Corrupting Power
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Breakpoint - Part Six
🕑 Added 2023-02-24 07:28:27 +0000 UTCPart Six
Harry
It was surprising to him that the ladies hadn’t figured out what was happening sooner, but he wrote it off as he was always slightly more open minded to the impossible than the average person ways. They made their way back to their room and looked at him expectantly, as he moved to sit down on the bed, each of them part way across the room from him.
“Alright, so watch me now, ladies, and you’ll see what I mean.” He extended his left arm outward and then set his right hand atop it, pressing his fingernails down onto the skin enough so that he’d feel the pressure, and then dragged his fingertips from his elbow to his wrist, dragging on his flesh and drawing little white lines on the skin as he saw both women instinctively reach for their own left arms, rubbing the top of it with their right hand. “You both felt that, didn’t you?”
Calisto frowned, her face bunching up with discomfort. “What the hell have they done to us?”
“Our nervous systems are somewhat linked, it seems. We don’t seem to share feelings of minor things, like the feeling of a fork in your hands, but when it gets strong enough that more nerves are involved, we’re all linked into that sensation,” he told them. “That’s just my guess about it, anyway. I knew when we showed up at The Retreat that all rules of how the world worked were being thrown out the window. Every rumor I’ve heard about this place has done my head in, so the idea of us having linked nervous systems? Not really all that implausible. There have been all those studies into how twins are able to empathically communicate pain or pleasure with each other. Now, whether or not any of that is bullshit, all I’m pointing out is that there is precedent for this sort of thing.”
Stella reached one of her hands up and gave one of her own breasts a hard squeeze through her top, smirking when she saw both Harry and Calisto wince a little bit. “Felt that too, did you, Harry?”
“Just because I’m a man doesn’t mean I don’t have breasts, Stella,” he grumbled.
“Oh yeah? Then how about this?” Calisto said, pushing her hand down the front of her pants and sliding a fingertip inside of her own pussy.
It was rather a strange sensation for Harry, but clearly whatever sort of link they shared we functioning somehow, because it felt as though a finger had slid inside of his body just between the bottom of his shaft and the top of his balls, working its way inside of him, brushing against tender nerves he didn’t know he had.
“I’m certainly feeling that, even if he isn’t,” Stella said, shifting a little bit uncomfortably, her hand now a bit more gentle on her own breast.
“I’m definitely feeling something,” Harry replied. “How about if I do this? You ladies feel anything?” He reached down into his own pants and gave his cock a long, strident stroke, watching both women shudder in response to his touches.
“That’s so fucking weeeeeird,” Stella groaned. “Like I’m getting stimulated in ways my body isn’t supposed to feel.”
Calisto looked uncertain about what she wanted to do next, looking from Harry to Stella and back again three or four times before finally, reaching down to pull off her shirt, kicking off her boots and tugging down her pants. “Get naked. Both of you.” The commanding tone of her voice made it clear she didn’t want to wait, and Harry was trying to get over to the bed while Calisto was yanking his shirt up and off for him as he shimmied out of his shoes.
Stella looked like she wasn’t sure what they were about to do, but she certainly wasn’t going to miss out so she stripped faster than either of the two of them had done. As soon as she was over at the bed, she shoved Harry onto his back, and pushed her head down onto his cock, swallowing his shaft whole before Harry and Calisto both moaned at the exact same time in the exact same cadence. What was even weirder was feeling Stella’s moan flowing over his shaft.
They were a tangle of bodies very quickly, as Calisto finally pushed Stella out of place and moved to straddle Harry’s waist, pushing herself down onto his cock. It was truly a bizarre sensation, because it almost felt like he was being mirrored, and he’d never had a sensation of being entered before, even knowing it was all entirely in his head. And even as he started to thrust his hips upward, Stella moved to climb and straddle his head, pushing her cunt down onto his mouth, as he did his best to push his tongue up and inside of her. And he felt the sensation of his own tongue vaguely somewhere in his crotch.
For the next half hour, they were a weird triangle of erotic sensations, connected to each other in standard ways that were overly complicated by the fact that nobody was experiencing the sensations of their nerves alone, but instead all three of their nervous systems functioning in tandem, often causing conflicting or complicated feelings as their minds struggled to separate the signals coming from their own bodies as opposed to those they were just listening in on.
When Harry came inside of Calisto, it was the most unusual and mind bending sensation he’d ever had to deal with. He could feel his jism exiting his body, but it also felt like it was reentering his body at the same time. There was something exotic and thrilling about it, but it was also downright disconcerting.
None of the three of them wanted to talk much about it afterwards, happy to just sort of lay in bed, nestled up against one another, until they all drifted off to sleep.
Except, of course, Harry was still awake and was pretending to sleep. He very slowly extricated himself from the two women and pulled on some clothes as quietly as he could and made his way towards the doorway. He’d made it down the hallway before he felt a hand on his shoulder. He stopped and looked back to see Stella standing behind him.
“Thought we made it clear, wherever you go, we go,” she said to him quietly. “Where you going, Harry?”
“Look, either you trust me and go back to bed and rise up a bit in my estimations, or you follow me and fall a bit in my estimations,” he said to her. “But one way or another, I’m heading out for just a little bit and will be back in bed within an hour or so at the latest.”
She looked at him for a long moment, sighed, then hugged him. “Don’t get hurt, okay? That’s all I ask.” Before he could answer, she’d released him and turned to head back to their apartment.
That gave Harry the freedom he needed to move, as he headed down the stairs and started making his way across the village. Despite the fact that there was ample light, he was able to keep mostly to the shadows. He wasn’t trying to sneak around that much, but he still didn’t want to draw attention to himself, and the last thing he needed was someone asking questions about what he was doing out this late at night. Although he wasn’t entirely certain someone would even ask. He was still getting the hang of what expectations people had of each other on the island, and it seemed like the majority of the people preferred to be out during the daylight. With all the neon signage lit up from sunset to sunrise, though, it wasn’t as though it wasn’t safe to move around at night.
Harry moved his way around the back of the bar, finding Len leaning against the wall, flipping a coin over and over again.
“If that keeps coming up heads literally all of the time,” Harry said as he walked up, “I wouldn’t be the least be surprised.”
“No, but it’s landed edgewise a couple of times since I started, which is a different kind of weirdness,” Len said to Harry. “So, it looks like you made it to the island okay.”
“Okay is a matter of perspective, chief,” Harry sighed. “But I’m alive. Still, there’s some next level weirdness going on here.”
For the next few minutes, Harry tried to explain how his nervous system seemed to be mirrored to the two women he’d arrived with. Len seemed skeptical at first, but as Harry had kept detailing the whole thing, Len had grown less and less amused, and more and more concerned.
“Jesus, man,” Len said, rubbing his eyes. “You’re not kidding. That sounds odd as hell. You given any thought to what you’re going to do when they tell you to decide?”
“I’m not keen on leaving anyone to die on my say so, chief.”
“Doesn’t look like they’re giving you much of a choice, Harry.”
“What if I refuse to choose?”
“Then I suspect either they’ll make you choose, or they’ll just kill all three of you.”
Harry frowned. “Can’t say I’m particularly fond of any of these options, chief.”
“This ain’t a weekend retreat, Harry,” Len chuckled. “You don’t get turndown service and a complimentary continental breakfast. Nobody’s gonna give a damn about your feelings, so you’d better be prepared for that kind of thing.”
“Well, I’ve still got a bit of time left to consider it, so it’s something I’ll keep working on in the back of my brain. I saw Rin’s here. Any sign of Mick?”
“Not yet,” Len confirmed. “I assumed he was the last to get picked up so he’ll show up eventually.”
“How’s Rin doing?”
“She got here first, and she’s a little shaken up, but you know Rin – she’s a professional and I don’t know of much of anything that’s going to put her off job.”
“Tell me the island’s weirder than the shit I’m going through.”
“It’s a whole hell of a lot weirder than the shit you’re going through, brother, but don’t discount your own personal weirdness in the whole thing,” Len chuckled. “What’s weird to you may not be as weird to all of us, and vice versa. That said, take a look at this.” He reached into his satchel and pulled out a gold brick, hefting it over towards Harry, who caught it, surprised by the weight of it.
“You found a gold bar?” Harry asked, lifting it up towards the light. “The hell is that symbol on the top of it?”
“Oh right. You wouldn’t recognize that, being you were raised CofE and all that. Anyway, that’s the Holy See.”
“The whatnow?”
“The mark of the Vatican. That’s property of the Pope, or at least it was.”
“What the hell is it doing on an island in the South Pacific?”
“Who the fuck knows?” Len sighed. “It’s here, though, and not just this one brick either, but a whole shit load of it.”
“Are we gonna steal it?”
“You know a way to get it off of here?”
“Yeah, okay. Fair point.”
“Besides, not even all that sure it’d be back that way if we went by it again,” Len said, stretching his back against the concrete wall like he was some kind of giant housecat. “You probably haven’t noticed yet, but this whole island’s layout seems like it changes on a dime and nothing is exactly where you left it, once you venture outside of the city limits.”
“I’d say you’re fucking with me, Len, but after what I’ve seen and felt for the last couple of days, I’m not entirely sure what I do and don’t believe in from my own experiences anymore. I’m starting to think I should believe you over my own lyin’ eyes.”
“Just don’t rule anything out and you’ll probably be okay, Harry.”
There was a rustle from the trees, and both men turned to look in that direction before a man came barreling out of the jungle at them. The back of the bar faced part of the jungle so it was the ideal way for someone to approach. The man rushed straight at Len before either man could get a good look at him.
Len, however, had been the wrong choice for the man to attack. While Harry was sufficient at hand-to-hand and close-quarters combat, Len was easily the best trained out of their unit and took great delight in being able to manage and disarm an opponent.
The man attacking him was dressed in a drab grey outfit, heavily encrusted with dirt and grime, a large knife in one hand, which was perhaps the only reason why Len hadn’t dispatched him quickly. The man was European, with blonde hair and blue eyes, a sort of borderline mad look to him, and his face had dark grease smeared on it, as if it was some kind of camouflage. He bared his teeth wildly and swiped at the air between them with the knife, trying to follow it up with a lunge, but Len obviously didn’t have patience for the man’s antics, so he shifted the movement and shoved the man’s knife towards his own chest, stabbing him with his own weapon.
The movement wasn’t anticipated and as soon as he was stabbed, the man from the jungle collapsed, gasping up at them. “Bist du eine Art Dämon?”
Len’s face scrunched up in annoyance. “Die Nazis sind längst weg, Soldat. Warum tragen Sie noch die Uniform?”
“Was? Ich glaube dir nicht. Berlin würde niemals fallen,” the man wheezed. “Engländer?”
“Amerikaner. Wie lange bist du schon im Dschungel?” Len said, crouching down next to the man.
“Ich habe die Tage… aufgehört zu zählen, aber ich… denke, es müsste Juli 1944 sein.”
“Deine Welt ist schon lange vorbei, Soldat. Ruhen Sie sich jetzt aus und schließen Sie sich Ihren Freunden an.”
The man on the ground coughed, nodded once and then slumped lifelessly against the dirt floor.
“What the fuck was that?” Harry asked Len.
“Despite how utterly impossible it should be,” Len said, “I think I just killed my first Nazi.” He pulled the knife out of the man’s body, wiping it off on the corpse’s uniform before removing the scabbard from his belt, sheathing it and setting it aside. “Our friend here said he lost count of the days, but he was pretty certain it should be somewhere around July of 1944.”
“He had to have been lying,” Harry muttered. “Right? He was lying?”
“His German was far better than mine, and that surprise on his face looked pretty genuine. He thought I was British. And I dunno about you, but this outfit looks damn authentic to me. No modern stitching, no modern fabrics… it is exactly how it should be if he was who he said he was. Help me search his body.”
They spent a couple of minutes going through the man’s things. There was P38 in a holster on the man’s hip, but it seemed like it was long since out of ammunition, and hadn’t even been that well maintained. Len took it anyway, Harry noticed. The dead man still had his E tool and a collapsible spade, as well as a number of ammo pouches, all of which were entirely empty. There was a dogtag of sorts hanging around the man’s neck, with three little holes in the center of it, like it was meant to be broken in half. Harry shoved that into his own pocket, just so that he’d have something to prove the encounter was real. In the man’s pocket they also found a letter to home, with a name and address on the envelope, although no stamp. Harry saw Len tuck that into his pocket, while they finished searching the body, finding nothing else of any real use on it.
“What do we do with him?” Harry asked Len.
“The last thing I want is anyone coming across the body, so I suppose we’re going to bury him. Thankfully he came with his own shovel, and I know where Rin says they typically bury the bodies. Nobody ever digs them up, so he’ll just be another nameless unmarked grave, and nobody will be any the wiser. C’mon, grab his ankles.”
The two men picked up the body and hiked over to a large fenced off section with a number of graves in it, mostly without headstones or markings, but a few that had a tiny little shrine on top of them. They found there were a couple of half-dug holes already, as if the idea of throwing bodies into the area was common enough that it didn’t hurt to do some of the work in advance. Once the hole was deep enough, they tossed the impossible man’s body into it and quickly covered it with dirt.
Harry was sweating more than a little when they finally finished. “Gold from the Pope. Nazis who think it’s 1944. Buildings that are sometimes there and sometimes not. Women who’re somehow linked to my nervous system. Any other crazy shit I should know about, top?”
“Rin shot a praying mantis the size of a motorcycle with an arrow yesterday. Killed it, too.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Harry looked for any sign of a punchline coming and sighed when he didn’t spot one. “You’re not kidding. Fucking hell, boss, this place is next-level creepy.”
“I told you this was likely to be the weirdest job we’d ever take on in our lives, Harry, so maybe sometimes you guys’ll learn to trust me when I say shit like that, huh?”
“You say shit like that all the time, boss,” Harry grumbled.
“Not quite this vehemently, though, do I?”
“I suppose that’s fair.”
“Besides, you’ve got the singular experience of truly knowing what it feels like when someone tells you to go fuck yourself.”
Harry laughed, reaching over to slug Len in the shoulder. “What’s next?”
“What’s next is we start trying to figure out who’s playing for what team around here, who remembers what and who’s forgotten what. I know Rin’s already seen a couple of people she recognizes, and I found Mira.”
“Hooray for small miracles. How’s she holding up?”
“Her memory comes and goes, but she’s got large portions of it in place. I’m more worried about what’s missing than what she has, but that’s just me,” he sighed. “I’m always trying to make sure there’s nothing in the blindspots coming to kill me. I worry that there’s something in one of her memory holes that we’re going to desperately need and we won’t have access to it.”
“What’s missing?”
Len laughed, rolling his eyes. “Yeah, it doesn’t work that way, Harry. I can’t just ask you what you don’t remember, can I? There’s all sorts of things wrong with that. Anyway, tonight was mostly just supposed to be you and I trading brief info, up until we got attacked by a Nazi clearly out of his element.”
“You’re really thinking that guy just stumbled here from 1944?”
“Not directly, but sure. There’s pockets of weirdness all around this island, so if you told me there were pockets of loose time just drifting over the place, I wouldn’t even bat an eyelash at this point. I’d just ask you how I could spot them moving around.”
“Let’s hope they’re not common enough that we get caught up in one.”
“I can’t imagine they are,” Len said confidently. “Otherwise it would’ve been a lot more of them going missing and then showing up again. It’s gotta be minor things here and there, otherwise the whole place would know about it, instead of just us. But it’s an important lesson about this place that we as a squad need to commit ourselves to remembering – the laws of physics and reality are just guidelines around here, not hard and fast laws. The drifting layout once you get outside of the village boundaries is something we’re all going to have to be especially careful of. No idea why the village itself seems to be immune to it, but right now, it seems like there’s a very clear ‘safe zone’ around the village structures.”
“I’ve got two thoughts about that, boss.”
“Two’s better than zero. Hit me.”
“The first is all the neon. Notice how every building has a neon sign on it of some kind? Many of them are just decorative, so why have them at all? Unless they’re more than just decorative.”
“I’d wondered if the neon served another purpose, but that’s a definite thing I had not considered. What’s the other?”
Harry led Len over towards the edge of the village, bringing him right towards the sharp demarcation where village turned into jungle, tapping the thick line with his foot. “You see this? I noticed it when I first got out of the water, because it basically circles the village and the road leading to and from the dock. I’m not sure but I think it’s either a buried line of copper or iron, and it encases everything that seems like people are mostly staying to, so I’d bet the weirdness doesn’t generally cross it. It might be like the eruv that encircles Manhattan.”
“The whatnow?” Len asked.
“You’ve probably never noticed it, chief, but there’s over a dozen miles of fishing line hanging around the border of Manhattan to allow Orthodox Jews to interact with areas outside of their homes on the Sabbath. It’s called an eruv. I read about it when I was studying some of the lesser known facts about New York City. It might be something like that.”
“If it’s iron, there’s also legends that ghosts and spirits can’t cross iron boundaries. Maybe that figures into it too.”
Harry shrugged. “At that point, boss, you’re talking more theology and mythology than you are anything I’ve got real world experience with, but hey, maybe it means something, maybe it means nothing. But the ring around the area is something I noticed.”
“A’ight, get back to your ladies, Harry, and figure out what you’re gonna do about having to say goodbye to one of them, because this place doesn’t take no for an answer, so the last thing you wanna do is get stuck with the choice getting taken from you.”
“Got it. Thanks chief.” Harry shook Len’s hand then pulled him into an appreciative hug, taking the older soldier slightly offguard before both men chuckled. “Sorry, just needed to remind myself that I’m not alone here.”
“Together until we go down swinging, Harry. You know the rules.”
The two men parted under cover of darkness.
Len
He’d tried not to let on too much, but the sight of the Nazi had rattled his cage a little bit. Before that, he’d been able to write off much of the weirdness that he’d seen as things that existing in the fringe of plausibility, but with an actual goddamned Nazi having been transported from sometime in the 1940s to now without aging a day, he had to admit they’d stepped into genuine science fiction bullshit now, which was the last thing he needed.
Len missed the days when all the weirdness in his life could’ve been attributed to people doing weird people shit. He also wished like hell Mick would show up sooner rather than later, because the man’s knowledge would’ve been incredibly useful right about now, but he would have to just keep waiting, because there was no sign as to when Mick would arrive at the island.
Walking through the village at night reminded him of incredibly late nights in Japan, navigating along empty streets that still somehow seemed to have life in them because of the amount of lighting still illuminating the area.
Once the sun went down, the residents of the island tended to be far less active, at least in the public spaces, something Len was still struggling to acclimate to. He had always preferred to live his life in the evening hours, but that meant that he was now vulnerable when he slept, since there were no doors that locked or latched anywhere on the island. Even more complicated, all the doors for the apartments and buildings generally opened outward, so barricading them was damn near impossible.
He’d made his way back over to his building when he suddenly dipped to hide down behind the edge of the corner he’d been about to turn around, his eyes having caught motion near the bottom of the stairs at his building.
At the bottom of the stairs, he wasn’t entirely even sure what he saw. It was vaguely human shaped, but it was mostly comprised of lines of light, giving a weird impression of a person without it being an actual person. There were white glowing columns where arms, legs and the torso should be, and a weird blue ball of electrical light sparking at the top where the head should be. It was human shaped and sized, but other than that, it was almost like an after image of a person moving through the space. It had no hands, but there were two big sweeping curved edges extending from the ends of the arms like scythes, and Len could hear a humming sound like an electrical generator caught out in the rain before the figure let out a little cry of frustration. Then it turned and ran straight towards the forest, disappearing into nothingness as soon as it crossed over the borderline that Harry had just shown him a little earlier.
Len waited a couple more minutes, as if he was nervous the thing might unexpectantly come back, before he eventually felt safe and secure enough to walk out into the open. As he approached the area where he’d seen the thing standing, he found there was a sigil of some kind painted in mud on the wall. He wondered if it had kept the creature away or summoned it to the building in the first place.
He did a quick perimeter sweep around the building, but didn’t see anything else out of place from when he left it. The inability to lock anything had slowly been doing his head in, because it meant the only things he could guarantee were safe were the things he had on his person at any given time. He couldn’t store things, he couldn’t stash things and hiding things seemed a fool’s errand, especially since there were so many people at The Retreat that it was still far too early to be making friend and foe assessments beyond those he’d known before his arrival here, and even those he wasn’t completely rock solid on either.
He’d kept the knife they’d taken from the Nazi although he’d done his best to tuck it beneath his shirt, to keep it concealed. It wasn’t much, but it was something and something was better than nothing on an island where weapons seemed to be almost impossible to come by. His German was passable, but not great, and the last thing he wanted to do was intrude on the thoughts of a deadman, but he was fairly certain he didn’t have much of a choice.
Len headed inside and moved into the unit he and Mira were staying in. She was still sound asleep in the bed, where he’d left her a bit ago. He turned on a reading light in the living room area, opened the envelope and slowly began to translate and read.
‘My dearest Claudia,
If you are reading this, then I have died on this god forsaken island, and for what? There is no glory of battle here. There are no real foes to fight beyond the monsters that come and savagely pick us off from the dark. We have been told that our stay here will only be a few months, but after three months, the supply drops stopped, and we have seen no sign of anyone coming to relieve us. Klaus and Rainer decided to take the Uboat to go back towards Australia, in an effort to receive updated orders or just even find out why we have seen a lack of supplies. At least they told us they were going to do that, but I don’t even know how they would get access to the Uboat after Hauptmann Schenk went missing a few weeks ago. We have been unable to regain access to the underground part of the facility.
I fear I may die soon, Claudia, but if I do fall, know that my last thoughts were of you and our dearest Stephen. This damn island has taken everything from me but my soul and my life, and I fear both of those will fall soon.
Eternally your husband,
Olaf Grannemann”
As much as he wanted the letter to be fake, there had been something undeniably terrified in the man’s eyes, and he’d come at the two of them as if they seemed like easy targets, so it was entirely possible that he’d killed before. The paper didn’t feel like modern paper. He pulled the knife out beneath his shirt and started to examine it in the light.
While he wasn’t a military historian, the general shape and feel of it were certainly not modern in make. He’d held classic K-bar knives a bunch, but this was older, treated with a bit more respect because it was clear it couldn’t be easily and quickly replaced.
“What’ve you got there?” he heard Mira’s voice say. He looked up to see her standing in the doorframe, dressed in the nightgown she’d been wearing to bed.
“Would you believe me if I told you I killed a Nazi using his own knife tonight?” he said to her, hoping like hell she’d just call him crazy. “How much do you know about older weapons?”
“Enough that I can probably tell you you’re full of shit, but lemme take a look at it.”
“Look at this first,” he said, pulling the empty P38 from his pocket, setting it on the table in front of him. “Don’t worry, it doesn’t have any bullets in it.”
She moved over and kneeled next to the table, picking up the weapon, holding it up to get a better look at it. “It’s a P38, alright. Everyone seems to think all the Nazis were using Lugers, but the P38 was issued to way more troops. Despite the wear and tear from use, it’s in remarkable shape for being like eighty years old.”
“That’s just it, Mira,” he sighed. “I think it may have skipped a bit…”
Comments
JC
I had to Google Translate the Deutsch: “Are you some kind of demon?” Len's face scrunched up in annoyance. “The Nazis are long gone, soldier. Why are you still in uniform?” “What? I do not believe you. Berlin would never fall,” the man wheezed. “English people?” “American. How long have you been in the jungle?” Len said, crouching down next to the man. “I've stopped counting the days, but I... think it must be July 1944.” “Your world is long gone, soldier. Now rest and join your friends.”
J N
So far this story is feeling a bit like the old TV show Lost...but with more spies and people in general.
