Dream State

by K. Z. Howell

  Kendra Mills watched as the valet drove off in her car. She knew the disappearing taillights meant that she was now committed to following through on her instructions. Even if she changed her mind she had no way to run now. The impatient porter coughed discretely, he had her overnite bag and wanted out of the cool evening air. She looked at the darkening sky for a moment before telling the porter “Room 313”. He immediately replied “Please follow me, Ma’am” before strolling off with her bag toward the lobby and the elevator to the top floor. Her instructions had come via encrypted email and had been coded to change as she viewed it. The demands from Director Hall had been very specific and equally explicit.

  She wore a very revealing dress, bright gold and slit on one side almost to her waist. Her stiletto heels matched and the ensemble gave her the look of a glamorous movie star on the red carpet. Underneath she wore the barest minimum, and it was obvious. As she crossed the flagstoned lobby, her heels clacked on the stone and drew the attention of what few guests were in the wide room. The men stared openly at her attire and even more intently at her swaying breasts, their unrestrained state underneath the sheer fabric obvious in the cool air. She was accustomed to the stares of men, her figure had been of great interest to men since her late teens when she had suddenly developed curves in all the right places. Even when she entered the elevator behind the porter and turned, she still saw several patrons looking closely at the rear view.

  As the doors closed, her mind went back to the email she had received. Director Hall had been incredibly detailed on her attire and lack thereof. Her bag contained nothing that would be considered clothing for public wear. Even her make-up kit was dictated by the spy master and was specifically chosen for its complimentary nature. She had no illusion as to why. Her superior intended to fuck her for the entire weekend. He wasn’t interested in dinner and dancing and getting to know her. Not that she cared to do any of that with him anyway. She was being coerced into being his whore and the penalty for not complying “willingly, eagerly and with a smile” as the email had put it, was something the scientist did not even want to contemplate. Her ambition had gotten her into this mess, now her body was the price she would pay to get her out.

  They reached room 313. The entire floor was made up of only 4 rooms. The Royal catered to high powered types and the third floor suites were a favorite of the discriminating power broker looking for a luxurious and discrete place to indulge his mistress or his fetishes. The porter knocked once before opening the door with his pass key. He held the door open as she passed into the room and set her small bag on a stand just inside. He didn’t wait, she heard the latch click behind him as left without a word. The foyer led straight into a large sunken room with a one way glass wall that looked out over the Virginia hills. As she stood, taking in the layout of the room she heard a splash from the large hot tub that sat in the center of the stone floored room. Director Hall had obviously been awaiting her arrival.

  He sat at the far end of the tub, the water swirled around him in sparkling waves of bursting bubbles that reflected the various colors of the light from six iron wall sconces that mimicked torches in a middle age bath house. He poured a second wine glass full from a half empty bottle on a silver tray and held it out to her.

  “Join me in the water Kendra. Just drop your dress on the chair. You won’t need it again tonight.”

  Dream State

  Chapter 8

  “Dreams live somewhere between the lie and the truth.

  The difference is solely in how one acts upon them.”

  Professor August Bench

  Stafford, Texas

  Jen leaned against the shower wall, the heat from the streaming water relieving some of the tension from the chase and the long ride. The feel of the water cascading down her body was, in some small way, a reminder that despite the hardship of the last 24 hours she was still alive. It also freed her mind from the urgency of her fight or flight mentality and sent her thoughts careening wildly through her sleep deprived mind.

  Where was Will?

  What happened at the canyon that had allowed her to escape?

  Why did a cold ball of ice form in her gut whenever her thoughts turned to her husband?

  The fear and uncertainty of his fate at the hands of the armed men that had hunted them through the desert rocks came back now. It came back with a vengeance that dropped her to her knees under the relentless stream of liquid doubt. It wasn’t until the water began to turn cold that the tears and the awful shaking ended and she could unwrap herself from her fetal position and stand on quivering legs. Her hands shook as she dried off and put on a t-shirt from her bag.

  Wills shirt.

  Even through the days of being folded in a drawer and even more stuffed into a bag, it smelled of him. The smell was at once a comfort and a curse. It brought the image of his face into sharp focus in her memory and gave her comfort in its familiar scent. It also cursed her with his absence and brought fresh saltiness to her cheeks at the missing part of her soul. She did not feel the cold, hard tile beneath her feet as she stared at the small bed. Her mind refused to tell her legs to get under the sheet and lay her head on the pillow. She ached for sleep but knew that in that sleep she would find answers and suddenly she didn’t want them. For what seemed like hours she stood, mesmerized by the thought of never sleeping again and going on in blissful ignorance. She imagined Will walking through the door, smiling ashamedly as he explained that it had all been a huge misunderstanding. That the armed men had merely been out for target practice and had no interest in the two of them. In her mind they laughed in embarrassment at their epic overreaction and many years later told their children of the silly desert adventure they had had many years before.

  It was with a sadness she could not explain that Jen drew back the sheet and lay her body on the mattress. She laid her head on the pillow, alone for the first time in 4 years.

  Palmstown Royal Suites

  Room 313

  The first time Hall had taken her hadn’t been as bad as she had feared. She had downed a half a bottle of wine in the hot tub with him while he fondled her body like a man checking out a car he was considering purchasing. When he was ready he had dragged her onto his lap and penetrated her in the water. She got the hint and rode him as best she could in the awkward position. She had tried every trick she knew to speed it up, hoping he would be satisfied with the conquest and let her move on.

  No such luck.

  He had mauled her breasts and neck with his mouth and hands while she drove herself up and down on him. Maybe it was the wine or maybe it was natural stamina, but to her it had seemed to go on forever before she felt him nearing completion. She drove harder, pushing down farther and rising higher in an attempt to get it over with.

  That’s when she got a taste of what was to come later.

  He suddenly lifted her from his body and pushed her head down, forcing himself deep into her throat. He grabbed her hair in both hands and drove himself between her lips. He didn’t care that half the time her face was under the water. Whether his intent was to kill her or simply humiliate her, her life depended on his orgasm. She sucked harder, breathing as best she could when he pulled her up above the swirling water and tightening her lips as he drove her back under. Finally, she felt him swell and used her throat muscles to push him over the edge. That nearly drowned her. He drove her down as far as he could, her nose pressed against his belly as his shaft spewed down her throat. He held her in an iron grip beneath the water until he had finished before releasing her hair and allowing her to sputter and gasp as her face came above the water again.

  Afterward, he had ignored her for a while; literally behaving as though she were not there. That suited Kendra, she wanted to be as far from her perverted boss as she could get but knew that trying to leave would be futile. She watched his erratic behavior, saw him dancing to music that wasn’t there then suddenly stopping to laugh at a joke no one had told. She sat in the water, naked
and confused for half an hour. He had not spoken or even looked at her in that time. She rose and let the water drip from her body before wrapping a too small towel around her chest and looking for the rest room.

  She stayed in the restroom too long. The pounding on the door began only a few minutes after the far too loud heavy metal music had begun blaring throughout the suite. Her boss/blackmailer must have grown impatient with the absence of his sex toy. She opened the door and flinched at the sudden feel of his hand clamping down on her am. The happy smile never left his face as his iron grip pushed and pulled her toward the king sized bed. When they reached the edge of it, his hand left her arm and pulled the towel from her upper torso, exposing her large breasts to his hungry gaze again. He held a wine glass and pressed it to her lips until she had drained it, though his red rimmed eyes never left her heaving tits. When the glass was empty he placed his hands on her shoulders and pushed her into a sitting position at the edge of the bed before picking up a small tray from the nightstand. The look on his face changed as he took the straw and snorted some crystals from its smooth surface. He offered some to her, she declined and he just shrugged, “Your loss” he said. The only words he had spoken to her in nearly two hours. She saw pills on the tray, she didn’t recognize them, small yellow and round. He took one and downed it with a swallow from his wine glass.

  Whatever it was he had snorted must have kicked in. Hall began to sway, then bounce in place to the chaotic rhythm of the music. She briefly wondered why the management hadn’t come to tell him to keep it down, but she suddenly felt different. She caught herself staring at his limp cock as he bounced to the beat. She stared, hypnotized by its movement, vaguely realizing somewhere in the back of her mind that he had put something in her wine. She could feel the pounding beat of the bass and drum as the song drove its way deeper into her brain. The screaming voice of the singer was unintelligible but commanding at the same time. She began to sway back and forth, mesmerized by the effect of moving closer and then farther from the prick that bounced in front of her eyes.

  Her reverie was short lived. He noticed her stare and stopped his spastic gyrations. She stopped staring when he stopped bouncing and looked up. He had somehow gotten the tray again from the nightstand and was snorting another pile of the crystals. This time he rolled his head back and shook like a man possessed before he set the tray on the bed beside her. She again shook her head no when he offered her the straw. His reaction was to grab her hair in one hand use the other to place a pinch of the substance in her nostril. Then he covered her mouth. Her sudden intake of air drew the crystals in as surely as the straw would have.

  Whatever it was, it was powerful.

  Two hours later she began to regain her senses. At first, everything was distant and dull. The pounding in her ears was muffled as though they were stuffed with cotton. The room shook in front of her eyes, seeming to flicker as though a strobe light were blinking. She couldn’t move, or she didn’t try, for several moments she couldn’t tell the difference.

  Then it was gone.

  Somewhere inside her brain a switch flipped and the lights came back on. The pounding in her head was the painfully loud sounds reverberating from the stereo’s speakers a few feet in front of her. The shaking was her own body as Robert Hall pounded away inside her with brutal force. She couldn’t move because she was bound, face down and spread eagle across a heavy desk in the small study of the suite. Her mouth was sore and dry but the ball gag prevented her from getting any relief. She strained against the restraints, yelling at the bastard behind her but both actions were useless. She felt him as the rhythm of his strokes changed. His hands grabbed her hips. His hard, cold fingers digging deep into her soft skin like talons immobilizing a hawks prey for a kill strike. He slammed her bruised and sore pussy hard one last time and she felt the release of his cum inside her.

  He collapsed onto her back, his dwindling erection still buried in her and laughed in her ear.

  “Too bad I don’t have time for the other hole tonight. We’ll save that for another time.”

  She struggled against the bonds again and mumbled around the gag but Hall paid no mind. He withdrew from her and she heard him leave the room. She struggled harder for a moment but her own body rebelled at the further abuse and her attempts ceased. She lay there, his semen dripping down her leg, tracing a warm wet streak against her cool skin. Between the drugs and his treatment of her body, her mind and body had had enough, she heard him answer a ringing phone just as the lights went out.

  Dream State

  Chapter 9

  Lucid dreaming is the province of genius and madness.

  They are the same thing, with differing ends.

  Professor August Bench

  Stafford, Texas

  Jen hadn’t slept in over twenty four hours. Her body had run on fear and caffeine to the point where normal sleep wasn’t possible. The human body uses sleep as a maintenance and repair period, while the body tries to fix the damage done by the stress and strain of the waking hours the brain ordinarily spends the time sorting out memories and impressions and attempting to make sense of them. Much of this is discarded upon waking. The brain decides whether the new information is worth holding on to or if it is irrelevant. The dreaming mind is a chaotic and frenzied place of competing concepts and contradictions. At first, Jens mind was too occupied with repairing the physical damage that had occurred during the desperate escape from the canyon, from the strenuous effort of traveling so far without proper rest and the chemicals she had used to stave off sleep. Even the mostly subconscious stress of not knowing what happened to her husband had taken a toll on her physical body.

  Eventually though, reasonably normal sleep came. With it came what she desperately wanted, the communicative connection to the dream state. Will and professor Bench had had a far better technical understanding of the dream state than she did. To their analytical and logical minds the dream state was a brief period where her mind could interact with other minds directly through a link they believed was universal, but so weak in most humans that we are never really aware of it as a true connection.

  Jen waited. Her mind placed her in the desert where she had last seen Will. Not the same desert. Not the deep, wind carved canyon in New Mexico, this desert was flat and gray. There were no cactus plants, no scrubby bushes that survived the heat on captured dew. Only a windless patch of gray sand and the pale blue of the sky. She knew she waiting, she just didn’t know why. Kathryn appeared, sort of. Now Jen sat across from her redheaded friend back in her college apartment, she didn’t look but she knew Benji was asleep on the couch. She and Kathryn usually were the only ones to act in the dream state. Benji was aware of everything, but most often he either appeared as sleeping form just out of sight or as a silent presence at the very edge of sensation.

  Jen looked at Kathryn. There was no question, no words but she answered anyway.

  “Will is dead”

  Jens admission of what she had felt all along should have torn her apart, but in the dream state emotions were never what the real world would expect. She felt the tears and the heartache in her dream body, but not as real things. More as abstracts, more as an outsider sensing her own bodies reacting separate from her mind.

  Kathryn stared at her from across the table.

  “We should do something about that.”

  They were no longer in the apartment. They were back in the desert. Jen watched as Kathryn stood over one of the armed men, who was kneeling over Will. Kathryn touched the mans head and the scene began to play.

  Will darted out from the boulders and the shot rang out. The desert floor turned bright bold red and the memory of the event rang in the minds of the dreaming women. The scene flickered, Benji howled without a sound and Jen reached down part his hair and soothe him. If he woke the women lost much of their power. The scene steadied, though heavy clouds now spun and swirled above them. Benjis anger infected the dream state, Jen whispered to calm him and t
he world settled down.

  Kathryn stood facing another man. This one looked angry. He yelled at another man who smiled and hugged a rifle. He had shot Will. Kathryn looked at the angry man, standing eye to eye so close they looked to Jen as though they would kiss, but they didn’t. The mans memory flooded the womens minds. Now they knew what he knew.

  Jen was beside the man who had shot Will.

  He had no expression on his face. Even when she reached into his memory and made him relive the moment he shot Will in cold blood, he had no reaction. To him, the cruelty of killing the man she loved most in the world was just another day at the office. She looked into his eyes and saw his dreams. She saw what he loved. Racing cars. He cared about fast cars and the thrill of speed.

  Benji was no longer the sleeping figure just out of eyesight. The man was no longer simply a presence that was more felt than seen. He and Kathryn stood beside her, watching, waiting for her decision. She held out her hand and built a memory. She drew more than she had ever taken from Benji now. His aggression flowed through her and into the memory forming in her palm. The man who murdered Will loved only speed and excitement. She laid her palm against his forehead and gave him what he most wanted.

  Kathryn nodded. They had what they had come for; they knew who had caused this to happen.

  Kendra Mills.

  They were somewhere else now. At first they could only see darkness. Mills was not dreaming, she was unconscious. They had encountered this before. They moved toward the darkness until it was light and looked down at the bound form of Dr. Kendra Mills. She lay face down, naked and tied to a table. The room was bright and the sound of water mixed with the sounds of a mans voice. Jen stared at the abused form of the scientist, slowly making sense of the drug addled memories of the woman. Kathryn moved into another room toward the sound of a mans voice. She did not know him but Jen pulled the memory from Mills.