by Kenze, Kyle
I wouldn't say there were no secrets, but I was delighted she already knew we were both healthy.
Her leather chair turned out to be on wheels. After I stripped, she gestured at me to sit down, and then she herself sat on the hard spike she found in my lap. The more energetically we fucked, the more the chair wandered across the floor. The extra motion added an interesting layer of pleasure to our exertions.
And then she nipped my ear. “Cum. Cum now.”
“Oh, fuck, yes.”
It was a well-timed move. Seconds later, we were both coming, her muscular pussy squeezing me from my root to guarantee she'd drained me of every drop.
When it was over, though, it was well and truly over. She gestured at my clothes the way she'd gestured at the butler. Time to hop into my pants and go. This time, I didn't hesitate. There was nothing more to discuss. The gratifying intensity of our fuck wasn't enough to turn her head and convince her I knew anything about space defense. She was too smart for that.
Now, it was up to me to prove I too was smart. She expected me to have the basic social intelligence to understand I couldn't run around talking about aliens from Andromeda dropping viruses on the planet Earth. If I tried to raise the subject again, she'd be obligated to report me to Human Resources, and they'd probably yank my security clearance, if not actually send me to a psych unit for a full evaluation.
I'm not crazy, though.
Of course, that's what crazy people always think.
Shit. Sometimes, I still tried to tell myself the threat couldn't be real, but in my heart I was convinced. The alien menace was on its way, and billions of humans were going to die. The males directly as a result of the disease. Most of the females indirectly, because of society's complete collapse.
Somebody had to do something, and it looked like somebody was going to be me.
But what the fuck could I do? The most influential person I knew was General Dyers, and she'd already made it clear she saw me as little more than a twenty-eight-year-old boy toy.
I needed to talk to somebody else. Somebody capable of seeing me as an equal.
My father had brought me up on the three-day rule, but maybe that wasn't a thing anymore. Besides, it was practically three days already. I called Brandy.
“I was just about to text you,” she said.
“You want to meet somewhere?”
“There's a place near me with the best nachos.”
“I'll be there in twenty.”
I beat her to the restaurant, which gave me a chance to angst a little about what I planned to say. Brandy's job was even less important than mine, but she had a good head on her shoulders. There had to be a way of airing some of my alien-related concerns without violating my security oath.
Brandy rolled up to the booth at the same instant the server delivered a pitcher of beer and a shareable plate of super nachos loaded with everything. “You're a mind-reader. How did you know that's exactly what I needed?”
We didn't talk about the new job. She knew I had one, but she also knew I probably couldn't talk about it. The nachos were good, and the beer was better.
“You've got something on your mind,” she said.
“Maybe I need to forget it. Just get it off my mind.”
“We can do that.” Today, we were sitting on the same side of the booth, so it was easy for her to snuggle up close to me.
Her short skirt and long thigh felt so good against my leg.
“What if you knew something bad was going to happen but you couldn't get anyone to listen?”
She shrugged. “There's a thousand movies like that. If nobody listens, it's up to you to stop it.”
“What if I can't stop it because it already happened?”
She looked at me, her eyes slightly unfocused because we were sitting so close. “Not sure what you mean. Does this have something to do with the way you can vanish into thin air?”
Chapter 7
I was in a hammock on a beach. A white crescent of sand cupped blue water. Palm trees hovered on the edges of the sand, their fronds swaying in an evening breeze.
No clothes. These days, I never even bothered to hope my clothes would make the jaunt into the future with me.
I'm not a man who spends a lot of time in hammocks. Took a minute but I eventually figured out how to climb free of its knotty tangle so I could walk slowly along the shore. The water kept lapping up to wash away my footprints behind me.
“Is anybody here?” I called.
Darlene emerged from a small path between the palms. Well, Darlene or one of her clones, but I thought it was the original Dr. Darlene because of the tortoiseshell glasses. Another girl, one I didn't know, kicked up sand as she scampered to join her. This one had long silky hair, ivory skin, and warm brown cat-eyes accentuated with wings of dark eyeliner.
Darlene hugged me, and then the new girl did too. “I'm Jing.” She was a bird-like figure delicate in my arms, but she hugged me even more fiercely than Darlene herself.
It was good to be here. Good to see these girls. Good to see this world, so different from my city.
“You still know how to surprise us,” Darlene said. “I've been trying to figure out a schedule, but it's difficult. You still come and go so erratically, and it's never guaranteed that we can hold you as long as we want to.”
“Tell me about it. I've been thinking a lot about the process myself, but so far it isn't under my control. I suspect I have to use the device to pinpoint times and places, and my employers insist the device isn't ready.”
It was a problem. I never really knew where or when I'd go. Considering we were faced with the end of humanity, there were few things I regretted more than being blasted back to the past even as I emptying into Lily's hungry ass. I would have liked to linger there for a time. To glide and slide in sweet slow-motion. That was the kind of moment a man likes to keep for his own.
But, alas, the forces of time were stronger than a mere mortal such as myself.
“You need to start seeding as many different types of girls as you can.” Well, that was Dr. Darlene all over. “The more you can spread the uncontaminated DNA around, the better.”
“I'm aware. As always, I'm ready, willing, and able.” Had Lily gotten in trouble for milking my dick with her ass instead of her pussy? I hoped not but decided it was wiser not to ask.
Jing hopped into the hammock, spreading her small body so that both of her legs hung out of the sling. Her pussy was as wide open as it gets to let me see the sweet pink inviting me inside.
“I'm always ready to seed the willing, and, as always, there's no time like the present.” I climbed on and took aim, although I was still no hammock expert.
Laughing, Darlene pushed our joined bodies from the side, the better to make us swing. We slip/slotted into place, me on top of Jing, my dick jolting with pleasure inside her deliciously tight muff. Such a thrill when she lifted her small ankles to wrap her slender legs tightly around me.
Not a great moment for somebody to come shouting down the beach. “Hey, we need a doctor! Fast!” Caught up in Jing, I had only a vague idea of what the shouting woman looked like, but I knew she was beautiful. All women at the end of the galaxy were beautiful. They were clones, carefully crafted and selected.
Darlene let go of the hammock. “Gotta run.”
Slight Jing tapped with her small fist, not hard, but emphatically. “I'm sorry, Clayton, but I've gotta run too. I'm also a medic. Lots of us are medics in this world.”
It took all the willpower in the galaxy, but I found it. Struggling out of the hammock for the second time in fifteen minutes, I helped Jing to her feet. The beautiful woman, the one whose face didn't register, was still screaming.
“The virus has mutated again. The L-clones...”
I had a sick feeling I knew exactly who she meant.
“They all collapsed at the same moment. There's a new mutation of the virus, it targets them, it takes them down...” She balled up her fists to rub at her eyes.
“No, fucking hell, they're not stabilized. They're dying.”
I felt a cold chill in my bones.
That word doesn't mean what you think it means. It can't.
But it did.
The strange woman was still screaming. “They'll be gone in less than forty-eight hours unless we find a cure.”
Chapter 8
And, pop, I was back in my time again. Real time as I thought of it, although the future time was just as real. If Lacey and Lily died, they'd be just as forever dead as anyone who died in 2020.
The clock was running out for everybody. For the men of my time, and for the women of their time.
I couldn't sit on my hands and let it happen, but what the fuck else could I do?
A second pop.
A third.
What the?
I'd come back to my apartment, to the place where I stood flat-footed in the living room trying to remember if I'd kissed Brandy good-night or not. These random-ass bounces back and forth were getting to be disturbing.
There was a rustle of movement from the bedroom.
Brandy?
Yet I already knew it wasn't. Somehow, I knew.
My clothes were back, the same ones I'd been wearing in the nacho bar. What time was it? Was I always guaranteed to return to a later time than the one I'd left? I was, after all, allegedly under the control of a time travel device. There might be rules about that kind of thing, but I didn't know if I fully understood them.
“Who's there?” I called.
“Us.”
“It's us.”
“Does us have a name?”
Darlene and Jing slithered into my living room, both as naked, both as slinky, both as sexy as they'd been back on the beach.
My breath caught in my throat. “Weren't you guys supposed to be doctoring?” A stupid question, but I was flabbergasted.
How are you here? There's no time machine in the future. Or at least there wasn't in the version of the future I visited.
“Believe you me, we're just as surprised as you are.” Darlene's glasses hadn't come through. Her naked eyes looked very young and startled. “We didn't think anybody could travel into the past. It's like... the past is gone, there's no place to travel to.”
“That doesn't even make any sense,” I said. “The past isn't gone. It's right here. And I've been traveling back all along.”
“Yeah, but that's different. You're the last man. It doesn't create any weird-ass time travel paradoxes if you move around in time.”
“That's just logic.” Jing might be petite, but she'd back up her friend. “Anybody can figure that out.”
None of it sounded logical to me, but I wasn't about to argue with the female brain of the future.
“Can you get back?” I asked.
Darlene: “How would we even know that?”
Jing: “We don't even know how we got here in the first place.”
“How likely is it that all this crapola is happening all at once just by chance?” I asked.
Darlene: “What do you mean?”
“I saw someone in the trees when I was seeding Lily and Lacey. They said we were alone, but we weren't. There was somebody hiding there. Spying on us. And when you have people spying and hiding, it's usually because they have some nefarious purpose.”
Jing: “You think someone poisoned the Ls?”
“If they got to Lily and Lacey, the mutation might spread to all the other L-clones almost instantaneously. They'd all share the susceptibility to the same version of the virus. Correct?”
Darlene looked troubled. “Was it possible you brought back something from the past?”
“In my time, I get regular health tests,” I said. “I'm clean. Besides, you're still healthy, aren't you?”
She nodded.
“And I assume you ran diagnostics on me that first time. When you had me in that hospital bed.”
“Yes. Of course. The instruments all said you were healthy and uncontaminated.”
“This isn't coming from me.”
Jing had an assertive jaw for a small woman. “He's right. Besides, nobody human has access to the raw virus DNA. It was too dangerous to work with, even under Grade 4 lab conditions. It always escaped. That's how it cleansed the Earth so effectively. And that's why we had to relocate to the other side of the galaxy. The whole solar system became too dangerous for humans to hang around in. Fuck, it's too dangerous for us, and we've had centuries to look at the problem. It was unbreakable. We couldn't do it. Human technology has never risen to that level.”
My blood stopped circulating in my veins, if only for a moment. “So who would have access to this virus?” I asked the question slowly, enunciating it with excruciating precision, hoping all the while the girls would poke an easy hole in my logic. “Who would be immune to its effects and thus able to manipulate its genetic code to make it more dangerous to the only humans that remain?”
No one said anything. There wasn't any point.
There was only one answer.
The aliens from Andromeda.
The fuckers were back.
“And you know something else.” Darlene had gone glassy-eyed from the shock. “It isn't enough that they came back to finish the job of wiping out our species.”
“I know,” Jing said, throwing her small arms around her. “I know.”
“This is bullshit, this shouldn't be allowed. In a just universe, this wouldn't be allowed.”
“I know, I know.”
The fuckers had figured out how to disguise themselves as one of the girls.
Chapter 9
Back on planet Earth, my phone sang. When I looked down, I saw I'd been sent back in time an hour or so.
And I saw the caller was Brandy.
The timeline had changed. The way I remembered it, I was the one who called her. Swipe answer, breathe, breathe, breathe...
“Hey, Clayton, I was thinking...”
I wanted her to know I was in sync with her. That I'd been thinking of her. Even though I was too much of a d-bag to get around to calling her first, at least I'd fucking thought about it.
All that was in the meaning of how I butted in to finish the sentence for her. “That nacho place near you. Yeah, I can be there in twenty.”
“Wow. Great. You're really a mind-reader.” She was breathless, or was I imagining that? “That's the very place I was thinking about.”
“All right. See you soon.”
Darlene and Jing stood flat-footed and butt-naked in front of me. “You're going out?” Their pointy nipples were an unfair accusation. These girls needed some fun to make up for all the dick they'd missed in life, not to mention all the stress they were under.
I blew out a puff of air. “I hate to leave you girls, but I think I have to. Just for a little while. Maybe an hour. There's been a glitch in time, and I don't know if it's possible for a paradox to develop, but I don't want to take a chance of unraveling the entire thread of human history. In the original version of the timeline, I go to that restaurant and meet somebody from my job at the Pentagon, and I think I've got to do the same thing all over again, or time keeps breaking down more.”
“Time could already be breaking down all across the galaxy,” Jing said. “The fact that Darlene and I are even here suggests something is going badly wrong somewhere.”
“Every galaxy has a black hole at its center where time is disorganized,” Darlene said. “What if our area of disorganization is expanding?”
“Exactly. I need to keep to the original timeline as close as I possibly can, and that means I have to go out, if only for a short time. Besides, there's another reason. We have to be real. There's no way we can do battle with forces from the Andromeda galaxy on our own. We need to bring in the Pentagon.”
It didn't seem wise to bring up the fact that this particular represen
tative of the Pentagon was a girl who delivered files and inter-office packages. “I'm going to meet with this person, talk some things out, and you two take some time to familiarize yourself with my century. Anything you want to wear in my closet, help yourself. Any food in the kitchen. Oh, and there's some beer in the fridge. You might want to crack open some bottles and just hang loose for a while. Give yourself time to settle down from the disorienting effects of time travel.”
Darlene had already discovered the remote, which I didn't use anymore since I was all about the voice commands. She fiddled with it for a minute or two, and the TV came on a little too loud.
“Squawkbox, lower volume,” I said, and the TV switched to using its indoor voice.
The two girls looked amazed at each other. “Hey,” I said. “It's 2020, not 2010.”
Their surprise shocked me, but it shouldn't have. What the hell did I know about the tiny differences between the technology of 1920 and 1910? I had a vague idea people started driving cars instead of riding horses and that's about it. And that was only one century away. How many centuries away was the difference between 2010 and 2020 for Darlene and Jing?
Had I even bothered to ask?
Anyway, the boob tube seemed like a good idea. They could brush up on the fine points about the time where they'd landed - the little details that would let them fit in instead of standing out as weirdo slutty outcasts constantly on the cruise for dick.
“Bring back chocolate,” Jing said. “Chocolate ice cream, oh, and there's a legend of this drink that's a mix of chocolate and red wine...”
Huh. Sounded like she already knew more about my century than I did. Maybe those archives were more complete than I'd realized.
Time to motor.
This time I was the one late getting to the booth. Brandy was the one who'd ordered the pitcher of beer and the nachos. She was always pretty, but it looked like she'd made a special effort tonight. A swipe of glitter on her eyes, a second swipe of glitter on her collarbone. This pink dress wasn't a club dress, but it knew how to mold itself to her spectacular curves.