by elle`attend
FOR MATURE READERS ONLY
Cassandra Betancort doused the lights on the Humvee, then killed the engine, slipping the transmission into neutral and letting the vehicle coast down the last gentle incline toward the cluster of small, mudwalled huts on the floor of the dry wadi. She let the Hummer roll to a scrunching halt in the loose gravel of the broad ravine, and sat motionless for a few moments, allowing her eyes to adjust to the moonlight, and assessing the lay of the land.
The killing ground...
MY killing ground, she thought to herself.
She was unbuckling her seatbelt and harness when the first of the screams split the darkness, shrill and unexpected as a train whistle in this arid, desolate waste: thin, piercing, almost inhuman.
Someone’s in hell already, she thought grimly to herself, sliding silently out of the Hummer onto the still-hot desert floor..
Cassandra sat on the running board of the Hummer and began unlacing her boots, peeling off her thick cotton socks and placing them inside the boots. She wriggled her toes in the warm, pebbly sand, luxuriating for a moment in the sensual feel of it between her bare toes. She stood, and quickly unbuttoned her khaki cargo shirt, then unzipped her shorts and stepped out of them, throwing the garments carelessly onto the back seat of the HumVee. She stretched like an animal, a graceful jungle panther, her skin already shining dully in the silvery light with a thin matte finish of perspiration in the hot, still night air.
She liked to be naked when she hunted.
She quickly checked her Glock, then re-holstered it and buckled its webbing belt around her hips, and strapped the eight-inch commando knife and sheath to her bare thigh. The nine-millimeter was strictly for backup – Cassandra preferred to do her wet work in close, where she could see her prey’s eyes as she dispatched them. That look of almost blissful adoration, as if they were seeing the last love that they would ever experience in their lives. Cassandra liked to think they were.The kill was an act of love for her, as well.
She gave a last check of the vehicle, and her ordnance, then slipped skintight wrist length pigskin gloves over her hands, flexing her fingers once or twice to seat them like a second skin. She glanced back down the wadi, then crouched and began to glide across the shimmering desert floor like a wraith, all but invisible in the unearthly silver moonlight as she floated from rock to rock, approaching the closest hut in which a pale yellow light illumined a window. The scream had come from here, she was certain.
Her midnight blue eyes were fully dilated and her nostrils flaring, her head moving slightly from side to side as if casting about for a scent on the dry desert air. She had broken a full sweat now, and moved with an easy, supple grace from the concealing shadow of one rock to another. When she was less than ten yards from the lighted window, another marrow-chilling scream ripped through the stillness of the desert night, trailing off into gurgling, hiccoughing sobs.
The familiar taste of adrenalin began to fill her mouth, and a small, hard smile crept across her lips. She wrapped her strong fingers around the bone handle of the hunting knife, and slipped like a ghost toward the door of the hut.
**********
This is probably the most disgusting movie I’ve ever seen in my life, was all that I could think.
Then why do you feel as if you are about to wet yourself, honey? My little voice answered with a sly, nastily insinuating chuckle.
The woman called Jolie opened her mouth again, and another of those unearthly noises issued from it, more like a badly dubbed sound effect from a Japanese movie than a woman’s scream. I tried to concentrate on her, on her agony, on how I might stop it, but I was continually being distracted by the grainy black and white image flickering over her suspended body. Her frantic writhing made the woman’s face being projected on her skin waver and ripple surrealistically, as if I were viewing it from underwater. But it was still the most lovely face that I had ever seen, and I wanted it so badly. I knew that I wanted it, because the voices told me so, in the pauses between those punishing shocks that were being administered to the softer portions of my anatomy.
“Mistress,” I murmured, my voice thick, and slurred with my arousal.
And the drugs, of course.
Beatrix Mackay’s phantom lips parted, directly above Jolie’s glistening, shaven mons, and I groaned in something like real agony myself now. My ache for the woman was a stab of fire in my genitals, a need that shamed me, and drove me at the same instant.
Someone did something to the young woman suspended by her wrists, and she screamed again, a heart-wrenching sound, the cry of a damned soul in hell. I cringed, and my stomach turned over in revulsion, at the same moment that my vagina began to spasm around the tongue twisting within it, probing my sexual defenses like a sly, licentious serpent. My thighs shook convulsively against their restraints, and I bucked and thrust my pelvis at the woman’s face pressed between my legs, hearing the banging of the chair legs on the floor, only vaguely aware that I was lifting them in my feverish attempts to entice the woman’s tongue more deeply into my slit.
‘Mistress,’ I moaned again, not caring who heard, not caring what they did to that poor young girl whose pussy Beatrix Mackay’s celluloid lips were caressing while she screamed. Tiny pulses of electricity tickled at my nipples, and my clitoris. I sighed shudderingly again, the burning intensifying in my thigh at the site of the IV needle. I licked my dry lips, and slowly began rotating my hips at the gamin blonde’s knowledgeable mouth.
Brie Analeiou had talents that had hitherto not been disclosed to me, I reflected dazedly.
A hand moved with a feather-like touch across my naked thigh, checking the IV tubing, while a woman’s voice floated out from somewhere behind my chair.
“Are you sure it’s a good idea to use such a concentrated dosage, Zahra? After all, the deep programming is still in place, and she’s liable to…”
“We don’t have time for any of that ‘deep programming’ bullshit now, Erica, ” the woman closest to me retorted, turning the valve on the drip IV again, increasing the flow of solution into my burning, tingling thigh. “We need this cunt’s mind wiped, and pristine or this’ll never take, and we haven’t got all week to do it. She doesn’t have to be able to do anything other than dress herself, and remember a name and an address…after that, they can find a bed for her in some nice institution for the criminally insane, with all the rest of the veggies…”
The rest of her thought was subsumed by my next orgasm, surging through me like molten metal, frying my mind, my flesh, my soul…I dimly imagined that I could hear my nerve-endings sizzling as they were cooked in my body’s own fires…the girl’s screams were almost constant now, and seemed to rise and fall in nearly perfect synchronization with the undulations rippling through my sex… I dug my nails into the hard wooden arms of the chair, and filled my lungs, then screamed in unison with that poor helpless girl who was being tortured to death before my eyes, while Beatrix Mackay’s beautiful, malignant countenance danced across her lovely, savaged body…
Mistress…I breathed again, in an ecstasy of dissolution…
“All the arrangements have been made, Doctor Mackay, just as you requested,’ the obese, lightly perspiring man intoned unctuously.
Beatrix Mackay gave a terse nod of her head, sweeping the sheaf of papers and tickets from the desk into her Coachman leather carryall. She rose peremptorily, the man rising as well. “One last thing, M. Havaal,” she said, turning back toward the man. “I may be needing a boat charter, to Istanbul, on rather short notice…can you arrange it for me, should it be necessary?”
The man beamed, still flattered beyond belief that the famous American lecturer and philanthropist had chosen to come to him. “Mais certainment, Madame Docteur,” he babbled foolishly, wringing his hands in an almost comic parody of servility. “I am at your complete disposal, Madame. You have only to ask, and Havaal will make it so…”
The Madame Docteur favored the sweating man with a tiny smile. “Merci beaucoup, Monsieur… Je suis beaucoup endetté à vous.” She offered her gloved hand to be slobbered over by M Havaal, then turned and walked slowly from his office, making certain that he was afforded a stunning view of her rear as she undulated pneumatically toward the door. One could never tell when someone even of this person’s limited abilities might be needed.
“Yes indeed, Madame Docteur, anything at all, anytime at all. Why, just yesterday I was honored to provide land transport for a colleague of yours, Madame…no service can be too great, or too trivial, for Monsieur Havaal to provide for your illustrious…”
Beatrix Mackay froze, her hand on the doorknob. She turned slowly back toward the blathering travel agent.
“Colleague? Which colleague, M Havaal?”
“Why, Mademoiselle Bétancort, of course…she required an all-terrain vehicle, Madame. Said that she was going to meet you, in fact, Madame. That is why I was so surprised when you called this morning. I had assumed that you must have…”
Beatrix Mackay waved her hand dismissively, cutting him off. “Of course, M. Havaal…it must have slipped my mind, what with all these other preparations that I’ve had preoccupying me.” Her luminous green eyes narrowed slightly. “Tell me, Monsieur, did Mlle. Betancort happen to mention where she was heading when she left? I assume that you filed an itinerary for the vehicle, per state policy when renting to foreign nationals…”
Havaal blushed furiously now, eyes lowered, hands fidgeting nervously like a small boy caught rummaging through his father’s naughty magazines. “But Madame, you see…she was most insistent, Madame, and used your name most specifically…said in fact that she was acting in your stead. Of course, I filed no document with the constabulary, Madame. I never do when I am doing business with the Madame Docteur, as you are well aware…” He trailed off into an awkward silence.
“Of course, Monsieur…and you were quite right not to do so. Please don’t give it another thought. Good day again, Monsieur…”
Back in her suite at the hotel, Dr Beatrix Mackay bathed, shaved her legs, and changed into a dark navy lycra bodysuit, black linen slacks and jacket. Almost as an afterthought, she opened her lingerie drawer, and delved beneath the neatly folded silken underthings. She slid the gunmetal gray Beretta mini635 from beneath them and clipped it into the elastic waist band of her slacks at the small of her back, swearing softly under her breath. Forty-eight hours ago she had hoped to rectify a few simple operational glitches, and put her organization back on line. Now, she was hoping simply to salvage the remainder of her network before it was completely incinerated.
At this rate, she thought bitterly, there would soon be nothing left to salvage, but dead bodies.
**********
I was drooling again, and could not stop.
I looked lethargically down at my body, still securely strapped into the heavy wooden chair. The clips had been removed from my nipples, and clitoris, and a thick, greasy ointment of some sort had been haphazardly slathered across the superficial burns on them - whether to ease the throbbing pain, or increase the conductivity when the clips were reattached was a question completely beyond my ken at the moment.
I watched entranced as the long, silver strand of saliva bobbed from my mouth, nearly but not quite making common cause with the unguent smeared on my right nipple. My body shone softly with perspiration, adding to the sparkling carnival of lights that held my attention so hypnotically. I was so very sparkly…
Rainwoman…I began to giggle insanely.
A groan, sounding more like a wounded animal than a human being, drew my eyes reluctantly away from the colorful rainbow of my own body, to the woman twisting slowly in the air a few feet in front of me. I blinked stupidly, trying again to place her. I might have known her at one time in my life, it was almost impossible to say. She certainly would not have looked like this then if I had. Some part of my mind had sealed off, or I would have gone mad simply at the sight of her.
She hung by her wrists, arms about shoulder length apart, swaying softly, her toes just brushing the ground. Her fingers were nearly black, and swollen to almost twice their normal size. A thin ribbon of rusty-reddish fluid ran down her left arm from beneath the thongs biting into her wrist. Her puffy, bruised face was pressed against one sweaty arm, her mouth agape, panting softly. She was drooling as well, the saliva depending from her own slack mouth tinted a rosy pinkish color. I winced as my eyes traveled lower, down below her collar bones, to the nightmare that was her body.
My mind balked at imagining a person capable of inflicting such brutality on a fellow human being. The girl’s body was a wild chiaroscuro of contusions, burns, and lacerations, criss-crossing her full breasts, and slender waist and abdomen, forming imbricate patterns on her hips, thighs, and calves. Barely a square inch of her seemed unmarked, unviolated. I watched her as she drew another long, shuddering breath, a respiration that put one in mind of a death rattle.
‘Jolie,’ I whispered.
Her eyelids fluttered slightly.
Something moved within me, like a fetus moving in a mother’s womb.
Jolie…
I blinked again, shaking my head softly, trying to get in touch with anything that might remain of the woman who had known this girl. Whoever she had been, whatever she had done, no person deserved such treatment.
And suddenly, with perfect clarity, I knew why she was being abused this way, why she had been brought to the very brink of death.
It was because of me. And something that I had done. Or had yet to do.
I tried to focus, think of what it could be, bring what was left of my mind to bear on this question that suddenly seemed the most important in the world for me, the ONLY question in the world. My head ached miserably, as if a steel wedge were being driven into my skull just above my eyes, driving any possibilty of coherent thought from it. My own wounds, though superficial in comparison to the girl’s, throbbed distressingly enough to make concentration on anything for very long all but impossible. I shifted uncomfortably on the hard wooden seat, and stared again at the blonde draped across my thighs, her head immersed in my crotch. This one I did know.
It was Brie Analeiou.
Something moved inside of me again, this time something colder, and more sinister. I fell back at once into the reassuring routine of the rote task or pattern that had been drilled into me, so deeply that I was unaware at a concious level of what I was doing at all. My eyes moved mechanically about the room, sweeping it, burning every detail of it into my mind. I fixed my stare on the wooden door in the opposite wall, and listened, holding my breath, willing my very heart to beat more quietly. I heard voices engaged in sporadic, but animated conversation, somewhere on the other side of the door.
We were alone.
I looked down intently on the sweaty, filth-encrusted golden head in my lap, and began bouncing my thighs gently under her arms, whispering her name softly, but firmly, over and over.
“Brie…Brie…Brie…”
A low moan, and just the slightest of movements of the head against my groin. I fought down the immediate wave of almost bestial heat that surged through me down there, and simply repeated her name again, and again, jouncing her lightly with my thighs. She was on her knees between my legs, her wrists tied to my ankles, and her upper arms knotted cruelly to my knees, the cords all but disappearing into the soft, bruised flesh of her biceps. She groaned again, more loudly this time, and I lifted my hips, crushing my pussy to her mouth, muffling her somewhat.
“Brie…Brie…look at me, Brie…look at me…”
She lifted her golden head, eyes searching out mine, gray and dead looking. She’s nearly finished, I thought to myself. Have to hurry…
I bent forward, and whispered to her, a word I did not know, had never known; a word I longed to forget. She nodded her head torpidly, and turned it slightly to her left, craning her neck, stretching painfully toward my right wrist, and the strap binding it to the chair. Her teeth found the leather, and bit and tore at it, like a puppy playing with an old slipper. Several times her teeth found my skin, tearing it open, and my blood flowed freely into her mouth as she chewed away at the restraint holding my wrist. The blood worked as a lubricant, loosening the strap, allowing her to get more purchase with her teeth. Suddenly my right wrist was free. I moved my hand, and spoke again to her, a single whispered word of command.
Then I touched her, and spoke again. Touched her again, in another place. Spoke again, words I would never have understood, uttered in a flat monotone, as the fingers of my right hand danced over her body. She breathed more quickly, her eyes clearing, flashing with sudden understanding, giving glimpses of the woman that had once inhabited this ruined shell. She began to speak, softly and steadily, without pause. I cleared my mind and listened, shutting out everything, everyone else in the world, but those slate gray eyes, that glittering blonde head, and the torrent of words pouring from her broken, bleeding lips. At last she finished, and lowered her head exhaustedly into my lap again. I stroked her hair tenderly, instinctively regretting what I had just done to her, without understanding in any wise what it was that I had done. I began to cry, silently, for her, and for Jolie, and for myself.
Then there was a sound like thunder from the other room, and the world exploded…
**********
Two voices. Both female. Cassandra pressed against the mudwalled hut beneath the unglazed window, listening intently. Only the two voices, but she could hear other sounds within the room that indicated at least two other occupants, probably males, judging from the heaviness of their movements. Four in all, at least. She slipped the safety off on the nine-millimeter automatic, altering her plan on the fly. I’ll have to take the two men down first, and quickly, she thought to herself. She hoped that she wouldn’t be forced to take the women out as well; there were things she wanted to learn from them before they died.
She was just tensing the muscles in her legs to vault through the window when a gloved hand closed around her bare bicep. She froze as another went over her mouth, cursing silently at the ease with which she had been taken. She closed her fingers on the bone handle of her combat knife, and cut her eyes sideways.
Bea.
Beatrix Mackay gave a short, sharp shake of her head, then slowly removed her gloved hand from Cassandra’s mouth, gesturing toward the doorway. Cassandra nodded her head curtly, and moved toward it like a cat. When she was in position, she looked back at Bea, crouched, pistol in hand. Their eyes locked, then Mackay gave a quick nod, and dove for the window, as Cassandra drove her foot into the door, slamming it open.
**********
The door burst open, and Erica Galloway and Zahra al`Ajii tumbled through it, as deafening explosions rang out in the room they had just vacated. Zahra raced behind my chair, and seized me by the hair of my head, jerking it up and back, bowing my neck as she pressed the keen edged hunting knife to my larynx. Erica simply shrank into the shadows against the far wall. The reek of cordite drifted through the opened door, followed closely by a pale, disembodied head and a naked, flame-haired apparition, each holding a smoking pistol. The red-haired woman smiled grimly, and slipped her pistol into the holster on her hip, raising the knife in her left hand slowly, so that it caught the lamplight, reflecting it across my face. The other woman disappeared into the shadows near Erica Galloway.
“Another twitch, and I slit this cow’s throat,” Zahra hissed near my ear.
“Be my guest,” Cassandra Bétancort smiled, tossing the heavy knife expertly from her left hand to her right. “It will save me the trouble…”
There was a short, high-pitched scream, followed closely by a wet bubbling noise, as if someone were gargling with warm maple syrup. Then a heavy thud, and Erica Galloway’s twitching body was thrown to the floor almost at my feet, bleeding profusely from the grotesque new mouth that had been sliced into her throat from ear to ear. Zahra tightened her grip on my hair, and pressed the knife into my neck, breaking the skin. I felt warm wetness trickling down my neck. I would surely have peed myself, had there been any fluids left in me.
“You still have an opportunity to walk out of this wadi alive, if you use your head, Colonel…”
I froze, and my stomach knotted in fear. That voice. That voice…
Beatrix Mackay’s pale, moon-like face floated into my field of vision again; expressionless, emotionless, pistol vanished now, those cold green eyes boring into the face of the woman holding me. I could feel the blade of the woman’s knife wavering against my larynx as she was pulled into their vortex, feel her hand begin to tremble in my hair.
“I swear I’ll kill this woman if you make another move,” she hissed, her voice faint now, and tremulous.
“You’ll kill no one, Colonel,” the woman replied reasonably. “Killing is such a sloppy and unsatisfactory way to resolve situations like this. Not to mention unprofitable…”
She nudged Brie Analeiou with her toe, then made a nearly imperceptible gesture toward Cassandra. The naked amazon moved with catlike grace, crouching behind Brie and slipping her blade beneath the cords that bound her to my legs, then pulled her gently away from me. Zahra pressed the blade more firmly against my throat. I could feel her heart pounding against the back of my skull. I nearly wet myself from fear.
“I’m warning you…” she rasped. I felt the blade opening another slim wound on my throat, sticky warmth crawling down my neck.
Beatrix Mackay smiled faintly. “There’s no need for us to threaten one another, Colonel al`Ajii, or indulge in any more pointless bloodshed here. Our interests may coincide much more than you might imagine, in fact.”
“How?” I felt the woman holding me swallow, with some difficulty.
“Just let me clear away a few untidy loose ends here, Colonel, and then we shall have a nice leisurely chat…Would that be acceptable to you?”
Without waiting for her reply, Beatrix Mackay reached into the pocket of her linen jacket, and produced a small black case. She flipped it open, and removed the already filled syringe from it. She gestured questioningly at me with the needle, her eyes fixed on the woman holding me. I felt her nod her assent.
I threw myself wildly against my bonds, thrashing and moaning, gibbering incomprehensibly as that hated face moved toward me, smiling almost reassuringly. Death suddenly seemed like a pleasant alternative to falling into this woman’s hands again. She reached out and gripped my arm in that cold, lifeless-feeling talon, and I felt a sharp stab in my bicep. My head began to swim almost immediately, my vision darkening as I drooled out a few last imprecations at her. I rolled my eyes in the direction of the unconcious girl hanging behind Beatrix Mackay, and mumbled an apology to her, for something that I could no longer remember having done…
© MEB 2002
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