Hottest Blood

by Jeff Gelb

  “Turn right again. Up the hill here. Turn left at the corner.”

  “Up near the big burn-out, huh?” They were driving through the hills charred by the Berkeley-Oakland fire of ’91. The black ash had seeped away in the rains, except along the concrete foundation lines of the burned houses; most of the ground was gray and muddy and erosion-raked. Chimneys jutted here and there like those termite towers you see in pictures of arid African plains.

  He drove onto her cul-de-sac. The fire had been a windfall for Drexel’s contracting business, but he hadn’t been on this particular street. All the houses were burned away except one, with thick brush around it. Brush that should have burned, he would have thought.

  “Yes, we were lucky in the fire. The neighbors were crowding us.” She smiled distantly. “‘Make people do things,’ you said. What sort of things? In your fantasies?”

  “Hm? Oh, God.”

  “Come on. I told you mine.”

  “Right. Chewing on people. Chewing on feet. Clean feet, of course. Chewing on private parts. Not…not hurting anything but…sucking and chewing on fingers and toes and nipples, really chewing…God, it feels good to just…” He shifted in his eat. He hadn’t been this hard since his teens.

  He parked in front of her house. Drexel had flirted with architecture in his one year of community college; he recognized the house as an old Maybeck, heavy on the dark wood, the intricate levels, the big windows. The yard was overgrown; he didn’t recognize most of the plants. There were pines encircling the place and more pine and fir, singed survivors of the fire, marching down the hill behind it. The Bay, Berkeley, much of Oakland would be visible on the other side of the house, maybe even San Francisco.

  They went up the mossy flagstones; brown pine needles fringed the stones, and stiff silvery-green brush pressed in from both sides of the winding path. Sindra stepped over something on the porch—something that made Drexel backpedal a few steps. A large gray tarantula. It made tentative, feathery movements, like the fingers of an anxious piano player, and slipped into the succulents lining the porch. “It’s that time of year in the East Bay hills,” Sindra said, noticing his reaction. “It gets warm and they come out and mate.”

  She unlocked the door and they went in. It was cool and moist here and smelled of mildew. They passed along a dim hallway to a living room. There were picture windows that should have looked down on Berkeley and the Bay—but they were covered with red cellophane. There were large, shapeless cushions on the hardwood floor. Nothing else to sit on.

  He stood awkwardly in the flushed light by the window as Sindra went to the built-in bar. There were paintings on the walls, but standing here he couldn’t quite make them out.

  Sindra knelt beside a small refrigerator—the movement tightened the skirt around her ass. She took out a Mason jar of dark liquid and poured some into two cups with a little cola. “I make a mind-fuck of a cocktail,” she said. “I keep it premixed.”

  She brought the glasses back to him, and they each drank. The stuff was both sweet and acrid. He couldn’t quite…

  “What is it?”

  “Tarantula venom, partly,” she said, as he began to twitch.

  Even in his toxic delirium, he thought passingly: They must be silicone. Too perfect, too firm.

  She was on her back, nude, legs spread, her whole body beckoning. Her breasts looked violet in this light, with purple-brown nipples. They were vast, jutting, round, perfect, and just impossible.

  But they weren’t silicone. One of the whores had been silicone-enhanced that time. Kneeling between her legs, exploring with his hands, he knew: This wasn’t the same. This was…

  They were meaty. They were big breasts, not like enhanced pectorals, and she had a real pussy; it wasn’t as if she were some kind of transsexual, no. But these things were filled, he assumed, with muscle. Which was impossible, wasn’t it?

  He thought about all this for maybe two and a half drugged seconds. Then the convulsions hit him.

  After a while he stopped noticing. The convulsions stopped scaring him. And not long after that they stopped entirely.

  It was all the same to Drexel: He had gone through the panic and the sickness stage, and now, with the psychedelic effects of the high-dose venom, he was riding waves of psychotic exultation through a storm of light. The storm’s colors were sultry shades of the primaries, and neon variants of violet and emerald and gold, whipping past him in arching, interweaving wires, like lasers gone rubbery. The wires of light dove into him and careened down his spine, each color a different sensation; other lights arched over him like the buttresses of some infinitely refined cathedral, where even the building stones were of stained glass. And occupying completely the floor of the cathedral was the naked Sindra and her impossibly perfect breasts.

  He’d twitched his clothes off, and his cock was hard as teak. She took him immediately, all in one embrace, cock into yielding, slick pussy, his face into her cleavage.

  There was a delightful scent off her that was like venison and gardenias with just a touch of frying trout. It translated into taste as he thrust his tongue into her meaty cleavage; he rocked back from her a little with the intensity of the feeling, a sexual sensation as palpable as the heat waves you felt rolling off the tarmac when you stepped off a plane in hot-season Florida. “Jezzusya…Jezzusya…” His heart felt like a molten lump. He couldn’t quite talk. “Jezzusya fuggincredibuh…Yuh incredibuh…”

  “Why thank you, Sid,” she said quite clearly, her voice chiming against the incandescent glass of the air.

  He shoved up into her and he seemed to go farther than physically possible—as if the cleft of her kept parting, wider and wider; as if he were wading into her, as a man might wade into a swamp.

  And her nipple in his mouth—it moved, the nipple probed in his mouth….

  “Bit it, sweetheart,” she said, sweetly and lucidly.

  “Yuh ruhlly wahmuh?”

  “I really do. Bite it hard.”

  He bit down, and forty years of frustration came rollicking out of him, singing. A lifelong weight he’d taken for granted simply curtsied and left him. This was way better than he’d hoped for.

  “Bit harder, much harder. Yes. Now harder still.” Her voice was quite clear and insistent, there was no mistaking it, but it was hard to believe she wanted…

  “Harder.”

  “Yuh sure?”

  “Oh yes.”

  He bit down as hard as he could, and if he hadn’t been in unspeakable ecstasy he would have screamed in revulsion as her skin parted under his teeth. His teeth sank into the meat of her.

  “Now chew it up.”

  Oh no. But he could not more spit it out than a two-year-old boy could spit out his first taste of real candy. Maybe he’d be sorry later, maybe he’d be explaining it to the police and the National Star and specialists in criminal psychiatry, but right now was Right Now more than it ever had been, and this was the most delicious bite he’d ever taken; it was the most satisfying oral sensation he’d ever felt. Her flesh was drugged. It was cocaine and heroin and Quaaludes, oozing velvety fingers of electric delight into his brain. As he chewed, he waited, rather abstractedly, for her to scream and push him away. But after he swallowed—that itself a deeply satisfying act, awakening unheard-of erogenous zones in his esophagus—she demanded, “Take another bite. A big one.” When he hesitated, she said, “Bite and chew it up and swallow! It doesn’t hurt me!”

  He ate most of her right breast and was working on the left before he began to feel full. And even then he could feel the bitten-off breast melting in his stomach…dissolving into him more rapidly than with anything so banal as digestion. The taste was of meat, almost a sausage but more delicately flavored, and some sort of exotic fruit pie, and just a faint touch of blood, hardly any at all, and a faint underflavor of something he’d had at a Japanese restaurant. Roe? Sea-urchin eggs?

  And the texture: wonderfully creamy, but with just the right meaty resistance to his m
astication.

  He could hardly breath, with his sticky face thrust deeply into the rind of her left breast. But he couldn’t get enough; he was infinitely hungry, endlessly consumed by lust. His hips thrusting, cock working almost incidentally in her pussy (orgasm was not an issue, so to speak—he was far beyond that), he devoured the pulpy wet blue-violet glory, working his way greedily down into the breast, down to a sort of root…Like the little nubbin one finds at the inside bottom of a pumpkin, a kind of internal stalk. He gnawed at the stalk, sucking away the last of the drugged flesh around it—and she said, “That’s about right, I’d say.”

  The stalk opened and took hold of his tongue.

  Someone in the background said, “Are you in full contact?” A man’s voice.

  “Yes,” she said. “I have his tongue and his cock.”

  He tried to pull free, of course; both extensions of him were pinned, and pain warned him not to try again. The pain was as intense as the pleasure. It commanded him to stillness.

  He was still drunk on her; the high had programmed a profoundly somatic trust in him. He was hers.

  A man squatted behind Drexel and thrust something in Drexel’s ass.

  But he knew from the shape of it—it hadn’t been a penis. It was a rounder, more truncated shape. It dissolved, like the stuff in his stomach, and seeped into him.

  He saw someone else out of the corner of his eye—another man, kneeling by Sindra’s head. Bending, thrusting his hips toward her face.

  She bit off the mans’ penis and chewed it up, her smile droopy with euphoria.

  The man arched his back, but not in pain. This wasn’t something masochistic. There was no blood at the bitten-off root of the man’s cock. Only the same bluish pulp at the stub.

  Drexel couldn’t see the man’s face clearly from this awkward angle. But he recognized the tattoo on the muscular arm: the bartender.

  He felt something flush into him through his tongue; tingling, interpenetrating. Something else warmly hissing into his trapped cock, like a backward ejaculation. Some secretion, entering him, from her. He sensed that the seeming cock that Sindra had bitten off, the flesh of the bartender, had been processed through her somehow and was now entering Drexel, fertilizing the meaty secrets he’d swallowed.

  Most of the time he would lie passively in the low, bowl-shaped bed. Squirming only occasionally, when the internal sensations unsettled him. Now he reposed dreamily, listening to her soothings. Sindra was standing over him, telling him a few things just to keep him quiet, so it would all seem so natural. So he wouldn’t struggle, though there was little struggle left in him. His limbs had merged arm into arm, leg to leg. There wasn’t much he could do. The inhabited flesh he’d swallowed, with the secretions that she and the men of her peculiar species had mixed into it, were changing him; were guiding him, on a cellular level, along some metamorphic byway of synergenesis.

  She remained nude when she was in the house; so did the “bartender.” So did the others: the women with the slightly blue skin; their heads, when they’d removed their wigs, furred with the faintly waving blue polyps; the men had golden polyps on their craniums, and their skin was softly gold. It was not a tan.

  The bartender’s cock was growing back.

  As Sindra stood beside Drexel, gazing at his changing body, smiling beatifically, he could see that her breasts were already rapidly growing back as well; the little stalks were covered over, the rinds of the old breasts fallen neatly away. At this rate, she’d be back up to size in a week.

  A little boy came to the incubator bed; a boy of about five, nude and golden-skinned but without the quivery polyps on his scalp the others had. More than once he’d come to look at Drexel with some unspoken personal fascination.

  Sindra shooed the boy away with a murmur, then turned to the bed, reached in, and stroked Drexel as she spoke. “It’s all a cycle, a natural, beautiful cycle, Sidney. We have a pact with them—we call them the Guests. They are the brethren of the Akishra. Their world intertwines ours, in places; we’ve always had a sort of overlapping ecology with it, with their dimension. A lot of the old Nature gods were just people altered by the Guests, Siddy.” She cocked her head thoughtfully, looking for the most calming way to explain it. “Some of us are suitable to be hosts to the Guests—and others are to be incubators, for their young. It’s to do with your DNA, I suppose, and your spiritual type. It’s something we can sense. Carl and I sensed you were perfect incubator material—and so you are! Not everyone is suitable, so it’s fortunate the Guests only need to lay once or twice a year. The Guests use us as hosts—people like me, and Carl, your ‘bartender’—and they change us and give us life. A very, very long life with many pleasures. They pass through us to you incubators, and we feel no pain, and our lives are sweet and varied.” She paused to stroke his swelling belly.

  “They’ve passed fully into you, Sidney; you brought the layings of the Guests in, hungrily, and willingly. I used the venom of our pets to make it faster. And because I enjoy it. But we didn’t really need the drug. You wanted me that way, Sidney—and now you’re fulfilled!”

  She crouched beside the incubator bed, letting him try out his feeble protest, which came out as unintelligible mutterings. She stroked him and pinched one of her own nascent nipples thoughtfully, as she went on.

  “Hush, hush and lay still, Sid. The real miracle is still to come. We fertilized that which you devoured from me; from my breasts; it’s growing in you. You won’t be one of us; they need you differently. But you’ll have your own rewards…”

  She bent near him with a sponge of nutrients, sweet and syrup-thick, blowing kisses at his muted lips.

  At the Feedtime, the time of reconfiguration, they no longer had to soothe him. The unneeded part of him was gone. It was displaced when the one who’d grown in his belly moved up, through the passages within, and entered his skull for its first feeding.

  Sindra and Carl and the boy and the others knelt beside the incubation bed. Hugging one another in excitement, they watched as the transformation achieved its penultimate stage.

  The Guest had moved into Drexel’s head like a hermit crab into a seashell. Now the onlookers gasped in wonder and joy, like anyone privileged to watch a birth, as Drexel’s head detached itself from his neck and crawled—the head crawled—on its gastropodic underside, down the length of Drexel’s body. It began to graze contentedly, nourishing itself on his flesh. It would fill itself thus until the Growtime should come, and then the bonding with a host: the little boy who watched eagerly and happily beside his parents, Carl and Sindra. The boy had been instructed in what to expect; he would not become an incubator like Drexel—he would become a carrier for a Guest, like Carl and Sindra, immortal and perfect. He watched rapturously as the Guest in Drexel’s head fed on the body it had quit; he watched in a glow of anticipation, eager for the day the Guest should be ready to join with him, to bring him into the manhood of his people…

  Hard Evidence

  John Edward Ames

  They say you never hear the shot that kills you,” remarked Dez Lofley.

  The forensics lab chief raised his eyes from a 9mm bullet under the scanning electron microscope in front of him. It was one of several instruments lining a long, zinc-topped counter. Behind him another lab tech was heating up a fiber sample in a quartz tube.

  Lofley wore a pullover that proclaimed KARMA OWES ME, DUDE. His seamed face broke into a triumphant grin when he looked at Reno Morgan, the detective anxiously waiting for his verdict.

  “You can bet your ass this chick is fried and freeze-dried now, ace. We got a full match. Usually the bullet lead will frag or deform too much for a positive ID with the tool marks in the gun. But this one matches up like a frickin’ jigsaw.”

  Morgan nodded and flashed a thumbs-up. Oddly, though, he felt a hard little nibbin of regret cankering inside him.

  Like any good homicide cop, he was obsessed with one working maxim: Get hard evidence. He knew that motive and oppor
tunity and autopsy protocols alone were as useless as last weeks’ TV Guide unless there was a definite physical link between a suspect and a corpse. Without that link, a murder investigation was virtually impossible to wrap.

  Fortunately for his rep as a supercop, the sensational D’antoni case appeared all but wrapped from Day One.

  The crime was violent and brutal and perfect fare for the bucket-of-blood tabloids: The Teflon-coated, armor piercing “cop killer” bullet, fired pointblank, had turned multimillionaire Keith D’antoni’s rugged profile into an arabesque on the wallpaper behind him. Nor was there any doubt in Morgan’s mind that he lab crew had already gut-hooked their fish. A comparison microscope had established exactly which Browning parabellum had fired the slug; a neutron-activation test to detect primer gunshot residue had identified the hand that had most likely fired the gun. Not only was the weapon now safely locked up in the police evidence room—Morgan was also convinced it had been surrendered to him at the crime scene by the murderer herself.

  Not that Ursual D’antoni had actually admitted to killing her husband. But neither had she denied it.

  So far she had shown neither remorse, confusion, fear, nor even interest. She was not in shock, had passed a thorough physical, and was declared legally sane by the court psychiatrist. The death of her husband simply did not seem to concern her. She just passively refused to let herself be assimilated by all the investigative fuss around her. Physically speaking, she was not what Morgan would call your typical traffic hazard.

  Hers was a more subtle, sloe-eyed beauty that left glowing retinal afterimages when he closed his eyes. Subtle…yet the sheer erotic force of her felt like nothing he had ever experienced.

  Now Lofley’s voice sliced into his pleasant reverie with the invasive weight of a coroner’s bone-saw. “Any glitches turn up during the post?”