Chapter 6

“Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

There is a reason why most of the world’s religions were founded by cultures living in the desert. By day the sun bakes and addles your brain and after sunset you’re then shivering out in the dry desert cold looking up at a night sky that is 100 times brighter and far more majestic than you’ve ever seen before in your entire life. In the high deserts of Arizona (and Afghanistan) the moon sometimes looks so big that you could reach out and touch it with your bare hands. And the stars, there are gazillions of them, not just the few brighter ones you can see at night in the big city, washed out by light pollution.

Under this big sky, you always feel very small and quite unimportant. Insignificant really, compared to the wonders of the cosmos stretched out above us.

You just can’t help but do a whole lot of soul-searching ... and I did, while out on endless deployments in the Big Sandbox. For quite a long time I second-guessed myself and chewed endlessly on the memories of how I had gotten revenge for Patty, and if there wasn’t a dozen of other ways that I could have accomplished this better ... and far cleaner.

It was pointless to stew over this, I eventually decided, as it was now just water that had passed under the bridge a long time ago. I’d made a decision (for good or ill) based upon morality, that something was wrong ... and I was going to fix it – by any and all means necessary. It was later, after eight years spent in the US Army Rangers, that I began to make my peace with my past, and decided, rather firmly, that continuing my military career was not in my future. Now, about four years later on, it seemed that I was still haunted by some of those old ghosts.

That was another realization that eventually pierced into the thickness of my skull, sitting out in the dark on some nameless hill in Afghanistan under that huge overwhelming sky, that today’s military isn’t about fighting a war based on morals, good vs bad etc, the free world vs facism or communism anymore. Today’s military is entirely about keeping the politicians happy and maintaining the status quo while keeping the money train flowing smoothly to defense contractors. This is what happens when an empire reaches stagnation, I eventually decided. Societies on the decline will wage endless wars and create demand for unnecessary conflicts in order to keep the bacon flowing to the elites and the corporations, and keep the economy stimulus for the rich going. All the while, the regular citizen will see endless inflation, stagnating wages, and the disappearance of good quality jobs ... and hope for a better future.

Eventually, history tells us, the middle class completely disappears. This is what happened to post-Columbus Spain, pre-revolutionary France, Rome, pharaonic Egypt, classical Greece, Ottoman Turkey, and literally every empire in the world. Sooner or later, all the money goes to the military after enough incompetent leaders and people with everything handed to them become entrenched as the ruling class, and their appetite to take everything around them only grows.

Morality then disappears, and most likely the root historical primal cause was always tribalism and the endless striving for hegemony. The Drum Major Instinct, and the fear of the tribe just over the next hill, that’s the problem, maybe. Constant war becomes a curse of the elite upon the ordinary people just trying to live their lives. The elites create a fear ... and then a means to profit by it, and this is repeated endless through history. A non-moral war is excess resources poorly spent ... a crime against economic (and then societal) principles.

The special forces officers and senior NCOs that I most admired had caught on to all of this somewhat before I had, and all but the most cynical ones were separating from the service at the next earliest opportunity ... and when I figured this out too, I then did the same. A special force NCO or officer will climb ranks a lot slower than a normal one, even though they are more elite. They tend to have too much character and the good ones are smart and opinionated, and they’ll want intelligent and reasonable explanations for why they’re being sent out on missions endangering their men’s lives. They are only tolerated by our superiors because they are skilled in this very specialized job, but invariably some sort of invisible black mark gets into our personnel jackets, noting that we’re not really suitable for promotion past field grade. We all (or most of us) caught on to this fast, and I even noted this with the some of the elite Marine Recon units too.

If there is no reward for taking risk, then no one wants to take risk. It all became about doing our time and getting everyone’s ass going home safely afterwards, no one getting hurt - the Mission be damned. No one ever even joked about ‘winning the war’, and I didn’t want to become just another time-server. Once, I’d reminded myself when I made the decision to become a civilian once more, I’d taken huge risks and significantly risked my life on the basis of a Moral decision to ‘do the right thing’.

I’d decided now, leaving the Arizona border driving north into Colorado on what I hoped would be my last day of travel, that I’d indeed made the right decisions ... then ... and afterwards. Hell, now that I’d put a bit more perspective on the matter, I’d decided that I was starting to ‘like’ that relatively innocent kid I’d been, and that probably I’d done exactly the right thing after all, consequences be damned!

When I returned at my Lair of Villainy after my successful bit of breaking and entering trip, it didn’t me long to figure out what sort of gold nuggets I’d panned out on this trip. The shit the gang had been up to, for years, just defied any simple explanation other than ‘if mom and dad can do it, so can we’. At the root of things, it was all about money and power. Isn’t it always?

Even after just a few hours after school of reviewing video files and email evidence late the following evening, after a long, long night’s sleep back at home, I saw more than enough court admissible proof to bring the entire state police down here to do a complete clean sweep. That (I think) was my original goal ... but when I started to really chart out the assorted crimes, names and dates, a new major co-conspirator was revealed whose name hadn’t been found yet anywhere in my criminal structure flowchart. Amy Hutchins - rich-bitch, socialite, cheerleader, and full-time professional ‘mean girl’.

In a way, it made sense that Amy was the primary locus to the female half of the way things were done at our school, and across the county, but I didn’t get her separate section of the gang organizational table charted correctly the first or even the third time I tried drawing it out. Like when I was trying to figure out what sort of box to sort Reggie into, I had similar problems figuring out to my conclusive satisfaction what Amy’s culpability was.

She wasn’t the head cheerleader or homecoming queen, nor was she the head girl at anything she put her claws into, sports, choral society, drama club and so forth ... but she was always pictured standing next to those girls. Her social media photos especially tied her at the hip to Lorena, who was the head cheerleader and Homecoming Queen, and general all-around women’s sport’s team captain and the top social queen bee. If Lorena liked you, you were ‘in’ and got invited into the better school social clubs and organizations and all of the most fun parties. If you were ‘out’, like Porky Patty, then you were tagged for disposal, marked as fair game for anyone/everyone to abuse and ridicule.

Just like Reg’s partnership with Frank, Amy seemed to have a similar sort of symbiotic relationship with Lorena. It was obvious from Reg’s long, long chain of emails with Frank just who was really the driver behind the wheel, steering the focus of the gang’s events ... and now as I started to painstakingly track the course of the gang’s more recent events (from the about the time of Patricia’s suicide onward) I started to understand that I was really only seeing and understanding about half of what was really going on.

Finding Reggie’s hidden trove of secrets gave me a complete comprehensive ‘big picture’ view of the boy’s gang’s activities, but the guys in their private correspondence to each other weren’t really bragging too much about what had been done, and to whom. The general attitude seemed to be, once it was over with, it wasn’t at all cool to keep talking about it. Reg certainly had the talent of keeping his pie hole shut and kept to the #1 club golden rule – don’t talk about the drugging and raping girls club. Nothing first-hand found on Reggie’s computer or cd files was going to conclusively convict him of anything, other than perhaps having very poor taste. But there was something in Amy’s frequent emails to Reg that hinted and suggested (tactlessly) there might be some actual fire to this rather smoke-filled affair.

Reggie and Amy were not the school’s power couple and their relationship, which also stretched from middle school onwards, tended to run in cycles between hot and cold. Currently, per their most recent emails, the relationship was somewhere in-between, but certainly they were still friends with benefits, as the expression goes. One entire subdirectory on Reg’s PC contained ten different recorded video chat sessions where Amy had stripped naked, danced and masturbated on-camera for him. Whether he reciprocated or not, there was no evidence on his computer. One of Mini-CD video discs from last summer did show the young couple having very consensual sex in some bedroom, probably hers. It was a decently hot private sex tape, as teenaged self-shot movies go. I watched it a time or two, just for educational purposes, and then deleted out my copy of it and the backups. They were proof of nothing, and if it ever turned out to become important later, the original was still safe in Reggie’s stash.

I almost missed the most interesting nugget of video gold, which was hidden almost in plain sight, a DVD-R disc labeled WinXP reinstall files. I’d checked that disc which contained only two data files, setup.exe and winxpsetup.tor, both dated from late last spring, and I promptly ignored it. No one in their right mind would want to reinstall WinXP from a dodgy looking torrent file version that probably had built-in computer viruses encoded into it, if they already owned a legal copy of the software. But sometime around o’dark-thirty my subconscious began to nibble at me with more curiosity. Even if it was just a cracked bootleg copy from off of the net, why was it stashed away next to the other more secret stuff?

The next afternoon, I setup a clean external drive on my laptop and double-clicked the setup.exe file, just to see what happened. It promptly asked me for a password, which I guessed correctly on the third try time was ‘AmyHutchins’, and watched the big heavily compressed executable file install onto my safe external drive an enormous, nearly two-hour long video file. The metadata for the video read simple enough – ‘Spring Cheer Initiation’ ... and it didn’t disappoint. No, it didn’t show all that much that was blatantly criminally illegal ... for most of the participants anyway, but it did give me some superb wanking material for the next few days until I started paying closer attention to the finer details.

The rules were quite simple, as Callie Graham, the ‘then’ graduating senior head cheerleader reminded the group of over a dozen assembled sophomore and junior girls dressed in their spirit bunny uniforms, that if they wanted pre-selection to join the top cheerleading squad that fall, that they must obey without questioning any and every order given to them. If they left the room before the entire initiation ceremony was completed, they would forever be banned, from the senior cheer team and from the bunnies as well. In fact, they would be removed, permanently, from every school club or other activity ... and this non-compliance could also affect any college scholarship offers later on. Then, once all of the girls had spoken up to affirm their willingness to complete the initiation the fun began.

I only vaguely remembered Callie, who was then two years ahead of me and about to graduate, but I recalled immediately that she had been a looker. Already standing about six feet tall with long blonde hair, she was dressed to command her younger charges ... wearing a black leather under-bust corset, a garter belt (no panties) and white stockings ... and an evil smile, plus a riding crop. She ordered the fourteen younger underclass girls to strip naked except for their green stockings (our school color, or pretty close to it). Now all naked, the girls were ordered to put their hands up behind their heads and once this was done, the senior head cheerleader began cane their bare asses with the crop. Hard. After she’d struck each girl three or four times, just to get their butts warmed up, she called in the rest of the current senior team members to each select an initiate and then whip their asses, cunts, stomach, and tits without mercy. The first girl to drop out of formation and cry was ‘out’, Callie laughed, while starting to rub her open bare crotch with her crop.

“Real sluts love it rough,” she reminded the younger girls, “so embrace the pain and turn it into more pleasure instead!”

Frankly, the beatings lasted longer than I would have thought, taking just over ten minutes before at last the ‘weakest link’ dropped out, sobbing uncontrollably on the floor. Unceremoniously, two of the senior girls grabbed her by the hair and half-drug/pulled the girl out of the room. I didn’t recognize her at all, and I decided later that she must have transferred out to another school.

Next, Callie had them spread their legs out as wide as possible and then finger themselves with one hand while reciting loudly in unison, “I am a slut!” over and over again as the elder girls continued to spank their bright red asses until they were purple.

“I want to hear you CUM!”, Callie screamed out while fingering herself, “The last slut to cum... loudly, is gone. A real slut loves to cum, especially while being spanked ... now show me how much you love it!”

It really didn’t take very long at all. A few girls (true sluts, apparently) came strongly almost immediately as soon as their fingers touched their clits and the last two hold-outs finally came a few minutes later. It was close enough to a photo-finish that a small conference was held to vote on the loser, and this brief closeup video of the assembled ringleaders showed both Lorena and Amy, the two most high-ranking officers of the junior girls conferring with a masked but partially nude adult figure, also clad in just a black corset, displaying a mature (and hairy) crotch. I didn’t have to squint at the figure long to guess that it was the facility coach of the cheer squads, Ms. Graham. I always suspected that she was a dyke from her attitude and very butch haircut. I got ample proof later.

Once the ‘loser’ was determined, the remaining dozen girls were order to pair up and face each other, as Callie ordered the sets of girls to now finger their partners to another orgasm, while the ass spanking continued. The rule this time was that the girl who could not make her partner orgasm would be out. This was a little harder for some of the girls to accomplish, but most of the gals seemed to show some bare, basic knowledge about how to jill off another gal. At least half of them, I’d say, had done this sort of thing (and more) before at various slumber parties.

“CUM, SLUTS”, Callie grunted while cumming herself fairly strongly, “true sluts love the feel and touch of another woman!” Actually, from the loud sounds of girls loudly orgasming, one right after the other, I’d say that most of these girls agreed. Once the dejected last loser was escorted out, the remaining eleven girls were quickly narrowed down again to a semi-final ten.

“Get into a daisy-chain circle on the floor sluts, mouths to cunts, all of you. Any girl who even looks like she’s unwilling to eat her sister’s cunt is gone.” None were ... and all of the girls came again fairly quickly afterward. “Rotate and switch partners,” was then ordered. “A slut must know and love the taste of all of her fellow sisters, their cunt flavor and their piss ... even blindfolded. Now stand up and kneel, while spreading wide and keep fingering your nasty wet snatches.”

All of the initiates were now tied up and blindfolded and then ordered to kneel and await their mistress’s pleasure. Then the woman’s coach, Callie, Lorena and Amy each stood in the first four girls and crammed their cunts into their faces. “Lick hard and fast sluts,” the woman’s coach grunted, “until you can guess by taste, or from our cum sounds, whose clit you’re polishing.”

About half of the girls could guess correctly on the first try. If their guess was wrong, they were slapped in the face. Hard! Then they had to sample a different cunt and guess again until they could get it right. Now there were just ten girls left and they faced a more difficult challenge next.

“Now sluts, it’s time for a well-deserved break now,” Callie laughed, “so pair up and each of you grab a handful of toys from that table over there and put them to some good use in those nasty wet snatches of yours! I want to see a dildo grinding deep into every asshole, a vibrator in every cunt and ten very busy tongues all glued to your partner’s slits. I want to hear those sloppy wet holes loudly squelching and overflowing with rivers of your vaginal nectars ... and you’d better be licking up every single drop too!” Randomly, over the next half-hour or so, the moaning girls were whipped across every bare inch of their exposed flesh and they rotated their partners upon command about every five minutes or so. All much to their mistress’s satisfaction, as none of these ten were then eliminated.

“A good slut needs cock,” Callie admitted, “and we need lots of it ... as often as we can get it and in every place a boy or man can find to put it into. And since it is the primary duty of our senior cheer squad to support our teams in every way possible, it’s time for our varsity squad to get to know our potential cheer team replacements ... in the biblical sense, of course! Now on your knee’s sluts, all of you ... but leave all of your toys in-place. The guys will take them out when they need those spaces later!” She laughed