That’s what Roxanne had decided Coral Beach and the surrounding towns felt like lately: Hiroshima. The atomic blast that was Adam Genblade had killed a lot of people, but they were almost the lucky ones. In the past few weeks the fallout of those events had begun to take its toll on her and the children she catered to. Depression was a popular reaction, but so too was anger, hostility, disbelief and paranoia. It was the same way she pictured the aftermath of a massive attack of any scale, large or small. The only difference was that the people of Coral Beach wouldn’t discover radioactivity in their breast milk in fifty years, although according to the rumors she had heard about the building they found north of town that might not be out of the question either.
She ran her hands through her curly red hair, raking her press-on nails against her scalp in a desperate effort to keep the thoughts that were stalking her out. She was leaning over the bar of The Factory on her elbows, staring down into an untouched cup of tea that wafted the sugary sweet scent of orange pekoe up into her face. The heat from the drink made her forehead and upper lip dot with sweat after only a moment, but she found she liked the way it tingled against her face.
An image flashed across the top of her brain like a strobe light. The memory produced a smell like ammonia and spit that made her nose curl even though it wasn’t really there. The recollection of it was more than enough. Gritting her teeth and digging in her nails until she thought she might be bleeding, Roxanne forced the image from her mind as she had many times on sleepless nights in the past two years. Nights when she’d woken up screaming and not remembered why at first. Nights after which no amount of showers and soaps could make her feel clean again.
But it was gone again now, and she could turn her attention back to the muddied and distorted visage of herself in her tea. She could force those images out for as long as it took. She’d had a lot of practice. It had taken some time, but she has started to think of it as a movie that had happened to someone else. The illusion was so complete that her memories of what had been done to her no longer had colour, and were grainy with cigarette burns the way old movies from the thirties were. Once she’d managed to convince her mind that it was just a movie, all she needed to do was turn off the projector.
The new things coming at her weren’t so easy. These weren’t memories she was fighting now but thought processes, her own mind working overtime against her.
“Yes, there were two or three men working in conjuncture.”
The federal agent’s voice had been so cold when he’d said that. It was just a fact to him, something with no emotional weight to it other than the loosest sense of empathy. To her it was the gateway that made the plight of that young girl real to Roxanne, a point of reference that could be used to extrapolate her experiences to fit this new scenario.
There would be more of that smell with three of them, she thought, even as she ground her molars together and tried to turn off the switch to the projector only to find that it was broken.
More of that same ammonia and saliva smell but not as much as she initially thought. Not three times as much, by any stretch. Scent was one of those odd things that reached a ceiling fairly quickly and no matter how much more you piled in, the smell would get no worse. Other things would get worse though. The smell of sweat with one of them was bad enough. With three of them, the B.O. would reach tsunami levels. It was so bad it almost made her throw up into her tea thinking about it. Cologne, too. Nothing expensive, something that an idiot would pick up with a sailboat on the bottle that smelled like her Uncle Chris’s moonshine.
That was just the smells. As her tea stopped sending wave after wave of heat at her face and became cool, she started to feel it. Again she tried desperately to turn off the movie playing in her head, but this was something her mind was creating. Once started it was like trying to stop an avalanche of thought. It simply couldn’t happen.
It started as a memory of the hands gripping her shoulders and her breasts. They were rough and pulled on her flesh as though they wanted it off like her clothes already were. Most people do not understand that rape is more about violence than it is about sex. She understood all too well. As she took the teacup in her shivering hand and brought it to her lips, her thoughts deviated from memory into their own tangent. There were three of them, after all. She’d never had that experience, but it wasn’t hard for her mind to fabricate. While the pressure was still tugging hard on her chest and shoulder, more was added at her hips and legs and hair. Before long she felt as though she had been tied to three different cars and they had begun pulling her in all directions at once.
The pressure was soon joined by weight. The sum total of the first one’s entire body was upon her and within her all at once. It would have been a thousand times worse than the pressure of their hands all on its own, but the hands had never really stopped their steady grope. The pain was unbelievable. What
