Chapter 51: for A Little Side Trip

Chuck, Melissa and Darren pulled their rental car into the lobby of a nice airport Hilton, where they were to meet Holly by prearrangement.

“Why here?” asked Darren as he fished to heavy bags out of the trunk.

“Holly hasn’t been anywhere in some 25 years. This was the only hotel she remembered near the airport,” he said. They walked up to the desk and confirmed their reservation.

“What room is our friend, Miss Compton, in?” Chuck asked as he fumbled for his wallet.

“She is in 414, right next to you,” the smiling clerk said. “Oh, no, sir. Your room is already paid for.”

Each of them lugged a bag filled with enough weapons to stock an armory – and thanking me for giving them additional strength with the Program. But the elevator was empty and the three of them found themselves outside a nice, top-floor suite facing away from the airport. Darren tapped on the door and a relieved Holly – at least a dour, plain-Jane version of her –- emerged and tightly hugged each of her friends.

“I had no idea how disorienting being back in the world would be,” she said. “I got so lost trying to go through the airport. Thank God I had a car and driver waiting for me. Thank you for that.”

“When are you ready to do this thing?” Chuck said, nodding towards his laptop.

“The sooner, the better,” Melissa said. “Have you been able to find Janey?”

“Oh, yeah. She’s here,” Holly said, and Chuck confirmed. “She’s still alone, but that could change.”

“If you guys need to rest, go ahead,” Holly said. “I realize this could be twice as hard as kidnapping me was.”

“Maybe not,” Chuck said. “We’ll have Janey deprogrammed before do we do anything.”

“Where is she?” Holly asked, looking over shoulder and seeing Master PC at work for the first time.

“Big shock,” Chuck said. “The 24-hour cafe next to the bus station. Same place she found you 25 years ago.”

After 10 pregnancies – eight children, she reminded herself – it was tougher for the 40-year-old Janey to remain attractive enough to be able to seduce young women with the promise of a new, better life. But she still had her looks, and that was her best selling point. She’s never be allowed to wear makeup inside the compound, but Out Here, she could still rock the war paint.

In a stylish dress that she had to leave here, at the cleaners, she was casually strolling along the street a block from the Los Angeles Greyhound terminal. She always had to get used to heels every time she went recruiting, leaving them in a locker in the Greyhound terminal, ironically.

Her idle thoughts were interrupted when she passed a busty blonde in a ponytail and cutoff shorts. She paused, but then dismissed the girl as looking like a hooker, so she was taken by surprise as she was nearly knocked off her feet by a girl whose wardrobe nearly screamed, “Just off the farm.” This girl was fairly plain, wearing almost no makeup and in a dress right out of “Little House on the Prairie” and white tennis shoes.

She was perfect!

“Hello! You look a little lost,” Janey said reassuringly. “You nearly knocked me down.”

“Oh! I’m so, so sorry!” she said, stumbling as she gripped her bag with two hands. “I’ve only been in town a little while.”

“Like maybe 15 minutes?” Janey smiled knowingly.

“Just about,” the girl smiled, showing white but slightly crooked teeth.

“Where are you from ... if you don’t mind my asking,” Janey asked, leading her to sit on a nearby bench.

“Oh, Clinton, Iowa. Ever heard of it? Nothing but corn, wind and boredom.”

Sounds a lot like Idaho, Janey thought, but quickly dismissed it. “Where are you trying to do. I’m pretty good with directions.”

“You haven’t even told me your name,” the girl smiled crookedly.

“That makes two of us,” Janey smiled, even as the hairs stood up on her neck telling her something was wrong. “My name’s Janey. Yours?”

“It’s Holly Danvers you #queenslut,” she said sharply, hitting her with the trigger word before she knew what hit her.

Janey was overwhelmed by the majesty and beauty of her former friend as she stood above her, almost aglow in her righteous majesty. She fell to the sidewalk on her knees. “I’m sorry, mistress, I didn’t recognize you. Forgive me!”

“Stand up, slut,” said Holly, still looking like the girl off the bus. “You’re going to contact the compound and tell them you’ve found a perfect recruit and will be bringing her in. No one will recognize me, and it will thrill you to be serving and pleasing me. You will bring me in like any other girl you’re proud of.”

“Yes, mistress,” Janey said, looking down at her feet.

“But first, you will come with me,” Holly told the girl. This time, extended her hand to Janey, who grasped it gratefully. She even offered to hoist Holly’s suitcase, and was surprised to find it empty. Melissa appeared alongside and added a teenage laugh to their meeting so that passersby would see on a group of friends on a night out.

Twenty minutes later, Holly had Janey sitting politely in her hotel room with Melissa, Chuck and Darren looking her over with curiosity.

“You’re saying this nice looking lady has kidnapped dozens of girls over the last three decades?” Darren asked.

“Easily,” Holly said. “I was hardly her first.”

“No, mistress,” Janey spoke up uninvited. “I had been recruiting breeders for over a year before we met.”

“Breeders, huh,” Melissa said. “Like you said, it was all about procreation, wasn’t it?”

“Look at it this way,” Holly said. “I had four kids there. Janey here has had, how many?”

“Eight. Two more died in childbirth,” she said sadly. “That’s why I’m not pregnant now. I can’t bring to term any longer.”

“You tell me, Dr. Arnovsky,” Holly said. “Does Master PC tell you if she’s sterile? For that matter, is she evil or just brainwashed?”

“She could be both, you know,” Chuck said as he studied the readout. “Her readings show her loyalty to the compound is absolute all the way across. Good call to make her absolutely loyal to you, or you couldn’t have brought her here willingly.”

“Is there good news?” Holly asked.

“Yeah, hers is a good, old-fashioned brainwashing, like yours,” Chuck said. “No Master PC involvement.”

“That makes it easier to deprogram her?” Holly asked.

“Hundred times easier,” Chuck said. “She’s also as sterile as this room’s décor. But we’re still going to have to restrain her. You want to do the honors or do you want Darren to do it?”

Darren raised his hand and pointed at himself, but Holly just rolled her eyes and bound Janey’s arms behind the chair while Melissa called on her military training and securely bound her feet to each chair leg, using the bedsheets in the room. Holly then knelt in front of the woman, whose eyes were beginning to show doubt.

“Trust me,” Holly said, touching her face.

“Yes, mistress,” said the helpless woman.

Holly walked over and pulled a chair next to Chuck – which he hated. “Show me each step, just like you deprogrammed me.”

“Be patient,” Chuck cautioned. “To take her loyalty to the compound from absolute to zero takes about 10 minutes of gradual movement. It can do it automatically, but if we were rush it, we could make her psychotic.”

“Go ahead. Start it,” Holly said, looking at Chuck.

“Already did,” he replied, nodding towards the keyboard. She glanced at the readouts; her commitment level was down to 97, no, 96 percent. “Next, we rebuild her body. Her ovaries and tubes are a wreck...”

“Remove them,” Holly said. “Make her healthy, but leave her sterile. Restore her sex drive – no, double it. Then reduce her age back to, say, 18. But allow her to keep all of her sexual knowledge.”

“You’re going to keep her, aren’t you?” Melissa said with a grin.

“Wouldn’t you? Look at her,” Holly said with a nod. “That’s what she looked like when someone kidnapped her.”

Tied to the chair was a hot chick where dignified middle-aged woman once sat. But just as quickly, Holly had Chuck restore her to her natural age – the better to get them inside.

“Keep her loyalty to me absolute,” Holly said. “But cure her of all diseases and illnesses.”

Mostly, it seems to be anemia,” Chuck said. “She has scarring in her rectum – don’t need to know why – several broken bones, most of which have healed properly. She has a significant amount of radiation poisoning – what kind of ammo to they make there anyway?”

Joanie laughed.

“That cover story still works,” she said. “But our facility has been updating weapons for foreign governments for years. I have helped transport and install certain – devices when I wasn’t pregnant.”

“That probably explains why you quit being able to conceive,” Darren said. He sat next to her, and Joanie looked directly back at him.

“Is she compelled to tell the truth?” Darren asked.

“She is now,” Chuck replied after about a five-second adjustment.

“What all do you manufacture there and who do you send them to?” he asked her firmly but directly. Since her loyalty was still over 60 percent, she had to look to Holly for approval.

“We make structures for dirty bombs,” she said. “Sometimes we have to remove the warheads and put them in new delivery systems. They ship out to China and one or both of the Koreas, I don’t even know. Asia, mostly.”

“Do you keep nuclear material on-site?” Melissa asked.

“No, of course now. There are too many children in the compound,” Janey said. “if it comes in with the old delivery systems, it goes out with the new. The scrapped delivery systems go out the same way.”

“What’s a delivery system?” Chuck asked.

“It’s a missile,” Darren said, wondering how limited the brilliant tech guy’s education actually was. “But one drained of its fuel.”

“How do you transport them?” Holly cut in. “No one ever seen anything leave.”

“Tunnel under the warehouse,” Janey said. “It’s brilliant. The materials come in the same way.”

“What makes it so brilliant?” Darren asked.

“Two-way tunnel,” she said. “Like the Chunnel. The comings never meet the goings.”

“How long is it?” Darren asked.

“Never been down there,” she said. “Two, maybe three miles. They have a loading bay hidden in that big truck stop by the state highway. No one has even sniffed it.”

“This is way bigger than us,” Chuck said. “You really want to do this?”

“Yes, and here’s how,” Holly said.

When she was finished explaining her idea, Melissa laughed and applauded, high-fiving fellow vet Darren, while Chuck said, “That might be the coolest, most twisted idea I’ve heard.”

Some 48 hours later, Janey – back in her conservative compound attire, led a wide-eyed newbie onto the compound grounds. She walked her through the interview process, the body cavity search, the disinfectant shower and the tour, finally walking her to her small dorm-type room. Quite a few of the women were pregnant, but there no sounds of babies or children to be heard.

Her room was across the hallway from one of the feeders – a new mom who was devoting her breast milk with her newborn son – and a select handful of other hungry male babies.

“That’s her, isn’t it?” Janey whispered to her new recruit, who she called “Ida.” With a tear forming in the corner of her eye, “Ida” nodded.

“That’s my daughter,” Holly said. “That’s Georgia.”

Since Chuck was able to follow Holly onto the compound through the Master PC profile program, Holly knew to make the OK hand gesture in sign language to tip him off that she was where she needed to be. When the diversion was required, she would use the signing for “raise hell.”

But for now, she played the part. Soon after bedding down for the night, she wordlessly accepting the advances of one of the men she recognized as one of Holly’s former concubines; he might even be the father of one of her kids.

“You’re pretty tight,” he grunted. “You a virgo?”

“Congratulations,” she said as she accepted his thrusts. “First in, first win.”

That helped set off his orgasm, and he came hard and long. He raised off “Ida” and walked away without a word, pleased as he could be that he deflowered a virgin and in all likelihood impregnated her. The men weren’t supposed to keep score, but, being men...

Over three miles away, once of the state’s busiest truck stops was seeing an odd sight: trucks were leaving, one after another and getting up to speed almost dangerously fast. The trucker’s CB radios – still a tool in the industry – had passed along an anonymous warning that a terrorist act was imminent and to move their precious cargo ASAP.

Employees at the truck stop had a similar message pop up on their Facebook page and the cafe and gas stations were closed on five minutes notice. Truckers silently gave truck stop employees a lift out of the danger zone.

A sentry for the loading bay was stationed in the cafe, and faced a moment of truth when the message was being posted. Should he relay it, he would be called to go over to the loading bay and helped defend it. Or he could get the hell out of there.

“Fuck it,” he said, dropping his special cell phone into the men’s room toilet. “Hey, bud, I’ll give you $500 to take me out of here in your rig.”

“Deal,” the trucker said as he finished his cup of coffee before hitting the door. In a matter of 15 minutes, the main truck stop, which was out of site of the loading bay by design, was nearly a ghost town, but the foreign nationals who staffed it, were below ground and failed to notice.

“Ida” sat in her room, idly tasting the discharge (she was, after all, under Master PC’s influence now), when Georgia returned from her long day of feeding nearly a dozen hungry kids. “Ida” marveled at how large the teenager’s boobs had gotten with so much breast-feeding, requiring the requisite amount of milk production. Her output made her a golden child for this community; she would be missed, and quickly.

But her absence and belated arrival told “Ida” that her just-delivered baby was a girl.

Georgia passed by her open doorway silently, but Holly was able to confirm that she had given birth to her third child. She would probably be pregnant again before her 16th birthday if Holly failed to pull this off.

“Ida” tapped on her door. Georgia had showered and put all of her milk-stained clothes in the community hamper. She was bone dry for the moment and glad of it. She lay back on her bed and did not get up when she heard the knock.

“Come on in,” she said, wishing it was time for lights out.

“Hi. I’m you’re new neighbor,” she said. “My name is ... Ida.”

They shook hands, but “Ida” reached up to touch Georgia’s hair the way that she would in their rare private time as mother and daughter. Georgia drew back, startled.

“What’s wrong?” “Ida” asked.

“Oh, nothing,” Georgia said, shaking her head. “That was just a little too familiar for my taste.”

“I guess people here are kinda private, huh?” “Ida” asked. “With your permission, I’d like to close your door so we can talk.”

“Sure. I guess. That’s actually not a bad idea,” Georgia agreed. But instead of merely closing the door, “Ida” flipped the light switch and muttered a word under her breath that Georgia did not quite hear. It was #hollytemp. When an alarmed Georgia jumped off her bed to flip the light switch back on, she was equal measure angry and frightened.

“I think you need to get...” she bit off her sentence as she refocused. “Mom!”

Holly Danvers sat where “Ida” was a moment before. She made no move towards her daughter, but said, “It’s really me, baby. I swore I’d come back for you.”