Apocalypse Alley

by Don Allmon

  Comet’s hands spread his ass cheeks, and Buzz felt the hot air of Comet’s breath along the hairs there (and his asshole puckered and sucked in and bloomed, and Comet shook his head, smiling), and then the soft warmth of his tongue prodding in, and the burn of whiskers on sensitive skin not used to anything but Charmin. The burn was too much, his ass too tender, not used to this at all. Buzz went to tune the sensation, dull the burn and magnify the flick of Comet’s tongue and the strange spreading warmth of Comet forcing spit deep into his ass.

  But then he tuned nothing. He filtered nothing, magnified nothing. Comet would take him however Comet wanted, and Buzz would feel all of it.

  Buzz made little puff of air noises when the sensation of tongue or teeth surprised him. He gritted his own teeth and whimpered when it started to burn. He forgot to look through the camera. It went on forever. He fought his handcuffs, and the bike wobbled, and he went still. One leg shook; the other went numb.

  And then Comet stood, leaned over Buzz, and took Buzz in his arms from behind, and Comet’s cock lay right in the crevice of his ass and Christ, it felt big. Ten times bigger than it looked. And Comet’s hard body pressed Buzz’s hands down on the cuffs so that they hurt, and he wrapped one arm around Buzz’s neck and pulled Buzz’s head back, turning him for a clumsy kiss. The position was uncomfortable. It hurt his wrists and his shoulders and his neck. He didn’t want Comet to ever let go.

  “Gonna fuck you now,” Comet said.

  And Buzz nodded frantically, yes, yes, oh my God, yes.

  Then Comet adjusted himself and pressed, and Buzz tightened up like he shouldn’t have done, but Comet kept pressing, and Buzz was so slick it popped right in with a sharp stab of pain. Buzz cried out and tried to pull away but Comet held him tight and told him to breathe and push out, push out, breathe and breathe, you can take it.

  Comet’s entry went on forever. Like there was an infinite amount of him that needed to be in Buzz. And Buzz thought, He’s inside me. Comet’s inside me. And that seemed like the most wonderful impossibility ever there was.

  “How you doing?” Comet whispered in his ear.

  Buzz couldn’t say anything. He could barely focus on anything but Comet’s happy smile in the motorcycle’s cameras.

  Comet had opened that file and watched the vid of Shaggy jizzing onto his bike, and goddamn, that had pissed him off, like Shaggy was mocking him for being naive and loyal and all those things no thief had any concept of. It might as well have been a video of Shaggy jizzing on Comet’s face.

  Except that thought wasn’t so bad. And he’d felt that itch he’d felt every damn time he looked at Shaggy.

  He watched the vid again and again, and each time Shaggy came that ridiculous firehose splash all over his bike, it was like Comet could feel it. And he thought, You little smart-ass fucker. You come on my bike, I’ll show you what you get. I’ll show you. But the tone of that thought changed every time he thought it, until he wasn’t pissed off at all. He was almost laughing.

  And he worried maybe he’d come on a bit strong and scared the guy with all his pretend domination, but look at Shaggy now: wearing Comet’s jeans down around one ankle; mussed hair like dark fire, curled tips of it hanging just over the reinforced collar of his jacket—Comet’s jacket—the contrast of the blue armor and the soft lily-pink ass beneath it so stark. And look at Comet’s cock: there were still a couple centimeters of it he could see, but the other fifteen were buried in the guy—hell, maybe twenty as hard as Comet was; so hard it felt like his cock would split open. And when he pulled out, the orange hairs of Shaggy’s ass stuck to Comet’s cock by the spit that lubed him up.

  And Shaggy wasn’t fighting him anymore, no matter what kind of oh-god-help-me noises he was making. His back was bowed and his ass was high, and he was pushing and wriggling down on Comet every bit as much as Comet was shoving into him.

  Goddamn but his ass was as tight as a flea’s.

  Comet fucked the way he liked to fuck: hard and solid, needing every whimper Shaggy gave him, needing to be deeper in him, deeper than he could ever possibly be. And if he hurt Shaggy a bit, well Shaggy deserved some of it, didn’t he? Because Shaggy was a little arrogant prick too. And he needed a lesson taught. And Comet hammered him hard enough to make the bike wobble and make Shaggy’s breath burst out in puffs of “oh” and “ah” and hisses.

  Whatever the lesson was supposed to be, Comet taught it.

  And there were so many things he wanted to do to him. And he wanted to know the noises Shaggy would make if he did this or that or this other, and he wanted to know what would make Shaggy come, and so sometimes he held Shaggy’s chained-up hands. And he slapped his ass sometimes, and pulled his hair sometimes, and bit the lobe of his ear sometimes, and kissed him sometimes. He wanted to know everything about how Shaggy’s body worked. He threw his head back and grinned up at the blue sky and prayed some kind of thank you, though to who, he didn’t know. And looked down again and there was his bike and his jeans and his jacket, and there was this guy that wasn’t his and would always be something wild, and Comet would always be chasing him and trying to tie him down. And the thought of endless pursuit and capture, what else could he ever want?

  And the same errant thought came to him as it always had before because Comet never went long without thinking of his team. They were his Greek chorus: You fucked an internationally wanted thief on the back of your bike, what the hell were you thinking?

  What the hell he was thinking was this: You knew in that alley that cyborg would hurt you and you let her hack you anyway just so you could hack her back. You broke out of those cuffs at my apartment and then apologized for it like you’d been rude. You told me I scared you and it made me feel like shit. You took a bullet to the arm and were proud of it. You’re scared of motorcycles, but you piloted one anyway. You came back for me when I was down and found me when I was lost. And he said to the Reindeer: What else could I have done?

  When everything was coming apart, what else were you supposed to do but fall in love?

  All the crazy mods in his rewired body tightened and fired, all the made-for-fucking biology Duke had specced into him because Duke liked to watch Comet reduced to helplessness when he came. His body spasmed and shuddered and ejected his very soul out of him, twenty-one grams of come, twenty-one milliliters if anyone was measuring, and that was a whole lot of come. Comet shot it into Shaggy, stream after stream after stream of it.

  The first time he’d come with this brand-new cock jacking off in that hospital bed with Duke watching, it had scared the hell out of him. He’d thought something had broken in his hot-wired body, that they’d hooked something together wrong and it was shutting down. The world had gone all dim, and he couldn’t see or smell or taste anything. Same as now.

  Comet came back to his senses one at a time. He tasted the sweat and dirt on Shaggy’s neck where he kissed him. He smelled asphalt and dust and pungent sweat. He heard the sharp prayer-like breaths Shaggy took. He felt balanced precariously: bent over Shaggy, bent over the bike on its kickstand.

  Comet pulled Shaggy standing. Shaggy couldn’t stand, legs numb and cramped, so Comet wrapped his arm tight around his chest like some kind of wrestling hold and held him up. And he jacked him off. Shaggy’s head fell back, eyes on the sky just as Comet’s had been, soft hair against Comet’s cheek. He gasped short breaths and fucked himself on Comet’s cock still in him until Comet felt Shaggy’s cuffed hands clench tight and felt the wetness pour over his own hand and saw Shaggy’s white spatter his bike and drip thickly from one piece of flame-colored plastic to the next piece of carbon steel, hanging in long sun-sparkling threads. He stroked the last bit of Shaggy’s jizz out of him until Shaggy winced.

  “I came on your bike again.”

  “Some people never learn. Next time you do that, you’re gonna lick it up.”

  He laid Shaggy down in the regrown druid-grass. It was thick and warm and took the edge off the gravel and hard earth beneath them
like the druids had known they’d fuck here and had made the grass just for them.

  And everything smelled alive, sweet and fragrant with flax and aster and the clean-bleach scent of their come. They kissed and held each other a long time and they didn’t talk because they didn’t know how to yet, so Comet slid into him again and made love to him this time, slow like it was meant to be done, and the sun went red and bloomed on the horizon as giant and shimmering as Comet felt.

  Click. Comet looked down at his hand. Shaggy had cuffed the two of them together.

  “How’d you do that?”

  “It’s just a counter and a transmitter. I can do that without the chip. It’s just the range that’s—”

  Comet shushed him with a kiss. “Little smart-ass.” And they kissed again, and Comet held his chin and looked into his eyes. “I don’t know anything about you.”

  “No.” And Shaggy choked on the word so it wasn’t a word as much as a sound.

  “What?” Comet laughed. “You afraid I’m gonna find something I don’t like? Afraid I’m gonna leave you?”

  And Comet’s stomach went all vertigo with the sad look Shaggy gave him, because he knew something bad was about to happen, bad like he’d known when he’d stepped off that plane and Jason hadn’t been there.

  “No,” Shaggy said. “I’m the one who’s leaving.”

  Shaggy told Comet about High Castle, 3djinn, BangBang, Critter, and C#Minor. He told him how BangBang had tried to kill him. He told him how he understood all of it now—his physical body wasn’t a liability just to 3djinn, but to everyone he ever loved—and when he got back to Greentown, he was going to deep sleep in High Castle.

  He said “High Castle” like it was some magical place, like Disney World or Jurassic Park, but Comet knew it was some kind of body bank, a pit a kilometer underground, some long-lost nuclear-missile vault, converted over, the kind of place where stim addicts “lived,” if you could call it that.

  “No,” Comet said with the flat kind of tone he used with the Reindeer when they were giving him flack. “No.”

  That tone didn’t work with Shaggy. “You got net access. So nothing changes, right? You just close your eyes and there we are together. And there’s good programs now, really good simulations, and you won’t know the difference, and I can make myself whatever you want—”

  “I want what you are.”

  “We can have sex on a beach. We can have dinner in Paris. We can do whatever we want. We can write it so you won’t even know the difference. You can’t even tell where real lets off and the network starts—that’s how good we can make it.”

  “And when I’m deployed and blacknetted? Or we’re in fucking Nevada?”

  “I’ll send a recorded VI of myself. You can sim it whenever you want!”

  “A fucking recording? A fucking recording?”

  “There’s no difference!”

  “What about now? What about all this we’ve done over the last day? You gonna sim all that too? You know why we’re fucking right now? Because you were next to me, you were with me through all of that . . . that shit we drove through! Not some goddamn recording. None of this would ever have happened if you hadn’t been really here. If you could have just logged out whenever you wanted, if I hadn’t worried about you getting hurt, or you hadn’t worried about me, or either of us hadn’t worried about Jason or Dante . . .” Comet kissed him. He kissed him again and again.

  And between kisses he said, “After the druid’s hole, we were on the ground and Urushiol and Firelight were arguing over us and you held my hand, but it was only a sim, so I took yours for real. Are you going to tell me it was the same thing?”

  Shaggy shook his head sad and slow. “But what else am I supposed to do? They’ll kill me, Comet, people like Valentine. And people like Dante will get hurt. And you can’t protect me.”

  Comet started to argue.

  “Stop. You can’t. You know you can’t.”

  “I’ll think of something.”

  And Comet held him, and all night they made love until they couldn’t anymore and even when Comet slept, his mind churned, Think of something.

  And when the sun came up, and they lay there bleary and uncomfortable because out in the open air on the ground is a shitty place to sleep, Comet said, “Maybe I can’t protect you, but Duke can.”

  Two days later, Buzz met them at 501 Main in Greentown. They sat at Duke’s corner booth: BangBang (with Critter), Buzz and Comet (sitting far closer than the last time they’d been here together), Duke, and finally Prancer. Prancer was tall, African descent, skin black as it got without mods. She was reed thin like a Spacer. She had cheekbones like knives. Buzz thought she looked like Janeé Awolowo when she’d shaved her head for Raise High Running.

  BangBang didn’t sit on the booth seat with the rest. He sat on a chair at the open arc of the table. Critter was a chinchilla this time. It curled in BangBang’s pocket. It was all a complicated illusion. BangBang and Critter were invisible to Duke and Prancer. Buzz could see and hear them, and via Buzz, Comet could too. Prancer was probably skilled enough to know some presence was there, but couldn’t quite pin it down.

  Duke sized up Buzz the way cannibals picked their dinner, and under Duke’s lightning-bolt gaze, Buzz fidgeted so bad he thought he’d bust. Comet touched him gently through their private space. He calmed a little. His vibrating leg went still. Comet sent, —You’re sure about this?

  —Sure. It ain’t like we’re getting married. It wasn’t like they were getting married, not at all. It was worse than that, so much worse.

  Comet kept that simulated pressure on Buzz’s shoulder, and Buzz knew Comet had been right, and this touch here would never be the same as Comet’s real touch on him. A sensation was never simply a sensation, because all the firings of the brain and all the wash of chemicals and all the memories of every other touch you ever had gave that touch meaning. When it came down to it, a touch was like a glamour, wasn’t it? You could try to re-create it, but the deeply embedded essence of what it was—every touch the culmination of all your life’s experience—that was always missing from a sim. A sim was always just fucking. And Comet’s simulated touches would never, ever be enough.

  This had to work.

  Buzz sent Comet a sober thumbs-up. —Let’s do it.

  Duke said, “Comet, why’s this guy sitting at my table and not dead or in jail?”

  “I want him on Reindeer Squad.”

  There was a moment of quiet that wasn’t quiet at all. The networks surrounding BangBang and Critter went wild. Prancer’s reaction was more delicate. The elaborate webbing surrounding her, connecting her to agencies worldwide snapped taut and held itself that way, awaiting Duke’s command.

  —You’re defecting, BangBang sent.

  —No, Buzz sent.

  “He wants to defect,” Duke said, unable to hear BangBang’s or Buzz’s response.

  “No,” Comet said.

  —You think they can protect you from us?

  —No, BangBang, just listen.

  “He wants my protection against 3djinn. He’s crazy.”

  “No, he doesn’t. Duke, please listen.”

  BangBang sent, —You broke a contract when you stole the Blue Unicorn, Buzz. And you put us all at risk with your adventuring. And now you’re selling data. What the hell is wrong with you?

  —If I were selling data, I sure as hell wouldn’t have invited you along to watch.

  Duke said, “What data do I get?”

  “You don’t get any data!” Buzz said.

  Comet said, “You get the best hacker on the planet, that’s what you get.”

  “Hey, sitting right here,” Prancer said.

  “He’s exaggerating,” Buzz said to Prancer.

  —This is about him, isn’t it? BangBang nodded at Comet.

  —Yes, Buzz sent.

  —We gave you everything, and you choose him over us.

  —He didn’t try to kill me!

  —You bet
rayed us first when you opened yourself up to Valentine!

  Buzz pointed at Critter. —Is that your little squirrel feeding you that line of bullshit?

  “Burn signal detected,” Prancer said calmly.

  Buzz had known this was coming. On that motorcycle ride back to Greentown, he and Comet had carefully thought through every scenario they could, and all of them came down to this: 3djinn would see Buzz’s desire to leave as nothing less than a betrayal. They would hire assassins. They’d lock him out of every system, blacklist him from every community, turn him into a hunted pariah. They’d make the Electric Dragon Triad’s pursuit of Buzz, which had ended with dozens dead and a druid’s lodge destroyed, look like amateur night. And the only way to mitigate that was to convince them he wasn’t selling data, and any effort to ruin him would be a useless expenditure of resources.

  There were systems in the networks that Buzz had been tied to for so long they’d become part of the background noise of his mind. Databases he accessed daily, data-mining applications that fed his VIs, Indigo and Ultraviolet invite-only shared spaces that always hummed like the conversation from two tables over. Those things went silent as 3djinns’s burn signal cut him off. It was like having parts of his mind removed.

  “Wow,” Prancer said. Because what it would look like to Prancer was the entire network in rebellion. News of Buzz’s “defection” shot everywhere, and suddenly 3djinn’s fortunes down-shifted. Alliances between network polities formed and broke in moments. Prancer’s unfocused eyes focused for just a moment on Buzz, as if reassessing.

  One second passed.

  Buzz Howdy appeared on the Interpol most wanted, and Pacifica, CTexas, Confederation, Carib, and New England Bureaus of Investigation.

  “Duke?” Prancer said, because Buzz’s value was decreasing by the nanosecond.

  And Buzz wanted to fight what 3djinn was doing, but he and Comet had talked about this too. If he fought 3djinn, they’d take it as evidence he was stealing from them. And if he sat here and did nothing, it would force Duke’s hand, right? Right? That was the plan.