It was well known—the human body being composed of roughly sixty percent water—that anyone passing through a Z needed to drink water immediately after. The side effect was that if they didn’t, they would be out cold in five minutes from dehydration. Sooner if they were prone to sipping State swill like Benito.
“Catching Z’s” at the Fifty was not a good idea, but Benito was so preoccupied and nervous that he forgot to stop at the hydration station and get a drink.
Once Benito was dried off and all the way inside, he tried to act as casually as he could. Raising the suspicions of the Fifty’s staff was not a good idea, either. In addition to the schizoid paranoia of the sanatorium’s numerous resident Protectants, there wasn’t a person who worked inside the eerily-lit, granite dungeon who wasn’t at least a little bit “mental.”
Something got on anyone who stayed too long in a sanatorium. A deep haze drifted over their soul that at first felt lethargic, like being really tired and on the edge of sleep. If they lingered too long—let it infect them to the point that they came down with a case of “Fifty-fever”—fell asleep at the switch in their job, or on a visit in Benito’s case… The Fifty had a habit of swallowing people up, and then shitting them into a body-bin in the garbage alley.
At the very best, the people who worked there could only imagine what it would be like to wake up inside your head, strapped down to a gurney as an unwilling “guest.” And no one on the outside but the powerful people who would never end up there had any clue about the torturous hell inside.
But Benito knew all about the lost souls trapped inside the Fifty, images of rape, torture and murder burning into their minds, creating for themselves their own private hells. The only thing he didn’t know was anyone who had burned their way out.
When the door at the other end of the long hall creaked its rusty metal hinges open, and out strolled Frank King—the very man Benito had hoped to avoid—he figured that was just what was about to happen to him. He knew he was going to burn for his sins.
The man sauntered toward Benito, smiling and almost dancing to some silent, whistling tune in his head.
Benito gripped his book and rubbed his fingers so hard into his Rosary beads that he thought he might crush them. He only let up when he felt the searing pain from his ripped fingernail.
He would have to drop something if he wanted to dig his pistol out from under his robe. But that would be something that wouldn’t go unnoticed. And even if he did somehow get his gun pulled before Frank’s Prime Officer Protection detail raced down the hall, where would he go?
The POP’s were too highly trained for one lonely priest and his little 9mm pistol to stand a chance. And Benito wasn’t a cardinal. If he were, he would have his own POP’s and he wouldn’t need the gun in the first place. It was all ludicrous and he began to question his sanity. What could he hope to accomplish?
With his long-buried handgun, Benito was a marginal shot at best. And once the alarms rang, six highly trained Protection agents would spring from nowhere and kill him. He’d seen it before, during a failed escape attempt that ended in a bloody, bullet-ridden body, oozing out its life right in front of him.
No, the only thing that would happen if Benito shot Frank now, was the man’s POP’s would riddle him with bullets … if he was lucky. Then there would be no one left to pay for Babette’s “therapy” at the Fifty. Absent that, she would become a lab rat or a sex slave … or both.
The gun was a last-ditch defense, a security blanket meant to deny a tyrant his tyranny. Benito knew that if he had to pull it out, it wouldn’t be to save his life or hers. It would be to save her soul, end her misery if he could. And then he would use it on himself to prevent the Protectors from condemning him to the same miserable fate.
It was a horrible dilemma—none of it was part of his primary mission—and given the eternal consequences of such a blasphemous act, two of them, really… But Benito had found love, and not where he’d meant to. He would have a reckoning with his destiny sooner or later, and he would answer to God or the Devil soon after that. But today, the love they had all denied him was locked up in this hell, not theirs.
Benito kept walking toward Frank, squeezing the symbols of his faith as he prepared himself for judgment. He prayed in his head to be saved from the damnation that the man walking toward him would bring, Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
And then Frank was just a few feet away, smiling as he surely prepared to imprison Benito’s soul. He’s smiling, Benito thought. He never smiles at me.
And then Frank…? Only it wasn’t Frank … but it was. Benito looked more closely.
The man resembled Babette’s husband—a dead ringer, for sure. But he was more like a copy, or a clone or some cinewave actor who was too close to tell the difference unless he was standing right next to the original man. Benito frowned a little. The man was just too … “perfect” was a word he would never use to describe the bastard, but that’s what he looked like, perfection.
And then Babette’s beast husband was right in front of Benito, and the man raised up his hand and pointed his fingers like a gun at him, and—BOOM!
That was the sound Benito heard inside his head, and it actually felt like a bullet ripped into his chest and exploded his heart, and then exited through his back, ripping flesh and bone and bile out the back of his black robe. And he stumbled and almost fell.
“Careful with the booze, Benito,” the copy of Frank said to him. At least that’s what he thought the man said, because the sound was muffled and it seemed slower than real speech. And then he felt like his head was slipping into a gooey bucket of molasses. “Makes … it … hard … to … wake … that … little … snake … up,” the copy said in slow motion. And then Benito felt dizzy, and he stumbled a little … right before he closed his eyes and went black.
When Benito woke up, he had a splitting headache … and he was surrounded! At least that’s what it felt like, staring up at two nurses, an orderly, and the two black-clad Protection sentries from the entrance to the interrogation wing.
His vision was fuzzy and it felt like there were ants, scratching their way up his throat. Benito touched his forehead, carefully feeling the lump throbbing and growing there. Then he slowly sat up and reached for his shirt pocket, feeling for the gun under his waistband as he did. Then he pulled out his thick, black-rimmed glasses—he was one of the few citizens that didn’t want a State Protection doctor “correcting” his vision with a laser. One of the lenses fell to the floor.
“I’ll get that, father,” the first nurse said. Then she let go of his arm and knelt down to pick it up.
Benito noticed that the girl—most of them were barely in their twenties—took particular care not to bend at the waist. She’s a veteran, he thought. The experienced nurses knew better. But at least there was still someone at the Fifty who wanted to help people in need. It certainly wasn’t the raping orderly behind her.
Benito recognized the big man from the description that one of the poor souls he’d given last rites and redemptions provided. She had whispered in his ear … just before she died of infection from a perforation to her cervix.
The second nurse knelt down next to Benito the same way the first had. She held a glass of water to his trembling lips. He put both of his hands on hers and sipped. Benito drank all of it in one long guzzle. Then he wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Thank”—he coughed a little and cleared his throat—“thank you.”
The orderly towered over him. “You all right, there, bub?” the big man asked. “Copping some Z’s, are ya?” He smiled down like a huge cat, picking its teeth with its claw while it eyed a tiny canary.
Benito knew he had to get that image out of his mind, because that would show on his face. Don’t be weak, don’t be weak, it was all he could think to change what he w
as sure was nothing but weakness, written all over his face. Showing frailty at the Fifty was a sure step to staying there. “I’m fine,” Benito said, barely making eye contact with the orderly, before looking at the first nurse. “Yes, fine, fine. Thank—thank you. I think I forgot to drink…” Another step was attracting the attention of any other body part on one of the sanatorium’s orderlies. “Thank you, thank you,” he said again, just for good measure. Then he wobbled his way to his feet.
As the nurse handed Benito his broken lens, she smiled a hesitant grin and then wiped it away. She glanced quickly at the orderly, before grabbing up her colleague by the arm and whisking her away down the hall, and then out through the double doors.
Benito knew that if the orderly was going to snatch him up, it would be better if the nurses weren’t around to show their disapproval. More than one staff nurse had become a permanent guest by catching the “eye” of the wrong orderly. And there wasn’t a “right” one in the entire building.
Benito had no idea where they found them. The huge and hateful men that Protection used to maintain order inside the prison. Whether it was a sanatorium or prison—there was precious little difference—the orderlies were only out-menaced by the Protection sentries themselves. In fact, orderly duty at the sanatorium was one of the shorter career paths to being asked to join Protection—go to the academy. And then, if a person could stomach the training, he might get to be an interrogator one day. Then, who knew, maybe Protection Agent In Charge—the most coveted job that a black-clad thug could aspire to.
Benito shuddered—physically shook his upper body and head—at the thought of this orderly running anything.
But that caught the eye of one of the Protection agents. And the man stared through his goggles at him. He gazed at Benito like they all stared at citizens—the indifference of an old guzzler mechanic, figuring out if he wanted to take the time to wipe up a single drop of spilled crude. “I don’t know, father,” the agent said. He reached for the comm-button on his shoulder, activating the mini-wave-unit on his helmet. “I’m waving medical—get you checked out.”
Benito grabbed the agent’s forearm on impulse, and quickly jerked his hand back as fast as he could. It wasn’t fast enough, and the second one rammed the metal action of his submachine gun into Benito’s outstretched arm.
Benito yelped a little and grabbed his arm with his other hand. Spiking pins and needles of pain shot into his elbow and then up his whole arm, and he winced hard and tried not to cry out. “I’m sorry, I’m—” he tried to get the apology out, but the barrel end of the second agent’s submachine gun was right in his face.
And then the agent punched his rifle at his forehead and sent a spike of pain into Benito’s already swelling forehead, and he stumbled backward and grabbed at his head.
“Thirteen-thirteen!” the first agent shouted into his shoulder. “Agent engaged! Agent engaged!” Then he let go of his shoulder and pointed his gun at Benito.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“Benito Octavio Benedetti,” the first agent said. Then they both moved right at him and held their guns inches from his face. “You are hereby remanded to Protection! State your compliance!”
And things were happening too fast, and once they found his pistol he’d be killed or worse, and Babette was—
“Threat severity, over?” the first agent’s helmet-mini squawked the wave back.
Benito’s mind raced. A “thirteen-thirteen”—“assault with intent to defy”—Protection agents only ran to one code faster. He would be beaten and tortured and then given to the orderlies for good measure. The last thing his soul would ever see would be a body-bin in the alley. Never see her again, his mind cried. “I didn’t mean to—”
“I said,” the second agent’s voice was angrier now, and Benito could see the fire in his eyes, glowing and growing, “state your intention to comply!” And the agent bent his elbow and leaned in fast and he smashed his forearm into Benito’s face.
Pain spiked into Benito’s eyes, and a bright light flashed and he fell to the ground. He grabbed at his head and the pain—he couldn’t see, and then his ribs caught fire and he screamed. The agents kicked him in the legs and the ribs, and he put his arms over his face and tried to roll away. He caught a flash of white and then the orderly was down on his knees, punching him in the chest.
“Submit-submit,” the orderly yelled as he swung over and over. “I can do this all day, ya old idiot. Submit!”
“I submi—” but Benito took another punch to the gut before he could get the full statement out. He gasped and coughed blood, and then he curled into the fetal position and urinated down his leg, soaking his pants and the floor.
When there were still courts and not just mountains of paperwork to bury someone under, agents were often asked why citizens had been beaten so badly during the process of remanding. The standard agent response—they taught it at all the academies—was, “The potential protectant resisted submission to judgment, and subsequently the Protection agents responding were compelled to force compliance.” It never went any further than that.
It was a small matter that saying one word was difficult enough while someone was being beaten to death, much less trying to spit four of them out in the correct order. The courts checked the box on the judgment form and then the protectant was remanded. Dead or alive hardly mattered.
Benito knew he had to get the words out to make it stop. “I submit to—” Another punch felt like it nearly caved in his chest. He gasped and then sucked for air.
Laughing while he worked—Benito could feel that the orderly was enjoying the chance to prove himself in front of two potential future comrades. “Goddammit,” the man laughed as he swung, “you pissed on my floor, ya little shit!”
But Benito gritted and yelled this time, “I submit to judgment! I submit to judgment!” Then he coughed and groaned.
The orderly swung again, but an arm caught his just before he hit Benito in the head. The second Protection agent wrapped his arm around the orderly’s and held back hard. “He’s submitted—no further force is necessary, citizen.”
The orderly got a disappointed look on his face. “No further force” was bad enough, but that wasn’t the worst thing the agent said to him.
“Citizen,” about the worst thing any Protection agent—wannabe-agent orderly or full-fledged agent—could be called. But there wasn’t one single thing the big man could do about it. Well, there was one thing…
Drunk on the adrenaline of beating an old man senseless, the orderly resisted. It was the one thing he could do about being called a lowly citizen—the wrong thing.
As strong as the huge orderly was, when he pulled his arm away from the agent as hard as he could, the agent flipped and then he slammed down hard on his back on the concrete floor. And the agent let out a huge groan, but then rolled away from the orderly as fast as he could.
The move wasn’t necessarily so the agent could escape; it was more that the man knew, in the ensuing response that followed a “thirty-one, thirty-one,” more than one Protection agent had been killed by “friendly” force. Because a “thirteen-thirteen” by a weak old priest was one thing, but “deadly defiance” against an agent of Protection…?
The first Protection agent didn’t even bother reading the orderly his rights to recourse. There wasn’t a rule, much less any law, that said he had to. Brrrrt-brrrrt-brrrrt! The agent’s squatty little submachine gun spit 9mm lead rounds so fast that the whole thing was over before the last of the ejected casings hit the concrete floor and echoed little tinks down the hallway.
Benito clutched at his ears and laid in his piss on the floor. His ears were ringing a little from the sounds of the rounds. If it weren’t for the suppressors on the Protection agent’s gun, he would have probably been deaf. Every Protection agent on duty and off were required to wear the squishy, sonic-barrier balls in their ears. Priests … were not. Benito was, however, required to admi
nister last rites and redemptions to the dying or dead.
He looked across the hallway at the bleeding, bullet-riddled body of the orderly who had just beaten him. And he searched for the faith and forgiveness to give the man his last R’s. Benito was silent. Whatever rights the sadistic bastard had left, he would have to exercise them in Hell.
“Donato Ortega Gonzales…” the first Protection agent recited the requirement at the man’s lifeless body. Even after a citizen was dead, it made the paperwork easier. The barrel on the agent’s MP7 hadn’t even stopped smoking when he finished it, “…you are hereby released from Protection.” Which was just an overly complicated legal way of saying “condemned,” the citizen’s slang term for dead.
— XCVII —
“WHAT THE HELL do you mean, you can resurrect people?” Jump asked Rain. A thousand years into this eternity and he had never even heard of such a thing, much less believed that his own daughter was capable of it … with a prayer, no less. “Why would you—who would want to go back to that shithole?”
“Calm down, calm down,” Salvation said to him. “I can handle this.” She tightened the feathers on her wings and tensed up the shield on her back. Then she looked back across the Throne Chamber of the Protectors—the residence of every Protector—at her daughter.
Rain was perched on top of the Throne of Judgment, like a white dove on a wire. And her back was to the Sword of Power—the huge stone shield and sword that formed the back of the throne. Rain was flanked on each side by a single golden guardian angel, each wearing sunshields to protect themselves from her bright.
Between the two beautiful guardians, Rain appeared older and more menacing than a thirteen-year-old girl should. But no angel really knew another’s “true” age—the relativity of time. Some ancient archangels acted like fledglings, and there were hatchlings in her and Jump’s hell, with the viciousness and cunning of a fully-fledged fallen. But this new deception—“What do you mean you can resurrect people?” Salvation raised her voice and said. “Why in—why would you do that? … And why the hell didn’t you tell us?”
TF- C - 00.00 - THE FALLEN Dark Fantasy Series: A Dark Dystopian Fantasy (Books 1 - 3) Page 41