Pain filled Xander’s eyes, his pupils shifted a little from their fixed position. Just enough that Cathy thought he was acknowledging her, finally.
“When I was in the tub, I don’t think I was scared,” she blurted out finally. “I think I was hopeful. I hoped that Al and Raine would come in and find me, and maybe they’d want me. Maybe somebody would finally want me. All these years, I’ve been watching you and Mike and Derek fawn over Sara. Since the party, Mike will barely touch me anymore, and I wasn’t even good enough for Grendel to rape.” She paused, nodded as the tears began again, then repeated herself. “Not good enough to rape.”
“...but then, I’m crazy,” Spider reasoned, the words muffled slightly as she bit on Genblade’s ear. Her expression grew serious then, as she just let Genblade do his thing and no longer paid him any attention. “It’s all coming, you know boy. Even now, you’ll start to see it. The explosion at Engen may have dulled your senses for a time, but they still hear the firing of the guns, hmm? The war is coming, Drew. Those that you call allies today will destroy you come the morrow. Those we count amongst our allies today will have betrayed us yesterday, and themselves in the morrow. The actions you take now lead you not to peace, but to bloodshed. To pain. And you will love it, for that is your power.”
Xander rose, confused. “I don’t understand,” he said, and Cathy sighed.
“What?” Genblade snarled as he used his nose to fondle Spider’s breasts. “Isn’t she being direct enough for you?”
“There are trails ahead, the stars are singing it so,” Spider said musically to Xander, her body again racked with pleasure from her husband. “But the man in the moon is terrible jealous, for he has no voice. Only eyes. He can’t sing and make the girls love him, but he can watch. Oh, yes he can. He watches everything.”
Finally, Xander began to clue in. The third rapist could see them. The victims, he’d seen them all before, known about their problems and lives. He knew them, somehow.
Spider laughed, as Genblade ripped off the last shreds of her jumpsuit. “Now you’re starting to think like a Womb.”
“What’s not to understand?” Cathy asked. “Nobody wants me, they just want my body. And it’s getting to the point where that’s going to be good enough. I’ll let them have it. They can take it away so that I don’t have to deal with it anymore,” she sobbed, collapsing onto her friend’s chest. “I don’t want it anymore, Xander,” she convulsed. Her hand reached up to brush against his lips, to have him kiss her hand. To have her feel as if someone wanted her for something other than a cheap lay.
Xander grabbed her hand out of the air and looked down at her, his mind snapping back to reality. “How did you get here?” he asked, his voice almost accusatory. “Why are you crying?”
Her lower lip shook violently. She snatched her hand away from him, her moist eyes becoming even more so. She shook her head, jutting a palm towards him to shut him up. She realized that again, he hadn’t been listening. That not even he cared. “I can’t…” she started, but couldn’t even finish before she left the room and the house completely, leaving Xander in a well of his own tears, feeling completely useless.
-BEEP-
-BEEP-
-BEEP-
Tim sighed as he peered in through the doorway to Greer Donaldson’s hospital room, listening to the tones emitted by the machine next to her as it coldly kept track of her heart rhythm. He was only vaguely aware of the woman next to him who had been going on for almost ten minutes about stats and hospital regulations and medical jargon, none of which he found particularly useful.
What he had come to see was in there.
Past the forest green door propped open with a rubber peg and behind all the equipment dedicated to keeping her breathing, was what he needed more than anything else in the world right now: motivation.
If his conversation with Roxanne that morning hadn’t made him feel bad enough, his one with Mike had sunken his heart even further. He had left the boy with a feeling of uselessness caked on him so hard that he didn’t even think a shower would get it all off. The worst part was the knowledge that it wasn’t completely ill deserved. Derek had almost been the worst of the lot, giving him no information and very little to go on. He felt like he was grasping at straws.
“--rated as a nine on the Glasgow Coma Scale. She makes no movements and cannot open her eyes, even upon application of painful stimuli. She does make the occasional sound, but they’re mostly just incomprehensible grunts and moans,” the nurse continued, Tim’s attention snapping back to her suddenly.
For a moment he didn’t really understand what she was saying, until his brain caught up with him and he remembered what they had been talking about. “Nine. That sounds pretty bad, Miss...”
“Reilly,” she said, but did not smile. She stared through the door at Greer for a moment just as Tim had, her dark red lips turning into a frown against the tan complexion of her face. She did not get as lost in it as Tim had, though, turning back to the conversation after only a moment. “And it’s not as bad as it sounds. The Glasgow Coma Scale goes up to fourteen, not ten. If I had to put it into simple terms, it is a very ‘moderate’ coma.”
“Will she recover?” he asked, again glancing toward the girl. It could have been anyone in that bed, really. The bruises and swollen welts that covered her head and upper body made it hard to distinguish her as female, let alone as Greer Donaldson.
Nurse Reilly sighed, pushing her brown bangs out of her eyes. “It’s hard to say, really. At this point she could recover... or she could recess deeper into the coma. A person’s place on the Coma Scale isn’t stagnate. It can change daily in the first few months... but with every day, the chances get less and less that she’ll wake up.”
Tim frowned. It occurred to him, and not for the first time, that there was another problem in this whole mess. Greer Donaldson’s attackers could only be charged with murder if she died within a year of the attack. After that it would be deemed as ‘natural causes,’ a thought that sickened him. Not that he didn’t want her to get better... But with every day the chances of that would get less and less likely. If she wasn’t going to wake up, he hoped that she would pass on in time to really get back at her assailants.
- BEEP BEEP!-
Nurse Reilly jumped back, her face startled as she looked into Greer’s room to see what was the matter.
Tim raised a hand to stop her, then withdrew his cell phone from his pocket. “Sorry,” he said quickly, his open palm changing to a single finger in a motion everyone understood as ‘give me a minute.’
“Well, that’s not the least of the reasons we don’t allow cellular telephones to be active while you’re inside the hospital, Mr. White,” she huffed, still regaining herself from the momentary start she’d been given.
It was the first time since beginning his conversation with her that Tim would have honestly described her as anything but mechanical. Now she shuffled her feet and let out several exasperated puffs of air, reminding him of the hens on his grandmother’s farm after the cat had given them a scare. The association made his lips curl into a smile, even though he knew it would only make her madder. Regardless, he brought the phone to his ear. “Hello?”
“Jeez, you are fucking impossible to get hold of,” came the agitated male voice from the other end.
Once again, despite the words being said, Tim got the distinct impression that the man was smiling. “Duncan,” he said, running a hand through his hair as he felt a migraine coming on.
“How’d you know? Anyway, hope you don’t mind me using th’ personal number and all, but you haven’t been in the office all day.”
“No, I’ve been out working my case all day, which I happen to be doing right now. So, if you don’t mind...”
“We don’t know our perp yet, but we think he’s a male age thirty to thirty-five. That could be wrong, but it’s coming from a reliable place,” Duncan continued, as if White hadn’t even spoken. “He likes to use th
ings he finds at the scene on his victims, I’ll tell you that much now. Has made for some nasty autopsies. But listen, I’m on my way to pick you up. I’ll brief you more then, but --”
Tim tried to find a spot to break into the conversation, but Duncan Taggart just kept talking. After a full minute of this, White simply closed the cell phone, hanging up on his overzealous partner.
“If you’re going to keep that thing on, you’re going to have to leave,” Nurse Reilly said sternly, her hands again folded in front of her.
Tim sighed, pocketing the cell phone. Turning toward the dark green doors, he took one last look at the battered face of Greer Donaldson, then turned to leave.
The Factory was in a rare state of emptiness, something that looked almost foreign and alien. Seeing it this way produced the same sort of uneasiness as seeing an empty dance club in the daytime, or returning to your old Kindergarten classroom and feeling everything was out of place.
The arcade games against the back wall still rung out taunts and chimes to its absent audience, the bells and whistles only slightly dulled by the soundproofed walls. The fighting games were the worst, spewing out sound effect after sound effect as battle waged on upon their screens, like some sort of auditory regurgitation.
One game flashed blue light in rapid strobes, casting odd and disjointed shadows on the pool table not far away. The shape of the sticks leaned against it were projected onto the wall with such intensity that if left in that position for a long amount of time, they might get burned there like the shadows of the unlucky souls that stood near ground zero at Hiroshima.
That’s what Roxanne had decided Coral Beach and the surrounding towns felt like lately: Hiroshima. The atomic blast that was Adam Genblade had killed a lot of people, but they were almost the lucky ones. In the past few weeks the fallout of those events had begun to take its toll on her and the children she catered to. Depression was a popular reaction, but so too was anger, hostility, disbelief and paranoia. It was the same way she pictured the aftermath of a massive attack of any scale, large or small. The only difference was that the people of Coral Beach wouldn’t discover radioactivity in their breast milk in fifty years, although according to the rumors she had heard about the building they found north of town that might not be out of the question either.
She ran her hands through her curly red hair, raking her press-on nails against her scalp in a desperate effort to keep the thoughts that were stalking her out. She was leaning over the bar of The Factory on her elbows, staring down into an untouched cup of tea that wafted the sugary sweet scent of orange pekoe up into her face. The heat from the drink made her forehead and upper lip dot with sweat after only a moment, but she found she liked the way it tingled against her face.
An image flashed across the top of her brain like a strobe light. The memory produced a smell like ammonia and spit that made her nose curl even though it wasn’t really there. The recollection of it was more than enough. Gritting her teeth and digging in her nails until she thought she might be bleeding, Roxanne forced the image from her mind as she had many times on sleepless nights in the past two years. Nights when she’d woken up screaming and not remembered why at first. Nights after which no amount of showers and soaps could make her feel clean again.
But it was gone again now, and she could turn her attention back to the muddied and distorted visage of herself in her tea. She could force those images out for as long as it took. She’d had a lot of practice. It had taken some time, but she has started to think of it as a movie that had happened to someone else. The illusion was so complete that her memories of what had been done to her no longer had colour, and were grainy with cigarette burns the way old movies from the thirties were. Once she’d managed to convince her mind that it was just a movie, all she needed to do was turn off the projector.
The new things coming at her weren’t so easy. These weren’t memories she was fighting now but thought processes, her own mind working overtime against her.
“Yes, there were two or three men working in conjuncture.”
The federal agent’s voice had been so cold when he’d said that. It was just a fact to him, something with no emotional weight to it other than the loosest sense of empathy. To her it was the gateway that made the plight of that young girl real to Roxanne, a point of reference that could be used to extrapolate her experiences to fit this new scenario.
There would be more of that smell with three of them, she thought, even as she ground her molars together and tried to turn off the switch to the projector only to find that it was broken.
More of that same ammonia and saliva smell but not as much as she initially thought. Not three times as much, by any stretch. Scent was one of those odd things that reached a ceiling fairly quickly and no matter how much more you piled in, the smell would get no worse. Other things would get worse though. The smell of sweat with one of them was bad enough. With three of them, the B.O. would reach tsunami levels. It was so bad it almost made her throw up into her tea thinking about it. Cologne, too. Nothing expensive, something that an idiot would pick up with a sailboat on the bottle that smelled like her Uncle Chris’s moonshine.
That was just the smells. As her tea stopped sending wave after wave of heat at her face and became cool, she started to feel it. Again she tried desperately to turn off the movie playing in her head, but this was something her mind was creating. Once started it was like trying to stop an avalanche of thought. It simply couldn’t happen.
It started as a memory of the hands gripping her shoulders and her breasts. They were rough and pulled on her flesh as though they wanted it off like her clothes already were. Most people do not understand that rape is more about violence than it is about sex. She understood all too well. As she took the teacup in her shivering hand and brought it to her lips, her thoughts deviated from memory into their own tangent. There were three of them, after all. She’d never had that experience, but it wasn’t hard for her mind to fabricate. While the pressure was still tugging hard on her chest and shoulder, more was added at her hips and legs and hair. Before long she felt as though she had been tied to three different cars and they had begun pulling her in all directions at once.
The pressure was soon joined by weight. The sum total of the first one’s entire body was upon her and within her all at once. It would have been a thousand times worse than the pressure of their hands all on its own, but the hands had never really stopped their steady grope. The pain was unbelievable. What was worse, her scientific mind instantly named and explained all of the sensations she was experiencing. Somehow it made it all the more real as the second one started.
Even though it wasn’t real.
Warm tea sloshing against her open-toed shoes brought her back to reality with a snap, the movie reel fading away for a moment. She breathed a sigh of relief, but did not smile. The thoughts were leaving fast, but not nearly fast enough. She still thought she could smell the mold of the garbage in the alley she had found herself in.
Huffing angrily, she took one last look out at the empty Factory. Glaring it down, she grabbed her red leather purse and opened it to make sure there was still a pack of Camels and a light inside, then buttoned it again and headed for the door, her left shoe leaving footprints of tea all the way to the door.
Roxanne cursed when she stepped in a puddle as she rounded the corner, her smoke already smouldering in her hand. She took a quick puff from between her ruby lips then brought the smoke away, holding it off to the side of her head the way she had seen women do in old movies from the fifties.
The back wall of The Factory looked the same as it always had, even before it was an arcade. None of her patrons really remembered this except for those that had seen it, but back in the day it had been a gymnasium. For a while, Coral Beach had been a boomtown as industrialists flocked there looking for coal and oil. The coal was gone now and the oil had never even existed, and most modern industrialists couldn’t find Coral Beach on a map of Maine even if t
heir lives depended on it. Around the time when it was a ‘boomtown’, it had attracted many of the prosperity and the problems that came with larger communities. When the success waned as it always does, the prosperity left but the problems remained. The gym had been closed within a month of the mine shutting down. It had sat there gaining rot for three years before Joan had bought it, slowly transforming it into what it was today.
Through all the paint jobs and reconstruction, the back wall was still just as she remembered it. Long and white with the paint still flecking in the same places no matter how many times they went over it again, a large mound of smooth rock jutting up half way through the foundation and combining with the concrete wall to create a makeshift seat.
Nowadays kids called this the ‘old sitting stone.’ She’d heard Tommy and Derek refer to it as that more than once while heading outside to have a smoke, much as she was now. Although she thought ‘old kissing stone’ would have been much more appropriate, as many kids had had their first kiss sitting on that stone after a concert or a game of pool.
Back when she was that age and before she’d gotten her first kiss, the smooth mound of granite was known by the more sinister moniker of The Devil’s Chair.
She didn’t know who named it that. She supposed nobody really knew who named such things around towns all over the world, only that it happened. Unlike ‘The Old Sitting Stone’ (which was, in itself, self-explanatory), The Devil’s Chair had started out as a ghost story. A kind of urban legend of her youth that everyone passes off as rubbish until they were staring it right in the face.
Habeas Corpus: Black Womb (Black Womb Collection Book 1) Page 29