Transcendence: Chronicles from the Long Apocalypse: Book One

by Benjamin Wilkins

  Despite the impending violence, Jennifer Kessler felt in complete control. Whatever she’d discovered in the out-of-body self-projection she’d experienced while doing her TM practice under duress remained with her still. She could feel the focus ring of the lens inside her mind, and though she was back to manually controlling the field of view, she’d now have her finger on the auto button at all times and she knew she could flip it in a heartbeat if required. It was a powerful feeling after being at the mercy of losing control over what hid beneath for so long. If Jimmy had only lived another couple days, she found herself thinking, he might have never been in danger at all. It was a thought that weighed heavily on her heart, but those private, self-reflected lamentations would have to wait for quieter, calmer times to be addressed. Things were about to escalate—Jen could feel it in the air, and one look at Bobby-Leigh told her she could feel it too.

  “Burn them!” somebody in the mob shouted.

  “That’s not very original,” Bobby-Leigh said under her breath.

  She was pissed. The near gang rape wasn’t what was bothering her, though—at least not on the level at which she was mentally processing things; Jen cutting those fucks’ dicks off and leaving them to bleed out and shit themselves went a long way to even that particular score for her. But her clothes, and the image of herself that went with them, had been her armor against the evil in the world and had taken a long time to put together. Now her whole outfit was all torn to shit. Even her panties were ripped and hanging off her. To make matters worse, they’d taken her ax in the van, so now she was facing down these bastards with her ass literally and figuratively in the wind.

  Where am I going to find another outfit? she screamed in her own head. It had taken her almost a year to collect the pieces of this one. A fucking year! The gothic-subgenre anime styling she’d managed to pull off with the combination of the knee-high stockings and the vintage lacy jumper-skirt would have made Japan’s Harajuku girls proud. But now this witty (and creepy) juxtaposition of Lolita, death, and innocence, which she had cultivated so painstakingly and wrapped up her mental image of herself so completely in, had been literally torn away. She was exposed. Vulnerable. Cold as hell. And she didn’t like it one bit.

  Bobby-Leigh was pissed, but she was not afraid. Jen seemed to have conquered the beast within her, and for Bobby-Leigh, that monster had been the only thing she was really afraid of. Not because it could kill her, but because whenever it got out, somebody or something Jen loved died—and she was pretty much the only thing her sister had left. Men with their nasty erections and probing fingers bled and died easily enough. Fire could be put out, burns treated, bullet holes sewn shut. Thoughts of pain, even death, didn’t make her lose any sleep. Those were just physical changes to the body. But the soul-crushing aftermath of Jen feeling responsible for what the berserker did? Any more of that would completely and irrevocably break her sister’s heart, and the fear of that is what kept Bobby-Leigh up at night—especially now that she knew she was too weak to put Jen down like she’d asked her to. As long as the berserker could stay locked away, Bobby-Leigh didn’t think she’d ever be afraid again.

  Fearlessness begot confidence and confidence begot peace. Peace in turn begot faith. This was not where she and Jen would die; though all evidence pointed to the contrary, she just knew it in her heart. So as a torch appeared in the crowd and was thrust between the bars and the pirate mob screamed for them to burn in hell, she just smiled. Jen shot her a look, eerily calm herself, and whipped her jacket off in a smooth motion. She deftly wrapped it around the torch as it came clumsily at them, smothering the flame.

  The crowd roared, but, before they could do anything else, Beverly showed up and put a stop to the craziness. Bobby-Leigh was right; today was not the day they would die. However, in the grand scheme of the universe no promises could be made about tomorrow. Death was coming and the Reaper wasn’t nearly as picky as folks tended to think he was.

  * * *

  A short time after she first bedded the MIC, Beverly had christened herself the Blood Queen, but up to now, at least as far as she knew, nobody had ever actually referred to her that way. Even the MIC refused to call her that, and he was wrapped pretty tightly around her little finger. As she approached the holding cage with the Kessler sisters in it, she marveled to herself how ridiculously superstitious her army of chanting, fear-mongering morons was.

  Could this be the opportunity she’d been looking for to establish her Blood Queen title with the men? A little shock and awe in the face of this collective hysteria might just bring the whole thing together.

  She stood back quietly and observed.

  Too scared of losing their penises to witchcraft, the idiots had settled on cautiously pushing a long torch into the cage in an utterly idiotic attempt to light Jennifer Kessler on fire. If they got their heads out of their asses and actually managed to do something that stood a snowball’s chance in hell of actually working, she’d have to step in and pull the little cunt out, but so far that seemed unlikely.

  The pretty teen is just as smart as she is fuckable, Beverly thought and smiled as she watched Jen deftly smother the flames of the ridiculous torch with her jacket. Her men, however, were decidedly not as smart. Beverly was no stranger to the fact that fear of the unknown makes folks stupid in ways that can seem unbelievable to more rational minds, but she’d never seen anything like this before. There was a gasp from the mob as the torch failed to light the girl on fire.

  “The devil protects his own!” a man screamed.

  Beverly mentally made a note of who the shouter was so she could deal with him later—some assholes were just too stupid to be allowed to continue living. She then stepped forward into the crowd and held up her hands.

  “Gentlemen!” she shouted in a voice that left no room to doubt who was in charge. “These girls are under my protection. They belong to me. Your Blood Queen. Any man here who would dare contaminate their virtue; any man here who would dare mark their flesh, spill their blood, fuck those soft, delicious holes of theirs; any one of you who would so much as take a single hair off one of their young heads will”—she smiled and paused for effect—“will no longer be a man.”

  The mob was silent.

  The sisters were silent.

  Beverly had everybody right where she wanted them.

  Why does that woman look so familiar? both Jen and Bobby-Leigh wondered as Beverly continued to slowly approach them. Her open robe fluttered in the cold, though her naked skin didn’t seem to feel it.

  “Beverly?” Jen said breathlessly, utterly shocked.

  Beverly smiled in acknowledgment.

  “They call me the Blood Queen here,” she said and as the pirates gathered around the cage started whispering to one another, her self-bestowed title suddenly became a reality. The satisfaction she felt hearing it murmured by the morons of her pirate army was disappointingly underwhelming. Still, it was a box that had to be checked on the grand list of things she needed to do before she dared publicly assert her leadership and rout the MIC from power.

  “Understand the words of your Blood Queen,” she said to the mob. “Hear and obey, or I will separate you from your cock, and your life, just as these men here have been.” She pointed to the dead men with shit in their pants and their dicks no longer attached. “These two little girls are not witches. They have no special powers. They cannot hurt you.”

  She turned to the sisters and winked conspiratorially at them, as if she was doing them a favor by making them seem harmless. Though that was hardly the primary purpose of her words or the intention behind claiming their perceived magical powers as her own, she was in fact doing them a favor. Rendering the Kessler girls harmless would save them as much as it would put Beverly in a better position and set the foundation of her title as Blood Queen in the morons’ minds. It was a win-win.

  “But there is one woman here who can hur
t you,” she continued, turning back to the mob. “Is there a man here too stupid to know who that woman is? Well, I’ll spell it out for you just the same. I am the one you should fear around here. Me, your Blood Queen, and only me. Fail to understand that, boys, and you’ll experience a suffering that these poor dead, lecherous fools would only envy. Got it?”

  Nobody there doubted a word she said, except for maybe Jennifer and Bobby-Leigh, who didn’t so much doubt Beverly’s words as much as they just didn’t understand what was happening.

  “Doubt me at your own peril, gentlemen,” Beverly repeated, just to drive the point home one last time. Then she grabbed the pirate closest to her—a scrawny, long-haired man who didn’t look like he could grow facial hair—and pulled him to her. Beverly was strong, but it was fear that brought the man to his knees in front of her, fear that made the Blood Queen’s loins burn with lust. For the first time, she felt like she might truly have power over these men. She smiled at him as he quaked under her gaze.

  “Open it.”

  The Blood Queen’s command was almost immediately obeyed.

  The cage door came crashing down. Beverly beckoned to the girls. Jen looked at her sister, for the first time truly seeing the tattered remnants of her clothing and just how close she had been to being raped right in front of her. Tears filled her eyes, but she fought them back. Bobby-Leigh locked eyes with her as she shivered in the cold. The little girl was angry, defiant, and totally confused by what had just happened. Neither girl knew what to expect next. Every ounce of Jen’s being told her Beverly could not be trusted, and yet she had put an end to the violence against them and secured their release.

  Back in town, before Beverly had disappeared and had been presumed dead, before Bobby-Leigh had drawn blood for the first time in that back room at Walmart, before her beloved Jimmy had been beaten to death by the demon inside her, Jen had not really known the woman who was now calling herself the Blood Queen. In fact, she’d been such an insignificant part of their lives while under Brennachecke’s care that Bobby-Leigh still didn’t recognize her beyond a nagging feeling that something about her was familiar.

  Cautiously the Kessler girls exited their confinement and entered the unknown. As they stepped free of the cage, Beverly stepped between them and put an arm around each and led them away.

  “Let’s get you cleaned up. And then, oh my God, girls, have I got some amazing things to show you.”

  “Aren’t you cold?” Bobby-Leigh asked under her breath in a tone that implied the real meaning of her words was more like Go fuck yourself.

  Beverly smiled at the little girl with her jackal smile and thought about how much fun she was going to have bathing in her virgin blood after this little charade of politeness came to an end. Brennachecke was going to die. These two little ungrateful cunts were going to die. The MIC was going to die. The Blood Queen’s time was coming.

  As they entered the lower-level restaurant of the Raj, the coy flurries of falling snow that had been playing hard to get all day finally stopped their teasing, stripped naked, and took a hit of ecstasy as serious snow began to fall.

  Holy shit, Beverly laughed to herself, it really is going to be Christmas in July.

  * * *

  “I’m going to need the knife,” Beverly said.

  They stood in the double room next to the queen-sized beds. Bobby-Leigh was wearing a Raj-branded white cotton robe over her tattered clothing. It was so long it dragged on the floor and covered her hands, but she was grateful to no longer be so utterly exposed. The Blood Queen, or Beverly, or whoever she was, obviously didn’t share Bobby-Leigh’s sense of modesty, as she hadn’t bothered to shut her robe once since she’d appeared out of nowhere in the nick of time and released them. Bobby-Leigh had never witnessed such a lack of shame around nakedness in her whole life. She wanted to interpret that lack of modesty as liberating, but she couldn’t. There was something off about Beverly that she just couldn’t shake, something dangerous just behind her eyes and at the corner of her smile. Though she’d been nothing but kind to them thus far, the Blood Queen’s refusal to cover her privates just added to that feeling that something was not right with her.

  From the emotional telepathy only siblings can understand, she knew that Jen shared her misgivings. She also knew Jen recognized the Blood Queen as somebody they knew, but for the life of her Bobby-Leigh couldn’t remember who Beverly had been. She didn’t know strategically how to respond to her demand, so she left it in her sister’s court while she tried to place this new person, who wasn’t actually new, in their lives.

  It was just the three of them in the room, but outside in the hall, four of Beverly’s more trusted personal guard stood waiting—armed, alert, and ready to kill on command. It felt like they were there to ensure the girls’ compliance as much as they were there to safeguard their virtue. But again, Bobby-Leigh wasn’t sure where those feelings were coming from.

  “What?” Jen asked. She wasn’t trying to be impertinent; the request had just caught her so off guard that she genuinely needed to hear it again to process it.

  Beverly, though, was already tired of playing nice and couldn’t help but take the question as anything but insolent. Still, she smiled and kept her tone in check. The training of all those years of hiding her true nature from the world had served her well. She could play her cards so close to her chest that folks would mistakenly think she wasn’t even in the game if she had to.

  “The knife, girls. Or are you two really witches after all?”

  Jen locked eyes with Beverly, trying desperately to read what was behind them, but aside from the general sense of untrustworthiness she’d always felt toward the woman, she couldn’t glean anything more specific. Uncle Allen’s admonition to never reveal their little weapons of last resort rang in her ears so loudly it was like he was in the room, telling her in person. It had been repeated so many times that it’d become instinctual to the point she felt physically ill at the thought of handing it over to someone, much less someone she was almost certain was at best not trustworthy and at worst . . . Fuck me, she thought, the possibilities are endless.

  “Why do you need it?”

  “You know why.”

  “I don’t.”

  “We can’t have you cutting any more dicks off while you’re here.”

  “As long as everybody keeps ’em in their pants, that won’t be an issue.”

  “It’s a security threat, dear.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Bobby-Leigh burst out. “You’ve got four dudes with, like, automatic weapons in the hallway, and you’re worried about—”

  “One little knife?!” Jen finished, cutting her sister off before she could say anything that would reveal there was more than one weapon between the two of them. Bobby-Leigh looked at Jen and immediately got the play her sister was making.

  “I know it doesn’t seem fair,” Beverly soothed. “But I promise, as long as you’re under my protection you have nothing to fear. Frankly, girls, there’s really no reason for you to have a weapon here at all. I, on the other hand, do have things I have to, need to, be afraid of. That’s why my boys have the guns. They’ll protect you with them too. That’s their orders, you can be sure of that.

  “But one of those things that I am afraid of is that you’ll have some kind of misguided overreaction if you should see something that doesn’t agree with you while you’re here. And I just can’t risk that. Pretty big fires can get started with the tiniest of little sparks. I’ve seen it. Hell, you girls just saw it for yourselves.”

  “What kind of things would we see that wouldn’t agree with us?” Bobby-Leigh asked, now morbidly, genuinely curious.

  “Let’s just say there’s a number of philosophical differences between how the Man-in-Charge and I run things here, compared to how that goody-goody Brennachecke manages your little group of pack rats.”

  “We�
�re not part of his group anymore.”

  “Really?” Beverly said, desperately trying to contain the cutting sneer that wanted to ride out on her words and cut the little bitch down. Then why is the old bastard risking his life to teach us how to fly just for a chance to get you two bitches back into the fold?

  “We had a falling out,” Jen said vaguely.

  “It’s none of my business,” Beverly said. “That knife of yours, however, is. This is only temporary, I’ll give it back as soon as I’m convinced you two have a strong enough stomach to handle what we do here.”

  Beverly smiled her jackal smile.

  Jen smiled back.

  Bobby-Leigh didn’t smile at all.

  The silence stretched out and out between the two girls and the woman until it engulfed them. Beverly’s smile spread from her lips to the corners of her eyes as genuine satisfaction bloomed inside her. It was so much more of a challenge to manipulate women, especially girls, than it was to manipulate boys and men. She could tell that Jen’s instincts were screaming at her not to trust anything Beverly said. She could tell that the young woman was hiding something more than just the knife. There was a real legitimate battle of wits happening here behind their smiles and their words. It was exhilarating. She’d still kill them in the end, of course, but for now she was relishing the change of pace.

  With boys and men, sex was almost always, one way or another, an effective weapon. Given enthusiastically, promised but repeatedly withheld, offered to a rival instead, allowed to be taken by force—there was always a way to use sex to influence those who peed standing up. Beverly was a master at it. It was easy. In fact, just having her robe open the way she did was enough to give her an edge in almost every interaction she had here in Vedic City—an edge that no doubt was instrumental in her survival. She knew very well that her numerous lies and acts of duplicity would have been long ago detected had the men around her not been so distracted by the constant brazen full-frontal view of her naked, toned, and seductive body.