“Yeah, on the left hand side of the cul-de-sac,” replied Sandy, her eyes dancing about the scene.
“So, if they blocked off the entire street, then we can infer something pretty nasty occurred, right?”
“Imm-himm,” was the girls’ grunt of agreement.
I blinked and inhaled sharply. “Which means it’s probably dangerous for us to go and get a closer look…” I stopped as Sandy and I exchanged a nervous glance. “We could be discovered.”
“I should go and check things out,” announced Katie, of a sudden, catching us both by surprise.
“Why you?” I questioned a little too aggressively. I didn’t want anything to happen to my beloved cousin, and was immediately protective.
“No one from the government knows I’m here, Eff. For all they know my mom and dad picked me up in Palm Springs and hauled my ass back to Oklahoma. They had released me before your mom arrive at the CHP station. I was sitting in the lobby waiting.” She was smiling at the memory. “When Aunt Patrice got there, I just waved at the front desk officer and she smiled. We walked out of there just like that, no fuss, no paperwork – nothing.
“There is no way anyone, outside our two families, knows where I am,” she concluded her visage smug with confidence.
I never said Katie was stupid!
I peered over at Sandy, who raised her brows and nodded. I could see she thought it was sound reasoning and, most likely, it was the best we could do, but I was worried for Katie. I don’t know what I’d do if anything bad happened to her. I’d probably go on some idiotic rampage that would endanger everyone else. I didn’t want to risk it.
Yet, we still owed it to Jolene to try and find out something about her family, even if it was terrible.
“Promise you will be careful, Katie?” I queried pathetically.
She frowned at me like I was a two-year old. “Of course, I’ll be careful, you wanker!”
“Very… careful…?” I clarified, reaching out for her face, stroking her cheek.
She cupped my hand with her own, then pulled it to her mouth and kissed my palm. “I promise,” she whispered, closing my hand about her kiss.
At that, Sandy unlocked the doors and Katie scrambled form the back seat, before I could do or say anything else. Seconds later, she was walking down Sunny Heights, her tight little butt swaying back and forth as she strode from us.
It was the longest twenty minutes of my life, and I spent the whole duration gazing like an eagle for any sign of my cousin. Until finally, I spied her emerging from the crowd, which had grown even larger since we had arrived. She had already crossed the street and was taking her time, trying to be natural and not raise any suspicion. Her lightly tanned legs looked scrumptious in the summer sun. Her denim booty-shorts were doing her right!
I scurried from the car much too quickly. Sandy grabbed me by the back of my shirt to slow my exit. I got the point and took hold of her wrist, turning slowly to mouth a silent “thank you”, which made her grin from ear to ear. I opened the rear door for Katie, who remained expressionless, ducking into the vehicle and scooting over so I could close the door behind her. I retook the shotgun seat and motioned for Sandy to start the car and get the fuck out of Dodge. She complied at once.
It wasn’t until we reached Division Street when Katie finally broke her silence. “They’re all dead.”
I looked back at her. Her eyes appeared a thousand miles away.
“Are you sure, Sweetie?” asked Sandy, hoping against hope.
Katie shook her head and crossed her arms under her pert breasts. “Yeah,” she huffed, wiping at the corners of each eye. “The fuckers burnt down their entire house and let two other catch fire just make sure no one got out alive.”
“What the fuck, are you kidding me?!?” I asked loudly, more at the situation itself, then to my cousin.
Katie answered as if I had directed me question at her. “No bullshit, Eff, they slaughtered them all, even some of the neighbors as well – those that came to help.” She seemed exhausted.
“How in the hell are those assholes getting away with shit like this?” wondered Sandy as she took us onto El Paso Drive, making sure she was observing every single rule of the road in the process.
Katie chuckled ruefully. “They can do whatever the fuck they want once they send out the word that a group of Muto Terrorists are holed-up somewhere.” I could hear the sardonic tone in her voice. My cousin was angry.
“That’s what they said?” I asked.
“No, that’s what I heard. The whole damned crowd was buzzing with relief that the terrorists had been brought to justice,” explained Katie.
“What had these ‘terrorists’ done exactly?” inquired Sandy, glancing at my cousin through the rear-view mirror.
“I don’t know, really,” she replied through an exhalation. I could tell the ordeal was wearing her thin. “There were so many rumors; it’s not even worth it to talk about.”
“That fucking sucks,” mumbled Sandy.
We all went quiet.
The NIA wasn’t messing around anymore, so it seemed.
When we turned back onto Meridan, I heard Katie fumbling with her cell phone, but didn’t turn around. Whatever she was doing was her business. Besides, I had too much on my mind to bother.
There was a few more seconds of silence, then: “Hey Caroline, it’s me Kat, how are you?”
She was calling home. I peeked over at Sandy, but she was intent upon the road.
“I don’t know, I haven’t heard from you guys in a while and I was just wondering if everything was alright.” Katie stopped talking, listening now.
“Well, no one’s called me since you did that first night, so I - .” She paused. “Yeah, I understand, but what about mom and dad?” Another pause ensued. “Ok, but where are they?”
The conversation was intruding into my awareness, because it didn’t sound like it was going the way it should’ve.
“Vacation, really? Mom didn’t tell me, when?” She listened some more. “A week, but she knew I would be waiting for her to talk to me! She hasn’t called me once, neither has dad…”
The car went quiet.
“Oh, fuck you, Caroline. You’re such a bitch!” A short stoppage followed. “Well, I don’t give a shit. I’m gonna stay out here where people love me and take care of me! I don’t need you idiots in my life. As far as I’m concerned, you call go fuck yourselves!”
I heard her tap the front of her cell emphatically. “Assholes, don’t give a rats’ ass about me,” I heard her mumble.
None of talked the rest of the way home.
*****
The rest of the day was shitty as fuck. The keening coming from Flavia’s room was bad enough as it was, but Jacob called a couple of hours later and, boy, was he ever a harbinger of the oh-so-fucked-up variety.
Apparently, surveillance had increased four-fold in our immediate area, coinciding with chatter over government channels. All of it, mentioning some large Muto terror-cell hiding out in the vicinity. Helicopter and street patrols were to begin that very night. He told us to stay low, to stay out of sight for the next couple of days, because something nasty was coming.
At four o’clock, Flavia came up to the Loft and we filled her in, while she told us Jolene had finally fallen asleep in Johan’s arms. Tirza had been reading her some passages from the family Bible. She probably had to scrape half an inch of dust off the darn thing, seeing how little use it got in my household.
I rolled my eyes at the thought of my ex-girlfriend reading from the book of books, but I told myself not to knock it too hard, if it worked to give Jolene some degree of solace, then who was I to pass judgment. The fact it wasn’t my cup of tea had absolutely nothing to do with it.
Next, we figured, those staying the night should call their parents and let them know who was staying where, we needed to cover our tracks against discovery by them or anyone else trying to find our group. Misdirection was most likely the best thing for ev
eryone involved, for now it would keep everyone safe. After all, one couldn’t tell what they didn’t know.
That night, I asked my mother if a few friends could come over for dinner and hang out. She frowned and bemoaned the amount of work it would take to feed everyone, but acquiesced when I volunteered to order the food with my own money. Of course, she had no idea I had a cash hoard given to me by two of my uncles she just happened to hate the most. There was no real need to explain all of that shit to her. So, like the good son I was, I didn’t.
My step-dad didn’t give two shits as long as we were quiet and I ordered him a pastrami from one of the places we had ordered food. In fact, his only comment had been, “Eff, you’re a good kid”, when I walked his meal and a couple of beers into the TV room. We didn’t hear hide or hair of him the rest of the evening.
The rest of us ate in the dining room. My mom occasionally peered about. It was obviously, she had taken note of the sizeable difference between the numbers of females versus males about the large table. She didn’t say anything though, because Ramona was there and, even she knew, my girlfriend could be sickeningly jealous at times. Well, at least, the old Ramona had been. The new one had learned to share.
Jolene and Tirza stayed up in the Loft. During the melee of our meal, Johan snuck up plates of pizza, stuffed pita pockets, a big bag of Lays² and a pair of Cokes³.
After dinner and a movie in the Loft, the girls pretended to leave, but really sneaked to the side of the house, waited twenty minutes or so, and then made their way up the tree and back into my room via the window as they had been doing for the past few nights.
We stayed up long enough to agree, as a group, we should abstain from any sort of sexual activity, because we felt we needed to be focused, alert. The NIA was hunting down families wholesale now. It was definitely not the time to be pounding and sweating. It was time for vigilance. All we had was each other. We had to make sure we protected what we loved.
For the second straight night, I slept with four girls, while Jolene and Flavia slept in Katie’s bed. Tirza and Johan each took one of the inflatable mattresses. It wasn’t long after the light went out, we were all asleep. The day had been wearisome; for some of us, it had almost been too much to endure.
I slept fitfully and couldn’t tell you if I dreamed or not. The world around me was nightmarish enough.
{ ¹Fanta: a global brand of fruit-flavored carbonated soft drinks created by the Coca-Cola Company in the 20th century. }
{ ²Lays: a snack; the brand name for a number of potato chip varieties as well as the name of the company that founded the chip brand in 1932. }
{ ³Cokes: referring to Coca-Cola, the marque product of the Coca-Cola Company. }
~~~~~~~~~~~~♦~~~~~~~~~~~~
~ Chapter 60 ~
(Summer – 2018)
A Tedious Vigil
Over the course of the next week, things began to turn routine and more commonplace around my parents’ house. So much so, we became evermore careless with how we moved or made noise. More than once an hour, we had to tell one another to be quieter or to at least pay attention, because if we didn’t my parents were definitely going to find out there were more kids staying the night, then they thought. With everything else going on at the time, I really didn’t need my mom (or my step-dad) up in my cheese, hell-bent over the fact I was sleeping with four girls every night. It wasn’t like we were having wild orgies – though we’d come close the night of my dream – and they wouldn’t have found us in a nasty, naked pile, but they’d still go ballistic. A seventeen year old boy wasn’t supposed to be sleeping with four girls at once.
Some of the reason was my fault. I had painstakingly covered my tracks whenever I had done something your typical A-B student wouldn’t do. Whether it was smoking marijuana or having sex on the fourth floor at school, you know, the usual bad-kid bull-crap.
Well, I went out of my way to make certain they never found out. I was careful not to get caught. I formulated plans before I acted. I was thorough. It didn’t stop me from doing some stupid shit, even back then, but I didn’t launch myself headlong into a given situation without some degree of fore-thought. I guess, even as a teen, I had a fairly decent knowledge of tradecraft and used it whenever and wherever possible.
The downside though, was my parents truly believed I was a goody, goody kid – nicely groomed and straight-laced. The truth would’ve shocked them into next week and probably would’ve brought undo notice to our safe and sane household, notice none of us Mutos needed. It would’ve meant our deaths.
So, we bitched and groaned at one another during the late night and early morning hours when my parents were home. We chastised those one of us that got too noisy or forgetful of the places they shouldn’t go within the house at a certain hour of the day.
Jacob called again on the first day, a Friday, telling me he might not be able to call over the coming weekend, because the overall situation was reaching a critical point. He explained, the night before - which would’ve been the night following the slaughter of Jolene’s family - the NIA had struck yet another home, though this one had been in El Sereno and the result had been very different.
Apparently, as he told me, members of two other households had come to the aid of the one being attacked. The interlopers had been armed and ambushed the Shock Troops as they were about to bust down the front door. The outcome had been made all the more worse by a persisting rumor that Mutations had been used to augment the defense against the NIA soldiers. From what he and my uncles were able to find out, there were bodies everywhere and more than three-quarters of them were government agents. Because of the carnage, the entire neighborhood was termed a threat to Meta-national Security and virtually cordoned off from the rest of the city. Countering the government’s response, the citizens living there had erected barriers and barricades about their properties’ and had booby-trapped every egress into the area. Now, an edgy sort of stand-off had ensued with both sides eyeing the other, waiting for the slightest provocation to attack.
Jacob said my uncles had become excited and immediately began to devise methods to smuggle food and water, and heavier weapons, to those trapped in El Sereno. It was what they were now calling, “one mother-loving, hell of a profit!” He said, if true war was ever going to erupt between the NIA and the Mutos, it would begin there, supplied and supported, in part, by our two crazy-assed uncles.
I found it hard to believe, after we had terminated the call, but really couldn’t put it past my uncles. They weren’t good people. They were opportunistic parasites, preying off every situation they could lay their hands on. To make quick money with the least amount of effort was their motto. And yet, I didn’t totally disagree with what they were doing either. People had the right to defend themselves from any threat, and that included the government. It was the whole “profit” thing that left a sour taste in my mouth. It just didn’t ring true.
Stupid me though. Little did I know at the time, I would adopt my uncles’ way of thinking and take their methods of doing business to heights undreamed of… all the way to the stars. I became ten thousand percent worse than they ever were. There are many harsh lessons one must learn before they can be called, Keeper of the Peace. Rule number one: you gotta be brave enough to enforce it.
There were other factors making us edgy and irritable as well. The fact the girls and I slept in the same bed didn’t help, because we were teenagers, in the flush of hormones, not quite adults, but old enough to act on adult desires and urges. Our pact regarding vigilance didn’t stop me from getting erections or any one of the girls from waking wet and moist, especially since we were always touching. There were times, in the depths of the night, I’d opened my eyes to one of them kissing my neck or fondling errant, midnight wood. Since I slept without a shirt, my nipples were nibbled or sucked multiple times a night. I began to wonder if I should sleep with a shirt on, but every time I climbed into that bed with all those girls within minutes the heat woul
d become unbearable and off came the shirt.
Once, I was awakened by female moans that had nothing to do with me. I turned over to find Ramona and Katie making out, each of them with a hand down the others’ pajama bottoms, making furious circular motions with their fingertips. My cock swelled so fast, I gasped in pain as blood filled the vessels down there so swiftly it felt like it was being torn from the inside out. I was about to join them when Leda sat up, hovering over us all, groggily, but firmly pulling us apart. She mumbled for us to stop, saying we had to stay the course, etc., etc. Blah, blah, blah! I remember thinking, as she physically planted herself between the two other girls, shoving me further away with her foot. My dick was so hard it ached. I wanted someone, any of them, to scoot down there and take me in their mouth. I wouldn’t have lasted that long. What was the big, fucking deal anyhow?
But they seemed to have gained their composure and fell back asleep. I stroked my pole a few times frustrated beyond belief. After a spell, I forced myself to let go of it, to roll to the side and forget all notions of a quick, but deep blow-job.
I woke the next morning sullen and withdrawn, the need to release was almost as bad as the pending doom that seemed to drape over us all like an invisible blanket of lead. It wore us down by the minute, pulled at our shoulders, made our backs bow. Add the sexual dissatisfaction to the mix and things could’ve gone nuclear in seconds. The tension was so thick, I could almost taste it. A little pussy would’ve helped big-time, but in the end, we stayed cool. We stayed just far enough away from each other to endure the nights, but it was hell – for all of us.
Of course, there were some things, other things, to keep us occupied whilst we waited for something, anything, to happen. Saturday afternoon, during our usual midday swim, I found Ramona staring intently at Flavia. I kept asking her what the matter was, but she kept pushing aside my questions. Deflecting them by saying she would tell me later. Finally, when my step-sister emerged from the pool and walked by us, Ramona reached out and grabbed Flavia by the wrist. My step-sister had stopped at once, peering into my girlfriend’s eyes for nearly a minute. The cords in my step-sister’s neck straining more and more with each passing second. When Ramona had finally let go, she said Flavia’s vision would be “special” too. She couldn’t define it more than that, but there would be no denying it. Flavia’s eyes were not going to be normal for long. Being the practical girl she was, Flavia shrugged and said, “thank you.”
Shadow Seed 1: The Misbegotten Page 68