Chapter 1: A Vigilante is Born

Linda sat at the bus stop, waiting for the number nine headed downtown. Two suitcases, a backpack, and her purse were all the worldly goods she owned. At least she managed to track down a cheap place to live. Unfortunately, it was a rat-trap hotel in what would have been called skid-row years ago. Now it was plagued by drunks, prostitutes, homeless people and drug dealers. Come to think of it, that’s probably the same way it was ‘years ago.’ Beggars as they say, can’t be choosers, as you get what you pay for, to mix metaphors.

The bus arrived in due time. Linda climbed on and dropped the fare into the meter-bowl then grabbed the first available empty seat, sat next to the window and dumped her suitcases into the aisle seat. She let out a sigh and looked around.

The man sitting across the aisle from her leered at her, “New in town, Missy?”

Linda could feel his thoughts crawling over her mind just as his eyes were crawling over her skin. He thought that while she wasn’t great looking, she could still pull john’s for blow jobs and make him a few bucks. She didn’t bother wondering how she tuned in to his thoughts. Anytime someone had evil ideas about her, she just ‘knew.’ It didn’t even come across as thoughts, just feelings she attributed to them.

Linda didn’t bother answering Mr. Bus Perv, just turned her face to the window and ignored him. Maybe with any luck he would take the hint. No chance of that happening, of course. Just not a great day for girls named Linda.

“Come on now baby, don’t be like that. I just want to help you out, maybe give you a job and a place to sleep.”

Linda glanced at him. He was short and thin, dirty T-shirt and faded jeans. Mr. Bus Perv sported a thin face with a pointed chin, beady eyes and a Hitler ‘stache.

Linda spun, glaring at him, “Shut the fuck up, asswipe! I’m not your baby, and have no intention of turning tricks for you or anyone else.”

Mr. Bus Perv turned away, and muttered, “Bitch.” Linda just ignored his thoughts and turned back to the window, glad to get her privacy back.

The bus arrived near her planned hotel, and she pulled the cord to signal a stop. The driver stopped and let Linda off. As she stepped out on the sidewalk Linda glanced around. The Wilson Hotel was just half a block away, so she grabbed her suitcases and trudged off.

Walking in the door Linda saw a small lobby with some very well worn couches and chairs, and a front desk with an old clerk sitting behind it reading a girlie magazine. Some blonde bimbo on the back cover was sucking a guy’s dick. The room smelled of sweat, stale beer and cigarettes. A couple of men sat on chairs watching the old fashioned tube-style TV and smoking. Another man in the corner read the newspaper. She walked up and dropped her suitcases, startling the clerk.

“Need a room, honey?”

“Yes I do, but I don’t have much money,” Linda replied.

The clerk turned and swept his arm around the room “Honey, take a look, this ain’t the Ritz. Ten bucks a day or forty a week. Towels included. Each floor has a bathroom with a shower. I suggest wearing flip-flops to keep from getting any fungus on your feet and lock the door. Most of our clientele are male and not terribly polite ... if you catch my drift. Pay in advance, cash only. We don’t accept credit cards. Burned too many times. No bogus checks either.”

“I’ll take a week’s lodging then.” Linda dug in her purse for her wallet and withdrew two twenties and handed them to the clerk. “I’d like a receipt, please.”

“Sure, sure no problem. No need to get your panties in a twist. Here’s your receipt and your key. Room 312. That’s on the third floor. Oh, and the elevator don’t always line up with the floor. Nothing to worry about, just hop down, or up – whichever. Try not to fall into the elevator shaft. Too much paperwork.”

Linda dragged her suitcases over to the elevator and pushed the call button. Her arms were getting tired from lugging all her stuff around. She could hear the creaky rattling elevator slowly work its way down. Upon arrival, she found it necessary to manually open the sliding door before stepping in and pushing the button for the 3rd floor. The elevator didn’t move.

“You have to pull the door closed, honey, or it just sits there,” yelled the clerk.

With a grimace, Linda reached out for the door handle and jerked the recalcitrant door closed. After a groan and some moaning the old elevator rode on up to the third floor. Contrary to what the clerk had said, it stopped just fine and was level with the hallway. The door even slid open, slowly but surely.

Linda sat on the only chair in the dingy hotel room. After putting her clothes away in the dresser, she took her wallet out of her purse and counted her remaining money, carefully fingering each bill to make sure nothing was missed. $482.53 was all that stood between her and living in a homeless shelter. The room at the end-of-the-road hotel was going to take forty dollars a week. Food? Well, you can survive indefinitely on ramen noodles. College students did.

At eighteen years old, Linda was finally out of the foster care system that claimed the last sixteen years of her young life. Mom and Dad were killed by a drunk driver when she was two. She didn’t remember them. All she had left were a couple of wedding pictures. One with them dancing, staring into each others eyes with big smiles on their faces. Mom in her white wedding gown and Dad in his tux. The other picture was of Mom stuffing a piece of wedding cake into her Dad’s mouth. Nothing else remained of her parents. She didn’t even know where their graves were located, although now that she was on her own she could probably find them. Internet search. Whenever she finally got access and some kind of computer.

With no known living relatives she ended up a foster child and had a long standing hatred of drunk drivers. Foster care was one of the worst things that could happen to a child. At least it was for her. As it turned out, some foster parents were just as bad as drunk drivers.

At age two, of course, she didn’t realize much and remembered even less. Her earliest memories of foster care were from around four or five. She remembered being hungry all the time, and always being ignored. Unloved. Even at five years old, she had chores to do and was beaten if they weren’t done properly. She had to keep her own room clean. She remembered cleaning the bathtub. And being spanked for not making her bed properly. If she was a bad girl she had to clean the kitchen floor with an old toothbrush.

Most foster parents were only looking for an extra payday and couldn’t care less about the kids entrusted to them. She did run into a couple good ones, but they were the outliers, rather than the norm.

The first foster parents she did remember were Bill and Kathy. She must have been about six or seven by then. She remembered Bill always smelled like cheap beer and cigars. Kathy always smelled sour. She was fat, sweated too much and seldom bathed. Other than that, she didn’t really remember them.

When she was about eight, Child Protective Services moved her to another family. Ted and Shirley. They had two kids of their own, both younger than her. She ended up doing most of the chores in the house, as they insisted she set a good example for their own kids, who they never bothered correcting. Babysitting, dishes, laundry, vacuuming and anything else that Shirley didn’t want to do. She even had her own stool to stand on for washing the dishes. Slavery didn’t end after the Civil War, it just got a new name; Foster Care. That lasted for a year. It ended when she woke up one night to find Ted in a drunken daze trying to climb into her bed, naked. She screamed, Shirley ran into the room, and the next day Child Services came and picked her up.

School wasn’t easy either. All the other kids had decent clothing and school supplies. At nine years old Linda was just beginning to realize how different her situation was from that of the other kids. That’s when she started to disappear. Not really invisible, but no one paid attention to her. She just seemed to fade into the background wherever she went. By the time she graduated high school, she was an expert at it. She called her disappearing persona, ‘Ms. Mouse.‘

Her first rape was by a man named Bob. His wife watched and did nothing. Said nothing. Just watched. Foster parents. She complained to her case worker, but it turned into a he said / she said and there were two of them against one of her. Still, Child Services had to move her. Before they did, Bob beat her for reporting them. He was experienced at beating kids, and didn’t leave a mark on her body. She ached all over for several days afterwards. That was the last time she complained to Child Services about rape, or foster parents in general. She was fourteen years old.

The next foster parents were actually quite decent. While they didn’t love her, shaking their heads when she didn’t act as they expected, they also didn’t mistreat her. She still had her share of chores, and even learned how to cook a few simple dishes. Jack and his wife Barbara both worked during the day and she would try to have something for them to eat when they got home. For the first time she remembered, some of the Child Services money was actually spent on clothing and school supplies, instead of booze and smokes for the foster parents. Goodwill clothing, but still it was something. Usually she got stuck with hand-me-downs from whoever lived there before her. Jack got a promotion when Linda was sixteen and they had to move away. Time for another set of foster parents.

In high school only one boy tried to molest her. Linda was seventeen. She didn’t cry or scream or make any normal girl responses. She just stared at him as he groped her. Then the boy did something odd. He stepped back and grabbed his groin, fell on the floor and curled into a ball, sobbing in pain. Linda nodded and walked to the lunch room. She had no idea what just happened, and didn’t care. As long as the creep left her alone the reason didn’t matter to her.

Betty and her husband Lurch (his name wasn’t really Lurch, but God, he looked just like the Addams Family’s butler) were an odd couple to say the least. She was extremely thin and Lurch was, well, Lurch. This time she was sexually abused by the wife, not the clueless husband. Betty was a lesbian posing as a wife so she wouldn’t have to work for a living. Lurch just went to work, did his job, came home for dinner and TV, then went to bed. Apparently, Betty’s job consisted of telling Linda how to clean the house. After Lurch passed out Betty would come to Linda’s room and force her to lick that nasty gash between her legs. Now Linda had tasted her own pussy juices out of curiosity and it wasn’t bad. Betty however had the sourest tasting cunt you can imagine. After Betty got off and returned to her own bedroom, Linda would gargle and wash her face and hands over and over to get rid of the stink and the vile taste. She knew better than to refuse. It would just gain her another beating.

Betty and Lurch lasted until Linda’s senior year in high school. Then Lurch just left. One day he was there, next day ... poof, gone. Maybe he wasn’t clueless anymore. With only one ‘parent’ in the house, Child Services had no choice but to move her again. This time she ended up in a different high school where she didn’t know anyone. Not that she had any real friends at the old school, but at least the faces and cliques were familiar and she knew who to avoid. After changing schools, she just avoided everyone.

The new set of parents were completely unremarkable. She thought of them as Mr. and Mrs. Robot. They stayed out of her life and collected their monthly checks from Child Protective Services. Linda was free to do whatever she wanted as long as she kept her share of the household chores done and was home at a reasonable hour. They barely spoke to her the entire time she lived there.

Thinking about her future, Linda got a part-time job at the local McDonald’s. It wasn’t much, but she knew that when she turned eighteen and high school was in the rear-view-mirror, Child Protective Services would boot her out on the street. She’d need cash money if she didn’t want to end up ‘working’ street corners and giving blow jobs, the property of some pimp, or living in a homeless shelter and begging passing drivers for money.

It was during her senior year that odd things began to happen around her. One time at work, she dropped a kid’s happy meal and it stopped in mid-air.

It just stopped, hanging about halfway to the floor!

She reached down and grabbed it before it fell again. Now, happy meals didn’t do that. Normally, they came back up, right after the kids ate them. Didn’t matter how happy they were, they did not float! Probably, McD’s could sell a hell of a lot more of them if they did. Thank God no one noticed. This gave her many sleepless nights of wondering just what happened, but she couldn’t explain it. She also didn’t connect the floating-happy-meal to the teenage molester at school. He never floated. At least not when Linda was watching.

Her mental radar was improving. She was getting clearer mental pictures from other people when they thought about her, but only when they were ugly thoughts. The kind of thoughts you really don’t want bouncing around in your head. She had always been able to ‘feel’ negative, dangerous emotions, but this was a whole new level. It was alarming to realize just how many boys in high school thought about sex all day. No one else seemed to ever have such mental pictures. At least, if they did, they never talked about it. Linda found she had to concentrate to ‘receive’ anything, but it was definitely there. They weren’t really words, just feelings and vague concepts.

Oh, well. Enough with her recollections. What happened, happened. She had to get on with her life and moaning about the past wouldn’t pay for any ramen noodles.

She stood up and looked in the slightly grayish mirror above the dresser and took stock of her assets. She had everything any other girl of eighteen had. All the right parts in the right places, just nothing remarkable. Smallish B-cup boobs on a thin frame. Slim hips, short legs, and stringy brown hair. Her lips were maybe larger than most, but so was her nose. Eyebrows too thick. Nearsighted, so she had to wear glasses. Child Protective Services had paid for routine dental care so her teeth were healthy just not straight. Braces for foster kids were not in the budget. With a sigh, Linda realized she was, in a word, mousy. Just one more of the faceless mobs of people living in a moderate sized city. No one who passed her in the street would ever think twice about her, or remember what she looked like. Total and complete anonymity. Ms. Mouse indeed.

Chapter 2 »