W

your just still, your still mourning now"*

by: ADRIENnE

The lights blinded her. Losing her rhyme and reason, is that what that woman had said? Losing your rhyme and reason. The meek blond cringed in panic behind her. The hall was immense, it looked as if would span forever in any direction and continue to hypnotize you with it's black on white, black on white, black on white driving pattern. Was the room spinning? Or was it merely her head? The small sequences that littered the seemingly endless corridor suddenly enlarged then shrank again. Specks of light danced on the floor beneath her feet, gliding in from the open windows that sparkled a watery white. Like pure water, like pearls in pure water. It sent her senses reeling and her mind onto a childish hop-scotch game. Was this a new Eden? Or a hell in guise? The room seemed to have a fluent motion all it's own. The white and black tiled walls spinning, whirling, turning, performing a ritual known only to the building.

They were all ushered down the summer-salting halls by two men and a woman dressed entirely in white. The loose fabric hung in floaty layers about her over sized frame. Her cropped dark hair was dyed like a twisted rainbow. Reds, blues, and screaming yellows pushed beyond her massive scalp. The rebel that dwelt thrashing inside Laura began to drift into a induced, sluggish sleep, keeping her silent and in awe. She could still taste the faint essence of the burgundy wine they had been forced into consuming. Hallucinogens, damn it! I should have known! The blond woman was clutching her arm now. Digging her blunt, rounded nails deep into the flesh of it. Laura bit her bottom lip to keep from screaming. The men that lead the group, like lost sheep took a sharp turn to the far right, the woman with the multi-colored hair stopped abruptly almost causing a few of the scattered captives to ram into her. She spoke with a snotty tone that made Laura want to smack the grin right off her face. But she could not move, the blond woman had her anchored to the floor.

"Don't be afraid," the woman in white began "none of you will come to any harm here." She smiled at the crowd. "My name is Dr. Sterling, I work for the United States government."

"Oh, that's a big surprise!" a woman from the crowd belted fiercely. Laura managed to turn and get a glimpse of the woman's face. Her hair was long, an ember color. A strange mix of fire ball red and a deep, drowning brown. Her green eyes flared and her face was twisted in fear and anger. Laura came to the conclusion that while this woman would not be drop dead beautiful, she would be rather comely to look at.

"SILENCE!" Dr. Sterling bellowed as she swept her arm towards the woman, dragging along with it the layers of white that were lazily draped over her chubby arm. The green eyed woman shrunk back into the crowd. The doctor began again. "Don't you people realize how fortunate you are? Do you know how many of your friends and fellow humans would kill their own mother to be in your shoes? You ungrateful people! You, you, you...."

"Dr. Sterling!" a male voice shouted from the right that the two men had not minutes ago turn into "Dr. Sterling, that is enough! Bring them in" the voice commanded.

The doctor sneered at the red headed woman and motioned for the huddled mass to follow her as she turned towards two large doors. The doors, so like the hallway, leapt forever upward. The steel was cool to the fingers and almost glassy to the eyes. They stood like alert soldiers as they painstakingly passed through their hollowed opening. Then froze.

The room was not nearly as immense as the light speckled hall, but it's abstract presence overwhelmed all of them. The room was a aqua-blue and marble white color. The patterns collided, forming a totally new means of art. Oblong tables sat invitingly before them. Then a sound boomed from the front of the room. A man stood behind a tall blue and gold decorated podium. A large gold seal sat in the middle of it as it's crowing feature. The man was tall, balding towards the frontal side of his bony skull, his thick glass magnified his eyes, to large for his small face as they slide down his crooked nose. When he spoke confusion rippled through the mass.

"Please, please, ladies and gentlemen, please have a seat. You will come to no harm, please, calm yourselves." The man had a grandfatherly tone to his aged voice. It seemed to draw the scattered people to a seat. If only to hear the soothing voice again, to pray that it may answer their questions, or wake them from this twisted dream. "Thank you, thank you. Now please, remain in your seats and relax. Dr. Stats will be here in a moment to explain everything to you. Trust me, you'll all be fine." His soft voice faded. And their ears then filled with the echo of the hard heeled shoe that his feet wore as they cumbersomely scuttled away. Leaving the room in a suffocating silence.

Then the others came. Mostly men, dressed in sharp suits, pressed to a T, of various browns, grays, and blacks, with straightened ties and equally straight faces. They began to segregate the crowd. All women on the left and all the men on the right. A man grabbed Laura's arm, ripping her away from the blond woman, and with that practically ripping off her arm.

"Hey! take it easy you bastard!" Laura cursed as she was almost dragged across to the shadowy left side of the room. The man looked annoyed, but said nothing. Then threw her like a rag doll to the floor. Laura managed to mumble a few more choice words then stopped when a pale hand came into her view.

"Come on," the nameless voice whispered "come on, or do you want to sit on the floor all day?"

Laura grasped the hand set before her and with small effort, pulled herself to her feet.

"Thanks" she said and peered to the side to see who the good Samaritan was. The ember hair waved in her face, and Laura smiled. "Hey babe! thanks, I'm Laura."

The woman looked a little embarrassed and picked up her head. "Your welcome, uh, my name is Dione."

"Dione, you don't have to be so shy," when Laura said shy she did a small mock whisper, trying to imitate Dione's voice "were all in this together."

Dione smiled. Laura knew deep in the pits of her soul, at that very moment, that she would always remember Dione's first smile. She didn't know why, but she knew she always would.

"Yup," Laura said out loud "I decided I like you Dione, by the way that's a very pretty name."

"Do you think their going to change it?"

Laura laughed. Dione knew more than she already.

II

Kate cringed as she stood alone, surrounded by unfamiliar faces. She turned, someone touched her. LEAVE ME ALONE!! her inner voice screamed. Someone else brushed up behind her, she snapped.

"STOP!" Kate screeched pulling at her curled blond tress. She fell dramatically to her knees and began to mumble. "Dear God why me? I was always good. All I wanted to do was marry Shawn and have some kids, raise them in a house on a hill with a white picket fence and roses. Why? WHY!!!"

The room was silent, caught up in the mumbling of the poor woman lying in a small heap on the marble floor. One of the men approached her. From the left side of the room Dione motioned to Laura.

"Look, poor thing." Dione was back to her withdrawn whispering again.

"Kate?" Laura said, shaking her head, "KATE!"

The blond hair woman looked up from her self-induced trance of misery. "Laura?" she began "Oh God Laura, where are we? Laura? Where are we?" she cried out in misery. Two men crept up behind her, with the look of jaguars, ready to pounce. Laura spasmed.

"You sons a bitches! Don't you touch her!" She bellowed as she leapt forward to shield Kate. The men stopped.

They were frozen in their places. Laura was giddy with triumph. But it didn't last. The voice that echoed behind her changed that.

"Leave her alone gentlemen." The voice ordered "Miss Duna, please return to your side of the room, no one will harm Miss Fletcher."

Laura snarled visually.

Dione motioned for her to return to the left side. Her eyes pleaded. But Laura never noticed. With the boldness of a warrior returning for battle, she strode slowly over, as if daring the straight suited men to stop her, and began to help Kate Fletcher off the cold marble floor. She peered over to see what the woman Dione was doing. Dione was resting on one heel, looking ready to spring if any of the men suddenly decided to move forward.

"Miss Duna!" the voice commanded "Take your seat-immediately"

"Go to hell" she mumbled under her breath. Kate staggered slowly up from the floor, her knees began to bleed from the speed of her impact. Together they made the trip to the other side of the room, as the mocking figures that suddenly lines the walls stared with vengeful eyes.

*

The people sat like ceramic statues. Cold, pale, and silent. The tables were a fine polished oak, cool and smooth to the touch sending a tingle up one's fingers to glide them to and fro across the lengthy captive desks. But no one could utter a word of defiance now. Fear, panic, and confusion had woven together to create a silencing tapestry. The man behind the megaphone like microphone lumbered over them, as if trying to do his very best to be as intimidating as possible before he began to speak.

He began. It wasn't until just now that Dione noticed the thickness of his accent. A deep but aged and distinct trace of an Irish slur.

"Silence please, now I suppose you are all curious about the circumstance leading up to your presence here..." he explained, but it was too late, she was already gone...

She remembered...it was three thirty when she first heard the violent slamming sounds coming from the den, two rooms away from where she slept. She actually made herself believe that it was just the dog. Back then random house raids were common. After the president was murdered house raids were very conventional.

Her best friend, Jamie had just called her not three hours before and told her about how the house next door was just ransacked by some of the armed forces.

"I can't believe it!" Jamie yelled as she pushed something over.

"Jesus, it's twice as bad in New York. It seems like every day somebody's being raided and hung."

"Yeah, but God, she was a seventy year old woman. She couldn't be a threat even if she wanted to! They're just looking for someone to kill. Christ! what's become of this country!"

They heard the knock at the door. The swift, formal, pounding of knuckles on the frost powdered front door.

"God!" Jamie whispered.

"Don't answer it! Let who ever it is keep knocking."

"Oh my God, Oh my God!" there was a sudden pause. Then the screech split the air in two. "DIONE!!"

The dial tone was all she could hear, it filled her head. Then - CLICK!

She told herself that it was nothing. She made herself believe that there must have been trouble with the lines. That they would have no reason to take Jamie. Jamie must have yelled her name merely because, she knew the phones were going dead - yes! And she yelled because she couldn't hear her. She pinned her faith and her vanished security to that single, misguided thought. That wish of phone lines, a transcontinental lie.

*

At first it was like a gentle, tap-tap-ta-tap-tap on the outside of her two story stone domicile. With it's eminent ascending levees. A reasonable wind on most cloudy nights would rattle the windows in their aging frames. She was too naive to notice the shadows that flicked across the casements that lined the southern most wall of her bedroom. The shadows that seemed to take on...almost human forms. But, it was only the trees, it was windy. Otherwise the windows wouldn't be shaking in their strangely unfamiliar way...,the wind, the trees. That's all you idiot, she kept telling herself, that's all. That's all that's all that's all that's all

When the first of the many rhythmic bangs began, she sat up in her down covered bed. Sprayed elegantly with the golds and greens that complimented the room about her. Her weight shifted under the billowy blanket, then causing the floor boards beneath the enormous pine berth to squeak. The sound ceased, but only momentarily.

"Bandit" she called out the Irish setters name, in a soft urgent whisper. "Come ere' babe!" then proceeded to whistle gently.

Nothing came. Only the darkness, that took a sweeping turn around the corner answered her paranoid call. She waited, heard only the tender sound of a too deep silence, and pushed herself tightly back into the crevice of the bed. Her blue silk night suit began to side up around her knees and she moved herself lower. As if cringing away from the night. Small static sparks flew between the top sheet and her bending legs while she curled them defensively. The silk and spark was sending tiny spinning sensations up her legs. She rolled her head back on the misarranged pillow as the spinning finally reached her spine. The bangs began again, but the eddy feeling that instantaneously hit her head took care of any resistance she

may have exhibited. She suddenly felt light, almost like floating.

She took a deep breath.

Then the vapors filled her ringing nostrils. Gas? she

could suddenly smell the faintest hint of a gas in the air about

her limp body. Gas! there was a gas leak in the house! Her mind jolted sporadically, to discover only another mind rocketing find. The house had no gas! No gas heating, no gas stove, no gas fireplace! Her mind raced while her body lay helpless. Jesus! she had been breathing God-knows-what kind of gas! Someone is trying to kill me, she thought as she tired in vain to move from the fetal position she had bend herself in.

Paralyzed and panic stricken Dione began to feel herself slip out of reality. The spinning had somehow escaped her body and beset the room. It whirled and the gold-like haze set in. Similar to the way wet paint slithers down a wet wall, with acutely agonizing slowness. And then the CRASH finally came, she felt like a merry-go-round set on break neck speed. Too bombarded with the on-set of the coming high to stop the madness about to envelope her. She remembered the first shot she heard, or what she thought was a shot. It propelled through the overcast space above her. Like a fire cracker exploding over her head. She managed to loll her head to the right, straining every neck muscle she had.

The first man through the wide passage to her room seemed irate, almost savage in looks. His broad face was accented to a chilling extent by a midnight black meshed beard that lined the contours of his face. It was ragged and uncombed, causing him to look almost deadly. His coal black eyes seemed to burn away the dark, shefroze in thought. Christ, he's going to kill me!

The tap-tap of the man's footsteps sunk into the wood of

the floor, silently making his way over to the bed. She could feel the pressure of his massive hand as it pushed down on it's edge. Only muffling the covers lightly. She could see him smiling in the darkness. Her body had become aware of every movement in the room, her pores alive like antennas in an electrical storm. The bed shifted again. The weighty man began to circle the standing pine four poster bed, only to come around to the front, he was mumbling something to himself, Dione couldn't make out the words.

When he pulled back the blankets that surrounded her lifeless body, it was like a jump start for her senses. Setting them all into over drive after being dormant as the gas played over them. He was beside her now, running his beefy hand up and down the outside of her thigh. The silk suit bottoms pressed cool and harrowed to the skin. She could make out the blue in their pattern now, he pushed the pants up past her knees. She suddenly lost a sense of panic. Urgency for the deed to be done with fell into her scrambled mind. Just get it over with, it yelled. Resource less to defend herself, she managed to summon all the strength in her to mummer:

"You bast-ard!" in a slow breath, then collapsed against the crooked pillows.

He only laughed then moved that disgusted hand across her flat milky white stomach. Then proceeded to removed the blue green pants from her completely. Dione felt as if a thousand razors had suddenly been interwoven into the cloth, slashing the skin of her legs into cream colored ribbons. They fell to the floor with a swift and almost inaudible smack. His fingers probed through her mons with such shameful intensity that small hot tears formed at the corners of her eyes. Those fingers felt like fire charring tiny circles over the mound. Dione could feel the dirt on the man's invading hands as it fell into her undergarment. Sending a sick feeling rolling in the pit of her stomach. The tears felt like acid on her cheeks, cutting out craters in her face. When his rounded clay covered finger passed over her clitoris, Dione cringed like a beaten animal. She began to sob violently, praying for death. It was as if her life blood had been drained drop by drop from her body, then replaced with slim oozing mud. Hallucinations began to sweep over her, she was so dirty, filth everywhere. Even the inside of her anatomy began to feel sordid. She would never get this dirt off her, it was plastered every where. Dione shivered, I'll never be clean again. The nauseated feeling in her stomach began to lump and boil. She was going to be sick. The man straddled her hips, and with one hand churning below her hips, he slide the other up under the blue and green button down silk night-shirt. Her stomach lurched as she saw the grin on his face widen. She could feel the vomit swelling in her throat as he squeezed down on her left breast, pinching so violently that it bruised the tender areola. Suddenly, like a chain reaction Dione shot up from her defenseless position and a hallowing choking sound ripped from her paled lips. The hot stomach acid sprayed from them, covering the face and neck of the intended rapist. He repelled momentarily, then jerked both hands free from their pornographic game and ran them across his stinging face.

"YOU FUCKING BITCH!" he shrieked in pulsating wrath, pulling his hands down and staring at them with hard disbelief. "Your going to pay for this you little whore!" he spat in her ear.

Her breath came faster as the saliva dribbled into the curve of her ear. She tried desperately to close her eyes, and then she felt it. A single brawny clenched fist smashing her head, causing her entire torso to rocket side ways.

Then the rhythmic bangs began again, only this time they were not on the door.

"Worthless bitch, asking for it! I'm going to mess you up royally baby." He hissed as he brought his palm crashing across her bloody cheek. Her head bobbed like a punching bag, jerking to the left, then to the right. Until the pain overwhelmed her. His hands vomit and blood covered ricocheted back and forth, until he was giddy. He began to laugh as she thumped and jerked like a rag doll beneath him. The

blood filled her eyes and washed out the taste of vomit in her mouth. It stained her pillow case. And the thought flashed again-I'll never be clean, I can never get the dirt off me. She heard the sound of a metallic zipper coming undone, but she was too far gone to care. The next words she knew would stay fresh in her mind forever. Those words would be her stigmata for life and beyond, the man's last words were the only thing that registered clearly after that.

"This is the way it is bitch! where your going your going to be getting a lot of it. But I don't know why anyone would want you, useless whore."

This is the way it is? She believed it. Her virginity flashed through her momentarily, and the last signs of panic vacated. Leaving her in total infant like submission. Everything throbbed with a type of pain that she never knew existed, she had no will left to live. She began to slip away.

When the tall thin man in the rusty green uniform entered the room, Dione had already passed out from the intoxicating mixture of fear, panic, and pain.

"WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING!!!" the thin man bellowed as he savagely ripped the black bearded man from her. Rage shot from his eyes as he looked from Dione's bloody body, passed out from sear mental exhaustion to the black beard man whose hands were still covered in Dione's agony. "What are you doing!!?" The tall man asked again as he pulled a small metallic weapon from behind him. "You had better answer me soldier, NOW!" He began to wave the blunted metal in the bearded man's vomit covered face. He cringed.

Then he lied, "she was resisting, Sir." He muttered.

"Resisting what? Your sexual advances? Your orders were to help this woman out of bed and prepare her things for transfer!"

He was speechless. "Yes sir."

The tall man spat out "get the hell out of here, sent in the paramedics-you bastard!" Then peered sideways towards Dione's flaccid beaten body. He moved in closer, then placed his slender hand over left wrist gently, feeling for a pulse. He froze, nothing, he checked again, then went rigid. "GET SOMEBODY IN HERE NOW!!! SHE HAS NO PULSE DAMN IT!!" He swung around on one heel, looking directly at the bearded man, still trying to gather himself on the floor. "If she dies Jonathan, it's your head!"

Three men in white and midnight blue suits burst through the doorway, as if running from doomsday. One gasped as he laid eyes on the woman on the bed.

"Jesus! what hit her, a train?"

The blue eyed paramedic pulled a miniature air mask from the bundle at his slender waist. While the other men cleaned her face and torso with slow easy strokes up and to the side. The blue eyed paramedic began to compress the release the small bag at the end of the air mask making a loud wheezing sound at each release. The man in green paced silently beside the two cleaning the woman's body. Her skin was already bruising beneath the softness of the cotton cloths. Shit! the tall man thought suddenly, this is all I need, to lose one!

They began to lift her body from the sanguinary support, when her chest began to heave in slow stabbing convulsions. The tall man in green shot to the woman's side. He put his tanned hand on her forehead, to fatherly brush back her blood soaked hair. Her cough was raspy, and spewed blood across her wet chest. The blood was clotty with lumps, the man didn't even want to know what they were. It was dark, almost black blood, oozing slowly down her thorax. She could feel again, she felt the warm wetness of her blood, the smoothness of the cotton cloths pressed to her head, to push back the waterfall of life blood running from what she already knew was a concussion near the top of her forehead. She felt the secure bouncing movement beneath her back. She pushed herself deeper into the support, only to feel it expand beneath her pressing back. Her arms were still limp, but she started to regain feeling in her toes. It was like a warm brick had been placed on them, a sensation of warm pressure, gliding up her feet. Her head cleared and she peered up to gaze at the paramedics. She opened her mouth to speak, but no words came. She merely lipped a message, with a dazed smile tugging at her lips. She was high. She remembered the feeling from medical school. She began to wonder what they put in the gas.

The tall man looked over at Dione, regaining her sense of reality like a baby. He cleared his throat.

"Miss Kilborn, could you please get your things ready."