“A b—Ah. I see. Baby.” Kane examined the scanner again. “That explains it. Hm.” He punched at the keys of his little computer, probably updating his program.
“Please,” the redhead whimpered. “Please, mister—”
“Be quiet,” Kane said absently. “Let me think.”
“I’ll do anyth—”
He cracked his hand across her again and she screamed and began to sob louder. Kane closed his eyes briefly, then opened them, grim and set with determination, and hit her again, harder. The redhead stuffed her fists in her mouth and cried quietly. Kane eyed his weeping victim and then returned his attention to his monitor.
“Raven, are you asleep?” he asked, raising his voice only a little.
“Not yet.”
“Come and find out about this baby. How…soon it is…How old it is.”
Raven got up and eased over to sit on the redhead’s other side as Kane turned his attention to the blonde.
“This is the part where I offer you the best fuck of your life,” the blonde said seriously.
Kane formed a thin smile.
“Look, I’m not going to play you,” said the blonde biker. “I do a lot of dope and as much coke as I can, and I’ve probably got the clap. But I will fuck you. I’ll fuck you until you scream. I’ll fuck you until you make me scream. I’ll fuck you any way you want. I’ll drink your piss if you want me to. I saw you looking at your girl and Rosie Harper. If you want, you can fuck me while I eat her out. Or we can do each other sixty-nine. We can take you together if you want. You’ve never fucked Earther until you’ve had a tit-rub. Swear. You can pierce me. You can pierce me yourself. You can cum all over her and I’ll lick it off her if you want. Just let me live, okay? Just let me live.”
“Dope, coke, clap,” Kane echoed, and reached for his scanner. “The drugs can be cleaned. This…clap…that too can be cleaned, but it will take longer. And I am not inclined to wait.”
But Raven shrewdly noted that Kane didn’t simply kill her. He leaned on his arms, still smiling. ‘Convince me,’ his posture said, and the blonde biker spoke posture pretty well.
“Tell me what you want me to do,” she said intently. “I’ll do anything. I’ll get down in that blood and suck you off right now. I’ll suck him off, if you want me to.”
Kane glanced at the dead biker when she pointed and said ‘him’, and his smile became a little wider. He looked back at Raven, considering her, and then down at his scanner.
The blonde was silent, unblinking. The only sound was Raven’s own low voice whispering to the redhead, and the redhead’s hushed weeping.
“I believe I can work with you,” Kane said at length. “I can fuck you for a few days at least. That is your only purpose, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that you will live to see the back of me. Give me your arm.”
The blonde held out her bound wrists and Kane slit them apart with one claw. As he loaded the funny little air gun he used for injecting, he remarked, “I appreciate your candor, human, and I’ll give it back to you. I will kill you the instant I suspect that you are…playing me. I’ll kill you if you slow me down. I’ll kill you if you anger me. I’ll kill you if you provoke me, inconvenience me, or bore me. Understand that.”
“Check, chief.”
“This—” Kane’s hand came down on Raven’s thigh and squeezed. “—is mine. I’ll kill you if you threaten her. You’re here for me to fuck for a few days. Her, I mean to keep.” He squeezed again, a warning Raven felt as comfort as she tried quietly to coax the redhead to speak.
Kane nodded once, shoved her head to once side, and injected her in the base of her neck. It raised a thin red circle, but that was all.
“My name is Sue-Eye,” said the blonde biker.
“I don’t care,” he replied, and turned his attention back to his computer and the vials of brain juice he’d collected.
“You can call me whatever you want.”
“Yes. I can. Raven, what is she saying?”
The redhead hadn’t said anything. Raven shrugged an answer, her arms still around the biker’s shoulders.
Kane nodded, as if this were the answer he expected. “Go sleep then.”
Raven stood up and moved back toward the bench, fully expecting to hear the brittle crack of the redhead’s skull being broken open for harvest. Instead, she heard Kane asking in a low voice if the biker wanted to see the sun come up.
“Yes, sir,” the redhead sniffled.
“Go and bring me every bit of money in this room. Put it here on the table. If there’s blood on the money, clean it off. Then I want you to take the fuel out of those vehicles and put it into the car I came in until it is fully fueled. I will be watching you, and I will catch you if you run and make you wait for hours before I finish killing you. Understand me, human.”
“Yes, sir,” she said again, a breathless whisper.
“Look at me. Look right at me. That’s right. If you behave yourself and obey me, I will leave you here alive in the morning. I have done it before.”
Virtually the same speech he’d given to Raven. She relaxed a little, sliding into the booth and stretching out there, making a pillow of her hands. She was reasonably sure the redhead would be alive in the morning, or at least, if she weren’t, it would be her own fault.
“And you, go sleep.”
Raven heard footfalls and the creak of leather approach her, and then the shuffling sounds of a body settling into the same booth. She opened her eyes and saw the biker looking at her underneath the table. They stared at each other as Kane sat working at his lab and the redhead went around picking the pockets of the dead.
“Hi,” the biker breathed.
Raven chewed her lip. “Hi.”
“I’m Sue-Eye.”
“I’m Raven.”
“Sleep,” Kane commanded, without turning.
He means it, Raven tried to say telepathically.
Sue-Eye spoke silence as well she spoke posture. She closed her eyes at once.
Raven lay awake and listened to the low tak-tak-tak of Kane’s claws at his computer, the faint humming and bubbling of his chemicals and tools as he built his drug, and eventually, the thick snapping and gurgling pleas as he returned to the work of harvesting. She slept.
*
“Up.”
Raven jerked awake, struck her head on the side of the table, and struggled upright.
Kane, satisfied that she wouldn’t fall back to sleep, moved away from the booth and shouldered his pack. There were six more strange bikers on the floor, one of them a woman. Blood was now so thick around the center table that it hadn’t soaked into the floorboards, hadn’t even dried to a crust. The redhead was sleeping with her head on her folded arms, strands of her hair lying in a clotted puddle of the biker chief’s bloody brain matter. Sue-Eye was standing near the bar, looking solemn and very alert.
“Get your head together and drink something,” Kane said, striding towards the table where the redhead sat sleeping. “I want to get moving.”
He only had to touch her and the redhead came up with a shriek, arms slapping wildly all around her.
Raven flinched instinctively, dead certain she was about to see the girl’s head fly across the room, but Kane actually burst out laughing, stepping back with one arm up to fend off the biker’s puny blows.
“All right, that’s enough,” he said, still grinning. He caught one of the redhead’s wrists and she grew instantly still, staring up at him and shivering, white as milk. “Up,” Kane said, and gently towed her from her seat, only to take the chair for himself and pull her back down onto his lap. He put his arm around her, smiling like a shark and holding her pinned in his eyes, and then took out the funny spray-thing he kept in his pack.