Predator Prey - 5. Escape

Silence. He snapped to awareness in deep silence. No party. No noise of any kind.

Sunday. Of course. Sunday was always the quietest morning of the entire week in the residence.

The only remaining evidence of the previous night's debauchery from his place on the bed was the stench of beer, smoke, sex and vomit. Someone had lost it somewhere in the apartment. Maybe several someones. More than once.

He stifled a groan as he managed to move protesting muscles into a sitting position on the bed. His ass didn't appreciate the change. He hurt. His ass burned and ached and throbbed in pain. He wondered if it would ever work again. He held his head in his hands, and stayed in that position for a long time, just getting used to being semi-upright again. He wondered if he needed to go to a hospital.

Hell, no. He'd wasn't going to any damn hospital. He'd be fine. He had to be.

At least his roommate wasn't in the room.

After what seemed an eternity, he eased himself forward, looking for some clothes to put on. Nothing on the floor that he could see. He'd been naked for twenty-four hours, he reckoned. He stood, pawed in his drawer, and pulled on some jeans: a tee, a hoodie, socks and sneakers followed after. His wallet. He needed his wallet.

He groped gingerly around under the bed for his pants from the day – no, two nights - before. Nothing.

With increasing urgency, he searched the bedroom. In time, he found the leather billfold, tossed carelessly on his roommate's study desk. Stupid name for the stolid piece of oak furniture; the redhead had never done any kind of studying there. They'd fucked once or twice on the hard wood surface, though.

The billfold was empty. No cash, no credit cards or debit cards – there had been four – virtually nothing remained. The only things left to him were a library card, his student ID, an expired coupon to a local pizza place, and his driver's license.

His keys were missing. And his phone. What had they done with his phone? He practically lived on the thing. Neither keys nor phone were anywhere in the room; another, more thorough search told him that.

Another missing item registered in his brain. His lockbox. The big, grey steel box held pretty much all his stock of the pricey stuff. It was what he made the real money on. All the best weed, the pills, the powders – and the cash – all that was in the box. It wasn't just that the box was empty, it was gone completely.

He hesitated to leave the confines of his bedroom, his prison for the past day and night. Confronting Ted and the redhead could be dangerous. Would be dangerous. The throbbing ache in his butt, gut, and joints reminded him of that.

No choice, though. He had to find his phone. He needed to see what was up. He eased himself out of the bedroom.

The social area of the suite was a disaster area. It always was after one of his events, but this was worse than usual. He'd need to hire a cleaning service and pay them overtime for all this.

A few late-stayers were draped on bits of furniture or the floor where they'd passed out. After every event, he usually woke people like this and made them help with the cleanup in the afternoon.

Ted and the redhead slept, entwined quite naked on the couch, where they'd obviously coupled sometime in the darkness. Their clothes could have been anywhere in the mess all over the floor. He picked his way around the room carefully, trying not to wake anyone. He checked a couple of stray pairs of pants for his keys or cards. Nothing.

In the second bedroom, he found a pile of naked bodies sprawled on the bed. The room smelled like the rest of the suite, a bad mix of pot and semen. He didn't have to ponder what the customers had got up to in there. He backed away. His keys turned up in the kitchen, lying on the counter beside a half dozen mostly empty bottles. One of his credit cards lay next to them. He gathered these up, but further search proved fruitless. No phone. He wondered if he had anything left in his account.

The lockbox was nowhere to be seen.

He found a laptop in the bathroom, of all places. It wasn't his. His own computer had some rather embarrassing records and figures and files on it. Strictly business. That elegant steel-cased affair was safely stashed in an anonymous locker in one of the classroom buildings. Who would look for it there?

No, this laptop was a pretty standard-issue college student machine. The screen flashed to life when he nudged it. Whoever owned it never installed a password protection on it. Stupid.

He froze when he saw the screen, though.

A tube site. A porn tube site. Free streaming video. Not great quality, obviously taken from a phone camera. A man, spread eagled on a bed, getting gang fucked, while two or three others drank, smoked and jeered. Himself. Unmistakably. His own slack jawed face was completely visible. When had that happened? He shuddered involuntarily. His stomach heaved, and he added incrementally to the cesspool that was gathered in the toilet.

The stink. Ugh.

He retched again.

When he could stand, he stared again at the laptop. The video. It had been taken and uploaded in the night. It was on someone's phone. No way to retrieve it. And if it was out, it could be anywhere. Everywhere.

He'd been used like a whore. Like a party boy.

It was then that it hit him, hard; an almost physical blow harder than any part of this disaster had dealt him. This was his own work. He'd trapped others into making his events more unusual, more hedonistic, more outrageous each time, all for his own fun and considerable profit, and at little cost to himself.

If he felt like a victim, well, so what? Turnabout was supposed to be fair play. Fair or not, it made him sick. Maybe it was the pills, an aftereffect of the chemicals in his system. Maybe it was something he'd walled off inside after leaving home. Conscience.

Voices and faces of people he'd hurt, people he'd used, people he'd sold. Their eyes, fearful or stoned, appeared to his vision. He heard their manic laughter or cries of hurt echoed in his ears. Every one of them seemed to fill the cramped, stinking space, crowding in on him, on his mind, on every sense he possessed. He shut his eyes, willing the apparitions to disappear.

They faded, but failed to vanish into the miasma that was the bathroom.

Shaking, he slipped out into social area. He drifted to the entry foyer and stared at the wreckage of the apartment. He couldn't face anyone right now. He told himself that he needed to eat, though his stomach was sending the opposite message. Maybe he'd come back in a while, after everyone had left, and he could confront the disaster this weekend had been.

He heard someone moving. Someone in the living room. He thought he recognized Ted's low growl. His roommate's higher voice responded sleepily with a simpering chuckle a second later. A chill ran down his spine.

He fled.