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fredbassettTitle : Between a Rock and a Hard Place, Part 3 of 3
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Primeval
Rating : 18
Characters : Ryan, Leek, Lester, Finn, Ditzy, Becker, OCs
Disclaimer : Not mine, no money made, don’t sue.
Word Count : This part 4,811. (Total 12,671)
Spoilers : None
Warnings : Non-con, rape, inappropriate bodily fluids and a very, very filthy mattress. Need I say more?
Summary : Ryan wakes up in a cell. Neither he nor the other person know where they are or why they’ve been kidnapped.
A/N : Written for the very lovely![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fififolle ’s birthday, which should really be a warning in itself, I think! Thank you to lukadreaming for being brave enough to beta this.
*****
It was obvious from the moment the guard stepped into the cell that they were in for even more trouble than usual. He had a look of anger on his face that Ryan hadn’t seen before. Someone had clearly crossed him and it looked very much like they were going to pay the price.
Ryan tensed, wondered what was about to happen.
“I think it’s time you had some fun, soldier boy,” the guard commented. “And Ollie. I don’t see why I should always be the one to do the hard work around here.”
Cold fingers started to twist themselves into Ryan’s guts. He wondered if they’d finally reached the point where he was going to have to risk fighting back.
“Fuck him,” the guard ordered. “I want to watch you fuck him.”
Ryan stayed where he was on the mattress. Yes, it looked like they’d finally reached a line he wasn’t prepared to cross. He kept his eyes fixed on the man’s boots. They were clean again today.
“Fuck him or I’ll fuck you.”
Ryan glanced up. As threats went, that one didn’t mean a lot. He was just surprised that the guard hadn’t already made use of his body that way. The man’s eyes stared down at him, as soulless as ever and Ryan knew exactly how this was going to end.
They played the usual games for a few minutes, with the guard repeating his threats and Ryan repeating his refusals while Leek just curled up into an even tighter ball in the corner. If it had been a choice between the man smashing Leek’s hands, then Ryan’s, the way he’d threatened once before, it might have been a harder decision, but if it was a simple matter of his arse or Leek’s, he could live with that. When their tormentor finally lost patience and brought his dick out to play, Ryan simply went over onto his hands and knees on the mattress and did his best to relax his muscles, knowing from past experience how much rape hurt if you tried to resist.
He knew he was cutting off his nose to spite his face by not trying to suck the guard’s cock first to achieve even a small amount of lubrication but for once, Ryan had gone beyond the point of playing games. If this was going to happen then he just wanted it over with, then at least the gut-gnawing anticipation would be over with.
The guard dropped to his knees behind him and Ryan felt his arse-cheeks being splayed to reveal his hole. He drew in a long breath and exhaled slowly, trying to detach his mind from his body. The penetration when it came was every bit as bad as he’d expected. The guard’s cock was not particularly long, but it was thick. The man thrust himself inside Ryan’s dry, tight channel with one hard shove. Ryan’s hands curled into fists on the mattress but he managed to hold back a scream.
Next to him on the stained mattress, Oliver Leek uncurled enough to put one hand out, tentatively, and rest it on Ryan’s fingers. He opened his eyes and saw Leek looking at him, his eyes dark with sympathy. Ryan made no attempt to pull his hand away.
The assault hurt more than Ryan had been expecting, more than the other rapes he’d been forced to endure, and by the time it was finally over, his arse was slick with a mixture of his own blood and the guard’s come. He was breathing heavily and had managed to bite his lower lip with the effort of not crying out. They taught you a lot in Hereford, but even the British Army drew the line at teaching you how to put up with some bastard ramming his cock up your arse although in his experience the army were actually surprisingly good at helping you to deal with it afterwards. Even if they didn’t like to advertise quite how frequently serving soldiers found themselves in this sort of position.
When his attacker pulled out, Ryan slumped down onto his elbows, his fingers still entwined with Leek’s. He knew what he was going to be ordered to do next and the temptation to bite the bastard’s dick off at the root was going to be almost too strong to resist.
“Clean it.”
Before Ryan had a chance to move, Leek uncurled himself, letting go of Ryan’s hand, and got up onto his knees. Ryan looked around, his stomach clenching in horror as he watched his cell mate take his place at the guard’s feet.
And afterwards, when they were alone again, it was Leek who cleaned Ryan’s torn and bloody arse and then held his hand again while Ryan counted every brick in the opposite wall at least ten times over.
* * * * *
Ryan ran his fingers through stubble that was very rapidly turning into a short beard. From the look of the hair on Oliver Leek’s sunken cheeks he estimated that the man had now been in captivity for something approaching a month and, at a rough guess, Ryan had been in the cell with him for nearly half that time. He’d kept himself active with a mixture of sit-ups, press-ups and other exercises, but he was getting tired more quickly now. Their diet wasn’t exactly conducive to excess energy, although Ryan had a suspicion that the food was actually more nutritious that it looked – or tasted.
The guard still amused himself at their expense, mainly by demanding blowjobs, but on one occasion he’d made good on his initial threat and had clearly taken a lot of pleasure in forcing Ryan to kneel at his feet while he’d pissed over him again, even forcing him to open his mouth and swallow. Like the rape, Ryan had been expecting it, but that still hadn’t made it any easier to bear.
The odd thing about their guard was the way his moods appeared to vary depending on which side he wore his holstered pistol. Ryan had taken to wondering whether he even dressed his dick on the same side to match, but as the guy always fished his own cock out of his pants he had no evidence to base that supposition on. When the man wore the Sig Sauer on his left thigh it seemed to mean he was in a mood for pissing or blowjobs, or sometimes both. When he dressed to the right it meant he wanted full sex. Ryan’s arse was now in as much of a mess as Leek’s. He’d lost count of the number of times they’d each been raped. The only thing that did surprise him was that neither of them had succumbed to an infection, and he was starting to think that they were being fed some kind of medication in their food, and possibly other drugs as well.
Ryan’s brain felt like it was in a permanent fog and it was becoming harder and harder to stick to any kind of exercise regime. He found himself drifting off to sleep more often, curled up with Leek on the soiled mattress, arms around each other for warmth and comfort. Even the length of their beards wasn’t a very reliable indicator of the passage of time, as Ryan remembered reading somewhere that hair growth would slow down in circumstances of extreme privation, and he imagined that what they were going through would qualify for that.
It was becoming increasingly obvious that he would have to try something – and soon. Leek had lost even more weight and even the filthy white shirt failed to disguise that. It was becoming almost too much of an effort to keep up even basic standards of hygiene and Leek was starting to whimper in protest when Ryan insisted on him removing his rags of clothing so that Ryan could run wet hands over Leek’s body in an attempt to remove the unappealing mix of bodily fluids left behind by their guard’s attentions.
Eventually, Ryan knew that if he didn’t take action soon, he would soon be beyond the stage of doing so. He’d stopped allowing himself to hope that they stood any chance of rescue. If they were being drugged through the food, he’d be better starving himself just to see if it did make any difference to his mental state. If that didn’t make a difference he’d have to see if they were being slipped something in the water. He wouldn’t last long without drinking, but maybe a day – or what he guessed at as a day – would be enough to make a difference. But he’d check out his theory about the food first.
He wasn’t counting on Oliver Leek for any physical back-up, so he simply told his companion that he wasn’t hungry and Leek accepted his explanation at face value.
Ryan had just broken the third rule of captivity. He was now refusing food.
* * * * *
The sound of heavy, booted footsteps in the corridor was now enough to elevate Ryan’s heart rate. The knowledge that it was a purely Pavlovian response didn’t help. But this time the spike of adrenaline in his body felt different, less impaired by drugs. A prickle of excitement ran through Ryan’s fingers. He glanced down at Leek. The man was curled on his side facing the wall, his shirt fisted in both hands. Ryan reached out and gave his companion’s bony shoulder a gentle squeeze.
Ryan’s eyes went immediately to the guard’s thigh holster. He was dressing to the left today. Ryan hoped it would be just a blowjob this time as he was heartily sick of the smell – and taste – of piss. Their mattress now stank of it, as did the whole cell. He stayed were he was, waiting for the guard to speak.
“Suck me.”
The relief almost brought a smile to Ryan’s face. He really was pretty sick of the alternatives.
He took the guard’s cock in his mouth and got ready to see if he could beat his own record for bringing the man off. He’d got it down to a fine art by now. Last time he’d even managed to take 12 seconds off his own personal best, getting it down – by his reckoning – to a mere four minutes six seconds.
He was just coming up on three and a half minutes when the sound of a distant alarm caused the guard’s dick to jerk in his mouth, scraping it against Ryan’s teeth. The man swore violently and fisted his hand in Ryan’s hair. The alarm continued to sound. In the same instant, Ryan bit down hard, locking his teeth together and grinding his jaw, just for good measure. Blood burst in his mouth like he’d just bitten into an over-ripe plum. Moving with all the speed he could muster, Ryan went for the guard’s holster with his right hand, grabbing at the pistol-grip while he worried at the man’s dick like a dog at a bone.
A hand pounded him in the face as the guard’s yell of pain echoed in the brick-lined cell. In the background, the alarm continued its siren-song.
The Sig Sauer cleared the holster in Ryan’s left hand. He jerked his head away from the guard’s groin, spitting out a mouthful of hot blood at the same time as racking the slide on the automatic pistol. A second later he’d put a 9mm bullet in the man’s gut and a second one into his head.
Leek jerked in shock at the deafening report of the pistol in the confined space of the cell. For a horrible moment Ryan thought his cell mate had been shot but then he realised Leek was just cowering away from the sudden violence.
A dark shadow appeared in the doorway and Ryan squeezed off two more shots, the Sig Sauer held in both hands now. His first shot took the man in the thigh, his second in the throat. Blood sprayed into the cell and the man fell forward, collapsing over the other black-uniformed body splayed out on the rank floor.
Ryan scrambled to his feet, fighting to remain in control of his body’s reactions as he stared down at two dead men.
Two identical dead men.
They had the same craggy features, cleft chin and lined brow. The only differences between them were that one of them wore his gun-holster on the right thigh and the other wore his on his left. Oh, and one of them had his now-limp dick hanging on by no more than a scrap of flesh and the other had lost the top half of his head to Ryan’s second bullet, but there was still enough of his face left to make the comparison valid.
With the sound of the alarm still ringing in his ears, Ryan doubled over and lost several precious seconds of his escape attempt vomiting up one of the men’s blood.
* * * * *
Whatever was happening in the rest of their prison had clearly been enough to prevent anyone taking the time to investigate four gunshots.
Wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, Ryan peered around the cell door, staring for the first time out into the white-painted corridor. One end was a blank wall, the other led to a closed door. Two other doors opened off the corridor on the same side as their cell. Neither was locked. Both rooms were empty, although there was a large stain from what looked like old blood in the middle of one of them. As far as Ryan could tell they were in some sort of basement, with service pipes and ducts running the length of the corridor at ceiling height. He had no idea what was going on anywhere else, but they needed to get out of here, and fast, but he didn’t like the idea of making an escape attempt stark naked. It would make him conspicuous, to say the least.
Working as quickly as possible, Ryan started stripping the two bodies. “Oliver, help me!”
Leek’s eyes were wide with fright and Ryan half-expected him to simply curl up into a ball again, but instead his companion scrambled over to help him. Between them they got the second man’s equipment vest and jacket off. Ryan pulled them on, his fingers fumbling with the fastenings while Leek pulled off the first guard’s boots and did his best to divest him of his trousers. The guard’s half-severed cock flopped bloodily against a pale thigh.
Ryan pulled on the black trousers. They were too big for him, but the belt would keep them up. Likewise, the man’s feet were bigger than his, but the socks helped. He strapped the holsters on both thighs, grabbed all the spare magazines he could find and was ready for action.
“Stay behind me, Oliver. I haven’t a fucking clue what we’re going to find when we get out of here.”
“There’ll be more of them,” Leek said, staring down at the bodies. “I know there was a third one, but I haven’t seen him since before they brought you here.”
“How did you tell them apart?” Ryan was groping to make sense of what he’d just seen and at that point any information at all could help save their lives. He now realised what Leek had been hinting at when they’d first discussed the guards.
“One didn’t seem to like hurting me as much as the others. He… he gave me my clothes. And brought the mattress.” Leek clutched his shirt and tried to pull it down, seemingly conscious for the first time in a long while of his naked legs. “There were others, too, but none of them lasted long.”
Jesus, Ryan didn’t have the time to deal with any of this right now, nor did he want to think of any of the guards as having more humanity than the others – not when he wasn’t even sure that they were human – and not when he was almost certainly going to have to kill some more of them.
With Leek staying close to the wall behind, Ryan made his way down the corridor. He could definitely hear shots now. The deep-throated boom of a combat shotgun echoed dully on the other side of the door, followed by the higher-pitched chatter of someone emptying the clip of an assault rifle with indecent haste.
Ryan debated waiting for the noise of combat to cease but his instincts told him that he’d be better off taking advantage of whatever the hell was going on in the rest of the building. If it was a rescue attempt, then the faster he joined up with his own side, the better. If it wasn’t, then hopefully he and Leek would have a chance to slip away in whatever melee was going on.
The door opened onto another corridor with a flight of steps leading upwards. The sound of gunfire was louder now, mingled with something that sounded suspiciously like the roar of a large animal. He didn’t like the sound of it at all, but their choices were strictly limited. He climbed the stairs, gesturing for Leek to remain at the bottom until he knew what they were up against.
Ryan opened the door and stepped out just as at least three flashbangs detonated at once.
The blast knocked him backwards and the subsequent disorientation caused by the sudden loss of sight coupled with the disturbance to the fluid of his inner ear sent him backwards down the stairs. Ryan’s last thought before the world went black was that it would be ironic after everything he’d been through to end up dying of a broken neck.
* * * * *
On this occasion, Ryan came awake in his own time, without the aid of a boot in his guts. OK, he was still lying on a concrete floor, but this time he was fully dressed – still in the uniform he’d taken from the dead guard – and someone was holding one of his hands very tightly.
“We’ve found him!” The yell came from the top of the stairs, and was followed immediately, in a softer tone, by the words, “OK, mate, you can put the gun down, we’re the good guys.”
Ryan opened his eyes and realised that Oliver Leek was crouched next to him on the floor, one hand holding Ryan’s, the other hand holding the Sig Sauer that Ryan must have dropped in his tumble down the stairs. His hand was shaking badly and Ryan was amazed he hadn’t pulled the trigger by accident.
“Honest, mate, you can trust us, put the gun down…”
“Didn’t your mum teach you the magic word, Finn?” Ryan asked, shaking his head and swallowing hard in an attempt to clear his ears. He squeezed Leek’s hand. “He’s on our side, Oliver. Please put the gun down.”
The pistol fell from Leek’s nerveless fingers and he slumped to the ground in a dead faint.
“Christ on a bike!” Finn took the stairs two at a time and dropped to his knees next to Ryan. “Boss, are you all right?”
Hysterical laughter bubbled up in Ryan’s throat. “Better for seeing you, mate.” He glanced up the stairs at the sound of someone pumping shell after shell out of a combat shotgun. “What the fuck’s happening up there?”
“New captain,” grinned Finn. “He’s the cautious type.”
“Is Ditz with you?”
Finn nodded as the boom of another grenade sounded above them. “Sounds like they’re mopping up,” he commented. “I’ll go and fetch him.”
With the sound of a minor war still raging overhead, Ryan simply tugged Oliver Leek into his arms and slumped against the wall, waiting for the rest of the cavalry to arrive.
* * * * *
The usually imperturbable medic stared down at him with a look of shock on his face that Ryan had never seen before. Ryan knew he probably looked a mess, but he was demonstrably alive and in possession of all his limbs, and Ditzy didn’t have x-ray vision, so there was no way he could see the state of Ryan’s arse. So why in the name of hell did he look like he’d just seen a ghost?
“Get Lester,” Ditzy ordered, addressing the command to Finn.
The young soldier looked down, did a sudden and equally inexplicable double-take, said, “Fucking hell,” and then took the stairs two at a time.
“His name’s Oliver Leek,” Ryan said, unsettled by the look on Ditzy’s face. “We’ve shared a cell for… since they snatched me,” he amended, still unclear how long he’d been in captivity.
“You were taken 16 days ago, boss,” Ditzy said, still staring down at them. “OK, let me take a look at him. What sort of state are you in?”
“I’m alive,” Ryan said, closing down that line of questioning immediately. “They’ve had Oliver a couple of weeks longer than me. He’s more than half-starved. We’ve been drugged – probably in the food – and he’s been the victim of multiple rapes. He can’t take much more, mate, so treat him gently, OK?” Ryan saw the look on his friend’s face and added, “Yeah, they did me too, but I don’t want to talk about it right now. I want to get Oliver out of here and into hospital, and I want to stay with him.”
The medic made a rapid check on Leek’s breathing and pulse. By the time he’d finished, the noises from the floor above them were starting to subside and Leek had returned to consciousness, although his eyes were still haunted and afraid. With Ditzy’s help, Ryan got the man onto his feet and looped his arm around Leek’s wait to keep him there.
“Ditz, are you going to tell me what the fuck is going on?” Ryan hissed, rattled by the look in his friend’s eyes every time he looked at the man Ryan had shared a cell with for the last 16 days.
“No, Captain Ryan,” drawled a voice that Ryan had last heard in a team briefing the afternoon he’d been kidnapped. “I imagine that honour is going to fall to me. Lieutenant Owen, after what we’ve just witnessed upstairs, I’m surprised this has come as so much of a shock.” Immaculate in his hand-made Italian suit and bright pink tie, Lester made his way down the stairs, looking as composed as ever and remarked, “Hello, Oliver. I’m sorry it took us so long to find you.” His expression softened for a moment as he added, “I had no idea that I was putting you at such risk by offering you the job.”
Oliver Leek met Lester’s eyes briefly, but Ryan could see the effort it was costing him. Old habits were going to be very hard to break. He mumbled something that might have been “That’s all right, Sir James,” and then promptly stared at the floor again.
To Ryan’s immense surprise, Lester unbuttoned his jacket, slipped it off his shoulders to reveal a pristine white cotton shirt and held the jacket out to Leek.
Ryan could feel the trembling in the other man’s thin body and Leek made no move to take the proffered clothing. Ryan held out his hand for it instead, and draped it around Leek’s shoulders. “Oliver’s used to having to earn his clothes, sir,” Ryan said quietly.
“So how did you get those?” Lester asked, staring at Ryan’s black uniform.
“I killed the men who were wearing them,” Ryan said, jerking his head at the open cell door.
Lester stepped past Ryan, his nose wrinkling in disgust at the rank smell of urine mixed with sweat and blood and stared into the cell. The sight that met his eyes made the colour drain from Lester’s face and for a moment, Ryan thought that his ice-cold boss was about to lose his famed composure.
“I’m sorry, Ryan,” Lester said quietly, his eyes still resting on the two dead bodies. “That was not one of my more sensitive questions. In my defence, today has proved rather… eventful, to say the least.”
“Sir, what the fuck is going on?” Ryan knew this wasn’t exactly the time for a detailed debrief but he had to know. “What are… were… they?”
Lester hesitated, then sighed. “I believe they’re what popular science might describe as clones, Ryan.” He glanced at Leek and said quietly, “If it’s any consolation, Oliver, the one they made of you didn’t have an ounce of your administrative abilities. It also wrote with the wrong hand, which is what first alerted me to the possibility that something was rotten in the state of Denmark, so to speak. I’m just sorry it took us so long to track this facility down.” He dragged his eyes away from the bodies on the floor with an obvious effort. “Owen, take our colleagues back to the medical facilities in the ARC. Make sure they’re well looked after.”
The scene that met Ryan’s eyes on the floor above their cell looked like something out of a horror film. A huge, cavernous room was filled with the acrid smell of the flashbangs that the soldiers had been letting off. The corpses of several large animals were strewn brokenly on the floor. He recognised something that looked like a large sabre-toothed cat, but there were others that he’d never seen before, including something that looked similar to an elephant seal, only twice the size, but with long, grasping forearms. Next to it, lay one of the creatures that Cutter’s wife had claimed had followed her through an anomaly from the future. As Ryan stared down at the body, its bony fingers twitched once and a red light on some sort of small box melded to its bony skull blinked once then went out.
On the ground were the bodies of several more of the black-uniformed guards. It seemed like none of them had been willing to surrender. They were all identical to the two that Ryan had killed.
Another body lay to one side, dressed differently to the others in a pin-striped suit. Ryan knew without needing to be told whose face it would be wearing. At his side, he heard Oliver Leek draw in a sharp breath. Leek walked over to the body, shivering from head to foot, and stared down at it. Ryan could see a spreading pool of blood from a ragged tear across the dead man’s throat. He wasn’t sure which of the creatures had been responsible, but from the carnage all around it looked like there were plenty of candidates.
He reached out and rested his hand on Leeks’ shoulder. “It’s dead, Oliver. Whatever it is, it’s fucking dead.”
Leek gave an almost imperceptible nod and then turned away from his own double, a look of horror deeply etched on his face. Ryan wondered hazily if somewhere amidst the chaos all around them there was something that looked like him as well.
A tall, dark-haired soldier with a combat shotgun resting on his shoulder was kneeling over one of the bodies checking for signs of life. He got to his feet, smiled and held out his hand. “Hello, sir.”
Ryan shook the hand being was offered to him. “Didn’t expect to see you here, Becker, I thought you were still in Iraq.” He glanced at the gun. “New girlfriend?”
Captain Becker nodded. “She’s a real goer.”
“So we heard. She’s noisy, as well.”
The banality of their exchange was nothing more than a means of disguising the fact that the adrenaline in Ryan’s system was starting to take him down almost as quickly as one of the slugs from Becker’s Mossburg 590 would have done. He could feel weakness creeping into every limb and he was starting to tremble almost as much as his former cell-mate. Becker was one of the brightest young officers that Ryan had ever worked with and he went up even further in Ryan’s estimation when he didn’t make any offers of help.
Ryan felt like shit but he was determined to make it out of the warehouse under his own steam and it looked like Oliver Leek felt the same. Together, he and Ryan stepped outside into wintery daylight. There was a chill in the air and Lester’s jacket wouldn’t be providing much protection against the cold but in spite of that, both men simply stood there, drinking in the smell of clean, fresh air for the first time in weeks.
Silent tears were tracking through the grime on Leek’s face. Ryan tightened his arm around his companion’s waist and tried – and failed – to bring his own emotions under control.
They’d both survived. That was all that mattered.
He’d deal with everything else later.
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Primeval
Rating : 18
Characters : Ryan, Leek, Lester, Finn, Ditzy, Becker, OCs
Disclaimer : Not mine, no money made, don’t sue.
Word Count : This part 4,811. (Total 12,671)
Spoilers : None
Warnings : Non-con, rape, inappropriate bodily fluids and a very, very filthy mattress. Need I say more?
Summary : Ryan wakes up in a cell. Neither he nor the other person know where they are or why they’ve been kidnapped.
A/N : Written for the very lovely
fififolle ’s birthday, which should really be a warning in itself, I think! Thank you to lukadreaming for being brave enough to beta this. *****
It was obvious from the moment the guard stepped into the cell that they were in for even more trouble than usual. He had a look of anger on his face that Ryan hadn’t seen before. Someone had clearly crossed him and it looked very much like they were going to pay the price.
Ryan tensed, wondered what was about to happen.
“I think it’s time you had some fun, soldier boy,” the guard commented. “And Ollie. I don’t see why I should always be the one to do the hard work around here.”
Cold fingers started to twist themselves into Ryan’s guts. He wondered if they’d finally reached the point where he was going to have to risk fighting back.
“Fuck him,” the guard ordered. “I want to watch you fuck him.”
Ryan stayed where he was on the mattress. Yes, it looked like they’d finally reached a line he wasn’t prepared to cross. He kept his eyes fixed on the man’s boots. They were clean again today.
“Fuck him or I’ll fuck you.”
Ryan glanced up. As threats went, that one didn’t mean a lot. He was just surprised that the guard hadn’t already made use of his body that way. The man’s eyes stared down at him, as soulless as ever and Ryan knew exactly how this was going to end.
They played the usual games for a few minutes, with the guard repeating his threats and Ryan repeating his refusals while Leek just curled up into an even tighter ball in the corner. If it had been a choice between the man smashing Leek’s hands, then Ryan’s, the way he’d threatened once before, it might have been a harder decision, but if it was a simple matter of his arse or Leek’s, he could live with that. When their tormentor finally lost patience and brought his dick out to play, Ryan simply went over onto his hands and knees on the mattress and did his best to relax his muscles, knowing from past experience how much rape hurt if you tried to resist.
He knew he was cutting off his nose to spite his face by not trying to suck the guard’s cock first to achieve even a small amount of lubrication but for once, Ryan had gone beyond the point of playing games. If this was going to happen then he just wanted it over with, then at least the gut-gnawing anticipation would be over with.
The guard dropped to his knees behind him and Ryan felt his arse-cheeks being splayed to reveal his hole. He drew in a long breath and exhaled slowly, trying to detach his mind from his body. The penetration when it came was every bit as bad as he’d expected. The guard’s cock was not particularly long, but it was thick. The man thrust himself inside Ryan’s dry, tight channel with one hard shove. Ryan’s hands curled into fists on the mattress but he managed to hold back a scream.
Next to him on the stained mattress, Oliver Leek uncurled enough to put one hand out, tentatively, and rest it on Ryan’s fingers. He opened his eyes and saw Leek looking at him, his eyes dark with sympathy. Ryan made no attempt to pull his hand away.
The assault hurt more than Ryan had been expecting, more than the other rapes he’d been forced to endure, and by the time it was finally over, his arse was slick with a mixture of his own blood and the guard’s come. He was breathing heavily and had managed to bite his lower lip with the effort of not crying out. They taught you a lot in Hereford, but even the British Army drew the line at teaching you how to put up with some bastard ramming his cock up your arse although in his experience the army were actually surprisingly good at helping you to deal with it afterwards. Even if they didn’t like to advertise quite how frequently serving soldiers found themselves in this sort of position.
When his attacker pulled out, Ryan slumped down onto his elbows, his fingers still entwined with Leek’s. He knew what he was going to be ordered to do next and the temptation to bite the bastard’s dick off at the root was going to be almost too strong to resist.
“Clean it.”
Before Ryan had a chance to move, Leek uncurled himself, letting go of Ryan’s hand, and got up onto his knees. Ryan looked around, his stomach clenching in horror as he watched his cell mate take his place at the guard’s feet.
And afterwards, when they were alone again, it was Leek who cleaned Ryan’s torn and bloody arse and then held his hand again while Ryan counted every brick in the opposite wall at least ten times over.
* * * * *
Ryan ran his fingers through stubble that was very rapidly turning into a short beard. From the look of the hair on Oliver Leek’s sunken cheeks he estimated that the man had now been in captivity for something approaching a month and, at a rough guess, Ryan had been in the cell with him for nearly half that time. He’d kept himself active with a mixture of sit-ups, press-ups and other exercises, but he was getting tired more quickly now. Their diet wasn’t exactly conducive to excess energy, although Ryan had a suspicion that the food was actually more nutritious that it looked – or tasted.
The guard still amused himself at their expense, mainly by demanding blowjobs, but on one occasion he’d made good on his initial threat and had clearly taken a lot of pleasure in forcing Ryan to kneel at his feet while he’d pissed over him again, even forcing him to open his mouth and swallow. Like the rape, Ryan had been expecting it, but that still hadn’t made it any easier to bear.
The odd thing about their guard was the way his moods appeared to vary depending on which side he wore his holstered pistol. Ryan had taken to wondering whether he even dressed his dick on the same side to match, but as the guy always fished his own cock out of his pants he had no evidence to base that supposition on. When the man wore the Sig Sauer on his left thigh it seemed to mean he was in a mood for pissing or blowjobs, or sometimes both. When he dressed to the right it meant he wanted full sex. Ryan’s arse was now in as much of a mess as Leek’s. He’d lost count of the number of times they’d each been raped. The only thing that did surprise him was that neither of them had succumbed to an infection, and he was starting to think that they were being fed some kind of medication in their food, and possibly other drugs as well.
Ryan’s brain felt like it was in a permanent fog and it was becoming harder and harder to stick to any kind of exercise regime. He found himself drifting off to sleep more often, curled up with Leek on the soiled mattress, arms around each other for warmth and comfort. Even the length of their beards wasn’t a very reliable indicator of the passage of time, as Ryan remembered reading somewhere that hair growth would slow down in circumstances of extreme privation, and he imagined that what they were going through would qualify for that.
It was becoming increasingly obvious that he would have to try something – and soon. Leek had lost even more weight and even the filthy white shirt failed to disguise that. It was becoming almost too much of an effort to keep up even basic standards of hygiene and Leek was starting to whimper in protest when Ryan insisted on him removing his rags of clothing so that Ryan could run wet hands over Leek’s body in an attempt to remove the unappealing mix of bodily fluids left behind by their guard’s attentions.
Eventually, Ryan knew that if he didn’t take action soon, he would soon be beyond the stage of doing so. He’d stopped allowing himself to hope that they stood any chance of rescue. If they were being drugged through the food, he’d be better starving himself just to see if it did make any difference to his mental state. If that didn’t make a difference he’d have to see if they were being slipped something in the water. He wouldn’t last long without drinking, but maybe a day – or what he guessed at as a day – would be enough to make a difference. But he’d check out his theory about the food first.
He wasn’t counting on Oliver Leek for any physical back-up, so he simply told his companion that he wasn’t hungry and Leek accepted his explanation at face value.
Ryan had just broken the third rule of captivity. He was now refusing food.
* * * * *
The sound of heavy, booted footsteps in the corridor was now enough to elevate Ryan’s heart rate. The knowledge that it was a purely Pavlovian response didn’t help. But this time the spike of adrenaline in his body felt different, less impaired by drugs. A prickle of excitement ran through Ryan’s fingers. He glanced down at Leek. The man was curled on his side facing the wall, his shirt fisted in both hands. Ryan reached out and gave his companion’s bony shoulder a gentle squeeze.
Ryan’s eyes went immediately to the guard’s thigh holster. He was dressing to the left today. Ryan hoped it would be just a blowjob this time as he was heartily sick of the smell – and taste – of piss. Their mattress now stank of it, as did the whole cell. He stayed were he was, waiting for the guard to speak.
“Suck me.”
The relief almost brought a smile to Ryan’s face. He really was pretty sick of the alternatives.
He took the guard’s cock in his mouth and got ready to see if he could beat his own record for bringing the man off. He’d got it down to a fine art by now. Last time he’d even managed to take 12 seconds off his own personal best, getting it down – by his reckoning – to a mere four minutes six seconds.
He was just coming up on three and a half minutes when the sound of a distant alarm caused the guard’s dick to jerk in his mouth, scraping it against Ryan’s teeth. The man swore violently and fisted his hand in Ryan’s hair. The alarm continued to sound. In the same instant, Ryan bit down hard, locking his teeth together and grinding his jaw, just for good measure. Blood burst in his mouth like he’d just bitten into an over-ripe plum. Moving with all the speed he could muster, Ryan went for the guard’s holster with his right hand, grabbing at the pistol-grip while he worried at the man’s dick like a dog at a bone.
A hand pounded him in the face as the guard’s yell of pain echoed in the brick-lined cell. In the background, the alarm continued its siren-song.
The Sig Sauer cleared the holster in Ryan’s left hand. He jerked his head away from the guard’s groin, spitting out a mouthful of hot blood at the same time as racking the slide on the automatic pistol. A second later he’d put a 9mm bullet in the man’s gut and a second one into his head.
Leek jerked in shock at the deafening report of the pistol in the confined space of the cell. For a horrible moment Ryan thought his cell mate had been shot but then he realised Leek was just cowering away from the sudden violence.
A dark shadow appeared in the doorway and Ryan squeezed off two more shots, the Sig Sauer held in both hands now. His first shot took the man in the thigh, his second in the throat. Blood sprayed into the cell and the man fell forward, collapsing over the other black-uniformed body splayed out on the rank floor.
Ryan scrambled to his feet, fighting to remain in control of his body’s reactions as he stared down at two dead men.
Two identical dead men.
They had the same craggy features, cleft chin and lined brow. The only differences between them were that one of them wore his gun-holster on the right thigh and the other wore his on his left. Oh, and one of them had his now-limp dick hanging on by no more than a scrap of flesh and the other had lost the top half of his head to Ryan’s second bullet, but there was still enough of his face left to make the comparison valid.
With the sound of the alarm still ringing in his ears, Ryan doubled over and lost several precious seconds of his escape attempt vomiting up one of the men’s blood.
* * * * *
Whatever was happening in the rest of their prison had clearly been enough to prevent anyone taking the time to investigate four gunshots.
Wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, Ryan peered around the cell door, staring for the first time out into the white-painted corridor. One end was a blank wall, the other led to a closed door. Two other doors opened off the corridor on the same side as their cell. Neither was locked. Both rooms were empty, although there was a large stain from what looked like old blood in the middle of one of them. As far as Ryan could tell they were in some sort of basement, with service pipes and ducts running the length of the corridor at ceiling height. He had no idea what was going on anywhere else, but they needed to get out of here, and fast, but he didn’t like the idea of making an escape attempt stark naked. It would make him conspicuous, to say the least.
Working as quickly as possible, Ryan started stripping the two bodies. “Oliver, help me!”
Leek’s eyes were wide with fright and Ryan half-expected him to simply curl up into a ball again, but instead his companion scrambled over to help him. Between them they got the second man’s equipment vest and jacket off. Ryan pulled them on, his fingers fumbling with the fastenings while Leek pulled off the first guard’s boots and did his best to divest him of his trousers. The guard’s half-severed cock flopped bloodily against a pale thigh.
Ryan pulled on the black trousers. They were too big for him, but the belt would keep them up. Likewise, the man’s feet were bigger than his, but the socks helped. He strapped the holsters on both thighs, grabbed all the spare magazines he could find and was ready for action.
“Stay behind me, Oliver. I haven’t a fucking clue what we’re going to find when we get out of here.”
“There’ll be more of them,” Leek said, staring down at the bodies. “I know there was a third one, but I haven’t seen him since before they brought you here.”
“How did you tell them apart?” Ryan was groping to make sense of what he’d just seen and at that point any information at all could help save their lives. He now realised what Leek had been hinting at when they’d first discussed the guards.
“One didn’t seem to like hurting me as much as the others. He… he gave me my clothes. And brought the mattress.” Leek clutched his shirt and tried to pull it down, seemingly conscious for the first time in a long while of his naked legs. “There were others, too, but none of them lasted long.”
Jesus, Ryan didn’t have the time to deal with any of this right now, nor did he want to think of any of the guards as having more humanity than the others – not when he wasn’t even sure that they were human – and not when he was almost certainly going to have to kill some more of them.
With Leek staying close to the wall behind, Ryan made his way down the corridor. He could definitely hear shots now. The deep-throated boom of a combat shotgun echoed dully on the other side of the door, followed by the higher-pitched chatter of someone emptying the clip of an assault rifle with indecent haste.
Ryan debated waiting for the noise of combat to cease but his instincts told him that he’d be better off taking advantage of whatever the hell was going on in the rest of the building. If it was a rescue attempt, then the faster he joined up with his own side, the better. If it wasn’t, then hopefully he and Leek would have a chance to slip away in whatever melee was going on.
The door opened onto another corridor with a flight of steps leading upwards. The sound of gunfire was louder now, mingled with something that sounded suspiciously like the roar of a large animal. He didn’t like the sound of it at all, but their choices were strictly limited. He climbed the stairs, gesturing for Leek to remain at the bottom until he knew what they were up against.
Ryan opened the door and stepped out just as at least three flashbangs detonated at once.
The blast knocked him backwards and the subsequent disorientation caused by the sudden loss of sight coupled with the disturbance to the fluid of his inner ear sent him backwards down the stairs. Ryan’s last thought before the world went black was that it would be ironic after everything he’d been through to end up dying of a broken neck.
* * * * *
On this occasion, Ryan came awake in his own time, without the aid of a boot in his guts. OK, he was still lying on a concrete floor, but this time he was fully dressed – still in the uniform he’d taken from the dead guard – and someone was holding one of his hands very tightly.
“We’ve found him!” The yell came from the top of the stairs, and was followed immediately, in a softer tone, by the words, “OK, mate, you can put the gun down, we’re the good guys.”
Ryan opened his eyes and realised that Oliver Leek was crouched next to him on the floor, one hand holding Ryan’s, the other hand holding the Sig Sauer that Ryan must have dropped in his tumble down the stairs. His hand was shaking badly and Ryan was amazed he hadn’t pulled the trigger by accident.
“Honest, mate, you can trust us, put the gun down…”
“Didn’t your mum teach you the magic word, Finn?” Ryan asked, shaking his head and swallowing hard in an attempt to clear his ears. He squeezed Leek’s hand. “He’s on our side, Oliver. Please put the gun down.”
The pistol fell from Leek’s nerveless fingers and he slumped to the ground in a dead faint.
“Christ on a bike!” Finn took the stairs two at a time and dropped to his knees next to Ryan. “Boss, are you all right?”
Hysterical laughter bubbled up in Ryan’s throat. “Better for seeing you, mate.” He glanced up the stairs at the sound of someone pumping shell after shell out of a combat shotgun. “What the fuck’s happening up there?”
“New captain,” grinned Finn. “He’s the cautious type.”
“Is Ditz with you?”
Finn nodded as the boom of another grenade sounded above them. “Sounds like they’re mopping up,” he commented. “I’ll go and fetch him.”
With the sound of a minor war still raging overhead, Ryan simply tugged Oliver Leek into his arms and slumped against the wall, waiting for the rest of the cavalry to arrive.
* * * * *
The usually imperturbable medic stared down at him with a look of shock on his face that Ryan had never seen before. Ryan knew he probably looked a mess, but he was demonstrably alive and in possession of all his limbs, and Ditzy didn’t have x-ray vision, so there was no way he could see the state of Ryan’s arse. So why in the name of hell did he look like he’d just seen a ghost?
“Get Lester,” Ditzy ordered, addressing the command to Finn.
The young soldier looked down, did a sudden and equally inexplicable double-take, said, “Fucking hell,” and then took the stairs two at a time.
“His name’s Oliver Leek,” Ryan said, unsettled by the look on Ditzy’s face. “We’ve shared a cell for… since they snatched me,” he amended, still unclear how long he’d been in captivity.
“You were taken 16 days ago, boss,” Ditzy said, still staring down at them. “OK, let me take a look at him. What sort of state are you in?”
“I’m alive,” Ryan said, closing down that line of questioning immediately. “They’ve had Oliver a couple of weeks longer than me. He’s more than half-starved. We’ve been drugged – probably in the food – and he’s been the victim of multiple rapes. He can’t take much more, mate, so treat him gently, OK?” Ryan saw the look on his friend’s face and added, “Yeah, they did me too, but I don’t want to talk about it right now. I want to get Oliver out of here and into hospital, and I want to stay with him.”
The medic made a rapid check on Leek’s breathing and pulse. By the time he’d finished, the noises from the floor above them were starting to subside and Leek had returned to consciousness, although his eyes were still haunted and afraid. With Ditzy’s help, Ryan got the man onto his feet and looped his arm around Leek’s wait to keep him there.
“Ditz, are you going to tell me what the fuck is going on?” Ryan hissed, rattled by the look in his friend’s eyes every time he looked at the man Ryan had shared a cell with for the last 16 days.
“No, Captain Ryan,” drawled a voice that Ryan had last heard in a team briefing the afternoon he’d been kidnapped. “I imagine that honour is going to fall to me. Lieutenant Owen, after what we’ve just witnessed upstairs, I’m surprised this has come as so much of a shock.” Immaculate in his hand-made Italian suit and bright pink tie, Lester made his way down the stairs, looking as composed as ever and remarked, “Hello, Oliver. I’m sorry it took us so long to find you.” His expression softened for a moment as he added, “I had no idea that I was putting you at such risk by offering you the job.”
Oliver Leek met Lester’s eyes briefly, but Ryan could see the effort it was costing him. Old habits were going to be very hard to break. He mumbled something that might have been “That’s all right, Sir James,” and then promptly stared at the floor again.
To Ryan’s immense surprise, Lester unbuttoned his jacket, slipped it off his shoulders to reveal a pristine white cotton shirt and held the jacket out to Leek.
Ryan could feel the trembling in the other man’s thin body and Leek made no move to take the proffered clothing. Ryan held out his hand for it instead, and draped it around Leek’s shoulders. “Oliver’s used to having to earn his clothes, sir,” Ryan said quietly.
“So how did you get those?” Lester asked, staring at Ryan’s black uniform.
“I killed the men who were wearing them,” Ryan said, jerking his head at the open cell door.
Lester stepped past Ryan, his nose wrinkling in disgust at the rank smell of urine mixed with sweat and blood and stared into the cell. The sight that met his eyes made the colour drain from Lester’s face and for a moment, Ryan thought that his ice-cold boss was about to lose his famed composure.
“I’m sorry, Ryan,” Lester said quietly, his eyes still resting on the two dead bodies. “That was not one of my more sensitive questions. In my defence, today has proved rather… eventful, to say the least.”
“Sir, what the fuck is going on?” Ryan knew this wasn’t exactly the time for a detailed debrief but he had to know. “What are… were… they?”
Lester hesitated, then sighed. “I believe they’re what popular science might describe as clones, Ryan.” He glanced at Leek and said quietly, “If it’s any consolation, Oliver, the one they made of you didn’t have an ounce of your administrative abilities. It also wrote with the wrong hand, which is what first alerted me to the possibility that something was rotten in the state of Denmark, so to speak. I’m just sorry it took us so long to track this facility down.” He dragged his eyes away from the bodies on the floor with an obvious effort. “Owen, take our colleagues back to the medical facilities in the ARC. Make sure they’re well looked after.”
The scene that met Ryan’s eyes on the floor above their cell looked like something out of a horror film. A huge, cavernous room was filled with the acrid smell of the flashbangs that the soldiers had been letting off. The corpses of several large animals were strewn brokenly on the floor. He recognised something that looked like a large sabre-toothed cat, but there were others that he’d never seen before, including something that looked similar to an elephant seal, only twice the size, but with long, grasping forearms. Next to it, lay one of the creatures that Cutter’s wife had claimed had followed her through an anomaly from the future. As Ryan stared down at the body, its bony fingers twitched once and a red light on some sort of small box melded to its bony skull blinked once then went out.
On the ground were the bodies of several more of the black-uniformed guards. It seemed like none of them had been willing to surrender. They were all identical to the two that Ryan had killed.
Another body lay to one side, dressed differently to the others in a pin-striped suit. Ryan knew without needing to be told whose face it would be wearing. At his side, he heard Oliver Leek draw in a sharp breath. Leek walked over to the body, shivering from head to foot, and stared down at it. Ryan could see a spreading pool of blood from a ragged tear across the dead man’s throat. He wasn’t sure which of the creatures had been responsible, but from the carnage all around it looked like there were plenty of candidates.
He reached out and rested his hand on Leeks’ shoulder. “It’s dead, Oliver. Whatever it is, it’s fucking dead.”
Leek gave an almost imperceptible nod and then turned away from his own double, a look of horror deeply etched on his face. Ryan wondered hazily if somewhere amidst the chaos all around them there was something that looked like him as well.
A tall, dark-haired soldier with a combat shotgun resting on his shoulder was kneeling over one of the bodies checking for signs of life. He got to his feet, smiled and held out his hand. “Hello, sir.”
Ryan shook the hand being was offered to him. “Didn’t expect to see you here, Becker, I thought you were still in Iraq.” He glanced at the gun. “New girlfriend?”
Captain Becker nodded. “She’s a real goer.”
“So we heard. She’s noisy, as well.”
The banality of their exchange was nothing more than a means of disguising the fact that the adrenaline in Ryan’s system was starting to take him down almost as quickly as one of the slugs from Becker’s Mossburg 590 would have done. He could feel weakness creeping into every limb and he was starting to tremble almost as much as his former cell-mate. Becker was one of the brightest young officers that Ryan had ever worked with and he went up even further in Ryan’s estimation when he didn’t make any offers of help.
Ryan felt like shit but he was determined to make it out of the warehouse under his own steam and it looked like Oliver Leek felt the same. Together, he and Ryan stepped outside into wintery daylight. There was a chill in the air and Lester’s jacket wouldn’t be providing much protection against the cold but in spite of that, both men simply stood there, drinking in the smell of clean, fresh air for the first time in weeks.
Silent tears were tracking through the grime on Leek’s face. Ryan tightened his arm around his companion’s waist and tried – and failed – to bring his own emotions under control.
They’d both survived. That was all that mattered.
He’d deal with everything else later.