Chapter 47

She knew the effects when taken intravenously, but she’d never taken it orally. It was insidious. The powerful sedative had crept up on her like a lion, stalking through the tall grass while she drank from the watering hole. So subtle, in fact, that she mistook it for normal intoxication, because she had hardly any experience drinking alcohol.

Endora had to tell Mike and Charmagne.

She pushed off Amelia and stumbled forward, wondering where her kneecaps went. For the first time, she noticed several others having similar difficulties standing. In fact, many had already sought out chairs to rest in, or simply descended to the ground to sit. A few even laid down on the cold pavement.

“Mike,” she yelled, but her breathing was so shallow, it was hardly louder than her normal speaking voice, and completely drowned out by the loud music and murmuring conversation.

It felt so good to laugh, and Mike and Charmagne laughed a lot, holding onto each other for support. He noticed how much firmer she felt under her uniform than she had before. She’d lost a lot of weight over the past several weeks. To the point where she’d regained her feminine shape. Though still soft, her belly was less pronounced, and her waist had narrowed. Her arms and thighs were slimmer. Her breasts were smaller too, and firmer, sitting high on her chest. The breasts of a teenage girl.

From the corner of his eye Mike noticed Linda watching them intently. He couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. She’d lost everything in the world that meant anything to her. Her career, her school, her students, her house. Kristin. Despite her losses, however, it was impossible to overlook how cruel and vindictive she’d been. She was a danger to them all, and the decision to exile her was the right one.

He saw Endora weaving her way through the crowd and his eyebrows sank. She was another menace they’d have to figure out what to do with. She was out of control, which is exactly how she looked at the moment. She could barely walk, and her extreme intoxication amused him.

“Whope! Gotta sit,” Charmagne said, abruptly plopping down into a chair next to Linda. She took a deep breath and turned to face her with half-closed eyes. “What the fuck’re you lookin’ at?”

Linda said nothing, and merely stared back. Charmagne huffed, but left it alone.

Endora managed to make it to them, only to collapse onto the ground at their feet. Mike laughed. So hard that he had to sit. Down he went, sinking to the ground next to Endora while she struggled to turn herself over onto her back. Charmagne slid off her chair and landed on her ass.

“Oops!” she said, opening her mouth to laugh, but all that came out was a cough and a deep, breathy sigh.

“Drugged,” Endora muttered after much effort. “She ... drugged...”

Mike didn’t have the first clue what she was talking about, but the pavement looked so very comfortable. Rest. He needed rest. He’d been going full tilt for weeks, and his body demanded it now. Linda could wait until the morning.

Charmagne somehow managed to remain upright a while longer, and her face was compressed into an unusual mix of emotions. Surprise maybe? Or anger? Shock? Determination? It was too difficult for Mike to comprehend at the moment. He felt so damned tired. Charmagne must have been sleepy too, because she finally tipped over backward, smacking her head on the asphalt.

“You’ve seen her tits,” Eric said, resting his crossed forearms on the dining table shooting platform, and his chin on his arms. “What do you think? On a scale of one to ten?”

Kali stood at the railing, peering over, but the mist was too thick to see anything except the glow of the dormitory’s exterior lights. They hadn’t heard from the Staff Sergeant for a while now. Not since she gave the all clear. They could hear faint music, but nothing more.

“I don’t know,” Kali said, trying to ignore him.

“Come on, Sarge. You’ve got pretty big ones yourself. Doesn’t that make you some kind of an expert, or something?”

“Draper!” she shouted, turning to him with an impatient, scolding glare. “Shut it! Get on the damn scope and tell me if you can see anything down there.”

“Probably a fucking orgy,” Eric grumbled, turning on the sight.

The low battery indicator appeared. Shit. He and Sgt. Chapman had run it down watching Endora and Grace fuck all night on top of Leavitt Hall, but they never got around to replacing it. The little battery icon had no bars left, so there was no telling how much longer it would stay on. He decided not to mention it to the Sergeant.

He tilted the scope down and saw green light flashing from behind the foggy shroud. The hairs stood up on the back of his neck and he stiffened.

“Shit, shit, shit! Delta-Alpha-Charlie! Delta-Alpha-Charlie, Sarge!”

The color drained from Kali’s face. When the mist first began to shroud the mountaintops several days ago, Charmagne became worried about the lack of visibility down to the cove. She asked Mike to modify some of the spare IR laser pointers to function as beacons. Each had four settings. Always on, blinking, a pattern unique to each soldier, and a fourth pattern. An emergency flash designated Delta-Alpha-Charlie. Their distress call.

Kali lifted the radio. “Cedar Keep, Raptor’s Roost. What’s your status? Over.”

She waited several seconds before repeating the call, then she checked the radio’s display. It was tuned to the correct frequency. She tuned it to one of the preprogrammed private channels.

“Iron Valkyrie, this is Raptor’s Roost! Please indicate your status, over! Shit!” She turned to Draper. “Can you see anything?”

“Nothing! Just fucking clouds!”

His focus shifted to the low battery indicator and he gritted his teeth. Fuck.

Linda bent forward in her chair and carefully spun the volume knob on Charmagne’s radio until Kali’s urgent voice dimmed to silence. Charmagne hovered in a semi-conscious twilight, her eyes half closed and unfocused, her movements nothing but autonomic responses to stimuli. Small turns of her head or twitches of her fingers. Linda looked at the limp bodies lying all around her. Few of them moved, and none made a sound. Although the music still played, it sounded eerily silent.

Linda nudged Charmagne with her bare foot. “You awake?” A soft groan blew from her lips and she lolled her head, but nothing more. Linda nudged her again. “Hey, you fucking dyke! Wake up!”

No response. Just small, incidental movements. She was slipping deeper and deeper into unconsciousness by the second. About time, Linda thought. She drank an entire milligram of Rohypnol. They all did.

Linda had divided nearly the entire one hundred milliliter vial of the powerful sedative among the eleven bottles, after using a sewing needle and a hammer to punch a tiny pinhole in the top of each screw cap. Just big enough to slide the syringe needle through. A small blob of black nail polish covered it neatly.

She stood and cautiously nudged Charmagne several more times, just to be sure. Then she pulled her leg back and used the side of her foot to kick Charmagne in the jaw as hard as she could.

“No one punches me, you fucking cunt.”

When Charmagne didn’t move to defend herself, Linda bent to slide her sidearm from its holster. Then she shot her four times in the torso. Dark blood bloomed across her uniform.

“Shots fired!” Kali shouted, even though Eric didn’t need to be told. They’d both seen the flashes through the clouds, and heard the distinctive pop of small arms fire.

Despite the cool night air, sweat tickled Eric’s temples as he peered through the night sight. The swirling mist was amorphous. Several times it thinned, so tantalizingly close to being translucent enough to see through, before it maddeningly thickened up again.

“I can’t see shit, Sarge! Fuck!”

“I’m going down there,” Kali said.

“We’re not supposed to leave this post, Sergeant! Those are direct orders from the Staff Sergeant herself.”

“Someone’s shooting down there, and we have no clue what’s happening!”

Eric looked at her and considered what they knew. The Staff Sergeant’s order to monitor Linda. The distress beacon. Four gunshots with no return fire. They both had a pretty good idea. They weren’t under attack. Someone just got executed. Eric nodded.

“Go. I’ll cover you as best I can.”

Kali hoisted her pack with the med kits onto her back and shouldered her carbine, then ran for the stairs. Eric put his eye back on the night sight. The battery icon was now flashing.

Linda stood over Endora’s unconscious form. The naked teen didn’t have the body mass of Charmagne, so she’d already fully succumbed to the sedative.

“Think that was funny, huh? Breaking into my house. Attacking Kristin. Stealing from me. Drugging me. Siccing your two lesbian bitches on me to ruin my life!”

Linda raised the pistol and fired once, putting a perfectly round hole in Endora’s chest, a few inches above her left nipple. Blood rushed out of the wound, spilling across her chest and onto the pavement beneath her.

“Are you laughing now?”

Eric witnessed the execution.

For the briefest moment, the clouds parted and he saw her, standing over Endora with a pistol in her hand. She fired once. Then blood, which appeared black on the scope’s monochrome viewfinder, poured from the girl’s chest. She killed her. Linda fucking killed that girl.

Eric moved to place the crosshairs over her, but a thick cloud of fog drifted in to block his view.

There wasn’t much time. Those guards at the lookout would have undoubtedly heard the gunshots, and were probably already on their way down the mountainside. Fucking Kali. If only she’d been at movie night too, Linda could have gotten them all. How long does it take for them to run down the mountainside? Ten minutes? Fifteen?

Too long to stop her.

Linda squatted beside Mike with the pistol held loosely in her grip. He hovered on the verge of total unconsciousness. Drifting in and out. Lying still one moment, moving the next. She ran her fingers through his wavy, dark hair, then traced along the contours of his face.

“You are so unbelievably handsome. How I would have loved to fuck you.”

Her eyes travelled down his body. Then she reached for him, cupping his groin. Feeling the manhood that had so captivated her.

“All of us in that basement were supposed to die that day. But because of you, we cheated death, and we’ve been living on borrowed time ever since.” She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. “I don’t want to live any more, Mike. I’m done. There’s nothing left for me now.”

A cool gust of wind blew her hair into her face, and she wiped the tears that had formed in her eyes. Then she mounted him, straddling his hips and settling her weight down on top of him. This is the position, she thought. This is how I would have fucked him. On top, riding his big cock while he played with my tits.

How to do it? She placed the barrel against his chest. In the heart, like Endora and Charmagne? She pressed the gun against the bottom of his chin. Or in the head?

A break in the clouds opened and Eric saw her. Sitting on top of Mike with the gun pointed at his head. Shit. He sighted in on her. Calculating the windage would be a guessing game. Then he saw her hair blow. West to east. He dialed it in with a click.

Slow, deep breaths. He eased his shoulders and took up the slack in the trigger. The battery light continued to flash. The scope would blank out at any moment. Then, from the bottom of the viewfinder, he caught sight of Haylee’s unconscious naked form.