Mind of a Child: Sentient Serpents (OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT Book 1)

by Dean C. Moore

  She gave him a dirty look, and shook her head. “You’re a complete idiot.”

  “I prefer to think of myself as a partial idiot, thank you very much. Though I prefer slow learner, even Special Needs. Speaking of which, you think you could hold these guys off while I take a piss? I’ve needed to take a wicked whiz for some time now.”

  Cassandra groaned. “You better hope I don’t throw you down in that hole with the blues.”

  “The blues?” He turned to gape into the abyss. “The blues! Hello, ladies. Can I introduce you to my phallic substitute?” he said, holding up his rifle.

  “Like I said, complete idiot.”

  SEVENTY-THREE

  As the last traces of life drained from Mudra her past flashed before her eyes. At least the parts she wanted to hold on to. There was this professor once…

  ***

  Mudra had her face buried in her chem notes, drawing out her equations on her sketchpad from her desk. She thought that the drape of hair that hung down from her head was enough of a privacy curtain. Apparently not, judging by the repeated utterance of her name, eventually snapping her out of her fugue. She often concentrated so much on her chemistry homework that she lost track of place and time. She looked up to find the professor staring bemusedly at her. “Class has been over for some time now,” he said.

  She glanced around the room to confirm, still trying to drop the blinders on her tunnel vision. “Why so patient with me?”

  “Honestly, I was looking for an opportunity to ask you out. Figured this was it.”

  “Hitting on your students, doc? Aren’t there enough definitions in the dictionary for ‘dirty old man’ already?”

  He smiled. “You gotta ask yourself, am I the dirty old man in your life, or does that title go to somebody else?” She flashed on her father, Jacko. The old man scooping out his own butt to stir feces into her food before handing her the plate. Reacher must have been able to read her past on her. Predators always knew their prey. It was some pheromone scent they gave off that attracted them to one another. Fine. She had daddy issues and he was not beyond capitalizing on them. Worse things had been done to her in the name of parenting.

  “Yeah, sure, doc. If you can’t keep it up, I’m a biochemist after all. There’s no aspect of old age I can’t fix, barring the psycho lurking inside your head, of course.”

  “He’s lurking inside all of us, Mudra. But something tells me you’re a beastmaster.”

  She smiled. This guy really did have her number.

  She was nineteen. He was, what, thirty-seven, thirty-eight? Athletic. Bronzed. At least he didn’t make her skin crawl the way the pasty-skinned white men did. They reminded her of the walking dead. One of the neighboring tribes near her village in the Brazilian rainforest plastered white ash on themselves as part of their ceremonies for communing with the dead. It was a cultural thing. He just wouldn’t understand. Luckily, being Latin and bronzed, he would be spared her bugaboos.

  Mudra rose from the desk, slipped her work into her backpack, hurled the backpack over her shoulder, and said, “Heel, creature of the night.”

  “Okay, just so we’re clear, I’m a morning person.”

  She smiled despite herself and when she headed for the door she didn’t look back. What doubt was there he’d be trailing her like a comet traces destiny?

  It was barely an hour later when they arrived at the horse stables. “You ride?” he said with some enthusiasm and fear mixed together.

  “Quite well. And quite fast. No room in the Amazon jungle for such a sense of freedom.”

  “You could swing from the trees like Tarzan.”

  She gave him an ugly look.

  “You want me to be more sensitive. Check.”

  To his mock protests—she didn’t think he really cared—he saddled both horses western riding style for them, not English. She hated all that prissy bobbing up and down. And John Wayne was the only father figure she could ever relate to. He’d gotten her through her freshman year, probably influenced her speaking style more than her voice coach.

  They rode the day, along the scenic Paulinskill Valley trails and river of Northern New Jersey.

  The sun was not only setting, but had nearly disappeared behind the hills when she called it a day by the riverside.

  He hadn’t done half bad keeping up with her. They let the horses drink untethered. They weren’t going anywhere in their state. Instead they nibbled at the tall grasses along the bank.

  “When I envisioned taking you on the ride of your life, I hadn’t expected it going quite this way.”

  She smiled at his artless, on-the-nose humor. She liked men who thought they were funnier than they actually were. It was one of the many things she’d learned about herself since arriving in America to study at her father’s and Truman’s behest. She liked men to be far less entrancing in general than they thought they were; it shifted the power in the dynamic to her. Her father, the shaman for their people, had been hypnotic enough when she was growing up. His idea of parenting involved him coming inside her body and using her like a voodoo puppet, possessing her mind, body, and soul. He had always had erotic desires for her, and the poor boundaries between them had started when she was very young in life. Blurred boundaries between parent and child were a sign of trouble ahead. The children almost always grew up neurotic in ways modern psychology was not prepared to fix. On or off medication. She sheltered higher hopes for herself. But she had never come up short on dreams. Just on reality.

  “I should tell you, this is where I see myself making my move,” he said.

  Again she smiled at his clumsiness. She couldn’t help herself. It was such a relief after having a father that could make a mortal enemy do his bidding with little effort. “Slow down, stud. Why don’t you start by telling me when you first knew you were a pedophile?”

  “Ha-ha. You’re joking, right? I certainly hope so.” He paused to check her expression. She didn’t give him anything. Finally, he sighed. “You must forgive me; I’m surrounded by students all day in the full bloom of life, and I guess I’m still a child at heart myself. Spent my youth in books and when I looked up from them it was gone, and so was my chance to have meaningful relationships. Especially in the circles I flow in.”

  “Fair enough.” She enjoyed shocking people with the truth, with her directness, like sticking needles in them, just like her father did with his voodoo dolls. Maybe the prickly pear didn’t fall so far from the gnarly tree as all that. “I’m not sure two broken people can heal one another, though. You and I both might do better in the hands of a sex therapist.”

  “If you can’t be with the ones you love, love the ones you with.”

  “That a line from something?”

  “Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young.”

  She smiled ruefully. “Kiss me.”

  “You don’t want to stretch out a blanket first? I was thinking one of the ones from the horses.”

  “It’ll be lined with their sweat. The saltiness will chafe your skin and the stink will likely give you nightmares of sucking horse dick.”

  He coughed. He probably meant to groan, but the gag reflex excited like that, it came out more like hacking. “But the bugs and creepy crawlies,” he said.

  She’d grown up in the Amazon rainforest, so to her, this land was relatively lifeless. And harmless. She found it amusing he felt so threatened by nature. He’d probably be traumatized exposed to it with the level of intensity she had. “I promise to be the only creepy crawly for miles.”

  He stood there, unable to join her on the grass until his imagination got the better of his fears. Then he sort of fell on her. His amorousness made her think of an avalanche. Her mad extremist form of skiing, from the highest peaks she could get access to, since she got to the U.S., had triggered more than one. So she knew what crawling out from under one felt like. And the only difference with Professor Reacher’s approach was that an actual avalanche was warmer to the touch, only slightly less bruti
sh, and only slightly longer lasting.

  When he came too quickly he curled up like a pill bug at the first sign of danger. Sobbed. “I should have practiced first on someone who didn’t mean so much to me.”

  The remark made her wonder how long he’d been carrying a torch for her. “Don’t worry about it,” she said dryly.

  “That’s the thing. Now I can’t let the sense of failure go unless…”

  It was the tone of voice that had her turning back to him instead of heading the rest of the way to the horse. He jumped her with a knife he had strapped to the small of his back. Note to self, Mudra: Never have sex again unless both parties are fully undressed.

  She’d had a brother, Panno, much stronger and more muscular, and with a good fifty pounds on this guy, she had learned to fight off even as a young child. He’d picked up some of their father’s bad habits, and thought dominating women was how all relationships were supposed to go. So Professor Reacher scarcely stood a chance.

  She ended up peeling him alive with his own knife, slowly.

  Very slowly.

  His screaming through the night was the most erotic exchange with another man she’d ever experienced. His pleading, begging for mercy, squirming and spasming in her hands every time she tore off a strip of flesh… It had made her come multiple times over before there was no more skin to peel off. She had to sneak away into the woods a few times to bring back herbs that could keep him going. The American analogues to her Amazonian admixtures weren’t nearly as potent, but he just had to last the night.

  He confessed so much to her before the night was out. Told her everything about his life. She never got to know another man as well as the professor. His backstory added to the sense of intimacy between them.

  “You’re special, Reacher. I think I’m falling for you,” she said sometime before dawn. “I hope you won’t mind me keeping you as a pet for a while. The pain that comes next will make the pain you’ve felt so far feel like mere prologue. But I have to burn you to keep you alive. The burns will heal with skin grafts and my herbal remedies. But it’ll take months, and by then you’ll beg me for more pain. You won’t know how to live without it.”

  “Why? Why are you doing this to me?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? We were meant for one another. You sensed it before you asked me out here. We have matching neuroses, you and I. Those are the only people who can truly be in a relationship for any length of time. We’re going to make each other very happy, Reacher.”

  He came at the pronouncement. The most prolonged orgasm he’d had of the night. Though not his first. He was a lot more shocked than she was to see that his sense of pain and pleasure were so inextricably intermixed. But now that he understood that better, his yielding to her would only continue to increase. Right now the only thing holding back a sense of complete surrender was the pain threshold that he hadn’t quite mastered yet. But that would soon change.

  ***

  WEEKS LATER

  “The new chem professor isn’t half bad,” Mudra confessed. The living charcoal briquette that Reacher had become stared back at her from the autopsy table in the abandoned morgue, which, mercifully came supplied with plenty of adequate drainage for all the blood. Tiled floors were nothing to sneeze at with dating practices like this.

  Reacher interrupted his moaning to speak to her in a raspy voice. “More pain, mistress.” His bloody gauze bandages would need changing again soon. Some of the blackened flesh would need to be debrided and the new skin grafts sewn on. Keeping him on the fine line between life and death was ever the trial.

  “You don’t want to hear about my day? You know how that’ll make me feel?”

  Reacher could barely move his head from all the unhealed scabs along his neck, head and face. But he tilted forward just enough to observe his dick getting hard. He was glad he wasn’t just experiencing the phantom pleasure. It was the one area of his body she’d left alone so she could climb on top him and ride him as it suited her. It suited her today, which was why the game of foreplay between them. He was well aware of the consequences of not asking about her day.

  She took a hot branding iron and stuck it into one of the areas healing on his body. He screamed in pain, his muscles convulsed. Next, she tore away some of the blackened flesh from another area with a scalpel. Making no effort to administer anesthesia first. The whole point of their relationship was shared pain. And she commenced to stitch in one of the skin grafts. Unlike a full-thickness graft, which involved the removal of the muscles and blood vessels in addition to the top two layers of skin from the donor site, the split-level thickness draft only involved the removal of the epidermis and dermis. The latter was preferable for covering large areas like this, but would not grow and blend with the rest of his body. The skin would remain forever shiny and fragile. Thus with each split-level thickness draft she applied, he would grow a bit more grotesque. He was slowly morphing into the perfect monster on the outside that he was on the inside.

  ***

  Reacher’s mind sought escape from the pain of Mudra’s scalpel. Reaching out to those he’d ever loved and who’d ever loved him, who’d ever shown him the slightest kindness.

  He was at Luigi’s, his favorite Italian restaurant, seated opposite Mama Rosa. She was stuffing her face, as always, with items drawn from each of the seven dishes in front of her. She never ate her seven course meal in sequence, always at once. She was laughing at one of his jokes, spitting food everywhere. “You must find yourself a fine woman, and soon, young man. Or you’ll end up like me, nothing but comfort food and more comfort food. They tell me it’s a problem with my genes. I tell them it’s a problem with my heart. But what do these Americans know of love, eh?”

  Reacher’s smile drew him out of the remembrance and planted him in another. Walking through his chemistry class, ostensibly making sure no one was cheating. But actually stealing winks at any of the girls who looked up at him during their tests. Any of the boys too. They knew for sexual favors a good test score could always be won. So much so that many had been emboldened to take each of his eight classes, whenever they needed to bolster their grades. He was that dependable, as were they. Pie-Faced Mary winked and smiled at him, a promise of things to come. He’d hold off scoring her test until that fateful moment. Redheaded-Dreadlocks Rhonda slid her tongue across her lips for him with promises of her own to come. She could get him to come in her mouth again and again in a tireless effort to get him to maintain just one of those erections for more than a minute. God bless her, maybe if he toned down her technique a bit.

  As the bell went off, and the timed test was over, the curly haired boy gestured to the storage closet with his eyes. Reacher collected up the tests, smiled at each of the students on their way out the door, then let the curly haired teen of no more than nineteen take him into the classroom closet. He spun his teacher around, pulled down his pants and commenced plowing him. Reacher became so excited he came prematurely. It was always this way. Always, no amount of practice could ever get him to control his excitement. He begged the teen to ride him as long as he could anyway, sniveling away his embarrassment, promising an “A” if he did. “No problem, teach,” the teen said, laughing condescendingly at him. Curly Haired Tommy, how could Reacher ever forget Curly Haired Tommy.

  Of course, the memories were all bittersweet now. None of his students could truly set him free, not like Mudra, for all their hormone-riddled sex appeal.

  The realization brought him back into the moment.

  ***

  Reacher’s agonized screaming continued throughout Mudra’s graft procedure, rising and falling in intensity like the calming surf. “You’re going to make me come, mistress. Please, not before I get a chance to ride you.”

  “Very well.” Finished stitching the graft in place, she climbed on top the autopsy table, and did the work of bobbing up and down on top of him until it was his turn. At which point, she said, “Now, you.” And he took that as his signal to move through
the pain to push into her. He screamed with each thrust.

  She glanced over at the cadaver which had supplied the donor skin, sprawled on another autopsy table. She’d had six hours from his time of death in which to take what she needed, before his skin was no longer viable for transplantation. It had been a small window in which to work, considering she had to liberate him from the mortuary first. Luckily, she had a mortician on the payroll. A corrupt, weak-minded man whom it hadn’t been particularly difficult to put under her influence using her father’s human-puppeteering techniques. Even if she hadn’t mastered the craft to the degree her father had, her methods were good enough for that imbecile.

  With a bit more craning of her neck, she glanced over at the other bodies piled up on the floor, prior donors. They were rotting and stinking up the place. But they served their purpose. To remind Reacher of the depth of their love, and the costs.

  Of course, the true costs could not be viewed from that pile alone. She panned her head to the pile of still-writhing bodies, only semi-conscious, but still quite alive, who had also supplied her with skin grafts for Reacher over the many weeks. These donors had been taken from his family and friends, his favorite students, everyone he’d ever loved or cared for. As he said, “I’m going to come, mistress,” she tilted his head for him towards the pile of family and friends. Made him look as he shot his load.

  Reacher screamed as he beheld his still-living donors. “Everyone I’ve ever loved, ever cared for.” He sobbed and whimpered. Mama Rosa, her fat, porcine body spread like a slice of bread over the packed meat of bodies beneath her. Pie-Faced Mary. Redheaded-dreadlocks Rhonda. And, of course, Curly-Haired Tommy. Who could forget Curly-Haired Tommy? Each among the “sandwich meats.” “They’re all in that pile now. No one left to torture me with.” The tears flowed freely down his face.