Spermjackers From Hell

by Christine Morgan

  So, now, when They fed him, They did so via makeshift gastric tube. Each would ooze up to him, extrude a long thin tendril to worm up his nose and down his throat—slick and terrible invasive sinal violation!—and pump the goo-jelly in steady, pulsating streams directly into his stomach.

  At least he couldn’t taste it. At least there was that.

  Unless he managed to vomit.

  He wasn’t sure which was worst. The feeling of a sloshing, full, contented belly…the murky flavor mixed with acids gurgling back up…or the knowledge of what it was.

  No, the knowledge of what it was, that was the worst.

  Brendan hung helpless in Her soft, pendulous mass and wanted to die.

  Around him, around Her, the others went about their various duties.

  Some were builders, depositing gluey globs of the most waxlike substance, shaping it, smoothing it in layers. Reminding him of those immense termite mounds found in Africa, ten or twelve feet tall, constructed of chewed mud and secretions— spermite mounds, he thought, but it wasn’t funny.

  Some tended the hollows where the not-honey brimmed in pools, ripening and steeping and fermenting…sorted by variety, color, vintage…filled vats being sealed over to properly age…like a weird version of a winery or distillery…put that on your tours, Fairmont wine-snobs!

  Some were nurses, taking care of the squirmy larval tadpole-things which hatched in runny caviar torrents from the brussels-sprout pustules lining Her sides. Some served as personal attendants, some as guards and scouts.

  And some were collectors. Seeking, gathering, bringing.

  What They brought, She sampled.

  The salt-life-seed, the nectar, the man-milk.

  The mind-milk.

  Echoes and images. Dreams. Fantasies. Memories. Cut scenes of the subconscious, the guilty conscience, the dark nasty underside of the psyche.

  He knew them, most of them, and half-recognized the rest.

  There were his friends…the friends who’d run away and abandoned him, not such good friends, fuck you guys anyway, fuck you! Enjoy your imaginary Cynthia-Lynne and demon queen and trailer trash freakshow and…Beth? Had that been Beth? But Devon, new kid good boy virgin too chicken too scared?

  Jake’s neighbor with the shaved head and neck tats…had a thing for lips, a lip-fetish, Avon catalogs with close-up after close-up of luscious full lips lipstick colors coral blush rich burgundy frosted peach red velvet succulent pink, lips lips lips wet and pouting parting shiny plump, actresses and models, Kardashian, Beyonce, Jolie, internet duck-face selfies, nothing else just the lips just a big ball of lips opening opening painted lips printing their lipmarks at the base of his cock—also tattooed, holy shit, the dude had neck tats and groin tats, how must that have hurt!—but the lips sliding gliding riding up and down plum and crimson and sweet clear gloss as the ball revolved and revolved.

  There was Coach…Coach and Roxie? Sucked off by his dog? Man’s best friend, okay, great, noble and all, but really that should only go so far!

  And Beth’s boss, big bad black Rodney, liking vulnerable white women with wounded-shy eyes, getting them down on their knees between his muscular thighs, take it you take it all you throat it throat it good, and finishing off with fist-pumping facials pearl necklaces dousing their pillowy tits, yeah you love that dontcha yeah baby…

  There was Sebastian Abbott, rich-playboy hot-shit hotel mogul sleazeball, as if he didn’t already have all the pussy he could handle, mistresses and affairs and one-night-stands. But evidently none of them were giving him what he really wanted, and he normally had to save that release for trips to the city where he could buy discretion because there weren’t going to be many ladies in Fairmont who’d agree to provide watersports and scatplay and throwjobs—

  Brendan almost did vomit then, stopped only by the gross certainty Abbott might get off on it if he knew.

  More ordinary fantasies predominated, hitchhikers cheerleaders strippers schoolgirls pajama parties anonymous hookups drunk mistakes glory holes naughty nurses…more people from town, former classmates, shopkeepers—was that Devon’s dad?—and one of the nerdy poindexter assistants from his parents’ clinic enjoying some cartoon action with Betty and Veronica.

  Then the dark sick stuff again, the pain yes the pain, some old man, wizened and paralyzed, bedridden…and the bitch with her cigarettes and cruel smile twisting the ash-smolder-embers into his wrinkled leathery skin…it hurts oh it hurts but it’s all he can feel…he can feel he can feel something, something stiffening for the first time in years... and she recoils in loathing hatred disgust…you filthy old fuck!…to punish him she grinds it out there, but joke’s on her and the squirt hits the bitch right in the eye!

  Troy? Was that Troy Cahill laying down a little vindictive date-rape on a passed-out Cynthia-Lynne?

  And here, some other guy standing beside a bed…the bathroom light is on and he can see her burrowed sleeping under the covers…he’s known, he’s always known, deep in his heart he’s always known…the lying, faithless whore…her and her migraines, and he’d been such a sap…slaving away while she fools around behind his back, probably laughing at him, laughing with her lovers…but no more of that, no, no more…one last headache, he’d give her a migraine to remember…bash her brains open and skull-fuck her as she dies!

  All this and more, They brought back to the nest, back to the lair, to the hive, to Her.

  Feeding and growing.

  Becoming stronger.

  Gathering. Storing.

  Treating and transforming. Making ready. Making ripe.

  Preparing for the next phase, the next step, the next stage of their cycle.

  Meanwhile, Brendan’s friends—his so-called, asshole, friends!—had returned.

  To look for him, they told themselves. To fix their mistakes and make right their wrongs.

  How’s that working out for you, fellas? he thought. Not too well, huh?

  Maybe, if they were lucky, they’d end up like the homeless creeps who’d wandered down here.

  More likely, they’d end up like Brendan himself.

  After all, Devon and Spencer and Marty and Jake had been right there involved in the summoning, too. Had each contributed, participated, taken part in the ritual.

  The five of them, together, had Called.

  And She had Answered.

  He hung there, suspended immobile in the bathwater-warm albumen, aware of the softening bagginess and sloughing of his skin, of the way his body hair had long since dissolved—fingernails and toenails, too. Aware of the way his bones felt spongy and weightless and weak, so that even if he was suddenly somehow freed, his limbs would flail and flop limp as noodles.

  And aware, vividly, horribly aware, of what had already happened to his balls.

  Words like blanched, peeled, poached, and separated sprang to mind. Along with medical words like tubules and vesicles, which did not go well with words like unraveled, uncoiled, unspooled, and drifting.

  Even if he was suddenly somehow freed…

  Yeah, all he would want, all he would beg and pray for, was death.

  Chapter Twenty: Evacuation

  Lines of murky red, dim, seemingly floating in the gloom.

  Lines forming symbols.

  Familiar symbols.

  Letters.

  Spelling out that most magic of magic words.

  EXIT.

  What Spence, in the lead, had seen first and pointed out to the rest of them.

  “Hey! Fuck yeah!” he’d cried.

  “Ohthankgod.”—Marty.

  “Told you it was this way! Let’s get out of here!”—Jake.

  “Fuckin’ A.”—Spencer.

  Get out, yes. But then what? Who’ll believe us?—Devon, not aloud.

  Those questions could wait. Discussion later. Anywhere but here.

  They hadn’t gone half the distance toward the beckoning beacon, the promise of salvation, when the sounds reached them again. Murmuring, chuckling, rustlin
g, a low and intimate whispering.

  Feminine sounds, sounds to sway and stroke and seduce. Cooing and crooning.

  Sleek. Terrible. Supple. Sexy.

  None of them spoke. Spencer didn’t bother to swear. They just ran again, ran like hell, ran like rabbits, ran in a headlong panicked final sprint.

  As, behind them, clear blue-green gleams appeared, rippling shimmers of sun-on-tropical-shallows turquoise, an enticing and intoxicating promise, wonderful wet warmth, and a shining, deadly, hellish hunger.

  Ahead was the EXIT sign, mounted above a door. A thick emergencies-only-alarm-will-sound kind of door, with a heavy pushbar and an inset rectangular window of double-paned, wire-reinforced glass.

  Jake and Spencer, neck-and-neck at the finish line, hit the pushbar simultaneously with the heels of their hands without slowing their pace.

  It would have looked great, flawless choreography, if it had worked.

  If the pushbar had budged. If the door had opened.

  Instead, they both slammed straight full-tilt into it. The synchronized clanging thump of their bodies hitting metal didn’t drown out the brittle snap-crackle-pop of at least a couple of wrists and one cell phone.

  Spencer screeched. Jake howled. Devon managed to stop himself, only to have Marty plow into him from behind and turn the whole deal into a four-car pileup. By the time they sorted it out, the crooning murmurs and low chuckles seemed to be everywhere.

  “It’s locked!” Marty announced, trying the door.

  “Thanks a shitload, Captain Obvious. My arm, fuckin’ ow!”

  With Jake’s phone now broken and Marty’s battery dead, they only had Devon’s for light…that and the dull glow shed by the EXIT sign, which painted them with muddy reddish shadows. Devon shined his phone around.

  Through the window was a tantalizing, teasing glimpse of freedom in the form of a dingy cinderblock stairwell. Leading who knew where, but leading up, and up was what mattered. Up, out, away.

  He turned to shine it the other direction, suddenly remembering that damn Five Nights at Freddy’s game Marty had made them watch Let’s Plays of, and really wishing he hadn’t.

  The corridor stretched long and empty. He didn’t see any—

  Wait!

  Or no, eyes playing tricks. Hyped imagination and nerves.

  Maybe.

  Something seemed to have moved. A sinuous, silken undulation. Coming closer.

  He swept the phone around again, this time catching an eerie bluish-green gleam, a cat’s-eye shimmer, a ripple like sunlight on tropical shallows.

  No doubt this time, and Devon’s heart gave a jump up his throat like a pinched watermelon seed. They were here. They were close. This time, he wouldn’t be able to escape untouched. They weren’t going to take no for an answer, not that he knew how much longer he’d be able to resist. How he’d done so this far was a mystery and a miracle he hadn’t paused to examine.

  “Break the window!” Jake said, grimacing through gritted teeth as he cradled both wrists to his chest.

  “With what?” Marty banged a fist against the wire-reinforced glass. “I’d need like a sledgehammer!”

  “Use that!” He jerked his head, sweat-damp hair falling in his eyes.

  Devon looked where Jake indicated. Mounted on the wall was a fire extinguisher, the red paint of its tank chipped and peeling. Its bracket, caked with years of rust and corrosion, did not want to surrender its grasp.

  Metal squealed as they struggled with it. Gritty flakes sifted to the floor. Devon scraped a knuckle, and Marty gashed his palm.

  “Ah crap, we’re going to need tetanus shots,” Marty complained.

  “Lockjaw, kind of the least of our problems,” Jake said.

  “Fuckin’ hurry, would you?”

  “We’re…unh!…trying!” Devon said.

  The fire extinguisher tore loose with another tortured ear-splitting squeal, its abrupt release and plummeting weight making them both stagger. They almost dropped it—how about some broken toes to go with Spence and Jake’s broken wrists?—but hefted it and drove its blunt butt-end into the window.

  Thunk.

  “Like you mean it!” Spence shouted.

  “C’mon, guys!” Jake added.

  Thunk! Clunk!

  A brief and regretted glance over his shoulder showed Devon the scene he’d expected and dreaded—the hallway a wavery aquamarine radiance now, with succubus-blobs clinging to the floor-walls-ceiling, approaching in eager gooshing lollops, their warm bakery scent steaming in the air, yeast and eggs with saltier/meatier undertones, everything they’d put into that basin and more.

  THUNK-crack!

  “Fuck yeah! Like that!”

  One ridiculous goddamn little fault-line, but he and Marty struck again with renewed effort—thunk-whack-crunch! Their battering ram was taking its own battering, metal denting, rust flakes and paint flakes showering in a grit; a race to see which would give way first. But the fault lines were spreading with brittle scratchy crackles, the window going cataract-opaque in patches, little crumbly glass-clods falling out.

  Don’t do this don’t do this don’t go don’t run, stay stay stay, be with me be with us be with Her one with Her one with us.

  “Get out of my head!” Devon heard himself shout.

  “Shit, guys, faster!”

  “Hurry!”

  “We’re screwed we’re so screwed,” sobbed Marty.

  Then crack-CRUNCH and a cascade of chunks; some stayed caught in the wire webbing and some to the frame but a cool gust of dank concrete-scented air blew through with faint whistling noises—

  —before the tank itself split, the fire extinguisher leap-spinning from their grasp, clanging to the floor, sputtering-spitting-spraying whatever the hell chemical foam they’d used in the 50’s or whenever, choking clouds of weird whitish smoke through which the blue-green light turned into a disco-rave laser show.

  Coughing, they attacked the reinforcing wire with their bare hands, Dev and Marty, even Spencer tearing at it like a rabid mongoose.

  While Jake—“Go on, guys, go!”—did the heroic noble-leader self-sacrifice charge, running back toward the thickest concentrations of turquoise glows.

  “Jake!” Devon yelled.

  But he kept going, his shadow looming and leaping distorted against the luminescent mist. It swallowed him up. He was gone.

  “Jesus-fuck!” Spencer went from rabid mongoose to rabid wolverine.

  Wires snapped and poinged from their moorings. Their fingers were thin-cut and sliced, ragged, stinging, slick with blood.

  A terrible brightness loomed and grew in the corridor, casting its own shadows, an underwater sun, dawn as seen through a cresting tidal wave.

  Marty abandoned his assault on the window, began wailing something—“Boss battle! Boss battle!” was what it sounded like—and flung himself into a fetal position with his arms wrapping his head.

  They had forced open a gap in the reinforcing wire lattice, not much of a gap but enough for skinny Spence to decide it must be worth a shot; he boost-heaved himself into the opening, the poking wire ends ripping clothes and skin, drawing more blood. He thrashed like a fish in a net, kicked like a rabbit in a snare, and fell through headfirst in a scrabbling thud.

  “Spencer!”

  “I’m okay,” he groaned, muffled. “Only my fuckin’ face.”

  The boss-battle tsunami brightened and swelled, and it was visions of beauty bearing tempting treats, pies and cobblers, buttery-golden-fruity-melty-delicious, and girls, impossible dream girls, women, lingerie, the Victoria’s Secret fashion show just for him…

  Just for you all for you come to us come with us come for us yes come.

  …and the little girl he’d had a crush on in grade school and the teacher he’d had a crush on in grade school and characters from those fanart websites he needed to delete from his browser history...

  Spence popped back up, split lips and busted nose, and thrust his good arm back through the hole.
“Move your ass, new kid!”

  Dev looked at Marty, but Marty was a lost cause even if he’d’ve been able to fit; Marty had given up.

  Come to us be with us be with Me be with Her we are Her the pleasure the pleasure all you could desire all you could ever want endless pleasure let us love you and serve you and taste yes taste so rich and sweet.

  He lunged for the window, seizing Spencer’s hand, and it was his turn to kick-thrash-scrabble as the wires snagged at him like cat-claws, like thorns, like fishhooks. His shoulders wedged. He twisted and fought. His clothes tore. Spencer held tight, yanked with all his scant weight, and Devon screamed at a popping-gristle flare of pain in his elbow. The wires, now teeth of bear-traps, raked at his sides and chest.

  Then something touched his feet.

  Touched, flowed over, enfolded.

  This was how bugs felt caught in syrupy tree-sap that would become amber…this was how it’d be to get caught in warm quicksand, or one of those thermal mineral mudbaths, or swallowing lava that somehow didn’t burn.

  Inexorable.

  Spencer swore up a storm but the pull was too strong, their hands wrenched apart. Devon saw him fly backward, heard another painful thud, and stopped caring what happened to Spencer then because he was going backward himself, the wire teeth once again shredding clothes and flesh.

  Into the engulfing, gelatinous, blue-green mass of Her embrace.

  Chapter Twenty-One: Resolution

  He dragged himself up the stairs, crawling, hitching along with one arm, leaving bloody handprints and smears. Each breath was like sandpaper. He couldn’t see for shit in the dark but was glad, because dark meant they weren’t hot on his heels and his ass.

  Up the stairs, dragging, crawling, for what seemed like a vertical-fuckin’-mile.

  Snuffling gasps of air through his mouth because his nose was a crushed, dripping mess. He’d lost a couple teeth somewhere in there too, he thought.

  Up and up.

  No idea what he’d find at the top but so what, who gave a fuck, he didn’t care if he emerged in the basement of the Fairmont Town Hall or police station or courthouse…didn’t care if it led to a round hatch in some island jungle Lost bullshit…as long as it was out, as long as it was away.