“Don’t blame me. The hairs respond before the sensory input reaches my conscious mind, so I can’t control their triggers. That shock was minor, a warning of the damage it could deliver from a real threat.”
“I thought you were making excuses.” Quiggs stared at the reddened mark left on his skin. “Are there hairy surprises below the waist?”
“None.” Max had sparse body hair.
“Good.” He applied oil to Max’s cock. “Oh… you’re rising. Damn, I forget how huge you are and how your ring pales and pulses when I rub it like—”
“Enough!” Max cut off Quiggs’s exposition before it turned into a fog. He positioned his cock between Quiggs’s slicked thighs, using one hand to hold himself in place while the other clenched a rounded buttock. “Too rough?” Max gasped.
“Heh. Shut up and finger fuck me. I need the extra.”
Max slid in an oiled finger to the knuckle. His concubine squirmed on top, biting his lip as if rethinking his words. Max rubbed the third nut, and a howl erupted. He stuffed a towel in Quiggs’s mouth before he damaged his healing throat.
Quiggs’s eyes rolled back, and his channel squeezed. His cock spurted over his fist, his body flushed from ears to chest at the intensity of his third orgasm. No faking this time. Max followed, bucking and splashing his concubine’s ass and thighs with weeks of cum. He rolled them to their sides to cuddle, but it was short-lived when Max caught a whiff of the repulsive speckled seed he’d spent.
Quiggs spat out the towel and mopped the cum. “Vile, isn’t it? Open the port holes.” He inspected his hand. “Good. Mine’s clean.” He yawned and promptly dozed off.
Max opened both port holes, then lifted the lid off the tub Cutty had filled for them and lowered his sleepy concubine into the steamy water. Quiggs squirmed until the heat rendered him boneless, with his arms dangling over the sides and his head resting on a towel.
Quiggs sighed. “I’ve decided I love sex a thousand times better than honey custards.”
“You’re inexperienced. You’d love it with a toothless eel skinner.”
“I love sex with you.” Quiggs closed his eyes as Max added a handful of perfumed bath salts.
Max knelt by the tub, soaping lazy circles around each pink nipple with his hands. He liked flat hairless chests with pebbly pink nipples. And cute melon heads. And thick, long lashes. And lush, pouting, sweet, rosy lips owing him twelve seconds…
As if sensing an oncoming kiss, Quiggs slid lower until the water level covered his mouth. The water bubbled from his burst of laughter at Max’s frustrated growl.
Max would collect his twelve seconds another time. He lifted Quiggs out to stand on a small rug and toweled him dry. “Showers with your braid must have been an ordeal. But it’s over now.”
“Until my hair grows out.” Quiggs spoke without anger, just a quiet statement of the obstacle in their future.
Max cursed himself for dousing their afterglow.
“There’s only one solution,” Quiggs tucked the towel around his waist and padded to the table to finish his honey custard.
“I can’t submit,” Max snapped. “You felt a mild shock. Imagine a fully charged one.”
“I’m not asking you to submit. After my service ends, when the braid becomes a nuisance, I’ll visit a pleasure house. The act will be verified and the issue settled without injuring your pride.”
Max listened to Quiggs’s blithe solution. Share Quiggs with another man? Before Max exploded, a hard knock on the door interrupted.
“Commander?” It was Beau at the door, his voice agitated.
Max wondered how much of their sex play Beau had overheard. “What is it, Private?”
“I smell blood in the air. Human blood. Ahead at Milepost Sixteen.”
A sputternut orchard owned by Rosamunde grew on the outbank near Milepost Sixteen, four miles from Port Paducah. His naked body exuding the power and authority of his rank better than any ridiculous formal jacket and sash, Max strode to the whistle panel. He whistled the code for the pilot to tie off at the next milepost with cables thrown around the posts on each bank to hold the barge in place. Next, he whistled for his sergeants to have the first wave of defense at attention, ready to storm the outbank with him.
He dressed for battle, selecting a pair of gleaming axes for his shoulder harness and sliding into a pair of thin flexible boots that would allow his double-jointed feet to race through the vines. Quiggs had never remarked on his abnormal feet, never investigating much lower than his thighs.
“Max, is it a raid?” Quiggs pulled on his Bucket Patrol tee and tucked it into his pants.
As he fastened a studded leather collar around his neck to prevent teeth ripping out his throat, Max spoke quickly. “Likely a raid. I won’t rule out it being a distraction to scatter my men and leave you vulnerable. Don’t worry. A killer and his accomplices can’t board with the ramp pulled back from the bank and with the barge in the middle of the canal. Pulling alongside in a boat won’t work because archers in the towers will spot them. Stay locked inside the cabin where you’re safe.”
This was the first time the thought of dying in battle grieved Max for what he would leave behind. He struggled to find the words to say goodbye.
Quiggs’s over-bright green eyes implored Max to return safely.
“Fuck it.” Max seized Quiggs and pecked him quickly on his surprised mouth. He leaped back before Quiggs gagged. “Gotcha, my baby cadet.”
Quiggs rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth.
Max grinned. “I’ll be back to collect the rest of my seconds.”
“Ten.”
“Eleven and a half.”
“Twelve if you come back. Be careful, Max.”
“I’m taking Beau to track the scent. Lock the door behind me.”
Max, Beau, and sixty soldiers reached the orchard before the blood on the ground had dried. The raid was swift, brutal, cunning, and of a magnitude Max had never encountered. Neither had his uncle or centuries of previous commanders.
He knelt and examined the bloodied metal objects scattered on the ground, then looked up to find broken branches among the trees. Fucking hell, advanced ferals. Under the cover of fog with heavy metal objects as weapons, these ferals had climbed the trees before dawn, patiently waited for the unsuspecting men to pass beneath the branches, and hurled to crush skulls.
For each of her orchards, Rosamunde hired two middle-aged herders and eight experienced older guards. The large number discouraged a typical raid. A feral scout might slip through and snatch a goat or two, but she would warn her band against a full-blown raid.
The archers in the watchtower on the inner bank told Max the men had rafted across the canal for their scheduled rotation less than an hour ago. The ferals struck, took the goats, and killed the men. It was over before the archers fired a third flight of arrows. Until Max explained, they were unaware the attack came from the trees.
The raiding party had planned this attack with the help of earlier scouts and climbed the trees with weapons while the mists hid them. And where the fuck had they found pristine colonial metal for weapons?
By sheer luck, Max’s barge was nearby for him to reach the orchard and follow the trail of slashed, trampled vines left behind before the vines repaired themselves. He and Beau ran abreast, leading the chase. Where the trail disappeared in places, Beau and Max picked it up, following the blood scent of a female struck by an arrow.
Like Max, Beau wore a protective collar and carried an ax and a spear. The other soldiers wore field goggles, collars, and abdominal plates. The added gear gave a soldier a chance to deliver a killing strike while the feral wasted slashes instinctively aimed at his protected throat, eyes, gut. Max and Beau declined wearing plates and goggles because the items hampered their sensory input.
Chasing after the raiding party, Max picked up a different scent. Hideously oily, musty, intense. Females entering a mating heat had participated in this raid. High-pitched cries ech
oed in the distance—from sentries guiding their sisters through the vines to rejoin the rest of the band. Humans couldn’t detect them, but Max and Beau could. They glanced at each other, concerned at the size of the raiding party.
As they closed the gap behind the ferals, Beau appeared confused. His tongue darted out tasting the air, and he shook his head, his pace slowing. “The scent ahead is thinning. It should not be thinning. My hairs tingle. Something is wrong, my commander. I think the females are splitting up into smaller groups.”
Max trusted Beau’s instincts. He raised a hand, halting the line of soldiers running behind them. In the stillness, the tawny hairs around his ears tingled at the whisper of vines disturbed by bodies coming toward his men from either side. Max shouted to form a defensive circle. They closed ranks as the ferals sprung from the vines.
Max speared one and was desperately fending off two more when the ferals abandoned the attack and raced ahead to join the others. Their speed and strength shocked Max. These females outmatched his soldiers in hand-to-hand combat.
Six soldiers died instantly, their necks snapped. Eleven men were critically wounded from limbs ripped off or clawed to the bone and bleeding out. If Beau hadn’t noticed the change in the air, Max would have lost everyone. He had worried he was tracking twenty at the most. Now he realized the number was twice the size, with more waiting at their breeding den. He barked orders to bandage the injured and retreat to the canal.
Max found Beau squatting by a female he’d speared through the heart. Traumatized by his first kill, Beau rocked, his pupils blown. Blood had been sprayed across his face and chest. Max rested a hand on his shoulder. “You saved the lives of many good men, Beau.”
“I killed family,” Beau whispered. He wrapped his arms over his head, a yowl escaping when Max peppered him with questions.
The females he and Beau killed had a broader forehead and longer jaw than a typical feral. They were taller, muscular, well-fed. Beau’s female was old, her long gray hair matted with filth. Her skin was a leathery yellow with purple markings on her arms as if she boasted her kills as Max did. A necklace of teeth from animals he didn’t recognize dangled between sagging breasts that had suckled offspring. A triangular scrap of leather covered her genitals.
Since when did ferals exhibit modesty?
Where had these creatures come from? Little was known beyond a mile of the canal. The band could have broken from a cluster a thousand miles away.
Beau said he had killed family. Were his memories surfacing? Until he calmed, Max couldn’t get answers. He gently ordered Beau to return to the barge where he could guard Quiggs, reminding him that the killer could use the upheaval in canal traffic to slip aboard.
Beau stopped whimpering. Immediately, he jumped to his feet and sprinted alone to the canal to guard his good friend Quiggs.
When Max returned to the orchard, his couriers greeted him with the news of a second raid at Milepost Eighteen. A few goats were taken. Six young men were missing, and the older men were dead. If the ferals had taken young men instead of available goats, they were creating a breeding den. Possibly they had found a multi-chambered cave to accommodate several bands.
The raids would escalate when the young arrived.
What could be done to stop them? The Triangle relied on its thousands of goats to graze the 60 miles of outbank. A small sector of vines crossing the canal would wipe out crops within a year. If several sectors crossed over, the vines would smother the land within two months.
Max could ban the herds from grazing. The storage bins held enough grain to feed them a week. But goats depended upon fresh vines, or their body mass declined. Meanwhile, the ferals would scout the canal and add eels and fins to their diet. If the herders grazed their starving goats, the ferals would hunt until none remained.
Hand-to-hand combat with these ferals was ineffective. They’d rip a spear from a soldier’s grip before he knew he was under attack, then rip off the arm. Max would lose men faster than goats.
What Max needed was something to scare the shit out of this new species—like the explosive trap Quiggs had mentioned. Quiggs had a week to build one and to dig answers about family from Beau.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The cabin door was thick and locked with a heavy bar. While he waited for Max and Beau to return, Quiggs kept a spear from Max’s arsenal within reach. Unless the assassin—or assassins—ran straight into the spear, the weapon was as harmless as a puff of air in Quiggs’s hands.
The crew periodically stopped by a port hole to tell him the latest news. Rosamunde’s orchard had been raided. The ferals took the goats and killed the men. A second raid was reported at Milepost Eighteen, with six young men taken along with their herd. Both raids appeared coordinated by separate bands of ferals.
Port Paducah was in a panic at the proximity of the second raid. Max was tracking the first raiding party and was unaware of the second. Until he returned, the Herders Guild banned grazing between Port Memphis and Port Paducah.
Throughout the morning Quiggs listened to hails at passing craft to hug the inner bank for safety. He could pace the cabin drenched in sweat from worrying Max would suffer his first defeat, or he could park his butt in a chair and focus on giving Max a new weapon when he returned safely with Beau. Because Max would return safely. He had to!
Quiggs parked his butt in a chair, propped his feet on the table, and focused.
These raids comprised dozens of ferals. Successful hand-to-hand combat against ferals drawn into a baited trap depended upon trained soldiers outnumbering a small band, but Max lacked enough soldiers to cover the perimeter if these coordinated raids continued. The death toll would be heavy for soldiers, ferals, goats.
The vines would win unless Quiggs came up with a badass weapon of destruction.
He already knew how to modify his fuel paste to create a staggering explosion. Since his abilities worried the extremists, he’d withheld the information.
Blowing up an acre around a baited trap was simple. Setting up a chain of explosions to level miles was simple. Luring ferals into a baited trap was simple.
Igniting the device from a safe distance stumped him.
Shooting a flaming arrow from a watchtower in the vines into an explosive trap wouldn’t work. The ferals skirted unnatural structures. Meanwhile, the vines swiftly climbed any tower and filled in the cleared area around a trap, making a clean shot impossible. Taking out the entire raiding party required baiting traps deeper in the vines, where the band felt safer.
The only failsafe way to detonate his explosive was by hand, inside the trap. A brawny, young volunteer would need to sit inside a sturdy trap baited by Max or Beau and wait until the excited females surrounded and appraised him. When the time was right, he would trigger the explosion. The heat would set off the rest of the explosives scattered over the area, and the combined explosions would wipe out everything within miles.
Including the volunteers in the traps.
Beau returned in the afternoon.
Quiggs removed the bar and opened the door, anxious because it should have been Max pounding the door. Purple sap and dried blood clung to Beau’s clothes and skin, and sticky leaves matted his hair. Before Quiggs could speak, Beau leaped past him and slid beneath the table where he squatted and rocked at a feverish pace.
Quiggs’s gut clenched. An icy wave rolled over him, numbing him to the bone. He forced himself to go to Beau and kneel by the table, gripping the edge for support. His voice cracked as he asked, “Is Max… was he…?”
Beau stopped whimpering. “We were attacked. He is safe, but many good soldiers died.”
Quiggs sank back on his heels. Max was alive. When the ice thawed and blood flowed through his heart once again, he asked, “Are you injured?”
“I saw many bad things. I am ashamed of my blood. My good friend Quiggs will hate me.” He wrapped his arms around his head as he rocked to shut out the hurt.
“Tell me what happened.�
�
“No.” The word was a soft whimper.
“Come out and let me pet you.”
Beau shrank away when Quiggs tried to stroke his back. “You pet animals. I want to be human.” He spat the words. Then the low keening began. If Quiggs couldn’t soothe him, the yowling would follow.
Beau had to be hungry. Rather than cajole him with words, Quiggs heaped a plate with food, then sat on the floor with his back to Beau and the plate on his lap. He bit into a spicy sausage and smacked his lips. He popped a small handful of roasted nuts in his mouth, crunching loudly.
The keening slowed as Beau scooted closer, closer. When Quiggs offered to hand-feed him, he scampered back, and the anguished keening resumed. He did not want to be fed like a pet.
Quiggs set the plate on the floor and took a seat in the chair. The keening stopped. Beau snatched the plate and shoveled down the food. Quiggs silently refilled the plate twice, adding a gift of small ripe oranges from Stefan’s balcony garden.
Eventually, Beau crawled out and hunkered on the floor beside Quiggs’s chair. He drank the pitcher of water Quiggs handed him without stopping for breath, then laid his exhausted head on Quiggs’s thigh. When Quiggs honored his feelings by not petting him, Beau reached for his hand and placed it on his dirty head.
Smiling, Quiggs petted his six-foot-ten friend, picking out leaves from his short white-blond hair. Beau’s thick hair had double rows of longer tawny hairs around the hairline, more than Max. As Quiggs petted him, the hairs curled. No unpleasant shocks, just a sensation like a hum on Quiggs’s fingers. Quiet minutes passed with the water slapping the hull.
“I smelled family,” Beau whispered.
Quiggs kept silent, sensing Beau would stop if interrupted. Family meant the band of related females Beau was born into. Cousins, siblings, aunts, mother, grandmother.
Barely audible, Beau whispered, “They kill unworthy men and eat them. They do not waste meat.”
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