Sea Monster's Revenge Read online

  She let them go, watching over the edge of the building. She waited till they were in the glare of the parking lot near the boardwalk and could no longer see her. Then she dropped lightly to the street and followed them, running to catch up with them and return to the crowds.

  As she did so she had her hair change to blond and short, her eyes to grey. Her clothing was like that of enough of the people around her that she was completely anonymous. It hung loose on her because she had also compressed her body fat back to its usual state.

  She found a taxi and had the driver take her to the hotel. It was one of the new ultra-modern middling-expensive motel chains, four stories, the first taken up by service rooms and a small spa/pool and exercise room. Starting with the top floor she tried the card in all the doors. On the third floor the door lock flashed green for one room.

  She had not smelled the tracking scent with which she infected the two men anywhere in the hotel. Nevertheless she went to slow time as she carefully opened the door in case someone else was in the room. But the room was dark and quiet with no recent scents of occupants or visitors.

  There was nothing interesting to see, just two beds and a desk and chairs and a TV. There was a bathroom to one side of the entrance. On the other side was a shallow alcove with a few changes of clothes on hangars and two empty suitcases beneath them.

  She turned on the dim hallway overhead light but not the room lights. It was a good thing she had. There was a door to an adjoining room and a narrow strip of light showed beneath it.

  That made sense. The two men slept here, she could tell by the scents in the room. Their boss or colleagues likely slept next door.

  Sylvia prowled quietly around the room but there was nothing interesting to discover. The same might not be true next door.

  She pondered approaches. She could barge into the room and demand answers. But first she should try trickery. And an approach occurred to her that made her smile.

  She quickly returned to her Maria persona, walked back into the hallway, and knocked on the door of the adjoining room.

  Long moments passed. The monster wondered if there was anyone home. But then she heard a security chain being stealthily threaded into its lock on the door and it opened to the limits of the chain.

  "Yes?" The man inside was speaking in English. She replied in the same language.

  "I have business proposition for you."

  "So?"

  "Your men had a talk with me earlier. "

  The man had to think about that, but then the chain was disengaged and the door was flung wide. A few feet back from her stood a man in suit pants with a tie at half mast on a white shirt. He wore no suit coat but had a pistol as an accessory. It was pointed at her.

  "Come in."

  Sylvia complied, her hands at her sides and obviously empty of weapons.

  "Close the door."

  She did so and surveyed the room. It was identical in mirror reverse of the other room. Lights gleamed out of the bathroom to one side of the entrance. The desk lamp and the lamps beside the beds were lit. The odors in the room suggested only this one man slept here but there were older scents of her two would-be assailants.

  "Sit on the couch."

  She walked past him as he moved to one side to keep his distance from her. It would have been an effective move if she had been human. Sitting, she leaned back and crossed her legs. See, totally harmless and in a position hard to get out of quickly.

  The man sat in a desk chair across from her, back to the desk against a wall. He rested his gun hand on one leg but kept the gun pointed at her chest.

  He was in his mid-thirties and good-looking in the manner of the Italians who made up so many of Argentina's immigrants. Years from now—if she let him live—he might turn into a central-casting gangster thug.

  "Where are my men?"

  The monster shrugged. "Probably in a hospital getting fixed up. I was a bit severe with them when they came at me with weapons. It hurt my feelings. I am very sensitive."

  He chewed that over for a moment .

  "I have a business proposition for you."

  He nodded for her to go on.

  "You have been recruiting young women of a certain quality. I can supply you with some—for a fee."

  This time it was he who shrugged. "We are satisfied with our own procedures and products. And we don't know you."

  "True. So let's get to know each other. As a token of good faith, I will supply you with a special item I have on hand which you could make a good profit on."

  He was silent, but it was a considering silence.

  "She is sixteen—"

  "We deal only in single women on their own."

  "A sensible precaution. But this young lady is also on her own. Self-emancipated, so to speak. She is beautiful, a blond with blue eyes, a Lola type figure." The last referred to a term she had learned associating with prostitutes. It meant an under-age school-girl type favored by some men.

  "And she's a virgin. I understand the rarity makes for a high mark-up."

  "I don't like the way you treated my men."

  "I was as gentle as I could be. Let me be clear on one thing. In the service to my country I learned a number of skills. I am, for instance, expert with a sniper rifle. And getting places undetected. I suggest you do not try my patience or try to double-cross me in the future.

  "On the other hand, those skills can be very useful to you if you have need of them. For a price, of course."

  The man thought deeply for a couple of minutes.

  "Bring your product here tomorrow night. Then we'll see."

  "She will not be available until Tuesday night."

  "Then bring her here Wednesday night. At 9:00 o'clock."

  "Very well. Oh, I won't be available that night. I'll have two of my associates bring her by. The two I have downstairs ready to come up if I didn't come down in—" She glanced at her watch. "—another eleven minutes."

  On the first thing Monday Sylvia put in for two weeks of absence beginning that Thursday. If her plan worked out she would soon be in South America killing a large number of men.

  Chapter 24 - Bimbo

  Puerto Rico, Ponce

  On Wednesday Sylvia made her last preparations for two weeks and two days of leave which would return her to work on a Monday. She had been vague to her friends about just where she would be traveling to, saying only that she had a slight family emergency.

  At the bus station she went to the restroom with a small rolling suitcase and changed from casual but nice traveling clothes to teen-age-relaxed clothing. This included a colorful autumn-leaved print short-sleeved blouse tied at her waist. This showed her belly button and flat mid-teen belly and a décolleté showing she was wearing no bra. Her tight shorts were bright pink. Her tennis shoes were a matching pink.

  Her face she shaped into a mid-teen cast with pouty red lips like succulent cherries. Her nose was small and her eyes big and blue with long dark lashes. Her hair was long, blond, and curly. Her body was almost childishly slender but her hips were woman wide with perky buttocks.

  She had made herself over into every pedophile pervert's dream.

  She stowed the womanly traveling clothes and heels in her now-wardrobe size rental locker and took a taxi into the red-light district. There she met two large rent-a-thugs she had engaged over the weekend for a generous sum. They escorted her to the hotel where she was to be "given" to the "recruiter" for the South American prostitute gang. One of the thugs knocked loudly on the door to the recruiter's room, ignoring the door chime button.

  One of the two men who'd tried to beat up "Maria" answered the door. He warily examined the three standing before it. Then he backed up to let them in.

  Sylvia looked around as if in curiosity. Her two escorts looked around warily, gun hands hovering near their belt buckles. Their guns were concealed by loose jackets.

  The second recruiter muscle man was standing so that he and his compatriot were not in each
other's way. At the far end of the room the recruiter sat on the couch where Sylvia had sat on Friday night. He appeared perfectly at ease but Sylvia would have bet that a gun was tucked away somewhere handy.

  The muscle men backed up as the thugs entered. The one who had answered the door carried a gun openly but pointing at the floor. Ditto his companion.

  The recruiter stood up slowly.

  "Well, I see Maria's little girl has arrived. Come here, dear."

  Sylvia—who now answered to Candy—walked forward unconcernedly and looked up the few inches to his face. Meanwhile she was peripherally aware of the other four men. If shooting threatened to begin she was ready to disable or kill all three of the slaver gang as quickly as possible.

  The recruiter looked her up and down very carefully. "Turn around," he said, so she did. This had the benefit of giving her a better view of the four other men.

  She felt the man behind her pull down her shorts. He squeezed her bare bottom, then smacked each cheek.

  In the years since her resurrection Sylvia's body had changed much internally. Her bones had slowly evolved into a very hard and more flexible substance, with much less calcium and much more of some composite material full of long-chain carbon molecules. Her body organs had become more efficient. Her muscles were at least twenty times as strong as they had been but had shrunk in bulk as they became more efficient. To keep roughly human proportions her body fat had grown. It had also become very compressed and changed chemically so it was much harder and yet more quickly metabolized. She was half again her apparent body weight. The fat had clustered around more delicate parts of her body such as the spine.

  She had become rather like a statue made of very tough rubber. Slow bullets and other projectiles would bounce off her. Body blows would hurt the fists of her attackers and merely annoy her.

  To counteract that she had spent some time making her body appear softer and more flexible on the surface, with normal capillaries and veins near that surface. So she knew that her bottom felt natural to the man and knew that pink hand prints had appeared on each cheek.

  All four men in front of her had relaxed and paid more attention to her and less to their opponents. That was another benefit of her "humiliation," an emotion she felt not at all.

  "Turn around. Let me see your tits."

  Sylvia complied, pulling her shorts back into place and loosening her blouse and letting it drop open. She had sculpted her breasts to small girlish cones showing little of gravity's effects. She had made her areolas rosy and medium size and her nipples a bit large. This quite successfully made them targets of men's eyes, exactly as she had planned.

  The recruiter squeezed each breast, tweaked her nipples, hard.

  "Oww," said Sylvia. "Do that again and I'll squeeze your nuts so hard you piss blood for a month."

  Where had that come from? She'd intended to be a helpless timid child, let them think they were mistreating her ultra-tough body. Well, may as well go on as she'd started and see what came of it.

  The recruiter's mouth hardened but he forbore to say anything to her. He spoke to her two escorts .

  "She'll do. Tell your boss we'll take her. If she works out we can do business."

  The two rent-a-thugs said nothing in reply. Instead they backed up to the door and left, closing it behind them.

  The muscle man closest to the door stepped quickly forward and peered through the spy glass in the door, watching the thugs walk down the hall. And perfectly positioning himself, the monster thought, to be killed by gunfire through the door if the men outside had been watching for the slight darkening of the glass which indicated someone inside was looking through it.

  Not the sharpest of tools, were the recruiter's men.

  Sylvia had half-turned to watch this byplay. The recruiter grabbed an arm and turned her back toward him, squeezing hard enough to hurt an ordinary human.

  "You...will...NOT...backtalk me!"

  He raised a hand and swung a hard slap at her face. The sea monster leaned back just enough so that the hand missed her by less than an inch. She kept her eyes calmly on his face.

  Slightly off-balance, the man's face reddened with anger. He grabbed her other arm and shook her so hard her head would have bobbled painfully—if she had been human.

  She was not. She very calmly watched him realize she would not be intimidated. And perhaps feel that her body was slightly alien. Perhaps he had sensed her hardness and extra weight.

  He pushed her away. An ordinary girl would have stumbled backward and maybe fallen. Sylvia simply flowed backward two steps.

  "Juan! Teach her some manners!" In Argentine Spanish.

  The nearest of the muscle men took a step forward and stopped. "Candy" was showing absolutely no fear. Instead she had a smile which showed teeth bared as if to bite.

  "Uh, Boss. Something's not right here."

  The boss-man's face showed his fury. "Do what I say!"

  Juan stepped forward and reached with his hand, the one with a wrist wrapped in a pressure bandage. Candy/Sylvia snapped her arm in a fast circular motion which struck the injured wrist.

  Juan literally turned pale. He staggered, hugged his hurt arm to his chest, cradled it with his good arm.

  Candy instantly changed from Blond Bimbo From Hell to Kind Little Mother.

  "Oh, dear! I am so sorry! Here, sit down. You, help him!"

  The other muscle hurried forward and he and Candy eased Juan to a seat on the couch.

  "You!" she said to the helper. "You have pills for this? Then go get them. And a glass of water."

  The man hurried through the open door connecting the two rooms. Candy sat on the couch and put her arms around the hurt man, making sure one hand rested on bared skin at his neck. She sent into him ease for his shock. It began to slowly fade.

  "Poor baby! I didn't mean to hurt you so bad. Poor baby. You'll get better. We just need you to relax and—"

  The other flunky appeared in front of them with a glass of water and a plastic bottle of pills. Candy took the bottle from his hand and held it up to read the label.

  "It says here two pills. I think we can go with three right now, don't you think?"

  Without waiting for a reply she popped the cap and shook three red-and-blue banded capsules into her hand. She handed the bottle back to its bearer and took the glass from his hand.

  "Open up, now. That's a good boy. Now just a sip of water. Here, I'll help hold it."

  Still murmuring soothing nonsense she helped him take a sip of water to wash down the pills, then coaxed him into two more sips. Then she leaned away from the man to set the glass down on a couch-side table and leaned back to hug the man.

  With her skin contact she fed carefully metered pain-killer instructions to speed up the effect of the pills. As the minutes passed Juan relaxed more and his face returned to its normal color.

  Candy had shifted her attention to the standing colleague. In the same soothing tones she learned that his name was Felipe and that he had grown up in a small town in the Córdoba Province of Argentina.

  Shortly she judged that Juan was able to walk. She and Felipe got him to his feet and urged him into the room the two shared. They got him to lie on his bed and she slipped his shoes off. She caressed his forehead and at the same time infected him with an urge to sleep.

  She stood upright and turned to his companion.

  "Felipe, when he's sleepy enough, if you can manage it, get his pants off and cover him. Will you do that for me, Felipe?"

  He nodded and went to the small refrigerator against one wall and took out a bottle of wine or sterner alcoholic drink. Candy went back into the other room and closed the door quietly behind her.

  The recruiter was sitting on the couch and drinking tea, maté by its odor. His gun was laying on the kick table before the couch.

  Candy pulled a desk chair over to the opposite side of the low table so that she and he faced each other. She leaned back, crossed her bare legs, and looked at him
.

  He looked back, half angry and half puzzled. He took another sip of his drink.

  "You're older than you look."

  Candy just smiled at him, not protesting his statement.

  "You're not sixteen. Thirty?"

  Still she said nothing.

  "You can't really be a virgin."

  "I'm a freak. I heal faster and better than anyone. In a month I'm back to being a virgin again. It's a very marketable talent. In some circles."

  "I don't know what to do with you. You've already got my men eating out of your hand."

  He looked at his gun. The butt was toward him but it was perhaps six feet away from him.

  "I'm much stronger and faster than I look. And I picked up some useful skills from Marie."

  She held up a fist with her forefinger sticking out of it pointed at him.

  "I can drive this right through your eyeball. Your brain is only a few inches in. There's a trick to it, however."

  She turned her fist onto its back and crooked her finger slightly. Then she tilted her fist so that the finger hooked upward and toward her.

  "You have to hook upward to get the frontal lobe."

  He apparently had a good imagination. He turned a bit pale.

  "But why would I do that to you? What's your name?"

  He blinked at that last question.

  "Carlos."

  "We're going to be great friends, Carlos." People liked to hear their name.

  "You're going to take me to—Argentina? And you're going to sell me for a good deal of money. To some politician or businessman who likes little girls."

  Her look became dreamy, her voice quieter.

  "He will become obsessed with me. But I will find someone richer, more powerful. He'll probably kill himself when I leave him. Or try to kill me. But I'm very hard to kill. It will be a great scandal. They'll try to hush it up..."

  "You're crazy."

  She snapped back, seemingly, to the present, real world.

  "Am I? Don't you remember your history? Juan Domingo Perón, el Presidente, liked little girls."

  "But he gave them up. He married Eva Duarte."