Chapter 8: Rat Hunt

October 26th - December 18th, 1987

The next three days were very hard on both of us. Joey was back to his “normal” self, and that ended up meaning he was almost as depressed as I was.

For him, it was the concept of how completely futile our rescuing his sister appeared. No matter how he looked at it, he couldn’t see a way to convince the Etas to let him join. We both believed that our age was the reason for the hormone levels not being within their acceptable range, and that was one thing we couldn’t alter about ourselves. Even though Joey had just turned seventeen exactly two weeks before the party, we suspected that he wouldn’t be accepted next spring either.

My biggest problem was my stupid empathic senses wouldn’t stop feeling that damn dark spot I had inflicted on Joey’s ... soul? Whatever. He didn’t understand why I felt so guilty whenever I looked at him, and I guess that also added to his depressed mood.

To top it all off, Greg and Nick both had earrings on Monday, and simply accepted the fact we weren’t going to make it in. They weren’t unfriendly towards us, or anyone else for that matter, but they didn’t even try to include us in their activities, even the ones we had been doing together for the past two months.

Joey and I both had stopped going to the workouts and were skipping classes right and left. On Wednesday, Joey suddenly started throwing things around the room, not really trying to break anything, just needing to work off some of his powerful body’s energy since he hadn’t been working it off.

It was purely by accident that Joey knocked the cabinet under the refrigerator open. I was lying in my bunk ignoring his cusses and activity, my eyes not looking at anything in particular and just happened to lock on one of the contents which had been behind the door.

I don’t know how long I stared at the bottle before it registered, and even then in my half-drunken state, it took a minute for my brain to make some connections and trigger an important conclusion.

“SHIT!” I said, sitting up and nearly braining myself on the bunk above me.

“What!” Joey snapped, throwing the handcuffs at the radiator that would have driven me crazy if he had done it three hours earlier while I had been hungover.

“Joey, think about it. Other than our age, what else could make our hormone levels be so different from everyone else’s?”

“I don’t ... Oh shit. You mean...”

“The STERIODS,” we both said.

We had stopped taking them two weeks before the party because we felt we had added enough muscle tone to get us by without them. But we had started taking them before we had left home, so they had been in our systems at the time our blood samples had been taken.

“Oh man, that HAS to be it!” Joey said, grabbing the practically empty bottle out of the cabinet.

“But how does that help us now?” I asked, feeling my head pounding from the quick movements I had been making.

“What do you mean? All we do is ask Mike ... to ... Oh.”

Joey frowned, then grabbed one of the notebooks he had been pitching around earlier. He started writing things down silently while I corked my bottle and put it away out of sight.

I laid back down in my bunk while the familiar static electric sensation filled the room from Joey’s mind switching into hyperdrive.

I guess I fell asleep, for the next thing I knew, Joey was handing me the notebook.

Mission objectives:

1. Construct a believable reason to have our blood taken again for testing.

2. There are twenty open beds, and nearly forty guys to fill them. Determine a way to get in ahead of at least twenty of the others.

I asked, “Is that it? All that thinking for two objectives?”

“Fuck you. I was trying to find the solutions.”

“Oh,” I said, finding the room trying to spin. “Look, I’m feeling a little woozy. Can we talk about this tomorrow? Say around noon?”

“Shit. You need to lay off the booze. I’m going to go find Greg or Nick and scan them for anything I can get.”

“Bye,” I said after the door shut.

That night, I had a very strange dream. I was sitting alone on my bunk when Greg walked in. We started talking, but every once in a while, I would get a glimpse of what I thought was a rat sticking its nose out Greg’s ear or mouth or something. It was kind of gross.

Anyway, I started to catch on that every time the rat showed up, Greg was more ... well, perverted. As Greg started to talk about how he likes getting carrots stuck up his ass, I prepared to grab the rat by its whiskers the next time it poked its head out.

When I grabbed it, I suddenly had control over the rat. I told the rat to undo what he had done to Greg, and that’s when I woke up.

It wasn’t until the next morning when Joey’s alarm woke both us up at six before I figured out what my dream meant.

“Joey. I got it!”

“What? A hangover?”

“No. Well, a little. But, shit. What was I going to say? Oh yeah. We need to go to classes today, then tonight you and I are going to go rat hunting.”

That evening as we stood outside Greg and Austin’s door, Joey asked, “Are you sure about this?”

“Positive. I’ve tried it out on three different people. It will ... Hi, Greg. Mind if we come in?” I said, not waiting for an answer when Greg opened the door.

Greg said, “Uh, actually...”

“Close the door, Greg,” I said as I closed the curtains while Joey used his version of a Vulcan neck pinch on Austin who was sitting at the table doing homework.

Joey gently let Austin sag forward, resting his pudgy nose on the book he had been working out of as Greg asked, “What did you do to him?”

“Oh, just a little thing I picked up,” Joey said, blowing across the tip of his index finger and putting it back in his imaginary holster.

“What do you want?” Greg asked as he examined his cousin, then wondering why he felt so calm.

“Mike sent us,” I said after sitting down on Greg’s bunk.

“He did?”

Joey said, “Yeah. We’re supposed to give you a test.”

“What kind of test?” Greg asked suspiciously.

I said softly, “Sit down next to me, and I’ll show you.”

“How do I know Mike really sent you?” Greg responded just as softly as he sat down.

“Because of this,” I said, raising my shirt up to show him my right nipple.

Greg gasped, seeing the illusion of a nipple ring on my right nipple with the Roman letters Gamma Alpha Eta inscribed on it. He looked up to Joey and watched him with a look of respect as Joey flashed his own right nipple at us.

“What do I have to do?” Greg’s said, his enslaved persona now in control and very willing to proceed.

I said, “Simple. Take off your earring and never put it back on.”

“But...” he said, hesitating.

“We’re waiting, Greg,” Joey said before turning around and closing his eyes. “Don’t fail this test, or you’ll never get in.”

“I don’t understand,” Greg said, reaching up to his earring, then looked over at me.

I looked in his eyes and formed an empathic connection, and immediately began pushing against the confusion. I pushed hard. Very hard, actually, and once I was passing through his emotional tide, I set out feeling my way through his emotions searching for their sources. I waded through the streams of emotions, seeking out the ones that felt they didn’t belong. There were hundreds of forks in the stream, and at each fork, I had to determine which way the out of place emotions were coming from in order to follow them to their source.

Suddenly there it was. A foreign energy or pattern sticking out of the riverbed, sending all sorts of pollutants downstream. With a surge of anger and fear, I lashed out at its base and found it retaliating by surging and spewing even more waste down the stream of emotions.

After I slammed it with my emotional sledgehammer twice more, I felt it suddenly expand, exploding outwards and flinging me back down the stream.

As my senses returned to the real world around me, I heard Joey announce, “GOT IT!” and knew it had worked ... so far.

Joey sputtered, “Hurry up, Tim! It’s slipperier than KY!”

I focused my telepathic senses to follow the hold Joey had on what we were calling Greg’s mental rat, and as soon as I got a hold of its tail, I quickly went after its neck.

He was right about it being slippery. Three times I had just about got it pinned down that it suddenly rewrote itself into another section of the subconscious. But on the fourth attempt, I got my mental grasp around its scrawny neck and immediately tore out its puny mind and began replacing it with a far more complex one of my creation.

“Okay, Joey. Let it go,” I said finally while keeping my mind focused on it just in case I missed something.

“What happened?” Greg said a moment later. “Did I pass the test?”

Seeing that everything was in order, I let the new, improved rat go and opened my eyes to find Greg waiting for our answer.

“Take off your earring and we’ll find out,” I said, trying not to grin.

“Uh ... Okay,” he said, reaching up and pulling its clasp off.

The moment the pin came out of his earlobe, Greg’s own face broke out into a broad grin before he said, “I guess you might say I’m all yours.”

“How do you feel?” I asked, letting myself mirror his grin.

“Like an undercover cop or something. What do you want me to do?”

“Well, for starters, tell us everything they said or did while you were a, um...”

“While I was a zombie?” Greg said, humorously. “Mike and Alex asked Kyle and me if we wanted to see where we would sleep if we got in. As soon as we were alone in the sleeping area, I just didn’t want to do anything but stand there. I guess Kyle was done first since nothing happened to me for a while.”

Joey sent, <Or copying his persona.>

Greg continued, “When they did get to me, I felt everything for me change. I saw how important it was to become a Gamma Alpha Eta brother. I wanted to do whatever Mike or any of the other Etas asked me to do. I knew how to make myself forget things, and then remember them when I needed to. And what’s really cool is I can even make up something and believe it when I need to.

“I guess you know all that already. Let’s see ... They really didn’t say much of anything. Oh. Mike asked if some guy ... Richardson, I think, was going to try any of us out before we were officially in. Alex said something like, ‘You know Wally. He’s already asking me about the new recruits.’”

“Richardson again,” Joey said. “Sounds like he’s above Mike.”

Greg said, “You might want to get Nick in on this. I think he’s going to meet the guy this weekend.”

“Nick was next on our list anyway,” I said while probing Greg really quick to make sure the rat was still working right. “Did they say anything else?”

“Just instructions on what to do. Sorry about giving you guys the cold shoulder. They told us to get our ears pierced and to start spending all our time with the other initiates or full brothers. We’re not to have any sex, drink, smoke, stuff like that until told otherwise, and to keep our grades up because they were important for our cover. Then they told us to make ourselves forget everything except looking around and then go back to the party.”

“Has any of the other brothers told you anything that you had to forget later?”

“Oh yeah ... Just today too. Blake told Nick and I that we were for sure getting in and told us about what they did after seven o’clock. Get this! The Etas all workout in the nude!”

“Really?” I said, truly surprised.

Joey said, “I wonder why Fred never remembered that.”

I shrugged at him, then said to Greg, “What do they do afterward? Suck each other off?”

“No! Or at least we didn’t. You would have really liked it. Blake told us to get the maximum performance out of our bodies, we had to concentrate on keeping ourselves hard while we worked out. He kept talking about how hard it made him working out in the nude, and man, you should have seen his. I swore it looked like it would explode sometimes.”

I said to Joey, “That does explain the way Fred got so turned on working out.”

Joey asked Greg, “Anything else?”

“Nothing except that we were all supposed to start eating a special diet. I got the list of what we could eat somewhere. Do you want to see it?”

I said, “Show me tomorrow. I think we better go do Nick before it gets any later.”

Greg asked anxiously, “What do you want me to do until then?”

“You know you have to hide everything about our visit from yourself and the Etas, right?”

“Yes. And you’re the only two who can tell me to take my earring off and bring all my memories back.”

“Right. What we need is any information about what goes on behind the scenes, who’s in control of who, and things like that. Maybe try pumping Blake and others for information. Don’t take any risks, though. Try and make it look like your natural curiosity, not something more. The most important thing you can do is not to get caught, okay?”

“Yes sir!” he said, making a mock a salute. “I’ll crack my cyanide filled filling open and swallow it before they can even ask me my name.”

I said seriously, “Suicide is not an option.”

Greg said just as seriously, “Okay. Understood.”

After we left Greg to wake his cousin up, Joey said, “Shit, Tim. Maybe you shouldn’t make Nick so eager to die for our cause.”

“I didn’t make him like that. It’s part of the original rat’s programming. If I change it, there’s another chance they will find it and trace it back to us,” I said before knocking on Nick’s door.

“FUCK!” we heard Nick’s voice say inside. “WHOEVER IT IS, GO AWAY!”

“What are you doing, Nick?” I said through the door. “Jerkin’ off to one of my pornos again?”

“And what if I am?!” he replied as we heard the TV shut off.

“Shit, Tim. He was.” Joey said, peeking out through Nick’s eyes.

“Come on, Nick. Put your little buddy away and let us in. Or do you want Lenny to find out you like watching After School Watersports.”

“Shit,” Nick said, opening the door.

After we walked in and Nick closed the door, Joey and I both couldn’t help but glance down at the raging hardon which was struggling to get back out of his boxer shorts.

Nick asked, “Well? What do you want? I’m trying to get some sleep.”

“We’re here to test you,” Joey said, then gave me a shrug when I looked at him in surprise.

“Test me?” Nick said doubtfully.

I said, more for Joey’s benefit, “Never mind what Joe said, Nick. I forgot to tell him that the rat comes when it’s called.”

Joey asked, amused, “Oh yeah? Mind telling me what its name is?”

I said, “It doesn’t have a name. Does it, Nick. It just knows when it is supposed to come out.”

Nick said, “What are you talking about? Come on, guys. I really have to get some sleep. It’s not my fault you two quit.”

“You still don’t get it, do you, Nick,” I said, flashing the illusionary nipple pin at Nick then walking around him, inspecting him like a piece of meat. “Perhaps Mike was wrong about you.”

Nick merely blinked when his enslaved persona took over, then he asked, “Mike? Wrong about what?”

“Oh, just that he thought Richardson wanted someone like you. Aren’t you supposed to meet him this weekend or something?”

Nick asked a bit breathlessly, “Richardson? How do you know him?”

“Let’s just say we were present in a very important discussion about whether Richardson would get to try any of the new initiates before the initiation.”

“Yeah,” Joey said, seeing what I was trying to do. “Was that before or after Janice gave you that blowjob?”

“I don’t remember. I think it was before. Maybe Mike remembers. Oh yeah. Mike said that you can work out in the nude if you want, but you still can’t have any sex until we say. Got that?”

“Yes sir,” Nick said immediately. “Does that mean I’m not going to have to watch that video anymore?”

“Which video?” I asked, confused.

“The one that teaches you how to give blowjobs. I’m supposed to study it every night before I go to bed so that I know what I’m doing when I give Master Richardson a blowjob.”

I managed not to visually react to that before saying, “Oh, that tape. I thought you were talking about the pornos that I gave you. Who’s in it? Anybody you know?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said, suddenly concerned.

“We made a new one last month, and I was wondering if they’re using it yet,” I said, realizing he was starting to disbelieve me again.

“A new one? I don’t think so. Alex said his mentor gave it to him for his first time with Richardson and wanted to give it to me because I was cute. Was I supposed to get a different tape?”

Joey announced, “Got it.”

“Got what?” Nick said before he felt his mind’s very center get torn out.

“Got what?” Nick repeated ten minutes later, not recalling he had said it before.

Joey mysteriously said, “The answer to all your problems.”

Nick replied, irritated, “What does that mean?”

“Nothing. Just take off your earring.”

Nick gave a frustrated sigh as he slipped the clasp off and started pulling the pin out of his ear.

Just as with Greg, Nick grinned when it was out of his ear and said, “Now I understand.”

“I told you it was the answer to all your problems,” Joey said, trying not to give in to the contagious grinning.

“Okay, Nick,” I said, wiping off my own grin, “Tell us everything they didn’t want you to remember.”

Nick’s story was pretty much the same as Greg’s, except he had gone alone with Mike and Alex to see the sleeping area, and after Nick’s persona was copied and the rat programming was done, Alex asked Mike if he could talk to Nick alone for a few minutes, which Mike agreed to.

Alex told Nick that he would meet one of his masters next weekend and that Master Richardson was going to like Nick a lot. He offered Nick to help him please his Master Richardson, and that’s when he gave Nick the tape. After Nick called Alex master while thanking him, Alex quickly corrected him.

“I’m not anyone’s master, Nick. Master Richardson is my master just as much, if not more, as he is yours. And if Mike wasn’t an Eta, we’d be calling him master also. You should call any of the leading council sir, and that includes me and Mike. But you don’t have to call me that when you and I are alone, okay? I’m Wally’s favorite, and because you remind me of me as a freshman, I want to help you become Wally’s new favorite before I graduate this Christmas. Just like someone did for me.”

Nick had agreed enthusiastically, his programming making any suggestion made by a council member a top priority in his life. After Alex gave him instructions concerning the tape and forgetting what had happened, they left to back to the party.

That night as I cuddled up with my bottle of Jack Daniel’s, I started thinking about how we could use Greg, Nick, and other initiates to gather information and maybe even help us get Sarah away from them if we could ever find her. I had some fairly good ideas, but after a while, my brain sank into a drunken state of depression. I laid there for some time remembering all the gross and perverted things Joey and I had done together and ended up imagining Nick doing those things to some overweight out of shape middle-aged man that I thought Richardson would be. I fell asleep very disturbed, seeing myself no better than Steven for what I thought would happen to Nick.

You’re probably wondering why I bothered to drink when all I did was get depressed. I drank because in between the depressive moments, I would forget everything and have - not happy moments, but moments that I was free of the pressure I felt weighing down on me.

Joey and I decided the next morning we had to keep our appearances up just in case we found a way to get in the fraternity. So even though I had a hangover, I went to classes that morning in order to hopefully get my grades back up.

Having lost the fear of our telepathic activity being detected while in the dorms, Joey and I took as many shortcuts as we could in catching up on our course work. We even went as far as having a few people copy other people’s homework for us and had two guys down the hall that were in our English Comp class write our already late three page papers for us.

We had a good reason for all of this dishonesty. Joey and I were very busy Thursday and Friday flushing out more mental rats to convert, and simply couldn’t do that, go to class, and catch up on our school work at the same time.

Joey and I got pretty good at catching those slippery rodents, but we almost screwed up really bad with the first guy Greg and Nick brought with them to our room.

The first screw up was the fact that even though Nick and Greg had complied with our orders while under the Eta’s rat had control, they and Olsen all left saying they had to go right after they got there. We saw the problem immediately. The only way for them to help us would be to ask them to remove their earrings.

But instead of doing that in front of Olsen (which would have made him very suspicious), we arranged to have Austin stay away from his and Greg’s room, and simply programmed Nick and Greg to get Olsen’s rat to surface by talking about secret Eta stuff while Joey and I sat in our room next door grabbing and replacing the rat with our own.

The second thing we screwed up with Olsen was after we finished, we knocked on their door and asked them to take off their earrings. While all three of them did so, Olsen’s face showed shock instead of a grin.

Apparently, Olsen had gotten his ear pierced when he was still in high school, but had gone and had another hole made so he could wear both his expensive stud and the one that the Etas supplied. So when we had asked them to remove their earrings, Olsen complied but removed the wrong one first and noticed the other two had removed their Eta pins which he thought was impossible. Luckily Joey responded immediately by asking him again, then we were relieved to see his grin while holding out the Eta earring in his hand.

By Friday night, Joey and I were exhausted from all the use of our telepathy. I realized that telepathy was just like a muscle. For over two months, I had refrained from using my telepathic abilities as much as possible. While it hadn’t lost any of its strength per se, I just couldn’t use it as much without feeling tired or strained.

I suspected Janice had been taking breaks from using hers when she had been mud wrestling the night of the party. From the other Eta recruits we had inducted into our gang of spies, we determined there had been four telepaths there, two male, two female, and while they all had taken turns copying personas and installing rats, Mike had checked each one he didn’t do himself.

Even though Alex wasn’t one of the telepaths, it was clear he had some sort of seniority over Janice and the other two telepaths. Mike was the only one he seemed to be on equal footing with. I had a sense they were friends, but I had a sense Alex’s position was more about Alex being Richardson’s favorite than anything else.

That Saturday and Sunday seemed to last forever. Nick and another guy named Conner spent the whole weekend with their “Master Richardson,” and we both were worried about what Nick was being put through. It wasn’t just our concern for our friend, mind you. There was a possibility that Richardson might discover my alteration of their rat’s program that allowed my own rat to interrupt and control theirs. If he did find it and then caught our rat, we could find ourselves in deep shit.

That was the first weekend the twins came to visit us. Believe it or not, it was actually pretty difficult to keep the twin’s presence a secret with all the Eta initiates around. We simply didn’t want any of them to see the twins, even if they had our rat in their heads. The twins were our backup in case we were discovered and attacked, and the element of surprise was their best defense and would aid their offense significantly.

One of us spent a day back at the dorms bored out of their mind, trying not to feel like rat bait. The other was with the twins at an apartment we were renting just for their weekend visits. That lucky cat had a wonderful time in between the half-hourly checks through the share link, making sure the cheese for the big rat was still uneaten. I elected myself to be the cheese on Saturday, and Joey stupidly agreed.

You see, Joey slept with the twins Friday night, so that meant I got to sleep with them Saturday night. What’s the difference? Easy. Who can sleep when at any moment your mind may come under attack? Nick didn’t leave until early Saturday morning, so I didn’t have any major problems going to sleep Friday night, but I think Joey only got about three hours Saturday night.

When Nick finally got back Sunday night around midnight, Joey gave him the trick question, and to our relief, he took his earring off. Because we wanted to have a night together with the twins, Joey only checked our rat for tampering, then left for the apartment when he found none.

Joey looked so tired when he came into the bedroom that I couldn’t help myself in expressing my affection for him, only to be shocked by his reaction.

“Come off it, Tim. I want to do this with the twins, not you,” he said, avoiding my mouth in our embrace and struggling to get away.

I let him go and didn’t move, disbelieving what had just happened. I suddenly could sense the rat in Joey’s own mind, a rat that I had created and had given control over my Joey. I just stood there, feeling that black glob sticking to Joey’s soul like black super glue grow more undeniably present, more obvious to my senses and mind, more evident of my betrayal and the evil thing I had done to my best friend.

Honey put herself between us, blocking my sight of Joey hurriedly undressing to get in bed with Joy. When I looked in her eyes, it was clear that they knew. Just as I started to shake from realizing someone else knew my horrible secret, Honey stopped it with a clear empathic message.

<<it’s okay>> <<we don’t blame you>>

There were no actual words to her message for emotions don’t use them. But never had either of the twins ever transmitted a message of such clarity, or so unquestionable as to its meaning. I nearly jumped from surprise when for a moment I thought she had said it aloud.

After getting over my surprise, I couldn’t help but feel better knowing that at least they thought I had done the right thing, even if I didn’t in my heart. So when Honey teasingly attempted to use her enslaving call on me, I grinned and said, “Yes, mistress. I’m coming to fuck you now, mistress.”

Something told me that the twins were going to try something that night, and I was right. After Joey and I had both finished having our fun, they suddenly released an incredibly powerful call for submission on the two of us.

Joey immediately fell under their control, and even though I also obeyed their command to mount, I was struggling against their grasp on my being. I never knew when Honey and I had switched positions, for it wasn’t until I finally reversed the direction of the empathic control that I found my arms leaving her breasts above me that I realized I was now on the bottom.

I was just barely holding Honey’s empathic attack off when suddenly she cut all resistance and submitted herself to my own control. And take control I did. She was back on the bottom the next moment, and as my lust for controlling her every thought filled my already hard dick, my slow humps became faster and deeper.

My concentration was broken by Joey climbing on top of me, attaching his lips to the side of my mouth as he attempted to push me on top of Honey. My confusion was overcome by the feel of his cock against my back door, and while Joy frantically tried frenching my mouth, everything was clear to me.

The twins never intended to reassert their controls into me. They wanted to regain the trust they had lost by submitting themselves to my own empathic controls. Honey’s submission hadn’t been just her own. The two girls were so closely linked emphatically that everything I had done to Honey had also affected Joy in the same way. Joy had already set Joey up to give me what she thought I had wanted earlier, but for once, the girls had misread me. I had never truly wanted physical sex with him. There had always been an honest love within the sex that simply could not be forced by the twins or anyone. I thought I had lost that love from Joey forever, and while Joey began making untrue love to me, I believed that through and through.

Leaving the comfort and safety of the apartment was a very stupid thing to do in my state. But I left anyway to wander aimlessly around the sleeping campus, then finally returned to the dorm sometime after three, and was promptly piss ass drunk and unconscious by four.

I heard Joey’s voice say from somewhere over the horizon, “Tim, wake up, you stupid drunk!”

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