by John Everson
“Just having some fun,” TG said through gritted teeth. “Lighten up and you might have some too.”
Carrie undid the belt buckle, all the while frantically trying to remember what color briefs she’d pulled on this morning. She had matching Victoria’s Secret sets, but had she worn one? In the insanity of the situation, she honestly couldn’t remember. She held her breath and dropped drawers in the cool night, exposing a pair of lean runner’s thighs, and a pair of white panties edged in the same lace as the cup of her bra. She breathed her own sigh of relief as she saw them.
“She’s organized,” TG pronounced. He moved forward, and ran one knuckle down her cheek, neck and across the exposed top of her cleavage.
“I like that in a woman.”
She shivered at his touch, but forced herself not to move away. But when his fingers slipped beneath the lace, she cried out.
TG didn’t miss a beat. He belted her one across the jaw, never letting go of the bra. The result was a suddenly freed breast, nipple angry pink in the dark, and constricted by the half-yanked-down bra cup.
TG leaned down and took the nipple between his teeth. Carrie pushed at his shoulders, but it was as effective as swatting at a swarm of flies. In a flash his hands were all over her, yanking hard on her undies and ripping and tugging at the clasp on the back of her bra.
“Jesus,” Billy yelled. “We talked about this. You can’t be doing this here.”
“Yer right,” TG said, pulling his face away from the woman’s chest. “Spot me down here in the gulley. I’ve got some organization to tend to.”
He dragged the girl away from the car and down the slight decline away from the road in the dark. Presently, he said, “Oh yes, she’s very organized. Neat and tidy and trim. I like that in a woman, yes I do.”
Billy just hung his head and paced near the back of the Mustang, praying no headlights slipped around the bend. But the noises in the ditch soon died down, and TG reappeared, dragging the struggling, screaming naked girl by a hank of blonde hair up the incline.
“Duct tape,” TG demanded. Soon the screeching subsided to muffled whimpering.
Then, “Rope.”
Then, “Tire iron.”
And then there wasn’t any noise at all.
The Mustang pulled away from the Nova without any pretense of civility. Gravel flew and tires screeched. And TG gave out a buoyant “yee-ha” as the car fishtailed onto the asphalt and sped back toward Castle Point.
“I thought we were going to have to actually walk the bar scene in Oak Falls again,” he laughed. “You know how much I hate that. But here, right here on the road, we get a little vixen just sitting here waiting for us. A gift,” he said.
“You shouldn’t a fucked her,” Billy complained.
“Why, because you didn’t get to? You want me to pull over and you can have your turn?”
“That’s not it,” the other man said. “We’re supposed to be delivering her for testing and experiments. We don’t know if she’s going to be back on the street in a week, and if she is…we’re fuckin’ toast, man!”
“You know Billy, you worry too much,” TG said. “How you gonna run a bar, where shit happens virtually every night in the bathroom or the brawl room, if you’re such a worrytit? I mean…think about it. The doctor, he’s paying us to deliver him healthy, young females, ain’t he? And he’s PAYING us to pick them up, tie them up and deliver them to him. Do you honestly think these girls have a chance in hell of getting out of whatever the hell he’s doing to them? Shit, Billy, what I just did for that girl is a favor. Probably the last good time she’s going to have. You need to lighten up.”
“Pull up to the back,” Billy complained, as TG powered down the Mustang at the front door of the Castle House Asylum. “The doc said to bring ’em to the back.”
“I know what he said,” TG growled, ripping the gear shift into park with an audible crack. “But I’m going to let him know we’re here. It’s late, and I’m not sitting around the back of this haunted house throwing rocks at the windows and hoping someone hears.”
TG left Billy in the car and stomped up to the twin torchlights that framed the oak door of the asylum. They were the remnants of another era, not the sort of entry that you’d expect at the crazy house, but someone had obviously polished and pimped them up to serve again. TG tried the knob before knocking, but it didn’t open.
So he pounded a few raps with a beefy fist and waited. In a moment, the door cracked open, a chain obviously still securing it to the frame. Billy couldn’t hear what was said, but a moment later TG was back in the car and throwing it into reverse.
“We’re going to the back,” was all he said.
Billy didn’t ask questions. It was best that way.
The back of Castle House was dark, except for a single light high up on the third floor.
“They could at least put on a light,” Billy said. The darkness stretched unbroken from just beyond their car headlights to probably the outskirts of Castle Point, almost twenty miles and several steep bends away.
“It’s right here,” TG said, and aimed the car toward a small white door set amid the brown brick. There was a gravel path that led past the door and opened to a circular parking spot in front of an old metal shed.
“Utility entrance,” TG said. “C’mon, help me get her out of the trunk.”
TG reached in and hefted her half out of the trunk by her legs, while Billy reached in to hoist the rest of her out by her armpits. They shuffled toward the door, but when he felt something warm on his arm, Billy cried out.
“Jesus, man, you hit her too hard. There’s blood all over me.”
“She’ll be fine,” TG promised. “They got a doctor in the house.”
But the bigger man could see even in the slight illumination from the third floor that the girl had blood all over her head. Maybe a tire iron hadn’t been the best blackjack.
“Bang your heel on that door and let’s get her in.”
Three quick kicks was all it took to get a reaction from inside. The white door opened and a woman in a white smock went wide-eyed when she saw the cargo. The door opened wide and she demanded, “Come in, come in. What’s happened to her?”
She led them down a short hall to an exam room, and motioned for them to lay the body on the paper-covered table.
“Where’s the doc?” TG demanded. “Did you call him like I asked?”
“He’s on his way,” she said, but refused to meet his eyes. She wet a towel in the stainless-steel sink across the room and then used it to clean the blood away from the back of the unconscious woman’s skull.
TG stood at the girl’s feet, arms crossed, frankly just enjoying the view. The chick was stacked, and she kept the bushes pruned too. There was good reason he’d taken this one to the ditch. They’d lucked out on the drive tonight. Saved a troublesome full trip into Oak Falls AND found a sweet peach to boot.
Billy wasn’t so calm. He paced in and out of the exam room doorway as the nurse cleaned Carrie’s wound. And he visibly jumped when the doctor strode confidently past him into the room and barked, “What the hell did you do to her?”
TG didn’t flinch. “Found her on the side of the road, Doc. Thought you’d want a piece of her.”
The doctor brushed the nurse out of the way and examined the wound, holding back the thick clumps of sticky hair to trace the ragged flesh beneath. “Looks more like you had a piece of her,” the doctor said without looking up. “Please tell me, why is she naked?”
TG shrugged. “Wanted to make sure she was healthy for ya, Doc.” He couldn’t stifle the chuckle at the end.
The doctor straightened up and glared at the men. “Two things I demand from here on out,” he said. “You don’t fuck the girls, and you don’t touch their heads. You just messed with the two reasons I need these women. Now tell me…where are her clothes?”
“I threw them in her car,” Billy said softly.
“And the car, where is it?”
“Great,” the doctor said. “So her clothes, covered with your hair and probably semen and sweat and a hundred other sources of DNA, not to mention her car, which you also probably put your fingerprints all over, is sitting there in the open waiting for the police to pick up on all the evidence and ID you. And then, when they’ve picked you up and thrown you in a cell, you’ll point the finger at me. Not that that will save your asses from a long stretch in jail!”
Billy turned pale. Even TG blinked an extra time or two.
The doctor straightened up to his full six feet and pointed a blood-smeared finger at them both. “Listen to me, morons. You get out there, and you get that car off the road someplace where nobody’s going to find it. You burn her clothes and anything else you put your fingers on. Do that, and IF this girl recovers enough for me to use her for what I need, then we can talk about payment.”
“Whoa, Doc,” TG began, putting two beefy hands in the air. “We need cash if we’re gonna keep doing this.”
“Get your dipshit asses out there and get rid of the evidence you left sitting around in full view of the first cop who gets a missing persons report and we’ll talk,” the doctor said. “Git! I need to help this poor girl.”
TG and Billy were a mile down the road from the asylum when Billy finally got up the courage to say it.
“I told you not to fuck her.”
TG didn’t take his eyes off the road. But his voice was sharp as glass. “Just for that, you’re getting under the hood of her piece of shit Nova and figuring out what the hell’s wrong with it. That, or you’re pushing it all the way back to the shack.”
Billy thought it best not to answer.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The lab coat folded very neatly after he creased and laid it on the counter. Barry Rockford appreciated a good crease. He knew it was just a sign of a mental fixation that begged to become an obsession, but frankly, my dear, he didn’t give a damn.
There was a reason Barry—that’s Barry Rockford, MD, PhD, thank you—had taken his family inheritance and a silent siphon of offshore investor funds and moved out here to lab-rat land. And obsession had a lot to do with it. But it wasn’t an obsession with fabric folding.
After twenty years in a lab at MIT, his focus was on more organic problems. Barry Rockford had published dozens of papers on his research in the pages of journals like Science and Genetics. His paper on in vitro stem-cell mining had generated the largest avalanche of mail the New England Journal of Medicine had ever received. It had also gotten him barred from ever submitting another paper there. Which was laughable, since, after all, weren’t they the ones who’d agreed to publish his research in the first place?
He didn’t care. The stem cells were just the means to an end. And more and more, the end was just the beginning.
Barry pulled out the chart on the girl in room seven. The dipshit boys had brought her in two weeks ago from Oak Falls. She’d been a little roughed up when she’d gotten here—apparently the boys hadn’t expected her to pull a knife when they cornered her in a parking garage. But the bruises were finally starting to fade. Amazingly, the Neanderthal hadn’t broken a rib or her jaw, but it would be a couple more weeks before the evidence would be completely gone.
No matter. The patient wouldn’t be fully conscious for the foreseeable future to complain.
The chart read, “Diagnosis: extreme psychosis. Dangerous to self and others. No next of kin identified. Treatment recommended: long-term sedation and therapy.”
His lips turned in a slight smile as he skimmed the description and the subsequent notations on her “treatment” since arriving. The diagnosis would certainly have been news to the girl who had no doubt been leading a typically unsatisfied life of unfulfilling relationships and insolvable debt before being set upon by two thugs in the dead of night. Although, she had proved adept with a knife, as the dressings on Billy’s chest would attest, if he admitted to anyone that they were there.
He read the last notation in the chart and grinned. It was time to start on the next phase of her treatment. Her cycle had begun again.
Dr. Rockford stood, and called down the hall for his head nurse.
“Amelia!”
She appeared in a heartbeat from the exam room.
“Yes, Doctor. The new girl seems to be stabilized.”
“I read your notes on room seven. Shall we begin tonight?”
“If you are ready, Doctor,” Amelia said. There was a slight glint to her eyes as she said it. As if she was baiting him.
“I’m always ready,” he said. “Bring the restraints and we’ll begin.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The room was pitch-black and the bed sucked. Those were the first two thoughts that entered Jackie Meyer’s head when she blinked open her eyes. The room swam before her, like she’d downed an entire bottle of vodka before slipping beneath the sheets. But…she didn’t drink when she was ’tending. And she didn’t remember going home with anyone.
She tried to clear the fog from her head and think.
Had she worked Teehan’s Irish Bar last night? Was it Saturday or Sunday, and little Jack was sleeping over at Becky’s so she could work the weekend shift and clear the good tips? Fuck, where was she? And who was she with?
She tried to move her arm to feel the other side of the bed but it wouldn’t budge. It was as if her body were a block of ice. Melting away the sleep, but still solid as iron.
Damn it. She’d made rules for herself: no drinking on the job, and no dates on the spur. She had a son to take care of now, and the days of waking up in strange rooms were over.
So where the hell was she?
She felt strange. Not really drunk. Not high…She couldn’t describe it. Her brain was tripping into gear but the rest of her might as well have been tied to a rack. And the response when she tried to move anything, even her eyebrow, was a fuzzy burn of blue in the back of her head. Like dull sparks that didn’t light the fire.
Jackie found she could move her tongue.
That was one muscle that responded. She licked the inside of her gums and grimaced. Her teeth felt like mossy stones. Ugh. And her mouth felt hot. Dried out.
What had she done last night?
Focus.
Think.
Remember.
What was the last thing…
There was Jack…She remembered leaving him with Becky. His ice blue eyes had opened wide and he grinned with wet pink lips and gave her a kiss. “Night night, Momma,” he’d said, a warm lump of a boy in his blue dinosaur one-piece. “Night, kiddo,” she’d said, giving him a big hug and thanking Becky who stood behind him, arms crossed and waiting to take the boy to his weekend bed.
Was that last night? Last week? It all seemed strangely distant. But it was all she could pull up. Work at the bar. Yellowed lights blearing over fifty bottles of booze…rowdy customers…a college kid buying shots of Jaeger for his girlfriend…a stubbled regular slurring, “I’m all right, I’m okay,” over and over while holding out his glass for more…
The memories were a blur, almost overshad-owed in sepia, as if she were watching someone else’s old film. But they seemed like the last things she could dredge out of her memory.
There were pins and needles in her arm. Damn it.
She hated that. Especially since she couldn’t seem to move a muscle to calm them. One, two, three, she counted mentally…and threw herself to the side.
Her body didn’t move.
But maybe her finger did. She tried again.
One, two, three…
Her arm flopped. And, oh shit did the pins and needles come on then. She opened her mouth to cry out and then thought better of it. She didn’t know who she’d be waking yet, and it seemed oddly important that she remember that.
She tried again to piece together the night before, but instead of bar scenes, she found herself seeing the eyes of a man looking down at her. H
e wore a white lab coat or smock—as if he was a doctor.
“Relax,” he told her. Something pinched her arm, and his eyes drew in very close to hers. “Everything is going to be all right now.”
There was a cold sensation in her arm, and something tugging at her waist. The doctor pulled at something by her thigh, and cold washed over her as her coverings slipped away. Then his hands were on her, rubbing the places that hurt, and the places that felt good. She could feel sensation returning all over her body in a wash of pricks and feather tickles.
“Everything is going to be all right now,” he said again. And then a nurse put a hand on her brow. “Just lay back and enjoy it,” the woman suggested.
Enjoy it?
Something cold pressed between her legs, something slimy and cool. She flinched, but the nurse again rubbed her brow. And then something definitely not cold pressed itself there, something warm and fleshy and she fought to stop its entrance, but then she realized that her arms were strapped and her legs were strapped and the doctor was leaning over her, grinning, ice blue eyes like daggers stabbing their poison into her soul, as his wide, thin lips bent down to touch her own…
“Oh shit, shit, shit,” she moaned again. The pins and needles had gotten worse and she could make a fist. Where am I? Who was that man?
She tried to think again about the night she’d left Jack with Becky and the people she’d served at the bar. It all seemed a very long and foggy time ago. But then she did remember one thing. At the end of the night, near last call, two hicks had come into the bar. They’d pulled up stools and ordered beer…but had seemed half trashed already. When she’d told them it was last call and that they’d have to drink fast, the bigger one had grinned and said he could do it fast, could she?
Then what?
She struggled through the fog to remember.
She saw the doctor, big chin and scary eyes looking over her.
She saw the hick, laughing at two A.M. and staggering out the door with his buddy in tow.
She saw a big hand cupped across her face as she tried to put her keys in the lock of her car. “I told you I was fast, didn’t I?” he said, and then there was a cloth over her face and a smell like turpentine and then…