by Glen Frost
Yet Anya was...different somehow. It wasn't physical, or at least not just physical; there had been an indefinable something about her, the way she had tilted her head ever so slightly and looked at him in that strange little way. He could already tell that there was a mutual attraction there. That could make things tricky if he didn't stamp on it right the fuck now. Getting involved with subordinates was always a bad idea, but doubly so here at The Agency. When your job was basically fighting the nastiest monsters (both human and inhuman) on the face of the planet, you couldn't afford to have any sort of sentimental attachment to your comrades. That tended to get people killed.
Stepping into his own room in what everybody like to call Officer's Country, Neil headed straight for the fridge and cracked open an ice cold beer. It was Sunday evening, just after seven. Ordinarily he'd spend the night kicking back with a couple of brews and a good movie, but tonight was going to be different. He didn't even bother to turn the TV on. His latest trainee's regimen was going to take a lot of forethought, and he needed to devise something that would make best use of The Agency's training time and resources.
Sitting down at his compact writing desk and firing up his laptop, the SEAL officer opened up a new text file, named it ANYA TRAINING.doc, and got right down to work. He made damned sure to shove any thoughts concerning the girl herself straight to the back of his mind.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Prisoner Zero looked down upon him from on high, her face a mask of loathing and barely suppressed fury. The breathing tube was still in her mouth, feeding her oxygen from the ventilator, but now that she had regained consciousness it was making her choke. Reaching for the exposed length of plastic tube, she gripped it firmly in her right fist, opened her mouth as wide as it could go, and pulled.
When the inflated cuff which held the tube in place passed through her vocal cords, the woman dry-heaved as it triggered her gag reflex. Once the airway device was free of her mouth, she tossed it aside, then after tearing the piece of tape that was stretched across her nose, she proceeded to extract a good two feet of nasogastric feeding tube from all the way down inside her belly.
Leaning forward with her head between her spread thighs, the female prisoner finally succumbed to the urge to vomit. A stream of foul-smelling watery liquid that was thickened ever so slightly by parts of her stomach lining erupted from her mouth.
McCrudden's eyes widened in horror. The whole thing was happening in slow motion, and it felt as though he was swimming through molasses. He tried desperately to roll away, but the best he could manage was to roll onto his left side and screw his eyes tight shut.
Puke splattered across the side of Mark's face. It began to run along the edge of his cheekbone, caught in the unerring grip of gravity, cresting the prominence of his zygomatic arch and running into his nose to mingle with the free-flowing stream of blood. More of it splurged across his lips, which he had thankfully possessed the foresight to clamp shut, and yet the very thought of a stranger's puke coating his mouth (even a stranger this alluring) was now making him want to throw up, which is exactly what he did. Prisoner Zero's vomit mixed in with his own.
"Bastard. You motherfucking bastard."
Seething with righteous anger, her voice was pure east coast fury. Even amidst the cacophony of pain and revulsion that he was currently caught up in, a small part of Mark's brain was trying to nail down exactly where. Jersey, maybe? That would be where he'd put his money, if he were a gambling man.
"Stand up."
The woman's voice was suddenly as cold as ice. He had been expecting her to jump down and try to beat the shit out of him, but instead she was trying to give him orders. What the hell was that all about? Who did she think she—
To his utter surprise, McCrudden found himself obeying. Struggling to get his feet beneath him, the astonished prison guard gripped the bed's siderail and used it as leverage to help haul himself upright. His legs felt a little unsteady, but that was nothing compared to how his brain felt right now.
"Go over there and pick up that breathing tube." She gestured toward the spit-slicked length of curved transparent plastic. It was laying on the floor closed to the inner door, still connected up to the ventilator tubing.
Yet again, Mark found himself doing exactly what she had told him to do, shuffling along with his pants around his ankles. What the fuck was going on? He didn't want to obey her; in fact, he was actively trying to resist doing whatever she told him to do. But it was as though there was another voice lurking in the back of his mind, speaking whenever Prisoner Zero spoke; a soft, quiet voice that nevertheless had to be obeyed, no matter what he might feel about doing so.
"What the hell is this? Mind control?" It sounded ridiculous, even to his own ears. The woman simply smiled at him, her lips thin and her expression severe. Somehow, the fact that she was mostly naked and splashed with his semen only contrived to make her appear more fearsome.
"Something like that. Now, I want you to listen to me carefully. Are you listening?"
Against his will, Mark nodded. The woman seemed pleased.
"Good. Your next instruction should be nice and easy, so listen carefully." She leaned forward, looking him right in the eye, and said, "Go and fuck yourself."
"What? You can't be serious...!"
But she was. Mark could tell by the almost reptilian coldness in her eyes. What was worse, he couldn't help but do it...
Reaching around behind his back, the hapless guard used one hand to pull his buttocks apart, while the other pushed the tip of the rigid plastic tube into his rectum. The intrusion sickened him on a visceral level, and yet ironically McCrudden didn't even think about comparing this current violation to that which he had just inflicted on the unconscious woman.
"No! No! For fuck's sake!"
Mark was horrified to realized that he just couldn't help himself; the weird compulsion to do what Prisoner Zero told him to do was just too strong.
Lubricated only with her saliva, the tip of the breathing tube was not going to pass easily. McCrudden winced as he felt the rigid tip scrape against his anus, nudging insistently against the sphincter despite his every effort to resist it.
"Do it," the woman repeated slowly. "Go on. Fuck. Your. Self."
And so he did.
With the tube clenched firmly in his right fist, McCrudden jammed it backwards as hard as he could. He felt something rip deep inside his rectum, a tearing pain more brutally, invasively intense than anything he had ever felt in his entire life.
He screamed.
"Ssssh." Prisoner Zero held a finger to her lips. "Quietly now. Oh yes, and harder too."
Gritting his teeth, Mark bent slightly forward at the waist. He shoved the medical device even deeper into himself. He wanted desperately to scream out against the agony, but there seemed to be some kind of mental block preventing him from doing so, denying him even that tiny form of release. Something hot and sticky was running down the back of his legs. Mark looked down. Dark red droplets had spattered onto the tiles, interspersed with foul-smelling brown patches that could only be feces.
Seemingly amused by his distress, Prisoner Zero began to call out more specific instructions to him.
"In...Out. In...Out. That's it. "In...out."
Bitter tears running down his face, McCrudden followed her timings exactly. On each in, he thrust the tube deeper inside himself, withdrawing it on the out, only to plunge it right back into his back passage once more on the next in. She began to increase the pace until it became one continuous stretch of "In, out, in, out," and his hand was little more than a blur, sawing the medical device back and forth as quickly as his arm could manage.
The coppery smell of freshly-spilled blood vied with the stench of liquid shit in an assault upon Mark's nostrils that made him want to puke. The feeling of being invaded by a rigid foreign object probing his rear entrance only added to the urge, and before the prison guard knew it he was retching and bringing up the contents of his stomach
in great gasping heaves. With every retch, the breathing tube sunk into him another few millimeters. White hot pain exploded through Mark's abdomen, driving him down to his knees in utter shock. Although he had no way of knowing it, the end of the tube had just perforated his distal colon, poking its tip through the tear and out into his abdominal cavity.
Blood from the traumatized intestine began to leak into his abdomen; still more of it poured around the last few inches of tube that poked out from between his buttocks. McCrudden threw up orange chunks of stomach lining in a tapering V-shaped splatter all down the front of his shirt.
He was beginning to feel light-headed and dizzy, his vision beginning to blur; the image of the smiling woman swam before his eyes, which were already wet with tears. She was the last thing that Officer McCrudden would ever see as he collapsed in an insensible heap among his own bodily secretions, still sitting on the edge of the bed and simply watching him as the life bled from his body.
Mark McCrudden had no way of knowing that he was only the first of what would be many victims.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
At seven o'clock on the first morning of her training, Anya sat straight-backed in a chair inside one of the compound's numerous classrooms. It could comfortably accommodate thirty students, but today its only occupants would be Anya and Commander Wilson, who was wearing highly polished black boots, a baseball cap (which she learned was apparently called a “cover”) and duty BDUs containing various insignia.
"Have you ever handled a firearm before?" he asked without preamble, standing in front of the digital smart board at the front of the classroom. She shook her head. "That's not a problem. It means I don't have to un-train you out of any bad habits before I can teach you the right way."
They started out with the rudiments of firearms care and maintenance. Anya was issued with an M16A2 from the armory. The assault rifle had been immaculately cleaned and lightly oiled when she got it; Neil spent the morning teaching her how to break the weapon down into its constituent parts, patiently going over the name and purpose of each individual component, before finally instructing her on how to reassemble it all again.
"Feel like you've got it?" he asked Anya as she laid the fully-assembled weapon down on the desktop for what felt like the hundredth time that morning. He looked up at the wall clock. Eleven-thirty. They weren't making bad time.
"Yes. It was not difficult."
"Is that so? Then I guess we need to find a way to challenge your skills a little." Walking to the instructor's podium at the front of the classroom, the Navy SEAL bent down and picked up a canvas tote bag from somewhere down at his feet.
"What is that for?" Anya asked, her voice full of caution.
"Taking it to the next level." He slipped the bag down over her head, tugging the edges down snugly enough that she couldn't see a thing yet still leaving enough space for the air to flow. "Take it apart."
"How? I cannot see."
"That's the point. Anybody can break a weapon down when they can see what they're doing. That's easy. A professional has to be able to do it in the dark, when it's pitch black and the shit's flying left and right. You ever see Star Wars?"
"Huh?"
"You know. Star Wars. Darth Vader. Death Star. Jedi Knights."
"Yes, once or twice. I have seen some of them."
"Well to steal a line: ‘Your eyes deceive you. Don't trust them.’"
"I do not understand."
"Use your hands, Anya. Let them do all the work. Go ahead and try."
She reached out tentatively, her fingertips brushing against the rifle's stock. Tracing her way across the firing mechanism and along the barrel, she slowly began to lift each piece and fit it together, going by feel and a mental picture of how they should all be combined. Neil timed her using the stopwatch app on his phone.
"Four minutes, seventeen seconds. Not bad for a first attempt."
"I guess." Anya seemed unconvinced.
"Don't worry. You can do better. And you will."
And so she did. By the end of the day, Anya had it down to two minutes and forty-three seconds; by the end of the week, standing on the back of countless repetitions, she could reassemble an M16A2 in just shy of one minute flat. Even the SEAL commander was impressed; it had taken him a couple of weeks' hard practice to reach that level of proficiency.
"You seem to have a natural aptitude for this," he told Anya as the pair of them made their way toward the outdoor live firing range on the first morning of her second week.
"I do not think so, Commander. I have no military experience whatsoever."
"Being a good soldier...being a good field operative, is all about attention to detail. Forget that 'firing from the hip, spray and pray' bullshit you've seen in Hollywood war movies."
"I do not watch war movies. Prefer funny ones, or sometimes horror movies."
You’re basically living in a horror movie, Wilson thought sardonically. "What's your favorite movie?"
"The Lord of the Rings."
Neil laughed out loud. "Those movies aren't comedies, Anya."
"They're funny to me." Her forehead furrowed as though she was trying to decipher his meaning. "The little people and their magic invisibility ring. It makes me laugh."
"Whatever floats your boat. Alright, here we are."
The range was divided up into six long lanes, marked off in hundred-meter increments.At the far end was a big berm and a series of human-shaped targets, which Anya had to squint at in order to make them out. Just like her mentor, she was wearing digi-cam BDUs; unlike him, she also wore a combat harness rig. Its pouches were filled with thirty-round magazines for the M16A2.
Leading Anya up to the first firing position, Neil instructed Anya to get down. Obediently, she dropped into the prone position. He handed her a set of ear defenders and placed a second set over his own ears.
"With a magazine of thirty rounds: Load." He had to raise his voice in order to be heard.
They had run through numerous dry runs of this particular exercise on the previous Friday, so it was already beginning to feel like second nature to Anya. The muscle memory was starting to develop, her neural pathways adapting to welcome the new skill. Without conscious thought, she reached into a hip pouch and extracted a magazine, fitting it securely into the assault rifle's well, and then put a round into the chamber before bringing the weapon up snugly into her shoulder.
"In your own time, Anya. Five rounds, single shot. Go."
She pulled back on the trigger. The rifle recoiled, its muzzle flashing and riding high. Squinting, Neil could make out a puff of brown earth just behind and above the target.
She’s snatching at the trigger a little, not squeezing it gently like I showed her.
The second round went low and to the left, kicking up another plume. Her trigger pull had been a little more measured this time.
The girl analyzes her mistakes and does her best to correct them.
He knew that the sights needed to be zeroed, adjusted to suit her eye and body dimensions. But still, the Navy SEAL mused when Anya took her third shot and blew off the bottom left corner of the target, she was already improving in leaps and bounds.
The fourth and fifth rounds came in rapid succession, almost a double-tap. One hit the empty space in the outer eight o'clock position, and the other landed closer to the center in what would definitely have been an incapacitating hit if the charging paper target had been a real live human being.
Setting the assault rifle down, Anya made sure to leave its still-smoking barrel pointing downrange. She took off her ear defenders and laid them aside carefully, then rolled onto her left side and looked up at her trainer, her eyes searching his face for approval.
"Not too shabby for your first time," Wilson admitted. He nodded toward the M16A2. "Once we get this thing zeroed in, you'll find it a hell of a lot easier to put those rounds dead center."
His words proved to be true. After a couple more days on the range, during which she b
urned through more rounds than the average infantry company did in a month, Anya was putting rounds in both the head and the center of mass every time.
"Our girl's been under your care for a couple of weeks now," Hubbard said one Friday evening when Wilson once again found himself sitting across from her desk.
"Let me guess. You'd like to know why I'm teaching a blood-fueled super-powered killing machine infantry tactics 101," he said, unable to stifle the faintest of smiles.
"The thought had crossed my mind." Reaching into a desk drawer, she retrieved a bottle of Jim Beam and two small glasses. Pouring a couple of fingers' worth of liquor into each one, the director slid one of the glasses across the desktop toward him. When he failed to take it, she prodded: "Oh, go on. You're out of uniform, Neil."
"But not off duty."
"During this attachment, you're off duty if I say you're off duty. I'm saying it now."
"Oh, twist my arm, why don’t you?" The SEAL commander took the proffered glass and sipped it, enjoying the pleasant burn as the liquid went down his throat. Setting it back down on the desk, he regarded his civilian superior levelly. "Anya doesn't need a firearm to kill and maim; you're right about that. She could take down ten times her number without breaking a sweat."
"So long as the blood flows."
"Yeah. So long as the blood flows. That's not why I'm teaching her marksmanship and fieldcraft, though."
"Go on. I must confess to being intrigued." Gina took a slug from her glass, emptying it in a single gulp, and then refilling it once more from the bottle.
"The problem with Anya is that despite her power, she's undisciplined...all raw, unrefined potential. She still thinks like a civilian, which is hardly her fault. After all, she still is a civilian. She's never had any real sense of discipline, either self-discipline or that which is imposed from the outside."
"So your firearms training..."
