The Syndicate: Darkest Before the Dawn - Part Nine by: Enemyoffun Rick Grant has always been in control of his life, whether its living on the streets or stealing to survive. But when things get out of control he finds himself facing off against a very dangerous organization with vicious tactics, persuasive agents and a deadly agenda.

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Author's Note: Here's Chapter Twelve, another one chapter post. There is a three day jump in this chapter,something I plan to do with a couple more chapters until the end of the story. This one might seem like a short chapter but its content, not length that makes things interesting. There's a few things in here I like and a couple that are important. This chapter can be considered "The Calm Before the Storm"

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Chapter Twelve:

“You're on your back again”.

Black loomed over me, his huge body hanging above me like death. He wasn’t smiling. He held out his hand, I took it and he pulled me to my feet. It was the third time in the last two minutes that he threw me to the ground. I didn’t like this one bit. Three days, that’s how much time has passed since my Skills test. Three whole days of him kicking my ass over and over again. When he first told me he was going to teach me a form of defense they taught him in Special Forces I was ecstatic. When I smile, he asked me what I was so happy about. After the first day of getting my ass handed to me, I never smiled again.

I was panting already as I took a defensive kung fu stance called the horse. My feet were spread wide apart, my arms out and up, ready to defend. He taught me a little kung fu on my first day. We went over the basic stances and I did pretty well with those. On the second day, he introduced me to what he called Krav Maga, it was a fighting style used by the Israeli Special Forces. It was all about getting in close to your opponent and taking him down as quickly and as aggressively as possible. The key to Krav Maga was to stay off your back.

“You’re not aggressive enough”.

I nodded. I’m not an aggressive person in general. I didn’t like violence, I hated it in fact. I couldn’t remember the last time I was in a fight. When I did fight, I used to curl up into a ball, covering my hands over my head. I liked to call it my turtle defense, it worked real well. When you’re a little kid growing up in an orphanage it’s like blood in the water. All the bigger and older kids used to take shots at me. The fighting didn’t stop until I went to my first foster family. After that the only beatings I got were from the occasional drunken foster dad.

“I’m going to come at you again, this time I want you to defend”

Black was quick, too quick for a big guy. His fists flew fast and hard. He said the only way to teach was by showing. For the last three days he’s been showing me everything with his fists. But I was learning. His fists flew at my face and I blocked them with my forearms. Then he switched to his knees, going for my groin. He instructed as he attacked. Krav Maga was taking out your opponent so that he was out and was not getting back up. I was holding my own, blocking his fists and knees, until he got a hold of my head and flipped me over his back. Once again I hit the mat hard but didn’t feel a thing. It knocked the wind out of me and my chest was heaving up and down.

He was standing over me again. “You’re not bad at defending but it’s also about attacking too. You have to attack to defend with this technique”

He helped me up again and sighed. He looked at the clock on the wall. I looked over too, our time was up. He patted me on the back gently, told me I was getting better and then told me to hit the showers. I left the Dojo, sweat drenched and exhausted. The showers were attached to the locker rooms. Because we practiced so late, to compensate for my photosensitivity, I had the room all to myself.

I stripped down and got into the shower. I turned on the water, as hot as possible and basked in it. The steam was invigorating and the hot blast felt good on my skin. Guess what; it’s not just the cold I can’t feel. The hot water, I felt none of it. I could see it turning my skin red and I could feel the water pelting my skin but there was no heat. It could have been ice cold and it would have made no difference to me. I’m not sure if that was cool or real scary. I discovered my immunity to the hot water after my first hot shower, the morning of my first Dojo session. Trish was not happy to hear about it, she said it could be very dangerous and made me promise not to crank it up so hot.

The girls thought it was kind of cool though. I told them about it after my first dojo session. Matilda seemed to think it made me the superstar around here. She said that it was only a matter of time before the Deviants came to recruit. But I reiterated that I wanted no part in them. There was no way that I was going to abandon my friends. As soon as I said it, the other three looked downtrodden. You remember how Holly was so excited about being put in the Advanced Class?

After her first day of it she was exhausted and looked kind of stressed. After her second day she still looked a bit exhausted but her stress was gone. It was replaced with something else. It happened in lunch, when Chloe and Matilda invited her to the table. She looked at them and then looked over at Beatrice’s table. She decided to sit with us but she couldn’t stop talking about how we were wrong about Beatrice. According to Holly, she was a really nice girl but she was just under a lot of stress. Matilda got a little peeved about Holly being buddies with The Queen Bee and Holly viciously defended her. Yeah, she defended Beatrice.

I groaned as the water washed over me, just thinking about Holly made my blood boil. This morning when we went to class, she was completely different. It was subtle but it was there. I think I noticed it first because I could smell the perfume as soon as she walked into the room. It was horrible, one of those fruity fake scents. It swarmed her in a cloud of dull color, making me know it probably wasn’t good for her. The perfume wasn’t the only thing though. Her hair was different too. Usually she either wore it in braids or pulled back into a ponytail. This morning it was down and curled on the ends.

Her clothes were different too. Gone were her Naruto t-shirts and funky Japanese necklaces. In their place were plain white tees and simple, normal jewelry. Holly was girly but she always wore baggy jeans but her jeans this morning were tight. They were the new skinny leg ones, like all the teenage girls liked to wear. They were the very same jeans that Holly was making fun of no more than four days ago. I’ve heard of unpopular people getting absorbed into the popular crowd but I didn’t think it happened this fast?

I shut the water off and stepped out of the shower. There was a towel hanging on a hook nearby. I grabbed it and started to wrap it around my waist but stopped. I couldn’t do that anymore. So I wrapped it around my body, like the women in shampoo commercials did. I had another towel sitting on the bench for my hair but I just dried it off, I still couldn’t get the knack of wrapping my hair in it yet. Trish tried to show me but I’m lousy at those things.

I turned to the floor length mirror on the wall, admiring the dripping wet girl wrapped in the towel. She was damn sexy; I always liked seeing girls in movies as soon as they got out of the shower. They were more vulnerable of something. I turned left and right, I even did a couple of sexy poses. It’s been a little over a week since they first brought me here and I think I’m fully adjusted to this. I pulled my hair up on top of my head and leaned closer to the mirror, my eyes were shining as usual. Trish said it must have been the dark; I tried not to think about it.

I finished drying and got dressed. I stuffed my yoga clothes into my black gym bag, locked the door and headed back to my room. I didn’t need anyone to show me to the Dojo so I walked the halls by myself. It was kind of peaceful. I memorized all the twists and turns and I knew where everything important was. There was a vending machine just up around the corner, next to a water fountain. A little way down from that was a unisex bathroom. A few doors from that were the normal boys and girls bathrooms. I’d never been in the bathrooms here and didn’t plan too. I felt more secure in the dormitory one, I’m not sure why.

As I walked, I distinctively heard him coming. I started to learn the sounds of my fellow “Inmates” so no one could surprise me. Each of them was distinct in their own way. Barry, for instance, liked to scuffle his feet. Matilda had light steps, Holly walked fast, and Clara walked slowly. Chloe kind of slinked along. Beatrice and her Clones glided and they usually wore high heels so they clacked too. Donovan was strange because he sometimes walked with the front of his feet only, so he sort of padded a long like a dog. As for Max, he kind of half walked, half jogged when he actually traveled like a normal person. When he was phasing, he made a certain swoosh sound as he passed through walls.

It was the swoosh that I heard. He came up behind me, putting one hand on my hip and covering my eyes with the other. I took some good advice from Trish a couple of days ago, after she spotted Max looking at me again. She told me he had it bad and if I wasn’t interested then I needed to tell him. I told him yesterday, after Greg’s class. He heard me nut it was like his head was made of air because he didn’t seem to listen.

“Guess who?” he said, making his voice sound deeper.

“I know it’s you Max” I said with a laugh. “You can’t sneak up on me, I heard you three hallways over”

You had to hand to him, if anything he was persistent.

He slipped around in front of me, his hand gone from my eyes and behind his back. The other one was still on my waist. He moved the hand up my body, very slowly and sensually. My skin tingled and it felt wrong. It wasn’t supposed to feel wrong when a guy ran their hand up your side. It was supposed to feel good. At least I think it was supposed to. Instead Max’s hand felt wrong. When it finally got to my face, he brushed it against my cheek. It was kind of clammy. It was jittery too, like he was shaking. I noticed his jitteriness yesterday and when I asked him about it he said it was nerves. What the hell were they teaching in that Advanced Class anyway?

“I got something for you” he said, moving his face within inches of mine.

I sighed. “I told you Max, I’m not interested in you romantically. I just want to be friends, can’t we just be that”.

He pulled his face away. He was wearing a pair of shades like Blue’s. I couldn’t see his eyes underneath but I could see the confusion on his face. HE seemed to be thinking it over for a few seconds and nodded.

“Can’t friends give one another gifts?”

I sighed and nodded. What the hell?

He smiled and pulled his hand out from behind his back, revealing the most beautiful purple rose I’d ever seen. I was speechless as I took it from him. No one’s ever given me something like this before. I mean people have given me presents but usually because they had too, like for my Birthday. But no one has ever just given me something because they wanted too. It was kind of sweet. I blushed a bit, wondering if it showed up in his night vision.

‘How was your pounding today?”

“It was the same. I defended a little bit though. Black says I’m not aggressive enough”

Max scoffed as the two of us walked down the hall, side by side. Our fingers brushed briefly but I quickly pulled my hand away. I didn’t want to give him the chance. It wasn’t Max’s hand that I wanted to hold.

“He’s the master of aggression so he should know”

I sighed and shook my head. “What do you guys see in him that I don’t? He may be a little tough and a bit over the top but he’s been nothing but great with me”

Max stopped. His breathing got heavier and I could smell the sweat. At first I thought it was nervous sweat but it was something else. It was fear. I’d never smelt fear before but it was there. Looking at him I could see it, the smell, not the actually emotion. The smell was blue, a deep dark and almost angry blue. It circled his body like a meandering snake. It looked wicked and fierce, like something you did not want to mess with.

“Have you ever heard of The Box?”

I nodded. I’d heard Blue and Henderson threaten to put their men into it a couple of times. I thought it was some kind of code. I told Max that and he shook his head.

When he spoke, it was tears and a slight sob. “It's an actual box. It’s made out of metal, bolted to the floor. It’s about four feet by four feet and inside you have to curl into a ball to fit. When they close you up in it there’s no light except from the hole that’s there for you to breath. The first time you go in they leave you there for an hour then each additional time another hour is tacked on”

He was really crying now. I leaned over and gave him a hug. I wrapped my arms around his head and let it rest on my shoulder as he sobbed. I held him for a long time. The two of us stood in that dark hall and he cried. When I was a guy I never would have cried like that. Maybe there was something of the girl left in him? It made me wonder if there was anything of the boy left in me. Because there certainly was no boy in Matilda or Beatrice.
When he finally stopped crying, he laughed. “Sorry, a bit of Alice slipped through there”

I let him go and held his hand. I don’t know how that happened but it just did. I asked him how many times he’d been in the Box and he said enough. He changed the topic because he said it was too painful. So I asked him about himself, before the Change. He told me, he liked talking about himself apparently. He had been Alice, the eldest daughter of Charles and Gloria Miller. He was from Kansas, his family owned a farm. His little sister was Jessie and she absolutely adored him. Back before the Change the two of them had been real close.

“She must have been heart broken when I disappeared” he said, starting to cry again. ‘We used to do everything together. She had no friends because she had braces but I always used to tell her they made her special and the others were just jealous”

“You sounded like you were a good sister”

He nodded. “I was a fantastic sister”. Then his voice lowered, anger rose a bit in it. “Then they ruined it”

I nodded. “How did it happen?”

‘I was riding my bike home from school. Jessie had Girl Scouts so she stayed after school and I rode home by myself. I was in a real hurry because there was this boy, Phil, I kind of liked him” He blushed. “He was supposed to call me. I wasn’t watching where I was going and I ran over some glass, it shredded my back tire. I wanted to cry but I didn’t get a chance. This car pulled up and this guy got out. HE was about my age, tall, real slick. He offered to give me a ride home and I stupidly agreed. I’m not sure what happened because I blacked out and woke up in a strange room. The Change already happened and I was a guy. I wish my powers were the ability to travel back in time because I definitely would have stopped myself from getting in the car with that dude”

I squeezed his hand. “It would have happened regardless, you know. The Change I mean”

“I know. But I was messed up for a while. It’s not easy you know. I had a hard time. One minute I wanted Phil Jones’s penis between my legs so bad and the next thing I know I’ve got one of my own. I didn’t adjust well. If it wasn’t for Dr. V. I think I probably would have killed myself”

He was crying again. But he wouldn’t let me give him a hug.

He pushed away and changed the subject. ‘Do you think you could help me?”

I nodded. After all he shared, it was the least I could do. I told him that and he smiled.

‘I tried writing a letter to Jessie, telling her what happened to me. But they wouldn’t let me send it. They said as far as my family was concerned I was a runaway and they’d never see me again. They moved on you know. Two months after I got here, Blue brought me a paper; he was real smug about it. They declared me dead because they found my backpack in the bottom of a nearby ravine. According to the paper, they feared I was drown and washed away in the creek. I even got to read my obituary”

“That’s horrible. Blue’s a fucking bastard”

He nodded and lowered his voice. “When we get out of here, do you think you can go with me while I deliver the letter?”

I opened my mouth, I’m not sure what I was going to say but he stopped me by putting one of his hands over it.

“I had Beatrice burn my original but I’ve written another. I don’t tell Jessie who I am now but I do tell her that I’m alive and well. I don’t want to deliver it in person but could you go with me when I put it in the mailbox”

“Yes, I’d love to do that”

His acknowledgement of getting out of here surprised me. It was something that had been in the back of my mind for a while now. Well at least ever since I started training with Black. Were they going to let us out of here? Probably not. So if we wanted to breathe the free air then that meant we needed to accomplish that freedom on our own. I thought I was the only one who wanted to escape but it makes sense that the others wanted out too. These people were messed up, what they were doing to us was wrong. They were perverts and psychopaths and megalomaniacs. We can’t stay here any longer, I can’t stay here.

It made me happy that at least someone thought the same way. Now it made me wonder if the others did as well.
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“Would you stop wiggling?”

I groaned. This is not how I wanted to spend the rest of my afternoon but Matilda insisted upon it. After getting back from the Dojo, she caught me going into my room. I thought she was having a fit or something. She started gasping and twitching. But it turns out the only thing she was having a problem with, was me. I looked like a “drown rat”. I’m not sure why she was so interested in the way I look all of the sudden. I tried to drill her on it but she just said it was about time I learn to take care of myself.

In Matilda speak that meant one thing: more girly.

‘Is this really necessary?”

She had just finished blow-drying my hair after she dragged me to the bathroom so she could wet it again. She had practically shoved my head under the sink. She told me she was going to show me how to properly wash and dry my hair. Have you ever had someone wash your hair in a bathroom sink? It’s not fun and it’s not easy. She shampooed it and conditioned it. She complained the whole time too. Ok, so I’m not a girly girl. I’ve never had anyone show me how to wash my hair, not properly anyway. I usually just shampoo, rinse and dry. Who knew it was more complicated than that.

After the bathroom she dragged me back to her room and fussed.

“What did you and Max talk about?” she asked as she ran a big brush through my raven locks.

I groaned. She must have heard, so she knew what we were talking about. It’s hard when your best friend can manipulate sound waves.

“Is that what this is about?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about”

“Max and I are just friends”

She stopped brushing. The two of us were sitting on her bed, Indian style (as they used to call it when I was little). She looked real cute today. Her hair was done in braided pigtails and she was wearing another dress, this time it was green. She wasn’t wearing any tights today and her shoes were on the floor. Her toenails were painted a bright shade of pink. Sometimes it was really hard to imagine she had ever been a guy.

“Did he tell you about his sister?”

“You tell me, little Miss Eavesdropper?”

She smiled. “Max was in real bad shape. He refused to acknowledge that he changed. It’s funny but the girls were harder with it than the guys, except Chloe. But you know about that. Max tried to kill himself you know. Luckily for him, Barry and Bee stopped him. He tried it in the boy’s bathroom. Barry heard him crying and went to investigate. Max had one of those pink bic razors and was trying to cut his wrist with it. Barry grabbed it from him and the two of them had a bit of a roll-around. Bee was out in the hall and when she heard the fighting she got one of the guards”

“Max went to Dr. V. He was gone for several days but whatever she did worked. When he came back he was much better. He didn’t have any problems after that, in fact he kind of embraced his masculinity, maybe a little too much. Shortly after that they put him in the Advanced Class”

I nodded. I didn’t realize Max had it that bad. I knew he had problems because he told me but it never occurred to him that it was so serious. It made me feel even sorrier for him. I silently made a vow to treat him a little better. I couldn’t be his girlfriend (hell I couldn’t even say the world out loud) but I could be his friend.

I told Matilda the other thing we talked about.

She looked at me with eyes that were cold and calculating then slapped me. It wasn’t real hard and of course I didn’t feel it but it was a surprise. At first I thought she did it out of anger but then I saw the tears in her eyes.

‘Never talk about that out loud, especially in a hallway” her voice had a cold edge to it.

Then her whisper floated around my head. “There are cameras and recorders everywhere. Why do you think they k now everything. You can’t let them know you want out of here, if you do bad things will happen, the Box is the least of it”

Then she smiled the biggest smile ever. The fakest one too, which made me believe they were probably monitoring us right now. I tried to smile too. But I couldn’t help but listen. I don’t know what I was listening for but it didn’t take me long: there was a clicking sound. It was coming from the left wall, behind Matilda’s vanity. By now she was behind me again, brushing my hair. When I looked at the vanity she gave my hair a nasty pull. It brought me back to my senses and when I gave her a stern look she gave me one in return. This meant she knew what I knew. I smiled and she winked.

She continued to play teacher. She finished brushing my hair and then French braided it. After that she told me she had a surprise. A surprise, two in one day? I was a little weary especially when she ran over and got a bag she’d been hiding behind her dresser. She had the biggest smile on her face as she handed me the bag. I looked inside and felt my insides flip over. It was a dress, the pinkest, girliest dress I’d ever seen. I looked at her with malice and she laughed.

“Please, just for me, just this once?”

She was pleaded with me, begging with her hands clasped in front of her. She started to do this thing with eyes, making them big and doe-like. Then her bottom lip started to quiver a bit. She looked like one of those cute cartoon characters. It was hard to resist, so I groaned and promised her I’d put it on. She shouted “yeah” and jumped into me, giving me the biggest hug ever. I told her I could only wear it in the room because of the light outside and she nodded. So with her back turned, I stood up, stripped to my underwear and took the dress out of the bag. I can do this, it’s just a dress. It was going to happen sooner or later, right.

It wasn’t just pink though. It had these thing little straps and a really frilly neckline. There was some kind of crazy design all over it to: I’m not sure what to call it. I held the dress up, looking at it, wondering how to put it on. I must have been taking too long because Matilda sighed and turned around.
“You’re hopeless” said as she took the dress from me.

She told me to stand still as she slipped it over my head. Then she ordered my arms through the straps. She smiled then grimaced. I looked about, trying to see what was wrong now.

“Is it on backwards because if it, it’s your fault”

“You haven’t shaved your pits or your legs” She screwed her face, making it look like she’d fell into a toilet or something.

I looked at my armpits, they were hairy. I was supposed to shave them, that’s barbaric. But then I thought about it and the girls in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit editions didn’t have hair except on their heads. I groaned; this girl thing was a pain in the ass.

Matilda grabbed a little bag from her vanity. Then she ordered me out of the dress. I did as she asked. When I was in my underwear, again, she threw my gloves and coat at me. She asked me if my legs were going to be all right for a few seconds in the light. When I nodded she took my hand, opened her door and pulled me out into the hallway. We ran down the hall, my legs burned. She dragged me into the shower room and shut off all the lights. I don’t need to explain what the shower room looked like, do I? Well just so you know it had pink tiles and lots of showers.

Matilda dragged me over to the one furthest from the door. I took off my coat and gloves and hesitated before stripped completely naked.

“We’re both girls here and we both like guys”

I flushed red. I did like guys but I hated to be reminded of it. So I very reluctantly took off my clothes, standing naked in front of a girl for the very first time. Of course I did that every morning now, in the mirror. But standing here, in front of Matilda, without any clothes on was different. She looked me over from head to toe and groaned.

“That is so not fair” she said as she turned on the water.

“What!” I asked, startled, covering myself with my hands.

“Your boobs are way bigger than mine”.

I smacked her gently on the arm. She picked up my bra, mumbled something about 34 B and then pushed me into the shower. She handed me a pink razor from her bag and a can of shaving gel. I’m not going to go into the specifics of my first time shaving my pits and legs. Yes, my legs too. Let’s just say that I nicked myself more than once and it stung like a bitch. But Matilda was a good and patient teacher. Not like The Priss. Did I tell you about my ballet lessons? Well I’m not going too; some embarrassments are left for the imagination.

After the shower, my third one of the day (I took one in the morning too), Matilda dragged me back to her room. She blow dried my hair again, redid the French braid and then forced me back into the dress. When she got me into front of her mirror, I looked and felt like a total ass. I didn’t mind the hair, I kind of liked the hair and I had to admit that my arms and legs looked a lot better. It was the dress. Matilda said it was fantastic. But it was too short for one thing. It barely reached my legs and for another it showed off way too much skin. I tried tugging it down and Matilda slapped my hand.

‘Can I take this off now?”

Matilda frowned. “You look so cute. Why would you ever want to take something like that off?”

“I look and feel like a dork”

“Well that’s not what I’m seeing” She hugged me from behind. “If I had a body like yours, I’d definitely show it off. Those legs of yours are killer and that butt”

She smacked it, which made me jump.

We both laughed.

I stood staring at myself for a few seconds. I turned left and right and had to admit my body was pretty good. Though it wasn’t something I’d wear every day, I can’t in fact; it was something I might enjoy. Matilda surprised me again a few seconds later. She came forward with another bag. I looked at it, recognizing the label of a shoe store. Where the hell was she getting these things from? She pulled a box from the bag and took out a pair of sandals. They were white and had these weird strap things. But worse of all, they had heels and not those clunky ones like my boots. They were actual heels.

She told me to sit on the bed, ignoring my protests. I decided not to argue and did as I was told. She was happy to see that she got the right size and slipped them on my feet. The straps went up my ankle a bit and fit just right. When she told me to stand, I was weary at first. She helped when she took my hand and pulled me to my feet. She made me pace the room a few times and I was really nervous I was going to fall and break my neck. I wobbled a bit but I got the hang of it real quick. After a few paces around the room, it was as if I’d been wearing them my whole life. They were great and the best thing was I felt much taller.

‘How tall am I now?”

“Those are about three inches”

I wanted to squeal. I suppressed it and I’m glad I did. I already felt girly enough, squealing would have just sealed it for me. Instead I walked around the room a feel more times, strutting my stuff like those girls on the runway. What I watch that Tyra Banks show or at least I used too. I haven’t watched much TV in a while what with first living on the streets and now this crazy place.

After an hour of talking and laughing, we called it a day. I took off the dress and sandals. I tried to give them back but Matilda refused. They were too big for her and she got them for me. I was a little reluctant to take them but I did. I gave her a hug as I started for the door.

When I got back into my room and tossed the few bags on the floor, her whisper came to me.

“If you want to escape, I think you and I can think of something”

Photo Credit: MeetMeByTheLake2Nite