ANNOUNCEMENT!!
This story got away from me. I've never been satisfied with it, but I didn't know what to do with it. Luckily, some of you readers have helped with your comments. I now know what to do. This story will be REWRITTEN!! The premise will be the same, but the characters will make VERY different decisions. When it's finished, the new story will exist as a parallel reality to this one. Since that story will take a while to write, I will continue to post this one to its conclusion. I hope those of you who stuck with it will continue to enjoy it despite its imperfection. These stories mean a great deal to me and I always try to do my best with them. It frustrates me when my best isn't as good as I'd like it to be. Thank you for your indulgence! On with the story!!
Disclaimer:
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Crown Vic to a Parallel World: Stolen Love The third and final installment of the ongoing adventures of Church Philips
40
Save the Children
"We'd been here for four or five days and hadn't seen any of the town, so one morning, after our wake-up romp and a second go in the shower, we left the hotel to look around the city. We both had on something like board shorts and buttoned-down shirts that we didn't button.
"Shawn would have been perfectly happy walking around in just a male-bikini-bottom-style bathing suit. He didn't because, with that much of him on display, I wouldn't be able to think of anything except his body. With our emotional link, and my lust already in overdrive...it would have been a problem. As for me, I had the best body of my whole life, but I was still self-conscious about showing it off, so I preferred more coverage than less.
"You see," I tried to explain how I felt at the time, "it was September, so I was almost forty-two, and Shawn was twenty-two. I still felt like a cradle robber, but I didn't really look like one. When my magic ate up my body at the end of the first mission, and I had to do all that work to recover, the body that I rebuilt looked much younger than the one I'd destroyed. I appeared at least ten years younger, so while it was obvious that I was older than Shawn, I didn't look like his father. That's important to the story because the way we got sucked into this thing, was because of a misunderstanding."
With the stage set, I got into the meat of the story. "Shawn and I were walking along, at the edge of the beach and the road, when a pair of kids ran by us chasing a frisbee into the street. Someone should have been watching them, they were too young to be unsupervised." I realized that, as I verbalized my thoughts, my voice had an unintentional tone of superiority in it.
"How old?" Paul asked to clarify.
"I guess ten and twelve, or so. I got the impression they were related somehow, but not brothers. They may have just been two kids of parents who were friends and who were thrown together on a mutual vacation trip. They came tearing across the sand, elbowing and battling to catch the frisbee with no concern about running into the road. I doubt they even realized they were headed into danger. They were twenty yards or so ahead of us when I saw what was about to happen, so I used my magic to take control of the frisbee. I floated it toward us and into Shawn's hands.
"The kids ran over and asked for their toy, but Shawn wasn't going to make it that simple for them. He loves kids and I think he wanted to play." I paused for a quick explanation of why. "Shawn didn't get much of a childhood."
"I gathered that." Paul said to let me know he was following along.
"Shawn ran right across the sand and tossed the frisbee back at the kids. They chased it, elbowing and shouting, just like they had before. When they caught it, and finished fighting over who would throw it next, they tossed it to Shawn. He was one of them instantly, running and playing and shouting along with them. If I'm honest, I was jealous of how easily they accepted him into their fun. It made me feel old, like the only adult in the room, a necessary but unwelcome chaperone. I found a bench at the edge of the sand and sat down to watch the boys play.
"After a while, a man appeared on the bench next to me. He was a big man for Solum; not tall, but broad and stocky. Like one of the Dux brothers with less muscle and more fat. He had a big bushy head of blond hair that didn't look natural, and his skin was dark bronze like someone who lived under the sun. He was dressed like me, with an open shirt on, but instead of board shorts, he wore white bikini bottoms.
"He had a deck of cards in his hands that he let fall from his right hand into his left in a waterfall stream, like a trick dealer would. He did that over and over while I watched the boys play and he seemed to watch me. The guy made me uneasy, just sitting there staring, so I tried to break the ice by saying something about the weather. In response to my comment about the heat, he jerked his head out to the kids. Like em young do you?' he asked.
"I thought he meant Shawn. What I didn't realize until I thought about it much later, was that Shawn was down by the water and the kids were between him and my bench. The perspective and the distance being what they were, it would be easy to mistake Shawn for just another boy unless you really looked, and this guy was too busy looking at me to look at Shawn.
"Anyway, he asked me if I like them young and I said something like who doesn't.' The guy let the cards fall into his left hand one more time. He flicked a card from the stack with his left thumb and held it out to me. I took it and held it up. It read, tenera Iuventus.'"
"Tender youth." Paul breathed with a shudder. I guessed he had some idea of where the story was headed because he followed his translation with a one-word comment. "Disgusting."
"When I looked up from the card, the guy was already on his feet and passing in front of me. We like em young too.' He said and moved on. I didn't get it. I didn't know what the man, or the card meant. If there had been a trashcan next to the bench, I would have flipped the card in, and never had a second thought. Because there wasn't one, I put the card in my shirt pocket and forgot about it.
"Shawn tossed the frisbee around a bit more, then came back to me and we moved on. I didn't mention the card and Shawn didn't mention if he saw the guy sitting with me on the bench or not. It was a non-event, until later that night.
"We were home...back at the hotel I mean, and were undressing for another shower, when the card fell out of my pocket and fluttered to the floor. Shawn picked it up and commented over it. Oooohhh...' he teased me, I'm not enough beast for you? You want more?'
"I didn't know what he was talking about. He had to explain. Shawn said that the guy who sat on the bench and the cards were advertisements for an illicit sex trade. Organizations tended to crop up around resort towns, anywhere there's money and people on vacation.
"These guys, like the one on the bench, basically they're panders. They walk around and play with the cards while they look for guys or women doing what that guy thought I was doing, leering at what I couldn't have. They come up and offer a card that pertains to what the person is looking at. Most of the time these roving panders have cards that offer all kinds of experiences; men, women, old, young, and, in the case of the card I was given, the VERY young.
"Shawn knew the sex trade was illegal, but he didn't have much of a problem with the idea, morally anyway, because he didn't realize what that particular card was offering. He didn't see the point of the sex trade.
"As a Solum native, he always treated sex as something that was kind of `ask and have.' He reminded me that we didn't have to pay if we wanted some variety. We were in a vacation spot where many people would be open to trying something new. You remember, before we left on our honeymoon, we'd had Bem join us regularly, so the idea wasn't that far-fetched. I thought about it, and the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea.
"I didn't want to just meet someone though. I admit that the idea of a professional appealed to me, someone with experience, for whom it would be a simple business arrangement. With no disease to worry about, I didn't see the downside.
"I knew that Shawn liked to go by the rules on all things. I knew that he wouldn't like the idea of doing something that was technically against the law, but I thought if it was a surprise, he'd probably go with it. I planned to take Shawn out to dinner, then come back to the room, teasing him and working him up as we went, and open the door to `find' someone in our bed waiting for us. I figured it would be a hot time for both of us.
"I called the number on the card. A sexless voice answered. I felt like I was talking to a machine. The voice didn't even say hello or open the conversation, right to business. `Boy or girl?' It asked.
"I said I wanted a boy. I thought it was strange we were using words like boy' and girl,' but I figured it was part of the game. You know, pretending the sex workers were all innocent young things. The voice went on with some other questions like body type and hair color. I made some choices that I thought Shawn would like and that I thought would offer some physical variety. I asked for a slim blond with no body hair. The last question the voice asked me was the one that should have tipped me that something wasn't right, but again, I misunderstood the situation. `Eight, nine, or ten?' the voice asked.
"I thought they meant like a rating system of hotness. You know the old joke, `I never had a ten, but one night I had five twos.' I thought people would want to choose different levels based on their fantasy. Like maybe someone who thought of themselves as a five could pick an eight to pretend they scored on their own instead of a ten that they would automatically consider unattainable. Anyway, like a dope, I asked for a ten. I figured Shawn was an eleven or twelve, so adding a ten would be a treat for me, and a treat for the ten, because he would get to have Shawn the twelve."
"Instead," Paul interrupted, once he saw where my story was headed, "you unwittingly ordered a ten-year-old blond boy."
I pressed my left index finger to the tip of my nose to tell Paul he was correct. "My God," the man pressed Fidum's Bible to his chest and shook his large head over it, "is nowhere free of reprehensible deviance?"
I took Paul's question to be a rhetorical one and didn't bother to offer an answer to it. I saw that Andy and Comet were on the edge of their seats to know what happened next, so I kept going with the story. "The obvious thing happened. We went back to the room to find a naked child waiting for us.
"Luckily for me," I said to premise the rest of the story, "Shawn knew me well enough by then to know I wouldn't have ordered a boy on purpose. It took some hard thinking and a full explanation of everything that transpired, both on the beach and over the phone before we figured out what had happened. We managed to reason it out in just a few minutes. If Shawn was a slightly different person, something like that could have been the end of my marriage. Thank God he knows what a dope I can be."
Comet chimed in with some wit. "Can't hide your leading characteristic." He quipped, to the sniggering delight of my nephew.
I was glad Comet was growing comfortable around me, but I started to wonder if he was getting too comfortable. I thought about it for just a second before I decided that, with the way he and Andy acted together, it was very possible that Comet would wind up being my nephew-in-law, if that's even a thing. I decided it was OK if he got too comfortable with me. I'd much rather have it that way, than have him afraid of me. I didn't give him the satisfaction of replying to his comment though. That would have been too much.
"Shawn called his uncle who sent a team to lock down the hotel and interview the kid. His name was Albedo, the child's name I mean. He was under deep compulsion. Ars had to send a specialist to release it without triggering a failsafe program. The monster that programmed the compulsion inserted a failsafe program into the kid's mind. If someone tried to release the compulsion with brute force, it would have completely erased the kid's memory.
"Ars' people caught the...I won't call him a pimp; he was more like an escort for the kids when they were out on jobs. He dressed like a vacationing father and protected these children when they were turning tricks. The escort led Ars' people to the main facility and that led to the masterminds and the rest of the organization. The whole thing was truly disgusting.
"The legitimate front to the whole enterprise was a daycare center called something like `Kid-Cations.' The idea was, vacationing parents with young kids could drop their children at this center and the parents could go have adult fun while the kids were looked after.
"The kids didn't just rot at a facility though. This kid-cation place offered all kinds of activities and outings, fun for all. The kids would have great fun and make great memories. They'd get to make friends...the whole bit. It seemed completely innocent, except, there was a high-powered empath on staff that would take certain kids aside and start to program them. Not only would they start the programming, but they would read their minds to learn all about them and their home lives at the same time.
"These monsters focused on kids from far off places. The idea being, once they were kidnapped, they'd have a hard time reaching out for help and it would be unlikely that they'd ever run into someone who knew them. The kids would enjoy their vacation and then hurry home with the programming dormant inside their minds. When the organization needed more workers, they sent the empath after these kids.
"They'd snatch them off the street with a code word that would activate their programming. The kid would go with them, docile as could be. They would even call the empath a family member if questioned. The empath would bring them all the way back here and program them into the perfect little sex worker, who would become the perfect adult sex worker in due course."
Paul leaned a shoulder into mine to ask a question that I hoped I wouldn't have to answer. "And then? I mean, after their usefulness was over?"
"The ocean." I admitted without elaborating.
"Monstrous." Paul said and filled the word with passionate feeling.
"The long and short of it was, Ars knew there was a sex trade going on here, but no one had any idea how big it was or how...I don't know what to say...how bad...that's not the word."
"Insidious." Andy offered through a disgusted scowl that Joe would have been proud of.
"Insidious," I agreed, "how insidious it was. The investigation that I started by accidentally ordering a ten-year-old boy for sex, ripped this city open like a watermelon dropped from a hot air balloon. The local police force was riddled with corruption, the city council, officials at every level; the indictments went way up into the government. To his credit, even Ars suffered a black eye because it happened on his watch. He exposed it all though, with ruthless efficiency. Hundreds of missing kids and young adults were recovered. Families were reunited.
"Many more lives were ruined." I went on. "The criminal organization kept a record of all their patrons. The ones who enjoyed the children, usually wound-up paying blackmail through the nose. Those that could be useful, either politically or in other ways, were forced to be useful and also paid the blackmail. Ars exposed every single one of these people, no one was spared. People in high up places were disgraced, quite a few killed themselves, but the poison was drained from the wound and the healing could begin."
"What of the children?" Paul asked. "What life could they have after something like that?" "Harder!" Neb interrupted my story again. "Shift change."
I took my hand from Leah's shoulder and endured the sniggers of the group, set off by Neb's second use of the nickname. I wondered if I'd ever live that name down, but even as I wondered, I knew that I wouldn't. To keep things simple, instead of everyone playing musical bus seats, Leah switched with Andy so the rest of us could remain in place. Andy got to work quickly, and we set off again.
I gave Comet a few minutes to catch Leah up on the story. She hadn't missed much though. While her focus was greater, her concentration while searching seemed less intense than Andy's. I wondered if that meant something but didn't know enough about her process verses his to ask.
I also noticed that Leah seemed less affected by my misery after that shift than she had after the first one. I wondered if she'd gotten used to it, or if the distraction of telling the story made me project less negativity into my niece. Either way, I was pleased to see she didn't have tears to wipe away when she finished her shift.
Paul reiterated his question as the vehicle started rolling again. "Well," he pressed, "what of the children? Please tell me something could be done for them."
"As much as is possible, they've been given their lives back." I shrugged helplessly, because I knew as I said it, my statement was a gross oversimplification. "Ars brought in specialists who used the same magic that was once used to control the children, to free them. Their memories of that time were isolated and locked off. The kids worked with counselors to deal with the reality of what happened to them, and most have been able to cope.
"Many of them have requested those locked off memories be unlocked, gradually, so they could deal with them a little at a time. Others have left them alone, a blank space in their past that they choose not to acknowledge. I couldn't imagine the horror of having to make that choice, though I think I'd rather know what happened than imagine it. I think my imagination could conjure darker horrors than the memories could provide."
"And what of the evil people who did this?" Paul asked, his voice low and gravelly with anger.
I had a brief qualm about telling Paul the brutal truth about what happened to the perpetrators, but I stuck to my policy of honesty and pressed on. "This world is not as enlightened as you might think, depending on your definition of the word. Some of its punishments are medieval. For many, the worst of the worst, they were put to death.
"The method is as humane as any method of causing death can be. The person is placed in a reflection room, a room that lets no magic in or out. In the room is a powerful catalyst. The room is sealed, and the catalyst activated. It absorbs the life force of the doomed prisoner like putting a water glass over a lit candle will suffocate the flame. Their bodies are incinerated, and the ash used as fertilizer. The rest were given long prison sentences. Most will never breathe free air again."
Paul didn't comment on the executions. I was both surprised and pleased by that. I suspected he thought the punishment fitting but couldn't bring himself to say as much. Instead, he focused his concern on the victims. "But," Paul objected, "those poor children. How can anything make that right?"
"It can't." I admitted. "Not ever. Nothing can fix it, but we're doing our best."
Paul inclined his head toward me, and I knew I'd said too much. I tried not to react, but the priest was too perceptive, even without his clairvoyance. "We?" He asked.
I rubbed the back of my neck. I wanted to rub my face, but with only one hand available to me, I had to settle for rubbing my neck. "Between the two of us, Shawn is really the philanthropist. He enjoys helping, but this one...this one is mine. I started a foundation to advocate for these kids and young adults. It's the most transparent organization you ever saw. The whole point is not to call attention to them, not to create a group to pity. I've made the organization available to anyone that was involved, including the family members of the...let's call them what they were, sex slaves."
I took a breath and blew it out to try to purge the ugliness the word left in my mouth. I took another to keep going. "Whatever they need, that's above and beyond what the government will provide for them as victims of a crime, my foundation helps to provide. If they need counseling, we help, education, we help, a loan to start a business, we help, a job, we help. The foundation advocates and assists. It's not a handout. The last thing we want is to create a group of victims. We're trying to foster them into productive citizens, and for the most part, it's working. These kids, they're succeeding."
"Doing what?" Paul asked. He seemed to be pressing for information out of deep feeling and curiosity, not out of some drive to make me prove my point.
I didn't mind telling him. "All kinds of things."
I was getting ready to list some of them when Comet broke into the discussion. "Some of them work for us...I mean Andy...I mean the Andy Philips Fashion Firm."
"You know?" I asked Comet. I knew that Andy was aware that some of his employees were members of that group. He'd agreed to partner with my foundation when he was looking for talented people to staff his start-up company. I knew of no harder-working group of people than the former sex slaves of Litus Descendit.
There was also no group of people I wanted to help more than them. I'd gone to Andy, not as his uncle, but as an advocate for a group of people I cared deeply about and asked him to help me, to help them, to help him. I never told him the full story of what happened. I just told him that there was a group of people that I wanted to do something for. He agreed to interview several candidates. He was impressed by them, hired many, and he never regretted it.
Comet explained what he knew. "I knew there were people on staff that were special and that they had something to do with you, but I didn't know the rest until today. They're...they work like they have something to prove. I never realized that's because they do...have something to prove that is. No matter what they do, they succeed with it. I work with two in accounting, and I know Andy has them in design and modeling and all the other departments."
I took the lead again. "I employ five at the foundation, full time, processing applications for aid and keeping track of the whole group. We try to keep tabs on all of them without being intrusive. We want to make sure no one...I don't want any of them to feel like they're alone in the world. Something happened to all of them, something terrible that nothing can put right, but none of them are alone in that experience. It shouldn't be isolating. I don't want any of them to ever...feel like I did."
The eyes of my niece and my nephew's boyfriend locked onto me and stayed there. Of the members of my extended family who knew my story, Shawn was the one that knew the most. Second to him was probably Bem, then Joe and Mary. After them, Andy, as the oldest and the one I identified the most with, was probably the last of the best informed.
Outside of that select group...it's not that my early life was a secret, it's just that it wasn't something I enjoyed reliving, so I didn't offer stories as conversation. Leah knew me fairly well from being my sister's daughter and being around me since she was eight years old, but I doubted she knew many specifics from my Earth life. Most of those events took place before she was born, so she'd have no reason to know of them.
I decided to keep my past out of the story as much as possible but to tell those present just enough to clarify my statement. "I wasn't sexually abused." I said to close the door on that potential speculation. "But I have things locked inside me that isolated me and made me miserable. I thought of killing myself many times. I spent a lot of years hating myself for things that weren't my fault.
"I don't want any of these people, the victims of these crimes, to ever feel the way I did. I don't want them to suffer for what wasn't their fault. We keep an eye on them, as much as possible, without invading their privacy. If we see evidence of depression, hopelessness, substance abuse, or anything like that, we do our best to be available...to hold out a hand if they decide to reach for it. So far, we haven't had a single suicide."
"How many victims?" Paul asked, his voice a nervous whisper. I guessed he worried about the scale of the crime. Numbers always make things seem more real.
"Directly involved, four-hundred-and-seventy-three; including family members and spouses registered with the foundation, just under two thousand."
"So many." Paul gasped. A single tear slid down the old man's craggy face. He sniffed and wiped it away. "Why...why did you waste so much money on me, young man?" He demanded to admonish me for my generosity. "This cause is so much more worthy than me."
"Paul," I reached awkwardly across my right arm that was extended out to Andy's shoulder and put my left hand out to touch Paul's upper arm, "the foundation is self-sufficient now. It's been around for almost sixteen years. The more fortunate in that group, the ones who have succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams, they support it now...they manage it. Out of the original victims, two are billionaires, seven of them are millionaires, another ten or fifteen are close to that.
"What Comet said about the way they work...for better or worse, the adversity of being a member of that group has created a drive in them to succeed. They've even started branching out to other human tragedies. They're offering other groups of victims the model that brought us so much success. It's working too. The others, the other groups that is, the ones that are applying the model are seeing successes they never thought were possible."
Paul leaned against me. His solid body pinned me to the side of the bus as he gushed over my story. "You're such a wonderful man! How did you come up with the model you mentioned? It makes so much sense. The old adage to offer people a hand up, not a hand-out. Genius, young man, pure and simple."
I almost hated to admit that the `genius' wasn't my brainchild. "Lenis came up with it. She came up with the framework and all the organization behind it. She built the foundation and got it running. All I did was finance it. If it was up to me, I would have just lavished money on the problem and probably created a group of dependent victims instead of successful members of society.
"When we uncovered the crime, and the massive group of victims, I went to Shawn's mother for help to set up a foundation. She took control of the whole thing. It's her success as much as that of the victims. The foundation was the first project she took on after leaving Verpa. That's her real story. We put her in charge of our fortune, and she's built it into one of the largest on the planet. It would be easy to see that as her greatest accomplishment, but the both of us look at the foundation as her shining achievement."
"A remarkable woman." Paul said with feeling.
"She's hot too." I teased and leaned my weight into him. To my delight, Paul blushed at my teasing. I counted that as a win given the embarrassing morning I'd had, telling Paul all my silly and dirty secrets. "Ask her about it when we get back. It'll be a great ice breaker for you."
"Ice breaker," Paul muttered as he looked everywhere that wasn't at me, "and what would I need one of those for?"
"Harder!" Neb called as she pulled the bus over again. "Shift change and a five-minute break." She pulled into a convenient parking lot and touched the button that opened the bus doors front and back. The group left the vehicle to mill around and stretch their legs. I took the opportunity to catch up on the macadamia nuts I'd forgotten about eating while I was telling the story. The break also let Paul off the hook from having to talk about Shawn's mother.
We'd done two hours of searching and covered a little over twelve miles of the thirty-mile distance. We still had a long way to go.