by Quil Carter
“Are you done yet, Spike?” Adler said from the laptop. He glanced towards us and motioned for Spike to come over. “I see quad tracks but whenever they hit the road, the tracks disappear. It might be worth seeking out though.”
“Just torture the information out of him,” Spike snapped. He put a hand on my chin and puckered his lips at me. He had a nasty untreated cut on his forehead. I’d given him that by smacking him with a wooden statue. “I could get you to sing, pretty baby. I could get you to make all sorts of noises.”
“He won’t talk, I can see it in his face, and I’ll kill him if he frustrates me.” Adler locked eyes with me and we glared each other down. “Reaver will tell me what I want to know if the little shit’s threatened.”
Inside of my head I smiled at this. I flattered myself by trying to go over every encounter I’d had with Adler and Spike, to try and pinpoint just where he’d gotten this opinion of me from. I hoped it was my attitude, or maybe I was starting to look the part.
“I’m surprised Reaver would be dating some dipshit greywaster,” Spike said. “He was obviously important enough for Perish to make radiation-immune. Maybe he’s one of their slaves. Sigils.”
“Sengils,” I said coldly.
“Check his blood and log into the ACL,” Adler said.
“I tried. An error code keeps coming up and I’m not fucking tearing Turris apart looking for the error code book. He’s probably just some stupid greywaster.”
“I still think he’s a slave, one of the sex slaves.”
“And I’m not a sengil, or a cicaro,” I said curtly.
“Kick-car-oh,” Spike said as he moved the words around on his tongue. “The sex slaves of the chimeras.” Then he looked over at Kiki. “Mantis said almost all the stealths are sengils or cicaros because they’re too wild to be on their own without a master to control them. Not until they’re older apparently. You don’t seem wild at all, you’re quite docile.”
Kiki smiled shyly and bowed his head to Spike. The kid had some horrible bruises and cuts on his face; he fought like I had. “I’m engineered to please my master no matter who that is. I love all my masters.” He bit his bottom lip and I watched with disgust as he fluttered his eyes at Spike. “Is your real name Spike? I like that name.” Kiki’s eyes kept travelling around as he kept that dumb smile on his face. He must’ve had his head knocked around when they were capturing us because he was acting like a retard.
Spike beheld him with disdain and I did as well. I despised that kid. Ceph was bleeding and in pain several feet away and that little slut was batting his eyelashes and submitting to every authority figure he saw.
“It’s my real name,” Spike said. He hoisted himself up to a metal table that was beside Kiki. All three of us had been pushed against the wall in the far corner of the laboratory. Ceph, then myself in the middle, and Kiki with the table that Spike was now sitting on top of. In front of us was another long slab-like table with nasty-looking surgical instruments, put there while we watched as a means of intimidation, and past that to the right was a desk with Adler’s laptop.
Then to the far left, beside the metal door leading to a set of stairs that was our exit, was a desktop with a flat panel monitor on a wooden desk full of plastic bins that held papers, folders, and CDs. There was a webcam on top of the monitor and a microphone. Adler had told us that could be used to talk to Reaver and Nero, or as he said ‘would be a way for them to see us killed one-by-one’ if we misbehaved.
We were all in this one room, but there was another wing of the laboratory. I knew Mantis was in there somewhere resurrecting, but what else could be found past that open door was anyone’s guess. I was hoping it would lead to an exit but it wasn’t like they were going to tell us if there was.
“My real name is Kincade,” Kiki said cheerfully, and he looked to Ceph. “His is Cepherus. How old are you?”
“Nineteen,” Spike replied. “Mantis says I’m a stealth chimera like you. Fifth generation with Reaver, Caligula, and Jade.”
“I’m sixteen,” Kiki said. Then his smile turned shy again. “I see you have a cut on your head. You know I’m trained to treat injuries. We seem to get injured a lot, and I’m pretty good at it.”
“Spike. Come look at this,” Adler called. Adler was clicking on a wireless mouse, the glow of the computer screen reflecting in his grey eyes. He had a unique voice, it was deep and raspy like a road with fresh gravel laid on it. I hated this clone of Sky, but this voice triggered something inside of me. I felt myself listening every time he opened his mouth.
Spike walked over and looked at the screen. “You’ve taken it too far from my tower. You’re going to lose the signal, and the last time we ventured out that far we saw celldwellers and they almost got my chopper.”
“I’m still seeing quad tracks.” Adler shook his head. I didn’t understand just what they were doing, or what they were looking at. I was assuming they were trying to find where Kiki’s home base had been. But why? To take our Nong Shim noodles? There wasn’t much there.
“What are celldwellers?” Kiki asked. I glared at him. He was staring with inquisitive eyes and was perked up and peppy. I looked over to see if Ceph shared my disgust at Kiki’s submission, but Ceph was still on his side, staring up at the ceiling with no more fun songs spoken. I think he was getting tired, like I was.
“It doesn’t matter if you see quad tracks. If their house is there it’s too far for us to go. We just need to wait for Mantis to wake up.”
Mantis to wake up? Then what?
“No. He’s going to censor Perish’s files, and I’m tired of him hiding shit from me. I have to see them. I don’t fucking care how far away they are,” Adler said. “I’ve been waiting months for that little shit to come here with Perish’s quad, and I’ve been fucking cheated. You’ll be fine.”
“You’re fucking sending me out there? Fuck you. If I get proxied I’m dead. You fucking go out, Angel Adler. It’s your fucking crush you’re after.”
Perish’s files? The realization hit me, and like smoke being cleared away from a colourful picture, I realized what I was watching. They were trying to find me and Reaver’s plagueland house. They wanted all of the files, CDs, all of the things Perish had loaded on the quad. An immortal’s life of information that he’d given me before he died. I barely even looked at any of these things. Perish’s death had been too painful and raw, and my feelings for him too conflicting.
“You’ll do as I fucking say, Spike.”
Spike’s already granite expression hardened further, and look of hostility became as clear as day, but then Adler whirled around. “I can see your reflection,” he said coldly. “Don’t you dare test my authority, boy.”
Whoa. There were many cracks in this chimera faction. I watched with a new level of fascination as Spike turned from the laptop screen and stalked back over to the metal table he’d been sitting on; he shot me a hateful glare as he did, and I had one of my own to give him back.
And he called him boy? I guess he was thirty from the Blood Crow’s timeline, but like Silas he’d stopped aging at twenty-four. Well, even if he didn’t look that much older than Spike, he certainly felt like he was old enough to look down his nose at him. When I’d first saw Spike and Adler I’d assumed they were dating or something, but obviously not.
Spike deflected his gaze from me and instead looked at Kiki. The stupid cicaro was giving him back a smile, one that seemed like it was coming from someone with a few screws loose.
“Can I please have some water?” Kiki asked nicely.
Spike hesitated for a moment, then he nodded and jumped off of the metal table and disappeared out the door. While he was gone, I leaned down and nudged Ceph. “Want to try and get up?” I asked him.
Ceph’s green eyes, previously disconnected, focused and looked at me. “Nah. I’m fine down here. Thanks though.” Then his gaze returned to the ceiling. “I was in a dark place for a long time and I got good at kinda tuning everything out.”
Spike came back with a cup of water and a straw. He held it up to Kiki, and the cicaro drank with a thankful smile. “Thank you,” he said once he was done. “My throat was starting to burn.”
And mine was too. “Can I have some… please?”
Spike’s eyes flashed. “Tell me where the shit Perish gave you is and you can have some.”
My jaw clenched and before I could stop myself I said something I immediately knew I would regret. Something drawn out from the area of my brain that stored everything I had learned being around Reaver. “Then I guess you can stick that glass up your ass, and you can go fuck your–”
Before I even got the last syllable out, Spike raised his hand and smacked me with the water glass. It shattered on my face, so close to my eye I saw bright lights shooting through my vision like a lit sparkler. I cried out from the pain, feeling like I had just been hit by a truck, and felt my head flop to the side.
Then I saw a fist, it hit my jaw before grabbing it and wrenching my chin up. Two blood-red eyes seared my own, and his grasp on my jaw tightened until my mouth opened and my face tensed; all of my efforts now concentrated on not screaming from the heavy pressure on my jaw.
“He’s not fucking immortal. Don’t kill him, you stupid fuck!” Adler snapped behind him.
Spike’s lined face shook from rage and started turning bright red. He pulled my jaw before leaning down until he was nose-to-nose with me.
“I’m going to fuck you tonight, Killian,” he said to me. His pointed teeth showing with all their glory as his mouth moved. “I’m going to fuck you in front of those two until they both get so hard they’ll be dry humping the air.”
“If you want to sow it, I’ll make sure you reap it, asshole,” I snarled, but my venomous words were only a mask, inside blood was gathering in my head, drawing out a heat that made me anxious. I knew I’d gone too far now, and for the first time since arriving here I felt a flicker of fear.
I couldn’t handle someone doing that to me again… I just couldn’t.
Spike yanked my jaw back and forth in a playful manner. “I’ll be planting a lot of seeds in you. I’ll–”
Suddenly, without me even fully realizing what I was doing, I jumped to my feet, taking the computer chair I was tied to with me. Spike jumped back quickly, bewildered at my sudden movements, and I did the only thing that jumped into my mind. I whirled around and used the back of the chair as a weapon, and felt it hit Spike, hopefully in the face.
Kiki gasped but Ceph laughed, fuelling me even more. When I was turned around and facing Spike again, I saw he was on the floor, blood now squirting from his nose.
Adler was running towards me. My mind raced, trying to think of something I could do, but in an instant he was in front of me.
Adler punched me in the side of the face, and like Ceph, I tumbled to the floor. My head smacked against the linoleum and haze overtook my senses, but I was with it enough to feel the impact of his boot on my stomach, and the pain that followed.
“If I catch you raping him, I’m proxying you,” Adler snapped. “I told you, no sex. Not with them, not with Mantis, not with the Blood Crows, not with anyone! We’re better than that! We’re not like the Skyfall chimeras.”
“You’re the one that despises sex, Virgin Adler, not me!” Spike snapped, holding his bloody nose. “Don’t knock it ‘til you tried it.” Spike then grunted as Adler, still reeling from my outburst, smacked him across the face.
“Mantis is going to fucking disown you when he finds out what you’re doing to Reaver and Perish’s little pet. You know Reaver’s fucking Elish’s prodigy. He’s going to proxy you, this time.” Spike jumped to his feet, and with a murderous glare towards me, he stalked out of the room, through the held open door.
“Yeah! Daddy’s gonna beat your ass, Adi,” Ceph called from the floor. “He’s gonna fuck you until you call him Mantis.” I looked down at Ceph, my eye now swelling shut and my head throbbing. He looked back at me, and I saw he was smiling. “Get it? Because if he already calls him Daddy… if he was fucking him it wouldn’t be anything out of the ordinary so… he’d call him Mantis. Right?”
Blood was dripping down the back of my throat, and my head was pounding like it was being hammered on, but when Ceph laughed, still on his back with the computer chair tied under him, I laughed too and shook my head.
“It’s really too bad you’re married, Ceph,” I said to him, and the smile turned into a goofy crooked grin. “I know a guy who you would’ve loved.”
When evening turned to night, Adler eventually gave up on his mission to locate me and Reaver’s plaguelands house and they both disappeared through the other laboratory door. We weren’t fed or given any water, the lights were just tuned off and the door locked.
The side of my face had swollen up and the blood that had been leaking from my many wounds had clotted and dried. Now my face felt like it had a thin film on it that made it tight and itchy. Every time I would tense and flex my face, I could feel the coating break like I was wearing a mud mask. It was uncomfortable, and that on top of the throbbing pain that never seemed to fade, I wasn’t in the greatest of moods.
Kiki might be awake to my left, but I wasn’t sure. Ceph was obviously fast asleep from the ground-rattling sounds he was making. He sounded like a chainsaw trying to cut through metal. I had no idea how anyone could sleep next to that. If Reaver snored that loud, I would’ve smothered him with a pillow.
I sighed at the thought of Reaver. I glanced up at the ceiling and wondered just why he hadn’t bombed the door yet. It had been long enough already.
Unless Nero had killed him. Kiki and I had both heard the music blasting and then the commotion. After that though, we’d been rather preoccupied with Adler and Spike.
I’d almost gotten away… I was so close I could taste it, but the two chimeras were so quick with their movements, they’d just been blurs.
What if Nero overpowered Reaver and had infected him with the worms? Reaver could be halfway to the plaguelands right now, and if he was, he would have the entire rest of the world to hide from me, or the parasite inside of him at least.
It seemed like Mantis was researching these parasites or something. It wasn’t explained to me, but just through Spike and Adler’s conversation it was as if Mantis was breeding them or experimenting on them. From what I heard they called it proxying, and Mantis regularly proxied both Adler and Spike, and once they came along… Nero and Ceph too.
It also was obvious Mantis had learned how to control the parasites, since Nero had been his puppet. Ceph, it seemed, must’ve gotten a different type because he was normal acting at the festival and his eye hadn’t changed colour.
I jumped and looked towards the door as I heard a click. My remaining eye squinted from the pain of a flashlight being shined on it, but then the beam shone onto Kiki.
Footsteps followed, ones just tiptoeing towards us in a way that told me we weren’t the only ones he wanted to hide his presence from. Sure enough, when the flashlight lowered I saw Spike holding food. He was shirtless, and wearing only white boxers with black designs.
His eyes hardened when he saw me, but they deflected to the cicaro. He put the flashlight down and directed the beam at the wall, casting long shadows of the four of us like we were actors on a stage.
Spike held out a bottle of water with a straw sticking out of it and brought it to Kiki’s lips. I eyed a bowl of what looked like nuts mixed in with dried fruit, and felt saliva fill my mouth.
Kiki drank half the bottle and gasped when his lips broke the straw. “Thank you,” he whispered.
Spike hesitated, his tongue poking out of his mouth. Then he laid a hand on Kiki’s chin and began stroking his growing stubble gently. “If you want the food… I want something from you.” Spike glanced at the dark hallway and started pawing his boxers.
I looked away from disgust and glared at the illuminated metal desk in the middle of the room, all of the torture instruments still laid ou
t, but unused.
My nose curled like I was smelling something bad when I heard Kiki laugh lightly. “You don’t need to bribe me. Adler might be in denial but I know you’re not. We love sex. I get cranky if I don’t get something every day.” I glanced over and saw the moment Spike withdrew a thick cock, already hard. He was uncut, and the typical chimera girth and length. Kiki eyed it hungrily, and like the slut he was, he licked his lips while making eye contact with Spike.
“Come closer,” Kiki whispered. Spike put a hand on the wall behind Kiki and leaned on it. He thrusted his hips up, but even with Kiki leaning down he still couldn’t reach. Spike sat down on the metal table instead and spun Kiki towards him, and moments after that I started hearing light sucking, and Spike’s deep breathing.
What a fucking whore. I wish Ceph was awake to hear this, but he was dead to the world. It was just me forced to listen to this blowjob in the cover of darkness. The quiet mixed in with one’s enhanced senses in the middle of the night was amplifying the sounds, lapping and sucking and Spike’s stifled moans, trying his hardest to keep quiet. When I looked again, I even saw a hand cupped over Spike’s mouth, his other hand on Kiki’s head as the cicaro bobbed up and down.
“Will you fuck me?” Kiki whispered in the middle of his exploits. “Please? I want it in me.”
“I fucking can’t!” I heard Spike hiss. “He’ll hear, and you’re fucking tied up.”
“There must be some place we can go,” Kiki said, and he gave out a moan and the sucking continued. “I know you haven’t fucked someone in a while, I can feel it. I haven’t either. It’s in our genetics. Come on.”
“I… no, no, just keep sucking,” Spike groaned. I saw him with his hands now behind him to prop himself up, his hips jolting as he thrusted into the cicaro’s mouth.