Mesmer, page 23
“Near enough! We fucked enough collectables up in the house. He’ll know.” His voice petered off. “Nothing here gives it away. Last time I checked the crows weren’t monogrammed, or the hay bales. Let’s get this done. I want some blood on her today.” Tomik-Mitchell came to a halt just past Roman’s shoulder.
“She can use this knife. Your blood or hers?” Roman chuckled, then handed me his knife. So much for grubbing up nails to poke them with.
I clutched the hilt, the indentations of the grip snuggling into my hand. They gave me a weapon and knew I couldn’t do anything, except what they told me to. My heart hurt. The sorrow of having no say in my life, or my death, no revenge even.
“Hers.” Said in such a nasty low tone, my nipples rose to peaks. Goosebumps brushed a trail of cold down my body. “Her blood.”
“Good to know.” Carefully, Roman pushed aside the knife then slapped me twice across the breasts, and my first screech tore loose. “Going to be easy to get her making noises today.”
I bit my lip, bit down on the tears, determined not to make more noises than I absolutely had to. Anything that made these two happy was to be avoided. Yet the old scrapes and scratches on my breasts still stung and ached. Some places had deep-down bruises.
“Come to the middle. Crawl.” Roman clicked his fingers then walked backward, luring me on with that big grin splitting his face. It was a lopsided grin, like a clown that had been told it was his day to be evil and not a good day to juggle balls.
Once he’d run to switch on the camera, my man two, my Tomik-Mitchell, also followed me, musing as I winced over the imbedded gravel that bit into my knees and my knuckles where I still held the knife.
“Let’s see. Barbed wire today. Knife in her cunt. The old west revolver we found. Won’t fire but he won’t know it. I want her to do it to herself though. We can fuck her once she’s bleeding.”
“You are the perfect sort of evil, my brother.”
“I get first claim on the bloody anal.”
They planned to get me to suicide. Like the others. What else?
I put my head down. He’d said, brother. Logic said Roman’s brother could not be Tomik. So Greta was right.
*Bingo. And they said this is near a house Tomik knows. We should remember that.*
Not Tomik. Somehow this identical man was not him. I took that fact and let it keep me warm, at least for a while longer. He had not betrayed me. Their laughter and their boots followed me to the tractor.
“Tomorrow I’m going to want to claim bits of her,” Roman muttered. “After she starts to kill herself. That should take another day to be finished. Let her off herself somewhere public. Then we sit and wait for him. He’ll come. Then he’ll die.”
No. Oh no. I shut my eyes until they made me open them.
Mitchell-Tomik patted my cheek. “Let’s begin.”
I was naked already, of course. They had me lean back and fuck myself with the knife, carefully. It was blunt, not sharp as I’d thought, and I guess they wanted to reserve the potentially fatal stuff for the next day. How nice of them.
They made me grab hold of one springy end of the single-strand barbed wire, and my eyes felt ready to pop from the deliberate pain I inflicted, as my hand closed around the sharpness and blood trickled from between my fingers.
“Keep going,” one said. “Twirl it up your arm.”
Oh fuck. The wire took over my arm, a gray metal vine meant for stopping soldiers, straying cows, and people with soft flesh, from going where they should not. It dug its claws up my arm. I flinched when it looped unexpectedly, whimpered at the scratches. I think I peed myself at least the once.
This perfectly deliberate self-mutilation was fearsome, and yet… tomorrow they had worse for me. To stitch myself.
*Shhh. Get it done!* I could hear the grating of Greta’s teeth.
Mine, my teeth, were locked together, holding back the fear and the noises.
The orgasms were fewer today.
I wasn’t sure if I should be grateful. Pleasure abraded the edge off the pain.
Unfortunately, my screams became plentiful as I wrapped the wire about one arm and shoved the antique revolver into my pussy. The wire was kept under tension by the smiling Mitchell-Tomik with his gloved hand. The other end was anchored around the tractor’s broken seat.
How sore my throat became. Screaming for too long meant my throat lost its power. I whimpered and coughed now instead, hoarse, a muted victim, though the barbed wire cut me and made blood ooze from where it wriggled.
It gave me some gratification that I couldn’t obey his command to scream and scream loudly.
“Deeper, fuck it.” Roman had a thing for guns in cunts, he’d said, and I wasn’t doing it right.
He strode over and shoved the barrel further in, until he was happy, then he made me kneel and fucked my mouth. I carried on sticking that gun inside myself as much as the bend of arm and hand would allow. He squirted come on my face and chest then walked away backward.
“Ain’t that the best?”
Mitchell-Tomik grunted. “Keep winding the barbed wire on you.”
“You can stop with the fucking.”
I dropped the gun and stood, twirling like a macabre slow-motion ballerina. To get the wire to wind higher up my arm, I had to raise my arm and turn, and raise it and turn, until the wire reached my torso. From there the wire crawled a route across my chest, around my back, my belly, my thighs. More blood sprang from where the points dug in. The wire rolled on, marking me, spitefully, as its own.
“Stop! Wait.” Roman scratched his chin, his freed cock wobbling and already erect again. The problem with mesmers, I recalled, with some whimpering and with sweaty brow, with wire meandering over my skin and with pain everywhere… the problem with mesmers was they could keep fucking you forever.
“What?”
“Look. How do we get in to fuck her now?”
Mitchell snorted.
Yes, it is Mitchell.
I’d figured him out, somehow. I swayed one way then the other, weak and pressing against the tension of the wire while they argued how to screw me. I saw him as Tomik. He looked like Tomik but was not him.
They came and untwirled me, this shocked, white, and cold me, this shivering me, who would have fallen to her knees if one of them wasn’t already poking into me and fucking my ass. I swear I could hardly tell. So much hurt. I shuddered with each blow of his body as he slapped in, fully inside, pulling the wire into me also.
*Good girl. Don’t let them hear you.* That was bleary-eyed Greta. Her eyes wept blood. There were black and red cracks on her arms.
She felt my pain. I remembered that. Poor Greta. Even her smile was wrecked. Teeth and scarlet liquid seeping.
I moaned quietly, blubbering drool and blood, until Roman chose to again shove cock into my mouth, holding my head low despite the wire. The wet sounds seemed to come from elsewhere. Someone not me.
Not. Me.
I swung in their grasp, making odd squeaks and gasps, battered and hurting.
The wire would kill me by itself, I was sure.
My eyes had shut but I saw Greta, and somehow she was here, before me, though Roman stood to my front. Eyes opening, I saw him move in close, his body squashing my nose and making me retch as he climaxed in a spurting gush. He unplugged himself from my mouth and staggered away, zipping up while I spat and gagged on what he’d left.
*You want him back? Tomik? You’d go from being their mesmer meat to being his mesmer meat, again.*
Bitter, she was bitter, but I sensed an out. An escape. Better than dead.
I stared at my rebellious, goth figment. The girl who was and wasn’t me. What did she think she could do?
Yes. Please. Please.
*I will regret this. I know I will. You will too. There will be a price.*
The day chose then to shut me down, and I knew I was about to fall as my mind swarmed with black and buzzing, with flickering pixels. As I crumbled, I felt her finger write on my belly.
The camera? It must see this, whatever it was.
I tottered and somehow stayed upright for another few seconds before I began to fall.
The wire caught me, and I spun and I spun, landing with a scream.
26
Tomik
The latest video arrived.
Haggard, chin feeling as if it’d sprouted a small beaten-down forest, I clicked play. I blinked away the ache in my eyeballs. At least I made myself watch it minus sound, the first time. But not the second. My argument was that maybe the twins would drop a name, something that’d let me figure out where they were. They hadn’t so far.
I sprawled back on the bed and hauled the laptop higher.
The usual hard-on had appeared, but I was getting better at ignoring it—though better seemed the wrong word. When I switched on the audio, all those little noises she made as they fucked her would mean my dick would get even harder.
As weird if appropriate penance, I’d stopped masturbating. Wouldn’t get me into Heaven, if I’d believed in it, but it made me feel less disturbed to suffer even a little while she suffered.
Not that I’d ever be stabbing myself in the balls.
This time they’d chosen a barn. I could tell from experience when they were getting toward the end of their daily perversions with Hannah, plus the video timeline at the bottom was almost eaten up. Barbed wire, a knife, and a revolver. Guess they were running out of ideas, though these instruments were the most potentially damaging they’d used, so far.
Was that an ominous hint? The twins were not known for subtlety.
A barn. For once they’d missed the obvious—fucking her with a farm animal or similar. I drew my hand into a fist before I calmed and reached my fingers toward the screen, stopping just above the surface. She was there before me. These electrons that arrived at my eyes had in a metaphysical way originated where she had been. So, all I needed was the transporter beam from Star Trek.
For how much longer would she be alive?
I switched the sound on and watched it again, hoping, obsessing, lusting.
What would I do when they inevitably killed her? I’d track them down and kill them, of course, but then what? Assuming I survived I’d be in a world minus my Hannah.
It was an unimaginable state of being.
An overwhelming longing welled up, took me by the throat, and squeezed.
Wait. I froze. I stared, trying to somehow extract extra pixels from the screen by willpower alone.
The final few seconds before Roman sauntered past the camera and switched it off seemed to show something odd. Holding my breath, I rewound and pulled the laptop toward me. I adjusted the tilt. I stopped the playback, rewound, played it again, halting the video a few times to peer closer, and finally I saw what my brain had processed almost before my eyes had.
One arm was caught in that vicious wire and bleeding, but the other arm was free. Letters, there were letters forming on her belly where her finger seemed to drift aimlessly, then to flicker, to brush her skin. Letters that did not quite match the spot her fingers dwelled upon. A trick of the light perhaps?
I ran it and paused it over and over, until finally I sat back, leaning on my elbow, sure the letters on her stomach were BALLRM.
Ballroom seemed the likeliest meaning. But was this a location or some rambling coincidence? How could letters be unintentional? How could she draw so well when she was injured and under their control?
I had to take this as a fact. Had to. Either they told her to draw it or she had simply wanted to. Either way it must be genuine?
Take it as her doing. I’d go crazy seeing traps. Maybe she’d practiced for days, writing like this.
The letters must mean something but there’d be tens of thousands of houses with large living areas. Fewer hotels and mansions with true ballrooms. Was it one of those? Must be. A barn meant in the country.
My brain kicked me again, and I recalled the revolver. Struck by a possibility I rewound to that and enlarged it, enough to see it better without losing it to blurring.
Ballroom plus that antique firearm came close to making a DING sound in my head. It was too much a puzzle to be a twins idea. Those two would think a Rubik’s cube a table decoration.
“I know it.” I flopped onto my back, and the overly soft bedding took me into its embrace. “I know it.” I’d held that gun, taken it apart and put it back together, then left it in a drawer in the cedar cupboard in the dining room.
They were at an old mesmer house, a grand country mansion in Illinois, not too many miles from where I’d grown up with Hannah. But how long would they stay? This might be my only chance, and I had to make this work.
I’d been so hung up over my failures and need for revenge, my need to find her, that my days had lately been spent lusting over how I’d swarm wherever they were with ten or twenty mercenaries and wipe them out in seconds in the midnight hour.
Now I had the information I required, the energy to do that drained away in the face of reality.
I was a mesmer, and I could not bring myself to trash that forever, to expose myself by letting others understand our secrets. With this much going on, it’d be close to certain something would slip. Me or the twins or Hannah, or some information the twins had left lying about would reveal us to the world. Like vampires in the sunlight. Poof. If law enforcement or the other government agencies already had suspicions, we’d end up hunted.
Either that or the NSA or the cops would intercept messages about my hurried employment of a small army and arrest me before I reached Hannah.
I couldn’t use my ninja mercs.
I couldn’t even gather a squad of collectables, as any of them could be sensed and grabbed by the twins as easily as I could command them. I had my pet cop, and she would have to stay back. What I needed was a sniper who was a collectable. I knew of none.
I bit a torn nail, chewed it off.
There was me, my cop, and whatever weapons I had. I couldn’t simply blow up the house, and I had to keep Hannah safe, so turning the walls into swiss cheese with a powerful machine gun was also out.
The small hours around one AM were the best for sneak assaults. Or so I’d heard via google search.
Me only and with no one else close enough to help in an emergency. This sucked, but they didn’t know I was coming. I had a feeling they planned to suck me in and set a trap, but that moment hadn’t come.
Shit. Unless they’d doctored the video? Made it look like Hannah had written on herself?
It was possible, but I didn’t think they’d let anyone handle these porn torture vids as it was risky to do so. I didn’t think the twins had the skills to do it themselves.
“Nothing for it but to believe I can do this, take care, and go in guns… popping, not blazing, because I need a silencer.”
The neighbors were over a mile away, but the sound of gunfire might carry.
Drone surveillance to check things out? Likely I’d crash it into a tree or a window. My pet cop in my hometown might be able to arrange a distant drive-by to see how many vehicles were parked in the grounds. This needed to be done within the next day to minimize the chance of them moving on. I needed to be there, now.
Fuck.
One big gun, the nine mm HK MP5, and my Glock. Those, a knife too. I’d rely on my innate ability to punch their brains in with my fist if it came down to it.
I’d practiced at firing ranges, dabbled in martial arts, but had never thought to become a gung-ho assassin, unfortunately. Yet I had dabbled, whereas the twins had never been keen on anything unless it involved fucking women or looking like millionaires on holiday.
They’d have guns for sure, but I could get off several shots before they woke, if I did this right, and I was lucky.
I closed the laptop with a soft click.
This was the consequence of my love for Hannah, and if I died doing this, then it would be justice for my past sins. I would save her from this evil we mesmers had spawned.
I threw the laptop and a few things into my suitcase, then slammed it and settled for what I had, the keys to my car, my cellphone, my wallet, the clothes I wore, and the boots on the floor beside the bed.
My one surprise—I was the only one coming.
27
Tomik
One AM, just as I’d planned. I’d hiked in from the fence line, left my car with all the medical supplies and anything else I could think of that might help when I’d freed her.
When. Thinking positive.
The house was about fifty yards away when I decided it was a good place for Lina to wait.
“Here.” I pointed at the ground. A thin line of mulberry trees would shield her. Since the moon was barely a thin crescent the twins would need good night vision to spot her, or me.
Lina was the cop I had under my thumb in this locality. I’d barely noticed her following me from the car, knew she’d be there, with her personal arsenal ready. Most importantly she could be back-up. Not to shoot anyone probably, to be a crutch, a first aid station. Maybe I should’ve found a paramedic collectable.
“I’ll be back.” There I was echoing Schwarzenegger, without meaning to.
I crept forward at a crouch, the MP5 ready and the shoulder sling dipping down and brushing the grass heads. Ballistic vest, though it would only stop small arms fire, spare pistol in a chest holster, Glock at my waist, as well as the sheathed knife, and I had a key to the front door. Only, just in case I was wrong, and they expected me, I wasn’t using either door.
One of the reasons we’d stopped using this place was the timber rot. A crosshatched window in the library had lost part of its frame long ago. A civil war cannon ball had damaged it, or so rumor said, not that Illinois had suffered from any battle I knew of. The glass had fallen out and been replaced by a square of plywood. Thin ply.
In the wan moonlight, I could see the twins hadn’t fixed it. With patient wriggling, the nails fastening the ply came loose from the rest of the weakened timber. If I’d needed to snap the ply, I was going to instead use the key.
