"NO!! SARAH!! NO!!" Joey cried just before he fell out of the bed.
"Joey! It's okay! It was only a dream!" I said, nearly falling out of bed after him.
"NO! I SHOT HER! I SHOT SARAH! I REMEMBER! I DID IT! IT WAS ME!" Joey continued as he stumbled and struggled to get free of the covers.
I realized he was lost in the emotions his dream had produced, and just as he got to his feet intending to run, I tackled him back to the floor and held onto him with everything I had while he went into a hysterical fit.
The twins where gone by the time Joey had worn himself out, and before Joey dropped back asleep, I had managed to piece his dream together from the fragments his terrified mind had recalled.
His dream was a combination of real events and imaginary ones, the imaginary ones having come from Steven's tampering of Joey's memory. From what I saw, Joey had taken on the role of both Steven, himself, and Tammy's old master, where he raped, enslaved, brainwashed, toyed with, mistreated, and finally shot his 12 year old sister in the head.
The worse part was Joey had done almost everything he experienced in the dream, and at the time, he had loved doing it. While he had been settling down from his fit, I found Joey still believed he had killed his sister, and wasn't listening to me, even when I thought directly to his mind.
It took me a while to go back to sleep, and when the twins woke me up doing their morning rounds, I snapped at them and sent them away with their feelings hurt.
I was relieved to find Joey's sense of reality had returned, but I could still see the horror in his eyes. He didn't say a word to me, just moved towards me and started crying.
I fell asleep holding Joey's head against me, but I don't think he went back to sleep at all. For when I opened my eyes, Joey lifted his head and smiled weakly at me, saying, "It's about time you woke up."
"Are you okay?"
"No.. Tim, I want to go find her. I want to forge my way into college, join that fraternity, and find out if my sister is alive or not."
"Joey.. We can't join that fraternity. Ron knows we're not old enough. He'd blow the whistle."
"Not if we use the twins on him and make him forget us."
"What about Jason and Pete? They're going to join it too, and we're not going to wipe them."
"We'll just make them transfer to another school. Tim? You know I can't do this without you. I can't promise you anything in return because I don't have anything to give you except my own life, and I know you don't want that. But without you..."
"Shit, Joey. I pretty much guessed this is what you'd want to do, and you know I'd do anything for you... Okay.. I'll help you do it. But we have to figure out a better plan than that. I have some ideas of my own that you might not have thought of."
Joey and I spent the entire morning exchanging our ideas, arguing over which made more sense, and finally decided we simply had to have more information before we could do anything.
We found that Ron and Jason had left that morning to get Jason ready for the initiation into the fraternity. Usually the fraternity only allowed new members to join during mid-semesters, right after the initiates had endured a vigorous and intensive bodybuilding program which was run by the fraternity's upperclassmen.
Because Jason had been able to continue his bodybuilding while in hiding with his parents, the fraternity was making an exception for Jason by holding his initiation rituals the week before classes began. They apparently had been impressed by his determination when he proved to the fraternity's higher council he had surpassed their entry requirements by nearly %50. And I'm sure Ron had a hand in getting Jason's entry approved.
Even if I didn't already know there was a ulterior goal behind the fraternity, it was plain there was something fishy about it. Anyone accepted into the fraternity stayed in it until they graduated, their members having the highest grades and the largest muscles. Their parties were the best, their sexual habits were always safe, and no one ever saw a member high on drugs or smoke a cigarette. They were too good to be true, but no one seemed to find that suspicious.
Joey and I had gotten most of this information from Pete, but once he couldn't tell us anything else, he pointed us to the exact kind of person we were looking for.
Fredrick Paul Brown, Fred to his friends, Freddie to his loved ones, had just graduated from Northwest State and happened to be an alumni of Gamma Alpha Eta, the fraternity which Ron was a member of. Joey and I couldn't believe our good fortune of finding that Fred had undergone the same programming Ron had. I wasn't able to detect whether his hidden personality was still there or not, and there was no sign of any overlooked memories, but his mind was littered with foggy blank areas, and his huge muscular body was probably proof enough. No one could get that big without something extraordinary making him do it.
Fred was friendly enough to talk to us about Gamma Alpha Eta and such, but he kind of brushed us off after fulfilling his duty to his frat brothers. His mind was full of expectations about his new job waiting for him three states away. After a few minutes of discussion outside his parents home, Joey convinced me we had to take him home and see what my dad could make of him.
Twenty minutes later, Fred was packing his suitcase with excitement equal to landing that job he wasn't starting for another two weeks. He couldn't believe his new boss had given him the extra time to go and live with his two new best friends before moving away and probably never seeing them again.
Joey and I became completely consumed in preparing for our self-assigned mission. Surprisingly, my mom and dad didn't even try to talk us out of it once our intentions became clear. They spent many hours testing and launching surprise attacks on the cover personalities Joey and I were constructing. I knew they were doing it so they could feel a little more comfortable knowing that we were a safe behind a mental cloak that even they couldn't penetrate.
The mental cloak that Melissa had taught me was nowhere near as thorough as her own, but I believe that was because Melissa's cover personality had been formed over years of growing up in a hostile place, obtaining its own set of memories which were from real events.
Joey's and my cover personalities were composed of as many real memories as possible, but because we were only half way through high school, and most of those memories were inappropriate, we had a lot of trouble filling that area in with something that felt believable.
We were under a great deal of pressure to get our cover personalities worked out, forge our enrollment at Northwest State, gather as much information as we could to help us prepare for college and getting into the fraternity, all while dealing with the hysterical fits Joey had every night after waking up from another nightmare.
I barely had time to say goodbye to Holly before she and Tammy left Thursday for a university in Texas. I felt so guilty for not spending any more time with her, but she didn't seem to be upset with me. I couldn't help feeling she had lost interest in me, especially the way she just told me to take care of Midge and left with only a peck on the cheek.
But I didn't have time to dwell on Holly's departure. Joey had decided it was time to wake up his mom and dad, and on Friday morning he kissed them both, hoping they would make faster recoveries than he and Suzi had.
Joey knew the first two or three days were the most important in restoring them to their former selves. He believed that because he had gone through the experience himself, he would have an easier time helping them than any of us. But once their memories started to come back, Joey was overwhelmed by their emotional hell, and I spent the whole day Saturday trying to keep him busy while my mom and Joey's paternal grandparents took over the job.
Sunday was truly a day of hell. Both high school and college classes started on Monday, and both of us knew we weren't ready for college, but we had prepared too much to wait for the following semester. The idea of going back to high school seemed completely out of the question, but we simply didn't feel we had had enough time preparing ourselves for passing off as college 'men'.
Fred ended up being the deciding factor that had us pack our bags that night. He convinced us we were only feeling what every college freshman felt before leaving home for school the first time, and that there were always a couple of guys who looked too young to be in college.
Even the fact that Joey and I only had to shave about once every two weeks didn't seem to persuade Fred's assurances we were as ready as we could be. Of course he didn't know what we had been preparing for. As far as Fred was concerned, we were just two really young looking guys who had needed his assurances and insight about college life. He didn't know that while he was telling us everything he remembered from his college experience, my dad was picking his brain with a small but extremely sharp mental blade.
The things my dad was able to pull from the foggy areas of Fred's memory convinced Joey that Sarah was alive and a slave at one of the four state universities. The first thing my dad pieced together was a memory of one of Fred's daily visits to a medical laboratory where at least twenty medical students were working.
Fred just walked right in, took a form from a bin near the door, wrote his name, the time, and his student id number on it, then removed his shirt and looked for the first available station. The two lab assistants at the station he picked took Fred's blood pressure and other measurements, then Fred removed the small pin from his pierced nipple and stood still while one of them inserted a short needle into the top hole, puncturing the skin inside.
Fred didn't seem to feel anything but a mild tingle as the lab assistant extracted several cc's of a faintly yellow liquid. The extraction took several minutes to complete, and once the assistant seemed satisfied by the amount, he called the other one over while removing the syringe section, leaving the needle section stuck in Fred's nipple.
The first assistant took the syringe away while the other returned with another syringe filled with a clear liquid. She attached the syringe to the needle, then proceeded to inject the contents into the same place the other had come from. When she finished, the syringe and needle were removed, and Fred automatically reinserted the sterilized nipple pin, put his shirt on and left.
Apparently he did this three times a day without having any conscious memory of doing it, and this seemed to make up the largest portion of the blank spots in his memory.
But not all of them. In fact, the most important piece of information we got came from a week he couldn't consciously recall living.
A few weeks after his initiation into the fraternity and the programming of his mind by an unseen person, one of the senior brothers told Fred to meet some of the other new members outside at 2:00am, and to follow the instructions given to him by the masked stranger who showed up.
When a woman appeared wearing a black ski mask, she ordered the group to close their eyes and to put on the blindfolds she passed out. One by one, they were led into what felt like a school bus and were told to go to sleep. He never knew how long he had been asleep, or how far away he had traveled before waking up in a hospital like waiting room.
A nurse rolled a cart into the waiting room after he waited patiently in the room for a good hour. She passed out a clipboard of forms and a paper grocery bag to each of the ten young men there, then told them to fill out the forms and to write their names on the bags before stripping and putting all their clothes in it.
They followed her orders without question, then once they were all nude, she led them all down the hall to room filled with physicians. They were given physicals, gave blood and urine samples, ran through an assortment of other tests and scans, then finally were told to lay down on a gurney and were knocked out by an injection.
Fred woke up finding his right breast burning like a bitch, but having been ordered to ignore it, he didn't touch it or complain about in the least. Just like with Tammy, Fred found himself still nude, in strange unknown surroundings, and completely committed to please his mistress.
The woman who he and four others pleasured for six exhaustive days was not someone we had seen before, but it was perfectly obvious that while she was a telepath, she wasn't talented or even smart enough to perform the kind of programming we had been finding. In fact, she appeared to be a spoiled brat who didn't want to do any of the work to obtain what she wanted. It was clear she was dependant on someone else's skill and generosity, sometimes mentioning what she was going to ask for next.
Each day they were run through the same routine, waking up in the hospital, being run through the battery of tests like cattle, then getting knocked out just to wake up with their breast feeling like it was on fire. But with the wild and frenzied sex they had after they woke, Fred didn't seem to notice it all that much.
When Fred's mistress would get tired of the five men's attentions, she would entertain herself by having them wrestle and eventually fuck each other. Fred had never considered sex with another man before, but the moment his mistress said so, he desired nothing else.
Fred woke up once hearing an unfamiliar voice talking to his mistress. He only caught a glance of the other woman before Fred was told to go back to sleep. Even though he didn't get a good look at her, both Joey and I swore it looked like an older version of the girl who had met Joey's dad with the man we were looking for.
So that was when we knew we were on the right track.