Simon Jillson: Driven To Depravity

She tightened her arms around him in an iron grip. She hooked her legs around his and clung to him desperately.

Judy blinked against the glare of the bright sunlight, then put on her dark glasses. She tried not to look at the unkempt lawn with its shaggy tussocks of grass and bobbing heads of dandelions going to seed. When it literally came down to a matter of life and death, a well-tended lawn was unimportant.

Her short skirt whipped around her bare thighs as she went briskly down the walk. She focused her mind entirely on the problem ahead of her.

Her life had been reduced to hard-core basics. Everything she did, and everything Mark did, was aimed at one goal – keeping him alive for another day, or week, or month, or, God willing, possibly a year or more.

One by one their avenues of escape had been cut off. It was almost as if some evil entity were thwarting them. When the disease had first attacked Mark's kidneys, there had been the possibility that the damage could be stopped before it went too far. When that hadn't happened, the doctors had mentioned the possibility that perhaps the damage wouldn't be permanent, that some fragments of those vital organs would regenerate and resume filtering the poisons out of his bloodstream.

That hope had proved as false as the first. Mark's kidneys were gone, destroyed, totally incapable of performing their task.

For a time there had been the artificial kidney at the hospital. Hooked up to a stainless steel tank the size of a washing machine, Mark could survive. And his fate had been placed in the hands of The Committee.

The cost of an artificial kidney meant that there could never be enough to serve all the patients who needed one. Some would live and some would die, and The Committee sat in judgment, playing God, deciding who was to receive the life-giving treatments and who wasn't.

In the end the bitter decision was that Mark was to be taken off. No reasons were given. Reasons were never given. Even the names of the people serving on The Committee were kept secret to protect them from pleading or harassment or bribery by desperate patients and families.

Since Mark and Judy couldn't afford a kidney machine, they had only one faint hope left. It was one of the factors considered by The Committee.

The higher the possibility of a transplant being made, the more likely the patient was to get time on the kidney machine. But in Mark's case, the possibility of an acceptable transplant becoming available was minuscule. He possessed one of the rarest blood types, and had no living blood relatives. There seemed almost no chance that tissues could be matched closely enough to prevent rejection of a foreign organ.

It meant, for the rest of his life, being a slave to a machine that could filter his blood. And the dialysis unit at the hospital was available to him only a few more times, would give him only a few precious weeks of life.

Before then, they had to find some other solution. The only one left was a home dialysis unit, a machine like the hospital's, but of their own.

That was their final hope, and Judy was determined not to let it slip from their grasp. Somewhere, somehow, some way she had to come up with the money to buy the artificial kidney. Time was getting short. Mark had lost his job because of his increasing absences. It was all up to her.

Squaring her shoulders, she arranged a pillow on the back of the seat so she could reach the pedals, and slid behind the wheel of the shabby old car, ignoring the sharp point of the spring protruding from the frayed upholstery. In front of her, the needle of the speedometer stood stubbornly between the 30 and the 40. The bright sunlight seemed to be swallowed up by the dulled, rust-mottled hood.

With no skills and no training, Judy had been forced to struggle from one job to another. When it had become obvious that she was going to be the sole support for them, and the only possible source of money for the kidney machine, she had looked for a job where there was a possibility of earning a large amount of money rapidly. By working as a go-go dancer in the evenings, and going to classes during the day, she had managed to get a Real Estate Agent's license. A few small sales had freed her from her distasteful evening job – just in time. Since business was bad, the owner of the night spot had been threatening to go topless and bottomless and have his dancers wait on tables that way.

It wasn't that Judy was ashamed of her body. Quite the opposite. She had always been proud of her petite figure. Barely five feet tall and never having gone over a hundred pounds, she was neat and trim, almost childish in shape. Gymnastics had hardened her and molded her into a series of trim, graceful curves, and sexual maturity had rounded her hips and filled out her breasts to graceful, feminine mounds. Judy had known that the bar was being dragged down into a seamy, sleazy twilight area between the legal and the illegal. Sooner or later the "table tending" was certain to have degenerated to "entertaining" the customers, first witn friendly conversation while their horny glances feasted on her, then physical contact, a reaching patting hand that wasn't to be discouraged. Eventually, it would have wound up in one of the back rooms.

Judy had quit as soon as she could.

But since those early successes, the real estate business had deteriorated. As the end of Mark's time on the kidney machine drew closer and closer, the listings of houses to be sold had fallen off.

Just living had cut deeper and deeper into the painfully small, desperately accumulated savings.

Judy finally managed to get the car started. The inside fittings – door handles and window cranks, rear view mirror, everything – rattled.

Carefully, she moved the shift lever to drive and eased the accelerator down. The decrepit automatic transmission lurched quickly through its repertoire until it reached high. As she pulled away from the curb, Judy could see the thick fog of oil smoke hanging in the air behind her.

So, Judy thought, she was now down to one last desperate gamble to keep Mark alive. She knew of a house, a mansion, really an estate, that might, just might, be going up for sale. If she succeeded in getting the owner to list it with her, she had a possible buyer for it.

She needed to get the listing, and make the sale. If she could pull it off, the commission would be enough to get a kidney machine. Nothing else mattered but the life-giving machine.

Hot gusts of air puffed through the hole in the rusted fire wall separating Judy from the engine and swirled up under her short skirt, bringing with it heat and the stink of burning oil. The hot blasts warmed the insides of her bare thighs, touched the crotch of her panties. As she drove toward the home of her potential client, she was desperate. The potential buyer was losing faith in her, threatening to go to some other agent to find the kind of house he wanted. Judy knew this estate wasn't exactly what the buyer wanted, but was desperately hoping she could convince him. But first she had to get the owner to decide to sell, and to decide to give her the listing.

In front of the impressive door of the house, Judy squared her shoulders, took a deep breath, and pressed the doorbell. She nibbled nervously on her lower lip as she waited. The facade of the house was blank and uninformative – not formidable or frightening, just unhelpful. The windows were like mirrors – reflecting images of the immaculate lawns and shrubs.

The house was modern – long and low, all on one floor. The color was a spotless white. The entrance where Judy waited was set exactly in the center of the front of the house. The door was a huge slab of wood, four feet wide. The fixtures were brass – simple, well-polished, and expensive.