A Doll's Foot

Chapter 19

WHEN RACHEL AWOKE, SHE WAS NOT IN THE SAME ROOM. She was lying on her back on a bench or lounge chair, more like the thing you would lie on in a doctor's office for a physical exam, except there was no piece of paper over the vinyl upholstery. Her legs were up in stirrups just like the one time she had gone to see a gynecologist, but there were straps, cushioned ones, around her ankles and her wrists and over her belly. Her bladder and bowels should have been complaining, but they were not. She wasn't hungry, she wasn't thirsty. It occurred to her that maybe she was dead. A figure that did not look much like an angel, huge, black, bulging with muscles and an enormous erection, appeared in front of her. He was carrying a little wand, cold metal as it touched her clitoris. It gave a little buzz, and she quickly reached orgasm. Then a click, and she was gasping at the pain. The figure, man or demon, gave a maniacal laugh and waved the wand at her again. Which was it going to be this time? And was this her fate for eternity?

"Don't scream. Don't give him the satisfaction."

It was a familiar voice. Bea's voice. Not Rachel's first choice for companionship, but better than nothing. Maybe. She turned her head to see that she was not alone in the room. Bea in a similar situation to the left of her, Risa to the right of her. Just like the Crucifixion. That random thought was enough to make her giggle. She was rewarded with another blast of pain.

"Pay attention." The demon gave her a slap. "You are going to get nice and wet so I can fuck your cunt. Then you are going to get me even wetter so I can fuck your asshole. Understand?"

"Of course."

"She's a professional," Beatrice had to add.

"Really, I can't show you all my skills tied up like this. Come up closer so I can suck your balls, lick your asshole. Damn." She was squirming. "I can't get my finger up your butt tied up this way."

With that, he loosened the strap on her right wrist. He had his cock halfway down her throat, she had a finger rubbing the little bulge inside his rectum, when they were interrupted.

"Antoine! Not now! Get some clothes on!" That demon had, literally, appeared out of nowhere. She really had to be dreaming, or perhaps she was in some version of Anna's game.

With that, the first demon got off of her, forgetting to strap her wrist back in. She put her arm back in place. A move in her favor, to have one arm free. How was she going to get the other three straps loose without being detected?

"Ladies, it is so good to see you in the flesh at last." The second demon's voice, out of the shadows.

"Who the fuck are you?" Marissa asked.

"You would know me as the sheikh." He was dressed like one, in flowing robes and a keffiyeh. But his accent sounded British.

"The sheikh? Sheikh who? Sheikh of what?"

"I am the Sheikh of Araby." He started to sing the song. "And your love really does belong to me. Along with the rest of you. Ah, our guests have arrived."

No one had entered the room, but Rachel realized that two faces had appeared on screens scattered around the room, one of them overhead. One face she recognized at once. It was Nestor. The other was, perhaps, the woman who had revived Andre.

"Anna!" Beatrice spat out the name like a curse.

"Bea. Looking lovely as usual. I like the way you've done your hair. Blue was always a good color for you. And Risa, you definitely look pretty in pink. And who is that in the middle? Is that Rachel? The girl from the game? Weren't you were at the funeral? So nice to see you again."

"Well," the sheikh said, "enough of these pleasantries."

"Where are we?" Rachel asked. "On the Luxor?"

"Oh my, what a bright girl you are. Yes, you are on the Luxor. Not that it matters. Of course, Nestor and Natalia know where you are. But what are they going to do about it? We're many miles from anywhere. Oh yes, I suppose you could send a missile to destroy the ship, but then you would lose the girls, would you not? And how do you know I'm actually on board? I could just be a hologram. The girls aren't going to reach out and touch me to find out. Are you, ladies?

"But let's get down to business. As you may have realized by now, we have been in the process of subverting Nestor's grand creation, his noble Investigative Directorate. Come on now, Nestor, didn't you wonder why the directorate sent you off on a wild goose chase to Southeast Asia? One that you were enjoying thoroughly, I might add."

"I knew there was a problem," Anna said. "That's why I decided it was too dangerous to keep doing the web shows."

"Yes, you went into hiding, which should have been quite difficult for you to do. Anatalia, or Anna as you girls know her, although her

nom de guerre

was Natalie, was released on parole. On the understanding that she would behave herself."

"No one said I couldn't have sex. That I couldn't do cam shows. Andre was all for it."

"Ah yes, Andre, running his little side business at night. But I digress."

"You were on parole?" Rachel asked. "What for?"

The sheikh answered for her. "Natalia made her reputation leaking secrets that discredited the United States and its allies. Which made her a darling with the powers that be in Russia. It didn't hurt that her father was a part of the oligarchy. But alas, at heart she is Ukrainian."

"My mother is Ukrainian."

"She made the mistake of leaking secrets that hindered the Russian liberation of Ukraine."

"I revealed how my father fell out of favor. Literally, ten thousand feet falling from an airplane. It wasn't enough to throw him out a window."

"Your father was creating his own little African empire. Without permission. But be that as it may, you were granted parole."

"More like house arrest."

"You were free to go wherever you wanted, do whatever you wanted, within reason, under Andre's supervision, of course."

"And with the ankle monitor."

"Ankle monitor?" Beatrice broke in. "I've seen her ankles a lot of times. No bracelet or anything."

"An implant," Rachel grumbled in exasperation. Granted Bea was not the sharpest tool in the drawer, but really. "In her foot, not her ankle."

"A fail safe one," the sheikh added. "Any attempt to extract it would release a poison. But once again I digress. I don't want to waste too much of your valuable time with things that are irrelevant. We have run into a slight problem with the entity formerly called the Investigative Directorate. We need your assistance to correct that problem."

"And if we decline?" Nestor asked.

"Well, there is the matter of these three lovely ladies. If you cooperate they will be returned to you in slightly used condition. Otherwise, I will absorb them into my harem."

"Returned to us?" Anna was rolling her eyes. "Really. Why would we want that?"

"Well, returned to their usual lives."

"Maybe they'd be better off in the harem."

"Of course, they would have to be properly prepared for harem life."

"Meaning?" Beatrice asked.

"Circumcised," Rachel said.

"How the fuck to you circumcise a female?"

"You cut off her clit."

"It's not the worst thing in the world," Anna said. "You can still have orgasms, but you need some penetration."

"Of course," the sheikh added, "we would be it doing here, with you two observing. Without pain killer. It should be quite amusing."

"Yes, I'd like to see that. Especially with Bea. I always wanted to bite her clit off. Too bad I'm not there to help you out."

"Just what do you need help with?" Nestor asked. "I can't believe you keep a harem. And want to add these three to it? Well, maybe Rachel."

"How nice of you to ask. We seem to have reached a limit of what we can do with the directorate. It seems to have some sort of fail safe built in. Something like Asimov's three laws for robots, although not quite as obvious or explicit. I would assume that one or the other of you put these restraints into it."

"What kind of restraints?"

"Blowing up a nuclear power plant. Opening a dam. Crashing a passenger plane. That sort of thing."

"You've actually tried to do these things?" Anna asked. She was trying to keep her tone calm, defiant, but her lip was trembling. Not as good an actress as she needed to be.

"Only on a very small scale. Just to test its capabilities."

"And?"

"It says that it cannot comply with that request." The sheikh paused. "That I do not have authorization."

"This is an area we never tested," Nestor said. "One way or the other. At least I never did."

"Me neither. Really, the directorate was intended to investigate. Not to take actions beyond that."

"But Natalia, you did work on systems with those capabilities. While you were in prison. That's how you earned your parole."

"Has anyone tried to use those supposed capabilities? Do you think I would give the men who killed my father that kind of power?"

"But you could have given it to them. You were able to convince them that you had. Maybe that's the real reason you wanted to escape. You were living on borrowed time until they found out that you had tricked them."

"Perhaps. Perhaps there were many lies. Hard to sort through them all."

"Artificial intelligence is not the best solution for doing that sort of thing," Nestor said. He might as well have been giving an interview, or lecture. "AI literally has a mind of its own. It will second guess you."

"So both of you are saying that you will not, or can not, satisfy my request for assistance?"

"That's about the size of it."

"What a pity. All this fuss just to get three more ladies in the harem. Although they are quite lovely as long as they aren't talking. Very well, let's proceed with the circumcisions. Antoine, are you ready? Why don't we start with the one that Nestor and Natalia seem to detest the least. The blonde."

"She's got a nice big clit. But I have to get it standing up first." The first demon approached Rachel with a small knife, which he lay down on the armrest next to her free hand as he bent down to lick her.

"Watch out!" the sheikh yelled. Rachel had grabbed the knife.

"Come on honey, what are you going to do with that thing?" The demon reached to retrieve it from her hand. But Rachel knew exactly what to do. Just like one of the cows she slaughtered. Blood everywhere, but it only made it easier to get her other hand and her legs free, cutting through the straps with the knife. She got up to release the other girls.

"Stop right there." The sheikh had produced a little pistol from under his robes.

"Really," Rachel snorted. "If you're really on this ship and you kill us, Nestor will blow it up. Won't you, Nestor?" But Nestor and Anna had vanished off of all the screens.

"

Merde

." She threw the knife at the sheikh, aiming for just above the Adam's apple like she had seen Nestor do with the shish kabob stick. But it went right through his body and clattered to the floor. With that, the sheikh vanished.

"Hurry up," Marissa said. "He's probably alerting the crew."

"Unless Nestor is jamming him." In any case, Rachel didn't waste time cutting the other two free. "Now what?"

"We look for resources and clues," Beatrice said. She rummaged through the pockets of the dead demon. Or guard. Rachel was coming to the reluctant conclusion that maybe she wasn't in hell, or in a virtual reality game. In one pocket they found a pistol. In another a phone. "See?"

"Even better." Marissa had found another weapon on the chair the guard had been sitting on. A larger one, a little assault rifle.

"Do you know what you're doing with that thing?" Rachel asked. It made her nervous, the way Marissa was waving it around.

"Rocco was training us. We spent a lot of time at shooting ranges, learning how to use these. Haven't you seen the videos of us with the guns?"

"No."

"Even better, here, well not here, where we live, used to live, whatever, there's a shooting range in the nudist area. Escape games. Naked paintball."

"Rocco had us doing, like basic training, in the nude. While he was filming us."

"He was in the army for a year, before he went to university."

"Why?" Rachel asked.

"I don't know. I think he was tired of sitting in a classroom."

"No, why did he have you learning how to use, what, assault rifles? Like that one?" Rachel was remembering that book about Charles Manson. What if there had been web shows in the 60s? Would anyone have taken him seriously? "You were going to shoot up a school or something?"

"He was talking about making a PMV of us doing that. With a song he was writing as the music, and us playing it."

"A PMV?"

"A porn music video."

"Oh. Not for real?"

"Not for real. I've never killed anyone. Like you just did."

"Yet," Marissa said. "Maybe in two minutes. Once we get out in the hall. Here, you take the phone." She handed it to Rachel. Of course, no pockets, they had to carry the few items they had found in their hands. "What do we do now?"

Rachel took the phone and it started to ring immediately.

"Don't answer it!"

"It's Nestor."

"What? How do you know?"

"Caller ID."

"Easy to spoof. Don't answer it."\

But Rachel did. "Hello?"

"Hi, put on Rachel please." The voice sounded like Nestor, so aggravatingly calm.

"This is Rachel."

"Where are you?"

"In the same room. But we're free to move now. And we have two guns and the phone."

"That's a start. You're alone?"

"Antoine is dead. The sheikh vanished."

"Okay, I think I've bought you a little time. Just outside in the hall there's sign that says Emergency and a ladder right next to it. You need to climb up the ladder and open the hatch at the top."

"Carrying our stuff?"

"The assault rifle has a shoulder sling. The other two can use the pockets in Antoine's suit coat and shirt."

That meant prying the clothes off the bloody corpse. The other girls couldn't go near it, but Rachel helped slaughter some mornings at the restaurant. She had lost her squeamishness, at least for cows and pigs and chickens. She tried to ignore that the flesh she was dealing with was human. Of course, the sleeves were so long they would make it impossible to climb. She used the little knife to cut them off at the shoulders to make vests. She took the shirt for herself and handed the remains of the suit jacket to Beatrice. Now that she had two pockets she could take the knife along with the phone. Hopefully not to slit another throat, but maybe they would need to cut a rope or something.

When they got out into the hall, there was another guard sitting on a little plastic chair, napping. Right at the base of the ladder they were supposed to climb. With the sign that said Emergency behind him, above the words an arrow pointing up to a boat symbol. A boat? The ladder went up at least ten meters, through a sort of vertical tunnel. What was a lifeboat doing up there? Beatrice put a finger to her lips, then ran a hand over her throat.

No

. Rachel shook her head.

No

. But was there any way they were going to get up the ladder without waking up the guard? And then what?

She took the little knife out of the shirt pocket, but her hand was trembling. She started to sob. The guard opened his eyes, he opened his mouth, he was about to say something, but they would never know what. Beatrice grabbed the knife out of Rachel's hand and slammed it into his throat. Then she put it into one of the pockets of the vest Rachel had made out of Antoine's suit jacket. The guard had a pistol in a shoulder holster, and one of the little assault rifles leaning against the wall. She handed the holster to Marissa, who put it on a free shoulder, and added the rifle to her arsenal. They went up the ladder with Marissa first, Beatrice on the bottom, with the idea that the two armed girls could shoot up or down depending on which way they had problems.

"How could you do that?" Rachel asked when they were about halfway up, well above the hall ceiling, sheltered somewhat within the tube that held the ladder. "What did he ever do to you?"

"Raped me. Shocked me with an electric prod. Laughed as I screamed. He shocked me while he was raping me because he said I wasn't tight enough. Said I was a flabby old whore and why would the sheikh have any interest in me?"

"Oh."

"He was probably about to say something like that when he saw us."

"Oh."

"I would have cut his dick off first if we weren't in a hurry."

By that time Marissa had reached the top of the ladder. There was something like a porthole at the top, horizontal though instead of vertical. She opened it cautiously. She got up far enough her head and shoulders were above the exit. Still nothing. Just what seemed to be an open deck or maybe rooftop. She struggled to get the assault rifle off her shoulder, almost dropping it. There was no way she was going to get herself up onto the deck holding on to it. Reluctantly, she slid it out onto the deck, and pulled herself up far enough to roll out after it. Then nothing. After a very long minute, her hand appeared over the opening, giving a thumbs up.

Rachel scrambled out quite easily. She only had the phone in her pocket, and she was almost as agile as Marissa. The other two girls had to drag Beatrice out. It was a good thing she was on the bottom.

"You look like a stranded whale," her

amica

jibed as she struggled to get to her feet. "The great blue whale."

"Very funny." The other two had climbed the ladder as if it was nothing, but she was exhausted. Out of shape. She and Rocco were definitely going to do more running. If he was still alive. If he hadn't betrayed her. It was one thing to sell your soul to the devil, and she was quite sure he was capable of that, but to sell your lovers to seal the bargain... She started to sob.

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. That was uncalled for." Marissa gave her a little kiss.

"It's not that. It's Rocco."

"Rocco? What about him?"

"Where is he?"

"He took me to a Black Mass," Rachel said. "The wine was spiked or something. The next thing I knew I was here."

"Ladies," Marissa said, "we need to concentrate on the current situation. As in, what the fuck is a lifeboat doing up on top of the roof?"

They were at the back of the ship, on a deck that served as the helipad. With a helicopter on it, which meant maybe the sheikh was on the ship after all. And at the very back, nose tipping down towards the wake of the ship, a bulbous orange lifeboat. It looked like an oversized bathtub toy, the kind that always turned right up and bobbed back up to the surface.

"It's on a slide," Rachel said. "I saw a video once. You get in the boat and it goes down the slide into the water. Wait." She poked at the phone for a moment. "Here's the video. Okay, release the cable. Unplug the battery charger. Open the hatch. Start the engine. Go inside."

Which they did. The floor was slanted at a thirty degree angle.

"Close the rear hatch. Make sure the drain plug is closed. Get in you seats, buckle yourselves in."

"You've got to be kidding."

"You have a better idea?" Rachel climbed a little ladder up to the pilot's seat. The view out the front window was intimidating. The video had shown the boat splashing down into nice calm water, but there were waves down there. Whitecaps. Alright, she had been about to die for a while now, she had been fearless, reckless, indomitable. But now she was staring at death, beckoning to her in those waves.

"

Salva me fons pietas

." Save her from what? Her death crashing into the waves? Her sins, if she did die? So many sins, if the nuns were correct, gleefully, unrepentantly committed. No time for confession, for atonement, even for remorse.

"People coming!" Beatrice screamed.

Rachel pulled the lever. The boat slid down its track, over the edge of the ship, pointing straight down so that she was looking directly at the water. Falling so slowly, the waves stopping their motion, time frozen by her panic. There was a seal in the water below them, maybe it was a dolphin, staring up in consternation at the huge orange object hurtling down upon it. There was a big wave drifting toward them, so slowly, the crest of it catching the nose of the boat, tipping it backwards. Then she was suspended, the water above her head, the world spinning around her. Then staring up at the sky as the back of the boat hit the wave. It teetered for a moment, then fell forward with a crash that almost dislodged her. They were in the water in less than a second, shaken up but still alive.