ROGUE STATE
4 – They Shoot Up Horses, Don’t They?
I woke in silence and shadows, water trickling down my chin. I was so thirsty my lungs burned. My lips seized hard on the mouth of the bottle rattling against my teeth as I sucked the water inside down in choking gulps. The water was deliciously cold, lessening the sting of its hard metallic taste, and only as consciousness started dawning fully in my head did I recognize that taste as the same I’d found in the water they’d fed me in the truck, however many hours ago.
I opened my eyes.
I was lying on the matted floor, the cuffs gone, collar on. I was still naked. And sticky. Down there. Moonlight poured through a high window.
Dried sweat crusted up when I bent my neck, trying to loosen the muscle knots, the edge of the heavy leather collar scratching at my chin. Stephens was sitting beside me, holding the water bottle, his grin glowing with the moon like a light I wanted to punch out.
“You’re interesting,” he said.
I sat up, covering my breasts with both arms, fingers splayed wide.
“I’m fascinated by your mind,” he went on.
“That wasn’t what you were groping.”
“True,” he said. “but it is what I was actually playing with.”
I stared at him but he had nothing to add. “If that’s your idea of foreplay,” I said, “I can see why you need dope to get laid.”
“No one got laid. That was an interrogation.”
I snorted. “Got a lot of info, didn’t you.”
He looked puzzled. “You don’t remember?”
I shook my head, which mixed a dirty water swirl in my brain—the new stuff, the drink I just add, must have been kicking in.
“You broke,” he said.
“No,” I whispered. “No!”
“A thousand times no?” he smirked. “Afraid so, my little windup doll.” He leaned forward. “You are interesting, though.”
I leaned back, closed my eyes, tried to get my head steady. “Interesting,” I muttered. “Seems to be the word of the day.”
“The numerical sequencing, for instance,” he said. “You snapped into it so quickly. And the phrase that was so clear to you—‘obey, slave girl.’ It’s as if your absolutely perfect material for my program.”
“Your speakers were pretty loud. The words were hard to miss.”
“The speakers didn’t say that. Your head did.”
“Excuse me?”
“Well, think about it. We train all kinds of languages here, but only a few girls whose primary language is English. No, what you heard was a tonal array carefully calculated to affect your subconscious in particular ways. Which, I must say, you grasped readily.”
“The background sounds certainly helped!” I snapped.
“The background was Symphonie Fantastique,” he said. “Hector Berlioz. What you made of it was the result of how you processed the tonal array of psychological manipulation.”
“Berlioz,” I grunted.
“What?”
“Oh, just—figures, that’s all. God only knows what old Hector got up to in his spare time. The stories about his involvement in the Parisian occult scene were legion.”
The bastard actually smiled at me like I was a prize pet. “You are all over this, coming and going. You could have been somebody around here, instead of a fuck toy, which is what you’ll be turned into. It’s a shame you’ve taken the road you’ve taken.”
“Said the butcher to the lamb.”
He laughed, infuriating me by laughing as if I honestly meant to amuse him, his witty little concubine.
“This is MK-ULTRA shit, is that what we’ve got going on here?” I pressed. “If I recall my history right, when the kitchen got too hot in D.C., the CIA moved MK-ULTRA experiments up to Canada. Is that where you got onto the mind control gravy train?”
He looked impressed. “My father,” he said quietly, “was a great man. Had so-called democracies implemented his technology back in the last century, we’d not have had all the troubles we’ve had since then.”
“Mind control,” I dripped out the sarcasm, “would produce oil?”
“Yes, it does, in a sense,” he replied, very deliberately looking at the sticky smears atop my thighs. “But what I had in mind was social order.”
“You’re ridiculous,” I muttered. “You’re working for tin pot warlords. You want to kidnap women, strip us and fuck us—just say that. Just be what you are, instead of pretending your little narcocracy is some sort of noble rogue state.”
He sighed, shaking his head slowly. “I haven’t fucked you,” he said. “Yet.”
“Depends on what you call ‘fucked’, I’d say.”
He gave me a dopey smile, infuriatingly innocent, as if this was a normal sort of situation and conversation. But then I supposed it was, for him.
“I didn’t break,” I said. “I just passed out.”
“Spence.”
A chill shot down my back.
“What?”
“The guy who flew you here was an American named Spence. You hooked up with him through U.S. government contacts. He does contract work here for them. We had you look at about a dozen photographs of the local bush pilots. You picked him out instantly.” He shrugged. “Our patrols should have him in hand soon enough. Especially if he tries to make it back to his little hut, down there outside Kamphaeng Phet.”
I opened my mouth, felt it shake, and closed it again, eyes filling with sandy frustration-anger—“damn you!” tears.
“You broke,” he said quietly. “On the bright side – for you – I am convinced now that it’s pure coincidence you’ve shown up just now. Others suspected it was tied to a deal we’re doing in the next few days. But you seem to have no clue about that.”
“Goody,” I croaked.
“Goody, indeed. If you’d been assessed otherwise, we’d have moved on to more intensive measures. Chemicals that would turn your mind to mush. We’d have gotten the truth but you’d be a vegetable, useless to us, buried out in the jungle.”
“So now I go to Disneyland instead?”
He laughed. “For what it’s worth, you were a tougher break than I’ve handled for some time. Expected, of course. Highly educated, arrogant American bitch like yourself ....” Face gone somber, he went on, “You have choices, though. You’ve got a lot of skills I’d found useful here, quite apart from what you’ll learn to do with that delicious little body of yours.”
He drank me in, head to toe, and opened his mouth but a tweet-tweetle sound cut him off. He yanked a cell phone from his shirt pocket and had a brief, hushed exchange before clapping it shut. “My apologies, dear lady,” he said. “I’ll have to step out for now. Take the time to rest. I plan on keeping you up all night.”
“Where are you going?” I blurted out.
“Spence,” he said. “They’ve just brought him in. Thanks, by the way, for the tip off.”
I moaned, leaning back against the wall as he slammed the door shut. Spence was caught in the teeth of this little monster, and it was my fault. A little dope in my blood, some slobbering guards getting handsy, and I spill my guts—without even remembering it!
I sat, head spinning, the chill of the cell enveloping me even as heat grew moist down there and swelled up through my belly, into my breasts. I could feel my throat flush red. If anything, this was stronger dope than before. I lost track of the time that drifted through the air like smoke. If I could grab it I thought, I could stop it. Reel it back in, maybe make it go backwards. All of that made sense for one long brittle breath, and then I was laughing, a laugh more like a cough than the high side of a chuckle, sounding crazy to my own ears.
The door groaned open and in walked my second least favorite person in the world just now—Mr. Chuang, the patrol leader who wanted a piece of me in the worst way (and in every conceivable sense of the phrase).
“Get bitch up,” he snapped. The guards yanked me to my feet by the arms, immediately half-walking, half-dragging me out of the cell—obviously privy to a plan that was a terrifying mystery to me.
Naked in a public hallway again! How public, I wondered, shouting, “I want the American ambassador!”
“And I want fish juice!” shouted Chuang, causing the guards to laugh aloud and me to assume I’d miss something in the translation. They took me past several closed cell doors, then through one open. I was cuffed up and yanked to my toes by a chain from the ceiling before I could fully register the entire selection of whips and crops hung on hooks in a side wall.
My head had cleared and I regretted it. It wasn’t hard to guess what was coming and now I craved the dope that might cloud my thoughts and distance me from the pain. Looking at my feet, I saw that the cement floor declined slightly toward the center of the room, not far from my toes, a drainage hold in the middle of the floor. Seems like they used dope for everything except on-coming pain.
Chuang pulled my head back by the hair, steaming his garlic drowned shrimp breath into my eyes. “You guilty of spying against my beloved country,” he said. “And proof traitors in our midst. You tell me conspirators’ names ... soon. First, you pay for death of my men.”
He went to the wall I faced and chose a several bladed flogger, handing it to one of his men, who beamed with gratitude. Then he nodded at someone behind me.
The water hit me with a sheet of surprise that wrapped chills all over my body. It was as much the fact that the water was completely unanticipated as it was that the water was cold. Goosebumps teased my skin up and down, then as the man with the hose came around to face me, my nipples chill-puckered, his thumb sharpening the stream into a rod of hard hitting water that pounded my breasts. He eased off and let the water flow from my crown on down, my hair sopping, my eyes blinking hard to get the water out as my fingers wrapped tight around the chains that held my wrists helpless.
The hose was tossed down, water still spouting out, running quickly into the drain near my feet. The men eased back on their heels with a visible group sigh and drank in the gleam of my soaking wet body. I knew the effect from days on the beach back home, back in Cali. I’d come out of the surf and feel like a goddess. My soft brown skin would shade differently as the sun played in the water, copper and bronze and then warm earth brown, tight and lined with curves. It had been fun watching those poor boys salivate – not just boys, but old men, too. Right on their face you could see the inner ache for what they maybe never had, and certainly would never have the rest of their lives. I’d gotten a kick out of the obvious pain in their eyes whenever I twitched a little muscle in my ass or swung it wide turning a corner. Such power in a little flash of flesh!
But now my body was stretched taut, a hanging bauble toy. Taunting the lion had turned into serving as tussled meat. I wondered if they’d skip the whipping and go straight to the groping. They’d get there anyway, so –
A sharp whistle behind me, and I knew not everyone was standing in front of me. Instinct started my head to twist but the hard sharp snake snapped my back before I could look behind me. Pain jolted me, white light flashing through my head as I rolled it back with a scream. My back went from numb to screaming pain just before the second stroke of the whip flamed against it.
Pain blurred time while tears blurred my sight after that, my lungs burning from useless screams. Still, I was aware of their leers, the laughs, the little pauses when I sobbed and shuddered barely noticing the groping hands. And then a much longer pause, followed with another hose down that drew quavering gasps through my raw throat before I passed out.
I woke up to the pleasant scent of cinnamon, my blurred vision clearing to see a stunningly beautiful woman staring down at me. She pressed a moist rag to my forehead. She was sitting on the large bare bed on which I lay, dressed in silk harem pants, her bare perfect breasts defying gravity with upturned little brown nipples, above a flat tan belly. I glanced around and saw we were in a cell, not a room, at least by the spare but pleasant furnishings. A sweet but full bodied aroma filled the room, not exactly like the haze of marijuana, but certainly reminiscent of what I’d always found in the dorm rooms down the hall at college. I thought I was shocked when she brushed the back of my nipples with her knuckles, but when she started top ull back they arched like tiny kitten heads and I heard myself purr.
We still weren’t in Kansas, but it beat the hell out of a wet whipping.