Pente: Octopada Occupation - Intro

{c}Introduction

Ringing.
Incessant ringing.

As she covered her ears to protect them, the sound seemed to punch holes in her skull, forcing her to acknowledge its presence. Not that it mattered though; she was too weak and bruised to do anything against its onslaught at the moment.

Once more the ringing begins, only to be cut short. She hears a short message in her own voice and then a loud beep. It’s her answering machine, or at least it is hers now. It had belonged to the Professor. She had been bugging him to get a newer one or just switch over to using voicemail, but he is stubborn in changing. Well, he used to be, before he had died, before he had been murdered. Now she seemed as unwilling as he had been to change, not out of stubbornness, but she simply wasn’t ready to move on just yet.

Finally a voice rang out from the speaker inside the machine. It was her boyfriend, he sounded upset. “Danielle? Are you home? Pick up the phone! We need to talk! I don’t like the way you backed up Pavel last night!” his voice twisted as he said the name, as if he had wanted to say something else, something vulgar. “If we are going to be together, you and me, as a team, I need your support, not you supporting him. Either way, I will be there tonight. If you love me, you will be there by my side and not his.”

The line closes, static erupting from the speaker until the machine hangs up. She gave as much thought to what he said as the static that had followed when he hung up. She had much more weighty matters to consider. As she glanced around her bedroom, she was glad they had begun to use the other location as their base of operations. All the furniture had been overturned or broken. As she tried to sit up, she became faintly aware that she had been bleeding heavily. As she tried to lift her head, the blood caked in her hair stuck to the carpet. She had to yank it free with her hand before she could raise herself up on her elbows to survey the damage to her body.

The blouse she had been wearing was torn open. The waistband of her skirt was still around her waist with the rest of the skirt hanging on by a few stitches in the back. It looked like a strange black cape that she was wearing around her waist. Look at me, Super Danielle, vanguard of raped women. The thought failed to amuse her and with good reason. Her situation was nothing to laugh at. The more she thought about what was going on, the more she could feel a throbbing ache coming from deep within her belly. It was as if the pain in each area of her body had been waiting for her mind to open shop and now that she was conscious, each was vying for a front position in the line. The pain emanating from her nether region down below must have been the one currently first in line. She could see a small pool of blood near her buttocks. She wondered whether she could still walk, let alone have children some day. One of her legs cramped in response to her question. We’re down, but not out. She was suddenly glad for all of the Tae kwon-do classes she had taken. Her muscles probably would not have been able to move if she hadn’t been pushing them so hard recently.

Danielle pushed herself up into a sitting position. Just before becoming fully upright, she felt a sharp pain on her lower back on the right side, causing her to fall backwards. Fortunately she caught herself before falling back completely. She felt around with her hand and found what she had feared. They had stabbed her. It didn’t feel deep, but there was no way of knowing. She pulled her knees up into her chest. The task was tantamount to rolling a boulder uphill; nature and muscle wanting to let them roll back down with only her mind’s will keeping them in place.

As she sat in a fetal position, she decided to give her body some respite while she considered what the rapists had told her last night. She could remember with perfect clarity how the events transpired. It caused a large lump to develop in her throat as she felt the same shroud of terror fall over her as the night before.

“Miss Callahan told you to leave well enough alone, but you don’t seem to understand do you?” His mouth, inches from her face, stank of hard liquor and loose women. He obviously had been making a hobby of what he was about to do. “Now we’re going to teach you why you don’t cross her.” The man had already begun to tear at the bodice of her blouse. “I’d tell you to pass the message along to your friends, but I’m not sure you’ll live through this to tell them. Don’t cry though, it’s going to be like that old song, ‘Oooh baby, you make it hurt so good.’ Ha ha ha.”

She blacked out after that with his hollow laughter ringing in her ears. She wasn’t sure if it was due to her forcing her mind to go somewhere else while he violated her body or if it was because someone struck her over the head. Although the blood caked in her hair and running from her ear seemed to suggest the latter, she reasoned that it had probably been a combination of both.

She felt broken, like a vase that had fallen and smashed into a thousand pieces. It wasn’t the feeling of being broken that bothered her; it was the accompanying feeling of never being able to piece herself back together. Like somehow the pieces of the vase had changed so they could never be glued back together again. She felt as perverse as the men who had forced themselves on her last night. She had to lose that feeling.

She rolled over on her side and forced herself into a crawl. She made her way along the length of hallway between her bedroom and the bathroom, hands and knees her only contact with surroundings that passed in her peripheral vision. Her mind was elsewhere, perhaps seeking the place it went last night, still trying to block out the finality of it all. It was as if she was a disembodied ghost, animated in flesh through her hands and lower legs only. The rest of her sought to be somewhere else, to be someone else. She vaguely realized the floor beneath her had changed from wooden to cold tile. She was in the bathroom.

To say that she stripped off her clothes would have been a lie. She really had nothing on to begin with. She removed the few bits of cloth that had managed to cling to her body in tatters. With a Herculean effort, she climbed into a standing position near the tub, an antique pedestal tank with clawed feet. The Professor's only interest outside his work was antiques and his home reflected it.

The large tub that lay before her stood nearly as high as her chest. It rested on a brick platform that seemed to suggest the original owners had wanted to place a large grill instead of a tub in the bathroom. The large, sloped back of the tub followed graceful lines down to a straight front. The fat, cast iron gargoyle feet on the bottom had been painted black to match the outside of the tub. The inside, however, was as white as the goose-down comforter she kept on her bed. It had a small nick in the finish near the crest at the back of the tub where she had slipped and fallen once and hit it with her teeth. The blood that had escaped her mouth that time had run in long streaks down the inside of the tub. I wonder how much blood will run down the sides this time. Normally she would have to lift her legs and swing high to get inside the tub. The searing pain she felt would make any such maneuvers impossible. She clasped the rolled lip of the tub in her hands and poured herself over the side into the tub. It was icy cold lying there naked, but Danielle felt good. She had worked a bit of sweat just waking up and making it down the hall to the bathroom. The cold porcelain numbed her backside as she lay there. She reached up and turned the dual knobs that controlled the hot and cold water. She put the water to the hottest she could stand, hotter even. She wanted to burn the filth off her body that the rapists had left. She would burn the rags that had once been her outfit too; she didn’t want anything that had touched their hands.

As the hot water filled the tub, she thought about the last time she and the Professor had been able to spend quality time together. She did it not to reminisce, but because she needed to come to a decision about what she was going to do later. The meeting that her boyfriend had spoken of would happen tonight at midnight. She had doubts about wanting to go but the need was great. She wanted to go over in her mind all the events that had led up to last night’s fracas in her bedroom. When I can better understand where these events have come from, then I will be better prepared to know where they are going. Her reasoning sounded suspect but logical nonetheless. She closed her eyes and began to dream, letting the water slowly rise to cover her body.