4. Karen Carenson

Karen's command complex was at the back of the ship, beneath where the pilot's cabin had been before she had the tanker, the OPCO Michelangelo, modified into The Queen of Art.

The complex consisted of an alternate pilot's cabin from which she could herself direct the movement of the ship. The duplication was superfluous because the movement of the huge tanker had to be decided a long way in advance. Its huge bulk caused it to continue its forward motion long after its computer had been instructed to turn. However, Karen installed it to hide, if she wished, course coordinates from her Captain.

Karen decided to turn the Queen toward the Gaspé Peninsula and their Art of the Lord Monastery of Love after her thwarted attempt on The Chairman. The change in the ship's course, which was set for De'Corvo Acores, had little affect on its motion.

She then checked to see all was going as planned with respect to her orchestrated campaign to oppose any attempt to limit population growth. Attempts to do so were clear and present threats to her business interests and she simply would not let that occur.

When intelligence first brought her information the Council of Representative World Governments, CORWOG as she and her associates branded it, passed a unanimous resolution to persuade the governments of the world to take effective action to limit their population growth patterns, she raised war chests from the nationalistic leaders in her clique to finance the massive popular uprisings required to defeat what she designated as the Declaration of Death by The Representative World Government.

The Fund For Personal Freedom had collected vast sums from stalwarts like Jimmie Bourgesie, Donnie Denjens and the always-pliable asshole Anatol, all with access to their nations' treasuries and never once hesitating to spend everything on their primary task, keeping themselves in power.

Gako accomplished the organization effortlessly, as only he, with his unlimited access to funds, could. The kids were in the streets in their rags with their signs wherever there was a crowd of people and hired cameras were always present, grinding away their footage for the gullible talking suits and skirts around the world. The nationalistic leaders in countries where the reduction in population would reduce slave labor, cutting into their personal profits, reduce the number of expendable gun toters available to maintain their power, and endanger the endless progression of victims available to keep their dungeons and torture chambers humming along, forked over willingly.

Pieces of the Lang kid were being dispatched regularly without regard to any response on the part of Lang. The purpose was simply to cause Lang's own mental process to destroy her body, a process Karen reveled in during her rare moments of repose, knowing she was causing a maxim amount of pain with no physical effort of her part.

All in all, the opposition to the population initiative was going along swimmingly. Karen ordered the preparation of The Brush, her swift Stratodart, giving instructions to have the Queen surface and clear the deck so it'd serve as a runway for the Dart's takeoff. She then shut down the auxiliary command center, leaving the crew to their work.

Her sitting room abutted the command center with her bedroom complex off to the right. Her recreation center, the spotless stainless steel torture chamber, connected to both her sitting room and the bar.

She poured a glass of vodka, putting in a single ice cube to give it a chill, and sat back to contemplate the agony Rudolph Lang was going through and the agony Block was yet to endure.

She wondered which she found more delightful, the direct infliction of pain by the physical application of instruments that tore, burned, electrified the flesh, or the indirect infliction of pain, putting a person in a position causing incredible personal suffering and then allowing that person to use their own mind to whip their body with the physical blows every thought brought.

It was a toss up, she decided. It was impossible to recreate the feeling of pleasure in the mind her body felt at the time, but she could recreate the sequence of pictures that brought her the pleasure.

And were they precious pictures.

She'd been eleven when it all began to come together. She enjoyed sitting at her uncle's desk and playing make-believe. She found instead of actually experiencing a slight from somebody to invoke the rage she could then work off by imagining tying the person up and doing what she wanted to him, she could pass a law in her mind, one the person couldn't help but break, something like saying her name, or asking her a question, or even breathing.

Once the law was broken, it was all over for the mental image of the lawbreaker, creating delicious feelings for herself.

Of course, she realized her uncle made his money keeping people from being punished by the laws passed to provide the punishment to keep people from doing things the laws were designed to keep them from doing, but it was the same principle.

Her reward wasn't monetary, which required taking the money and finding something to buy that would give her pleasure.

Her reward was direct pleasure in the mental things she did to the captive image that broke the law.

What her uncle did was no different than what she did. The laws were passed not to keep people from doing something, but to require people to pay money to keep from being punished by the laws.

The difference was, she just wanted them punished and she wanted to be the one doing the punishing.

She'd sit for hours at her uncle's desk pretending laws into existence, pretending violations, and finally pretending punishments.

She then went to school and promptly began to collect the violations.

Before long, however, it occurred to her there was more to the law than simply crime and punishment.

When she'd threatened to tell her parents her uncle told her about the pictures, he'd been afraid, not of her parents, but what the law would do to him if it found out about the pictures.

The law could turn her uncle, the defender of the lawbreakers, into a lawbreaker himself.

And when she realized she had the power to turn him in, she also realized she had the power to turn him into a sniveling simpleton.

Although maybe not such a simpleton. She thought he rather liked being put in a position where she could make him do something he didn't want to do. She was fascinated with the feeling he must have at being forced to do something he didn't want to do.

She knew how it made her feel to be denied something she wanted or to have to do something she didn't want to do. It made her stomach ache. It made her neck stiff and hard to turn. It created pain in her shoulders. It could cause her cramps, long hours of sitting on the toilet with fire coming out her tail. It could make her lose her appetite and throw up. It could make her heart beat fast, her head dizzy, her ears ring.

She definitely didn't like being put in a position where she couldn't do exactly as she wished.

It was the one thing that kept her from trying out some of her mental tortures in reality. If she started to do it, and was prohibited from doing it for some reason, she'd have adverse physical effects from being denied in physical reality what she was doing in her mind.

She couldn't understand why her uncle would let her, a mere eleven year old, put him in the position of being forced to do what he didn't want to do, but she sensed that, when she let him off the hook after he'd complied with her wishes to the extent her wishes needed compliance, the feeling of relief he felt was somewhat akin to the feeling of relief she felt when she imagined taking out her wrath on her intended victims.

After all, the feelings the rage brought up in her weren't much different from the feelings she got when she was forced to do something against her wishes or denied doing what she wanted to do.

The only difference was, she was in control of her own discomfort. She determined when, how, and in what manner she could relieve her discomfort.

Her uncle had no such control. Her whim determined if and when he'd get relief.

That's the way she liked it and, whether he liked it or not, that's the way he was going to keep getting it. If he liked it that way, she wasn't going to let it interfere with her own pleasure.

One of the first things she wanted to know after contemplating the fact her parents made a living selling pictures of children being abused in one way or another was why it was against the law?

"Because," her uncle replied solemnly, "society seeks to protect its children. Children are innocents. They haven't grown up enough to make moral choices. They mustn't be corrupted, defiled by the evil in the world."

"You mean the laws against selling the pictures of children tied up are designed to protect the children?"

"Certainly, Bunchkins. What else?"

"How much money would you be making if those laws didn't exist?"

"Probably just as much. There're laws against getting a divorce, there're laws against leaving your money to who you want, there're laws against spitting in the streets. There're plenty of laws for people to break. I could always make a living keeping people out of jail."

"But not as easy."

"Well, if there's no law against the pictures, your parents wouldn't be able to make a lot of money selling them and then where would you be?"

"That's a good question, Unk, where would I be? Probably back in the country where I was born rather than this nameless backwater."

"This nameless backwater has very stringent laws concerning children who speak back to their elders."

"If there are laws to protect the children in the pictures, why aren't there laws to protect the children we see in the streets every day? What if those children wanted to pose for pictures and it was the only way they could get money to eat?"

"That's what the law is designed to protect against, the exploitation of children for immoral purposes."

Karen let her question about what is moral and immoral slide. Her uncle hadn't answered the question about why the law didn't protect the children in the streets. She gathered it'd protect one of them from being tied up and photographed but it wouldn't protect a lot of them from being tied up, burned with cigarettes, raped, shot, and left to the morning mist as a warning to others less obedient.

Who would pay to protect them?

But, no matter how she looked at it, her parents were breaking the law. Selling pictures of children who were bound and tied was illegal. Her parents made a lot of money selling them and a lot of that money passed to her uncle to keep them from having to suffer the consequences of breaking the law.

Without the law, there would be no money.

And money allowed them to break the law.

Laws prohibited them from doing exactly what they wanted to do but they went right ahead doing it.

She wanted to do exactly what she wanted to do.

Therefore, she'd have to put herself in a position of having money.

It was that simple.

Gako provided her with her first opportunity to obtain money and, to her surprise, transfer some of the mental pictures she conjured up into reality.

An older schoolmate, Gako Lupato, was a constant object for her pleasure. He was always blocking her way, pulling her hair, making fun of her. He could make her face burn with frustration as she helplessly stood incapable of opposing his actions.

She spent long afternoons after school tearing the flesh off his body, putting his eyes out, putting them back in so he could see more of his flesh being torn off, sticking pencils in his ears, breaking his fingers.

But recently, his torments had turned to solicitousness. Instead of blocking her way, he pressed her body against the wall with his. Instead of pulling her hair, he pushed her dress between the cheeks of her ass.

Her reaction was still rage, but a different sort of rage, a rage that didn't provide a basis for picturing herself tearing his flesh.

On the contrary, the pictures she formed were pictures of him doing more of the same things, although he had to do them to her strict requirements.

Gako was a year ahead of her, which made him thirteen years old. Boys were bigger, her classmates were bigger, and those a year ahead were bigger still, so she couldn't control him physically. She couldn't tie him up.

She had to find a way to make Gako do what she wanted him to do. She felt certain her uncle's instructions about the law would provide the key that would allow her to wrap Gako around any of her fingers.

One day when he had her firmly pressed against the cloakroom wall, she whispered in his ear: "I'll tell the teacher on you."

He seemed to get even more excited. "No you won't. You like this as much as I do."

Not getting anywhere with the threat, she reversed course immediately. "Then why don't we go somewhere we can do it without getting caught?"

It was a mere toss away. She had no idea why she said it. She was just casting around for something she could use to control him.

But the effect was incredible. He froze, his breathing stopped, and she became aware of something pressing against her from between his legs.

She had no idea what pictures she'd created in his mind.

"Have you got a place to go?" She could barely understand him, his voice was so low and raspy.

"Sure. I'm always home alone. We could go to my place."

"Let's go."

"School isn't over."

"Fuck school. They won't miss us for one period."

She agreed. She'd always wondered why the number of people in the classes got smaller and smaller as the day wore on, and now she was about to find out.

She took him home and gave him a tour of the house. She showed him her uncle's office, her father's studio, her bedroom.

He didn't seem interested in any of them. He just wanted to know where they could do it.

She didn't know what he wanted to do, but she finally gave in and told him, anywhere he wanted to.

"Do you want to take your clothes off?" Gako asked.

"Why would I want to do that?" she asked in return.

Gako didn't ask further. He ripped her clothes off, hurting her neck when her sweater ripped over her head, leaving a burn where her blouse was ripped apart, leaving a tear in her flesh as the zipper scratched across her buttocks.

Gako didn't bother taking his pants off. He simply unbuttoned the front and pulled out the hard thing that'd pushed against her at school. She hardly had a chance to look at it before he threw her on the floor and was on top of her, trying to push it up between her legs.

The pain was excruciating as he slammed the end of it again and again against her opening, trying to get it past her hairless lips. She had a boyish figure and was small even for a girl, and she was very small there, so no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't get it in her.

The more he tried and failed, the more he flailed about. He took his hand and tried to shove it up her backside but met the same problem there.

She felt warm moistness between her legs and knew she was bleeding. Her back and head hurt where he'd thrown her down. He was crying, tears rolling down his cheeks, his teeth clenched, repeating damn, fuck, shit, over and over in no particular order. Her lower parts felt like somebody had beaten them with a belt. She heard herself grunting and moaning, the pain of the onslaught was so intense.

Finally, he gave up working on her underside and grabbed her hand in his and started to move it rapidly over the end of the hard thing. After a few seconds, or minutes, she didn't know which because she seemed to be swimming in a sea of pain, her palm filled with a warm sticky fluid as he cried, grunted, groaned, falling in a weak heap beside her.

She waited for his breathing to slow, his sobs turn to silence, feeling in her body every ache, every pain he'd created on it.

She was exultant.

If he could inflict such violence on her, she could inflict it on others.

She could translate her mental dreams into physical reality.

The bruised and battered bodies of the morning, collected daily in trash bags, were no longer an abstract concept, a part of the environment.

They'd been living flesh just like herself, and the same type of violence just inflicted on her had been inflicted on them.

Others had the same dreams she created to provide herself with endless hours of pleasure, but instead of just dreaming, they actually carried out those dreams in reality, actually obtained a real person and caused that person real pain.

And had done so until that person was no longer a person, just a dead body.

The excitement rose within her as she realized once a person was restrained, once he was under her physical control, he was, for all intents and purposes, dead but for the things she could do to him.

And she realized with a thrill that actually made her body shake with anticipation, she could be the person doing the restraining.

She could do the inflicting.

She could act in physical reality to carry out the things that gave her pleasure, the things that up to now she'd only dreamed about.

To be able to do it, though, she needed someone like her uncle to protect her from the consequences of the law.

She needed money.

Or better, she needed to be able to control the law.

She needed lots of money!

And lying there with the excitement rising in her body, she'd learned another way to control a person.

She could make a person do what she wanted them to do for her, or let her do what she wanted to do to them, by making the alternative to her desires worse.

Or she could give them something they wanted, something they couldn't do without.

Gako clearly had a need.

She just needed to find out what that need was.

She reached down between his legs and searched for the hard thing,

All she found was soft wet flesh.

She took it in her hand. He flinched.

She started to rub it between her fingers to get its texture, fascinated with it. She got the overwhelming urge to kiss it, to take it in her mouth. She suppressed it. She'd no intention of doing anything to Gako until she found out what she was doing for him.

But the soft flesh began to grow under her very fingers and its growth caused an extreme sense of excitement to flood her mind, an intenseness not unlike the pleasure she felt when she imagined ripping and tearing his flesh with her mental tools of pain.

As it got harder, he began to moan quietly. She felt down between her legs at the slippery moistness of her blood and lubricated the area he wanted access to. She then helped him up on his knees and, holding him between her hands, helped him gain the access he needed.

She thought he was going to rip her apart, that the pain was going to split her mind in half, but he was out almost before he was in, the warm sticky liquid mixing with her blood.

She held the back of his neck as he sobbed on her shoulder saying thank you, thank you, over and over.

And, she thought as she sipped her drink and watched the last of the ice cube melt into the background of the ice colored vodka, he'd been saying thank you ever since. She'd never taken him into her mouth. She'd do that for no man. Nor would she let him take her into his mouth when he wanted to bury his face between her legs.

The one might be interpreted as a subservience she'd never allow regardless of the pleasure it might provide her, the other a kindness she couldn't turn into anger.

She'd taken him into her body many times after the first entry, although it was a long time before she could feel anything but the satisfaction of the control it gave her over him.

Finishing her vodka, she took a fresh bottle and left the command quarters. As she walked into the body of the Queen, she passed over the superstructure holding the gutted tanker together like a giant erector set.

Its innards held the three attack choppers, her command helicopter, and her Stratodart. As she walked up the platform on the starboard side, she passed the crews going over the attack choppers to see that everything was all right after the attempted assault on The Chairman.

The Stratodart rested on an elevator in the bow of the ship which was just starting to rise to the deck.

Karen walked the distance quickly, wanting to cozy into the cockpit of the small speedster with her bottle of vodka and her thoughts. She wanted to get Block in her spotless stainless steel auxiliary fun room at the monastery. She'd figured as soon as she'd heard he was headed for Gaspé, he was going there to consult with Georges Lansdowne.

Her kids in the monastery had long since milked Lansdowne of everything he had, taking copious notes that were transcribed and sent back to scientists working at her various monasteries around the world.

Her pets were very good at attending classes all over the world. All professors loved a student who could take down what was said in class so later it could be spit back verbatim, reinforcement for what must in the end be very fragile egos.

Gako once again tried to get her to don a pressure suit as she made it to the platform beside the Stratodart. He was ever solicitous, but being uncomfortable in her own little world while she was in the blackness of the sky wasn't to her liking and things not to liking didn't happen.

She climbed the steps of the waiting Stratodart.

The Queen had been raised so the deck was a foot above water. As she climbed in, the side gates were opened so the water washed out of their holding ponds and tracks folded down connecting the five sections of the deck for her takeoff.

In seconds, she was seated and had activated the engine. The plane shot down the surface of the ship like a dart and as it lifted off the surface of The Queen, the surface dropped below the water, making the ship once again invisible from the satellite sky, making it appear, should there be anyone around to observe, as if a blip had emerged from the surface of the ocean.

By the time satellite radar picked her up, sorted her out, and people began to ask questions, she'd be off the circuits in Gaspé. That was the benefit of automatic control. As long as she didn't enter controlled airspace, she'd be tracked, but would be invisible for a lack of available attention.

She had, she thought as she put her vodka in her glass and put the glass to her lips, always been able to act directly in a manner that accomplished her goals before those who might object could stop her.

Gako had tried to rape her. He had, he confessed, raped other girls. He'd even raped some of them more than once. He told them he'd hurt them badly if they ever told on him. He'd then hurt them badly to show them what they could expect.

None ever told on him.

Karen knew Gako hadn't expected her to do what she'd done instinctively. Instead of gritting her teeth and getting through it, she'd participated and helped a failing Gako get through it.

She also sensed at the time, although she could never quite understand why, that what Gako had gotten from her when she'd helped him, was something he'd never gotten from the insides of any other girl.

Her willingness, not to mention her diminutive passage, opened up a whole new world for Gako that sucked him in without his awareness.

She knew she could make him want it again. She knew she could make him want it anytime she wanted him to want it. And she knew she controlled when he was going to get it.

She didn't understand exactly what he was getting from her. She herself didn't feel anything. But whatever Gako was feeling, she was the source and the source controlled the demand.

And her first demand was money. If money was power, then the reverse must be true. If she had power over Gako, if she could make him do what she wanted him to do, she should be able to turn that power into money.

Gako gave her all he had willingly. But he complained business was bad and he couldn't get her more than he gave her.

She wondered what type of business a thirteen year old could be in. Was he getting money as well as sex from the girls he was raping?

"No," he replied.

"Have you tried it?" she asked.

"No. I just get boy's lunch money."

"Why do they give you their lunch money?"

"Because I'll beat them senseless if they don't. Only I've got some competition lately. My clients are being scared by another guy who's threatening to do things to them that would make me beating them a pleasure.

"What things?" Karen's questions were relentless.

"He tells them he's going to rape them if they don't give him their money. They're more scared of being raped by him than they are of being beaten by me."

"Why don't you threaten to rape them too?"

"I don't rape boys. That's for fags."

Karen sorted this out, concluding Gako couldn't meet the competition and he wasn't making as much money as he could.

If Gako wasn't making the money, she wasn't getting the money.

"Why don't we get your competition working for us?" she asked him.

"How can we do that? He's working for himself."

"We get him to pay you the same way you get boys to pay you. We let the boys continue to pay him, only he has to give you part of what they pay him. You get the money and you don't have to do anything."

"Except beat him up, and he's not only big enough to beat me up, he'll probably rape me to boot. I don't want to give him ideas."

"Don't worry about that. How can we get him to meet us?"

"I'll just tell him I want to kick his ass. He'll come anywhere I say. Why?"

"You just get some rope and a two-by-four and I'll do the rest."

Under the assumption that what gave the most pleasure to Gako would also produce the most pain, Karen got a pair of pliers out of her mother's household tool kit and met Gako in one of the fields behind the road her uncle used to take her to school. When Gako's competition came to do some damage to Gako, she took the two-by-four and hit him across the back, stunning him, leaving him gasping for air.

She'd used all her strength, but she was so slight, they were barely able to get him tied up before he regained the use of his arms.

As soon as he realized his hands were tied, he began to scream for help. Karen had forgotten a gag. She hadn't counted on a scream because in her dreams her victims suffered in silent agony. She quickly took off her underpants and stuffed them in his mouth.

"I want you to shake your head yes or no when I ask you a question, do you understand?" she said quietly.

He was propped, his eyes wide with terror, against one of the broken buildings. The world didn't care whether he lived or died. The thought filled Karen with joy.

When he didn't respond, she hit him on the bridge of the nose with the pliers.

"Do you understand?" she repeated, this time with an edge to her voice.

Gako looked on, fascinated.

The boy shook his head yes as his eyes streamed tears from the blow to his nose.

"I want you to feel something," Karen said to her helpless victim, unzipping his pants and pulling out what she now well knew was any boy's focal point.

The boy looked down in surprise and then at Karen, puzzled, tears still streaming down his cheeks.

Karen quickly stroked the boy until he was hard. Gako moved around for a closer look. The boy started to say something, but Karen cut him off.

"Look down at what I'm going to do to you," she instructed.

This time the boy obeyed, unable to help himself. He watched as the pliers closed around the tip of his penis. He jerked in agony as Karen pressed them tight. The tears streaking his face were drowned in the sweat pouring from his brow.

Karen released the hold after the briefest of seconds.

"Did you feel that?"

The boy shook his head frantically.

"Good. Then I want you to really feel it."

She pressed the handles together and the boy started flopping in agony like a fish suspended from a wire hook.

Gako wiped a piece of spittle from his mouth. He couldn't talk, his mouth was so dry. Karen kept the pressure up until the boy passed out from the pain.

She hadn't counted on that. The boys in her dreams stayed awake and took their punishment over and over.

They didn't faint.

She looked down at her handiwork. He'd shrunk even smaller than Gako after she let him have her, and the end was as flat as a pancake.

"How do we wake him up?" Karen asked.

"Just wait, I guess. Slap him a little."

Karen poked him a few times and he started to come around.

"Untie him," she told Gako.

"Are you kidding? He'll kill us. I'd kill us."

"No you wouldn't. Untie him and we'll see. We can always bean him again.

Gako did as he was told. The boy came awake and immediately grabbed between his legs, his face contorting in agony. "What did you do to me?" he whined.

"It's not what I did to you. It's what I didn't do to you. I didn't cut it off, you prick, do you understand what I'm saying?"

The boy shook his head automatically.

"If you don't do exactly what I say, I will cut it off, do you understand?"

The boy realized his hands were free and he looked at them, puzzled, and then at Karen.

He shook his head yes.

"Good. You'll do everything Gako tells you to do, is that understood?"

He shook his head yes.

"Quit shaking your head and answer out loud, you prick."

"Yes."

"Gako, have him do to you what you're always pestering me to do to you."

Gako sat down beside the boy and exposed himself. "Suck on it," he said.

"No . . ." he started to say, but couldn't bring himself to say it. He instinctively rubbed himself, still exposed, the tip just starting to regain its shape, and looked at the pliers still in Karen's hand. "I ain't no fag."

"You rape boys."

"I rape girls too. What do I care where I stick it. But I ain't no fag. I don't suck on the thing."

"Well, there's a first time for everything," she motioned to Gako with the pliers.

"Suck," Gako ordered.

The air seemed to go out of the boy. It was like his will had flown out the flattened end of his penis. He sucked, at first hesitantly, then as he started to feel the technique involved, with relish.

After that, the boy became Gako's lieutenant, ever-willing, ever-submissive, and the other boys at the settlement school who wanted to play Gako's game fell into place one after another.

It was a disappointment to Karen. The money was flowing in, but the need to use violence to obtain it was diminishing, non-existent except in the few instances somebody new came on the scene, a new diplomat was assigned, a corporate executive came on board to operate in the foreign office, or a new local was able to muscle his way up the lackey ladder of the Commander General, the ruler of the small country the enclave occupied.

It always amazed Karen that no matter how the other kids described to newcomers who wanted a piece of the action what would happen to them if they tried to get it, the newcomer always tried to get the action. It was like they couldn't hear, as if they had a blind spot when it came to the type of physical violence she was willing, not to mention eager, to administer.

Most of them learned violence early at their father or mother's hands. They learned to take beatings because they had no other choice. They were smaller than their parents, and defenseless.

When they went out into the world, they ran up against the majority of kids who had no experience with violence.

The kids who'd been beaten at home knew what it was like to be beaten and raped and knew they could survive it.

The kids they were beating on didn't know what it was like to be beaten and didn't know they could survive.

The kids who'd been beaten had no fear of being beaten.

The kids who hadn't been beaten or otherwise molested had an unreasoning fear of it.

That's why they'd give up their money at the threat of the first blow. That's why they'd keep quiet. They'd been raised in a home that honored the reflective rather than the reflexive.

It was as if life was favoring the lowest common denominator, the meanest factor in the equation, rather than the best.

But when it came to the people who had been beaten, the ones with no fear of being beaten, the description of what was in store for them if they encroached on Karen Carenson's territory didn't seem to trigger a response.

It must be, Karen thought, what they were hearing about was just another form of physical violence. And physical violence was something they could deal with.

They didn't realize the violence Karen delighted in, the violence she herself received such physical pleasure from, was a violence that transcended a simple beating.

Physical blows on the body were just a method to get to the real work, the destruction of the person's willpower, the creation of subservience, not for the purpose of making the person grovel, but to elevate herself, allow her ego to expand so her anger could grow to enormous proportions and fill her body and mind with pleasure as she acted on the object of her anger to release the pressure of the anger.

She always welcomed encroachers.

The kids in the city were another issue altogether.

They were pitiful, useless creatures born to perish. They must have a use in life, but Karen could only catch a glimpse what that purpose might be.

Necessity, however, made them very crafty and every once in a while a crafty one, one who'd survived the police and shopkeepers and thrill seekers, would get the idea they could prey on Karen's customers, turn them into their own.

The rage Karen felt the first time this happened startled even her.

When the body was found the next day, it caused quite a stir. It showed the care Karen took in destroying it. The paper didn't go into details, but named the boy "Jimmy" and went to great lengths lamenting the fact society was throwing away its children. Enough money was collected to give what remained of "Jimmy" a decent burial, but by the time of the burial, only a handful of the paper's employee's showed up.

The details concerning the condition of the body and the speculation about what the boy must've suffered for his body to reach such a state, however, raced through the community, mouth to mouth, delighting some, astonishing others, rendering others speechless, and creating in still others a sort of professional jealousy. Interest in Jimmy didn't continue, but he lived on in the local vernacular. If someone was really mad at someone else, they would threaten to jimi them, and if kids didn't behave, their mothers would throw the jimi threat at them.

Because the police picked off the potential leaders who were troublesome and the local crime rings employed the potential leaders who were compliant, there were very few potential victims who would emerge from the amorphous mass of leaderless waifs to encroach on Karen's territory and create the rage she needed to experience such pleasure.

And she needed the rage, Karen thought, as she sipped her vodka under the starry sky. She was high enough so the atmosphere didn't cause the light to refract and the pinpoint specs of light soothed her mind.

But they couldn't sooth the underlying images that kept pushing themselves up past the vodka, the determination to destroy Block, the reflections on the glories of the past, the images that made her body restless in response, demanding satisfaction she could no longer readily provide it. The thought of the agonies she was inflicting on Rudolph Lang temporarily assuaged the insistent demands that kept coursing through her system, satisfied for a moment the untickelable tickle, but even that was growing stale.

The vodka, and the thoughts of the triumphs of the past, that was what gave her surcease from her unsatisfiable desires.

And it'd been a glorious past.

She'd consolidated her power over her external environment. Money was flowing in. She could practice in physical reality what she could conjure up in her mind.

She was twelve years old and as she sat at her uncle's desk, she realized she was going on thirteen.

She was already becoming restless, with new images forming in her mind every day, images that caused a physical reaction in her body, the physical reaction coloring her mind so the images were reinforced, the reinforcement calling forth an even more intense physical reaction in a spiraling cycle until she was crawling out of her skin wanting the relief she now needed, had become addicted to.

She'd long since forced her uncle into explaining in detail how her father collected children from the local orphanage when he needed fresh subjects for his pictures.

When she asked who tied them up, her uncle responded they practically tied themselves up.

"How so?" she asked.

"If they don't do what they're told to do at the orphanage, they know the consequences," her uncle replied.

"What are the consequences?"

"They get spanked, I guess. I don't interest myself in that stuff too much."

Karen again saw the mental whip. If you want somebody to do something, you give them two choices, one choice being what you want them to do, the other being something so unacceptable, they'll readily do what you want them to do.

She'd learned after her father took the pictures, he put the film in the dark room for her mother to develop.

The whole process took only a couple of hours a week, if that.

Although she knew the answer, Karen asked why couldn't anybody do it if it was so easy.

Her uncle explained again about the laws, but added her father paid off the Commander General who he'd known when he was the Commander of the city jail. Because the Commander General made substantial profits off the business, he used the laws against exploiting children to put anyone who tried to compete with her father into his old place of employment.

"Besides, with advancements in technology, film is turning digital and can be posted on the Internet."

"What's the Internet?"

"It's a communication tool the Commander General has banned so your father can continue making money with his pictures."

"How are the pictures sold?" she asked.

"I handle the business end. There are established distribution channels."

She concluded it must be a pretty profitable business, the source of a lot of funds, and handled properly, it could be the source of substantially more funds.

And because Karen wished to do the things she wanted to do when she wanted to do them without any interference, she decided that handled properly meant handled by her. And because she was being prohibited from handing the funds, she was being slighted, with her clueless parents the source of the slight.

One afternoon when the house was quiet, she had Gako come over. She put a roll of film in the camera so all Gako had to do was push the button. Once the button had been pushed, the camera would rapidly begin to click a seemingly endless series of shots.

Karen told Gako to strip and put on the pants, shoes and socks she'd laid out for him. There was nothing special about them other than the fact they were her uncle's and being distinctive, white pleat pants with white buck shoes, his trademark.

She then stripped herself and had Gako tie her up. This turned out to be the hard part. The more he tied her up, the more his hands shook and the heavier his breathing became. She had to let him relieve himself in her before he got to her legs or it'd have been a complete wash. Even with that, he had trouble keeping his hands off himself once he had her tied in a neat little package. For one instant, she thought he might force himself into her mouth, but a stern and steady glare and a sharp word put a stop to that impulse.

She then examined herself in the mirror behind the camera. She looked just like a boy, her budding figure not budding at all, her legs tied tightly, apparently teasingly hiding a penis. She told Gako to trip the camera and then move behind her. As he did so, she began to grimace and contort herself against the ropes, the camera click, click, clicking away.

When she was finished, she had him untie her and let him in her one more time as a reward, then sent him home.

She then took the role of film and put it with several others in the dark room.

It took a couple of days for her mother to get around to developing the rolls of film, but when she did, and saw her daughter hog tied in front of the camera, she went into a rage the likes of which Karen had never seen.

Karen got home from school to witness what she'd never witnessed, her parents fighting. A loving couple, her mother was screaming at the top of her lungs at her father, accusing him of being a pervert, threatening to kill him, to jimi him, to divorce him.

Her father, helpless in his defense, unknowing, pleading he didn't know anything about it, would periodically reach the limits of his endurance and turn on her mother, threatening to kill her, to jimi her, to divorce her.

The outburst would only set her mother off again.

It was like two kids on a seesaw, her mother, the accuser, swinging up as high as she could go in indignity, her father, abject, as low as he could get, and then when her mother had reached as high as she could go and was about to settle down, her father's indignity raising him up, his voice rising with his stature, her mother shrinking down before him until he too had reached as high as he could go and her mother as low as she could go, and then, with new reserve, she'd beat him down once again, rising up in stature and indignity, the two seesawing back and forth, trading high dungeon with each other.

Karen listened through the door as they railed at each other, her faint smile turning broader as she listened to them tearing each other, and themselves, apart in the process.

It was incredible, she thought, how easy it was to take a person's own mind and use it as an instrument to create physical havoc in their own bodies. She didn't have to use knives to slice their flesh. What she was using was cutting far deeper into the flesh than a knife could ever reach, affecting cells and organs no amount of external physical force could reach.

Karen was cutting into the very cells of her parent's bodies, leaving their flesh intact.

It was a delightful revelation, and one she'd love to see continue forever, but knew it couldn't.

She therefore made sure the safety was off the gun she'd removed from her uncle's desk, opened the door to the studio where her parents were railing at each other, walked over so she was directly between them, in front of her mother and facing her father, and shot him in the crotch and, as he doubled over, directly in the top of his head.

"Mommy, Mommy," she cried, handing her mother the gun. "It was horrible, just horrible."

Her mother looked at her father, then at the gun, then back at her father and cried, real tears streaming down her cheeks: "What have I done? This is terrible!"

Karen escorted her mother over to a chair and helped her sit down, patting her on the shoulders as she bent over, sobbing.

Then she collected the prints and the negatives of her session with Gako, carefully placing them in a legal sized vanilla envelope from her uncle's office.

She then fixed her mother a cup of tea to settle her nerves and sat comfortably behind her uncle's desk waiting for him to return.

It was an hour before she heard him come in. She checked on her mother, who was in a stupor, the tea, untouched, cold beside her.

"Hi, Bunchkins," her uncle greeted her, putting his papers on the desk. "What's up?"

"Daddy's dead," Karen said without explanation.

"Dead? How could he be dead? He was alive just this morning."

Karen took his arm and led him into the other room. He gasped when he saw her father lying on the floor, crouched in a sort of fetal position from the blow of the bullet to the back of his head while he'd been in the act of grabbing his crotch.

"Heart attack?" her uncle asked.

"I don't think so," Karen replied.

Her uncle went over and took her father's wrist in his hand as if he were a doctor. "He has no pulse. He must be dead. Call a doctor."

His eyes then focused on his sister, the tea, and the gun, which was now on the table beside the tea. "That's my gun. How did it get here?"

"Ask your sister," Karen said.

"How did my gun get here?" he asked.

"What have I done?" her mother replied. "This is terrible."

"My god!" her uncle said. "You killed him. What happened? This is terrible."

Karen took her uncle by the hand and steered him back into his study, getting him safely seated behind his desk. "We're going to have to call the police," she said

"Police? Call the police. Yes. The police. We can't call the police. We have to call the Inspector. He'll take care of this for us."

"How?"

"Why, cover it up, of course. We can't have this getting in the paper.

"Uncle, this is my father we're talking about. He's been murdered. He's a respectable member of the community. You can't cover it up."

"Sure I can. We'll just say he died of a heart attack. His heart stopped, didn't it?"

Karen wondered if he could do that and decided he probably could.

"If you cover it up, say he died of a heart attack, somebody is going to know different, aren't they?"

"Not if we don't tell. I'll get a doctor to issue a death certificate on a pre-existing condition and have him cremated."

"Won't you have to pay off the doctor?"

"Yes."

"So it won't be just us that'll be able to tell. It'll be somebody else."

"Oh, my, yes. I went into the wrong type of law. I just don't know what to do."

"What kind of defense do you think you can provide her? Can you say she caught him fooling around with another women and killed him in a fit of rage."

"Don't be silly, my child. That's a man's defense. If a man finds his wife screwing around, he's entitled to kill the guy and beat her silly. If he can't bring himself to touch her because she's bespoiled herself, he is entirely within his rights to kill her.

"But, no, that would never work the other way. No. No. No. No jury would ever buy that as a defense for a woman. It's just too far fetched."

"Well, I guess you're going to have to call the police, your inspector friend, or whatever, and do the best you can. I'm sure you can work something out."

Her uncle looked through his phone book and dialed a number. "This is the Inspector's private number," he said to her over the phone receiver. "Hello, Don, yes, Mike here, my sister has just shot her husband. Can you come right over? Good. Thanks." He turned to Karen. "He'll be right over."

He sat there staring into space.

"Why don't you talk to mother before the Inspector gets here," Karen suggested.

"Right," her uncle replied, getting up from behind his desk.

Karen steered him into the other room where her mother still sat staring into space.

"What happened?" he asked.

"The bastard."

The fierceness in her mothers voice startled Karen, sending a thrill through her body. Until today, she'd never heard her mother refer to her father in anything but the gentlest, most loving terms. Now he was a bastard.

"Come here, baby."

Karen obliged and her mother wrapped her arms around her.

"Your asshole brother-in-law was molesting my little baby," she said, stroking Karen's head.

"How do you know that?"

"I have the proof. He took pictures of her and did God knows what else." She looked around the room, looking for the pictures.

"I have them in a safe place," Karen said as her uncle started looking where her mother was looking. "Do you want to see one?" She disengaged herself from her mother's arms and steered her uncle back into the study.

"Here," she said, taking one out of the legal sized vanilla envelope and holding it in front of her uncle.

"These aren't your father's work," he said, taking out a pair of reading glasses to get a better look. "Why, they don't have the composition that made your father such an artist. The posing isn't right, the lighting deficient, the angles all wrong. And it's a little girl, not a boy for heaven's sake. He'd never photograph a girl. Why, that's you."

His hands started shaking and fell away from the picture Karen still held. She put it back in the envelope.

The bell rang.

It was the Inspector.

Several weeks into the investigation, when tests on the gun turned up everybody's fingerprints, including her father's, and it was time to wrap up the investigation and put the responsible party in jail, the Inspector consulted with her uncle. He related the conversation to her in detail.

Not having the pictures, the Inspector could come up with no motive for her mother shooting her father. The possibility Karen herself had shot her father in such a manner didn't even cross his mind. There was no apparent reason her uncle would've killed his sister.

It was all a big blank to him. Therefore, he was going to charge her mother with the murder and let the grand jury decide whether she did it or not.

"The grand jury will come up with whatever conclusion the prosecutor decides to give them evidence to support," her uncle snorted. "We'll get her off with a song. He's got every picture your father ever took!"

"I don't think so," Karen replied.

She got out the pictures again. "Take a closer look at these pictures."

"Why? They're just junk. You're father didn't take them."

"The grand jury doesn't have your taste. They wouldn't know composition from compost. Here. Take a closer look. Please."

Her uncle got out his reading glasses and peered at the picture.

She gave him another one. He peered at that.

She pointed at the legs in the picture.

He still peered.

"Whose legs are those?" she asked, slightly frustrated with his obtusity.

"Oh, you mean the guy behind you. That's me. I mean, those are my pants."

Recognition dawned. "But I was never in any picture with you. What's going on here?"

"What would a grand jury say if they got a good look at those pictures?"

"I don't know. I guess they could believe anything."

"What they'll believe is that my father caught you taking pictures of me, that he was enraged, that he was going to kill you, that you shot him to keep him from doing the right thing, protect my morals."

"Why would they believe that?"

"Look at the pictures. What else in the pictures can testify to your guilt?"

Her uncle looked at the pictures again, and finally recognition dawned on him.

"You. You'd tell them that?"

"Give me the phone."

"Jeez. Then my sister didn't kill your father?"

"I don't think so," Karen replied.

"Then who?"

Karen smiled.

"My lord." He buried his face in his hands and then his head in his arms. He could feel the tension start to build. The vision of himself safe, comfortable, free, the normal everyday concept of self he carried around in his dealings with the world, was all of a sudden confronted with the picture of bars, dark walls, sinister men, unthinkable humiliations.

The two pictures, violently opposed to each other and competing for the same mind, a mind that could only hold one of them, paralyzed his mind and sent streams of electricity into his body, creating a physical impact in his subsystems like he'd never before experienced.

The possibility of jail had always been a feature of his life, but his concept of self free, never having experienced the sliding of the doors behind him as he was forced into the cell, could never conjure up a solid enough picture to affect his behavior.

But here his niece wasn't holding a speculative rope around his neck. It wasn't a matter of her mother finding out about him telling her, or her accidentally telling somebody else. It wasn't a matter of things he could protect himself from once they happened.

It was a matter of do not pass go, go directly to jail. All his niece had to do was produce the pictures and a convincing story, and it was all over for him.

He couldn't get the horrible pictures out of his mind and the conflict was destroying his body. He had to get her assurance she wouldn't use the pictures, wouldn't testify against him.

He raised his head from his arms and looked at her, his eyes pleading.

She absent-mindedly scratched softly between her legs, working at one of the newly sprouted hairs that were causing her to itch, waiting for him to put what was in his eyes into words, enveloped in anticipation.

"Please don't." His voice cracked from the tension in his body, a virtual plea for relief from the agonies wreaking his body.

"Well, it's either you or your sister," Karen replied.

Your sister! The words stabbed through him. He loved his sister. He'd always relied on her. The thought of her being locked away in some Godforsaken dungeon flooded into his mind, conflicting with his concept of freedom.

The reaction was a whole new set of impacts, electrical jolts sent into his subsystems, causing his breathing to increase, his heart to race, his palms to turn sweaty.

Now instead of a horrible thought competing with his normal concept of self, his self-awareness of himself and the world, a single conflict paralyzing his mind and sending unwanted signals into his body, he had two horrible thoughts competing with each other to conflict with his ordinary thoughts.

No matter which one he chose, he was still going to end up with a paralyzed mind and a tormented body.

Karen watched his struggle with glee. It was like looking at a fish caught on two hooks, fighting against both, not knowing which one to work on because concentrating on one made the other sink in deeper, flopping around as a result, digging both deeper, injuring itself, slowly killing itself.

And, she thought, it took no physical effort whatsoever on her part. And the feeling was just as delicious.

"What will it be?" she asked her uncle quietly. "You or your sister?"

Her uncle seemed to come out of a trance. "But this is so foolish," he finally said. "You're destroying both our sources of income. Without your father to take the pictures and your mother to develop them, I'll have nothing to sell. We'll both starve."

The image of himself starving was so remote he used it for a moment to replace the two competing images, himself in jail, his sister in jail, him turning his back on his sister, three competing images now, all competing with his concept of himself free, in order to bring himself a little peace.

"I'll have something for you to sell. You'll never have to worry about starving as long as you do what I tell you to do and don't interfere with what I want to do."

The picture of him turning his back on his sister replaced the picture of himself in jail, and jail in general, pushing him closer to the source of relief he first felt when he thought of himself starving. One more stroke and he'd be over the top, if only she'd give it to him.

"A jury would never make an orphan out of me," Karen said. "They won't go too hard on her."

He wouldn't be turning his back on his sister after all. He'd be helping her.

The thought took him over the top. The tension evaporated. His body felt a rush of relief, of pleasure as his mind let it be, quit tormenting it with unwanted messages, returned to normal.

He lit a cigarette and leaned back in the chair, enjoying the smoke.

"What are you going to sell?"

"Don't you worry about that. When is Mother's grand jury hearing? You want to be prepared."

Her uncle convinced her mother he could get her off with a slap on the wrist, as he knew he could. The evening they came to take her to jail, Karen invited Gako over to celebrate. When she let him in her, she made him move very slowly and, thinking about her mother being put behind bars, had her first orgasm.

Making Gako withhold his own climax had taken a toll on him. When she tried to show him how to manipulate her, all he wanted to do was bury his head between her legs.

She sent him home and spent the rest of the night working on herself, thinking about how her mother must feel, sending herself into orgasm after orgasm after orgasm.

The thought made her body want what it couldn't get and Karen broke off the memory, with the vodka sweating out of her brow as the instrument panel blinked her approach for landing.

She took over the controls and let the reality of her situation sink in.

The Stratodart was gliding smoothly over the thinning forest. Long before she reached the vast gap in the earth left by abandoned mining, she could see the stunted growth that indicated the roots were trying to take sustenance out of copper rich soil.

She'd had The Art of the Lord buy up the mine and millions of acres around it when the price of copper sank during the last economic slowdown, and took it off the market. The loss of its production to the marketplace and the general cyclical nature of the marketplace would eventually increase the price of copper to the point her in-place ore would be worth a hundred, perhaps a thousand times, what The Art paid for it.

As she was The Art, that meant billions and billions of dollars she controlled and could use for her own delicious desires, desires that were becoming harder and harder to satisfy the more satisfaction she forced out of her body.

But the world was full of money and it was filled with people on whom she could vent her desires, a veritable farm of organisms, producing crop after crop of human tissue she could mine with the money for her own pleasure.

The vision of Rudolph Lang, wreaked with agony, forced her hand between her legs, making the wings of the Stratodart wobble ever so little. She'd tell Gako to send Lang the kid's little appendage wrapped in pink paper as the coup de'grâce. Prime Minister Bourgesie would never miss it and President Denjens could do without mangling it just this once.

Her hand returned to the vodka in time to glide the Stratodart into a smooth landing on the rough surface of the dirt runway.

She was met instantly by her transfer crew manning the small, long-range chopper she favored, waiting to take off.

She finished her vodka and, holding the neck of the bottle firmly in hand, climbed out of the control seat of the Stratodart and into the control seat of the chopper.

She was off in a flash, heading for the Art of the Lord's monastery resting on the top of the mountain facing the rock off the Gaspé Peninsula.

She took a long pull directly from the bottle, the hot liquid dissolving the warm glow of the lights on the control panel.

She'd awakened the day after her mother was imprisoned bright and cheerful. She had her uncle call in her absence at school so she could visit her mother in her new surroundings.

She was shocked to see them.

For one thing, there was no lock on the door. The prison was a converted mansion one of the city's founding elites had to donate in the face of ruinous taxes to the entity doing the taxing. Her mother's prison was one of the guest rooms in the mansion. The guest room was fitted out with a four-poster bed. It had its own writing table, throw rugs, and was connected to a bathroom with a bathtub, shower, and, from Karen's point of view, for heaven's sake, a bidet.

To top off the indignity, the meals were prepared in the kitchen and delivered to her mother in her room on a trey.

"Are you all right?" she asked her mother.

"As best as can be considered under the circumstances. This is just terrible. They didn't even change the linens."

Her mother had been contemplating her situation. She spent several weeks in mortal terror of just what was happening. She'd never been to prison. She'd only heard stories about it, none of them pleasant. Every time she tried to conjure up a picture of herself behind bars, the conflict it caused and the resulting physical damage, the sweating, increased heartbeat, shortness of breath, everything she ate tying her digestive system into twisting, painful knots, fire in the toilet, her mind recoiled at the thought.

The reaction itself caused her to almost black out.

She'd been desperate, stumbling through the days, hours, even minutes, seconds at a time.

Karen stayed right by her side the whole time, solicitous of her every complaint.

Now what was impossible to imagine had become a reality. She was in prison, she'd survived, and it wasn't nearly as bad as she'd expected.

Thank the good Lord she had a brother who was wise in the ways of the law. He'd get her out on bail and then this whole horrible mess would be behind her, a memory. She could face the loneliness of her life without her husband, start it anew.

Karen could see her mother was glad to see her. She knew her mother had finally come to her senses, realizing she didn't pull the trigger.

It made her feel good she was going through this ordeal to protect her daughter who had her whole life before her. She was in her mid-thirties, but her daughter was just coming of age and still had the precious years of growing up ahead of her. While it was unfortunate this budding life had to undergo the difficulties involved in the whole vile incident, it was extremely important she not be marred by the stigma of going through the ordeal of a trial and the resulting publicity.

"Did you get a good look at the pictures?" Karen asked.

"Oh, don't even think of that, child. It's too horrible to contemplate. Put it behind you."

Her mind was running smoothly. She had a clear picture of her situation, a day or two under these conditions, bad but not catastrophic, bail, a short trial, probation, home and family. She was using experience to create a picture of how it'd be once the restraints on her existence were removed. Because she wanted comfort in her surroundings, her mind picked and chose those elements of her memory she wanted to recall and furnished her imagined future existence with.

"Did they look like father's work?" Karen asked.

"He wasn't himself. He was doing a horrible thing."

She may have indirectly caused her husband's death, her arguments against him may have driven her daughter to shoot him, she may have to protect her daughter at all costs, but the argument was valid. She'd railed against him for good reason. He'd molested her daughter. She couldn't allow that to happen. She'd seen the result of molestation too often to let it happen to her daughter. No daughter of hers was going to be molested, and especially not by her husband. It was unthinkable. It was terrible.

But he did take the pictures. That was the evidence that justified the argument that led to his death.

If he hadn't taken the pictures, the argument was unjust and she was directly responsible for his death.

Was it possible he didn't take the pictures?

Her mind raced, trying to recall the pictures frame by frame as she'd seen them materialize in the developing treys. She could remember thinking the boy was pretty, at least prettier than a boy usually is, but with thin features, birdlike, almost pinched.

And then she'd focused on the straight, fine black hair and, looking closer, realized the body was much too slight to be a boy.

She realized it was a girl and, looking back at the contorted face, that it was her daughter.

But, her mind leaped, the film had been placed where her husband always placed the film, so the pictures had to be taken by him.

She re-examined the frames in her memory once again. The subject, her daughter, was slightly off center. Her husband, she thought with a sinking feeling, would never pose a subject off center. He was too much of an artist.

She'd altered her concept of self to accommodate her situation in prison. In doing so, she'd justified her part in the shooting based on her husband's transgression, momentary though it may have been, a transgression nonetheless. Her picture of herself eventually free on probation had been built on this picture, her taking the blame for her daughter, both living happily ever after.

The thought her husband hadn't taken the pictures conflicted with the picture she'd built up.

It paralyzed her mind, sending streams of unwanted stress straight into her stomach, creating the physical situation she'd faced before being imprisoned, a feeling she'd put behind her.

"I . . ." she started, but let her voice trail off.

Karen stood looking at her mother, a slight smile on her face.

She could see the hook go in, see her mother bite, see the hook catch, see her start to flop uncontrollably on the end of her line.

"I have to go," she said brightly, holding the line high, knowing her mother would start beating her own body to death on the walls of the more restricted prison she'd created for her. She wanted to get home and get to work on her own body again to draw forth the pleasure she'd so recently found it held. She was decidedly unhappy because she had work to do that couldn't wait.

But it was work her mother had caused and she knew the rage she'd build up from her mother keeping her from her pleasure would increase her pleasure once she was able to take it. Pleasure delayed was both the pleasure of anticipation and an increased pleasure once it was obtained.

So putting off working on herself wouldn't be such a chore after all. She summoned Gako out of school, telling him to meet her at her house.

On the way home, she bought a paper to get the likeness of the Commander General, who was always on the front page. While she was waiting for Gako, she took out a sketchpad and tried to duplicate the Commander General. It wasn't easy because she was making a prick for his nose, balls for his eyes, and for his mouth, or at least where his mouth should've been, she drew an ass hole with another big prick sticking in it.

When Gako arrived, she asked him who the likeness was.

"I dunno. Don't have the foggiest."

Karen lips tightened in impatience. "It's supposed to be the Commander General."

"Put seven stars on his head," Gako suggested. "That'll identify him.

Karen drew the stars.

"There," Gako said, "looks just like him. What's it for?"

Karen wrote in big bold letters below the picture: Free Carenson From the Pig Prick!

"Now," she told Gako, "I want you to have about a hundred thousand of these made. Take the money out of petty cash. Hire a bunch of the kids from the street and have them post them on every corner of the city. Put four, five, a hundred on every block. I want the city walls papered with them.

Gako accomplished the task before the day was out.

"It didn't go well," her uncle said, sitting heavily behind his desk.

"The bail hearing?" Karen asked.

"It didn't go well," he repeated. "Not well at all. Your Mother was denied bail. She's being held over for trial. I don't know what happened. Things were going so well."

"I'll go visit her."

"I don't think you should," her uncle replied.

"Why not?"

"They've taken her out of the detention home and put her in the city jail. It's not pleasant. That's the Commander General's old billet. I hear unpleasant things happen there."

"Like what?" Karen, insistent as ever, asked.

"Oh, you know, horrible things."

"Well, I still think I ought to go see her. Will you arrange a visit?"

"Of course."

"Do you think you'll be able to get her out?"

"I hope so."

He looked broken. She could hear his stomach working. She left him secure in the knowledge his thoughts wouldn't be conducive to physical comfort.

The visiting time was arranged for five the following day.

At four, she called the Commander General's private number.

"Please?" the voice on the other end of the phone responded.

"I want to talk to the Commander General," Karen said into the receiver.

"This is he. Who is this?"

"Karen Carenson."

She waited out the silence on the receiver.

"Oh, certainly. My friend's little girl. I've arranged for you to visit your Mother. What else can I do for you? He was a fine man, your Father. Your Mother, too. I don't know what happened. It's all so horrible. Do you need anything?"

"I'd like to meet you at the prison when I visit."

"Please? But that would be impossible. I'm a busy man."

"Are you too busy to meet the killer of little Jimmy?"

"Please? You're going to have the killer of little Jimmy in jail today?"

"In a manner of speaking," Karen said.

"The killing of little Jimmy, there're a lot of details, a lot of rumor, stories about what, ah, specifically happened to him. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

"He was in pretty bad shape."

"Is this a little girl I'm talking to?"

"This is Karen Carenson. We have some business to discuss."

"Well, about little Jimmy's murder, please, there're certain things, details, that never got into the rumors or stories, things we withheld so we could keep people from confessing to that, ah, rather artful death falsely. Do you know what I mean? This is Karen Carenson, isn't it, yes, I see that it is. I just found your number and it matches the one you're calling from.

"So do you know what I mean about these, ah, details we've withheld?"

"What details do you want to talk about?" Karen asked.

"Well, the boy's hands for instance. Can you tell me anything about the fingers?"

"Sure. They weren't broken. The joints had all been separated without breaking the bones."

"Ah, yes. That's exactly right. That's an extremely difficult thing to do, but extremely painful. Very desirable. We've been trying to duplicate it in the laboratory without success. Knowing how to do that would be wonderful. You say you'll have this artist at the city jail this afternoon?"

"Will you be there?"

"I wouldn't miss it. I think, young Miss Carenson, we're going to have a profitable relationship together. See you at five."

"Five fifteen," Karen responded. "I have to see my Mother first."

The city jail stretched over four full city blocks. It was so large the mind simply couldn't comprehend it. There was no one place where a person could step back and get a perspective of the whole. Pictures from the air showed a nondescript series of buildings not unlike its neighbors, its identifying walls invisible to all but the most discerning eye.

The entrances were nondescript, with most of the traffic in prisoners being conducted by means of delivery trucks bearing pictures of Champaign bottles with their corks popping and fizz spurting. The back of each truck was divided into two by four by four-foot pens into which prisoners were stuffed for transport.

A prominent guardhouse was located at one of the entrances. A large wooden door protected it with huge knockers. The door was never opened, a symbol of the fact the public had no control over who entered or left the premises. People with appointments, however, could walk through a truck entrance by the guardhouse without a problem. The lieutenants in the guardhouse would wave visitors, once identified as authorized, through. If they weren't identified as authorized, they would be waved through anyway. However, they would leave, if at all, in one of the Champaign trucks.

Karen was expected and waived right through, a young sergeant emerging to escort her to her mother's quarters.

This was more like it, she thought, as she walked behind the uniform clad youth. The corridor was dark with bare electric bulbs spaced just far enough apart to eliminate shadows. Every four feet there was an iron door with a slit in the bottom for sliding food through.

"We don't get many visitors to this part of the prison. We usually deliver them to the visiting room. You must know someone," the sergeant commented.

"I wanted to visit my Mother in her cell to be sure everything was okay."

"Okay?" the sergeant snorted. "Nothing is okay in these cells. Day is night and night is day. The prisoners have to sleep in their own shit and the slop we feed them is designed to make them shit a lot. Hell, we don't even bother collecting it for the punishment tank, the stuff is so watery. Okay? I don't think you're going to find anything okay. The only benefit these people have is they haven't been put through the regimen yet."

"Regimen? What's that?" Karen asked.

"They aren't in the process. We aren't interrogating them."

"Why not?"

"Too many people in front of them. We'll get around to them, if they're still alive, that is. Here it is."

He stopped in front of a door just like all the other doors. The Sergeant took out a key and turned it in the lock. The door swung open. Karen spotted her mother huddled on the floor in a corner, her knees drawn up to her chest, her face buried between them.

"Hi, Mother," she said. The sergeant started to close the door behind her, but she signaled not to. "I won't be but a second," she told him. "I brought you something, Mother."

Her mother looked up at her, eyes past pleading, misery etched into what only days before had been a young, beautiful face. Karen could imagine the indignities, the brutalities she'd been forced to endure, but she wanted to save that for later when she was in the privacy of her own hands. For now, she held out a small brown wrapper with a piece of candy in it.

"I brought you your favorite."

"Oh?"

Her mother's eyes brightened.

"It's a chocolate covered cherry, Mother," Karen said. "It's your favorite."

"Oh, you wonderful child." She took the piece of candy and set it on the floor in front of her.

"Mother, go ahead and eat it."

"No, I want to save it. I want to think about what it will be like to eat it."

"No, Mother. You go ahead and eat it now. I won't leave until you do, and you wouldn't want me in surroundings like this, would you?"

"When's your uncle going to get me out of here?"

"He's not, Mother."

"But I shouldn't be in here?"

"I know that, Mother."

Her mother was getting to her feet, her voice rising.

"I shouldn't be in here. It's unjust. It's unfair."

Tears were streaming down her cheeks.

"You can't imagine what it's like encased in stone, living in a tomb, a living dead person."

She stumbled toward Karen, reaching for her, her fingers outstretched, grasping.

Karen stepped back and motioned to the guard who floored her mother with a single blow.

Karen knelt down, picked up the chocolate covered cherry, unwrapped it being careful to put the wrapper on the cell floor, and popped it into her mother's sobbing mouth. Her mouth automatically started to chew on it between sobs. Karen stepped back through the door as the sergeant slammed it shut, turning the key in the lock.

"That was a pretty neat thing to do," he said. "We have it a little more refined, though."

"How's that?" Karen asked.

"We bring them in these little cages, you know."

Karen didn't, but she nodded her head.

"We'll leave them in the truck overnight. They're cramped up so bad by the next morning, their muscles have all knotted and they're in agony, thirsty and half starved. It's really a sight to get them out of their little cages in the truck. Takes four of five guards to get eight of them moving. You can imagine the jokes.

"Anyway, we separate out any we want to play with and stick the others in narrow boxes about four inches too short for them so they have to stoop to stand but still can't sit. We leave them there for a day or so, then feed them the juiciest piece of steak they've ever tasted and leave them in there with nothing else for a week.

"I've talked to some who've been through the regimen and are ready to get out. They've been beaten, raped, dumped face first in shit, shocked, you name it, and they say the time in the box thinking about the taste of that piece of steak, preying for just one more bite, was the worst time of their stay here.

"A cherry filled chocolate. You're a real artist," he finished, delivering Karen to the reception area of the prison's administrative offices.

Karen smiled and turned to face the Commander General. He was standing at the center of the reception area, lounging against a filing cabinet, talking to a pretty brunette secretary. The only other person in the room was a man dressed in white pants and shirt, wearing tennis shoes. They all looked freshly laundered. He looked like he was waiting for the secretary to finish up some paperwork.

"Please," the Commander General said, indicating a large office behind the secretary's desk.

Karen walked up to the Commander General and held out her hand. The Commander General ignored it, putting his arm around her slight shoulders and guiding her into the office.

His desk dominated the room, which was bare except for several throw rugs, a few easy chairs, a number of straight-backed chairs, and two spring frames without mattresses.

"So, you didn't bring the killer of little Jimmy with you. I'm very disappointed. I was so looking forward to meeting him."

"You just did," Karen replied.

"You? But how delightful. Please. Tell me again what was unusual about the hands of poor little Jimmy."

"I used a little technique I developed for some of my more useful employees. When they get out of line, I want to teach them a lesson, but I don't want to keep them from performing their duties. I just separate the joints on their fingers and leave them that way until I need them. When I do, I just get somebody to put their joints back in place.

"I like it because it causes extreme pain without doing any permanent damage, at least not to the fingers."

"But that's just what we need. We've all sorts of people we want to be presentable, please, so they don't look like they've been having any problems. We don't want them showing the deformity that results from breaking fingers. So we learn how you do it and then we pop them out, and put them back when we want. Meanwhile, ouch."

"Do you have some fingers I can work with?"

The Commander General looked around the room and then remembered the secretary in the outer office. He pushed the intercom. "Honey, is the release still out their?"

"Dan?"

"Ask him to come in, please."

"Just a moment."

A few seconds passed before the door opened. The man in the freshly laundered white outfit came in slowly, carefully, looking at the Commander General without really looking at him, trying to get a clue what was expected of him.

"This is Dan," he said to Karen. "He's been through our little program and he's ready for release to the public. We were just finishing up your release papers, weren't we, Dan? I don't get here very often anymore, Karen, but when I do, I like to go through a little ceremony if I have the time.

"But, before we have the ceremony, Dan, I wonder if you could help us with a little experiment. Karen wants to show me how to do something. I just need to use your fingers for a second." He turned to Karen.

"Karen?"

"I'll need an unsharpened pencil."

"No problem." He made the request through the intercom, and the secretary brought in a pencil.

"We'll have to set up something so Dan doesn't hurt himself when I show you how to do it." She looked around the room, spotting the hard-backed chairs which had horizontal slots in their backs. "Do you have a set of handcuffs?"

"Always," the Commander General replied, opening a drawer in the desk, removing a pair, and sliding them across the desk to Karen.

"Dan?"

"Yes, young miss?"

"Could you bring two of those straight backed chairs over here? No, just the ones with the horizontal slots. Right. Just over here next to the desk. No. With their backs up against the desk. That's fine. Now slip your hands through the backs, one through the one on the left, the other through the one on the right. That's great. You're doing fine. Sure, that's it, just get on your knees on the chairs. Get comfortable."

She went over beside him and jumped up on the desk, sitting so she was to the side of Dan but facing him.

She took the cuffs and placed them around his wrists. "Push on the chairs all you want Dan." She motioned the Commander General over. "He won't want to pull the chairs away from the desk. Now watch closely how I do this."

She took Dan's hand closest to the Commander General and threaded the pencil through his fingers.

"See?"

The Commander General looked closely and shook his head. "Yes."

"The beauty of this is, it takes very little effort on your part. You don't have to do much work to get excellent results."

She moved her fingers slightly, putting pressure on both Dan's fingers and the pencil.

The reaction was immediate. Dan's feet shot out from behind him, hitting the floor running. The howl started low in his throat, reaching a cry of agony almost immediately. He turned his body this way and that, yelping, groaning, screaming, crying.

"Notice," Karen pointed to the hand she held loosely in her own, "he'll flop all over the place, but he won't do anything to move that hand because that's where his pain is. Now I just . . ."

The scream of agony became a sob as Dan's finger popped, a stain appearing on the front of his pants.

"Don't worry about it," the Commander General told Karen, "we keep a mop and bucket around for that very purpose. Dan can clean up after we're finished with him. Let me see the finger."

Karen held it up, moving the top half independent of the bottom half, Dan screaming, "please don't" with each movement.

"You try one," she said, handing the Commander General the pencil.

"No. No. I don't want to mess it up. I don't want to try it until I'm sure I know what I'm doing. Do it to his little finger. That's really sensitive."

Karen rethreaded the pencil.

"Please, no," Dan sobbed as he watched the pencil being threaded and Karen's fingers tighten over his own.

His feet hit the floor running again but this time he bit into his arm, drawing blood.

Karen held up the separated finger for the Commander General's inspection.

He took both separated fingers and jiggled them, causing Dan's legs to splay, his pain dragging the cuffs tight against the backs of both chairs.

"Please, Dan, stand up. We need a little cooperation here," the Commander General ordered.

Dan, his legs shaking, was able to crawl back up on the chairs. His knees were so unsteady, the chairs were constantly moving under him.

The Commander General opened the intercom and asked his secretary to come in.

"Dan's a little shaky," he told her. "We need to brace the chairs with something?"

He spied the bedsprings. "I used those when I had some paperwork to do," he said to Karen. "I'd have some fresh meat brought in, plug her wherever I wanted for a while, then sandwich her between the bedsprings. I'd wet her down, then put the electrical input on the springs at low level, you have to tailor it individually, so you turn the dial till you get the maximum effect that'll get her squirming, making the springs sing their song. The electricity would go through her a thousand different ways and I'd sit here and do my paperwork until the springs stopped singing. Then I'd go over and dump some more water on her to revive her and enhance the flow of electricity and get back to work to the music of the springs. The cries and moans didn't hurt either. It was a delightful way to get out of the boredom of paperwork." He turned to the secretary. "Slide one over and push it under Dan's ankles against the legs of the two chairs.

"Just hold it there for a minute while I get the hang of this thing."

He took the pencil from Karen and threaded it through one of the fingers on Dan's untouched hand. "Stay still now," he cautioned Dan. "Please?" He looked at Karen.

"You've got the thread reversed. You'll break his finger that way."

The Commander General rethreaded the pencil. "Like so?"

Karen nodded, taking his hands and placing them in the proper position over Dan's fingers. "There," she said. "go ahead."

The Commander General tightened his fingers ever so slightly and Dan's feet exploded backward once again, this time catching in the bedsprings. It was push and tug for a while, but the secretary was able to get them stabilized against the chairs.

"This is fantastic," the Commander General exclaimed. He threaded the pencil around another finger, looking to Karen for guidance, and when Karen gave her approval, separated the two bones at the joint.

Once he got going, it was pop, pop, pop, and he was through the remaining twenty-five joints on Dan's hands. Dan was past pain, blubbering gibberish, his legs randomly shooting this way and that in reaction to whatever was happening to his fingers.

"I always had a problem with that," Karen observed.

"Please, what's that?" the Commander General asked.

"How you can do it all at once. I usually have to wait awhile until they settle down. I can only do two or three at a time."

"It's not the application that's important, dear Karen. It's the result, the pain he's in after the application. I could put Dan here in a cell for a week and he'd never be without pain, never catch a wink of sleep."

He turned to his secretary. "Take Dan out and have somebody put his fingers back together, will you?"

Karen noted Dan's willing behavior. "So what happens when he gets out on the street?"

"Dan? He's not going anywhere now. I thought he did a wonderful job. He'll make a good subject for the training classes on this. He really reacts. The students will love him."

"You mean you're going to keep disjointing his fingers and re-jointing them." The idea intrigued Karen.

"By the time they're finished with him, they'll probably be working on his toes and everything else that's moveable. You know how students are. Always curious, always experimenting."

"Well, what'd happen if he did go back out into society?"

"Nothing."

"He wouldn't tell people what happened to him?"

"He may, he may not. I doubt he would. He was so grateful to be getting out, he was ready to kiss my hand. Of course, now that he's not going anywhere, he'll be wanting to kiss my ass."

"I've noticed people don't seem to comprehend what can happen to them before it happens."

"I can tell you stories," the Commander General said, getting a bottle of vodka out of his desk drawer. "You're a comrade, a member of the clan, want a slug of this stuff? Never too young to start."

"I've never gotten around to drinking. I'm still underage."

"Underage my ass. Here, I'll put a little juice in it for you. Now where was I? Oh, yes. What happens when somebody finds out about what goes on in here.

"I'll tell you a story about a little girl my men brought in on a routine roundup.

"You see, these people all deal with each other. You wouldn't expect them to deal with somebody like me. They're educated, they think they can change the world. We get one, we start working on them to get the names of all their friends. It's as simple as that. Once we get the names of their friends, we round up their friends and start getting the names of their friends.

"Please. It's like following up a syphilis case, one fuck leads to another, eh?

"So anyway, they drag this girl in and she's a real spitfire, cursing and calling everybody names. My two lieutenants were in the guardhouse at the entrance at the time and they decided to settle her down there and then instead of processing her into the system.

"Well, when they got her stripped down and ready to go to work on, they were astounded at what her shapeless dress had been hiding. She was a knockout, the thing of dreams.

"So for sure they weren't going to lay a finger on her without me having first turn down. I was the Commander of the place in those days and there were standing orders I got first dibs on any good stuff that came through the door.

"So Mo and Joe, that's what I called them, they give me a call and I come down and take one look and say to myself, please, there's no way I ain't going to sink my meat in this stuff. It was too picture perfect.

"So I tell my lieutenants to grab her by the arms, bring her to the guardhouse which was more convenient than my office and throw her face up on the desk so I can have a go at her. I have it out and I'm going between her legs and she's kicking and bucking and twisting something fierce.

"Mo and Joe could barely hold her down and I was having a hell of a time sinking my put, so to speak.

"Now, you know what to do with a bitch that gives you that much trouble, please? Well maybe you don't, but I don't like to do it cold like that without loosening it up a little because it hurts the end of my prick, but a man's got to do what a man's got to do and we had to settle her down so I had them torn her over on her stomach so I could give her a good butt fuck. On her stomach, she got no way to fight you face to face, so they got her spread eagled on the desk and I just looked at that ass in marvel, I mean it was a piece of work.

"I couldn't resist, so I take my belt off and start to redden up the meat a bit. Shit, she was screaming, but sometimes that makes them wet down there and you can use that to moisten the hole so it don't hurt you so much, and it did work a little, but I could tell she'd no idea I was going to plug her in the butt, so when I jammed it in, her head went straight up and her curses turned to the worst scream I ever heard in my life, and believe me, I've heard millions.

"That, of course, was music to my ears and as I rammed it back and forth in her ass, the blood started to make it slippery and it really started to feel good, I'm really liking it, this one was turning out to be a real find. Joe and Mo were urging me on, telling me to hurry so they could have their turn, but the blood is making it so slippery I'm getting a good long go at it and finally Mo, who's hot all the time anyhow, lets go of her arm and reaches around to hold her down by one tit, I mean that's how big they were, he just wrapped his hand around it and pinned her down, and then he takes his prick out and starts working on himself, and that gets me going and I'm pumping harder and harder, her screams are interrupted by grunts each time I thrust it home and her left hand, the one Mo let go is reaching back flailing at me at her backside, so I reach around and grab her other nipple between my thumb and finger nails and start to rip it off, and this gets me really up, and I'm just about to put a load in her that'll take her an hour to shit out when wham!"

The Commander General paused to take a breath. Karen was listening, entranced, one hand between her legs, the other holding the vodka and juice she was absent-mindedly sipping.

"Those damn knockers on the wooden door go bang, bang, bang. Now I ran this place for ten years before that, and I never heard those damn knockers bang. I mean, please, who the shit would be stupid enough. And I've never heard them since. So the only time I ever hear the damn things, I got my pecker up this absolutely beautiful ass and I'm just about to shoot my wad. Shit. That's the worst thing that can happen to a man, to be interrupted in the middle of a good fuck, and especially if the good fuck is just about to come to a good end.

"So I slam it hard a couple more times, real fast to see if I could get it off, but just as I was about to come again, wham, wham, wham all over and this guy's shouting, open up the door you fucks, I want my sister back, open up and let her go or I'll kill you, you bastards, and wham, wham, wham, he goes on and on.

"Please, how's a man to get his pleasure with that sort of shit going on, so I take the girl by the hair and slam her face on the desk to stun her and I go open the little side door and tell the shithead to come on in, please, I say, real polite.

"And he's more stunned than anything else, I don't think he expected to see the damn door opened, so I take him by the arm and pull him in, I hadn't even zipped up my pants for crying out loud, and I pull him in the room and he sees his sister lying face down on the desk, moaning, blood trickling out of her ass, and he blinks and starts to open his mouth and I cuff him behind the back of the head.

"He goes down like a bag of cement. Please, I motion to Mo and Joe, and they come over and strip him down and cuff him and hang him over a peg on the wall so he could watch us playing with his sister.

"Mo, who's still anxious to get his dong in her anywhere he can, is pouring water on her to revive her, get her vocal chords functioning. She comes to, looking around, wondering what the fuck is going on, wondering why she is sobbing, so I tell them to turn her over and I'll have a go at her from the front.

"They did, and I was pushing it up her before she realized where she was and what I was doing and shit, that really hurt because I hadn't expected her to be a virgin, if I'd known that, I'd have taken her off, drugged her, and taken my sweet time about it, but you know, you never can tell, and what's done is done, so I grit my teeth against the pain and clear the way. Just as well, too, because there was more blood and it was more slippery and I could shove it to her longer and I was laughing my ass off because Mo was trying to stick it in her mouth at the same time and we hadn't even pulled her teeth yet. He wedged a pencil in there to keep it open.

"When I finally came, I thought it was going to blow her head off. It was wonderful knowing she'd never had a fuck like I'd just given her. She'd have to look a long time for a man to pleasure her like that.

"So, anyway, I'm whacking it to get the last ounce of pleasure when I see her brother hanging there with his eyes shut tight.

"I can't have that, I thought, so I get myself together and start rummaging through the desk. Mo finally got his turn and was pumping away in her while Joe was sticking it in her mouth with the stupid pencil still there and they're both getting a good go and she's just lying there between them, sort of flopping around, moaning and groaning, just loving it, and I'm getting frustrated because I can't find what I'm looking for and then I remember Joe always carried a pen knife he cuts apples with, so I stick my hand in his pocket and come up with it.

"I open it up to see if it's sharp enough, and it is, so I go over to the bitch's brother, pull out one of his eyelids and slice it off. His other eye pops open in surprise and I slice the eyelid off that one too. That'll teach the fuck to shut his eyes, I said, turning to see how Mo and Joe were doing, getting a little hot again myself.

"Mo was just finishing up down below, so Joe took his turn there. I went over and grabbed her face in my hand and took the pencil out. Please, we have jawbreakers. We put them in and slowly screw the jaw down until it breaks off its hinges. They're just the ticket when you want a little throat action. I placed one in her mouth so she couldn't bite me. I shoved several fingers down her throat to see how it'd feel and that got me going the rest of the way so I stuck it in and started to pump it all the way down her throat. Once I got it going, I looked over at her brother who couldn't do anything but look and damn if he wasn't getting a hard on.

"Nothing he could do about it, in his position, though, but the sight got me off before I knew it.

"Joe was finishing up and Mo was hard again and he said he wanted it in her ass so he sat on the edge of the desk, and we lowered her onto him. She's getting kind of listless by this time, but he leaned back, pulled her down on him with her back to his stomach and started to butt plug away, and she sort of grunted with each thrust with sobs in between.

"I went over and took her brother's hard on and twisted it almost one full turn.

"'Don't,' the fuck screeched. Shit, talk about dumb. He had no idea what was about to come his way. He just stared out at me from those lidless eyes, tears mixing with the blood, begging and pleading. It was making me hot again, but Mo hadn't finished with the girl yet so I took his balls in my hand and slowly started to squeeze them.

"If you've never seen what a man hung on a peg can do when you squeeze his ball, give it a try sometime. Boy, his knees came up, his head went down between his arms, he started vomiting on himself.

"Shit, I thought, well, please, his sister can clean it up, but I'm really getting hot again so I see Mo is finishing up and I go over and stick it up her ass and finish what I started in the first place.

"We're all getting a little tired, so I had them go and get some wine and booze and we had a little party, the guy hanging there looking around with his lidless eyes, the girl lying naked and bloody on the desk sobbing.

"We started to discuss who would get to do what to the guy, and how.

"The more we talked, the more frightened the guy becomes. When I described what I was going to do with his dick, the guy shit all over the floor. Served him right, the shit. How dare he interrupt me when I'm doing my job.

"We finished eating and I went over and told the girl I wanted her to be attentive and watch us, watch what we did to her brother.

"She shook her head, tears streaming down her cheeks.

"I screwed the jawbreaker open so wide, her tears became spurts. I asked her if she could see what I'd done to her brother's eyes. She looked more closely and sobbed in surprise. I took his eyelids out of my pocket and held them in my palm in front of her. 'I'll cut yours off, too, if I catch you looking anywhere but at your brother, you understand?' I said.

"She didn't shake her head so I took one of her eyelids, pulled it out, and stuck the tip of the knife through it.

"She caught on fast.

"Well, it took the rest of the afternoon to finish off her brother, with her sobbing all the time, but damn well looking all the time too. Anytime the work would make us hot, we'd stick it in her anywhere we had the urge to. We turned her into a sperm cushion. She had the stuff oozing from her pours.

"By quitting time, the boy lay in pieces on the floor underneath what remained of his body. He was barely alive.

"I gave the girl the knife and told her to finish him off.

"She cried, she pleaded, she said she couldn't kill her own brother even if it'd be an act of mercy. I grabbed her by a tit and told her to watch. She was very obedient by this time and she looked down at where I was pointing the knife.

"I squeezed the tit as tight as I could so the nipple looked like it was going to pop off and I cut halfway through it so it was hanging off.

"'Kill your brother,' I told her, 'or this is just the beginning for you.' I took the nipple between my fingers and moved it back and forth like a flap.

"She cried some more so I took her other breast and started to do the same thing, but she said she'd do it, she'd do it.

"But she didn't do it right away so I reached down and grabbed her by her cunt, thumb in the front, three fingers shoved up her asshole, and dragged her over. I started shaking her, half lifting her off the ground, until she finally started flailing away at her brother with the knife.

"It was only a little blade and he had difficulty dying and she started saying over and over through her own pain, die, die, die, you bastard, die.

"She didn't know he was dead as soon as his bladder let go, so I let her stick him a while longer, then I bent her over the table and butt fucked her again.

"Death does that to me.

"Mo and Joe were anxious to get home to their wife and kids and it was a single shift coming on, so I told the guy, I can't remember his name, to have the bitch clean up her mess.

"I did her a favor, please, and got her a plastic bag to put the pieces of her brother in, but the girl just looked at the bag.

"I realized she was worried his torso wouldn't fit in the bag so I threw her the saw we'd used when we were working on his backbone and told her to saw him into pieces small enough to fit into the bag.

"She whimpered a little but took the saw and started to listlessly saw away.

"'If you don't have that done in an hour,' I told her, 'I take the shit and put it in the garbage. You're fucking brother will die without a grave.'

"Boy, she started to saw away like he was a steer just slaughtered for a bunch of hungry conventioneers."

"Having something to put in a grave motivated her to cut her brother apart?" Karen asked, still entranced.

"Please, dear Karen, I haven't finished yet. It was pretty late, so I told her she'd end up just like her brother is she didn't get him hacked up and the mess she'd made cleaned up.

"I went out for dinner and a little dancing and came back three hours later. She had everything in a bag and the floor cleaned up good.

"She hadn't been in our care for twelve hours and you can see what good results we get.

"I told her to go clean herself up and find a dress from all the clothes we take from the bitches we bring in and get herself pretty for me.

"I then told what's his name to call her parents to pick up the bag at seven sharp the next morning.

"He wanted to know what he could do to her during the night. I told him anything he wanted to as long as she could stand up and be presentable when she gave the bag to her parents."

Karen held out her glass for some more vodka and juice.

The Commander General refilled her glass, favoring the vodka over the juice.

"I came in the next morning for the presentation and the mother was so grateful, she kissed my hand.

"She still does," he concluded.

"What happened to the girl?" Karen asked.

"We put her through the system, the regimen, and she came out just fine. She sells oranges down at the town gate. She's no spirit, no mind."

"But what do the people around her say? I mean, she can still talk, can't she?"

"Karen, you have to realize these people don't have anything to talk about anymore. Do you think a girl wants to remember looking at her nipple being sliced off? Do you think she wants to remember looking while a glass rod was shoved up her brother's dick and shattered into a million pieces?

"People don't want to face the unpleasant. People will rationalize the unpleasant into cotton candy floating on a sea of self-satisfaction. People refuse to believe the violence I can inflict on their bodies and minds simply because they don't want to believe it.

"Why do we want a world that's any different?

"What gives me pleasure gives the world pleasure and I want to give all the pleasure I can."

"So the boy's mother actually thanked you?" Karen was still having trouble digesting gratitude for being tortured and killed.

"Thanks me. As does the girl every chance she gets. Let me show you how we operate here. You're an artist. We're only clods. You've somehow mixed the ability to act, cause pain, with the ability to create a picture of somebody in agony and come up with a way to make it happen.

"If I hadn't seen Jimmy's mutilated body for myself, I would never have believed it possible. Such pain! We have to carry on the tradition. You're marvelous, my child. If you weren't underage, I'd give you a big kiss."

"So what exactly is this regimen?"

The Commander General told his secretary to go out and get the day's schedule.

While he was waiting, he went over to his intercom and pushed a button.

The room was immediately filled with screams and cries, voices pleading, begging, just plain delirious, the sounds of humanity slowly being chewed up in a garbage disposal.

"This is our little in-house music system," he told Karen. "We pipe this into the people in process about a week before they start going through the system just to get them juiced up.

"By the time we stick electrodes in their asses and cunts, on their nipples, pricks, ears, tongues, whatever, they're scared so shitless, they don't have any shit to mess up the equipment."

The secretary brought him a list, pages long, three rows of names printed single-spaced. The Commander General threw it on the desk in disgust.

"There're so many these days, it's just not worth it. There's no fun if there isn't something personal involved.

"Oh, well, I can still give you the tour."

He made sure her vodka was refreshed, motioned to a door at the back of the office, and gently guided Karen ahead of him.

It was padded with leather, soundproofed, and as he opened it, she heard the cries of agony directly instead of over the speaker system.

It was thrilling, like seeing someone nude for the first time. The feeling of pleasure took her breath away. She absent-mindedly pulled on her left nipple, wishing there was something more there than her breastbone.

"The first thing we do is inspect them and decide who gets to rape who. We have to do that up front because after they're here a few days, not even a donkey would want to touch them."

"What about the men?" Karen asked.

"Oh, they're favorites. Getting it up the ass the first time is, well, please. If they like that sort of thing, of course, we've women who can turn them into whimpering idiots.

"It's like young stuff, it gets old fast, so you want to use it fast."

He indicated the doors to a series of interrogation rooms. "We get a lot of good reactive sounds from the rapes. They still have the ability to form words, so their screams are combined with curses and pleading. It makes good listening."

He opened a door and Karen saw a boy bent over a horizontal rod, hands handcuffed to his legs. A huge interrogator was in front of him, holding his head up by the hair, methodically shoving his penis back and forth in the man's mouth.

"This part is just to break them in and give our interrogators a little incentive. If they call them names, it gets them pissed off and they get a special interest in creating pain. This is work, you know."

They watched as the guy slammed his prick into the boy's mouth several more times, and when the boy started throwing up, he moved behind him and started shoving it up his ass.

"Watch, I like this part," the Commander General said.

The interrogator pumped the guy in the butt several times so hard the metal rod he was bent over swayed in its stand. He then pulled it out, inspected it, saw it was covered with shit and blood and went back around and held it in front of the guy, who had his eyes shut tight.

"Look, you fuck, or I'll stick a broom stick so far up your ass, it'll come out your nose."

The guy still kept his eyes shut. The guard reached under and grabbed the guy's dick. The guy opened his eyes quickly. He saw the prick in front of his nose, dripping with blood and shit, and threw up on it. The guard cupped as much of it as he could in the hand he was holding his prick with and when the guy started to dry heave, shoved the whole mess back deep into his throat.

The Commander General laughed.

"Creative, isn't he? This helps our charges a lot because if our people are sexually satisfied, they tend to be kinder. We always have a problem with damaging people physically. That's all we need is some asshole from The Representative World Government coming in here on an inspection tour and giving us shit."

"Do you rape them all?" Karen asked.

"Well, some aren't worth it. But most of the people we bring in are young, so there's usually someone on the staff willing to give them a go.

"It's just a formality, really, a way for the staff to let off steam.

"The serious stuff starts after the play ends."

He motioned her on. They came to a door opening onto a large room done in tile, the floor slanted to the center with a drain in the middle. A man was hung in the center and three interrogators were systematically beating him with clubs and rubber truncheons. Several more nude figures were sitting on the floor to the side waiting their turn.

"This is punishment work for our guys. If they step out of line, we give them a couple of weeks shift on this work. You sit there and pound on something all day long, it makes you think there are better things to do."

They watched as the man was unstrung and dropped to the floor. The interrogators kicked him until he crawled over to the opposite wall. One whistled at another figure sitting waiting in the group. The figure's head shook. The interrogator went over and took him by the hair, dragging him to the center of the room. A few well-placed kicks persuaded the man to hold his hands up so he could be strung over the hook hanging down over the drain. Several interrogators began slamming him on the back of his legs and in his kidneys before he was even settled in.

"We do piece work now," the Commander General said. "There was a time when we could afford to tarry over someone, but there're so many coming through, it's really quite a chore."

He shut the door and moved Karen down the corridor.

"You'll like the next one. It takes a lot of finesse."

He opened the door to a small, well-lit room with a stone slab in the middle. A girl was spread eagled, her hands tied to the four corners of the slab. Five interrogators were seated around her, touching various parts of her body with electrical wires attached to a machine. One kept changing the dials, altering the intensity of the charges, the other four divided in pairs.

Every time the wires touched, the girl's body arched in a spasm of agony. The men sat around her in a circle, pinching her where they thought a jolt would get a reaction, laughing when it did, cursing her when it didn't, always examining her closely as the electricity had its effect.

Karen watched, fascinated, until the electricity had no more effect, the girl having become insensitive to the pain.

"Isn't that counterproductive?" she asked the Commander General. "I mean, the whole purpose is to keep her awake and sensitive to what you're doing to her. What type of information are you trying to get out of her anyway? She can't even talk anymore."

The interrogators began to unstrap the girl when she came to and started to curse. It was too much for the man operating the dials. He pushed the others aside and, pulling his pants down, and began raping the semi-conscious figure. When he finished, she was still moaning so they tried the wires again and got some reaction. They were able to keep her twitching for another minute or so.

"We don't care if they talk or not. The whole purpose is to get them softened up. The beatings, the electrical shocks, all this stuff, they don't even know it's happening to them once it starts.

"It's later, when they're alone in the silence of their mind, they start to feel the pain. We just make their bodies do our work for us. After we finish here, every muscle in their body has been abused. When they wake up, they wake up to pain, and the pain just keeps on going. They can't get away from it.

"The electric shock, for instance. That sweet young thing is senseless now, but in an hour or two, the contortions her muscles were forced into will come back to her. She will be cramped, crying in agony.

"After a few days, the cramps will go away, she'll start to feel the relief the absence of pain brings and we'll cart her back in and do it to her all over again.

"We usually alter the beatings with the electricity because we want to get all the muscles involved. We want the person to experience the total effect of their existence."

"If you don't want information, what do you want?"

"Please," he said, moving Karen out of the way as they carried the girl out of the room, her bare feet scrapping against the wooden floor leaving a wet trail of sweat and urine and feces.

They dodged a young man who was being led into the room.

"Lie down," the guy at the controls ordered.

He did.

"Put your hands in the straps."

He did.

The Commander General led Karen out of the small room. "You see," he said. "These people are different, they think they can visualize a different world and they want to create it. Pure shit.

"When I was a young man, there were a lot of them, but not so many as there are today.

"Please, one of them can be born to a pair of simple peasants, two people who never had a thought between them, and all of a sudden they're thinking, and then they're reading, and then they're coming up with crazy ideas.

"Can you imagine what the world would be like filled with a bunch of people who thought they could think?

"It'd be chaos.

"My job's to root them out and put their minds back where they belong. The sanctity of life requires they be allowed to live as long as they're productive, as long as they just look at the work given them and do it, and don't try to come up with ways to improve on what already exists.

"We've created a civilization in the world that's lasted for five thousand years and it will last five thousand years more.

"The deviants born with a desire to think only screw up the process.

"That's why we go after friends of friends. The people who create new worlds in their minds only talk to others who create new worlds in their minds.

"We can get them by relationship and once we get them, we have to break, tear apart, whatever it is that makes them think the world can be better than it already is.

"Here," he said, stopping and sliding open a window on still another door.

"This is our holding tank. We toss them in here after we've given them enough pain to keep them awake."

Karen saw the room was a mess, with ten times as many people as it was designed to hold. They fit in because they didn't have to worry about clothes, and they were so emaciated their ribs were countable in the bright light. And the lights were bright, searingly bright. If anyone shut their eyes, a guard yelled at them through the grate. If their eyes stayed shut, the person was brought to the door and beaten in front of everyone.

Even though the room was overcrowded by a factor of ten, there was a clearing for the slop bucket. Emaciated men, women, boys and girls were lined up in front to shit, piss and puke. "They've been told when they were under interrogation if they didn't put every bit of stuff in that bucket, we would turn them into a crab."

"A crab?"

The Commander General pointed out what used to be a man, his hand and legs broken and healed so badly he could only lie on his stomach and squirm back and forth before the emaciated bodies.

"We take the ones that don't condition and break them into pieces as examples to the rest of what we can do to them if we really get upset with them. Come on, I'll show you what we do with the slop."

They walked further down the corridor, the screams of agony like music to Karen's ears, working her almost to the point of orgasm without even touching herself.

"We've a little trouble with turnover."

"Oh?"

"Yes. It's really tough on the poor interrogators. They start off enthusiastic about their work. You should see the relish they go after their first real case. It's a delight to see. Of course, they've practiced on dogs and cats all their lives, but they really light up when they get their hands on a real live human, if you can call these people human.

"But pretty soon, they're drinking too much, and then their girl friends start to complain they can't get it up for them anymore, they become vicious in their frustration, and we have to put them out to pasture.

"We try to get the dumbest, most ignorant ones we can, but they all follow the same course. The average life of a good interrogator is about five years. After that, they're just going through the motions, they've got no more gusto in the execution of their profession.

"Ah. Here's the slop room."

He opened the door and the stink almost knocked Karen off her feet.

The center of the room contained a pit about four feet square.

"We throw all the stuff generated by our charges in there, the piss, shit, puke, blood, you name it."

Two guards were struggling with a nude girl in her late teens who was trying to back away from the pit, her whole body in stark terror.

"They don't like this much. Watch."

One of the guards finally got the girl's arms pinned behind her and lifted her off the ground. The other took her feet and pulled them above her head. The other guard let go of her arms and took one of the feet so the girl was suspended upside down. They then took up positions on opposite sides of the pit so her head was just above the smelly ooze.

"We can always tell when a guard or interrogator is breaking down by the time they're willing to hold someone over the pit."

The girl was flailing away, helpless, suspended by her feet, trying to kick free with no effect, arching her back to get her head away from the vile ooze, screaming, pleading, begging.

Karen felt her orgasm come as the guards lowered her head into the pit. It was an incredible feeling, spontaneous, she hadn't even touched herself or pushed her thighs together.

"She'll hold her breath as long as she can, but you can imagine, they have to open their mouth and when they do, there . . ."

He pointed at the thin trickle of shit sliding down the girl's backbone. The guards yanked her out.

"They start to suffocate from inhaling the stuff."

The guards had her head out. She was flailing about, trying to get her breath, breathing the shit and piss and puke with every gasp. When she finally caught her breath and was ready to settle down, the guards dumped her in again.

"This is how we introduce new clients to our hospitality, after a little raping of course. But still . . ."

"Still?" Karen was still feeling the warmth of her orgasm.

"After this and the beatings and the shockings and all the rest, we still have some that resist."

"Show me one."

"I was hoping you'd ask. I have one we're just about to turn into a crab."

"How do you do that?"

"We just send them into a room with four of five guards with iron rods. They break every bone that's breakable. Nothing serious. Just cracks and clean breaks. Then they bind him up with tape so every thing heals were the tape wants it to heal.

"We call them our disk jockeys. We put a microphone in the ward where they're taped up. That's the background music you hear over the screams of the ones being actively worked on.

"Please."

The Commander General slid open the door's observation plate. Karen looked in at a man in his late sixties, his eyes fierce, burning under defiant brows.

"He's been here for a year and he hasn't given in to anything. We were thinking of putting an ad in the paper asking Jimmy's killer to come forward.

"To be honest with you, we've run out of things to do to him. How can you salvage a person that refuses to be salvaged?"

"What have you done to him?"

"I couldn't even begin to describe it. He was nineteen when we brought him in, and he's been here a year. We even gave him special care."

"What kind of care is that?"

"We beat them severely, wait twelve hours for the bruises to form and go to work on the bruises. It's so exquisitely painful, it isn't long before they pass out, but we make up for it by repeating it for weeks on end. Wish we had to time to do it with everyone."

"You've dumped him in the pit I suppose." Karen said.

"He's eaten more shit than food in this place."

"I'm still fascinated with the concept of that pit. You're not causing them pain, particularly. It's the idea that's destroying their minds," Karen said. "You destroy most of the minds just by physical abuse, but to really destroy a mind, you need the finesse you've shown with that pit thing. I really liked that. Did you think it up?"

"They sent me on a cooperative visit one time early in my career. One redeemer made a man eat his own shit as an alternative to having his prick cut off."

"They cut it off anyway, I hope."

"It depended. There're worse things you can do with a prick, as you've demonstrated. But it gave me the idea. I've since learned there're no new ideas, only rediscovered ideas.

"We revere the people that rediscover and torture the people that discover."

"I still like that pit."

Karen looked directly into the eyes of the young old man. He stared back fiercely. The stare excited her. She felt the feeling rise in her body.

She knew immediately what to do to him.

"If I can make this guy see the truth, will it deprive you of a needed crab?"

"It's a matter of degree who we bust up. It's more important we save these people from their minds. As long as there's a need, we can always break somebody else up.

"What do you have in mind?"

"Get some of your guards, interrogators, whatever, and some chains. I want to hang him up."

The Commander General had the guards and chains in a manner of minutes.

"How do you want to do this? What do you want to do?"

"Hog-tie him with the chains, then wrap a chain around his waist and hang him stomach up."

The man resisted, so they punched him in the stomach until he was in a sort of awake stupor. They then attached the chains.

"How so?"

Karen showed them how to lift him up so his back was to the ground, his head hanging down, face up toward the door.

When he was in place, she threw some water on him.

His head came up instinctively as he became conscious.

"You say you've peen working on this guy for a year?" Karen asked the Commander General.

"He's been a problem."

"Piss in his mouth."

"Please?"

The guy had forced his head even further upward.

"Piss in his mouth. That'll break him."

"It couldn't be that simple," the Commander General exclaimed.

The guy was shaking his head back and forth.

"Just wait a minute. His neck muscles will tire and you'll have a clear shot at his mouth. You haven't gone for the whole time I've been here, so I'm sure you could relieve yourself."

"Really? That simple?"

He walked over above the head and pulled his dick out, waving it over the guy who was pulling his head as far away as he could.

"Just let him tire himself out," Karen said.

After a minute, the white haired boy asked if he could suck the Commander General off.

The Commander General just stood their, cock poised, waiting for him to tire.

With a massive effort, the boy firmly put his head on his chest.

Karen went over and adjusted the chains so he was slanted further down, making it harder for him to hold his head up.

The boy tried even harder to keep his head up.

Karen took her finger and shoved it up his ass, bending it and rotating it so her nail did its damage.

"Ahhhh," the boy screamed, letting his head fall backward into the instantaneous stream from the Commander General's prick.

The scream chocked into a gurgle.

Every muscle in the boy's body seemed to give in. He let his head hang backward, the Commander General's yellow liquid puddling on the floor under him.

"Fantastic!" the Commander General said in glee.

He shook his prick clean over the boy's mouth and motioned to the other two guards.

"Karenate!" he ordered, and in seconds, the golden streams were cascading into the boy's mouth, on his face, everywhere.

The Commander General pulled Karen aside as word got around and everyone came to relieve themselves on the white haired boy's face.

By the time they left, he was speaking gibberish, begging for more, asking to be unchained so he could clean up his mess.

"Isn't that the same as being dunked in the stuff?" the Commander General asked.

"You're dignity can survive being dumped in piss, it can't survive being pissed on." Karen replied.

"Fantastic," the Commander General said again. He was more than pleased, he was ecstatic.

"I kiss your hand," he said as he escorted her back to the office. "I don't care if it's against the law. I'd kiss your ass if you'd let me. No. I'll be happy with the hand. What's your wish, anything, you name it."

"My mother's all alone in her cell. I'd like her to hear some of your music."

"I'll have her cell wired in no time."

"No. I want her to experience it live. Can you find a little cell for her right near the shit pit?"

"Shit pit! How creative you are. Art is ageless and so are you. The baton will go to you. You'll carry it forward. You'll keep these ants from being born to stray from the nest they're designed to protect.

"I drink to your expertise. Would it were universal."

The Commander General poured her a drink of vodka without the juice.

She liked the feeling it gave her as it burned down her throat.

"You were saying your workers couldn't get it up after a couple of years?"

"Not after awhile. They start off fucking them everywhere, including the eardrum, but after awhile, it takes its toll and they just seem to flaccid out."

"Well, how about yourself?"

"Oh, I get by. The older I get, the younger I like them, but I can't really do what I want with them. Like your sainted father, I get my kids from the orphanage, but I have to return them in reasonably good shape or everybody starts to raise a stink, threatens to turn me in for investigation by representatives of The Representative World Government, and you know what those busybodies are like.

"I'd like to feel some innocent young bones breaking under my hands, but, you know, it's just not po