The PAIC continued his explanation. “Regardless, our overwatch asset witnessed the entire incident from his position on top of the scraper above the Mike.” He slowly pulled his gloves off and tucked them both under his right armpit. “As you are well aware, Mr. King, operational protocols specify that anyone interfering with a Protection operation in progress may be condemned at the discretion of the agent in charge of that operation. So I instructed my team to do that as soon as they had vectors on her and her accomplices. The team had no idea who she was or why she tried to run into this particular building.”
Frank adjusted the collar of his shirt. The mesh armor “skins” that his Prime Officer Protection leader made him wear at work, constantly itched and irritated his skin. Not to mention that the scaled mesh made it hard to quill out a quickie with one of his secretary-bodyguards at lunch. He reached down and adjusted the crotch of his pants. He would talk to his POP agent after he dealt with this latest uncomfortable “itch” he had to scratch.
Frank knew it was going to take a lot of credits, not to mention the free pharmaceuticals his company would have to “donate,” to get his daughter out of this.
Before, it had simply been petty theft and mischievous vandalism. Nothing that a few credits to the right agent and some concessions in his company’s lucrative Protection contracts couldn’t fix. But this? Just defying a Protection agent could get the average citizen condemned down the Genesis elevator—ferried underground to the interrogation wing of the sanatorium across the street.
Then they would be tied up, tortured, and pitched into a body-bin in the alley outside—bound for burning. Fortunately for Mercedes, her father Frank was not the average citizen.
Frank frowned. Cracking credits in Cancun was one thing, but this would make his daughter’s vacation bills look like spare metal for Protection traffic towers.
Still, he had a plan for his daughter, especially since his wife, Babette, had gone volatile on him. That was particularly annoying, but it was nothing compared to the change in her … usefulness.
It was the simplest solution and he was going to put his plan into motion on Mercedes’ sixteenth birthday. He smiled a little. Just as easy to move things up to today, he thought. Once he paid off the PAIC, he’d head into the cell and get “reimbursed.”
Frank reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out his hex-card. No need for cash, because every Protection agent he knew carried a six-point credit swiper tied to their personal accounts. And since he was wealthy—it didn’t get any richer than the Prime Officer of State’s sole drugs and detainment contractor—all he had to do now was determine the price. “She doesn’t look too bad,” Frank said. “I humbly thank you for sparing her life, agent. It won’t happ—”
“Put that away,” the PAIC said, “I’m afraid things have become a bit more complicated than that.”
Frank knew that the entire process of bribing a Protection agent, especially a PAIC, was a negotiation—haggling was part of it. And this agent had two bodies on his hands—mountains of paperwork before he could burn them.
No matter how senior a Protection agent got, someone had to do the paperwork. And if a senior agent was too high up to be bothered with it, he would still have to listen to a whining rookie PA, squawking and hackling his feathers about the forms. No agent who had flown up through the ranks wanted to be associated with the Protection paper pushers—to a fully-fledged field agent, a P3 was worse than a citizen—always complaining and bitching for more.
“I understand,” Frank said. “The bodies… Who are—who were they?” He had a pretty good idea who the other two girls were, and he had warned Mercedes enough times that running with them was going to end badly one day.
Frank routinely answered late night waves and then raced his Masari through the night drizzle to Seattle’s downtown Protection precinct, where he had to credit-spring all three of them. It was better than listening to his wife bitch at him all night.
The first time Frank let Mercedes and her little “chick” friends spend the night in a minimum Protection cell—teach them a lesson—Babette kept him awake all night, screaming and screeching about what might happen to them. But in minimum, a protectant got fed better than most citizens ate in their habitats.
Dolphin, Dungeness, and donuts—the minimum D3 appetizers were like being at an overpriced Protection fundraiser. And the net-feed waves in the “cells”—if you could call the plush pillows and sheets in them cells… The waves in minimum pumped all the contraband channels. There was a reason for it, of course. The bribes it took to spring little rich chicks—take them back to their nests—were obscene.
The PAIC pulled out his wave-tablet. The two condemned protectants’ parents had already been notified via mini-drone messenger—no need to waste a fully-fledged agent’s wings on that duty. “Anthem, Tessa and Baines, Bri—”
“Brianna Baines…” Frank said. And then he hung his head. They were Mercedes’ primary posse. She was going to need two new companions to fly around the world reaping trouble with. The only thing was, he knew that Tessa’s father was deep into the state finance farm—his credits debt was racing faster than Frank’s car. And with an unburned body in a cardboard box the only thing he would get for his bribe money, Mr. Anthem wasn’t cracking credits anytime soon.
As for Brianna… Frank had footed the bill for her more times than he could count. Mercedes had even made him pay off the girl’s boyfriend to keep him from telling some secret to her little frigid friend.
But Frank kept a rolling tab in his ledgers on them both—all of them, really—and he had planned to collect their debts in other ways soon enough. At least if they were alive he could have continued the trials on them. Now, it was just another bribe with no upside. “How much for them?” he asked. Better to just get it over with. It was clear that Mercedes’ price was tied to theirs. Maybe if he sweetened the deal—sprinkled a little bonus for the agent. “I can work disposal off the books.”
Disposal costs would be easy enough—K&T owned the Protection disposal contracts anyway. One extra corpse… It wasn’t like anyone counted them.
The PAIC pulled his gloves out from his armpit, stretched them back onto his hands—they didn’t leave them off very long. Then he put his hand into his pocket. He sighed and said, “I don’t think you are understanding me, sir.”
Sir… Frank thought. It was going to cost more than he planned, and that would have to come out of his wife, Babs’, allowance … or her ass, he didn’t care which. But her little brat was getting more expensive than his wife could bend over to pay for.
Frank looked at the agent. The man was still facing forward—they were single-minded and focused predators. Only this man didn’t seem to be looking at Mercedes anymore. He was staring into the half of the room that was still bathed in darkness.
All of the Protection cells had lighting that was designed to keep a protectant blasted with bright light and the interrogators hidden, lurking in the black. That was part of the strategy of fear and intimidation. But there were no interrogation agents in the room.
Frank looked into the darkness. Once he saw his daughter, he hadn’t even bothered to glance at the other half of the cell. He could barely make out the outline of another person, strapped to a chair—bathed in shadows—directly in front of Mercedes, and only separated from her by the table in the center of the cell.
A third one? No wonder, Frank thought. He prepared himself for a bigger number. He leaned into the glass, trying to see into the shadows. “I thought you said they were”—he noticed a line of red, slowly making its way out of the dark half of the room and across the concrete floor, toward the drain—“dead.”
— LXXVII —
BABETTE CABOT-KING—there had been no way her husband, Frank, was going to strip her of her maiden name. That was over twenty years ago, though, and ever since she seduced him when she overheard that he was the richest man in Seattle, Frank King had “stripped” her almost every day since.<
br />
Landing such a big catch was an easy thing to do—back then, Babette was bleach-blonde, brazen, and beautiful. But soon after she got Frank “in the boat”—reeled him through a huge wedding and a honeymoon to Cancun—he became an insatiable pig, sweating and grunting and making her swallow everything, including her pride.
He was sadistic, too. A little secret he hid until it was too late to get away from him. But after “Babs”—what the filthy dog liked to call her—woke up from a three-day experimental drug-induced dream, surrounded by state Protection doctors and rehabilitation agents, sporting a brand new set of silicone implants, aching in her chest … she knew she would never get away from him alive.
It was a fact she plainly understood, as one of the first things her husband said to her when she woke up was that the implants contained little wave catchers. And those receivers were connected to tiny titanium capsules of his pharmaceutical company’s highly experimental interrogation serum. “Sleep syrup,” they called it at the Black Market. A little bit would give you the most vivid and sensual dreams you could ever imagine.
But, depending on how you lived your life, the dreams could be the hottest and heaviest ecstasy you had experienced … or the most horrific nightmares, filled with God only knew what manner of raping demons and devils.
Anyone who woke up from a syrup sleep… A rich recreational user had a pretty good hope in Hell of recovery, but a citizen, getting it injected into their arm in a Protection cell… Best case once an interrogation team was done with them, was a 5150 hotel—the nuthouse. Even if they got lucky—somehow avoided the white-walled palace of pain—they would forever remember the drug by its street name, “Judgment,” or simply “J.”
Frank assured Babette that if she ever tried to run, he would send the wave to trigger release of the serum into her bloodstream. He showed her the little metal medallion with the symbol of a cross on it that he kept around his neck. Inside it, there was a little blue fingerprint scanner about the size of a quarter-credit. After he showed her that, he let Babette see the satellite feed he had on his phone so he could track her every move.
The next day, Babette got a gun, a pistol from the Black Market. She knew it wouldn’t save her from him, but one day she wouldn’t care. Sure, guns were expensive—more than a citizen made in a year—but one of the few good things about her new life was that credits were not a problem.
She never worried about it being illegal—no rich person did—because being in minimum Protection for a few days on unauthorized possession was like taking a vacation from the Devil. She let herself get remanded to Protection every once in a while just to take a break. Frank always credit-sprung her anyway.
Yes, Babette lived a Protection prisoner’s life, and that’s where her husband kept her—high above the rest of the world—virtually locked in the penthouse atop the Smith Tower in Seattle’s upper district.
Strictly speaking, she could go anywhere and do anything she wanted, so long as she did anything that Frank wanted first. But that wasn’t freedom and when she finally realized it, she knew she was just like any other citizen—free to come and go as she pleased, but trapped in the chains of her life. A rich citizen sure, but a slave nonetheless.
So she used her “new-won” wealth to torture her tormentor in the only way she could—she cracked-credits on his hex-card, buying anything and everything she could get her freshly primed nails on. Travel, trinkets and tobacco were her favorites, but if that got too boring she simply stopped by the Church and donated … right after she “confessed” her sins. And there was no way to get those credits back.
The church had figured out how to hide money long before her husband made a single credit. Even powerful people had no idea how to recapture revenue from the religions of the world. That drove Frank particularly nuts. To an evil business baron, credits to charity was the worst way to waste wealth.
Babette sarcastically told him the donations were to make sure that he didn’t go to Hell for all the sins he had to commit to get them. But to Frank, it was wasteful. “Gifting green to God,” he had said to her, “you might as well burn it.”
And she thought about it too, but that wouldn’t have allowed her to pay for her other favorite pastime—banging the benevolent.
Babette bent over and gripped the sheets at the head of her super-king bed in the lower loft of their penthouse suite at the top of the Smith Tower. She normally used her daughter’s loft in the tower’s tip—made the maids clean Mercedes’ sheets instead of her own—but Mercedes had the building maintenance change the security code on the portal to her loft. The little bitch’s room was locked up tight.
Babette frowned—thinking about it was getting her out of “the mood.” It was getting harder to keep her little teen twat in line.
When Mercedes was young, it had been easier. Print up some fake fan tickets to her daughter’s favorite wavestar concerts, post them on the ice-keeper, and whenever the little miscreant didn’t do what she wanted, Babette ripped the tickets up in front of her and said, “And that’s no concert for you!” It didn’t take long for her daughter to catch on to that trick.
But the locked portal to Mercedes’ room hardly mattered anymore—if her husband didn’t know by now, he was too stupid to ever figure it out.
Babette moaned and said, “Fuck me!” Her head heaved forward. “Grab my tits.”
And she felt the familiar pain of fingers squeezing too hard. “Aaaaah!” she winced and yelled. Just because she had to endure it when her husband did it. “Son of a bitch! Don’t rip them off! What the…? Get off me!”
Incoming wave … Incoming wave … Incoming wave…
The annoying voice from the loft’s integrated communications net ground on Babette’s ears like fresh-primed nails on a wave-tablet. Frank had found a young secretary at his company for the voice synthesizer module to mimic. The girl’s annoyingly “helpful” voice drove Babette crazy. More after she bumped into the little slut on one of her few visits to the Genesis scraper downtown. Visits which really had only one purpose—Frank liked to show off Babette’s breasts to his business buddies.
Incoming wave … Incoming wave … Incoming wave…
And Babette’s “lover” jumped up and scrambled to the corner of the room—out of view of the communication feed camera.
Babette didn’t even bother pulling the covers over her—she already knew who it was. So she stood up, naked on the bed with her hands on her hips. There was only one reason that the feed hadn’t automatically answered—her husband was giving her time to shove anyone she had out the door and get covered up. “Accept,” she said.
And the 3D holographic feed projected in front of the wall opposite the foot of the bed, and her husband’s face and torso appeared in full color. “Babs,” the projection said before her husband realized. “Jesus Christ, what are you…? Put some clothes on!”
“Why?” Babette said. “I’m hot.”
For the last few years, Babette had faked hot flashes and migraines to see if that would get her husband to leave her alone. It worked for a while, but in the damp cold of the Pacific Northwest Quarter, it was hard to claim “hot flashes” to delay her husband’s advances.
Frank’s image on the holograph frowned. “Jesus Christ,” he said, “we both know that’s bullshit.”
Babette got down on all fours on the bed and crawled toward the feed camera. “What do you mean?” In his office, all the way downtown and in the middle of the day, she could tease and torture Frank without worry of “retribution.” Immediate revenge, anyway.
“Knock it off,” Frank said, “this is serious. Get dressed and send the father back to church. Where is he?” And Frank’s projection turned and looked behind him. Then Babette was shocked when he almost whispered, “Never mind, I’ll deal with him later. You need to get your tits down here … right now.”
And the holographic projection disappeared and then the grinding voice hit Babette’s ears again—
Wave
terminated. Have a nice day, Babette King.
Babette stood back up. “Bitch,” she muttered. Then she looked over at the father. He was wide-eyed and a little less “faithful,” standing in the corner with a sheet around his waist. “Hah, you wanna put that in your little book? If I was you, I’d get a gun.” She glanced at his waist, and then back at his face. “Probably a little bigger than that one.” Then she smiled—she wasn’t finished.
When the father didn’t move quickly enough, Babette frowned a little and motioned for him to come back into the bed. The father hesitated.
“Aw, sweetie,” Babette said, “I’m just kidding, he’s not going to do anything. He has an image. Besides, you’re the largest church in the city—everyone comes to you to confess their conscience. He knows that. All it’s going to cost you is a few secrets.” And she rolled onto her back and spread her legs. “Now … get back in here.”
— LXXVIII —
THE ARCHANGEL FAITH flapped his tired wings and slowly fluttered toward the portal to the dungeons. He was exhausted, but it wasn’t because he was an old, boozing and blaspheming believer. His days as a Man-monkey priest were long gone. Jump had confiscated his flask and Rain had pardoned him for the rest. But neither of them could remove the weight of his conscience, hanging like an anvil of guilt around his soul. A Rosary of remembrance, reminding him of who he really was … who he had been.
But Faith’s body was strong—angels were stout creatures with few, if any, physical weaknesses. So whatever ailments and addictions he had as a Man-monkey were left behind when Fury lopped off his head in his own church. An act he forgave as it was only so Rain could carry his soul and forge her way back into Purgatory in order to save eternity from Lived and Life.
It seemed like more than an eternity since Rain had ferried his essence into the arena. There, Father Benito Benedetti was judged, turned into the dark archangel, Faith, and then burned to ashes by the devil, Lived.
TF- C - 00.00 - THE FALLEN Dark Fantasy Series: A Dark Dystopian Fantasy (Books 1 - 3) Page 30