Revik

by J. C. Andrijeski

  Dehgoies didn’t see any sign of the woman at all.

  Groaning a little as he did it, he sat up.

  He glanced down at the device in his hand, cursing silently to himself when he saw the notification showing up on the dark-green metal.

  Fuck. They were already late.

  That Russian piece of shit called him the night before, in the middle of everything and right after Revik had done two lines of heroin. He finally gave him a time, and a place.

  He must have had enough presence of mind to set the alarm, but he did a shitty job in terms of gauging the right time. Now that his mind was clear––relatively, at least––he remembered his conversation with the Russian in full, including the time and meeting place.

  He remembered he’d been getting head from the married bikini woman while he talked to him. By then, Revik had been pulled into that craziness; he’d also been in a mood, between that green-eyed seer, what he’d done with Raven, the heroin, little or no food.

  By the time the Russian called, Revik had taken over directing recreational activities for the female, with Terry’s encouragement.

  As a part of that, he’d gotten a few of the bar cockroaches to go grab some of their friends. By then, he’d read enough off the woman’s mind to know she’d had a string of lovers all over Saigon, and that her husband, as far as the wife knew, had no idea.

  Revik was high enough that he thought he’d try and get her pregnant as a gift to her mate.

  Luckily, she wasn’t on the pill.

  After he read her for more details about her husband, he decided to only allow male humans who looked absolutely nothing like him to fuck her.

  He remembered watching her orgasm around the cock of a nearly coal-skinned human who’d been riding her bareback. He’d noted the sheer pleasure on her face with a certain, sick kind of satisfaction as the male came shortly after, even as Revik used his aleimi to open both of their lights as much as he could, thinking it might help his little project along.

  They weren’t seers, so the biology wasn’t the same.

  Still, he figured it couldn’t hurt.

  If her husband saw his wife giving birth to a dark-skinned and/or Vietnamese-looking baby in nine months, maybe he’d get a head’s up as to the reality of his marriage.

  Thinking about the whole thing now, Revik felt nauseous.

  At the time, he’d been weirdly focused, almost obsessed, like he got sometimes when he was high––but now he couldn’t fathom what the fuck he’d been doing.

  It probably wasn’t even the worst thing he’d done while he’d been that high, but it struck him as the most personal. It was almost like some part of him had been compensating for how open he’d let his light get, how vulnerable and confused he’d felt, after his interaction with the green-eyed seer.

  As his seer’s memory reminded him of everything he’d done, in excruciating fucking detail, including the woman begging him to fuck her in the ass after he’d made her cunt too sore with the humans, he tasted bile in the back of his throat.

  Terian found the whole thing hilarious, of course.

  Even Raven found it funny.

  She contributed her own candidate to the breeding pool at one point, pulling in the hotel’s room service waiter for a turn when the female human seemed open to another round.

  Then again, Raven was in a good mood in general after her and Revik’s own little progeny experiment. He’d acquiesced in trying with her a few more times after that first attempt, which seemed to make her even happier.

  By then, he’d been seriously not in the mood.

  He’d never been one to half-ass anything, though, not once he’d committed.

  Dragging himself to his feet, he brought the device with him, but left Raven where she was. He was still rubbing his face as he walked to the common room separating the suite’s two bedrooms. It didn’t occur to him that he was naked until he realized he was hard, too, enough so that it was difficult to walk.

  He knew he probably needed to urinate, but he also knew that wasn’t all of it.

  Other thoughts besides the Russian contact and Revik’s own sick drug fantasies shifted in the back of his mind, making his hard-on worse.

  None of them featured Raven.

  He’d been dreaming. He’d been dreaming about that woman by the pool.

  Or maybe not her, exactly.

  Frowning, he tried to decide what that meant.

  Seconds later, he decided he didn’t fucking care.

  Pushing her out of his mind in some irritation, he glanced around the common room once he’d opened the bedroom door, only taking in a few details.

  They’d pretty much demolished the bar’s stores the night before.

  Empty bottles stood on the mirrored tray and lay scattered on the carpeted floor, along with glasses holding remnants of alcohol and tepid water from the ice, some with human cigarette butts and hiri floating in them, staining the liquid dark yellow and brown.

  The mirror they’d pulled off the wall of the bathroom to use for drugs somehow got cracked down the middle, but a few, lonely-looking lines remained down the center of it, along with the razor blade they’d been using, and the now-frayed Vietnamese 10,000 dong bill.

  Dehgoies paused at the table, staring down at the mirror.

  Making a swift decision, he bent over, chopping up the exposed remains of the drugs they’d laid out the night before, rearranging the powder on the glass before he re-rolled the bill. Setting down the organic hand-held briefly, he used the bill to snort up the two thickest lines he’d created of that mixture of cocaine and heroin.

  As soon as the drugs hit his bloodstream, he felt better.

  More importantly, he felt awake.

  His aleimi caught on fire, vibrating around his form.

  Raising his head, Dehgoies rubbed his nose, sniffing again until he tasted copper and that harsher taste at the back of his throat.

  He felt his body start to wake up for real.

  By the time he walked to the door of the other bedroom, his mind was almost working again.

  He knocked, sharply.

  When his knock was answered by nothing but silence, he didn’t wait, but turned the handle to the door and pushed it abruptly open.

  Terian lay sprawled there, on the bed, two of the original bar cockroaches he’d lured up here wrapped around him in sleep.

  Dehgoies didn’t see the woman, or the other three men Terry had pushed into joining them from the poolside bar, or any of their darker-skinned friends, or the Vietnamese room service waiter, but that didn’t surprise him.

  Usually a few favorites emerged by the end of the night, and Terian would push the others out the door, with or without clothes, with or without their memories intact.

  Erasing them often wasn’t necessary.

  Shame could do wonders to keep people silent, even in Saigon.

  One of the remaining males still had come dried to his chest, gods only knew from which one of them. One was blond, the other dark-haired. Both looked to be in their late twenties, and in decent physical shape. They had strong jaws, handsome faces, long limbs.

  Terian’s two new acquisitions both looked contented in sleep, wrapped around Terian’s chest and waist as if they’d been fucking him all of their lives.

  Dehgoies wondered if they’d had some sort of latent preference for males, or if Terian had liked them for some other reason.

  A few seconds later, he decided he didn’t care.

  He picked up a throw pillow from the nearest chair and aimed it skillfully at Terian’s face, hitting him dead-on, hard enough that the seer jumped. The other male’s eyes jerked open as he sat up, halfway in fighting mode already.

  When he saw Dehgoies there, he relaxed.

  Dehgoies gave a low, humorless snort, then lifted up the organic, showing Terian the same message that had woken him.

  Terian nodded, even as he grimaced a little, rubbing his temples.

  Clearly, the night was catchi
ng up with him already, too.

  The other seer’s amber eyes had glassed over again slightly once his mind caught up with the lack of an immediate threat to his life. Dehgoies watched as Terian rubbed his face with the heel of one hand and began disentangling himself from the two males wrapped around his naked body.

  “Hurry up,” Dehgoies whispered. “Do a few lines. I can bring it in here, if you want.”

  “No, no… you go ahead.”

  “I already did,” Dehgoies said.

  Terian blinked, nodding, rubbing his face a second time. Then he smiled, motioning down towards Dehgoies’ erection.

  “I can see that,” he smirked, staring openly at the other’s cock. “Your stamina, as always, impresses me to no end, brother.”

  Dehgoies snorted. “I bet.” He threw another pillow when the male continued to stare at his erection. “…Move your ass, Terry. I’m taking a shower. And no, you can’t join me. We’re leaving in ten. Wake Raven, all right? When you’re finished?”

  “Of course, brother. Of course…”

  With that, Dehgoies left the room, not bothering to close the door behind him.

  Nine

  Murderer

  A FEW HOURS later, they were in a compound outside the city, and a good hundred miles from Phan Rang Air Base.

  Their contact was paranoid as hell.

  Dehgoies didn’t mind the paranoia.

  He was just glad the fucker wasn’t as stupid as that blond Russian who’d been talking about “glow-eyes” in the middle of a downtown Saigon bar.

  He was outside though, in more or less direct sunlight. It was only midday, but already, it was hotter than hell, and so humid his clothes stuck to his skin, his hair sweating to his face and neck. He felt like he was breathing as much water as air.

  He wiped sweat out of his eyes with the back of his wrist, adjusting the olive-green army cap over his head to keep the sun off his black hair, where it seemed to want to bake his very skull, making him feel even more like throwing up.

  He knew he smelled from the alcohol and drugs being sweated out of his system, but he found it difficult to care about that, either, as he surveyed the pen in front of him, frowning as he took in the wash of dirty faces.

  “This is all of them?” he asked the seer in Prexci.

  The male Sark shrugged, his dark eyes wary.

  “More older ones inside,” he said, motioning towards the shed.

  “Bring them out here,” Revik said.

  The male Sark yelled out a command in mixed Hindi and the seer tongue, and two of his people walked dutifully into the shed.

  A few minutes later, they herded out another twenty or so seers.

  Like the male seer said, most of them looked like adults.

  The smuggler motioned for them to join the others by the pen, shouting at them in the same pidgin he used with his workers. He wore carefully crafted Viet Cong garb, Revik noticed. He probably wore contact lenses too, to cover whatever color his irises really were. Revik doubted they were the muddy brown they appeared to be now.

  Overall, the male had his local-peasant-slash-revolutionary gear down to a “T,” from the tire-tread sandals and camouflage paint to the tattered shirt he wore over dark gray peasant pants and the sweat-stained V-necked cotton shirt he wore beneath.

  Dehgoies knew the North Vietnamese Army, or NVA, was already on its way to this part of the country. If his most recent intel wasn’t total shit, they were headed for Saigon.

  He also knew the war would likely be over soon.

  Hell, it basically ended once the Americans stopped providing money to the puppet regime in the South, but he didn’t much care about that, either.

  That wasn’t why he was here.

  Well, not anymore.

  He and Terian hadn’t been involved much in the war itself for a few years now.

  Dehgoies’ eyes scanned the young seers squatting in pens outside the bamboo and plywood shed. His eyes shifted to the adults after, counting them like he had the young ones.

  Palm trees angled down at them without managing to block any of the sun.

  Flies and other insects buzzed around his face and other exposed areas of skin, along with Terry’s and Raven’s and the skin of the prisoners. The sheer number of insects made it difficult to think straight, their prevalence made worse by the nearby rice paddies and the rotting dead they’d passed on the road on the way here.

  He could smell urine and feces from where the prisoners had soiled themselves, probably through fear, at least in part.

  He could also smell the faintest whiff of copper.

  He knew that had to be blood.

  Dehgoies didn’t want to know how many of those dead he’d seen on the road were seers, much less baby seers, like most of those squatting in the pen in front of him.

  He definitely didn’t want to know how many of them should have been part of this shipment.

  At the same time, he would need to find out how many, before he left here.

  The remains of both groups had been tied together with dirty rope, so that they huddled together more like frightened animals than like brothers and sisters in the light.

  Dehgoies grimaced again when he realized that most of the females weren’t wearing any clothes. That wasn’t only true of the adult females the smuggler had just ordered out of the storage shed. It was true of the little ones, too. He saw black eyes on more than a few of them, and swollen jaws and cheeks.

  Again, the injuries were common across both adults and children.

  Several of those who had been beaten couldn’t have been more than twenty.

  Because they were seers, that made them look closer to eleven or twelve, in human years, and small enough that he couldn’t help wincing at the bruises over the lower half of their small, fragile-looking bodies.

  Those bruises seemed darker and more vivid under the pale skin of their pre-adolescent breasts. One had a savage-looking bite mark by her light-brown areola, and a cut across her stomach from what looked like a hunting knife. A few of them had dried blood on their thighs.

  Revulsion took him, enough that he had to look away from that part of their bodies, feeling a kind of shame creep in that he’d been staring at all.

  Fucking babies.

  He couldn’t help noticing the dead-eyed stares in some of their eyes, or the way they huddled there, like dogs waiting to be hit.

  Watching a prepubescent female stare up at him fearfully, an open panic in her violet-colored eyes, Dehgoies felt his throat constrict.

  “Been sampling the merchandise, I see,” he muttered.

  His voice came out empty, devoid of any emotion whatsoever.

  He shoved the clipboard back at the older seer’s narrower chest, giving the male a hard stare when the Vietnamese-looking seer blinked up at him.

  “…Or did you just sell it to the army as they passed through?”

  The seer shrugged, unapologetic.

  “Worms get hungry, too,” was all he said.

  “Yeah.” Dehgoies clenched his jaw, arranging the cap on his head. “Sure.”

  The nausea he’d been feeling worsened.

  His hangover and the drugs leaving his system warred and mixed with the flies buzzing around him in the heat, the image of the bruised and bloodied children cowering before him in the dirt, and the older females watching him fearfully.

  He wondered if they felt rescued by “The Ghost,” too.

  His mind flashed to the night before, to the woman in the red bikini.

  The sick feeling in his gut worsened.

  His eyes scanned over faces a second time as he counted again, taking the older ones into account this time, making sure his first pass on the children had been accurate. He still couldn’t make himself look at them for long, at least not in terms of details.

  He didn’t trust himself to meet the gaze of the smaller seer who stood next to him, either. He couldn’t help but feel the bland indifference emanating from the other male’s li
ght as he gazed out over the same miserable scene as Revik did.

  Fucker had the Nazi scar cut into his face.

  He wore the evidence of what the German SS had done to mark the seers who passed through to meet the ovens and the labs.

  He’d been in the fucking camps during World War II.

  He should know what it meant to be a slave.

  Hell, he clearly did know.

  Maybe that’s what made him such a callous, ice-souled bastard now.

  Without giving the other male a glance, Dehgoies walked directly into the pen filled with young seers, staring around at the number of them, trying to force his mind into some semblance of objectivity.

  He got the same count both times. Thirty-two.

  Twenty-eight females.

  Most of them looked sick. All of them looked underfed. He glanced at the adults then and frowned, recounting their numbers as well.

  “Where are the rest of the males?” he said. “The adults?”

  He didn’t trust himself to look back at the Asian seer, so he continued to stare, his jaw hard, at the adult merchandise instead.

  He only saw two males in the whole bunch.

  “I know the shipments are female-heavy,” he said, attempting to be diplomatic, in part to suppress the rage slowly heating his chest. “…but I was told you would have more males for this one. Galaith specifically requested more males to work in North America. Sight rank five or above. He was pretty fucking specific.”

  The man gave him another of those indifferent shrugs.

  “Some of them might have gotten away,” he said.

  “Gotten away?” Dehgoies swiveled his hips, turning his head to stare at the other male. “What do you mean… ’gotten away’?”

  “We had a problem in the fields.”

  The man in the VC outfit shrugged, scratching a bright red bug bite on his neck and swatting away more flies. At Dehgoies’ continued stare the male seer sighed, but the feeling in his light never changed from that base indifference.