Pets: Bach's Story (14 page)

Chilled fingertips caressed his spine, moving down into his belly to grip his gut in an icy fist. Bach bent slowly down and looked inside. The side window had been smashed in, and Pani was gone.

Chapter Nine

Bach pounded on Councilman Remeik’s door hard enough to rattle it in its frame and to hurt Bach’s fist. He didn’t care. When the Councilman opened the door, Bach grabbed him by the throat, shoved him back inside and up against the nearest wall. Two pets—both a male and a female—screamed in unison, followed by Remeik’s wife.

The aged Councilman was much more sedate. He merely wheezed, “Hello, Bach. What brings you by?”

“Where is she?” Bach demanded.

“She who?”

Bach squeezed. “I am not a untried recruit fresh off the training field, old man. Keep playing with me and the Council will have to find someone else to nominate for the senate seat.”

“By she, can I assume you mean Pani?” Remeik asked. Bach squeezed even tighter, causing him to wheeze out a rasped and high pitched, “I can’t answer if you won’t let me.”

Slamming him back against the wall, Bach let go and stormed off through the house, yelling, “Pani!”

Rubbing his throat, Remeik waited until Bach came charging back through the living room, heading for the stairs to the second floor. “Pani!”

“I don’t have her.” The old man spread his arms in an all encompassing gesture. “Why would I? What could I hope to gain by taking your pet?”

“Leverage!” Standing on the bottom most step, Bach rounded on him, “So I’ll do this last damn mission of yours.”

The Councilman laughed. “If I wanted you that badly, I’d have you arrested and tortured into compliance.”

Glaring angrily, Bach came down off the stairs. “If you don’t have her, then you can find her.”

“Of course I can,” the old man said readily enough. “But if I find her, you must be willing to return a favor for me as well.”

His expression turning extremely dark, Bach growled, “God damn you.” Turning his back on Remeik, he ran a hand through his own dark hair, an expression of deep aggravation. He frowned at the wall for a long minute, then turned around again. “All right. Find her, and I’ll do it. Whatever it is, I’ll do it. But you’d better damn well never ask anything more of me again.”

“Right.” The Councilman turned to his wife. “Theni, take the pets upstairs, if you would.

Baths and bed time. And don’t forget to triple lock Aven. If I find him in Obra’s crib again tonight, everyone will get a spanking, starting with you.”

He leveled a stern look at his wife, who seemed more concerned about Bach than her husband’s threat. She took hold of both pets and led them up the stairs.

Remeik held out a guiding hand. “My study is right down the hall. So, tell me, my boy.

Did you get her microchipped?”

*

It looked like any other farm on the outskirts of town to Bach. Small house secretly surrounded with police and in need of some roof work, an ancient barn out in the middle of a vacant but neatly-mowed field, and a huge crop of almost harvestable tandii growing everyplace else for miles on both sides of the winding country road. Bach couldn’t even see the pet breeding facilities or hear the humans until one of the eight well-armed officers that Remeik had brought with him opened the barn door. As silent as assassins, they all crept inside, crouching down to hide in the shadows as they invaded the structure.

The stalls down both sides had been modified into cages, half of which housed four to six males, while the other half, the breeding pens, provided a buffer that ensured no two groups of males were caged back-to-back.

Only two of the breeding pens were actually occupied. In the first, a plump brunette had already been strapped down on a T-shaped post affixed to the cement floor. The top of the bar was padded to support her hips, but that was all the comfort she was given. A second bar fastened to each of her ankles forced her legs wide apart, and both the bar as well as her chained wrists were fastened to rings in the floor. She had a gag in her mouth and a plug in her bottom, leaving only her quivering female sex open to mounting from the aggressive males who were lined up on either side of the chain fencing. Doors linked each cage to the pen, but neither was open. High on the wall above each door, was a set of lights, red and green. So far, the red was the only one lit on both sides.

Though as close as Bach was, the males—focused intently on the female, some already in states of extreme arousal—never even turned their heads to look at him. But the female did.

Snuffling softly around her gag, she looked back at him through her elbows and knees, her brown eyes pleading with him for intervention.

“Activating three,” came the low, faint tones of a man’s voice from the shadows somewhere to the very back of the barn.

As one, both groups of males looked up at the lights. The set above the far right door switched from red to green and a loud buzzer signaled the remote controlled unlocking of the cage. The female shook, mewing in her bonds as the males spilled into the breeding pen.

There was an obvious pecking order, as blackened eyes and bruises on some of the males obviously showed. The alpha male took up the coveted position behind her, while the others pulled at the gag over her mouth, rubbing their burgeoning penises against her face and squeezing and fondling her breasts with rough, hard hands.

No attempt at all was made to arouse her, and she made the most pitiful sounds from the moment the alpha male thrust himself inside her until Bach finally turned from the scene, sick to his stomach. Was this what humans did in the wild, or was this what they did when forced into captivity?

It didn’t matter. It wasn’t going to happen to Pani.

Already Remeik and his men were making their way into the shadowy back sections of the barn towards the owner of that masculine voice, and Bach followed.

Halfway down the row, three mutilated bodies had been stacked like cords of kindling in front of an empty breeder pen. Two were males, so battered and bloody that there was nothing left of their facial features at all.

Likewise, the female was only recognizable as such by her bruised breasts and the battered folds of her genitalia, crusted in blood from a multitude of bite marks. Her bloody head was bald, the hair and bits of scalp having been ripped out by the roots. Her face was badly mauled and one eye was missing entirely.

Remeik signaled to him from two cages ahead, and Bach gratefully abandoned his position beside the corpses.

Inside a pen by himself was the aggressive blonde male from Exotics, Inc. Both fists were swollen and raw and he bore the signs of brawling all over his body. He squatted against the back wall, glaring into the affixed breeder pen with dead, pitiless eyes. Pani had already been strapped down, gagged and harnessed, with a plug fixed securely in her bottom to help ensure the success of the breeding.

There were lash marks on her back, buttocks and legs; she must have tried to escape and the attempt been received nowhere near as kindly as he’d done. There was also a hole in her back where they had dug out the microchip. The wound looked red and raw around the ugly scab, the coloring of which suggested infection might already have set in.

Remeik’s staying hand on his arm was the only thing that kept Bach from charging into the pen to get her. It was only then that he noticed Pani wasn’t alone.

The same stately woman who had so admired Pani at the pet shop all those weeks ago, reached down to stroke her long copper hair with a gloved hand. In her other, she held an electric shock prod.

“Imagine,” she said softly. “A pet with his strength and her coloring; we’d never be able to keep up with the whelp orders.”

From a control box on the rear side of the cage, a man said, “We’ll never breed him. He was more interested in fucking his cage mates than the female we gave him, and even then he killed them first. He’ll probably just tear this one apart like he did the other. I think we should cut our losses and put him down.”

The woman lay the prod against her shoulder. “No. He’s an animal, but he’s not stupid.”

Leaving Pani’s side, she went to the door of the male’s cage and boldly opened it. “He’s going to behave himself properly this time,” she said as she slowly stepped inside. “He’s going to impregnate our pretty little red-mane the way he should,” the prod came off her shoulder and the male followed the end of it with his eyes until it pointed safely down at the ground. “Or I’ll be very displeased.”

She activated the prod and the end crackled with blue sparks. “Move,” she told him.

The male’s nostrils flared. The look he gave her was nothing short of absolute hatred, but he got up just the same. So did Bach.

Bach shot the breeder male through the head even as it stepped through the cage door. He salved his conscience with the belief that, at this point, it was probably a mercy for the savage human beast.

“What—” The man froze mid-charge out of the control box, his eyes all but crossing as he stared in shock at the gun one of Remeik’s men had thrust in his face. He slowly put his hands up in the air.

The woman was a good deal more vocal. “This is private property! You have no business here!”

“Where’s the keys?” Bach demanded as he pushed through the door into the breeder pen.

At the first sound of his voice, Pani began to squeal and wriggle to get out of her bonds.

Hers were the happiest, most relieved and yet muffled sounding ‘Papa’ noises he’d yet heard.

They were also very welcome to his ears.

“Get out before I call the authorities,” the woman ordered him. She hefted the prod as she stormed towards him. Then he saw her eyes flicker as she recognized his face. She stopped, and the prod lowered by the barest of inches.

“Let me save you the time,” he snapped. “I brought the authorities with me.”

She stared at the fully armed men that were literally coming out of the shadows. Then she glared at Bach again. “Trespassing is against the law.”

“So is theft of private property,” Remeik stated.

“Possession is nine-tenths of ownership,” she countered. “Besides, I have the sales’ slips for every one of my breeders. Including the one you destroyed. I want compensation for that.”

“I don’t care what you claim to have.” Bach took the gag off Pani, releasing a volley of ‘Papa, take Pani home’s. “This is my pet!”

There was no change in the woman’s beautiful, yet emotionally void face. “You’re mistaken, I’m sure. My pet simply looks like yours, has similar coloring.”

“Where’s the damn key?” Bach growled. He’d used a knife to cut through the hip strap, but the chains on Pani’s wrists and ankles were another matter entirely.

“Here’s one,” one of the men at the control box said. He handed it through the fence of the pen into Bach’s outstretched palm.

Councilman Remeik stepped inside the breeding pen. “Hri Mosk, you’ve ben found guilty of theft.”

“I didn’t steal her,” the woman insisted. “How could I have known she belonged to another?”

“You saw her with me in the pet shop on Forte Street,” Bach stated.

“Not to mention there’s the obvious chip removal from her back. Whether you did that yourself or not is irrelevant. The procedure was done here, at this farm, so you can’t say you didn’t know. It was the frequency of the removed chip that led us to you.”

The woman’s serene look faltered. “Those chips don’t emit an outward frequency. They don’t emit any kind of signal unless scanned.”

Remeik smiled. “Not as far as the public knows, true.” He unholstered the gun at his hip.

“Have you anything to say before I pass sentence?”

Her mouth thinned and she looked from him to Bach. “I ask for acquittal, since there is no actual proof of my involvement.”

“Denied,” Remeik said simply. “Possession is nine-tenths of ownership and, therefore, proof enough for me.”

“Then I ask for mercy.”

The Councilman frowned. “I hate it when they beg. Bach?”

Kneeling in front of the ‘T’, Bach had got her feet loose but the pet manacle’s locks were stiff and he was still working on her wrists. He looked at the marks on her back and legs and at the ugly gash that would certainly scar between her shoulders. “I don’t think I believe in mercy right now.”

“I didn’t think so.” Remeik shot the woman between the eyes and almost had his gun back in its holster before her body hit the cement floor.

Pani squeaked, and her struggles to get free died suddenly as she found herself staring into Hri’s lifeless eyes.

The Councilman sighed. “I love my job. The beauty and swiftness of justice are unequaled by any other profession.”

Pani squeaked again, and Bach finally got the antiquated wrist locks to turn. The manacles popped open, and she was free.

She scrambled into his lap, flinging her arms around his neck and even wrapped her legs around his hips. “Take Pani home.”

He patted the small of her back, the only part that wasn’t married by welts, and softly kissed the side of her neck. “Anything you wish.”

She blinked and drew her head back. “No more spanking?” she asked hopefully.

The clever little thing.

He smiled. “Don’t press your luck.”

*

Every one of the breeder males was put down. Aggression being the core of their natures, they could never have made good family pets. Not even Mogo was spared, though they found him in the house, chained in Hri’s bedroom. He didn’t move so much as an inch. All he did was watch them with passionless eyes as Remeik’s men came through the door, pointed their guns at him and pulled the triggers.

The breeder female Bach took home with him, even though he suspected she was too far gone as well. He had no idea of what he was supposed to do with her. She sat all day by the window, staring outside. And at night, she looked up at the stars. She never spoke. He practically had to force feed her. He gave her Pani’s old nursery and for the most part just left her alone.

Bach didn’t even bother stretching her.

Pani, on the other hand, he took as often as he could. Every night and sometimes during the days. He buried himself in her body and loved her with all the passionate desperation of a man who knew what he had to do, but who was still not yet resigned to a miserable task.