33. Res
33
Res
P art of me can’t help but grudgingly respect Samson’s tactics. It would be one thing to just keep me locked in a room with Jaxson’s father’s voice lecturing and blowing hot air through a speaker. I can make myself tune that out. But to force me to take a test afterward where someone’s safety depends on it makes me listen in a different way. Because now, I’m listening for the right answers. And in listening for the “right answers,” it forces my brain to start to rewire against my will. To admit when Jaxson’s father has a point even when, in the context of the point, he's completely wrong.
It may seem a benign thing to admit when a cult leader is right, even though you know they’re full of shit. But cults operate under the assumption that if they can find common ground with you on one thing that you can and will eventually agree with them on more. Because for all the terrible in the world, people aren’t inclined to distrust. They’re even less inclined to confront people they don’t know. If you give them a reason to trust you, they will. If you give them a reason to think you’re right, they’ll believe you. And if they believe you on one thing, they’ll believe you on another and another until you believe that everything that comes out of their mouth is gold and the brainwashing is complete.
I’m more resistant to it than most, but even I find that after hours of isolation, my mind slips and latches onto Jaxson’s father’s voice, thinking that maybe there’s some merit to a few things he says. When those thoughts intrude on my mind, I’m quick to remind myself that there’s no context in which this man and his harmful, delusional rambling are right. But in doing so, it also distracts me from listening to vital information that might be in the next test.
In the second test, I get one question right and everything else wrong. In the third test, I’m almost positive that they’re fucking with me and that the answers to the questions they give me aren’t in the lectures. Like when, for shits and giggles and my own curiosity, I got my hands on Dianetics and the test booklet from Scientology. The answers to the questions were supposed to be apparent and evident in the text, but many weren’t in the text at all, though the woman I sent my text answers to insisted that they were and that there had been a “misunderstanding” in my comprehension.
In the fourth test, I wonder if there’s really something I’m missing. Some trick to this. There has to be. If I don’t write the right answers. If I don’t figure this out…
My hands shake and my heart races as though I’m running a marathon while I painstakingly attempt to answer the fourth test I’ve been given in who knows how many days. I feel like I’m six years old again, frustrated as I do my homework with tears in my eyes because no matter how much my mother yells at me, I don’t understand the work I’ve been given, let alone know the answers .
Samson’s gaze, as he watches me take this stupid test, weighs heavy on me. He’s by himself this time, though I have no doubt that if I fail, he’ll call his men right in with another woman to torment me.
“If you don’t know the answers by now, I don’t think staring at the paper for much longer will help magically reveal them to you, sweetheart,” Samson says smugly.
More than anything, I want to take this pencil and stab that fucking smile right off his face with it. It only takes me half a second to realize that there’s nothing stopping me from doing just that, and they can’t do a damn thing about it. I have nothing to lose.
Quicker than Samson, even with all his training, can react, I launch myself at him and stab the pencil at his face. I was aiming for his lips, but I miss and stab him in the cheek instead. Unfortunately, the pencil isn’t sharp enough to stab a hole all the way through his fucking cheek, but it’s sharp enough to take him by surprise and hurt.
He tumbles backward onto the floor, and I raise the pencil over and over again, stabbing at his face.
Samson manages to bring an arm up to keep me from poking his fucking eyes out, but seeing his arms bleed as he struggles to throw me off him is just as satisfying. Finally, he manages to grab my wrist and take the pencil from me, tossing it across the room. That’s fine, though; my nails will do perfectly fine. But before my nails can connect with skin, Samson manages to flip me off him and presses me against the ground on my back with the weight of his heavy body.
I struggle to throw him off, trying to use my hips as leverage against the large man, but to no avail .
“All that’s doing is making me hard for you, honey,” Samson points out.
I immediately stop. That’s the last thing I want to be doing for him right now.
“Not so eager now?” Samson asks with a chuckle. “Fuck, you don’t know how enticing you are. Do you know how easy it would be for me to strip you naked and fuck you right here on the floor, and no one would ever know? Nor would anyone ever believe you because no man would ever dare be brave enough to touch a woman that belongs to the Oracle. His next conduit.”
“Get off me,” I growl, trying again to throw him off me, him being aroused be damned. It’s not my fault he’s a pervert.
He grabs onto my neck, lifts me up, and slams me onto the floor.
“You’re lucky the Oracle has claimed you as his. But test me like that one more time, and I may conveniently forget that if it means making you regret this. Understand?” he asks.
I spit in his face and then answer, “Jaxson will kill you if you do when he finds out. And I won’t try to stop him.”
Samson laughs and squeezes my neck once more before letting me go and getting off me. I sit up and slide back against the side of the bed while he leaves. He comes back with ten more of his men and another of the girls they’re holding hostage.
As I watch what they do to her because of my failure, I pretend I’m some sort of federal investigator. I pretend that I’m watching a violent sexual crime for the sake of figuring out who needs to be arrested and charged later. Clinically. With the sort of emotional detachment that comes with seeing these violent materials day after day. So used to it that seeing a young woman being gang-raped doesn’t even make the top ten of the worst things I’ve seen. It’s still vile, but at least she’s not a minor. Thinking of it this way is the only way I can ignore the horror of it all.
Samson notices, the weight of his gaze becoming heavier and heavier, and by the time the girl is being raped for the fifth time by a fifth man, he’s clearly had enough of my detachment.
“This isn’t turning you on, sweetheart,” Samson says to me. “This isn’t exciting enough for you?”
I don’t answer him. It’s not worth the energy that I could be using to stay in my detached state.
“You know,” Samson continues, “I think there’s a way to make this more exciting for everyone involved and ensure you’re taking it all in to learn your lesson.”
He waits for an answer from me that he’s not going to get, so he keeps going.
“This is what you’re going to do for me, honey. You’re going to take off all your clothes, and then you’re going to sit back down and spread those pretty little legs so I can see that glistening cunt of yours, and then you’re going to make yourself come.”
That gets my attention. How could such a request not get my attention, even in my detachment from this entire situation?
“You’re insane,” I say for lack of anything better to say. I’m not able to dredge up the requisite anger and dismay I should feel at Samson’s request, so I sound like I’m boredly telling him the time after I read it off my phone.
“Oh, you’re not telling me anything I don’t know, sweet cheeks. ”
“The Oracle said you couldn’t touch me,” I remind.
“He did. Never said anything about getting a good look. And even if he did,” Samson leans over and puts his lips just millimeters from my ear, “how’s he going to know?”
“Fuck you,” I snap, defiant as I can be before the other shoe inevitably drops and Samson gives whatever ultimatum he’s going to give.
“Okay then. Don’t. But until you do, you’re going to sit here and watch as I call even more people in here to fuck this whore. And when she dies, I’ll go get another and more men to fuck her. I can do this all day,” he warns.
I could argue that even if he has enough women, there’s only so long a man can keep an erection, and there’s no way he has that many men willing to participate in this madness. But that’s easy to get around by using objects. Because the point isn’t anyone’s sexual gratification. It’s just the cruelty. The cruelty of all this is the point. The control is the point. No matter how much I argue, he’ll find a way to coerce me. And the more I resist, the more others are going to get hurt and die.
I don’t have a choice. Not if I want as many people to live as long as possible.
Without saying anything, without bothering with any begging or tears, I stand up. In my detached emotional state, I don’t know that I could even muster the ability to beg or cry. I certainly find that I can’t muster up the shame to be humiliated once I’m naked and sitting back on the floor with my knees bent and my legs spread .
By the time Samson has had his good look and tells me to touch myself, I’m so detached from my actual body that even while physically stimulating myself, I don’t feel any pleasure from it.
Samson notices and slaps me hard.
So much for not touching. But maybe the Oracle just meant sexually.
“No,” he says angrily. “I want you to look. I want you to pay attention. I want you to get off on this.”
He wants to lower me to his level, is what he doesn’t say. He wants me to be no better than him.
But there’s not enough threatening or coercion in the world that will have me getting off on a real live woman being violently gang-raped in front of me. But if I don’t get myself off, this torment isn’t going to end.
So while keeping my eyes on the brutal scene in front of me, I try to overlay it with something else from my imagination. At first, I think about Jaxson. I think about him being here, whispering in my ear, telling me to pleasure myself. It would undoubtedly be accompanied by some heinous pain and some type of torment that would make me want to die, but that I’d ultimately get through. The thought crosses my mind that this with Samson is no different. But I quickly put it out of my mind. With Jaxson, it’s different. With him, I know that even when he’s hurting me, he’s never hurting me. With him, I know there’s a warm bath, a warm hug, or a fireplace with a blanket and my favorite food waiting for me afterward. I refuse to taint that.
But I need something to get me off .
Samson’s chuckling next to me breaks through the haze of my detachment, and I find myself suddenly overcome by anger. Overcome at his audacity. Overcome at his arrogant certainty that he’ll break me. I imagine that he’s the one naked and being humiliated. That he’s tied to one of Jaxson’s crosses with a gun shoved up his ass while he’s being fucked with it.
Imagining that does manage to turn me on. Manages to make me wet. Makes my breaths go shallow. Allows me not to feel guilty as my mind reconnects with my body and I experience the pleasure my fingers on my cunt drag out.
“Just like that, sweetheart,” Samson says to me.
I imagine him screaming in terror while he’s strapped to the cross as a finger places itself on the trigger he’s being fucked with.
I feel my orgasm building to a peak as I get off not from the real brutality of an innocent woman who doesn’t deserve it, but from the imagining of a man being brutalized and deserving every second and then some.
I picture the trigger being pulled, a bullet going straight through Samson’s body, tearing through vital flesh and organs. Blood seeps from his ass and drips from his mouth as he dies a very painful death.
I let out a groan as my orgasm crashes over me at the thought. Not just the thought. The anticipation that when I get out of here, the thing he threatened to do to someone else is exactly what I’m going to make sure happens to him.
I come down from my orgasm. I wait for the humiliation to set in. I wait for the shame. I wait for the guilt. But it doesn’t come. Maybe it will come later. The only thing I feel while watching the men finish the woman off and Samson laughing and getting off at the entire display is rage. That and steel determination.
I wait until it’s over and Samson and his men leave, carrying the unresponsive but hopefully still alive woman with them, to put my clothes back on. Then I go to the door and inspect the lock and bolt. I jiggle the handle of the door, and even though it doesn’t budge, I’m sure with a decent enough tool, I can unlock both the bolt and the knob.
Then I go to the bathroom, remove the top from the toilet, and break the piece of metal off the back of the flusher before going back to the door.
As I work on getting the locks open, I’m unconcerned that I’m going to be discovered.
When I woke up, I was under the impression that there were cameras and someone was watching me. It was a logical assumption to make considering cults and prisons, no matter what their trappings, are all about surveillance and being watched. Or, at the very least, the illusion of it.
When I was trying to stab Samson with the pencil, no one rushed in to save him. When he said he could rape me and no one would know, it’s likely because no one really would know, as there was nothing recording it for someone outside who would tell the Oracle to see. And while maybe he just gave his men orders not to interfere, or maybe he thinks his men are more loyal to him than the Oracle and he could get away with it, the more logical conclusion is that they aren’t watching me every second like I assumed .
They locked me in a room with nothing to do but listen to lectures from Jaxson’s father, with the only thing keeping me from freedom being a bolted door and no cameras to ensure I behave.
I can’t help but laugh maniacally as Jaxson’s father’s voice comes through the speakers again. It’s like the old saying goes. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.
I plan to be the most dangerous devil Samson has ever messed with.