Travis came back into the living room with a bottle of water.
He handed it to me and said, “This is Courtney. She doesn’t say much.”
“It’s . . . very nice to meet you.”
“Courtney, this is Brad, my oldest friend.” He sat down on the couch, leaning slightly against the arm so he was facing me. “So what’s been up with you? I heard you quit Billups’.”
“Yeah. Did you know he was a racist?”
Travis smirked a little. “Dude, this is Gethsemane. Everyone’s a racist.”
“I guess it just didn’t bother me until lately. I don’t even think I gave it much thought.”
“That’s just your excuse. You left because it was time for you to move on. You were ready.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re ready to join the community.”
“I’ve lived in the community for years. Still not sure what you’re talking about.”
“Dawn’s community. She’s here to do amazing things. She’s going to change shit. Is changing shit. You do know Dawn, right?”
I felt winded. I took a shaky sip of my water.
“Yeah,” I rasped.
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of. I’m a member of it too. Almost everyone in town is. It’s like Gethsemane created her. She comes to you when you’re ready. It’s like she just knows. And then, all of a sudden . . . she’s just there, man.”
“Wait . . . I don’t . . .”
“That night I called you. That was my breaking point. The night of my rebirth. You were my recruit.” He gestured at Courtney. “She was my reward. Well . . . and the house. And, okay, sometimes I have to do some stuff I don’t want to do but I’m able to forget it about it pretty easily. It’s not even that I don’t want to do it . . . it just makes me feel bad sometimes. Well, it used to. I think I’ve gotten over it. She can set you up with Weishaupt and he’ll fix you the perfect cocktail. Every morning’s like a brand new day. I finally feel like a grownup, man. I was tired of feeling like poor white trash. Dawn knows how to get ahead. She knows what this town needs.”
So many feelings surged through me—anger, fear, confusion, betrayal—that I struggled just to latch onto one of them.
“Why?” was all I managed to say.
“Why what? Why you?”
“Yeah,” I said, but what I meant was “Why any of it?”
“I guess because I was desperate. You could be mad. Hell, I know you pretty good so I know you probably are mad, but you shouldn’t be. Paradise is just around the corner. You just gotta learn how to let go. In the end, I think you’ll see that I did you a really big favor.”
“What happened to you?”
He smiled and I realized for the first time this was not the Travis I had known. I mean, physically he was still the same, but the Travis I had known had not displayed a smile that carefree in years. I would be hard pressed to even think of a time he’d smiled when he hadn’t been drunk.
“I found happiness,” he said.
“You mean you’ve given up,” I blurted.
“Given in. I never understood that the tools for my happiness have been around me my entire life. I’ve done nothing but sabotage myself because I didn’t think I deserved to be happy. I closed myself off to the town. I fought against it. Closed myself to all the wonderful people surrounding me. And things just got worse and worse. You should be happy for me. Instead you just sound jealous.”
“It’s just . . . really hard for me to understand.”
“You’re not letting yourself understand. It’s like . . . remember all that conspiracy stuff I used to talk to you about? You always said something like ‘It’s not a conspiracy if you’re being openly manipulated.’ Maybe that’s why you were so resistant to it for so long. It didn’t have any mystery to it. Imagine it though, man . . . It was like all that conspiracy shit was my religion so finding out that it’s all true is like someone proving that God exists. Not to mention that the truth is stranger and more beautiful than I could have ever dreamed of.”
“I just . . . I feel like I’ve been sold out.”
“It’s easy to feel that way. It’s much harder to be happy. Look, you didn’t feel sold out when I got you the job at Billups’, did you? Trust me, this is something much better.”
I glanced at Travis. He had a be-one-of-us gleam in his eyes. I didn’t like it but still found myself slightly envious.
“Do you really want to spend the rest of your life fighting? Aren’t you exhausted? Do you even know what you’re fighting against anymore? Rebellion is a young man’s game. Submission to the will of Dawn, to the will of this town, is like opening the door to a dream.”
“This all sounds like a sales pitch.”
“Except you can’t buy it with money. The only thing you lose is your misery.”
“I think I need to go,” I said.
“Are you sure? I could answer some questions.”
I had a lot of questions but felt like Travis would only put some kind of positive spin on the answers, confusing me even further.
I stood up.
“Well,” I said, “it was good seeing you again, man.”
“Stop by any time.”
He asked if I wanted his new phone number and I told him my phone was dead so he wrote it down.
I walked through the humid evening to my apartment, which wasn’t very far away. I kept thinking about what Travis said: “The only thing you lose is your misery.” But I thought there was a greater price. It was hard to even put it into words, but it seemed like there was some great psychic toll for being a member of the community. It was like some part of their brain had been eaten away and something else had moved in. It was like they were all being drained. But . . . then again, wasn’t that what I’d felt was happening to me since graduating high school and joining the workforce?
Still, I came back to the only solution—leaving. But the last time I’d tried to do that it had nearly killed me.
* * *
On my way back to the apartment, I saw the two men in black leaving my building. I assumed it was the same two men I’d seen on the other occasions. They were so nondescript it was impossible to tell. I froze where I was and they went in the opposite direction.
What business did they have in my building?
Was it paranoia to think they were there for me?
I went back up to my apartment and lay in my bed.
Seeing Travis had been a big surprise. If I’d been telling myself I had become involved with Dawn to find out what had happened to him then I no longer really had any reason to be involved with Dawn, did I?
Of course, I had no reason not to be involved with Dawn, either.
My apartment was stifling. I opened the window beside the bed and tried to summon a breeze.
I pulled my useless phone from my pocket. I could take it to the library and charge it but I didn’t really have the energy to move. I knew I’d have to leave the apartment at some time since there was absolutely nothing in it for me.
I lay there thinking about Travis and his nice house and his beautiful girlfriend . . . or whatever she was.
It didn’t seem too bad.
Who could blame me for giving up and joining the community?
Maybe I was already a part of it.
After all, I’d never really been a joiner and what had it gotten me so far?
Absolutely nothing.
No one was paying attention.
Who was I trying to impress?
I fell asleep and dreamed of Travis. He and his girlfriend were in what I assumed was his new backyard. He had his shirt off. A number of neon green nubs protruded from his chest and back. His girlfriend had a pair of pruning shears and was mechanically cutting the protuberances off. They hit the soil and wriggled into it. I kept thinking I should tell them to stop but I felt like I was hiding and didn’t want to reveal myself.
When I woke up, it was dark outside and Dawn stood beside my bed, w
atching me, and I had a lingering thought that I should have asked Travis about the things growing on my back and my cock.
The room smelled heavily of gasoline.
“I think it’s time you come with me,” Dawn said.
I was still groggy, possibly from sleep, possibly from the fumes, possibly just from Dawn’s presence.
I wanted to resist her, felt like I should resist her, but I couldn’t.
I sat up. Maybe the fumes had gone to my head. My vision swam in and out and, for a horrifying moment, I was convinced Dawn was going to set me on fire.
“Come on,” she said. “These fumes are making me sick.”
I pivoted off the bed and stood on watery legs.
“Where . . .” was all I could manage to say.
“Back to my place. You’re one of us now.”
“No,” I slurred.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes.” And she reached out and put a hand on my shoulder. And for as much as I knew her to be a sadistic psycho, that touch sent a feeling of calm spreading throughout my body. It felt comforting.
I made my way to the door, already open. I stood in the hallway and watched as Dawn turned, flicked a match, and tossed it into the room.
She stood in a state of thrall until the entire apartment was alight.
“Now you have nothing to come back to,” she said.
I should have felt a sense of loss, but I didn’t.
A New Reality
I felt a little better by the time we got back to her house, which was surprisingly empty and eerily quiet. Most of the rooms were darkened. I followed her through the house and up a flight of stairs. She led me to her bedroom. My cock stiffened. The nubs on my back stiffened also, the sensation oddly pleasurable.
Dawn turned and unbuttoned her shorts, sliding them and her underwear down.
She sat on the edge of the bed and spread her legs.
I knew what I was supposed to do.
And I wanted to.
The first flash of lightning from an incoming storm turned the window a bright blue for a second.
I got down on my knees and leaned into the familiar scent. My body shook with the need and anticipation.
I ran my tongue up and down her labia, pressed the tip of it against her clit. She reached down and wrapped her hands around the back of my head. This was the first time she’d ever done this. I sucked her clit into my mouth and pressed a finger against her opening, expecting her to tell me to stop.
“Just your mouth,” she said. “Please.”
I felt a momentary sense of frustration, but the more I drank of her, the frustration quickly dissipated.
Thunder rumbled in the distance.
I continued suckling her clit. I tried to get a pleasurable response from her but nothing was happening. I didn’t care. I could have kept doing it for hours. To taste her was to understand her. Embrace the nebulous gray shape of her mystery, some essential part of her that had been here forever, in this place, in Gethsemane, and I wondered if every town and city had a guardian like her.
She moved her hands around to the sides of my head, pulled me from her, and said, “It’s time.”
I quit suckling her, stood up, and stripped off my shirt.
“Kiss me,” she said.
I leaned over, shaking with anticipation. Our lips met just as another bright flash of lightning lit up the room and I thought it was like she was controlling the heavens. Our tongues entered each other’s mouths, probing and snaking around each other. While locked together, I could feel her taking something from me. It wasn’t stealing, as I gave it to her willingly. And I excused her and forgave her, thinking it was possible she was so sadistic because she did this, absorbed other people’s pain, drank it up. And I again caught a glimpse of that ancient shadowy being somewhere in her core and knew this girl in my hands was only one version of Dawn. I was guessing her physical appearance changed every year. She may have even looked different to everyone who knew her. I saw what I wanted to see. I felt like she was always female, always eighteen. In appearance only. I wondered when this Dawn became who she was, when she had changed, what would happen to her body when that thing inside of her moved onto someone else.
Dawn wrapped her arms around my torso and raised her fingers to the protuberances on my back. Her touch stiffened my cock even further. I felt the protuberances tauten my skin, tingling with a million nerve endings.
I slid my fingers under the hem of her shirt, again expecting a protest.
I slowly lifted her shirt. I couldn’t believe this was happening.
For the first time, I looked down at a fully naked Dawn.
Maybe there would have been a time when I would have been repulsed. Instead the sight of her naked body sent my cock and the nubs on my back throbbing.
Her nipples were not nipples. They were neon green protuberances.
She looked down at her chest and said, “We need to make more.”
She slid off the bed and came to rest on her knees in front of me. At first I thought she was going to take me in her mouth but she didn’t. She angled my cock down so the protuberance touched one of the growths on her breast. My green nub reached out to touch her green nub. They slid and rubbed together as our tongues had only moments before. It felt amazing. I lost myself to it. Every part of my body felt alive and trembling.
We eventually moved up onto the bed. I lay on my stomach while she straddled my lower back and leaned her breasts into the nubs below my shoulders. I felt them writhing together, faster and faster. I slowly ground myself against the bed, Dawn’s satisfying weight pressing down on me. The feeling grew so intense I felt I was going to scream and then my cock and the other protuberances stiffened and quivered in spasm.
With my orgasm came a burst of clarity.
Clarity always came too late.
Everything I’d experienced since meeting Dawn had been scripted, and it all led to this exact moment.
I had dreamed of fucking Dawn and, in a sense, that’s what we had just done. But I was now just her incubator. My biology had begun changing from the first time I’d gone down on her but I’d been . . . distracted.
Was that what all the filming and adventures were about? Diversion?
I had gone into some kind of fog since meeting Dawn and now felt that fog lifting, replaced with a sense of wide-awake terror. Or awareness. Maybe those things were not mutually exclusive.
I continued lying on the bed, frozen with this terror, while Dawn scooted off with the determined finality of someone who’d just completed a job.
I noticed she had two or three more of those protuberances on her back.
“What are they?” I said.
“You know what they are.”
“I really don’t.”
“Then you know what they become. Beautiful young girls. Part of me to send out into the world. My children.”
Dawn left the room, leaving me with my thoughts and the final grumbling of the thunderstorm.
* * *
When I woke up the next morning, I didn’t feel that great.
I went into the bathroom and vomited until there wasn’t anything left, not that there was a lot in there in the first place. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten anything. I also couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a shower and, while I felt like there were probably a million other things I should be worried about, I couldn’t think of them right now. I stripped off my clothes and inspected my naked body in the full-length mirror on the back of the door.
There were more protuberances. Or, I guess, they were buds.
One was on my upper left arm and the other was under my right nipple.
I took a hot shower and tried to scrub them away.
It didn’t do anything but make them hurt.
There were so many things that had been thrown my way, but this was what it was really all about. Dawn using the human race as some sort of starter culture for her monster horde. And I’d walked right into it. I rea
lly had no choice from the second I got into her car that night.
I wondered how long it would take for the buds to fully fruit and drop. I wondered what would happen to me then.
I was pretty sure I knew.
It was what was happening to everyone in Gethsemane.
You’re given some material things—imprisoned by material things, nothing more than diversions—and you slowly rot away, mentally and physically, until you find yourself lying in bed and turning to rust like Mrs. Dinsmore. And then a new person moves in after you and the cycle repeats itself. This was probably how White Power Larry had managed to amass such a following. By the time people were used up, the only thing they could believe in with any certainty was the color of their skin, the shallowest form of self-identity possible.
I had never seriously questioned my sanity before but I did now.
The worst part was knowing all this and not being able to do a damn thing about it.
Being poor for most of my life had made me feel trapped, but this felt like some kind of prison. Or like being stuck in a nightmare.
* * *
The days melted away. I slept a lot. The buds grew larger. I now had five. I slept most of the days away. When I wasn’t sleeping I was eating. Dawn seemed to lose all interest in me and whatever sexual attraction I’d had for her had completely disappeared. Actually, it seemed like my sexual drive had disappeared, also. The erections I ritualistically woke up with were the only ones I ever got. Many times the house was filled with the young girls, but they did nothing for me. It probably didn’t help that I knew they came from people like me. They were simply there to placate people so Dawn could do her bidding. But one day they stopped showing up and I thought about Dawn saying how this was how she put herself out into the world.
I wasn’t surprised to see Barcie and Sheriff Bando around the house. Of course they weren’t dead. It was all just part of Dawn’s script. Conveniently there to distract me when she needed them. Absent when she didn’t.
And I wasn’t surprised to see who Dawn had taken a shine to.
Kren.
I felt somewhat guilty for putting him in this position.
The position Travis had sold me into.
Maybe I should have been angry with Travis but I felt beyond it. Maybe he had done me a favor.
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