Then Rico slams the brakes on, and they shudder to a halt. Across the access-ramp approach to the suspension bridge there’s a barricade made up of cars, metal panels and junk stacked across the road. Two armed men atop it, one with a heavy-duty machine pistol, the other shouldering some kind of rocket-launcher.
‘What now?’ says Rico, throwing his hands up.
‘We need to get across. Could take us miles off our course if we have to seek an alternate crossing-point. Even if we reverse now they could blow us off the road if they so choose.’ Roxton jerks the door open and steps down onto the road surface. His hands raised. They watch as he strides determinedly towards the barricade. And stops.
Two men survey them from the barricade. Another emerges through a crude concealed gate in the ramshackle structure, two more armed men a pace behind him. They move to within metres of Roxton, and stop. ‘This is our turf,’ yells the leader. ‘I’m Commander Harriman, you come through here, you pay my toll.’
Roxton makes an expansive gesture. ‘We got nothing you need. Some tubs of clean water. Cans of food. You’re welcome to that. We just want to cross the bridge, that’s all.’
‘Where are you making for?’
‘Earthfort. We want to join the fight-back from there.’
Harriman laughs and scuffs in the dirt. ‘Yet, you gotta cross here to get there. But let me put you in the picture. We’ve created a safe enclave here. We keep it clear of Darkula, spooks, Goon Squad looters and Zees. You cross my bridge, you need our permission.’
‘Do we have your permission? I’m asking you politely.’
He knuckles his chin thoughtfully, deliberately savouring his power, stringing the negotiation out. ‘We’ll take your water and your cans. We’ll keep the camper van too. I like the camper van. You go on to Earthfort, you can walk.’ His two companions cackle dutifully.
Roxton extends his arms, palms down in a conciliatory gesture. ‘You got it. Now let us through.’
‘One more thing. You have a woman. As a token of mutual goodwill, we use your woman, you use ours.’ Harriman makes one sharp wave over his shoulder. A fourth man emerges through the crude gate, he leads a naked woman by a leather chord around her neck. The woman walks submissively with her hands clasped behind her back, her head slightly bowed, long blonde hair cascading around her face. Across her large rounded breasts the lettering ‘S.L.U.T.’ has been inked.
‘Wait,’ says Roxton. He retreats, careful not to make a sudden movement that could be misinterpreted. The camper van door gapes open and he clambers inside to face Grace. ‘They’re living out some weird Mad Max fantasy. I can’t ask you to do this.’
‘Seems to me we have no choice.’ She meets his eyes unflinchingly. ‘Let’s do this.’ She pulls her jacket off as they watch, pulls her boots off and shimmies out of her slacks. She straightens up nude. ‘C’mon, guys, make it look good. Make me look like she does.’
Roxton slips his belt in a loose noose around her neck, she holds her hair aside to facilitate it. With a shaking hand Randall rummages around and produces a felt-tip pen, to write ‘SLUT’ across her breasts. He stands back to admire his handiwork.
They file out of the van, leaving the weapons inside, standing together. Roxton a pace ahead, leading Grace by the leash. The sun is low in the sky. There’s no sound.
In the space between, they’ve unrolled a length of carpet across the asphalt. Four of them waiting, with the naked blonde girl. Her head still bowed. Harriman indicates to her, and she slumps down onto her knees, falling forward so that she’s crouched passively on all fours.
Roxton glances nervously as Grace. Her jaw is set. Her eyes betray no waver of indecision. When she reaches the carpet edge, her bare toes encountering its softness, without inducement she lowers down onto all fours, side by side with the blonde girl. The two glancing at each other curiously. The men stand around in an awkward silence. Harriman coughs.
It’s Randall who makes the first move. Unbuckles his pants, moving forward as they fall away, crouching down towards the blonde’s head, she comes up to meet him, her mouth gaping. She takes his cock without hesitation. Then all hell breaks loose. Harriman laughs, moves in behind Grace, and slides a fat cock up between her parted legs, her hips raised to receive him. Another moves in at her face, and she sucks him simultaneously. Their bodies moving together, her free-hanging breasts shivering with each thrust. The other men circle closer, taking their orifices of choice. When Randall pulls out of her mouth and moves around to her rear, Rico takes his place in the girl’s mouth. The moist sounds of sex seem amplified, flesh slithering on flesh, gurgles and choking noises, grunts and moans.
The men work in teams, two simultaneously, switching mouth to cunt then cunt to mouth. The anonymous bodies blur, one after the other. Grace hears a choking gasp, glances across at the blonde girl. Their eyes meet. The other grimaces in a weird pained pleasure. Looking back over her shoulder she sees Roxton, and knows exactly what he’s doing to her, and why her expression is so conflicted. Then her mouth is required by the next man. Until at last there are no more. Both girls stay crouched, unsure, awaiting instructions.
Harriman approaches Roxton, hand outstretched. ‘Great way to bond, eh?’ Roxton shakes the proffered hand warily. He indicates irritably at the girls, and they struggle uncertainly to their feet, brushing dirt from their knees.
‘We get to cross the bridge now?’
‘Sure, we’re all friends here, ain’t we?’ But Harriman strides towards the camper van, climbs up into the driver’s seat, and fires the engine. Roxton reaches out to help Grace, and they pace across to climb into the back. She retrieves her white leatherette jacket and pulls it around her shoulders, using a wet-wipe to clean her face, then down between her legs.
Harriman steers the vehicle carefully forward, through the gate in the barricade. The ragged trail of men file in behind them, the blonde girl too. Grace watches keenly. There are more armed men inside the protective barrier. Too many of them. The ramp of the bridge rises beyond, leading to the river’s far shore. She sees it all, frozen in strange clarity. Her mind still buzzing, surging with the multiple-fuck sensations, as though her senses are heightened. The light is unnatural. Casting tall mauve shadows. As though she’s hallucinating unreal aftershocks.
No. There are two suns in the sky. The second, mauve sun, descending through cloud layers, in between the tower-blocks. So bright it’s dazzling, too painful to look at directly. She shields her eyes. There’s panic outside, some are scattering, others assume defensive positions, blasting sporadic bursts of fire at the incoming globe. It’s gliding in low. Its light prickling exposed areas of skin with radiation-burn.
Harriman slams on the brakes, judders the van to a halt. As he starts to his feet to dismount, Grace smashes him in the face with a tyre lever. He staggers back, she hits him again so he crumples down into the well. She scrambles over the bucket seat, releases the door catch so it swings open, and kicks him hard. He falls back against the doorframe, loses purchase, and head-over-heels out towards the tarmac. She guns the engine.
The alien sun as spinning like a blazing comet, passing low now. Roxton is at the door as the van accelerates. ‘Rico, Randall … here!’ She steers in a wide arc. L’Estrada leaps aboard. Rico too. Randall pulls the blonde girl by the leash, hauls her into the van.
‘You wanna get out of this? You want to come with us?’ yells Roxton.
‘What would I want to do that for?’ spits the naked woman.
‘The way they treat you. You’re better with us.’
‘Lemme go. I don’t need this. They look after me, protect me.’
‘You’re choice,’ says Grace over her shoulder, as she decelerates long enough for the girl to jump clear, then hits higher gear and spins the wheel towards the ramp, yawing and canting. There’s an explosion ripping the facia off an overhanging building complex, igniting in eruptions of flame sparked by the spinning sun-sphere. She hits the ramp towards the bridge, thrumming a
cross the span, the shadows of support-beams spoking across them. The startle of gunfire fades in their wake. There’s no pursuit. The sun already re-climbing the sky.
‘Right,’ says Rico, consulting his sat, ‘take us right.’ Off the far-side ramp and onto a new endlessly deserted highway. She throttles back to cruising speed, avoiding the rusting corpses of wrecked autos.
‘You did fine, Grace,’ concedes Roxton evenly.
‘What the hell was that flying fire-cracker anyway?’ says Rico.
‘Sentient, robotic, programmed AI … who knows? When the Darkula open their portals, other stuff gets through too, bugs, microbes, seeds. Could be their equivalent of rodent infestation. Just be glad it arrived when it did.’
‘If it was coincidence,’ points out Randall. ‘It’s almost like it meant to be there, helping us.’ He shrugs, suddenly flustered when they turn to him. ‘Hey, don’t bug me, I’m just saying …’
Eventually they pull off the main strip into a mall to stay overnight. The sky rippled by tides of strange light. Rico and L’Estrada investigate the upper mall levels, gunning down a group of rad-muties sheltering in a storefront, disturbing the stench of putrefying flesh. There’s a supermarket below. Forcing through concertina door-shutters into the rear stockroom, most of it is ransacked, but there are crates of untouched cans and even bottles. In an enclosed central court they ignite a huge roaring fire, sparks dancing into the vault above, and break out the food, heating it up on a makeshift grill overhanging the blaze. The bottles of surprisingly good lager help. The three—Rico, Randall and L’Estrada stand around her now with a new easy familiarity, and she sucks each of them in turn. Then they fuck.
Eventually she stands, naked, brushes herself down, teases her hair back, and seeks out Roxton. He’s sitting in an alcove dismantling and reassembling his machine-pistol. He looks up as she approaches. ‘This time,’ she smiles, ‘it’s on my terms. This time, you get to know just how good a woman feels.’ She crouches down to unfasten his pants.
Earthfort, the following day. Concrete bunker above surrounded by gun-tower emplacements. A ramp opens to admit them. Swallowing them underground. Armoured figures circle them, fumigate them, x-ray them, cat-scan them. Doctors take swabs, blood-samples, oral and rectal probes. They’re documented, interrogated. Then dropped down further subterranean levels where vast machinery powers strikeback arsenals of mighty doomsday weaponry, to quarantine cells, in naked antiseptic isolation.
Roxton nods as they’re separated. ‘It’s fine. They’ve got to be certain. Once through this we’re in, part of the retaliation. It’s only a matter of time. Wait.’
Grace slumps in the cell corner. Crouches down, head in hands. Lightning bursts in vivid storms across her retinas. Flashbacks of the bug clattering up the stairwell. She sees it all, frozen in strange clarity. Rael and Miko loosing off tracer bursts spattering its chitinous shell. Nerve-shredding terror, in the formic acid urine-stench. While Oliver, from below, works around its thorax, lodging grenades, so it erupts in a larval deluge of sloppy flame and streaming gut, threshing jointed legs, mandibles screaming so high-pitched it splits eardrums numb. Oliver drenched in its fire-stream, scarred and melting, dragged to safety into the suite. She sits beside him, as he turns comatose, then shrieking. When his face caves in it’s squirming with corpse-white maggot-larvae. Rael and Miko toss him from the balcony, he howls all the way down with what’s left of his mouth, to splatter-impact. It’s only in the silence that descends afterwards that she feels silver scintillas of ice-pain, and hears the maggot chomping its way through her brain-tissue. Blackness. Forgetfulness. Sleep. Nightmare. Terror.
She slumps. Crouches. Her mind buzzing, surging, as though through heightened senses. The light is unnatural. Casting tall mauve shadows. As though she’s hallucinating unreal aftershocks. No. There are now two suns. For she’s becoming one of them. Her skin is glowing, beams of intense lights pricking out through flesh-punctures in energy-spikes. Her outline shivering, melting, slurring into a single radiant mass. A spinning sphere of light. No thought. No consciousness. Racing towards her programmed detonation …
Commander Harriman curses, spits down from the heights of the barricade. Shields his eyes against the sudden glare. A nuke? A retaliatory strike at the Darkula? No. The massive eruption beyond the skyline is inland, from the direction of the supposed Earthfort. The last human stronghold. No more. He surveys the compound below him. The scattered men and women safe, for the moment, behind his own fortifications. This, he thinks, is now the final human redoubt. He, its last commander. He watches the sky.
<<====>>
AUTHOR’S STORY NOTE
When I first began writing fiction for what was dubiously termed ‘Men’s magazines’ I drew up a set of rules for myself concerning my Feminist sensitivities towards women. I enjoy sex, but not sexism. And so there’d be no gratuitous exploitation or disrespect. I’m not sure if ‘The Coming Of The Darkula’ strictly adheres to these guidelines or not, but the positive response to its publication has come overwhelmingly from women. A Californian artist friend immediately engaged in a long detailed analysis, insisting I should extend the story into a novel, exploring Grace’s motivations further, and that the ending should be tweaked to enable her reprogramming, and salvation. She’s even commenced on a screenplay, along these lines. But the post-apocalypse setting—to me, is part of an established SF trope that includes George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend … clear up to TVs graphic-novel adaptation of The Walking Dead, which is why—while I’m happy to use that precedent as homage or reference, I’m maybe reluctant to develop this story beyond its present form. I enjoyed writing it, and I’m delighted that it will reach new audiences in this book.
LITTLE SISTER, LITTLE BROTHER
SARAH L. JOHNSON
From Suicide Stitch: Eleven Stories
Publisher: EMP Publishing
______
Available for immediate occupancy.
Furnished 1BR suite in the historical Leighhaven building.
Conveniently located just outside downtown.
Quiet, well maintained, with live-in management.
Email [email protected]
***
The kid had a staring problem. From behind the first floor window, her dark eyes tracked Tate as he approached the wide stoop. Tiny hands splayed against the glass, tangled hair spilling over her shoulders—Tate figured she was five, maybe six years old. Whole milk in a plastic cup with Oreo sludge at the bottom. Maybe.
Tate didn’t know much about kids, though he had two nephews. Countless times he’d stood on his brother’s deck, peeling the label off a Heineken, while the boys savaged each other on the lawn. Occasionally they’d return to their respective corners for a slug of cherry Kool-Aid and Brad would offer booming encouragement as he swaggered over the grill.
Doesn’t get any better than this. You’re missing out, little brother. What about Shelly? Her divorce is final. Think maybe she’s ready to test the waters …
Do not set me up.
You’re thirty-five, Tate. The business is solid. You’re looking good. What are you waiting for? What about the Internet? There’s that plenty of fish thing.
Sounds like a good way to get crabs.
Man your age shouldn’t be alone. Have some potato salad.
No thanks.
Fuck’s the matter with you, lately?
It’s mayonnaise.
One good dinner won’t hurt. C’mon, Val worked all day on the food, made your favorites …
Jesus.
How many matchmaking attempts had he endured? How much mayonnaise had he eaten just to be polite? How many times had he covered at the bar because someone’s crotch dropping had a ballet recital, or tae kwon do, or anthrax?
But that was then and there. This was here and now. Hundreds of kilometers. A trail he’d followed into the woods, and overnight everything changed. Because it had to.
The litt
le girl in the window slapped her palm over her mouth. Tate swore he heard giggling through the glass. He raised a hand in a hesitant wave. Were you supposed to wave at kids you didn’t know? Had he just done a Creepy Thing? With a flap of dingy skirt, the kid turned and vanished into the apartment.
Above the heavy door, a sandstone arch bore the engraving ‘Leighaven Est. 1901.’ Tate pressed the old fashioned buzzer and watched for movement through the smoked glass panels. He buzzed again. He waited.
As Tate reached for the handle, the door swung inward. A woman stood in the entryway. Tall enough to ride the roller coaster but short enough for him to see scalp through a razor sharp part running down the middle of her head. Dark hair bracketed her pale face. Old enough to rent a car, young enough to wear red flannel without looking frumpy. Huge, dark eyes. She stood with one hand braced against the door and one behind her back, as though expecting him to foist a Book of Mormon on her.
“You must be Tate,” she said.
“Are you Cymbria?”
A groove creased her forehead and her mouth stretched diagonally. “You’re thin.”
“Beg your pardon?” he asked, feeling the tips of his ears sizzle.
“Never mind.” She twirled and started down the dim hallway, hair swishing down her back. “Come on in, Tate. Enter, if you dare.”
Lager. One of those snotty craft brews in a pint glass.
The heels of her purple Mary Janes thumped on the runner as she led him past a door marked OFFICE and into a windowless stairwell.
“Hope you like exercise,” she said, her voice echoing off plaster. “We don’t have a …” She snapped her fingers. Once. Twice.
Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 2 Page 17