by Bryan Smith
The Accord crested the hill and the terrain leveled out.
Karen whistled. “Will you look at that?”
They looked.
The protest at the tip of Alicia’s tongue went unspoken.
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The Master’s house loomed before them. An array of klieg lights illuminated its exterior. As they neared the house, a big stone mansion, Dream’s friends reiterated their desire to flee this place, but their pleas barely registered. Dream was looking at the Doric columns rising from the ends of a long porch and bracketing a big balcony that overlooked the front yard.
It was imposing.
A grim sentinel hunched against the mountain.
And yet…
Dream experienced a moment of vivid prescience.
A frisson of familiarity.
She had never seen this house before, had never glimpsed its gambrel roof and gabled windows, but this first peek elicited an odd-and undeniable-feeling.
She felt as if she belonged here.
As if she needed to be here.
She drove on.
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The man behind the desk possessed the aloof air of every coolly efficient bureaucrat Chad had ever encountered. He was tall and thin, gaunt-looking, with bony hands and the dark, predatory eyes of a wolf. He wore a black suit over a crisp white shirt and a narrow black tie, the sort of ensemble an undertaker might wear. His bored expression managed to convey impatience, disdain, and haughty superiority all at the same time.
“So,” he said, addressing Cindy in an oily, insinuating voice that made Chad think of Peter Lorre. “I have before me a petition for emancipation .” He nodded at Cindy. “And you, I understand, are the party petitioning for emancipation.”
Cindy nodded. “Yes, sir.”
The man, who Chad had gathered was a warden of sorts, chuckled without humor. “And what have you done to merit this privilege?”
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“I’ve served The Master well for three years.”
Cindy strode closer to the warden’s desk. The armed guards flanking the desk watched her with suspicion. This, after all, was a woman who’d just physically subdued and murdered a man in her cell. She made them uncomfortable, anxious and edgy, but Cindy seemed oblivious to the danger.
She indicated Chad with a nod. “I have an endorsement from Overlord Gonzo, and this one can take my spot in his herd.”
The warden lifted a single sheet of smudged paper off his desk, glanced at it, and flashed those predatory eyes at Cindy. “Do you mean this endorsement? Signed, I see, by your owner and several witnesses.”
Cindy’s eyes narrowed. “Yes. Everything should be in order.”
Chad could not believe what he was hearing. They were speaking in very rational, measured tones-civilized tones-about things medieval and barbaric. The warden’s office added to this perception. It was a large, dimly lit room with an absurdly high ceiling. The desk was the only piece of furniture in the room. The walls were painted a dark green. Chad thought of hospital walls. Prison walls. Institutional walls. Images from movies. The world of make-believe was the only apt frame of reference, he decided. This place was just too surreal. He noticed a coiled hose attached to a spigot in one corner of the room and a rust-flecked drain set in the floor below it. His gaze shifted from the drain to a set of shackles and chains affixed to wall mounts. Then he saw the coiled whip that hung from a peg behind the desk.
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He began to tremble.
The warden’s thin lips formed a wet slit of a smile, and he held the piece of paper so Cindy could see it clearly, gripping the upper corners with the thumbs and forefingers of his hands. The multiple signatures were legible from where Chad stood.
The warden tore the piece of paper down the middle, then folded the separate pieces together and tore them again.
And again.
Cindy shook with silent rage.
The man pursed his lips and stared hard at her over steepled fingers. “Oops, I seem to have misplaced it.”
Chad’s mouth opened in an astonished expression of righteous disbelief. He couldn’t believe the audacity of this man. He wanted to say something, to protest, but could think of nothing that wouldn’t sound foolish or naive. He was clearly in a place where the normal rules of decorum didn’t apply. Hell, rules at all didn’t seem to apply. Apparently, if you occupied a position of power in this place, you could just make them up as you went along. Chad’s tolerance level for brazen abuses of authority had always been low, but there seemed no means of recourse here.
They were at this man’s mercy.
Whose distinguishing characteristic seemed to be a lack thereof.
Cindy began to move toward the desk. The tall man’s eyes widened slightly, but he was never in any real danger. A guard interceded, clamping massive hands around her
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upper arms. She struggled in his grip, realized instantly it was useless, and gave up.
“This is wrong,” she whispered. “Wrong, wrong, wrong.”
Chad despaired at the defeated tone in her voice. It was disheartening to see someone so strong and so spirited beaten so easily. He didn’t much care for what it seemed to portend for him, either, which was total subjugation. He was no coward, but he was self-aware enough to know he was likely no match for anyone down here.
The tall man made a tsk-tsk noise and shook his head. “Such a stupid cunt.” He smirked. “You should know better than to threaten your betters.”
He pushed away from the desk and stood up. Chad was unable to suppress a gasp. The man was even taller than he’d guessed. NBA tall. He removed his jacket and draped it over the back of the chair, then he unbuttoned the cuffs of his sleeves and rolled the sleeves up.
The smirk deepened, becoming a sneer. “I shall administer your punishment myself.” He licked his lips, again causing Chad to think of a wolf. A wolf about to descend upon a gaggle of undefended chickens. “Twenty lashes.” He chuckled. “No, thirty!”
He removed the whip from the peg, uncoiled it, and snapped it against the floor with a crisp flick of the wrist. He nodded at the guard holding Cindy. “Prepare her.”
The guard pushed her toward the corner Chad now realized functioned as a sort of bare-bones torture chamber. He looked at the drain and the coiled hose again. A shiver went through him. The curiously equipped corner likely served a dual purpose. Torture was just the first phase of
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punishment. Perhaps, if you were lucky, the only phase. The second phase was certainly execution. The hose was a heavy-gauge one. It could be turned on the prisoner as an additional element of torture, but Chad believed its primary purpose was to drive blood and tissue down the scummy drain.
Chad’s stomach rumbled.
“Please don’t do this,” he mumbled.
Another guard clubbed him in the ear. “Shut up.”
The guard assigned to Cindy slammed her against the wall, causing her to cry out. Chad winced at the brutality. He had to remind himself this was far from the worst of what he would see before this nightmare was over.
The shackles snapped shut around Cindy’s wrists and ankles. The tall man approached her slowly, flicking the whip against the floor again and again. Chad sensed a terrible relish in the man’s deliberate approach. He radiated malevolence. His dark eyes reflected no hint of mercy.
He stood before Cindy and smiled. “Who do you serve, bitch?”
Tears were streaming down Cindy’s cheeks. “The M-Master.”
“Yessss.” The tall man sounded like a snake poised to strike. “As we all do. And you have offended the Master with your insolence. Now you pay.”
Cindy’s knees shook. “Please. Please don’t.” She was sobbing now. “I’ll do anything.” Chad wanted to look away, but he found himself unable to do so, as though some outside force compelled him to bear witness to Cindy’s indignity. The heartbreaking part of it was the strength that still
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resonat
ed in her voice. “Anything at all. You got anybody you want dead? I’ll make them dead. Use my body in any perverted, fucked-up way you want. I’ll make it better than your sick mind ever imagined. Just please don’t do this.”
The tall man laughed. “Really? How tempting.” Laughter from the guards this time. “Of course, I’m used to pleas of this nature from people in your position, but I find this interesting.” He nodded at Chad. “Would you kill him?”
Something at the center of Chad’s being went very cold. Cindy made eye contact with him and held his gaze for a period of seconds that seemed eons long. Then she looked at the tall man. “Would you approve my petition?”
The tall man’s eyes narrowed and he turned to appraise Chad more fully. He stroked his chin with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. In that moment the warden was the epitome of a Mephistophelean figure, diabolic and crafty. It was just one more unpleasant association on top of a whole heap of unpleasantness, and Chad suddenly felt very weary.
He was really and truly fucked.
The tall man seemed amused by Cindy’s gesture of ruthless self-interest. “I would consider it a second time, perhaps more favorably?
Cindy scowled. “Fuck that. You have to promise.”
Chad had to wonder what the point of that condition was-this was so clearly not a man who honored his word. His promises would be worth less than Confederate cash. And he didn’t know what to make of Cindy’s tentative acquiescence, either. He had a hard time believing she would kill him, not if he trusted the truth of the things she’d
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told him in the cell, but maybe none of that mattered anymore.
Maybe all she gave a damn about at this point was self-preservation. He strongly suspected no one survived three years in this place without making that the number-one priority of every waking moment.
So, yeah, he could see her killing him.
All of a sudden, he felt a little less detached from the situation.
A little more in imminent danger of serious harm.
He didn’t know how to deal with it. Should he protest? Beg for his life? Maybe whimper and cower like the cowardly cur he secretly feared he was. Maybe there was some other angle he was missing. Wasn’t it possible Cindy was acting, playing the angles until she could work out a way to get them out of here? The helplessness he felt was humiliating. Debilitating. He’d handled some pretty stressful situations in this business world, scenarios that called for quick thinking and an ability to solve complex problems in creative ways, and he’d come to believe he was pretty damn smooth.
Well, that self-image was all shot to hell now.
He didn’t have clue fucking one what to do.
The way the warden was eyeing him wasn’t helping matters. He looked like a serial killer sizing up a lone prostitute at two in the morning. “I’ll tell you a secret. This is a personal insight I’m giving the two of you. The thing I treasure most about my position Below is the freedom to do as I wish with my inferiors.”
He started to coil the whip. “Before I came here, I ran an office of twenty. I worked my people hard, and most of
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them did good work. Some of them, though, were slackers. Layabouts. I did my best to get rid of them, but that wasn’t so easy a proposition with the ones who’d done enough to fake their way through the probationary period. The corporate bylaws made them almost untouchable. The niggers were the worst. That affirmative-action shit made my life hell, I’ll tell you. All that red tape. All those government regulations. I can’t tell you how much it all pissed me off. I would’ve given anything to string any of those assholes up by the balls.”
He finished coiling the whip and handed it to a guard, who returned it to the peg behind the tall man’s desk. “Here …” He spread his hands wide and smiled. “I have none of those worries. Procedure?” He indicated the pile of shredded paper on his desk. “You’ve seen how much proper procedure means to me.” He addressed one of the guards. “Release the woman.” The guard took a ring of keys from his belt, unlocked the shackles around Cindy’s wrists and ankles, and moved back as she stepped away from the wall. She rubbed her wrists as she walked slowly to the center of the room. She walked straight toward Chad, making fearless eye contact with him, and came to a stop several feet in front of him.
She said, “We do what we have to do down here.” She extended an open hand and a guard slapped a baton into it. She held out her other hand and the handle of a knife was pressed into the palm. She began to advance on Chad, who was dismayed by the gladiatorial gleam in her eyes. She smiled. “It’s going to feel good to kill.”
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Chad drew in a deep, anticipatory breath.
This is it, he thought.
Ready or not, this is it.
Holy shit, say a prayer or something.
He barely perceived the rest of the warden’s monologue, but he could see Cindy was waiting for him to be done speaking. “Two more examples. Two mysteries someone else might give a damn about solving. Two people who wound up sharing a cell with you, young lady. Two people who were never signed in.”
He chuckled. “Typical administrative sloppiness. Accurate record-keeping isn’t one of our priorities. It bothered me in the beginning, when I first took this position, but now I appreciate the freedom it gives me.
“No record, no official notation of their presence, means they were never here.”
Another chuckle.
“You can think of it as a license to kill.” A pause. “Again.”
Cindy’s voice was a breathy whisper. “Thank you, dead man.”
Chad winced, bracing himself for the killing blows.
He wasn’t prepared, however, for the roar of gunfire that suddenly filled the room. He flinched and hunched his shoulders, but he didn’t seek cover-because Cindy’s stolid green eyes never wavered.
She smiled at him. “You’re okay, Chad.”
Her voice released him, and his gaze darted about the room, taking in the carnage. Three guards were dead on the floor. A fourth guard stood to his right, a 9mm pistol aimed at the still-standing warden, who was now a quivering
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mass of terror. His lanky, angular frame seemed to collapse in on itself as he fell back against the desk, his shaking hands held out before him.
“P-please … ,” he sputtered, his suddenly red eyes brimming with tears. “I can-“
Cindy was still facing Chad. “I don’t give a shit what he can do.”
Her hand, the one holding the knife, reared back.
Then, with a grace and precision worthy of a prima ballerina, she wheeled around, cocked her arm all the way back, and whipped it forward. This all occurred in the space of a heartbeat. The knife sliced through the air and flew straight and true. The tall man had time to gasp before the blade punched through one of his eyes and penetrated his brain. His hands clutched instinctively for the knife’s handle, but he was already dead. His body toppled backward, slid sideways along the desktop, and rolled to the floor.
Chad’s psyche, overloaded with violent sensory input, finally kicked his mouth back into gear. “Oh my God, I thought you were going to kill me. I thought you were going to torture me and then kill me. Oh, shit. Oh my God. Oh shit. Holy fucking shit.”
But Cindy’s smile was implacable. She exuded the calm that had left her following the tall man’s denial of her petition. “That was never going to happen, Chad. You’re too important.”
Chad cackled, a sound close to lunacy unleashed. “Yeah, you bet. Never going to happen. That’s what I thought all along.”
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He looked at the guard with the pistol.
The unlikely savior.
He was a stocky guy in his thirties. He had a thin wisp of a mustache and a receding hairline. His gaze was sturdy, and he projected the air of a man you don’t mess with, not unless you want to lose a lot of teeth. Of course, maybe some of that had something to do with the big gun his hands were wrap
ped around. The black pistol looked huge and malevolent. But, hey, at least it wasn’t pointed at them.
“So you’re in on it, too.”
Chad’s gaze shifted back to Cindy. “You really ought to tell me more about this whole revolution, conspiracy thing. You’ve been implying I’m some kind of central figure in whatever’s going on, which makes no goddamn sense, since I don’t know you people and have never set foot in this godforsaken place even once in my whole life.” He laughed again. “Call me crazy, I think I’m owed a little more of an explanation.”
Cindy clasped hands with him. “Soon, Chad, I promise.”
And then she was pulling him out of the room.
“But now we have to go.”
He staggered after her.
The guard followed them.
“Hey-“
They were proceeding down a drab hallway at a pace Chad had difficulty maintaining, and he tried to plant his feet, an attempt to bring their exodus from this place to a temporary halt. He was pissed off about being kept in the dark. He wanted answers. But Cindy’s strength again
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eclipsed his own, and he was dragged along a bit before managing to regain his footing.
“Jesus Christ, Cindy” He panted. “It’s not like I’m being unreasonable. I really did think I was about to die in there. You could’ve fucking told me about our friend here. Do you not have an ounce of compassion in you? Not one single fucking ounce? And what was up with the wait? Why wait so long to bring in the cavalry?”
The guard cleared his throat. “Had to find out how much the boss knew.”
Cindy added, “Which turned out to be not much.”
The guard grunted. “Thank God.”
They exited the building through a rear door and stood in a tunnel that vaguely resembled an underground mine shaft. Earthen walls supported by joists and beams. Chad peered down the length of tunnel he could make out, which wasn’t much-it curved and formed a blind spot. He saw something flickering-a gas lamp flame.