Theta Waves Box Set: The Complete Trilogy (Books 1-3) (Theta Waves Trilogy)
Page 34
She took one look at the suit on that young male body, that Ivory-soap face standing amid the rubble of broken pave and fallen buildings and she knew. In a world with no god, no religion, no morality, what better means to survive than to embrace the demons.
"Want a ride you'll never forget?" she said to him, and the tiny flashlight eyes fell on her in a way that made her shiver. Something wasn't right with this boy. He was too clean for this ruinous world. Too cherubic. Even as she wrestled the blasphemous term to the back of her mind, she willed herself to become an altar as she pushed herself to a swaying stand, offering him all the deity of a forgotten Heaven, all the rush of a demon's wings clipping through Hell. He would take her offer; he had to. She needed the fix.
"A magic beyond any," she urged. "There's nothing like it." She straightened up against the ruinous wall, using the jut of a broken mortar joint to steady herself.
The beams fell on her, stripping her of the goddess glamour. "Good as godspit?" he said.
She moved her weight foot to foot, scraping her sneaker toe across a jumble of pebbles. He knew. He'd read the haunted look in her eyes and knew she had a replacement god already.
"You don't want that shit," she said. "I got something better."
His tongue went to the inside of his cheek as he studied her, leaving her feeling as though he'd peeled her skin off and found every single sore and seeping wound she'd bound up with drugs. Even so, she couldn't back down. The godspit had begun to coo to her with its hushing lullaby, whispering up her skin. She couldn't deny it. She wouldn't.
"Half a ten gets you that magic," she said, counting up the hope that she could buy a coffee from the survivor's station for that if she let the manager sit with her. Always wanting to talk, that Ami, always wondering how she was doing. Ridiculous behavior for a dealer.
"Cheap enough," the youth said and his face went from angelic to lecherous in an instant. He would devour her, she thought, if she gave him what he really wanted.
She jerked her head at him. "Gimme your hand."
"Right here?"
She waited for him to peer around, to take in the prostitute blowing a man at a long-dead traffic light, the tattooed biker raping what he'd called a Nancy boy not two minutes before he decided to assault him, the group of teens beating the daylights out of an older man.
"Yes," he whispered, realizing how ludicrous his comment was. "I see."
She said nothing to that. He didn't see. How could he? Obviously from the western end of the supercity, he would never truly understand how this end flirted with the worst of human behavior so frequently the notion of courtship was moot.
"You want that ride or not?"
"Not," he said.
The response took all the air from her lungs. The swoosh of wings swept her head, her godspit sailing off to the bright blue yonder.
She clutched at his sleeve as he started to walk away. "Please," she said. "I need it."
"How old are you?" he said.
"I'm fucken forty-one," she snapped and clamped her teeth down on her tongue as his jaw clenched. She took a deep breath, held her hand out for him. "Please."
She didn't need to look at her hands to know how badly they shook. Instead, she peered upwards, seeking the sun, waiting for the god to slap her fingers as she held them there. She laughed. The god. He was gone. He cared as much about her sobriety as he cared for her father's.
Warm fingers curled around hers. "Okay," he said with a voice that could oil a tin man to smooth movement. "You have my hand."
"I need your blood," she said. Was that the feel of her heart tripping on itself, or was it relief? She'd been coating her psyche with manufactured bliss so much she'd lost track of which emotions were which. "Can you cut yourself somehow?"
He tried to wrench free, but she had him now. She ran his hand down the rough wall, scraping hard, bringing the blood to the skin. Even as he bucked backwards, she jammed the wound onto her tongue.
And she fell.
Blackness consumed her, one so complete she swore she'd never seen true shadow before, never felt such complete loneliness. Thunder moved through the blackness, a heartbeat thrummed in her ears as though it came through water. Then a point of light. She smelled linen, fragrant perfumes, something her mind told her was linseed oil. No. Not her mind. His. This was his lifetime. His soul memory.
And then gunfire. The stink of sulfur. A urine-drenched kerchief pressed into her mouth, against her nose. Gagging her. Saving her.
It was the mustard gas. That was the reason for the hankie: to filter out noxious fumes in case the enemy sent mists of it on the move again. Except that possibility was the least of her worries in the light of the pepper-hot rain of shrapnel falling. Mushrooms bloomed around her in broad-capped puffs of smoke. She was skewered by a searing heat that made her shoulder jerk like bacon fat spitting back. The gods were ravenous for flesh, devouring every living thing.
No.
It wasn't the gods. That day was gone. This day it was men who were hungry, so desperately insatiable for life they cut down any brother in front of them in order to breathe for just one more instant.
This was war.
And she knew war.
She looked down at her comrades, all eight of them, mouths agape, flies even now seeking the moist caverns of cheeks and tongues to lay down their biological cargo. Riddled with bullets, the brave souls holding the line even as the sickness worsened. No time to find an aid station. Trapped here instead as the enemy fell upon them, pinning them down. The retched-up foulness of blood and mucous stained the dead's chins, and where the sick didn't cake onto the skin, the flesh crawled with seeping boils that still oozed in places and dried to globs in others. She knew this pain too. Knew the itching that came before, the hoarse throat. The way the itching turned to pain and the hoarseness into a dry hacking cough.
But the war raged on, and though her brothers were dead, no soldier left alive in her trench would be relieved. The French had run already, fleeing the mist of poison and leaving their allies to face the gas alone, was it two days gone already?
She looked down at the brother closest to her. Robert, she thought his name was. A quiet man, broad-shouldered but gentle as a giant.
"There's no one to save us," she murmured to him through the kerchief. "No one to save me."
If she peeked out over the top of the trench, or looked far down the sides of them, she could see the clambering forms of the enemy slipping over the lips and forging on. Rifling through the bodies with bayonets, stabbing into chests and bellies to make sure the presumed dead stayed dead.
She collapsed onto Robert, gasping through the cloth, working through the invasion of fear that sent dozens of possibilities racing through her mind. One stood out. It sent adrenaline to her muscles, willing them to move. To...
Run.
All of her will went into staying motionless. She felt sick with it. The cloth forced her throat to gag, and she yanked the offending material off her mouth, praying they'd pass her by, that she'd survive the thrust when it came. Long enough to retreat when they moved on. A fly charged into her nose, seeking to unburden itself, itching the inside, threatening a sneeze. There was no choice left under such a threat: she forced air from her nostrils, tickling the insect free, her heart pounding in her ears because the breath was a bullet shot from a canon. And they heard it. Surely to God they heard it.
She robbed her lungs of oxygen for a long moment as they drew close. Their sweat smeared itself on her palate, angry it couldn't be detected by her olfactories, demanding to be tasted, waiting for the moment it could assault her and make her retch. Reveal herself to them.
They were casual about the killing now, she could tell by the way they spoke to each other, the lazy way they grunted as they fell through material and into soft entrails. No one cried out. Everyone in this section of trench was so obviously dead. A waste of their time, perhaps. A degrading, boring duty, even. The tear of cloth came less frequently. The gru
nting less. More conversation.
Laughter.
Sweet mother of God, they just might pass her by--so close but not bothering to check. They would keep moving if only she kept her head. If she somehow made her heart beat more quietly. Held her breath. Inhaled slowly, methodically, willed her lungs to use what it was being given. They must not be greedy. Don't drag in the air. Exhale with purpose. Let them continue down the ranks, make the obligatory and sporadic shove into flesh.
Breathe again.
The fresh scent of urine struck her nose. The wet heat of it trickled down her leg before it got sopped into her pants. She was leaking from every opening it seemed; tears pooled unwanted, drool spilled down her chin.
But she was alive. Wounded, yes. Aching from sores, but alive. The trembling rattled her teeth.
She crept out at dusk and followed the trail of dead for hours until she was captured on the fringes of woods and field, led for hours in the growing light.
She stared into the face of the enemy soldier who took the opportunity to beat her ragged and she laughed until she coughed up blood at the absurdity of being captured after escaping certain death.
"Idiot," someone hissed from behind her.
She looked around, taking in her surroundings, finally. Half a dozen captives, bound, sitting in muck together. She blinked at them, trying to remember how she'd gotten there. Chickens squabbled somewhere off to her right. The stink of old manure sent her memory tripping to a lifetime ages ago, of milking cows. Of mucking a barn. A barn. Yes. Right there.
She laughed again. Full circle. Oh life, how strange thou art.
"Thank you," she wheezed out, swaying on her feet. "Thank you."
Light bloomed behind her eyes before the pain could move from jaw to brain and back again. Struck hard with something wooden. Struck again, this time with a fist.
The laughter bubbled behind her lips. They couldn't understand. How could they? Born in a barn, her mother had always accused, because she left the front door open so often when she ran in for supper. After mucking the stalls. After working the fields. Born in a barn. Now to die in one.
"Barn," she said, pointing at the broad doors. She wasn't laughing anymore, but her chest shook just the same. She shrugged helplessly.
This time, the assault was for her belly. Blood rose to her mouth, then the peculiar taste of manure. Did it come from the barn, she wondered, or her own belly coming up into her throat, protesting the invasion of steel? Didn't matter. There wasn't time to consider how she would die anymore. It was happening; hands grappled for her arms, shoving her backwards, slamming her against the door. Fingers went for her eyes.
Someone called out past the hoarse sounds of German. "Leave him be. Stop."
One of the assailants left her. There was a sweet synchronicity in the sound of another's bone cracking as her own arm broke. She tried to cry out at that. The pain kept her tongue hostage even as the enemy stretched her arms out, pinned her feet together. She couldn't keep her head up. That angered them, it seemed. Someone cursed at her, yanked her by the hair and shoved her head against the wooden door.
Pressure built in her throat before pain rose. Skewered by steel into the door so that she couldn't let her head hang. When they rammed their bayonets into her hands and feet, pinning her to the wood, the sullen voice escaped. She let it tear up her throat, gave it all the oxygen left in her lungs, fueled it with agony.
It gurgled free.
Blackness came for her as they skewered her side. The quiet heartbeat of her last breaths thrummed in her ears, whispering truths to her that she'd forgotten when she'd taken on this flesh. Several heartbeats, like Morse code, bleeping out one revelatory word to her mind.
Golgotha.
Chapter 22
Theda had to remind herself to breathe. Even so, her legs stopped short, giving her feet time to root themselves into the carpet. He had seen her, yes, but did he know who she was? The short, cropped red hair, the sunglasses. Surely he wouldn't connect the gaunt blonde woman he'd purchased from Sasha's boutique and nearly beheaded to the disguised woman in front of him. He would know she wasn't Kat, that much was certain, but that might be the worst of it.
Because he was naked, she took the opportunity to pull the spread from the bed and stuff it into the cage. He grabbed for it greedily and wrapped it around his portly stomach. Bile rose to Theda's mouth. This was a man who purchased women--worthless spitters, in his eyes--from the boutique and made them dress as famous women from history so that he could reenact their murders or executions. A sort of glorified snuff experience, with the blissfully ignorant addicts playing their roles as artfully as they could because they thought it meant a lifetime supply of their favorite distraction. This was the man who had bought her from a slave block, had brought her to a medievally furnished torture chamber in the hopes of delaying his gratification to a painfully exquisite conclusion. This was the man whom the Beast had pardoned for all of that heinous activity as though he were no more than a small boy caught stealing a cookie from his mother's pantry.
She realized the pistol was still in her hand.
She gave a brief thought to raising it, pointing it at the disgusting pile of fat flesh and pulling the trigger. He deserved it. Even in this new Earth, people weren't meant to be another's plaything, to be manipulated by their own failings for another's revolting pleasures. She knew this new Earth held no justice, but that didn't make it right.
Her knees went to water as she regarded him and she had to steady herself by jamming her leg against the bed. She dragged in air like she wouldn't get another breath, tried to keep his eye, and remembered he couldn't see hers behind the glasses. He might not believe she was Kat, but he didn't know she was the religion-monger either.
"Are you planning to use that?" he said, and she startled. She hadn't expected him to speak first. She fell onto the bed, telling herself it was a casual sit rather than an out-and-out collapse.
She made a great show of placing the pistol onto the mattress. Without speaking, she looked pointedly around the room, taking in the leather whips, the handcuffs, the more eccentric equipment that might mean slight debasement for some, pure pain for others. Several electrified instruments rested on the shelf: a cattle prod, a Taser, a shock collar. She waited for him to whimper softly as he realized the things she might be considering.
This equipment was mild in comparison to the things this man had in store for her when she'd last been here. That last experience had been a re-creation of a vision she'd given him of one of his past lives: a life they'd shared together during the witch hunts in Germany. He had Sasha furnish each detail of the accusation and punishment chamber to such detail that it made Theda's heart race now in recall. No lazy pleasure hunter, this one. A full-on, out-and-out, masochistic sociopath. In another world, in Old Earth, he would have been hunted as a serial killer and put away. Maybe executed. Not in this one. In this one he got away with murder.
The memory of that experience trembled through her. And yet there was more.
She remembered the sloe-eyed Salima and the councilman's complaints to Sasha when the young girl wouldn't let a poisonous snake bite her. For punishment, Sasha had decided to sell the girl to a client with a Jack the Ripper fetish, and the poor thing had only escaped because Theda had managed to feed her enough godspit to keep her so unconscious she was useless.
Her gaze landed on a cat 'o nine tails whip as she recalled these things. She rose to trembling feet, and with shaky, determined steps, crossed the room to pull the whip from the wall. She took her time turning around, not because she wanted to draw it out, but because she didn't want him to see the tears that had begun to pool on her chin. He was the reason she didn't want to come back here. Sasha was bad enough, but this man was a demon.
He had crawled to his knees by the time she did turn to face him, his fists tight around the bars. "I explained to him that I was just keeping her until he could get there."
"Explained to who?"
Theda took a step closer and he fell from the bars, pressing himself into the corner. She pulled the glasses down just enough that she could get a better look at him. Something wasn't right. He should know by now that she wasn't the Red General. He should know unless...
"You haven't seen me play yet," she said with her best growl and he responded by hanging his head and shaking it back and forth as though he agreed.
"I haven't," he said. "You're right. Of course you're right." His tone was placating tone, beseeching, and that was when she knew.
He did think she was Kat. Probably starving. Probably hadn't slept in days. More than likely hallucinating, the same as she had been doing back in the laboratory after the murderous doctor had tried to lobotomize her. She felt the almost guilty twinge of pleasure.
She cracked the whip against the floor and it made a satisfyingly nasty crack. It sounded amazing. It balmed something deep inside as though it had been yearning for a poultice.
"I've been waiting to do this," she said to him and she was surprised at how guttural her voice sounded, how the growl beneath curled her lip into a snarl. "You're going to suffer. You're going to beg me to end your miserable life."
He nodded so quickly she thought he would bite his tongue. She thought she heard him sob.
"Yes," he stammered. "Yes. I'll beg. Whatever you want."
She knew she could let him out of the cage, then. He was nothing but a pitiful mound of terrified flesh. No more than that. She didn't have to worry about overcoming him with strength, he'd already given up. He thought she was the general, and the general would be able to overpower him easily, and just as thoughtlessly put a bullet through his head. But she wanted him more terrified. She wanted him pissing himself in fear. She wanted to see him slobber with terror.