Pets 2: Pani's Story (25 page)

After three days locked in a tiny eight-by-eight interrogation room with Adam Bolton and three nights in a cell next to Crazy—listening to the constant creak of bedsprings as she rocked back and forth and sang to herself, like a broken record repeating the same hesitant, disjointed lines from Ring Around the Rosie over and over again, sometimes for hours—getting committed to Holstead Mental Health Hospital had almost been a blessing. Over time, the agency’s initial near-daily visits had gradually diminished to an every-four-weeks’ rotation. Obviously the NSA hadn’t forgotten about her. Perhaps it never would.

“Maybe you should say hello today,” Barney suggested, giving her hand which held the small cup of pills a nudge towards her mouth. “Bet that’d tickle the man half to death.” Pani continued to stare out the windows, looking beyond the flowers and the bees humming among the opening buds, her eyes slowly focusing on reflections in the glass beyond her.

Beyond Barney. Beyond the patients half-circled around the activity room’s only wall-mounted 112

TV, beyond the table with its half-finished picture puzzle, past old man Derek Ferger who sat eating the pages of his Bible, slowly working his way through Revelations, and past Crazy who sat quietly by herself, tugging at her flushed and swollen lips with one hand, the fingers of her other tapping haltingly at the air in front of her face.

Beyond all these movements, all these distractions, slowly her eyes brought into focus a white lab coat and a conspicuous blue suit. That she could hear him at all from all the way over here was nothing short of miraculous, but if she listened just hard enough, she could have sworn she heard Dr. Solbee saying, “…proof we’ve found the proper medications for her. There hasn’t been an escape attempt in almost eighteen months. In fact, since her move to the minimum security wing three weeks ago, Judy has become a model patient.” Bolton was far from impressed. “Yeah. Great. Who cares? What I want to know is, has there been any progress?”

“You mean, is she lucid?” Solbee politely specified. Good ol’ Dr. Solbee. Always polite.

Always patient. Always right to the point. “Not in the slightest. She has taken a complete psychotic break from reality. She hasn’t said one word in almost two years. There’s no way for us to know whether she’ll ever talk again. Whatever she experienced out there…whatever information you keep hoping she’ll provide you—about them, where they took her, what they did, what they have—we may never know. Personally, I don’t think I want to know.”

“That’s my job though, isn’t it?”

In front of her, Barney moved slowly, leaning sideways just far enough to block her view through the garden windows. When her eyes finally focused on him, he offered her an ever so patient, cajoling smile. “Be a good girl, Judy. Come on now. Take your meds.” Be a good girl…

Bringing the cup of pills to her mouth, Pani tipped back her head and then drank the water.

She handed both empty cups back to him, and then showed him her empty mouth.

“Good girl,” he said again and made another check on his clipboard. As Pani settled back in her chair, the serenity of her face once more bathed in warm, chain-link-checkered sunlight, he said, “Maybe after I’m done with this, if I’ve got the time, I’ll come back and help you with your hair.” He patted her shoulder and, as he walked away, very softly added, “Heads up, baby. Here they come.”

Baby.

Pani stared into the garden, her eyes growing fixed and unfocused again as Dr. Solbee escorted Bolton through the busy room, skirting some of the more skittish patients, like Crazy who took one look at him, jumped up from her seat and hurried all the way across the room to where another orderly, Mark, blocked her retreat for the garden door.

“You know you’re not cleared to go outside yet,” he said, sliding in between her and the electronic keypad that kept the door securely locked against the more escape-prone patients.

Crazy didn’t know the code, but she liked to push buttons just the same. Her fingers tapped spastically at the air, her other hand clawing at her bottom lip until Mark caught her wrist and forced her to stop.

“Good morning, Judy,” Dr. Solbee said. He was always so cheerful when they talked. “You remember Special Agent Bolton, don’t you?”

113

“Sure she remembers me.” Bolton came around the back of her chair to stand in front of her. He seemed to take great delight in blocking out the sun. A petty revenge for all the trouble she’d somehow caused him just by coming back to Earth. “It’s that time again, Ms. Baker. I’ve got some questions for you, and this is the day you’re going to start answering them.”

“Special Agent Bolton,” the doctor censured. “Please…”

“No.” Shaking his head, he leaned over to brace his hands over the flimsy arms of her chair, pinning her in place. “No, we’re past please. We’re two years past please.” He angled his head, bending until he was eye-level with her, forcing her to stare as intently into his eyes as he did hers. “Who knows, might do you some good to talk about it? Alien abduction; must have been pretty damn scary while it was happening, huh? So how’d they do it? How did they suck you up into their space ship? How long did they keep you? How did you get that scar in your back, hm? What kind of experiments did they perform on you? Was it all physical? Mental, maybe?

Sexual?” His eyes narrowed and one corner of his mouth turned mockingly upward. “Tell me honestly…Did they probe you?”

It took everything she had not to shove him away from her, but in the end, one slow blink of her eyes was the only movement she made. She made no sound beyond that required for breathing. Her reward was the glimmer of dark frustration that flashed through the depths of his eyes when he failed to get a reaction.

“A psychotic break is not something a person can turn on and off like a light switch,” Dr.

Solbee finally said. “She doesn’t do this to anger you. She simply is lost in whatever world her mind constructed to help her deal with the horrors of her abduction.”

“Yeah,” Bolton said slowly, the look on his face anything but convinced. “Yeah, right.” But eventually, when she continued simply to sit there, reacting to nothing, staring straight through him as if he weren’t even there, he stepped back out of the light, letting her be engulfed in the bright amber glow of the sun again.

He sounded defeated when he finally sighed and said, “Where’d that other one go? Maybe she’ll be more talkative.”

“Please,” Dr. Solbee fell into step beside him. “Be gentle with her. Hanna is in a very fragile state right now.”

“She’ll be even more fragile when I get done with her,” Bolton muttered, and away they walked, leaving Pani to stare out across the garden alone.

Across the activities room, Crazy saw him coming and quickly wrenched away from Mark.

She snapped around to face the wall, squeezing her eyes tightly shut and grabbing a fistful of her own hair with one hand, the fingers of her other rapidly tapping and twitching at the empty air.

“Oh now, you’ve got something to say to me, don’t you Hanna?” Bolton asked her, leaning in over her shoulder to whisper into Crazy’s ear. “Want to talk about the big, bad aliens?” Crazy’s whole body shuddered hard. She yanked at her hair, ripping sections out by the root, waving her free hand and slapping indiscriminately at both the orderly and the wall as she began to scream. High-pitched. Wild and frantic. Bolton jerked back, startled. Dr. Solbee lurched forward, grabbing her hair-entwined fist before she could hurt herself further while Mark grabbed her flailing arm.

By then, re-establishing calm became a lost cause. Half of the patients gathered around the 114

TV joined Crazy in screaming, some just reveling in the commotion, while others jumped about truly alarmed.

Someone hit a code and orderlies came running from all over the facility, moving calmer patients out of the area, distracting those who could be distracted and de-escalating the crisis before it grew too far out of hand. More than a couple had to be wrestled into restraints and dragging them from the room towards Seclusion. Eventually, with Crazy removed to the calm sanctuary of a padded cell, calm and quiet resumed its command of Holstead’s patients.

Beyond frustrated, Bolton raked his hand through his hair, turning in a full circle as he took in the room. From National Security agent to official alien profiler, right from the beginning he had considered this to be the biggest shit job of his career, and how it had come to land on his desk, he’d never know.

Almost resentfully, his eyes returned to the chair centered before the three bay windows that overlooked the flower garden of the hospital grounds.

The chair was empty, and Judy was gone.

They searched the hospital and the grounds, and then the police were called. Then too was the military. Within hours, an extensive search of the surrounding neighborhood turned up a discarded orange jumpsuit lying in the rhododendron bushes not fifty feet from a backyard laundry line with several suspicious gaps amidst the drying clothes. Shortly after Judy’s picture flashed across local media channels alerting the public to the escape, Bolton was dispatched to an area bank. A woman answering to Judy’s description had used a stolen bankcard to withdraw the daily limit from the outside ATM.

That was the last grainy picture ever taken of Judy Baker. From there, she seemed simply to vanish from the face of the planet.

* * * * *

The morning dawned gray and wet. Winter was closing in and it was getting colder, but not so cold as to discourage early morning joggers from the park. So far, there were only two people making use of the well-manicured path that wove in and out amongst the trees and underbrush surrounding the duck pond.

One, a man in a yellow jogging suit, was walking his dog, a sedate golden lab who paused frequently to make good use of the bushes. The other was Pani.

Bundled against the cold in a heavy wool coat given to her by charity workers almost a month ago, she walked the path. There was an absence of bird calls and squirrel chatter this morning, leaving the air feeling unnaturally still. Ominous, even. She’d felt this once before, and after a year of living under bridges and inside muddy culverts, and of haunting city parks waiting for a morning like this one, she could barely control the thrill of excitement spiraling through her.

Up ahead, the man rounded the far end of the pond, disappearing behind a cluster of tall bushes and trees. For a brief few seconds, the morning stillness was shattered by a sudden barking, and then the dog reappeared, running along the path on the opposite site of the pond, his leash trailing the ground behind him.

“Papa come Pani,” she whispered, her fingers trembling from more than just the cold as she 115

shed her bulky clothes and made of herself an open and appealing target. “Papa’s home now.” She walked towards the end of the pond, slow and steady, giving them plenty of time to see her and get ready.

“Take Pani Papa’s home…”

She reached the end of the pond, following the path into the denser copse of vegetation. It provided a relatively brief cover from the rest of the park, and at one point, she turned to look behind her to see if she had yet reached that ‘point of no return.’

A soft hiss whipped the air a half second before she felt the pain of the drugged dart hit her thigh. Her muscles went limp with shocking speed, and Pani fell over backwards into the dirt.

As the gray of the morning faded into a heavily weighted blackness, a large, dark head moved into her field of vision. She smiled up at him, loving the sight of all that dark hair, those ink black eyes and jutting, Neanderthal brow.

“Pani,” she whispered for his ears alone. “Property of…Papa…11355921.” His face underwent a metamorphosis of startlement. He blinked twice, his head angling curiously and, just before she lost consciousness entirely, reached down to pick her up with three-fingered hands.

It had taken almost three years, but finally Pani would be going home.

The End

116

Blushing Books hopes you enjoyed this spicy, romantic spanking novel. We have lots of other erotic novels and novellas available, and new stories are constantly and continuing to be published on our online store:

www.blushingbooks.com

Come and sign up for our free newsletter and be the first to be informed of stories such as the one you’ve just enjoyed!

117