by Pam Godwin
Michio removed the probe and covered our hands with his. “The baby drew my venom when I bit Evie.” His eyebrows pulled together. “I don’t know what it means or how it will affect them.”
Jesse’s gaze lowered to my neck. “Both times?”
I wasn’t surprised he hadn’t missed the second set of bite marks. He didn’t appear upset, only eager to understand, which was a testament to how much he trusted Michio not to harm me.
“Just the first time.” Michio studied my face. “Can you think of anything else that’s changed or evolved in the past four weeks?”
I thought back and remembered the drive between Las Vegas and the dam. “I don’t sense nymphs anymore.” I looked at Jesse and Roark. “Not since Virginia. I passed numerous nymphs on the way here and didn’t pass out, didn’t feel their pain, didn’t feel anything. Do you think…?”
“She’s protecting you.” Michio sat back on his heels. “And protecting herself. It’s just a guess but not completely implausible, considering she’s given you the power to mentally wipe out aphids.” He climbed off the bed and packed his equipment away. “You need daily exposure to sunlight.”
“But you won’t go to the surface without one of us,” Jesse said, firmly.
I sighed. “I have all this energy. Unless you want to spend all day, every day, fucking it out of me, I need to run or something.”
“There are miles of tunnels down here.” Michio narrowed his eyes at me. “But pay attention to your heart rate. And I want you eating a full-balanced diet, including vegetables.”
“Lots of canned mush, then.” Roark rubbed his jaw. “Though that fella with the ronnie said he was going to start a hydroponic vegetable garden at the bottom of the dam.”
I scrunched my nose. “What fella? And what the hell is a ronnie?”
“Link brought that farmer with him, love. Ye know, the lad with the hairy mouth mirken that looks like someone shat on his lip?”
I vaguely remembered a man with a mustache. “Does this farmer have a name?”
He lifted a shoulder. “I call him Ronnie.”
Of course, he did. I gave him a scolding look, made ineffective by my wide grin, and reached for my clothes. “Are you done with all the poking, Doc?”
“Until tomorrow. Don’t roll your eyes, Evie. These exams will be daily. Get used to it.”
Michio hadn’t been lying. For the next six weeks, not a day sneaked by without him prodding and sticking. I always received a clean bill of health, but he was diligent in his quest to not overlook anything, and not only during exam time. If I so much as sneezed, the medical bag came out.
Over the weeks, Link chased down the people and supplies Michio requested, and slowly, the equipment, medications, and doctors trickled in. Like Michio, the new physicians and nurses—all of them men—had yet to find anything worrying in my exams. Shea’s pregnancy was deemed healthy as well, the ultrasound readings placing her one week further along than me. As the inches grew around our waistlines, she tired easier and slept more, while I felt stronger, hornier, and more energetic than ever.
I jogged the tunnels every morning. Darwin always joined me, as well as one or all of my guardians. It was one of my favorite parts of the day, stretching my legs, flexing my lungs, and tracing my gaze over the bunch and pull of their muscular, half-dressed physiques. Stopping myself from tackling them to the ground was more arduous than trying to keep pace with their long-legged strides.
The sinews tightening and straining in Jesse’s powerful legs, the sweat clinging to Roark’s boxer’s shoulders, the sensual flow of Michio’s effortless gait, all of their movements recalled every touch of their fingers, the heat of their skin, and the press of their thighs against mine. Just looking at them made me insane with need.
It was during one of these daily jogs, at the end of our sixth week of residency in the dam, when Link stopped the four of us at the bend in a tunnel.
He leaned against the natural rock wall, arms crossed over his barrel chest. “My boys are back from Arkendale.”
My lungs heaved, more from my anticipation than from the three miles I’d just run.
Glistening in sweat, Jesse matched Link’s posture on the opposite wall, while Michio stepped beside me, not winded in the least, and pressed two fingers over my neck to check my pulse.
Roark bent at the waist, hands braced on knees, and panted noisily. “Spit it out, fuckhole.”
Laughing, Link ran his fingers through Darwin’s fur as my dog circled around his legs. “The peninsula is overrun with women, as is the state of Virginia, and from what I understand, the entire Northeast coast.”
I covered my mouth with my hands, my eyes pricking, and my heart leaping. All those women had been infected, trapped in their bodies with harrowing pain, and now they were free. To fall in love. To have children. To find happiness.
“Pregnancies?” Michio gripped my arm, lowering it to hold my hand.
“Over half are pregnant.” Link passed me an amused look. “It’s no secret the women are horny as hell.”
“Aiman mentioned the same thing.” Michio rubbed his thumb over my hand. “His doctors studied the cured women and reported hormone and testosterone levels had been altered.”
Altered by my blood. I supposed passing on my sex drive was a benefit to repopulation.
Link glanced at Jesse. “I know what you’re thinking. Security could be better. But this is no longer just a single town. These communities span multiple states with Arkendale at its center. There’s been some growing pains, but I’m confident in the leadership I left behind to guide them.”
Jesse nodded, his thoughts probably taking the same path as mine. We couldn’t run a town or a state or a country. We were just meant to heal them and trust in their abilities to govern and take care of themselves.
Link met my eyes. “Arkendale hasn’t seen an aphid in six weeks. And my boys didn’t see any on their journey there or back.”
“That’s on the other side of the country.” My pulse spiked. “They’re all dead? Jesus, what about the nymphs? Did they see—?”
“There are nymphs.” Link softened his voice. “A lot of them are still headed toward the east coast.”
I blew out a heavy sigh of relief and squeezed Michio’s hand.
“One last thing…” Link grinned widely, his black eyes glinting beneath the overhead light. “There’s a pretty reliable rumor that some of the women boarded an oceanic cruise ship, and they’re crossing the Atlantic right now to cure nymphs on other continents.”
He left that news floating around us as he strolled away, his off-tune whistle following the tap of his footsteps.
“Ye did it.” Roark’s whisper sifted through me right before he swept me in his arms and twirled me around.
“We did it.” I laughed as my eyes filled with tears.
We’d set out to cure the world, and it was happening. Just imagining the widespread repopulation felt like an explosion in my chest, shaking through my body, and gripping my soul. My guardians felt it, too, their eyes shining as they exchanged smiles.
Roark set me down. “Race ye back to the room?”
“What do I get if I win?”
He scratched pensively at his jaw. “Me.”
Michio leaned around me. “And if I win?”
There was no if, considering his rate of speed was, oh, a few hundred miles per hour.
Roark grinned and pointed at Jesse. “Ye win him.”
Leaning against the opposite wall, Jesse held his head down, his eyes peering up, watching us with a bored expression. But I didn’t miss the twitch in his shoulders from his suppressed laughter.
We raced back, with Darwin on our heels, and when we reached the room, we all seemed to forget who’d won in our race to strip off our clothes and slake the hunger that had built on the sprint back.
We did a lot of that in the weeks that followed, sprinting and flirting, fucking and laughing, and the few hours we weren’t together each day, we
more than made up for at night.
Jesse spent the daylight hours with Link’s army of fifty soldiers, improving the security and training them on weaponry. Any new recruits were sent to a work site Link had set up in Las Vegas. The women and nymphs who stumbled upon our doorstep were sent there as well. We kept our commune small and intimate, limited by supplies, food storage, and sleeping space. We were working on creating a community, but we weren’t ready to support a village.
After I made my daily jogs through the dam, I always joined Shea on the rooftop of the generator room, the very spot I would’ve splattered had Michio not caught my rope. It was there that the farmer, Ronnie—he actually answered to Roark’s nickname—set up the garden. Under his tutelage, Shea and I learned the mechanics of hydroponics, helped him channel the water and nutrients, and modified the system as the vegetables grew. And they grew fast. Fifty percent faster than soil plants. Eddie would have vegetables on the menu in a few short weeks.
When Roark wasn’t with us in the garden, I often found him kneeling beside our bed or holing up in an empty tunnel with his head bowed. The larger the bump in my belly grew, the more he prayed. I always left him alone with his prayers, as his faith in God seemed to cushion the weight of the prophecy.
My fate. The big ugly thing my guardians didn’t talk about. Yet when I peered deep into their eyes, I could see it there, the shadowy threat of my death like an impression looming in their thoughts. My healthy exams consoled them, but fate would come, most likely in the form of a tiny baby girl. Some days, my pregnancy felt like an endless fight against time.
Michio set up his lab in an old office near the generator room. After he took me outside for my daily dose of vitamin D, he would dart off to his research, bending over microscopes and studying my biology—or rather that of our daughter’s. He never vocalized his assumptions, but I knew he suspected the same thing I did. She was the reason for my surplus of energy. When the time came to push her from my body, there was a good chance she would take all my superhuman quirks with her. Would she take my metabolic energy, too? My blood? And my final breath?
Day after day, we watched her grow and develop on the screen and listened to the physicians repeatedly confirm she was a girl. But every night, we left the medical exams, praying, gardening, and security worries behind us to satisfy other needs. Sometimes my guardians were patient and steady, content just to look at me, as if waiting for me to offer whatever I was willing to give. They already had all of me, so I would assure them, coaxing them with my eyes, reaching out with a husky whisper, opening my legs, and fingering my cunt as they watched with feral intensity.
But most often, by the time we reached our room at night, they were restless and worked-up, assertive and needful, climbing between my thighs, pressing me against the wall, bending me over the bed, and taking their pleasure. Michio always took me first then fucked me again after Jesse and Roark were spent. I never glimpsed jealousy in their heavy-lidded eyes. I saw ambition, maybe a little healthy rivalry, and always love and respect, for each other as much as for me.
It went on like that, week after week, month after month. Winter melted into spring. Spring bloomed into summer, and our baby grew, pressing outward and stretching my skin. Much like my deep attachment to her fathers. I didn’t think I could love those men any more than I did yesterday. Then today came and proved me wrong. I couldn’t fathom losing one of them, couldn’t imagine wondering every second of every hour if that was the moment I would watch one of them die.
It was June when I reached the beginning of my third trimester, and I was stir-crazy, wired, and anxious to breach the conversation I’d put off for so long. I needed them to start thinking about what life would look like caring for an infant, seeking love and happiness, and slaking baser needs, without me.
Every day, I jogged the tunnels, my mountainous belly bouncing with the restless strides of my legs, using that time to frame my thoughts and plan for my family’s future.
Shea had sorrowfully agreed to nurse my baby, but in the event she couldn’t produce milk, I’d been gathering baby formula, with Hunter’s help. If my guardians were privy to that effort, they’d never commented on it.
By the time we’d reached our seventh month, Shea had all but hibernated in her room with Paul and Eddie. I remembered my own endless exhaustion during my pregnancies with Annie and Aaron, but this baby was different. I couldn’t sit still, my body a boisterous mass of surging blood and fire, nerves and power. A normal woman might’ve accredited the boundless energy to Ronnie’s nutritious vegetables, but I hadn’t been a normal woman in a very long time.
Link kept me updated on his attempts to locate the facilities where Aiman had sent all the bitten women. He’d captured dozens of spiders, but no amount of torture convinced Aiman’s servants to release the locations. Link explained that they weren’t exactly mindless, but their minds had been altered to unerringly and devotedly follow Aiman’s requisite without concern for themselves or their own interests. With the spiders’ speed and strength and growing numbers, only a fraction of Link’s men returned from each mission.
Every time Link delivered one of these updates to me, he left me shivering in a blanket of ice-cold terror. I couldn’t telepathically control the spiders and wondered how my daughter was meant to stop them.
I was alone in the bathroom, showering after a sweaty run and lost in all of these thoughts, when Michio slipped in and shut the door.
“When was the last time you went outside?” He reclined against the wall and gave me a narrowed look.
Evidently, this was a service call by Dr. Nealy. I would’ve preferred a booty call.
I rinsed out my hair and reached for a towel. “I was thinking about heading to the surface today.”
No I wasn’t. To be honest, I hadn’t been outside in a week or longer. Michio had extended his hours in the lab, his mission in figuring out my genetic oddities growing more desperate every day. Without his nagging and with the June temperatures sweltering into the triple digits, I’d eschewed my need for Vitamin D. The last time I went outside, I thought my skin was going to melt off.
He pushed away from the wall and grabbed my clothes from the sink. “Have you considered the possibility that we’ve been deliberately keeping you inside?”
My head kicked back. “What?” That hadn’t even crossed my mind. “Why? What’s going on?”
“There’s a lot of commotion out there.” He positioned my shorts in front of me, holding them open so I could step into them. “We finally have it contained.” He straightened, pulling my shorts in place and tenderly gliding his fingers over my big bump. “It’s time.”
“Time for what?” Suspicion rushed in around me, bristling my nerves. I pulled on the t-shirt, trying and failing to stretch it over my belly. “What is contained? Tell me!”
“I prefer to show you.”
In a blur of winding tunnels and metal stairs, Michio carried me to the surface of the dam at superhuman speeds. At least he didn’t leave me in suspense long. Within minutes, he stepped off the final elevator and onto the road that traveled the top of the wall. The desert heat zapped the moisture from my mouth, and sunlight blinded my eyes. But what crowded around the canyon stole my breath.
People.
Men and women as far as I could see. They lined the shores of the Colorado River. Gathered behind the barricades on both sides of the dam. Peered down from the surrounding cliffs. The density of their numbers strummed the air with a thunderous buzz. There must’ve been thousands congregated beneath the full glare of the sun.
The din of voices and the electricity radiating from so many lives evoked memories of going to baseball games with Joel and the kids, memories of the infectious emotional high that always hovered in a packed stadium. I hadn’t witnessed this many humans accumulated in one place since before the plague. Such a profound contrast to the barren desolation I’d grown accustomed to.
I couldn’t breathe in those first few moments as
I eagerly scanned the crowds. They were too far away to derive expressions, but I could make out general details, such as the wide spectrum of ethnicities and the similarities in ages. Most were in their late twenties to early thirties. Some younger.
Men outnumbered women. Maybe ten to one? Many of the women were visibly pregnant. Perhaps all of them were with children.
Were they seeking sanctuary? Food? Medicine? I didn’t sense the threatening hum of spiders, but maybe they’d come for protection?
“Holy shit, Michio.” I gave him a questioning look. “What do they want?”
He set me down and laced our hands. The asphalt heated the soles of my feet as he wordlessly guided me to the guardrail where Jesse and Roark waited. Darwin, Link, Shea, our whole crew was there, standing along the railing and staring out over the river and the surrounding mob.
When I reached the half-wall, a sudden hush settled through the canyon, reminding me of how an entire stadium could fall completely quiet while a single person sang the National Anthem. I shivered despite the Nevada heat.
“Not too close.” Jesse barred an arm across my chest, forcing me away from the edge.
I stepped back, my breaths accelerating beneath the weight of countless eyes. The silence was so heavy my skin prickled with unease.
After a useless attempt to tug my shirt over my belly, I gave up. “Why are they here?”
Roark sidled behind me, his hands sliding around my waist and resting on my belly, as he brought his mouth to my ear. “They’re here for ye, love.”
“Why?” I couldn’t tell if they were angry, hurt, excited…
“We’ll let her tell you.” Michio nodded at the main gate, thirty yards away.
Her? I craned my neck, searching the female faces that stared through the vertical rungs of the barricade.
Armed men slid the twelve-foot tall gate to the side, opening it wide enough for a lanky pregnant woman to slip through. The crush of people from the outside tried to follow, but the guards pushed them back with firm shouting and raised crossbows. Dozens of our men stood inside and outside of the gate, bows and axes gripped tightly in their hands.