A Mistake To Remember Chapter 5 free porn video

Chapter 5: A month after the council meeting, I was pregnant again with a different man's child. I didn't know his name, nor did I want to know. I'd have given even odds that the baby in my belly was Henry's, which would have been just the sort of sneaky bull shit he'd try. My destiny, it appeared, was set: I would have a baby, wait a few months to recover, and then they'd baster me another in the stirrups. All I had to do was eat right and pretend to be happy to keep bringing all the little darlings into the world. And yet, it could have been much worse. Leonard, it seemed, had done me more of a favor than I'd thought. Henry and the other council members stopped by from time to time while I was at work with the Atlantean scripts. If any of them were inclined to stop me, I shut it down early on. "Oh, I just love my work!" I once gushed to Henry. "Understanding and exploring our roots is so important to me. Without it I think I'd go crazy." He walked away muttering. ~That's right! You have to keep me satisfied, you son-of-a-bitch!~ My ultimate goal had always been to access the knowledge on the peculiar glass or plastic tubes. The ancient Atlantean readers had been irrevocably damaged, corroded, their parts frozen and melted together after being immersed in the salt water of the Mediterranean thousands of years ago while they were being transported from Tyre to Carthage, but examining the pictures, I had a good idea of how they worked. When I'd done as much as I could with the Atlantean to English translator, I asked to see the council. When they were reluctant to grant me permission to see the tubes, I started to cry. Henry was not impressed. "It's impossible. You can't leave the grounds. You're too valuable to worry about losing you in a traffic accident." "If I can't leave the estate, then why not bring the tubes here? I'm almost certain that they're optical storage devices, similar to our CD ROMs." "I see," he said, collecting his hands in front of him on the table. "And you are an expert in this technology, I suppose?" he asked sarcastically. "Enough. I'm confident that I could modify a CD ROM reader to read a tube instead of a disk. It's not even that difficult. You see, a CD ROM consists of a single track with pits and flat spots that simulate ones and zeros. A laser set to a specific frequency rides over them, is reflected back by the shiny coating beneath, and based on its return amplitude --" "Hold. Are you saying that we have the capacity now to read the ancient knowledge?" "Not exactly, but if I'm right, we could copy it bit for bit to a file. We've been able to do that for decades. It's just that no one has had the time or the inclination to do it. The real work, though, is analyzing those files, which could take some time. The Atlantean format wouldn't match any of ours. Likely the tracks and sectors would have different markers. And then there's the error checking, interpolation, and the formats for the characters, display, pictures.... It could take a year or more to work out the basics. After that it could be years more before all the information could be categorized and processed, but I believe that I can do it, and I'd like to start as soon as possible." Henry turned to the others, but it was a foregone conclusion. Henry, as taciturn and dismissive of my life as he was, wasn't without a soul. The wisdom of his ancestors lay waiting. I, too, shared his enthusiasm for Atlantis. If circumstances had been different, I would have willingly given decades of my life to uncover this great mystery. I would have been grateful, even, to make a few babies while I was at it. Of course, condemning the women, and me, to death at the end of my usefulness sort of put a damper on the whole glorious enterprise. Now I required more than uncovering history, and more, with luck, might be within my grasp. Henry rapidly found consensus among the rest of the council. He nodded to me. "Your request is granted. A recording tube shall be temporarily removed from the archives for your use. If successful, you will receive the rest." I grinned to let them all know that I was very pleased and like, you know, totally unlikely to ever run away. "Thank you. I'll need to order a few items to complete the modifications, nothing elaborate or expensive." "Whatever you need -- within reason," he said, adding that extra bit to satisfy his inner ass hole. `"Reason." I do not think we use the word in the same way, Henry.~ *** It took some time before I had the adjustments right, but I managed to copy the contents of the entire tube, from the writing on its label, a collection of literature. Curiously, the tube wasn't as sophisticated as a CD ROM. The paths were wider and spaced farther apart. What should have been twenty times the storage capacity of a CD was less than half that. The shape was awkward, too, a reminder that at least in some technology we'd surpassed them. The tubes were capped at both ends with a ceramic material, indented in the exact center as an insertion guide for the Atlantean reader. As the rest of the tubes came in, two of the end caps were cracked, one badly enough where it needed to be replaced. Inside the damaged tube, the reflective aluminum was lined with a discolored compound that flaked at the touch, brittle after thousands of years of exposure to the air. I slipped a couple of the larger pieces into my purse and tested them in our apartment with various cleaning compounds, discovering that it became a sludge in our window cleaner, and dissolved quite nicely when stirred. I thought that was very interesting. Soon afterwards, I gave birth to Karen. Leonard was by my side when she arrived. He played with her and produced the right words, but the child wasn't his, and the pang of it overlay his smile. Leonard was sweet, but it wasn't the same between us. Since the council meeting, he'd been distant, as if I weren't quite there anymore. It was a kind of divorce, I thought, a psychological step on the way to my extinction. In time, my husband would be able to reconcile his guilt with the family's needs, and eventually convince himself that my death was "regrettable." I was damned if I was going to give him the chance. I returned to my work a month after Karen was born, leaving her in the nurse's hands. The day before I came back, I cleaned our apartment from top to bottom using all sorts of cleaners. The tubes arrived in groups of twenty, in steel cases lined in form- fitting packing, designed to withstand a substantial explosion. The council required that two of us be together with them at all times, but the copy routine was boring. Evalyn was usually with me, but at the rate I'd set up, it took several hours to copy a single tube, and she went away on bathroom break once in a while. A moment was all I needed to use a tiny drill on five of the tubes I'd already copied, squirt in some household cleaning agents, seal them up again, and give them a good shaking before returning them to their containers. The entire remaining legacy of Atlantis didn't quite fill a ten terabyte hard drive. Naturally, I made a few copies. Before I could get far breaking the keys to the data structure, the third year anniversary of my first meeting with Leonard approached, and I had plenty to celebrate. When Leonard returned from work that evening, I said to my man, "I want to attend this years Halloween party." "Why .. why of course, if you'd like. I thought that you didn't care for that sort of thing." "That was last year, when the other wives were giving me the cold shoulder." "They came around, though, didn't they? You see? They only had to get used to the idea." ~Yes, what a comforting thought.~ They'd come around, all right, and it burned me that Leonard could speak so casually of using the drug on them. "What are you coming as?" I asked. "This year I would like to be a naval officer from around the turn of the century -- the early twentieth, that is -- and you, my darling, should be a Gibson Girl. You'd be perfect for it." "And what, pray tell, is a Gibson Girl?" He traced a rather sharp hourglass in the air with his hands. "Had you lived back then, you'd have been one. She was all the rage at the time. A Gibson Girl was the quintessential American young woman, beautiful and independent. It's hard to explain in today's terms, but her personality combined an aristocratic bearing with a feminine, mischievous side." "This was before the -- ah, suffragette thing? Wait a second," I said, feeling queasy as I remembered how sharply he'd shaped that hourglass. "Did they wear corsets?" He nodded. "In those days it was another piece of clothing. As a member of the family, you can't come to the party as a ninja or a seal, you know, and it's an unwritten rule that family wear historical clothing from an age they're familiar with. You're too young for anything meaningful, so you must match me, and I choose Gibson Girl." ~What the hell, how bad can it be?~ *** I grunted, as more of my organs were forced north and south. So far, I had borne the outrage without protest. Evalyn and I were in the fitting room at Historical Replicators, the largest supplier of reenactment and period piece clothing in Atlanta. The room was private, so no one would see a modern woman voluntarily submitting herself to the indignities her ancestors had fought to overcome. "Uh!" I grunted again, and this time I had to turn around. My mother-in-law, already decked out in a green and gold dress, a duplicate of the one she'd worn at Andrew Jackson's wild White House inauguration party, seemed to be having too much of a grand old time yanking on the laces of my corset. "Evalyn! Are you trying to squeeze me in half?" "Hush. If you can complain so loudly, there's plenty of room. Now exhale." She gave it a last tug, and my lungs abruptly lost a quarter of their capacity. She stepped back, pleased. "There, that should do it. How does it feel?" "If I had a stinger in my butt, I'd be a wasp." She patted me on the shoulder. "Just right, then. Now let's try the fit again." This time, I managed to wriggle into the costume. The narrow-waisted woman in the floor length skirts and frilly high-neck blouse didn't look like me. My hair was a puffed-up pompadour with a thick trailing sweep that carried around to hang over one shoulder. My shape was classic female. My breasts were a mammalian display. Under my pinched abdomen, my bottom seemed broad of beam, and, with the bustle and the forward lean of the "swan" corset, it may as well have been hanging out in the breeze. Alongside the gaudy aristocrats in silk, my presentation would be mildly aloof, I thought, but more approachable. "Daughter, you look wonderful," Evalyn said. "This person you see fits you well. Those were the days when the country was optimistic and forward-looking, before the Great War made us cynical." She bussed me on the cheek in the old world way, and slid closer, so we stood together. Was Evalyn right? Would I have been a Gibson Girl in an earlier age? I had no basis for comparison. "You look great yourself, Mom, as if the last hundred and fifty years or so were a dream." It was like that for most of the Mengstroms. Family Halloweens weren't so much pretending to be someone else as it was taking a break from the present to become one's original, and likely, true self. Evalyn said, "This is only the beginning, my dear. A hundred years passes quickly. I waited a very long time for my own daughter-in-law, but I couldn't be happier than I am now, and to have granddaughters to raise and to see become women -- who could have imagined it?" She hugged me from the side and smiled at me from our reflection. It might have been a tender moment, perfect for a family album. Of course, I couldn't tell her that those granddaughters were her doom, or that not too long before, she had bitterly resented me for having Larissa. It would have only messed up her mind and make things much, much worse. The drug scared the hell out of me. This version of Evalyn was nicer and more easygoing. Oh, she was real enough and her love for me was genuine -- and I couldn't help but love her back -- but the old Evalyn I'd known was irretrievably gone. My guard and driver had stayed outside to give us some privacy. Corsets being what they are, Evalyn had to visit the ladies room, leaving me alone. While she was gone, I thought for a moment, then strolled to the weapons rack. Next to the fake Civil War flintlocks and the plastic samurai swords was an array of realistic pistols. I chose a .38 Special, a handy prop accessory for a would-be old-time cop or bad-ass pimp. I paid for it in cash. *** Halloween night, Leonard and I left Larissa and Karen with the nurse. Leonard was dazzling in his Captain's uniform, solid blue with two glittering rows of polished brass buttons down the front, gold epaulets, and a hat like an inverted ship on his head. He wore it with familiarity, proudly, as one might if one had earned something similar at one time, so it didn't look out of place, although on practically anyone else it would have. He tipped it to David outside our door, one of the three Mengstrom guards on duty that night. I didn't precisely like David, but I admired him. He was taller and thicker through the shoulders than most of the other men in the family. He looked about thirty-five, which meant he was well over two hundred years old. I knew him slightly. He was a veteran of five wars, and an expert in everything from unarmed combat to anti-tank rockets. He was undistinguished enough to blend into a crowd, but if one looked carefully, one might notice that he never seemed to be surprised, and he had a way about him, an economy of movement that hinted how deadly he could be. "David, we should be back by midnight," Leonard said. David nodded once. "Then I'll be here," he said. As we walked down the corridor, my hand on Leonard's arm, I heard David speak softly into his shoulder radio, reporting us leaving our residence. Leonard and I descended the stairs together arm in arm. The Mengstrom party was already in progress. The Mengstrom Industries employees weren't due to arrive for a couple of hours, which gave the family time to get reacquainted. The dais was much as it was when I'd first seen it, a smorgasbord of centuries. I spotted Henry, for tonight a leaner, colder Henry VIII, a sinister figure in a blood-red coat accented with gold trim, striped pantaloons over matching red tights, which he managed to wear without looking gay, and a fur-lined cow patty beret with a feather. His wife, Bridget, was with him, wearing those god- awful puffy sleeves of the late sixteenth century, a different sort of corset that did its best to compress her torso into a tube, and a restricting high neck. They stood among the other English lords and ladies in the fifteenth to seventeenth century crowd. Others a little younger constituted the French court: women with powdered faces, fans, silk dresses with heavy bustles and outrageous wigs, and the men, the eighteenth century's version of metrosexuals, with lace, wigs with bows, and overcoats so long and elegant they were nearly dresses. One of their order carried a riding crop in his hand, a stylish item equally useful for whacking a horse or, if one should appear, an impudent peasant. Thaddeus and Yolanda were among them, as well as a mixed bag of the later renaissance: Russians, Germans, and Italians. Leonard led us through them with a few greetings and compliments to those we hadn't seen for a while, and onward to those who identified with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Evalyn and Victor were there, speaking with another couple whose costumes dated to just before the Civil War. Donna waved to me. The former dancer wore a silver roaring twenties dress with tassels that whipped back and forth when she moved. Her husband stood easy by her side in a striped gangster suit with two-tone spats. Donna slipped around him and grabbed me by the shoulders. "Charlene!" I hadn't seen her since Larissa was born, and I pressed her to my bound bosom. "Donna!" She led me a few steps away. "I was hoping I'd see you. I am so sick of bein' the junior female around here. Come on, tell me what you've been up to." She was the perfect antidote for my nerves. I talked about my work, life with Leonard and the usual baby things we shared, and then it was her turn about her life in Manhattan, and how her son was doing, and George. I had missed her; we had some laughs and I sipped on tequila until Leonard wrested me away to do my duty and mix with the rest of the family. I zoned out for a while. I spoke a few words to everyone, even Henry, who couldn't quite rid himself of expressing distaste for the mother of the species. Most of the time, I was with the women. With a few exceptions like Donna and George, the men stuck together and left us to chatter about whatever women found amusing. Eventually, the clock on the wall passed eight o'clock, the time for the MI employees to arrive. All foreign languages ceased, and English broke out everywhere. The men and women, as if on cue, split up and went their own ways to mingle as they would. Evalyn came to my side. "Are you all right? You seem unsettled," she said. In fact, I was scared out of my freaking mind. "I'm ... well, I could be a little nervous." Evalyn provided a reassuring smile. "I remember that it was rather overwhelming for me the first time. A word," she said, raising an eyebrow. "Avoid the foods that could give you gas. In a corset it can be most unpleasant." "Oh, for .. is that what they call the vapors?" "Not those vapors, but be careful not to overdue anything. If you aren't used to a corset, even getting excited can leave you short of breath, and that's not fun at all." ~Well isn't that just what I need to hear.~ "I'll do my best, Mother." "Have a good time." If everything was like my first Halloween party, there was a guard outside at the front entrance. With David outside my door, that left one more besides the one in a room upstairs monitoring the CCTV's at the entrances. I couldn't find him anywhere in the Grand Room, so I figured that he was outside. I went out to the terrace, picking up a few chips to go with the drink I was nursing. The grounds were well lit. I still didn't see the last guard, but if I didn't see him, if old patterns held, he was likely patrolling behind the estate where our rooms were, doing his part to protect the future of the species. I went inside again to Leonard's side to kill time and to think about what I was doing. It looked like I had it covered; I thought that I had a good plan, but it had no room for error. I could still back out. It was possible that there could be a better opportunity later on, especially if I just wanted to save myself. The guests began to arrive in force. I left Leonard to go to the bathroom. When I came back, I picked up another drink, which I determined would only touch my lips. And then I saw my old crew. Carmen wasn't there. From what Evalyn had told me, she had married the year before and moved away. Su Mi was a farmer, an impossible juxtaposition of Asian beauty and work boots. She held a lucky piece of straw in her perfect teeth, and thumbs pierced the bands on her faded overalls. Modesty looked great in a psychedelic mini-dress with matching chain belt of disks, go go boots, and bouffant hair pulled back in a sixties style. It hurt to see her again. She was beautiful, but she wasn't the same. Modesty's soft lips, the feel of her body next to mine, my male responses and urges -- the wonder of her -- were sweet memories, but faded and out of context. I'd become too used to firm bodies. Maleness set me on fire now. I wasn't attracted to her delightful curves except in the abstract, and yet, I felt cheated. I wasn't meant to be this way. Modesty might have made a man named Charlie happy for a lifetime. Leonard was either a rat or a mouse -- I couldn't make up my mind. Modesty caught me staring. She probably thought that I was looking at her outfit -- either that or I was a lesbian. I raised my glass and said, "nice costume." She smiled, then came my way. "Thanks. That's a nice costume, too. I'm Modesty. Have we met before?" "No. I'm Charlene, Leonard, the R&D VP's wife." I motioned to the side with my drink, where he was conversing with a man who had known Catherine the Great. I held out my free right hand. "Nice to meet you, Modesty. So, where do you work in MI?" We talked for a while. She talked about her work, and I mentioned my girls. Modesty had a boyfriend that she had hopes for, and she didn't want to wait too long before settling down. What was left from Charlie ached for her, but most of me saw her from the perspective of shared likes and needs. I liked her, and perhaps, she liked me. After a time, we said goodbye, and she went back to her friends. I couldn't have told her who I was, of course. She never would have believed me, and a careless word from me and the family would have drugged her or worse to keep their secret, but there was another, more important reason I let her go: Modesty was in her prime; she would never be more beautiful, but she had aged three years. By human terms I had aged less than two months. There wasn't a woman on the planet who wouldn't have given everything she had to enjoy centuries of youth. What if I had told Modesty who I was, and how long I was expected to live, and she had believed me? She never would have forgiven me. I understood Leonard a little better, now. How alone it must have been to live among the short-lived humans, cursed to never have true friends, and to move away every few years from those you cared for. I had a few options that night depending on how brave I was and how the chips fell. Sometimes, though, fate lends a hand. I took as deep a breath as I could in that damned corset, and girded those loins -- or whatever I had now -- and made my final decision. I'd go for it all. ~For you, Modesty, and for humanity!~ I returned to the fold for an hour or so. At ten o'clock I begged off for another pit stop. In the bathroom, I flipped up my dress and turned on the device strapped to my thigh I'd made with some "extra parts" from the optical reader, a simple 1.9 Ghz jammer that had a range of a few feet. I left the bathroom, but turned down the hall instead of heading back downstairs, and slipped into the same room Leonard had brought me to three years ago. Hoping like hell they hadn't changed the combination, I found the panel, flipped it back and entered the four-digit code. The paneling slid back smoothly. It was too late to go back now. If any secret alarms were going off, they had already happened. I stepped inside and pressed the down button. When I arrived in the basement, the door opened. It was just as I'd remembered: the blue concrete walls, the table, chairs, and the room beyond, behind the steel door. I heaved the heavy door back and passed through. The tree was still there in its fertile patch of ground, its bright green branches resembling fibrous stalks. Full spectrum lights overhead illuminated it with a moderate glow. The fecund stench of fertilizer hung in the humid air and a few pods lay on the ground, including the same one I'd spent a season in. Hanging from the branches above, spread amidst enormous leaves, were dangling husks, the seeds. I was dragging a ladder towards one of the lower branches when I heard the sound of the elevator. I let the ladder drop into the grass and ran for the door, nearly tripping on my long dress. Now I understood why women used to faint all the time -- damn corsets! It took me a moment before my sight returned completely and I had my breath back. If it was a guard I was history, so I pretended it wasn't an option. I made it to the door just as Henry and Leonard disembarked. They both stared at me, Henry with malice, Leonard in shock. "What are you doing here?" demanded the old bastard. If I thought the man in tights with his hands on his hips looked a little ridiculous, it was still a damn good question. "Well, ah, I like research and, uh..." Shit! There was no way I was going to talk my way out of this! I reached beneath my dress and pulled out the phony .38 Special. "Hold it right there! Now we're going to talk about this like rational people or I will blow you both away!" I probably looked steadier than I was. Both hands were on the fake gun, but it was as much to keep them still as it was to make them think I knew what I was doing. A .38 is a double action, but I cocked it just for the hell of it. It made a nice, realistic "snick!". "Charlene, you can't mean it," Leonard said, his mouth wide open, ~like mine had been when he stuck his dick in it!~ "I have nothing to lose. I know about the arrangement. As soon as the girls I give birth to grow up you'll kill us all. If you think I'm going to wait for it, you're insane." "How did --" "Shut up, Leonard!" Henry shouted. "Young lady, I don't know what you've been told, but it's nonsense. Put down the gun and we'll talk." I had to laugh; he was such a prick. "You told me yourself! I threw up the drug and remember everything. You're not going to fuck with my mind, you medieval maniac. I'm getting out of this nut farm. I'd rather not shoot you because of the noise, but if you try anything, I will." He gnashed and clenched, but he controlled himself. "What do you intend, Charlene?" "I won't say a friggin' word about the family. That's all you need to know. You can go on doing whatever you want. All I want is to be left alone." I waved the gun towards the chairs. "I can't have you spoiling my escape. I'll have to tie you up. Now move." They moved. They might have suspected that the gun wasn't real, but they wouldn't take a chance, not with their ace in the hole. I had them empty their pockets first. Neither had much more than a set of keys, a pocketknife and a wallet. Leonard tied up Henry into a chair, his hands behind him, then took a seat and tied up his own legs. I finished the job and rolled them both in the tree room, closing the door behind us. Now, if they wanted to scream their heads off, no one would hear them. I was positioning the ladder to get the seeds when I hear a series of muffled beeps coming from Henry. ~Shit.~ I fought for and won the cell phone in his hands. The bastard had a pocket hidden somewhere in the rear section of his voluminous shorts. He looked me up and down with a nasty smile that faded as time passed and I refused to drop into a heap at his feet. I checked Henry's phone, then moved it close to me. The "out of range" indicator came on. I'd tested the jammer beforehand, terminating a few calls with it, but it was a joy to see it work when it counted, still, my heart pounded too hard from the near miss to appreciate success. "I blame myself for this, Henry. I made a terrible mistake by not searching you better." Taking the pocketknife, I flicked it open. Henry screamed for help. "Oh, shut up! I'm not going to kill you." I began cutting away his clothes, leaving his bonds in place. He screamed louder, and was positively screeching when I had him naked. I think he had an idea what was going to happen. I dragged his chair across the grass and opened a pod. He fought me, but all I had to do was tip the chair, and he rolled out into the gelatinous mass with an assist from my foot on his skinny ass. I lowered the cover while he was still wriggling. I wiped my hands on my skirts, and then started with Leonard. "Wait! Charlene! Why me?" "You know too much. You thought I didn't know about the tracker and the sedative. The family assumes that they can avoid a messy search by making a phone call in the middle of the night to render me unconscious, and then pick me up in the morning using the tracker. I like it when the family is overconfident. If you told them I've taken countermeasures, the family would use the police and sic the FBI on me." "I wouldn't have let them kill you, Charlene! I swear!" I patted his cheek gently. "I almost believe you, but even if that were true, it's not enough. When I'm gone, things will get back to what passes for normal around here. You won't be murdering your wives and mothers because I'm removing the reason. I'm taking the kids with me." He squeezed his eyes shut at that, and a tear trickled down his face. I nearly started one myself; Leonard, with all his flaws, loved our Larissa, and Karen, too. "Are you really going to keep the family secret?" "Yes. It would do the world more harm than good knowing about the family, and I include me in that, by the way. Leonard - I'm truly sorry it must be this way. I know what a shock it is to wake up as a woman, but it's not the end of the world." He looked at me bitterly. "You wanted to be a woman. What you're doing is as cruel as it gets." "If there was another sure way to put you on ice for a few hours, I would. And you're wrong. I never wanted to be a woman. I woke up royally pissed off and had to learn the femme side the hard way. One word of advice: listen to your mother, she can help you get through it." "There's no need for this! I won't tell anyone that you know about the tracker. I swear!" He was so full of shit that he couldn't even lie convincingly when his balls were on the line. "It's time to get a divorce. This is easy in our case because, you see, there are no same sex marriages in Georgia." "Charlene!" "Happy Halloween. Hey, here's a thought! Maybe you can be the Gibson Girl next year." I tipped him into the pod. In a moment he stopped thrashing and sank into the ooze. I collected a few seeds, and then headed for the elevator. A moment later I was outside the door to my apartment. "Back so soon?" David asked, mildly curious. "I've decided to retire. I don't think that Leonard will be up for a while." "Good night, then." He keyed his radio and reported my position. I let the nurse go. Larissa and Karen were fast asleep and unlikely to wake up for a few hours. My watch told me I had twenty minutes before the CD player I'd planted in the woods that morning started screaming bloody murder. I took off my clothes and bound my hair into a bun, a style I never used. Dark make-up gave me a temporary tan. I put on some shades, slipped into loose black slacks with padded bicycle shorts to make my butt and thighs larger, and added a beige blouse to approximate the caterer's uniform. The screaming started, loud enough where it had to be investigated. This was where I had to guess: who would check it out? It would have to be either David or the guard out back, the one who likely had a good view of my window. I was betting on the guard out back. A knock at the door shut my heart down for a couple of beats. I hadn't figured on David checking on me. Holy shit, he could have just opened the door! "Charlene, is everything all right in there?" "Yes, David. Everything is fine here; I'm about to get in bed. Is everything okay? I hear a noise." "Nothing to worry about, likely a prank." I crept towards the door, but didn't hear him walk away. That was good enough for me. I figured that I had a few minutes, tops. I put my babies into a cooler I'd prepared with bedding, stacked them on top of each other, separated by a rack. I was willing to seal the lid, which, with all the insulation, would have made it nearly soundproof, but they were both so tired they barely stirred. I added the hard drives wrapped in bubble wrap to the top rack, at the base of Karen's feet. I opened the window and lowered the cooler to the ground with a rope I'd prepared, then climbed out, pulled the window shut, and lowered myself to hang by the ledge. I pushed myself backwards and dropped ten feet to the grass, damn near spraining an ankle. From there it was a matter of walking around the building under the lights, past the pool and terrace where a band played twenty year-old soft rock for ersatz felines, demons, anime characters, and barbarians of both sexes. Every step felt like my last; the evening cooled the sweat on my back. I fought the urge to run, keeping my gait natural only because of the burden I carried. I didn't see much except a blur of moving colors, not daring to look around. Somehow, I made it to the caterer's truck, parked just off the terrace in the guest section. I stopped, going flat to the asphalt behind it to get a look around under the vehicle. I had to know exactly where the guard by the front entrance was. I heard the dim sound of Karen beginning to cry. Wondering if I was about to give my youngest claustrophobia, I apologized mentally to her in advance and snapped the lid shut. The guard stood in the shadows with a good view of the Mengstrom family parking lot directly in front of the entrance, but not so much of where I was. I crept behind the cars, the cooler making it tough, and made my way around the backside of the lot, then crossed the drive to the family parking lot when I thought his attention was elsewhere. It was just my bad luck that Leonard's BMW was parked so close to the front entrance. I crouched very low until I reached the car and opened the door. The interior lights gave me away, and the guard sprinted towards me, but the car started instantly, and I burned rubber backing up. I threw it into drive and flashed around him, but he had a good look at me. I watched him pull out his gun in the rearview mirror, scaring the crap out of me because after a century or so of practice, all the guards were fantastic marksmen. I jerked the car around to throw off any tire shots, and he put his piece away, deciding he didn't want to take a chance on hitting me, or, more probably, that he knew that I could be stopped an easier way. I roared up the tree-lined drive and squealed onto the main road. When we were a couple of blocks away, I opened the cooler beside me on the seat, and let Karen have all the air she needed. "It's all right, baby, cry," I said, smoothing her hair and remembering my time suffocating in the pod. "I know exactly how you feel." I turned on the radio and punched in an easy listening station. I needed a decent lead before they figured out the tracker wasn't working. Depending on what procedures they had in place, it could have been anywhere from immediately to several minutes. I avoided I-20, taking the back roads on a big loop towards North Atlanta, stopping only once to buy some Pampers and formula at a Stop & Go, and to get rid of the bicycle shorts and dark makeup, before I headed downtown. I cruised a seedier side of Atlanta until I found what I wanted, a tattoo parlor that was still open, one of those smaller places that does its best business after a customer gets too stoned or drunk to think about what they're doing. I found a place to park nearby, thanking the powers that be that my kids had fallen asleep again. I locked the car and ran towards the neon sign. It was nearly midnight. The owner, a weathered man in his forties, was just hanging the sign when I banged on the door. "Come back tomorrow night. I'm closing," he said in a gruff voice. "No! I can't wait. I'll pay double!" His forearms, wrapped in twin tattoo dragons, paused on the shades, and he gave me a good look through the slats. "This can't take too long, girl." "This shouldn't take long, and I'll give you a hundred minimum." He nodded wearily and unlocked the door. "All right. It's been a slow night, but you can't have anythin' fancy." I came inside. The air smelled of inks and disinfectant. "I don't want a tattoo, but I'm sure you can handle it easily." I explained what I wanted, and pointed to my derriere. He looked like he wanted to spit. "You are fuckin' whacked, girl. Get the hell out of my store." I whipped out three hundred dollars and flashed them in front of me like a shield. "It's true! It was white slavery! I escaped, but there's a tracker under my cheek, right here. Please, just get it out! If you won't do it, I'll ... I'll go to the first person with a knife. I'll get some horrible infection -- and it will be all your fault!" He mumbled something obscene under his breath. "You're crazy, but give me a hundred, and I'll prove you're wrong." "I am not wrong." I snapped the shades at the door shut, pulled off my pants, then lay face down on the table in panties and blouse, and let him probe. With his hands on my tail cheeks, he checked the side I told him, and then the other to compare. His hands stopped the butt massage where I first showed him, and squeezed. "Well, how about that. Something is in there." "No shit. Do you believe me now? Take the damn thing out of me!" "You got it, babe. Hold on, this is going to be painful." Painful? I felt like a live trout being gutted, and I yelped like hell. Finally, he reached inside with a pair of tongs, and I felt him pull something out of my posterior. "Son of a bitch," he muttered, looking at it. He patched me with Super Glue and a bandage, then handed me the tracker. The accursed thing looked like a flat lozenge about an inch long, a translucent white in color. Held up to the light I could see a flexible circuit with a hinge about midway. I couldn't figure out why until it hit me: like an old time watch, it used my own body movement to keep the tiny battery charged. A part of it held a packet of viscous liquid. I kept it close to the jammer, but the jammer, which had been on the entire time, had to be losing the power to block the cell phone frequencies. "My name's Ralph. Were you really in white slavery?" "Near enough. Think of it as the Hotel California. You don't want to know the details. These guys are dangerous." I could see he wanted to disbelieve my flimsy story, but his eyes kept returning to the tracker. "I take it you couldn't go to the cops, or else you would have been there already." I nodded. "They would know about it if I did." "Then you need to get rid of this thing." He snatched the jammer and the tracker, and put them in a bag together. "Hey, what are you doing?" "I'm giving you a diversion. Be right back." He ran out the door before I could protest. He returned a few minutes later. "Done," he said, a big satisfied smile on his face. "I put it in a pickup with South Carolina plates heading to I-85. When your jammer runs out of juice, the tracker will come on. With any luck, whoever is monitoring it will think that you're a hundred miles away and heading North." I looked up sullenly. It grated that he hadn't allowed me a choice, but it wasn't a bad idea. "Thank you." I pulled up my pants, wriggling my behind to ease its way over my sore rear end. He waited until the show was over then asked, "Do you have a place to go?" I shook my head. "Anyone I ever knew well could be watched. I can buy a phony identity in El Paso or L.A. I don't need much, just a place to stay for my two daughters and me. I have some money. I'll make it somehow." "Maybe, maybe not. There's no sense in taking a chance. Look, I have an old Marine buddy. He's a decent guy. Lives in a mountain community. Let me see if I can get hold of him, see what he says." I stopped buckling my pants to look up. "Ralph, I can't ask anyone to risk themselves for me. I swear, I'm hotter than fresh lava." Too late: he was already punching in the numbers. "Get real," he scoffed. "A woman on the run with two kids needs help. The worst that can happen is that he'll say no. Hell, this should help him decide." He snapped my picture with his phone. Ralph spoke with the man on the other end, telling him the sequence of events in a straightforward way. Ralph described me as a "sweet young thing," a phrase that had me blushing. After a moment, the man on the other end wanted to talk to me, and Ralph handed me the phone. "My name is Harry," the man said. "Don't tell me your name yet. Do you have a police record?" "Well, I had a couple of speeding tickets. To get away I stole a car, but they can have it back." "You brought two children with you?" "My baby girls." "Which did you like better: Star Trek TNG, Enterprise, Space: Above and Beyond, or Babylon Five?" "Wha...? Ah, I don't know, maybe 'Space: Above and Beyond'." "Good choice. Would you like to be my live-in housekeeper?" "That depends on whether my job requires that I sleep with you. If it does, I'll take my chances somewhere else." "It does not, and the pay is terrible, but we mind our own business up here. Do you want the job?" Tears began to form in my eyes. I hadn't realized until then how much I'd worried about finding something like this, a safe place where I could keep Larissa and Karen. "Sure! It sounds wonderful." Two days later we were in Montana.