Dawn of the Courtezan: Phase 01 (The Eighteenth Shadow)

by Grafton, Jon Lee

  Nurse Fossbender continued, eyes illuminating, “This is what you get for messing with the master. Did you really think you were going to show up here, drunk, torch my hovcar at my hospital and get away with it? You thought I’d just let that go?”

  She grabbed Tara Dean’s hair and forced her gaze, “You need to look at mommy when I talk to you. Since your own mommy doesn’t really care. Now does she?”

  Tara Dean closed her eyes. At least she could do that. The tears would not stop.

  She could feel the hot beads of saliva dribbling on her cheek as the woman went on, “You got away with your first hospital visit because you were only fourteen. Charge Nurse Young was a Traditionalist piece of trash. You got away with your L2 visit, got to spend all 28 days in isolation with doctor visits only, cause you staged that scene in group therapy, made it look like I attacked you. Cracked your rib and all. But what about this time, eh cunt?”

  Nurse Fossbender put three fingers together on her left hand and stuck them in her mouth, smacking her lips in Tara Dean’s face as she pulled them out glistening wet. The girl’s legs were parted, forced wide by the pressure of the bio-braces. The nurse raised Tara Dean’s gown, pulled her underwear aside and shoved all three fingers in. The expression of agony on patient 373-C’s face pushed Nurse Fossbender over the edge. The big woman reached between her own legs, parting the thigh flesh, and began to touch herself with her other hand.

  “I’ve been waiting for this night, ohhhh, a little schedule shift and now here I am. And you can’t do a goddamn thing about it… cunt,” Nurse Fossbender’s body jiggled as her pleasure intensified.

  Tara Dean turned her head away miserably while the nurse rammed her fingers in and out, heaving eagerly. She tried to let her mind drift. The pain was excruciating. Any dissociation she tried quickly proved hollow.

  Why don’t the eyes work? Because I let her hate me from the start, got her angry. Stupid, stupid, stupid!

  Nurse Fossbender was close to orgasm. She stood laboriously and put her mouth back on Tara Dean’s nipple, heaving with joy, “I’m going to love – standing – there watching – while the drill scrambles – your – brain.”

  The nurse came. The air around the hospital bed was tinged with the odor of her sopping. Tara winced through blinding tears at the damp slapping sound the woman’s legs made when they came together after she had finished. The nurse extracted her right hand from beneath her own skirt. As she pulled her other hand from between Tara Dean’s legs, Nurse Fossbender grabbed the girl’s clitoris between her thumb and forefinger and twisted it violently. The girl’s face wrenched with anguish as she screamed uselessly against her burning vocal inhibitor.

  “That’s what you get for trying to flip me attitude. I’m your master, whore!”

  The nurse wiped her right hand all over Tara Dean’s face until it was dry, “Drill through the eye or not, I don’t want you to ever forget who won. So you tell me. How’s my pussy smell now?”

  Nurse Fossbender laughed at the world. She was quietly victorious. It was one of the few completely successful experiences of her entire life. She relished leaving this girl in a smear of jizz and tortured tears.

  She touched the diode on the vocal inhibitor and the nanotubes instantly extracted themselves. She snapped up the small silver disc and slid it into her pocket innocuously. Tara Dean’s vocal chords would remain paralyzed for another five minutes.

  Nurse Fossbender walked out of the room, returned to the nurse’s station and reactivated all the standard security protocols for Room 13 Hall A on her holotab. It was so easy. It was as if none of it had ever happened. Unless there was a security breach, which was impossible, no record of her shutting down observation would ever be flagged in a Govcloud audit.

  The sound of patients moaning in the distance was no longer annoying, but she turned up the computer jazz anyway. She knew Tara Dean hated it. The yellow street light poured in just as it had before, suddenly refreshing in its familiarity, like sunshine. The nurse eased back into her chair, thinking for a moment. Then she tore open another HempButterz bar and devoured it ravenously as she waited for her shift to end. She would have a couple of hours to go home and rest before patient 373-C’s 8 am surgery.

  Her wife, Lucinda, would bring her a cup of coffee. Some hemp-flour pancakes, with blueberries and syrup for breakfast. It was going to be a beautiful morning.

  Chapter 1.6 – Flight Risk

  January 2080 – Two Years Nine Months Before Event.

  Help… they’re hurting me. I need you.

  The words pounded his mind. Over and over. The sex would be easy. Spencer Hotshine still liked to think of himself as a lantern-jawed high school soccer sex superstar! Even if truth be told, he was more of a lantern-jawed, pot-bellied orderly with a bum knee, questionable facial hair and a year old GED.

  I am a Union orderly, at least. I can support us when we get settled. This is real love.

  He had once been in love with a betty named Melinda.

  Or Melanie?

  Whoever. The 29 minutes they had spent entwined in a dark corner of the Zero G Tumblar at the Kansas State Fair in the summer of ’78 had been so light. Regrettably, Spencer had never seen the girl again.

  Melissa?

  Memory had never been his A game. Nonetheless, he had daydreamed of that betty every single day since.

  Until the day he locked eyes with the patient from Room 13C.

  She was prettier than a sky blue sky. She was… a toasted garden.

  That doesn’t sound right.

  She was… the place apples and cherries come from. She was the Earth spinning the sun in its hands!

  That’s better… even if Virgil wrote it.

  The green whirlpool of her eyes constantly tugged.

  To summarize these complex feelings, Spencer had told his new buddy, Virgil, earlier that afternoon, “She’s like plasma gun hot, bro. For realzz.”

  And her name was not Melinda, Melanie nor Melissa. It was Tara. Spencer had met her 48 hours earlier when he was transferred by chance to a week of graveyard shifts on the slaughterhouse wing. The regular orderly took ill. Now he and Tara were like two starships rounding the moons of Saturn.

  What’s the name of that moon? Rheema? Why do I feel like I’m doing something wrong?

  Spencer’s head wasn’t used to so much activity.

  Help… they’re hurting me. I need you.

  An orderly on B Wing told Spencer that Patient 373-C was the only addict she could remember who had been kept in isolation for both L2 and L3. The L2 month in isolation was her own choice. That was any citizen’s right. Others had done it. Nurse Fossbender had also body slammed the girl and cracked one of her ribs.

  Help… they’re hurting me. I need you.

  Oh man, when they actually spoke, what would Spencer say? Gossip on floor was she had nearly caused a riot in Marlene Fossbender’s group therapy. This betty had a pair, especially to go up against The Bookshelf. And anyone who holo’d The Journal World knew why she was being kept on isolation for her L3 stint.

  Because she was considered a flight risk, Tara Dean was restrained in bio-braces each night. During daylight hours she was allowed freedom of movement within her locked hospital room. Given the extreme circumstances of her incarceration, the aging, withered psychiatrist Doc Styles was the only person allowed to see her directly. Family members also, though there hadn’t been so much as a holotext from the girl’s mother.

  So it was that Tara Dean spent her thirty days leading up to SAMCL surgery like a Siamese fighting fish trapped in a bowl. The orderlies and nurses had been instructed not to peer, but they all did. Patient Dean did yoga for hours. She would stand on her head for forty minutes rotating lithe, balanced legs through the air, smooth as an inverted column of smoke. The fact that she did so in only her underwear and bra was not lost on anyone. Especially Spencer. Beads of sweat poured down the girl’s olive skin as she transitioned from pose to pose. She was a cybernetic tiger in human
form.

  Spencer Hotshine now reasoned why Nurse Fossbender took on a night shift. The nurse was outwardly sexless, though it was rumored she had the private desires of a wildebeest.

  Grooooss!

  Spencer could feel the nurse ignoring him. He hated her as much as he lived in fear of her very shadow. He had seen the nurse doing awful things in Tara’s room earlier!

  Help me escape… they’re hurting me. I need you. I love you… BUT NOT NOW, you moron! Come back as soon as she leaves…

  Spencer’s stomach was uneasy with confusion. He paced the halls. He watched. He waited. Life had never felt so… lifelike before.

  How could someone as sweet and pretty as Tara Dean be a boozebum? Spencer loved him some ganjabeer, as his pot belly attested. He had been riding that jane-train since he turned sixteen like all the guys from high school. Alcohol, other hard drugs… trouble. His best friend, Virgil, drank. Virgil was in college to be a poet, though, and said alcohol was required to graduate. Spencer had tried real beer twice himself. He vomited horribly twice, once on a double date.

  Drugs had never been his A game either.

  Oh Dog, what would momma say?

  Spencer’s mother didn’t even like her boy drinking janebevs. Let alone booze. Ms. Hotshine was a religious woman. She took the words of Jesus Christ from the 21st Century Holoevangelist Testament to heart, “For as a sun-born flower is the road of hope and new light, wine’s dapper illusion shall but lead one down a path of broken virtue…” That was Mrs. Hotshine’s favorite holographic preacher quote.

  Having dutifully thought it over near 47 hours and 58 minutes, the facts seemed clear. Tara Dean was a victim, and Spencer Hotshine felt hotly compelled to be her savior. He felt compelled to do a variety of things. As he waited down the hall with a merciless, aching boner pushing through his white scrubs while Nurse Fossbender raped Tara Dean, Spencer Hotshine found his own sorta Vision. He was Tara’s only hope. Spencer Hotshine walked in salvation’s shoes.

  Help… they’re hurting me. I need you.

  He crouched in the shadows on the dark side of the floor until he was sure that Nurse Fossbender had returned to the nurse’s station. When the volume on the elevator jazz began to increase, he knew it was time. Fossbender was back in her control nest, snacking and fidgeting. Spencer felt no allegiance to the cruel ox. He had only stinging remembrances of Nurse Fossbender admonishing him harshly for being sixty seconds late for a shift. Or leaving a door open. Or engaging in small talk with female staff members. It was this last offense that particularly seemed to irk the big woman.

  “No fraternizing on duty, Mr. Hotshine. If you need something to do, there is always, and I mean always, a toilet that needs a sonic detail.”

  The memory of the nurse’s voice in his head made Spencer nauseous. This was a new sensation. Another sign that Tara Dean was correct. He closed his eyes. His head hurt mightily from all this thinking and revelating and so forth.

  The robotic floor polisher made him jump. He had seen the Kleendroyd© a thousand times, but now he stared at it like it was an invading Martian colonist. The robot was just shy of a meter tall, a pallid silver dome illuminated by the blinking lights of its spatial laser array. It sat on a plastic, cylindrical chassis and hovered quietly four centimeters off the floor. The rotating brushes at its base whirled in a blur.

  Spencer knelt before the robot. The silver bot stopped, waiting patiently for the human to give it space. Spencer desperately wanted someone to talk to! What he was planning was entirely insane.

  A few more seconds passed, and the robot’s com emitter said, “Excuse me, Orderly Hotshine,” in a chipper male voice.

  LED’s on the bot’s display screen rearranged themselves into a smile. It then moved smoothly to one side, continuing to clean.

  Talking to robots never got you anywhere. Spencer steeled himself.

  He stopped outside Tara Dean’s door and took a breath. From the time he used his access code to open the door, they would have exactly ten minutes until the hospital com pinged a klaxon to Chief Gordon’s security detail. As well as the nurse’s station. At that point, the vid feed would be auto-streamed across the Govcloud to the Douglas County Sheriff’s Department. By then, they would either be long gone or on their knees in magcuffs.

  His heart pounded furiously. The thought of running away to Sonora with patient 373-C! It was as nice as any farmland in the Union. The voice she pushed between his ears said the hydroponic orange groves went on for kilometers in the hills overlooking the beaches of Tucson 2.0. They would rent a little cabin in the cheap part of town and find management jobs with the orange processors, she said. The pay was meager compared to his hospital salary, but Sonora was the least expensive coastal state in the NAUS.

  The Gulf of California…

  Spencer grinned stupidly. These fresh daydreams were top of the fond.

  Where I really wanna go… that body!

  Fantasy had found him masturbating furiously in the bathroom three times that day already. The way her green eyes turned to black and she smiled… oh Dog, she’d melt the moon right out of the night.

  Okay, that was a good line too, Virgil.

  Help… they’re hurting me. I need you.

  Authorized at the beginning of his shift by another CVSW but never completed, Spencer now logged a ten minute floor cleaning for room 13C. He scanned a thumbprint into his holotab.

  I’ll simulquest a fifteen minute break. Maybe that will buy us some extra time.

  The computer validated instantaneously and the door’s lock slid silently open. Would she be asleep at this time of night? Like hospital patients in a holovision story?

  Oh yeah, Nurse Fossbender just raped her.

  As soon as he opened the door, her gaze crushed him. The girl was only now regaining the use of her voice from the vocal inhibitor.

  “Hello, lover…” she said weakly.

  He rushed to her side and kissed her clumsily while babbling, “Miss Dean! I hated seeing her mouth on you… I hated it so much!” He grabbed her hand and held it rapt, like a schoolboy.

  Tara Dean rolled her eyes, coughing, “Some days you gotta take one for the team, right? Say, Spencer? It’s Spencer, right?”

  “Yes!”

  “You’re smashing my hand.”

  “Oh!”

  “Would you mind releasing these straps, sugar?”

  Her voice was like warm honey. He knew it would be sweet.

  “Of course. I’m sorry!”

  “It’s fine,” she raised her eyebrows, “The bio-braces?”

  “You’re so gorgeous!” He didn’t know what else to say.

  “Thanks.”

  Spencer Hotshine passed his holotab in front of the sensor on the hospital bed, “Request 5, authorization: Hotshine,” he spoke quick and quiet.

  The bio-braces disengaged and retracted silently into the side of the bed like flat gray worms.

  Tara Dean sprang up and cracked the kinks from her neck. She stood on her tiptoes, stretching tall as if to touch the ceiling.

  She hugged him efficiently, “Thank you… sweetie,” she sounded like she might choke on the word. “That’s much better!”

  Spencer swooned, “Anything for you…”

  She squinted, looking left and right, taking inventory. First things first. She went to the sink and rinsed the filth from her face and dried her skin with a towel.

  Put the nurse out of your head.

  Spencer stared, obsessed as he watched her pad back towards him.

  She let him fall into her dilated pupils, pulled the pretty boy’s face to hers and kissed him softly, then said, “I have something even sweeter waiting for you just as soon as you get me out of here, big fella.”

  She gave him a quick squeeze between the legs, winking like a pro, “Now, let me rock some clothes. We gotta float and I mean yesterday!”

  Tara hopped over the bed like a cat and slipped into the pair of blue jeans she had been eyeing all night, long so
cks, her lace-up black army boots plus a tee and the hooded pink sweatshirt. She tied her hair back with a scrunchy, pulled the backpack on and tightened the straps. There was no telling where she’d land or what she’d need to carry with her. Next, she tested the hood of her sweatshirt to make sure it would cover her head when she needed it to.

  Done.

  Tara returned to Spencer’s side and pecked him on the cheek, “Okay Romeo, let’s float.”

  She squatted low and cracked the door, peering around the corner in the direction of the nurse’s station. A broom was leaned against the door to the custodian’s closet on the opposite side of the hall. Tara momentarily considered how wonderful it would feel to grab the broom, walk up to the nurse’s station and start beating Marlene Fossbender bloody. But it was not payback time, and she had no intention of reporting the rape to police.

  Like that will do anything.

  No justice the courts would administer would be sufficient. Tara Dean would hold her own court. The moment would be unexpected, perhaps years in the future, perhaps days. But when the time was right, she would burn Marlene Fossbender’s grotesque heart on a cross.

  At the moment, however, she had only 7 minutes and 31 seconds to get as far away from the Greystone Medical Complex as possible. How exactly this was going to happen, she was not sure. But she’d had 29 days to reason up a decent plan.

  The halls of the slaughterhouse wing were fortunately not silent. The Dogforsaken digital jazz oozed glossily from the com. Patients moaned their suffering all around. The dim, steady glow of night lights embedded in either side of the floor was punctuated by the blinking red sensor sweeps that recorded environmental data in four second intervals. The hospital tracked everything and everyone with an Ipv7 address.

  She stepped into the hall on tiger quiet toes and paused to flip a middle finger at the nearest observation node. She blew the camera a kiss for good measure, wishing triple six hells she could be a fly on the wall when security reviewed the footage with the duty staff.