Periphery (9 page)

*

The room was cold and dark when I woke. Puke in my mouth, sweat rancid on my body. I could still feel the buzz of the nonexistent hard-on between my legs. I was alone, back in the reception area. There was no sign of my nurse. I was glad. With the swirling cesspool of filth in my head I was as likely to kill her as kiss her.

I fell to my knees as I tried to get up. Plastic tethers bound my wrists. I tore at them with my teeth but that only tightened their grip. I made it to an adjacent bathroom and fumbled on a light. I didn’t recognize the haggard face in the mirror.

I turned away and dialed the cold water as high as it would go and stuck my face underneath it, trying to rinse my mouth without opening it. The recent memory of another wide-open mouth was too raw.

The moment liquid touched my stomach what little I hadn’t thrown up came screaming out. I just managed to unzip and drag my clothes down in time to throw myself on the throne before my body eliminated everything else it couldn’t vomit up.

That’s how she found me—head between my knees, weeping up a storm, pants round my ankles, stinking up her pristine white bathroom.

“Poor baby,” she crooned, stroking my hair. “Let it all out.”

Then I was sobbing against a soft yielding breast. Scents of the home I never had surrounded me; mother, gripe water and Heinz chocolate pudding. She rolled my mind, manipulating me as surely as she had upstairs. But I was too needy to push her away.

I don’t remember getting off the pot, or her cutting my restraints. Nor do I recall how I ended up in the shower. My next clear memory was hot water pounding down. The clean smell of coconut soap. Her hands on me.

I don’t think Cassandra’s a lesbian. Something about me when I’m passing arouses her. I haven’t probed. There’s a memory that has to do with a brother or cousin I remind her of. It isn’t my business. Contrary to rumor, I don’t want to know what you’re thinking. What we do affects her as much as me. We come out of it aroused, hating ourselves and needing release.

I leaned my head against the porcelain, pressed my hands against the tile, assuming the position. She wasn’t searching for weapons. She’d changed form. Her breasts were firm against my back, butting me as she ground into my thigh. Her inexperienced fingers thrust, rubbed and probed trying to give me what I needed in time to her increasingly violent humping. Her frustration echoed off the walls.

What she was trying to do felt good, but I couldn’t get off like this. Not now. Not after what I’d witnessed. Not with murder singing in my head. But she could.

I spun round, putting her in my place, facing me, and ran my hands roughly over her until she begged. Then I forced my tongue into her mouth. Her eyes fluttered closed while I rode her thigh and rubbed her clit until I could feel her dilate. While she was out of it I smacked her head against the tile. While she was too groggy to protest, I soaped up one arm to the elbow and went to my knees. She was so open I could thrust my entire hand inside her to the wrist. She shrieked.

I pumped her hard enough to bruise. Her fingers locked in my hair. Eventually her screams had guards dragging me out of the stall and off her. Beating me senseless. She couldn’t stop them. She was too embarrassed to explain it was what she wanted.

The next time I roused I was in my cell. I ached everywhere. They stopped just short of killing me. I’m too valuable to lose. Once more in denim, I was strapped to the bed, covered by a thin blanket. My life full of lost time.

My body was still aroused. Every inch of me an itch that needed scratching. The light scrape of the blanket against my bare skin a torment. The seam of the jeans in just the wrong place. Cassandra would be equally as frustrated. I hadn’t finished her off.

I didn’t know whether the soap in lieu of lube had come from “Mr. Clean” (as I’d dubbed the deviant) or from my own psyche. My love making before they locked me up had never been violent, but then, I hadn’t had long to find out much about my needs. I couldn’t begin to know how my desires would have developed.

“Killian, are you there?”

The voice from the teleprinter was weak, hidden beneath the blanket. She must have been monitoring bio-signs and seen the change from sleeping to waking.

I sensed embarrassment. After what I’d done to her I owed her a break.

I felt her surprise. Why was she shocked when I asked after her? Did she think I wanted to hurt her? It wasn’t her fault I was locked up here; she was just the current human face of the law. I resented her because of what she forced me to do.

“The soap stung a little,” she admitted. Latent desire lingered in her words. She’d enjoyed it, then.

“Bump the size of an egg. I’ll live. Did you really have to?”

I’ve never experienced an all over blush secondhand. That was what it was. I allowed her to feel my satisfaction. She didn’t ask after my health. One of my related talents is accelerated healing. In an hour, you’d never know I’d been beaten.

Another reason for the suicide watch. If I chose to kill myself I would have made damn sure there was no chance of revival. My talents might bring me back. I wasn’t even sure I could die. A wrinkle in my desire for the freedom death should grant. She took a moment to compose herself, conscious of my awareness of her.

“Can you find him?”

The drawback. Unless they’re thinking of their name when they kill (and who is?) I have to wait until they strike again for the bond to form. Even with an image of his face in my mind I haven’t had much success working with a sketch artist or mug shot books.

“He’s escalating?”

“You got all that?”

Empaths can’t merge with the murderer. Cassandra saw the event through the eyes of the victim. I got both. The murderer’s physical contact with the victim allows me to jump into the perpetrator. Now I had the killer and the victim inside my head. One howling for revenge, the other for the next kill.

My cell door unlocked.

“No one’s scheduled!”

An officer I’d never seen before lumbered inside and closed the door. He was built like a grizzly. His eyes set close, porcine; his brow low, a definite throwback. If my kind represents the next stage in human evolution, he was its past. Piggy eyes ran over my bound form, assessing.

“Help?”

I tried to reach him, send him away and found…nothing. Had I been free I could have disabled him. Not easily. But when you have nothing else to do but fend off the unwelcome advances of what the system calls “caretakers” you learn things. Bound like this, I had only one defense. It was almost always lethal.

He drew the thin blanket off the bed and began pawing my clothes. I heard Cassandra swearing and hitting the speed dial on the phone.

“I need to speak to the governor. It’s an emergency. He’ll know who it is. Look, I don’t care what he’s doing, put him on, now! Damn it! Don’t even think of leaving me on hold! I’ll have your job! Crap! They hung up! Killian, can he hear me? If I talk to him, do you think he’ll stop?”

“Hey, you! I don’t know what your name is, but you shouldn’t be in that cell. You need to get out right now. I’ll have your job, too! Are you listening? If you’re the kind of person who gets off on raping women there’s no way you’re staying in gainful employment! You’ll never work again!”

My would-be rapist unfastened my hand with a grip like iron and yanked it to his thick lips. “Can she hear me?” he grunted, grinding the small bones in my wrist. My body arched in pain. Unable to reply in a way he could hear, I could only nod.

“Shut up, bitch. You’re making me mad. You can’t see me. Don’t think you can threaten my job! I’m going to get some pussy then go. Nothing you say is going to stop me. I don’t have to listen.”

He turned my hand and smashed the visible portion of the teleprinter against the steel side of the bed frame. My body jerked in agony. It took three tries to silence Cassandra’s voice and he wasn’t satisfied until he’d broken my wrist and yanked the implanted electronics out and stamped them to powder under his size eleven boot.

The pain brought me close to oblivion. The thought of what he’d do to me if I passed out made me cling to consciousness. I had no choice. No one was coming to help me. I had to take him down myself.

My whimpers of pain only served to excite him. He was tenting his uniform pants. The parallels between this animal and those I hunted did not escape me. He was clumsier in his increasing need, fumbling with the fastenings on my shirt in frustration. I lay still, needing his hand on bare flesh to do what I had to. Eventually he snarled in frustration and tore the shirt open, spitting buttons across the cell. There was nothing underneath. His eyes feasted on my small breasts before his big hands clamped down.

I closed my eyes, fought past pain and revulsion and reached into him. Through skin, veins, muscles, to the largest muscle of all. I wrapped my mind around his heart and squeezed. He gasped. Letting go of me he staggered away, clutching his chest. Contact broken, his heart skipped a beat then fell back into its usual rhythm.

He didn’t understand, couldn’t relate it to me. He stood, breathing hard, massaging his chest, wondering whether to try again, wedgie withering in uncertainty.

I tried to cover myself but my fingers wouldn’t work. All I succeeded in doing was daubing myself with blood. That drew his attention. He came back, forcing my arm to the bed frame, securing it. I couldn’t stop him. I was in too much pain to concentrate. He laid the shirt open again, checked the straps fastening my ankles to the bed, then started on my jeans.

Whoever dressed me hadn’t bothered with underwear. My tormentor yanked denim past my knees without touching skin. Cool air made goose flesh of my belly. Laid bare I was happy to have untrimmed pubic hair. I felt less helpless. By now he was once more pressing urgently against his zip. He unfastened carefully and knelt on the bed over the taut cloth he’d pushed down. He never once looked at my face. He thrust himself towards me. As his flesh made contact with mine I lashed out.

His body whiplashed upright, his heart exploding in his chest. For the first and last time his eyes met mine in realization, then they glazed over as life ebbed out of him. His cooling corpse fell sideways and slipped gracelessly off the bed. His leg was still sticking upright over me, tangled in my jeans and the blanket when Cassandra burst through the door with another officer half an hour later.

“The bitch killed him!”

“In case you hadn’t noticed, she was tied down, being raped. That would be difficult to prove.”

“She does that weird mind stuff. That’s why she’s here. The judge wouldn’t find it hard to believe.”

“It looks like a heart attack brought on by obesity and overexcitement to me. That’s what it will say in my report. Unless you want me to add that your colleague was assaulting a valuable government asset, I suggest you get that idiot out of here.”

The officer complied. Not with any enthusiasm.

“Get a move on! If the body goes into rigor you’ll never be able to get it out of the door.” She drew the blanket over my nakedness. “And fetch some fresh clothes.”

As soon as we were alone she unfastened the straps. My legs free, I curled around myself and one handed yanked my clothes together beneath the thin cover.

“It was a heart attack, wasn’t it?”

I nodded. If I have to kill, I’ve learned to make it look like natural causes. I hadn’t had time to make it as neat as I should, but he hadn’t left me much choice. I want to die; I don’t want to be raped.

She gathered my ruined hand into both of hers. “Tell me what to do. I know you can fix this, given time, but the bones aren’t straight. If I just leave it…”

Her eyes opened wide with horror. “You can’t mean…?”

I indicated the simple wooden chair drawn up to the equally simple table. It was all they’d given me, together with the bed and the head, by way of furniture.

She lost all color. Stood up and scuttled across the cell.

I flipped aside the blanket and followed her, holding my pants up with my good hand, holding the shirt closed against me with the broken one. I must have looked like hell. I felt like it.

She’d never seen me like this. Never been here. She knew where the place was, but I’d always been brought to her. Scrubbed, dressed and brought up to her room for her little games. Used, abused and tossed back when we were done, the criminal caught. This was too real for her. She was the one living in the outside world. I was the one who paid the price.

Unsteadily I walked back to the bed, sat on the edge and tried to zip the pants without trapping public hair in the teeth. There was a smear of pre-cum down the side of my left leg. I wasn’t going to make myself any more vulnerable than I already felt by trying to wash it off with a broken hand and water from the tin toilet.

Fingers covered mine as I struggled. I stopped. She was on her knees. She wasn’t wearing her real face. This was as close as I’d ever seen her come in public. Her eyes were dark hollows. She was afraid but she didn’t let it stop her.

“I didn’t know you lived like this.” She spoke to my crotch, “I thought they gave you secure rooms, like mine. I thought you were just being ungrateful.”