Bahia
Tango swipes his arm across the top of her dresser, sending perfume phials and framed photos flying. “I said get lost! Or do you want to hang around until I can get it up again?”
Kerry regards the hunched, panting, disheveled figure for a long moment, her expression of disbelief segueing to one of grim acceptance. Then, with slow pained motions, she slides off the bed. One stocking clumps loosely around her calf. She makes no move to rummage in closet or bureau, but simply retrieves purse and coat, and sidles out the apartment without further imploring or lamentations, like a prisoner jailed for decades and now facing the long-imagined but unreally materialized end of her incarceration and the prospect of greeting an alien, unwelcoming world.
During her staircase descent, she pauses on a landing to fix her stockings. Adjusting them at her upper thigh, she pulls her hand back wetly rust-smeared. “Oh, Christ, not now.” She rummages in her purse, finds a scuff-cased sanitary pad, unwraps it and clumsily layers it into place at her crotch, heedless of her semi-public exposure.
Again, no friendly beggar graces the ground-floor vestibule. Kerry steps out onto the empty sidewalk. Pulling her thin coat more tightly about her, she walks away from her violated lost home.
Halfway toward her only possible destination, she spies a lone soldier at the same moment he catches sight of her. She stops and stands in an unthreatening posture, hands well away from her pockets. The soldier advances quickly, rifle held at the ready.
A lithe young black man, he wears his fatigues and equipment awkwardly, as if newly conscripted. Beneath the brim of his helmet, his features summon the image of a chiseled pagan icon, somatic planes of burnished tropical lumbers. A patch across his breast proclaims him PVT. SHANGOLD.
Unmoving, Kerry shivers against the encroaching chill. “I have my ID in my purse—”
“Shut up. Come with me.”
“Why? Wait a minute—where’s your partner?”
The soldier hooks her arm. “I said shut up!” He yanks her forward, and Kerry is forced to stumble ahead of him. Only a few dozen steps separate them from the maw of a dark alley. Propelled within that dank, fetid channel, Kerry pitches boomingly against a big metal dumpster. Strap snapping, her purse tumbles away. When she turns, the soldier has slung his weapon across his back.
“Kneel down.”
“No, don’t—”
The soldier clamps hands atop her shoulders and forces her to her knees. Grit bites her nyloned knees, and the toes of her shoes scrape twin troughs in the alley’s debris. Transferring a clawlike grip to the short hair feathering her nape, the rogue soldier cants Kerry’s face to within a few inches of his trousers. He unsnaps his waistband fastening and drags down his zipper. He wears no briefs, and his hair-nested unclipped cock sags atop plummy wrinkled balls. A blunt thumb lofts his meat toward her mouth, while two fingers of the same hand pry between her lips, nails scraping teeth.
Kerry reluctantly allows her mouth to be pried open, and the soldier’s cock communions her tongue. Her mouth’s hot moisture catalyzes the growth of his dick, and it burgeons swiftly between her lips. Puppetting her head while he rocks his hips back and forth, the black man fucks her mouth with growing intensity.
Kerry’s eyes are closed, and she perforce supports herself against the soldier’s hairy thighs. Gutteral groans escape him, and an accelerating tempo betrays his impending climax.
At the last instant, he pulls entirely out. Kerry partially averts her face, and he pumps his fragrant jism across the gap between them to splash athwart her birthmark: silver lakes clump that wine-dark continent, mercury flecks the forest of her lashes.
As Kerry raises a hand to her smirched face, something cuts the air above her head. There sounds a concussive thump, inanimate material connecting with flesh and bone, and then the soldier is crumpled across the alley floor.
Kerry clumsily gathers her feet beneath her, stands and faces the dumpster.
Half-revealed in the open vertical trash door, like Punch in a pantomime, stands the beggar who haunts her building. Leering gap-toothedly, he clutches a bent length of pipe, its threaded business end blackened with blood.
“Better run, lady. Better run.”
Her hand is still trembling when she places it on the security scanner in the atrium of the Diaverde building. Ensconced in their impregnable synthetic transparent turret, the brace of clean-cut night guards watch her suspiciously; even recognizing her, they are plainly distrustful of her dirty, disarrayed, purseless state. When the elevator acknowledges her and invites her onboard, the sentinels minimally relax.
