Doll Hunter 1

 

A Doll of My Own

 

 

by John Rookwood

 

 

 

 

Copyright © 2020 by John Rookwood

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to johnrookwood@yahoo.com

 

 

 

 

Chapter 1

 

I unlocked the door to the townhouse at three AM on Saturday morning. Breaking and entering wasn't all that hard, especially when you had as much preparation time as I had getting ready for this particular job. I knew there was no alarm system which meant I should be able to get in, grab what I was here for and get out with a minimum of fuss. I was getting paid one hundred large for this job, so it had to be perfect.

Technically, I wasn't 'breaking' so much as just entering since I had a copy of the owner's door key. I've been doing this sort of thing for five years now, and I am pretty good at acquisitions of this kind. Sure I could pick the lock quickly, but that leaves marks inside the mechanism which would tip someone off that outside forces had been at work. When I do a job, it's important that no one suspects that the disappearance was strange That's important to my bosses and my mentor had drilled that into me.

After all, kidnapping people was serious business.

I had spent the better part of a month preparing for this night. Watching my target's home from various vehicles rented under several fake IDs. Learning her patterns and entering her place three weeks prior when she went jogging and had left the sliding back door open to allow a breeze to air the place out.

It had been a simple matter to pull on one of my various costume jackets, in this case one with the local power company logo and matching hat. Then, wearing my tool belt, I simply walked around the back of the complex and fiddled with the power box nearest her patio, after a few minutes I walked to the glass door, knocked, waited for a second and then slid it open further, sticking my head inside. I muttered a few words, then nodded and stepped inside.

To anyone watching me that day, I had asked the resident a question and been invited to enter to resolve whatever problem I was there to fix.

On that day my goals had been simple enough, the first was to find and make an impression of the door key, I found a spare set on a peg by the door, and after figuring out which was the main door key, I made an imprint that I could use later to create a duplicate. Then I went to the main objective, her computer. After connecting an external drive to her laptop, I cloned the laptop OS and all its files to the external and departed. These two items were all I needed to set things in motion.

Over the next three weeks I built the cover story for her imminent disappearance and made arraignments to send anyone who would go looking for her on a wild goose chase that should keep them busy until the trail was long cold.

First, I made myself a simple hard resin copy of her house key and then, using a laptop with her cloned drive, I began performing searches at restaurants and coffee shops near the brokerage firm where she worked. I made sure to do these searches when she was on her lunch breaks, so when the time came for the cops to check, everything would look legitimate.

But now the time had come to grab her. It was a three-day weekend at her firm, so there would be an extra day before her absence was noticed.

Long weekends and non-family oriented holidays were the best time to abduct people since those were the days people tended to travel.

The resin copy of her house key unlocked the front door and I entered wearing what I called my 'hunting suit', which consisted of a brand new jumpsuit with the electric company logo on it, new socks, new canvas shoes with a set of flesh-colored latex gloves and hat with the same logo. A simple dust filter mask made sure that if I somehow got spotted by a security camera, there would be no way to identify me.

A van was parked outside bearing the same company logo. If anyone was awake and looked out at the parking spaces in front of her place, they would get the impression that she had a late night power issue of some kind.

Night-vision goggles allowed me to move through the dark townhouse with ease, and keeping the lights out added to the illusion of a power issue.

I moved inside as quietly as possible and pulled the out a chloroform-soaked rag from one of the pouches on my belt as I slipped into her bedroom. My target was fast asleep in her bed, according to the file I had been given when I took the job, her name was Erma Jacobs and she was a decent-looking woman with light brown hair that fell just past her shoulders, fair skin and a nice set of thirty-four-C breasts. I could see why she was a target, even if she was a little older than most girls I abducted for my company.

As the rag touched her face, she snapped awake and struggled, but I was ready for this response and straddled her as I grabbed her throat with my other hand. Squeezing a little caused her to react like anyone does when their air supply is cut off and she instinctively tried to suck in air. After a second, I relaxed my grip and she inhaled deeply, getting a nice heavy dose of the fumes.

No matter what the movies and TV shows tell you, chloroform isn't fast acting. It took a full two minutes of struggling to make her weak and two more to put her out cold.

During the struggle she thrashed, tried to scream through the rag and clawed at my arms. I was used to this and ready for it. The jacket kept her from getting to my skin and by straddling her I kept her pinned to the mattress. Squeezing her throat when she managed to get a grip on my arms forced her to concentrate on breaking my grip there, even as she had to realize that the fumes were the real danger here.

People tend to act irrationally in times of danger - well most people.

My victim was one of those normal ones and before five minutes were up, she was out cold. Now I just had to move her to the van and cover my tracks.

I folded the unconscious woman up into a fetal position and wrapped her up in her own bed sheets, then I lifted her up and carried the bundle to the kitchen and set her down by the door. I took a lawn and leaf bag off my belt and slid the wrapped bundle into it. Then I peeked out the window and once I was sure it was clear, I lugged the bundle containing Ms. Erma Jacobs to the van and placed her inside. I pulled out the cloned laptop that I had been using to set up the false trail and wiped it down completely before pressing her hands over it in a variety of positions to insure her prints were the only ones that would be found. Once that was done I changed into a fresh set of gloves, tossing the chloroform tainted ones in a plastic bag before I took the laptop back into her home.

I swapped out her laptop for the cloned one and then accessed her bank accounts on the clone. and began transferring her not insignificant funds to an anonymous Cayman Islands account. Ms Jacobs had enough money in the bank that she would have been able to live for a few months without a paycheck, or at least she had until just now. By the time the transfer was complete, her account wouldn't be able to cover the cost of a pizza and a beer. When I was done helping myself to her savings, I ran a re-installation command on the cloned laptop and left it there to be found later.

Finding her linen closet allowed me to make the bed with fresh sheets, that way a stripped mattress wouldn't seem out of place and there would be no trace of chloroform to be sniffed out by forensics.

After that task was complete, I went to her closet and pulled out a suitcase before collecting a few articles of Erma's clothing from her closet and chest of drawers. I wasn't picky about what I took, this was just to make it look like she packed in a hurry and left, and I left the drawers open and dropped the hangers on the floor to add to the dressing of the scene.

To complete the illusion of her rapid and wholly self-motivated departure, I grabbed her brushes and other grooming items along with the medicine bottles from her bathroom and took a couple of small pictures off the wall and added them to the suitcase. I didn't need or want any of this stuff, but it was necessary for the deception. I looked around for anything that screamed 'personal' and grabbed a few figurines and an old stuffed bear off a dresser and closed the suitcase.

Next, I wrapped the suitcase in another lawn bag and carried it out to the van, snagging her phone, purse and key-ring on my way out. I locked the front door behind me with her own set of keys and using a small can of compressed air with a needle tube, I blasted the interior of the lock a couple of times to flush out any resin flakes that might have lingered before I left.

Cranking up the van, I drove away, parking a few blocks south of her place. Then I climbed into the back of the van and checked on my victim. After unwrapping her from the bag and sheets, I pulled out my medical gear and loaded up a syringe with sedative that had proven to be effective on most people and dosed her. The chloroform would wear off too soon for the trip we were going to be making, but the shot would take effect in about ten or fifteen minutes and insure she would sleep for a good six hours.

Why not use the shot to begin with, one might ask? Because it's hard as hell to find a vein and inject someone who is struggling.

Once Erma was dosed, I put and inflatable gag on her and pumped it up before cuffing her hands behind her back and binding her ankles with a dozen feet of duct tape before wrapping her back up in the sheets, just in case things went pear-shaped and I got pulled over. A body might be spotted, even from the driver's window, but a bundle of sheets could be passed off as dropcloth for working around dusty areas.

Satisfied that Erma was secure, I slipped out of the kidnapping clothes and put on another new set of street clothes, although I kept the gloves on for the next phase of the operation.

Walking back to her condo complex, I used her keys to take her car a dozen miles into the heart of the city. I left the car parked on the street near a bus stop that served the airport with the windows up and the doors locked. While it was possible, the car would be stolen, the security system should deter most casual thieves.

Standing at the bus stop, I took out Erma's phone; I pulled the battery and broke the device in half, putting the pieces in my pocket. Then I walked to a nearby alley where I collected a scooter I had left under a tarp and chained to a dumpster earlier in the day.

I rode back to the van looking for all the world like just another guy who had lost his license in a DUI. I spent half an hour puttering my way back to the van and along the way I tossed the pieces of Erma's phone into sewer drains on different roads. When I arrived at my kidnap vehicle, the scooter went into the back next to the sleeping Erma and at just after 4am, the risky part of the job was over and it was time to make the trip to collect my payday.

A month of set up and prep, one hour of actual work and I was done. This was one for the textbooks, if kidnapping women for profit had any textbooks, which I am fairly certain they don't.

I'm sure many people would ask how I had gotten into the business of abductions for hire, if they knew that was what I really did for a living. My business cards say that I work in political advertising, no one ever asks me about that job.

The truth is, I got this job the same way most people get jobs, I applied online.

No, seriously.

Of course I didn't know it was kidnapping for hire when I filled out the forms, I thought it was a bounty hunting and property recovery operation, which seemed like a good fit for me after twelve years in the military. It wasn't until I had gone through a couple of personality tests and an interview that I got a clue.

They were careful about broaching the subject, but eventually an interviewer informed me about the private contracts aspect of their bounty hunting operation. By this time they were confident I was the kind of guy who wouldn't run to the cops to rat them out, but they had a plan if those bio-metrics they were secretly monitoring indicated I was lying when I said I was interested.

Of course, once I was in, I discovered it was even more illegal than I thought. I had assumed that what they were talking about was just going to be rich people paying me to have things they couldn't buy stolen for them, like some piece of art; or maybe the bounties would have us grabbing people the customer wanted revenge on for something they couldn't go to court over.

It turned out the company I applied to was fake. There were a series of shells used when they recruited hunters, all of which eventually led back to an outfit called Mancipium Enterprises.

The people behind Mancipium had either developed or stolen some seriously scary technology a decade or two back. The tech had been intended to allow people with a special brain implant to upload skill sets and use them as if they had been trained for years. It had been designed to be used as a shortcut for military training, as long as the body was physically able to perform the tasks, the user could upload any skills needed in the field. Suddenly every soldier could be any kind of specialist after a few hours at an upload center.

The human trials had been where they ran into problems. First and foremost was the immune system rejection rate which was around seventy percent among test subjects. The smart people found that rejection could be overcome with specially designed drugs, but those drugs left the immune system weakened. This created a new problem in that the average lifespan of someone taking the drug treatment was projected at fifteen years at the outside and less than half that in unhygienic areas of the world. Since most wars aren't fought in areas with a cleaning crew on hand to sanitize the battlefield, the project never made it to the military conventions.

Then there was the unexpected side effect. After some tests, it was discovered that implanted subjects could upload more than just skills. With the right tweaks you could upload programming that altered mannerisms, eliminate or create phobias, or even upload whole new personalities.

A subject to could be made to not want to smoke, or to exercise more, or you could create a whole new identity profile. A lazy smoker with a drinking problem could be altered to become a clean living exercise nut and a willful antisocial goth girl could be made into a Suzy home-maker who loves to cook, clean and please her man.

Predictably, the side effect is where my job comes into play. For the right price you can have your own human 'doll', modified physically and mentally to be your perfect companion, perfect sex toy or your perfect victim.

The process goes something like this; a customer makes contact with Mancipium and puts in an 'order,' for a doll. Now, sometimes they just take one of the various 'bimbos' that M.E. has prepped and ready to go - think of them as the basic model kept on the lot. The bimbos are the cheapest way to go and can be reprogrammed in a few hours, but often the customer wants something more personalized, they might want a specific person as their toy or maybe they want a lookalike of someone famous, which the company refers to as a template. If it's a template, then life is easier for us on the collection side of the biz and the process is cheaper for the customer than acquiring a specific person.

On rare occasions, the customer wants a specific someone famous and that really runs into money. Disappearing or replacing a star requires a lot of work and typically runs the customer ten figures and up.

Most customers go for a template, since most of them are satisfied with a simple lookalike of a porn queen, music star, movie idol, or old flame with a personality modified to their liking.

I had met one of the modded template girls one time. She had been a Marilyn Monroe 'doll' who after a little plastic surgery looked just like the actress, although an inch or two taller that the real thing had been. The doll had the speech patterns and mannerisms down pat, but the customer had a dominatrix personality installed which was a little trippy to hear and see.

The templates earn good money for guys like me. We get a list of potential subjects gleaned from automated searches of social media sites which perform facial comparisons followed by body type analysis to provide candidates that requires the minimum surgery to become a match.

Once a doll hunter has the target info they go out into the field and start stalking potential victims.

A target being married or living with someone is a hurdle, but not always a disqualifier. It all comes down to picking a target that can be taken with a believable cover and given several targets, a hunter will naturally take the easiest one we can. Work smarter, not harder and all that.

Specific targets are harder, and as such pay better.

Erma was a specific target. The customer in this case was a regular with our service and while I didn't know the customer's name, I could probably have figured it out if I tried since she seemed to be systematically creating a harem.

The fact that the customer paid for specific targets, like Erma, made me suspect they were all women who wronged her in the past. The customer in this case had a pile of money to blow and the file connected to the ID code on the acquisition file for Erma showed that the customer had already collected a former high school cheerleader, a former college student, and two small business owners, now she would own Erma as well.

Erma must have angered the customer a year ago, judging by the age difference between her and the previous targets the customer paid to collect. Erma wasn't the type the company normally wanted, I mean she wasn't ugly by any means. She was five and a half feet tall with a decent body that was in fairly good shape, although she could stand to lose a few pounds. Her breasts were large and full but starting to sag a little from age, I suspected she would be getting a little touch up work done to her before final delivery.

Not that I cared how she looked, after all I was paid to make the grab and cover my tracks. In a few hours I would arrive at a special warehouse where I would put Erma into a holding cell for eventual pickup. The contract didn't forbid me from fucking her if I wanted, it just noted I should use protection. If the target was delivered pregnant or with an STD, my payment was forfeit. Not that I had any STDs mind you, sex is fun but not a controlling factor in my life.

Erma woke up about a half hour before I reached the drop off point and she squirmed around in the sheets, grunting and moaning a bit until I yelled at her to stop it or I'd dose her again. After that she just whimpered and tried to get comfortable, although she did get her head out of the sheets.

Now some people might be worried about being identified by the victims, but it's not like she would be able to tell anyone what I looked like once she was processed. Even if something happened later on and she got away from her owner, there was a special personality modification in all the dolls which kicked in if the authorities ever got hold of the doll and started asking questions. In such circumstances the doll in question would be rendered comatose for a while then reawaken with one thought on their minds: suicide. The coma part was intended to facilitate the doll being moved to a medical facility where the self-destructive mindset would have a variety of options to choose from and fewer guards to interfere.

Gruesome? Yes, but I knowingly kidnapped women, and sometimes men, to deliver them to people who in turn convert them into brainwashed slaves with an average lifespan of about three presidential elections. So gruesome is all about perspective, and from my perspective those safeguards were the sort of thing that might keep me out of jail.

Approaching the warehouse, I made the required drive-by looking for indicators that the place had been compromised.

If anyone enters the holding location and doesn't deactivate certain hidden triggers, a couple of simple things will happen. The old satellite antenna on the roof changes direction, breaking the network connection and a few of the outside lights strategically overload and burn out. If those specific lights are out or the dish is facing north, I keep driving and go to the next place on my secret list and log the safe-house as suspect, which will cause the company to check it out and either reset it for use or destroy it.

Everything looked normal when I passed, but I took my time and eventually pulled up to the building an hour later. After I let myself in and brought the van inside, I deactivated the security systems and sent the 'arrived safe with package' code on a burner phone.

Before unloading Erma, I checked the holding cells and made sure they were ready. Hunters like me are supposed to clean up after a job but some of my fellow kidnappers are sloppy. Once I was satisfied that everything was in place I collected some gear from the far side of the secret holding facility and loaded them onto a rolling cart which I pushed over to the van.

I was now ready to unload Ms. Jacobs and have a little fun.