A well-tended house on a quiet suburban street hides a crime Stark must avenge, and a criminal that must be punished. When a wife's CD plays a different tune, someone has to pay the piper — and Stark's the new DJ. The song's not pretty, but someone's going to dance to it ... for a long, long time.

From the outside, the house on the suburban street appeared well-tended. The grass was cut, the hedges trimmed, and the exterior was recently repainted in a pale blue that seemed almost feminine. Considering the hand she was sure had painted it, Stark was not surprised.

She sat in her car across the street, watching the house and waiting for the go-ahead from the prep team. The hate was still there, still strong, burning deep inside her. It glowed white hot in her mind, and she cherished it for the protection it gave her. It was her last line of defense against what she could become -- what she would become if the hate ever failed her.

Every time she glanced down at the folder in her lap, it would flare briefly as her eyes registered the pictures of the handsome middle-aged man, and what he had become. Then she would look away and let it cool, just a little. Keeping the hate balanced was an art.

At one point in the past, she had let it consume her. She needed to, then, to overcome the programming they'd given her. She'd needed it to survive. When she had killed the bitches who had done this to her, she was little more than an animal. She was better now, relatively speaking. But she still needed the hate. It was the only thing that kept her from becoming what the bitches programmed her to be. Unfortunately, as a result, she was always a breath away from becoming either an inhuman psychopath, or a happy play toy for anything with a cock and an attitude. Too much hate or too little — lean too far either way, and she would be lost.

Sometimes she wondered if she was already gone, and just too stubborn to admit it. She was nothing at all like the man she had been before they had taken her, and nothing like the woman the bitches had wanted her to become. But she always pushed that thought away. Unlike most people, she knew who she was, and where she came from. And she had a purpose. If I am the walking dead, she thought with a scowl, I'm going to rattle a lot of chains before they lay me down.

The radio cracked into life.

"Process completed, Ma'am. They're ready."

She flicked the switch over her head. "Thank you, gentlemen," she said sweetly, her voice projecting a teasing playfulness she did not feel at all. "You can go now."

Stark put the folder aside, snagged her purse from the passenger seat, and opened the door. Knees together, she swiveled her lower body and placed her feet firmly on the ground before rising smoothly from the driver's seat. She wore blacks and grays, as she always did — a mid-length black dress with a smart charcoal grey jacket, black hose and calf-high black boots with three-inch heels. Her blonde hair tumbled down over her shoulder in large curls, and her pale blue eyes flicked cautiously to either side before striding across the street. Her full red lips framed a cheerful half-smile of bright straight white teeth, welcoming and friendly.

It was only when someone looked into her eyes that they realized she was neither.

Her heels clicked their way up the front walk, her hips swaying, her skirt moving back and forth against her legs. Her breasts bounced slightly as she mounted the stairs. When she reached the door, she could hear the sound of a vacuum cleaner running inside.

She rang the bell.

The vacuum shut off almost instantly, replaced by the sound of heels on a small patch of hardwood floor. The door swung open, revealing a pretty brunette with a stunning figure. She wore a light green dress in a floral print, and a pair of sensible pumps. The plunging neckline revealed impressive cleavage, framed by a string of pearls. As Stark looked into her face, she saw only a cheerful smile and a twinkle in her eyes.

It made her sick.

"Can I help you?" The woman asked, her voice a contralto melody.

"Actually, Donna, I'm here to help you," Stark said softly. She muttered a twisted mess of syllables, causing Donna to smile wider, step aside, and motion Stark to enter. The entryway was small and attached to the living room area, which was tastefully decorated in a feminine style. No masculine influences here, Stark thought ruefully. Not anymore. She looked at the pictures on the walls and tables, of a group of four women happily doing things together --dancing, cruises, even a camping trip.

"Excuse me," a sharp voice said from behind. "Who are you?"

Stark turned around to see a slightly irritated woman in a sweatshirt and jeans staring at her from the entryway to the kitchen.

"This is a friend, Marybeth," Donna said happily. "Miss ...?"

"Stark," she said. "Just Stark. And although I may be Don's friend, I am most certainly no friend of yours."

Marybeth looked confused for a moment, then realized what Stark had said. "D...Don," she stuttered, her eyes shifting to Donna's still smiling face and back again. "There is no Don here."

"No," Stark agreed in a flat voice. "Not anymore. Not since you killed him."

Donna became more confused, her eyes shifting from Stark to Marybeth and back again. "I ... I was Don," she whispered. "A long time ago. But that was before I knew who I really was. Marybeth helped me become the woman I had always been ... inside."

Stark turned to her and spoke again, another tangled knot of sounds that almost seemed like words. Donna's eyes turned vacant, and she walked to the sofa, swept her skirt under her, and sat gracefully before dropping off into sleep. Marybeth watched this happen, and Stark saw her eyes narrow when she realized the truth.

"You know." Marybeth saw the look on Stark's face and stepped back without realizing she was retreating.

"I know," Stark said, her voice dripping with loathing. "I know everything. As soon as I heard about it, I tracked down the company selling those mind control CDs and DVDs, and shut it down. We confiscated the equipment for making those CDs, and the computers. We also found customer files stretching back decades — the addresses of murderers who never even stopped to consider what they were doing to the people they supposedly loved. And the weird thing was ... almost all of the customers were women. Strange, don't you think? That those who are supposed to care the most, love the deepest, should kill those they love so easily?"

More apparently random sounds slipped from Stark's lips, and Marybeth found herself walking across the room to sit in the chair by the fireplace. It was like she was remote controlled, which in a way is exactly what she was.

"Sorry for the puppet treatment," Stark said, then smiled. "Actually, I'm not. We've been pumping subliminal programming into the house for the past two days. The same sort of thing you used on Don, as a matter of fact. It's nice to see it works just as well for me."

Still frozen in her chair, Marybeth found she could still speak. "H ... how could you ...?"

Stark shrugged. "Send a strong enough radio signal at any speaker, and it will play what you send, regardless of whether the device attached to the speaker is actually on. Or so they tell me." She raised her hands in mock surrender. "I'm just the boss. I don't HAVE to know how any of it works."

"Who the hell ARE you?" Marybeth's voice began to rise with a mix of anger and fear.

"I'm Stark," she replied simply, sitting gracefully across from Marybeth and crossing her legs at the knee. "For reasons of my own, I've made it my life's work to rescue men forced into feminization and submission by women like you -- or to balance the scales for those who cannot be saved, like Don."

"What are you talking about? Donna is right there!"

"Oh, yes." Stark's normally beautiful face instantly became a mask of hate. "Donna is here. But the man you married ... the man you loved and spent twenty five happy years with ... well, he's gone now." She rose to her feet and began pacing, leaving Marybeth to watch her stride angrily back and forth across the spotless living room. "Don made enough money to retire early, after a long and successful career working hard to provide for you and your sons. He started spending all his time at home, with you. At first, it was wonderful, wasn't it? Then things changed. He started watching football and NASCAR all day. Messing up the kitchen and the bathroom. Leaving his clothes on the floor. Inviting his friends to hang out and drink beer. In your house. It was irritating at first, but as it went on, you became angrier and angrier. There were arguments, and some screaming matches. Divorce was mentioned, but no one was quite sure by who."

"How do you know all this?"

Stark waved her hands in dismissal. "We interviewed the people in your old neighborhood, and where Don used to work."

Marybeth frowned. "That's a lot of effort."

"I like to be thorough. No sense rushing to judgment, after all. As much as I like to." She pouted briefly, then continued.

"One day, in the middle of all this domestic drama, your son and his wife come for a visit. He's dressed in women's clothing, exhibiting perfectly natural feminine mannerisms, gushing about clothes and make-up and hair, helping in the kitchen. And there's your daughter-in-law Judy, dressing like a man and playing husband to the 'new girl.' She tells you about these wonderful CDs she used to change Kevin into Kira, a perfect housewife ... and a bitch in heat in the bedroom."

Stark turned and stared at Marybeth from across the room, with a look that made her wonder how this woman actually saw her. It was cold, but somehow worse than the heat she'd shown only a few minutes earlier. As if Marybeth was a specimen ... like a rare insect or bird.

"Now, here's some thing I just don't understand," Stark said, her voice almost calm. "Kevin was by all accounts a good man. You raised him well. He was a successful engineer. He loved tinkering with cars and computers, building things in the basement. He read murder mysteries and science fiction, and coached peewee baseball and soccer. He was a good husband. He was your son. Now he's gone, and there's this ... thing called Kira living in his body. All Kira wants to do now is clean house, watch soaps, and make love to her 'husband' whenever 'he's' in the mood. A good little puppet."

Now her voice turned sharp, and angry. "If someone did something like that to someone I loved, they would be dead. I'm a simple girl with simple rules, and no one messes with the people I care about. But you! You let your daughter-in-law get away with killing the boy you raised. A good man. And then you went and did the same thing to Don, the man you built a life with."

"She even convinced Kevin he wanted a complete sex change," Stark muttered, folding her arms under her breasts and shivering. "Made him think it was a reward. Just like you did with Don."

Marybeth said nothing. Stark stood over her and glowered.

"Now you're enjoying yourself, aren't you? You and Judy, with your life-sized Barbie dolls. Life's just a great big party, isn't it? Donna cooks and cleans, happily doing whatever you want her to. Then at night, she gets into her little black dress and her four-inch heels and you all go out for dinner and dancing, and maybe Donna catches herself a stud with an itch to scratch and you send her off while you hunt your own man for the night. And I bet Judy and Kira do the same. One big happy fucking family. Life would be perfect, except for the whole 'murdering Don and Kevin' thing."

Marybeth felt a flash of anger. "You're crazy! They're not gone! Don is right there! All you'd have to do to bring him back is use the right commands!"

"Ha!" Stark strode angrily towards Marybeth, still frozen in the chair. She put both hands on the arms of the chair and leaned over the other woman. "You think so? You think the man you married is still in there? After more than two years ... like that?"

"Of course!"

"Then go ahead! Call him back!" Stark turned her head and muttered more syllables, and Donna roused slowly and looked at them both. Stark turned and snarled in Marybeth's face. "Call him back, if you can!"

Marybeth felt a shiver of fear, and then spoke a few words in Donna's direction. Nothing happened. She tried again. Still nothing. Stark put Donna back to sleep, then rose from her position above the woman and took a few steps back.

"Don is dead," she stated flatly. "Kevin's dead, too. They started dying the first time you and your daughter-in-law used those CDs. The programming on those things ... it goes into the deep structures of the brain, writes over whatever it finds and replaces it with whatever the user desires. That ... thing ... on the sofa is little more than a biological robot, a Stepford Wives wanna-be, driven by a series of command pathways and overrides set in place by you. Oh, it thinks and feels and primps and cleans, but it isn't Don. The only thing left of Don is his DNA, surgically altered, shuffling around in a pretty print dress and heels vacuuming your rugs and pretending to be your sister, or your best friend, or whatever you decided you wanted instead of the husband and lover you had."

Stark turned towards Donna, and sighed. "And even if we could somehow bring Don and Kevin back as they were, before you and Judy betrayed them ... can you imagine the horror of waking up with two years gone and discovering that the women they thought loved them had brainwashed them? Turned them into paragons of stereotypical womanhood -- then had their bodies carved to fit?"

Marybeth's lower lips trembled, but she refused to give up. "It's not true. They can't be dead! You could use the CDs again to fix them, reprogram them to be what they were!"

Stark didn't even bother to look at her. "The brain is not a hard drive, you stupid bitch. It's living tissue. How many times do you think you can re-write neural pathways? They're only supposed to be written once, when you form the original connections. That's when you teach yourself how to think ... how to be the person you are. People are a sum of their experiences. Their likes and dislikes change and grow over years of development. You deleted all that when you wrote over it. And when you deleted that, you deleted Don. So even if we used the CDs again without killing them both, it wouldn't be bringing Don or Kevin back. We'd just be programming the biological robots with a new set of instructions. They might behave the way you remember Don or Kevin behaving, but they would just be going through the motions. The spontaneity and creativity would be missing. The soul, or whatever it is that makes humans individuals, alive and self-determining, would be gone."

There was a long silence as Marybeth thought about what she'd done. Stark did nothing. Since she had been transformed, Stark had become surprisingly good at doing nothing. Finally, Marybeth spoke.

"I don't care," she snapped. "Donna is here now, and Judy has Kira, and if they aren't what they were anymore, they're still happy with who we told them to be. That's enough for me."

"Well not for me," Stark replied in an even tone. "You murdered Don. Judy murdered Kevin."

"Well, what of it? We're happy together now," Marybeth continued stubbornly. "Why don't you just go away and leave us alone? Donna is happy with me, and you'll only hurt her if you kill me now. She'll have no one."

"I won't leave you alone because you murdered Don. You admitted it. Without remorse." Stark turned back towards the motionless woman in the chair. "I'm not going to kill you. That would be quick, and you don't deserve quick. And even though Donna isn't Don, she still deserves respect in his memory. To leave Donna alone and friendless after what you did would punish her for your crime. No, you won't die."

Marybeth felt a brief spark of hope, an instant before she saw Stark's lips move as if she's tasted something unpleasant.

"You won't die," Stark repeated. "I have something ... worse in mind for you."

She spoke again, another twisted tangle of almost-words. A big empty hole opened in Marybeth's soul, and suddenly she was thrust into memories so real they HURT ...

... Don coming to her at the pub, asking if she'd like a drink, looking at her like she was candy and almost too frightened to approach her, making her feel special and wanted even though he'd barely spoken four words to her and she looked into his eyes ...

... the first time they kissed, their lips meeting and her insides melting and his arms around her and the whole world drowned out by the feeling inside ...

... their first date, so handsome and her with her best dress on, treating her like a princess, dinner and dancing and the whole time his eyes never left her as he listened to every word, just happy to have her ...

Marybeth fell to her knees, her arms wrapped around her, her body wracked by the power of her own past. Stark smiled grimly, and spoke again.

... she watched him as he held tiny Kevin for the first time, carefully with a little fear, like just touching the baby would break it somehow, his eyes wide with wonder and love as he looked down on his newborn son and she realized how much Don meant to her, how special he was ...

... him hugging her from behind in the kitchen as she cooked, the warm male smell of him filling her nostrils while his mouth softly kissed her neck, his whispered words of love bringing tears to her eyes ...

... Don's arms around her on a Sunday morning as they slept, long before Kevin was born, just a few months past "I do" and the honeymoon still strong inside them both, "'til death" ...

Tears streamed down her cheeks, unheeded, unchecked. She lay curled up on the floor, moaning softly, deep despair filling her to the core. Her heart ached remembering the man she'd loved. The man she'd lost.

The man she killed.

Stark spoke a third time, and Marybeth rose to her feet. Tears dried instantly on the outside, although inside her heart still screamed from the pain.

Stark walked right up to her and looked into her eyes.

"This is how it works. You killed Don, and said you didn't care. Well, I'm going to make you care. From this point on, every time you see Donna, you'll relive the happiest parts of the life you shared with the Don you loved. The Don who loved you."

She smiled. "You'll relive twenty five years of the joys and simple pleasures your husband brought you, and bask in the love he felt and showed you -- every time you look at the pretty puppet you turned him into. It will eat you up inside. But that's where it will stay. Nothing will ever show ... outside."

Marybeth's face grew calm, and it even smiled a little. But behind the mask, she was an emotional wreck, battered by her own memories and the knowledge of what she had lost.

"You can't leave Donna. Ever. You can't avoid her, either. It's impossible with the programming we set up. You'll just keep doing everything you've been doing. And you can't tell anyone what's going on in your head, especially Donna." Stark looked over at the sleeping figure on the sofa with pity. "Knowing how much just looking at her is hurting you would be too much for her to bear. She may not be Don, but there's still someone there -- an innocent who's suffered enough."

She looked back at Marybeth. "Instead, you'll just smile and laugh and carry on just as you've always done, while on the inside you'll be ripping yourself apart remembering all the good times you had with the man you killed."

Stark picked up her purse, turned and walked to the front door. She turned back to find a smiling Marybeth watching her, a touch of desperation in her eyes.

"I made sure Donna won't notice anything out of the ordinary, like an occasional tear or a trembling lip," Stark said. "I don't want her asking questions you can't answer. It would only upset her."

"Why do you care so much how Donna feels if she isn't real?" Marybeth's question was delivered easily, through smiling lips.

"Oh, I never said she wasn't real. I just said she wasn't Don." She pushed a few stray curls back over her shoulder. "I've been through something like what she went through. I'm pretty sure I'm still real. I'm just not quite the man I was."

Marybeth's eyes widened. Stark nodded.

"I have to give her the benefit of the doubt, or start worrying about myself. And I've got enough going on in my head as it is."

She said something unintelligible to Donna, and she began to wake.

"I'll just leave you two lovebirds to it, then," Stark said, almost happily. She opened the door, letting light stream in from the outside. "I have an appointment with Judy and Kevin next. Her punishment won't be the same as yours. It wouldn't really work. After all, she had only a few years with Kevin before she killed him, so the memories won't be as rich or as ... numerous as yours. But whatever I come up with, I know it will be fun. For me, anyway." She stepped out the door with a wave, pulling it closed behind her.

As Stark walked across the street to her car, she grinned to herself. Trust a ghost like me to stage an old-fashioned haunting, she thought savagely. And the best thing is, she'll do all the haunting herself.

The black car pulled away from the curb, and the pale blue house on the suburban street retreated in the rear view mirror.

"The party's over, bitch," Stark whispered as she watched it disappear. "Welcome to your table in hell."