Twenty-one year-old Lea Belle was always pretty much a normal person. She was just out of college and already had a job, house, and husband. She had her flaws, but that just meant that she was like the other 99.9% of the population. But one week all that changed…

Her problems began with her mother's death early one week. Lea's occupation as Head Assistant Manager of Taco Bell's Advertising Staff would not allow her to go to her mother's funeral in Ohio. Lea immediately became depressed and started missing deadlines for Taco Bell. They fired her because she missed too many assignments. She cracked.

In the dining room at dinner that night, Lea decided to kill her husband. She was in an argument with her husband about whether Taco Bell had a right to fire her. She settled it by stabbing her husband through the eyes with a pair of forks.

She stared in horror at what she had done, then laughed a cold, maniacal laugh. She quickly changed into an all-black outfit complete with cape and ski mask and set out to destroy Taco Bell.

After grabbing her husband's hunting rifle, she jumped into her black Mustang, and drove down to the Taco Bell Management Office. Upon arriving, she shot the guard on duty at point-blank range at went inside. She easily found the office of her Supervisor, the man directly responsible for firing her. After that, she simply shot anyone she saw who was higher ranked than she had been just before her sudden departure.

She heard the police cars outside, and thus decided her continued presence there would not be a good idea. She jumped into the service elevator shaft and dropped down to the basement. There she found and changed into a second set of clothes that she used to keep there. She crossed under the street via sewer, and forced her way into a building on the other side. She exited the building, hurried casually to her car, and sped off, keeping an eye on the police barricade behind her the entire time.

When she got home, she figured that the police would be coming to ask her questions, considering her recent dismissal, so she felt that she would have to leave. She got a map, closed her eyes, and stuck her finger down. She pointed to a small town in Utah called Sandy. She drove all night and reached Sandy early the next morning. With all of the proper (forged) papers, she promised to make a new life for herself.

A Few Years Later…

After easily escaping from her first few murders, Lea Belle decided to go straight. She actually did it for a few years, and even found a new boyfriend.

She opened her own fast food restaurant, Taco Belle, and was making a good deal of money from it. Her life was so much easier now than it had been before she murdered her husband three years prior. Someone else, his sister, actually, had been arrested, and there was enough evidence for the court to throw her in jail and close the case.

She loved her new life, until…

One night she came home from work early to surprise her boyfriend and found him with another man. A man who happened to be her former husband's brother, whom she happened to have had a crush on before he admitted that he was gay.

She yelled and screamed at them both until she couldn't even whisper. Then she kicked them out, and quickly jotted down a note telling them never to come back.

A few days later, her ex-boyfriend and his boyfriend received "I'm Sorry" notes from Lea, inviting them to come to lunch at Taco Belle. Midway through lunch, Lea's two guests dropped dead into their tacos. Lea quietly slipped out the back exit, pausing only to activate the fire alarm, and took off in her brand new Explorer, thereby abandoning the life that she had worked so hard to create.

Lea Belle, a.k.a. 'The Murderess' or just 'Murderess', was sitting in a chair in her new house. She was laughing to herself. The poison that she had put in the soft drink machine at Taco Belle would last at least until the restaurant was forced to shut down. Even if the poison was found she wouldn't care - there was no way that they could find her, even if they did trace it to her. Sitting in that chair, she thought about the time that she had spent since leaving Taco Belle…

Over the years that she had spent 'straight,' Lea had begun to love the look and small of fire, and she had one in her fireplace almost all the time now. But she wanted, needed bigger fires. Fires that would light up the sky from mile away, Fires that would have every fire engine from the three surrounding counties on the scene, leaving her to go and set one, undefended, somewhere else. With great effort, she had decided to become The Arsonist instead of being The Murderess. "Beavis and Butt-Head" became her favorite television show, and she absolutely loved yelling, "Fire!, Fire!, Fire!"

She managed to make a hobby out of trapping people inside buildings, lighting the buildings on fire, and taking the bodies back to her house to store them in her basement.

Back to the present, her new house was in a small village with no police or fire departments out in a desert in Nevada. There used to be houses around her house, but there weren't anymore, because she likes to be alone. Coincidentally, the population of the village had shrunken from 247 to 139 since her arrival there.

She felt that one of these days she would have to clean out her basement, since it was now completely full of charred, almost unrecognizable bodies that she had collected from burnt buildings. It was a big basement. There were many bodies in it.

Even considering all of this, she felt that she had been idle far too long. Her small, neighborhood fires had either been ignored or treated by the press as "just more of the same." She went to the nearest large city, being Las Vegas, and set up dozens of small pumps whose sole purpose was to spray gasoline everywhere. Then she would just have to light a match, and run.

After setting up all forty-two of the devices, she stood back to watch. Just after they started spraying gas, a man walked out a side door of a casino which she had been planning to blow up, looked at the device, saw her standing next to it, and ran back inside.

"I guess he could just be scared of me," Lea thought optimistically. But within minutes the police cars showed up. They came from all sides and surrounded her. She readily surrendered. They had her.

There was no trial. There would have been no point. She had over 400 various charges against her, most of which could be easily proven.

She was given a life sentence with no chance of bail or parole. She was forced to see a psychiatrist on a daily basis. But the worst part, for her, was that she wasn't allowed to watch Beavis and Butt-Head anymore.

Lea Belle was watching television in her house when suddenly, the program that she had been watching shut off.

"We interrupt your regularly scheduled program," the newsman started, "To tell you that Lea Belle, known to most of our viewers as 'The Murderess,' has escaped from prison. She is armed and considered extremely dangerous. Her jailbreak was accomplished by killing nearly half of the guards on duty at the time with a kitchen knife, while holding the warden hostage until she was let out. It is believed that she had outside help, as she was picked up in a black 1996 Ford Probe, license plate Y-O-U-S-U-C-K. The experts are telling us that she has most likely already found a new identity and residence, based on her psychological profile."

Lea liked this new house, even if it didn't have any furniture except for the television, a couch, and a table. It didn't matter. She would probably be leaving soon anyway. She turned back to the television.

"Lea was in prison for more than 130 murders, 17 charges of arson, and over 500 attempted murders."

"How can she have 500 attempted murders, you ask? Apparently, she tried to poison everyone in her own restaurant right before she left it few years back. Fortunately, the manager was smart enough to have found it in time."

"Lea is 5'11" and weighs about 140 pounds. She seems to be the type of person who would kill you on the street if you simply looked at her funny. She has blonde hair, and she is very athletic.

"If you see her, do not attempt to apprehend her. Leave the area, and report to the local police. Thank you for watching. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming."

Lea turned off the television and thought for a few moments. Then she got up and went off to plan her next few kills.

2048 A. D.: The Inner Solar System

The U.A.S. Red Death silently glided through space. The 12-day supply run was almost over. The shuttle could make its landing on Mars today, but it would be very dangerous, so the captain had decided to wait.

Captain Johnson was in the command center piloting the shuttle. He locked in a course and the shuttle entered orbit around Mars. He checked to make sure that all the status gauges were in the green, then he left the command center. He found his first officer, April Belle, in the garden. The garden was actually just a closet-sized room with a few plants in it but it had delusions of grandeur. It was placed as far away from the engine room as possible, in order to minimize the almost nonexistent radiation.

He was just about to attempt to start a conversation when he heard the hum of the shuttle's intercom.

"Captain, incoming L.W.T. for you. It's from Command."

"Thank you. I'll be right there."

When he got to the bridge, he sat down to receive the message. A quarter of the way through, the communications array went blank, leaving him staring at the blank screen. Suddenly, the entire room lurched violently around him, throwing him from his chair. He instantly knew what had happened. A bomb had gone off aboard the shuttle.

Johnson quickly looked around for April. She was nowhere in sight. He closed the airlock at the entrance to the command center to avoid losing all of its precious oxygen. He repressurized the room and checked their status.

They had no engines, minimal life support, and no maneuvering jets. The explosion had been centered in the main engines, ripping them apart. It had blown the cargo doors clear off and torn through the outer hull a dozen different places. Only one other person survived, April. She was still in the garden. He activated the garden's VidScanner to see if she had been hurt and saw her standing there, laughing.

He knew at once that she had set up the bomb that caused the explosion. He figured that she was probably insane, and would probably not survive the crash in her present condition, but there was nothing that he could do about that.

He checked the sensor readings, and found that their expected crash zone was only about fifty kilometers from the landing pad, far less than it could have been. At least the computer still worked enough to tell him these things, he thought.

The shuttle began to shake. The computer told him that they were reentering the planet's atmosphere. There was a loud creaking noise of metal bending in the aft section of the ship. Then an impossibly loud *crack*. Johnson checked the sensor readings and found that everything from the cargo bay back had snapped off. He turned back to the gauge that he had been watching.10,000 ft., 5,000 ft., 1,000 ft., the altimeter was giving readouts faster than he could read them.

Suddenly there was a crash as the station hit the Martian surface, and Johnson could feel his body being crushed its own weight with the introduction of this newly acquired gravity. Though he could feel the air rushing out where the airlock seal had ruptured, he took the time to set the radio for a repeating distress call. He wouldn't be able to receive a transmission because his incoming radio was broken, but at least he could try to get some help. He checked the sensor readings, and found the other half of the shuttle a hundred meters away with no life forms aboard.

Obviously there was no air on the surface, so he needed to get to the emergency space suits in the cargo bay in the other half of the ship if he was going to survive until help arrived. He ripped open a section of the console and reached inside. His hand, after searching awhile, came out with a full-fuel tank and a 2-way pump. As he pulled his hand out, it accidentally brushed across a bare wire. Sparks jumped from the computer console onto the floor where they gradually burned themselves out. He poured out the fuel, and pumped air into the fuel tank. He stuck the fuel hose in his mouth and instantly smelled and tasted metal, but at least he could breathe.

He walked outside onto the frozen surface. He knew that he would need something to warm him up, and soon. Just then a spark hit the fuel and the entire forward half of the shuttle went up in flames. Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it, he thought. He got to the cargo bay and went inside. There was still enough oxygen to keep the many bulkhead fires going. There was debris all over. He could smell acrid smoke, along with the stronger stench of death.

He grabbed one of the spacesuits and put it on before walking outside to wait for help to arrive. At one point during his wait, he could have sworn that he heard someone moving inside the cargo bay, but he assumed that it was his imagination. After a few hours, a small, sleek, running shoe shaped spacecraft landed not far from where he was sitting. The pilot emerged, dressed in his own EV suit and approached Johnson.

"Need a lift?" he said.

"It's a long walk back to the outpost," Johnson replied cautiously. He knew that no one could have answered his distress signal this quickly, so this man must have stumbled on them by accident. But, he thought, beggars can't be choosers, so he was on his way to enter the craft when the other man suddenly dropped to the ground. Even from twenty or so feet away, Johnson could feel that the man was dead, shot in the back with a high-energy laser. He slowly turned around to find April standing directly behind him, still holding in her left hand the cloaking field generator that had allowed her to remain unseen by the ship's sensors. In her other hand was a Mark III laser rifle. It was pointed at his head.

As she launched the Heart of Gold, April thought about the life that she would make for herself. Following in her mother's footsteps, she would seek out all intelligent life forms in the galaxy and destroy them, an Interstellar Murderess. And then, she thought, her daughter would do the same, and her daughter, and her daughter…

She laughed to herself and set out on her mission.