Tales of the Lost: Monsters of the Amazon

Chapter 1: Monsters
By Persephone Bolero

(Tales of the Lost is loosely based on actual roleplay adventures in the Amazon in Second Life. Photos courtesy of unsplash.com.)

The rock beside me exploded, and splinters of stone stung my thighs and hips. The sound of the shot followed so closely I wasn’t sure which happened first. I frantically scanned the overhanging ridges of the cenote for the shooter.

Every morning before my coffee and shower, I walk to the clear pool, strip away my clothes, and plunge from the overhanging ridges into the cool waters below. It washes away the night’s humidity and any residual sleepiness.

After a brief swim, I will usually sit on the dock and think as the water drips off my body. I used to think of iPhones and Uber and sushi bars and spin classes. The memories became a sort of tally of every single thing this jungle stole from me.

I don’t yearn for these urban luxuries quite so much anymore, and I don’t see my life in the Amazon the same way. I lost the City of Angels, or maybe it lost me. Whatever the case, the only luxury I yearn for now is peace, and it’s the monsters of the rainforest that steal it away.

It took me a moment to spot the rotund figure on the top of the ridge with the rifle trained on me. The shape was Miss Shard's, and though I couldn’t see her face, I could feel that crazy look in her eye zooming down that scope at me. I scrambled back, splinters from the rustic boards of the dock burying themselves in my bare backside.

The second shot grazed my arm and slammed into the limestone behind me. I froze, trembling where I sat as a thin line of blood seeped from the wound.

“Persephoneeeeeee,” Miss Shards sang, her voice echoing around the stony walls that surrounded the pool. Then she ended her little song on a flat note: “Get up here.”

The lump in my throat bobbed, and I held my injured arm. “What do you want?” I called back.

“Get up here,” she repeated. The thoughts in her head must sound like the thud of a cudgel. She never answered questions, and it was an act of procrastination that I ever posited any to her. She never saw the value in explanations. She wanted me to do something, and as far as she was concerned, it seemed, that was all the explanation she should ever need to give.

My clothes, weapons, and shoulder pack lay right where I left them up at the top of the overhang, and that is precisely where she stood. She was skilled with a rifle. The first shots were intentional misses. I knew another shot would not be.

I considered diving into the water and swimming through the cave under the pool. I had traversed its dark length a couple times just for the challenge, but then I had been calm. If I made a mistake fleeing my attacker and got turned around in the cavern, the air in my lungs would bubble away like a deadly hourglass. My daughter, Kiki, would wait at our home, crying my name for weeks and always wondering what happened to me.

The thing about Miss Shards is she responded to compliance. I was likely to survive if I gave her whatever she wanted. With the monsters of the Amazon, sometimes submission was an effective survival strategy. And even if she were to kill me, it’d be better I died where my body was likely to be found. At least then Kiki would know I never abandoned her. I got to my feet and walked naked up the rickety stairs to the top.

There’s no greater sense of vulnerability than walking up nude to someone who has a gun trained on you. It’s a situation I often face in the jungle, and I’ve never gotten used to it.

Her eyes guzzled me down like a cheap beer as I approached, the limestone rough on the soles of my bare feet. I put an arm across my breasts. The other hand lay over my vagina. I approached her diffidently, my eyes looking past her muddy boots to the pile of clothes I left behind.

Miss Shards was not a slender woman, and crude tattoos stretched across her wide belly. She always wore jeans that were too small for her, and her flesh pushed over the top of the denim that dug into her waist. Her sleeves were always long, and sweat stains spread under her arms. The way she dressed exuded an air of discomfort, and it made her appearance as oppressive as everything else about her.

I stood there, eyes down upon the rocky surface, waiting for her to speak. She slung the rifle over her shoulder, the stock bumping against the fanny pack at her back. She then just stared as I trembled before her.

After suffering under her gaze for a long moment, and I blurted out demandingly, “Can I have my clothes, please?”

“No, you can’t,” she pounced immediately, the answer delivered as if she were just waiting for me to ask so she could deny the request.

She took a few steps to close the distance between us, and I started to step back when a wet cough burst from her, splattering my breasts with blood. The abruptness of it made me jump. She wiped blood from her lips with the back of her hand, and for a fleeting moment I thought my attacker may very well drop dead right in front of me. I would not, however, be so fortunate.

Miss Shards reached back with her bloody hand and unzipped the pouch hanging behind her. She withdrew a syringe and a vial. My wide eyes were glued to it.

“What is that?” I asked.

“Oh, just a little something I’ve been working on,” she said casually, as she pulled the plunger back and filled the syringe. She tapped bubbles off the inside of glass with her fingernail, the clinking sound so delicate yet so menacing.

“You’re not going to inject me with that, are you?” A question. Pointless.

“Give me your arm,” she replied flatly.

I began to sob and beg, my words shaking with terror. “I don’t want to die. Oh god please, I don’t want to die.”

She grabbed my arm by the wrist, yanking me forcefully toward her. I whimpered. “If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead. This isn’t going to kill you,” she said callously. She slid the needle into my arm before I could pull away or protest further. A gasp sprang from my gaping mouth, and I looked away. “At least I’m pretty sure it won’t,” she added.

A fire crawled from the injection point toward my shoulder. The world spun around me as darkness ate at the corners of my vision. My knees buckled and I hung by my arm, secure in Miss Shards’s grasp.

I always hated needles. For as far back as I can remember I couldn’t get a shot without panicking. At five-years-old I was too young to understand what the shot was for. I called it an “incokalashun,” mimicking as best I could the big word my father used when he explained why I was going to the clinic in West Beverly Hills. He was always using big words, and then he would get impatient with my confusion.

One of the nurses smiled at me kindly, telling me my brown pigtails were pretty, distracting me as the other nurse prepared the syringe.

“You’re my brave little girl, aren’t you, Persephone?” my father told me, his hand on my back. An entertainment lawyer, he held to strict codes of Los Angeles business fashion, such as they were in the late 1980s. His hair was slicked back and shiny, a loose tie flopped between the suspenders holding up his pleated slacks.

I looked up to him and nodded eagerly. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do, but I wanted so much to make him proud. When I looked to the nurse, I saw the needle disappearing into my little arm held in the woman’s large hands. Next thing I knew, I woke up on the exam bed.

“I’m sorry,” I said hazily.

“It’s okay, sweetie,” the nurse who liked my pigtails replied. “You just had a little accident.” I could smell vomit on my sky blue dress.

My father rushed me out the door of the clinic and into the car, the front of my dress soaked wet. He wouldn’t even look at me.

“I’m sorry,” I repeated as he buckled me into the leather front seats of his Maserati convertible sports car.

“You embarrassed me in there,” he said.

Despite his disappointment, he took me for ice cream. It’s how he always punished me. He’d give me a reward I hadn’t earned, and then let me suffer the guilt as I enjoyed it.

“Persephoneeee,” Miss Shards was singing as she firmly slapped my cheeks, alternating between left and right. My eyes opened and tried to focus on her blurry face. Her other hand was placed firmly against my labia, gripping my crotch to hold me up until I regained consciousness. As my legs began to hold my weight again, she began to rub my sex. She pressed herself against me, pushing me against the rough tree bark.

“Stop,” I said, trying to speak clearly but still too weak to do much more than mumble. My effort to push her hand away was just as feeble.

She brought her lips close to my ear and shushed me gently. “Let it take effect.”

“I want to go home.”

“Soon.”

“Am I going to die?”

“Probably not.”

She leaned back, and I could smell her breath. It had the metallic ketosis scent of someone whose diet consists almost entirely of meat. I whimpered again as her fingers sawed uncomfortably between the halves of my labia. My head spun every time I tried to focus on her face. It rolled weakly on my neck.

The calm began to seep in very gradually, forming as a kind of pink pleasure at the back of my head before blooming into a fluffy white euphoria. My eyes rolled back above my spreading smile. My wetness began to develop between my legs, smearing on her grubby fingers. As my hips rocked, the skin of my backside scratched against the tree bark. I began to moan softly, as a pleasured calm replaced terror. I closed my eyes peacefully.

“Fuck, you are such a sexy girl, Persephone,” she said in a sort of hissing growl.

One of my feet scooted a few inches further from the other, my legs opening to invite her touch as my heavy breaths peppered her face with my moans. I reached forward, absentmindedly, and laid my hand on her hip. She took her hand off my sex just long enough to roughly swat my hand away. My eyes sprung open to see the index finger of her other hand pointed at my face. She returned the swatting hand to my sex and forced a couple fingers inside me.

“Don’t you ever touch me,” she admonished.

“I’m sorry,” I begged as her fingers dug uncomfortably into my opening.

I continued to offer my contrition and her glare softened. She uncurled her fingers and began to fuck me with them. My breathy moans replaced the apologies. I reached back with the hand that had been swatted away and gripped the bark behind me. I closed my eyes again.

My climax was nearing. I could see it on the back of my eyelids, like the warm rays that rise on the horizon just before dawn. Miss Shards leaned her face forward again to bring her lips to my ear, her breath warm upon my lobe.

“Can you hear me?” she asked softly.

“Uh huh.”

“Aries,” she then whispered.

Suddenly I could see his face appearing in the rising sun in my vision. His black skin covered in a coarse beard--I could feel it scratch against my cheeks. A bandana wrapped under the thick dreads sprouting like a fountain from the top of his head, and I could feel the tufts against my palms. The defined sinew of his biceps exuding a violent power as his arms wrapped around my body. And I could feel Aries’ cock as it disappeared inside me again and again in hard, relentless slaps that sent my breasts shaking upon my body.

Miss Shards’s voice penetrated the fantasy. “You will go to him,” she was saying. “You fuck him ‘till his dick turns blue, and then you get his cum in this bottle. You hear me?”

“Yes,” I blurted out between breaths.

“You have 72 hours. You find me. Don’t make me come find you.” The warning was as serious as a lump in my breast.

She placed the small, plastic bottle into my hand and curled my fingers around it. I gripped it tightly as I shuddered against the tree, my orgasming song echoing through the rain forest. Aries’ wicked smile, clear in my vision, faded into a cerulean haze, which itself was overcome by the fluff of clouds as bright as my smile. And all that gave way to a peaceful, dreamless sleep.

When I awoke, Miss Shards and my clothes were gone. I looked at the plastic bottle in my hand. The blood on my arm had dried, as had Miss Shards’s blood on my breasts. My recollection of her and what transpired between us returned gradually as I got to my feet and determined where I was. My head felt like it was packed with nails. Covering my nudity with my arms and hands, I started back toward home.

But with each step came thoughts of Aries. They were fleeting, salacious splashes of fantasy: me spread over his bed on my belly as he grunted from behind, bouncing upon his cock as the water in a steamy hot spring sloshed around us, my body wrapped around his as he stood in my shower. Try as I might to turn my thoughts away from him, something pulled me back into the fantasies, and droplets hung from the fur between my legs.

I walked down the path toward the river, where the path forked into two directions. The left path went down to the banks, where my boat was tied at the dock. The other went up into the Central Raider Lands, as I called them, where Aries made his home.

I paused at the fork, my hand covering my pussy. It was no longer there to hide my nakedness. Absently, I was rubbing myself. I took my hand away and folded my arms as if to secure my hands in place, but the effort did nothing to turn my thoughts away from Aries. I took the right path, toward the man’s house, an angry hunger driving my steps toward his bed.

(To be continued…)