Part Four

Fanni and Ian stood in the high grass at the edge of the clearing  around the house and stared off into a mist that scraped the mountains  and cut off the tops of the trees.  The rain had stopped, and in place  of its omnipresent drumming, a dead stillness shrouded the place.  Water  ran in runnels through any exposed ground and the grass had a  flattened, gorged loot about it.  The door to the cabin was wide open  for the first time in days to admit some fresh air.

“Something’s gone wrong,” Fanni said, her voice a monotone, devoid of  emotion.  Her eyes spoke more than her voice of the concern that slowly  roiled around in her.  She glanced at her watch, then checked herself.   A stupid gesture, she thought.  Suni’s not a couple of minutes or hours  late, she’s a whole goddamned day off.

Ian remained motionless, thinking.

 “Anybody know where you are?”

“Alissa knew how to get up to Grey’s place, but that was as much as  she knew.  That was as much as I told her.  Suni knows how to get back.   She might have got lost…”

“negative, luv, negative.  Not her.  Even if she got confused, all  she’d have to do is follow the reciprocal of the compass heading to the  store to get back into this general area.” He thought some more.  “I  think I agree; something is a bit off, here.”

“She might have had some mechanical problem with that damned bike.  She may even be hurt.”

“Again, unlikely.”

“I’m going back.” Fanni started for the house.  Ian turned and caught up with her.

“I think it might be better if I went, Fanni.  If there’s anybody  unfriendly around to spread the welcoming mat, it’d be better if it were  me to handle it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Ian.  You don’t even know how to get there.  I  know this area inside and out.  I know places around that store where  you can see everything for four hundred yards and not be seen.  Do you?”

He shook his head no.

“Then it’s settled.  Give me the keys to the Blazer.”

Ian fumbled in the pocket of his coat and began removing one key from the ring while Fanni darted to the house.

She swung open the door to the gun cabinet and eeny-meeny-minied over  the weapons inside.  There were a lot of nice shotguns and a lot of  nicer sporting-type rifles, but her eye finally settled on one of her  father’s more recent additions, and one of which she was not  particularly fond.

She hefted the beast and, with a heartfelt grunt, pried the operating  handle out and pulled it back to the bolt-open notch and locked it.   The gun was a Heckler & Koch model 91, which is to say nothing much  more than a barely “civilianized” version of the G3 assault rifle, which  is to say again that the only real difference between the two is that  the G3 will fire full automatic and the 91 won’t.  Simple.

Another of father’s lethal toys.  Except it really wasn’t a toy.  But  it sure as hell was ugly; sheet metal stamping and plastic and the  whole damned thing flat black.  It was too muzzle-heavy, and it shoved  her around too much if she tried to fire really fast, but as father was  wont to say, that’s the difference between a “man’s” .308 and a  “pussy’s” .223.  her father had gone damn near into coma when the .30-06  was finally supplanted by the .308 and the further reduction to .223  with the mass (finally) introduction of the M-16 had him in a froth that  lasted for months.

She snapped the bi-pod into the front of the forearm and carefully  clipped the scope onto the flimsy little notches on the top of the  receiver.  The Krauts didn’t do themselves any great goddamned favors  with that piss-ant excuse for a scope mount.  The peculiar irony of the  91 was that it was substantially more accurate than the vast majority of  civilian sporting rifles for some reason or other, so the scope was  fully justified.  There were four twenty-round magazines in the drawer  and she stuffed three of these into her coat pockets and jammed the  other one into the gun.

John was lounging in the other room with Dawnelle when she walked  out.  He gave her a look of mild surprise and then some amusement as she  trudged across the room toward the door.

“Lions?  Tigers?  Elephants?” he quipped.

She gave him a well-known international sign of disrespect, and he laughed.  Dawnelle looked speculative.

Alissa’s problem, Madame concluded, was that her ruthlessness had no  direction other than that inspired by the moment.  She was an island  cast adrift from the continent of her father’s influence, existing  within a wholly artificial framework established by her father, funded  by her father, guarded by her father.  A little girl in a gigantic  playpen, one which she was herself finding as constricting s the more  formally ensconced occupants; at least they had the consolation, however  small, of knowing that they were held against their will and could  escape to something better.  Alissa didn’t have even that to look  forward to.  Which made her cruelties just that much more severe and  capricious.

Sondra was a good case in point.  She, it was, who had accompanied  Alissa to Madame’s squalid cell.  She, it was, who was the favored pet  of the menagerie, a spoiled and willful child, like Alissa herself,  reveling in what she imagined to be the charade of her slavery.  And  then, by degrees, she discovered that the slavery was quite genuine, and  by then, of course, it was a little too late.

She and Alissa had grown together as

children.  Sondra’s father had  been a boozer who had one night disappeared to leave her and her mother  alone.  The mother and daughter had existed in service to the old man on  one of the more obscure estates, chosen by Bertram B.  for just that  quality; his rare escapes from pure business chicanery demanded the  bucolic sluggishness that the place offered.  As often as was possible,  he thought along the tiny golden child that was all that was left him of  his wife.

When Sondra’s mother, too, dropped dead one late afternoon, the child  was adopted into the family as easily as if she had been a lost  relative, and they became as sisters.  Almost.  The games they played as  children and then as adults were always characterized by small  intermittent jabs of cruelty from Alissa.  Sondra never understood why  and they always hurt.

But always she shrugged and pressed on.

The slave-game seemed a natural to her.  The role, the appurtenances,  seemed like a second skin.  And it was just a game.  Walking down the  long corridor with her wrists clipped behind her back and the dildo  twisting within her under the catsuit, she found herself content but  strangely apprehensive.  The blow when she had commented, sagely she had  thought, on the woman squatting on the floor had hurt savagely, and she  had to work to force the glimmerings of suspicion back out of sight.   What was wrong with Alissa?  In the car, later, the gag had been buckled  so tight that the straps had sunk into her cheeks.  She didn’t  understand.  But then maybe she did.

She had watched in horrified fascination the beating Alissa had  lavished onto Madame.  Never, never, had she seen Alissa like this  before.  Where was her friend?

For a short time, then, Alissa totally ignored Sondra, leaving her,  paradoxically, either in the strictest of positions that the human body  could attain, or totally free to roam the expansive house.  Alissa had  the new woman to toy with; Sondra would have to fend for herself in the  meantime.  The depression grew, then began to fester.  Jealousy?

The tides of circumstance changed and she was back under Alissa’s  control, only now she and the other woman were often as not thrown  together, usually humiliatingly and always painfully.  The chasm between  Sondra and Alissa seemed to have widened to Grand Canyon proportions  and, illogically, Sondra blamed the new woman – Madame.

On this day, it amused Alissa to give Sondra a bit of carte blanche with Madame.

Sondra was only too happy to comply; the other day it had been Madame’s turn.

Alissa had them in identical cells down a short corridor from the  rest of the slave quarters.  They were, at the moment, her very special  playthings.  For the last several mornings, Alissa would pick them up,  usually Madame first, and then walk them down to the very end of the  walkway and through the door into the chamber she used exclusively,  their leashes dangling back from her small fist.

This morning was to be no different.  The key rasped in the lock the  sae as usual and, after a short pause, Alissa stepped gingerly into the  cell as if expecting an attack.  That always struck Sondra as somehow  amusing; the collar around her neck weighed a good ten pounds and was  secured to the wall by a chain that must have exceeded her body weight.   What did Alissa think she was going to do, chew through the damned  thing?  After a careful glance to make sure all was as it should be,  Alissa stepped all the way into the cell, the slim bracelets open and  dangling from one hand.  Sondra turned her back and put her hands behind  her.  Her ankles were already hobbled.

The huge collar fell away to be immediately replaced by the light  steel one, complete with its leash.  The obligatory gag came next, and  Alissa turned her around to appraise her efforts.  Apparently satisfied,  she turned her back on Sondra and let her out of the cell.

Madame, similarly bound, had been left standing out in the hall.  Her  eyes lifted for a second and the two women looked at each other.   Alissa gave both leashed a jerk and they were off to another day of  diversions.

In the center of the “playroom” was a longish wooden plank set up  parallel to the floor and about a foot and a half above it, supported by  heavy wooden legs.  Coils of rope sat on it near one end.

Alissa separated the women, leading Sondra to the side of the room  and attaching the end of her leash to a hook in the wall.  She then  approached Madame and shortened up the hobble to one link.  She came  back to Sondra with the key to the bracelets and locked her hands out in  front of her.

“Your turn, sweetie,” she said, simply, hooking a thumb over her  shoulder at Madame.  Madame got a rather caged look in her eyes with  those words.  The tone of Alissa’s voice was bantering, but the words  were a definite command, not a suggestion; less than wholehearted  cooperation from Sondra and she knew she’d get a lot worse than she  gave.

Madam’s attentions of the other day were still fresh in her memory,  and on her body, and she got down to Alissa’s business with alacrity.   The latter leaned against a wall and watched.

Sondra laid Madame back on the wooden slab and bound her upper body  firmly to the board with some of the rope.  She took another length of  the rope, tied it around the ankle cuff and pulled Madame’s feet up and  back and doubled her legs up against her chest.  Then kept pulling until  her shins were pressed into the side of her face.  Only then did she  tie off the rope.  Another rope wound around her legs just behind the  knees and the position was completed.  Alissa nodded and a short cane  clattered onto the floor.

Madame clearly was not enjoying this to the hilt; the backs of her  legs were totally exposed and taut as wire from her heels to her  bottom.  Worse, her bare sex stuck out as if it were a side show all by  itself.  This was going to be very, very entertaining.

“Take out the gag.  I want a little background music,” Alissa  commented.  Sondra fumbled with the buckle, largely hidden behind  Madame’s head and tangled in her hair.  “We’ll just leave yours on,  Sondra, old chum.”

The first stroke was about as bad as she’d expected, and the second  and third predictably more so, especially with her legs so stretched.   It wasn’t until the cane sought out that part of her so conspicuously  arrayed that she began to scream and beg.

Sondra was like a machine, the cane rising and falling with what  would doubtless have been boring regularity to any disinterested  observer.  Neither of the two observers was disinterested.  Not in the  slightest.  Sondra could see in Alissa’s contented slouch and the  glittering eyes that she’d saved herself for the day.

The next day found the two of them dangling from the ceiling.  They  faced each other, joined at their heads by a gag that had a pear on both  sides and double straps to hold two mouths about the pears.

Their weights were held up by an enormously thick rubber strap  stretching from one side of the cell to the other.  This they sat  astride, as well as the anchored dildoes, one for each.  Their ankles  were stretched wide to the walls at the sides of the strap.  Their arms  were caught up in leather pouches behind their backs.

For hours they bobbed and swayed on the perch, coming to increasingly  violent orgasms as the gentle undulations of the strap worked the  rubber phallus's deep into their bodies.  At intervals, Alissa would  brand white-hot lines across their legs and flanks with another of the  canes.  The pain seemed somehow to work as an absolutely perfect  counterpoint to the overwhelming erotica of the ride on the strap.   Neither of the two women would have believed such vividly intense  sensations to be possible at all, let alone desirable.  Or survivable.

The look Alissa directed up to them was smug, almost loquacious in it  aura of contentment.  And something else, Sondra dimly perceived.  She  struggled against the waves of sexual explosions that seemed somehow to  go right to the top of her head and then all the way back to the tips of  her toes and then back again, always returning to and originating from  between her legs even the slight turning of her head to better see  Alissa’s upturned face brought forth a paroxysm of sweating, writhing  delight.  Alissa was extremely pleased about something.  Her stare was  fixed on Madame.

“Daddy knows where your girlfriend is, bitch.” Instantly, Madame  stiffened, whether from orgasm or from the import of the words, Sondra  couldn’t tell.  Madame’s eyes had flown open and looked squarely into  hers.  “He just called to tell me.  He’s going to bring her here.”

Madame had a strange expression in her eyes, one that Sondra had not  seen before.  Fear?  For herself or for the other one?  She couldn’t  tell for sure.  A flicker of emotion equally indecipherable flickered  across Alissa’s face as she saw Madame respond.  Sondra had the absurd  impression that it might have been jealousy.  Another surge of heat  ballooned out from her crotch and she surrendered to it fully.   Priorities were priorities.  After all.

Like insects, they had come.  Locusts.  Fleas in the fall.  Gorilla  had fled for his life after Madame had been spirited away by the Bertram  Boys, but hadn’t gone as far as they had hoped.  The old man’s  attentions had been diverted so rapidly by subsequent events that the  army of clean-shaven goons had accomplished little more than  consolidating their position in the house and grounds.  Digging out the  employees hadn’t been very high on the list. Which was exceedingly  fortunate for Gorila; the old man knew a great deal about him and didn’t  like what he read.  Gorila was slated for a one-way to the nearest lime  pit.

He knew Madame would be back.  Somehow.  Some way.  And he waited.   On the outside, but with a conduit, risky and fraught with security  pitfalls, to the inside.  Her name was Maria and she was without doubt  the smallest of all the slaves Madame had ever possessed.  And the only  one she had ever freed.  And nobody but Gorila and Madame, hopefully,  knew about her.  She wore the chains and endured Alissa’s whippings as  did all the other women in the compound.  And she watched, and Gorila  knew all that she did.

When Madame had been dropped back into the compound, Gorila had all  but danced for joy, then had caught sight of his near three hundred  pounds of bulk flouncing around the room in the mirror and desisted.   Even big ugly men have some decorum.  He had to know more, a lot more.

Maria’s specific problem was that she existed on the periphery of the  hierarchy that now ruled extant in the house and, perforce, some of her  information was inevitably sketchy.  It did provide Gorila with enough  background “ambiance” information to tell him that things had well and  truly gone down the tubes, especially where Alissa was concerned.  He  too, like Madame, had thought the transformation was complete with the  brat.  They were both, it seemed, completely wrong.

That stung Gorila’s pride, more than anything else.  He had adjudged  himself a better judge of character than that.  He would, it seemed,  have to turn serious energies to the problem.  And get Madame the hell  out of there, by the way.

At the same time, the shrewd component of Gorila’s brain-works, so  skillfully disguised under the overt trappings of ogre, warned him that  extricating Madame and tending to the brat would only be scaling the tip  of the iceberg.  The kid’s old man was the real problem here.

The Hall woman offered promise; her short tenure had convinced him of  that, if nothing else.  He was convinced that a linkup would be to the  advantage of both sides.  But how to accomplish it?  He didn’t even know  if she were still alive, although he suspected that she was.  And how  would he broach the subject to the woman, knowing as he did the personal  and professional enmities involved between Madame and Hall?  It wasn’t  the kind of additional encumbrance he needed at the moment.  His real  problems were a lot closer to home.

And then Maria told him that Madame was to be branded.  His time for  dithering was at an end.  She said she’d know exactly when in a couple  of days at most.

Madame herself got the cheery news while wearing and being worn by a  novel device that she had started years ago wand which Alissa had  improved on during her stay as Madame’s slave.  They had both provided  input during the design and construction stages and Alissa had  use-tested it on many occasions.  It was Madame’s turn, this cycle.

The device was simply a two-inch-thick hollow steel tube erupting  from the cement floor at a 60-degree angle.  The “user” would be  strapped to this pole, feet toward the top end and buttocks held several  inches from the bottom of the pole and the floor itself.  A ring at the  top of the pole would be used as the anchoring point for another strap  that was attached to the “user’s” hair.  The strap was shortened until  the unfortunate on the pole would be forced to bend sharply forward from  the waist, the weight of her torso, sympathetic to the simple demand of  gravity, would then be held up either by the girl’s hair or the  strength of her belly muscles.  Or both.  Her little hands, needless to  say, would be tucked carefully out of the way of trouble.  Madame had  said that it was just peachy wonderful for meditation.  Particularly  when, as now, a pivoting plugger had been attached near the bottom.

Madame had been part of the device for several hours when Alissa  found her way through the door of the cell.  She watched Madame  squirming and sweating for a couple of minutes, musing.  Madame only  dimly registered her entrance.  The muscles in her stomach had long  since ceased any effective countermeasures to the pull coming from the  ground and now she hung from the strap in her hair as much as anything  else.  As long as she remained perfectly motionless, the pain was at  least marginally tolerable.  The long greasy dildo made that difficult.

Alissa continued to say nothing.  She stepped, instead, to the top of  the pole and unbuckled the strap and let Madame’s back swing slowly  backward until it touched the floor.  Madame’s belly muscles were a  screaming wall of pain from her crotch clear to her sternum.  She gasped  in short little breaths of air as Alissa released her legs and swung  them, too, to the floor.

Alissa’s movements were almost languid as she stood Madame up on her  feet and began walking her toward the door of the cell, one hand on her  arm, gentle, solicitous, almost.  Madame should have been instantly  suspicious, but the effects of having spent an afternoon on the pole had  rendered her normal perceptions and subsequent reactions dormant.   Moribund would have been more like it.

The room they finally entered was new to Madame’s experience and her  interest flared, she had built the place, after all.  It reminded her  vaguely of those movable walls n modern buildings so that the tenants  can make whatever beehive they want without affecting the basic  structure.  She moved her face around the walls, trying to remember  where she was, trying to figure out where Alissa had thrown this  together.  Sweat ran into her eyes and she shook her head against it.   Alissa left her standing in the center of the room and walked to the  side to stand, watching.

The brazier was electric and squat like a box against one side of the  room.  Its bricks were an odd off-white and looked dusty.  A door was  set into the front and was opened by a black plastic handle running  horizontally across the top.  Below that was a smallish window into the  interior of the furnace.

A stout electrical cable drooped down the wall from behind the box  and the knobbed, tongued end sat under its wall socket.  A bulky pair of  insulated mittens hung from a hood on the right side of the thing.  It  was an oddly muted little display of purpose.  Perhaps because in its  utilitarian mundanity it was so far over-shadowed by the remainder of  the display in the room.

And that display was what had Madame’s attention from virtually the  first second she walked into the place.  It was the reaction to the  appearance of that display that so enraptured and held Alissa’s  attention.  The brands.  The irons hanging black and clean and  variegated from their small hooks.

And Madame finally fully understood the solicitude; Alissa had wanted  her fully off guard for the moment of the unveiling.  That she had  been.  She whirled and caught the Cheshire Cat grin, the slouched but  menacing lean into the wall.  The sense of almost infinite boredom  suddenly enlightened by a purpose.  Short-lived to be sure, but a  purpose.  The branding, the searing of the authority figure that she  would subdue, that Alissa could defeat.  Madame.  The one-time mistress  reduced to abject, and initiated, chattel.  Madame, the surrogate  father-figure that had failed, ultimately, that she could lash out at,  finally, that she could eradicate, utterly.

And the poor stupid asshole had it all wrong, Madame told herself.   The irons terrified her in a frank, raw way.  The pain and the mark  would be awful, horrendous, but Madame’s psyche was far too well  established with itself and with its innate flaws and few superiorities  and with a basic ability to face itself in a mirror to feel the utter  character destruction, the stigma, the abyss that Alissa seemed to seek  for her.

Madame’s surmise about her character, astute or otherwise, wouldn’t  have had any effect on Alissa’s decision, even had she known.   Introspection was something that rarely went beyond a questioning of  other people’s motives for causing her irritations.  And now wasn’t the  time for that.

She walked to the racks of irons and ran her fingertips lightly over  the knobs at the ends of the hafts, pausing, starting again, choosing.   “What would you think would be appropriate?  How about a ‘B’ for bitch,  or… a ‘C’ for cunt… or…” She walked to another rack.

“’A.’ For Alissa’s property.” She held the rod with its crude heavy letter out aimed at Madame’s face.  “Do you like that?”

Madame said nothing and stared off into space, avoiding the iron with her gaze.  Alissa meant it and Madame knew it.

“And now, where do we put it?” she walked around Madame in a  tightening circle, one hand under her chin and the iron waving from the  other over her shoulder.

She was interrupted by the sudden entrance of one of her women guards  banging into the cell without the usual enforced formality of knocking  and asking permission.  The woman propelled a tiny waif of a slave  before her so that the latter skidded across the tile and into a huddle  at Alissa’s feet.  Alissa’s face was a mask of anger and questioning  surprise.

“She’s been sending out little messages to the outside, this one,” the guard barked, furious and glaring at the slave.

Alissa’s eyes bulged but she stifled the gasp of rage, and fear, that would have come.  Maria!  It wasn’t possible!

“I have the message, or most of it, anyway.  We caught her just  before she finished!” the beefy woman handed a tiny slip of paper across  the room to Alissa.  Alissa was still staring a Maria in shock.  If  Daddy found out about this!  She took the paper and smoothed it out.   Maria was a small quivering ball under her feet.  The guard, enraged,  thumped a hefty kick into her side and would have delivered another,  curses a continuous stream from her lips, but Alissa waved her off and  turned to the words Maria had penciled.

G.

Don’t know how much longer can keep comm.  All  suspicious around me.  M. to be branded tonight!!  A. says BBB knows  where Hall is.  Bringing her here som

The message ended abruptly.  The little bitch, the dirty little  bitch.  Alissa felt empty, devoid of emotions.  How much more had she  sent off and to whom?  It just wasn’t fair.  Tears welled from her  eyes.  Just when everything was starting to go right, this happens.   Daddy would never trust her again.  Never!

Her gaze finally dropped to the girl hunched below her and the rage  she felt swelled up like a balloon.  Her hands shook so that she was in  danger of ripping the fragile message but somehow, from somewhere within  her, she got hold of herself.  She couldn’t destroy the message.  It  had to go out.  It must!  As long as the parties on the outside thought  things were still normal, they would probably either not act or might  even be enticed into making a stupid mistake.

She glared again at the message.  Who the hell was “G”?  what did it  stand for?  Gastropod, George, Geoffrey, Ginger, Gerry, Garage Sale…  Gorila.  Gorila.  He’d disappeared when Daddy’s people got there.  She  figured he’d be smart enough to hightail it to the woods and that was  apparently what he’d done.  She squinted up her eyes in thought, she’d  never noticed any particularly partiality extended toward Maria, or any  of the other slaves for that matter.  And yet, common sense dictated  that Madame must have had at least one deep plant amongst the girls.   Certainly, she always seemed well on top of things.  But Maria?  Why  would she take the risk for a mistress?  And why would Gorila stick  around for a defunct employer?  It made only a very flimsy amount of  sense that there might possibly be some additional attachment between  the three of them, but she really couldn’t see it.

“How is Gorila, these days?” she asked lightly.  Maria’s accompanying  jerk confirmed the suspicion, and it all began to click in her head.

Gorilla probably didn’t give a damn about Hall or anything else.  He  wanted Madame out of there.  Both of them did.  She glanced at maria.   Why else the emphasis on the branding?  And how much else did Gorila  know?  She grabbed a pencil and erased the notations about the branding  coming tonight and wrote in instead that it was to occur tomorrow.  At  the end of the message, she continued with the interrupted writing,  saying that Fanni would be in sometime next week.

“How did you usually end the message?” maria hunched herself deeper into a ball and refused to say anything.

“Robin, her cell mate, say that she always put ‘MR’ at the ending,”  the guard volunteered.  Maria had been betrayed by one of her own, just  as Gorila had secretly feared.

“How does she deliver it?” she asked, no longer talking to Maria.

“It goes out in the garbage, usually in an empty cereal carton.” My, my, Gorila must love message-pickup time, Alissa thought.

“Very well.  Get Cheevers to take a couple of his people and watch  that truck and where it goes and to pick up anybody who noses around in  the garbage.  I want them brought here, and I want them brought in  alive!  Do you understand that?”

The guard nodded her head yes.

“Make damned sure that Cheevers does, too.  Here!” She threw the message to the guard, who snatched it out of the air and left.

“You’re going to tell me everything I want to know, aren’t you,  Maria, my sweet.” Maria said nothing.  Alissa wound her fingers in the  hair on the small head and jerked her to her feet.

Thirty seconds later, they were in another small room, accompanied by  another guard.  Alissa expertly threw Maria to the floor and, aided by  the guard, roped her legs together at the ankles and knees.

She ran a cord between the braceleted wrists and pulled the ankles up  to meet them.  Another cord went clear around Maria’s already doubled  legs and added extra, redundant, security.  Alissa then spun a cocoon of  rope around the arms and chest, the elbows already pressed hard  together by a single cord.

The ceiling of the room was quite low, relative to the floor.  From  the center of the ceiling protruded a polished brass knob, striking  similar to a doorknob in both size and shape.  Next to it sprung a sturdy  eye-bolt of plain galvanized steel.

Alissa and the guard hoisted Maria up onto a wooden stand immediately  below the knob and coaxed her jaws apart enough to get the bulk of the  knob into her mouth.  In a smoothly rehearsed motion, the guard snapped  the end of a short length of quarter-inch steel cable through the  eye-bolt and pulled the other end around Maria’s throat and snapped it  into place in a slipknot.

Alissa jerked the wooden stand out from under Maria’s knees and with a  bump she found her entire weight supported by her mouth’s grasp of the  knob.  The presence of the cable around her neck explained itself  instantly, let go of the knob and hang herself.

“When you feel like doing what I want, just signal the guard here.” Alissa headed for

the door.

“What do I do if she can’t hang on?’ asked the guard.  She hadn’t really intended the pun.

“Watch.  Make sure she’s dead before you let her down.” And with that cheery sentiment she was gone.

Maria was terrified to a degree that she would never have believed.   She still found herself dazed by the brutal quickness with which it had  happened.  To Alissa she was nothing more than a traitorous piece of  meat; she wanted her information, but if she wouldn’t give it up, she’d  hang from the cable and Alissa wouldn’t care less.  All her steeling  herself to the ideas of torture had dealt with conventional coercion  and with, ultimately, the belief that she would come out of it alive.   She bit on the knob in desperation.  She knew she couldn’t hold it for  more than a few minutes.  The guard was watching with a kind of  fascination.  If Alissa had at lease stayed in the room, Maria might  have held out some hope, but she’d left her to an ignominious and  agonizing death on the end of a steel cable with no more thought than  that which she might have expended on an arrant fly.  Only the guard  would be witness to her life’s end.  And she didn’t want to die!  God,  she didn’t want to die!