Amazon Apocalypse 2: Chapter 79 (Patreon)

"Terrance!” I yelled. "Terrance! Are you in there, buddy?"

There was no response. That was a bad sign, but I didn’t have long to worry about it.

My forces clashed with the now-mindless former policemen who'd been pulling a late shift with their Captain. It was one thing to fight the mindless hordes of Crownhill County Prison. It was entirely another to fight our own people.

These had been good men. Loyal men. Men who'd stay up late with their Captain because there was work that needed to be done. And now they'd paid the price for their loyalty.

"These are our friends! Restrain them if you can!" I ordered as I grabbed another mindless puppet by either arm and pinned him. He tried to bite me, but I was a much higher level than him. And with Eldritch Augmentation, my flesh was too tough for normal human teeth.

Still, we found it surprisingly difficult to handcuff a man when he's desperate to get at you, one way or another. Doubly so if he didn't mind breaking his wrists in the process. Even unarmed and restrained, he still thrashed and bit. But that sort of damage could be fixed, in time.

My people heeded my orders a little too well, so I had to throw out a small correction. "Don't be shy about breaking some bones, though. Doctor Roswell can fix them up later."

With increased aggression on our part and a few blows with a hammer, victory was ours. Even living zombies have a hard time biting you with a broken jaw. Or clawing your eyes out with broken arms or mangled fingers.

The additional people streaming through the door that reinforced us were also a big help. I saw Sakura among them. Good. I doubted anyone else could strategically break bones like she could.

Outnumbering the living zombies thirty to five meant everyone could grab a limb and keep them pinned until someone else used every handcuff and zip tie we had on hand. We had everyone secured in under a minute. But a minute is an awful long time when you are trying to catch someone.

As soon as my allies had things in hand, I rushed deeper into the station. I realized I didn't know my way around, so I doubled back to grab one of the uniformed officers and brought him with me. Sakura jumped to her feet from where she'd been pinning someone to the ground to be handcuffed and was soon hot on my heels.

"Which door?" I yelled to the policeman I was practically dragging behind me.

The officer pointed. "There! That's the captain's office!"

I followed his gesture and came to the door. It was locked, of course, so I blasted the door knob with Eldritch Blast. Unfortunately, the lock was made of sturdy stuff and my spell didn’t break it.

"Let me try." Sakura hefted her bat and swung. Crimson light streamed along the edge of her club, and it sheared clean through the metal knob.

"Uh... I think I hear someone behind the door!" the officer said as he nervously fingered his service pistol.

I doubted it would be much use. Even someone like Lisette, who focused primarily on her Charisma stat, would have enough Vitality to shrug off a full magazine of bullets.

Sakura's second blow shattered the wood of the door itself, and she shoved the broken chunks aside as we clambered through the hole she’d made. She came to a stop just past the entrance.

"Terrance? Terrance!" I called through the opening. There was no response.

I forced my way in behind Sakura, my eyes going wide. Terrance was here alright, but he sat there, face slack and completely unresponsive—just like Kyle and Marcus.

"Carter..." Sakura placed a comforting hand on my shoulder.

I sank to my knees. "Damn it! We were too late." I slammed my fist into the ground, cracking the faux marble tiles of the office. "First Kyle and Marcus, now Terrance, too..."

The man had always seemed so sturdy and reliable. I hadn't known him before the integration, but he seemed like the sort of guy I could always count on when the going got tough. It was getting tough now, but he was one of the casualties.

He sat in his chair, vacant eyes staring up at the ceiling. His pants lay around his ankles and his arms were splayed out on the chair’s armrests. If not for his still throbbing erection, I might have thought he'd gotten his soul sucked out and died.

"Lisette got to him," Sakura surmised. "Looks like she didn't finish whatever she was doing, but she got far enough that Terrance won't be much help until we figure out how to cure him… and the others."

I stuck my head out the window. Even now, the curtains flapped with the last remnants of recent movement. It seemed we'd missed Lisette by only a few seconds.

Fury boiled in my heart. If Lisette had agreed to reverse what she'd done to Kyle and Marcus, we could have come to an arrangement that would leave her alive. Not anymore. Now I understood why Charisma abilities were considered taboo—why Charisma Classes like Lisette's would be kill on sight on Themyscira.

Our only saving grace was the fact that we had gotten to Terrance before she could finish whatever it was she did to turn people into mindless puppets. I suspected it took her longer to manipulate higher-level people. Either that, or she wanted them to retain more of their abilities, so as to be more useful to her.

Whatever it was she did, I was glad she had failed. And I didn't plan to give her another chance to get to my friends.

I turned to Sakura. "Call the militia to action… all of them. I want the entire militia on the streets searching for that bitch. We won't let her get away with this."

***

The guards just did what they were taught to do by their predecessors. There wasn't any need for them to find Lisette as, per my orders, all our other forces were already out looking for her. The trouble was the same as it usually was for these sorts of manhunts.

Lisette didn't want to be found. She was very good at hiding. No wonder she'd been so confident that she could build her powerbase right under my nose.

I remained in the police station with Terrance until Frank, Rick, and Margaret came to take him away. They took him to Doctor Roswell’s clinic, along with Kyle and Marcus. All were staying in the same room we'd kept the Wolfman pups in.

I wasn't sure if Lisette would try to return to finish whatever she’d been doing to Terrance, but I didn't want to find out. Like Kyle and Marcus, his level was high enough to cause serious problems for us—especially if he fell fully under Lisette's sway, like the people back at the prison had.

I made sure Doctor Roswell’s clinic was well guarded, and guarded mostly by women, at that. So far all of Lisette's victims had been men. The same had been true at the Crownhill County Prison. I was growing increasingly certain that Lisette was powerless against her fellow women.

It was the only edge we had right now. So, we made as much use out of that as we could. It was nearly morning by the time my militia finally brought me a lead.

Kerrie was the one to come share the news. "Sir, some of the militia have noticed a few guys in the shelter acting strangely. They suddenly pooled all their points together to rent a small apartment in one of the nicer areas.”

She frowned. “None of them knew each other before yesterday. Until very recently, they were all layabouts, but suddenly they've decided to do scavenging runs in a desperate bid for points."

"A change like that doesn't come so suddenly without a reason. Are they like the psychos we fought?" I asked.

"Not quite. They can still talk, for one. At first glance, they seem normal. But the things they say aren't normal." Kerrie shook her head. "At first, we thought they were just weirdos. But they were all weird in the same way."

"If they can talk, they're worth interrogating. Bring them in," I ordered.

"I figured you'd say that. The first one is already waiting in the interrogation room. We're softening him up now." Kerrie nodded toward the door.

"Fantastic. I want to be there for the questioning."

Kerrie led the way. Sure enough, there was a man handcuffed to a chair before a table in an otherwise empty room. His skin was pale and pasty. He had bags under his eyes and messy, grease-slickened hair. He looked like he hadn't showered in weeks. While most people hadn't bathed much since the integration, their higher stats kept them clean.

But this guy looked like he'd been through an apocalypse. And using Examine, I saw he was still level 2. How had someone managed to live this long and gain only a single level? Perhaps that was the secret why Lisette had been able to do more with this guy. His low level meant her skills removed less of his mind?

"Lisette is my goddess! I would never betray her!" the man shouted as soon as Kerrie entered the interrogation chamber.

His eyes were wide and feverish, his expression full of adoration. He seemed desperate to please, and not all that bright. I got the impression that the desperation was new—though the lack of smarts was not. Kerrie asked a few questions, to no avail.

Frustrated, I took the time to step out of the room and look at the other people waiting to be interrogated. Like the one in the room, all of them had pathetically low levels. And they all shared the same desperate to please look.

There was a pattern here. None of these people had been winners. Maybe they'd done alright before the integration, but they hadn't made anything of themselves since then. They'd simply eaten the free food I was still giving away out of my own funds and lounged about while others protected them and toiled to rebuild the society that cared for them.

They were underachievers and completely lacking in motivation. Lisette had stepped in and, since they had no willpower to fight her, she was able to completely supplant their lack of goals and desires with her own objectives.

Stepping back into the interrogation room, I realized Kerrie had figured out the same thing I had. She'd also come to another realization. These men were weak-willed and easily influenced by a pretty woman's requests. That had worked well for Lisette… but did Lisette have to be the pretty woman making the request?

Kerrie decided to try her luck.

She batted her eyes at the person she was interrogating. "It would make me very, very happy if you would just talk to me. Is that so bad, talking to me?"

"N-no... I'm... loyal..." the man replied hesitatingly.

Kerrie flexed her chest, snapping the top button on her uniform open with the subtle motion. The man she was interrogating was absolutely transfixed by the cleavage that suddenly appeared before him.

"Come on. Tell me where your apartment is. Who else do you know who works with Lisette? Where are her other safe houses?" Kerrie asked, pushing her chest closer to the man's face.

"I... no! No! I won't..." The man struggled against temptation for a while, then finally broke. "I'll talk if I can touch them. Okay?"

Kerrie laughed, looking smug. “Not so scary after all, huh?”

As soon as I had an address, I left Kerrie to interrogate the remaining prisoners. She seemed to have a working system in place, and there was little need for me to remain in the room for it. I found the apartment quickly enough.

It was a serious downgrade from staying with Kyle, but it functioned well enough in a pinch, I supposed, especially as an emergency safe house. As Kerrie had explained, these guys weren't particularly high leveled, nor particularly motivated to thrive after the apocalypse. They'd turned into layabouts following the integration, and in any place less defended than the area around the obelisk, they would have long since perished.

The small, cramped apartment they'd acquired occupied the upper floor of what had previously been a coffee shop—before the System had done a shitty job duplicating it, that is. This was one of the copies.

It seems somebody had gone to the trouble of straightening the sagging walls and reinforcing the foundation. That was probably why it was being rented out, now. The council had worked out a way to give legal ownership of buildings to whoever got them functional.

There weren't any telltale signs of Lisette's presence here. I knew she was fond of pink curtains, but these windows remained bare. She probably hadn't had time to touch up the place. Either that, or she had a better safehouse elsewhere in the city and didn't plan on staying here much, using it as backup.

I did smell a familiar scent shortly after entering the apartment, though. It was that sickly sweet medicinal incense she'd burned when she’d tried to control me. I looked around the room until I hunted the incense sticks down.

I stuck them in my bag of holding. I wasn't sure if they'd be any use, but maybe Myrina could figure out what they were… and what they were supposed to do. Anything would help, at this point.

That done, after searching the place I met briefly with Frank and told him to have people keeping an eye on that apartment. If Lisette showed up, I wanted to be ready to spring an ambush and grab her. I rejoined Kerrie just as she was finishing up her last interrogation. By the end, she'd grown extremely skilled at drawing confessions and information out of these particularly weak-willed and less than impressive specimens of masculinity.

"It's as we suspected," Kerrie explained as she put a new jacket on. The old one had run out of buttons after she kept popping it wide.

"Lisette has assembled several cells of guys like these idiots, who are all willing to hide her. They are low-leveled and weak willed, but have just enough resources that she can pool what they’ve got and blend in amongst the lower rungs of society. Based on what I'm hearing, though, she isn't exactly happy about that.”

Kerrie smirked. “The girl's got a taste for luxury and has all of her new minions working overtime to improve her lot as fast as possible. That might be the mistake to exploit. Such drastic changes in behavior are a telltale sign. Talking to them is the proof."

"Think you can identify these guys out in the field?" I asked. "It isn't realistic to interrogate everyone in the settlement, but we might be able to swing a few hundred cretins like these into a room like this one."

Kerrie shrugged. "I'm not sure if the guys can… but me and the girls? Yeah, we know this type of guy. I think we'll be able to figure it out just talking to people. It will be a good way to bring the new recruits into this without waiting for them to get fully trained up.”

I hadn’t thought about that. “Will they be safe?”

She shrugged. “They don't need to know how to fight, but most of them already know how to talk to people—and almost all women can spot a creepy, weird guy from a mile away."

"Excellent. I want every one of Lisette's secret bases identified. Detain a few from every group and get as much information from them as we can. We'll just pretend they died on a scavenging expedition or something.”

She nodded.

“I want you monitoring the rest. As soon as Lisette picks somewhere to rest her head, I want us to know where she is so that we can grab her when the moment is right."

"This might cause some trouble with the new residents," Kerrie warned. "We won't exactly be respecting people's privacy."

I shook my head. "Desperate times call for desperate measures. They'll either understand… or they won't. At this point, it's time to do whatever needs to be done."


<Note>
Author's note goes here.