Chapter 61

The first few lazy flakes of snow wafted down as the last recognizable signs of civilization fell away on the road north out of town. The view was not enough to distract Diane after the lapse in the conversation.

The physical sensation of arousal was getting worse. It had started shortly after Richie and Cassie had visited the guest room. She had hoped she was only picking up vibes from that, yet it had persisted after they were done.

She squirmed and let out her breath as a soft, husky sigh. She wondered if Jason were doing this to her deliberately, or if she were sharing in a sexual experience he was having. Didn't Melinda mention that he had two other slaves?

Diane shuddered. Two other slaves. Diane was already part of a harem.

Her mind was still intact, as far as she could tell. All she was feeling was the physical manifestations generated by her enslaved self. Nevertheless, induced arousal did not feel much different than voluntary, and that unnerved her.

"So where the hell is this thing?" Richie finally said from the back seat.

"Is that your roundabout way of asking 'are we there yet?'" Debby asked in a mildly amused voice. Diane chuckled, grateful to feel some other emotion, albeit briefly.

"Ha, ha, very funny." Richie glanced outside. "There's nothing out here. Why the fuck would they build a motel in the sticks of the sticks?"

"Lots of towns have motels right outside the city limits," Diane said. "They tend to be cheaper than the ones in town."

"This one was definitely cheap, I seem to recall," Debby said. "And you got what you paid for, unfortunately."

"Real fleabag, huh?" Richie asked.

"Not quite that bad, but not a place I would stay by choice."

"This is weird," Diane said. "I haven't seen a single car going into town the whole drive. And was that an abandoned air field we passed on the left, Mrs. Radson?"

"I'm not sure if it's abandoned, Diane," said Debby. "It was used by a military base up in the foothills northwest of town. It's since become some sort of Department of Defense research lab."

"Heather mentioned that Brad's father was stationed there. Never let on as to what they're doing up there."

Richie snorted. "Probably making some sort of super virus or something."

"Those have been banned for decades," said Diane.

"You think a piece of paper is gonna stop the feds when they want to do something? Tell that to Jason's father."

"Okay, that's enough," Debby said in gentle admonishment. "We're about there, I see the pullout, but ... strange, the sign is ... oh dear."

Diane looked through the windshield as Debby pulled the van across the oncoming lane and over a speed bump. "Oh no, not again!"

The motel was a dilapidated, weathered, two story ruin sitting on the other side of a small parking lot littered with debris. Tall, browned weeds thrust up between cracks in the asphalt. A lamppost had fallen over, blocking the one-way entry, forcing Debby to swing around in what would have been the wrong direction.

"I have to stop here," Debby said, pulling up just short of the covered entryway. "There's too much broken glass, and I don't want to blow a tire way out here."

Diane stared at the snowflakes as they hit the windshield, heaving a heavy sigh. "Shit," she said in a tiny voice.

"Unless you can get some visions outside, this trip may have been for nothing," said Debby. "I apologize for getting your hopes up."

"Can we walk beside the building?" Diane said.

"Yes, but not very close. In fact, I wouldn't come any closer than this, those gutters along the sides could come down at any--"

The back door suddenly slid open and frigid air poured in. Richie jumped outside and came around the front of the van, sneakers crunching on glass, and bee-lined for the entrance.

Debby opened her door far enough to yell, "Just where do you think you're going, young man?!"

Richie whipped around but did not stop, backing up towards the entrance. "Where the fuck do you think I'm going?! We didn't come out here to sit on our asses and admire the fucking architecture."

"Richie, I forbid you from going in there!" Debby bellowed.

Diane cringed. She wanted to go, too, but not after that.

Richie stopped and gave Debby a contrite look. "No offense, Mrs. Radson, but you're not my mother."

Debby looked at him as if he had slapped her in the face.

"Diane, you coming?" Richie called out.

Diane glared at Richie for forcing her into this position. She gave Debby a sheepish look.

Debby sighed and spoke in a low, shaky voice. "He's right. I'm not his mother. I'm not your mother either. I guess ... I guess I need to stop acting like one."

Diane placed a hand over Debby's and squeezed it. "Mrs. Radson, please, don't stop being a mother to us. Just ... just realize that ... we have things we have to do and..."

The words just got harder to force out, and she was relieved when Debby squeezed her hand in return and offered a tiny smile. She nodded towards Diane's passenger door, then climbed out at the same time as Diane and slammed the door behind her. "I may not be your mother in the sense of authority over you, Richie," Debby said. She went around the rear of the car, opened the back door for a moment, and slammed it shut. She returned carrying a flashlight. "But I damn well will be a mother in that I won't let harm come to either of you if I can help it. I'm coming inside with you."

"Suits me fine, Mrs. Radson," Richie said, and Diane wondered if Debby realized he had meant it.

One look at Debby's misting eyes confirmed it.

Ned stared at the four-part number he had just jotted down, a cold, half-eaten slice of pizza sitting on a paper plate next to the mousepad. He still could not believe he had done it, or how easy it would have been from the start had he known exactly where to go in the maze of menu options.

He looked up at the screen. The application he had broken into did not have access to customer accounts, but it did have a customer status page. He watched as numbers changed, showing the second-to-second variations in signal strength to the modem, signal-to-noise ratio, accumulated bandwidth usage, and packets transmitted and received.

What he had really needed was right below where it said "Customer Name: Laura Bendon." That was where the IP address appeared.

Ned pulled Jason's folder into his lap. "Okay, let's see what the next step is, though I can kinda guess."

This was the part he had read over the night before and actually understood. Jason had talked about such things enough that he had already picked up some basic knowledge. What would determine the ease with which he got into the laptop was how security-conscious Laura had been when she had first set up her home network.

Ned found the answer to his chagrin only a few minutes later. The IP address did not respond to a "ping" request, which was effectively a simple packet sent to see if the machine was alive. A computer or router could be instructed not to respond to such requests. Nor did the address respond to well-known Windows open-port vulnerabilities, any of which may have allowed him to take remote control of the laptop.

He looked at the customer status page. It still hummed with surges of incoming packets interspersed with pauses. Laura was surfing the web at that very moment.

He heard footsteps and Seeger poked his head in. "Progress?"

"Some," Ned said with a sigh as he grabbed the remains of his lunch and chewed a bite before continuing. "Got her IP moniker, but so far her laptop's locked up tighter than an A-cup bra on a D-cup bosom."

"I can only hope your hacking abilities are better than your ability to create metaphor," Seeger said with a tired sigh. "Is there anything you need from me at the moment?"

"Nah, not unless ya got a way ta have Ms. Bendon open up all the ports on her laptop."

"Sadly, I do not. I wish to step out for a moment to head to the drugstore." He placed a hand over his chest. "The combination of stress and cheap pizza has given me heartburn."

"Sorry ta hear that. Yeah, I'll hold down the fort til you're back."

"I will not be gone long," said Seeger.

As Seeger's footfalls faded into the distance, Ned glanced at Jason's notes. "Hmm. A port scan, huh? Says I need some app named nmap for that."

Ned poked around on the web and soon had nmap downloaded and installed. He ran it against the IP address and waited. The long pause was telling him what he already knew, that she had nothing worth exploiting...

... until it popped out port 80 on the output.

"Port eighty? Isn't that fer the web?"

He entered the IP into a new browser window. It spun for a few seconds until it returned a simple page with a large icon of a hardhat and the words "UNDER CONSTRUCTION!" in bold underneath it.

"Huh," Ned said with a smirk. "We got a buddin' web designer here."

Except there was nowhere else to go. No links led anywhere. His only clue was when he did a "view source" on the page that he saw the version of Windows IIS which had delivered the page.

It took some searching through the notes, but he found that Jason had listed techniques for poking around a website to find things which were accessible but not linked directly. Unless the user was savvy enough to protect those pages by requiring the referred URL to be from within the site (which itself could be bypassed with ridiculous ease anyway), then a brute-force approach might work.

Jason had listed the more popular forms of free software that anyone could download and run with minimal effort -- Wordpress, phpBB, SimpleMachines, just to name a few -- and what their likely default URLs would be relative to the main page.

He started trying them in order, but each one returned the same result: 504 Not Found. As he reached the tenth entry in the list, he decided that he would hate that number to his dying days.

On the eleventh, he hit pay dirt. He was now looking at the front page of a piece of software called SuperWords!Lite, a type of blogging software. It was a bare-bones setup as well, with no more than a single post which read "testing testing testing." The post was dated well over six months ago, before she became enslaved to Nyssa.

"Huh. She prolly doesn't even remember she has this. Question is, can I exploit it? Well, if ya knew that, Nose, ya wouldn't be sittin' here talkin' ta yerself."

Jason had not listed any specific exploits for this software. Ned did some Googling and discovered that versions prior to 1.2 had a serious attack vector concerning faking the administrator login. Once past that, another exploit would allow him access to a command prompt.

He looked at the bottom of Laura's webpage and gave a small whoop of delight when he saw the words "Powered by SuperWords!Lite v1.1."

He was about to start surfing to find the secret sauce for this exploit when he heard Seeger's footsteps approaching, accompanied by a second set out of sync with his. From the report they made against the floor of the hallway, he guessed it was a woman's shoe heels.

"Uh-oh," Ned said, his mind conjuring up the worse case scenario, that Laura had caught on to his scheme had had driven to the school to put a stop to it. He closed out of everything and stuffed the paper with the IP address into his pocket and bolted from the chair. "Hey, uh, Mr. S., ya back already?" he started before he had even appeared in the doorway. "Or didja forget... hey!"

The next moment, Cassie threw her arms around him and hugged him tightly. Ned uttered a relieved sigh into her ear, glancing over her shoulder at a rather bemused Seeger. "Don't get me wrong, babe, I'm glad ta see ya," Ned said as they broke off the hug. "But what brings ya down here?"

"I just wanted to see how you were doing, that's all," Cassie said.

Ned detected the bit of huskiness to her voice and wished Seeger would go about his business. "Gettin' there. Think I jus' made a breakthrough soon after Mr. S. had left."

Seeger cleared his throat. "Miss Kendall was fortunate I had arrived when I did. I suspect her driver was giving her a hard time."

"I told him I left a textbook at school that I needed to finish my homework," Cassie said. She rolled her eyes. "When Mr. Seeger showed up, I told Harry that my mother had already called on ahead to insist he show up to let me in. Harry would believe that of my mother."

"Heh, I'd believe that of yer mother," Ned said with a smirk.

"So I can't stay long in either case," Cassie said with a distinct note of disappointment in her voice.

"Ya want me ta call ya before I leave so ya can pick me up?"

"Only if it's not too late in the day. There's some snow headed in this afternoon."

"Okay, I'll see what kinda progress I can make."

Cassie smiled. She hugged him again and gave him a kiss. She held it a bit longer than perhaps she had meant, her breath leaving her as a desirous gasp. She was slow to separate from him when he drew back, following his lips for a second.

Ned glanced past Cassie. Seeger had turned away and folded his twitching hands behind his back.

Cassie noticed his gaze and Seeger's posture. She blushed, but gave Ned a small smile before she headed for the door. "Thank you, Mr. Seeger," said Cassie. "I'll go by my locker and grab a book before heading out."

Seeger nodded and waited until she was away before turning back to Ned. "Am I to understand you and Miss Kendall are... involved?"

Ned grinned. "That's kinda puttin' it mildly, but yeah."

Seeger stood with a befuddled look on his face before clearing his throat again. "Ah ... I shall see Miss Kendall out and head to the drugstore."

Ned managed to hold back his laughter until Seeger was out of sight.

The front door of the motel had been locked with a chain and padlock, but the hinges gave way to Richie's kick. The door swung back on its chain, then fell with a crash when the rusting chain snapped.

Diane gingerly picked her way around the detritus of splintered wood and broken glass left in the wake of the door's destruction and coughed at dust suspended in the air. Behind her, a welcome beam of light swung around the remnants of the lobby.

"This is really odd," Debby said as her beam played first on the counter, then a moldy sofa, and then a moth-eaten rug. "It's like they simply closed up one day and never returned. Not even the lobby furniture was removed."

"Is it like you remember it, Mrs. Radson?" Diane asked.

"Yes, just about exactly so. I--"

Diane flinched when a crash resounded from a far corner of the room. Debby's light swung towards it, catching Richie standing before the remains of the cabinet behind the counter where the keys to the rooms had been kept. Several lay scattered across the floor.

"Richie, be careful!" Debby cried.

"Hey, I barely fucking touched it!" Richie declared.

"I believe you, and I feel that's the problem with this entire place. It may be just waiting to come down on top of us."

Richie joined them. "Then let's not waste any more time. Let's find the room and see what I can get."

"Is it even safe to go up the stairs?" Diane asked.

"Oh, for fuck's sake, it's just the furniture that's gone to shit."

"But we have no idea how long this place has been shut down."

"Look, you want to turn back now? Fine. Hand me the pendant and I'll go upstairs myself."

"No," Debby said. "If you both go, I go with you. But only if both of you go. Diane has to decide for herself."

Diane sighed. She most certainly did not want this expedition riding on her, yet now Richie looked at her expectantly. "Well ... I-I promised Heather," Diane finally sputtered. "And I don't want to go back on that."

She looked at Debby's face, but in the dimness it was unreadable. Was Debby disappointed in that answer? Would she have preferred Diane find some sort of personal fortitude with which to answer the question? Diane had no choice but to disappoint on that score. Ever since her encounter with Jason the day before, she felt like she was being guided, that nothing was really in her control anymore.

"All right," Debby said in a neutral voice. She stepped past Diane and Richie. "But I'll lead the way. If the stairs can take my weight, they probably can take yours as well."

Diane shuddered at the thought of what they would do were Debby to take a fall and leave them stranded. She would indeed be helpless, for they were as far away from the lines as they could possibly be. They already diverged quite a bit in the north part of town, and now they might as well not even exist. She could not use her power even if needed.

She glanced at Richie. Even now, when he was getting his way, he seemed on edge. It was not just the induced lust from the potion. Every now and then he would wince and press a hand to his head, as if he had a headache.

Diane followed along, bringing up the rear. Debby led them out of the lobby and suddenly stopped. Still lost in her thoughts, Diane nearly ran into Richie. She heard a thump and a rattle of chains. "No good," Debby said. "I remember the stairs being here, but there's a locked door in front of it."

"Lemme see it," Richie said and edged past her. Debby shone her beam on a chain and padlock twined around the door handle. While this chain also had some rust, it was far less weathered than the one on the outside door had been.

Richie pulled it, then kicked the door several times. "Richie, that won't do any good!" Debby shouted above the din. "It opens out."

"Shit," Richie grumbled as he gave it one last kick out of frustration.

"There's always at least two sets of stairs in any hotel I've ever been in," Diane said.

"Yes, that's what I was thinking as well, Diane," said Debby. "I just don't know where it is." She swung her light to the corridor stretching to the left into darkness. "Let's try down this way."

Diane never thought a motel could feel this creepy. As the light faded save for Debby's flashlight, she thought she saw shapes moving in the darkness. "Here it is," Debby said. "And it's open. Now, everyone, please, let's take this slowly. If I tell you to turn back, you will turn back. No arguments."

They crept up two flights of stairs. The steps were metal and less prone to weathering than wood, but a few steps creaked, sounding loud and ominous in the silence. Diane heard a sigh of relief from Debby, and they soon stepped off the stairs and stood on the second floor.

"So it was two-oh-seven, right?" Diane said in a nervous voice.

Debby flicked her beam to the nearest door, which was unmarked, only some rust stains where the nails which once held the number to the door remained. She swept her flashlight to a door on the other side, which read "217". They advanced and found another door on that side with no nameplate.

"We're going to have to count," Debby said. She jiggled her light over the unmarked door. "This is likely two-fifteen." They advanced. "Two-thirteen ... two-eleven ... two-oh-nine ... two-oh-seven!"

As it turned out, the "7" still remained, though cocked at an angle. Debby tried the door and found it locked. A few kicks from Richie solved the problem.

"What a chintzy piece of shit this place is," Richie said as he stepped over the threshold. "Most hotels I know would've broken my foot just now."

"No, it wasn't much, but it was reasonably priced," Debby said as she followed him in. She swept her beam over the moldering bed, the dust-shrouded drapes, and the water-stained desk. She flipped her light up and saw a similar stain on the drop-ceiling tiles.

Diane swallowed and forced herself over the threshold. She coughed at the smell of mold and rot. "A-all right, let's get this done, please," she said as she pulled out the pendant.

Richie stepped forward, but Debby held out an arm and stopped him.

"What?" Richie demanded. In a less hostile voice he added, "I mean, what is it, Mrs. Radson?"

"I just realized something," Debby said. "If Penny was here for the reason I think she was, then ... you may see her in a compromising position."

"In that case, I'll all for Diane's suggestion," Richie said as he pushed past Debby's arm. Diane saw the smirk on his face even in the dark. "Let's do this."

Diane nodded. She took a deep breath and steeled herself, then slapped her hand and the pendant against Richie's outstretched hand.

The darkness was suddenly replaced by stark incandescence. She and Richie stood on a plush, clean carpet, and the smell of must had disappeared. It had been replaced by another heady aroma, and Diane uttered a gasp as her gaze came to rest on the bed.

Penny was indeed here, wig and dark glasses abandoned on the night table, the pendant having fallen to the floor. Her long rust-red hair spilled over the mattress. Her naked body rocked, her breasts bouncing in time to the thrusts of a broad-shouldered man with tousled dark hair who let into her with a vengeance, forcing each thrust home as if working off more than just sexual need.

Diane blushed, and her hips squirmed in a vain attempt to release the growing heat in her pussy. All her attention was on Penny and her gorgeous curves, the same she had grown so used to seeing on Heather. Penny's eyes were dark with lust but shimmering with uncertainty.

"Holy shit," Richie muttered. "Fuck. I'm sorry, but I call 'em like I see 'em, and Heather's Mom is one hot babe."

"Why is she doing this?!" Diane cried. "She's married! Why would she want to do it with another guy?"

"Hey, sometimes married people play around. Been happening since--"

The man made a noise like a grunted exclamation, the words too garbled to be understood. Diane glanced at Richie, who stared at the man, his eyes narrowed. "Wait just a fucking second, that sounds like..."

The man paused to reposition himself, drawing himself up.

Richie suddenly shoved Diane to the side and gaped at the man's face. "DAD?!"

Diane's ears rang from that one screamed word. "What?!"

"What the flying FUCK is my Dad doing here?!"

"Oh my God, Richie, are you serious?!" Diane cried, eyes wide.

"Why the FUCK wouldn't I be serious?! Shit. Shit shit SHIT!"

"R-Richie, please, calm down!" Diane said in a shaky voice. "Y-you said he divorced your mother when you were five. That was, what, um, 1995. This has to be at least two years after that."

"It's not that, okay?!" Richie bellowed, stomping his foot. "Look, I don't know how to explain it, but this is just wrong!"

"Richie, l-let me see if I can pick up what Penny's thinking. Just hold on a moment."

She turned away just to get Richie's anger out of view. She hated being around him when he got that way. One of the reasons she had agreed to do that foolish diversion for him so he could save some of the potion for Melinda was his increasing agitation when she tried to beg off.

Diane's heart pounded as she stepped to the side of the bed. She took a deep breath and plunged her hand into Penny's shoulder.