Bernadette entered the Library. The meeting was there around the Chief Matriarch’s desk. There were seven of them, all evil witches, all crones (except for the cane wielding sadist, Angie, in middle age) who poisoned their wisdom by holding on to power past their time, by ruining pleasure in life for an entire generation with a single evil act, and by conspiring to turn the next generation into breeding stock, separated from pleasure, save what they do for themselves or each other.
Bernadette stood there with a slight smile, pointing the silenced pistol at the group, “Good morning Matriarchs. It’s sunny but cool today in the Matriarchal Zone, a mild wind is blowing, and the afternoon will be pleasant…..It’s a good day to die. As you can see, I have a pistol. It has a silencer. Let me demonstrate.” The pistol went POPPPP, the shell went flying to the right, landed on the carpet with a soft THUP, and the bullet passed within inches of the Chief Matriarch’s head, burrowing into the bookshelf behind. The group was motionless and silent. “It’s a little unwieldy with the long magazine but I still have 27 shots available. More than enough for all of you and a firefight with FEM/DOM after. So if you don’t want to die immediately and lose any chance of rescue, sit down facing that wall and put your hands behind your back.”
The group moved sullenly and sat on the floor, some slower than other from creaky joints. Bernadette was dressed to kill, as Abigail, but in a Boyfriend Shirt with the top 3 buttons open, flats on the feet, (making her 5ft 5in tall) and the harem pants which, surprisingly, had side pockets. From the left one of these, while still pointing the gun, she drew out five double circles of white plastic, non metal handcuffs, and threw them on the ground behind the group. They were already just barely locked, so she could use her one hand, slip them around their two hands, then just pull and the hands were pinioned.
The room was dead quiet and you could hear the ZZZZZZZUP as each tie locked down. She went down the row, throwing more rings out and then placing and tightening them. She was finished, and no one was going anywhere. They stared at the blank wall as Bernadette paused and waited. A couple of them, including Angie, started to shake as they anticipated the first pop, thinking that they would all be slain execution style.
“Now stand up, get in single file, and go to the Punishment Room.” While still holding the gun in one hand, she had to help three of the older ones up with the other. “I’ll be behind you with the gun, so don’t do anything foolish.” Next to the open double doors of the punishment room was an old fashioned style leather briefcase with a leather and brass colored clamp. It had an X on one side made with black electrical tape. Bernadette grabbed it as she passed. “Now sit on the floor behind the punishment block and facing out.” When they were all seated, Bernadette turned, pulled the doors to and then locked them.
As they sat, huddled together, the oldest one started to cry softly and Bernadette set the briefcase on the block, X side toward the Matriarchs. The block was straight topped and only 2 feet high so whoever used the strap or cane could get in a full, gravity aided, swing. So the briefcase was at head height of the seated group. The wooden throne in the back of the room was still there, facing the block, so Bernadette sat on it.
“Chief Matriarch, do you know who I am?”
“You’re the little citizen whore I had caned and forced out of the Zone. Commander Hawkins told me you were back here.”
“I’m so glad she got promoted. She was the only one at my beating who treated me like a human being. Except for your extravagant malice I probably would be one of her cops today. I wish I had been able to live and work in a country that was ‘prosperous in moderate measure’ as they told us in our training, the country that was there before my beating, and in my generation that has been beggared because of that beating.
“Do you ever think of that, Matriarch? Just about all the people I knew in Citizenship training, and thousands more, are living payday to payday, totally deprived of the comfort, pleasuring, and company of submissive males, all because of your hatred and malice in beating the wrong people. Do you have any remorse about that?…..
“Nothing to say? That’ll do for the “no” that you’re too cowardly to say out loud. It’s a shame. If you’d said yes, it would have been one last good thing in you at your “moment of truth”. I’d have respected that. But there is no good in you to bring to the table, I guess. Just the same hatred and malice that drove you to beat both me and my father over a trifle.
“And you, Angie. I didn’t ask if you recognized me because I didn’t have time to show you my bare ass. That’s a shame. After all, even while I was being caned, you were walking around the table and I got to see your wet crotch. The theatrical black you wear may mute it, but it sure doesn’t disguise it. Your black tights and leotards, however, did terrify me at the time.
“So at your “moment of truth” you can take that with you, that and the fact that you can cane someone to pork sausage better than any one else in the world, better even than the pros at the prison in Singapore. I’ve seen the photos, and I know. Do you have them and use them with your vibrator? Or is beating your three submissives enough to satisfy you. You ARE very generous, the beatings have sent them twice to retraining at FEM/AUTH. Nobody would want them after that. But you took them back. How do I know all this stuff? I’ll tell you in a minute.
“And, finally, you, Matriarchs of the Cabinet. You’re probably thinking that this so unfair. I’m going to die for no reason. That’s not quite true. I’ll assume the best I can about you, that you didn’t agree with what these two evil women did but you didn’t have the courage to toss them out. And for years you have been an accessory of their crimes. If you aid and abet evil, you become evil. And I don’t have a single qualm about killing you. As far as I can see, you will bring nothing of value at all to your “moment of truth”.
“Now I’m sure someone here recognizes that phrase. I’m a spy for GLCIS, a deep cover agent here for years. That’s part of how I got this opportunity to go renegade and do this. I’ve been here all the time as freelance writer Caitlin Jones. Surely you remember her, the woman with black hair you almost never see here. And she wore black rimmed glasses. Do I see a glimmer of light? At one point or another, as Caitlin, I’ve interviewed almost all of you. Not only that, I interviewed your submissives so I know a lot about you that you wouldn’t want to see in print. Angie’s submissives, for example, showed me their whip scars. At home, Angie uses an illegal single tail whip.” Angie’s face was flushed with anger.
Bernadette continued, “No Angie, you’re not going to beat them until they bleed out. Sorry. When I obtained my citizenship certificate and license to beat, I was recruited by GLCIS and let them have my fresh paper. They were ecstatic. This was the first ones they’d ever acquired. They sent it to their forgers and not only have they fabricated two for my cover, they’ve made hundreds, and there are about 20 Medium Cover spies with them here, disguised as citizens, completely unchipped and doing who knows what. I can tell you what a couple of them are doing. They’re staying at home managing a safe house for someone like me if I have to go on the run. They’re personally attached, of course.
“I’m sure Commander Hawkins has been scratching her head for years about where all the GLCIS spies are. I’m sure she doesn’t think we stopped sending them, but she’s not caught any of them since about 2073 so there’s not a lot we don’t know about you. And you know what, I’m sure there is no master list of citizen names anywhere. It just “wouldn’t be anybody’s place” to do such a thing on their own, nor anybody’s place to order someone else to do it. And nobody’s brought up the idea to YOU Chief Matriarch. If they had, we’d have known about it. As far as counterintelligence goes, the Zone is fucked. For good.
“But that’s enough about you, let’s talk about me. I’ll read you something. From the Book of Genesis, 4-14/15:
“4:14 Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me. 4:15 And the LORD said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.
“You wanted a mark of Cain on me and you succeeded. By the grace of God, a Zone botanist, and a Singapore herbalist, my buttocks wasn’t covered in scars as you intended, with the pain and damage to follow me through all my life. But one remained, with nerve damage below it, exactly where I sit. So for 17 years I’ve never sat down without pain.
“But you know something, you’re not God. You’re not even close. And the vengeance sevenfold has found YOU. You are merely a spiteful old woman who crushed my dream of living in peace in a Matriarchy. You ruined a piece of my body that I must use every day and can never forget. You sent my father into a living death both physically and mentally. And last year a real death, a suicide, because he could no longer stand the pain, the flashbacks, and the nightmares.
“You and Angie killed him, Angie with her cane as she killed so many others in the past. You with your arbitrary whim abusing power outside of even your so called “laws”. Your propaganda says that the House of Matriarchs can “nullify” your decisions. Could they nullify the scar on my butt, or the nightmares that I have now, too? Could they nullify the 78 bleeding wounds that turned into painful scars on my father’s butt and legs. They made every conscious moment of the rest of his life so painful that he had his own Heroin pump to dull it. That’s all the Heroin did was dull it, was mask it, and he was never really free of it. When I first saw my father afterward, I made a vow to kill both of you, somehow, someway. And when he died, I knew it was time.
“I also saw that if I killed you two together, I just might shake this country to its foundations, and nullify a multitude of it’s sins by killing all of your accomplices, called the Matriarchal Cabinet. Finally, I saw that I would have to die, too. When I’ve taken my vengeance on you, your accomplices, and even this rotten and hypocritical pisspot of a country, there really will be no reason for me to live. I’m okay with that.
“At GLCIS we’ve kept count and track of every one that went through the Black Widow. All of them, even of the other agencies, had to pass through our hospital system, since we’re your only shared border. So we have records of your infamy. And ALL of them, ALL of them died by suicide to escape the living death. You murdered them too. And you laughed about it. “They’ll have to retire him as an agent and they surely won’t give him a 9 to 5 job sitting at a desk!” Ha. Ha. Ha. “You know what they say, You won’t sit down for the rest of your life.” Just a mountain of giggles.
“Micha Haaretz is dead. GLCIS killed her. In her last letter she knew it was coming. All she asked for was a swift, clean death. Largely because of saving Henry Peterson, from the Widow, by killing him, she got her wish, a bullet through the heart and no more than 2 minutes, probably much less, before she blacked out for the last time. Helen Thoroughgood is dead, from a silenced bullet of Mossad, through her right cheek, that shattered the back of her head. How do I know that? I work for a spy agency and I’ve seen a copy of the autopsy report. Why? Because Helen had recklessly exposed Micha Haaretz to our killers.
“My boss at GLCIS tells me that you both came within inches of being killed by GLCIS for what you did to me and my father. Only the intervention of the President saved you. Remember Gerald, Amy? And how he called you a war criminal? I know what you said back to him. I’ve not only read the transcript, I’ve heard the original recording. It’s a miracle you’re still alive. I would have had a much happier life than I’ll be ending today if GLCIS had had its way.
“My boss was a deep cover agent in SEC/SPY. All the time she spied here, no one ever knew her name, not even at SEC/SPY itself. And when she left the Zone, she left absolutely no record that she was ever here. In our shop, she’s known as “the spook who never was there”. And as a deep cover agent she worked just across the building from Micha Haaretz, without Micha ever knowing that a spy was even there. She was good, almost as good as Henry Peterson.
“My boss told me before I left that, by and large, Matriarchal women were essentially inhumane. Remember what you said to me after you had me beaten to the limits of possible pain. “I want him scarred repeatedly and permanently as a lesson to the people who know him in GLC: Don’t come over here unless you behave with ABSOLUTE courtesy and respect toward your betters.” That inhumane arrogance IS the real core of the Matriarchal Zone. I have never wanted to believe it, I wanted to hold on to the memory of my wonderful dream, but it’s true. Coming here as an adult and hiding in the shadows, I now know it to be true.
“The only regret I have in all this is that it will probably ruin my boss’ career and tarnish her legacy after. But there is simply no way to avoid that collateral damage.
“So let’s get to the heart of the matter. In my briefcase is a bomb. It’s made from chemical fertilizer mixed with motor oil for two stroke gasoline engines. Yes, they still have them, they’re still used on emergency portable power generators. It’s not a large bomb but it has quite a lot of power for its size. In addition, because the room has no windows, the pressure wave from the blast will actually bounce off the walls and back into the room, so it will crush your chest cavity like an egg shell. And that’s why you will die.
“Finally on the side of the briefcase with an X there are six sheets of 12×16 in. plate glass. The blast will shatter that glass into hundreds of razor sharp pieces that will rip through the leather and then rip through your faces. When they take the bodies out of here, the only way they will recognize any of you will be by your fingerprints and your clothes, although these will also be in ribbons from the glass. Your autopsy will be nasty. They will have to fish out scores of sharp glass pieces to even get to your vital organs for examination. And the mortician will not be able to give you anything but a closed casket funeral.
“That’s almost it. But, two things. Both then and now Matriarch, you have called me a whore assuming it would insult me. That’s a shame. The whores on Scarlet Fever Lane are probably the nicest people in this whole damn country. And, you know, it isn’t just for male submissives and randy non-citizen men anymore. More and more women my age are going there, particularly to the house called Elizabeth’s Secret. They have always been very women friendly and had bi-sexual whores, but the demand of 30 something Zone Women for release, relief, and companionship has forced them to retrain more than half their stable to go both ways and I think soon all of them will. I’ve been there myself and they are very, very good at what they do.
Because of the Zone support, they think they do being a whore, better than anyone else, that they are High Class Tarts. I’m certainly not that, but I needed to become one over in GLC to obtain highly illegal things like the blasting cap in the bomb and the gun in my hand. So I had to go to the whores here to learn how to give men multiple orgasms and more spectacular ones than they’ve ever had before. I went to Chicago as an amateur knowing much more than the average whore on the street. I had to barter for these things among the lowest strata of Chicago hoodlums and thugs, and within two weeks I had a street rep that wouldn’t quit. So in the last few minutes before we all die don’t feel shy about calling me a whore. I am one. And a good one. I made my self so in order to mutilate and kill you.
“Second, Matriarch, when you gave me the Mark of Cain, it wasn’t like God. You didn’t mark me because I killed anyone, and you didn’t mark me so that no one would kill me. You marked me out of personal malice and nothing more. But, just like becoming a whore, this morning I became a killer. When I came in, I killed your housekeeper and one of your Maleservants. I let the other one go so he could bring the police. I’ve been chattering all this time waiting for the audience to get here. They probably had to get their SWAT gear out of storage. I’m starting to hear multiple sirens loud enough to defeat this room’s sound deadening. So we must move on. The trigger to the bomb is another Datapad in the briefcase whose ringer will set off the bomb…….there, now I’ve input all but the last digit of it’s number.
“We’ll wait ’til they use the loudspeaker, or start battering the door……….
“There they are. Goodbye.”
The Matriarchal Zone 