The Gray Lady is the second most famous statue in New York, behind only Lady Liberty. Everyone's seen it at least once: a young woman perched on a building's ledge with a gun in her hands. They think of her as a symbol of their unique nature, their internalized rebellion.

What most people don't realize, because New Yorkers have trained themselves not to look up unless they have to, is that the Gray Lady is almost never in the same place twice, and that's because the Gray Lady is not a statue at all, but a woman with inexhaustable patience waiting for her next victim. Midtown is her favorite hunting ground, though she'll skulk through the outer boroughs or even slip through at night and wreak havoc on the populace of New Jersey.

She slips into her domicile with the dawn, satisfied with her work; she took out a Denver Nugget and half his posse as they left the Garden, and there's always something special about killing a Colorado basketball player. She inspects her shotgun for flaws, defects, or spots of dirt. Mechanically, she runs a cloth up and down the gun's barrel. "You were good tonight, Meg, you were really good. I don't know where I'd be without you, troublemaker mine. You cause the most trouble of anyone I've ever known." This isn't unusual behavior for her. She talks to all her guns: the shotgun Meg, the rifle she calls Chris, the revolver she named Fiver. They're the only ones anyone's ever seen her talk to; her business with humanity, such as it is, is conducted in grim silence.

She's gone by many names, even if most of them were before hell broke loose in America. Once upon a time, they called her the White Widow, when her shining blonde hair, alabaster skin, and lithe figure were enough to lure some zombies out of their beahvioral pattern. That was a long time ago, when she still loved, and lost herself for it. Now, of course, they call her the Gray Lady. She's become a woman of stone, her hair prematurely and completely gray, the playful blue light in her eyes faded to steel, her heart hardened and empty, her face permanently set in an expression of intense concentration. Even if her clothes hadn't started out dingy gray, the sickening air of New York City would have discolored them to the same dull shade as everything else. Life in the madhouse is not easy, and though she's only in her forties, stress has aged her- except for the girlish delicacy of her features, that hasn't changed, and it jars with the lines around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth.

As she bends to her work, the necklace hidden under her shirt shifts, and the three numeric charms strung along the chain click against each other. 3, 2, 5: the order seems random, or maybe mathematical, but the significance stretches back to a time before things went horribly wrong. They concisely symbolize four women, three dead, one who might as well be: the martyr, the murderer, the rebel... and the Gray Lady.

When New York was isolated, when the government really took over and when the American people really turned into sheep, she swore that she would not let this state of affairs continue unopposed. She made a promise to herself that she would kill at least one brainwashed person a day. She's had to miss some days running from the law- killing athletes tends to get attention- but always makes up for them with an en masse attack like the previous night at the Garden. A tally on the wall opposite her cot keeps count of how many people she's liberated: it stands at close to four thousand.

There are very few personal effects in the Gray Lady's apartment. There are her guns, of course, and the means of taking care of them. There is the tally board. There are some photos of her with a woman who could pass as her sister and often did. She keeps that to remind her of what she's fighting for. She has pictures of friends who died as heroes, and one photo of a colleague whose character she never knew until it was too late, a young woman they'd teased about her faith. She'd never been a fervent believer, but of all the group- those who'd died, those who'd converted, those who'd run- she had been the only one who had had options and took death instead of conversion. Somehow, despite a conservative upbringing and a strong belief in the power of God, she was one of those few who couldn't be controlled aginst her will; she saw through the lies and refused to live that life. And her reward was death at her best friend's hands, the final test of the damned programming.

It's for people like that that the Gray Lady keeps fighting and rebelling, even more so than she does to honor her lover. She believes that subconsciously everyone has a choice when it comes to the images put in their heads, and most people voluntarily let the government rearrange their brains. That's the way she sees it, and she doesn't think such people deserve to live. She has no patience or tolerance for the zombies, as she and others term the brainwashed populace of the rest of America, and would off them in a batch if she could.

She refocuses on the present day and realizes that she's polished Meg's barrel to a feverish shine. She shakes her head sharply, puts the cloth down, and returns Meg to the rack next to the closet. There, the Gray Lady keeps two other secrets, one that would get her killed anywhere but New York, one that would cause her to be beaten by an angry mob even on the streets of New York.

One is a tattered, faded rainbow flag; it reminds her of the horror she felt (back when she could still feel) when she came home to the apartment she and her lover shared only to find the other woman dead on the floor. Her pride was battered then, broken with her heart, but somewhere inside it's still there.

The other is a black-market, dearly-obtained black baseball cap hanging on a peg, adorned with the logo of the Toronto Blue Jays.