Sullivan nodded, thoughtful. “I know. That’s
because I’m still not sure.” Brian was out of his chair and heading
towards the door. “Wait, you idiot! Remember what happened the last
time you stormed off?”
Brian paused with his hand at the doorknob. His
shoulders slumped as he tried to get his emotions under control,
and he realized, suddenly, that he was exhausted. The energy boost
that Sullivan’s healing had given him early that morning had worn
off, and the constant adrenaline flow since then was starting to
take its toll.
Which may have saved his life, since he was relaxed
when the door blew off its hinges directly into him, throwing him
back and onto the floor. He lay on the floor, unable to breathe,
looking up at the door which had fallen on top of him. The strange
thudding of heavy feet running across the door vibrated against his
cheek, more felt than heard as the ringing in his ears blended with
the strange resonance of the door. Sullivan’s shout of alarm was
tinny and distant, as was the sharp firecracker snap of
gunfire.
He wanted to get up. He wanted to push the door
off. He wanted to rush to help Sullivan. He wanted to protect his
daughters.
He wanted to breathe again.
Instead, his world grayed out into darkness.
Sometimes waking is a long slow and pleasant drift
from the secure black womb of sleep into the seeping glow of color
as the world begins to occupy the conscious mind.
This time, however, it was the searing jump and
scream as Brian became aware of the needles of pain shooting into
his testes. He was brutally awake, eyes flashing wide as his body
convulsed, and they rolled wildly before focusing on the man in
front of him, holding a silver pom pom with a wire coming off of
the end.
“Good. You’re awake. We can begin.” The man was
chubby in a sallow kind of way, his body seeming to have given up
any effort at health long ago. His skin was sweating under the
white shirt he wore, top button undone and red tie loosened so that
it flopped over the gold tie bar at the top of his swollen belly.
He gave another flick of the pom pom at Brian’s genitals, and again
the needle-like darts ripped into him, causing him to buck and pull
against the ropes that held up his wrists.
Ropes?
He couldn’t help himself, he
looked up out of curiousity, just to see what it was they’d used to
tie him up. The ropes were wrapped around his wrists three times
and then cinched tightly in the middle, the rope tails then
travelling up into a darkness above that was intensifed by the
single bulb light shining over his head. At first he was absurdly
critical of whoever tied the knot (
that’s
way too tight! That’ll cut off the circulation, could cause nerve
damage, could–
). The train of thought
abruptly derailed as he realized these were his wrists in the
ropes. And even worse, the reason it was taking him a while to
realize it was because he could no longer feel his
hands.
This is not good.
Brian arched his back again as the strands of the
electric pompoms from hell brushed up against his genitals again,
the needles of agony combining into a more steady ache that seemed
to push up directly from his crotch into his stomach.
“Mr. Stanford. I trust I have your attention
now.”
In spite of the sweat covering his body and face,
Brian’s mouth was dry, and he had to moisten his tongue by licking
his upper lip before he could reply. “Definitely. Complete. Total.
What can I do for you?”
“That, Mr. Stanford, remains to be seen. Our first
concern is with what you have done already. With a… Rebecca Horst,
I believe? And John Sullivan?” The man’s lip twisted in disgust.
“Wicked, perverse things. You are in a great deal of trouble, Mr.
Stanford.”
Yeah, I kind of noticed.
“Look, I just, um, followed her home from the
bar, you know, trying to get some, any guy would—“ His attempt at
good-ol-boy camaraderie broke into a yelling screech of pain as the
man simply jabbed the metal pompom directly into his genitals, the
thick flexible strands draping over the base of his penis and
falling over either side of his testes. The pain was not subtle or
random; Brian could feel the actual modulation of the current as it
shot into his body, adding involuntary twitches to his efforts to
twist away from the current.
The man held it there, watching dispassionately as
Brian twisted and moaned, then finally lowered it, the metal
brushing Brian’s spasming inner thighs as it passed. “Now. As I
said, you are in trouble. And before you deal with the rest of your
pitiful life as a Stroker, you will tell me where Horst and
Sullivan are.”
“Where… ” Brian’s thoughts were
having trouble rising above the pain in his midsection, but he
registered what the question meant.
Sullivan isn’t dead.
Having been
saved once, already, by the man, he felt the first stirrings of a
faint hope beginning to rise.
Got to
stall,
he thought. Though the man in front
of him did not seem the type to allow for any delay in his pursuit
of answers. Like a shock of icy snow injected over his mind, he
realized that stalling was not, in fact, necessary. There was no
effort required at all to dodge the sweaty little man’s
questions.
“I don’t know,” Brian said, his
voice resigned with the knowledge that he was going to be unhappy
about this for quite a while. He licked his lips again, and tried
to put sincerity in his hoarse voice. “I went home with—Horst, you
called her? She told me she was Vish, or some Indian name.
Honestly, sir,”
that’s it, show respect,
butter him up, maybe he’ll turn the electricity down to
eleven
, “I went home with her, and she
wanted to play some kind of kinky games, and I thought, well, why
not, and then she pulled out this knife, and it just… got… all…
weird. I didn’t know it would lead to, well, any of” he jerked his
head up at the ropes around his hands, “this kind of stuff.” He
watched the man’s face closely, trying to read in it some
indication of whether he was being believed, or at least
tolerated.
The pompom rose again. This time, though, it was
simply passed to the other hand as the sallow man rubbed his jaw,
staring past Brian as if considering whether to have a steak medium
well or charred. After a tense few moments of deliberation, he
turned away and put the pompom back on the table. “I’m surprised
you’re so cooperative, Mr. Stanford. Your kind rarely are. The
perverse are, after all, by their nature, rebellious. Rebellious
against what is natural and right.” Brian had begun to relax a bit,
his shoulders aching but the upright draw actually helping him to
stretch out some of the muscles in his back that had knotted up in
his convulsive attempts at escape.
As he isometrically pulled at the ropes, he
realized that while he couldn’t feel his fingers, at the same time,
he somehow was aware of the ropes. He didn’t dare look up, lest he
give the sallow man the idea he was contemplating escape… but at
the same time, he didn’t need to. He knew where each loop passed
over each other, where the rope was folded over in a bight to wind
the loops together between his wrists. With a start he realized
that he knew more than that, he could sense the rope rising up over
his head, where it passed over a rafter and down again to the left,
where it was wrapped to a boat hitch.
The room was dark, except for the single bulb, and
the ridiculous stereotype of the torture chamber situation actually
made him feel a little indignant. Somehow the lack of effort to go
beyond the pulp-fictional interrogation situation seemed insulting
to his aesthetic sensibilities. The man was still hunched over the
table, mumbling under his breath as he clinked and clanked
something that Brian had no doubt was going to be unpleasant.
He closed his eyes, trying again to explore his
awareness of the rope, visualizing it as a glowing tendril not so
much binding him as somehow connecting him. Connecting him to…
what? He tried reaching, not with his body, but pushing his
awareness out, further, and as he did so, not only did the shining
glow of the rope in his mind brighten… but there was an answering
flicker of warmth from the series of healing scars still
criss-crossing his torso in intricate whorls, the patterns left by
Vashte reacting somehow with the connection towards which the rope
was drawing him.
But he couldn’t quite reach that last inch to
complete the connection with whatever it was, and abruptly the
pudgy man turned and pushed his glasses up across the bridge of his
nose. He raised his other hand up to the light, and squirted a
little black liquid out the end of the hypodermic he held there.
“The thing is, Mr. Stanford, I believe you. And those two are
really not terribly important, in the vast scheme of things. So
there’s no reason to delay the inevitable, and you can begin your
work as a Stroker.”
“What’s a Stroker?” Brian asked quickly, eyes wide
as he looked at the hypodermic. There was no real aversion to
needles, but a keen awareness that strange ones often contained
things that could do bad things not only in the short term, but
permanently. The man wasn’t bothering to answer as he approached
Brian, who instinctively contracted his muscles away from him.
Above him, he could sense the rope like it was his own skin, even
feeling the friction of the beam as it rubbed against the fibers
where they passed over. “Sounds somebody likely to go blind, heh…
”
The weak joke seemed to take the man by surprise.
“Why, yes, that’s exactly what you’ll be doing, Mr. Stanford. You
will be masturbating your filthy little penis all day long, secure
on a mildew covered mattress we’ve got set up for you in dirty
little crack house. Eventually the diseases, malnutrition, or just
another Stroker will end your life for you, but not until you’ve
provided us with a goodly surge or two of this Power that you don’t
know what to do with.” He finally smiled, now, the tiny marble eyes
registering a maniacal satisfaction as he looked at Brian, and
lifted up the needle so that it glistened in the yellow light of
the single bulb. “This is just the start of the long, sad end of
your wicked life, Mr. Stanford. But fear not—or fear, it makes no
difference—you will be blissfully ecstatic through the whole
process. We don’t, after all, want to make you unhappy.” The smile
grew wider, a predator sure of his prey. “We just want to use you
and then get you out of the way for the next happy bit of
scum.”
“So it’s… some kind of special drug? Supposed to
make me into a sex maniac?”
“Nothing special about it at all. It’s simply a
variant of heroin. Enough to get you hooked, blow out your pleasure
receptors, and then we add a little special bit to make you
desperate to feel something, anything again. So you begin stroking
that filthy little penis,” he said it like a mantra, nose wrinkling
and his voice rising as if it was an effort to speak of such a
thing, “more and more. And you will get a few surges, but they
won’t be as sweet as this injection will feel. But there will be
someone there in the house with you, someone who will become your
very best friend, the supplier of this sweet little black juice,
and he’ll help keep you happy and stroking. For a while.” The man
frowned, as though something of mild concern just occurred to him.
“Hmmm. You may last a bit longer than most. You seem to recover
rather quickly.”
That’s when Brian realized that yes, he did feel
almost completely normal, far from what one would expect from
having a door blown into his face. His mind had cleared the effects
of the unconsciousness almost completely, leaving him with a sharp
hyper-realistic clarity that seemed to bring out the textures in
the room, the damp shine of the sweat on the yellowish skin of the
man’s forehead, the swirling black liquid under the cold glass of
the hypodermic, the woven soft tension of the rope drawing his arms
up and connecting him, somehow, to something that seemed just out
of reach, something that was—
Powerful
.
The rope was connecting him, just as it had with Vashte, to power.
It was like an antenna, and Brian realized that he could use it to
amplify and –
Push.
It
was instinctive, and he knew somehow that if he really thought
about it, he would lose it, but that same awareness that was
sensing the rope could be twisted, used to give a little push, a
force of denial to the man’s progress forward. It was tenuous, like
pushing with hands full of tissue paper… but it was a lot of tissue
paper, and it served, for a moment, to slow the sallow man’s
progress.
Brian could tell, though, that it
would only last a moment. There was no time to plan; he simply had
to act. Again his body moved, taking advantage of the physical as
well as metaphysical reinforcement of the rope, using it to swing
his leg up so that his knees bent and landed on either side of his
captor’s stunned face, caught in a sudden vice grip as Brian locked
his thighs together. The man’s eyes grew wide as he was suddenly
faced with the close proximity of that
filthy little penis
he’d found so
distasteful. Brian glared down at him, and his feeling of triumph
made him pause and savor the look of terror.
That’s when he made his mistake. In that moment of
hesitation, perched like a raptor over with his hands held high
over his head, the man recovered just a little of his presence of
mind. Just a little. Just enough to lift the hand that was still
holding the needle up and drive it into Brian’s thigh.
If Brian had been asked to articulate what he
thought he was doing when he had trapped the man in his thighs, he
would have probably thought of something along the lines of choking
the man into unconsciousness. Instead, as he saw the needle rise up
and plunge into him, he twisted away from it… and heard the
crackling pops as the man’s neck snapped. His body was suddenly
pulled straight as the corpse that he now held between his thighs
thudded with a wet smack into the floor.