Crimson Flare: The Threat of Pitchblende
by marat

Chapter Five

Once home, Karen didn’t even bother to remove her tattered uniform before she was on the phone to Stacy. The tragic and frightening ordeal she had just survived left her stomach twisted and painful, her sexual areas still reacting to the rapes with spasms and with excruciating throbs. As she punched the numbers, she saw her hand shaking almost uncontrollably. Her nerves made her drop the handset.

As her body tightened, she cut off the call before it had rung even once. Before she would talk to Stacy, she would have to calm herself. She bowed at the waist and bent her knees, trying to soothe herself, both inside and out. She dry heaved again, and the dizziness that followed dropped her to all fours.

Her gloved hand slowly reached up and removed the vinyl mask from her heavily perspiring face. She breathed deeply through her mouth as spools of saliva unwound and dripped slowly to the carpet. She reached up to just above her forehead and slowly pulled her cowl back, revealing her sweat-soaked brown hair. As she tossed the form-fitting black vinyl aside, she lowered her body to the floor. Her body shivered. Finally, the pent-up emotions gushed forth in a single roaring wave as she broke down and cried. She cried with relief at her survival; she cried because she had killed, something she had hoped never to have to do; she cried at the residual pain which she still felt, and at what the pain represented: her violation and degradation at the hands of JoJo Savanarol and the Savoyards.

It was fifteen minutes before she composed herself sufficiently to dial Stacy’s number again. It took a few moments for Stacy to answer this most private number, a personal connexion between Crimson Flare and her patron (Stacy called it the Batphone).

‘What is it, Karen?’ Stacy answered.

‘Oohhh, Stacy. I need to talk to you. I need to come and see you.’ Karen spoke so rapidly the words tumbled over one another and Stacy made her slow down and repeat herself.

‘OK, Karen, come right over. Are you sure you’re in condition to drive? You sound…’

‘I can drive. It’s not that far.’ Karen felt herself calming now. ‘Let me shower and clean up first. I’ll be there in an hour or so. It’s just…’

‘Just what?’

‘You’d better check the news before I get there. You can give me any details about… about…’ and Karen started to cry again.

‘Karen, Karen,’ Stacy tried to soothe her emotionally distraught friend. She spoke calmly and quietly. ‘Karen, I’ve already heard about the fire down by the river.’ She was ready to ask, ‘Were you there?’ when she thought better of it. ‘It might be easier if I came there. Take care of the things you were about to, and I’ll be there, like you said, in about an hour. Is there anything you want?’

Karen replied, ‘A chance to re-do the last ten hours.’

Stacy was silent for a moment. When Karen didn’t ring off, she spoke, again with a quiet reassurance, ‘I’ll bring something to quiet things down.’ There were infrequent times when this might have meant that the two friends would share a joint, but Stacy realised that this time it shouldn’t be anything stronger than some Earl Grey. ‘See you in about an hour.’ She hung up.

When Karen heard the line go dead, she wanted to scream at Stacy for abandoning her. Tears flowed again, more briefly this time, as she tossed the receiver aside. She rolled onto her side and curled up, drawing her knees to her chest and wrapping her arms around them. She didn’t move.

*****

That was the way Stacy found her. Stacy had her own key for Karen’s apartment, and, when she let herself in, she came across her friend, still in the ripped uniform of the city’s champion, her mask and cowl thrown aside, lying on her side, her body showing the evidence of the night’s attacks. Bruises, scratches, and redness showed through on every bare portion of her face and body. The worst was her face and jaw, where JoJo and Vas had worked her over with their fists.

Stacy picked the heroine up and laid her gently on the overstuffed cushions of the sofa. The body of the superheroine was light, though Stacy could feel the well-toned muscles beneath the smooth, flawless skin. The wealthy patroness then walked to the kitchen where she put on some water for tea.

Returning to the living room, she began to unzip Karen’s black boots. Stacy noted the scuffs and tears on the highly polished leather surface. Removing the boots, she also removed the remains of the shiny flesh-toned tights that were beneath. Stacy stared at the fading red marks around Karen’s ankles, the residue of her bondage. Checking her friend’s wrists, she was not surprised to see the same marks there.

Stacy undid the black leather belt which served as a holster for Crimson Flare’s baton. As she did so, the sequined costume fell open, revealing more bruises on the crimefighter’s chest and abdomen. The marks on her breasts were almost purple, revealed as the costume was gently removed. Stacy lifted the heroine tenderly and slid her outfit off her shoulders. Then she pulled the tatters of the Crimson Flare’s highly recognisable attire down her legs. Each of these elements of the uniform was laid carefully aside.

Karen now lay naked on the sofa. She looked barely conscious, with her eyes closed, her mouth hanging loosely open, sucking deep gulps of air. Stacy knew that Crimson Flare had run into trouble, and that that trouble had climaxed in the fire at the riverfront this morning. Stacy steeled herself against any emotional outburst, even now. She would have to remain firm, for Karen would need reassurance.

It was at this moment that she noticed the blood residue and bruising at her groin and anus.

It had finally happened.

Stacy had feared this, perhaps, more than any other possibility. Crimson Flare had been captured and raped. Many times she had tried to reassure Karen that her strength made this unlikely and would see her through any crisis, but even she didn’t believe this. Now that it had happened, Stacy knew, she would have to use all of her persuasive powers to keep the heroine active.

She drew a bath for her distraught friend. Karen would need to be relaxed before they undertook the question of Crimson Flare’s continued existence.

*****

The death toll had been high in the warehouse. Evidently, most of the Savoyards had not escaped before the explosion. Karen informed Stacy that she had been responsible for the deaths of JoJo and Vas, and maybe a few more during her break out.

‘The miserable thing is,’ Karen was saying while still sitting up to her chest in the bathwater, from which ribbons of steam rose, ‘I can’t go lodge a complaint, or charge any of the survivors with attempted rape or assault, or anything.’ She was more composed now. She had been sitting in the tub for almost an hour, Stacy rubbing her down with the sponge, pouring the hot water over her head and back. Stacy thought that Karen’s back and shoulders were her sexiest features, even though the newspapers and TV reports always talked about her legs.

‘I feel so helpless. Almost as helpless as I was when they had me tied. I can’t even go to the hospital for a rape kit. It was Crimson Flare who was raped, not Karen Perry. We should have realised this. How can Crimson Flare continue to do what she does, when everyone will know how to control her?’

Stacy replied, ‘I can’t simply tell you to continue the work. I can recall my own rape, but I know that your experience was more frightening and more deadly. But you have to believe in what your strength has given you the opportunity to do. I won’t even talk about obligations. Crimson Flare’s life depends on whether or not you are willing to risk that world out there. She could disappear and a year from now she’ll be a faded memory in the collective mind of Mitropoulos. Karen, only you can decide to continue.’

‘I don’t know whether I can. It hurt so much. Oh, god, it hurt. And some of the things they said were so degrading. I thought that Crimson Flare was helping people. There are people who HATE her. Hate her. Hate her for what she does; hate her for being a woman.’

‘I know. I hear some of them at meetings I attend. The people who say them are not all members of the criminal element. Some of them sit in board rooms.’ For a moment, anger crossed Stacy’s face and eyes. She swallowed hard. Crimson Flare’s patron knew she wasn’t helping her case with that admission, but she knew that if anything would keep Karen active, it would be honesty.

Stacy couldn’t explain it to herself, much less to Karen: she only knew that what Karen and Crimson Flare were doing was important. Crimson Flare wasn’t a Superwoman. She only had great strength. Eventually, Stacy knew, that would not be enough to deal with all of the enemies who would emerge. She had to use her intelligence, as well. Along with the superb computer system located in her home. The cooperation between the two allies would have to become closer, and yet the link between them could never be discovered. If that were to happen, then there would be a way to get at Crimson Flare, and everything she fought for, without attacking her directly.

‘I have this strength, Stacy. But it’s all I have. If someone took it into his head to shoot me, they could do it. This rape made me realise just how vulnerable I am.’

‘I know. And I’m not going to try to force you to continue. You have to believe in it. You believed in it easily when it was easy to be a superheroine. You saw it getting tougher. And yet you stayed with it. Was it still… fun?’

‘No. I was making things better. But will I continue to make things better by getting myself raped or killed?’

‘What can I do to help prevent that?’

‘Maybe you should ask your computer.’

The two young women continued talking in this vein for another half-hour. Stacy watched as Karen’s toes puckered in the water; but they also discovered that Stacy’s prowess with the computer and the money that allowed her to maintain cutting-edge technology, better than any police or criminal computer, could forearm Crimson Flare before she entered a situation similar to one she had most recently encountered. Stacy noticed that Karen was no longer discussing the pain, the agony, and the humiliation. Karen was looking for a solution to the problem. Inside, she was comforted. Outside, she let her soft hands comfort her best friend.

*****

Karen, despite her willingness to continue in her role as superheroine, was not easily convinced. The openness that had cheered Stacy disappeared as flashes of pain, and anger, and humiliation flashed through the battered girl’s mind. More than once she was ready to give up. Each time she brought herself back. Stacy didn’t coerce or pressure her. Stacy’s position was clear: Crimson Flare was important to Mitropoulos; but Crimson Flare would only be effective if Karen willingly took on the responsibility. All Stacy could do was promise to do all that money could do to prevent a repetition.

Then Karen brought up a surprising issue. Stacy had to agree to continue to help her, even if it meant that Karen would kill again.

‘Does this mean you enjoyed it?’ Stacy asked, worried.

‘No, no. Rather, exactly the opposite. I’m still grinding inside at the image of the blood and bodies. It was like I watched myself do it. It was someone else was doing it and when I realised that that someone was me, I… I…,’ she paused.

‘I had never killed anyone before. I had always tried to leave them for the police along with all the evidence needed to convict them of their crimes. This kind of made it fun. But when JoJo… did what he did… and said what he said… I knew that it was either my life or his.

‘But it also made me realise that what he said was true. In the world I found myself, a world of men and their violence, I couldn’t continue to play according to those old rules.

‘I don’t know whether I like the idea of going back out there. There are men out there who would kill me without a second thought. There are some who want nothing more than to break me sexually.’

Stacy was shocked as she realised that her friend was right.

‘But I also don’t know whether I can go out there knowing that I might kill someone every time I’m in a confrontation. If I do, I have to live with it, or get out. Can you live with it?’

The long silence that followed was shattered periodically by the ‘drip, drip’ from the faucet. The drops sounded like gunshots in the bathroom.

‘I… can… live with it.’

*****

It was a week later before Crimson Flare again went out on her late-night patrols. During that time a lot of makeup was used to cover Karen’s bruises around her face and jaw. This avoided any possibly embarrassing questions at work. When Crimson Flare returned to the fight, she was formidably armed with information from Stacy’s computer. Everything that was known about the Normans by the police in all localities and even at the State Capital was now also known by the crimefighter.

The Normans were the remaining gang in Mitropoulos. Rivals with the Savoyards until the destruction of their warehouse, their leadership, and their membership, the Normans had moved swiftly into the vacuum created by the events of several nights ago.

Crimson Flare was sure they had been contacted by Pitchblende. Whether the villain had been in touch with the gang before their recent rise to power was a relevant question, since they may have been informed about her weakness. But, at a minimum, what the superheroine wanted to know was whether the reports of her gigantic battle against the Savoyards had raised any doubts about that information.

One of the Normans’ headquarters was in an abandoned subway station in downtown Mitropoulos. Their pattern was to move their headquarters periodically, traveling between four or five meeting places during the course of a month. Stacy’s computer had given the heroine all of the known locations. She started with the one she knew had at least three points of access. She did not want to be trapped like she had in the vault at the warehouse.

America’s Darling arrived shortly after dark, keeping to the alleyways and back streets on the city’s blighted inner core. Abandoned and boarded-up buildings and collapsed houses provided cover as she made her way to the Austin Street Station. When she arrived, she observed two burly men standing at the top of the steps leading down into the station.

Evidently, there’s a meeting tonight, she thought. Crimson Flare wasn’t sure she was pleased to have guessed right. In her heart of hearts, she had the still small wish that her first encounter with the gang might take place a few days hence.

She made her way into the vacant Meyerson Company depot, through which, Stacy’s computer had informed her, it was possible to enter the subway system below. Crimson Flare found the ground floor rest room the computer had indicated would offer the access she sought. Sure enough, the rusted pipes gave way easily under her strength and she saw the darkened unused subway tunnel below. Crimson easily fit her diminutive body into the hole she had made, lowered herself so that she hung from the lip of the opening, and then dropped to the tracks below. It was a long drop, nearly twenty feet, but one which she could allow her strength to overcome. She landed squarely, like an expert gymnast. Looking around, she saw faint lights in the direction of the station.

There were the echoes of trains running elsewhere in Mitropoulos’ active subway system, so Crimson Flare could not hear any sounds from the elevated platform about fifty yards from where she stood in the dark. The sequins of her costume glinted dimly in the tunnel, as she moved to the inner wall. Pressing herself as close to the cement as she could, she eased toward the light.

As the masked champion drew closer to the platform, she expected to hear at least the muffled sounds of conversations among gang members. She heard nothing at all. If she didn’t know better, she would have believed that she had stumbled into another trap.

But that was impossible. The only person who knew that she was coming was Stacy; and Stacy protected her friend with all the security and technology her fortune could buy.

Crimson Flare continued her approach, listening, staring, mystified that there were no shadows, no whispers, no….

The rustle of bodies running, the heavy breathing of lungs stretched to bursting, a dozen Normans raced into the tunnel at full speed at the same time that two makeshift lamps illuminated the darkness around the avenger.

If this had happened two weeks ago, there’s no doubt that the crimson-garbed champion of Mitropoulos would have stepped forward and waded into her attackers, using her tremendous strength to bring them to heel. But after her pounding at the hands of the JoJo, Vas, and the Savoyards, she first froze at the sight of the purple leather jackets racing toward her. Before she even reacted, her mind wondered how they could know that she was coming. Only Stacy had been involved in the preparations. She still paused. Stacy? No, it couldn’t be Stacy. Stacy was her oldest friend.

A guttural yell echoed up the tunnel from the throng charging at the vinyl-masked heroine, and awoke her from her reverie. Two weeks ago she surely would have stayed to fight. Now, however, she turned and raced back toward the hole in the roof of the subway. All thoughts of her past, of her heroic persona, of her strength left her. She was simply a frightened young woman being chased by a gang of angry men, men bent on her destruction.

When she got to her entry, she looked up at the small hole in the ceiling. She turned and looked down the tunnel. Her superspeed had created some distance between herself and her pursuers, though the time she had before they were upon her was short. Bending at the knees until her heels were just below her hips, she sprang full force toward the little aperture through which he had entered this nightmare.

Her hands grabbed at the broken wood around the opening, finding two pieces at opposite sides of the opening that gave her a grip. But her body hung down from the breach, her booted legs swinging wildly as she tried to pull herself up. It was only seconds before she felt the hands of her pursuers tugging at her boots, first one pair of hands on one black leather boot, then a second on the other, then more hands, and more, and more, wrapping around her leather-wrapped calves as the gang members literally crawled on top of one another to get at the fleeing heroine. Their weight eventually became too much for her handhold and she tumbled amid the Normans, still gripping small shreds of the wood that had offered safety only moments before.

‘AAAAHHHhhhhh!!! NO! NOOOOOO!!’

She felt pieces of rope looping around her booted calves and her thighs as she struggled desperately to free herself.

“NNNOOOOO!! AAAaaahh!’

More rope was twisted around her shoulders and upper arms.

She screamed unintelligibly against her attackers.

Still more rope enveloped her waist and even more bound her gloved wrists.

‘AAAAHHHHhhhhgghhh!! NNOOO!’

*****

At home, Stacy worked diligently at her computer, seeking more intelligence on the Normans and the as-yet unknown threat called Pitchblende, hoping that Crimson Flare would tonight uncover whether there was a connexion between the two.

Suddenly, and to her horror, she watched as her files melted away, seemingly devoured by an unknown parasite ensconced in her computer. She was near tears as days of work simply disappeared, the pixels evaporating and leaving her screen blank. And she feared for her friend, for this disruption of her previously secure system meant that Crimson Flare was in greater danger than either of them ever imagined. It was just possible that, if Pitchblende were behind this attack, then he already knew about their relationship.

If he knew about that, then she too was in danger.

*****

Screaming and struggling futilely, the crimson-and-gold form of the champion of Mitropoulos was carried down the tunnel toward the brightly lit subway platform. Standing on that platform, smiling widely, were the three principal leaders of the Normans: Chan, the gang’s chief warlord, some said the real brains behind their success; Justin, chief bodyguard to this elite; and, presently the most powerful criminal figure in Mitropoulos, Cos, the androgynous sociopath who had organized them as a means of fighting the Savoyards. Each wore the customary purple leather jacket that marked him as a member of this group.

When she was deposited before this trio, her uniform was unmarred, for the gang had been ordered to deliver the prisoner undamaged. Crimson was stood before the gods, the many hands of the Normans still holding her erect. For many gang members, it was not a fear of her falling that led them to continue to fondle and caress their bound beauty, but rather the erotic rush of contact with her latex-and-sequin wrapped body, or the satin-gloved arms, or the nylon-enclosed thighs. Crimson Flare was the most desired prize of Mitropoulos’ underworld, and the Normans were not about to let it go.

End of Chapter Five