She heard him coming at the last second, turning just in time to take the force of his charge with her shoulder. She went down on her back, the breath knocked out of her. He pinned her arms, straddling her and immobilizing her legs before she could kick him. He was bearded, strong, and smelled of stale beer and cologne.
She relaxed, fighting the release of adrenaline before it took control from her. Her muscles slacked and she closed her eyes. Breathing stopped, and her attention moved to the tiny junctions of her capillaries and the beating of her heart. Gradually, she contained the stress hormones that panic had thrown into her system. She altered her adrenal gland to produce noradrenaline, which was easier to control. Her energy built, but remained latent.
The man seemed to take her lack of resistance as surrender. He was still breathing hard. He maneuvered one of her arms so that it was pinned under his knee, and took her by the throat with his free hand.
Her panic suppressed, she breathed again, careful to start the change slowly. She felt a prickling in her stomachs. It was the release of her own unique hormones.
He kept saying, "Real pretty, real pretty." He leaned closer. The alcohol on his breath filled her nostrils. He released an exaggerated sigh and said: "We will not act civilized in this fucking city." The anarchists' motto. He laughed, as if it had been a witty thing to say, and began to touch her.
Blotting it out, she concentrated on subtle shifts in the bones and sinews of her face. The jaw needed extra muscle. The lips could be thinned and hardened, but only slightly. The change was not even painful. It was trivial compared to her earlier exertions. The last, precise step took only a few seconds.
By the time she opened her eyes, her teeth were razor sharp.
His hands were crudely fondling her breasts. He was still breathing hard and mumbling something to himself, eyes closed. She struggled one hand free and tapped his shoulder. His eyes opened.
"Kiss me, you fool," she said.
Ten years before, there had been a man named Carlos living in her mother's building. He never seemed to leave the projects, occupying the front door stoop from morning until the yellow parking lot lights came on at dusk. At this signal, she had to run back home from the project's playground. Seated on a folding chair too small for his bulk, Carlos would smile as she squeezed past him. Then one afternoon Carlos had found her alone, playing under the broken solar panels on the building's roof. He had assaulted her. In her panic and confusion, her body had done things to Carlos that made this look like child's play.
The teeth sliced in so cleanly that he probably didn't feel it, at first. As she turned to spit a warm mouthful of flesh to one side, she felt his blood running warm onto her neck. He started to say something, but it came out wet and meaningless, turned into an animal mewling as she pushed him off. She kicked him in the stomach, and he made a single low sound like a cough and stopped moving; she was very strong. She walked steadily away. There would be nightmares later, maybe the clean wash of tears, but in suppressing her panic she had for the moment switched off everything inside that could be shaken. Changing also had that effect: it pushed emotions back into some nether region, turned her focus to the needs and pleasures of the body.
She went on toward the club. A little alcohol would kill any viruses and wash away the taste.
************************************
The usual crowd was outside Payday. There were kids from New Jersey, white-faced and anxious, who had parked their parents' big ethanol cars on the broad shoulder of FDR. A group of suits, slumming, looked at their watches as they waited for the door workers to check them out. The crowd was fairly small, and nobody was getting in.
A long limousine, a clumsy old gas-burner, pulled in off the freeway. The driver got out to have a quick word with the door workers and then returned to open the door of the car. A beautiful young couple in full evening dress emerged, and the crowd parted for them.
She straightened her hair and approached the red velvet rope. She recognized Louis and Carol, Payday's door workers for two months now. Carol checked her out first. The coral jump pants brought a sneer to her lips. Carol turned to Louis with pursed lips and pointed.
As Louis took a terse look at her, she splayed a hand on her chest in a Who, me? gesture. His eyes widened at the hand's strange outline, and he made a quick computation in the obscure calculus of door workers. He dropped the rope.
************************************
Inside the ruined amphitheater, soft blue halogen lights bathed the graffitied and broken stone. The entrance opened on what had been the audience area, the seating formed by wide concentric steps that led down to the stage. A few dozen Paydayers had arranged themselves in small knots. A bar was set up to her right. The entrance faced a half-collapsed concrete band shell. Behind it, inside the structure that had served as the amphitheater's backstage, Payday's familiar dancebeat pulsed.
The arch over the stage bore a reminder of her encounter in the park. It read: WE WILL NOT ACT CIVILIZED. ... in meter-high letters. The last phrase was overgrown with weeds. Rumor had it that the amphitheater had once witnessed the sacrificial rites of the Missing Foundation, an anarchist cult that had mutated out of an extremist homeless advocacy group. On the other hand, she had also heard that there was no Foundation, or that it was just a stalking-horse for real estate interests, the police, and authority in general. For her part, she liked to believe that there were many Missing Foundations, spawned one from another like rumors in a long, hot summer. She doubted that the man who had attacked her was part of any of it. He was just a man.
She avoided the bar and the stench of the chemical toilet behind it. Descending the steps to the stage, she saw a few people she had met before. Some, she knew well. Of course, there was no recognition in the glances they returned. Stairs led up either side of the stage into the dance area behind it. The stone floor vibrated with the beat. Inside, harshly colored lights moved and strobed, and the music was cruelly loud.
Payday's dancebeat extended well into the infrabass. Most of the sound was too low to really hear, but it provoked an urgent physiological response. Her confidence had been riding on delayed adrenaline from the attack, but as she crossed the dance floor her gut tightened, her knees weakening. She could still taste the man's blood. She hoped she hadn't swallowed any. She looked down and gasped: The slick dance floor was transparent. Below a rocksteady sheet of HARD plastic was garbage accumulated from decades of abandonment. Rain-soaked leaves and magazines, rotting food, tattered clothes, feces, even a used condom were flattened by the dance floor like butterflies pressed under glass - Payday's conservative aesthetic at work. The club altered its environs as little as possible. Rather than clean up the detritus collected over years of ruin, Payday had preserved it, serving it up like some pagan delicacy.