One in Ten Ch. 04

"Do you really think that, or are you lashing out because of your own personal injustices?" Delilah argued. "My parents were both medical researchers when the plague hit. My father died in year four, working right up until the end. The day after he died, my mother went back to work. I've followed in their footsteps, looking for a cure."

"How is that working out for you?" I remarked.

"Ever heard of a drug called Carabolix 37?" she countered. Something tickled at the back of my brain but I couldn't figure out the what, why, or where of that memory.

"No," I lied.

"It was the last anti-viral to be cleared for live trials," she informed me. Live trials meant men being experimented on. "It was tested twenty years ago. I worked on it. Of the eighteen men in the trial, nine died from massive organ failure, eight developed a highly aggressive form of testicular cancer and had to be castrated to save their lives."

"The last subject died of massive testosterone toxicity. We couldn't suppress his testosterone production fast enough to save his life," she related.

"Okay, beyond being a very depressing story, why are you telling me this?" I worried.

"Forty doses of Carabolix 37 were saved for what we would hope would be future research," she started.

"Twenty doses were stored at our research facility close by," she gave a sliver of a smile. "The other twenty were left at the research hospital where the trial was performed - St. Jerome's." That made no damn sense. When I was rescued by the police from the Aurora Slasher, they took me to St. Jerome's - because it was the closest hospital.

Still, I couldn't imagine the doctors and staff using it on me. That made less than no sense.

"Very recently we went looking for both stockpiles. The one at our facility is safe but the one at St. Jerome's is missing," she was prodding me along. I didn't know where.

"What do you think happened to it?" I muttered.

"I think someone who mistook it for a fertility drug stole it," she regarded me slyly.

"How many doses did each test subject take?" I whispered.

"One," she was starting to smile.

"Why am I still alive?" I mouthed. The breath to power the words wouldn't come.

"Now that would be the intriguing question, wouldn't it?" Delilah looked at me in a startling motherly way. I fell down. My knees turned to water and I folded like an accordion. I was in that basement, she was talking to me as she bathed my body. She wanted me clean. She took a vial out of the small refrigerator down there, filled the syringe and came at me.

We were going to make a baby, she promised. We were going to make many baby boys. She shot me up, it hurt like hell - like my whole crotch had been set on fire. It hurt for days. I begged her to stop but she kept injecting me. The pain got worse and worse and worse until one day it simply vanished.

When the law came for the Aurora Slasher, they didn't even know I was alive. Only after the stampede was over did one officer get assigned to search the basement for evidence. When she saw me, she first thought I was a corpse. Only when she flashed her light in my eyes did I blink and turn away. There was a lot of yelling after that.

My first question to the EMT's was if 'she' was still alive - she was. I then asked about our baby. I wanted to know if our baby was okay. They had no response for that, so I feared the worse - she'd miscarried during the fight. It wasn't until the Federal investigators talked to me the next day did I learn that the Aurora Slasher could never get pregnant. There was no baby. There would never have been a baby and all I'd been through had been utterly without purpose.

It had taken eighteen months to submerge all of those painful memories yet here they were, back again.

"Israel," Delilah called out to me quietly. "Israel?" Using every tool at my disposal, I jury-rigged my psyche back together and forced my way to my feet.

"So you do remember," she mused triumphantly.

"If making me remember any of that was supposed to inspire me to give a crap about any of you, you were sorely mistaken," I growled.

"If you want to see your children, I can help with that," Delilah offered. "In turn, you could help me help all of us."

I wanted to scream at her. I wanted her to realize how fucking sleazy and evil she was for using my offspring as a lure to carve off another piece of soul by helping any of them.

"I need to think about it," I mumbled.

"Very well," she agreed compassionately.

She wasn't even putting any time pressures on me. It didn't make her one of the good ones. It made her one smart predator. Bethany had inherited some of that subtlety but was too over-privileged to appreciate it.

"What do you do?" I asked. Doctors and researchers were well paid but not paid enough to end up here, or so I believed.

"I'm majority stockholder in Augsburg Pharmaceuticals," she informed me. God, I'd been dosed with a variety of her concoctions multiple times in my life. AP was also famous for the creation of 'aggression suppression' drugs - things they used on male prisoners to keep them in check so they could be used for breeding. That shit was so nasty you had to have your civil rights voided by the courts first.

I was struggling to keep my breathing under control. I'd given up on my heart rate.

"If you have an anti-viral that works, why aren't you doing something?" I blathered.

"I don't know why it works, for one," she explained calmly, "and if this was to become public knowledge before we had manufactured an appropriate supply, the governments of the world would void my patents and create their own batches."

I couldn't tell her, but that was the best impetus I'd ever heard for me committing suicide and I'd literally been through hell. Killing myself was a pointless surrender. Stopping Dr. Delilah Fremont from leveraging my horrific fortune into an economic windfall was worth it - almost. I simply didn't know if a seventy story fall would render my testicles beyond recovery.

"Have you ever wondered that it was someone just like you, trying to play God, who started the Gender Plague in the first place?" I inquired somewhat hopelessly.

"Oh, I'm sure of it," Dr. Fremont responded instantly. "It really is a masterpiece of genetic engineering," she grinned happily.

"It is specific in its targeting, it mutates randomly and it grows in potency with each hundred or so permutations," she added. She admired the damn thing. I was sorting through that when the words impacted me.

"It's getting tougher?" I gasped.

"Yes. It is damaging male spermatozoa, increasing the likelihood of female births. Successful male inseminations suffer from a higher rates of fetal mutations and miscarriages," she informed me.

"Why tell me this?" I wondered. "I'm hardly a fan."

"You are a compassionate survivalist, Israel," she profiled me. "You are angry now, but you seem to get over it and let your compassionate nature shine through. How many boys will die in their first year if you do nothing? You may hate me and Bethany, but you don't hate your daughters. You don't want them to grow up never knowing the loving touch of a male lover."

Once, way before I was born, they might have called me a 'nice guy'. I wasn't sure what it would have meant back then but tonight it was a weak-willed male who caved-in to the desires of the women around him.

"Compassion only goes so far," I struggled to articulate. "If I say no, what do you do next?"

"That's the rub," she shared a secret smile. "Thirty years of research have not been totally in vain. We know one of the key causes of the plague's mutation - physical and mental stress."

I stared - I stared - I stared then I laughed loudly.

"You treating us like second class citizens is finally biting you in the ass?" I tittered insanely.

"We made logical decisions designed to save the human race," Delilah reasoned calmly. "There were factors we didn't take into consideration. Besides, the majority of men don't seem to mind so much."

"If that was the case, we wouldn't be dying out," I countered.

"Still," I reasoned, "if women," at least the women in charge, "know, why aren't they doing something to make the lives of men easier?"

"Please, Israel," her eyes danced. "Where would it stop? Men would demand everything and the female population has come too far to give into male extortion now."

"We are not going to roll back the clock two hundred years on women's rights," Delilah said. "So we keep a lid on things until a cure becomes available. That's where you come in. You are a very promising lead."

"A promising lead to what?" Maggy asked, rescuing me from this mortifying conversation.

"For finding happiness," Delilah smiled at me.

"Interesting. Does that apply to all of us, Dr. Fremont, or just you?" Maggy inquired.

"Neither," I fought for my center. My mind raced but my thoughts were focusing down to a few salient points.

"You have a jammer," I said to no one in particular.

"Of course," Delilah nodded in appreciation of my non-idiot-hood. "Not everything needs to be committed to electronic memory."

"That sounds positively criminal," Maggy purred.

"Lady - Maggy, you have no idea," I muttered. She found that utterly amusing.

"We will talk more about this later, Israel," Delilah winked. "Try giving Bethany one more chance. She could be useful to you."

"I look forward to having no other options," I gulped. Delilah laughed as she left me out on the balcony with Magdalena.

"From what I've heard, you are an oddity for one of these functions, Mr. Jensen," she said.

"First time here," I noted absently.

"For both of us it seems. That's not what makes you so appealing though - or your very fortunate lady friend," Maggy smiled.

"The fact that I'm acting like I don't want to be here?" I hoped.

"I doubt it. It is the fact that you are tip-toeing on the precipice of sanity, Mr. Jensen," she clarified.

"You can call me Israel," suggested.

"You can call me Maggy," she reiterated.

"I think I'll call you Magdalena. Maggy is a nice, warm, friendly name. Magdalena reminds me that behind your glittering teeth is a soulless carnivore," I told her.

"You really don't know who I am, do you?" Magdalena regarded me studiously.

"Nope," I shrugged. "I'm not terribly interested in knowing who you are either. I didn't come here to get nice and cozy with the dark side of human nature - sadly, I failed in that desire - and all of you have the misfortune of being found both useful and morally pliable by Isobel Diaz, which puts you all in the aforementioned 'dark side of human nature'."

"You really don't know who I am?" she blinked in shock. "I would normally assume you were a trap set by Isobel, but you really don't seem to give a crap who I am."

"Good. We are on the same page," I noted.

"Israel, I find you fascinating," Magdalena declared. "This doesn't happen often. In fact, the last time a male truly interested me I was...nine."

"Oh," I groaned. "For the love of God, tell me what it is and I'll correct it. Whatever it takes for you to turn around and walk back inside - forgetting everything I've said and done that you find the slightest bit interesting - please tell me what it is and I'll do my best to do it."

"No, I don't think so," she smirked. "I am a soulless carnivore, as you mentioned."

"I'm not sure what it is about you that I like, but there is something there," she mentioned. "Until I find out what it is, I'm going to keep an eye on you."

When you build a levee to withstand a flood you do it in anticipation you know how high the river will rise.

From the age of sixteen, the water had been rising. There was no design to it; all chance. Chance had led me to Bethany Fremont. Bethany had led me to Isobel Diaz. Bethany and Isobel had led me to Delilah Fremont. Isobel had also led me to Magdalena, whoever she was, except in the politics of female status, Magdalena had brought Isobel to task over me and Isobel didn't like that.

This might leave me to believe that Magdalena could shield me from Isobel. Unless all of this was an elaborate psychological ploy to raise my hopes only to slap them down at a time of Isobel's choosing. At that rate, I wouldn't need for GED to put me away; I'd fracture my mind all on my own. To get out from under this, all I had to do was not take the bait.

Paraphrasing what I had told Kuiko, using the lion to drive off the leopard doesn't do the zebra any good. Even if Magdalena was a real enemy of Isobel, giving her a tool to use against the evil sow didn't make me anything better than a tool. I turned and leaned over the railing.

"You are not going to jump, are you?" Magdalena moved toward me.

"Are you encouraging me and angling for a better view," I muttered, "or are you trying to stop me on the off chance I've lost my mind?"

"I've seen enough death," Maggy told me. "Normally I can tell the type - the ones who have given up hope, but you are - what's the term - a Janus?"

"Do we really want to discuss the state of my mental health or how it was shaped?" I questioned. I caught some movement behind me, by the door. "Wouldn't you rather explore your favorite body oils and silk sheets versus cotton blends?" It was my two minders. "Oh look, your friends are here," I turned to the two ex-military security types.

"They are not my friends," Magdalena informed me.

"I don't care. Four-ways cost extra," I joked feebly.

"How much would that be?" Magdalena regarded me.

"Not a clue," I sighed. "Until tonight, I had successfully avoided being a prostitute."

"Do you know the first thing about prostitution?" she stared intently, even angrily.

"I doubt four year old boys want to grow up to be whores," I stared back.

"How did you come by this insight?" she countered.

"I know what it is to be a man, have someone demand sex and not being able to say 'no'," I expressed with sad eyes.

"It is a business after all," she pointed out. "As a chef, you don't always get to determine who your clientele are either. You still are expected to prepare a meal."

"You sound like a pimp," I enlightened her. Magdalena smiled and snorted in amusement.

"I've been called worse," she admitted.

"I don't think those two are going to leave us alone," she added. "We might as well go inside."

We went inside and I vaguely remembered meeting various women, none who I could have described five minutes later. It was a testament to how far I'd fallen in the past few hours that I didn't even flinch when I was 'bid' on - all in the name of some charity - and bought.

Perhaps I should have worried about Magdalena buying me for the evening. Maybe I should have noticed how not very many women, or teams of women, vigorously pursued the bidding for me. In retrospect, I should have been impressed, but there were things I would only find out later that I didn't know then.

As I said, I really didn't care what was going on until I was alone with Magdalena once more.

We walked into the penthouse reception area - I'd come in the servants' entrance, where we picked up two frightening women. They were dressed in casual chic but possessed the characteristics of very hungry wolves.

The first one was tall, almost as tall as me. Her dusky skin spoke of a parentage on four continents. She had black hair pulled back in a tight ponytail that went half way down her back. She looked me over, then through me, never saying a word and barely acknowledging me. I called her Silent for lack of given name.

The second girl was shorter, maybe 5'6 with tanned skinned, short cropped black hair and barely contained rage. She had a flame tattoo that came up the left side of her neck but the same design was also on her left hand, making me wonder how connected they were. I called her Flame because I felt that asking was the best way to get my head torn off.

We were in the bedroom of one of the tower apartments, two stories below the penthouse, when Magdalena finally spoke.

"Well?" she inquired. I put on my best game face, slapped some asbestos on the Hindenburg and got ready inside and out to perform.

I had my jacket on the back of the chair and the bow tie unraveled in my hands when she held up a hand.

"No, I want the face," she insisted. Sensing a lack of understanding, she clarified. "The face you gave to that woman this morning."

"Oh," I mused then, "That's not going to happen."

"Why not? You walked off the elevator willing, didn't you? You didn't protest when I paid for you, did you? So why can't you uphold your side of the bargain, Mr. Jensen," she studied me angrily.

"You haven't earned it," I shot back. "Hell, you weren't even supposed to see that. It was a private moment between me and someone I hold honest affection for. I have to accept that the image was stolen from me but I don't have to like it and I certainly don't need to pay the thief for the pleasure of them stealing it from me."

The two female 'friends' had appeared at the door. Perhaps I had been ranting a little too loudly.

"What do you mean 'I haven't earned it'?" she questioned.

"God - that you are even asking that," I shook my head. "You are a businesswoman," I tried a different approach.

"There were over thirty people upstairs who were more than happy to spend the night with you, if not the whole damn weekend - ready, able and most likely, willing. Yet you chose to invest in a man clearly miserable with the whole situation, who has shown no carnal, emotional, or social interest in you," I explained.

"Now you claim to be unhappy with what you paid for?" I countered. "You didn't pay for the guy in that video. You couldn't afford him. No, you paid for the poor slub who couldn't find a way out of appearing tonight - who had to leave that woman and the warmth of her body next to mine, to come here to be with a woman I neither know or care to know."

"The man you claim to want is back there with her still. She's holding him safe until I return and I get to be him once more," I glared. Magdalena stared at me with very cold, almost lifeless eyes.

"Want me to beat him up some, Little M?" Flame asked Maggy.

Magdalena weighed her response as Flame closed in. I imagined she expected me to do something; defend myself, run, throw something, beg forgiveness - something. I stood there. The physical options were pointless and I'd be begging as soon as my pain threshold was breeched.

In a perverse way, seeing how much more pain I could take this time was all I had to look forward to. There was no winning, or showing them how tough I was. I wasn't that kind of man and if there were any like that anymore, they were keeping their heads down.

"Not the face or hands," Magdalena instructed and the pain began.

Physical violence against men was a rather rare thing. Sure, I had been bullied by girls in middle school. Girls are bigger and stronger at that age plus they are working out their hormonal shift where boys are concerned. Not only do teachers look out for you, but boys tend to form cliques covering multiple age groups.

Since we were so few, it was only natural that boys would create our own little social order. It wasn't anything sinister or subversive. It was our experience with being 'manly' and 'macho'. We could roughhouse, talk about girls, sports and do stupid guy shit that drove our mothers nuts when they found out.

I had no idea how many men Flame had beaten up in her career. Maybe men and women are identical in the weak points in our bodies. Flame seemed to know them all. To be somewhat fair to her, I forgot to scream until after all the air had escaped my lungs. I was also somewhat obsessed with the craziness of it all.

Who beats up a guy for refusing to have sex with them, or has some flunky do it for them? I had to wonder if I walked into situations like this - was this my fault? Was there something about me that attracted the worst kind of women?