The Dragons of Styx

by John E. Siers

  “Also, there are certain bodily reactions we check for to make sure we’ve done it right and you’re not suffering. Easier to do that when you’re undressed.”

  She had continued to strip while he talked and was now naked except for pantyhose, which she peeled down and removed without hesitation.

  “All done…” She straightened up and looked at him with a surprisingly cheerful expression.

  “And…okay…full disclosure,” he told her. “I’m a guy, and I’ll admit, I enjoy looking at naked women, especially when they’re not trying to look sexy or seductive. That’s when they’re usually most attractive.”

  “I’m not about to enter any beauty contests.” She shook her head. “I’m not trying to look sexy, because it’s pretty much a lost cause.”

  “Eye of the beholder…” he muttered as he led her out to the center of the balcony, where a red-carpeted square stood out in contrast to the grey carpeting that surrounded it. Just outside the square, a waist-high pedestal held a small control panel.

  Donna Ventura was still an attractive woman in Mark’s view. She had a nice figure—a bit heavy perhaps, but far from what he would call fat, more like pleasantly plump. She was what a Jewish Marine he had once served with liked to call zaftig. Her face showed full lips and a pair of clear brown eyes, framed by sandy-colored hair that was done up in a stylish braid behind her head.

  Her body showed tan lines that spoke of considerable time in the California sunshine without much more than shorts and a halter top. A glance below the waist revealed that the hair color on her head was natural. The only hint of age came from a few lines around the eyes and lips, and her sad, somewhat weary expression.

  She had undressed without a hint of shyness, but her body language showed a lack of interest in anything to do with life. Nonetheless, Mark found himself wishing she had taken him up on his offer of a pre-termination sex session. Oh, well…her choice, my loss.

  He walked around behind her. “Give me your hands back here, please.”

  She complied, and he fastened the handcuffs in place.

  “You don’t need to do that,” she told him. “I’m not going to resist or anything.”

  “I know, but sometimes people try—purely out of reflex, even when they don’t intend to. This is just to make sure everything goes the way it’s supposed to.”

  She didn’t reply, and he walked around in front of her, then bent to pick up the noose from the floor where it lay with several feet of slack in the rope, which had been carefully set to account for her height. The floor of the drop zone was 12 feet below the balcony floor, and the Ferry standard called for the rope to stop her between 18 and 24 inches short of her feet being able to touch down.

  She started to tremble as he put the noose over her head and drew it tight around her neck. He laid it out along her left shoulder, allowing the slack to hang down in front along her left side.

  “Don’t worry…it’s completely painless,” he assured her. “You won’t feel a thing.”

  He had no way of knowing whether that was actually true. Medical experts claimed when the neck was broken and the spinal cord ruptured, pain signals had no way to reach the brain. Her body would show all sorts of reactions, including muscle spasms, heart failure, and something very much like an orgasm, but in theory, she wouldn’t feel any of it.

  Of course, the medical experts had not been able to verify those claims, since the victims didn’t survive to talk about it. Mark’s comment was mostly intended to calm her during her remaining moments.

  He stepped back to the console and looked her over once more as he turned the key to arm the system.

  “Good night, Donna. Sleep well,” he told her as he pressed the large red button.

  Her eyes went wide, and her mouth opened to draw a sharp breath as the floor opened under her feet, but she didn’t have time to cry out. She dropped out of sight, and he felt the familiar thrill as the rope snapped tight with an audible twang.

  “Ooooh…I felt that!” Lisa shivered suddenly. Then she sighed and closed her eyes.

  “Felt what?” Sparkling looked at her curiously.

  “Mark just terminated the client…and I felt it. That’s…really weird.”

  “Terminated? You mean she’s…?”

  “Dead. Yes…right now she’s dangling from the end of a rope with a broken neck.”

  “And you felt it? I’m supposed to be a paranormal sensitive, but I didn’t feel anything. What exactly…?”

  “I always get a thrill during an execution—an extraordinarily strong thrill, actually kind of…erotic. It happens whether Mark does it or I do it, whether the client is male or female, no matter what method we use, but…until now, it’s only happened when I’ve actually watched the client die.

  “Sometimes I’ll be waiting down below to help Mark, and I’ll actually see it happen, but if not, I usually watch it on live video—we have cameras everywhere around here, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “Yeah…I noticed.” Sparkling looked around. There were four such cameras—one in each corner—in Lisa’s office.

  “I planned to do that today—” Lisa shrugged, “—then you and I got into a conversation, and I didn’t watch the time…but I felt it when it happened, and that’s weird. I wonder if it has anything to do with the dragon thing.”

  “Maybe…” Sparkling nodded slowly. Thinking back, she realized she had felt something through her paranormal sense—the brief, vague feeling of a departing spirit. For some reason, ghosts didn’t hang around long at the Ferry. Maybe that also had something to do with what Lisa had just called ‘the dragon thing.’

  “Lisa…can I ask you something? I know it’s ‘client privilege,’ but that woman…I mean, she looked so normal, so ordinary. Why did she come here?”

  “Client privilege doesn’t matter anymore, Sparkle—the client’s dead. It’s still not for publication, but I trust you not to repeat any of this. Just like LifeEnders, we don’t talk about it to anybody except insiders, and I figure you’re pretty much one by now.

  “Her name was Donna, and she was once happily married, with children, a nice house in an upscale neighborhood, and enough money to support a full lifestyle. Then her only son died while serving in the Marines, halfway around the world. That was the first tragedy.

  “Then she survived ovarian cancer, but the radical surgery, chemo, and radiation treatments left her unable to have any more children. She still had a daughter, though, and was well on the way to recovery when her husband ran off with a woman 20 years younger than she was.

  “Six months later, he broke it off and tried to reconcile with Donna. She was going to give him another chance, and he was on his way back home, when he got whacked by LifeEnders. Of course they don’t tell anyone who hired them, but the other woman’s husband is the logical suspect—especially since the woman got whacked three days later.

  “Still, Donna might have gotten through that, but then her daughter—her last surviving child—died in one of the wildfires up north. You probably heard about the fire that swept through a campground with a bunch of college kids on a summer break. Donna’s daughter was one of them.

  “That was probably the point at which she gave up on life, but the final straw came when a financial advisor she’d hired gained her trust, then ran off with most of her money. So she sold the house—it was worth a couple of million—came here, and signed a contract with us last Tuesday. Of course she’d applied in advance, and we did our usual investigation. That’s how we know all those things, since she didn’t tell us—she just told Mark she didn’t want to bore him with the details.”

  In the Drop Zone under the balcony, Mark was still admiring his handiwork—Donna’s corpse dangling on the end of the rope, her feet about 20 inches above the floor, her neck obviously broken. She was quite limp now, the kicking and twitching of her arms and legs having subsided. She had also finished emptying her bladder and bowels, leaving the expected mess on the tiled floor u
nder her.

  Mark had already retrieved coveralls from the nearby locker and suited up to start the cleanup process. He removed the handcuffs, letting her arms dangle free, then grabbed a handful of toilet paper from a roll on the shelf and wiped the mess off her buttocks and the back of her legs.

  He removed the grate for the large floor drain and grabbed a long-handled push broom, with which he proceeded to corral the mess and shove it into the drain. He flushed it down with a hose, washing off the broom as well, then replaced the grate. The real job of sanitizing the floor would be done later by the floorbots—cleaning robots that were just one of the many automated systems that made the Ferry’s building easy to maintain.

  Next he retrieved a gurney and rolled it into place under the dangling corpse—a bit of a tricky maneuver, since he had to lift Donna’s legs as he brought the gurney in, then position her body as he worked the rope controls to lower her onto it. He wasn’t used to doing it alone, and it took a couple of adjustments to get her lying properly so he could remove the noose.

  Usually Mark and Lisa did clean-up together, but not today. They had allowed Sparkle to see some parts of their operation, but they weren’t ready to let her witness an actual termination or the aftermath. He’d left it to Lisa to keep her entertained until he finished the job.

  Only a few things left to do. He rolled the gurney to the far wall, where he opened a panel to reveal a gleaming stainless-steel chute, the opening into a 30-inch diameter tube that led to a refrigerated brine tank in the basement. He pressed a button to turn on the tank’s brine pump, and the nozzles in the chute began to spray, effectively turning the tube into a water slide.

  Positioning the gurney in front of the chute, he adjusted it to the proper height with a slight tilt that let him slide the dead woman’s body headfirst into the chute with little effort. A few seconds later, a splash echoed up the tube, announcing her arrival in the tank below. He shut off the water and closed the panel.

  After that, he stripped the cover off the gurney, removed his coveralls, and dropped both into a laundry chute. He put the gurney away, activated the floorbots, and went upstairs to collect Donna’s clothing—which would also go into the laundry.

  He checked the time on his pad. A little over half an hour since Donna Verona had walked into his office. Not bad.

  All done. Break time, he told Lisa. Meet in the cafeteria?

  See you there, she responded.

  “So…what do you do with the bodies?” Sparkling hesitated, not knowing whether this was a question she was allowed to ask.

  Mark looked at Lisa, who shrugged. Might as well tell her…just the big picture, not the gory details.

  He nodded, thinking once again that it was great to be able to confer privately with Lisa when others were present.

  “We put them in a refrigerated brine tank in the basement. That preserves them until we’re ready to process them.”

  “Process…?” She raised an eyebrow.

  “You know what they say about curiosity and cats, Spark….” His easy grin convinced her that it was not a threat.

  “Curiosity led me to discover dragons,” she retorted. “So I guess you could say curiosity saved this pussycat.”

  “Okay, you win.” He chuckled. “Processing means we pull them out of the tank and harvest their organs, which we sell to medical researchers and universities through a broker who specializes in such things. We salvage what we can for whatever purpose we might find for it. The rest goes into the incinerator.”

  In fact, they harvested a variety of things for purposes of their own that probably would have shocked their guest—and would certainly have caused an uproar if known by the general public—but Mark chose not to go into detail.

  “So…that woman I saw come in here is now pickled in salt water until you’re ready for her?”

  “Hah! Pickled! Never thought of it that way, but I guess you’re right. You know that’s how they used to preserve meat—beef and pork—for long sea voyages a few hundred years ago.”

  “It works,” Lisa insisted. “When things have gotten busy here, we’ve left some of them in the tank for a week or more without problems and could probably leave them for a month if we had to.”

  And this one will probably stay until you leave us, Sparkle, she thought. Another facet of the Ferry’s operations we’re not ready to show you…yet, anyway. She had a strange feeling that Sparkling Waters was not going to go away, would be a part of their lives for the foreseeable future—a feeling that was both happy and troubling at the same time.

  “Well, I’ve got a few things to do,” Mark said, getting up from the cafeteria table to take his coffee cup to the sink. “For one thing, I have to file the official notice with the State of California that one Donna Verona—Universal ID Card attached—is now deceased. Then I have to make the appropriate entries in the general ledger, and I’m done for today. Any thoughts on what we’re doing for dinner?”

  “Actually…since you’ve been bragging about my culinary skills, I was planning on cooking tonight,” Lisa said. “I was thinking seafood, if no one objects.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Mark said with enthusiasm.

  “Me, too…” Sparkling agreed, “but…then tonight…are we gonna…you know, get together?” She looked at them with nervous anticipation.

  Mark looked at Lisa, but she looked back at him with no expression, nor did she give him any telepathic clues as to her opinion on the subject.

  “No, Spark…” he said, slowly. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  Chapter Eight: Family Affair

  “But…” Sparkling blushed again. “I thought you…I mean…” She looked back and forth between Mark and Lisa.

  “I don’t know how to say this, Spark…” Mark said slowly. “It just doesn’t feel right. Hard to explain, but…well, we don’t fool around with people we’re close to. We don’t have many friends, but if Jay or Nydia, for example, wanted to have a threesome with us, we wouldn’t do it…Lisa, am I wrong?”

  “No, you’re right,” she said, still with a noncommittal expression.

  “Spark, we have sex with clients and prospects sometimes—that’s just business, we don’t know them, and don’t have any intention of getting to know them. Besides, most of the time they’re dead a few minutes later.”

  “So that’s what I am? A friend?” He heard a hint of anger in her voice. “I’m just somebody you have lunch with once in a while…or maybe somebody you’re stuck with for a few days because you went and rescued me—is that all I am to you?”

  “No, it’s not,” he told her firmly. “The truth is, right now you feel more like family to me—like maybe the little sister I never had—and that makes it even worse. Incest is not something I’m comfortable with.”

  “I’m not your sister, and I’m not a little kid,” she said. “I’m 27 years old, and I’m far from being a virgin. What’s your problem?”

  She turned to Lisa with the beginnings of tears in her eyes.

  “Sorry, Sparkle.” Lisa shook her head. “I’m feeling pretty much the same way as Mark. Only difference is, I would have said it feels like you’re my daughter—which is even crazier, because I’ve never been a mother, and I would have been seven years old when you were born.”

  Sparkling got up from the chair and backed away from the table.

  “OK…I know what rejection feels like,” she said. “I’ve been rejected before, but most people who do it manage to come up with a better reason. I need to get out of here.”

  She turned and started toward the door.

  “Where are you going?” Lisa called after her.

  “Out. Home. Back to my apartment. I’ll call for a ride.”

  “You can’t leave the building,” Mark said. “System won’t let you. We’re locked down.”

  She spun around in the doorway and glared at him.

  “If they’ve figured out where you are, there could be Shooters waiting across the street,
” he told her. “This is the only place you’re safe right now. Now please, come back here, sit down, and let’s talk.”

  “Nothing to talk about,” she said. “I’m going up to my room…oh, excuse me—I’m going to the guest room you so graciously allow your friends to use.”

  With that she turned and left the cafeteria. At least, Mark noted, she was headed for the elevators instead of the front door.

  “Let her go,” Lisa said. “Maybe she’ll calm down by the time dinner’s ready.”

  Two hours later, they sat down for dinner in Lisa’s apartment—without Sparkling Waters. Lisa had prepared the promised epicurean seafood feast, but when she’d knocked on the door of Sparkling’s room, she’d gotten only a terse answer.

  “Not hungry. Go away.”

  “Honey, we’ve got to talk. We really care about you, and…”

  “Not now. Maybe later.”

  With that, Lisa had shrugged and gone back to the kitchen. She’d prepared a dish for Sparkling, wrapped it, and put it in the refrigerator. Hopefully it would stand up to being nuked later without losing too much of its gourmet quality. They started the meal in silence, but a few minutes later, Mark spoke up.

  “You’ve outdone yourself, Love…this is delicious. I just wish…”

  “I love you, Big Guy,” she told him.

  “Mutual as always, Babe…but what prompted the sudden affirmation?”

  “When she dropped that proposition on us, it took me by surprise—but like you said, it just didn’t feel right to me. I kind of froze up for a moment—wondered what you were going to say.

  “If you had said, ‘OK, Spark—let’s skip dinner and jump in bed’…well…. I would have gone along with it, but it wouldn’t have felt right. I mean, you know me—I love girls as well as guys, and she’s a cute, sexy little thing—but I just didn’t want to do it, and I couldn’t explain why not.

  “Then you said ‘family,’ and it just clicked. Yes…she’s family—crazy, and I still don’t know how that happened—but ever since she called for help and we went charging off to rescue her, it’s been like…”