I screamed her name just before a heavy weight came down upon the back of my head. Long after the universe went dark, I was still screaming.
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Mamacita Said There'd Be Days Like This
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"So, this is Bando Nicos, the chili pepper Chief of the Razai pigfuzz." The voice was tuba deep and rough as gravel. My hands were tied behind me so tightly I couldn't feel my fingers. I fought through the grandfather of all headaches and forced my eyes open. When the images before my eyes stopped swimming I saw a squat graying haystack yard monster with an ugly purple scar on his left cheek that ran from the corner of his eye to the corner of his mouth. It was a grin scar put there by someone in Kegel's past who didn't like him very much. It made him look silly as hell.
Behind him, tied to tent poles, were Alna and Mercy Jane. Nance was sitting on the floor, her ankles chained together with irons. Both Alna and Nance had dead faces on. I closed my eyes again, my heart sick.
I knew the dead face. It's a hiding place. It's not like the man who was hanging by his guts. He was only hiding from Kegel. The person wearing the dead face was hiding from the universe. They were hiding from reality. I could see it on both of them. They had been raped. Tortured.
"I'm Deke Kegel, pigfuzz. Tell me something I want to know."
"Nukualofa is the capital of Tonga, Smiley."
His face flashed red, he swung back his booted foot, and kicked me square in the nuts. After half a scream, I went out. It worked just like Needles said it would. Kegel just had no future as a torturer. Piss him off and he'd get carried away and either kill you or send you to sleep.
The trick was always to keep the victim alive and conscious. That was what Needles Taliaferro used to say. Needles had been the official unofficial torturer for some non-Union Latin American paradise. He had fled to the Union of Terran Republics after a rather abrupt change in management. He was dropped into the crowbars at Greenville shortly after he started up a private practice.
Needles once told me how he used to take a rough cut piece of oak planking and rub his victim's naked body all over with the board, with the grain. Everybody knows how painful just one tiny splinter can be. Needles would cover you with thousands of little tiny splinters. And when they had become infected after a few hours, he'd take cheesecloth and give you a rubdown, each little loop of the cheesecloth catching each little splinter that it met, giving the tiny piece of wood a twang.
You have to be an artist to think like that. Needles was an artist. It made my skin crawl talking to him, but that's just what you wanted on hot, humid days in Greenville. You picked up some useful information, too.
"You have to keep your mind on your work," he used to caution. "You can't get emotionally involved. The man who takes things personally will never be any good at the business. It's too easy to make him angry. The angry man always overkills."
The first sign of returning consciousness was a dull ache in my groin. It increased in intensity until it equaled my headache. I opened my eyes and once again beheld Gutty Kegel. This time, however, he was sitting on a big chair, his arms spread wide, his face covered with gloom.
Alna's dead face was gone. She had been crying, and it didn't take a detective to figure out who she had been crying for. There were brown spots on the front of Alna's shirt. Jontine was there, too. They dropped her in the tent like dead fish. The side of her head was missing. I looked at Nance. Her face was like stone, her eyes narrowed to tiny slits as she studied the woman who stood before me. I moved my head a few degrees in her direction. I didn't need to be introduced. She was the one the squats and grunts outside had said was running Kegel. It was Anna Tane.
She was a body built angel cake. Although I could count her muscles, she wasn't worked down to nothing but iron. There were all the right lumps. She had a body and face any vid star would have killed for, and she wore her tight leathers and cutaway top like she knew it. White blonde hair framed a face that, from soft clear skin to full red lips, was perfect in every way, except for the eyes. Her eyes were black, emotionless, and looking at me.
"I see that you are with us again, Bando Nicos," she said. Her mouth smiled but her eyes didn't go along with the exercise. I just hung there from whatever it was that I was tied to and tried to keep from losing my lunch or my water. She scared me to death.
"As you have seen," she continued, "Deke is rather sensitive about his deformity. Please do not refer to it again."
"Are you talking about his freakface?" I inquired. "I can see why you don't want to talk about it." Kegel leaped up and began coming for me, but Anna Tane stopped him dead with a straight arm to his chest.
"Sit down," she ordered him.
"You hear what he called me!"
"Sit down." After a moment of mandatory macho blowholing, Kegel sat.
"Man," I said to him, "whatever happened to you, you poor pussy-whipped freakface you. Did this bit whack your weenie?"
"Sometime soon, chili pepper, I'll show you a couple of things." His voice was a growl.
I grinned at him. "I just love a man with a crooked smile, Nightmare," I answered. Once more Anna restrained her man, but this time she sent him from the tent.
Once he had gone she faced me. "Deke takes things too personally." She placed a gentle hand on my cheek. "I don't at all."
As my heart moved into my throat, I gathered every last bit of spit I could find in my mouth and got her with a spray that covered her face from her nose to her left cheek and chin. Hope left the universe as I saw her only smile and wipe the goober from her face with the palm of her hand. As Needles used to say, she had a thoroughly professional attitude.
She walked to a low table, dipped a cloth into a water jar, and talked as she cleaned her face with dainty dabs. "We've captured many Razai prisoners, and a few of them became quite conversational after we did a little work on them." She placed the cloth onto the table as she faced me and held out her hand toward one of Kegel's Hellborn. The Fork handed her a rifle and she nodded for him to make himself scarce.
"We know that you are some kind of police officer, and I would really love to know how that happened. I can't think of anything in the universe that would prompt a bunch of sharks to put up with a police authority. I certainly can't imagine why a man of your obvious intelligence would allow himself to become a police officer."
I glanced at Nance, remembering her telling me to either do the job or hit the dunes. On her shirt, where her breasts pressed against the fabric, there were brown spots. I faced Anna Tane, shoved my shoulders into the semblance of a shrug, and repeated the famous words of Tydeus. "It seemed like a good idea at the time."
She looked down at the weapon and turned it over. It was one of the pieces converted by the Trolls. The clip and auto nut were missing. "You're here to recover your boss. I know that much, and I want you to know that I'm going to send you back alive with my offer for her safe return." She held the rifle beneath my nose. "The offer has to do with this. This rifle."
"What about it?"
The right corner of her lovely mouth pulled back into a slight grin. "Bando Nicos, perhaps you have figured out that I am a person who does not enjoy games. Take torture, for example. I derive no pleasure from it. Hence I tend toward efficiency, first finding the subject's most vulnerable place, and concentrating my attention there." She lowered the weapon and let her long graceful fingers play around the entrance port for the ammo clip. "What's your most vulnerable place, Bando Nicos?"
"I really hate broccoli." There were some snickers here and there in the tent. My throat was as dry as salt in Hell.
She looked down at the rifle. "The survivors from the patrol you ambushed were simply full of stories when they came back to camp. They kept talking about being met by a solid wall of machine gun fire. Of course we all laughed at them. Since these rifles first appeared twenty five years ago the different gangs have been
trying their best to make automatic weapons out of them. We knew it couldn't have been that."
Her dark eyes looked from the weapon to me. "We assumed they had simply run into a large force of three or four hundred rifles. But when I personally went to the site of the ambush the evidence only supported an attacking force of perhaps fifteen or twenty Razai. And the stitch trails along the sides of the lughs. Just like those made by machine guns. How do you account for that?"
"I'm not an accountant."
A guard laughed out loud, Anna Tane nailed him to a stake with her eyes. She looked back at me. What the hell. As long as they were concentrating on me, they weren't working over Alna, Nance, and Mercy Jane. "With that incredibly inept diversion your men pulled tonight, I was able to hear the weapons for myself. We only found one body and the tracks of a few more leading north, away from the camp."
I couldn't remember any diversion. It took me awhile to flog my brain into understanding what she was saying. Our "diversion" had been the Exterminator having another breakthrough. I couldn't believe how badly I had screwed things up. Victim, Jontine, Brain Drain, and now the Exterminator. How many more I didn't know.
"We didn't capture any of their weapons, but we did capture yours. None of them work. The ammo clip is obviously missing." She pointed at the port for the auto nut. "Something is missing here, as well. I've had this weapon apart and the missing piece is some kind of complex cam switching arrangement. I want to know what it is."
What the hell? What harm could a name do? "It needs an auto nut."
"Very good. Perhaps you could show me how they are made."
"I don't know anything about machines, lady. I just shoot 'em. I don't build 'em."
"Where is the auto nut for this weapon?"
"I don't know."
"I think you do."
"I mean I don't know where they are now. We left ours behind with the other group so they wouldn't get captured. It's the truth."
Her voice became very quiet, very low, almost seductive. "Bando, I like you. I don't want to hurt you."
"I'm special glad to hear that."
"You take a kick in the groin very well." I could feel the bile moving up into my mouth. Right then my balls were swollen and protesting the touch of my trousers. "There are things we can do that are more painful than that."
I silently thanked the Spider. At least they weren't going to work some more on my balls. "I told you the truth, lady. We left the auto nuts with the others."
She shook her head as she said, "I can't buy it, Bando. Five sharks sneak into an enemy camp carrying weapons that don't fire?"
"What can I tell you? It was part of the disguise."
"No one out of the crowbars is that stupid. You have to be a soldier or a fanatic to do something like that. No shark ever performed that kind of sacrifice for the greater good. I think you either have yours on you or you dropped it in the fight outside. Remember what I said about something more painful than kicking you in the testicles?"
"I remember. I've been telling you the truth. I got nothing more to say."
She nodded once at some Forks behind me. "Strip him."
They untied my hands and the yard monsters held me as they pulled off my sheet, pulled down my trousers and smalls, along with my coat and shirt. With one yard monster on each wrist, I stood there in my God-issue. Anna Tane was looking me over with a big smirk on her face. I wasn't hauling the body beautiful, but I wasn't ashamed of it. I figured if she wanted to look, let her.
As a couple of the Forks went through my pockets and seams, Anna Tane walked around me, pulling her fingers across my chest, my back, my buttocks. She came to a stop in front of me and cupped my testicles in her hand.
"Sore, aren't they?" she whispered.
"A bit." That bile was in my throat again. Holy Christ, she was going after my nuts.
But I was wrong. Her lips moved close to mine as her hand moved from my nuts and began stroking my penis, making it hard. Alna was watching, and I tried to force myself not to have an erection. It was no use.
I glanced at Alna and saw her eyes widen. She screamed. I turned to see what she had seen and Kegel was behind me, his dick in his hand.
"No!" I shouted it, roared it, screamed it, begged it. "No!"
"Down with him," said that gravel-filled voice. "Get him down and bend him over. I'm all buttered up and lookin' for a bit of chili pepper."
I fought, pulled, tried to kick, scream. God after all of the years in the crowbars clawing and slugging to keep the boybungers out of my ass—
"No!"
Someone's hand grabbed my left shoulder and I bit it, sinking my teeth in until they grated against the bone. There was a howl, then a fist hit my jaw. The world spun for a moment, I had nothing but blood in my mouth, but damn the heavens, I didn't go out.
I was over, my face ground into the filthy carpet of the tent, Alna's screams and Kegel's laughs in my ears. He split me apart as he thrust his filthy thing inside of me and began pumping.
I roared. I roared and screamed, cursed, begged, whimpered, screamed and roared some more.
Then it wasn't happening to me. It was happening to someone else. Maybe Jimmy Bennet or some other crowbar faggot was getting spread. I didn't know. It was none of my business.
But it was my business.
It was me.
Then the screams and roars.
When Kegel was finished with me they tied my hands and ankles behind my back and left me on my face at Alna's feet, crying. Anna Tane said to me before she left, "I warned you."
I kept my eyes closed as I cried, denied the thing that had happened, admitted it, denied and admitted it again and again. My head was exploding, my universe shattering, and I couldn't stop it.
"Bando," croaked a voice. "Bando, you're still a man." I opened my eyes, turned my head, and through my tears I saw Alna looking down at me. "You're still a man, Bando. He can't take anything away from you unless you let him."
I lifted my head and crashed my right temple down on the filthy rug again and again until my wound split open and darkness took away my mind.
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Indispensable
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I didn't know how long I had been staring at the light beam coming through the hole in the small tent. It was orange. Daylight. I was alive. I could see no one, yet I knew I wasn't alone. Knives of pain coursed through my head, and I blessed them because everything else was numb. Everything else in my awareness, everything else in my body. My life before that awakening had been hacked from my memory.
Slow bit by slow bit messages were picked up by my senses. I frowned as I realized I was on a cot. My head was bandaged and I was wearing my clothes. I was tempted to cry my thanks to whoever had dressed me, couldn't remember why, then froze the tears, the thanks, and the feelings.
There were footsteps and I closed my eyes, once again trying to fool the monsters into thinking I was asleep and therefore beyond their powers. "Is he alive?" It was a high, reedy voice. "Is he alive?" the voice repeated. "Kegel's bit wants to know."
"He's alive," answered Mercy Jane's voice.
"Can he ride?"
"A corpse can ride."
The reedy voice laughed and faded. My closed eyes tempted me and I followed my light-headedness down that steep spiral to oblivion.
There was a memory of waking up in the dark. I was standing up in a different tent, my hands bound above me to a post, four guards sitting on the carpet playing a card game they called "poke." Everything about me had been dead, and I watched the guards as they played. The guard called Dive was the poke, and the three other guards stayed in against him. Dive took two more cards, bet again, and the others called.
"What's she read, Dive?" asked the one called Crawler.
Dive put down his cards and the other three players laughed. "Trip eights? Are you mad? I almost got that beat with me own hand."
&n
bsp; Dive gestured with his head. "More cards, less talk."
Card by card in turn the players assembled a hand that attempted to beat Dive's three eights. The first three cards were two kings and a six. The remaining two cards were another six and another king.
They ribbed Dive about his clumsy play, and the guard stood and stretched. "I can't concentrate. I think I'll take a look around."
"Sure," laughed Crawler. "You take a look around."
On his way out of the tent he noticed my eyes were open. We were both standing in the shadows. He stopped and looked me in the eyes. "You're awake."
I kept looking at him. He averted his gaze a moment and looked back. "What happened to you. It's not us. It's that bitch. There's nothin' we could do."
I didn't know what he was talking about, but I did know the law. "In the Razai," I said, "the chup who stands by and lets a crime happen is just as guilty as the perp." My voice sounded strange in my own ears.
"Well, we don't have no cops here." He nodded and walked off as I faded out again. I came up the spiral. I was in a cot in a different tent. Survival still seemed important, and survival said that there were parts of reality I could not afford to deal with right then. Still those pieces kept flashing by me before I could kill them. They were there and then they weren't. Somehow I tried to clutch to this childish belief that if I couldn't think about it, it never happened. Still there was a part of me that knew it was a lie and it waited for me because it knew that if the lie lived I would die.
I lifted my head and gently sat up, my eyes still closed. As my feet touched the ground, I heard someone stand. My body went rigid and my eyes shut as I tried to deny everything all at once. Someone stood in front of me. I opened my eyes and filled my sight with Greenville blues. It was a woman's torso. Where her breasts pressed against her shirt, there were drops of blood. I looked up and Jane Sheene was looking down at me, her face stiff and lined, her eyes cold and old. I touched the bandage on my head. "You did this?"
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