Kiss Off/Apple of Sodom

From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe

I thought he was just another trick. I didn’t like the clean ones; they were always the most trouble. Any Rogue Isles hooker knew that. The clean ones are slumming, looking for the real kinks they can’t get. Sometimes they don’t even want sex, they just want to take you apart. I avoided the clean ones.

I would have avoided this one, too, but I was hungry and hadn’t turned a trick all night. Or last night, for that matter. I was getting too old for this; too old, too drunk, too high. It showed, and I knew it. But I didn’t have anything else. So I followed the fifty into the alley, and woke up a whole lot later.

God, what to say about that damned cage... It was glass on all sides, with a padded floor, a food slot, a speaker, a fan, and a door with no handle on the inside. It was in a larger room with a row of computers and nothing else. It was timeless. It was hell.

From time to time, people came and went. They stared at me, they made notes, they had conversations, they left again. No one ever talked to me. I went through detox in that cage, puking and shaking and crying and sweating. Sometimes someone would come in. They dragged me out, scrubbed me down, put me back. They didn’t talk to me either. They gave me food. Sometimes I ate. Sometimes I didn’t.

One day, someone talked to me. He showed up at the food slot. “Arm,” he said.

I stared at him. Someone was actually talking to me.

“Give me your arm,” he said, slower.

I shook my head. “No. You can tell me what the fu—”

That was as far as I got. Gas hissed out of the vent overhead. I slumped. Groggy but not unconscious, I heard them come in, felt them wipe the crook of my arm down, felt the needle go in. They left.

Hours passed. They fed me. I ate. They took away the bedpan. The man came again to my food slot. “Arm,” he said grimly.

I put my arm through the slot. He gave me an injection.

One time he showed up with a gas mask. He didn’t say anything, just held up the needle. Confused, I put my arm through. He gave me the injection. He left.

More days passed. Every time he came, he wore a gas mask. So did the people who brought me my food, who took my bedpan and emptied it.

When the door opened, I couldn’t understand it for what it was in time to get out. The room outside the cage was dark except for faint light from the monitors. A man stepped in, the injection man. The door shut behind him. I stared at him. He stared back at me.

“P-please,” I began, throat choking on the words. I hadn’t spoken in a lifetime. “Please. I want to go home.”

“You don’t have a home. You’re a homeless hooker.”

That just made me angry. “Get me out of here!” I screamed.

He blinked, his expression shifting from disdain to confusion, then even that was gone. “I’m on it,” he said.

He tried, I’ll give him that. He used anything at hand to try and get the door open. He kicked, pounded, even tried to use my empty bedpan to break the glass. He threw his shoulder at the glass until his arm hung at his side, his shoulder dislocated. Finally, he used his head. Literally.

I heard the crack as he rammed his head into the door, and all I could do was stare as he slid to the floor, unconscious.

“Get him out of there.”

I looked over my shoulder. Lights flickered on, and I saw now that the room had never been empty. Above my head, the exhaust fan started up. Over the renewed noise, I heard someone say, “I’d call that a positive. Schedule the surgery.”

I had just enough time to think that I could run for it if they came in to get the unconscious man when I heard the hiss of gas.

Have you ever been beaten, I mean really beaten? Been pounded with fists and feet until you’re huddling on the ground, curled up, thinking that you’re never going to survive? I have. Life in the Rogue Isles isn’t easy, and there are all sorts of people who find one lone drugged-out woman easy prey.

When I woke up, I felt like that. Beaten, battered, used for target practice. If life in the cage was hell, life in the hospital room all bandaged up was a whole new level where the Devil took his fun with the inmates.

All my nurses were female. They moved me around like an oversized doll, and pain kept me humble and obedient. They changed my bandages, smeared me with creams, fed me, bathed me, wiped my ass. The first day I managed to get to the bathroom by myself, they gave me cake. The next day, I started physical therapy.

At least that had a bright side. After PT, I got to soak in a hot tub, then I got a rub down. It didn’t smell that great, but whatever it was, it was a miracle on scars. I didn’t mention the scars, did I? I was covered with them. Scars down my legs, across my stomach, along my arms, even under my breasts. I could feel them on my face. They didn’t let me have a mirror. Even my scalp had scars, though those became less easy to feel under a slow growth of hair.

No one ever would tell me what had been done to me. When my hair was long enough to see, I got my first hint. Before, my hair had been brown. Not a nice brown, just a plain brown. Muddy brown. What I could see now was red. It all but glittered. A handful of my hair had all the colors of a gentle flame; gold, red, orange, yellow. Even some darker hints of rich auburn, strands that coiled like smoke through the fire.

That was when the scientists came back.

I was led into a room. In the corners were women with guns and watchful eyes. My entry interrupted a conversation.

“...full range, but still a qualified success. We’re encouraged.”

One man nervously rubbed his shoulder. “You’re sure this works?” I knew him. It was the man who’d beaten himself unconscious trying to open the door to the cage.

“Oh yes, Dr. Hyde, it’s completely safe. It seems to only affect a certain genetically-predisposed type. If you have the receptors, as you do, you’ll require the antidote to protect you. Without the receptors, she has no effect at all.”

One low whistle from one of the other scientists turned all eyes to me. “I wouldn’t say no effect,” the whistler said.

“Yes... well. That was the idea. The physical form of the subject enhances the effect, of course.”

“What the hell is going on?” I demanded. I expected to be ignored. I wasn’t.

One man stepped forward. He was tall, too thin, his lab coat would have hung better on a wire coat hanger than on his bony shoulders. “You are the test subject of an ongoing experiment we like to call The Aphrodite Project. Of this iteration, you are Subject Twelve. You do mark a considerable step forward in our progress.” He sounded proud of me.

“Great,” I said, lacing my tone with acid. I felt my mouth fill with saliva. I swallowed it down, and it tasted sour. “What did you do to me?”

“We have made... certain improvements to your endocrine system, your nervous system, several of your secretory pathways. And of course to your physical form.”

A million questions spun around my head. Everything I had wanted to know since the day I woke up in the cage, everything I had wanted to ask, all crashed into each other, tangled up, fought to see what would come out of my mouth first. “Why?” I asked, hating the desperate pleading edge to it.

“To improve the effect you have on men. Unfortunately, the process is not yet perfected and you have the ability to affect only a limited portion of the population. Having isolated the pheromone you produce, we have synthesized a counter-agent, naturally.”

I took a step toward him. From the corners, I heard the sound of guns coming up and I stopped moving, seething. “Let me go!” I demanded.

“That will be quite imp—”

A howl of rage cut him off, but not my howl. Dr. Hyde. He swung wildly, smashing his fist into the side of the head of one of the other scientists. The man went down.

“No!” screamed the head scientist, his hands flinging toward the guards. “Don’t shoot him, we need him alive!”

I sprang toward the door, felt an arm around my waist flinging me back. I spun into the grip and punched at the guard holding me. Dr. Hyde grabbed her throat from behind and throttled her. My mouth filled with that sour taste again, and I spat it in her face. She screamed, even through her damaged windpipe.

That’s when I got hit with the butt of a gun. I dropped, consciousness fading in and out. I heard them get Hyde under control, drag him to the floor, cuff him. He landed inches from me.

“What the hell was that?!” asked one panicked voice. Someone was vomiting. The screaming had stopped. “How could she command him?”

“Your vaccine doesn’t work, that’s how!” Fury in that voice. The lead scientist, I thought, the one who had been talking to me.

“It works perfectly! It must be residual. The effect doesn’t fade, that’s all. She retained her control of him. As soon as she gave an order, he tried to obey it.”

“And that ... spit? What was that? That wasn’t in any of the design parameters!”

“I don’t know! None of the other subjects exhibited that phenotype.”

Silence for a few moments. The guard stopped vomiting, weakly assuring the others she was all right. “Get a sample,” the lead said. “Whatever it is, it’s temporary. Debilitating, but temporary. And for god’s sake, get me a tranquilizer before she wakes up. We’ve got to get her back into the observation chamber before she spits on the entire nursing staff.”

“What about Hyde?”

More silence. “Leave him for the moment. We’ll run some tests. It would be worth seeing if we can reverse the effect entirely.”

“I’m sorry,” I heard Hyde whisper. “I tried, I tried, please... I’m so sorry.”

I couldn’t keep the tears at bay. They leaked from my eyes, spilled down my cheeks. I heard him struggle closer. “Please don’t cry,” he whispered. His lips brushed my face.

I fought to open my eyes. I could see my tears on his lips. I saw his tongue reach out to lick them away. I saw his mouth gape open as he fought for breath. The others barked orders, pulled him away from me, started CPR.

Ten seconds after he kissed away my tears, Dr. Hyde died.

They put me back in the cage. They fed me, took away my bedpans, took blood samples. For a time, it seemed that nothing had changed. Then they came back.

I woke up to their voices. A row of them, doctors all, and one man in a business suit.

“Nice to see the surgery works, at least. No sign of scar tissue?”

“No, none. Selling the formula should offset some of the costs of the operation.”

I pushed my hair out of my eyes. It was long enough to do that, at this point.

The suit stared at me, his lips thinned. He wasn’t happy. “You’re sure about this venom thing?”

“Absolutely,” said the lead scientist, regretful all the way. Bastard. “We can’t be sure how it happened. Something unique in her biochemistry, or a result of all the times we had to anesthetize her.”

“And it’s everywhere?”

“Everywhere. It didn’t show up in the earlier blood tests, but it’s present now. Tears, blood, sweat, saliva, even vaginal fluid. Any fluid her body produces carries toxins, and not just one kind. Some are absorbed through the skin, some require ingestion or direct contact with an open wound or the eyes. She’s a stew of them. She is, quite literally, poisonous.”

The suit sighed. “One step forward, one step back. Very well. We’ll continue. Find a new subject, start again.”

“What shall we do with Subject Twelve?”

They all stared at me. I shivered. So this is how lab rats felt at the end of the experiment, I thought.

The suit narrowed his eyes. “Let’s put her back where we found her,” he said. “No sense running the risk of keeping her here, and we might need her for further tests down the road.”

“You should reconsider,” warned the lead scientist. “We could maintain tissue samples without keeping the entire organism alive. That should suffice for any foreseeable need...”

“If you could foresee every need, we wouldn’t have had this venom problem in the first place,” Suit said, cold as ice. “I will not waste a possible resource. Besides.” He looked back at me, eyes sweeping over me, one corner of his lips curving up. “I’d sooner burn the David for lime as kill that. My compliments to the surgeon.” He walked out.

Lead scientist glared at me. I stared back at him. “Gas her,” he snapped. “Drop her back on Mercy. Maybe she’ll get herself killed and we can harvest the samples then.”

The gas hissed. God, I hate that sound.

When it wore off, I could hear seagulls and waves and footsteps nearby.

“Aw DAMN, man, check out this bitch!”

A chorus of whistles. I only understood about half the words. The rest were in gutter Spanish that not even my life had taught me to translate. I sat up, looked around, and knew I was in very deep trouble.

“Me first,” growled the man with the most tattoos.

“Stop!” I said.

He didn’t.

But someone else stopped him. A gunshot slammed through the alley, painting the brick over my head in brain matter and blood. Two of the three remaining gang bangers whipped around, never expecting to see one of their own holding the gun. The one who did wasn’t that old, wasn’t that hardened, and he looked at me like he was seeing heaven.

“Kill the rest,” I said.

They died before they could draw their guns.

I held up one hand. “Help me up,” I told my new slave. He obeyed, gently assisting me to my feet, steadying me as I swayed.

I thought about things as I waited for my dizziness to fade, for the last of the drug to clear out of my system. I wanted clothes. I wanted food. But mostly, I wanted to get away from that alley before the scientists could change their mind and come back for me. I grabbed the shirt from one corpse, finding it long enough to fall to mid-thigh. It would do for now.

I looked at the kid. “Help me,” I said.

“Anything,” he said, staring at me.

I smiled at his obedience, hungry, predatory. A whole new world of possibility lay in his adoration. “Good boy,” I purred, patting his head. “Heel.”

Turning, I left the alleyway for the streets of Mercy Island, my little pet trotting along behind me. I couldn’t help it. I laughed, stretching my arms toward the wide-open sky.

Ain’t life a bitch?