by Renard, Loki
Well that’s great. More shitty news.
I cross my arms over my chest. “I’m hungry. I want to pee.”
“You can take care of that once we’re done here.”
“How fucking many of you do I need to take care of? You’re running a goddamn spook train on me here!”
I see the corner of his lip twist just a little. Most of these agents are pretty bland and humorless. I’ve heard in the past that they select grey men and women as agents, people who blend in anywhere. Slick is an exception, and so is this guy. I can sense a different energy in him, though the beige suit he’s wearing is doing its best to suck all life and character out of him.
“I’m the last one,” he says.
“I bet you’re not.”
“For today,” he clarifies.
“Alright, Agent Cock,” I say. “What do you want?”
“Funny. Literally never heard that before,” he deadpans.
“Really?”
“No. I hear it all the time.”
“Ah.”
He opens his folder. “Okay, so, I have a few questions for you.”
He pushes two photos toward me. One is of a mallard duck. The other is of a squirrel.
“Which one of these two is more likely to be a communist?”
“What?”
“Answer quickly please, Ms Kitty.”
Everybody here has been calling me Katherine. It’s nice to hear my chosen name again.
“I don’t know. The duck?”
The agent nods and pulls both pictures back. “Alright.”
He pushes two more pictures toward me. They’re both of the exact same steam engine.
“Which one of these trains has been robbed?”
“Neither,” I say. “There’s no train, just two engines.”
“Good.” He nods approvingly. “Very, very good.”
“Is this some kind of test?”
“It is definitely some kind of something,” he confirms. “I’d take this seriously if I were you.”
“Okay.”
He shows me three pictures this time. Two of them are of bowls of fruit. One of them is of a capuchin monkey.
“Which one does the monkey eat?”
“This seems like a waste of time. This can’t be telling you anything.”
“Wrong,” he says. “This is the cutting edge of personality science. Which one does the monkey eat?”
“They look the same.”
“One on the left, or one on the right?”
“One on the left, I guess?”
He nods, as if I’ve just told him something very important.
The interrogation, or assessment, whatever it is, goes on for some time until mid-question, Agent Koch checks his watch. “Time to go,” he announces in an impressively deep baritone.
“Time to go where?”
“Where? Why? How? Those things don’t matter anymore. You go where you are sent, for the reasons we decide and you do what we want you to do.” He closes his file. “We must leave immediately.”
When I don’t move, he reaches over the table and pulls me up off the seat. He guides me around the table to stand in front of him.
“You don’t want to go?”
Shit. I don’t know if I do. This room is small and closed, but I’m safe here, and I don’t know what’s waiting for me out there. The world has become an entirely unpredictable place, and I desperately need it to be safe. I need something familiar. Someone to trust. But there’s nobody. Just a stream of strangers, all of whom want something.
“The last time I went with someone, it went badly,” I say. “Someone I trusted. Someone I knew. And now…”
“You’re talking about the man you call Slick, right?”
I nod.
Agent Koch leans down, his lips close to my ear. His voice pitches up an octave even as it stays in a hushed whisper. “He’s such a fucking bitch, oh my god, I just want to grind him up, put him in a firework and shoot him into a latrine.”
I draw in a deep gasp. Oh my god. Coco’s voice is coming out of this agent’s mouth.
Holy. Fucking. Shit
10
Kitty
Coco / Koch loads me into a sedan and drives me out of what turns out to be a concrete factory in the middle of fucking nowhere.
“Please tell me you’re not doing this to fuck me over again. Please tell me this is going to be okay,” I beg. I’m not so naive as to think this is a rescue. My past experiences with Coco have been varied, to say the least.
“You’re fine, sweetheart,” he says. I believe him. I have to.
We drive like bats out of hell, the car feeling like it is skating over the tarmac rather than riding on it directly. I have never been broken out of a black site before. It’s thrilling.
I try asking questions, but Agent Koch doesn’t answer them. The windows are down, the roar of the wind is in our hair, and the thrill of escape is enough for now.
When it seems we’re not being chased by a fleet of CIA agents, we pull over at a gas station.
“I need to freshen up,” Agent Koch says, handing me a twenty dollar bill. “Grab some snacks.”
I’m only too happy to. My stomach is growling. I need calories to continue my escape from everything that has been fucking my world up for the last week. No more CIA, no more Vicious, just the big wide world of country and forest, mountain and stream. I could lose myself out here.
I sit on the hood of the car and chew on Twizzlers. Agent Koch disappears into the bathroom, and fifteen minutes later, Coco Shantay emerges.
“Looking good!” I salute her with my candy.
She tosses her hair and breathes a sigh of relief. “Oh my god! That fucking male drag is so oppressive.”
It’s as if an entirely different person has come out of the shabby door which I’m sure hides a multitude of sins. Coco is as fabulous here as she is in her salon, moving with a sinuous feminine swagger on heels taller than I could walk in. A short black skirt replaces the beige slacks, and a tank top which covers less than you’d expect.
“Thanks for getting me out of there,” I say more quietly as she gets closer.
“Oh I was just doing my job, honey,” Coco smiles. “Besides, it was something different to do, right?”
“Are you an agent? Or did you just sneak in there and make them think you were one?”
She taps the side of her nose. “A lady has to keep some of her secrets,” she smiles.
I’d ask more, but at that point a low slung sports car pulls up outside the gas station and a familiar figure emerges. Tall, dark, and fucked up, Vicious comes strolling across the parking lot.
“Oh fuck no!” I curse. “YOU ASSHOLE!”
Maybe I should be happy to see him, but fuck me if I haven’t been furious since finding out the real reason he wanted me in the first place. He’s put me through so much - and for what? Some painting? Some cheap trinkets? It’s bullshit. All bullshit.
“Keep your voice down,” he growls. His eyes are flashing that green fire they do when he is riled.
“Keep your fucked up lying down.”
He grabs me by the arm, looming over me, his features hard, his eyes searing down into me. “I just got you back. Don’t make me beat you right away.”
“You mean you just got your chip back,” I say, letting him know that I know what he’s been hiding from me.
He exhales through his nostrils, seeming impatient and annoyed.
“Oh yeah, I know about that now, so you can stop pretending that you, yannow, care.”
“Kitty, if I just wanted you for the chip I would put you in a cage and drive you around where I wanted you in the back of a soundproofed van. I would not bother with the rest of this.”
“You lied to me!”
“I told you I wanted you to work for me. That was true.”
“You didn’t tell me about the chip embedded in my guts!”
“I was working up to that.” He releases his grip on me. �
��You wouldn’t believe this, but I thought you might take the news badly.”
“No shit I’d take it badly. How long have I been walking around, transmitting, receiving, downloading, uploading? Actually don’t answer that, I know, since I got the appendicitis.”
“I didn’t do this to you, Kitty.”
“No, you just took advantage of it and made sure nobody else got to use me.”
“I might be evil, but I am the lesser one.”
I can’t help the snort that escapes me. “Do you practice that line in front of the mirror, Arthur?”
His fist tightens. My feet leave the ground as he yanks me up, his teeth snapping at the tip of my nose. “Have you forgotten who I am, Kitty? Who you’re dealing with?”
I channel Blaze. I kick him in the shin. Hard.
And it does nothing.
“That was a mistake, Kitty.”
“Let me fucking go!”
“Coco, get the trunk, would you?”
I look around to see if anybody is paying attention, but the forecourt is empty. There’s no point in screaming for help anyway. I’m on the run. The last thing I want is for someone to call law enforcement.
Coco opens the trunk, and Vicious bodily tosses me inside, the reminder of his strength a shock to my system. It’s not fair, the way men are built. Trying to fight one is almost impossible unless you fight dirty.
“You can come out when you’ve come to your senses and remembered your manners,” he lectures briefly before slamming the trunk lid down again.
I find myself in angry darkness as I hear his door close and the vehicle begin to start moving at high speed. Oh fuck this. I lay on my back and kick the upper part of the left hand side back seat hard enough to break the snib which holds it in place.
The seat falls open and I crawl out. One of Vicious’ ties is on the back seat. He usually gags me with them. This time he didn’t bother. Well, let’s see how he likes a taste of his own medicine.
I get behind him and loop the tie around his neck, pulling hard enough to choke him. He splutters and the car weaves. He’s trying to get some threat out, but he doesn’t have the air - not until he pulls the car all the way off the road, grabs a knife out of his pocket and cuts the tie, the sudden loss of tension sending me falling back against the seat.
Vicious jumps out and comes around, the knife still in his hand as he throws the door open.
I scramble away, try to get the other side open, but I can’t. He grabs me by the ankle and drags me kicking and screaming toward him.
“Fuck off, Vicious!”
“Cut it out,” he growls, flipping me over onto my stomach. His hand comes down against my ass in a hard slap. It hurts, but a lot less than being stabbed would.
Vicious
She just tried to choke me while I was driving a moving vehicle. I’m so fucking proud I can barely bring myself to punish her. Kitty has changed so much in the short time I have had her, and I take credit for that. She’s stronger than she was. She’s braver than she was. I dodge a kick to my balls and slap her ass again, admiring the growl I get instead of the girlish squeals she used to give.
Kitty is mine. She hates me, but she’s as much mine as I am hers. Our love has been sealed with sex, and not the easy one night stand kind. The sex we have is the kind that infects your soul. She couldn’t run from me if she wanted to. We’d be drawn back together over and over again, I just know it.
“Fucking stop!”
“Absolutely not. When you choke someone, you use wire, something that can’t be cut. You want it to cut through the skin. An effective garrotte is impossible to escape.”
“You should be fucking grateful it wasn’t effective, not lecturing me how to make it more so!” She writhes as my palm falls on that perfect ass of hers over and over, punishing her for what she did, and what she did not do in equal measure.
“I’ve told you, Kitty. This is an education for you. I’m not just using you. I’m giving you skills that will make your life with that chip inside you survivable.”
“Well thank fucking you. You could have told me that in the first place. You had no damn right to hide that from me.”
“I already explained that. Rollo put the chip in you, Kitty. Be mad at his waterlogged corpse, not me.”
I slap her bottom with another hard swat. Kitty is always going to need my discipline. The more adept she gets at handling herself, the firmer and more thorough it will have to be.
She can be angry if she likes, that’s not going to change anything. She knows as well as I do that I am not the cause of her current troubles.
“You should be grateful,” I lecture, spanking her again. “I just broke you out. If not for me, you would have spent the next years of your life in and out of a CIA handler’s cell, doing jobs for them when they wanted, being a prisoner at all other times.”
“Bullshit,” she swears, her voice pitching up. “Slick was there. He would have let me out.”
“He took you there, and you think he would have set you free?” I smack her ass several more times, each one a hard slap to the very center of her cheeks. She cannot be serious right now, making everyone else an innocent party in this little play, but casting me as the villain.
“Maybe not. But he didn’t lie to me. He didn’t fuck me…”
“I knew that was a mistake,” I growl, spanking her harder.
“You regret it?”
“I regret that it made you expect something from me I can’t give. I will never tell you everything, Kitty. That’s not how I operate. There will be secrets. They are how I stay alive, and how I keep those I care about alive. Your life isn’t going to be any easier now you know about the chip. You’ve had a little more of your innocence taken away, and in its place, paranoia will grow.”
“That’s my problem, not yours.”
“Wrong. You are my problem.”
I slap her ass one last time and let her up. She pops up, snarling and angry, but both her hands go back to rub her butt and she loses quite a bit of her ferocity in that process.
Kitty
“Do you want to come with me? Or do you want to go back to the black site Slick had you at?”
He asks a question which can only have one answer - unless I change the question.
“And just who the fuck is Slick? You better tell me something, Arthur. I am getting seriously sick of not knowing what is going on.”
“Slick is a CIA agent,” Vicious confirms, folding his arms over his chest and giving me a grim look.
“You have a CIA agent on your payroll?”
BANG
A bullet hits the side of the car, right between Vicious and I. Ordinarily that would freak me the fuck out, but after the day I’ve had, the lies that seem to be swirling around me, I don’t know if I care. Nothing I thought I knew was real. Coco, Slick, and Vicious himself all belong, in one way or another, to the government.
“Get in,” he growls. “We’re leaving.”
“Are we? Or is this just what happens when someone asks you too many questions you don’t want to answer? It’s so convenient that right when I’m getting to ask you…”
BANG
Another bullet comes sailing through the air, just above my head. A CIA round, I am guessing.
“Would you get the fuck down! This is not a game!” Vicious grabs me and pushes me back into the car with a shove hard enough to make me fly inside. He slams the door behind me, leaps behind the wheel and we head off at tire squealing speed. I slide around the back seat, swearing at the top of my lungs.
“Stay down!” Vicious yells the order just as a bullet slams through the back windshield, shattering it and letting a vortex of safety glass and air to go howling through the back.
“Why are the CIA doing this?”
“That’s not CIA!”
“Who the fuck is it then?”
“Russians,” he shouts back.
“What the fuck do Russians want with us?”
“Can’t
talk right now, Kitty,” he growls, swerving back and forth across the road in an attempt to dodge the volley of projectiles coming from behind us.
Behind us, a car is fast approaching. Can’t tell if it is Russian or not at this point. Can’t tell anything besides the fact that bullets are being pumped out of it at a frankly astounding rate.
Suddenly, the relative desolation of this countryside is no longer an advantage. I’d give anything for law enforcement, or for a witness to this shit show.
BAM!
A large explosion sound and a sudden fish-tailing heralds the back left tire being shot out and going entirely flat.
Sparks fly as the car runs on rims. Vicious is on the phone to somebody. I can’t tell who. The sound of being chased is roaring in my ears, along with my pulse.
The car is swaying back and forth across the road as Vicious fights for control and bullets slam into the back with increasing frequency. Those who are chasing us are getting closer, firing at will. They want to kill us.
BAM! The other back tire goes out and now we are running on rims on both sides, two bright showers of sparks leaping at the sides of the car like playful dolphins carrying us into oblivion. Only the chaos of our speed and motion keeps the people behind us from catching up and overhauling us.
“VICIOUS!” I scream his name as that changes. A white sedan comes speeding past, gunfire blazing from the back. The engine of our vehicle is riddled with bullets. Seconds later what used to be a car but is now a hole ridden husk slides to a screeching halt in the middle of the road.
Vicious slumps over between the front seats, pushing a gun into my hands.
He looks like hell. His face is pale and covered in blood. I can’t tell if he’s been hit by a bullet or if its a bloody flesh wound from the broken glass that’s making all the mess.
“These men are going to hurt you,” he says. “Hold them off as long as you can. Do not give in. Do not surrender.”
His breathing is labored. He has been hit. A spreading crimson stain low on his belly tells me it’s a gut shot. One of the most painful places to be hit, and one of the slowest, most certain deaths without surgery.
