“You’re amazing,” she said.
Bobby-Leigh didn’t know how to respond. It was impossible to focus with all the catcalls and violent threats being hurled at them. She didn’t know how Jen was doing it, but she did know that whatever it was she was doing to keep calm in the middle of this was the reason she was not berserking out. You’re the one who’s amazing, she thought, seconds before a man’s hand found one of the rings on Bobby-Leigh’s dog collar choker and snapped a chain on her.
Is that a fucking leash? was all she had time to think before it was yanked and back she tumbled toward the bars. In the next seconds, the leash got help. First one strong hand grabbed her. Then the one became two, then three, then four, until there were so many hands pawing at her she couldn’t isolate them individually anymore. They pinned her hands up against the bars before she could get her secret weapon out. They pinched and squeezed. They poked. Her jumper-skirt was ripping. Fingers were staring to push their way toward places she did not want fingers to go.
Jennifer’s eerie, almost creepy calmness no longer seemed so amazing to Bobby-Leigh. Suddenly that calm smile seemed more dangerous to her than if her sister had lost control and berserked out right then and there. As the hands of the men tore at her, intent on violating anything of the little girl’s they could get inside of, Jennifer watched from her happy place as if she had no intention of helping. Humiliated and seconds away from being violated right there through the bars, Bobby-Leigh thought she understood the horrible truth behind those brilliant-green eyes—there was simply nothing her sister could do for her at this time. She felt erect penises brush and bump into her now exposed skin from behind. Her panties were ripped away. Bobby-Leigh closed her eyes and screamed.
* * *
It had taken Jennifer a long time to finally find her way to a place of transcendence above the physical brutality she and her sister were up against. She’d stepped outside herself as the cable netting closed around them back out on Highway 1, but it wasn’t enough to keep the monster inside her in check for long. She could feel the chemistry of her body shifting and stirring, trying to wake up the blinding rage that would wash out all other experiences for her until it had run its course.
The part of her mind that was still connected to her body was meditating like she had been for years. That was the easy part, the familiar part, the part she knew the limits of. But there was more to what she’d been learning than basic Transcendental Meditation, and this was the first time she’d really had a chance to test the out-of-body self-projection strategies Uncle Allen had suggested she study up on. She’d spent thousands of hours training herself to self-project and could at times certainly achieve something like an out-of-body experience. Unfortunately, every one of those successes had been in a private, calm space. Not under duress. Not tangled in metal cabling. Not en route to Blood City.
The experience was much like manually focusing a camera lens with a very shallow depth of field. Micro-adjustments of less than a single millimeter would throw the whole image out of focus. Shaky hands. Uncontrolled breathing. A pounding heart. Everything joggled the focus ring. As the net snapped tight and pulled them into the van, Jennifer realized that she’d never achieve and maintain the focus she needed for her self-projection to be successful if she continued to try to do it manually. It was just impossible.
What she needed to do was find a way to switch this metaphoric camera into autofocus. But there had been nothing that explained how to do that in the books she’d been studying. Nobody she knew of had ever even described the split-body experience she had going for herself right now. Her guidebooks were all like photography books that walked you through how to use a camera and then explained the elements that made a good picture, but never actually described how you connected those two to produce a good picture yourself. Now she was left wondering if maybe good pictures were just accidents.
Uncle Allen had been the one to suggest she try to learn the whole out-of-body thing, but he’d never been able to do it himself. Maybe nobody ever actually has, she thought in her detached mind as the van bounced down the road toward Vedic City. Maybe everything she’d read was just fucking theoretical and she was the first person in the history of the universe to actually do it herself. There were days she thought enlightenment might actually be like that, because for all the descriptions of transcendence and bliss the old TM dudes—including her uncle Allen—talked about, for all their lectures on the power in those amazing states of bliss that can be found when the mind travels down to the very source of consciousness, for all the hopping the TM Sidhi-trained meditators did under the name of “yogic flying,” that oneness of universal consciousness, as far as she could tell, might just be something that can only be witnessed in glimpses out of the corner of your mind’s eye, not actually experienced.
How can you know, ever really know, you are actually fully experiencing something? she wondered. What does it even mean to be enlightened? And yet, as the van doors opened and the pirates pulled the netting off them through the bars, she realized that she did know those answers. Recognizing the duality of knowing without knowing for the universal truth that it was suddenly allowed her to take the next step and switch the focus on her out-of-body self-projection from manual to automatic. Ironically, just like the authors of her books, she couldn’t have explained how the mechanics and the result were connected either. They just were. You had to experience it to understand it. You had to be doing it to be able to learn it.
So, as she felt the hands of the man on her—the bastard her sister would momentarily be ripping the flesh from with her teeth—as she felt him pulling her against the bars of their cage by her breasts, as she felt the adrenaline explode inside her and push her inner chemistry past the tipping point, as she felt herself falling into the fugue berserker state she’d been so terrified of, she just flipped the switch in her consciousness. It was effortless. Her inability to articulate the hows and whys of it all did not impend her implementation of it in the slightest. Her focus fluttered for a split second and then, with an almost audible snap, sharpened automatically to perfection and stayed that way.
In an instant there was no stress. She was perfectly calm. The adrenaline pump in her brain shut off. The monster inside her rolled over and settled back into its precarious slumber. Effortlessly, she turned and moved out of the weakened grip of her assailant and watched as he fell back. She smiled as her sister spit out the big chunk of his flesh and scrabbled to her arms.
You are amazing, Jen thought, or said. It was hard to tell which in her current state. She watched as the crowd of evil men drew in around them. She watched as the man who had assaulted her was assaulted himself and shamed away into the coming cold dusk of the day. She watched one of the men get a hold of the collar around her sister’s neck and snap on a chain. She watched her get dragged against the cage wall, her hands trapped, making it impossible for her to defend herself. She watched as the groping, disgusting hands seemed to give birth to more and more of the same. She watched as Bobby-Leigh’s jumper-skirt started to tear. She watched as the little girl’s panties were ripped off her body and the evil men’s cocks started getting pulled out, stoked into erections, and pressed against Bobby-Leigh’s exposed skin. She watched as her sister closed her eyes and screamed.
She looked at the beautiful whiteness of her sister’s teeth, and marveled that even in all this violence and filth and evil, her teeth could be so perfect. But even in her nearly transcendent state, she’d reached the point where she couldn’t just watch anymore—not when she could act.
Like a switch, she flipped the focus button in her mind and snapped out of it—or back into it, as the case may be. Still in control of her inner demon but no longer floating away and above herself on a cloud of bliss, she pulled her own karambit blade from its hiding spot and started to cut.
* * *
When an erect penis is severed from the body of the man who
was once attached to it, the spray of blood is not at all like a fire hose, as folks often think it would be. It is actually more akin to a water balloon exploding. The blood supply is ample, but the pressure, once released, is just not anything like what causes an arterial blood spray. This fact turns the mere seconds it takes to bleed out when folks have their jugulars severed into several minutes when their erect penises are removed. If the man in question kept a level head after the impromptu penectomy and was able to stop the bleeding and put the removed organ on ice, surgeons would most likely be able to reattach the member, just like if it was a finger.
Vedic City did not have any surgeons, but even if the blood pirates had set up the most pristine surgical center possible in post-apocalyptic Iowa and filled it with the most highly decorated staff and the most sophisticated equipment money and violence could procure, not a single one of the bastards trying to rape Bobby-Leigh would have been able to get their cocks put back on. The chaos and confusion, to say nothing of the screaming and yelling, that followed Jennifer’s extremely targeted cutting left those motherfuckers’ dicks simply lying in the bloody mud to be trampled on by the crowd.
The men who were once attached to those penises didn’t fare much better. Falling to the ground in horror, they were also trampled in the bedlam. All three men bled out and died before anybody realized what had actually happened. And even then, not a single pirate in the jeering crowd actually saw Jen’s knife. All they saw was the big (hot) sister rush to the little (creepy) one and start to pull her away from the onslaught of rapists groping her from the other side of the bars. Then, as far as any of them could tell, dicks just started exploding and falling off.
The prevailing theory on the cause of the apocalypse among the blood pirates had up to that point been Who gives a flying fuck? But the old cultural and religious roots still ran deep even in these ungodly men. Not a man among them would have questioned the theory that berserkers were, in fact, demon possessed, nor for that matter would they have questioned a more scientific explanation. It had not been in their dark natures to wonder about the hows and the whys of things. Up until then, they’d existed only to take and to hurt—so much so that folks might even have said the blood pirates, not the berserkers, were the demonic agents of this particular apocalypse. But when penises seemingly just started to fall off of their own accord, leaving their rapist owners to bleed out screaming, suddenly it seemed there was an answer to the pirates’ prevailing Who gives a fuck question. Suddenly each and every one of them gave a very big flying fuck, because as it turns out, nothing makes a man start asking questions like lopping off the cock of the man next to him.
As the men realized that several of their own had just lost their fun sticks right as the fuck party was about to get started, and the dots between those losses and their attempted violation of Bobby-Leigh got connected in their brains, a stunned calm swept through the crowd. Abruptly, no man there any longer dared to take the risk of losing his manhood to what they all suddenly and collectively concluded could only be magic.
“Witches!” one screamed at them, already retreating.
“Witches!” another echoed.
It would take less than an hour for almost every single person in Vedic City to hear a version of the “witch girl” incident, and in turn pass it on with a few new, fantastic embellishments above and beyond what had happened. By the time the story got back to Beverly, the witch girls had gone from victims to perpetrators and the attempted gang rape had become a mass seduction wherein the sisters had lured ten poor, unsuspecting pirates in by stripping themselves naked and performing some kind of ritualized satanic lesbian sex act—a sex act that cast a spell on anybody there, a spell that would make any man’s penis that grew erect explode if he watched. From the common threads of the various ridiculous descriptions given of these witch girls, Beverly put together that the story could only be about the Kessler sisters, whom she knew with a good amount of certainly were not witches in any way.
“How many boys lost their dicks?” she asked the two men in front of her for the second time.
“At least ten,” one man said.
“I think it was more like fifteen,” said the other.
The blood bag she was swapping with was almost empty. The Man-in-Charge was still out learning to fly with Brennachecke. She knew that if the girls were significantly harmed the old solider would refuse to continue the flying lessons the MIC was so excited about. She might get to kill the old man then, or better yet pit him against one of the berserkers in the arena. But then the MIC would be all pouty, and she hated dealing with that shit. Absently she wondered (as she often did when the Man-in-Charge wasn’t actually with her) how much longer it would be until she felt secure enough in her authority over the pirate army there to finally take over and just get rid of the fucking waste of good berserker blood.
Certainly not yet, but that day was coming.
She smiled and pulled the IV line out of her arm. When she got up, her bloodstained cashmere robe opened, exposing glimpses of her unnaturally youthful and toned naked body to the two men who had been summoned to explain to her what the fuck all the commotion was over.
“Alright, then, let’s go see what these two little fuck-cunts have to say for themselves,” she said.
The men hesitated.
“What? Are you morons fucking afraid of them too?” she asked, her tone sharp with ridicule.
Neither man answered, but neither one moved either, which in its own way was answer enough. For all the positive effects berserker blood bestowed upon those who swapped it out with their own, patience was not one of them. Beverly desperately wanted each and every man in her pirate army to unquestionably obey any and all commands she gave. Every little hesitation was an affront to her position and more evidence of the fact she was constantly hoping would change in her favor: the men in Vedic City as a whole were simply not yet willing to follow her. It was just another reminder that even though she had actually ruled Vedic City from behind the scenes for some time now—the MIC really being just her little lapdog at the end of the day—the perception of the men she wanted dominion over was that she was just a blood-hungry whore.
A familiar anger filled her temples, making her head hurt, but she knew what would calm her impatient soul. These two assholes just needed a little demonstration of her authority. After all, she thought, there is only one woman in Vedic City with enough real power to cut off a man’s cock and throw it away like the useless thing it is. And it wasn’t the fucking Kessler bitches. It was her, goddamn it.
Her hand reached out and snatched the closest man’s hair. With the added strength from just having swapped blood, the small yank she gave was enough to pull the man off balance and drop him to his knees in front of her. She buried both her hands in his thick hair and smiled down at him.
“There is only one woman in this city you ever need to be afraid of,” she said and twisted the man’s head savagely to the right, snapping his neck. As his body crumpled lifelessly onto the floor, she looked up at the other man, her wicked smile never wavering.
“You do know who that woman is, right?” she asked the man who still lived.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said instantly, his fear now secured away in the right place.
“Good. Now take me to those little cunts you morons think have magic powers.”
There was no hesitation this time. Beverly was, at least for the moment, satisfied. She was actually excited to see the girls. So what if she couldn’t allow herself to hurt them physically? She could still sure as hell wipe the stupid innocence Brennachecke had so endeavored to safeguard in them off their pretty, stupid little faces. Since most of the folks that were snatched from the highway who didn’t turn out to have berserker blood flowing through their veins got left to the men as party favors, a reward for following orders, she had very few people to show off to when it came to all the work she’d put into
the place. None of her people appreciated the cold precision she’d applied to Vedic City’s operations. None of them appreciated the recruitment trials she’d started up. In the few years she’d been secretly running the show, their band of pirates had grown from fewer than a hundred to almost a thousand. And she’d been the one who got the power turned back on. Sure, electricity wasn’t in all the buildings yet, but they had lights and hot water in the Raj almost 24/7, which was a significant improvement over the daylight emergency power shit they’d started with. She was the life force behind their current strength. She was the unappreciated proud mama bear of a literal army of degenerate cubs.
Hell, if I hadn’t been there, she thought, the MIC probably would have just fucking killed Brennachecke when he’d showed up asking about the Kessler girls. So if they did end up getting airborne, she’d get to take credit for making that happen too. In short, she was a little light in the public-affirmation-and-awe department and was looking forward to collecting on some long-overdue bragging rights.
* * *
“Fucking witches!”
The crowd of men around the girls’ cage had shifted from lecherous to fearful and angry. Jennifer and Bobby-Leigh hadn’t decided yet if that was actually a good thing or not. Nobody was reaching in to molest or violate them, but as the number of men grew, so did the boldness of the mob. Rapists were frankly easier to fight against.
A rock bounced off the bars and landed just inside. This wasn’t the first thing that had been thrown at them since Jen had saved her sister from being fucked against her will, but it was the first thing to make it inside the cage. The crowd was a swirling, ever-shifting mass of male bodies. Jen kept expecting to get used to the smell of blood and body odor and shit (both of her now dickless victims had emptied their bowels as they bled out, and nobody seemed to care enough to remove their bodies, much less clean the mess up). It was impossible to identify who was throwing things at them. And even if they could see who it was, it was not like they were in a position to do much about it.
Transcendence: Chronicles from the Long Apocalypse: Book One Page 23