The Samaritan Cometh
Part 9: “What am I to You?"
By Brian Lewis a.k.a Red Vector
She sighs and shifts her position slightly when I stroke her still damp hair. She
mumbles something unintelligible into my chest when my hand moves to the nape of
her neck and slowly down her back. Eventually my hand makes its way lightly across
her buttocks. By way of response she moans softly and shivers with pleasure. We
spent the rest of the morning and into the afternoon like that. Enjoying and exploring
each other’s bodies. And when we weren’t doing that we were like children playing
hooky from school. But we were adults hiding out from the realities of our lives,
realities that were brought back with a simple question.
“You shielded them with your body, didn’t you?” She was, of course asking about the
New York bank hostage situation three days ago.
“If I hadn’t they were going to kill a lot of people.” It was the most public use of my
abilities to date, but I had no choice.
“The bullets, when they hit you did it hurt?” She asks with almost childlike curiosity as
she lays her hand on my chest.
I level my self up to a sitting position and look out across the water. My answer is a
simple statement of fact.
“Yes, it did.” I say as I turn back to her returning her gaze. In that moment of intense
eye contact, I can see she’s suddenly struck by an epiphany.
“Your motorcycle has an Arizona plate.” She says. “That Valentine’s Day massacre it
was you, wasn’t it? Even though the news reports said that it was a rival gang, it was
you. You killed them all single handedly. ”
“What did you expect the news reports to say? That the single largest mass killing in U.
S. history was carried out by one man, in one night?” I say to her in a sarcastic tone.
“Please, nobody would believe it.”
“I believe that if you killed them, they richly deserved killing.” She says, as she traces
the mask like markings on my face. It’s a mask that doesn’t come off, a mask that has
become more prominent in the last few months.
“I’m a monster Maddie, a freak.” I say as I turn away from her, suddenly unable to meet
her gaze. “Every time I cut loose like that, it’s like a piece of me is irretrievably lost.”
“The only monster I see here is between your legs.” She says in a sultry seductive
tone. As she does she kisses me on the forehead like you would a troubled child. Then
she’s on top of me and proceeds to kiss me on the mouth with an intensity that leaves
me breathless. At that point the turmoil I was feeling vanished like smoke on the wind.
Sometime later, I awake with a start noticing the distinct absence of her presence. And
some thing even more disturbing, the soft warm sand I was lying on wasn’t sand
anymore, it was cold hard concrete. The sound of the summer wind through the trees
is gone; the only sound I can hear is the mechanical drone of an ancient ventilation
system. I roll over on my back and the life giving sun has been replaced by the harsh
lifelessness of florescent lights.
“What the fuck? Where am I?” My voice echoes hollowly off the walls, of my
approximately twelve by twenty four foot cell. It’s a cell that stinks of dankness, death,
and worse yet despair.
I try to stand only to be struck down with a crippling wave of nausea and vertigo that
pitches me forward flat on my face. Immediately followed by an intense fit of vomiting
and dry heaves that leaves me spent, trembling, and in a cold sweat.
But, just when I think my situation couldn’t get any worse, it does.
“Mr. Harland he’s ready; you can put it on him now.” The voice comes from a loud
speaker from somewhere in the cell. It has the same vocal inflection and tonal quality
of a voice I heard eight months ago. It’s the same man who was calling the shots the
night they flash fried two of their own people to cover their tracks. And they would
have done the same to me if I hadn’t turned their hitter’s arms into pretzels and his
face into something resembling a Picasso painting.
As I hear a metal door open and the heavy footfalls of men approaching me, I’m sure
that whatever “It” is, I’m not going to like it at all.
“Of course we knew that needles wouldn’t penetrate your skin so we had to
improvise.” As the sickeningly bland voice speaks, I can feel strong hands on either
side of me haul me up to my knees. Hands I can only squirm weakly against, given my
current condition. Any other time I would be decorating the walls with their blood and
body parts.
“You should feel privileged it was specially made with you in mind.” The voice finishes.
Mr. Harland was a big man with a blond buzz cut and steely blue eyes. And I could tell
by the way he carries himself he’s a man who enjoys his work immensely, especially
when his work involves inflicting pain.
“You sick fucks.” I say when I see what Harland was holding in his hands. My voice is a
dry whisper, but my in my mind it was a scream.