Page 26

Chapter Seven

Alex

Alex dozed fitfully all night. He hurt all over, but it was a darker pain that kept waking him.

So far, he’d managed to cling on to an illusion of consent in his sexual encounters with Tyler’s guests.

He’d convinced himself that it was no different to fucking strangers in clubs when he was drunk, or using his body to whore croc from people at university, which he’d done almost as a game.

However, being bent over a table, beaten, and forcibly fucked had stripped away that defence mechanism, revealing his position for what it truly was. He’d been raped, not just this time, but every single previous time, too, and he had to find a way to come to terms with that.

Halfway through the night, he needed the toilet.

He slid out of bed, hissing with pain, and staggered into the bathroom.

Leaning against the wall for support, he pissed, and then decided to try to remove his crumpled clothes, taking them off slowly, one garment at a time, shuddering as every movement sent agonising shockwaves through his body.

His white boxer shorts were streaked with blood and stuck to his buttocks.

He peeled them away gingerly, his breath coming in shaky gasps.

He was so shattered from the effort that he had to hold on to the sink afterwards, panting .

Looking up, he caught sight of himself in the bathroom mirror. He looked terrible – the slicked-down hair from the previous day was now a mess, pointing up stiffly in many different directions, and his face was pale and pinched.

He angled his body sideways and glanced over his shoulder to see the reflection of his backside in the mirror. The marks of Harper’s belt were imprinted on it in livid welts, and there were dark red and purple bruises, too.

There was also another issue – he’d been in so much pain from the beating that he’d been less aware of the damage caused by the violent penetration. Now he realised that his hole ached from where it had been pounded and torn.

He felt used and dirty, so he crawled into the shower. He leaned against the tiled wall, shaking, hoping the warm water would wash Harper’s stench from his skin. The water stung his bruised flesh, but he stayed there anyway, the need to feel clean overriding the pain.

Finally, he forced himself to slather his hands in shower gel and carefully rinse out his abused hole. It hurt so much, and at first the water ran pink with blood. Seeing it, something inside him broke, and for the first time since he’d become an IS, he cried.

Sinking down on his haunches on the shower floor, he sobbed. He wept so hard his throat hurt, and he didn’t stop until he was too exhausted to cry anymore. Then he crouched there for a long time, staring into space as the water continued to flow over him.

He still felt dirty. If he closed his eyes, he was immediately back in that room, being held down over the table.

He could feel Harper’s hands on his thighs, the warmth of his breath on the back of his neck, and the hardness of the surface beneath him.

Looking down, he could see marks on his hips where the edge of the table had dug into him, and an ugly red line around his wrists where they’d been tightly bound.

He was bruised all over, including on the sides of his thighs, where he could see the imprint of Harper’s fingers painted on his flesh.

Nothing could wash them away. No matter how long he stood under the spray, nothing could remove the sense of shame and humiliation he was feeling right now.

Eventually, after more than an hour, he staggered out, patted himself cautiously with a towel, and crawled back into bed.

The walls had changed again and were now showing a woodland glade that was calming and restful.

He gave up trying to understand Tyler’s choice of décor and closed his eyes once more.

He was asleep when the door opened at 9a.m. and a short, round man he’d never seen before entered, waking him. He was carrying a medibot.

“I’m Doctor Parker,” he said. “Mr Tyler has sent me to check you over.”

Alex gazed at him blankly. “Anyone would think he cared,” he croaked, his voice sounding strange to his own ears. “But I guess he’s just worried in case his investment loses value.”

Dr Parker examined him carefully; Alex was too far gone to care about the further indignity of what that entailed. He closed his eyes and concentrated on dealing with the pain. When the doctor had finished his examination, he injected him with a combination of antibiotics and painkillers.

“You’ll be fine. You need some rest, but then you’ll be fit to resume your duties,” he said.

“Shouldn’t you tell the authorities?” Alex rasped. “What happened to me isn’t legal. No IS should be whipped and raped. Don’t you have a duty to report it?”

The doctor pointed to the ID tag pinned to his jacket. “I do as Mr Tyler orders,” he said, although there was a trace of shame in his eyes.

Alex buried his head in his pillow. What kind of doctor ended up as an IS? Parker was either a convict, like himself, or had acquired debts he couldn’t pay without selling himself. Either way, he wasn’t an ally.

The medic gave him a reassuring pat on the shoulder. “Just rest. You’ll feel better soon.”

Alex didn’t leave his room all day – he stayed in bed, gazing blankly at the wall, which was displaying an ocean view on a sunny day, the movement of the waves oddly mesmerising.

Surprisingly, both Chef and Mason left him alone, which could only have been on Tyler’s instructions.

Trays of food were left outside his door, but he couldn’t face eating .

When he didn’t surface on the second day, Solange knocked on the door and tiptoed inside, with Scarface close behind.

“Come and be with us, Alex,” she said. “We’ve made a kind of den for you in the living room.”

He lifted his head to see them gazing at him sympathetically.

“It hurts to move,” he admitted, feeling desperately ashamed, even though it wasn’t his fault.

“I’ll carry you,” Scarface offered.

“I’m fine here.” He buried his face back in his pillow.

Solange sat down on the bed beside him and gently stroked his hair. “Please, Alex. Let us help,” she said tenderly.

Their kindness somehow penetrated the foggy haze of his depression, and he allowed Scarface to lift him off the bed and carry him into the living room, where they’d created a little bed of soft pillows and light blankets on the sofa.

Scarface laid him on it carefully, and Solange spread the blankets gently over him.

She and Scarface were his constant companions for the next few days.

They sat with him as he watched movies, read, and took regular naps to help his body heal.

Solange chatted to him for hours on end, about anything other than what had happened to him at Tyler’s office.

It reminded Alex of when she’d been covered with bruises after her night with Clive: they both knew that suffering had taken place, and could guess the nature of it, but no good came from talking about it. They both had their pride.

She was curled up next to him most of the time, getting up only to fetch him cups of tea and snacks that he barely picked at.

She painted her nails while telling him a story she’d heard about Mason losing his ID tag and being punished for it by the major-domo – an idea they both relished, although Alex wondered if it was true.

When Scarface was on duty, he could often be prevailed upon to gossip indiscreetly about life in the IS dormitories downstairs, and everyone he shared quarters with. Fatso liked to tell dirty jokes that nobody found very funny, but apart from that he left them alone.

Alex found himself liking Scarface more and more.

He noticed also that Solange had grown close to the tall, lean man with the lugubrious face and dry sense of humour.

The two of them introduced Alex to a show they were both hooked on.

Alex thought it was terrible, but he liked the in-jokes they had about it, and feeling part of their little gang as they watched it together.

“How did you become an IS?” he asked Scarface one day as they watched another episode together.

Scarface shrugged. “I was born in the Quarterlands, like Solange, but I wanted to get away; there was nothing there for me.”

“Couldn’t you… I don’t know… find a job and move out?”

Scarface laughed. “You’re so dumb it’s almost cute.

There are no jobs. Most people only want to employ indies these days, because it’s cheap labour.

Being a Quarterlander doesn’t help; people don’t like us.

Some will take us on without putting a chip in our wrists, but only because they don’t want the responsibility of keeping servants. ”

“Then how do you cope in there? How do you survive?” Alex wondered why he’d never thought about it before.

His father had always been suspicious of the Quarterlands, insisting that the people who chose to live there were murderers and thieves.

He’d said that the sooner the government cleaned them all out and forced them into the IS scheme, the better.

For Alex, it had always been a case of out of sight, out of mind – he’d seen dramas set in the Quarterlands, but he’d never been anywhere near them himself.

“A few Quarterlanders have menial jobs, like cleaning and construction; the rest get by on the black market, but it’s not easy,” Scarface said.

“I was tired of always struggling to find enough to eat, of just getting by instead of really living. I wanted a future; becoming an IS seemed the best way of finding one.”

Alex shifted; his bottom and the backs of his thighs still hurt, but the previously intense pain had at least faded now to a dull, throbbing ache. “So what happened? How did you end up here?”