Chapter 3: A Fish Tale
MA dreamed she was back in third grade, at St. Boniface Elementary School. She
was being chased by Theresa McGee, who was bigger and often beat her up. Only it
was so odd ！ Theresa was a 10-year-old child, while MA was her adult self, yet
Theresa somehow was till bigger. And as mean as ever. They ran through the
school playground, which had somehow morphed into Moulton's Garden of Earthly
Delights. Crowds of naked, pink people wandered about the grounds. They were
smaller than MA, and they spoke a strange language she didn't understand.
She heard Theresa somewhere behind her, yelling, "Brenda Wade, when I'm finished
with you, you won't be so pretty anymore."
MA climbed a staircase that spiraled around one of the strange garden
sculptures. The rose-colored sculpture hadn't appeared very big when she started
climbing, but soon she was a hundred feet above the ground and there were still
many stairs to climb. She passed an oval window, and a hand reached out and
grabbed her. She was pulled through the window and found herself facing a house
cat as big as she was ！ in fact, quite a bit bigger.
"We eat little girls like you," said the cat. It moved toward her. She pressed
her back against the wall and closed her eyes, trembling with fear. Then she
felt a rough tongue stroking her crotch.
"Yes, start there," said a familiar voice. She opened her eyes. It was the
Magyar. He was holding the wand. It had grown and was now at least three feet
long. "And when she's nice and juicy," he told the cat, "I will explode her into
a billion, trillion pieces, and you can lick them up at your leisure."
MA awoke with a start. She was covered with sweat and breathing heavily. The
room was dark, except for a glimmer of moonlight that came through the barred
window.
She got out of bed, and her knees almost buckled. She was weak with fear ！ and
with sexual excitement. She heard the tiny whir of an electric motor. She knew
it was the TV camera mounted just below the ceiling. Even in the dark, it
followed her every motion. Infra-red, she thought to herself.
She went to the window and looked out. The ground sloped away from the house on
this side, down to a tree-lined stream. There was just enough moonlight to make
out the contours of the landscape.
A metallic sound behind her made her turn around. The door to her room was open,
and someone stood silhouetted in the doorway.
"Can't sleep?" It was Betty.
"Why do you care?" asked MA.
"I want you fit and ready to fight in the morning."
MA laughed bitterly. "Why do we have to fight? You proved you're stronger than I
am. I concede."
"That's no fun," said Betty. "If you don't put up a good fight, Bohner and
Moulton will figure you're broken, and they'll sell you. Don't you want to put
that off as long as possible?"
Betty walked over and caressed her shoulder with her fingertips. "I don't want
to see you sold. As bad as things may seem here, they will be much worse when
you become some dip-shit sheik's sex toy."
MA tried to read Betty's face in the dark. "How would you know?" she asked.
"Have you ever been a sex slave?"
"No," Betty whispered, "but I'd like to be yours."
They embraced tentatively, then MA succumbed to Betty's sudden ardor. Betty
picked her up and carried her to the bed.
They made love until sunrise. Betty was an expert, but MA wanted more. She
shuddered as she thought what it was she wanted, what she craved as she had
never craved anything before ！ the wand and its big, magical silver sphere. She
wanted it deep inside her. She wanted it to fill her until she burst, until she
was obliterated in an orgasmic explosion.
# # #
"Do we really need to do this?" said Betty.
"Absolutely," said Bohner. "You've mastered her only once. It will take at least
four or five sessions before the message is indelibly etched in her mind, until
she knows she's no longer some kind of hot-shit superheroine."
They stood next to a muddy pit behind Moulton's stables. It had been selected by
Bohner, with Moulton's enthusiastic approval, as the venue for the next
MA-vs.-Big Betty match.
"I've seen some very good mud-wrestling videos," Moulton told Bohner. "I think
we can top them with these girls."
This fight would join the others in Moulton's video library. A camera crew had
set up at the perimeter of the pit, and a microphone dangled from a boom, to
catch the grunts, curses and howls of the combatants.
Betty was stripped and ready for action, even if her heart wasn't in it. MA
arrived at the pit with her wrists tied behind her and a guard on either side of
her. She had been stripped, too ！ and Betty figured whoever did the stripping
did a few other things, judging from the look of shame and despair on her face.
"Untie her," Bohner said. "Ms. A, you don't look like you've gotten into the
spirit of today's event. I hope you won't let us down."
"Fuck you," MA whispered.
"Ah, that's a good sign," said Bohner. "Get mad. Get mad as hell. Get mad as
hell, and take it out on Betty."
MA turned to say something to him, but at that moment, Betty grabbed her from
behind, lifted her off her feet and tossed her into the pit. Mud splattered
everywhere from the impact, and MA sat up, sputtering with shock and rage.
Betty climbed into the muck and immediately sank knee-deep. She reached for MA,
but the superheroine made a quick move and kicked her in the side. Betty's face
turned red with anger, and in a second she was on top of MA, pummeling her,
pulling her hair, pushing her face into the mud.
MA fought back bravely and at one point managed to flip Betty over her shoulder
into the muck. But the outcome of this match, like the one the day before,
seemed predetermined: Betty's superior strength would prevail.
It would have, had Bohner's cell phone not rung just as Betty was preparing to
finish off the battered superheroine. The ring distracted Betty for an instant,
and MA landed a hard right to her jaw.
Betty's knees buckled. MA didn't wait for her to recover. She clambered out of
the pit, rolled over and kicked a security guard in the balls. Then she was on
her feet, running as fast as she could. Two other guards gave chase, and Bohner
used his cell phone to call for reinforcements.
In less than a minute, Oliver Taggart, the overweight head of Moulton's security
force, and his assistant Stan Lee, arrived on the scene in an electric cart.
"Where did she go?" asked Taggart.
"Toward those woods," said Bohner. "Two of your men took off after her, but
she's quite a runner."
"Well, I'm no goddam runner," said Taggart. "Me and Stan will take the cart."
"How the hell are you going to get a cart into the woods?" Bohner asked in
exasperation.
"I'm not going into the woods, Doc," said Taggart. "I've got six other men,
besides the two chasing her, who'll be combing the woods. I want to be where
she's most likely to be when she comes out of the woods. So just let me do my
job, and you do yours ！ whatever the fuck that is."
# # #
After eluding Moulton's security team for twenty minutes, MA cautiously emerged
from the forest. She found herself standing before a large building of yellow
brick, to which were attached two large cylindrical steel tanks and what
appeared to be industrial pumps.
She cautiously circled the building until she came to the main entrance. The
walkway to the glass double was divided by a rectangular pond full of goldfish.
She stepped into it and washed the mud from her legs. No sense leaving a trail
for her pursuers. The goldfish cowered under water lily pads.
She could hear voices approaching in the woods in back of the building, and in
the other direction, about 100 yards away, she spotted an electric cart with two
men in it rolling up a path that led to the entrance.
It was time to make a move. She tried one of the big glass double doors. It
opened easily.
Inside, it was dark and cool. She was in an entrance hall with large pictures
and diagrams on the walls. Just enough light came through the doors to enable
her to recognize that the pictures were of fish and turtles. It was too dark to
read the accompanying text, and in any event she didn't have time for a lesson
on aquatic ecology.
She looked back through the glass doors. The cart was only about fifty yards
away. She had to find a place to hide.
In the wall opposite the main entrance was an arched doorway with a black
curtain. She pushed aside the curtain and found herself in a narrow, curved
corridor that encircled the most important part of the building, a huge,
cylindrical tank filled with marine life. Through a glass portal, she recognized
groupers and loggerhead turtles. A school of smaller fish flashed by. She
pressed her nose to the glass just as a large shadow in the blue-green haze
turned into a shark. She stepped back automatically, but the shark swerved as it
approached the glass, and she saw a pair of remoras attached to its grey skin,
just behind its gill.
MA heard the doors open out in the entrance hall, then the voices of Taggart and
Lee.
She turned left and followed the curved corridor, hoping to find a way out, or a
place to hide.
"You go that way," said Taggart. "I'll meet you on the other side."
MA was growing desperate. But suddenly she spotted a small metal door on her
left. When she opened it, she saw that it gave access to a narrow, vertical
shaft with hand rungs. She closed the door and started climbing.
In a few seconds, she was on a platform just above the ceiling of the corridor
she had been in. And at the edge of the platform was the big tank. It was
illuminated by a skylight only a few inches above her head.
She heard someone turn the handle of the door below.
"Shit," she said to herself. If he came up the ladder, he'd have her. She looked
down into the water. The shark she had seen was circling lazily. Or maybe it was
a different shark. She realized there were at least three or four.
She heard the clink of metal on metal. Someone was coming up the ladder ！ and
probably carrying a gun.
She sat at the edge of the platform and dangled her legs in the tank. Then
bracing herself with her hands, she let her body slide into the water.
It was cold but not as cold as she expected. She took a big gulp of air, then
swam underwater toward a replica of a shipwreck. A shark swam alongside her for
a moment, then turned away.
She hid in the shipwreck and hoped she could hold her breath long enough for
whoever was on the platform to look around and lose interest. Finally, after a
minute and a half, her body was screaming for oxygen. She swam to the surface as
unobtrusively as possible, but when her head came out of the water she couldn't
restrain herself. She noisily forced the stale air out of her lungs and inhaled
deeply.
Then she looked over at the platform. No one was there.
Her feeling of relief was interrupted by a forceful bump in the side. A shark
was nudging her. She turned to face it, and it bumped her again, this time in
the belly.
Was it preparing to attack? Or did it think she was an aquarium worker, come to
feed it? Another bump, this time from behind. A second shark had joined in the
fun.
MA tried to remain cool. She didn't want to do anything to startle or anger the
sharks, but she also didn't want them to view her as helpless ！ and as a meal.
These weren't great whites, but they were big enough to do serious damage.
In the viewing hall below, Moulton's security guards were watching all this with
amusement.
"Think they'll take a bite out of her?" Lee asked.
"I sure would like to," said Taggart.
MA swam, as calmly as possible, around the perimeter of the big tank. She was
looking for a way out. Returning the way she had come seemed too risky.
At last, she came to a concrete wall with rungs. As she climbed up, one of the
sharks nipped at her right leg. She felt a sudden pang, and when she looked
down, blood was flowing from her calf.
She pulled her legs out of the water just in time. The sharks had grown excited
by the scent of blood.
MA looked around. She was on a ledge between the big tank she had just emerged
from and another, smaller one. This one wasn't covered by the skylight, so she
couldn't tell what was in the dark water. But there were only two choices: the
small tank, with whatever hazards it might hold, or the big one with several
hungry sharks. She slid into the small tank.
"She's a goner," said Taggart.
"Why? She got out before the sharks really got going."
Taggart laughed grimly. "Yeah, she got out, all right. And I'm pretty sure she's
now in the Jug."
MA had no way of knowing, of course, that the "Jug" was where Moulton's aquarium
keepers maintained a host of less attractive forms of aquatic life found mostly
in the Amazon river system ！ life forms that few visitors to public aquariums
were interested in seeing.
The first to attack her were a pair of lampreys, which attached their circular,
tooth-filled mouths to her breasts. She was startled, but the sensation was
almost pleasurable at first. There was nothing pleasurable, however, when she
attempted to pull the parasites off of her. The pain was agonizing, and she
realized that removing the lampreys would likely mean tearing off her nipples.
Then she felt other creatures probing her anus and her vulva. She kicked and
squirmed. Something was definitely entering her vagina. Terrified, she screamed
and swam back to the ledge she had left. But now something had become interested
in the gash in her leg, and she felt several new sets of teeth digging in. She
tried to pull herself out of the waster, but she began to feel weak and dizzy.
"Got to get out," she told herself. But everything began to whirl around her,
and she lost consciousness. Small but powerful jaws pulled her below the surface
of the water. Bubbles poured from her nose and mouth as she sank into a gloom
darkened by her own blood.
[To be continued.]
