Man Hunt (4 page)

On the ground floor of the fortress, in the exact center of an entirely white room sat a desk. It was enormous, and it was beautiful. A giant rectangle of polished cherrywood, it literally gleamed in the nearly sterile room. It was cleaned and buffed regularly. It was occasionally inspected and repaired of inevitable scratches and dings. And except when actively in use, it was always barren.

Above the desk hovered a woman. She, too, was beautiful, though perhaps only in the eyes of a physiologist, for she was also enormous. Yet it was muscle, not fat, which adorned her so impressively.                Veins stood out on the backs of her hands, pulsing rhythmically as her hot blood moved through them, tight under the pressure of such malicious stock. They walked a crooked course past her wrists and up her forearms, dwindling slowly as they went. The largest survived all the way across her curving right bicep before disappearing under the mountain of muscle that screamed of power and control.

Yet her arms were but one example of her impressive form. There was the chiseled stomach, the wide back, the trunk-like thighs and, as inevitable as revenge itself, the breasts as flat as road kill. It had taken years to achieve her envisioned embodiment of perfection. Decades. However there was something about the woman that made her somehow bigger still. This was a thing deep inside which most who encountered her detected at once. It was an extreme sense of confidence in part, but also a sense of greed, of entitlement, and of rage. It was most often perceived in the eyes. And for this woman, her eyes lacked the ability to deceive. To look directly into them meant to feel her full wrath.

Between the desk and the woman lay a large, intricate map. Though the paper didn't curl, the woman's paw-like hands held down its crisp edges, pinning it into position like a dead insect.

The woman's eyes stared at a drawn wedge that covered the northwestern trisector of the map, piercing its tiny black center as if the spot there was her prey. Perhaps it was.

She glared at the spot for a very long and perfectly still moment, thinking. Perceiving. The map did not so much as flutter in the light breeze coming through the open window behind her. The only air that flowed was from her nostrils in a steady stream that seemed to never end. But eventually the current did thin and die. Immediately she inhaled a deep, healthy breath of the fresh oxygen that wafted in from the outside, and she held it a long moment before beginning another slow demise of wind.

"Pigs," the woman finally mumbled, though the sound was so quiet even her own ears did not quite detect it. This word was the closest she would allow herself to curse. All the women on the island used it, of course. But, as with the idea and design for The Cause itself, its use had originated with her. As the air in her lungs ran out, she slowly inhaled, held the new breath for a moment, and said the word again.

"Pigs are hiding," she said. "Where do piggies hide?"

The map, a large square, had been hand-drawn by the woman over a painstaking eight-day fervor that she had very recently completed. It had not yet earned its first crease. It had never once been rolled. Like the desk and the woman, it claimed its own distinct account of beauty.

There were two other such tiny squares on the map like the black one the woman watched so closely. One was blue; the other, green. Each of these three squares was precisely centered within its own wedge-shaped domain. The blue square's wedge was to the north and east, and green's was the entire south. And in the center, where they all met at perfect 60-degree angles, a large white rectangle loomed. The entire image, when viewed from above, held a certain resemblance to a face.

A thin blue scar cut the face in twain. A stream in reality, it ran straight down from the center of the forehead and along the nose, curve under the face's left eye– the blue one– and finally ended far down on the left cheek. Another scar, shorter but deeper and wider, was a long, thin gulf leading to the ocean. It cut a painful divot into the opposite side of the face. Black square's wedge had suffered but survived this nearly fatal wound just south of the eye, high on the nonexistent cheekbone.

The face had terrible acne. Tiny white-brown dots and little black lines surrounded the nose, cheeks, forehead, and chin. These blemishes were rundown buildings, streets, and alleys– the remnants of a former world filled with laughter, camaraderie, and the contentment that comes with well-executed tourism. Now these manmade structures were slowly crumbling and giving way to the diligence of nature below. This thought made the woman smile. Perhaps one day she'd live to see the men on her island run through true jungles and chased on foot, the way a hunt was meant to be.

But for now they ran on pavement and her hunters' weapon of choice was still the automobile. So for many years to come her maps would still be needed. Therefore, every building, every street, every nondescript walkway was perfectly located and sized to scale. It had taken two years of constant surveying to record their complete story.

The outer areas of the island not tainted by humanity were also precisely rendered. Dark green expanses modeled the exact locations of the few and sparse groves of Hoop Pine, Coconut, Bermuda Juniper, and wonderfully fragrant Mokihana trees. Tan patches with black stippling were large beds of thistle bushes. Dark gray, marbleized masses were spans of rock left behind from the long-dead volcano that had created the island in a time before men and women had learned to use and abuse each other. Beyond these disparate features was not any ordinary white border, but a large blue vastness that couldn't quite reach the edges of the desk.

But then, anything off the edges of this map was just more water, and neither predator nor prey would ever need to know any more than that.

Rhonda sat at her office desk, waiting. Though she would have preferred to be working on her manuscript, it was the first day for the man in box #55, and his initiation was imminent. The drugs would be wearing off any minute, and the timing of his first contact was critical. Though a seasoned insomniac, she had purposely slept several hours the night before so as to be able to spend more time with him later that evening.

Her desk sat at the juncture of two hallways, one long and one short. It was stationed facing their corner so she could see fully down both lengths. To her left were two rows of magnetically-sealed doors numbered 1-50, each a knee-high square measuring just two feet by two feet. To her right were another hundred and fifty doors.

The men in the boxes had no idea what time it was. Many thought that morning was still hours away. Perhaps as many as half of them lay there awake, still horrified that their door would be suddenly wrenched open and another training session would begin. Rhonda alone knew that the man in box #55 was the only one who needed fear anything just then, and the irony that he was yet ignorant of his situation was a thing she found sweetly delicious.

Sleep deprivation was one of the foundations for administering and controlling virtually every form of coercive persuasion, and at irregular intervals throughout both day and night she or one of her trainers would take a two-foot lead pole affectionately nicknamed "The Sandman", and slam on the face of each metal door hard enough to cause yet another dent. Doors were replaced every six to eight months as needed. Rhonda, her insomnia working yet again in her favor, did all of her door banging when the rest of the women's fortress was asleep. This was also the time when she did her best training.

Yet despite the men's fear and their sheer numbers, the training area was always utterly silent. All of the current men had learned not to make noises while they awaited their further training. Rhonda and her trainers always spoke in whispers and often wore cotton-bottomed slippers to ensure complete surprise at any given moment. Other than the few routines the men could count on— which were also a large part of Rhonda's program— the only noise that could ever be heard was her constant clacking as she worked on her massive manuscript.

Of course, what muted noises came from the training rooms themselves was another story entirely.

"What the hell?" a male voice suddenly said. It was muffled behind the two-inch-thick door, but in such silence and with Rhonda awaiting it, the utterance was clearly audible and more sweet music to her ears. Man #55 was awake.

Five men had been added this week, two of whom had already been initiated. The final two were still drugged and lay in peaceful sleep, unaware their normal lives had even been compromised.

Of the new initiates, Rhonda was happy to have found one who thought he was truly tough. He had refrained from screaming on his first day, something that a rare few could manage. She was going to enjoy planning out his schedule. Though her girls could take care of him easily enough, her true joy came in the strategic developing and implementing of a personalized and complicated plan of ebbs and flows that would one day culminated in his true emotional obliteration.

It was true that certain steps within a man's training were always personal favorites of one woman or another. Some liked the simple but terror-inducing physical torture. Others liked their day of release or hearing them talk to themselves in solitary confinement. Rhonda's had always been Day One. It was the most critical in training a man to become the pathetic sack of meat and bones which allowed the clean slate she needed in order to reshape them. No moment filled her with as much peace as a man's initiation.

A few moments of silence passed until— and Rhonda nearly timed the exact second of its occurrence— a low
donk!
followed by louder curses was heard. He'd tried to sit up, of course, and discovered just how small his box was.

The clanks of his shackles and long chain that secured him to the back wall of his box came next. He was exploring his confines, and Rhonda waited for the moment when he began to lose control. Soon after, the moment of first contact would arrive. She sat, playfully twirling the scalpel in her hand.

"Hello!" man #55 shouted. There was no response. She ruminated on the various thoughts from the other men when they heard one of their own waking for the first time. Was it relief that they would be spared for another hour, or did they experience sympathy pains in expectation of what was to come? For some, she could pinpoint one or the other of these usual reactions, but for others she could never be sure. Coercive Persuasion was more an art than a science, after all, despite what her research had told her. And this was the reason for her manuscript. It would one day be the definitive work on the subject. And despite knowing her name would go down in infamy, it would certainly be a name that would be remembered.

"Hello?" A question this time. Fear was starting to seep into his mind. "Stephanie? Hello?"

Yes. How often they called out for help from the very girl who had brought them there. More silence lingered, and Rhonda mimed in her mind the five stages of grief coursing through him. Stages she'd seen thousands of times before. "
Hello!
"

"
Shut up, stupid!
" Another man. Whispering.

A noob,
Rhonda surmised.
Man 62 or 51 perhaps. Couldn't be 57. He's smarter by now, surely. Is he trying to help, or just sick of the noise because it, too, is torture?
She twirled the scalpel, feeling the tone of the second man's words.
The torture
, she soon decided. His voice had been desperate, bordering on insanity. She would have to assign an extra beating to everyone in his row today, just to be sure they all understood the rules.

"Who's there?" man #55 asked. More silence, and Rhonda continued waiting. He was closer now, but not quite ready. "Hello?"

"Just shut up, you asshole!"

"Who are you?" And during the next silence Rhonda finally stood and crept like a hunting panther toward the right-hand hallway. Her scalpel was now firmly clenched in her hand.

"I'm nobody, and so are you. Now shut the fuck up or I'll kill you myself if I get the chance."

Rhonda stopped outside box #55 and waited one final time. The glow from her computer monitor was the only light shed, and the man behind the door before her was in total darkness. Upstairs her girls were busy having breakfast and chatting away their frivolous blather. They weren't scheduled to arrive for another hour. She had the training rooms all to herself, which was how she always initiated a man.

She listened intently for a moment, waiting for a whimper or, if he was inherently weak, a slight blubber. A mumbled curse would suggest he was of the violent type, like most of them were. Instead, man #55 revealed himself to be quite the moron. A truly slow learner. She smiled when he began his string of shouted obscenities because second only to the tough guys, she had always liked slow learners best of all.

"STEPHANIE YOU FUCKING BITCH! WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO TO ME YOU FUCKING CUNT! FUCKING WHORE! FUCKING COCK SU—"

Rhonda yanked the door open and he immediately stopped. From his cramped, chained vantage point she knew he could see only her feet and perhaps, if he leaned forward far enough, the tip of the scalpel dangling in her hand.

"Hello, pig," she said softly. Her practiced voice was sickly sweet, both playful and ugly at the same time. "My name is Rhonda. You have no name because you are a disgusting, useless heap of garbage. I will now give you exactly three seconds to crawl out here and kiss my feet. If you don't, I'll be very slow when I cut off your testicles. Ready? Go."

Man #55 did not begin to scramble until Rhonda had already reached two.