Everyone's Favorite Girl (20 page)

Melissa, what the fuck are you doing?

I almost laughed out loud.  I was sneaking.  In my hands I held a Get Out of Jail Free Card for almost any situation, and here I was trying to play ninja.

I walked up to the kid and tapped him on the shoulder.  He jumped so hard he knocked his headset loose.  He was reaching to fix it when I sprayed him in the face.

“Hold up your sleeve,” I said, opening the small case Judy had given me.  Locked into little clips were three syringes and a vial of the Loyalty Drug.

I injected the kid as Judy had instructed, straight into the meat of the shoulder, and, reloading the same syringe, said to him, “Go back to playing your video games.  I was never here.  You never saw me.”

He was happy to do so, though my interruption of his game had cost him his character’s life.  He had to reset and start over from a previous fixed point.  I wanted to tell him I could sympathize, but I didn’t have time and he’d already gone back to battling aliens on another planet.  Important stuff.

I took it Kate’s cubicle was the one on the far right, and I was correct, though I didn’t know for sure until I unlocked two deadbolts and pulled the door open.

I held the spray bottle up like a gun, pulled slowly.  Suddenly the door flung open and Kate came spilling out, falling to the tile floor with a loud smack.  Her hair was matted and tangled and she smelled of piss and body odor.

She was climbing to her feet when I sprayed her.

The fervor subsided, and now she stood slowly, properly, not with modesty or sensuality but with complete disregard for her own nudity.  All anger abated, all ill will lost like a useless thought.

“Hi Melissa,” she said, and for the first time ever those two words weren’t sullied by bitchiness and hatred.

“Be still,” I said.

She didn’t even look at the needle when I injected her.

I put the robe over her shoulders and led her out of the room.  Everyone would see us in the Level C lobby, but that wouldn’t matter for long, unless Sean happened to be there.  That would put a dent in my plans.

I got lucky on this one.  The lobby was mostly empty.  It wasn’t quite lunchtime yet.

I took Kate back to my room—today it was once more her room, as well—and told her to take a quick but thorough bath.  She lathered herself up head to toe and then dove into the Jacuzzi, rinsing herself by swimming.

Next I took her to the closet and let her pick out something “sexy but subtle.”

Some things never change.  Kate proved that when she emerged in a red cocktail dress.  It showed much less cleavage than normal, and the skirt came halfway down her thighs, but it was still very much in Kate’s normal fashion.

I gave her detailed instructions.

Then we went back to the lobby, me heading to the elevator, Kate heading to the cafeteria.

~ ~ ~ ~

The elevator worked.  The lab techs weren’t holding it anymore.  This meant James had managed to haul off all the dead Favorite Girls, so that at a glance the only thing out of the ordinary would be their absence from work.

I rode back down to Level A, where Judy, James, and Patton were waiting for me.  Patton’s sleeves were covered in blood, and Frog Girl was nowhere to be found.

“No one came down the stairs?”

“Nope.”

“Good.”

I had a better plan now.

The next item on the agenda was for us all to disperse and return to our normal days.  I sent Judy back to Level B to tinker with test tubes and do science stuff.  I sent James to keep an eye on Liu.

“Let her flirt with you—and flirt back.  She’s been on your nuts for months.  Be your usual horny self.”

“You mean act the way I used to act,” he said.

“Exactly.”

“I can do that.”

We all rode the elevator together, Judy getting off on Level B, James getting off on Level C, and Patton and I riding to Level D, where we ran to Patton’s apartment to avoid anyone seeing the blood.

Flora started crying when we walked in the door.

“Whose blood is that?” she asked.

I told Patton to get out of those clothes and take a shower.

Flora didn’t start to calm down until the blood was out of sight.

The most horrible thing I did in my time at Your Favorite Girl, Incorporated, was lie to Flora about her sisters.  Now wasn’t the time.  I couldn’t add her incapacitation from grief to my list of things to worry about.

So I told her one of the lab techs had an accident and Patton took care of him.  I told her the Favorite Girls were having a good time playing warehouse, that I’d turned the work into a game.

We sat together while Patton showered and I made up the game off the top of my head.  In what might well be our last moments together, I told Flora a terrible lie, and she ate it up.

People are happy to believe a lie.

The truth is never as pretty.

-The End-

KATE WASN’T the only one proving things never change today.  In distress, Mr. Shriver went right to Sean to investigate the situation and round up all relevant parties.
  However buddy-buddy James and Mr. Shriver had become in the past day or two, Sean was still the old man’s go-to guy.

Mr. Shriver was getting rash with his decisions.  I like to think I played a part in inspiring that.

Sean came to collect Patton first.  A betrayer stripped of his position in the company, sure, but still their brother.

He was surprised to find me
in Patton’s apartment, but only in a passive way.  I didn’t like the way he looked at Flora, though.  She was wearing one of Patton’s wife beaters with a bra underneath.  It sagged so low her whole chest showed.  He glared at her, like a pissed off ex-boyfriend when he walks into a party and spots you chatting in the corner with another guy.

I couldn’t figure out what that look meant, so I just brushed it aside.

Sean was in a hurry anyway.

In the elevator, he asked me if I’d let Kate out of the Showcase Hall.

“No, do you need her?  Take her out if you want.”

He grinned and shook his head.  “Someone let her out already.”

We stepped out into the Level C lobby and could hear the ruckus in the cafeteria.  Kate had done just as I instructed, and now nearly every employee of Your Favorite Girl, Inc., was now naked and immersed in a massive orgy.

I couldn’t make out most of them.  Sean’s guards stood out like sore thumbs—all three for their sheer size but one because of his limp, snub-nose penis.

I also spied Damien, my short, fat, mute friend, on his back with one of the girls I’d assigned to guard the stairwell sucking his dick and the other sitting on his face.

The lucky little bastard was still holding his notebook.  I imagined him writing,
Oh yeah, oh yeah, that’s it baby,
and started laughing.

“You think this is funny,” Sean said, shouting over the moans and cries.

“Just a little,” I said.

“Mr. Shriver sees things differently.”

“I imagine so.”

“Did you do this?”

“No.”

“Did Judy?”

“No.”

Of course he suspected Judy.  He thought this orgy was the result of the Libido Drug.  Judy had a history when it came to this sort of thing.

Sean stared me down for a moment.  Then he motioned for us to follow.  He led us to the service desk, where we collected Liu—I didn’t know why she was on Mr. Shriver’s list, but she was.  Then we rode to Level B to collect Judy, a more obvious suspect in a conspiracy to cause such chaos.  Sean knew Kate no longer had access to the Libido Drug.

With Judy in the elevator, Sean hit the E button on the panel.

“What about James?”

“James is already up there,” Sean said.

Indeed, when we reached Level E, we came upon Mr. Shriver and James sitting in two of the high-back leather chairs.  The bed had been replaced with the stripper pole, and Kate, as I expected, was tied to it, still sporting her cute red dress—and also a black eye.

After spiking as many trays of food, batches of waffle mix, loaves of bread, and items in the salad bar that she could, Kate had stood in the cafeteria doorway and watched as the cafeteria fell silent, each person stripped of his or her emotions, thoughts, and desires.  Finally, she commanded them all to pick a partner or two and have passionate sex until further notice.

Then she’d waited to be found.

Liu had been the one to discover the scene.  She made a point to mention it five times on the elevator ride.

We came into the circle and Mr. Shriver invited everyone to sit.

Kate looked calm.  Too calm, really.  I started to fear she would give us away.  On a normal day Kate bitched and complained even when she was getting her way.  Now she was tied to a pole that you didn’t get tied to unless you were about to die, and she didn’t have a thing to say about it.

I should have coached her to cry and struggle.

I fucked that up.

When I sat next to Patton, Sean waltzed up to me shaking his head.

“Nope, not you,” he said.  “Stand up.”

I didn’t move.

“She was with me, Sean,” Patton said.  “She had nothing to do with it.”

“Take a seat, Sean,” Mr. Shriver said.

But I could tell he wasn’t listening.  His black eyes bore into me like wood bees.  I could f
eel the bite of them, a tiny sting foretelling the pain to come.

He snatched me out of the chair so hard it felt like my shoulder popped out of its socket, and in one quick motion he slammed my back against the hard pole, yanked my arms up, and
duck-taped my hands with Kate’s.  My mind was reeling, trying to figure out where I went wrong, what set him off.  Was it instinct?  Did he just hate me that much?

“What the hell are you doing?” Mr. Shriver demanded.

“This bitch played us all,” Sean said, pulling his knife.  “I saw the stitches on that little cunt’s arm—”

He stopped.

“What the fuck is this?!” Mr. Shriver screamed.

Sean stepped aside to reveal James standing behind him, holding the syringe he’d just plunged into the back of Sean’s neck.

That was it.  The look Sean had given Flora.  The loose wife beater.  He’d seen the stiches on her arm, plain as day, and he’d realized what I’d done.  That I’d used the Love Drug from the device to get to Judy, and then used her to fake my way into earning Mr. Shriver’s trust.

Mr. Shriver was losing his mind.
  He knew his only ally in the room was Liu, and she was standing there looking like a little kid lost in a crowd.  She had no idea what was going on.

“Sean, seize him!”  Sean didn’t answer, so he turned to James.  “What did you inject him with?  You think you can touch me?  You have
no idea
what’ll happen to you if anything happens to me. 
All
of you!”

“That’s why you’re going to tell us,” I said. 
“Sean, if you would please put Mr. Shriver back in his chair.”

Sean stepped away from me, and I knew I wasn’t going to die.

“I’m not telling you shit,” Mr. Shriver said, so upset now he spat with every word.

“James, cut me loose.”

While James freed me from the pole, I watched Sean deliver a hard jab to Mr. Shriver’s jaw.  He never looked so frail and old as he did now.  Brittle, when he’d always come off as so foreboding.  Stunned from the blow, he let Sean guide him to the chair, and he sat there holding his face, steaming mad but obviously rocked with fear.

“Judy, if you will…”
I said.

Judy opened a small case like the one she’d loaned me and loaded a syringe with Loyalty.  Mr. Shriver began to struggle and Sean responded with two more punches, rendering the old man half-conscious.

She plunged in the needle.

I stepped forward to watch
.

It was the most exhilarating penetration I’ve ever known.

~ ~ ~ ~

“Get on your knees.”

Patton stood over Sean, holding the knife he’d just confiscated from him.

“I’ve always known I’d kill you first, if I ever got the chance.”

“Me?” Sean asked.  “Why?”

“Why?”
Patton screamed.  “For half a century I’ve been raising these girls as my own, giving them everything they need to go out into the world as functioning adults, just in case—just in
case
—I get the chance to kill you before it’s their time.  Brian was the cruelest one for bringing them into this world, but you were always there at the end.  To rape them, to torture them, and to murder them.”  He paused, glaring down at a man who possessed no malicious feelings for him.  A blank slate with only the shape of the person to whom he spoke.

The rest of us
watched eagerly, Mr. Shriver included—though he was like Sean now, a little confused and eager to be given an order or asked a question.  I think even Liu wanted to see Sean die.

“I keep telling myself I should turn you back into the person you were when we were children
,” Patton said.  “My brother.  A good man I can look up to.  But I keep coming to a dead end, Sean.  You were never anything but what you are right now, and if I let you live, I’ll have to create a whole new personality for you.  Well I’m done creating things that were never meant to exist.  The only reason I should have stopped Melissa from killing Brian was so I could do it myself.  Goodbye, brother.”

Taking a cue from me, Patton stabbed Sean through his eye.

Then he let go of the blade, stood, and walked over to his eldest brother.  Mr. Shriver smiled up at him like a grandparent with dementia.

Everyone turned to the sound of me yanking the knife out of Sean’s skull.  They all watched me walk
around the pole to face Kate, who had also felt Sean’s fist today.  She wasn’t upset, though.  I hadn’t told her to be.

“Open your mouth.”

She stuck out her tongue.  On it was one of the Favorite Girl devices.  I’d had James pluck a handful from a few dead girls, just in case we needed them.

The plan had been for Kate to bite down on the button and spit in Sean’s face when he stepped up to kill her.
  It would put him in a lustful rage and he would lose control of himself.  In that way, Kate would act as a sticky trap.

I took the device from her tongue, and then I kissed her.

I kissed the girl she was before she came to Your Favorite Girl, just in case, unlike Sean, some good person had once existed in her body.  If Kate had always been Kate, I kissed the girl she was going to be.

Then I raised the knife up and cut the duct tape from the pole.

Unlike Patton, I was ready to create all kinds of things.

“Thank you,” Kate said.

I helped her pull the tape from her wrists.  Then I walked over and knelt before Mr. Shriver.

~ ~ ~ ~

“Tell me what happens if you die.”

“
Well now, if I die, my drafted confession—along with a brick of documents incriminating every person in this building—will automatically go out to specific media outlets, police departments, state’s attorneys, and what have you, and everything will dissolve, with most of you spending the rest of your lives in prison.”

“How do we change it?”

“It’s a simple alteration of my Last Will and Testament.”

“Okay,” I said, getting a little impatient, “let’s alter it.”

“We can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because my Will is guarded, and the person who guards it is well-trained to commit suicide if anyone, including I, ever ask him to change it.  I report to him, and he reports to a third party.  If that third party fails to receive two day’s reports, I’m assumed dead.  I’m very sorry to say there’s nothing I can do.”

“Oh, but there is,” I said.  “Take me to him.”

“To the man who guards my Will.”

“Yes.  Is he in the city?”

“He’s in the building—on this floor, in fact.  I keep him and his family locked away and I feed them meals laced with Longevity.  They’ve been a young family for many years now.”

I stood up then and turned to Patton.

“He has a fucking
family
locked up in here somewhere?”

“I didn’t know,” Patton said.

I snatched the case from Judy’s hand and plucked out a syringe.

“You’ll say the same after I shoot you up with this?” I hissed.

I don’t know what came over me, but I wanted to kill Mr. Shriver right then and there.  So I made him lead me through a series of hallways to a door he said would lead me to this kidnapped family.  When he handed me the keycard that would grant me access, I instructed James to take him to his own dungeon, activate a device and make him swallow it, and then lock him in a cell.

“And you know what?” I said as James turned to lead Mr. Shriver away.  “You get in there with him.”

I didn’t watch what happened to those two, but later Patton would discover them in a cell together with their dicks ripped off.  They’d really had a go at each other.

Patton, of course, was looking for any decommissioned Favorite Girls who might have survived.

There weren’t any left.  Only fresh blood from when Sean had killed the remaining few.

I hesitated at the door, afraid of what I would find
inside.  A family frozen in time for decades.  Had they adapted to the world or did they still see it the way people did back then?  Would I terrify them?

“Patton, go get Flora.”

It was the best decision I ever made, sending Flora in to talk to Mr. Shriver’s attorney and his family.  Of course, I sent her with a vial of Loyalty, and she used it, but Flora has a gentle nature about her all the brainwashing in the world couldn’t give me.