Vengeance, Thy Name Is
Chapter 1 — Reporting for Duty:
Claudia didn’t know exactly what to expect when she walked through the door. Upstate New York had the strange feel of city people being displaced into the country as it was, and the last thing she needed was the complication of joining a strange unit made up of people hell-bent on revenge in far away countries. The end result might be just, but the more she thought about it, the more she couldn’t help but thing that there was something spiteful and sinister about the unit’s makeup, something that made leaving her family, job, and fiancé back in Cleveland seem like a bad idea. But when she looked at the picture of her late sister Wanda at her graduation, she knew why she was headed there. It wasn’t just a way to seek justice against the perverts who sent her sister to a fate worse than death, it was the only way she knew to get revenge.
She reached deep into herself and embraced the rage in her heart, the same anger that her grandfather had railed so much about that everyone had thought he had gone completely mad. Her uncle Bill was the black sheep of the family; not much was known about him, and only Grandpa Richard had thought much about him at all. His cover was the same as hers was about to be: joining the Army and living the life of a career soldier. Claudia’s story could be much looser. After what the entire family had been through, enough people knew about the Marion lineage of fighting controllers.
Once she’d finally met Uncle Bill and learned what he was really doing, she’d started watching him closely, but the strangest thing about him was that there was nothing strange about him. For someone who had to be in his sixties, he was in excellent shape, still clearly the active soldier as Claudia noted the cold calculation on his face. Detailed notes of some kind were on his lap as he worked on a new mission plan.
They pulled up to the cooking school that she had been told was their destination. For her, she thought the funniest part of her new life was the connection between these... spies, for lack of a better word... and the fluffiest personality in television history. Claudia knew the basics from reading her grandfather’s diaries: that Rachel Beard had been an OSS agent captured in Nanking, that she’d been exposed to horrific brainwashing designed to make her a puppet of the Japanese Empire, that she’d been saved by her future husband Robert Kerr, that whatever had been done to her made her both eccentric and compelling. Claudia still didn’t understand the deep connections and code work of the group’s founders. Aside from the convenience of the cover and the abundance of coq au vin puns, she didn’t understand why they had chosen this. But no one would suspect a camp under a cooking school, and as the black limo rolled down the ramp into a search area guarded by blast doors, Claudia knew they meant business.
“You were expecting to drop down a phone booth?” Bill asked with what appeared to be the first smile she could recall seeing from him—but it reminded her too much of the sardonic expression her grandfather used to wear whenever he expected nothing but pure ignorance from the person he was talking to.
“Of course not. I don’t expect you to bungle that many missions,” Claudia said with a tight-lipped smile. As she got out of the car, she felt more out of place. Her black t-shirt and blue jeans didn’t fit with the skirts and suits around her as the agents checked the car for any foreign objects. One man stuck a penlight through the window to check their eyes and look for signs of drugs.
The wall in front of them opened up, allowing the car to pull into the garage. Claudia’s head swiveled back and forth as she looked at the various cars that filled it from wall to wall and up beyond her field of vision. They ranged from the most expensive models to clunkers that would have been at home in the city dump. She played the license plate game with herself, just out of curiosity, and came up with twenty-seven states, four Canadian provinces, and eight countries before the car came to a stop. The driver got out and let out first Bill, then Claudia.
“This is it. Last chance. You step through that door, you don’t step out the same person ever again. If you have any objections, butterflies in your stomach, or a sudden need for a thicker pair of socks, this is when you voice it, and that’s when you go home and forget that this ever happened.”
“This won’t bring Wanda back, but mama will still have one daughter she can be proud of, right?” Claudia asked sharply, making her subtext as clear as she possibly could.
“You’ll still be part of the family, and you’ll see them whenever you can. We use the Army as our guise so you aren’t tied to one place and don’t have to explain long absences, but I have a family with children and grandchildren. They know enough to know that they can’t know more—I would never endanger their lives like that, not like some other agencies do. We’re not the CIA. We’re proud people, sworn to protect innocents against the cruelest of the cruel and the most evil creatures you can imagine. Some of the more religious of our group say that we’re crusading against Satan and his servants. From what you saw of your late sister, you can understand why we accept that kind of fanaticism.”
“Fight fire with fire,” Claudia agreed.
Bill nodded. “We are worldwide and international, funded in secret by private citizens who have seen the worst of the worst and will do anything to stop it, and by small governments who don’t have the resources to mount their own counteroffensive, and by everyone in between. It’s where our name comes from. We’re uncapped in our resources, because once you see the face of evil, it’s hard not to give every last dime to help destroy it, and there have been those who have thrown all they had into the fight. All we ask for in return is a chance at a little decency in a life that offers none whatsoever.”
“I see. I’m ready, or as ready as I’m going to get,” Claudia said, and the brush back of her long curls as she headed towards the main entrance was the only tell of her nervousness.
“That’s what I thought. You’re a Marion, after all.” Bill stepped in front of her and keyed in a code to open the door. Claudia stared wide-eyed at what looked like an underground palace. The floors were cool white marble from edge to edge, and the glass-fronted offices were slices of pure corporate life. The front desk had a stone carving of a familiar set of lyrics.
“I’ve been wondering who the Rolling Stones fan was ever since you told me about this group. That bugged me more than the covertness,” Claudia admitted, raising an eyebrow at the cheesy 60’s music that such a serious organization used as its motto and morals.
“Ah, how we got our code introduction. We’ve been known as the Men of Wealth and Taste from the beginning—non-gender specific men, of course. We were co-founded by a 6′2″ sexpot armed with an angry lobster, after all. If you know anything about the history of music, you know more about us than you realize. There was this little thing in the 60s called LSD that caused a lot of people to be mistaken for being controlled. Eventually, these people came down from the high and wrote about what they saw. Of course, being under the influence of a very powerful hallucinogen helps keep our cover intact. But you might want to look at the painting to your left.”
“So. John Lennon, a priest, and an old woman in front of a wall of—why are pictures of women in jars? Prostitutes, no less?” Claudia asked.
“A face that she keeps in a jar near the door,” Bill sang.
“No fucking way.”
“Rigby and McKenzie were top scientists who worked on deprogramming techniques used by non-controllers, anti-controllers, and controllers alike to this day. They were murdered before the peak of their work could be reached. That’s a long story that encompasses half the Beatles’ history, but John didn’t understand the magnitude of what he was seeing. All he saw was a bunch of lonely people in a camp, with nowhere to go, run by a couple of idiots with no one to work for. Not his best work, but he was on acid, so what else could you expect? Now, Mick Jagger, on the other hand...”
“So this was always your greeting?”
“A warning and a threat before we need to pull out our guns,” Bill agreed. “Mick ran across one of our agents. He thought we were interesting and gave us a ton of money for something he knew nothing about. Now we use the song as our code list. Any controller worth fighting knows our threat levels. Let’s get you checked in.”
“Agent B. Marion, welcome back. Excellent work in Japan,” the blonde in the black suit said. Her tone was a little too even, and her blouse too unbuttoned, for Claudia to be completely comfortable.
“Thanks, Lydia. This is my niece that I was telling you about. She’s here to join the cadet corps.
“Dressing room is down the hall. It opens into the barracks. Training will begin at 0900 tomorrow morning,” Lydia recited.
“War surplus?” Claudia whispered to Bill with mild disdain.
“Asylum seeker would be closer. We reform whoever can be reformed. Lydia here is a few weeks away from being able to function in the outside world. Once she’s independent enough to survive, she’ll be returned to the life she had before, and she won’t even miss a beat thanks to our hackers. The Russians got her, made her quite the prostitute. That crop was so far gone that we almost gave up on them, but they made a breakthrough. They’re still a little lockstep, and I’m not sure she was wearing her underwear under that suit, but step by step we’ll bring them back to the real world. All our clerical and maintenance staff members are the same way. We only keep them until they’re ready to go home. The rehab wing is a connecting building—you’ll probably see it as part of your advanced training. Technically this makes us controllers too, but we owe it to Agent Beard and the tireless effort she put in every day for decades to make herself barely able to function.”
“Ha! I should have realized she had some form of control ability. She made half the country want to eat snails, after all,” Claudia said with a wink as she followed Bill to the dressing area. “And what is this dressing area for, anyway? Don’t tell me I have to wear one of those James Bond catsuits!”
“What’s wrong with escargot and leather?” Bill said with a smile.
“What do you think this is, some low-budget porno?”
Bill laughed. “None of that, I assure you. Standard military issue. We might be international and independent now, but we were born out of the OSS. When you’re done here, you’ll go to Female Barracks 3. Good luck, kid. I don’t think you’ll need it, but it can’t hurt to have it. I know you’ll ace training. I can see the determination in your eyes. You’ll do great—you’re strong enough, and you’ve got the Marion nerve. Just one thing. The one you see is rarely the threat. The one who’s smart enough to hide always is.”
The door closed behind him with a final click as Claudia stood alone in the dressing room. Most people would have felt some kind of fear or nervousness at knowing that this was the first step on a path she couldn’t turn from. Most people weren’t Claudia Marion. She looked around the room to get her bearings. She saw her name printed on the lid of a box—on the lids of several boxes, which made her suspicious. I’m being tested, she realized, and she looked around until she saw the security camera.
“Pervs. Don’t you get enough of that in your line of business? Or maybe y’all didn’t think about decency when you were worrying about security,” she said with a smile, taking her shirt off and using it to cover the camera. She looked over the boxes again and figured that they were several’ days worth of clothes. Since this was her first day, she opened the first box and saw the short shorts and sports bra.
“So they’re going to work me out on the first day? I guess that makes sense,” she said as she began to put on the oufit. But soon she felt the same strange sleepy sensation that had gripped her when Wanda was trapping her family with the home movies. She tried to look away from anything, but the constant movement made her dizzier, and she felt herself mechanically putting on the tight shorts and bra and trying to pull her hair back in a ponytail. Her hands went limp and her eyes went in and out of focus. She was starting to feel a little warm, but nothing she couldn’t fight off. She worked her eyes and tried to twitch her fingers as much as she could, but she felt like she was swimming through Jello.
She knew she was being moved somewhere, but she didn’t know where, and after an hour of being in that state, she was able to break out with a vicious scream of “What the fuck did you assholes do to me?”
“I like your fire,” the woman in front of her replied. “One hour, two minutes, and forty-three seconds—one of the lowest scores I’ve seen in years. And the driver tells me he couldn’t even get a peck on the cheek from you. You’re a woman of wealth and taste for sure if you can do all of that under the influence of weapons-grade itching powder. I thought they were just putting you in Elite 1 because of your last name, but maybe that last name comes with a little more than I thought. Each box had something different in it. Smart of you to take the first one. Did you know that the traps got progressively stronger?”
“No. The first one seemed like the most logical one ot open,” Claudia replied, getting the sense that lying to this woman would be a bad idea.
“Honest, too. Smart. You know I’d see right through you. Covering up the security camera before the light could burn your brain into submission, that was a pretty good mov too. I’m Staff Sergeant Anna McMichael. You won’t hear me swearing like a sailor, insulting your mother, or smacking you around to beat you into submission, but cross me or don’t respect me, you’ll be submitting faster than you can think enough to avoid it.” She looked at Claudia with cold, dark, unreadable eyes. Claudia recognized just how bad an idea fucking with this woman would be. The camo uniform and hat were almost overkill when coupled with Anna’s air of authority.
“So you drugged me with something that could turn a normal girl into a panting whore, and you treat it like running the forty?” Claudia asked.
“And you could barely be under enough to be taken to our classified little home. What’s your point, Marion? All our ammo is live, and I’ve had to send a few to chef school and the front desk. If you’re going to fight controllers, you better make sure you can fight control. You had a useful head start, if the colonel’s report about your sister’s vacation video on the boob tube was any indication. But mark my words, Marion, if you aren’t ready, you’ll be pole dancing for your unit to Britney Fucking Spears and buzzing off to a poster of the Backstreet Boys in the middle of the street before you can say knife. Now that that ugliness is out of the way, you should meet your unit. Well, first you should get your uniform. Your real one, I mean. You can not trust me if you want. I admire that kind of paranoia. But does it make any sense for you to strut around in Pournakova pants?”
“Sense? No. From the way you’re eying my cleavage, you might not be thinking about sense,” Claudia snapped back, her glare burning right through Anna’s plastic smile.
“Sassy. This will be fun,” Anna said proudly, tossing over a comfortable-looking blue and gray sweatsuit. Claudia was still taking no chances, and she looked it over with extra care before putting it on and heading into the barracks.
“Company! Front and center! Meet the new recruit! Claudia Marion—she’s not here just because of her name, but it sure as hell helped!” Anna barked out.
Claudia headed inside to meet her unitmates. She noticed the pictures on the wall, made a reasonable guess that they were lost family members, and she was glad she kept the picture of Wanda to hang up over her bunk.
“Sister?” the meek-looking dirty blonde asked her as she put the picture up. “Me too. Name’s Brenna.”
“You or your sister?”
“Me. My sister was Allison. Our parents are still more proud of her than me, and that’s what really, really led me here. She’s obviously a bimbo, and obviously brain dead, and they’re celebrating her because she’s a cheerleader. I dunno what they did to her in Lubbock, but I know that bleach blonde isn’t Allison, and here they agreed with me. Glad someone did,” Brenna explained.
“For me, it was my mother. Those fucking Russians. We’re all lucky they didn’t take my little sister. No morals at all. Gianna,” the tall, black-haired woman—barely more than a girl herself—said with a strong Italian accent and pure hate in her voice.
“Girlfriend. Oh, good, you ain’t looking at me like I got two heads. Our girls get dragged off to be harem bitches too,” a ferocious-looking broad-shouldered black woman said. Almost as an afterthought, she said, “Rhonda.”
“Cynthia,” the knockout brunette with the light tan said. “I lost my entire senior class to those bastards near Philly. They had me half-fitted for a catsuit too, but I got away before they could get their claws into me. But my career as a teacher was over. As far as anyone who knew me knows, I’m leading my old soccer team as a sucking team somewhere in the college ranks, or worse.” Her voice carried the familiar notes of hatred, but also regret.”
“Cheryl, and it’s my baby brother,” the redhead with the vicious glare grumbled under her breath.
Claudia looked around the room. “That’s Cynthia’s team picture, and that’s Rhonda’s... wedding picture... and that’s Gianna and her mom in Rome, and that’s Brenna looking like her sister’s twin, but...”
“My brother puts people on the wall, fucking little pervert. It was fun and games when he’d pretend to be a vampire after watching some horror movie, but then he made it so mom blamed me for everything, and then he got the prom queen to take him to the dance, and then he took her to the bathroom with the rest of the court... and the English teacher... and the prom queen’s mom...”
“I get it,” Claudia interrupted. “Glad you didn’t join him, either in your panties or with your own pocket watch.” She taped up Wanda’s picture over her bunk, turned to the rest of the group, and said, “That was Wanda, the sweetest, most caring big sister you’d ever know. She put her career before everything just to make sure mom could retire. She went all the way to Japan to do it—of course, she didn’t know what kind of sacrifice that was.”
Even Rhonda winced at the mention of the Japanese. “I hear those are some nasty motherfuckers. How big did they make her tits?”
“Uncle Bill—the colonel—says that they were retractable, so I never saw them all the way out, but from the way he described things, they’d touch her toes before her fingers would,” Claudia replied with a skull’s smile. “Only six in this unit? I’d think you’d need more.”
“We’re the only ones so tough they barely got us drowsy enough to get in the car to transport out of the building. So how did they finally get you? I got the disco ball. Blame it on my age,” Cynthia said with a blush.
“Shocked me with a vibe in my moment of weakness,” Rhonda drawled. “But you can’t keep a butch down too long. We like it better on top.”
“Chocolate got the best of me, but only long enough to stun me,” Gianna said.
“I made it all the way to the limo, then the driver gave me the secret handshake,” Cheryl boasted.
“Simpsons reruns. Lucky for me they forgot to spike the credits,” Brenna said.
“They got me with the itchy panties, but they didn’t make me hot so much as they made me dizzy, so I shook it off as fast as I could. Still got me here, though.”
“Damn, girl! Don’t you know what that was taken from?” Cheryl shrieked.
“Itching powder they don’t even try except on the ones they think are the best of the best. That shit was stolen from a guy who would fit in with those assholes in Japan,” Rhonda elaborated.
“I’d hate to think what it would do to most people, then, ‘cause it knocked me out for an hour.”
“Well, that makes you the leader kind around here. You know Anna’s a bad motherfucker. We’ve been here a week, and all of us have been knocked out at least once. She uses all the same stuff that kills, but so far we haven’t lost anyone yet, although Brenna here still has glitter in her eyes,” Cheryl explained. Brenna glared at the redhead, then at everyone else as if challenging them to say anything.
“All right, recruits! Lights out!” Anna yelled from outside the room.
“And if you even think about sleeping, either you’re suicidal or you have the secret urge to twirl a pole. She’s full of booby traps. You have to stay up until she’s out cold. Trust me, I got my brain fried by an iPod twice,” Cynthia noted, and everyone else nodded.
“Good training, though. You think those creeps sleep? Hell naw. They wake up when we fall asleep,” Rhonda growled.
“I hear that, but doesn’t that just mean we should be proactive?” Claudia asked with a devilish smile.
“What do you have in mind?” Cynthia asked with a curious note in her voice.
Still showing all signs of mischief, Claudia gathered the team into a huddle.