The Watchdogs in…

THE FIRST DEATH OF KATIE TOLLIFSON

By Clayton Tooley

One month ago, her husband had died and she had tasted his brains.

It wasn’t intentional, more a by-product of the thing that had killed her husband using his blood and brain-smeared hand to grab her by the face and drag her through more than a mile of woods. Her back, legs and arms had been ripped to shreds by the undergrowth and trees she’d been rudely drug through. By the time Redeye had dropped her roughly to the bed of a pickup truck, she’d thrown up on herself four times and swallowed what felt like a gallon of her own vomit mixed with various fluids from her husband.

Two other men in that horrible orange and purple body armor had come into the truck and roughly bound her hands, feet and gagged her, jamming a dirty rag into her mouth and adding to the bile she was already tasting. Tears had not stopped streaming down her cheeks but all the gagging and screaming had worn her throat out and she only moaned when touched, which thankfully was not often as the two Watchdogs had left her alone and the truck started and took off across a very rough road through the backwoods of Georgia.

It was after one particularly devastating jolt had thrown her against the cab of the truck that Katie Walker Tollifson realized that Johnny wasn’t coming after all.

15 Years ago

The pain was unbearable and clouded her vision, making her world nothing but shades of red and yellows and blacks. She was crying and screaming and it felt like ages before firm hands grasped her shoulder and anchored her, drawing her attention back to the real world. Her vision sharpened and the nine-year-old Katie Walker looked up into the eyes of her big brother, John.

At 13 he was not her oldest sibling, but since Mike had died in the war Johnny had taken it upon himself to be the big brother and their parent’s oldest. She hadn’t even known he was nearby or how he’d found her, but his face was creased with concern but not panic. She’d been playing with her girlfriends and they’d found a vine to swing on…only it broke mid-way through her swing and she fell more than 10 feet to the ground, but it was rocky and her leg had came down wrong on a rock and snapped her leg like a pretzel. Not that she understood that as she lay there…she only knew it hurt like hell.

“It’s ok, Katie,” John said as he pulled off his shirt and began tearing it apart. “Your leg broke but Pa and I splinted Blue’s leg once and I can do it for you.” Blue had been their dog, a collie, who’d died from an infection from that leg break, which didn’t really make Katie feel that much better. “It’s going to hurt,” Johnny continued as he pulled some branches together, all her friends gathering behind him and watching, unsure of how to help. “But trust me, little sis, I’m going to get you home. I promise.”

Then he’d set to work but his eyes never strayed far from hers for long, always keeping a link between them and his strong blue eyes mesmerized her even as his hands lashed her leg to the splints to immobilize it, causing amazing amounts of pain. When he finished, Johnny knelt beside her and wiped her forehead with a cool rag one of her friends had brought back from the stream. The cool water soothed her blazing face and she sighed briefly. “Thank you, Johnny.”

“It’s what brother’s do,” Johnny said as he slid his hands under her and lifted her smoothly off of the ground. He may have been 13 but he was a strong boy from years working on the farm with their father. Katie, however, was not a small girl for her age and the strain on Johnny must have been terrible, and as he began walking as quickly yet carefully as possible, she thought about the fact that they were easily three miles from the house and she didn’t know how Johnny expected to be able to cover half that distance carrying her.

But he did… As she faded in and out of consciousness to the swaying of his movements, which only very rarely jarred her roughly, she noticed the changing scenery as Johnny led the group through the woods. She recognized the fence around the outer edge of their lower pasture and she began to cry for a different reason than the pain. Johnny’s face was nearly purple and his breathing was ragged, but he’d never slowed, never rested and never complained. She’d never seen such an expression of love before or since in her life.

Johnny didn’t stop until their father came rushing up to them with two of Katie’s friends behind him and he took Katie from John’s trembling hands. Pa looked between his injured daughter to his exhausted son, who collapsed to his knees once Katie was taken from him, and Katie realized she’d never seen her father cry before or smile so wide. “You did right, boy,” her father said as he rushed her to his truck to go to the hospital.

Reality crashed back into Katie’s mind when she impacted the cold, damp concrete floor on her side and slid to a stop against the block wall, her check and right arm being scratched up from the hard, rough floor. She pushed her damp hair out of her face and looked down at herself, realizing that she had been stripped and washed at some point while she’d been off in her head and was now wearing a white tank top and blue pajama pants, which were now being stained by the blood trickling down her right side.

Strangely, the idea of being stripped and washed by these animals was the least shocking thing she’d experienced today, and that terrified her.

Standing in the door was the architect of her situation, the Watchdog Elite named Redeye. His face was monstrous, split down the middle with the left half remaining human but the right half metallic and cold, a terrible burning red eye gazing unblinkingly at her. His body was mostly metal with that terrible orange and purple Watchdog armor strapped on at various locations, looming over her at nearly seven feet tall. He crossed his arms, his right hand still stained with her husband’s blood, and leaned against the wall.

“He won’t find you, you know,” Redeye said, scratching the half of his jaw that was still human skin. “It’s been 13 hours since I killed your husband and your brother is on a SHIELD transport heading back to New York City. Not only does he not know where you are, he doesn’t even know if you’re alive. All he knows is that we have you…which is enough, really. After all, the only thing we want your brother to feel before we torture him to death is pain, so I image we’re doing well so far.”

“Why?” Katie asked in a low voice.

“Why?” Redeye asked, apparently stunned by her one word. His teeth clacked together as loud as a pistol shot as he moved from his position so quickly she barely registered it as he lifted her by the face and into the hard wall behind her with a thunderous impact. “Why, you worthless, hateful cunt?!” he screamed, spittle splashing onto her face. “You can look into this face and ask me that?!”

Struggling for air around his metallic hand that was crushing her head, warm blood seeping from her nose into her mouth, Katie speared him with an equally hate-filled eye. “You…slaughtered our…parents!” she said, kicking ineffectively against his armored shins. “Go…fuck your…face,” she finished, fading from consciousness due to lack of air.

Redeye punched her viscously in the stomach, dropping her to the floor where she began gasping for air and vomiting a thin stream of stomach acid tinged with blood from her empty gut across the floor. She wasn’t certain how long she’d been on her hands and knees gagging before she realized Redeye had left, looking up at the solidly locked metal door as she rolled over onto her side, sobbing silently, unwilling to let them hear her cry.

God she wished Dave was here…the bastard.

7 Years Ago

The movie had blown…who really hadn’t known that Bruce Willis was dead? Katie Walker and David Tollifson walked back to his truck in the nice, peaceful evening and stopped by her side of the truck, kissing passionately for several minutes. “So, you wanna…” Dave began before Katie pushed him back.

“I can’t, baby, you know that. Johnny’s coming home tonight.”

“Of course,” Dave said, sighing. “You’re almost 18, Katie, you don’t have to go running when he decides to come home! You can have your own life.”

“Screw you, Dave,” Katie said, shoving him hard. “He’s my brother, the only one I have left in case you’ve forgotten, and he’s been in the army forever and I only get to see him a few times a year. Just because your brother was a…”

Her voice stopped as Dave’s hand had slapped her, rocking her head back to the side and she slumped against the side of the truck.

Immediately Dave was kneeling beside her, apologizing and crying. “Oh baby, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean… You know how I am about Todd… I wasn’t thinking, I didn’t mean any…”

Katie wiped the tears from her eyes and rubbed her face, nodding and trying to get up before someone saw them. She knew about his brother, what Todd had done to Dave, and she shouldn’t have mentioned it but she’d gotten angry. She put her arms around him and tried to stop her own shaking, shushing him. “It’s ok, Dave, I’m ok. Just-just take me home,” she said quietly.

He helped her into the truck and they didn’t talk as he drove through Custer’s Grove, GA back to the large and productive farm still overseen by Caleb Walker even at his age, and Katie got out of the truck herself before Dave had put the car in park. “Go home,” Katie said, finishing applying the makeup to her face as she hurried toward the front door. “You don’t want to come in tonight.”

“Katie!” Dave hissed as she kept walking, outpacing him to the light of the house as he tried to follow, but he stopped and stood there, shaking with shame for what he’d done but also anger at her just dismissing him like that. “How dare she…” he began thinking as he turned and ran face-first into an immovable object, bouncing back and rubbing his nose.

He looked up into the crew cut and impassive face of John Walker. His blue eyes bored down into Dave with the impact of nuclear weapons and Dave shrank back, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his worn jeans, weakly saying, “Hey, Johnny boy, how ya doing?”

John Walker looked the perfect picture of the army in his fatigues and he used all of the training he’d received to rein in his breathing and his desire to put both thumbs into the eyes of the cockroach standing before him. What his sister saw in this scumbag was beyond him, a fact he would be discussing with Katie this very night, but for right now he only answered, “Dave.”

“Yeah, so, I should be going. Got work early tomorrow…” Dave said as he tried to side-step Johnny and get back in his truck.

A large hand on his chest stopped him and he froze. “Don’t answer this, Dave. In fact, don’t speak at all. I just want you to know one thing: I know why Katie was putting makeup on when she got out of your truck.” Johnny’s hand pulled back and he stabbed forward with only his index finger, painfully poking Dave’s chest. “I. Know.”

“Johnny, I…” Dave said before Johnny leaned into his face and Dave shut up quickly.

“If you do it again, you’re dead. I’d kill you right now but my mother just came out onto the porch and is watching me and I could never commit murder in front of her, regardless of the reasons.” Johnny looked up and smiled warmly, waving at his mother. “But when I get back from this new detail out west, if you’re still seeing Katie and I think something like this has happened again…you’re done.”

With a friendly pat on the shoulder, John Walker walked past the man who would marry his sister and up onto the porch where all of his family was now waiting. Dave got in his truck quickly, barely throwing off a wave as he peeled out of the driveway.

Katie watched him go, knowing what Johnny had probably said to him and loving him for it, but her heart went out to the troubled man she loved with all of her heart nonetheless. He had suffered traumas in his past but she knew he was a good man who loved her. She honestly believed they were going to spend the rest of their lives together…

The days had bled into a blur of pain and degradation for Katie.

No horror movie inspired idea of torture and humiliation that could be laid upon a young woman was overlooked by the Watchdogs…they only started with the rape to get it out of the way. Every day as the sun came up. One, two, three Watchdogs…it varied every day in number, length, restraining devices and punishment.

She stopped crying after the first week. She stopped making any sounds after the second.

Then the Watchdog Elites started joining in.

They were the Watchdog soldiers who had survived Johnny’s vicious attack on them in the barn in Georgia in the moments after they had gunned down his parents. They were all mangled men who had been put back together by mechanical means, becoming nightmarish cyborgs wrapped in the purple and orange trappings of the normal Watchdog uniforms. Most of them were missing limbs and significant portion of their faces, but some had lost their genitals and had had them replaced with horrific appendages that could facilitate the action of sex but never the feeling. Their only function seemed to be to torment those missing them with what they had lost…and to inflict cruel, awful pain and suffering on those they loosed themselves upon.

They succeeded in making Katie make sounds again…for two days.

In the third week they stopped and as she lay on the floor of her cell, 30 pounds lighter than when she had been thrown in their and with eyes so sunken she looked dead, she stared at the small window high in her cell at the blazing sun and suddenly began to cry because she realized that in at least one way they had succeeded in breaking her.

A part of her missed the intimacy of her abuse and humiliation.

4 Years Ago

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Tollifson, but the fetus is dead. We’ll schedule the extraction for early tomorrow.”

For the first two hours after she had been told, Katie sat in the hospital bed and hugged her knees to her chest and didn’t move or speak even as her best and only friend Josie tried to comfort and care for her. They had been friends since grade school and Josie had never let her down, but her ministrations and care grated on Katie this day through no fault of Josie’s. It wasn’t her friend’s fault that she was the only person in the world Katie could count on.

It was a selfish and spiteful thought, and Katie hated herself for thinking it, but in her misery she couldn’t help it. It had been just a month since her parents had been murdered in Custer’s Grove and three weeks since their funeral…the one Johnny didn’t bother to show up for. Dave had done nothing but bitch and moan about the cost of the funeral and the fact that they’d had to handle it all while Johnny did nothing but bring pain upon them. They had fought furiously about why Johnny did or didn’t show…up until the day she’d seen Johnny set Hector and Jerome on fire on the evening news…and she’d cried in appreciation.

She honestly believed that was when God had decided to forsake her. Gloating over the death of another, even the two son of a bitches who’d set in motion the death of her parents, was a sin of the highest order and one Katie knew she would have to pay for some day. Little did she know how soon that payment would come due.

A week ago she’d received a visit from someone in a military uniform asking if she’d seen the news conference this morning. She’d been sick and delirious all night from beginning her third trimester and had not turned the television on, but something in his demeanor made it obvious why he was there now. “How?” she asked wirily.

‘Captain Johnathon Walker, recently operating as Captain America, was gunned down on the steps outside of Congress today by the criminal known as the Scourge of the Underworld. I have been dispatched to express to you the condolences of the United States of America and the Commission on Superhuman Activities, and notify you that his personal affects will be transferred to you shortly.”

The young man had been helpful enough to catch her when her legs gave out and carried her gently to a chair in the kitchen, taking a seat opposite her. He got her a glass of water and let her gather herself before he continued “Given his powers, for national security reasons he will be cremated and will then be interred in a special section of Arlington National Cemetery and awarded full military honors in a private memorial.. We would, of course, be happy to have you and your husband as our guest at the service but, given your condition and the recent tragedies your family has suffered, we understand if you decline.”

She had declined and cried almost constantly until she’d received Johnny’s possessions and a folded American flag a few days later. As she clutched the flag to her chest she felt something contained inside and she reached in to find a small card had been pinned to the flag. She pulled it out and opened it and read the words inside:

“Mrs. Tollifson, my name is Captain America, though I’d be happy if you would know me as Steve. Your brother suffered in some serious ways, quite a few of his own making, but in the end he overcame a great evil to reclaim his soul and his pride. He saved my life and this country from a terrible threat and earned the right to wear the costume he willingly handed back to me. While we had not gotten there yet, I think we might have been friends in time, and I wanted you to know that. You have my sympathies for your loss. Steve”

Katie came out of her memories and wiped her eyes, realizing that Josie had left and she was alone in her dark room. She ran her hand over the bulge in her stomach and looked at the clock, realizing it had been four hours since Dave should have gotten off of work, yet he still had not shown up at the hospital. This was his bowling night and, even though she and Josie had both left numerous messages on his cell phone and at his work, she was not surprised he had not came to her. It was more than enough for most women to make that final decision to leave, as Josie had been urging her to do, but Katie knew she would never been that strong.

She was all alone now, utterly and completely. Dave was all she had left…Dave and her tears.

Katie ran her hand over the depression that had used to be her stomach and remembered the pain of the extraction of her fetus and the emptiness she’d felt for nearly a year after that terrible loss. It was strangely, terribly reminiscent of the psychological emptiness she felt over the end of her sexual abuse. That only lasted a few days, however, before the physical beatings began again, along with the experiments.

For the last four weeks they had taken her late in the afternoons and long into the nights and strapped her to a number of tables and machines. The needles long, the drugs hot and acidic, and the drills and saws noisy and deep as they looked at ever part of her, front to back, top to bottom. Her hair was shaved, her teeth adjusted, her limbs twisted and stretched until near breaking; except for her left knee, which was pushed too far one day and the knee joint splinted entirely.

That night Redeye made doubly certain to throw her into her cell so she’d land on that knee, skipping like a stone and face planting the wall. She lay there nauseated and was sick on herself and shivered in her torn, ragged hospital gown, her body completely afire from the 30 days of constant abuse.

Redeye stood in the door, savoring her agony. “It’s been a month, and yet here you still are,” he said, cackling. “Oh, but I’m certain that Johnny’s searching frantically for you. I mean, what could possibly have delayed him, hmmm?”

Katie looked up as Redeye moved closer to her and she didn’t even have the strength to resist as he grabbed her by the nape of her neck and pulled her roughly up until she could see what he had in his hand. It was a cell phone playing a video that appeared to be from a security camera and at first Katie’s mind couldn’t translate the images she was being shown, but after a minute she realized what it was.

It was Johnny and some woman she didn’t know having sex. The time and date stamp on the lower left hand of the image showed it was from just a little more than a week after she’d been kidnapped. Tears she didn’t know she had left to cry flowed down her cheeks as she watched them finish, forced to watch it all by the unrelenting strength of Redeye, who spared no moment to not ridicule her about what was going on in the image.

Finally he relented and dropped her bodily into the ledge she slept upon, her chest and face bouncing harshly off the unyielding stone and she flopped back onto her back, numb to the pain. Her left eye would be swelled shut by morning but that was all right. For the short amount of time she had left, one eye would be more than enough. As she ignored Redeye’s final taunts as he left, seemingly ecstatic over her new tears, her mind kept replaying the image of Johnny over and over.

She didn’t see it as a betrayal like Redeye did, because she knew a truth Johnny would never admit to himself…she was never getting out of her alive. All the Watchdogs would do is use her as long as they could to hurt her brother before they killed her in some terrible way that would do far more harm to Johnny than to her.

He had found some sort of peace and she knew he could survive anything, even her death, because he had survived worse, but she refused to let the Watchdogs dictate those terms to her. She had also seen her brother laying in the bed after the woman had fallen asleep and he had touched his nose with two fingers and raised them toward Heaven before he’d fallen asleep, which was what their mother had done every night before she went to bed during all the times Michael or Johnny had been in the military and potentially in danger.

It meant that she had loved them and prayed for them and would never stop waiting for them to come home safe. She knew Johnny was doing it for her and that he loved her and would never stop looking for her. Katie raised her pained right arm and touched her nose, raising it shakily to Heaven and said in her nearly lifeless voice. “You found me, Johnny, and I love you too.”

She fell asleep with a content heart for the first time in a month, comforted by the knowledge that tomorrow was the day she put her carefully constructed plan into motion…and killed herself.

3 Years Ago

“Mrs. Tollifson, my name is Lemar Hoskins and I was your brother’s best friend.”

Katie stood in the driveway of her home and looked up at the impressive, massively muscled black man in front of her and tried to reconcile his image with the pictures of the skinny yet handsome man Johnny’d become great friends with in the Army. She realized that Johnny had gone through some sort of body modification process many years ago that had given him his muscles and powers, so she realized that Lemar must also have done so. “I was told not to talk to you.”

Lemar looked surprised as he took off his sunglasses and slid them into his jacket. “Me?”

“Well, anyone, actually,” Katie said, uncomfortable at the image of the two of them talking. Though Georgia was evolving, a married white woman talking to a strange black man standing next to an expensive muscle car could potentially cause her some personal problems. “Your name did come up, which struck me as weird until now.” She was quiet for a minute and signed. “Were you there when he died?”

“I was,” Lemar said, nodding and remembering that terrible day. “But I don’t think he’s dead.”

They had gone inside then and talked for more than an hour, and Katie tried to deny and dissuade Lemar from his beliefs, but inside she had to struggle harder against her own desire to believe his every word in every way. They had parted with an agreement to stay in touch and she’d provided him with her new telephone number that she and Dave had been required to get after the military had moved them a few months ago.

Katie didn’t tell Dave about the visit, not that he’d have been there to care anyway since he was spending more and more time out with his ‘friends’ during the week and slept most of the time when he was home. She kept in touch with Lemar sporadically over the next few months but then she didn’t hear from him for a while, which she later learned was because he was kidnapped by a guy named the Power Broker along with some other enhanced wrestlers in some sort of plot, before being saved by a man named U.S.Agent, who was the one who’d called and told her about Lemar.

The man who said he thought he might be her brother…

“You think she’s dead?”

“I don’t fucking know, or care really, but with her bones sticking out so far I can’t see if she’s breathing.”

“For fuck’s sake, she’s got a destroyed knee and a hasn’t had anything to eat of any substance in a month. Go check on her, you pussy.”

“Fine.”

The door to her cell had already been opened and the two Watchdog guards, young men in their twenties, stood in the pale light form the hallway, one holding the tray her ‘breakfast’ was usually carried upon, which consisted of a single piece of toast covered in oatless oatmeal and a small glass of water in a plastic cup. He dropped the tray casually onto the floor next to her, not noticing that a piece of the plastic edge broke from the impact, and knelt to check her pulse as he knelt on her other side, placing a hand on her throat.

“I dunno,” he said, looking back at his friend in the door, the only one of them carrying any weapon. Both of them were dressed only in the purple under suit of their group with the orange chest protector, but no helmets or other protection. “How do you check a pulse?”

“Fer fuck’s sake, Chuck,” the second said, slinging his shotgun over his shoulder on its strap and moving next to Katie on the same side as Chuck. “Get outta the way you…”

Chuck didn’t see what happened since Matt had gotten between him and the bitch, but something warm splashed onto his face and then Matt was flying back into him, having apparently tried to leap back from the woman and bowled the both of them over. He had just pushed his friend to the side when he saw what he had believed was a dead girl rise from the ground on her one good knee and throw herself at him with a feral scream and a piece of the orange plastic tray clenched in her blood covered fist.

After thirty days of torment, Katie struck her second blow for survival and it landed as true as her first, which has pierced Matt’s throat just behind his Adam’s apple and clean through to the other side. When Matt had kicked back from her in pain and surprise, that part of his throat popped out clean and lay somewhere near the front of the cell now as a fountain of blood erupted all over his chest and hands. Chuck had no time to see this as the plastic descended on his unprotected face and sank up to Katie’s clenched fist in his eye socket, piercing his brain and cutting off his short cry of surprise.

Gasping, black spots clouding her vision and light bulbs flashing in her brain, Katie moved over to where Matt lay next to the door, which opened into her cell and she dug frantically at the strap on his shoulder and pulled free his shotgun. She closed her fingers happily around the weapon and lifted it free, ready to end this once and for all, when she noticed something terrifying. Quickly jacking open the stock, she cursed as she found out the weapon was unloaded.

“Motherfucker!” she cursed and froze when she heard a sound coming from down the long hallway that made her freeze…the sound of the gears and motors in Redeye’s body as he came for his morning taunting of her. She’d planned to blow her brains out with the shotgun and ending this as quickly as possible, but that out and she was way up shit creek now. Looking back at Chuck’s body, Katie realized her only option and quickly closed her door as quietly as she could and painfully rolled Matt over twice until he was wedged flat against the bottom of the door. She then hobbled in agony over to Chuck and pried her carefully created weapon form his eye and flopped back over to add her weight to Matt’s.

She had spent the few minutes she’d had alone with the flat, sturdy plastic meal tray each day carefully working one of it’s long sides down using the edge of the stone ledge she had to sleep on, abusing the plastic slowly and carefully, keeping her work out of the regular places one would carry the tray. Since they never overloaded it with more than a half-pound of weight and usually shoved it into her hands instead of tossing it down, she was able to weaken it enough that she could snap her weapon off of it at a moments notice. Her only problem had been how to get them to drop their guards enough, which was made painfully clear when her knee was destroyed.

She made the first deep cut into her left wrist, her teeth snapping together against the pain and she almost stopped but instead she raised her right hand and slammed it down onto her destroyed knee. The pain that lanced through her was sharp and deep and so overwhelming that even as tears of agony rolled down her face her wrist vanished from consideration. She then drug the plastic shiv up her left forearm to her elbow and then quickly, before losing dexterity, performed similar damage to her right arm.

It was then that Redeye slammed into the door, nearly sending her flying across the room. “Guards!” he yelled, realizing something was wrong. “Guards!”

“Go fuck yourself!” Katie said as she slammed her arms down onto the stone floor, splattering fat drops of blood all over herself and Matt’s corpse. “You lose, you piece of shit!” she screamed as loudly as she could, but knowing it was enough since Redeye could hear her quietest whisper.

Two metallic hands smashed into the door above her head and splintered the door inward, but the door was thick wood with metal rods ran through it for strength and security, but after a couple super-strong punches a small hole was made in the door that allowed Katie to see Redeye staring down at her as her nearly lifeless head lolled back onto Matt’s chest. “You stupid bitch,” Redeye said. “You have no idea what you’ve done.”

“I st-stopped you,” Katie said, smiling even as blood pooled beneath her and images began running through her mind. Johnny. Her parents. The ultrasound pictures of her lost baby. Josie. Dave. She smiled at them all, her eyes closing on the dark descending upon her. “You won’t hurt…Johnny…with me.”

Redeye continued pounding on the door even after Katie had stopped breathing and after a few moments had succeeded in shattering the upper half of the door enough to reach in and grab Katie with his two extendable arms, jerking her quickly through the door and sprinting down the hallway toward the medical area. He slammed into the room and dropped her body roughly onto the stainless steel table in the center of the room, her bloody limbs making wet snaps as they hit the cold, antiseptic surface.

Redeye looked up at the three doctors who were standing in the room, all of them surprised looking but suddenly starting to grin in response to his own terrible smile.

“It’s finally time to begin,” he said.

TO BE CONTINUED IN USAGENT #12!