VENOM - The Precinct
The Precinct was a dump, and if you had a decent life and a decent home and a decent job, you'd barely be aware that somewhere like this was on the outskirts of your city. But there it was - crime-ridden and corrupt, home to outcasts and broken dreams, host to the hopeless and the irredeemable. If you set foot there, the stench wouldn't come off your shoes. If you didn't throw them away, the rot would climb you like a vine. The Precinct would overtake you, make you its parasite, feeding your gnawing hunger out of its dark belly.
It wasn't somewhere he'd ever been before. It wasn't somewhere he'd ever voluntarily go. But this was work, and work had taken him to many an insalubrious place. It was a dirty job.
After having his wristcode scanned and buying a whiskey he sank down in a chair to the rear of the room, where it was darkest, though it was relatively easy to be unobtrusive at this stage in the night. Most of the clientele of the seedy bar sought to be unobtrusive as well. At least until alcohol loosened their tongues and unbolted the shackles of their inhibitions. Then they'd be loud, crass, vulgar. Disgusting. They'd leer and shout, littering the stage with credits and filling the air with catcalls until the entertainment ended and they either left on their own two legs, or were seen off the premises. The staff were all burly, well-trained, all experienced. They were used to escorting patrons out, or to put it more bluntly, to kicking them out, perhaps with a broken nose or a black eye to send the offenders on their sorry way, depending on how offensive they'd been. It seemed not to matter to the louts that their behavior was on record, thanks to the mandatory scanning. Information gathered on any premises was held by the proprietors, ostensibly in confidence, but it was widely though quietly known that information could always be had for a price. To blackname someone, you only had to approach their favorite watering hole with a fistful of credits. Secrets were market-based commodities like any others.
Field Officer Cullen found the entire concept of the place squalid, and deplored his fellow man for its existence. No doubt any random patron he approached on this night, if he was to bring up the idea that this sort of display was demeaning to women, would counter with the assertion that he both loved and admired women, and that his attendance here was testament to his regard for them. The attendee would probably go so far as to claim that the girls here liked their job. No doubt these same men had wives and daughters at home, had sisters and mothers, and would defend them to the death against the lascivious, slack-eyed gazes of any predatory male who would view them as no more than flesh and skin, on display purely for gratification. Cognitive dissonance, that most handy of defences.
And the women themselves? What privation had they endured to have made them so lacking in self-worth and identity that they would seek employment as objects? And what society would be structured in such a way that women could earn more money showing their breasts to slobbering strangers in a dark, dirty pit of iniquity than engaged in work as a teacher or tradesperson, a clerk or shopkeeper?
The first visit here was just the start of it. The place had come to the attention of Civic Administration because of a spate of hospital admissions, beginning a year or so ago, and a spate of deaths. Coroner's reports were sent to CivAd as a matter of course, and some eagle-eyed filing assistant had noticed similarities in several reports and had started asking questions. The affected girls had two things in common - one, a connection to the Precinct. Two, a dark sludge in their blood, a blemish that ailed them and haunted them and drove them to madness. It was a drug never seen before, and the Investigations Unit was called in. A covert operation over months had traced the drug back to the character known as Aro. Agents had been lost along the way, as they'd sampled what came to be known as "Venom" and discovered its dangerous pleasures. Their early reports had said you felt like you ruled the world. You felt ageless and deathless, as if you could live forever. For those agents under deep cover, the reports had stopped. For most of the girls who sampled venom, forever turned out to be a matter of weeks. The drug's combination of causing dramatic fluid loss and an increased heart rate put its users lives at an extreme risk. Venom's seductiveness had girls addicted after their first hit, and dead shortly afterwards.
Cullen was especially morose tonight as he had a new officer serving alongside. Well, alongside and undercover as well, and right now he had no idea where she was or how she was faring. She had been introduced to him earlier in the week as Swan, and his first thought was that she seemed absurdly young. She looked no more than a teenager, though a quick perusal of her file had informed him she was twenty-five. It also informed him that she was some sort of wunderkind, having graduated from the Academy with the highest aggregate mark of her year. Apparently she was dedicated, astute, and highly accurate with a gun. That was all very well, but in tonight's role she would have nowhere to put a gun. The report also indicated that she was skilled in hand-to-hand combat, but Cullen had been standing right next to her when they were briefed on the assignment, and she was not only of short stature, she was thin, and didn't look like she'd be able to hold off anybody bigger than a child. Hence his worry.
They both had parts to play, acting being a major component of the sort of work they were engaged in, and Cullen's part was to play a dirty misogynist pervert, out for a night's drinking at a girly bar. Swan's role was to apply for a job as a stripper. Their quarry was a notorious vice lord whose name had been spilled any number of times by any number of petty criminals, but who had always managed either to evade capture, or to avoid being caught with anything positively incriminating. Swan was to get a job, succumb to a drug addiction, and ask him to supply her. When he did, she and Cullen would bust him. It was hugely risky for Swan, given the danger of the drug.
Staring into his whisky, Cullen told himself for the thousandth time that this line of work would destroy his soul. He told himself that he shouldn't have dropped out of medical school. That he should have kept up with his jazz piano. That he should have... should have...
And then the stage lights came on and the music started, and Cullen remembered - biting the inside of his cheek and tasting the hard metal of his own blood - remembered why he was here when he saw the sad eyes, the gauntness, the trackmarks on the arms and the sores on the ankles of the girl who came out onto the stage. He was here because she was.
She could have been fifteen or fifty, blonde or brunette, Anneke or Zoii - she was everygirl and no-one, she was the universal archetype - Woman, reviled by man.
Because she was the first out, the audience were disinterested and subdued. "Better" girls were saved for later. She gyrated around with no enthusiasm or vigor, and clearly hadn't had a fix yet. Judging by how thin she was she had already had far too much over the last few weeks anyway.
As Cullen watched, a heartbreaking parade passed by. He wondered how many of them were struggling to support children, or sick relatives. Putting siblings through school. Paying off loan sharks. It was dismal and relentless, half an hour, another half, another half. He had to keep buying drinks, because the clientele were expected to, and he couldn't afford to draw attention to himself, and every time he went to the bar he came close to the stage and saw the deadness in the girls' eyes.
By the fifth girl he was starting to feel concerned that Swan hadn't appeared yet. Certainly she was nowhere near as sallow as these pitiable creatures - but Cullen assumed the fleshier, more well-endowed girls would be show-cased later in the program, and his discreet scrutiny of Swan at their briefings hadn't shown much to speak of as far as breasts and hips went. He was about to make for the backstage door to investigate when the music changed. The lighting changed. The mood changed.
Sensing something different was about to happen, chairlegs scraped on the grimy floor as audience members shifted. The more blase merely leant forward in their seats; those less used to the spectacle stood and shuffled forward.
For all his training, for all his experience, for all his professionalism, Cullen couldn't suppress the gasp of surprise as Field Agent Swan strode to the centre of the stage in a facsimile of an old-fashioned early-century police officer's uniform. Encased sleekly head-to-toe in close-fitting charcoal, she paced to and fro, glaring at the crowd. Swinging along one thigh was a long baton, to the side of her hip was a set of handcuffs, and on the other hip a pistol. The uniform continued to stray from accuracy to titillation with tight bullet belts across her chest, delineating small but upright breasts, and a shoulder pocket containing a communicator. Her hair was pulled severely back, with a helmet sitting atop it. Despite the half-face screen on the helmet, Cullen still knew her. The ridiculous four-inch heels of the faux-biker boots made her legs look yards long, and she showed no difficulty in balancing on them. When she uncoiled a whip she'd had dangling from one shoulder and began trailing it along the ground behind her, he wondered what she was going to do. When she gracefully and almost lazily stepped backwards, whip before her, and raised the handle, then with a move like lightning cracked the thong so hard every man in the place winced, he wondered who he was working with.
When she dropped the whip and whirled back to centrestage, unbuttoning her shirt and running the communicator - tubular and about six inches long - up and down the valley between her breasts, he wondered if he'd underestimated her.
Seconds later, he knew he had.
No-one had noticed the pole which had suddenly descended to the centre of the stage until Swan stroked it in her hands, and in the smooth execution of a move that elicited a collective growl, she unclasped the cuffs from the clip on her waist, hooked them smoothly around the pole, then around her wrists. She was trapped.
The music throbbed and pulsed, as Swan began tugging at her bindings. Arms clasped in such an awkward embrace, she began to gyrate around the pole in a blend of dance and desperation, now embracing it, now pulling away. Men rose from their chairs and moved forward, crowding as she writhed sinuously in a display of breathtaking agility. Cullen himself moved closer, completely unknowing as to how she was going to get herself out of the situation before her eager audience actually climbed the steps and descended upon her. The soundtrack to her struggles pounded with greater urgency, and she reached with seeming frustration to push the helmet off, releasing cascades of dark hair.
It was becoming too much. He'd had no idea she was planning this. It was dangerous and he would have told her no if she'd confided in him. He was going to have to rescue her from the men who were about to storm the stage and put their hands on her while she was restrained and unable to escape the lechery they would subject her to. He was just reaching for the nerve gun concealed in his jacket lining when Swan resolved the situation herself.
In a smooth, sudden twist, she shifted her hips to the pole, legs stretching vertically along it. Suspended upside-down, she slid her light-gun from its holster. Then she flipped herself, landing feet flat on the floor, and swept the room with the nozzle of her weapon, glowering at each man there in the eye. With a flick of her wrist, she turned the gun neatly inward and shot through the link of the cuffs.
The music ended and the audience were too stunned to move. Their stripper hadn't shed any clothes, was armed and was clearly dangerous. Field Agent Swan aimed her weapon into the air and fired it, and nothing happened. She held her arms out and pulled the cuffs easily from them, as though the metal were paper. She yanked at her shirt and it fell apart, leaving her standing in tight pants, those killer boots, and a transparent bra. Then she yanked at the pants too, disintegrating them to reveal transparent panties. The audience cautiously started to cheer and clap. Cullen's breath caught. Very, very smart, he thought. The cuffs had been made of short-chain polymer, looking just just like metal. Her clothes were of similar synthetic construction - they appeared dense but had the consistency of paper.
She had nerves of steel, to have come out like that with an artificial though realistic gun and cuffs. Without the finishing touch of the fake clothes she could have been in serious trouble, though now that they understood the ruse, the men were cheering. They wanted the underwear off as well. Cullen registered that though Swan was skinny, she had some curvature, and her taut muscles were decidedly feminine. No doubt the more popular performers would be a lot more rounded, and a lot less edgy, but Swan had certainly managed to attract attention. She turned her back on the audience and wiggled her derriere at them, cheekily, bending forward and grabbing her ankles so that her long hair swept the floor.
Applause broke out, then laughter and shouting. Credits were thrown on the stage. Fright had turned to relief as the men realized how brave and jaunty she was, and then that they could see her ass through her panties.
The next girl came out, and she had big tits and generous hips, with solid, reassuring thighs. She got straight down to business, removing her blouse, and was cheered. Order was restored.
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