by Zaide Bishop
“No?” Fox taunted. “I seem to remember you coming pretty hard at my expense yesterday.”
Whiskey flushed, humiliated and angry the Elikai would bring that up. She wanted to deny it, but Fox slid a finger inside of her and Whiskey cried out, back arching against the bonds. She struggled hard until Fox had to cup her hips to keep her still.
“I thought you were strong, Whiskey,” she teased.
Fox slid her finger into the shell again. Whiskey was wet now; she could feel how easily the digit moved inside her. Fox coaxed more of her juice out and sucked her finger again.
“You taste amazing.”
“No,” Whiskey hissed.
“It’s your choice,” Fox said, infuriatingly calm. “We can do this my way and I’ll give you another shot of my seed, or I can go. Right now.”
Whiskey was silent for a long moment, her breath coming short and fast.
“Do it fast,” she said.
“No.” She grinned. “I won’t be doing that.”
Fox buried her head between Whiskey’s legs again, tongue stroking with enthusiastic abandon. She took in as much of Whiskey as she could, working her with fingers and her mouth, savoring her as if she were honey.
Whiskey whimpered and shook, pleasure lashing through her in waves. It was filthy, disgusting, this wretched Elikai, devouring her like she was her last meal. Why had she never been so turned on before?
The idea that any moment, Fox was going to thrust herself inside her, penetrate her with that horrible alien appendage, sent a shockwave of pleasure and disgust right through her core, and she screamed, back arched, hips bucking as Fox’s tongue teased out climax after climax. She was begging him to stop when he pulled away.
Relief flooded through her. Her body was throbbing with the sheer force of her orgasm; the awkward position had made the muscles across her belly taut with strain. She’d never come this hard before. Never felt anything like this, her nipples aching, her skin humming with need.
Her relief was short-lived. Fox had only pulled back to position herself and before Whiskey could react, she had buried her cock into her, all the way to the hilt.
Fox was as hard as stone and filled every inch of her shell. Whiskey gasped, and Fox began to thrust, rabid and desperate. She cut the ties that bound Whiskey’s ankles and without any warning, she rolled Whiskey onto her back. Her arms were pushed up by the log, held at an awkward angle, and Fox yanked her legs apart, burying herself into her again, only now they were face-to-face.
Fox grabbed her breasts as Whiskey had done to herself the night before, pinching her nipples, sending hard shots of pleasurable fire into Whiskey’s belly. She whimpered, overwhelmed by the pounding force inside her.
Fox had gone mad with need. Her body was bowed so Fox could kiss and bite her way across Whiskey’s chest, sucking her breasts, torturing them with lips, teeth and tongue.
Whiskey climaxed again, legs locked around Fox’s hips, pulling her deeper with every thrust, even though she was sobbing for her to stop. Fox’s whole body arched with her own climax, so strong Whiskey could feel it inside her, a hot jet of fluid.
She pulled out and Whiskey’s whole body sagged, defeated by the raw power of the pleasure the Elikai had inflicted on her. She could scarcely move, scarcely breathe.
Fox slipped out a knife, Whiskey’s knife, and lay it on the sand a few feet away. Within reach, though not easy reach. With one more long look into her eyes, Fox bolted, fleeing through the jungle before Whiskey could catch her breath.
* * *
Fox scrambled into the creek, turning north, then west. Whiskey would catch him if he stuck to the creek. He had intentionally left the Varekai tied loosely, so he would not die in the clearing, but now he feared he had been too hasty and that it would only be minutes before Whiskey was on his tail. Possibly it was better than the alternative. If he had bound Whiskey tightly, then forgotten how to get back, he could not even send his brothers to rescue him. Causing the death of a Varekai, particularly such an unpleasant death, would be unforgivable.
Whiskey had the added advantage that he knew this part of the forest and Fox had never been here before. He doubted the Varekai spent much time in the mangroves, though, and maybe there would be a traversable path along the western coast. A track made by goats or pigs would be just as safe for him.
He turned away from the rising sun, scrambling up the bank of the creek then forging west, battling through thick undergrowth and immense golden orb spiderwebs, some four yards across. The spiders themselves were equally large, with leg spans wide enough to wrap their long, hairless legs around Fox’s head. They were not aggressive and actually quite good to eat. It did sicken him to see small birds and little green snakes, dead and desiccated, in the high corners of the webs.
The soggy forest floor gave way to oozing mudflats and trees with trunks crusted with salt. The sharp, spear-like breathing roots of the mangroves were a hazard. A misstep could have seen one slice straight though his foot. He slogged through the ankle-deep mud, looking for denser trees that would let him climb from branch to branch. But the bigger trees were over the water and in the murky brown pools; a sixteen-foot crocodile could be invisible under the surface in only two feet of water. The massive salties could propel their entire body length out of the water by churning their tails like a rudder, and there were no trees in the entire mangrove tall enough to keep him out of their reach.
He saw a knobbly gray head sink under the surface not ten yards from where he stood. A juvenile, the size he would spear and eat on a good day, but for every crocodile you saw, there were ten more you didn’t. He knew, without needing to smell their rank odors, or see their sinuous, ancient movements, that he was surrounded.
He froze, considering going back, but imagined Whiskey already on his trail. The Varekai intended him harm. The crocodiles were simply being themselves. Besides, crocodiles, particularly the mature ones, preferred prey of habit. They would watch a canoe come and go for weeks before attacking. They would remember routines. They would be waiting, often only feet away from their prey, for several days before they struck.
A swimmer taken by a crocodile had probably brushed by it in the same waterhole three or four times before being attacked. It was why they lived so long. It was why they were such superior hunters.
If Fox was attacked today, it would probably be because he startled a croc; stepped on it, came too close to a nest or crèche, or inadvertently came between it and the surface. He chose the crocodiles over the Varekai and pushed on.
A thick tussock of grass alerted him to a wide, long island amid the mire. He climbed over to it, prodding at the grasses with a stick before stepping onto the island. There was quite a bit of dry ground here, some three hundred yards from the shore. A mini island amid the mud channels. There was also a dreadful smell of rotting meat and the low hum of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of flies.
Crocodiles often dragged dead prey back to their dens to rot, waiting until the meat was rancid and slimy to eat it. Survivors of crocodile attacks would wake piled amid the slurry of rotted carcasses. The prognosis for a crocodile bite was poor. The crushing wounds tended to kill weeks later, and anyone who dragged themselves from a den alive only survived long enough to tell the tale.
Fox edged along the island. He could make better time on the solid ground. Hopefully, the occupant of the den was out feeding, or basking. He paused, though, when he saw the huge dark tree through the smaller, gray trunks. It looked like some kind of massive fig, its trunk as wide as an Elikai was long, with low, wide branches and clusters of red-yellow fruit amid small, dark leaves.
He’d never seen a tree like that, not growing in the salt and soggy mud. Around its base huge, thick roots hugged a wide, black pool that could have housed the entire Elikai village. Fruit bobbed all across its surface, and on the far side was a vast,
unnatural mound of black debris and branches.
There was something poking out of the mound. A gleaming white skull, perfectly domed.
An Elikai skull? Or a Varekai? It had to be one or the other, but no member of either tribe had been lost since Alpha died from the shark attack. It didn’t make sense.
Fox made his way carefully along the grassy rim, then picked his way across the huge, twisted roots of the fig toward the edge of the mound. As he got closer, he realized there was another skull beside the first and, below that, a third.
His heart was pounding and he swallowed hard, momentarily too sickened to go on. Who were these dead people? If they weren’t Elikai or Varekai, where had they come from? Was there another tribe in the world? Were there more teachers somewhere, like those in Eden?
He reached out tentatively to touch the closest skull, but under his fingers it was warm and rubbery. Not bone at all, more like...
“Reptile eggs?” he breathed, confused. The largest of the eggs he had seen on the isles could easily fit in his palm. Big crocodiles and snakes did not lay big eggs; they simply laid more of them. There was nothing that laid eggs this size in the archipelago. Nothing.
In the black pool beside him, the water began to churn.
Chapter Ten
Fox was leaving a trail a blind boar could follow. Where she had stepped onto a branch, her footprints were etched in mud and there were still sinkholes in where she had placed her feet in the pools. There was no need for Whiskey to move slowly, as the Elikai had forged a path already. She simply stepped where Fox had stepped, bounding after her with ruthless fury.
The Elikai was never going to run again when Whiskey caught up. She would spend the rest of her days in the Elikai village, mending nets and tending cooking fires. For this insult, Whiskey would take the hunt from her. Permanently.
She scrambled through the trees, hauling herself up onto the grassy tussock, then drew back, shocked by the sudden fetid stench that washed over her. She flinched as a wave of flies rose up around her, hundreds of thousands of them, and then jerked as a large spider ran up her bare leg. The island was crawling with carrion feeders and the predators that came to feed on them. Flies and crabs attracted spiders, fish, lizards, dragonflies and snakes. The sudden sense that all around her the grass was infested with life and movement alarmed her, and she almost backed away.
The tanned arm and leg high in the fig tree across the pool spurred her back into forward motion. Fox must already be injured to try to hide from her in a tree. A sprained ankle, perhaps. A snakebite. She carefully avoided the same, dropping down to the tangled roots at the edge of the black, still pool. Two lizards and a small adder fell off the roots into the water, sending out ripples across the surface as they swam frantically out of her path.
“I see you, Elikai.” She grinned, losing sight of the Elikai as she scrambled toward the trunk. “And when I catch you—”
Suddenly, Fox was right there in front of her, hanging down from a higher branch. She grabbed Whiskey’s forearm in a vise-like grip and yanked her upward the same instant a wall of water exploded behind her.
Something the size of a tree slammed into the fig, showering them with branches and fruit. Whiskey scrambled for safety, drenched and blinded as something vast and sharp sliced open her thigh. Then she was high in the cradle of the branches and below her, the pool was sloshing, small tsunamis swamping the grass and lapping up the trunk of the tree, which was now scored and bleeding amber sap from deep wounds in the wood.
Whiskey was too shocked even to scream, the laceration on her leg sending a thick trickle of blood down her ankle. She’d dropped everything. Her spear, her bow, both were floating across the surface of the pool.
“What—”
Fox took her knife and cut away the wide strap of leather that bound Whiskey’s breasts.
“Hey!” she protested, but the Elikai fastened it around her leg, trying to slow the flow of blood. This time, she did scream.
She smacked Fox, hard, across the cheek.
“You’re welcome,” Fox spat. Whiskey snarled at her, scrambling away from her up the branch.
For a long moment they glared at one another, then Whiskey looked back down at the pool.
“What was that?”
“It’s a crocodile.”
“No. It’s too big.”
Fox pointed to something on the bank. “Look.”
Whiskey could see the hulking shape of the crocodile in the grass, but there was something very wrong about her. Her eyes were milky and weeping, her front legs splayed at a strange angle, as if they were too swollen to touch the ground. She could see her tail and hind legs, resting almost parallel to her body, but Whiskey couldn’t understand how it could twist that way, almost completely folded in half.
She pulled herself up higher, trying to make out its middle amid the tangle of roots and grasses.
“Where is...” What she was seeing slowly dawned on her. Clotted around the monster—twisted and swollen, writhing with insects—was not roots and reeds. It was her insides. She wasn’t bent at all, but torn in half, spilt open and tossed aside.
Toyota was the biggest predator in the archipelago. There was nothing that could do this to her. There was nothing strong enough to tear a crocodile open like this, unless it was a monstrous shark, something from the deep ocean, but the water was too shallow here for such things.
The water in the pool heaved and shifted, and there was a deep throbbing through the core of the tree, like an earthquake. She braced herself for the whole mangrove to tremble, for the earth to shift and collect itself with the seismic force, but nothing happened.
The black water oozed and bubbled, turning over and sucking down as if... A shape slowly started to form, a length of ridges, a pointed tip. It was the tail of a crocodile, but far larger than Whiskey had ever imagined. The head, some thirty feet away, was too wide and too flat to be from the estuarine crocodiles they feared.
This was something new.
“What...is that?” Whiskey looked to Fox, wide-eyed.
“Something they made, in the world before, I think,” she said grimly. “One of those creatures that were extinct and then came back again. A super croc.”
Whiskey shook her head, not wanting to believe. “Why would it come here? There’s not enough prey for something this size on the islands. It must eat leviathans. It must come from the mainland.”
Fox nodded grimly and pointed to a huge rotting mound of vegetation. “It’s making a nest. I saw eggs in there, as big as your head.”
She couldn’t hide her horror. “Eggs. Eggs! We can’t let there be more of these things! It could swallow a whole canoe!”
“I know,” Fox said. “But I don’t know what you think we can do about it from here.”
“I doubt you could do anything about it regardless of where you were...”
“Really?” she demanded. “You’re going to start with that now?”
“I need to get back to my sisters. It will take the whole tribe to take down something of this size.” Whiskey paused. “I’m going to lose all my dogs fighting this thing.”
“You can’t just throw dogs at it until it goes away, Whiskey. It killed Toyota. I think it’s fair to say your entire pack would be a snack.”
They both fell silent, watching the prehistoric creature. Varekai, Elikai and reptile, all as still as rocks while around them the busy industry of death feasted on Toyota’s remains.
“Its eyes are weeping,” Whiskey said. “They’re irritated and milky. I don’t think it likes the salt water.”
“Do you think there are rivers on the mainland big enough for something that size?” Fox asked.
“I think there are a lot of things on the mainland. Bad things. Big things. Things the people before should never have
made.”
“We’re going to die here if we can’t work together,” Fox said quietly.
Whiskey gave her a scathing look. “Of course, Fox. Cooperation will kill the beast. We’ll hold hands and share a seagull and the monster will just melt away.”
“I could push you in the water and run while it eats you,” she pointed out.
“You could try.”
They both fell silent, and slowly the midday heat intensified.
* * *
Whiskey woke to the touch of something smooth and cold. In the dim moonlight, she could see a tree branch as thick around as she was silently sliding by. For a dizzying moment, she thought she was dreaming and started to close her eyes again. Then she froze, eyes wide-open, as the massive python worked its way up the trunk beside her.
The Burmese pythons thrived in the mangroves, feeding on pigs, goats and smaller crocodiles, usually hunting at the edge of freshwater creeks and waterholes. They swam almost as well as crocodiles, their long, strong bodies buoyant in the water.
But snakes could be opportunistic too, and two warm bodies sleeping in a tree had been easy prey.
Whiskey reached for her knife, knowing it would be little help—but Fox had not given it back when she cut off Whiskey’s clothes. She turned her head slowly, trying to locate the head of the snake in the undulating masses of coils around her. It would sniff its prey carefully with a forked tongue to find the sleeping victim’s head before striking.
Where possible, a python always bit the head of its prey, coiling around it, crushing it, then swallowing it headfirst so spines, fins and claws would be laid flat inside its gut.
If Whiskey was being tasted, she was already dead.
However, the snake had passed her, continuing through the tree to poise itself over Fox. Its tongue was flicking across her hair, disturbing the loose brown curls and sending them rolling down her cheek to cover her eyes.
Whiskey remembered the Elikai’s hand in hers, jerking her into the tree an instant before the super croc had struck. She remembered the searing pain as she’d bound her leg to stop the bleeding. Fox could have let her die twice. She could have tied Whiskey up so tightly she was unable to chase her and let her dehydrate in the clearing.