Cracked Porcelain (4 page)

Mardo knighted her an honorary member of the Bay Bruisers association by inviting several of his boys to sample her. The Gatekeeper was a relentless taskmaster, ensuring her passive servitude, even as she lowered herself to service greater and greater debaucheries. Her “initiation” stretched out over days where her drugged form became a veritable buffet for an endlessly rotating cast of Bruisers. Mardo watched for the most part, verbally coaching her on her performances and giving advice on how to improve her oral techniques. During this marathon she’d lost an astonishing amount of weight with her diet consisting largely of Gatekeeper
and a deluge of Bruiser semen.

Maximillia spun into an endless void where time lost all meaning. Days, weeks, months all flew by with only faint sparks of significance. She had been marked by the Gatekeeper, a
n unwilling slave to it. Mardo was her dealer so she acquiesced to his every request. Now, she resembled little more than a hellish archangel in all of its infernal glory: bloodshot eyes sunken into dark sockets, her face a skeletal visage, rib bones pressing against sweat-dabbed skin and weak, bony legs incapable of maintaining a sober balance. Her only valuable utility at this point was as a receptacle for Mardo’s daily seminal deposits, or the seminal deposits of whichever lucky member of the crew he allowed into her.

Often times Maximillia would wake up in the middle of the night crumpled in a heap on Mardo’s couch, naked from the waist down, only a cum-stained blouse to cover her, with globs of dried semen in her hair, on her face and thighs and her vagina a beaten, frothy mess. How many lovers she’d serviced that night she didn’t dare speculate on. She’d spend hours in the bathroom clinging to the toilet seat, spewing out a bellyful of Gatekeeper, semen and undigested food into the bowl. Her hair would sometimes fall in, marinating in this foul stew. The extended lack of nutrition barely allowed her to remain conscious. She should’ve been worried but she had been deadened to the capacity for self-preservation. Still, her mind centered solely on the demonic blue liquor, which Mardo doled out to his benefit.

Her new family unfortunately required financial resources to continue their wild ways so she learned the martial ways by which the gang pilfered. Of that they had refined to a science. A crude, sloppy science, but a science nonetheless. From armed robberies of docked cargo ships to midnight warehouse raids, the gangs’ transgressions ran the gamut. They collected protection money, did random armed and unarmed robberies, muggings and even got into gun and
drug-running, prostitution, extortion and kidnapping. Maximillia was embroiled in all of it. Mardo masterfully guided her along with promises of Gatekeeper at every turn. When she ran her first robbery with the rest of the crew, they congratulated her by getting Maximillia her first ink job. A tattoo of a little inverted star was etched onto her right ankle. This concluded her rite of passage and her marriage to the gang was consummated. The successive string of crimes was followed by a successive string of ink jobs. Before long, her arms and legs became a full-color tapestry acting as an illustrated portfolio of her criminal history.

Mandra Bay law enforcement was ill-equipped and ill-motivated to counter the shenanigans of a gang of soulless, antisocial marauders who had nothing to lose so the Bruisers ran a rampant, uncontested campaign of criminality. Sure, they weren’t top dogs in the criminal underworld
--more an assembly of low-level rabble--but they were a force to be reckoned with.

Maximillia became exceedingly thin, her lack of nutrition bordering on life-threatening. She’d become Mardo’s favorite girl and
he found enjoyment in watching her every orifice get stabbed by several of his drug-addled goons as she was in the midst of Gatekeeper-induced intoxication. However, she found not a single one of them physically attractive. In fact, in sober moments she found them physically repellent but the drink potently diluted her standards and did so frequently.

Mardo would remark how he liked his “little girl” skinny, so Maximillia’s deprivation of food was something of a fetish for him at that point. Wherever he went, she was at his side like a loyal minion and everyone in the gang knew that no one could lay a finger on her without his consent. She belonged to him. He made it a point to constantly compliment her on her long, dark locks and would illustrate this by cumming on
her hair while she slept or even by ordering some of his knuckle-dragging disciples to do the same while he watched. He’d take great pleasure in watching half a dozen of his goons empty their balls into her hair; a kind of dry shampoo job.

In Maximillia’s near-constant drunken stupor, she consented to every vile sexual escapade. During sex he began to get very physical, going so far as to choke her into unconsciousness on common occasion. Her bare ass would typically end up with a pink, hand-shaped mark on it after an especially energetic Mardo took his spanking to the next level. The choking and spanking led to light face slapping during sex, then heavy face slapping. The
one-sided physical altercations bled into non-sexual situations and the brutal beast began to find the simplest non-reasons to sling Maximillia’s weakened, rubbery form around his love nest.

The violence escalated still. The first pure assault took even Maximillia by surprise. Mardo had just given her a heaping glass of Gatekeeper and she was midway into her blissful descent into drugged comfort when a hallucinatory episode brought about by a drug-fueled binge of his own threw him into a rage. He threw her across the room and proceeded to throw down a storm of fists atop her, cracking several of her ribs and loosening several of her teeth. She managed to slip out into the night after he collapsed into sleep and found refuge in a nearby storm drain.

She’d been with the gang for nearly a year and had become so irredeemably blended into their ranks that she felt that her individual persona was gone and her only value was as one of them. She was cold, nearly naked, hungry, broke and with no friends whom didn’t bear the branded mark of a Bruiser that her options were few. She didn’t dare entertain the idea of going to see her father. Definitely not in her current state. The man, upon seeing his precious lost girl merely an upright sack of hair and bones peppered with cuts and bruises, would’ve rolled into the Bruiser compound with a blaster in each hand, gunning down goons until he himself was gunned down. She still loved her father dearly and couldn’t allow her horrible life mismanagement to doom his own. No, she’d keep her diseased curse of dependency and physical abuse to herself.

It didn’t occur to her after the sixth or seventh time curled up in that storm drain
--one of her eyes swollen shut, her nose bleeding and lips busted, courtesy of Mardo’s knuckles--that perhaps their association was less than beneficial for her. She always shuffled back into his open arms, tears streaming out whichever eye wasn’t swollen shut. He’d shed his crocodile tears for her with promises that the abuse would end, which it would for a few weeks. When he predictably, yet somehow unexpectedly, snapped she’d crawl back to that storm drain.

Sometimes, as Maximillia sat in that fortress of solitude, that nurturing ring of metal,
she’d glare out through the curtains of drizzling rain at the glimmering lights of Mandra Bay in the distance as she’d sink into this serene, almost supernatural sense of calm. The world around her melted away and all that was left was the sound and the lights. The glaring, judging eyes of her peers, the lustful eyes of the male Bruisers, the watchful eyes of the local police, it was as if the world were bearing down on her, refusing her an inch of peace.

A growl of distant thunder would remind her that strife was never more than a moment away from intruding on her serenity. With rueful regret she’d tread that familiar path back into Mardo’s arms and into his bed.

Weeks later, after healing completely, Maximillia ginned up the courage to find her way back to her father’s house to collect some of the few items she wanted to take with her back to the compound.

Gareth wasn’t one to let something simple like losing
the use of his legs in the Mechanized Infantry stop him from earning an honest living. Vintage hovercycles were popular amongst the old-timers in Mandra Bay. The largest concentration of cycle gangsters in the region set up shop in Mandra and they tended to treat their bikes the way they treated their women, guaranteeing Gareth plenty of work. It kept him employed. It kept him sane. Confined to a hoverchair wasn’t going to keep him infirm. Maximillia’s absence weighed heavily on him, though. A good father’s mind is never far removed from thoughts of his child but she was always on the outside. He pursued while she fled. The cycle would’ve been too much for most, but Gareth was never one to give up on anything, least of all her.

She knew her way back to the shop. The garage was a glimmering beacon, a unique block of old world architecture amidst the tedious, glossy corporate decay. With an empty bag slung over her shoulder she traipsed up to the open door and found her dad hovering over a Castor-
Trach reverse magnatron capacitor. Ancient engineering by modern standards but the old-timers favored vintage over state-of-the-art.

“Hi, dad.”

Gareth looked up from his bench. Maximillia looked as thin as a shardflower, almost unrecognizable, but still his daughter. Awestruck, he reached out to her with a quivering hand. “Maxie?”

She cracked a smile and walked up to him, bending down to hug him. In disbelief he wrapped his arms tightly around her, not letting her go.
He could feel her rib bones rolling under her skin as he hugged her. She tried not to let the bubbling emotion overcome her.

The shop doubled as the family home growing up. Maximillia was always comfortable around technology. Her childhood bedroom was a miniature shop in its own right, complete with child-sized workbench. She never quite grew out of it, but make-up and clothes started to crowd out the outdated mech parts that were typically strewn about her room. When she left, Gareth didn’t disturb a speck of dust there. She hadn’t set foot in the room for almost a year. It felt like an alien environment. Too still and peaceful. She had grown a disturbing symbiosis with the chaos inherent in the Bruisers’ compound. It reminded her of a cruel early life, as well.

Maximillia’s father heaped love and affection on her but she’d soon come to realize that the outside world wasn’t as welcoming. The kids always teased her during those formative years. They said her eyes were too big for her head and that she belonged off-world on some alien colony. This successfully alienated her and she sank into herself, preferring the safety of solitude where that room offered its best utility. She burned away thousands of quiet nights in that room, listening to her dad’s arc-saw cutting through an engine’s metal. That whirring, grinding song put her to sleep many a night.

There were always boys. The shy ones would shuffle around the shop from time to time but they were in a worse mental world than she was in. They were lost souls looking for acceptance. She was lost, but content in limbo. She knew they didn’t want her, they just wanted someone to want them. They wanted reassurance and saw her to possibly be one equally desperate and likely to quicken them. There’s no truth in that kind of desperation.

“I left everything as you left it. I knew you’d be back,” Gareth beamed with a suffering pride as they stood in her bedroom's doorway, looking in.

Maximillia inched into the room, overtaken by nostalgia, even though it had been less than a year since she set foot there. Her condition was the elephant in the room. He couldn’t ignore her scrawny appearance.

“Can I feed you at least?”

She shook her head. “I’m not hungry.”

He couldn’t relent, ever the concerned father. “You’re just so skinny, Maxie. Have you been eating?”

She nodded, looking back at him. “Yeah, of course.”

“Are you sick?” He knew where his questions were leading him. He was hoping she’d reveal a truth that contradicted his suspicions.

“No, I’m fine, dad.”

“You don’t look fine, sweetie.”

She sighed, rolling her eyes, snapping out of that nostalgic sentimentality and moved quickly to start tossing certain items into her ba
g, as if anxious to leave. He knew he was losing her again.

He treaded carefully. “Can you stay? At least for the night? I missed you, sweetheart,” he begged, his eyes welling with tears. “I haven’t seen you in so long. I miss you every day. I
just—”

The words struck her dead in the chest. She shut her eyes, her back to him, her face squinch
ed as the tears trickled. She hunched forward, propping herself up with an outstretched arm resting on her workbench. He rolled around to face her, touching her hand. She flinched. He wasn’t a hard ass hovercycle mechanic anymore. He couldn’t afford to be. Not in this moment.

“Honey, you know, she left me, too. She didn’t just leave you.”

She covered her face, but he knew she was crying.

“There’s nothing you did that was wrong. That crap she was taking... it poisoned her mind. It was the drugs, honey. It changed her. That’s what they do. They take everything that’s
good about a person and it erases them.” His tears were streaming now, his fervent pleading unapologetic. “Don’t leave, Maxie. Stay with papa. Stay here so I can take care of you.”

She yanked her hand away from his, still crying.

“Don’t leave me again, sweetheart. Papa loves you. I’ll take care of you. Don’t become her!”