But with girls, that all went out the window. Even lesbians didn’t respond to seeing somebody they wanted to have sex with naked the way men did. She supposed that was because when women got aroused their blood didn’t need to fill up an entire cock, just the button of their clit, and so the extra was left to rush to their brains, which in turn must make them more perceptive.
Fucking lesbians, Beverly thought, as her mind began to wander in the tension of the silence. This difficulty staying focused was happening more and more to her, but like always she blew it off as boredom instead of connecting it to its true cause, which was of course the ever-increasing amount of berserker blood she swapped into her veins. The fact was she was anything but bored. She wanted to just reach out and slap the little bitch and see what would happen, but knowing Jen had somehow managed to cut the dicks off three men without anybody seeing it happen, and then conceal the tool she’d used to do it, kept her in check. The Kessler girls had already proven themselves worthy of a certain amount of guarded respect. Beverly was not one to underestimate folks.
Finally Jen sighed in that unique way only an American teenage girl can and rolled her eyes as she said, “Fine. Give her the knife, Bobby-Leigh.”
“Really?”
Jen knew that Bobby-Leigh wasn’t actually questioning her but was just playing along with the ruse. She was proud of how quick her sister was. They’d need to be quick, she thought, if whatever was happening in this place might really drive them to resort to their sacred secret weapons—or weapon, as the case may be now. She knew perfectly well that the only way they’d get Bobby-Leigh’s knife back was if Beverly was dead. But she could live with that. She’d give her sister hers if she needed to.
“Yeah, give it up.”
Bobby-Leigh reached into the folds of the too-large robe she was wearing and from someplace Beverly couldn’t fathom the location of, she pulled out the surgically sharp karambit blade and flipped it open. There was a soft click as the knife locked into place, ready to be of service. An almost uncontrollable, instinctual urge to launch herself forward and plunge the knife into the woman’s jugular suddenly threatened to overtake her, but Bobby-Leigh managed to convert all that distrustful bloodlust into a jackal smile of her own. She handed the weapon over, hilt first.
“Well, now aren’t you a little magician,” Beverly said, still trying to figure out where the girl had hidden the knife on her person. She took the weapon and admired it for a second. It was perfect in its design. Beverly instantly decided she’d follow the little girl’s lead and keep it on her, hidden, as a weapon of last resort. Her promise to return it was forgotten without a second thought.
“We’ve got hot water and heat. Clean yourselves up. I’ll see about finding you some new clothes and have some food sent up. Make yourselves at home in here. Brennachecke is going to insist on seeing that you’re okay once they get back from the airport, which should be any—”
“Brennachecke wants us dead,” Bobby-Leigh said, cutting Beverly off. “Or at least he wants my sister dead.” Jen smiled and shrugged, revealing nothing beyond the feigned flippant attitude of an ordinary American teenage girl.
“Interesting,” the Blood Queen said and smiled. “Well, fear not, ladies. My protection of you here is against any kind of violence from any man, Brennachecke included. And it is absolute. I’ll cut his cock off myself if he tries anything.”
Jen and Bobby-Leigh couldn’t tell if Beverly was being serious or if the threat to their surrogate father was just hyperbole. Had anybody else said it, it would have been an obvious exaggeration, but with this woman who called herself the Blood Queen it didn’t feel like an overstatement.
Jen knew full well that Brennachecke intended to take her life, and yet the idea of this woman hurting him, especially in her and her sister’s name, for some reason made her sick to her stomach. The thought of her own karambit blade hidden in its secret spot against her flesh stirred so vividly that she could suddenly feel the knife’s pressure against her skin. Unbidden, her mind tossed out a clear picture of herself saving the man who was coming to kill her, by killing the woman who had saved them. The image was a very, very satisfying one, but try though she might, she couldn’t make any sense of why.
Chapter Nine
The Cuckold on the Other Side of the Glass
Dan shivered in the darkness as he looked through his faint reflection in the one remaining window of the little airport, out toward the road to Vedic City. He couldn’t believe it was snowing outside, really snowing, like Fire up the damn snowplows and get those roads clear or folks aren’t going to be able to get to work in the morning kind of snowing—not that folks were going to work anymore, or that there was anybody left to drive the plows even if there had still been folks who needed to use the roads.
He also couldn’t believe Brennachecke hadn’t given him more detailed instructions. Can the flying lessons even continue in this? he wondered. When Brennachecke had left with his little band of pirate flight students just a few hours ago, he’d convinced himself that he should go into Vedic City and find out what the hell was going on. But now, with the snow tumbling out of the sky like it was February instead of July, he wasn’t so sure.
First of all, he would leave tracks. If the snow continued coming down like it was, that wouldn’t really matter; they’d all get covered and nobody would be the wiser. But if it stopped . . . And it had to stop; it was the middle of summer after all, so surely no amount of climate craziness could produce this radical a change from the norm for any kind of extended period of time—or could it? If it stopped, then he’d end up leaving a trail right back here and fuck up the entire plan. Assuming that the plan was still the plan.
And even if the snow didn’t stop, and his tracks were covered up, it was maybe twenty degrees outside. God knows what that became when you factored in the windchill. Dan was prepared for a couple of cold July nights—nights in the forties, or even the high thirties. He had a solid jacket and some thick canvas hunting pants, but they were hardly enough to weather a freak blizzard for a significant amount of time. He knew his hands would be too cold to accurately shoot his bow with any kind of speed by the time he got across the cornfield and into Vedic City, never mind by the time he actually found anything out. He had a knife, but using it as a weapon under the circumstances was a bad joke.
What do you call the man who brings a knife to a gunfight?
A dead man. Ha, ha, ha. (Not.)
“Fuck me,” he muttered to himself and turned away from the glass, just as unsure about what to do as he’d been an hour ago.
* * *
“It’s not impossible, but it’s a lot harder,” Brennachecke said, looking out the library window of the Raj over the little balcony and at the freak July snowstorm hell-bent on covering the ground with white. “The cold makes your engine harder to manage, at least initially. Stiffens the rest of the plane up. But the ice is the real problem, and the wind, of course.”
The Man-in-Charge frowned. This was not what he wanted to hear. The powerful effects of the berserker blood he was swapping out as they talked about the next session of Brennachecke’s flight school didn’t actually do much to settle his tingling nerves. Flying was exhilarating. The idea of stopping because of a little snow was so ridiculous he wanted to scream and break things.
As gravity pulled the stolen red AB blood down from the IV bag and into his spiked vein, his frown deepened and deepened. He preferred AB to O when it came to swapping. The universal donor essence of type O blood felt cheap to him. It couldn’t be as good if anybody could use it. AB, on the other hand, would kill, or least really fuck up, anybody with another blood type. It was special. It made him special. Swapping with AB made him feel so much better than just settling for O. Or at least he thought it did. Both made him stronger. Both healed his wounds. Both filled him with confidence. And he was feeling strong and healthy and confident. But AB mad
e him less frustrated. Calmer. More in control. Or at least he thought it did.
He looked again at the bag hanging next to him and at the big handwritten letters on it, confirming for the third time that this was AB and not O. Maybe it wasn’t any better after all. He just didn’t know anymore. The MIC was not the kind of man that typically wondered these kinds of things, and so the very fact that he had these questions only made it all worse. He wordlessly motioned to the attendant who was doing the blood work to set him up with another bag. The man set to work on it immediately without needing any further clarification, but the MIC needed more than just a new bag of blood, so he grabbed him and dragged him over to his side and whispered something in his ear.
Brennachecke turned and looked at the MIC just as the private instructions were ending. He felt the hairs on the back of his neck prick up. “I can still go over procedures and we can work in the plane on the ground, inside a hangar or something, but there’s just no way I safely put you in the air until this stops.”
The MIC nodded, but said nothing.
The man seemed distracted, and Brennachecke didn’t know if that was something that would end up being in his favor or not. What he did know was that he needed to check in on the Kessler sisters. Since they’d landed, Brennachecke had not seen any indication the MIC had made it clear to anybody other than the men who had actually picked the girls up that they were to be left alone. Would the message have been reliably passed on? he wondered. Not likely. He had no gun and no knife anymore. In the plane he had had leverage. He could easily enough just crash the thing and kill everybody; none of the pirates, the MIC included, knew enough yet to stop him from doing it. But they were not in the plane anymore, and Dan was back at the airport being snowed in more and more with each minute that passed.
Brennachecke was at the mercy of the deal they’d made. Deals made with less than honorable men even in the best of times tended to be trouble—and these were anything but the best of times. He felt sick to his stomach at the thought of what could be happening to Jennifer and her sister right now under his very nose. He still intended on putting a bullet in Jen’s head at some point soon, but he didn’t want her to suffer before he did it—or after, for that matter.
“I need to see those girls.”
“You need to figure out how to keep our little fight school up and running in the weather,” the MIC said as the attendant slipped out of the room.
“I told you what I can do down here,” the old soldier said. “I’m sure the snow won’t last and we’ll be back in the air in no time. It’s July after all.”
“Then I’m sure it will be no time until you see your precious little cunts.”
“My concern is that they’ll be . . . damaged when I see them.”
“Then you better figure out a way for us to fly tomorrow, old man.”
Brennachecke sighed. This was the third time he’d gone through this conversation with the MIC, and the stubborn man simply would not give. He looked out the window again at the snow tumbling down from the sky and then at the four guards with AR-15s in the room with them. He didn’t even know where the girls were being held.
“Please.”
The MIC smiled sadistically. The two men’s eyes locked. Neither one liked what they saw down there in the wells of the other’s soul.
* * *
“Screw it,” Dan said. “Screw it, screw it. Screw. It.”
He opened the door and marched out into the snow, hoping to God that he was not making the biggest mistake of his life, but also not really caring anymore if he was. This plan of Brennachecke’s had been risky to begin with, and that was before the snow started falling. Maybe the pirates would think his tracks were a deer’s. Surely they were not that stupid, but maybe Dan would get lucky. He was due for some luck. Long overdue, actually, he thought. Of course, that wasn’t how luck worked, so far as such a thing existed, and Dan knew it. As far as he understood it, luck was just a selective viewing of random chance happenings. Folks just didn’t recognize the randomness over the emotional power of the “lucky” event.
“Success and failure are in the hands of God, my love, not your own.” The words were his mother’s. They suddenly came to him unbidden and without any love behind them.
“Yeah, that’s why you’re dead and I’m not,” he muttered in response to himself, feeling colder on the inside because of it. God didn’t fucking save you in the end, he thought as the emotional shreds of his mother’s passing stirred up around him like leaves in a whirlwind.
“Yes, my love. He did. He took me just as he took all the faithful of His children to live forever by His side in heaven. It’s you and the other sinners He left behind to fend for yourselves in hell.”
“Shut up, Mom.”
It didn’t matter anyway. Lucky or not. Good idea or bad one. Blessed by the Lord or cursed. Dan needed some answers, and he was going to get them. The snow was accumulating fast. Each time Dan looked back as he made his way through the cornfield that separated the airport from Vedic City, there was a little less of a trail for somebody to follow. He smiled in the cold.
* * *
Beverly was already on her way there when the stitched-mouthed attendant found her and passed on the message, which he’d written on a page in a small notebook as he looked for her, that the MIC wanted to see her in the library. She came in and closed the door behind her, smiling as she watched Brennachecke and the MIC staring each other down. For a moment, she just enjoyed having secrets. Then she went to her lover’s side.
This had been one of the best days she’d had in years. Strides forward had been made in the preparations for her coup. The Kessler girls had proven themselves to be powerful and intelligent and she was excited to have beaten them into giving up the knife, and even more excited about the idea of bathing in their blood. Then again, she considered now, if she did decide to let them live, the idea of twisting and molding their young and naive little minds into her own sinister tools for maintaining power was pretty exciting too. Her dreams felt so close. But then, as if the MIC could tell his demise was imminent and knew he needed to remind her who was in control, the rug was suddenly yanked out from under Beverly’s feet.
“Suck it,” the MIC said to her as he continued to stare Brennachecke down.
“The Kessler girls are—” Beverly began proudly, not hearing what the man had said, or even registering the fact that he’d spoken in the first place.
“Suck it,” he repeated and pulled his penis from his pants, his eyes never leaving Brennachecke’s.
Beverly looked at Brennachecke, who did not break the invisible beam connecting the two men by returning her look. She smiled her jackal smile. This time it was coy and seductive, as if to say the performance she was about to give was really for his benefit and not for the man whose penis she was about to take into her mouth. Then she placed herself between the legs of the Man-in-Charge and did what he had asked, while inside and in absolute secret she burned in both humiliation and anger. The MIC grabbed her roughly by the hair and forced himself deeper and deeper down her throat until tears filled and then dripped out of her eyes. She fought for breath, but did so elegantly, never once betraying the appearance that this was exactly what she wanted to be doing.
Brennachecke didn’t flinch. He didn’t break eye contact. He knew that somehow this juvenile, sadistic staring contest would determine if he saw the Kessler girls before he finished teaching the MIC and his pirates how to fly. Beverly was just being used as a ploy to break his attention.
Beverly, for her part, even while the MIC brutalized her mouth, understood what was happening too. This wasn’t about her. It wasn’t about sex either. Brennachecke needed to be broken and the MIC was demonstrating how powerful he was. Even as she felt his hot, slippery ejaculate wash down her throat and was tossed aside like a penny fuck whore, Beverly didn’t take it personally. She’d play the par
t, for now. Then one day soon, she’d use the karambit claw knife the Kessler girls had been so reluctant to give up to split the man from asshole to throat.
One day, she thought. Soon.
She smiled up at her abusive partner and seductively wiped her lips. As she sat on her chair, her robe open, fully exposed, she cocked her head and shot Brennachecke a look that said she’d take him that way too if he wanted. His reaction almost made the humiliation worth it for her. Almost.
The MIC had broken eye contact when he’d blown his load, but somehow because of the way he’d done it he hadn’t exactly lost the battle of wills, nor had Brennachecke exactly won. He watched as Beverly turned to the MIC and whispered in his ear like she hadn’t just been sexually assaulted by him. He laughed. She whispered some more and then she laughed herself.
“So, no flying until this fucking crazy storm passes, huh?” Beverly said to Brennachecke, absently playing with herself.
“No, not after just a single day behind the stick,” he said, wishing the woman would cover herself up and stop trying to titillate him. “Flying in weather like this takes a seriously advanced skill set.”
“Mmm,” she said. “And as long as the girls stay untouched, then you’ll teach that skill set to our people here, yes?”
“Of course, eventually, but you’ve got to start at the beginning. And that is still where we are here. Now look, I’ve made good on my end of our deal. I know you took the Kessler girls in today, we saw it happen. So I think it’s time I got to confirm that they’re okay.”
“Oh, they’re okay. Confirmed.”
“I need to see them with my own eyes.”
“Why? Don’t you trust me?”
“Not at all.”
Beverly laughed. Brennachecke and his stupid honesty was actually rather refreshing after the constant mind games she’d been playing here.
Transcendence: Chronicles from the Long Apocalypse: Book One Page 25