A Question of Time

Maggie wasn't thinking about anything.

Friends, work, stress, worries, cares, troubles, fears, all of them gone.

She just lay there, focusing on the sensations of pleasure as she gently drifted on hypnotic currents, her mind sinking down, deeper and deeper, unable to move, unable to think, unable to resist...she could hear a voice speaking to her, and it felt so good to do what the voice said. So good. So relaxing to not think, to just do as she was told like a good girl, and obey instructions. Good girls always obeyed instructions, and she was a good girl. She obeyed, and obedience felt so good, so...

"Wake up," Burke said. He didn't even sound angry anymore, just sort of resigned. Her eyelids fluttered open, and she realized she didn't even have her clothes on this time.

"Pretty bad, huh?" she asked, trying not to notice the damp spot on the bed. A week ago, she'd probably have been more embarrassed by Burke seeing her naked than by her failure to resist hypnosis again, but seven days of sharing hotel rooms with him all day and driving all night had changed that a bit. Burke had never tried anything sexual, and probably was too nice to ever try anything, but the forced intimacy of their trip had made her surprisingly comfortable about losing her privacy.

Burke shook his head. "Five seconds. And within five minutes of going under, I'd gotten your clothes off, found out the names of three girlfriends without close family members or friends who would miss them, and gotten a signature on a document giving me power of attorney over you. I'm beginning to suspect that you're never going to learn how to resist hypnosis."

Maggie blushed. She was trying so hard to resist trance, but it seemed instead like she only got weaker and more compliant with each lesson. The traitorous itch between her thighs had only gotten worse, too. Each time Burke put her under, she came out of it horny as hell, frustrated, and just slightly too embarrassed by her poor performances to slip off to the bathroom and frig herself off. After all those stories, all those times imagining some mysterious man taking her off to a hotel room and hypnotizing her, it was finally happening...and all she could do was feel ashamed at giving into it so easily. "How far to Mexico?" she asked at last, trying to change the subject.

Burke sighed. "At least another three days. They had up two more roadblocks last night, forced me to change direction a few times. I think we actually wound up driving away from Mexico more than we drove towards it last night."

Maggie rubbed her eyes. "I hadn't noticed," she said. In fact, she felt more than a little guilty that she spent so much of each night's drive sound asleep in the passenger seat. She knew better than to offer to drive by now-Burke knew so much better than her how to spot the danger signs of a hypnoslaver trap-but she could at least try to keep him company, so that he wasn't just playing loud music to try to stay awake all night.

Burke stood up, stretched, and headed towards the bathroom. "Far as I'm concerned," he said, "that's good. I'm going to hit the head for a moment, here, then we'll take one more whack at training you to resist before I go to sleep." He grinned a crooked grin. "If you can't last at least thirty seconds this time, I get the bed and you can sleep on the floor."

Maggie groaned as he closed the door. Not another day of sleeping on the floor...with a sigh, she began gathering up her scattered clothes.

*****

That night was when it all went bad.

By the time things actually collapsed around them, it wasn't technically night anymore. The sky was pink with early sunlight, shining down on desert floor as the two of them rode south. Maggie had just woken up, her head still fogged with sleep, and the motion of the car suddenly felt unfamiliar and sickening to her. "What's going on?" she asked.

"We've got trouble," Burke responded tersely as he put pressure on the accelerator. "They're pulling out all the stops."

Maggie wished that the fear would make her instantly alert, like it did in stories, but instead it just made her want to curl up in the fetal position and cling to Burke for support. "More roadblocks?"

"Roadblocks, tails, and I thought I saw a helicopter up there a little bit ago. You must be worth quite a lot of money to Them. Not that I'm too surprised...after the last week; I imagine that someone as pliant as you would have a lot of uses for Them."

Maggie felt a surge of erotic pride at that comment, and tried to quell it. "But we can lose them, right?"

"Going to try," he said, swinging the steering wheel into a hard right onto an on-ramp. Maggie clenched her eyes tightly shut, not wanting to see it if they lost control of the car and crashed.

They didn't. She felt the car veer left, then right, then left again. Sheer terror seemed to make her retreat deeper into herself. After all the things Burke had told her, all the things They would make her do...she didn't want to become a slave. She'd do anything, anything at all, to avoid that fate.

She opened her eyes just a little, just enough to see that they'd turned onto a tiny dusty road, little more than a dirt track leading through the desert. Burke's BMW shuddered as it traveled over the rough roads at speeds that surely neither the road nor the car were meant to undergo. Maggie closed her eyes again and kept them closed.

When Burke stopped, it was with such suddenness that Maggie felt the seat belt push into her chest. She opened her eyes for the last time and saw the end of the road.

It was, literally, the end of the road. A faded yellow sign read 'SCENIC OVERLOOK', and the road stopped amidst clumps of rock and a steep drop overlooking a ravine. Burke sat there for a long second, staring out at the rocks with a thousand-yard stare that made Maggie's soul ache with sorrow. She knew what was about to happen to her, but Burke...she felt worse for him. She wasn't going to remember any of this. He was. Suddenly she wished she'd fucked him back at the hotel room yesterday.

Maggie could see a trail of dust in the side-view mirror, the sign of a rapidly approaching car, and her mind raced with improbable solutions. "We could try to run," she said. "On foot, I mean."

"They'd catch you within minutes," he said. She heard the sorrow in his voice, and her soul ached for him. "Dead end. And it's all my fault."

Her eyes were wet with tears. "You could...I mean, I can't escape, but if there's no way out, I...I think I might rather be dead than live like that. I don't want them to put me under and brainwash me. If you-"

"No," Burke said. His eyes were suddenly wild, filled with a manic hope. "That's only if there's no way out."

"But if we can't run, and we can't fight, then-"

Burke looked her in the eyes, and suddenly she couldn't look away. "If they catch you, if they brainwash you, then there's no hope, Maggie. None at all. But if I put you under...if I brainwash you myself, and give them to you, then deep down you'd be under my control. Not theirs. I could come back for you, find you, and set you free. It's the only way to escape Them, Maggie. To give yourself to them willingly. To trust me to come back for you, and free you, and to surrender your mind until then. Do you trust me, Maggie?"

That was the moment when Margaret Jane Westbrook knew it was all over. She knew she couldn't look away from Burke's cold, gray eyes. She knew that hypnotizing someone over and over didn't help them build resistance. She knew that people like Burke described would never have let him live this long if he was a real independent. She knew that she was losing track of her surroundings, she knew that she was so damned horny she would do anything to cum, she knew that despite all the other things she knew she was no more able to distrust Burke than she was to open the car door and fly over the ravine...

She knew that she hadn't fled away from hypnoslavers. She'd run to them.

Burke was still waiting for her response. She could see in his eyes that he knew that she knew, and she wondered why he'd gone to all this effort, really. She was so weak, so submissive, that he could almost certainly push her over the edge directly. But he wanted her to believe that he'd free her someday. Maybe that would keep her from fighting it. Maybe it would salve his conscience, believing that he really would keep his promise. But she knew how she had to respond.

Her question surprised both of them. It must have taken an unimaginable amount of strength to ask it, more strength than either one of them thought she had by then. Nonetheless, she managed to ask "Promise me you'll come back some day?" as her eyes slipped three-quarters closed.

"I promise," Burke said. Perhaps it was the truth, perhaps it was just a lie they both believed, perhaps it was just a lie she wanted to believe he believed. But it was enough. Maggie's eyes closed, and she was gone.

Friends, work, stress, worries, cares, troubles, fears, all of them gone.

Maggie wasn't thinking about anything.

*****

Frank was. When Maggie didn't come back to work, and everyone spread rumors about how she'd quit in a rage over the condition of the womens' restroom, Frank wondered about that last night he'd seen her at the club. When it came out that she'd also liquidated all her assets, but left all her possessions behind at the apartment she still had five months' lease on, Frank worried about that strange man he'd seen her with that night. And when everyone else dismissed Maggie as a flake who'd gone off to some new life in Rio or something, Frank wondered what would have happened if he'd managed to work up the courage to talk to her that night. Would she have gone with him, instead of that strange man with the cold gray eyes? Would she still be here now? Where was she now?

Sometimes you don't get all the answers.

*****

EPILOGUE

The temperature of the health club was just slightly cool, but Becky didn't notice. She'd been going for an extra-long workout today, and the air couldn't feel cool enough as she pushed herself for a last half-mile on the treadmill. Her legs felt rubbery, sweat dripped into her eyes, and the music in her earphones had just become noise, but she was determined to finish, not just stop.

The man who just seemed to appear next to her startled her so much she almost fell off the treadmill.

He wasn't a member, he wasn't here to work out, he wasn't even dressed in gym clothes. He just had on a T-shirt, jeans, a leather jacket, a pair of cowboy boots, and some ridiculous hat that she couldn't imagine anyone would be caught dead with in London.

But he spoke with a quiet, urgent intensity that somehow carried over her workout music and sent chills up her spine. "You're in grave danger," he said roughly. "You have to trust me implicitly, or you'll never make it out of here."

THE END