Description

5-Star Crash Test Rating, gouache on watercolor paper, 5 x 6 inches

The taste of iron pooled in Lillian Kennedy’s mouth. “Cheap shot,” she snorted darkly, then stood and wiped her busted lip with the back of her hand. As Lioness’ newest member, Kennedy only had but a handful of sorties under her belt. Training had impressed upon her time and again the gravity, the harrowing brutality, of this work, but thus far she’d been lucky. While she knew academically that she could die fighting these monstrosities, she didn’t really believe it. Or rather, she hadn’t.

But now, as Kennedy stared down the behemoth that had just so effortlessly struck her, she felt tears welling up against her will. Suddenly, she was ten years old again, not Kennedy but Lilly, cowering in a corner as her father screamed in her face. “Oh, you’re going to cry? Grow up!”

Kennedy swallowed the memory, buried it under a mask of bravado that felt more and more real with each passing second. Even before Lioness, she’d been training to fight monsters, and now, she was the strongest she’d ever been. She just needed an edge…

There, at her feet: a bus that had somehow managed to escape all of the destruction around it. Kennedy knelt down, peered in through the windows. Vacant. Perfect. She picked it up, all of its forty feet of length to her like wielding a club or baton. It was no silver bullet, but she’d have that much more reach, that much more control over the distance between her and her foe. Just the edge she was looking for. She plastered a cocky grin across her face and pretended she actually was the towering guardian that she appeared to be. Then, she charged.