World Without End by Chris Mooney Read Free Book Online Page B

activities, you name it, and then encrypt the info and bounce it all over the Internet so it couldn't be traced. A simple process, he had done it hundreds of times and not once had he got caught.
    Faust wasn't interested.
    Faust listened he always listened and sometimes paused to ask questions, but in the end had said no. Gunther knew better than to press for an explanation. He figured Faust already had someone working on the inside, maybe a mole within the CIA, someone with access to IWAC. Faust, Gunther knew, had contacts in all the major agencies.
    Faust never mentioned who this CIA contact might be or if this person did, in fact, exist. That didn't mean he was trying to hide the truth.
    He had been very up front with his reasons behind stealing the technology: "It's up to people like us to protect the good and the innocent. That's who we are, Gunther. That's what we're about. Always remember that."
    Gunther trusted Faust. His debt to the man was a large one.
    Gunther had been fourteen and homeless, forced to live on the streets of Prague after being kicked out of the house by his cunt of a mother, a goddamn whore. She was pretty for her age and always had a man in her bed. Sometimes late at night, when the groans cut his sleep, he would walk over to her bedroom and in the space between the opened door he would look inside the room full of candlelight and see his naked mother being straddled by a man, usually an older teenage boy (and sometimes, but not often, it was someone Gunther knew). Gunther's attention always drifted toward the men. He liked men. At least he thought he did.
    Gunther sought refuge in the local gym around the corner from his house. The gym was this musty-smelling basement of gray paint and mirrors and pounding techno music and a locker room with showers that offered no privacy. Gunther begged the owner for a job and finally got one: working after school as a sort of janitor to keep the place clean.
    The money was horrible, but it gave him a free membership and allowed him to stay out of the house and away from his mother. More importantly, it allowed him to be close to the older crowd of teenage body builders Gunther liked to watch them work out, their muscles gorging with blood, sweat running off their brows and backs. When their workouts were done, he would find a reason to wander inside the locker room, the steamed air packed with sweat and testosterone, and through the pockets in the steam Gunther would drink in the sight of the hot water sluicing off their hard bodies and feel a sexual urge that he knew once validated would condemn him to a lifetime of rejection and hate.
    But that knowledge didn't stop him from experimenting. When one of the boys approached him and offered sex, Gunther made the mistake of inviting him back to his house. His mother worked the bar on Wednesday nights and never came home until late. But for some reason, she came home early that night, drunk as always, and when she opened his bedroom door and saw what was going on, she threw him out and told him that she wasn't going to live with a faggot, that from this day on her son was dead. Gunther would never forget the look of relief on her face, as if she had suddenly been given the perfect reason to torpedo him from her life. Word got around. Friends wrote him off. Gunther was alone.
    Living on the streets was manageable. But when the free food and scraps stolen from garbage pails dried up, the hunger gnawed at him until he grew desperate. Gunther had heard of the places where a boy's flesh could bring money.
    It was about survival. It was just sex, that's it, no big deal. The men he was forced to transact with were often older, in their late forties to mid-fifties, some of them married, all of them out of shape and flabby, their bodies overgrown with untamed weeds of hair, their greedy hands gentle at first as they removed his clothes and then working his skin with a desperate and often violent hunger. Gunther didn't care