Joyce laid into me ferociously with the switch, then paused. She looked down at me with disgust as my freshly reddened ass radiated heat. There was something different in her eyes now. I shivered in delightful fear as I melted further into moldable putty in my mistress's presence. 

Joyce pulled on my leash and brought me down to the carpet we had laid out on the creaky floorboards of our shack. She eased one of her feet- large for a woman's but small for a trans one- onto my back, then stepped down hard. My already shivering naked body was beset my wave upon wave of effortful pleasure. She brought her other foot up and stomped a bit. She was shorter than me, but heavier. I groaned and pressed my face into the carpet. Her feet stepped carefully but heavily lower and lower until one was on my waist and one was on my ass. By this time I was already shaking uncontrollably. With one expertly conducted foot she pressed hard into the lower cusp of my ass, right by my thigh. I bit into the carpet fibers as I came forcefully under her foot's direction.

I laid there shivering from the aftershocks of my orgasm. I didn't notice Joyce had left the room until she came back with a lighter and a red candle. She lit the candle wordlessly and began dripping hot wax on my back, causing my head to jolt back with every burning sting of heat. Soon she had formed tendrils of wax that spiraled from my shoulders to the crack of my ass. A few more drops on my thighs brought me to another orgasm. When she had finished pulling all the wax off, she fingered me and brought me to my third.

Her duties fulfilled, Joyce lay back on the bed, spreading her arms wide and letting me fall lightly into them. She had been administering pain nightly, in as many doses as I could ask for. She had seemed eager to, even happy at times. I hadn't seen her smile so much in years. But over the last week she had been distant, an attribute I found worrying despite the alluring quality it held over me. She had never been the distant one- that had been Michael. I found myself bothered by the possibilities and so when a different topic drifted into mind I was grateful and opened my mouth to share it at once.

"Did you talk to Zoe's doctor friend about the clinic?" I asked, "What did she say?"

I had been too busy fussing around with ink pens in the shack to come with Joyce to visit the former doctor. They had been a lucky find, from a desk in one of the bigger homes closer to the City, and I had been drawing some dicks with truly impeccable crosshatching. Walking to the City and back took a full day, and I had been only too happy to lean on Joyce once again for support. The unbalanced nature of our current relationship weighed on me at times, but it had become impossible for me to pay back all her favors. I hadn't even fucked her in weeks, which had once been my usual payment for dominance rendered.

"With the stuff she has at home and the stuff we found at the clinic, she said maybe she could do it. But she really doesn't want to attempt it alone- I mean she's never even performed SRS, Riese."

"There's books. She can learn!"

"How to perform a surgery she'll never even do again? The woman is sixty-nine, Riese. I don't see the point."

"Why do you think she'll never need to do it again?"

"We're the last of a dying breed, Riese," Joyce sighed, "Let's face it- when was the last time you heard of someone coming out as trans?"

"Cilantro did! A month ago!"

"As nonbinary."

"And trans!"

"You're missing the point. They're not getting surgery. Or taking hormones. Because the first one is impossible and the second involves a shit ton of scavenging."

"So? They'll learn how to synthesize hormones again some day! We still exist!"

"Kids these days are raised by gangs, Riese. Or unions. Groups with group mentalities and goals, that the kids share. They're not going to give up that safety for the kind of lives we've lived- foraging, missing doses all the time, feeling like shit. Nah. Well, maybe some will. Not many though. You remember when liberals used to call us 'brave'? Fuck that. Trans kids these days are fucking brave. It's like the Wild fucking Northwest out here."

I winced, sighed, and offered no rebuttal. We got up, took turns pissing, then moved to the couch. Joyce brought out a joint and gave me a hit. I stared at the smoke, then at her. It had been three months since she killed Stanley, and in all that time I had come no closer to deciphering the riddle he had posed in his last moments. He had claimed God's computer was nothing more than a statue, housing a tiny processor. That couldn't be true, because Joyce had been resurrected by the mighty processor that stony laptop must have housed. Every time I asked her she confirmed this. If there had been any logic to what Stanley had said, she would know. It had probably been a desperate lie. Yet I couldn't shake this weird feeling that in this last attempt at self-preservation Stanley had shielded himself behind at least a partial truth. I decided I was going to question Joyce yet again.

"Riese," she said, interrupting my thought.

"Yeah?"

"I... I'm seeing someone else."

"...oh."

​We sat in silence for barely a minute. It felt like an hour. My emotions swelled up but got stuck in my throat. I swallowed them down and bit my lip. I couldn't manage to look at Joyce- her mere blurry presence in the corner of my vision was a fiery star that singed my retinas. It was too much to bare, so I got up and went outside.

I sat down in Bryan the Wise's old rocking chair. He had insisted we take it after Joyce and I returned his gun to him. Thankfully Stills and Young were unharmed and safe. Stanley had come shortly after I left, and hadn't appreciated Bryan's buckshot greeting with the same good humor I had. He had taken Bryan's gun from him but Cosby had managed to fight him off. They were lucky the shotgun took so long to reload and that Stanley wasn't a gun guy. So I rocked back and forth for a bit. Joyce came out and asked if I was okay. I managed a shaky yeah and we sat together a while. 

"He lives pretty close," Joyce said, "In one of those McMansions they got a bit to the south. Only he totally gutted it. It's dope, I feel shitty about leaving you alone in the shack."

"The shack's okay. We fixed it together. How long?"

"A couple weeks."

"Fuck."

"I honestly didn't know it was going to piss you off. We were never actually exclu-"

"Fuck that, Joyce! Michael and Stanley are dead! We're living alone together in a shack! Why do I have to ask you if we can be exclusive?"

"Uh, because we've never done that before? And I've definitely never done that with a girl before? Look, you're my best friend. We've been through some real shit. I like domming you. But this shit is messy as fuck. Thank you for bringing me back. I've got a whole new life now and I gotta figure it out."

"...I know. I wanted to help."

"Help yourself, first."

I cried a bit, and Joyce hugged me. Then she announced she was going to spend the night at her boyfriend's and walked off. The sunset kept me company after that. It grew more beautiful every year the atmosphere became clearer. Autumn had turned the leaves on the trees dotting the landscape to warm red embers of dying light. Soon the great fire on the horizon faded, but the night was warm and still and I stayed rocking. I felt my head grow heavy as I rocked myself to sleep.

Suddenly the night grew cold. Not just cold, but empty. I woke and everything in my vision was white. There was a wall of whiteness, growing, sucking the warm air away, leaving emptiness. I screamed, but the wall sucked that away too. I winced and braced off myself as my body was enveloped in the cold nothingness.

Chapter One || Previous Chapter || Next Chapter

Marc Siskel is a 28-year-old musician from Palouse, a small town in eastern Washington. In 2013 he moved to Seattle and started a band with longtime friend Dan Becker, who had moved there to attend the University of Washington. Both co-wrote and played various instruments, with Marc handling more of the vocals and Dan most of the guitars. Shortly after Dan dropped out, the pair, now named Spak, released their eponymous first album. Its twenty tracks were mostly recorded in the basement sublet they shared, and ranged from acoustic numbers like "Get the Fuck Up Outta Here" to rockers such as "I Am Tired" and "Rotting". "The Earworm" in particular showed their passion for emulating rock legends with finesse. 
Though primitive, this first effort proved the boys to be quite capable in different genres. They followed it quickly with a more refined album, Controls the Universe, in 2015. It added a lot to the band's mythos, in particular Mungie, a squidlike god the two seem to have a fascination with. The album was supposedly made under the influence of typewriter correction fluid stolen from Marc's grandma, and it shows on tracks like "Encino" and "Gawd Rest His Soul". It might just be the band's quirkiest album, and also boasted 20 tracks.
Yadda released in 2017, with a "mature" cover that hinted at the band's own strange maturation. Though there were still songs about fish tacos and strawberry headed humans, there was more depth to the lyrics, particularly on "Pagan Pie" which explored love and religion. Gunkhed, the band's last album, came out in 2019 and featured a combination of these aspects of Spak. Not much has been heard from Spak since the COVID-19 pandemic started, which has fans wondering what's become of them. I spoke with Marc over Zoom to understand the band's past and uncertain future...

Four days of solemn travel brought us back to the city, the few remaining phallic constructions of which loomed over us on that last day like incipient inevitabilities. As we approached the offices of Permanent Solutions, a familiar darkness began to permeate my brain. It was the same darkness that had driven me endlessly towards Michael, a darkness I thought I had finally quelled when I committed my first act of grisly murder. Here it was again, though, that bitter taste on my tongue and almost imperceptible ringing in my ears. I looked at Joyce and could tell the darkness was in her brain too, or at least her code. I reached my hand out and she grasped it tightly. Zoe and Thalia followed us obliviously, our stalwart protectors and, if need be, instruments that would serve out our required justice.

​Joyce and I walked up the stairs, hand in hand. We didn't stop at the landing where she had died, she just gripped me tighter and we pressed on. We finally reached the sixth floor and found the lobby empty and Stanley's office door shut. I motioned for Joyce to release my hand and she reluctantly obliged. I tried the door handle and found it locked. I slammed my shoulder on the door and succeeded in hurting my shoulder.

"Fuck that hurt," I said, "Zoe? Or Thalia?"

Zoe nodded at Thalia who strode past me and kicked the door right off its hinges. You had to admire that kind of raw strength in a woman. You just had to! She took a step into the dark office and flipped the lights on. Then she turned around with a confused expression.

I hastily squeezed by her and looked around. Stanley's office was even more minimalist than I remembered. Even his desk was missing. I made several full rotations despite there being nowhere for him to possibly be hiding. I stepped back out into the lobby and Joyce heard me groaning to myself.

"What?" she asked.

"He knew we were coming," I said.

"Well he's still gotta be here. He wouldn't abandon this place, ever. It meant everything to him."

"Maybe, but he could have backup. I know it was just him and that Jeremy guy before but if he knows I'm back he could have a dude with a gun in every office."

"Nah. Stanley was never good at making friends."

"Oh yeah," I laughed nervously, "That makes sense. Can't relate though, I definitely find it really easy to forge meaningful relationships with people I'm not sleeping with!"

Joyce gave me a condescending look and lead our group down the hall. She slammed open the first office door on the right and flicked on the light switch. The desk in there was missing, too. She did the same at the next door on the left and then slammed the door shut loudly. 

"Stanley!" she yelled, "Where the fuck are you?!"

After a moment the third door on the left slowly creaked open. We heard slow footsteps behind it and Zoe and Thalia stepped in front of me, forming a human shield which I was very glad for until I saw the face peeking out from behind the door. Joyce approached with her fist raised.

"Wait!" shouted Jeremy, terrified. A thin curtain of sweat inched down his face. "I just want to go home! Do whatever you want!"

I couldn't help but lose all my affection for Jeremy as he stood there whimpering. He had given up before even laying eyes upon the threat- in his office, I assumed, probably as warm urine soaked his boxer briefs. Then again, his boss wasn't the type to inspire much loyalty. In the end, it seemed he'd be forced to face us completely alone. This empty inanimate hellscape of postmodern design and fluorescent lights was all Stanley had left now.

Zoe stepped behind Jeremy and grabbed his wrists. He began walking toward the stairs without any further provocation, but Zoe held on with what looked like a sturdy grip. He lead her out the door and out of sight, while Thalia and I carried on following Joyce down the long hall.

"Don't worry- she'll check him for weapons and make sure he doesn't come back," said Thalia.

"I wasn't worried," I said.

"Right, you're not really so small. Not like her. She's different..." she said, staring almost reverentially at Joyce.

"She sure is. I mean, she always was. She doesn't wait around for people, either. I'm always waiting for people to decide how they feel about me. But she doesn't."

"Do you love her?"

"...Probably. I feel like I need her. She told me she loved me once, but I wasn't ready. Then there wasn't anything romantic left between us, I guess. Then she died."

"I think you love her."

"I don't know, Thalia, maybe. Right now I'm just scared to shit."

"Don't worry, I'll take care of Stanley."

"Not of him."

"Hey, Thalia!" shouted Joyce from the very end of the hall, "Can you come help me with this one? It's locked."

Thalia patted my head and ran to Joyce, stopping at the locked door. As Joyce and I looked on, the Greek beauty widened her stance and slammed into the door, knocking it off its hinges. Then her body flew into the hall as shrapnel exploded out of her back. She slammed her head into the wall and fell back against it, her chest now a bloody mess. I recoiled in shock and horror.

Joyce screamed and started shaking. Regarding Thalia's destroyed body, she began to glow a light blue. She then turned around and stepped into the dark room before I could stop her. Her glow brightened and the room was soon illuminated. It was spacious, and seemed to have been used for storage. In the corner were a couple of vacuums and a mop, along with a shelf containing other supplies. The main feature of the room now, though, was the massive structure of flipped and stacked desks, all wooden with steel beams. They had been piled at least seven feet high, and formed a barricade with solid walls and a couple of peeking windows low to the ground. From one of these I caught sight of Stanley's bespectacled face, scared to shit.

"Oh, fuck!" he exclaimed, and started fiddling furiously with something. When he was done he stuck it through the hole in his barricade of desks. It was a shotgun that had once belonged to Hunter S. Thompson, but which I had only seen carried by Bryan the Wise. I was about to yell to her when Joyce grabbed hold of the gun barrel and pulled it, along with its carrier, through the hole. Stanley hit the cement hard with his shoulder and sprawled out on his back, writhing there in Joyce's glow. As she approached him he spun himself around and stuck his hands out in protest.

"Wait! Riese, tell her to stop! Come on!"

Joyce slowed in her approach not one tad. I did nothing to help Stanley, whose stammering reasoning had become more frantic.

"Hold on! Think about it! God's computer? Come on, that's bullshit! What was it doing there? Wh-why was it so huge? It's a statue, an artifact! A shell for a tiny processor that Ashe couldn't even access directly! Think about it! Riese, come on! Don't you care?"

"Actually no," I said, my face blank and bitchy, "I don't understand a fucking thing."

Stanley's eyes grew even wider as Joyce leaned in. She tossed Bryan's gun over her shoulder and reached out with her other hand. I had no idea what she was about to do but I couldn't look away. Not from the man who I still held such a seething envy for. Even now that he had nothing left, I felt the pain of Joyce being not quite mine, something I had needed ever since I had become not quite Michael's. It was a sharp and throbbing lack, and it turned my blood to toxic bubbly gamer fuel.

​Wordlessly, Joyce grabbed Stanley's shoulder. Hard. By increments, his skin started to blur and roughen. To my shock, the subtle and supple musculature of his nerd arms all turned to sharp edges, each a different shade of pale that reflected light with no particular care for detail. His face turned to a grimacing citrine skull, jagged and uncanny. It opened to scream and what came out was a distorted garble, rather like a dial tone from before the before time. He flailed against her, but Joyce grabbed him with both hands and pushed him down, straddling his suddenly weaker body.

Blue light ebbed and flowed from Joyce into the flailing skeleton. Seams started to emerge from within Stanley's skin. They glowed cold blue, and crisscrossed his body like well-designed city roads. As the seams split, the gaps between these segmented squares of Stanley's body surface grew. Blood spilled out of each, quickly forming a huge pool under my former dominatrix and her prey. I could see bone and viscera still floating within, naked and divided. Joyce bore down harder and suddenly all the squares collapsed. The bones and viscera were gone, leaving only flat squares like what Ashe had become. There lay Stanley, except he was only the vaguest approximation of the man I had known and obsessed over. Tears fell from my wide and fearful eyes as I looked down wordlessly at him.

But Joyce wasn't done. She pushed down on the flat squares, which had suddenly soaked up the blood like sea sponges. The blue energy kept coming into them, and they began to coalesce. Groups of four squares shifted and merged, and this repeated exponentially. Soon there was only one square- light brown and trembling slightly. Joyce smashed her fist into it. Then her other fist came down. Again. And again.

"FUCK!" cried Joyce, her tears dripping suddenly and heavily, "MOTHERFUCKER!"

A huge crack formed on the brown square, the shaking of which had become spastic vibration. Joyce's fists continued to rain down and the crack grew until it bisected the cube diagonally. With one more punch it tore apart and exploded into dust. For a moment I thought I saw 1s and 0s fly across my vision. That may have been mere fanciful allegorical trans metaphor. Or not. It didn't really matter.

​Stanley was dead.

​Chapter One || Previous Chapter || Next Chapter

I held Nash's hand and lead her into Ashe's computer room. Joyce was sitting alone on top of Garfield, her feet dangling in Ashe's coding hole like it was a pool on a cool day. She seemed almost serene, except for a certain guilt in her eyes- a rare thing to find in those deep black portals. I scanned the room for signs of Ashe and found none.

"We gotta go, Joyce, but where's Ashe?" I asked with Nash still tugging gently on my hand.

Joyce stared at me vacantly and motioned to a spot on the floor beside her. There appeared to be an intricate pattern of white, blue and pink tiles spread across the cement. It made no sense to me until I moved and shifted my perspective. The pattern came into focus and I saw a dissected two-dimensional representation of Ashe within it. Little white squares for her hair and little pink and blue squares for her clothes. I turned back to Joyce, my eyes as wide as a nice set of hips. This gave her the cue that it was time to explain.

"I was just trying to restrain her so I could copy all her data and wipe it," she said, "I guess I mighta lowered her res a bit. Just to make it go smoother. But she just got way bitchier, after that, believe me, and then things got kinda... out of control. She got so low-res that she lost a dimension. She's basically like a sprite, now, from some shit like Gex or something."

I sighed and looked back at the pattern. Ashe did look like something out of a video game, but this twisted version of her was all wrong. Every few seconds the tiles shifted slightly, and I couldn't tell if this was something she was doing consciously or merely in reaction to her environment. There was no way to communicate with her- Joyce had turned her into pixels and data, she had no vocal cords that were capable of vibration. I looked back at Joyce with her feet in the coding pit. The monitor in there was blank- there was no more code anyone could feed into that ancient computer outside and use to kill everyone Stanley's unethical program deemed unworthy. Joyce had certainly handled things thoroughly. I was now painfully aware of the huge divide between her very nature as a being of code and mine as a human. All I could do was try to be cautious of it.

​"If you have the code, there's nothing left for us here." I said, "Let's go- there's a lot of stairs."

The three of us descended slowly down the sparsely illuminated staircase. Joyce walked a little ways ahead of us, occasionally flitting out of view for a few seconds. I focused on making sure Nash didn't trip and fall in her state of shock. There was nothing by way of a railing there so I did my best to function as her railing, but in a different way than I had hoped she would function as mine. Even after everything that had happened I knew I would still be needing it soon. After a while we heard some excited chattering from the chamber we were circling around. I motioned for silence and peeked in. I caught a glimpse of robust and well developed shoulders on the figures below and ascertained it was the escaped iron-workers. I told Joyce and tried to help Nash hurry along downstairs.

When we reached the bottom of the stairs there were already a few iron-workers gathered by the large orange door. All three were muscular goddesses, tanned and statuesque. They recognized me instantly and began chattering amongst themselves. It was almost more than my ego could take.

"Hey," said one, "Aren't you that girl with the fake nails and the really loose asshole from last week?" 

I stirred and sputtered, my face turning bright red as I tried to pretend I didn't notice Joyce's wry smile. I explained to the tan beauty that I was also the one who had freed them, and she nodded and ran off into the chamber. She came back with another goddess, a pale redhead with an air of authority who I hadn't seen before. This woman introduced herself as Becky and, after cornering me against the stone wall, slapped the wall above my shoulder quite fiercely. Even Nash flinched at the bang her strong but elegant hand produced. Becky nodded at her then turned back to me.

"So you're the one that unlocked the cells, huh?" she asked, looking down at me, "Why? Because some of my girls helped you out that time?"

"No," I said, "I need your help."

"Of course you do. But it turns out we're busy. See, those fuckers still have one of our workers. Her name was Val. So now we gotta go out and search the mountain perimeter for the assholes that took her."

"You would die!"

"Probably. But we have to find her. We're Arbuckles- the union always has been."

Nash covered her face and I thought I heard a soft sob. I pushed myself up off the wall and turned my face up towards Becky's.

"You don't," I said, "Val is dead." But! She was one of them. A cat person. And we didn't kill her- it was Davis."

"What the fuck?" asked Becky, "Nash? Is that true?" 

Nash nodded.

"I'm pretty sure she was actually their leader," I said, "So we don't have to worry about the rest of them. They're just subby cats who can't organize for shit unless someone else tells them what to do. We can all just walk out of here."

Becky took a while to consider this. The greek-looking workers watched her with interest. She finally pushed herself off the wall and reached out her hand. I took it gingerly.

"If Val was a rat- I mean cat," she said, "Then thanks for taking care of it for us."

"It was Davis," I said.

"Sure. Look, we owe you one- probably more! There was no reason for you to help us- besides, well, I can tell you care about Nash. Which is good, I always thought she was too good for Val. Whatever it is, I'll put my best and brightest on it. But first we gotta get outta here safely. Can you do one more thing for me?"

"Sure, Becky."

"Take this- it was Val's. She was always a big fan of films from 1991 to 2001. The 'true nineties', she called them. Had quite a prop collection. This is one of them- an invisibility cloak."

She handed me a piece of cloth barely large enough to cover a single well-developed teenager. It was a dark purplish grey, and covered in moons and stars. I gave Becky a quizzical look and pulled the cloak over my head.

"Can you see me?" I asked.

"Uh, no. I can't. Where'd you go?" Becky replied dryly. Joyce flashed me a smirk.

"Really? I'm actually invisible right now?"

"Yeah, sure. Now go sneak a peek at those cat people so we can sneak outta here. Then we can help you or whatever."

I nodded and started walking off. Nash and Becky still followed me with their eyes despite the cloak. Joyce even ran up to me and stopped me at the narrow corridor. 

"Wait, Riese," she said, "You're sure you wanna wear that cloak?"

"Why, is it not working?" I asked.

"No, it's totally working," she teased, "But wasn't it created by a Terf? There might be discourse here."

"Maybe. But I think it's ok 'cause I'm reclaiming it."

"How?"

"By, like, being a chick with a dick and stealing a Terf's cloak."

"Ah, cool."

​I walked through the corridor with the shaky belief that I was doing something revolutionary. The inside of the mountain's stony rampart held a small screen with a lock symbol. I tapped it and the lock unhinged, which caused the wall to rumble and give way. I sidled out and saw no signs of man or cat. Lacking any sense of direction, I started off to my right and began searching the perimeter of the mountain. After a few minutes I came upon the couple hundred cat persons, some on guard while others lounged and chatted idly. As soon as I began stealthily approaching the closest ones stirred and stopped talking. They stared at me, as did those behind them, and then the masses beyond. Soon all two hundred were giving me a blank look. I stepped back and prepared to run for my life. Then, just as soon as they had stopped, they resumed their searching and lounging.

​I breathed an uncertain sigh and inched a bit closer- as close as I dared. From here I could see the faces of almost all the cultists. But there was one face that I didn't realize I was expecting to see until I didn't. I frowned and slowly turned around. I made it back to the front of the mountain and removed the pipe from its hole. I stepped inside and locked the entrance. Joyce, Nash, and Becky were waiting for me. I slid off the auspicious cloak and they all feigned surprise despite all having seen me and Nash having waved.

​"We can avoid them if we all just go left," I said.

"So they're on the north side, then," said Becky, "Good."

"Yeah, Becky," said Joyce, "Anything else, Riese?"

"Not really," I said, "There was this guy I met last week. I thought I'd see him here for sure. He seemed like a really big fan of Garfield."

I shrugged and Joyce narrowed her eyes. Becky ventured into to the main chamber and returned with two of the greek women. She motioned towards them.

"Thank you for your help, Riese. I'll start organizing my girls so we can move out. You can take Zoe and Thalia. They're some of my hardest workers. They can help you with whatever you need, just send them back to me after. Deal?

"Sure," I said, "Welcome aboard."

​Zoe and Thalia nodded. Becky thanked me again and then returned to her people. I gathered Nash and Joyce and after leading all four through some deep breathing exercises we all zipped up our coats and headed out through the narrow passage. I lead the group, with Joyce behind me, then Zoe and Thalia. Nash brought up the rear.

The mountain birthed us out into the wintery quiet. The snow had picked up and we couldn't even hear the group of cat people less than a hundred yards away. We stood their for a moment before taking a dozen paces south. I already felt chilled to the bone, but in that refreshing and invigorating way that I sometimes craved when exploring such climates. It would be nice to return to the moderate warmness of summer at home, and to the lingering pollution of the City.

I turned around to check if my group were in similar spirits. I saw Joyce smiling in her tank top and shorts, impervious to the cold as she was, and the greek unionists in their warm black coats with their unreadable faces. But to my shock I couldn't see Nash. I asked Joyce where she was and she looked around and shrugged. I ran back by the mountain, then further south and what I guessed must be west. I didn't dare go north without Val's cloak. 

"Nash!" I yelled. There was no reply in the stiffening cold. Just an empty silence and a smattering of yellow snow in the spot my tenacious travelling lesbian had vanished from.

Chapter One || Previous Chapter || Next Chapter

I came lurching down out of the shadows and into the warm glow cast by the panel lights of the control room. The door was wide open, and inside Nash stood slowly panting with her back to me. Her hand was wrapped around the throat of a the man who had been leading the Cat hymns and chanting down below. His hood was pulled back exposing his scruffy brown beard. He still held his microphone in one hand- the other was swatting weakly at Nash's sizable forearm. His eyes darted from her to the other man in black robes who also had his hood pulled back. He stood at the far end of the room, his long blond hair backlit by a sparking loose wire in Garfield's mouth. He held Val close against him, with a butterfly knife at her throat and her leash wrapped tight around his hand. She looked scared but very lucid.

The three hooded figures at the control panel seemed to be unconscious. One was on the floor, one was slumping off the side of the chair and one was stuck laying against the panel. The final figure still wearing a hood was crouching tensely by Jim Davis and the wire which had somehow broken loose. Jim was moaning and trying to push his head out of the tangled wires which engulfed him. I could see he was still in possession of a neck which he was jutting out, his veins bulging and muscles straining.

The blond man twirled his knife in his hand and held it by Val's collarbone. 

"This is ridiculous," he said in an accent that might have been Slovenian, "You're going to release Scrap now, and then we will talk this through. Yes?"

"You want me to release him?" Nash asked.

"Nash!" I yelled, stopping a couple feet past the door. She ignored me.

"Yes," said the blond European. 

Nash turned and smiled directly at me. She then grabbed the man Val's captor had called Scrap by the arm and sent him flying towards me. I panicked and tried to step backwards, my leg flailing as I did so. I ended up kicking him in the stomach, and he collapsed to the ground.

"Shit! I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" I shouted instinctively.

"Grab his microphone!" yelled Nash.

I did as my travelling companion commanded and plucked the mic off the floor. Scrap was breathing but not moving much otherwise. Nash and I turned towards the blond man, waiting for a strained moment to see his response.

"Ah, fuck this!" he bellowed, "You can deal with her yourselves! Let me tend to the man Davis!"

The European drew his knife away and let go of Val's leash. Val stood staring at Nash as he retreated to speak in hush and hurried tones to his hooded friend. 

"Val!" Nash cried, tears welling up in her eyes, "Val, I'm so glad you're okay!"

"You shouldn't have come." spoke Val, her voice barely more than a monotone whisper.

Nash and I looked at each other uneasily as Val unclasped the leash from her collar and dropped it to the floor. In her torn leggings and black tank top she cut quite the imposing figure despite being the shortest iron-worker at five-foot-five. Her cat eyeliner was as sharp as the fake claws on her gloves. She approached us steadily, never breaking eye contact with Nash to look at me as I nervously tightened my grip on the microphone.

​"You weren't supposed to see any of this, Nash," Val said, "Why did you even leave your dad's farm? There's nothing you can do. Nothing any human can do in the age of the feline."

She was a hair length away from Nash, who seemed to be struggling and sweating now more than she had when fighting the hooded goons. The conscious two of which had now donned insulated leather gloves and were trying to grab hold of the sparking, writhing wires- there were three now! Scrap seemed down for the count so I nervously inched towards Nash and Val, the microphone now feeling very heavy in my hand.

​"I was going to come back for you, after all this was over," Val continued, "This is the only way for us- you need to understand that."

"I understand," said Nash, "I understand that you're a fucking catgirl!"

"I am a Cat Woman!" Val yelled furiously. She scratched at Nash's arm and I saw a streak of red open up. I ran to Nash in an effort to steady her. She stood there like a blinking statue. Val jumped back, crouched, and licked her bloody claws. Slowly she crawled towards me.

"Did you like that suppository, Riese?" she said, looking up at me with her green eyes, "I designed it myself. I hope it came in handy for you. Look- my partner and I have some things we need to discuss alone. Why don't you just give me the microphone and I'll wait 'til you leave to tell the kittens below what just happened. Give you a head start. That's more than fair."

I fearfully held the microphone up over my head and circled around Nash, trying to read her expression. She seemed too stunned to help me deal with her deranged partner. Was she going to let me die? I wished Joyce was there. From the back of the room, I heard the sparking intensify. Over that buzzing was a low and deep moan growing louder.

"The other option," she said, "Won't be as fun for you. I'm going to tear that thing out of your hand and call the kittens up here. You'll already be a bloody mess by the time they come, but when they do it's going to be a feast. Fancy Feast is nice fresh out the can, but fresh meat is just purr-fect."

"Wow," I said, my heart beating in my chest like Tommy Ramone, "You guys take pet play really seriously! Uhh, good for you!"

I tried to prepare myself to do to her what I had done to Michael two weeks ago. I didn't have anything sharp, just a blunt microphone, so there would be none of the quick and violent finality of a knife- just painful brutality. I wasn't sure if I was honestly capable of applying cat euthanasia in this form. From the back of the room I heard a high-pitched wail and a Slovenian scream. The blond man and his friend were cowering in the corner- his friend had her hood off now and her small white face was contorted into a countenance of absolute terror.

On the ground rolled the head of Jim Davis. It tilted unnaturally from side to side, its jaw pivoting and clacking against the hard cement floor. From his open neck down Jim Davis was nothing more than a tangle of thin wires, mostly black and red. The red ones seemed to be tubes carrying blood from his heart, which was encased in thin transparent plastic and was currently being dragged across the floor along with the other organs visible in the tangle. Four thin clusters of long wires vaguely resembling limbs were in the process of pulling Mr. Davis across the cement, leaving a trail of blood in his wake from the red tubes that had already torn. He was moaning, his eyes staring right up at me desperately. He seemed to want something from me, as he was crawling right towards me. Val separated the two of us, but she didn't lose her focus for a second. I might have pissed my leggings but it wouldn't mean a thing to her.

"You don't need to die here, Riese," she said, "You're not like my former coworkers. You don't even need to die in the Restructuring. I can slip Ashe another note. You seem like a nice girl. Just give me the microphone and go. Leave Nash here. You can still leave. Go."

"No, Val," I replied, stepping out in front of Nash and standing up straight, "I don't think so. 'Cause, like, I'm actually really into your girlfriend and I want her to peg me."

Val snarled and crouched down again, preparing to lunge. Suddenly a mess of wires wrapped around her leg. She turned and looked down to see the smiling head of Jim Davis. His furthest wired limb was suddenly slapped by one of the frayed and sparking wires slamming up and down across the area in front of Garfield's tongue. The wires connected and 440 volts of electricity at a tenth of an amp passed through Val's body. She lit up from within like a mass of fairy lights and dropped to the ground. Jim's head rolled limply, his smile now plastered permanently upon it.

Nash stared at her dead lover for a few moments, then dropped to the floor, a small puddle of blood pooling around her arm. I ripped off Scrap's robe and kneeled to wrap part of it around her arm. She was still conscious, but wouldn't say a word. I stood up and shakily ran a hand through my hair and shook myself to feel a bit calmer. I quickly but steadily walked to the corner where the blond and the pale faced brunette were still cowering from the lifeless husks of Jim Davis and his first and final victim.

"What's your name?" I asked the blond man politely.

"Uh... it's Mister McFluffer," he said, dazed.

"No it's not." I said.

"No... it's not. It's Lukas."

"Lukas, can you help me? I don't know if I did it right."

Lukas followed me to Nash and tightened my makeshift tourniquet. His friend trailed behind. I approached her as calmly as I had Lukas.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Nadine," she said.

"Thanks for not giving me a cat name. Can you tell me where the iron-workers are? Val's co-workers, I mean? You know, the butch women?"

"They're in His left foot. Downstairs. It's a prison. But there are always a few guarding His feet. Even during the orgies."

I nodded, gathering that He was their lord Garfield. I remembered there being sexier anthro cats many long years ago, but somehow now only He remained. A shame, I thought. I pressed the button on the microphone and brought it to my face. Even from a thousand feet above, I could still hear my voice booming over the massive speakers in the grand chamber.

"PAPA OOH MA MEOW MEOW, KITTIES!" I said in my best impression of the unconscious fellow at the console, "WOW! THERE ARE NASTY PUPPERS OUTSIDE TRYING TO BLOW UP OUR MASTER'S MOUNTAIN! EVERYNYAH HAS TO GO OUT AND STOP EM! PWEEZE?"

I let go of the button. Lukas and Nadine were both staring at me bewilderedly. I flashed them a forced smile and a peace sign and put my head to the floor, listening. I heard from deep below what sounded like a mass migration of semi-nude bodies towards the mountain's entrance. I breathed a sigh of relief.

"Okay, Nadine, open the cages down there," I said, "Or the foot. Open the foot. Whatever."

Nadine went to the console and flipped a few switches. Then she nodded at me and waved worriedly. I ran back over to Nash.

"Hey, hey- can you walk?" I asked her, "We gotta find Joyce and get the fuck out of here!"

​"I can walk," she said, "And getting the fuck out of here sounds great."

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