SCI-ROTICA

by Cameron Hale

  Darien gathered her in his arms and stroked her hot, damp, face. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m not handling my own fear very well. It was probably the native version of a mosquito.”

  “Bullshit,” she whimpered. “That thing in the trees followed us. It found us. And now…”

  “Just try not to lose it,” he said, struggling to keep the irritation from his voice. “We've got to try and find water. Obviously, there’s life on this planet. We just haven't found it yet.”

  She lunged from his grasp and clawed at the welt. Malodorous fluid the color of rotten egg yolks spurted angrily from the wound. “I don't want to die! Get it out! I want it out of me now!”

  Darien grabbed her hands and slapped her face. She cowered and stared at him with the eyes of a trapped animal.

  “We'll both die if we stay here. Do you understand? Now if you want to stay behind, that's fine. But I'm pushing on to find water. Are you with me?”

  She nodded mutely. He helped her up, her body unpleasantly warm and flaccid. A trail of noxious fluid trickled down her thigh.

  “Try and leave that bite alone. The last thing you want is to get it infected.”

  * * *

  They walked slowly, clumsily, the arboreal scenery unchanging. No bird or insect stirred, no breeze whispered through the branches. The lack of water sapped their energy. Saranoud could not travel more than a few yards without resting. Though the air was fresh, the incessant turpentine reek stung their lungs and left them nauseous.

  The welt pulsed. Saranoud winced, the flesh heaving on the back of her thigh. “Stop a minute, Darien. Something's happening to my leg.”

  As she turned to look, the undulating sore exploded and showered her with a putrid viscous fluid. Darien recoiled, his hands automatically screening his face. The droplets oozed through the pores of Saranoud's exposed flesh with burning ferocity. Uttering a garbled scream, she collapsed unconscious to the ground.

  Darien bolted toward her. He hesitated as a rash of pus-filled welts erupted over her body. Saranoud jerked convulsively, her tongue lolling gray and swollen from her gaping mouth. She voided herself, filling the air with a foul stench.

  He approached only when she was still and crouched a safe distance away. “Saranoud?” He inched closer and cautiously nudged her with his foot. The welts spread as he watched, the original bite area an ugly, mottled purple. He vacillated, fascinated yet repulsed by her condition, ashamed of a nagging instinct that urged him to leave her and save himself.

  “Saranoud, can you hear me?”

  Her eyes rolled back, their violet color filmed and rheumy. Her trembling hands reached for him in supplication. “Help me—please don’t leave me…”

  Tears blurred Darien's vision. Saranoud’s voice was little more than a croak, her expression mirroring the hellish agony consuming her. Guilt and remorse pricked him. Though she would have eventually become merely another sexual conquest to add to his tally, he could not bear to watch her suffer.

  “It’ll be over soon,” he said, his glance unwillingly drifting to whatever might be watching from the trees. “Just close your eyes and let go, Saranoud.”

  He scanned the forest with frightened eyes and slowly moved away. A knobbly object pressed into the thin sole of his shoe. He danced away in alarm, noticing something half buried in the soil. The object glinted in the filtered light. Cautiously prodding it with his toe, he felt a hard, metallic surface. He dropped to the ground and dug it up, the sight of the unfamiliar insignia like a physical blow. Battling a moment of dizziness, he exhaled harshly and fingered the trident shaped object.

  Its coppery surface pitted and tarnished by time and the elements, the insignia gleamed dully in the surreal light. An inscription reminiscent of cuneiform outlined the roughened edges. Darien ran his finger over the raised lettering, the metal strangely vibrant beneath his skin. He shook his head with a troubled expression.

  “How many others?” he said aloud, his voice a lonely punctuation in the suffocating silence. “Who were you? A week, a thousand years, it makes no difference here.” He rose unsteadily, the insignia clutched tightly in his hand. “I wish you could speak,” he said to the object. “What a tale you’d tell.”

  He cast a furtive glance at Saranoud. Her contorted body was finally still, her clutching hands embedded in the dirt. A dark substance thickly bubbled from her gaping mouth.

  “Forgive me, Saranoud,” he said, darting off into the forest.

  * * *

  Only the subtle shifting of light indicated the passage of time. Darien trudged through the endless forest, the spongy soil reminiscent of mud. The relentless suction tired his legs and slowed his progress. He frequently stopped to rest, his labored breathing occasionally disrupted by a bout of phlegmy coughing. At one point, he drifted off to fitful sleep, his body jerking from shadowy nightmares.

  Awakening with a start, he stared dully at the forest as though unsure of where he was. He rose on wobbly legs and attempted to urinate, his fingers barely able to negotiate the press-seam opening to his trousers. He winced, his efforts producing only a feeble, dark orange dribble that splattered disconsolately on his shoes. He coughed, the sound dry and hacking.

  There must be water somewhere, he thought, too afraid to speak.

  He continued his erratic trek through the forest. Often, he found himself wandering in circles, the unchanging scenery offering no clues. By evening, he had scarcely progressed a few hundred yards. Glistening with fever, his aching body wracked by convulsive chills, he finally collapsed. He moaned and clutched his stomach, his eyes constantly blinking as he desperately scrabbled for something edible in the soil. Tentatively, he tasted a clump of moist dirt and immediately retched, his swollen gray tongue lolling from his mouth. Tears streamed uncontrollably down his face. He curled into a fetal position and sobbed until only dry heaves wracked his body and dusk draped the trees in a sinister cloak.

  Only a distant, surreptitious rustling finally prompted him to his feet. Staggering like a drunkard, he weaved an unsteady path through the moonlit forest. “Help me,” he muttered, the words repeated like a litany. “Someone, please help me…”

  He shuffled to an abrupt stop, his trembling body dripping with sweat as he sniffed the air. Overcome, he dropped to his knees, a stealthy rustling in a nearby tree barely catching his attention. He peered around, muttering incoherently, his unsteady gaze resting on something clutching one of the lower branches. His mouth worked silently when a squat, chitinous creature descended the tree trunk.

  Unconcerned by Darien’s presence, the seeker approached its prey. The unidentifiable mass of the female pulsed in the final throes of metamorphosis, the surrounding soil glistening with a noxious soup of fluid and tissue segments. Pale strands of what might have been hair floated in the sludge, the remnants of silver fabric an occasional glint of color. The seeker continued its vigil over the prey. It cast only an occasional, disinterested glance at Darien, who watched in stunned disbelief.

  “I—must be hallucinating,” he mumbled. “This, this can’t be real…”

  The motionless seeker was a distorted shadow in the greenish moonlight, the transformation it patiently observed a monstrous mutation. Grimacing in disgust, Darien tried to rise and promptly passed out.

  * * *

  Gradually, the prey transformed into a compact crustacean body. The skin calcified, limbs curved and segmented. Sensory organs reassembled while a collective memory spawned in the altered brain. The larvae deposited within host bodies worked quickly and efficiently to detoxify and assimilate alien life forms into true Acajix life forms. Integration into the vast Acajix community followed, nurturing eventual expansion throughout the galaxy.

  A garbled cry rose from Darien as he doubled over and clutched his groin. The pain prodded him to delirious wakefulness. He groaned and rolled onto his back, his watering eyes half closed against the filtered sunlight. A fearful expression suddenly crossed his face, prompting him to glance toward the tree w
here he had glimpsed the alien creature. The area, at least within his limited range of vision, was deserted. With almost superhuman effort, he struggled from the ground and staggered off until dusk cloaked the forest.

  Bathed in emerald moonlight, careless movement alerted the seekers. Openly perched on the lower branches of a tree, their extended feelers gently rippled as Darien blundered into view. Haggard and ashen, he crawled toward the trunk and began clawing erratically at the bark, oblivious to the skin sloughing from his hands.

  The seekers clicked and moved in unison toward the prey. Consumed by delirium, Darien babbled incoherently, doggedly seeking purchase on the tree, oblivious to the impending danger. One of the seekers hesitated and peered at the prey with glowing eyestalks, eliciting a resounding cuff from the other. The recalcitrant seeker continued, proboscis poised. It struck the prey swiftly on the left hand without the use of the numbing agent. Stunned and weakened, the prey offered no resistance. Immediately, the seeker pumped a yellowish amniotic fluid deep into the tissue.

  Darien collapsed to the ground, his eyes gaping in horror at the crustacean-like creatures flanking him. His lips moved soundlessly while they retreated up the tree trunk. A few garbled words spilled from his mouth, prompting one of the seekers to stop and look back at him. Its eyestalks waved furiously as it emitted a series of mournful clicks that for the briefest moment, sounded like words.

  “Saranoud! Oh, God…” he muttered, his hand groping for the timeworn insignia that had slipped from his tattered trouser pocket.

  THE DOUGHNUT

  Nona awoke late from a gray restless sleep to an even grayer reality. Shivering from the perennial dampness, she drew her legs up and huddled beneath the skimpy aluminum blanket. Her sore, cramped muscles ached in protest, the rising bruise on her left hip a dull, steady throb. Beyond, the bare walls dripped with condensation, the air cold and stale. Once again, the central ventilation system was down; the prospect of repair relegated to the tenuous realm of month-end maintenance rounds.

  She sighed and half-closed her eyes. Anemic sunlight filtered through dust-caked blinds. Supposedly light sensitive, the detector mechanism had long ago failed, leaving the blinds permanently slanted open. The deep-set windows reminded her of the archer slits of ancient castle turrets. She recalled the image of great stone fortresses from a half-forgotten history lesson, the memory a faded sepia-toned relic from a past too remote to matter.

  Once again, a faintly suffocating sensation of claustrophobia teased her. Like an elusive specter, it haunted her throughout her waking hours, taunting her, reminding her that she was a mere speck of insignificance mirrored by the dismal, utilitarian apartment she shared with her twin sister. A soulless collection of miserly rooms carved from anonymous gray walls, the complex was infamously known as the doughnut¾the term a complimentary name for the circular, twenty-story concrete and granite community project built during the housing shortages at the turn of the century.

  The center of the doughnut consisted of open ground. Originally intended as a recreational park for the residents, it had long since deteriorated into a dangerous, unkempt wilderness. Outsiders and renegades had formed posses and infested the overgrown tangle, culling rats, insects and whatever could be scrounged from the depleted land. In an attempt to curb the infestation, the Housing Commission had finally erected huge ironwork barriers to seal off the park. Gradually, residents became used to being penned in like farm animals, the barren land beyond the doughnut too tainted to support life.

  Through the scourge of escalating violence, the projects transformed into isolated, self-contained islands of chaos, supplies and other needs dealt with either on-site or via weekly drop shipments from transport-copters. Neglect and corruption were rampant, and as contact between other communities dwindled, so did the general standard of life until most became prostituted to eking a living any way possible.

  Shifting to ease her throbbing hip, Nona brushed against Nadya’s body. Ripe like a luscious contraband fruit Nona had once sampled years ago, the refuge of warm curves and hollows beckoned her like loving arms. Still deeply asleep, Nadya’s cornsilk hair spilled across the air pillow in a glorious halo. Nona briefly paused to stare at her sister’s sublime expression and brushed her silken lips in a gentle kiss. She nestled close against flawless flesh, relishing the gentle pressure of Nadya’s voluptuous breasts against her own. Slowly, she trailed a hand across the smooth slope of Nadya’s belly and let her fingers roam the shaven mound of her cunt. Sticky wetness greeted her gentle probing, the engorged clit swelling even more at her touch. Nadya murmured and languorously parted her thighs.

  Always so willing, Nona thought. As though your body was a foreign land where anyone could explore, never mind how…

  Irritated by Nadya’s sensual response, Nona turned onto her stomach, her sister’s arousal a stark contradiction to her own self-loathing. Even after so many years of plying the trade, she could not understand how Nadya could enjoy their assignations. Her eagerness never flagged, her enthusiasm transcending the sordidness their lives had become. Though identical twins in the physical sense, they could not have been more dissimilar in personality and temperament than if they had been born of different parents.

  Parents…

  An image of two faces briefly surfaced in her mind. No more substantial than the occasional frail wisp of cloud that trailed across the washed out sky, she could not even summon their names. Abandoned as children, she and Nadya had soon learned the bitter lesson that barter for beauty provided their only means of survival.

  Her fingers involuntarily traced the bruise on her hip. She shuddered, almost afraid to further explore the abused terrain of her body. The leather harness that had imprisoned her was crudely constructed—the studs and buckles digging into her flesh with sadistic vigor as the masked man, or marks, as paying customers were commonly known, gleefully bound her to the well-worn padded table. Blindfolded, she had simultaneously felt the weight of Nadya’s face between her legs and the musky warmth of her cunt straddling her mouth.

  Bound together with the final tug of a leather strap, Nona had smelled the stench of the mark’s rising excitement. Muttering incoherently, he circled the table like a predator, trailing and slapping his engorged cock along their bodies. It was at that point Nona felt Nadya’s tongue flicker across her cunt, relentlessly seeking and probing until it found her clit and nursed on it. Nadya’s own heat scorched Nona’s lips, her salty wetness leaving a sticky veil against her mouth. Nadya’s hips began to thrust against Nona’s mouth, demanding entry. Reluctantly, Nona inserted her tongue into Nadya’s clit and anus and alternately probed and sucked.

  Nadya writhed against Nona, her body slick with sweat. Bullet hard nipples branded her belly. Bucking to an increasingly frenzied rhythm, Nadya violently jerked and cried out. Nona felt her sister’s contractions. A subsequent gush of come engulfed her mouth. The mark’s own climax erupted a moment later as he shot strings of scalding come across their bodies. Sated, panting, Nadya collapsed onto her sister.

  Inevitably, the mark had chuckled, eliciting the standard conclusion to the session. Silently obeying, Nadya systematically proceeded to lick the sweat from Nona, her questing tongue scouring each mound and crevice. Only when he hoarsely commanded her to stop did she comply. Together, they had waited on the table until the mark released them. As always, they removed their blindfolds only to see an empty room and a pile of dingy ration coupons waiting on a nearby table. Beneath, on a soiled piece of paper, a hastily scrawled time and date confirmed their next session.

  Stinging from the recollection, Nona stifled a gasp and blinked back incipient tears. Her glimpse of the black draped apartment had been limited to tenuous shadows emerging from the blood-colored glowlights. A cloying fog of incense further obscured, but did not completely disguise a sinister array of bondage paraphernalia. Though the mark never touched them beyond the harnessing, she still felt betrayed by Nadya’s behavior. That she willingly consented to b
e used by a man was one thing, but the fact that she enjoyed it could not be disguised.

  Her glance strayed to the bedside ledge serving as a table and eyed the crumpled, dirty ration coupons¾enough for at least a week’s supply of food. Sustenance for the body, but little else. No amount of time in the shower had been able to wash away the mark’s stink. Considered prime meat in the trade, she no longer saw her reflection in the mirror, only a composite of coupons obtained by the ransom of her body.

  Her gaze returned to Nadya’s slumbering form. The feeble sunlight filtering through the blinds briefly kissed her hair. Nona ran a finger along the curves of her face and studied her full lips and prominent cheekbones. Tall, feline and beautifully sculpted, Nadya mirrored Nona down to the symmetrical arch of their eyebrows. Nona grimaced as she considered the consequences of a beauty that harkened to their distant Nordic roots. Clearly, their parents had not comprehended the value of the children they had so heartlessly abandoned so long ago.

  Unable to get comfortable, she rolled over and stared dully at the featureless ceiling. The air pillow wheezed thinly beneath her head. Each night elicited a growing dread as she anxiously awaited news of Nadya’s latest assignation. She struggled for a moment to recall a term once used for such procurement¾pimp, and she, the whore. In the year 2092, she realized she was an anachronism, experiencing emotions and clinging to a set of values abandoned generations ago. No matter how many times she watched Nadya perform with lustful abandon, she could not descend to the same level of moral void.

  “You know what your problem is?”

  Nona started and turned. Nadya stared at her with languorous eyes, her hand idly drifting to Nona’s breast. She gently tweaked the tawny nipple until it blossomed beneath her touch. Nona grimaced and shook her off.