AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You would’ve jumped us if we hadn’t,” Schultz said angrily. “Comrades,” Lieutenant Colonel Kraminov said-in German, which gave the word a different feel from the harsh Russian Lidov had used. “Please, comrades. If we are to be comrades, we shall need to work together. If we go at each other’s throats, only the Lizards will benefit”
“He’s right, Georg,” Jager said. “If we start arguing, we’ll never get anything done.” He hadn’t forgotten his own dislike and contempt for nearly everything he’d seen in the Soviet Union, but could not deny the Russians fought hard-nor that they were masters of partisan warfare. “For now, let ideology wait.”
“Can you get me a telegraph line to Germany?” Otto Skorzeny asked. “I must have authorization before proceeding with this scheme.”
“Provided the latest Lizard advances have not cut it, yes,” Lidov said. “I can also let you transmit on the frequency arranged with your government You must talk around what you truly wish to say there, however, to keep the Lizards from following if they intercept the signal, as they very likely will.”
“The telegraph first, then,” Skorzeny said. “That failing, the radio. The mission strikes me as worth accomplishing. Other concerns can wait” He studied the NKVD lieutenant colonel as if through the eyepiece of a panzer cannon sight Lidov scowled right back at him. Without words, both men said that, while other concerns could wait, they were not forgotten.
Liu Han sat naked on the shiny mat in her room in the giant airplane that somehow never fell down from the sky. She made herself into the smallest bundle she could, legs drawn up tight, hands clasped on her shins, head pressed down till it touched her knees. With her eyes closed, she could imagine the entire universe around her had disappeared.
Her world view did not include the concept experimental animal, but that was what she had become. The little scaly devils who held her here wanted to discover certain things about the way people functioned, and were using her to help them learn. They cared not at all what she thought of the process.
The door to the chamber slid open. Before she could will herself to stillness, she looked up. Two Lizards marched in, with a man-a foreign devil, not even decently Chinese-between them. The man wore no more clothes than she did. “Another one here,” one of the scaly devils said in his hissing Chinese.
She lowered her head again, refused to answer. Another one, she thought. When would they be satisfied that she could indeed fit the prongs of however many men they brought her? This was-the fifth? The sixth? She couldn’t remember. Maybe, after a while, it ceased to matter. How could her defilement grow any greater?
She tried to recapture the feeling of power, the feeling of being her own person, she’d known for that little while when Yi Min was helpless and afraid. Then her own will had mattered, if only for a short time. Before then, she’d been held in her place by the customs of her village, and her people, afterward by the terrifying might of the Lizards. Just for a moment, though, she’d almost been free.
“You two show what you do, you eat. You not, no food for you,” the devil said. Liu Han knew he meant it. After the first couple of men in this grim series, she’d tried to starve herself to death, but her body refused to obey her. Her belly cried louder than her spirit. Eventually, she did what she had to do to eat.
The other Lizard spoke to the foreign devil in a language that was neither Chinese nor the Lizards’ own speech-Liu Han still tried to pick up words of that whenever she could. Then the scaly devils went out of the chamber. They were probably (no, certainly) taking pictures, but that was not the same as having them in the room. She still drew the line there.
Reluctantly, she looked up at the foreign devil. He was very hairy, and had grown a short thick beard that reached to within a couple of fingers’ breadth of his eyes. His nose seemed nearer a hawk’s beak than what a proper person should grow. His skin was not too different in color from hers.
At least he did not simply ravage her, as one man had the second the door closed behind him. He stood quietly, watching her, letting her look him over. Sighing, she stretched herself out flat on the mat. “Come ahead; let’s get it over with,” she said in Chinese, her weary voice full of infinite bitterness.
He stooped beside her. She tried not to cringe. He said something in his own language. She shook her head. He tried what sounded like a different tongue, but she understood no better. She expected him to get on top of her then, but instead he let out hisses and grunts which, she realized after a moment, were words in the Lizards’ speech: “Name-is.” He ended with the cough that showed the sentence was a question.
Her eyes filled with tears. None of the others had even bothered to ask. “Name is Liu Han,” she answered, sitting up. She had to repeat herself; the accents she and he gave the Lizards’ words were so different that they had trouble following each other. Once she’d given her name, she saw she ought to treat him as a human being, too. “You-name-is?”
He pointed to his furry chest. “Bobby Fiore.” He turned toward the doorway by which the little scaly devils had departed, spoke their name for themselves. “Race-” Then he delivered an extraordinary series of gestures, most of which she’d never seen before but all obviously a long way from compliments. Either he didn’t know his picture was being taken or he didn’t care. Some of his antics were so spirited, almost like those of a traveling actor in a skit, that she found herself smiling for the first time in a long while.
“Race bad,” she said when he was done, and gave the different cough that put extra stress on what she said.
Instead of answering with words, he just repeated the emphatic cough. she’d never heard a little scaly devil do that, but she followed him well enough.
No matter how they despised their captors, though, they remained captive. If they were going to eat, they had to do what the scaly devils wanted. Liu Han still didn’t understand why the Lizards thought it important to prove that men and women didn’t go into heat and could lie with each other any time, but they did. She lay back again. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad this time.
As far as skill went, Yi Min was three times the lover the foreign devil with the unpronounceable second name proved to be. But if he was rather clumsy, he treated her as though it were their wedding night, not as if she was a handy convenience. She hadn’t imagined foreign devils had so much kindness in them; few enough Chinese did. She hadn’t known any kindness since her husband died in the Japanese attack on her village.
To thank him, she did her best to respond to his caresses. she’d been through too much, though; her body would not answer. Still, when he closed his eyes and groaned atop her, she was moved to reach up and stroke his cheek. The beard there was almost as rough as a bristle brush. She wondered if it itched.
He slid out of her, sat back on his knees. she drew up one leg to hide her secret place-foolish, when he’d just been inside her. He pantomimed smoking a cigarette with such nimble gestures that she started to laugh before she could catch herself. He raised a bushy eyebrow, took another drag on the imaginary smoke, then made as if to crush it out on his chest.
He’d so convinced her the nothing between his two fingers was real, she exclaimed in Chinese: “Don’t get burned!” That set her laughing again. She groped for words in the Lizards’ tongue, the only one they had in common: “You-not bad.”
“You, Liu Han”-he said her name so strangely, she needed a moment to recognize it-“you-not bad also.”
She looked away from him. she didn’t know she was crying till the first scalding tears ran down her cheeks. Once she started, she discovered she could not stop. She wailed and keened for all she’d lost and suffered and endured, for her husband and her village, for her very world and her own violation. she’d never imagined she had so many tears inside her.
After a little while, she felt Bobby Fiore’s han
d on her shoulder. “Hey,” he said. “Hey.” she didn’t know what it meant in his language. she didn’t know if it meant anything or was just a sound. she did know his voice held sympathy, and that he was the only human being who’d shown her any since her nightmare began. She twisted around and clung to him till she’d cried herself out.
He didn’t do much but let her hold him. He ran a hand through her hair once or twice and quietly said “Hey” a few more times. She hardly noticed, so consumed was she by her own grief.
As her sobs at last slowed to gasps and hiccups, she felt his erection pressed against her belly, hot as the tears she’d shed. She wondered how long he’d had it. It didn’t surprise her; she would have been surprised if a naked man in the arms of a naked woman failed to rise. What surprised her was that he’d been content to ignore it. What could she possibly have done to stop him if he’d decided to take her again?
His restraint made her want to cry again. She realized how desperate she’d grown when simply not being raped became a kindness worth tears.
He asked her something in his own language. She shook her head. He shook his, too, maybe angry at himself for forgetting she couldn’t understand. His eyebrows came together as he looked thoughtfully past her shoulder toward the blank metal wall of the chamber. He tried the scaly devils’ speech: “You, Liu Han, not bad now?”
“Not so bad, Bobby Fiore.” When she tried to say his name, she botched it at least as badly as he had hers.
“Okay,” he said. she did understand that; a city person in one of the films she’d seen had said it. People in the city picked up foreign devils’ slang along with their machines and funny clothes.
He let go of her. She looked down at herself. she’d held him so tight, the smooth skin of her chest had the marks of his hair pressed into it. His erection started to droop now that she no longer lay against him. She reached out and closed her hand around him. The Lizards had taken everything she’d ever had, leaving her with only her body with which to thank him.
