The Killing Queens Read online

  “Enjoy them Ladies. Your hard work. Will has not been in vain.

  Chapter 9:The Change

  The night was both beautiful and elegant. There were things that had been absent for years existed. Dancing, conversation, civilized meals. The conduct between men and women was a beautiful sight to see and was to be even more beautiful as parties departed.

  “Come on now, Spencer,” Priscilla said to her assigned C.H.I.P. man.

  He looked at her with deep brown eyes and nodded. “Yes, ma’am,” he said gently. He stood up and helped her out of her chair. Spencer then retrieved her coat from the closet and helped her put it on.

  The all-female secret service team surrounded her and walked her to her car with Spencer following behind. They went through the doors of the building where her black suburban was waiting.

  They quickly crawled into the car and were off traveling to the her Vice Presidential home on Observatory Circle. As Spencer sat in his seat looking forward with a smile, Priscilla , began looking at him and sizing him up. He had thick black straight hair that was cut above his neck and he had tan skin, likely from working in the fields at The Farm.

  With that thought in mind, she looked down at her lap where her gloved hands sat over her lap. Priscilla thought to herself that Spencer was very attractive physically, but was he really meant to please her in every way?

  As they arrived at her home, Priscilla entered her home with turned on Spencer behind her along with her secret service agents.

  “Leave us,” Priscilla said.

  “But, ma’am,” one of her agents started to stay.

  “No buts.” She snapped her fingers and pointed to the door. “Out. I’ll see you guys tomorrow.”

  The head guard shrugged her shoulders and breathed deeply. “Yes, ma’am,” “We’ll be back in the morning at 0600,” she said. After that, she lead her fellow agents out and left Priscilla with Spencer.

  She turned the remote dial ordering Spencer to turn to her.

  “Spencer,” she began.

  “Yes, ma’am,”

  “I’m trusting that you’ve been programed correctly. We’re going to test this,” She cleared her throat and stated, “Spencer, prepare my evening routine.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. Dashing off, Spencer ran up her carpeted staircase and into her bathroom. As she slowly climbed the stairs, she heard him doing the things she liked unexpedly. She heard the sounds of water rushing into her tub and inhaled the scent the sweet and peaceful smell of lavender expected. Moments later, she reached the top of her stairs and went into her bedroom and peered into the bathtub. She saw the tub nearly filled with white foamy bubbles as the smell of lavender relaxed her muscles. On the side of the tub, she saw a fluffy white towel and underneath a pair of black and white plaid pajamas.

  She then walked into the bathroom and sat in front of the wooden chair in her vanity. The bureau with various bottles and jars on it full of creams and lotions. Spencer came over, grabbed a brush, stripped her hair of its bobby pins and ponytail hold, and began brushing it with softly.

  Priscilla looked over her shoulder at Spencer and gently smiled. “Thank you for coming, Spencer,” Priscilla said. “I do appreciate it greatly.”

  “You’re welcome, ma’am,” he said, continuing to massage her scalp with his fingers.

  “Is this as good as you’re used to?”

  Priscilla closed her eyes and thought back to the last time that a man had touched her hair and shivered at the memory in the hot and foamy tub.

  “Oh, yes, much better. Much, much better,” she said, slipping deeper into the water. She closed her eyes, and that’s when the memories came to her. The thoughts of who she was a few short years ago.

  ***

  “You look like shit,” her sister, Belle, said to her one day after she came by the small apartment Priscilla shared with her husband.

  “I know,” Priscilla said to her. “I thought I looked pretty good.” she said, primping and pushing up her hair in a bush and pushing out the small wrinkles in her dress.

  The two sisters could not have been more different. While Priscilla had a face full of makeup and hair well done while wearing a navy blue dress matching pumps, her sister wore a bright sunshine yellow T-shirt, blue jeans, and pink high tops.

  “Why are you in jeans?” Priscilla questioned her sister as she got into her small blue hybrid. “You know those are illegal for us.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe I don’t want to show off my legs today or be, ‘feminine as women were created to be,’” Belle said as she made air quotes with her fingers. She then started her car with the click of a button and began driving down the Oregon suburbs towards the coastline.

  “We wore these clothes on the regular as kids. Come on now. What happened to the strong girl that used to be my baby sis? I know I taught you better. And if you’d let me, I’d give that husband of yours more than just a piece of my mind.”

  “No, no. Please don’t do that,” Priscilla pleaded. “He’s not a bad guy. I just need to do better at getting out of his way.”

  “Yeah,” Belle said, pushing her sister’s dress up to expose a black bruise on her olive skin. “He’s not a bad guy?”

  Priscilla shrugged and pushed the dress down quickly, looking out the window at the flat brown grounds where trees once were.

  “What happened to you? What happened to the strong woman I knew who wanted to change the world for the better? Not live in a world that imprisoned people for their gender? Or for their body choices?”

  Looking in her rearview mirror, Belle saw a large black SUV tailing them. “Uh oh,” she said. “I think we’re being tailed.”

  “I told you that you shouldn’t have been wearing those clothes, and now we’ll both get in trouble,” Priscilla hissed.

  “You don’t know that,” Belle replied with a slight tremble in her voice.

  “Attention! Driver, pull over immediately!” a large booming voice announced over the intercom.

  “Ok, they definitely want us to pull over, but probably not for just that.”

  “I’ll say it again. Driver, pull over immediately!”

  “What do you mean probably not just for that?”

  “Have you ever heard the story of Boudica?”

  “The British Isles warrior that fought against the Roman Empire?”

  “Yep, she’s the one.”

  “What does that have to do with us being chased by the government? Woah!”

  Belle slammed her foot down on the accelerator and pushed her little hybrid hard. It dashed up the road and weaved through traffic, causing cars to honk at them.

  “Belle! What are you doing?” Priscilla questioned as she gripped the passenger’s seat.

  Belle was focused on the road ahead as she raced onto the interstate, nearly hitting another car along the way as the black SUV followed. “Priscilla, promise me that whatever happens, you won’t let them break you. Promise me you’ll fight.”

  “Fight?” Priscilla inquired. “What do you mean fight?”

  She reved her engine and began driving off the road towards a patch of trees.

  “Belle! Watch where you’re going!”

  “You have to listen to me!” Belle said. “There’s a beacon, a map, a compass, and a watch in the glove compartment. Grab them,” she instructed.

  Priscilla quickly obeyed and grabbed the three items from the glove compartment. “I’ve got them.”

  “Now, grab the backpack from underneath the seat.”

  As Priscilla went for the backpack, she heard the sound of gunfire hitting the car, cracking the windows and denting the sides.

  Priscilla screamed from the floor, covering her ears.

  “Priscilla, get up!” Belle commanded from her seat.

  With one hand still on the wheel, Belle reached in her waistband for her own sidearm. She started firing back while weaving in and out of the trees. Her sister was in awe.

  “Where did you get that gun from
? Who are you, Wonder Woman?”

  “ I stole it and No!”

  “Captain Marvel?”

  “No!”

  “Hawkgirl?”

  “No! I’m just a woman who’s had enough!” With that, Belle revved the engine and headed towards a clearing that lead to a cliff.

  “Belle, we’re going towards a cliff.”

  “I know.”

  “Does your car, by chance, fly?”

  “Maybe,” Belle hinted as she continued to shoot.

  “Maybe!” Priscilla exclaimed. “What do you mean maybe? That is a yes or no. Not a maybe.”

  Belle chuckled and opened the center console where three switches and a large silver lever were.

  “Are those the things that make this car fly?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Oh boy,” Priscilla squeezed her eyes shut and clung to the backpack. She still heard the sounds of breaking glass and metal being dented behind her as Belle clicked the switches and pushed the throttle forward.

  “Here we go! Woo hoo!”

  Chapter 10:The Trap

  On the way back to her mansion, Martha looked out of the window of her SUV. She stared at the night sky filled with stars, clouds, and the moon, thinking about all things in the past, present, and future.

  She looked to the seat beside her where her assigned man sat. He was tall and thin with olive skin. He had soft brown eyes and a bald head that shone in the moonlight.

  “Excuse me, ma’am. When will you give me a name?” he asked.

  “A name?” she repeated. Martha thought to herself, then clicked his remote off so he went into dormant state where his eyes closed and his head drooped as he went into temporary slumber.

  “We’ll work on that,” she said in the darkness.

  At the mentioning of names of men, the memories the men she had dated or tried to date in her youth came to mind. Even though she was secretly and semi-happy with her marriage to Kelly, he was her second husband.

  The road to and from her first husband was long and filled with blood.

  Thinking back to early 2010, Martha had moved out of Florida where she grew up to the new revitalized city of Detroit. While it a had a rough decade after the city filed bankruptcy, it had gradually improved over the years.

  Martha had earned an entry level position at the Ford engineering headquarters. She prided herself on not only being a good employee but the best employee. Within her first two years at the company, she had been promoted from training engineer to junior engineer. She was committed to her job, staying late to do extra work and to build models, and test her inventions. After years of long nights and long day, one of her inventions was taken seriously and created.

  Martha was proud to see her rainbow of tiny cubes rolling up and down roads, saving people thousands of dollars in money while at the same time, saving million in air cleaning filters, saving the planet at the time before they would be maximized before becoming useless.

  As she continued with her work in engineering, she gained great wealth from her inventions and patents as well as speeches she gave in regards to being an inventor. While she was satisfied and content with her work, she wanted what so many women were raised to have: a husband.

  Martha searched with everything she could to find the perfect man. Dating apps, blind dates, dirty parties, you name it, she did it. And while she did date men, for the most part they were all truly unavailable to her. The years went by and as her awards collected on the mantle in her luxurious and renovated Victorian mansion in the suburbs outside of Detroit. She was twenty-eight, a near millionaire engineering phenom, and yet unmarried and in the eyes of many including her mother, she was unsatisfactory.

  “Maybe you just need to try harder. Look harder. Attack dating like you attack your work,” her mother, Virginia, said to her as she sat on the backyard porch, looking out at her swimming pool as she brought out lemonade.

  “Maybe,” Martha said as she sat next to her in the adjoining chair.

  Virginia looked at her daughters thighs, in a sense, measuring them for thickness. They had always been the thickest part of Martha, which she immensely hated.

  “How much do you weight?” she asked.

  “Umm.” Martha thought carefully planning out the answer to her question. She always said at least ten pounds less than what she really was to make her mother happy and give herself less grief. It wasn’t that she enjoyed the lying. It was that she enjoyed less of the tormenting over the amount of fat on her body.

  “One forty-five, last time I checked,” she answered.

  “Well, you could still lose some more weight. Why don’t you get back down to one twenty-five like you were at MIT? You were so thin and attractive back then”

  “Yeah, Mom. I was awesome then.” Martha thought back to her college and glory days. She had earned a full ride scholarship to MIT for cross country and track. Her coach always called her chubby and plus size. She wore herself down from one forty-five to one twenty, and when that wasn’t good enough, she got down to one fifteen.She looked as awful as she felt. Missing food for days, eating the same diet as a newborn rabbit, making ten baby carrots last a day full of mechanical engineering classes, work, and two a day practices, between her sophomore and freshman year. She went from a healthy eighteen-year-old to a half dead nineteen-year-old.

  “Well, come now. I don’t want to make you late for your plane ride, Mom,” Martha had finally replied.

  After a quick ride to the airport and a kiss-hug combo, Martha was back in her cube and driving home to her mansion. As she drove on the interstate, she thought more about what her mother said. She was furious. After tours of the city, a visit to the opera, and the plant, her Mom still brought up her shortcomings. Deep down, she knew her mother meant to help her, but still, Martha was angry. She pushed her foot harder on the accelerator as she thought about it. She thought about the days where she counted out raisins. A single can could last her three months easy because she had twenty-one at a time and stretched them out over a week. Seven a day as her desert. She ran faster and lighter than anyone on the team for a good while, but after the race she’d be barfing her guts out in a toilet or a trash can for at least ten minutes.

  It was disgusting, and she never wanted to do anything like that for anybody.

  Then she saw the blue lights.

  “Crap,” she said, pulling over on the side of the interstate. As she pulled over, she kept her eyes forward. She wanted a minimal amount of trouble. Even though some things had changed, some things were still the same.

  Martha looked in her rearview mirror and saw a tall olive-toned guy in a gray short-sleeved uniform and gray felt smokey bear cover along with with his belt, decorated with his gun, taser, handcuffs, mace, and other police toys.

  “Good afternoon, ma’am. License and registration, please,” the officer said to her as he spoke to her through the open driver side window.

  Martha took them out of the glove compartment and handed them to him. She looked in his eyes for a second and saw that they were green and they seemed to dazzle in the sun.

  “Ma’am, do you know how fast you were going?” he asked.

  “Umm….fast, which is bad, I know, officer,” she clambered. He made her nervous and skittish .

  “I just got mad at my…” she paused.

  “Your what?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” Martha responded. “It’s stupid,”

  “You’re Martha Youngblood, the inventor of a majority of the cars I stop everyday,” he said. “Trust me. What you’re going to tell me isn’t stupid.”

  And for them, that is where it all started.

  She didn’t get a ticket that day. Instead, she got a warning and a phone number on the back, which she called.

  His name was Jacob Williams, Trooper Williams when he was working, but to her, he was just Jack. For the next few months, they dated with dinners, camping trips, and concerts. He showered her with adoration, gifts, and love.

>   Or what she thought was love. He would call her often but not obsessively, he doted on her when she was well and when she was ill, and changed his schedule to take of her.

  He really seemed to care deeply about her.. When he proposed it was in a beautiful and intimate way. He made her go on a scavenger hunt throughout Detroit, stopping by their favorite place in the city and picking up pieces of a much larger puzzle. When Martha made it back home to her mansion as the last clue directed, she saw him on the front porch with red roses and a small black box.

  Two months later, they were married in a small backyard ceremony. Jack wore his dress uniform and had his blonde hair trimmed to be an elegant high and tight. Martha wore a long lace detailed trim and sleeves and a long train and veil that covered her face.

  That day was magical and memorable. Everything from the arrival of the guests to the ceremony itself and the reception.

  It was close to midnight when the Trooper and Mrs. Williams were settling into their newlywed suite before they set off on their honeymoon in Galveston, Texas as government regulations had closed off travel overseas.

  As Jack unzipped his bride’s dress, he leaned in close to Martha and kissed her on the cheek. “I love you, Martha, and I promise I’ll make you feel like a queen everyday,” he whispered.

  And he did. For months, he did. He cuddled her close every night, carried her to bed when she fell asleep at her desk, fixed her meals on top of his own, and adored her every day.

  But that was only for eleven months.

  They were married in June, and six months later, in January, she found out she was pregnant. They were filled with joy as they planned for the next chapter in their lives.

  But it wasn’t meant to be.

  In the second trimester, they discovered that their baby, who was a girl, was quite ill. While her heart was beating strong, her brain and spine had failed to develop properly as they should have been and they would not as modern science in the twenty-first century could not always override mother nature.

  The doctor advised her to have an abortion right then and there. The baby would only live a few painful and short hours if she carried it to term.William told her not to and that he wanted to see his child.