stiffer. This was near the place where she had gotten zapped by lightning, that night when it all started. Recently one of Mr. Nedrow's men had driven her around the area, hoping Dareen would be able to point out where that house was with that mad scientist guy, but it was hopeless. Dareen had been lost that night and couldn't even say what road she had been on and even if she did, it had been so dark and rainy, and she had been so disoriented, running madly as if in a dream, that she wouldn't have been able to pick out any landmarks, especially not in daylight when things looked so different.
But now she found herself flying down to what she knew was the exact spot. Hovering a hundred feet up in the night air, she saw that very house, that little place with the open garage where she had seen that bullet-like rocket and the mad scientist who had wanted her to change her clothes right in front of him. It was more beat-up than she remembered. She flew a little lower, checking the shuttered windows, unconsciously covering her breasts and pussy with her hands. She didn't want that old guy seeing her like this. She remembered standing in that garage opening, embarrassed because he could see the outline of her toes through her stockinged feet. And now totally naked!
Fortunately the house seemed deserted. Looking over the way, she saw the road, and could identify the spot where her car had stalled. She remembered that night so vividly now, her cell phone being dead, nobody driving by, the cascading rain, the need to get to a telephone. And there was the tree she had run to, just before getting zapped.
The house was closed up now. The area looked very peaceful on this clear still night, but Dareen knew otherwise from the tingling feeling. Standing straight up in mid-air, she turned this way and that, pointing her nipples in each direction as if they were antennas and she was trying to get better reception. They led her to an equipment shed a little ways away from the house.
She opened the little Quonset shed and looked around in the dark. Her bare feet told her that this was no ordinary shed. She was standing on top of a metal hatch. The tingling was stronger now, almost painful, like bees stinging her nipples. She opened the hatch. There was an access tube with a ladder going down.
She felt awkward and vulnerable doing this naked. Also she was somehow less confident of her powers, so near where she had obtained them, and now in such a strange underground facility. But she descended the ladder as she knew she should, her toes clasping the rungs as she went down. At the bottom of the tube was a metal door with a hasp. She pulled open the hasp and found herself in a hallway.
This was impressive, reminding her in a way of the undergound installation where she had been tested. The wide hallway was lit and white and metallic. Through her soles she felt a humming from under the floor as if from unseen motors. The tingling increased.
Now a bigger door. She opened it and felt the blast of cold air. Great, a freezer. Well, she could deal with it. She remembered hiding in the dark freezer in that restaurant, after averting that drive-by shooting, and knew that being able to withstand the cold was one of her super powers. The important thing now was to find that bomb and fly it up into the atmosphere before it went off.
The freezer room was dimly lit. A noisy cooling unit roared away near the ceiling. She walked across the icy floor to the other side. Another door.
She opened this one and was hit by the bright light of the all-white room. She immediately saw the source of the tingling. There were a series of metal boxes on the floor, like little filing cabinets. She ran towards them. The air here was different. It was REALLY cold. The door clicked shut behind her.
There were a dozen boxes. Which one had the bomb? They had little knobs on top. She opened the first one. Empty. It was hard to see through the white clouds that were the condensation of her breath. She went toward the second one.
Then the tingling stopped. She opened the second box. Empty. She stood up straight. What was going on here? She felt up her nipples with her hands as if to waken them. No -- the tingling had stopped.
In the dim light she saw the thick clouds of condensation puff out from her mouth. She had never been in air this cold. As she breathed in and out it felt like she was breathing in sand, and breathing it out. An odd and unnatural feeling.
She looked around and clutched herself. She lifted one bare foot to rub against the other. She felt every degree of this cold. Brrr!! She had to get out of here.
The door had no handle. She would have to rip the door out. She braced her feet well apart, stretched her arms out to grab the sides, cringed as her breasts crushed against the super-cold metal of the wide door, and heaved. Heaved again, as hard as she could. Her super powers were gone!
She was going to freeze to death if she didn't get out of here right away. She saw what looked like a grille on the ceiling. She jumped for it; and landed on the floor again. Of course, she couldn't fly either.
She took a lungful of sandy air and then yelled, "Help! Help me!", cold clouds shooting out from her mouth. Her voice rang wonderfully loud in the frigid air but to no avail. She closed her eyes and said a prayer. "O Allah, please don't let me freeze to death. Show me a way..."
She crouched down, clutching herself, looking down at her purplish toes, feeling the bite of unnatural cold on her pussy, the sting on her anus as she rested her butt cheeks on her heels and her buttocks separated. The button monitor fell from her stiffening fingers and tinkled onto the metal floor. And then red smoke came from somewhere and she saw it coursing around her feet. She breathed in and out but there was no oxygen. She felt faint and then fell forward and she bumped her head on the floor and everything went dark.