Fierce Enchantments

by Janine Ashbless

  She wriggles out of her bags and belts, frantic to shed the weight, and has to force herself not to fling down her most precious cargo. The front zipper of her biker all-in-one goes all the way down to her crotch, making it easier to peel off the arms and shoulders and drop the top half of the suit to hang from her hips. That helps. She sets her shoulders back against the corrugated metal, praying for cool, but it’s warmer than she is. She can see the man staring. His torso is completely bare, and she envies that. She can feel the moisture flooding between her burning thighs. Her mind is a churning whirl. She wants to be naked. She wants to be cold. She wants water and a breeze.

  He’s gone very still. Outside, the living dead moan with frustration.

  The trousers of her suit have zips up the outside of the shins, allowing them to be put on and taken off over boots. One leg at a time, she lifts her feet and looses the vents. Then she pushes the leathers down over her thighs and kicks them away.

  She’s not wearing anything but panties beneath. Panties and boots, and above that the tight, clinging vest. Even those last pieces of clothing disgust her. She wants to weep with frustration. Her singlet is like a second skin, and stained with wear. She pulls it away from her stomach, desperate for the tiniest breeze on her flesh, stretching her throat as she tilts her head back.

  When she glances down again, he’s definitely moved. He’s still on hands and knees, but he’s that tiny bit closer to her. She tries to focus her eyes, and registers the lift of one hand: a placating gesture, an apology for his entirely involuntary shift in her direction. His eyes are wide and his lips a little parted.

  “S’okay,” he mutters, not blinking. “Don’t be scared. Nothing to be scared of.”

  She wants to laugh, but she’s forgotten how. For the last two years there has never once been nothing to be scared of. Periods of calm or stultifying boredom, yes—many of those. But never freedom from fear. Not a single waking hour when the dread and the loss weren’t there like a choking lump under her breastbone. Fear is the omnipresent guest at the feast, the mother of every decision she makes. It’s the air she breathes. In a world where corpses move and speak and eat, fear is the one thing left that distinguishes the living from the dead.

  She looks into the deep darkness of his eyes, searching for the fear. And it’s there, that sharp and bitter edge. But it’s only a glint. It’s been almost driven out by something else, just as primal. He can’t stop looking at her. At her tight and filthy clothing. At what’s hidden beneath. Each heave of her chest seems to draw him in.

  “What’s your name, darling?” he tries again, in a throaty whisper.

  She blinks hard, like a drunk trying to sober up, wanting to make sense of his questions and his haggard soldier’s face and his muscled body. He looks strong. Bleakly handsome, perhaps—it’s so hard to tell these days. She wants to know how she feels about him, but she’s no longer capable of judgment.

  “Zita.” It’s not her name, not her original one, but she’s taken to shedding her identity every time she loses her companions. It seems too arrogant, to go on unchanged when so many of those she’s loved and lived with have been slaughtered. Something of her has to die with them. Ben died two weeks ago, and she gave up being Evie.

  “Well … Zita.” He’s shifting toward her, on toes and fingertips. Keeping slow and down on the floor, so as not to spook her. “It’s a bit warm, isn’t it? This box.” The inanity of his words is not as important as the low, husky tone. He’s got a voice that reminds her of some movie star’s, though she can’t think whose—she can’t remember anything that far back right now—but it’s oddly familiar because of that, and not unpleasant. “That top of yours, it looks … It looks a bit hot.”

  He licks his parched lips.

  She wants more water. She wants the aching to stop—the ache that that seems to lie not in her muscles but under every inch of her skin, in her belly, right down between her legs. All she wants … is to stop feeling awful.

  “Yes.” Looking into his eyes, she takes the sodden vest and lifts it to bare her breasts.

  Oh God, that feels good.

  “Ah,” he says. Just that one syllable, a low vibration his chest. But it’s a noise that sounds like profound relief. And for a long moment he just looks. She can feel the tickle of sweat-droplets running down her breastbone. They’re beading around her dark nipples and slipping in arcs down the overhang of her breasts. Her whole body weeps salt tears. Like him, she’s bruised and scarred and underweight.

  Like him, she’s alive.

  Still on his knees, he closes the gap between them. She flinches at the last moment, afraid that his skin will be hot to the touch and only add to her torment—but in fact his hands on her hips feel cool. That’s all he touches her with. Fingertips, and mouth. He brushes his lips to her belly and his tongue sweeps the skin, tasting her salt.

  She utters a keening sob. It is the noise of the end of the world. It’s been two weeks since she last saw a living being. Two weeks without human contact, without the press of Ben’s body against hers, without comfort or pleasure or release.

  “Ohhh,” he groans into her stomach. She can smell the scent of his sweat, mingling with her own.

  Then he floods her senses as he begins to lap and suck at her, his mouth craving her skin just as her skin hungers for comfort. He licks her from navel to ribs, and up the damp valley between her breasts, and over their twin mounds, across those pillowy swells that seem like the legacy of a former age, when softness and nurture meant something. He pushes her back against the metal wall and sucks ravenously at her nipples, drawing them out to swollen points. That makes her sob, dryly. He fills his mouth with her and guzzles, the snorts of his breath frantic, while she runs her hands over his bristly scalp and whimpers encouragement.

  Then he hooks his thumbs in her panties and pulls them down over her thighs. She squirms—she doesn’t want him to go there, she isn’t clean, she can smell her own musk—but he doesn’t care if she’s been weeks in her leathers. He stoops to plunge his face to the juncture of her thighs, inhaling her greedily, lifting one of her legs to grant him access to her split and pushing her up on tiptoes in his eagerness. Then, almost perversely procrastinating, he laps the inside of her upper thighs with long teasing strokes, first one then the other. It makes her whimper more. Finally his mouth, hot and wet, closes over her clit and she bangs her head back against the metal, seeing stars.

  He eats her.

  He’s like an AC, she thinks, half-terrified by the analogy and grabbing for purchase on the corrugated wall, on his head, anywhere that will help. There’s the same inexorable appetite, the same obsession. Hunger is everything, and he eats without fear. She can hear her own gasping cries and the rising moans of the dead massed outside, on the other side of the wall. He lifts her up on his hands and wraps her legs over his shoulders, burrowing into her sex. His tongue lashes her clit and slithers into her deep wet furrow. Each motion of his tongue burns across her nerves. He’s eating me. He’s eating me, she cries in her head. Suddenly the heat and the stuffy box and the stink and the discomfort—none of that matters.

  She always knew she was going to die like this: being devoured.

  And, being eaten, she finally forgets to be afraid. She comes, arching and shaking and gasping, twisting in his hands and on his face, thumping her skull back against the metal. The dead outside take up the clangor and hammer their bloodless hands against the container wall. She tries to wriggle out of his grasp but he won’t let her. He’s going for it again, sucking her in, gobbling her up, forcing her into a second orgasm and then a third, without a break, until only the slamming of her palms against the metal anchors her to the world at all, and she’s away somewhere else entirely.

  Only after her fourth climax is his hunger sated.

  “Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck,” she sobs, nearly witless, as she comes down at last. He lets her slip fro
m his gasp and collapse back against the wall, pressing his hands hard against the tops of her thighs, sucking her juices from his lips as his gaze rakes her crotch and belly and up across her breasts to her face. The throb of her afterwash fills her. Panting, she drags her hands across her stomach and up to her breasts, as if checking that he hasn’t torn her to pieces in his greed. The metal thrums against her spine.

  “Better?” he asks.

  Wide-eyed, it dawns upon her that, for a moment, she hadn’t been able to feel the terrible heat.

  His mouth twists in a smile. Then he glances aside, searching for the canteen she’s managed to drop somewhere in the whirl of her pleasure. He tilts it to his lips but it’s empty, so he reaches for the flask strapped to her own discarded bandolier.

  “No!” she gasps, coming out of her sexual maelstrom with sickening abruptness. “Not that!”

  Something in her tone gets through to him. “What?” he grunts.

  “That’s not water!” She puts out her hand for it.

  He frowns at the flask, holding it just out of her reach. It’s shiny and hi-tech, nothing like the battered military canteen he’d offered her. “What then?”

  “It’s a bioculture!”

  “What?” Momentarily, he’s distracted from his lust. But he still doesn’t hand it back. Even kneeling there before her, he’s somehow not remotely submissive. Her fear begins to creep back in.

  “I’m a vet. I used to work for DEFRA—specialized in agricultural parasitology. That there’s a bioactive culture. It might even be the cure.”

  “The cure?”

  “For that.” She waves at the walls of their prison, at the monsters clanging and moaning beyond. “Flukes.”

  “You what?”

  “Flatworms. We’ve known for years that parasites can mess with animal behavior. Wasp grubs. Cordyceps fungi. Toxoplasma makes rats seek out cats. Lancet flukes make ants climb grass stalks at night and get eaten. Gordian worms make their insect hosts commit suicide by drowning. They infect the brain. That’s how the parasite completes its life-cycle. Same with them out there.”

  “Worms in the brain?”

  “Yes. Tiny ones.”

  “No shit.” He doesn’t look impressed.

  “And we’ve found an agent—an even smaller nematode—that kills the flukes. We just need to find a vector for distributing it through the ecosystem. It has to be spread everywhere. We were taking it to Porton Down. They’ll be able to work out a way.”

  “Hh. He tilts his head, considering her in the half-light. “D’you know where Porton Down is?”

  “Yes. Sort of.” They don’t exactly print the location of government biological warfare research centers on maps.

  “It’s inside the Pale. How’re you planning to get through that?”

  She shakes her head. “I’ll find a way.”

  “Hh.” He tips his chin, as if signaling to himself. Then he puts the flask carefully back in her hand. “Don’t break it, now.”

  For a moment she’s nonplussed. She’s naked except for her boots, pinned against a wall by a man who’s just eaten her snatch. She can still feel the pulsing slipperiness between her thighs.

  As if reading her mind, he lifts his hand and cups her sex, and without letting go he stands. Now he’s on his feet, he looms over her. His hand is big and callused and warm, and it holds her wet pussy so snugly, with such intent, that she can feel herself softening and opening to him, her hips tilting into the nest of his palm in instinctive surrender. She can feel her pulse beating against his thumb. He stoops closer to brush his lips to her ear.

  “Have you got water?” he murmurs.

  She nods.

  He licks his lips and nips the lobe of her ear. “I need a drink.”

  Slipping from his grasp, she puts the flask aside and finds the plastic water-pouch in the tumble of her belongings. He moves with her, staying in physical contact, his hand glossing the small of her back, then the curve of her ass, as she stoops over. His touch is a reminder that he hasn’t finished with her, that there is something between them that is yet to be completed. It makes her heart hammer. It makes her clumsy and stumble-footed as she turns back to him with the flat plastic bag and offers it up.

  Though he’s sucked and sucked for all he’s worth, she’s no less wet between her legs.

  Without a word he takes the bag and slurps from the nozzle, drinking deep, his spare hand light but deliberate on her hip, his eyes watching her. The pressure on the bottle makes the water gush out, some escaping his lips, and it runs down his chin and over his chest just as his own water had spilt upon her body. In the half-light she follows the flow with eyes and fingertips, down over his sternum, across the ridges of his stomach, through the harsh, gathering hair at the base of his abdomen. His leather trousers are open, of course. The water slips into the dark V of tanned hide.

  There. There’s his cock. Waiting within, barely held back by the leather. Thick; hard; slippery with sweat just like the rest of him. Not nice at all. A rough beast impatient for its hour to come round.

  When she strokes that red-hot length, that’s enough to distract him from drinking. It’s enough to tip everything into action.

  He shoves her up against the wall again. Discomfort and delirious need are suddenly one and the same. The slick and the smell are both terrible and intoxicating. His skin slides over hers, the heat unbearable. They’re slippery everywhere they touch. He’s shaking now, perhaps because of their dreadful circumstances, perhaps with the strain of holding back. With frightening ease he grips her thighs and lifts her clear of the floor, and as she wraps her forearms about his shoulders he shifts her onto his hips, angling his big hot cock up into the open split of her sex. He effects entry in moments, sliding straight into the tight gap he finds there, making space for his bulk with determined thrusts. She gasps; the sensation is shocking. It’s always shocking, like someone knocking on the door of her psyche. He’s impaling her and pressing the breath from her and enfolding her, all at the same time.

  “Oh fuck!” he groans, his voice breaking. And that’s the noise of the end of the world too.

  He’s rough. Oh God, he’s rough. This isn’t a world for gentleness or delicacy. He pins her against the wall and fucks her fast and rough and deep, his face pressed against hers, his breath harsh and teeth clenched. She can’t help crying out—and that’s a release too, in its way. She’s been quiet for so long, stifling her voice even in the brief and furtive throes of sex, in dread of being heard by the ACs. Even in the various Safe Houses, with Ben and with others before him, she’s kept all noise down, fearing the resentment of the living almost as much. The taking of any pleasure seems like an insult these days.

  But this man doesn’t just take pleasure. He forces it upon her too. She tries, but she can’t fight it. Every thrust nails it into her, deeper and deeper, and with every thrust she cries out in shock. Until her voice is just one ragged howl, and the dead lift their voices to howl along with her—but she can’t hear them or herself, she can’t feel the heat or the horror, she can only buck and scream as orgasm takes her like a storm.

  Slowly her eyes regain focus. They are one slippery tangle of quivering limbs. Fresh sweat dews his throat. His pupils are hugely dilated in the gloom.

  “Yes,” she groans. “More.”

  Those eyes narrow. He drops her, turns her, takes both her wrists and slaps her hands against the wall. She can feel the metal reverberate. His hands descend on her ass cheeks, and then he muscles in from behind, rutting up against her. It turns out that he can thrust much more freely in this position, his cock sliding all the way in and then almost all the way out, on each stroke. His shaft feels huge. She has to brace her arms as hard as she can, just to stop him bouncing her against the metal, as he gropes her thighs and ass and grabs her hips, fucking her with immense thoroughness.

  She l
ets loose, crying out with every slap of his pelvis against her. She’s howling with pleasure, but also with defiance and grief. Screaming at the ACs massed outside, screaming for everything and everyone’s she’s lost. The dead yammer and claw the booming metal in frustration. The container is like a steam-room and everything within her is boiling up in an explosive seethe. Soon the man banging her starts roaring too, and—incredibly—she feels that big cock swell even further, spreading her wide as he bores in to her like a hammer-drill, all the way to his climax.

  “Ah … Ah! I’m coming, you fucker!” she wails.

  “Yes!” he shouts, his voice mingling with hers as he empties his balls inside her. He has a deep, rough voice, as thick and savage as his plunging cock. “Oh fuck yes!”

  Loud enough to wake the dead.

  ♦♦♦

  Dawn pokes gray fingers through the drilled air-holes of their shipping container, but they wait. They don’t leave until the day is warm enough to blind the ACs. He slides the door bolt back, millimeter by painstaking millimeter, while she thumps the wall at the far end of the container to draw their besiegers away from the entrance. She pictures them like iron filings drawn in a dark swathe to the pole of a huge magnet.

  Yes, ACs are that stupid.

  They ease out into the open, treading softly, holding their breath so the taint of carbon dioxide doesn’t give them away. They’ve both done this before. Stealth is as vital as speed and strength.

  It’s a whole block before he touches her arm. “That way,” he says, pointing down an intersection where a rusted sign indicates the route to a highway. “East.”

  She shakes her head. “I’m going south.”

  “East first, darling. We want the checkpoint at Reading. I’ve got clearance. I can get you inside the Pale, Zeta. If you stick with me.”

  She frowns. “Who are you, then?” she asks, realizing she’s never asked so much as his name, never mind what he’s doing out here on his own.

  He grins. “Hang around and find out.”